Duchess of Milan (74 page)

Loches, France, 17 May 1508

The Captain of Archers ducked his head beneath the roughly cut stone doorway. He entered a cell carved into the solid rock at the base of the Chateau of Loches; the only opening in the massive walls was a deep, narrow slot bored through the stone. The tiny window admitted enough light to reveal the features of the corpse. It lay on a small pallet set against the wall, the body covered with a linen shroud, the chalky face surrounded by long, almost translucently white hair. The dead man’s humped nose was sharp, Caesar-like, the cheeks and eyes sunken and shadowed.

“Were you here when he died,
Pere?”
the Captain asked the priest who stood by the body.

“Yes,” the priest said. He seemed to regard the dead man with respect. “I gave him the Holy Sacraments.”

“I doubt that will help him much,
Pere.
They will dance in Hell tonight when Il Moro comes home. We have orders to take the body.” The Captain looked around the cell. The gray rock walls were covered with painted Sforza emblems and scratched graffiti in Latin and Italian. He stepped beside the corpse and examined two lines of text painstakingly incised in the wall just above the bed, almost at eye level for someone lying on the small straw mattress. “What does it say,
Pere?
Is it sorcery?”

The priest shook his head. The unlettered soldiers of France might consider Il Moro a devil, but the priest had found him gentle and charming, beyond a doubt the most learned man in Loches, perhaps the most learned man in France. The priest had come to this cell as often as he could, to read from Il Moro’s one book, the
Divina Commedia,
and discuss its complex meanings.

“Those are the words of Dante,” the priest explained. “An Italian poet. From his great epic. ‘No sorrow is greater in this eternal woe than to remember in pain our moment of happiness.’ “

The Captain rubbed his stubbled chin.
“Pere,
you saw him die. Did he summon devils to take him to his father, Satan?”

“He called only one name at the end.” The priest looked down and smiled wistfully at Il Moro’s pale death mask. “The name of the woman who showed his poet the way to God: Beatrice.”

Bari, 9 February 1524

The two girls were about twelve years old; both had the heavy eyebrows and dark coloring of southern Italy, which gave a subtle sensuality to fresh adolescent features. They were the daughters of widowed serving women in the Duchess of Bari’s household, and their faces had yet to be molded by an inevitable fate. But their mothers would be unable to provide them dowries, and so their choices were sadly limited: to be rudely used in marriage to some impoverished peasant who would take them for free, to be rudely used in some rough convent that would waive the dowry usually required by Christ (about a fifth of that demanded by a more corporeal husband), or to be rudely used as cheap prostitutes. In less than fifteen years they would be old women.

Both girls wore freshly washed linen smocks. There was something irrepressibly hopeful in their guileless carriage: the stiff, dignified backs, the fidgety, excited movements of their slender arms. The Duchess of Bari’s lady-in-waiting smoothed back the taller girl’s long dark hair, then stood back and appraised the pair.

“Well, that is as good as we are going to get,” the lady said matter-of-factly, without spite or condescension. “Now, you both know how to curtsy to the Duchess. You don’t have to say anything unless the Duchess asks you a question. And you must be very quiet and listen to the Duchess very carefully. The Duchess is not in good health, and we mustn’t tax her strength. Very well, now, I’m sending you in.”

The page opened the double doors to the Duchess of Bari’s rooms, and the lady-in-waiting shooed the girls in with gentle pats on the shoulders. When the doors had been closed again, the lady turned to the Duchess’s elderly chamberlain. “Messer Dionigi,” she said, “I would have more hope for our Duchess’s recovery if she would call for a physician instead of her servants’ children.”

Messer Dionigi smiled, his eyes squinting amid the surrounding wrinkles and folds. “The Duchess has always had an aversion to physicians.”

The girls entered the Duchess of Bari’s bedchamber, their eyes wide with wonder. They had never seen such a bed, a massive, canopied structure with bronze finials and embroidered crimson drapes and a gold-and-white satin bedspread. The Duchess was much less impressive, a gaunt-looking, gray-haired woman propped up by big tasseled velvet pillows. A down coverlet had been pulled up to her chin.

