THREE women mourned Cesare’s death: his wife Charlotte, his sister Lucrezia and his mother Vannozza.
Charlotte d’Albret remains a shadowy figure, and her relationship with her husband mysterious. At the news of his death she plunged herself into a rigid mourning to which she clung for the rest of her life. At the Château of La Motte Feuilly where she lived, the hangings and furniture in the yellow and crimson colours of the Duke of Valentinois were replaced with sombre black cloth, her bright gowns carefully put away in a chest. From then on she wore widow’s weeds and slept in a bed draped in black; even the trappings on her daughter’s Luisa’s pony were changed to the colour of mourning. When Cesare died she was only twenty-five, beautiful and an heiress, but she never remarried, nor did she return to court, but lived out her days in seclusion at La Motte Feuilly, occupying herself with the administration of her estates, charitable works, and occasional visits to her friend, the divorced Jeanne de France, in the Convent of the Annonciades at nearby Bourges. Charlotte was gentle, kindly and pious, her goodness was remarked on by more than one observer, and she was a careful administrator who took great interest in her estates and had an acquisitive eye for property (she later bought the lordship of Chalus for 17,000 crowns). But she seems to have been a narrow-minded woman; the few books she owned were all devotional works, and in her enshrinement of her husband’s memory it is possible to see more than a touch of obsessive neurosis.
She had never made any attempt to go to her husband, even when in the later years of their marriage she was free to do so. The Mantuan envoy to the French court, Jacopo d’Atri, reported that in July and early August 1503 repeated efforts were made to induce her to go to Italy and join her husband, but in vain. Cesare sent a messenger, Artese, to persuade her, and his efforts were strongly seconded by Louis, who at that moment was very much afraid that Cesare was inclining to Spain, and extremely anxious to accommodate him. Louis even threatened to deprive her of her honoured position as governess to his daughter by Anne, Madame Claude, and promised to send Cesare his daughter Luisa, but the envoy said that Charlotte ‘did not want to go to her husband’. She had been deeply shocked by the events at Sinigallia, wrote Francesco Gonzaga, and doubtless by many other reports of Cesare’s activities, including his abduction of Dorotea Caracciolo. And although at a distance she was prepared to do her dutiful best for her husband – in January 1504 the Venetian diarist Sanuto stated that she had come to court specifically to plead for Cesare’s release – she did not join him even when he was at her brother’s court at Pamplona. It would seem that she preferred the mythical memory of the handsome, dashing young husband she had known for those few summer months of 1499 to the harsh reality of the ruthless impious man whom all reports indicated him to be. Cesare’s disgrace after his father’s death no doubt made her position at the French court an embarrassing one, for some time in the autumn of 1503 she negotiated the purchase of the Château de la Motte Feuilly in Touraine, and moved there in 1504. Absorbed in her widowhood, she lived there in retirement until her death on 11 March 1514, aged thirty-two. The inscription on the stone above the place where her heart was buried in the chapel of La Motte Feuilly was perhaps the best expression of Charlotte’s short, unhappy life: ‘Here lies the heart of the most high and powerful lady Charlotte d’Albret, in her life the widow of the most high powerful prince Dom Cesar, Duke of Valentinois, Count of Diois, seigneur of Issoudun and of La Motte Feuilly …’
Cesare’s daughter by Charlotte, Luisa Borgia, was just under seven when he died. He never saw the little girl whose marriages he had planned, first to his godson of the same age, Federigo Gonzaga, then to Pope Julius’ nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, the boy Prefect of Sinigallia. Luisa was fourteen at the time of Charlotte’s death, when she was given – unwillingly it appears from a pathetic appeal she made to her hard-hearted old grandfather Alain d’Albret – into the tutelage of the formidable Louise of Savoy, Madame d’Angoulême, mother of the future Francis I. Luisa kept up her Italian connections, corresponding with Isabella d’Este and doubtless too with her aunt Lucrezia; indeed in 1516 the project of her marriage to Federigo Gonzaga was again briefly revived, and when that fell through a match with Piero de’ Medici’s son Lorenzo was discussed. But il Valentino’s daughter was destined never to see Italy; in April 1517, aged seventeen, she was married to a widower of forty-one, Louis de la Trémouille, lord of Thouars, a brilliant, honourable soldier who was the veteran of many Italian campaigns. De la Trémouille was killed fighting for Francis I against the troops of Charles V on the field of Pavia in 1525. Five years later Luisa married Philippe de Bourbon, lord of Chabannes. By him she had six children, four sons and two daughters; of their descendants the Bourbon counts of Bussett and Chalus still exist today, direct heirs to Cesare Borgia.
