November 2, 2009 • 19 mins
As the daughter of a pope, Lucrezia was born into dizzying power and political intrigue. She was also controversial -- rumors of incest and other crimes dogged her and persist today. Join Sarah and Katie as they try to separate the fact from fiction.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before,
perhaps and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Daddy. So last weekend
I checked out the new exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci
(00:45):
at the High Museum in Atlanta, and I would definitely
call the centerpiece of the exhibit this colossal horse reproduction.
So you're basically in the middle middle of like midtown Atlanta,
and then you're by this huge foe Bronze Renaissance force.
And when I was learning a little bit about it,
it was originally commissioned by the sports of Family, which
(01:09):
got me thinking about other famous Renaissance families, and we're
talking about the Borgia's, specifically Lucrezia Borgia, and it was
funny I changed my Facebook stas to say that I
knew more about Lucretia Borgia than anyone, and I got
so many comments on it, and a friend of mine
brought up a three Stooges sketch where Mo accuses Curly
(01:29):
of being a Lucretia Borgia by trying to poison them.
And that's the legend that she was this incestuous poisoning
thumb fatale or just a victim in a pawn of
her brother and her family. So we're gonna try to
figure out what really happened with her. Um. To do that,
we're gonna start out talking a little bit about the
(01:50):
Borgia family. They're originally from Spain, but they were based
in Italy, and it's a pretty amazing family. They produced
two popes, the mo Attele for the Mackavellian Prince and
a saint But don't worry, we're not going to focus
on the saintly family the contrary Um and their primary puppet,
(02:12):
or perhaps their primary player, was Lucrazia, who was the
illegitimate daughter of Um, an unlikely character as we'll find
out in a minute, but the family kind of got
set up by a great uncle, Alfonso di Borgia, who
was Pope Callixtus the third, and he set up his
family through neptism in the church and in politics, including
(02:36):
his young nephew Rodrigo Borgia, who becomes a cardinal and
Rodrigo Borgia, who later became Pope Alexander the sixth had
a mistress, the notesa Dikatane, and it wasn't that uncommon
for religious men of the time to have mistresses, as
surprising as that maybe to us today, especially religious men
(02:57):
of that statue. A cardinal is a pretty important position, right,
that's very high up there. But they had three kids together.
He had at least six kids, and possibly some more,
We're not entirely sure. And one of those three was Lucrezia,
who was born in April eighteenth, fourteen eighty in Rome.
The other two were Cis and Juan, and Wan ends
(03:19):
up in the Tiber at some point, probably killed high Csari.
The Borges as a family were known for being very attractive,
very intelligent, and very strong willed. They were also well educated.
Lucrezia was educated by a woman named Adriana Orsini, who
was related to them, and traditionally, most well off young
women of the time were educated in convents, but a
(03:42):
lot of these convents weren't the morally upstanding kind of
places you would think a convent would be. Again, kind
of on par with being a cardinal or Yeah, the
church was a bit corrupt at the time, and a
lot of religious education was more about the forms of
religion rather than the ethics. So you would learn how
to appear to be a holy person. But no one
(04:04):
told you not to have orgies in the Vatican. We'll
come up a little bit later. So she was trained
in languages, music, drawing, and embroidery, and by the age
of eleven she was engaged twice to Spanish nobles, actually
at the same time. So covering her bets, I gotta
have a back up to Don Cherubino, Wanda Centell and
(04:25):
Don Gasparo. And it's rumored she lost her virginity at
age ten to Don Cherubino. But in four two, Daddy
becomes pope, so little Lucrezia can do better than her
Spanish dawns. And uh, they're the Borgia family wants to
find an alliance that can do some work for him,
(04:47):
and so they decide on Giovanni Sports and this is
a powerful alliance with a Milanese family. And these are
the these are the guys who are commissioning the horse
from Bernardo DaVinci, eventually the giant horse people. As far
as those remember, he was an illegitimate prince, and I
think according to the wedding contract, she was supposed to
remain in Rome for a year after the ceremony, until
(05:10):
which time the marriage was not to be consummated. But