The girls came shyly to the end of the bed and made deep, touchingly awkward curtsies.

“You girls come over here.” The Duchess’s voice was a hoarse whisper, but with an underlying forcefulness. “I’m tired of all the
vecchie
who are in here all day and night. I want to see some girls with life ahead of them before I die.
Al nome d’Iddio,
don’t look at me pop-eyed like that. The worms aren’t going to eat me while you’re standing there. I’ll die when I’ve settled my affairs. By then I’ll be good and ready.
Gesu,
I’ve had enough of life. What I haven’t lived to see! Do you girls know who I am?”

The girls shifted uncomfortably. “You’re the Duchess of Bari, Your Highness,” the taller girl tentatively ventured.

“Come over here and I will tell you.”

The girls filed to the side of the Duchess’s bed.

“I wasn’t always the Duchess of Bari. I became Duchess of Bari because a man named Il Moro left me Bari in his will. But once I was the Duchess of Milan. Back when I was a girl, that was better than being the Queen of France. There’s never been anything like Milan when I was the Duchess. ‘Paradise on earth,’ all the travelers said. And it was. Before the French destroyed everything. Yes, there was a time when no foreign army would dare cross the mountains into Italy. Now the Frenchmen come every three or four years. And if they don’t start a war, the Venetians or the Germans or His Holiness will.”

The Duchess looked at the girls. They were respectfully attentive, but these abstract events had no resonance for them. “We’re fortunate to be down here in Bari, away from everything,” she told them. “Away from the fighting. Until you’ve seen a war, you imagine that it is very romantic and heroic. Like a joust. But in a war people you love die. My husband died. My father and brother died.” She shook her head slightly. “I had a son. He wasn’t ten years old when the French took him away from me. Back to France. He died there. He fell from his horse while he was hunting.” She closed her eyes. Her voice was almost inaudible. “I hadn’t seen him in twelve years.”

The Duchess looked up. Her jade-green eyes were vivid against her pale face. “I had two daughters. My baby died when she was still a little girl. Fever.” The Duchess paused, and her eyes shadowed with pain. “My daughter Bona is married to the King of Poland. That’s a considerable distance from here. She’s been gone six years.

“So now you know who I am. I am a lonely old woman who talks too much about people who are far away or no longer alive. But then that is my prerogative as a
vecchia.
It is also my privilege to ask young ladies like yourselves to grant me a last favor. Can I ask you to do that?”

The girls nodded gravely.

“Here is my problem. I have a not inconsiderable amount of property and little family to leave it to. I’m not going to send everything to my daughter in Poland, because between here and there I would just be giving it to mercenaries or bandits. That’s the kind of world it is now. You can’t even trust the Florentine banks. But if I leave my money here, as sure as the two of you are standing there, the priests will find a way to get it. So I require girls like you to help me save my money from the priests.”

The girls nodded gravely again.

The Duchess looked off into the garden courtyard visible through the narrow, Gothic-arched window. The colors of the tropical foliage, set aflame by the southern sun, seemed too intense for any earthly garden. She looked back at the girls. “I’m going to establish dowries for each of you, so you can have decent husbands.”

Two pairs of eyes popped wide, and two jaws dropped.

“Don’t think you won’t have an obligation to me,” the Duchess fairly barked. “You will have to choose wisely. If I learn that one of you has married some
ribaldo
who spends all your money on
meretrice
or some
pappatore
who loses all of it playing cards, I will come screaming out of my grave. Do you understand?”

“May we thank you, Your Highness?” the taller girl asked.

“When I am finished explaining your obligation. There’s something else I expect you to do for me. I assume your marriages will be blessed with children. And I hope that each of you will have at least one girl. In addition to all your sons, of course. So what each of you must do is give your first girl the name I tell you.” The Duchess nodded to the shorter girl. “Now, you. What is your name?”

“Giovanna, Your Highness.”

