crosspost: Cesare and Kuvira [Nov 2014]
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anghraineKuvira reminds me of Cesare Borgia, a lot. And this is why.
(Note: there are plenty of major differences that I mostly didn’t get into, plenty of aspects of Cesare’s character and career I didn’t get into, plenty of aspects of Kuvira I didn’t get into, because… that’s not what I’m writing about. And I’m not so myopic a Borgias fan as to argue that, of course, Bryke must have been thinking of Cesare–just that I personally see a ton of parallels and it makes me happy. Blahblahdisclaimerblah.)
So. During and after his lifetime, Cesare Borgia was feared and hated throughout Italy, with one rather glaring exception: his own lands, which he had conquered and unified into the powerful duchy of Romagna. Previously, the Romagna was:
governed by impotent rulers who would have sooner plundered their subjects than governed them, and had given them cause for disunity rather than unity, so that the entire province was full of robberies, fighting, and every other kind of insolence.
Pretty much exactly like the Earth Kingdom we see in LOK, first under the Earth Queen and then after her fall.
That’s Machiavelli’s description, but I haven’t found anyone seriously disagreeing with it. The Romagna was a nightmare. The various petty lords theoretically held their respective towns and cities as vassals of the Church, but they’d long since abandoned any pretense of it. Still, it gave the Borgias the excuse they needed to take over and gain a secular state for themselves; Cesare, as Captain-General of the Church, was ostensibly sent in to bring the Papal States back under the authority of the Church.
In LOK, Kuvira goes to Ba Sing Se to deal with the chaos there and is appointed to bring order to the plundered, bandit-infested provinces of the Earth Kingdom, ostensibly on behalf of the monarchy; once unified, authority will transfer to the prince. Theoretically. Sound familiar?
Historically, the Romagna was very difficult to conquer or hold; the Romagnol people, while unhappy, were not easily subdued. In Avatar, the Earth Kingdom is described as too tough and independent to be simply trodden underfoot by a superior force.
Nevertheless, Cesare invaded the Romagna with a borrowed army, and not only managed to conquer it, in many places the local lords were so wildly unpopular that he was welcomed as a liberator (~all hail the Great Uniter~). Throughout his campaigns, he insisted that he was acting as a vicar of the Church. He wasn't conquering, he was clearing out tyrants, okay.
(Renaissance Italy being somewhat cannier than the United Republic, nobody believed him.)
Within about three years, he was Duke of Romagna in fact as well as name. Kuvira spends three years uniting the Earth provinces.
He gradually phased out the borrowed troops and depended more and more on his own followers–Spanish, Romagnol, and talented recruits from anywhere, who by and large proved to be overwhelmingly loyal to him.
Kuvira started out with, apparently, the wealthy citizenry and supporters she brought from Zaofu, but at this point is primarily backed by the armies she’s raised out of the provinces she took over. Cesare’s Romagnol troops are often said to be the faithful backbone of his army; Machiavelli certainly thought so.
Various reasons have been floated for his men’s admiration and loyalty; he was charismatic, paid the soldiery generously, and to quote an old Victorian essay:
Whatever might be Caesar’s vices cowardice was not one of them, and he was deservedly notorious for his skill in arms.
(Sir Charles Robertson)
arms, bending, what’s the difference
One of the French officers he fought with said:
In war he was a good companion and a brave man.
Machiavelli reported to the Signoria of Florence:
in the pursuit of glory and territory he is unceasing and knows neither danger nor fatigue. He arrives at a place before anyone is aware that he has left the place he was at before. He is beloved by his soldiers and he has in his service the best men in Italy. All this makes him victorious and formidable
The envoy of the Duke of Ferrara said:
He answered me in carefully chosen words, covering each point, and very fluently. […] He is considered brave, strong, and liberal, and it is said that he sets great store by straightforward men. He is hard in revenge, so I have been told by many; a man of soaring spirit, thirsting for greatness and fame
Whatever the reason, his followers–Spanish, Italian, French, whatever–generally followed him anywhere he chose to lead them and stayed loyal even after his downfall (the exception was a revolt among some hilariously faithless captains which he crushed in a magnificent coup that I sadly don’t have space to get into here, but it was very epic and Kuvira-worthy). According to one story, he managed to calm panicked soldiers just by riding out and looking at them; the ambassadors of his enemies were afraid to speak to him for fear of being overpowered by his personality.
