Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (9 page)

Yet in the midst of all his troubles, Alexander’s yearning to see his mistress was at the forefront of his mind. Giulia Farnese was also in an awkward position. Her husband, Orsino Orsini, far from being complacent at her public and scandalous association with the Pope, had remained at Città di Castello on the pretext of illness so that he would not have to join the Neapolitan forces, and was determined that Giulia should return to him at Bassanello. Alexander, however, prevailed on Virginio Orsini to order Orsino to join the Neapolitan camp of the Duke of Calabria. Virginio, in Rome to confer with the Pope about the betrayal of Ostia to his hereditary enemies, the Colonna and their Savelli allies, took Alexander’s side against his own unfortunate kinsman. On 21 September 1494 he wrote to Orsino, clearly (since a draft in the Pope’s hand exists in the Vatican Secret Archives) at Alexander’s dictation. The letter has hitherto been attributed to Alexander but the terms in which it is written and the fact that it was to be sent from Monterotondo, the Orsini fortress outside Rome, makes it clear that the text was agreed between them during their conference in Rome, and that Orsini dispatched it from Monterotondo, Alexander keeping a draft for his archives.

In this letter Virginio informed Orsino that he had received news that the Duke of Calabria was angry because he had been told that Orsino was now recovered. ‘I therefore urge you for your honour and to purge your contumaciousness that you go immediately to the Duke of Calabria who I am sure will receive you kindly,’ he wrote, adding that he had hoped to find Adriana and Giulia ‘your mother and your wife’ in Rome so that he could encourage them not to abandon the Pope in this undertaking for the good of the King of Naples and his state and the benefit of the house of Orsini. He understood that the King had written to the same effect to Adriana: ‘And therefore it is necessary and thus we pray and command you that you should write immediately to Madama [Adriana] asking her and expressly ordering your wife that they should immediately come to Rome together and with all their skill and art to urge the Pope to remain firm in this enterprise . . .’ In view of the urgency of the matter he was sending his courier with the letter to await a reply confirming the orders Orsino would have given.
³⁹

The letter was almost certainly prompted by a report from Alexander’s confidant Francesco Gacet, which had roused the Pope to fury. He informed Alexander that Adriana had arrived at the Farnese estate of Capodimonte and had told Cardinal Farnese of Alexander’s recent resolution that Giulia should go to Rome and the archdeacon be sent to Orsino to persuade him to do the Pope’s will. Farnese (the future Pope Paul III), a proud and intelligent man who was well aware that he was known as ‘the petticoat cardinal’ because of his sister’s part in his promotion, stood firm against causing further scandal. He cared nothing for offending Orsino in order to do His Beatitude a service but he could not do this for his own honour and the infamy it would bring on his house. Gacet had suggested that Virginio Orsini should be prevailed upon to intervene and persuade Orsino to go to join the Neapolitan camp and after his departure the women could go to Rome. The cardinal, he stressed, would not for his honour resist Orsino’s demands that his wife should go to Bassanello. Fra Theseo, a monk in Giulia’s service, wrote from Bassanello warning her that he had never seen Orsino so enraged and that if she was wise she would under no circumstances go to Rome.
⁴⁰

Alexander was a man of unusual force of character, always determined to get his own way in all circumstances. He minuted three furious letters to Giulia, Adriana and Cardinal Farnese:

Ungrateful and perfidious Julia, we have received a letter of yours via Navarrico by which you declare that your intention is not to come here without the permission [against the will] of Ursino. And although at this moment we understand your wicked state of mind and that of those who counsel you, however, considering your feigned, dissimulating words can we totally persuade ourselves that you should use such ingratitude and perfidy towards us, having so many times sworn and pledged your faith to be at our command and not to concile yourself with Ursino. That now you want to do the contrary and go to Basanello [sic] with express peril to your life, I would not believe that you would do for any other reason if not to plunge again into that water of Bassanello . . . [a euphemism for resuming marital relations with Orsino which on a previous occasion resulted in the birth of their daughter, Laura].

