CHAPTER THREE
“Where is Il Valentino?” asked Leonardo plaintively, not for the first time.
Urbino had hummed with that question for three days, as the duke’s absence became increasingly obvious and his lieutenant Ramiro de Lorqua, who stood out as a brute even among his Spanish soldiers, ruled with an iron hand. Blackfield had carefully held his peace, and he did nothing to enlighten Leonardo now.
“Oh, probably some surprise inspection tour,” he lied. In fact, he had a very good idea where Il Valentino had gone.
Soon, his supposition was confirmed in all respects—except that Borgia had, astonishingly, taken a detour to Ferrara to visit his sister Lucrezia who was pregnant by her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s son. Apparently their meeting had been so intense, with intimate conversations in their native Catalan, incomprehensible to Italians, that she had suffered a relapse after his departure. (Blackfield, like everyone else, was always careful not to repeat the rumors that Borgia’s feelings for her went well beyond the normal scope of brotherly affection.) But then he had continued on to what Blackfield had been sure was his real destination, arriving on August 5 at King Louis’ court at Pavia.
For Borgia had taken the kind of breathtakingly reckless gamble so characteristic of him, slipping out of Urbino in disguise and going to personally confront the King and persuade him not to listen to his enemies, who had had time to make their cases. Those enemies were a choice lot, including Guidobaldo, the fugitive Duke of Urbino, and Giovanni Sforza, deposed lord of Pesaro and Lucrezia’s former husband. (The pope had forced him to publicly declare himself impotent so the marriage could be annulled to make way for a more advantageous one.) And lately they had been joined by two cardinals: the grimly formidable Giuliano della Rovere, onetime rival of Rodrigo Borgia for the papacy, and Giambattista Orsini, who had fled Rome to warn the king against Alexander VI and his son.
But from everything he had learned by keeping his mouth shut and his ears open around Urbino, Blackfield was fairly confident the gamble was going to succeed. The Borgias’ opponents had reckoned without one thing: King Louis genuinely liked Duke Valentinois, who had lavished on him all the charm he was capable of bringing to bear when necessary.
It soon became apparent that Blackfield’s instinct was right, as messages began to arrive from Milan. Borgia’s enemies were beginning to slink away from the court, and Vitellozzo had finally and grudgingly obeyed orders and withdrawn from Arezzo. These messages also included instructions for Leonardo, who promptly complied by preparing to set out on his inspection tour of the Romagna. Blackfield interpreted his own earlier orders as meaning he should accompany the engineer—and, at any rate, Bishop Soderini had by then returned to Florence.
Setting out in fine early August weather, they took two days to reach the Adriatic coast at Pesaro. It gave Blackfield a chance to see, for the first time, Leonardo’s penchant for observing everything. And what he observed clearly did not impress him.
“The Romagna,” he exclaimed to Blackfield as they rode through farmlands, “is the chief realm of all idiocy. Look at that!” He pointed at a peasant who was struggling with one of the ubiquitous local carts. “That thing places all the weight on the two small wheels at the front, making it unnecessarily difficult to pull. Why don’t they use a more efficient design?” He gave a headshake of exasperation, and Blackfield looked blank. In his experience, things were done the way they were simply because… well, because that was the way things were done. This whole business of systematically searching for improvements and innovations was a new thing in the world.
They remained at Pesaro for only a short time, most of which Leonardo spent immured in that city’s well-known library. Then they made their way up the coast twenty miles to Rimini. Two days later, on August 10, they arrived at Cesena, capital of the Romagna, in the midst of the Feast of San Lorenzo. Leonardo’s notebooks continued to grow, and at Cesena he set up a workshop.
One day, Blackfield found himself waiting for Leonardo in that workshop. Neither Salaì nor any of the maestro’s other assistants were about, and Blackfield strolled around the cluttered room, glancing with only minimal curiosity at things that meant nothing to him. Then, in a corner, he noticed something odd: a wooden cone about three feet across, not very steep, with what looked like a tiny cupola at the top. At first he thought it must be a model of a building of some kind. But then, looking closely, he noticed four wheels beneath it. Puzzled, he knelt down to get a better look at them. Then, with his eyes close to the floor, he noticed what looked like the muzzles of tiny cannon protruding under the eaves of the conical roof, all around the circumference of the thing.
“Ah, my model,” came a familiar voice, as Leonardo entered the workshop.
“But a model of what?” Blackfield asked as he got to his feet.
“I don’t really have a name for it yet. It’s one of the things that caught Il Valentino’s eye when we met in Milan.” Leonardo touched a latch on the surface of the thing, and part of its roof swung aside to reveal the interior, holding a bewildering four-part set of machinery. Blackfield saw at once that what he had thought resembled cannons were, in fact, just that.
“The surface,” Leonardo explained, “would be hardwood reinforced with metal. The turret at the top is for sighting. The wheels would be turned by cranks operated by men. I considered using horses, but they might become uncontrollable if confined inside, with the noise of the guns. So it wouldn’t be able to move very fast, and would only be practical on a level battlefield, but…” His voice trailed off, but he had said enough. Blackfield now understood what he was looking at. And he tried to imagine the effect on an army that saw a full-sized version of such a moving fortress rumbling toward it, belching fire from all sides.
It was as though Leonardo read his thoughts. “Naturally, I considered the possible danger of this getting into the wrong hands.” Blackfield wondered what could possibly be the right hands. But before he could raise the point, Leonardo resumed with a smile. “So in my sketches, and in this model, I deliberately incorporated a flawed design, as you can see if you look at the cranks.” (Blackfield could see no such thing.) “If built as shown here, they would act against each other, and the machine could not move.” He exuded satisfaction at his own cleverness.
“One problem,” BLackfield said, taking refuge in practicality. “The men firing those guns would have to leap outside every time they wanted to reload them.”
For an instant, Leonardo looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. “Oh. I see. You’re thinking in terms of loading the powder and shot into the muzzles.”
“Well, of course,” said Blackfield with a touch of impatience. How else? he thought.
“Oh, they wouldn’t have to do that. Come let me show you.” Leonardo led the way to a table and rummaged among his notebooks. “Ah, here it is.” He pointed at a set of drawings. “I’ve long thought the chief drawback of artillery is the time it takes to reload—not to mention the danger of having to run around to the front of it. So I’ve halved that time by devising a means of opening and resealing the breech.”
Blackfield stared. But then his eye was caught by another drawing. It looked somewhat like an artillery carriage, with wheels to the side and a limber behind. But instead of a cannon barrel, it had a triangular framework, each of whose sides held a row of tubes.
Leonardo noticed his interest. “Oh, that. Well, if a gun fires too rapidly—not normally a problem—the barrel will overheat. So I devised this method. Each row of barrels is fired, either one at a time or all at once. Then the framework is turned around to the next side of the framework. And then the next. By the time it comes around to the first side, the barrels will have cooled. So a continuous fire can be maintained.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose you’d call it a gun-machine… or perhaps a machine-gun.”
Blackfield said nothing. He was visualizing the dense formations arquebus-men had to fight in, making up for their weapons’ inaccuracy with sheer volume of fire, and the equally dense formations of the pikemen who protected them from cavalry charges. One of these things would turn the men in one of those formations into sausage meat.
“I began to study these matters,” he heard Leonardo saying, “while I was under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. I read Roberto Valturio’s On the Military Arts—in fact, I taught myself Latin to do so. He had many interesting ideas, but most of them were fanciful. I have improved on them by applying rigorous mathematical analysis to them to produce working drawings of machines that would actually work. So you see, the application of reason to the natural world and its workings holds as good for war as for other forms of human activity.”
Blackfield spoke slowly. “Maestro, war the way you’ll have us waging it isn’t war. It’s murder.”
And, he added silently, I now understand why Il Valentino wanted your services so very much.
**********
Yet further evidence of that arrived on August 18 by courier from Pavia, where Borgia was still engaged in his charm offensive at Louis XII’s court. Despite all else he had on his mind, the duke hadn’t forgotten the document he had promised Leonardo back at Urbino, giving him free passage throughout the Romagna. Now it arrived, and it was everything the duke had promised, commanding his subordinates to afford the engineer every assistance.
By that time, those subordinates were no longer headed by Ramiro de Lorqua. A few days earlier, another message from Pavia had dismissed the brutish Spaniard from his governorship of the Romagna and placed him in a purely military post at relatively out-of-the-way Rimini. The general opinion was that this reflected doubts as to Lorqua’s loyalty—he had always been a crony of Vitellozzo and the Orsini. Blackfield suspected there was another motive as well: after having so far ignored every instrument of government except terror, Borgia was now seeking to gain the gratitude of the Romagna’s people by freeing them from the brute he himself had placed over them. His opinion was shortly confirmed when Borgia announced Lorqua’s replacement: the highly regarded jurist Antonio di Sansavino, who proceeded to set up a model administration, respecting local privileges while establishing a central Rota, or court of appeals, on which every city was represented.
By this time, they were on the road, armed with Leonardo’s passport, and inspecting the defenses of the Romagna cities. There was much to inspect. Even the most impregnable of medieval fortresses could be reduced to rubble by the new heavy artillery first introduced into Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494. Leonardo had already recommended that Borgia obtain such guns from the foundry at Brescia (the only place in Italy capable of manufacturing them) rather than remain dependent on Louis XII. Now he ordained the destruction of the more hopelessly obsolete fortifications and the renovation of the rest, altering their geometry with mathematical precision so as to maximize the chance of cannon balls bouncing off at an angle rather than scoring direct hits.
Then, in the first week of September, came the word that Borgia had left King Louis’ court and (after another detour to visit his sister in Ferrara) was on his way back to the Romagna. His bold gamble had paid off beyond all expectations. His enemies were discredited, and the king had pressured his sworn enemy Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, into agreeing to an alliance with him, cemented by a betrothal of Gonzaga’s three-year-old son to Valentino’s two-year-old daughter Louise. He had also obtained a promise of more French troops, in exchange for free passage through the papal territories when Louis marched south to asset his claim to the throne of Naples.
Assert it against the Spaniards, who he himself brought into Italy by offering to divide Naples with them, thought Blackfield with a mental chuckle. I’m sure Machiavelli doesn’t approve. But then, Machiavelli had always considered the French hopeless at statecraft.
There were other elements of Borgia’s agreement with Louis. One rather vague one was that he was to have a free hand in dealing with certain enemies. More and more, Blackfield was becoming convinced that he knew who those enemies were.
Machiavelli, he thought, would have been proud of him.