Paolo del Rosso, knight, assassin, poet

Paolo del Rosso, knight of Malta, might just have scraped through the test set by Grand Master Lascaris for admission into the Order of St John: “My Order needs soldiers and seamen, not men with doctorates and other idle persons of whom this island is full, to the great detriment of this principality”. For a change, Del Rosso was an outstanding man of letters, a daring warrior who braved the enemy and suffered torture, and much else besides.

He scoured the Mediterranean hunting the Muslims, only, in turn, to be hunted by the Medicis- Giovanni Bonello

When one picks up a copy of the Order’s statutes in Italian and reads “translated by Fra Paolo del Rosso” on its title page, the last things that come to mind are the supreme dramas lurking behind those clichéd, neutral words.

Del Rosso led an incredibly adventurous existence. He scoured the Mediterranean hunting the Muslims, only, in turn, to be hunted by the Medicis and tortured within an inch of his life. He was generally believed to be an assassin on commission, and wrote important prose and less important verse.

His literary output includes one of the earliest descriptions of Malta, and two poems in praise of his friend, Grand Master de Valette. Virtually forgotten in Malta, in Italy he has had a best-selling book (Paolo Simoncelli, Il Cavaliere Dimezzato, Milan, 1991) dedicated exclusively to his life and exploits.

I shall concentrate mostly on Del Rosso’s connections with Malta and the Order of St John though, to appreciate these better, some background flashes appear indispensable. Del Rosso’s involvement with the Order developed quite late in his life.

While by far the majority of other noblemen joined the ranks of the knights in their teens, he professed in January 1551, just short of his 46th birthday. There must be some compelling reason why this ‘late vocation’ to knighthood was so notably delayed.

That year the knight Fra Scipione Strozzi, “a young man full of wisdom and daring” (giovanetto giudizioso e ardito) had reach­ed Malta on one of the Strozzi galleys with Del Rosso as his lieutenant. The Order’s historian describes Del Rosso as “a Florentine knight brave in arms and adorned with striking literary talents”. Scipione was an illegitimate son of Piero Strozzi.

Together, Scipione and Del Rosso sailed eastwards from Malta under the Order’s flag and made several rich prizes against Muslim shipping. Scipione was killed fighting, like many other knights of Malta, during the disastrous, botched landing at Jerba (Zoara) in 1552 which ended in a massacre.

Del Rosso had already been corsairing in the Mediterranean with one of the leading knights of Malta, Fra Leone Strozzi, since about1546, and had taken part in various armed conflicts with the Turks – he seems to have spent most of the years from 1546 to 1552 with the Strozzis on their galleys and those of the Order of Malta.

Quite likely, Del Rosso’s association with the Order of St John had started through his closeness to the two Strozzi knights – sworn enemies of the Medici family. The Strozzi and the Medici were strongly linked by intermarriage and more strongly es­tranged by power and wealth. In the company of Fra Leone Strozzi, Del Rosso had sailed and travelled overland “in Italy, in France and Spain, in England and Scotland, in Portugal and in Constantinople, and through almost all corners of the West and of the East”.

A poet friend, Ludovico Beccadelli, celebrated in verse Del Rosso’s military exploits throughout all Europe: “to that heaven have the wings of glory carried you /as you deserved, and Malta knows it, and England, Italy and France, and with Spain, the Moors”.

Fra Leone later missed by a whisker being elected Grand Master of Malta instead of Claude de La Sengle. Still in the company of Fra Leone, Del Rosso was arrested in Trapani, Sicily, for some mysterious reason, but was soon set free again. In 1552 (only one year after his profession) the Grand Master sent him to Rome “for honourable and important business and embassies for your Hospitaller Order”. That trip was to have tragic consequences for Fra Paolo.

Del Rosso was born in Florence in July 1505 to a middle-class family of artisans. In the early 16th century the city was sharply divided between those who favoured the old republican government, and those who supported the upstart oligarchy of the Medici family. The Del Rosso openly opposed the Medici – and suffered persecution accordingly. Among their most powerful, gifted and virulent enemies, the Medici counted the Strozzi – the leaders of the opposition.

How the unbearably aristocratic Order of Malta allowed a man of artisan ancestry like Del Rosso to join as a full knight of justice, without the required proofs of nobility, remains unexplained. My only suggestion is that Del Rosso’s year of admission and his proved prowess as a man of arms could provide the relevant clue.

The year 1551 was one of the most tragic in the whole history of the Order, the year in which it lost Tripoli to the Turks and suffered Gozo to be ransacked and nearly its whole population enslaved almost without opposition – truly the Hospitallers’ annus horribilis. The dearth of warriors to defend its interests may have prompted the Order to close an aristocratic eye in the recruitment of new knights to man the ramparts and the galleys.

What we do know is that Del Rosso was inducted as a Hospitaller by Fra Leone directly – he had every interest to increase the number of his supporters in the ranks of the Order, and may well have pretended not to notice how Del Rosso’s blood was a paler shade of blue.

The records do not say much about Del Rosso’s childhood and adolescence, except that he had distinguished himself in combat: “In his youth he wielded arms as competently as any other and, whenever it proved necessary, he always excelled and was victorious over his opponents”.

His military training must have gone hand in hand with a thorough academic schooling as, in later life he produced impeccable translations of the Latin classics, still admired today, competent poetry and a pioneer guide to the ‘Tuscan language’, that is, modern Italian.

Latin must have been like a first language to the young Del Rosso, and his focusing on Tuscan, among the many variants of Italian speech, showed an admirable prescience that other late Renaissance scholars of Italian may have lacked.

