In Florence it was a time of war. The battlegrounds were not the streets and piazzas but the soul of the city itself. The enemies not two armies but two men.
Il Magnifico
and Savonarola. There were no more festivals, save somber religious processions. Neighbors informed on neighbors, children on parents. Beauty, culture, and learning had been stripped from society. The joy Florentines once felt was replaced with fear of eternal damnation. I made do in Castella Lucrezia, though life there was a mere shadow of my former existence—a time when I was a respected citizen and a useful neighbor in the greatest city in the world.
The avenues were unnervingly quiet as I made my way toward the Palazzo Medici. What few people I saw made no greeting and would not even meet my eye. My destination was not the palace this day, but a special place adjacent to it—one that Lorenzo had created after the sudden and unexpected death of Clarice. It was a passing that Lorenzo mourned more for his children’s mother and the dutiful Italian wife she had been than for any loss of love or passion between them.
As I pushed open the heavy doors to the Medici Garden I heaved the deepest of relieved sighs, for this was nothing less than an Eden. Planted lushly and decorated with stone fountains and the finest of the family’s antiquities, it housed a school for up-and-coming artists. Here, the paintings and classical sculptures might need restoring. Others were meant only for teaching and inspiration. Amidst a stark city of pain my love had built a sanctuary of beauty and creation.
All along the garden’s perimeter were covered cubicles with young men hard at work in clay and stone. A maestro strolled from student to student making his comments.
I could see that Lorenzo had already arrived. He stood beneath a massive marble Hercules with his eldest son, Piero—now twenty-four—the only one of the Medici children of whom Lorenzo despaired. The daughters had been married. Another boy made cardinal. But the snobbery inherited from his indulgent mother, his arrogance and frivolity deeply worried his father, as Piero would one day rule Florence. Lines of frustration creased Lorenzo’s face as his son absently plucked living leaves from a rosebush and let them fall at his feet.
“We may, as you say, be the greatest family in Florence, but we are not royalty,” Lorenzo insisted. “We are simple citizens, Piero, like any other in the republic.”
“You want me to believe that we’re no better than hide tanners or silk dyers?”
“That is exactly what you must understand in your deepest heart! A hundred years ago our ancestors were charcoal burners. We made good in this city, but if we lose our humility we are no better than the tyrants Savonarola preaches we are.”
Lorenzo’s eyes rose to a window of the Monastery of San Marco that shared a wall with the Medici Garden, overlooking it. He had believed it a stroke of perverse irony to have built the school so that the newly appointed prior of the order—Savonarola himself—was forced to look down on the “Devil’s Playground” from his first-floor office.
“Look where your republican ideals have gotten us,” Piero said with a petulance that angered me.
I came to their side. “How can you so disrespect your father?” I said, surprising even myself. “He’s managed to keep five rival Italian states in a fine and measured peace. Foreign potentates curry his favor. Even Pope Innocent is kept pacified and subtly controlled. Your papa is the world’s greatest diplomat, yet you have no need for his advice.”
“I’d say I’m going out with my friends,” Piero said with a sneer, “but in Florence there is nowhere left to go. Oh, unless one wishes to go to mass.” He bowed perfunctorily to Lorenzo and did not bother a good-bye to me, then left the garden, slamming the heavy doors behind him.
Lorenzo could barely manage a smile at me, so distressed was he. “The boy is a disaster,” he said quietly. “There is a weakness in him. Not of the body, like my own. Of the spirit.”
Lorenzo spoke truly of his health. It was beginning to fail. None of my remedies seemed to halt the cruel progression of crumbling joints and unrelenting pain. Whenever we could we traveled to mineral waters. They eased the agonies for a time, but his duties always drew him back to Florence, and there was never a time that he refused to heed that call.
“I’ve had a letter from my father,” I told him. “His Indian wife has died.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“He’s always so brave, but I’m hearing homesickness in his words. I have nightmares of him dying in a strange land, alone and unloved.”
“Will he come back, do you think?”
“He’s always said he has no use for Vinci. I hope if he returns he’ll come here. I can make a home for him.”
“Come, let me show you something cheerful,” Lorenzo said. We went to a cubicle where a short young man with a squashed nose and a fierce intensity was tapping with a chisel on the finely wrought face of a small marble faun.
