He goes back to his dispatch, the words now pouring from his quill. And at the end of it all, what to say about the man himself? This enemy who so wants Florence’s allegiance. Given all that he has seen, Niccolò cannot keep the admiration from his voice.
A few days later, an exhausted, bedraggled figure in peasant dress accompanied by two similarly disguised servants reaches the main gates of the city of Mantua. His arrival at the Gonzaga court causes jubilation and consternation in equal measures. Until a week ago, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro was the Duke of Urbino. Now he owns nothing but the clothes he stands up in and they are not even his. He has barely slept for the danger around him, on the run like a common criminal through his own lands, dodging bands of Cesare Borgia’s troops sent out to catch him.
That evening—after the most sad and joyful reunion with Elisabetta, his wife; her brother Francesco and her sister-in-law, Isabella d’Este—all sat at the banqueting table listening in mute horror to his stories. Fury and fear are everywhere, a rain of insults against the Pope and his barbarian son. And his daughter, Lucrezia, of course, is not left out. Isabella has the most to say on that subject, for the rivalry she feels toward this upstart woman who has already taken her mother’s title, and will soon take her full place, has grown darker since the news of her pregnancy.
“My poor father and brother! That they should suffer the shame of living with that woman in their midst.”
Later that night, when their guests, now permanent visitors in exile, have retired to bed, she and her husband relive the outrage.
“You never met her, Francesco, she is like a serpent in the garden. As for Guidobaldo, it’s better that he doesn’t know the worst of it, though we will have to tell him soon enough: the way that monster is plundering the ducal palace. Imagine, all that wondrous art, those priceless items stuffed on the backs of mules, hauled up hills and sunk in bogs only to be stored in some fortress cellar in Imola or Cesena. Or even worse, sold on across Europe to raise money to further his murderous campaigns. For none of them gives a fig for art.”
“Don’t worry about it. He’ll die skewered on a sword soon enough and God willing, it will be mine. Guidobaldo and I will go to Milan to await the arrival of King Louis. However much he needs papal support, he cannot let this go on.”
“Francesco, you must be careful,” she urges; years of marriage have taught her that her pugnacious husband is not built for diplomacy. “Promise me you will conceal your fury until you see which way the wind blows. As long as the Pope lives we may have to swallow our hatred or Mantua could be his next victim.”
That night, the marchesa rushes through her prayers. So many different things she longs for; she will have to leave it to God to sort out the right order of importance. But afterward, as she lies awake, she walks mentally through the palace of Urbino, cataloging all those artistic treasures, a number of which she has admired, at times coveted for her own collection.
Next morning, she sits down and writes to her brother Cardinal Ippolito d’Este in Rome, a letter filled with the scandals of the moment, but coming to rest on a specific matter.
It would be a crime if all this great art were to disappear, never to be seen again. Given that, I wonder if you would intercede with the Pope and his son, the Duke Valentine, on my behalf, with regard to two of them, both works of the highest beauty and standard….I cannot think this will be an inconvenient request, since I know that His Excellency, the duke, does not take much pleasure in antiques.
“Listen to this. The fat gorgon is interested in a small statue of Venus and a stone carving of a naked Cupid asleep on a bed, his wings laid out behind him.”
In such a volatile climate it doesn’t take long for the request to reach the ears of Cesare Borgia himself via the intercession of Cardinal Ippolito. The letter causes him such delight that he has to stop every few sentences to savor the victory.
“Do you remember these objects, Michelotto? My brother-in-law cardinal says here that they are unimportant works, worth very little, but that my sister has taken a quaint fancy to them, and as we are all one family these days…”
He gives a mock frown. “Of course, being a bastard marauding philistine, how would I know a priceless ancient treasure from a worthless fraud?”
What tales he could tell about that naked stone Cupid.
