Cesare Borgia

• 1. Introduction

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  Here lies in a little earth he whom everyone feared, he who held peace and war in his hand. These lines are tied to the tomb of Cesare Borgia in Viana, a town in northern Spain. A visiting bishop wrote them down from memory in the 16th century, and the wording shifted over the years. The man they praise was born in Italy, the son of a cardinal who would later become pope. How does a pope's son come to hold peace and war in his hand? Why did a Florentine diplomat study him so closely that his reports survive? And why does a grave that boasted of his power no longer exist? Those questions run through the life of a man who was a cardinal, a soldier and a duke.

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• 2. The Borgia Inheritance

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  Subiaco, in the Papal States, is where Cesare Borgia was born, in either 1475 or 1476. Even the year is argued over, though the 13th of September 1475 is the date attached to his name. His father was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, born Roderic Llançol i de Borja, who would become Pope Alexander VI. His mother was an Italian mistress named Vannozza dei Cattanei, about whom little is recorded.

  The family came from the Kingdom of Valencia and rose to prominence in the middle of the 15th century. In 1455, Cesare's great-uncle Alphonso Borgia, who lived from 1378 to 1458 and had been Bishop of Valencia, was elected Pope Callixtus III. Cesare's own father would become the first pope to openly acknowledge children born outside marriage. Cesare had three full siblings, Giovanni, Lucrezia and Gioffre, although the fatherhood of Gioffre was later contested.

  The question of Cesare's legitimacy produced rival stories. The Italian historian Stefano Infessura wrote that Cardinal Borgia falsely presented the boy as the child of Domenico d'Arignano, the nominal husband of Vannozza. A likelier solution came on the 1st of October 1480, when Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull excusing Cesare from proving the circumstances of his birth.

  The Church was meant to be his career. After schooling in Perugia and Pisa, he studied law at the Studium Urbis, known today as the Sapienza University of Rome. Titles arrived at a startling pace. At 15 he became Bishop of Pamplona and Tudela, and at 17 he became Archbishop of Valencia. In 1493 he gained the bishoprics of Castres and Elne, and in 1494 he became abbot of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa. When his father was elected pope, Cesare was made a cardinal at 18.

  Yet his ordination stopped at the rank of deacon, on the 26th of March 1494. He never became a priest or a consecrated bishop, and that limit would surface again in the paperwork that ended his church career.

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• 3. A Brother's Death

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  Giovanni Borgia, Cesare's brother, was the son on whom Alexander VI pinned the family's hopes. The pope made him captain-general of the papal military forces. In 1497 Giovanni was assassinated, under circumstances that have never been fully explained.

  Several contemporaries pointed at Cesare. The accusation first appears in a despatch from the Ferrarese ambassador at Venice, dated the 22nd of February 1498. The ambassador wrote: "I recently learned how the death of the Duke of Candia was caused by his brother, the Cardinal." Some argue the two men were personal rivals, and that Giovanni's removal freed Cesare to leave the Church and take his brother's military place.

  The case against Cesare has a hole in it. He had no clear motive, because a powerful secular position was likely to come his way whether or not Giovanni lived. It is also possible that Giovanni was killed over a sexual liaison. His role in the murder remains unclear.

  Whatever the truth, the way out of the Church opened quickly. On the 17th of August 1498, Cesare resigned as cardinal to pursue a military career. The same day, King Louis XII of France named him Duke of Valentinois. The title looks almost arbitrary, but it echoed his nickname, Il Valentino, meaning "The Valencian." That nickname came from his father's Latin papal epithet, Valentinus, which pointed to the family's Valencian roots. It also recalled Cesare's earlier post as Cardinal of Valencia.

  The legal release followed on the 6th of September 1499, when he was laicised from his diaconal orders. He was now a layman, free to fill the soldier's role that Giovanni had once held.

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• 4. Conquest of the Romagna

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  Louis XII invaded Italy in 1499, and Cesare rode beside him into Milan. Gian Giacomo Trivulzio had just driven out the city's duke, Ludovico Sforza. Cesare's rise rested on his father's gift for handing out favors and on his alliance with France. That alliance was reinforced on the 10th of May 1499, when he married Charlotte d'Albret, sister of King John III of Navarre. The couple had a daughter, Louise Borgia, who lived from 1500 to 1553.

  Alexander saw an opening to carve out a state for his son. He declared that all of his vicars in Romagna and the Marche were deposed. Cesare was named commander of the papal armies, which combined Italian mercenaries with 300 cavalry and 4,000 Swiss infantry lent by the French king. His first targets were Imola and Forlì, ruled by Caterina Sforza, the mother of the Medici condottiero Giovanni dalle Bande Nere.

  After those two cities fell, the French troops were taken away. Cesare still returned to Rome for a triumph and received the title of Papal Gonfalonier from his father. In 1500, Alexander created twelve new cardinals, and the money this raised paid for a stronger force. Cesare hired the condottieri Vitellozzo Vitelli, Gian Paolo Baglioni, Giulio and Paolo Orsini, and Oliverotto Euffreducci, and the Romagna campaign resumed.

