In the whole of recorded
history, has there ever been a more infamous figure than Roderigo Borgia, Pope
Alexander VI, the most extravagantly wicked of all the wicked Borgias, indeed
surely the ultimate champion of depravity?
This should not have the appearance of
an extravagant question. Open any standard history or book of reference,
including those written by Catholics, and you will find the same generally
accepted picture, summarized as well as anyone else by one of his countless
biographers, Orestes Ferrara, who tells us on the first page of his great work:
For public life, the word Borgia calls up a vision of poison and dagger, of malevolent cunning, incest, fratricide, perfidy unlimited; and for the Church, simony, nepotism, utter want of belief, something very close to atheism. In common opinion, the comparatively short period in which Pope Alexander occupied the throne of Peter was a time of abomination so immeasurable that other ages, no matter how notorious their infamy, can only approach and never equal it.
Alexander, we are told by
Ferrara and countless others, led a life of constant debauchery. Using his
great wealth, he bought the office of pope; he murdered many of the cardinals
who were his former colleagues, killed others besides—even stabbing a boy aged
twelve years old to death—and seized the money of all his victims. He practiced
nepotism on a huge scale, kept a harem, flaunted his many concubines,
entertaining some twenty five women in the Vatican every evening, and on one
notable occasion assaulted a married woman. He and his scarcely less wicked son,
César Borgia, committed incest with the same woman, his daughter and César’s
sister, the unspeakable Lucretia Borgia. He destroyed the peace of Europe,
invited the conquest of Italy by barbarians, robbed princes of their towns,
castles, and houses, and stole money and other goods from the Church. He died
after committing suicide by poison. Thus was the life of the two-hundred
fourteenth occupant of the Chair of Saint Peter, the Vicar of Christ possessing
the God-given authority to teach and to govern the Catholic faithful. No wonder
he is the frequent subject of films and television spectaculars.
Between ourselves, good readers (I am
hoping the editor will blink when he comes to this sentence and let it
through!)—historical writers, like journalists, are sometimes prone to
exaggeration. But the breadth and variety of his crimes and vices make
exaggeration in the case of a villain of world-historic proportions such as
Alexander VI impossible even before we measure his life against his solemn
responsibility, inherent in the Petrine Office, of giving the best possible
example of the virtues relevant to princes.
What, however, if the picture of this
pontiff given to us by most historians is not all of it true? What, more to the point, if it is entirely false? It
is a more serious question than you might think. Even historians are not
unanimous on the question. I must now give you some more of Orestes Ferrara,
who, unusually among those who have written about this pope, made extensive
first-hand research. Here is the passage that immediately follows the one I
have just quoted:
It is quite certain that the palpitating story that now occupies the general mind is a sheer invention. What passes for the history of the Borgias is a legend, in part invented by contemporaries and in part added by later authors. . . . To make it plausible it has been necessary little by little to add imaginary acts to real acts, then to alter proportions, to turn guesses into realities, and finally, with the aid of distance, to transform the whole thing into a piece of drama. The history of Alexander VI as it has reached us is a tissue of inaccuracies, extraordinarily easy to disprove the moment recourse is had to contemporary documents in a spirit of sane criticism.
Accusation
after accusation collapses, not only for want of proof, but still more because
it was evidently impossible for him to have committed the crime in question!
Despite his
words—“extraordinarily easy to disprove” and “evidently impossible for him to
have committed the crime in question”—in relation to many of the accusations,
Ferrara was far from uncritical of Alexander VI. Another writer whom any
conscientious investigator should consult is the American, Monsignor Peter De
Roo, acclaimed in his day as an important historian.
Having noticed anomalies in the accepted view of Alexander VI, De Roo devoted years of painstaking labor to consulting authentic contemporary documents, not failing to note, amongst other indisputable evidence, when eyewitnesses to his supposed crimes could not have failed to mention others of his crimes if they had really happened, and yet did not do so. (This, of course, might only mean that one falsifier was not aware of what was being alleged, or to be alleged, by other falsifiers.) From these researches—more than two-thousand five-hundred pages’ worth in total—came his Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI, His Relatives and His Time, published in New York in 1924.
Let me guess. You haven’t read it? You
are not alone. It has never been available in English bookshops, and, when I
first consulted the British Library copy, its pages were still uncut.
What a pity. For in these unread
volumes De Roo concluded that Alexander worked effectively in his capacity as
head of the Church, that he made strenuous efforts to carry out such reforms of
the clergy as were needed at the time, that he labored constantly to save
Europe from destructive attacks by the Turks, and made great personal
sacrifices in doing so. He demonstrates that in his dealings with princes and
subjects of the Papal States, the pope, who had the gravest reasons to act
firmly against the kings of France and Naples, he was both generous and
merciful, acting always in accordance with justice and duty. Moreover, he was
all his life a man of excellent moral character in every way, and a truly great
pope.
Of course, De Roo does not have to be
right. But he does not have to be wrong either. Even in our present democratic
age, facts that are definite facts are not decided by majority vote, nor even
by virtually unanimous vote. Indeed, if anything, a lone voice is more likely
to be right than wrong in such a matter, no matter how many and eminent are the
historians opposed to him, provided that he has adequate qualifications for his
task and there is no need to suspect his motives.
I bring to your attention a famous detective novel about the murder of a businessman, Whose Body, by Dorothy Sayers. At the inquest Sir Julian Freke, a senior and well-known surgeon, says that the deceased was killed recently by a blow to the head; with the utmost reluctance, Dr. Grimbold, a less eminent physician, insists that the man must have died several days after receiving the blow. Naturally Grimbold would only disagree with a respected surgeon when the truth was so elementary and obvious. We ultimately discover that the surgeon is himself the murderer.
By analogy, De Roo is unlikely to have
devoted so many years to research and writing absent the well-judged conviction
that he was right. He was never going to profit financially from publication
(nor did he). And the credibility of the Church was not at stake either way—it
has never been a claim of the Church that popes cannot disgrace their office.
Not that this proves that De Roo is
right. But was he, especially in his contention about Alexander’s excellent
moral character? I maintain that, on the basis of the evidence accumulated in
his five volumes, his conclusion is completely inescapable, beyond any possibility
of doubt.
To pass on to you the contents of six
volumes is not the easiest of tasks. But I can say that according to the actual
historical evidence compiled by Monsignor De Roo, Pope Alexander VI was loved
by all who knew him: by the popes whom he served before becoming pope himself,
by cardinals, by officials of the Roman court, and by the common people of his
city. He was very generous and charitable towards the poor and the sick. He was
responsible for a massive promotion of learning, including the rebuilding of
the Roman University and the establishment and favoring of several other
universities. He restored several churches, improved the Vatican Palace, and
rebuilt the castle of Sant’Angelo. He improved the streets and aqueducts of
Rome and repaired all the city walls, gates, and several bridges. He also
restored the fountains of Rome.
What about the famous Line of
Demarcation by which, as every schoolchild knows (or used to know), he
arbitrarily gave half of South America to Spain and the other half to Portugal?
This story is based upon a misunderstanding of one the basic functions of papal
bulls. All Alexander did was to confirm existing arrangements, which Spain and
Portugal would not have regarded as binding unless confirmed by the pope. That
was the custom in those days: a bull used for such a purpose was rather like a
modern patent protecting the inventor. And the most important result of the
line—peace between the two halves of South America ever since—can hardly be
said to have been a misfortune in itself.
On the subject of robbery and murder,
it is surely sufficient to say that not a single contemporary writer who is considered reliable attributed to him any
unbecoming deed whatever, whether as a young man, as a cardinal, or as pope.
This includes simony. We are accustomed to hear that Alexander VI bought and
sold offices and influence in the Church, indeed, the papacy itself. It is
often impossible to prove a negative, but it is easy enough in this case. His
election as pope was, rather unusually, unanimous. Twenty-three cardinals
voted, twenty-two of them for Cardinal Borgia. The only dissenting voter was
Borgia himself. These exceptional circumstances were known and remarked upon
throughout Christendom, as even his later enemies acknowledge.
