The Borgias

— CHAPTER 5 — Marriages and Alliances

HE WOULD ‘SHOW THEM WHO WAS POPE AND… WOULD MAKE MORE CARDINALS, WHETHER THEY LIKED IT OR NOT’

LIVING IN THE LUXURIOUS surroundings of Palazzo Montegiordano, the Orsini residence in Rome, under the care of Adriana da Mila, Rodrigo’s children had grown up protected from the violence and squalor of the city beyond its walls. It seems that Lucrezia received her early education from the ladies of the household, from Spanish tutors, from a priest who presided over the children’s schoolroom, and from the nuns of a nearby convent to which she was regularly conducted. While she spoke Spanish with her brothers and her father, she was also fluent in Italian and French, as well as Latin, and knew some Greek; her syllabus had included rhetoric and humanist literature; she enjoyed reading poetry and wrote her own verses. She was also an accomplished dancer and, indeed, regularly took part in the exhibitions of Valencian dancing arranged by Rodrigo for the entertainment of himself and his guests. She was a happy, cheerful, and pretty child, adored by all her family.

Like other girls of noble birth, Lucrezia was expected to marry young, to a man of her father’s choice whose connections would be beneficial to the family. In 1490, when she was just ten years old, she was betrothed to a young Spanish nobleman, some fifteen years older than herself, Don Juan de Centelles. The proposed marriage was, however, abandoned a year later when another more desirable suitor appeared in the form of a Spanish grandee, Don Gasparo di Procida, the Count of Aversa, whose lawyers entered into negotiations with those of the cardinal. These lawyers were still negotiating the details of the marriage contract when Rodrigo was elected pope. Now he could set his sights much higher and, according to Burchard, gave the young man ‘3,000 ducats to buy his silence and break the contract’; the pope, he continued, ‘intended thus to raise the status of his daughter.’ Alexander VI’s choice of bridegroom, however, would be one who also brought significant political advantages for himself.

On February 12, 1493, in a ceremony at the Vatican, Lucrezia was formally betrothed, by proxy, to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, a widower twice her age but cousin to Ludovico Sforza, ruler of Milan, and to his brother Cardinal Ascanio, the vice-chancellor.

Four months later, on June 9, Giovanni Sforza arrived in Rome for the marriage, accompanied by forty pack animals and some 280 horsemen, all richly dressed. He made his official entrance into the city through the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo, welcomed by a large crowd and escorted to the Vatican, where he ceremonially kissed the pope’s foot.

The marriage took place three days later, on June 12, when, according to Burchard, ‘the illustrious Giovanni Sforza, Count of Cotignola and Lord of Pesaro, took as his legitimate wife, Lucrezia Borgia, virgin, in her tenth year, or thereabouts’ — Burchard was, unusually for him, misinformed about her age; she had in fact celebrated her thirteenth birthday a few weeks earlier. On the morning of her wedding, in obedience to the instructions of their father, Lucrezia’s brother Juan escorted the young bride from the residence of Gianbattista Zen, cardinal of Santa Maria in Porticu, where she was then living, to the Vatican Palace. Her train was carried by one black girl, while another carried that of her principal attendant, a granddaughter of Innocent VIII. They were followed by well over 150 Roman ladies, led by Giulia Farnese, aptly described by Alexander VI’s master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, in his account of the event, as ‘the concubine of the Pope.’

The procession of ladies entered the room where the pope sat on his throne, accompanied by ten cardinals, five seated on each side of him, as well as several priests and deacons. As the ladies filed past the papal throne, much to the annoyance of the master of ceremonies most of them failed to genuflect, despite his scolding, though he was pleased to see that Lucrezia did observe this custom. Then Juan and Lucrezia approached to kiss the pope’s foot, followed this time by all the ladies. Brother and sister remained on their knees, while the rest of the ladies moved back toward the wall. Here also stood Cesare, seemingly annoyed by the prominent role that his younger brother had been accorded in the ceremony.

Alexander VI’s trusted lawyer, Camillo Beneimbene, now stepped forward to address the twenty-four-year-old bridegroom, Giovanni Sforza, who knelt on a cushion next to his bride. ‘Most worthy Lord,’ began the notary, ‘I believe that Your Lordship has recently undertaken to marry the illustrious Donna Lucrezia Borgia, who is here present, and that your proctor has submitted the matrimonial contract in your name… Are you ready to accept, and do you promise to observe what has been contracted?’

‘I perfectly understand the terms of the contract and accept them,’ the bridegroom responded, ‘and hereby promise to observe and undertake all its obligations.’ Then Camillo asked, ‘Most worthy Lord, do you agree to take the illustrious Lucrezia Borgia here present to be your lawful spouse?’ ‘I will,’ he replied, ‘most willingly.’

The cardinals and the others present were enjoined to be witnesses to Sforza’s oath, and the bride was then asked if she was prepared to become his ‘lawful spouse.’ She also replied, ‘I will.’ The bishop of Concordia then stepped forward and placed a ring on the ring finger of the bride’s left hand and another on the second finger while Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano and captain general of the papal armies, held a drawn sword over the heads of the couple. There followed a sermon by the bishop about the sacrament of marriage.

