The Borgias (69 page)

As with other stories about Rodrigo Borgia’s moral degeneracy and sexual excesses, this one proves upon careful examination to be supported by only the flimsiest and most dubious evidence
. It is certainly true, and was no secret at the time, that Giulia Farnese became a regular at the papal court when barely out of childhood, and it is likewise true that her presence gave rise to rumors that were taken up by three contemporary writers at least. One was the diarist and gossip Stefano Infessura, whose political agenda and recklessness with the facts have been noted more than once in the present book. The others, Jacopo Sannazzaro of Naples and Francesco Matarazzo of Perugia, were essentially entertainers, professional satirists concerned not with truth but with amusing such patrons as the Baglioni warlords of Perugia, enemies of the Borgias. To use them as sources is approximately as legitimate as basing an evaluation of President George W. Bush on transcripts of
The Daily Show
. When, more than a generation after Alexander’s death, Francesco Guicciardini conferred new dignity on the Giulia story by making note of it in his
Storia d’Italia
, he acknowledged that he was repeating low gossip.

A sexual relationship is not needed to explain Giulia’s presence at Cardinal Rodrigo’s palace or at the papal court
. She had access by virtue of the prominence of the Farnese and Gaetani families (her mother was a Gaetani), and she penetrated the Borgia inner circle when she married the son of Adriana del Milà. Along the way she became a close friend and companion of Lucrezia, and she and her husband joined the social set centered on Lucrezia and Alfonso duke of Bisceglie. Though she certainly became a favorite of the pope’s, it is a long leap from charming an aging cleric to becoming his mistress.

Likewise, Giulia’s submission to Rodrigo is not required to explain Alessandro Farnese’s promotion to cardinal
. Alessandro was not plucked out of obscurity; his appointment to the Sacred College in the second year of Pope Alexander’s reign shocked no one. A young man of ability and high social status (in 1534 he would become Pope Paul III, going on to achieve considerable historical importance), he had first been singled out for advancement by Innocent VIII. He became a protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici and at the time of Alexander VI’s election already held the high rank of protonotary apostolic, was the Vatican’s treasurer-general, and had served as a papal secretary.
He was several years older than Cesare when they were among the dozen new cardinals appointed in September 1493. According to the contemporary historian Sigismondo de’ Conti, his selection had been urged upon Alexander by the Roman nobility.

Though the young Cardinal Farnese became the butt of jokes, this was not necessarily because his sister was the pope’s mistress
. He was called “the petticoat cardinal,” and this has been assumed to refer to his dependence on his sister’s special position. It could as easily have reference to his connection to the clique whose central figure was Adriana del Milà. Similarly, the fact that Giulia was called “the bride of Christ” is significant only to the extent that the satirists responsible for such jibes were credible—which they have no known claim to having been.

Bella Giulia had one child only—and there is no reason to believe that that child had a Borgia father
. The Borgias, as we have seen, were not only willing but eager to acknowledge and embrace illegitimate additions to the family (taking several small bastards with them, for example, upon fleeing Rome after the death of Alexander). Alexander at no point showed any interest in Giulia’s child, her daughter Laura, who grew up to be married in a lavish Vatican ceremony to Nicola della Rovere, a nephew of Pope Julius II. Julius of course was the former Giuliano della Rovere, whose obsessive hatred of the Borgias makes it difficult to believe that he could have countenanced such a union if he even suspected the bride of being a daughter of Alexander VI.

The alleged role of Adriana del Milà in the Giulia story is deeply improbable
. Evidence or testimony to the contrary being nonexistent, it is fair to Adriana to assume that she was a person of at least normally good moral character. Both before and after his election as pope, Rodrigo Borgia (her father’s first cousin) entrusted her not only with running his household but with raising Lucrezia and her brothers after their mother remarried and they moved to Rome. When Lucrezia journeyed from Rome to Ferrara to become the wife of Alfonso d’Este, the pope sent Adriana along as her chaperone. A widow, she was devoted to her son, an only child. And yet the Giulia story requires us to believe that this same woman participated in cuckolding her son—a noble who does not appear to have sought advancement in the papal service and certainly was not financially needy—and in reducing his bride, who was barely more than a child, to a state not far removed from prostitution. If as is often alleged Giulia was already the pope’s mistress at the time of her wedding, the story requires us to believe also that as powerful and proud a figure as Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini, in attending the ceremony, also acquiesced in such a vile travesty.

This is not the only psychologically improbable part of the Giulia story. Would Alexander, who doted on Lucrezia even as he used her as a diplomatic pawn, have allowed her to grow up in a Vatican bordello and live almost as the sister of his concubine? At the time of the Este marriage, when distancing Lucrezia from the scandalous stories then in circulation was so essential, would he have sent her to Ferrara in the care of his personal procuress? Would Giulia’s kinsmen, her Farnese brothers and Gaetani uncles and Orsini in-laws, have accepted concubinage without complaint? Or would the pope, during the time when his passion for Giulia was supposedly at its height, have launched the attacks that resulted in the ruin of the Gaetani? An affirmative answer to all these questions is possible. In the absence of better evidence, however, it would be unreasonable to regard affirmative answers as
very
possible, never mind probable. To assume them to be the true answers is irresponsible.
As Ferrara says in his chapter on the Bella Giulia question, the whole business is “ringed round with confusion and alterations of known fact.”

