Two years ago I held in my hand the letter dictated from her deathbed by
Lucrezia Borgia to the Pope, Leo X, dated June 22, 1519:
“Most Holy Father . . . Having suffered greatly for more than two months
because of a difficult pregnancy, as it has pleased God on the fourteenth of
this month at dawn I had a daughter, and I hoped that having given birth my
illness also must be alleviated: but the contrary happened, so that I must
yield to nature. Our most clement Creator has given me so many gifts, that I
recognise the end of my life and feel that within a few hours I shall be out
of it . . .”
Two days later she died, just two months after her 39th birthday. Poignantly,
the man who opened the letter at the Vatican and handed it to the Pope, the
papal secretary, the writer Pietro Bembo, had once been Lucrezia’s lover.
Was this eloquent appeal the letter of a female monster, as Lucrezia has so
often been depicted? Over some 500 years, the Borgias, Lucrezia included,
have received a generally bad press as ruthless poisoners — a reputation
which, it must be said, her father Pope Alexander VI and her brother Cesare
Borgia largely deserved. Today, however, Lucrezia is the only Borgia whom
people have heard of, although she herself never killed anyone. Melodramas
such as Victor Hugo’s Lucrece Borgia, Donizetti’s opera, films
by Abel Gance and others, and innumerable 19th-century paintings depict her
as a murderess.
Why should this be? The idea of a woman as a killer holds a certain
fascination as a transgression against nature. Lady Macbeth, Catherine de’
Medici and Ruth Ellis have a resonance in the popular imagination that men
as murderers do not. Poison is seen as a subtle, woman’s weapon. Both
Catherine de’ Medici and Lucrezia Borgia were traditionally supposed to have
deployed rings containing white arsenic to be slipped into their victims’
drink. Murderess, whore, incestuous daughter and sister are the charges
levelled against Lucrezia since the Renaissance. So who was the real
Lucrezia Borgia and what kind of woman was she? I decided to go back to the
orginal sources for her life: the archives in Milan, Mantua, Modena and the
Vatican. Sifting through thousands of papers I came to discover a woman who
was the complete opposite of her historical portrayal: intelligent, well
educated, strong and compassionate, a survivor who forged her own destiny in
a dangerous world.
She was 12 when her father Rodrigo Borgia, or de Borja as the family were
known in their native Valencia, succeeded as Pope Alexander in 1492, the
year that Columbus discovered America. She was only 13 when, to suit his
political aims, he forced her into her first marriage, dissolved, again for
political reasons, when she was 17. Her former husband told anyone who would
listen that the Pope had ended the marriage to have Lucrezia for himself.
Inevitably, therefore, when within a few months of the divorce a mysterious
son was born to her, rumour had it that he was her father’s child. The
gossips were confused by the birth at around the same time of a boy named
Giovanni whom Alexander later admitted he had fathered.
Lucrezia’s child disappeared or did not survive but he was almost certainly
the son of a handsome young chamberlain with whom Lucrezia had had an affair
and who was found drowned in mysterious circumstances together with one of
Lucrezia’s maids. Their murder appears to have been organised by Cesare to
avenge his sister’s honour and save her reputation. Indeed, if the
contemporary charges of incest against Lucrezia had any foundation, it was
more likely to have been true of her relations with Cesare, whom she loved
enough to forgive for the deliberate murder of her second husband, whom
Cesare had had strangled. After his removal, the Borgias planned a splendid
third marriage for Lucrezia to Alfonso d’Este, heir to one of the most
prestigious families in Italy, the Este dukes of Ferrara.
Up until this stage, documentary evidence concerning Lucrezia is sketchy,
based largely on the gossipy reports of the diplomats, envoys of the Italian
states in attendance on the papal court, and the often shocked and shocking
diary kept by the Pope’s master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, a
sometimes racy account of Borgia orgies and murders. (Burchard’s Diarium
was used as source material by Victor Hugo.) Lucrezia features in two sexy
scenes which have been standard currency ever since. In one, she is an
onlooker at the “Chestnut Orgy” in the Vatican, where naked courtesans
scrabbled on the floor among lighted candelabra, picking up hot chestnuts,
and prizes were offered to the man who could make love to them the most
times. In another, Lucrezia and her father in fits of laughter watched from
a balcony in the Vatican as rutting stallions were released to rival each
other in mounting mares. Both stories could well be true in essence,
although sexed up to make spicier reading. Lucrezia was certainly no prude.
In the Vatican Secret Archive, a fascinating collection of papers left in the
Castel Sant’Angelo by Alexander when he fled there for safety from the
invading army of Charles VIII of France late in 1494, sheds a ray of light
on Lucrezia’s family relationships at the time of her first marriage. I
began to piece together Lucrezia’s life from these letters and subsequently
from the Sforza archive in Milan — which provided details of her first
marriage, divorce and subsequent remarriage. The archives of the Este family
are now in Modena. Since Alfonso’s sister, the famous Isabella d’Este,
married Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, the archives of Mantua and
Modena fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw and, together with
Lucrezia’s own papers which she brought with her from Rome, are the
principal source for her life.