He hoped that she and the ‘
ingratissima
’ Adriana would come to their senses and repent. Nonetheless, under pain of excommunication and sentence to eternal punishment he ordered her not to leave Capodimonte and still less to go to Bassanello.
⁴¹

He wrote to Adriana along much the same lines, accusing her of revealing her wicked mind and malignity in declaring in her letter brought by Navarrico that she did not wish Giulia to go to Rome against the will of Orsino, and forbidding her to leave Capodimonte without his express permission.
⁴²
To Alessandro Farnese he wrote less venomously, reminding him of how much he, the Pope, had done for him and, with a note of trust betrayed, that he could have so soon preferred Orsino to him. Now, so that Farnese could excuse himself with Orsino and so that Giulia should not have to go to Bassanello, he, Alexander, would send him another papal brief in the hand of the Bishop of Nepi, exhorting and commanding him ‘to conform freely to our will’.
⁴³

But that was far from being the end of the matter: Alexander never gave up, as he informed Gacet. He had seen Fra Theseo’s letter to Giulia advising her to go to Bassanello and not to Rome (‘I know that friar,’ he added menacingly). He had responded by sending a brief to Orsino commanding him under threat of the gravest penalties either to go to the camp of the Duke of Calabria or to come to him in Rome within three days. Intimidated by all this pressure, Orsino capitulated, his brief stand for his honour evaporated: on 28 November he extracted his price, asking the Pope for money to pay his troops. On the 29th, Giulia, with her sister Girolama and Adriana, left Capodimonte for Rome. But they had left it too late and once again Alexander was – temporarily – thwarted in his desires. The party was captured near Viterbo by French troops under the gallant captain Yves d’Alègre and a demand for a ransom of 3,000 ducats was sent to the Pope. Alexander was frantic: he appealed to his former allies, Ascanio Sforza and Cardinal Sanseverino, to intercede for him with the King of France. His request was granted, and on I December the ladies arrived at the Vatican to be greeted by Juan Marrades, the Pope’s Catalan chamberlain. It was rumoured that Giulia spent the night there.

The ageing Pope’s passion and vanity were ridiculed by his many enemies, among them Ludovico Sforza. Giacomo Trotti, Ferrarese envoy at the court of Milan, reported Sforza’s reaction to Duke Ercole:

He gravely reproved Monsignor Ascanio and Cardinal Sanseverino for surrendering Madonna Giulia, Madonna Adriana, and Hieronyma [Girolama Farnese] to his Holiness: for, since these ladies were the ‘heart and eyes’ of the Pope, they would have been the best whip for compelling him to do everything which was wanted of him, for he could not live without them. The French, who captured them, received only three thousand ducats as ransom, although the Pope would gladly have paid fifty thousand or more simply to have them back again. The . . . Duke [Sforza] received news from Rome . . . that when the ladies entered, His Holiness went to meet them arrayed in a black doublet bordered with gold brocade, with a beautiful belt in the Spanish fashion, and with a sword and dagger. He wore Spanish boots and a velvet biretta, all very gallant. The Duke asked me, laughing, what I thought of it, and I told him that, were I the Duke of Milan, like him, I would endeavour, with the aid of the King of France and in every other way – and on the pretext of establishing peace – to entrap His Holiness, and with fair words, such as he himself was in the habit of using, to take him and the cardinals prisoners, which would be very easy. He who has the servant, as we say at home, has also the wagon and the oxen . . .
⁴⁴

Lucrezia, meanwhile, remained safely in Pesaro where life was pleasant enough in the princely palace in the main square and at the beautiful Villa Imperiale on the hill of San Bartolo above the city. Pesarese society, although less cosmopolitan than that of Rome, was far from being dull and provincial. It was, above all, secure: the French army, pouring southward without meeting any resistance, was intent on reaching Rome and taking Naples. In Rome, her father was isolated, supported only by Cesare. Juan was still in Spain, Jofre and Sancia in Naples. Alexander had been betrayed by the Orsini who handed their castle of Bracciano over to the French King, while the Neapolitan army had had to retreat south to defend the Kingdom. On 31 December, as Charles VIII entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo at the head of his troops, Alexander retreated through the covered way from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’Angelo, taking with him his private papers (including the letters quoted above) which were to reveal so much of his family relationships. The Borgias were at bay.

3. The Borgias Renascent

‘And when His Excellency asked him [Giovanni Sforza] if this [his alleged impotence and inability to consummate his marriage to Lucrezia] were true, he answered no. Rather, he had known her an infinite number of times. But the Pope had taken her away from him only in order to have her to himself . . .’

