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Were the Borgias Really so Bad?
Alexander Lee attempts to rescue the Borgias from their baleful reputation.
 Painting by John Collier, A glass of wine with Caesar Borgia, from left: Cesare Borgia, Lucrezia, Pope Alexander, and a young man holding an empty glass.
Renaissance Italy was dominated by rich and powerful families whose
reputations have been shaped by the many dark and dastardly deeds they
committed. In quattrocento Florence, the Medici bought, bribed,
and blackmailed their way to the top; in Rimini, the Malatesta flitted
continually between self-destructive megalomania and near psychopathic
brutality; and in Milan, the Sforza were every bit as infamous for their
sexual proclivities as they were for their political ruthlessness. But
in this devilish roll-call of nefarious names, none sends such a chill
up the spine as that of ‘Borgia’.
It is impossible to imagine a family more heavily tainted by the
stains of sin and immorality, and – as even those who have not seen the
eponymous television series will know – there is scarcely one of their
number who does not seem to be cloaked in an aura of iniquity. The
founder of the family’s fortunes, Alfons de Borja (1378-1458) – who
reigned as Pope Callixtus III – was decried even by his closest allies
as the “scandal of [his] age” for his monstrously corrupt ways. His
nephew, Rodrigo (1431-1503) – who he himself elevated to the
cardinalate, and who would be elected Pope Alexander VI in 1492 – was
reputed to be even worse. Accused of buying the papacy, he would later
be besmirched by rumours so severe that the Venetian diplomat Girolamo
Priuli felt able to claim he had “given his soul and body to the great
demon in Hell”. Indeed, as the papal master of ceremonies, Johann
Burchard, was to contend in the middle of Alexander’s reign:
There is no longer any crime or shameful act that does
not take place in public in Rome and in the home of the Pontiff. Who
could fail to be horrified by the…terrible, monstrous acts of lechery
that are committed openly in his home, with no respect for God or man?
Rapes and acts of incest are countless…[and] great throngs of courtesans
frequent St. Peter’s Palace, pimps, brothels, and whorehouses are to be
found everywhere!
But worse still was the reputation of Alexander’s children, and
Burchard’s blithe comment that they were “utterly depraved” barely
begins to cover the crimes with which they were associated in the
contemporary imagination. Lucrezia (1480-1519) – with whom the pope was
reputed to have slept – was cast not only as a whore, but also as a
poisoner, a murderer, and a witch. And Cesare (1475/6-1507) – the most
handsome, dashing, and despicable Borgia of all – was widely believed to
have killed his elder brother Juan in a fit of jealousy, bedded his
sister, and embarked on a campaign of slaughter and conquest aimed at
carving a kingdom out of the scattered states of Northern Italy.
 Portrait of a Woman by Bartolomeo Veneto, traditionally assumed to be Lucrezia Borgia.
Confronted with so comprehensively damning a portrait, it is
difficult to believe that the Borgias could have been any more dreadful
if they had tried. But precisely because the impression conveyed by
contemporary accounts is so utterly dreadful, it is equally
difficult not to question whether such a terrible reputation was
entirely justified. Were the Borgias really all that bad?
As with most things that are supposed to have happened behind the
scenes in the shadowy world of Renaissance Rome, certainty is often
elusive, and it is a challenging task to separate the evidential wheat
from the gossipy chaff when sifting through the documents which have
survived. Yet despite this, there is enough to suggest that the Borgias
weren’t quite the one-dimensional evil-doers they first appear to have
been.
On the one hand, they certainly weren’t the demonic arch-villains
they have been painted as. For all of the vividness with which
observers such as Burchard, Priuli, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini
described the Borgias, it is clear that at least some of the
family’s unenviable reputation was entirely undeserved. The charge of
incest, for example, seems to be without any solid basis in fact. So
too, the suggestion that Lucrezia was a poisoner is grounded more on
salacious gossip and the hysterical accusations of a divorced husband
than on reliable evidence. Although thrice married – each time for
political reasons – she was, by all accounts, a highly cultured and
intelligent figure who was admired and respected by contemporaries such
as the poet Pietro Bembo, and who was never seriously associated with
any misdeeds. But equally untenable is the claim that Cesare killed his
brother. Not only was there little for Cesare to gain from Juan’s death,
but it is even arguable that – since Cesare was compelled to set aside
his cardinal’s hat to assume Juan’s secular roles - the family’s
long-term position was weakened so severely that he could not have been
unaware of the risks. Much more plausible is the suggestion that Juan
was killed either in an amorous adventure gone wrong, or at the
instigation of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, with whom he had argued, and who
was an avowed enemy of the whole family. Even less credible, however,
are the piquant accounts of the Borgias’ supposedly raucous parties. The
so-called “Banquet of the Chestnuts” – an all-night orgy at Apostolic
Palace attended by fifty “honest prostitutes” and involving eye-popping
sexual athletics – is, for example, attested only in Burchard’s memoirs,
and is not only intrinsically implausible, but was also dismissed as
such by many contemporaries.
