The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (15 page)

As any traveller approaching today, Felice saw the castle of Bracciano on the horizon long before she reached it. It is an imposing fortress, with thick perimeter walls and massive towers built of the local grey volcanic stone.
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Perched high on a cliff, it overlooks the Lago di Bracciano, Italy’s eighth-largest lake, which conceals a Bronze Age settlement in its depths. The castle is sometimes described as great and gloomy and perhaps Felice was to be pitied as she approached her new home. Yet, looking up at Bracciano, she might not have been so sorry for herself. On a summer day with the water of the vast lake sparkling in the sunlight, the snow-capped Sibillini Mountains visible in the distance, she might have felt happy to have escaped the heat and smells of Rome. As Felice and the Orsini party approached the castle, they reached a thick stone wall with a moat and drawbridge. As Felice crossed the bridge, the castle rose directly above her and an outcrop of small houses surrounded her. These were home to the hundreds of people who worked for the Orsini, either as house servants at the castle or as labourers on Bracciano’s land. Felice had arrived at the hub, the nerve centre, of her husband’s family’s economy. She quickly came to understand the resonance of her new home – practical, historical and symbolic.

Below the castle, there were fields of grain and barley, staples of the Roman diet, and vineyards producing local wine. The oldest agricultural activity was the raising of pigs, and Bracciano’s original name is believed to have been Porcianum. Water from the lake was a precious commodity, and had been since the second century
ad
, when the Emperor Nerva routed the Aquedotto Traiano by the lake. Later, in the sixteenth century, this water fed the Acqua Paola, the aqueduct installed by Pope Paul V to bring water to Rome. Securing the water rights from the vast lake in
1427
gave a significant boost to the Orsini family finances.

Further contributions to the family economy were provided by the multiple fiefs under the jurisdiction of Bracciano: Santo Polo, San Gregorio, Scrofano, Isola, Campana, Cantalupo, Canemorto, Montorio and Vicarello, to name but a few.
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A complex network of indentured peasants worked the land. They existed in a feudal system long since extinct and, even in the sixteenth century, increasingly old-fashioned in the growing urbanism of Renaissance Italy. In Felice’s time an array of
massari
and
subditi
– the words were used to describe different kinds of labourers and tenants and are no longer current in modern Italian – populated these
feudi
. Their ruler was the
Signor
of Bracciano. They provided their Orsini Lord with a substantial portion of his yearly revenue and looked to him for assistance and protection, frequently from each other. Rivalry was utterly entrenched in these settlements. Like much small-town life, bitter disputes arose over seemingly the most trivial of matters. It was the responsibility of the Orsini Lord, or his representatives, to resolve them.

The Orsini had long-standing interests in Bracciano and its surrounding lands but it had not always been theirs in its entirety. They had once fiercely contested its possession with another old Roman family, the Di Vico. The Di Vico had built the original castle of Bracciano in the late twelfth century when they served as prefects of the nearby city of Viterbo.

Like Felice’s maternal family, the Normanni, the Di Vico had since waned in power and prestige but back in the fourteenth century they were as considerable an enemy of the Orsini as the Colonna were in the fifteenth. In
1407
the French anti-pope at Avignon, Clement VI, an Orsini supporter, passed an edict to force the Di Vico family to surrender the castle to the Orsini. Ironically, given his status as a member of the Colonna family, the Orsini’s bitter enemy, it was Pope Martin V who ratified Orsini possession in
1419
. The castle had thus come to stand as a symbol of an Orsini victory over their local rivals, the Di Vico.

The castle of Bracciano did not undergo any further additions and enlargements until
1470
, when Gian Giordano’s grandfather, Napoleone, renowned as a ‘man skilled in the military arts’, invested his earnings as a
condottiere
in its renovation. The castle now acquired its irregular quadrilateral shape, punctuated by six turrets, which together surrounded a courtyard. Significantly, despite rebuilding at the height of the new fashion for
all’antica
architecture, Napoleone did not attempt to modernize his castle or to alter it aesthetically in any way from its late-medieval appearance. He simply made it larger and more imposing. It was important for Orsini family prestige that the castle should adhere to its medieval roots in order to remind all that surveyed it that, unlike the families of the wealthy cardinals now flocking to Rome, this family could trace its roots into antiquity. The new castle certainly impressed those in nearby Rome. Felice’s great-uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, spent several months in residence there in the summer of
1481
, following a severe outbreak of plague in the city. Sixtus wrote letters in which he indicated he was at ‘the house of Napeoleone Orsini, the exceedingly well-fortified palace called Bracciano’.
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The room in which he stayed was still called the
capella papalina
at the end of the sixteenth century. Other visitors to Bracciano included Medici family members, and Charles VIII of France.

After the death of Napoleone, his son Gentile Virginio continued embellishing the family home. In
1491
he hired a Roman artist known as Antoniazzo Romano to paint frescos recording major events in Gentile Virginio’s life. The original location of these images, since transferred inside, was unusual: they were painted on the walls of the covered entry leading up to the castle’s principal
cortile
. Anyone arriving at Bracciano was greeted by images of Gentile Virginio. On one wall he was featured at his
1487
meeting with his nephew Piero de’ Medici who was
en route
to Rome to arrange the marriage of his sister Maddalena to a nephew of the Genoese pope, Innocent VIII. On the other, Ferdinand of Aragon could be seen bestowing a military command on Gentile, as he did in
1489
. Another fresco cycle Gentile Virginio commissioned from the Antoniazzo workshop was intended to emphasize Orsini ties with France. One room was adorned with scenes from
Les Fontaines de Jouvence
, a chivalric French legend about the fountain of youth. Gallic homage such as this would have pleased any French visitor to the castle.

Like Monte Giordano back in Rome, Bracciano had seen more than its fair share of violence. In the late
1490
s it was the target of sieges by the Borgia family, but had been defended bravely by Gian Giordano’s aunt, Pantasilea, and her
condottiere
husband, Bartolomeo d’Alviano. Small wonder then that much of the Bracciano family identity and sense of pride was invested in the castle.

The castle of Bracciano might have given Felice some reassurance that she had not made a dreadful mistake in marrying Gian Giordano, especially after having eaten cold meat with her bare hands in the fire-damaged great hall of Monte Giordano. True, the castle’s interiors might not have been as luxurious as those Felice had seen her cardinal cousins create at their palaces in Rome; nor was its architecture as up to date as that of the palace her father had commissioned at Savona. But the sheer scale of the castle and its elegant frescos commemorating her late father-in-law’s deeds, not to mention its historical aura, would have impressed her. And Bracciano was near to Rome; Felice need not feel as trapped or isolated as she might have done with a move to Piombino or Salerno. Here her de Cupis family would never be too far away.

About a month after Felice and Gian Giordano arrived at Bracciano, Marino Sanuto recorded that ‘festivities have taken place at Brazano [
sic
] to celebrate the wedding of Madonna Felice with Signor Gian Giordano Orsini’.
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It is to be hoped that these events were an improvement in style and substance from those in Rome. At least Gian Giordano did mark the occasion, and his acknowledgement of his new bride was important for Felice’s standing at Bracciano. She needed to command the respect of the family’s high-ranking servants, who included Martino da Bracciano, Philippo da Bracciano and Giovanni della Colle. Highly able men, they ran the estate and were sufficiently well educated to serve as Orsini diplomatic representatives abroad if needed. They in turn commanded the loyalty and co-operation of the lower-ranking servants.

Felice understood very well the need to befriend these men. In terms of their activities, education and background, they were like her stepfather, Bernardino de Cupis. Bernardino came from a small hill town, Montefalco, similar to Bracciano, and he ran Girolamo della Rovere’s household in Rome in a similar fashion to the way these men ran the Orsini estate. The smooth functioning of the estate depended on their skills and co-operation. In keeping with her natural inclinations, Felice was probably more interested in securing the good will of the Bracciano staff than she was in making friends with her new Orsini relatives. In Savona, she had chilly relations with her aunt Luchina and cousin Lucrezia but had established a good rapport with the town’s merchants. Her relationship with the family into which she married and with their servants was similar. Gian Giordano’s younger children, Napoleone and Carlotta, lived at Vicovaro, the Orsini estate to the east of Rome out by Tivoli. However, there was no shortage of Orsini relatives in the neighbourhood of Bracciano when Felice arrived. Carlo Orsini, Gian Giordano’s illegitimate half-brother, lived in a castle at nearby Anguillara, on the other side of Lake Bracciano, with his wife Portia and son Gentile Virgino. Then there was Renzo da Ceri, who took his name from the costal town of Cerveteri, also not too far away. Renzo, an aspiring
condottiere
, was married to Gian Giordano’s eldest daughter, Francesca, and was a regular presence at Bracciano. Renzo’s uncle was Giulio, of the Monterotondo branch of the family. If, in the early years of her marriage, there was no open hostility between Felice and most of the Orsini family members, relations seem never to have been more than cordial. As with Luchina and Lucrezia, the Orsini felt that they were inherently superior to the Pope’s illegitimate daughter, an attitude Felice did not share.

chapter 2

Felice and the Orsini

While she appreciated the importance of influential friends such as Isabella d’Este, Felice never much liked members of the nobility whose position in life rested solely on blood line or military successes. Neither born into nor brought up as a member of the feudal aristocracy, she had little in common with them. She far preferred those members of society, the curia or scholars, who had advanced through their innate cerebral ability. It was those members of the Orsini family who had entered the clergy with whom she had the most rapport. They in turn gave her greater deference because she was Pope Julius II’s daughter than did other members of their family.

Felice had a particularly good relationship with Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, an Orsini relative through his mother, Clarice, of the Monterotondo Orsini. He was the Cardinal who had distinguished himself at Felice’s wedding by wearing a purple hat while his fellow cardinals all wore their regular scarlet ones. Giovanni maintained his family ties with the Orsini and at one point he procured
200
ducats on behalf of his cousin Gian Giordano, ‘for repairs to the house of Monte Giordano’.
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However, his bond with Felice, whose father he served, was stronger. She called on his favour in January
1507
, when she wrote to him as ‘my most honoured lord’, asking him to support Bartolomeo d’Alviano, Gian Giordano’s uncle, by marriage, on a diplomatic mission to the King of Spain. Cardinal Giovanni’s support would in turn sway her father, Julius II, who was still suspicious of any interaction with Spain. The letter shows how schooled Felice was already in the language of charming self-abasement, designed to ensure the writer would get her way: ‘I am sure Your Reverence recognizes the superfluity of my intervention here, as much as he knows my love for him...However, I beg that your Reverence might wish to help, as to do so would be to do a good deed, as much for the love of the present Lord [Alviano] as for the love of me.’
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Felice’s letter ends with her asking Cardinal Giovanni to ‘as always, recommend me to His Holiness, whose feet I humbly kiss’. Protocol dictated Felice not refer to Julius as her father.

Felice’s tone was very different with another Orsini cleric, Annibale. He was Gian Giordano’s short-lived younger brother, resident at Vicovaro, where he oversaw some of the estate’s transactions. On
25
November
1506
, an older and less exalted member of the family, Dianora Orsini, had written to him in agitated terms, with the following request: ‘I ordered hay from Cola d’Alessandro, and I have learned that Cola refuses to sell to me, which surprises me greatly. I beg of your lordship to order that Cola d’Alessandro should sell the hay at my request, as I have promised it to others.’
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A demand for hay might seem like a trivial matter, and the refusal on the part of an Orsini servant to part with it to an Orsini family member surprising. Hay, however, was an essential staple, a valuable commodity, especially in years when there was little yield. Dianora Orsini might well have calculated her own finances based on her acquisition of hay from the family estate. She could exchange it for other goods with merchants from the towns, whose own access to agricultural goods might be limited. However, Cola d’Alessandro, a farm manager at Vicovaro, had evidently decided to sell the hay to someone more influential, or who had something that he himself wanted. Nor did Annibale Orsini apparently pay any attention to Dianora’s request to assist her. Feeling that her words appeared to count for very little, Dianora turned to the Orsini family’s newest member for help with her appeal. On
17
December, Felice wrote to Annibale, in a firmly authoritative but measured tone, one with which her servants and associates would become very familiar: ‘Illustrious Reverend: I have seen Madonna Dianora and I understand that she wrote to you about the farm manager, Cola. And because the matter is of no small importance, I am asking you here to take this money, do what is necessary, and do not do anything less.’
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