ART. IX.-Lucrezia Borgia. Nach Urkunden und Correspondenzen ihrer eigenen Zeit. Von FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS. Stuttgart: 1874.

THE HE sphinx-like riddle of the story of Lucrezia Borgia has of late much occupied the attention of historical investigators in various countries. In Italy, especially in the cities of Turin, Ferrara, Modena, and Milan, books have been published to vindicate the honour of the too famous daughter of Alexander VI. In France, M. Armand Baschet, to whom the world is indebted for researches by which he has brought to light many interesting documents from the archives of various states of Italy, has for years been occupied in collecting materials for a life of Lucrezia Borgia. This, however, is unfortunately not yet completed. A Dominican monk, Ollivier, in 1870, made a desperate attempt to whitewash the whole of the Borgias in the first part of a book entitled Le Pape Alexander VI. et les Borgias.' This book, which forms a fantastic contrast to the tragedy of Victor Hugo, has not been received with favour even by the most Ultramontane organs of the Roman Catholic Church, who acknowledge that the moral character of Alexander VI. cannot possibly be rehabilitated in the face of irrefragable contemporary documents In England Mr. William Gilbert published a meritorious biography of Lucrezia Borgia in two volumes in 1869.

The first writer, however, who entered the list as a serious champion in behalf of this enigmatical lady was Mr. Roscoe, whose apology of Lucrezia speedily aroused the warmest recognition among the Italians, and has been the forerunner of all subsequent efforts of the same character. Since his time, however, it may be said that the difficulty of giving anything like a fair reputation to Lucrezia is indefinitely increased by the success which has attended the drama of a great poet and the opera of a great composer; through both of which the theatre and opera-going public of Europe have made such acquaintance with Lucrezia, as a sort of Bacchanal of blood, equally free in the use of the poison cup and the dagger, that it would seem an anomaly or a paradox to divest this heroine of the tragic qualities which have endowed her with the power of stage-fascination.

Herr Gregorovius, however, already so favourably known by his monograph on Corsica, and by his History of the City of

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Rome in the Middle Ages, has now produced the most complete and trustworthy work on the subject which has yet appeared; and although we cannot affirm that all obscurity is removed from the life and character of Lucrezia Borgia, we can at least recognise that a quantity of new and important documents have been brought to light, which enable us to take a clearer view of the difficulties of the problem.

Herr Gregorovius appears to have been moved to undertake the subject by a discovery which he made among the archives of the notarial acts of the Roman capital. He was already possessed of a number of original documents concerning the Borgias which he had collected during his researches among the archives of Italy, for the purposes of his work on Rome in the Middle Ages, when he came upon a volume of protocols of Camillo de Beneimbene, who was the confidential notary of Alexander VI. during the greater part of his career. From the documents therein contained, the genealogy of the Borgia family, both in its legitimate and illegitimate relations, could be clearly established, and the book contained the whole series of the marriage contracts of Lucrezia Borgia, besides other papers from which details of the inner relations of the Borgia family were to be drawn. He has also spared no pains in the collection of other materials. He has visited every city and town where Lucrezia abode and with which she had any connexion. He has visited Modena, Mantua, Nepi, Pesaro, Ferrara, and Florence repeatedly in the course of his researches, and he found in the State Archives of the Este family at Modena the richest treasure-trove in the way of Borgia documents. The work as thus composed cannot be regarded as an apology for Lucrezia Borgia; but it is difficult after reading it to believe that the woman was such an incarnate fiend as her enemies, who were her contemporaries, have made out. At the same time it would evince remarkable credulity to accept as true the panegyrics of the poets and writers and courtiers who knew her only as Duchess of Ferrara; it would be indeed an anomaly if a paragon of virtue had been born out of the foul nest of the Borgias.

The Spanish race of the Borjas or Borgias, whose story will always remain as illustrative of the florid exuberance of the Renaissance Period in crime as well as in virtue, were a remarkable race. They belonged to the same national type as the Cortez and the Pizarros, or as Loyola, who later was the founder of the most powerful political and religious institution which the world has ever known. They were endowed with extraordinary gifts, with physical beauty and power, as well

as with quick intelligence and courage, and fierce energy of will. Although they professed to descend from the kings of Aragon, their origin cannot be traced further back than Alfonso Borgia, who ascended the Papal chair as Callixtus III. in 1455. Alfonso Borgia was born at Xativa near Valencia. He began his Italian career as private secretary of Alfonso king of Aragon, who became afterwards king of Naples.

The family of the Borgias were related to to two other Valencian families, the Milas and the Lanzols, and members of both these families came flocking to Rome, even as early as 1444, when Alfonso was made Cardinal. Spain having by this time terminated her wars against the Moors, her sons began to divert their energies abroad, and in both hemispheres they placed their country, for a while, in a position of paramount influence. No city at that time offered a more ready and more attractive field of ambition than Rome. She was the political centre of the world. The Papacy was still revered through all civilised nations as the highest spiritual power, and no deficiency of birth or fortune could be so great there as to prevent a man from aiming at the chiefest offices of ambition, in an institution in which the highest dignity might be, as it was later, achieved by the son of a swineherd.

Callixtus III. had two sisters, one of them married a Lanzol and had two sons, Pedro Luis and Rodrigo, besides daughters. Callixtus adopted both his nephews and gave them his own family name of Borgia. Rodrigo, the youngest of these nephews of Callixtus III., he who afterwards became Alexander VI., was made a cardinal in the twenty-sixth year of his age, and one year later was advanced to the high dignity of Vice-Chancellor of the Roman Church.

