The Borgias (5 page)

This is no trivial matter. Since the return of the papal court from what is called the Babylonian Captivity, when for sixty-seven years it remained at Avignon in Provence and so completely under the thumb
of the kings of France that seven consecutive popes were Frenchmen, there has been a return also to the assumption that popes should be Roman, and if not Roman then at least Italian. The people of the Eternal City take this idea seriously indeed. The cardinals know that the election of an outsider is likely to bring angry crowds into the streets, and that the election of someone from what the Romans regard as the barbarian world beyond the Alps would be certain to do so. Though the city has been fairly tranquil since the failure of the republican conspiracy of 1453, thanks largely to the pains taken by Nicholas V to deal even-handedly with the ever-jealous Orsini and Colonna and other baronial clans, not a great deal is ever needed to spark an explosion in Rome. The separation of the Italian cardinals into irreconcilable camps, and the consequent possibility of a non-Italian pope, are further causes of anxiety.

The Italians cannot be unified because of the presence of two of the Sacred College’s most formidable members, both of them Roman nobles, both in their mid-forties, and both able to draw on enormous reserves of political, financial, and even military power. Latino Orsini occupies the seat in the college that his family has held for so many centuries that its leaders regard it as theirs by right, as practically their personal property. Among the ornaments on his family tree are three Orsini popes, the first elected in 1191, and the second so notorious for corruption that Dante gave him a small speaking role as one of the damned souls in
The Inferno
. Latino need look no further than to his clan’s history for lessons in what a boon it can be to put a relative, or someone dependent on one’s relatives, on the papal throne. And for equally compelling examples of how badly things can go when that throne is occupied by an enemy—worst of all, from the Orsini perspective, by a Colonna or a friend of the Colonna.

Proud and potent though Latino is, he is outmatched by his most dangerous rival, Cardinal Prospero Colonna. A nephew of the Oddone Colonna who became Pope Martin V in 1417 and used his office to heap wealth, high office, and noble titles on his kinsmen, Prospero has had a colorful career. He was made a cardinal while still in his teens, was excommunicated after his uncle’s death changed the Colonna from Vatican insiders to undesirables, won his way back into favor, and then was very nearly elected himself.
Through three tense days at the conclave
of 1447, Prospero remained just two votes short of victory. His inability to get those two votes and the subsequent melting away of his support were due to the loyalty to the Orsini of several cardinals and the uneasiness felt by others because of Prospero’s notorious readiness to use violence in pursuing his objectives. It was this Orsini-versus-Colonna deadlock that led to the surprise election of the conclave’s newest member, the scholarly Tommaso Parentucelli, who had thus become the now-deceased Nicholas V.

The conditions that led to deadlock in 1447 are all in place in 1455. As the cardinals prepare to cast the first round of ballots, it becomes clear that the Italian Domenico Capranica is favored by a number of his colleagues. Objectively, this is an understandable, even a commendable, development. There is nothing objectionable about Capranica and much to recommend him. At fifty-five he is a seasoned senior churchman, having been a bishop for thirty years and a cardinal for more than twenty. He is also one of the Vatican’s leading diplomats and administrators, a humanist scholar of note, a champion of ecclesiastical reform, and so blameless in his personal life that historians of the early Renaissance will one day describe him as saintly.

By the measures that should matter most he is an exceptional candidate. No one could find good grounds for complaining of his election, and his colleagues like the fact that he has been one of them for nearly a generation; many of them feel that, because the late Nicholas had entered the Sacred College mere months before his election, he never developed a proper respect for its importance.

Capranica has a problem all the same, and it proves to be disabling. He began his career as secretary to the Colonna pope Martin V—had been chosen for the post because of his exceptional abilities and outstanding promise—and because of this the Orsini early classified him as an enemy and always treated him accordingly. Over the years he and the Orsini clashed so often and so seriously that there can be no hope of his election in any conclave over which Latino Orsini holds veto power.

