Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (12 page)

That day, Monday 6 August, was spent sleeping and on the Tuesday Cesare gave a party in the great loggia of the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican gardens (built by Pope Innocent VIII and decorated with frescoes by Mantegna). Cesare, seated beside Alexander, wore lay dress, splendid in a doublet of crimson satin and white brocade in the French style, white buskins or half-boots, a cape and a bonnet of black velvet with golden tassels and a white plume, adorned with a gold medallion showing a woman’s head. Lucrezia, Cesare and Sancia danced together, then the others danced and at one hour of the night they brought in the table for supper. Cesare, who had changed his clothes once again, acted as master of ceremonies to the Pope while the principal men of his household carried out the service of the table. Others acted as pages bearing flaming torches, including Cesare’s henchman, the sinister Don Miguel de Corella. Afterwards the company watched ‘some buffoons who performed many tricks’. Then Cesare danced another dance with Lucrezia, and another eight with Sancia; then the Pope ordered Cesare, Lucrezia and Sancia to dance together, followed by general dancing, after which the company retired to rest. At sunrise the Pope got up and went to the loggia where they were all served with a collation of sweetmeats, with Cesare again acting as master of ceremonies. There were one hundred dishes of sweetmeats and conserves. Then came ‘diverse and very beautiful inventions’—sugar statues presented by Cesare with diverse motifs. One placed before the Pope was in the figure of a woman with an apple in her hand signifying his mastery of the world; for Alfonso there was a cupid with verses in his hand; for Lucrezia a woman supposed to be the Roman matron Lucretia; for Cesare – significantly – a knight with arms given to him by the goddess of battles. Jofre was given a statue of a sleeping man, possibly a teasing reference to his role as his brother’s cuckold; and Sancia, less suitably, a unicorn, the symbol of chastity. At the end of the collation the Pope sent Alfonso, Lucrezia and the others to their lodgings once more, at which point he again retired to his own rooms with Cesare.

That was not the end of the Borgia celebrations masterminded by Cesare and in which he played the dominant role. On 12 August, the following Sunday, in the park of Cardinal Ascanio’s villa, he organized a bullfight; attended by ten thousand spectators, its most notable feature was a magnificently decorated platform draped with tapestries and lengths of silk for the guests of honour, Lucrezia and Alfonso, Sancia and Jofre and their retinues. Cesare appeared on the field on foot with twelve knights: his clothes (some of which she had presented to him that day) excited Sancia’s admiration so much that in her record of events she even included a description of his horse, a white Barbary steed, with its jewel-studded harness and white brocade caparison the most beautiful she had ever seen. In one hand Cesare carried a fine lance worked in silver and gold which Sancia had also given him that day, and in the other held the reins of eight fine horses equally beautifully caparisoned. Two mounted pages holding lances bearing banners embroidered with a golden sun accompanied him, and he was preceded by twelve boys dressed in his livery of yellow satin halved with carmine, and twelve horsemen all wearing livery given to them by Cesare. In the course of the afternoon Cesare killed all the bulls. The party then feasted and the horsemen held races until nightfall when the party rode to Sancia’s palace where they supped and passed six more hours in ‘singing and other pleasures’.
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But even as Lucrezia and Alfonso exuberantly celebrated their wedding, the tide was already turning. Cesare’s ambitions and Alexander’s international policies had taken a new turn that summer. Since the death of Charles VIII, it had become obvious that there would be a conflict in Italy between Ferdinand of Aragon and Louis of France. This time Alexander saw more advantage to be drawn from the French King than from his old patron, Ferdinand. Ferdinand had placed obstacles in the way of Alexander’s plans for Cesare: supporting King Federigo of Naples in his refusal to give Cesare his legitimate daughter, Carlotta; opposing Cesare’s intention to give up his cardinalate so that he could pursue his secular ambitions; and refusing to allow the late Juan Gandia’s lands in Valencia to pass to Cesare. France, on the other hand, offered to accommodate Alexander in every way in order to obtain the dissolution of Louis’s marriage with Jeanne de France and a dispensation enabling him to marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne de Bretagne. Late that summer a secret agreement was signed between King and Pope, by which Louis promised to support Cesare’s marriage to Carlotta of Aragon (who was at the French court at the time), to give him the counties of Valence and Diois, the former to be raised to a duchy, with revenues of 20,000 gold francs, the financing by Louis of a large force of nearly two thousand heavy cavalry to operate on Cesare’s orders in Italy or elsewhere, a personal subsidy to Cesare of 20,000 gold francs per annum, the lordship of Asti for Cesare upon the French conquest of Milan, and finally his investiture of France’s highest honour, the Order of St Michel.