We haven’t seen this much of Kuvira yet, but we’ve definitely seen people who seem to be swayed by her force of personality and eloquence as much as anything else. Su, at least, seemed convinced that Kuvira’s armies and state would simply dissolve if they could take her out. (Cesare’s did, once he himself was no longer able to put up a resistance.) We’ve certainly seen Kuvira’s personal fearlessness and skill (and pleasure in her skill) as a fighter.
Despite all this, Cesare used diplomacy and maneuvering as much as violence; if anything, he seems to have preferred to get what he could without fighting, though he was perfectly prepared to do it. Like Kuvira, he cared about his reputation to a surprising extent for someone who at the same time was supremely indifferent to popular opinion of him and widely regarded as a dangerous, duplicitous, completely unscrupulous villain. He could not tolerate insult and might turn on an ally on a slight pretext, but he had to have that pretext, that sense of justification.
Thus when his ally Guidobaldo, the popular Duke of Urbino, gave some small aid to Camerino, a city Cesare’s forces were attacking, he seized the opportunity to lure Guidobaldo out and take Urbino with virtually no bloodshed. But when his father ordered him to attack a member of an enemy family, many of whom had betrayed them (and been killed at Cesare’s orders for it), Cesare dug his heels in because they were knights in the same order, and that particular person had not wronged him or posed any threat. The hostile Paolo Giovio said with some exasperation that Cesare regarded his public honour more than his private interest.
Kuvira, meanwhile, makes a point of presenting herself as reasonable; she warns her inner circle that they have to follow the appropriate protocols; she does her best to ensure that others are seen to have provoked her, so she has some appearance of justification, however disproportionate her response.
Congratulations on your Cesare Borgia seal of approval, Kuvira.
Sidenote: Cesare was a political/strategic/administrative genius, but he had other interests, like poetry. He was a very graceful dancer (as is Kuvira). And even in the military vein, he was deeply interested in innovation: new weaponry, new approaches, new architecture of war. So he hired one of the most brilliant minds of his day, or any day, and gave him space to wander around improving things and inventing shit, preferably of the destroying-all-enemies kind. Anyone who interfered was subject to Cesare’s gravest displeasure. This “military engineer” was an eccentric inventor/scientist/all-around-genius by the name of Leonardo da Vinci.
…Congratulations on your Kuvira seal of approval, Cesare.
Paul Strathern suggests that Leonardo grew a conscience in the course of working for Cesare. I doubt Strathern on general principle, but - *waves vaguely*. Oh hey, wasn’t Zhu Li talking about how she faithfully served Varrick because she considered him the most brilliant mind of his day?
/chinhands
(We all know she’s in love with him, but lol, pretty sure Leonardo’s omnipresent assistant was in love with him, too.)
Back to the Romagna, obviously conquest is not the only thing that unites a region: administration is crucial. And like his father and sister, that happened to be something for which Cesare had a certain flair. But where Pope Alexander and Lucrezia Borgia were competent and charming, Cesare’s leadership had a slightly … different flavour.
He seems to have instantly decided that the Romagna would continue to be as restive and generally unreliable as always unless there was a strong central government and laws clearly carried out. So firstly he crushed the general chaos and disorder by way of an authoritarian minister named Ramiro de Lorqua. Lorqua, according to Robertson, “employed needless cruelty and severity,” despite being repeatedly warned by Cesare, and possibly embezzled grain, risking a famine that Cesare averted by opening up his capital’s stores and importing more from Sicily, at great expense. At any rate, Lorqua made himself deeply unpopular with Cesare and the people. So, at Christmas, Cesare had him killed and the two pieces of his body tossed down in the city square, where everyone could see.
