The Borgias (19 page)

The word that sums up Rodrigo Borgia is
gusto
. He loved life, enjoyed people, and found satisfaction even in the most challenging duties, but he was capable also of putting the cares of his work out of mind whenever time permitted.
Zest
would suit him also. And
joie de vivre
.
The German Ludwig Pastor, who spent most of his life in Rome and wrote a forty-volume history of the papacy, observed that “nothing can be more false than the ordinary conception of Borgia as a morose and inhuman monster.”
A twentieth-century historian, Michael Mallett, summed up the consensus of five hundred years in writing of how even people with reasons to dislike Rodrigo “were often reconciled by his friendliness and boisterous good humor.”

To round out the picture it is worthwhile to return to Guicciardini, who hated what he knew or thought he knew of Rodrigo and went far beyond the bounds of fairness in attempting to sully his name.
Even Guicciardini conceded that as vice-chancellor Rodrigo was “prudent, vigilant, and maturely reflective,” as well as exceptionally persuasive and effective in the management of difficult matters. Juxtaposed against how Rodrigo is usually depicted, even by Guicciardini himself, such words become rather baffling.
It may have been bafflement that caused
a more recent historian to throw up his hands at what he took to be Rodrigo’s “strange many-sidedness” and call him “an enigma to his contemporaries.” He was no such thing. People who knew him appear to have taken him at face value, and with few and explainable exceptions they liked what they saw.

When Pope Pius finally consented to bid adieu to Siena, three years remained to his life. They would be consumed by two things that commonly come together: war and money trouble.
There was a continuing war in Naples, where Ferrante, with the help of reinforcements sent by Pius, Milan, and Skanderbeg of Albania, was clawing his way back from the brink of ruin.
As the rebellious barons and the Angevin invaders slowly ran out of fight and Ferrante’s situation became less dire, he was freed to reveal facets of his character that earlier had been concealed—except, perhaps, from those who knew him best, onetime intimates like Alonso Borgia. It was at about this time, according to stories from credible sources, that he created the prison-cum-museum in which the embalmed bodies of defeated foes were displayed alongside cages in which living captives were either starved to death or left to slowly go insane. As his political position became secure, Ferrante became nearly as powerful a force in Italian politics as his father Alfonso had been. It would become clear soon enough that he was also just as meddlesome.

War went on in the Romagna too, where the rebellious warlord Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini was proving to be a maddeningly able soldier and impossible to bring to heel. But the conflict that was costing Pius the most, both financially and in emotional terms, was not a real but a hoped-for one. It was the fight he wanted to carry to the Ottoman Turks, the crusade he had pledged to launch in 1464 in spite of the failure of the congress of Mantua. It became the source of his, and then of Rodrigo’s, worst money troubles. The sending of envoys to every part of Europe on a fund-raising campaign proved a serious financial drain—the crowned heads would have been insulted if the pope’s men failed to arrive in grand style—and the returns were scarcely commensurate with the costs. Pius like Calixtus before him was meanwhile emptying the papal treasury to build galleys and hire crews. He found himself in such financial straits that he introduced a
practice that would continue to have a corrosive effect on the Church long after his reign was over: he began selling positions in the Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy.

Rodrigo was not merely feeling the pinch—he appears to have been going broke. He was doing so in spite of the fact that Pius, even more than his uncle Calixtus, rained benefices on him: bishoprics, abbeys, a share in the revenues generated by the sale of offices, sources of ecclesiastical income of almost every possible kind. Once again, it was a matter of his income being needed for the discharge of his responsibilities. At this time as much as at any in his life, that income was proving to be woefully inadequate for the purpose.

