The Borgias (67 page)

What, finally, are we to make of this family?

First and most obviously, that the extraordinary durability of its fame is rooted less in its achievements, which though remarkable were in no way unique, than in an unequaled reputation for wickedness: for incest, fratricide, betrayal, and the ruthless pursuit of ignoble goals.

Second, that the darkest parts of this reputation turn out, when tested, to be nonsense pure and simple. Consider one example of which much was made from the sixteenth century onward: the deathbed scene described by Francesco Gonzaga in a letter to his wife just weeks after Alexander VI’s passing.

When he fell sick, [Alexander] began to talk in such a way that anyone who did not know what was in his mind would have thought that he was wandering, although he was perfectly conscious of what he said; his words were, “I come; it is right; wait a moment.” Those who know the secret say that in the conclave following the death of Innocent he made a compact with the devil, and purchased the papacy from him at the price of his soul. Among the other provisions of the agreement was one which said that he should be allowed to occupy the Holy See twelve years, and this he did with the addition of four days. There are some who affirm that at the moment he gave up his spirit seven devils were seen in his chamber. As soon as he was dead his body began to putrefy and his mouth to foam like a kettle over the fire, which continued as long as it was on the earth
.

Et cetera. That the worldly lord of Mantua could write such things makes it unsurprising that the most fantastically improbable tales won wide acceptance in the Italy of his time. When Alexander died, the reader may recall, Gonzaga was not only not at the Vatican but not in Rome, being in command of French troops on their way to attack Naples. He notes in his letter that “scandalous epigrams [about Alexander] are every day published,” which is hardly surprising when one considers the number and importance of the pope’s political adversaries and the eagerness of the Italian public to believe a Spanish pontiff capable of every imaginable evil.

A third fact deserving notice is that the black myth of the Borgias is largely a manufactured thing, produced for a purpose, and that the process of manufacturing it was fully under way even before Alexander’s death. It got off to an impressively fast start thanks to the pope’s blithe indifference not only to personal criticism but to gross slander, and his consistent failure to respond. It accelerated further when he was in his grave, with Julius II not only encouraging fresh slanders but actually having onetime Borgia associates tortured in an almost Stalinist campaign of terror aimed at generating damaging material. That nothing of substance was turned up in this way mattered hardly at all; the rumors and fabrications were quite colorful and numerous enough to satisfy every need, and the retailing of them was encouraged and rewarded by Julius and others. Memories of what a formidable character Cesare had been, and of how potent a combination he and Alexander had formed, encouraged the generation that followed them to believe the worst. As the stories accumulated, and then as the Reformation threw the Catholic Church on the defensive and used Alexander and his family as prime examples of the decadence of Rome, it came to be assumed on all sides that the Borgias were indefensible, and that to question the established view was a pastime for fools.

As soon as that established view is put to the test, it becomes clear that a reconsideration is not only possible but needed. Authoritative contemporary descriptions of Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander, bring to mind what Oliver Wendell Holmes said of President Franklin Roosevelt: a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament. Alexander has never been described as a genius, political or otherwise, but neither is it possible to doubt that he was a keenly intelligent man. Nor is it possible to dispute that he was hardworking, conscientious, and courageous. As for temperament, virtually everyone who recorded an impression of him testifies to his serene good humor, his friendliness, and his ability to project warmth and sympathy without compromising the dignity of his position. He stands unconvicted of sexual immorality, and whoever wishes to argue that he was as cynical about religion as has generally been assumed carries a weighty burden of proof. He took the lead in saving Italy from one French invasion, and struggled under impossibly difficult conditions to manage another and limit the damage it caused. If in the last decade of his life he went to unacceptable lengths to advance his policies and especially his young relations—and obviously he did—his actions in that regard were nonetheless not totally incompatible with the interests of the papacy and the Church he had been elected to lead. As J. H. Whitfield observed more than half a century ago, in important ways—reclaiming the Papal States for Rome, for example, and resisting foreign interference in Italy—Alexander deserves credit that usually goes to the man who hated him most bitterly and was almost fanatically bent on destroying his reputation, Pope Julius II. Alexander was far from guiltless, as we have seen, but it is not even necessary to consider the historical context to find more in him to admire than to deplore. In context—and especially in comparison with many of his predecessors and successors—he can seem, in some ways, an almost heroic figure.

As for Cesare, the ruthlessness for which he has always been famous is explained if not excused by the milieu in which he operated, and the character of the enemies with whom he was obliged to contend. If he had been less hard and less relentless, he would not have survived long enough to be remembered, and his place would have been filled by men far worse than himself. That he insisted on surrendering a secure place at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is as plausibly interpreted as
testament to his integrity as to anything else, and that he transformed himself into such an important figure at such a young age is proof of his immense gifts. And it is fair to ask: if he had achieved his ambitions, establishing himself securely as ruler of a powerful state, in what way would that have been worse for the people of Italy than what they experienced over the centuries after his death? In what way would it have been worse for Europe?

The last of the three notorious Borgias, Lucrezia, is in her limited way even more of an archetype than Alexander or her brother. She became the subject of gutter talk when little more than a child, precociously notorious thanks to the circumstances into which life and family had cast her.
Considered by many to be unworthy of marriage into the Este family, distrusted and even despised, she lived long enough to be recognized by her husband, his family, and the citizens of her adoptive home as what in fact she was: “a pattern of womanly virtue.”

