The Borgias (33 page)

Cesare’s duchy had begun to disintegrate in the aftermath of Alexander VI’s death: ‘Only the states of the Romagna stood firm,’ Francesco Guicciardini observed, and they did so because the government had been entrusted by Cesare ‘to the hands of men who ruled with so much justice and integrity that he was greatly loved by them.’ Other writers maintained that, in the words of the Perugian chronicler Matarazzo, ‘the people remained quiet from fear rather than contentment’; while the Venetians generally believed that his subjects were ‘full of discontent because of the tyranny and violence practised by the officials of the Duke Valentino.’

Now Cesare could only count on the loyalty of his Spanish governors in Cesena, Imola, and the fortress of Forlì, but he could rely on the strength of these newly built fortifications. Julius II, however, despite the earlier promises reported by Machiavelli, had no intention of allowing Cesare to retain control of them. ‘We want the states to return to the Church,’ he declared. ‘It is our intention to recover them,’ and although ‘we made certain promises to the Duke,’ he explained, ‘we intended merely to guarantee his personal
safety and his fortune, even though, after all, it was stolen from its rightful owners.’

Julius II was an old hand at playing the long game. Fully aware that by depriving Cesare of his duchy in the Romagna, he would create a dangerous political vacuum into which Venice would be the first to step, he needed at all costs to avoid the expansion of an already-powerful Venetian republic in order to preserve his own authority in the Papal States. Equally, he needed to ensure that he did not give Cesare the opportunity to reestablish his own position in the Romagna. He needed, in other words, to tread with considerable care.

It was not long before it became clear that Cesare was, indeed, overconfident in his belief that Julius II would favour him, even to the limited extent that he had been led to believe was his due; and the more clearly he realised that the pope was deceiving him, the more angry he became. When Machiavelli was granted an interview with him early in November, he found him in an unusually emotional mood, angry and resentful, rambling on at length ‘with words full of poison and anger.’ Cesare was no longer the forceful and competent leader Machiavelli had met eighteen months earlier in Urbino.

Other observers gave similar descriptions of ‘an angry, broken man, out of his mind and not knowing what he wanted to do.’ Francesco Soderini described him as ‘inconstant, irresolute, and suspicious, not standing firm in any decision.’ Machiavelli reported that his plans were uncertain:

In fact, Cesare still hoped to march north from Rome to his strongholds in the Romagna, and accordingly waited anxiously for the letter he expected from Florence confirming his safe conduct through the republic’s territories. But the Florentines, advised by Machiavelli that Julius II’s support of Cesare was only a temporary measure, decided not to agree to Cesare’s request.

And so, on November 18, his power and possessions crumbling around him, Cesare left Rome for Ostia, from where he intended to reach his strongholds in the Romagna, avoiding Florentine territory by travelling by sea to Livorno and from there marching east across the Apennines to Cesena. Before he could leave, however, two cardinals arrived in Ostia with orders from Julius II for Cesare to hand over the passwords he had agreed with his castellans for each of the fortresses. Cesare refused to do so.

Julius II, fearful of rumours that Venice planned to seize these strategically vital citadels for herself, was incensed with rage and ordered Cesare to return to Rome immediately; and if he declined to obey the order, he was to be brought back by force.

At the same time, the pope issued a warrant for the arrest of Cesare’s lieutenant Miguel de Corella, who was to be questioned about the deaths of many persons: Juan, the Duke of Gandía,
Cesare’s brother, whose body had been fished out of the Tiber in June 1497; Alfonso of Aragon, Lucrezia’s second husband, who had been strangled on his sickbed; Astorre Manfredi, Lord of Faenza, and his brother, whose bodies, weighted with stones, had been found in the Tiber in June 1502; Giulio Cesare da Varano, Lord of Camerino, who had been strangled at La Pergola shortly afterward, and his two sons, who had had their throats cut; and many more.

So, on November 29, three days after Julius II’s magnificent and extravagant coronation procession, Cesare returned to Rome, a prisoner. There were unconfirmed reports that, now in custody, his spirit had finally broken. There were stories that he wept when he was dragged into his cell in the Torre Borgia, that he had fallen onto his knees before Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, begged for forgiveness for what he had done in Urbino, and undertook to return the works of art that had been stolen from the ducal palace. And on December 1 came the news that a body of Cesare’s troops, under the leadership of Corella, had been captured near Arezzo, thanks, it was said, to a warning sent to the Florentine government by Machiavelli that these men were on their way north.

Worse was soon to follow, when a number of wagons belonging to Cesare, but travelling under the name of Lucrezia’s brother-in-law Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, came to the attention of the customs men in Bologna, who were inspecting baggage for taxable goods. ‘When they opened the chests and bales,’ wrote the Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, ‘they found inside great riches taken from the Church, namely, the cross of St Peter, covered with gems of an infinite value,’ several other pieces of gem-encrusted jewellery that were the property of the church, priceless clothes and altar hangings, ‘a little gilded cat with diamonds for its eyes,’ and
even a little altarpiece of the Virgin, worth a total, so Zambotti estimated, of 300,000 ducats.