Luisa died in 1553, at the age of fifty-three, signing herself to the end of her life ‘Louise de Valentinois’, with the titles she inherited from the father whose connection with her everyone tried to suppress. When her first husband, de la Trémouille, was asked why he was taking the infamous Borgia’s daughter to wife, he is reported to have answered that he was marrying Luisa because she was a lady of the house of d’Albret, whose women had always been known for their virtue. The only known description of her, recorded by Anne of Brittany’s biographer Père Hilarion de Coste, declared that she was ‘a very noble and virtuous lady, heiress to the perfections as well as to the riches of her mother, whose manners and disposition she made her own; a lady in short, as chaste, virtuous and gentle as her father was possessed, cruel and wicked’.
Luisa was Cesare’s only legitimate child. He also had an illegitimate son and daughter, Gerolamo and Camilla Lucrezia, both born between 1501 and 1502, and may well have had others whose existence is unrecorded. Gerolamo and Camilla Lucrezia, whose mother or mothers were unknown, were probably the two children of whom Burchard records that Cesare took them with the little Borgia Dukes Giovanni and Rodrigo into Castel Sant’Angelo with him in October 1503. Since a document of 8 August 1509 legitimizing Camilla Lucrezia refers to her as having been born of Cesare, married, and of a married woman unnamed, it is possible to conjecture that her mother might have been Dorotea Caracciolo, although there is absolutely no evidence to support this. Camilla Lucrezia was brought up in the Convent of Corpo di Christo in Ferrara, under her aunt’s protection, and became a nun there in 1516, taking the name of Suor Lucrezia in her honour. Probably due to her connections with the Este family, she eventually became abbess of the convent, and died there in 1573, aged just over seventy. She inherited her father’s intelligence and spirit, being described as of a ‘grande animo’, but not, it seems, his character, since she died with a reputation for saintliness and good works.
Gerolamo, like his sister, was sent to Lucrezia at Ferrara; in June 1505 Lucrezia placed him under the tutelage of Alberto Pio, lord of Capri, a celebrated Maecenas, and patron of Ariosto. As the nephew of the Duchess of Ferrara he moved in noble circles, and in 1537 he married a daughter of the lord of Capri, by whom he had two daughters, named Lucrezia and Ippolita in honour of the Estes. Apart from the record of his marriage, the only reference we have to Gerolamo shows him, unlike his saintly sister, to have inherited some of his father’s more sinister characteristics. On 4 March 1542 the Bolognese chronicler Jacopo Ranieri recorded: ‘Three Ferrarese were executed … because they had come into the Bolognese at Poggio, on the orders of a son of Duke Valentino, to kill a man named Chastron …’ The assassination attempt failed, but four years later the wretched Chastron was stabbed to death at Ferrara, where Gerolamo was living; il Valentino’s son had his father’s capacity for nursing a long vendetta. Other claimants to descent from Cesare were of dubious authenticity: in 1550 a correspondent of the Estes reported the appearance in Paris of a priest who claimed to be the natural son of il Valentino, having come from Rome with the strange idea of requesting a subsidy from the King of France on the grounds of his father’s death in Navarre fighting in the service of France! And according to Aretino’s I Ragionamenti, Roman courtesans in the sixteenth century liked to give themselves airs by pretending to be the illegitimate daughters of Duke Valentino.
