The Borgias (29 page)

On September 2 Cesare left Genoa and five days later was in Ferrara to cheer the ailing Lucrezia, who was suffering from puerperal fever. He then rode south to Camerino to confer with his father, who was in the city to install as the new Duke of Camerino the four-and-a-half-year-old Juan, the boy widely supposed to have been the result of Lucrezia’s infamous affair with the papal valet Pedro Calderon. The pope and Cesare had much to discuss, not least the plan for seizing Bologna.

In fulfilment of his agreement with Cesare, Louis XII had sent an envoy to Giovanni Bentivoglio at Bologna, informing him that he would not oppose the wishes of Alexander VI, who now called Bentivoglio to Rome to answer charges of misgovernment.

Cesare’s captains, however, had become increasingly suspicious of their master’s intentions. If Giovanni Bentivoglio was about to lose his state, how safe were their own territories, which all lay on the edges of Cesare’s duchy, their security guaranteed, so they thought, by their service in the duke’s armies. Accordingly, Cardinal Orsini called a meeting at the castle of Magione, a short distance from Lake Trasimeno, which was attended by all the threatened rulers: Gianpaolo Baglioni of Perugia; Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina; Paolo Orsini of Palombara; Oliverotto Euffreducci of Fermo; even Vitellozzo Vitelli, Lord of Città di Castello,
who was suffering from an acutely painful attack of syphilis and had to be carried there on a stretcher. And those who could not come in person to Magione were represented: Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna sent his son, Ermes; Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena sent two courtiers; Guidobaldo da Montefeltro sent another; and so on.

Gianpaolo Baglioni warned those attending the conference that they all risked being ‘devoured one by one by the dragon’ if they did not act against Cesare. Yet so long as not only France but also Florence and Venice declined to help them, the majority of the members of the conference were reluctant to face up to the danger that confronted them. On October 7, however, there was an uprising against the Borgias in the fortress of San Leo in Urbino; and, with this encouragement, agreement was reached; it was settled that Cesare was to be attacked simultaneously by Giovanni Bentivoglio in the Romagna and by the members of the Orsini family, who were to encourage the revolt in Urbino.

When he heard of this threat, which seemed for a time to weaken his hold on his state, Cesare withdrew his forces to Imola and the security of the Romagna. When Machiavelli joined him there, to offer the support of Florence, he found the duke to be quite unperturbed, even indifferent. He accepted the loss of Urbino with apparent nonchalance and prepared for war with evident confidence in victory, raising troops and money, and appointing new condottieri captains, many of whom were Spanish, to replace the conspirators. He also spent such large sums on his intelligence services that Machiavelli thought that he ‘laid out as much on couriers and special messengers in two weeks as anyone else would have spent in two years.’

At first the military operations did not go well for Cesare; and toward the end of October, the duchy of Urbino fell to the conspirators, who, according to Burchard, after having assembled some five hundred cavalry and two thousand troops, restored the city of Urbino and all its territory to the illustrious Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, rightful Duke of Urbino.

But as more money came in and more troops were enlisted, the tide, as Machiavelli said, began to turn. His enemies were ‘tardy in pressing him’; they had failed to seize the moment, as he himself undoubtedly would have done, and, as they began to lose heart in opposing him, were eventually persuaded to come to terms with him.

As Machiavelli was later to write in
The Prince
, Cesare ‘overcame the revolt of Urbino, the uprisings in the Romagna, and the countless threats with the help of the French’ to which he added his own not inconsiderable political skills:

The general desire now to regain the good opinion of Cesare was, so Machiavelli said, reflected in the submissive letter addressed to him by Vitellozzo Vitelli, who excused himself for having joined
the alliance against the duke and saying that if he ever had the opportunity to speak to him personally, he had no doubt he would be able to justify himself completely.

