A Very Borgia Break Up | History's Worst Breakups

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Episode: A Very Borgia Break Up | History's Worst Breakups
Host: Dr Kate Lister
Guest: Professor Catherine Fletcher
Date: February 24, 2026

In this episode, Dr Kate Lister and Renaissance historian Professor Catherine Fletcher delve into one of history’s messiest and most scandalous marital dissolutions: the annulment of Lucrezia Borgia and Giovanni Sforza. Weaving in court gossip, political intrigue, rumors of impotence, incest, and a possible secret baby, they break down why this 15th-century breakup has remained infamous for over 500 years.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene: Who Were the Main Players?

• Lucrezia Borgia (b. 1480): Illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). Married at 13 for dynastic reasons.

• Giovanni Sforza: Lord of Pesaro, member of the Milanese Sforza family, 26 years old at marriage, widower (his first wife died in childbirth).

• Context: Marriage occurred in 1493 as a political alliance—the Sforzas had helped Rodrigo become pope. The union was sealed in the Vatican with a notorious, lavish, and scandal-filled ceremony.

  “Lucrezia in 1493 is the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI... and she, at the point of this marriage, is 13 years old.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 04:27)

The Wedding: Scandal and Spectacle in the Vatican

• Pope Alexander VI was exceptionally public with his illegitimate children, inviting further gossip.

• The wedding extravaganza featured gold, velvet, Roman noble guests, and even the pope’s mistress, creating spectacle (and food fights), as chronicled by observers both scandalized and discreet.

  “There’s a bridesmaid... all the Roman nobility in attendance. Rodrigo the Pope, Pope Alexander, has also brought his mistress and she’s brought all her friends. So it’s this good family wedding... in the Vatican.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 07:45)

The Early Marriage: “Reasonably Well” to Rupture

• Lucrezia moves to Giovanni's domain (Pesaro); initially, their marriage appears unremarkable.

• War forces Giovanni to be away; Lucrezia returns to Rome, her preferred social scene.

• The pope begins seeking a stronger alliance, preferring Naples over Milan, and thus contemplates annulling Lucrezia’s marriage to facilitate another political match.

  “Y’know, you’re 13, 14, 15, you want to be back with your friends. She was really pretty good friends with her sister-in-law… They had a circle there.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 11:18)

The Annulment: An “Impotent” Excuse

• Divorce was nearly impossible in this era. The first strategy: find a paperwork technicality. When cardinals refuse, Plan B emerges—claim non-consummation due to “impotence.”

• Giovanni, insulted and humiliated, lashes out by spreading rumors the pope only wants his daughter for himself, fueling allegations of incest.

  “‘Plan B, we’re gonna say that the marriage was never consummated because Giovanni was not capable...’ You can imagine this does not play particularly well with Giovanni.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 19:10)

  “In this same letter... Giovanni hits back and he says that the reason the Pope is trying to take Lucrezia away from him is to sleep with her himself.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 21:50)

Scandal Multiplies: Incest, Impotence, and Secret Baby

• The incest rumors have long afterlives; historians have debated them for centuries.

• Lucrezia withdraws to a convent during this crisis. Rumors arise she’s pregnant by another man (possibly her father’s staff member, Pedro Calderon, who is later found dead under suspicious circumstances).

• A child, referenced in papal documents as the “Roman infant,” mysteriously appears—his parentage an enduring source of speculation.

  “So as all is... on the one hand, she’s getting divorced for non-consummation, and on the other hand, she’s taken herself off to seclusion in a nunnery. And then there’s a child.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 32:07)

Pressures and Outcomes: Annulment and Aftermath

• Giovanni’s family bows to papal pressure, urging him to accept humiliation to preserve ties with the Vatican.

• Giovanni finally agrees to the annulment, insisting the marriage was consummated and bitterly insulted by the slander.

• Lucrezia remarries happily (for a time), Giovanni remarries and fathers more children (proving his virility to all).

  “Yes, he does. He gets married again... So clearly he was on the case to demonstrate that he was not very impotent.”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 37:53)

• Giovanni’s reputation remains forever tainted—he is remembered primarily as the husband once accused of impotence in a papal divorce.

  “If you go to his Wikip entry, it says something like, Giovanni is mainly known for being accused of impotence in the divorce...”
  (Catherine Fletcher, 42:02)

Legacies and Historical Debate

• Lucrezia: Gains a temporary respite in her second marriage, although her life remains tumultuous.
• Giovanni: Never reconciles with the Borgias, later restored to his properties after the Borgias’ fall from power.
• The Borgia Name: Continues to invoke scandal, Spanish outsider status, and moral ambiguity in Italian and broader European discourse.