Surely, these three deserve more serious—more
careful
—attention than they have hitherto commonly received. Not only are they and their stories intrinsically fascinating, but to follow those stories is to reach deep into the world of the Renaissance and shed light on it from innumerable new directions. It is a thing eminently worth doing. To bring to it a burden of demonstrably unwarranted assumptions is a shame and a waste.

Examining Old Assumptions

About the Character of Alexander VI

There is nothing, apparently, that somebody somewhere won’t say about the Borgias. About any Borgia, even the blameless Alonso, who by becoming pope in old age unwittingly put his family on the road to infamy.

There is even a website—among the first to appear when one Googles “Pope Calixtus III”—that places Alonso Borgia among the twenty-five most evil people of the fifteenth century. It accuses him of “unprecedented depravity, torture, and inhumanity for the purpose of satanic worship,” of turning “the major churches of Rome and Europe into fully operating torture chambers and fully operating satanic temples involving the daily ritualistic sacrifice of innocent men, women, and children,” of “depraved sexual acts with victims prior to slaughter and after slaughter,” and finally (a rather feeble anticlimax) of mere cannibalism.

We have seen how preposterous this is, and there is no reason to suppose that it is taken seriously by sensible grown-ups anywhere. Alonso is saved from notoriety less by what is actually known of the man and his life than by his profound obscurity—the fact that not many people even know he existed.

It is different with his nephew Rodrigo, Pope Alexander VI. He could hardly be more notorious or less obscure, at least by the standards of long-dead popes. The accepted version of his life story provides the world with something it apparently needs:
the
perfect example of papal decadence. Even today, five centuries on, he is considered sufficiently fascinating—sufficiently lurid—to serve as the centerpiece of a major multiseason television production. Everyone knows or thinks he knows that Alexander was devoid of moral principles, and that his story is laced with murder, lust that did not stop at incest, and unbridled greed. That Alexander belongs in the same corner of hell as the likes of Caligula, say, or Nero—of Mussolini if not quite of Hitler.

The only question worth asking, at this point, is the one that never gets asked: Is the story true? Was Alexander VI in fact a monster? To take that question seriously, rather than putting it aside as settled, is to discover why it remains untouched.
Because to let go of the assumptions, preconceptions, and distortions that are universally accepted as the answer is to find oneself adrift on what a French biographer of the Borgias, Jean Lucas-Dubreton, deplored six decades ago as a “sea of uncertainty.” It is to enter a place where things previously taken as self-evident can suddenly cease to make sense and where, as Lucas-Dubreton warned, “there is danger of being drowned.”

Uncertainty begins with the realization that, with the exception of a salacious Roman gossip named Stefano Infessura and the absurdly sensational anonymous pamphlet that appeared in Rome at the start of the sixteenth century, the most terrible stories about the Borgias did not begin to surface until after Alexander was dead and Cesare’s career had come to ruin. These stories appeared when they did in part because there was a voracious one-man market for them: Alexander’s successor Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere, who had been blocked by the Borgias from winning the papal throne first in 1492 and again in September 1503 and who had spent most of the intervening years in seethingly bitter exile. Upon bullying and bribing his way to the throne at last, this towering but evil-tempered man, a great hater as well as a great patron of Michelangelo, made it one of the purposes of his existence to blacken the Borgia name. He had former associates of the Borgias tortured in his quest for blacking material. Though the results must have disappointed him keenly—employment by the Borgias turned out to be no guarantee that one had witnessed unspeakable things—the supply of gossip grew steadily all the same, at a pace that accelerated over time. The Borgias were easy to hate in the Rome of the early sixteenth century because they were Spaniards, foreigners, just at the time when Italy was falling under foreign, largely Spanish, domination. Italians high and low, in Rome and elsewhere, were happy to be told that allowing the Vatican to fall into the hands of foreigners could lead to nothing good.

The dark legend of the Borgias, having taken root in Italy, found a much wider audience when religious reformers went forth in search of evidence not just that non-Italian popes were a bad idea but that the papacy was an evil institution, illegitimate and inherently corrupt. As for the Roman Catholic Church, with much of northern Europe breaking away and the loyalty of France in question and the Ottoman Turks reaching the gates of Vienna, it had bigger things to worry about than the lost cause that the reputation of Alexander VI had become. Especially when someone as eminent as the Venetian statesman Francesco Guicciardini was describing Alexander as “mightily lustful of both sexes, publicly keeping girls and boys, but more
girls.” Even today the
Catholic Encyclopedia
, which is wrong about things as basic as whether Alexander’s paternal grandfather was a Lanzol or a Borgia, says that although he was exemplary in the execution of the duties of his office, he continued after his election “the manner of life that had disgraced his cardinalate.” Thereby ignoring the fact, noted with regret by many historians, that almost nothing is known of Rodrigo Borgia’s “manner of life” during the three and a half decades between his appointment to the College of Cardinals and his election as pope.

Testimony to Alexander’s bad character has always been available in abundance, even in such classics as Jacob Burckhardt’s
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
, where he is depicted as an impacted mass of “ambition, avarice, and sensuality” and as guilty of unspecified acts of “devilish wickedness.” The problem is that this testimony, though routinely accepted as true beyond possibility of doubt, has never been anything of the kind. Confirmation by contemporary sources—by known individuals who were alive when the Borgias were alive, had some sort of access to the truth, and were not grinding political, ideological, or sectarian axes so flagrantly as to destroy their own credibility—proved to be exceedingly scarce. Even after this scarcity began to be acknowledged, it was regarded not as it should have been—as an indication that the whole subject required radical reexamination—but as an oddity to be noted in passing, a trivial inconvenience.