The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Biographers were forced into uncomfortable and even absurd positions. Lucas-Dubreton himself, on almost the same page where he complains about the “sea of uncertainty” that is Borgia history, plunges headlong into the murk. He follows an admission that almost nothing is known of Cardinal Rodrigo’s private life with details about when and where he first met his alleged mistress Vannozza, providing no sources. Much the same thing was done in the nineteenth century by the Prussian Ferdinand Gregorovius, author of an eight-volume History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages along with a hefty biography of Lucrezia. As noted in the introduction to the present work, Gregorovius preceded Lucas-Dubreton in acknowledging that “nothing is known of Rodrigo’s private life during the pontificate of the four popes who followed Calixtus.” But this clean admission, a recognition of the need for restraint in writing about who Alexander was and what he did before 1492, is followed by a declaration that “insatiable sensuality ruled this Borgia, a man of unusual beauty and strength, until his last years. Never was he able to cast out this demon.” These are outlandish charges to level at a man about whose personal life “nothing” is known until he is in his sixties—against whom no charges of what Gregorovius means by “sensuality” can be proved from the beginning to the end of his life.

  An English historian, Sir Charles Grant Robertson, acknowledged in a published lecture of 1891 that little is known also of the woman said to have been Cardinal Rodrigo’s de facto wife and the mother of any number of his children. Robertson complained that “little [is] wrapped in the almost impenetrable mystery which shrouds the private affairs of the Borgias.” One wonders if it occurred to Robertson, or to any of the writers who have had so much to say about the lady in question, that perhaps the only thing making the Borgias so mysterious is the insistence on believing tales for which no sufficient evidence exists. The question of how one of the most visible and influential men in the capital of the Christian West was able to raise a large family without even his most hateful adversaries commenting on it in their letters, diplomatic reports, and other writings dissolves into nothingness the moment real evidence is requested. A more recent historian, Michael Mallett, follows the conventional line in asserting of Alexander’s children that “there were certainly eight or possibly nine.” He then adds, however, that even to “consider” (a curious word choice) these offspring is to be “plunged into a world of uncertainty tinged with acrimonious and often libidinous controversy.” Seeing a writer and scholar as competent as Mallett resort to such vague and florid abstractions raises questions about his own confidence in whatever he was struggling to say.

  In the end the worst that can responsibly be said of Alexander VI is that he is one of history’s puzzles. Gregorovius came to acknowledge this and to admit his own bafflement. “All experience of psychology,” he wrote, “makes us expect that the burden of sin should have made of Alexander a man dark with fear and gloom, but he stands before us cheerful and happy, ready for enjoyment, till the last days of his life.” This aspect of the puzzle would disappear if Alexander could be shown to have been utterly cynical, without belief in the creed he professed and therefore exempt from any sense of sinfulness. He is often, even usually, depicted in exactly that way, but such an interpretation of his character is unquestionably false. He was a believer and a devout one, displaying particular devotion to the Virgin Mary and unqualified so far as we know in his acceptance of the teachings of the Church he led. It is at least possible that, while believing in damnation (he would be a remarkable fifteenth-century European if he did not), he was not “dark with fear and gloom” for the simple reason that he was hopeful of escaping it and saw reason to be so.

  The first historian to take such possibilities seriously appears to have been the Italian Andrea Leonetti, who in an 1880 work titled Papa Alessandro VI raised the startling question of whether what the world had believed about his subject for almost four hundred years might after all be wrong. His book drew some praise, some of it from scholars and journals of note, but it was not translated into languages other than Italian and sank into oblivion. Something similar happened in the 1920s, when Peter De Roo, in his Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI (see background section on “Paternity” beginning on this page) published five volumes of documents inconsistent with the Alexander legend, and again in the 1930s and 1940s, with the publication first in Italian and then in English of Orestes Ferrara’s The Borgia Pope. Both De Roo and Ferrara appear to have been ignored—certainly they have been denied the dignity of rebuttal—and to have had no impact whatever.

