The Borgias

— CHAPTER 22 — Castles and Condottieri

‘THE AMOUNT OF A POPE’S INCOME IS WHATEVER HE CHOOSES IT TO BE’

IN MARCH 1502, while Lucrezia was adjusting to life at the ducal court in Ferrara, an event occurred that demonstrated just how strong and resourceful both the pope and Cesare could be in moments of crisis. The two men — accompanied by six cardinals, one of whom was Lucrezia’s brother-in-law Ippolito d’Este, seven prelates, and a large number of courtiers, secretaries, and servants — had travelled by boat to Piombino, where they had reviewed the defences of this strategic port captured by Cesare’s troops the summer before. ‘Six triremes had been prepared,’ recorded Burchard, ‘using those prisoners incarcerated for petty crimes to man the oars’; others had been press-ganged ‘by violence or by trickery in the taverns of Rome,’ and the pope had also ‘requisitioned all barge owners and many fishermen.’

Having finished their tour of inspection in Piombino, the pope proposed to his companions to take a day sailing around the coast ‘to amuse themselves.’ Unfortunately, an unexpected storm blew up, as sometimes happens in the Tyrrhenian Sea, making it impossibly dangerous for them to reenter the harbour at Piombino and forcing them to spend the next few nights at sea. On the fourth day the storm had worsened, bringing huge breakers crashing over the bows of their boats, and Cesare, ‘fearing great danger,’ risked his own life by leaving the galley in a small boat to row ashore to get help.

Then, according to Burchard, who recounted what he had heard from the survivors:

The Pope stayed on the galley, unable to put into port. His companions, paralysed by fear, lay stretched out in the bottom of the boat; only His Holiness, seated on the poop, kept a resolute and brave stand. When the sea pounded the boat with anger, he cried ‘Jesus!’ and made the sign of the cross and told the sailors to get on with preparing the meal. But they replied that the crashing waves and the roaring wind prevented them from lighting a fire. Finally the sea grew calmer and it was possible to fry fish for the Pope to eat.

Back in Rome a few days later, the pope and Cesare turned their thoughts to the next stage of the expansion of the duchy of Romagna and to the raising of the large sums of money required to prosecute it. With the northern border of the duchy secured by the marriage of Lucrezia to Alfonso d’Este, Cesare set his sights on two small papal fiefs, Camerino and Senigallia; more covertly, father and son had plotted a far more ambitious scheme to seize the much larger fiefs of Urbino and Bologna and also to expand into Tuscany by fomenting rebellion in Arezzo and Pisa, two cities that much resented their subjugation to republican Florence.

With this campaign in mind, it was at about this time, in the summer of 1502, that Cesare appointed Leonardo da Vinci as his ‘Architect and General Engineer’ and, as such, instructed him to ‘survey the strongholds and fortresses’ of his territories. By this commission Leonardo was to be exempt from ‘all public toll for himself and his company’ and to be given free access to ‘see, measure and estimate all that he may wish.’

Leonardo, whose Last Supper in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan was so much admired by Louis XII, had been employed as a military engineer by the luckless Duke Ludovico Sforza since he was a painter. For Cesare he drew maps, proposed systems of defence works, and designed a canal connecting Cesena with the port of Cesenatico. For ten months he travelled across the Papal States, clearly fascinated by the character and ambitions of his gifted and mysterious employer; several maps survive among Leonardo’s papers, including one showing the approaches to Arezzo.

By the beginning of June, Alexander VI and Cesare had laid their plans. By coincidence, a new ambassador arrived from Venice at about the same time; this was Antonio Giustinian, whose perceptive and illuminating dispatches were to keep the Venetian government as well informed about papal affairs as could be expected. His task, however, was hampered by Cesare, who, he reported, continued to clothe his intentions behind a curtain of secrecy and declined to give a date when he could spare time to see the envoy.

In one of his first dispatches, Giustinian reported that there were differences between Alexander VI and his son, especially regarding money. ‘Today the Pope has had some difficulties with the Duke, who requires another 20,000 ducats for his campaign, for which His Holiness has already paid a great deal,’ he wrote, before coming to the conclusion that ‘although the Pope is reluctant to give him the money, he will come round in the end, as he does with everything concerning his son.’

