If more needs to be said of him, let it be mentioned that the letter in which he expresses that conviction is dated April 1497—two months before the murder took place! So that even Gregorovius is forced to doubt the authenticity of that document.
GUICCIARDINI is not a contemporary chronicler of events as they happened, but an historian writing some thirty years later. He merely repeats what Capello and others have said before him. It is for him to quote authorities for what he writes, and not to be set up as an authority. He is not reliable, and he is a notorious defamer of the Papacy, sparing nothing that will serve his ends. He dilates with gusto upon the accusation of incest.
Lastly, PANVINTO is in the same category as Guicciardini. He was not born until some thirty years after these events, and his History of the Popes was not written until some sixty years after the murder of the Duke of Gandia. This history bristles with inaccuracies; he never troubles to verify his facts, and as an authority he is entirely negligible.
In the valuable Diarium of Burchard there is unfortunately a lacuna at this juncture, from the day after the murder (of which he gives the full particulars to which we have gone for our narrative of that event) until the month of August following. And now we may see Gregorovius actually using silence as evidence. He seizes upon that lacuna, and goes so far as to set up the tentative explanation that Burchard “perhaps purposely interrupted his Diary that he might avoid mentioning the fratricide.”
If such were the case, it would be a strange departure from Burchard’s invariable rule, which is one of cold, relentless, uncritical chronicling of events, no matter what their nature. Besides, any significance with which that lacuna might be invested is discounted by the fact that such gaps are of fairly common occurrence in the course of Burchard’s record. Finally it remains to be shown that the lacuna in question exists in the original diaries, which have yet to be discovered.
So much for the valuable authorities, out of which—and by means of a selection which is not quite clearly defined—Gregorovius claims to have proved that the murderer of the Duke of Gandia was his brother Cesare Borgia, Cardinal of Valencia.(1)
1 It is rather odd that, in the course of casting about for a possible
murderer of Gandia, public opinion should never have fastened upon
Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. He had lately been stripped of the
Patrimony of St. Peter that the governorship of this might be bestowed
upon Gandia; his resentment had been provoked by that action of the
Pope’s, and the relations between himself and the Borgias were strained
in consequence. Possibly there was clear proof that he could have had no
connection with the crime.
Now to examine more closely the actual motives given by those authorities and by later, critical writers, for attributing the guilt to Cesare.
In September of the year 1497, the Pope had dissolved the marriage of his daughter Lucrezia and Giovanni Sforza, and the grounds for the dissolution were that the husband was impotens et frigidus natura—admitted by himself.(2)
2 “El S. de Pesaro ha scripto qua de sua mano non haverla mai
cognosciuta et esser impotente, alias la sententia non se potea dare. El
prefato S. dice pero haver scripto cosi per obedire el Duca de Milano et
Aschanio” (Collenuccio’s letter from Rome to the Duke of Ferrara, Dec.
25, 1497).