Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  Vannozza bore Rodrigo three more children after Cesare: Juan, born in 1476, Lucrezia, born in 1480, and Jofre, born in 1481. Domenico da Rignano died soon after Cesare’s birth, and in 1480 or 1481 Vannozza married Giorgio di Croce, a Milanese who had been apostolic secretary to Pope Sixtus IV. Her physical relationship with Rodrigo may have been ending by the time of her second marriage; Rodrigo later publicly expressed doubts as to whether Jofre was indeed his son, and did not legitimize him until 1493 after he became Pope, when Jofre was twelve years old. In 1486 both di Croce and Vannozza’s son by him, Ottaviano, died and Rodrigo hastened to marry his former mistress to another suitable husband, Carlo Canale, a Mantuan man of letters who had been secretary to Cardinal Gonzaga. A man of education but no means, Canale hoped to make his way in the world through his bride’s connection with the powerful Cardinal Borgia. The marriage took place in June 1486, in the presence of the Borgia notary Camillo Beneimbene; Vannozza brought her new husband a dowry of a thousand gold florins and a curial appointment. Canale’s expectations were not disappointed; when five years later his wife’s former lover became Pope, he was rewarded with an important post as Governor of the Torre di Nona, the city prison. So absorbed did he become with his wife’s family that he appears to have acted as unofficial secretary to her illegitimate sons, writing letters to his former patrons, the Gonzagas of Mantua, begging for horses for Juan, to whom he proudly refers as ‘my stepson’, even signing himself ‘Carolus de Cattaneis’, his wife’s family name, instead of his own.

  The Borgia children were not brought up in their father’s house; Rodrigo as Cardinal veiled his private life with discretion, and the existence of his illegitimate children seems not to have become public knowledge until after his accession to the Papacy. The bull of September 1493 specifically stated that Cesare and Juan were brought up in the same house; they probably had their own household, as befitted sons of a prince of the Church, and certainly shared the same tutor. Their sister Lucrezia spent the first years of her life in her mother’s house on the Piazza Pizzo di Merlo in the Ponte quarter, a few steps from Rodrigo’s palace on the Corso. Rodrigo then placed her in the care of his first cousin and female confidante, Adriana de Mila, who was married to an Orsini, Ludovico lord of Bassanello, and lived in the vast Orsini palace on Monte Giordano.

  Yet there is little doubt that the children saw a great deal of their father, who loved them deeply. A contemporary described Rodrigo as ‘the most carnal of men’ in his attachment to his own flesh and blood. And like other fathers he planned for his sons’ futures – those plans being simple and in the habitual order of things. Pedro Luis, the eldest son, should take up the sword to win himself lands and fortune; Cesare, the second son, was destined for the Church; Juan, the third, would follow Pedro Luis in a secular career, while Jofre remained to be deployed as a pawn in the family game as opportunity allowed. The girls, naturally, were to make their way through suitable marriages.

  But to think of Rodrigo’s whole illegitimate brood as a family group would be wrong. Indeed, Cesare can scarcely have known his elder half-brother and half-sisters. By 1483, when Cesare was eight, the dashing Pedro Luis was back in the Borgias’ homeland, fighting in the service of Ferdinand of Aragon. He did not return to Rome for four years, and a year later he was dead. Cesare’s half-sister Girolama, who had married into the noble Cesarini family in 1482, died in 1483, while her sister Isabella was married in the same year to a Roman nobleman, Pier Giovanni Matuzzi.

