In Our Time - The Borgias

Episode Date: November 22, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Borgias, the most notorious family in Renaissance Italy. Famed for their treachery and corruption, the Borgias produced two popes during their time of dominance in Rome in the late 15th century. The most well-known of these two popes is Alexander VI, previously Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. He was accused of buying votes to elect him to the papacy and openly promoted his children in positions of power. Rodrigo's daughter, Lucrezia, is widely remembered as a ruthless poisoner; his son, Cesare, as a brutal soldier. Murder, intrigue and power politics characterised their rule, but many of the stories now told about their depraved behaviour and evil ways emerged after their demise and gave rise to the so-called 'Black Legend'. The sullied reputation of the Borgia dynasty endures even today and their lives have provided a major theme for plays, novels and over forty films.With:Evelyn Welch Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of LondonCatherine Fletcher Lecturer in Public History at the University of SheffieldChristine Shaw Honorary Research Fellow at Swansea University Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Borgiers are thought to be one of the most notorious dynasties in European history. In 15001, the papal diarist, Jakob Burkhart, wrote, There is no longer any crime or shameful act that does not take place in public in Rome and in the House of the Pontiff. Rapes and acts of incest are countless.

his sons and daughters are utterly depraved. Great throngs of courtesans, frequent St. Peter's Palace, pimps, brothels and hallhouses are to be found everywhere, a most shameful situation. The Pope in question was Alexander the 6th, the leader and possibly most infamous member of the Borgiers who dominated the Italian city-states in the 15th and early 16th century. Today their name is synonymous with vice, brutality and corruption,

so much so that all the stories related to their wrongdoings are referred to collectively, as the black legend, but is the Borgia's infamous reputation justified and how significant was their rule in Renaissance Italy? With me to discuss the Borgias are Evelyn Welsh, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, Christine Shaw, honour research fellow at Swansea University, and Catherine Fletcher, lecturer in public history at the University of Sheffield. Evelyn Welsh, the Borgies came to fire in Italy in the mid-late 15th century. Can you give us some idea of what Italy was like then?

Today we think of Italy, the place, as the same as Italy, the kind of political entity. That wasn't the case in the 15th century. The peninsula was divided, really seriously divided, between city-states who would rather have a foreigner come in from France than be ruled by another neighbour of theirs. So you have city-state republics such as Florence and Venice, you have principalities and duchies, such as the Duchy of Milan, and you have the Kingdom of Naples. And in amongst all of this, of course, you have the papacy. Not only is the Pope, the spiritual representative on earth of Christ,

he is also a secular leader. He is, in fact, the feudal overlord of the Kingdom of Naples, and he has control over much of Central Italy. So when the popes are powerful, they are also very, very powerful secular rulers. When the popes are weak, those lands are up for grabs. And you not only have these different states, they're often keen to make alliances with what we now think. as foreign countries, as with people in their own countries,

you have strong, very strong families. You have extremely strong families who are reliant both on matrimonial alliances and on money. So you have families such as the Medici and Florence who make their power not by being rulers of Florence, but by being bankers. And what they do is that they support some of these other families to take control.

So, for example, the Sforza of Milan, are not what we might call born into power. they use a combination of military force and Medici money to gain power in the mid-15th century. And then they sustain it by, of course, hiring wonderful artists. It's a fantastic time to be an artist because you have so many rulers trying to prove and demonstrate that they really do deserve the honours and the offices that they hold.

And that's the beginning. There's a stack of about ten families, the Viscontas, the Dalliveres, the Ossini. These are some big family around these states and India. What were the borgias that? Who were they, and how did they come into the frame? So the Borgias come out of what today we would call Spain. In the period was called Aragon, the Kingdom of Aragon,

and their origins through Alonzo de Borgia, or Alfonso Borgia, as he's known, really emerged in the late 14th century. So Alfonso Borgia is trained as a lawyer, and he joins the cavalcade of the King of Aragon as he comes to try to take Naples in the first. 1430s and the 1440s. Without confusing matters, the kingdom of Naples is contested by both the French and the Aragonese in this particular period. Because Alfonso of Aragon, the king, is successful. Alfonso, his secretary, becomes cardinal. As cardinal, he's now in this really special

position. He's eligible to become Pope. So in the 1450s, he's, he is elected at a very elderly age as Calyxtus the third. He does two important things. He attempts to do a crusade, very, very important crusade to recover Constantinople, and above all, he makes his nephews cardinals themselves. And so Calyxas died Catherine Fletcher in 1458, but the House of Borgia remains strong in Rome. Thanks to Rodrigo, which Evelyn was telling us about. Could you tell us more about Rodrigo?