this wedding is something else. So once again her father
is pope. By now he's actually moved on to a
new mistress aside from her mother, Julia France. Yeah, and
they have this big wedding at the Vatican, which just
seems so terribly inappropriate, the pope's daughter getting married to
(05:33):
the Vatican um. But it's a really big deal, five
ladies attending the bride, and um the new mistress involved,
and it's it's a little screwing. Yeah. So they're married
for a few years and she lives with her husband
and Pizarro, and then eventually they come back to Rome,
(05:54):
but Lucuzia things are rupturing. By that point. The Borges
have decided that Giovanni doesn't have all the power that
they need. He's no longer that beneficial of a political alliance,
and they're thinking she could do better. Yeah, the Pope
has switched as alliance, so he's supporting Naples, so he
he doesn't want to be aligned with the sorts of
(06:16):
family anymore. And it wasn't a happy marriage either, so
Lucretia maybe wouldn't have been so sad to have it
ruptured for her. So one of two things may have
happened here. One, the Pope may have actually ordered Giovanni's execution,
and Lucrezia warned her husband he got out of Dodge
Dodge being Rome in this case, and then that kind
(06:40):
of gives ground for an eventual annulment. Or she might
have just made the entire thing up to get rid
of him then, like boring Husble, and he knew that
he was no longer the person that they had hoped
him to be, and so she tells him, you know,
my father once she murdered, he's very powerful, and and
he leaves. Yeah, but regardless, Giovanni's out of Rome, and
(07:01):
this opens up an avenue for a forced annulment. And
the ennulment is so embarrassing for Giovanni they force him
to sign it and it says that he's impotent and
therefore the marriage was never consummated, which is dubious at
best because may have been pregnant at the time, although
perhaps not from him. We won't find out about that
(07:24):
until a little bit later. But Giovanni is so ticked
off about how he's been forced to do this that
he accuses her of incest with her father and brother,
and that's where that long history linger with her reputation
for quite some time. But she's free to marry again,
and the Borges of course want an equally powerful political
(07:47):
alliance as her first was, so they marry her off
right away, and they marry her off to Alfonso of Aragon,
who was seventeen. He was the Duke of Basselli, an
important part of Naples, and it seemed to be a
off match. They're both, you know, young and in love
and handsome, and things were working out well. But of course,
if you're a Borgia son in law, things can't last
(08:09):
too long. And soon enough, the Pope has realigned his
allegiances again and Alfonso is no longer in favor, and
that's where things get very tragic. The Pope tells them
they should come to Rome to wait for the birth
of their baby, um Rodrigo Borgia to Aragon, and Alfonso
(08:32):
gets there and realizes this is not a good place
for him to be, so he leaves and eventually is
convinced to come back by Lucrezia. And he is attacked
and almost killed in St. Peter's Square in July by
a mysterious band of men, and as he's recovering from
that and Lucrezia is nursing him, he's strangled, likely by
(08:55):
her brother or perhaps the servant. So she's heartbroken. Her
family has murdered her husband and she's sent off because
they're tired of watching her grieve. Well, and that may
have been a case too of cis are going against
Pope Alexander's wishes because the pope it's on a guard
because he knew what might happen, and cis are got
(09:16):
around him. But Lucrezia was heartbroken and she heads to
Nippy and start signing her letters the most unhappy Princess
of Salerno, so our from Fatale here, it's clearly a
little devastated by what's happens. Yeah. Well, and around the
same time we have one of the weirdest events in
Lucrezia's life. This toddler appears on the scene three year
(09:39):
old child who's popularly known as the Roman infant, but
whose name Toiovanni, don't you like that very descriptive name, right,
I do? Um? And two papal bulls are released regarding
this kid. So I'd say one would be a lot
for most people, but two, and the first one calls
him the legitimate son of cis A, Lucrezia's brother. The
(10:04):
second calls him the legitimate son of Alexander the Pope,
neither of whom should be having kids anyways. Obviously Alexander's
the pope cs are he is probably still a cardinal
when this mysterious infant is fathered, So those are both
pretty sketchy options well, and to issue papal bulls saying
(10:25):
things like the Pope has had this child is even stranger.
