The Borgias (22 page)

Cesare was immediately suspected of the kidnapping. The Venetian authorities protested loudly to the papal legate and to the French ambassador in Venice about the duke’s supposed involvement in the affair; the abduction of ‘one of the most beautiful and notable ladies in Italy’ was a horrible crime, to be ‘abominated and detested.’

The government also sent a representative to Cesare to complain of the crime and to demand Dorotea’s release. Cesare denied all knowledge of the abduction, and when the Venetian agent – who had been instructed to make no salutation to him – was received by Cesare, he was arrogantly rebuffed. Cesare assured the
man that he had ‘no lack of women’ and did not need to abduct them. He declared, moreover, that the crime had been committed by one of his Spanish officers, Diego Ramires, and that it was he and Dorotea who had been lovers. Indeed, claimed Cesare, Diego Ramires had shown him some shirts that Dorotea had given him.

The Venetian government was not alone in protesting at Cesare’s guilt. The king of France also complained; so did Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua, on behalf of his sister, the Duchess of Urbino, in whose care Dorotea had been before her marriage. But Cesare brushed aside all such protests, and as the days and weeks passed, while there were rumours that Dorotea was being kept in captivity against her will, perhaps in the castle of Forlì, nothing reliable was heard of her for the moment. She reappeared, however, in February 1504, at Faenza after a long sojourn in a convent.

It was certainly the case that Ramires was suspected by many in Italy of being guilty of the crime. Indeed, one contemporary chronicler, Giuliano Fantaguzzi, wrote unequivocally that Dorotea was ‘attacked and abducted by Messer Diego Ramiro, soldier of Duke Valentino and formerly courtier of the Duke of Urbino.’

Others, however, were certain Cesare was guilty. Even the pope believed that his son might well have committed the ‘horrid and detestable crime.’ He informed the Venetian ambassador in Rome: ‘I do not know what punishment whoever did it deserves,’ adding that ‘if the Duke has done it, he has lost his mind.’ He showed the envoy a letter written to Cesare demanding that the culprit be severely punished; and he maintained that when the abduction took place, his son had been in Imola, not Forlì. Despite his ‘bold words,’ however, the pope showed how deeply the affair ‘had upset him.’

Meanwhile, Faenza was holding out against the siege of Cesare’s armies, ‘supplied,’ as the Ferrarese chronicler explained, ‘with victuals thanks to the covert assistance of Florence, Bologna and other Italian powers.’ Cesare had resumed his attack on the city at the end of January: ‘Yves d’Alègre with 1,000 horses,’ reported the chronicler, ‘passed through Reggio Emilia to help Duke Valentino who has decided to take Faenza by force.’ The chronicler also noted large quantities, ‘10,000 they say’ of French cavalry, foot soldiers, lancers, and artillery moving through the duchy of Ferrara in March and early April.

Cesare finally took Faenza during the week following Easter, which fell on April 11 that year. As many as two thousand were killed; many more were wounded. Cesare lost seven hundred of his own men and several of his captains, on the first day of the battle. In Rome Alexander VI failed to attend Mass in the Sistine Chapel on Easter Saturday – ‘it was said,’ reported Burchard, ‘that the Pope had not come because of a rumour that many of the Duke’s soldiers have been killed outside Faenza.’ But a few days later, his worries eased when news arrived that the city had finally fallen, that Astorre Manfredi, the young Lord of Faenza, had surrendered, and that Faenza had paid 40,000 ducats to Cesare to avoid being sacked.

The news, which had arrived in Rome on April 26, was greeted with great excitement. While the cannons of Castel Sant’Angelo roared from eight o’clock that evening until light dawned the next day, Jofrè rode through the streets celebrating his brother’s victory, accompanied by Carlo Orsini and a large group of revellers, shouting, ‘The Duke! The Duke! Orsini! Orsini!’

