The Borgias (30 page)

When the rich Venetian Cardinal Giovanni Michiel died in mysterious circumstances on April 10, 1503, after days of vomiting and diarrhoea, it was widely conjectured that the pope himself had been instrumental in having him poisoned. Certainly, so the Venetian ambassador Antonio Giustinian was told: ‘As soon as the Pope heard of his death he sent a man to his house and, before dawn, it was completely plundered,’ adding that ‘the death of the Cardinal has brought him over 150,000 ducats.’

Further amounts, so Giustinian claimed, were raised by the creation of cardinals. In May 1503 the nomination was agreed in a secret consistory of nine new cardinals; the three Italians were all Borgia men, one was German, a favour to the emperor, and the other five were Spaniards, all well disposed toward the Spanish
pope and a reflection of Alexander VI’s change of policy; none, significantly, were French. ‘Today there was a consistory,’ Giustinian reported to the Venetian government, ‘and nine new cardinals were nominated, mostly men of dubious reputation and all have paid handsomely for their elevation, some 20,000 ducats and more, so that from 120,000 to 130,000 ducats have been collected; it is notorious that His Holiness is showing the world that the amount of a pope’s income is whatever he chooses it to be.’

A man who had worked for them in the past and had hoped to be rewarded with a red hat, Francesco Troche, did not trouble to conceal his disappointment and spoke slightingly of Cesare. ‘His Holiness the Pope told him that he was a madman to speak like that and if the Duke came to hear of it he would be killed,’ reported one ambassador to his master, ‘and it was because of the words of His Beatitude that, terrified, Troche took flight.’ He fled first to Genoa and then, by way of Sardinia, ended up in Corsica; but there he was caught and brought back to Rome, where he was strangled by Cesare’s sinister lieutenant, Miguel da Corella. On the same day, another man who had fallen foul of Cesare, Jacopo di Santacroce, a Roman nobleman and former Borgia supporter, was hanged and his body displayed on the Ponte Sant’Angelo as a warning to all enemies of the Borgias.

Cesare was now at the height of his power. Having raised enough money by all the means at his disposal, and ridding himself of several enemies, he now enrolled an army of some twelve hundred light cavalry and over four thousand infantry, all wearing his red-and-yellow livery, with the word
CESAR
in large letters embroidered on the chests and backs of their uniforms. ‘All the best soldiers were with him,’ the chronicler Matarazzo wrote. ‘And he had so much
accumulated treasure and possessions that it seemed there was not as much elsewhere in all Italy. Nor were there as many well-disciplined soldiers so well supplied with arms and horses.’

Cesare was ready for his next campaign. At the beginning of July, the pope confirmed him as ruler of Città di Castello and ordered the city of Perugia to accept his lordship; he expected soon to add the cities of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena to his dominion. Poised for his Tuscan campaign, Cesare’s well-supplied and well-trained army began to march north up the Via Flaminia toward Perugia and the borders of Tuscany. Cesare himself remained in Rome, waiting for the right moment to start. With the Spanish army facing unexpected opposition in its conquest of the kingdom of Naples, its advance slowed; the French troops in northern Italy, meanwhile, had begun their long march south to relieve their beleaguered comrades. Cesare had to gamble on the Spanish winning through and fixed the date of his departure for August 9.

‘T
HIS MONTH IS FATAL FOR STOUT MEN
’

T
HE WEATHER IN
R
OME
that summer of 1503 was unusually hot and humid. Alexander VI had fallen ill in July, and when the Venetian ambassador had visited him in the papal apartments in the Vatican, he had found the pope ‘reclining on a sofa, fully clothed.’ Giustinian reported that Alexander VI ‘received me with good humour, saying that for three days he had been inconvenienced by a slight dysentery but that he hoped it would be nothing serious.’

‘There are many ill with fever here,’ a Florentine working in Rome wrote that July; ‘and people are dying in great numbers.’ One of the dead was the former Florentine ambassador, whose successor was now gravely ill. Despite his seventy-three years, the pope recovered his health quickly enough but not his normally ebullient demeanour. Alexander VI grew unusually depressed as the daily death toll grew of men, women, and children who had
succumbed to the fever – typhoid, typhus, or perhaps malaria – that raged in the city. He admitted as much to Giustinian, to whom he confessed that he was preoccupied with these reports: ‘All these deaths make us fearful and persuade us to take more care of our health.’ On August 1 his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia died; and as the pope watched the funeral procession pass beneath his window, he remarked, with uncharacteristic mournfulness, ‘This month is fatal for stout men.’ The sultry months of July and August had indeed proved fatal for his five predecessors, Innocent VIII, Sixtus IV, Paul II, Pius II, and the pope’s own uncle Calixtus III.

On August 5, just four days before Cesare was due to leave Rome, father and son accepted an invitation to dinner at the villa of Cardinal Adriano Castellesi in the countryside some miles outside of Rome. On this occasion it was Cesare’s health that caused the greater anxiety, since he was not only suffering from pain in his stomach, but also, according to Burchard, he was ‘much irritated by the skin on his face in the lower part, which falls apart like rotten leaves and results in a pus that he is much concerned to hide with his mask.’

