Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (10 page)

By 4 May, Ludovico had learned – presumably from his ambassador Taberna – the cause of Sforza’s flight, namely Borgia threats. He was all the more surprised, therefore, to receive a request from the Pope to intervene to obtain Giovanni’s return to Rome. Puzzled, he pressed his nephew to tell him the exact reasons both for his abrupt departure from Rome and his refusal to return there; he must do so either by letter or orally if it seemed to him something which should not be committed to paper. He promised Giovanni that he would not force him to return to Rome.
¹⁵
Giovanni, clearly still in a state of panic and confusion, assured Ludovico of his loyal gratitude but said that he was sending a trusted messenger to Rome to ask Alexander to permit Lucrezia to come to Pesaro, as was only reasonable, and that if the Pope later wanted them both to return to Rome he would be content to do so. The messenger was instructed to go then to Ludovico with the Pope’s answer and to explain to him why Giovanni was unwilling to return to Rome so that Ludovico would understand that he had good reason for his actions.
¹⁶
By I June, Ludovico had received letters from Ascanio in Rome informing him of the Pope’s fixed desire for a dissolution of the marriage. Giovanni rode to Urbino to consult Guidobaldo, who had been released after paying his own ransom, and returned to Pesaro ‘ill-content’. The arrival five days later of Fra Mariano, Alexander’s envoy, in Pesaro provoked Giovanni into a panic flight to consult with Ludovico in Milan. The Mantuan representative in Urbino, Silvestro Calandra, reported to Francesco Gonzaga on 6 June that he left ‘incognito, desperate and in a hurry’. Guidobaldo was sending a trusted servant to inform the Marquis ‘of the bad behaviour of the Pope to the damage and shame of Signor Giovanni . . .’
¹⁷
In another move of sinister purport to the Sforza interest, there were reports that the Pope had come to an agreement with Ascanio’s enemy and rival, Giuliano della Rovere, with whom he had been negotiating for some time, that della Rovere should come back to Rome from France with all his offences pardoned and his benefices restored.

Meanwhile Lucrezia, the victim at the eye of the storm, left the Vatican on 4 June accompanied by her household and took refuge with the nuns of the Dominican convent of San Sisto, a pattern of behaviour she repeated throughout her troubled life at times of particular pressure. No one seems to have penetrated the depths of her feelings at this time but they appear to have been rebellious. One observer
¹⁸
said that she had left her father ‘as an unwelcome guest’, in other words, she had quarrelled with the Pope, presumably over the divorce proceedings, another that she had parted from her husband some months ago ‘on unamicable terms’. From the distance of Urbino, Calandra reported that her father had sent the
bargello
(sheriff or constable of police) to fetch her out of the convent, but she did not leave.
¹⁹
Most probably she had gone there of her own accord, to escape from the tensions created by her father and brothers, both of whom had declared she should never return to Sforza. Reports of the divorce, and the reasons which were to be put forward for it, were already public, as the always well-informed Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo wrote. The Pope had sent Lucrezia to a convent – ‘it was said for two reasons: the first that, before he married her to the said lord of Pesaro, he had promised her to another lord in Spain [Procida]; secondly, it is said that since she was married the said lord has never consummated the marriage because he was impotent. And that he [the Pope] will undertake a process and then, if it was so, will dissolve the marriage . . .’
²⁰
Another report alleged that Juan Gandia would take her with him to Spain because of the divorce, and that the Pope was so set upon the dissolution of the marriage that he had even offered to allow Giovanni Sforza to keep Lucrezia’s dowry. Ascanio Sforza wrote to Ludovico on 14 June that the breach between Lucrezia and Giovanni was final, that the Pope, supported by Cesare and Juan, had declared that Lucrezia could not remain in the hands of such a man, that the marriage had never been consummated and could and should be annulled.
²¹
From Milan the Ferrarese Antonio Costabili wrote to his master, Duke Ercole, reporting that Giovanni Sforza had been there to implore Duke Ludovico to persuade the Pope to allow Lucrezia to return to him; this the Pope had refused to do on the grounds that he had never been able to consummate the marriage despite all the years they had spent together. ‘And when His Excellency asked him if this were true, he answered no. Rather, he had known her an infinite number of times. But the Pope had taken her away from him only in order to have her to himself and he expressed himself at length on the subject of His Holiness.’ Ludovico unkindly suggested to Giovanni that the Pope should send Lucrezia to the castle of Nepi, then in the hands of his brother Ascanio, where Giovanni could also go and consummate his marriage so that the Pope would restore her to him. Sforza declined the offer and still more the suggestion that he should prove himself ‘with Women’ in the presence of the papal legate. And given that he (Giovanni) refused both alternatives, il Moro asked him how they could say that he was impotent considering that he had made the sister of the Marquis of Mantua pregnant (Sforza’s late wife, Maddalena Gonzaga, had died in childbirth in 1490). To which he replied – ‘Your Excellency can see for yourself, they still say that I had her made pregnant by another.’ This, Costabili added, made Ludovico think that if the lord of Pesaro were to be given ‘two twists of the rope (
due tracti di corda
) he would confess to never having done anything either with the sister of the Marquis of Mantua or with this one [Lucrezia] because if he really was potent he would have wanted to give some proof of himself. This gave His Highness to believe that if Sforza was not constrained to give up the dowry, he would not put up much objection to the divorce.’
²²