Cesare, meanwhile, had wasted little time on celebrations. Just days after his victory at Faenza, he had seized the opportunity to
consolidate his hold on the area by marching some ten miles up the Via Emilia to take Castel Bolognese. This strategic outpost belonged to Bologna, and Cesare’s move had caught Giovanni Bentivoglio, the ruler of the city, by surprise. In order to avoid a direct attack, he was forced into an alliance with Cesare, recognizing his possession of Castel Bolognese and agreeing to provide him with a hundred soldiers, which were to be maintained at Bologna’s expense, in return for the guarantee of his security.

As Lord of Imola, Castel Bolognese, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, and Pesaro, Cesare was now the ruler of a substantial state that stretched seventy-five miles down the Via Emilia from Bologna to the Adriatic coast. And in May his father, the pope, invested him with the title of Lord of the Romagna. He had achieved his stated goal as captain-general of the church of returning the fiefs that had belonged to the excommunicated vicars to papal rule, and slightly exceeded his man date with the capture of Castel Bolognese.

Alexander VI now ordered his son to return to Rome. It was soon clear, however, that Cesare had assumed a new importance in his own eyes. Acting independently of the pope, and in a way that was directly contrary to his father’s wishes, Cesare now turned his attention to Florence. He was aware of the need for speed: Yves d’Alègre and the other French troops would soon be obliged to leave him to join the French army that was massing at Parma for Louis XII’s campaign against Naples.

Florence’s republican government was seriously alarmed. ‘From all parts come reports of the ill intentions of the Pope and the Duke, who intend to attack us and change our constitution,’ the Florentine representative in France, Machiavelli, was told. The Florentines were only too aware that Cesare would have ‘such confidence
in his fortune that every undertaking, even the most difficult, seems easy to him.’ And they worried about the motives of several of Cesare’s captains, whom they described as ‘most inimical to our city.’ Paolo Orsini, for example, had close links with the exiled and detested Medici family; or Vitellozzo Vitelli, who had sworn publicly to take revenge on the Florentines for executing his brother Paolo.

In the city itself, fear of Cesare had caused ‘the greatest disorder,’ so Biagio Buonaccorsi said; many citizens had fled their homes, he added, and ‘appeals were made to the King [of France] who was too far away to be of any help in so urgent a matter; the King did write letters to the Duke, but none of them was obeyed and everything was in suspense and great tumult.’

By May 2, five days after seizing Castel Bolognese, Cesare’s troops had crossed the Apennines and set up camp at Firenzuola, just thirty miles from Florence. His army approached the city slowly, taking every opportunity to destroy crops, burn barns, steal animals and food stores, even to cut the grain ripening in the fields. On May 13 the Florentine envoys met Cesare at Campi and, much to the relief of the city, negotiated a treaty of alliance with the bold invader, paying Cesare 36,000 ducats a year for the privilege. Buonaccorsi claimed that the Florentines had signed ‘merely to get Cesare off their backs,’ but the threat had been very real.

‘This lord is very proud,’ Machiavelli was to write later of Cesare, ‘and, as a soldier, he is so enterprising that nothing is so great that it does not seem trivial to him. And, for the sake of glory and of acquiring lands, he does not rest, and acknowledges no fatigue or danger. He arrives at one place before he is known to have left the other; he endears himself to his soldiers; he has got hold of the best
men in Italy, and these factors, together with continual good fortune, make him victorious and dangerous.’

Cesare now withdrew his men to the Tuscan coast, allowing them to plunder indiscriminately on their way to their camp near Piombino, opposite the island of Elba, from where he was now in a position to threaten both Pisa and Siena. Cesare himself, however, had other obligations, not least his promise to assist in the French campaign to conquer Naples, and so, on June 27, he finally acceded to his father’s request and returned to Rome. He had reason to feel satisfied with himself and his achievements. At the age of twenty-five, the new Lord of the Romagna had become a force to command fear and respect in Italian affairs.

‘T
HEY KILLED WITHOUT PITY
’

C
ESARE RETURNED TO
R
OME
late in the evening of June 17, 1501, stealing in quietly through one of the smaller gates in his characteristically mysterious way, unobserved in the gathering dusk and in the general commotion caused by the vanguard of the French army, who had set up camp outside the city walls the day before.