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Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

On the Borgias’ Reputation

“If historians for centuries later are picking through the wreckage going, what really happened here? That’s a bad, bad break up.”
(Kate Lister, 03:28)

On Public Humiliation

“People like us are still making podcasts about your bad divorce and your penis problems. What can I say, Giovanni? It’s not the legacy you really want to leave, is it?”
(Kate Lister, 42:35)

On the Papal Wedding

“You can imagine if the Pope today started holding a wedding ceremony for his illegitimate daughter in the Vatican, it would be absolutely outrageous. Scandal with his mistress... Quite publicly.”
(Catherine Fletcher, 08:16)

Incest, Politics, and Rumor

“It starts to raise questions about his first marriage, because remember I said his first wife died in childbirth. So if Giovanni is impotent or has become impotent, what’s going on with the first wife?”
(Catherine Fletcher, 20:34)

“When you make this accusation, even if you’re making it sort of somewhat metaphorically... it associates Rodrigo with the ultimate bad guys of Roman history.”
(Catherine Fletcher, 28:06)

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Timeline & Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:14–02:54 – Introduction, setting the stage, and main players
• 03:01–10:14 – The Borgia family, the unusual Vatican wedding, early marriage dynamics
• 10:29–12:58 – War, marital estrangement, and the pope’s changing alliances
• 16:00–17:22 – The end of marital harmony, family deaths, and start of annulment process
• 17:22–19:10 – Papal efforts to find a loophole, commission of cardinals
• 19:10–22:13 – The “impotence” strategy and Giovanni’s furious counter-allegation
• 27:23–34:43 – Amplifying rumors, Lucrezia’s seclusion, the secret child, murders in the Tiber
• 35:36–39:57 – Pressure on Giovanni, the outcome for all parties, dowry details
• 39:57–42:41 – Giovanni’s restored fortunes post-Borgia, the enduring stain of scandal

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The Episode’s Tone and Approach

The conversation is energetic, witty, and irreverent—balancing sharp historical insight with a frankness about sex, power, and reputation that befits Betwixt the Sheets’ signature style.

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Summary: Why This Breakup Still Matters

Lucrezia Borgia and Giovanni Sforza’s marriage and messy dissolution exemplify how sex, power, and scandal are deeply intertwined in history. The mix of realpolitik, personal humiliation, and the afterlife of rumor (enabled by a press- and gossip-rich Rome) left scars still visible in historical records—and in cultural memory five centuries later. As Kate remarks, to be remembered only for your “bad divorce and your penis problems” is perhaps the worst legacy of all.

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For further reading, Catherine Fletcher recommends her book "The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance."

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[A]

Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cad Lister. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the place where all of your historical filth and smut can be found, where we're just being very rude, but we can all pretend that we're actually learning something at the same time. Hurrah.

[B]

Win, win.

[A]

But before we go any further, I do have to tell you this is an adult podcast. Spoke about adults to other adults about adulty things in adultery way. You can arrange adult subjects and you should be an adult too, right? Proceed at your own caution. Are the divorce courts of history echoey ceilings rustling paper and ter lawyers talking to one another? There's a real mix here from all throughout history. Look, there's Charles and Diana keeping very much to themselves. Henry and Catherine of Aragon are on opposite sides of the room. And Caesar and Pompeia are dead on their feet. Well, they have been here a very, very long time. All these former lovers are busy providing all the evidence and information that they need to get the divorces or annulments that they want. Proof of infidelity, proof of neglect, proof that they never slept with their brother's widow, and so forth. There's a crowd gathered around one couple. However, there's a rumor going round that the man is about to try and prove his virility to the crowd gathered. Been anything but going into therapy, I guess. Right. On with the show.

[B]

Foreign.

[A]

Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. It's been a romantic month, hasn't it? And nothing puts me in the mood more than discussing history's worst breakups. To top them all off, I'm joined once again by Katherine Fletcher. Catherine has previously joined us to talk about the naughtiest pope of all time. And today we're heading back to the 15th century Vatican to meet his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia and her first husband, Giovanni Sforza. With rumours of impotence, incest and a secret illegitimate Roman love child. Could this take the cake as the worst breakup of all? Cloaks on everybody? Let's find out. Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Katherine Fletcher. How are you doing?

