The Borgias (38 page)

The king was still at Velletri when envoys of Spain rode into his encampment and demanded an audience. Ferdinand by this point was deeply uneasy about the dispatches he was receiving from Italy and had run out of patience. He could never have accepted a restoration of French rule in Naples and had been so taken aback at the ease with which Charles VIII was bringing all Italy to its knees that he was now transferring troops from Spain to Sicily with instructions to make ready for action on the mainland. What his ambassadors delivered at Velletri was a stern warning for Charles: his campaign was in violation of the Treaty of Barcelona, which reserved to Spain the right to protect the Papal States. They demanded that the port of Ostia be restored to Alexander, that Cesare Borgia be released (not knowing that the young cardinal had seen to that himself), and that the advance on Naples be
brought to an immediate halt. When Charles made it clear that he took none of this seriously, his visitors tore up their copy of the Barcelona pact and threw it at his feet. The chronicles tell us that “high words” were exchanged before their departure.

And so Charles resumed his southward journey, his army continuing to meet with no serious resistance but spreading devastation everywhere it went. He allowed the Colonna to use the troops for which he was paying to lay waste to the fortresses, homes, and orchards of their old enemies the Conti. His mercenaries continued to take looting and rapine as their right. When the
rocca
at San Giovanni was annoyingly slow to submit, its garrison of almost nine hundred men was put to the sword, the town burned to the ground. The new King Ferrandino, having had no time for a coronation, was attempting to form a line of defense at Capua when reports of a revolt in his capital obliged him to gallop off to the south. As soon as he was out of sight, Capua surrendered to the invaders, and Gaeta did the same three days later. Ferrandino returned on February 21. Finding Capua in enemy hands, and no support anywhere, he accepted the hopelessness of the situation and took ship for the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. Soon thereafter he was with his father in Sicily, having taken his half-sister Sancia and her husband Jofrè Borgia with him. Within twenty-four hours of his flight Charles VIII passed in triumph through the gates of Naples, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. They hailed him for delivering the city from decades of tyranny and terror. And his arrival was, in its way, an extraordinary achievement. He had taken possession of the largest state in Italy, long one of the richest and most powerful in all Europe, without having to fight a single battle worthy of the name, almost without having to fire a round from one of his great brass guns. Italy had collapsed at his feet like a house of cards.

Cem, who had ridden into Naples just behind the king, a living symbol of the crusade against his brother that supposedly lay just ahead, was found dead in his bed three days later. Years later, when the campaign to demolish the reputation of the Borgias was fully under way and no rumor was too outlandish to be set down in print, it would be alleged that the prince, who at the time of his death had been a pampered prisoner for some thirteen years, must have been poisoned. And that the poisoner could of course have been none other than
Alexander VI—who else? If reminded that Cem had died approximately one month after the pope handed him over to the French, the accusers would respond that obviously the Borgias possessed the secret of some delayed-action poison, some concoction capable of suddenly felling its victims weeks after being ingested.

In fact it is not at all unlikely that Cem died of natural causes, having lived a life of relentless self-indulgence throughout his captivity. His death, far from benefiting the pope, deprived the pope not only of an enormous annual stipend but of a powerful diplomatic weapon, one that even in French hands could have been used to threaten the Ottoman sultan and keep his aggressions in check. The only European prince who could possibly have wanted that death was the king who had taken Cem to Naples and in whose custody the prince had spent his last weeks. Cem was to have been the figurehead behind which Charles would lead his assault on the Turks—assuming that Charles still wanted to push on to Jerusalem.

That was not an entirely safe assumption. Cem’s corpse was barely cold before Charles announced that the crusade would have to be called off. The pope’s response to this change of plans was interesting: he authorized Ferdinand of Spain to impose a special tax on church properties within his domains, in order to build ships to be used against the Turks. This was probably an oblique rebuke to Charles VIII for abandoning the great purpose that supposedly had taken him to Naples. It may also have been a way of helping Ferdinand to muster the resources needed for war with France.