“Well, if she wants them, she shall have them. Crate them up and dispatch them while I write a few pretty words to her. I’d like to see Montefeltro’s and his wife’s faces when they find their stolen treasures on show in their sister-in-law’s palace! God’s blood! And behind our backs they bitch about how we have no decency.”
He pulls a piece of paper toward him.
“The lady will be paying for her statues soon enough.”
SUMMER
1502
God preserve the duchess elect, because it would not be to anybody’s purposes that she should die now.
—Bernardino di Prosperi, Ferrarese noble and correspondent, writing to Isabella d’Este August 1502
CHAPTER 15
The loaded carts are still rolling out from Urbino when news comes of the surrender of Camerino. The event is more an inevitability than a military wonder, but in Rome, Alexander celebrates extravagantly with feasts and cannon salutes pounding out from Castel Sant’Angelo. With every acquisition the Borgia belt of power pulls tighter around the middle of Italy.
In public, he cannot get enough of his son’s exploits, retelling his triumphs to every envoy and cardinal who comes into his presence. And yet…and yet, he is not always so effervescent; when he is alone, or sometimes with his chamberlains or Burchard, his manner is more muted. Perhaps it is the weather, for it is already uncomfortably hot. It is not usually a problem; he has memories of summers when he sat up half the night watching his daughter and her ladies dancing, before padding his way through the Vatican to the neighboring palace where Giulia Farnese would be waiting for him, powdered skin under cool silk.
Perhaps a visit would soothe him now. The journey will be longer, as this summer she has moved out of Rome to Subiaco, to a house he has given her and their children, Laura and Romano. There will be a third baby early next year. The idea rather tires him. The world will no doubt see it as further proof of his rutting corruption, but in truth he finds himself less driven by demands of the flesh these days and this conception was the result of a meeting he barely remembers. Not that Giulia isn’t lovely. And available. She is a widow after all now, poor woman. Or rather, poor husband. For just at the time Alexander might not have minded him getting his wife back, the man had had a ceiling fall on his head. For years he had been Rome’s most famous cuckold, yet he found no dignity even in death: the wooden beam that might have jolted his eyes back into alignment—he suffered the most terrible squint—had stove his head in instead.
“Your Holiness, we are honored that you could find the time to visit us.”
As ever, Giulia welcomes him with open arms, though her belly is a little too swollen for an easy embrace. They lunch under a vine-clad loggia. His four-year-old son runs among the trees chased by servants while Laura, now a gawky nine-year-old who does not see him regularly enough to be comfortable in his presence, sits pretending a grace she does not feel. Papal business and empire building have left him little time to enjoy his latest family. When Lucrezia was this girl’s age her welcoming smile could turn his worst moods to sunshine. He glances back at Laura. How she has grown. He can see traces of the budding young woman in her face; alas, she will be nowhere near as pretty as her mother. A marriage must be arranged soon and a convent found to take her till she is ready. Dear me, he thinks, is it really nine years since her birth?
That evening he sits alone with Giulia, cupping his hand over the gentle hillock of her skirts. There was a time when a woman’s fertility only sharpened his desire; Vannozza, Cesare and Lucrezia’s mother, used to tease him about how his appetite grew at the same rate as her belly. But she liked it too. No question of that. My
God, they could not get enough of each other in those days; no man could have had a more satisfying mistress. Still, Giulia is most lovely. He pulls her head toward him and kisses her on the lips, testing out the sweetness of her mouth with his tongue. Perhaps if her sleeping chamber is not too hot…
She returns the kiss affectionately, but with no great enthusiasm. She has no wish to go to bed with this great walrus. At twenty-seven, she has lost some of that peach bloom of youth, which drives men mad to reach the juice underneath, and she finds the respite almost relaxing. Her body has already made the Farnese fortune, earning the family a cardinal and money and houses enough to see her—and others—into old age. In time perhaps she might take another husband. For now, though, it is a pleasure to have herself to herself for a while. Not many women of her age can boast such a thing. It is a gift that will be hers for as long as the Pope lives.
