The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (36 page)

‘
To teach the Pope a lesson he would
never forget
’

A
S OFTEN
as he could Pope Leo rode out of Rome to the Villa Magliana, his country house on the road to Porto. Here, continuing to use the advice of the court physicians as his excuse for a flagrant breach of canon law, he indulged to the full his passion for hunting, hawking and ferreting. Huge tracts of land around the villa were reserved for his use. In the grounds an immense netted enclosure was filled with the doves, jays and herons which provided the hawks with their prey, and there was also a
conigliare
well stocked with rabbits for the ferrets.

At the Villa Magliana, where the Pope would remain for six weeks at a time, he abandoned his stole and rochet, and to the consternation of the papal master of ceremonies actually put on ‘long riding boots, which is most improper, seeing that the people consequently cannot kiss the Pope’s feet’. His poor eyesight did not permit him to participate in the early stages of the hunt, so he rode out on his favourite white horse to watch the killing through his spy-glass from a high mound or specially constructed platform.

The ground to be hunted had already been sealed off by tall strips of tough sail-cloth attached to poles. To prevent any animals inside the pen escaping into nearby thickets or marshes, soldiers of the Swiss guard and mounted gamekeepers assisted by peasants were drawn up in ranks around it. When the grooms holding the greyhounds and mastiffs in leash were ready, and the cardinals, gentlemen
the papal court and all their friends had also taken up their positions, the Pope raised a white handkerchief as a signal for the horn to be sounded. Then the under-keepers, shouting, blowing trumpets and exploding charges of gunpowder, entered the pen and began to drive the game towards a gap in the canvas screen. Soon a torrent of animals came rushing out into the open, stags and boars, hares and rabbits, wolves, goats and porcupines. The waiting sportsmen would then eagerly fall upon their chosen target with spear or sword, axe or halberd, or gallop away after the greyhounds in pursuit of any animal that might have escaped their swinging blades.

The Pope would watch these scenes of slaughter through his glass, laughing at the antics of Fra Mariano, who would usually contrive to get into some sort of ludicrous difficulty, or admiring the strength of the enormous Cardinal Sanseverino who, on these occasions, habitually wore a lion skin across his shoulders. If an animal became entangled in a net or rope, the Pope would then proceed closer and, holding his glass to his left eye and taking up a spear, he would kill the struggling creature, cheerfully acknowledging the congratulations of his attendants.

The Pope especially enjoyed one day, according to the poet Guido Silvester. It was a day of many accidents. First a member of the papal court killed a hound in mistake for a wolf, which appears to have much amused the Pope when shown the result of the man’s stupidity. Then there was a fight over the carcass of a boar in which one of the disputants lost an eye. Finally one of Cardinal Cornaro’s kennel-men, notorious for his drunkenness, made a lunge with his spear at a wounded boar running for safety into the woods, missed his aim, killed his favourite hound, and, infuriated, threw himself onto the back of the boar which he tried to throttle. The boar shook the drunkard from his back and gored him to death. His companion carried the body back to Cardinal Cornaro who ordered the face to be washed with the best old wine while he composed an epitaph to commemorate his servant’s fate. As the Pope rode back, followed by the carcasses slain, he was heard to observe, ‘What a glorious day!’

To his description of these violent events, Guido Silvester adds the comment that after such a day’s hunting, the Pope would invariably
be in so good a mood that he would happily agree to anything that was proposed to him, sign documents with contented smiles, grant requests with genial words; whereas a bad day’s hunting would produce only growls and complaints. A courtier or churchman with some special favour to ask would accordingly wait until the Pope’s return from a successful hunt in the Campagna, or from a happy day’s fishing in the artificial salt-water lake he had had constructed near Ostia, or from a visit to Cardinal Farnese’s estate at Viterbo where pheasants, partridges and quails could be bagged in their thousands and flocks of ortolans, thrushes, larks and goldfinches could be snared in the cardinal’s
uccellari
.

Well liked as the Pope was by those country people upon whom he extravagantly bestowed his largesse when riding out to hunt or fish, and by those churchmen and members of his court to whom he had granted some ambitious request, there were cardinals in Rome who had cause to feel dissatisfied with his behaviour. The costly war with Urbino was not the only Medicean cause which was straining the resources of the papal treasury; nor, when it became plain that Leo was attempting to arrange a marriage between his nephew, Lorenzo, and a French princess, was Francesco Soderini the only cardinal who felt outraged by a broken promise.

Cardinal Raffaele Riario had never forgiven the Pope for driving his kinsman Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino to provide a duchy for the wretched Lorenzo; nor had Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci overcome the anger that had swept over him when Leo had helped to remove his brother Borghese Petrucci from the governorship of Siena. They and many other cardinals had been further offended when Leo raised to the cardinalate various intimate friends and relations, ignoring the claims of more worthy members of their own families. Within months of his election he gave Bernardo Dovizi a scarlet hat; he also gave one to another Tuscan friend, Lorenzo Pucci; a third went to his nephew, Lorenzo Cibò. And, so as to do equal honour to Giulio de’ Medici, whom he had already appointed Archbishop of Florence, he established a commission to inquire into the
circumstances of his cousin’s birth, making it clear enough to its members that he wished them to find – as dutifully they did find – that his uncle, Giuliano, had been secretly married to Simonetta Gorini and that Giulio was their legitimate son. This might not have been so objectionable had Giulio been better liked; but as Francesco Guicciardini observed

he was rather morose and disagreeable, disinclined to grant a favour, reputedly avaricious and very grave and cautious in all his actions. Perfectly self-controlled, he would have been highly capable had not timidity made him shrink from what he should have done.

