The Borgias (14 page)

Boiled down to its essence, the letter was an appeal to Rodrigo Borgia to return to Rome.
“Would to God that this were granted,” Piccolomini wrote, “the sooner the better; for your return would be very useful; you would be a comfort to the great aged Pontiff, your uncle, who, absorbed by constant anxieties, finds no relief. Your very presence would be an enjoyment for him, since it is sweet to mind and heart to be with one of your own blood.”

It was not for Rodrigo to decide when he should return to Rome, of course. But the question was soon decided for him, and a lonely old man’s wish to have someone of his “own blood” near at hand may have had something to do with the startling way in which it happened. In the autumn of 1457 Calixtus sent a letter “to our beloved son, Rodrigo,” informing his nephew that he was again being promoted, this time to a post that would elevate him above all other members of the College of Cardinals.
He was to report to Rome and take up the duties of vice-chancellor of the Church, the highest position in the hierarchy after the papacy itself. If the pope could be thought of as in effect the Church’s chairman and chief executive, and the College of Cardinals as analogous to a board of directors, the vice-chancellor was the pope’s right hand, a chief operating officer responsible for managing much of the Curia’s vast administrative apparatus as well as overseeing the collection of revenues and the granting of benefices and favors. The office also gave Rodrigo—fittingly enough, insofar as he had a doctorate in law—charge of the Sacred Romana Rota, the Vatican’s highest court with twelve judges and a large staff of advocates and notaries. If some cardinals were surprised at seeing a position of such reach and power conferred upon a twenty-six-year-old, the fact that the nominee was a relative of the pope’s appears to have offended no one. As Cardinal Piccolomini’s letter to Rodrigo showed, the pontiff’s need for lieutenants in whom he could place firm personal trust was understood. The last man to serve as vice-chancellor—the post had been vacant since 1453—had been a nephew of Eugenius IV.

As if all this were not more than enough, Rodrigo was simultaneously appointed “chief and general commissary of the pontifical army.” This amorphous title, suggestive to modern ears of procurement and
food service, in fact conferred upon the young cardinal not only command over all the officers of the papal armed forces, his brother the captain-general included, but responsibility for overseeing whatever wars the Vatican might be engaged in and authority to enter into treaties with the warlords whose little domains studded the map of the Papal States. It made Rodrigo not so much a field general—never in his life would he claim to have either experience or competence as a soldier—as his uncle’s minister for war. Thus when he finally departed the March of Ancona, probably in November 1457, it was to take up in Rome an astonishingly heavy array of responsibilities. He took with him, as the residue of almost a year of restoring order in the March, direct experience of the lawlessness that poisoned life in the Papal States and new, well-earned confidence in his own ability to deal with such matters. It was a time of extraordinary personal growth for Rodrigo, as his uncle heaped more and more work on his shoulders and he showed himself capable of handling it. The process of being tested and tested again and never found wanting was lifting him to a position of primacy among the pope’s three nephews.

The months following his return to Rome appear to have been a comparatively quiet time for Rodrigo. He gets little mention in the reports of the ambassadors at the Vatican, which is not surprising in light of the time and attention that must have been required for him to take up the reins of the chancery with its many departments, the Rota, and the papal military. He also had to set up a household, one both appropriate to his new eminence and big enough to provide working space for his suddenly enormous number of subordinates. His brother Pedro Luis was ill that winter of 1457–58, so that the papal army was even less active than it ordinarily would have been at that time of year. Calixtus from his bed continued to try to muster reinforcements for Scarampo’s little force in the eastern Mediterranean and continued to be rebuffed. He and Rodrigo would have spent many hours conferring.