[B]

Hello. I am very well. Hello, Kate. Thanks for having me back.

[A]

A pleasure. I mean, who else were we gonna ask for this one? This is the latest installment in our little mini episode of history's worst breakups. And we have gone for Lucretia and Giovanni. Now that's a fun topic.

[B]

It's a very bad Breakup. I mean, if anyone gives you bad

[A]

breakups, it's the Borgias, right?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, they certainly can. And Lucrezia's three marriages are quite something. So here we are in the first one, and it is going to get nasty. It's not just going to get nasty in a period. It's going to get nasty for about four centuries afterwards while historians argue over, like, was it true, you know, which side was to blame, what were they up to? Did it really happen? All the rest of it. So, yeah, lots, Lots to get into.

[A]

See, that's a bad breakup, isn't it? If historians for centuries later are picking through the wreckage going, what really happened here? That's a bad, bad breaker.

[B]

I mean, literally five centuries on, people are going, the secret baby. Really? So that's. That's where. That's where we are. You know, was she actually having somebody else's child? What was going on? You know, there's plenty of scandal attached to this one.

[A]

All right, okay. So set the scene, because there'll be people listening who maybe aren't sure who the main players are. Can you please introduce us to. Is it Lucretia? Is that how we pronounce it?

[B]

Yeah, if you want to be Italian about it. It's Lucrezia or Lucretia. Lucrezia and Giovanni. And they get married in 1493. Now, who's Lucrezia? Lucrezia in 1493 is the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Now, we have talked about this guy before, Kate, and he is one of history's naughtiest popes. And Lucrezia is one of his many illegitimate children. And she, at the point of this marriage, is 13 years old.

[A]

Oh, whoa. Timeout. Whoa, whoa.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, I know. She's 13 years old. I mean, to be fair, she was betrothed when she was 12 years old, and they decided to wait a whole year for her to grow up a little bit before she got actually.

[A]

Oh, well, then. Oh, my.

[B]

So, well, yeah, I know. This was. So. So as things go in the period. Yeah, this is still pushing things a bit, but it's not completely out of the question in terms of what goes on with aristocratic marriages.

[A]

Okay, okay. How old's he? How old?

[B]

He is twice her age at 26.

[A]

All right.

[B]

Okay. Yeah. She's 30 year old being married off to a guy twice her age. And it is a dynastic match, and it's a better match than the family had been planning for her previously. Because since, you know, they first started chatting about who to marry her to which was around when she was a child. Alexander VI has become pope. And as pope, he's in charge of one of the five large states in Italy. And so he could think about much more advantageous marriages for his children. And so he decides, okay, Lucrecia is going to get married to a member of the ruling house of Milan. Now, this is not accidental. These people, the Sportses, helped him get elected pope, so he kind of owes them a favor. And one of the ways that you make these alliances between different countries is with a marriage. So Lucrezia's going to go off and marry Giovanni. Giovanni, who's 26, he's already a widower. His first wife had died in childbirth, which is going to be important for our story later on how she died. Giovanni is the ruler of a town called Pesaro, which is on the Adriatic coast of Italy. And he's a relatively minor member of the ruling family in Milan. But, you know, he's a lord. He's got his own town to be in charge of. It's not a bad match, as these things go.

[A]

Is it weird that he would like to marry or wanted to marry, was offered to marry an illegitimate daughter, even if her dad's the pope?

[B]

Yeah, I think that's why she's marrying a minor member of the family. She's not marrying somebody in the main line of the ruling house of Milan. They would want to marry, you know, if they were going to marry the illegitimate daughter, it would be the illegitimate daughter of maybe the Holy Roman Emperor or the King of France. Probably not an illegitimate daughter of the pope. Rodrigo Borgia as pope, is a little bit unusual in just how public he is about his illegitimate children. I mean, lots of.

