The Borgias (59 page)

Which is how it came to pass that Machiavelli was in Senigallia when, an hour or two after midnight on the first day of 1503, Vitellozzo and Oliverotto were strangled by Cesare’s constant companion, Michelotto Corella. He used a violin string. Vitelli, it was said, begged to be allowed to live long enough to ask the pope for an indulgence that would spare him from divine punishment for his sins. Oliverotto whined and wept and blamed Vitelli for everything.

Later that same short winter day, when Cesare marched his troops out of Senigallia once again heading south, Machiavelli was as before part of the procession. So were three Orsini—Paolo, the young Francesco duke of Gravina, and a kinsman of theirs named Roberto, a member of the family’s Pitigliano branch. But they were Cesare’s prisoners now, not commanders of his troops, and they were manacled and under close guard. Back in Rome, having been advised by Cesare that aggressive
action would be called for starting on New Year’s Day, Alexander was filling his prisons with as many Orsini as could be rounded up. Cardinal Orsini was in the cell where he would soon die, his palace stripped and his aged mother left to wander the streets alone, unable to find anyone not too frightened to offer her food or shelter. What was in process was not just war against the Orsini but a war of extermination.

At last, in the second week of January, Machiavelli received permission to return home. He would not see Cesare again until nine months had passed. They would meet next in Rome, in October, by which time Cesare would be once more in crisis, beset by dangers far beyond anything encountered in Imola or elsewhere, in 1502 or at any other point in his young life.

Background
 
 THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

EVENTS THAT TRULY CHANGE THE WORLD—THAT CHANGE IT IN fundamental ways—don’t come along every year. In Europe, before the Industrial Revolution, they didn’t often happen once a century.

It is therefore more than remarkable that two such events happened within a span of five and a half years in the middle of the reign of Pope Alexander VI. The first came in March 1493, when Christopher Columbus returned to Spain after an absence of seven months to report that he had just succeeded in sailing to Asia (which is where he thought he had been). Then, in September 1499, Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Lisbon and announced that in the course of a voyage that had taken twenty-six months he had done what no one could have imagined doing not many years before. He had rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, reached the west coast of India with its limitless supplies of spices and other precious goods, and returned alive to tell the tale.

Also remarkable is how interconnected these two events were—so much so that they nearly brought Spain and Portugal to war with each other. And how it was Alexander, more than anyone in Spain or Portugal, who did what was needed to keep the peace.

Though ultimately the less momentous of the two voyages—it didn’t lead to the discovery of two vast and previously unsuspected continents—da Gama’s was the more impressive achievement. And in the near term its results were more dramatic. It was the culmination of almost a hundred years of effort by the Portuguese royal family to promote and underwrite exploration of the unknown parts of the world. The persistence with which this program of exploration was pursued generation after generation, and the financial risks and sacrifices that it entailed, would make the global network of colonies that came to Portugal as a result about as close to being
earned
as it is possible for an empire to be.

It began with a son and brother of Portuguese kings who, though he personally rarely traveled and never explored anything, is rightly known
to history as Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1415, a time when in all Europe there was little knowledge of astronomy or mathematics and seafarers tried to stay within sight of shore because otherwise they had dangerously little way of knowing their location or even their direction of travel, he founded a school dedicated to the development of sailors more skilled than any in Europe. By the time of his death in 1460 Portugal had such sailors in abundance. The boldest of them had journeyed far down the west coast of Africa, establishing trading stations along the way and bases on the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira in the Atlantic. They had done so in ships developed under Henry’s sponsorship, the fast and nimble little caravels. He had gone to extraordinary lengths to encourage his explorers, providing and outfitting their ships, giving them an equal share in any profits from trade or plunder while making good any losses out of his own pocket.

Magnificent as these achievements were, they had a tragically dark side. The Portuguese captains, always on the lookout for financial gain, found that even the poorest sections of the African coast offered a nearly unlimited supply of human beings who could be transported to the north and profitably sold. Thus traffic in slaves, a feature of the European and Mediterranean worlds from time immemorial, became almost from the beginning a central characteristic of the Great Age of Discovery.

Henry’s work was carried on by his nephew King Afonso V, who introduced a licensing arrangement under which a Lisbon merchant was given exclusive trading rights from Guinea southward in return for exploring another four hundred miles of coastline every year. In such ways the Portuguese continued to push on into the unknown, and the late 1480s brought the greatest triumph yet: ships out of Lisbon reached what they named the Cape of Storms (the king, not wishing to discourage the less bold, changed it to the Cape of Good Hope) and entered the Indian Ocean. News of this, when it reached Portugal, electrified the royal court. It was for the first time certain that Ptolemy had been wrong, in the second century AD, when he wrote that a bridge of land blocked access to the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. It was
not
impossible to sail from the Iberian peninsula to India.