New popes, upon taking office, were required to surrender whatever offices and benefices they had held at the time of their election, distributing them as administrative or political considerations required or as their personal preferences suggested. Calixtus of course had conformed to this rule, but in the two years following his coronation he had done nothing to fill the vacant see of Valencia, the only bishopric he had held
when a cardinal. Because Valencia was the Borgia family’s home diocese, and also no doubt because it was one of the richest and most prestigious sees on the Iberian peninsula, Calixtus wanted to give it to Rodrigo, whose mother was presumably still living in its episcopal palace. Though from a Roman perspective vastly less important than the vice-chancellorship or the war ministry, the see turned out to be much more difficult for the pope to bestow as he wished, because others had designs on it. Calixtus’s old master and now-nemesis Alfonso V wanted it for one of his son Ferrante’s numerous offspring, while Alfonso’s brother King Juan of Navarre saw it as a suitable perch for one of
his
sons. This was not an unusual conflict; disagreements over who had the right to appoint bishops and archbishops had been setting kings and popes at odds with each other almost as long as Europe had had kings and popes, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Confronted with such formidable competition, Calixtus sensibly hesitated to act. There were limits to how far even a pope could go in defying the family that ruled much of the Mediterranean world.

Everything changed in May 1458 when Alfonso V fell ill. Still boiling with vitality and ambition, until suddenly obliged to retire to his bed he had been preparing the next of his attacks on Genoa, whose colonial outposts he had never stopped coveting. He declined rapidly but lingered for some forty days, the royal physicians trying every available remedy to no avail. When death came on June 27 it removed from the scene the mightiest monarch and one of the most brilliant personalities of his time. King of Aragon and Valencia, of Majorca and Sardinia and Corsica and Sicily and Naples, count of Barcelona and Rousillon, he was as fascinatingly paradoxical a character as any biographer could hope to find: sincerely religious but also utterly untrustworthy; kindly and generous but also ruthlessly, insatiably ambitious; a great patron of the arts and an endless source of trouble for Italy’s other rulers. He might have been the man to unify Italy—he certainly intended to be—if at various times and in various ways he had not been thwarted by the Sforzas of Milan, the Medici of Florence, and the popes in Rome. Blocked by Venice and the Turks from creating the empire that he hungered for in the East, he had retaliated by creating endless difficulties for both. He had dominated the political stage for so long that his disappearance, which the embalming process showed to have been the result of an abscess on
his lung, left everyone in a state of stunned uncertainty. The kingdom of Naples, which during his reign had been inexhaustibly aggressive, suddenly went limp.

Alfonso’s intended heir Ferrante, his claim to the crown seriously in doubt, was immediately thrown on the defensive. This brought a sense of deliverance in many quarters. Almost overnight Venice found that it had one fewer rival in the Aegean and other eastern places; thus it felt free to be less hostile toward Skanderbeg of Albania. This freed the Albanians, in turn, to focus on rebuilding their strength in anticipation of renewed Turkish aggression. Genoa felt that a black cloud had been removed from over its head, and for a while politics became less thorny for the Italian states generally.

No one was more delighted than Calixtus. “The bond is broken,” he exclaimed, “and we are free!” Free not only of Alfonso’s endless meddling in the affairs of Rome and the Papal States, but free also to set Naples on an entirely new course in which Ferrante would have no part. The legal complexities of the succession question were enormous, but in all Europe there was no one better prepared to deal with them than the onetime legal scholar Alonso de Borja. Drawing upon his professional knowledge, he found a sound basis for arguing that, when Eugenius IV invested Alfonso with the crown of Naples, the king had been granted life tenure only, with no right of succession.
No less significantly, Europe’s feudal code made it virtually indisputable that legitimization did not carry with it the right of inheritance, especially with respect to thrones. Calixtus issued a bull declaring that with Alfonso’s death the fief of Naples had reverted to the Holy See. He said that as pope he was at liberty to bestow the crown wherever he wished—or to bestow it on no one. Ferrante, who had long shared the responsibilities of rule with his father and at age thirty-five was a seasoned and formidably shrewd politician, sent envoys to Rome to argue his case. To the extent that they were given a hearing, it was a distinctly frosty one.

Suggestions that the pope had a hidden agenda—that he hoped to make the Borgias the ruling dynasty of Naples—are not easily squared with what we know of Calixtus’s character, the existence of several candidates possessing both royal blood and powerful support, and the certain fact that any attempt to confer the crown on Pedro Luis or any
other Borgia would have aroused ferocious opposition not only throughout Italy but across Europe. Ferrante’s most obvious rival was Juan of Navarre, whose entitlement to every part of his brother Alfonso’s empire except—just possibly—Naples was beyond possibility of challenge. The thought of Juan inheriting Naples was not a comfortable one for Rome, however, because the vast reserves of manpower and wealth available to him as ruler of Aragon and Sicily and numerous other places would enable him to become the same kind of danger Alfonso had been. To the Aragonese argument that Sicily and Naples went together, so that if Juan was king of Sicily he was entitled to Naples as well, Calixtus replied that the so-called Union of Two Sicilies had been created for the benefit of Alfonso alone and was dissolved by his death.

