Cesare Borgia

Cesare Borgia was born on September 13, 1475, at Subiaco, a hill town east of Rome, the son of the Spanish cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and his Roman mistress Vannozza dei Cattanei ^[1]. The Borgia family, originally Borja of Valencia, had already produced one pope, Calixtus III, and Rodrigo held the powerful office of vice chancellor of the Church. Cesare grew up alongside his siblings Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofre in a household that mixed Spanish custom, Roman politics, and enormous wealth ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Cesare Borgia must begin with the career his father planned for him: the Church. As a boy he received benefices and titles that generated income long before he could perform any duties, a common practice for well connected families of the period ^[1]. He studied law and the humanities at the universities of Perugia and Pisa, where contemporaries described him as quick, athletic, and confident beyond his years ^[3].

In August 1492 Rodrigo Borgia was elected pope as Alexander VI, and the family's fortunes changed overnight. Cesare, still a teenager, was named archbishop of Valencia, and in 1493, at about eighteen, his father raised him to the College of Cardinals ^[2]. He was ordained only to lesser orders, remaining a Catholic deacon rather than a priest, a detail that later made his exit from the Church easier to arrange ^[1].

The red hat never suited him. Cesare preferred hunting, bullfights, and soldiering to liturgy, and Roman observers noted that he dressed and behaved more like a secular prince than a churchman ^[3]. The military role in the family belonged to his younger brother Juan, Duke of Gandia, whom Alexander VI made captain general of the papal forces. In June 1497 Juan was murdered in Rome and his body pulled from the Tiber; the crime was never solved, and although rumor eventually pointed at Cesare, no evidence has ever confirmed his involvement ^[2].

Juan's death cleared the path Cesare wanted. In August 1498 he became the first man in history to resign the cardinalate, laying down his ecclesiastical dignities with papal consent so that he could pursue a secular career ^[1]. That same year King Louis XII of France, who needed a papal annulment of his first marriage, granted Cesare the duchy of Valentinois in the Dauphine. The title gave him his famous nickname, il Valentino ^[2].

In May 1499 he sealed the French alliance by marrying Charlotte d'Albret, sister of the king of Navarre, at the French court ^[4]. Louis XII supplied troops and cavalry, and Cesare rode into Italy beside the French army when it seized Milan that autumn. He now had what few second sons of any family could claim: a foreign royal alliance, papal money, and an army ^[3].

The heart of any Cesare Borgia biography is the campaign he waged between 1499 and 1502 in the Romagna, the band of territory stretching from Bologna toward the Adriatic. The region belonged in law to the papacy but was actually ruled by local lords, the so called papal vicars, whom Alexander VI declared deposed for failing to pay their dues ^[2]. Acting as gonfalonier, the standard bearer of the Church, Cesare set out to remove them one by one.

Imola and Forli fell first, in late 1499 and January 1500, after their formidable ruler Caterina Sforza was captured defending the fortress of Ravaldino ^[4]. A second campaign brought down Pesaro, Rimini, and, after a hard siege, Faenza, whose young lord Astorre Manfredi surrendered in 1501 and was later found dead in the Tiber ^[3]. Alexander VI rewarded his son with the title Duke of Romagna in May 1501. In June 1502 Cesare took Urbino by a sudden feint that stunned Italy: he asked Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro for artillery as a friend, then marched on the city before the request could be understood as a threat ^[4].

Among the most striking Cesare Borgia facts is the quality of his administration. In the conquered Romagna he suppressed the petty tyrannies, appointed the respected jurist Antonio Ciocchi del Monte and later Antonio da Sandro as governors, and installed a rota, a court of appeal, to give the region uniform justice ^[2]. His notorious lieutenant Remirro de Orco pacified the province with brutal methods; in December 1502 Cesare had him executed and his body displayed in two pieces in the piazza at Cesena, a gesture Machiavelli read as calculated theater that both satisfied and awed the population ^[5].

In October 1502 Cesare's own captains, fearing they would be devoured next, rose against him in the conspiracy known as the revolt of the condottieri, organized at the diet of La Magione near Perugia ^[3]. The rebels included Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and members of the Orsini clan, and for a moment his new state seemed ready to dissolve. Cesare kept his composure, raised fresh troops with French help, and opened negotiations that lured the plotters back into his service ^[4].

