Blood & Beauty The Borgias

Chapter 19



It takes them a good deal longer to leave than to arrive. Four weeks of regular food and sleeping on new straw in warm rooms as winter rages outside have sapped their eagerness for the promise of Naples. There is much complaining and groaning and swearing as they hitch up their breeches, stuff their meagre belongings into bags and load up the carts in drizzling rain. As darkness falls they are still trudging through the streets towards the southern gates. The city, which has long since lost its respect for men with glinting swords and long pikes, does not come out to see them off. As the palazzi and private houses close their doors, they are already starting fires and boiling water to burn and scrub away the lice. Still, even those who barely grasp the vagaries of high politics have an understanding that they have been let off lightly and that their pope has shown himself a father to his Roman flock as well as a dupe to his nubile young mistress. As for Naples, well, many go to bed that night remembering it in their prayers.

In the Vatican, Alexander, resplendent in ceremonial robes, bids goodbye to the runty young king whom he has lavishly entertained over the last few days and who has bowed and scraped in front of him (but not so much as to be allowed to feel humiliated). He embraces him as his own dear and faithful son with many tender words before seeing him on to his horse at the gate of the private gardens. Along with endearments, Charles carries only the vaguest promises of Alexander’s support in Naples; just as well then that his hostage is both the Pope’s son and a cardinal, ceremonially able to put the crown on his head when the moment comes.

As soon as he is out of sight, the Holy Father, Burchard and other prelates gather at the windows of the newly refurnished corridor which leads from the Vatican palace to Sant’ Angelo to watch unseen as the King, joined by Cesare in his Church finery, ride out together like brothers in arms, followed by six magnificent unsaddled horses which the Cardinal of Valencia has just gifted to His Majesty as a token of his affection, while behind them come nineteen chests of his personal luggage loaded on a pack of plodding mules.

When he turns back towards his private apartments, Alexander, for the first time in his papacy, finds himself alone without any of his children. At another time it might have been a moment for sentiment. A few tears, perhaps. At another time… As it is, no sooner is the royal entourage out of sight across the bridge than he is welcoming the Spanish ambassador, who has been pacing the floor of the anteroom waiting for the exodus to finish.

Cesare meanwhile is determined to suck some sweetness from the hostage experience. The sky brightens as the army moves south along the great Via Appia, navigable again since Sixtus IV had parts of it cleared and repaved. History stretches before and behind them. The first day they make camp at Marino, where they are joined by Prince Djem and his retinue, who drinks freely and regales them with tales of piracy and savagery on the high seas (where he never was). They are still eating when news arrives from Naples. Alfonso, King for less than a year, during which time he has not slept for nightmares of doom, has abdicated in favour of his son; and both father and son and the whole court have fled to Sicily. The table rejoices. Cesare lifts his glass along with the others, in the knowledge that his baby brother Jofré is safe.

Unlike Djem, who spends the days in a stupor recovering from the nights before, Cesare is the life and soul of the march. His French is smooth and his sense of humour sharp, and without his cardinal’s clothing he appears every bit the soldier as he moves through the ranks of the army, interested and eager for stories of battle. At rest stops he tests the crossbows and the pikes. He rides for a while with the advance light cavalry, impressing them with his horse skills, leaping from one moving mount to another, racing stretches of open road and winning against whoever is fool enough to challenge him. He quizzes cohort commanders and those professional soldiers who sell their service and their troops to the highest bidder. War is a business with its own balance sheets, and a good general needs to master its economy as well as its weaponry. But he is at his most inquisitive with the artillery, running his hands over the rich bronze guns (kept cleaned and primed, ready for instant battle) and regaling the gunners with questions. What weight do they carry? How fast can they reload? What thickness of wall can they penetrate? In short, a more amiable, charming hostage it would be impossible to find, and at night when they dine, the King insists that he sits by his side.

At the city of Velletri they are met by Cardinal della Rovere, whose archbishopric it is. At the banquet he lays on, he and Cesare sit at the same table, raising their glasses in cold politeness. That night the whole company sleeps well oiled, confident of victory and glory ahead of them. It is the waning of the moon and the winter darkness is thick as soup.

Sometime after midnight a figure, dressed in the black livery of the King’s stable boys, slips out from a torn flap in the back of Cesare’s tent. He moves past the guards, with whom he exchanges a coarse joke in French, towards the field where the royal horses are tethered. He approaches a black stallion, the finest of the six gifted to the King and one who has proved skittish and uncooperative to anyone who tries to mount him. The animal stands still as a statue as the young man slips a saddle and bridle over him, all the time whispering in its ear. Minutes later, the two move in silent harmony through the shadows and out beyond the sleeping camp. They cover the first few miles across fields before rejoining the road. Just before first light, outside a church near Marino, he is met by a masked man waiting with a sword and a change of clothes. The two grasp hands once, then twice, and as the sun comes up on a gauzy grey winter’s morning, they gallop off, to be swallowed up instantly by the mist. Before nightfall they will be in Rome.

Back at camp, the King and his entourage breakfast early without the young cardinal. When a guard is sent to rouse him his servant is found in a drugged sleep and his pallet is empty. The King is puce with fury. In the baggage train, Cesare’s great chests of luggage remain intact. They are hauled out and broken open on the road in front of the King. Inside, under layers of rich brocade, is revealed great expanses of nothing. The mules, who look burdened even when they are not, stand impassively by as the King jumps up and down on his little feet, spitting fire: ‘All Italians are scum, blackguards and traitors and the Pope and his poxy family are the worst of them. As God is my witness I will have the Pope off his throne and…’

But he and twenty-five thousand men are halfway to Naples and everybody knows there is no going back now.

When the dispatch (the same sentiments with only slightly mediated language) arrives with Alexander, he roars even louder than the King.

‘What! Does His Majesty think I would conspire against him, he whom I have welcomed into my heart as my dear son? How dare the Cardinal of Valencia disobey me, his pontiff? His desertion is none of our doing and causes us more pain and fury than it does the King. Where is he? Where? We will scour the city and smoke him out and when he is found he will be sent back immediately.’

The French envoy backs out of the room, his ears ringing. Standing behind the closed door, staring up at the bull crest on the beams above, he hears the rant continue through the wood.

‘Get me Burchard! Get me the commander of the Papal Guard! We will have the cardinal found if we have to turn inside-out every palace in Rome!’

At home in Paris, the French court has a fine reputation for the art of drama, richly performed tales of love and tragedy, but its envoy has never in his life come across an actor of the calibre of Alexander.

Meanwhile, seventy miles to the north-east, in the castle of Spoleto, Pedro Calderón is already delivering orders for the fires to be lit and the bedrooms to be made up in readiness for new guests.

Within a few days two masked men arrive, dusty from the road but in high spirits. To his delight, Calderón is included in the celebration that night. The great hearth spits fire into the darkness as the men gather their chairs close by, the meal laid on trays before them: roasted wild boar in a thick apple gravy with a fat red wine from the local slopes. The alcohol mixes with the exhilaration of escape to loosen tongues, and the talk is all of the skills of war, with Cesare holding forth on the setting and breaking of camps, the superior power of pikes in formation against cavalry, and the onomatopoeic violence of two syllables which have already entered the language to describe the sound and fury of a new siege weapon.

Bom Bard.