Cesare Borgia

Italian military leader and politician

• Born: 1475 or 1476
• Birthplace: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: March 12, 1507
• Place of death: Viana, Navarre (now in Spain)

Cesare Borgia was one of the most formidable of Renaissance dynasts, a skillful campaigner and ruthless politician who helped establish his family among the premier houses of Renaissance Italy. He was later immortalized as the hero and archetype of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Early Life

The family of Cesare Borgia (CHAY-zahr-ay BAWR-jah) originated near Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, rising to prominence in the time of Cardinal Alfonso de Borja, who became Pope Calixtus III in 1455. In 1456, Calixtus elevated one of his nephews, Rodrigo Borja, Cesare’s father, to the rank of cardinal.

Rodrigo (who Italianized his name to “Borgia”) devoted himself to the continued advancement of his family. Even by the lax moral standards of the Renaissance Papacy, Rodrigo lived scandalously; he fathered at least ten illegitimate children, showering special favor on the four (including Cesare) born to him by his favorite mistress, Vannozza Cattanei.

Private vices notwithstanding, Rodrigo was a shrewd and effective administrator who served as vice-chancellor (chief administrative officer) of the papal curia for thirty-five years. His election as Pope Alexander VI in 1492 achieved in no small part by massive bribes marked the culmination of a brilliant, if morally dubious, ecclesiastical career.

Alexander VI worked tirelessly to establish the Borgia family as preeminent in the Papacy’s Italian territories. In and of itself, this was hardly remarkable; for medieval and Renaissance popes, nepotism and family patronage were essential tools of effective pontifical government. The scope of Alexander’s ambitions, however, and his family’s Iberian origins were exceptional and quickly aroused considerable opposition from the leading Italian houses, particularly the royal house of Naples.

At first, the pope pinned his hopes to his favorite son, Juan, for whom he acquired the Spanish duchy of Gandia. Cesare, by contrast, was marked for ecclesiastical preferment; he studied law at Pisa before successive appointments to the Spanish sees of Pamplona and Valencia. In 1493, he was named cardinal-deacon of Santa Maria Nuova, but the restless and martial Cesare was ill-suited to a career with the Church. When Juan died under mysterious circumstances in the spring of 1497, it was widely believed that Cesare had had him murdered. The disconsolate pope, himself convinced of Cesare’s guilt, had little choice but to release Cesare from his vows and to place Juan’s temporal holdings at Cesare’s disposal.

Life’s Work

Cesare showed himself a far more capable and energetic agent of his family’s interests than the feckless Juan had been; his personal motto, aut Caesar aut nihil (either Caesar or nothing), speaks to his single-minded and boundless ambition. In May, 1499, he secured an important alliance with the French king, Louis XII , from whom he received the French duchy of Valentinois. Soon afterward, also in 1499, he married Charlotte d’Albret, a sister of the king of Navarre. Cesare then turned his attention to the reconquest of the Papal States, substantial portions of which had become effectively independent of papal control in the course of the previous generation.

As captain-general of the Church, Cesare built up a formidable army, including substantial numbers of French and Swiss mercenaries. From his headquarters at Cesena, he moved against the petty tyrants of the cities of Romagna and Marches. In 1499, he captured Imola; the following year he took Forlì, Rimini, and Pesaro in quick succession. After the fall of Faenza in 1501, Alexander VI named Cesare duke of Romagna. Clearly, the pope sought to create a great Borgia patrimony in central and northern Italy, with Cesare as its dynastic founder.

In the face of Cesare’s astonishing victories, his enemies set their differences aside and made common cause against him. Even some of his allies, fearing for their own possessions, began to conspire against him. Rebellions broke out in the eastern Papal States, and Cesare suffered several major setbacks over the course of 1502. His alliance with Louis XII soon proved its value, however: The mere suggestion of a French invasion put an end to the uprisings, and by the end of 1502 Cesare was once again in firm control of his territories. Before he could press on to further conquests, however, both he and his father fell gravely ill in the summer of 1503. It was long believed that they accidentally took poison intended for an enemy, but the malaria that thrived in the miasmal Roman summer is a more likely culprit. In any event, the seventy-two-year-old pope died on August 18.

