The Borgias and Their Enemies 1431–1519 Christopher Hibbert Table of Contents Front Cover Title Page Table of Contents ... Copyright Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 29 Bibliography Index Harcourt, Inc. Orlando Austin New York San Diego London Copyright © 2008 by Christopher Hibbert and Mary Hollingsworth All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. www.HarcourtBooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hibbert, Christopher, 1924– The Borgias and their enemies: 1431–1519/Christopher Hibbert.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Borgia family. 2. Italy—History—15th century. 3. Italy—History— 1492–1559. 4. Nobility—Italy—Biography. I. Title. DG463.8.B7H53 2008 945'.050922—dc22 2008003076 ISBN 978-0-15-101033-2 Text set in Requiem Text Designed by Lydia D'moch Printed in the United States of America First edition A C E G I K J H F D B Contents C 1 The Crumbling City [>] HAPTER C 2 Elections and Celebrations [>] HAPTER C 3 A Man of Endless Virility [>] HAPTER C 4 Servant of the Servant of God [>] HAPTER C 5 Marriages and Alliances [>] HAPTER C 6 The French in Rome [>] HAPTER C 7 The Conquest of Naples [>] HAPTER C 8 The Borgia Bull [>] HAPTER C 9 Father and Children [>] HAPTER C 10 The Dominican Friar [>] HAPTER C 11 Murder [>] HAPTER C 12 Another Husband for Lucrezia [>] HAPTER C 13 The Unwanted Cardinal's Hat [>] HAPTER C 14 Cesare's French Bride [>] HAPTER C 15 Conquests [>] HAPTER C 16 Jubilee [>] HAPTER C 17 Duke of the Romagna [>] HAPTER C 18 The Naples Campaign [>] HAPTER C 19 The Duke and the Borgia Girl [>] HAPTER C 20 Frolics and Festivities [>] HAPTER C 21 The New Bride [>] HAPTER C 22 Castles and Condottieri [>] HAPTER C 23 The Death of the Pope [>] HAPTER C 24 Conclaves [>] HAPTER C 25 Cesare at Bay [>] HAPTER C 26 Duchess of Ferrara [>] HAPTER C 27 The End of the Affair [>] HAPTER C 28 The Death of the Duchess [>] HAPTER C 29 Saints and Sinners [>] HAPTER Bibliography [>] Index [>] Chapter 1 The Crumbling City "OH GOD, HOW PITIABLE IS ROME" "YOU MUST HAVE heard of this city from others," wrote a visitor to Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century. There are many splendid palaces, houses, tombs and temples here, and infinite numbers of other edifices, but they are all in ruins. There is much porphyry and marble from ancient buildings but every day these marbles are destroyed in a scandalous fashion by being burned to make lime. And what is modern is poor stuff.... The men of today, who call themselves Romans, are very different in bearing and conduct from the ancient inhabitants.... They all look like cowherds. Other visitors wrote of moss-covered statues, of defaced and indecipherable inscriptions, of "parts within the walls that look like thick woods or caves where forest animals were wont to breed, of deer and hares being caught in the streets ... of the daily sight of heads and limbs of men who had been executed and quartered being nailed to doors, placed in cages or impaled on spears." This was the state of the city that had once been the capital of a mighty empire; now two-thirds of the area inside the walls, which had been built to protect a population of 800,000, was uninhabited, acres of open countryside used for orchards, pasture, and vineyards, and dotted with ancient ruins, which provided safe hiding places for thieves and bandits. And this was the state of the true home of the pope, the leader of the church who could trace his predecessors back in an unbroken line to St. Peter, the apostle entrusted by Christ himself with the care of his flock. For most of the fourteenth century, even the papacy had abandoned Rome. In 1305, distressed by the unrest and bloody disturbances in the city, the French Pope Clement V (1305–14) had set up his court in Avignon, in the rambling palace on the east bank of the Rhône, which is known as the Palais des Papes. In Rome there had been constant calls for the papacy to return from its French exile. Most recently these calls had come from an elderly woman, who could be seen almost every day in the crumbling city, sitting by the door of the convent of San Lorenzo, begging for alms for the poor. She was Birgitta Gudmarsson, the daughter of a rich Swedish judge and widow of a Swedish nobleman, to whom she had been married at the age of thirteen and for whom she had borne eight children. Founder of the Brigittines, she had left Sweden after experiencing a vision in which Christ had appeared before her, commanding her to leave immediately for Rome and to remain there until she had witnessed the