The Borgias (29 page)

When Innocent followed Lorenzo to the grave three and a half months later, few except his relatives could see any reason to be sorry.

11

The Best Man for the Job

I am Pope! I am Pope!

This is what Rodrigo Borgia is reported to have cried out in jubilation, almost in ecstasy, upon being chosen by his fellow cardinals to succeed Innocent VIII in August 1492. An alternative and more imperious version, translated from the Florentine Italian of five centuries ago, is:

I! I am Pope!

These words have invariably been interpreted as a spontaneous eruption of dark things that supposedly lay concealed under Cardinal Rodrigo’s cheerful exterior: pride, arrogance, joy in mastering people and things and bending them to sinister purposes.

But of course his outburst—assuming that it happened—can just as plausibly be seen in an entirely different light. As an expression of surprise—which Rodrigo’s election almost certainly was, to himself no less than to others. As an effusion of simple, almost childish joy from a man who had served five successive popes, had been witness to their innumerable failures and misdeeds, their few and dubious triumphs and sometimes gruesome tragedies, and was justified in thinking himself capable of doing better.

To which it is necessary to add that it is not certain—that it is on balance less than probable—that Rodrigo ever said any such thing. The first report of it appeared nine years after his election, in an anonymous
pamphlet written for the purpose of showing him to be what its author explicitly called him: “the monster,” “this cursed beast” in the course of whose papacy “the bestiality and savagery of Nero and Caligula are surpassed.” Suffice it to note, for present purposes, that such a depiction of Rodrigo’s performance as pope is dubious at best.

This is the Borgia problem in a nutshell: wildly outlandish accusations accepted as true generation after generation because when taken together they add up to one of the most gloriously lurid stories in all of history. Anecdotes about murder and incest that are especially delicious because their subject is a pope, and that have become so firmly embedded in the consciousness of the whole world that to question them can seem fatuous, to challenge them preposterous.

If the problem begins with a notorious garden party in Siena during the reign of Pius II, it bursts into full bloom with the conclave that raised Rodrigo to the throne as Pope Alexander VI. It is vividly apparent, for example, in the work of the first noteworthy historian of medieval and Renaissance Italy, Francesco Guicciardini.
He wrote—and influenced countless later historians by writing—that Cardinal Borgia’s election is a tale of how “with money, offices, benefices, promises, and all his powers and resources he suborned and bought the votes of the cardinals and the College.”
And that the 1492 conclave was “a hideous and abominable thing, and a most apt beginning to [the new pope’s] future deplorable proceedings and behavior.”

As with so much Borgia history, Guicciardini’s allegations require closer examination than they have usually received. At the time of which he is writing, Guicciardini was a nine-year-old schoolboy in Florence. He never met a Borgia, is not known to have set foot in Rome when the Borgias were in power there, and in the course of growing to manhood absorbed his home city’s deep-rooted hostility toward Roman and papal power in general and the Borgias specifically.
He could be ridiculously credulous, reporting for example that one night early in Alexander’s reign three suns appeared overhead and that “huge numbers of armed soldiers riding enormous steeds were seen for many days passing across the sky with a terrible clash of trumpets and drums.” He laced his
History of Italy
(written some forty years after Rodrigo became Alexander) with the choicest products of the anti-Borgia pamphleteers who flourished in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. Though
a pioneer in the use of documentary evidence, he had no credible documents to work with in writing of the 1492 conclave and little more than gossip to draw upon in dealing with the lives of the Borgias.

That Rodrigo nursed little hope of being elected is suggested by the fact that, during the five months or more during which Innocent VIII was declining toward death, he made no effort to increase the number of votes available to him. He could have asked the two cardinals then resident in Spain, his cousin Luis Juan del Milà (who had been appointed to the College of Cardinals with him back in 1456) and Pedro González de Mendoza (who owed his red hat to Rodrigo’s mission to Castile in the early seventies), to travel to Rome in time for the increasingly inevitable election. They would have represented nearly ten percent of the electors present at the conclave, providing a counterweight to the various nephews of Sixtus IV on hand to vote for their cousin Giuliano della Rovere.

