February 16, 2021 • 30 mins
Her first lover was found dead in a river. Her second husband was strangled in his bed. Perhaps it's no surprise that in popular culture, Lucrezia Borgia has become a femme fatale, a black widow murderess who stepped over husbands in order to achieve her own ends. But the real Lucrezia is a figure far more complex and tragic than the stereotypes might lead you to believe. [Support Noble Blood on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales. Noble Blood merch is available here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood]
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaronminkie. Listener discretion is advised.
While touring through Milan in eighteen sixteen, Lord Byron visited
the museum collection of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana. Byron found himself
(00:25):
entranced by one particular exhibit, handwritten letters from over four
hundred years earlier between poet and his lover, Lucrezia Borgia.
The letters were displayed under glass, along with a luck
of Lucrezia's famous blonde hair that she had cut off,
(00:46):
in this case to send her paramour, along with one
of the letters. Lord Byron being Lord Byron, he couldn't
resist the urge to look around, be sure no one
was watching, and then take some of the hair for himself.
Byron could never resist a woman or the glamor of fame,
(01:07):
and Lucrezia Borgia was famous in her lifetime. She was
a central figure in the Italian social scene, the illegitimate
daughter of a man who would then go on to
become the Pope, she was a member of one of
the era's most powerful families, the Borges. Even while she
(01:27):
was alive, rumors about Lucrezia spread wildly, but after her
death especially, she became a larger than life figure, a
Lady Macbeth, villainous, a conniving poisoner, a usurper, a man eater. Famously,
Lucrezia Borgia was said to have owned a ring where
(01:49):
instead of a stone, there was a hollow chamber that
she could fill with powdered poison in order to surreptitiously
murder her enemies. For the record, there's no evidence that
that actually existed. Though political murders were happening all around her,
several at the behest of her family, there's no actual
(02:12):
evidence that Lucrezia was involved in any of them at all.
It's rare for me in an episode of Noble Blood
to come to an understanding that a figure or any
historical event is less interesting than most people understand it
to be. But in Lucrezia Borgia's case it might be true.
(02:34):
The rumors and speculation around her in the centuries since
her death have loomed so large that in researching her life,
I felt not unlike a Renaissance artist chipping away at
a block of marble. You begin with a block of stone,
A story high and then carve away piece by piece
(02:57):
until what's left a woman just human sized? So was
she a fen fatale or maybe she was just a
blonde bimbo manipulated by the more powerful men in her life,
her father and her brother. What if the answer is neither,
what then what's left? There's a painting that I think
(03:21):
embodies the strange marriage between the perception and the reality
of Lucrezia Borgia. It's called Lucrezia Borgia reigns in the
Vatican in the absence of Pope Alexander the sixth It
was painted around by Frank Cadogan Cowper and it currently
hangs in the Tape in London. The painting is of
(03:42):
a Vatican throne room, painted almost entirely in reds. The
cardinals surrounding the papal throne look more like flames, and
in the center of the canvas, where the Pope should
be sitting, is instead his daughter. The at t a Borgia,
a vision in orange yellow, almost glowing golden. The artist's
(04:08):
rendition is actually based on a true event in which
Lucrezia scandalized the Vatican by taking her father's place in
his seat, but the artist imagined something one step further.
The artist painted two cardinals pulling away at either side
of Lucrezia's dress to allow a friar to kiss her feet.
(04:33):
That almost certainly never happened, But in the painting it is,
at least to my eyes, unambiguously sexual symbolism. Whatever was
true or false in terms of rumors about Lucrezia's life,
that symbolic implication at least was true. Here was a
(04:53):
woman more sexual than sixteenth century Italy wanted her to
be more powerful, and they wanted her to be and
glowing or not, nobody could take their eyes off of her.
I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. In the
(05:20):
fifteenth century, the notion of a pope having children was
considered far less outrageous than it might sound today. Though
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had gone through the motions briefly pretending
that the four children that he had with his married
mistress were his nephews and niece. Eventually he lifted his
(05:41):
hands and admitted that he had four children, Chessire, Giovanni, Lucrezia,
and Geoffrey. Their mother, Venoza, was a notoriously famous beauty
of Rome, and though she was, as previously mentioned, married,
she was also the favorite of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. At
(06:03):
this point, the Borges had limited but significant power. The
borgia Is already had a pope in their family, trade
Pope Callixtus the Third, but they were still considered outsiders
in Italian society. For one, they weren't really Italian. The
Borges were actually Catalan, and they had lived in the
(06:24):
formerly Moorish currently Spanish kingdom of Valencia, as they did
with most other Catalans. Italians thought of the Borgia's as
tight fisted and ruthless. They referred to them as Morani
or secret Jews, and so even as the Borgias became
(06:44):
more powerful in Italy, they remained a tight knit family
above all else. They spoke Catalan amongst themselves, and they
had their own internal loyalties. They were all raised believing
in in us versus them mentality. If you've watched or
read Game of Thrones, certain parallels will reveal themselves soon enough,
(07:08):
and I suspect that George R. Martin might have been
a little bit inspired by the Borgia family, especially when
building the personalities of the Landisters. When Lucrezia Borgia was twelve,
her father was elected Pope Alexander the sixth. There were
rumors even then that he had bought the seat with bribery,
(07:30):
or that it was nepotism because his uncle had been
pope already, and both of those things may have been factors,
but probably a more important factor is that Borgia was
seen as a centrist candidate. The other powerful families vying
for pope had their own rivalries and loyalties. Bourgea wasn't
(07:50):
to pro France or to Milanaise. The Borgia's just mostly
looked out for the Borgia's. And a brief note from
this point in the story, I'll be referring to Lucrezia's
father by his papal name Alexander for clarity. Even though
he was born Rodrigo, at this point in history, there
was very little stigma attached to the fact that Alexander's
(08:13):
four children were bastards, just as there was really no
stigma attached to the fact that Alexander was about to
use his new found powers as pope to advance his
family's position. It's what all the popes did in this case.