On their arrival at Castellesi’s villa, father and son were both extremely thirsty and asked for cups of wine, which they drank ‘most gratefully.’ It was a sultry evening, and the guests dined alfresco, thankful for the shade cast by the trees in the garden. The next day their host felt ill and went to bed; a week later the pope also took to his bed; Cesare then fell ill; so did several of the cardinal’s other guests, as well as some of his servants. Poison was naturally suspected. Giustinian was among those who believed that a servant had been responsible; others suggested that Cesare was the poisoner. Yet others said that the pope himself was responsible, that he
had intended poisoning his former secretary for some reason but had inadvertently drunk the poisoned wine himself. It was not the wine that had been tampered with, others maintained, but poisoned sweetmeats that had been passed around among the guests after the meal.

But the pope himself declared that the putrid air in Rome during this intolerable heat wave was probably responsible. Beltrando Costabili, the Ferrarese ambassador in Rome, reported that it was not surprising that the pope and his son had both fallen ill, ‘since all the palace officials are in the same condition because of the unwholesome air here.’

Burchard recorded daily bulletins on the pope’s health. On August 12 he wrote that ‘His Holiness shows signs of a fever which does not abate.’ The next day Giustinian reported to Venice:

Costabili sent a similarly dispiriting report to Ferrara:

The same news was sent by other envoys to their various states. Giustinian was particularly assiduous in this respect, reporting on August 16, 1503: ‘Early this morning Our Lord the Pope, well aware that his illness is dangerous, received his rites; and some cardinals have been admitted into his bedchamber; the viaticum was given in secret, for those about him try to conceal his condition as much as they can.’ The bishop who had administered the rites ‘left the room in tears saying that the danger was very great and complaining of the ineffectiveness of the medicines that have been administered.’

By now Alexander VI was in a high fever and was violently sick during the night. He was bled so copiously that Giustinian was shocked to hear of it. Cesare also had been severely bled before being plunged into a bath of ice-cold water, from which he emerged with the skin peeling from his back. Both father and son were still feverish the next morning, so Giustinian was told, the duke ‘more severely with recurrent paroxysms of fever one after the other and strange fits,’ and Giustinian added that Cesare had ‘sent for the
doctors who are looking after him and he will not let them leave, and is insistent that his condition must not generally be known.’

The following day, Friday, August 18, Alexander VI died; as Burchard commented, he had ‘made his confession to the Bishop of Carignola who then said mass in his presence and, after the Bishop had taken communion himself, he offered the sacrament of the Eucharist to the Pope in his bed.’ After the Mass the pope told the cardinals gathered around his bedside ‘that he felt very poorly.’ The cardinals evidently left the room shortly afterward; the pope ‘received Extreme Unction from the Bishop of Carignola at the hour of Vespers and died with just the Bishop, the Datary and a papal groom present.’

Cesare was informed immediately of his father’s death. Although he was giving his doctors some hope that he would recover, Cesare was still desperately ill and very weak, barely capable of making the decisions and issuing the orders that the crisis now demanded. Fortunately for him, his loyal lieutenant, Miguel de Corella, was already in the palace and able to act on his master’s behalf.

Keeping the news a closely guarded secret, Corella now took a party of men and locked all the doors leading into the papal apartments. He then marched into the pope’s bedchamber, where he found Cardinal Casanova and, holding a knife to his throat, threatened to cut it open and throw him out of the window if he did not hand over the keys to the cupboards and closets, where, Cesare had informed him, a large sum of money was stored. The terrified cardinal handed over the keys without protest, whereupon Corella and his men unlocked the chests and appropriated the money and silver they contained; according to Giustinian’s report to the
Venetian Senate, they removed coins, silver, and jewels worth 500,000 ducats.

Corella now made the public announcement that Alexander VI was dead, and immediately the pope’s servants ran into the apartments to help themselves to the clothes they found in his wardrobe and other items. Nothing of value was left, so Burchard said, ‘except the papal chairs, some cushions and the tapestries nailed to the walls.’

Though, in fact, when the cardinals came to make an inventory of the pope’s possessions a few days later, they found a lot of ‘silver, jewels and precious objects,’ according to Burchard, items that Corella had overlooked or, perhaps, had been hidden by the pope even from his own son. ‘They found the tiara, two valuable mitres, all the rings which the Pope used at mass, and all the sacred vessels the Pope used when he officiated at mass, which filled eight large coffers.’ According to Burchard, they also found a ‘cypress chest covered with green tapestry, which too had escaped Corella and his men, inside of which they found precious stones and valuable rings worth 25,000 ducats.’

It was not until early evening that Burchard himself was informed of the pope’s death, and the loyal master of ceremonies hastened into the papal apartments. ‘After I had seen the Pope’s body,’ which had already been washed, ‘I clothed it in red brocade vestments, with silken amice and chasuble.’ He could not find the pope’s shoes but did find a pair of slippers properly embroidered with crosses ‘and two strings that I used for binding them to his feet,’ but he was unable to replace the pope’s missing ring, which had, no doubt, been ripped off his finger by Corella and his men.
Burchard then had the corpse put on a bier in the antechamber before being taken into the Sala del Pappagallo, where it was placed on a table covered with a crimson cloth and ‘a piece of fine tapestry’; and four monks began to recite the Office of the Dead.