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Lucrezia Borgia - (1480-1519)

Of Lucretia Borgia we have little more than a legend, according to which she is a fury, the poison in one hand, the poignard in the other; and yet this baneful personality possessed all the charms and graces. Victor Hugo painted her as a moral monster, in which form she still treads the operatic stage, and this is the conception which mankind in general have of her. The lover of real poetry regards this romanticist's terrible drama of Lucretia Borgia as a grotesque manifestation of the art, while the historian laughs at it.

The popular estimate of Lucrezia Borgia is forcibly embodied in the drama Lucrice Borgia of Victor Hugo (1833), in the opera of Donizetti. Gregorovius, indeed, says that Hugo has been solely intent, in his drama of Lucrezia Borgia, to make a "moral monster" the heroine of drama; nor is the charge without foundation. In both opera and drama the popular conception of the character and deeds of the Duchess of Ferrara has been adopted to loosely imagined plots calculated only to produce effect upon the stage. In both productions Lucrezia appears, with eyes of baleful meaning gleaming through the mystery of a mask, with hands which grasp the dagger and the bowl, and with an indomitably wicked will which treads ruthlessly upon human'lives in a dark progress from crime to crime.

Lucrezia Borgia, duchess of Ferrara, daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI, by his mistress Vanozza dei Cattanci, was bom at Rome in 1480. Her early years were spent at her mother's house near her father's splendid palace; but later she was given over to the care of Adriana de Mila, a relation of Cardinal Borgia and mother-in-law of Giulia Farnesc, another of his mistresses. Lucrezia was educated according to the usual curriculum of Renaissance ladies of rank, and was taught languages, music, embroidery, painting, etc.; she was famed for her beauty and charm, but the corrupt court of Rome in which she was brought up was not conducive to a good moral education.

Her father at first contemplated a Spanish marriage for her, and at the age of eleven she was betrothed to Don Cherubin de Centelles, a Spanish nobleman. But the engagement was broken off almost immediately, and Lucrezia was married by proxy to another Spaniard, Don Gasparo dc Procida, son of the count of Aversa. On the death of Innocent VIII (1492), Cardinal Borgia was elected pope as Alexander VI, and, contemplating a yet more ambitious marriage for his daughter, he annulled the union with Procida.

In February 1493 Lucrezia was betrothed to Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro, with whose family Alexander was now in close alliance. The wedding was celebrated in June; but when the pope's policy changed and he became friendly to the king of Naples, the enemy of the house of Sforza, he planned the subjugation of the vassal lords of Romagna, and Giovanni, feeling his position insecure, left Rome for Pesaro with his wife. By Christmas 1495 they were back in Rome; the pope had all his children around him, and celebrated the carnival with a series of magnificent festivities.

The other and more disgraceful rumors connected with the house of Lucrezia which then poisoned the air of Rome merit brief attention. Such charges of revolting immorality are analogous to those made by the Venetian ambassador against Catherine Sforza, and the threats of the Pope respecting the reputation of Isabella of Spain, or, to take an instance from a later period, the foul libels with which the Spanish ambassador endeavoured to bespatter the fame of Elizabeth. Accusations such as these, it must be remembered, were part and parcel of the stock-in-trade which politicians and controversialists freely used to strengthen their own position.

The pope decided that he had done with Sforza, and in 1497 Lucrezia was summarily divorced from her husband Giovanni Sforza - an act which, following so quickly the murder of the Duke of Gandia, enabled the divorced nobleman to publish what he deemed were the reasons for this step, and gave rise to charges of immorality more gross and envenomed than ever.

But the Pope cared little for rumour, and he now proceeded to strengthen his position by marrying her to Alphonso, Duke of Bisceglia, a natural son of Alphonso II, on June 20, 1498. Alphonso of Aragon, duke of Bisceglie, a handsome youth of eighteen, related to the Neapolitan king, too realized the fickleness of the Borgias' favor when Alexander backed up Louis XII of France in the lattcr's schemes for the conquest of Naples. Bisceglie fled from Rome, fearing for his life, and the pope sent Lucrezia to receive the homage of the city of Spoleto as governor. On her return to Rome in 1499, her husband, who really loved her, was induced to join her once more. A year later he was murdered by the order of her brother Cesare.

After the death of Bisceglie, Lucrezia retired to Nepi, and then returned to Rome, where she acted for a time as regent during Alexander's absence. The latter now was anxious for a union between his daughter and Alphonso, son and heir to Ercole d'Este, duke of Ferrara. The negotiations were somewhat difficult, as neither Alphonso nor his father was anxious for a connexion with the house of Borgia, and Lucrezia's own reputation was not unblemished. However, by bribes and threats the opposition was overcome, and in September 1501 the marriage was celebrated by proxy with great magnificence in Rome.

On Lucrezia's arrival at Ferrara she won over her reluctant husband by her youthful charm (she was only twenty-two), and from that time forth she led a peaceful life, about which there was hardly a breath of scandal. On the death of Ercole in 1505, her husband became duke, and she gathered many learned men, poets and artists at her court, among whom were Ariosto, Cardinal Bembo, Aldus Manutius the printer, and the painters Titian and Dosso Dossi. She devoted herself to the education of her children and to charitable works; the only tragedy connected with this period of her life is the murder of Ercole Strozzi, who is said to have admired her and fallen a victim to Alphonso's jealousy.

She died on the 24th of June 1519, leaving three sons and a daughter by the duke of Ferrara, besides one son Rodrigo by the duke of Bisceglie, and possibly another of doubtful paternity. She seems to have been a woman of very mediocre talents, and only played a part in history because she was the daughter of Alexander VI and the sister of Cesare Borgia. While she was in Rome she was probably no better and no worse than the women around her, but there is no serious evidence for the charges of incest with her father and brothers which were brought against her by the scandal-mongers of the time.

Belief in the Borgia practice of poisoning enemies or victims is borne out by the view that Alexander and Caesar were both poisoned by some (for them) mischance in an attempt to poison Adriano, Cardinale di Corneto. By an accident, the poisoned chalice, intended for another, was commended to their own lips. Caesar, who was much younger than his father, saved his life by the timely use of antidotes, things with which he was probably well acquainted ; but Alexander perished miserably by the very poison which he had intended for the cardinal. That poisoning was frequent in the Middle Ages in Italy there can be no doubt, yet it was by no means carried to the extent generally believed. It is absurd to imagine that where the science of medicine was in so developed a condition as it was in Italy during the fifteenth century, the science of poisoning could have arrived at the refinement and perfection accorded to it. That persons accused of poisoning, as well as of witchcraft, did, under the torture of the rack, frequently admit their guilt, is certain. At the same time many of the confessions of guilt extorted from criminals accused of poisoning were as utterly incredible as those of witchcraft. Doubtless many persons who were imagined to have died from poison were merely victims to attacks of sporadic diseases, or some similar causes, arising from defective ventilation and bad sanitary regulations. Any one at all acquainted with the science of medicine, and who has visited any of the houses of the Italian nobility which were built so recently as the last century, can easily imagine how frequently deaths might have occurred from malignant fevers, which, in the state of medical ignorance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, would give good grounds for believing that the patients had died from the effects of poison.