The snobbish Isabella looked down on her new sister-in-law and deployed a
network of confidants to spy on her. One collection of some seven hundred
letters from an Este loyalist named Bernardino di Prosperi, never used
before in its entirety, tracks Lucrezia in her daily life in Ferrara. We
hear of her household, her musicians, her gorgeous clothes and jewels, the
decoration of her apartments, her kitchen, her banquets and parties, her
confinements and illnesses from the day of her arrival in February 1502
until the day of her death.
Lucrezia failed to charm her sister-in-law, but she soon won over the rest of
the family, including her once reluctant husband. Alfonso had a taste for
whores and tavern companions but he found Lucrezia physically attractive and
frequently got her pregnant. Like many of the men of his time he suffered
from the new disease, syphilis, which probably accounts for Lucrezia’s
difficult pregnancies. She was not only young (22), beautiful, high-spirited
and charming, she was also well educated. She spoke Italian, Catalan (the
family language), French and Latin and could write verse in all of them. She
had some understanding of Greek, had been taught eloquence and could express
herself elegantly in public speech.
She loved music and poetry: Spanish canzones and volumes of Dante and
Petrarch were among the books she brought with her from Rome. She became the
centre of a literary court of poets and writers who idolised her. One,
Pietro Bembo, entered into an ardent relationship with her: their
correspondence survives in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan along with a
lock of Lucrezia’s blonde hair. When Byron read them he called them “the
prettiest love letters in the world ” and took a strand of Lucrezia’s hair.
It was not an easy affair: “Do not trust anyone. And take care not to be
seen writing because I know you are watched very closely,” Bembo implored
her.
In the end, probably fearful of the Este, particularly Alfonso and his
ruthless brother, Cardinal Ippolito, Bembo withdrew. Lucrezia, writing under
the pseudonym “ff”, had taken a tremendous risk in the correspondence with
Bembo; yet, as their affair was on the wane she entered into an even more
dangerous relationship with Francesco Gonzaga, Isabella’s husband. The
go-between for this affair was the poet Ercole Strozzi, a friend and admirer
of Lucrezia, who paid for his services with his life: he was found stabbed
to death in the street. The murderer was never found and no attempt made to
trace him, which indicates that his death was ordered by one of the Este.
Lucrezia, however, continued her correspondence with Gonzaga through
Strozzi’s brother. As a Borgia she was used to navigating dangerous waters.
Violence and death were never far from Lucrezia’s life. Her father died in
Rome of malarial fever in August 1503, leaving her dangerously vulnerable to
rejection by the Este. As the King of France told the Ferrarese Ambassador,
he was well aware that they had not wanted the marriage and that “Madonna
Lucretia was not the true wife of Don Alfonso”. It is a tribute to the
influence that Lucrezia already exercised over them that they did not
repudiate her, although the Pope was dead, and Cesare’s star falling
rapidly. Cesare himself lost all his territories in Italy and died violently
in an ambush in Navarre four years later. Lucrezia cried out to God in
anguish at the news of his death, but worse was still to come. Rodrigo
Bisceglie, her only son by her murdered second husband, whom she had been
forced to leave behind when she came to Ferrara, died, aged 12. He had been
only two years old when she last saw him.
Determinedly she survived, making full use of her powerful position as Duchess
of Ferrara. She was not only a brilliant hostess but a skilful and
compassionate administrator. With her husband frequently away fighting,
Lucrezia administered justice in his place, showing concern for the poor,
and a reluctance to punish those unjustly accused, interceding with Alfonso
on their behalf. Her letters to him and to Gonzaga are full of pleas to
“spare the poor little man condemned to death” . When danger threatened, she
saw to the defence of the city and reported intelligence of enemy movements
to her husband. Pope Julius II vowed to have Ferrara, making Francesco
Gonzaga his commander: in these dangerous circumstances Lucrezia secretly
and skilfully kept her lover on side.
She was a conscientious head of her household: her accounts books reveal the
minutiae of her daily life, even down to the names of her herd of cows —
Rose, Violet etc.
She oversaw the education of her damsels and arranged marriages for them. Woe
betide any young man who tried to evade his engagement: Lucrezia issued
orders for him to keep his promise or else. Despite several miscarriages,
stillbirths and infant deaths, she bore Alfonso three sons and a daughter
who survived, one son to become the Duke of Ferrara, another Cardinal
Ippolito who built the Villa d’Este near Tivoli. The daughter, probably
influenced by Lucrezia’s increasing piety, became a nun. Lucrezia concerned
herself with her sons’ education, corresponding with one of the leading
humanists of the day over their curriculum.
On April 26, 1519, suffering from a difficult pregnancy and depressed by the
death of her lover Gonzaga the previous month, she seems to have had a
premonition of her own death, telling Alfonso that “a religious person” had
warned her that “everyone should take good care of themselves in these two
months of which they hinted that they feared some danger . . .”. Two months
later, after a prolonged labour and agonising aftermath to a difficult
birth, she died.
Alfonso was devastated. “In anguish of my soul,” he told his nephew, he felt
himself unable to “write without tears, so grave is it to find myself
deprived of such a sweet, dear companion as she was to me . . . and for the
tender love there was between us”. These letters are among the many which
have never been previously published and which illuminate Lucrezia’s human
and very moving story. After more than five hundred years of fire, flood,
even Second World War bombardment, they have survived as a testament to a
remarkable woman.
Sarah Bradford’s Lucrezia Borgia: Love, Life and Death in
Renaissance Italy is published by Viking (£25, offer £20)