“Giovanna. You must name your girl Beatrice. That is a very special name. Beatrice was Dante’s love. It is also the name of my cousin and my
arnica,
who died many years ago. She was once the Duchess of Bari, just as I am now, and she was also once the Duchess of Milan, just as I was. A very strange coincidence, isn’t it? As if Fortune made us mirrors of one another.” The Duchess’s gaze turned inward. “We looked into those mirrors and saw the best of ourselves, and the worst. Mirrors of truth. I suppose Beatrice taught me that we could see the people we love in that unforgiving glass and still love them. And still forgive them.” The Duchess waved her hand and refocused her attention on Giovanna. “Anyway, Beatrice is a very fine name, and your daughter will be proud to have it.”

The Duchess nodded to the other girl.

“Leonora, Your Highness.”

“Leonora.” The Duchess paused and seemed to have trouble swallowing. Impulsively, Leonora stepped forward and took the Duchess’s hand.

“Leonora. You must name your girl Ippolita.” The Duchess sat up and looked into the garden, no longer seeing the sunny colors, looking at something much farther away. For a moment she seemed infinitely weary. When she finally spoke, her voice was hoarser and very low. “Ippolita was a sad, gentle woman who . . . suffered a great deal. But she tried as best she could . . . to love. And to be loved.” The Duchess blinked at her tears and pressed Leonora’s hand tightly. “Ippolita,” she whispered. Then she lay back and closed her eyes, and all the weariness left her face. “Ippolita was my mother’s name.”

When the French came over the Alps in the last decade of the fifteenth century, they also crossed a great divide on the landscape of history. Although sixteenth-century Italy enjoyed a final cultural florescence, the political power of the Italian city-states declined catastrophically following the French invasions, and for the next 350 years Italy lay at the mercy of a succession of transalpine invaders. France, rebuilt on the plunder of Italy, became the dominant power on the European continent for more than four centuries, as well as the principal check on the New World ambitions of Spain and England. As late as the eve of World War II, the French army remained the most vaunted military force in the world; the huge guns of the Maginot line, so swiftly outflanked by German tanks in May 1940, completed the circle of destiny begun by French cannons in 1494. The French cultural legacy, founded on the wholesale theft of Italian art, architecture, and cuisine, has proved even more enduring than the French tradition of conquest.

Isabella of Aragon died at Bari on February 11,1524. Galeazzo di Sanseverino became the
Grand Ecuyer
of France and was killed in battle in 1525 while shielding the French King with his own body. Leonardo da Vinci, who spent the last years of his life
working for King Francis I of France, is today the most universally recognized Renaissance man. Beatrice’s sister, Isabella d’Este, the Marquesa of Mantua, who lived to age sixty-four and saw her eldest son crowned Duke of Mantua by the Holy Roman Emperor, has entered history as the
prima donna
of the Renaissance, the patron of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo. Perhaps if Beatrice d’Este had lived even half as long as her sister, she might have given Fortune’s wheel another spin, and today’s world might be a very different place. But perhaps Beatrice’s favorite poet, Dante, settled all such arguments when he warned that Fortune’s purpose is always hidden, and no mortal hand can stay her eternal cycle of change.

Al nome
d’Iddio
In the name of God!

al’nuovo
New; original; “the latest.”

all’antica
Literally, “in the style of the ancients”--i.e., the Greeks and Romans. The rebirth of classical civilization gave the Renaissance its name, so anything from architecture to typefaces done in the
all’antica
style was considered, paradoxically, the height of fifteenth-century modernity.

alia Turca
In the Turkish style. Despite constant threats by Christian sovereigns to wrest Constantinople from the Turks (who had conquered the city in 1453) and subjugate the vast Ottoman Empire, Turkish-style masked balls and decorative motifs were as popular with the fashionably well-to-do in Renaissance Italy as
chinoiserie
was in France and England in the late eighteenth century.

allucciolati
Loops of gold or silver thread woven into velvet to produce a rich sparkling effect.

amante
Lover; mistress.

amatissima
Beloved; dearest.

amica/amico
Girlfriend/boyfriend.

amore
Love; my love.

anima
Soul.
Anima mia,
“my soul,” was a profound endearment.

appicciolato
A striped or floral-patterned silk damask.

bassa danza
A slow, ceremonious dance popular in courts throughout Europe. Performed by a large circle of couples, often revolving around a group of musicians.