They were, according to Machiavelli, both satisfied and stunned.
(I don’t think Kuvira would do this. She would have an unsatisfactory governor sent to be re-educated, obviously. But, uh, I suspect that’s the Y-7 equivalent, or whatever goes for Y-7 in Bryke’s heads.)
Cesare followed up by establishing a system of justice: a civil court in the middle of the Romagna, with an apparently superb judge, and an advocate from each of the cities. He governed the Romagna so well and so justly that, ruthless, amoral, and treacherous though he was, the people there loved him and nobody could fairly say that he had not been a good ruler. A quick sample from the full spectrum of pro- and anti-Borgia historians:
Rafael Sabatini:
afterwards the name of Cesare Borgia was blessed there as that of a minister of divine justice (“tanquam minister divina justitiae”) who had lifted from them the harsh yoke by which they had been oppressed
Ferdinand Gregorovius:
Yet it is undeniable that his government was energetic and good; for the first time Romagna enjoyed peace and was rid of her vampires.
J. R. Hillgarth:
He also omits Maffei’s tribute to Cesare Borgia’s good government of the Romagna.
Cesare’s epitaph began:
Aquí yace en poca tierra
Al que toda le temía
El que la paz y la guerra
En la su mano tenía
(“Here lies in a little earth one whom all feared, one who held peace and war in his hand.”)
The last seems a poetic way of pointing out that the various cities of the Romagna had been pretty much constantly embroiled in various conflicts, internal and external, until he briefly unified the region; Cesare’s meteoric rise to power brought peace and prosperity to the Romagna and wreaked havoc through the rest of Italy.
This is actually fuzzier. At first glance, Kuvira’s government does appear to be very like this (grain and all!). As the show has gone on, though, it’s sounding like it may only be a PR surface, while by all accounts Cesare’s government was exactly what it looked like. We’ll see about that.
Beyond that, rumour (not reality) had it that Cesare completely terrorized his father, the Pope, to the point that people still say that he was essentially Cesare’s captive. For example, in James Reston's Dogs of God, we hear:
Alexander died in 1504, a virtual prisoner of his malevolent son, Cesare Borgia.
Pope Alexander VI actually died in 1503 and Cesare was dying at the time and not remotely imprisoning him, but it gives you an idea of how the story goes. The story also goes that Cesare had an affair with his beloved sister, Lucrezia, who was unswervingly loyal to him. (This was a rumour started by her bitter ex-husband.)
Kuvira actually does take her adoptive mother, Suyin, captive, along with two of Suyin’s sons (Cesare was reputed to have murdered his brother and brother-in-law; the former is unlikely, the latter very likely). You might consider those sons as Kuvira’s brothers, if she were not engaged to another one of them–one, thus far, as intensely devoted as Lucrezia Borgia.
So there’s that.
Machiavelli summed Cesare up this way:
Whoever, therefore, deems it necessary in his new principality to secure himself against enemies, to win friends, to conquer by force or by fraud, to make himself loved and feared by the people, followed and revered by the soldiers, to destroy those who can or must do you harm, to transform old institutions with new measures, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to eliminate an untrustworthy army, to create a new one, to maintain the friendship of kings and princes in such a way that they must either help you with good grace or offend you with caution—such a person cannot find better examples to imitate than the actions of this man.
or woman :) :) :)
(Note: there are plenty of major differences that I mostly didn’t get into, plenty of aspects of Cesare’s character and career I didn’t get into, plenty of aspects of Kuvira I didn’t get into, because… that’s not what I’m writing about. And I’m not so myopic a Borgias fan as to argue that, of course, Bryke must have been thinking of Cesare–just that I personally see a ton of parallels and it makes me happy. Blahblahdisclaimerblah.)
