regime.’
Charles VIII was intent upon enjoying himself in Naples. The city was, he declared, ‘an earthly paradise.’ He was certainly, ‘as one of the most lascivious men in France,’ finding plenty of opportunity to indulge his ‘fondness for copulation’ and of ‘changing his dishes’ so that ‘once he had had a woman, he cared no more about her, taking his pleasure with fresh ones.’ His soldiers were equally lascivious, and having made themselves hated in Rome, they now became detested in Naples, despite the welcome they had first received. As Guicciardini commented:
The natural arrogance of the French, exacerbated by the ease of their victory, as a result of which they had a highly esteemed opinion of themselves and no respect whatever for any Italian. They seized lodgings in Naples and in other parts of the kingdom with insolence and violence and wherever their troops were quartered they were hated; everywhere they treated their hosts so badly that the friendly welcome with which they had been received was now changed into burning hatred.
The French were ‘stupid, dirty and dissolute people,’ another Italian observer decided, and he added:
They were constantly after women… Their table manners were disgusting… Whenever one of them entered the house of a Neapolitan, they always took the best rooms and sent the master of the house to sleep in the worst. They stole wine and grain and sold them at the market. They raped the women, then robbed them, pulling the rings from their fingers, and, if any woman resisted, they would cut off her fingers to get at the rings… Even so, they spend much time in church praying.
The arrival of the French, moreover, coincided with the first dramatic epidemic of syphilis, which was known as the ‘
For almost two months after he escaped from the French court at Velletri, nothing reliable was heard about Cesare; and then he reappeared once more, as a deus ex machina, in Rome, where, with his customary skill in such matters, he set about organizing an attack upon the Swiss troops who had been left behind in the city when the French army marched south for Naples. The troops were attacked in the piazza in front of St Peter’s by a large body of Spaniards who killed over twenty of them and wounded several more.
Some said afterwards that all these violent acts were ordered by Cesare Borgia [commented Burchard] because these Swiss soldiers were in the service of the French and, with violence and without cause, had sacked and plundered the home of his mother, robbing her of 800 ducats and other valuable possessions.
Certainly, Cesare had already acquired a reputation for never forgiving what he took to be a wrong and for savagely punishing anyone who crossed him in any way; and having escaped from Charles VIII’s custody, he was now considering ways in which he might harm the French king.
Despite the spread of syphilis, the ill discipline of his troops, and the need to get back to France before an emerging alliance of Italian states, headed by Alexander VI, could march against him, Charles VIII was reluctantly obliged to turn his back on the pleasures of Naples. It was not, however, until the end of the third week in May 1495 that he began the long march north. He arrived in Rome four days later, expecting to be able to have an audience with Alexander VI, who he hoped would give formal recognition of his conquest of Naples and invest him as king, but he found only Cardinal Antoniotto Pallavicini, who had been left in charge of the city. The wily pope had removed himself, together with nineteen cardinals, over four thousand troops, and the entire papal court, first to Orvieto and then, when the French king threatened to find him there, on to Perugia and out of harm’s way.
Meanwhile, the forces of the Holy League were massing in Lombardy to attack the French as they made for the Alpine passes. By the end of June, the returning army had crossed the Apennines, but on July 6 their march was brought to a sudden halt at Fornovo, by the banks of the river Taro, where they encountered the mercenary troops of the Holy League under the command of Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua. The battle was fierce but brief, lasting less than one hour, with little chance for the French to use their invincible artillery; the French lost just two hundred men; the Holy League counted over three thousand dead. ‘The palm of victory was generally awarded to the French,’ wrote Guicciardini, ‘because of the great difference in the number of casualties’ and ‘because they had won free passage to advance, which was the reason that the battle had been fought.’
However, since he was left in possession of the field and had captured part of the French baggage train — which included a piece of the Holy Cross, a sacred thorn, a limb of St Denis, the blessed Virgin’s vest, and a book depicting naked women ‘painted at various times and places… with sketches of intercourse and lasciviousness in each city’ — the Marquis of Mantua claimed the victory. The poets at his court in Mantua celebrated the success of his venture in epic verse and prose, and the marquis, for his part, began building a votive chapel in the city, commissioning his court painter, Andrea Mantegna, to paint his
But the French army, though battered, weary, and ill, was still a powerful force and had not been beaten. Accompanied by mules, one to every two men, loaded with treasure, it moved unimpeded toward the Alps and reached France in safety. The Italians were shocked by the realization that, for all their virtues, talents, wealth, past glory, and experience, they had been unable to withstand the ruthless men from the north, and Alexander VI, so proud of his stamina and prone to comparing his strength to that of the bull on the Borgia coat-of-arms, had been unable to withstand the might of a foreign king.
— CHAPTER 8 — The Borgia Bull
‘MANY ARE ASSISTED BY FORTUNE WITHOUT BEING ENDOWED WITH THE NECESSARY TALENT’
SOON AFTER HIS ELECTION, Alexander VI began planning a new set of rooms, seven in all, for his personal use in the Vatican, and to decorate them in a manner that would suit his ostentatious and luxurious tastes. The resulting set of apartments, known as the Appartamento Borgia, has survived, with the exception of one room that was destroyed, and it is still one of the highlights of the tour of the papal palace.
With their ornate ceramic-tiled floors, the rooms have a boldly Spanish appearance — indeed, the tiles were ordered by the pope specially from Spain — and their lavishly gilded stucco decoration made a marked contrast to the modestly austere chapel painted for Nicholas V by the Florentine Fra Angelico.
Despite his taste for lavish surroundings, Alexander VI was notoriously frugal at mealtimes, rarely having more than one course, according to the Ferrarese ambassador Giovanni Boccaccio, who said that cardinals avoided dining with the pope if they possibly could because his table was so parsimonious compared with their own, particularly during Lent and on Fridays, when sardines were commonly served at his table instead of the meat dishes otherwise provided by the papal household’s six cooks.
The fashion for gilded stucco was a new one, and it had been inspired by the discovery, near the Colosseum, of the remains of the Golden House of Nero, the palace of legendary opulence built by the emperor, whose Circus had once resounded to the roars of the Roman populace in the place where the Vatican now stood.
Visiting the ruins was no easy matter; armed with tallow candles and lunch boxes packed with ham, bread, apples, and wine, artists and others interested in the remains of antiquity crawled into a narrow opening in the side of the Esquiline Hill and into even smaller passages, filthy and pitch-black, that had been excavated below the vaults of the palace, where they lit their torches to catch a glimpse of the glittering stuccoes and frescoes that