pope's return. As she went about Rome, from church to crumbling church, house to ruinous house, she claimed to have had further visions; both Jesus and his mother Mary, she said, had spoken to her, and they had strengthened her faith in the restoration of the pope and in the eventual salvation of the city. Around the house where she lived stretched the charred shells of burned-out buildings, piles of rotting refuse, deserted palaces, derelict churches, stagnant swamps, fortresses abandoned by their rich owners, who had gone to live on their estates in the Campagna, hovels occupied by families on the verge of starvation. Pilgrims took home with them stories of a gloomy city, whose silence was broken only by the howling of dogs and wolves, and the shouts of rampaging mobs. In Avignon the popes remained deaf to the calls for their return, heedless of the prayers that the saintly Birgitta Gudmarsson uttered so fervently and of the letters that the poet Francesco Petrarch wrote, describing the "rubbish heap of history" that Rome had become. This once-superb imperial capital was now a lawless ruin, a city torn by violence in which belligerent factions paraded through the streets with daggers and swords, where houses were invaded and looted by armed bands, pilgrims and travellers were robbed, nuns violated in their convents, and long lines of flagellants filed through the gates, barefoot, their heads covered in cowls, claiming board and lodging but offering no money, scourging their naked bloody backs, chanting frightening hymns outside churches, throwing themselves weeping, moaning, bleeding before the altars. Goats nibbled at the weeds growing up between the stones littering the piazzas and flourishing in the overgrown, rat-infested ruins of the Campo Marzio; cattle grazed by the altars of roofless churches; robbers lurked in the narrow alleys; at night wolves fought with dogs beneath the walls of St. Peter's and dug up corpses in the nearby Campo Santo. "Oh God, how pitiable is Rome," an English visitor lamented, "once she was filled with great nobles and palaces, now with huts, wolves and vermin; and the Romans themselves tear each other to pieces." In 1362, while Petrarch was urging the papacy to return to Rome, a sixth Frenchman was elected to the line of Avignon popes: the austere and unworldly Urban V. Encouraged by Emperor Charles IV, who offered to accompany him, he recognized the necessity of return, not only for the sake of the neglected and decaying city but also for the papacy itself, now in danger at Avignon, both from the mercenary bands roaming throughout western Europe as well as from the English, who were fighting the French in wars that were to last intermittently for a hundred years. Five years after his election, Urban V travelled across the Alps, knelt in prayer before the grave of St. Peter, and took up residence in the stuffy, dismal rooms that had been prepared for him in the Vatican Palace. His visit to Rome, however, was brief. He found the city even more dilapidated and depressing than he had feared; and, feeling that he could undertake the role of mediator between England and France more effectively from Avignon than from Rome, he went back to France in 1370. Having ignored Birgitta Gudmarsson's warning that he would die if he abandoned the city, he then fulfilled her prophecy by expiring within just a few months of his return to the Palais des Papes. It was his successor, Gregory XI, another Frenchman and the last of the Avignon popes, who finally moved the Curia back to Rome, fearful that the Church and her estates in Italy would be lost to the papacy forever. He died there, however, in March 1378, little more than a year after his return, and his death provoked a papal election of extraordinary animosity. Terrified by the Roman mob, which had invaded the Vatican during the course of the conclave, the cardinals chose the Neapolitan Bartolomeo Prignano, who took the title of Urban VI. The French cardinals, however, refused to accept him, declaring the election invalid and electing their own candidate, a Frenchman, naturally, Clement VII. The Great Schism had begun; the lame and wall-eyed Clement VII returned to Avignon, while the rough and energetic Urban VI remained in Rome. By now it was not just the sight of the city, little more than a decayed provincial town, that distressed visitors. Corruption was rife in the Church and shocked the pilgrims who came to Rome to receive indulgences, which were now being dispensed on an unprecedented scale. Abandoning in despair their attempts to form a strong