[A]

I remember you saying that, actually.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Lots of popes have illegitimate children. They tend to be a bit more discreet than Rodrigo was. So when this pair go off and get married, in fact, they don't go off and get married, they get married in the Vatican. They have a huge wedding ceremony which is very public in the Vatican with all the Roman nobility there. You know, there's that. They've decorate the place up this plot of gold. There's velvet hangings, there's. There's a bridesmaid. There's all the Roman nobility in attendance. Rodrigo the Pope, Pope Alexander has also brought his mistress and she's brought all her friends. So it's this good family wedding going on for the Pope's daughter in the Vatican. So you could imagine people are already raising eyebrows at the start of the marriage because it's not really what a Pope's meant to do. Nobody comments. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just. It's not worse. It's not. You know, you can imagine if the Pope today, like, started holding a wedding ceremony for his illegitimate daughter in the Vatican, it would be absolutely outrageous. Scandal with his mistress. Yeah. Quite publicly. So in your face about all this, which starts to upset various people, and you see that already in that the different versions that you get of the wedding are quite divided. So we've got one version of the wedding which is extremely disapproving. And this is written by the guy who is in charge of ceremonial matters at the Vatican, a guy called Johann Burkhardt, who really does not approve of the Borgias, because they're breaking all the rules about how you're meant to operate properly. And he gives this description where the wedding breakfast ends up in a food fight where all the guests are just taking these Marzi cards and confectionery. They've all got drunk. He's like. There were about 200, like, big basins of wine and cups all around the place, and the whole thing has just descended into absolute chaos as people start flinging things and the food gets trampled underfoot. And he's just. He's very moralizing about this. You know, this is a disgrace. This is, you know, a waste of food. It's outrageous. You know, you can really hear the tone of disapproval coming through. And then you get the other side of the story, which is people writing an account of the wedding who want to just pretend that that stuff didn't happen, so they don't mention it, and they move on to the evening when presumably everybody has sobered up a little bit. And they emphasize the fact that the evening, the ladies had a bit of a dance and then they watched a respectable comedy, a nice clean piece of theatre, and so they report that bit instead.

[A]

It's a bit mad. It doesn't sound like, you know, all right, they had, I guess, a bit of fun, a bit of weird fun at their wedding. There's some scandal, there's some mistresses, but it's pretty on brand for this Pope. They sound like a reasonable match so far.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, they should be a reasonable match. Lucrezia goes off to Pesaro, which is her husband's town, and so far, as we can understand, the marriage goes reasonably well. There are no questions, there is no scandal about it. A war breaks out the following year, and her husband, being a lord in this period, what you do, if you're a lord in this period generally is you go off to war. So he went off to war and the couple were separated for quite an extended period. And at a certain point, Lucrezia ended up living back in Rome. Again, that's not all that unusual. And there is a bit of a question, you know, should she have stayed in Pesaro and just run the family estates? I don't think that was her personality particularly. I think she liked the center of things. You know, you're 13, 14, 15, you know, you want to be back with your friends. She was really pretty good friends with her sister in law, who was also in Rome a lot. And, you know, they had a circle there. That was where she'd grown up. So it seems pretty unsurprising that given that husband wasn't around in Pesaro, that she would come back and effectively spend time living with the family. So this war is also part of a picture in terms of what happens with the marriage, because Italy at this time is divided into many different states. There are five big ones, of which the Papacy and Milan are two. There are lots of small ones. You've also got France involved, you've got Spain involved. The Holy Roman Empire is involved. Everybody is involved in this war. It's the big war going on in Europe. And the smaller players in particular often shift alliances, swap sides, and at a certain point the Pope decides that actually the alliance with Milan is not that useful to him anymore and he would rather have an alliance with Naples. How do you cement an alliance? You do it with a marriage. Now, he's got one child married into Naples already, but the suggestion is perhaps he could upgrade Lucrezia to a better marriage to somebody more senior in the Kingdom of Naples.

[A]

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[C]

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[A]

Did they get along? Did they like each other? So the Pope's kind of angling to, maybe I could do something here, but was this a happy marriage? Like, admittedly, he's away at war, but did they. Did you get any sense that they got on, that they were happy together?

[B]

So far as we can tell, there's not a lot of sources for this. She seems to have been fairly neutral on it. There's no record of her being massively, like, upset. And she's not greatly enthused about it all. And there are a lot of other things going on which at the time, which also come into this bigger picture. Not least the fact that her brother Juan is murdered in the middle of 1497. As this whole process of talking about A split kicks off.

[A]

Oh, dear.

[B]

So you know which of Lucrezia's actions we can attribute to her being upset about the divorce? Which of them are her being upset about her brother? Which of them are her being upset about? Just a general situation. Situation we don't quite know. Certainly one of the things she does in the middle of it is to go off and live in a convent. But we could come on to that because that's. There's a whole other set of stories attached to that. But meanwhile, we've got this divorce going on in which, you know, it's a political divorce. It's about shifting an alliance.

