Introduction
The infamous Borgias had risen from minor nobility in Renaissance Rome to a position of supreme national power ... Roderigo Borgia, now Pope Alexander VI, manipulated the armies of Europe against a disturbing scene of international intrigue while his children, Lucrezia and Cesare, vied in an unparalleled debauch of domestic carnality. Roderigo plotted the slaughter of the French armies descending on Naples even as the vile rumors spread throughout the city: Lucrezia, tiring of her young husband, had reverted to her brothers, Cesare and Giovanni, who-with her father, the Pope-she found the most exciting of men. These were the years when the House of Borgia took what it wanted from the body and blood of Italy!
THE BORGIAS By L. T. Woodward, M.D.
The astonishing family history of the Borgias, that flamboyant tribe of Renaissance Rome, is not so much a view of a period of human culture as it is an insight into the darker side of human life. Every imaginable sin and has been credited to the fantastic Borgias of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: incest, torture, crimes against nature, murder by various hideous methods, and foul sacrilege. Most of the sins of the Borgias, it seems, were invented by imaginative chroniclers eager, for one reason or another, to heap infamy on this family. Yet even when we discount nine-fold the exaggerations of the anti-Borgia faction, a rather remarkable residue of amoral behavior is left-enough to make the life and times of the Borgia family of interest both to the casual reader and to the serious medical-psychological student of the distortions of the human sexual impulse.
Who. were these Borgias, anyway, and what were their terrible crimes?
For one thing, they were Spaniards-even though their base of operations was the holy city of Rome. The Borgia family, which is still in existence today, traces its ancestry back to an eleventh-century King of Aragon. In the middle of the twelfth century, a certain Don Ricardo de Borja migrated to Italy and founded an Italian branch of the family, changing the spelling of the name from the Spanish "Borja" to the Italian "Borgia"-but this is not the Borgia family of infamy. Those Borgias remained in Spain, as Borjas, until the middle of the fifteenth century.
The Borgias who claim the attention of students of crime and sexology are three in number: Roderigo Borgia, elected to be Pope Alexander the Sixth, and two of his illegitimate children, Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia. (Already the unusual nature of the Borgia family starts to be apparent, when we begin speaking of a Pope and his illegitimate children!) However, the family fortunes began their upward climb in the person of Roderigo Borgia's uncle, Alonso de Borja, the Bishop of Valencia. At Easter time of 1455, Pope Nicho1as the Fifth died. The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church met at Rome to elect his successor. At that time, the office of Pope was virtually the property of a few great Italian noble families, who passed it around among themselves in a kind of rotation scheme. But in 1455 there was a stalemate between the candidates of the House of Colonna and the House of Orsini. Fifteen out of the twenty Cardinals were present at the election, and they were hopelessly deadlocked. At last a compromise candidate was proposed. On April 8, 1455, one of the Cardinals emerged from the conclave to declare:
"I announce to you great joy. We have for a Pope the Lord Alonso de Borja, Bishop of Valencia, who wills to be called Calixtus the Third."
This first Borgia Pope was no monster of sin. Far from it. He was a kindly, somewhat colorless old man of 77, feeble and interested in nothing but his churchly duties. In this he was quite different from most of the swashbuckling Renaissance Popes. The theory behind his election was that he would live only a year or two, long enough for the feuding aristocrats to make up their minds as to who the real next Pope ought to be.
And indeed Pope Calixtus the Third occupied the Throne of St. Peter only three years. But before his death in 1458 he succeeded in selecting three new Cardinals. Two of them, by some coincidence, happened to be the Pope's own nephews: 20-year-old Don Luis Juan de Mila y Borja, famous for his good looks, and 25-year-old Don Roderigo de Lancol y Borja, famous because he would later become Alexander the Sixth, the most corrupt Pope in the history of the Church.
Mark well, there was nothing unusual in choosing such young men as Cardinals. Today, Cardinals are always men of mature years who have worked their way up through the hierarchy of the Church; but in the fifteenth century the Pope thought of himself not just as a religious leader but as a worldly ruler, who commanded armies and owned vast estates, and the College of Cardinals was in effect his "cabinet." He needed young, vigorous, loyal "cabinet ministers" to serve him. And so the red hats of Cardinals were handed out, not on the basis of age or wisdom, but on the basis of family position. The Pope built alliances that way.