During Cesare’s long and difficult convalescence, his enemies, led by the powerful Roman Orsini family, exploited his incapacity and rose up against the Borgia hegemony. On September 22, the cardinals elected a new pope, Pius III, but when the frail Pius died less than one month later, the cardinals elected Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere as Pope Julius II . The able and bellicose Giuliano had long been among the most implacable opponents of the Borgias. Cesare fled to Spain, where he was arrested and imprisoned on the orders of King Ferdinand II . He escaped in 1506 and took refuge at the court of his brother-in-law, King John of Navarre.

Cesare doubtless hoped to make an eventual return to the Italian theater. On March 12, 1507, however, Cesare was killed at the castle of Viana while fighting a rebellious vassal of King John. Any hopes of a Borgia restoration in Italy died with him. In less than one decade, the remarkable Borgia achievement in Italy had vanished without a trace.

Significance

Cesare remains a controversial and intriguing figure. Tales of his extravagance were doubtless exaggerated by his enemies, and rumors of an incestuous relationship with his sister, Lucrezia, are without merit. He was handsome and athletic, but he lacked the breadth of accomplishment of the greatest Renaissance princes. Cesare defined success entirely in political and military terms. Despite an excellent private education, Cesare was indifferent to scholarship and the arts (though he did briefly employ Leonardo da Vinci as a military engineer).

There is no denying the remorseless cruelty with which he struck at his enemies, however, and his condottiere, Michelotto Coreglia, was an assassin and enforcer of unparalleled brutality. Suspicious of all, trusted by none, Cesare commanded fear and admiration but could not inspire loyalty or affection.

Still, at least some of Cesare’s contemporaries viewed his legacy in a more positive light. Niccolò Machiavelli argued in Il principe (wr. 1513, pb. 1532; The Prince , 1640) that Cesare’s conquests rendered an invaluable service to the public good. While acknowledging the amoral character of Cesare’s political activities, Machiavelli held that Cesare’s firm hand brought stability and peace to lands that had too long been rent by lawlessness and civil strife. Even more significant, Machiavelli saw Cesare as a potential bulwark against the competing ambitions of the French and Spanish crowns, though whether even a commander of Cesare’s ability could have preserved Italian independence before the imminent tide of foreign conquest seems doubtful.

Cesare’s career was most significant in marking the apogee of papal patronage and the politics of nepotism. Alexander VI came closer than any other pope to transforming papal patronage into the basis of a new type of regional, dynastic state building in Renaissance Italy. In the end, the Borgia experiment could not survive the death of its papal architect, but it could not have enjoyed its spectacular, if short-lived, success without the considerable talent and determination of Cesare.

Bibliography

Bradford, Sarah. Cesare Borgia. New York: Macmillan, 1976. Though hardly groundbreaking in its presentation, this polished and readable biography does an excellent job of capturing the character and ambition of this most feared of Renaissance princes.

Burchard, Johann. At the Court of the Borgia. Edited and translated by Geoffrey Parker. London: Folio Society, 1963. An excellent edition and translation, with scholarly commentary, of Johannes Burchard’s fascinating (if sometimes deliberately misleading) contemporary account of life at the court of Alexander VI.

Corvo, Frederick Baron. A History of the Borgias. New York: Modern Library, 1931. Written by an author every bit as colorful as his subjects, this elegant, overwrought, and hugely entertaining book revels in the more lurid aspects of the Borgia legacy. Despite its erudition and thorough research, this one should probably be read more as entertainment than as a work of scholarship.

Johnson, Marion, and Georgina Masson. The Borgias. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Originally published in 1981, this lively, readable, and relatively brief work is an important contribution to the ongoing rehabilitation of the Borgia reputation.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by George Bull, with an introduction by Anthony Grafton. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. This masterpiece of Western political thought portrays Cesare Borgia as the perfect exemplar of the late medieval and early modern ruler: intelligent, unsentimental, and wholly willing to subordinate moral concerns to raison d’état (reason of state).

Mallett, Michael E. The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1969. One of the best English-language studies of the dynasty, Mallett’s work examines the Borgia family fortunes in the context of the ever-shifting political circumstances of Renaissance Italy.

Sabatini, Rafael. The Life of Cesare Borgia. New York: Brentano’s, 1912. This classic biography was written by a celebrated novelist with a flair for swashbuckling adventures. Still, it was one of the earliest works to attempt a more balanced portrait of Cesare Borgia.