Blood & Beauty The Borgias

Chapter 20



Ten days later the French Army enters Naples, to the jubilation of a people who are tired of decades of cruelty and negligence, and remain hopeful, as people so often do, that a new ruler will treat them better than the last.

In the royal palace, where he sets up his court, the King welcomes the first flock of Neapolitan well-wishers, along with their wives and prettiest of daughters, all eager to find favour with a monarch whose patronage might also be described as the spoils of war. He is so delighted by the loveliness of what is on offer that he vows to remember every one of his pleasures in a little leather-bound book, which he keeps under his bed. The recording of history comes in many shapes and sizes.

Spurred on by their king’s example, the French now settle to some serious lotus eating. Their failing memory is not helped by the loss of their second hostage, Prince Djem. He had been in ill health right from the start, his waking hours spent drunk and abusive, picking quarrels with anyone willing to waste the time of day with him. Alexander, who has watched him disintegrate for years, had been right in his judgement: at thirty-six, the man is a lost cause, bitter and ashamed and now in rising fear that he may, after all, have to face a brother who is more able and at least as unforgiving as he is.

The closer they have got to Naples, the more time he has spent comatose. Once settled into the palace, he seldom comes out of his room and then only to complain about the rottenness of the food. One morning he does not wake up at all. His servants, grateful for the respite, leave him to it. By the time they think to check, he is barely breathing. The King, who is already having such a good time that he doesn’t want to be disturbed, sends his doctors, who sniff and probe and poke, a little more violently than they ought perhaps, but then he has been as abusive to them as everyone else. They get no response. By nightfall he is stiff as a plank.

It doesn’t take long for the rumour to spread that Alexander, whose name is now evil incarnate, has had him poisoned to spoil the King’s crusade. When the same rumour reaches Alexander, newly reunited with Cesare and scrutinising each and every dispatch from his spies in Naples, he is caught between fury and celebration at his enemies’ stupidity.

‘See how such men are swayed by their own thirst for scandal! What possible advantage is there in it for us to have the Turk poisoned? Alive he added forty thousand ducats a year to the papal purse – more as long as someone else was paying his bed and board! Ah well! Someone had better tell Pinturicchio. He might want to erase his likeness from the court of Alexandria now.’

Back in Naples, the prince’s possessions are distributed among those nobles who have a hankering for oriental fashion, and his great curved sabre, which once cut the heads off dozens of true believers (or so he claimed), is given to the King. It is clear even now that this is the closest His Majesty will ever come to the Holy Land. The army lets out a sigh of relief. Who needs rough seas and infidels when they are in the land of plenty?

From underneath the skirts of their Neapolitan hostesses (amateurs fast joined by an army of professionals) the lotus petals unfold and offer up further narcotic sweetness.

Three months later, when the French wake irritated by a gross itching in their groin, Spanish ships from Sicily are already docking on the mainland and an anti-French league has been signed in Rome, negotiated with impressive speed by a pope who, for all his reputation for carnality, knows when to put work above women. The sole object of this alliance: to expel the French and cut off their retreat to the Alps.

They move as fast as an army carrying its own weight in booty on the backs of a thousand mules can manage. Charles heads for Rome, hoping to win over Alexander (despite his treachery he remembers him warmly as the father figure he never had). But by the time they get there, the papal court has moved to Orvieto to avoid him. When they reach Orvieto, the Pope is in Perugia. To follow him any further would be to waste time in what is already becoming a fraught retreat. From Umbria, the French make a dash for home.

The two forces meet on a field outside Fornovo, south-west of Parma. The battle lasts all day. Both sides win and both sides lose. Heavy rain soaks the gunpowder so that the famous French artillery cannot fire. They still manage to kill more soldiers than they lose and break through to head north, but their baggage train is left behind and much of that fabulous war booty falls to the enemy, even down to the King’s own chests of treasure, inside one of which is found a little leather-bound book filled with names and dates and coded but pertinent observations.

It is not the only thing they leave behind. Everywhere they have loitered – and in Naples most of all, with its labyrinthine tenements and overflow of humanity – a new disease of the loins starts to spread, to the bewilderment of the doctors called to treat it. Its symptoms, written on the sufferers’ faces with angry pustules – a mark of shame for all to see – come and then go, only to return with no warning months later. It is christened ‘the French disease’, and along with ‘bom bard’ it enters the language as another weapon of war.

In Rome, where as yet the population remains smooth-skinned, there is more to celebrate. The Pope has seen off not just an army of conquest but also a direct attack on himself and the papacy by two of his greatest enemies. Cardinal della Rovere slips back to France to lick his wounds and bide his time, but in the south, Virginio Orsini, arch-traitor to the papal cause, is captured by the army of the returning King of Naples and thrown into a dungeon deep inside Castel dell’Ovo on the edge of the sea: an ignominious fate for the head of one of Rome’s most powerful families.

In her vineyard, Vannozza is back over her account books, her house and gardens restored. She doesn’t ask what happened to the men responsible for their destruction, though she cannot miss the gossip that circulates. It was the misfortune of the Swiss Guard to be left behind by the French King to protect his quarters in case of return. The very day after the league of opposition was signed, a group of them were taking the evening air in Piazza Navona when a wave of Spaniards came crashing out from the side streets and set upon them. Outnumbered ten to one, it is not what anyone would have called a fair fight, and by the time it ended there were some three dozen corpses leaking Swiss blood on to the cobblestones, many of them falling at the hands of two swordsmen, the first in a mask, the other disfigured by scars.

One enemy at a time. The Cardinal of Valencia is a quick learner.

As revenge and celebration mix, the Pope sends instructions for all his children to join him. The family is about to be reunited.