  The last small eruption of Borgia revisionism occurred almost seven decades ago in an article, “New Views upon the Borgias,” written by J. H. Whitfield of Oxford University and published in the March 1944 issue of the journal History. Whitfield, who was at the time lecturer in Italian, devoted most of his article to a somewhat cursory but generally perceptive overview of the literature in which, over the centuries, “every conceivable crime” had been attributed to the Borgias. Whitfield describes Burckhardt’s depiction of the Borgia family as a “growth of romance,” apparently meaning a tumorlike thing, and explains the Gregorovius version as “animated mainly by the wish to prove his thesis of the necessity of the German Reformation.” He calls the standard biography of Lucrezia, written by Maria Bellonci in the 1930s, “not honest” and says too much has been made of suspect editions and faulty translation of the diaries of Vatican master of ceremonies Johann Burchard. He notes that even writers hostile to the Borgias have found themselves forced by the evidence (or the absence of evidence) to conclude that Cesare was not involved in the murder of his brother Juan, that he and his sister and Alexander could not have poisoned Prince Cem and are not likely to have been poisoners at all, and that the pope’s actions against the Roman barons and the warlords of the Romagna were not only justified but necessary, et cetera.

  Turning his attention to the defenders of the Borgias, Whitfield describes Ferrara’s The Borgia Pope as “too simple” and “too blithe,” not explaining what he means. Of De Roo’s five volumes he has nothing to say except that they are “frankly apologetic” (both words are exactly correct, and it is improbable that De Roo himself would have rejected either), giving no indication of having paid much attention to their contents.

  Whitfield concludes that “a revision in favor of the Borgias remains to be made,” that “it is no longer possible to make with impunity the old global assertions of the wickedness of the Renascence,” and that, as he previously noted, “Burckhardt and Gregorovius have had their day.”

  On that last point he was wrong. After his article appeared, Whitfield left Oxford to become professor of Italian language and literature at the University of Birmingham, never again publishing anything about the Borgias. Seventy years on, the “revision” that he expected remains to be made. The “day” of Burckhardt and Gregorovius persists as a long, long twilight.

  About the Famous Mistresses

  It would hardly be surprising, taking into account the general level of clerical discipline in the generations before the Council of Trent and his own immense vitality and joie de vivre, if Rodrigo Borgia had a full and varied sex life. One might be justified in thinking it improbable that he did not.

  None of this changes the fact, or licenses us to ignore the fact, that there is no convincing evidence that he ever had anything of the kind. Nor does it rescue the stories about his having long-term relationships with two women, Vannozza Catanei and Giulia Farnese, from ranking among the most dubious elements of the whole dark Borgia legend.

  We saw in “Background: The Paternity Question: An ‘Apology’ ” following chapter 13 that Peter De Roo, in volume one of his Material, concludes that Vannozza’s five hundred years of notoriety are almost certainly undeserved—that though she was indeed the mother of Cesare and Lucrezia and five or more other children, the father was not Rodrigo Borgia but a son of his sister. That this conclusion departs radically from the legend is of cour
se obvious. Its credibility becomes stronger, however, when one delves into what other historians have had to say about Vannozza and discovers the confusion and contradiction that they have left for us to untangle as best we can.

  Was she Spanish or Italian? If Italian, was she from Mantua or Rome? Did she become Rodrigo’s mistress as early as 1460, as Ludwig Pastor tells us, or is Gregorovius correct in saying that the relationship “may have begun shortly before 1470” (in which case Vannozza could not be the mother of Pedro Luis first duke of Gandía). Was she of noble rank, or an innkeeper, or a prostitute and madame of a brothel? What was her proper name, actually—Vanotia or Giovanna? We could be helped in deciding if the writers offering their many different answers to the endless questions gave us evidence for what they assert. They rarely, almost never, do.

