Absolute Monarchs (35 page)

4.
Much of his verse was inspired by the poet Francesco Filelfo, who had been commissioned by Nicholas V to write a book of stories later described as “the most nauseous compositions that coarseness and filthy fancy ever spanned.” Nicholas, we are told, had much enjoyed them.

5.
There had been earlier Inquisitions, such as the so-called Papal Inquisition that ultimately eradicated the Cathars in the thirteenth century. The Spanish Inquisition was on an altogether different scale.

6.
Giovanni was not new to Church preferment. An abbot at the age of eight, he had been nominated to the great Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino at eleven. Later he was to become Pope Leo X.

7.
This is the modern Turkish spelling. The name is pronounced
Gem.

8.
Noel,
The Renaissance Popes
, p. 62.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Monsters

F
ew years in all history have proved to be more fateful than the year 1492. It began dramatically enough, with the completion on January 2 of the Spanish conquest of Granada, ending the Moorish kingdom and consolidating the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella; in March the Jews in Spain were given three months to accept Christianity or leave the country; April saw the death, in his family villa at Careggi, of Lorenzo the Magnificent; in late July Pope Innocent VIII died in Rome; and in early August Christopher Columbus sailed, all unwittingly, for the New World.

Innocent’s successor, Rodrigo Borgia, now sixty-one years old, took the name Alexander VI. His great-uncle Calixtus had given him a good start: a cardinal at twenty-five, already in possession of a whole clutch of bishoprics and abbeys, at twenty-six he had become vice chancellor of the Holy See, an office which guaranteed him the vast income he was to hold over the next four pontificates. There can be little doubt that he owed his election principally to the huge bribes he shamelessly distributed: it is said that four muleloads of bullion were carried from the Borgia palace to that of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. His principal rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, could not match his wealth and was obliged to contain his fury as best he could. His time would come.

Alexander was, however, known to be highly intelligent and an experienced administrator, almost certainly better able than any of his rivals to restore order to Rome, which under Innocent had been allowed to fall dangerously out of control. He was said never to have missed a consistory—the cardinals’ regular meeting—except when he was ill or absent from Rome; no one had a deeper understanding of the workings of the Curia. He was also witty, charming, and excellent company: “Women,” wrote an envious contemporary, “were attracted to him like iron to a magnet.” What he lacked was the slightest glimmering of religious feeling. He made no secret of the fact that he was in the Church for what he could get out of it—and he got a very great deal. By the time of his election, which was celebrated with a bullfight in the piazza in front of St. Peter’s, he had fathered no fewer than eight children by at least three different women, earning him a severe rebuke from Pius II which had had no effect whatever. Those of his offspring who remained closest to him were his four children by the aristocratic Roman Vannozza Catanei: Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia, and Goffredo (or Gioffrè; in Catalan, Jofré.) No fewer than five of his family were to receive the red hat, Cesare at the age of only eighteen, by which time he was already an archbishop.

Alexander had occupied the papal throne for only two years when King Charles VIII of France, described by the historian H. A. L. Fisher as “a young and licentious hunchback of doubtful sanity,” led an army of some 30,000 into Italy, inaugurating a whole series of invasions which over the next seventy years were to put much of the peninsula under foreign domination. The casus belli was Naples. The old Angevin royal line had died out in 1435 with Queen Joanna II, and the Neapolitan throne had been seized by the King of Sicily, Alfonso V of Aragon, who had been succeeded by his illegitimate son Ferdinand
¹
and then by Ferdinand’s son, another Alfonso. But the bastard grandson of a usurper, it was generally agreed, had but a tenuous claim to the throne; and Charles, as a descendant of his namesake Charles of Anjou, believed that he had a very much better one. All this was bad news indeed for Pope Alexander. In 1493 he had married his son Goffredo to Ferdinand’s granddaughter and on Ferdinand’s death had immediately recognized and crowned the young Alfonso. He was not encouraged by Charles’s repeated threats to depose him, nor by the news that his bitterest enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had declared for the French king and had headed north to join him.

