The Family - Mario Puzo [115]
The golden bull carved on Cesare’s black chestplate shone bright in the noonday sun. His new armor was made light to allow greater freedom and still offer vital protection. Now he could fight effectively even on foot if he were dismounted.
Cesare’s men, heavily armored and atop powerful horses, were efficient fighting machines, difficult to stop and fearsome to oppose. His light cavalry was protected by chain mail and tough seasoned leather, armed with swords and lethal lances.
The infantry was made up of hardy Swiss soldiers with frightening ten-foot pikes, Italian troopers with various weapons, and swarthy Germans bearing crossbows and small-caliber long guns.
But the most devastating weapon of Cesare’s entire arsenal was Captain Vito Vitelli’s powerful Italian artillery.
Imola and Forli had always been a source of trouble in the Romagna. These two lands had once been ruled by Girolamo Riario, the rude and brutish heir of a powerful northern Italian family and the son of old Pope Sixtus. Girolamo had married Caterina Sforza, a niece of Milan’s Ludovico Sforza, when she was only a girl. When Girolamo was murdered twelve years later, Caterina had grown up and grown angry; instead of retiring to a convent, she mounted her horse and led her soldiers in swift pursuit of her husband’s killers.
When they were captured and brought before her, Caterina exacted a fierce and terrible revenge on the aristocratic assassins. She sliced off their genitals, lifted them with her own hand to place them in a linen handkerchief, and, with ribbons she had taken from her hair, tied their penises around their necks, for she thought them a breed not to be encouraged.
“These lands are mine,” she said, standing over them. “I had no wish to be a widow.” Then she stayed to watch as the blood from their bodies spilled onto the ground in small spidery veins of red until the murderers turned stiff and cold. Ah, what she would have done had she truly loved him.
Immediately upon her return, Caterina had claimed both Imola and Forli in the name of her son, Otto Riario, a godson of Pope Alexander. Once word spread throughout the towns and territories of her ruthless punishment, Caterina became as famous for her ferocity as she was for her beauty. For truly she was as vicious as any warrior—and as feminine as any duchess. Her long blond hair framed a fine-featured face; her skin, as soft as sable, was her pride; and though she was taller than many men, she was a beautiful woman. She spent much of her time with her children, and for enjoyment she often created special salves for her flawless pale skin, bleaches for her ash-blond hair, and lotions for her large, firm breasts which she often displayed almost uncovered. She used charcoal to shine her even white teeth, and it was said that she kept a book in which she journaled all her magic spells. It was well-known in the villages that she had an appetite for sensual pleasure that could equal any man’s. She was, in Renaissance terms, a true virago—a woman to admire for her courage and culture, a testimony to her powerful steely mind and unscrupulous will.
When she married again—and her second husband was also murdered—she again took a furious revenge. This time she had the limbs torn from the bodies of the assassins, and then hacked their remains to pieces.
Three years later she had married Giovanni Medici, and together they had a son. Bando Neir was the name of the babe, and he was her favorite child. She enjoyed having Gio as a husband; even his ugliness appealed to her, for in the night, and in the bedchamber, he was more of a man than any she’d known. But in the year just passed she had again become a widow. Caterina was now thirty-six years old, and so fierce that she had become known as the She-Wolf.
Caterina Sforza despised the Borgia family for their betrayal of her after her husband Riario died, and had no intention of allowing