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172 Rossella Cancila

Turkish up until then, even if always ambiguous and marked by tactics
and blackmail. The King of France, Louis XII also joined, but was
defeated at Mitilene in 1501: it was to be the last defeat of a French king
on crusade. Some decades later, in 1536, the most Christian Francis I,
heir of Charlemagne and Louis IX, agreed terms with the Ottoman
Sultan, an alliance defined as impious by Spanish propaganda,
promoted in order to avenge the shame of Pavia and oppose Charles V’s
hegemony in Europe, something feared by the Pope as well after the
Sack of Rome in 1527.
The Borgia Pope’s crusade is to be seen in a climate of the recom -
mencement of hostilities and of a return to arms, after a phase of
intense contacts between Rome and Istanbul. A key person in the
transactions of those years is Cem, the younger brother of Bayezid, who,
defeated in the race to the throne, had taken refuge on Rhodes, and
then was sold to France and at last ceded to the Pope who kept him
until 1489 largely in agreement with the Sultan: Bayezid in actual fact
paid 40,000 Venetian ducats a year for his brother’s upkeep and de
facto to keep him away from Istanbul, a sum which constituted a
regular income in the Papal accounts. In this way Pope Alessandro VI
used Cem skilfully as a weapon of blackmail, letting the Sultan know
that if the Kingdom of Naples had fallen into the hands of Charles VIII
it would have been unlikely that the hostage would be kept in Rome,
and instead would be sent to Turkey to harass the Sultan. In addition
the Mameluke sovereign of Egypt, Bayezid’s enemy, would have paid a
huge fortune just to get his hands on Cem; and the Pope himself could
have used him in the case of persecutions of Christians in Hungary and
Croatia. Bayezid responded to the Pope’s solicitations in his turn with
letters, at least five, and in one especially scandalous letter he suggested
the Pope kill Cem, «who in any case is subject to death …. Might be
hastened to death, which would be for him a new life and would
represent benefit and peace for Your Power and for us great satisfaction»
(p. 61). He left the Pope ample freedom of choice concerning the means
to be used in return for 300,000 ducats, paid in advance and in trust.
Cem died in 1495 in mysterious circumstances in Naples – where he
found himself after being taken from the Pope by Charles VIII according
to an official agreement – and a great scandal resulted from this, all the
more because the correspondence (the Pope’s instructions to his envoy
and five letters with the Sultan’s replies) had in the meantime been
intercepted by Giovanni Della Rovere, ruler of Senigalia, brother to the
Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere, the future Pope Giulio II, enemy of the
Borgia, and the correspondence was then sent to Florence where it was
translated and published by the notary Filippo Patriarchi.
The question remains as to how to assess the authenticity of the
translation and of the documentation, the original version of which, what

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVI - Aprile 2019 n.45
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)