With the self-confidence he now always chose to display, Cesare announced that the ‘recovery of the lands and lordships of Imola and Forli’ would now be achieved without undue delay. The Riario family, he insisted, had become so disliked by their subjects that they could not depend upon the resistance of the inhabitants, who were more than likely to open their gates to their liberators. This confident estimate, however, did not take into account the resolution of Girolamo Riario’s widow, Caterina Sforza-Riario.
Imola proved no obstacle, and the fortress surrendered to Cesare’s armies on December 11, after a brief, almost token resistance by Caterina Sforza-Riario’s castellan, and six days later Alexander VI’s great-nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia received the oath of obedience from the civic authorities on behalf of the pope. Forli, however, was to prove a greater obstacle; the city itself fell without a struggle but the fortress, to which Caterina had retreated, was one of the strongest in Italy. While she held out inside the castle, Cesare entered Forli with his lance at rest in silent acknowledgement of his victory. French and Swiss mercenaries, followed by hundreds of rapacious camp followers, poured in through the gates, plundering the captured towns and violating their women.
Cesare made little effort to stem the violence: when the citizens appealed to him to curb his soldiers, he used the spurious excuse that the troops were answerable to the king of France and he could not control them. He did, however, succeed in placating the responsible citizens of both Imola and Forli by assuring them that if he survived to keep his promise, he would make it up to them and ensure that when peace was fully restored, they would be reappointed to any offices they might have undeservedly lost.
Caterina was a remarkable woman. The illegitimate daughter of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza, she was now thirty-six years old. Tall and beautiful, brave and unscrupulous, she was given to outbursts of fury, real or assumed, and was ‘much feared by her men,’ who knew her among themselves as the Virago. On occasion she wore full armour, adapted to conform to her full figure, and was immediately recognized by the falcon perched on her arm. She had been married three times, had had several lovers, and had borne nine children.
After the assassination of her husband, Girolamo Riario, in 1488, she had run for shelter to the castle in Forli, leaving her children to the mercy of his murderers, who had threatened to kill them too. She had responded in a characteristic manner, standing on the battlements of the castle, her skirt raised in her arms and shouting: ‘Fools! Can’t you see that I can make more?’
She was also alleged to be a witch with an arcane knowledge of magical potions, the recipes for which she kept in a safely guarded book and that were, in fact, potions, salves, bleaches, and all kinds of cosmetics that she used to preserve and enhance her undoubted beauty.
Her first reaction upon hearing that the pope had confiscated her state was to plan his murder. On the evening of the day that Cesare had left Rome, Burchard reported, ‘a certain Tomasino da Forli, a musician of the Pope, and one of his colleagues were arrested and taken to Castel Sant’Angelo.’ It emerged that Tomasino had just arrived in Rome carrying letters that purported to be an offer of peace from Caterina and that he had intended, after bribing one of the Vatican guards to gain entry to the palace, to present to the pope in person.
‘If the Pope had opened them,’ continued Burchard, ‘he would have been poisoned and would have been dead a few hours or days later.’ Tomasino confessed that ‘it had been his firm belief that, once the Pope was dead, the cities of Imola and Forli would have been liberated from the siege imposed by the Duke of Valence.’ What exactly had been in the package no one knew for sure, but it was widely rumoured that Caterina had wrapped the letters in the grave cloth of the corpse of a man who had recently died of the plague. Her nephew Cardinal Raffaello Riario fled Rome a few days later, taking with him a small group of servants and sticking to minor roads to evade any pursuers.
Despite the failure of her devious plot, the formidable Caterina still refused to give up, and she now waited in her citadel above the town at Forli, determined to hold out as long as she could against the Borgia advance. Standing defiantly on the ramparts, she rebuffed Cesare when he came up twice to the edge of the moat to demand her surrender, and on one of these occasions, so it was reported, she almost captured him by inducing him to come onto the drawbridge to discuss the terms and then giving orders for the drawbridge to be raised.
