The Borgias (58 page)

Then there was Pandolfo Petrucci, lord of Siena, at fifty the oldest of the conspirators. He was sufficiently superior in cunning and intelligence to emerge as perhaps the closest thing they had to a leader, but he was also a vicious sadist. He had achieved supreme power in Siena by murdering his father-in-law (who was probably, it must in fairness be noted, plotting to murder him first) and is best remembered for one of his favorite forms of amusement. He loved to roll boulders down on low-lying parts of Siena from the heights above, howling with delight at the resulting devastation.

The weak and gullible Paolo Orsini was among the conspirators as well. And the devious Cardinal Orsini, he of the thousand tricks, along with his slippery brother Giulio. And Gian Giordano Orsini, who had been thrown into a Neapolitan prison with his father Virginio at the time of Charles VIII’s withdrawal and was quietly awaiting his chance to avenge the old man’s miserable death. Such was the vipers’ tangle that was in league against Cesare: an assortment of sociopaths and psychopaths famous not just for ruthlessness, not just for a readiness to torture and murder the innocent, but for a willingness to betray their own blood. The one conspicuous exception was the recently deposed, even more recently restored Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. Adoring son of a majestic father, loved by the people of Urbino for his gentleness and kindness and admired by artists and scholars for his refinement, he was badly out of place in this affair and not taken seriously even by his partners. His prestige among such savages was not enhanced by rumors—almost certainly true—that he was sexually impotent, a fact that adds poignancy to his loving relationship with his wife, Francesco Gonzaga’s sister Elisabetta.

Repulsive as they were on the whole, the confederates almost certainly could have overcome Cesare if they had moved quickly, firmly, and in concert. They proved to be incapable of doing any such thing. No real leader emerged to keep them together and focused. It would be said later that Cardinal Orsini had been the driving force behind the conspiracy, and Petrucci of Siena is sometimes described as its brains,
but neither demonstrated the kind of mastery that the situation required. Not one of them had an objective loftier than his own survival and perhaps that of his family; almost all would cheerfully have sacrificed the others for his own sake, and they knew one another well enough to understand this. Such things might have been manageable if they had faced a less formidable adversary. But Cesare understood them and their vulnerabilities at least as well as they understood themselves, and he was both clever enough to outwit them and tough enough to undo them.

From his base at Imola, almost certainly drawing on a secret source of intelligence inside the enemy camp, Cesare played on the conspirators’ divisions and aggravated their fears. Early on he had identified Paolo Orsini as the weakest and most seducible of his adversaries. He surreptitiously got word to Paolo of his willingness to forgive and forget, to allow the
condottieri
to return to his payroll while demanding nothing of consequence in return. When Paolo shared this offer with his fellow plotters at one of their gatherings at Magione, they showed more interest than was wise in a group of men who had already thrown down the gauntlet to a dangerous enemy, and Paolo was authorized to explore the matter further. In Rome, Pope Alexander opened parallel negotiations with the city’s leading Orsini and found that they too were receptive. From Siena, meanwhile, Pandolfo Petrucci sent Cesare an almost craven message, earnestly assuring him that he had never intended to displease. Wherever the Borgias tested the resolve of the men plotting against them, they found weakness and a readiness to cut deals—even separate deals, when that seemed feasible. They could be confident that in a showdown each of the conspirators would look to his own immediate interests regardless of the fate of the others.

They had reason to be worried all the same. The risings south of the Romagna, and the fact that Cesare was all but trapped at Imola, left Alexander feeling deeply insecure. He feared that everything the two of them had achieved and were planning to achieve, the whole grand enterprise into which he was pouring the wealth of the papacy, was suddenly on the verge of collapse. He complained of Cesare’s incessant demands for money and of the meager results his own generosity appeared to be producing. Carried on the grapevine, his lamentations must have boosted the confidence of the rebels.

Cesare by contrast waited and watched in silence, using his own inscrutability to unnerve his enemies. When Ermes Bentivoglio moved his troops near the outskirts of Imola but failed to provoke the expected countermove by Cesare, failed even to get an acknowledgment of his presence, he lost heart and withdrew in befuddlement. When it became certain that the plotters could expect no help from Venice or Florence, and that when Louis XII’s army arrived on the scene it would come as Cesare’s friend, their resolve disintegrated. Cesare meanwhile was continuing to receive infusions of gold from a pope too worried to tighten his purse strings, and he was using them to hire new
condottieri
and send agents into Lombardy to recruit fighters. He was able to keep his troops well paid, well provisioned, and loyal. Week by week, quietly, he was rebuilding his strength.