The soldiers had left a trail of destruction behind them as they had marched through central Italy. The Florentine diarist Luca Landucci reported as many as thirty thousand troops ‘doing many wicked things: they cut crops for their horses wherever they went, plundered all the wine cellars, flogging anyone in their way; they respected neither the commissioners nor the people; they killed the peasants who tried to stop them from taking their hens and in one fight they killed twenty men.’ On hearing the news that the French
had arrived in Rome, Landucci exclaimed with compassion, ‘Just think what it is like in Rome.’

The French army of fourteen thousand men had been provided with meat, bread, and wine, and a camp had been established for them outside the walls of Rome. They had, additionally, so Burchard said, been provided with the services of the very inadequate number of sixteen prostitutes. Burchard also said that the Florentine merchants in Rome had bribed the city governor with a generous sum of ducats to avoid having senior French officers billeted in their houses; the French were billeted on them anyway, and the governor kept the money.

Their commander, Robert Stuart, Lord d’Aubigny, a Scot by birth, arrived in Rome on June 23 and was received at the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo by Jofrè, who escorted the Frenchman to the Vatican. The pope greeted his guest, and, so the French chronicler Jean d’Auton observed, ‘dissimulated his feelings with a joyous countenance.’ Alexander VI, ‘despite the fact that he was Spanish and no friend of the French,’ continued the chronicler, ‘received the captains of the French army, and talked merrily with them on various subjects.’ He handed out lavish presents to all; d’Aubigny received a great grey charger, ‘with harness so splendid that everyone was amazed by it.’

That evening Cardinal Sanseverino, the brother of the commander of the Italian troops, entertained the French officers at ‘a magnificent banquet,’ which was held in the gardens of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza’s villa, ‘in which there were groves of orange and lemon trees and pomegranates as well as other fruit trees and flowers of all kinds and scents, and singers, jugglers, tragedians and comedians all exercised their art in turn.’

The French army left Rome on June 28, after marching past Castel Sant’Angelo. From his position high on the balcony, Alexander VI watched the parade of 12,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 26 carriages laden with artillery, observing, so it was said, ‘the departure of these soldiers with great joy.’ Also in the parade was Cesare, seen in public for the first time since his secret return ten days earlier.

The following day Lord d’Aubigny went to the Vatican, where he was closeted for some time with the pope, who told his visitor the news that, in a secret consistory held a few days earlier, he had formally dispossessed Federigo of Aragon of the kingdom of Naples and bestowed it instead on the king of France. After their private talks, d’Aubigny went to the Sala del Pappagallo, where, Burchard reported, ‘all the cardinals permitted him the honour of kissing them on the mouth,’ before taking his leave and rejoining his troops on the road south to Naples.

Despite taking part in the parade, Cesare himself did not leave Rome immediately, delaying his departure for several reasons. The formidable Caterina Sforza, weakened after spending nearly a year imprisoned in the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo, was finally persuaded to abandon her rights to Imola and Forlì, and she was released from gaol to spend the rest of her years in exile in Florence. More importantly, Cesare was waiting impatiently for his captain Vitellozzo Vitelli and his soldiers, who were on their way south from Tuscany, having taken the strategically important port of Piombino. Finally Cesare and his four hundred troops were ready to join the French army marching to Naples under the command of d’Aubigny.

Little serious resistance was offered to the French troops and their allies in Aversa, Nola, and other towns in the kingdom of
Naples. Only Capua, twenty miles north of the capital, put up a fight, and by the middle of July, Cesare was absorbed in a violent and bloody campaign to seize the city for Louis XII. ‘The taking of Capua was due to the treason of an inhabitant of that city, who secretly let in the Duke’s troops and they then killed him,’ reported Burchard. ‘They killed without pity priests, monks and nuns, in churches and convents, and all the women they found: the young girls were seized and cruelly abused; the number of people killed amounted to around 6,000.’ According to an improbable account by Guicciardini, Cesare had the women of the town locked up in a tower and selected the most desirable for himself. What was certain was that this orgy of rape, murder, and looting ended in the entire population of Capua being killed.