Receiving no reply to his letter, and denied a personal interview with Cesare, Vitelli could but guess what Cesare intended to do next. Machiavelli was also kept in the dark. ‘I have not tried to speak to the Duke, having nothing new to tell him,’ he reported to Florence, ‘and the same things would bore him; you must realise that he talks to nobody other than three or four of his ministers and various foreigners who are obliged to deal with him about important matters and he does not come out of his study until late at night; and so there is no opportunity to speak to him except when an audience has been appointed.

‘Besides,’ continued Machiavelli, ‘he is very secretive. I do not believe that what he is going to do is known to anyone other than himself. His secretaries have told me often that he does not reveal his plans until they are ready to be carried out. So I beg your Lordships will excuse me and not put it down to my negligence if I do not satisfy your Lordships with information, because most of the time I do not even satisfy myself.’

So Machiavelli could not by any means discover what Cesare intended to do next. Then, just before Christmas, there was news; Cesare had summoned all the French officers in his army to come to see him and had told them that he no longer needed them; their upkeep in idleness was an expense that he no longer wished to afford. On the day of their departure, a ball was held in Cesare’s honour at Cesena. The pretty wife of one of these officers attracted his attention, and he danced with her several times, closely watched by her husband.

While he was apparently enjoying this ball, the military governor of the Romagna, the fierce, aggressive Ramiro de Lorqua, was immediately arrested on his return from Pesaro and cast into prison. At dawn three days later, he was beheaded in the piazza at Cesena. His decapitated body was left on the block, his head displayed on a lance.

No explanation was given for this sudden execution other than that Ramiro had been guilty of corruption in the exercise of his office; but this solution to the mystery was not generally accepted. There was a rumour that Ramiro had been in correspondence with the conspirators, notably in some kind of plot with Giovanni Bentivoglio, Vitelli, and members of the Orsini family. ‘The reason for his death is not known,’ Machiavelli commented, ‘but perhaps it pleased the Prince who likes to show that he knows how to make and unmake men at his will.’

Certainly Cesare’s occupying troops had been ill-disciplined at first, while the Spanish officers, like the unpopular and corrupt Ramiro de Lorqua, who were installed as administrators, had dealt most harshly with recalcitrant people. But, in time, Italians replaced Spaniards; and, to the general satisfaction, a peripatetic court of appeal was established under the direction of a lawyer of good reputation, Antonio del Monte.

What at least seemed certain after Ramiro’s execution was that Cesare was preparing some kind of move against the condottieri captains who had been plotting his own murder. In the meantime they agreed to take in Cesare’s name the small town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast south of Fano. Senigallia had been the fief of Giovanni della Rovere, brother of Cardinal Giuliano, but he had died in November 1501, leaving his wife, Giovanna, sister of
Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, acting as regent for his young son. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, mindful of the fate of Astorre Manfredi, had arranged for his twelve-year-old nephew, Francesco Maria, to be smuggled out of the area to the safety of his own palace in Savona. And, knowing Cesare’s reputation for cruelty, the cardinal had warned Giovanna not to offer any resistance.

The town fell without a struggle, but its military commander refused to surrender the citadel to anyone other than Cesare Borgia himself. Wearing full armour, Cesare rode toward Senigallia on December 31, 1502, at the head of his army, the condottieri captains coming out to meet him and following him back into the town, the gates of which were closed behind them.

Cesare now called upon his captains to attend a conference in the house he chose to occupy as his headquarters. Responding to his invitation to join him at table, they entered the courtyard of this house as Cesare, according to one account, was mounting a staircase in order, so he said, to ‘answer a call of nature.’ When he was halfway up the stairs, he turned to nod to Miguel de Corella. And in obedience to this signal, the condottieri were suddenly surrounded by armed soldiers; only Vitelli had time to draw his sword and wound several of the soldiers, before they were all arrested and disarmed.

