The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (7 page)

For them, she was simply a family bastard, an insignificant girl at that, who did not merit any special treatment from them. This cool attitude in itself might have surprised her. It is also possible that Felice arrived, not only full of self-confidence, but with a marked sense of superiority too. She was Roman, from the
caput mundi
, a city that was second to none, while Savona lived in the shadow of its more prosperous neighbour, Genoa. Felice came from a city filled with ancient temples, churches and palaces. During the papacy of Sixtus IV, Savona’s cathedral had been enlarged when he built a sumptuous chapel for his parents. In
1490
, Giuliano della Rovere gave a magnificent altarpiece by Vincenzo Foppa to Savona’s Oratory of Our Lady, featuring the Madonna and Child, and Giuliano himself kneeling as a donor, and the merchants’ houses became adorned with stylish
all’antica
decoration.
²
The Roman Felice could see it was hardly comparable to the city she had left behind. Undoubtedly she arrived with all the preconceptions city-dwellers have towards places they deem less sophisticated.

There were plenty of ingredients for conflict between a headstrong and lonely girl and her Savonese relations. They did not even share a first language. The Italian used for written correspondence or spoken between Italians of different towns or provinces was
toscana
, the language of Tuscany. But even today each province still has its own dialect, spoken exclusively by its natives. At home, Felice would have spoken
romanescha
, the language of the Romans. Her relatives in Savona spoke a Savonese variant on the Ligurian dialect. This linguistic difference would have served only to widen the gap between them.

What is important about this turn of events in Felice’s life is how it moulded her attitude towards her family. Her instinct was to trust and turn to those family members who were churchmen. She always had good relations with them, perhaps because she had had good experiences with the clergy in Rome as a child. But secular family members were a different matter. She tended to regard them with suspicion and isolated herself from them. Whatever might be said about there being little difference between legitimate and illegitimate children, the legitimate ones were always prepared to use their status as a trump card. It seems likely that Felice’s provincial relatives, taken aback by the self-possession and self-confidence of a child they viewed as a marginal member of their family, chose to remind her that she was not really one of them. Felice was not one to forget such slights.

Whether she liked it or not, Savona was to become her home. With Rome out of Giuliano della Rovere’s reach, he turned his attention to shaping Savona into a kingdom for himself. Part of his grand scheme was to encourage the French, his current allies, to invade Italy and take Genoa and Savona, then establishing him as prince in his native land. He spent a good deal of time in France trying to bring this about, but that did not mean he left Savona unattended. In a foreshadowing of his behaviour in the following decade, Giuliano set about creating a residence in Savona fit for its potential new lord. He hired the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo to build him a splendid palace in the style of those occupied by the Medici and their associates in Florence. The Palazzo della Rovere was the largest the city had ever seen, located at the highest point in Savona overlooking the harbour, on a parcel of land bought originally by Sixtus

IV. The palace, which was more magnificent than surrounding buildings, dominated the harbour front. It could easily be seen from the water, a symbol of Giuliano’s control of his city. The building was so impressive that in
1500
the town of Savona conferred citizenship on Giuliano da Sangallo, ‘master of stone and design’.
³

Re-creating Felice’s part in her father’s Savona plans is something of a challenge. Some time after
1497
, when she was fourteen, the acceptable age for girls to be married, Giuliano found a husband for her. Supposition, based on the available evidence, provides the following picture of the young Felice’s attitude to married life. Marriage was not at all to her liking.

chapter 10

Felice’s First Marriage

In
1505
, it would be said of Felice that she liked being widowed, and had turned down several husbands her father had put before her when he was a cardinal. Assuming that an inexperienced fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl, even without Felice’s apparent degree of pride and arrogance, would not have been so defiant or independent that she could refuse to marry the man her father proposed, we can deduce that she had accepted a husband at that age. This would have been around
1497
–
98
. We do not know the identity of her husband but logic dictates he would not have been a politically or socially powerful figure beyond the immediate community. He was most likely someone of local political influence, either from Savona or Genoa, who could assist Giuliano in his dealings in the area. Her spouse, who was undoubtedly dead by the beginning of
1504
, probably died some time before that date, as there had to be an opportunity for Felice to refuse further husbands her cardinal father proposed for her. So this was a brief marriage and, judging by her reluctance to repeat the experience, she did not enjoy it very much.

Of all the lacunae in Felice’s early life, this one is the most frustrating. It is impossible to determine exactly what went wrong to make her so resistant to the idea of remarrying. Did she enter marriage with the expectation of receiving from a husband the affection she had not been granted by her Savona relatives, and then found it lacking? Was she simply angry at being forced to marry a man from Liguria, which would mean that she would never be able to return to Rome? Whatever it was that happened in Felice’s first marriage, it certainly left a deep and apparently negative imprint on her psyche.

