Noble Blood - The Three Husbands of Lucrezia Borgia

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Her first lover was found dead in a river. Her second husband was strangled in his bed. Perhaps it's no surprise that in popular culture, Lucrezia Borgia has become a femme fatale, a black widow murderess who stepped over husbands in order to achieve her own ends. But the real Lucrezia is a figure far more complex and tragic than the stereotypes might lead you to believe. [Support Noble Blood on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales. Noble Blood merch is available here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood] Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. While touring through Milan in 1816, Lord Byron visited the museum collection of the Biblioteca Ambrosian. Byron found himself entranced by one particular exhibit, handwritten letters from over 400 years earlier, between a poet and his lover Lucretia Borgia. The letters were displayed under glass, along with the lock of Lucretia's famous blonde hair, that she had cut off, in this case, to send her paramour along with one of the letters. Lord Byron being Lord Byron, he couldn't resist the urge to look around, be sure no one was watching, and then take some of the hair for himself.

Byron could never resist a woman or the glamour of fame, and Lucrezia Borgia was famous. In her lifetime, she was a central figure in the Italian social scene, the illegitimate daughter of a man who would then go on to become the Pope, She was a member of one of the era's most powerful families, the Borgias. Even while she was alive, rumors about Lucrezia spread wildly. But after her death especially, she became a larger-than-life figure, a Lady Macbeth villainous, a conniving poisoner, a usurper, a man-eater. Famously, Lucrezia Borja was said to have owned a ring where, instead of

of a stone, there was a hollow chamber that she could fill with powdered poison in order to surreptitiously murder her enemies. For the record, there's no evidence that that actually existed. Though political murders were happening all around her, several at the behest of her family, there's no actual evidence that Lucrezia was involved in any of them at all. It's rare for me in an episode of Noble Blood, to come to an understanding that a figure or any historical event is less interesting than most people understand it to be. But in Lucrezia Borges' case, it might be true. The rumors and speculation around her in the centuries since her death have loomed so large that in researching her life, I felt not unlike a Renaissance artist chipping away at a block of

marble. You begin with a block of stone, a story high, and then carve away piece by piece until what's left? A woman, just human-sized. So was she a femme fatale? Or maybe she was just a blonde bimbo manipulated by the more powerful men in her life, her father and her brother? What if the answer is neither? What then? What's left? There's a painting that I think embodies the strange marriage between the perception and the reality of Lucrezia Borgia. It's called Lucretia Borgia reigns in the Vatican in the absence of Pope Alexander the 6th. It was painted around 1910 by Frank Cadigan Cowper and it currently hangs in the tape in London. The painting is of a Vatican throne room, painted almost entirely in reds.

The cardinals surrounding the papal throne look more like flames, and in the center of the canvas, where the Pope should be sitting, is instead his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, a vision in orange, yellow, almost glowing golden. The artist's rendition is actually based on a true event, in which Lucretia scandalized the Vatican by taking her father's place in his place in his. seat. But the artist imagined something one step further. The artist painted two cardinals, pulling away at either side of Lucrezia's dress, to allow a friar to kiss her feet. That almost certainly never happened. But in the painting, it is, at least to my eyes,

unambiguously sexual symbolism. Whatever was true or false in terms of rumored, about Lucrezia's life. That symbolic implication at least was true. Here was a woman more sexual than 16th century Italy wanted her to be, more powerful than they wanted her to be. And, glowing or not, nobody could take their eyes off of her. I'm Danish Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. In the 15th century, the notion of a pope having children

was considered far less outrageous than it might sound today. Though Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had gone through the motions, briefly pretending that the four children that he had with his married mistress were his nephews and niece, eventually he lifted his hands and admitted that he had four children, Chesare, Giovanni, Lucrezia, and Joffrey. Their mother, Vanosa, was a notoriously famous beauty of, Rome, and though she was, as previously mentioned, married, she was also the favorite of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. At this point, the Borgias had limited but significant power. The Borgias already had a pope in their family tree, Pope Calixtus III, but they were still considered

outsiders in Italian society. For one, they weren't really Italian. The Borgias were actually Catalan, and they had lived in the formerly Moorish, currently Spanish, kingdom of Valencia. As they did with most other Catalans, Italians thought of the Borgias as tight-fisted and ruthless. They referred to them as Morani or secret Jews. And so even as the Borgias became more powerful in Italy, they remained a tight-knit family above all else. They spoke Catalan amongst themselves, and they had their own internal loyalties. They were all raised believing in an us versus them mentality. If you've watched or read Game of Thrones,

certain parallels will reveal themselves soon enough, and I suspect that George R.R. Martin might have been a little bit inspired by the Borgia family, especially when building the personalities of the Lannisters. When Lucretia Borja was 12, her father was elected Pope Alexander the 6th. There were rumors even then that he had bought the seat with bribery or that it was nepotism because his uncle had been Pope already. And both of those things may have been factors, but probably a more important factor is that Borja was seen as a centrist candidate.

