The palace is splendidly decorated: the walls of the great entrance hall are hung with tapestries depicting various historical scenes. A small drawing room leads off this, which was also decorated with fine tapestries; the carpets on the floor harmonized with the furnishings which included a sumptuous day bed upholstered in red satin with a canopy over it, and a chest on which was laid out a vast and beautiful collection of gold and silver plate. Beyond this there were two more rooms, one hung with fine satin, carpeted, and with another canopied bed covered with Alexandrine velvet; the other even more ornate with a couch covered in cloth of gold. In this room the central table was covered with a cloth of Alexandrine velvet [a complicated dyeing process which resulted in a violet blue] and surrounded by finely carved chairs.
Rodrigo Borgia was a man of immense shrewdness and ability, devious and ruthless, avid for money and possessions but at the same time possessed of overwhelming charm, a quick sense of humour and a great lust for life and beautiful women. Priest or not, his sexual power was intense: ‘He is handsome; of a most glad countenance and joyous aspect, gifted with honeyed and choice eloquence’, his former tutor had described him as a cardinal; ‘The beautiful women on whom his eyes are cast he lures to love him, and moves them in a wondrous way, more powerfully than the magnet influences iron.’I A Sienese garden party held when he was twenty-nine was described by his master, Pope Pius II, as an orgy, with dancing, lewd women and lascivious conduct by all present. The Sienese joked that if all the children fathered on that day were born with the robes of their fathers they would turn out priests and cardinals.2 Thirty-three years later he was still an attractive man, described by Hieronymus Portius in 1493 as ‘tall, in complexion neither fair nor dark; his eyes are black, his mouth somewhat full. His health is splendid, and he has a marvellous power of enduring all sorts of fatigue. He is singularly eloquent in speech, and is gifted with an innate good breeding which never forsakes him.’3 Rodrigo was an impressive figure with his powerful, hooked nose, imposing manner and heavy but athletic body (he had a passion for hunting). He was possessed of great willpower and would let nothing, not even his children, stand in the way of his ambitions.
He fathered eight, possibly nine, children: the first three, by unknown mothers, were Pedro Luis, born in about 1468; Jeronima, who married the Roman noble Gian Andrea Cesarini in 1482; and Elisabetta, who married a papal official, Pietro Matuzzi, that same year. Two more boys by anonymous mothers were born after he succeeded to the papacy, but his principal mistress and mother of the three children he loved the most, Lucrezia and her two elder brothers Cesare and Juan, was Vannozza Cattanei. Vannozza, the daughter of one Jacopo Pinctoris, (the Painter), was probably born and brought up in Rome, but is believed to have been of Mantuan origin. She must have had a strong personality to have held a man like Rodrigo Borgia for so long; she was certainly attractive enough to marry two husbands while carrying on her affair with the cardinal. Her relationship with Rodrigo ended shortly after Lucrezia’s birth, although she claimed that her last child, Jofre, born in 1481/2, was fathered by Rodrigo and would proudly record the fact on her tombstone. Rodrigo himself remained dubious as to Jofre’s parenthood and apparently suspected he was the son of Vannozza by her second husband, the Milanese Giorgio della Croce, to whom she was married at the time of Jofre’s birth. Vannozza profited greatly from her connection with the powerful Cardinal Borgia, becoming a woman of property, with inns in the smart quarters of Rome and houses which she rented to artisans and prostitutes. From the few letters of hers which survive, she comes across as distinctly unattractive in character – grasping, social-climbing, avid for money and position. She kept in touch with Alexander after their affair ended by which time she was married to a third husband, Carlo Canale, but seems to have played little part in her children’s lives as they grew up. While she remained close to her eldest son, Cesare, her relationship with Lucrezia, her only daughter, was a distant one.
