He would not be the only man in Italy to be so afflicted. Now even when Alexander is awake, many of the envoys and ambassadors knock first at the duke’s door. He is barely ever seen outside his apartments in the Vatican. The devil has become an overworn comparison, but what else could describe him: this elusive masked creature who lives mainly in darkness, an expert in murder and deceit? Even the glint in his dark eyes suggests a man who has given up feeling in favor of cruelty. The only thing missing is any sign that he might be enjoying it—for isn’t the devil supposed to take pleasure in the horror he unleashes?
That day of the argument, Cesare had been the one to make peace, but only because it had been a waste of his time to fight further. The Pope’s obsession with the Orsini is another example of how his vision is blurring. Even if they could be wiped off the map, it would only create anxiety in others, leaving no room for the shifting sands of allegiances that, over time, could force even the fiercest of enemies to become allies again. Or vice versa. What a captivating bedfellow fortune is turning out to be.
—
Cesare’s love affair with France, like everything else, has been contingent on what he could get out of it, and it will not cause him much grief to be unfaithful now.
The Kingdom of Naples. Even he, who has never had time for history unless it involves a direct comparison between himself and the other Caesar, knows it to be so troublesome and wild a place as to be hardly worth the effort. The French should have learned that by now; the only thing they had to show for their last occupation, ten years before, was the birth of the pox and a few strategic remaining footholds to hold out against future Spanish aggression. France and Spain. Like some international bout of arm wrestling, the two powers have been locked in conflict over Naples for years. But not, it seems, anymore. It has taken less than six weeks—my God, what timing!—for the French to find their arm being forced inch by inch backward toward the surface of the table. Over half of their fortresses are now in Spanish hands. Even their castle strongholds inside Naples itself are threatened, and no one, certainly not France’s most valued allies, the Borgias, can remain unaffected.
From his window, Cesare watches as the Pope, guided by his chaplain, waddles inside to meet the Spanish ambassador. He already knows the news the man will give his father, for these days anyone of any importance visits him first.
The Pope will have something to smile about tonight over his sardines. This long alliance between the papacy and France has been painful for a man of his Spanish blood. He will almost certainly want to move too soon—this latest gain is inside the boundaries of the city itself—but Cesare knows they must be careful. When it comes to arm wrestling, the loser must be screaming for mercy, his forearm slammed hard against the wood, before it is over.
Cesare turns back into the room where Michelotto stands waiting, a rough map of Italy already laid out on the table. At least here there is no danger of loose tongues.
Through the long months of diplomacy and conquest, Miguel de Corella has remained his master’s shadow, silent until called upon to speak. Most of the world sees him as a hatchet-faced executioner, more a machine than a man, but those with more discernment recognize a fine soldier with an eye for political strategy. In a government run by Cesare Borgia, he would be the minister of war. It is perhaps not so far away.
“So, these are the strongholds the French still have and need to hold,” Michelotto says, ringing three or four fortified castles scattered to the north and east of Naples.
“According to the Spanish ambassador, they will take them all before the summer.”
Cesare cuts in. “But he’s a diplomat who’s never held a sword. He wouldn’t have the first clue how to take this one.”
Cesare jabs his finger down onto a spot near the sea, about sixty miles north of Naples. The fortress of Gaeta. Both of them remember it from their journey to Naples six years ago, when Cesare was still in the Church and on official business. The city, especially the women, had welcomed him generously, and among the gifts he had left with had been a leaking boil on his penis and a recurring bout of excruciating pustules and pain. Thank God for Torella. He must remember to agree to the man’s dedication for his treatise. But even with his groin on fire, he had noticed the fortress at Gaeta. Nothing of import could pass north—or south—without the agreement of whoever controlled it. And the French have held it for years, effectively locking the Spanish in. But if Gaeta was to fall…
“How long would it take us if we had our own artillery outside its walls?” he says. “Two, three weeks?”
Michelotto shakes his head. “More almost certainly. It is well fortified. If the summer is bad enough and one could somehow poison the wells, they would drop with the heat. But then so would the besiegers on the other side. I wouldn’t want to be the one doing it.”
Both men fall silent. They know that when King Louis finally launches his counterattack on Naples, the Borgia army is bound by the terms of allegiance to join them. Southern Italy in summer. A man could fry inside his armor.
“If Louis moves we will have no option,” Cesare says, not needing to clarify the thought. “To turn against the French now would bring Louis’s army down on half of our cities in the Romagna. However…”
He looks back at the map.
“If they did lose Gaeta, then we could ditch France and make a new alliance with Spain. God’s bollocks, my father’s smile would be as big as the Sistine Chapel! The papacy would give a Spanish army freedom to pass through Rome, and the French would be shaking in their shoes. And then, all of this”—he gestures to the southern half of Tuscany—“all of this, would be ours for the taking.”
CHAPTER 36
In Florence, it is a peculiarity of the republic that the men who are elected to govern must leave their houses and live in the fortified town hall of the Palazzo della Signoria for the length of their appointment. Niccolò Machiavelli, employed, not elected, gets to stay at home, though, as ever, he is still at work before any of them.
