1487. This led to Giovanni de' Medici receiving a Cardinal's hat at the

age of thirteen, and thus the Medicean interest in Rome was founded; in the course of a few years the Medici gave two Popes to the Holy See, and by their ecclesiastical influence riveted the chains of Florence fast.[3] The traffic which Innocent and Franceschetto carried on in theft and murder filled the Campagna with brigands and assassins.[4] Travelers and pilgrims and ambassadors were stripped and murdered on their way to Rome; and in the city itself more than two hundred people were publicly assassinated with impunity during the last months of the Pope's life. He was gradually dozing off into his last long sleep, and Franceschetto was planning how to carry off his ducats. While the Holy Father still hovered between life and death, a Jewish doctor proposed to reinvigorate him by the transfusion of young blood into his torpid veins. Three boys throbbing with the elixir of early youth were sacrificed in vain. Each boy, says Infessura, received one ducat. He adds, not without grim humor: 'Et paulo post mortui sunt; Judæus quidem aufugit, et Papa non sanatus est.' The epitaph of this poor old Pope reads like a rather clever but blasphemous witticism: 'Ego autem in Innocentiâ meâ ingressus sum.' [1] 'Primus pontificum filios filiasque palam ostentavit, primus eorum apertas fecit nuptias, primus domesticos hymenæos celebravit.' Egidius of Viterbo, quoted by Greg. _Stadt Rom_, vol. vii. p. 274, note. [2] Infessura says he heard the Vice-chancellor, when asked why criminals were allowed to pay instead of being punished, answer: 'God wills not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should pay and live.' Dominico di Viterbo, Apostolic Scribe, forged bulls by which the Pope granted indulgences for the commission of the worst scandals. His father tried to buy him off for 5,000 ducats. Innocent replied that, as his honor was concerned, he must have 6,000. The poor father could not scrape so much money together; so the bargain fell through, and Dominico was executed. A Roman who had killed two of his own daughters bought his pardon for 800 ducats. [3] Guicciardini, i. 1., points out that Lorenzo, having the Pope for his ally, was able to create that balance of power in Italy which it was his chief political merit to have maintained until his death. [4] It is only by reading the pages of Infessura's Diary (Eccardus vol. ii. pp. 2003-2005) that any notion of the mixed debauchery and violence of Rome at this time can be formed. Meanwhile the Cardinals had not been idle. The tedious leisure of Innocent's long lethargy was employed by them in active simony. Simony, it may be said in passing, gave the great Italian families a direct interest in the election of the richest and most paying candidate. It served the turn of a man like Ascanio Sforza to fatten the golden goose that laid such eggs, before he killed it--in other words, to take the bribes of Innocent and Alexander, while deferring for a future time his own election. All the Cardinals, with the exception of Roderigo Borgia,[1] were the creatures of Sixtus or of Innocent. Having bought their hats with gold, they were now disposed to sell their votes to the highest bidder. The Borgia was the richest, strongest, wisest, and most worldly of them all. He ascertained exactly what the price of each suffrage would be, and laid his plans accordingly. The Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, would accept the lucrative post of Vice-Chancellor. The Cardinal Orsini would be satisfied with the Borgia Palaces at Rome and the Castles of Monticello and Saviano. The Cardinal Colonna had a mind for the Abbey of Subbiaco with its fortresses. The Cardinal of S. Angelo preferred the comfortable Bishopric of Porto with its palace stocked with choice wines. The Cardinal of Parma would take Nepi. The Cardinal of Genoa was bribable with the Church of S. Maria in Via Lata. Less influential members of the Conclave sold themselves for gold; to meet their demands the Borgia sent Ascanio Sforza four mules laden with coin in open day, requesting him to distribute it in proper portions to the voters. The fiery Giuliano della Rovere remained implacable and obdurate. In the Borgia his vehement temperament perceived a fit antagonist. The armor which he donned in their first encounters he never doffed, but waged fierce war with the whole brood of Borgias at Ostia, at the French Court, in Romagna, wherever and whenever he found opportunity.[2] He and five other Cardinals--among them his cousin Raphael Riario--refused to sell their votes. But Roderigo Borgia, having corrupted the rest of the college, assumed the mantle of S. Peter in 1492, with the ever-memorable title of Alexander VI. [1] Roderigo was the son of Isabella Borgia, niece of Pope Calixtus III., by her marriage with Joffré Lenzuoli. He took the name of Borgia, when he came to Rome to be made Cardinal, and to share in his uncle's greatness. [2] The marriage of his nephew Nicolo della Rovere to Laura, the daughter of Alexander VI. by Giulia Bella, in 1505, long after the Borgia family had lost its hold on Italy, is a curious and unexplained incident. Rome rejoiced. The Holy City attired herself in festival array, exhibiting on every flag and balcony the Bull of the house of Borgia, and crying like the Egyptians when they found Apis:-- Vive diu Bos! Vive diu Bos! Borgia vive! Vivit Alexander: Roma beata manet. In truth there was nothing to convince the Romans of the coming woe, or to raise suspicion that a Pope had been elected who would deserve the execration of succeeding centuries. In Roderigo Borgia the people only saw, as yet, a man accomplished at all points, of handsome person, royal carriage, majestic presence, affable address. He was a brilliant orator, a passionate lover, a demigod of court pageantry and ecclesiastic parade--qualities which, though they do not suit our notions of a churchman, imposed upon the taste of the Renaissance. As he rode in triumph toward the Lateran, voices were loud in his praise. 'He sits upon a snow-white horse,' writes one of the humanists of the century,[1] 'with serene forehead, with commanding dignity. As he distributes his blessing to the crowd, all eyes are fixed upon him, and all hearts rejoice. How admirable is the mild composure of his mien! how noble his countenance! his glance how free! His stature and carriage, his beauty and the full health of his body, how they enhance the reverence which he inspires!' Another panegyrist[2] describes his 'broad forehead, kingly brow, free countenance full of majesty,' adding that 'the heroic beauty of his whole body' was given him by nature in order that he might 'adorn the seat of the Apostles with his divine form in the place of God.' How little in the early days of his Pontificate the Borgia resembled that Alexander with whom the legend of his subsequent life has familiarized our fancy, may be gathered from the following account:[3] 'He is handsome, of a most glad countenance and joyous aspect, gifted with honeyed and choice eloquence; the beautiful women on whom his eyes are cast he lures to love him, and moves them in a wondrous way, more powerfully than the magnet influences iron.' These, we must remember, are the testimonies of men of letters, imbued with the Pagan sentiments of the fifteenth century, and rejoicing in the advent of a Pope who would, they hoped, make Rome the capital of luxury and license. Therefore they require to be received with caution. Yet there is no reason to suppose that the majority of the Italians regarded the elevation of the Borgia with peculiar horror. As a Cardinal he had given proof of his ability, but shown no signs of force or cruelty or fraud. Nor were his morals worse than those of his colleagues. If he was the father of several children, so was Giuliano della Rovere, and so had been Pope Innocent before him. This mattered but little in an age when the Primate of Christendom had come to be regarded as a secular potentate, less fortunate than other princes inasmuch as his rule was not hereditary, but more fortunate in so far as he could wield the thunders and dispense the privileges of the Church. A few men of discernment knew what had been done, and shuddered. 'The king of Naples,' says Guicciardini, 'though he dissembled his grief, told the queen, his wife, with tears--tears which he was wont to check even at the death of his own sons--that a Pope had been made who would prove most pestilent to the whole Christian commonwealth.' The young Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, again, showed his discernment of the situation by whispering in the Conclave to his kinsman Cibo: 'We are in the wolf's jaws; he will gulp us down, unless we make our flight good.' Besides, there was in Italy a widely spread repugnance to the Spanish intruders--Marrani, or renegade Moors, as they were properly called--who crowded the Vatican and threatened to possess the land of their adoption like conquerors. 'Ten Papacies would not suffice to satiate the greed of all this kindred,' wrote Giannandrea Boccaccio to the Duke of Ferrara in 1492: and events proved that these apprehensions were justified; for during the Pontificate of Alexander eighteen Spanish Cardinals were created, five of whom belonged to the house of the Borgias. [1] See Michael Fernus, quoted by Greg. _Lucrezia Borgia_, p. 45. [2] Jason Mainus, quoted by Greg, _Stadt Rom._ p. 314, note. [3] Gasp. Ver., quoted by Greg. _Stadt Rom._ p. 208, note. It is certain, however, that the profound horror with which the name of Alexander VI. strikes a modern ear was not felt among the Italians at the time of his election. The sentiment of hatred with which he was afterwards regarded arose partly from the crimes by which his Pontificate was rendered infamous, partly from the fear which his son Cesare inspired, and partly from the mysteries of his private life, which revolted even the corrupt conscience of the sixteenth century. This sentiment of hatred had grown to universal execration at the date of his death. In course of time, when the attention of the Northern nations had been directed to the iniquities of Rome, and when the glaring discrepancy between Alexander's pretension as a Pope and his conduct as a man had been apprehended, it inspired a legend which, like all legends, distorts the facts which it reflects. Alexander was, in truth, a man eminently fitted to close an old age and to inaugurate a new, to demonstrate the paradoxical situation of the Popes by the inexorable logic of his practical impiety, and to fuse two conflicting world-forces in the cynicism of supreme corruption. The Emperors of the Julian house had exhibited the extreme of sensual insolence in their autocracy. What they desired of strange and sweet and terrible in the forbidden fruits of lust, they had enjoyed. The Popes of the Middle Ages--Hildebrand and Boniface--had displayed the extreme of spiritual insolence in their theocracy. What they desired of tyrannous and forceful in the exercise of an usurped despotism over souls, they had enjoyed. The Borgia combined both impulses toward the illimitable. To describe him as the Genius of Evil, whose sensualities, as unrestrained as Nero's, were relieved against the background of flame and smoke which Christianity had raised for fleshly sins, is justifiable. His spiritual tyranny, that arrogated Jus, by right of which he claimed the hemisphere revealed by Christopher Columbus, and imposed upon the press of Europe the censure of the Church of Rome, was rendered ten times monstrous by the glare reflected on it from the unquenched furnace of a godless life. The universal conscience of Christianity is revolted by those unnamable delights, orgies of blood and festivals of lust, which were enjoyed in the plenitude of his green and vigorous old age by this versatile diplomatist and subtle priest, who controlled the councils of kings, and who chanted the sacramental service for a listening world on Easter Day in Rome. Rome has never been small or weak or mediocre. And now in the Pontificate of Alexander 'that memorable scene' presented to the nations of the modern world a pageant of Antichrist and Antiphysis--the negation of the Gospel and of nature; a glaring spectacle of discord between humanity as it aspires to be at its best, and humanity as it is at its worst; a tragi-comedy composed by some infernal Aristophanes, in which the servant of servants, the anointed of the Lord, the lieutenant upon earth of Christ, played the chief part. It may be objected that this is the language not of history but of the legend. I reply that there are occasions when the legend has caught the spirit of the truth. Alexander was a stronger and a firmer man than his immediate predecessors. 'He combined,' says Guicciardini, 'craft with singular sagacity, a sound judgment with extraordinary powers of persuasion; and to all the grave affairs of life he applied ability and pains beyond belief.'[1] His first care was to reduce Rome to order. The old factions of Colonna and Orsini, which Sixtus had scotched, but which had raised their heads again during the dotage of Innocent, were destroyed in his Pontificate. In this way, as Machiavelli observed,[2] he laid the real basis for the temporal power of the Papacy. Alexander, indeed, as a sovereign, achieved for the Papal See what Louis XI. had done for the throne of France, and made Rome on its small scale follow the type of the large European monarchies. The faithlessness and perjuries of the Pope, 'who never did aught else but deceive, nor ever thought of anything but this, and always found occasion for his frauds,'[3] when combined with his