– Antonio Costabili, Ferrarese envoy in Rome to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara on the subject of Lucrezia’s divorce from Giovanni Sforza

By the late spring of 1495 the situation had changed dramatically for the Borgias. With no weapons other than his diplomatic skills and the power of his personality, Alexander had succeeded in outwitting the French King with a formidable force at his back. Charles had received fair words from the Pope and nothing more; having taken the road for Naples with Cesare in his train as hostage for his father’s good behaviour, he was incandescent with fury when Cesare, in a pre-arranged plan, escaped at Velletri disguised as a groom. When it was discovered that he had disappeared overnight and that all the trunks of his baggage train were loaded with stones, Charles’s mood darkened further. Furious, he declared, ‘All Italians are dirty dogs, and the Holy Father is the worst of them.‘ Within a few months of Charles’s departure from Rome, he was to discover what a formidable and cunning enemy he faced in Alexander who succeeded in uniting a daunting array of powers against him. On 31 March 1495 a Holy League against the French was announced between Milan, Venice, Spain, the papacy and the Emperor.

Meanwhile, in Naples Charles’s position was becoming untenable; where he had at first been welcome he was now hated. Although hideous in appearance – ‘more like a monster than a man’, as one commentator described him, he was a relentless womanizer. ‘[the] was one of the most lascivious men in France, and was very fond of copulation, and of changing his dishes, so that once he had had a woman, he cared no more about her, taking his pleasure with new ones . . .’ wrote an observer. His soldiery were no better: ‘The French were clownish, dirty, and dissolute people . . . They were always to be found in sin and venereal acts.’ When the main body of the French army finally left the Kingdom in May, making for home, they took with them not just plunder but syphilis, a terrifying new disease, which spread like wildfire through Europe.

As they approached Rome on their way north, Alexander and Cesare, with nineteen cardinals and a large force of papal, Milanese and Venetian troops, beat a strategic retreat, first to Orvieto and then to Perugia. Realizing there was nothing further to be gained by remaining in Italy, where he could be cut off and trapped by the League, Charles made off northwards. At Fornovo on the River Taro he met the forces of the League under the command of Francesco Gonzaga. The Italians claimed a famous victory and Gonzaga commissioned his favourite painter, Andrea Mantegna, to execute the
Madonna della Vittoria
(ironically, now in the Louvre) to commemorate it, but the inescapable fact was that Charles got away, leaving behind on the field of battle his Neapolitan plunder, including a book containing the portraits of the ladies whose favours he had enjoyed in ‘Naples’. At the end of June, the Borgias returned to Rome.

The triumph of the Borgia Pope and his family was celebrated in the heart of the Vatican where Bernardino Pinturicchio had completed the decoration of the Borgia Apartments (which still exist) as a flamboyant demonstration of their Spanish origins and family pride. Here, covering walls and ceiling in almost megalomaniac repetition, are the two Borgia devices, the double crown of Aragon, symbol of the royal house from which, quite fictitiously, they claimed descent, and to which they have added sun rays or flames pointing downwards, and the grazing ox of their original emblem transformed into a rampant, virile, pagan bull.

These rooms have an alien, defiantly Spanish feeling: the tiled floors blaze with the Aragonese double crown, the frames surrounding Pinturicchio’s frescoes are coloured, geometric stucco work, recalling the Moorish craftsmanship of Granada and Seville. One fresco depicts the unmistakable, powerful figure of Alexander, clothed in a cope studded with jewels and pearls, his profile expressing not spirituality but a sensual vitality. Frescoes in the adjoining Sala dei Santi incorporated supposed portraits of his children – Cesare, Lucrezia and Juan Gandia.
¹

Lucrezia was still in Pesaro in the spring of 1495 when Giovanni Sforza, in the wake of an exchange of visits between Pesaro and Urbino, wrote to the Gonzaga boasting that ‘without fail’ he would send his wife to Rome after Easter ‘from where she will not leave until she has obtained all we desire [for Sigismondo to be made cardinal] because no one else can achieve this better, I am sending her and she goes willingly to serve Your Excellency to whom she is devoted . . .’
²
But for all his boasting, Sforza did not trust the Borgias, as whining letters he wrote from Pesaro to Ludovico il Moro in March and April demonstrated.
³
On 18 March he wrote to Ludovico telling him that at dawn that morning a messenger from the Pope had arrived, forbidding him to leave home (presumably to go to Rome) and then ordering him to join the service of the Pope, Milan and Venice. Sforza said he planned instead to go to Milan, throw himself into his arms and place himself and his state under Ludovico’s protection. One wonders what he was afraid of.