The reckoning came at Senigallia on December 31, 1502. Invited into the town to celebrate its surrender, the ringleaders were seized at a friendly meeting; Vitelli and Oliverotto were strangled that night, and two Orsini captains were executed soon after ^[5]. Niccolo Machiavelli, then a Florentine envoy attached to Cesare's camp, sent home vivid dispatches and later wrote a short account of the affair. In The Prince, published after both men were dead, Machiavelli held up Duke Valentino as the example of a new ruler who did nearly everything right and fell only through extraordinary bad luck ^[5].

That verdict has shaped his reputation ever since. To Machiavelli, Cesare's cruelty was economical: swift, targeted, and followed by order, in contrast to the chronic disorder of the lords he replaced ^[5]. Modern historians are more skeptical, noting that his state rested on papal revenue and French protection rather than on any durable foundation of his own ^[3].

Cesare's marriage to Charlotte d'Albret lasted only four months in person. He left France for Italy in the autumn of 1499 and never saw his wife again, though she remained loyal to his memory and raised their daughter, Louise Borgia, who later married into the French nobility ^[4]. He also fathered at least two illegitimate children, Girolamo and Camilla, the latter of whom became abbess of a convent in Ferrara ^[1].

Contemporaries dwelt on his appearance and manner. Envoys described a tall, strikingly handsome man of unusual physical strength who could behead a bull with a single stroke, kept late hours, and wore a mask in public in his final Italian years, possibly to hide facial scarring left by syphilis, the so called French disease that he contracted around 1497 ^[3]. He was devoted to his sister Lucrezia Borgia, whose three marriages served the family's shifting alliances, and hostile Roman gossip about the siblings, never supported by evidence, became part of the Borgia legend ^[2].

His motto, Aut Caesar aut nihil, either Caesar or nothing, appeared on his sword and captured the scale of his ambition ^[1]. He was a patron as well as a soldier: in 1502 and 1503 he employed Leonardo da Vinci as his architect and military engineer, and Leonardo's celebrated map of Imola, one of the earliest accurate town plans in Europe, was produced in his service ^[6].

Everything depended on the pope, and in August 1503 both Alexander VI and Cesare fell violently ill in Rome, probably of malarial fever. The pope died on August 18; Cesare survived but was bedridden at the precise moment when his entire system needed his presence ^[2]. He later told Machiavelli that he had prepared for every eventuality on his father's death except one: that he himself would be dying at the same time ^[5].

The brief pontificate of Pius III gave him a respite, but in October 1503 Giuliano della Rovere, the Borgia family's oldest enemy, was elected as Julius II after promising Cesare confirmation as gonfalonier. The promise evaporated. Julius demanded the surrender of the Romagna fortresses, arrested Cesare when he stalled, and stripped him of his lands ^[1]. Released, Cesare fled to Naples in 1504, where the Spanish commander Gonzalo de Cordoba arrested him under orders from King Ferdinand of Aragon. He was shipped to Spain and confined first at Chinchilla, then in the castle of La Mota at Medina del Campo ^[3].

In October 1506 he escaped from La Mota by rope, was injured in the descent, and made his way to Navarre, where his brother in law King John III gave him command of troops ^[4]. On March 12, 1507, during the siege of Viana against a rebellious count, Cesare rode out ahead of his men in pursuit of raiders, was cut off in a ravine, and was killed by enemy men at arms who did not know who he was. He was thirty one, and was buried at the church of Santa Maria in Viana ^[1].

The list of lasting Cesare Borgia achievements is short but real. In under four years he abolished a patchwork of small tyrannies and gave the Romagna a taste of unified, relatively even handed government; Julius II kept the region under direct papal rule, and it remained part of the Papal States for more than three centuries ^[2]. His campaigns also demonstrated how quickly a commander combining papal authority, French arms, and personal daring could redraw the Italian map, a lesson absorbed by every power in the peninsula ^[3].

His deeper legacy is literary. Machiavelli's portrait in chapter seven of The Prince turned Duke Valentino into the permanent case study of ruthless statecraft, debated by political theorists from the sixteenth century to the present ^[5]. Later writers embroidered the darker material: the Borgia name became a byword for poison, incest, and ambition, much of it traceable to hostile chroniclers writing under Julius II rather than to documented fact ^[2].

Historians such as William Harrison Woodward in the early twentieth century and Sarah Bradford in the 1970s worked to separate the man from the myth, presenting a ruler who was cruel by any standard yet no more so than many contemporaries, and considerably more effective ^[3]. His remains, long buried under a street in Viana after a bishop ordered them removed from the church, were reinterred inside Santa Maria de Viana in 2007, five hundred years after his death ^[7]. In fiction, television, and video games he remains one of the most recognizable figures of the Italian Renaissance.