Free The Borgias by G.J. Meyer

Naples and Rome and that the king claimed as rightfully his. The rift became unbridgeable when Alfonso sent a beautiful young woman with whom he had become infatuated, Lucrezia d’Alagna, to Rome to ask Calixtus to annul his forty-year marriage to Maria of Castile. Calixtus had already shown himself willing, within broad limits, to help the king with his wooing. He had agreed to the appointment of a cousin of Lucrezia’s as cardinal-archbishop of Naples, and to the marriage of her sister to Ausias del Milà, one of his own young kinsmen. The annulment of a royal marriage of almost forty years’ duration, however, was more than he felt able to give.Pressed for an answer, he told the young lady, who had been accompanied to Rome by an extravagantly costly entourage and was obviously hoping to become Naples’s queen, that he could not do as she asked because he did not wish to accompany her to hell. That marked the end of civil communications between Naples and Rome.
    Before long Calixtus was warning Alfonso that “Your Majesty should know that a pope can depose kings,” and Alfonso was replying that “Your Holiness should know that, should we wish, we shall find a way of deposing a pope.” When Calixtus refused to appoint a bastard son of the bastard Ferrante to the bishopric of Zaragoza in Spain—frustration was driving Alfonso to make increasingly outlandish demands—old resentments hardened into a cold hatred that would last until pope and king were both dead. Alfonso, in a quest for allies among the other rulers of Italy, began arranging what would become a set of marriage alliances with the Sforzas of Milan. His grandson and namesake was married to a daughter of Duke Francesco Sforza, and later a daughter of that union would be married to the third Sforza duke of Milan. The eventual consequences of these arrangements would have horrified Alfonso and Francesco alike had they been able to foresee them.
    The pope’s continuing appeals for unity and resistance to the Ottoman onslaught received the friendliest reception, not unnaturally, inthose places that were most directly threatened. One such place was the Serbian capital of Belgrade, an Orthodox bulwark against Turkish conquest of the Balkan peninsula and, as long as it could hold out, a shield protecting the rest of eastern Europe. Its survival at this juncture was in large measure the achievement of three extraordinary individuals, two of them sent by Calixtus from Rome. One was possibly the nearest thing to a military genius that Europe produced in the fifteenth century, the Hungarian János Hunyadi, who understood what a catastrophe the fall of Belgrade would be for his homeland and threw himself wholeheartedly into what many others saw as a cause already lost. The second was the Franciscan friar Juan Capistrano, who had been sent to Germany to preach Calixtus’s crusade and, upon learning that a showdown was approaching in Belgrade, recruited his own army of volunteers and, at age seventy, marched it the five hundred miles from Frankfurt to Serbia. The third was a veteran Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, whom Calixtus had dispatched to Hungary to help in whatever way he could. Together, the Hungarian general, the Neapolitan friar, and the Spanish cardinal managed to get the various nationalities and factions gathered at Belgrade to put their differences aside and focus on the threat outside the city’s gates. Drawing on resources made available by Calixtus’s order that all monies collected outside Italy for crusade purposes should be sent directly to Hungary rather than to Rome, they were able to assemble and arm enough men—albeit largely untrained men—to reduce the sultan’s numerical advantage to two against one. On July 22, 1456, a masterful counterattack by Hunyadi so shattered the Ottoman army that the sultan, himself wounded, had to abandon the siege. It was as great a defeat as Mehmed II would suffer in a career studded with