The Borgias

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Authors: Christopher Hibbert

Tags: #Europe, #History, #General

BOOK: The Borgias
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A
LSO BY
C
HRISTOPHER
H
IBBERT

M
ILITARY
H
ISTORY

Wolfe at Quebec

The Destruction of Lord Raglan: A Tragedy of the Crimean War

Corunna

The Battle of Arnhem

Agincourt

Redcoats and Rebels: The War for America, 1770–1781

Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English at War, 1642–1649

H
ISTORY

King Mob: Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780

The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment

The Court at Windsor: A Domestic History

The Grand Tour

London: The Biography of a City

The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793–1911

The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

The Great Mutiny: India, 1857

The French Revolution

Rome: The Biography of a City

The English: A Social History, 1066–1945

Venice: The Biography of a City

Florence: The Biography of a City

No Ordinary Place: Radley College and the Public School System, 1847–1997

B
IOGRAPHIES

Benito Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce

Garibaldi and His Enemies: The Clash of Arms and Personalities in the Making of Italy

The Making of Charles Dickens

Charles I

The Personal History of Samuel Johnson

George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762–1811

George IV: Regent and King, 1811–1830

Edward VII: A Portrait

Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals

The Virgin Queen: The Personal History of Elizabeth I

Nelson: A Personal History

Wellington: A Personal History

George III: A Personal History

The Marlboroughs: John and Sarah Churchill, 1650–1744

Queen Victoria: A Personal History

Napoleon: His Wives and Women

Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the USA by Harcourt,
a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008,
as
The Borgias and Their Enemies

First published in the UK as
The House of Borgia
by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2009

This edition published by Constable, 2011

Copyright © Christopher Hibbert and Mary Hollingsworth, 2008

The right of Christopher Hibbert and Mary Hollingsworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-84901-994-1
eISBN: 978-1-78033-005-1

Printed and bound in the UK

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

— C
ONTENTS

 

 

C
HAPTER
1 The Crumbling City

C
HAPTER
2 Elections and Celebrations

C
HAPTER
3 A Man of Endless Virility

C
HAPTER
4 Servant of the Servant of God

C
HAPTER
5 Marriages and Alliances

C
HAPTER
6 The French in Rome

C
HAPTER
7 The Conquest of Naples

C
HAPTER
8 The Borgia Bull

C
HAPTER
9 Father and Children

C
HAPTER
10 The Dominican Friar

C
HAPTER
11 Murder

C
HAPTER
12 Another Husband for Lucrezia

C
HAPTER
13 The Unwanted Cardinal’s Hat

C
HAPTER
14 Cesare’s French Bride

C
HAPTER
15 Conquests

C
HAPTER
16 Jubilee

C
HAPTER
17 Duke of the Romagna

C
HAPTER
18 The Naples Campaign

C
HAPTER
19 The Duke and the Borgia Girl

C
HAPTER
20 Frolics and Festivities

C
HAPTER
21 The New Bride

C
HAPTER
22 Castles and Condottieri

C
HAPTER
23 The Death of the Pope

C
HAPTER
24 Conclaves

C
HAPTER
25 Cesare at Bay

C
HAPTER
26 Duchess of Ferrara

C
HAPTER
27 The End of the Affair

C
HAPTER
28 The Death of the Duchess

C
HAPTER
29 Saints and Sinners

— C
HAPTER 1

 

The Crumbling City

‘O
H
G
OD
,
HOW PITIABLE IS
R
OME

 

‘Y
OU MUST HAVE
heard of this city from others,’ wrote a visitor to Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century.

There are many splendid palaces, houses, tombs and temples here, and infinite numbers of other edifices, but they are all in ruins. There is much porphyry and marble from ancient buildings but every day these marbles are destroyed in a scandalous fashion by being burned to make lime. And what is modern is poor stuff . . . The men of today, who call themselves Romans, are very different in bearing and conduct from the ancient inhabitants . . . They all look like cowherds.

 

Other visitors wrote of moss-covered statues, of defaced and indecipherable inscriptions, of ‘parts within the walls that look like
thick woods or caves where forest animals were wont to breed, of deer and hares being caught in the streets . . . of the daily sight of heads and limbs of men who had been executed and quartered being nailed to doors, placed in cages or impaled on spears.’

This was the state of the city that had once been the capital of a mighty empire; now two-thirds of the area inside the walls, which had been built to protect a population of 800,000, was uninhabited, acres of open countryside used for orchards, pasture, and vineyards, and dotted with ancient ruins, which provided safe hiding places for thieves and bandits. And this was the state of the true home of the pope, the leader of the church who could trace his predecessors back in an unbroken line to St Peter, the apostle entrusted by Christ himself with the care of his flock.

For most of the fourteenth century, even the papacy had abandoned Rome. In 1305, distressed by the unrest and bloody disturbances in the city, the French Pope Clement V (1305–14) had set up his court in Avignon, in the rambling palace on the east bank of the Rhône, which is known as the Palais des Papes. In Rome there had been constant calls for the papacy to return from its French exile. Most recently these calls had come from an elderly woman, who could be seen almost every day in the crumbling city, sitting by the door of the convent of San Lorenzo, begging for alms for the poor.

She was Birgitta Gudmarsson, the daughter of a rich Swedish judge and widow of a Swedish nobleman, to whom she had been married at the age of thirteen and for whom she had borne eight children. Founder of the Brigittines, she had left Sweden after experiencing a vision in which Christ had appeared before her, commanding her to leave immediately for Rome and to remain there
until she had witnessed the pope’s return. As she went about Rome, from church to crumbling church, house to ruinous house, she claimed to have had further visions; both Jesus and his mother Mary, she said, had spoken to her, and they had strengthened her faith in the restoration of the pope and in the eventual salvation of the city.

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