In the end Giustinian did not have to wait long for the nature of Cesare’s plans to be revealed. On June 5, within days of the envoy’s arrival, news came through of a riot against the unpopular Florentine government in Arezzo, outside which Cesare’s trusted condottiere Vitellozzo Vitelli and an army of three thousand men awaited orders; Vitelli entered the city two days later, where he was joined by another of Cesare’s captains, Gianpaolo Baglioni. Almost immediately, news also arrived of a successful uprising in Pisa, and the city offered its allegiance to Cesare. Four days later Burchard noted that ‘the corpse of Astorre Manfredi, Lord of Faenza,’ who had been overthrown by Cesare after a long siege the previous year and imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo, ‘has been fished out of the Tiber, drowned by a stone tied round his neck.’ The master of ceremonies lamented his death: ‘This young man, just 18 years old, was of such beauty and stature that it would not be possible to find his equal among a thousand of his contemporaries.’

Although both Alexander VI and Cesare vigorously denied any involvement in the taking of Arezzo, protesting instead that Vitelli had acted upon his own initiative, few in Rome believed them. And it was generally accepted that the murder of Manfredi was also committed on the orders of Cesare, who was anxious to avoid any trouble from the supporters of the popular Astorre while he was away from Rome with his army.

A few days later Cesare was at Spoleto with his army of six thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry, and his condottieri captains, the Spaniards Ugo de Moncada and Miguel de Corella, and the Italians Paolo Orsini and his cousin Francesco, the Duke of Gravina; Oliverotto Euffreducci, Lord of Fermo; Gianpaolo Baglioni, Lord of Perugia; and Vitellozzo Vitelli, Lord of Città di Castello, who had reluctantly submitted to Cesare’s request to withdraw from Arezzo. Massing in the Romagna, meanwhile, another army, led by Cesare’s governor, Ramiro de Lorqua, prepared to move south.

There was at first some doubt in Rome as to where these armies were marching; some said Pisa, others Arezzo, though most assumed that their destination was Camerino, the state of Giulio Cesare da Varano, who had been excommunicated by Alexander VI on June 5 on a charge of fratricide. To this end, the Duke of Urbino had given permission for Ramiro de Lorqua and the Romagna troops to pass through his state; though he had also, unwisely as it was to turn out, offered help to Varano to defend Camerino.

In fact, Cesare was about to attempt a highly ambitious coup and seize Urbino itself, with its commanding position between the Romagna and Rome; and to justify this unprovoked attack by claiming that the duke, Guidobaldo de Montefeltro, had acted treasonably in his offer to assist Varano.

The Duke of Urbino, meanwhile, believing Cesare to be many miles away to the south and having no reason to doubt his protestations of friendship, had gone to enjoy an alfresco dinner in the park of a monastery just outside the walls of his capital. In the middle of the meal, a courier was observed riding at speed into the park with an urgent message: Cesare’s troops were marching on Urbino itself; they were less than twenty miles away. Guidobaldo fled and, evading Cesare’s troops who had been ordered to intercept him, he arrived, dishevelled and exhausted, in Mantua a week later.

The exiled Guidobaldo da Montefeltro did, however, retain his dignity, refusing the offer of a cardinal’s hat and a pension in exchange for his rights to the dukedom of Urbino. To humiliate the duke still further, it was revealed at this time that he was impotent, a misfortune that had remained a secret outside the family for years. Still, his loyal wife, Elisabetta, declared that she would rather live with him as his sister than no longer as his wife.

In an attempt to negotiate the restoration of their authority in Arezzo, the Florentines now sent to Urbino a high-ranking delegation led by Francesco Soderini, bishop of Volterra and brother to the head of the Florentine republic, which was required to report on the situation to the government back home. The secretary to this delegation was none other than Niccolò Machiavelli, who was deeply impressed with Cesare, so much so in fact that his enemies would later claim that the secretary had been bribed by the duke, though no evidence has ever emerged to support these rumours.