It was the Buonarroti boy—Lorenzo’s latest discovery. I knew that the young sculptor meant more to Lorenzo than a source of beautiful work for the Medici houses. Perhaps as a balm to the hurt of an unloving heir, he had recently adopted the artist, given him a room at the city palazzo, a salary, and an honored seat at his table.
“Michelangelo, show Cato what you’ve done.”
The boy smiled up at his patron with naked admiration and love. “Well,” he said, “when Lorenzo first saw me at work on the faun he poked fun at it because I’d given the creature a tongue and a mouthful of teeth. He said, ‘Don’t you know old people never have all their teeth?’” Michelangelo stepped aside and we peered at the faun’s face. One of its front teeth was conspicuously missing.
“He knocked it out the moment I left,” said Lorenzo, suppressing a smile.
“It is one thing to have a generous patron,” Michelangelo said, his eyes fixed humbly on the ground, “and quite another to have a wise one.”
“So it is,” I agreed, and we went on to enjoy the loveliness of the garden. I chanced a look up at Savonarola’s window and thought I saw a shadow suddenly disappear from behind it.
Lorenzo had seen it, too. “They say this place gives him fits,” he said, eyeing the classical statues in its center. “All these naked young Greeks.”
“He needs more than a fit,” I said, unable to hide the bitterness in my voice.
Lorenzo’s eyes grew unfixed, wandering. “What is needed,” he finally said, “is another good head on this problem.”
“I take it you know exactly on whose shoulders this head sits.”
“Oh, yes. And I think the choice will suit you very well.”
“So she is seriously considering sending the Genoese navigator west to find a new route to India?” Lorenzo asked with more than a touch of skepticism.
Roderigo Borgia, sharing a mineral bath with us in the ancient ruins at Chianciano Terme, dunked his head beneath the sulfurous hot waters and came up dripping before he answered. He was still a vibrant man at sixty, even more so shorn of his stiff cardinal’s robes, his long black hair slicked around his head, the thin lawn shirt clinging to his chest. He had agreed to meet us in this Sienese spa, away from the prying eyes of Rome.
“Isabella’s mind is made up. Ferdinand is unsure. So it is just a matter of time before this Christoforo Columbus sets sail. And of course she is very preoccupied at the moment.”
“She will really banish all the Jews from Spain?” Lorenzo asked, scowling.
“My countrywoman is set in her beliefs,” Roderigo answered. “If her Inquisition cannot rid her of the Jewish ‘swine,’ then she will have it another way.”
“Surely there is something you can do, Roderigo.”
“When I am pope, perhaps.”
“Will it be soon?” I asked. Despite the sulfurous odor, I could not help but luxuriate in the pool that was so old the Romans had built colonnades around it as a monument to
their
ancestors, the Etruscans. “I understand Innocent’s seizures are happening more frequently.”
“He’s got the constitution of a bull,” Roderigo said. “He may outlive us all.”
“Certainly me,” Lorenzo joked, but I knew there was more than a grain of truth in his jest. We were spending more and more time away from Florence, desperately seeking relief from his symptoms and pain. Mineral waters and mud baths. Caves that blew warm air from inside the earth to be breathed. Foul-tasting waters that were drunk to induce the excretion of liver bile. And soaks at
Sant’Elena
for his kidneys. I forbade him to drink red wine, to which he acceded—though cursed me to high heaven—and all meats, which he staunchly refused to give up.
Still, when the pain and inflammation grew excruciating my poor love was too ill to eat anything at all. Then I would sit with him, forcing him to sip warm water infused with the juice of lemons. I applied to his joints poultices of juniper leaves soaked in ley and thickened with powdered elm bark. These provided some relief, as did the curative waters, as long as we could stay awhile.
But Savonarola’s madness had completely poisoned the minds of our fellow Florentines. By the time Piero, who’d assumed the day-today responsibilities of ruling Florence, had sent word to his father that San Marco’s prior had thrown into his latest Bonfire of Vanities a pair of sodomites and a female prostitute, and no one had objected—Lorenzo had already written to Roderigo Borgia and requested a meeting.
