Retrato del eclesiástico español Alfonso de Borja y Cavanilles (1378-1458), que posteriormente llegaría a ser papa de la Iglesia Católica con el nombre de Calixto III.
Excerpted from The Borgias: The Hidden History
In May 1456, meeting the deadline that Calixtus had set a year earlier, a Christian war fleet made up of sixteen newly built triremes set forth from the papal port at Ostia, where the Tiber enters the sea some twenty miles downstream from Rome. In command was Cardinal Ludovico Trevisano, known as Scarampo and, as it happened, the same ferocious prelate who, a decade and a half before, had so thoroughly subdued the Papal States and the city of Rome as to make it possible for Pope Eugenius IV to return from exile. By this time Scarampo, vastly rich thanks to the booty from his campaigns, had for some years been peaceably occupied as chamberlain at the papal court. It is not surprising that a man of his aggressive temperament was eager for a return to action.
He sailed first for Naples, where he expected to be joined by Alfonso V’s fleet and perhaps by Bishop Urrea’s wayward squadron as well. He found no one waiting for him, however, because by then the king’s and Urrea’s ships had joined forces and sailed off to the north, launching an unprovoked attack on the city-state of Genoa. Not only would Naples not be contributing to Calixtus’s crusade, therefore, but Genoa, which Alfonso regarded as an obstacle to the expansion of his empire, was now out of the picture as well. Scarampo had no choice but to embark for the East alone. Calixtus, when he learned what had happened, took King Alfonso’s actions as not only a violation of Naples’s responsibilities as a member of the Italian League but as a personal betrayal.
Alfonso was emerging as second only to the Turkish sultan as an obstacle to the fulfillment of Calixtus’s hopes, and the relationship between him and the pope was turning venomous. But the king too felt betrayed: Calixtus, far from being the compliant tool of Naples that Alfonso had expected and others had feared, was proving to be entirely his own man and showed no inclination to take direction from anyone, Spanish or Italian or otherwise. The two were clashing not only over war against the Turks but across a wide array of issues. In the very month that Scarampo’s fleet disappeared over the horizon, Calixtus found it necessary to use thousands of his desperately needed ducats to pay off a mercenary chieftain named Jacopo Piccinino, to get him to break off a siege of Siena that had disrupted the peace in Tuscany. Along the way the pope discovered that from the start, Piccinino had been acting with Alfonso’s encouragement and support. It was another violation of the Italian League, and another betrayal.
It must by this time have seemed to Calixtus that he could expect nothing from those whose help he needed except disappointment and double-dealing. Even the captain-general of the papal forces, one Giovanni Ventimiglia, turned out to be a traitor. He had somehow contrived to get himself taken prisoner just as he stood at the threshold of victory over Piccinino, who was thus able to escape with his forces intact.
It is understandable that Alfonso found it difficult to accept that his onetime secretary, whom he had lifted out of obscurity and put on the path to the papacy, was now his liege lord. The fact that he, proud head of the greatest family in Spain, was obliged as king of Naples to pay a vassal’s obeisance to a mere Borja of Játiva must have seemed a violation of the natural order. To be defied by this same Borja must have seemed an outrage. Frustrated and indignant, Alfonso clearly thought himself justified in stirring up trouble not only in Tuscany and Genoa but in the pope’s own territories. He continued to meddle in the Papal States, encouraging the local barons in their habitual defiance of Rome’s authority. He saw the Orsini in particular as a conduit through which to extend his influence northward, and he made himself their patron in order to do so.