Over the next three months Charles VIII earned the contempt in which he has ever since been held. Having been received as a hero by the people and nobility of Naples, he proceeded in an impressively short time to alienate virtually all of his new subjects. Having brought Italy to its knees, he then conducted himself so atrociously as to provoke the states he had so easily subdued to take up arms. He surrendered to the seductions of a licentious Neapolitan capital and a glorious Neapolitan spring, wallowing in the pleasures of the flesh while his troops preyed on a helpless population and the hundreds of French nobles in his entourage treated themselves to every office, title, and estate they could find an excuse to claim. As outrage followed outrage, Naples’s joy at the fall of the House of Aragon turned first to annoyance and then into
smoldering rage. In due course it burst into flame as the Neapolitans became determined to rid themselves of the intruders.

Charles, blissfully distracted, remained oblivious. Ferdinand of Spain meanwhile had ambassadors at all the major capitals, and under his instructions they encouraged the various princes to imagine the consequences of a continued French presence in Italy and to understand that such a fate was not inevitable. Milan was receptive, Ludovico Sforza needing no one to tell him that he had blundered, and the Venetians were aware by now that what had happened to Naples could happen to them as well. Even in faraway England, King Henry VII was prepared to contribute to keeping France from growing stronger than it already was, and Maximilian of Hapsburg had not only the Holy Roman Empire to protect from France but a deep personal grudge dating back to the time when Charles had simultaneously jilted his daughter and stolen his fiancée, depriving him of the great duchy of Brittany. As for the pope, his position could not have been clearer; he was the only leader in Italy neither to have thrown himself at Charles’s feet nor to have fled at the approach of his army. When in March a congress was convened in Venice, all of the above attended or sent representatives.
In short order they formed what they named their Holy League. Its members pledged to remain allied for twenty-five years—not one of them could have thought that possible—and to contribute thousands of troops to the formation of an army the sole purpose of which would be to drive the French back to France.

Charles, convinced by his successes that he was invincible, was slow to awaken to what was happening. His only political interest at this point was the old one of getting the pope to invest him with his new crown.
When a new round of appeals proved as futile as the ones he had made personally while in Rome, and when the things he offered in return for investiture grew more and more lavish but still produced no response, the realization finally dawned that his position was not as solid as he had supposed. His initial response was not, however, either to reinforce that position or to prepare for an orderly withdrawal. Instead he staged an elaborate ceremony at the Naples cathedral at which, to the acclaim of nobody except his own hangers-on, he crowned himself as monarch of Il Regno and “Emperor of the East.” Even he was beginning to have some sense of the growing dangers of his situation,
however, and to see the absurdity of his self-coronation. He sent ambassadors to Rome with an offer he hoped would be impossible to refuse. In return for cooperating, Alexander would receive an annual tribute of fifty thousand ducats, repayment of the hundred thousand ducats that Naples had owed to the Vatican since the time of Ferrante and Alfonso II, and the promise of a French-led crusade against the Turks. Alexander’s refusal made it impossible to doubt that, with all the Italian states now rallying against him, Charles was no longer safe so far from home. Preparations began, in haste, for an escape.

Charles departed Naples on May 20, taking with him half of what remained of his army after six months of casualties, desertions, and disease.
With him went also the perfect symbol of just what kind of expedition his foray into Italy had been: a vast procession of mules—estimates of their number run as high as ten thousand—each laden with treasure stripped from all the places through which the French and their mercenaries had passed. In Rome, meanwhile, an annoyed Alexander was calling the attention of the Holy League to the failure of every member state except Venice to provide the troops that all had pledged. Only two of the states of central and northern Italy had no reason to fear what might happen when Charles returned from Naples. One was Ferrara, whose Duke Ercole hated Venice far too much to enter any league to which it belonged. The other was Florence, now more than ever dominated by Friar Savonarola, who in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary continued to insist that the king of France was God’s own agent in Italy.

