The Borgias (22 page)

Things went even better when Paul chose, as his next objective, a
piece of papal territory less than a day’s journey north of Rome. This had for years been the domain of Eversus Anguillara, patriarch of a family of ruffians and bandits that had taken advantage of the weakness of the papacy to seize a number of towns and impose on them a brutishly harsh regime. Eversus having died, Paul again hired Montefeltro, along with Napoleone Orsini, lord of Bracciano, and dispatched them to drive out Anguillara’s sons. In short order thirteen castles were taken and the tyrants put to flight. The end result, however, was not what the pope had in mind: the Orsini took over many of the properties from which the Anguillara had been expelled, strengthening their position north of Rome and with it their own ability to make trouble. This was another step in the education of Rodrigo Borgia, looking on from Rome. It demonstrated anew both the need to deal with the warlord clans and the difficulties of doing so in ways that made a meaningful difference.

The attack on the Anguillara was, in any case, the end of Paul’s good luck. When he turned his attention to a more ambitious target, the great papal fiefdom of Bologna, things quickly went wrong. Bologna, rich and powerful since the days of the Roman Empire, was in the grip of a tight little circle of dominant families. The pope regarded this flagrantly self-serving oligarchy as a disgrace to the papacy, which as overlord was supposed to be in charge.
But when he demanded reforms, he met with more resistance than he had the means to overcome, and in the end he agreed to a settlement that served no purpose except to allow much of the power of the oligarchs to pass into the hands of a single family, the Bentivoglii. Once again, intervention had produced unintended and distinctly unwelcome consequences. As a result, Bologna would be an even more intractable problem for Paul’s successors than it had ever been for his predecessors.

Mistake followed mistake, failure begot failure.
Most humiliating of all was a crisis that erupted at home, within the Curia. Paul was unusual among Renaissance pontiffs in having no perceptible interest in humanistic studies. He disliked the classicists’ celebration of pagan antiquity and therefore resented the costs of maintaining the Vatican’s College of Abbreviators, a privileged clique of literary men, officially scribes or secretaries, whose membership had been increased to seventy by Pius II. Paul suspected the abbreviators, not without reason, of
harboring heretical beliefs and dreams of making Rome a republic once again. When reports reached him that they were involved in a plot to imprison or kill him and take command of the city, Paul’s response was to declare the college abolished. Their jobs disappeared with it, and as many of them had paid hard cash for their positions, the ferocity of their resentment is not hard to understand.

Though the rebellion that ensued was a tiny one with no possibility of accomplishing anything, it did leave Paul besieged in his palace for some three weeks. The outcome was inevitable—the rebels were subdued and taken prisoner, Paul liberated—but the whole thing had been a profound embarrassment. It showed the pope to be so weak that he could be put in peril by fewer than a hundred of his own scribbling scholars. The episode also assured that Paul would be known as a bad man and bad pope more or less forever. The leading troublemaker among the abbreviators, Bartolomeo Platina, somehow expected to be reemployed upon his release from confinement, and when this did not happen, he was freshly offended. He took his revenge years later by writing
Lives of the Popes
, which depicted Paul II as a monster of cruelty and sexual depravity. His description has long since been shown to bear little connection to the truth, but the damage to its subject’s reputation proved to be lasting.

