The Borgias (3 page)

The Borgia Problem:

An Introduction

This is not the book I set out to write.

My expectation, at the start, was simple: that by digging more deeply into the story of the Borgias than other writers appeared to have done, I might be able to put new flesh on that story’s old bones—all the thrilling tales of murder and incest and horrors beyond numbering. Thereby bringing the whole thing to life in more entertaining, possibly more meaningful ways.

A year of research on both sides of the Atlantic did generate that new flesh—more fresh material than I had hoped, as the following pages will show. But I found something unforeseen as well: evidence that the Borgia story, when one pursues it far enough, turns out to be vastly different from what the world supposes and vastly more interesting than I myself had imagined.

I found myself confronted not only with new flesh but new bones—an entirely new understanding of who the Borgias were and what they actually did. As my book began to take shape, it did so in stunningly unexpected ways.

I send the result out into the world on the two wings of a promise and a hope.

My promise is that any reader who has some knowledge of the Borgias will be surprised by the pages that follow. That, in fact, the more familiar you are with the version of the Borgia story that centuries ago hardened into legend, the greater your surprise will be.

My hope is that the appearance of this book may encourage others—by provoking incredulity or indignation, if that’s what it takes—to look anew at its subject. Popular interest in the Borgias never flags, which is
as it should be in view of the extraordinary personalities of the family’s leading members, the high drama of their lives, and above all the light their story casts on the world of the Renaissance. But scholarly interest has been so dormant for so long that a revival is badly overdue.

Nearly seven decades have passed since J. H. Whitfield of Oxford University, in an article in
History
, called attention to what was even then the decrepit state of the established Borgia myth. The evil reputation of the family, Whitfield observed, had appeared to be confirmed beyond possibility of doubt by such once-magisterial nineteenth-century historians as Jacob Burckhardt and Ferdinand Gregorovius. But in the twentieth century it became clear that those same historians were so wrong about so many things that they were, in effect, largely discredited. Whitfield not only regarded “a revision in favor of the Borgias” as necessary but appears to have expected it to come soon.

Though his optimism was misplaced, he put his finger on what has always been the core of the Borgia problem: the acceptance as true, on the basis of laughably insubstantial evidence or no evidence at all, of accusations of the darkest kind. Examples abound in Gregorovius’s treatment of the central figure in the Borgia story, the Rodrigo Borgia who in 1492 became Pope Alexander VI.
In the seventh volume of his
History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages
, Gregorovius acknowledges that “the secrets of [Rodrigo’s] life as cardinal are unknown, no one having spoken on the subject,” and in his biography of Lucrezia Borgia he observes again that “nothing is known” of Rodrigo’s private life during the thirty-six years between his elevation to the College of Cardinals and his election as pope. But immediately after the first of these statements Gregorovius describes Rodrigo as “passionately sensual,” and immediately after the second he asserts that “insatiable sensuality ruled this Borgia … until his last years. Never was he able to cast out this demon.” These words are bizarre, coming as they do from someone who has just admitted that his subject’s personal life remained a complete blank until, at age sixty, he took center stage as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

It is much the same with Burckhardt, who in his long-revered
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
accepts as true one outlandish anecdote after another, informing his readers that Rodrigo/Alexander was defined by “devilish wickedness,” that Cesare had an “insane thirst for
blood,” and that the two saved the world from themselves by inadvertently imbibing some of the mysterious “white powder of an agreeable taste” with which they had previously decimated the elite of Rome. The present volume will, I trust, demonstrate the absurdity of these opinions.

The Borgia problem is rooted in the fact that from the early sixteenth century forward, for reasons ranging from Pope Julius II’s hatred of his predecessor, Alexander VI, to the eagerness of Reformation polemicists to depict the papacy in morally horrific terms, “every conceivable crime was credited to the Borgias.” By a process of gradual accumulation the scant contemporary record came to be covered over by a thick blanket of invective, with Victor Hugo contributing his play about a monstrous Lucrezia Borgia and Donizetti turning the play into grand opera. Finally even the Catholic historian Ludwig Pastor, whose
History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages
fills forty fat volumes, evidently could see no point in even questioning the legend. That the Borgias were indefensible had come to seem self-evident.

“Burckhardt and Gregorovius have had their day,” said Whitfield in 1944. But since then: almost nothing. Little beyond the endless repetition of the same old shopworn tales, unsupported and insupportable as many of them are.

