The Borgias (32 page)

When the conclave finally opened on September 16, with thirty-seven cardinals in attendance, it was soon clear that the cardinal of Rouen could not win the tiara; both the Italians and Spaniards were against him, and in order to break the deadlock caused by rival national interests and by fears that Cesare Borgia might recover sufficiently from his illness to interfere in the election, the search
turned to a compromise candidate, one who was not expected to survive for long and who would provide a temporary measure allowing all parties to build up support for a candidate of their own. Their choice consequently fell upon Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, archbishop of Siena, the kindly nephew of Pius II, who was racked by gout and already gave the appearance of a very old man, despite being only sixty-four years old. When he was elected, on September 22, he chose to be known as Pius III, in honour of his uncle.

Pius III was a learned and cultured man, a protégé of his uncle, who had taken him into his household and arranged for him to attend courses in legal studies at Perugia. At the age of twenty-one, he had become, again at his uncle’s instigation, archbishop of Siena and soon afterward cardinal of Sant’Eustachio. For Cesare, everything now hinged on whether he would enjoy the favour of this man, his father’s successor.

The enforced convalescence at Nepi had by now almost restored Cesare to his previous good health, though he was careful to ensure that reports of his worsening condition continued to circulate in Rome. And his spirits rose when he was given grounds to believe that he would soon be confirmed in his office as captain-general of the church by the new pope and returned to authority in his former estates in the Romagna. Certainly, Pius III seemed prepared to condone the indulgence of Cesare’s ambitions, declaring that it had been God’s will that those lords whom Cesare had dispossessed should lose their authority, even though it had been carried out by a ‘wretched instrument.’

‘In consequence of the pressure put upon me by the Spanish cardinals, I have been compelled to issue some briefs in favour of
Cesare Borgia,’ he explained to Giustinian, ‘but I will not give him any further help.’ Pius III’s opinion of his predecessor’s son was not encouraging: ‘I do not wish any harm to the Duke, since it is my duty as Pope to have compassion for all men, but I foresee that, by God’s judgement, the Duke must come to a bad end.’ Giustinian reported that ‘the Duke has had good words from the Pope,’ adding later, ‘But His Holiness does not trust him.’

Cesare now decided to return to Rome, where he hoped to be able to press Pius III to confirm him in his offices of captain general of the church and Duke of Romagna. He needed papal permission, however, to enter the city and ordered the Spanish cardinals to plead his case. ‘They tell me he is very ill,’ Pius III informed the Ferrarese envoy Beltrando Costabili, who reported that the pope had never imagined he would feel pity for Cesare but did now ‘indeed most deeply pity him,’ adding that ‘he wants to come to Rome to die, so I have given my permission.’ Much to the surprise of all in Rome, when Cesare returned on October 3, he seemed to be in the best of health.

A few days later Giustinian reported that Cesare was ‘not so ill as we all believed,’ and, moreover, ‘now speaks with his customary arrogance and boasts that he will soon regain possession of all his states.’ The ruse had worked, though, and on October 8, the day of his coronation, Pius III confirmed Cesare as captain-general of the church. Such was the pope’s ill health, however, that the customary procession from St Peter’s to San Giovanni in Laterano had to be cancelled; Pius III was suffering so painfully from gout that he was unable to undertake this lengthy ceremony and retired to his apartments in the Vatican, where, ten days later, he died.

Cesare had spent those ten days making preparations to return with his army to the Romagna, where his grasp was weakening as each day passed, and seeking to acquire the safe-conduct passes needed to move his troops through Florentine territories. But Cesare, still obliged to spend much time in bed, and seemingly disturbed in mind as well as sick in body, was now apparently incapable of acting as decisively as he had been in the past; and when he did make decisions, they were not infrequently the wrong ones. His decision to come to Rome after the election of Pius III, rather than travel directly from Nepi to the Romagna, would prove to be one of these.

In the meantime, however, his plans soon had to be modified as his enemies Cardinal della Rovere and Cardinal Raffaello Riario, Gianpaolo Baglioni and Giovanni Bentivoglio, and the Orsini and the Colonna families, still in uneasy alliance, all began to move, one after the other, against him. Not only threatened by his enemies, Cesare was also troubled by a mutiny of his own soldiers, who were demanding better pay; then he became involved in a ferocious fight with Orsini supporters and, deserted by many of his men, was forced to take shelter first in the Vatican, then in Castel Sant’Angelo.

His situation seemed hopeless, but the death of Pius III a few days later rescued him from disaster, casting away his former gloom and renewing his hopes for the future. ‘The Duke still occupies quarters in the Castel Sant’Angelo,’ Machiavelli reported on October 27. ‘He is more confident than ever that he can still do great things for he believes that a pope favourable to him will now be elected.’

Throughout this time, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had been strengthening his position in Rome. As the bargaining began between the cardinals for the election of the new pope, it was clear that he was the front-runner. His main rival was the Frenchman Georges d’Amboise, whose election was supported by Louis XII; Giuliano’s emphatic protestations that a French pope might well take the papacy back to Avignon brought him much support among the Italian cardinals.

Cesare’s own position weakened considerably when, toward the end of October, news arrived that Forlì, Faenza, Rimini, and Pesaro had fallen to his enemies. On October 29, two days before the conclave was due to open, Cesare and Cardinal Giuliano signed an agreement in the Vatican whereby all the Spanish cardinals agreed to vote for the cardinal on the understanding that, assuming he was elected pope, he would confirm Cesare in his offices of gonfalonier and captain-general and do his utmost to help Cesare establish himself once more in his possession of the duchy in the Romagna.

