The Borgias (45 page)

Nevertheless, when on October 16 Alexander next wrote to Savonarola, he withdrew his earlier subordination of the San Marco monastery to Santa Croce, and though he repeated his order that Savonarola stop preaching until he had visited Rome, he promised to receive him “with a father’s heart.” Savonarola responded with enigmatic silence,
neither leaving Florence nor, at least for some weeks, returning to his pulpit. The situation hung in suspense until February 1497, when Florence’s ruling council took fright at reports that Piero de’ Medici was plotting a coup. Knowing that Savonarola’s hatred for the banished Medici was no less intense than his hatred for Rome, the council not merely encouraged but ordered him to resume preaching. He did so with relish, throwing off all inhibition in a round of Lenten sermons that went further than before in denouncing the Church as corrupt.
“Oh prostitute Church,” he railed, “thou hast displayed thy foulness to the whole world, and stinkest up to heaven.”

This went on week after week, the Church decried as “lower than a beast, a monster of abomination,” until finally Savonarola was telling his listeners that it was necessary to accept what he was saying in order to be a good Christian. Florence’s council, weary now of the kinds of disturbances that it had earlier encouraged and less fearful of a Medici coup than of letting things get out of hand, used an outbreak of plague as an excuse to order not only Savonarola but all members of religious orders to desist from preaching. After all that had transpired, Savonarola’s response could have surprised no one: he declared that to oppose him was to oppose God. When his words failed to ignite the kind of public excitement to which he had become accustomed, he pulled back, sending a vaguely conciliatory letter to the pope and lapsing once again into silence. People who had earlier responded sympathetically to his demands for reform—people as respected as Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who was known to have a good opinion of Savonarola and had been appointed vicar-general of the Dominicans of Tuscany as a gesture of goodwill on Alexander’s part—began to turn away in disgust or alarm. From every direction came demands that the pope
do something
.

Once again, Alexander did nothing. By March 1497 the friar was calling for a council to install a new pope. He was also writing to the kings of France, Spain, England, and Hungary and the Holy Roman emperor, informing them that Alexander had usurped the pontifical throne and that his position was “opposed to charity and the law of God.” Carnival time brought another Bonfire of the Vanities, followed by a series of Lenten sermons, delivered in Florence’s glorious Duomo, that in their extremism surpassed anything that had come before.
On May 12, yielding to demands from all sides, Alexander signed a brief of excommunication.
It charged Savonarola with having “disseminated pernicious doctrines to the scandal and great grief of simple souls” and forbade all Christians “to assist him, hold intercourse with him, or abet him either by word or deed.” He resisted making it known, however, until June 18, at which time, predictably, Savonarola denounced it as invalid. The friar also, however, obeyed the papal brief’s order to stop saying mass in public and for some months assumed an ambiguous posture somewhere between quiet obedience and passive resistance.

He burned with too much passion, however, to remain silent forever. On Christmas Day, sweeping aside the prohibitions imposed by his excommunication, he publicly said mass three times and distributed communion. The pope of course learned of this flagrant defiance but yet again did nothing. He continued to do nothing as, early in the new year, Savonarola resumed preaching in Florence’s cathedral (anyone opposing him was “supporting the kingdom of Satan”), thereby not only disobeying the pope but violating a municipal order to confine his oratory to his own friary church. Without question Alexander understood that the friar had become a real and present danger not only to him but to the Church and the security of Italy, but his continued passivity had political purpose. Rome was an enemy in the eyes of many Florentines, and aggressive action by the pope might not only have been defied but have cast Savonarola in the role of victim, causing the city to rally to his defense. Savonarola was on a path to self-destruction, and Alexander had no reason to get in his way.

At this point the story rises to tragedy and descends into farce. The head of a Franciscan monastery in Florence, fed up with the successes and presumption of the Dominican Savonarola, challenged him to a trial by fire—a test in which the two of them would be simultaneously burned at the stake, and God would be given the opportunity to intervene and save the life of whichever he favored. The Franciscan was obviously calling Savonarola’s bluff; he was said to be prepared for both of them to perish if his challenge was accepted, and to believe that his sacrifice would be worthwhile if it delivered the people of Florence from the grip of a lunatic.

