Lucrezia Borgia was born on April 18, 1480, in Subiaco, a town outside Rome that is now a suburb of the Italian capital. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, was a Spaniard from near Valencia who had come to Rome in the mid-fifteenth century and risen rapidly through the ranks of the Catholic Church under the patronage of his uncle, who became Pope Calixtus III in 1455. By the end of the 1450s, Rodrigo was a cardinal in a papal state that controlled much of central Italy. He was not an average cardinal.
He kept many mistresses and fathered several children, which was not uncommon for churchmen of the time despite the church’s public preaching of celibacy. Lucrezia was one of four children Rodrigo had with his chief mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei. She got along well with her siblings, especially her older brother Cesare, and the two showed great affection for one another. That bond would later fuel dark rumors.
As the daughter of one of the most prominent religious figures of the day, Lucrezia received a significant education in the new humanist learning of the Renaissance, which centered on ancient Greek and Roman authors. Through her guardian, Adriana Orsini of Milan, she learned several languages and was fluent in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, and Latin. Her humanist education also gave her a grounding in Greek and Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, logic, and philosophy. Lucrezia grew up during a tumultuous period in Italian history.
Italy was the center of European civilization, with cities like Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan attracting the greatest artists of the age, but politically the peninsula was chaotic. It was not united but divided into more than two dozen city-states, including the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice, the northern duchies of Milan, Ferrara, and Urbino, Florence under the Medici family, and the papal state in the center. In the south, Spain controlled the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. From 1494 onward, a series of wars broke out as Spain and France rivaled each other for influence in the peninsula.
Lucrezia’s father saw her as a diplomatic asset. When she was just ten years old, he promised her hand in marriage to a Valencian lord, but that arrangement and several others were called off as his political fortunes fluctuated. In August 1492, his bargaining power changed dramatically when he won the contest to become pope, taking the name Alexander VI. Now able to negotiate a far more favorable alliance, he arranged for Lucrezia to marry Giovanni Sforza, a member of the powerful Sforza family that ruled the Duchy of Milan.
They married on June 12, 1493, but the marriage lasted only until 1497. By then, the pope had decided the alliance with the Sforzas was no longer the best option. He wanted a better marriage alliance for Lucrezia, which meant ending the union. After pressure was applied, Giovanni Sforza signed a humiliating document declaring he could not consummate the marriage because he was impotent, which provided sufficient grounds for an annulment.
In response, it is believed the humiliated Giovanni began spreading gossip that Lucrezia engaged in sexual relations with her brothers and father. By this time, Lucrezia was approaching adulthood, and rumors abounded that she was pregnant at the time of the annulment due to an affair with a chamberlain who worked for her father, a man named Pedro Calderón. The events that followed are shadowy. Lucrezia disappeared from public view for some time and may have given birth to her first child by Calderón.
In the weeks that followed, Calderón was found dead in the Tiber River early in 1498, a victim of the Borgia family’s ruthlessness in disposing of embarrassing problems. Her second marriage was to Alfonso of Aragon, a cousin of the Spanish royal family through the royal house of Aragon. The marriage in 1498 was part of her father’s decision to temporarily back Spain in the Italian wars, but it lasted only as long as Pope Alexander’s diplomatic realignment. Despite being a good match, with both partners the same age and even said to have fallen deeply in love, the marriage ended when the Borgias decided in 1500 to support France again.
The pope needed Alfonso gone, and he quickly turned up dead in Rome. The marriage had already produced a son, named Rodrigo after his grandfather. Lucrezia may have been complicit in the murder, though the sources are unclear. After her second husband’s death, accusations of an incestuous relationship with her brother Cesare abounded, especially since Cesare was widely suspected of ordering the murder.
It is unlikely the killing had anything to do with lovers’ jealousy. Cesare had acted as their father’s general in extending the papal state’s territory in central Italy during the late 1490s, and his decision to kill Alfonso of Aragon in 1500 was purely political, tied to the papacy’s alliance with France. Lucrezia’s third marriage, celebrated in early 1502, was her most prominent and her last. Her new husband was Alfonso d’Este, heir to Ercole d’Este, the duke of the significant city-state of Ferrara in northern Italy.
