The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (18 page)

One of the entries in this account book reads: ‘
20
March,
1511
: We notify Felix Ruveris d’Ursini, our patron, that we have sold on her behalf to Gian Rinaldo Marcciano of Elba fifty twenty five
rubbios
[
13
,
608
dry litres] worth of grain from Palo for the price of fourteen
carlini
for every
5
rubbios
. Signed, Maestro Biasso, Captain of the galley of His Holiness and Maestro Gian Paolo, governor of the Castle of Bracciano.’
²
In this same shipment, Antonio Marcciano of Elba bought
42
rubbio
; Constantino of Elba,
26
; Andrea,
16
. On another occasion, Captain Biasso took his ship up to Savona. There he sold
65
rubbio
to Giovanni di Stefano and
64
to Riccardo Corvello, who possibly numbered among those merchants to whom Felice had written back in
1504
, assuring them of a favoured place in Rome now that her father was pope.

Other customers were down in Sperlonga, the coastal town about a hundred kilometres to the south of Rome. One individual entered in this account book, and the only Orsini family member who acquired grain from Felice, is Dianora, on whose behalf Felice had intervened shortly after her marriage, when Dianora wanted hay from the Orsini estate. Felice might have taken it on herself to supply her personally with everything she needed, so she would no longer be reduced to sending fruitless begging letters.

In this account book Felice’s full name is latinized as ‘Felix Ruveris Ursinis’. This might not be so strange if the rest of the document were not written in Italian, and suggests that the assumption of this expression of her name is a deliberate choice on Felice’s part. In Latin it has a very masculine ring: ‘The Fortunate One of the Oak and the Bear’. The name denotes strength, durability and ferocity – qualities surpassed only by her father’s
terribilità
. It is not the name of someone to cross and an excellent name for use in the context of business and politics. Felice was to exploit its resonance to its fullest.

Purchasing Palo was the shrewdest act Felice had yet undertaken. As a property-owner in her own right, with her identity and authority further enhanced, she was about to take yet another step in her career and become a political negotiator.

chapter 7

Vatican Ambassadress

The January
1509
purchase of Palo marks a point of maturity for Felice. She was now independently wealthy, and that autonomy garnered her greater respect among her peers. Her father saw that he could exploit the influence she now wielded for his own ends. Felice willingly colluded.

In the two years that had passed since Felice married Gian Giordano, Julius had continued to implement his plans and ambitions. He had carried on with his work renovating the Vatican Palace. Bramante had built ceremonial staircases, designed a great window in the main throne room, the Sala Regia, and made progress on the construction of New St Peter’s. The stormiest relationship ever between an artist and a patron, that between Michelangelo and Julius, also gave birth to extraordinary works of art. Julius had lost interest in his tomb project but in
1508
he did set Michelangelo to work on new decorations for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the masterpiece of his uncle Sixtus IV’s reign whose ceiling was now cracking.

That same year, Julius brought Michelangelo’s greatest rival to Rome, the twenty-five-year-old painter Raphael of Urbino, who was, coincidentally, the same age as Felice. The young artist, who grew up at the Montefeltro court, had already taken Florence by storm with his exquisite rendition of the Virgin and Child, redefining the word
sprezzatura
. It gave Julius tremendous satisfaction to steal him from the city whose beauty he was deter-mined Rome would surpass. But Julius wanted Raphael’s skills for his private pleasure: he had no desire to live in the apartments belonging to his predecessor Alexander VI. Their decorations, by the Sienese painter Pinturicchio, consisted of stories from the Old and New Testament with the participants in the guise of members of the Borgia family. Pinturiccho depicted the blonde-haired Lucrezia as St Catherine, her brother Cesare as a Turk, and Alexander as King Solomon. Julius had absolutely no intention of looking up into their faces every day. Instead of simply continuing to live in the same rooms, and have Pinturicchio’s work painted over, he decided to move out of them entirely. He had Bramante perform structural work on older papal chambers, known simply as the
Stanze
(rooms). Raphael was to adorn them with frescos symbolically illustrating all the great achievements and dreams of his reign.
¹
Among these are
Parnassus
, where Apollo and the Muses sit among scholars and philosophers from Homer to Dante. The multi-figured
School of Athens
includes Bramante depicted as Euclid, Michelangelo as the melancholic Heraclitus, and Leonardo da Vinci as Plato. Raphael himself peers out from the far right-hand corner.

The fruits of Julius’s aesthetic vision still endure. His political programme was, however, much more problematic. Outside Rome, Julius’s political fortunes waxed and waned. He had had an astonishingly easy victory when he removed the Bentivoglio family from Bologna in
1506
. This was in part because the family had made itself unpopular and many citizens of Bologna welcomed his arrival to liberate them from its tyranny. However, the Bolognese proved fickle, and Julius had to fight several times over before he finally subdued the Bentivoglio.

Perhaps Julius’s greatest success, primarily a result of his matrimonial strategies, was the
1511
Pax Romana
– The Roman Peace. The
Pax
, signed on
28
August
1511
, was a treaty between the barons and the citizens of Rome. Its most important signatories were, needless to say, members of the Colonna and Orsini families. Giulio Orsini signed for Gian Giordano, who was absent in France. Their names were joined by those of others from the thirteen Roman districts, including such Roman families as the Savelli and the Massimo. All promised to dedicate themselves ‘to the honour and exaltation of His Holiness Our Lord Pope Julius II, and to the Holy Mother Church...to peace, quiet and good living in the fair city of Rome, our communal
patria
’.
²
While tensions still continued between the barons, Rome gradually ceased to be torn apart from the inside. This relative peace made for an easier existence for Julius and his successors within the city of Rome. A special kind of maiolica, pottery ware, was created to commemorate the peace. This became known as Orsini–Colonna ware and depicted a bear, the Orsini emblem, embracing a column (
colonna
) with the inscription ‘we shall be friends’.

Julius had arranged Felice’s marriage to Gian Giordano Orsini as a means of making peace in Rome. But Felice had made her own contribution to baronial accord two years before the
Pax Romana
, in
1509
, when she had negotiated an
entente
between the Orsini and Savelli families. The Orsini and Savelli were not especially bitter enemies, but Savelli inclinations to ally with the Colonna had caused hostility between the families. Felice, however, had befriended one Savelli family member, Portia, who was married to her brother-in-law Carlo Orsini. It was perhaps through Portia that Felice had engineered a concord on which the Mantuan ambassador reported on
24
April
1509
. He described how representatives of the two families had appeared ‘in front of the Pope, vowing to quarrel no more. In return, any penalties [for fighting] they had incurred would be dropped. As a guarantee that this peace would be respected, they will deposit
100
,
000
ducats, supplied by certain cardinals, as well as by lords who are their friends, and the people of Rome.’
3

Felice’s work with the Savelli had coincided with another, much more dangerous, piece of negotiation, when she had contrived to prevent the Orsini forming an alliance with Venice. The Venetian Republic had been a thorn in Julius’s side ever since he took the papal tiara. The Venetians consistently challenged papal power and overrode and superseded clerical appointments instituted by Julius. He had been particularly angered by their refusal to appoint one of his nephews, Bartolomeo della Rovere, as Archbishop of Padua in
1508
following the death of his brother, Galeotto Franciotto della Rovere, in whose bed Felice and Gian Giordano had consummated their marriage. By
1510
, the Venetians had also begun to assert themselves militarily. They were conscious of the threat of Turkish aggression from the east, and from the north-west the possibility of a French invasion. They wanted to arm and defend themselves. Julius had no desire to see Italy invaded by either side, nor did he want any military action in Italy unless it was under his command, and he disliked the self-assertiveness of the Venetian Republic. He decided to join the international, anti-Venetian League of Cambrai, whose other members were Louis XII of France, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian, and the Spanish Ferdinand of Aragon.
⁴

In early
1509
, the Venetians readied themselves for war against the League. As was common in military practice at this time, they not only had their troops captained by members of the Venetian Republic, they also hired
condottieri
from elsewhere in Italy to augment their capabilities. They entered into negotiations with Giulio Orsini and Gian Giordano’s son-in-law, Renzo da Ceri, to serve as military commanders in their war. This situation angered Julius and embarrassed Gian Giordano. The Orsini, through Gian Giordano’s marriage to Felice, were supposedly papal allies and from Julius’s perspective such an alliance did not allow them to go to war on behalf of the state that Julius had deemed an enemy. Gian Giordano, a long-standing servant of the French crown, was equally uncomfortable with his relatives’ choice of new employer. However, there was a reason why
condottieri
were called ‘mercenaries’ in English. Their services went to the highest bidder and political loyalty, if it was a factor at all, was a secondary consideration for them. There was no denying that Orsini family finances were still in some degree of disarray following the conflicts with the Borgia. Not having shared Gian Giordano’s French income, Giulio and Renzo did not share his loyalty to the French. And even though he was head of the Bracciano clan, Gian Giordano was in no position to forbid his relatives to take Venetian pay.

Gian Giordano found himself in a decided quandary. He did not want his family to appear less than united, nor did he want conflict with his father-in-law, or with his French patrons. It was his wife, Felice, who allowed him to save face. She acted as the means by which his Orsini relatives were prevented from serving as mercenaries for Venice.

On
1
April
1509
, Julius called a meeting at the Vatican with the two bankers, Agostino da Sandro and Bonvixi, who were responsible for paying out the Venetian salaries of the Orsini
condottieri
. He then absented himself, and the discussion took place with the bankers ‘by way of Madonna Felice’ to ensure the rest of the money promised them did not reach the Orsini.
⁵
Felice then ‘stayed the night at the palace, with an armed guard’. Clearly, with such delicate and potentially volatile negotiations taking place, it was too dangerous for her to return that night to the palace of Monte Giordano and run the risk of being abducted or even assassinated.

Having stalled Orsini access to the Venetian funds, Felice then approached the Orsini themselves. News of what took place between the two sides came to Venice by way of a courier, Mafio: ‘From the mouth of this courier,’ Marino Sanuto reported, ‘there came news of the Orsini and it is not good. They have reached an agreement with the Pope and the cause of this is Madonna Felice, daughter of the Pope, wife of Gian Giordano Orsini. She went to find these Orsini and had them reconcile with the Pope, and they have returned the
16
,
000
ducats they had from our orators.’
⁶