Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (48 page)

On a more pleasant note, Lucrezia had thanked Isabella for a recipe for ‘
el Juleppo
’ (?an infusion), which Isabella had sent her in the hope that it would do her good. Lucrezia had been unwell since Isabella left but she was sure that the ‘
Juleppo
’ would help her ‘principally because it comes from you who I know loves me like a sister: I will soon try it when the weather cools’. She did not know what was wrong with her but joked, ‘it must be as ‘
Catherina che suona
’, one of her musicians, sings ‘because fortune wills it’.
¹⁰
References to Lucrezia’s ill health become increasingly frequent in di Prosperi’s reports over these years. On 4 March he wrote that Alfonso, who had been hawking in the Barco and was planning to hunt wolf, put off his plans because of Lucrezia’s delicate state of health and forbade her from continuing her Lenten fasting and dieting.
¹¹

Five days later, however, she was seen in public again. On 14 March she dispatched an envoy, il Nasello, to Naples for what di Prosperi thought were negotiations regarding ‘her brother, Don Giovanni’, although it was more likely that it concerned the winding-up of Rodrigo Bisceglie’s affairs. Giovanni Borgia, like Rodrigo Bisceglie, had been under the official tutelage of Cardinal Cosenza, who was joined in that office by Ippolito d’Este in November 1501, presumably in preparation for Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso. Giovanni remained Spanish at heart: he liked to sign himself ‘Don Juan de Borja’ and his letter of condolence to Alfonso on Lucrezia’s death was written not in Italian but in Castilian, in a looping, immature hand.
¹²
Giovanni Borgia was the one member of Lucrezia’s extended family whom Alfonso found hard to stomach. While he liked Cesare’s son Girolamo, and had him in his household after Alberto Pio left Carpi for Rome, Giovanni Borgia can best be described as a nuisance. It would appear that he was now back in Ferrara because in May one of his men killed a squire employed by the ducal sons. Enraged by such a ‘cruel and arrogant case’ touching on his own family, Alfonso was determined to arrest him and tortured other servants of Giovanni’s suspected of having spirited the culprit away.
¹³
In June, di Prosperi reported that Lucrezia too was angry about the case: ‘Alberto di Petrato, a servant of the Lady Duchess was placed in the Castello for having helped the escape of those of the household of Don Giovanni [Borgia] who murdered under the loggia of the piazza a squire of the Lord’s sons and it seems that Her Excellency has been angry with him until now.’ Lucrezia, however, with her customary mercy, later released him. Giovanni Borgia had gone to Rome before Alfonso arrived from Venice on 3 June, ‘and it was conjectured that he had done so because he was no longer well regarded by the Duke’.
¹⁴
He remained there until early September when di Prosperi reported that he would be given a pension by the King of France and would go to the French court. He was to be a source of endless irritation to Alfonso on his own visit there, and it is a measure of his deep affection for Lucrezia that he did so much for the wretched youth. The feckless creature had been nominated Duke of Camerino by his father Alexander and among Lucrezia’s papers are several documents relating to the estate,
^I5
but on the fall of the Borgias the Varano family, close connections of the Este, swiftly returned there.

Not only was Lucrezia indulgent towards her worthless half-brother, but she also looked out for the interests and education of another half-brother, Rodrigo Borgia, her father’s last child, born in the final year of his pontificate. From two letters of the faithful Borgia follower Juan Las Cases, written in May and September 1518, it appears that this Rodrigo Borgia had gone from Rome to Salerno in the Kingdom of Naples and that Lucrezia had written somewhat peremptorily, demanding to know how his studies were proceeding. Las Cases gave various excuses, including illness, for failing to reply sooner and expressed a great desire to go to Ferrara to see her ‘to talk about old times’.
¹⁶
In September, Las Cases wrote again assuring Lucrezia that the chaplain sent to tutor ‘Dom Rodrigo’ had been instructed as she wished to get him to say his offices and to keep him ‘in the love and fear of God’.