As for naming two of his own nephews as Cardinals-well, that was a little irregular, but certainly not illegal. And it is to Pope Calixtus' credit that he did not give the red hat to his own son, a handsome young man of fifteen. (Yes, Pope Calixtus had fathered a son at the age of 63, while Bishop of Valencia.)
Young Roderigo Cardinal Borja came to Rome, started spelling his name Borgia, and began amassing churchly power. He also filled his Roman palace with a variety of comely mistresses. Then as now, prelates of the Roman Catholic Church were supposed to take a vow of celibacy, but in brawling Renaissance Europe that vow was mostly honored in the breach. The young Cardinal was dashing and handsome, and liked women. They liked him, too. A contemporary chronicler describes Don Roderigo Borgia as "a comely man, of cheerful countenance and honeyed discourse, who gains the affections of all the women he admires, and attracts them as the lodes tone attracts iron."
In the Vatican, Popes came and went, and all the time Cardinal Borgia grew stronger, richer, fatter, and more sodden with lust. Pope Julius the Second, poet and novelist as well as churchman, was chosen in 1458 and died in 1464. Pope Paul the Second followed him, and then in 1471 Pope Sixtus the Fourth. Upon his death in 1484 the Papacy passed to Pope Innocent the Eighth.
Roderigo Cardinal Borgia took an active part in the wheeling and dealing of all these elections. In exchange for his support and his vote, he demanded favors from the candidates, and he got them. He won power and splendor for himself, and as the ranks of his illegitimate children grew, Cardinal Borgia obtained high places for them. He had many mistresses, and many children, but only one openly admitted "family". These were the children he had sired by the voluptuous Giovanna (Vannozza) dei Cattani, who had had a variety of husbands but who spent most of her nights between 1470 and 1486 in Cardinal Borgia's bed. There were four recognized children of this unofficial relationship. The eldest, Giovanni, born in 1474, became Duke of Gandia when still a boy. The second child, Cesare, born in 1476, was the Cardinal's favorite; when Cesare Borgia was only ten years old, his father succeeded in having him appointed to the richly influential post of Treasurer of the Cathedral of Cartagena, Spain. In 1480 Lucrezia Borgia was born, a golden-haired child of great beauty who one day would gain a perhaps undeserved sinister reputation. A year or two later came the Cardinal's third son, Giuffredo or Giuffre.
In 1492 Pope Innocent the Eighth, enfeebled by his sins, sank toward death. Neither drinks of women's milk nor boys' blood could save him. When he died, twenty-three Cardinals came together to elect his successor. Christopher Columbus was sailing westward across the Atlantic during the month that Cardinal Borgia, now 61 years old and made more vigorous by decades of riotous living, decided to make himself Pope.
He was one of three leading candidates. Using his great wealth, Borgia was able to buy many votes, including that of one of his three rivals. He poured so much gold and silver into the election that he was elected Pope by the unprecedented landslide of twenty-two to one. When the results were announced, seventeen-year-old Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, of the great Florentine family, turned to another Cardinal and whispered, "Now we are in the jaws of a ravening wolf, and if we do not flee he will devour us."
Cardinal Borgia chose the name of Alexander the Sixth-and now, more like a bloated pig than like a ravening wolf, he rose like a colossus above Rome.
Feasting and drinking were the order of the day at the Vatican. The Pope's trusted agents engaged in foreign intrigue in many lands. Enemies of the Borgias disappeared and were found to have mysteriously died. The Pontiff was interested mainly in enhancing the power of himself and of his family, as though, having gained the Papacy, he planned to make it hereditary in the Borgia family.
But it is hard to sort the fact from the fantasy when reviewing the career of Alexander the Sixth. Was he really such a monster? Ravisher of his own daughter, indulger in bestial sins, glutton, wanton, murderer? He covered his tracks well, if so. All we have are the rumors, the bitter accusations. We can judge Alexander the Sixth as we please. As one of the family's biographers said at the beginning of this century, "No man, save One, since Adam, has been wholly good. Not one has been wholly bad. The truth about the Borgias, no doubt, lies between the two extremes."