logical intellect and persuasive eloquence, made him a redoubtable antagonist. All considerations of religion and morality were subordinated by him with strict impartiality to policy: and his policy he restrained to two objects--the advancement of his family, and the consolidation of the temporal power. These were narrow aims for the ambition of a potentate who with one stroke of his pen pretended to confer the new-found world on Spain. Yet they taxed his whole strength, and drove him to the perpetration of enormous crimes. [1] It is but fair to Guicciardini to complete his sentence in a note: 'These good qualities were far surpassed by his vices; private habits of the utmost obscenity, no shame nor sense of truth, no fidelity to his engagements, no religious sentiment; insatiable avarice, unbridled ambition, cruelty beyond the cruelty of barbarous races, burning desire to elevate his sons by any means: of these there were many, and among them--in order that he might not lack vicious instruments for effecting his vicious schemes--one not less detestable in any way than his father.' _St. d'It._ vol. i. p. 9. I shall translate and put into the appendix Guicciardini's character of Alexander from the _Storia di Firenze_. [2] In the sentences which close the 11th chapter of the _Prince_. [3] Mach. _Prince_, ch. xvii. In the Satires of Ariosto (Satire i. 208-27) there is a brilliant and singularly outspoken passage on the nepotism of the Popes and its ruinous results for Italy. Former Pontiffs had raised money by the sale of benefices and indulgences: this, of course, Alexander also practiced--to such an extent, indeed, that an epigram gained currency: 'Alexander sells the keys, the altars, Christ. Well, he bought them; so he has a right to sell them.' But he went further and took lessons from Tiberius. Having sold the scarlet to the highest bidder, he used to feed his prelate with rich benefices. When he had fattened him sufficiently, he poisoned him, laid hands upon his hoards, and recommenced the game. Paolo Capello, the Venetian Ambassador, wrote in the year 1500: 'Every night they find in Rome four or five murdered men, Bishops and Prelates and so forth.' Panvinius mentions three Cardinals who were known to have been poisoned by the Pope; and to their names may be added those of the Cardinals of Capua and of Verona.[1] To be a prince of the Church was dangerous in those days; and if the Borgia had not at last poisoned himself by mistake, he must in the long-run have had to pay people to accept so perilous a privilege. His traffic in Church dignities was carried on upon a grand scale: twelve Cardinals' hats, for example, were put to auction in a single day in 1500.[2] This was when he wished to pack the Conclave with votes in favor of the cession of Romagna to Cesare Borgia, as well as to replenish his exhausted coffers. Forty-three Cardinals were created by him in eleven promotions: each of these was worth on an average 10,000 florins; while the price paid by Francesco Soderini amounted to 20,000 and that paid by Domenico Grimani reached the sum of 30,000. [1] See the authorities in Burckhardt, pp. 93, 94. [2] Guicc. _St. d'It._ vol. iii. p. 15. Former Popes had preached crusades against the Turk, languidly or energetically according as the coasts of Italy were threatened. Alexander frequently invited Bajazet to enter Europe and relieve him of the princes who opposed his intrigues in the favor of his children. The fraternal feeling which subsisted between the Pope and the Sultan was to some extent dependent on the fate of Prince Djem, a brother of Bajazet and son of the conqueror of Constantinople, who had fled for protection to the Christian powers, and whom the Pope kept prisoner, receiving 40,000 ducats yearly from the Porte for his jail fee. Innocent VIII. had been the first to snare this lucrative guest in 1489. The Lance of Longinus was sent him as a token of the Sultan's gratitude, and Innocent, who built an altar for the relique, caused his own tomb to be raised close by. His effigy in bronze by Pollajuolo still carries in its hand this blood-gift from the infidel to the High Priest of Christendom. Djem meanwhile remained in Rome, and held his Moslem Court side by side with the Pontiff in the Vatican. Dispatches are extant in which Alexander and Bajazet exchange terms of the warmest friendship, the Turk imploring his Greatness--so he addressed the Pope--to put an end to the unlucky Djem, and promising as the price of this assassination a sum of 300,000 ducats and the tunic worn by Christ, presumably that very seamless coat over which the soldiers of Calvary had cast their dice.