‘This Lord is very splendid and magnificent,’ Machiavelli wrote in a letter signed by Soderini:

In war there is no enterprise so great that it does not appear little to him. In his pursuit of glory and lands he never rests, nor is he put off by danger or fatigue. He arrives in one place before it is known that he has left another. He is well liked by his soldiers, and he had collected the best men in Italy. These things bring him victory and make him formidable, especially when combined with una perpetua fortuna.

Machiavelli might have added how exasperating was Cesare, who, having kept him waiting for hours on end for an interview, would suddenly summon him in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning, often not appearing when some meeting had been arranged, and, on occasion, riding away to where his army was in camp at Fermignano, a few miles south of Urbino, where he could be seen early in the morning hunting with his leopards in the surrounding hills, accompanied by ‘a host of servants, his face wrapped in gauze.’

When at Urbino, much of Cesare’s time was spent supervising the dispatch by mule train of numerous Montefeltro treasures to the fortresses at Forlì and Cesena — those costly furnishings and works of art that had ornamented the magnificent ducal palace where Lucrezia had been much honoured as a guest just five months earlier. ‘He had all Guidobaldo da Montefeltro’s furniture taken from the palace,’ a local chronicler reported, ‘so that, over the period of a month, 180 mules were employed each day; thus was an honoured family despoiled of silver and rich tapestries, and the magnificent library of rare books, which had been assembled with such loving care by Guidobaldo’s father, Duke Federigo.’ In his notebooks, Leonardo also recorded the strings of ‘mules carrying rich loads of gold and silver, many treasures and great wealth.’

Among these treasures were works of art that Isabella d’Este, who possessed by her own admission ‘an insatiable desire for antique things,’ was eager to acquire. She wrote to her brother in Rome, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, asking him to approach Cesare with a request for two antique statues, one of a Cupid attributed by some to the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles, and the other ‘a little antique marble Venus,’ which she hoped Cesare might be prepared to part with since he did not ‘take much pleasure in antiquities.’

In fact, the Cupid was not an antique but a modern work carved by the Florentine sculptor Michelangelo, and Cesare could well spare it. Indeed, his agent delivered the statues to Isabella in Mantua on July 21. She had sought permission from the exiled duke, her brother-in-law, before purchasing these items, but when Guidobaldo tried to reclaim the sculptures later, she, somewhat meanly, refused to let them go.

After Cesare’s success at Urbino, the seizure of Camerino offered few problems; and the aged lord of the place, Giulio Cesare da Varano, together with his two sons, was handed over to Cesare and was later strangled in the castle of La Pergola.

In Rome the pope celebrated Cesare’s victory at Camerino in his usual exuberant manner with the customary cannonade from the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo and, that evening, as Burchard reported, with ‘bonfires, fireworks and a great party in the piazza of St Peter’s.’

Firmly in control of an obedient Romagna, Cesare now set about raising money to feed and equip his army, which was said to cost him more than 1,000 ducats a day. He turned to his father for assistance, and although the pope was always of a far more cautious turn of mind where money was concerned, and constantly lamenting the extravagances of his son, Cesare did not turn in vain.

Indeed, the pope resorted to all manner of expedients in order to raise the necessary amounts of cash. Large sums poured in from the imposition of fines and penalties upon Jews and from the creation of numerous offices in the papal administration that were profitably sold for as much as 700 ducats each. He adopted the questionable tactic of countermanding legal wills, appointing himself as heir and replacing the named executors with his own men; he even, so it was said, resorted to murder to help his son financially so far as he could.

Adding substantially to the papal coffers was the death on July 20, 1502, of Cardinal Gianbattista Ferrari, Alexander VI’s erstwhile datary, who had paid 22,000 ducats for his red hat in September 1500, as part of the pope’s efforts to raise funds for Cesare’s campaign against Faenza, Rimini, and Pesaro. The cardinal had fallen ill in early June, Burchard reported, and ‘declined all medical treatment, refusing stubbornly to be given enemas, to be bled, to take syrups or pills or any other medicines.’ After a few days in bed, he had been well enough to dine on ‘bread soup and a pint of excellent Corsican wine,’ but soon suffered a relapse, severe enough to be given the last rites; however, he rallied again and lasted for another month, still refusing medicines of any kind.