and stable political state, the Romans allowed Urban VI's successor, the clever and avaricious Boniface IX, another Neapolitan, to assume full control of their city, to turn the Vatican as well as the enlarged Castel Sant'Angelo into fortified strongholds, and to appoint his relations and friends to positions of power and profit. On his death in 1404, fear of the powerful Kingdom of Naples led to the election of another pontiff known to be on good terms with the king: the ineffective Innocent VII from the Abruzzi, against whom the Romans roused themselves to revolt in a tragic uprising that was to end in humiliating retreat; and after the death of Innocent VII in 1406, the election of Gregory XII, a Venetian who seemed disposed to come to terms with the anti-pope in Avignon, led to the invasion of Rome in 1413 by the king of Naples, who was determined not to lose his influence by ending the Great Schism. Meanwhile, a fresh attempt had been started to end the schism, which had divided Europe, by summoning a council of the Church at Pisa. The council's solution was to charge both the Avignon and Roman popes with heresy and to depose them. In their place the council elected a cardinal from the island of Crete, Petros Philargos, who took the title of Alexander V and who promptly adjourned the council, whose decision was, in any case, not recognized by either of his rivals. There were now three popes instead of two, each claiming legitimate descent from St. Peter and each of whom excommunicated the others. A second attempt to disentangle the imbroglio was now made by Emperor Sigismund, who summoned another Church council at Constance. By this time a new pope had appeared on the scene in the unlikely person of Baldassare Cossa, successor of Alexander V, the pope chosen at Pisa, whom he was widely supposed to have murdered. Once a pirate and then a dissolute soldier, John XXIII was sensual, unscrupulous, and extremely superstitious. He came from an old Neapolitan family and established himself in Rome with the help of a mutually suspicious alliance with the king of Naples. On June 8, 1413, in breach of their understanding, the king attacked Rome, driving the pope out of the city. John XXIII fled with his court along the Via Cassia, beside which several prelates died of exhaustion and the rest were robbed by their own mercenaries. Yet again, the city behind them was plundered. The Neapolitan soldiers, unchecked by their commander, set fire to houses, looted the sacristy of St. Peter's, stabled their horses in this ancient basilica, ransacked sanctuaries and churches, and sat down amid their loot with prostitutes, drinking wine from consecrated chalices. John XXIII travelled to the council at Constance, where he found himself accused of all manner of crimes, including heresy, simony, tyranny, murder, and the seduction of some two hundred ladies of Bologna. After escaping from Constance in the guise of a soldier of fortune, he was recognized, betrayed, and brought back to face the council, which deposed both him and the Avignon pope and which, once the Germans and the English had united with the Italians to keep out the French, managed to elect a new pope, the Roman Martin V. Martin V was a member of the Colonna family, one of the old baronial dynasties of Rome. When he returned to the city in 1420 under a purple baldachin, jesters danced before him and the people ran through the streets with flaming torches, shouting their welcome long into the night. He was to reign in Rome for over ten years, followed by two more Italians, Eugenius IV and Nicholas V. There was hope at last that a new age was dawning for the city. Nicholas V, who had been elected in 1447, in appearance at least looked peculiarly unsuited for his role as the champion of this new age. Small, pale, and withered, he walked with stooped shoulders, his bright black eyes darting nervous glances around him. But no one doubted either his generosity or his kindliness, just as all those who knew him praised his piety and his learning: "He owed his distinction not to his birth," wrote one contemporary, "but to his erudition and intellectual qualities." They also praised his determination to reconcile the Church with the secular culture of the burgeoning Renaissance, sending his agents all over Europe and beyond in his search for manuscripts of the literary and theoretical works of antiquity, many of which were preserved in monastic libraries, and then generously rewarding the humanist scholars who translated and copied these ancient texts. The Rome of Nicholas V, however, was