Lucrezia Borgia

I took 2 weeks off work to get married and spent a lot of time relaxing in the garden, so I have a little backlog of entries in project #EuropeanBios. #42 is Lucrezia Borgia, a 15th century noblewoman in the absolute thick of Renaissance politics, which were vicious and bloody.

Lucrezia was born in a town near Rome in 1480, the daughter of Rodrigo de Borgia, who 12 years later would become Pope Alexander VI. If your reaction is "wait, aren't popes supposed to be celibate?" then wow, you are going to have a fun time learning about popes. He had 8 kids.

Old Alex was one of the old-school popes. He ruled a huge chunk of Italy through a combination of religious authority and also extremely secular "armies with guns" and was constantly going to war with Italian city-states and especially with France.

Lucrezia's pope-dad was born in Spain, one of relatively few Spanish popes, which gave her a connection to one of our previous subjects, Isabella of Castille, who was at the time of Lucrezia's birth already queen of Spain with her puppet-husband Ferdinand.

In my thread on Isabella of Castille I noted that she gained sole power by making Ferdinand nominal co-ruler and that a lot of sexist historians believed Ferdinand was really in charge; Lucrezia's biographer, writing as recently as 2004, also makes this mistake.

Pope Alex, Lucrezia's dad, had taken Isabella's side in various disputes and gained a lot of power that way, which led pretty directly to his becoming pope, so Isabella is responsible for giving Lucrezia a great deal of the wealth and power she enjoyed her whole life.

Pope Alex's kids were born before he was pope and initially he pretended they were his nieces and nephews. This was obviously not true and eventually he dispensed with the lie, and became unabashed about using his power to benefit them, giving them titles and land and money.

Pope Alex also did the reverse, using his children as bargaining chips in marriage alliances that cemented his own power and wealth. Lucrezia was promised in marriage to various random nobles starting at age 11, though Pope Alex cancelled several of these before any wedding.

Her first marriage was at age 13, but thankfully pope-dad Alex refused to let her husband actually have sex with her and eventually used this lack of consummation to annul that marriage so he could marry her to somebody else more politically advantageous four years later.

At some point during the 4 years she was officially married to but not having sex with Giovanni Sforza she may have had consensual sex with somebody, it's not clear who. By the moral standards of the time this was a scandal, not because of her age but because of no marriage.

People evidently spent a LOT of time slut-shaming Lucrezia, which is always unfortunate, but also weird because she was part of a family of vicious, power-hungry bastards who warred, poisoned and otherwise murdered their way to the top. They had no problem with that, apparently?

At age 17 pope-dad arranged another marriage (she was not consulted on any of this). She apparently quite liked this guy, Alfonso d'Aragon, and the marriage was enthusiastically consummated (observing a couple consummating their wedding was a normal practice at the time).

But the political landscape shifted and Alfonso became less powerful. So in order to get more wealth and power for the Borgias, Lucrezia's brother Cesare murdered her husband after 2 years of marriage. Lucrezia was reportedly not that bummed about it, the Borgias were stone cold.

Her brother Cesare was a fucking piece of work, incidentally. He was just randomly murdering people right and left, usually for political gain but sometimes just for fun. Lucrezia adored her brother, so much so that their political enemies accused them of incest (probably a lie).

It's hard to overstate quite how much murdering was going on as part of high-level politics at this time. Everybody was constantly getting poisoned, ambushed, exiled, imprisoned, tortured or killed in battle. For Cesare to be notable against this background is REALLY a feat.

With Lucrezia on the marriage market again, pope-dad started arranging a new marriage almost immediately to Alfonso d'Este, a significantly more powerful and up-market choice. This time Lucrezia was actively involved, negotiating the massively lucrative wedding contract directly.

Alfonso d'Este was absolutely NOT into the idea of marrying Lucrezia, who by this point had a terrible reputation as a loose woman (not true, and anyway so what) and also a vicious murderer (absolutely true and a big problem for him, given her previous victim was her husband).

But pope-dad Alex managed a complex fit of international diplomacy in which he and the king of France simultaneously leaned on Alfonso to accept the marriage. He was compensated with an absolutely huge sum of money in the form of a dowry that came along with Lucrezia.

To be clear quite how reluctant Alfonso was and how mistrustful everybody was of each other, the dowry was delivered in installments: a down-payment on agreement to marry, another when she reached his town safely, a third when they actually got married. The contract was detailed.

In the end Alfonso and Lucrezia ended up quite liking each other. They got along well personally and were sufficiently sexually attracted that Lucrezia became pregnant dozens of times, giving birth to 8 living children and miscarrying a great number of times.

They were however by no means monogamous; Alfonso was famously horny and had lots of mistresses. He also apparently enjoyed the company of men, and there are records of people trying to gain favor with him by delivering particularly attractive male prostitutes. Neato.

Lucrezia also had fun, having affairs including with a poet, Pietro Bembo, who wrote her amazing love letters. In one he claimed that his love was so intense people would still be talking about it "in a hundred years" which, 500 years later, is certainly true.

Lucrezia also had a longer and more intense affair with her brother-in-law, Francesco Gonzaga. This was quite the power move. Francesco's wife Isabella was a rival and generally not a fan of Lucrezia, but by boinking her husband Lucrezia managed to avoid fallout from Isabella.

Lucrezia's simultaneous good relationship with her husband and extremely good relationship with her brother in law is probably what saved her when Pope-dad Alex died and her murderous brother was imprisoned and eventually killed by some unknown one of his many, many enemies.

After the death of her father and brother the house of Borgia collapsed in power, but Lucrezia managed to survive and thrive for many more years, by all accounts a capable administrator and shrewd political operator, and halted only by her death.

A major cultural event of the 1490s was Europeans visiting the Americas en masse, financed by Queen Isabella of Castille, pope-dad's benefactor and general ass-kicker. They brought back immense amounts of gold (great for Spain) and also syphilis (extremely bad).

It seems like basically every European noble at this point had syphilis? And there was no cure so it was BAD, people had open sores on their faces and lost control of their nervous systems and their minds. Lucrezia's husband had it, and she almost certainly did too.

Lucrezia died after giving birth. Her life had been notable for many miscarriages and babies who died soon after birth. Miscarriages can result from advanced syphilis, as can many of the symptoms her sick children displayed. She died aged 39, syphilis almost certainly a factor.

Lucrezia is not, in the final analysis, that exceptional a person. She was born to great power and wealth, and given this enormous head start on life she exercised it well and ruthlessly, by the standards of a particularly murderous time. She did okay for herself.

What is unusual about Lucrezia Borgia is that we know about her. Most women of her (medium vicious bastard) calibre are simply ignored by history. We can take records of her existence as more proof that women have always kicked ass and taken names, even when nobody wrote it down.

P.S. I forgot to add this PS about popes to the thread: