Princesses Behaving Badly (15 page)

With marriage number three, Lucrezia’s reputation was on the upswing. Even a spy in the employ of her new and distrustful sister-in-law declared that “every day she makes a better impression on me; she is a lady with a very good mind, astute, you have to keep your wits about you with her.” And despite her husband’s initial misgivings, he and Lucrezia got on like a house on fire. True, he spent his days prowling the streets for whores and hanging out in taverns, but he spent his nights with her. Lucrezia’s relationships with her new in-laws were improving as well, which was probably a good thing, because the Borgias’ roller coaster fortunes were about to take a nosedive.

In 1502, Cesare was the acknowledged military power in Italy, having attacked and taken control of several key city-states. He was a terror. Once, suspecting that one of his most trusted followers was plotting against him, he had the man decapitated, the head mounted on a lance and displayed in the town piazza. Anyone who stood in Cesare’s way was likely to meet a similar fate.

By 1503, however, Cesare’s fortunes were turning. In particular, his alliance with the French king was becoming a problem. Believing that Cesare was too powerful, Louis VII began blocking his acquisition of additional lands. Then the situation worsened—on August 18 of that year, Pope Alexander VI died. The man who had been the source of the Borgia authority was gone, and Cesare’s mad scramble for power had made him more enemies
than he could afford. The new pope supported him but wasn’t around long enough to matter: the elderly man died only 26 days into his reign. The next pope to be elected was one of the Borgias’ most hated rivals, and Cesare found himself a marked man. In 1504 he was arrested by papal forces and shipped off to prison in Spain. After a dramatic escape in 1507, Cesare was killed while fighting in the army of his brother-in-law the king of Navarre.

Lucrezia remained loyal to her brother until the end. By this time her own position was extremely perilous. Not only had her family’s power and influence died with her father, but so far she had been unable to do the one thing she needed to do: produce an heir. Though pregnant in her first year of marriage, she had given birth to a stillborn daughter at seven months and nearly died from fever. Her husband had an easy out should he want one—everyone knew that the grounds for Lucrezia’s divorce from Sforza were a sham, a claim that, if pressed, could mean that her current union had no legal basis.

But Lucrezia’s new family didn’t try to ditch her, for the simple reason that they liked her. That’s as strong an indication as any that Lucrezia was not the evil incestuous murderess that contemporary and historical gossip claim she was. True, had her husband divorced her, he would have been obligated to return her exceptionally large dowry. But there is no evidence that any of the duke’s family even raised the thought. On the contrary, her new family protected her, respected her, and even tried to help her wayward brother.

In some ways, the Borgia downfall proved to be Lucrezia’s salvation—run-of-the-mill intrigue was far less deadly than Borgia-level intrigue. And though she had a few affairs—most notably with poet Pietro Bembo and her brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga—for the most part she led a quiet life. She re-created herself as the quintessential Renaissance lady: a patron of the arts, charitable, pious, reserved, and nearly constantly pregnant. She eventually bore four sons and a daughter who survived infancy, though she was also plagued by multiple miscarriages and difficult births. Lucrezia’s final pregnancy, at the age of almost 39, resulted in her death. She succumbed to postchildbirth puerperal fever five days after delivering another daughter, who also did not survive.

By the end of her life, Lucrezia had become excessively penitential, whether for sins real or imagined, only she knows. How complicit she was in her family’s crimes is unclear, but she certainly benefitted from them. The constant intrigues and murderous tendencies brought her power, wealth, and excellent marriages she couldn’t possibly have made otherwise. But her brother murdered one of her lovers
and
one of her husbands
and
one of their own brothers, and her family’s actions separated her from her firstborn son. Though her flirtations with independence didn’t always go well, they did reveal a woman trying to break free from those who used her for their own ends.

Few women in history have been as demonized, even fetishized, as Lucrezia Borgia. Historians and novelists preferred to believe that her sins were real, and over the centuries many have added several she couldn’t possibly have been guilty of. In 1833, for example, the French writer Victor Hugo wrote a stage play based on Lucrezia’s life, depicting her as a lusty, amoral murderess who accidentally poisons her illegitimate son; the play later became Gaetano Donizetti’s opera. In Hugo’s preface, he makes his opinions unequivocally clear: “Take the most hideous, the most repulsive, the most complete moral deformity; place it where it fits best—in the heart of a woman whose physical beauty and royal grandeur will make the crime stand out all the more strikingly; then add to all that moral deformity the purest feeling a woman can have, that of a mother.… Inside our monster put a mother and the monster will interest us and make us weep. And this creature that filled us with fear will inspire pity; that deformed soul will be almost beautiful in our eyes.”

It’s this sexy, incestuous, philandering, murderous princess that people want to believe in, the one who makes the most scandalous story. But Lucrezia Borgia wasn’t the slutty poisoner everyone wanted her to be. She was a woman who managed to survive not only the pit of vipers that was Renaissance Italy, but the pit of vipers that was her own family. And isn’t that story more interesting?

Malinche

C
A
. 1502–1529
A
ZTEC
M
EXICO AND
S
PANISH
M
EXICO

O
nce upon a time, there was an Aztec princess. Her father was the
cacique
of a city-state near the Gulf of Mexico, but he died when the princess was very young. Her wicked mother soon remarried and gave birth to a little boy.