Yet another twist was the fact that Juan had two sons who were not churchmen, were both legitimate though born to different mothers, and had rival claims to be their father’s heir. The elder of the two, Carlos of Viana, was not only alienated from his father, who favored his younger half-brother Ferdinand, but literally at war with him. It was undoubtedly for this reason that Calixtus declared Carlos’s claim to Naples to be worthy of consideration; it was a way of keeping Juan off balance. The pope said similarly encouraging things about the claim of the House of Anjou, the branch of the French royal family that Alfonso had driven out of Naples fifteen years before.
He pledged to “do my utmost to deliver my successor” by excluding Ferrante not only from the throne but even from the list of candidates. Clearly this was his main objective where Naples was concerned. His second was to keep the kingdom from falling into the hands of anyone as powerful as Juan.

On June 30 he cut the Gordian knot, assembling the cardinals in consistory and securing their approval of Rodrigo as bishop of Valencia. At the same time, in an effort to placate the House of Aragon, he got consent to the bestowal of the archbishopric of Zaragoza upon a third son of King Juan. The gesture failed; the new archbishop’s royal father was neither satisfied nor grateful. Being now in possession of his late brother’s international empire, he believed himself entitled to choose his own bishops, especially on his home ground in Spain. And there were practical reasons for his discontent. The bishopric of Valencia was substantially more lucrative than the archbishopric of Zaragoza,
producing as it did an income of nearly twenty thousand ducats per year. Calixtus, however, had made up his mind. He was determined to keep Valencia in the family and not to let the opportunity created by Alfonso’s death slip away unused.

In Naples, meanwhile, Ferrante was showing his determination to become king regardless of what the pope thought. When Calixtus repeated his old assertion that neither Ferrante nor Naples had any claim to Benevento or Terracina or the territories surrounding, Ferrante moved to secure both places with his troops. Pedro Luis then moved the papal army southward to the frontier, where he paused to await developments. A further move by either side would be the start of a war.

By that time July was well advanced, bringing with it the heat and humidity that invariably descended upon Rome in midsummer. Daily life became a punishment even for the young and healthy, and malaria and plague began to ravage the population. For an eighty-year-old pope who had long been an invalid it was murderous, making the long days nearly unendurable and sleep difficult even at night. From ancient times it had been part of the rhythm of Roman life for everyone who could do so to withdraw to the cool of the hill country. But in 1458, either because he had so much to do or because he was too weak to travel, Calixtus did not go. The result was predictable: he became seriously ill and soon was unable to attend to business. Reports that he was dying spread. The members of the baronial clans who had not left the city, already short-tempered thanks to the oppressive weather, began to make plans for taking advantage of his passing.

On July 26, upon receiving unsettling reports about his uncle’s condition, Rodrigo left his hilltop retreat in Tivoli and hurried the twenty-five miles back to the Vatican. Pedro Luis may have done likewise, because in the course of the next several days Calixtus rallied sufficiently to dictate a bull making him vicar—not duke, but governor—of Benevento and Terracina. The pope must have believed, or hoped at least, that he was not dying, because he certainly understood that such a bull could mean nothing in the event of his death.

As August began, the imminence of the pope’s death was taken for granted everywhere. This brought to the enemies of the Borgias the liberating conviction that they no longer had anything to fear. That the
hour of vengeance had arrived. For the Orsini especially, but for some of the city’s lesser clans as well, the effect was exhilarating. They took to the streets and summoned their rural kinsmen to join them. It became dangerous to be a Spaniard, never mind a Borgia, anywhere in Rome. The Spanish were attacked if they left their homes, and at least a few were killed. Houses were set afire, along with the warehouses of Spanish merchants. Many of the papal household’s Spanish employees stopped showing up for work.