For all Giovanni Sforza’s boasting, Lucrezia had not so far succeeded in obtaining the cardinal’s hat for Sigismondo Gonzaga, as his brother Francesco complained bitterly to Ludovico Sforza.
⁴
In his role as Captain General of Venice commanding the forces of the League, Francesco visited both Lucrezia and Cesare when he passed through Rome en route for Naples in March 1496 where the remaining French were besieged in Atella. Alexander presented him with the Golden Rose for his services to the League and the Church but he had preferred to strengthen his own position by the appointment as cardinals of intimates whose loyalty was assured: his cousin, Juan de Borja-Llançol, the Valencians, Juan Llopis and Bartolomeu Marti, and the Catalan Juan de Castre-Pinos. As the victor of Fornovo and the foremost soldier in Italy, Francesco Gonzaga, with his dark, sensual looks, no doubt made an impression on Lucrezia and he was destined to play a major role in her life. What Gonzaga, married to the formidable Isabella d’Este and with a mistress by whom he had three children, thought of the fifteen-year-old Countess of Pesaro is not recorded. His opinion of her father no doubt coincided with that of his scatological correspondent, Floriano Dolfo, who in a long letter wrote of ‘this our Pope who brought to this rose [the Golden Rose] such a stink of trickery, simony, quarrels and cankers that not even the perfume of so noble a flower can overcome it . . .
⁵

Giovanni Sforza was not in Rome (although he had apparently been in January); rather, he was in Pesaro, putting his troops in order prior to joining Gonzaga in the Kingdom and going through the usual protracted negotiations with the Pope and the Duke of Milan over money for his
condotta
.
⁶
He arrived in Rome on 16 April and remained there for ten days extracting money from the Pope and resisting all attempts to make him leave earlier.
⁷
Something was wrong in his relationship with Lucrezia. The Mantuan envoy Gian Carlo Scalona made dark hints as to the reason for Sforza’s departure on 28 April – ‘perhaps he has something at home, something which others would not suspect’ – adding that he had left in a most desperate state of mind and would not return, ‘leaving his wife under the apostolic mantle’, a phrase which has been interpreted as a suggestion of incest. No hint of this, however, appears in the correspondence of Ascanio Sforza and the Milanese envoy Stefano Taberna, who, being close to Giovanni, would have been in a position to know.

With Giovanni Sforza out of the way, the summer of 1496 was notable for a series of Borgia family reunions, celebrated with their customary pomp. In May, Jofre and Sancia returned to Rome, their entry into the city organized by Alexander and Cesare with all the showmanship of which they were past masters. Entering by the Lateran Gate, the couple were greeted by the households of all the cardinals, the commander of the Vatican Guard at the head of two hundred soldiers, the ambassadors of Spain, Milan, Naples, Venice and the Empire, with the senators, nobles and leading citizens of Rome. Lucrezia, anxious not to be outshone by her sister-in-law, of whose attractions she had already heard much, was gorgeously dressed to meet her. Jofre and Sancia rode to the Vatican where Alexander peeped down at their approach through a half-closed shutter before going down with Cesare to greet them. The atmosphere of sexuality surrounding Sancia, and indeed the Borgia court, emerges clearly in this description by Scalona:

In truth she did not appear as beautiful as she had been made out to be. Indeed the lady of Pesaro [Lucrezia] surpassed her. However that may be, by her gestures and aspect the sheep will put herself easily at the disposal of the wolf. She has also some ladies of hers who are in no way inferior to their mistress, thus they say publicly it will be a fine flock . . . She is more than twenty-two years old, naturally dark, with glancing eyes, an aquiline nose and very well made up, and will in my opinion not give the lie to my predictions . . .
⁸

He dismissed Jofre as ‘dark in complexion and otherwise lascivious-looking with long hair with a reddish tinge . . . and he is fourteen or fifteen years of age’.

Sancia’s behaviour and reputation were such that, as early as June 1494, the Catalan master of the Squillace household had felt it necessary to issue a sworn declaration with the testimony of a dozen witnesses denying improprieties: ‘I, Anthoni Gurrea, give testimony that in the Household of the Prince of Squillace the government of the Ladies is so honest and of such good order as is possible to have. And in the chamber of the Princess no man whatever is entertained . . .’
⁹
Jofre was too young and too insignificant to satisfy Sancia; within months she found a man more to her taste in Cesare. She and Lucrezia became close friends: at a service in St Peter’s later that month the two girls shocked the papal master of ceremonies when, during a long and tedious sermon, they climbed to the choir reserved for the canons and sat there laughing and chatting with their ladies.