still a crumbling, dirty medieval city, bitterly cold in winter, when the tramontana blew across the frozen marshes, unhealthy in summer when malaria was rife. The inhabitants, a large proportion of them foreigners and many of the rest born outside the city, numbered no more than 40,000, less than a twentieth of the population that had lived in Rome in the days of Emperor Nero. The city was small also by the standards of the time—Florence had a population of 50,000, whereas Venice, one of the largest cities in Europe, could boast over 100,000 inhabitants. Rome, however, was the true heart of the Christian world, and those who made the long pilgrimage there each year provided the city with its one highly profitable trade. At the beginning of 1449, Nicholas V proclaimed a Holy Year for 1450, and the surge of pilgrims who came to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee brought immense profits to the Church—not least from the sale of indulgences. So much money, in fact, that Nicholas V was able to deposit 100,000 golden sovereigns in the Medici bank and to continue confidently with his plans to restore the city. In the judgement of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the cardinal of Siena, "he built magnificent edifices in his city, though he started more than he finished." The focus of Nicholas V's new Christian capital was St. Peter's, the church built by Emperor Constantine over the tomb of the first pope and restored by Nicholas. He also moved his official residence from the Lateran to the Vatican Palace, and the influx of artists who came to Rome to work on his projects was soon to make the city a leading centre for goldsmiths and silversmiths, as well as painters and sculptors. It also became home for a time to Fra Angelico, who decorated Nicholas V's lovely private chapel in the Vatican with scenes from the lives of two early Christian martyrs, St. Stephen and St. Laurence. This small and saintly Dominican friar knelt to pray before starting to paint each morning and was so overcome with emotion when painting Christ upon the Cross that tears poured down his cheeks. Chapter 2 Elections and Celebrations "THERE WAS NOT A PLACE WHERE HORNS AND TRUMPETS DID NOT SOUND" SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH of Nicholas V, on March 24, 1455, there was held in Rome the annual ceremony of the Exposition of the Vernicle, the handkerchief that was alleged to have belonged to St. Veronica. Tradition had it that when she wiped the sweat from Christ's face on his way to Calvary, his features were miraculously impressed upon her handkerchief. A few days later those cardinals resident in Rome, and such others as had been able to reach the city in time, took part in the magnificent procession, accompanied by the papal choir intoning the hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus," from St. Peter's to the Vatican, where they would choose Nicholas V's successor. Trumpets sounded; drums were beaten; the cardinals entered the apartments where the conclave was to take place; the doors were locked; the entrances bricked up; and the discussions and arguments began. Hour after hour the talks went on. Promises were made, veiled threats issued, bribes offered. Night fell and no decision was reached. No agreement was possible between the mutually antagonistic candidates supported by the rival Roman barons, the Colonna and Orsini families. Many hoped for the election of the elderly, frail John Bessarion, who suffered excruciatingly from kidney stones, a common complaint of the time. He was a distinguished theologian and humanist who had been brought up as a member of the Orthodox Church but had recently converted to Rome. "Shall we give the Latin Church to a Greek Pope?" asked one of the French cardinals in the conclave. "How can we be sure that his conversion is sincere?" he added. "Shall he be the leader of the Christian army?" At length a compromise was proposed: it was decided to support the candidature of a man who would probably not live long. The names of two elderly candidates emerged in the discussions; both were considered unobjectionable, although both were unfortunately Spaniards and, therefore, not likely to prove a popular choice with the Roman people, notoriously hostile to the Catalans, as Spaniards were generally known. Of these two, the less objectionable was the modest and scholarly bishop of Valencia, and it was he who was eventually chosen to succeed Nicholas V. Again the trumpets in the piazza of St. Peter's sounded; a cloud of smoke rose into the sky as a