So. During and after his lifetime, Cesare Borgia was feared and hated throughout Italy, with one rather glaring exception: his own lands, which he had conquered and unified into the powerful duchy of Romagna. Previously, the Romagna was:
governed by impotent rulers who would have sooner plundered their subjects than governed them, and had given them cause for disunity rather than unity, so that the entire province was full of robberies, fighting, and every other kind of insolence.
Pretty much exactly like the Earth Kingdom we see in LOK, first under the Earth Queen and then after her fall.
That’s Machiavelli’s description, but I haven’t found anyone seriously disagreeing with it. The Romagna was a nightmare. The various petty lords theoretically held their respective towns and cities as vassals of the Church, but they’d long since abandoned any pretense of it. Still, it gave the Borgias the excuse they needed to take over and gain a secular state for themselves; Cesare, as Captain-General of the Church, was ostensibly sent in to bring the Papal States back under the authority of the Church.
In LOK, Kuvira goes to Ba Sing Se to deal with the chaos there and is appointed to bring order to the plundered, bandit-infested provinces of the Earth Kingdom, ostensibly on behalf of the monarchy; once unified, authority will transfer to the prince. Theoretically. Sound familiar?
Historically, the Romagna was very difficult to conquer or hold; the Romagnol people, while unhappy, were not easily subdued. In Avatar, the Earth Kingdom is described as too tough and independent to be simply trodden underfoot by a superior force.
Nevertheless, Cesare invaded the Romagna with a borrowed army, and not only managed to conquer it, in many places the local lords were so wildly unpopular that he was welcomed as a liberator (~all hail the Great Uniter~). Throughout his campaigns, he insisted that he was acting as a vicar of the Church. He wasn't conquering, he was clearing out tyrants, okay.
(Renaissance Italy being somewhat cannier than the United Republic, nobody believed him.)
Within about three years, he was Duke of Romagna in fact as well as name. Kuvira spends three years uniting the Earth provinces.
He gradually phased out the borrowed troops and depended more and more on his own followers–Spanish, Romagnol, and talented recruits from anywhere, who by and large proved to be overwhelmingly loyal to him.
Kuvira started out with, apparently, the wealthy citizenry and supporters she brought from Zaofu, but at this point is primarily backed by the armies she’s raised out of the provinces she took over. Cesare’s Romagnol troops are often said to be the faithful backbone of his army; Machiavelli certainly thought so.
Various reasons have been floated for his men’s admiration and loyalty; he was charismatic, paid the soldiery generously, and to quote an old Victorian essay:
Whatever might be Caesar’s vices cowardice was not one of them, and he was deservedly notorious for his skill in arms.
(Sir Charles Robertson)
One of the French officers he fought with said:
In war he was a good companion and a brave man.
Machiavelli reported to the Signoria of Florence:
in the pursuit of glory and territory he is unceasing and knows neither danger nor fatigue. He arrives at a place before anyone is aware that he has left the place he was at before. He is beloved by his soldiers and he has in his service the best men in Italy. All this makes him victorious and formidable
The envoy of the Duke of Ferrara said:
He answered me in carefully chosen words, covering each point, and very fluently. […] He is considered brave, strong, and liberal, and it is said that he sets great store by straightforward men. He is hard in revenge, so I have been told by many; a man of soaring spirit, thirsting for greatness and fame
Whatever the reason, his followers–Spanish, Italian, French, whatever–generally followed him anywhere he chose to lead them and stayed loyal even after his downfall (the exception was a revolt among some hilariously faithless captains which he crushed in a magnificent coup that I sadly don’t have space to get into here, but it was very epic and Kuvira-worthy). According to one story, he managed to calm panicked soldiers just by riding out and looking at them; the ambassadors of his enemies were afraid to speak to him for fear of being overpowered by his personality.