Yes, of course, Rodriguez was the size. of Alonso's sister Isabella. He had been destined for a career in the church from an early age, so he'd gone off to study law first in Valencia, and then he went over to Rome to join his uncle after his uncle became a cardinal. Now, when his uncle, rather unexpectedly, became Pope, Rodrigo was one of the people, one of the papal nephews, who joined him as a cardinal. Now, I mean, the word in Italian for nephew is nepote. That's where we get our modern phrase nepotism, the modern word nepotism. And it was fairly typical for popes at the time to elevate a couple of young nephews who might help them out with government. Because of course as Pope, you had inherited

a bunch of officials from the previous incumbent who might or might not be friendly. Now, the elevation of Rodrigo to the cardulet wasn't uncontroversial. There were some snide comments. After all, he was only 25. He was really quite a young man. And people said that he and two other young, young men who had been elected at the same time, really had the age and experience between them for one cardinals. So he was promoted very young, but he established himself rather well, rather quickly. Was there any sense of spirituality or religion in this, or are we talking from the beginning and getting it straight about real politics all the time? I think it would be unfair to say that the cardinals of this period didn't have their personal sense of spirituality, but certainly

within the Cardinals, within the College of Cardinals as a whole, you have something of a division between people who are essentially appointed to be loyal family men and to do jobs in government to represent Italian ruling houses, to do diplomacy, and those who are appointed because they are eminent theologians, who do take our important spiritual roles within the church. But I think there's a bit of a division of labour, and I think Rodrigo is definitely on the temporal side of that division. He became Pope in 1492, was his ill.

election expected? Was it easy? Did he have to bribe his weather? What happened? Well, over the course of his 34 years in the cardlet, remember he was promoted in 1456, but he didn't become Pope until 1492. He had built up a huge wealth of roles in papal government. He was a vice-chancellor of the church. He had half a dozen bishoprics, mainly in Spain. And so... They're very profitable, these bishoprics. They are indeed very profitable. Good incomes. Yes. Good incomes. He's been acquiring wealth. He's been acquiring power in the church. And of course, when he becomes Pope, all these things are going to be redistributed. Now, some people might call that process of redistribution bribery.

Some people might call it natural part of the process of what you do when you're elected Pope. So he'd a lot to offer those who voted for him. Indeed, he did. But so did other candidates. Yes. So how did he get it? What was the defining factor if there wasn't? Well, there was a bit of a stalemate between different parties in the election. It was a stalemate between people backed by the Milanese and people backed by the rulers of Naples. Neither of their candidates was doing convincingly well in the scrutinies. And what happened essentially was that at a certain point in the election,

a Scania Sforza of the Milanese party decided that his candidate wasn't going to win. And in order to stop the other guy, he would switch. his votes to Rodrigo Borgia so Rodrigo could come through the middle and be elected. Then, of course, Rodrigo would owe Sforza a lot of favours. So back to the families that Evelyn was talking about. Savorza came in on the side of the Borgias against the Della Rivera's, at that time. Against the Dela Rover party who were in turn backed by Naples. It's frightfully complicated and they keep switching sides.

There's an awful lot of politics involved. There's an awful lot of jockeying for power. Yes, well, it's so unknown. in the unblooded world in which he lived today. So he's there. He'd made a lot of money. He'd also got a lot of power. He'd established a little kingdom, hadn't he?