But a lot of people thought it might have been
Lucrezia's child, And there's also a rumor that it was
her child by this messenger who's later murdered Pedro Calderone,
and he's found in the Tiber along with a lot
of Borgia enemies. So, but this kid kind of follows
(10:47):
Lucrezia around through her life, you know, living with different relatives,
but making appearances, they seem to have an important bond
between them, even though she refers to him as her
nephew for most of it. A lot of historians think
it was actually her child, which means again, she would
have been very pregnant when she was getting divorced for
non consummation of her marriage. So thanks Porgea's she gets
(11:11):
married again, her third and last marriage, and that's to
Alphonso Destay, the Duke of Ferrara, and they're married in
fifteen o one. It's arranged by Chaserae and Alfonse, who
is not excited about marrying Offfortunately, I mean, you've seen
what what's happened to her previous two husbands, Like, why
would you want to hear a family? They're clearly morally
corrupt and in general terrible people. Her future sister in
(11:34):
law Isabelle, freaks out and wants nothing to do with
this marriage and does everything she can to stop it,
but Lucrezia does her best to win over the family.
And this is my favorite detail about this. Her future
father in law collects nuns, preferably those who have displayed
the stigmata, so of course, yeah, why would you want
(11:55):
any other kind, So Lucrezia helps him add his collection
by sending him a few nuns. And I just I
have to wonder, since she's a member of the Borgia family,
how did these poor nuns get their stigmatas and really
probably rather work for them. The Estay family was extremely
important and powerful, and the Borgias were desperate to be
(12:16):
part of it, and they also really wanted to fix
the Crazias image because at this point people were calling
her terrible things. I think one of her nicknames was
the worst whore in all of Rome. Apologies for the language,
that's what it was. Although her new husband wasn't that
fantastic either. He was warlike and uncouth and really liked
the company of prostitutes, but his first wife had died
(12:37):
in childbirth and he was in need of someone else
to give him an air. But it actually ends up
being a pretty good match. Surprisingly, they sort of rule
as um partners over Ferrara. She helps bring a lot
of art and culture to her court, and she's generally
regarded as a as a success and manages to survive
(13:00):
most impressively, survived the fall of her family, and when
the Borgia's fall, they go down hard and It starts
when Alexander dies in fifteen oh three, maybe from poisoning,
maybe from the plague, and the priests at St. Peter's
this is how bad things are. The priests refused to
accept his body initially, the Pope and um Esar. Without
(13:24):
the support of his father and all that strength, he
goes down pretty fast, and his exile to Spain died
shortly afterwards in a siege. So you would think Lucrezia
would be influenced by this fall too, but she's set
herself up so respectfully by this point that she's pretty
much immune to it. It it even improves her oddly enough.
(13:47):
She becomes a lot less political and a lot more religious.
She even pawns her jewels to help the poor. She's
not so interested anymore in the intrigues of the Borgia family,
and she's had her own private tragedies during this marriage.
She's had had several miscarriages and very difficult pregnancies, a
few still births, and was treated with the typically medieval
medical procedures of the time. So people were bleeding her
(14:10):
from the foot with her stillborn children, which it could
not have unpleasant. They end up having six children, four
lived to adulthood. Um. Little Isabella dies at birth, and
so does Alessandro. But we don't want to make her
out to be too pious, because she had her fund.
During her marriage as well, she had several love affairs,
(14:30):
one of whom was her brother in law, Francesco second Gonzaga,
the Marquis of Mantua, her bisexual brother in law, who
was married to the aforementioned Isabella dste who hated her,
and they ended up breaking off their affair, possibly because
of syphilis which he died of, and possibly because the
messenger between them was stabbed twenty two times and killed.
