Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (30 page)

Ercole replied, in an affectionate, thoughtful, almost fatherly letter, that he considered the cardinal’s advice sound, and that Lucrezia owed Cosenza a debt of gratitude

for the demonstration and proof of so much cordial love that he clearly bears to you and to the most illustrious Don Roderico your son, who, one can say, has been preserved in life by his means. And although Don Roderico will be somewhat severed from Your Ladyship, it is better to be so far away and safe, than near with the danger in which he evidently would be; nor, because of this distance, will the love between you be at all diminished. When he has grown up, he will be able according to the condition of the times to decide on his own course, whether to return to Italy or to stay.

He thought the cardinal’s suggestion that Rodrigo’s Italian property should be sold to provide for his support a wise one (since, following the death of Alexander, the dukedom of Nepi would be taken away from him, leaving him only with his father’s estates in the Kingdom of Naples). ‘Nevertheless,’ Ercole ended, ‘if to your Ladyship, who is most prudent, it should seem otherwise, we yield to your better judgement.’
²⁹

Lucrezia’s maternal feelings led her to reject the advice of both Ercole and Cosenza. She could not bring herself to send her firstborn – and at that time only – child to Spain. A compromise was reached whereby Rodrigo was to be brought up by his father’s relations, first in Naples, probably by Sancia, his aunt, and then after her death in c. 1506 by his father’s half-sister, Isabella d’Aragona Sforza, Duchess of Bari, the legitimate daughter of Alfonso II. He would keep his Neapolitan estates. This last decision may possibly have been prompted by a solemn promise made by the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, on 20 May 1502 confirming Cesare, Jofre, Juan Gandia’s son (also named Juan), in the possession of all their Neapolitan estates, an impressive document which Lucrezia had taken care to bring with her from Rome since it still exists among her papers in the archives at Modena.
³⁰
Although apparently not allowed to have Rodrigo with her at Ferrara, Lucrezia continued to care for his welfare and there are many entries in her wardrobe accounts for clothes for ‘Don Rodrigo’. Lucrezia’s baby half-brother, also called Rodrigo and born in the last year of her father’s life, was apparently brought up in Naples, while Giovanni Borgia and Cesare’s two illegitimate children were brought to Carpi, not far from Ferrara.

Just at this time Lucrezia and Pietro Bembo had a quarrel in the course of which she seems to have accused him of wavering in his devotion to her and leaving her to go to Venice. Bembo’s affair with Lucrezia was described by his biographer as ‘the most ambitious and memorable, but also the most risky and anguished’ of his life. It seems probable that his father, well acquainted with the situation in Ferrara, had put pressure on him to return to Venice for his own sake and indeed planned (unsuccessfully) to get him out of the way by obtaining a post for him with an embassy to France. Poor Bembo was anguished. On 5 October he wrote:

Firstly. . . I would rather not have come by some great treasure than hear what I heard from you yesterday. . . although – as our sworn affinity deserved – you might well have let me know it earlier. And secondly, that as long as there is life in me my cruel fate will never prevent the fire in which f.f. and my destiny have placed me from being the highest and brightest blaze that in our time ever set a lover’s heart alight. It will soar by virtue of the place where it burns, bright with the intensity of its own flame, and one day it will be a beacon to all the world.

She had completely misjudged him, he told her.

Now think me false as much as you will, believe the truth as little as you please, but like it or not, the day shall come when you must acknowledge how far you judged me wrong. There are times I fear this is not so much how others would have you believe, it is your very own opinion. And if this be so, then I hope that the motto I read among your papers a few days ago will prove to be true:
quien quiere matar perro ravia le levanta
(he who would kill a dog must work himself up a rage). Make a merry blaze of all my other letters. . . and this alone I beg you to deign to keep as pledge for what I write . . .
³¹

During the time Lucrezia had been at Medelana and Bembo at Ostellato, the two had enjoyed romantic meetings, as he recalled in a letter from Venice on 18 October. In the eight days since he had parted from Lucrezia not one hour had passed without his thinking of her: ‘Often I find myself recalling. . . certain words spoken to me, some on the balcony with the moon as witness, others at that window I shall always look upon so gladly . . .
³²
But Lucrezia had been right in her diagnosis of her lover’s waning ardour, or more probably his increased concern for his own safety. Bembo’s surviving subsequent letters for that year are no less ardent but full of excuses for not seeing her. On 25 October he wrote to ‘f.f.’ from his father’s villa at Noniano that he had to go to Venice for two days, after which, as he had promised her, he would return:

to see once more my own dear half without whom I am not merely incomplete but nothing at all, she being not simply one half of me but everything I am and can ever hope to be. And there could be no sweeter fate for me on earth nor could I win anything more precious than to lose myself like this, living the rest of my life in one thought alone, which, if in two hearts one and the same purpose thrives, and one single fire, may endure as long as those hearts wish, no matter what the heavens conspire. And this they can all the more readily accomplish because strangers’ eyes are unable to discern their thoughts and no human power can bar the road they take since they come and go unseen . . .
³³

