The Borgias Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by G. J. Meyer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Meyer, G. J.

  The Borgias: the hidden history / G.J. Meyer.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52693-9

  1. Borgia family. 2. Nobility—Italy—Biography. 3. Renaissance—Italy. 4. Italy—History—15th century. 5. Italy—History—1492–1559. I. Title.

  DG463.8.B7M49 2013

  945′.060922—dc23

  [B]

  2012037777

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design by Susan Zucker

  Jacket image © Margie Hurwich / Archangel

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Family Trees

  Timeline

  The Borgia Problem: An Introduction

  Prologue: One Whom All Did Fear

  PART ONE: Alonso

  From Out of Nowhere

  Chapter 1: A Most Improbable Pope

  Background: The Road to Rome

  Chapter 2: Surprises, Disappointments, Hope

  Background: Il Regno—The Kingdom

  Chapter 3: Pope and King, Friends No More

  Background: Amazing Italy

  Chapter 4: Family Matters

  Background: The Men in the Red Hats

  Chapter 5: The End of the Beginning

  PART TWO: Rodrigo

  A Long Apprenticeship

  Chapter 6: Surviving

  Background: The Eternal City, Eternally Reborn

  Chapter 7: Pius II: Troubles Rumored and Real

  Background: Il Papa

  Chapter 8: Paul II: The Poisoned Chalice

  Background: The Inextinguishable Evil-Heads

  Chapter 9: Sixtus IV: Disturbing the Peace

  Background: War, Italian Style

  Chapter 10: Innocent VIII: Plumbing the Depths

  PART THREE: Alexander

  Pope at Last

  Chapter 11: The Best Man for the Job

  Background: Madness and Milan

  Chapter 12: The Coming of the French

  Background: Florence: An Anti-Renaissance

  Chapter 13: The French Depart

  Background: The Paternity Question: An “Apology”

  Chapter 14: A Shattering Loss

  Background: The Young Ones

  Chapter 15: Valentino

  PART FOUR: Cesare

  Caesar or Nothing

  Chapter 16: The Landscape Changes

  Background: Venice, Serene No More

  Chapter 17: Conqueror

  Background: The Angel’s Castle

  Chapter 18: “Longing for Greatness and Renown”

  Background: The Newest Profession

  Chapter 19: Settling Scores

  Background: The Great Discoveries

  Chapter 20: Man of Destiny

  Background: Superstitions: Another Side of the Renaissance

  Chapter 21: Alone

  Aftermath

  Examining Old Assumptions

  Dedication

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Maps

  Other Books by This Author

  Photo Insert

  About the Author

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  Timeline

  1378 Alonso de Borja born at Játiva in Valencia, Spain.

  Start of Great or Western Schism, dividing Roman Church.

  1416 Alfonso V becomes king of Aragon.

  1417 Alonso de Borja enters service of Alfonso V.

  Oddone Colonna elected Pope Martin V.

  1420 Martin V returns papacy to Rome, ending long exile.

  1431 Rodrigo de Borja born at Játiva.

  Gabriele Condulmer elected Pope Eugenius IV.

  1442 Alfonso V drives Angevins from Naples, assumes Neapolitan crown.

  1444 Alonso de Borja appointed to College of Cardinals, moves to Rome following year.

  1447 Tommaso Parentucelli elected Pope Nicholas V.

  1451 Birth of Isabella, future queen of Castile.

  1452 Birth of Ferdinand II, future king of Aragon.

  1453 Constantinople falls to Ottoman Turks.

  1455 Cardinal Alonso Borgia elected Pope Calixtus III, appoints Rodrigo Borgia protonotary apostolic and Pedro Luis Borgia commander of Castel Sant’Angelo.

  1456 Rodrigo Borgia is made a cardinal, Pedro Luis captain-general of papal army.

  1457 Rodrigo appointed vice-chancellor of Church.

  1458 Rodrigo appointed bishop of Valencia.

  Alfonso V dies, to be succeeded as king of Naples by son Ferrante (Ferdinand I).

  Calixtus III dies; Enea Silvio Piccolomini succeeds as Pope Pius II.

  Death of Pedro Luis Borgia.

  Athens falls to Turks.

  1460 Cardinal Rodrigo rebuked by Pius II following garden party in Siena.

  1462 Birth of Louis of Orléans, future Louis XII of France.

  1463 Start of sixteen-year war between Venice and Ottoman Empire.

  1464 Pietro Barbo elected Pope Paul II.

  1470 Negropont captured by Turks.

  Birth of Charles VIII of France.

  1471 Francesco della Rovere elected Pope Sixtus IV.

  Rodrigo Borgia appointed papal legate to Iberian peninsula.

  1475 Probable year of Cesare Lanzol y de Borja’s birth in Spain.

  1476 Probable year of birth of Cesare’s brother Juan Lanzol y de Borja.

  1478 Pazzi Conspiracy against Medici family in Florence.

  Beginning of Pope Sixtus’s Italian War, which will continue two years.

  1480 Lucrezia Lanzol y de Borja born.

  Ottoman Turks occupy Otranto in southern Italy.