The alienation of pope from king deepened step by painful step. Calixtus alarmed Alfonso by declining to ratify the bulls of legitimization conferred on young Ferrante by his two predecessors, thereby reviving the old question of whether the king’s bastard was entitled to inherit the Neapolitan crown. Next he declared that Alfonso had no right to Benevento and Terracina, two strongholds that lay in the disputed borderlands between Naples and Rome and that the king claimed as rightfully his. The rift became unbridgeable when Alfonso sent a beautiful young woman with whom he had become infatuated, Lucrezia d’Alagna, to Rome to ask Calixtus to annul his forty-year marriage to Maria of Castile. Calixtus had already shown himself willing, within broad limits, to help the king with his wooing. He had agreed to the appointment of a cousin of Lucrezia’s as cardinal-archbishop of Naples, and to the marriage of her sister to Ausias del Milà, one of his own young kinsmen. The annulment of a royal marriage of almost forty years’ duration, however, was more than he felt able to give. Pressed for an answer, he told the young lady, who had been accompanied to Rome by an extravagantly costly entourage and was obviously hoping to become Naples’s queen, that he could not do as she asked because he did not wish to accompany her to hell. That marked the end of civil communications between Naples and Rome.
Before long Calixtus was warning Alfonso that “Your Majesty should know that a pope can depose kings,” and Alfonso was replying that “Your Holiness should know that, should we wish, we shall find a way of deposing a pope.” When Calixtus refused to appoint a bastard son of the bastard Ferrante to the bishopric of Zaragoza in Spain—frustration was driving Alfonso to make increasingly outlandish demands—old resentments hardened into a cold hatred that would last until pope and king were both dead. Alfonso, in a quest for allies among the other rulers of Italy, began arranging what would become a set of marriage alliances with the Sforzas of Milan. His grandson and namesake was married to a daughter of Duke Francesco Sforza, and later a daughter of that union would be married to the third Sforza duke of Milan. The eventual consequences of these arrangements would have horrified Alfonso and Francesco alike had they been able to foresee them.
The pope’s continuing appeals for unity and resistance to the Ottoman onslaught received the friendliest reception, not unnaturally, in those places that were most directly threatened. One such place was the Serbian capital of Belgrade, an Orthodox bulwark against Turkish conquest of the Balkan peninsula and, as long as it could hold out, a shield protecting the rest of eastern Europe. Its survival at this juncture was in large measure the achievement of three extraordinary individuals, two of them sent by Calixtus from Rome. One was possibly the nearest thing to a military genius that Europe produced in the fifteenth century, the Hungarian János Hunyadi, who understood what a catastrophe the fall of Belgrade would be for his homeland and threw himself wholeheartedly into what many others saw as a cause already lost. The second was the Franciscan friar Juan Capistrano, who had been sent to Germany to preach Calixtus’s crusade and, upon learning that a showdown was approaching in Belgrade, recruited his own army of volunteers and, at age seventy, marched it the five hundred miles from Frankfurt to Serbia. The third was a veteran Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, whom Calixtus had dispatched to Hungary to help in whatever way he could. Together, the Hungarian general, the Neapolitan friar, and the Spanish cardinal managed to get the various nationalities and factions gathered at Belgrade to put their differences aside and focus on the threat outside the city’s gates. Drawing on resources made available by Calixtus’s order that all monies collected outside Italy for crusade purposes should be sent directly to Hungary rather than to Rome, they were able to assemble and arm enough men—albeit largely untrained men—to reduce the sultan’s numerical advantage to two against one. On July 22, 1456, a masterful counterattack by Hunyadi so shattered the Ottoman army that the sultan, himself wounded, had to abandon the siege. It was as great a defeat as Mehmed II would suffer in a career studded with victories, and when news of it reached the Vatican, it sparked wild jubilation.
Turkish miniature of the siege of Belgrade 1456Calixtus, convinced that a miracle had occurred, ordered it to be celebrated annually, thereby making the Feast of the Transfiguration a permanent feature of the liturgical calendar. Good news rarely lasted long where the conflict with the Turks was concerned, however. Just a month after his victory, Hunyadi fell victim to an outbreak of plague probably precipitated by the heaps of rotting corpses in and around Belgrade. Capistrano died of the same cause in October. Nevertheless, what they and Carvajal had achieved stood as proof that the Ottomans were not invincible and that much could be achieved if the Christians learned to cooperate.
