Borgia

Borgia, a family originally of Jativa, in the Spanish province of Valencia, where, at the time of the expulsion of the Moors (1238), the name figures among the Caballeros de la Conquista. One of its members, Alfonso de Borja (1378-1458), bishop, and private secretary to Alfonso of Aragon, accompanied that monarch to Naples, where he had gone to establish his rule. This Borja, chosen pope as Calixtus III., settled a number of his family in Italy. Rodrigo de Borja (1431-1503), his nephew, in turn ascended the papal throne in 1492, under the title of Alexander VI. (q.v.); and from that time the principal seat of the family was in Italy, while its name took the Italian form of Borgia. Before his elevation to the pontificate Alexander had had a number of children by a Roman girl, known in history as Vanozza, but whose real name was Giovanna Catanei (1442-1518). Two of these children, Cæsar, the fourth, and Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, the fifth, were destined to play important parts, and to acquire in history an unhappy renown.—CÆSAR BORGIA was born in April 1476, and died in 1507. An ambition that knew no bounds, energy that never flagged, and a contempt for laws divine and human, joined to qualities of the first order as a general and administrator, rendered him one of the most extraordinary figures of the Renaissance period. To arrest his vast projects, there was required a league of all Italy and of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe. Vowed to the priesthood from his birth, and from the age of seventeen invested with the dignity of cardinal, he early resolved to surmount all obstacles to his ambition; he shrank from neither sacrilege nor murder, and procured the assassination of his elder brother, Giovanni, Duke of Gandia, whom he shortly after succeeded in the post of captain-general of the Church, for which he readily doffed the purple to assume the breastplate. His father, Alexander, had made an alliance with Louis XII. of France for the invasion of the kingdom of Naples. In the Princess Charlotte d'Albret, sister of the king of Navarre, a bride had been found for Cæsar, who, named Duke of Valentinois, with a rich pension and the promise of a company of two hundred lances for the support of the throne of St Peter, went to contract his marriage (11th May 1499) in France, and carried in exchange to Louis the papal bull, which was indispensable to the king before he could espouse his predecessor's widow, Anne of Brittany. Cæsar's active life extended over no more than four years. Whilst his father was crushing the feudal power of the barons of the Romagna, he undertook to recover, one by one, all the fiefs along the Adriatic coast which had ceased to acknowledge the over-lordship of the Holy See. In two successive campaigns, he made himself master of the Romagna, Perugia, Siena, Piombino, the duchy of Urbino; he went so far as to threaten Florence itself, and was planning the reconstruction of a kingdom of Central Italy, with himself at its head, when a powerful league was formed against him. His own officers sought to arrest his march, but he misled them by a feint, divided them, invited them to Sinigallia, and there coldly passed on them sentence of death. Named Duke of Romagna by the pope, he was proceeding to menace Bologna and expel the family of Bentivoglio, when, on the eve of his departure for his third campaign, both he and his father were stricken with sudden illness while at a farewell banquet given by the Cardinal of Corneto. There was talk of poison. The old man succumbed (August 18, 1503), but Cæsar's youth, and his extraordinary force of will, triumphed over the malady; the death of Alexander, however, was in effect the end of his projects, and his enemies now raised their heads. The election of Pius III. (a Piccolomini) gave him a moment's hope; the succession of Julius II. (Della Rovere), his bitterest enemy, after Pius's brief reign of twenty-seven days, was fatal to him. Cæsar surrendered at Naples, under the promise of a safe conduct from the king of Aragon; but Gonzalvo de Cordova broke his oath, and (25th May 1504) had him arrested and carried to Valencia. After an attempt to break out of Chinchilla, where he was first imprisoned, he was removed to Medina del Campo, from whence, on the 25th October 1506, he made his escape to the court of Navarre. Here he took command of the royal forces against Luis de Beamonte, Constable of Navarre, who refused to surrender the citadel of Viana, which he held for the king; and in a sortie, 12th May 1507, at the age of thirty, Cæsar Borgia fell, after heroically defending himself, at a place called Mendavia. Despite attempts to rehabilitate it, his memory remains in execration—despite, too, the estimate of Machiavelli, who had him in view when he wrote the Principe; he has moreover left among the peoples whom he governed, the reputation of a just prince, upright and severe, and of an able administrator. He encouraged art, and was the friend of Pinturricchio, and the protector of Leonardo da Vinci.—LUCREZIA BORGIA, born at Rome in 1480, married in the first instance Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro (June 1493); but her father, ambitious of a more advantageous alliance, annulled this marriage (20th December 1497), and gave her (20th June 1498) to Alfonso, Duke of Biseceglia, nephew of the king of Naples. The same motive induced her father and brother to separate her from her new husband, who was assassinated, 18th August 1500, by Michelotto, Cæsar Borgia's bravo. For the third time free, the pope's daughter became, in spite of the repugnance of the Duke Ercole d'Este, the wife of the latter's son, Alfonso, who soon after inherited the duchy of Ferrara. Lucrezia has been represented as placed outside the pale of humanity by her wantonness, her vices, and her crimes; but the recent researches of most accurate and unprejudiced historians have demonstrated that in her youth, with no initiative, no choice permitted to her, she was rather the too pliant instrument in the hands of Alexander and of Cæsar Borgia. She died 24th June 1519, enjoying the respect of her subjects, a generous patroness of learning and of art, whose praises were sung by the poets of her time; the closing years of her career being in singular contrast to her early life at the Vatican.