The Borgias (25 page)

Italy had rarely seen anything to compare with the arrogance and presumption of these upstarts from the hinterlands, and trouble was inevitable. It began in the spring of 1473—Rodrigo was still in Spain—with a clash over territory between Sixtus and a much younger man of equally strong will, Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence. In his fourth year as de facto chief of the Florentine republic in spite of being only twenty-four, Lorenzo was well along in his development into the fabled Lorenzo the Magnificent, one of the supreme personalities of the Renaissance. It is difficult to say whether he or Sixtus was most responsible for their conflict. Lorenzo made the first move, entering into an agreement by which Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan was to sell the town of Imola to Florence for a hundred thousand florins. Imola was far from being one of the great urban centers of Italy, but it lay just north and east of the Apennine Mountains and commanded miles of the rich flatlands of the Romagna. It also sat athwart the old Roman highway called the Via Emilia, a lifeline that helped to connect Florence to the Adriatic and the markets of the East. Thus it had a strategic importance out of proportion to its size.

Like the whole of the Romagna Imola owed fealty to Rome, but like much other papal territory it had long ago slipped out of papal control. It was one of the jumble of petty city-states ruled by clans that at best paid lip service to Rome while ruthlessly exploiting their subjects. Sixtus like Paul II had entered upon his reign determined to reestablish control of as much of the Papal States as possible, and again like Paul he gave particular attention to the Romagna. There were good reasons for this: the fertility of its soil made the Romagna an agricultural cornucopia,
and many of the region’s warlords had no legitimate claim to the towns they ruled and no grounds for complaint if displaced. It had become a centerpiece of papal policy to displace them if possible, and therefore Imola was at least as important to Rome as to Florence. The sale arranged by Lorenzo de’ Medici was as unthinkable for the pope as control of the city by Rome—or by any state except Florence—was for the Florentines.

When Sixtus ordered Milan’s Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza to cancel the sale on grounds that he had no right to sell what he did not own even if his troops happened to occupy it, what followed was not obedience but prolonged, multisided, and indescribably complicated negotiations. These ended in a new agreement, this one between Milan and Rome with Florence relegated to the sidelines. Imola was to be handed over not to Florence but to the pope, and for forty thousand florins rather than a hundred. Seller and buyer were to be brought together in harmony via the marriage (which had long been under discussion) of Count Girolamo Riario to Galeazzo Maria’s illegitimate daughter Caterina, now all of eleven years old. Such a marriage had become advantageous in a new way: it would allow all parties to pretend that Imola was not being sold at all but was the dowry of the bride-to-be. Florence, neither fooled nor mollified, was soon in an uproar of indignation.

The Vatican treasury did not have forty thousand florins to spare. The Roman branch of the Medici bank having had a monopoly on the papacy’s business since a grateful client became Pope Nicholas V back in 1447, Sixtus found himself applying for a loan to none other than Lorenzo de’ Medici. If he was less than shocked at being turned down, he definitely was infuriated. He broke off relations with the House of Medici and put in its place a rival Florentine establishment, the bank of Francesco de’ Pazzi.

That might have been the end of it, but was only the beginning. When Sixtus sent envoys to assert his authority in the Romagna, hostile local warlords forced them to turn back. The pope then raised the stakes, sending an armed force northward under his nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. The compulsive determination to dominate everyone and everything, to impose his will upon every situation and accept no setbacks, made Giuliano a throwback to the ferocious warrior-cardinals of the past. He was also an abler soldier than his cousin
Girolamo, the papal captain-general, because he was more intelligent and courageous. He was thwarted all the same, forced into retreat by a superior Florentine force. Predictably, and with considerable justification, Sixtus again seethed with indignation. Eventually, after considerable to-ing and fro-ing, the pope’s troops succeeded in reaching Imola, and Girolamo Riario was installed as its lord.

Girolamo’s brother Pietro, meanwhile, was occupied with other matters.
Still in Milan and on the friendliest of terms with its murderous duke—it was partly because of their friendship that the duke had elected to sell Imola to the pope rather than to Florence—the cardinal and his host were engaged now in hatching a breathtakingly bizarre scheme that if somehow carried to completion might have satisfied the voracious ambitions of both men. Galeazzo Maria was to become king of Lombardy, his coronation performed by the pope. He would then advance on Rome and use his army to install Pietro on the papal throne. (Sixtus would be willing, one must assume, to abdicate in his nephew’s favor to make this possible.) That these things could ever have been accomplished is extremely unlikely; the forces in opposition would have been daunting. In any case the question was never put to the test. Upon returning to Rome, presumably to finalize arrangements with his uncle, Pietro was struck down by fever. In January 1474, after weeks of struggle and amid the usual rumors of poisoning, he died aged twenty-eight. Whether or to what extent Sixtus knew of Pietro’s plan and the part he was expected to play in it remains a mystery.

Pietro’s death left his uncle bereft and a vacuum at the heart of the papal court. With all his excesses the young cardinal had been a comfort to Sixtus, a source of pride and even, at times, of helpful counsel. No greater question faced the pontiff, now in the third year of his reign, than where to look for a new right hand.

There were several satisfactory answers, both in the College of Cardinals and elsewhere.

Sixtus would choose badly.

Background
 
 WAR, ITALIAN STYLE

TO BE A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY POPE WAS TO BE FACED WITH A humiliating and costly form of political impotence: the inability to establish even limited control over those whole provinces of Italy that by law and tradition were the property of the papacy but in fact were in other, rarely friendly, hands.

The resulting conflicts and frustrations are a dark thread running through the reigns of all the century’s popes. Time after time succeeding pontiffs found themselves blocked from their own territories by even the pettiest of lordlings, especially when, as commonly happened, those lordlings were under the protection of more powerful neighbors. We saw this in the reign of Paul II, who was able to take control of his fiefdom of Cesena only because its reigning strongman had died without an heir and the other interested powers were momentarily distracted. We saw also that only the help of Federico da Montefeltro enabled Paul to drive the vicious Anguillara clan from the little domain they had carved out of the Papal States, and that when this same Montefeltro changed sides (in spite of being himself a papal vassal), the pope was rendered helpless.

It was much the same for Sixtus IV, who would never have been able to obtain Imola for his nephew Girolamo if the duke of Milan had not been willing to sell it. What had been given to the popes by emperors was taken from them by gangsters during the years of exile and schism, and after the papacy returned to Rome, those families proved impossible to control and all but impossible to uproot.

To understand the Borgia story it is necessary to understand who these families were, and how they had come to matter as much as they did.
Most of them were, by the time the first Borgias arrived in Rome, members of a brotherhood called the
condottieri
, which means simply that they signed contracts,
condotta
, to sell their military services in return for hard cash: for gold.

It is appropriate, if less romantic, to call them warlords. Most were
lords in a quite literal sense—the rulers, even when they did not bear titles of nobility, of one or more cities or towns. In most cases their rule was brutish and tyrannical, with no basis in law or justice. They spent their lives fighting one another, waging war for pay, or collecting retainers while waiting for the call to battle.

It could be a lucrative line of work, being a
condottiere
, and it was not necessarily all that dangerous. A good
condotta
was a thing to be coveted, so fine a source of honor and income that by the fifteenth century breaking into the business had come to be nearly impossible for anyone lacking the right family connections. For anyone not born, that is, into the increasingly exclusive circle of Italian tyrant families.

The world of these families was Italy’s version of the phenomenon that historians refer to as “bastard feudalism.” In its unadulterated form, feudalism was an arrangement by which a king granted land to his nobles, the nobles in turn parceled out their land among knights, and the knights used peasants to farm the parcels. Everyone at every level of this pyramid owed service to whoever stood directly above him and ultimately to the man at the apex, the prince. Part of the price for possession of land, and for protection, was an obligation to report for military service when summoned. This was the only dependable way of raising an armed force where not much money was in circulation. But it became a nuisance to everyone involved as economic life became more sophisticated. Gradually it mutated into the debased form that permitted noblemen, rather than fighting the king’s wars themselves, to send the king a purseful of gold instead.

Things developed differently in Italy. As we saw earlier, feudalism failed to sink its roots as deeply south of the Alps as in the north, and it began to fade away earlier. The development of manufacturing and trade, the emergence of lively urban centers, and the absence of even a vestige of national government combined to create more opportunities for the freelance fighting man in Italy than elsewhere, and in ways that few ordinary Italians could have welcomed. When German kings began to invade the sunny lands of the south, they did so at the head of armies that seemed to the onlooking locals (no doubt accurately enough) to be not much of an improvement over the barbarian tribes that had overrun their forebears a thousand years before.

Inevitably, amid the disorder created by these invasions, troops of
battle-hardened foreigners found themselves at loose ends but unwilling to return to the cold and backward north when the emperors who had brought them to Italy were obliged to go home. Armed and unemployed in a rich and fragmented country, they rather naturally took up the business of pillaging. They came together to form companies that sometimes numbered more than ten thousand men, enough to make them a threat to the largest city-states. By electing their officers and providing opportunities for quick wealth that would have been inconceivable in any other line of work, they achieved surprisingly high levels of cohesion. Of course they left devastation behind them wherever they went. Their opportunism and ruthlessness are illustrated by an episode of 1329, when a force of eight hundred German cavalry deserted from the army of Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria and independently laid siege to the city of Lucca. The man sent by the emperor to order them to return defected himself instead and was rewarded with election as their leader. Upon capturing Lucca they looted it of everything of value, and then sold it to Genoa for thirty thousand florins.

One of the most notorious early captains, Werner von Urslingen, is said to have displayed on his breastplate the motto “Enemy of God, of pity, and of mercy”—and to have earned it in years of savagely pillaging the Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria. For a while he sold the services of the force he had created, the notorious Great Company, to the pope. When that proved insufficiently lucrative, he switched to ravaging the Papal States.

Another fourteenth-century legend, Ezzelino da Romano (of German extraction despite his name), became so notorious for his atrocities that, two and a half centuries after his death, the poet Ariosto wrote that he was “believed to be the son of a demon.” He was not devoid of redeeming qualities, however. He was the only commander to remain loyal to Frederick II as that extraordinary emperor was brought low by the pope, and he was generous in his treatment of vanquished foes. It appears likely that the most horrifying of the stories he inspired—accounts of his monstrous treatment of children, for example—were invented by his enemies. The moral caliber of those enemies, and the standards of conduct prevailing at the time, might fairly be measured by what happened after Ezzelino was captured and subjected to a slow, agonizing death. His brother and partner Alberico, also captured, was forced to watch as
his wife and two daughters were burned alive. All six of his sons were then executed, their bodies chopped into pieces and scattered. Finally, ropes were tied to Alberico’s extremities and to horses that pulled him apart. If the brothers were monsters, their enemies were no better.