Whatever the real truth – and only the Borgia inner circle knew it – Lucrezia was still in San Sisto when a tragedy took place which shook Rome – and the Borgias – to the core. While Lucrezia was apparently out of favour, Alexander had conferred singular favours on her brothers: in a secret consistory (a council of cardinals) on 8 June, Cesare was nominated legate for King Federigo’s coronation in Naples, a blatantly nepotistic appointment in view of his youth and lack of seniority But it was the investiture of Juan, in another secret consistory held the previous day, with the Duchy of Benevento and the cities of Terracina and Pontecorvo, which caused the greatest resentment. The alienation of these important papal cities as hereditary fiefs to Gandia was regarded as an intolerable scandal. Juan, whose arrogance had already earned him powerful enemies, became the primary target of anti-Borgia hostility

On Wednesday 14 June, exactly one week after his investiture, Juan Gandia disappeared. On the afternoon of that day he had ridden out with Cesare and Cardinal Juan Borgia of Monreale to have supper with Vannozza at her vineyard, or country villa, near Monte San Martino dei Monti. Returning as night was falling, they reached the bridge of Sant’Angelo leading to the Vatican, where Juan told the others that he must leave them as he had to go somewhere alone. Both the cardinals and Gandia’s ’s servants, according to Scalona’s report, did everything possible so that he should not go unaccompanied; the streets of Rome were not safe at night for a rich young man alone, especially with the enemies Gandia had. But Juan was adamant; the most he would do for his own safety was to send one of his grooms back to his rooms in the Vatican to fetch his light ‘night armour’, and then tell him to wait for him in the Piazza Judea. He took leave of Cesare and Cardinal Borgia and turned his mule in the direction of the Ghetto. As he did so, a masked man in a black cloak was seen to mount the mule behind him and the two rode off together.

Cesare and Cardinal Borgia, not unnaturally uneasy over these mysterious proceedings, waited some time by the bridge for him to return. When he did not, they rode back to the Vatican ‘with considerable anxiety and doubt in their minds’. Juan’s groom was attacked on his way to fetch the armour, receiving slight stab wounds but, ‘as he was a strong man’, says Scalona, he returned to the Piazza Judea to wait for his master. When Gandia did not return, he went back to the Vatican, thinking that Juan was spending the night with some Roman woman, as was frequently his custom. Neither the groom nor Cesare, for the same reason, reported Juan’s escapade to the Pope that night.