Cesare’s squire, Juanito Grasica, reached Ferrara with the news of his master’s death on 22 April 1507. Ippolito d’Este, who received him, knowing, as one of Isabella d’Este’s correspondents put it, that Lucrezia ‘loved her brother as much as if she were his mother’, was afraid to tell her, and the unpleasant duty was deputed to a certain friar Raffaele. Lucrezia received the news with remarkable stoicism – one imagines that by that time she may already have heard rumours of it – exclaiming sadly to the monk: ‘The more I try to follow God’s will, the more he visits me with sorrows. I thank his divinity, I am content with what pleases him.’ She retired to a convent for two days to mourn her brother in private. No doubt she knew that she would receive little sincere sympathy from the rest of the world for her loss, and was too proud to reveal the misery it caused her. While Cesare was alive, and particularly in his time of trouble, she had never ceased to work for the brother whom she loved more than any other human being, and after his death the world must have seemed an empty place for her. Nonetheless, Lucrezia was no Charlotte d’Albret, but a true Borgia. As Duchess of Ferrara she enlivened her husband’s court with her charm, gaiety and sophistication. Alfonso was a cold husband, who continued to regard his Borgia wife with a certain suspicion as he pursued his passions for artillery, pottery-making and other women. He seems to have resented his wife’s passion for physical exercise and dancing, and claimed that it was responsible for her difficult pregnancies; indeed she had lost her first child by Alfonso in the autumn of 1502, and her first son Alessandro, born in 1505, survived only a month. The birth of the heir Ercole in 1508 established her position, and he was followed by a succession of children; Ippolito, born in 1509; Alessandro, born in 1514; Eleonora, born 1515; Francesco, born 1516; and Isabella Maria, born in 1519.
Lucrezia consoled herself for her husband’s lack of appreciation with the adulation of the literary men who surrounded her, including Ercole Strozzi, who dedicated his Epicedium to describing Cesare’s death. She was still the same light-hearted Lucrezia, craving admiration, and very soon after her marriage, some time in the autumn of 1502, she entered into a relationship with the poet Pietro Bembo which almost certainly went beyond pure literary interests. In 1505 Bembo dedicated his masterpiece Gli Asolani to Lucrezia, but he had already been supplanted in her affections by her sister-in-law Isabella’s husband, Francesco Gonzaga. Their intimacy began in the autumn of 1505, initiated probably by Lucrezia’s desire to enlist Gonzaga’s help for Cesare’s release. Clandestine correspondence began between them through the medium of Ercole Strozzi until Strozzi’s murder in 1508, and seems to have continued until at least 1513. There was no love lost between Lucrezia and her haughty sister-in-law, who regarded-156 each other with mutual jealousy and cold dislike, and the affair with Francesco must have had an added piquancy for Lucrezia in its implied humiliation of Isabella. However, she became increasingly pious in her later years, and when she died after the birth of Isabella Maria in 1519 it was rumoured that for some years she had secretly worn a hair shirt.
Vannozza died in Rome on 26 November 1518, at the advanced age, for those days, of seventy-six, having outlived three husbands and all her children by Rodrigo Borgia save Lucrezia. Tough, tenacious, a true bourgeoise, Vannozza survived all the tragedies of her family to become a respected member of Roman society. The Borgias’ enemy Paolo Giovio wrote of her that apart from having been Cesare’s mother she was otherwise an upright woman. She was also an extremely astute and acquisitive lady with a keen commercial acumen, owning several hostelries and houses which she rented out, and running a profitable sideline in pawnbroking by lending money against the security of jewels. She was not above sharp practice and had used her Borgia relationships for all they were worth; in 1514 one Nardo Antoniozzi was forced to sue her for the return of a silver cross which she had ordered twelve years ago in 1502 and neglected to pay for. He had done nothing about it at the time he said, ‘because Duke Valentino dominated the city and all Italy …’
Forceful character that she was, Vannozza had always had the respect of her children and maintained a close relationship with them; she had sustained Cesare after Alexander’s death by accompanying him to Nepi, and kept up a frequent correspondence with Lucrezia until she died. Determined to occupy as comfortable a place in the after life as she had enjoyed on earth, she made many charitable donations, and was a member of the Confraternity of the Gonfalone to which most of the highest Roman society belonged. When she died, Pope Leo X, Giovanni de’ Medici, Cesare’s fellow student at Pisa, ordered all his court to attend her funeral, which rivalled in pomp the obsequies of a cardinal. Vannozza was buried beside Juan Gandia, her husband Giorgio di Croce and Ottaviano, her son by him, in the family chapel she had prepared for herself in the fashionable church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Rodrigo Borgia’s mistress was proud of her Borgia connections to the end; her funerary chapel was adorned with a painting, which has since disappeared, depicting her with her lover and their children, while the inscription on her tomb, ignoring her more obscure relationships, proudly proclaimed her the mother of Rodrigo’s children, Cesare, Juan, Jofre and Lucrezia.