(14:52):
It's really the boys is a dangerous, dangerous people to
be around. Um. One of her other lovers perhaps just
uh this this affair might have just been conducted in
courtly love letters, but regardless it went on for sixteen years.
Was with Pietro Bembo, who was a linguist and later
(15:13):
a cardinal's ken. We feel that because um, but he's
most famous today because his name belongs to a font
which Katie and I checked it a lot available in
our office suite. UM. And he's also a character in
Castiglione is the book of the courtier. But uh. These
(15:33):
letters exchanged with Lucrezia made it survive through history and
came along with a lock of hair believed to be lucreziaus.
And Lord Byron views this correspondence in the eighteen hundreds,
and he's so taken by this correspondence, which he just
thinks it is absolutely beautiful that he steals the strand
(15:56):
of the hair. It's kind of it's kind of greed,
be isn't it. He steals the strand of the hair
and he shows it to Lee Hunt and Walter Savage Lander,
who writes an epigram about the hair. It's more about
the hair than it is about Lucrezia. You know, you
have to read it. Okay, It's called on seeing a
hair of Lucrezia Borgia Borgia. Thou once wert almost too
(16:19):
august and high for adoration. Now thou art dust. All
that remains of these plates in fold calm hair meandering
with pellucid gold. Which is a much nicer thing written
about her than what Victor Hugo wrote in his preface
to the play Lucrezia Borgia. This is a direct quote.
Who actually is Lucrezia Borgia? Take the most hideous the
(16:42):
most repulsive, the most complete moral deformity. Place it where
it fits best, in the heart of a woman, whose
physical beauty and royal grandeur will make the crime stand
out all the more strikingly. Then, add to all that
moral deformity the purest feeling a woman can have, that
of a mother inside our monster. Put a mother, and
the mother will interest to us and make us weep.
And this creature that filled us with fear will inspire pity.
(17:03):
That deformed soul will be almost beautiful in our eyes.
So you can see the scathing judgment that history put
on the Crazia. Romantics became almost obsessed with Lucrezia and
of an opera. Donaldetti wrote an opera based on Victor
Hugo's work. They just they couldn't get enough of her,
(17:24):
it seems. When it was one of those things I
keep saying, history is not black and white, and people
wanted to make her either really good or really bad.
So if there were those people who said she was
the incestuous poisoner who was evil embodied, and then the
people who tried to say, no, no, she was actually
very pious, and go to the complete obvious extreme, she'd
run away to the nunnery whenever, whereas we're going to say,
(17:45):
she was somewhere in the middle and had a lot
of good qualities and a lot of bad ones. And
she died complications of childbirth and june um when baby
Isabella was born stillborn, and before when she knew she
was dying, she wrote to Hope Leo asking for his
forgiveness for all of her sins and as for her
other children. Giovanni went to the French court, and he
(18:08):
never succeeded in making his fortune like they'd hope. He
died in Genoa in fifteen forty seven. Er Cole succeeded
his father as the Dike of Ferrara. I Polito became
a cardinal, and when I think of Bippolito, I think
of the restaurant, so that's all I could think of
when I was sitting at this. Leonora became a nun
and Francesco was Marquese di Messo Lombardo, and the Borgia
is actually just sort of slip away not too long
(18:30):
after this. There really only prominent in the fourteen hundreds
and the fifteen hundreds, and well, we think of the
Medici family and even the sports is is having descendants
who made it into all sorts of European courts, or
or had had influential family members down the line. The Borgias,
(18:51):
they're pretty much gone. Um one interesting descendant though, Brookshields.