If Rodrigo did in fact give himself little chance of being elected, this was in part because, of the twenty-three cardinals able to attend the conclave, only he and Jorge da Costa of Portugal were not Italian. Among the Italians, in addition to the della Rovere-Riario circle, were a Medici, a Sforza, representatives of the Orsini, Colonna, and Savelli families, Paul II’s three nephews, nephews of Pius II and Innocent VIII, and several cardinals who, if not so bountifully endowed with family connections, were esteemed for their personal qualities. In terms of talent as well as clout, it was a formidable assortment of plausible candidates, almost all of them preferring to keep the papacy in Italian hands.

In the summer of 1492 the usual intricacies of papal politics were complicated by growing antagonism between Naples and Milan, which threatened the stability of all Italy. The trouble originated this time not with a pope’s ambitions but with those of Ferrante of Naples, just a year short of his seventieth birthday, in his thirty-fourth year as king, but still probing restlessly for opportunities to extend his reach. Ferrante, whose political tool kit included everything from torture and cold-blooded murder to the subtlest diplomatic intrigues, had over the preceding three decades used arranged marriages to link his family to the Sforzas of Milan. In 1465 he had married his son and heir, Alfonso duke of Calabria, to Duke Francesco Sforza’s daughter. A generation later a daughter of this marriage, Isabella of Aragon, was wed to her nineteen-year-old
first cousin Gian Galeazzo Sforza, who had inherited the ducal title at age seven following the assassination of his father. Aware that Gian Galeazzo was physically delicate and weak of will, Ferrante hoped to dominate Milan through Isabella. All such plans crumbled into dust, however, when Gian Galeazzo came of age and the self-appointed regent, his uncle Ludovico Sforza, refused to step aside.

If as tough an old cynic as Ferrante is not likely to have been much moved by the tearful complaints of the Duchess Isabella—who in addition to being a stronger personality than her husband was a great beauty, believed by some historians to be Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—he did care greatly about the thwarting of his own schemes. His reaction had come at the start of 1492, when he radically changed course, calling a halt to his aggressions in the Papal States and resuming the annual payments that he owed to Rome as the pope’s vassal, thereby making peace with Innocent VIII and positioning Naples in opposition to Milan. Thus did Italy’s balance of power begin to totter. Because Rome was suddenly no longer at odds with Naples, the Venetians with their fear of Ferrante ceased to regard the pope as a dependable ally. Florence, which had long managed to keep both Milan and Naples as allies, found it difficult to do so now that the two were on such unfriendly terms.

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in April removed the one man who might have saved the situation. It left the leadership of Florence in the hands of his twenty-year-old son Piero. Lorenzo had been the same age when he succeeded his own father, and he had said with fatherly pride that Piero promised to be the greatest of the Medici. About that he was lamentably wrong. Florence’s new first citizen would come to be known as Piero the Unfortunate, an inappropriate label insofar as the worst of his misfortunes would be of his own making. His first great mistake was to turn his back on the Sforzas and ally Florence with Naples exclusively. The result, as predictable as it was laden with ill fortune for all of Italy, was a badly frightened Ludovico Sforza. Feeling himself isolated, with a hostile Venice to his east and Florence, Rome, and Naples all seemingly arrayed against him to the south, he could think of only one place to look for help. To the north. To France.

