"Fortune helps the intrepid and abandons the cowards. I am the daughter of a man who did not know of fear. Whatever may come, I am resolved to follow that."
Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), also called "La Tigre" (the name is already telling) is perhaps the cleanest Italian Renaissance SLE example available, with the warrior-condottiera life of her grandfather Francesco Sforza and her son Giovanni delle Bande Nere flanking her on either side as likely SLEs of the same lineage. This type is recognizable in the lifelong preference for action over books (even if she was interested in alchemy), the personal command of sieges in armor, the willingness to seize papal fortresses while seven months pregnant, the use of torture against opponents and their families.
Caterina was clearly a woman of higher than average intelligence, partially because she received an excellent humanist education at the Milanese court, where her grandmother Bianca Maria Visconti trained her in command and warfare alongside the boys of the family, but every available source claims that she preferred the active life over the study of books. The type, while not uninterested in the world-and-humanity issues, characteristically chooses physical-military activity over contemplative-intellectual life when given both options, and Caterina chose accordingly from childhood.
The 1484 ride to Sant'Angelo is the first major action of her adult career and shows the type already operating at full pitch. As Pope Sixtus IV lay dying, Caterina, seven months pregnant, rode on horseback to the Castel Sant'Angelo, seized the papal castle, and threatened the College of Cardinals with its artillery to secure her family's position during the succession. The cluster of features is very much SLE in its Talanovite formulation: the rapid mobilization, the willingness to act on the moment, the disrespect for the existing order when it impedes the goal, the readiness to use force at scale against high-status opponents.
The episode after Girolamo Riario (her first husband)'s assassination shows the type's tactical intelligence at work. After the Orsi conspirators killed him and took Caterina and her children hostage, she persuaded the conspirators to let her enter the Rocca di Ravaldino, where the garrison was refusing to surrender, on her promise to persuade them to give up the fortress. Once inside, she sealed the gates and refused to submit to her captors' demands. The conspirators threatened to kill her children. The famous gesture, lifting her skirts and pointing to her pubic area while crying "I have enough here to make more!", is probably apocryphal but, as the National Geographic version puts it, "has a ring of truth." Whether or not she said the words, she held the fortress, her children survived, and she then proceeded to hunt down the conspirators and their families, having them tortured and killed. This is SLE at its most brutal: the targeting not just of the actual conspirators but of their kin reveals the indifference to the moral considerations that would have constrained other types. The Britannica formulation is direct, noting "her cunning, audacity, and extreme brutality as a warrior and a ruler." She defied the morals of the time by genuinely falling in love and marrying the second time. When her second husband was killed in a conspiracy, she reacted with evem greater brutality, killing even the young children of the conspirators.
The 1499–1500 defense of Ravaldino fortress against Cesare Borgia is her most famous action. Caterina retreated there from Borgia's troops with about a thousand soldiers, and refused every peace offer. She commanded the defense personally in armor for weeks. The fortress was finally breached after a battle that impressed Borgia himself. Her own line during the defense — "If I have to lose, I want to lose in a manly way" — is quite characteristic of the type.
In fact, Caterina and Cesare Borgia were recognized by their contemporaries as similar figures, like the Encyclopedia.com article about him notes: Cesare was "like Caterina herself: far more a person of action than of books and words." Both were bold, audacious, willing to use force and fraud, focused on power maintenance, indifferent to moral constraint, calm under threat. Cesare was the model for several features of Machiavelli's Prince. Machiavelli met Caterina personally in 1499 on his first diplomatic mission, and his subsequent writings include her as one of his exemplars of virtù — the active capacity to bend circumstance to one's will. Two SLEs of comparable temperament, fighting each other in 1499–1500, while Machiavelli, a more cerebral type (WSS has him as ILI, and it's plausible at least), observed and took notes that would result in a mini-revolution of European political thought.
The contempt for weakness is the SLE marker that completes the picture, and it operated in Caterina's relations with her own children as well as her enemies. Her eldest son Ottaviano, for whom she had ruled as regent and whose rights to Imola and Forlì she defended through three wars, "had grown into a lazy young man with great ambition and few abilities." Caterina despised him for it and continued to rule in his place even after he came of age. Her youngest son Giovanni, by contrast, "inherited his mother's forceful, militant personality" and became Giovanni delle Bande Nere, one of the great Italian captains of arms of the early sixteenth century — the only one of her eight children she fully approved of.
A note on her somewhat scientific interest in alchemy: SLE actually scores average in "interested in world and humanity issues" and "scientific thinking" traits. While not a typical scientist type, having a somewhat inquisitive mind about the outside world, in particular, in more practical pursuits, is quite common for representatives of that type of higher-than-average intelligence. Caterina's Experimenti was a recipe collection: alchemical preparations for cosmetics, herbal medicines, poisons, dyes, beauty treatments, household chemistry. She compiled it across decades through actual experimentation with materials, not through theoretical speculation.
The end is characteristic. After Borgia took Ravaldino, Caterina was held prisoner for two years, attempted escape from the Belvedere villa, was sent to Sant'Angelo (the fortress she had seized fifteen years earlier), and was finally released in 1501 after the French king intervened. She retreated to Florence, fought a long custody battle to recover her son Giovanni from her brother-in-law Lorenzo de' Medici, and spent her last years on her children, her alchemy, and her writing. She died of pneumonia in 1509 at forty-six. Her son Giovanni delle Bande Nere became the great captain she had hoped for; his son Cosimo became Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Comments
Post a Comment