She's a She's a descendant of Lucretia's. Well, there's a
Hollywood trivia tidbit. I bet you didn't know, because I
certainly didn't. So if you'd like to learn more about
how the papacy works, as well as the Italian Renaissance,
go check out our homepage at www dot how stuff
(19:13):
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in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com homepage
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before,
perhaps and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Daddy. So last weekend
I checked out the new exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci
(00:45):
at the High Museum in Atlanta, and I would definitely
call the centerpiece of the exhibit this colossal horse reproduction.
So you're basically in the middle middle of like midtown Atlanta,
and then you're by this huge foe Bronze Renaissance force.
And when I was learning a little bit about it,
it was originally commissioned by the sports of Family, which
(01:09):
got me thinking about other famous Renaissance families, and we're
talking about the Borgia's, specifically Lucrezia Borgia, and it was
funny I changed my Facebook stas to say that I
knew more about Lucretia Borgia than anyone, and I got
so many comments on it, and a friend of mine
brought up a three Stooges sketch where Mo accuses Curly
(01:29):
of being a Lucretia Borgia by trying to poison them.
And that's the legend that she was this incestuous poisoning
thumb fatale or just a victim in a pawn of
her brother and her family. So we're gonna try to
figure out what really happened with her. Um. To do that,
we're gonna start out talking a little bit about the
(01:50):
Borgia family. They're originally from Spain, but they were based
in Italy, and it's a pretty amazing family. They produced
two popes, the mo Attele for the Mackavellian Prince and
a saint But don't worry, we're not going to focus
on the saintly family the contrary Um and their primary puppet,
(02:12):
or perhaps their primary player, was Lucrazia, who was the
illegitimate daughter of Um, an unlikely character as we'll find
out in a minute, but the family kind of got
set up by a great uncle, Alfonso di Borgia, who
was Pope Callixtus the third, and he set up his
family through neptism in the church and in politics, including
(02:36):
his young nephew Rodrigo Borgia, who becomes a cardinal and
Rodrigo Borgia, who later became Pope Alexander the sixth had
a mistress, the notesa Dikatane, and it wasn't that uncommon
for religious men of the time to have mistresses, as
surprising as that maybe to us today, especially religious men
(02:57):
of that statue. A cardinal is a pretty important position, right,
that's very high up there. But they had three kids together.
He had at least six kids, and possibly some more,
We're not entirely sure. And one of those three was Lucrezia,
who was born in April eighteenth, fourteen eighty in Rome.
The other two were Cis and Juan, and Wan ends
(03:19):
up in the Tiber at some point, probably killed high Csari.
The Borges as a family were known for being very attractive,
very intelligent, and very strong willed. They were also well educated.
Lucrezia was educated by a woman named Adriana Orsini, who
was related to them, and traditionally, most well off young
women of the time were educated in convents, but a
(03:42):
lot of these convents weren't the morally upstanding kind of
places you would think a convent would be. Again, kind
of on par with being a cardinal or Yeah, the
church was a bit corrupt at the time, and a
lot of religious education was more about the forms of
religion rather than the ethics. So you would learn how
to appear to be a holy person. But no one
(04:04):
told you not to have orgies in the Vatican. We'll
come up a little bit later. So she was trained
in languages, music, drawing, and embroidery, and by the age
of eleven she was engaged twice to Spanish nobles, actually
at the same time. So covering her bets, I gotta
have a back up to Don Cherubino, Wanda Centell and
(04:25):
Don Gasparo. And it's rumored she lost her virginity at
age ten to Don Cherubino. But in four two, Daddy
becomes pope, so little Lucrezia can do better than her
Spanish dawns. And uh, they're the Borgia family wants to
find an alliance that can do some work for him,
(04:47):
and so they decide on Giovanni Sports and this is
a powerful alliance with a Milanese family. And these are
the these are the guys who are commissioning the horse
from Bernardo DaVinci, eventually the giant horse people. As far
as those remember, he was an illegitimate prince, and I
think according to the wedding contract, she was supposed to
remain in Rome for a year after the ceremony, until
(05:10):
