Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (5 page)

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.’
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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,
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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.’
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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.
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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 behaviour and have all the appearance of
marrani’
.
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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.

Alexander’s children were the instruments and beneficiaries of his policies. No stigma was attached to bastardy at the time; bastards being sometimes preferred over legitimate children. Nepotism among Renaissance popes was nothing new. It was taken as normal by Italians of the time that each pope, as soon as he was elected, would in the usually comparatively short time available to him take steps to advance his relations to positions of power and wealth and, if possible, to establish a dynasty on a permanent basis. Calixtus himself, who led a blameless private life, had been guilty of excessive nepotism. Alexander, however, was unique in the lengths to which he would go, and in the ambition, talent and looks of the children he promoted. Sexual laxity in the princes of the Church, and indeed in lay society, was taken as a matter of course and it was not until the kings and princes felt their interests threatened by Alexander’s political proceedings that the torrent of abuse against him began. At the time, however, Rodrigo Borgia’s election was generally welcomed. No one beyond the pious Queen Isabella of Castile objected to his immoral way of life as unsuited to the occupant of the Chair of St Peter. Indeed, when the Queen later remonstrated with the papal nuncio Desprats (another Catalan) about Alexander’s flaunting of his children, Desprats retorted that the Queen had clearly not studied the lives of Alexander’s predecessors such as Innocent VIII and Sixtus IV, and that if she had she would not have complained about his present Holiness. ‘And I revealed to her some things about Pope Sixtus and Pope Innocent, demonstrating how much more worthily Your Holiness behaved than the aforesaid [pontiffs]’, he wrote disingenuously to his patron, Alexander.
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Lucrezia’s immediate future was inextricably linked with her father’s dynastic plan for his family and influenced by the shifts in his political alliances. Before his election to the papacy, Alexander had concentrated on building a power base in his native Valencia with rich benefices for himself and his children, not to mention the dukedom of Gandia and other secular privileges as the fruits of his complex relationship with the Catholic Kings of Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The Borgias originated in Aragon but for several hundred years had lived in the territory of the former Moorish kingdom of Valencia. The social ascent of the family from the obscure ranks of the small landowning class of citizens had begun in the fourteenth century, accelerating in the time of Calixtus when his niece, Rodrigo’s sister Joana, married a member of the ancient nobility Their spectacular rise to prominence during the fifteenth century owed itself to the efforts of first Calixtus (who had four sisters and numerous relations living there) and then to Alexander as cardinal and as Pope. Their ascent to the ranks of the high nobility was confirmed when Rodrigo obtained the dukedom of Gandia for his eldest son, Pedro Luis, in 1485. This honour, and the lands which went with it, for which the then Cardinal Borgia paid handsomely and subsequently enlarged, was the foundation stone of the Borja dynasty in Spain. In keeping with their customary position of bargaining between King Ferdinand of Aragon and Rodrigo as one Catalan to another, it seems likely that the dukedom was the reward Rodrigo extracted for his services in influencing the then Pope, Sixtus IV, to grant a Bull of dispensation in 1471 enabling Ferdinand to marry Isabella, thus uniting the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Pedro Luis, whom Rodrigo had named guardian to Juan, died unmarried and without heirs in Rodrigo’s palace in Rome in 1488, leaving his titles and Spanish estates to Juan, who also inherited his fiancée, Maria Enriques, cousin to King Ferdinand.

Lucrezia, eight years old at the time, was left 10,000 ducats by the half-brother whom she had barely known. As her father continued to exploit his Spanish connections, she was promised in marriage, aged ten, to Querubi de Centelles, son of the Count of Oliva, on 26 February 1491, when she was described in the agreement between Borgia and Oliva as ‘carnal daughter of the said most reverend cardinal and sister of the most illustrious lord Don Juan de Borja, Duke of Gandia’. Within just over two months her father, after her proposed bridegroom married someone else, betrothed her, now aged just eleven, on 30 April 1491, to Don Gaspar de Procida, son of the Count of Almenara and Aversa. This marriage contract too was annulled on 8 November 1492, after Rodrigo’s election, when the new Pope no longer saw his daughter’s future in Spain. As Alexander trod the difficult path endeavouring to preserve the independence of the papacy between conflicting interests, Lucrezia would be the victim of his shifting pattern of alliances.