Still worse was to come. In 1469 word reached Rome that the tireless Sultan Mehmed II was assembling an army of eighty thousand men and an enormous fleet of galleys for a fresh offensive and that his target this time was to be the city of Negropont in the Aegean Sea.
Negropont was a key Venetian stronghold, one of the serene republic’s essential colonial possessions, and its loss would be a disaster of the first order. Venice tried to rise to the challenge, extracting forced loans from its wealthier citizens and using the money to hurriedly expand its war fleet. By the time the Turkish attack came in 1470, the Venetians were ready. Negropont was under siege but holding out, its walls being slowly reduced to rubble by the Turks’ guns, when Venice’s fleet came racing over the horizon. The plan was to sever the Ottoman lines of supply, which would force the attackers to withdraw. Success seemed certain when suddenly the inexperienced Venetian commander lost his nerve and ordered his galleys to turn back. Negropont fell to the Turks just a day later, and its population was slaughtered. The city’s governor,
who had surrendered on condition that he not lose his head, was cut in half at the waist instead. It was the greatest Turkish success since the conquest of Bosnia in 1463. Coming on the heels of the death of Skanderbeg of Albania, who had fallen victim to malaria, it awoke all Italy to just how great the danger now was. The peninsula’s leading powers and a number of the secondary ones came together once again in the new League of Lodi, a nonaggression pact akin to the one that had brought peace to Italy in the last days of Nicholas V. Peace was once again assured, at least for the time being, but it was a peace of a fearful and demoralized kind.

One evening a year after the fall of Negropont, Pope Paul, still only fifty-four years old, became ill after a hard day that had included six hours spent in consistory. He canceled the audiences scheduled for that night and retired to his bedchamber. Hours later his attendants found him dead, the victim of “apoplexy” according to his baffled physicians, probably of a stroke. It was said that he died from overindulging in melons, which must be a medical first of some kind, and stories of how he had suffered a fatal seizure while being sodomized by a young favorite would years later make their way into print. There is no contemporary testimony to any such thing, and no reputable commentator believes it today.

It makes more sense to suggest that Paul II had drunk too deeply from the supposedly great prize he had won seven years before and had become its latest victim.

Background
 
 THE INEXTINGUISHABLE EVIL-HEADS

THE STORY OF THE POPES AND THE ROMAGNA REGION OF northeastern Italy, from early times part of the Papal States, is a long, dismal chronicle of bloodshed, betrayal, and tragic outcomes. And it appears in perfect capsule form in the story of one family: the
Malatesta of Rimini.

Malatesta:
the word translates as something like “evil-head.” It is not necessary to delve very deep into the family’s history to get some understanding of why this came to be its name. Generation after generation over a period of two centuries, the Malatesta repeatedly shocked even their violent age with the extravagance of their crimes. They came to embody much of what was worst, along with a little of what was best, in the Italy of their time.

They first appear in history in the twelfth century as one of the first families to become noteworthy as soldiers-for-hire. Early in the thirteenth century they took a decisive step up, playing one side against the other as the popes in Rome fought the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II for supremacy in Italy, and establishing themselves as masters of several towns. Before the end of that century they were the lords of Rimini, which from that time forward would be the capital and main stronghold of the family’s senior branch.

A rich lore would grow up around any princely family that stayed in power very long, but the tales told of the Malatesta were different: singularly horrific, and also generally true. The oldest and most famous of these tales—Dante included it in
The Inferno
, and it has been the subject of dozens of operas and plays—is that of Francesca da Rimini. She was the bride of a physically deformed Malatesta lord, fell in love and had an affair with her husband’s charming brother, and was butchered along with her lover when the husband found them out. History repeated itself more than a century later when the fourteen-year-old Parisina Malatesta was married to Niccolò d’Este lord of Ferrara, twenty years her senior. This Niccolò had an illegitimate son a year younger
than his bride, and again an affair ensued. When the lovers were discovered and young Ugo d’Este was put to death, Parisina cried out, “Now I no longer want to live!” Her husband obliged her by cutting off her head.

If these were the most romantic episodes in the history of the Malatesta, they were by no means the bloodiest. But ruthlessness and cruelty were useful in their world, and as the Malatesta went on with murdering their enemies and one another, they also gradually came into possession of a little mini-empire of cities and towns scattered across the Romagna and the March of Ancona. As they did so—here we touch on one of the paradoxes of Renaissance Italy—they also showed themselves to be improbably cultivated, lovers of literature and patrons of the arts. They built up a great library, which survives today, and early in the fifteenth century one of the lords of Rimini came to be known as “Malatesta of the sonnets.”