That evening Machiavelli arrived from Fano to find the town in an uproar. He sent a message to Florence reporting the arrest of the condottieri captains and added, ominously, ‘In my view they will not be alive tomorrow morning.’ Soon afterward Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto Euffreducci were garrotted by Cesare’s ‘executioner,’ Corella, as they sat back to back on a bench. The three
Orsinis – Paolo, Francesco, and Roberto – had been taken away as prisoners, so Machiavelli was told, and ‘faced a similar fate,’ and Cesare sent an urgent letter to Rome ordering his father to arrest Cardinal Orsini as soon as possible. When the cardinal arrived at the Vatican the next morning in order to congratulate the pope on Cesare’s seizure of Senigallia, he made his entrance into the Sala del Pappagallo, where, according to Burchard, ‘he was terrified to find himself surrounded by armed men and immediately cast into prison.’ Burchard added that ‘all his possessions were seized,’ before being ‘loaded onto mules and taken to the Vatican.’

The punishment of the faithless condottieri was considered well merited. Even Isabella d’Este wrote to congratulate Cesare on his punishment of them, sending him a present of one hundred carnival masks and expressing the hope that ‘after the strains and fatigues’ that he had undergone in ‘these glorious undertakings,’ he should now find time to enjoy himself. ‘He insisted on examining the masks with his own hand,’ Isabella said, ‘saying how fine they were, and how much they resembled various people of his acquaintance.’

The day after the murders of Vitellozzo and Oliverotto, Cesare left Senigallia, having accepted the surrender of its citadel, and, in the pouring rain, set out to claim the states of his disloyal captains for his own. Città di Castello fell quickly. At Perugia, Gianpaolo Baglioni fled at his approach, seeking refuge with Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena. Cesare marched toward Siena, seizing the city’s outposts along the way, his men sacking, pillaging, and raping at will. At San Quirico d’Orcia, his soldiers found just two men and nine women, all elderly, whom they hung up by their arms, kindling a fire
beneath their feet to torture them into confessing where their valuables were hidden; the old people did not know, or were not prepared to reveal anything, and they died.

Declaring that he acted as captain-general of the church and that he had no selfish motives, Cesare then drove Petrucci from Siena and, having done so, moved against the Orsini castles and lands in the countryside around Rome. The stronghold of Ceri surrendered after a savage bombardment on April 5, 1503. Other Orsini castles, including Palombara and Cerveteri, followed suit; Paolo Orsini, Lord of Palombara, was strangled; Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, was also murdered, so it was widely supposed, on the orders of the pope. Only Giangiordano Orsini, Lord of Bracciano, was spared; like Cesare, he was a knight of the French royal Order of St Michael, whose members swore a solemn oath on receiving their collar not to make war on one another.

Looking back on the events of the previous year, Machiavelli wrote: ‘Duke Valentino enjoys exceptional good fortune, courage and confidence that are almost inhuman, and a belief that he can accomplish whatever he undertakes.’ As a soldier, his talents lay in an extraordinary capacity for rapid movement and deceit. No sooner was he reported to be in one place than he suddenly appeared in another, miles away. He turned the art of war, so it was said of him, into the art of deceit. There are very few descriptions of him as a commander in the field; but there is one that demonstrates the astonishing power of his personality. His men were crossing a river when, in fear of drowning, they panicked. Shout as they did, their officers could not restore order. Cesare rode down to the riverbank. His men saw him sitting there, gazing upon the scene, silent and impressive. When they caught sight of him, the
soldiers were brought immediately to order; and they crossed the river quietly.

And in his present situation, Cesare accepted the fact that he would have to undertake a realignment in his relations with foreign powers now that Spain was emerging as the stronger power in her struggle with France over Naples, notably since April 28, when the commander of the Spanish army, Gonsalvo di Córdoba, won a decisive victory over the French at Cerignola, exposing the weakness of the French hold over Naples. Cesare had his eyes on Tuscany, and it was believed that he had it in mind to form an alliance with the Spaniards to gain his end.

Cesare could do nothing, however, until he had raised more money to replenish his coffers, which had been so drastically depleted by his campaign of the previous year, by his attacks on the Orsini, and by his wild extravagance. Once again he turned to his father.