The Borgias (11 page)

The peninsula became an arena in which the popes and Germany’s so-called Holy Roman emperors fought each other for dominance. Both sides, in seeking the support of the cities, granted them liberties and favors that ultimately, if inadvertently, helped them to become autonomous. Those cities, in turn, were developing in strikingly different ways, sometimes adopting republican forms of government that at a distance could almost be mistaken for democracy. Many fell under the dominion of warlords, and even the republics came to be run by elites that rarely constituted more than a fraction of their populations.

By the time Alonso Borgia became Calixtus III, the peninsula had long been dominated by five “great” (by Italy’s modest standards) powers:

Venice, a republic dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families that had grown immensely rich and risen to a position of international importance by trading throughout the eastern Mediterranean, building there a great network of colonies and commercial alliances.

Florence, also a republic and ruled by families that had made their fortunes in banking, manufacturing, and trade, the jewel in Italy’s golden crown by virtue of the astonishing artistic and intellectual flowering that, before the end of the fifteenth century, would make it one of the most dazzling cultural phenomena in all of human history.

Rome, a theocracy dominated by the pope, gradually recovering some of its long-lost strength but still an administrative center only, without a commercial middle class capable of challenging the baronial clans.

Milan, the giant of the north, an industrial powerhouse and master of the vast fertile plain of Lombardy, politically a tyranny, long in the grip first of its Visconti and then of its Sforza dukes.

And of course Naples, Il Regno, a kingdom encompassing the whole southern half of the mainland, the most feudal state in Italy and therefore also the most backward, fatally weakened by an endless struggle between
its great capital city and rural barons unwilling to be ruled by anyone.

The greatest of Italy’s cities—Naples, Venice, and Milan—all had populations of well over a hundred thousand when London was still the only city in England with as many as twenty thousand residents. And all of them controlled great expanses of countryside, staking out broad spheres of influence by conquest, intimidation, and bribery. All of them but Naples, which stagnated under the oppressive rule of a series of more or less vicious and decadent monarchs, possessed a vitality to be found almost nowhere else. They took for granted things that remained unknown or unwelcome elsewhere: rapid change, steady growth, and wide-open social mobility—even, in some places, educational opportunities for women comparable to those available to men.

The absence of a functioning feudal system, and of feudalism’s arrangement of the population into commoners who owed loyalty to nobles who in turn owed loyalty to kings, had one unfortunate consequence. Some of the greatest of the city-states, along with innumerable smaller communities including tiny hilltop villages, came to be dominated by local strongmen who could make no claim to political legitimacy—to having any real right to the power they wielded. In the fourteenth century, when the papacy was absent from Rome and utterly incapable of stopping thugs from seizing pieces of the Papal States and setting themselves up as tyrants, authority based on force alone became virtually the norm. Thus the masters of one city-state after another were in a vastly less justifiable position than, say, an English baron whose title and landholdings had been formally conferred upon him in a Church-sanctioned ceremony by an anointed king. Even when the usurpers were able to win recognition as papal vicars, governing their domains in the pope’s name, such titles were little more than legal fictions. They signified almost nothing—certainly not a willingness to be loyal to the pope. To the extent that vicariate status gave the warlords a shred of the legitimacy they craved, it was a shred too scanty to remove their insecurity or make them more responsible in the use of their power or make the so-called Papal States more peaceful.

Misrule and instability thus formed the dark underside of the Italian Renaissance, with almost every regime recurrently under threat from
internal as well as external enemies. It was far from uncommon, and at times was almost commonplace, for the lords of Italy’s cities to be bloodily overthrown—often by their own kinsmen, with brother killing brother either to gain or to retain power. Men who had become rulers through violence could find little grounds for complaint, and often nowhere to appeal, when their turn came to be violently overthrown. Might made right: this became a fact of life and was the one utterly inglorious element in Renaissance Italy’s otherwise magnificent heritage. Betrayal and murder became endemic even at the most exalted levels of society, even within the greatest families. This was the world in which the Borjas of Valencia had to learn to make their way.

4

Family Matters

During the years when an increasingly feeble Calixtus III was bringing unexpected vigor to meeting the Turkish threat, managing a Church that was the largest and by far the most complex institution in Europe, and struggling to cope with the never-ending schemes and squabbles of strongmen far and near, another and more personal dimension of his life was becoming burdensome as well.

This was his relationship with his family, which in addition to being numerous and eager for advancement had become binational as more and more of its members left Spain for Rome to see what advantage could be wrung from having a relative who was first a cardinal and then—miracle of miracles—the supreme pontiff.

We don’t know how many Borgias were in Italy during Calixtus’s reign, only that their demands for favors provoked him to complain. But he complained too of relatives who had not left Spain at all, instead remaining there while appealing for help in achieving a lifestyle appropriate to a family whose name he had made grand. Among the stay-at-homes was his sister Isabella, who as a young woman had married their kinsman Don Jofrè de Borja, son of a wealthier branch of the family with better connections to the aristocracy. This Jofrè had died in 1437, leaving Isabella with a family of at least two sons and four daughters, possibly more. By that time Alonso was bishop of Valencia and living in Italy in the service of Alfonso V. He permitted Isabella to move with
her brood into Valencia’s episcopal palace, which put her on a level with the city’s proudest families.