The same lesson could be drawn from the accomplishments of Scarampo and his fleet during the eighteen months that they were active in the eastern Mediterranean. In the course of 1457, from their base on the island of Rhodes, the cardinal’s men drove Ottoman forces from the Aegean islands of Lemnos, Thassos, and Samothrace, briefly took possession of the city of Corinth and even of the Acropolis at Athens, and defeated a Turkish fleet at Mytilene. These were inspiring achievements for a small force operating far from home, or should have been. Scarampo sent repeated appeals for more ships, more men, more money. Calixtus tried to help but had little left to give. When he summoned the nations of Europe to a general congress to open in Rome that December, the result was fresh disappointment. Not enough delegates were on hand for discussions to begin in earnest until March, and two months after that the congress was abandoned, having accomplished nothing. Still unsupported, unable to deliver a decisive blow, Scarampo performed a great service nevertheless. Until finally obliged to return to Italy, he kept the sultan’s navy distracted, divided, and off balance. His expedition, like the defense of Belgrade, became a painfully vivid lesson in what might have been.
It is likely that much of Europe owed its safety and survival, at this juncture, to what was happening in the East. The regions where Roman Christianity gave way to the Orthodox faith became the setting for exploits of an epic character. Though most Italians paid little attention, great things were accomplished decade after decade and made an immense and lasting difference. One of the most brilliant of the heroes was Stephen III, who in 1457 at age twenty-four was crowned prince of Moldavia in what is now Romania and immediately launched into a career that over the next forty-seven years would see him defeat one invasion after another by various, always numerically superior, enemies. He won forty-six of his forty-eight battles, repelling a lifelong series of Turkish attacks while also having to fight off the attempts of his Roman Catholic neighbors, Hungary and Poland in particular, to take possession of his homeland. Somehow he managed to improve the prosperity and enrich the cultural life of Moldavia in the midst of endless peril, and after his death he would be canonized a saint by the Orthodox Church.
Better remembered today, for macabre and not entirely imaginary reasons, was Vlad III of Wallachia, like Moldavia an independent principality in the fifteenth century and today part of Romania. Known even in his own time as Dracula (son of the dragon), and to the Turks as “the impaler prince” for his favored method of dispatching enemies, he became voivode or ruler of Wallachia a year before Stephen took charge of Moldavia and was about the same age. Despite his lurid reputation, he was on the whole a good if severely firm ruler, and the intensity of his hatred for the Turks is explained by his life story. In boyhood he had become a hostage of the sultan, his father surrendering him and a brother as security for good behavior, and he was regularly beaten for recalcitrance. The Turks ultimately killed his father and blinded and buried alive an elder brother. Though after achieving his freedom Vlad succeeded in retaking Wallachia from the invaders, this early success simply opened the way to a life of unceasing conflict. Like Stephen, he became an immovable obstacle to Turkish progress west of the Black Sea, and he continued to stand firm until his death in battle at age forty-five. The West owed him, as it owed Stephen, an immense debt. The two kept whole Ottoman armies tied up for decades.
Even more important, and with an even more remarkable story, was the Albanian George Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg. He, like Vlad Dracula, was given over to the Turks as a hostage in his youth, and in contrast to the Impaler he converted to Islam, entered military service as a janissary, and rose to be a general of cavalry fighting, among other Christian leaders, Hunyadi of Hungary. But in 1443 he switched sides, and a year later won the first of what would ultimately be his more than twenty victories over his erstwhile Turkish comrades. And again the Christian states demonstrated their chronic inability to support, even to refrain from undercutting, one another. Venice, at first delighted with Skanderbeg’s repeated thrashings of the Turks, by 1447 was beginning to be wary of Albania’s growing strength. And so it declared war on Skanderbeg, offering a lifetime pension to anyone who succeeded in killing him and encouraging the Turks to attack him in his rear. In 1448, in the space of a few days, Skanderbeg so completely crushed first the Turks and then the Venetians that the latter were obliged to come to terms. Then, his little nation exhausted and desperately in need of support, Skanderbeg offered to become a vassal of Alfonso V, promising to take an oath of fealty as soon as the last Turk had been expelled from Albania (something that was, in fact, never achieved).
