The Borgias (27 page)

Rodrigo knew nothing of the plot. Girolamo, aware that the vice-chancellor had no respect for him and had long been on friendly terms with Lorenzo, made certain that he knew nothing. Sixtus on the other hand was informed, in delicate terms and strict confidence, that certain steps were being taken to clear the Medici out of Florence; not even his favorite nephew would have dared to keep such a momentous undertaking from him. But when told that it might become necessary to kill Lorenzo and his brother (Girolamo pretended that none of the plotters
wanted
that to happen), Sixtus forbade the shedding of blood. That his problems with the Medici had engendered in him an icy hatred for the entire clan is not to be doubted, and he would have celebrated a change of regimes in Florence. But none of this stopped him from calling Girolamo “fool” when asked if the assassination of Lorenzo would be forgiven, or from repeating what he had said earlier: “I will not have anyone killed.”

The plot went forward and became the fiasco of the century. When the assassins attacked, young Giuliano de’ Medici was all but cut to bits, but Lorenzo escaped with a knife wound in his neck. Supporters of the murderers ran through the streets of Florence shouting
“libertà! libertà!”
but got nothing like the enthusiastic reception they expected. Within minutes the dead bodies of various members of the Pazzi family, the archbishop of Pisa, and the two priests who had done the stabbing were hanging in the city’s central piazza. A general bloodbath would have ensued if Lorenzo had not intervened. Among those saved was the newest of Sixtus’s nephew-cardinals, Raffaele Sansoni Riario, whose stop at Florence en route to Rome had been used by the conspirators to lure the Medici to the Duomo. A grandson of one of Sixtus IV’s sisters, born into poverty like so many of the pope’s relatives and adopting
the Riario surname because of its new prestige, this boy, just sixteen, was one of the youngest cardinals in history. He had known nothing of the plot, and stood at the Duomo’s altar in a state of stupefaction as the brothers came under attack. Lorenzo took him into protective custody and later provided guards to escort him safely to Rome. It would be said that over the next forty years, which he spent as one of Rome’s wealthiest cardinals and greatest patrons of the arts, his face never lost the haunted expression it acquired that Sunday in Florence.

Sixtus’s response to the debacle was perhaps the most ignoble episode in what was turning into a deeply disgraceful reign. He denounced the killing not of Giuliano de’ Medici but of the archbishop of Pisa, on grounds that even obviously guilty clerics had to be handed over to the Church for judgment.
He summoned Lorenzo to Rome, and when his order was not obeyed Lorenzo was excommunicated—a punishment supposed to entail eternal damnation. When Florence’s city council refused to hand its leader over, the whole city was put under an interdict, which meant that none of its priests were to make the sacraments available to the citizenry: no weddings or baptisms, no mass or communion, no last rites or burials. When this too had no effect, the Florentines forcing even the most reluctant of their priests to carry on as usual, Sixtus declared that Rome and Florence were at war. He was immediately joined by Naples: Ferrante saw an opportunity to seize some Florentine territory at little cost or risk. He and Sixtus found a third ally in the Tuscan city-state of Siena, which always welcomed a chance to weaken its bigger and much-feared neighbor Florence.

Fear of Sixtus’s ambitions brought Venice and Milan in on Florence’s side. They were followed by Ferrara, Bologna, and Rimini, all of them papal fiefs and therefore now in rebellion against their overlord. An indignant Sixtus then persuaded Genoa to rebel against Milan and recruited companies of Swiss mercenaries to attack the Sforzas from the north. Thanks to Girolamo Riario and his reckless scheming, the whole of Italy was at war, almost all the northern powers arrayed against Rome. If Sixtus was distressed to learn that summer that the capital of Albania had fallen to the Turks, and that the Turks had also taken possession of the Friuli region at the northern end of the Adriatic and were beginning to encroach on Austria, he no longer had the means even to try to respond.

In Italy, however, alliances were made to be broken, and to be winning today was almost an assurance that one would be losing tomorrow. Milan’s new strongman, the regent Ludovico Sforza, decided that it would be to his advantage to break with Venice and Florence and join Naples and Rome.
When a hard-pressed Venice reacted to this betrayal by abandoning its sixteen-year war with the Turks, signing a treaty by which it surrendered strategic outposts in the eastern Mediterranean and consented to pay Constantinople a hefty annual tribute, the course of Italian history was changed in ways few could have foreseen. Having accepted a position subordinate to the Turks in parts of the world where it had once been supreme, Venice began looking to the Italian mainland as its best—its last—opportunity for an expanding sphere of influence. It became a more volatile, more aggressive element in the age-old contest for primacy among Italy’s leading states, because it no longer saw any reason to accept the status quo put in place by the Italian League a generation before. It saw its only choices as expansion or stagnation, and few ways of expanding except at the expense of its Italian neighbors, the neighbors that were currently its allies included.

