Caesar Borgia: A Study of the Renaissance

by John Leslie Garner

To face p. 52.

Securing possession of the papal office at a time when all men were greedy for power; building up principalities and advancing the family interests and at the same time enhancing the Spanish influence in the Holy See and throughout Italy, their enemies minimised their virtues and magnified their vices. They were charged with all sorts of hideous crimes, some of which they undoubtedly committed, and some, of which they certainly were innocent. Their hostile contemporaries spread reports of their evil deeds throughout Christendom, and the charges made against them in their lifetime have been repeated by historians down to the present day.

Again, the Borgias have been judged, not in connection with their age and their contemporaries, but as isolated creatures, or by modern standards of ethics. Caesar Borgia has been described as a ravening wolf among a flock of sheep, whereas, as Medin well says,[7] he was merely a wolf battling with other wolves, with this difference, that while he possessed the same greediness, ferocity, and ambition, he surpassed them all in the vastness of his projects and in the unshakable determination with which he carried them out.

To judge the Borgias by present standards is manifestly unjust. The character of the Papacy has changed; Alexander VI. was merely a temporal prince with certain sacerdotal functions. He used his great office for the advancement of himself, his family, and his followers, as other Popes of his epoch did, but more consistently, more skilfully. Like other potentates of the day, he had his mistresses, whom he did not hesitate to introduce into the Vatican, and his numerous bastards, whom he publicly acknowledged.

In this connection it might be well to remember that the illegitimate in the fifteenth century were not regarded with the contempt in which they are supposed to be held at the present time; in fact, they were openly recognised and treated exactly the same as the legitimate children, and when for political or other reasons it became necessary to legitimatise them, nothing was easier, the Popes often undertaking to remove the taint by special bulls. Gregorovius calls this the golden age of bastards and enumerates among the reigning princes of Italy of illegitimate birth, Sforza of Milan, Ferrante of Calabria, Sigismondo Malatesta of the Marches, and Borso of Ferrara, who was one of the eight natural sons of the House of Este who rode forth to meet Pius II. when he was on his way to the Congress of Mantua in 1459, and whom he described as “eloquent, generous, and magnificent.”[8] When the lawful children were minors or lacking in force, bastards were often admitted to the succession; the fitness of the individual, and not the fact of pure or impure birth, was the test. In more northern countries, Burgundy for example, illegitimate children were provided for by a distinct class of appanages, such as bishoprics. The greatest of the sons of men did not express an isolated opinion when he made Gloucester’s illegitimate son, Edmund, exclaim:—

“Who in the lusty stealth of nature take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got ’tween asleep and awake.”

History, whose chief concern until recent years has been the recording of the victories of fraud and force and the perpetuation of the memory of the morally deformed, from Caesar to Bonaparte, has preserved for our edification the names of innumerable bastards who dazzled their contemporaries, and whom little boys and girls are taught to admire, just as they are taught to admire those monsters who, in the pursuit of their own aims and ambitions, have destroyed the greatest number of their fellows—wholesale murder being a glorious achievement; thus we have Don John of Austria, Vendôme, Dunois, Prince Eugene, the Constable of Bourbon, and Maurice of Saxony. Not until the sixteenth century did Italy feel any repugnance for illegitimacy, and then it was due to the influence of foreign ideas and the counter-revolution.[9]

In addition to illegitimacy of birth another form of illegitimacy was common in the peninsula, the illegitimate power of a reigning sovereign—that is, the usurped dominion enjoyed by a political adventurer. We need not pause to inquire whether he usurped it from an earlier usurper, either a prince or a faction, or to ask how usurped power can ever become legitimate. This state of affairs gave birth to innumerable crimes of violence, and the dagger and the poisoned cup were the usual instruments of personal political advancement.

The origin of some of these illegitimate powers can be traced back to the middle of the eleventh century, when the feudal lords found themselves confronted by a new power in the cities in the form of the corporation or guild of artisans who had gradually become conscious of their strength and importance, and had shown their masters that they were to be counted with in the future.

The development of this new movement was furthered by the Wars of Investiture, which, while weakening the authority of the bishops, aroused the minds of the citizens, caused them to take an interest in public affairs, and gave them a desire for freedom.