The Borgias

By Marion Jones
Reviewed by Kenny Brechner

    "Who will know or care what they looked like in one hundred years," Michelangelo is said to have commented to a patron upon being taken to task for the looseness of resemblance in his statuary portraiture. With the benefit of five centuries of hindsight, considering especially the perpetual historical fascination with Renaissance personalities, one is inclined to feel that Michelangelo would have shown more foresight had he argued that no one will be able to agree what they looked like in one hundred years.

    Five hundred years later we continue to care very much what the Renaissance personalities looked and acted like. The nature and character of our fascination, subject as it is to strong opinion, has certainly eluded anything approaching consensus. Amongst the many notable figures of dispute, few are the object of either greater fascination or less agreement than the Borgias.

    The lack of consensus regarding the Borgias is of particular interest in that their contemporaries were essentially of one mind concerning them, that they represented the most corrupt and deviant influence to ever be associated with the Papacy. "Within a short time the name was judged and damned, from obscure beginnings the family arose like a malign meteor, infecting the body politic with its influence, before it blazed away into darkness. For fear of the infamy, bones were scattered, the epitaphs destroyed, the monuments razed. The stink of abomination remains to this day."

    So wrote Marion Johnson, author of The Borgias, just re-released in a large format edition under Penguin’s new Classic Biography imprint. The Borgia dynasty was short lived, covering, essentially, the fifteenth century. The Borgias were a Spanish family whose fortune was established by the steady and capable Alfons de Borja, whose long political and clerical career ended with his ascension to the Papacy as Calixtus III. Upon his death, due to strenuous preferment granted to his family, Alfons’ dependents were left living in Rome, firmly established in the Roman Church hierarchy. The centerpiece of the Borgia legacy involves Calxitus’ nephew Rodrigo, who ascended to the papacy as Alexander VI, and Rodrigo’s children, most notably Cesare, Lucrezia, and Juan.

    Numerous mysteries surrounding Alexander’s tenure as Pope have remained unresolved, even after five hundred years of strenuous investigation and debate. Who murdered Juan Borgia, The Duke of Gandia? Were the widely circulated rumors of incest true? Who murdered Lucrezia’s second husband? Who was the prime mover in Alexander’s latter years, Cesare or Rodrigo? Was Lucretia a relatively innocent victim or a well practiced sinner reformed in later life? Are we to see Cesare as prince or demon? Furthermore, are we to see the Borgias as creatures of their time, particularly vilified as being outsiders, Spaniards, in Rome, or is their exceptional infamy deserved?

    Johnson takes the line that the Borgias’ "condemnation has been too absolute; behind the gaudy horrors lie people of real talent and achievement, possessors, even of moderate virtues." In her careful narrative of the Borgia history she takes care to note that the Borgia vices of lechery, simony, deceit, and murder, were all commonplace in the Borgia’s predecessors and contemporaries. Johnson argues that "vice and cruelty to equal and go beyond them (the Borgias) could be found in a dozen Italian courts, large and small. Among great men Ferdinand of Spain, Louis of France, and Ludivico Il Moro were as calculating and faithless; Ferrante of Naples more faithless and far more depraved. As promoters of terror and harbingers of chaos Vitelleschi, Sixtus IV and Charles VIII outdid them...." Yet this argument doesn’t really add up.

    First of all, only one of these contemporaries was another Pope. Alexander VI was, after all, the only Pope to openly acknowledge his children and the possession of a mistress, the twenty year old famed beauty Giula Farnese. Secondly, comparing the Borgia’s vices piecemeal with other Rennaissance figures ignores the central point that when it came to infamy of all descriptions the Borgia’s provide the historical observer with one stop shopping. The Borgias left no sin unsampled. The sense of abomination which invested itself upon them was gestalt, the whole of their infamy was greater than the sum of its parts.

    Johnson’s argument that Lucrezia was a straightforward victim of her father is unconvincing, particularly as she largely ignores the most damning contemporary evidence to the contrary, Johan Burchard’s Diarium Romanum. Her complex treatment of Cesare, on the other hand, is the book’s greatest strength, and one feels persuaded of Cesare’s abilities as an administrator and consolidator of power. Her ultimate conclusion however, that the notoriety of the Borgias was arbitrary, that "time makes no distinctions, just and unjust are tumbled in its maw," is completely unfair to the Borgias. The Borgias worked hard to distinguish themselves. They earned their notoriety.