He'd got various city-states and Bishop Briggs and so on. Well, it's not quite a kingdom at this stage. That's going to come a little bit later because that's what his son, Chesery, is going to do. Having got himself into power as Pope, what Rodrigo Borgia seeks to do is to make a hereditary duchy for his family. And that's the sort of next part of the story

with his son Chesre. But before we get there, he's got to kind of work out a lot of things about the strategic politics of Rome, the strategic politics of the Italian peninsula, and he's got to work out how best to create this fiefdom for Chesre. He seems to do it very...

He's helped by the fact that they discover alum in the hills and his... Rome, which you can tell us how important that was to his wealth, and also by his massive sale of indulgences, so rich people could get out of purgatory quicker. Yes, well, of course, this is going slightly backwards to the period of the 1460s, when Rodrigo was a cardinal and vice-chancellor of the church. So he was effectively running the papal government, second-in-command of the papal government, running the temporal side of the business from day-to-day. Now, in this period, the papal incomes shifted, rather, from being mainly

derived from spiritual incomes, so incomes a proportion of bishop's income, for example, went to the papacy, to having a much bigger temporal element. One important factors of the important factors in that was the discovery of alum within the papal states. Now, alum is a very, very important ingredient in the cloth industry. Up until this point, they'd had to import it from Turkey. And after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, that became much more problematic. So the fact that the popes could get themselves a monopoly on this dying ingredient made them hugely wealthy, but also gave a big push towards that secular, temporal side of government. Christine Shaw, Morgia, as we heard at the very beginning of the programme, that quotation from

Jakobok had, has been called one of the worst, if not the worst pope of all time. And in the popular imagination, he gets darker by the day. Could you give us a general idea of what popes were like before we investigate whether this was true what was said about him and his family? What popes were supposed to be like at that time?

What the going pope was like? Was there a going pope? This is the period I mean it's known to historians as the Renaissance papacy or to some historians as a period of grand nepotism or nepotism on the grand scale. And Alexander comes in the middle of this.

really. It's a period when, as we've heard, the popes are, well, they're re-establishing themselves in the papal states as temporal rulers. Their role as temporal rulers is becoming more important in their own concept of their power. Their income from the papal states is becoming more important to them as rulers. They are becoming a factor in the politics of Italy, in the diplomatic alliances and the military alliances and the wars. During this period, Italian rulers are having to become accustomed to the idea that if you want the alliance of the Pope, it's a jolly good idea to offer the Pope's family some goodies, benefits, lands, bride, and then you have a better chance getting the Pope's alliance.

Alexander is fitting into this pattern, but his pontificate is, in some sense, is the apathy of this particular bays of the preys of the pretext. papacy, partly because of the greed and ambition, and partly because Alexander, although he was a very astute politician, a very intelligent man,

great experience, had been a cardinal, all those years had been in Rome, had been sitting in the consistory, as soon as the interests of his family come into play, develops a kind of blind spot. So ambassadors can be talking to him and you'll get a very wise and in-depth discussion

of the political situation. But if it comes to formation of papal policy, he is quite explicit, what's in it for my family? And the Italian rulers have been used to this kind of calculation. The first thing you do when a new Pope is elected in this time is who are his relatives, who do we have to square, who's going to be the cardinal nephew, who's going to be important. The interesting about this period, and Alexander's period starts it because this is a period of the Italian wars, which I think you're going to be talking about in a moment, that other European rulers are going to have to start making the same calculations.

And this is a bit of a shock. They're used to dealing with the papacy as a rival with jurisdiction, as someone who wants to collect taxes they don't want to give, as someone who wants to appoint to benefits as they'd rather appoint to themselves. But they're not used to having to think of how are we going to further the interests of the Pope's family in order to get his alliance. We know of eight illegitimate children he had, four by one mistress, Cheshire, Lucretia, Joffre, Joffre, and Joanne. And he promoted them very heavily.

And it's out of this that the sort of stench begins to come. Now, I know we're going to this, I want to go into this later, but what substance would you give to the accusations? Just to delightly touch on them? The black legends, as it were. The atmosphere in Rome during Alessandas' certificate is definitely different from the atmosphere in other certificates.

People are scared of the Borgia. Murders do happen. Rome is always a hotbed of rumour and malicious rumour and gossip. And rumours do spread very quickly about the borgia, the incest, the poisoning. But there does seem to be an underlying genuine fear and a genuine

menace from the Borgia. They will kill people who come across, who cut across them. And it can be dangerous to cross other popes, but not to the same extent. There is definitely something different about this. Let's go back everyone in a watch to the political thing that's going on, although we're all intrigued by

what's happening back home. But still, after about 40 years of relative peace, and this follows a time of the great, this follows a time of the time of the two popes, three popes for many, many decades. We're settled in Rome now with the papacy, and there was war broke out with France. How did he handle that, Alexander?

So Alexander VI is in an interesting position. He's situated himself with alliances, with the Kingdom of Naples, with the Aragonese, and he's also very cleverly ensured that he's got strong alliances with France. In fact, he's using his children as much as any secular ruler will. He's marrying them off appropriately, and he is using that kind of diplomatic sense of balancing.

You can never tell who's going to win out here. And in around the late 1490s, there's a particularly complex set of circumstances which arise. And stop me if I'm getting too complicated here. I will try to. I don't really want to, but it's just this business of time, and we're beating it at our ears. So if we remember that there are contesting family interests in Naples, both in the Aragonese side and in the French side,

and that in Milan, when the Sforza take power, their potential rivals are the heirs of the Visconti who are also French there. So when we get to the 1490s, the ruler of Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza, famous for his sponsorship of people, like Leonardo da Vinci. He's not really the official ruler of Milan.

He's actually the Duke of Barre. He's the regent for his nephew, who is married to the daughter of the King of Naples. Yes, we're getting complicated. Drifting away now. The reason that this matters is that the King of Naples wants his daughter and his son-in-law to take power in Milan. To counteract that, Ludovico Maria Sforza,

encourages Charles the Ace, who has claims on the Kingdom of Naples to enter France. Right. What does Alexander do with the Pope? So what Alexander is doing throughout this is trying to keep in with the Sforza, supporting Ascanyos Sforza, and at the same time, in with the Neapolitans there. At the very last moment, as the French troops are outside Rome, he gives in to the French. by this stage, actually even Ludovico Maria Sforza is anxious. So once he's let the French army through,

he then turns around and tries to create an alliance between Milan, Venice, and Naples to get rid of the French. So he's very shrewd about that. He's doing well in the politics, we think, at this stage. Okay, Catherine Fletcher, Christine mentioned his ruthlessness. Is this demonstrated in his treatment of Savonarola, the preacher in Florence, who was burnt at the stake after four years? as preaching against not only the rules of Florence, but most particularly against the Pope.

Well, I think he was actually quite diplomatic in the way that he related to Savonarola, because Savonarola had effectively taken power in Florence amidst all this chaos of the French descent into Italy. He and a group of anti-Medici partisans had overthrown the Medici regime in Florence and installed themselves as a kind of almost a theocratic Republican ruling Florence. Saffonarola had made his name with these very fiery sermons against loose living and all sorts of immorality

and was leading a crackdown in Florence against sodomy, vice, gambling, reading classical poetry and such like. And he was preaching very harshly against Alexander. But in fact, Alexander was very careful about the way that he handled all this because he knew there were calls for reform of the church. He knew that Savonarola had some supporters in the College of Cardinals. and he had to tread very carefully. In fact, what we see in 1497, as Svonarola is still in power in Florence, is Alexander VI, setting up a commission to discuss reform of the church.

Now, this is not, you know, a man who's straightforwardly going out and having a Svonarola excommunicated and executed. I think when Savonarola goes, it's much more for domestic Florentine reasons than it is as a product of Alexander's cruelty. Can I refer back to every moment. I rush you there of and I'm aware of it. But when these armies come into Italy, of course, this is enormous disruption which was alluded to there.

So if you can just give us some idea, it's a permanent crisis, isn't that really? This really establishes a complete crisis. The balance that's established through the Peace of Lodi in 1454 is a very tenuous balance. You've had small-scale skirmishes, but nothing like this before.

