The Borgias (62 page)

There was nothing that admirable about necromancy, the use of ritual and formula to make contact with the dead and enlist their help in putting curses on enemies, acquiring some desired possession, or learning such secrets as who committed a crime or where a lost object might be found. It was at least as old as astrology, but it had always been less respectable. Moses in his law code made it a capital offense, and millennia later Leonardo da Vinci scornfully observed that “of all human opinions that is to be reputed the most foolish which deals with the belief in necromancy.”

Astrology appears to have been far more widely embraced in Italy than elsewhere in Europe. (The University of Paris condemned it in 1494, by which date it was being taught at universities across Italy.) Paradoxically, the difference may have stemmed from Italy’s unique status as the birthplace of the Renaissance and from the work of its scholars in rediscovering the literature of the distant past. Astrology’s credibility was enhanced by the many ancient texts on the subject that the Italian humanists were unearthing and translating. The cryptic character of such texts helped to make astrology seem both mysterious and a legitimate subject of study, worthy of close attention. It offered the same things it had offered thousands of years before: a way of drawing meaning from the night sky and making sense of a baffling world.

Astrology’s failure to get such a firm grip on imaginations outside Italy did not mean that the Italians were more credulous than people elsewhere. For whatever reason, north of the Alps there was less interest in astrology than in magic, which involved the belief that one could achieve even the most ignoble of ends by entering into relations with spirits from other worlds, and which came in “black” and “white” varieties. Thus the appeal of witchcraft, and the fears of the orthodox that witches existed in great numbers and possessed secret spells and concoctions that could make people love or hate one another, visit terrible afflictions upon
them, and work all manner of mischief. In 1484 an antiwitchcraft bull of Pope Innocent VIII sparked witch hunts on a terrifying scale—in a single year forty-one accused individuals were burned at the stake in the town of Como—with reverberations echoing down to Salem, Massachusetts, two-plus centuries later.

It was all part of the environment in which the people of fifteenth-century Europe lived their lives, and it would remain a central part of that environment until the first real scientists appeared on the scene with their demands for bona fide evidence and their emphasis on repeatable experiments. In the interim, ironically, superstition contributed in important ways to the birth of science. The work of astrologers in studying the heavens did more than anything else to expand the knowledge of astronomy, just as alchemy turned out to be the parent of chemistry. Ultimately, inevitably, astrology and its sister superstitions were reduced to the marginal things they are today, sources of harmless amusement for many, of income for others, and of irrational obsessions for an unfortunate few.

21

Alone

Cesare, when his luck appeared to have pretty much run out, would tell Machiavelli that at the great crisis of his life, when everything was at stake, he had been prepared for everything except what actually happened.

That climactic crisis, which not only followed Cardinal Castelli’s garden party but was a direct consequence of it, was presaged by an event so odd that it has been remembered ever since in spite of being essentially meaningless. On the day after the party, an owl flew into the papal apartments through an open window, fell dead, and was declared by Alexander to be an “evil omen.”

An omen of what? First came other harbingers, followed in short order by the thing itself. On August 7, the day after the episode of the owl, the Venetian ambassador paid a routine call on the pope and found him wrapped in a shawl in spite of the punishing heat and in uncharacteristically low spirits. He fretted not only about official business—especially the imponderable consequences of the new war for Naples—but also about such things as the growing number of lives being claimed by that year’s summer fevers. All this was unusual enough for the ambassador to make note of it in his report. He made no mention, however, of Cesare; presumably Valentino was not present, occupied with preparations for his return to the north.

On August 11, the eleventh anniversary of Alexander’s election, Cardinal
Castelli fell seriously ill. On Saturday the twelfth, exactly a week after the party, the pope rose as usual, said mass, breakfasted, vomited, and returned in distress to his bed. Cesare, on the verge of departing the city, was struck down by the same symptoms at almost exactly the same time. He managed to make his way to his quarters directly above Alexander’s apartment before collapsing. He appeared to be the more dangerously afflicted of the two. The pope lay in silence after ordering the Vatican barricaded, feeling well enough, after a few days, to sit up and watch some of the cardinals attending him play cards at his bedside. Cesare, by contrast, became so alarmingly feverish that he was stripped naked and lowered into a huge oil jar filled with cold water; his skin was reported to have peeled as a result. He was in a state of delirium when, on the seventeenth, Alexander took such a severe turn for the worse that his physicians were soon declaring him to be beyond hope. After receiving the last rites, he died a solitary death on the night of August 18. The servants attending him, terrified, stripped the pontifical apartments of everything of value (even the throne disappeared) and vanished into the dark streets. Long before sunrise the people of the city knew what had happened and were coming together in rowdy clusters, looking for Spaniards to attack and rob.

Cesare’s patron, the man who had made everything possible, was gone. It was a blow, obviously, and it called for an immediate response. But Cesare had long anticipated that such a thing not only could happen but was certain to happen sooner or later. And he had long been prepared—not for the pope’s fall from hearty good health into his grave in less than two weeks in August 1503, specifically, but certainly for his removal at some unforeseeable point, and so for the day when he, Cesare, would be entirely on his own. Everything he had done since casting aside the red hat can be seen as preparation for that day: the hurry to carve a principality out of the Papal States; the destruction of the warlords of the Romagna and elsewhere; the building up of an army superior to any the other Italian princes could put in the field; the uprooting and scattering of the Roman barons; and the loading of the College of Cardinals with Borgia loyalists.

The vigor and thoroughness with which Cesare pursued all these objectives was one of the things that Machiavelli found admirable about him. By achieving all of them, he had positioned himself to act
swiftly whenever the pope did finally die or become incapacitated, and to deal decisively with whatever obstacles might rise up in his path. What undid all these preparations—what he didn’t foresee and could hardly have prepared for had he somehow foreseen it—was that when Alexander exited the stage, he himself, Cesare, would be in a state of total helplessness.

