Cesare was careful not to publicly display any sign of the growing friction between himself and his brother-in-law. When the two men were seen together, they appeared to be on perfectly amicable terms, riding about the city in evident amity. Yet there was noticed in Cesare’s manner a more than usual impatience, ‘as though he were anxious for important actions to unfold.’
Cesare also appeared in public during this summer of 1500 honing his skills as a bullfighter. On June 24, the Feast of St John the Baptist, he demonstrated his prowess with the sword in the piazza of St Peter’s, which had been cordoned off to prevent the bulls from escaping. On another occasion, so the Venetian envoy Paolo Capello reported, he killed ‘seven bulls, fighting on horseback in the Spanish style and cutting off the head of one of them with his first stroke, a feat which seemed great to all Rome.’
On June 29, shortly before sunset, the pope himself was lucky to escape with his life thanks to an act not of man, but of God. During an exceptionally violent storm, with ‘hailstones the size of broad beans and an extremely violent wind,’ reported Burchard, a chimney in the Vatican collapsed, breaking two beams in an upper chamber that brought down the ceiling of the room below, where Alexander VI was in discussion with a cardinal and one of his private secretaries. The two men were just closing the windows, as the pope had asked them to do, when they heard the thunderous crash and turned immediately to find the papal throne hidden under a pile of rubble: ‘They cried to the guards, ‘The Pope is dead! The Pope is dead!’ and the news quickly spread throughout the city.’ Alexander VI, however, was only unconscious; when they removed the plaster and bricks, they found him seated on his throne, with two small cuts to the head, two larger ones on his right hand, and another on his right arm, miraculously still alive. As one chronicler observed, this lucky escape ‘was seen as a great sign and omen for the Pope.’
Some two weeks later, on the evening of July 15, 1500, Alfonso of Aragon went to the Vatican to dine with the pope; after what seems to have been a pleasant evening, he took his leave of his fellow guests to walk the short distance home to the palace of Santa Maria in Portico just across the piazza of St Peter’s, accompanied by a gentleman of his household, Tomaso Albanese, and a groom. As they passed by the basilica, a number of men, apparently sleeping on the flight of great ceremonial steps, roused from their ‘slumbers,’ rose to their feet, and suddenly fell upon Alfonso, stabbing him with their daggers. They would have carried him off to their tethered horses had not his companions rushed to his aid and dragged him away to the safety of the Vatican.
Inside the palace, Lucrezia fainted at the sight of her wounded husband. By the light of the tapers and candles, it was soon clear to all that Alfonso’s injuries were serious; he had deep gashes to his head and his shoulder, ‘either one of which could prove mortal,’ as the Florentine ambassador reported. The Pope had him taken to one of his own rooms in the Borgia apartments, where his wounds were dressed. He recovered slowly, under the watchful eye of a doctor sent to him by the king of Naples and the careful nursing of Lucrezia and Sancia, his room guarded by soldiers and his food prepared by his loving wife, fearful of another attempt on his life.
It was generally supposed that the instigator of the attack was Cesare Borgia. The pope was inclined to agree: at least, he told the Venetian ambassador that if Cesare had, indeed, been responsible for the attack, Alfonso thoroughly deserved it. Alfonso himself clearly had no doubts as to who was responsible, and he was only too ready to avenge this vicious attack on his person. When he caught sight of Cesare one day in the gardens below his bedroom window, he picked up a crossbow and shot a bolt that only narrowly missed its target.
On August 18 Alfonso, still in bed but much recovered, together with his wife and his sister, was enjoying the company of his uncle and the Neapolitan ambassador, when a party of armed men, led by Miguel de Corella, Cesare’s trusted Spanish lieutenant and known by some as his ‘executioner,’ rushed into the room, claiming that they had orders to arrest the visitors. There had been a plot, Corella announced: Cesare Borgia’s life had been threatened. Lucrezia and Sancia protested — they themselves had not been warned of any such plot; the officer must have written authority before they could allow any member of their patient’s household to be taken away.
Possibly he had mistaken his orders, Corella replied; and he suggested that the two ladies should go to the pope and ask him to confirm that the envoy was to be arrested. So the two young women left for the pope’s apartments; and when they returned, they found the door of Alfonso’s room locked against them. There had been an accident, they were told; the duke had tripped and fallen; his wounds had reopened; regrettably he was dead. Burchard reported, succinctly, that he had been ‘strangled in his bed.’
Alfonso was buried that night in the Church of Santa Maria della Febbre; and it was given out that he had been the victim of a dreadful plot, details of which would be published later. Naturally, they never were. Though, within a short time, according to Ferdinand Gregorovius, the murder was no longer a mystery since Cesare, Duke of Valence, had openly declared that he had killed his brother-in-law because his own life had been threatened by Alfonso.
Lucrezia left Rome a few days later, accompanied by just six riders, bound for her castle at Nepi. This castle had been a favourite residence of Alexander VI while he was a cardinal, and it was he who had given the town its forbidding aspect when he built a new circuit of walls to fortify this strategic stronghold on the Via Cassia, some twenty-five miles north of Rome, that guarded one of the main approaches to the city. Once pope, he had given the town to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in gratitude for Sforza’s support in the conclave, but after the cardinal’s flight from Rome the previous summer, he had rescinded the gift, bestowing it instead on his daughter. In February 1500 the fond and indulgent father had also spent 24,000 ducats on the town of Sermoneta, with its castles and land to the south of Rome, for his beloved Lucrezia to add to her ownership of Spoleto and Nepi.
Lucrezia spent four quiet months secluded at Nepi with her baby boy, Rodrigo. ‘The reason for this journey,’ explained Burchard, ‘was to find some consolation or distraction from the anguish and shock she has felt since the death of her husband, Alfonso.’ Her misery was evident at the bottom of the letters she wrote to her household in Rome, where she signed herself ‘La Infelicissima’ (most unhappy woman) and she spent large sums of money arranging for prayers to be said for the soul of her murdered husband and to assuage her own grief.
She had had cause to feel isolated in Rome. Her former friends were wary and, in the words of the Mantuan envoy, ‘neither her brother nor her father could forgive her for the love she had borne her husband.’ According to the fanciful account of the Venetian ambassador in Rome, Lucrezia had ‘drunk so deeply at the spring of sorrow’ upon the murder of her husband, that ‘in a single night she had become more like a woman three times her age, and it was clear that she would never recover her youthful beauty.’
One day in late August, shortly after Alfonso’s assassination, Baron de Trans arrived in Rome, once again acting as envoy for Louis XII with a message for Cesare. He stopped at an inn just outside the city walls and soon afterward, according to Burchard, ‘there came a certain horseman, masked and riding fast, who dismounted at the inn and, keeping on his mask, which he did not lower, embraced Monsieur de Trans and spoke with him. After a short while the masked man returned to the city. They say it was Duke Valentino.’