Advancing his family meant advantageous marriages. By the time she
(08:39):
was twelve, Lucrezia had already been engaged three times. It
wasn't hard to find her matches even from a young age.
She had golden hair and bright white teeth. She was
charming and well educated. But then her father was elected
pope and her prospects got a whole lot better. In
(09:00):
fourte three, when Lucrezia was just thirteen years old, she
was married to a man nearly fifteen years her senior,
a man named Giovanni Sparza of the powerful Sparza family.
Giovanni was the nephew of the Duke of Milan, and
even though Lucrezia and her new husband remained in Rome,
(09:21):
it was important for the Boorges to have allies in
northern Italy. But as it turned out, that alliance was
more temporarily important. Lucrezia and Giovanni had been married only
a year when the Sparzas began to seem like a liability.
A lot of complicated political maneuvering is happening behind the
(09:42):
scenes in Italy at this moment, But to make a
long story short, the Duke of Milan allied with the
King of France against the Pope still in Rome, Giovanni
was stranded metaphorically in the belly of the beast, not
quite sure if she was supposed to ally himself with
his uncle but of Milan or with his wife's powerful family.
(10:03):
But for the Borges, their choice of loyalty was entirely clear.
Lucrezia's older brother, Chessire, met with her one afternoon and
calmly explained to her that her husband would need to
be killed so that she could be remarried to someone
who could actually help them politically. Lucrezia panicked. She liked
(10:24):
her husband, they were genuinely fond of each other, and
so she ran home that afternoon and warned him. Giovanni
fled to Milan disguised as a beggar. We can just
imagine Pope Alexander putting his head in his hand and sighing,
saying something like, darn, it's going to be so much
(10:45):
harder for you to get out of that marriage now, Lucrezia. Now,
the Borges only had one option to get Lucrezia out
of that marriage. That option was annulling it. With them
being Catholic and their father being the Pope meant the
only way to do that was to claim that the
marriage had never been consummated. Well, that was a bit
(11:06):
of a laugh. There was absolutely no reason to believe
that that was true, and all of Rome knew it. No,
it's true, Chess, he said, It's Giovanni's fault. He is impotent.
Ignore the fact that he had already been married once
and his first wife died in childbirth. He never consummated
the marriage with my sister because he's impotent. Trust me.
(11:28):
The Borges were going to force Giovanni Sparza to sign
a statement to that effect, which he eventually did, but
not without lashing out in his own way, saying that
maybe the Boorges only wanted Lucrezia single so that they
could have her for themselves. Alexander, her father, and Ssary.
The Borges were notoriously close, weren't they. This is about
(11:52):
when the rumors of incest began, but those rumors would
continue on for the rest of Lucrezia's life. While the
annulment was working itself out, Lucrezia needed to get out
of the picture, just to be put aside so that
no one in Rome would think about her for a
(12:13):
little while, and you know, maybe just in case she
had gotten pregnant from her first husband, to make sure
that no one could see it lest they believed that
the marriage had been consummated, and so Lucrezia was sent
to a nunnery outside the city. But two unfortunate incidents
occurred in the months after lucrezia separation from her first
(12:35):
husband that would begin the tarnish on her reputation. First,
on Valentine's Day fourteen ninety eight, a young Spaniard named
Pedro called her own, known colloquially as Perotto, who worked
in the Pope's chamber, was found dead in the Tiber
River along with one of Lucrezia's ladies. Speculation ran rampant
(13:00):
that Lucrezia had been having an affair with Piroto and
that her brother Chessia had had him killed in order
to protect his sister's reputation. Although before you think I'm
accusing Chessire of brotherly kindness, protecting Lucrezia's reputation really just
meant protecting her marriage prospects. And then the second incident,
(13:24):
a Borgia baby was born, and no one seemed to
be sure whose it was. The baby was initially known
as the Infant Romanus or the Infant of Rome, but
he would later be known as Giovanni. There are a
lot of Giovanni's in this story. The most likely explanation
for the baby is that he was Pope Alexander's child,
(13:48):
and the Pope even admitted so much in a papal
bull later in his life. But early on, right after
the baby appeared, they said it was chess Eire's child
out of wedlock before he got married. But Lucrezia had
been sent away and her marriage being unconsummated was essential
to her family's political dealings. What if people thought the
(14:12):
baby was hers and it was result of I don't know,
incest with her father, or and here you can cue
the Game of Thrones theme song, what if it was
a result of incest with her brother? Again, there was
no evidence to support this, and most historians agree. Now
(14:33):
the child was almost certainly Pope Alexander's, possibly Chanceres, but
really probably not Lucrezia's. Still, the Boers has had power,
and other families of Italy wanted that power. Rumors were
a weapon. When Lucrezia turned eighteen, it was time for
(14:57):
her to get married. Again and again, death, tragedy and
rumors would follow behind her. This time, Pope Alexander wanted
to secure the Borgia position with the royal family of
the Kingdom of Naples. Naples was in a precarious position
under the threat of King Charles the eighth of France,
(15:21):
who claimed the throne for himself through a certain inherited lineage.