We can attach one sin to Alexander the Sixth's record without any doubt at all, because he boasted proudly of it himself: He kept mistresses and fathered illegitimate children. That in itself does not seem too terribly shocking to us, except for the circumstance that he was a priest, a bishop, a Cardinal and finally a Pope. For a priest to break his vows of chastity is bad enough; for a Pope to do it is monstrous.
Yet we have to look at Alexander against the context of his time-a time in which sexual and moral values were quite different from what they are today. If a candidate for President in our country should admit the fathership of a bastard, or if it should merely be whispered about, his career would be doomed. But id Renaissance Europe, and particularly in Italy, there was no duke nor count nor baron nor churchly lord who did not have his retinue of concubines and his collection of openly acknowledged bastards. Alexander the Sixth's immediate predecessor as Pope, Innocent the Eighth, was not quite so innocent as his name implies; he admitted the paternity of seven children. A successor, Pope Paul the Third, was also a well-known family man. Even the venerable, saintly Calixtus the Third, first of the two Borgia Popes, had at least one child.
So Alexander the Sixth, it seems, was no demon. He merely carried the loose morals of the time to their ultimate conclusions. Larger than life, hungry for power and the gratification of his lusts, this Vicar of Christ denied himself nothing, but differed from his contemporaries only in the quantity, not in the quality, of his sins.
When we look at the Pope's children, though, we enter a different sphere of morality.
Cesare Borgia seems to deserve all that rumor says of him. He was Alexander's darling boy; and, sheltered by the might of his indulgent father's high office, he rampaged through Europe in a lifelong orgy of sex, brigandage and terror. When his father became Pope, sixteen-year-old Cesare was made Archbishop of Valencia-a mockery of that sacred office. A year later, Cesare was a Cardinal. Despite this dignity, he spent his days wenching and gambling. One thorn in his side was the existence of his elder brother Giovanni, the Duke of Gandia. Giovanni, as a duke, had received great territorial possessions, which Cesare envied.
On a June night in 1497 the 23-year-old Duke of Gandia disappeared. In the morning his body was found floating in the Tiber, fully clothed, his dagger still in its sheath, none of the jewels with which he had adorned himself taken. He bore eleven wounds or more, including a great gash in his throat. Pope Alexander, hearing the terrible news, roared with grief and vowed to reform not only his own ways but the entire Church, two vows that were never kept. But who had slain the duke? Soon all Rome was whispering the answer: His brother Cesare was the murderer.
The mystery remains unsolved; but there is good reason to place the guilt at Cesare's door. He was known to be envious of his brother's power, and to Cesare Borgia no such rival could be allowed to remain. Furthermore, there were dark rumors that Cesare and the duke were rivals in love-the joint object of their love being the wife of Giuffre, their youngest brother! There was also talk that they were incestuously involved with their sister Lucrezia.
After the murder of the duke, Alexander the Sixth was more restrained and austere in his ways, as though sadness had drained his vitality. In any case he was near seventy. There was no holding Cesare back, now.
He became the most powerful-and the most feared Roman of them all. Whenever he needed funds to support one of his military or sexual adventures, he simply extorted them from some rich Cardinal or bishop or nobleman, using his father's power as a threat. He left a trail of blood through Italy.
In 1501 an odd episode occurred involving father and son. The Pope issued an official document declaring that the newborn bastard of his son Cesare with a Roman girl was to be considered legitimate. Later that same day, Alexander issued a second document, which said that the child was not Cesare's at all, but rather the Pope's own offspring! Evidently Alexander and Cesare had been sharing the same mistress at that point. But why did the seventy-year-old Pope first call the child Cesare's, then change his mind and claim it as his own? Pride in his virility? A quarrel with Cesare?
In the summer of 1503 both Cesare and his father fell ill at Rome. For a while both their lives were despaired of; then Cesare's youthful vitality pulled him through; but the Pope, weakened by dissipation and age, died. Rumor had it that a butler in the Papal household had prepared a poisoned drink for a guest, but that through error it had been served to Cesare and the Pope. However, malaria was rife in Rome that summer, as it was every summer in those days, and it seems that the Pope's death was a natural one.
With Alexander gone, Cesare's swashbuckling days were just about over. His ferocity brought his enemies down on him. Arrested several times, imprisoned at one point for two years, he escaped from a Spanish jail only to meet death in 1507 in a common brawl. He was little more than thirty years old.
