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This etext was produced by John Stuart Middleton

The Life of Cesare Borgia

Of France, Duke of Valentinois and Romagna, Prince of Andria and Venafri
Count of Dyois, Lord of Piombino, Camerino and Urbino, Gonfalonier and
Captain-General of Holy Church

A History and Some Criticisms

by Raphael Sabatini

PREFACE

This is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It
is a record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human,
strenuous age; a lustful, flamboyant age; an age red with blood and pale
with passion at white-heat; an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour,
dazzling light and impenetrable shadow; an age of swift movement,
pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing
contrasts.

To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct
century--as we conceive our own to be--is for sedate middle-age to judge
from its own standpoint the reckless, hot, passionate, lustful humours of
youth, of youth that errs grievously and achieves greatly.

So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless
procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with
it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the
youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we
waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to
accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as
may pursue the study of us.

But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards of
our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals for
judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the purpose
from the environment in which they had their being? How false must be
the conception of them thus obtained! We view the individuals so
selected through a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous and
abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and
abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment of
the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that is
corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed, must appear
similarly distorted.

Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and
accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait upon
our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or
South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or
Mayfair.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of
the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving
and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you
shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naïve soul of this
Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing
hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You shall infer
something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his tempestuous mirth,
his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naïveté, his inquisitiveness, his
cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of sunshine and bright
gewgaws.

To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the
age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of
Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano
afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the
learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla--of whom more anon--wrote his famous
indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments
of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop of
Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which, coming
from a churchman's pen, will leave you cold with horror should you chance
to turn its pages. This was the age of the Discovery of Man; the pagan
age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so
that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before an image of the
Greek by whose teachings--in common with so many scholars of his day--he
sought to inform himself.

It was an age that had become unable to discriminate between the merits
of the Saints of the Church and the Harlots of the Town. Therefore it
honoured both alike, extolled the carnal merits of the one in much the
same terms as were employed to extol the spiritual merits of the other.
Thus when a famous Roman courtesan departed this life in the year 1511,
at the early age of twenty-six, she was accorded a splendid funeral and
an imposing tomb in the Chapel Santa Gregoria with a tablet bearing the
following inscription:

"IMPERIA CORTISANA ROMANA QUAE
DIGNA TANTO NOMINE, RARAE INTER MORTALES
FORMAE SPECIMEN DEDIT."

It was, in short, an age so universally immoral as scarcely to be termed
immoral, since immorality may be defined as a departure from the morals
that obtain a given time and in a given place. So that whilst from our
own standpoint the Cinquecento, taken collectively, is an age of grossest
licence and immorality, from the standpoint of the Cinquecento itself few
of its individuals might with justice be branded immoral.

For the rest, it was an epoch of reaction from the Age of Chivalry: an
epoch of unbounded luxury, of the cult and worship of the beautiful
externally; an epoch that set no store by any inward virtue, by truth or
honour; an epoch that laid it down as a maxim that no inconvenient
engagement should be kept if opportunity offered to evade it.

The history of the Cinquecento is a history developed in broken pledges,
trusts dishonoured and basest treacheries, as you shall come to conclude
before you have read far in the story that is here to be set down.

In a profligate age what can you look for but profligates? Is it just,
is it reasonable, or is it even honest to take a man or a family from
such an environment, for judgement by the canons of a later epoch? Yet
is it not the method that has been most frequently adopted in dealing
with the vast subject of the Borgias?

To avoid the dangers that must wait upon that error, the history of that
House shall here be taken up with the elevation of Calixtus III to the
Papal Throne; and the reign of the four Popes immediately preceding
Roderigo Borgia--who reigned as Alexander VI--shall briefly be surveyed
that a standard may be set by which to judge the man and the family that
form the real subject of this work.

The history of this amazing Pope Alexander is yet to be written. No
attempt has been made to exhaust it here. Yet of necessity he bulks
large in these pages; for the history of his dazzling, meteoric son is so
closely interwoven with his own that it is impossible to present the one
without dealing at considerable length with the other.

The sources from which the history of the House of Borgia has been culled
are not to be examined in a preface. They are too numerous, and they
require too minute and individual a consideration that their precise
value and degree of credibility may be ascertained. Abundantly shall
such examination be made in the course of this history, and in a measure
as the need arises to cite evidence for one side or for the other shall
that evidence be sifted.

Never, perhaps, has anything more true been written of the Borgias and
their history than the matter contained in the following lines of Rawdon
Brown in his Ragguagli sulla Vita e sulle Opere di Marino Sanuto: "It
seems to me that history has made use of the House of Borgia as of a
canvas upon which to depict the turpitudes of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries."

Materials for the work were very ready to the hand; and although they do
not signally differ from the materials out of which the histories of half
a dozen Popes of the same epoch might be compiled, they are far more
abundant in the case of the Borgia Pope, for the excellent reason that
the Borgia Pope detaches from the background of the Renaissance far more
than any of his compeers by virtue of his importance as a political
force.

In this was reason to spare for his being libelled and lampooned even
beyond the usual extravagant wont. Slanders concerning him and his son
Cesare were readily circulated, and they will generally be found to
spring from those States which had most cause for jealousy and resentment
of the Borgia might--Venice, Florence, and Milan, amongst others.

No rancour is so bitter as political rancour--save, perhaps, religious
rancour, which we shall also trace; no warfare more unscrupulous or more
prone to use the insidious weapons of slander than political warfare. Of
this such striking instances abound in our own time that there can scarce
be the need to labour the point. And from the form taken by such
slanders as are circulated in our own sedate and moderate epoch may be
conceived what might be said by political opponents in a fierce age that
knew no pudency and no restraint. All this in its proper place shall be
more closely examined.

For many of the charges brought against the House of Borgia some
testimony exists; for many others--and these are the more lurid,
sensational, and appalling covering as they do rape and murder, adultery,
incest, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain--no single grain of real
evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, at this time of day evidence is no
longer called for where the sins of the Borgias are concerned. Oft-
reiterated assertion has usurped the place of evidence--for a lie
sufficiently repeated comes to be credited by its very utterer. And
meanwhile the calumny has sped from tongue to tongue, from pen to pen,
gathering matter as it goes. The world absorbs the stories; it devours
them greedily so they be sensational, and writers well aware of this have
been pandering to that morbid appetite for some centuries now with this
subject of the Borgias. A salted, piquant tale of vice, a ghastly story
of moral turpitude and physical corruption, a hair-raising narrative of
horrors and abominations--these are the stock-in-trade of the sensation-
monger. With the authenticity of the matters he retails such a one has
no concern. "Se non é vero é ben trovato," is his motto, and in his
heart the sensation-monger--of whatsoever age--rather hopes the thing be
true. He will certainly make his public so believe it; for to discredit
it would be to lose nine-tenths of its sensational value. So he trims
and adjusts his wares, adds a touch or two of colour and what else he
accounts necessary to heighten their air of authenticity, to dissemble
any peeping spuriousness.

A form of hypnosis accompanies your study of the subject--a suggestion
that what is so positively and repeatedly stated must of necessity be
true, must of necessity have been proved by irrefutable evidence at some
time or other. So much you take for granted--for matters which began
their existence perhaps as tentative hypotheses have imperceptibly
developed into established facts.

Occasionally it happens that we find some such sentence as the following
summing up this deed or that one in the Borgia histories: "A deal of
mystery remains to be cleared up, but the Verdict of History assigns the
guilt to Cesare Borgia."

Behold how easy it is to dispense with evidence. So that your tale be
well-salted and well-spiced, a fico for evidence! If it hangs not
overwell together in places, if there be contradictions, lacunae, or
openings for doubt, fling the Verdict of History into the gap, and so
strike any questioner into silence.

So far have matters gone in this connection that who undertakes to set
down to-day the history of Cesare Borgia, with intent to do just and
honest work, must find it impossible to tell a plain and straightforward
tale--to present him not as a villain of melodrama, not a monster,
ludicrous, grotesque, impossible, but as human being, a cold, relentless
egotist, it is true, using men for his own ends, terrible and even
treacherous in his reprisals, swift as a panther and as cruel where his
anger was aroused, yet with certain elements of greatness: a splendid
soldier, an unrivalled administrator, a man pre-eminently just, if
merciless in that same justice.