Of the remaining members of Cesare’s family, Jofre, last heard of callously caracoling in Gonsalvo de Cordoba’s train after his brother’s arrest, made an abrupt end to an insipid life early in 1517, having married a noble Neapolitan girl Maria Milan de Aragon y Villahermosa, after the death of his estranged wife Sancia in 1506. Strangely enough, one of Cesare’s great-nephews, grandson of the dissolute Juan Gandia, became a saint, St Francis Borgia, third General of the Jesuits.
Cesare’s most unsaintly follower, Michelotto, ‘that most cruel, terrible, and much-feared man’, as Guicciardini described him, reappeared briefly on the Italian scene while the master he had served so faithfully was still in prison in Spain. On 1 April 1506 he signed a condotta with Florence; Machiavelli, who remembered Michelotto’s abilities as a leader of Cesare’s Romagnol militia, had secured his appointment as commander of his new militia army in Florence, ‘since he was used, when he was with the Duke, to command and manage similar men’. Michelotto’s employment raised fears in Florence that the Gonfalonier Soderini intended to follow the sinister methods of il Valentino. However, it appears that Michelotto was principally employed to spread terror on the borders of the Romagna, where no doubt the fear of his name was as effective as the actual cruelties he committed. After May 1506, Michelotto, the man who more than any other knew the darkest secrets of the terrible Valentino, vanished from historical records, leaving only his dread reputation as Valentino’s ‘executioner’ across its pages. Possibly he joined his legitimate brother fighting in the service of Spain; he may even have returned to his distant native town of Corella, in Navarre. The date of his death is not known, but Miguel da Corella being the man that he was, one can conjecture that he, like his master Cesare, died fighting.
Julius II, the man principally responsible for Cesare’s downfall, died on the night of 20 February 1513, at the age of seventy, still as formidable, restless and energetic as ever. He died triumphant, having mastered the States of the Church, humbled the proud Republic of Venice, and driven the French out of Italy. In him the greatest artistic geniuses of the Renaissance had found their most liberal and appreciative patron. When he died, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel had been completed, and Raphael’s masterpiece, the Stanze della Segnatura, obliterated all memories of il Valentino in the Vatican apartments that had once been his, while the new St Peter’s, designed by Michelangelo and Bramante, was rising on the site of the old basilica, destined to be the greatest cathedral in the world, and an astounding monument to a religion founded upon poverty. Michelangelo created the perfect memorial to the towering personality of his patron in the statue of Moses which stands above Julius’ tomb in the church of San Pietro ad Vincoli. Moses is shown not so much as the high priest and law-giver but as the resolute leader, a fiery, powerful man of action, whose angry eyes seem to dart flame at those who might dare to oppose him. It is the final expression of the man who was Julius II, in many ways the greatest, and certainly the most successful of the popes of the High Renaissance.
No magnificent memorials remain to Julius’ predecessor, his old enemy Alexander VI, his children, or their mother. Fragments of the monument which Alexander raised to the memory of his uncle Calixtus remain in the Vatican crypt, but, characteristically, Alexander had still not envisaged a tomb for himself when he died. He was interred in the chapel of Santa Maria delle Febbri in St Peter’s, beside Calixtus and his murdered son-in-law, Alfonso Bisceglie. When the chapel was destroyed in 1586 to make an entrance for the pedestal of the obelisk, the bones of both Popes were removed to the interior of the basilica near the choir. In 1610 the Spanish cardinals at the Vatican had them transferred to the Spanish church of Santa Maria de Monserrato, where they were deposited in a wooden box in the wardrobe of the sacristy. Here they were seen in 1864 by the Prussian minister to the Vatican, Kurd von Schlozer, who recorded the simple label affixed to the box: ‘The bones of two Popes lie in this chest, and they are Calixtus and Alexander VI, and they were Spaniards.’ This remained the only epitaph to the two Borgia Popes until 1889, when a group of Spanish noblemen resident in Rome erected a modest monument in a side chapel of the church, and even then the sculptor put the wrong names under their portraits.