But Bembo was being overoptimistic: the heavens were indeed about to conspire against the lovers. In November 1503 Bembo had taken refuge in Ferrara with Strozzi even though Lucrezia was still in Medelana ‘because at Ostellato, as I told you, there are no provisions on account of the visit of His Lordship Don Alfonso’s court . . .’, a feeble excuse which suggests that Bembo was unwilling to incur Alfonso’s anger by being seen in Lucrezia’s vicinity. Although Lucrezia was in Ferrara from at least mid December, there was time for only one last meeting before Bembo was called back to Venice to find that his brother Carlo had died on 30 December. The need to comfort his elderly father and, one might well speculate, the instinct that he was not welcome in Ferrara once Lucrezia’s husband had returned, led him to decide to stay in Venice and send for his books, which indicated that his stay would be a long one. He would always, he assured her in words that have an almost valedictory ring, ‘be that faithful Heliotrope to whom you alone and for ever remain the sun’.
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10. The Dark Marquis

‘If during this period you chance to find your ears are ringing it will be because I am communing with all those dark things and horrors and tears of yours, or else writing pages about you that will still be read a century after we are gone’

– Pietro Bembo to Lucrezia, 25 July 1504

During the high summer and autumn of 1503 the plague had raged through Ferrara; all those rich enough to escape had left, and the Este with their various households had retreated separately to their country villas. The poor and the
artisanelli –
literally ‘little artisans’ – had been the principal victims and some 850 had died. By November the disease had spread to the countryside: on I November, di Prosperi reported that he had heard that fifty-seven members of Lucrezia’s household were sick. Both Lucrezia and Alfonso remained outside the city, Lucrezia at Medelana, Alfonso at Ostellato.

Meanwhile, an event had occurred in Rome which was to have serious consequences for Cesare, the Este and indeed Lucrezia herself. On the night of 17 October the gentle, kindly but infirm Pius III died after a reign of only twenty-six days. Pius had protected and favoured Cesare; on 8 October, the day of his coronation, he had confirmed him as Captain General of the Church and Gonfalonier. Cesare had been preparing to leave for the Romagna as his enemies – the Orsini, Gian Paolo Baglioni and Bartolommeo d’Alviano – gathered in Rome. Even the Colonna joined them. Cesare tried to break out but the Orsini got wind of his plans and after a ferocious fight Cesare was forced to retreat to the Vatican for safety. Even there he was not secure as the Orsini and their allies raged through the Borgo, shouting, ‘Let us kill the Jewish dog!’ Protected by the cardinals and the castellan of Sant’Angelo, a Borgia partisan, Cesare fled along the covered way to the castle with his family – Rodrigo Bisceglie, Giovanni Borgia and his two illegitimate children. Two days later Pius died, leaving Cesare at bay in the Castel Sant’Angelo. News of his predicament caused the final crumbling of his states in the Romagna where, by the end of the month, he held only a few cities and castles. In Rome he still hoped to gain something by bargaining the support of his Spanish cardinals in the conclave to elect the new pope. But in reality there was only one candidate: the Borgias’ lifelong enemy, Giuliano della Rovere.

On 1 November 1503, Giuliano became pope, taking the title Julius II; Cesare had made an agreement with him over the election but the long-term prognostication for their relationship was not good. The former Giuliano della Rovere was sixty years old when he attained the papacy, the object of his lifelong ambition. Men said of him that he had the soul of an emperor and his appearance was as imperial as his manner was imperious. He was a man of volcanic temperament: when he acted it was with dynamic energy and he was given to fits of violent temper, often fuelled by too much wine. Guicciardini wrote of him that he was notoriously difficult by nature and formidable with everyone; that he had spent his long life in restless action, in great enmities and friendships and constant intrigues. The Venetian envoys Lippomano and Capello described him as extremely acute but tempestuous: ‘It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is. In body and soul he has the nature of a giant.’ He had the reputation of being a man of his word, which even the Borgias believed, but in fact he was subtle, devious and ruthless in pursuit of his aims. And Cesare had seriously misjudged him, as Machiavelli, always the acute observer, commented: ‘He does not love il Valentino, but nonetheless strings him along for two reasons: one, to keep his word, of which men hold him most observant, and for the obligations he has towards him, being recognizant to him for the good part of the Papacy; the other, since it seems to him, that His Holiness being without forces, the Duke [Cesare] is better placed to resist the Venetians.’
¹