By no one in the Sacred College was Giulio more disliked than by Alfonso Petrucci, the handsome, arrogant, dissolute, twenty-two-year-old cardinal whom the Pope had so deeply offended by interfering in his family’s affairs at Siena. His outspoken attacks on Leo, whom he had helped to elect, met with a good deal of sympathy in Rome, particularly from Cardinals Riario and Soderini, from Petrucci’s rich young friend, Cardinal Sauli, and from Cardinal Adriano Castellesi, formerly Cardinal Protector of England. Castellesi had no family grudge against the Pope, but he was said to have taken so seriously the prophecies of a soothsayer, who foretold that the next pope would be ‘Adrian, a learned man of humble birth’, that he had conceived it his sacred duty to do all he could to bring about the prophecy’s fulfilment as soon as possible.

It was at first decided that the easiest way to dispose of the present Pope would be to pay an assassin to stab him while he was out hunting. But then a more subtle plan was devised: His Holiness would be dispatched by means of poisoned bandages which a quack doctor from Vercelli, aided by Petrucci’s secretary and a Sienese friend of his, would in some way find reason to apply to the Pope’s anal fistula. Having satisfied himself of the likely efficacy of this complicated plot, Petrucci left to discuss its consequences with Francesco Maria della Rovere, the deposed Duke of Urbino. In his absence the conspiracy was uncovered through the indiscretions of a page; and the quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his Sienese friend were all handed over to the attentions of the papal rack-master.

Soon afterwards Petrucci was asked to return to Rome to discuss certain matters with the Pope who at the same time sent him promise of safe conduct. Either trusting in this guarantee, or supposing that the Pope had repented of his previous conduct to his family, the ingenuous Petrucci returned immediately to Rome where, in company with Cardinal Sauli, he presented himself at the Vatican. Both men were promptly arrested and thrown into ‘the most horrible dungeon’ of Sant’ Angelo, Petrucci cursing the treacherous Leo at the top of his voice, Sauli furiously tearing his rochet to pieces. Like their minions, they, too, were tortured on the rack. Their confessions having been duly elicited, orders were given for the arrest of Cardinal Riario, who was discovered in a state of such abject terror that he had to be carried to his place of confinement in a litter.

Rather than arrest the other sympathizers with Petrucci’s plot, the Pope now convoked the consistory, before whom he appeared in so unaccustomed a rage that some of his audience believed him to be playing a part in order to intimidate them. His obese body trembling and his voice so loud that it could be heard ringing round the adjoining corridors, he demanded the names of the other guilty men. Cardinal Soderini and Cardinal Castellesi both confessed their knowledge of the conspiracy, and knelt in humble submission at the Pope’s feet.

Castellesi managed to escape from Rome and disappeared into oblivion. Soderini, having paid a vast fine which helped to settle some of Leo’s more pressing debts, thought it best to follow Castellesi’s example. Riario was relieved of a sum even greater than that taken from Soderini and went to live in Naples. Sauli, who had powerful friends in France as well as in Italy, was allowed to leave his dungeon and to live under house arrest at Monte Rotondo, where he died in mysterious circumstances the next year. Petrucci was executed in his dungeon by the Pope’s Muslim hangman who either strangled him or cut off his head. The Vercelli quack, Petrucci’s secretary and his friend, were dragged by horses through the Roman streets; gouts of flesh having been nipped from their bodies with red-hot pincers, they were then gibbeted on the parapet of the bridge of Sant’ Angelo.

Although his finances had been much improved by the huge fines imposed on Riario and Soderini, the Pope still felt it necessary to bring in further sums of money to his treasury by creating numerous new cardinals to fill up the vacant places in the Sacred College, and by requiring the richer of those elected to make suitable contributions. Money, however, was not Leo’s only reason for the creation of thirty-one new cardinals. He hoped to create a far more reliable College than its predecessor, and one that would raise no objections to the advancement of Medicean interests. So, while there were several worthy men on the Pope’s list, there were also those who had been selected for more selfish reasons. Among these were young princes of the royal houses of France and Portugal; Ercole Rangone, the son of Bianca Rangone of Modena, Leo’s former benefactress; Pompeo Colonna, whose unruliness it was hoped a scarlet hat might serve to moderate; two Florentine nephews, Niccolò Ridolfi and Giovanni Salviati; and a third Florentine relation, Luigi Rossi.

With the Sacred College thus conveniently packed with Medici friends and relations and those who had cause to be grateful to the Medici, the Pope felt that the time was now propitious for the marriage of his nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de la Tour Auvergne, cousin of Francis I, King of France. Accordingly, in March the next year, 1518, Lorenzo was sent north across the Alps with an immense train of crimson-clad attendants and his uncle’s lavish presents, amongst which were to be found thirty-six horses and an astonishing nuptial bed made of tortoise-shell inlaid with mother-of-pearl and enriched by precious stones.

Much as they were impressed by the evident riches of his family, the denizens of the French court were far from struck with the Duke of Urbino himself, whose arrogant nature they found objectionable and whose physique at the age of twenty-five was now pitiable. After a few months of marriage, indeed, it became evident that the Duke did not have much longer to live. Nor, as it happened, did his wife. She died at the end of April 1519 soon after the birth of a daughter, who was christened Caterina and was one day to be Queen of France. Her husband died a few days later of tuberculosis aggravated by syphilis. Even in the villas of Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, where he
had spent the last months of his life in the company of a Pistoian secretary and another male companion of sinister reputation, there was little evidence of grief.

Ever since Lorenzo had returned from France, the Florentines had been grumbling about his increasingly lordly manner, his political ambitions that enfeebled health had in no way diminished, his mismanagement of the city’s finances and the influence of his haughty, greedy and domineering mother, Alfonsina, whose interests were wholly bound up in her son and whose death in Rome eight months after his was received with as little sorrow.