This was how things stood in July, when Innocent VIII expired, and in August, when twenty-three cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel
(still a good many years from being handed over to Michelangelo for decoration) to elect a new pope. What became most obvious at the start was the bitter opposition of two irreconcilable factions. One, essentially Milanese, was led by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who in addition to being an able politician in his own right was a brother of the usurper Ludovico Sforza and therefore had all the resources of Milan at his disposal. Ascanio put himself forward as a candidate, and among his early supporters were Rodrigo Borgia and the cardinals then representing the Orsini and Conti clans. The group opposing him was led by the most relentlessly ambitious ecclesiastical politician then living, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who entered the conclave as the representative of a formidable assortment of interests. Among his supporters were Ferrante, whose aim was to achieve whatever result would be most damaging to Milan; young King Charles VIII of France, who had ambitions of his own where Italy was concerned and was reported to have made two hundred thousand ducats available for della Rovere’s use; and the city-state of Genoa, which contributed an additional hundred thousand out of fear of its neighbor Milan. Venice too leaned toward della Rovere for the simple reason that Milan opposed him, and the Colonna and Savelli cardinals were on his side because their rivals the Orsini and Conti supported Milan. In the Sistine Chapel as elsewhere, the enemy of your enemy was your friend.

In the first balloting no favorite emerged. Ascanio Sforza showed no strength at all, a reflection of his age, thirty-seven, and the unwillingness of his colleagues to put the papacy in the hands of a brother of the tyrant of Milan. Through subsequent ballots the feared and disliked della Rovere found himself stuck at five votes—just one more than the total delivered by himself and his cousins. As it became clear that another deadlock was taking shape, Rodrigo Borgia emerged as the only cardinal whose tally was rising, though just barely. It increased to seven while he was still giving his own vote to Ascanio, and a day later it was up to eight. The leader with nine was Oliviero Carafa, who was in an awkward position despite his impeccable reputation and his long record of achievement in diplomacy. He was drawing support from friends of Milan and of his native city of Naples as well. It was obvious to all that, if elected, he could find himself impossibly conflicted.

By the fifth day it was clear that no one closely associated with either
Naples or Milan had a chance of being elected. The Sforzas, with Ascanio pulling every possible string, were prepared to go to any lengths to block della Rovere and his party. Della Rovere for his part would accept schism before a Milanese pope. As so often in the past, compromise was unavoidable. Once accepted as necessary, it was achieved quickly and with surprising ease. August 11 brought not only the election but ultimately the unanimous election of Rodrigo Borgia. And with it the start of rumors, immortalized in the reports of various ambassadors back to their home cities, of how the Spaniard had used his supposedly colossal wealth to buy the crown. According to one particularly colorful story, four stout mules had been needed to transfer a fortune in silver—or was it gold?—from Rodrigo’s palace to the residence of Ascanio Sforza.

What actually happened was that Ascanio, knowing his own election to be impossible and fearful that a prolongation of the deadlock might end in a shift to della Rovere, decided to instruct the members of his faction to support Rodrigo. Records of the conclave, lost in the Vatican archives for centuries, show that from the first day Ascanio had himself been voting for Rodrigo, as had two cardinals generally acknowledged to be incorruptible, Carafa and Piccolomini. Getting votes from the other camp was less easy, Rodrigo’s relationship with the prickly della Rovere being no better than anyone else’s. But that too came to pass, della Rovere himself deciding to align himself with the inevitable and undoubtedly not foreseeing just how bitter the loss of this election was going to make him. No tales of simony—of paying for votes—are needed to explain the outcome. Rodrigo’s initial support for Ascanio did not change the fact that, having declined to choose sides in the quarrel between France and Milan on one side and Naples and Venice on the other, he had no bonds of obligation to any of the leading powers. Thus if none of these powers could count on him for special favors, neither did any of them have reason to fear him or regard him as the agent of their enemies. At a dangerous time for all Italy, with the Church in urgent need of competent and responsible leadership, Rodrigo’s experience was unequaled. He was also respected and liked on all sides. And one searches in vain, even in the writings and recorded comments of his most intransigent political enemies, for contemporary evidence of immoral behavior. By any reasonable measure, taking into
account the general state of affairs in Italy in 1492, he was quite simply the best man for the job.