To present Cesare Borgia thus in a plain straightforward tale at this
time of day, would be to provoke the scorn and derision of those who have
made his acquaintance in the pages of that eminent German scholar,
Ferdinand Gregorovius, and of some other writers not quite so eminent yet
eminent enough to serve serious consideration. Hence has it been
necessary to examine at close quarters the findings of these great ones,
and to present certain criticisms of those same findings. The author is
overwhelmingly conscious of the invidious quality of that task; but he is
no less conscious of its inevitability if this tale is to be told at all.

Whilst the actual sources of historical evidence shall be examined in the
course of this narrative, it may be well to examine at this stage the
sources of the popular conceptions of the Borgias, since there will be no
occasion later to allude to them.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it
may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be
one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To
render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-
defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to
enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that
preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the
period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be
formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching
is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that
must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them
--the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like
distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a
lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into
disrepute. Many writers frankly make no pretence--leastways none that
can be discerned--of aiming at historical precision; others, however,
invest their work with a spurious scholarliness, go the length of citing
authorities to support the point of view which they have taken, and which
they lay before you as the fruit of strenuous lucubrations.

These are the dangerous ones, and of this type is Victor Hugo's famous
tragedy Lucrezia Borgia, a work to which perhaps more than to any other
(not excepting Les Borgias in Crimes Célèbres of Alexandre Dumas) is due
the popular conception that prevails to-day of Cesare Borgia's sister.

It is questionable whether anything has ever flowed from a distinguished
pen in which so many licences have been taken with the history of
individuals and of an epoch; in which there is so rich a crop of crude,
transpontine absurdities and flagrant, impossible anachronisms. Victor
Hugo was a writer of rare gifts, a fertile romancer and a great poet, and
it may be unjust to censure him for having taken the fullest advantages
of the licences conceded to both. But it would be difficult to censure
him too harshly for having--in his Lucrezia Borgia--struck a pose of
scholarliness, for having pretended and maintained that his work was
honest work founded upon the study of historical evidences. With that
piece of charlatanism he deceived the great mass of the unlettered of
France and of all Europe into believing that in his tragedy he presented
the true Lucrezia Borgia.

"If you do not believe me," he declared, "read Tommaso Tommasi, read the
Diary of Burchard."

Read, then, that Diary, extending over a period of twenty-three years,
from 1483 to 1506, of the Master of Ceremonies of the Vatican (which
largely contributes the groundwork of the present history), and the one
conclusion to which you will be forced is that Victor Hugo himself had
never read it, else he would have hesitated to bid you refer to a work
which does not support a single line that he has written.

As for Tommaso Tommasi--oh, the danger of a little learning! Into what
quagmires does it not lead those who flaunt it to impress you!

Tommasi's place among historians is on precisely the same plane as
Alexandre Dumas's. His Vita di Cesare Borgia is on the same historical
level as Les Borgias, much of which it supplied. Like Crimes Célèbres,
Tommasi's book is invested with a certain air of being a narrative of
sober fact; but like Crimes Célèbres, it is none the less a work of
fiction.

This Tommaso Tommasi, whose real name was Gregorio Leti--and it is under
this that such works of his as are reprinted are published nowadays--was
a most prolific author of the seventeenth century, who, having turned
Calvinist, vented in his writings a mordacious hatred of the Papacy and
of the religion from which he had seceded. His Life of Cesare Borgia was
published in 1670. It enjoyed a considerable vogue, was translated into
French, and has been the chief source from which many writers of fiction
and some writers of "fact" have drawn for subsequent work to carry
forward the ceaseless defamation of the Borgias.

History should be as inexorable as Divine Justice. Before we admit
facts, not only should we call for evidence and analyse it when it is
forthcoming, but the very sources of such evidence should be examined,
that, as far as possible, we may ascertain what degree of credit they
deserve. In the study of the history of the Borgias, we repeat, there
has been too much acceptance without question, too much taking for
granted of matters whose incredibility frequently touches and
occasionally oversteps the confines of the impossible.