He and Machiavelli filled their idle hours with each other’s company. Though Cesare persisted in revealing little of what he knew and nothing of what he intended, his reticence only increased Machiavelli’s admiration of what he called, in explaining to his exasperated superiors why he had so little of value to report, his host’s “most commendable secrecy.” More impressed than ever with Cesare’s perceptiveness and ability to make difficult decisions quickly, he advised the Ten that as things stood, it would be folly for Florence to put itself openly at odds with such a resourceful political player.

Late in October, with the unraveling of the conspiracy too far advanced to remain secret, a nervous Paolo Orsini showed up in Imola in disguise. He was eager to cut a deal, Cesare was happy to oblige him so long as the terms put him in a commanding position, and so a conditional agreement was worked out. When Paolo carried it back to Magione, however, it drew a mixed response. Cesare’s sole hard demand was that the two cities of Urbino and Camerino—the homes of the Montefeltri and the Varani—must be returned to him. By and large, the conspirators who were not lords of either of those two cities, though no doubt less than delighted, found this a small enough price for their own deliverance. Though Vitelli and Baglioni at first poured scorn on the idea of trusting Cesare after having been so obviously bent on his destruction, and though their reptilian protégé Oliverotto lined up with them as usual, nobody else agreed, and the three gradually abandoned their objections.

Bentivoglio of Bologna, however, refused to be won over. As did Guidobaldo of Urbino—understandably so, as the terms on offer made him the principal sacrificial lamb. But the deal was accepted, the plotters took up once again their
condotta
with Cesare, and Guidobaldo was ordered to depart. Soon after, in making his second forced departure from the city his father had devoted his life to transforming, he would be heard to cry out to God, asking why such a fate had been visited upon him. As for whether Cesare’s demand for possession of Urbino and Camerino was in any way justified, it should be remembered that, in hostile hands, the two cities would have been ideal platforms from which to threaten the Romagna. As soon as the Varani were gone from Camerino, the pope declared it a duchy and bestowed it upon the same mysterious little Giovanni Borgia, the so-called Infant of Rome, who was already duke of Nepi. Further evidence that he was—perhaps—Cesare’s son.

In the end, thanks to the intervention of Louis XII, even Bentivoglio was persuaded to make peace. The king, wanting no disputes that might complicate the pursuit of his own goals, wanting also to retain the friendship of the pope and the use of his army without alienating a city as strategically situated as Bologna, arranged a settlement aimed at giving something to everyone. Bologna once again joined Florence in being under French protection and off limits to Cesare. In return, Bentivoglio was obliged once again to pledge a substantial payment in gold to Cesare and provide him with troops.

The conspiracy having been brought to an unsuccessful conclusion, its target and its instigators presumably reconciled, Cesare was once again eager to take the field. Machiavelli, however, came down with a fever as winter tightened its grip on the Romagnese plain, and found himself living in wretchedly constrained circumstances because Florence was neglecting to send his pay while Imola and the surrounding countryside were being picked clean by Cesare’s troops and camp followers. He sent letter after letter begging to be allowed to return home, where obligations including children, a young wife, and a widowed mother required his attention. The
signori
replied that he was needed where he was.

On December 10, when Cesare led his army of twelve thousand men out of Imola through a driving snowstorm, several of the former plotters
were once again with him, commanding his troops. The disheartened Machiavelli, however, reported himself too ill to go along. He followed a few days later, and on December 14 caught up with the others at Cesena after a ride of thirty miles down the Via Emilia. They were still at Cesena six days later when Cesare sprang his latest surprise, suddenly ordering the French cavalry that formed the core of his force to depart for Milan and rejoin Louis XII. At a stroke he thus radically reduced the size of his army and stripped it of its best troops, and as usual he declined to explain himself. One plausible explanation is that France’s men-at-arms were simply too expensive to maintain—that in dismissing them Cesare was responding to the pope’s complaints about costs. Another is that he had seen enough of the brutish behavior of the foreigners and had decided that if he didn’t bring it to an end, he could never hope to be accepted by the populations whose lord he intended to remain. A third hypothesis, no less credible and much more intriguing in light of the events of the next three weeks, is that by sending away so many of the troops most likely to remain loyal to him, he was showing Vitelli, the Orsini, and the others that he trusted them and that they had nothing to fear.