which time the marriage was not to be consummated. But
this wedding is something else. So once again her father
is pope. By now he's actually moved on to a
new mistress aside from her mother, Julia France. Yeah, and
they have this big wedding at the Vatican, which just
seems so terribly inappropriate, the pope's daughter getting married to
(05:33):
the Vatican um. But it's a really big deal, five
ladies attending the bride, and um the new mistress involved,
and it's it's a little screwing. Yeah. So they're married
for a few years and she lives with her husband
and Pizarro, and then eventually they come back to Rome,
(05:54):
but Lucuzia things are rupturing. By that point. The Borges
have decided that Giovanni doesn't have all the power that
they need. He's no longer that beneficial of a political alliance,
and they're thinking she could do better. Yeah, the Pope
has switched as alliance, so he's supporting Naples, so he
he doesn't want to be aligned with the sorts of
(06:16):
family anymore. And it wasn't a happy marriage either, so
Lucretia maybe wouldn't have been so sad to have it
ruptured for her. So one of two things may have
happened here. One, the Pope may have actually ordered Giovanni's execution,
and Lucrezia warned her husband he got out of Dodge
Dodge being Rome in this case, and then that kind
(06:40):
of gives ground for an eventual annulment. Or she might
have just made the entire thing up to get rid
of him then, like boring Husble, and he knew that
he was no longer the person that they had hoped
him to be, and so she tells him, you know,
my father once she murdered, he's very powerful, and and
he leaves. Yeah, but regardless, Giovanni's out of Rome, and
(07:01):
this opens up an avenue for a forced annulment. And
the ennulment is so embarrassing for Giovanni they force him
to sign it and it says that he's impotent and
therefore the marriage was never consummated, which is dubious at
best because may have been pregnant at the time, although
perhaps not from him. We won't find out about that
(07:24):
until a little bit later. But Giovanni is so ticked
off about how he's been forced to do this that
he accuses her of incest with her father and brother,
and that's where that long history linger with her reputation
for quite some time. But she's free to marry again,
and the Borges of course want an equally powerful political
(07:47):
alliance as her first was, so they marry her off
right away, and they marry her off to Alfonso of Aragon,
who was seventeen. He was the Duke of Basselli, an
important part of Naples, and it seemed to be a
off match. They're both, you know, young and in love
and handsome, and things were working out well. But of course,
if you're a Borgia son in law, things can't last
(08:09):
too long. And soon enough, the Pope has realigned his
allegiances again and Alfonso is no longer in favor, and
that's where things get very tragic. The Pope tells them
they should come to Rome to wait for the birth
of their baby, um Rodrigo Borgia to Aragon, and Alfonso
(08:32):
gets there and realizes this is not a good place
for him to be, so he leaves and eventually is
convinced to come back by Lucrezia. And he is attacked
and almost killed in St. Peter's Square in July by
a mysterious band of men, and as he's recovering from
that and Lucrezia is nursing him, he's strangled, likely by
(08:55):
her brother or perhaps the servant. So she's heartbroken. Her
family has murdered her husband and she's sent off because
they're tired of watching her grieve. Well, and that may
have been a case too of cis are going against
Pope Alexander's wishes because the pope it's on a guard
because he knew what might happen, and cis are got
(09:16):
around him. But Lucrezia was heartbroken and she heads to
Nippy and start signing her letters the most unhappy Princess
of Salerno, so our from Fatale here, it's clearly a
little devastated by what's happens. Yeah. Well, and around the
same time we have one of the weirdest events in
Lucrezia's life. This toddler appears on the scene three year
(09:39):
old child who's popularly known as the Roman infant, but
whose name Toiovanni, don't you like that very descriptive name, right,
I do? Um? And two papal bulls are released regarding
this kid. So I'd say one would be a lot
for most people, but two, and the first one calls
him the legitimate son of cis A, Lucrezia's brother. The
(10:04):
second calls him the legitimate son of Alexander the Pope,
neither of whom should be having kids anyways. Obviously Alexander's
the pope cs are he is probably still a cardinal
when this mysterious infant is fathered, So those are both
pretty sketchy options well, and to issue papal bulls saying
(10:25):
things like the Pope has had this child is even stranger.