The following morning Gandia’s household informed Alexander that he had not returned. The Pope was still not greatly concerned, being accustomed to Juan’s amorous adventures, but his alarm mounted as the day passed with no sign of him and in the evening Alexander sent for Cesare and Cardinal Borgia and begged them to tell him what had happened. They told him what they had learned from Juan’s groom, whereupon Alexander, according to Scalona, said ‘that if he was dead, he knew the origin and the cause’. Then, ‘seized with mortal terror’, in the words of the diarist Johannes Burchard, the German papal master of ceremonies, he ordered a search to be made. As Alexander’s agents scoured the streets, the city was in uproar: fearful of a vendetta, many Romans closed their shops and barricaded their doors. The Colonna, Savelli, Orsini and Caetani fortified their palaces while parties of excited and angry Spaniards roamed the streets with drawn swords. Finally, on Friday 16 June, feverish inquiries brought to light the report of a timber dealer, Giorgio Schiavi, who was accustomed to keep watch over the wood which he unloaded on the river bank near the Ospedale of San Girolamo degli Schiavoni. On Wednesday night, he said:

about the hour of two, while I was guarding my wood, lying in my boat, two men on foot came out of the alley on the left of the Ospedale degli Schiavoni, onto the open way by the river. They looked cautiously about them to see that no one was passing, and not having found anyone, returned the way they had come into the same alley. Shortly afterwards two other men came out of that same alley, also looking furtively round them; not seeing anybody, they made a signal to their companions. Then there appeared a rider on a white horse, carrying a body slung across its crupper behind him, the head and arms hanging to one side, the legs to the other, supported on the right by the two first men so that it should not fall off. Having reached the point from which refuse is thrown into the river, the horseman turned his horse so that its tail faced the river, then the two men who were standing on either side, taking the body, one by the hands and arms, the other by the feet and legs, flung it with all their strength into the river. To the horseman’s demand whether the body had sunk, they replied, ‘Yes, sir’, then the horseman looked again at the river and saw the dead man’s cloak floating on the water, and asked what it was. They answered, ‘Sir, the cloak’. Then he threw some stones at it and made it sink. This done, all five, including the other two who had come out of the alley to keep watch, went away by an alley which leads to the Hospital of San Giacomo.

Asked why he had not reported the incident to the authorities, Schiavi answered simply: ‘In the course of my life, on various nights, I have seen more than a hundred bodies thrown into the river right at this spot, and never heard of anyone troubling himself about them.’

Following this report, all the fishermen and boatmen of Rome were called in to search the river with promise of a reward. First the body of an unknown man was discovered; then around midday, near the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, a fisherman named Battistino da Taglia brought up in his net the body of a young man, fully clothed, with his gloves and a purse containing 30 ducats still hanging from his belt. Nine stab wounds were counted on his body, in the neck, head, body and legs. It was Juan Gandia.

Juan’s body was taken to the Castel Sant’Angelo where it was washed and dressed in brocade with the insignia of Captain General of the Church. At six o’clock that evening it was borne by the noblemen of Gandia’s household in procession from Sant’ Angelo to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo to be buried in the family chapel, in a procession led by twelve torch bearers, the palace clerics, the papal chamberlains and squires, ‘all marching along weeping and wailing and in considerable disorder’, as Burchard commented. ‘The body was borne on a magnificent bier so that all could see it, and it seemed that the Duke were not dead but sleeping’, he recorded, while another observer remarked that Juan looked ‘almost more handsome than when he was alive’. An elegant funeral oration was performed for the dead Duke by the humanist Tommaso Inghirami, known as Fedra.

Alexander’s grief for his beloved son was indescribable; even the stolid and normally unsympathetic Burchard was moved:

The Pope, when he heard that the Duke had been killed and flung into the river like dung, was thrown into a paroxysm of grief, and for the pain and bitterness of his heart shut himself in his room and wept most bitterly. The Cardinal Segorbe (Bartolomeu Martì, a cousin of Rodrigo) and some of his servants went to the door, persuading him to open it, which he did only after many hours. The Pope neither ate nor drank anything from the Wednesday evening until the following Saturday, nor from the morning of Thursday to the following Sunday did he know a moment’s peace.

By Monday 19 June, Alexander had recovered himself sufficiently to hold a public consistory in which he referred to his son’s death in emotional terms: ‘The Duke of Gandia is dead. His death has given us the greatest sorrow, and no greater pain than this could we suffer, because we loved him above all things, and esteemed not more the papacy nor anything else. Rather, had we seven papacies we would give them all to have the Duke alive again. God has done this perhaps for some sin of ours, and not because he deserved such a cruel death; nor do we know who killed him and threw him into the Tiber.’