The Borgia Myth [pp. 1-16]

THE BORGIA MYTH.
teenth and sixteenth centuries is well known. Both republics had
interests in the Romagna. Its rebellious feudatories looked to
them for aid in their struggle against the conquering Caesar of the
house of Borgia. The Colonnas and the Orsinis were always se cretly, and sometimes openly, aided and abetted by their Florentine and Venetian allies; both interested in thwarting the plans
of Alexander VI. for the destruction of the "tyranni," as they
were called, in Central Italy. Hence the Venetian and Florentine
ambassadors, whether at Naples or at Rome, sent to their respective governments malicious reports of all that was done at the
Vatican. Paolo Cappello and the rest show bias in all their despatches; and the compilation of the Venetian Marino Sanuto is
a mixture of gossip, fable, fact, and fiction! *
The league of the Borgias with the French under Charles
VIII. and Louis XII., and the war of Alexander against Ferdinand
of Naples, caused the pontiff to be detested at the court of that
monarch. Gibes and satires against the Borgias became the
amusement of his table, and epigrams against Alexander, Lucretia, and Caesar the stock in trade of the court poets. Pontano,
one of them, while he satirized the pope and Lucretia, did not
spare even his royal master and benefactor, whom he afterwards
deserted for the French conqueror in A.D. I501. Sannazaro was
more faithful, for he followed Ferdinand into exile. These poets,.
in common with others of the Renaissance, affected to imitate
their pagan exemplars in obscenity as well as in style, and to
such excesses did they go that, according to Roscoe in his Life of
Leo X., they surpassed even Catullus and Martial in libertinism
and indecency. Ulrich von Hutten and the other early Reformers of the sixteenth century imported into Germany the writings
of these Italian satirists, and sent the flood of licentiousness and
falsehood of which they were the source rolling down the cen-.
turies to the present day. It is not astonishing, therefore, that
serious writers like Roscoe, Ranke, and Gregorovius, who believe
that history should be a faithful record of facts proven by documents and other trustworthy testimony, instead of a gazette of
gossip, should protest against the slanders forged against the
Borgias and aid in restoring their character to the level of truth
and justice. These writers deserve credit for having to a great
extent conquered their prejudices of creed and nationality in the
interest of historical truth.
Along with them we must name Edoardo Alvisi, a liberal
Italian, who published, a few years ago, a work entitled Cesars
* Alberi, Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Venetiz Firenze, x864.
I 8s6.]
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