I’ve taken certain liberties with the life stories of historical figures Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia. I’ve omitted details that didn’t serve (the other Borgia siblings, for instance). The Borgia involvement with a de Nevada family is fictional. However, I have used selected scraps of history to lend credence to the narrative.
The glamour of the Borgias rests on the rumors of incest, poisonings, adultery, conspiracy, murder, striking physical beauty, vigorous sexual appetites, hedonism, nepotism, and papal fallibility of the most egregious sort. That the Borgia family is also credited occasionally with bouts of wise and just governance, with art patronage, with interest in the scientific developments of their day, makes less good copy.
Bayezid did send the spear of Longinus, or something purported to be such, to Rome, which suggests that artifacts with biblical credentials, whatever their provenance or their imputed spiritual pizzazz, had some political value.
Prince Dschem was believed to have been murdered through a slow-acting poison administered by Cesare before the Bull of the Borgias escaped from the custody of Charles VIII.
Paracelsus spent time at the university in Ferrara while Lucrezia was Duchessa there. It’s unlikely she ever attended lectures, but she was said to have a lively mind about all manner of things and, like many highborn women of her day, took license to do as she liked whenever she could get away with it.
A bridge on an aqueduct spans the gorge beside the castle at Spoleto, where Lucrezia, at the age of nineteen and newly married for the second time, was governatrice.
During the High Renaissance, the medical use of mercury (to treat syphilis among other ailments) was accompanied by the growing awareness of a side effect of what we might now call paranoia. And grand Spanish families a few generations earlier did bathe in pools coated with mercury. I have imagined the transplanted Borgias might have brought that old custom to Rome with them.
The identification of Cesare Borgia as the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince is well known. And Lucrezia Borgia’s coloring of her hair with lemon juice was a venial sin at best. The most egregious examples of corruption in the Vatican aren’t my invention, though some of them may well have been exaggerated, the result of a public relations campaign that plagued the Borgias while they were in power and besmirched them further when they lost it.
The Borgia family reputation hasn’t been helped by Victor Hugo’s sensational Lucrèce Borgia, the basis of the Donizetti opera. However, Montserrat Caballé comes closer than anyone else to redeeming Lucrezia Borgia’s reputation as an amoral murderess simply by singing the aria “Com’e bello!” in a voice of silvery purity. (A recording of her 1965 performance is available on cassette or compact disc.) Recent biographies of Lucrezia and the Borgia family by Rachel Erlanger, Ivan Cloulas, and others will supply more information for readers interested in separating verifiable fact from fiction—either mine or that promulgated by the Borgias’ enemies.
May I be excused for embroidering upon the history of a dynasty whose career has already entered into legend? Cesare Borgia might have had my head for it, and Alexander VI recommended the eventual disposition of my soul, but I like to hope that Lucrezia Borgia, who commissioned Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, would have understood some of the licenses I’ve been bold enough to take.
And wherever they are, those Borgias, may they rest in peace.