The 'Decadence' of the Borgia Popes (1455–1503): Debunking the Myth and the Catholic Response

An Aragonese Family Propelled by Diplomacy

The house of Borja — Italianized as Borgia — is attested at Xàtiva, in the Kingdom of Valencia (Crown of Aragon), from the 13th century. They are hidalgos of petty nobility, jurists, career ecclesiastics, who owe their Roman rise to one man: Alonso de Borja, the future Callixtus III. Born in 1378, trained in canon law at Lérida, he successively served antipope Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna), then Alfonso V of Aragon as legal counsel, before receiving the cardinal's purple in 1444 from the hands of Eugene IV.^[1]

The family's rise belongs to a precise context: the end of the Western Schism (1378–1417), the fall of Constantinople (May 29, 1453), and the Ottoman push now directly threatening Italy. A curia in search of solid jurists and experienced diplomats opens its doors to Aragonese clerics. The Borjas settle there permanently.^[2]

Callixtus III (1455–1458): The Forgotten Pope Who Rehabilitated Joan of Arc

Elected on April 8, 1455 at seventy-six years of age upon the death of Nicholas V, Alonso de Borja takes the name of Callixtus III. His pontificate lasts only three years (April 8, 1455 – August 6, 1458), but it is marked by two acts that the usual narratives against the Borgias pass over in silence.

The first is the retrial of Joan of Arc. On June 11, 1455, at the request of Isabelle Romée, Joan's mother, Callixtus III signs the rescript ordering the complete re-examination of the 1431 trial. A commission of three prelates — Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, Archbishop of Reims, Guillaume Chartier, Bishop of Paris, and Richard Olivier de Longueil, Bishop of Coutances — conducts the inquiry with Inquisitor Jean Bréhal. From November 1455 to July 1456, it hears about one hundred and fifteen witnesses according to the most common counts. On July 7, 1456, at Rouen, the rehabilitation sentence is solemnly proclaimed. The trial that had condemned Joan is declared fraudulent and unjust; Joan is restored to her honor.^[3] This is a pontifical act of historical reparation of the first order — the work of the house of Borgia.

The second is the organization of a crusade against the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople. Callixtus III melts down the apostolic palace's silver plate to finance a papal fleet, mobilizes the preaching of Saint John of Capistrano in the Balkans, and supports the defense of Belgrade led by John Hunyadi. On July 22, 1456, the Ottoman advance is halted beneath the city's walls by the Hungarian armies and Capistrano's Franciscan crusaders. News of the victory reaches Rome on August 6; Callixtus III extends the feast of the Transfiguration (August 6) to the universal calendar, in memory of the victory.^[4]

Callixtus III does indeed practice nepotism, like all the popes of his time. He makes his nephew Rodrigo a cardinal on February 20, 1456, and two other nephews receive important offices. This nepotism must not be judged anachronistically: the Renaissance curia operates according to a system of family clienteles that structures every European court; Callixtus's singularity is not that he uses it, but that he uses it more visibly than his contemporaries, because he is Spanish in an Italian milieu jealous of its prerogatives.^[5]

Rodrigo de Borja, Thirty-Five Years at the Heart of the Curia

Rodrigo Llançol de Borja, son of Joffré Llançol and Isabelle de Borja (sister of Callixtus III), was born on January 1, 1431 at Xàtiva. He receives the education of a court prelate: grammar at Valencia, canon law at Bologna where he earns a doctorate utriusque iuris in 1456. Created cardinal-deacon by his uncle on February 20 of the same year, he is appointed Vice-Chancellor of the Roman Church on May 1, 1457.^[6]

The post is the second in the curia, just after the pope's: it runs the apostolic chancery, supervises the drafting of bulls, controls the pontifical archives, and coordinates diplomacy. Rodrigo holds it for thirty-five years, under five successive pontificates: Callixtus III (1455–1458), Pius II (1458–1464), Paul II (1464–1471), Sixtus IV (1471–1484), and Innocent VIII (1484–1492). This continuity is unique in the history of the modern Roman curia and testifies to exceptional administrative competence.^[7]

Michael Mallett sums up this trajectory: for thirty-five years, Rodrigo Borgia was the central administrative cog of the papacy — no man since the 13th century possessed such mastery of Roman affairs at the moment of his election.^[8]

Diplomatic reports nuance this portrait. Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini), humanist pope and writer, addresses to Rodrigo, then twenty-nine years old, a famous letter dated June 11, 1460, after a scandalous feast at Siena in the absence of the Cardinal of Mantua. The letter — preserved in Pius II's Commentarii — reproaches the young vice-chancellor for his worldly conduct while acknowledging his administrative qualities.^[9] The document is precious: it attests that contemporaries saw in Rodrigo a capable and lavish man, without attributing to him any of the monstrosities posterity would later assign him.

Rodrigo has children. His long liaison with Vannozza Cattanei (1442–1518), a Roman woman of modest origin, gives him at least four recognized children: Giovanni (c. 1474), Cesare (c. 1475), Lucrezia (April 18, 1480), and Gioffre (c. 1481). These children are born before his election to the pontificate. This precision does not diminish the gravity of the clerical scandal — a bishop, and a fortiori a future pope, is bound to continence — but it forbids the popular caricature of a pope behaving like a sultan during his pontificate. When he becomes Alexander VI, his children are formed adults or adolescents whom he must then "place" socially: it is from this that the later political marriages arise.^[10]

The Night of August 10, 1492

Innocent VIII dies on July 25, 1492. The conclave opens on August 6 in the Sistine Chapel — whose frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli are less than a decade old. Twenty-three cardinals take part. Five principal candidates: Rodrigo Borgia, Giuliano della Rovere (the future Julius II, nephew of Sixtus IV), Ascanio Sforza (brother of the Duke of Milan), Oliviero Carafa (Naples), and Lorenzo Cibo (close to the late Innocent VIII).^[11]

At the ballot of August 11, at dawn, Rodrigo de Borja gathers the necessary votes (two-thirds, i.e., sixteen votes out of twenty-three). Elected on August 11, he takes the name of Alexander VI and receives the pontifical crown on August 26, 1492^[12] — according to the common hypothesis, in homage to Alexander the Great and to Pope Alexander III (1159–1181), the real motive for this choice remaining debated among historians. The principal accusation that will pursue his pontificate is that of simony: the purchase of votes at the conclave through the distribution of benefices, offices, and chests of gold.