Cesare’s two illegitimate children, Girolamo and Camilla Lucrezia, were under her eye in Ferrara, the former as a page at court, the latter as a nun at San Bernardino. Both were now teenagers, having been born between 1501 and 1502 of mothers unknown, although in a document of 1509 legitimizing Camilla, Lucrezia stated that she was born of Cesare, married, and an unnamed married woman. Cesare’s one legitimate child, his daughter by his wife, Charlotte d’Albret, Luisa or Louise, born in May 1500 and whom he had never seen, was just under seven years old when he died. She never visited Ferrara but wrote dutiful letters to her aunt Lucrezia.
¹⁷
She married, aged seventeen, an elderly and distinguished soldier and courtier, Louis de la Trémouïlle, in 1517. And Lucrezia, according to her accounts books, also kept in touch with Juan Gandia’s widow and son.
¹⁸

Early in May 1518 Alfonso went to Abano to take the waters for his health, leaving Lucrezia in sole charge (Ippolito having left the previous year with a huge retinue of hunting dogs, stallions and leopards to look after his interests in the bishopric of Eger in Hungary). ‘The Lady Duchess has remained as Governor and is most expeditious in our affairs at present: it is true that sometimes she asks counsel of the Magistrates to assist her,’ di Prosperi wrote on 16 May. ‘And up till now they have tortured some persons arrested for going about without light at night, so everyone is on their guard . . .’This offence was apparently considered so grave that Alfonso had written to Lucrezia about it from Abano, demanding that they should be tortured because they were armed when arrested. Lucrezia responded, pleading not to be forced to torture them. Her letter gives an interesting insight not only into her own merciful character but into the class-based nature of Ferrarese justice. On 15 May she wrote to Alfonso giving her reasons for her actions:

More than one cause induced me not to torture
[dare la corda]
Giovanni Battista Bonleo, first because when he was arrested it was only just after the prescribed hour and he was wearing his day clothes and not things that would give rise to suspicion of any evil intent, but having only gone out and was returning home. And then I remembered the proclamation that the corda should not be given to any gentleman nor of the condition he is, I did not think I was wrong to have respect to his house and relations, but I have kept this decision between ourselves and released him on security of 200 ducats. And nor do I think I did wrong in releasing Verghezino because the
podestà
told me that Your Excellency had ordered him to have great respect for all the Cardinal’s household, and the others were released at the instance of Sismondo Cistarello [probably Ippolito’s untrustworthy wardrobe master, Sigismondo Cestarello] who gave a simple testimony that they were servants of the Cardinal . . . but . . . on investigation of this and suspecting it was not true, I ordered them to be re-arrested . . .

In another letter of 19 May she attempted to calm Alfonso’s anger against a son of Annibale Bentivoglio who had been accused of violence against the Ferrarese officers who were taking a Bolognese to prison and on the next day it was another case of mercy for a man arrested armed with a sword but without a light. This time it was ‘Leonardo, a nephew of Giacomo di Lunardi, who has charge of il Boschetto who, when it was intended to proceed against him according to the proclamation, I was prayed by him that if I would not grant him any other grace . . . he would willingly pay the 25 ducats than suffer the
tre tratti di corda
. I had him therefore held in prison until I could inform Your Excellency and have your opinion . . .’ Francesco Gonzaga was also bombarded with letters from Lucrezia in her role as administrator of justice, no less than three that month concerning the arrest of a criminal, Alfonso Rampino, ‘my Ferrarese subject’.

On 24 May, Lucrezia addressed a housewifely letter to Alfonso requesting six guinea fowl eggs for hatching, reminding him that, when she had requested some of his fowl for a friend, he had told her that guinea fowl did not survive being moved and promised that he would give her eggs when the season came. At the end of the month while Alfonso was still away, this time having gone from Abano to Venice where he was most honourably received, the two Duchesses of Urbino, Elisabetta and Leonora, arrived on a formal visit. Lucrezia sent her sons out to meet them accompanied by the leading gentlemen and ladies of the court, while she herself waited to greet them, standing at the head of the marble staircase leading to the Corte. She accompanied them to their apartments above the loggia overlooking the piazza where Francesco Gonzaga used to stay and which were now normally occupied by her sons, who for the past month had been staying in the apartment in the great garden of the Castello.

