The Borgias (26 page)
On January 16, ten days after bidding farewell to her father, the cavalcade turned off the Via Flaminia onto the steep road leading to the hilltop town of Gubbio, where the redoubtable Duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga, sister-in-law to Isabella d’Este, dressed in her habitual black, waited unsmilingly to meet the horsemen and rumbling carriages. The following day Lucrezia, accompanied by the thirty-year-old duchess, continued the journey in the gilded sedan chair, behind the curtains of which the two women conducted an evidently stilted conversation, their friendship hampered not least by the fact that the duchess believed Cesare guilty of abducting her protégée, Dorotea Malatesta, a year earlier.
At Urbino the duke, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, was awaiting their arrival on the road leading to his capital, the streets of which were decorated with flags and streamers and garlands of dried
flowers. Beneath these the brightly painted and heavily laden carts, drawn by bullocks, rattled and screeched into the courtyard of the ducal palace, where Lucrezia was to stay.
For two nights Lucrezia remained in Urbino, staying in the imposing castle and enjoying not only the comforts of aristocratic life but also its lavish balls, banquets, and theatrical entertainments. She appeared at one ball in a dress of black velvet with a huge diamond on her forehead, while the Spanish dwarfs, who formed an ill-disciplined and noisy addition to her suite, hopped and romped around her, crying, ‘Look at the great lady!’
Lucrezia was aware that reports about her appearance and behaviour, even details of her personal hygiene, were being sent to the jealous and formidable Isabella d’Este by her secret informant, a man known as Il Prete (the priest) but whose identity remains mysterious. When his inquisitive behaviour came to Lucrezia’s notice, she sent for the man, questioned him at length, and managed to elicit more information about her new sister-in-law than he had intended to divulge. ‘She is a lady of keen intelligence and perspicacity,’ he afterward reported of Lucrezia; ‘one had to have one’s wits about one when speaking to her.’
The luxuries of the ducal palace, however, were not to be enjoyed for long, and once again the slow and exhausting journey was resumed, now toward Pesaro, still in the stilted company of the Duchess of Urbino, who would stay with her until they reached their destination. The two women arrived at Pesaro on January 21, thankful at least that the stony snowy mountains were, at last, behind them.
At Pesaro – the city that had once belonged to her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, and was now the possession of her brother – it
was Cesare’s Spanish governor, Ramiro de Lorqua, who was waiting to welcome her and escort her past the expectant populace crowding the streets. When the cavalcade finally halted that evening, Lucrezia pleaded fatigue as an excuse for not joining a ball that had been arranged in her honour but that would be attended by many of her ex-husband’s subjects; and she retired with her ladies to the quarters assigned to her, where one of her maids performed what was almost a daily ritual by washing her mistress’s long blond hair.
Riding through Cesare’s duchy, the journey along the Via Emilia pleasantly smooth after the rough jolting over the hill roads, Lucrezia reached Cesena, her brother’s capital, on January 24. Here, however, an unsettling rumour of trouble ahead brought an end to such carefree gaiety; it was said that Dorotea Malatesta’s fiancé, the mercenary commander Giambattista Caracciolo, had sworn to take revenge for the kidnapping and was now awaiting to fall upon the Borgia bride somewhere nearby.
The threat, however, did not materialize, and Lucrezia reached Bologna without incident, though her decision to delay her arrival in that city by spending a second night at Imola in order to rest must have irritated Giovanni Bentivoglio and his wife, her hosts in Bologna. After a splendid procession through the city, watched by huge crowds, and another ball, Lucrezia was so tired that she overslept the next morning.
On the last day of January, Lucrezia and the Duchess of Urbino left Bologna for the villa of their hosts at Bentivoglio, near the border of the duchy of Ferrara, and the last stop on her exhaustingly long journey from Rome. Just before sunset an unexpected party of four horsemen were seen dismounting at the door. Lucrezia’s
bridegroom, Alfonso d’Este, had impetuously decided to come in person to greet his bride. ‘This act pleased everyone,’ wrote Bernardino Zambotti, the Ferrarese diarist, ‘and especially the bride and her ladies, that his lordship wished to see her,’ and did much to counter the widespread rumours of Alfonso’s opposition to the match.
