Tanzanite's Castle Full of Books

History often obscures the truth, but perhaps no group of people has suffered more from this than the family we know as the Borgias and associate with violence, debauchery and methods of persuasion that wouldn’t put the Mafia to shame.


I have been fascinated by the Borgias for many years, but more recently, my research for my novel SINS OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA set me thinking about the gulf between what we know about the family, and what we think we know.

To begin with, the Borgias were not even Italian, despite the fact we see them today as prototypical Mafiosi. The Borja family came from a small town called Jativa in Catalonia, and it was Rodrigo Borgia’s uncle, Alonso, who first emigrated to Rome, where in due course he became Pope Calixtus III. Not only did the family give us two Popes, but also a saint – Saint Francis Borja, who was the third General of the Society of Jesus and confessor to Queen Juana I of Spain, known as ‘La Loca’. Saint Francis was the great nephew of the notorious Cesare Borgia, who plays a major role in my novel.

His great aunt, Lucrezia, whose third marriage is the catalyst for SINS OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA, seems to me to encapsulate more than any of the rest of her family the contradictions between historical ‘truth’ and the layers of rumour and legend that have grown up around her, not only since her death but during her lifetime as well. From the tender age of thirteen, she was beset by stories of sexual licence, including having incestuous relations with her father and two of her brothers, and lying to a Consistory of cardinals by telling them she was still a virgin when she was actually six months’ pregnant. There is no proven truth behind any of these stories – although there’s no smoke without fire, as they say – nor any evidence that she ever poisoned anybody. This didn’t stop Victor Hugo devising some very lurid episodes for his novel about Lucrezia, published in 1833 and later used as the basis for Donizetti’s opera. Hugo is more responsible than anybody for Lucrezia’s salacious reputation.

By the time of her death in 1519, she had successfully shaken off the dark influence of her father and Cesare, as a visit to Ferrara, where she was duchess for fourteen years, clearly shows. There she is remembered fondly, as a great patron of the arts (notably of the poets Ariosto and Pietro Bembo, who was also her lover), a wise and just administrator and a gallant defender of the city during war. She once pawned all her jewellery to buy ammunition for artillery during the War of the League of Cambrai. She was a devoted mother of five children, one of whom was Cardinal Ippolito d’Este II, the builder of the great Villa d’Este in Tivoli.

Cesare’s reputation has undergone similar ups and downs. During his lifetime, he was, if not liked, admired for his political and military acumen as Machiavelli’s tribute to him in The Prince demonstrates. He was known as a womaniser but, of course, as he was a man, that was seen as a positive rather than a negative. While those whom he relieved of their states clearly had no reason to love him, his soldiers adored him and the citizens of the towns and cities he came to rule found his administration to be fair and efficient. It was only after his father, the Pope’s, sudden death, at a time when he was himself mortally ill, that his enemies were able to take advantage of him and call for his imprisonment for a whole list of crimes, many of which he certainly didn’t commit.

It is, for example, very unlikely that he murdered his brother, Juan, because he had nothing to gain from it. Murder was a pretty universal political tool in Renaissance Italy, and Cesare certainly made use of it, but he was far too calculating a figure to murder people out of passion. However much he disliked Juan – and there seems to have been little love lost between them – he wouldn’t have seen that as a motive for murder. Besides, Juan was family and the Borgias, just like the Sopranos or the Corleones, stuck together.

Cesare enjoyed a brief period in the sun during the Italian Risorgimento, when his state building in central Italy was seen as a precursor of the unification which the Risorgimento brought about. The novelist Rafael Sabatini, creator of Scaramouche and supporter of the Risorgimento, wrote an absurdly hagiographic biography of Cesare which casts him as a tremendous romantic hero – just as Victor Hugo is doing the opposite for his sister.

So how come the Borgias have become a watchword for evil and corruption, even though they really didn’t act outside the norms of their times? Yes, Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, had a string of mistresses and no less than nine illegitimate children, but then, so did most other Renaissance Popes, so much so that the period has been called ‘the golden age of bastards’. Yes, he bought votes in the Papal elections, but that again was standard practice – though, parsimonious as he was, and having served as Vatican Treasurer for some fifteen years before his election, he had more money to throw around than most.

To my mind, the source of the Borgias reputation is the fact that they were foreigners. They had moved to Italy from Spain and been successful – which, as we know from our own times, tends to make immigrants unpopular. They also made little attempt to blend in, continuing to speak Catalan among themselves, surrounding themselves with Spanish advisers and enjoying Spanish entertainments such as bull fighting. It seems to me that this refusal to become part of the establishment, even when they were at the centre of it, explains a lot of the hostility they generated, which was then taken and blown out of all proportion by later writers with their own agenda.


I have tried, in my novel, to achieve a level of contemporary authenticity and to judge these remarkable people by the mores of their own times, not ours, and during my researches I have come to like them very much indeed. They were brilliant, engaging and resourceful individuals and the Renaissance would have been poorer without them.


My thanks to Sarah for providing this great historical information about the Borgia family.  Sins of the House of Borgia was released  March 1, 2011.