The Borgias (66 page)

Awakened early on the morning of March 12, 1507, when a relief force of rebels attempted to break the siege, he donned his armor, mounted his charger, and led a party of his soldiers in hot pursuit of fleeing enemy horsemen. He chased them into a ravine, where he was ambushed and cut to pieces at the conclusion of a bitter fight in which he killed several men. His body was stripped naked and abandoned. Perhaps he had not realized that he was alone as he entered the ravine—that his own men were either not following or had been outrun. It is not impossible that he committed a kind of suicide, intentionally throwing himself into a situation that made a swift death inevitable, preferring early oblivion to long years as the aging dependent of a poor and insignificant king.

The body when recovered was placed in the church of Saint Mary of the Assumption in Viana. Over it was constructed the ornate tomb that an indignant bishop of Calahorra would later order destroyed.

Aftermath

The end of Cesare left Lucrezia exposed and solitary. Though now duchess of Ferrara, her father-in-law having died in 1505, she was in a cold union with a dour duke who would never have married her if he had not been bullied into it and showed no interest in her except as a body upon which to generate an heir. Married five years now, repeatedly pregnant, Lucrezia had yet to give Alfonso a living child. For this reason and others she remained an isolated figure at the Ferrara court, an outsider.

Anyone wishing to persuade Alfonso that association with the Borgias could lead only to grief needed only to point to what his family had already suffered as a consequence of his marriage. Lucrezia, in moving to Ferrara, had brought along as part of her entourage a young cousin named Angela. A great beauty (painted later in life by Leonardo da Vinci), this Angela was like Lucrezia herself a Lanzol, but like all the Roman Lanzols she used Borgia as her surname. Soon after arriving in Ferrara, she found herself pursued both by Alfonso d’Este’s priapic brother Cardinal Ippolito and their illegitimate half-brother Giulio. This led to the cardinal’s sending thugs to waylay Giulio and (because Angela had driven Ippolito half-mad with jealousy by rhapsodizing upon the beauty of his rival’s eyes) blind him. Giulio escaped with his fine face disfigured but only one eye lost. Outraged to learn that the cardinal’s only punishment was to be ordered to leave Ferrara, he began to plot revenge. Soon he was at the center of a conspiracy not only to poison the cardinal but to murder Alfonso as well and replace him as duke with the youngest of the legitimate Este brothers, Ferrante,
named for his maternal grandfather King Ferrante of Naples. The scheme was discovered, the conspirators were convicted of treason, and all were beheaded except Giulio and Ferrante, who were literally at the chopping block when reprieved and sent off to confinement.

Ferrante would die in his dungeon in Ferrara’s great palace thirty-four years later. Giulio would be released after fifty-four years, a piece of human wreckage in his ninth decade and an object of mirth as he stumbled into the daylight in his tattered, antique clothes. Angela Borgia, untouched by the tragedy she had innocently set in motion, became the bride of an Italian count six months after the brothers’ arrest. She later gave birth to a son who would grow up to marry Cardinal Ippolito’s illegitimate daughter.

Louis of France encouraged Alfonso to rid himself of his Borgia wife. Such a move would certainly have been approved, and probably abetted, by Julius II, whose hatred of all the Borgias remained so intense that he refused to set foot in the Vatican apartments that had been their private quarters. The duke, however, politely ignored the suggestion. Shedding a wife of several years could be a messy affair. An annulment would be required, and establishing grounds could lead to the kind of unpleasantness that the end of Lucrezia’s first marriage had brought down on Giovanni Sforza. What probably mattered more, the financial consequences would have been painful. Lucrezia, if sent packing, would be entitled to take her dowry with her. With northern Italy in turmoil and the relationship between Spain and France unsettled at best, Ferrara was likely soon to be once again at war. Alfonso could ill afford to give up the hundred thousand ducats and other treasure that had come to him with his bride.