With his loyal lieutenant under arrest in Florence and much of his fortune confiscated in Bologna, there seemed little alternative to Cesare but to divulge the passwords he had been at such pains to conceal. Machiavelli commented that his life would not be worth much after the strongholds surrendered. ‘It seems tome,’ he wrote, ‘that this Duke of ours is slipping little by little down to his grave.’ The castellans, however, whether out of loyalty to their duke or following some prearranged plan, valiantly refused to surrender the fortresses until they had positive proof that Cesare was no longer a prisoner.

The stalemate continued, much to Julius II’s fury, until the end of the year, when news arrived in Rome that much cheered Cesare: Gonsalvo di Córdoba had won a decisive victory over the French at the Battle of Garigliano on December 27. Hoping, indeed expecting, support from a Spanish Naples, Cesare signed a formal agreement on January 29, 1504, agreeing to surrender his Romagna fortresses in return for his freedom. Pending the surrender, Cesare was taken to Ostia while, one by one, his strongholds were taken by Julius II’s troops.

In April 1504 he set forth, in optimistic spirits, in a galley bound for Naples and the court of Gonsalvo di Córdoba, Duke of Terranova, who had been appointed viceroy of the kingdom by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He was not welcome, however. The Spanish monarchs, ‘their Catholic Majesties,’ had informed their ambassador in Naples that ‘we regard the arrival of the Duke with great displeasure and not for political reasons alone; for, as you know, the man is deeply abhorrent to us because of the gravity of
his crimes and we certainly do not wish that such a man should be considered to be in our service.’ They had, they informed the ambassador, also written to Gonsalvo di Córdoba, asking him to arrest Cesare and ‘to send the Duke to us and to provide two galleys for the journey so that he cannot escape elsewhere.’

Even before Gonsalvo di Córdoba had received these orders, Cesare, his confidence by now restored, had set about planning a march into the Romagna to regain what he had recently lost. When the royal instructions arrived from Spain, he believed that as a fellow Spaniard, Gonsalvo would be prepared to overlook them, and he started to raise troops for a campaign in Italy that he hoped would restore him to power. Gonsalvo, however, remained loyal to his masters.

The Florentine ambassador in Naples reported what happened next:

Soon after this dispatch was received in Florence, Cesare was put onto a galley bound for Spain, where, so his sister heard, he was ‘shut up with a page’ in the castle of Chinchilla, high in the mountains behind Valencia.

Cesare’s fall had been as dramatic as his meteoric rise. Machiavelli blamed it on Cesare’s decision to support Julius II’s election, though it is difficult to see how he could have organized an alternative candidate to counter the front-runner and ensure enough support in the conclave to achieve the required two-thirds majority among the cardinals.

As Machiavelli commented in
The Prince:

‘M
Y JOY IN SEEING YOU IS NEVER DONE
’

T
HE DEATH OF HER FATHER
, Alexander VI, followed so rapidly by the collapse of Cesare’s empire and his ambitions, and his humiliating imprisonment so far away in Spain, must have been devastating to the twenty-three-year-old Lucrezia. All the more so, isolated in Ferrara, where, according to the chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, it was widely believed that the pope had been poisoned; Cesare, too, ‘was found to have been poisoned,’ he reported, adding that ‘it was chiefly due to the fact that he was placed inside the still warm entrails of two mules that he was cured.’

The torrential rain that lashed Ferrara that September and October, causing the Po to burst its banks, flooding both fields and city streets, matched the depths of her misery. Couriers arrived daily with news of Cesare’s cities and fortresses as they fell, one by one, some returning to their earlier rulers, others seized by Venice;
of the new tenant of her old home, the Vatican Palace, and how the new pope had shut up her father’s apartments, where she had once danced and laughed so gaily, and vilified ‘that Spaniard of accursed memory.’

It was not just her private grief at the loss of her father and brother that overwhelmed her; it was clear from the gossip at court that Lucrezia’s position as wife of the heir to the duchy was now also under threat. One friend advised her to do all she could to assuage her grief lest people thought she was overcome by apprehension about her own future.

Louis XII himself was ready to repudiate both Cesare and Lucrezia now that Alexander VI was dead; and he told the Ferrarese envoy that he knew very well that the Este family had never been pleased with the Borgia alliance, and ‘therefore the French court did not regard Madonna Lucrezia as Don Alfonso’s real wife.’ Alfonso, however, had become attached to Lucrezia. Hearing of her father’s death, he came home to Ferrara to comfort his wife and thus to show that although the marriage had lost its political raison d’être, it still retained its private lustre.