The most notorious and in his way the greatest of the Malatesta was born in 1417 and grew up to become the plague of popes and kings. This was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, tall and powerfully built, blue-eyed and golden-haired, with the moral code of a sociopath. He first went soldiering at age thirteen, a year later took command of Rimini’s defenses and fought off an attack by some Malatesta cousins, and succeeded to the lordship of the city one year after that. He was intelligent, a poet, a patron of artists and architects, so talented a general as to be described by some as a military genius. He was also so unscrupulous, so hungry for conquest, that finally no one could trust him. The stories told about him defy belief; he was said to have murdered two wives, copulated with his daughters, and been stopped at knifepoint from raping his son. The worst of these tales are almost certainly fabrications—Pope Pius II, who hated him as he hated no one else on earth, was the source of many of the most hair-raising of them—but it is nonetheless certain that he was capable of atrocious acts. The same cousins whom he had bested at Rimini at age fourteen later became so terrified of him that to escape his wrath they sold their home city of Pesaro to the duke of Milan.

The assortment of enemies that Sigismondo accumulated would have caused most men to reconsider their conduct, but he was fearless quite literally to a fault. Among those who sought his destruction were Alfonso
V of Aragon and then his son Ferrante, Pope Pius II and then his successor, Paul. What would ultimately matter more, Federico da Montefeltro, a general who was an even better soldier than he and a far cooler head, came to hate him bitterly. Montefeltro’s home city of Urbino was not distant from Malatesta’s Rimini, which meant that, both men being ambitious to expand their domains, they were fated to collide. Things first turned seriously ugly in the late 1450s, when the two became embroiled in a dispute over the towns of Mondavio in the March of Ancona and Senigallia on the Romagna coast. Pope Pius was invited to arbitrate, but his decision left Malatesta convinced that he had been cheated. His response was to seize Mondavio and lay siege to Senigallia, thus putting himself at war with Rome and drawing down upon himself charges of heresy and treason.

In July 1462 Malatesta met a superior papal force at Castel Leone and subjected it to such a humiliating defeat that he expected Pius to come to terms. But the pope was unwilling to give up. Instead he again hired Montefeltro, who had not been present at Castel Leone, and in one of the weirdest exercises in the history of the papacy had Malatesta burned in effigy and canonized in reverse as a damned soul. (
“I am Sigismondo Malatesta, king of traitors,” a sign on the blazing dummy said. “Enemy of God and man, by sentence of the Sacred College condemned to the flames.”) In short order Montefeltro and Malatesta had their showdown, and the latter was defeated so thoroughly that the war was over.

Pius wanted to drive the now-helpless Malatesta out of his last remaining stronghold, Rimini, and take possession of it himself. But Milan and Venice intervened, declaring that they could not tolerate the establishment of a papal outpost so far north. Malatesta had to pay a hefty annual tribute and pledge to fast on bread and water every Friday for the rest of his life. He lost almost all of his territories but was allowed to keep Rimini and a bit of the adjacent countryside for as long as he lived. His brother Domenico remained lord of Cesena on the same terms. Satisfied, Pius lifted the three bulls of excommunication earlier laid on Sigismondo and approved his departure for Greece, where he became a commander of Venetian forces in the war against the Turks.

The Malatesta, it appeared, were finished. This seemed all the more certain when, in 1465, Domenico died without an heir and the lordship of Cesena became vacant. Paul II, just a year into his papacy, moved
quickly to take possession. Under ordinary circumstances such a step would have been opposed by the leading powers of the north, all of which coveted the Romagna and none of which wanted to see Rome entrench itself in the region. But Paul was lucky in his timing. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was in no position to do anything, obviously. Florence was distracted by upheavals following the death of its leader Cosimo de’ Medici; Milan’s Duke Francesco Sforza was incapacitated by dropsy and gout; and the Venetians, locked in their war with the Turks, were unwilling to risk offending their ally the pope. In short order Cesena’s government was in the hands of a legate from Rome, and it had all been accomplished without bloodshed.