The Borgias (26 page)

The most successful of the early mercenary chieftains was John Hawkwood, the one Englishman to rise to prominence fighting in Italy for pay. Of humble origins and probably illiterate, Hawkwood fought in France under King Edward III in the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. He is believed to have been about forty when he entered Italy and became a member of the Great Company. In the early 1360s he was elected commander of its successor the White Company, and he spent the next thirty years engaged in almost every significant conflict in Italy. He and his company regularly changed employers, not infrequently signing on with a patron’s enemy. They would accept a
condotta
from one city and then take money from that city’s enemies in return for not attacking. Hawkwood came to be honored all the same, perhaps in part because he never made the mistake that led to the ruin of Ezzelino and many others: he never tried to carve out a principality for himself. He married into the Visconti dynasty of Milan, and when he died, the city of Florence buried him in state in its cathedral, where his monument can be seen to this day. King Richard II asked for the return of his body to England.

By early in the fifteenth century the
condottieri
were becoming not just freebooting mercenaries but instruments of governance, and were more respectable as a result. It was another time of severe instability, with city-states large and small both threatened by external enemies and weakened from within as rival factions fought for control. Many of the cities had long been organized as communes, with substantial numbers of the citizens having at least some voice in government. Now, however, and with increasing frequency, powerful individuals (men both ambitious and rich, usually) were using the pervasive uncertainty as an excuse to take command, impose order on their own terms, and set themselves up as tyrants. As early as the thirteenth century, Dante had complained that “the cities of Italy are full of tyrants.” By the fifteenth century tyranny was the rule.

Typically, upon seizing power a new tyrant would disarm the citizenry. This was not as unpopular a measure as one might suppose; random
bloodshed stopped as swords and daggers disappeared, so that the change was not greatly deplored. Still, the need to maintain order and defend against invaders remained, and even leaders as supposedly enlightened as the Medici found it advisable to suppress dissent. The tyrants needed soldiers to do such work but, being usurpers, most found it impossible to trust the people they ruled. And so it became the practice to sign outsiders to
condotta
. This was made easier by Italy’s early development of a money economy. The employment of
condottieri
became policy even in such republics as Venice and Florence, partly because the merchants and bankers who dominated these cities had no wish to go soldiering themselves. The papacy too made frequent use of
condotta
. The lure of cash had a further effect, causing many tyrants to become
condottieri
themselves and see to it that their sons were trained to take up military careers. As the warlord families intermarried in an endless and largely futile quest for dependable allies, non-Italians found it impossible to win contracts.
Condotta
became an oblique way of paying tribute to a feared warlord—of buying his neutrality if not his friendship. Many ruling families became dependent on their earnings as mercenaries to cover the costs of running their own little states.

The mid-fifteenth century produced the greatest of the
condottieri
. The most admired was a figure we have already encountered more than once because he was employed in almost every conflict of consequence during his lifetime. This was Federico da Montefeltro, scion of the dynasty that had long ruled the remote hilltop city of Urbino. The eagerness of other cities to hire him generated the fantastic sums with which he turned Urbino into an architectural showplace of international renown, established one of the greatest libraries and most brilliant courts of the century, and raised his family to ducal status.

Even more spectacularly successful, and by a wide margin the most feared, was Francesco Sforza. Though not born into a ruling family, he gained admittance to the brotherhood of
condottieri
while still half-grown by virtue of being the son of one of the leading mercenary commanders of the early 1400s, Muzio Attendolo. In the course of his own impressive career, as a kind of early experiment in branding, this Attendolo had given himself the name Sforza, meaning “force.” Francesco, twenty-three when his father drowned crossing a river during one of their campaigns, took charge of the family business and soon showed
himself to be a general of immense courage and rare ability. In the manner of his profession he changed sides whenever it was advantageous to do so, first fighting against Pope Eugenius IV and then contracting to work for him. Later, in the service of Venice, he inflicted a painful defeat on Milan, after which he married the sixteen-year-old only child of Milan’s ruler, the last Visconti duke. When his father-in-law died, Francesco laid claim to the ducal title. To win it he had to fend off challenges from the German emperor (whose fiefdom Milan was), the French duke of Orléans (whose mother was a Visconti), and the military might of Venice. In succeeding he became the only
condottiere
to found a ruling dynasty.

It might go without saying, in light of all this, that there was nothing remotely demeaning about accepting employment under a
condotta
. The contrary was more often true: demanding a contract could be a kind of blackmail, a levy imposed by the strong upon the less strong. On the other hand, employment as a
condottiere
, even success as one, was no proof of ability or courage. The nature of the system meant that commanders rarely had reason to care passionately about whatever side they had been hired to fight for, or to put themselves in danger. Machiavelli would identify this problem, and the cynical self-interest that it engendered, as one reason for Italy’s inability to defend itself against invaders. Warfare in Italy, as long as it was conducted by Italians only, was often a ritual affair in which the risks even to combatants were kept within narrow limits and harm to civilians was often a thing to be avoided. Statistically, the warlords stood in far greater risk of being murdered by their own relatives than of dying in battle.

All this would change when the foreign armies came.

10

Innocent VIII: Plumbing the Depths

Sixtus IV’s priorities were not changed by the death of his nephew Pietro. He was still determined to start bringing the Papal States under control, pledged to oppose the advance of the Turks, and passionately, obsessively, blindly committed to lifting his family into the highest ranks of Italian society.

The clarity of his goals and the strength of his will, however, were not matched by his talents as a strategist. He needed help not just in the execution but in the formulation of policy—in deciding how to get what he wanted. There were also tricky questions having to do with what he wanted
most
, because fighting the Turks and satisfying his young kinsmen proved to be not quite compatible objectives. Among the most obvious possible sources of counsel was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. In his early forties now, with nearly two decades of experience as one of the Vatican’s top men, he had a deserved reputation as a hard worker and an intelligent, capable manager. His affability and even temperament had made him a well-liked member of the Sacred College, and his achievements in Spain had reinforced the good opinion that Sixtus had always had of him. Since returning to the papal court, however, Rodrigo had found himself eclipsed, first by Pietro Riario and then, after Pietro’s death, by his cousin Giuliano della Rovere. Though the pope’s nephews were by no means a united force—Giuliano allied himself with the Colonna, for example, while the Riario brothers encouraged
Sixtus to make war on them—the conflicts among them served only to increase their visibility and deepen the shadows to which Rodrigo found himself relegated. The death of Pietro improved his situation somewhat, making it impossible for a bereft pope not to increase his reliance on a veteran vice-chancellor whose judgment he respected. Rodrigo remained a power in the great bureaucracy that was the Curia as well as in consistory, but a power of not quite the first rank. The seat at the pope’s right hand went not to him, not even to Sixtus’s strong-willed and gifted nephew Giuliano, but to the worst choice available, the late Pietro’s conspicuously untalented brother Girolamo, now lord of Imola.

Trouble did not follow quickly from the pope’s decision, however. Instead there ensued an Indian summer of quiet and stability for Rome and for Italy, the last tranquil interlude of Cardinal Borgia’s life. The wars with the Turks raged on, but so far out on the fringes of Europe that the monarchs of the West usually found it possible to ignore them. In Moldavia, at the eastern end of faraway Romania and therefore seemingly in another world, the amazing Stephen III was annually beating back invasions by Mehmed II. In 1476 his neighbor Vlad III Dracula met his death in a last courageous stand in Wallachia, but his passing attracted little notice in Italy. The Italians paid somewhat more attention when the Turks captured the Black Sea port of Caffa, a crucial link in the chain of commercial colonies that Genoa had painstakingly put together in the East over the centuries. But nothing came of Sixtus’s call for a counteroffensive, and the Turks met little opposition as they fanned out from Caffa to take control of the whole Crimean coast.

In the spring following the fall of Caffa a flood of unprecedented magnitude buried much of Rome under a blanket of stinking mud and brought on an outbreak of plague that by summer had decimated the population and sent the pope and his court fleeing to Viterbo. Months later Milan was shaken when the cruelties of the psychopathic sadist Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza caused him to be assassinated by desperate subjects who were destroyed in their turn. Galeazzo Maria’s heir was a seven-year-old child, his son Gian Galeazzo, and though the boy’s mother Bona of Savoy attempted to take charge, she was pushed aside by her brother-in-law, the murdered duke’s brother Ludovico. Proclaiming
himself regent, Ludovico restored order so quickly that none of Milan’s neighbors had time to exploit the situation.

Sixtus brought Rodrigo out of the background when King Ferrante of Naples announced that he was marrying his first cousin, a daughter of his uncle King Juan of Aragon. Ferrante, one of the most vicious rulers of his violent times, now a fifty-four-year-old widower with three grown sons, was perhaps not the bridegroom of a twenty-two-year-old princess’s dreams. But he and his relatives in Spain required careful handling, and the obvious choice to take charge of the marital formalities was the cardinal who already had the friendship of Aragon. In August 1477 Rodrigo traveled to Naples, bearing with him the powers of a plenipotentiary envoy. There he crowned Ferrante’s bride, conferred a papal blessing on the marriage, and, as in Spain earlier, attended to various matters of Church business.

Sixtus and Girolamo Riario meanwhile nursed their ambitions for the Romagna, probing for signs of weakness in the neighboring states. In so doing they inflamed the suspicions of the Florentines, fearful as always of allowing the Romagna to fall into unfriendly hands. In 1477 Girolamo was allowed to consummate his marriage to the now fourteen-year-old, and strikingly beautiful, Caterina Sforza. After triumphantly parading her through the streets of Imola, he took her to Rome, so as to have ready access to the pope’s ear. He made no secret of wanting to rule more than Imola, and Sixtus encouraged his ambitions. Florence for its part made clear that it would not stand by idly if the two of them tried to expand their Romagna holdings beyond Imola. There was fear on both sides, and fear led as usual to bad decisions.

When Lorenzo de’ Medici worked out a defensive alliance with Milan and Venice, the two great powers to his north, Pope Sixtus denounced it as an act of aggression. But in the mind of Girolamo Riario, a mind incapable of subtleties yoked to a spirit incapable of restraint, this was a problem with a simple solution. Florence needed a new regime, one more understanding of the pope’s rights and needs. The Medici, specifically the meddlesome Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano, had to be replaced. Then everything would be fine.
And so was hatched the Pazzi Conspiracy, in which Girolamo plotted with the banker Jacopo de’ Pazzi, the archbishop of Pisa, and others to murder the Medici brothers while they were hearing mass in Florence’s great Duomo.
Here again fear was the driving force: Lorenzo’s refusal to tolerate challenges to his authority, coupled with his resentment of the loss of the Vatican’s banking business, had caused the Pazzi to suspect that he was planning their destruction and to conclude that their only hope of survival was to destroy the Medici first. The archbishop too was spurred by fear mixed with thwarted ambition. For three years Lorenzo, seeing him as an agent of the pope, had been refusing to allow him to enter Pisa and take up his duties there. The archbishop was certain that if he tried, he would pay with his life.