One of the many misunderstandings De
Roo clears up is that Alexander was at no point in his life a rich man. But
suppose, for the sake of argument, that he had been one: can we really imagine
that the entire College of Cardinals viewed the conclave as an open
marketplace, that corruption was so widespread that the vote of every single
member was for sale? Believe that if you will. But even among Alexander’s
severest critics, you will find no historian who suggests that such a thing
ever took place, or could have. Moreover, as is also widely admitted, his
election was welcomed with unprecedented enthusiasm, with sumptuous feasts and
rejoicings everywhere. This is, unsurprisingly, what we should expect if by
reputation, on the basis of his achievements until that point, he was commonly
regarded as very much the right man
for the Chair.
What about sins of the flesh? De Roo’s
exhaustive research uncovers no mention of any such crimes or scandals in
contemporary dispatches. The best that can be said for the two women who are
commonly named as his concubines, the so-called Spanish and Roman Vanozzas, is
that at least the Spanish one actually existed. She was the wife of his nephew,
William Raymond Borgia. Nowhere in the writings of any of the contemporaries of
Alexander VI, or in the writings of later historians of his family, is there
any mention of any actual occasion of his being seen in her company, or of his
having spoken to her, met her, or even looked at her.
As for his openly acknowledged
children, among whom the monstrous César and Lucretia are much the best known,
none of them was heard of in Italy until 1488. They were all born in Spain, at
dates that make it impossible for Roderigo Borgia to have fathered them. In
reality, they appear to have been the children of his nephew, William Raymond.
The only evidence that Pope Alexander was their real father is that he often
used expressions such as “my sons” and “my daughters” in correspondence with
them. On occasion, he would address Lucretia in letters as “Our dearest
daughter in Christ”. He used a similar expression—“Our beloved daughter”—when
he addressed Queen Elizabeth of Spain, and far as I am aware no family
relationship has been alleged to have existed between the pope, and the latter.
Likewise, while he certainly called César and Giovanni, another nephew, his
“favorite sons,” he employed identical words in his correspondence with the
Emperor Maximilian, and indeed with all Christians with whom he had any
correspondence. As for Lucretia and César themselves, they seem to have been
persons, as De Roo shows us, of widely acknowledged and admired virtue.
Finally, it is worth noting that so far from having possibly committed suicide,
the particular circumstances of Alexander’s final illness and exemplary death are
very well established. The pope died naturally of fever on August 18, 1503.
I shall pass over countless other
charges (save that of nepotism, which I have reason to consider below), other
than to say that De Roo gives completely satisfactory answers to all of them. A
more interesting question is: why? Why has Alexander been libeled to such an
extraordinary degree, surely without precedent in the whole of history?
One factor is almost certainly that
Rodrigo Borgia was not Italian, but a Spaniard. Spaniards were consistently
hated by the Italian nobility, and his contemporaries among the Italian
nobility must have hated him all the more when those Italians on whom he had
bestowed important offices in the Church (but who turned out to have had their
own non-spiritual agendas) consistently betrayed him, to which he responded by
giving those offices to fellow-Spaniards, including members of his own family,
since these were the only people whom he could trust. A much more important
reason for the character assassination of him, though, is that he consistently
followed, without compromise, his conscience as a statesman; he did this
irrespective of the strength of the local vested interests, which the interests
of the Church required him to trample upon. How he did so—consistently, with
his duties to Christ and the poor constantly before his eyes—is shown very
clearly and ably in De Roo’s six volumes, which I wish I could say were
available in your local library. Perhaps some enterprising Catholic publisher
could make them available again. Until then, one can only regret the calumnies
visited upon poor Alexander VI.
Do I mean poor? Only up to a point, I
suggest. My readers may recall those words of the eighth and final Beatitude,
recorded in the fifth chapter of Saint Matthew’s Gospel: “Blessed are you when
they shall revile you and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against
you, for My sake. Be glad and rejoice; for your reward is very great in
Heaven.”
N.M. Gwynne is the author of Gwynne’s Latin and Gwynne’s Grammar.