Machiavelli was astounded when he heard that Cesare had offered his support to Giuliano della Rovere, his father’s old enemy. ‘No one can be unaware of the extreme hate which the Cardinal bears Cesare, since he cannot easily forget the exile in which he had been kept for ten years; the Duke, on the other hand, allows himself to be guided by a blind, unjustified confidence.’

In the end, the conclave was no contest. When it came to the counting of the slips that had been placed in the golden chalice after the first round of voting, it was found that all but three of them bore the name of Giuliano della Rovere. He had acquired the necessary two-thirds majority in one of the shortest conclaves in the
history of the papacy, and he chose to be known as Pope Julius II. Francesco Guicciardini commented:

‘T
HE
D
UKE
’
S CHOICE WAS A MISTAKEN ONE; AND IT WAS THE CAUSE OF HIS ULTIMATE DOWNFALL
’

A
MONTH SHORT
of his sixtieth birthday when elected, Julius II was, unlike his predecessor, unusually vigorous and energetic; still in his prime and enjoying robust health, he was a strong-willed, purposeful, and resolute man, with a very determined view of the world and his position in it.

The grandson of a fisherman from Liguria in northern Italy, he was proud of his humble birth and much given to boasting of his poverty-stricken childhood and of having sailed down the coast with cargoes of onions. His plans to pursue a career in commerce had been dramatically cut short in 1471 when, at the age of twenty-seven, he was made a cardinal by his uncle Sixtus IV.

A tall, rough, impulsive, and handsome man, talkative, arrogant, and restless, he had a fiercely commanding expression and a very short temper. He habitually carried a stick with which he beat men
who annoyed or provoked him, and he would hurl anything at hand, including his spectacles, at messengers who brought him unwelcome news. He had had many mistresses in the past, from one of whom he had contracted syphilis, and as a cardinal he had fathered three daughters. But he had thereafter shown no interest in women, concentrating his sensual appetites on food and drink, which he enjoyed to the full. He relished game and suckling pig and the strong wines of Greece and Corsica; and during Lent, like many others who could afford to do so, he made do with large dishes of lampreys, prawns, caviar, and tunny fish. He paid no attention to his doctors’ words of caution, and when ill, treated his indisposition by chewing quantities of strawberries and plums, which he believed had curative properties.

He was no scholar, he used to say with defensive pride; he was more suited to the life of a soldier. Indeed, he sometimes said that he ought to have been a soldier; and certainly when he personally led his armies out of Rome to compel the obedience of rebel cities in the Papal States and to recover lost territories for the church, he displayed a taste for hard campaigning that dismayed the less robust cardinals whom he obliged to accompany him. It was Julius II who, unwilling to rely upon capricious and often irresolute mercenaries, decided to form a professional papal army; and this decision led in 1506 to the creation of the Swiss Guards, who remained a fighting force until 1825, when they became a smaller domestic bodyguard, though still retaining their old uniform of slashed doublets, striped hose, and rakish berets, as well as their pikes and halberds.

When a sculptor asked him what should be placed in the hand of a statue of him, he replied, ‘Put a sword in my hand, not a book.’ As
a soldier he wore full armour, with a tiara taking the place of a helmet. One contemporary likened him to a ship guided neither by compass nor by charts. ‘No one has any influence over him, and he consults few or none,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote; ‘anything that he has been thinking about during the day has to be carried out immediately,’ the envoy added. ‘Everything about him is on a magnificent scale, both his undertakings and his passions.’

One of his overpowering passions was a deep hatred of the Borgia family. As a cardinal, and fearing assassination, he had fled to France, where he had encouraged Charles VIII to invade Italy and had accompanied him on his campaign. He had failed in his attempt to have a council appointed to depose the pope for simony; but, deprived of the satisfaction of dethroning Alexander VI, ‘that Spaniard of accursed memory,’ he determined to pursue Alexander’s son to the death, to reestablish the church’s rule in the Papal States, and to restore the temporal power of the papacy, which he knew to be essential to his authority.

As Machiavelli wrote, Julius II’s hatred of Cesare ‘was notorious; and it is not to be supposed that the Pope will so quickly have forgotten the ten years of exile which he had had to endure under Alexander VI.’ In a conversation with Giustinian, the new pope said, ‘We do not want [the duke] to be under the illusion that we will favour him, nor that he shall have even one rampart in the Romagna, and although we have promised him something, we intend that our promise shall only extend to the security of his life and of the money and goods that he has stolen.’ For the moment, however, he was prepared to give the impression that the past enmity, which had characterized the relationship between himself and ‘that detested family,’ was now to be modified.

The new pope, having at last achieved the position for which he had yearned for so long, seemed disposed to abide by the undertakings he had given Cesare before the conclave. The Florentines were told to grant the duke and his troops free passage through their territory to the Romagna; while so long as Cesare stayed in Rome, he was free to leave the dark rooms in Castel Sant’Angelo and to occupy apartments in the Vatican. Julius II also promised to confirm Cesare in his appointment as captain-general, and, initially at least, he continued to show respect for Cesare, going so far as to refer to him as ‘our beloved son’ in a brief to Faenza written within days of his election.