rooms, one of them with another canopied day-bed covered with velvet, the other with a sofa covered with cloth- of-gold. In this latter room is a large table on which is spread a fine velvet cloth and around which is a set of finely carved chairs.
In this palace and its outbuildings and stables, as many as two hundred servants, several of them slaves, lived and worked, wearing the dark mulberry red and yellow of the Borgia livery. In addition to the grooms and guards and domestic servants, there were numerous courtiers, secretaries, and clerks installed in the rooms above, as well as the cardinal’s lawyer, Camillo Beneimbene, discreet and reliable, the repository of many secrets.
In the square outside the palace on festive occasions, the populace was regaled with allegories and pantomimes, fireworks, the roar of cannons, and the savagery of bullfights, while cups of wine were offered to the crowds of spectators by Rodrigo’s numerous servants.
Despite the huge sums expended upon his palace and its furnishings, Rodrigo had enough money to spare for such gestures as the supply and equipment of a galley for the Venetian fleet in Christendom’s war against the Turkish infidels, and for generous contributions to the crusade, which Pius II was planning with missionary zeal and which he intended to lead in person. Accompanied by Rodrigo, he left Rome for Ancona, where, already a gravely ill man, he died in the episcopal palace on August 15, 1464.
Rodrigo, too, fell ill at Ancona, a notoriously unhealthy city, possibly with the plague or with some sexually transmitted disease. ‘The Vice-Chancellor is stricken with illness,’ the governor of Ancona was informed, ‘and this is its symptom: he has pain in his ears and a swelling under his arm. The doctor who has seen him says that he has little hope of curing him, especially considering that a short while ago he did not sleep alone in his bed.’ Certainly on his way to Ancona, Rodrigo had not stinted himself in enjoying the masked balls and nocturnal parties that were given at his request so that the ‘passage of the dignitaries of the Holy Church,’ northeast across the Apennines to the Adriatic coast, would not ‘depress the social life’ of the towns through which he passed.
Rodrigo, however, turned out not to be as seriously ill as his doctors first thought, and he was back in Rome in time to attend the conclave to choose the new pope. The cardinals’ choice this time was a Venetian, Pietro Barbo, a handsome, self-regarding, and pleasure-loving man who had originally intended becoming a merchant like his rich father; but when his uncle had been elected to succeed Martin V as Pope Eugenius IV, he decided that the Church might well offer a life more suited to his character. His love of display, indeed, was soon indulged by building a fine palace in central Rome, the Palazzo San Marco, now the Palazzo di Venezia; he moved the papal court there in 1466 and lived in the palace, in ostentatious splendour, surrounded by his superb collection of antique cameos, bronzes, marble busts, and precious gems until his death in 1471.
At the conclave following Paul II’s death, Rodrigo played a key role in manoeuvring the election of Francesco della Rovere, who took the name Sixtus IV. A large, ambitious, gruff, and toothless man with a huge head, a flattened nose, and an intimidating presence, Sixtus IV had been born into an impoverished fishing community in Liguria and became a Franciscan, rising though the ranks of the order to become its minister general. ‘This pope was the first,’ claimed Niccolo Machiavelli, ‘to show just how much a pontiff could do and how many actions which would have been called errors in earlier times were now hidden under the cloak of papal authority.’ Others praised his nobility, ‘not of birth but of character and erudition,’ and many commented on his fervent devotion to the Virgin.
From the moment of his election, this apparently austere friar was unremitting in granting to his relations offices, money, and profitable lordships in the Papal States — those lands in central Italy that belonged to the pope, the Patrimony of St Peter. He soon became notorious for the particularly lucrative preferments he lavished upon two young nephews, Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere, both of whom he made cardinals within months of his election and appointed to numerous abbacies, benefices, and bishoprics. He also gave red hats to another four of his relations, a total of six of the thirty-four cardinals he created during his long pontificate, not all of whom were as unworthy as his family.