On the other hand, even those crimes of which the Borgias were
guilty weren’t anything out of the ordinary. Indeed, when the evidence
is interrogated more carefully, it is apparent that the Borgias were
entirely typical of the families who were continually vying for the
papal throne during the Renaissance.
 Cesare Borgia
They were, for example, undoubtedly guilty of both nepotism and
simony. Although the sums involved were unquestionably exaggerated by
contemporary chroniclers, both Callixtus III and Alexander VI bribed
their way to the papacy, and used their power to advance their family as
fully as possible. Alexander VI alone elevated not fewer than ten of
his relatives to the College of Cardinals, and endowed others with a
host of fiefdoms in the Papal States. But precisely because the papacy
could so easily be misused for familial aggrandisement and enrichment,
these ecclesiastical abuses were all too familiar. Though formally
classed as a sin, simony was common. In 1410, for example, Baldassare
Cossa borrowed 10,000fl. from Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici to
bribe his way to becoming Anti-pope John XXIII, and at the conclave of
1458, Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville promised to distribute a vast
array of lucrative benefices to anyone who would vote for him, albeit in
vain. Nepotism, too, was widespread. In the early fifteenth century,
Martin V had secured immense estates for his Colonna relatives in the
kingdom of Naples, but within a century, nepotism had become so extreme
that even Machiavelli felt obliged to attack Sixtus IV – who had
elevated six of his relatives to the Sacred College – for this crime.
Later, Julius II (a kinsman of Sixtus IV) acquired the duchy of Urbino
for his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere; Clement VII made his
illegitimate son, Alessandro, the first duke of Florence; and Paul III
raised his bastard child, Pier Luigi Farnese, to the duchy of Parma.
Similarly, there is no doubting that Alexander VI was a lusty and
sexually adventurous pope. He openly acknowledged fathering a bevy of
children by his mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei, and later enjoyed the
legendary affections of Giulia Farnese, renowned as one of the most
beautiful women of her day. But here again, Alexander was merely
following the norms of the Renaissance papacy, and it is telling that
Pius II had no shame about penning a wild, sexual comedy called Chrysis.
Popes and cardinals were almost expected to have mistresses. Julius II,
for example, was the father of numerous children, and never bothered to
hide the fact, while Cardinal Jean de Jouffroy was notorious for being a
devotee of brothels. Homosexual affairs were no less common, and in
that he seems to have limited himself to only one gender, Alexander VI
almost seems straight-laced. Sixtus IV was, for instance, reputed to
have given the cardinals special permission to commit sodomy during the
summer, perhaps to allow him to do so without fear of criticism, while
Paul II was rumoured to have died while being sodomised by a page-boy.
Even Cesare’s deserved reputation for savage megalomania is rather
less impressive when set in the context of the period. He was, of
course, a ferociously ambitious figure who indulged in some pretty low
tactics. Having divested himself of his cardinal’s hat, he ripped
through the Romagna and Le Marche, building a vast, private fiefdom in
the space of just three years. In all this, murder seemed not an
occasional necessity, but an integral part of everyday existence. In
1499 alone, he ordered the assassination or execution of the Spanish
Constable of the Guard, the soldier-captain Juan Cervillon, and
Ferdinando d’Almaida, the cruel-minded bishop of Ceuta, and subsequently
added a host of individuals such as Astorre III Manfredi to his list of
victims. Later, he even slaughtered three of his own senior commanders
at a dinner in Senigallia after (rightly) suspecting them of plotting
against him. But from a certain perspective, all of this was only to be
expected. It was quite normal for the relatives of Renaissance popes to
set their sights on conquest and acquisition. Although some ‘papal’
families – such as the Colonna – owned huge tracts of land, the majority
– such as the Piccolomini and the della Rovere – started out as
cash-strapped minor nobles, or – in the Borgias’ case – as landless
foreigners, and popes from this latter group naturally encouraged their
kinsmen to seize enough territory to put them on a par with the greatest
noble houses in Italy. This meant war. And in an age in which war was
the preserve of mercenaries, war meant cruelty on a grand scale. The
wild, bisexual Pier Luigi Farnese, for example, was infamous for his
brutality, and not only pillaged at will, but also made a habit of
hunting down those men who resisted his advances. So too, Francesco
Maria della Rovere, was nothing more than a soldier for hire, who
ordered his troops to slaughter Cardinal Francesco Alidosi after his own
failure to capture Bologna. Indeed, if anything, Cesare was unusual
only in his tactical brilliance and in his comparative self-restraint.
