Of all the progeny of Alexander VI the most fortunate were those who were the descendants of the murdered Don Giovanni. His widow, Donna Maria, lived for a long time highly respected at the court of Queen Isabella of Castile, and subsequently she became an ascetic bigot and entered a convent. Her daughter Isabella did the same, dying in 1537. Her only son, Don Giovanni, while a child, had succeeded his unfortunate father as Duke of Gandia and had managed to retain his Neapolitan estates, which included an extensive domain in Terra di Lavoro, with the cities of Suessa, Teano, Carinola, Montefuscolo, Fiume, and others. In 1506 the youthful Gandia relinquished these towns to the King of Spain on payment of a sum of money. To the great Captain Gonsalvo was given the Principality of Suessa.
Don Giovanni remained in Spain a highly respected grandee. He married Giovanna d'Aragona, a princess of the deposed royal house of Naples; his second wife was a daughter of the Viscount of Eval, Donna Francesca de Castro y Pinos, whom he married in 1520. The marriages of the Borgias were as a rule exceedingly fruitful. When this grandson of Alexander VI died in 1543 he left no fewer than fifteen children. His daughters married among the grandees of Spain and his sons were numbered among the great nobles of the country, where they enjoyed the highest honors. The eldest, Don Francesco Borgia, born in 1510, became Duke of Gandia and a great lord in Spain and highly honored at the court of Charles V, who made him Vice-Regent of Catalonia and Commander of San Iago. He accompanied the emperor on his expedition against France and even to Africa. In 1529 he married one of the ladies in waiting to the empress, Eleonora de Castro, who bore him five sons and three daughters. When she died, in 1546, the Duke of Gandia yielded to his long-standing desire to enter the Society of Jesus and to relinquish his brilliant position forever. It seemed as if a mysterious force was impelling him thus to expiate the crimes of his house. It is not strange, however, to find a descendant of Alexander VI in the garb of a Jesuit, for the diabolic force of will which had characterized that Borgia lived again in the person of his countryman, Loyola, in another form and directed to another end. The maxims of Macchiavelli's "Prince" thus became part of the political programme of the Jesuits.
In 1550 the Duke of Gandia went to Rome to cast himself at the feet of the Pope and to become a member of the Order. Paul III, brother of Giulia Farnese, had just died, and del Monte as Julius III had ascended the papal throne. Ercole II, cousin of Don Francesco, still occupied the ducal throne of Ferrara. He remembered the relationship and invited the traveler to stop at his city on his way to Rome. Francesco spent three days at the court of Lucretia's son, where he was received by Renée. Whether Loyola's brilliant pupil had any knowledge of the religious attitude of Calvin's friend is not known. The presence of this man in Savonarola's native city and at Lucretia's former residence is, on account of the contrast, remarkable. Francesco left for Rome almost immediately, and then returned to Spain. On the death of Lainez, in 1565, he became general,—the third in order,—of the Society of Jesus. He still held this position at the time of his death, which occurred in Rome in the year 1572. The Church pronounced him holy, and thus a descendant of Alexander VI became a saint.[248]
The descendants of this Borgia married into the greatest families of Spain. His eldest son, Don Carlos, Duke of Gandia, married Donna Maddalena, daughter of the Count of Oliva, of the house of Centelles, and thus the family to which Lucretia's first suitor belonged, after the lapse of fifty years, became connected with the Borgias. The Gandia branch survived until the eighteenth century, when there were two cardinals of the name of Borgia who were members of it.
Ercole II did not discover the heretical tendencies of his wife Renée until 1554, when he placed her in a convent. The noble princess remained true to the Reformation. As the Inquisition stamped out the reform movement in Ferrara while her son was reigning duke, she returned to France, where she lived with the Huguenots in her Castle of Montargis, dying in 1575. It is worthy of note that the Duke of Guise was her son-in-law.
Renée had borne her husband several children,—the hereditary Prince Alfonso Luigi, who subsequently became a cardinal; Donna Anna, who married the Duke of Guise; Donna Lucretia, who became Duchess of Urbino; and Donna Leonora, who remained single.
Her son Alfonso II succeeded to the throne of Ferrara in 1559. This was the duke whom Tasso made immortal. Just as Ariosto, during the reign of the first Alfonso and Lucretia, had celebrated the house of Este in a monumental poem, so Torquato Tasso now continued to do at the home of his descendant, Alfonso II. By a curious coincidence the two greatest epic poets of Italy were in the service of the same family. Tasso's fate is one of the darkest memories of the house of Este, and is also the last of any special importance in the history of the court of Ferrara. His poem may be regarded as the death song of this famous family, for the legitimate line of the house of Este died out October 27, 1597, in Alfonso II, Lucretia Borgia's grandson. Don Cæsar, a grandson of Alfonso I, and son of that Alfonso whom Laura Dianti had borne him and of Donna Giulia Rovere of Urbino, ascended the ducal throne of Ferrara on the death of Alfonso II as his heir. The Pope, however, would not recognize him. In vain he endeavored to prove that his grandfather, shortly before his death, had legally married Laura Dianti, and that consequently he was the legitimate heir to the throne. It availed nothing for the contestants to appear before the tribunal of emperor and pope and endeavor to make Don Cæsar's pretensions good, nor does it now avail for the Ferrarese, who, following Muratori, still seek to substantiate these claims. Don Cæsar was forced to yield to Clement VIII, January 13, 1598, the grandson of Alfonso I renouncing the Duchy of Ferrara. Together with his wife, Virginia Medici and his children, he left the old palace of his ancestors and betook himself to Modena, the title of duke of that city and the estates of Reggio and Carpi having been conferred upon him.
Don Cæsar continued the branch line of the Este. At the end of the eighteenth century it passed into the Austrian Este house in the person of Archduke Ferdinand, and in the nineteenth century this line also became extinct.
No longer do the popes control Ferrara. Where the castle of Tedaldo stood when Lucretia made her entry into the city in 1502, where Clement VIII later erected the great castle which was razed in 1859, there is now a wide field in the middle of which, lost and forgotten, is a melancholy statue of Paul V, and all about is a waste. There is still standing before the castle of Giovanni Sforza in Pesaro a column from which the statue has been overturned, and on the base is the inscription: "Statue of Urban VII—That is all that is left of it."