The Borgias (28 page)

Although both Alexander VI and Cesare vigorously denied any involvement in the taking of Arezzo, protesting instead that Vitelli had acted upon his own initiative, few in Rome believed them. And it was generally accepted that the murder of Manfredi was also committed on the orders of Cesare, who was anxious to avoid any
trouble from the supporters of the popular Astorre while he was away from Rome with his army.

A few days later Cesare was at Spoleto with his army of six thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry, and his condottieri captains, the Spaniards Ugo de Moncada and Miguel de Corella, and the Italians Paolo Orsini and his cousin Francesco, the Duke of Gravina; Oliverotto Euffreducci, Lord of Fermo; Gianpaolo Baglioni, Lord of Perugia; and Vitellozzo Vitelli, Lord of Città di Castello, who had reluctantly submitted to Cesare’s request to withdraw from Arezzo. Massing in the Romagna, meanwhile, another army, led by Cesare’s governor, Ramiro de Lorqua, prepared to move south.

There was at first some doubt in Rome as to where these armies were marching; some said Pisa, others Arezzo, though most assumed that their destination was Camerino, the state of Giulio Cesare da Varano, who had been excommunicated by Alexander VI on June 5 on a charge of fratricide. To this end, the Duke of Urbino had given permission for Ramiro de Lorqua and the Romagna troops to pass through his state; though he had also, unwisely as it was to turn out, offered help to Varano to defend Camerino.

In fact, Cesare was about to attempt a highly ambitious coup and seize Urbino itself, with its commanding position between the Romagna and Rome; and to justify this unprovoked attack by claiming that the duke, Guidobaldo de Montefeltro, had acted treasonably in his offer to assist Varano.

The Duke of Urbino, meanwhile, believing Cesare to be many miles away to the south and having no reason to doubt his protestations of friendship, had gone to enjoy an alfresco dinner in the park of a monastery just outside the walls of his capital. In the
middle of the meal, a courier was observed riding at speed into the park with an urgent message: Cesare’s troops were marching on Urbino itself; they were less than twenty miles away. Guidobaldo fled and, evading Cesare’s troops who had been ordered to intercept him, he arrived, dishevelled and exhausted, in Mantua a week later.

The exiled Guidobaldo da Montefeltro did, however, retain his dignity, refusing the offer of a cardinal’s hat and a pension in exchange for his rights to the dukedom of Urbino. To humiliate the duke still further, it was revealed at this time that he was impotent, a misfortune that had remained a secret outside the family for years. Still, his loyal wife, Elisabetta, declared that she would rather live with him as his sister than no longer as his wife.

In an attempt to negotiate the restoration of their authority in Arezzo, the Florentines now sent to Urbino a high-ranking delegation led by Francesco Soderini, bishop of Volterra and brother to the head of the Florentine republic, which was required to report on the situation to the government back home. The secretary to this delegation was none other than Niccolò Machiavelli, who was deeply impressed with Cesare, so much so in fact that his enemies would later claim that the secretary had been bribed by the duke, though no evidence has ever emerged to support these rumours.

‘This Lord is very splendid and magnificent,’ Machiavelli wrote in a letter signed by Soderini:

Machiavelli might have added how exasperating was Cesare, who, having kept him waiting for hours on end for an interview, would suddenly summon him in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning, often not appearing when some meeting had been arranged, and, on occasion, riding away to where his army was in camp at Fermignano, a few miles south of Urbino, where he could be seen early in the morning hunting with his leopards in the surrounding hills, accompanied by ‘a host of servants, his face wrapped in gauze.’

When at Urbino, much of Cesare’s time was spent supervising the dispatch by mule train of numerous Montefeltro treasures to the fortresses at Forlì and Cesena – those costly furnishings and works of art that had ornamented the magnificent ducal palace where Lucrezia had been much honoured as a guest just five months earlier. ‘He had all Guidobaldo da Montefeltro’s furniture taken from the palace,’ a local chronicler reported, ‘so that, over the period of a month, 180 mules were employed each day; thus was an honoured family despoiled of silver and rich tapestries, and the magnificent library of rare books, which had been assembled with such loving care by Guidobaldo’s father, Duke Federigo.’ In his notebooks, Leonardo also recorded the strings of ‘mules carrying rich loads of gold and silver, many treasures and great wealth.’

Among these treasures were works of art that Isabella d’Este, who possessed by her own admission ‘an insatiable desire for antique things,’ was eager to acquire. She wrote to her brother in
Rome, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, asking him to approach Cesare with a request for two antique statues, one of a Cupid attributed by some to the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles, and the other ‘a little antique marble Venus,’ which she hoped Cesare might be prepared to part with since he did not ‘take much pleasure in antiquities.’

In fact, the Cupid was not an antique but a modern work carved by the Florentine sculptor Michelangelo, and Cesare could well spare it. Indeed, his agent delivered the statues to Isabella in Mantua on July 21. She had sought permission from the exiled duke, her brother-in-law, before purchasing these items, but when Guidobaldo tried to reclaim the sculptures later, she, somewhat meanly, refused to let them go.

After Cesare’s success at Urbino, the seizure of Camerino offered few problems; and the aged lord of the place, Giulio Cesare da Varano, together with his two sons, was handed over to Cesare and was later strangled in the castle of La Pergola.

In Rome the pope celebrated Cesare’s victory at Camerino in his usual exuberant manner with the customary cannonade from the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo and, that evening, as Burchard reported, with ‘bonfires, fireworks and a great party in the piazza of St Peter’s.’