In terms of bloodline, Isabella’s children stood above their mother and her brother the cardinal. Their paternal grandmother, Don Jofrè’s mother, was a child of the de Oms family, which occupied a higher perch in the Valencian nobility than any of the Borjas. It was partly because of his marriage to Sibila de Oms that Jofrè’s father, Rodrigo Gil de Borja, had risen to be chief counselor of Játiva and a member of the court of King Pedro of Aragon. Isabella’s marriage to Jofrè had been a significant step up, and Alonso always took an interest in her children. He saw to it that advantageous marriages were arranged for the daughters and that the sons were provided with the kinds of educations and connections that could get young careers off to a fast start. Alonso had another sister, Catalina, who had made a good marriage to the Valencian baron Juan del Milà, and he was generous with assistance to their numerous progeny as well.

Several of Alonso’s nephews and cousins, Isabella’s son Rodrigo and Catalina’s Luis Juan del Milà among them, were steered toward careers in the Church. This was customary because practical: it was in the ecclesiastical field that an uncle who was first a bishop and then a cardinal could be most helpful. Vatican records show Rodrigo and Luis Juan being singled out, as early as the reign of Eugenius IV, for benefices, offices generating ecclesiastical income, that would have been unimaginable without the intervention of a patron who had access to the pope’s ear and the king of Aragon’s as well.
We see Rodrigo, still no more than a schoolboy, becoming the recipient of ecclesiastical revenues first from his hometown of Játiva, then from the cathedral of Barcelona, and finally from the cathedral of Valencia. In 1449, when Rodrigo was about eighteen and his uncle was in his fifth year as a cardinal resident in Rome, Pope Nicholas V issued a bull allowing him—in contravention of the rules, which is why a bull was necessary—to keep his benefices (all of which were in Spain) even if he resided at a university or in Italy. This cleared the way for the youth to leave Spain for study at one of the great universities of Italy without sacrificing the income that permitted him to live in the style of a young lord—a cardinal’s nephew. Again there was nothing scandalous, even unusual, about any of this. Everything known about Rodrigo makes it reasonable to suppose that he was
both an able student—not even his enemies would ever deny his intelligence—and a conscientious one, consistent hard work being one of his defining characteristics throughout his life.

Rodrigo thus spent the next six years in Italy, along with his brother Pedro Luis and their cousin del Milà, but little is known of their lives. Rodrigo and del Milà were almost certainly studying law at the University of Bologna, and in 1453 the latter, who was probably the elder of the two by a few years, was given the bishopric of Segorbe in Spain although still short of the required canonical age of twenty-seven. Two years later, when Alonso became pope, the nephews, in their mid-twenties now, found their lives dramatically transformed. On May 10, 1455, just twenty days after his coronation, Calixtus appointed all three to positions of importance. Rodrigo was given the high office of protonotary apostolic, with duties appropriate to his legal training. Bishop Luis Juan del Milà became papal legate, representative, in the great city of Bologna, a fief of the papacy. Pedro Luis Borgia, the trio’s sole non-churchman, took command of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the massive and ancient circular fortress that stood on the bank of the River Tiber overlooking the Vatican. This was no mere honorary appointment. The Castel, thirteen hundred years old, was an impregnable stronghold and the cornerstone of papal security in Rome. As its governor and commander of its troops, Pedro Luis became a power in the city and a potential adversary of the baronial clans, the Orsini and Colonna and others, whose unruly behavior kept Rome endlessly on the verge of violent disorder.

Upon receiving these promotions Rodrigo and Luis Juan returned to Bologna, where the latter took up his duties as legate and the former returned to his studies, completing his doctorate in the autumn of 1456. Before that happened, there had come a flurry of further and even more significant appointments. On February 20, in consistory, Calixtus announced his first three appointments to the Sacred College: his two clerical nephews and, as part of his efforts to win support for the campaign against the Turks, a twenty-two-year-old member of the Portuguese royal family who was also a nephew of Alfonso V.
It would later be said that several cardinals objected to the elevation of such young men to such high positions, but in fact there is no contemporary evidence of any such reaction—none provided by anyone in a position to
know, certainly.
The scholarly diplomat Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a respected figure and destined to become pope himself, wrote at the time that “Cardinal Rodrigo is young, it is true, but his conduct and good sense add years to his age.” Every cardinal present signed the bull of appointment. By the time the promotions were made public, Calixtus had also named Pedro Luis Borgia captain-general, commanding officer, of the papal army.

These actions, though obviously nepotistic, raised no eyebrows. Such things were not only accepted but expected—Nicholas V had been the exception rather than the rule—and the reasons for them were clear. Calixtus, still new in office, was surrounded by the same men who had assented to his election only because their own choices had been blocked, and they expected him to do nothing while waiting quietly for his own death. These were hardened veterans of the Vatican’s political wars, cynical and self-serving, and to a man they were professing to be the pontiff’s best friends while pushing for the advancement of their own agendas and the thwarting of their rivals. At the center of this tangle of hypocrisy and intrigue, isolated and probably lonely, Calixtus faced immense problems and was in urgent need of deputies he could trust. There were such men among the cardinals who elected him—the Greek Bessarion, the Spaniard Carvajal—and he took them into his confidence. But he needed others too, and he was far from being the first pope to look to his own family. Not even the Orsini or the Colonna could complain when he did so.

Especially not the Orsini or the Colonna. Both families owed much of their wealth and power to the success of their ancestors in capturing and exploiting the papal crown. And they must have understood that not only Calixtus but the Church itself was fortunate that he had capable and responsible young nephews to place in the Sacred College. As for the appointment of Pedro Luis as captain-general, if it is not excused it is certainly explained by the treachery of the previous incumbent, Giovanni Ventimiglia, who at Siena had snatched defeat from the jaws of what should have been an important papal victory by arranging to have himself taken prisoner by a beaten foe. Beyond that, the promotion is most fairly judged on the basis of Pedro Luis’s subsequent performance in office.