The Single Source: Giuliano della Rovere

The accusation of simony rests almost entirely on a single contemporary source: Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who was the principal defeated rival at the conclave. Della Rovere does not content himself with recriminations: he leaves Rome, flees to France, and spends four years (1494–1498) soliciting armed intervention by Charles VIII against Alexander VI, attempting to obtain the convocation of a council to depose him.^[13] This source is not neutral. It is that of a man who wants to overthrow the pope he accuses.

On this point, Ludwig von Pastor — a Catholic historian yet very severe toward Alexander VI's morals — considers that the accusations of simony rest essentially on the testimonies of della Rovere's hostile camp and cannot, in the present state of documentation, be held as fully proven.^[14]

Pastor's verdict carries all the more weight in that he is Catholic, monarchist, profoundly hostile to the morals of the Renaissance papacy, and devotes an entire volume to Alexander VI in which he spares no scandalous fact. When even Pastor refuses to hold simony as proven, it is because he knows the documentation is fragile.

"Mules Laden with Gold": The Ambassadors' Rumor

The most cited testimony for the prosecution is the letter of August 14, 1492 sent by the Milanese ambassadors to Ludovico il Moro, reporting that mules laden with gold are said to have been conveyed to Ascanio Sforza's palace during the decisive night. The letter is kept in the Dispacci of the Archivio di Stato di Milano and was reproduced by Pastor himself.^[15] It proves, however, nothing more than the circulation of a Roman rumor in the aftermath of the election: no direct witness, no accounts, no counter-information from the Venetian, Ferrarese, or Neapolitan ambassadors attending the conclave.

The Historical Irony: Della Rovere Would Do Worse

The decisive argument against the simony accusation leveled at Alexander VI comes from a fact his detractors prefer to forget: when Giuliano della Rovere himself becomes pope under the name of Julius II in 1503, his election at the October conclave — which follows the lightning death of Pius III — likewise rests on documented bargaining with the cardinals, notably promises made to Cesare Borgia and the Spanish cardinals in exchange for their votes.^[16] Aware of the potential criticism, Julius II moreover promulgates in 1505 the bull Cum tam divino, which declares henceforth null ipso jure pontifical elections obtained through simony.^[17] The bull applies to conclaves to come: it does not retroact upon any past election — neither Alexander VI's in 1492, nor Julius II's own in 1503.

This nuance does not exonerate the 1492 election of all irregularity. It simply invites us not to hold as certain an accusation whose principal source is a bitter rival, whose direct documentation is fragile, and whose final formulator practiced the same customs before prohibiting them.

Inter caetera (1493): The Papacy as Arbiter of the New World

On August 3, 1492 — eight days before Alexander VI's election — Christopher Columbus sails from Palos. On October 12, he reaches the Bahamas. On March 15, 1493, he returns to Lisbon, then to Barcelona, and presents his discoveries to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Very quickly, a territorial conflict threatens to erupt between Castile and Portugal, each claiming the new lands by virtue of earlier bulls (notably Romanus Pontifex of Nicholas V, 1455, favorable to Portugal).

Alexander VI successively publishes five bulls: Inter caetera (May 3, 1493), Inter caetera (May 4, 1493 — augmented version), Eximiae devotionis (May 3, 1493), Piis fidelium (June 25, 1493), and Dudum siquidem (September 26, 1493). The most famous is the second Inter caetera, dated May 4, 1493, which draws a line of demarcation in the Atlantic 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands: all territory to the west falls to Castile, all territory to the east to Portugal.^[18]

Far from being a mere gift to Spain — as it is often summarized — the bull constitutes an act of pontifical diplomatic arbitration: it attempts to prevent a war between two great Catholic powers. Proof that the decision was not a foregone conclusion in Spain's favor: the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), negotiated directly between Castile and Portugal with retroactive pontifical approval, moves the line 270 leagues further west, giving Portugal a considerable portion of South America — which will become Brazil.^[19]

The historian L. A. Vigneras sees in it one of the most effective acts of international arbitration in all of modern history: whatever one thinks of the consequences of colonization, Alexander VI's legal act in 1493 and 1494 avoided open war between the two principal Atlantic powers, and the division thus fixed held for three centuries.^[20]

The Roman Refuge of the Jews Expelled from Spain

On March 31, 1492 — four months before Alexander VI's election — Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile sign the Alhambra Decree, ordering the Jews to leave Spain within four months. According to high estimates, some one hundred and fifty thousand people flee to Portugal, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Low Countries. Many perish on the way.^[21]

Alexander VI then does what no European Catholic monarch dares: he opens the Pontifical States to the Jewish refugees, despite pressure from the Catholic Monarchs to exclude them as well. In a letter addressed to his legates in Spain, he directs that they be received with dignity and treated humanely.^[22] Several thousand settle in Rome, in Trastevere and the future Ghetto. The Jewish historian Cecil Roth documents this welcome in his history of the Jews of Italy:

In his account, Alexander VI treated the Jews with a humanity that contrasts sharply with the cruelty of the Christian sovereigns of Spain, took the Jewish scholar Samuel Sarfati as his personal physician, and made Rome the safest refuge in Europe for those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.^[23]

The pope also chooses a Jewish physician, Samuel Sarfati, as his personal doctor, and refuses to introduce into Rome the Spanish Inquisition on Torquemada's model. The distinction between the Roman Inquisition — under direct pontifical oversight and more moderate — and the Spanish Inquisition — instrumentalized by the crown — dates in part from this refusal. See the bloody legend of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Jubilee of 1500 and the Rite of the Holy Door

On December 20, 1499, Alexander VI promulgates the bull Inter curas multiplices, which convokes the Jubilee of 1500 and fixes for the first time the solemn rite of the opening of the Holy Door of Rome's four major basilicas. The ceremony — in which the pope strikes the wall three times with a silver hammer while reciting "Aperite mihi portas iustitiae" ("Open to me the gates of justice," Ps 117:19) — is still celebrated today, in a form directly inherited from the Alexandrine staging.^[24] The Jubilee draws immense crowds of pilgrims to Rome. The same bull opens the holy year to the faithful prevented from coming to Rome, through the institution of equivalent liturgical functions in the dioceses.

