Caesar Borgia: A Study of the Renaissance

by John Leslie Garner

The attack on the Duke of Bisceglia evidently was well planned, and he was subsequently strangled within the very walls of the Vatican. The servants and physicians were immediately exonerated. Who, then, was responsible for the murder?

All the chroniclers, historians, and ambassadors either openly or by implication charge Caesar with the crime. According to the standards of that perfidious and brutal age, he had ample grounds for the murder—grounds based on both personal hatred and on political ambition.

The conquest of Romagna was intimately connected with the aims of the King of France with respect to Naples, and Alfonso was an obstacle in Caesar’s path. The Neapolitan House had refused Valentino one of its daughters for wife, and he had married a French princess; the destruction of the Aragonese family was therefore the logical sequel.

When Alfonso of Bisceglia was murdered, Lucretia was only twenty years of age; she was beautiful and wealthy, and had powerful kinsmen and a considerable domain of her own; it would be a comparatively easy matter, in view of these attractions, to find her another husband in one of the great families of the peninsula, who would be of help to Alexander and Caesar in subjugating Romagna, and in any other ambitious projects they might evolve.

Alfonso of Bisceglia was useless to such practical men as Valentino and his father; he was honest, gentle, and weak, and such men had even less place in the swift movement of the Renaissance than they have in modern politics and industry, and he had to be removed.

Alexander perhaps recognised his own blood in Caesar, and discovered in him the same cynical contempt for all laws, human and Divine, that he himself felt. If he had any horror of his son’s deed, it was not of long duration, for Capello, wrote in September, a month after the murder: “The Pope is daily growing younger; his greatest sorrows pass in a night; he is of a most cheerful disposition, and never undertakes anything but what promises to turn to his own profit; all his thoughts are directed to a single end—to make great personages of his children—to all else he is indifferent.”

Efforts have been made to place the responsibility for the murder of Alfonso on the Sanseverini, who were robbed of the Principality of Salerno in order that it might be given the prince; and on the Gaetani, who had been despoiled of the Duchy of Sermoneta that it might be bestowed on Alfonso’s infant son, Rodrigo. However, neither of these families, who must also have had their enemies, was ever charged with the crime by their contemporaries, and had Caesar and Alexander ever suspected either of them, they certainly would not have treated the affair with such indifference. The only one charged with it at the time was the Duke of Valentino.

An ingenious eulogist of the Borgias has suggested that the strangling in the Borgia tower, which was doubtless reported by Lucretia or Sancia, was no strangling at all, but probably tetanic convulsions due to infected wounds caused by the daggers—poignards usually being cleaned in the earth; he, however, neglects to explain away the attack when the daggers were used two weeks before.

Early in July the Pope had placed the ban on Faenza, on the ground that Astorre Manfredi had refused to pay the tribute; the reduction of Faenza and Rimini, therefore, was decided upon by the Pope and Caesar. By his ambassador, Villeneuve, Louis XII. sent his consent for the undertaking, and also his promise to help as far as he was able. In addition the Venetian ambassador assured the Vatican of the neutrality of his Government.

Valentinois had formed an army which he was holding in Umbria, in order that it might be near at hand to be used to destroy the Colonna, who were allies of Federigo of Naples, or for the operations in Romagna.