Pope Alexander VI

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Alexander VI died on the 18th of August 1503, and what happened to his body in the summer heat of Rome became the talk of every court in Europe. His corpse, left for public viewing, had swelled and blackened so severely that the Venetian ambassador described it as "the ugliest, most monstrous and horrible dead body that was ever seen, without any form or likeness of humanity." No devoted follower dared, as custom required, to kiss his hands or feet. This was the end of a man who had served the Church for nearly six decades, who had helped decide the fate of Ferdinand and Isabella's marriage, who had divided the New World between Spain and Portugal with a line on a map, and who had fathered children he pretended for years were someone else's. The questions his life raises are not simple ones. Was Rodrigo Borgia the monster that his enemies and successors claimed? Or was he something harder to categorize: a shrewd operator of a dangerous era who happened to hold the most powerful religious office in Christendom?

• 2. A Valencian in Rome

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  Roderic de Borja was born around 1431 in Xàtiva, a town near Valencia that was then part of the Crown of Aragon. His father was Jofré Llançol i Escrivà, and his mother was Isabel de Borja y Cavanilles. He carried his father's surname, Llançol, until 1455, when he adopted his mother's family name of Borja after her brother Alonso rose to become Pope Callixtus III. In Italian, that name became Borgia, and it is under that form that history remembers him.

  His entry into the Church came early. At age 14, in 1445, he was appointed sacristan at the Cathedral of Valencia by his uncle, who was already a cardinal. By 1448 he held canon positions at the cathedrals of Valencia, Barcelona, and Segorbe simultaneously, and his uncle arranged for him to collect the associated incomes without being physically present, freeing the young man to travel to Rome. There he studied under Gaspare da Verona, a humanist tutor, before heading to Bologna, where he graduated not merely as Doctor of Law but, according to the record, as "the most eminent and judicious jurisprudent."

  When his uncle became Callixtus III in 1455, the appointments accelerated. Rodrigo was made bishop of Valencia, then Dean of Santa Maria in Xàtiva. The following year he was ordained deacon and created cardinal-deacon of San Nicola in Carcere. In 1457, sent to Ancona as a papal legate to suppress a revolt, he succeeded, and as a reward Callixtus named him vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Church. He would hold that post for 35 years.

• 3. The Art of the Conclave

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  Through the reigns of five consecutive popes, Rodrigo Borgia survived by making himself indispensable. When Callixtus III died in 1458, Borgia was too young to seek the papacy himself, so he threw his weight behind Cardinal Piccolomini, who became Pius II. The new pope rewarded him with the chancellorship and a lucrative abbey. When Pius died in 1464, Borgia delivered the vote to his friend Pietro Barbo, who became Paul II, and kept his position again.

  By the conclave of 1471, Borgia had the wealth and standing to mount a bid of his own, but he faced a near-impossible obstacle: there were only three non-Italian cardinals eligible, making his election unlikely. He played kingmaker again, this time gathering votes for Francesco della Rovere, the uncle of his future rival Giuliano della Rovere. Sixtus IV, as della Rovere became, promoted Borgia to cardinal-bishop and consecrated him Bishop of Albano. He also sent Borgia to Spain as a papal legate, where Borgia made a decision that would quietly shape European history: he approved the marriage dispensation for Ferdinand and Isabella, who were second cousins, and the couple made him godfather to their first son. The marriage unified Castile and Aragon into Spain. On his return voyage, Borgia narrowly survived a storm that sank a nearby galley carrying 200 men of his household.

  When the conclave of 1492 finally opened following the death of Innocent VIII on the 25th of July, Borgia was 61 years old. The ceremony's master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, recorded in his diary that it was a particularly expensive campaign. Giuliano della Rovere, now his open rival, was backed by King Charles VIII of France to the tune of 200,000 gold ducats, with another 100,000 from the Republic of Genoa. Borgia won Ascanio Sforza's support with promises and bribes that reportedly included four mule-loads of silver. On the 11th of August 1492, he was elected and took the name Alexander VI.

• 4. Dividing the World

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  The papal bull Inter caetera, issued on the 4th of May 1493, drew a line down a map of the Atlantic and told Spain and Portugal which half of the newly discovered world belonged to each of them. Christopher Columbus had returned from the Americas only months before, and the Spanish crown wanted its claim confirmed. Alexander confirmed it, and the bull became the basis of the Treaty of Tordesillas.

  What that line meant for the peoples already living in those lands became fiercely disputed by historians. Three bulls issued by Alexander in 1493 granted Spain rights over the newly discovered Americas similar to those Pope Nicholas V had previously granted Portugal. Francisco Morales Padrón, writing in 1979, concluded that these bulls gave power to enslave indigenous peoples. Minnich, writing in 2010, countered that the trade was permitted to facilitate conversion to Christianity. Other historians and Vatican scholars strongly rejected the accusation that Alexander had approved slavery. Later popes kept returning to the question: Paul III in 1537, Benedict XIV in 1741, and Gregory XVI in 1839 each issued their own condemnations of slavery, suggesting the earlier bulls left room for interpretation that troubled the Church for centuries.

  In 1993, the Indigenous Law Institute called on Pope John Paul II to revoke Inter caetera and make reparation for what they called an unreasonable historical grief. A similar appeal followed in 1994 from the Parliament of World Religions. The document Alexander signed in one of his first years of office was still generating formal demands for redress five centuries later.

