The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere by Caroline P. Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

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    years later he had the young Ferrante Gonzaga held as hostage at the Vatican court in return for his father’s, the Marquis of Mantua’s, loyalty to the papacy. This kind of hostage-taking had a long history, dating back to the ancient world. Giuliano might have been a somewhat distant father to Felice, but he knew that Alexander would not hesitate to seize her if he felt that he could then force her father’s hand. It would not be safe for Felice della Rovere to stay in Rome any longer.
    The assertion that this is what happened to Felice is based on a combination of speculation and available historical material. It is evident that Felice did spend her earliest years with her mother and the de Cupis family because of her closeness to them later on, not to mention her almost instinctive understanding of how Rome worked. Yet, in 1504 , contemporary accounts describe her as ‘Madonna Felice da Savona’ implying that the della Rovere home town was now her place of residence.
    Felice was taken from the de Cupis palace, from the home of her mother and stepfather, brothers and sisters. She knew that, like other girls, at the age of fifteen or sixteen she would have left home to be married. But she was little more than eleven, young to be leaving the only home she had ever known. Moreover, even on her marriage, she might not have expected that she would have to leave her city, because it was very likely that her husband would have been a Roman. She could never have imagined that she would have to leave, by boat, for her father’s native city of Savona, to be placed in the care of her della Rovere relatives.
    As a young girl living in the centre of Rome, Felice had had little opportunity or need to travel very far. It is probable that the longest journey she had ever taken was to cross the Tiber river to visit St Peter’s or her mother’s family in Trastevere. Now she boarded a boat, a mode of transportation that was completely alien to her, to undertake the five-hundred-kilometre journey north along the Tyrrhenian coastline. Nor were sixteenth-century ships remotely comfortable; their decks sloped, making moving around challenging for the uninitiated. 4 The voyage can have served only to heighten Felice’s fear and growing indignation.
    That Felice was well aware that it was the Borgia who were driving her out of her native city is indicated by a story she would tell a little later in life. While at sea, she believed a Borgia ship was chasing her boat and she vowed that she would throw herself into the water rather than be taken by its sailors. Her father’s enemy became her own. In fact she had her own personal grievance against them: they had taken her from her family. Awaiting her in Savona might be her blood kin, but Felice della Rovere, despite her name, was a daughter of Rome not of Savona.

    chapter 9
    The Adolescent Felice
    Savona was very different from Rome, not simply in terms of its size and history, but also in its social structure. Unlike Rome, Savona was not a city that fed off the Church, populated by bureaucrats, and where a cardinal’s daughter, living in their midst, was revered as something special. Instead Savona was a small harbour town, whose important men were its merchants. 1 In Rome, the della Rovere cousins Felice knew, such as her cousin Girolamo Basso, were churchmen. Now she was to encounter secular relations such as her aunt Luchina, Giuliano’s sister, and her cousin Lucrezia, who was almost the same age as her. If Giuliano had given any thought to the matter at all, he might perhaps have expected Luchina to become a second mother to Felice and Lucrezia a new sister.
    But the absence of any contact between Felice and Luchina and Lucrezia once Felice was an adult suggests that their relationship did not develop along these lines. It is not hard to imagine the young Felice, on the cusp of adolescence, arriving in Savona unhappy at having been taken from the only family she knew and with