The other powerful families vying for Pope had their own rivalries and loyalties. Borges wasn't too pro-France or two Milanese, the Borges just mostly looked out for the Borges. And a brief note, from this point in the story, I'll be referring to Lucrezia's father by his papal name, Alexander, for clarity, even though he was born Rodrigo. At this point in history, there was very little stigma attached to the fact that Alexander's four children were bastards. Just as there was really no stigma attached to the fact that,

Alexander was about to use his newfound powers as Pope to advance his family's position. It's what all the popes did. In this case, advancing his family meant advantageous marriages. By the time she was 12, Lucretia had already been engaged three times. It wasn't hard to find her matches. Even from a young age, she had golden hair and bright white teeth. She was charming and well-educated. But then her father was elected Pope, and her prospects got a whole lot better. In 1493, when Lucrezia was just 13 years old, she was married to a man nearly 15 years her senior, a man named Giovanni Svarsa of the powerful Svarsa family. Giovanni was the nephew of the Duke of Milan, and even though Lucretia and her new husband remained in Rome,

it was important for the Borgias to have allies in northern Italy. But as it turned out, that alliance was more temporarily important. Lucrezia and Giovanni had been married only a year when the Sfarzas began to seem like a liability. A lot of complicated political maneuvering is happening behind the scenes in Italy at this moment, but to make a long story short, the Duke of Milan allied with the King of France against the Pope. Still in Rome, Giovanni was stranded metaphorically in the belly of the beast.

Not quite sure if he was supposed to ally himself with his uncle, the Duke of Milan, or with his wife's powerful family. But for the Borgias, their choice of loyalty was entirely clear. Lucretia's older brother, Chesere, met with her one afternoon and calmly explained to her that her husband would need to be killed so that she could be remarried to someone who could actually help them, politically. Lucrezia panicked. She liked her husband. They were genuinely fond of each other. And so, she ran home that afternoon and warned him. Giovanni fled to Milan, disguised as a beggar. We can just imagine Pope Alexander putting his head in his hand and sighing, saying something like, darn, it's going to be so much harder for you to get out of that marriage now, Lucretia.

now the Borgias only had one option to get Lopretti out of that marriage. That option was annulling it. But them being Catholic and their father being the Pope meant the only way to do that was to claim that the marriage had never been consummated. Well, that was a bit of a laugh. There was absolutely no reason to believe that that was true, and all of Rome knew it. No, it's true, Chessori said. It's Giovanni's fault.

He is impotent. Ignore the fact that he had already been married once and his first wife died in childbirth, he never consummated the marriage with my sister because he's impotent. Trust me. The Borgias were going to force Giovanni Sparza to sign a statement to that effect, which he eventually did, but not without lashing out in his own way, saying that maybe the Borgias only wanted Lucretia single so that they could have her for themselves. Alexander, her father, and Chisare.

The Borgias were notoriously close, weren't they? This is about when the rumors of incest began, but those rumors would continue on for the rest of Lucrezia's life. While the annulment was working itself out, Lucrezia needed to get out of the picture, just to be put aside so that no one in Rome would think about her for a little while, and, you know, maybe just in case she had gotten pregnant from her first husband, to make sure that no one could see it,

lest they believe that the marriage had been consummated. And so Lucrezia was sent to a nunnery outside the city. But two unfortunate incidents occurred in the months after Lucretia's separation from her first husband that would begin the tarnish on her reputation. First, on Valentine's Day, 1498, a young Spaniard named Pedro Calderon, known colloquially as Perotto,

who worked in the Pope's chamber, was found dead in the Tiber River, along with one of Lucrezia's ladies. Speculation ran rampant that Lucrezia had been having an affair with Peroto, and that her brother Cheseray had had him killed in order to protect his sister's reputation. Although, before you think I'm accusing Cheseray of brotherly kindness, protecting Lucretia's reputation really just meant protecting her marriage prospect. And then the second incident, a Borgia baby was born, and no one seemed to be sure whose it was. The baby was initially known as the Infanz Romanus, or the infant of Rome, but he would later be known as Giovanni.

There are a lot of Giovanni's in this story. The most likely explanation for the baby is that he was Pope Alexander's child, and the Pope even admitted so much in a papal bull, later in his life. But early on, right after the baby appeared, they said it was Cheseray's child out of wedlock before he got married. But Lucrezia had been sent away, and her marriage being unconsumated was essential to her family's political dealings. What if, people thought, the baby was hers, and it was result of, I don't know, incest with her father? Or, and, and, you know, I don't know, incest with her father, or, and here you can cue the Game of Thrones theme song. What if it was a result of incest with her brother?

Again, there was no evidence to support this, and most historians agree now, the child was almost certainly Pope Alexander's, possibly Chisorais, but really probably not Lucrez. Still, the Borges had power, and other families of Italy wanted that power. Rumors were a weapon. When Lucretia turned 18, it was time for her to get married again.

And again, death, tragedy, and rumors would follow behind her. This time, Pope Alexander wanted to secure the Borgia position with the royal family of the Kingdom of Naples. Naples was in a precarious position under the threat of King Charles Ith of France, who claimed the throne for himself through a certain inhabit. heritage. Not to get too deep into the weeds of these politics, but the Pope's youngest son, Joffrey, had already married the daughter of the King of Naples, a girl named Sancha. Although seeing her name spelled out, S-A-N-C-I-A, you might be forgiven for mispronouncing it, Sonsa.

Joffrey and Sansa is another fun little layer of Game of Thrones intrigue into the mix. But back to Lucrezia, Lucretia was going to get married to the King of Naples' illegitimate son, Alfonso, Duke of Bachelier, the half-brother of Sancho. But that marriage wasn't the Pope's endgame. The thing was their dad, Alfonso and Sancha's dad, wasn't the king anymore. He had died, and their uncle became the king. And the new king had a daughter, Carlotta, that the Pope really wanted for his eldest son, Chesere. So, as sort of a consolation prize, he was marrying Lucrezia to the illegitimate, but still titled and important Duke of Bichelier, hoping it would be a foothold for Carlotta to get

with Chesare. That marriage for Chesare never worked out, although Cheseray did end up having an affair with Sancho, his younger brother's wife. In her defense, relatively, she was 16 when she was married to a 12-year-old Joffrey. But what can I say? The Borgias were very scandalous and very messy. As for Lucretia and husband number two, it seemed like she had finally struck the jackpot, at least in terms of her own personal happiness.

Another quick aside, there is just an influx of Alfonso's in this story, and so for clarity, husband number two will be referred to by his title, Bachelier. Lucretia and Bachelier were only a year apart in age, and he was known to be tall and graceful, athletic, and handsome. Their wedding was private, but we know details from Sanchez's writing. We know that Lucretia wore a dress with jewel-studded sleeves

and a French-style robe with black thread and a red velvet trim. Pearls encircled her belt and her neck, and her cap was embroidered with glittering gems. She wore a gold circlet crown in her golden, blonde hair. The groom were a brooch that his new bride had given him. The festivities were as magnificent as he might expect from a Borgia party. After the ceremony, there was another raucous after-party, and marvelous tabloes were set up to amuse the guests throughout the Borgia apartments.

In one tableau, there was an intricate fountain. Another was a room all made up to look like the woods, and members of the Borgia family dressed up as wild animals. Chesere dressed as a unicorn. His younger, co-colded little brother was given AC goose costume. For a short while, Lucretia and her husband were living a life together. She lost a pregnancy, but eventually she became pregnant again. The two lived together in...

relative happiness in Rome, but politics were still happening in the world all around them. This is going to be a vast oversimplification, but I hope it at least serves as a decent overview. Naples was in a precarious position. It was under threat by King Charles the 8th of France, who claimed the throne of Naples for himself through a sort of convoluted lineage. But then, King Charles VIII died. in France without a direct error, which meant that his second cousin once removed Louis the 12th inherited France. And he also inherited Charles' claim to the throne of Naples. But there was something else Louis Xelft wanted, Brittany. Brittany wasn't part of France at the time,

and the former king only had it because he had been married to the Duchess of Brittany, named Anne. Well, great, Louis the 12th would marry Anne of Brittany too. The only problem was, Louis was already married. There's a quick answer to that. You just need the Pope to take care of it. An alliance was born. Pope Alexander annulled Louis's marriage, so he could marry the Duchess of Brittany.

And in exchange, Louis gave the Pope's son, Cheseray, a duchy, military assistance, and a bride, a princess of Navarre. All of this is to say, through a convoluted series of the Borgias became allied with France, and they supported the French claim to Naples, and not the claim of the Italian royal family of Naples, the family of Lucretia's husband. Bachelier sensed that the winds were changing,

and he fled Rome when his wife was six months pregnant. The Pope was furious and sent out men to find him. They couldn't. And yet even though he would, home-free, Bachelier returned to Rome for the birth of his child at his wife's behest. The way it looked later, it looked like Lucrezia lured him back into a trap. As the sun set on July 15th in 1500, Bachelier was strolling up the steps of St. Peter's Basilica, when before he reached the threshold, he was accosted by a group of assassins.

the assassins stabbed him in the head, in the right arm, and in the leg. While Bachelier bled on the stairs, the assassins tried to snatch him up and carry him away. But then guards came out, and the assassins fled. There wasn't much time to save his life, or any time at all. He needed to get to safety, and so he was brought inside the Borgia Tower, where his sister, Sancha, and his wife Lucrezia, wept over his body while he slept. Lucretia knew that her brother was behind it,

but there was nothing she could do about that. All she could do in the meantime was prepare her husband's food just to be sure it wasn't poisoned and send for her husband's own doctors from Naples to take care of him. And for a few weeks, it looked like he was getting better. Bachelier was going to survive his wounds. Chisari, ever acting innocent, came one morning to visit his brother-in-law.