Alfonso himself was clearly pleased by what he saw; and, so it was reported, he suggested that he and Lucrezia go to bed together there and then. Dissuaded from this impropriety, he returned to Ferrara, where, the next day, standing beside his father, with a company of crossbowmen behind them, he welcomed the ducal barge in which, in staterooms of considerable splendour, Lucrezia had travelled the twenty miles of waterway from Bentivoglio.
At Malalbergo she had been joined by her new sister-in-law, the jealous and hostile Isabella d’Este, who was reluctantly acting, as custom dictated, as hostess for her widowed father, the duke. Her eyes would fill with tears, so Isabella said, when she saw her mother’s ruby necklace hanging around Lucrezia’s graceful neck.
It was not until she disembarked from the ducal barge outside the walls of Ferrara that Lucrezia met her new father-in-law for the first time. The elderly Duke Ercole, almost seventy years old, seemed greatly struck by her appearance and was much entertained by the jokes and posturings of her clowns. He graciously kissed her hand before escorting her to the house of Alberto d’Este, his illegitimate brother, where she would stay the night in order to prepare for her state entry into Ferrara the following day.
The preparations in Ferrara for the arrival of the heir’s bride had been gathering pace over the past weeks: streets were cleaned, horse droppings and mud carted away; inns were fully booked; shops were
stocked with splendid stuffs and mementos; tailors and dressmakers worked day and night to finish the new outfits ordered by the city’s courtiers; playwrights and poets were busy writing their dramas, while actors and orators were rehearsing their lines; flags and banners were embroidered with interwoven depictions of the Borgia bull and the Este arms; coats-of-arms of the two families were emblazoned on the gates of the ducal palace. Garlands were hung over shopfronts and tapestries draped from windows above. The army of painters and carpenters had managed to finish a series of elaborate arches erected along the route the procession would take, decorated with mythological scenes to proclaim the union of the two families, the Borgia bull standing solidly beside the black and white eagles of the Este dynasty.
The city seethed with excitement; one Ferrarese diarist spoke for many when he responded to one man who thought the festivities ‘a gross inconvenience, but in my opinion he was speaking like a fool.’
The city’s leading families competed with each other for the honour of providing a daughter to join the bride’s new household and prepared apartments in their palaces to accommodate the official guests who had been invited. Ambassadors arrived from Lucca, Florence, and Siena; the Venetian embassy numbered 150; around the necks of the French embassy, met by the duke in person, one observer counted eighty-four heavy gold chains, worth, he thought, some 35,000 ducats. There were ‘so many visitors in Ferrara,’ he noted, ‘that it was almost impossible to believe.’
Finally, late in the clear, cold afternoon of February 2, the Feast of Candlemas, Lucrezia rode across the bridge over the Po at Castel Tedaldo to enter the city that would be her home for the rest of her life.
Eighty trumpeters led the cavalcade, followed by a hundred mounted crossbowmen, all dressed in the red-and-white Este livery and wearing caps made in the French style, a mark of honour to Louis XII, whose alliance with the pope and Cesare had precipitated the marriage. Next came the heralds wearing black-and-gold tabards and carrying silver trumpets, followed by drummers riding white mules, by armed halberdiers, by mounted pages and nobles and bishops and ambassadors, a gaudy array of gold and silver, red and purple, velvets and silks, and costly fur-lined cloaks – the Spanish courtiers of Cesare’s household provided a sober contrast in their customary plain black.
Spontaneous cheers greeted the bridegroom Alfonso, who was splendidly dressed in grey velvet embroidered with gold – the embroidery alone was said to be worth 8,000 ducats – and a cap trimmed with feathers, riding with his squires astride a superb bay charger caparisoned in purple velvet. Then came the bishops, in white copes and jewelled mitres; the ambassadors in their official finery; and then the drummers and jesters, who heralded the arrival of the bride. This was what the crowds had been waiting for, and they roared their approval.
Riding a snow-white horse with gold trappings, Lucrezia entered Ferrara beneath a white silk canopy decorated with gold fringe, which was carried by eight doctors of the university. She wore a jewelled coif on her head, its value estimated at 15,000 ducats, one of the caps that, as Isabella d’Este acidly remarked, ‘my lord father sent her in Rome,’ adding, ‘Around her throat was the necklace which had belonged to my mother.’ On her feet was a pair of slippers worth 2,000 ducats, and she wore a dress of gold brocade striped with purple satin, ornamented, according to one observer,
‘with so many jewels that it was a marvel,’ with a gold cloak thrown back over one shoulder to display its ermine lining.
