Christopher Hibbert - The Borgias

When apart, the two wrote passionate letters to each other in the fashion of their times. Lucrezia called him ‘Messer Bembomio’ (my Mr Bembo), and he wrote to her with deep affection. She gave him a lock of her lovely blond hair, which can still be seen today, on display in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, along with much of their correspondence and the poems they wrote to each other; seeing ‘those beautiful locks that I love ever more deeply,’ ran one of Bembo’s verses, ‘my heart was torn from me and caught.’ One of his letters to her ends: ‘With my heart do I now kiss that hand of yours, which soon I shall kiss with my lips that ever have your name engraved upon them.’

‘Were I an angel as she is,’ Bembo told Lucrezia’s cousin Angela Borgia, ‘I would take pity on anyone who loved as I love.’ And in one of the verses he sent her, he wrote:

Avess’io almen d’un bel cristallo il core

Che quel ch’io taccio, Madonna non vede

De l’interno mio mal, senza altre fede

A suoi occhi traducesse fore.

[Had I a heart made of fine crystal

rather than the one I hide, which Madonna does not see

from inside me my pain

would betray itself in her eyes.]

When Lucrezia replied (the letter is dated June 24, 1503) that in the crystal of her heart she had found a perfect conformity with Bembo’s, he replied that his own crystal was now more precious to him than ‘all the pearls of the Indian seas.’

When Bembo heard of the death of Alexander VI, he immediately rode the ten miles or so from Ostellato to the ducal villa at Medelana where Lucrezia was staying to see what he could do to comfort her in her grief. But she was, for the moment, beyond grief. ‘As soon as I saw you lying in your darkened room, wearing your black gown, weeping and desolate,’ he wrote to her the following day, ‘I was so overcome by my feelings that I stood still, as though struck dumb, not knowing what to say. Instead of offering sympathy, I felt in need of sympathy myself. I left, fumbling and speechless, overcome with emotion at the sight of your misery.’ He could offer little in the way of solace: ‘I know not what else to say except to remind you that time soothes and eases all our sorrows,’ he said, adding that although Alexander VI, ‘your very great father,’ had died, ‘this is not the first misfortune which you have had to endure at the hands of your cruel and malign destiny.’

As summer turned to autumn and the plight of her beloved brother grew worse and worse, Bembo continued to offer what help he could to comfort Lucrezia, writing to her when they were apart with that romantic passion she found so beguiling. ‘The whole of this night in my dreams, and in the wakeful watches, however long they were, I was with you,’ one of his letters ran. ‘And I hope that every other night of my life, whatever it holds in store for me, the same thing will happen.’

Lucrezia, in return, asked Bembo to translate one of her own Spanish sonnets into Italian:

Yours is the radiance which makes me burn,

And growing with each act and gracious word

My joy in seeing you is never done.

But these contented days at Medelana were soon to end: Bembo’s younger brother, Carlo, fell seriously ill at Venice; Bembo hurried to his bedside too late to see him before he died. ‘I am sending for my books which I left behind in Ferrara,’ Bembo wrote to Lucrezia in early 1504, to say that ‘I shall remain here for a while in order that my aged and sorrowful father need not remain entirely alone for it is clear he has much need of my company.’

It was to be many months before he and Lucrezia saw each other again, and by then the ardour of their attachment to each other had cooled to friendship, one that was to last until the end of her life. In 1505 he dedicated his dialogues on Platonic love, Gli Asolani , to Lucrezia, whose visit to him on one occasion when he had been ill had ‘cured him of every feverish languore ’ that beset him. The following year he moved from Venice to the lively court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Elisabetta Gonzaga, now reinstated in Urbino, and he was one of the leading characters in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier . A few years later he moved to Rome to take up his appointment as secretary to Pope Leo X and would later be made a cardinal by Paul III. Having established a reputation for Latin lyric poetry, he turned to Italian verse, the collected edition of his Italian poems appearing in 1530.

One of the last letters Lucrezia wrote to him was quite perfunctory; certainly she had not written much of late, she told him, but he must rest assured that there were many good reasons why she had not been able to do so. She remained, she added caringly, as anxious as ever to please him.

It was around the time when Bembo left for Venice that Lucrezia began to appear more frequently in public, fulfilling her duties and responsibilities as Duchess of Ferrara. Using the skills she had learned at her father’s court, she received embassies with a grace that her husband was quite unable to muster on such occasions. With her extensive knowledge of political affairs, she took an unfeigned interest in the government of the duchy and its relationships with the other Italian states and with foreign powers.

She was also busy fulfilling her primary duty as Alfonso’s wife, endeavouring to produce an heir for the duchy, a subject particularly close to Duke Ercole’s heart. A year after the disappointment of her stillborn daughter, Lucrezia was pregnant again, and yet again she miscarried. At Christmas 1504 Lucrezia was pregnant once more, bearing Alfonso’s child for a third time, much to the joy of her seventy-one-year-old father-in-law, whose own long life was finally drawing to a close.

During the previous summer, the duke had travelled to Florence in order to visit the miraculous image of the Virgin in the Church of Santissima Annunziata, but on his return, ‘much fatigued by the journey,’ according to the Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, he had fallen seriously ill. Alfonso, who was on a trip to France to visit Louis XII, was informed immediately by a courier sent posthaste to the French court, and he rushed home to join Isabella, who had arrived from Mantua, at their father’s bedside. Alfonso arrived, according to Zambotti, ‘healthy and safe but very downcast with anxiety and sorrow’; he was ‘much concerned with what might have occurred if his father had died in his absence.’ With four brothers, one of whom was illegitimate, he did have occasion to worry.

The old duke finally died on January 25, 1505, much mourned by his family and by his subjects; Alfonso was proclaimed his successor later that same day before riding in a grand ceremonial procession through the streets of Ferrara, accompanied by his court, dressed in the ducal mantle of white satin lined with fur and the great gold chain of state hanging across his breast. When Lucrezia dutifully knelt before him to offer her homage, the new duke embraced her warmly and kissed her before leading her out onto the balcony, her hand in his, to display the new duchess to her people.

During the summer of 1505, the rivalry between Alfonso’s brothers erupted dramatically into open hostility. Life in the hot, humid city of Ferrara was more unpleasant than usual that year; on May 17, reported one chronicler, ‘there was no wheat for sale in the market place, nor fodder of any sort, except for rice,’ which was selling at double the normal price, ‘and for two days there was no bread for sale either.’ When the wheat did arrive, it was found to be full of weevils, and the poor could be seen across the city, ‘crying out for a slice of bread.’ In the middle of June, with the price of foodstuffs rising daily, a ten-year-old boy was found dead on the street, and when the neighbours went to his house, they found that his parents had died of the plague.