The Borgias (13 page)

Appointment to the college remained a great prize all the same and attracted the interest of even the greatest of kings. Inevitably in a world where noble and even royal families consigned children to careers in the
Church for political purposes, the red hat could become the penultimate goal (the pontifical throne being the ultimate one) for power-hungry, greedy men with no interest at all in the religious life. In a Church whose supreme head doubled as the monarch of one of Italy’s most important states—a state that was, inevitably, sometimes in conflict with its neighbors—cardinals who knew how to make war could be worth their weight in holy relics. Thus in the fourteenth century, when Pope Innocent VI wanted to return from Avignon but didn’t dare do so before clearing Rome and the adjacent territory of the ruffians who had taken control, the man he chose for the job was Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, archbishop of Toledo. He proved a good choice. A veteran of Spain’s wars against the Moors, Albornoz took Rome back from the bandit who had established himself as tyrant there and not only subdued most of the Papal States but imposed on them a constitution that would remain in effect into the nineteenth century. It was only his sudden death, and the unraveling of his gains, that obliged the pope to forget about a triumphal return to Rome.

Albornoz’s successor was another warrior-cardinal, one who if not his equal as a general or administrator definitely surpassed him in savagery. Like Albornoz of royal blood (he was a cousin of the king of France), Robert of Geneva came to be known as the “butcher of Cesena” for allowing some four thousand of that little city’s citizens to be slaughtered in retribution for a rebellion. This, however, did not prevent his being elected the first antipope of the Western Schism (again in contrast to Albornoz, who at the pinnacle of his career refused the papal crown). His reign as Clement VII was undistinguished but free of further atrocities. Mainly he confined himself to selling ecclesiastical offices and doing the bidding of the French crown.

He was not the last of the fighting cardinals, but from the time of the popes’ return to Rome they were a disappearing breed. Gradually the Sacred College was domesticated, its members abandoning the idea of becoming at least equal to the pope and accepting high status in compensation. This new status would become official in the 1460s when the pope of the time, Paul II, conferred on all cardinals the official rank of prince, so that they were recognized across Europe as equal to dukes in the feudal hierarchy and inferior only to the pope and his fellow crowned
heads. Thenceforth they would dress in resplendent red robes and be the star performers in a whole new theater of pomp and circumstance. They were not to appear in public except “in state,” accompanied by as many as three hundred uniformed attendants.

But they were never just puppets in a meaningless bigger-than-life play. They sat with the pope in consistory and so had the opportunity to influence important decisions.
Most of them had charge of at least one of the Vatican’s numerous courts, which dealt with cases from every corner of Europe. They also directed the Curia’s most important departments; high rank, good education, and lofty family connections made them useful as diplomats; and they were often employed as legates and governors in the Papal States. Rulers throughout Europe found it advantageous to employ cardinals as advisers or petitioners when favors were wanted from Rome, and often put them on retainer.

For all these reasons the Sacred College became a hotbed of political and diplomatic intrigue, especially for the states of Italy as they maneuvered for advantage. This was never more true than when the cardinals gathered to elect a new pope; many arrived as agents of whatever secular state had secured their appointment in the first place and were expected to support candidates not unfriendly to that state or even—the best of all possible outcomes—its native sons. History is a trickster, though, and it mocks the best-laid plans. Thus Alonso Borgia was elected precisely because, during his decade in Rome, he had refused to become a player in the politics of the Vatican. It was by becoming the least visible and least feared of cardinals, ironically, that he turned himself into the man of the hour. He was, however, one of those exceptions that prove a rule. The rule in this case was the unsurprising fact that success both in college and in conclave required skill, strength, and clear, practical goals.

Perhaps the most surprising development of the fifteenth century was the way in which the College of Cardinals gradually became less, rather than more, international.
Of the fifteen cardinals at the conclave that elected Alonso Borgia, seven were Italian. Thirty-seven years later, when another conclave elected a second Borgia pope, twenty-three cardinals participated, but only two were not Italian. The Italians had taken over in part because their most powerful families, the rulers of the peninsula’s
leading states, had more at stake than their counterparts in more distant places. It had come to seem essential, in the interim between the two elections, that every princely house in Italy not only be represented in the college but place one of its own sons there. It was taken for granted that the college could never be without a Sforza from Milan, a Medici from Florence, an Este from Ferrara, a Gonzaga from Mantua, and an Orsini and a Colonna from Rome and its environs. Among the things demanded of cardinals was, above all, that they live in princely fashion—that they expend their wealth on the construction and adornment of great palaces, the building or rebuilding of the churches and piazzas of Rome, and the recruitment of artists and artisans capable of carrying out such work at the highest level of perfection. Thus could they contribute to fulfilling the dream that Martin V had for Rome when he returned the papacy from its long exile in 1420: that it would again become the glory of the world, a monument in stone to the greatness of the Church.

That contradictions lay embedded in all this could go without saying. To recruit cardinals from the richest and most powerful families in Italy, to make them both the political instruments of their houses and Rome’s new royalty—these things were easily accomplished. But that these same men should also function as religious leaders, as models of rectitude—that was expecting too much.

This whole line of discussion inevitably gives rise to questions about the moral standards of the cardinals and other clergy—their sexual behavior in particular—in the fifteenth century. Salacious anecdotes are available in abundance and in a vast array of sources. What is less easy is to determine how meaningful these anecdotes are, how typical of the cardinals, bishops, and priests of the time, and even how true. Alonso Borgia was elected pope 332 years after the First Lateran Council settled a thousand-year debate about clerical celibacy by making it mandatory throughout the Western Church. All clergy thenceforth took vows of chastity. In a milieu where many positions of leadership were held by men who had been assigned to ecclesiastical careers for political and dynastic reasons and where much of the clerical rank and file was without education or training, it is hardly surprising if lapses were commonplace. Complaints about lapses were likewise not rare and came, as often as not, from the clergy itself. The only valid generalization, probably,
is that exemplary behavior and gross misbehavior were to be found almost anywhere one looked, and that the College of Cardinals itself was rich in saints and sinners.