We haven’t seen this much of Kuvira yet, but we’ve definitely seen people who seem to be swayed by her force of personality and eloquence as much as anything else. Su, at least, seemed convinced that Kuvira’s armies and state would simply dissolve if they could take her out. (Cesare’s did, once he himself was no longer able to put up a resistance.) We’ve certainly seen Kuvira’s personal fearlessness and skill (and pleasure in her skill) as a fighter.
Despite all this, Cesare used diplomacy and maneuvering as much as violence; if anything, he seems to have preferred to get what he could without fighting, though he was perfectly prepared to do it. Like Kuvira, he cared about his reputation to a surprising extent for someone who at the same time was supremely indifferent to popular opinion of him and widely regarded as a dangerous, duplicitous, completely unscrupulous villain. He could not tolerate insult and might turn on an ally on a slight pretext, but he had to have that pretext, that sense of justification.
Thus when his ally Guidobaldo, the popular Duke of Urbino, gave some small aid to Camerino, a city Cesare’s forces were attacking, he seized the opportunity to lure Guidobaldo out and take Urbino with virtually no bloodshed. But when his father ordered him to attack a member of an enemy family, many of whom had betrayed them (and been killed at Cesare’s orders for it), Cesare dug his heels in because they were knights in the same order, and that particular person had not wronged him or posed any threat. The hostile Paolo Giovio said with some exasperation that Cesare regarded his public honour more than his private interest.
Kuvira, meanwhile, makes a point of presenting herself as reasonable; she warns her inner circle that they have to follow the appropriate protocols; she does her best to ensure that others are seen to have provoked her, so she has some appearance of justification, however disproportionate her response.
Congratulations on your Cesare Borgia seal of approval, Kuvira.
Sidenote: Cesare was a political/strategic/administrative genius, but he had other interests, like poetry. He was a very graceful dancer (as is Kuvira). And even in the military vein, he was deeply interested in innovation: new weaponry, new approaches, new architecture of war. So he hired one of the most brilliant minds of his day, or any day, and gave him space to wander around improving things and inventing shit, preferably of the destroying-all-enemies kind. Anyone who interfered was subject to Cesare’s gravest displeasure. This “military engineer” was an eccentric inventor/scientist/all-around-genius by the name of Leonardo da Vinci.
…Congratulations on your Kuvira seal of approval, Cesare.
Paul Strathern suggests that Leonardo grew a conscience in the course of working for Cesare. I doubt Strathern on general principle, but - *waves vaguely*. Oh hey, wasn’t Zhu Li talking about how she faithfully served Varrick because she considered him the most brilliant mind of his day?
/chinhands
(We all know she’s in love with him, but lol, pretty sure Leonardo’s omnipresent assistant was in love with him, too.)
Back to the Romagna, obviously conquest is not the only thing that unites a region: administration is crucial. And like his father and sister, that happened to be something for which Cesare had a certain flair. But where Pope Alexander and Lucrezia Borgia were competent and charming, Cesare’s leadership had a slightly … different flavour.
He seems to have instantly decided that the Romagna would continue to be as restive and generally unreliable as always unless there was a strong central government and laws clearly carried out. So firstly he crushed the general chaos and disorder by way of an authoritarian minister named Ramiro de Lorqua. Lorqua, according to Robertson, “employed needless cruelty and severity,” despite being repeatedly warned by Cesare, and possibly embezzled grain, risking a famine that Cesare averted by opening up his capital’s stores and importing more from Sicily, at great expense. At any rate, Lorqua made himself deeply unpopular with Cesare and the people. So, at Christmas, Cesare had him killed and the two pieces of his body tossed down in the city square, where everyone could see.
They were, according to Machiavelli, both satisfied and stunned.
(I don’t think Kuvira would do this. She would have an unsatisfactory governor sent to be re-educated, obviously. But, uh, I suspect that’s the Y-7 equivalent, or whatever goes for Y-7 in Bryke’s heads.)