[1] The money and the relique arrived in Italy and were intercepted by the partisans of Giuliano della Rovere. Alexander, before the bargain with the Sultan had been concluded by the murder of Djem, was forced to hand him over to the French king. But the unlucky Turk carried in his constitution the slow poison of the Borgias, and died in Charles's camp between Rome and Naples. Whatever crimes may be condoned in Alexander, it is difficult to extenuate this traffic with the Turks. By his appeal from the powers of Europe to the Sultan, at a time when the peril to the Western world was still most serious, he stands attained for high treason against Christendom, of which he professed to be the chief; against civilization, which the Church pretended to protect; against Christ, whose vicar he presumed to style himself. [1] See the letters in the 'Preuves et Observations,' printed at the end of the _Mémoires de Comines_. Like Sixtus, Alexander combined this deadness to the spirit and the interests of Christianity with zeal for dogma. He never flinched in formal orthodoxy, and the measures which he took for riveting the chains of superstition on the people were calculated with the military firmness of a Napoleon. It was he who established the censure of the press, by which printers were obliged, under pain of excommunication, to submit the books they issued to the control of the Archbishops and their delegates. The Brief of June 1, 1501, which contains this order, may be reasonably said to have retarded civilization, at least in Italy and Spain. Carnal sensuality was the besetting vice of this Pope throughout his life.[1] This, together with his almost insane weakness for his children, whereby he became a slave to the terrible Cesare, caused all the crimes which he committed. At the same time, though sensual, Alexander was not gluttonous. Boccaccio, the Ferrarese Ambassador, remarks: 'The Pope eats only of one dish. It is, therefore, disagreeable to have to dine with him.' In this respect he may be favorably contrasted with the Roman prelates of the age of Leo. His relations to Vannozza Catanei, the titular wife first of Giorgio de Croce, and then of Carlo Canale, and to Giulia Farnese,[2] surnamed La Bella, the titular wife of Orsino Orsini, were open and acknowledged. These two sultanas ruled him during the greater portion of his career, conniving meanwhile at the harem, which, after truly Oriental fashion, he maintained in the Vatican. An incident which happened during the French invasion of 1494 brings the domestic circumstances of a Pope of the Renaissance vividly before us. Monseigneur d'Allegre caught the ladies Giulia and Girolama Farnese, together with the lady Adriana de Mila, who was employed as their duenna, near Capodimonte, on November 29, and carried them to Montefiascone. The sum fixed for their ransom was 3,000 ducats. This the Pope paid, and on December 1 they were released. Alexander met them outside Rome, attired like a layman in a black jerkin trimmed with gold brocade, and fastened round his waist by a Spanish girdle, from which hung his dagger. Lodovico Sforza, when he heard what had happened, remarked that it was weak to release these ladies, who were 'the very eyes and heart' of his Holiness, for so small a ransom--if 50,000 ducats had been demanded, they would have been paid. This and a few similar jokes, uttered at the Pope's expense, make us understand to what extent the Italians were accustomed to regard their high priest as a secular prince. Even the pageant of Alexander seated in S. Peter's, with his daughter Lucrezia on one side of his throne and his daughter-in-law Sancia upon the other, moved no moral indignation; nor were the Romans astonished when Lucrezia was appointed Governor of Spoleto, and plenipotentiary Regent of the Vatican in her father's absence. These scandals, however, created a very different impression in the north, and prepared the way for the Reformation. [1] Guicciardini (_St. Fior._ cap. 27) writes: 'Fu lussoriosissimo nell' uno e nell' altro sesso, tenendo publicamente femine e garzoni, ma più ancora nelle femine.' A notion of the public disorders connected with his dissolute life may be gained from this passage in Sanuto's Diary (Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_, p. 88): 'Da Roma per le lettere del orator nostro se intese et etiam de private persone cossa assai abominevole in le chiesa di Dio, che al papa erra nato un fiolo di una dona romana maritata, ch' el padre