Alfonso, so blithely indifferent to Pope Calixtus’s efforts to mount a crusade, was nevertheless happy to take Albania under his wing. Doing so gave him, in the person of Skanderbeg, a brilliantly able ally in his long campaign to elbow Venice aside in the eastern Mediterranean and establish an empire of his own there. It provided benefits closer to home as well. When a baronial rebellion erupted in Naples, Skanderbeg sent some of his famously ferocious light cavalry, the stradioti, to help Alfonso put it down. He repeated the favor in Sicily a year later, both suppressing an uprising and helping Alfonso to show enough strength to discourage a threatened invasion by the Turks.
Cynical self-interest, however, remained endemic among the Italians. When the Albanian capital came under siege at one point, Venetian merchants happily sold supplies to the Turkish invaders.
By a cruel irony, Skanderbeg’s success became a factor in the fall of Constantinople: his ability to turn back one invasion after another encouraged other princes to resist Ottoman expansion as well, and this persuaded the Turks that the ancient Christian capital could not be allowed to survive. Four years after they took it, in 1457, they felt ready to attack Albania again and did so with an army of seventy thousand men. On September 2 of that year, true to form, Skanderbeg whipped them so thoroughly that the sultan agreed to a five-year truce. Once again, however, Albania was exhausted physically and financially, and this time Skanderbeg’s appeals to Alfonso V were ignored. He next appealed to Rome, and though Calixtus’s response was pathetically feeble, it appears to have been the best he could do: the immediate dispatch of the only available galley, a gift of money so inadequate as to be practically irrelevant, and a promise of more at the earliest opportunity. Skanderbeg cannot have been greatly consoled to have conferred upon him the meaningless title Athleta Christi—Champion of Christ. He was essentially alone, facing the dead certainty that, truce or no truce, the Turks would be back in their scores of thousands.
Without question Alfonso had it within his means to help Skanderbeg substantially, and without question he was greatly in Skanderbeg’s debt. There being no particular need to care about the fate of Albania at the moment, however, it was not in the king’s nature to be distracted from his own immediate priorities, especially the status of his son Ferrante in the aftermath of Calixtus’s refusal to issue a bull (a document bearing the papal seal and therefore official) declaring the young man to be legitimate. It was by now clear that so long as Calixtus remained alive, Ferrante’s path to the crown would be anything but assured.
Lurking in the background through all this was the question of whether Ferrante was actually Alfonso’s son. Doubts about his paternity had stalked Ferrante all his life. From his infancy people had whispered that his real father was a half-Moorish functionary at the Aragonese court, and alternatively that Ferrante’s supposed mother had pretended to give birth to him in order to spare the wife of one of the king’s brothers the humiliation of being exposed as an adulteress. Whatever the truth—and the rumors may have been rooted in nothing more substantial than a belief the great Alfonso couldn’t possibly have fathered such an unappealing human being—by the late 1450s Calixtus was in as good a position as anyone still living to know it. At the time of Ferrante’s birth he had been Alfonso’s secretary, and at the center of Aragonese court life, for some five years.
Fernando I de Nápoles, rey de Nápoles (1458-1494).
There being nothing in Calixtus’s life story to cast doubt on his integrity or his respect for the prerogatives of royalty, his unbending opposition to Ferrante remains an enticing mystery. Niccolò Machiavelli, who was still eleven years from being born when Alfonso died and appears to have had little evidence to draw on, would later allege that the pope was scheming to make one of his own nephews the king of Naples. This is implausible for many reasons, not least the existence of other, far more formidable claimants. Perhaps by this point Calixtus’s hatred for Alfonso had grown so powerful as to overwhelm his usual equanimity. Possibly he was repelled by the prospect of a bastard becoming anointed king of the great kingdom of Naples; having been born and raised in a culture far more feudal than Italy’s, he is likely to have taken a sternly disapproving view of illegitimate birth. Additionally, he had seen enough of the world to understand the threat to stability that sons born out of wedlock could pose when they laid claim to thrones, and the wisdom of the ancient precept that no bastard should ever become king. And it is in no way impossible that he believed—and had reason to believe—that Ferrante was not even Alfonso’s bastard.