Cumulatively, the demands on Rodrigo’s purse were of crushing weight. He was paying to construct the episcopal palace that he had “volunteered” to contribute to Pius’s remaking of Pienza, and to provide a fully equipped galley with crew for the pope’s crusade. (Such a warship was so costly that only the wealthiest entities in the Papal States—the city of Bologna, for example, and the duke of Ferrara—could possibly be asked to finance one.) He was also expected to contribute a troop of thirty armed men and ten horses to the pope’s war with Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and it was taken for granted that as one of Rome’s most prominent cardinals he would maintain himself in a style worthy of a prince—a style involving the establishment and maintenance of a residence, a palace, that reflected glory on the Church and its capital. Beyond all this it was his responsibility to provide salaries, workplaces, and perhaps even accommodations for a good many of the men employed in the chancery and the Rota as well.

While Calixtus was still alive, Rodrigo had purchased from the Vatican for two thousand florins a row of old buildings across the Tiber from St. Peter’s between the Piazza di Spagna and the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo. He then began converting these buildings, among them a derelict structure that once had housed the papal mint, into a suitably grand home with space for his subordinates and the conduct of the chancery’s business—a palace. This became yet another chronic and painful financial drain.

It all proved to be too much.
In 1462, unable to meet his obligations, Rodrigo offered to sell his unfinished palace back to the papal treasury,
the camera, for the original purchase price plus what he had spent on improvements. But the camera too was insolvent. Rather than letting what had become the chancery’s headquarters go to a third party, Rodrigo mortgaged it. A year later he was still under such pressure financially that Pius granted him temporary permission to tax the beneficiaries of his diocese of Valencia—those clergymen receiving stipends as deans, canons, and the like. He was also allowed to sell at a discount, in return for an immediate infusion of cash, the next three years of his own revenues as Valencia’s bishop. We will see him resorting to similar expedients in decades to come even as he is supposedly amassing a fortune of almost inconceivable size.

With the kings and high churchmen of all Europe reluctant to contribute more than token quantities of money and men, the pope’s dream of a crusade would have had to be abandoned except for an event so unexpected, indeed so utterly improbable, that Pius declared it a miracle.
It was the discovery, on land belonging to the papacy in the wooded hills of Tolfa about sixty miles north of Rome, of huge deposits of high-quality alum—potassium aluminum sulfate, the same humble substance sold today in the form of styptic pencils to stop the bleeding from shaving cuts.

Until some two hundred years ago, when a way of synthesizing it was discovered, alum was a quasi-precious substance with many uses, the most important involving the tanning of leather and the dyeing of wool and other fibers. Mines at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula had long been Europe’s only source, and after the Turks moved into the Balkans, it could be obtained only at extortionate prices. This came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1462, thanks to a onetime dyer named Giovanni di Castro, who had fled Constantinople when it fell to the Turks and become a minor official in the Papal States. One day, exploring the hills inland from Civitavecchia between Florence and Rome, Castro noticed the prevalence of a species of tree rarely seen in Italy but common around the alum mines of the Balkans. Investigating further, he made his great discovery.
He hurried to Rome and in great excitement announced to the pope that “today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year they wring from the Christians more than three hundred thousand ducats for the alum with which we dye wool … But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could
supply seven worlds … This mine will supply you with the sinews of war, money, and take them from the Turks.”

About the value of what he had found, Castro was not exaggerating. In short order thousands of men were at work in new mines at Tolfa; they would remain in operation for three and a half centuries. The profits climbed rapidly toward a hundred thousand ducats per year. Pius decreed that all of it was to be spent to make war on the Turks.

Thus it became possible for the crusade preparations to continue. The need remained obvious: a year after Castro’s discovery, Sultan Mehmed invaded Bosnia and conquered it with frightening ease, taking his empire another step closer to Vienna, to Italy, to the nerve centers of southeastern Europe. Even after this loss, however, Pius could find support in only two places. First in Venice, resigned at last to the inevitability of war with the Turks, and then among the common people of the north. Even in places where the leaders of church and state had no interest in sacrificing anything for the sake of a distant campaign—in Germany and the Low Countries, in France and Spain, and as far away as Scotland—ordinary people responded to the pope’s call. From pulpits across Europe, preachers dispatched from Rome were telling the faithful that all available men should prepare to report for duty in the summer of 1464. They should assemble in Venice, or better yet they should make their way farther down Italy’s east coast and join the pope at the port city of Ancona. There—so the plan went—they would be taken aboard a great fleet of mostly Venetian galleys for transportation to the East and the great showdown with Islam.