By the last week of the year 1499, Cesare’s French troops had put their artillery in position and the attack on the castle began in earnest. Whenever the guns fell silent for a time, Caterina could be seen scrambling over fallen masonry, sometimes in armour and with her sword in hand, at others dressed as though for some grand fete, always apparently undaunted.
The outcome, however, was never in doubt. After two weeks of heavy bombardment, with Cesare’s gunners battering the citadel by night as well as by day, the keep collapsed and then a large part of the outer wall fell into the moat. A storming party crossed the moat on rafts, clambering up the tumbled stones and through the breach in the walls, pouring into the fortress to hack and stab at the defenders. On January 14 the defence collapsed, four hundred of Caterina’s soldiers were dead, and Caterina herself was taken prisoner. The slaughter was total: Burchard, who reported that news of the victory at Forli reached Rome that night, wrote that ‘the magnificent Countess, widow of Count Girolamo Riario, has been captured; all the others have been killed.’ And the papal legate, the cardinal of Monreale, who was ill with a fever in Urbino, rashly left his sickbed to ride to Forli to congratulate his cousin on his victory, but he only got as far as Fossombrone, where he collapsed and died.
It was said afterward that Cesare and Yves d’Alegre quarrelled over who should take charge of Caterina — d’Alegre had been her captor; Cesare was in command. In the end Cesare won the argument and dragged the struggling woman to his quarters, where he was alleged to have commented that she had defended her castle more vigorously than she had her ultimately willing body. The Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo reported that the relationship between Cesare and Caterina was far from being merely that of captor and prisoner: Duke Valentino, he wrote, ‘is keeping the lady of Forli… who is a most beautiful woman, daughter of Duke Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, day and night in his room. And, in the opinion of all, he is taking his pleasure.’ Louis XII’s general, the Milanese condottiere Gian Jacopo Trivulzio, put it more bluntly: ‘Oh, good Madonna, now you will not lack for fucking.’
From Forli, Cesare intended to march south to attack Pesaro, the state of his ex-brother-in-law, Giovanni Sforza, but before he could do so, a courier brought the startling news that Ludovico Sforza had managed to raise a large force of eighty-five hundred mercenaries and was about to march on Milan to reclaim his duchy. Louis XII now requested that the French soldiers serving under Cesare were to be withdrawn, temporarily, from his command and recalled to Lombardy. The first stage of Cesare’s campaign was now at an end, and he decided to return to Rome, leaving some of his troops to garrison his new possessions and bringing his famous prisoner with him for incarceration in the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo.
The pope prepared a tumultuous welcome in Rome for his son, and the entry, which was to take place during Carnival, would add impressively to the customary events staged during that season. ‘On Wednesday 26 February, all the cardinals, on the order of His Holiness,’ reported Burchard, ‘received notification that they were to arrange for their households to be outside the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo’ at midday to welcome Cesare on his return. Burchard also announced that all ambassadors, government representatives, and officials of the Curia were to be there ‘in person,’ as were the cardinals themselves. They had a long, cold wait; it was not until after three o’clock that the crowds at the gate finally heard the distant sounds of trumpets and pipes that heralded Cesare’s arrival.
His entry was recorded in detail by Burchard, who had arranged the whole event and was evidently displeased that not all of the participants shared his own desire for order:
The cardinals, learning that Don Cesare was approaching, mounted their mules and waited in customary fashion outside the gate. They doffed their hats to welcome him, and he in turn took off his own cap and graciously thanked them. The procession made its way to the Vatican, Don Cesare riding between Cardinals Pallavicini and Orsini, passing along the Via Lata to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva… and the Campo dei Fiori.
About a hundred packhorses in new black trappings led the cavalcade, walking in good order, and behind, rather more haphazardly strung out, were fifty more. I was unable to arrange the households in any sort of order since there were in the procession about a thousand infantry soldiers, Swiss and Gascons, who marched along in ranks of five each under their own separate standards, all blazoned with Don Cesare’s arms, and were not interested in our arrangements at all. When the Pope’s infantry approached, carrying their own banner, the Swiss, on meeting them, demanded that they should lower this standard. They absolutely refused to march along with it,