This was a stunning prospect. An increasingly wealthy Europe had for generations been developing an insatiable appetite for the exotic products of India, China, and other points east—especially for the spices
grown in these places. But it was able to procure them in severely limited quantities only and at exorbitant prices. These prices were the result of rarity and monopoly control: all the produce of the Orient, after it reached the bustling ports of India’s west coast, was in the hands of Arab traders who transported it by ship through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea and then overland by caravan to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. These merchants took big slices of profit at every stage, and at Alexandria and other ports they sold their merchandise to the Venetians and Genoese, who marked it up again in carrying it to Italy and other European markets.

There was a bonanza to be reaped by sailing from Lisbon directly to India, thereby eliminating all the middlemen. And so the Portuguese government, having established that it could be done, hurried to organize the expedition that set sail under Vasco da Gama’s command in July 1497 and reached the Indian city of Calicut in May 1498. When it returned home in September 1499, it was laden with pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon—things nearly as precious as gold. Another, much bigger expedition was readied with all possible speed, and thus was Portugal’s global empire born. It undermined the advantages long enjoyed by Venice and the Arabs and began what gradually became a prodigious redistribution of wealth and national power.

By the time da Gama completed his great voyage, Columbus was midway through his third visit to what he would die thinking was the eastern edge of Asia. His exploits could have been another great triumph for Portugal, but in the 1480s, after hearing Columbus out, a council of experts decided that his plan to reach the Far East by sailing west was impossible. They therefore refused his request for the financing of an expedition. (The council was right and Columbus was wrong, by the way. Its members knew, as did all educated people of the time, that the world was a sphere, and they knew also that it was a much bigger sphere than Columbus believed. He argued that Asia was four thousand miles west of the Canary Islands. His judges found that ridiculous. They judged correctly, but without knowing that between the Canaries and Asia lay North and South America. No ship of the time could cover the required distance before all hands had died on board.)

Columbus, Genoese by birth, then spent years trying to sell his idea to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He had no success until 1492, when
their conquest of Granada put the royal couple in an expansive frame of mind, prompting them to provide him with three ships and crews made up largely of convicted criminals. He departed Spain on August 3 of that year, launched into the unknown on September 6 after a stop in the Canaries, and by early October was cruising among the islands of the Caribbean.

King John of Portugal was so offended by Spain’s apparent success in finding a new route to the quasi-mythic lands known to Europe as Cathay (China), Cipango (Japan), and India, so certain that the Spanish had no right to impinge upon his kingdom’s hard-earned monopoly, that he began preparations to send a Portuguese fleet across the Atlantic to lay claim to what was rightfully his. Learning of this, Ferdinand and Isabella began assembling a war fleet of their own, simultaneously appealing to Rome for a vindication of their rights. The result was a series of four papal bulls, the third of which,
Inter Caetera
of May 4, 1493, granted to the kingdom of Castile all discoveries more than one hundred leagues west of the Atlantic’s Cape Verde Islands. Everything east of that point went to the Portuguese. It was a stopgap solution, “league” being an ambiguous unit of measure and no one really knowing how to measure great stretches of longitude, but it averted war. A year later, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain sought to assuage continuing Portuguese anger by agreeing to move the line of demarcation another 250 leagues to the west. This would lead to further momentous consequences when, in 1500, a fleet of Portuguese merchant ships en route to the Cape of Good Hope swung far to the west and happened upon the coast of Brazil. Because of the settlement that Alexander had negotiated, this vast rich land, though part of the South American continent, would for the next three centuries belong to Portugal and not Spain.

20

Man of Destiny

On January 18, 1503, moving slowly as he entered the hills of eastern Tuscany so as to give his troops time to ravage the towns and farmsteads that had the misfortune to lie in their path, Cesare finally had his prisoners Paolo and Francesco Orsini strangled. As at Senigallia the deed was done by Michelotto, quietly, and it reflected the hard fact that the war on the Orsini had passed the point of no return—the point at which too much damage had been done for reconciliation to be conceivable. What provoked comment was not so much the killings themselves—they were colorless events compared with what was happening in and around Rome—as Cesare’s mysterious release of his third Orsini prisoner, an obscure figure known as Roberto of Pitigliano. This answered the question, people said, of how Cesare had kept himself so well informed throughout the conspiracy that had nearly undone him. Obviously, they said, this Roberto had been Cesare’s secret agent, his prime source of intelligence. And now he had his reward.

Following as they did on the heels of the murders at Senigallia, these latest killings consolidated Cesare’s reputation as not only the most feared man in Italy but, at least among the ruling and fighting classes, the most respected as well. Machiavelli, freshly restored to home and family by the time of this second round of stranglings, was typical in his approval. Like everyone associated with Florence’s post-Medici republic, he celebrated the liquidation of men as dedicated to the restoration
of the old regime as Vitellozzo Vitelli and his henchmen. For him, however, the meaning of what Cesare had done went further. The murders removed any doubt, as far as he was concerned, about Valentino being a man of destiny—about whether his talents, ambition, strength of will, and sheer ruthless courage made him the leader for which all Italy was unconsciously yearning, the one capable of freeing the peninsula from the barbarians. Machiavelli began to invest in Cesare all his hopes for the deliverance of his homeland.