The morning of his death, somewhat delirious, he complained that he had been robbed of 10 ducats in a transaction relating to a petition. Two monks who were present told him ‘Most Reverend Lord, do not trouble yourself about these transactions. You must recommend yourself to Him who will deliver you from all fraud and deceit.’ He kissed the crucifix and made the sign of the cross by striking his mouth with his right hand. Shortly afterwards he yielded up his spirit.

The cardinal’s interment in Santa Maria della Febbre was not a dignified ceremony; a member of the dead man’s household hurried toward the coffin to retrieve a pair of gloves that, he claimed, belonged to him, as well as a ring that, so he maintained, was also his property. Then it was found that the lid of the coffin would not close upon the corpse, so a carpenter was called to kneel on it to force it down.

Although a rich man who was reported to have accumulated a large fortune in ducats and in gold and silver, by extremely questionable means, Gianbattista Ferrari had been notoriously parsimonious; and Burchard recorded the joke that was being told of him at that time in Rome, that, on presenting himself at the gates of heaven, St Peter had asked him for an entrance fee of 1,000 ducats. He protested that he could not possibly pay such a sum. Well, said St Peter, he would settle for 500 ducats. That, too, was quite impossible; the price was eventually dropped to one ducat, but even this was too much for the miserly cardinal. ‘If you cannot pay a single ducat,’ St Peter then exclaimed, ‘go to the Devil, and remain a pauper with him for all eternity.’

So the death of the cardinal was not widely mourned; his stinginess and disregard for the plight of the poor had earned him an evil reputation; and while his last illness seems to have been caused by a fever endemic in Rome, there were many who believed that he had been poisoned in the manner in which he himself was supposed to have arranged the deaths of several of those who crossed his path. Certainly, much of the cardinal’s fortune, which Burchard estimated at 80,000 ducats, not counting his clothes and jewels, passed into the hands of the pope, and thence into Cesare’s battle chest.

Having taken Urbino and Camerino, Cesare was now ready for the next step in his ruthless campaign. For this he needed the cooperation of Louis XII, who was, conveniently for Cesare, on his way from France in person to visit Milan, where he was expected on July 28. So, just four days after the surrender of Camerino, Cesare galloped out of his camp at Fermignano, together with three companions, ‘disguised as a Knight of St John of Jerusalem, with a cross on his coat,’ reported Burchard, and availing himself of the order’s chain-of-post horses along the road.

At Borgo San Donnino, Cesare and his companions feasted on a huge quantity of chickens and pigeons, so many indeed that ‘they shocked the locals,’ claimed Burchard, ‘covering themselves with shame.’ They stopped briefly in Ferrara, where Cesare visited his beloved Lucrezia, who was seriously ill, and rode on to Milan, where they arrived on August 5.

A witness reported to Isabella d’Este the manner of Cesare’s reception by Louis XII:

The King publicly embraced and welcomed him with great joy and led him into the castle where he had him installed in the chamber nearest his own, and the King himself ordered his supper, choosing diverse dishes… and he ordered that his guest should dress in the King’s own shirt and tunic, since Duke Valentino had brought no baggage animals with him, only horses. In short — he could not have done more for a son or a brother.

The pope was displeased by his son’s actions — about which he had been increasingly often kept in the dark — and, always inclined to be wary of France, was ‘highly troubled by this journey of his son’s to Milan,’ Giustinian had reported, ‘because I hear from a completely reliable source that he undertook the journey without any consultation or even informing His Holiness.’

For Cesare, however, the journey was to prove highly profitable; not only did he cement his friendship and understanding with Louis XII, but he also succeeded in intimidating his enemies who had clustered around the French court. Cesare’s reception by the king must have been galling for many of the other guests, notably for Giovanni Sforza and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, both of whom had been usurped by Cesare and were hoping for French aid to regain their dominions.

