The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  The first volume, at more than six hundred pages, amounts to a radical revision of Pope Alexander’s family tree. Borgia genealogy has always been a challenge, and a playground for mischief-makers. Gaps in the surviving records (to be expected in the provincial Spain of more than five centuries ago), the repeated use of the same given names generation after generation, the adoption of the Borgia patronym by the descendants of at least one of Alexander’s sisters, and the speculations and intended and unintended distortions of generations of writers combine to make it impossible to know whose children even some fairly prominent Borgias were and how they are related to one another. The author knows of no other researcher who has gone nearly as deeply into these mysteries as Peter De Roo or has uncovered nearly as much original material. His evidence, and the arguments based on that evidence, are not in every case as complete or conclusive as one would wish; this is for example true with respect to exactly where and when the members of Cesare and Lucrezia’s generation were born. In the end it becomes necessary, therefore, to consider the case of the Borgias not quite closed. Nevertheless, and in the absence of any real evidence at all for many key aspects of the accepted Borgia myth, the content of Material provides a substantial basis upon which to assert that the following points are probably, and in some cases certainly, true.

  1) The four young Borgias who came to prominence in Rome with Cardinal Rodrigo’s election as pope—Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè—were what genealogists called “siblings german.” That is, all four had the same father and mother; their parents also had at least three other, older children. The eldest was the aforementioned Pedro Luis Lanzol y de Borja, who inherited considerable wealth upon his father’s early death, became the first duke of Gandía, and died years before Rodrigo was elected pope. After him came two daughters named Isabella and Girolama or Geronima. Which means that the threshold for proving all seven to have been Alexander’s children is not as high as one might expect. If he can be shown to have fathered just one, he must have been the father of all.

  2) At least five of the children in question, and probably all seven, were born in Spain (see item 3 for additional matter related to this question). Though this is one of the areas in which more documentation is needed, about Pedro Luis there can be no doubt: he is not known ever to have been outside Spain. Nor is there any record of Cesare being in Italy before 1488, when his name appears in the dedication of a book titled Syllabeca by one Paolo Pompilio. At the end of the Italian part of his career, in an exchange with the viceroy of Naples, he stated explicitly that he was Spanish by birth and his siblings were also. As for Juan (or Giovanni the second duke of Gandía), even the historian Gregorovius, who somehow never doubted Alexander’s paternity, says that he was born in Spain, and the Vatican master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, goes further and describes him as a native of Valencia. About the youngest two, Lucrezia and Jofrè, there is no comparably credible information. Though Lucrezia is often said to have been born in Spoleto in Italy, the supporting documentation has (some might say conveniently) disappeared. Gregorovius, interestingly, says he found her date of birth (April 18, 1480) in a Valencian document. But as we have seen, the young Rodrigo Borgia left Spain for Rome no later than 1455 (at least five years before Pedro Luis’s birth) and returned only once, on the diplomatic mission that kept him there from June 1472 to September 1473. Thus he was too late to have impregnated the mother of Isabella and Girolama, and too soon to be responsible for Cesare or Juan. Which means that Rodrigo Borgia cannot be the father of the seven young Borgias—unless, of course, their mother was shuttling back and forth between Spain and Italy with a frequency all but inconceivable in the fifteenth century.

  3) The father of the seven, Cardinal Rodrigo’s nephew Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, was the firstborn of the numerous children of Rodrigo’s eldest sister Juana de Borja and her husband Pedro Guillen Lanzol, of noble rank as lord of Villalona in Valencia, a wealthy landowner and figure of some distinction (serving as, among other things, Pope Pius II’s envoy to the kings of Aragon and Castile). Guillen Ramón does not appear in the most commonly used Borgia genealogies, but De Roo claimed to have found him in Jacob Wilhelm Imhof’s exhaustive Genealogie XX illustrium familiarum in Hispania of 1712. The author of the present work was able to confirm this claim by inspecting Imhof’s great sprawling volume in the rare books archive of Oxford University’s All Souls College. Guillen Ramón’s wife was, according to De Roo, named Violanta—diminutive Vanotia or Vannozza. He describes her as the daughter of Gerard lord of Castelvert and his wife Damiata del Milà, daughter of Alonso Borgia’s sister Catalina and her husband Juan del Milà. Which means that, although Alexander VI was not the father of the young Borgias, he had a double connection to them by blood. As the grandchildren of his sister Juana, they were his grand-nephews and -nieces. As the great-grandchildren of his aunt Catalina, they were also his first cousins twice removed.

  4) When Guillen Ramón Lanzol died, in or very shortly before 1481, Vannozza was pregnant with their last child, Jofrè. Pedro Luis, as eldest son and heir, remained in Spain, where he was achieving precocious success as a courtier and soldier. By the end of that decade, at some date or dates uncertain, separately or together, Vannozza and the younger children made their way to Rome and came under the patronage of Cardinal Rodrigo. This was a reprise of what had happened thirty years before, when Rodrigo and his brother Pedro Luis and their cousin Luis Juan del Milà had been brought to Rome by their Borgia uncle. Vannozza never lived in Cardinal Rodrigo’s palace or the Vatican but before, during, and after Alexander VI’s reign maintained her own establishment.

  5) Various documents supposedly establishing Rodrigo’s paternity are, to put it gently, suspect. A typical example is a supposed papal bull bearing the date October 1, 1480, by which Pope Sixtus IV legitimatizes a child whose name is given both as Cesare de Boria and Cesare de Borja and who is described as the son of a cardinal and a married woman, neither of them identified by name. The use of the Spanish form of the family name rather than the Italian Borgia, along with other usages standard in Spanish but not in Vatican documents, brings the bull’s authenticity into question. More damningly, no record of any such bull is to be found in the Curial registry in Rome, into which copies of all official documents were entered before being dispatched. De Roo notes that Cesare would have been about five years old in October 1480 and that as a second son he was in line to inherit nothing and stood in no need of being legitimatized even if a bastard. It is also worth noting that it was established Vatican practice, in documents granting benefices to a person previously legitimatized, to include brief mention of that fact. There exist a number of documents in which Popes Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent VIII granted offices and revenues to the boy Cesare, and in none of them is there any such mention.

  De Roo devotes eighty-three pages of his first volume to a close examination of this document and others of its kind, finding in them so many anomalies (incorrect facts, deviations from standard practice, absence of corroboration in the appropriate registers) as to make it seem probable that they are what he calls them: the “fabrication of some criminal ignorant of the habits of the Roman Curia.” He notes, correctly, that the forging of papal documents was widespread for many centuries and was not always so clumsily done.

  6) Nothing should be deduced, though much often has been, from those many instances in which Alexander VI refers to Vannozza’s children as sons or daughters—when, for example, he opens a letter to Lucrezia by saluting her as “our beloved daughter.” He addressed Queen Isabella of Spain in exactly the same way, and her husband Ferdinand along with Emperor Maximilian as “beloved son,” while Louis XII was his “most beloved son.” He addressed almost everyone with whom he had correspondence in the same terms, which were standard usage in the personal and official communications of popes (or papas), and was himself repeatedly referred to as a “beloved son” in documents of the popes he served. The fact that he commonly refers to Lu
crezia as “our daughter in Christ” seems little less than an acknowledgment that he is expressing himself figuratively and expects to be understood accordingly. Similarly, when in the 1480s he provided Lucrezia’s elder sister Girolama with a dowry of four thousand ducats, the instrument of conveyance described the girl as “the issue of his family and house” and himself as acting as the representative of her brothers “for the honor of this house.” The instances in which the young Borgias are referred to as sons and daughters are vastly outnumbered by those in which Alexander’s friends and enemies as well as neutral observers write of them as the pontiff’s nephews and nieces. Typical are a 1493 ambassador’s letter to the marchioness of Mantua in which Cesare is called nepote de uno fratello di N. Signore (nephew of a brother of Our Lord), a letter of 1494 in which the duke of Ferrara’s agent in Rome writes of Jofrè Borgia as a “nephew son” of the pope, two letters in which the bishop of Modena calls Lucrezia Alexander’s “niece,” a document in which Ferrante of Naples calls his granddaughter Sancia illegitimi but says nothing of the kind about her intended husband Jofrè, and an October 1500 Venetian proclamation that admitted Cesare to the republic’s nobility and described him as nepote di papa Alessandro VI. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian-born historian of Spain, wrote that Cesare was rumored to be Alexander’s son—such gossip would have been inevitable—but always denied it. In 1573, long after there could have been any reason for concealment, a grandson of Cesare’s referred to Pope Alexander as Cesare’s oncle in a lawsuit seeking restoration of property confiscated by the French crown.