Cesare’s predicament caused strains in the relationship between Lucrezia and her husband. Alfonso was not enthusiastic about her support for her embattled brother. While Ercole had taken the view that Cesare in charge in the Romagna would be less dangerous to Ferrara than a powerful Venice, Alfonso was more circumspect and courted Venice through the medium of the Venetian envoy, della Pigna. According to Sanudo, on 21 October Alfonso complained to della Pigna that the Venetian Signory ‘do not wish him well and he does not know why if it were not for the men sent by madonna Lucretia to help Valentino, and he has not given him a penny, etc. . .’ The envoy concludes that ‘it would be good to act together with Don Alfonso, who wishes evil to Valentino . . .’
²
Ercole, eager to keep in with the new Pope, had dispatched Ippolito to Rome with Ferrante, the Pope’s godson, for Julius’s coronation on 3 November.

Whatever their differences over Cesare (and it is possible that Alfonso was playing games with the Venetians) and Alfonso’s distaste for Lucrezia’s literary circle, he was strongly physically attracted to his wife; from the first year of her marriage to the end of her life, Lucrezia was almost continually pregnant and getting her in that condition seems to have been almost an obsession with him. Numbers of children were associated with virility: Alfonso’s grandfather, Niccolò̀ III, had so many children, legitimate and otherwise, that official genealogists gave up after sixteen, adding after the sixteenth, Baldassare, ‘and many other bastards’. Ercole himself had fathered eight children. On 17 November, di Prosperi reported to Isabella that Lucrezia was said to be unwell due to a new pregnancy; her condition was confirmed by the end of the month. It was only just over a year since the stillbirth of her daughter when Alfonso had promised her another child. Her hopes were high but some time the following year she miscarried; the only written evidence is in a letter to her from Bembo of September 1505 which talks of ‘the cruel disappointment and vain hopes of last year’.
³

Meanwhile, in Rome things were going from bad to worse for Cesare. Julius II was a warrior pope with vast ambitions. Like Alexander he was determined to have the States of the Church under his control, and even to extend them further than Alexander and Cesare had done. Cesare was merely a temporary instrument to be discarded once his usefulness was past. For some months the Pope played a cat and mouse game with il Valentino, intent upon gaining the surrender of Cesare’s remaining fortresses in the Romagna. On 1 December news came that Michelotto and Cesare’s cavalry had been captured near Arezzo. This report, according to Machiavelli, threw the Pope into ecstasies, ‘since it seemed to him that by the capture of that man he had the chance to uncover all the cruelties of robberies, sacrileges and other infinite evils which over the past eleven years. . . have been done in Rome against God and man’. Julius told Machiavelli gleefully that he was looking forward to interviewing Michelotto ‘to learn some tricks from him, so as to enable him to better govern the Church’. Devastated by the capture of Michelotto, Cesare promised to render to Julius certain fortresses in the Romagna. However, when the papal messenger arrived at Cesena, Cesare’s castellans, the Ramires brothers, beat him and hanged him from the castle walls, and sent an insolent message to the Pope. Julius fell into a rage and on 20 December confined Cesare to the Torre Borgia, the very room in which Michelotto had murdered Alfonso Bisceglie three years before.

Early in January 1504, Cesare suffered another blow when two wagonloads of his possessions destined for Ferrara were seized, one from Rome by the Florentines in Tuscany, the other coming from Cesena, by Giovanni Bentivoglio, as it passed through Bolognese territory. The latter contained many of the goods taken by Michelotto from Alexander’s room on the day of his death, including the jewel-studded mantle of St Peter, altarpieces and cups of gold and precious stones, eighty huge pearls and ‘a cat in gold with two most noble diamonds as its eyes’.
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They had been travelling in the name of Ippolito, an indication that under Lucrezia’s persuasion the Este were still prepared to help him. Ippolito and Lucrezia were acting to help Cesare, as is evident from a letter of 10 April 1504 written by Juan Artes, commandant of Cesare’s galleys, addressed to Ippolito but mentioning Lucrezia; he gave them what he described as ‘the good news’ that an agreement had been reached whereby Cesare’s castellans in the Romagna would hand over his fortresses to the Pope’s representative, after which Cesare would be freed from the fortress at Ostia, where he now was, to go safely to Naples.
⁵
However, at Naples, Cesare, the great deceiver, was himself the victim of a double-cross from the quarter he least expected it, Gonsalvo da Cordoba, ‘the Great Captain’. On 26 May, the eve of his departure by ship for Tuscany, he went to take leave of Gonsalvo only to find himself arrested, despite the safe conduct he had received from him. He was the victim of an international intrigue between the Pope, who was afraid of what il Valentino might do once freed, and the King and Queen of Spain, who wanted two things from the Pope and were therefore desperate to please him—a dispensation enabling Catherine of Aragon to marry her dead husband’s brother, the future Henry VIII of England, and their own investiture with the Kingdom of Naples. Moreover, it was reported that Juan Gandia’s widow, convinced that Cesare had murdered her husband, pleaded in person with the Spanish sovereigns to bring him back to be tried for his crime. In August, Cesare lost his last possession in the Romagna when his loyal castellan, Gonsalvo de Mirafuentes, rode out of the Rocca di Forlì, lance held high.
⁶
With this, Cesare had lost everything for within the Rocca di Forlì was stored the loot he had stolen from Urbino, including the famous library. With tears in his eyes Guidobaldo retrieved his possessions; the Pope’s agents seized the rest. A few days later Cesare was shipped as a prisoner to Spain.

