The Borgias (24 page)

Now that the contract had been signed, the formal betrothal between Alfonso and Lucrezia could take place. Accordingly, as Burchard recorded, ‘about the hour of Vespers on Saturday 4 September news came of the marriage contracted and concluded between Alfonso d’Este, elder son of the Duke of Ferrara, and Lucrezia Borgia, formerly the Duchess of Bisceglie and earlier the wife of Giovanni Sforza.’

The news of the forthcoming marriage was greeted in Rome with exceptional excitement and with the celebrations that the citizens so much enjoyed on these occasions; a ‘continual cannonade’
of artillery fired noisily from the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo while fireworks flashed and spluttered in the sky. The following day, Sunday, saw Lucrezia, dressed in a robe of gold brocade and accompanied by her ladies and several bishops, riding in the place of honour in a grand procession of three hundred horses from her palace to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, while her Spanish dwarfs skipped and jumped through the streets.

That evening, as the great Capitoline bell tolled, bonfires were lit at Castel Sant’Angelo and throughout the city, illuminating the towers of the castle, the Capitol, and other buildings: ‘The people became wildly excited,’ which, according to Burchard, ‘caused some anxiety.’ On Monday two clowns ‘paraded through all the principal streets and piazzas,’ continued Burchard. They went on their way, one on horseback, one on foot, both shouting loudly, ‘Long live the Duchess of Ferrara! Long live Pope Alexander! Viva! Viva!’ Lucrezia had given each of them a dress from her wardrobe; the riding clown had received the new gold brocade robe she had worn the evening before, which was said to be worth as much as 300 ducats.

The pope also celebrated his daughter’s betrothal with a succession of parties and banquets at the Vatican. He joined in the festivities with relish, undeterred by a bad cold and a loose tooth, and the fact that he was approaching his seventieth birthday, remarking cheerfully to the Ferrarese ambassador that, although his face was tied up, he would happily invite the bridegroom’s father to a wild boar hunt.

Cesare, who had returned from Naples on September 15, was exhausted after the fighting. A few days later he received a visitor – one of the rare occasions when he received them at all – lying down
but fully dressed. ‘I thought he was ill,’ the surprised Ferrarese envoy wrote, ‘but yesterday evening he danced without intermission and will do so again tonight at the Pope’s palace where the illustrious Duchess [Lucrezia] is going to supper.’ Burchard also commented on Cesare’s condition: ‘The Duke has recently been ill again with his old complaint, which returned upon him after the conquest of Naples and has, some of his physicians think, affected his mind as well as his body. Although forcing himself to take part in dances and entertainments, it is seen and reported by his servants that they discover him exhausted and sometimes in pain upon his bed.’

Lucrezia, too, was beginning to feel the strain of unremitting parties and dances that the pope was so fond of attending and watching. ‘Whenever she is at the Pope’s palace,’ the Ferrarese envoy reported, ‘the entire night, until two or three in the morning, is spent dancing and at play, which fatigues her greatly.’

On September 25 the celebrations were halted when the pope and his son left Rome for a week, leaving Lucrezia once again in charge at the Vatican, while they went on a tour of inspection of the papal castles north of Rome, stopping at Nepi and, in particular, the fortress at Civita Castellana, forty miles north of Rome, which was being built under the direction of the military architect Antonio da Sangallo. The two men did the same in October, this time travelling south to view the fortresses recently seized from the Colonna family.

By the end of October, Cesare and his father were back in Rome. Perhaps it was these trips that revitalized Cesare, but he had certainly recovered his spirits by October 31, when he hosted a supper party in his apartments in the Vatican Palace to which he invited his
father, his sister, and many friends, along with fifty courtesans. This particularly colourful party was described in detail by Burchard:

Four days later, so the Florentine ambassador Francesco Pepi reported, the pope failed to attend Mass in the papal chapel. It was rumoured that he was ill, no doubt the after-effects of Cesare’s party, at which, according to Pepi, the elderly pope had spent ‘the night until the twelfth hour with the Duke who had brought into the palace that night, singers and courtesans; and all night they spent in pleasure, dancing and laughter.’ Rather less reliably, the Perugian chronicler Francesco Matarazzo reported that the pope had all the lights put out, and then all the women who were there, and as many men as well, took off all their clothes, and there was much play and festivity.’

Lucrezia was again seen to be enjoying herself when, a few days after the game with the chestnuts and candles, there was a display of animal lubricity inside the Vatican. Burchard described how a farmer had brought some mares through the Viridaria gate by the palace carrying loads of wood for the market and

Cesare was evidently not present on this occasion; and it appears that there was at this time a growing friction between father and son, the pope becoming increasingly annoyed by his son’s ‘turning day into night and night into day,’ as one of the Ferrarese envoys put it, and extremely hard to pin down to a meeting to discuss affairs of state.

