Free The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere by Caroline P. Murphy

marriage so that a son from a second could inherit was not necessarily abnormal in contemporary
    marital politics. The second part, that should there be no children Felice would receive Piombino, was much more unusual. Furthermore, Bibbiena remarked that she could dispose of the estate as ‘she’ pleased. He gives Felice an autonomy rare for a woman of this time, indicating her instinct to protect herself and her interests.
    Less than a month after Bibbiena’s report, however, the Piombino match was off. A Venetian in Rome wrote home in March noting that Julius had sent an emissary to France ‘to arrange a marriage between the Pope’s daughter with the son of the Duke of Lorraine’. 9 Perhaps Julius decided he would benefit more from a French liaison, with its international implications, than from the provincial Piombino match. The Duke of Lorraine, René d’Anjou, was an old political ally of Julius, and a marriage between their children would further cement this relationship.
    However, Felice herself might have voiced the opinion that the Piombino marriage was not to her liking. If it was in Julius’s interests to hold out for something better, then certainly the same was true for Felice. After meeting Jacopo Appiano, she perhaps felt that the potential prize of Piombino would not compensate her fully for however many years of matrimony she might have to endure. The Vatican officials and bureaucrats who were constant visitors to her stepfather’s house chattered and gossiped and probably told her, directly or indirectly, all she needed to know about Jacopo Appiano. Of great interest to her was that he had been passed over as a husband for Lucrezia Borgia. Felice might not have paid a great deal of attention to Lucrezia Borgia while she was herself only a cardinal’s daughter. However, what Lucrezia had been given was now a benchmark for what Felice wanted for herself. The notion of settling for a Borgia reject was not something she would have been able to tolerate.
    Nor did anything come of Felice’s potential Lorraine marriage, although whether interest waned on the bride’s or groom’s side is not known. Shortly after the French union was broached, Felice sailed back to Savona for a brief period. Her return is the first indication that Julius did see his daughter as more than material for the marriage market, for when she went back, he had her act as an agent of good will between himself and the Savonese mercantile community. They were evidently anxious to hear that they would receive favourable treatment in Rome now that there was a pope who was one of their own. Julius’s uncle Sixtus had seen himself as specifically Savonese; inscriptions emblazoned across the Vatican Palace from his reign read ‘Sixtus IV Saonensis’. Julius was not quite so parochial in his outlook. He preferred to identify himself by way of his province, Liguria, which meant he could exploit a connection with the more powerful and wealthy city of Genoa. None the less, he had no desire to alienate his native city’s business people and was ready to take advantage of the good relations his daughter had established in Savona. Before she departed again for Rome, Felice, awaiting a boat from Genoa, wrote once more to the Savonese commune , assuring them that the ‘Pope holds you dearly in his heart and loves the city more than any man has ever loved his patria ’. 10
    This stay in Savona provided Felice with a period of respite from the ongoing campaign to find her a husband. It also allowed her to perform in a role that was instinctively hers. Ironically, she was a natural cardinal nipote , she loved mediation and diplomacy, and particularly enjoyed helping those weaker than herself. Julius was described as ‘always on the alert to shield the humblest of his subjects from oppression’, and in this respect, as in others, Felice was her father’s daughter, taking time to deal with small grievances in the midst of major crises. 11 Like