Not to get too deep into the weeds of these politics,
but the Pope's youngest son, Geoffrey, had already married the
daughter of the King of Naples, a girl named Sancha,
although seeing her name spelled out s A n c
(15:41):
I A, you might be forgiven for mispronouncing it Sansa.
Geoffrey and Santa is another fun little layer of Game
of Thrones intrigue into the mix. But back to Lucrezia.
Lucrezia was going to get married to the King of
naples illegitimate son, Alfonso, Duke of Bichellier, the half brother
(16:03):
of Sancha, but that marriage wasn't the Pope's end game.
The thing was their dad, Alfonso and Sancha's dad wasn't
the king anymore. He had died and their uncle became
the king and the new king had a daughter, Carlotta,
that the Pope really wanted for his eldest son, chess Are,
(16:24):
so as sort of a consolation prize, he was marrying
Lucrezia to the illegitimate but still titled and important Duke
of Bichellier, hoping it would be a foothold for Carlotta
to get with chess Are. That marriage for chess Are
never worked out, although jess a A did end up
having an affair with Sancha, his younger brother's wife. In
(16:46):
her defense, relatively, she was sixteen when she was married
to a twelve year old Geoffrey, but what can I say?
The Borgias were very scandalous and very messy. As for
Lucrezia and husband number two, it seemed like she had
finally struck the jackpot, at least in terms of her
(17:07):
own personal happiness. Another quick aside, there is just an
influx of Alphonso's in this story, and so for clarity,
husband number two will be referred to by his title Bachelier.
Lucrezia and Bichellier were only a year apart in age,
and he was known to be tall and graceful, athletic
(17:28):
and handsome. Their wedding was private, but we know details
from Sanche's writing. We know that Lucrezia wore addressed with
jewel studded sleeves and a French style robe with black
thread and a red velvet trim. Pearls encircled her belt
and her neck, and her cap was embroidered with glittering gems.
(17:52):
She wore a gold circlet crown in her golden blonde hair.
The groom were a broach that his new bride had
given him. The festivities were as magnificent as he might
expect from a Borgia party. After the ceremony, there was
another raucous after party, and marvelous tableaus were set up
(18:16):
to amuse the guests throughout the Borgia apartments. In one
tableau there was an intricate fountain. Another was a room
all made up to look like the woods, and members
of the Borgia family dressed up as wild animals. Chessire
dressed as a unicorn, his younger, cockolded little brother was
(18:37):
given a sea goose costume. For a short while, the
Cretia and her husband were living a life together, she
lost a pregnancy, but eventually she became pregnant again. The
two lived together in relative happiness in Rome, but politics
were still happening in the world all around them. This
(19:04):
is going to be a vast oversimplification, but I hope
it at least serves as a decent overview. Naples was
in a precarious position. It was under threat by King
Charles the Eighth of France, who claimed the throne of
Naples for himself through a sort of convoluted lineage. But
(19:25):
then King Charles the Eighth died in France without a director,
which meant that his second cousin, once removed, Louis the
twelfth inherited France, and he also inherited Charles's claim to
the throne of Naples. But there was something else. Louis
the Twelfth wanted Brittany. Brittany wasn't part of France at
(19:45):
the time, and the former king only had it because
he had been married to the Duchess of Brittany named Anne. Well,
Great Louis the twelfth would marry Anne of Brittany too.
The only problem was Louis was already married. There's a
quick answer to that. You just need the pope to
take care of it. An alliance was born. Pope Alexander
(20:09):
annulled louis marriage so he could marry the Duchess of Brittany,
and in exchange, Louis gave the Pope's son chits Or,
a duchy military assistant, and a bride, a Princess of Navarre.
All of this is to say, through a convoluted series
of events, the Boorges became allied with France, and they
(20:31):
supported the French claim to Naples and not the claim
of the Italian royal family of Naples. The family of
Lucrezia's husband, Michelier, sensed that the winds were changing, and
he fled Rome when his wife was six months pregnant.
The Pope was furious and sent out men to find him.
(20:54):
They couldn't, And yet, even though he was home free,
Chellier returned to Rome for the birth of his child
at his wife's behest. The way it looked later, it
looked likely Crezzia alured him back into a trap. As
(21:16):
the sun set on July dred Butchellier was strolling up
the steps of St. Peter's Basilica when before he reached
the threshold, he was accosted by a group of assassins.