  The lords of the region fell one after another. Giovanni Sforza, the first husband of Cesare's sister Lucrezia, was driven out of Pesaro. Pandolfo Malatesta lost Rimini. Faenza surrendered, and its young lord, Astorre III Manfredi, was later drowned in the Tiber on Cesare's orders. In May 1501, Cesare was created Duke of Romagna. Hired by Florence, he then added the lordship of Piombino.

  On the 24th of June 1501, Borgia's troops stormed Capua, ending a siege in which he commanded French forces. Naples and Capua were defended by Prospero and Fabrizio Colonna. Meanwhile his condottieri finished the siege of Piombino in 1502.

  In June 1502, Cesare marched into the Marche and took Urbino and Camerino by treason. Bologna was his next goal. But Vitellozzo Vitelli and the three Orsini brothers, Giulio, Paolo and Francesco, feared his cruelty and plotted against him. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Giovanni Maria da Varano went back to Urbino and Camerino, and Fossombrone revolted. The plotters struggled, because Cesare's subjects had so far enjoyed his rule. He called his loyal generals to Imola and waited for the loose alliance against him to fall apart.

  On the 31st of December 1502, Cesare invited the conspirators to reconcile. Instead he imprisoned his condottieri at Senigallia, then called Sinigaglia, and had them strangled. The historian Paolo Giovio called it a "wonderful deceiving." In 1503, Cesare conquered the Republic of San Marino, and the next move he planned was Tuscany.

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• 5. A Patron Lost

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  News of Alexander VI's death in 1503 reached Cesare as he prepared to invade Tuscany. He was recovering in Castel Sant'Angelo from malarial fever, probably caught on the same occasion that gave his father the fatal illness. Even so, his troops controlled the papal conclave of September 1503.

  The new pope, Pius III, backed Cesare and confirmed him as Gonfaloniere. Pius died after a pontificate of just twenty-six days. Giuliano Della Rovere, Cesare's deadly enemy, then won him over with offers of money and continued papal support for Borgia policy in the Romagna. Della Rovere was elected Pope Julius II by a near-unanimous vote of the cardinals in the conclave of October 1503, and he ignored every promise.

  Cesare saw his mistake and tried to repair it, but Julius blocked each attempt. One result was that Cesare had to hand back San Marino after holding it for six months. Ferdinand II of Aragon was hostile as well. In Naples, Cesare was captured by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, a man he had counted as an ally. While he sat in prison, the papacy took back his lands.

  In 1504 he was moved to Spain and held first in the Castle of Chinchilla de Montearagón, in La Mancha. After an escape attempt he was sent north to the Castle of La Mota, in Medina del Campo near Segovia. From there he did escape, with help. He crossed Santander, Durango and Gipuzkoa and reached Pamplona on the 3rd of December 1506. King John III of Navarre welcomed him warmly, since the kingdom lacked an experienced commander and feared a Castilian invasion.

  Cesare retook the town of Viana in Navarre from forces loyal to Louis de Beaumont, the count of Lerín. The count was Ferdinand's conspiratorial ally in Navarre, and he would later pave the way for Ferdinand's invasion in 1512 against John III and Catherine of Navarre. Cesare could not take Viana's castle, so he besieged it.

  In the early morning of the 11th of March 1507, during a heavy storm, a party of knights fled the castle. Furious at how the siege was going, Cesare galloped after them and found himself alone. The knights saw this and turned on him in an ambush. A spear gave him a fatal wound. His attackers stripped away his rich clothing, his valuables and a leather mask that covered half his face. They left him naked and abandoned, and King John III of Navarre would soon order a marbled mausoleum for the body.

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• 6. Eyes at His Court

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  From the 7th of October 1502 to the 18th of January 1503, Niccolò Machiavelli lived at Cesare's court as Secretary of the Florentine Chancellery. He sent regular dispatches to his superiors in Florence, and many survive in his Collected Works. He later turned Cesare into a lesson in The Prince, using him to show the dangers of gaining a principality through someone else's power.

  Machiavelli judged that Cesare ruled the Romagna with skill and tact for the most part. The weakness was borrowed strength. When Alexander died and a rival to the Borgias took the papal seat, Cesare was overthrown within months. Machiavelli argued that if Cesare had won the new pope's favor, he would have been a very successful ruler. Machiavelli also wrote a lesser-known work, The Description, about how Cesare answered the Magione conspiracy. By deceit, he trapped and then executed the rival Italian lords who served him as mercenaries.

  Machiavelli credited Cesare with two notable episodes. One is the way he pacified the Romagna, which is discussed in chapter VII of The Prince. The other is the killing of his captains at Senigallia on New Year's Eve of 1502.

  Later readers have argued over what to make of this admiration. Some scholars see Machiavelli's Borgia as a forerunner of the state crimes of the 20th century. Macaulay and Lord Acton placed Machiavelli's portrait in context. They explained his admiration for such violence as a product of the widespread criminality and corruption of the age.

