The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [46]
As a young Cardinal, he had fathered a son and two daughters of unrecorded mothers and subsequently, when in his forties, three more sons and a daughter, born to his acknowledged mistress, Vanozza de Cataneis, who reputedly succeeded her mother in that role. All were his acknowledged family. He was able to acquire for the eldest son, Pedro Luis, the dukedom of Gandia in Spain and betrothal to a cousin of King Ferdinand. When Pedro died young, his title, lands and fiancée passed to his stepbrother Juan, his father’s favorite, destined for a death of the kind that was to make the Borgia family a byword. Cesare and Lucrezia, the two famous Borgias who helped to make it so, were children of Vanozza, together with Juan and another brother, Jofré. The paternity of an eighth child named Giovanni, born during the Borgia Papacy, seems to have been uncertain even within the family. Two successive papal Bulls legitimized him first as the son of Cesare and then of the Pope himself, while public opinion considered him a bastard child of Lucrezia.
Whether for a veil of respectability or for the pleasure of cuckolding, Borgia liked his mistresses to have husbands, and arranged two successive marriages for Vanozza while she was his mistress and another for her successor, the beautiful Giulia Farnese. At nineteen, with golden hair reaching to her feet, Giulia was married to an Orsini in Borgia’s palace and almost simultaneously became the Cardinal’s mistress. While a licentious private life was no scandal in the high Renaissance, this liaison between an old man, as he was considered at 59, and a girl forty years younger was offensive to Italians, perhaps because they found it inartistic. Made the subject of lewd jokes, it helped to tarnish Borgia’s reputation.
Upon Borgia’s election as Pope, the disgraceful traffic that gained him the place soon became common knowledge through the fury of the disappointed della Rovere and his partisans. Borgia himself openly boasted of it. This was a mistake because simony was an official sin that was to give the new Pope’s enemies a handle against him, which they very soon used. In the meantime, Alexander VI, as he now was, rode through Rome in a resplendent ceremony to take possession of the Lateran attended by thirteen squadrons of cavalry, 21 cardinals, each with a retinue of twelve, and ambassadors and noble dignitaries vying in the magnificence of their garments and equestrian draperies. Streets were decorated with garlands of flowers, triumphal arches, living statues formed by gilded naked youths and flags displaying the Borgia arms, a rather apt red bull rampant on a field of gold.
At this point, the shadow of France could be felt lengthening over Italy, preliminary to the era of foreign invasions that were to accelerate the decline of the Papacy and subject Italy to outside control. They were to ravage the peninsula for the next seventy years, wreck its prosperity, seize pieces of territory, diminish sovereignty and postpone the conditions for Italian unity by 400 years—all for no permanent gain to any of the parties involved. Fragmented by the incessant civil strife of its princes, Italy was an inviting and vulnerable target. It was envied too for its urban treasures, even if the region was not quite so tranquil, fertile, commercially prosperous and nobly adorned as in Guicciardini’s famous description of his country on the eve of penetration. No economic need propelled the invasions, but war was still the assumed activity of the ruling class, indemnities and expected revenues from taxable conquered territories its source of