Among the most outspoken of Cesare’s enemies gathered at the French court was Isabella d’Este’s husband, Francesco Gonzaga, who had sworn that he would fight a duel with Cesare, ‘that bastard son of a priest’s,’ but now felt obliged to recant, and reported to a friend that he and Cesare had ‘embraced each other as good brothers,’ adding, ‘We have spent all this day dancing and feasting with His Majesty.’

Despite his anger at the arrogance with which Cesare flaunted his military strength, and especially with his encroachment into the territory of Florence, which remained an important ally of France, the king needed the support of Alexander VI, and of the pope’s son’s army, to defend his authority in Naples, where the relations between France and Spain, unusually cordial in recent years, had begun to return to their customary hostility. And so, Louis XII and Cesare came to an agreement whereby the king agreed to give the duke a free hand in Bologna while Cesare was to lend support to French ambitions in Naples.

Cesare spent nearly a month with the French court, travelling with the king first to Pavia, where they were entertained with a ritual duel between two feuding members of the Gonzaga family, who were then seated opposite each other at the lavish banquet that followed. They then rode on to Genoa, where a spectacular reception had been planned to welcome Louis XII, at a cost to the city of 12,000 ducats.

On September 2 Cesare left Genoa and five days later was in Ferrara to cheer the ailing Lucrezia, who was suffering from puerperal fever. He then rode south to Camerino to confer with his father, who was in the city to install as the new Duke of Camerino the four-and-a-half-year-old Juan, the boy widely supposed to have been the result of Lucrezia’s infamous affair with the papal valet Pedro Calderon. The pope and Cesare had much to discuss, not least the plan for seizing Bologna.

In fulfilment of his agreement with Cesare, Louis XII had sent an envoy to Giovanni Bentivoglio at Bologna, informing him that he would not oppose the wishes of Alexander VI, who now called Bentivoglio to Rome to answer charges of misgovernment.

Cesare’s captains, however, had become increasingly suspicious of their master’s intentions. If Giovanni Bentivoglio was about to lose his state, how safe were their own territories, which all lay on the edges of Cesare’s duchy, their security guaranteed, so they thought, by their service in the duke’s armies. Accordingly, Cardinal Orsini called a meeting at the castle of Magione, a short distance from Lake Trasimeno, which was attended by all the threatened rulers: Gianpaolo Baglioni of Perugia; Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina; Paolo Orsini of Palombara; Oliverotto Euffreducci of Fermo; even Vitellozzo Vitelli, Lord of Città di Castello, who was suffering from an acutely painful attack of syphilis and had to be carried there on a stretcher. And those who could not come in person to Magione were represented: Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna sent his son, Ermes; Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena sent two courtiers; Guidobaldo da Montefeltro sent another; and so on.

Gianpaolo Baglioni warned those attending the conference that they all risked being ‘devoured one by one by the dragon’ if they did not act against Cesare. Yet so long as not only France but also Florence and Venice declined to help them, the majority of the members of the conference were reluctant to face up to the danger that confronted them. On October 7, however, there was an uprising against the Borgias in the fortress of San Leo in Urbino; and, with this encouragement, agreement was reached; it was settled that Cesare was to be attacked simultaneously by Giovanni Bentivoglio in the Romagna and by the members of the Orsini family, who were to encourage the revolt in Urbino.

When he heard of this threat, which seemed for a time to weaken his hold on his state, Cesare withdrew his forces to Imola and the security of the Romagna. When Machiavelli joined him there, to offer the support of Florence, he found the duke to be quite unperturbed, even indifferent. He accepted the loss of Urbino with apparent nonchalance and prepared for war with evident confidence in victory, raising troops and money, and appointing new condottieri captains, many of whom were Spanish, to replace the conspirators. He also spent such large sums on his intelligence services that Machiavelli thought that he ‘laid out as much on couriers and special messengers in two weeks as anyone else would have spent in two years.’

At first the military operations did not go well for Cesare; and toward the end of October, the duchy of Urbino fell to the conspirators, who, according to Burchard, after having assembled some five hundred cavalry and two thousand troops, restored the city of Urbino and all its territory to the illustrious Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, rightful Duke of Urbino.