On this particular morning, the first day of June 1503, he arrives to find the dispatches have been delayed. A peerless blue sky and the promise of heat are more appealing than the pages of Livy, and rather than stay at his desk, he makes his way up through the building to the bell tower, with its fine view of the city. The only finer vantage point is the top of the Duomo itself. As an official of the state, he would no doubt be allowed to climb inside the skin of Brunelleschi’s miracle construction, but the prospect of scaling pitch-black vertical tunnels no wider than a coffin has never appealed. He thinks of Michelotto crawling like a worm through the earth under the fortress of Fossombrone. When Florence comes to create her militia, as surely she must, they should pick its commander carefully; men new to soldiering will need a leader who can inspire a little fear along with admiration.
The climb up the bell tower staircase takes him past a single cramped cell built into the walls; it is reserved for the state’s more illustrious prisoners. The great Cosimo de’ Medici was a visitor here for a few months when his love for the state grew too entangled with his own ambition. If Niccolò had been in government then, he would have offered to be Cosimo’s jailer, for there would have been no better conversation to be had anywhere else in the building. He steps inside, and his nose registers the tang of dried urine. How long does a man’s piss last, or is this the product of the odd bell ringer relieving himself on the way up and down the stairs? The last occupant had left what—four? no, five years ago now. That man too had loved Florence, though he’d been more interested in saving her eternal soul than in easing her passage through life.
Niccolò had never had any time for his apocalyptic preaching, yet there were those who believed in Savonarola passionately. He had been brought here after the mob stormed the monastery of San Marco and took him prisoner. From one cell to another. But he had found no comfort in these stones. From here they’d taken him for the torture of the strappado: fixing his wrists behind his back and winching
him up to a great height, only to release him suddenly to jerk and dangle, his arms straining out of his sockets. With each successive drop they had accused him of treachery against the state and the heresy of false prophecy. His screams could be heard out into the square, where the crowd cheered when it was announced that he had confessed to everything. But when they brought him back, he fell to his knees, broken and shamed, crying out to God, shouting to his jailers that his body had betrayed him and he was and always would be God’s true prophet.
So they had strung him up again. And again. And again; finally, he had broken.
When the news reached the tavern where Niccolò and his friends were drinking, none of them had the stomach to celebrate. No man knows how strong he will be until he is tested. Niccolò still thinks about it: did God abandon Savonarola as a punishment for hubris, or had his prophecies been delusion all along? What if he was right and Florence had been so corrupted by the new learning? Might all those newly painted church frescoes peopled with flesh-and-blood men and women in some ways undermine the purity of the Scriptures? Except who could live freely in a city that believed such things?
Whenever such questions assail him, Niccolò goes back to the work of the great Lucretius, his wild, wise outpouring of philosophy and nature; a vision of the world as a seething mass of atoms from which all life, man included, is made: birth, growth, decay, time stretching out before and after like an ever-receding horizon. If you cannot remember yourself before birth, why should you fear what you might feel after death? He can still taste the thrill of the moment as he absorbed that thought. But what excites one man is heresy to another. What makes sense to one man is heresy to another. He barely speaks of such ideas in company, for even the faithful Biagio finds the idea of a Godless universe too shocking to contemplate. Better to talk matters of state.
The cold cell has dampened Niccolò’s appetite for fresh air, and he makes his way down toward the offices again. As he does a huge commotion reaches him. While he has been spinning thoughts, the dispatches have arrived, and for once they are worth opening. An official communication from the Vatican, signed by the Pope himself! There is to be an elevation of nine new cardinals to the Consistory, and Florence’s own Bishop Francesco Soderini is one of them. A cardinal’s hat for the city! The first since Giovanni de’ Medici over twenty years before.
When finally the door to his office closes, Gonfaloniere Soderini’s smile makes him look ten years younger.
“A cardinal’s hat for my brother no less. This day will go down in the history of Florence. It is a great, great honor. A cardinal’s hat,” he says again. “Even if it is partly a reward for the signing of our treaty, eh?”
Partly, Niccolò thinks. Though possibly also a bribe for something yet to come.
“I have written to Francesco recalling him from diplomatic duty, and when he returns we shall have the whole of Florence on the streets to greet him. It is a long time since the city had something to celebrate.”
Soderini sits enjoying the moment for as long as he can. But there is another dispatch, also from Rome, that is demanding their attention.
“And then there is this,” he says.
He pushes the paper across the table.
Niccolò’s eyes scan it fast. It is a richer as well as a darker piece of news than a cardinal’s hat: the strangled body of the Pope’s envoy to King Louis was pulled out of the Tiber two days ago.
“So, what do we make of this? The man was an intimate of the Borgia circle for years. He must have smoothed the path between the king and the Pope a dozen times when Duke Valentine’s actions overstepped the mark. Yet now he falls so grossly out of favor.”
Niccolò dances a little on the spot. His wife is not the only one who has grown accustomed to his quivering. “Perhaps his long closeness to the king compromised his loyalty to the Pope,” he says slowly. “If the Borgias are considering throwing over France in favor of Spain, Louis would have paid a great deal of money to know the details.”
“You think the man betrayed their plans to the king?”
“The duke has the nose of a hunting hound for treachery, and the garrote is a traitor’s death,” Niccolò says quietly.
He is thinking again of the arrival in the small town of Sarteano, east of Siena, on the evening of January 18—he had marked the date in his notes. He had watched the two remaining conspirators, Paolo and Francesco Orsini, be pulled from their horses and bundled into the town’s small fortress. Next morning their bodies had been on display in the forecourt. The ritual of a bloody necklace; all that was missing was the duke’s favorite graveyard, the Tiber.
“So it is Valentine’s work, not the Pope’s?”
“I think there’s nothing to choose between them now.”
“In which case, God save the Church. And God save Florence too. Because if Spain is the way the wind blows, it can only bring the duke down on us sooner rather than later. Even with a cardinal in the Consistory. What? Come—I know that look. What are you thinking?”
“I am not sure that’s how it will happen, Gonfaloniere. This gift of the cardinal’s hat may be less a reward than a way of ensuring our neutrality while he takes everything else in his path. The duke likes to insult us, but he must know that a republican government would be more of a challenge than a dozen corrupt family city-states. For a while we might sit better as an ally at the table than a rebellious meal in his stomach. Also.” He pauses. “Also, he must be hoping that a Florentine cardinal will be another vote for whoever is his chosen candidate in the conclave after his father’s death.”
The gonfaloniere sits back in his chair. There have been moments since his secretary arrived back from his great diplomatic adventure when he wonders whether it is Machiavelli or Cesare Borgia he is talking to.
“Hmm. How long have you been back now, Niccolò?”
“Four months.”
“Time to get over your saddle sores?”
Niccolò can feel a pulse of excitement. He would not like to miss the baby’s birth. But…
“Well, let us all enjoy life a little first. After the bishop, my brother’s inauguration in Rome, we will have our own ceremony here in the cathedral. Perhaps then, if events call for it, you might like to go to Rome yourself. Catch up with a few old friends from your days on the road.”
Rome! The center of the web, a dozen new strands of history spun every other day.
He thinks of Marietta’s face.
Maybe if he could get her a ringside seat at the service it would help.
CHAPTER 37
Yours is the radiance which makes me burn
And growing with each act and gracious work
My joy in seeing you is never done.
…And to you I look, as heliotrope looks to the sun.
In Ferrara the rising temperature is matched by the heat of poetry.
Radiance which burns…Heliotrope to the sun…How cleverly he contrasts the parallel worlds of emotion and nature. Lucrezia has been reading widely and understands the language of poetry better now. Along with the heartbeat and blush that come with their meetings, there is now the challenge of argument. She has written a short poem of her own. He praises it too highly, but she is not so much in love that she doesn’t see through it and argues back. In her three marriages, her mind was never a considered attribute. A little wit is, perhaps, desirable in a woman, but only for fencing prettily: real swordplay is men’s business. Her intelligence is a pleasure for both of them. In this epic poem of love that he is composing, smart women are the foils to his philosophizing men, and he wants their voices to sing. How better than to listen to hers?
But it is more than that: when a woman is unobtainable—as Lucrezia must be—then words have to do much of the work of the affair.
The Este marriage, meanwhile, has been restored to life thanks to a natural fading of tenderness and the arrival of a jar of unguent from her precious dispensary sister. They have both been nervous, and the different ways in which they
have compensated—she too solicitous, he too polite—effectively doused any spark of passion long before it could be ignited. The act was accomplished without pain, though with no great pleasure, and since then, business—the occasional night visit, augmented for him by his ladies and for her by a growing interest in court matters—has continued much as usual.
She has not let it dampen her spirits. She has come too far in this last year—is it really only a year since her barge broke through the fog to a blood orange sun lighting up a city?—to be defeated by the demands of the marriage bed. Perhaps this is the resilience of survival that Sister Bonaventura talked about, in which case she is most grateful for it. After their first night, she had retrieved the pages of the manuscript from under her mattress and thrown herself into a clever discourse about love.
In public, she and Bembo remain duchess and poet occasionally crossing paths in a lively court, while in private they are never left entirely unchaperoned. No child was conceived by the union of metaphors, and while her ladies may cultivate a little strategic blindness—dropping behind in the gardens, or turning their eyes as the couple’s hands join with their words—it is not to the point of recklessness.
But what they cannot hide is the glow that Lucrezia carries about her. It lights up the whole court. What a marvelous thing it is to have a duchess so gay and pretty, so eager to enjoy life, while encouraging others to do the same. Her musicians have grown new calluses on their fingers from all the dance tunes they play, and Tromboncino cannot keep up with her demand for new frottole and motets. He has a voice with the sweetness and strength of caramel. A drug to the senses. There are times listening to him when she cannot help but slide her eyes toward Bembo. He is a regular at both her own and the duke’s soirees now, sitting with Strozzi and a few other scribblers, court perfect in his manner, body upright, profile medallion sharp. Does he feel her glance upon him? Of course he does. An invisible thread of attention is strung taut between them, so that if either pulls on it even by a fraction the other is aware.