To Lucrezia, in despair over Cesare’s fate, Ercole wrote a letter which showed how much she had captured his affections: ‘Be of good heart, for even as we love you sincerely and with every tenderness of heart as our daughter, so we shall never fail him, and we wish to be to him a good father and good brother in everything.’ But there was little in fact that Ercole could do beyond the pious exhortation to ‘hope in Our Lord God who does not abandon whoso trusts in him’.
⁷

Indeed, at the moment when Artes’s letter had arrived with its message of false hope, Lucrezia had had no one to turn to beyond her father-in-law, now in failing health. Alfonso embarked on 13 April on a protracted tour of the European courts, in the course of which he visited Paris, then Brussels, where he met the future Charles V, and England where he was welcomed by Henry VII and ‘much caressed and honoured’.
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Ippolito had managed to quarrel both with his father and the Pope. A messenger had been sent by Julius to Ippolito to deliver a brief concerning the surrender of some of his benefices which the Pope wished to confer on someone else. Ippolito fell into a rage and had the unfortunate man soundly beaten. When an outraged Ercole ordered him to write a letter of apology to the Pope, he rudely refused and was exiled to Mantua, whereupon there was an exchange of angry letters between father and son. ‘Since you have been disobedient and ungrateful towards us, you need not wonder that we have dismissed you from our State; because behaving yourself as you do, we do not think you are worthy to be near us,’ Ercole wrote on 14 April in reply to an insolent letter from Ippolito.
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That day Francesco Gonzaga arrived by barge down the Po to effect a reconciliation between Ercole and Ippolito; his intervention was successful and the cardinal was back in Ferrara for the annual St George’s Day races, when Isabella’s horse won the
palio
prize.

Despite the valedictory note of Bembo’s letter to her of 5 January 1504, Lucrezia continued to correspond with him. Although Bembo still wrote her occasional romantic letters from afar, referring to her as ‘f.f.’, he did not visit her, pleading ‘indisposition’. In late May she was also ‘indisposed’; she may even have miscarried then. In July he was planning to visit her in Ferrara but procrastinated so that she had gone to Modena at the time he was to arrive. Instead he went to his Paduan villa ‘so that I may finish those things which I began for you’. ‘If,’ he told her, ‘during this period you chance to find your ears are ringing it will be because I am communing with all those dark things and horrors and tears of yours, or else writing pages about you that will still be read a century after we are gone . . .’
¹⁰
This is probably a reference to
Gli Asolani
with its dedicatory letter to Lucrezia dated 1 August 1504—although it was not published by Aldus Manutius until March 1505. Ercole Strozzi was still acting as a go-between on lightning visits to Venice and they were still in touch through him and Lucrezia’s ladies – Nicola, now the wife of the Ferrarese aristocrat, Bigio dei Trotti, Elisabetta senese and Madonna Giovanna. They also now had another friend of Bembo’s, Alfonso Ariosto, a relation of Ludovico, who acted as a private messenger. Alfonso Ariosto, Bembo wrote, ‘comes to you deeply desiring to render you homage and make your acquaintance, already afire with the flame that the rays of your great qualities have kindled in his breast, having heard them praised so many times. . .’ Towards the end of September, Lucrezia sent Bembo a poem by their mutual friend Antonio Tebaldeo, now acting as her secretary. In October, Bembo wrote that he had planned to come to Ferrara to see her but that he had heard that the Gonzaga would be there on account of Duke Ercole’s serious relapse, which would prevent him from paying his respects to her ‘as unhurriedly as I would desire’.