As the war wore on the influence of Giovanni Sforza was seen as diminished. The Duke and the Cardinal Sforza were their own force that seemed impossible to penetrate or predict. As things went badly for the French, they went badly for the Duke. By the time forces were marshalling on either side of the Taro, before Fornovo, Giovanni's young wife Lucezia, then fifteen, had returned home to Rome and the Borgia court of Alexander VI. Giovanni would also come to Rome by 1496 and the couple would move into a palace at Santa Maria In Portico, near the Vatican.
There, returned from the less interesting country-living, Lucrezia seems, by all accounts, to have come into her own sense of self. There were her brothers and sisters to tend to and they were all their own personalities. The fact that her famous father Roderic Borgia, as pope, had so many children, and by different women, struck the whole Christian world as very strange. The fact that he doted on them so lavishly was not so bad, but he often promoted them too, to places often far above the regular course. But this pope seemed to dispense with the idea of humility itself and loved to spread the wealth that came to him, because of his power, to his friends and especially amongst his children. And he did this in a way that extended precedents in several fields.
Lucrezia's brother Cesare, by summer, already a Cardinal and not twenty years old, had a section in the Vatican above the pope's chambers where he took up his residence. But the party of the season in May 1496 was the home-coming, not of Lucrezia, but of her brother Gioffre and his wife Sancia, daughter of Alfonso of Aragon, now King of Sicily. With Lucrezia at sixteen and Sancia at eighteen, the two girls would become fast friends and live out a glorious summer at the head of a train of pageantry, in complete safety and security at the Vatican. When the couple came to Rome, the proud papa made sure the youth could see thesmselves and be seen in splendour. Hibbert tells us the couple arrived at the gate of San Giovanni in Laterano and, helpfully, gives us a quote from the master of ceremonies to the popes, Johann Burchard.
"The captain of the militia went to meet them with some 200 of his men-at-arms and the households and servants of all the cardinals, except for those of the prelates of the Pope, were also there to receive them."This captain was none other than the nineteen (or twenty) year old brother, Giovanni Borgia.
"All the cardinals had been invited that morning, by the couriers of the Pope acting in the name of the Cardinal Valence, to send their chaplains and squires, but not their prelates, to receive his brother Jofre on his entry into the city. All acceded to this request. "Thus, not the administrative or office holding members of the Church, but their often more youthful servants, attendants and squires.
"Lucrezia Sforza, daughter of His Holiness and wife of the illustrious Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, also went to the said gate to meet Don Jofre, her brother. She was accompanied by some twenty ladies and preceded by two pages on horseback wearing capes. One of the horses was covered in a magnificent cloth-of-gold caparison; the other in a caparison of red velvet. Lucrezia received Don Jofre and his wife with affection." [p.94]Hibbert tells us the train back to the Vatican had thirty mules loaded with luggage. They went past the Colosseum, the Campo dei Fiori, and the bridge past the Castel Sant' Angello. When they arrived, Hibbert also tells us the Mantuan ambassador thought that Lucrezia's beauty far surpassed that of the Spanish daughter Sancia of Naples. Her father had been King Alfonso II, but for only the brief period of the war, and had fled in late 1495 to Sicily. He died at Messina trying to both return to and escape from danger just over six months before. It was now her half-brother that was called King of Naples. He too would die before that year's fall had come.
In any event, the Mantuan ambassador, Hibbert tells us, reported that Sancia's ladies-in-waiting were 'a fine crop' that year, and Sancia herself 'had glancing eyes and an aquiline nose'. Giovanni had business to attend to in Spain that year. Gioffre found other amusements in Rome, apparently. There would be another party that year in August when Giovanni Duke of Gandia returned. But this was a summer where Lucrezia and Sancia were seen all over town. And Cesare had apparently taken a liking to Sancia, his younger brother Gioffre's wife.
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disentangled from Hibbert, Christopher: The Borgia's and their enemies: 1431-1519; Harcourt, Inc., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; US, 2008
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