• 5. Cesare, Lucrezia, and Family Power

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  Rodrigo Borgia had begun fathering children decades before he became pope. In 1462, while serving under Pius II, he had his first son, Pedro Luis, with an unknown mistress, sending the boy to grow up in Spain. Then, back in Rome, he began his relationship with Vannozza dei Cattanei. She bore him four children: Cesare in 1475, Giovanni in 1474 or 1476, Lucrezia in 1480, and Gioffre in 1482. He had pretended for years that these four were his niece and nephews, fathered by Vannozza's husbands. Once he became pope, he acknowledged them, though the historian G. J. Meyer questioned whether the birth dates were compatible with Alexander's known whereabouts.

  Cesare's elevation was rapid. At 17 he was made Archbishop of Valencia. At 18 he was created a cardinal, one of 12 new cardinals Alexander appointed in a move that generated considerable scandal. Among that same group was Alessandro Farnese, brother of Alexander's mistress Giulia Farnese, who would later become Pope Paul III.

  Alexander's use of family as the primary instrument of policy reflected a hard reality. Prominent Italian families resented the Spanish Borgias and blocked their ambitions at every turn. He could not trust men who owed their positions to his predecessors. When he tried to arrange fiefs for his sons out of the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, he collided with Ferdinand I of Naples and with Cardinal della Rovere, both of whom saw the Borgias as interlopers. The murder of his son Juan, Duke of Gandia, whose body was pulled from the Tiber River on the 16th of June 1497, briefly broke Alexander. He shut himself in his chambers for days without eating, drinking, or sleeping, and declared that reforming the Church morally would be the sole object of his remaining life.

• 6. Savonarola and Reform

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  The Florentine friar Girolamo Savonarola was delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons against papal corruption in the 1490s, and word of his denunciations reached Alexander in Rome. Alexander, according to reports, was reduced to laughter. He nonetheless acted, appointing Sebastian Maggi to investigate the friar, and on the 16th of October 1495 he addressed Savonarola directly in a written response, noting that the friar claimed to speak by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit while predicting the future, and ordering him to cease preaching until he could appear at Rome. Alexander's letter was carefully calibrated: he acknowledged that what Savonarola had done might stem from "a certain simple-mindedness and a zeal, however misguided," rather than an evil motive.

  Savonarola's hostility, the source suggests, was more political than personal. When Juan, the Duke of Gandia, was murdered, Savonarola sent Alexander a letter of condolence: "Faith, most Holy Father, is the one and true source of peace and consolation. Faith alone brings consolation from a far-off country." The relationship between the pope and the friar was, in other words, more complicated than the caricature of corrupt pope versus righteous reformer.

  The Florentines eventually tired of Savonarola's moralizing, and their government condemned him to death. He was executed on the 23rd of May 1498. Alexander himself had sought reform within the Curia, assembling his most pious cardinals to draft new rules limiting cardinals to one diocese, placing restrictions on the sale of Church property, and imposing stricter moral codes on clergy. None of these reforms were implemented.

• 7. The Holy Door and the Jubilee

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  In 1499, after consulting with Johann Burchard, his master of ceremonies, Alexander VI invented a ritual that the Catholic Church still practices today. On Christmas Eve 1499, he opened the first holy door in St. Peter's Basilica, inaugurating the Jubilee year of 1500. Carried in the sedia gestatoria to St. Peter's, he and his assistants processed to the door bearing candles while the choir chanted Psalm 118:19-20. He knocked three times, workers moved the door from the inside, and the procession crossed the threshold to begin a period of penance and reconciliation.

  Alexander had commissioned a new opening created in the portico and a marble door to fill it. He also established the ritual for closing: on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1501, two cardinals began sealing the door with two bricks, one silver and one gold, while basilica workers completed the seal, placing specially minted coins and medals inside the wall.

  His legacy in the arts ran alongside this ceremonial innovation. Raphael, Michelangelo, and Pinturicchio all worked under his patronage. He commissioned Pinturicchio to paint a suite of rooms in the Apostolic Palace that are still known today as the Borgia Apartments. He took an interest in theatre, having Plautus's Menaechmi performed in those same rooms. In 1495, he issued a papal bull founding King's College, Aberdeen, at the request of William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, and James IV of Scotland. In 1501, he approved the University of Valencia.

• 8. Death and Aftermath

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  On the 6th of August 1503, Alexander and Cesare dined with Cardinal Adriano Castellesi. Both fell ill with fever a few days later. Cesare survived, though his skin was peeling and his face had turned violet. Alexander, 72 years old, did not. His personal master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, recorded the progression day by day: the fever beginning on Saturday the 12th of August, thirteen ounces of blood drawn on the 15th, and finally on the 18th, after receiving confession from the Bishop of Carignola and receiving Extreme Unction, Alexander died. Commentators attributed the death to malaria, then prevalent in Rome, or to a similar pestilence. One contemporary official wrote that many in the Roman Curia had fallen ill from the bad air, and that there was little surprise Alexander was among them.

  While Alexander lay dying, Cesare sent his chief agent Don Micheletto to seize the pope's treasures before the death became public knowledge. The body decomposed so rapidly in the August heat that when it was displayed the following day, it was covered by an old tapestry. The bishop of Gallipoli had spoken of Alexander's genuine contrition at the end: that he had made a careful confession, shed tears, and received each of the last sacraments voluntarily.

  His successor Julius II, who was Giuliano della Rovere, said on the day of his own election: "I will not live in the same rooms as the Borgias lived. He desecrated the Holy Church as none before." The Borgia Apartments remained sealed until the 19th century. Yet two later popes, Sixtus V and Urban VIII, counted Alexander among the most outstanding pontiffs since Saint Peter. After his death, the Roman barons and the lordships of Romagna were never again the problem for the papacy that they had been during his reign. Julius II's own successes, the source argues, owed much to the framework the Borgias had built.