Poor Vannozza’s careful provisions for the preservation of her memory were in vain: in 1760 the name of Alexander’s mistress was deleted from the roll of commemoratory masses of the confraternity to which she had belonged; some time later her tomb and the painting of herself with her lover and her children also disappeared from the church. All that remains in Santa Maria del Popolo of her optimistically magnificent donations is a holy water stoup carved with the Borgia arms. The inscription with her name and those of her children by Rodrigo has been moved to the Basilica of San Marco. Lucrezia’s tomb at Ferrara is a simple marble slab.
Almost no trace of Cesare remains in Italy. In Rome the serene beauty of Raphael’s frescoes has effaced his memory in the Vatican apartments where he lived; the rooms which once echoed to the Borgias’ laughter are now filled with tourists staring reverently at the walls. In the Romagna, the Rubicon which was of such symbolic importance to him still trickles, an insignificant stream with an overpoweringly evocative name, between Cesena and Rimini, and the Rocca of Forlì, his last stronghold, still bears his half-effaced arms – the Borgia bull, the lilies of France and the batons of Captain General of the Church – but otherwise his dominion of the Romagna has fulfilled the nun of Mantua’s prediction that it would be ‘as a straw fire’. White turkeys gobble peacefully in the precincts of Cesare’s citadel of Cesena, where once he held Caterina Sforza prisoner; Caterina’s arms, not his, decorate the interior of the fortress of Imola, although one building there is traditionally held to have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci, and if so must have been executed during his time in Cesare’s service. At Sinigallia, the scene of one of his greatest coups, a shabby square before the citadel bears the name ‘Piazza del Duca’, but that is all. Italy is a land overcrowded with the ghosts of history; only the memories of the men who built great monuments remain alive. Cesare, in his brief, frenzied years of power, had no time for immortality, and the terrible Valentino has faded into the rich tapestry of the past as if he had never been.
It is in Navarre, where the ghosts of history are few and far between, that Cesare is still remembered as the hero of the fight for independence which failed but remains a tenacious dream. In 1512, five years after his death, the Duke of Alba marched across the frontier and annexed the kingdom for the crown of Castile, but Navarre is a country where the past is yesterday, and lost causes remain alive. At Viana, on 27 August 1945, the grave presumed to be Cesare’s was reopened: excavating under the surface of the Calle de la Rua in front of the steps of the church of Santa Maria, they found a grave hollowed out of the rock to fit a human body, covered and protected with bricks. In this rough grave lay the incomplete skeleton of an adult human, mingled with the bones of a child and fragments of domestic animals. The skeleton was lifted out and examined by two experts, who found nothing which invalidated the tradition that it was Cesare’s, and several factors which might indicate that it was indeed his. The skeleton was that of a man of between twenty-five and forty years of age, which had lain in its present grave for at least two hundred years. In life the man’s height had been approximately 1.73 metres, tall for the period; the left shoulder bone showed clear evidence of a lance wound 2 centimetres in diameter received while the man was alive, the right shoulder evidencing extensive osteitis, a lesion consonant with fractures due to a heavy fall. If the skeleton was Cesare’s, the lance wound could have been one of those he received on the day of his death, the shoulder injuries those which he suffered in his escape from La Mota.
The bones remained in the municipal archives of Viana until 3 December 1953, when they were reinterred with considerable ceremonial in the presence of the civil and military governors of Navarre, a representative of the provincial government of Valencia, home of the Borgias, and other dignitaries, permission for their burial having been given by the Bishop of Calahorra, successor of the sixteenth-century bishop who had expelled Cesare’s impious bones from the church. Preceded by the municipal band, the bones, enclosed in an urn specially made for the occasion, covered with red carnations brought from Valencia, were attended to the church of Santa Maria by the uniformed dignitaries and children waving flowers, to be reinterred in front of the main door. Valencian soil and red carnations, with flowers from the gardens of Viana, were laid over the urn before the grave was closed; inset into the pavement above it they placed a marble memorial tablet with the resounding inscription: CESAR BORGIA GENERALISSIMO OF THE NAVARRESE AND PONTIFICAL ARMIES DIED IN THE FIELDS OF VIANA II [sic] MARCH 1507.
In 1965 the Diputación Foral de Navarra commissioned a local sculptor to execute a bust of Cesare to be placed on a pediment beside the church. Today his idealized features in bronze, calm, commanding, ascetically beautiful, look down on a quiet leafy square in Viana, in the guise of a hero of Navarrese independence, a reincarnation which would have evoked in Cesare himself a self-mocking Borgia smile.