[A]

So the Pope, he's come up with this plan. I could marry off to somebody else. What's the mechanism for this? Does he. Does he just say, now you're divorced, Abracadabra, boom, poof, done.

[B]

No, it's quite difficult to get a divorce in this period. They don't really have that divorce. Yes. Yeah. You might have heard that another person had this problem. Henry viii. Yes. Yes, he did.

[A]

I was just thinking, it's not that easy, is it?

[B]

It's not that easy. So what the Pope does is he sets up a commission of cardinals to investigate whether all the paperwork for the marriage was originally in order. And what he wants these cardinals to do and what the mechanism generally for doing a divorce in this period is, is you find some error in the paperwork that means that the marriage wasn't properly valid. So this could be, for example, that the person was previously betrothed, but the betrothal hadn't been cancelled properly, and that can make the marriage invalid. So they're like, oh, well, no, this paper wasn't signed off by the right people, so therefore the marriage is invalid. Hey, presto, you're divorced.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But the cardinals he puts in charge don't play ball with this because they are a little bit serious, possibly for political reasons, possibly just for religious reasons. I mean, people do take marriage pretty seriously in this period. It's a sacrament. It's something you do in the sight of God. You're not meant to cancel it for trivial reasons. So that doesn't work for him. It's like, okay, plan.

[A]

They don't find anything.

[B]

They certainly don't find the error in the paperwork the Pope was hoping they would find or invent or whatever.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

You know, you don't even need to have a real error in the paperwork. You could have some fake paperwork, but they are not going along with this plan. So we then get, okay, okay, plan B. There are some other reasons by which a marriage might not be valid. For example, if it's never been consummated. For example, if the groom could not consummate the marriage, if the groom was impotent, the guy couldn't get it up. You've got a reason for a divorce. So plan B, we're gonna say that the marriage was never consummated because Giovanni was not capable. You can imagine this does not play particularly well with Giovanni because he is going to have to sign off the documents to confirm it.

[A]

I was just about to say, what's he doing in all of this mess? Did he resist it? Did he go, oh, all right then, like, what was the. What was he doing?

[B]

I mean, I don't think he was exactly happy to start with, because it is a little bit of a slur on your honor to say, look, we're going to marry your wife to somebody more important than you are. You are a bit redundant to our plans now.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, look, you could accept the story that's a technical error in paperwork and just move on with your life. The very public story that you have a problem is a lot harder for Giovanni or not, you can imagine. I mean, so it's not a lot harder for Giovanni to. To deal with. So this is where it all starts kicking off. It's humiliating, you know, and it starts to raise questions about his first marriage, because, remember I said his first wife died in childbirth. So if Giovanni is impotent or has become impotent, what's going on with the first wife? You know, had the first wife actually slept with somebody else to. To have that baby, you know, you don't do. But, you know what I mean, it just sort of opens up all sorts of routes to gossip here. It, you know, raises questions about, you know, Lucrezia hasn't got pregnant, so maybe that's also going to sort of shore up the rumors that he does have some kind of problem. And, you know, the court of Rome, it's notoriously gossipy. You can imagine people saying all sorts. And Giovanni is understandably upset about this whole period. And he, you know, there's a letter from one of the diplomats in Rome in which, you know, Giovanni has been telling him that, you know, he'd slept with his wife an infinity of times. You know, he is absolutely clear that he, you know, they had been properly going at it. And then in this same letter, this is the same letter, Giovanni hits back and he says that the reason the Pope is trying to take Lucrezia away from him is to sleep with her himself.

[A]

Oh, well played, Giovanni.

[B]

Okay. Giovanni is like, okay, look, there's a reason why he's doing this. It's not about politics. It's because he has got incestuous designs on his own daughter and that's why he wants to her to be divorced, so he can get her back. Now, you know, there is, this is not true. There is no evidence, I think where it comes from. Why the rumor picks up a bit is partly because Borgias are an unusually close family in Roman terms. I mean, popes don't, don't usually behave with their illegitimate children like Rodrigo Borgia behaves with his. They are unusually close and there is some suggestion that they're also quite physically affectionate, which isn't sort of the quite the done thing in the etiquette of the court of Rome. And so things like, you know, kissing, hugging, etc get interpreted through this prism as suggestive of something more.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Which I don't think any sort of historians really take that very seriously. But you can see how somebody who is upset at the slur on his own honour like giovanni might put two and two together and make about 17 and say, yes, this is what's going on, this is what it's really about. These people are a bit unnatural anyway. They don't behave like you're meant to. They're a bit foreign, you know, they're, they're from a Spanish dynasty, they're not like us Italians. And start to sort of really spread those rumors about the problem, you know, the problems, the weirdness of this behavior and spin out from there.