But as more money came in and more troops were enlisted, the tide, as Machiavelli said, began to turn. His enemies were ‘tardy in pressing him’; they had failed to seize the moment, as he himself undoubtedly would have done, and, as they began to lose heart in opposing him, were eventually persuaded to come to terms with him.

As Machiavelli was later to write in The Prince, Cesare ‘overcame the revolt of Urbino, the uprisings in the Romagna, and the countless threats with the help of the French’ to which he added his own not inconsiderable political skills:

His former standing in Italy was restored, but he no longer trusted the French or the forces of others, and in order to avoid the risk of doing so, he resorted to stratagems. His powers of dissimulation were so impressive that even the Orsini, through Lord Paolo [of Palombara] reconciled themselves with him. The Duke used every device of diplomacy to reassure Paolo Orsini, giving him gifts of money, clothes and horses.

The general desire now to regain the good opinion of Cesare was, so Machiavelli said, reflected in the submissive letter addressed to him by Vitellozzo Vitelli, who excused himself for having joined the alliance against the duke and saying that if he ever had the opportunity to speak to him personally, he had no doubt he would be able to justify himself completely.

Receiving no reply to his letter, and denied a personal interview with Cesare, Vitelli could but guess what Cesare intended to do next. Machiavelli was also kept in the dark. ‘I have not tried to speak to the Duke, having nothing new to tell him,’ he reported to Florence, ‘and the same things would bore him; you must realise that he talks to nobody other than three or four of his ministers and various foreigners who are obliged to deal with him about important matters and he does not come out of his study until late at night; and so there is no opportunity to speak to him except when an audience has been appointed.

‘Besides,’ continued Machiavelli, ‘he is very secretive. I do not believe that what he is going to do is known to anyone other than himself. His secretaries have told me often that he does not reveal his plans until they are ready to be carried out. So I beg your Lordships will excuse me and not put it down to my negligence if I do not satisfy your Lordships with information, because most of the time I do not even satisfy myself.’

So Machiavelli could not by any means discover what Cesare intended to do next. Then, just before Christmas, there was news; Cesare had summoned all the French officers in his army to come to see him and had told them that he no longer needed them; their upkeep in idleness was an expense that he no longer wished to afford. On the day of their departure, a ball was held in Cesare’s honour at Cesena. The pretty wife of one of these officers attracted his attention, and he danced with her several times, closely watched by her husband.

While he was apparently enjoying this ball, the military governor of the Romagna, the fierce, aggressive Ramiro de Lorqua, was immediately arrested on his return from Pesaro and cast into prison. At dawn three days later, he was beheaded in the piazza at Cesena. His decapitated body was left on the block, his head displayed on a lance.

No explanation was given for this sudden execution other than that Ramiro had been guilty of corruption in the exercise of his office; but this solution to the mystery was not generally accepted. There was a rumour that Ramiro had been in correspondence with the conspirators, notably in some kind of plot with Giovanni Bentivoglio, Vitelli, and members of the Orsini family. ‘The reason for his death is not known,’ Machiavelli commented, ‘but perhaps it pleased the Prince who likes to show that he knows how to make and unmake men at his will.’

Certainly Cesare’s occupying troops had been ill-disciplined at first, while the Spanish officers, like the unpopular and corrupt Ramiro de Lorqua, who were installed as administrators, had dealt most harshly with recalcitrant people. But, in time, Italians replaced Spaniards; and, to the general satisfaction, a peripatetic court of appeal was established under the direction of a lawyer of good reputation, Antonio del Monte.

What at least seemed certain after Ramiro’s execution was that Cesare was preparing some kind of move against the condottieri captains who had been plotting his own murder. In the meantime they agreed to take in Cesare’s name the small town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast south of Fano. Senigallia had been the fief of Giovanni della Rovere, brother of Cardinal Giuliano, but he had died in November 1501, leaving his wife, Giovanna, sister of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, acting as regent for his young son. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, mindful of the fate of Astorre Manfredi, had arranged for his twelve-year-old nephew, Francesco Maria, to be smuggled out of the area to the safety of his own palace in Savona. And, knowing Cesare’s reputation for cruelty, the cardinal had warned Giovanna not to offer any resistance.

