Rafael Sabatini - The Life of Cesare Borgia

He crashed down in all the glory of his rich armour, which those brigand-soldiers already coveted. And thus he died—mercifully, maybe happily, for he had no time in which to taste the bitterness of death—that awful draught which he had forced upon so many.

Within a few moments of his falling, this man who had been a living force, whose word had carried law from the Campagna to the Bolognese, was so much naked, blood-smeared carrion—for those human vultures stripped him to the skin; his very shirt must they have. And there, a stark, livid corpse, of no more account than any dog that died last Saturday, they left Cesare Borgia of France, Duke of Romagna and Valentinois, Prince of Andria, and Lord of a dozen Tyrannies.

The body was found there anon by those who so tardily rode after their leader, and his dismayed troopers bore those poor remains to Viana. The king, arriving there that very day, horror-stricken at the news and sight that awaited him, ordered Cesare a magnificent funeral, and so he was laid to rest before the High Altar of Sainte Marie de Viane.

To rest? May the soul of him rest at least, for men—Christian men—have refused to vouchsafe that privilege to his poor ashes.

Nearly two hundred years later—at the close of the seventeenth century, a priest of God and a bishop, one who preached a gospel of love and mercy so infinite that he dared believe by its lights no man to have been damned, came to disturb the dust of Cesare Borgia. This Bishop of Calahorra—lineal descendant in soul of that Pharisee who exalted himself in God's House, thrilled with titillations of delicious horror at the desecrating presence of the base publican—had his pietist's eyes offended by the slab that marked Cesare Borgia's resting-place. (62)

The pious, Christian bishop had read of this man—perhaps that life of him published by the apostate Gregorio Leti under the pen-name of Tommaso Tommasi, which had lately seen the light—and he ordered the tomb's removal from that holy place. And thus it befell that the ashes of Cesare Borgia were scattered and lost.

Charlotte d'Albret was bereft of her one friend, Queen Jeanne, in that same year of Cesare's death. The Duchess of Valentinois withdrew to La Motte­Feuilly, and for the seven years remaining of her life was never seen other than in mourning; her very house was equipped with sombre, funereal furniture, and so maintained until her end, which supports the view that she had conceived affection and respect for the husband of whom she had seen so little.

On March 14, 1514, that poor lady passed from a life which appears to have offered her few joys.

Louise de Valentinois—a handsome damsel of the age of fourteen—remained for three years under the tutelage of the Duchess of Angoulême—the mother of King Francis I—to whom Charlotte d'Albret had entrusted her child. Louise married, at the age of seventeen, Louis de la Trémouille, Prince de Talmont and Vicomte de Thouars, known as the Knight Sans Peur et Sans Reproche. She maintained some correspondence with her aunt, Lucrezia Borgia, whom she had never seen, and ever signed herself "Louise de Valentinois." At the age of thirty—Trémouille having been killed at Pavia—she married, in second nuptials, Philippe de Bourbon-Busset.

Lucrezia died in 1519, one year after her mother, Vanozza de'Catanei, with whom she corresponded to the end.

REQUIESCANT!

St. Francisco Borgia, S.J.—great-grandson of Pope Alexander VI, born at Gandia, in Spain, in 1510.

Pasquale Villari in his Machiavelli i suoi Tempi

See Burchard's Diarium, Thuasne Edition, Vol. II. p.442 et seq.

He was not ordained priest until 1471, after the election of Sixtus IV.

Don Francisco de Borja, born at Valencia in 1441.

Macchiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine.

In a letter to Francesco Gonzaga.

Istorie Florentine.

Istoria d'Italia.

See the supplement to the Appendix of Thuasne's edition of Burchard's Diarium.

D'Arignano is as much a fiction as the rest of Infessura's story.

"Facendomi intendere the epsa Duchessa é di etá di anni ventidui, li quali finiranno a questo Aprile; in el qual tempo anche lo Illmo. Duca di Romagna fornirá anni ventisei."

A contract never executed.

"Item mes attenent que dita Dona Lucretia a XVIIII de Abril prop. vinent entrará in edat de dotze anys."

1 The glory of the Sistine Chapel, however, is Michelangelo's "Last Judgement," which was added later, in the reign of Pope Julius II

(Giuliano della Rovere).

The gold florin, ducat, or crown was equal to ten shillings of our present money, and had a purchasing power of five times that amount.

Macchiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine.

The silly interpretation of this afforded by later writers, that this physician attempted transfusion of blood—silly, because unthinkable in an age which knew nothing of the circulation of the blood—has already been exploded.

"...essendo concordi tutti i cardinali, quasi da contrari voti rivolti tutti in favore di uno solo, crearono lui sommo ponteflce" (Casanatense MSS). See P. Leonetti, Alessandro VI.

"Fu pubblicato il Cardinale Vice-Cancelliere in Sommo Pontefice Alessandro VI(to) nuncupato, el quale dopo una lunga contentione fu creato omnium consensum—ne ii manco un solo voto" (Valori's letter to the Otto di Pratica, August 12, 1492). See Supplement to Appendix in E. Thuasne's edition of Burchard's Diarium.

Cardinals Piccolomini, de'Medici, and Giuliano della Rovere.

Istoria d'Italia, tom. V.

Touching Lodovico Maria's by-name of "Il Moro"—which is generally translated as "The Moor," whilst in one writer we have found him mentioned as "Black Lodovico," Benedetto Varchi's explanation (in his Storia Fiorentina) may be of interest. He tells us that Lodovico was not so called on account of any swarthiness of complexion, as is supposed by Guicciardini, because, on the contrary, he was fair; nor yet on account of his device, showing a Moorish squire, who, brush in hand, dusts the gown of a young woman in regal apparel, with the motto, "Per Italia nettar d'ogni bruttura"; this device of the Moor, he tells us, was a rébus or pun upon the word "moro," which also means the mulberry, and was so meant by Lodovico. The mulberry burgeons at the end of winter and blossoms very early. Thus Lodovico symbolized his own prudence and readiness to seize opportunity betimes.

Ferdinand Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia.

See, inter alia, the letters of Alfonso d'Este and Giovanni Gonzaga on her death, quoted in Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia.

"Et multa alia dicta sunt; que hic non scribo, que aut non sunt; vel si sunt, incredibilia" (Infessura, Diarium).

La Vie de César Borgia.

Thus in the matter of the fifty silver cups tossed by the Pope into the ladies' laps, "sinum" is the word employed by Infessura—a word which has too loosely been given its general translation of "bosom," ignoring that it equally means "lap" and that "lap" it obviously means in this instance. M. Yriarte, however, goes a step further, and prefers to translate it as "corsage," which at once, and unpleasantly, falsifies the picture; and he adds matter to dot the I's to an extent certainly not warranted even by Infessura.