Sixtus’s war dragged drearily, pointlessly on. He was urged to end it by the College of Cardinals, the Holy Roman emperor, and the kings of France and Hungary, but paid them no heed. He was encouraged to fight on only by his nephew Girolamo and by Ferrante of Naples, both of whom had narrow and purely selfish motives. Lorenzo de’ Medici meanwhile was himself under heavy pressure, his support among the people of Florence eroding as the war brought increasing hardship. His position became even more difficult in November 1479, when after a siege of more than half a year the Neapolitans captured the town of Colle di Val d’Elsa just thirty miles from Florence. This cut the Florentines off from one of their primary sources of food and put them in danger of famine.

Lorenzo bet everything on a final throw of the dice. He raised sixty thousand florins by mortgaging much of what he owned, boarded a galley at Livorno, and proceeded to Naples. There he delivered himself into the hands of his enemy Ferrante—an act as brave as it was desperate. In departing Florence, Lorenzo accepted the very real possibility that the city’s exhausted and demoralized citizens might abandon him for the sake of peace. And in going to Naples he was putting himself at
the mercy of a truly sinister man. On an earlier and somewhat similar occasion, when visited by a mercenary commander who had long been his partner in crime, Ferrante had entertained his guest lavishly for weeks before abruptly having him strangled. The murder was entirely characteristic of the Neapolitan king.

Lorenzo was no fool, however, and though his courage in going to Naples cannot be disputed, the venture was not a blind leap. He had friends at the Neapolitan court and in fact had been encouraged by Ferrante’s son Alfonso to undertake his daring journey. Also, he was a head of state in effect if not quite officially, not some troublemaking soldier of fortune, and so was unlikely to be put to death. Ferrante was, as it turned out, fascinated by his charismatic young visitor. The two talked frequently and at length, and Lorenzo used his borrowed florins to put on flamboyant displays of princely generosity, winning the applause of the Neapolitan public by buying the freedom of a hundred galley slaves and giving each of them ten florins and a new suit of clothes. He appeared to be bringing Ferrante around to the idea that Florence, as a friend of France and Venice, would be a more valuable ally than the pope, but whenever he proposed an alliance, the king became evasive. It was only by pretending to give up and actually setting off for home that Lorenzo was able to extract a treaty from Ferrante at last. When this became known in Florence, Lorenzo was once again a hero.

But Sixtus remained immovable, and his shabby little war dragged on. Nothing was accomplished by either side, though in the summer of 1480 Girolamo Riario was able to use his uncle’s army to pry the town of Forlì out of the hands of the squabbling heirs of its last Ordelaffi lord. With this one stroke—barely related to the wider war—he doubled his holdings in the Romagna. That wider war might have gone on indefinitely if reality had not suddenly intruded. It arrived with the news that a seaborne Turkish army, wandering the Mediterranean after unsuccessfully attacking the island of Rhodes, had come ashore on Naples’s east coast and captured the city of Otranto. Almost half of Otranto’s twenty-two thousand inhabitants had been massacred, many of them after being raped or tortured, and the survivors had been taken away as slaves. Both Otranto’s governor and its aged archbishop had been sawed in half alive.

The Turks were in Italy. This shocking development changed everything, and immediately. Ferrante begged the pope for assistance, warning that if it was not forthcoming he was prepared to come to terms with the invaders. Sixtus responded with a shipment of gold, a special tithe on the churches of Naples and the Papal States, and an assessment of one ducat on every household in the territories he controlled. He also extracted pledges totaling 150,000 ducats from the cardinals. The money thus raised financed the recruitment of troops and a new crash program of galley construction, and even the princes of northern Europe promised to send help. Preparations got under way for moving the papal court to France if the Turks advanced on Rome.