The assassins stabbed him in the head, in the right arm,
(21:37):
and in the leg. While the Chellier bled on the stairs,
the assassins tried to snatch him up and carry him away,
but then guards came out and the assassins fled. There
wasn't much time to save his life, or any time
at all. He needed to get to safety, and so
he was brought inside the Borgia Tower, where his sister
(22:00):
Sancha and his wife Lucrezia wept over his body while
he slept. Lucrezia knew that her brother was behind it,
but there was nothing she could do about that. All
she could do in the meantime was prepare her husband's
food just to be sure it wasn't poisoned, and send
for her husband's own doctors from Naples to take care
(22:23):
of him. And for a few weeks it looked like
he was getting better. Baschellier was going to survive his wounds.
To sorry ever, acting innocent, came one morning to visit
his brother in law. He leaned in close to give
Bachelier a kiss on the cheek. What didn't happen at
(22:44):
lunch can still happen at dinner, he whispered. A month later,
Bachellier was strangled in his bed. The assassins were never caught.
Lucrezia was heartbroken. She went into deep mourning, signing letters
to her family as Latin filicima, the extremely unhappy one.
(23:09):
She was only twenty years old and she had already
had two husbands. Maybe she was cursed like everyone said,
but her family wouldn't let her mourn for long. In
fifteen o two, she was married yet again to another Alfonso,
Alfonso d'Este, who had later become the Duke of Ferrara. Alfonso,
(23:32):
for his part, was, and I'll say maybe justifiably hesitant
to marry into this incredibly conniving, bloodthirsty family. It objectively
had not worked out for either of his predecessors. The
Duke sent a group of ambassadors to Rome to scope
Lucrezia out, and the report came back spotless. One of
(23:55):
his ambassadors wrote of Lucrezia quote, she is a wise lady,
and it is not only my opinion, but that of
the whole company. And so Alfonso agreed to the marriage.
It turns out he had a lot in common with Lucrezia.
He was only twenty four and a widower himself. The
pair were married and for the first time in Lucrezia's life,
(24:18):
she lived away from Rome and away from the direct
influence of her powerful father and brother. As the Duchess
of Ferrara, Lucrezia Sword, she was accomplished and widely praised
for her beauty and leadership. This would be the longest
marriage of her life, lasting seventeen years, though neither party
(24:40):
was faithful. Lucrezia, in classic Boorgia fashion, had an affair
with her husband's brother in law, the husband of her
husband's sister, and of course she also had an affair
with the much older poet whose love letters to her
Lord Byron would one day call the prettiest love letters
(25:02):
in the world. But there was one dark spot to
her life in Ferrara. She was never allowed to see
her son, Rodrigo again, her firstborn that she had with
her second husband. The idea coming into her third marriage
(25:25):
was that she still had to sort of ostensibly present
herself as if she was a virgin, even though by
that point everyone knew the jig was up. Throughout Rodrigo's
entire young life, she begged to see him. She would
send him gifts and letters. She sent him a tutor
from university in Ferrara. She didn't get to see him
(25:47):
until he was twelve years old. After he already died,
Lucrezia was able to travel to where he had been living,
where she stayed for a month in mourning. Lucrezia's own
end would be far less dramatic than her life. She
outlived her oldest son, her father, and her older brother Chesare,
(26:10):
and over the course of her multiple marriages she would
have eight known children, at least one stillborn, and several miscarriages.
It would be during the birth of what might have
been her ninth child, Isabella, that Lucrezia, then thirty nine,
would finally fall. It was the burden of all women,
(26:31):
the risk of childbirth, that looming specter. Her father, Pope Alexander,
died in fifteen o three, and with his death came
the fall in power for the whole Bourgah clan. Lucrezia's
brother Cesare had been forced to flee Italy, and he
attempted to capture Navarre. In a military battle in fifteen
(26:54):
o seven. He was chasing an enemy group of knights,
only to be ambushed an attacked, killed by a spear.
The enemy men stripped him of all of his fine
clothing and valuables and left him alone with just a
single red tile covering his genitals and the leather mask
(27:14):
that he wore later in life to cover the half
of his face that had become grossly disfigured thanks to Syphilers.
With the deaths of Chesire and Pope Alexander came the
death of Borgia's central power and protection. The rumors and
stories about Lucrezia had always been there, but now more
(27:37):
quickly came the slander and accusations. Some of the stories
were probably warranted. The Borgia's as a whole were murderous
and promiscuous, but Lucrezia would always be cast as the
fun fatale, the murderous black widow. It's an archetype, so compelling,
(27:59):
so romantic, but sometimes it's hard to find the woman underneath.
That's the story of Lucrezia Borgia. But stick around after
a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more
about the overall legacy of the Borgias. Lucrezia has been
(28:31):
immortalized in books and plays and operas hundreds of times,
but her brother Tessare has an even more impressive literary legacy.
Tessire had been ruthless in his pursuit of power, using
his father's papal armies and his own mercenaries to expand
his land and his family's influence. Chess Are was so
(28:54):
notable that he caught the interest of the political theorist
Niccolo Macchiavelli. It was Chessire Borgia who inspired what would
become Machiavelli's most famous work. Some say that Machiavelli wrote
it ironically as a tongue in cheek critique of power.