It seems clear that the Borgias’ rather unfortunate reputation was
undeserved. While some of the accusations levelled at them were simply
untrue, even those crimes which they did commit were typical of the
period, and paled by comparison to those of other ‘papal’ families.
Yet this leaves us with a problem. If the Borgias weren’t as bad as
they may seem, why was their name so heavily tarnished? Why did
observers turn on them quite so comprehensively, and what was the reason
for so dramatic a smear campaign?
Although in later years, the steady worsening of the Borgias’
reputation was intimately linked to the shifting currents of Reformation
and Counter-Reformation thought, there are perhaps three reasons why
contemporary observers were prepared to attack them quite so viciously.
 Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI.
The first is simply that they were Spaniards, and as such,
were yoked to shifting perceptions of Spanish influence in the Italian
peninsula. Attitudes were, of course, often positive, but as a result of
the involvement of Spain and the Aragonese kingdom of Naples in the
affairs of Northern Italy during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, there gradually emerged a ‘Black Legend’, a virulent form of
anti-Spanish propaganda which identified all things Spanish with
oppression, brutality, and cruelty. The fact that the Borgias hailed
from Valencia, and that Alexander VI had helped to involve the Spanish
more closely in Italian affairs meant that the family was almost
inevitably tarred with the same brush.
The second reason is that they were outsiders. In spite of the
universality of the Church’s message, the Renaissance papacy was
perceived to be an Italian institution, simply by virtue of the
fact that the control of the Papal States gave a pontiff and his family
colossal power in the Italian peninsula itself, both in terms of direct
political influence, and in terms of familial aggrandizement. Whichever
way you looked at it, the papacy was dominated by Italians, directed in
the interest of Italian states, and misused for the benefit of
Italians. The Borgias were an anomaly. It was not merely that they were not Italian
(there would be only one other non-Italian pope between the end of the
Great Schism in 1417 and the Sack of Rome in 1527); rather, it was that
Callixtus III and Alexander VI sought to use the papacy to enrich their
family at the expense of Italians. They despoiled other (Italian)
families of their land and titles; they invoked the help of foreign
powers; and they generally disrupted the delicate balance of power in
Italy. As a consequence, it was almost natural that Italian commentators
and historians – many of whom had experienced the rapaciousness of
successive pontiffs – were willing to depict the Borgias inaccurately as
especially corrupt and vile individuals.
The third – and most important – reason is, however, that the Borgias
simply weren’t all that successful. Although it was not unusual for
families to base their success entirely on papal favour, most were canny
enough to limit their ambitions, to consolidate their gains gradually
and to graft themselves into other more established families. In other
words, they started small, played the long game and tried not to ruffle
too many feathers. And, by and large, this was a technique that worked.
The Piccolomini, the della Rovere, and the Farnese families all climbed
the ladder slowly and effectively, and – in time – became dominant
players in the game of Italian politics. This fact alone prevented
anyone from taking too strong a dislike to them. You just had to get
along with them. But the Borgias were different. They were too hasty,
too reliant on papal authority and foreign favour, and too unwilling to
respect existing patters of landed power. They were building on sand. No
sooner had Alexander VI died than Cesare’s proto-kingdom imploded and
he himself was betrayed by Julius II. There was nothing left, and there
was no-one to turn to for help. Forced to return to Spain, Cesare – and
the Borgias – had failed. And in failure, even their former friends had
no hesitation in decrying them as scoundrels. Without lasting power or
influence, there was nothing either to hold back the criticism or to
restrain the exaggerations.
If the Borgias weren’t as bad as they have often seemed, therefore,
the background to their unfortunate and ill-deserved reputation leaves
us with a rather more interesting and engaging history. On the one hand,
it is a tale of an obscure Spanish family determined to seek its
fortune in a foreign land, set on beating the Italians at their own
game, and perhaps willing to engage a little too freely in some of the
more sensuous pleasures of the age. But on the other hand, it is a story
of inglorious failure, dramatic defeat, and the ignominious assaults of
enemies who hated outsiders – especially Spaniards – more than anything
else. It is not a tale we might expect of the Borgias, but it is
nevertheless a tale that is all too reflective of the amazing
double-standards of the Renaissance, and is perhaps all the richer for
it.
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