It was a doomed enterprise, insufficiently funded and without political support. It was kept alive by little more than the pope’s refusal to admit that the obstacles were too great to be overcome. In September 1463, with his launch date now less than a year away, Pius called the cardinals together in a consistory at which he complained in angry, bitter terms that neither Europe’s leaders nor its people were rallying to the cause. He was right about the leaders and undoubtedly should have called the whole thing off, but he had become a man obsessed. In an act so deeply foolish that it can only have been intended to shame the crowned heads of Christendom, Pius announced that he was going to lead the crusade personally. He had already recruited the brilliant Skanderbeg to take charge of military operations; this new pledge to inject
himself into the expedition in spite of his complete lack of military experience and indifferent health looks less like an effort to inspire than an outburst of spite and defiance.

Nine months later, on June 18, 1464, Pius set out for Ancona and the fulfillment of his great dream. Some of Rome’s leading citizens, the memory of the disorders that had erupted during the pope’s previous long absence still fresh in their minds, had objected with considerable heat when informed of his plans. To placate them he promised to leave the pontifical administration at home, its leadership intact. This removed any possibility that Cardinal Borgia, the central figure in that administration, might be expected to go with the pontiff to war. He did, however, set off to accompany the pope to Ancona. It was a brutally hot summer, and Pius, who had been feverish for some time, found himself capable of traveling only in short, slow stages with frequent stops for recuperation. Rodrigo caught up with him at Terni, and they pushed on together from there. They arrived at Ancona on July 19 to find it a boiling cauldron of confusion and pestilence, overrun with amateur crusaders from all parts of Europe. The town had no way to shelter so many visitors, too little food, even a desperate shortage of drinking water. There was no sign of the Venetian fleet, which was overdue, and as plague broke out, many of the volunteers who did not fall sick began to flee. The pope, too weak to leave his room overlooking the harbor, watched for the arrival of Venice’s galleys as his ragtag volunteer army melted away. By August 9 Rodrigo too was ill—which fact has given rise to another ridiculously insubstantial Borgia scandal.

This one rises out of a letter written on August 10 by the marquess of Mantua’s ambassador to the papal court. He informs his master of Rodrigo’s sickness, adding that “the physician who saw him first says that he has little hope for him, principally because he had, shortly before, not slept alone in bed.” This has been interpreted as meaning that Rodrigo had been indulging in sexual adventures since arriving in Ancona and was dying as a result. But of course there never has been a venereal disease that kills or even incapacitates in a matter of days, and the most dangerous of such diseases, syphilis, is generally believed to have been unknown in Europe before Columbus’s return from his first voyage of discovery in 1493. As for the cardinal’s not sleeping alone, as recently as the nineteenth century it was not uncommon even for men
of importance to share beds, and it may very well have been necessary for senior members of the pope’s entourage to do so in the grossly overcrowded conditions of Ancona that summer.

Rodrigo’s symptoms, in any case, are on record. They included earache and a swelling under his left arm. These are consistent with the bubonic plague, which was rampant in the March of Ancona at this time and gets its name from the phenomenon called buboes, a swelling of the lymphatic glands in armpit and groin. Here again we see that no stick is too crooked to be used in whipping a Borgia.

Four days after the Mantuan envoy wrote his letter, the Venetian fleet sailed into Ancona’s harbor with the doge Cristoforo Moro in command. On that same day, the death of Pope Pius was so obviously imminent that those cardinals not too sick to move were called to his bedroom to say their goodbyes.
He died the next day, and it was probably with deep relief that Moro, after seeing the state of affairs in Ancona and conferring with the cardinals who remained able to function (Rodrigo was not among them), declared that proceeding to the East had become impossible. He returned to his fleet and was rowed home to Venice.