Now that Louis XII was secure in his possession of Milan, his attention had turned to his next objective — the capture of Naples — for which he needed the help of both Alexander VI and his son. De Trans had brought with him to Rome a letter from the French king asking the pope for political support for the planned conquest of Naples, unhindered passage for his armies through the Papal States, and recognition as the rightful king; from Cesare he required the duke’s undoubted military skills in the campaign. In return, Cesare was to be offered a large force of infantry and lancers, under the command once again of Yves d’Alègre, for the next stage of his conquest of the Romagna.
As the Mantuan envoy reported ominously, ‘The Pope intends to make the Duke Valentino a great man and King of Italy if he can.’ ‘I am not dreaming,’ he added, ‘my brains are not disordered, I will say no more.’ Cesare had already enlisted the help of various condottieri and was running out of money to pay them. His father had done what he could to help him, going so far as to divert not only some of the funds he had accumulated to finance a crusade against the Turks, but also much of the money received from pilgrims in Rome for the Jubilee. It was to augment these funds that Alexander VI decided to create a large number of cardinals, imposing a fee for each nomination.
Accordingly, on September 18, after the cardinals had returned from their summer retreat in their villas in the hills outside Rome, Alexander VI summoned them to a secret consistory to discuss the distribution of the new red hats. But not enough members of the sacred college turned up at the Vatican that morning; the cardinal of Lisbon wrote to apologize but he was ill; the cardinal of Siena also apologized but he was bedridden with gout. A week later the pope tried again; this time the consistory took place, but such was the opposition to his plan that no decision could be taken.
Meanwhile, the Turkish threat to Venice had provided Alexander VI with the lever he needed to enlist the aid of that city’s government to Cesare’s campaign in the Romagna. With Venetian colonies on the Dalmatian coast falling like ninepins to the mighty Turkish navy, two envoys had been dispatched to Rome in September to seek the pope’s help.
Alexander VI received them graciously and proceeded to admonish them for their past behaviour. ‘The government of Venice has until now acted ungratefully towards His Holiness,’ he said, according to the Florentine ambassador’s report of the conversation, and ‘if they wish to please His Holiness they must act differently in [the] future. They answered that they wished to do anything for His Holiness, and to embrace the Duke Valentino and consider him their good son, and to give him a condotta on the most generous terms and, as for Rimini and Faenza, they would be perfectly willing for him to carry out his intentions in those places. The Pope answered that he wanted no more of their fine words — he had had quite enough of these already — now he wanted deeds.’
Alexander VI was given his wish; the government of Venice created Cesare an hereditary gentiluomo of the city and presented him with a palace there in order to maintain this signal honour. On September 26, 1500, the day after the second consistory had failed to agree on the promotion of the new cardinals, the Venetian ambassador felt able to report that ‘the order has now been given that Duke Valentino will leave two or three days after the cardinals have received their hats,’ more specifically ‘according to what the astrologer concludes will be a favourable moment.’
Two days later Alexander VI tried a third time to persuade the college to agree to the creation of the new red hats; on this occasion fifteen cardinals arrived at the Vatican and did, finally, agree formally to the promotion of thirteen new colleagues. Guicciardini was to remark, some years later, that these cardinals were ‘selected not amongst the most worthy but amongst those who offered him [the pope] the highest price.’ Burchard listed their names and the fees that had been levied upon the value of their benefices, which amounted to the enormous sum of 160,000 ducats.
When the names were made public, it was clear to all that most had close links to Cesare and his father: Amanieu d’Albret was Cesare’s brother-in-law and his hat had been promised as part of the contract for his marriage to Charlotte; Pedro Luis Borgia was his cousin; Francisco Borgia and Jaime Serra, who had been tutor to his brother, the murdered Juan, were more distant relations; Juan Vera was Cesare’s own tutor; Pedro Isvalies was the governor of Rome; Ludovico Podocatharo was Alexander VI’s personal physician; Gianbattista Ferrari was datary to the pope; and so on.
Just six of the new cardinals were in Rome when the consistory agreed to their promotion, and they were summoned immediately to the Vatican to await the end of the meeting. ‘There, once the doors were open, they kissed the Pope’s foot, then his hand and his mouth,’ announced Burchard, and the cardinals ‘escorted them to the Duke of Valence’s rooms, which are above the Sala del Pappagallo.’ As the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘They went to the Duke, offering themselves to him, they dined with him, settled their accounts and swore their loyalty to him.’
It was with unusual haste, just four days later on October 2, that these six men attended a ceremony in St Peter’s during which the pope solemnly gave each one his cardinal’s hat, with its distinctive hanging tassels. Later that day Cesare left Rome to join his army marching north up the Via Flaminia toward the Romagna.
— CHAPTER 17 — Duke of the Romagna
‘FROM ALL PARTS COME REPORTS OF THE ILL INTENTIONS OF THE POPE AND THE DUKE’
CESARE RODE OUT OF ROME on October 2, 1500, with an entourage of young Roman nobles, papal bureaucrats to man the administration of his new state, and members of his household, including his secretary, his treasurer, and his doctor, the ever-present Gaspar Torella. After a brief detour to visit the grieving Lucrezia at Nepi, he joined his formidable army of over ten thousand men, who had now reached the foothills of the Apennines.
Marching under Cesare’s command were some of the finest condottieri captains available; or, as Machiavelli put it, ‘nearly all the professional soldiers in Italy.’ In addition to the Frenchman Yves d’Alègre and his three hundred lancers, and the Spaniard Miguel de Corella, Cesare’s ‘executioner,’ were Gianpaolo Baglioni, Lord of Perugia; Paolo Orsini, once a captain in Florence’s armies; and Vitellozzo Vitelli, the famous artillery expert whose family ruled the papal fief of Città di Castello.
Among the troops was the Florentine artist Pietro Torrigiano, famous for having broken the nose of his fellow student Michelangelo: ‘Money being offered in the service of Duke Valentino,’ as Giorgio Vasari recorded, he ‘changed himself in a moment from a sculptor to a soldier,’ though he was later to return to stone-cutting and travelled to England, where he created the tomb of King Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, which has been rightly described as England’s greatest memorial of the Italian Renaissance.
Cesare’s objective, before winter closed in and the fighting season ended, was to consolidate his control of the Via Emilia by taking Faenza, a strongly fortified city between Forlì and Imola, and to extend the state south to the Adriatic coast with Rimini and Pesaro, two towns south of Cesena. The going was slow on the long march north from Rome, the mud thick on the road; but Cesare was in no hurry to commit himself to expensive military action, hoping that the agents he had infiltrated into these towns would persuade the excommunicated vicars to surrender without a fight.
In Rimini the despised Pandolfo Malatesta, arrogant grandson of the famous condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, made little trouble. He handed over the keys of his city to Cesare’s representative, the bishop of Isernia, before taking a boat to Venice, much to the relief of his subjects, who had failed in their attempt to remove him just two years previously. It proved almost as easy to convince Giovanni Sforza to leave Pesaro. On hearing that his erstwhile brother-in-law’s troops were crossing the Apennines and approaching the city, Giovanni, who had already been humiliated by the Borgias once before, fled and, just a few days after accepting the keys of Rimini, the bishop of Isernia did the same in Pesaro.