Having been brought to his senses, Sixtus removed the interdict from Florence and restored Lorenzo to good standing in the Church. The Turks at Otranto were being brought under siege when, at the start of the summer of 1481, another bolt of stunning news arrived. Mehmed II was dead. The sultan had been only forty-nine years old and brimmed with vitality almost to the end, making this one of the rare instances when rumors of poisoning may have been justified. One suspect, an Italian-born convert to Islam who served as the sultan’s physician, was put to death. An equally plausible possibility, Mehmed’s son Bayezid, was too powerful to be accused. Whatever its cause, the death was celebrated with the ringing of church bells in Naples and Rome. And it really did change things drastically. The Ottoman Empire found itself caught in a contest between two claimants to the throne, Bayezid and his brother Cem, and when the former quickly prevailed, he showed himself to be both less belligerent than his father and less interested in Italy. The vast territories he already controlled were presenting him with an abundance of headaches, a war with Persia among them, and so he both revised the treaty that his father had imposed upon Venice, making its terms less onerous and the Venetians grateful, and pulled his troops out of Otranto.
The withdrawal was hailed as a great victory for the Christians but should be seen as a shift in strategy on the part of the Turks.

Be that as it may, this was without question a moment of weakness and indecision for the Ottoman Empire.
A Christian counteroffensive might have achieved great things—might have retaken Albania and Greece, even conceivably Constantinople. But when Sixtus proposed
an advance on Albania, no one else was interested. He therefore turned his attention back to Italy and to matters in which he might better have never become involved. Mere months after the death of Mehmed, the Italians were once again at war with one another. And for no better reason than Girolamo’s hunger to become lord of the whole of the Romagna, and the pope’s desire for revenge.

The great obstacle to the pope’s freedom of action in the Romagna and on the Adriatic coast was Venice. It needed to be neutralized if the Romagna was ever to be subdued, but it was far too mighty for this to be accomplished by force. Diplomacy was required—bribery, really—and so Sixtus offered the Venetians a stupendous prize.
He said they could have the duchy of Ferrara, which lay just to the southwest of Venice and for centuries had been a papal fief ruled by the House of Este, one of the oldest and proudest families in Europe. The price, of course, was that Venice must become Rome’s friend and ally once again. To do so it would have to take on the dirty job of defeating Ferrara’s duke, a tough and experienced soldier who had long been making himself a nuisance by supporting Lorenzo de’ Medici and refusing to pay the annual tribute that he owed, as a vassal, to Rome. He was certain to put up a hard fight, but if the Venetians were not exactly delighted by the prospect of taking him on, they certainly were willing. This was an opportunity to vastly expand, at a single stroke, their holdings on the mainland. And the expansion would come with a papal blessing, which would cloak it in legitimacy. Venice accepted the pope’s offer, its rivals were outraged when they learned of the deal, and Italy again went up in flames. Again the cause lay entirely in Rome.

In the protracted and terrible conflict that would be called the War of Ferrara, Rome and Venice were opposed not only by Ferrara itself but by Naples, Milan, Florence, and smaller city-states including Bologna, Mantua, Roberto Malatesta’s Rimini, and Federico da Montefeltro’s Urbino. All were convinced that their safety required them to resist what they saw as the pope’s unprovoked betrayal of one of his own vassals. The complications that ensued were often bizarre and included even more than the usual number of inexplicable surprises. With the violence at its height Roberto Malatesta and Pope Sixtus were somehow reconciled. Malatesta was given command of Venice’s army, inflicted a ruinous defeat on a Neapolitan force that had invaded the
Papal States, and was received in Rome as a hero just days before dying there of malaria. His father-in-law Montefeltro died on the same day, so that two of Italy’s best generals simultaneously disappeared from the scene. Most bizarrely of all, Sixtus then broke with Venice and teamed up with Ferrante, probably because he felt endangered by the latter’s repeated attacks on the Papal States.

It is a measure of the irresponsibility of nearly all the participants in this lunatic conflict that Ferrante hired fifteen hundred
Turkish
cavalry to fight his fellow Italians on Italian soil. Most irresponsible of all, and also incompetent, was Girolamo Riario. At one crucial point, with enemy troops threatening, he used the main altar of a Roman church as a dicing table on which to gamble away his army’s payroll. Eventually, having proved even to himself that he was incapable of accomplishing anything on conventional fields of battle, he launched a gratuitously savage campaign aimed at the destruction of the Colonna and their allies. As this was largely a matter of forcing the Colonna out of their strongholds inside Rome, the streets of the papal capital were engulfed in the general mayhem.