He knows, of course, that the whole world is busy whispering those same words. In a few months he will be seventy-two years old. Ha! It is nothing. Nothing. His uncle, Calixtus, the first Borgia pope, had lived to be nearly eighty, and though he governed the Church from his bed, his mind stayed sharp as a pilgrim’s pin. Alexander will do the same. Cesare’s conquests are not over, and more important, he must outlive Giuliano della Rovere, his oldest and most bitter cardinal rival, who sits in self-imposed exile in his palace in Ostia, growing meaner on his own bile with each passing year. Everyone knows the man has the French pox. God willing he will be one of those who die in agony from it.
That night he shares Giulia’s bed and they indulge in a little wet fondling, which is sufficient for both of them, and when, in the night, he is taken with a bout of cramp in his left leg, she rises and goes in search of some ointment. He lies on his back as her fingers work to release the knotted muscles. Where once she gave him pleasure, now she brings relief from pain. The irony does not escape him. She is indeed a lovely woman.
Back in Rome, the fever has arrived. He is not worried for himself—he has the constitution of a bull when it comes to illness—but the deaths of other men give him pause for thought. In particular, Cardinal Giovanni Ferrari. The hardened old Church administrator had survived his bout of sickness back in March, but now his refusal to allow a doctor near him proves fatal within days.
Alexander is ready and waiting to seize his assets—but the manner of his death and its aftermath affects him more than he expects.
It is Burchard who brings the news, the nearest the taciturn secretary gets to gossip. It seems that even on his deathbed the cardinal was still ranting about unpaid loans and had to be brought to his senses by two monks wielding the crucifix like a stick in front of his face, insisting that he favor God over money at such a moment. At the funeral, inside St. Peter’s Basilica, a member of his household had pushed in and grabbed the gloves out of the dead man’s hands, yelling how the old miser had stolen them from him, and later someone had carved images of a gallows and gibbet into the coffin lid, with an inscription about how God had accounts to be squared too, and those owing would be tormented with eternal punishment.
The outrage soon breeds an even better story: how when the cardinal reaches the gates of heaven and tells them his name, St. Peter asks him for an entrance fee of 100,000 ducats. When he says all his wealth has been taken by the Pope, Peter keeps lowering the price, then finally sends him packing to the other place, where hell’s janitor takes one look at his empty purse and banishes him to the lowest circle of infernal torment. The day before the joke spreads the Pope had sold on one of his benefices to the dead man’s nephew, the cash already destined for Cesare’s war chest. Perhaps that is the reason he can’t get the cardinal’s death out of his mind.
“He should have been more generous when he was alive. No one likes a miser and he had more than enough money,” he says as he and Burchard sit together going through the day’s events. When he gets no response he plows on. “The fact is, Burchard, this business of selling off so many offices predates our papacy. You of all people know that. Pope Innocent tripled the number of posts in the curia with a single stroke. You were lucky to get in before the inflation started. What did you pay to become Master of Ceremonies back then—a couple of hundred ducats?”
“Four hundred and fifty, Your Holiness,” Burchard says quietly; it is not a sum that a man from a humble background forgets in a hurry.
“Bah! It would be five or six times that now. Anyway, men have always complained about it. When I arrived from Spain—Sweet Virgin Mary, it must be fifty years ago now—they were arguing about such things then. How the Church was going to the devil and reform was essential. I remember the debates, treatises being written about how priests showed more reverence for gold and silver than they did for Christ. What were you doing then, Burchard? Learning your catechism probably.”
The Master of Ceremonies gives a small shrug. He has come a long way from the noise and stink of the alleyways of Niederhaslach and does not go back there willingly. “I was honored enough to be given a place in the College of St. Florentius,” he says, choosing instead to see the great façade of the Gothic church, and the secret places of its library, where he drank in words as if they were the water of life.
“Ah yes. That prodigious memory of yours marked you out early. Did you always want to go into the Church?”
