The Borgias (37 page)

The friar was not a charlatan or a hypocrite and by no means an entirely bad man. He was not an enemy of classical learning to the same extent as, say, the English Puritans of a century later; those zealots would have burned the great Medici library rather than taking pains, as Savonarola did, to save it from the French. They certainly never would have
approved his friendship with many of the city’s leading artists. Under Savonarola’s influence, Florence achieved something much closer to truly democratic government than had ever been possible under the Medici, and his reforms included such things as a cooperative lending society to protect people in need of credit from being exploited.

But perhaps it is in the nature of such men to be drawn by their own success into increasingly extreme positions. Certainly it was in Savonarola’s nature. The things he would do in progressing from criticism of Rome to an attack on the legitimacy of the Church’s authority, and the way in which the pope responded, provide very nearly the best insight we have into just what kind of man Alexander VI was.

13

The French Depart

The meeting of King Charles VIII and Pope Alexander VI, when it finally took place in Rome in the first week of January 1495, was an encounter in which all the important advantages appeared to lie on one side.

Charles, for all his youth and inexperience and foolishness, was ruler of one of the two mightiest kingdoms in Europe and in the preceding few months had made himself master of half of Italy as well. He commanded an army so fearsome that it had been obliged to fight no real battles as it worked its way down the peninsula; no one could see any point in attempting to stop it.

Alexander by contrast had nothing with which to oppose the invaders except whatever value was to be found in the prestige of his ancient office. He had opened Rome’s gates to the French for the most practical of reasons: because in military terms he was powerless, utterly without means of defense. Aside from Ferrandino of Naples, every supposed friend with the capacity to provide help had either defected to the enemy or declared a neutrality that amounted to acceptance of French domination. His decision not to flee as Rome fell into the hands of a king committed to deposing him must have seemed an act less of courage than of madness—or perhaps of abject surrender.

And yet the results of their encounter would demonstrate, as eloquently as anything in history, that brute power is not always everything.
That there are times, even in the realm of international power politics, when a strong man can bend a weak man to his will even when he has few resources to draw on beyond the force of his own personality.

Though units of the French army were inside the walls of Rome by December 27, Charles delayed his own entry until New Year’s Eve, a day approved by his astrologers. Led by 2,500 nobles on horseback, the great army arrived at the Porta del Popolo at the north end of the city at three in the afternoon and continued to stream through the gates until nine that night. The people of the city looked on in wonder as, hour after hour, they were passed by foot soldiers and cavalry from Switzerland and Germany, from Brittany and Gascony, and by dozens of horse-drawn guns. At the king’s side rode Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Giuliano della Rovere, and immediately behind them came Cardinals Colonna and Savelli, members of two of the baronial clans that had abandoned the pope and entered the service of the French. Crowds that at first had gathered out of simple curiosity were soon swept up by the spectacle, shouting
“Francia! Francia!”
and
“Colonna! Colonna!”
What had to be most bitter to Pope Alexander, if he could hear it from his perch high in the Castel, they also shouted
“Vincoli! Vincoli!”
This was a salute to the man most unalterably committed to the Borgia pope’s destruction, Giuliano della Rovere, cardinal of Rome’s San Pietro in Vincoli Church. Hearing his companions saluted in this way must have confirmed for Charles that he had allied himself with the right faction of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

As he commandeered for a headquarters Rome’s most magnificent residence, the Palazzo San Marco that had once been the home of Pope Paul II and now belonged to his nephew Cardinal Marco Barbo, Charles released his troops to pillage the part of the city that lay across the river from the Vatican. The palaces of cardinals who had not declared their support of the invasion became prime targets, and the homes of a number of Borgias—Cesare and Lucrezia’s mother included—were stripped bare. Alexander meanwhile made no effort to see the king. He sent three cardinals in his place, instructing them to point out to Charles the advantages of doing business with a sitting pope rather than trying to put a new one in his place. He empowered them to agree to any arrangement that left him secure in the Vatican and did not recognize Charles as king of Naples.

Charles at this point saw no need to concede anything and was encouraged to think so by the eight cardinals now attached to his court. With a decree for Alexander’s deposition already drawn up and ready for his signature, he gave Alexander’s envoys a set of demands to carry back to the Vatican. The pope, if he wanted talks, would first have to surrender the Castel Sant’Angelo, his only defensible stronghold. He would also have to hand over his prisoner Cem, the brother of Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, a valuable hostage and a potent symbol of resistance to the sultan’s rule. Finally, Alexander was instructed to assign Cardinal Cesare Borgia as legate to the French court; obviously this meant surrendering Cesare as a hostage. Charles must have been taken aback when the pope, from where he was holed up in the Castel with Cem, a small group of cardinals including Cesare, and a company of troops, rejected every one of his demands out of hand. If the splendor of his entry into Europe’s most fabled city had encouraged the king to think that the pope was his to command, he was being disabused.

During the standoff that ensued, Charles amused himself with visits to the principal churches and pilgrimage sites of Rome. Though his commanders set up gallows in public places as a caution to their troops to control themselves, the soldiers largely ignored them, regarding the right to pillage as one of the fringe benefits of their trade. Some of the French cannons were hauled up within range of the Castel but stood ominously quiet. The pope’s show of defiance took on a farcical note when, without a shot having been fired, a section of the Castel’s massive but decayed outer wall spontaneously collapsed into the Tiber, opening a hole through which the French could almost certainly have forced their way. Instead, however, king and pope began to negotiate through intermediaries and by mid-January came to an understanding. Charles got things that Alexander had no way of denying him: freedom of passage through the Papal States and possession of the papal fortresses at Civitavecchia, Terracina, Viterbo, and Spoleto. Additionally, Alexander agreed to hand over Prince Cem—but only on condition that he and not Charles would continue to receive the forty thousand ducats that the Ottoman sultan paid annually to prevent his brother from being set free. Charles wanted the prince as a trophy, evidently—one whom he could put on display when he set out to conquer Constantinople. Alexander agreed also to send Cesare to Charles as a
legate-hostage. More significant were the things that Charles did
not
get: surrender of the Castel, recognition of himself as king of Naples, or a repudiation of the kingship of Alfonso II. The one bitter pill the pope had to swallow was the king’s demand that all the cardinals who had supported him in his invasion be granted amnesty, including the restoration of their property and offices. In context, however, this was of limited importance. It was made easier by the fact that Alexander was throughout his life a forgiving rather than a vindictive man.