Humanist Patronage: Pinturicchio, Aberdeen, and La Sapienza

Alexander VI commissions Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto) to decorate the Borgia Apartments in the apostolic palace, completed in 1494. The iconographic cycle — Mysteries of the Faith, Lives of the Saints, Liberal Arts, Egyptian Histories — combines Christian theology, Mariology, typological theory, and rediscovered Egyptian antiquities. The Resurrection shows Alexander VI kneeling at Christ's feet. It is one of the major iconographic cycles of the Roman Renaissance, predating Raphael's rooms (1508–1517) and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel (1508–1512).^[25]

In 1495, the pope grants a founding charter to the King's College of the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), at the request of Bishop William Elphinstone and King James IV of Scotland — the bull is dated February 10, 1495 (February 10, 1494 by the Scottish reckoning of the time, the year beginning on March 25), and James IV's royal charter follows the same year. Aberdeen is Scotland's third university, after St Andrews and Glasgow; it still exists and ranks among the oldest university establishments in the United Kingdom.^[26]

The same year, Alexander VI reforms the statutes of La Sapienza at Rome, increasing the number of chairs and the budget. These university acts are almost never mentioned in the usual narratives against the Borgias, yet they place Alexander VI in the line of the humanist popes of the Quattrocento.

The Reform Commission of 1497

On June 14, 1497, the body of Giovanni Borgia, Duke of Gandía and the pope's favorite son, is fished from the Tiber near the church of San Girolamo dei Schiavoni. He has been stabbed nine times and thrown into the river the previous night. The murder remains unsolved. Cesare Borgia, his brother, is one of the suspects but without definitive proof; the other leads point to the Orsini, the Caetani, or a deceived husband. Burchard describes Alexander VI's grief as sincere and profound: the pope shuts himself away for three days without eating.^[27]

In the weeks that follow, Alexander VI convenes a commission of six cardinals to reform the morals of the curia. The commission sits for several months and produces a substantial report on simony, the accumulation of benefices, clerical discipline, and the cardinals' way of life. The report is kept in the Vatican Archives (Reg. Vat. 877) and was published by Pastor as an appendix to his volume V.^[28] The measures have no lasting effect — Alexander VI gradually returns to his earlier policy from 1498 onward — but their existence shows that he was not entirely impervious to the moral dimension of his office.

G. J. Meyer stresses the paradox: that the 1497 reform was ephemeral is undeniable, but that it existed is equally so — and the hostile Roman chronicles prefer to ignore it. No pope entirely insensitive to the question engages a commission of six cardinals on the discipline of the curia.^[29]

The accusations against Alexander VI are numerous, but four of them alone structure the black legend in the popular imagination: the chestnut banquet, incest, the poisoned ring, and death by his own poison. All four, examined against the test of the sources, prove to be either fragile, fabricated, or positively refutable.

The "Chestnut Banquet" (October 31, 1501)

The most famous episode of Borgia mythology is the Banchetto delle castagne, supposedly held at the Vatican on October 30 or 31, 1501. According to the account, Cesare Borgia is said to have organized in his apartment a feast attended by his father the pope, his sister Lucrezia, and fifty prostitutes; the women are said to have danced naked, picked up chestnuts from the floor between the candelabra; and prizes are said to have been awarded to those who performed the most "sexual exploits" — with lewd flourishes included.

The single source for this episode is the Liber notarum of Johann Burchard (1450–1506), master of pontifical ceremonies under Innocent VIII then Alexander VI, whose journal was only edited in 1883–1885 by Louis Thuasne (for the years 1492–1506) and Enrico Celani (for 1483–1492).^[30] The controversial passage is preserved in several manuscripts, but with textual variants: some scholars suspect a late scribal interpolation.

Four methodological problems make the episode doubtful:

1. A single contemporary source. No other Roman witness — none of the Venetian, Florentine, Ferrarese, Spanish, or Milanese ambassadors posted at Rome, who yet scrupulously noted every scandal — mentions the episode.

2. The silence of the libels. An anonymous letter dated November 15, 1501, attributed to Silvio Savelli, nevertheless draws up the exhaustive list of public grievances against Alexander VI in the following weeks. It mentions "a dinner offered by Cesare Borgia" — but with no mention of the fifty prostitutes, the chestnuts, or the sexual prizes.^[31] Had the episode possessed the substance Burchard lends it, this libel, whose very object is to pile up charges, would have made it its headline.

3. Burchard's doubtful reliability. The Liber notarum contains several entries whose inaccuracy is demonstrable, and its author — a German cleric hostile to the Borgias — has been caught red-handed amplifying in other passages. Mallett, who spares Alexander VI nothing, warns that the Liber notarum is a precious source but must be used with the greatest caution on everything touching the pope's private morals.^[32]

4. Topographical implausibility. Cesare Borgia's Vatican apartment is known: it is small, and it is unimaginable that fifty women plus an equivalent male retinue could have been gathered there without any guard, courtier, or ambassador reporting the detail. Yet no independent report does so.

The honest historical conclusion is this: the episode as described in popular tradition rests on a single uncorroborated testimony, possibly interpolated. This does not mean Alexander VI's curia was irreproachable — it certainly was not. It means that the banchetto delle castagne, in its full orgy-narrative version, is not an historically established fact.

Incest: A Repudiated Husband's Revenge

The accusation of incest between Alexander VI and his daughter Lucrezia — or between Cesare and Lucrezia — is one of the most tenacious and the most recycled by Romantic literature. Its documentary origin is well identified. It comes from Giovanni Sforza, Lucrezia's first husband, whom the Borgia family forced to divorce in December 1497 on the official ground of impotentia coeundi (impotence).

Giovanni Sforza, publicly humiliated and driven from Rome, takes refuge at the Milanese court with his cousin Ludovico il Moro. It is there, during ducal audiences well documented in the Milanese chronicles, that he utters the incest accusation for the first time: he claims Lucrezia could not have been released from him for his impotence, since she was carrying on a liaison with her own father.^[33] The rumor's origin is therefore explicit: a repudiated husband seeking revenge through public defamation, before a court that was the enemy of his family rival.

