Lehal Library

to which every town was to send a representative and he placed a distinguished man in charge. And since he was aware that the recent severity had led some people to hate him, in order to have them change their minds, and hence win them over entirely to his side, he decided to show that if the regime had been cruel, that was due to the brutal nature of his minister, not to him. So as soon as he found a pretext, he had de Orco beheaded and his corpse put on display one morning in the piazza in Cesena with a wooden block and a bloody knife beside. The ferocity of the spectacle left people both gratified and shocked. But let’s get back to where we left off. Borgia had consoli- dated his power and secured himself against most immediate dangers, building up an army of his own and seeing off the majority of the other armies that had been near enough to attack him. At this point the only obstacle to further expan- sion was the King of France. Borgia knew the king had real- ized he’d made a mistake supporting him earlier on and hence would not put up with further adventures. So he began to look around for new alliances and was less than generous in his support when Louis marched south to fight the Spanish who were besieging Gaeta in the northern part of the King- dom of Naples. His aim was to be safe from French inter- ference, something he would have managed soon enough no doubt, if his father, Pope Alexander, had not died. So that was how Borgia dealt with the immediate situation. As far as the future was concerned, what worried the duke most of all was that his father’s eventual successor would be hostile and try to deprive him of the territory Pope Alexander had given him. He devised four strategies to guard against this: first, eliminate the families of all the local rulers whose land he had taken, thus denying a new pope the option of restoring them; second, win the support of all the noble families of Rome (as we’ve already seen) so as to put the brakes on any papal initiative; third, get as much control as