But a lot of people thought it might have been
Lucrezia's child, And there's also a rumor that it was
her child by this messenger who's later murdered Pedro Calderone,
and he's found in the Tiber along with a lot
of Borgia enemies. So, but this kid kind of follows
(10:47):
Lucrezia around through her life, you know, living with different relatives,
but making appearances, they seem to have an important bond
between them, even though she refers to him as her
nephew for most of it. A lot of historians think
it was actually her child, which means again, she would
have been very pregnant when she was getting divorced for
non consummation of her marriage. So thanks Porgea's she gets
(11:11):
married again, her third and last marriage, and that's to
Alphonso Destay, the Duke of Ferrara, and they're married in
fifteen o one. It's arranged by Chaserae and Alfonse, who
is not excited about marrying Offfortunately, I mean, you've seen
what what's happened to her previous two husbands, Like, why
would you want to hear a family? They're clearly morally
corrupt and in general terrible people. Her future sister in
(11:34):
law Isabelle, freaks out and wants nothing to do with
this marriage and does everything she can to stop it,
but Lucrezia does her best to win over the family.
And this is my favorite detail about this. Her future
father in law collects nuns, preferably those who have displayed
the stigmata, so of course, yeah, why would you want
(11:55):
any other kind, So Lucrezia helps him add his collection
by sending him a few nuns. And I just I
have to wonder, since she's a member of the Borgia family,
how did these poor nuns get their stigmatas and really
probably rather work for them. The Estay family was extremely
important and powerful, and the Borgias were desperate to be
(12:16):
part of it, and they also really wanted to fix
the Crazias image because at this point people were calling
her terrible things. I think one of her nicknames was
the worst whore in all of Rome. Apologies for the language,
that's what it was. Although her new husband wasn't that
fantastic either. He was warlike and uncouth and really liked
the company of prostitutes, but his first wife had died
(12:37):
in childbirth and he was in need of someone else
to give him an air. But it actually ends up
being a pretty good match. Surprisingly, they sort of rule
as um partners over Ferrara. She helps bring a lot
of art and culture to her court, and she's generally
regarded as a as a success and manages to survive
(13:00):
most impressively, survived the fall of her family, and when
the Borgia's fall, they go down hard and It starts
when Alexander dies in fifteen oh three, maybe from poisoning,
maybe from the plague, and the priests at St. Peter's
this is how bad things are. The priests refused to
accept his body initially, the Pope and um Esar. Without
(13:24):
the support of his father and all that strength, he
goes down pretty fast, and his exile to Spain died
shortly afterwards in a siege. So you would think Lucrezia
would be influenced by this fall too, but she's set
herself up so respectfully by this point that she's pretty
much immune to it. It it even improves her oddly enough.
(13:47):
She becomes a lot less political and a lot more religious.
She even pawns her jewels to help the poor. She's
not so interested anymore in the intrigues of the Borgia family,
and she's had her own private tragedies during this marriage.
She's had had several miscarriages and very difficult pregnancies, a
few still births, and was treated with the typically medieval
medical procedures of the time. So people were bleeding her
(14:10):
from the foot with her stillborn children, which it could
not have unpleasant. They end up having six children, four
lived to adulthood. Um. Little Isabella dies at birth, and
so does Alessandro. But we don't want to make her
out to be too pious, because she had her fund.
During her marriage as well, she had several love affairs,
(14:30):
one of whom was her brother in law, Francesco second Gonzaga,
the Marquis of Mantua, her bisexual brother in law, who
was married to the aforementioned Isabella dste who hated her,
and they ended up breaking off their affair, possibly because
of syphilis which he died of, and possibly because the
messenger between them was stabbed twenty two times and killed.