  After Material, no work has explored this matter as thoroughly as Orestes Ferrara’s The Borgia Pope. Ferrara devotes an entire chapter to Vannozza’s origins and her place in the Rome of the late fifteenth century (later doing the same for Giulia Farnese). After considering the various versions of the Vannozza story that have been offered over the centuries, he arrives at a conclusion that at first can seem almost a joke. “We find,” he writes, “that there must have been several of them”—several Vannozzas. He is not joking, and what he says makes sense. He observes that Vannozza was a popular nickname, that Catanei was “one of the commonest names of the time,” that it is not implausible that more than one woman so named was living in Rome in the 1480s and after, and that no one of them is likely to have been doing all the things that the archives of the time show people named Vannozza to have been doing. “The rich woman [named Vannozza Catanei] who left a fortune to charitable and religious works could not be the poor woman [another Vannozza] whom the notorial document shows so concerned about her small debts.… The woman who kept hostelries could not be the mother of the Duke of Gandía, the Duchess of Ferrara and the Prince of Squillace.” Nor, Ferrara adds, is it likely that any single Vannozza could have been for many years the mistress of the vice-chancellor of the Church, the mother of his many children, and the wife, sequentially, of at least three other men, with one of whom she supposedly had a son named Ottaviano at almost the same time that Jofrè Borgia was born. Too much material has been conflated in a story that cannot logically contain it all.

  Ferrara concludes, in tones suggestive of despair, that “in all this question there is more darkness than light” and that in the absence of adequate information the only way to prove that Vannozza was Rodrigo’s mistress would be to establish that he was the father of her children. Which sends us back to De Roo and the fact that Rodrigo’s paternity is, as we have seen, a distinctly shaky proposition.

  De Roo and Ferrara are agreed on a number of important points, and together these points form a Vannozza story that is more coherent and less fraught with difficulties than the better-known alternatives. The first is that after the death of her first husband, Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, Vannozza married a Spaniard named Domenico Arenos. The two moved to Rome in the 1480s under the sponsorship of Cardinal Rodrigo, who is likely to have been responsible for Arenos’s (in Italy the name became de Arignano or Carignano) finding employment in the papal bureaucracy. In keeping with the customs of the time Vannozza did not take her children with her into her second husband’s household (we saw the same thing when Lucrezia Borgia moved to Ferrara as the bride of Alfonso d’Este, leaving her son Rodrigo of Aragon in Rome). The four youngest were taken into the establishment of their great-uncle Rodrigo, where the cardinal’s friend and cousin Adriana del Milà took charge of their care and they came to be known as Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè Borgia.

  What, in the end, is proved? Very little, where Vannozza is concerned. To return to Ferrara’s words, “it is extraordinarily difficult to affirm anything whatsoever with absolute certainty.” Without question it is not only difficult but impossible to say with anything like confidence that she was Rodrigo Borgia’s woman, or he the father of her children.

  Readers with some prior knowledge of the Borgia story (if only through the most recent television dramatization, which is to be excused on grounds that its producer denies any attempt at historical accuracy) will perhaps have been surprised by the small attention given in the present volume to Alexander VI’s supposed mistress Giulia Farnese. She looms large in most accounts, as an example and victim of the pope’s satyriasis.

  As the story goes:

  Giulia, reputed to be so fantastically beautiful that she was known to all Rome as La Bella Giulia, became the mistress of Rodrigo Borgia when she was at most fifteen years old and he nearly sixty. She was seduced or coerced into submitting not only by a monster of a pontiff but by her own greedy relatives—above all her ambitious brother Alessandro, who traded the use of her body for appointment to the College of Cardinals.

  She went on to bear the pope at least one child, possibly three or even four. She did so in spite of having a young husband, the Baron Orso or Orsino Orsini, and in spite of being herself a daughter of the Roman nobility, descended from two of central Italy’s most important families.

  For almost a decade she reigned as unofficial queen of a papal household that was managed, in perhaps the story’s oddest twist, by her husband’s mother, Adriana del Milà, who after moving from Spain to Rome had married Ludovico Orsini, lord of Bassanello, and been widowed after giving birth to her son.

  It is a great story, as rich in novelty and drama as it is sordid. It is, however, only a story and for that reason has been omitted from the main narrative of the present volume. Here, in summary, are its flaws:

  As with other stories about Rodrigo Borgia’s moral degeneracy and sexual excesses, this one proves upon careful examination to be supported by only the flimsiest and most dubious evidence. It is certainly true, and was no secret at the time, that Giulia Farnese became a regular at the papal court when barely out of childhood, and it is likewise true that her presence gave rise to rumors that were taken up by three contemporary writers at least. One was the diarist and gossip Stefano Infessura, whose political agenda and recklessness with the facts have been noted more than once in the present book. The others, Jacopo Sannazzaro of Naples and Francesco Matarazzo of Perugia, were essentially entertainers, professional satirists concerned not with truth but with amusing such patrons as the Baglioni warlords of Perugia, enemies of the Borgias. To use them as sources is approximately as legitimate as basing an evaluation of President George W. Bush on transcripts of The Daily Show. When, more than a generation after Alexander’s death, Francesco Guicciardini conferred new dignity on the Giulia story by making note of it in his Storia d’Italia, he acknowledged that he was repeating low gossip.

  A sexual relationship is not needed to explain Giulia’s presence at Cardinal Rodrigo’s palace or at the papal court. She had access by virtue of the prominence of the Farnese and Gaetani families (her mother was a Gaetani), and she penetrated the Borgia inner circle when she married the son of Adriana del Milà. Along the way she became a close friend and companion of Lucrezia, and she and her husband joined the social set centered on Lucrezia and Alfonso duke of Bisceglie. Though she certainly became a favorite of the pope’s, it is a long leap from charming an aging cleric to becoming his mistress.

  Likewise, Giulia’s submission to Rodrigo is not required to explain Alessandro Farnese’s promotion to cardinal. Alessandro was not plucked out of obscurity; his appointment to the Sacred College in the second year of Pope Alexander’s reign shocked no one. A young man of ability and high social status (in 1534 he would become Pope Paul III, going on to achieve considerable historical importance), he had first been singled out for advancement by Innocent VIII. He became a protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici and at the time of Alexander VI’s election already held the high rank of protonotary apostolic, was the Vatican’s treasurer-general, and had served as a papal secretary. He was several years older than Cesare when they were among the dozen new cardinals appoin
ted in September 1493. According to the contemporary historian Sigismondo de’ Conti, his selection had been urged upon Alexander by the Roman nobility.

  Though the young Cardinal Farnese became the butt of jokes, this was not necessarily because his sister was the pope’s mistress. He was called “the petticoat cardinal,” and this has been assumed to refer to his dependence on his sister’s special position. It could as easily have reference to his connection to the clique whose central figure was Adriana del Milà. Similarly, the fact that Giulia was called “the bride of Christ” is significant only to the extent that the satirists responsible for such jibes were credible—which they have no known claim to having been.

  Bella Giulia had one child only—and there is no reason to believe that that child had a Borgia father. The Borgias, as we have seen, were not only willing but eager to acknowledge and embrace illegitimate additions to the family (taking several small bastards with them, for example, upon fleeing Rome after the death of Alexander). Alexander at no point showed any interest in Giulia’s child, her daughter Laura, who grew up to be married in a lavish Vatican ceremony to Nicola della Rovere, a nephew of Pope Julius II. Julius of course was the former Giuliano della Rovere, whose obsessive hatred of the Borgias makes it difficult to believe that he could have countenanced such a union if he even suspected the bride of being a daughter of Alexander VI.

  The alleged role of Adriana del Milà in the Giulia story is deeply improbable. Evidence or testimony to the contrary being nonexistent, it is fair to Adriana to assume that she was a person of at least normally good moral character. Both before and after his election as pope, Rodrigo Borgia (her father’s first cousin) entrusted her not only with running his household but with raising Lucrezia and her brothers after their mother remarried and they moved to Rome. When Lucrezia journeyed from Rome to Ferrara to become the wife of Alfonso d’Este, the pope sent Adriana along as her chaperone. A widow, she was devoted to her son, an only child. And yet the Giulia story requires us to believe that this same woman participated in cuckolding her son—a noble who does not appear to have sought advancement in the papal service and certainly was not financially needy—and in reducing his bride, who was barely more than a child, to a state not far removed from prostitution. If as is often alleged Giulia was already the pope’s mistress at the time of her wedding, the story requires us to believe also that as powerful and proud a figure as Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini, in attending the ceremony, also acquiesced in such a vile travesty.