  The diplomat also noticed the man's moods. Cesare could be secretive and taciturn, then loquacious and boastful. Machiavelli saw bursts of demonic activity in which he stayed up all night receiving and sending messengers. These alternated with spells of unaccountable sloth, when he stayed in bed and refused to see anyone. He was quick to take offense and kept his distance from his own entourage. Yet he was open with his subjects, liked joining local sports and cut a dashing figure. At other times Machiavelli described "inexhaustible" energy, an unrelenting genius for war and diplomacy, and days and nights without apparent need for sleep.

  A second famous witness was the artist Leonardo da Vinci. Between 1502 and 1503, Cesare briefly employed him as a military architect and engineer. He gave Leonardo an unlimited pass to inspect and direct all construction, current or planned, across his domain. In Romagna, Leonardo built the canal from Cesena to the Porto Cesenatico.

  Before Cesare, Leonardo had served for many years at the Milanese court of Ludovico Sforza, until Louis XII drove Sforza out of Italy. After leaving Cesare, Leonardo could not find another patron in Italy. King Francis I of France eventually persuaded him to enter his service, and Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in France.

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• 7. Bones in the Street

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  A marbled mausoleum at the altar of the Church of Santa María in Viana first held Cesare's body. The church stands on one of the stops of the Camino de Santiago. The epitaph carved there was recopied and changed over the years. The version quoted most often now comes from the 18th century, published by the priest and historian Francisco de Alesón.

  The tomb did not last. The circumstances are not well known, but it was destroyed at some point between 1523 and 1608, while Santa María was being renovated and enlarged. According to tradition, a Bishop of Calahorra thought it improper to keep the remains of "that degenerate" inside the church. The monument was torn down, and the bones were reburied under the street in front, where everyone passing through the town would walk over them.

  The remains were later moved to Viana's town hall, directly across from Santa María, and stayed there until 1953. They were then reburied just outside the church, safe from footsteps. A memorial stone was placed over the grave, and in English translation it called Borgia Generalissimo of both the papal and the Navarrese forces.

  In the late 1980s, a movement arose to dig him up again and return him to the church interior. Church officials rejected it, citing a recent ruling that only a pope or a cardinal could be buried inside. Because Cesare had given up the cardinalate, they decided it would be improper to place his bones there.

  The matter flared again in 2007. It was reported that Fernando Sebastián Aguilar, the Archbishop of Pamplona, would give way after more than 50 years of petitions. The move would take place on the 11th of March 2007, as the 500th anniversary of Cesare's death approached. An Archbishopric spokesman then declared that the church does not authorize any such practice. The local church added: "we have nothing against the transfer of his remains. Whatever he may have done in life, he deserves to be forgiven now."

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• 8. What He Left Behind

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  Cesare fathered at least 11 illegitimate children beyond his daughter Louise. One of them, Girolamo Borgia, married Isabella Contessa di Carpi. Another, Camilla Lucrezia Borgia, was taken after his death to Ferrara, to the court of her aunt Lucrezia Borgia.

  Philosophers kept returning to him long after his death. Machiavelli's The Prince appeared in 1532. Friedrich Nietzsche discussed Cesare in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, Twilight of the Idols in 1889 and The Antichrist in 1895. Theodor Adorno wrote about him in Minima Moralia in 1951, and Max Horkheimer in a 1982 work on egoism and freedom movements. Louis Althusser followed in The Philosophy of the Encounter in 2006.

  Biographers have kept up the pace. Rafael Sabatini published The Life of Cesare Borgia in 1912, and Carlo Beuf followed in 1942 with Cesare Borgia: The Machiavellian Prince. Jean Plaidy included him in A Triptych of Poisoners in 1958, and E. R. Chamberlin wrote The Fall of the House of Borgia in 1974. Sarah Bradford wrote Cesare Borgia in 1976, then The Borgias in 1981 with John Prebble. More recent studies include Paul Strathern's The Artist, The Philosopher and the Warrior in 2009, G. J. Meyer's The Borgias: The Hidden History in 2013 and Samantha Morris's Cesare Borgia in a Nutshell in 2016.

  Fiction has been just as eager. Samuel Shellabarger's 1947 novel Prince of Foxes features him, and Orson Welles played Cesare in the 1949 film version. Oliver Cotton took the role in the 1981 BBC series The Borgias. In 2011, Francois Arnaud played him in an American series of the same name, while Mark Ryder played him in the European series Borgia. A parody of The Addams Family in series 4 of Horrible Histories gave the part to Mathew Baynton. Mario Puzo, creator of The Godfather, made him a character in The Family. In Brazilian literature, Miguel M. Abrahão made him a lead in The Devil's Strip.

  Games, songs and comics have taken him up too. Cesare is the main antagonist of the 2010 video game Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, voiced by Andreas Apergis and built mainly by Ubisoft Montreal with help from four other Ubisoft studios. The Hatsune Miku and KAITO song "Cantarella" is based on Cesare and his sister Lucrezia. You Higuri's manga Cantarella is a dark fantasy of his life with supernatural elements. Fuyumi Soryo's manga Cesare: Il Creatore che ha distrutto follows him from the age of 15. A musical adaptation of it premiered in 2023, with Akinori Nakagawa in the original title role.

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