signal that the conclave had come to a conclusion, and it was greeted with shouts by the large crowd gathered there; the recently erected brickwork was knocked down. The doors opened and the dean of the college of cardinals appeared to announce the conclave's decision: "I proclaim to you great joy," he said, "we have a new pope, Lord Alfonso de Borja, Bishop of Valencia; he desires to be known as Calixtus the Third." The Borjas, or Borgias as they were known in Italy, were a family of some consequence in Spain, descended, as they claimed, from the ancient royal House of Aragon. Alfonso, born in 1378, was the son of the owner of an estate at Játiva near Valencia; he had studied and then taught law at Lérida and, at the age of thirty-eight, had been appointed to the prestigious post of private secretary to King Alfonso V of Aragon, in whose service he was to remain for forty-two years. He helped to arrange the abdication of the anti-pope Clement VIII, thus paving the way for the ending of the Great Schism, and was given the bishopric of Valencia as a reward for his services. In 1442 he moved to Naples, still in the service of his king, who had conquered the city to become Alfonso I of Naples. As the king's private secretary, he was closely involved in the negotiations to reconcile his master with Pope Eugenius IV, who rewarded Alfonso Borgia with a cardinal's hat and the splendid titular Church of Santi Quattro Coronati. By the time of the conclave of April 1455, he was living in Rome, an austere, modest, and increasingly gouty old man in his late seventies, in such poor health that it was doubted that he would survive the arduous ceremonies of his coronation. These involved a long service in St. Peter's during which he would receive from the cardinal archdeacon the Triple Crown and Cross, the Keys, and the Mantle of Jurisdiction. This coronation would be followed by a long procession to the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano, where, in another lengthy ceremony, the new pope would be enthroned as bishop of Rome. The procession from St. Peter's to the Lateran, known as the possesso, was one of the most colourful and, to the Roman populace, exciting sights that the city had to offer. Vatican guards and choristers, preceded by falconers with their hawks and rat catchers with dogs to clear the vermin from the low-lying land by the Tiber, marched along the streets, followed by the bearers of sweet-smelling herbs. Then came the officials of the government of Rome, the bishops and cardinals, and, finally, Pope Calixtus III himself, riding a saddle horse beneath a canopy of gold supported by dignitaries and escorted by lancers and foot soldiers, to keep at a distance the importunate crowds of sightseers. Waiting as the procession approached Monte Giordano stood a rabbi together with a crowd of his fellow Jews, who, as custom dictated, offered the pope a bejewelled copy of the Torah, the book of the Jewish laws. Calixtus III accepted it, then threw it to the ground with the traditional words, "This is the law we know; but we do not accept your interpretation of it." As he spoke, a number of onlookers scrambled to take possession of the book beneath the palfrey and the horses of the guards. By the steps of the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano, Calixtus III knelt down submissively, as his white-and-gold vestments were removed to be replaced by a black soutane. He raised his hands in a gesture of benediction as a fight broke out, as it so often did, between the rival supporters of the constantly feuding Orsini and Colonna families. No sooner had he been elected, the new pope now set his heart upon the organization of a crusade that would free Constantinople from the grip of the Turks, who had captured the city in May 1453. "He vowed to focus all his efforts against the heretic Turks," wrote Enea Silvio Piccolomini, whom Calixtus III created the cardinal of Siena, "giving absolution for the sins of all who enlisted." The pope's determination surprised many; it was well known that he was suffering increasingly from painful attacks of gout, and it had been expected that he would continue to live a quiet and pious life in the Vatican, rather than embark on such an ambitious venture. Money was raised by the imposition of taxes and by the selling of works of art, including the precious book bindings that had been bought at such expense by Nicholas V; Calixtus III went so far as to pawn his own mitre and sent numerous preachers armed with indulgences all over Europe; he also put a stop to various