On 17 August 1498, Cesare put off his cardinal’s robes.A magnificently wrought parade sword he had had made earlier that summer symbolized his new personal ambitions for it was decorated with scenes from the life of Julius Caesar with whom Cesare identified. Cesare, who always signed himself ‘Cesar’, the Spanish form of his name and the one closest to the Roman original, was later to adopt as his motto ‘
Aut Caesar aut nihil
’: ‘Either Caesar or nothing’. That same day Louis’s envoy, Baron de Trans, arrived in Rome bearing the letters patent that would entitle the former Cardinal of Valencia to call himself duc de Valentinois. For Italians, the two foreign titles sounded almost the same: Valencia became ‘il Valentino’. There was general outrage at the blatant cynicism of the Borgias: Cesare had made his announcement to a sparse audience on 17 August, even the Spanish cardinals having thought it prudent to be out of Rome. Relentlessly Alexander rounded them up: five days later, at another consistory, he obtained all the cardinals’ votes. Cesare’s power in Rome had already been recognized – ‘he has the Pope in his fist’, an envoy had written two years before. Cesare held not just the Pope but the Pope’s castellans in Rome and the surrounding territories in an iron grip.

His departure for France on I October was yet another public demonstration of Borgia power and splendour paid for by 200,000 ducats, raised, it was said, from the confiscation of the goods of Pedro de Aranda, Bishop of Calahorra, lately condemned for heresy, and from the three hundred Jews whose conversion Lucrezia had earlier witnessed in the piazza of St Peter’s. Roman supplies of rich stuffs, jewels, gold and silverware had been exhausted so that additional luxuries had to be brought in from Venice and elsewhere. Cesare had requested Francesco Gonzaga and Ippolito d’Este to send him horses ‘not unworthy of French esteem’ from their famous stables. These coursers were to be shod with silver; Cesare even took with him a princely travelling privy ‘covered with gold brocade without and scarlet within, with silver vessels within the urinals’. No expense was spared in an effort to impress the French and perhaps some of it was intended to offset the discomfort Cesare felt at his appearance. For the blotches under the skin associated with the second stage of syphilis now showed on his handsome face. The significance of his departure for France on a French ship, destined for a military career, was not lost on the watching envoys of the Italian powers. As the Mantuan Cattaneo wrote with wry foreboding: ‘The ruin of Italy is confirmed . . . given the plans which father and son have made but many believe the Holy Spirit has no part in them . . .’ Nor would the Holy Spirit have any part in Cesare’s plans for Lucrezia, still happy and content in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico with her new young husband.

That autumn after Cesare’s departure, Lucrezia was first in her father’s attentions, courted particularly by Ascanio Sforza who was anxiously aware of which way the Pope’s alliances were inclining. On 23 October, Sanudo reported that Ascanio was in Rome, though not invited to the Vatican by the Pope, but that he ‘has been with the daughter of the Pontiff and attends to nothing else’.
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At the end of the year, a confidant of Ludovico reported that Lucrezia, with the cardinals of Capua and Borgia, were the three people of influence with the Pope.
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On the surface, all had seemed well; at a ceremony in the Vatican, Paolo Orsini’s son, Fabio, married Geronima Borgia, sister of Cardinal Juan Borgia the younger, on 8 September, when Lucrezia’s husband held the naked sword over the couple.

But even Lucrezia, now pregnant with her first child by Alfonso, could not avert the shadows gathering around him. In late December ambassadors arrived from Spain for a stormy four-hour interview with Alexander during which they complained of his negotiations with the French, returned to the old charges of simony concerning his election to the papacy and threatened a Council of the Church to depose him. They tactlessly raised the death of Gandia as God’s punishment for his sins – to which Alexander angrily retorted that God had also punished the Spanish sovereigns with the death of their son.
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They reminded him of his pledge (made in the immediate aftermath of Gandia’s murder) to reform the papacy and send away his children. This Alexander steadfastly refused to consider: during another fierce row with the envoys in the Sala del Pappagallo the following month in the presence of six cardinals, when they petitioned him to recall Cesare from France and restore him to the cardinalate, Alexander, according to Sanudo, threatened to throw them into the Tiber.

In February, Lucrezia suffered a miscarriage. Running down a hill in a ‘vineyard’ on a beautiful Roman spring day she fell, and the lady following her fell on top of her, as a result of which she lost a baby girl. She was soon pregnant again but politics – and Cesare – would make a settled life with her husband impossible. On 23 May a special courier arrived in Rome with the news that Cesare had contracted – and consummated – marriage, not with Carlotta of Aragon, who had resolutely refused to consider it, but with a cousin of the French King, the sister of the King of Navarre. Charlotte d’Albret, three years younger than Lucrezia, was an acknowledged beauty – even the critical Italian envoys called her ‘the loveliest daughter of France’. King Louis reassured the Pope that the marriage had been consummated, Cesare’s performance in bed even surpassing his own wedding night with Anne de Bretagne: ‘Valencia has broken four lances more than he, two before supper and six at night,’ reported Cattaneo after all the letters from France had been read out on the orders of the delighted Pope. Alexander – and the Spanish, Milanese and Neapolitan party – had been on tenterhooks as to the outcome of Cesare’s French adventure. The result spelled danger for the dynasties of Sforza and the Aragonese of Naples.

To celebrate her brother’s marriage Lucrezia lit a fire outside her palace but it is unlikely that her jubilation was shared by her husband or her sister-in-law. It was not long before the outcome became clear: as commander of a squadron of heavy cavalry Cesare was to accompany Louis to Italy. By mid July as the news filtered through to Italy, the casualties of the Borgias’ pro-French policy fled Rome. Ascanio was the first to go, leaving precipitately on 13 July for the Colonna stronghold at Nettuno. A week later Ludovico captured one of Cesare’s servants en route from Rome to Lyons with secret letters from the Pope. Ascanio immediately fled Nettuno for Milan to join his brother. On Friday 2 August Alfonso, now, as the chronicler put it, ‘an unwelcome guest’, ‘secretly left the city before daybreak . . . to go to the lands of the Colonna and thence to the Kingdom of Naples without the licence, knowledge or will of the Pontiff’. He left Lucrezia six months pregnant and in tears. There seems to be little doubt that they loved each other: from Genazzano, Alfonso wrote to her begging her to join him. He should have known the Vatican intelligence system better: the letters fell into the Pope’s hands and Alexander forced Lucrezia to write back asking him to return. For greater security, the Pope sent Lucrezia out of Rome to act as Governor of Spoleto. Lucrezia was only nineteen but her appointment was far from being a cynical joke; later in life she was to demonstrate that she had inherited her father’s administrative ability. With Cesare in France, Alexander regarded her as the only one whose ability and loyalty he could trust: Jofre had been placed in the Castel Sant’Angelo after incurring his father’s wrath for involving himself with the city police in a brawl in which he had been wounded. Alexander’s anger had extended to Sancia when the fiery princess defended Jofre. As a potential spy in the Vatican, she was dispatched to Naples in Alfonso’s wake.

Lucrezia’s appointment as Governor of Spoleto was intended to demonstrate a Borgia presence in the Papal States north of Rome and to provide Lucrezia with an independent power base with rich revenues. Jofre, who accompanied his sister as she left the city, was clearly considered inadequate to fulfil that role. Alexander made his trust in Lucrezia plain in a letter he wrote to the Priors of Spoleto:

We have entrusted to our beloved daughter in Christ, the noble lady, Lucretia de Borgia, Duchess of Biseglia [sic], the office of keeper of the castle, as well as the government of our cities of Spoleto and Foligno, and of the county and district about them. Having perfect confidence in the intelligence, fidelity and probity of the Duchess, which We have dwelt upon in previous letters . . . We trust that you will receive the Duchess Lucretia as is your duty, with all due honour as your regent, and show her submission in all things . . . collectively and severally, in so far as law and custom dictate in the government of the city, and whatever she may think proper to exact of you, even as you would obey Ourselves, and to execute her commands with all diligence and promptness.
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