Caesar Borgia: A Study of the Renaissance

by John Leslie Garner

RIMINI.

From an early engraving.

To face p. 176.

Nothing illustrates the duplicity of the age better than this coalition of the head of the Christian Church and the King of France for the destruction of the House of Naples. Only four years before Caesar, as cardinal-legate, had crowned the last of the Aragonese Kings of Naples; three times Alexander had endeavoured to marry one of his children into this family, and he had become connected with it by the marriage of his son Giuffre with Doña Sancia, and that of his daughter Lucretia with Alfonso, Prince of Bisceglia, whom Caesar had murdered—and in this perfidious age the most perfidious of all was the head of the Christian Church.

In 1499 Louis XII. had secured the Pope’s consent to his undertaking with respect to the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan.

This, as we have seen, was one of those immoral bargains which powers and potentates still make at the expense of weaker States, although the bald egoism of the ruler is now less in evidence in these transactions than it was during the Renaissance. To-day the heads of government, being shorn of autocratic power, do not represent personal ambition or achievement; they are either simply survivals of mediaevalism or the representatives of some interest or faction—of an industrial unit of some sort; therefore in advanced countries the actual egoism of the ruler is of slight moment.

In the age of the Borgia the personality of the ruler was more important; the extension of his power—in fact, his very tenure of office and position—depended on his physical strength, his cunning, his powers of dissimulation, his predilections, his ambitions, his morals. He was hampered by no constitutional restrictions and his dynasty required for its perpetuation something more than law; the domination of his family could be secured only by force and fraud. The heads of governments to-day being mere accidents of birth or the product of economic interests, their accession to positions of nominal power and their abandonment of those positions have no appreciable influence upon the destinies of States; they are products of one class of economic or social factors just as the despots of the Renaissance were the products of another group.

Louis XII. was a ferocious egoist just as were Alexander VI. and Caesar Borgia. He had desired a divorce from Jeanne of France in order that he might marry Anne of Bretagne. Superstition, if not universal, was then general, and was not, as it is now, confined to the ignorant and depraved; rationalism and personal independence had not reached the stage when mankind sees how absurd and preposterous it is to entrust the conscience to the care and guidance of another man and especially a bad one. During the latter half of the fifteenth century, when the Popes were more depraved than they ever were before or have been since, other monarchs were especially anxious to secure the pontiff’s assent to their own egotistical undertakings and the more determined to avoid his weapon of excommunication, ridiculous as it was. Louis, therefore, had made a bargain with the Pope by which the latter was to sanction and aid in the destruction of Naples and Milan, and also to grant the necessary dispensation to enable the King to put aside his wife. In return the King had created the Pope’s son, Caesar, Duke of Valentinois, and had secured for him the hand of a French princess; the bargain had been made and formally sealed, and now Louis was endeavouring to compel the Pope to perform his part of the agreement. The House of Aragon, by right of conquest, which it may be observed is no right at all, had ruled Southern Italy for a hundred years, but its days were now numbered. To give his project an appearance of right Louis had based his claim to Naples on the imaginary rights of the House of Anjou.

Caesar came quietly to Rome the evening of June 17, 1501. The 19th Yves d’Allegre arrived with his men-at-arms, who were to be placed under Valentino’s command. Acqua Traversa was selected for the French camp, and Burchard enumerates the supplies required for the troops; wine, bread, meat, eggs, cheese, fruit, and even sixteen harlots were allotted them. He also informs us that certain Florentine merchants who were required to lodge the officers paid the Governor of the city two hundred ducats to be relieved of the burden, and that the official accepted the money, but, nevertheless, when the French officers arrived compelled the Florentines to lodge them.