The bride was then escorted by Juan Borgia into the Sala Reale, specially hung for the occasion with lavish silks, velvets, and tapestries, where Alexander VI and his mistress, Giulia Farnese, played host to the bridegroom and the bride’s ladies. ‘An assortment of all kinds of sweets, marzipans, crystallized fruits and wines were served,’ noted Burchard, and ‘over 200 dishes were carried in by the stewards and squires, each with a napkin over his shoulder, offering them first to the Pope and his cardinals, then to the bridal couple and lastly the guests. Finally they flung what was left out of the window to the crowds of people below in such abundance that I believe more than 100 pounds of sweetmeats were crushed and trampled underfoot.’

The party was a lively and lecherous affair. The diarist Stefano Infessura noted that in their excitement, some of the male guests ‘threw the sweetmeats into the cleavages of many ladies, especially the good-looking ones,’ and those cardinals who remained behind to dine with the pope and his mistress were each seated between two pretty girls. The guests were regaled with what Burchard described as ‘a series of entertainments,’ including a comedy performed with ‘such elegance that everyone loudly applauded’ the actors; Infessura reported that ‘lascivious comedies and tragedies were performed which provoked much laughter in the audience.’

Once dinner was over, Alexander VI himself accompanied his daughter and her husband to the palace of Santa Maria in Porticu by the grand steps leading up to the Basilica of St Peter’s. ‘There the groom took marital possession of his bride,’ reported Infessura, adding, rather enigmatically, that ‘I could tell you many other things but I will not recount them because some are not true and those that are, are anyway unbelievable.’

This marriage had been arranged in the shadow of a bitter quarrel between King Ferrante of Naples and Ludovico Sforza, ruler of Milan. Ludovico was a ‘wise man,’ in the opinion of the French chronicler Philippe de Commynes, ‘but very timorous and humble when he was in awe, and false when it was to his advantage to be so; and this opinion I do not hold by hearsay but as one that knew him well, having had much business to do with him.’ Handsome in his way, despite the ugly, massive nose to be seen in the portrait attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he was known as Il Moro on account of his cunning and his resourceful nature, which were generally supposed to be characteristics of the Moors of North Africa. He was also greedy for power. When his brother Duke Galeazzo Maria was assassinated in 1476, leaving his seven-year-old nephew, Gian Galeazzo, as heir, Ludovico had seized control of Milan to rule in the young duke’s name. Together with his beautiful and clever wife, Beatrice d’Este, Ludovico presided over an impressively splendid court to which Leonardo was welcomed as painter and musician, as well as military engineer.

The sickly and insipid Gian Galeazzo was not too troubled by this deprivation, which allowed him the time and opportunity to hunt in the pleasant countryside around the castle of Pavia, where he was confined. His ambitious wife, Isabella of Aragon, granddaughter of King Ferrante, however, was far from satisfied with this arrangement and jealously resented the position that Beatrice occupied as wife of ‘the Moor,’ a position to which she herself felt entitled as the wife of the rightful duke. In 1493 she wrote a letter of bitter complaint to her father in Naples:

Everything is in his [Gian Galeazzo’s] power, while we are obliged to live as though we were private people. Yet Ludovico, not Gian galeazzo is Duke. His wife has lately given birth to a son who, everyone thinks, will succeed to the dukedom. Royal honours were paid to him at birth while we and our children are treated with contempt. We live here in Milan at risk to our very lives… If you have fatherly compassion… I implore you to come to our help and deliver your daughter and son-in-law from the fear of slavery, restoring them to their rightful place in the world.

Isabella’s father would willingly have responded to this call, but her grandfather, King Ferrante, advised caution. Both sides appealed to Alexander VI for papal support in their quarrel. At first the pope was inclined to support the Sforzas in their endeavour; after all, theirs was a family into which his daughter was to be married and, indeed, was married on June 12, 1493.

Soon after Lucrezia’s wedding, however, an envoy of the Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, arrived in Rome and told the pope that his master and mistress supported the Spanish claim to Naples. They proposed a double alliance: Alexander VI’s son Jofrè should become Prince of Squillace, a Neapolitan grandee, and be married to Sancia, the illegitimate daughter of King Ferrante’s son, while Juan Borgia, the pope’s second and favourite son, who had inherited the Spanish title Duke of Gandía after the death of his half-brother, should now marry Maria Enriquez, a cousin of King Ferdinand.

In August Juan left for Spain, accompanied by four galleys laden with jewels and luxurious furnishings for his new palace. By November reports were reaching Rome of his misbehaviour, his mistreatment of his new wife, his reluctance to consummate the marriage, his extravagance, and his gambling. ‘Try to fulfil the hope which His Holiness has always founded upon you,’ Cesare wrote to his brother, adding, ‘If you have my own feelings at heart, do see that these reports, which give His Holiness so much pain, should cease.’