Background
AMAZING ITALY
THE ITALY FOR WHICH ALONSO DE BORJA LEFT SPAIN IN THE 1440s, and to which many of his relatives later began migrating in hopes of benefiting from his exalted position, was a place that lightning had struck twice. A full thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was once again the wonder of the world: the richest region in all of Europe because by a wide margin the most economically advanced. Its cities were incomparably the biggest, most beautiful, and most vibrant, and in fields as diverse as education and architecture, banking and art, it was leading the way to modernity.
In one area only was Italy conspicuously backward. Politically it was so fragmented, in such disarray, that strictly speaking there was no such thing as “Italy.” From the Alps southward the peninsula was a crazy quilt of large and small city-states, some of which were more or less autonomous while others were subject to domineering neighbors. They differed vastly in character and had long since shown themselves to be incapable of sustained cooperation. To the extent that their people saw themselves as members of a single Italian nation, they did so by virtue of more or less sharing a common language (“more or less” because that language was splintered into a babel of dialects) and a culture unlike any to be found elsewhere. But their nationhood, such as it was, had never come close to producing unity. That this remained true while France and Spain were beginning to coalesce under increasingly powerful monarchs meant that Italy, for all its achievements, was year by year growing comparatively weaker. It was becoming vulnerable.
How Italy had come to be such a stunning place—and that is literally what it was, newcomers from the north consistently describing themselves as stunned upon experiencing it for the first time—is of course a complicated story. Probably it starts with the fact that much of the Italian peninsula, having been the heart of the empire of the Caesars, continued during what we call the Dark Ages to cling to two things that were disappearing in places more distant from Rome. One was the town as the core around which society was organized. Whereas throughout northern Europe cities of any significance became rare, with the nobility withdrawing into often-remote fortresses from which they could dominate populations of peasants, the most vital parts of Italy remained distinctly town-centered.
Except in the region around Rome and the sprawling kingdom of Naples, both of which developed a feudal order similar to the one prevailing beyond the Alps, the survival of the towns and the evolution of some of them into great cities became an essential element in Italy’s unique character. Class and caste distinctions grew faint and porous as nobles and merchants, artisans and soldiers and clergy, learned to live together on terms approaching equality in their crowded, lively streets. More than in any other place in Europe, the townsfolk of Italy were not oppressed, could not even be looked down on, by the hereditary nobility. To the contrary, some of the greatest cities came to be ruled by their commercial classes. It was not uncommon for nobles to be excluded from public life, and for noble families to be forced to abandon their rural strongholds and move to town.
The other fragment of the classical past that set Italy apart was the Roman law, which was not swept away in favor of rigid, status-focused feudal codes as happened elsewhere. This proved to have a profound impact intellectually, culturally, and socially. While the scholars of a slowly reviving northern Europe were focusing on theology and philosophy, in the early twelfth century their Italian counterparts discovered and undertook the study of digests of imperial law compiled under the Emperor Justinian six hundred years earlier. Italy’s traders found in the old code an ideal framework for their bustling commercial life: practical rules and regulations and guidelines, ways of doing business, that grew ever more relevant as the economy developed. The Italian universities, the first to appear anywhere on earth, attached an importance to the study of the law not to be found in France, Germany, or Spain.
Italy was shaped also, even long after Rome ceased to be the hub of the known world, by an astonishing diversity of outside influences. The Eastern Christian Empire, from its capital at Constantinople, early put its cosmopolitan stamp on Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula as well as on its main outpost on the northern Adriatic coast, the port of Ravenna. Sicily was an Arab possession until late in the eleventh century, the Normans then came from northern France to make themselves kings of Naples as well as Sicily, both places fell next into the hands of the Spanish, and from the Dark to the High Middle Ages a succession of German chieftains and kings descended regularly upon Italy and laid claim to various parts of it. Meanwhile the bishops of Rome were evolving into popes, declaring themselves the spiritual leaders of all Christendom, and becoming the overlords of much of central Italy.