For G. J. Meyer, the incest accusation is born of a bitter, humiliated, dispossessed man, who had every personal reason to want to destroy the reputation of those who had cast him aside: no independent documentary proof has ever supported it, and it survives because it is dramatically satisfying, not because it is historically grounded.^[34]

The biographer Sarah Bradford, after sifting the Ferrarese, Milanese, and Vatican archives, reaches the same conclusion: no documentary proof of incest has ever been found; what the sources show, on the contrary, is a young woman manipulated by her family, married three times for the needs of dynastic politics, who became at Ferrara a loved and respected duchess.^[35]

The Roman pasquinades — anonymous libels posted on the ancient Pasquino statue, near Piazza Navona — take up and amplify these accusations with no probative value. As the historian Ivan Cloulas recalls, the Pasquino functioned as the scandal press of Renaissance Rome — no pope, no cardinal, no ambassador escaped it — and it would be naive to draw the least historical conclusion from it.^[36]

Modern historiography — Bradford (2004), Cloulas (1987), Meyer (2013), Mallett (1969) — unanimously converges: the incest accusation is a posthumous construction born of a wounded man's hatred, propagated by the pasquinades, without the least documentary foundation. No letter, no independent testimony, no investigation document has ever been produced. On the contrary, Lucrezia's private correspondence, kept in the Modena and Ferrara archives, depicts a pious, educated young woman, manifestly distressed at being the object of such rumors.

The Poisoned Ring and the "Borgia Poison"

The legend of a poisoned ring the Borgias are said to have used to poison their enemies — a ring with a secret spring releasing the lethal dose into a wine cup — is found, to our knowledge, in no identified source of the 15th or the 16th century. No ambassador, no chronicler, no pamphleteer mentions it. It appears for the first time under the pen of Alexandre Dumas père, in his Crimes célèbres published in 1839–1841.^[37] Dumas combines elements borrowed from Burchard's chronicle, Hugo's theater (Lucrezia Borgia, 1833), and 17th-century cabinet-of-curiosities tales.

The poison accusations more generally leveled at the Borgias rest on hostile chronicles — Guicciardini, Sannazaro, Burchard — which report rumors without precise technical details, without autopsy, without agreement among the sources on the nature of the poison, its preparation, or its mode of administration. The Borgias' supposed cantarella — an arsenic-based poison — is never technically described by any contemporary source; it is a retrospective invention by analogy with the 17th-century Italian arsenicalism (the Aqua Tofana affair, tried at Rome in 1659).^[38]

This does not mean no poisoning ever occurred in the Borgia entourage: Renaissance Italy did indeed sometimes resort to poison as a political weapon. But the image of an industrial Borgia "poison workshop," fed by a secret ring and an alchemical arsenal, is a 19th-century literary construction, not an attested historical fact.

The Death of Alexander VI: Tiber Malaria, Not Poisoning

Alexander VI dies on August 18, 1503, at seventy-two years of age. The popular explanation — popularized from Guicciardini onward — holds that he died poisoned by accident, victim of a poison intended for Cardinal Adriano Castellesi during a dinner the latter was hosting at his villa in the Vatican gardens.

The reality is more prosaic. Burchard himself, a direct witness, describes in his journal a fever striking simultaneously Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia, and several cardinals from the same dinner, on August 5, 1503.^[39] This simultaneity is incompatible with targeted poisoning: a poison aims at one person, not a whole group. It corresponds exactly, on the other hand, to malaria (febbre tertiana or quartana), endemic at Rome in summer.

The epidemiology is eloquent. 15th-century Rome is ringed by the Pontine Marshes, which would only be drained in the 20th century. Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, strike the city every year between July and October, with significant mortality among residents and above all among non-immunized visitors.^[40] Cardinal Castellesi, the dinner's host, falls ill too: he barely survives. Cesare Borgia also survives but remains weakened for weeks — which will contribute to his political downfall. Several guests die in the following days. The picture corresponds very exactly to a malarial epidemic in an outdoor living environment.

Giuseppe Fornasini, in his study of Roman malarial fevers, likewise holds malaria to be the most probable hypothesis: a collective poisoning striking all the guests of the same dinner to varying degrees is medically implausible, whereas Roman malaria — which strikes or spares according to acquired immunity — accounts for every observed case, including Alexander VI's particular vulnerability. The competing thesis of accidental poisoning comes from Guicciardini, who writes more than thirty years after the facts with no direct witness to support him: it is this documentary imbalance that makes malaria the favored hypothesis. The file remains, however, that of a historical hypothesis — founded on Burchard's sole circumstantial account, without autopsy — not an established medical diagnosis.^[41]

Three Marriages as Dynastic Instrument

Lucrezia Borgia is born on April 18, 1480 at Subiaco, in the Vannozza Cattanei family castle. She is raised at Rome in the palace of her cousin Adriana de Mila, where she receives a careful humanist education: Latin, Italian, Spanish, embroidery, music. Her contemporaries describe her as blonde, graceful, of great gentleness.^[42]

Her married life is entirely orchestrated by her father and her brother Cesare. She is:

Lucrezia is essentially an instrument of family diplomacy — a fate shared by most noblewomen of Renaissance Italy. She is not a calculating poisoner: she is a young woman subject to the decisions of the men of her family, which she ends up enduring with a patience all the sources emphasize.^[43]

The Duchess of Ferrara (1502–1519)

From 1502 onward, Lucrezia lives at Ferrara as duchess alongside Alfonso d'Este. The Ferrarese documentation — systematically sifted by Maria Bellonci (1939), Sarah Bradford (2004), and Diane Yvonne Ghirardo (2008) — reveals a figure radically different from the Romantic caricature.

She administers the duchy in her husband's absence, as he is often at war. Her political correspondence, kept in the State Archives of Modena, is judged by contemporary diplomats to be of remarkable intelligence and measure.^[44]

She maintains an epistolary and amorous correspondence with Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), humanist, future cardinal, and secretary to Leo X. The letters, kept in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, are one of the great monuments of Renaissance Italian epistolary prose. Lord Byron, who will consult them on October 15, 1816, will be overwhelmed by them and will call them "the prettiest love letters in the world."^[45]

Ariosto celebrates Lucrezia in an eulogistic stanza of canto XIII of the Orlando Furioso: "Lucrezia Borgia, di cui d'ora in ora / la beltà, la virtù, la fama onesta / e la fortuna crescerà" ("Lucrezia Borgia, whose beauty, virtue, honest fame, and fortune will grow from hour to hour").^[46] A portrait of Lucrezia by Titian around 1515 has sometimes been claimed — an attribution now disputed (the Nîmes museum portrait is now given to Bartolomeo Veneto). The Ferrarese chroniclers — Bernardino Zambotti, Paolo Zerbinato — describe her as pious, generous to the poor, attentive to her children's education.