He was still at Cesena on Christmas morning, when the townsfolk awoke to find a decapitated body on display in their central piazza. It was the corpse of the hated Ramiro de Lorqua, long one of Cesare’s most important henchmen. Its head was impaled on an upright lance, an executioner’s ax on the ground beside it. There was no need for speculation about whose work this was. Just three days before, Lorqua had been summoned to Cesena from his post at Rimini, and when he arrived, Cesare had had him placed under arrest. Thereafter he had been under interrogation, and almost certainly under torture, and evidently had revealed some dark things indeed.

Lorqua (known variously to the Italians as Lorca, de Orca, and d’Orco) had always been excessively zealous, not to say bloodthirsty, in the execution of his duties. His status as a Borgia insider is apparent in the role he had played in the negotiation of Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso d’Este. There had been signs of trouble even then, however: vague tales of how he had angered Cesare by somehow behaving inappropriately while escorting Lucrezia to her new life in Ferrara. More recently his rough methods as vicar-general of the Romagna had caused
Cesare to demote him to Rimini, where he was now said to be enriching himself through extortion and pillage. His execution, though never explained, sent unmistakable messages. In the most forceful terms imaginable, it demonstrated to the inhabitants of the Romagna that their new duke regarded Lorqua’s misconduct as intolerable. It reinforced the signal that Cesare had sent his subjects when he placed the honest and conscientious Antonio di Monte Sansovino in charge, first in the Romagna and then elsewhere as well. Even before Lorqua’s death, Sansovino had been sent to Urbino to announce a general pardon of all who had opposed Cesare and the restoration of all the rights the population had enjoyed under the Montefeltri. Such acts were calming the conquered territories. In the Romagna especially, with its long history of misrule, they were giving the population more reasons than ever to be grateful for Cesare’s invasion.

The killing of Lorqua also helped to assuage whatever fears the former conspirators might still have felt. In part simply because he was a Spaniard, but more because of his undisguised contempt for all things Italian, Lorqua had been hated by Cesare’s Italian
condottieri
. That he had known Cesare far longer than any of the warlords, and appeared to be closer to him than any of his other fellow Spaniards except Michelotto, made him greatly feared as well. His dramatic elimination, like the dismissal of the French troops, was a vivid demonstration of just how ruthless Cesare was capable of being. But it also gave Vitelli and the others reason to believe that Cesare had cast his lot irrevocably with them rather than with the French or even his old comrades from Spain.

As always, Cesare kept his secrets. Among those secrets were the things that Lorqua had revealed after his arrest—things of which Cesare may have already been informed by his secret agent inside the Orsini camp but that now could be taken as certain. Lorqua, resentful of his demotion, aware that he was out of favor and fearful of what that might portend, had entered into an improbable alliance with the members of the anti-Cesare conspiracy. Together they had begun hatching new schemes for preemptively ridding themselves of Cesare. The knowledge that he was again being plotted against explains everything that Cesare would do over the next six days. It also explains why, at
exactly this point and for the first time, he began wearing a shirt of chain mail night and day.

Nevertheless, when Cesare left Cesena on December 26, he took with him only a single company of personal guards, dividing the bulk of his remaining army into units that were spread out across the landscape and ordered to proceed separately. Again he was showing his captains that he trusted them, that he was comfortable enough not to require strong protection and posed no threat to them. When Oliverotto volunteered to go on ahead with enough men to secure the coastal town of Senigallia, Cesare gave his consent. Senigallia, a papal vicariate, was held in defiance of Alexander VI by the widow of Giovanni della Rovere, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere’s brother, on behalf of her young son. Machiavelli was again traveling with Cesare, sensing as everyone did that something momentous was in the air. After a march of some forty miles southward along the coast they paused at Lucrezia’s old home of Pesaro, where they received word that Oliverotto had taken Senigallia and was preparing it for Cesare’s arrival. Two easy marches more, one of just six miles and another of a dozen, found them passing through Senigallia’s gates on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. On hand to welcome them were Oliverotto, Vitelli, and Paolo and Francesco Orsini. They did what they could to make it a triumphal occasion.