Blood & Beauty The Borgias

Chapter 52



The power of family. Sforza in Milan. Aragon in Naples. For near on half a century their mutual ambitions have affected the balance between north and south, their dynastic webs spun together with threads of blood through marriage and offspring. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that when one falls the other should be taken down with it.

On the battlefield outside Milan the French army decisively crush the Sforza force. Victory is made sweeter a day later with the capture of a swarthy Swiss soldier, a man with such execrable German and soft, manicured hands that it takes no time for him to be unmasked. Ludovico Sforza, once the scourge of Italy, is put into chains and loaded on to a cart bound for France, where King Louis himself is waiting to welcome him to a royal castle where he will reign undisturbed over a water-soaked dungeon with a court of rats for company.

With one brother taken, the next follows swiftly. Vice-Chancellor Ascanio Sforza, excommunicated as a traitor, is also imprisoned, his palace and his cardinal’s assets forfeited to the Church. Sforza. Who would have that name now? In Pesaro, Giovanni spends his life in the privy, his bowels turned to water in panic, while in Rome, Caterina is escorted by soldiers from the Belvedere Palace to less salubrious rooms in Castel Sant’ Angelo that might concentrate her mind better on the signing away of her birthright.

Cesare, his temper much improved by the news, takes to the bullring with public displays of strength, dispatching seven bulls in a series of bloody fights. Rome falls in love with him all over again.

It is not long before the French ambassadors arrive, smiles on their faces and the word ‘Naples’ on their lips. A few days later a Spanish contingent joins them. In the Pope’s receiving-room old enemies now shake hands and exchange compliments. The conquest of southern Italy is such a great undertaking; surely it would be better for the balance of Europe if it could be shared rather than opposed?

Of course, nothing can be done without the blessing of the Pope. The crown of Naples sits in his hands and his own warrior son will be part of the conquering force. Not quite yet though. First Cesare has his own war to finish, for which the French King will gladly furnish part of his own army to knock down any walls that withstand him.

Political stitch-ups do not come much tidier or more cynical than this.

Amid such satisfying developments, the news from France that the lovely Charlotte d’Albret Borgia has safely given birth is diplomatically underwhelming. The opening words say it all. A baby girl. Alexander dispatches best wishes and presents. Cesare, in contrast, finds himself unexpectedly touched, but nothing either of them can do will shift the fact that his wife is rooted in France, where King Louis seems determined to keep her.

Alas, even a pope as creative as Alexander cannot find a way to put asunder this marriage. It is unfortunate, because Cesare would be a great catch on the Italian marriage market now. And as he keeps telling his father, the new state they are building will need a key Borgia alliance to protect it.

‘Naples will not fall for at least a year. The sooner Lucrezia is free the better, Father. You have always said yourself that Fate favours those who act without waiting for tomorrow. You are almost seventy, and—’

‘Sweet Mother of God, not this again. Look at me! Do you see a man who is about to die? I have never felt better, as everyone but you is telling me.’

It is true: Alexander does have more energy these days. A few months before, when the world was filled with business and strife, he had given Giulia permission to visit her husband in the country, but now success has increased his appetite in many things, so that recently his eye has started wandering over one or two of Lucrezia’s prettier ladies-in-waiting. ‘We will come to it when the time is right, Cesare. Let us at least enjoy a little sunshine before negotiating another storm.’

Cesare, whose faith in Fate grows greater with each passing year, will remember the choice of words for some time to come.

June 29, late afternoon of a blazing hot day. Rome is bursting with pilgrims and the Pope is seated on his throne in the great Sala dei Papi, with his personal chamberlain in conference with a Spanish cardinal, the windows thrown open wide to let in a welcome breeze from across the river.

It is a common enough marvel, the way a summer storm in Rome can arrive out of nowhere: a sudden rising wind shunting in fat-bellied clouds and letting loose such sheets of rain that within the half-hour it might last there can be flash floods in the streets or rivers gushing down chimneys.

Today, the force is furious. First comes rain, then hailstones, big as nails, driven sideways by the gale. The cardinal and the chamberlain rush to the windows, struggling to secure them as the thick circles of glass rattle in their metal frames. As lightning tears a jagged hole in the sky, a thunderclap arrives at exactly the same moment, exploding directly overhead. It is so loud the cardinal cries out at the sound. On the roof, the bolt scores a direct hit on the chimney breast, bringing down the whole stone fireplace in the room above and smashing through the floorboards into the salon below.

As the two men turn from the window, the room is a dust storm. Most of the ceiling has gone. So has the Pope: man and throne engulfed by an avalanche of wood and plaster.

‘Holy Father!’ the chamberlain calls out hoarsely. ‘Holy Father?’

There is no sound. Nothing. No living soul could have withstood such a weight of masonry.

‘The Pope!’ both men scream as the doors open. ‘Help! Help! The Pope is dead.’

