The Borgias (15 page)

The danger was greatest for Pedro Luis; the Orsini hated no one as they hated him. It became impossible for him to show his face in public. As Calixtus faded into unconsciousness, many of the cardinals turned against his captain-general, demanding that he relinquish control of the Castel Sant’Angelo and other key fortresses. The Orsini and their henchmen grew bolder by the hour. It had become questionable whether Pedro Luis—whether any member of his family—could survive either by remaining in the city or by trying to get away.

The Borgias of Rome had arrived at their first great crisis.

6

Surviving

Calixtus was not yet dead when the contempt of the Roman citizenry for the Spanish interlopers they called “Catalans” rose to a murderous pitch.

The pontiff was not himself an object of this hatred or of the blood-lust to which it gave rise. Though the Romans sometimes called him a “barbarian” pope, this was less because he had done anything to give offense—or was perceived as an offensive figure, even—than because he was not Italian, had come to Rome as a man of advanced years, and so would always be an outsider. Against a man who lived as simply and virtuously as Calixtus did, one so determined to go on doing his duty as the infirmities of old age bore down on him, not even the Romans could work up much hostility.

Although he was left to die almost alone as the members of his largely Spanish household slipped fearfully away, Calixtus was therefore never in danger. No one objected to letting him expire in peace.

It was different for his countrymen, most different of all for the young Borgias whom he had raised to princely status. They were marked men. Pedro Luis, prefect of Rome and captain-general of the papal troops, master in his uncle’s name of more towns and territories than anyone could readily name or even count, was in danger from the moment the pope’s illness became widely known. By the first days of
August it was no longer possible to be confident that Pedro Luis was going to escape with his life.

This part of our story would be simpler if more were known about what kind of man Pedro Luis actually was. But the evidence is too thin and too dubious to bring him into focus. That he was raised high at a precocious age, and was bitterly resented by those who saw his advancement as an affront and a threat, we have already seen. What is not clear is whether and to what extent he had done anything to justify the hatred that was directed at him. Did it happen simply because he was a Spaniard and a Borgia and conscientious in the execution of the duties assigned to him by the pope? Or was he in fact the kind of man who would have been hated even if he had been Roman from birth?

Down the centuries, Pedro Luis has often been depicted as everyone’s image of a Spanish nobleman-warrior in the age of the conquistadores: proud, arrogant, cruel, and therefore despised by decent people. He has also been described as self-defeatingly stupid—a defect not often found among the Borgias—and doomed for that reason. Possibly he was all these things, but it is equally possible that he was none of them. Practically all of the unflattering accounts of his character can be traced no further back than to people who had never met him, people who were not alive when he was but had political or religious reasons to think him a typically evil member of a uniquely vicious clan. In Pedro Luis we encounter for the first time the great challenge of Borgia history: the need to distinguish between what can be accepted as true or at least probable on the basis of credible evidence and what was fabricated after the fact but has been endlessly repeated because of its usefulness in showing yet another Borgia to have been odious. What is known for sure about Pedro Luis is sufficient neither to condemn him nor to declare him grievously misunderstood. It is difficult to judge even his performance as a military commander, so little being known about the opposition he faced, the resources he had at his disposal, or how he conducted himself while in action.

On August 5, 1458, in any case, the truth about Pedro Luis’s character and conduct was far less urgent than the question of his survival. On the previous day, with Calixtus visibly losing his grip on life and the clans rampaging in the streets, a delegation of cardinals had called on
the captain-general and demanded that he surrender the one absolutely secure place of refuge in Rome, the Castel Sant’Angelo. He had agreed, but only after being promised the twenty-two thousand gold ducats that he claimed were owed him by the pontifical treasury. (There is no way of judging the legitimacy of this debt, but it is entirely plausible that Pedro Luis expended this much or more out of his own pocket in the discharge of his many duties.) A deal having been struck, attention shifted to getting him out of Rome.

This turned out to require both guile and a show of force. Between them, Cardinal Rodrigo as de facto Vatican war minister and Pedro Luis as captain-general were able to muster some three thousand mounted troops and two hundred infantry. This little army, after being formed into a protective phalanx around the mounted Pedro Luis, was paraded with attention-compelling ostentation out of the Vatican and across the Milvian Bridge, obviously headed out of the city. But as it approached the Porta del Popolo, a major exit point known to be in the hands of the Orsini, Rodrigo and a friend from the College of Cardinals, Pietro Barbo, slipped away with a smaller, less conspicuous company of troops, taking a disguised Pedro Luis with them. Upon reaching the Porta San Paolo, having determined that the road ahead was clear, the two cardinals bade Pedro Luis farewell and turned back into the city. Pedro Luis galloped downriver toward Ostia on the coast, taking his gold with him. There he waited to be picked up by a galley that never came, finally hiring a fishing boat that took him the forty miles up the coast to the papal fortress of Civitavecchia, which he commanded as captain-general.

Rodrigo returned to the Vatican—an act of some courage under the circumstances—and was with his uncle when he died the following day. Rome was in a state of near-anarchy. Rodrigo did nothing to protect his “palace”—still little more than a strung-together assortment of recently derelict buildings, used mainly as a workplace for the employees of the papal chancery—and so it was stripped bare. He must have had relatively little worth stealing at this point, and trying to hold off the mob could only have inflamed its wrath. By in effect throwing open his doors he relieved some of the hostility directed at him as a Catalan, a Borgia, and the dead pontiff’s fellow barbarian.

