Cesare Borgia's Conquest of the Romagna
Cesare Borgia's second Romagna campaign turned a French expedition into a state of his own. The first had taken Imola and Forlì with French troops lent by Louis XII in exchange for a papal annulment, and the second in 1500 and 1501 took Pesaro, Rimini, Faenza and finally Urbino, which he seized in 1502 by asking its duke for artillery and then marching on him with it. The Romagna he was conquering had been papal territory in name for centuries and had been governed by families who paid nothing and fought each other constantly. What made him more than a condottiere was what he did after taking a town. He appointed a single governor for the whole province, Ramiro de Lorqua, with instructions to restore order by any means, and Lorqua did it with a brutality that produced quiet within a year. Cesare then had him cut in two and displayed in the square at Cesena on a December morning with a block and a bloody knife beside him, which left the province satisfied and stupefied — Machiavelli's words. He established a civil court of appeal at Cesena with judges from every city, so that grievances went to a tribunal rather than to a faction. The condottieri who had conspired against him at Magione were reconciled, invited to Senigallia in December 1502, and strangled. His father died in August 1503 and everything collapsed within months. Machiavelli was the Florentine envoy at Senigallia and wrote a short account of it that reads like a thriller. He admired the technique and recorded the collapse, and the lesson he drew was that a state built on borrowed arms and one man's father cannot survive either being withdrawn. The province itself is the part of the record usually left out. The lordships he removed had taxed arbitrarily and fought each other across the fields of people who had no part in the quarrel, and contemporaries from the Romagna wrote that the new administration was the first in living memory that could be appealed to. Cesare fell ill at the same moment as his father in August 1503, which he had not planned for and could not have. Julius II, elected in November, was a Della Rovere and an old enemy, and he took the fortresses back one by one and had Cesare arrested and shipped to Spain. He escaped and was killed in a skirmish in Navarre in 1507 at about thirty-one.
- Year: 1499 CE
- Category: Military