How, then, did widowhood affect the young Felice? Herein lies the key to understanding how Felice, widowed perhaps as young as sixteen, recognized her potential power. As a widow, she had some degree of financial independence. On her husband’s death, according to law, she would have received the dowry she had been given on her marriage. It was not necessarily large, but it would have provided an adequate means of support and was at her disposal for as long as she remained unmarried. Her recognition of this probably contributed to her reluctance to accept another husband. Why should she relinquish this degree of financial independence in exchange for another disagreeable marriage? Her father’s regular absence from Savona also meant that there was nobody who had direct control over her, who could try to force another husband on her. Felice never answered to another della Rovere relative.

Along with this financial independence came a certain status. In Savona, a della Rovere widow was far removed from a della Rovere bastard, and Felice saw the usefulness of the respect accorded her. It provided her with her first opportunity to negotiate with the business community of Savona.

As a widow, Felice would have lived in the new palace that Giuliano had built in Savona. In her father’s frequent absences, she became its chatelaine, and the position gave her a taste of power. The palazzo was more than simply a palatial home. It was the symbolic seat of his own power, and those anxious to ingratiate themselves with the cardinal came to its doors. Visitors included captains of the ships that docked in Savona’s harbour; they left gifts that might entice the cardinal and his family into future transactions. As did Savona’s merchants. There was a sense of intrigue about the palace. on those occasions when Felice’s father was in residence, emissaries would arrive for discussions on ways to overthrow Alexander. For Felice, this new life in the Palazzo della Rovere could in some ways replicate life in the Palazzo de Cupis. If she was not directly involved in the acts of international diplomacy, she certainly enjoyed the frisson of being so close to policy and intrigue. She wanted her own part in it.

On his return visits to Savona, Giuliano could see for himself that his daughter had a talent for negotiation. Felice knew almost instinctively how to set a deal in motion, how to get the most out of it, how to command the respect and trust of those with whom she bargained. At this level, and at her age, the negotiations might not have been very substantial, the acquisition of small amounts of foodstuffs or clothing materials, but it was very good training for what was to come later in life for this cardinal’s daughter.

There were also those who came to the palace door seeking help, those in Savona who had fallen on hard times, or who needed the influence of the town’s leading family. The last few years of her life had shown Felice a world in which she was perceived as an outsider. That sense of being on the outside looking in had made her unusually sympathetic to those on the margins. She was always willing to champion an underdog, to extend help and influence where she could.

These distractions aside, Felice was still anxious about her immediate future. A point would come when her father would lose patience and insist that she take a husband, perhaps again from the local community. Her position of relative independence could not last for ever. But then, another death occurred, one that once more changed the destinies of the exiled cardinal and his daughter. What has up to now been Felice’s phantomlike presence in history’s chronicles rapidly acquires deeper shadow and substance and colour.

part ii

The Pope’s Daughter

chapter 1

The New Pope

By August
1503
, Alexander VI had grown obese as a result of all the gluttonous and sybaritic events he had staged at the Vatican Palace. ‘This month is a bad one for fat people,’ lamented the Pope. By
12
August he had succumbed to the malaria carried by the mosquitoes that riddled the many as yet undrained swampy areas of Rome. A week later, the Spanish pope was dead. He was buried in the ancient rotunda once attached to St Peter’s called, ironically, Santa Maria della Febbre (‘Our Lady of the Fever’), designed to protect the faithful from the plague.
¹

Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere wasted little time in returning from exile and he arrived back in Rome on
3
September to participate in conclave. ‘I have come here on my own account,’ he said, ‘and not on other people’s.’
2
Anxious to secure the tiara for himself, that September he was to be unlucky. Too many opposing interests, including a strong French desire to see the election of one of their own, meant the crown fell into the hands of an outside candidate on
22
September. This was the aged Sienese cardinal, Francesco Piccolomini, who took the name Pope Pius III in memory of his own uncle, Pius II. It seemed as if Giuliano’s run of bad luck, which had begun over a decade earlier with the election of Alexander, was not yet over. But his fortunes were to change faster than he might have imagined. Just two weeks after becoming pope, the frail Pius fell ill. He was dead by
19
October. This time Giuliano did not intend to fail. He adopted the same recourse to bribery that had earned Alexander the tiara. He made promises he had no intention of keeping, in particular to the contingent of Spanish cardinals, whom he particularly loathed because of their affiliation with Alexander. None the less, as the Ferrarese ambassador remarked, ‘The Spanish cardinals do not intend to be poor when they come out of conclave.’
³
On
31
October, the cardinals entered conclave. They cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel and slept on trestle beds put up in the Vatican Palace’s audience halls, the Sala Regia and the Sala Ducale. This temporary accommodation was, this time, required for only one night. The cardinals returned with the quickest decision in the history of the process thus far and emerged the very next day, announcing the della Rovere cardinal as their new pope. Coincidentally, the
conclavisto
, the official responsible for locking and unlocking the cardinals in their sequestered quarters, was Bernardino de Cupis.
⁴
So it was her stepfather who presented to the world Felice’s biological father as
Il Papa
, the father of every Christian soul.