And as Charles VIII descends down from the Alps, all the way down to Naples, and then goes back again, all those alliances that have been so carefully negotiated collapse, and all the dissent, particularly in Florence, that had been suppressed for many years, comes forward. It's a transformative moment for the Italian peninsula

from which it never recovers. Yeah, and I think that the thing about that is, we don't necessarily think of Alexander VI as a Pope at war, but he was a pope in the middle of an absolutely chaotic period of warfare on the Italian peninsula. And when we think about what he might have done or might not have done, we have to think of these actions as going on in that situation of warfare. Absolutely. Christine, sure.

Chesera Borgia has a pivotal role in the act of the Borgia family and in the midst of the Borgia family. Can you tell us something about him? Can I just preface this by saying, am I right to say that one of the things that annoyed people and disturbed people about the way Alexander was behaving is that it's all very well giving your children decent jobs and that but he legitimised them as if he was at every as I understand it or wanted to legitimise them and they put them in a different category

to illegitimate children of previous popes? I don't think it's not in this period from the popes of before the mid-15th century possibly yes But in this period, I mean, his predecessor, in St. the 8th, had had an illegitimate son, who he'd made head of the army, as Chaseray became, head of the papal army, who was given lands. So this tradition was established? Alexander was not initiating, no, in this. What annoyed people was the scale of the goodies that he wanted for his family.

He not only made Chaserie, I mean, Chaserie had to, knock out some of the rulers of the small towns in the north and the east of the papal states. You mean attack them and assassinate them? He had an army with him. Most people left quietly. Some were captured. One met a mysterious death in the papal fortress in Rome afterwards. But he makes Cheseray, Duke of Romania.

He gives him a very large chunk of the north and east of the papal states. tries to eradicate the Roman barons who are very powerful and have lands extending in a wide arc around Rome and give them to members of his family. He would have given his family a sizable chunk of the papal states if he could. He also had, Chesby also had estates in France. There are other members of the family who would be given extensive estates or bought extensive estates in Naples and in the Kingdom of Spain. Alexander at some stage had piped about possibly Chasier and becoming king of Naples. He's not the only Pope who thinks that might be a good idea

because Naples is a papal thief, about becoming a rule of Siena, Florence, Mantua. The ambitions were endless. He was more ambitious than Chasery was, because Chasery, in the end, had a greater sense of reality about what was possible. Can we just talk about, was it a particular, I mean, it was an obsession with this family, wasn't he?

Can you explain why he was so determined? It seems to be at the forefront of his mind and his policies to advance his family, especially those four children I have that first associate. You can't inherit the papacy. It's as simple as that. So if you want to create a dynasty, a proper dynasty in which you can really look after your grandchildren

and great-great-grandchildren, you need land that's heritable. So as Christine says, he's not the first to do it. He certainly won't be the last to do it. And you are using terms like assassination. We might say, collateral damage there in a period in which you are trying to ensure that the the Borgia family, not the papacy, but the Borgia family, has a legacy there.

They are Catalanes there, and they're called the Catalans, they're called Marani, they're accused of being Jewish, they're accused of being Muslim, they are deeply disliked by the Italian populace. They're seen as foreign. Can I turn to you, Catherine? His brother, Cheshiree, Chesri, is supposed to have killed his brother, murdered his brother, in 1495, which is one of the acts that set off this black book, this black legend. And how, and earlier Christine talked about the fear that there was in Rome.

You didn't cross the porches, and it was more intense than, as we call it it it it at other times. Can you tell us about that one thing to see if we could. Did he murder his brother? brother? Well, we don't know whether he murdered his brother. We do know that he had his brother-in-law murdered a few years later. That's Lucrezia's second husband, Alfonso Duke of Bichelio. So some of the suspicion has to be that after Chesre had Alfonso murdered, the rumours are red back that he may also have murdered his brother. Now, I have to say, at the time, he was only one of several candidates who was responsible for this sort of stabbed

body washing up in the tiber. There were a number of, indeed, yes, the diarists are very careful about recording precisely how many wounds there were to any given body washed up in the tiber. So it may have been him, it may have been a

spurned husband, angry at Juan for seducing his wife. It may have been one of the Roman barons. There are lots and lots of candidates. I think the fact that there are so many candidates actually tells you something about the challenges that the Borgia establishing have in establishing themselves

as if you like part of the furniture in Rome there. There are a lot of people who are suspected of wanting to kill almost any member of the Borgia family. Christine Scho. The problem was that when I was saying Alexander was over-ambitious.