It seemed as though Cesare, increasingly independent, elusive, and self-assured, and liable to fly off the handle at the least hint of criticism of his actions, no longer valued the advice of his father and certainly rarely sought it. Cesare’s arrogant atheism was another
bone of contention since, although his father’s morals were widely held to be deeply corrupt – indeed, Agostino Vespucci told Machiavelli that it was ‘known to everyone that His Holiness brought every evening to the Vatican twenty-five women or more . . . so that the palace is manifestly made the brothel of all filth’ – the pope was scrupulous in the outward observances of his religious duties and had an apparently sincere devotion to the cult of the Virgin Mary.

When wearing his black mask by day, Cesare naturally became an object of curiosity on the streets of Rome; but men who stared at him soon learned that it was dangerous to do so. Cesare had one man arrested and imprisoned for apparently making a critical remark; that night his hand was cut off, his tongue ripped out and attached to the little finger of the severed hand, and the whole grisly ensemble was hung out of the prison window for all to see. Yet another, guilty of some unknown offence, was ‘secretly strangled and his body cast into the Tiber.’ Men naturally grew evermore wary in Cesare’s presence.

‘He cannot tolerate insults,’ his father confided in conversation with the Venetian ambassador. ‘I have often told him that Rome is a free city and that everyone may speak and write as they please. Evil is often spoken of me but I let it pass. The Duke replied to me, ‘It may be true that Romans are accustomed to speak and write as they please but I will teach people to take care what they say about me.” He was as good as his word – more than one man had a hand struck off or his tongue ripped out for writing or speaking mockingly of the Duke of Valence.

Uneasy as relations between the pope and Cesare were from time to time, both remained devoted to Lucrezia. Indeed, the pope
patently adored his daughter, the ‘apple of his eye,’ and, useful as her marriage to Alfonso d’Este would be to both of them politically, providing a reliable alliance with Ferrara, both father and brother looked upon it as a sacrifice, one that would bring Lucrezia’s inevitable departure from Rome.

Meanwhile, Duke Ercole’s ambassadors continued to send favourable reports regarding the behaviour of the girl soon to be his daughter-in-law. ‘Lucrezia is a highly intelligent, gracious and extremely graceful young lady, modest and lovable,’ one envoy reported in November 1501. ‘She is also devout and dutiful as a Christian. Tomorrow she will go to confession and intends to receive communion during Christmas week.’

The duke’s daughter, Isabella d’Este, however, was suspicious of this attractive twenty-one-year-old woman who was to become her sister-in-law and was to receive so many valuable family jewels and sumptuous clothes in consequence. She dispatched to Rome a man who could be trusted to send her accurate reports of the unwelcome bride, her trousseau, and the ladies of her court. The man, having undertaken ‘to follow the most excellent lady as a shadow follows a body,’ sent back to Mantua reports that cannot have pleased Isabella, describing a ‘charming and very graceful lady’:

Finally, at the beginning of December 1501, Duke Ercole gave the order for the departure of the grand cavalcade that was to travel to Rome in order to escort his son’s bride back to her new home. Three of Alfonso’s brothers – Ferrante, Sigismondo, and Cardinal Ippolito – led the party of ducal courtiers, secretaries, councillors, bishops, soldiers, and servants, horses, mules, and wagons. The weather was dreadful, the going exceptionally hard. They struggled for three weeks through the snowbound passes of the Apennines and down to the flooded Tiber plain. Finally, just before Christmas, the long line of horsemen, carriages, and carts drew to a halt outside the walls of Rome at the gate by Santa Maria del Popolo.

‘T
HE CUSTOMARY FESTIVITIES
[
FOR CARNIVAL
] ,
INCLUDING THE HORSE RACES
,
WILL COMMENCE AFTER
C
HRISTMAS
’

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
of December 23, 1501, the entire papal court assembled, at Alexander VI’s orders, at the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo to greet the Este princes and their courtiers, who had come to Rome to escort Lucrezia back to Ferrara. The cardinals waited an uncomfortable hour on their mules before dismounting and retiring to the comparative warmth of the church, where they waited another hour before the visitors finally arrived.

They were received by Cesare, who was accompanied by pages in silk tunics, a band of trumpeters, and four thousand soldiers, all wearing his personal livery. And after the lengthy speeches of welcome had been finished, he escorted the Ferrarese party through the city, across the Ponte Sant’Angelo, to the deafening roar of cannons that thundered from the ramparts of the castle, and on to the
Vatican. His appearance thrilled the crowds that had gathered on the streets to watch the cavalcade pass: Burchard recorded that he ‘excited great admiration in the minds of all who beheld him, for he was magnificently dressed in a coat of the French fashion, fastened with a gold belt which set off his graceful yet athletic form to advantage, and rode a fine, strong charger which was so magnificently caparisoned that its trappings alone were said to be worth 10,000 ducats.’