Capranica’s cause being thus lost, Latino now puts forth his choice: Pietro Barbo, nephew of the Pope Eugenius IV who had died in 1447 (and who himself had been the nephew of a still earlier pope). Barbo is a fifteen-year veteran of the college in spite of being only thirty-eight years old, and though not as distinguished as Capranica, he is in no way
unworthy of consideration. He has the support not only of the Orsini but of Venice and the king of Naples as well. But he too has no chance, and for reasons unrelated to anything he himself has ever said or done. The problem is his late uncle. When Eugenius made Barbo a cardinal at age twenty-three, he did so in Florence, and he was living in Florence because six years earlier he had fled Rome for his life, and his flight from Rome had become necessary when he tried to break the power of the Colonna and instead was overpowered.

The result was humiliation. Three years after his election Eugenius found himself disguised as a monk and floating downstream in a Tiber barge, cowering under a shield as wrathful Romans shouted their contempt and hurled stones, sticks, and rubbish down on him from the banks above. He found refuge in Florence, which welcomed him because its dominant family, the Medici, was closely affiliated with the Orsini, who were always happy to embrace an enemy of the Colonna.

Rome was ultimately retaken by force, not by Eugenius himself but by a commander of the papal army named Giovanni Vitelleschi, who was both a cardinal and one of the most savagely aggressive soldiers of the age. The leader of Rome’s short-lived, Colonna-sponsored republic was dismembered alive by men wielding red-hot tongs, and the city was put under a military occupation designed to make resistance impossible and life intolerable for any Colonna foolish enough to remain. The provinces belonging to the papacy and known as the Papal States were ravaged as well, even the churches of towns disloyal to the exiled pope were razed, and the city of Palestrina, seat of one of the Colonna family’s most powerful branches, was obliterated.

Pietro Barbo had nothing to do with any of this—it is unclear whether even his uncle the pope intended or approved the atrocities committed in his name—but in the eyes of the Colonna he is fatally tainted, absolutely and forever unworthy of trust. If in 1455 Prospero Colonna no longer has sufficient clout to stand as a credible candidate himself, he certainly remains capable of blocking the election of anyone suspected of being a danger to his clan. He is helped by Barbo’s relative youth. Not without reason, cardinals tend to think it unwise to bestow the crown on someone who might possibly wear it for twenty or thirty years. In Barbo’s case a forty-year reign would not be inconceivable.

With Capranica and Barbo eliminated, clearly a compromise is needed, one that Latino and Prospero will accept. Days are passing, and as the cardinals look about them for a solution, several find their attention fixing on an ecclesiastical anomaly. This is Basilios Bessarion, who with his compatriot Isidore of Kiev is one of two Greeks present at the conclave. Both began their careers in the Orthodox Church, rose high in the hierarchy at Constantinople, and in 1434 were appointed delegates to the Roman Church’s Council of Basel, where they showed themselves to be strongly in favor of ending the centuries-old split between the Eastern and Western rites. In 1439, when the council was meeting in Florence, Bessarion and Isidore delighted the papal court and became traitors in the eyes of their Orthodox brethren by defecting to Rome. In short order they were made cardinals. Over the next decade and a half Bessarion won a reputation as one of Europe’s leading humanists and promoters of the new learning, and as a man of solid competence and impeccable moral character. Also in his favor, in the opinion of many cardinals, are the appreciation of the Turkish threat that his Eastern origins have given him and his insistence that the West must respond forcefully.

But he too has no chance of election. The conclave’s French members, no longer keeping silent because what is under discussion is no longer a strictly Italian quarrel, take the lead in complaining that Bessarion is an alien. They make much of the fact that, contrary to the conventions of the Sacred College, he continues, in the Byzantine fashion, to wear a long beard. Even those cardinals who most admire Bessarion find it necessary to agree that expecting him to rule Rome and its Church could end in nothing but calamity.