As for Rodrigo's elder brother, Pedro Luis, he was overwhelmed with honours, offices, and possessions, with a profusion which made him a prototype in some measure of the position attained later by his nephew, Cæsar Borgia. Pedro Luis, however, died young, not long after the death of his uncle the Pope; and as he was unmarried, his immense property in lands and goods went to swell the resources of his brother the Cardinal, who was beginning to amass from the spoils of Christendom that immense fortune which enabled him to outbid all competitors for the chair of Saint Peter, to enrich mistresses and assassins, and to make opulent and powerful a whole tribe of illegitimate descendants. Cardinal Borgia was the richest of all the princes of the Church, at a time when the Papal exchequer was flooded with the tribute of the whole Christian world. His uncle, the Pope, Callixtus

III., had by his influence with foreign potentates procured for him a crowd of ecclesiastical benefices and sinecures in various countries of which he received the incomes at Rome. He expended a portion of these in keeping up the state of his office, and amassed the remainder so as to be ready for the day when the Papacy should become vacant.

'He is a man,' writes one of his contemporaries, ' of a spirit equal to all things, and of great intelligence; ready in speech, to which, being moderately versed in literature, he understands well how to give style; subtle by nature and of marvellous skill in the conduct of business. He is extraordinarily rich, and the protection of many kings and princes gives him reputation. He inhabits a beautiful and convenient palace which he has had built between the Ponte Sant' Angelo and the Campo de Fine. From his ecclesiastical benefices, his many abbeys in Italy, Spain, and his three bishoprics Valencia, Portus, and Carthago, he draws boundless incomes, while the office of Vice-Chancellor alone, as they say, brings him in yearly 8,000 golden gulden. The quantity of his silver plate, of his pearls, of his hangings worked in gold and silver, and his books of all kinds of knowledge is very great, and all this of a splendid magnificence which were worthy of a king or of a pope. I do not speak of the inestimable adornings of his beds and of his horses, nor of all his similar ornaments of gold and silver and silk, nor of his costly wardrobe, nor of the great mass of coined gold in his possession.'

As long as Callixtus lived, the Spaniards who flocked to Rome during his pontificate were all-powerful, and enjoyed a monopoly of all the Papal patronage, to the exclusion of the great Roman families, who on the death of the Spanish Pope arose in revolt against the hateful supremacy of foreigners, and some of them were obliged to leave the city. Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was then twenty-seven years of age; he retained his office of Papal Vice-Chancellor, and seems to have lived quietly through the pontificates of Pius II., Paul II., Sixtus IV., and Innocent VIII., still continuing to amass wealth, and waiting his time to make a bid for the Papacy. There are few details of his private life at this period. One letter of exhortation, however, is still extant, addressed to him by Pius II., in his twenty-ninth year, from which it appears that his dissolute conduct during a visit to Sienna had raised a scandal in the town, and filled the Pope's heart with shame and indignation. He had many mistresses, but Vanozza is the one best known to history, since she was the mother of Cæsar and Lucrezia, and with her Cardinal Borgia became acquainted about the year 1466. The name Vanozza was a familiar transformation of Giovanna-her full name was Vanozza Catanei, but of what family she came is not known. Some

years after his connexion with Vanozza he contrived, as some cloak to his relations with her, to bring about a marriage between his mistress and one Giorgio di Croce, a Milanese, for whom he had obtained the post of apostolic writer for Sixtus IV., and who was willing to accept this dishonourable alliance for the sake of advancement.

Lucrezia Borgia was born in the year 1480, in the pontificate of Sixtus ÏV., in the very same month in which Lorenzo the Magnificent had consolidated his power at Florence by the establishment of the Council of Seventy. Lucrezia was six years younger than her terrible brother Cæsar Borgia, and eight years younger than Juan, Duke of Gandia, destined to be the victim of his brother's ruthless ambition. The period in which Lucrezia was born was one for Rome of abomination, not as dark indeed as that of the Borgia epoch, but still sufficiently terrible for a city which was held to be the capital of Christianity. The Pope, Sixtus IV., of the Riario family, was a pontiff of more commanding powers than Alexander VI., and exhibited a restless activity in his endeavours to extend the temporal power of the Church by intrigue and violence; he had concerted the conspiracy of the Pazzi, whose plans included the murder of the Medicis. His nephew, Girolamo Riario, was all-powerful under the pontificate, and it was for him the Pope was unweariedly scheming the conquest of the Romagna--that eternal object of papal cupidity to obtain possession of which Cæsar Borgia committed some of the ghastliest in his series of crimes, with the full approbation of his father. While the head of the Church was thus absorbed in schemes of temporal ambition, and unscrupulous of means, religion itself became a mere show, in which the actors were stained with every vice and crime, and the immorality of all classes was furious and shameless. Whole quarters were swarming with courtesans, who paraded the streets in the pride and state of princesses, while the feuds of the great families broke out continually into open warfare, and the armed followers of the Colonna and the Savelli, on the one side, with those of the Orsini on the other, carried on the old war of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, recruited their strength among the other hostile families in Rome, and day by day terrified the city with scenes. of havoc and assassination.

Lucrezia passed the first years of her childhood in the house of her mother, who dwelt close to the palace of the Cardinal Borgia himself, in the Piazza Pizzo di Merlo, which was situated in the quarter called Ponte, adjoining the Ponte Sant' Angelo, through which passed the high road to the Vatican,