In writing the present volume I have done two things that are unusual in the treatment of the Borgias, though neither should be unusual at all. I have asked obvious if long-neglected questions, and I have declined to accept answers generally accepted as settled when those answers turn out to have little or no factual foundation. I have also rejected the old practice, where evidence is lacking, of opting for the ugliest hypothetical explanation of a puzzling event.

I make no claim to providing definitive answers to all the questions I raise. Some are probably unanswerable after five hundred years, but simply pointing out that they are unanswerable is worthwhile under the circumstances. Others cry out for the attention of investigators with unusual skills (in the regional dialects of medieval Spain, for example, or the record-keeping practices of Vatican archivists half a millennium ago, or the detection of forged papal bulls).

Much work remains to be done. If this book serves to encourage the undertaking of some part of that work, I will regard my own efforts as
richly rewarded. If other writers can show—not just complain, but
show
—that I have gone too far in being skeptical about alleged Borgia crimes, I will welcome their achievement. Every time another of the old tales is shown to be at least probably true or untrue, another step will have been taken in a process that should be much further along than it is: lifting the Borgia story out of the realm of fable and turning it into history.

I wish to express particular thanks to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where I spent many fruitful days over a period of many months. Without its magnificent resources and the helpfulness of its staff, this book would have been immeasurably more difficult if not impossible to complete in its present form. Also to my superb editor, the acutely perceptive and tirelessly helpful Tracy Devine.

G. J. Meyer
Mere, Wiltshire, England

Prologue

One Whom All Did Fear

The dates and some of the other details are hopelessly uncertain, but the story’s essential elements appear to be beyond dispute:

One day the bishop of Calahorra paid an official visit to the church of Saint Mary of the Assumption in the little city of Viana, in what was by then northern Spain but had long been part of the kingdom of Navarre.
If the visit happened in 1527 as some of the accounts have it, or in 1537 as is also said, the church was already more than two centuries old, its origins as distant for the bishop as those of the White House, say, are for us. It was a tall, gauntly cavernous specimen of Gothic stonework, with pointed arches everywhere and ceilings so high as to be shrouded in gloom even on the brightest days.

If as is commonly said the visit didn’t take place in the 1500s at all but in the closing years of the seventeenth century, it may have happened in connection with the renovations the church is known to have been undergoing at that time. A high tower was being erected above the main entrance, its design baroque rather than Gothic. Inside, the original altars and alcoves were disappearing under extravagant carvings in the newer, more fashionable rococo style. It would have been natural for the bishop, whose diocese included Viana, to make a tour of inspection while all this work was in process.

Whenever it happened,
what
happened is that His Excellency the bishop was shocked to come upon, just in front of the high altar and therefore in a position that could hardly have been more conspicuous, the bulkily ornate tomb of one of the most famous sons of one of Spain’s
most famous families. And to find displayed upon it an epitaph, written in regional dialect, that translates as follows:

Here in a little earth

Lies one whom all did fear
,

One whose hands dispensed both peace and war
.

Oh, you that go in search of things deserving praise
,

If you would praise the worthiest
,

Then let your journey end here
,

Nor tremble to go farther
.

The body inside the tomb was that of a young man, and if intact it bore the signs of a horrifically violent death. In life it had worn the red hat of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, made its home in the papal palace in Rome, ridden into proud cities as their conqueror, been joined in marriage to a princess, and had honors heaped upon it by kings of France and Spain. Not once but twice it had held in its hands the power to decide who would be elected pope. For thirty years it had been inhabited by a spirit of such force and originality as to inspire one of the immortal classics of world literature.

Perhaps most remarkably, all these things had been done by the time the man was twenty-eight years old. By that age he had become one of the legendary figures of European history, as feared and admired—as his epitaph attested—as anyone living in his time.

The bishop of Calahorra, however, was offended to find such a man memorialized not only in this way, not only in a church, but in a church for which he, as prelate, was responsible. It seemed to him a scandal. And so he ordered the tomb demolished—literally eradicated, broken into bits with heavy hammers—and the body removed. Even that was not enough. Declaring the exhumed remains to be unfit for interment in consecrated ground, the bishop had a hole dug at the foot of the stone staircase leading down from the church to the busy road below. He then had the body deposited in the hole and paved over. So that, he is supposed to have said, it would be “trampled on by man and beasts forever.”

Whose body
was
this? What kind of man, having risen to eminence in so many ways in the course of such a short life, would leave behind a
name capable of provoking such a powerful reaction from a churchman who could never have known him—and doing so decades, possibly generations, after his obscure and rather mysterious death?

To answer that question is one of the purposes of the story that follows. In order to answer it, we must look first at the world, and the family, out of which the young man rose.