The Borgias

— CHAPTER 4 — Servant of the Servant of God

‘I AM POPE! I AM POPE!’

FOR FOUR GRUELLING DAYS, the cardinals plotted and negotiated and placed their voting slips in the gilded chalice, locked, in the intolerable summer heat, inside the Vatican and living, in considerable discomfort, in the tiny cubicles that had been erected for each cardinal in the Sistine Chapel. In the evening of the fourth day, rumours began to seep out of the Vatican and into the streets and taverns of Rome that the conclave was in deadlock. The crowds that had gathered so expectantly on the piazza in front of St Peter’s beneath the first-floor windows of the palace, waiting for the result of the election, began to disperse as night fell. The few who remained there overnight were astonished when, shortly after daybreak on the morning of August 11, 1492, the long-awaited announcement was made: ‘Habemus Papam!’

‘Deo Gratias!’ came the response and then, from the window above, fluttered down several pieces of paper on which were written the words ‘We have for Pope, Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia of Valencia.’ The new pope himself then appeared at the window, wearing the largest of the three sizes of papal robes that had been made in advance and laid out for the successful candidate. He was clearly much excited by his victory; instead of modestly declaring ‘volo,’ as custom required, he repeatedly shouted, ‘I am Pope! I am Pope!’

He had, it was said, spent large sums of money in becoming so. As the sixteenth-century Florentine author of The History of Italy, Francesco Guicciardini, explained:

[Rodrigo] had been a cardinal for many years and had become one of the most influential men at the papal court; his succession to the papacy was due to the conflict between Cardinal Ascanio Sforza and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, but principally his election was due to the fact that he had unashamedly bought the votes of many cardinals in a manner that was unprecedented in those times, using not only money but also the promise of his offices and benefices, which were plentiful.

There were, indeed, widespread rumours that he had paid bribes to no fewer than thirteen cardinals, including his main ally, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan and perhaps the most papabile of all the cardinals. In return for relinquishing his own ambitions to further those of Rodrigo, Ascanio was promised not only gold, which was reported to have been sent under cover of darkness to Ascanio’s palace on four heavily laden mules, but also the influential and lucrative office of vice-chancellor, which Rodrigo would have to surrender if he became pope. And along with the job would come the official residence, Rodrigo’s magnificent palace, known as the Cancelleria Vecchia. (It is now the Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini and was completely rebuilt in 1888 to the designs of Pio Piacentini, who retained just one side of the elegant fifteenth century courtyard.)

According to Burchard’s account, ‘Only five cardinals wished to receive nothing, namely the cardinals of Naples, Siena, Lisbon, San Pietro in Vincoli and Santa Maria in Porticu; they alone refused the gratuities, saying that the votes to elect a pope should be given freely and should not be purchased with presents.’ In the end, however, according to the Florentine ambassador’s report of the election, there was only one dissenting voice in the conclave and that was Sixtus IV’s nephew Giuliano della Rovere, the cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Yet even those who had been most ready to condemn the methods by which the new pope had secured his election were now forced to concede that, guilty as he may well have been of simony, bribery, and sexual incontinence, Alexander VI was both conscientious and competent in the discharge of his duties. Approachable, affable, and good-natured, he was also determined to put a stop to the riotous lawlessness into which Rome had fallen during the pontificate of his predecessor, Innocent VIII.

Accordingly, during September 1492, as Burchard outlined, ‘he established a body of prison inspectors; he also appointed four commissioners whom he charged with listening to all those who had complaints to make in Rome; similarly he reorganized the functions of the governor of the city and his officers.’ The pope ‘also decided that he would hold an audience every Tuesday which would be open to all citizens, men and women; he himself listened to their complaints and rendered justice in an admirable manner.’ It was not long, therefore, before order was restored; and the Romans could look forward to the pontificate of a man with a highly developed taste for ceremony and pageantry.

‘There was an incredible crowd of prelates,’ wrote Bernardino Corio, the Milanese chronicler, describing the scene outside St Peter’s on August 27, 1492, the day of Alexander VI’s coronation. ‘It was a most wonderful thing to see for each prelate was wearing his mitre and each was clothed according to his particular office; one after another the cardinals approached the Pope to kiss his feet, his hand and his mouth.’

Led by the papal cavalry, the prelates, cardinals, and foreign ambassadors then took part in the possesso, the ceremonial procession through the streets of Rome out into the uninhabited area and on through fields and orchards to the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano. Ascanio Sforza, the new vice-chancellor, was attended by twelve pages, ‘each dressed in doublets of crimson satin and purple capes, carrying batons and bearing the arms of his family.’ Altogether there were ‘seven hundred priests and cardinals with their retinues in splendid cavalcade with long lances and glittering shields.’

Riding a snow-white horse sat Alexander VI, ‘serene of countenance and supremely dignified,’ wrote another witness of the parade with fulsome hyperbole. ‘How wonderful is his tranquil bearing, how noble his face, how open, how frank. How greatly does the honour we feel him increase when we behold the dignity of his bearing… He showed himself to the people and blessed them… His glance fell upon them and filled every heart with joy.’

It was a stiflingly hot day; the crowds lining the route were described as immense; the air was thick with dust that the street sweepers had vainly tried to allay with bucketfuls of water; it was ‘almost impossible to see the sky.’ The route from the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Lateran took the procession past the ruins of the Colosseum, the great amphitheatre built by Emperor Vespasian, where once audiences of fifty-five thousand had thrilled to gladiatorial games and other spectacles; its cavernous vaults now converted into workshops and storerooms. They passed through enormous triumphal arches specially erected for the occasion and decorated with representations of a huge black bull grazing on a golden field, the striking emblem of the Borgia family, which could also be seen on the flags, pennants, and gonfalons waving in the hands of the cheering crowds.

The festivities over, Alexander VI surveyed his achievements. He was now ‘Sovereign Pontiff, servant of the servants of God, supreme Lord of Rome and of the Papal States.’ As pope and Vicar of Christ, he was also president of the Roman Rota, the court of appeal for the ecclesiastical affairs of Christendom, and one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. His own realm stretched north of Rome as far as Bologna and Ravenna, from Civitavecchia, on the shores of the Mediterranean, to Ancona and Rimini on the Adriatic coast. The Patrimony of St Peter would yield him an annual income of some 100,000 florins a year, a sum that had recently been much increased by the discovery of rich deposits of alum (a sulphate of aluminium and potassium essential to the tanning and clothing industries) in the hills north of Rome at Tolfa near Civitavecchia.

These Tolfa deposits had been discovered by a Florentine, Giovanni di Castro, who had written to Pius II of his belief that this discovery would save enormous sums in the way of tolls that Italian merchants had hitherto been obliged to pay to the authorities in Asia Minor ever since the European alum mines had been exhausted.

Holy Father [Giovanni di Castro had written], today I bring you victory over the Turks. Every year they extort more than 300,000 ducats from the Christians… because the alum mines of Lipari have been worked out. Today I have found seven mountains so rich in alum that they could furnish seven worlds. You will be able to supply enough alum to dye the cloth of the whole of Europe and thus snatch away the profits of the infidel.

Since this letter was written, the alum mines north of Rome had contributed handsomely to the income enjoyed by the papacy. While not as large as that of several other European states, it was now sufficient for the balancing of the papal budget, which had been much in debt in the time of Alexander VI’s predecessors. The mines also helped to maintain a small army for the protection of the Papal States and contributed to the gifts that the treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber, the pope’s cousin Francisco Borgia, was authorized to pass on to His Holiness’s indulged children, as well as to the expenses of the elaborate entertainments provided at the papal court.

Powerful and possessed of the sums needed to exercise his authority, Alexander VI was a fortunate man, indeed. He was now sixty-one years old; he had grown rather fat in recent years, and his large and fleshy nose seemed more pronounced than ever. Yet he remained an attractive man capable of exercising great charm, lively in conversation, attentive, and responsive, with an ingratiating manner and ready smile, a sensual nature, a commanding presence, and a sonorous voice. ‘He is handsome, of a most glad countenance,’ his tutor had written of him, and ‘he is also gifted with honeyed eloquence.’ Jacopo Gherardi da Volterra observed of him that he was blessed with a ‘powerful intellect and great imagination,’ adding, ‘He is brilliantly skilled in the conduct of affairs of state.’

The historian Francesco Guicciardini judged him to be a man who possessed singular cunning and shrewdness, excellent perspicacity, amazing powers of persuasion, and an incredible agility and concentration when dealing with affairs of state; but these qualities were far outweighed by his vices: the most obscene manners, hypocrisy, immodesty, mendacity, infidelity, profanity, insatiable greed, unrestrained ambition, a predilection for viciousness that was worse than barbaric, and a fervent hunger to exalt his many children, among whom there were several no less repellent than the father.

Men soon learned that it was dangerous to cross Alexander VI and never to be less than wary in his presence. This was an ambitious pope, powerful, rich, politically astute, and determined to establish his own family in the ranks of Europe’s ruling elite.