In a subsequent letter, Cesare wrote of their father’s decision that their brother Jofrè was to be granted the title of Prince of Squillace and an income of 40,000 ducats a year, and that Juan should add the Neapolitan title of Prince of Tricarico to his Spanish dukedom.

This agreement was reached ten or twelve days ago [Cesare told Juan] and your Grace will be amazed that I should not have informed you of it earlier but, finding myself somewhat indisposed when the aforesaid agreements were reached, I left for the baths at Stigliano, where I have been until yesterday, returning in health by God’s good grace… We have reason, my Lord brother, to kiss the ground on which His Holiness walks and to pray always for the life of him who has made us so great; and therefore I pray you to seek continually to serve and please His Holiness, in a manner that you may show him on our behalf our gratitude in every way that we can.

While the arrangements for Jofrè’s marriage to Sancia were being made, negotiations were also in progress to arrange a cardinal’s hat for Cesare, to join his cousin Juan Borgia-Lanzol, who had been created cardinal of Monreale a fortnight after Alexander VI’s election. As Cesare had been declared legitimate by Sixtus IV, the two cardinals entrusted with establishing his status were able to declare that he was eligible for admission to the sacred college; and so he was admitted at the age of eighteen, though he was not yet even in holy orders, which he would take the following year in Holy Week, and was admittedly ‘very young in all his actions.’

‘Such discord has never been seen,’ wrote the Mantuan ambassador when the list of proposed new cardinals was placed before the college on September 18, 1493. In an attempt to gain control of the college, Alexander VI wanted to flood it with his own candidates by creating an unprecedented thirteen new red hats. Three of the proposed candidates were Alexander VI’s secretaries; another was Alessandro Farnese, ‘brother of Giulia, the Pope’s concubine,’ as Burchard recorded; and another was Cesare, ‘the Pope’s son.’ The college objected in the strongest terms; upon being told that several cardinals strongly objected to a certain name on the list, Alexander VI angrily declared that he would ‘show them who was Pope, and that at Christmas he would make more cardinals, whether they liked it or not.’ A majority of the cardinals did not like this elevation of a mere boy to the college.

Two days later, on September 20, eleven cardinals arrived for the consistory meeting, and seven of those present agreed to vote the issue through; the other four, reluctant to be party to this unprecedented act, all abstained. Ten more cardinals, led by Giuliano della Rovere, showed their outright opposition to the scheme by refusing to attend the consistory. The decision to give Cesare a cardinal’s hat was greeted with cries of outrage. The violent Giuliano della Rovere, a longtime enemy of Alexander VI (and who later was to become pope himself as Julius II), was said ‘to howl with rage,’ so furious, indeed, that he had to take to his bed with a high fever. And when Alexander VI invested Cesare with his red hat in a grand ceremony in St Peter’s and assigned him his titular church on September 23, Giuliano and his supporters refused to play their customary part in the proceedings.

Alexander VI’s narrow victory reflected just how insecure his position was during those early days of his pontificate. He realized that he would have to tread carefully if he were to benefit from his position. There was also the fear that his enemy Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, a formidable opponent, might well call for a council that would have the power to depose him. Already della Rovere was accusing him of trying to gain control of the college of cardinals by filling it with Spaniards and other foreigners. Alexander VI also needed to proceed cautiously in his relations with France, where the Spanish marriage alliances of two of his children were causing due unease.

As if to echo the precariousness of his position, the storms that autumn were more violent and dramatic than usual. Torrential rain caused huge damage in the fields and vineyards around Rome, and the Tiber burst its banks, flooding the city streets. ‘Bolts of lightning struck in many places,’ Burchard recorded, ‘and one hit the Vatican palace in the very room in which the Pope was in at that precise moment; he was so shocked and terrified that he lost the power of speech; two of his servants lost consciousness’; luckily they all recovered.

That autumn plague also broke out in Rome, brought, it was widely believed, by the Jews who had been expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella and who had taken refuge in Rome, setting up their tents in a camp outside the city walls by the gate leading out onto the Via Appia. As the death toll climbed into the hundreds and claimed one cardinal as a victim, Alexander VI decided to move the papal court to Viterbo. Appointing his nephew the cardinal of Monreale to take charge of Rome in his absence, the pope and his huge entourage, which included a horse carrying the Tabernacle of the Eucharist, left the city; they stayed a few days at Alexander VI’s castle at Nepi and at the Bell Inn at Ronciglione before arriving at their destination. The pope and his court stayed at Viterbo, where Alexander VI could indulge his passion for hunting in the wooded hills around the city, for six weeks, accompanied by eighteen cardinals, one of whom was Cesare. Giuliano della Rovere was conspicuous by his absence.

On December 18, the day before his return, a proclamation was read out in Rome ‘to tell all the inhabitants to be present tomorrow on the return of His Holiness,’ reported Burchard. ‘Each must clean the area of street in front of his house, hang out all their tapestries and other items, and do all necessary to honour the Pope, as is his due.’