Rodrigo's children were given routes to success: his eldest son became a Duke, while daughters were married to secure alliances. A papal conclave in installed Innocent VIII rather than making Rodrigo pope, but the Borgia leader had his eye on the throne, and worked hard to secure allies for what he considered his last chance, and was aided by the current pope causing violence and chaos. It has been said, not without validity, that he bought the papacy. Alexander had widespread public support and was capable, diplomatic, and skilled, as well as rich, hedonistic, and concerned with ostentatious displays.
While Alexander at first tried to keep his role separate from family, his children soon benefited from his election, and received huge wealth; Cesare became a cardinal in Relatives arrived in Rome and were rewarded, and the Borgias were soon endemic in Italy.
While many other Popes had been nepotists, Alexander went farther, promoting his own children and had a range of mistresses, something that further fueled a growing and negative reputation.
At this point, some of the Borgia children also began to cause problems, as they annoyed their new families, and at one point Alexander appears to have threatened to excommunicate a mistress for returning to her husband.
Alexander soon had to navigate a way through the warring states and families which surrounded him, and, at first, he tried negotiation, including the marriage of a twelve-year-old Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza. He had some success with diplomacy, but it was short-lived. Accounts claim Lucrezia's husband believed rumors of incest between Alexander and Lucrezia that persist to this day.
His advance was barely stopped, and as Charles entered Rome, Alexander retired to a palace. He could have fled but stayed to use his ability against the neurotic Charles. He negotiated both his own survival and a compromise which ensured an independent papacy, but which left Cesare as both a papal legate and a hostage… until he escaped. France took Naples, but the rest of Italy came together in a Holy League in which Alexander played a key role.
However, when Charles retreated back through Rome, Alexander thought it best to leave this second time. Alexander now turned on a Roman family who stayed loyal to France: the Orsini. Meanwhile, Rome echoed to the rumors of the excesses of the Borgia children. Alexander meant to give Juan first the vital Orsini land, and then strategic papal lands, but Juan was assassinated and his corpse thrown into the Tiber.
He was No one knows who did it. Cesare represented the future to Alexander, partly because the other male Borgia children were dying or weak. Cesare secularized himself fully in His wife became pregnant before he left for Italy, but neither she nor the child ever saw Cesare again. Louis was successful and Cesare, who was only 23 but with an iron will and strong drive, began a remarkable military career.
Alexander looked at the condition of the Papal States , left in disarray after the first French invasion, and decided military action was needed. He thus ordered Cesare, who was in Milan with his army, to pacify large areas of central Italy for the Borgias. Cesare had early success, although when his large French contingent returned to France, he needed a new army and returned to Rome.
Cesare seemed to have control over his father now, and people after papal appointments and acts found it more profitable to seek out the son instead of Alexander. Cesare also became Captain-General of the churches armies and a dominant figure in central Italy. Murder was common in Rome, and many of the unsolved deaths were attributed to the Borgias, and usually Cesare.
With a substantial war chest from Alexander, Cesare conquered. When Alexander went south to oversee the division of land, Lucrezia was left behind in Rome as regent. As the alliance with France now seemed to be holding Cesare back, plans were made, deals struck, wealth acquired and enemies murdered to take a change of direction, but in mid Alexander died of malaria. Cesare found his benefactor gone, his realm not yet consolidated, large foreign armies in the north and south, and himself also deeply ill.
Furthermore, with Cesare weak, his enemies rushed back from exile to threaten his lands, and when Cesare failed to coerce the papal conclave, he retreated from Rome. He persuaded the new pope Pius III served September-October to re-admit him safely, but that pontiff died after twenty-six days and Cesare had to flee.
Borgias were now thrown out of their positions, or forced into keeping quiet. Developments allowed Cesare to be released, and he went to Naples, but he was arrested by Ferdinand of Aragon and locked up again. Cesare did escape after two years but was killed in a skirmish in He was just 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. 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. 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.
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 , for example, Baldassare Cossa borrowed 10, fl. 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.
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.
He was, of course, a ferociously ambitious figure who indulged in some pretty low tactics. In all this, murder seemed not an occasional necessity, but an integral part of everyday existence. 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. This meant war. Alexander delegated this task to his son Cesare Borgia, who accomplished it with brutal determination.
But Cesare's marriage to the French princess Charlotte d'Albret in forced his father into a very unwise course of action. Thus Alexander betrayed his countrymen and reversed his anti-French policy. Alexander VI died on Aug.
Alexander VI has been widely condemned for his conduct. He disregarded priestly celibacy and preferred political machinations to spiritual leadership.
He practiced simony selling Church offices and was notorious for his nepotism. He used his position to enrich his children, supported a mob of Spanish relatives in Rome, and created 19 Spanish cardinals. He shocked his contemporaries by openly acknowledging his children. In Alexander's favor it must be said that his morals were no worse than those of his contemporaries and that he had the real virtue of sincere love for his family.
He was devastated with grief when his son Giovanni was mysteriously murdered; and although he used his daughter Lucrezia as a political pawn in her three marriages, he could hardly bear to be separated from her.
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