The whole peninsula was in turmoil as the French retraced the path they had taken the previous year. In Rome, the question of whether the pope and his court should stay or go was debated ad nauseam. The consensus of the cardinals was that all of them should stay in place, and this opinion was reinforced when Charles wrote suggesting a meeting and promising to keep his troops under better control this time. Alexander, however, thought it a mistake to receive the king again, seeing no way to do so without arousing suspicion among the other members of the Holy League. He knew that the immense task of keeping the French troops fed would prevent Charles from halting them at Rome for more than a few days, so that eluding him would pose no great challenge. And so when Charles arrived on June 1, he was, in keeping with Alexander’s
instructions, received with full honors and invited to take up residence in the Vatican once again. But the pope himself was not on hand; he had left for Orvieto. When Charles sent horsemen racing to bring him back, they arrived at Orvieto only to learn that Alexander had moved on again, this time to Perugia, well out of the way of the road back to France. Charles was as good as his word where the conduct of his troops was concerned; the now-infamous Swiss were not allowed near the city walls, and the others were confined to their encampments. And as the pope had foreseen, Charles moved out again less than forty-eight hours after his arrival. He knew that Venetian and Milanese troops were coming together in anticipation of a showdown, and that he would be lucky to get home without a fight.

And so on they went, with speed now the priority and Charles making little effort to maintain the good order that he had imposed upon his troops while in Rome. French marauders all but wiped the town of Toscanella off the map. The Swiss did much the same to Pontremoli. Avoiding Florence and its tiresomely demanding republican government, Charles chose a route that took him first through Siena and then to Pisa, where he was obliged to pause long enough to permit a delegation of the city’s womenfolk, all weeping theatrically, to beg him to save them from falling back under Florentine control. He said just enough to give them hope that their appeals would not go unheeded, thereby contradicting his most recent assurances to Florence, and departed with as much haste as decorum allowed.
Something worse than wailing ladies was awaiting him at Poggibonsi: the gallingly fearless and obsessed Savonarola, who had traveled from Florence so as not to miss the opportunity to berate Charles for failing to fulfill the mission on which God had sent him from France. Here we see Savonarola at the point when he is beginning to be tinged with madness, proclaiming himself the instrument through which God gives the rest of the human race its marching orders. The king’s divine assignment, Savonarola declared, had been not to make himself king of Naples, not to launch a crusade, but to cleanse Italy, the Church, and Rome. “You have incurred the wrath of God,” he told Charles, “by neglecting that work of reforming the Church which, by my mouth, he had charged you to undertake, and to which he had called you by so many unmistakable signs. This time you will escape from the danger which threatens you; but if you
again disregard the command which he now, through me his unworthy slave, reiterates, and still refuse to take up the work which he commits to you, I warn you that he will punish you with far more terrible misfortunes, and will choose another man in your place.”

This is the Savonarola who, back home in Florence, will soon be condemning even the most innocuous forms of petty gambling, not only immodest but costly dress, even racing. Who will be organizing the boys of Florence into vigilante gangs that bring to mind the Red Guards of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, sending them out to disrupt card games, confiscate musical instruments and diversions as innocent as magnifying glasses, and either attack or report whatever forbidden amusement they find. In time he will be advocating the death penalty for anyone who supports tyranny—which means anyone foolish enough to speak favorably of the Medici—and the stoning and burying alive of anyone found guilty of sodomy (for which the penalty had previously been a fine of fifty ducats). The carnival preceding Lent will be cleansed of drinking and revelry, becoming instead an occasion for Savonarola’s famous Bonfires of the Vanities—his public burning of great heaps of clothing, books, jewelry, games, and works of art deemed unacceptable. A visiting Venetian merchant will offer 22,000 ducats for the treasures laid on one of Savonarola’s pyres and will be scornfully refused.