Behind her came several open carriages bearing numerous Ferrarese ladies and other guests and, last of all, the long line of pack mules carrying the chests filled with her clothes, jewellery, and other possessions, their loads covered with lengths of deep red satin embroidered with her own device.
Lucrezia’s mount, an elegant bay horse, was startled by the sudden deafening roar of artillery from Castel Tedaldo that sounded as she crossed the bridge, and it reared up, throwing her to the ground. Fortunately she was not hurt but picked herself up, laughing merrily, ‘and this I saw myself because I was right there,’ wrote one observer of the event. A mule was brought for her to continue, and she made her way through the narrow winding streets, past the entertainments staged for her at every turn, and finally into the great piazza in front of the ducal castle.
The piazza was crowded with people, ‘so full,’ remarked one observer, ‘that if a grain of millet had fallen from the sky it would not have reached the ground.’ The arrival of the cavalcade was heralded by a tremendous fanfare from the 113 trumpeters and pipers playing on the balcony of the ducal palace, and the dungeons beneath were opened to release a stream of prisoners. Two men then descended down ropes from the top of the high towers in the piazza, their arms outstretched so that ‘they looked like birds,’ as one man said, to land at Lucrezia’s feet. Zambotti commented that ‘everyone thought it a great marvel because it happened so quickly and neither of them was hurt.’
Lucrezia rode into the courtyard of the palace, where she dismounted and climbed the marble staircase, at the top of which
Isabella d’Este and other female members of the ducal family waited to embrace her before escorting her into the Great Hall, which had been hung with cloth-of-gold ‘and silks of great value’ to mark the occasion. There she was guest of honour at the feast, the highlight of which was a series of life-size sculptures all made in sugar, followed by a ball.
At the end of the evening, the bridal couple made their way to their bedchamber in the apartments that had once belonged to Alfonso’s mother. The following day, the bridegroom’s father reported to the pope: ‘Last night our illustrious son, Don Alfonso, went to bed with his wife, and from all accounts, it appears they were quite satisfied with one another.’ Her husband seemed pleased with her and was attentive for the first few days, even though he did not linger for long of a morning in their bed, but, having slept with her, so the Ferrarese ambassador to Rome told the pope, he ‘took his pleasure with other women during the day.’ ‘Being young,’ the pope had commented, complacently, ‘it does him good.’
The phlegmatic, silent bridegroom, a man whose interests, so it was said, were limited to sewers and artillery, had regarded his marriage as no more than a painful duty. The two women he had most deeply cared for had both died young; his mother, Eleonora of Aragon, the sister of King Federigo, had died when he was seventeen years old; his younger sister, Beatrice, had died in childbirth four years later. Alfonso’s secretary thought it was interesting to speculate on his master’s feelings toward the bride in whom he had appeared to show no initial interest. As he came to know Lucrezia better, however, the more interesting and attractive he found her; he actually sought out her company, grateful to have reason to dis
believe the stories of her debauched past. ‘Whatever his feelings were before he met her, before long he conceived,’ so it seemed to the secretary, ‘a love as ardent as was the aversion he had felt for her when the marriage had first been proposed.’
The wedding festivities continued for over a week. There were jousts most days in the great square in front of the palace, followed by banquets and balls every night. A troupe of actors performed the comedies of Plautus each afternoon, which the duke, determined to show off the quality of culture for which Ferrara was justly famous, had insisted were to be better than anything that Lucrezia would have seen in Rome. There were also the customary ceremonial offerings of presents to the bride and groom. The Venetians produced two superb mantles of deep red velvet, worth 300 ducats each. The French ambassador had brought expensive gifts from Louis XII: a rosary for Lucrezia, its beads of perforated gold filled with aromatic musk, and a shield for Alfonso, decorated with the figure of Mary Magdalene, which, the ambassador was at pains to explain, was to show that he had taken a woman of virtue, though all of those present had heard the rumours of incest and many believed that Lucrezia’s past, like the Magdalene’s, had been far from virtuous.