(29:16):
Plenty of people take it completely earnestly, but Machiavelli had
watched Chessire Borgia operate, and he would use that as
his playbook, his template when he sat down to write
his treatise, The Prince. Noble Blood is a production of
(29:40):
I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.
The show was written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and
produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble Blood tails dot com. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(30:03):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaronminkie. Listener discretion is advised.
While touring through Milan in eighteen sixteen, Lord Byron visited
the museum collection of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana. Byron found himself
(00:25):
entranced by one particular exhibit, handwritten letters from over four
hundred years earlier between poet and his lover, Lucrezia Borgia.
The letters were displayed under glass, along with a luck
of Lucrezia's famous blonde hair that she had cut off,
(00:46):
in this case to send her paramour, along with one
of the letters. Lord Byron being Lord Byron, he couldn't
resist the urge to look around, be sure no one
was watching, and then take some of the hair for himself.
Byron could never resist a woman or the glamor of fame,
(01:07):
and Lucrezia Borgia was famous in her lifetime. She was
a central figure in the Italian social scene, the illegitimate
daughter of a man who would then go on to
become the Pope, she was a member of one of
the era's most powerful families, the Borges. Even while she
(01:27):
was alive, rumors about Lucrezia spread wildly, but after her
death especially, she became a larger than life figure, a
Lady Macbeth, villainous, a conniving poisoner, a usurper, a man eater. Famously,
Lucrezia Borgia was said to have owned a ring where
(01:49):
instead of a stone, there was a hollow chamber that
she could fill with powdered poison in order to surreptitiously
murder her enemies. For the record, there's no evidence that
that actually existed. Though political murders were happening all around her,
several at the behest of her family, there's no actual
(02:12):
evidence that Lucrezia was involved in any of them at all.
It's rare for me in an episode of Noble Blood
to come to an understanding that a figure or any
historical event is less interesting than most people understand it
to be. But in Lucrezia Borgia's case it might be true.
(02:34):
The rumors and speculation around her in the centuries since
her death have loomed so large that in researching her life,
I felt not unlike a Renaissance artist chipping away at
a block of marble. You begin with a block of stone,
A story high and then carve away piece by piece
(02:57):
until what's left a woman just human sized? So was
she a fen fatale or maybe she was just a
blonde bimbo manipulated by the more powerful men in her life,
her father and her brother. What if the answer is neither,
what then what's left? There's a painting that I think
(03:21):
embodies the strange marriage between the perception and the reality
of Lucrezia Borgia. It's called Lucrezia Borgia reigns in the
Vatican in the absence of Pope Alexander the sixth It
was painted around by Frank Cadogan Cowper and it currently
hangs in the Tape in London. The painting is of
(03:42):
a Vatican throne room, painted almost entirely in reds. The
cardinals surrounding the papal throne look more like flames, and
in the center of the canvas, where the Pope should
be sitting, is instead his daughter. The at t a Borgia,
a vision in orange yellow, almost glowing golden. The artist's
(04:08):
rendition is actually based on a true event in which
Lucrezia scandalized the Vatican by taking her father's place in
his seat, but the artist imagined something one step further.
The artist painted two cardinals pulling away at either side
of Lucrezia's dress to allow a friar to kiss her feet.
(04:33):
That almost certainly never happened, But in the painting it is,
at least to my eyes, unambiguously sexual symbolism. Whatever was
true or false in terms of rumors about Lucrezia's life,
that symbolic implication at least was true. Here was a
(04:53):
woman more sexual than sixteenth century Italy wanted her to
be more powerful, and they wanted her to be and
glowing or not, nobody could take their eyes off of her.
I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. In the
(05:20):
fifteenth century, the notion of a pope having children was
considered far less outrageous than it might sound today. Though
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had gone through the motions briefly pretending
that the four children that he had with his married
mistress were his nephews and niece. Eventually he lifted his
(05:41):
hands and admitted that he had four children, Chessire, Giovanni, Lucrezia,
and Geoffrey. Their mother, Venoza, was a notoriously famous beauty
of Rome, and though she was, as previously mentioned, married,
she was also the favorite of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. At
(06:03):
this point, the Borges had limited but significant power. The
borgia Is already had a pope in their family, trade
Pope Callixtus the Third, but they were still considered outsiders
in Italian society. For one, they weren't really Italian. The
Borges were actually Catalan, and they had lived in the
(06:24):
formerly Moorish currently Spanish kingdom of Valencia, as they did
with most other Catalans. Italians thought of the Borgia's as
tight fisted and ruthless. They referred to them as Morani
or secret Jews, and so even as the Borgias became
(06:44):
more powerful in Italy, they remained a tight knit family
above all else. They spoke Catalan amongst themselves, and they
had their own internal loyalties. They were all raised believing
in in us versus them mentality. If you've watched or
read Game of Thrones, certain parallels will reveal themselves soon enough,
(07:08):
and I suspect that George R. Martin might have been
a little bit inspired by the Borgia family, especially when
building the personalities of the Landisters. When Lucrezia Borgia was twelve,
her father was elected Pope Alexander the sixth. There were
rumors even then that he had bought the seat with bribery,
(07:30):
or that it was nepotism because his uncle had been
pope already, and both of those things may have been factors,
but probably a more important factor is that Borgia was
seen as a centrist candidate. The other powerful families vying
for pope had their own rivalries and loyalties. Bourgea wasn't
(07:50):
to pro France or to Milanaise. The Borgia's just mostly
looked out for the Borgia's. And a brief note from
this point in the story, I'll be referring to Lucrezia's
father by his papal name Alexander for clarity. Even though
he was born Rodrigo, at this point in history, there
was very little stigma attached to the fact that Alexander's
(08:13):
four children were bastards, just as there was really no
stigma attached to the fact that Alexander was about to
use his new found powers as pope to advance his
family's position. It's what all the popes did in this case.