The complex ironies of the situation are encapsulated in what Ludovico Gonzaga, marquess of the city-state of Mantua, told his son in 1460:

“Although you are a cardinal, be religious.”

5

The End of the Beginning

Don Pedro Luis de Borja—Pierluigi Borgia to the Italians—was still in his mid-twenties when he became the first member of his family to be the most hated man in Rome. He did so not by behaving badly in any way of which a credible record has survived, but by carrying out an assignment that made him the enemy of some of the most badly behaved Romans of his time.

That assignment, simply described, was to lead an army into the countryside north and west of Rome and take control of it in his uncle the pope’s name. By every measure this was a lawful and legitimate objective, the territories in question having been the property of the Church for fully a thousand years. In practical terms too, it was entirely justified, even necessary, involving as it did a long-overdue challenge to the misrule of the Orsini. For generations—for centuries, actually—the leaders of the Orsini clan had been left free to do whatever they chose in places to which they had no rightful claim without having to account to anyone.

What they consistently chose, as it happened, was contrary to the interests of everyone involved except the Orsini themselves. The people who worked the land had sunk into a state of profound demoralization after generations of being treated as little better than livestock. In Rome itself disorder and danger became chronic, the Orsini turning the parts of the city that they controlled into killing zones. They showed
no reluctance to shut down the highways leading to the city’s gates and so cut off its supplies of food, fuel, and other essentials whenever it served their purposes to do so.

Though Calixtus III was by no means the first pontiff to set out to regain control of at least some part of the Papal States, his approach was novel in one important respect. In the regions closest to Rome in particular, his predecessors had commonly used one baronial clan as a weapon with which to bludgeon another into submission, supporting now the Colonna against the Orsini, now the Orsini against the Colonna. Almost invariably this turned out to be a self-defeating strategy, because whatever could be taken from the clan targeted for attack tended to end up in the hands not of the Church but of the clan that had done the attacking in the pope’s name. The result was an endlessly repeating pattern in which, as pope succeeded pope, the fortunes of the Orsini and the Colonna became like two pistons in a reciprocating engine, with one side up whenever the other was down. Where the Church was concerned nothing really changed: the Papal States, and much of the old capital, remained out of control.

By appointing his nephew captain-general and sending him against the Orsini, Calixtus gave himself a chance, at least, of holding on to the fruits of any victories the campaign might achieve. The only serious disadvantage affected Pedro Luis personally: he became a marked man, conspicuous as both the leader and the symbol of his uncle’s war. By contrast, his brother Cardinal Rodrigo and their cousin Cardinal Luis Juan del Milà—the former far away in the March of Ancona when Pedro Luis took the field, the latter even farther away in Bologna—could take comfort in being almost forgotten men.

The process by which the wrath of the Orsini came to be focused on Pedro Luis unfolded very gradually. The first favor that his uncle bestowed on him upon becoming pope, the governorship of the great citadel of Castel Sant’Angelo, caused little concern if any. At this early point in his reign Calixtus appeared to have no objectives except to mount a crusade against the Turks, and there was no reason to suspect that in disposing of the Castel he had anything more in mind than to raise a young favorite to a position of some prestige. Later, when Pedro Luis became the Vatican’s captain-general, it again seemed nothing more than a harmless act of nepotistic largesse, without political significance
and no threat to anyone. But soon Pedro Luis was not merely enjoying an impressive title and the handsome income that went with it, but actually making war. On the Orsini. At that point everything changed.

The campaign went surpassingly well. Advancing out of Rome, Pedro Luis took control, generally at the direct expense of the Orsini, of more towns and fortresses than can be named here. Of Terni, Narni, and Rieti; Todi, Orvieto, and Foligno; Nocera, Assisi, and Amelia; not only the whole of the province called the Patrimony of St. Peter but the part of Tuscany that belonged to the popes; finally even the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento and the great fortress of Terracina far to the south. This culminated in Pedro Luis’s appointment, in April 1457, to the important post of prefect of Rome. The position had become vacant with the death of the latest in an unbroken line of Orsini prefects reaching back so far that the family had come to regard it as theirs by hereditary right. With the office they lost also—were obliged to surrender to Pedro Luis—the coastal city of Civitavecchia and much of the territory abutting Lake Vico north of Rome. These were serious losses; things were getting difficult for the Orsini, even alarming, as one possession after another was being torn out of their hands and Pedro Luis continued to press on. Cardinal Latino Orsini, long one of the most powerful men in Rome, found his situation so uncomfortable that he slipped away to the countryside.

The Colonna, of course, were delighted with everything that was happening and delighted also with Calixtus and his captain-general. His connection to the pope, his victories, and his growing number of offices made Pedro Luis the most attractive marital prize in central Italy, and soon there was talk of his betrothal to a Colonna bride. Everything he had gained and everything he still hoped to accomplish depended, however, on the survival of his uncle, and Calixtus was growing steadily more frail and finding it increasingly difficult to leave his bed. He continued to send out streams of instructions, exhortations, and appeals, willing himself to generate more activity than many of his younger, healthier predecessors, but that he was in serious decline is suggested by a letter sent to Rodrigo in the March of Ancona. It was written not by Calixtus himself but by his old friend Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a seasoned Vatican diplomat who had recently been made a
cardinal at the urging of Germany’s Holy Roman emperor and the king of Hungary.