Cesare arrived in Rome on June 13. There was none of the usual pomp on
this occasion. He made his entrance quietly, attended only by a small
body of men-at-arms, and he was followed, on the morrow, by Yves
d’Allègre with the army--considerably reduced by the detachments which
had been left to garrison the Romagna, and to lay siege to Piombino.
Repairing to his quarters in the Vatican, the duke remained so close
there for the few weeks that he abode in Rome on this occasion(1) that,
from now onward, it became a matter of the utmost difficulty to obtain
audience from him. This may have been due to his habit of turning night
into day and day into night, whether at work or at play, which in fact
was the excuse offered by the Pope to certain envoys sent to Cesare
from Rimini, who were left to cool their heels about the Vatican
ante-chambers for a fortnight without succeeding in obtaining an
audience.
1 “Mansit in Palatio secrete,” says Burchard.
Cesare Borgia was now Lord of Imola, Forli, Rimini, Faenza and Piombino,
warranting his assumption of the inclusive title of Duke of Romagna
which he had taken immediately after the fall of Faenza.
As his State grew, so naturally did the affairs of government; and,
during those four weeks in Rome, business claimed his attention and an
enormous amount of it was dispatched. Chiefly was he engaged upon the
administration of the affairs of Faenza, which he had so hurriedly
quitted. In this his shrewd policy of generosity is again apparent. As
his representative and lieutenant he appointed a prominent citizen of
Faenza named Pasi, one of the very members of that Council which had
been engaged in defending the city and resisting Cesare. The duke gave
it as his motive for the choice that the man was obviously worthy of
trust in view of his fidelity to Astorre.
And there you have not only the shrewdness of the man who knows how
to choose his servants--which is one of the most important factors of
success--but a breadth of mind very unusual indeed in the Cinquecento.
In addition to the immunity from indemnity provided for by the terms
of the city’s capitulation, Cesare actually went so far as to grant the
peasantry of the valley 2,000 ducats as compensation for damage done in
the war. Further, he supported the intercessions of the Council to the
Pope for the erection of a new convent to replace the one that had been
destroyed in the bombardment. In giving his consent to this--in a brief
dated July 12, 1501--the Pope announces that he does so in response to
the prayers of the Council and of the duke.
Giovanni Vera, Cesare’s erstwhile preceptor--and still affectionately
accorded this title by the duke--was now Archbiship of Salerno, Cardinal
of Santa Balbina, and papal legate in Macerata, and he was chosen by the
Pope to go to Pesaro and Fano for the purpose of receiving the oath of
fealty. With him Cesare sent, as his own personal representative, his
secretary, Agabito Gherardi, who had been in his employ in that capacity
since the duke’s journey into France, and who was to follow his fortunes
to the end.
However the people of Fano may have refrained from offering themselves
to the duke’s dominion when, in the previous October, he had afforded
them by his presence the opportunity of doing so, their conduct
now hardly indicated that the earlier abstention had been born of
reluctance, or else their minds had undergone, in the meanwhile, a
considerable change. For, when they received the brief appointing
him their lord, they celebrated the event by public rejoicings and
illuminations; whilst on July 21 the Council, representing the people,
in the presence of Vera and Gherardi, took oath upon the Gospels of
allegiance to Cesare and his descendants for ever.
In the Consistory of June 25 of that year the French and Spanish
ambassadors came formally to notify the Holy Father of the treaty of
Granada, entered into in the previous November by Louis XII of the one
part, and Ferdinand and Isabella of the other, concerning the conquest
and division of the Kingdom of Naples. The rival claimants had come to
a compromise by virtue of which they were to undertake together the
conquest and thereafter share the spoil--Naples and the Abruzzi going to
France, and Calabria and Puglia to Spain.
Alexander immediately published his Bull declaring Federigo of Naples
deposed for disobedience to the Church, and for having called the Turk
to his aid, either of which charges it would have taxed Alexander’s
ingenuity--vast though it was--convincingly to have established; or,
being established, to censure when all the facts were considered.
The charges were no better than pretexts for the spoliation of the
unfortunate king who, in the matter of his daughter’s alliance with
Cesare, had conceived that he might flout the Borgias with impunity.