  The above could be expanded into a book of its own and probably should be, but even in severely abbreviated form it demonstrates the legitimacy—the necessity—of questioning what is taken for granted about how Alexander VI was related to Cesare and his siblings. A few other points seem so compelling that not to mention them in this context would be almost irresponsible:

  Of fifteenth-century writers whose work has survived, only the credulous and notoriously unreliable scandalmonger Stefano Infessura, keeper of a famous diary and implacable enemy not only of popes but of the institution of the papacy, so much as suggested during Alexander’s lifetime that he had an intimate relationship with the lady Vannozza—who, by the way, is not known ever to have set foot inside the Vatican. Not even the supporters of Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494, not even the bitterly vengeful Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, not even Savonarola at his most unrestrained, ever accused Alexander of sexual immorality.

  It is not true that Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, either to aggrandize an eldest son or for any other reason, bought the dukedom of Gandía for Pedro Luis Borgia. As the eldest son of Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, Pedro Luis at the time of his father’s death inherited great wealth including the Gandía properties that later became the nucleus of his duchy. Far from being financially dependent on his kinsman Rodrigo, Pedro Luis actually lent the cardinal a substantial sum in 1483.

  A Spanish royal brief of the early 1480s, one confirming the noble status of the boy Juan de Borja (later Giovanni Borgia), refers to his “father the late illustrious [name deleted].” This wording is more laden with significance than is at first apparent. It not only states explicitly that Juan’s father (and Cesare’s and Lucrezia’s et cetera) is deceased (quondam), which Rodrigo Borgia was many years from being when the brief was issued, but also sheds light on who his father was and was not. The word “illustrious” indicates that the father had been noble and a layman; had he been a cardinal, the appropriate modifier would have been “most reverend.” The deletion of the name—a sad fact for scholars—suggests tampering for purposes of concealment, possibly for the same reason that papal bulls may have been forged.

  Orestes Ferrara, in a biography of Alexander VI that first appeared in English in 1942, offers a persuasive hypothesis as to why so many writers have been misled into believing that Alexander VI’s true family name was not Borgia but Lanzol. As noted in the foregoing pages, the future Alexander VI was Rodrigo de Borja y de Borja from birth, both of his parents having the same surname. The sons of his sister Juana and her husband Pedro Guillen Lanzol, on the other hand, began life under the name Lanzol y de Borja, and it was their children and grandchildren (including Cesare and his siblings) who introduced that name to Rome before allowing the less prestigious (and utterly unknown in Rome) Lanzol to fall away. They were so numerous, and several became so prominent, that it may have come to be assumed, in Rome, that all Borgias were actually Lanzols.

  Questions abound, and at this late date many of them must be considered unanswerable. Be that as it may, so many things weigh against Rodrigo/Alexander’s being the father of Vannozza’s children that it becomes inexcusable to treat his paternity as settled fact.

  One final question: why have De Roo’s volumes, which probe the character, career, and family connections of Alexander VI in far greater depth than any other works before or since, had so little impact in the nine decades since their publication? Have later biographers examined them only to conclude that they are not only wrong but unworthy of rebuttal, even of acknowledgment? Or has he simply been ignored?

  Something suggestive of an answer lay untouched, deep in the recesses of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, until 2010. That was the year in which the author of the present work first requested access to the Bodleian’s single copy of Material. And began at the beginning, with volume one, the six hundred pages dealing with the Borgia family tree and little else. And found that the pages were uncut—meaning that no one could possibly have ever read them. Other copies exist, of course. The one held by the British Library in London, when examined by the author of the present work, proved to be literally in tatters, the binding having dried and disintegrated, clumps of loose pages held together with strips of knotted ribbon. Is their condition the result of heavy use by researchers over the generations? Or does it indicate so little demand that no one has seen a need to have them rebound? The total absence of detailed attention to De Roo in any work since Material itself was published makes the second possibility seem the more plausible of the two.

  14

  A Shattering Loss

  Charles VIII’s withdrawal to France did not bring peace to Italy. It did not even mark the end of the French invasion. The thousands of troops that the king left behind were a violation of Neapolitan sovereignty and a threat to Il Regno’s neighbors.

  The Italians in attendance at Charles’s court, meanwhile, reported that he was making no secret of his intention to invade again in the not very distant future. He was even said to be talking openly, now that he was no longer exposed to the force of Alexander VI’s personality, of placing Cardinal della Rovere on the papal throne.

  Though the Holy League had not disintegrated in the aftermath of Ludovico il Moro’s defection, Charles’s return to France had deprived it of its reason for existing; few of the Italian powers saw further need for cooperation. Ferrandino of Naples was an exception. With the French holding a number of his strongholds, and the weakness of his once-great kingdom having been revealed to the world, he was in desperate need of friends. Only Venice was both able and willing to help, however, and it did so only after Ferrandino ceded it the seaports of Brindisi, Trani, Gallipoli, and Otranto. Alexander VI was another exception. In all of Italy he was the sole champion of unity and of unqualified opposition to incursions by outside powers. He like Ferrandino looked first to Venice for support, and he too found the Venetians focused on their own affairs. When he looked to Florence, he saw cause for alarm. Savonarola and the city’s republican government remained openly loyal to France, an inducement to Charles to return. Finding a way to sever that connection became one of the fundamentals of papal policy.

  Despite all the turmoil and uncertainty, Alexander had reason to feel confident. He had won much respect, both in Rome and elsewhere, for the adroitness and persistence of his opposition to Charles VIII. And he was far from isolated; Milan and Venice were with him in supporting Pisa’s rejection
of Florentine domination. What mattered more, he still had the friendship of Spain—could count on it more surely than ever, because of his refusal to submit to the French king even when at his mercy. This friendship was a sword with more than one edge, however. On the positive side it had become a source of security, because Ferdinand and Isabella were still building up their forces in Sicily and making it known that they would never accept French control of Naples—or for that matter of Rome. Less comfortingly, the growing power of the Spaniards in Italy created the possibility that they might decide to use that power in a campaign of conquest of their own. Ferdinand was ambitious and crafty, and he had never concealed his conviction that Naples was rightfully his.

  Against this background, Alexander must have been less than enthusiastic when he learned that Spanish troops were being moved in substantial numbers to the Neapolitan mainland, and that they had been put under the command of one of the most fearsome generals of the age, Gonzalo Hernández de Córdoba, known as Gonsalvo and destined to be immortalized as the Great Captain. He was a veteran of the long, bitter campaign that had ended in 1492 with the expulsion of the Muslims from Granada, and he was formidably smart and tough. As an ally of Ferrandino he was certain to be invaluable. But if ever used to plant the banners of Aragon and Castile in Italy, he would become at least as big a problem as the French. He, and his master and mistress in Spain, needed careful management. Alexander alone was attempting to manage them constructively, in such a way as to maintain the autonomy and integrity of the peninsula.