[A]

Is it true that the marriage was unconsummated? Do we have any information on that?

[B]

I mean, it seems unlikely to me that it would not have been consummated because people in this period are usually pretty hot on making sure the marriage is consummated precisely for this reason that you don't want it to be declared invalid later on. Obviously, you know, the couple haven't spent loads and loads of time together because he's got off to war. But there was plenty of time that they did spend together. I mean, it might have been the case that they didn't have a lot of sex because actually in marriages where the bride is very young, sometimes they decide not to because they're concerned about the impact of childbirth. I mean, they do understand for all that the marriage at 30 is quite dubious to our standards today. And it sometimes even was back then. They do sometimes then delay more than just a one off consummation because they don't really want to risk a pregnancy when she's still so young. So it's possible that that's a part of the picture. It's really hard to say. Nobody is writing down the details of this. We don't have those kind of household records. We just have to imagine. So, okay, yeah, we get to this point, but I think, you know, if the marriage had not been consummated, somebody would have been dealing with that earlier.

[A]

Be back with Catherine after this short break.

[D]

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[B]

After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's republic, the monarchy returned, but Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this month on Not Just the Tudors. We're transporting back to the age of Restoration royalty from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

So we've got this situation where the Pope's going, he's impotent. And Giovanni's going, he's a nonce and he's incestuous. Nobody knows what Lucretia is doing at this point. Now what happens? Because this is. This is now metastasized into. We've got ego on the line, we've got masculinity on the line, we have reputation on the line. What's the next move?

[B]

So the next move is that these rumours kind of multiply and these rumors about incest are seen as an attack, really from Giovanni, not just sort of specifically saying, the guy's a pervert. He's tried to shag his daughter. But more broadly, they are an attack on the Borgias, on the Pope, on the idea that this man Rodrigo Borgia is a proper person and, you know, a proper person, a proper head of the family. You know, it's a really. A fundamental. It's pretty fundamental accusation to make against somebody. And thinking about the Renaissance culture more generally, you know, this is the type of accusation that is leveled against the worst of the emperors. So the. The emperors who famously are meant to be doing incest are Nero and Caligula. So when you make this accusation, even if you're making it sort of somewhat metaphorically, and it's not 100 clear whether Giovanni literally believes it or not, or whether he's just sort of doing some mudslinging, yeah, it's something that associates Rodrigo with the ultimate bad guys of Roman history. So you can see how, how it works in that sense. But there's also a political context for this, and in terms of getting, you know, who's going to win? Is Giovanni going to back down? Is Rodrigo going to back down? What is Lucrezia going to do? The key people to make the difference are actually Giovanni's family, because the Duke of Milan and the Cardinal Sforza, who's his senior relative, Rodrigo's ally in the court in Rome, actually do not want a massive falling out with the Pope. They think all this is a bit embarrassing for their family, but fundamentally that their younger relatives should just suck it up, put up, shut up with the accusations. Shut up and let them get back to building a normal diplomatic relationship with the Pope. One that, okay, they haven't got a marriage alliance anymore, but they want this problem to go away.

[A]

Yeah, I bet they do. I bet they do.

[B]

Yeah. So eventually, they do not want a whole scandal blowing up because their younger cousin is going around accusing the Pope and now the Pope's son as well, are sleeping with their daughter or sister. Sister. So this is not. This is not great from their point of view. They want to put a lid on it. So they gradually put pressure onto Giovanni to go along with the divorce. Meanwhile, there's a set of stories going around about Lucrezia, which also have potential to cause a lot of problems. The Lucrezia has taken herself off or been sent off, we don't quite know, to a convent and where she stays, really, until this is all sorted. And the letters and correspondence around this time when she goes off to the convent are really quite interesting, but also very coded. So we get things like, some say she wants to become a nun, others say other things, which it is really safe to put in writing. And one of the rumors that starts to go around is that Lucrezia is in fact, pregnant. And so she is off in this convent having a baby, which would be an enormous problem for a question about consummation of this marriage. What if it's possible?