The popes are, the popes had a long period when they weren't in the Abinghamon Papers who then was the Great Schism when there were two or three popes. As we said, the popes are really only re-established themselves in the papal states in the 15th century.

networks, important political and social networks, have been built up over centuries. And Alexander seems to feel that he can sweep these away, install his own family, and that this will last. And it was a political commonplace, as Evelyn was saying, you can't establish a papal dynasty. It was a political commonplace that the Pope's nephews are only powerful as long as their Pope is living.

And the sensible thing to do is to try to establish your your family. Yes, try and make them a prince. Give them land which isn't really claimed by anybody else. Try and give them some support. Try and ensure that they're going to survive after your death. Alexander seems to lose sight of this and to feel that he can just sweep it all away, establish his own family in these places, and that the next Pope is going to allow this to stand. No Pope could have allowed the border to keep all the lands they had been given. They've been given such a huge chunk of the papal states. Let's move to Lucretia.

Roger, the other, and the second to Chesire the most, or even more notable than, than Chesrae, her brother. There have been accusations of incest. Her father certainly used her for three marriages, for dynastic advancement of himself and the sons of his house. Can you tell us about her relationship with him? It's quite useful for daughters of rulers at this time to be married off, to be married off young and obviously they don't have much choice

of their choice of husband. He's unusual, he's not, as we said, the first Pope to have a daughter. He's not the first Pope to have his daughter sometimes in the Vatican. The paper court is peculiar because there is no role for women. There aren't

supposed to be women taking part in the ceremonies or the social life of the Vatican. Alexander is very, very fond of his children, particularly Chéééééééé and Lucrezia. He likes to put her on show. She's charming, she's attractive, she's vivacious, she's good at dancing.

He likes her, and he likes to entertain him. He's very proud of her. He tells people how intelligent she is. He says she can get anything out of me she wants. She's very good at asking, how good she's at receiving ambassadors. She can't, she isn't actually an ambitious woman. Remember, she's only 13 at the time of her first marriage, no, 18 at the time of the second.

and she's a very young woman. She doesn't, she actually doesn't have any say in policy. But her father tries to put her forward in a way, to the extent, to the ridiculous extent in a way, and to the shocking extent, at one time when he was touring his estate south of Rome, he leaves Lucrezia in the Vatican, in his papal apartments, to open the papal correspondence and consult the Cardinals if there was a crisis. this is his daughter who's barely 20, and it's absurd.

But this is what I say, he loses his sense. He's an intelligent man, a good politician. He's just lost his sense of reality when he's doing that. Catherine Fletcher, can we come back to a theme that was introduced at the beginning of the programme and is part of the Borgia idea? We're building to it, but is this behaviour part of the creation of the fear of the Borgia? Are they beginning to be widely regarded? not only Alexander, not only is a man who wants to possess great territories and advances children,

but of people who are deeply immoral. Am we poisoning, orgies, incest, brother, killing brother, don't. Well, okay, so the incest allegations to start with then. There are allegations about incest between Lucrezia and her father that circulate, and they circulate from her first husband at the time when Alexander wants to have the marriage between, them dissolved so that Lucrezia can marry somebody who's more helpful in terms of political alliances. Now, the way they go about getting this annulment is they put pressure on the husband, Giovanni Sforza, to say that he couldn't consummate the marriage. Now, he is understandably not very happy

about the implications for his masculinity of all this, and he sort of lashes back with this allegation that Alexander is saying this because he wants Lucrezia for himself. So that's where those rumours come from. But they, obviously, they spread. And Alexander's attention to his children obviously helps fuel the fire of all this. Can we use take Lucretia through Abin Welsh and then move on? She had a third marriage to Alfonso Desta, the Duke of Ferrara, where she were very successful, as I understand it,

and she died at the age of 39 in childbirth after. eight children? That's right. So at the end of her life, Lucretti is a model Italian princess. She's produced male heirs for the Desti family, which will allow the continuity, if not the Borgia family, the Desti family there. She has brought a very substantial dowry, and she's given substantial income in land by her husband. She's a fantastic manager as well.

