Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (44 page)

In the course of writing
Poison,
I relied mainly on the following works: Sarah Bradford’s
Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy
and
Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times;
Ivan Cloulas’s
The Borgias;
Marion Johnson’s
The Borgias;
E. R. Chamberlin’s
The Fall of the House of Borgia;
Clemente Fusero’s
The Borgias;
Michael Edward Mallett’s
The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty;
and Christopher Hibbert’s
The Borgias and Their Enemies
. As a primary source, Johann Burchard’s
At the Court of the Borgia
was invaluable.

In addition, several people played key roles in bringing this book from the kernel of an idea to a completed work. I am especially grateful to my agent, Andrea Cirillo, for her constant patience and sound advice. Thanks also for the outstanding editorial support provided by Charles Spicer and Allison Caplin, and to marketing whiz Anne-Marie Tallberg, who so generously shared her expertise.

As always, my family coped wonderfully with a distracted writer muttering about poisons and other arcane means of inflicting death. Without their unfailing encouragement, this book and a great deal more would never have been accomplished.

The challenge in writing historical fiction is to weave together what is real and what can be imagined into a coherent and, one hopes, compelling story. Francesca herself is, of course, fictional, but much of
Poison
is based on real people and the events they took part in during the summer of 1492.

Pope Innocent VIII died on July 25 in that year after a long illness punctuated by an improvement in his health around the time that Francesca’s father is depicted as having been murdered. In the final stage of his life, Innocent was rumored to take mothers’ milk to stay alive. During his last days, he was also said to have ingested the blood of young boys in an effort to stave off death. As much as I would like to claim credit for coming up with such macabre devices, this is a case of history truly being stranger than fiction.

Poison was rumored to be the cause of the pope’s demise, as it was widely believed to be the cause of many deaths in this period. While it is most likely that Innocent expired from natural causes, we can no more be certain of that than could Francesca.

Although there is no evidence that Innocent was considering a papal edict calling for expulsion of the Jews from all of Christendom, it is well known that he applauded the decision by Ferdinand and Isabella to force all the Jews of Spain to convert or leave their kingdom. The doctrine of anti-Semitism was ubiquitous throughout Europe at this time, but no institution supported it more vigorously or effectively than did the Catholic Church.

The events described as having occurred in La Guardia, Spain,
and the story of the “Holy Child” are based on fact. Tomás Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, is a historical figure, but if he made a trip to Rome at the time of Innocent’s death, no record remains of it.

The papal conclave that selected Innocent’s successor is remembered as the most corrupt ever held. Rodrigo Borgia triumphed, becoming Pope Alexander VI not because he alone was willing to engage in bribery to attain votes but because he proved the most effective at understanding and exploiting the greed of his fellow princes of the Church. The vast wealth that Borgia used to secure his victory was rumored to have come in part from the Jews, in return for which he agreed to tolerate their presence in the Papal States and by extension in Christendom. If an attempt was made during the conclave to poison Borgia’s great rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, that has escaped the notice of history.

Rodrigo Borgia and the most notorious of his children, Lucrezia and Cesare, have long been accused of using poison to advance their ambitions, in addition to a host of other crimes. It is my belief that Lucrezia was a victim of her father’s unbridled lust for power and that she survived as long as she did despite, not because of, the corruption of her age. While Rodrigo and Cesare may have been amenable to using poison, they clearly preferred the more direct methods of bribery, intimidation, and, when necessary, open warfare.

Poison
takes place near the beginning of the great struggle between the forces of the Renaissance and those of the Inquisition, a struggle that dominated Europe for centuries and played such a crucial role in shaping the world we know today. While an argument can be made that there were decent, well-intentioned people on both sides of this conflict, overwhelmingly the Inquisition represented an oppressive force willing to sacrifice even the hope of a better life for
the many in order to maintain the power of the very few. The valiant men and women who stood against it, and who often paid for their courage with their lives, deserve to be remembered, but the victory they won must be earned again by every generation.