Burchard frowns. He is not used to such personal questions, though since Donna Lucrezia’s leaving he has noticed that the Pope likes to salt business with more chatter. “I…There was little else for a family like mine…”
“Indeed. Indeed. And that is surely part of the argument, Johannes. What chance would men like you have in a poor Church? It’s what the others said—new thinkers, theologians, who turned the question on its head: what good is a poor Church? Poverty doesn’t bring men dignity. On the contrary it encourages envy and crime. In which case, those with enough money to buy their offices are the only ones able to avoid corruption rather than to foster it.”
He is laughing now, invigorated by memories of being a young man fresh off the boat ready to engage with elevated discussions. Valencia had been the biggest city in Spain, rich and sophisticated by its own standards, yes, but from the moment he became a churchman there had always been the promise of Rome, the thrill of being at the center of things, the closeness of power, the wonder of possibility.
“And then of course there is the argument that the Church must have majesty as well as doctrine. How could it hold its own with kings and princes if its officials arrived on foot with begging bowls?” He stops to draw breath. “So, what is your opinion on this, Burchard? After all these years we have never really talked of such things.”
“I…I think for the Church to be honored, there must be authority in her ceremonies and the upholding of her traditions.”
“Undoubtedly. And corruption?”
“It is not within my remit to have an opinion on such things,” he says stiffly.
“Still, I am sure that doesn’t stop you,” Alexander retorts brightly, for when he has the time it can be a pleasure of sorts, goading this most proper of proper men. “Perhaps you keep such thoughts for your own writing.”
Burchard stays quiet. He has no idea where the rumor about his diary came from, but he will never forget Cesare’s dark mutterings about it after the death of the Pope’s son Juan. He had begun it soon after his appointment as a way of recording the complexities of Church ceremonies and the challenges of keeping men’s personalities in line with the protocol of their offices, a modest kind of history certainly, but one that might, in time, be of some use to the Church. On occasion he has slipped into more personal recollections: a visit to volcanic wilds around Naples, or the insistent drama of world events, the coronations and marriages of kings, the French occupation of Rome. But as the political temperature inside the Vatican rose, he had grown more circumspect. It is one thing to record an unexpected death, another to write down the name of the man who might have caused it. Recently, he began keeping the pages
in a strongbox under his bed. You cannot be too careful in Borgia Rome. Men have ended up in the Tiber for less.
“My goodness, Johannes, you look queasy. Don’t worry; I have no interest in whatever you wish to keep private. How long is it we have known each other now? Twenty years? And ten years of those we have worked together closely. We have things in common, you know. We are both foreigners, both from somewhat humble backgrounds—though yours is more humble than mine—and both masters in our own way: I of the Church in its time of trouble, and you of its rituals and traditions. I always knew we would get on well. You are an exemplary Master of Ceremonies, and I would be lost without you,” he says, grinning.
Reassured, Burchard feels the muscles in his face start the slow, unfamiliar journey toward a smile.
Yes, indeed, lost without you, the Pope thinks, which means I cannot offer you elevation to the College of Cardinals yet, even though there is a place free and you would surely have the money to pay for it.
“Thank you for your kind words, Your Holiness.”
Alexander stares at him. He used to wish the man smiled more, but seeing him now he thinks perhaps it is best as it is; he looks as if he is about to cry.
He signs a set of documents, enjoying the scratch and flourish of his pen, such a secure feeling, the sight of a man’s name flowing out across the page. How many documents had the dead Cardinal Ferrari signed in his lifetime?
“When it comes to my funeral, Johannes, you will make sure it goes off without any problems, won’t you?” he says. “I mean it would not be good for the standing of the papacy for there to be—unseemly behavior. The city can turn nasty on a pope’s death.”
Burchard stares at him. In all their partnership he has never heard Rodrigo Borgia talk of his own dying, yet now he has asked the same question twice in only a few months. Has he really forgotten so soon?