Savonarola disappointed his adherents by not accepting. He then amused the cynics by allowing one of his associates to accept in his place, making it impossible to believe that he had refused on principle
and difficult not to wonder if he might be a coward and a fraud. From Rome, Alexander and the College of Cardinals condemned the whole affair as barbaric and superstitious, but it went ahead anyway. When on April 7 thousands of people gathered in Florence’s great central piazza to witness what they hoped would be an immolation and perhaps a miracle as well, they found themselves having to listen to a tedious and interminable address in which Savonarola laid down conditions that he insisted must be fulfilled before the ordeal could proceed. He demanded that his surrogate, for example, be allowed to hold in his hands a consecrated communion host. When at length the flames were lit, a spring shower arrived to put them out. That ended it. The dampened crowd dispersed in a mood of surly dissatisfaction. Savonarola returned to his friary with his credibility in tatters.

He was so diminished a figure that Pope Alexander found it possible to leave his fate to the
signoria
in Florence, thereby sparing himself no end of trouble. Three trials ensued, in the course of which the friar was physically tortured and confessed himself guilty of a list of offenses that filled forty-two pages. A number of his most impressive prophecies, he said, had been based on information that his fellow Dominicans acquired in hearing confessions. On one occasion, he said, he had arranged for his prediction of attempted murder to be fulfilled by having a dish of poisoned lampreys fed to a cat (which promptly died) instead of to the man he had identified as the intended victim. Being the fruits of torture, these tales should have been given no weight, but they destroyed what remained of Savonarola’s reputation all the same. He and his two closest associates were condemned to death by hanging. They died with dignity, and in his final hour Savonarola denied everything that he had earlier confessed. Afterward his body was burned, the charred remains thrown into the River Arno to prevent the collection of relics. His removal had no impact on Florentine policy, which remained openly friendly to France.

Cesare, meanwhile, was moving to center stage in Rome. This was happening in part as a result of his own actions, starting with his role in the dissolution of Lucrezia’s marriage. Just why he was so determined to break the link that Pope Alexander had forged between the Borgias and the Sforzas is not clear—though the marriage had lost its political value, it was not a serious liability—and of Lucrezia’s attitude nothing
at all is known. In spite of Cesare’s willingness to use his sister for his own ends it is impossible to doubt that the two were genuinely close, as we shall see repeatedly. Though there is no evidence that he was doing as Lucrezia wished in ridding her of her husband, there is also no evidence that he was ignoring or overriding her wishes. He certainly shared his late brother’s dislike for their brother-in-law, apparently a glum and passive figure with no appetite for the kinds of escapades in which the young Borgias were constantly involved, and it was his failure to conceal his antipathy that had provoked Sforza’s flight in disguise from Rome. Possibly Cesare regarded him, though he was a count and ruler of the handsome and prosperous seaside city of Pesaro, as unworthy of the beautiful Lucrezia. What mattered most, however, was Cesare’s growing awareness, as his ambition expanded in daring new directions, of just how useful his sister would be if she could be returned to the market as a virginal prospective bride.

This was proving to be difficult, however, because of Sforza’s refusal to cooperate. He could not be induced to confess to impotence, the grounds on which an annulment of the marriage was being sought, or to give up either Lucrezia or her dowry of thirty thousand florins. He was acutely aware that, as lord of a papal fief, he would be vastly more secure if he could restore good relations with the pope’s family, but in the absence of a way of making that happen he could only keep himself walled up inside his great moated
rocca
at Pesaro. The pressure, however, mounted steadily. Even the head of the Sforza family, Ludovico il Moro of Milan, declined to side with him, sensibly regarding a cousin’s marital difficulties as not worth a showdown with Rome. At last, having been promised that he could keep the dowry, Giovanni signed an admission that his marriage had never been consummated. Later he would write to Il Moro complaining that he had been coerced into doing so. The truth of the matter is anyone’s guess. On one hand, it is surely significant that in a later marriage Sforza would sire two children. On the other hand, it is at least curious that this was the only one of Lucrezia’s marriages that did not result in her rather quickly becoming pregnant.

