Cesare Borgia by Sarah Bradford

Author:Sarah Bradford [Bradford, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241958766
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

If Burchard is to be believed, here was an orgy in the true Roman tradition, held in the palace of the spiritual ruler of Christendom. The story of the naked courtesans crawling after hot chestnuts, and of the virility contest, may have been prurient embroideries, but that Cesare did give a party for his father and sister, which included courtesans, is attested by another source. On 4 November the Florentine orator Pepi reported that the Pope had not attended mass in St Peter’s or in the papal chapel on the days of All Saints and All Souls because of an indisposition, ‘which’, he added cautiously in cipher, ‘did not however impede him on Sunday night, the vigil of All Saints, from spending the night until the twelfth hour with the Duke, who had brought into the palace that night singers, courtesans, and all the night they spent in pleasures, dancing and laughter …’ Pepi’s account of the evening sounds harmless enough, and contains nothing which, in normal circumstances, an Italian of the day would have found especially shocking. Courtesans, the hetaerae of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rome, were an essential part of a lively informal party, as the pages of Cellini’s autobiography record. Yet this supper, which would otherwise have passed unremarked, took place in the Vatican in the presence of the Pope, a fact which gave it an additional piquancy even in the eyes of seasoned observers of the princely courts of the Renaissance.

It is hardly surprising that Alexander’s reputation for sensuality should have grown to exaggerated proportions. Agostino Vespucci wrote to Machiavelli in July of that year: ‘It remains for me to say that it is known by everyone that the Pope, who is surrounded there by his illicit flock, has brought in from outside every evening to the palace, twenty-five women or more, from the Ave Maria to one o’clock, so that the Palace is manifestly made the brothel of all filth. I do not wish to give you other news from here now, but if you answer this I will send you more and finer …’ Where the Borgias were concerned there was always more and ‘finer’ news; family vignettes which could be painted into a great canvas of colourful vice by the watchful envoys, waiting with pens poised, avid as gossip columnists for spicy titbits to enliven their dispatches. A few days after Cesare’s chestnut supper, Burchard reported what he called ‘another incident’ on 11 November, involving mares loaded with wood which a peasant had brought into Rome through the Viridaria gate near the Vatican.

When the mares reached the Piazza San Pietro, some of the palace guard came up, cut through the straps and threw off the saddles and the wood in order to lead the mares into the courtyard immediately inside the palace gate. Four stallions were then freed from their reins and harness and let out of the palace stables. They immediately ran to the mares, over whom they proceeded to fight furiously and

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