  It was specifically Vannozza’s children, Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia and Jofre, who grew up as a compact family unit, their lives dominated by their father – although in looks they seem to have taken after their mother. None of them seems to have inherited the broad strength of their father’s face, nor the powerful curve of his nose. All of them, Cesare and Lucrezia in particular, received from him his physical resilience and strength, his buoyant good spirits and charm. Cesare was tall like his father, but the finely proportioned figure for which he was noted had nothing of Rodrigo’s heaviness. No contemporary portrait of Cesare seems to have survived, but the painting generally held to have resembled him and inscribed ‘Dux Valentinus’ – Duke Valentino – shows a young man with strong, finely cut features, a long, high-bridged nose, dark eyes shaped like his mother’s with a watchful look to them, under strongly marked eyebrows, a fresh complexion probably also inherited from Vannozza, and long dark hair tinged with red. ‘His head is most beautiful,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote of him in 1500 when he was twenty-five. In character he inherited his father’s intelligence and great ambition, his deviousness and his skill in diplomacy and intrigue, but although he could exert the famous Borgia charm when it suited him and was capable of outbursts of boisterous high spirits like his father, he did not share Rodrigo’s outgoing nature. While appearing outwardly frank, he was inwardly secretive, controlled; his bouts of hectic enjoyment were often followed by periods of apparent lethargy and depression. He had a Spanish pride, and was deeply resentful of slights on his honour, which he never forgave and always avenged. He was suspicious and wary, and – unlike his father – apparently incapable of deep love for anyone, with the exception of Lucrezia. He was self-sufficient, with an almost superstitious belief in himself, that ‘high confidence’ which Machiavelli later noted in him. Cold, ruthless and unpredictable, Cesare’s ‘dangerous nature’ may have been the reason that Rodrigo, while caring for him deeply, clearly favoured his younger brother Juan, whom he must have found easier to manage.

  Juan, ‘the spoilt boy’ as the Aragonese chronicler Zurita described him, seems to have resembled Cesare in looks, although his hair was lighter in colour. Handsome, vain and self-indulgent, he lacked Cesare’s intelligence and self-control. As he grew up observers remarked on the arrogance which was to earn him dangerous enemies. Lucrezia was undoubtedly the darling of the family; both Cesare and his father adored her, Rodrigo it was said ‘superlatively’. All her contemporaries agreed in describing her as singularly attractive, with a grace and joyousness that charmed everyone who met her. Niccolò Cagnolo of Parma wrote of her: ‘She is of middle height and graceful of form, her face is rather long, the nose well-cut, hair golden, eyes of no special colour [possibly he meant grey-blue]; her mouth is rather large, the teeth brilliantly white, her neck is slender and fair, her bosom admirably proportioned. She is always gay and smiling.’ Lucrezia was extremely feminine, intelligent and adept at getting her way through charm. She also had the Borgia inner toughness where emotions were concerned, and her brother’s incapacity for lasting deep feeling. She was no cipher and knew what she wanted, but in will-power she was completely dominated by her father and Cesare. Jofre, the baby of the family, appears to have been a complete nonentity and made no mark on his contemporaries apart from invidious comparisons with Cesare – one of them remarked how Jofre ‘fits the spurs to the Duke’s [Cesare’s] boots …’ The only thing he shared with Cesare was their dark hair with the reddish tinge inherited from their mother.

  These young Borgias identified closely with their father, their sense of kinship heightened by their Spanish blood and the strongly Spanish character of their father’s household. Rodrigo Borgia had lived in Italy for more than thirty years and had only returned to his native land once, yet Spanish remained his first language. He wrote and spoke in Catalan, the dialect of Valencia, or in Castilian; it was the language of the Borgia family inner circle, which they used when conversing with each other on intimate occasions or when they preferred not to be understood by outsiders. Cesare himself always used the Spanish form of his name, signing himself ‘Cesar’, and his first tutor and lifelong friend, Juan Vera of Ercilla, was a Spaniard.

  Cesare would have begun his education at an early age; his contemporary Piero de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo, was already writing letters to his father in Latin at the age of seven, and at six he wrote to Lorenzo: ‘I have already learned many verses of Virgil, and I know nearly the whole of the first book of Theodoro [the standard Greek
grammar by Theodore Gaza] by heart.’ Gaza’s Greek textbook and Gaspare da Verona’s Latin grammar formed part of Cesare’s early education; Podocatharo, Rodrigo’s Greek Cypriot secretary, undoubtedly helped him with his Greek studies, while Lorenz Behaim, the master of the household, who was a Latinist and member of the Roman classical Academy of Pomponius Laetus, would have introduced him to the classical authors. Cesare wrote and spoke Spanish, Italian, French, Greek and Latin, learned music and drawing, arithmetic and Euclidian geometry. As he grew older he would have been expected to write elegant Latin prose and poetry, and to improvise discourses in Latin, for which Cicero’s speeches were the prime model, as were his letters for Latin prose style. The plays of Terence and Plautus were used to teach Latin conversation, and Cesare would have learned history from the works of Tacitus, Livy, Thucydides and Herodotus, poetry from those of Virgil, Horace and Ovid.