l' havea rufianata, e di questa il marito invitò il suocero a la vigna e lo uccise tagliandoli el capo, ponendo quello sopra uno legno con letere che diceva questo è il capo de mio suocero che a rufianato sua fiola al papa, et che inteso questo il papa fece metter el dito in exilio di Roma con taglia. Questa nova venne per letere particular; etiam si godea con la sua spagnola menatali per suo fiol duca di Gandia novamente li venuto.' [2] Her brother Alexander, afterwards Paul III., owed his promotion to the purple to this liaison, which was, therefore, the origin of the greatness of the Farnesi. The tomb of Paul III. in the Tribune of S. Peter's has three notable family portraits--the Pope himself in bronze; his sister Giulia, naked in marble, as Justice; and their old mother, Giovanna Gaetani, the bawd, as Prudence. The nepotism of Sixtus was like water to the strong wine of Alexander's paternal ambition. The passion of paternity, exaggerated beyond the bounds of natural affection, and scandalous in a Roman Pontiff, was the main motive of the Borgia's action. Of his children by Vannozza, he caused the eldest son to be created Duke of Gandia; the youngest he married to Donna Sancia, a daughter of Alfonso of Aragon, by whom the boy was honored with the Dukedom of Squillace. Cesare, the second of this family, was appointed Bishop of Valentia, and Cardinal. The Dukedoms of Camerino and Nepi were given to another John, whom Alexander first declared to be his grandson through Cesare, and afterwards acknowledged as his son. This John may possibly have been Lucrezia's child. The Dukedom of Sermoneta, wrenched for a moment from the hands of the Gaetani family, who still own it, was conferred upon Lucrezia's son, Roderigo. Lucrezia, the only daughter of Alexander by Vannozza, took three husbands in succession, after having been formally betrothed to two Spanish nobles, Don Cherubino Juan de Centelles, and Don Gasparo da Procida, son of the Count of Aversa. These contracts, made before her father became Pope, were annulled as not magnificent enough for the Pontiff's daughter. In 1492 she was married to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. But in 1497 the pretensions of the Borgias had outgrown this alliance, and their public policy was inclining to relations with the Southern Courts of Italy. Accordingly she was divorced and given to Alfonso, Prince of Biseglia, a natural son of the King of Naples. When this man's father lost his crown, the Borgias, not caring to be connected with an ex-royal family, caused Alfonso to be stabbed on the steps of S. Peter's in 1501; and while he lingered between life and death, they had him strangled in his sick-bed, by Michellozzo, Cesare's assassin in chief. Finally Lucrezia was wedded to Alfonso, crown-prince of Ferrara, in 1502.[1] The proud heir of the Este dynasty was forced by policy, against his inclination, to take to his board and bed a Pope's bastard, twice divorced, once severed from her husband by murder, and soiled, whether justly or not, by atrocious rumors, to which her father's and her brother's conduct gave but too much color. She proved a model princess after all, and died at last in childbirth, after having been praised by Ariosto as a second Lucrece, brighter for her virtues than the star of regal Rome. [1] Her dowry was 300,000 ducats, besides wedding presents, and certain important immunities and privileges granted to Ferrara by the Pope. History has at last done justice to the memory of this woman, whose long yellow hair was so beautiful, and whose character was so colorless. The legend which made her a poison-brewing Mænad has been proved a lie--but only at the expense of the whole society in which she lived. The simple northern folk, familiar with the tales of Chriemhild, Brynhild, and Gudrun, who helped to forge this legend, could not understand that a woman should be irresponsible for all the crimes and scandals perpetrated in her name. Yet it seems now clear enough that not hers, but her father's and her brother's, were the atrocities which made her married life in Rome a byword. She sat and smiled through all the tempests which tossed her to and fro, until she found at last a fair port in the Duchy of Ferrara. Nursed in the corruption of Papal Rome, which Lorenzo de' Medici described to his son Giovanni as 'a sink of all the vices,' consorting habitually with her father's concubines, and conscious that her own mother had been married for show to two successive husbands, it is not possible that Lucrezia ruled her conduct at any time with propriety. It is even probable that the darkest tales about her are true. The Lord of Pesaro, we must remember, told his kinsman, the Duke of Milan, that the assigned reasons for his divorce were false, and that the fact was what can scarcely be recorded.