The Tiger Who Defied The Borgias

Caterina Sforza was one of the most extraordinary and terrifying women of the entire Renaissance — a warrior, a ruler, and a survivor so fierce that she earned the nickname “La Tigre,” The Tiger, and so bold that she made even Machiavelli sit up and take notice. Her life was a series of astonishing acts of defiance, and one of them is among the most jaw-dropping moments in all of Renaissance history.

She was born in 1463, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan, and raised at his glittering court. But unlike most noble girls of her time, Caterina was given more than a fine education in art and letters — she was trained as a hunter and a warrior, learning to ride, to hunt, and to handle herself in a fight. And she would need every bit of it. Like almost every noblewoman of her age, she was used as a marriage pawn: at just ten years old, she was married off to Girolamo Riario, a nephew of the Pope — a corrupt, greedy, and cowardly man she never loved. Through him, she became the Countess of Forlì and Imola, cities in the Romagna region of Italy.

The Horror

Caterina’s world was one of constant, brutal political violence, where power was held at the point of a sword and rivals settled scores with assassination. And in 1488, that violence came for her family. Her husband, the unpopular Count Girolamo, was assassinated by a rival faction in a palace conspiracy, his body stripped and thrown from a window. The conspirators seized control of the city of Forlì — and they captured Caterina herself, along with her children.

The rebels held the city, but they did not hold everything. The key to real power was the mighty fortress of Ravaldino, the great stronghold that dominated Forlì — and its loyal castellan refused to hand it over to the conspirators. As long as that fortress held, the rebels’ grip was not secure. So they needed Caterina to order the castellan to surrender it.

And here Caterina Sforza pulled off one of the greatest bluffs in history. She told the conspirators that only she could persuade the stubborn castellan to give up the fortress — and that she would go inside and do it for them, if they would let her enter. As insurance, the rebels kept her children as hostages, holding them outside the walls, confident she would never risk their lives. They let her go in.

But once Caterina was inside the fortress of Ravaldino, safe behind its massive walls, she revealed her true intentions. She had no plan to surrender anything. She had tricked her way into the strongest position in the city, and now she turned on the men who held her children. The furious conspirators dragged her young children to the foot of the walls and threatened to murder them, right there in front of her, if she did not come out and hand over the fortress.

And Caterina Sforza, standing on the battlements, looking down at the men who held her own children with knives to their throats, refused to break. According to the famous account — recorded and immortalised by Niccolò Machiavelli himself — she responded to their threat with an act of breathtaking, shocking defiance. She mounted the ramparts, and, the story goes, she lifted her skirts, gestured to her own body, and shouted down at them that she had the means to make more children — that if they killed the ones they held, she could simply produce others. “Do it then, you fools!” she is said to have cried.

It was a monumental, almost unbelievable gamble. Whether she truly would have sacrificed her children, or whether — as her biographers argue — she was making a cold, calculated bet that the rebels would never dare actually murder the children of such a powerful family for fear of the vengeance her relatives would unleash, we cannot know for certain. But the effect was devastating. Her defiance shattered the conspirators’ entire strategy. Their one piece of leverage was gone. They had been outmaneuvered by a woman who refused to be blackmailed. And they did not kill the children.

Caterina held the fortress. Reinforcements loyal to her arrived. And “The Tiger” took her revenge on the men who had murdered her husband and threatened her children — hunting down the conspirators and destroying them utterly. She reclaimed her cities and ruled them herself, as regent for her young son, with an iron will that stunned the men around her.

THE MODERN RELIC Caterina ruled Forlì and Imola for years as one of the most formidable rulers in Italy — a woman governing, fighting, and outwitting the powerful men who surrounded her, surviving assassination plots and further conspiracies, and even personally leading troops in armour. But her greatest and final test came from the most dangerous family in Italy: the Borgias.

In 1499, Cesare Borgia — the ruthless, brilliant son of Pope Alexander VI, the man Machiavelli would later use as his model for the ideal ruthless prince — swept through Italy carving out a state for himself, and he came for Caterina’s lands. Almost every other lord simply surrendered before the terrifying Borgia war machine. Caterina Sforza did not. She fortified her stronghold of Ravaldino and prepared to fight. And in early 1500, she made her legendary last stand, personally directing the defence of her fortress — reportedly in armour, sword in hand — as Cesare Borgia’s cannon pounded her walls to rubble. She was one of the very few in all of Italy who dared to resist him at all.

In the end, the walls fell and the fortress was stormed. Caterina was captured. Cesare Borgia held her prisoner and eventually had her imprisoned in the grim Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, where she spent about a year in captivity. But even the Borgias could not truly break her. She was eventually released, and she retired to Florence, where she lived out her remaining years — spending her time on her children, her gardens, and her lifelong passion for alchemy and experiments, until her death in 1509 at the age of forty-six.

Near the end of her life, Caterina Sforza looked back on everything she had done and survived, and gave her own verdict on her extraordinary story. She said, simply: “If I could write everything that happened, I would shock the world.”

The relics are in the city she fought so fiercely to hold. In Forlì, in northern Italy, the great fortress of Ravaldino — the Rocca di Ravaldino, where Caterina made her defiant stand against the conspirators and her last stand against the Borgias — still stands to this day, and is sometimes known by her name. And her defiant blood ran on: her youngest son became the famous warrior Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and her line led directly to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany — so that the fierce, unbroken Tiger of Forlì, the woman who dared an army to kill her children and won, became the ancestress of the rulers of Florence. She was, as one shaken ambassador who watched her fight put it, a tigress — and she has never been forgotten.

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