The career of his sister Lucrezia is the most enigmatic of all. We know that Alexander the Sixth was a gaudy old sinner, and that Cesare Borgia was a rapacious adventurer. But Lucrezia Borgia has attained a sinister reputation as a poisoner on virtually no evidence whatever.
We know that she was of great beauty, with shimmering golden hair and a lovely body. We know that she was intelligent, a patron of the arts. We also know that her father used her beauty as a pawn in his own political schemes.
She was raised and educated by Giulia Farnese, one of the Pope's mistresses of later years. There were dark stories of her incestuous sexual involvements with her brothers from her earliest youth, but of course none of this can be proved. When eleven years old and of dubious virginity, the fair Lucrezia was betrothed to a Spanish nobleman, but almost at once the engagement was broken when her father found a wealthier grandee for her to marry. The twelve-year-old bride soon was not a wife, for when Roderigo Borgia became Pope in 1492, he used his authority to annul Lucrezia's marriage, thus making her available for a still more ambitious union. This time she was affianced to Giovanni Sforza, the 26-year-old lord of Pesaro.
Ten Cardinals and fifteen members of the Roman nobility were present at the Vatican in June of 1493 for the feast that celebrated the wedding of a Pope's bastard daughter. The Pope himself gaily thrust sweetmeats into the plunging bosoms of the aristocratic women guests. But in a few years Alexander had need of Lucrezia's matrimonial services again; he annulled her marriage to Sforza on the scandalous and probably false grounds of his impotence, and married Lucrezia to Alphonso of Aragon, the Duke of Bisceglie.
Alphonso met a bleak fate in 1500. He was assaulted on the steps of St. Peter's Cathedral by masked men who stabbed him repeatedly. Severely wounded, he dragged himself into the Vatican seemingly at the point of death. Lucrezia nursed Bisceglie back to health so successfully that a month later, on an August evening, it was necessary to make a second attempt on his life. Cesare Borgia entered his brother-in-law's room and stood by approvingly while a hired thug strangled him to death. Cesare explained later that the Duke of Bisceglie had tried to murder him, first, as if that justified the murder. Wagging tongues told of Cesare's jealousy toward the man who shared his sister's bed.
A year later Lucrezia married the Duke of Ferrara and seemingly lived happily ever after. She devoted herself to poetry and music, was famed for her lovely embroidery, and her court enjoyed the presence of such men as the poet Ariosto and the painter Titian. Only occasionally did anyone connected with her meet a violent death. She is the great enigma of the Borgia family. Was she the terrible murderess of legend-or merely a beautiful and gifted woman, no better and no worse in her morals than the other aristocratic belles of her time?
With Lucrezia's death in 1519, the most celebrated members of the Borgia family were gone. But this remarkable house had one final prank left: it produced a saint. Francis Borgia, great-grandson of Alexander the Sixth, was born in Spain in 1510 and lived a pure, self-denying, blameless life. Respected and admired by all for his piety, he rose high in the churchly ranks, modestly refused the honor of becoming a Cardinal, and served as the third general of the Jesuits. In 1671, a century after his death, Pope Clement the Tenth entered him in the roster of saints. Saint Francis Borgia! How the salty, lascivious old Pope Alexander would have loved that!
The Borgias are worth our attention today, and we can rejoice that Marcus van Heller's magnificently readable, superbly vivid HOUSE OF BORGIA has at last broken the chains of prudery and become available to the American public. With unsparing honesty, this young European scholar and novelist shows us both the majesty and the depravity of the Borgia family. He reveals keen insight into the underlying perversions of the sexual impulse that left their imprint on the Italian Renaissance. His book is at once mar-velously readable and entertaining-almost like a novel in its profusion of lively scenes-and yet a serious, important contribution to history as well. No one who reads The House of Borgia is likely to forget the dark deeds of the Borgias in times to come. This amazing family displayed vitality, colossal audacity, a kind of cosmic energy in lust and ambition. And this equally amazing book about them shows us that unique period, the Renaissance, at its best ... and at its sordid worst.
-L. T. Woodward, M.D.
THE HOUSE OF BORGIA VOL. I