The Franciscan End

She founds several convents in the Duchy of Ferrara: Saint Bernardine (1510), Saint Vincent (1515), and supports the Poor Clare sisters of Corpus Domini. She maintains regular spiritual correspondence with Maria di Buonafede, Sister Lucia di Narni — a stigmatic — and with other figures of Ferrarese spirituality. From 1513 onward, she enters the Franciscan Third Order, chooses the Franciscan Tommaso Caiani as confessor, and regularly wears the tertiary habit beneath her duchess's garments.^[47]

She dies on June 24, 1519, at thirty-nine years of age, exhausted by her eighth pregnancy, after giving birth to a stillborn daughter. She asks to be clothed, for her agony, in the Franciscan tertiary habit. Her last letter, dictated on June 22, 1519, is addressed to Pope Leo X: she asks his blessing in articulo mortis for herself and her children, commends her soul to divine mercy, and entrusts to His Holiness her charitable works.^[48]

After minute examination of the archives and contemporary testimonies, Sarah Bradford judges it impossible to sustain the image of a poisoning, intriguing Lucrezia Borgia: what emerges from the sources is the portrait of a remarkably courageous woman, who survived a difficult childhood and youth to become, at Ferrara, a respected and loved duchess.^[49]

For Ivan Cloulas, Lucrezia's black legend is a posthumous construction, fed by her political enemies and the dramatic necessities of Romantic theater: the 19th century needed a fatal poisoner and fabricated her from fragments of Roman chronicle, ignoring the totality of the Ferrarese archives after 1502.^[50]

One of the black legend's most powerful biases is rhetorical isolation: Alexander VI is presented as a monstrous anomaly in a succession of edifying popes. Yet serious historiography shows that the Renaissance papacy was systematically marked by practices we today judge scandalous, and that Alexander VI was neither the first, nor the worst, nor an isolated case.

Sixtus IV (1471–1484): Nepotism and the Pazzi Conspiracy

Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere, uncle of Giuliano della Rovere and great-uncle of Julius II) creates six of his nephews cardinals and favors other members of his family — the della Rovere and the Riario — with massive donations drawn from the pontifical coffers. More grave: he is mixed up in the Pazzi conspiracy (April 26, 1478), the plot that attempted to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici in Florence's cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, during Mass, at the moment of the Elevation.

Sixtus IV had been informed of the plot, had withdrawn his diplomatic protection from Florence, and his nephew Girolamo Riario was one of its principal organizers. The pope had specified that he wanted "the death of no one" — a reservation whose exact scope historians still debate, and the extent of what Sixtus IV knew of the murderous side remains disputed. Giuliano de' Medici is stabbed before the altar — nineteen blows, according to Lauro Martines's detailed account — during the elevation of the host. Lorenzo manages to flee, wounded.^[51]

No public act of Alexander VI descends to this level: plotting the assassination of a Catholic prince during Mass. And yet it is Alexander VI whom posterity has elected as the symbol of pontifical decadence, not Sixtus IV.

Innocent VIII (1484–1492): The Family-Man Pope

Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cibo) is the first pope in history to publicly recognize his illegitimate children and to arrange their marriage at the Vatican. His son Franceschetto Cibo marries Maddalena de' Medici, daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, on January 20, 1488 in the Sala dei Papi of the apostolic palace. The dowry, drawn from the pontifical coffers, is 4,000 ducats.^[52]

Giovanni de' Medici — the future Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and thus brother-in-law of Franceschetto Cibo through the 1488 marriage — is created cardinal at thirteen years of age by Innocent VIII, as diplomatic counterpart to this union. Rodrigo Borgia, then vice-chancellor, attends all these nuptials. This precedent partly explains why Alexander VI's later conduct toward his own children — however objectively scandalous — is not perceived as an absolute rupture by his contemporaries: Innocent VIII had normalized the unspeakable.

Julius II (1503–1513): The Pope in Armor

Giuliano della Rovere, become Julius II in 1503, personally leads his armies in armor at the sieges of Mirandola (January 1511) and Bologna (1506 and 1511). He wears the helmet, charges in person, and imposes upon a pope contemporary with Michelangelo a condottiere posture that even Catholic chroniclers find unworthy.

Erasmus, who meets Julius II in 1506, devotes to him one of the most violent satirical dialogues in Renaissance literature, the Julius exclusus e caelis ("Julius Excluded from Heaven"), which circulates anonymously from 1514 onward. Here is its opening:

"— JULIUS II: Open, I tell you! What is keeping you? — SAINT PETER: Who are you? — JULIUS II: If you do not know, look at the key. But what is this? Not the key of the Kingdom, but the key of my strongbox... — SAINT PETER: I am surprised. I see you coming not with books, not with prayers, but with an army, with helmets, with shields, and all dripping with your enemies' blood." — Erasmus (attributed), Julius exclusus e caelis, c. 1513–1514 (article's translation)^[53]

Julius II also leaves three recognized illegitimate daughters, the most famous being Felice della Rovere, whom he marries in 1506 to Gian Giordano Orsini. The fact is rarely mentioned in the hagiographical biographies of Julius II by the same authors who express outrage at Alexander VI's children.^[54]

Leo X (1513–1521): The Pope of Indulgences and Luther

Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent), elected at thirty-seven years of age, is attributed by a late polemical tradition with an apocryphal saying addressed to his brother Giuliano, according to which one should enjoy the papacy received from God; no contemporary source attests it. His reign is marked by a lavish lifestyle, brilliant cultural policy (patronage of Raphael, completion of St Peter's), and above all by the massive abuse of indulgences tied to the construction of the new Vatican basilica.

It is precisely this practice — the preaching of indulgences by Johann Tetzel in the archdiocese of Mainz — that triggers the 95 Theses of Martin Luther posted at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. The "sin" that actually shakes Western Christendom in the 16th century is not Alexander VI's: it is Leo X's. This perspective is almost always missing from the anti-Borgia narrative.^[55]

The Overall Picture

The comparison is unpleasant, but it is unavoidable. The same moral criteria that condemn Alexander VI condemn at least as severely Sixtus IV, Julius II, and Leo X. If the Renaissance papacy is at issue, it is not a Borgia case: it is a system of which the Borgias are merely the preferred public target.