Alfonso appears to have been content with his life and eventually with his wife as well. He was a blunt character of simple tastes, dividing much of his time between the workshop and foundry where he tinkered with the production of guns, and his retinue of prostitutes. Her failure to produce children aside, Lucrezia had done nothing with which any sane husband could have found fault.
In almost all ways she was an exemplary consort: not only strikingly beautiful and so graceful that witnesses wrote of her seeming to walk on air, but unfailingly sweet-natured, brimming with “laughing good humor and gaiety.” She was fluent in Valencian Spanish, Italian, and French, had considerable
knowledge of Latin and some of Greek, and was a sophisticated patron of the arts. Finally she was modest in conduct, devout in religion, and, thanks both to her own abilities and to the responsibilities that Alexander VI had given her at an early age, a capable and conscientious administrator. Writers unable to square Lucrezia’s terrible reputation with her admirable behavior after the move to Ferrara have sometimes claimed that she underwent an astonishing transformation upon marrying Alfonso d’Este, the murdering libertine somehow turning into a grande dame of the highest quality.
But as the Borgia biographer Michael Mallett observed almost half a century ago, this notion is “implausible and unhistorical.” There was no transformation because the vicious young Lucrezia of legend never existed.

In 1508 she gave birth to a healthy son, named Ercole in honor of his late grandfather. In 1509 she had a second healthy son, this one named Ippolito after his uncle the cardinal and himself a future cardinal. As the mother of an heir and a spare she was at last relatively secure. By this time a new stage in the so-called Italian Wars had broken out as expected, the focus on northern Italy rather than Naples, and Ferrara was unavoidably involved. This fresh round of fighting, which would go on for eight years, was the work of Pope Julius. First he allied himself with France and Spain to drive Venice out of its recently conquered mainland territories, then later switched sides and joined Venice in making war on France. Alfonso d’Este and the duchy of Ferrara became prime targets of the pope’s inexhaustible reserves of wrath; Julius excommunicated the duke, placed Ferrara under an interdict, and declared that the House of Este’s right to rule had become null and void. The Este would be saved by Alfonso’s skill as a soldier and his mastery of the art and science of artillery, by the fact that when off at the war he was able to leave Ferrara under the regency of his capable wife, and finally, in 1513, by a stroke of immense good fortune. In that year Pope Julius, in the midst of preparations for an invasion of Ferrara, suddenly died. The invasion was called off, and the danger to Ferrara passed. The war years had tightened the bond between Lucrezia and the duke, giving each new respect for and trust in the other.

Lucrezia was in her mid-thirties when peace returned, and had barely a handful of years to live. Those years would be as eventful as the ones that had come before. In 1512 her son by the duke of Bisceglie,
Rodrigo of Aragon, died at age twelve. She had not seen him since being obliged to leave him behind when she departed Rome for Ferrara but had always been devoted to his well-being, and she was deeply wounded by the loss. After another series of failed pregnancies she gave birth to a son named Alessandro in 1514, a daughter named Leonora in 1515, and a boy named Francesco in 1516, the year when little Alessandro died. In the meantime, and originally at Cesare’s request, she had assumed responsibility for some of the young Borgias who without her might have been cut adrift, among them the Infant of Rome (endlessly rumored to be her child) and the mysterious Rodrigo Borgia who had been born at about the time of Pope Alexander’s death. The diligence with which she enlisted her husband’s help in trying to find a place for these children, and Alfonso’s efforts to get the unpleasant young Infant an appointment at France’s royal court, make it highly improbable that the duke could have thought it even possible that any of them might be her children.

Gradually, Lucrezia became a revered figure in Ferrara, loved for her kindness—she had pawned her jewels to help the city’s poor when the war with Rome brought hard times—and admired for her piety. She made romantic conquests of some of the most remarkable figures of her time. Among them were the humanists and poets Pietro Bembo, Ercole Strozzi, and Ariosto, leading literary figures all and deep in her thrall. Other admirers—so devoted that there have always been suspicions of affairs—included Lucrezia’s brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, a brilliant young French general named Gaston de Foix, and Gaston’s commander and friend Pierre Terrail LeVieux, known as the seigneur de Bayard, who left a description of her as “beautiful and good, gentle and amiable to everyone.” It is possible to interpret some of the letters that Lucrezia and these men exchanged as evidence of infidelity—but only by ignoring the conventions of courtly love that governed such relationships in those days.