An antique writer thus summarised Del Rosso: “The Latin language, which he mastered to perfection, and poetry, which he cultivated with passion, combined to make Paolo a perfect knight, an elegant man of letters, a gifted poet, a glory of literature, a high ornament of his native land and of his century”.

Virtually nothing is known so far about the private life of Paolo del Rosso. At 45, on joining the Order, he took solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – but before that he had been perfectly entitled to a public and flaunted love-life. Yet history does not record a single woman as the focus of his love or his desire.

More telling than that is the fact that almost all Del Rosso’s known friends were notorious pederasts – from Michelangelo Buonarroti, to Benvenuto Cellini, to Anton Francesco Grazzini, known as il Lasca, all his contemporaries and companions.

Cellini, the most outstanding goldsmith of his time and no mean sculptor either, though an unbridled womaniser, had suffered at least three criminal convictions for sexually abusing teenage boys.

In 1542, Del Rosso wrote a heartbroken elegy on the death of the 15-year-old Cecchino Bracci, a youth of heavenly beauty by whom Michelangelo was besotted (on the same occasion Michelangelo composed some 50 disconsolate funerary eulogies in verse in memory of his young servant, muse or partner and furnished the designs for his tomb in the ancient church of the Aracoeli, in Rome).

And Grazzini ‘il Lasca’, the leading satirical poet and playwright of his time and another friend of Del Rosso, made repeated, bawdy and sympathetic references in his writings to the preference of that sort of mature men for pubescent boys, then so widespread. Grazzini too lamented in verse the death of the ravishing Cecchino.

His military training must have gone hand in hand with a thorough academic schooling- Giovanni Bonello

Coincidences? Possibly.

One of Del Rosso’s more important literary compositions was his brilliant scholarly commentary on Guido Cavalcanti’s Canzone, the multi-layered Donna mi prega. Cavalcanti, a leading poet in the fair new literary style, the dolce stil nuovo, had earned the highest reputation for himself as the supreme singer of feminine grace and virtue and beauty. But some disenchanted contemporaries teased Cavalcanti publicly for his hypocrisy: who you tryin’ to kid, Guido? Doesn’t everyone know that the poems you write about those wondrous idealised ladies are, in fact, inspired by pretty adolescent boys?

An extremely rare work by Paolo del Rosso could well be the give-away of a rampant misogyny under the respectable guise of moralism. He wrote a scathing diatribe against women of pleasure, Vita, et fine miserabile delle meterici (sic), all about whores as major players in the civic life of Italy (and perhaps even more so, of Malta).

Carnal indulgence with women of mercantile virtue is, in Del Rosso’s view, the cause of most evil in the universe, and Providence had ordained that none escape their just desserts – most of them die horrid, squalid deaths.

Usually this rabid hostility to prostitutes came from genuinely pious moralists, but, quite as often, from those whom the many shareholders in the rent-a-lover industry had infected with incurable syphilis. This bizarre composition by Del Rosso, published post-humously in Bologna, so far unknown and never listed in his bibliography, deserves an in-depth study on its own.

The dire, murderous enmity between Alessandro de’ Medici and Filippo Strozzi was inherited by their descendants after their fathers’ violent deaths and always loomed as a major factor in the life of Paolo del Rosso. Filippo Strozzi, a tenacious and vocal adversary of the Medici usurpers, had strengthened Lorenzino de’ Medici’s re­solve to murder his kinsman Duke Alessandro in 1537, after luring him into a honey-trap with his stunningly beautiful sister.

The following year Alessandro’s son, Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, captured Filippo Strozzi and had him ruthlessly ‘suicided’ in a Medici dungeon in Florence. Filippo’s three sons, Piero, Roberto and the knight of Malta Fra Leone, then made it their lifetime’s mission to vindicate their father’s death.

Piero Strozzi, a daring, unprincipled and tragic condottiero, was reputed to have planned a condign vendetta on Cosimo, his father’s murderer: a flawless assassination by the use of poison. He homed in on Fra Paolo del Rosso, the great friend of his brother Fra Leone, as the most reliable manager to organise the elimination of the hated Cosimo.

Fra Paolo owed a lot to the Strozzi, particularly to Fra Leone and Fra Scipione (Piero’s son), and this was the time to invite him to repay his debt of gratitude. The plotters in Rome designated Paolo del Rosso, warrior and naive republican idealist, to take over the poisoning of Cosimo in Florence.

What the Florentine conspirators in Rome had not factored in was the very active network of spies kept in the papal city by the Medici. They somehow came to know of the plot and Duke Cosimo, taking advantage of the weakness of that debauched Pope, Julius III, prevailed on him, in July 1553, to ‘rendition’ Del Rosso to Florence to face his merciless justice. (Incidentally, that Pope, the appalling Giovanni Maria del Monte, and Grand Master Pietro del Monte were first cousins).

In Florence Cosimo condemned Paolo to life imprisonment in the castle of Pisa – and the first years of his detention in the Medici’s places of confinement proved to be harsh and cruel indeed. Del Rosso’s involvement in the assassination plot has been compellingly established – at least his political, if not his criminal, guilt. He was probably spared an excruciatingly painful execution by his more or less full collaboration with his captors and his turning against the Strozzi.

At that time Cosimo held Paolo del Rosso in abysmal esteem. He justified the illegal, underhand kidnap from Rome of his would-be poisoner by describing his prisoner thus: “Paolo is one of the most despicable persons around today, and his commitment is to nothing else but to treachery, conspiracy and poisons”, adding a curious consideration: such men forfeit any rights to legality: “where an assassin and rogue and conspirator against the life of the prince is concerned, public faith need not be respected”. Rights are only for those who humour the prince.

To be continued.