Cesare, still lying ill in bed, was in trouble, and he knew it. If one of his father’s enemies became pope, his career would be at an end. From his sickbed he frantically plotted and pulled strings. When a harmless and aged cardinal was elected Pius III, he heaved a sigh of relief; at least he had a breathing space. But it proved to be too short. The shock of becoming pope was too much for the old man, who died within a month. And the man who replaced him – as Julius II – was a member of the Rovere family, those old enemies of the Borgias. On the day Julius was elected, Cesare told Machiavelli grimly that ‘he had thought of everything that might happen on the death of his father, and provided against everything, except that he never thought that at his father’s death he would be dying himself.
It was a realistic assessment. Like the Old Man of the Mountain, Cesare had created so much hatred and disgust that he was regarded as a poisonous spider. Three years earlier the Venetian ambassador had reported: ‘Every night, four or five murdered men are discovered – bishops, prelates and others – so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the duke Cesare.’ Now that the pope was dead, Rome was determined to have no further cause to tremble. Cesare took refuge in the Castel Sant Angelo to avoid the daggers of his enemies. Lucrezia, safe in Ferrara, wrote to the king of France to ask him to allow Cesare to take up his dukedom there; but for the French, Cesare was now an embarrassment. For a while it looked as if his star was rising again; the new pope was forced to confirm him as head of the papal armies and sent him off to quell rebellions. Then he changed his mind and had Cesare arrested and brought back to the Vatican as a prisoner – he was kept in the room where Lucrezia’s second husband had been strangled. The Spaniards, who had been backing Cesare, realised that he was too dangerous to be allowed to raise an army. When Cesare escaped from Rome and hurried to his allies in Naples, the Spanish king Ferdinand had him arrested and put in prison on the island of Ischia. After two months there, he was forced to agree to give up his conquests in Romagna. Everything he had gained was now lost. Then he was allowed to go to Spain. But he had forgotten that his brother Juan had left a widow, and that she was determined to revenge her husband’s murder. Cesare was arrested again and imprisoned at Cincilla. The Spaniards had only one reason for keeping him alive: he was a valuable pawn to use against the pope. To have Cesare in prison was like having a plague germ in a bottle. In 1506, Cesare escaped, and succeeded in joining his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, who was engaged in a territorial dispute in Spain. Cesare again became a commander – of a mere hundred troops. Determined to demonstrate that he was as bold as ever, he rode ahead of the rest of the army and engaged the enemy. Luck had deserted him. He was badly wounded and left to die of thirst, stripped naked. It was 12 March 1507, and Cesare Borgia was still under thirty-one years of age.
Cesare had only three mourners: his mother Vannozza, his sister Lucrezia, and his one-time adviser, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat who began to make his mark shortly after the execution of Savonarola; the son of a poverty-stricken lawyer, he felt – like most of these Renaissance men – that success was the only thing that mattered. Being interested in power, he studied the gigantic chessboard of Renaissance Italy with fascination. When the Medicis came back to power, aided by the pope and the Spaniards, Machiavelli fell from favour and decided to write a book to try to ingratiate himself with the younger Lorenzo de Medici. Arrested, tortured and finally released, he spent his retirement producing The Prince, a work that has baffled generations of scholars. Its advocacy of cynical opportunism is so extraordinary that it seems inconceivable that he wrote it without some ulterior motive. It has been suggested that it is intended as satire – like Swift’s pamphlet suggesting that the people of Ireland should overcome starvation by eating their own children – or that he hoped to lure the younger Lorenzo to his own downfall. Both suggestions overlook the essential simplicity of Machiavelli’s outlook. He had no more inclination towards religion than Cesare Borgia had – or Rodrigo. Therefore, life was a question of how to achieve your objectives as economically as possible. For Machiavelli, the only worthwhile political objective was Italian unity. Cesare had brought that closer by conquering Romagna, and if it had not been for his bad luck in falling ill in 1503, he might have conquered the whole of Italy. With objectives as important as this, what did a little poisoning and a little treachery matter?