The little princess’s mother and stepfather wanted their son to become the next chief, and the little princess was in the way. They couldn’t let her marry because then her husband would have a claim to the throne. So the scheming parents hit upon an ingenious solution: they sold the girl
to a group of Mayan slave traders and told everyone she’d died. The Mayans in turn sold her to traders from the city of Tabasco, where the princess came of age and was rescued by the brave knights of the Spanish Empire. She proved her worth by acting as their translator and guide, so fully embracing their religion that when once again confronted with her mother, she forgave the perfidious woman on the spot.

That’s the fairy-tale version that later Spanish biographers would relate of the beautiful, noble, admirable princess known as Malinche. But that’s not the story modern Mexicans tell. To them, La Malinche is one of the most reviled, controversial women in postcolonial history.

The real story, of course, is a lot more complicated.

We don’t know the circumstances of the young woman’s birth or even her real name—Malinche was the Spanish garbling of Malintzin, the name she was called by the slavers who sold her. Though she probably was the daughter of a nobleman, the whole “princess” thing was added later by the Spanish who wanted to valorize her story. But it is true that at about 8 or 9 years old, little Malinche found herself sold into slavery. The institution was a deeply entrenched part of Mesoamerican culture at the time, and it was not uncommon for families to sell their children as slaves, who were typically used for manual labor or sex.

In 1519 the Spaniards arrived in Tabasco, and teenage Malinche’s whole world changed. Led by the conquistador Hernan Cortés, the Spanish had come calling a few times before, and their interactions with the local Chontal people had not exactly been friendly. This time around, the Chontal tried to put up a fight, but the invaders had armor, guns, and horses. The Chontal lost 220 men in a matter of hours; surrender was the only option. Malinche, along with 19 other women as well as large quantities of gold and food, was offered up as tribute. She was baptized Marina—it was standard practice among the conquistadors to convert women and slaves to Christianity before having sex with them—and then passed off to one of Cortés’s men.

This “most excellent woman,” according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo,
a foot soldier in Cortés’s army writing in 1568, was “good-looking, intelligent, and self-assured.” More important, she had a gift for languages that quickly made her indispensable. Malinche’s native tongue was Nahuatl, but as a slave in Tabasco she’d learned two Mayan dialects and soon she set to learning Castilian Spanish from a friar in Cortés’s company. Her facility was said to be so great that she was fluent in only four months. When Cortés realized her value, he made sure that she never left his side. She served so often as his mouthpiece, and the two were so closely identified with each other, that he was sometimes called “El Malinche” (kind of like Mr. Malinche) by the Mesoamericans.

But Malinche wasn’t valuable only as a translator. She was familiar with native royal customs, owing to what Spanish biographers claimed was her childhood lived in a nobleman’s home, and as a slave she’d spent time with several tribes. She understood how the indigenous peoples thought, what they believed, and how they worked. She could be exactly what Cortés needed: a guide in this strange new land.

It didn’t take long for Malinche to prove her worth. She told Cortés that the Aztecs thought he might be the reincarnation of their god ruler Quetzalcóatl. She also explained that several of the tribes chafing under Aztec rule could easily be persuaded to help him take down their empire. Cortés depended on her to communicate with those who wished to join him and, after the Spanish defeated a tribe, to explain to the people that they’d in fact been conquered. Malinche even acted as a sort of spy. Once, playing the disloyal servant, she heard from a local woman about a plot to ambush the Spaniards as they were leaving the village of Cholula. She told Cortés, who then ordered the massacre of Cholulan leaders and warriors.

With Malinche’s help, the Spaniards made their way to Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma’s massive and glorious city. In late 1519, it was Malinche who translated the Aztec leader’s first words with the foreign newcomers. Whatever Moctezuma actually said, and whatever Malinche may have translated, Cortés claimed to his king that the Aztec ruler had immediately agreed to cede his entire empire to Spain. That gave Cortés the pretext to subdue the Aztecs with force (technically, the Spanish king could not force a foreign people to serve him, but he could punish rebels who defied his rightful rule). In spring 1520, after several months of peaceful but tense
coexistence, fighting broke out. Cortés blamed the Aztecs, claiming a plot was afoot to revolt against the Spaniards; on that pretext and a trumped-up treason charge, he arrested Moctezuma. What happened next depends on whose version you believe. Native records claim that it was the Spanish who struck first, slaughtering the Aztecs in one of the temples during a religious festival. Cortés’s soldiers later said that the festival was just a cover for the warrior class and nobles to prepare to mount an attack on the Spaniards.

War was unavoidable. According to native accounts, Malinche tried to dissuade the Aztecs from revolting, pointing out that they were outgunned. But at first it was Cortés and his troops who were forced to retreat. Ultimately, though, the uprising was doomed to fail, not because of superior Spanish military might, but because of a much more insidious enemy: smallpox. The Spaniards had carried the deadly disease to the Americas, and native peoples had no natural defenses against it. Within weeks of their initial victory, thousands of Aztecs had died. At the end of April 1521, Cortés, with reinforcements from nearby Spanish-held Cuba, set out once again for Tenochtitlan, and this time he conquered it.

It’s doubtful that without the aid of Malinche, the Spanish could have pulled off such an astounding conquest in the span of two years and with fewer than 1,000 soldiers. So why did she help the enemy? On the face of it, Malinche had little reason to want the precolonial system to endure; all it got her was a one-way ticket to forced bondage. And though she may have felt she had no choice, it’s also possible that she was in love with Cortés. Whatever her feelings, in 1522 she bore him a son, whom they named Martín, after his grandfather.