For Charles, the invasion began promisingly enough. With his cousin the Duke of Orleans, he crossed the Alps without incident, his heavy cannon having been shipped separately to Genoa. Milan, now under the brilliant Duke Ludovico Sforza (“il Moro”), received him with enthusiasm, as did Lucca and Pisa. In Florence, welcomed as a liberator by the Dominican firebrand Girolamo Savonarola, the king took the opportunity to expel Piero de’ Medici, who displayed none of the statesmanship of his father, Lorenzo, dead two years before. On December 31, 1494, Rome opened her gates and Charles installed himself in what is now Palazzo Venezia, while Alexander, who had unsuccessfully appealed to the Sultan Bayezit for assistance, briefly took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo; but a fortnight later king and pope met for the first time—and Alexander’s famous charm did the rest. On January 17 he said Mass before 20,000 soldiers of the French army in the great piazza in front of St. Peter’s, with Charles himself acting as server.

The French remained for another ten days in Rome. Already, like all armies of occupation, they were becoming increasingly unpopular. They showed little respect for the local people; every day brought new stories of violence, robbery, and rape. Even the palace of Vannozza Catanei was ransacked. It was with unconcealed joy and relief that on January 27 the Romans watched them march away to Naples, accompanied by Cesare Borgia—ostensibly as papal legate but in fact as a hostage for his father’s good behavior. With them too went Prince Cem, the only man in the whole immense company whom they were sorry to see depart.

On February 22, 1495, Charles entered Naples. King Alfonso immediately abdicated and entered a monastery; his son Ferdinand II, also known as Ferrandino, fled for his life. The Neapolitans, on the other hand, who had never looked on the House of Aragon as anything other than usurping foreigners, gave the French king a hero’s welcome. On May 12 he was crowned for the second time. But, as he was all too soon to discover, there is all the difference in the world between a lightning offensive and a sustained program of occupation. The Neapolitans, delighted as they had been to get rid of the Aragonese, soon discovered that one foreign oppressor was very much like another. Unrest also grew among the inhabitants of many of the smaller towns, who found themselves having to support, for no good reason that they could understand, discontented and frequently licentious French garrisons.

Beyond the Kingdom of Naples, too, men were beginning to feel alarm. Even those states, Italian and foreign, which had previously looked benignly upon Charles’s advance were asking themselves just how much further the young conqueror might be intending to go. Ferdinand and Isabella, who wanted Naples for themselves, made an alliance with the Emperor Maximilian I, cementing it by offering the hand of their daughter Joanna—later to be known, with good reason, as “the Mad”—to Maximilian’s son Philip and preparing an invasion fleet; and even the king’s former ally Ludovico il Moro of Milan, by now as alarmed as anyone, was further disconcerted by the presence at nearby Asti of the Duke of Orleans, whose claims to Milan through his grandmother the Duchess Valentina Visconti he knew to be no less strong than his own or than those of Charles to Naples. Pope Alexander, who had by this time recovered his sangfroid, found plenty of support for his anti-French alliance, the so-called Holy League, ostensibly pacific but in fact with a single objective: to send the new king packing.

When news of the League was brought to Charles in Naples, he flew into a fury, but he did not underestimate the danger with which he was now faced. To make matters worse, he had lost both his distinguished hostages. Cesare had simply slipped away; Cem had contracted a high fever at Capua and died a few days later. Thus it was that only a week after his Neapolitan coronation Charles left his new kingdom forever and headed, together with 20,000 mules loaded with loot from Naples, back to the North. Rome was panic-stricken at the thought of his return. Alexander and most of his Curia slipped away to Orvieto, leaving only one unfortunate cardinal to greet the king.