The Della Rovere Operation

The first craftsman of the black legend is Giuliano della Rovere. Cardinal since 1471, defeated at the 1492 conclave, he leaves Rome, reaches France, and spends the following years multiplying accusations against Alexander VI: appeal for Charles VIII's military intervention in Italy (1494), repeated demands for the convocation of a deposition council, letters to European courts and ambassadors.^[56]

When della Rovere himself becomes pope under the name of Julius II on November 1, 1503 — eleven weeks after Alexander VI's death — he maintains these accusations. He has the Borgia Apartments sealed so as not to have to live in them, has several Borgia coats of arms effaced (the grazing oxen of the family arms), and confiscates Cesare's goods, whom he has imprisoned.^[57] The historian G. J. Meyer sees a political interest in this: presenting Alexander VI as a monster made his own election appear as a reparation and justified the confiscation of Borgia goods — what legend made of the Borgias should thus owe far less to what they actually accomplished than to the necessities of those who shaped their memory, foremost Giuliano della Rovere, who could not let subsist the honorable memory of the rival who had sidelined him for eleven years.^[58]

Guicciardini: Thirty-Five Years After the Facts

Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) writes his monumental Storia d'Italia between 1537 and 1540, that is, thirty-four to thirty-seven years after Alexander VI's death. It is the most cited historiographical source for the accusations against the Borgias, and the one that weighed most on literary posterity.

Guicciardini is not without value: he knows Italian diplomacy, he served Leo X and Clement VII, he has Florentine archives at his disposal. But his writing context is crucial. He drafts after the Sack of Rome (May 1527), after the Italian Wars, in an atmosphere of moralist exasperation where all of Italy's political collapse is retrospectively interpreted as the moral consequence of the curia's faults. For this thesis, Alexander VI is the ideal pedagogical figure: a monster whose faults are said to have "triggered" by divine decree all subsequent misfortunes.^[59]

His severest accusations are not documented by independent contemporary sources: Guicciardini repeats Burchard, amplifies Sannazaro, and adds the rhetorical pathos characterizing his prose. For Mark Phillips, author of the classic study of this historian, Guicciardini is not a contemporary witness of the Borgias but a retrospective moralist who uses them as a textbook case for his thesis on the Italian fall: his pages on Alexander VI rank among the finest in 16th-century Italian prose, and among the historically least reliable.^[60]

Taken Up by the Reformation

The 16th-century Lutheran and Calvinist presses reproduce and amplify the narratives about the Borgias, which become a piece of anti-Roman rhetoric. The caricatures of Lucas Cranach the Elder depicting the "Antichrist-Pope" — whose woodcuts illustrate the Passional Christi und Antichristi published in 1521 by Melanchthon — take up the theme of the unworthy pope, nourished among other things by the narratives circulating about Alexander VI.^[61]

The effect is lasting. In the 19th century, British and German Protestant history textbooks take up the Borgia portrait as a confessional argument. The narratives about the Borgias thus become a lasting polemical argument against Rome.

Hugo, Donizetti, and the Romantic Fixation (1833)

Two works published in the same year 1833 definitively fix the Borgias' image in the European popular imagination.

Victor Hugo creates his drama Lucrezia Borgia at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin on February 2, 1833, with Mademoiselle George in the title role and Frédérick Lemaître as Gennaro. The play — in which Lucrezia unwittingly poisons her own son — enjoys a public triumph and fixes the image of a tragic poisoner Lucrezia in the broad Francophone public.^[62] The same year, Gaetano Donizetti premieres at the Scala of Milan on December 26, 1833 his opera Lucrezia Borgia, on a libretto by Felice Romani directly drawn from Hugo's drama. The opera enjoys a massive European success, which definitively eclipses any archival reading.^[63]

These two works have no historical pretension — they exploit an already constituted myth for dramatic ends — but their extraordinary popular reception freezes an image that since then precedes all historical reading. When in the 20th century Maria Bellonci, Ivan Cloulas, and Sarah Bradford return to the Ferrarese archives, they find a pious and competent duchess — but their books reach only a minority of readers. Donizetti's opera, for its part, is regularly revived in the repertoire of the great opera houses — Scala, Vienna, Paris, New York — and with each revival reaches an audience beyond all comparison with that of archival monographs.

Maria Bellonci thus sums up the myth's power: religious power, forbidden sex, poison, and a beautiful woman — four irresistible dramatic ingredients against which documentary reality (a competent cardinal turned mediocre pope, a pious duchess married three times for politics) stands no chance.^[64]

Demythologizing the Borgias is necessary; but it is not enough. There remains to be answered the reverse apologetic argument: "even if only half of what is told is true, that would suffice to demonstrate that the Catholic Church is false, since a God could not allow His Church to be led by such men." This objection has a long history — it goes back to the 4th-century Donatists, who contested the validity of sacraments administered by priests who had betrayed during the persecutions. The Catholic response is ancient, complete, and fully maintained.

"On the Chair of Moses": The Gospel Distinction (Mt 23:2–3)

The fundamental response to pontifical scandals is inscribed in the Gospel itself. Christ, in full condemnation of the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, establishes a decisive distinction between the authority of the office and the holiness of the person holding it:

"The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice." — Matthew 23:2–3, English rendering of the liturgical French text (AELF)^[65]

The authority of an office and the personal holiness of its holder are two distinct realities since the Gospel. A religious leader can transmit a truth he does not himself live. This distinction does not excuse hypocrisy — Christ thunders against the Pharisees in the rest of the same chapter — but it prevents concluding that the transmitted truth is false because the transmitter is unworthy.

Saint Augustine will develop this distinction decisively against the Donatists, in the 4th century. The Donatists held that sacraments administered by traditor bishops (who had handed over the holy books to the pagan persecutors) were invalid. Augustine answers, in his treatise De baptismo contra Donatistas (c. 400–401), that the sacrament received and its virtue are two distinct things: administered by a good or a bad minister, the sacrament holds its holiness from Him who instituted it, not from him who gives it — a doctrine summarized here, the exact text remaining to be checked against the critical edition.^[66]

This is the first clear patristic formulation of the ex opere operato principle — which Trent will take up, and which answers the Borgia objection directly.

Ex Opere Operato: The Doctrine of Trent

The Council of Trent, Session VII (March 3, 1547), definitively formulates the ex opere operato principle — the validity of the sacrament rests on the objective sacramental act, not on the minister's subjective virtue:

"If anyone says that the sacraments of the New Law do not contain the grace which they signify, or that they do not confer that grace on those who place no obstacle in the way, as though they were only outward signs of grace or justice received through faith, and marks of Christian profession by which believers are distinguished among men: let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, Session VII, March 3, 1547, canon 6^[67]

And still more directly, against the objection that the priest's vices invalidate his ministry:

"If anyone says that a minister who is in mortal sin, though he observes all the essentials which belong to the performance or conferring of the sacrament, neither performs nor confers the sacrament: let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, Session VII, canon 12^[68]

Applied to the pontifical case, the principle means that the validity of Alexander VI's sacramental and magisterial acts does not depend on his personal holiness. He can absolve sins, consecrate bishops, define questions of faith — and all these acts are valid, even if his personal life is scandalous. Christ acts in the sacrament; the minister is but its instrument.