Advancing his family meant advantageous marriages. By the time she
(08:39):
was twelve, Lucrezia had already been engaged three times. It
wasn't hard to find her matches even from a young age.
She had golden hair and bright white teeth. She was
charming and well educated. But then her father was elected
pope and her prospects got a whole lot better. In
(09:00):
fourte three, when Lucrezia was just thirteen years old, she
was married to a man nearly fifteen years her senior,
a man named Giovanni Sparza of the powerful Sparza family.
Giovanni was the nephew of the Duke of Milan, and
even though Lucrezia and her new husband remained in Rome,
(09:21):
it was important for the Boorges to have allies in
northern Italy. But as it turned out, that alliance was
more temporarily important. Lucrezia and Giovanni had been married only
a year when the Sparzas began to seem like a liability.
A lot of complicated political maneuvering is happening behind the
(09:42):
scenes in Italy at this moment, But to make a
long story short, the Duke of Milan allied with the
King of France against the Pope still in Rome, Giovanni
was stranded metaphorically in the belly of the beast, not
quite sure if she was supposed to ally himself with
his uncle but of Milan or with his wife's powerful family.
(10:03):
But for the Borges, their choice of loyalty was entirely clear.
Lucrezia's older brother, Chessire, met with her one afternoon and
calmly explained to her that her husband would need to
be killed so that she could be remarried to someone
who could actually help them politically. Lucrezia panicked. She liked
(10:24):
her husband, they were genuinely fond of each other, and
so she ran home that afternoon and warned him. Giovanni
fled to Milan disguised as a beggar. We can just
imagine Pope Alexander putting his head in his hand and sighing,
saying something like, darn, it's going to be so much
(10:45):
harder for you to get out of that marriage now, Lucrezia. Now,
the Borges only had one option to get Lucrezia out
of that marriage. That option was annulling it. With them
being Catholic and their father being the Pope meant the
only way to do that was to claim that the
marriage had never been consummated. Well, that was a bit
(11:06):
of a laugh. There was absolutely no reason to believe
that that was true, and all of Rome knew it. No,
it's true, Chess, he said, It's Giovanni's fault. He is impotent.
Ignore the fact that he had already been married once
and his first wife died in childbirth. He never consummated
the marriage with my sister because he's impotent. Trust me.
(11:28):
The Borges were going to force Giovanni Sparza to sign
a statement to that effect, which he eventually did, but
not without lashing out in his own way, saying that
maybe the Boorges only wanted Lucrezia single so that they
could have her for themselves. Alexander, her father, and Ssary.
The Borges were notoriously close, weren't they. This is about
(11:52):
when the rumors of incest began, but those rumors would
continue on for the rest of Lucrezia's life. While the
annulment was working itself out, Lucrezia needed to get out
of the picture, just to be put aside so that
no one in Rome would think about her for a
(12:13):
little while, and you know, maybe just in case she
had gotten pregnant from her first husband, to make sure
that no one could see it lest they believed that
the marriage had been consummated, and so Lucrezia was sent
to a nunnery outside the city. But two unfortunate incidents
occurred in the months after lucrezia separation from her first
(12:35):
husband that would begin the tarnish on her reputation. First,
on Valentine's Day fourteen ninety eight, a young Spaniard named
Pedro called her own, known colloquially as Perotto, who worked
in the Pope's chamber, was found dead in the Tiber
River along with one of Lucrezia's ladies. Speculation ran rampant
(13:00):
that Lucrezia had been having an affair with Piroto and
that her brother Chessia had had him killed in order
to protect his sister's reputation. Although before you think I'm
accusing Chessire of brotherly kindness, protecting Lucrezia's reputation really just
meant protecting her marriage prospects. And then the second incident,
(13:24):
a Borgia baby was born, and no one seemed to
be sure whose it was. The baby was initially known
as the Infant Romanus or the Infant of Rome, but
he would later be known as Giovanni. There are a
lot of Giovanni's in this story. The most likely explanation
for the baby is that he was Pope Alexander's child,
(13:48):
and the Pope even admitted so much in a papal
bull later in his life. But early on, right after
the baby appeared, they said it was chess Eire's child
out of wedlock before he got married. But Lucrezia had
been sent away and her marriage being unconsummated was essential
to her family's political dealings. What if people thought the
(14:12):
baby was hers and it was result of I don't know,
incest with her father, or and here you can cue
the Game of Thrones theme song, what if it was
a result of incest with her brother? Again, there was
no evidence to support this, and most historians agree. Now
(14:33):
the child was almost certainly Pope Alexander's, possibly Chanceres, but
really probably not Lucrezia's. Still, the Boers has had power,
and other families of Italy wanted that power. Rumors were
a weapon. When Lucrezia turned eighteen, it was time for
(14:57):
her to get married. Again and again, death, tragedy and
rumors would follow behind her. This time, Pope Alexander wanted
to secure the Borgia position with the royal family of
the Kingdom of Naples. Naples was in a precarious position
under the threat of King Charles the eighth of France,
(15:21):
who claimed the throne for himself through a certain inherited lineage.
