The Malice of Fortune Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of actual persons, places, and characters is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work.

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Ennis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Simultaneously published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Illustrations by Michael Ennis

  Jacket design by Keith Hayes

  Jacket images: Top left: Judith and Holofernes, 1599, oil on canvas, © Cristofano Allori / The Bridgeman Art Library / Getty Images; top center: Violante (La Bella Gatta), by Tiziano Vecellio known as Titian, 1515–1518, unknown © Photoservice Electa / Universal Images Group / Getty Images; top right: Portrait of a Woman (La Muta), by Raffaello Sanzio, 1507, oil on panel, cm 64 × 48, © Photoservice Electa / Universal Images Group / Getty Images; middle left: Portrait of Magdalena Strozzi Doni, by Raphael, oil on panel, © SuperStock / Getty Images; middle center: Profile of Young Woman, series of six portraits by Gerolomo Muziano, oil on board, 1610–1630, © DEA / VENERANDA BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA / De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Images; middle right: Portrait of a Young Man, by Giovanni Girolamo (Gerolamo) Savoldo, c. 1525, oil on canvas, cm 60 × 40, © Photoservice Electa / Universal Images Group / Getty Images; bottom left: Interrupted Concert, by Tiziano Vecellio known as Titian, c. 1507–1508, oil on canvas, cm 86.5 × 123.5, © Photoservice Electa / Universal Images Group / Getty Images; bottom center: Self-portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio, by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, c. 1568, oil on canvas, cm 56 × 44, © Photoservice Electa / Universal Images Group / Getty Images; bottom right: La Donna Velata, by Raffaello Sanzio, c. 1513, oil on panel, cm 85 × 64, © Photoservice Electa / Universal Images Group / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ennis, Michael

  The malice of fortune / by Michael Ennis.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Alexander VI, Pope, 1431–1503—Fiction. 2. Courtesans—Fiction. 3. Illegitimate children—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527—Fiction. 5. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519—Fiction. 6. Serial murderers—Fiction. 7. Italy—History—16th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.N63M35 2012

  813′.54—dc23 2012006189

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53632-5

  v3.1

  In memory of

  Charles Livinstone Ennis

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Italy in 1502

  Dramatis Personae

  The Malice of Fortune

  Part One - Be Careful of the Truth You Seek

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Part Two - The Nature of Men

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three - Beyond the Shores of Fate

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Four - A Most Beautiful Deception

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  ITALY IN 1502

  Excerpted from Cesare Borgia: A Study of the Renaissance

  William Harrison Addington

  London, 1903

  istory seldom presents a paradox more striking than Italy at the outset of the sixteenth century. As the Renaissance reached new heights of splendor and innovation—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli now shared the stage—Italy foundered in a morass of political treachery and chaos. Fragmented into dozens of autonomous entities, varying from such formidable nation-states as the Republic of Venice to myriad small city-states, the Italian peninsula became a battleground contested by powerful family dynasties, mercenary warlords known as condottieri, and the armies of foreign monarchs.

  Amidst this endemic turmoil, the Italian people despaired of finding a remedy in God and the Church, and instead regarded themselves as subject to the goddess Fortune (a revival of the ancient Roman cult of Fortuna), personified in both literature and daily discourse as the capricious and ill-intentioned governess of all human affairs. Even the most enlightened intellects of the age were not immune to this belief in the tyranny of Fortune. Leonardo da Vinci opposed her anarchy with a new vision of the natural world, where order was established by mathematics and common principles. To similar purpose, Niccolò Machiavelli examined ancient and modern history, bent on deriving fundamental principles of human behavior, in the hope that this new science would allow Italy’s hapless leaders to anticipate crises and prepare for Fortune’s onslaughts …

  The year 1502 represented the historic moment when the intellect of man began to strike back against Fortune’s malice and might. This insurrection of human will and reason, which would alter the subsequent course of civilization, did not find its spark in the familiar capitals of the Renaissance but rather in a neglected region of Italy known as the Romagna, an elongated, fertile plain bounded by the Adriatic Sea and Apennine mountains. For generations only nominally a possession of the Roman Catholic Church (as one of the so-called Papal States), the Romagna had remained a collection of lawless fiefdoms, ceded to the rapacious local nobility by a succession of weak popes, until Rodrigo Borgia purchased the papacy in 1492. Assuming the name Pope Alexander VI, and declaring his intention to restore and expand the Church’s worldly domains with deeds worthy of Alexander the Great, the Borgia pope filled his war chest by peddling Church offices and indulgences with unprecedented industry. Inexplicably, however, this shrewd and conniving judge of men vested his martial ambitions in a woefully inept illegitimate son, Juan Borgia, the Duke of Gandia, who led the armies of the Church to a series of humiliating defeats. Only when Juan of Gandia was murdered in 1497, in mysterious circumstances, did Pope Alexander find a suitable instrument in yet another papal bastard: Juan of Gandia’s previously overlooked older brother, Cesare Borgia, transformed himself from an obscure cardinal into the celebrated “Duke Valentino” and reconquered the Romagna with extraordinary ingenuity and audacity. By 1502, no man in Europe inspired more hope among oppressed peoples or caused greater trepidation among tyrants …