Lucrezia was twelve when her father became Pope, having been born on 18 April 1480 in the fortress of Subiaco, one of her father’s strategic strongholds round Rome. Her birth outside the city was probably due to Rodrigo’s early policy of discretion as to the existence of his illegitimate family, as a result of which we know very little of her early life. She probably spent her first years in her mother’s house on the Piazza Pizzo di Merlo in the Ponte quarter of Rome, and it seems probable that she was also educated in the Dominican convent of San Sisto on the Appian Way, a place in which she later took refuge in times of difficulty and stress. She spent her formative years not with her mother but in the vast Orsini Palazzo Montegiordano in the care of Adriana de Mila, her father’s first cousin and the widow of a member of the powerful Roman clan. The dominant figure in her life was undoubtedly her father, who loved his three children by Vannozza with an extravagant passion – ‘he is the most carnal of men’, an observer remarked – so much so that there were later accusations of incest between Rodrigo and Lucrezia.
After his election to the papacy, Alexander moved Adriana and Lucrezia to the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico near the Vatican. The move brought Lucrezia to the attention of the largely hostile Borgia chroniclers, the gossip columnists of the day, and of the envoys to the papal court of the Italian states, an important part of whose duties was to purvey intimate detail to their employers. The limelight penetrated her hitherto private world where she lived in an ambience which was virtually a papal harem. Lucrezia was brought up in an atmosphere of male sexual power and dominance, in which the women were entirely subject to Rodrigo’s will and desires. The head of the household, Adriana de Mila, subjugated herself entirely to his interests, acting as Lucrezia’s guardian and chaperone, while at the same time encouraging his relationship with her own son’s wife, the beautiful, nineteen-year-old Giulia Farnese Orsini, known as ‘Giulia la Bella’. Giulia’s cuckold husband Orsino Orsini, nicknamed ‘Monoculus’ (‘One-eyed’), was kept well out of the way at their country estate of Bassanello.
Lucrezia herself, as the only daughter of Rodrigo’s relationship with Vannozza, was cherished by her father who loved her, according to the chroniclers, ‘superlatively’. Unlike her siblings she was fair, perhaps an indication of her northern Italian maternal origin. ‘She is of middle height and graceful in form’, Niccolò Cagnolo of Parma wrote of her in her early twenties. ‘Her face is rather long, the nose well cut, hair golden, eyes of no special colour [probably grey blue]. Her mouth is rather large, the teeth brilliantly white, her neck is slender and fair, the bust admirably proportioned. She is always gay and smiling.’4 Other narrators specifically praised her long golden hair and her bearing: ‘she carries herself with such grace that it seems as if she does not move’. It is significant of Rodrigo’s fashionable identification with the humanist, classical world that he should take as his papal name that of the Greek hero and conqueror Alexander, while naming one of his favourite sons Cesare (i.e. Caesar) and his daughter Lucretia after the Roman matron who committed suicide rather than live with the dishonour of being raped. The name Lucretia, symbolizing as it did womanly chastity, would make her the subject of unseemly mirth among many of her contemporaries. She was a woman of her time, well educated in humanist literature, speaking Italian, Catalan, French and Latin and capable of writing poetry in those languages; she also had an understanding of Greek. She had been taught eloquence and could express herself elegantly in public speech. She loved music and poetry both Spanish and Italian, owning volumes of Spanish canzones and of Dante and Petrarch. Like upper-class women – and men – of her time she learned to dance with skill and grace, an important part of courtly pastimes.
Lucrezia was brought up in a world in which male dominance was taken for granted; while her brother Cesare might believe Alberti’s dictum ‘a man can do anything he wills’, a woman’s dilemma was that of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s sister, Nannina Rucellai, who wrote to her mother in 1470, ‘Whoso wants to do as they wish, should not be born a woman.’5 She was also a
Borgia, with her father’s charm, graceful manners and administrative ability, his resilience and understanding of the workings of power. Like him, she well knew how to turn events to her advantage; she accepted situations as they were and went her own way, bending to circumstances but never defeated by them. She shared the curious mixture of piety, sensuality and complete indifference to sexual morality that was a feature of her family but, when she was in a position to express herself, she would prove to be a good, kind and compassionate woman.