Not to get too deep into the weeds of these politics,
but the Pope's youngest son, Geoffrey, had already married the
daughter of the King of Naples, a girl named Sancha,
although seeing her name spelled out s A n c
(15:41):
I A, you might be forgiven for mispronouncing it Sansa.
Geoffrey and Santa is another fun little layer of Game
of Thrones intrigue into the mix. But back to Lucrezia.
Lucrezia was going to get married to the King of
naples illegitimate son, Alfonso, Duke of Bichellier, the half brother
(16:03):
of Sancha, but that marriage wasn't the Pope's end game.
The thing was their dad, Alfonso and Sancha's dad wasn't
the king anymore. He had died and their uncle became
the king and the new king had a daughter, Carlotta,
that the Pope really wanted for his eldest son, chess Are,
(16:24):
so as sort of a consolation prize, he was marrying
Lucrezia to the illegitimate but still titled and important Duke
of Bichellier, hoping it would be a foothold for Carlotta
to get with chess Are. That marriage for chess Are
never worked out, although jess a A did end up
having an affair with Sancha, his younger brother's wife. In
(16:46):
her defense, relatively, she was sixteen when she was married
to a twelve year old Geoffrey, but what can I say?
The Borgias were very scandalous and very messy. As for
Lucrezia and husband number two, it seemed like she had
finally struck the jackpot, at least in terms of her
(17:07):
own personal happiness. Another quick aside, there is just an
influx of Alphonso's in this story, and so for clarity,
husband number two will be referred to by his title Bachelier.
Lucrezia and Bichellier were only a year apart in age,
and he was known to be tall and graceful, athletic
(17:28):
and handsome. Their wedding was private, but we know details
from Sanche's writing. We know that Lucrezia wore addressed with
jewel studded sleeves and a French style robe with black
thread and a red velvet trim. Pearls encircled her belt
and her neck, and her cap was embroidered with glittering gems.
(17:52):
She wore a gold circlet crown in her golden blonde hair.
The groom were a broach that his new bride had
given him. The festivities were as magnificent as he might
expect from a Borgia party. After the ceremony, there was
another raucous after party, and marvelous tableaus were set up
(18:16):
to amuse the guests throughout the Borgia apartments. In one
tableau there was an intricate fountain. Another was a room
all made up to look like the woods, and members
of the Borgia family dressed up as wild animals. Chessire
dressed as a unicorn, his younger, cockolded little brother was
(18:37):
given a sea goose costume. For a short while, the
Cretia and her husband were living a life together, she
lost a pregnancy, but eventually she became pregnant again. The
two lived together in relative happiness in Rome, but politics
were still happening in the world all around them. This
(19:04):
is going to be a vast oversimplification, but I hope
it at least serves as a decent overview. Naples was
in a precarious position. It was under threat by King
Charles the Eighth of France, who claimed the throne of
Naples for himself through a sort of convoluted lineage. But
(19:25):
then King Charles the Eighth died in France without a director,
which meant that his second cousin, once removed, Louis the
twelfth inherited France, and he also inherited Charles's claim to
the throne of Naples. But there was something else. Louis
the Twelfth wanted Brittany. Brittany wasn't part of France at
(19:45):
the time, and the former king only had it because
he had been married to the Duchess of Brittany named Anne. Well,
Great Louis the twelfth would marry Anne of Brittany too.
The only problem was Louis was already married. There's a
quick answer to that. You just need the pope to
take care of it. An alliance was born. Pope Alexander
(20:09):
annulled louis marriage so he could marry the Duchess of Brittany,
and in exchange, Louis gave the Pope's son chits Or,
a duchy military assistant, and a bride, a Princess of Navarre.
All of this is to say, through a convoluted series
of events, the Boorges became allied with France, and they
(20:31):
supported the French claim to Naples and not the claim
of the Italian royal family of Naples. The family of
Lucrezia's husband, Michelier, sensed that the winds were changing, and
he fled Rome when his wife was six months pregnant.
The Pope was furious and sent out men to find him.
(20:54):
They couldn't, And yet, even though he was home free,
Chellier returned to Rome for the birth of his child
at his wife's behest. The way it looked later, it
looked likely Crezzia alured him back into a trap. As
(21:16):
the sun set on July dred Butchellier was strolling up
the steps of St. Peter's Basilica when before he reached
the threshold, he was accosted by a group of assassins.
The assassins stabbed him in the head, in the right arm,
(21:37):
and in the leg. While the Chellier bled on the stairs,
the assassins tried to snatch him up and carry him away,
but then guards came out and the assassins fled. There
wasn't much time to save his life, or any time
at all. He needed to get to safety, and so
he was brought inside the Borgia Tower, where his sister
(22:00):
Sancha and his wife Lucrezia wept over his body while
he slept. Lucrezia knew that her brother was behind it,
but there was nothing she could do about that. All
she could do in the meantime was prepare her husband's
food just to be sure it wasn't poisoned, and send
for her husband's own doctors from Naples to take care
(22:23):
of him. And for a few weeks it looked like
he was getting better. Baschellier was going to survive his wounds.