On June 28 d’Aubigny left Rome with the French troops, accompanied by
the bulk of the considerable army with which Cesare supported his French
ally, besides 1,000 foot raised by the Pope and a condotta of 100 lances
under Morgante Baglioni. As the troops defiled before the Castle of
Sant’ Angelo they received the apostolic benediction from the Pope, who
stood on the lower ramparts of the fortress.
Cesare himself cannot have followed to join the army until after July
10, for as late as that date there is an edict indited by him against
all who should offer injury to his Romagna officers. At about the same
time that he quitted Rome to ride after the French, Gonsalo de Cordoba
landed a Spanish army in Calabria, and the days of the Aragon dominion
in Naples were numbered.
King Federigo prepared to face the foe. Whilst himself remaining in
Naples with Prospero Colonna, he sent the bulk of his forces to Capua
under Fabrizio Colonna and Count Rinuccio Marciano--the brother of that
Marciano whom Vitelli had put to death in Tuscany.
Ravaging the territory and forcing its strongholds as they came, the
allies were under the walls of Capua within three weeks of setting out;
but on July 17, when within two miles of the town, they were met by six
hundred lances under Colonna, who attempted to dispute their passage.
It was Cesare Borgia himself who led the charge against them. Jean
d’Auton--in his Chronicles of Louis XII--speaks in warm terms of the
duke’s valour and of the manner in which, by words and by example, he
encouraged his followers to charge the Colonna forces, with such good
effect that they utterly routed the Neapolitans, and drove them headlong
back to the shelter of Capua’s walls.
The allies brought up their cannon, and opened the bombardment. This
lasted incessantly from July 17--which was a Monday--until the following
Friday, when two bastions were so shattered that the French were able
to gain possession of them, putting to the sword some two hundred
Neapolitan soldiers who had been left to defend those outworks. Thence
admittance to the town itself was gained four days later--on the
25th--through a breach, according to some, through the treacherous
opening of a gate, according to others. Through gate or breach the
besiegers stormed to meet a fierce resistance, and the most horrible
carnage followed. Back and back they drove the defenders, fighting their
way through the streets and sparing none in the awful fury that beset
them. The defence was shattered; resistance was at an end; yet still
the bloody work went on. The combat had imperceptibly merged into a
slaughter; demoralized and panic-stricken in the reaction from their
late gallantry, the soldiers of Naples flung down their weapons and
fled, shrieking for quarter. But none was given. The invader butchered
every human thing he came upon, indiscriminant of age or sex, and the
blood of some four thousand victims flowed through the streets of Capua
like water after a thundershower. That sack of Capua is one of the most
horrid pages in the horrid history of sacks. You will find full details
in d’Auton’s chronicle, if you have a mind for such horrors. There is
a brief summary of the event in Burchard’s diary under date of July 26,
1501, which runs as follows:
“At about the fourth hour last night the Pope had news of the capture of
Capua by the Duke of Valentinois. The capture was due to the treason of
one Fabrizio--a citizen of Capua--who secretly introduced the besiegers
and was the first to be killed by them. After him the same fate was
met by some three thousand foot and some two hundred horse-soldiers, by
citizens, priests, conventuals of both sexes, even in the very churches
and monasteries, and all the women taken were given in prey to the
greatest cruelty. The total number of the slain is estimated at four
thousand.”
D’Auton, too, bears witness to this wholesale violation of the women,
“which,” he adds, “is the very worst of all war’s excesses.” He informs
us further that “the foot-soldiers of the Duke of Valentinois acquitted
themselves so well in this, that thirty of the most beautiful women went
captive to Rome,” a figure which is confirmed by Burchard.
“What an opportunity was not this for Guicciardini! The foot-soldiers
of the Duke of Valentinois acquitted themselves so well in this, that
thirty of the most beautiful women went captive to Rome.”
