The Borgias — the most infamous family in the history of the papacy — were victims of a “bad press”, according to a new book. As for Lucretia, she was innocent of incest and poisoning, and died a devout woman.
Journalist and historian Mario Dal Bello drew on documents from the Vatican Secret Archive to write his new book, I Borgia: La leggenda nera (The Borgias: The Black Legend).
He doesn’t set out to “rehabilitate” the Borgias, but rather give a more “fair account” of this family that produced two popes, cardinals, poets and warriors.
The Borgias were certainly “no saints”, he says, but they weren’t that much different from other powerful families of the time.
In 15th century Italy, resorting to murdering one’s political opponents — as Rodrigo Borgia, who became the second Borgia pope with the name of Alexander VI, did — wasn’t that unusual.
Neither was keeping mistresses, even while rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church, or appointing sons and nephews to become cardinals.
But the Borgias were also accused of many criminal activities, including adultery, simony, theft, rape, bribery, incest and murder (especially by arsenic poisoning).
The reason the Borgias have gone down in history as a synonym for “abject crime and depravity”, Dal Bello says, is that they were victims of an historic case of “bad press”.
“They were foreigners and they were hated for this,” he says.
According to Dal Bello, the difference between the legend and the truth is particularly vast in the case of Lucretia Borgia, one of the eight children of Pope Alexander VI.
She was accused of incest and poisoning — but she never did those things, he says. Rather, when she died in 1519 she was a devout woman beloved by the people of Ferrara, where she lived.
Dal Bello says her last words, when she died of complications from childbirth, were: “I belong to God forever… I rejoice in what he rejoices in.”
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