The Borgias (34 page)

They seemed to have been ‘quite satisfied with one another,’ and they may well have been so, but their temperaments were very different; while he still continued to spend a large part of each day in the lecture halls of the university or in his workshop, poring over proposals for public works, military engineering, and firearms, she enjoyed the life at court, where masques and tableaux, drama and poetry occupied the evening hours.

Music was the interest closest to Lucrezia’s heart, and one she shared with her husband, who was himself an accomplished player of the viol. She employed her own singers, pipers, and lute players,
even her own dancing master, spending a large part of her income on the patronage of music. She was particularly fond of songs, of the lovely Spanish poems that were set to music by her musicians; and she vied with her rival, Isabella d’Este, to attract the best players and composers to her court.

The court at Ferrara was famous throughout Italy as a centre of culture. Duke Ercole had doubled the size of the city and transformed it into a setting worthy of ducal grandeur, enclosing a huge hunting park, complete with its own racecourse, where ladies of the court could watch their knights displaying their skills, jousting at the ring or pursuing game with trained leopards; he added new gardens and gilded reception rooms to the ducal palace and, in 1504, decided to build on the grounds the Sala delle Comedie, the first purpose-built theatre since antiquity.

Among the many foreign writers and musicians attracted to this lively cultural centre were the scholarly humanists Ercole Strozzi and Pietro Bembo. A member of the Florentine family whose grand palazzo, built for Filippo Strozzi, is one of the most imposing in Florence, Ercole Strozzi was a poet of distinction. Much disliked by Lucrezia’s husband but admired and sponsored by her father-in-law, Strozzi was a distinctive figure in Ferrara, where he hobbled about on crutches that his clubfeet rendered indispensable.

Strozzi was clearly and immediately attracted to Lucrezia, as she was to him. He sympathised with her in her differences with her father-in-law, who kept her, so she complained, so short of money that she was not able to dress with the distinction that was her due. Strozzi made light of her complaints; she could always borrow money; and since he himself was shortly to go to Venice, he would
buy for her there such materials as those for which that city was celebrated. He returned with large bundles to the delight not only of Lucrezia but also of her ladies, who were presented with rolls of material to be made up into dresses of exceptional splendour.

Pietro Bembo, on the other hand, was a Venetian poet, handsome and charming, a man in his early thirties whose company Lucrezia found especially alluring. Indeed, there were whispers at court that the duke’s new daughter-in-law might have succumbed to Bembo’s charms; it was generally supposed that they soon became lovers. Certainly she was always ready to enjoy the company of the lively brilliant poet when he was in Ferrara or a guest at Ercole Strozzi’s lovely villa at Ostellato, on the shores of the lagoon at Comacchio, travelling there from time to time along the waters of the Po in her painted barge.

When apart, the two wrote passionate letters to each other in the fashion of their times. Lucrezia called him ‘Messer Bembomio’ (my Mr Bembo), and he wrote to her with deep affection. She gave him a lock of her lovely blond hair, which can still be seen today, on display in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, along with much of their correspondence and the poems they wrote to each other; seeing ‘those beautiful locks that I love ever more deeply,’ ran one of Bembo’s verses, ‘my heart was torn from me and caught.’ One of his letters to her ends: ‘With my heart do I now kiss that hand of yours, which soon I shall kiss with my lips that ever have your name engraved upon them.’

‘Were I an angel as she is,’ Bembo told Lucrezia’s cousin Angela Borgia, ‘I would take pity on anyone who loved as I love.’ And in one of the verses he sent her, he wrote:

When Lucrezia replied (the letter is dated June 24, 1503) that in the crystal of her heart she had found a perfect conformity with Bembo’s, he replied that his own crystal was now more precious to him than ‘all the pearls of the Indian seas.’