Alfonso would succeed his father as duke in 1505. The marriage lasted for the remainder of Lucrezia’s life and produced several children, though their parentage may be debatable, as both Lucrezia and her husband engaged in affairs throughout the 1500s and 1510s. These included a long-standing relationship between Lucrezia and the Marquis of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga, and a separate affair with the Renaissance composer and literary theorist Pietro Bembo, who was widely regarded as having formalized the Tuscan dialect that became the standard Italian language. Lucrezia’s family relations, marriages, and affairs made her a focus of salacious gossip and myth in late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italy.
Rumors circulated about illegitimate children with her lovers. She also developed a reputation as a femme fatale who could seduce men at will and poison them just as easily. She was rumored to wear a hollow ring that opened to pour poison into unsuspecting victims’ drinks. A notorious incident she was said to have been involved in was the Banquet of Chestnuts, a party thrown in Rome on October 30, 1501.
According to a single account by the master of ceremonies at the papal court, Johannes Burchard, Lucrezia, Cesare, and Pope Alexander were involved in what was effectively a borderline orgy involving some of Rome’s nobility and dozens of the city’s courtesans. Modern historians assume the story may have been entirely invented to smear the Borgia name. It is possible Lucrezia was neither a femme fatale nor particularly scandalous in her love life compared to any other aristocratic lady of late Renaissance Italy. Contemporaries considered her especially attractive, but her looks need not have resulted in any particular sordid behavior.
Rather, she seems to have been stigmatized because of her family’s dubious actions in the 1490s and 1500s. Her father, the pope, kept mistresses and encouraged his son to carve out his own kingdom in central Italy using the resources of the Holy See. Cesare was the most notorious of Renaissance lords, casting central Italy into chaos in the 1490s, and he was reputedly a major influence on Niccolò Machiavelli when the political theorist wrote his notorious treatise The Prince some years later. Lucrezia spent her adult life at the Este court in Ferrara.
She engaged in a string of affairs, which was hardly unusual by the standards of late Renaissance Italy. One complication arose when her lover Francesco Gonzaga contracted syphilis around the time of their affair. The disease had arrived with devastating consequences in Europe in the late fifteenth century after European contact with the Americas. In the early modern period, it slowly devastated the body, beginning with a rash and eventually leading to deformities, but Lucrezia apparently did not contract the disease.
Pope Alexander VI died in August 1503. He was a curious man, a ruthless Renaissance prince who broke all the rules associated with his office, yet he was remembered fondly by some of the other popes of the time. With his father gone, Cesare began to lose control over the territories he had conquered. He was eventually arrested by King Ferdinand of Aragon and transferred to Spain in 1504.
He spent over eighteen months in prison before escaping and launching a revolt in the north of the country that ended in his death in March 1507. Within a few years, Lucrezia went from being the daughter of one of the most powerful families in Italy to being an isolated figure descended from the fallen house of Borgia. She had at least eight children, with perhaps as many as ten depending on the parentage of two others. She also had several difficult conceptions and miscarriages during the 1500s and 1510s.
It was this turbulent natal history that led to her death in 1519. She gave birth to a baby girl christened Isabella, but the pregnancy was complicated. She fell ill after birth and, despite improving for a few days in the week that followed, worsened and died on June 24, 1519, at the age of thirty-nine. She was buried in the church of Corpus Domini in Ferrara.
Lucrezia Borgia was the last major figure of the turbulent dynasty that had been so prominent in Italy since the mid-fifteenth century. She has been one of the most widely studied women of early modern Italy ever since. In 1833, the French writer Victor Hugo scripted a stage play named after her, and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she has featured in numerous books, films, television series, and even a video game.
Many of the rumors that surrounded her during her lifetime have featured prominently in those retellings, keeping alive the myth of one of Renaissance Italy’s most notorious women.