The Borgias were vicious, shrewd, intellectual, and perspicacious, and possessed of indomitable will. They were endowed with the mental and physical force which wins success and often hatred.

Securing possession of the papal office at a time when all men were greedy for power; building up principalities and advancing the family interests and at the same time enhancing the Spanish influence in the Holy See and throughout Italy, their enemies minimised their virtues and magnified their vices. They were charged with all sorts of hideous crimes, some of which they undoubtedly committed, and some, of which they certainly were innocent. Their hostile contemporaries spread reports of their evil deeds throughout Christendom, and the charges made against them in their lifetime have been repeated by historians down to the present day.

Again, the Borgias have been judged, not in connection with their age and their contemporaries, but as isolated creatures, or by modern standards of ethics. Caesar Borgia has been described as a ravening wolf among a flock of sheep, whereas, as Medin well says,7 he was merely a wolf battling with other wolves, with this difference, that while he possessed the same greediness, ferocity, and ambition, he surpassed them all in the vastness of his projects and in the unshakable determination with which he carried them out.

To judge the Borgias by present standards is manifestly unjust. The character of the Papacy has changed; Alexander VI. was merely a temporal prince with certain sacerdotal functions. He used his great office for the advancement of himself, his family, and his followers, as other Popes of his epoch did, but more consistently, more skilfully. Like other potentates of the day, he had his mistresses, whom he did not hesitate to introduce into the Vatican, and his numerous bastards, whom he publicly acknowledged.

In this connection it might be well to remember that the illegitimate in the fifteenth century were not regarded with the contempt in which they are supposed to be held at the present time; in fact, they were openly recognised and treated exactly the same as the legitimate children, and when for political or other reasons it became necessary to legitimatise them, nothing was easier, the Popes often undertaking to remove the taint by special bulls. Gregorovius calls this the golden age of bastards and enumerates among the reigning princes of Italy of illegitimate birth, Sforza of Milan, Ferrante of Calabria, Sigismondo Malatesta of the Marches, and Borso of Ferrara, who was one of the eight natural sons of the House of Este who rode forth to meet Pius II. when he was on his way to the Congress of Mantua in 1459, and whom he described as “eloquent, generous, and magnificent.”8 When the lawful children were minors or lacking in force, bastards were often admitted to the succession; the fitness of the individual, and not the fact of pure or impure birth, was the test. In more northern countries, Burgundy for example, illegitimate children were provided for by a distinct class of appanages, such as bishoprics. The greatest of the sons of men did not express an isolated opinion when he made Gloucester’s illegitimate son, Edmund, exclaim:—

History, whose chief concern until recent years has been the recording of the victories of fraud and force and the perpetuation of the memory of the morally deformed, from Caesar to Bonaparte, has preserved for our edification the names of innumerable bastards who dazzled their contemporaries, and whom little boys and girls are taught to admire, just as they are taught to admire those monsters who, in the pursuit of their own aims and ambitions, have destroyed the greatest number of their fellows—wholesale murder being a glorious achievement; thus we have Don John of Austria, Vendôme, Dunois, Prince Eugene, the Constable of Bourbon, and Maurice of Saxony. Not until the sixteenth century did Italy feel any repugnance for illegitimacy, and then it was due to the influence of foreign ideas and the counter-revolution.9

In addition to illegitimacy of birth another form of illegitimacy was common in the peninsula, the illegitimate power of a reigning sovereign—that is, the usurped dominion enjoyed by a political adventurer. We need not pause to inquire whether he usurped it from an earlier usurper, either a prince or a faction, or to ask how usurped power can ever become legitimate. This state of affairs gave birth to innumerable crimes of violence, and the dagger and the poisoned cup were the usual instruments of personal political advancement.

The origin of some of these illegitimate powers can be traced back to the middle of the eleventh century, when the feudal lords found themselves confronted by a new power in the cities in the form of the corporation or guild of artisans who had gradually become conscious of their strength and importance, and had shown their masters that they were to be counted with in the future.

The development of this new movement was furthered by the Wars of Investiture, which, while weakening the authority of the bishops, aroused the minds of the citizens, caused them to take an interest in public affairs, and gave them a desire for freedom.

In almost every city there were then two bishops, one representing the Empire, the other the Holy See, and each sought to increase the number of his followers for the purpose of overcoming and expelling his rival; hence innumerable concessions, privileges, and franchises were granted the citizens, until finally, when the struggle was brought to a close by the Concordat of Worms, in 1122, almost all the sovereign rights—the regalia—had passed into the hands of the people.

Not only were the bishops forced to yield but the Emperor himself, the Countess Matilda, and all the great lords were compelled to acquiesce in the movement which even extended to cities that were independent of any bishop.

