Cesare Borgia

Indeed, Cesare had inherited none of that streak of piety which ran through his family. Alexander was a devotee of the Virgin Mary while Lucrezia developed a deep sense of religion over the years. Cesare’s great-nephew, grandson of his worthless younger brother Juan, even became a saint. But there is little to suggest that Cesare cared anything for God or religion. As a man of the Renaissance, he believed in an egocentric world, taking as his role model his namesake, Caesar. Following the Renaissance concept of the ancient world he believed that the ultimate aim of a man’s life was not heaven but fame and power on this earth, a goal to be achieved by his own individual exercise of skill and valour - ‘virtù’ - to conquer the unpredictable force of fortune - ‘fortuna’ - which ruled the world. Indeed, everything about Cesare pointed to a career other than the one chosen for him. He was a brilliant student - even the hostile historian Paolo Giovo admitted that at the University of Pisa, which he had attended after the University of Perugia, ‘he had gained such profit [from his studies] that, with ardent mind, he discussed learnedly the questions put to him in both canon and civil law’. And in a world which valued courage in war and physical prowess in the exercise of arms, he excelled in strength and competitiveness. He shared his father’s passion for hunting, for horses and hunting dogs and he learned bullfighting from the Spaniards of his own and his father’s households. He had everything with which to succeed, backed, all-importantly, by his father’s powerful position; it all depended upon his father’s life and that, in the nature of things, could not give him unlimited time. Convinced, as he once said, that he would die young, he became driven, devious, dissembling, ruthlessly crushing everyone who stood in his way. As his career progressed, the legend of the Borgia monster was born.

SARAH BRADFORD

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