Firmly in control of an obedient Romagna, Cesare now set about raising money to feed and equip his army, which was said to cost him more than 1,000 ducats a day. He turned to his father for assistance, and although the pope was always of a far more cautious turn of mind where money was concerned, and constantly lamenting the extravagances of his son, Cesare did not turn in vain.

Indeed, the pope resorted to all manner of expedients in order
to raise the necessary amounts of cash. Large sums poured in from the imposition of fines and penalties upon Jews and from the creation of numerous offices in the papal administration that were profitably sold for as much as 700 ducats each. He adopted the questionable tactic of countermanding legal wills, appointing himself as heir and replacing the named executors with his own men; he even, so it was said, resorted to murder to help his son financially so far as he could.

Adding substantially to the papal coffers was the death on July 20, 1502, of Cardinal Gianbattista Ferrari, Alexander VI’s erstwhile datary, who had paid 22,000 ducats for his red hat in September 1500, as part of the pope’s efforts to raise funds for Cesare’s campaign against Faenza, Rimini, and Pesaro. The cardinal had fallen ill in early June, Burchard reported, and ‘declined all medical treatment, refusing stubbornly to be given enemas, to be bled, to take syrups or pills or any other medicines.’ After a few days in bed, he had been well enough to dine on ‘bread soup and a pint of excellent Corsican wine,’ but soon suffered a relapse, severe enough to be given the last rites; however, he rallied again and lasted for another month, still refusing medicines of any kind.

The cardinal’s interment in Santa Maria della Febbre was not a dignified ceremony; a member of the dead man’s household hurried toward the coffin to retrieve a pair of gloves that, he claimed, belonged to him, as well as a ring that, so he maintained, was also his property. Then it was found that the lid of the coffin would not close upon the corpse, so a carpenter was called to kneel on it to force it down.

Although a rich man who was reported to have accumulated a large fortune in ducats and in gold and silver, by extremely questionable means, Gianbattista Ferrari had been notoriously parsimonious; and Burchard recorded the joke that was being told of him at that time in Rome, that, on presenting himself at the gates of heaven, St Peter had asked him for an entrance fee of 1,000 ducats. He protested that he could not possibly pay such a sum. Well, said St Peter, he would settle for 500 ducats. That, too, was quite impossible; the price was eventually dropped to one ducat, but even this was too much for the miserly cardinal. ‘If you cannot pay a single ducat,’ St Peter then exclaimed, ‘go to the Devil, and remain a pauper with him for all eternity.’

So the death of the cardinal was not widely mourned; his stinginess and disregard for the plight of the poor had earned him an evil reputation; and while his last illness seems to have been caused by a fever endemic in Rome, there were many who believed that he had been poisoned in the manner in which he himself was supposed to have arranged the deaths of several of those who crossed his path. Certainly, much of the cardinal’s fortune, which Burchard estimated at 80,000 ducats, not counting his clothes and jewels, passed into the hands of the pope, and thence into Cesare’s battle chest.

Having taken Urbino and Camerino, Cesare was now ready for the next step in his ruthless campaign. For this he needed the cooperation of Louis XII, who was, conveniently for Cesare, on his way from France in person to visit Milan, where he was expected on July 28. So, just four days after the surrender of Camerino, Cesare galloped out of his camp at Fermignano, together with three companions, ‘disguised as a Knight of St John of Jerusalem, with a cross on his coat,’ reported Burchard, and availing himself of the order’s chain-of-post horses along the road.

At Borgo San Donnino, Cesare and his companions feasted on a huge quantity of chickens and pigeons, so many indeed that ‘they shocked the locals,’ claimed Burchard, ‘covering themselves with shame.’ They stopped briefly in Ferrara, where Cesare visited his beloved Lucrezia, who was seriously ill, and rode on to Milan, where they arrived on August 5.

A witness reported to Isabella d’Este the manner of Cesare’s reception by Louis XII:

The pope was displeased by his son’s actions – about which he had been increasingly often kept in the dark – and, always inclined
to be wary of France, was ‘highly troubled by this journey of his son’s to Milan,’ Giustinian had reported, ‘because I hear from a completely reliable source that he undertook the journey without any consultation or even informing His Holiness.’

For Cesare, however, the journey was to prove highly profitable; not only did he cement his friendship and understanding with Louis XII, but he also succeeded in intimidating his enemies who had clustered around the French court. Cesare’s reception by the king must have been galling for many of the other guests, notably for Giovanni Sforza and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, both of whom had been usurped by Cesare and were hoping for French aid to regain their dominions.

Among the most outspoken of Cesare’s enemies gathered at the French court was Isabella d’Este’s husband, Francesco Gonzaga, who had sworn that he would fight a duel with Cesare, ‘that bastard son of a priest’s,’ but now felt obliged to recant, and reported to a friend that he and Cesare had ‘embraced each other as good brothers,’ adding, ‘We have spent all this day dancing and feasting with His Majesty.’

Despite his anger at the arrogance with which Cesare flaunted his military strength, and especially with his encroachment into the territory of Florence, which remained an important ally of France, the king needed the support of Alexander VI, and of the pope’s son’s army, to defend his authority in Naples, where the relations between France and Spain, unusually cordial in recent years, had begun to return to their customary hostility. And so, Louis XII and Cesare came to an agreement whereby the king agreed to give the duke a free hand in Bologna while Cesare was to lend support to French ambitions in Naples.

Cesare spent nearly a month with the French court, travelling with the king first to Pavia, where they were entertained with a ritual duel between two feuding members of the Gonzaga family, who were then seated opposite each other at the lavish banquet that followed. They then rode on to Genoa, where a spectacular reception had been planned to welcome Louis XII, at a cost to the city of 12,000 ducats.