Henceforth the cities governed themselves and elected their own chiefs or consuls. They, however, did not pretend to be wholly independent of the Empire but readily acknowledged themselves its feudatories. The movement spread throughout Italy, and many of the cities became so powerful that they compelled the feudal lords of the surrounding country to apply for citizenship and to agree to obey the communal statutes. These various elements introduced into the city soon occasioned discord and quarrels, in which bloodshed became frequent; in addition to this intestine warfare, the rivalry between the different communes resulted in continual strife among them.

For a time they were left to prey on each other; for, although they were feudatories of the Empire, the Emperors were unable to devote any attention to the affairs of Italy, Germany being torn asunder by the Guelphs, adherents of the house of Bavaria, and the Ghibellines, supporters of the house of Franconia.

The communal regime was an advance over the Feudal System, but it could not survive the internal and external quarrels; it soon began to show signs of weakness, and by the end of the century it was apparent that it was doomed. The majority of the people, interested in commerce and manufacturing, grew tired of the strife and were ready to welcome any strong power that would assume the leadership and put an end to the internal dissension and protect the city from attacks from without. As the commune was broken up into innumerable factions it was in a peculiarly suitable condition to be seized by any strong and daring adventurer who might aspire to the control, and when this man happened to be the head of the city government, the podestà or captain of the people, it was an easy step to the tyranny. During the later years of the communes the magistrates were usually selected from among the feudal families of the neighbourhood. They were accustomed to command and were supplied with arms, and in addition to their supporting faction in the city they had, in many cases, a large following of kinsmen and retainers on their neighbouring estates. Consequently nothing was easier than for them to seize the supreme power in the city, hold, and transmit it to their descendants.

Among the first families to secure and preserve this illegitimate power were the Della Scala, who appropriated Verona; the Este, who imposed themselves on Ferrara; the Medici, who secured the powerful commune of Florence; and the Gonzaga, who seized Mantua.

The vast multitude which came to Rome for the jubilee of 1300 inspired Boniface VIII. with dreams of empire, and a year later he published a bull in which he affirmed the absolute power of the Pope above all princes, kings, and emperors. This view was contested by Philippe le Bel of France, who was supported by the nobles, clergy, and people. Boniface retired to his city of Anagni to prepare a bull of excommunication, whereupon, acting in accord with Sciarra Colonna and other enemies of the Pope, Nogaret, Philippe’s minister, took possession of the town of Anagni and seized his Holiness, who was, however, liberated by the people a few days later. The Holy Father returned to Rome, where he died shortly afterwards (1303).

Two years later a Frenchman, Bertrand Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected Pope. He, however, did not go to Italy, but established the Papal See at Avignon, and the Popes finally placed themselves under the protection of the kings of France and their political authority rapidly declined.

During the succeeding two hundred years the tyrannies established on the ruins of the communes were growing stronger, and in many cities powerful dynasties had established themselves, handing the government down from father to son, or to the member of the clan best fitted to conserve the power, priority or legitimacy of birth having little to do with the succession, the possession of virtu, the characteristic most necessary for the preservation of self and family, determining the descent. Wherever the legitimate heir was found to be inferior, mentally or physically, to one of the bastards of the family, he was set aside for the latter.

The companies of paid soldiers now began to appear in Italy. These bands of mercenaries were captained by the so-called condottieri, and when the war for which they had been engaged was ended they were discharged like other wage-workers. Their leaders were bold and unscrupulous and had no personal interest at stake. This system gave rise to the gravest dangers to the peninsula; it brought into Italy swarms of worthless adventurers, who sold their services to any one able to pay for them and often they turned against their employer. They overran the country, robbing, murdering, debauching.

The power of the Popes in Romagna, never very strong, had grown weaker during their absence in Avignon. Bologna had fallen into the grasp of the Pepoli; the Polentani had secured Ravenna; the Manfredi owned Faenza; the Ordelaffi enjoyed Forli; the Malatesta held sway over Rimini; the Varano disposed of the fortunes of Camerino; the Montefeltre of Urbino and Civitavecchia. The Campagna was harassed by bands of brigands led by members of these families, and in Rome complete anarchy obtained, the two great clans of Orsini and Colonna constantly fighting to secure the control.

The fifteenth century was filled with the contests of the tyrannies among themselves; the weaker were crushed by the stronger, who absorbed their territories, and thus the great states were formed and their heads became princes. Besides the struggles with outside rivals these princely houses were always at strife with other powerful families within their own domain; conspiracies and intrigue filled the day; the princes became more despotic; rivals, pretenders, disobedient or lukewarm retainers were systematically put to death; cruelty knew no bounds.

The people were callous or indifferent to the crimes of the lords because they were committed chiefly against their own rivals—that is, persons of their own rank. The populace had long since lost all hope of ruling, and they were dazzled by the splendour of the Court and the magnificence of the monuments erected by the reigning prince. The return of a modicum of the spoils, in the form of a monument of some sort, a library, or a hospital, to commemorate the name and fame of the brigand has always been found to be the most efficacious way to placate the despoiled rabble.

The Visconti of Milan was one of the greatest of the princely houses of Italy, and it reached the height of its power in the person of Gian Galeazo, who added greatly to the family domains. With the assistance of the Carrara of Padua he overthrew the Scala of Verona and Vicenza, and then proceeded to wrest Padua from his late allies, who, however, soon recovered the city. He put down the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Este of Ferrara, and the Paleologi of Montferrat, and in 1395 he induced the Emperor Winzel to confer the title of Duke of Milan on him. Having defeated a coalition formed against him, he seized Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Perugia, Assisi, Spoleto, and Bologna, and was preparing to appropriate Florence and make himself King of Italy when he suddenly died (1402). On his death his states rapidly fell away; the Pope recovered Bologna, Perugia, and Assisi, Florence took Pisa, while the Venetians grabbed Verona and Vicenza. In some of the cities families that had been despoiled by the Visconti returned to power, and other places fell into the hands of the condottieri, so that Gian Galeazzo’s sons found their estates reduced to Milan and Pavia. No better example could be found of the rise, growth, and extinction of an illegitimate power—that is, a power based on fraud, usurpation, and tyranny.

Filippo Maria, the last of the Visconti, died in 1447 and a republic was immediately proclaimed in Milan. Francesco Sforza, not wishing to assert such rights as he may have had to the succession as the husband of a natural daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti, placed his services at the command of the republic in the war against Venice. He, however, unexpectedly made peace with the enemy and turned his forces against Milan, and, although there was a party favourable to Sforza, the city made a brave resistance. Finally an uprising occurred, the republic was overthrown, and Francesco entered the city and was proclaimed duke in 1450.

Milan in the second half of the fifteenth century was one of the most powerful of the Italian states; and when Francesco Sforza died in 1466 he was succeeded by his son Galeazzo Maria, a dissolute and cruel man, who was assassinated in a church by three nobles in 1476. His son, Gian Galeazzo, at this time was only eight years old, consequently his mother, Bona of Savoy, assumed the regency. The brothers of the deceased duke, however, conspired against her, and finally Ludovico il Moro, the most determined and deceitful of them, succeeded in getting possession of the government, whereupon he compelled her to leave the duchy.

Italy had awakened from the long slumber of the Middle Ages, during which her intellect had been paralysed by the superstitions and terrors inculcated by an ignorant and mercenary priesthood. She was emerging from the gloom into the new life which manifested itself, not only in the revival of learning and the prodigious blossoming of the fine arts, but also in the expansion of the human personality. Man had again discovered himself; he had become conscious of his faculties; he had found that he possessed a will that could carry him on to greatness in many fields of human activity. Hitherto superstitious, ignorant, and bigoted, he had been taught that if he ventured to use the intellect with which he had been endowed he would be eternally damned. Life to him was merely a painful pilgrimage between two eternities, through one of which he would be doomed to hell fire if in his mundane existence he dared to find any of the joy of living.

Finally some perspicacious souls began to doubt, and in the teachings of the newly discovered heathen philosophy they found a theory of life more humane, more natural, more charitable.

The arts had been entirely occupied with sacred subjects because in the Middle Ages the Church was their only patron. The gloom and superstition of mediaeval Christianity oppressed men’s souls, consequently the subjects selected were hideous and lugubrious in the extreme—emaciated saints, representations of the Last Judgment, human beings writhing in the torment of eternal wrath. The Almighty was not a god of pity and love, but one of vengeance. The teaching of the Nazarene was entirely distorted, just as it was by the Presbyterian divines in Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they proclaimed their mission to be “to thunder out the Lord’s wrath and to curse,” and endeavoured to frighten their hearers into the paths of virtue with horrible tales of men “scorched in hell-fire,” in “boiling oil, burning brimstone, scalding lead,” sufficiently summarised in one of Binning’s sermons: “You shall go out of one hell into a worse; eternity is the measure of its continuance, and the degrees of itself are answerable to its duration.” Such, according to the Scotch pastors, was the measure of God’s love.

Extremes, however, lead to revolution. A period of great asceticism is always followed by an era of licentiousness, and in Italy this era was synchronous with the age of the Borgias.

It is no part of the present writer’s purpose to palliate the crimes of the Borgia; recent attempts which have been made to show that Alexander VI. and his son Caesar were gentle and impeccable beings, maligned and slandered, are inspired chiefly by a love of paradox, or occasioned by a motive not unlike that which actuates the great criminal lawyer whose chief victories consist in securing, not the acquittal of the innocent but of the guilty. These efforts, therefore, should not be taken too seriously.

Like other princes, the Borgias were human, and the same passions that prevail among the laity also rule among the priesthood. Theoretically the cardinals were the Pope’s advisers, an ecclesiastical senate, charged with the salvation of humanity, but actually they were a body of powerful and astute politicians, appointed by the Pope on his own initiative or at the request of some reigning sovereign or great family whose support his Holiness was anxious to secure. The cardinalate was bestowed in precisely the same way, and for the same reasons, as a minister’s portfolio is at the present time—that is, without any regard to the fitness of the beneficiary, and as a reward for services rendered or to come, and sometimes for even baser reasons: Alexander VI. raised Farnese to the purple in return for the complaisance of his sister, the beautiful Giulia.

Youths were made cardinals at a tender age. Giovanni de’ Medici, a precocious prelate of eighteen years, on the conclusion of the conclave that elected Alexander VI. was wise enough to flee from Rome; and Caesar Borgia was seventeen when his father discovered he had need of his counsel in conducting the affairs of the Church.

The great houses vied with each other for the honour, prestige, and power. It was no small matter to sit in the ecclesiastical senate and have a voice in directing the conscience of civilised humanity, at a time when the masses did not dare even to think; and to have a vote in the election of the greatest potentate on earth, who could make and unmake kings and emperors, and consign them to eternal punishment at will. The vast emoluments of the great office, the enormous revenues of the various prebends and livings the cardinals enjoyed need not be mentioned.

Their power and wealth knew no bounds. Surrounded by their kinsmen and retainers, they maintained princely courts. They rode about the city in the garb of condottieri, encased in steel, with swords clanking at their sides. In their palaces they maintained hundreds of men, whose number was increased, when occasion demanded, by the addition of gangs of paid bullies and ruffians. Every palace was a stronghold, and in addition those of the cardinals possessed the right of sanctuary—a right, it may be observed, which was not generally respected unless it was backed by might, as is shown by the frequent murders in churches in Italy in the period of the Renaissance, one of the most extraordinary of which was the stabbing to death of Giuliano de’ Medici by Bernardo Bandini and Francesco de’ Pazzi, assisted by a priest, who “being accustomed to the place, was less superstitious about its sanctity,” at the steps of the altar in the duomo of Florence in 1478, under the very eyes of Cardinal Raffaele Riario, the raising of the Host being the signal for the attack. The palaces were great stone fortresses with towers and battlements; the portal was closed with doors barred and studded with iron, capable of resisting almost any force; within were vast courts and living quarters for the swarms of retainers. Many of these strongholds were even supplied with artillery. A criminal often secured the protection of some cardinal who, with the aid of his “family,” his armed followers, would rescue and save him from prison. On one occasion a number of playful young Romans having assaulted some of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza’s servants, the good prelate’s “family,” armed to the teeth, sallied forth, fell upon the jokers, and slashed and hacked about twenty of them. At another time when a certain Savelli, Captain of the Curia, was about to proceed with an execution in the vicinity of the palace of Cardinal Balue, that worthy ecclesiastic called to him from a window and commanded him to stop, as the place was in his own jurisdiction. On the captain’s refusal to do as he was commanded the cardinal ordered his “family” to storm the prison, which they did, liberating all the captives and destroying the records. That night Cardinals Savelli and Colonna dispatched their own forces against their colleague. Subsequently all the belligerents were summoned to appear before the Pope on the charge of contumacy, but the only notice which Cardinal Balue took of the order was to fill his lair with armed men.

In a world of rapid change human life, honour, and the higher sentiments are held in slight esteem; material success is the goal men strive to reach and few question the means they employ. During the late Renaissance the despot did not hesitate to remove any obstacle in the way of his progress, even when that obstacle was a near kinsman; and the act was generally connived at by the other members of the family, conscious that in those unsettled days their own position and safety depended upon the strength and astuteness of their chief.

Italy was then divided into a hundred petty dukedoms and principalities, each struggling to preserve itself by annihilating its neighbour. Coalitions were constantly formed for the destruction of a state whose growing power threatened to disturb the balance, and these compacts often were broken as soon as made. Deception became a fine art, and diplomacy and duplicity were synonymous. It was this keen struggle for existence which made the Italians the most perspicacious politicians of the day.

Every ruler sought to attract to his court the artist and the literary man, for he knew that the prestige gained thereby was no slight adjunct to his power, and this explains why many of the most brutal and egotistical of the princes became famous as patrons of the arts and sciences. This protection was repaid with flattery, and to what depths of sycophancy men will descend is attested by the nauseous dedications of books of the day. In 1488, when Caesar Borgia was fourteen years of age, and by the grace of Innocent VIII. a prothonotary of the Apostolic See, Paolo Pompilio dedicated his “Syllabica,” a work on rhetoric, “to the ornament and hope of the house of Borgia, the Illustrious Caesar, whose love of letters foretells the greatness that is to be his.”