The town fell without a struggle, but its military commander refused to surrender the citadel to anyone other than Cesare Borgia himself. Wearing full armour, Cesare rode toward Senigallia on December 31, 1502, at the head of his army, the condottieri captains coming out to meet him and following him back into the town, the gates of which were closed behind them.

Cesare now called upon his captains to attend a conference in the house he chose to occupy as his headquarters. Responding to his invitation to join him at table, they entered the courtyard of this house as Cesare, according to one account, was mounting a staircase in order, so he said, to ‘answer a call of nature.’ When he was halfway up the stairs, he turned to nod to Miguel de Corella. And in obedience to this signal, the condottieri were suddenly surrounded by armed soldiers; only Vitelli had time to draw his sword and wound several of the soldiers, before they were all arrested and disarmed.

That evening Machiavelli arrived from Fano to find the town in an uproar. He sent a message to Florence reporting the arrest of the condottieri captains and added, ominously, ‘In my view they will not be alive tomorrow morning.’ Soon afterward Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto Euffreducci were garrotted by Cesare’s ‘executioner,’ Corella, as they sat back to back on a bench. The three Orsinis — Paolo, Francesco, and Roberto — had been taken away as prisoners, so Machiavelli was told, and ‘faced a similar fate,’ and Cesare sent an urgent letter to Rome ordering his father to arrest Cardinal Orsini as soon as possible. When the cardinal arrived at the Vatican the next morning in order to congratulate the pope on Cesare’s seizure of Senigallia, he made his entrance into the Sala del Pappagallo, where, according to Burchard, ‘he was terrified to find himself surrounded by armed men and immediately cast into prison.’ Burchard added that ‘all his possessions were seized,’ before being ‘loaded onto mules and taken to the Vatican.’

The punishment of the faithless condottieri was considered well merited. Even Isabella d’Este wrote to congratulate Cesare on his punishment of them, sending him a present of one hundred carnival masks and expressing the hope that ‘after the strains and fatigues’ that he had undergone in ‘these glorious undertakings,’ he should now find time to enjoy himself. ‘He insisted on examining the masks with his own hand,’ Isabella said, ‘saying how fine they were, and how much they resembled various people of his acquaintance.’

The day after the murders of Vitellozzo and Oliverotto, Cesare left Senigallia, having accepted the surrender of its citadel, and, in the pouring rain, set out to claim the states of his disloyal captains for his own. Città di Castello fell quickly. At Perugia, Gianpaolo Baglioni fled at his approach, seeking refuge with Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena. Cesare marched toward Siena, seizing the city’s outposts along the way, his men sacking, pillaging, and raping at will. At San Quirico d’Orcia, his soldiers found just two men and nine women, all elderly, whom they hung up by their arms, kindling a fire beneath their feet to torture them into confessing where their valuables were hidden; the old people did not know, or were not prepared to reveal anything, and they died.

Declaring that he acted as captain-general of the church and that he had no selfish motives, Cesare then drove Petrucci from Siena and, having done so, moved against the Orsini castles and lands in the countryside around Rome. The stronghold of Ceri surrendered after a savage bombardment on April 5, 1503. Other Orsini castles, including Palombara and Cerveteri, followed suit; Paolo Orsini, Lord of Palombara, was strangled; Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, was also murdered, so it was widely supposed, on the orders of the pope. Only Giangiordano Orsini, Lord of Bracciano, was spared; like Cesare, he was a knight of the French royal Order of St Michael, whose members swore a solemn oath on receiving their collar not to make war on one another.

Looking back on the events of the previous year, Machiavelli wrote: ‘Duke Valentino enjoys exceptional good fortune, courage and confidence that are almost inhuman, and a belief that he can accomplish whatever he undertakes.’ As a soldier, his talents lay in an extraordinary capacity for rapid movement and deceit. No sooner was he reported to be in one place than he suddenly appeared in another, miles away. He turned the art of war, so it was said of him, into the art of deceit. There are very few descriptions of him as a commander in the field; but there is one that demonstrates the astonishing power of his personality. His men were crossing a river when, in fear of drowning, they panicked. Shout as they did, their officers could not restore order. Cesare rode down to the riverbank. His men saw him sitting there, gazing upon the scene, silent and impressive. When they caught sight of him, the soldiers were brought immediately to order; and they crossed the river quietly.