[1] Still, there is no ground for supposing that, in the matter of her first husband's divorce and the second's murder, she was more than a passive agent in the hands of Alexander and Cesare. The pleasure-loving, careless woman of the Renaissance is very different from the Medea of Victor Hugo's romance; and what remains most revolting to the modern conscience in her conduct is complacent acquiescence in scenes of debauchery devised for her amusement.[2] Instead of viewing her with dread as a potent and malignant witch, we have to regard her with contempt as a feeble woman, soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle. It is also due to truth to remember that at Ferrara she won the esteem of a husband who had married her unwillingly, attached the whole state to her by her sweetness of temper, and received the panegyrics of the two Strozzi, Bembo, Ariosto, Aldo Manuzio, and many other men of note. Foreigners who saw her surrounded by her brilliant Court exclaimed, like the French biographer of Bayard: 'J'ose bien dire que, de son temps, ni beau coup avant, il ne s'est point trouvé de plus triomphante princesse; car elle était belle, bonne douce, et courtoise à toutes gens.' [1] The whole question of Lucrezia's guilt has been ably investigated by Gregorovius (_Lucrezia Borgia_, pp. 101, 159-64). Charity suggests that the dreadful tradition of her relation to her father and brothers is founded less upon fact than upon the scandals current after her divorce. What Giovanni Sforza said was this: '_anzi haverla conosciuta infinite volte, ma chel Papa non gelha tolta per altro se non per usare con lei_.' This confession of the injured husband went the round of all the Courts of Italy, was repeated by Malipiero and Paolo Capello, formed the substance of the satires of Sannazaro and Pontano, crept into the chronicle of Matarazzo, and survived in the histories of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. There was nothing in his words to astonish men who were cognizant of the acts of Gianpaolo Baglioni and Sigismondo Malatesta; while the frantic passion of Alexander for his children, closely allied as this feeling was in him to excessive sensuality, gave them confirmation. Were they, however, true; or were they a malevolent lie? That is the real point at issue. Psychological speculation will help but little here. It is true that Lucrezia in after-life showed all the signs of a clear conscience. But so also did Alexander, whose buoyancy of spirits lasted till the very day of his death. Yet he was stained with crimes foul enough to darken the conscience of any man, at any period of life, and in any position. [2] See Burchard, ed. Leibnitz, pp. 77 and 78. Yet even at Ferrara tragedies which might remind her of the Vatican continued to surround her path. Alfonso, rude in manners and devoted to gun-foundry, interfered but little with the life she led among the wits and scholars who surrounded her. One day, however, in 1508, the poet Ercole Strozzi, who had sung her praises, was found dead, wrapped in his mantle, and pierced with two-and-twenty wounds. No judicial inquiry into this murder was made. Rumor credited both Alfonso and Lucrezia with the deed--Alfonso, because he might be jealous of his wife--Lucrezia, because her poet had recently married Barbara Torelli. Two years earlier another dark crime at Ferrara brought the name of Borgia before the public. One of Lucrezia's ladies, Angela Borgia, was courted by both Giulio d' Este and the Cardinal Ippolito. The girl praised the eyes of Giulio in the hearing of the Cardinal, who forthwith hired assassins to mutilate his brother's face. Giulio escaped from their hands with the loss of one of his eyes, and sought justice from the Duke against the Cardinal in vain. Thereupon he vowed to be revenged on both Ippolito and Alfonso. His plot was to murder them, and to place Ferdinand of Este on the throne. The treason was discovered; the conspirators appeared before Alfonso: he rushed upon Ferdinand, and with his dagger stabbed him in the face. Both Giulio and Ferdinand were thrown into the dungeons of the palace at Ferrara, where they languished for years, while the Duke and Lucrezia enjoyed themselves in its spacious halls and su ny loggie among their courtiers. Ferdinand died in prison, aged sixty-three, in