Much has been made, by various writers, of a letter sent by Alexander VI to Lucrezia when she was the wife of Giovanni Sforza. The pontiff blamed Lucrezia for allowing Adriana del Milà and Giulia, after visiting her at Pesaro, to travel to see Giulia’s gravely ill brother Angelo rather than returning directly to Rome. He chastised her in the following terms:

Madonna Adriana and Giulia have arrived at Capo di Monte, where they found her brother dead. This death has caused deep grief to Cardinal Farnese as to Giulia and both were so cast down that they caught the fever. We have sent Pietro Carianca to visit them, and we have provided doctors and all things necessary. Let us pray God and the glorious Madonna that they may very quickly recover. Messire Joanni and you have truly not shown great respect or consideration for us in the matter of this journey of Madonna Adriana and Giulia, in that you let them go without our permission: you should have remembered that such a journey, undertaken so suddenly and without our consent, could not but cause us extreme pain. You will say that they decided upon it because Cardinal Farnese had wished it and arranged it; but you should have asked yourself if it was to the Pope’s taste. The thing is done now, but another time we shall look to it better and shall consider in what hands we place our affairs
.

That this letter expresses hurt feelings could hardly be more obvious. Whether the hurt was caused more by Adriana or by Giulia—or by Lucrezia for that matter—is entirely unclear. To take the pope’s words as proof of his sexual involvement with Giulia is absurd. It is more sensible to interpret them, as Ferrara does, as akin to the complaint “of an old parish priest, who had grown difficult with age, irritable and touchy.” It is entirely plausible that what was irritating him most was the prolonged absence of the woman he twice names before Giulia in his letter, the woman on whom he was really dependent for his everyday comfort, his housekeeper-in-chief Adriana.

And About Lucrezia’s Mystery Pregnancy

Did Lucrezia become pregnant shortly after her final separation from Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro?

If so, might the father have been a young man named something like Pierotto Calderón, a courier in the employ of Alexander VI?

Was this Calderón murdered by Cesare? In the pope’s presence?

Did Lucrezia secretly give birth to a healthy son after the annulment of the Sforza marriage and before her betrothal to Alfonso duke of Bisceglie?

The search for answers to these questions takes one into an all-too-typical Borgia maze—one that leads nowhere.

W. H. Woodward, in a fine biography of Cesare written more than a century ago, concludes that “it seems to be true that [Lucrezia] was
enceinte
by the murdered man … but the story that he was murdered by an enraged Cesare in the presence of Alexander VI … is a later embroidery of the facts.”

Writing earlier, Ludwig Pastor in
The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages
likewise decided that the claim that “Cesare stabbed Pierotto
in the presence of the pope is another story that will not bear examination.” (Pastor’s use of the word
another
is not without significance. Though no one could accuse him of being a defender of the Borgias—the contrary would be closer to the truth—his researches led him to the conviction that much of what has come to be believed of the family over the centuries collapses when exposed to the known facts.)

A bona fide Borgia-hater, Ferdinand Gregorovius, fails even to mention the Calderón story in the more than two hundred pages devoted to the family in his
History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages
. Presumably he did not regard it as deserving of mention.

The extent to which writers can lose their bearings in dealing with the Borgias is perhaps most vividly apparent in Maria Bellonci’s often-reprinted 1939 biography of Lucrezia.
In her fourth chapter, Bellonci sets forth a detailed and romantic account of how Lucrezia and “Caldes” (as she calls him) surrendered to a passion that was all the more intense because of their understanding that it was doomed. She too describes the pope as splashed with blood as he tries to protect Lucrezia’s helpless lover from a Cesare driven out of his wits by the discovery of his sister’s condition.
When Bellonci returns to the subject two chapters later, however, she adds the awkwardly belated suggestion that
if
Lucrezia had a child in 1498, the father
may
have been not Caldes but rather the pope. In the end she throws up her hands, complaining that “the mystery is insoluble” and appearing to acknowledge that everything she has written about it is imagined. Perhaps she had not so much lost her bearings as yielded to the temptation to squeeze as much dramatic juice as possible out of sparse material, later feeling too uneasy about what she had done to let the matter rest.

Michael Mallett, in his 1969 work
The Borgias
, takes a more responsible approach, noting only that an affair and a pregnancy were rumored and that “Calderón” was a real person and was murdered—no one knows by whom.

There being no solid basis for choosing among the various versions of the story, if choice is deemed necessary it can only be done on the basis of probabilities, and the probabilities can be derived only from what is known of the individuals involved—Lucrezia herself above all. And it is prudent, when exploring the darker facets of the legend of Lucrezia Borgia, to begin with the understanding that they are invariably unproven and that the most sensational almost always turn out to be unworthy of attention. It is advisable to suspend judgment until one knows enough about the whole of Lucrezia’s life story to judge what sorts of things she does and does not seem to have been capable of doing, and enough about the world in which she lived to
judge what sorts of things a young woman of her status was—if she did them—likely to get away with.

It is the opinion of the writer of the present work that if in the late 1490s Lucrezia was capable of becoming pregnant by a man unsuited by rank to become her husband, she was unlikely to do such a thing and escape without consequences.

For Eric, Ellen, and Sarah

Who have always made everything meaningful, and worthwhile

Notes

In a book of this kind, a book of history, almost every sentence is based on some anterior source—or sources. It is the nature of the beast. To inform the reader of the origins of all the bits of information that make up the narrative would require a second volume.

Limits are necessary, choices must be made, and such rules as exist are ambiguous. In the present instance the governing principle, which the author hopes is an unobjectionable one, has been to omit source notes for: