The World полностью

Now Alexander was ready to deal with Savonarola, whose hold on Florence was wavering. Alexander excommunicated him. Savonarola threatened his critics: ‘Seats are prepared in Hell. Tell them the rod has come!’ Challenged to prove his relationship with God by walking through fire, he was saved by a rainstorm, but the people then arrested him. He was tortured with the strappado, found guilty of heresy, then hanged in chains and burned; his ‘legs and arms gradually dropped off’ until only ashes remained. The Medicis longed to return but a rival, Piero Soderini, opposed to their regal style, reasserted republican power, his policies devised by the twenty-nine-year-old Niccolò Machiavelli, playful writer and cynical diplomat.

Alexander planned a kingdom for his eldest son Giovanni, duke of Gandía – until the young man was found in the Tiber with his throat slit and nine stab wounds. It revealed something about the family that among the endless list of suspects were two of the duke’s own brothers, Joffre, incensed at fraternal cuckolding, and Cesare, who was jealous of the paternal favourite and also sleeping with his wife. Alexander was broken: ‘We loved the duke of Gandía more than anyone else in the world; we’d have given seven tiaras to recall him to life.’

Cesare stepped forward, renouncing the scarlet and soaring like a vicious star. Appointed gonfaloniere and duke of Romagna, he was exceptional – flashy, indefatigable, murderous, priapic, fathering at least eleven children. His ambition was boundless, his motto ‘Caesar or nothing’. Behind all this lurked the stiletto and the garrotte: as Machiavelli put it, Cesare believed it was ‘better to be feared than loved’.^* Even his proud father took the view that ‘The duke is a good-hearted man but he can’t bear an insult.’ When Alexander told him to tolerate animadversion, Cesare replied, ‘The Romans can publish slanders but I’ll teach them to repent.’ Murder was his tool: ‘Every night four or five men are discovered assassinated , bishops and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the Duke.’ When his brother-in-law Alfonso, duke of Bisceglie, cousin of Ferdinand and Isabella, crossed the family – who no longer needed a Spanish ally now they were allied to France – his Spanish hitman Don Micheletto strangled him in the Vatican.

Cesar conquered his principality of Romagna, moving so fast that ‘he arrives in one place before it’s known he has left another’. Micheletto strangled some captured commanders and bisected others: ‘Ramiro this morning was found in two pieces on the public square,’ wrote Machiavelli. ‘It has pleased the Prince who shows he can make and unmake men as he likes.’^*

Yet Borgia success was shallow, dependent on the ageing Alexander, who in May 1499 orchestrated a further French invasion by the new king Louis XII in return for arranging Cesare’s marriage to Charlotte of Navarre. Louis made Cesare duc de Valentinois, nicknamed Valentino for his love affairs, but the king disdained his preening as ‘vainglory and foolish bombast’. On his wedding night, Cesare boasted he gave himself ‘eight marks for his virility’, though actually the young syphilitic required aphrodisiacs – which were secretly replaced by laxatives, an escamotage that led to a very different sort of ejaculation. The syphilis started to rot Cesare’s face, eating his nose until he was forced to wear a leather mask to conceal the decay.

Queen Isabella lectured Alexander with ‘great love’ on her ‘displeasure and disgust’ at his outrageous ‘parties’, but he delivered on the things that mattered, so favouring Castile over Portugal in his bull Inter caetera that the two had to negotiate a more realistic carve-up of the world in the treaty of Tordesillas. Now the Catholic Monarchs had bigger plans.

Isabella was negotiating a double marriage with the Habsburgs that would create the first world empire.

* Practising Jews were not burned by the Inquisition: Jews and Muslims were outside its jurisdiction, which only covered self-identifying Christians who were accused of judaizing, secretly indulging in Jewish rituals. In the half-century after 1480, perhaps 2,000 such conversos were executed. Jews and Muslims could be punished only by the king.

* It was far from a conquest: the Portuguese started building on territory controlled by feuding Akan warlords. João negotiated with an Akan omahene (king), Kwamena Ansa, a vassal of the small kingdom of Egyafo, who impressed the Portuguese with the amount of gold he was wearing in bracelets and necklaces. But when Kwamena saw the Portuguese building on a sacred cliff, his archers and swordsmen wearing crocodile helmets forced them to retreat and build on land he specified.