This huge castle, the principal defence of the Vatican and St Peter’s, was considered to be impregnable; and soon after he became pope, Alexander VI approached Antonio da Sangallo, the Florentine architect, with a commission to transform the interior of the building into a luxurious residence, to which he might retreat in times of trouble. It was only a quarter of a mile or so from the Vatican, and it could be approached in safety from there by a walkway raised above the roofs of the intervening houses.
Pinturicchio decorated the interior as lavishly as he had the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, and this time the Borgia bulls were accompanied by scenes from the life of the pope himself, his achievements, and, of course, his family. One room contained scenes of Alexander VI’s diplomatic triumph over the naive Charles VIII, most of which showed the king submitting in subservient fashion to papal authority, notably his oath of obedience sworn so publicly in the Sala Regia.
So that the pope could hold out in the castle if necessary, Sangallo was instructed to provide it with large storehouses for grain and oil as well as with dungeons for the incarceration of enemies and prisoners. It was in one of these that the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini was to be imprisoned, along with, so he claimed, ‘spiders and many venomous worms.’
They flung me a wretched mattress of coarse hemp [Cellini later wrote], gave me no supper and locked four doors upon me. In three days that rotten mattress soaked up water like a sponge… For one hour and a half each day I got a little glimmering of light which penetrated that miserable cavern through a very narrow aperture. Only for so short a space of time could I read; for the rest of the day and night I lived in darkness.
Far above these miserable cells, Sangallo and Pinturicchio created apartments in which Alexander VI could live comfortably and work undisturbed; and above these, on the roof of the castle overlooking the Tiber, there was, for a time, a garden; and here the pope could occasionally be seen taking the air, walking with his secretaries, or playing with his children.
— CHAPTER 9 — Father and Children
‘MOTIVATED BY HIS UNBOUNDED GREED TO EXALT HIS CHILDREN’
‘EVEN MORE THAN BY anger or by any other emotion, the Pope was motivated by his unbounded greed to exalt his children, whom he loved passionately,’ wrote Guicciardini; unlike his predecessors on the throne of St Peter’s ‘who often concealed their infamous behaviour by declaring their children to be nephews, he was the first pope to announce and display them to the whole world as his own offspring.’
At the time of the French invasion, Cesare was the only one of Alexander VI’s children with him in Rome. His brother Juan had sailed for Spain in August 1493, to marry Maria Enriquez, cousin of the Spanish king, while Lucrezia had left for Pesaro nine months later to join her husband, Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Jofre and his wife, Sancia, had been in Naples when Charles VIII invaded and they escaped to the island of Ischia. With the threat of war over for the present, they all came back home and by the autumn of 1496 Alexander VI was once again surrounded by his family.
Cesare, by now twenty-one years old, was widely recognized as the most powerful cardinal in the college and as the most unscrupulous. His interests and ambitions, however, were far from priestly, and his clothes were the doublets and hose of a secular prince, not a man in holy orders. He lived in splendour in an apartment on the second floor of the Vatican Palace, later the site of the Raphael Stanze, in rooms that were immediately above those of his father, the two suites connected by a private winding staircase. He was frequently seen in the company of the pope, who came more and more to rely upon him, and his influence in Rome grew daily, especially among those who considered their interests would be best served for the moment by being on good terms with the Borgias.
Lucrezia was deeply attached to her brother Cesare, who loved her perhaps more devotedly than he could bring himself to love anyone else. She was, however, like almost everyone else, wary of her brother and his sadistic streak; once, it was said, he invited her to stand beside him on a balcony at the Vatican while he shot at a group of criminals drawn up as target practice in the courtyard below.
Lucrezia had been in Pesaro when the French invaded but had returned to Rome at the end of June the previous year, days before the Battle of Fornovo. By now a happy, lively, attractive young woman aged sixteen, she was thankful to be back at her father’s lively court after the provincial dullness of Pesaro. She was soon joined by her husband and the couple took up residence at the palace at Santa Maria in Portico, close by the entrance to the Vatican.
In May 1496 Jofre also returned to Rome, bringing with him his wife, Sancia. The arrival of his son and daughter-in-law gave Alexander VI an opportunity to indulge in one of those pageants he so much enjoyed. The couple entered the city through the gate of San Giovanni in Laterano, which the master of ceremonies described:
The captain of the militia went to meet them with some 200 of hismen-at-arms and the households and servants of all the cardinals, except for those of the prelates of the Pope, were also there to receive them. All the cardinals had been invited that morning, by the couriers of the Pope acting in the name of the Cardinal of Valence, to send their chaplains and squires, but not their prelates, to receive his brother Jofre on his entry into the city. All acceded to this request. Lucrezia Sforza, daughter of His Holiness and wife of the illustrious Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, also went to the said gate to meet Don Jofre, her brother. She was accompanied by some twenty ladies and preceded by two pages on horseback wearing capes. One of the horses was covered in a magnificent cloth- of-gold caparison; the other in a caparison of red velvet. Lucrezia received Don Jofre and his wife with affection.
Almost thirty mules trailed behind them, loaded with their luggage, conspicuously displaying Jofre’s coat-of- arms. The huge procession wound its way past the Colosseum, through the Campo dei Fiori, across the bridge at Castel Sant’Angelo, and up Alexander VI’s new road, the Via Alessandrina, to the Vatican, where the pope received them formally but no doubt with warmth from his throne in the Sala dei Pontefici.
Gian Carlo Scalona, the Mantuan ambassador, was not so impressed with Sancia, after all the reports from Naples extolling her charms and her beauty. ‘Indeed, the Lady of Pesaro,’ as Lucrezia was known, ‘surpassed her by far.’ He commented, however, that the twenty-two-year-old bride had ‘glancing eyes, an aquiline nose and is very well made up.’ He did not make direct mention of Sancia’s reputation for extremely louche behaviour, though he did report to his master that the Romans had judged her ladies-in-waiting to be ‘a fine crop.’ In Naples reports of a succession of young men who had been seen entering her bedchamber had reached the stage where her staff had been obliged to insist that only one male servant, ‘a reliable and elderly man, over 60 years old,’ had access to the room.
Scalona’s opinion of the much-younger Jofre was far from being favourable; he was ‘lascivious-looking,’ but small, ‘and dark-skinned, 14 or 15 years old with long reddish hair.’ His immaturity may well explain why, as the Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo reported, Jofre had still not consummated his marriage. It was not long after the couple arrived in Rome that rumours began to circulate to the effect that Sancia, frustrated by Jofre’s impotence, had succumbed to Cesare’s charms and had become his mistress.
Whether Lucrezia knew about Sancia’s relationship with Cesare or not, the two girls soon developed a close friendship. Indeed, they got on together extremely well and were often to be seen romping about just like high- spirited schoolgirls. Two days after Sancia’s arrival, they attended Mass in St Peter’s to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, with a sermon given by a Spanish chaplain that even the dutiful Burchard described as ‘too long and boring, which displeased the Pope.’ The girls were seen, much to Burchard’s disapproval, to leave their seats during the tedious service to go up together to the choir reserved for their ladies, and to chatter and laugh together, oblivious to the boring sermon.
In August 1496 Juan, Duke of Gandia, returned to Rome, on the summons of his father, leaving his son and his pregnant wife in Spain, to be welcomed to the city by an even-larger gaggle of cardinals, ambassadors,