His one great stroke of luck on the night of the pope’s death was the presence in the Vatican of the most ferociously loyal of his Spanish companions, Michelotto Corella, who had raced from his base at Perugia upon learning of Cesare’s illness. Without Michelotto, all might have been lost. Alexander had been dead only minutes when, accompanied by armed retainers, Michelotto burst into the papal apartments and demanded access to the locked inner chamber that had served as Alexander’s strongbox. When the cardinal responsible for the security of that chamber refused, Michelotto put a dagger to his throat and offered a simple choice: hand over the key or die. Chests that must have contained no less than a hundred thousand ducats, possibly much more, were then hauled upstairs to Cesare’s sickroom. Guards were posted under the alternating supervision of Michelotto and Jofrè Borgia, and all settled in to wait for Cesare to recover or die.

He recovered, but at a maddeningly slow pace, and while he was doing so Rome descended into madness. The remnants of the old baronial clans came rushing back to reclaim the properties that the Borgias had taken from them, and to settle scores. Twelve hundred men led by Fabio Orsini, vengeful son of the strangled Paolo, fanned out through the streets on the other side of the Tiber from the Vatican, setting fire to the homes and places of business of the city’s Spaniards, assaulting any “Catalans” they could lay hands on and killing several. Fabio—whose wife was a Lanzol Borgia—declared that he would not be satisfied until he had washed his hands and face in Borgia blood. Outside the city it was much the same: displaced Orsini and Colonna and Savelli with murder in their hearts jostled with one another to take back what they had thought lost forever and bring ruin to their foes.

In the midst of these horrors it was necessary to get the dead pope buried, and the funeral obsequies were themselves tinged with horror. A fight over silver candlesticks broke out between monks carrying Alexander’s body from the palace to St. Peter’s Basilica and the guards
assigned to protect them, so that the corpse was dumped on the ground and for a time abandoned. By the time it was laid out for public viewing, it had swelled up grotesquely and turned dark, a black distended tongue protruding from the mouth. In the end brute force had to be used to cram it into its coffin like an overstuffed sack of rotting potatoes.

From the start and as usual there was much talk of poisoning. Because whenever the Borgias figured in gossip of this kind they were cast as the villains, this time it was necessary to explain how Alexander and Cesare were murderers and victims at the same time. As the most popular account had it, the two of them had intended to murder their host Cardinal Castelli but had somehow lost track of which goblets of wine were safe and ended up inadvertently poisoning themselves. Why had a full week passed before they fell ill? We have encountered this question before, and the answer that has come to be accepted by the whole world. The Borgias not only knew how to brew a poison unavailable to the rest of the world, they could administer it in such ways as to take effect immediately or weeks later.

The truth of the matter is obvious and simple. Cardinal Castelli, Pope Alexander, and Cesare were all infected, and the pontiff was killed, by the malaria-bearing mosquitoes of the Tiber valley. It happened in a city notorious for its midsummer epidemics, during an August when even more people than usual were dying.
As a priest at the Vatican wrote four days before Alexander’s death, “It is not surprising that His Holiness and His Excellency should be ill, because every single outstanding man in this court is either ill or else sickening, especially those of the palace, owing to the bad condition of the air.” All the recorded symptoms of the two Borgias are consistent with a diagnosis of tertian malarial fever. As for that Borgia poison with its quasi-magical properties, five centuries later the world is still waiting for someone to rediscover it.

As Cesare recovered consciousness, he was made aware that the armies of France and Spain now loomed over Rome like a pair of watchful vultures. A French force commanded by one of La Trémoille’s
condottieri
, Francesco Gonzaga, marquess of Mantua (Lucrezia’s brother-in-law by virtue of his marriage to her husband’s sister), had broken off its march toward Naples upon learning of Alexander’s
death. It was camped at Viterbo north of Rome, awaiting developments; the sudden prospect of a papal election, and the hope of installing his chief minister Cardinal d’Amboise on the pontifical throne, had altered Louis XII’s priorities considerably. The Spaniard Gonsalvo, meanwhile, was shifting his forces northward after securing the city of Naples. Some of those forces were laying siege to the port city of Gaeta, essential to the ability of the French army to resupply itself in southern Italy, while others prepared to meet La Trémoille’s offensive. With that offensive now in abeyance, Gonsalvo too shifted his focus to Rome and to the question of the papal succession.

Cesare, from his bed in the Vatican, sent messages to the commanders on both sides, keeping his options open by giving each the impression that the writer was his special friend. His communications with Gonsalvo were entrusted to his private secretary, Agapito Geraldini, whom he authorized to enter into any agreement that seemed sufficiently advantageous. It happened that Geraldini reached the Spanish headquarters at almost the same time that two of Gonsalvo’s most valued
condottieri
, the same Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna who had helped him win the Battle of Cerignola four months earlier, requested permission to pull their troops out of the siege of Gaeta and take them temporarily to Rome. They knew of the disorder there, and they wanted to reclaim the palaces and estates that the Borgias had taken from them while the opportunity was open. Their request could hardly have been more timely from Gonsalvo’s perspective, and it set the wheels of intrigue turning. He not only consented but gave the Colonna some of his own troops to augment theirs, instructing them to attend to several matters on his behalf while in Rome. They were to offer protection to the city’s Spanish residents and make a sufficient show of force to keep the cardinals from feeling intimidated by the proximity of the French army as they undertook the business of electing a new pope. Also—Gonsalvo got Geraldini’s assent to this—as soon as Cesare was strong enough to travel, the Colonna were to escort him southward to Naples. All this having been agreed, Gonsalvo dispatched twelve galleys northward to secure the port of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, to keep it from falling into French hands.