Lucrezia died at age thirty-nine in 1519, shortly after giving birth to a daughter who also did not survive. She was mourned by her husband, her three sons and daughter, a wide circle of admirers, and virtually the whole population of Ferrara. Alfonso lived for another fifteen years, his son and heir Ercole II then ruled as duke of Ferrara until 1559 and was succeeded by his son Alfonso II, who lived until 1597 and centuries later
would provide Robert Browning with the model for the monstrous narrator of his poem “My Last Duchess.” The legitimate male line having become extinct with his passing, Ferrara was absorbed into the Papal States in 1598. An illegitimate cousin of Alfonso II’s, Cesare d’Este, established a line of dukes that would rule the city-state of Modena into the time of Napoleon. Among the descendants of Lucrezia living today are the kings of Spain and Belgium, the grand duke of Luxembourg, France’s House of Bourbon, and the descendants of the last royal rulers of Bavaria, Brazil, Saxony, and the so-called Two Sicilies.

Young though she was at the time of her death, Lucrezia had outlived by years Cesare’s widow Charlotte d’Albret, who was exactly her age. Because Charlotte had lived as Cesare’s wife for only a few months, and because what little has been reported about the relationship between the two is often self-contradictory—it is said both that she refused to rejoin her husband after he left France and that she was prevented from doing so either by Louis XII or by Cesare himself—her behavior during her years of widowhood seems distinctly weird. She withdrew into a state of perpetual mourning, draping her home in black crepe, trimming the harnesses of her mules with black, sleeping between black sheets, eating from black dishware, and requiring her daughter to do the same. The girl Louisa married into an illegitimate branch of the royal Bourbons.
Her descendants, like Lucrezia’s, are today among the highest of Europe’s titled nobility.

Lucrezia was, so far as we know, the last of Vannozza’s children to die. Her younger brother Jofrè had predeceased her by two years, leaving four small children and a widow of whom nothing is known except that her name was Maria del Milà and therefore she presumably was a member of that branch of the Borgia family tree. Jofrè had been freed to marry by the death in 1505 of his estranged wife Sancia, who at one time or another, it must have seemed to him, had been the mistress of almost every man of importance in Italy. Jofrè’s son by his second marriage, and then his grandson and great-grandson, succeeded to his title and estates as princes of Squillace. When the male line ended, the last prince’s only daughter was married to a Spanish descendant of Juan Borgia the murdered duke of Gandía. Her inheritance was thus merged into that of the family’s senior line.

The Borgia dukes of Gandía, immensely wealthy, remained important
in the public life of Spain and its empire for more than a hundred years. The fourth duke, Francisco, whose mother was the illegitimate daughter of an archbishop who was an illegitimate son of King Ferdinand, was a favorite at the court of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (the son of Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Juana the Mad and Philip the Handsome). Francisco served as viceroy of Catalonia before being widowed for a second time and entering the priesthood. This led to his becoming the third head of the young Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, and eventually to his being canonized a saint. Among his eighteen children (only one of them illegitimate) were two cardinals, an archbishop, a viceroy of Peru, a general, an ambassador, and five of the twenty-six Borgia maidens who in the course of two centuries became nuns (and often mothers superior) of the convent at Gandía. Later members of the family included viceroys in Aragon and Sicily, a “patriarch of the Indies,” and confidants of kings. By the time the last duke of Gandía died childless in 1740 and all the Borgia family’s male lines were extinct in Europe, various offspring of the duke-saint Francisco Borgia had established themselves permanently in the New World. Their descendants are said to be found today in Colombia and Peru.