That evening Machiavelli arrived from Fano to find the town in an uproar. He sent a message to Florence reporting the arrest of the condottieri captains and added, ominously, ‘In my view they will not be alive tomorrow morning.’ Soon afterward Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto Euffreducci were garrotted by Cesare’s ‘executioner,’ Corella, as they sat back to back on a bench. The three Orsinis — Paolo, Francesco, and Roberto — had been taken away as prisoners, so Machiavelli was told, and ‘faced a similar fate,’ and Cesare sent an urgent letter to Rome ordering his father to arrest Cardinal Orsini as soon as possible. When the cardinal arrived at the Vatican the next morning in order to congratulate the pope on Cesare’s seizure of Senigallia, he made his entrance into the Sala del Pappagallo, where, according to Burchard, ‘he was terrified to find himself surrounded by armed men and immediately cast into prison.’ Burchard added that ‘all his possessions were seized,’ before being ‘loaded onto mules and taken to the Vatican.’
The punishment of the faithless condottieri was considered well merited. Even Isabella d’Este wrote to congratulate Cesare on his punishment of them, sending him a present of one hundred carnival masks and expressing the hope that ‘after the strains and fatigues’ that he had undergone in ‘these glorious undertakings,’ he should now find time to enjoy himself. ‘He insisted on examining the masks with his own hand,’ Isabella said, ‘saying how fine they were, and how much they resembled various people of his acquaintance.’
The day after the murders of Vitellozzo and Oliverotto, Cesare left Senigallia, having accepted the surrender of its citadel, and, in the pouring rain, set out to claim the states of his disloyal captains for his own. Città di Castello fell quickly. At Perugia, Gianpaolo Baglioni fled at his approach, seeking refuge with Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena. Cesare marched toward Siena, seizing the city’s outposts along the way, his men sacking, pillaging, and raping at will. At San Quirico d’Orcia, his soldiers found just two men and nine women, all elderly, whom they hung up by their arms, kindling a fire beneath their feet to torture them into confessing where their valuables were hidden; the old people did not know, or were not prepared to reveal anything, and they died.
Declaring that he acted as captain-general of the church and that he had no selfish motives, Cesare then drove Petrucci from Siena and, having done so, moved against the Orsini castles and lands in the countryside around Rome. The stronghold of Ceri surrendered after a savage bombardment on April 5, 1503. Other Orsini castles, including Palombara and Cerveteri, followed suit; Paolo Orsini, Lord of Palombara, was strangled; Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, was also murdered, so it was widely supposed, on the orders of the pope. Only Giangiordano Orsini, Lord of Bracciano, was spared; like Cesare, he was a knight of the French royal Order of St Michael, whose members swore a solemn oath on receiving their collar not to make war on one another.
Looking back on the events of the previous year, Machiavelli wrote: ‘Duke Valentino enjoys exceptional good fortune, courage and confidence that are almost inhuman, and a belief that he can accomplish whatever he undertakes.’ As a soldier, his talents lay in an extraordinary capacity for rapid movement and deceit. No sooner was he reported to be in one place than he suddenly appeared in another, miles away. He turned the art of war, so it was said of him, into the art of deceit. There are very few descriptions of him as a commander in the field; but there is one that demonstrates the astonishing power of his personality. His men were crossing a river when, in fear of drowning, they panicked. Shout as they did, their officers could not restore order. Cesare rode down to the riverbank. His men saw him sitting there, gazing upon the scene, silent and impressive. When they caught sight of him, the soldiers were brought immediately to order; and they crossed the river quietly.
And in his present situation, Cesare accepted the fact that he would have to undertake a realignment in his relations with foreign powers now that Spain was emerging as the stronger power in her struggle with France over Naples, notably since April 28, when the commander of the Spanish army, Gonsalvo di Córdoba, won a decisive victory over the French at Cerignola, exposing the weakness of the French hold over Naples. Cesare had his eyes on Tuscany, and it was believed that he had it in mind to form an alliance with the Spaniards to gain his end.
Cesare could do nothing, however, until he had raised more money to replenish his coffers, which had been so drastically depleted by his campaign of the previous year, by his attacks on the Orsini, and by his wild extravagance. Once again he turned to his father.
When the rich Venetian Cardinal Giovanni Michiel died in mysterious circumstances on April 10, 1503, after days of vomiting and diarrhoea, it was widely conjectured that the pope himself had been instrumental in having him poisoned. Certainly, so the Venetian ambassador Antonio Giustinian was told: ‘As soon as the Pope heard of his death he sent a man to his house and, before dawn, it was completely plundered,’ adding that ‘the death of the Cardinal has brought him over 150,000 ducats.’
Further amounts, so Giustinian claimed, were raised by the creation of cardinals. In May 1503 the nomination was agreed in a secret consistory of nine new cardinals; the three Italians were all Borgia men, one was German, a favour to the emperor, and the other five were Spaniards, all well disposed toward the Spanish pope and a reflection of Alexander VI’s change of policy; none, significantly, were French. ‘Today there was a consistory,’ Giustinian reported to the Venetian government, ‘and nine new cardinals were nominated, mostly men of dubious reputation and all have paid handsomely for their elevation, some 20,000 ducats and more, so that from 120,000 to 130,000 ducats have been collected; it is notorious that His Holiness is showing the world that the amount of a pope’s income is whatever he chooses it to be.’
A man who had worked for them in the past and had hoped to be rewarded with a red hat, Francesco Troche, did not trouble to conceal his disappointment and spoke slightingly of Cesare. ‘His Holiness the Pope told him that he was a madman to speak like that and if the Duke came to hear of it he would be killed,’ reported one ambassador to his master, ‘and it was because of the words of His Beatitude that, terrified, Troche took flight.’ He fled first to Genoa and then, by way of Sardinia, ended up in Corsica; but there he was caught and brought back to Rome, where he was strangled by Cesare’s sinister lieutenant, Miguel da Corella. On the same day, another man who had fallen foul of Cesare, Jacopo di Santacroce, a Roman nobleman and former Borgia supporter, was hanged and his body displayed on the Ponte Sant’Angelo as a warning to all enemies of the Borgias.
Cesare was now at the height of his power. Having raised enough money by all the means at his disposal, and ridding himself of several enemies, he now enrolled an army of some twelve hundred light cavalry and over four thousand infantry, all wearing his red-and-yellow livery, with the word CESAR in large letters embroidered on the chests and backs of their uniforms. ‘All the best soldiers were with him,’ the chronicler Matarazzo wrote. ‘And he had so much accumulated treasure and possessions that it seemed there was not as much elsewhere in all Italy. Nor were there as many well-disciplined soldiers so well supplied with arms and horses.’