The argument sounds quite plausible – until we study the life of Cesare Borgia. Then we see that Machiavelli’s argument has one serious flaw. Cesare was a half-insane sadist, a Right Man driven by an outsize ego. Whatever success he achieved, the inner worm would have finally destroyed him – the total inability to control his own negative emotions. Even his political policies were short-sighted; his ruthlessness made him dangerous and therefore hated. Cesare was a symbolic figure; but not, as Machiavelli thought, of the ideal Renaissance Prince. He was, quite simply, the archetypal criminal, the man who spends his life taking short-cuts. Nothing is worse for a criminal than early success; it trains his reflexes to develop the lightning-grab. And without a counterbalancing self-control, he is bound to go too far. On one occasion when Cesare lost his temper with a cardinal in front of the pope, he drew his sword and actually stabbed the man so that blood splashed on the pope’s robes. (The. cardinal survived.) This was not the quality of a ‘man of iron’; it was mere lack of self-control. The death of his father made him realise that he had never possessed real power; he had been standing on his father’s shoulders. This is what he meant when he told Machiavelli that he had died on the same day as his father. The megalomaniac dream was over.
It becomes possible to see why reformers all over Europe were longing for the downfall of the Church. It was not simply that it had become corrupt – that could be remedied. It was that the Church had nothing whatever to do with religion. Rodrigo Borgia was not a particularly bad man. Apart from conniving at the murder of a few cardinals, he did nothing very wicked. But he had no more to do with the teaching of Jesus than Tiberius had. He was simply an updated Caesar. The Church was on to a good thing, and he knew it.
We have seen that history seems to be a story of the pendulum-swings of the human spirit between evolutionary purpose and mere materialism – that is, between religion and crime. Man needs material prosperity; it is basic to his survival. But when he has achieved material security, he finds himself oddly dissatisfied and confused. An instinct tells him that it is now time to turn to more important matters. This instinct aims ultimately at control: control of his own conscious processes. He recognises intuitively that such control can only be achieved if he can attach himself to some greater purpose, like a water-skier to a speedboat. And, absurdly enough, that he could achieve this aim more satisfactorily in a monastery cell or on a mountain top than in a palace. This is why Petrarch and Boccaccio became famous all over Europe, in spite of the fact that their books had to be copied by hand. Petrarch is remembered as the first man who climbed to a hilltop merely to look at the view. And when Boccaccio described his young men and women telling their risque stories in the midst of trees and flowers, he was giving expression to a new form of human longing – the same longing that had swept the Mediterranean world thirteen centuries earlier when the preacher from Nazareth announced the end of the world and a ‘new deal’ for the human race. What man wanted instinctively was a ‘new deal’. The plague only focused and intensified that longing. And the soul of man could begin to grasp its meaning on mountain tops or in the midst of woods and streams. Yet no one could deny the practical need for palaces – and hovels.
It must have seemed to these men of the late Middle Ages that the Persian prophet Mani was obviously right when he said that man consists of two warring principles, body and spirit. And this is why movements like the Cathars were so dangerous to the Church, and were stamped out with such murderous ferocity. To us, it seems obvious that the Cathars had oversimplified the problem to the point of absurdity. We know that man does possess two egos, that they appear to be associated with the double-brain, and that their purpose is to co-operate with each other like two lumberjacks at either end of a double-handed saw. The Cathars believed that the two principles were engaged in a war to the death, and that religion demanded that we should starve and humiliate the conscious ego. Naturally, then, they believed that the popes, with all their wealth, were on the devil’s side without knowing it. The popes were more reasonable and, in a logical sense, closer to the truth. They felt that man must learn to balance on a tightrope between body and spirit, and try to give each its due. They also recognised that man is ignorant and undisciplined and needs some kind of authority to give his life a basic semblance of order. Since the Cathars wanted to destroy that authority, they could not be treated with tolerance.