Under his nimble, malicious, unscrupulous pen that statement is
re-edited until not thirty but forty is the number of the captured
victims taken to Rome, and not Valentinois’s foot, but Valentinois
himself the ravisher of the entire forty! But hear the elegant
Florentine’s own words:
“It was spread about [divulgossi]” he writes, “that, besides other
wickednesses worthy of eternal infamy, many women who had taken refuge
in a tower, and thus escaped the first fury of the assault, were found
by the Duke of Valentinois, who, with the title of King’s Lieutenant,
followed the army with no more people than his gentlemen and his
guards.(1) He desired to see them all, and, after carefully examining
them [consideratele diligentemente] he retained forty of the most
beautiful.”
1 This, incidentally, is another misstatement. Valentinois had with
him, besides the thousand foot levied by the Pope and the hundred lances
under Morgante Baglioni, an army some thousands strong led for him by
Yves d’Allègre.
Guicciardini’s aim is, of course, to shock you; he considers it
necessary to maintain in Cesare the character of ravenous wolf which he
had bestowed upon him. The marvel is not that Guicciardini should have
penned that utterly ludicrous accusation, but that more or less serious
subsequent writers--and writers of our own time even--instead of being
moved to contemptuous laughter at the wild foolishness of the story,
instead of seeking in the available records the germ of true fact from
which it was sprung, should sedulously and unblushingly have carried
forward its dissemination.
Yriarte not only repeats the tale with all the sober calm of one utterly
destitute of a sense of the ridiculous, but he improves upon it by a
delicious touch, worthy of Guicciardini himself, when he assures us that
Cesare took these forty women for his harem!
It is a nice instance of how Borgia history has grown, and is still
growing.
If verisimilitude itself does not repudiate Guicciardini’s story, there
are the Capuan chronicles to do it--particularly that of Pellegrini, who
witnessed the pillage. In those chronicles from which Guicciardini drew
the matter for this portion of his history of Italy, you will seek in
vain for any confirmation of that fiction with which the Florentine
historian--he who had a pen of gold for his friends and one of iron for
his foes--thought well to adorn his facts.
If the grotesque in history-building is of interest to you, you may turn
the pages of the Storia Civile di Capua, by F. Granata, published in
1752. This writer has carefully followed the Capuan chroniclers in their
relation of the siege; but when it comes to these details of the forty
ladies in the tower (in which those chroniclers fail him) he actually
gives Guicciardini as his authority, setting a fashion which has not
lacked for unconscious, and no less egregious, imitators.
To return from the criticism of fiction to the consideration of fact,
Fabrizio Colonna and Rinuccio da Marciano were among the many captains
of the Neapolitan army that were taken prisoners. Rinuccio was the
head of the Florentine faction which had caused the execution of Paolo
Vitelli, and Giovio has it that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who had already
taken an instalment of vengeance by putting Pietro da Marciano to death
in Tuscany, caused Rinuccio’s wounds to be poisoned, so that he died two
days later.
The fall of Capua was very shortly followed by that of Gaeta, and,
within a week, by that of Naples, which was entered on August 3 by
Cesare Borgia in command of the vanguard of the army. “He who had come
as a cardinal to crown King Federigo, came now as a condottiero to
depose him.”
Federigo offered to surrender to the French all the fortresses that
still held for him, on condition that he should have safe-conduct to
Ischia and liberty to remain there for six months. This was agreed, and
Federigo was further permitted to take with him his moveable possessions
and his artillery, which latter, however, he afterwards sold to the
Pope.
Thus the last member of the House of Aragon to sit upon the throne of
Naples took his departure, accompanied by the few faithful ones who
loved him well enough to follow him into exile; amongst these was that
poet Sanazzaro, who, to avenge the wrong suffered by the master whom he
loved, was to launch his terrible epigrams against Alexander, Cesare,
and Lucrezia, and by means of those surviving verses enable the enemies
of the House of Borgia to vilify their memories through centuries to
follow.
Federigo’s captains Prospero and Fabrizio Colonna, upon being ransomed,
took their swords to Gonzalo de Cordoba, hoping for the day when they
might avenge upon the Borgia the ruin which, even in this Neapolitan
conquest they attributed to the Pope and his son.
And here, so far as Naples is concerned, closes the history of the House
of Aragon. In Italy it was extinct; and it was to become so, too, in
Spain within the century.