(14:52):
It's really the boys is a dangerous, dangerous people to
be around. Um. One of her other lovers perhaps just
uh this this affair might have just been conducted in
courtly love letters, but regardless it went on for sixteen years.
Was with Pietro Bembo, who was a linguist and later
(15:13):
a cardinal's ken. We feel that because um, but he's
most famous today because his name belongs to a font
which Katie and I checked it a lot available in
our office suite. UM. And he's also a character in
Castiglione is the book of the courtier. But uh. These
(15:33):
letters exchanged with Lucrezia made it survive through history and
came along with a lock of hair believed to be lucreziaus.
And Lord Byron views this correspondence in the eighteen hundreds,
and he's so taken by this correspondence, which he just
thinks it is absolutely beautiful that he steals the strand
(15:56):
of the hair. It's kind of it's kind of greed,
be isn't it. He steals the strand of the hair
and he shows it to Lee Hunt and Walter Savage Lander,
who writes an epigram about the hair. It's more about
the hair than it is about Lucrezia. You know, you
have to read it. Okay, It's called on seeing a
hair of Lucrezia Borgia Borgia. Thou once wert almost too
(16:19):
august and high for adoration. Now thou art dust. All
that remains of these plates in fold calm hair meandering
with pellucid gold. Which is a much nicer thing written
about her than what Victor Hugo wrote in his preface
to the play Lucrezia Borgia. This is a direct quote.
Who actually is Lucrezia Borgia? Take the most hideous the
(16:42):
most repulsive, the most complete moral deformity. Place it where
it fits best, in the heart of a woman, whose
physical beauty and royal grandeur will make the crime stand
out all the more strikingly. Then, add to all that
moral deformity the purest feeling a woman can have, that
of a mother inside our monster. Put a mother, and
the mother will interest to us and make us weep.
And this creature that filled us with fear will inspire pity.
(17:03):
That deformed soul will be almost beautiful in our eyes.
So you can see the scathing judgment that history put
on the Crazia. Romantics became almost obsessed with Lucrezia and
of an opera. Donaldetti wrote an opera based on Victor
Hugo's work. They just they couldn't get enough of her,
(17:24):
it seems. When it was one of those things I
keep saying, history is not black and white, and people
wanted to make her either really good or really bad.
So if there were those people who said she was
the incestuous poisoner who was evil embodied, and then the
people who tried to say, no, no, she was actually
very pious, and go to the complete obvious extreme, she'd
run away to the nunnery whenever, whereas we're going to say,
(17:45):
she was somewhere in the middle and had a lot
of good qualities and a lot of bad ones. And
she died complications of childbirth and june um when baby
Isabella was born stillborn, and before when she knew she
was dying, she wrote to Hope Leo asking for his
forgiveness for all of her sins and as for her
other children. Giovanni went to the French court, and he
(18:08):
never succeeded in making his fortune like they'd hope. He
died in Genoa in fifteen forty seven. Er Cole succeeded
his father as the Dike of Ferrara. I Polito became
a cardinal, and when I think of Bippolito, I think
of the restaurant, so that's all I could think of
when I was sitting at this. Leonora became a nun
and Francesco was Marquese di Messo Lombardo, and the Borgia
is actually just sort of slip away not too long
(18:30):
after this. There really only prominent in the fourteen hundreds
and the fifteen hundreds, and well, we think of the
Medici family and even the sports is is having descendants
who made it into all sorts of European courts, or
or had had influential family members down the line. The Borgias,
(18:51):
they're pretty much gone. Um one interesting descendant though, Brookshields.
She's a She's a descendant of Lucretia's. Well, there's a
Hollywood trivia tidbit. I bet you didn't know, because I
certainly didn't. So if you'd like to learn more about
how the papacy works, as well as the Italian Renaissance,
go check out our homepage at www dot how stuff
(19:13):
works dot com and check out the blog while you're there.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
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