  1481 Probable year of death of Guillen Ramón Lanzol, father of Pedro Luis, Cesare, Lucrezia, and others.

  Ludovico Sforza, as regent, wins control of the duchy of Milan.

  Death of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II; son and successor Bayezid II withdraws Turkish troops from Otranto.

  1484 Giovanni Battista Cibo elected Pope Innocent VIII.

  1485 Pedro Luis Lanzol y de Borja is made duke of Gandía by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.

  1488 Murder of Girolamo Riario, nephew of Sixtus IV and husband of Caterina Sforza.

  1491 Charles VIII of France marries Anne of Brittany.

  Cesare Borgia appointed bishop of Pamplona.

  1492 Death of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  Election of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI.

  Archbishopric of Valencia is conferred on Cesare.

  Christopher Columbus sails west from Spain, seeking Japan, China, and India.

  1493 Borgia marriages: Juan to Maria Enriquez de Luna of Spain, Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza, Jofrè to Sancia of Aragon.

  Cesare is appointed to College of Cardinals.

  Columbus returns from his first voyage of discovery.


  Papal bull divides newly discovered territories between Spain and Portugal.

  1494 Death of Ferrante of Naples; succeeded by son Alfonso II.

  French invasion of Italy by Charles VIII.

  Expulsion of Medici family from Florence.

  1495 Alfonso II of Naples abdicates; succeeded by son Ferrandino (Ferdinand II).

  Charles VIII meets Alexander VI in Rome, enters Naples in triumph.

  Holy League formed to resist French occupation.

  Following Battle of Fornovo, Charles withdraws to France.

  1496 Death of Ferrandino of Naples; succeeded by uncle Don Fadrique (Federico I).

  1497 Friar Girolamo Savonarola of Florence is excommunicated after calling for a council to depose Alexander VI.

  Alexander makes war on Orsini; death of Virginio Orsini.

  Murder in Rome of Juan Borgia, second duke of Gandía.

  Annulment of Lucrezia Borgia’s marriage to Giovanni Sforza.

  1498 Murder of Pedro Calderón, Lucrezia’s alleged lover.

  Death of Charles VIII; succeeded by Louis XII, who later agrees with Venice to partition Milan.

  Lucrezia wed to Alfonso of Aragon, duke of Bisceglie.

  Cesare is allowed to resign from College of Cardinals; travels to French court at Chinon, France; is made duke of Valentinois; wed to Charlotte d’Albret.

  Savonarola, discredited, is executed by Florentine civil authorities.

  1499 Louis XII marries Anne of Brittany, seizes Milan and Genoa.

  Pope Alexander excommunicates Romagna lords, seizes territories of the Gaetani.

  Vasco da Gama returns to Lisbon from voyage to India.

  Cesare’s first impresa captures Imola, besieges Forlì.

  Lucrezia gives birth to son, Rodrigo of Aragon.

  1500 Cesare captures Caterina Sforza.

  Duke of Bisceglie is attacked and gravely wounded, subsequently strangled.

  Cesare launches second impresa, besieges Faenza.

  Spain and France agree to partition kingdom of Naples.

  1501 Alexander creates Cesare duke of Romagna.

  Don Fadrique abdicates as king of Naples, retires to Anjou.

  Lucrezia is married to Alfonso d’Este.

  1502 Arezzo rebels against Florence.

  Cesare launches third impresa, captures Urbino and Cesena.

  Machiavelli and Soderini meet Cesare at Urbino.

  Conspiracy of condottieri against Cesare.

  Cesare makes surprise visit to Louis XII at Milan, renews alliance.

  Machiavelli visits Cesare at Imola.

  Cesare resumes offensive, advances to Senigallia.

  1503 Vitelli and Oliverotto strangled at Senigallia.

  Alexander and Cesare launch war on Orsini.

  Gonsalvo captures city of Naples for Spain.

  Death of Alexander VI, election of Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini as Pope Pius III.

  Death of Pius III, election of Giuliano della Rovere as Pope Julius II.

  1504 Having earlier become the prisoner of Julius II at Ostia and subsequently freed, Cesare is again arrested, at Naples, this time by Gonsalvo, transported as prisoner to Spain.

  Death of Isabella of Spain.

  1505 Lucrezia becomes duchess of Ferrara upon death of Ercole d’Este.

  Cesare transferred from Chinchilla to Medina del Campo.

  1506 Cesare escapes from Medina del Campo, makes way to Navarre.

  1507 Cesare killed in battle.

  1519 Death of Lucrezia.

  The Borgia Problem:

  An Introduction

  This is not the book I set out to write.

  My expectation, at the start, was simple: that by digging more deeply into the story of the Borgias than other writers appeared to have done, I might be able to put new flesh on that story’s old bones—all the thrilling tales of murder and incest and horrors beyond numbering. Thereby bringing the whole thing to life in more entertaining, possibly more meaningful ways.

  A year of research on both sides of the Atlantic did generate that new flesh—more fresh material than I had hoped, as the following pages will show. But I found something unforeseen as well: evidence that the Borgia story, when one pursues it far enough, turns out to be vastly different from what the world supposes and vastly more interesting than I myself had imagined.