So … some
other
compromise has to be found. The cardinals, frustrated and weary and wanting to be set free, find it quickly. Find
him
quickly. The desire to be done with this tiresome business awakens them at last to the fact that there is in their midst a man of whom no one has a bad word to say. A man who, if not a champion of the new humanism in the manner of Capranica or Bessarion or Pope Nicholas, is an esteemed scholar nevertheless, with two doctorates in law and an international reputation as an authority on the subject.

A good man, untouched by scandal and known to all Rome for his
sponsorship of hospitals, his generosity to the elderly and the poor, and the simplicity of his life.

A statesman too, with an impressive career behind him and decades spent at the right hand of one of the greatest kings in Europe.

A peacemaker of the first order, a key player in bringing the Western Schism to an end and settling a long conflict between Naples and Rome.

Known to be loyal to popes rather than councils, and to understand the Turkish threat.

Not greedy—not even ambitious.

And, what matters more in this deadlocked conclave, free of politics: unaffiliated with any of the Sacred College’s factions after ten years as a member, so detached from the intrigues of the papal court that no one—no Orsini, no Colonna, no anyone—has reason to regard him with distrust.

And finally—what’s best of all, the clincher—seventy-six years old and in declining health. It is inconceivable that he will live much longer. This makes him perfect.

And so when Cardinal Bessarion rises to his feet and declares in solemn tones that he is giving his vote to Alonso Borgia, his compeers all but fall over themselves in their haste to do the same. They do so with joyful relief, confident that they are settling on a man who will reign benignly, passively, and above all briefly, soon departing for the hereafter having distressed no one and changed nothing.

Little do they know.

Background
 
 THE ROAD TO ROME

IT IS CURIOUS THAT ALONSO DE BORJA CHOSE A LIFE IN THE Church. Being an only son of landowning parents, he must have been expected to marry, inherit his father’s estate, and carry on the family name. That name carried considerable weight in the old kingdom of Valencia, where Alonso’s life began. A hundred and forty years before his birth, when King Jaime of Aragon drove the Muslims out of Valencia, among the
conquistadores
in his army were eight men who called themselves de Borja. Possibly they, or some of them, were descended from an ancient family of that name. No less possibly, they just happened to be from the old Roman city of Borja near Zaragoza and had taken its name in the customary way.

The records show that one of Jaime’s Borja soldiers was given responsibility for parceling out conquered lands in and around the Valencian town of Játiva, or Xátiva. He was generous with himself and his kinsmen. Their name became common among the gentry of the neighborhood. The estate of Torre del Canals, where Alonso was born on the last day of 1378, was neither the humblest nor the grandest of the numerous Borja households.

Through much of his long life Alonso was a lawyer more than a churchman, remaining in minor orders rather than being ordained a priest. He entered the University of Lérida at age fourteen, staying to earn doctorates in canon and civil law and in time becoming a lecturer. At age thirty he was a respected and respectable academic—not a whiff of scandal was ever attached to his name—but still a deeply obscure provincial. He was not an intellectual in any true sense of the term, showing no interest in the revival of classical learning that was sweeping across Europe early in the fifteenth century. By all accounts he was honest, hardworking, and able, but one searches in vain for evidence of a colorful personality.

At age thirty-seven, doubtless because of his legal expertise and the appointment he held as a canon of the local cathedral, Borja was chosen
as the diocese of Lérida’s representative at the Council of Constance.
This assembly of the Church had been convened mainly to deal with the Great Schism, the split in Western Christendom that had begun in 1378 with the almost simultaneous election of two competing popes. (Considering the importance that the schism would play in Borja’s life, it is an interesting coincidence that the two entered the world in the same year.) During the four years of its existence the council deposed two men judged to be “antipopes” because never legitimately elected, accepted the resignation of the claimant whose election was recognized as legitimate (he quit voluntarily in the interests of unity), and chose a single successor, the Colonna who became Martin V. This did not end the schism, however, because a Spaniard calling himself Benedict XIII refused to abandon his claim and was supported by the royal House of Aragon.