Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (20 page)

Yet, in an interview with Gian Luca Pozzi on the eve of Lucrezia’s departure, Alexander experienced last-minute anxiety as to how his beloved daughter might be treated by the Este once she was out of his sphere. At Ercole’s instance, Pozzi had raised the subject of the marriage between the Gonzaga heir and Cesare’s daughter by Charlotte d’Albret. Alexander put him off, saying that Cesare would do nothing about this at the moment without the permission and goodwill of the King of France, and that he had discussed this with Lucrezia. He then went on to tell Pozzi that he ‘loved the aforesaid Madonna [Lucrezia] far more than he did the Duke [Cesare] because she was virtuous and prudent and had always been most obedient to him: and that if she would be well treated in Ferrara, nothing they could ask him would ever be in vain’.
²⁵

The sixth of January 1502, the Feast of the Epiphany, was the date of Lucrezia’s final departure from the city she had known all her life to face her new future in Ferrara. She spent a long time kneeling at her father’s feet in the Sala del Pappagallo where the two of them spoke alone before Alexander summoned Cesare. There was no mention of Lucrezia’s farewell to Rodrigo, now just two, which must have been heartbreaking for her, nor of Vannozza, who as always seemed to play little part in her life. Once the Pope had given her leave to go, Lucrezia left the Vatican escorted by Ippolito and Cesare. She was dressed, according to Ferrante, in a robe of curled cloth of gold cut with crimson thread and over it a cloak of cloth of gold lined with ermine. She wore a hat of crimson silk with a golden cap ornament with a large pendent jewel on one side and a necklace of large pearls. At the foot of the steps of the Vatican she mounted a ‘very fine mule, harnessed very richly with beaten gold and a long wide cloth of mulberry velvet’.
²⁶
It was snowing as she left, followed by her huge company. As she did so, Alexander went from window to window of the palace to catch the last glimpse of his beloved daughter.

PART TWO

Duchess of Ferrara 1502 – 19

7. The Road to Ferrara

‘She kept always to her room to wash her hair but also because she is rather solitary and remote by nature’

– The Ferrarese envoys accompanying Lucrezia to Duke Ercole describing her embarrassing experience in finding herself in her former city of Pesaro

A list preserved in the archives at Modena details Lucrezia’s company on the long hard journey northwards. She rode either her mule or a white jennet, or, when she was tired, in a handsome litter provided by her father. She was accompanied by her old friends and relations, Geronima Borgia, Adriana de Mila and her ladies, each with her personal servant. Headed by the beautiful Angela Borgia, always known as Dona Angela, they included ‘Elisabetha senese [of Siena] and her daughter, Elisabetha perusina [from Perugia], Catherina Spagnola [from Spain], Alexandra, Geronima [who later married Lucrezia’s favourite doctor, Lodovico Bonaccioli], Nicola [who married into the Ferrarese aristocratic family of Trotti], Camilla, Catherinella negra [a favourite black slave], four chambermaids, la Napolitana [the Neapolitan] with two daughters, Samaritana, and Camilla greca [the Greek] and two handmaids [‘
ancille
’], and a ‘Madonna Joanna’ (possibly Juana de Moncada, married to one of Alexander’s nephews), with four personal servants. Unmentioned in the archive list or in the list provided by the Ferrarese chronicler Zambotti was a woman named Drusilla, reputed to be Cesare’s lover. The only evidence for this Drusilla is an epigram by the poet Fausto Evangelista Maddaleni entitled ‘On the sorrow of Cesare for the departure of Lucrezia Borgia and Drusilla’.
¹
Cesare’s biographer, Gustavo Sacerdote, hazards a guess that this Drusilla may have been the mother of his two illegitimate children, Girolamo and Camilla, who followed Lucrezia to Ferrara.

While Ippolito had returned to Rome, Cardinal Cosenza was to accompany Lucrezia as far as Gubbio. Three bishops rode with her household, one of whom, the Bishop of Venosa, was Alexander’s favourite doctor. Also among the party were the major-domo, or master of Lucrezia’s household (bearing the sword and biretta destined for Alfonso from the Pope); ‘Messer Christoforo’ Piccimini, her secretary;
il bacilliere,
an obscure title, literally meaning ‘the bachelor’, i.e. a graduate, who was probably designated to read to her during her journey or possibly also to compose gracious speeches for her; her master of ceremonies; two chaplains (who may also have been chapel singers); her master of the stables; ‘Vincentio guardaroba’ (probably the same Vincenzo Giordano of her letters from Nepi); Sancho, her
scaldo
(steward); her master of horse; and Baldassare, her cup-bearer. Also in the party were the man in charge of the knives; the
credenciero
, responsible for her plate; the undercup-bearer; the doorkeeper; ‘Martin who reads the book’; ten pages; ten grooms; the man in charge of her chapel; the candlemaker; the
spenditore
who oversaw the expenses of her kitchen; the tailor; upholsterer
(repostero);
the dispenser of her cellar; two cooks; Alonso, the goldsmith; stable boys; coachmen; the locksmith; the saddler, ‘mastro Alvisi da cremona’; and Navarrico, the Spanish Borgia henchman who featured as a trusted messenger in the Vatican correspondence of 1494 and remained with Lucrezia at Ferrara. For this household alone, she travelled with one hundred and fifty carriages and mules and fifty muleteers.

