In 1475, a year after Rodrigo had made his appearance, dressed in the red robes befitting a cardinal, at the marriage of his mistress, she gave birth to a son, who was named Cesare — Sixtus IV showed his approval of his vice-chancellor by legitimizing the boy. Soon after this Vannozza’s well-rewarded husband died, and the widow gave birth to two more of Rodrigo’s children — another boy, Juan, a year younger than Cesare, and four years after that a girl, Lucrezia. Vannozza did not remain a widow long; she was married twice again to men selected by the cardinal and gave birth to Jofre, yet another son for Rodrigo, and Ottaviano, who may or may not have been his progeny.
Certainly their good-natured mother profited from the arrangement, being able to establish herself in a comfortable house in Rome and to buy a plot of land near the Baths of Diocletian on which she had another house built. She also acquired a lucrative interest in three of Rome’s best inns, while her third husband, Carlo Canale, made a handsome profit from his appointment as governor of Rome’s prison, the Torre Nuova, where the incarcerated men were charged for such privileges as they could afford.
Vannozza’s were by no means the only children who were generally believed to have been fathered by Cardinal Rodrigo. There were at least three others, all older than Vannozza’s offspring, who were widely assumed to be his, although very few people in Rome knew who their mother was. Two of these children were girls — one of them, Gerolama, having been quietly married into an unassuming though noble family, died young; the other, Isabella, lived into old age, dying in the middle of the sixteenth century, an object of much curiosity that she haughtily ignored. The third was a son, named Pedro Luis after Rodrigo’s brother, and he was created Duke of Gandia but, like Gerolama, died young, having spent much of his short life as an apparently worthy officer in the army in Spain.
Around 1483, when Cesare was eight years old and his brother Jofre still a baby, Rodrigo had taken his children away from their mother and placed them in the care of his cousin Adriana da Mila. Despite her evident charms and his affection for her, Vannozza’s background made her unsuitable for the upbringing of their family; Adriana, on the other hand, was a Spanish noblewoman and had married into one of the most powerful clans in Rome, the Orsini. In 1489 her son, Orsino Orsini, was married in Rodrigo’s palace in Rome to Giulia Farnese, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl of very modest fortune. Giulia — ‘la Bella’ as she was known throughout Rome — now became Rodrigo’s new mistress, while her husband withdrew to his family’s country estate at Bassanello.
Rodrigo seemed to be obsessed by the Farnese girl, his lovely carefree young mistress who now lived in a house shared with Adriana da Mila and the children of the pliable, good-natured Vannozza. Indeed, he appeared, for the first time in his life, to be capable of an intense jealousy, even of Giulia’s tiresome husband, whom she insisted on going to see in the country from time to time, provoking Rodrigo to write such letters as this:
We have heard that you have again refused to return to us [from Bassanello] without Orsini’s consent. We know the evil of your soul and of the man who guides you but we would never have thought it possible for you to break your solemn oath not to go near Orsino. But you have done so… to give yourself once more to that stallion. We order you, under pain of eternal damnation, never again to go to Bassanello.
Evidently alarmed by this letter, Orsini sent his wife back to the cardinal. Although almost forty years older than Giulia Farnese, Rodrigo was quite as virile as he had ever been; his sexual appetite was still said to be voracious. Sumptuous as were the meals served in his palace, he ate sparingly himself, often contenting himself with a single course. And while other cardinals were carried about Rome on litters or in carriages, he preferred to walk. He hunted; he wrestled; he enjoyed falconry; he took pride in having ‘the slender waist of a girl.’
Sixtus IV had died in August 1484, and his successor was the affable and ineffective Giovanni Battista Cibo, Innocent VIII, not a man of much distinction. Having obtained the papal tiara by undertaking to grant favours to various cardinals the night before his election, he was soon reduced to creating various supererogatory offices and selling them to the highest bidder, to meet the vast debts incurred by his predecessor. His finances were further strained by the importunities of several illegitimate children and by his quarrel with King Ferrante I of Naples, who refused to pay his papal dues.
Meanwhile Cardinal Rodrigo’s career prospered. Jovial and carefree by nature, he was nevertheless most conscientious in his attendance to the business of his office as vice-chancellor, an office that he was to hold in five pontificates.
‘It is now thirty-seven years since his uncle Calixtus III appointed him a cardinal and in that time he never missed a Consistory except when prevented by illness, and that was rare indeed,’ his secretary was to write in 1492. ‘[For almost forty years] he was at the centre of affairs… He well knew how to dominate, how to shine in conversation and how to impose his will on other men. Also, majestic in stature, he had the advantage over other men.’
He also became steadily richer and more influential, well able to afford the bribes that he would need to offer discreetly at the next conclave. ‘Altogether it is thought,’ wrote Jacopo Gherardi da Volterra, ‘that he possesses more gold and riches of every kind than all the other cardinals combined, excepting only d’Estouteville,’ the wealthy cardinal of Rouen.
Rome, however, under the easy going and unassertive leadership of Innocent VIII, known as ‘the Rabbit,’ had relapsed into the kind of anarchy that had been all too familiar a century before. Armed men again roamed through the city at night, and in the mornings the bodies of men who had been stabbed lay dead and dying in the streets; pilgrims and even escorted ambassadors were regularly robbed outside the city gates; cardinals’ palaces became fortified strongholds with crossbowmen and artillery at the windows and on the castellated roofs.
Justice had become a commodity to sell, like every other favour in this corrupt city. A man who had murdered his two daughters was permitted to buy his liberty for 800 ducats. Other murderers purchased their pardons from the Curia, the papal administration, as well as safe-conduct passes that allowed them to walk the streets with armed guards to protect them from avengers. When an important official was asked why malefactors were not punished, he answered with a smile in the hearing of the historian Stefano Infessura, ‘Rather than the death of a sinner, God wills that he should live — and pay.’
During the unpleasantly hot summer of 1492, Innocent VIII fell seriously ill, unable to keep down any nourishment other than mother’s milk. Among the cardinals who had gathered, as was the custom, at his bedside were Rodrigo Borgia and Giuliano della Rovere, who were soon involved in a heated argument. Rodrigo voiced his disapproval of the pope’s decision to distribute the reserves of cash in the papal coffers — some 47,000 ducats — to his relatives, and Giuliano defended the action, which, after all, had been agreed by the college, and made an insulting remark about Rodrigo’s Spanish heritage. The vice-chancellor retorted that, were they not in the presence of the pope, he would show Giuliano who he was, and the unseemly quarrel would have quickly deteriorated into a fight had the two not been restrained by some of their colleagues.
It was soon clear that Innocent VIII was dying, and the sacred college was much preoccupied with the choice of a suitable successor. No scholar was needed now, still less a saint. The next pope, they agreed, must be one of strong personality rather than moral worth, a man who could protect the Patrimony of St Peter from its rivals and enemies, and one who could restore order to Rome and inject some vigour into its artistic and scholarly life. Innocent VIII died on July 25, 1492, and it was with these thoughts in mind that the cardinals entered the Vatican on August 6 in order to elect his successor.
— CHAPTER 4 — Servant of the Servant of God
‘I AM POPE! I AM POPE!’
FOR FOUR GRUELLING DAYS, the cardinals plotted and negotiated and placed their voting slips in the gilded chalice, locked, in the intolerable summer heat, inside the Vatican and living, in considerable discomfort, in the tiny cubicles that had been erected for each cardinal in the Sistine Chapel. In the evening of the fourth day, rumours began to seep out of the Vatican and into the streets and taverns of Rome that the conclave was in deadlock. The crowds that had gathered so expectantly on the piazza in front of St Peter’s beneath the first-floor windows of the