The dreaded words fly down the Vatican corridors, even as the papal guards rush in, throwing themselves onto the pile, tearing at the rubble with their bare hands, causing more debris to dislodge and fall, until the captain arrives and shouts for them to halt. ‘Slowly! One piece at a time. More men. Get more men.’

In the open doorway Burchard stands, his thin sculpted face without expression. He turns to a servant behind him and nods, the man disappearing like a rabbit down a hole.

‘The Pope is dead!’

In Santa Maria in Portico next door, Sancia is visiting Lucrezia; they, their women and baby Rodrigo are now gathered in the main salon, driven from the garden by the storm. They hear the shouting but not the words, but it is enough to send them, skirts flying, through the secret corridors into the palace beyond.

‘The Pope is dead!’

Cardinal della Rovere is halfway through a dispatch to France when the messenger arrives. He drops the pen and is out of the door. He will find the inkblot spreading when he returns.

By the time Cesare gets there (how Fate adores this young man: it is one of his rooms, which he had left barely an hour before, that has taken the brunt of the damage) the chamber is filled with soldiers, cardinals and doctors. In the centre, edges of the throne are now visible while men work methodically, lifting chunks of masonry and wood, some of it decorated with the Borgia coat-of-arms. How could God be so cruel? To kill a pope using the weapon of his own name. And every few minutes the captain of the guards shouts for silence, then calls: ‘Holy Father. Your Holiness, can you hear us?’

It is at the tenth time of asking, with a sense of theatre that Burchard himself could not match, that a wavering voice replies.

The whole room erupts in a cheer, and the guards go at it even faster, clearing the surrounding debris until at last the Pope is revealed, bolt-upright in his seat, his right arm caught under a lump of wood, head covered in plaster dust and a slice of blood across one cheek, but palpably alive: a fortuitous collision of two beams meeting over his head and taking the weight of what should have crushed the life out of him.

‘Holy Father. You are saved!’

‘Yes,’ he says, as he takes in the waiting, stunned crowd. ‘Yes. I am.’ And that famed Borgia smile cracks from ear to ear.

Cesare backs out of the door to find Burchard standing outside and, coming swiftly towards them down the corridor that links the public rooms to the papal apartments, the tall, gangling figure of Giuliano della Rovere, his cardinal’s robes like lapping waves around him. Vultures, Cesare thinks. In Rome it is the ear rather than any sense of smell that has them gathering.

He moves to block his path. During their months of enforced cohabitation at the French court the two of them have perfected a tone of sincere insincerity. But since their arrival in Rome they have studiously avoided each other.

‘My lord duke.’ Della Rovere is breathless. ‘I came as soon as I heard. I—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Cesare interrupts loudly. ‘The most terrible accident. The ceiling of the room above has fallen directly on to the throne where he was seated.’

‘Oh, may Jesus Christ Our Lord have mercy on us all. Our beloved Holy Father? He is badly hurt?’

Cesare makes a stiff little gesture, as if he cannot speak.

‘No, oh – no – he is not dead?’

Cesare tastes the honey in the timing. ‘No, he isn’t. That is the wonder of it. He is very much alive.’

Della Rovere, for a second unsure how to proceed, crosses himself and pulls his hands together in prayer. ‘Praise be to all the saints.’

‘And how good of you to come to his aid so fast, cardinal. You must have men of great prescience around you.’

Della Rovere’s smile barely flickers. Behind them, Burchard is already moving back to the Pope’s chamber. Cesare’s voice reaches after him.

‘Is there anyone else we should disinform?’

Alexander, his right arm badly bruised and with various cuts and scratches to his head and face, is carried gently to his bedchamber. The word ‘miracle’ is already starting to whisper its way around the Vatican palace as Cesare walks out into the gardens that adjoin the Borgia apartments. The torrential rain has stopped as fast as it arrived and the sky is already clearing. The gravel and the flowerbeds are soaked and as the sun comes out it picks out trembling diamond drops of water on the leaves of the Seville orange trees that the Pope loves so much because they remind him of the Spanish home that he no longer quite remembers from his childhood. The hailstones have knocked some of the riper oranges to the ground: an early harvest for the Vatican kitchens, their pulp strong, slightly bitter to the taste. Borgia fruit. Della Rovere would no doubt have them all dug up and replanted. How fast it could all come apart, Cesare thinks: coats-of-arms covered up or chipped away, new apartments fashioned for a new papacy. He pushes the nightmare further: what future would there be then for a Borgia son with no army and just a few cities, still half owned by the papacy, in his grasp? No, if the Borgias are to survive, then the rest of Romagna must be secured and buffered by states in order to give it muscle against the belligerence of any new pope. And it must happen fast. Another campaign will take the cities he needs, and the fall of Naples to the French will cushion him in the south. To the north one state has long been the obvious choice. Ferrara. But to persuade the proud house of Este that they need an alliance with the new Duke of the Romagna will take the combined weight of a French king, a Borgia pope and a high-level marriage to formalise the good will.

Once again Fate, this time in the form of a summer storm and a fallen chimney breast, is his mentor.