Eight squires in the service of the Pope, almost all of them Spaniards, also accompanied her, and a party of Roman barons (those not yet dispossessed by Alexander), including Francesco Colonna of Palestrina and his wife, Giuliano Orsini di Stabia, Guillen Ramón, a nephew of the Pope and captain of the papal guard, and Ranuccio degli Ottoni, shortly to be deprived of his property in Macerata by Alexander in favour of the infant Giovanni Borgia. In addition there were four Roman ambassadors; eight Roman noblemen; more than thirty of Cesare’s gentlemen, including the gallant Yves d’Alègre, Ugo de Moncada, Cesare’s right-hand man, Juan Castellar, Remolins, Juan Marrades, and many distinguished Italian noblemen such as the Genoese Ottaviano Fregoso (who featured among the cast of characters in Castiglione’s
The Courtier
) accompanied by thirty trumpeters, six jesters and ‘Nicolò the musician’. Sanudo computed the Borgia contingent as 753 people, 426 horses and 234 mules.

The five-hundred-strong Ferrarese party, headed by Ferrante and Sigismondo d’Este, included many Este connections, such as Annibale Bentivoglio who was married to Duke Ercole’s illegitimate daughter, Lucrezia; Ercole d’Este, son of the Duke’s brother, Sigismondo; Niccolò da Correggio, whose mother was an Este (as was the mother of Lodovico Pico della Mirandola); Uguccione dei Contrari, the leading Ferrarese nobleman, married to Diana d’Este, daughter of the elder Sigismondo; and many of the nobility with whom Lucrezia was to become familiar and who were to become part of her new life, both Ferrarese and local lords, bound to the Este not only by ties of kinship but by the gift of lands and city palaces, offices and military service. The party included the two Ferrarese envoys Gian Luca Pozzi and Gherardo Saraceni.

Ippolito d’Este, whom both Cesare and Lucrezia had known as a young cardinal, had remained behind in Rome. The third son of Ercole by his wife, the Duchess Eleonora d’Aragona, and just a year older than Lucrezia, he was the cleverest of the Este brothers and the most ruthless. Like Cesare, he had been destined for the Church from an early age: at only three he was given the abbey of Casalnovo
in commendam,
an early start even for those days. Aged seven, thanks to his aunt, Beatrice d’Aragona, Queen of Hungary, he was given the rich archbishopric of Esztergom in Hungary, with an annual income of 50,000 ducats. Created cardinal in his absence in Hungary by Alexander in 1493, he later spent some time with Ludovico Sforza in Milan where he landed the archbishopric worth 5,000 ducats a year. He also acted as Governor of the city in the absences of Ludovico, but spent most of his time hunting and feasting outside the city. Like Cesare, he was clearly unsuited to the ecclesiastical life and, like him, preferred the exercise of arms and political intrigue to his priestly duties. His father Ercole had frequent occasion to reprove him for wearing armour instead of his priestly robes and for his generally unsuitable behaviour. In 1493 he had adjured the fifteen-year-old cardinal ‘to bear yourself in such a way that you be reputed a wise and prudent Cardinal . . . to give evidence of the virtue of your disposition and of the constancy that a prelate of your rank should have, and one raised to such a dignity as is the Cardinalate’.
²
The news that Ippolito had ordered a suit of white armour from Milanese craftsmen in order to fight for Ludovico in 1499 had horrified his father who commanded him ‘to desist from these warlike ways, and to strive to live like a good Archbishop and a most reverend Cardinal’.
³
Proud, insolent and voluptuous, but gifted with great personal charm and the family passion for music, Ippolito was to prove a good friend and counsellor to Lucrezia in Ferrara.

Ferrante d’Este, Ercole’s second son by Eleonora, was born in Naples in 1477, when Giuliano della Rovere stood as his godfather. In 1493 he had been dispatched by his father to take service with Charles VIII of France at the French court and was sent there richly equipped with four noble companions and eighty horse. Anxious that his son should make a good impression, Ercole told him he should present perfumes,
‘cose odorifere
’, to the King and Queen and the important personages of the court and dispatched a courtier to him bearing grains of musk and ‘two horns of civet’. Ferrante, however, vain, idle and dissolute, soon disappointed his father by not showing enough diligence in serving the French King, preferring to lounge about and enjoy himself. ‘We know that you have plenty of talent and that you know what your duty is, and that, if you wish, you can do yourself credit,’ the anxious father wrote.
⁴
Ercole, however, spoiled his son; in return for repeatedly sending him money, he received news of the French court, but when later that year Charles VIII invaded Italy, instead of showing keenness Ferrante merely dawdled in his wake and remained in Rome enjoying himself instead of following the French army to Naples. Ferrante’s excuse was that he could not afford to go as Charles had not paid his allowance. A furious Ercole sent one of his secretaries to haul Ferrante off to Naples to see the King and supplied him with a letter of credit for 500 ducats. He also sent a stern letter: ‘All these things,’ he wrote,

have proceeded from your own negligence, and from your wishing to give yourself to idleness and avoid labour; because if you had followed the Most Christian King, as was your duty and our intention, you would have got your allowance sooner . . . But you wanted to stay at Rome and take a holiday where you have spent more than you would have done in following the King. If, by your laziness and negligence, you lose the support of the Most Christian King, you will repent of it with time . . . If by your own fault you lose this opening, do not hope for anything from us, save a bad welcome and harsh treatment . . .
⁵