  This emphasis on classical studies was not merely an academic exercise; the passion for classical antiquity which characterized the Renaissance was of very real significance in Rome, once the centre of the Roman Empire, where the Romans were rediscovering their great past. The classical authors were regarded as sources of knowledge and as patterns for human behaviour; Cesare’s contemporaries took the great figures of classical times as models to be followed, and accepted what they understood to be the ancient Romans’ concepts of life as their own. Fama, fame or glory, was the goal; to gain it a man must exercise his individual skill and valour, virtù, to conquer the unpredictable force of fortune, fortuna, which ruled men’s lives. This concept of his own power to shape his destiny would have become deeply ingrained in Cesare’s mind, as he identified himself with his famous namesake Julius Caesar, whose actions had been guided by a supreme belief in the same idea. The key to the men of Cesare’s generation lay in Alberti’s famous phrase: ‘A man can do anything if he wills …’

  Education was also considered to include the physical side of a child’s life, an essential part of the training of the complete man. Alberti wrote: ‘Youths should ride for exercise, they should learn the practice of arms, they should run and jump and manage a horse.’ Cesare was strong – in later life he was reputed capable of bending a horseshoe with his bare hands – and excelled in all forms of physical exercise with the fierce competitiveness which he applied to everything he undertook. He shared his father’s enthusiasm for hunting, which he would have practised as early as the age of six, loved horses and hunting dogs, and learned bullfighting from the Spaniards of his father’s household, a skill with which he later amazed the Romans.

  If Cesare’s formative years equipped him mentally and physically for the demanding times ahead, the material side was by no means neglected. As early as October 1481, when he was just six years old, Rodrigo had paved the way to advancement in the career he had chosen for him by persuading the Pope to grant him a dispensation allowing him to hold benefices despite his illegitimacy, while the following year Ferdinand of Aragon exempted him from inferiority of status in law deriving from his illegitimate birth, thus allowing him to hold lordships in Spain. The way was now open for Cesare to amass lucrative appointments at the expense of the Church in Spain. In March 1482 Cesare, not yet seven, was made apostolic protonotary by Sixtus IV; in July he was given a prebend and canonry in the cathedral of his father’s bishopric of Valencia, as well as becoming archdeacon of Rodrigo’s native town Jativa, and rector of Gandia, his brother’s future dukedom. In April 1483 he became provost of Albar, while in the next year the new Pope Innocent VIII nominated him treasurer of his father’s bishopric of Cartagena, then prebendary of the cathedral of Majorca, archdeacon of the cathedral of Tarragona, and canon of the cathedral of Lerida. The young recipient of all these benefices was not of canonical age to undertake any duties in respect of his offices, whose accruing revenues were used by his father for his maintenance and education.

  By 1489 Cesare’s Roman boyhood was over; he was fourteen, and for the next three years he would complete his formal education at the universities of Perugia and Pisa. In the autumn of 1489 he was sent to Perugia to study at the Sapienza, and here, while continuing his studies, he was to gain his first experience of the harsh realities of Italian political life, and to make contact with the families of the political establishment outside Rome. Perugia, ancient capital of Umbria, was an important papal city with a town population of 20,000 and some 46,000 in its rich countryside, the contado; it was also the most turbulent town in Italy, with a long history of violence stretching back over centuries. The political situation in Perugia was in many ways typical of that pertaining in other papal cities such as Bologna. Officially government was shared between papal officials and the communal magistrates, the ten Priori, but in fact city life was dominated by the tough, unruly Baglioni family, the brothers Guido and Ridolfo and their eight sons, Cesare’s contemporaries, of whom Gian Paolo, later to become his condottiere, was the leader. Cesare, as the son of the powerful Vice-Chancellor, must have been frequently in company with Gian Paolo and his brothers; whose houses in the ‘Baglioni’ quarter of the town near the Porta Marzia were within a stone’s throw of the Sapienza building, and he probably went hunting with them on their estates of Bastia and Spello in the contado of Perugia. Through them he would have come into contact with the signorial network of Umbria, the Marches and Tuscany – families like the Vitellis, vicars of Città de Castello. At Perugia, Cesare’s eyes were opened to the true position within the States of the Church, a valuable lesson for the future.