Charles now abandoned all thought of deposing Alexander or trying to curtail the powers that had come to him with the papal crown. Instead he became intent on showing himself to be the pope’s faithful subject. The two met for the first time the day after the terms of their agreement were settled, and they did so in a theatrical fashion that had been carefully choreographed in advance. It was arranged that the pope would be carried in a sedan chair from the Castel to the Vatican gardens, where Charles would come upon him, supposedly deep in prayer. Charles would then fall to one knee not once but repeatedly, his third genuflection serving as Alexander’s cue to take notice, raise him to his feet, and greet him as a son. Whereupon, also by prearrangement, Charles would ask that his chief minister Briçonnet be made a cardinal, Alexander would not only agree but invite Charles to come live in the Vatican, and their reconciliation would be complete.

All went according to the script, and with Charles now under his roof the pope had time to apply the full force of his charm to the cementing of their friendship. He was, as usual, successful. When even the king’s appearance at consistory and direct appeal failed to win a promise of recognition, he nevertheless remained in thrall to his host. He lowered himself to the floor, kissed Alexander’s foot, and said he had come to Rome “to offer obedience and homage to your Holiness, as my predecessors the kings of France had done before me.” A member of his entourage, the president of the
parlement
of France, then read out a declaration that Charles acknowledged Alexander to be Christ’s vicar on earth and the successor to Saint Peter. The king’s reward for thus freeing Alexander from the greatest danger facing him was, by comparison, rather paltry. The only addition to the things that the pope had conceded before their meeting was another French seat in the College of Cardinals, a red hat for Charles’s cousin Philip of Luxembourg.

It was enough. In the days following, Alexander and Charles were together almost constantly, touring the city on horseback and giving no evidence of disagreeing about anything. The cardinals who had ridden into Rome as part of the king’s entourage, by contrast, were left to absorb the bewildering fact that they had been, if not exactly betrayed, inexplicably denied the great prizes that had seemed within their grasp. An exasperated Ascanio Sforza departed for Milan as soon as he saw that Charles and the pope had settled their differences. Giuliano della Rovere remained in Rome, but only in the hope that something might still be salvaged from the wreckage of his dreams.

When Charles departed for Naples on January 28, taking Prince Cem, Cesare Borgia, and Cardinal della Rovere with him, he had nothing to show for his weeks in Rome except the two hostages and a promise of unimpeded passage through the Papal States that his big army would have been perfectly capable of doing without. The main part of that army had been preceded out of Rome by an advance force under the command of the
condottiere
Fabrizio Colonna, whose path took him first through territories belonging to various branches of his family and then into the Abruzzi region. Now he was on Neapolitan ground, but even here he encountered no significant resistance. The local barons, with their memories of two generations of abuse at the hands of Alfonso II and his father Ferrante, could not have been less interested in fighting to defend the House of Aragon. Any who might have been so inclined were cowed not only by the size of the invasion force but by fast-spreading reports of how, throughout their long advance, King Charles’s troops had shown themselves prepared to employ mass murder wherever they met with even the threat of opposition.

The town of L’Aquila, upon learning of the approach of Fabrizio Colonna, opened its gates and hoisted a French flag. Sulmona did the same, and then Popoli. Soon the whole of Il Regno was in turmoil, with the lords of town after town declaring themselves faithful to the French crown. King Alfonso, an experienced soldier and the one man to whom every Neapolitan soldier looked for leadership, went almost catatonic with fear. A legend would arise to the effect that he was haunted at night by visions of the countless people he had destroyed in the course of his ignoble career and sank into a slough of remorse. He roused himself enough not to rally his troops but to have a flotilla of galleys loaded
with as many of his treasures as could be crammed aboard, at which point he abdicated in favor of his son Ferrandino and sailed away to Sicily, a safe haven securely in the hands of Spain. His departure came five days before Charles so much as left Rome. The twenty-five-year-old Ferrandino, who gave promise of being a better man and king than his father or grandfather, threw himself into organizing a defense. At every step he found his efforts impeded by the hatred of his subjects for the dynasty he now headed.

Charles, on his second night out of Rome, halted at the town of Velletri in the Alban Hills. Upon awaking the next morning, he and his entourage discovered that Cesare was nowhere to be found. They eventually learned that a local nobleman had shown him a secret passageway out of the
rocca
and that he had slipped away in the middle of the night disguised as a stableboy. The escape, an early expression of Cesare’s inability to be submissive to anyone, violated the terms of the pope’s agreement with the king. Horsemen carried complaints back to Alexander, who responded with profuse apologies and assurances that he was no less surprised than Charles and had no idea where Cesare might be. (In fact he had gone to Spoleto and would quietly remain there for almost two months.) King Charles’s men fell greedily upon the wagons containing the baggage that Cesare had brought with him from Rome. They discovered to their disgust that they had been tricked yet again: under their rich coverings the wagons were heaped with rubbish.