[A]

Oh, yes, yes, it would be, you

[B]

know, screw up the argument that he is impotent. Unless she slept with somebody else, which is what the story starts to go around, that she's actually having an illegitimate child. And, you know, some. Some people say, oh, this is all fake news. It's not happening. It's not made up. But there is a child. A child turns up after that date. Yes, yes. So as all is. So on the one hand, she's getting divorced for not consummation, and on the other hand, she's taken herself off to seclusion in a nunnery. And then there's a child. And the child is declared in two different papal documents to be either her father's or her brother's, not Lucrezia's. But the child exists. The child is known as the Roman infant. In a lot of the documents, he says a random Roman infant. Poor kid.

[A]

Who do you think this child is?

[B]

Well, this is where the plot thickens even further, because the following February, February, I think, 1498, a couple of bodies turn up in the River Tiber. And these are the bodies of a woman who's believed to be Lucrezia's maid. And the man who's called Pedrotto, Pedro Calderon, who's a member of her father's household and is rumoured to have got her pregnant in this time when she was away from her husband, living in Rome. Oh, so now the rumors sort of escalate that these two have been murdered to keep them quiet, to squash the rumor that the child was Lucrezia's by getting rid of the key witness. And of course, what actually happens is this only amplifies the rumors. So we don't know. We don't know whose child the Roman infant in fact is. Is it Lucretius? Is it Rodrigo's? Is it Cesare's? So what's interesting, what this could get, is being called Giovanni, like, Like. Like the divorced husband, which is kind of weird. But there's still, to this day, there's a debate between historians about whether or not that might be Lucrezia's baby, because some of the sources suggest that she treated him in much later on, rather more like she was treating her own children than she treated the other Borgia bastards. I personally am not sure that this is strong enough evidence to be sure, but I think, you know, the circumstantial evidence of Lucrezia disappearing, then the people who might be witnesses to all this, it's certainly enough to explain why there were rumors going around about Lucrezia's behavior in this period and why, of course, if you think about, on the one hand, Giovanni is being accused of impotence, the husband. And then, you know, even while the divorce process is still going on, the rumors start to circulate that his wife has gone off to have another man's child.

[A]

Oh, it's a whole mess. This is a right mess.

[B]

I mean, it's a complete mess, isn't it? And there are so many different tango blurs to it. There's the politics, there's what the couple themselves were actually doing. There's the mud slinging, there's all the rumors and the fact that, you know, for me, as a historian, the fact that we actually have tiny, tiny fragments of speculation. And a lot of people do this thing where they say, I have heard many rumours about this which I will not write down because they are such bad rumours, which is the kind of source that just got. Write them down, please. Like, just write the rumours down. Write them down. Yes. So we don't know, but that's where we've got. We've got rumours of an illegitimate child and we've got this sort of mudslinging of, on the one hand, impotence and on the other hand, incest.

[A]

It's really nasty. Does Giovanni agree to the divorce? Then what happens?

[B]

He does. He agrees to the divorce.

[A]

Yeah. He sounds like the weak point in all of this. If everyone's pressuring him, including his family.

[B]

I think everybody just wants this to go away.

[A]

Yes. Just shut up about your penis, Giovanni, please.

[B]

You know, Lucrezia moves on to her second marriage. By all accounts, the second marriage is a genuinely happy one. And I think that's, you know, it's actually a good outcome for her for a little while. Yeah. Until the second husband gets murdered, but that's another story. So she has a bit of happiness in the middle of what's quite a nasty situation in terms of, you know, her life course. But, yeah, she marries this Neapolitan prince. They seem to do quite well for a while. Giovanni goes off. He can never go back to his hometown while the Borgias are still around and in power. At one point, Lucrezia's brother Cesareo tries to take over his lands. So the military response to being accused of incest is like, actually, I'm going to invade your town. So there's not no comeback for him on these accusations.

[A]

Was there ever any suggestion that he would have to be tested for impotence? Because that does happen when somebody makes an accusation that the marriage couldn't be consummated. You see that in sort of medieval records going through into the early modern period, is that a group of wise matrons would be summoned to test the member.

[B]

No, because I think in this case, everybody understands that it's just a convenient fiction.

[A]

It's a lie.

[B]

Nobody's really saying he's impotent. They're just saying that because they need to say that to get the marriage ended. So, yeah, you wouldn't want to put it. Obviously, they're like, you know, testing is a bad idea in this circumstance because actually he would clearly pass the test. That's not the problem. The problem is we just want to agree on an excuse, however embarrassing it may be for this guy. And it is very embarrassing for him to claim that he cannot perform with women.