Cesare followed up by establishing a system of justice: a civil court in the middle of the Romagna, with an apparently superb judge, and an advocate from each of the cities. He governed the Romagna so well and so justly that, ruthless, amoral, and treacherous though he was, the people there loved him and nobody could fairly say that he had not been a good ruler. A quick sample from the full spectrum of pro- and anti-Borgia historians:
Rafael Sabatini:
afterwards the name of Cesare Borgia was blessed there as that of a minister of divine justice (“tanquam minister divina justitiae”) who had lifted from them the harsh yoke by which they had been oppressed
Ferdinand Gregorovius:
Yet it is undeniable that his government was energetic and good; for the first time Romagna enjoyed peace and was rid of her vampires.
J. R. Hillgarth:
He also omits Maffei’s tribute to Cesare Borgia’s good government of the Romagna.
Cesare’s epitaph began:
Aquí yace en poca tierra
Al que toda le temía
El que la paz y la guerra
En la su mano tenía
(“Here lies in a little earth one whom all feared, one who held peace and war in his hand.”)
The last seems a poetic way of pointing out that the various cities of the Romagna had been pretty much constantly embroiled in various conflicts, internal and external, until he briefly unified the region; Cesare’s meteoric rise to power brought peace and prosperity to the Romagna and wreaked havoc through the rest of Italy.
This is actually fuzzier. At first glance, Kuvira’s government does appear to be very like this (grain and all!). As the show has gone on, though, it’s sounding like it may only be a PR surface, while by all accounts Cesare’s government was exactly what it looked like. We’ll see about that.
Beyond that, rumour (not reality) had it that Cesare completely terrorized his father, the Pope, to the point that people still say that he was essentially Cesare’s captive. For example, in James Reston's Dogs of God, we hear:
Alexander died in 1504, a virtual prisoner of his malevolent son, Cesare Borgia.
Pope Alexander VI actually died in 1503 and Cesare was dying at the time and not remotely imprisoning him, but it gives you an idea of how the story goes. The story also goes that Cesare had an affair with his beloved sister, Lucrezia, who was unswervingly loyal to him. (This was a rumour started by her bitter ex-husband.)
Kuvira actually does take her adoptive mother, Suyin, captive, along with two of Suyin’s sons (Cesare was reputed to have murdered his brother and brother-in-law; the former is unlikely, the latter very likely). You might consider those sons as Kuvira’s brothers, if she were not engaged to another one of them–one, thus far, as intensely devoted as Lucrezia Borgia.
So there’s that.
Machiavelli summed Cesare up this way:
Whoever, therefore, deems it necessary in his new principality to secure himself against enemies, to win friends, to conquer by force or by fraud, to make himself loved and feared by the people, followed and revered by the soldiers, to destroy those who can or must do you harm, to transform old institutions with new measures, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to eliminate an untrustworthy army, to create a new one, to maintain the friendship of kings and princes in such a way that they must either help you with good grace or offend you with caution—such a person cannot find better examples to imitate than the actions of this man.
or woman :) :) :)
Works Cited
Bradford, Sarah. Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times. New Haven: Phoenix Press, 1976. Kindle file.
—-. Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy. New York: The Penguin Group, 2004. Print.
Chamberlin, E. R. The Fall of the House of Borgia. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989. Print.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand. Lucretia Borgia: According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day. 1904. Trans. John Leslie Garner. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1968. Project Gutenberg. Web. 12 November 2014.
Hillgarth, J. N. “The Image of Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996): 119-129. Web. 12 November 2014.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince and Other Writings. Trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.
Reston, James. Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors. New York: Anchor Books, 2005. Print.
Robertson, Charles. Caesar Borgia: the Stanhope Essay for 1891. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1891. Google Books. Web. 11 November 2014.
Sabatini, Rafael. The Life of Cesare Borgia. Project Gutenberg. Web. 12 November 2014.
Strathern, Paul. The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior. New York: Bantam Books, 2009. Print.