When Bembo heard of the death of Alexander VI, he immediately rode the ten miles or so from Ostellato to the ducal villa at Medelana where Lucrezia was staying to see what he could do to comfort her in her grief. But she was, for the moment, beyond grief. ‘As soon as I saw you lying in your darkened room, wearing your black gown, weeping and desolate,’ he wrote to her the following day, ‘I was so overcome by my feelings that I stood still, as though struck dumb, not knowing what to say. Instead of offering sympathy, I felt in need of sympathy myself. I left, fumbling and speechless, overcome with emotion at the sight of your misery.’ He could offer little in the way of solace: ‘I know not what else to say except to remind you that time soothes and eases all our sorrows,’ he said, adding that although Alexander VI, ‘your very great father,’ had died, ‘this is not the first misfortune which you have had to endure at the hands of your cruel and malign destiny.’

As summer turned to autumn and the plight of her beloved brother grew worse and worse, Bembo continued to offer what help he could to comfort Lucrezia, writing to her when they were apart with that romantic passion she found so beguiling. ‘The whole of this night in my dreams, and in the wakeful watches, however long they were, I was with you,’ one of his letters ran. ‘And I hope that every other night of my life, whatever it holds in store for me, the same thing will happen.’

Lucrezia, in return, asked Bembo to translate one of her own Spanish sonnets into Italian:

But these contented days at Medelana were soon to end: Bembo’s younger brother, Carlo, fell seriously ill at Venice; Bembo hurried to his bedside too late to see him before he died. ‘I am sending for my books which I left behind in Ferrara,’ Bembo wrote to Lucrezia in early 1504, to say that ‘I shall remain here for a while in order that my aged and sorrowful father need not remain entirely alone for it is clear he has much need of my company.’

It was to be many months before he and Lucrezia saw each other again, and by then the ardour of their attachment to each other had cooled to friendship, one that was to last until the end of her life. In 1505 he dedicated his dialogues on Platonic love,
Gli Asolani
, to Lucrezia, whose visit to him on one occasion when he had been ill had ‘cured him of every feverish
languore
’ that beset him. The following year he moved from Venice to the lively court of
Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Elisabetta Gonzaga, now reinstated in Urbino, and he was one of the leading characters in Baldassare Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
. A few years later he moved to Rome to take up his appointment as secretary to Pope Leo X and would later be made a cardinal by Paul III. Having established a reputation for Latin lyric poetry, he turned to Italian verse, the collected edition of his Italian poems appearing in 1530.

One of the last letters Lucrezia wrote to him was quite perfunctory; certainly she had not written much of late, she told him, but he must rest assured that there were many good reasons why she had not been able to do so. She remained, she added caringly, as anxious as ever to please him.

It was around the time when Bembo left for Venice that Lucrezia began to appear more frequently in public, fulfilling her duties and responsibilities as Duchess of Ferrara. Using the skills she had learned at her father’s court, she received embassies with a grace that her husband was quite unable to muster on such occasions. With her extensive knowledge of political affairs, she took an unfeigned interest in the government of the duchy and its relationships with the other Italian states and with foreign powers.

She was also busy fulfilling her primary duty as Alfonso’s wife, endeavouring to produce an heir for the duchy, a subject particularly close to Duke Ercole’s heart. A year after the disappointment of her stillborn daughter, Lucrezia was pregnant again, and yet again she miscarried. At Christmas 1504 Lucrezia was pregnant once more, bearing Alfonso’s child for a third time, much to the joy of her seventy-one-year-old father-in-law, whose own long life was finally drawing to a close.

During the previous summer, the duke had travelled to Florence in order to visit the miraculous image of the Virgin in the Church of Santissima Annunziata, but on his return, ‘much fatigued by the journey,’ according to the Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, he had fallen seriously ill. Alfonso, who was on a trip to France to visit Louis XII, was informed immediately by a courier sent posthaste to the French court, and he rushed home to join Isabella, who had arrived from Mantua, at their father’s bedside. Alfonso arrived, according to Zambotti, ‘healthy and safe but very downcast with anxiety and sorrow’; he was ‘much concerned with what might have occurred if his father had died in his absence.’ With four brothers, one of whom was illegitimate, he did have occasion to worry.