  Even as Valentino’s conquests presaged a new I
taly, he was compelled to achieve them with the assistance of a long-established evil, the condottieri. These mercenary generals well deserved their vile reputation, as they cynically contrived and perpetuated conflicts solely to finance lives of luxury and wanton pleasure; although such campaigns posed little risk to the “soldiers of fortune,” they were exceedingly onerous for the peasantry in their paths, and the helpless populations of cities subject to bombardment, starvation, and pillage … Pope Alexander, however, disregarded a long history of personal enmity and employed the detested condottieri to hasten his own ambitions … The condottieri, observing firsthand Valentino’s swift and unsparing consolidation of power in the Romagna, as well as his efforts to conscript and train his own citizen soldiers, apprehended an increasingly grave threat to their livelihoods, and their lives … In October 1502, the condottieri commenced large-scale armed assaults against papal strongholds in the Romagna.

  Among Italy’s many sovereign states, this blood feud imperiled none more imminently than the fledgling Republic of Florence. The Florentines had invested their civic genius in culture and commerce, and were all but indifferent to their own defense, even as the most capable of the condottieri, Vitellozzo Vitelli, declared a personal vendetta against them, his casus belli the Florentines’ execution of his brother for treason in 1499 … Duke Valentino, better cognizant of the common enemy, offered Florence a mutual defense agreement …

  Florence’s leaders, notorious for vacillation and indecision, were reluctant to bind their fate to the Borgia. Refusing to send a full ambassador to Valentino’s redoubt at the fortress city of Imola, in the heart of the Romagna, they instead dispatched a junior chancellery secretary, from whom they withheld any authority to negotiate terms, and who was instead instructed to delay the ever more impatient duke with glib promises and clever repartee. This Florentine envoy arrived in Imola on October 6, 1502, and he would place the events of the subsequent three months at the center of one of the signal works in the history of Western thought: Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  POPE ALEXANDER VI (RODRIGO BORGIA) History’s most worldly and venal pope, Rodrigo Borgia bought the papacy in 1492, promising deeds and conquests worthy of Alexander the Great. As Pope Alexander, he ambitiously expanded the Church’s temporal power under the aegis of his son Cesare (see Valentino), the most gifted of his seven acknowledged illegitimate children.

  AGAPITO DA AMELIA Valentino’s confidential secretary and official spokesman.

  ANTONIO BENIVIENI The prominent Florentine physician who documented his many postmortem examinations in a collection, De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causis (The Hidden Causes of Disease), regarded as the foundational work of scientific pathology.

  JUAN BORGIA, DUKE OF GANDIA (deceased) The murder of Pope Alexander’s favorite son on June 14, 1497, was the most notorious crime of the Renaissance—and remained conspicuously unsolved as of the autumn of 1502.

  CAMILLA Maid and attendant to the courtesan Damiata.

  DAMIATA A cultured, highly desirable Roman courtesan of the class known as cortigiana onesta, or “honest courtesan,” often interpreted more colloquially as “honest whore.” Her relationship with the Duke of Gandia and her suspected role in his murder are matters of historical record. “Damiata,” however, was almost certainly an alias.

  OLIVEROTTO DA FERMO An orphan trained for the soldier’s profession by Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto became lord of the city of Fermo after brutally usurping his uncle. He first served Valentino as a condottiero (mercenary general), then became instrumental in the conspiracy against him.

  GIACOMO (GIAN GIACOMO CAPROTTI) Leonardo da Vinci’s servant, apprentice, and companion. Adopted by Leonardo when he was ten years old, Giacomo was in his early twenties in 1502. His nickname “Salai” meant “little devil.”

  GIOVANNI Damiata’s young son, born in 1498.

  FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI The close friend and frequent correspondent to whom Machiavelli addresses his narrative. At the time of Machiavelli’s writing (1527), he was lieutenant general of the armies of Pope Clement VII. Guicciardini would later become a pioneer of modern historical method as author of the classic History of Italy.

  LEONARDO DA VINCI Officially designated as Duke Valentino’s engineer general and architect, Leonardo was fifty years old in 1502. His map of Imola, drawn that year, is regarded as one of his most revolutionary works; presently in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, it was the first map to have been made with precise measurements and the use of a magnetic compass, anticipating by centuries the advent of modern cartography.