Pontifical Infallibility: What Vatican I Really Defined (1870)

The dogmatic definition of pontifical infallibility by the First Vatican Council (constitution Pastor Aeternus, July 18, 1870) is almost universally misunderstood. It does not affirm that the pope is impeccable. It does not affirm that he is inspired in his political decisions. It does not affirm that his sins are approved by God. It lays down three strict cumulative conditions for a pontifical declaration to be infallible:

The exact text of the definition deserves to be quoted:

"The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra — that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church — possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed His Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals." — First Vatican Council, dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus, ch. IV, July 18, 1870^[69]

Alexander VI never defined ex cathedra that his nepotism was virtuous. He never defined that incest was permitted. He never defined that poison was licit. He never defined that a pope might beget children and endow them with the Pontifical States. His personal faults — real or legendary — never acquired the status of Catholic doctrine. They could therefore have refuted nothing, even had they all been proven.

Historical Precedents: The Church Has Survived Worse

Church history offers precedents showing that gravely unworthy popes never destroyed the institution nor invalidated its mission. The list is long, and older than Alexander VI.

John XII (955–964), elected pope at eighteen years of age under pressure from his father Alberic II, is deposed by a synod convened by Emperor Otto I on November 6, 963, on accusations of fornication, simony, perjury, and even profanation of the altar. The Church survives John XII and pursues her teaching without modifying a single dogma.^[70]

The "Cadaver Synod" (January 897) sees Pope Stephen VI have the body of his predecessor Formosus dug up to try it post mortem, clad in its pontifical ornaments. The corpse is condemned, mutilated (the three blessing fingers are cut off), and thrown into the Tiber. The episode is of unheard-of political violence, without equivalent in Alexander VI. The Church survived it.^[71]

The Western Schism (1378–1417) sees two then three simultaneous claimants dispute Peter's throne. For forty years, sincere Catholics — Saint Vincent Ferrer, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Bernardine of Siena — do not know with certainty whom to obey. The Council of Constance (1414–1418) resolves the crisis by electing Martin V on November 11, 1417. The Church did not emerge from the Western Schism with a modified doctrine on the Trinity, the sacraments, the Eucharist, or the resurrection.^[72]

Pope Liberius (352–366), under pressure from Emperor Constantius II, is said to have signed in exile a so-called "semi-Arian" formula (the third formula of Sirmium) in 358 — a file historians still discuss, down to the reality of the signature. This would be a theologically graver case than anything the Borgia legend reproaches Catholicism with: a doctrinal compromise under imperial constraint. Even in this extreme hypothesis, the Catholic reading maintains that Liberius defined nothing as doctrine to be held by the whole Church — the ex cathedra vocabulary being here that of Vatican I (1870), applied retrospectively as a reading grid — and that his act, politically cowardly, does not engage infallibility.^[73]

Eamon Duffy sums up the paradox: the true miracle of Catholic history is not the absence of scandalous popes — there have been some, from the 4th century to the 16th — it is that the Church crossed Liberius, John XII, the Cadaver Synod, the Western Schism, the Borgias, and the Wars of Religion while keeping intact a doctrine that the men leading her were often the first not to live.^[74]

The Catechism's Verdict

The Catechism of the Catholic Church synthesizes Catholic doctrine on this question:

"The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful — who confirms his brethren in the faith — he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. ... This infallibility extends as far as the deposit of divine Revelation itself." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §891^[75]

And more broadly on the holiness of the Church, which is never identified with the moral holiness of her members:

"While the Church, 'holy, innocent, without stain,' does not know sin, but comes only to expiate the sins of the people, the Church, which enfolds sinners in her bosom, is at once holy and always in need of purification, and pursues unceasingly penance and renewal. All members of the Church, including her ministers, must recognize themselves as sinners." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §827^[76]

See the full article on pontifical infallibility for the detail of the conditions, limits, and frequent objections.

"A Tree Is Judged by Its Fruits" — But Which Ones, and All of Them?

The reverse Gospel objection is regularly mobilized against the Church: had she truly been Christ's Church, she would not have produced the Borgias. The invoked verse is well known:

"You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?" — Matthew 7:16, English rendering of the liturgical French text (AELF)^[77]

The Catholic response does not consist in dodging the test, but in looking at all the fruits, not only the most scandalous. Half a century of Borgia pontificates does not exhaust the record of a bimillenary institution; and the complete examination of that same half-century gives the verse a scope diametrically opposed to the objection.

The same half-century that produces the Borgia pontificates sees blossom:

• Saint John of Capistrano (d. 1456, canonized 1690) — preacher of the Belgrade crusade.
• Saint Francis of Paola (d. 1507) — founder of the Minims, confessor of Louis XI.
• Saint Catherine of Bologna (d. 1463) — Poor Clare, mystic, spiritual writer.
• Saint Frances of Rome (d. 1440) — visionary and foundress of the Oblates of St Mary.
• Saint Antoninus of Florence (d. 1459) — Dominican archbishop, major moral theologian.

And the century following Alexander VI is precisely that of the Catholic Reformation that will produce one of the most prodigious harvests of holiness in all Church history:

• Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) — founder of the Society of Jesus.
• Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) — reformer of Carmel, Doctor of the Church.
• Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591) — major mystical doctor.
• Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552) — apostle of the Indies and Japan.
• Saint Charles Borromeo (1538–1584) — Archbishop of Milan, model of episcopal reform.
• Saint Philip Neri (1515–1595) — reformer of Roman spirituality.
• Saint Peter Canisius (1521–1597) — Doctor of the Church, apostle of Germany.

The Council of Trent (1545–1563) answers the real disciplinary abuses with substantial reform — seminaries, obligatory episcopal residence, suppression of plural benefices — without modifying a single dogmatic definition. See the Council of Trent and the Christian Renaissance.