She appears to have been ill again: Di Prosperi was guarded as to the nature of her illness: ‘for a few days now she has not left her apartments because of an indisposition which I think you know of’, he told Isabella on 30 May. Describing the Duchesses’ visit to Alfonso, Lucrezia told him that she had put them in ‘Your Lordship’s rooms’ and had given them not just one
camerino,
as he had ordered, but both
camerini
with the Stufa Grande, and had taken their own son Francesco to stay in her apartment, so that they could be more honourably lodged and she could have easy access to them. She had put Emilia Pia, Duchess Elisabetta’s great friend, and the ladies in Don Ercole’s rooms. Anxious to demonstrate to Alfonso the efforts she had made to make them comfortable and to present his possessions to the greatest advantage, she had heard that they wanted to see his
‘boschetto’,
the new villa – later known as the Belvedere – which Alfonso had begun to build five years earlier on a sandy island in the Po just outside Ferrara. She had had it furnished and arranged ‘so that it will give them pleasure and they will praise it’. Yet, despite Lucrezia’s efforts, di Prosperi told Isabella that the two Duchesses had ‘taken little pleasure from their stay, principally because of the late hours which we are accustomed to eat’.

Lucrezia was unwell again in August and had not been seen since the 15th, which di Prosperi attributed to
‘il solito male suo’
– her usual sickness – without giving details. She wrote to Alfonso about their sons: Ercole had gone that morning out of Ferrara, as he had ordered, but Ippolito stayed behind because he felt sick but did not appear to be in danger of serious illness. Perhaps because of concern for her and because she was not well enough to carry on government, Alfonso returned to Ferrara and plunged himself into administration: he divided his foreign secretariat between Opizo, or Obizzo, da Remi for Milan and France, and Bonaventura Pistofilo for Rome and Venice. In Lucrezia’s place he himself gave audiences in the
Examine
– ‘may God make it that he perseveres [in this] to the content and wellbeing of his subjects’, commented di Prosperi which, with other subsequent remarks, implied that Alfonso was not much given to administration. A week later he was still energetically taking part, giving audiences before breakfast, and afterwards taking the
Examine
with the two secretaries, Hieronymo Magnanimo and the Counsellors of Justice. He was enjoying himself, di Prosperi said, particularly the audiences – ‘as I remember did your Mother of most happy memory’. ‘And, in truth, it is a most lordly thing and of the greatest contentment to his subjects . . . that no one can consider himself with too much influence with His Lordship but all are considered
almost equal
[my italics].’He took an interest in improving the defences of Ferrara, visiting every morning the quarter known as the Borgo di Sotto, where a fosse and ramparts were being created, the ramparts to be as high as or higher than the tallest palazzo in the city. Walls and towers were being built to house artillery ‘The pity of it is,’ wrote di Prosperi, ‘that almost all the houses in that Borgo are being levelled, including that beautiful monastery of S. Silvestro founded so long ago by San Maurelio, our patron saint.’ When he returned to Comacchio, Lucrezia again took up the business of the
Examine
and gave audiences, which she did every day he was away.

Towards the end of November, Alfonso left for the French court to see if he could achieve some concrete action over Modena and Reggio. Leo had promised to hand over the two cities to Alfonso on payment of the 40,000 ducats which he [Leo] had paid the Emperor for them, plus 14,000 ducats he claimed to have spent on the administration of those cities. This had been formally agreed in a notarial document drawn up in Florence in February 1516, backed by Alfonso’s two royal supporters, Francis I and Henry VIII, when Alfonso had promised to pay the money demanded by the Pope. Nothing, however, had resulted and Leo was now planning to marry his nephew, Lorenzo de’Medici, to a French princess and give him Ferrara. When summoned by Francis I to Paris to attend the entry of the English ambassadors in December following an Anglo-French rapprochement, Alfonso hastened to comply.

Before he left he called a meeting of the gentlemen and leading citizens and told them formally: ‘I have called you here to tell you that the King of France’s Majesty writes that I should go to him. That is all I have to say except that I commend to you my wife and children and my state
[le cose mie]:
and if anything untoward should happen that you should do for them what you would do for me.’ For a man known to be taciturn, the words were few enough but all the more effective for that. His hearers remained ‘moved and mute’ for a while, then ‘reminded him of the faith which the people had always shown him and that His Lordship should not doubt of it, to which he replied that this heartened him to leave and otherwise he would not have departed.’
¹⁹