The Borgia family circle was complete with the arrival from Spain of Juan Gandia on 10 August. The twenty-year-old duke was dressed to the nines in a scarlet cap hung with pearls, a doublet of brown velvet blazing with jewels, black stockings embroidered with the golden crown and rays of Gandia and a long Turkish mantle of gold brocade. His bay horse was adorned with gold fringes and silver bells which tinkled as he rode, and he was accompanied by six squires, including a Moor dressed in gold brocade and crimson velvet, twelve splendid horses ridden by pages and a crowd of dwarfs and jesters. The role for which he was destined by his doting father was to crush the Orsini whose treachery in the last days of 1494 had not been forgotten and whose dominance of the Roman Campagna represented a serious threat to the independence of the papacy. Now, with the head of the clan, Virginio, and his eldest legitimate son, Giangiordano, in prison in Naples after the final surrender of the remaining French, Alexander saw his chance. It was the right strategy at the right moment, but in choosing Juan, a youth with no military experience, to lead the campaign, nominally headed by the cultured but feeble Guidobaldo, Duke of Montefeltro, as Captain General of the League, Alexander was making a serious mistake.

On 26 October, to the sound of trumpets, Gandia was invested in St Peter’s with the titles of Captain General of the Church and Gonfalonier (Standard Bearer). Alexander was beside himself with joy and pride while Scalona wrote scornfully: ‘The Pope is so swollen up and inflated with this election of his son, that he does not know what to do with himself, and this morning desired to set a feather in his cap with his own hands and sew on a jewel of great value . . .’
¹⁰
Unsurprisingly the campaign was a failure: at the great fortress of Bracciano, a woman, Bartolommea d’Alviano, wife of the most able of the Orsini captains, held out. The Orsini rampaged up to the walls of Rome, mocking Gandia by sending into the papal camp a large donkey with a placard ‘I am the ambassador of the Duke of Gandia’ round its neck and a rude letter addressed to him under its tail. At Soriano in January the papal army was defeated and Guidobaldo captured. The Orsini were now masters of the Roman Campagna and Alexander was left with little alternative but to make peace in February 1497. The Orsini retained all their castles except for Cerveteri and Anguillara which the Pope held as security against the payment of 50,000 ducats. He refused to ransom Guidobaldo and gave the major part of the Orsini indemnity to the undeserving Gandia
^II
in compensation for having failed to secure the Orsini lands. In March, Gandia, with the help of the great Spanish general Gonsalvo de Cordoba, took Ostia from the only French garrison remaining on Italian soil.

The exercise of Spanish military might on Alexander’s side boded ill for the Sforza; that very week, at the end of March, Giovanni Sforza, who had been at the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico with Lucrezia since mid January, fled precipitately from Rome to Pesaro, without informing either Ascanio or Ludovico Sforza. It had been clear since the beginning of the year that things had been going wrong in the Sforza marriage, as a letter of 7 January written from Pesaro by Giovanni to Ludovico revealed. The Pope, he said, had been putting pressure on him to return to Rome but he had excused himself on the grounds of indisposition. Recently, however, a brief had arrived from Alexander giving him eight days in which to comply.
¹²
A report from Scalona to Mantua that Sforza was in high favour with the Pope and that Lucrezia was now content and much in love with him seems to have been wide of the mark.
¹³
The hastiness and secrecy of his departure – he feigned to be going to a pardon ceremony outside the gates of Rome where in reality he had horses waiting for him – suggests that Giovanni had heard something to make him afraid of the Borgias. It may be that hints had been dropped, probably by Cesare, that as a husband for Lucrezia he was surplus to requirements. Scalona reported that there were rumours the Borgias would have him poisoned but that he himself believed these to be without foundation. Il Moro was seriously concerned at the possibility of a rupture with the Pope: much as he despised and distrusted Alexander, he needed his political support. The unwelcome prospect of a divorce seems to have been in the back of his mind when he drafted a request to be taken to Giovanni: ‘We wish that His Lordship will make clear to us the reasons he left so precipitately from Rome. And whether this has arisen because he has not yet consummated his marriage with his wife. Make him understand so that we may find some convenient remedy. And concerning this tell him that we pray he will declare his mind as he should . . .’
¹⁴
The wretched Sforza replied that the Pope was furious with him and demanded his return, threatening that if he did not do so of his own accord he would be forced to. He added that the Pope was using his flight as an excuse to deprive him of his wife absolutely without any reason in spite of his just demand (for Lucrezia to go to Pesaro).