To sorry ever, acting innocent, came one morning to visit
his brother in law. He leaned in close to give
Bachelier a kiss on the cheek. What didn't happen at
(22:44):
lunch can still happen at dinner, he whispered. A month later,
Bachellier was strangled in his bed. The assassins were never caught.
Lucrezia was heartbroken. She went into deep mourning, signing letters
to her family as Latin filicima, the extremely unhappy one.
(23:09):
She was only twenty years old and she had already
had two husbands. Maybe she was cursed like everyone said,
but her family wouldn't let her mourn for long. In
fifteen o two, she was married yet again to another Alfonso,
Alfonso d'Este, who had later become the Duke of Ferrara. Alfonso,
(23:32):
for his part, was, and I'll say maybe justifiably hesitant
to marry into this incredibly conniving, bloodthirsty family. It objectively
had not worked out for either of his predecessors. The
Duke sent a group of ambassadors to Rome to scope
Lucrezia out, and the report came back spotless. One of
(23:55):
his ambassadors wrote of Lucrezia quote, she is a wise lady,
and it is not only my opinion, but that of
the whole company. And so Alfonso agreed to the marriage.
It turns out he had a lot in common with Lucrezia.
He was only twenty four and a widower himself. The
pair were married and for the first time in Lucrezia's life,
(24:18):
she lived away from Rome and away from the direct
influence of her powerful father and brother. As the Duchess
of Ferrara, Lucrezia Sword, she was accomplished and widely praised
for her beauty and leadership. This would be the longest
marriage of her life, lasting seventeen years, though neither party
(24:40):
was faithful. Lucrezia, in classic Boorgia fashion, had an affair
with her husband's brother in law, the husband of her
husband's sister, and of course she also had an affair
with the much older poet whose love letters to her
Lord Byron would one day call the prettiest love letters
(25:02):
in the world. But there was one dark spot to
her life in Ferrara. She was never allowed to see
her son, Rodrigo again, her firstborn that she had with
her second husband. The idea coming into her third marriage
(25:25):
was that she still had to sort of ostensibly present
herself as if she was a virgin, even though by
that point everyone knew the jig was up. Throughout Rodrigo's
entire young life, she begged to see him. She would
send him gifts and letters. She sent him a tutor
from university in Ferrara. She didn't get to see him
(25:47):
until he was twelve years old. After he already died,
Lucrezia was able to travel to where he had been living,
where she stayed for a month in mourning. Lucrezia's own
end would be far less dramatic than her life. She
outlived her oldest son, her father, and her older brother Chesare,
(26:10):
and over the course of her multiple marriages she would
have eight known children, at least one stillborn, and several miscarriages.
It would be during the birth of what might have
been her ninth child, Isabella, that Lucrezia, then thirty nine,
would finally fall. It was the burden of all women,
(26:31):
the risk of childbirth, that looming specter. Her father, Pope Alexander,
died in fifteen o three, and with his death came
the fall in power for the whole Bourgah clan. Lucrezia's
brother Cesare had been forced to flee Italy, and he
attempted to capture Navarre. In a military battle in fifteen
(26:54):
o seven. He was chasing an enemy group of knights,
only to be ambushed an attacked, killed by a spear.
The enemy men stripped him of all of his fine
clothing and valuables and left him alone with just a
single red tile covering his genitals and the leather mask
(27:14):
that he wore later in life to cover the half
of his face that had become grossly disfigured thanks to Syphilers.
With the deaths of Chesire and Pope Alexander came the
death of Borgia's central power and protection. The rumors and
stories about Lucrezia had always been there, but now more
(27:37):
quickly came the slander and accusations. Some of the stories
were probably warranted. The Borgia's as a whole were murderous
and promiscuous, but Lucrezia would always be cast as the
fun fatale, the murderous black widow. It's an archetype, so compelling,
(27:59):
so romantic, but sometimes it's hard to find the woman underneath.
That's the story of Lucrezia Borgia. But stick around after
a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more
about the overall legacy of the Borgias. Lucrezia has been
(28:31):
immortalized in books and plays and operas hundreds of times,
but her brother Tessare has an even more impressive literary legacy.
Tessire had been ruthless in his pursuit of power, using
his father's papal armies and his own mercenaries to expand
his land and his family's influence. Chess Are was so
(28:54):
notable that he caught the interest of the political theorist
Niccolo Macchiavelli. It was Chessire Borgia who inspired what would
become Machiavelli's most famous work. Some say that Machiavelli wrote
it ironically as a tongue in cheek critique of power.
(29:16):
Plenty of people take it completely earnestly, but Machiavelli had
watched Chessire Borgia operate, and he would use that as
his playbook, his template when he sat down to write
his treatise, The Prince. Noble Blood is a production of
(29:40):
I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.
The show was written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and
produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble Blood tails dot com. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(30:03):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M M
Host
Dana Schwartz
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