A man who had worked for them in the past and had hoped to be rewarded with a red hat, Francesco Troche, did not trouble to conceal his disappointment and spoke slightingly of Cesare. ‘His Holiness the Pope told him that he was a madman to speak like that and if the Duke came to hear of it he would be killed,’ reported one ambassador to his master, ‘and it was because of the words of His Beatitude that, terrified, Troche took flight.’ He fled first to Genoa and then, by way of Sardinia, ended up in Corsica; but there he was caught and brought back to Rome, where he was strangled by Cesare’s sinister lieutenant, Miguel da Corella. On the same day, another man who had fallen foul of Cesare, Jacopo di Santacroce, a Roman nobleman and former Borgia supporter, was hanged and his body displayed on the Ponte Sant’Angelo as a warning to all enemies of the Borgias.
Cesare was now at the height of his power. Having raised enough money by all the means at his disposal, and ridding himself of several enemies, he now enrolled an army of some twelve hundred light cavalry and over four thousand infantry, all wearing his red-and-yellow livery, with the word CESAR in large letters embroidered on the chests and backs of their uniforms. ‘All the best soldiers were with him,’ the chronicler Matarazzo wrote. ‘And he had so much accumulated treasure and possessions that it seemed there was not as much elsewhere in all Italy. Nor were there as many well-disciplined soldiers so well supplied with arms and horses.’
Cesare was ready for his next campaign. At the beginning of July, the pope confirmed him as ruler of Citta di Castello and ordered the city of Perugia to accept his lordship; he expected soon to add the cities of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena to his dominion. Poised for his Tuscan campaign, Cesare’s well-supplied and well-trained army began to march north up the Via Flaminia toward Perugia and the borders of Tuscany. Cesare himself remained in Rome, waiting for the right moment to start. With the Spanish army facing unexpected opposition in its conquest of the kingdom of Naples, its advance slowed; the French troops in northern Italy, meanwhile, had begun their long march south to relieve their beleaguered comrades. Cesare had to gamble on the Spanish winning through and fixed the date of his departure for August 9.
— CHAPTER 23 — The Death of the Pope
‘THIS MONTH IS FATAL FOR STOUT MEN’
THE WEATHER IN ROME that summer of 1503 was unusually hot and humid. Alexander VI had fallen ill in July, and when the Venetian ambassador had visited him in the papal apartments in the Vatican, he had found the pope ‘reclining on a sofa, fully clothed.’ Giustinian reported that Alexander VI ‘received me with good humour, saying that for three days he had been inconvenienced by a slight dysentery but that he hoped it would be nothing serious.’
‘There are many ill with fever here,’ a Florentine working in Rome wrote that July; ‘and people are dying in great numbers.’ One of the dead was the former Florentine ambassador, whose successor was now gravely ill. Despite his seventy-three years, the pope recovered his health quickly enough but not his normally ebullient demeanour. Alexander VI grew unusually depressed as the daily death toll grew of men, women, and children who had succumbed to the fever — typhoid, typhus, or perhaps malaria — that raged in the city. He admitted as much to Giustinian, to whom he confessed that he was preoccupied with these reports: ‘All these deaths make us fearful and persuade us to take more care of our health.’ On August 1 his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia died; and as the pope watched the funeral procession pass beneath his window, he remarked, with uncharacteristic mournfulness, ‘This month is fatal for stout men.’ The sultry months of July and August had indeed proved fatal for his five predecessors, Innocent VIII, Sixtus IV, Paul II, Pius II, and the pope’s own uncle Calixtus III.
On August 5, just four days before Cesare was due to leave Rome, father and son accepted an invitation to dinner at the villa of Cardinal Adriano Castellesi in the countryside some miles outside of Rome. On this occasion it was Cesare’s health that caused the greater anxiety, since he was not only suffering from pain in his stomach, but also, according to Burchard, he was ‘much irritated by the skin on his face in the lower part, which falls apart like rotten leaves and results in a pus that he is much concerned to hide with his mask.’