  RAMIRO DA LORCA A Borgia family retainer of long standing, Ramiro earned both respect and notoriety as the harsh military governor of the Romagna, before being assigned to less politically sensitive duties in the autumn of 1502.

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI Machiavelli’s official titles in 1502 were second chancellor of the Republic of Florence (a second-tier civil service position) and secretary to the Ten of War. Although he was the ranking Florentine diplomat at the court of Duke Valentino, Machiavelli had no authority to conduct direct negotiations and was regarded as nothing more than a mouthpiece for his government. He was thirty-three years old at the time, and would not write The Prince for another eleven years (1513).

  MICHELOTTO (MICHELE DE COREGLIA) Valentino’s most trusted intimate.

  PAOLO ORSINI Scion of one of Italy’s most powerful and ruthless families, Orsini became a leader of the condottieri who first worked for and then conspired against Valentino in 1502.

  TOMMASO (TOMMASO DI GIOVANNI MASINI) A student of alchemy and other occult arts who frequently went by the alias Zoroastre, Tommaso joined Leonardo’s entourage during the latter’s long tenure (1482–99) at the court of Lodovico Sforza in Milan.

  VALENTINO (CESARE BORGIA) Duke of the Romagna and captain general of the armies of the Holy Roman Church. Designated Duke of Valentinois by the French king in 1498 (in a deal that bought Louis XII a divorce), Pope Alexander’s gifted bastard son was commonly known as Duke Valentino or, in a shorthand that spoke to his celebrity throughout Europe, simply Valentino.

  VITELLOZZO VITELLI One of Italy’s most experienced condottieri and maestro of a new technology—artillery—Vitellozzo essentially invented the modern infantry rifleman. He was Valentino’s most effective subordinate prior to leading the conspiracy against him.

  THE MALICE OF FORTUNE

  The following narrative is based entirely on actual events.

  All of the major characters are historical figures, and all of them do exactly what the archival evidence tells us they did, exactly where and when they did it. What history fails to tell us is how and why they did it.

  And thereby hangs a tale.…

  To Messer Francesco Guicciardini

  Lieutenant general, statesman, and historian

  9 January 1527

  Magnificent One. I have sent you this great pile of pages in order to provide a more faithful account of the final weeks of the year 1502, when the condottieri violently conspired against Duke Valentino and his father, Pope Alexander VI. As you know, my intimate witness of those events inspired my little pamphlet, The Prince; what you do not know is that there was considerably more to the entire matter than I have ever allowed. Hence I submit to you this lengthy “confession,” with the hope that you will not judge me—or attempt to write your own history—until you have read these pages entirely. Only then can you begin to grasp the terrifying nature of the secret I deliberately buried, let us say, between the lines of The Prince.

  You will find here a narrative divided into four parts, all but one in my own hand. The exception is the account that precedes my own, authored twenty-four years ago by a lady I knew as Damiata. Over the span of scarcely a fortnight, this learned woman recorded in every particular a number of conversations and occurrences that I am certain will intrigue you. She wrote not only to indemnify herself against the accusations that wer
e made against her but also to provide a last testament to her boy, Giovanni, although she intended that it be withheld from him until he was a young man of sufficient maturity to understand both the truth and the lies.

  My dear Francesco, I should remind you that Fortune achieves her worst ends by relying on our own willful blindness, as we proceed upon her twisting and obscure paths. When you read these pages, you will marvel at how cleverly Fortune led us on a perilous road to the Devil’s doorstep. And you will see how blind we remained, even as we stared into the face of evil.

  Your

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  Author of histories, comedies, and tragedies

  Rome and Imola: November 19—December 8,1502

  I

  My dearest, most darling Giovanni,

  We lived in two rooms in the Trastevere. This district of Rome lies across the Tiber from the old Capitol Hill, on the same side of the river as the Vatican and the Castel Sant’Angelo. Gathered around the Santa Maria church, the Trastevere was a village unto itself, a labyrinth of wineshops, inns, tanneries, dyers’ vats, and falling-down houses that were probably old when Titus Flavius returned in triumph after conquering Judea; many of the Jews who lived there claimed to be descended from his captives. But our neighbors came from everywhere: Seville, Corsica, Burgundy, Lombardy, even Arabia. It was a village where everyone was different, so no one stood out.

  Our rooms were on the ground floor of an ancient brick house off a narrow, muddy alley, with little shops and other houses crowding in on every side, their balconies and galleries so close overhead that we always seemed to go out into the night, even at noon. I kept my books and antique cameos hidden, displaying nothing that might tempt a thief—or reveal who I had formerly been. But we whitewashed the walls once a year and always swept the tiles, and you never slept on a straw mattress but always on good cotton stuffing; there was never a day we didn’t have flowers or fresh greens on our tiny table—or wanted for bacon in our beans.