The old duke finally died on January 25, 1505, much mourned by his family and by his subjects; Alfonso was proclaimed his successor later that same day before riding in a grand ceremonial procession through the streets of Ferrara, accompanied by his court, dressed in the ducal mantle of white satin lined with fur and the great gold chain of state hanging across his breast. When Lucrezia dutifully knelt before him to offer her homage, the new duke embraced her warmly and kissed her before leading her out onto the balcony, her hand in his, to display the new duchess to her people.

During the summer of 1505, the rivalry between Alfonso’s brothers erupted dramatically into open hostility. Life in the hot, humid city of Ferrara was more unpleasant than usual that year; on May 17, reported one chronicler, ‘there was no wheat for sale in the market place, nor fodder of any sort, except for rice,’ which was selling at double the normal price, ‘and for two days there was no
bread for sale either.’ When the wheat did arrive, it was found to be full of weevils, and the poor could be seen across the city, ‘crying out for a slice of bread.’ In the middle of June, with the price of foodstuffs rising daily, a ten-year-old boy was found dead on the street, and when the neighbours went to his house, they found that his parents had died of the plague.

Lucrezia, concerned by reports of the outbreak of the plague, decided to take her household to Modena both for her own sake – since her fluctuating temperature had induced her to consult her doctor, who advised her to leave the city – and for the sake of the child she was carrying. Her brother-in-law Giulio d’Este, Duke Ercole’s bastard son, asked if he might go with her. He was a rather tiresome young man, conceited, frivolous, quick-witted, and headstrong; but Lucrezia enjoyed his amusing company and so she readily assented. The old duke, well aware of the young man’s extravagance, had only granted him a modest allowance and had wanted him to go into the church. But Giulio had strongly resisted this plan and was much relieved when his brother, the new duke, presented him with a generous income as well as a palace.

Cardinal Ippolito was exasperated by the indulgence that Alfonso had shown to such a flighty and arrogant wastrel; and, as an opening gambit in the dispute that was developing between Ippolito and his illegitimate brother, he had a chaplain in Giulio’s household arrested and imprisoned. Giulio promptly broke into the prison and released the man.

The cardinal was a sardonic, elegant, supercilious, and argumentative man. He much regretted having been made a cardinal and certainly did not allow his unwanted eminence in the church to interfere with his passions for hunting and women. His
outbursts of temper were notorious; on one occasion he flew into a rage with one of his father’s crossbowmen and had him beaten so savagely that he was almost killed. Lucrezia was intrigued by him, and she was seen so often in his company that the Roman ambassador in Ferrara reported that ‘she belonged to her husband at night, and to the Cardinal by day.’

Meanwhile, Lucrezia, accompanied by Giulio, was forced to leave Modena, where plague had by then also broken out, and made for Reggio, where they were intercepted by a messenger from Duke Alfonso with an order banishing Giulio to a remote estate. At first Giulio refused to go there, but eventually he was persuaded to leave, while Lucrezia induced the chaplain whom Giulio had released from prison to return there voluntarily for the moment.

Nor was this the only aspect of Giulio’s behaviour that was provoking such fury in his brother the cardinal. For months Giulio had been pursuing the pretty, alluring Angela Borgia, Lucrezia’s cousin; and when she became pregnant, it was generally supposed that he was the father of her child. Here was another problem for Lucrezia, for, while conducting an affair with Giulio d’Este, Angela was simultaneously being pursued by a besotted Cardinal Ippolito.

It was at Reggio on September 19, 1505, that Lucrezia gave birth to another child, a boy this time, who was named Alessandro in memory of her father. Bembo offered his congratulations. ‘It gave me infinite pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘to hear of the happy birth of a male child to your ladyship; all the more so,’ he added, after ‘the cruel disappointment and vain hopes’ that had accompanied her miscarriage of the previous year. He prayed also that this ‘dearly awaited son’ would grow into a man ‘worthy of so fine a mother.’ His hopes, and those of Alfonso and Lucrezia, however, were to be once again
cruelly dashed. The infant proved poor and sickly; Alfonso sent his own doctor to Reggio to care for the baby, but despite his ministrations, barely a month later Alessandro was dead.