Lucrezia Borgia: Scandal, Power, and Survival in Renaissance Italy

On a spring day in 1480, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia commissioned various astrologers to predict the future of his newborn child at his home in Rome. The girl was named Lucrezia and was the daughter of Vannozza dei Cattanei, a Roman woman renowned for her beauty. No one believed for a moment that the child’s father was Vannozza’s husband, as Vannozza had been Borgia’s favourite mistress for many years. To the Cardinal’s delight, astrologers predicted an extraordinary future for his illegitimate daughter.

Whether their predictions came true, the world does not know, but Lucrezia grew up to become one of the most notorious members of the powerful Borgia clan.

The notorious femme fatale is known for the suspicious deaths and political intrigues that have swirled around her and her family. But how much of her scandalous reputation was real and how much fictional?

Her life has long fascinated storytellers and artists alike, portraying her as a fatal and seductive woman who poisoned those she could not manipulate, engaged in orgies and had incestuous relationships with members of her family. Most of these descriptions have little or no basis in fact, and today many historians see Lucrezia as a victim of the machinations of her family’s quest for power. Her life is a vivid insight into the turbulent world of papal politics at the height of the Italian Renaissance and in the tumultuous years before the Protestant Reformation.

Italy at the time of Lucrezia’s birth

Lucrezia Borgia lived during Italy’s Renaissance period, which reached its peak in the 15th and 16th centuries, a time when Italian artists, sculptors, architects, scientists and others rose to fame. She was born into one of the most notorious families in world history.

The Borgias, who had a reputation for being a vicious, violent and politically treacherous family, wanted to gain as much control over Italy as possible. Their success was made possible by the fact that Italy at that time was more a geographical expression than a country, a peninsula divided into independent republics, duchies, kingdoms and the Papal States, united by the faintest sense of a common nationality. The concept of Italy as a political whole did not exist, apart from a vague xenophobia in which non-Italians were seen as barbarians.

The ambitious and cosmopolitan Borgias, originally from Spain, were viewed with concern and envy by the native Italian noble families. Pope Callistus III, who ascended to the papal throne at the beginning of the century, was a Borgia.

Although Italy’s individual states were strong, their rulers were more inclined to clash with each other than to ally against hostile states such as France or Spain.

Italy urgently needed to unify and strengthen itself. With the right political manoeuvres, powerful alliances could be forged and great power could be gained. Around Rome, the great noble families of Orsini, Colonna, Savelli and Caetani owed official allegiance to the Pope, but in practice they often fought against him and were loyal to the biggest paymaster among the larger states.

The Kingdom of Naples was at the centre of foreign invasions during Lucrezia’s lifetime, with the throne being challenged by both the Aragonese kings of the time and the descendants of the previous rulers of the French Anjou family. The Pope, as secular ruler, had the right to the Neapolitan crown, and it was this power that put him at the centre of the Italian wars, as both external powers, France and Spain, claimed hereditary rights to the kingdom.

It was a time of political turmoil and deadly intrigue; many political problems were solved simply by assassination. The men of the Borgia family followed this trend.

The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, in his History of Italy, described the year 1492, when Lucrezia’s father was elected Pope Alexander VI, as the end of the Golden Age and the beginning of Italy’s troubles.

The so-called Italian Wars ravaged Italy for the next 65 years, completely changing its political order and shaping Lucrezia Borgia’s entire life.

A scandalous cardinal becomes Pope

Rodrigo Borgia (the Spanish form of his surname is de Borja) was born in 1431 near Valencia, Spain, then part of the Kingdom of Aragon.

He came to Italy at the age of 18 to study ecclesiastical law at the University of Bologna, and quickly rose up the Roman Catholic Church ladder under the patronage of his uncle Alfonso Borja, who was elected Pope Calisto III in 1455.

By the end of the 1450s, Rodrigo was a cardinal, a powerful position in the powerful Papal States, which at that time controlled much of central Italy, far from the Vatican.

Rodrigo was not an average cardinal. He had many mistresses and several children, which was not unusual for church dignitaries at the time.

Cardinal Borgia was an extremely skilful and capable man, shrewd and ruthless, eager for money and wealth, but he also had a remarkable charm and a great desire for life and beautiful women. He had a strong sex drive and did not allow himself to be hindered by the annoying vow of celibacy.

The new Pope Pius II, who himself enjoyed complete sexual freedom, but perhaps more discreetly, reproached the licentious cardinal, without a hair on his tongue, for his licentious habits, luxury and profiteering as unfit for a Church dignitary. He rebuked him harshly on several occasions, but this did not affect Rodrigo’s “getting to know him” in the slightest.

Rodrigo was an impressive personality with a strong will and he did not allow anything to stand in the way of his ambitions, not even his children. He had eight, perhaps nine children: the first three were by unknown mothers, and after his ascension to the papal throne two more boys were born to equally unknown women, but his main mistress and the mother of the three children he loved most, Lucrezia and her two elder brothers Cesare and Juan, was Vannozza dei Cattanei.

Her relationship with Rodrigo ended shortly after Lucrezia’s birth, although she claimed that her last child, Gioffre, born in 1482, was Rodrigo’s son. Rodrigo himself doubted Gioffre’s paternity and suspected that the boy was the son of Vannozza’s second husband, to whom she was married at the time of Gioffre’s birth. Despite his doubts, he acknowledged him as his son, but he never gave him the affection and attention he gave to the other three children he had with Gioffre’s mother.

Vannozza benefited greatly from her relationship with the powerful Cardinal Borgia, becoming a wealthy woman with taverns in the elegant quarters of Rome and houses to rent out to artisans and prostitutes. The few surviving letters show that she was rakish in character and greedy for money and position.

She maintained contact with Rodrigo, then Pope Alexander VI, after the end of their affair, when she was already married to a third husband, but she does not seem to have played a major role in the lives of her children as they grew up. She was apparently happy enough with the arrangement of raising the children and with her position as the mother of the Pope’s children, which meant money and social advancement. While she was close to her sons throughout her life, she maintained her relationship with Lucrezia exclusively through letters.

The Pope’s daughter

Lucrezia Borgia was born on 18 April 1480 in Subiaco, near Rome. Her birth outside the city was probably due to Rodrigo’s early discretion about the existence of his illegitimate family, which is why we know very little about the girl’s early life. She is thought to have spent her first three years with her mother Vannozza, before her father moved her to the palace of his confidante and relative Adriana de Mila, who taught her the rudiments of high culture.

Unlike most educated women of the time, for whom the main source of knowledge was the nuns in the convents, Lucrezia’s education came from the circle of intellectuals at the papal court and included the humanities, which were being revived by the Catholic Church at the time. The Pope’s illegitimate daughter learned several languages and in later life became fluent in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Latin, and her humanist education included a thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, logic and philosophy.

She also learned to play the lute, sing and draw, which enabled her to move easily in the highest court circles. She loved music and poetry, both Spanish and Italian, owning collections of Spanish canons and Dante and Petrarch. Like the women and men of the upper classes of the time, she learned to dance with skill and elegance, an important part of court entertainments.

Adriana had a determined approach to education – she wanted to teach Lucrezia to “think”, not to “make brilliant sentences”. This education served the Pope’s daughter well throughout her life, which soon turned upside down.

Fed up with Vannozza, Rodrigo fell in love with the fifteen-year-old Giulia Farnese, daughter-in-law of Adriana de Milo and a notorious beauty. Giulia soon occupied an important place in Lucrezia’s life and they became close friends.

In August 1492, Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and he made no secret of his joy at having achieved his desired goal. Asked by the master of ceremonies, Burchard, whether he wanted to accept the papacy, he did not reply with the traditional “Volo” (“I want it”), but shouted enthusiastically, “Sono papa!”. (“I am Pope!”) – and, beaming and smiling, he immediately went to give his blessing to the assembled crowd and to the world, Urbi et orbi.

At the age of sixty, the Catalan occupied one of the most powerful positions, since as Pope he was considered the chosen of God and the only one who could crown kings – which meant that all the courts of Europe bowed deeply to him and showered him with gifts of immeasurable value. The result was corruption, with the spirit of the times adding its own, which unshackled itself from the shackles of the Middle Ages and began to glorify man and his body. And with the glorification of the body, of course, came a period of debauchery.

Nepotism, which was considered normal by the Italians of the time, was nothing new among the Renaissance popes. At the age of 16, Cesare was consecrated to the Church against his will and made a bishop, and two years later he was made a cardinal. Juan was destined for a military future and was appointed Duke of Gandia and sent to Valencia.

Cesare spent years convincing his father that he was not happy with the priesthood and, after Juan’s death, Rodrigo allowed him to leave the clergy and take up the post of commander of the papal army.

Gioffre was only eleven years old when his father took over the papacy, so he could not yet hold any office. A year later, his father married him, politically favourably, to Sanccia, illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso II of Naples.

Lucrezia’s future was inextricably linked to his father’s dynastic plan, as he wanted to make the most of her marriage.

Before his election as Pope, Rodrigo focused on building a power base in his native Valencia, forging and breaking two of Lucrezia’s engagements. After his election, however, his bargaining power changed dramatically and Alexander VI no longer saw a future for his daughter in Spain.

Lucrezia, who was not only attractive because of her powerful family – she was described by her contemporaries as a graceful beauty with golden hair – was a victim of her father’s changing pattern of alliances. She was soon the focus of great interest among the upper echelons of Roman society.

Countess of Pesaro

As Pope, Rodrigo was able to arrange a much more favourable marriage for Lucrezia, which would have consolidated his papal position and secured him allies.

He wanted a strong ally in northern Italy, so he chose as Lucrezia’s first husband 26-year-old Giovanni Sforza, a member of the powerful Sforza family, which ruled the Duchy of Milan and several other small states in northern Italy.

The marriage by proxy took place in Rome on 12 June 1492, the marriage contract stipulating that the 13-year-old Lucrezia, who had acquired the title Countess of Pesaro, would stay in Rome because of her youth and would not consummate the marriage for a year. The official wedding took place at the Vatican the following year and the chronicles of the time recorded extravagant celebrations that lasted long into the night.

Life in Pesaro, in the Prince’s palace in the main square, was pleasant enough for young Lucrezia. Pesaro society was less cosmopolitan than Roman society, but it was far from dull and provincial. Despite the inconvenience of Giovanni’s constant absence to serve as commander of the papal mercenary troops, Lucrezia was content: she had her own court and the local poets celebrated her with their madrigals.

But her father’s presence was constant, there was a very dense correspondence with the Vatican, and the Pope, feeling lonely, soon declared that he wanted his women back in Rome. In fact, the Pope’s mistress Giulia and his confidante Adriana de Mila travelled with Lucrezia to Pesaro.

Meanwhile, the Pope’s policy changed, as he soon realised that he was not benefiting much from his alliance with the Sforzas and that he needed stronger allies. He established friendly ties with the King of Naples, an enemy of the Sforza family, and decided to get rid of Giovanni. For this reason, he may have ordered Giovanni’s assassination.

Cesare, who must have been aware of the plot, probably told Lucrezia of his father’s intentions, who then warned her husband. Giovanni fled Rome and returned to Pesaro.

The Pope was determined to annul his daughter’s marriage and tried another approach. The inability of a husband to fulfil his marital obligations was one of the few grounds for divorce in the Middle Ages, so he demanded that Giovanni admit that he was impotent and that the marriage was thus not consummated. This infuriated Count Pesaro, who, outraged by the accusations of his impotence, began to insinuate that Lucrezia’s father and brother wanted their daughter and sister for their own pleasure.

During the negotiations, Lucrezia was sent to the San Sisto convent to await the outcome of the annulment proceedings. Shortly afterwards, she received the horrific news of the mysterious death of her brother Juan, who had been found stabbed and his throat slit in the Tiber.

The Pope ordered an inquiry, but cancelled it after a week. Rumours that the killer was from the Borgia house were growing louder. Gioffre resented Juan’s love affair with his wife Sancia, and Cesare envied his brother’s command of the Pope’s army and thought he might replace him as commander after his death, as indeed happened later. It also seemed strange that Cesare did not attend the funeral of his murdered brother.

There are more possible suspects behind Juan’s murder. The most likely explanation is that his killers were members of the Orsini family, because the Pope was planning to seize some of their properties and give them to Juan.

While Lucrezia’s father was pleading for her virginity during the annulment proceedings, the Borgia family’s enemies were whispering that Lucrezia was pregnant.

Giovanni was asked to publicly prove the falsity of the accusation, but he firmly refused. Having also lost the support of his own Sforza family, Giovanni – after six months of pressure on him – was forced to give in and sign a declaration claiming that he had no real marriage with his wife. In exchange for keeping Lucrezia’s substantial dowry, he confirmed that Lucrezia was still a virgin.

The marriage was annulled on 20 December 1497, and rumours that Giovanni’s now ex-wife had been in an incestuous relationship with her own father and brother followed Lucrezia for the rest of her life and continue to cast a shadow over the history of the Borgias to this day.

The alleged affair with her father’s butler

Alexander VI may have got what he wanted, but the price of Lucrezia’s reputation was high. Few believed that her marriage was not “consummated” by Giovanni’s impotence, since his first wife died in childbirth. The claim that Lucrezia was a virgin, which was so important for the remarriage, was considered ridiculous. Matarazzo, an Italian chronicler who was not sympathetic to the Borgias, wrote: “It was a decision that made all Italy laugh … it is generally known that Lucrezia is the biggest whore there has ever been in Rome.”

Within months of the divorce, Lucrezia was involved in another sex scandal. In mid-February 1498, the body of Pedro Calderon, known as Perotto, a handsome young Spaniard who was the Pope’s chamberlain, was discovered in the Tiber, in charge of passing messages between Lucrezia and her father. According to Burchard, who, as the Pope’s ceremonialist, was well versed in the gossip circulating in the papal court, Perotto “fell, not of his own accord, into the Tiber … which is much talked about in the city”.

One of Lucrezia’s ladies was found drowned with him. It seems likely that Cesare had them both killed for reasons closely linked to Lucrezia, who was almost certainly having an affair with Perotto, and this would have damaged the negotiations for a second marriage.

The affair may also have been the reason for Lucrezia’s isolation in the convent of San Sisto at a time when the Borgias were planning her divorce from Sforza. In March 1498, a Ferrara envoy claimed in a report to Duke Ercole that the Pope’s daughter had given birth to a child. As negotiations were underway at the time for a second marriage for Lucrezia, Cesare had every reason to remove the evidence of his sister’s misbehaviour, take revenge on Perotto and silence Lucrezia’s lady-in-waiting.

The whole mysterious affair was further complicated by the birth of a baby boy around the same time. This was the infamous Giovanni Borgia, known as Infans Romanus (Child of Rome).

Alexander VI issued two contradictory papal bulls – one declaring the boy to be Cesare’s illegitimate son, the other declaring Giovanni to be his child. Although the papal family admitted that the baby was from their own ranks, none of them wanted to reveal who the real parents of the newborn child were.

It was whispered that the newborn was Lucrezia’s child and that the likely candidates to be its father were either her ex-husband Giovanni Sforza or her young murdered lover Perotto. There were also rumours that the mysterious boy might be the product of an incestuous relationship between Lucrezia and her brother or even her father, Pope Alexander VI himself.

Either way, Infans Romanus has added another layer of dysfunctionality to Italy’s holiest family.

Tragic love

The Pope was intent on consolidating his alliance with the Aragonese royal family of Naples, so Lucrezia had to remarry. In July 1498 she married Alfonso of Aragon, illegitimate son of the Duke of Calabria, the handsome seventeen-year-old Duke of Bisceglie, and soon became pregnant. In February 1499 she miscarried and, although she was pregnant again soon afterwards, she did not know that internal events in her family would prevent her from living a long and happy life with her husband, with whom, to everyone’s surprise, she fell in love.

Cesare’s ambitions and Alexander’s international politics took a new turn that summer and the changing alliances of the Borgias began to worry Alfonso, who, fearing for his life, fled Rome for a time and took refuge, leaving Lucrezia in tears and six months pregnant. He wrote letters to her from exile, begging her to join him.

He should have known better about the Vatican intelligence system: the letters got into the Pope’s hands and Alexander VI forced Lucretia to beg Alfonso to return. Instead of allowing his daughter to be with her husband, the Pope appointed her governor of Spoleto.

The appointment of a nineteen-year-old woman to a post usually held by cardinals was a typical example of nepotism. But Lucrezia, despite her youth and pregnancy, carried out her “manly” duties diligently and proved many times later in life that she had inherited her father’s administrative skills.

Eventually Alfonso joined Lucrezia in Spoleto and, as the time for childbirth approached, they returned to Rome.

On the first of November, Lucrezia gave birth to a son, whom she named Rodrigo in his father’s honour. For a brief moment it must have seemed as if everything was going to be all right, because her father, brother and husband were united in joy at the arrival of their son and heir. But as the new century began, Cesare’s ambitions and plans plunged his family and Rome deeper into chaos.

In July 1500, Alfonso was brutally attacked on the steps of St Peter’s Basilica and suffered serious wounds. Although the most likely instigators of the assassination attempt were the Orsini, it is plausible to suggest that Cesare may have known about it – he had his own reasons for wanting to get his brother-in-law out of the way – and that he, rather than the Orsini, had detailed information about Alfonso’s movements. He is reported to have said, “I did not hurt the Duke, but if I had, it would have been only as much as he deserved.”

By all accounts, the Pope was shocked and horrified by the attack and had his son-in-law placed in an apartment above his own, where Lucrezia and Sancia, Alfonso’s sister and the wife of Lucrezia’s younger brother Gioffre, could look after him at all times. He also gave him some of his soldiers to look after him.

Almost exactly a month after the attack, Alfonso, who had recovered considerably, was sitting on his bed in his room, talking and laughing with his wife, his sister, his uncle and his envoy, when suddenly violence broke out. Michelotto, Cesare’s most sinister mercenary and executioner, burst into the room and seized Alfonso’s uncle and the royal envoy from Naples by force. He handed them over to the armed men who stood at the door to take them to prison.

The two terrified women rushed to the Pope to beg his pardon, while Michelotto strangled the nineteen-year-old Duke. When Lucrezia and Sancia returned and found his body, their screams filled the halls of the Vatican Palace.

The excuse that Alfonso had died because he had tried to shoot Cesare with a crossbow while the heir to the Borgia family had been walking in the gardens not long before was convenient to convince the Pope that Alfonso had to be got rid of, but most people thought that Alfonso’s murder was purely political and done on Cesare’s orders. After all, it was known that Cesare, after the failed assassination attempt on the Vatican steps, had come to Alfonso and whispered menacingly to him, “What did not happen at lunch may still happen at dinner.”

The Borgias had forged a new alliance with France, and murder to get rid of the family alliance with Naples, which had been forged by marriage, was a miserable but easy solution. Rumours were also growing that Cesare had ordered the murder of his sister’s husband because he was in love with his sister and jealous of her blossoming relationship with Alfonso.

Lucrezia deeply mourned her husband, whom she adored. She raged against her father and brother and did not believe them when they told her the reason for Alfonso’s murder.

As her grief and agitation became too much of a nuisance, they sent her to Nepi for several months. Alfonso was buried with almost indecent haste and after the funeral (at which Lucrezia was not present) Cesare visited his sister. Whether or not she forgave him for her husband’s murder, she and her brother remained extremely close for the rest of their lives.

The saddened young widow wrote letters from the castle of Nepi signed “most unhappy Princess of Salerno”, a title she had acquired by marrying Alfonso, but at the same time, during those lonely months, she decided to take control of her life and escape the endless intrigues of her father and brother.

A new life

This time, the Borgias were aiming very high. The Este family was one of the oldest and most powerful in Italy, and for nine hundred years had boasted the title of Duke of Ferrara. The Pope now wanted a union between his daughter and Alfonso, the son and heir of Ercolo d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.

There is no doubt that Lucrezia also wanted to marry. To be Duchess of a country as important as Ferrara was surely the highest position she could aspire to. Like Alexander VI and Cesare, she was ambitious, clever and realistic. Rome had become oppressive for her, her surroundings constantly reminding her of things she would have preferred to forget. This was her chance to stop being a card in the calculating games played by Alexander VI and Cesare.

Negotiations were difficult because neither Alfonso nor his father Ercole d’Este wanted a union with the Borgia family. The Borgias were seen as haughty foreigners who sought to marry the illegitimate daughter of the Pope into their illustrious family, and Lucrezia’s reputation was of the worst kind, as at only twenty years of age she had a very delicate past.

While negotiating his daughter’s marriage, Pope Alexander VI shocked the Vatican by allowing Lucrezia to take his place at a meeting he could not attend. This meant not only that he allowed a woman to preside over the affairs of the Catholic Church, but no less than the illegitimate daughter of the Pope.

The Borgias followed their simple prescription and, after a good year, overcame the disapproval and resentment of the Este family with bribes and threats. With great pomp, the couple married by proxy in Rome in September 1501.

Ercole was determined that Lucrezia should remain in Rome until he had received everything he wanted from the Pope. He demanded a large dowry, a high ecclesiastical position, more land and a reduction in church taxes. Lucrezia assured Ercole in letters that she would do everything in her power to serve him. The envoys of the Este family indicated, among other things, that they would have preferred Lucrezia to come to Ferrara, at least in appearance, as a virgin bride and without the “baggage” of her previous life.

For Lucrezia, the separation from her two-year-old son, who had been with her since birth, was terrible, but as a realist and a woman of her time, she apparently accepted the wishes of her new husband’s family without reservation. She left her son Rodrigo to be raised by relatives and never saw him again.

On 6 January 1502, Lucrezia finally left the city she had known all her life to face her new future in Ferrara. As she left with her large entourage, her father Pope Alexander went from window to window of the palace to see his beloved daughter one last time.

The journey to Ferrara, far in the north of the Italian peninsula, was long and made even longer by Lucrezia’s frequent requests to stop to wash her hair. Her blonde curls reached down to her knees and washing them – which she did every three days with a boiled mixture of vine ash, myrrh, horse hoof shavings and other selected ingredients – was a tedious task.

In Bologna, Alfonso d’Este surprised her by bursting into his bride’s room while she was combing her damp hair. This romantic gesture delighted Lucrezia, and the groom was taken aback by the attractiveness of his new wife. Together they arrived in Ferrara, where they were greeted with great honours and pomp by the Duke of Ercole d’Este.

Lucrezia’s youthful charm and education soon charmed her father-in-law and the rest of the Este family. Isabella d’Este, Alfonso’s sister and wife of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquise of Mantova, and a prominent patron of the arts, was one of the few who had a spiteful attitude towards her sister-in-law. Fearing that Lucrezia’s arrival would cause her to lose her position as the most influential woman in Ferrara, she considered the Ferrara bride a rival and wanted to surpass her at every opportunity.

Forced marriage or not, Alfonso found his wife sexually attractive and spent every night with her. What he did during the day was another matter, as he returned to his former life with prostitutes and tavern attendants, and Lucrezia felt lonely. Her entourage had returned to Rome, and with the departure of her ladies, including her confidante Adriana de Milo, Lucrezia found herself increasingly confined to her rooms.

In September 1502, she fell dangerously ill and gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. The illness recurred and, while she was on the verge of death, the Borgias, on the other side of Italy, seized all the lands of the Roman nobles through the deceit and violence of Cesare, and reached the height of their power.

The fall of the House of Borgia

The recovered Lucrezia began to enjoy court life and sought to get to know Ferrara and her customs better. She became a centre and inspiration for young artists and poets.

At the beginning of 1503, Cesare’s happiness, which had seemed so bright, began to fade. His success depended on an alliance with King Louis XII of France, but as Cesare had become too strong, the King no longer allowed him to continue his conquests and closed the road to his northward expansion. There was a great deal of money to be raised for new bribes and the Borgias, father and son, resorted to more terror, poisoning the rich victims and then having their houses ransacked.

In August 1503, disaster struck. The difficult political situation meant that the Pope remained in Rome, although the papal court usually left the city on hot summer days and retreated to the cooler countryside to avoid the malaria transmitted by the swamp mosquito.

After a banquet at Cardinal Castellesi‘s house, perhaps in honour of the 11th anniversary of Rodrigo’s ascension to the papal throne, the Pope and Cesare fell ill with an illness that caused vomiting and high fever. For a while, the Pope seemed to be recovering while his son’s condition deteriorated, but then things took a turn for the worse. Pope Alexander VI was still celebrating Mass on the morning of 18 August, but by the evening he was dead.

As Cardinal Castellesi was to be Cesare’s next target in the poisoning scheme, it was whispered that the Pope’s son had mistakenly poisoned himself and his father instead of the Cardinal, but Alexander’s death was probably caused by malaria.

With the death of his father, Pope Alexander VI, Cesare’s power diminished and Lucrezia was able to distance herself from the deadly world of politics.

The new Pope Pius III supported Cesare, but his reign ended after only a few days, and he was succeeded by the old enemy of the Borgia, Julius II, who immediately seized all their property and sealed their chambers because he did not want to live in the same rooms as the Borgia, “who had profaned the holy Church as no one had ever done before”.

Threatened by his enemies, Cesare fled to his wife in Spain, where he died in 1507 during the Battle of Navarre.

Lucrezia’s position became precarious after her father’s death. The Pope, who had been the source of her power and influence, was now dead. The reasons of state that had prompted the Duke of Ferrara to marry the Pope’s daughter no longer existed. Moreover, everyone knew that her divorce from Giovanni Sforza on the grounds of “illegitimacy” was a farce, and it could be argued that her marriage to Alfonso had no legal basis.

From Lucrezia’s point of view, the worst thing was that she had not yet produced a male heir for the Este family. But fortunately there was no sign that they would ever consider getting rid of her; if they did, they would have to return her large dowry after all. With the exception of her sister-in-law Isabella, everyone in the Este family respected and loved her.

The death of Pope Alexander VI was also a danger for Lucrezia’s child Rodrigo Bisceglie, so she asked the Este family to take custody of him, which was not acceptable to them and they wanted to send the poor child to Spain. Lucrezia, with great effort, negotiated a compromise whereby Rodrigo would be brought up by his aunt Sancia in Naples. Only the “child of Rome”, Giovanni Borgia, was accepted in Ferrara as her half-brother.

The Duchess of Ferrara

After Ercole’s death in January 1505, Alfonso became the new Duke of Ferrara and some stability finally appeared in Lucrezia’s life. During her husband’s frequent absences, she took the management of the estate into her own hands and once again showed her talent as a stewardess. She also proved to be a patron of culture and the Ferrara court became the centre of the art and literature of the Italian Renaissance.

As Duchess of Ferrara, she cleverly invested her money in the many Ferrara marshes so that they could be drained and turned into farmland. She then reinvested her wealth back into monasteries and hospitals, earning her the respect and admiration of her subjects.

Lucrezia also played an active role in defending her new home, Ferrara. In 1510 Pope Julius II excommunicated Alfonso as part of his intrigue to add Ferrara to the Papal States. The Pope’s daughter was praised for her courage and calmness during the crisis and for pledging her jewels to raise money for the defence of Ferrara.

Lucrezia and Alfonso’s marriage was one of mutual respect and affection, but Lucrezia longed for the love she had for Alfonso of Aragon, but never found it again. The couple seemed happy from the start, despite the fact that they were involved in numerous affairs.

Shortly after the arrival of the poet and great humanist Pietro Bembo in Ferrara in early June 1503, Lucrezia began a love affair with Bembo, ten years her senior. Their love affair culminated in the next two years when Bembo left Ferrara in 1505, when the plague began to kill him.

In addition to the surviving letters, which the English Romantic poet Lord Byron described three hundred years later as “the most beautiful love letters in the world”, a lock of hair that Lucrezia gave to Pietro as a promise of steadfast love has also survived.

Lucrezia also enjoyed a relationship with her brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga for many years. The affair between Francesco and Lucrezia was more sexual than sentimental, as evidenced by the feverish love letters they wrote to each other. The long-running affair was to end when Francesco contracted syphilis as a result of his encounters with prostitutes.

In 1512, Lucrezia heard the news of the premature death of her twelve-year-old son Rodrigo, whom she had had with Alfonso of Aragon and whom she had not seen since she had been forced to leave him in Rome ten years earlier. Although she was separated from her son, she made sure that he was well looked after by choosing governors, teachers and administrators to oversee the Duchy of Bisceglie, which he had inherited from his father. She often wrote him letters and sent him gifts.

Overwhelmed with grief, she is said to have spent more and more time in her rooms or in the nearby monasteries and from then on lived a more pious and retired life. She devoted herself even more to charity, faith and piety, and began to wear a sackcloth shirt under her embroidered robes as a form of penance. She withdrew into herself and was plagued by increasingly frequent bouts of melancholy.

Lucrezia bore Alfonso three healthy sons, but her history of disastrous pregnancies, miscarriages, premature births and sickly, short-lived children could have been the result of Alfonso’s syphilis. Alfonso had regular sex with Lucrezia, resulting in repeated pregnancies that weakened her and ultimately led to her death.

On 14 June 1519, Lucrezia gave birth to a girl, whom she named Isabella Maria in honour of Alfonso’s sister Isabella d’Este. The baby died the same day and Lucrezia, who had become very weak during her tenth pregnancy, fell seriously ill after giving birth.

Despite being treated with frequent bloodletting – even her hair was cut off to ease her torment – her condition worsened and she died on 24 June at the age of 39, in the constant presence of her worried husband.

Legacy and stigma

Lucrezia Borgia’s life is surrounded by many dark myths and legends. Her name has been synonymous with evil for more than 500 years, as her life has been distorted by generations of historians, who have seen it through the prism of her family’s crimes and depravity, which were compounded by the hateful chroniclers of the time.

Lucrezia is said to have been a cunning seductress and adulteress who loved to poison her enemies. Although historians have not been able to confirm any of Lucrezia’s alleged poisonings, it is true that the enemies of the Borgia had a habit of dying suddenly and mysteriously. During her lifetime, rumours circulated that the Pope’s daughter wore a hollow ring containing various poisons, which she often used to poison the drinks of the Borgia family’s opponents at lavish family dinners. Perhaps the legend is a literal version of the reports of Lucrezia poisoning the minds of others with her charm.

We do not know enough about Lucrezia from historical sources to say with certainty whether any of the most notorious stories about her active participation in her father’s and brother’s crimes are true. However, a careful examination of her life from various manuscript documents, which has been undertaken by various historians in recent times, reveals that such rumours were not always deserved.

Many of the allusions to her illegitimate child and alleged incestuous behaviour may have been in revenge for the evil deeds committed by her father Rodrigo and brother Cesare.

Lucrezia grew up in a world where male dominance was taken for granted. Because she understood the workings of power, she often turned events in her favour; she accepted situations and consequences for the good of her family. She shared the unusual mixture of piety, sensuality and complete indifference to sexual morality that characterised her family, but when she was able to express herself, she proved to be a good, kind and compassionate woman.

Many historians in the 19th century began to cautiously correct her reputation, but the general conclusion was that, if she was not a ruthless careerist and womanizer, she was only a helpless tool and victim of the men in her family who embodied ruthless Machiavellian politics and sexual corruption. She was to play the role of the weakest chess piece, whose marriages were used to further the ambitions of her father and brother.

As Duchess of Ferrara, the ambitious Lucrezia managed to rise above the prestige of her Borgia family by showing great intelligence and skill in managing her life. She reigned at a magnificent court and was the centre of attention of a circle of poets and intellectuals. In times of war and plague, she exercised judicial authority and supervised the defence of Ferrara.

Lucrezia’s story is the story of a woman who did what she had to do to survive in a dangerous world run by men. In the end, only childbirth, the curse of the age for women, killed her.