Fortunately, on this occasion the French army proved surprisingly well behaved, probably because Charles was reluctant to waste any more time before getting safely across the Alps. He would have liked an audience with the pope, to discuss the possible dissolution of the Holy League and obtain full papal recognition of his Neapolitan coronation, but in the face of Alexander’s determination to avoid him, there was nothing he could do. The march, which involved dragging his heavy artillery across the Apennines in midsummer, proved a nightmare, and on July 5, 1495, he reached the little town of Fornovo near Parma to find himself facing some 30,000 soldiers of the League under the command of Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. The only battle of the whole campaign, fought on the following day, was over in a flash; but it was the bloodiest that Italy had seen for two hundred years. Gone were the days of the old mercenary
condottieri
, whose object was always to prolong a war as far as possible and live to fight again; they often tended to see a battle as little more than a stately pavane, with fighting—such as it was—hand to hand and artillery fire too weak and inaccurate to do much serious harm. The French had introduced a warfare of a very different kind: they, together with their Swiss and German mercenaries, fought to kill—and the heavy iron balls that burst from the mouths of their cannon inflicted hideous wounds.

Gonzaga managed to present the Battle of Fornovo as a victory; few dispassionate observers would have agreed with him. The French admittedly forfeited their baggage train, which included Charles’s sword, helmet, gold seal, and a “black book” containing portraits of his female conquests, but their losses were negligible compared with those of the Italians, who had utterly failed to stop them. They continued their march that same night and reached Asti unmolested a few days later. There, however, bad news awaited them. Alfonso’s son Ferdinand II had landed in Calabria, where, supported by Spanish troops from Sicily, he was rapidly advancing on Naples. On July 7 he reoccupied the city. Suddenly, all the French successes of the past year evaporated. A week or two later Charles led his army back across the Alps, leaving the Duke of Orleans behind to maintain a French presence as best he could.

But the soldiers whom he disbanded at Lyons that November carried something deadlier far than any dream of conquest. Columbus’s three ships, returning to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493, had brought with them the first cases of syphilis known to the Old World; through the agency of the Spanish mercenaries sent by Ferdinand and Isabella to support King Alfonso, the disease had quickly spread to Naples, where it was rife by the time Charles arrived. After three months of
dolce far niente
, his men must in turn have been thoroughly infected, and it was almost certainly they who were responsible for introducing the disease north of the Alps.

WITH CHARLES SAFELY
out of the way, Alexander was free to settle down to his principal task, the aggrandizement of his family. His eldest son, Giovanni, already Duke of Gandia, he had destined for the throne of Naples; this ambition, however, came to nothing when, in June 1497, the young man disappeared. Two days later his body was recovered from the Tiber. His throat had been cut, and there were no fewer than nine stab wounds. Who was the murderer? Giovanni was only twenty, but his violent, unstable character and his penchant for other men’s wives had already made him countless enemies.

Of all the possibilities, the likeliest seems to have been his brother Cesare; there were ugly rumors that the two had been rivals for the love of their sister-in-law, Goffredo’s wife, Sancia, or even of their own sister, Lucrezia. Cesare was well capable of fratricide—three years later he almost certainly murdered his brother-in-law Alfonso of Aragon, second husband of Lucrezia—and his jealousy of his elder brother was well known. There is also the curious fact that although Pope Alexander was genuinely shattered by the assassination of his favorite son—he is said to have touched neither food nor water for three days—he seems to have been content that no one was ever formally accused, much less convicted, of the crime. Cesare too, had he been innocent, would surely have moved Heaven and Earth to find his brother’s murderer.

For a time, it seemed that Alexander was a reformed character. Indeed, he said as much. “The blow that has fallen upon us,” he declared,

is the heaviest that we could possibly have sustained. We loved the Duke of Gandia more than anyone else in the world. We would have given seven tiaras to be able to recall him to life. God has done this as a punishment for our sins. We for our part are resolved to mend our own life and to reform the Church.

It certainly needed reforming. The cost of the wars required to maintain the Papal States and the ambitious building programs of successive popes meant that there was a constant search for new sources of income. The discovery in 1462 of an alum mine near Tolfa came to the papal treasury as a godsend. Alum was indispensable to both the cloth and leather trades. Heretofore it had had to be imported at considerable expense from Asia Minor; henceforth the popes could declare a ban on supplies from the Muslim world and establish their own monopoly. But alum alone was nowhere near enough. Indulgences were another invaluable source of income, as was the sale of offices. More and more sinecures were invented; these were bought for large sums and guaranteed an income for life. The result was a vast increase in the membership of the Curia, many of whose members had absolutely nothing to do.