The two nephews played a prominent part in the reception of the young Neapolitan princess Eleonora of Aragon as she passed through Rome in June 1473 on her way north to marry Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. Such was the grandeur of the apartments furnished for her at Pietro Riario’s palace at Santi Apostoli that, as she recounted in a letter to her father, the king of Naples, even her chamber pot was a vessel of gilded silver. ‘The treasure of the Church,’ she wrote, in astonishment, ‘is being put to such uses.’ The sumptuous banquet Pietro hosted for her lasted six hours, a relentless succession of opulent dishes, eaten to the accompaniment of music, poetry, and dancing: gilded and silvered breads, peacocks, pies filled with live quail that ran about the table when the crust was removed, a whole bear, plates of silvered eels and sturgeon, and ships made of sugar filled with silver acorns, the della Rovere emblem.
Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere, who had both followed their uncle into the Franciscan order, rapidly abandoned their vows to poverty and chastity once they were cardinals. Pietro, described by one contemporary as another Caligula, was the pope’s favourite; indeed, it was widely rumoured that he was in fact Sixtus IV’s son. With an income of over 50,000 ducats a year from his benefices, he could indulge freely in the luxuries of life and flaunt his mistress, whom he installed in his palace at Santi Apostoli, where her shoes, reputedly, were sewn with pearls. He died suddenly in January 1474, leaving debts of over 60,000 ducats, after suffering severe stomach pains that many thought were the result of poison but were more probably due to appendicitis. Giuliano now became Sixtus IV’s right-hand man in the college and started to build up his position at the papal court, where he would soon begin to rival Rodrigo.
Yet for all his persistent nepotism, Sixtus IV was a great benefactor to Rome and to the Roman people; and, largely by means of the heavy taxation of foreign churches and the sale of ecclesiastical offices, he was able to carry out numerous public works. Streets were paved and widened; at the same time the numerous conduits of ancient Rome, which had once brought fresh water to hundreds of the city’s fountains, were cleared and once again gave the Roman people a clean supply.
Hundreds of churches were repaired and rebuilt, so many indeed that Sixtus IV was hailed by his humanists as a second Augustus, following in the footsteps of the emperor who had found Rome built in brick and left it in marble. He sold off Paul II’s magnificent collection of valuable antiquities, for money or for political favour, and spent the proceeds on improving the city of Rome. A foundling hospital was established; new palaces appeared where desolate ruins had once stood; the city’s main market was moved to the Piazza Navona, the site of ancient Rome’s imperial circus, the infamous Stadium of Domitian.
The University of Rome, the Sapienza, was re-formed; in preparation for the Holy Year of 1475, the pope laid the foundation stone of the Ponte Sisto, standing up in a boat as he dropped several gold coins into the murky waters of the Tiber. Most memorably of all, it was Sixtus IV who was responsible for the Sistine Chapel, which was built for him by Giovannino de’ Dolci with its walls decorated with scenes of the lives of Moses and Christ by some of the most gifted artists of his time, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Pinturicchio.
Sixtus IV had been quick to reward Rodrigo for his support in the conclave, promoting him to the cardinal- bishopric of Albano and giving him the lucrative abbey of Subiaco, which included the lordship of the surrounding area and a castle that would provide the cardinal and his family with a pleasing summer retreat. The pope also appointed him as papal legate to Spain, to sort out the tricky situation that had developed there regarding the consanguineous marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, which had already taken place using a forged papal dispensation, much to the fury of the archbishop of Seville, who opposed the union of the two Spanish kingdoms.
Rodrigo left Rome in May 1472 and received a rapturous reception in Valencia, his episcopal seat. In Spain he displayed his intelligence, tact, discretion, good humour, and confidence to do what was necessary to regularize the marriage and to negotiate peace with the archbishop, who was placated with a cardinal’s hat; he also gained Spanish support for another crusade against the Turks. He left Spain fourteen months later, but on his journey home his galley ran into a violent storm and was wrecked off the coast of Tuscany. He was taken to Pisa to recover from his ordeal, and while there he was invited as guest of honour to a banquet, where he met an attractive and intelligent woman some ten years younger than himself, named Vannozza de’ Catanei.
A courtesan of charm and discretion from a family of the lesser nobility, Vannozza de’ Catanei seems to have intrigued the cardinal from the very beginning of their acquaintance. So as to facilitate what was to become a loving and lasting relationship, Rodrigo’s confidential legal adviser and notary, Camillo Beneimbene, arranged for her marriage to a complaisant husband, an elderly lawyer called Domenico da Rignano, who could be relied upon not to make any unwanted demands upon his wife.