  Meanwhile Rodrigo had not abated his efforts to advance his son’s career, and in September 1491 he obtained for him the rich prize of his first bishopric – that of Pamplona, ancient capital of the kingdom of Navarre. While Cesare was no doubt content to be a bishop with rich revenues and no duties, his new flock received the news with mutinous indignation. Their Bishop-elect was only fifteen, and had not yet taken holy orders; his sole qualification for his appointment lay in his being the illegitimate son of the Vice-Chancellor. Rodrigo attempted to calm the defiant Navarrese, ingenuously declaring the reasons for Cesare’s elevation to be his ‘merits, virtue and doctrine’, while Cesare, who was spending his university vacation hunting at the Borgia citadel of Soriano, hastened to write a pastoral letter in Spanish to ‘our magnificent and honourable friends’ the clergy of Pamplona, commending a certain Martin Zapata to them as his representative. Despite the soothing words of the Borgias, father and son, the Navarrese remained rebellious until Pope Innocent himself was obliged to intervene with a penal admonition against those who might attempt to usurp the see of Pamplona and appropriate its revenues.

  And so it was as Bishop-elect of Pamplona that Cesare, after two years at Perugia, went to attend the University of Pisa in the autumn of 1491. There he was to study for his doctorate in law under the famous Milanese jurist Filippo Decio, but the high reputation of the Pisan law school was not the only reason that prompted Rodrigo to send him. At Pisa, Cesare would be entering the territory of the Medicis, a family with which Rodrigo was anxious to be on good terms. In a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Rodrigo wrote that he was sending ‘the Bishop of Pamplona’ to Pisa to be under Lorenzo’s ‘wing and protection’ as a ‘means and pledge of the great love’ which he bore for the house of Medici. As Rodrigo well knew, Lorenzo’s second son Giovanni, Cesare’s exact contemporary (born in December 1475), and like him destined for the Church, would be his fellow-student at the University of Pisa.

  Lorenzo, who was equally anxious to take advantage of Rodrigo Borgia’s influence at the Vatican, had doubtless instructed his son to behave in a friendly manner towards ‘il Pamplona’ as Cesare was now known, and paternal pressure on both sides ensured that they saw a good deal of each other. But Giovanni’s true reaction to the young Borgia was probably reflected in his chancellor Ser Stefano’s comments on Cesare’s Spanish household: ‘It seems to us that these men of his who surround him are little men who have small consideration for behaviour and have all the appearanc
e of “marrani”.’

  Moreover the style in which the young Bishop of Pamplona lived seems to have exacerbated relations between the Medici and Borgia households. Rodrigo, with some of the instinct of the parvenu, was determined that Cesare at Pisa should outshine the other aristocratic students, and the ostentatious luxury of his life-style was enough to make even a Medici feel inferior. Ser Stefano reported: ‘We wished to invite him [Cesare] here one morning to dine, and, if the weather is good it could be this week … It is true that he has come so well provided with hangings and silver that our not having anything to equal it has left us a little perplexed …’

  The rivalry between the two may have extended to other more serious fields. Cesare was a brilliant student; even the hostile historian Paolo Giovio, who otherwise had nothing but ill to say of him, was forced to admit of his performance at his laureate that ‘he had gained such profit [from his studies] that, with ardent mind, he discussed learnedly the questions put to him both in canon and civil law.’ In any event he must have gained his laureate before Giovanni was awarded his, since he figured as one of the arguenti, disputants, in the debate for Giovanni’s laureate. Giovanni, legitimate son of one of the great families of Italy, probably secretly despised and resented the bastard son of the Catalan Borgia as an upstart, and possibly Cesare sensed this, for the two young men were never friends even while both were living in Rome. It was a revealing portent of the reactions of the Italian political establishment to him in the future.