The cardinal had been delighted to come, as Rome was in the midst of a blistering summer. Between the stink of the streets and the dust in the air thrown up by Innocent’s many building projects, the place had become unbearable. The thought of a cool Tuscany hill village pleased him as much as seeing his old friend Lorenzo.
Ascanio Sforza had agreed to stay behind to act as Roderigo’s eyes and ears at the Vatican during this crucial moment in the papacy. Innocent was, indeed, dying, and all but a few of the sixteen cardinals who would choose the new Holy Father were content with the thought of a Borgia pope. Despite his whispered reputation as a pagan, he had proven, after thirty-five years as the head of the Curia, to be a brilliant administrator, fair-minded and popular with the people. Should anything of import occur in Roderigo’s absence, Ascanio would send a courier posthaste.
“So what are we to do about this madman in your city?” the cardinal asked, taking his glass from the tiled edge of the tub.
“Stop him,” I said. “Bring sanity back to Florence.” In my years at Lorenzo’s side I had found my voice and could speak with authority to any man, even one who would, within the year, wear the papal tiara. “If his influence should spread outside of Tuscany to the rest of Europe, all its leaders will face the same scourge as Lorenzo has.”
“What is the prior’s weakness?” Roderigo asked. “Where are the chinks in his armor? That is where we will find our solution.”
We were quiet as we pondered, steam rising up around us.
“He is dishonest,” Lorenzo said, breaking the long silence. “So desperate is he to appear supernaturally blessed that he forces his friars to reveal to him the confessions of their parishioners. Then he inveighs about these citizens’ sins from the pulpit, pretending he gained his knowledge by divine revelation.”
“He steals confessions and makes them public?” Roderigo muttered incredulously.
“I think in his mania he has come to believe he
is
God,” I said. “One of the San Marco priests loyal to Lorenzo told me he saw Savonarola kneeling at the feet of a crucifix saying to the wooden Jesus, ‘If you lie, I lie.’”
“And he has begun to preach the Apocalypse,” Lorenzo added.
“Really?” Roderigo seemed intrigued by this. “Does he claim to be a prophet?”
“I’ve heard he calls himself the ‘Prophet of Doom,’” I said and grimaced, then added, “And he has prophesied Lorenzo’s death and the death of Innocent in the same year—1492.”
The cardinal was nodding thoughtfully.
“What is it, Roderigo?” Lorenzo asked.
“There is a prohibition in the church against false prophets,” he replied. “Here is a man who believes himself infallible, who is a cheat, and who is breaking a serious ecclesiastical rule. I believe,” he said with the hint of a sly smile, “that we have the beginnings of an answer.”
We had rented the whole of the grand villa of Solana, and except for our own servants were thankfully alone on the premises and therefore able to speak freely at our table after the evening meal. Lorenzo was blessedly pain-free after his soaking mineral bath and was as sharp and decisive as I had ever seen him.
“Then we will lay a trap for Savonarola,” he said, “proving him to be a false prophet. When he breaks canon law he will be chastised and prohibited from continuing to make his prophecies.”
“But in his arrogance he will defy the church,” said Roderigo, continuing the line of thought, “and the church, in reply, will throw its full force down upon his head.”
“But what are the prophecies?” I asked. “And how do we place them inside the man’s head?”
Lorenzo’s eyes seemed to gaze into the future. “I know the way we will suggest them. Let us try to discover the first of them. The others will come.”
As we sat quietly at the long table I was reminded of the last time we three had shared a board. It had been at the Vatican. The night Giovanni had been nominated for the cardinalate and two marriages had been announced—Cibo’s with Maddalena, and Maximilian’s with Bianca Sforza of Savoy. A picture began forming in my head. A memory of that night. All of us around the pope’s table. A surprising detail.
“Lorenzo,” I said. “Do you remember that portrait of Bianca Sforza as a girl?”
He thought a moment, looked into my eyes, and grew very still. I could tell he was flying back in time. We were sitting side by side in Innocent’s lavish dining room, Bianca’s portrait held between us.
“Yes,” he said. “Her sleeve.”
“Tell me,” Roderigo demanded, intrigued.
Lorenzo squeezed his forehead between his fingers. “It is convoluted and not altogether formed in my head. Tell him something, Cato. You know my mind.”