[A]

Does he ever live this down? Does he. Does he go on to have more wives? What's his deal?

[B]

Yeah, he does. He gets married again. He marries a woman called Ginevra Tiepolo and. And he had two sons with her and he had another two illegitimate daughters. So clearly he was on the case to demonstrate that he was not very impotent.

[A]

It must have just been desperate to have sex with people. Please have my baby. As soon as these babies turn around, look, look, they're here.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, while people in the period understand that this would have been an excuse to dissolve the marriage, and it's not really a slur against him, but when it's put to him as the alternative to the paperwork technicality solution, he clearly has at least a moment when he is absolutely losing it at the prospect of being publicly declared a guy who cannot get it up. You know, you have to. You have to sympathise a bit with. With his situation here.

[A]

I'd simply. That's not a nice thing to have to, like, put down on a piece of paper. Did it, like, did he have to return the dowry or anything else? Did they at least pay him off well for this madness?

[B]

So in theory, he was meant to return the dowry, but at least some interpretations suggest that he didn't. Yeah, I keep it. And it was, it was. It was 31, 000 ducats. The. The dowry, and that is a lot of money. So if you were a one of the lower paid cardinals in Rome at this time, you might be on around 3,000 a year. So it's 10 years lower ranking cardinals income, you know, that's not bad. It's not super rich billionaire type money, but it's a very nice, you know, amount of cash that is going to keep you very, very comfortably in, you know, without having to work for a living. So he is not doing very badly in those circumstances.

[A]

Does he ever make it up with the barges? I mean, don't they excommunicate him later on? That would suggest.

[B]

No, no, he doesn't ever make it up with the Borgias. He has to wait until the Borgias are out of power. In the next Pope Julius II comes into power. Julius hates the Borgias and Julius confirms Giovanni back in his Lordship of Pesaro and everything is fine again. And I think perhaps that reflects a bit of a broader feeling about the Borgias in the papacy, that the Borgias were, you know, and some of this I think is a certain amount of Italian prejudice against the Borgias for having Spanish roots. We comes through in quite nasty ways at certain points. But I think at the end of the day, there are also quite a lot of people relieved to see the Borgias out of power in 1503.

[A]

Through the back of them.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So as a final question then, was there good that came out of forcing this couple to divorce on kind of trumped up charges of impotence and all the rest of it? I guess what I'm asking is, did the Pope get what he wanted in the end? Was it worth it to do this?

[B]

I think the Pope got what he wanted, which was for the moment and aligns with Naples and a reasonably okay relationship with the rulers of Milan who eventually forced Giovanni to accept it. I think Lucrezia for a while got to marry somebody that she preferred. So it was a good outcome for her. She did all right for a while. Unfortunately, that also doesn't have a good ending in a different way. But she had a bit of happiness in the middle of there. And Giovanni, yeah, he had to wait it out. But we're only talking six years. It's not a very long time in the scheme of things. And then he could move on with wife, with the kids, with the mistresses and the other kids and you know, live the typical aristocratic life of the period.

[A]

He must have like, that must have just hung around his neck though, like, like to be accused of something like that on paper and have to sign to it. It must have been forever embarrassing.

[B]

I mean, I think it's indicative that. Still, I think if you go to his Wikip entry, it says something like, Giovanni is mainly known for being accused of impotence in the divorce. You know, like he's mainly known as the husband of the. And then they give. And then that's by far the largest section of his Wikipedia. Can you imagine that? That's. That's the thing that you were known for in your life. You go down in history. Five hundred years later, people like us are still making podcasts about your bad divorce and your penis problems. You know, what can I say, Giovanni? It's not the legacy you really want to leave, is it?

[A]

No, it's not. That is a bad breakup. That is a bad breakup. Oh, Catherine, you have been marvellous to talk to poor Giovanni. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[B]

So they can find my [e-mail] and they can find links to all my books. Books there. This topic is mainly covered in the Beauty and the Terror An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance.

[A]

Thank you so much. You have been wonderful.

[B]

Thank you, Kate.

[A]

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Catherine for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to, like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got Glitz, Glam, Bombshell and Murders. We are heading to the golden age of Hollywood. What was Tinseltown like at its peak and what scandals nearly brought it down. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtory hit.com. this podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the history of Sex Scandal in Society. A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.