The Malice of Fortune Read Online Free Page A

general of the armies of the Holy Roman Church, famed throughout Christendom as Valentino, Duke of the Romagna, the prodigy who threw off his cardinal’s cap for a warrior’s helmet, the vanquisher of tyrants and the savior of all Italy. The son who will enable your grandfather, His Holiness Pope Alexander VI, to conquer the Kingdoms of the World without rising from the Heavenly Throne of Saint Peter. Perhaps by the time you read this, that papal empire will have grown far beyond its present boundaries, to spread from the heart of Italy across Europe.
    Indeed, if all my present fears come to pass, perhaps Fortune has already made you heir to that empire. But if that is so, then the Borgia have told you nothing about me but lies, save where the truth is worse.

    At last your grandfather interrupted his own meditation. “Juan was going to your house the night he was murdered. You alone were privy to that. You alone could have informed someone else.”
    I had sat at this pope’s table often enough, and had observed his methods sufficiently, to know how well he crafted false accusations from undeniable fact. Having anticipated such an interrogation for more than five years, I replied, “If you are claiming that I betrayed Juan by revealing his route to my house that night, God and the Holy Mother know that it was far easier for his murderers to follow him from his mother’s house near the Esquiline, where he had dined, as half of Rome knew. And you know as well as any man that the Orsini and the Vitelli had their knives out for him. They are the very condottieri who would profit most if the Borgia were erased from the earth.”
    Now, I should explain that we Italians have for several generations placed the very survival of our various states and principalities in the hands of these condottieri , a brotherhood of mercenary generals whose bands of thugs carry out, for a very dear price, the martial tasks the French king would assign to a vast army of men in permanent service, led by nobles who have sworn allegiance to him. Here in Italy, however, it is our fashion to hire the agents of our own destruction. These “soldiers of fortune” strut about like pimps in their suits of engraved armor, waging phony war among themselves only to pillage the livelihoods of helpless peasants, transferring their allegiances to whoever will offer the fattest contract. And the two families presently in command of this blood-sucking cabal are the Orsini and the Vitelli.
    “You made Juan the captain general of the Holy Roman Church,” I accused my accuser. “An office for which he was entirely unsuited and which he in no way desired. And it was you who directed poor Juan to throw his soldiers into one hopeless assault after another on the Orsini fortresses around Rome, which were defended all the better by troops under the command of the Vitelli. Even a cloistered nun could have seen that Juan’s assassins were Orsini or Vitelli. Or both. But you did not pursue them, did you, Holiness?” If I expected an answer, it was not forthcoming. “You were too weak to reckon with your own son’s murderers. Instead you made use of them.”
    My meaning was clear to him, though perhaps it will not be toyou. The popes who preceded your grandfather had surrendered much of the Church’s earthly domain, which at present occupies the entire middle of Italy and is known as the Papal States, to a host of tyrants large and small. Without the assistance of the Orsini and Vitelli, your grandfather and Duke Valentino could only dream of defeating this confederacy of despots. So they hired their former enemies, subordinating these condottieri to Valentino’s bold and clever command, and were thus able to reclaim the Papal States with a swiftness that inspired awe throughout Europe; we heard of these victories even in the half-buried alleys of the Trastevere. That is why your grandfather, having no wish to implicate his allies, found it far more convenient to