She takes her lands, she acquires additional lands, she improves them agriculturally. She goes, for example, and imports water buffalo from the Kingdom of Naples to create mozzarella, using the sale of mozzarella to improve her own income, and also using the horns of the water buffalo to do things like create fans handles. At that time, is the reputation that we receive about Lucretia clinging to her, is it around the place? At the initial stages, when she arrives in Ferrara, there's a lot of anxiety. Here is the legitimised daughter of a pope, marrying into one of the oldest families in Italy.

There is considerable concern that the need to make this alliance, and that's what it is. It's a political alliance, will damage the esté in the long term. So a lot of the rumours that Catherine's alluded to are raked over. By the time she dies, she actually has a reputation for learning, for piety, with support of the church, and for great business sense. and above all she's done the right thing. She's died in childbirth. I'm coughing here with that one. Christine Shaw,

Chesra was built up a successful military career, massively celebrated after his death by Machiavelli and the Prince of Chesra, the Great Warrior, the magnificent general. But after his father died, he'd sort of had it. He was hounded out, wasn't he? Yes, but can I just comment first on Chesrae, the great general? Yes.

which is that he was actually raised, educated, to be a cardinal, to be an ecclesiastic, he spent his first years of his father's pontificate as a cardinal. And when he, after the murder of his brother, he says he will renounce the cardinal, see, he takes some time to actually give up the bishops, the bishoprics and the ecclesiastical. He must make sure he's got his lay income first. And then he turns himself into a soldier.

and he's given command of the papal army. But actually he only spends about the equivalent of three months over all the periods of the campaigns from 499 to 1503 that won him the Romania. He's not a great military leader. He wasn't trained as a military leader. So why did Machiavelli say he was? Machiavelli wasn't easy to fool.

Machiavelli wasn't as astute an observer as one might think sometimes. He's a civil servant member. He's not a politician. He's dazzled. right? That's as maybe, yeah. Machiavelli is sent on a mission by the Florentine government

to Chaseray in his camp. He's rather dazzled by the image. Chaserie's good at projecting this image of power and authority and menace and of ruthlessness, of ability. But actually

he is he doesn't have the influence with his father that one thinks he should have or he thinks he should have. Nevertheless, he wins lots of battles, gets lots of territories, and he's much lauded, and as far as he's concerned, his father dies a bit too early for him to achieve

everything he wants to achieve. And when his father dies, when the Pope Alexander 6 dies, there's a quick fall, a quick decline. In Chesra's fortunes, he's booted out by the incoming family, which happened to turn up for the Pope, and they're the border's greatest enemies, and he ends up being killed in a minor conflict in Navarre.

I want to move now to the myths that have grown since the 60th century. We've touched on them. But they are important for listeners. That's what a lot of us have been brought up on. I introduced the programme with the Yakop Borghardt saying this, nothing more terrible has ever been seen than what's going on in Roman development. Let's try to get to the bottom of that. What's the source for these stories of the Black Legend, Evelyn Welch?

So there's a multiplicity of evidence. People are really talking about the Bolger, so you get ambassadorial reports, contradictions in ambassadorial reports. The thing that we turn to now, for the most salacious stories, is actually a rather dull Latin text written by Johann Burkhart, who is the person responsible for protocol in the Vatican. And when this is translated into English,

it probably becomes a little more salacious than when the stories are told in Latin. Nonetheless, this is a relatively private document kept by a man who's incredibly irritated when people sit in the the wrong place. So in very dry terms he describes events such as the famous party with courtesans and chestnuts. Naked

cortisans and chestnuts. Well it depends on how you translate. We must not tune out of this. It sounds like a sort of completely enough nation. There you go. So it's potentially semi-clothed, semi-robed depending how you translate from the Latin. Cortisans on their hands, on their hands

of these, collecting chestnuts followed by rampant demonstrations of virility observed by Alexander and his children. So what are you saying about this, Jacques Burkut was a pretty chap who we can't trust, or what are you saying about it? Catherine. Well, I think, I think I actually play some credence in this story.