Thus adjured, Ferrante followed the French army to Naples and endeavoured to ingratiate himself with the King, receiving a good report from the ducal secretary. Ercole wrote praising him for having ‘begun to behave yourself well and with diligence . . . you must continue in being diligent and assiduous in the services of that King, and be prompt and ready at that Court . . .’ While Alfonso d’Este remained with Ludovico Sforza, now part of the League against the French, Ferrante was forced to follow Charles so that Ercole could keep in with both sides. He fought with him at the battle of Fornovo and only returned to Italy two years later, in 1497. He then obtained a
condotta
from Venice for her war against Pisa but, as usual, he was unhappy with his treatment and complained about lack of money, threatening to leave the Venetian service and earning himself another angry letter from his father. Despite all the evidence, Ercole continued to have faith in Ferrante’s charm and his future at the French court and took him with him and Alfonso to Milan to meet Louis XII in 1499. Ferrante singularly failed to live up to his father’s expectations: he had piled up such a mountain of debt while at the French court that poor Bartolommeo de’Cavalleri, Ercole’s ambassador there over the Borgia marriage negotiations, could get no credit and was forced to appeal to Ercole for funds. Louis himself formed a very poor opinion of Ferrante, whom he described as ‘acute but idle and irresponsible’. (Sigismondo d’Este, Ercole’s youngest son, born in September 1480, the least troublesome and ambitious of Ercole’s children, played only a small part in Ferrarese life. Like Alfonso and Ferrante he had contracted syphilis in 1496—7 but while the other brothers seem to have recovered he was so incapacitated by it that he became increasingly unable to live a normal life.)

Progress by the vast cavalcade was extremely slow, the pace being set by Lucrezia who found the horrible winter conditions and the bad roads extremely tiring. The Ferrarese envoys Pozzi and Saraceni, deputed by Ercole to get the bride to Ferrara by the desired date, were in despair. From Foligno a week after their departure from Rome they reported to Ercole:

From Narni we wrote to Your Excellency that we would travel from Terni to Spoleto and from Spoleto here without stopping anywhere: nonetheless the Illustrious Duchess finding herself and her ladies very tired when they arrived at Spoleto, decided to rest for an entire day at Spoleto and then another here so that we will not leave here until tomorrow. And we will not arrive in Urbino before next Tuesday which will be the 18th, because tomorrow we go to Nocera, Saturday to Gualdo, Sunday at Gubbio, Monday at Cagli, then Tuesday at Urbino where we will stay another whole day, that is all Wednesday, and from there we go to Pesaro on the 20th, and then from city to city as we have told Your Excellency. But we are certain that the Duchess will rest many entire days in many of those places so that without doubt we will not arrive in Ferrara before the last day of this month or the first of the next, or even the second or third.

They warned Ercole that he might have to put off the grand reception at Ferrara for a day or two and asked him to let them know what to do: ‘The reason I am led to believe what I have said above is that the Illustrious Madonna Lucrezia is of a delicate complexion and not accustomed to ride and neither are her ladies: and we can understand that she does not wish to arrive at Ferrara exhausted and undone by the journey.’
⁶

Everywhere she went, Lucrezia was received with huge acclaim and rejoicing. At the gate of Foligno, the town of which she had briefly been an absentee Governor, was a trophy depicting the Roman Lucretia with her dagger in her hand and verses declaring how she gave way to this Lucrezia, being far outdone in chastity, modesty, prudence and constancy. Near the piazza was a triumphal car with a cupid in front of it and on it stood Paris with the golden apple of the Hesperides in his hand, declaring that he had given the apple to Venus but since Lucrezia was so far superior in beauty, wisdom and riches to the three goddesses, he had withdrawn it in her favour. Finally, in the middle of the piazza an armed galley with Turks in Turkish robes had advanced to meet her; standing on the prow of the galley one of them declaimed rhyming verses to the effect that their Great King knew how powerful Lucrezia was in Italy and how she could be a good mediator for peace, and therefore he was offering her that Christian territory which he held. ‘We did not bother to take down the words of the verses, as they were not exactly those of Petrarch,’ one envoy commented, ‘nor did the representation of the ship seem of much importance or consequence.’ However, they were both impressed by the appearance, four miles outside Foligno, of the entire Baglioni clan of Perugia gathered to do Lucrezia honour, doubtless, although he did not say so, more from fear of her brother than respect for herself.