For Eamon Duffy, after the Borgias the Church produced saints in greater number than ever: the scandal wounded her without changing her into something else — and it is precisely because of these scandals that Tridentine holiness reached its intensity, grace abounding where sin had abounded.^[78]

A Sinful Pope Is Not a Catholic Doctrine

The fundamental distinction is the one Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger draws in his Introduction to the Catechism (1994): the Church is at once holy and made up of sinners. Her holiness is not the guaranteed moral holiness of all her members, nor even of all her leaders: it is the presence of Christ maintaining her in the truth of her teaching despite human weaknesses. In his account, the Church is not holy because her members would be holy — many are not, and History bears the mark of it — but because she is kept by the Holy One and Christ acts in her despite her ministers' failings. Her holiness is not a sociological fact: it is a Christological promise.^[79]

Alexander VI favored his children: that is not a Catholic doctrine. He used the Pontifical States as a dynastic power: that is not a Catholic doctrine. He lived a sexuality contrary to his state: that is not a Catholic doctrine. He never defined ex cathedra that these behaviors were virtuous, and no one in the Church ever taught that they were. On the contrary: the Catholic moral tradition always explicitly condemned them.

What Alexander VI Never Did

To be complete, the negative inventory must be established: what Alexander VI, despite all his scandals, never did on the doctrinal plane.

• He did not modify the Creed.
• He did not redefine the sacraments.
• He did not suppress the Mass.
• He did not teach that sin is a virtue.
• He did not make excommunication a weapon against every will to reform: he himself convened a reform commission in 1497. The case of Girolamo Savonarola — excommunicated on May 12, 1497 for persistent disobedience (refusal to join the Holy League, preaching against Rome, then public appeal for a council to depose the pope), arrested on April 8, 1498, tried at Florence, then hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria on May 23, 1498 with two Dominican companions — remains the disciplinary sanction of a rebel against pontifical authority itself, in a Florentine political conflict, not a condemnation of reform.^[80]
• He did not promulgate a heretical bull.
• He integrally maintained Catholic doctrine on faith, the sacraments, morals, and primacy.
• He publicly acknowledged having children, which is a grave sin for a cleric, but is not a doctrinal error.

The contrast is illuminating. Alexander VI sinned as a man. He did not betray as pope — in the sense that Peter's office continued to transmit, under his pontificate, apostolic doctrine without rupture.

The Church's Persistence After the Borgias

The true apologetic question is finally this: did the Church cease to be the Church because of the Borgias? The answer of the facts is no. She continues to teach the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (325, 381), to celebrate the Eucharist in the same doctrine as at Trent, to administer the seven sacraments, to reform her discipline without touching dogma, and to produce saints in every vocation.

The Tridentine reform following the Renaissance pontifical scandals is one of the deepest in Church history: it does not replace Catholic doctrine, it corrects the disciplinary abuses that had made it less credible. On a Catholic reading, the Church emerging from Trent — seminaries, Roman catechism, uniform missal, systematic sacramental theology — is doctrinally stronger than the one that entered it. The Borgias, paradoxically, contributed to this strengthening, by forcing the Church to reform in urgency.

The Borgias are a complex reality that neither partisan defense nor anti-Catholic attack treats honestly.

Alonso de Borja (Callixtus III) was a serious administrator, a seasoned jurist, rehabilitator of Joan of Arc and crusader of Belgrade — a pope of small physical stature and short duration, who practiced nepotism like all his Italian contemporaries and whom posterity unjustly swallowed into the family discredit.

Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI) was a morally scandalous pope through his personal life and his dynastic use of the Pontifical States — a fact the Catholic Church has no reason to hide. He was also a competent administrator, a major humanist patron, a diplomatic arbiter between Spain and Portugal, a protector of the Jews of Spain, the initiator of the modern rite of the Holy Door, the founder of a university that still exists — Aberdeen. The black legend's pamphleteers have nothing to say about any of this, and prefer chestnuts, incest, and the poisoned ring.

Lucrezia Borgia was a woman instrumentalized by her family — married three times according to political needs, broken with grief at Alfonso of Aragon's death — who knew, from 1502 onward, how to become at Ferrara a competent duchess, a correspondent of Pietro Bembo, a dedicatee of Ariosto, a foundress of convents, and a Franciscan tertiary who died in the habit of poverty. The Romantic myth of the poisoner has no archival correspondence: it is a literary construction that collapses as soon as one opens the boxes of the Archivio Estense.

The Borgias' black legend can be traced step by step: Giuliano della Rovere's rivalry with Alexander VI (flight to France, appeal to Charles VIII, demands for a deposition council), the retrospective narrative of Guicciardini, writing thirty-five years after the facts, the reprise by the polemicists of the Reformation, then the popular fixation by Hugo and Donizetti in 1833 — and by Dumas in 1839–1841. It is not without any foundation — Alexander VI's real faults are grave — but it is out of all proportion to the non-hostile contemporary sources.

On the theological plane, the Borgias refute nothing. Ex opere operato — formulated by Augustine against the Donatists, defined by Trent against the Reformers — guarantees the validity of sacraments administered by a sinful pope. The ex cathedra infallibility defined by Vatican I has three strict conditions that Alexander VI never even approached: he defined no doctrine, at no moment, as to be held by the whole Church. The holiness of the Church does not promise popes all saints — it promises that Christ keeps His Church in the truth of her teaching despite her members' infidelities.

That the Church survived the Borgias, John XII, the Cadaver Synod, the Western Schism, and the Wars of Religion while maintaining the same Creed, the same sacraments, and the same apostolic tradition is, on a Catholic reading, a sign of Christ's promise — not a refutation, but a confirmation by contrast. Christ had promised Peter as the foundation of His Church, and He had weighed in advance the worth of the men who would occupy the chair:

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it." — Matthew 16:18, English rendering of the liturgical French text (AELF)^[81]

He had not promised that those holding the keys would always be worthy of them. He had promised only that the gates of hell would not prevail. The Borgias wanted, without wanting to, to put this promise to the test. Five centuries later, the verdict is before our eyes.

• Pontifical infallibility — what the dogma really says, its conditions and limits.
• The Council of Trent — Catholic reform and response to the Renaissance disciplinary scandals.
• History argues in favor of Catholicism — the Church's continuity through crises.
• The Christian Renaissance — humanist Rome, Pinturicchio, and pontifical patronage.
• The bloody legend of the Spanish Inquisition — another textbook case of demythologized hostile historiography.
• Responses to Protestantism — Church abuses and doctrinal objections.
• Martin Luther — Leo X, indulgences, and the Wittenberg monk's reaction.
• The Pontifical States — temporal sovereignty, dynastic politics, abolition.