The peninsula became an arena in which the popes and Germany’s so-called Holy Roman emperors fought each other for dominance. Both sides, in seeking the support of the cities, granted them liberties and favors that ultimately, if inadvertently, helped them to become autonomous. Those cities, in turn, were developing in strikingly different ways, sometimes adopting republican forms of government that at a distance could almost be mistaken for democracy. Many fell under the dominion of warlords, and even the republics came to be run by elites that rarely constituted more than a fraction of their populations.
By the time Alonso Borgia became Calixtus III, the peninsula had long been dominated by five “great” (by Italy’s modest standards) powers:
Venice, a republic dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families that had grown immensely rich and risen to a position of international importance by trading throughout the eastern Mediterranean, building there a great network of colonies and commercial alliances.
Florence, also a republic and ruled by families that had made their fortunes in banking, manufacturing, and trade, the jewel in Italy’s golden crown by virtue of the astonishing artistic and intellectual flowering that, before the end of the fifteenth century, would make it one of the most dazzling cultural phenomena in all of human history.
Rome, a theocracy dominated by the pope, gradually recovering some of its long-lost strength but still an administrative center only, without a commercial middle class capable of challenging the baronial clans.
Milan, the giant of the north, an industrial powerhouse and master of the vast fertile plain of Lombardy, politically a tyranny, long in the grip first of its Visconti and then of its Sforza dukes.
And of course Naples, Il Regno, a kingdom encompassing the whole southern half of the mainland, the most feudal state in Italy and therefore also the most backward, fatally weakened by an endless struggle between its great capital city and rural barons unwilling to be ruled by anyone.
The greatest of Italy’s cities—Naples, Venice, and Milan—all had populations of well over a hundred thousand when London was still the only city in England with as many as twenty thousand residents. And all of them controlled great expanses of countryside, staking out broad spheres of influence by conquest, intimidation, and bribery. All of them but Naples, which stagnated under the oppressive rule of a series of more or less vicious and decadent monarchs, possessed a vitality to be found almost nowhere else. They took for granted things that remained unknown or unwelcome elsewhere: rapid change, steady growth, and wide-open social mobility—even, in some places, educational opportunities for women comparable to those available to men.
The absence of a functioning feudal system, and of feudalism’s arrangement of the population into commoners who owed loyalty to nobles who in turn owed loyalty to kings, had one unfortunate consequence. Some of the greatest of the city-states, along with innumerable smaller communities including tiny hilltop villages, came to be dominated by local strongmen who could make no claim to political legitimacy—to having any real right to the power they wielded. In the fourteenth century, when the papacy was absent from Rome and utterly incapable of stopping thugs from seizing pieces of the Papal States and setting themselves up as tyrants, authority based on force alone became virtually the norm. Thus the masters of one city-state after another were in a vastly less justifiable position than, say, an English baron whose title and landholdings had been formally conferred upon him in a Church-sanctioned ceremony by an anointed king. Even when the usurpers were able to win recognition as papal vicars, governing their domains in the pope’s name, such titles were little more than legal fictions. They signified almost nothing—certainly not a willingness to be loyal to the pope. To the extent that vicariate status gave the warlords a shred of the legitimacy they craved, it was a shred too scanty to remove their insecurity or make them more responsible in the use of their power or make the so-called Papal States more peaceful.
Misrule and instability thus formed the dark underside of the Italian Renaissance, with almost every regime recurrently under threat from internal as well as external enemies. It was far from uncommon, and at times was almost commonplace, for the lords of Italy’s cities to be bloodily overthrown—often by their own kinsmen, with brother killing brother either to gain or to retain power. Men who had become rulers through violence could find little grounds for complaint, and often nowhere to appeal, when their turn came to be violently overthrown. Might made right: this became a fact of life and was the one utterly inglorious element in Renaissance Italy’s otherwise magnificent heritage. Betrayal and murder became endemic even at the most exalted levels of society, even within the greatest families. This was the world in which the Borjas of Valencia had to learn to make their way.