One man knew Cesare Borgia better, perhaps, than did any other
contemporary, of the many who have left more or less valuable records;
for the mind of that man was the acutest of its age, one of the acutest
Italy and the world have ever known. That man was Niccolô Macchiavelli,
Secretary of State to the Signory of Florence. He owed no benefits to
Cesare; he was the ambassador of a power that was ever inimical to the
Borgias; so that it is not to be dreamt that his judgement suffered from
any bias in Cesare's favour. Yet he accounted Cesare Borgia--as we shall
see--the incarnation of an ideal conqueror and ruler; he took Cesare
Borgia as the model for his famous work The Prince, written as a grammar
of statecraft for the instruction in the art of government of that
weakling Giuliano de'Medici.

Macchiavelli pronounces upon Cesare Borgia the following verdict:

"If all the actions of the duke are taken into consideration, it will be
seen how great were the foundations he had laid to future power. Upon
these I do not think it superfluous to discourse, because I should not
know what better precept to lay before a new prince than the example of
his actions; and if success did not wait upon what dispositions he had
made, that was through no fault of his own, but the result of an
extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune."

In its proper place shall be considered what else Macchiavelli had to say
of Cesare Borgia and what to report of events that he witnessed connected
with Cesare Borgia's career.

Meanwhile, the above summary of Macchiavelli's judgement is put forward
as a justification for the writing of this book, which has for scope to
present to you the Cesare Borgia who served as the model for The Prince.

Before doing so, however, there is the rise of the House of Borgia to be
traced, and in the first two of the four books into which this history
will be divided it is Alexander VI, rather than his son, who will hold
the centre of the stage.

If the author has a mercy to crave of his critics, it is that they will
not impute it to him that he has set out with the express aim of
"whitewashing"--as the term goes--the family of Borgia. To whitewash is
to overlay, to mask the original fabric under a superadded surface. Too
much superadding has there been here already. By your leave, all shall
be stripped away. The grime shall be removed and the foulness of
inference, of surmise, of deliberate and cold-blooded malice, with which
centuries of scribblers, idle, fantastic, sensational, or venal, have
coated the substance of known facts.

But the grime shall be preserved and analysed side by side with the
actual substance, that you may judge if out of zeal to remove the former
any of the latter shall have been included in the scraping.

The author expresses his indebtedness to the following works which,
amongst others, have been studied for the purposes of the present
history:

Alvisi, Odoardo, Cesare Borgia, Duca di Romagna. Imola, 1878.
Auton, Jean d', Chroniques de Louis XII (Soc. de l'Hist. de France).
Paris, 1889.
Baldi, Bernardino, Della Vita e Fatti di Guidobaldo. Milano, 1821.
Barthélemy, Charles, Erreurs et Mensonges Historiques. Paris, 1873.
Bernardi, Andrea, Cronache Forlivese, 1476-1517. Bologna, 1897.
Bonnaffé, Edmond, Inventaire de la Duchesse de Valentinois, Paris,
1878.
Bonoli, Paolo, Istorie della Città di Forli. Forli, 1661.
Bourdeilles, Pierre, Vie des Hommes Illustres. Leyde, 1666.
Brown, Rawdon, Ragguagli Sulla Vita e sulle Opere di Marino Sanuto.
Venezia, 1837.
Buonaccorsi, Biagio, Diario. Firenze, 1568.
Burchard, Joannes, Diarium, sive Rerum Urbanarum Commentarii.
(Edited by L. Thuasne.) Paris, 1885.
Burckhardt, Jacob, Der Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. Basel, 1860.
Castiglione, Baldassare, Il Cortigiano. Firenze, 1885.
Chapelles, Grillon des, Esquisses Biographiques. Paris, 1862.
Cerri, Domenico, Borgia. Tonino, 1857.
Clementini, Cesare, Raccolto Istorico delle Fondatione di Rimino.
Rimini, 1617.
Corio, Bernardino, Storia di Milano. Milano, 1885.
Corvo, Baron, Chronicles of the House of Borgia. London, 1901.
Espinois, Henri de l', Le Pape Alexandre VI (in the Revue des Questions
Historiques, Vol. XXIX). Paris, 1881.
Giovio, Paolo, La Vita di Dicenove Uomini Illustri. Venetia, 1561.
Giovio, Paolo, Delle Istorie del Suo Tempo. Venetia, 1608.
Giustiniani, Antonio, Dispacci, 1502-1505. (Edited by Pasquale Villari.)
Firenze, 1876.
Granata, F., Storia Civile di Capua. 1752.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter.
Stuttgart, 1889.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand, Lacrezia Borgia (Italian translation). Firenze,
1855.
Guicciardini, Francesco, Istoria d'Italia. Milan, 1803.
Guingené, P. L., Histoire Littéraire d'Italie. Milano, 1820.
Infessura, Stefano, Diarum Rerum Romanum. (Edited by 0. Tommassini.)
Roma, 1887.
Leonetti, A., Papa Alessandro VI. Bologna, 1880.
Leti, Gregorio ("Tommaso Tommasi"), Vita di Cesare Borgia, Milano, 1851.
Lucaire, Achille, Alain le Grand, Sire d'Albret. Paris, 1877.
Macchiavelli, Niccolô, Il Principe. Torino, 1853.
Macchiavelli, Niccolô, Le Istorie Fiorentine. Firenze, 1848.
Macchiavelli, Niccolô, Opere Minori. Firenze, 1852.
Matarazzo, Francesco, Cronaca della Città di Perugia, 1492-1503.
(Edited by F. Bonaini and F. Polidori.) In Archivio Storico
Italiano, Firenze, 1851.
Panvinio, Onofrio, Le Vite dei Pontefici. Venezia, 1730.
Pascale, Aq., Racconto del Sacco di Capova. Napoli, 1632.
Righi, B., Annali di Faenza. Faenza, 1841.
Sanazzaro, Opere. Padua, 1723.
Sanuto Marino, Diarii, Vols. I to V. (Edited by F. Stefani.) Venice,
1879.
Tartt, W. M., Pandolfo Collenuccio, Memoirs connected with his life.
1868.
"Tommaso Tommasi" (Gregorio Leti), Vita di Cesare Borgia. 1789.
Varchi, Benedetto, Storia Fiorentina. Florence, 1858.
Visari, Gustavo, Vita degli Artefici.
Villari, Pasquale, La Storia di Girolamo Savonarola, etc. Florence,
1861.
Villari, Pasquale, Niccolò Machiavelli e I suoi Tempi. Milano, 1895.
Yriarte, Charles, La Vie de César Borgia. Paris, 1889.
Yriarte, Charles, Autour des Borgia. Paris, 1891.
Zurita, Geronimo, Historia del Rey Don Hernando el Catolico (in Anales).
Çaragoça, i610.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE HOUSE OF THE BULL

CHAPTER

I. THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA

II. THE REIGNS OF SIXTUS IV AND INNOCENT VIII

III. ALEXANDER VI

IV. BORGIA ALLIANCES

BOOK II

THE BULL PASCANT

I. THE FRENCH INVASION

II. THE POPE AND THE SUPERNATURAL

III. THE ROMAN BARONS

IV. THE MURDER OF THE DUKE OF GANDIA

V. THE RENUNCIATION OF THE PURPLE

BOOK III

THE BULL RAMPANT

I. THE DUCHESS OF VALENTINOIS

II. THE KNELL OF THE TYRANTS

III. IMOLA AND FORLI

IV. GONFALONIER OF THE CHURCH

V. THE MURDER OF ALFONSO OF ARAGON

VI. RIMINI AND PESARO

VII. THE SIEGE OF FAENZA

VIII. ASTORRE MANFREDI

IX. CASTEL BOLOGNESE AND PIOMBINO

X. THE END OF THE HOUSE OF ARAGON

XI. THE LETTER TO SILVIO SAVELLI

XII. LUCREZIA'S THIRD MARRIAGE

XIII. URBINO AND CAMERINO

XIV. THE REVOLT OF THE CONDOTTIERI

XV. MACCHIAVELLI'S LEGATION

XVI. RAMIRO DE LORQUA

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