Now, and partly I play some credence in it because there's only one of these tales. And I think that Burkhart wrote it down because there was something special and unusual about this party. but I think that says to me there was one wild party, one particularly wild party that Burkhart thought

worth recording, but they weren't doing this every week. Okay, well let's forget about the order then. It isn't all that important. In the scheme of things where we're talking about poison, murder, incest and assassination. It's quite a lot to get through the next few minutes, but has it been exaggerated, is this black propaganda, is there enough evidence to justify any or all of that?

Christine Shaw. There certainly were murders, as we said, the son-in-law. I mean, Alexander himself said that Chesre reacted, overreacted when someone insulted him. Chesri didn't like feeling insulted. He would ready to kill. The poisoning, I'm not so sure.

There is, of course, the legend, when both Chesri and his father fell ill and Alexander then dies and Chesry is ill and has difficulties maintaining his position after his father's death, partly because he was ill. it's immediately said that they fell ill because there was a mistake and they were poisoned by the poison they had intended for a rich cardinal whose wealth they wanted.

So poison is around there. What's the evidence for the poison? What's the evidence for the incest? We seem to be taken it for granted there's orgies and murder. So we're back to poison and incest. What's the evidence for that evidence? So there's almost no evidence for that at all. What you've got are Guichardini,

providing some very, very evocative phrases against Rome and against the popes. And the real problem that the Borgias have is that they're succeeded by one of their greatest enemies, Julius II, who does many of the same things as Alexander VI. But he eradicates the memory of the positive around the Borgias and stresses the negative. Very quickly, after Alexander's death, the rumours start circulating. There's a very dramatic tale of his dying, surrounded by seven devils and his body is starting to boil, which goes around in diplomatic letters. And this is supposedly evidence of his pact with the devil to buy the papacy.

And of course, it's picked up later by the Protestants who start talking about the Pope as the Antichrist. Christine Charles. I was going to say that accusations of poison are to a penny in Renaissance Italy. But they do seem to attach and stick to the border. And as Evelyn says, I don't think, I haven't seen. seen in much evidence to convince me that they're true. Even Lucrezia gets accused of a poison, I think, as part of the black legend, and there really is no evidence that she...

The hollow ring, yes. But I think there's no... Was it ever found? No. Lots of recipes for poison, though. I don't think there's that... I don't think she's ever really sensitively attached to any violence, or... She was really rather sorry when her husbands were got rid of by her brother and her father.

Well, I think that in many ways, our audience will be reeling at this shock. Borges. I mean, it's shocking news that the voyages on many counts, there's not enough evidence to sustain these. A loving family. Now we're going too far. So you think that the accusations, the building up with the black legend was all

propaganda of those who succeeded of them and from their bitter enemies of the time. That's the bulk of it. It comes from Savonarola first. It comes from enemies. It comes from anti-Spanish feeling in Spain. It then comes from Protestants. It comes from English writers who pick up on the connection between Machiavelli and Cheseray Borgia.

But I also think that, you know, we like to have this dark side to the Renaissance. We like to think we have the tyranny alongside the genius. That's very important to the way we understand it. But there are elements, as we said, Chaser was a murderer. Alexander's the only Pope I know who actually fathered children while he was Pope. It's usual at this time, quite usual for Cardinals to have children, but for a Pope to father a child while he is Pope, to have a mistress in the Vatican quite openly. That's extraordinary.

Right. We'll end on the extraordinary. Christine Shaw, Evelyn Welsh and Catherine Fletcher. Thank you very much indeed. And crystallography next week. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.ukuk slash Radio 4.