Attention now turned, to the extent that anyone could focus his attention in the midst of so much disorder, to the ceremonials involved in burying a pope and preparing for the election of a successor. It could go without saying that there was not the smallest possibility of Rodrigo Borgia being chosen or even considered; his youth would have disqualified him had there been no other negatives. By the time of Calixtus’s interment, those cardinals hopeful of election were well along with their campaigning. There was considerable expectation—probably proclaimed most strongly by the candidate himself—that the all-but-certain winner was Guillaume d’Estouteville, cardinal of Rouen. He was fabulously wealthy, a cousin of the king of France, openly ambitious for the throne, haughty, vain, of dubious moral character—and for all these reasons disliked by more of his fellow cardinals than he appears to have understood. In the days just after Calixtus’s death, the most popular contender had been Domenico Capranica, the same admired theologian whose candidacy had been blocked by Latino Orsini at the conclave of 1455. This time his chances looked better, but just three days before the opening of the conclave he threw everyone’s calculations into confusion by unexpectedly dying, aged fifty-eight. No doubt this confirmed for Estouteville that God himself was clearing a path to his election. The next five days, however, would demonstrate the wisdom of an ancient proverb: he who enters the conclave a pope, exits a cardinal.

The first secret ballot, taken after two days of discussion, produced a surprising result. Estouteville received not a single vote, meaning that he hadn’t voted for himself. This may have been an obscure strategic move on the Frenchman’s part, but it also sheds light on just how little his election was desired. Enea Silvio Piccolomini of Siena and Filippo Calandrini of Bologna received five votes each. The remaining ballots were scattered among an essentially random assortment of cardinals, none of whom had a chance of being elected.

That night Estouteville went into action, lobbying hard, offering bribes, and threatening retribution to any who declined to cooperate. He told his colleagues one by one, in feigned confidence, that he was a single vote short of the needed two-thirds majority, and he painted an enticing picture of the rewards that awaited the man who put him over the top. Obviously he was setting the stage for an overwhelming
show of support in the next day’s voting.
What happened next cannot be told better than in the words of the man who was about to emerge as Estouteville’s sole rival, Cardinal Piccolomini. In his written account of the conclave—a document unique in history, no cardinal before or since having produced anything comparable—Piccolomini refers to himself in the third person as “Enea.” He recounts how offended he was, on the night of August 18, to discover that Estouteville had stationed himself in the latrine (“a fit place for such a pope to be elected!” he exclaims) and was using every possible promise and threat in a bare-knuckles push for votes. And how, after being warned that he himself had better get on the bandwagon before it was too late, Piccolomini went to bed resolved to launch a stop-Estouteville campaign upon rising the next morning. His memoir continues:

Enea went at daybreak to Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor, and asked whether he had sold himself to Rouen. “What would you have me do?” he answered. “The thing is settled. Many of the cardinals have met in the privies and decided to elect him. It is not for my advantage to remain with a small minority out of favor with a new pope. I am joining the majority and I have looked out for my own interests. I shall not lose the chancellorship; I have a note from Rouen assuring me of that. If I do not vote for him, the others will elect him anyway and I shall be stripped of my office.”

Enea said to him, “You young fool! Will you then put an enemy of your nation in the Apostle’s chair? And will you put faith in the note of a man who is faithless? You will have the note; Avignon [another French cardinal] will have the chancellorship. For what has been promised you has been promised him also and solemnly affirmed. Will faith be kept with him or with you? Will a Frenchman be more friendly to a Frenchman or to a Catalan? Will he be more concerned for a foreigner or for his own countryman? Take care, you inexperienced boy! Take care, you fool! And if you have no thought for the Church of Rome, if you have no regard for the Christian religion and despise God, for whom you are preparing such a vicar, at least take thought for yourself, for you will find yourself among the hindmost, if a Frenchman is pope.”

He notes that Rodrigo “listened patiently to these words of his friend.” He had certainly given the vice-chancellor much food for thought.

Filippo Calandrini, one of the two leaders in the previous day’s balloting, dropped out before the next vote was taken. A hardworking but undistinguished Curia official who owed his place in the Sacred College to his half-brother Pope Nicholas V, Calandrini threw his support to Piccolomini. The next surprise, when the results of the latest round of voting became known, was that Estouteville, far from winning election or being barely short of victory as he had been telling everyone, received only six votes. The leader was his indignant antagonist Piccolomini, whose nine votes left him three short of the needed total.

At this point the conclave voted to try to bring matters to a conclusion “by accession,” a traditional recourse when secret balloting failed to produce a winner. It involved sitting together in silence and waiting to see if any of the electors found themselves moved to change their minds. Estouteville needed to double his vote, making his prospects dim at best. Even Piccolomini, needing three, appeared to have limited prospects against so intimidating an opponent. The cardinals sat for what seemed a long time, the tension building, no one speaking or making a move. Then at last Rodrigo Borgia rose to his feet. “I accede,” he said, “to the cardinal of Siena.” To Piccolomini, that is, moving him to within two votes of election. At that point, in a desperate attempt to disrupt the proceedings, Cardinals Isidore of Greece and Torquemada of Spain (an enemy of Piccolomini’s since the two had clashed over questions of theology at the Council of Basel) bolted from their seats and flounced out of the room. When no one followed, they decided that they had better return. They did so in time to see Cardinal Tebaldi of Santa Anastasia, a longtime protégé of Calixtus III and brother of the late pope’s favorite physician, stand up and repeat Rodrigo’s words.