by Sarah Dunant
‘We shall take you to your bed, Holy Father.’ He gestures to the Pope’s chamberlain, hovering, as ever, in the background.
‘No. No, not to bed.’ Alexander is rallying now. ‘Bed will do me no good. Not now. The day has begun.’
He turns. At the end of the open doors through which he has come, the figure of Cesare stands waiting, black against the ghostly white light of the snowy morning.
‘I will take some hot wine and a little soup,’ he calls back as he starts padding his way back along the long corridor, the papal robes like rising silk waters around the great bulk of the man. ‘The duke and I have work to do.’
HISTORICAL EPILOGUE
More than many in history, the Borgias have suffered from an excess of bad press. While their behaviour – personal and political – was often brutal and corrupt, they lived in brutal and corrupt times; and the thirst for diplomatic gossip and scandal, along with undoubted prejudice against their Spanish nationality, played its part in embellishing what was already a colourful story. Once the slander was abroad, much of it was incorporated into the historical record without being challenged. Spin, it seems, was a political art long before the modern word was introduced.
While Blood & Beauty is unapologetically an act of the imagination, the novel draws heavily on the work of modern historians whose judgement on the Borgias is more scrupulous and discriminating than many in the past. I have listened to their views and where there is contemporary evidence (be it true or false), through letters, reports, speeches or diaries, I have incorporated it into the text. My one liberty has been to do with the life of Pedro Calderón who, while he was a chamberlain in the Pope’s household, never, to my knowledge, worked exclusively for Cesare Borgia.
Apart from that, there remain certain contested incidents within this tangled story.
In particular there is the question of who killed Juan Borgia. While many historians now believe the assassination was the work of the Orsini family, there are still those who think it was Cesare himself (though there is no contemporary suggestion that he is a suspect until almost a year after Juan’s death). Equally, there are a few who speculate that in the early months of 1498, after a liaison with Pedro Calderón, a servant in the papal household, Lucrezia gave birth to a child. Others are of the opinion that the baby was that of the Pope and his mistress Giulia Farnese (Alexander acknowledges the child as his own later); others still, that it was Cesare’s. In these and similar areas where historians have disagreed among themselves (did Caterina Sforza try to kill the Pope or did the Borgias manufacture the plot to justify their aggression? Did Cesare Borgia host an evening of courtesans in the Vatican palace or was this slander becoming fact?) I have taken the liberty of writing what feels to me to be the psychological truth of the personalities as they have emerged from the research. In this I am no more right – or possibly no more wrong – than anyone else. It is one of the most compelling things about history, and this family in particular, that sometimes we simply do not know. Which is, of course, where the pleasure and challenge of fiction comes in.
Should you wish to make up your own mind on such things, and on the Borgias themselves, the reading list below will be a good place to start. I could not have written Blood & Beauty without these books, and I am much indebted to their authors, alive and dead.
Fate – a capricious goddess, as we know – permitting, there will be a concluding novel in a few years’ time. It may not surprise you to learn that the story of the Borgias does not get any less exciting.
Sarah Dunant
Florence, June 2012
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arrizabalaga, Jon, Henderson, John and French, Roger, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (Yale University Press, 1997)
Bellonci, Maria, Lucrezia Borgia (Phoenix Press, 2003)
Bradford, Sarah, Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976)
—————, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy (Viking Press, 2004)
Brown, Kevin, The Pox: The Life and Near Death of a Very Social Disease (Sutton Publishing, 2006)
Burchard, Johann (ed. and trans. Geoffrey Parker), At the Court of the Borgia (Folio Society, 1963)
Castiglione, Baldassare (trans. George Bull), The Book of the Courtier (Penguin, 1967)
Chamberlin, E. R., The Fall of the House of Borgia (Temple Smith, 1974)
Chambers, David, ‘Papal conclaves and prophetic mystery in the Sistine Chapel’ (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1978)
Cummins, J. S., ‘Pox and paranoia in Renaissance Europe’ (History Today, 1988)
Gregorovius, Ferdinand (trans. J. L. Garner), Lucretia Borgia (John Murray, 1908)
Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
—————, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Lev, Elizabeth, The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy’s Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de’ Medici (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Art of War (Dover Publications, 2006)
—————, The Prince (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Majanlahti, Anthony, The Families who made Rome: A History and a Guide (Chatto & Windus, 2005)
Mallett, Michael, The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (Academy Chicago, 1987)
Partner, Peter, ‘Papal financial policy in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation’ (Past and Present, 1980)
Pastor, Ludwig, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1899–1908)
Rolfe, Frederick (Baron Corvo), A History of the Borgias (Modern Library, 1931)
Roo, Peter de, Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI: His Relatives and His Time (Desclée, De Brouwer, 1924)
Rowland, Ingrid D., The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Sabatini, Rafael, The Life of Cesare Borgia: A History and Some Criticisms (S. Paul, 1926)
Setton, Kenneth M., The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571 (American Philosophical Society, 1976)
Shaw, Christine, Julius II: The Warrior Pope (Blackwell, 1993)
Stinger, Charles L., The Renaissance in Rome (Indiana University Press, 1998)
Taylor, F. L., The Art of War in Italy, 1494–1529 (Cambridge University Press, 1921)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In the writing of Blood & Beauty I am indebted to a number of places and people.
In London, the British Library and the Warburg at the University of London were invaluable for research. For early helpful readings, I must thank Clare Alexander, Hannah Charlton and Ian Grojnowski, and for later ones William Wallace and Tim Demetris, who, in particular, saved me from my own mistakes many times.
In Italy, the cities of Forlì, Imola, Faenza, Cesena and Nepi offered tantalising glimpses into their bellicose past while in Rome at the Vatican Museum, Carlos Maldonado gave me special help and access when visiting the Borgia apartments.
London, 2013
www.sarahdunant.com
Internationally bestselling writer Sarah Dunant is famous for her Italian historical novels: The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan and Sacred Hearts, which have been translated into more than thirty languages. She has worked widely in television, radio and print, and has written ten novels and edited two collections of essays. She lives in London and Florence.
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