In any case things worked out well enough from Cesare’s perspective. In December 1497 Lucrezia was summoned to the Vatican to hear
the nullification of her marriage pronounced—to hear it declared that she had never been married, was at eighteen still
virga intacta
, and so remained entirely worthy of whatever lofty union the pope and her brother might be able to arrange for her. But suddenly new problems loomed—rumors that threatened to plunge her into irreversible disgrace. The gossips of Rome were saying that, in appearing at the Vatican, Lucrezia had been dressed in such a way as to conceal pregnancy. That her pregnancy was the result of a love affair with a young Spaniard named Pedro Calderón, a Vatican chamberlain. And that the two had become involved when Calderón (also referred to in various accounts as Pedro Caldes, and as Perotto or Pierotto) was employed as Pope Alexander’s courier, carrying messages to and from Lucrezia when she was living at the convent of San Sisto.

What makes this episode impossible to dismiss out of hand is the macabre fact that in February 1498, two months after the annulment, Calderón’s decomposing body, bound hand and foot, was pulled out of the Tiber. In the most colorful account of what had been going on, found in a report by the Venetian ambassador, Calderón had not been drowned but stabbed to death. By none other than Cardinal Cesare Borgia personally. After fleeing in terror to Pope Alexander, who was spattered with blood when the furious Cesare ran Calderón through with his sword. It is not easy to know what to make of this, and the varying opinions of writers across the centuries are so contradictory that they simply compound the uncertainty. Suffice it to say here that, judged against Lucrezia’s whole life story, the pregnancy seems highly improbable, the story about how Cesare supposedly murdered her lover in the presence of the pope extremely so. (For more on this question, and on how it has been treated by historians, the reader is directed to
this page
.)

The princes of Italy obviously gave little credence to the gossip, because as soon as her marriage was annulled, Alexander and Cesare had an impressive array of eager suitors to choose from. Among them were a young Orsini duke; the Riario who as Caterina Sforza’s eldest son was titular lord of Imola and Forlì; a leading member of the baronial Sanseverino clan of Naples; and a member of Naples’s royal family. There were expressions of interest from Spain as well. But the matter remained
undecided when developments beyond the Alps changed the political status quo and confronted the Borgias with an entirely new set of challenges.

What happened first was that Charles VIII of France and Ferdinand of Spain astonished all Europe by announcing, in November 1497, that they were setting aside their differences and making peace. This was done largely for financial reasons, both kingdoms being nearly insolvent after years of conflict with numerous adversaries including each other, and no one could have expected it to last long. It was significant all the same, and not least for the Borgias: for the first time they found themselves free to deal on friendly terms with France without appearing to betray Spain. Within limits, of course. So long as they did nothing that conflicted directly with Ferdinand’s view of his own interests, they could explore possibilities that had been closed to them through all the years when keeping the friendship of Spain required shunning France.

But then, another and far bigger thunderbolt. Word came that Charles VIII was dead. It is appropriate that this incorrigibly foolish young monarch, still only twenty-seven and by all accounts sweet-natured and charming even when dealing face-to-face with enemies, should have perished in an odd, boyish, and distinctly unheroic way. He cracked his skull against the stone lintel of a castle doorway while playing
jeu de paume
—handball—and a short time later fell into a coma from which he never recovered. The ancient and royal House of Valois was at this time in the process of petering out, as one monarch after another either failed to produce heirs (who had to be male under France’s Salic law) or watched all his sons die early. Charles himself, sickly and ill formed, had not been born until his father was nearly fifty and was the only one of five brothers to live beyond infancy. Though he himself produced three legitimate sons and a daughter in the last six years of his life, not one of them survived him. Because he had no paternal uncles or male first cousins, his heir was his second cousin Louis, the same duke of Orléans who had joined him on the march to Naples and claimed to be rightful duke of Milan. Now King Louis XII, he was himself thirty-five and childless in spite of having been married for more than twenty years. He was also a seasoned and shrewd politician who had been through some hard times, including three years as a prisoner
of his father-in-law King Louis XI, Charles VIII’s father. It was obvious from the start that his coronation was likely to have consequences for the Italians. He immediately reasserted his old claim to Milan as well as appropriating to himself Charles’s claim to Naples.