The Borgias by Hibbert Christopher

Author:Hibbert, Christopher [Hibbert, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Constable
Published: 2011-07-14T21:00:00+00:00

— 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.

Cesare entered the city of Pesaro on October 27, his men-at-arms clad in his personal livery, which had been embroidered with a new emblem, the seven-headed Hydra, the mythical beast that when one head was cut off could grow another – an appropriate metaphor for Cesare’s military ambitions.

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