On their arrival at Castellesi’s villa, father and son were both extremely thirsty and asked for cups of wine, which they drank ‘most gratefully.’ It was a sultry evening, and the guests dined alfresco, thankful for the shade cast by the trees in the garden. The next day their host felt ill and went to bed; a week later the pope also took to his bed; Cesare then fell ill; so did several of the cardinal’s other guests, as well as some of his servants. Poison was naturally suspected. Giustinian was among those who believed that a servant had been responsible; others suggested that Cesare was the poisoner. Yet others said that the pope himself was responsible, that he had intended poisoning his former secretary for some reason but had inadvertently drunk the poisoned wine himself. It was not the wine that had been tampered with, others maintained, but poisoned sweetmeats that had been passed around among the guests after the meal.
But the pope himself declared that the putrid air in Rome during this intolerable heat wave was probably responsible. Beltrando Costabili, the Ferrarese ambassador in Rome, reported that it was not surprising that the pope and his son had both fallen ill, ‘since all the palace officials are in the same condition because of the unwholesome air here.’
Burchard recorded daily bulletins on the pope’s health. On August 12 he wrote that ‘His Holiness shows signs of a fever which does not abate.’ The next day Giustinian reported to Venice:
The Pope vomited yesterday evening and has been feverish all night; and Duke Cesare is in a similar condition. The doctors attend constantly and are considering whether or not to bleed… some of my informants talk of fourteen ounces of blood taken away; others of sixteen ounces. Perhaps ten ounces is more likely; and even that is a great quantity for a man of the age of His Holiness. But, great or small, it has had no effect and the fever does not abate. As for Duke Cesare, he is worse.
Costabili sent a similarly dispiriting report to Ferrara:
Yesterday morning I was told on good authority that His Holiness has summoned the Bishop of Venosa and another physician; and that these are not allowed to leave him. I was told that the Pope was feverish and vomiting yesterday, and that they have taken nine ounces of his blood… During the day His Holiness asked some of the cardinals to play cards in his room while he rested… But this afternoon there was a crisis such as there was on Saturday and this makes his attendants uneasy. Everyone is unwilling to talk of his condition; and the more I seek, the less I am told. The physicians, surgeons and apothecaries are not allowed to leave him from which I deduce that his condition is grave.
The same news was sent by other envoys to their various states. Giustinian was particularly assiduous in this respect, reporting on August 16, 1503: ‘Early this morning Our Lord the Pope, well aware that his illness is dangerous, received his rites; and some cardinals have been admitted into his bedchamber; the viaticum was given in secret, for those about him try to conceal his condition as much as they can.’ The bishop who had administered the rites ‘left the room in tears saying that the danger was very great and complaining of the ineffectiveness of the medicines that have been administered.’
By now Alexander VI was in a high fever and was violently sick during the night. He was bled so copiously that Giustinian was shocked to hear of it. Cesare also had been severely bled before being plunged into a bath of ice-cold water, from which he emerged with the skin peeling from his back. Both father and son were still feverish the next morning, so Giustinian was told, the duke ‘more severely with recurrent paroxysms of fever one after the other and strange fits,’ and Giustinian added that Cesare had ‘sent for the doctors who are looking after him and he will not let them leave, and is insistent that his condition must not generally be known.’
The following day, Friday, August 18, Alexander VI died; as Burchard commented, he had ‘made his confession to the Bishop of Carignola who then said mass in his presence and, after the Bishop had taken communion himself, he offered the sacrament of the Eucharist to the Pope in his bed.’ After the Mass the pope told the cardinals gathered around his bedside ‘that he felt very poorly.’ The cardinals evidently left the room shortly afterward; the pope ‘received Extreme Unction from the Bishop of Carignola at the hour of Vespers and died with just the Bishop, the Datary and a papal groom present.’
