Caesar Borgia: A Study of the Renaissance

by John Leslie Garner

The offspring of this union, Jofre de Borja y Doms, father of Rodrigo Borgia, therefore had the right to place the three bands azure of the house of Doms by the side of the Borgia bull, and this he did.

Rodrigo Borgia therefore was the son of Jofre de Borja y Doms and Isabella de Borja, who were first cousins; and he was the nephew of Calixtus III., his mother’s brother.

All the descendants of Alexander VI. used the arms which he had engraved on his pontifical seal and which by his order Pinturicchio painted in the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican.

When Lucretia Borgia, through her marriage with Alfonso d’Este, became Duchess of Ferrara, she added to her arms the eagle of the House of Este and also the pontifical keys, and when her brother Caesar, on his marriage with Charlotte d’Albret, was made Duke of Valentinois, he adopted the lilies of France, although he should have taken the arms of Navarre.

Now, what connection had the Lanzol with the Borgia, and what caused the curious mistake regarding the name of Rodrigo Borgia’s father?

Don Rodrigo de Borgia, later Alexander VI., had three sisters, one of whom, Doña Juana, married P. Guillem Lanzol de Romani and bore him a son, Don Jofre Lanzol y Borja, who married Doña Juana de Moncada and by her had a son, Don Rodrigo Lanzol, who, instead of calling himself Lanzol y Moncada, as he should have done, took the name of Borgia, which was that of his grandmother as well as of his great-grandmother, Isabella, the sister of Calixtus III., and it was this Rodrigo Lanzol, who incorrectly called himself Borgia, whose name finally, in some unaccountable way, became confused with that of Rodrigo Borja y Borja, subsequently Alexander VI., and the error has persisted for centuries. Such is Yriarte’s explanation. The evidence furnished by the arms is substantiated by the Valencian chronicles and by records in the archives of Osuna.

The Borgias were Spanish and such they remained throughout their long and infamous career in Italy, and they were always supported by a powerful Castillian party.

That Rodrigo Borgia was Caesar’s father there is no doubt. Rodrigo as cardinal, and later when Pope, always acknowledged and treated him as his son, lavishing unbounded parental affection on him and striving in every way to advance his material interests, as he did those of all his kinsmen and children.

One of the most striking traits of the Borgia family was their exaggerated affection for each other and their unbounded sense of family solidarity. Even Pope Calixtus III., who has not been accused of sacrificing his office wholly to his kinsmen, saw fit to bestow the cardinalate upon several of them.

If Mariana is correct in stating that Rodrigo’s eldest son Don Pedro Luis, first Duke of Gandia, who was born in 1467, was the child of Vannozza de’ Catanei, the cardinal’s relations with this woman, which lasted about fifteen years, began when he was about thirty-five.