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