  I found myself confronted not only with new flesh but new bones—an entirely new understanding of who the Borgias were and what they actually did. As my book began to take shape, it did so in stunningly unexpected ways.

  I send the result out into the world on the two wings of a promise and a hope.

  My promise is that any reader who has some knowledge of the Borgias will be surprised by the pages that follow. That, in fact, the more familiar you are with the version of the Borgia story that centuries ago hardened into legend, the greater your surprise will be.

  My hope is that the appearance of this book may encourage others—by provoking incredulity or indignation, if that’s what it takes—to look anew at its subject. Popular interest in the Borgias never flags, which is as it should be in view of the extraordinary personalities of the family’s leading members, the high drama of their lives, and above all the light their story casts on the world of the Renaissance. But scholarly interest has been so dormant for so long that a revival is badly overdue.

  Nearly seven decades have passed since J. H. Whitfield of Oxford University, in an article in History, called attention to what was even then the decrepit state of the established Borgia myth. The evil reputation of the family, Whitfield observed, had appeared to be confirmed beyond possibility of doubt by such once-magisterial nineteenth-century historians as Jacob Burckhardt and Ferdinand Gregorovius. But in the twentieth century it became clear that those same historians were so wrong about so many things that they were, in effect, largely discredited. Whitfield not only regarded “a revision in favor of the Borgias” as necessary but appears to have expected it to come soon.

  Though his optimism was misplaced, he put his finger on what has always been the core of the Borgia problem: the acceptance as true, on the basis of laughably insubstantial evidence or no evidence at all, of accusations of the darkest kind. Examples abound in Gregorovius’s treatment of the central figure in the Borgia story, the Rodrigo Borgia who in 1492 became Pope Alexander VI. In the seventh volume of his History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, Gregorovius acknowledges that “the secrets of [Rodrigo’s] life as cardinal are unknown, no one having spoken on the subject,” and in his biography of Lucrezia Borgia he observes again that “nothing is known” of Rodrigo’s private life during the thirty-six years between his elevation to the College of Cardinals and his election as pope. But immediately after the first of these statements Gregorovius describes Rodrigo as “passionately sensual,” and immediately after the second he asserts that “insatiable sensuality ruled this Borgia … until his last years. Never was he able to cast out this demon.” These words are bizarre, coming as they do from someone who has just admitted that his subject’s personal life remained a complete blank until, at age sixty, he took center stage as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

  It is much the same with Burckhardt, who in his long-revered The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy accepts as true one outlandish anecdote after another, informing his readers that Rodrigo/Alexander was defined by “devilish wickedness,” that Cesare had an “insane thirst for blood,” and that the two saved the world from themselves by inadvertently imbibing some of the mysterious “white powder of an agreeable taste” with which they had previously decimated the elite of Rome. The present volume will, I trust, demonstrate the absurdity of these opinions.

  The Borgia problem is rooted in the fact that from the early sixteenth century forward, for reasons ranging from Pope Julius II’s hatred of his predecessor, Alexander VI, to the eagerness of Reformation polemicists to depict the papacy in morally horrific terms, “every conceivable crime was credited to the Borg
ias.” By a process of gradual accumulation the scant contemporary record came to be covered over by a thick blanket of invective, with Victor Hugo contributing his play about a monstrous Lucrezia Borgia and Donizetti turning the play into grand opera. Finally even the Catholic historian Ludwig Pastor, whose History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages fills forty fat volumes, evidently could see no point in even questioning the legend. That the Borgias were indefensible had come to seem self-evident.

  “Burckhardt and Gregorovius have had their day,” said Whitfield in 1944. But since then: almost nothing. Little beyond the endless repetition of the same old shopworn tales, unsupported and insupportable as many of them are.

  In writing the present volume I have done two things that are unusual in the treatment of the Borgias, though neither should be unusual at all. I have asked obvious if long-neglected questions, and I have declined to accept answers generally accepted as settled when those answers turn out to have little or no factual foundation. I have also rejected the old practice, where evidence is lacking, of opting for the ugliest hypothetical explanation of a puzzling event.

  I make no claim to providing definitive answers to all the questions I raise. Some are probably unanswerable after five hundred years, but simply pointing out that they are unanswerable is worthwhile under the circumstances. Others cry out for the attention of investigators with unusual skills (in the regional dialects of medieval Spain, for example, or the record-keeping practices of Vatican archivists half a millennium ago, or the detection of forged papal bulls).

  Much work remains to be done. If this book serves to encourage the undertaking of some part of that work, I will regard my own efforts as richly rewarded. If other writers can show—not just complain, but show—that I have gone too far in being skeptical about alleged Borgia crimes, I will welcome their achievement. Every time another of the old tales is shown to be at least probably true or untrue, another step will have been taken in a process that should be much further along than it is: lifting the Borgia story out of the realm of fable and turning it into history.

  I wish to express particular thanks to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where I spent many fruitful days over a period of many months. Without its magnificent resources and the helpfulness of its staff, this book would have been immeasurably more difficult if not impossible to complete in its present form. Also to my superb editor, the acutely perceptive and tirelessly helpful Tracy Devine.