Of her immediate siblings she was closest to her brother Cesare, born in 1476,6 the most brilliant and ruthless of all the Borgias, including his father. Cesare was to be the evil genius of Lucrezia’s life: their love and loyalty to each other were such that he, like his father, would be accused of incest with her; even that his obsessive love for her led him to murder. Accusations of incest at the time have to be viewed with a degree of scepticism: sexual innuendo was a favourite ingredient of Italian gossip. It was, however, not always unjustified. Cesare’s contemporary Gian Paolo Baglioni, lord of Perugia, openly received ambassadors while lying in bed with his sister.
Cesare grew up to be the handsomest man of his day: at twenty-five the Venetian envoy Polo Capello, who by then had reason both to hate and to fear him, wrote ‘[he] is physically most beautiful, . . . tall and well-made’. The Mantuan envoy Boccaccio, who visited him in his palace in the Borgo, the newly built quarter next to the Vatican, in March 1493 described him aged seventeen to the Duke of Ferrara: ‘He possesses marked genius and a charming personality. He has the manners of a son of a great prince: above all he is lively and merry and fond of society . . .’ By then Cesare, destined by his father for the Church, had been accumulating rich ecclesiastical benefices since the age of seven. At fifteen, to the outrage of his future flock, he was appointed Bishop of Pamplona, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Navarre, although he had not yet even taken holy orders. After his elevation to the papacy, Alexander had bestowed on Cesare his own former archbishopric of Valencia, with a huge income of 16,000 ducats a year. When Boccaccio visited him the only sign of his clerical status was ‘a little tonsure like a simple priest’: otherwise he was dressed for the hunt in a ‘worldly garment of silk with a sword at his side’. ‘The Archbishop of Valencia,’ the envoy remarked, ‘has never had any inclination for the priesthood.’
Indeed, Cesare had inherited none of that streak of piety which ran through his family. Alexander was a devotee of the Virgin Mary while Lucrezia developed a deep sense of religion over the years. Cesare’s great-nephew, grandson of his worthless younger brother Juan, even became a saint. But there is little to suggest that Cesare cared anything for God or religion. As a man of the Renaissance, he believed in an egocentric world, taking as his role model his namesake, Caesar. Following the Renaissance concept of the ancient world he believed that the ultimate aim of a man’s life was not heaven but fame and power on this earth, a goal to be achieved by his own individual exercise of skill and valour – ‘virtù’ – to conquer the unpredictable force of fortune – ‘fortuna’ – which ruled the world. Indeed, everything about Cesare pointed to a career other than the one chosen for him. He was a brilliant student – even the hostile historian Paolo Giovio admitted that at the University of Pisa, which he had attended after the University of Perugia, ‘he had gained such profit [from his studies] that, with ardent mind, he discussed learnedly the questions put to him in both canon and civil law’. And in a world which valued courage in war and physical prowess in the exercise of arms, he excelled in strength and competitiveness. He shared his father’s passion for hunting, for horses and hunting dogs and he learned bullfighting from the Spaniards of his own and his father’s households. He had everything with which to succeed, backed, all-importantly, by his father’s powerful position; it all depended upon his father’s life and that, in the nature of things, could not give him unlimited time. Convinced, as he once said, that he would die young, he became driven, devious, dissembling, ruthlessly crushing everyone who stood in his way. As his career progressed, the legend of the Borgia monster was born.
Yet at seventeen he could still appear to the envoy Boccaccio as ‘very modest’ and his bearing ‘much better than that of the Duke of Gandia, his brother . . .’ Lucrezia’s other older brother, Juan Borgia, born c. 1478, was a vain, arrogant, mindless, dissolute youth who shared Cesare’s fine features and good looks but none of his qualities. Notwithstanding this, he was his father’s favourite son, as his stepfather, Vannozza’s third husband, Carlo Canale, informed Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who was exploring every avenue of influence with the Pope in order to have his brother, Sigismondo Gonzaga, made a cardinal. Canale, formerly a secretary to the previous Cardinal Gonzaga, uncle of the current Marquis, advised Gonzaga to do everything he could to conciliate Juan Gandia, such as presenting him with one of the Gonzaga horses which were coveted throughout Europe. ‘Because,’ he wrote, ‘. . . in dealings with His Holiness he could have no better intercessor than His Lordship because he is the eye of His Holiness Our Lord.’7 By this time Canale was so carried away by his wife’s exalted connections that he went so far as to sign the letter ‘Carolus de Cattaneis’. The youngest member of the quartet, Jofre Borgia, at least a year younger than Lucrezia and destined to play a minor part in her life, was far less favoured by Alexander than Vannozza’s three other children, although he deployed him as he did the others as a pawn in his political plans. Indeed, Jofre’s existence was barely noticed by commentators at that time. Alexander’s early discretion as to the existence of his children had succeeded to the extent that the Mantuan envoy Fioramonte Brognolo, writing to Francesco Gonzaga’s wife, Isabella d’Este, cautiously referred to both Cesare and Juan as ‘nephews of a brother of His Holiness’ as late as February 1493.
Although born in Roman territory and half Italian on their mother’s side, Lucrezia and her brothers were strongly influenced by their Catalan ancestry. ‘Catalan’, as distinct from Spanish, had a particular connotation in the eyes of Italians and indeed the Catalans themselves. The Kingdom of Aragon, represented in Alexander’s day by the wily King Ferdinand, included the Catalan-speaking peoples spread round the western coasts of the Mediterranean from the territory of Barcelona, the capital, to the former Moorish kingdom of Valencia in the south and the island of Mallorca. The reputation of the Catalans as tight-fisted merchants and ruthless fighters was widespread; as far as the Italians were concerned elements of race and religion also entered into it, particularly in the case of Valencia, a recently conquered Arab kingdom where Moors (Arabs) and Jews had lived side by side with Aragonese. The Moorish kingdom of Granada had only fallen to the Spaniards under Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife Isabella, independently Queen of Castile, in 1492, the year of Rodrigo’s election. Valencian Catalans in particular were referred to opprobriously by Italians as marrani, meaning secret Jews. The Borgias, or de Borjas, in Rome under Calixtus and subsequently Alexander, represented an alien cell, with their own loyalties and their own language (a mixture of Latin and Provencal). Both Borgia popes, Calixtus and Alexander, gathered a praetorian guard of their Valencian relations and fellow Catalans around them, to the exclusion of native-born Italians. Catalan was the language of the papal court of the Borgias and the family language which they used among themselves. Borgias and their connections swarmed round Alexander in the Vatican to an even greater degree than they had round his uncle Calixtus. Juan de Borja y Navarro, Archbishop of Monreale, was the only cardinal of Alexander’s first creation on 31 August 1493. The other Borja connections are too numerous to mention, occupying as they do no less than a dozen pages of the index of the authoritative work on the subject.8 That Italians were contemptuous of them as marrani is evidenced by the chancellor of Giovanni de’Medici (the future Pope Leo X, then a fellow student of Cesare at the University of Pisa in 1491), commenting on Cesare’s household: ‘It seems to us that these men of his who surround him are little men who have small consideration for beh
aviour and have all the appearance of marrani’.9
The awareness of being a race apart, regarded as foreigners in a foreign land, enhanced the Borgias’ sense of togetherness – ‘us against the world’. They employed their relations and compatriots as the only people they could trust in a potentially hostile environment. In Rome itself and its immediate environs, the independence and security of the papacy were threatened by the great baronial families with palaces in the city and strongholds in the Roman Campagna, the Colonna and the Orsini, and their lesser allies; only the fact that the two families invariably worked against each other made the situation inside and immediately outside the city tenable for the holder of the papal throne. And beyond the Orsini and Colonna, the great families of Italy were linked by a web of dynastic marriages and ancient alliances going back over hundreds of years. A chain of intermarriage joined Orsini to Medici, Este to Sforza, Gonzaga to Montefeltro, branching down to the smallest lordships. ‘So thick was the undergrowth of alliances among the signorial families’, an historian wrote, ‘that to strike one branch was to break another.’ This was the family network which the alien Borgias would attack in their ambitious plans to establish a dominant Borgia dynasty in Italy.
Lucrezia Borgia Page 3
