R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

He arrived on the eve of one of the most important transactions in Italian history. The refusal of the King of Naples to give his daughter to Cesare had alienated the Pope, and the murder of Lucrezia Borgia’s Neapolitan husband in August, 1500, undoubtedly effected through Cesare’s agency, has been looked upon as a deliberate prologue to a rupture with Naples. It was more probably the result of a private quarrel; the Pope seems to have honestly tried to protect his son-in-law, and the secret treaty between France and Spain for the partition of Naples was not signed until November, or published until June, 1501. An idle pretext was found in King Federigo’s friendly relations with the Sultan; but the archives of European diplomacy register nothing more shameful than this compact, and of all the public acts of Alexander’s pontificate his sanction of it is the most disgraceful and indefensible. This sanction was probably reluctant; for he cannot have wished to see two formidable Powers like France and Spain established upon his frontier, and he may have excused himself by the reflexion that there was no help for it, and that he was securing all the compensation he could. Nothing could really compensate for the degradation of the Spiritual Power by its complicity in so infamous a transaction; but this was a consideration which did not strongly appeal to Alexander. It is only just to observe, however, that at bottom this humiliating action sprang from the great cause of humiliation which he was endeavouring to abolish,—the Pope’s weakness as a temporal sovereign. This could not be remedied without foreign alliances, and they could not be had unless he was prepared to meet his allies half-way.

The conquest and partition of Naples were effected in a month, Spain taking Apulia and Calabria. The consideration for Alexander’s support had been French countenance in the suppression of the turbulent Colonna and Savelli barons who had disquieted the Popes for centuries, but who were now compelled to yield their castles, a welcome token of the disappearance of the feudal age. The Pope’s good humour was augmented by the success of his negotiations for the disposal of his daughter Lucrezia, who was betrothed to Alfonso, son of the Duke of Ferrara, in September, and married with great pomp in the following January. The Ferrarese princes only consented through fear; they probably knew that Alexander had only been prevented from attacking them by the veto of Venice. They now obtained a receipt in full and something more, for the Ferrarese tribute was remitted for three generations. The marriage proved happy. Lucrezia, a kindly, accomplished and somewhat apathetic woman, took no more notice of her husband’s gallantries than he took of the homage she received from Bembo and other men of letters. Nothing could be less like the real Lucrezia than the Lucrezia of the dramatists and romancers.

The year 1502 beheld a further extension of Cesare’s conquests. He appeared now at the head of a large army, divisions of which were commanded by the most celebrated Italian mercenary captains. In June he conducted an expedition against Camerino, but turned aside to make a sudden and successful attack on Urbino-a mistake as well as a piece of perfidy; for the people of Urbino loved their Duke, and Cesare’s sway was not heartily accepted there as in the Romagna. It was otherwise with Camerino, which was acquired with little difficulty. Negotiations followed with Florence and the French King, who was then in Italy; but while Cesare was scheming to extend his influence over Florence, and to persuade France to help him to new conquests, he was placed in the most imminent danger by a conspiracy of his condottieri, who had entered into relations with the Orsini family at Rome. The plot was detected, and the incident seemed to have been closed by a reconciliation, which may have been sincere on the part of the mutinous condottieri; but Cesare’s mind was manifested when on December 31, immediately after the capture of Sinigaglia, he seized the ringleaders and put them all to death. Embalmed in the prose of Machiavelli, who was present in Cesare’s camp as an envoy from Florence, this exploit has gone down to posterity as Cesare Borgia’s masterpiece, matchless in craft and perfidy; but it also had more justification than the perpetrators of such actions can often urge. In Rome Cardinal Orsini was arrested, and sent to St Angelo, where he soon expired. A vigorous campaign against the castles of the Orsini was set on foot, and they were almost as completely reduced as those of the Colonna had been. Alexander might, as he did, felicitate himself that he had succeeded where all his predecessors had failed. The Temporal Power had made prodigious strides in the last three years, but it was still a question whether its head was to be a Pope or a secular prince.

With all his triumphs, Alexander was ill at ease. The robber Kings who had partitioned Naples had gone to war over their booty. The Spaniards were prevailing in the kingdom; but the French threatened to come to the rescue with an army marching through Italy from north to south, and Alexander trembled lest they should interfere with his son’s possessions, or with his own. He began to see what a mistake had been committed in allowing powerful monarchs to establish themselves on his borders. “If the Lord,” he said to the Venetian ambassador, “had not put discord between France and Spain, where should we be?” This utterance escaped him in one of a series of interviews with Giustinian reported in the latter’s despatches, which, if Alexander’s sincerity could be trusted, would do him honour as a patriotic Italian prince. He appears or affects to have entirely returned to the ideas of the early years of his pontificate, when he formed leagues to keep the foreigner out of Italy. He paints the wretched condition of Italy in eloquent language, declares that her last hope consists in an alliance between himself and Venice, and calls upon the Republic to cooperate with him ere too late. It was too late already; had it been otherwise, the cautious, selfish Venetians would have been the last to have risked anything for the general good. Alexander must have allied himself either with Spain or with France; he might have decided the contest, but would himself have run great risk of being subjugated by the victor. A quite unforeseen stroke delivered the Papacy from this peril, and, annihilating all Alexander’s projects for the grandeur of his house, placed the great work of consolidating the Temporal Power in more disinterested though hardly more scrupulous hands. On August 5 he caught a chill while supping with Cardinal Corneto; on the 12th he felt ill; and on the 18th a fever carried him off. The suddenness of the event, the rapid decomposition of the corpse, and the circumstance that Cesare Borgia was simultaneously taken ill, accredited the inevitable rumours of poison, and his decease became the nucleus of a labyrinthine growth of legend and romance. Modern investigation has dispelled it all, and has left no reasonable doubt that the death was entirely natural.

Alexander’s character has undoubtedly gained by the scrutiny of modern historians. It was but natural that one accused of so many crimes, and unquestionably the cause of many scandals, should alternately appear as a tyrant and as a voluptuary. Neither description suits him. The groundwork of his character was extreme exuberance of nature. The Venetian ambassador calls him a carnal man, not implying anything morally derogatory, but meaning a man of sanguine temperament, unable to control his passions and emotions. This perplexed the cool unim-passioned Italians of the diplomatic type then prevalent among rulers and statesmen, and their misapprehensions have unduly prejudiced Alexander, who in truth was not less but more human than most princes of his time. This excessive “carnality” wrought in him for good and ill. Unrestrained by moral scruples, or by any spiritual conception of religion, he was betrayed by it into gross sensuality of one kind, though in other respects he was temperate and abstemious. In the more respectable guise of family affection it led him to outrage every principle of justice; though even here he only performed a necessary work which could not, as one of his agents said, have been accomplished “by holy water.” On the other hand, his geniality and joyousness preserved him from tyranny in the ordinary sense of the term; considering the absolute character of his authority, and the standard of his times, it is surprising how little, outside the regions of la haute politique, is charged against him. His sanguine constitution also gave him tremendous driving power. “Pope Alexander,” says a later writer, censuring the dilatoriness of Leo X, “did but will a thing, and it was done.” As a ruler, careful of the material weal of his people, he ranks among the best of his age; as a practical statesman he was the equal of any contemporary. But his insight was impaired by his lack of political morality; he had nothing of the higher wisdom which comprehends the characteristics and foresees the drift of an epoch, and he did not know what a principle was. The general tendency of investigation, while utterly shattering all idle attempts to represent him as a model Pope, has been to relieve him of the most odious imputations against his character. There remains the charge of secret poisoning from motives of cupidity, which indeed appears established, or nearly so, only in a single instance; but this may imply others.