He leaned in close to give Bachelier a kiss on the cheek. What didn't happen at lunch can still happen at dinner, he whispered. A month later, Bachelier was strangled in his bed. The assassins were never caught. Lucretia was heartbroken. She went into deep mourning, signing letters to her family as La Infilechesima, the extremely unhappy one. She was only 20 years old, and she had already had two husbands. Maybe she was cursed, like everyone said.

But her family wouldn't let her mourn for long. In 1502, she was married yet again to another Alfonso. Alfonso Desta, who had later become the Duke of Ferrara. Alfonso, for his part, was, and I'll say maybe justifiably, hesitant to marry into this incredibly conniving, bloodthirsty family. It objectively had not worked out for either of his predecessors. The Duke sent a group of ambassadors to Rome to scope Lucrezia out,

and the report came back spotless. One of his ambassadors wrote of Lucrezia, Quote, she is a wise lady, and it is not only my opinion, but that of the whole company. And so Alfonso agreed to the marriage. It turns out he had a lot in common with Lucrezia. He was only 24 and a widower himself. The pair were married, and, for the first time in Lucretia's life, she lived away from Rome and away from the direct influence of her powerful father and brother.

As the Duchess of Ferrara, Lucretia soared. She was accomplished and widely praised for her beauty and leadership. This would be the longest marriage of her life lasting 17 years, though neither party was faithful. Lucretia, in classic Borgia fashion, had an affair with her husband's brother-in-law, the husband of her husband's sister. And of course, she also also.

had an affair with the much older poet whose love letters to her, Lord Byron, would one day call the prettiest love letters in the world. But there was one dark spot to her life in Ferrara. She was never allowed to see her son, Rodrigo, again, her firstborn that she had with her second husband. The idea, coming into her third marriage, was that she still had to sort of ostensibly present herself as if she was a virgin, even though by that point, everyone knew the jig was up. Throughout Rodrigo's entire young life, she begged to see him. She would send him gifts and letters.

She sent him a tutor from university in Ferrara. She didn't get to see him until he was 12 years old after he already died. Lucrezia was able to travel to where he had been living, where she stayed for a month in mourning. Lucretia's own end, would be far less dramatic than her life. She outlived her oldest son, her father, and her older brother, Chesare. And over the course of her multiple marriages, she would have eight known children,

at least one stillborn and several miscarriages. It would be during the birth of what might have been her ninth child, Isabella, that Lucrezia, then 39, would finally fall. It was the burden of all women. the risk of childbirth, that looming specter. Her father, Pope Alexander, died in 1503, and with his death came the fall in power for the whole Borgia clan. Lucrezia's brother, Chesere, had been forced to flee Italy, and he attempted to capture Navarre in a military battle. In 1507, he was chasing an enemy group of knights only to be

ambushed and attacked, killed by a spear. The enemy men stripped him of all of his fine clothing and valuables and left him alone with just a single red tile covering his genitals and the leather mask that he wore later in life to cover the half of his face that had become grossly disfigured thanks to syphilers. With the deaths of Cheseray and Pope Alexander came the death of Borges' central power and protection.

The rumors and stories about Lucrezia had always been there, but now more quickly came the slander and accusations. Some of the stories were probably warranted. The Borges as a whole were murderous and promiscuous. But Lucrezia would always be cast as the femme fatal, the murderous black widow. It's an archetype so compelling, so romantic, that sometimes it's hard to find the woman underneath. That's the story of Lucrezia Borgia, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the overall legacy of the Borgias.

This is Amy Rovok alongside T.J. Holmes from the Amy and T.J. podcast. And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place. What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F. So let's cut the crap, okay? Follow the Amy and T.J. Podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day. And listen to Amy and T.J. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance.

And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Lucretia has been immortalized in books and plays and operas hundreds of times, but her brother Cheseray has an even more impressive literary legacy. Chesire had been ruthless in his pursuit of power, using his father's paper. armies and his own mercenaries to expand his land and his family's influence. Chesire was so notable that he caught the interest of the political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. It was Chesare Borgia who inspired what would become Machiavelli's most famous work. Some say that Machiavelli wrote it ironically as a tongue-in-cheek critique of power. Plenty of people take it completely earnestly, but Machiavelli had watched Cheseriborja operate, and he would use that as his playbook, his template when he sat down to write his treatise,

The Prince. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall, and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.

Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.