And in his present situation, Cesare accepted the fact that he would have to undertake a realignment in his relations with foreign powers now that Spain was emerging as the stronger power in her struggle with France over Naples, notably since April 28, when the commander of the Spanish army, Gonsalvo di Córdoba, won a decisive victory over the French at Cerignola, exposing the weakness of the French hold over Naples. Cesare had his eyes on Tuscany, and it was believed that he had it in mind to form an alliance with the Spaniards to gain his end.

Cesare could do nothing, however, until he had raised more money to replenish his coffers, which had been so drastically depleted by his campaign of the previous year, by his attacks on the Orsini, and by his wild extravagance. Once again he turned to his father.

When the rich Venetian Cardinal Giovanni Michiel died in mysterious circumstances on April 10, 1503, after days of vomiting and diarrhoea, it was widely conjectured that the pope himself had been instrumental in having him poisoned. Certainly, so the Venetian ambassador Antonio Giustinian was told: ‘As soon as the Pope heard of his death he sent a man to his house and, before dawn, it was completely plundered,’ adding that ‘the death of the Cardinal has brought him over 150,000 ducats.’

Further amounts, so Giustinian claimed, were raised by the creation of cardinals. In May 1503 the nomination was agreed in a secret consistory of nine new cardinals; the three Italians were all Borgia men, one was German, a favour to the emperor, and the other five were Spaniards, all well disposed toward the Spanish pope and a reflection of Alexander VI’s change of policy; none, significantly, were French. ‘Today there was a consistory,’ Giustinian reported to the Venetian government, ‘and nine new cardinals were nominated, mostly men of dubious reputation and all have paid handsomely for their elevation, some 20,000 ducats and more, so that from 120,000 to 130,000 ducats have been collected; it is notorious that His Holiness is showing the world that the amount of a pope’s income is whatever he chooses it to be.’

A man who had worked for them in the past and had hoped to be rewarded with a red hat, Francesco Troche, did not trouble to conceal his disappointment and spoke slightingly of Cesare. ‘His Holiness the Pope told him that he was a madman to speak like that and if the Duke came to hear of it he would be killed,’ reported one ambassador to his master, ‘and it was because of the words of His Beatitude that, terrified, Troche took flight.’ He fled first to Genoa and then, by way of Sardinia, ended up in Corsica; but there he was caught and brought back to Rome, where he was strangled by Cesare’s sinister lieutenant, Miguel da Corella. On the same day, another man who had fallen foul of Cesare, Jacopo di Santacroce, a Roman nobleman and former Borgia supporter, was hanged and his body displayed on the Ponte Sant’Angelo as a warning to all enemies of the Borgias.

Cesare was now at the height of his power. Having raised enough money by all the means at his disposal, and ridding himself of several enemies, he now enrolled an army of some twelve hundred light cavalry and over four thousand infantry, all wearing his red-and-yellow livery, with the word CESAR in large letters embroidered on the chests and backs of their uniforms. ‘All the best soldiers were with him,’ the chronicler Matarazzo wrote. ‘And he had so much accumulated treasure and possessions that it seemed there was not as much elsewhere in all Italy. Nor were there as many well-disciplined soldiers so well supplied with arms and horses.’

Cesare was ready for his next campaign. At the beginning of July, the pope confirmed him as ruler of Città di Castello and ordered the city of Perugia to accept his lordship; he expected soon to add the cities of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena to his dominion. Poised for his Tuscan campaign, Cesare’s well-supplied and well-trained army began to march north up the Via Flaminia toward Perugia and the borders of Tuscany. Cesare himself remained in Rome, waiting for the right moment to start. With the Spanish army facing unexpected opposition in its conquest of the kingdom of Naples, its advance slowed; the French troops in northern Italy, meanwhile, had begun their long march south to relieve their beleaguered comrades. Cesare had to gamble on the Spanish winning through and fixed the date of his departure for August 9.