mercantile Medici clan, and more than anyone else the ruler of Florence. In the year of my return he was still only forty-one, and I had counted heavily on his friendship in my plan to obtain help.
Saddened to hear of Lorenzo's illness, I hastened on to seek him at his suburban villa at Careggi. It was early April when I arrived there, and the countryside in one of the seasons of its greatest beauty.
I had hoped to find the great man, if not recovering, at least not too ill to remember his former ally and friend, the ferocious mercenary Signor Ladislao, once sent here by the King of Hungary. Had Lorenzo been anything like his usual energetic self, with the unexcelled Medici intelligence network at his command, he could very likely have provided Ladislao's supposed son or nephew with vital information. But such, alas, was not to be.
I arrived at the villa about the time the Paduan doctors, at great expense, were feeding Lorenzo powdered pearls in wine, a concoction no more harmful, if considerably more expensive, than most of the other remedies of the time.
Not that I, a stranger to the attendants, was allowed in to see the sick man at once. While waiting in a shaded courtyard garden for my chance to speak to my old friend, I found a white-robed, black-cloaked friar tarrying somewhat impatiently, with the same expectation. We introduced ourselves, and thus I had the chance to converse briefly with the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who had dropped by in hopes of being able to hear the potentate's confession and give him absolution.
Savonarola was a small man, with a thick-lipped, worried-looking face; during our single brief meeting, I never saw him smile. His nose was huge enough to provoke taunts—had it been set upon another's face. I think everyone who ever met this man understood at first glance that he was to be taken seriously.
Around us in the flower garden, bees prospered among early blooms, and stone fountains splashed and played. What did we talk about? It is hard to remember a sermon after so many centuries. Savonarola was of course concerned for my immortal soul—he took that attitude with everyone he met. Also he was absolutely fearless regarding his own safety in this world. I do recall that when the subject of the upper hierarchy of the Church in Rome came up, the impetuous monk openly expressed his great contempt for all of them, the Pope included, condemning in the strongest terms the thousand corruptions that most of them practiced. Fortunately for the Dominican, Pope Innocent was soon to die, and Alexander, his successor, had at least one virtue—he was as thick-skinned as the bull that bestrode his family coat of arms, as far as personal insults or accusations were concerned.
My turn came first to see Lorenzo—most likely because I had already hinted to the steward of a bribe. As soon as this potential offer had been discreetly realized, I was admitted for a brief visit to the dying man.
Lorenzo the Magnificent, pale and diminished as dying men are wont to be, showed little interest in my presence as he received me in his sunlit, ornate bedroom. Though still comparatively young, he was much changed from the robust youth of more than twenty years ago that I remembered. No one at the villa except Lorenzo himself was at all familiar to me, and apparently none of them remembered Signor Ladislao. Even Lorenzo's memory, as he lay dying, was certainly imperfect, and I was not sure whether he truly grasped my identity or not. We each had something to say about art, and toward the last he looked at me as if he did remember me.
And perhaps he did. For on turning over the name of Ladislao, he did finally recall that the man had come from far-off Wallachia. And, this leader of the Medici, dying as he was, beginning to perceive everything from the viewpoint of eternity, was not greatly impressed by the fact that I had not aged in more than twenty years.
Lorenzo, speaking automatically as it were, the mercantile instincts of the Medici still in control, asked me a question or two on politics, having to do with who was ruling in my homeland now, and I gave him such answers as I could. Political ambition had become the least of my concerns. I suppose I must have realized that I, in my present mode of mainly dusk-to-dawn existence, punctuated by trancelike sleeps sometimes extending over weeks or months, was in no condition to rule anything. However, my ignorance of current events in Wallachia was of little moment, for Lorenzo's gaze remained for the most part fixed upon eternity and he paid scant attention to my answers.
Even from the viewpoint of eternity, I was accepted as a man, and this was pleasing. Ever since the beginning of my trans-Alpine journey, my confidence in my ability to appear among breathing humans and be accepted as one of themselves had grown almost daily. So far I had confined my appearances in society mainly to the hours of darkness, though for some time now—as at Careggi—I had been able to demonstrate to my own satisfaction that daylight, at least of the dim and indirect variety, was not necessarily unbearable to my kind.
Only now and then, as I had moved across the Alps and into Italy, did I encounter anyone who appeared to suspect that there was something
I was still at Careggi when Lorenzo the Magnificent died, more peacefully than any great man has a right to expect, on the ninth of April, 1492.
As soon as the head of the House of Medici was dead, Savonarola hurried back to Florence to begin his campaign to take over and reform the city, and I moved on to Rome in search of the traitor Basarab, to whose whereabouts I thought I had received some clue.
But let Basarab go, for the moment. Ultimately he proves unimportant. It was in Rome, a city I had visited only briefly during my breathing days, that I had my first contact with the Borgias.
Lucrezia, whose illegitimate father Rodrigo Borgia was soon to become Pope Alexander VI, was in that year only twelve years old and living in a Roman household that also included one or two of her father's distant female relatives, and one of his mistresses, though not her mother. Lucrezia's brother Cesare was just seventeen, and already had been consecrated—if that is the correct word—Bishop of Pamplona. In September of the following year, 1493, his father was to make him a Cardinal…
(The tape here contains a fairly lengthy pause.)
On thinking the matter over, it strikes me that the reader whose native habitat is the late twentieth century may require some preparation before being thrown into intimate association with the Borgia family. At the time when I set down these words, people have grown accustomed to an altogether different type of news emanating from the Vatican from that provided by jolly fat Rodrigo and his contemporaries. Here in the later nineteen hundreds we are accustomed to hear from Rome of stately ecumenical councils, of the celebration of religious feasts, of theological wrangles. An occasional canonization or—a serious matter—the solemn process by which some educator may be deprived of his full teaching authority. Now and then, every few years perhaps, a whiff of banking scandal, subtle and indirect. Once in a great while—no more often than that, the Lord be thanked!—someone takes a shot at the Pope.
I must warn the reader that, five centuries ago, matters were considerably different. The news from the heart of Rome often concerned questions rather—how shall I say it?—rather more
I was, as I have written elsewhere, quiescent in my tomb (or in a temporary sepulcher at least) at the time of the supposed transfusion of Pope Innocent VIII with the blood of several children, in an effort to keep life in his own aging, failing body. So I cannot comment intelligently on the truth of that most scandalous rumor. If true, it was an outrage, but hardly incredible given the morals prevailing at the time among the upper hierarchy in Rome— Savonarola, you did not exaggerate.
In any event, Innocent died in Rome on 25 July of 1492, and in early August, for various political and financial reasons the conclave elected as his successor in office a Spanish Cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia. This man, as I have already mentioned, was the illegitimate father of both Cesare and Lucrezia, along with half a dozen other offspring of less historical importance. The new Pope, taking the name of Alexander VI, assumed the chair of St. Peter on 26 August; and whether the transfusion rumor involving his predecessor was true or not, Alexander was certainly no improvement. In Rodrigo Borgia, all authorities concur, the papacy attained its all-time nadir.
As long as I am setting the events of the Renaissance in perspective, there are a few other matters that should be mentioned. The selection of a new Pope was not the only momentous event of the month. On 3 August, half an hour before sunrise, all unbeknownst to me at the time, and unremarked by the vast majority of my contemporaries, an itinerant navigator named Christopher Columbus set sail from the port of Palos, Spain, on his
