These were taken off one by one with the appropriate words for the degradation… Then their faces and hands were shaved as is customary in this ceremony…When all three had been hanged a fire was made on the platform upon which gunpowder was put and set alight, so that the said fire burst out with a noise of rockets and cracking. In a few hours they were burnt, their legs and arms gradually dropping off. Part of their bodies remaining hanging to the chains, a quantity of stones were thrown to make them fall, as there was a fear of the people getting hold of them.
— CHAPTER 11 — Murder
‘HIS HOLINESS… THINKS OF NOTHING BUT THE WAY IN WHICH HE MAY SAFELY LAY HANDS ON THE GUILTY MEN’
‘ON WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 1497,’ so Johannes Burchard carefully recorded:
Cardinal Cesare Borgia and Don Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandía, both dear sons of His Holiness, had supper with Donna Vannozza, their mother, and some other guests, in her villa near the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. After the meal, and since night was coming on, the Cardinal suggested to his brother the Duke that they should return to the Vatican; and so they mounted their horses and left with only one or two servants to accompany them. They rode together almost to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza’s palace, which had been built by His Holiness when he was vice-chancellor. At this point the Duke told his brother that he wanted to go out in pursuit of further pleasure before going back to the palace.
Juan, therefore, left his brother, dismissed the few servants he had with him, except for a footman and a mysterious man in a mask who had joined Juan during the supper party at his mother’s and who, moreover, had been to see Juan at the Vatican almost every day for the past month.
Juan made room for this masked man to ride behind him on his mule, and they rode off together to the Piazza degli Ebrei, where Juan told the footman to wait there an hour and then, if he had not returned, to go back to the Vatican. Soon afterward the footman was attacked and badly wounded. Discovered in a pool of blood, he was dragged into a nearby house, whose owner was so frightened that he refused to report what had happened until the next morning, by which time the man was dead.
By now Juan’s disappearance was causing consternation at the Vatican Palace. Alexander VI hoped that perhaps he had spent the night with a woman and had not wanted to be seen leaving her house in daylight. But the longer Alexander VI waited for his son’s return, the more anxious he became.
He made urgent enquiries in the area where Juan was known to have been the night before. One of those questioned was a timber merchant whose practice it was to have his wood unloaded from boats in the Tiber not far from the hospital of San Girolamo degli Schiavoni. This man said that he had been keeping a watch on a delivery of timber when, close to midnight, he saw two men walk down to the riverbank, where they looked about them, presumably to see if the coast was clear. Shortly afterward two other men stealthily approached the water, where they were joined by a man on a white horse, which appeared to have a corpse slung across its back. He and the four other men then moved silently along the riverbank, halting just past a place where sewage and rubbish were customarily thrown into the water.
Here the dead body was pulled from the horse and hurled into the Tiber. The rider who had brought it then asked the others if it had sunk. He was assured that it had; but, noticing the corpse’s cloak still floating on the surface, he threw stones at it until it had disappeared from view. The five men then left the river together and were soon lost to sight.
All this the timber merchant related when questioned. Asked why he had not reported these events earlier, he replied that he must have seen at least a hundred bodies thrown into the river at that point and had never thought much about it.
Fishermen and boatmen were now called up and ordered to drag the riverbed. They soon found Juan’s body. It was fully dressed, with a purse tucked into a belt, which still contained 30 ducats. He had been stabbed repeatedly in his body, legs, and head.
The corpse was then taken to Castel Sant’Angelo, where it was stripped, washed, and dressed in military uniform before being taken to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in a procession led by over one hundred torchbearers, ecclesiastics, and members of the dead man’s household, all, so Burchard related, ‘marching along, weeping and wailing and in considerable disorder.’
Alexander VI was distraught, ‘shutting himself away in a room in grief and anguish of heart, weeping most bitterly… From the Wednesday evening until the following Saturday morning, he ate and drank nothing, whilst from Thursday morning to Sunday, he was quiet for no minute of any hour.’
On the Monday, June 19, the pope made a solemn announcement at a special consistory called for that morning:
The Duke of Gandía is dead. A greater calamity could not have befallen us for we bore him unbounded affection. Life has lost all interest for us. It must be that God punishes us for our sins, for the Duke has done nothing to deserve so terrible a fate.
WHEN HE HAD RECOVERED from the first pangs of grief, the pope determined to reform the Curia, the papal government. ‘We are resolved without delay to think of the Church first and foremost, and not of ourselves nor of our privileges,’ he announced, adding that ‘we must begin by reforming ourselves.’ For years the Curia had been allowed to become lax and corrupt, manned by officials who were steadily enriching themselves at the Church’s expense. He established a reform commission that produced a highly critical report. His enthusiasm soon evaporated, however; and having ordered the arrest of one of his more self-serving officials, Bartolomeo Flores, the archbishop of Cosenza, Alexander VI quickly abandoned his proposed programme of reform and helped himself to much of the fortune that the archbishop had managed to accumulate.
Flores, deprived of his see, was taken from his dungeon to a cell in Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was required ‘to wear a gown of coarse white cloth and a heavy white cap, to sleep on a straw mattress, to be content with one cask of water and three loaves of bread a day, one jug of oil and a lamp, a breviary, a Bible and a copy of the Epistle of St Peter.’ He died in his damp cell soon after his incarceration there, and his body was taken to the Church of Santa Maria in Transpontina, and there buried ‘without any torches, mourners, church ceremony or service.’
Meanwhile, several men had been questioned about Juan’s murder. Alexander VI had sorely missed his favourite son while Juan had been in Spain and had called him back to Rome, appointed him to command the papal armies, unsuited though he was to such a challenge, and had given him what was considered the undemanding task of turning the troublesome Orsini family out of the castle at Bracciano.
Juan’s failure at Bracciano and his seduction of Sancia, Cesare’s mistress, had infuriated Cesare, fuelling his jealous dislike of Juan as the obvious favourite, though unworthy and conceited second son. Jofrè also had cause to feel affronted at Juan’s behaviour. Nor were the two brothers the only men suspected of Juan’s murder, for this was a man with many enemies, particularly among the Orsini and their allies.
A few weeks after the murder, on July 1, the Florentine envoy in Rome reported that since Alexander VI no longer showed much interest ‘as to the man guilty of the murder,’ it was ‘held to be certain beyond any doubt that His Holiness has now discovered the truth, and that he thinks of nothing but the way in which he may safely lay hands on the guilty men.’ And later that year, Manfredo Manfredi, the Mantuan ambassador, told the Duke of Ferrara: ‘It seems that, more than ever, the Pope gives signs of blaming the Orsini for the murder of his son; and it is believed that he is disposed to avenge it.’ At the same time, it was reported from Venice: ‘His Holiness intends to ruin the Orsini because they certainly caused the death of his son, the Duke of Gandía.’