Katherine (4:32)

Catherine, welcome back to the podcast.

Ann Maddox (4:34)

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Katherine (4:36)

So it's great to talk to you about the Borgias and particularly today, Cesare. So his rise to power really begins with the moment his father is elected to the papacy. 1492, as Pope Alexander VI. Why did advancing Cesare in a religious career suit his father's ambitions?

Ann Maddox (4:57)

I think here, Rodrigo Borgia, who becomes Pope Alexander vi, is following a fairly conventional route that a lot of aristocratic families in Italy do at this time, and that is to split their sons between secular roles where they can become military leaders, make advantageous marriages to heiresses, gain lands and power in that secular side of the world, and then placing one or more sons in ecclesiastical career because that qualifies them to become bishops. Bishops often will have substantial landholdings and eventually they may also become a cardinal, which gives them a level of power at the highest echelons of the Catholic Church. So this is about not putting all your eggs in one basket, having some sons go down one route and other sons go down, you know, a second, which is also very significant in terms of the power relations across Europe.

Katherine (5:54)

And how had Cesare's early life and education prepared him for this role as a cardinal?

Ann Maddox (6:01)

We know that he was actually doing rather well at university I mean, he was very young to become a cardinal. He was still, in fact, in his teens at the point when he was nominated Bishop of Valencia in 1492. So he was born in 1475. But even people who are really, really critical of Cesare later on, like Paolo Jovio, who's a historian writing in the 1540s, say that he was a brilliant law student at the University of Pisa. So clearly he was bright. By this time, it was becoming rather accepted that popes did appoint their nephews to the College of Cardinals. Alexander VI certainly was not the first person to do that. And so Cesare comes in and speaks, starts taking up various officers, various roles in the papal administration.

Katherine (6:49)

And at the age of 23, however, having been sort of spending this time from the tender age of 16 in the church, he now moves into a position of military leadership. Was he better suited, do you think, for the secular life than the ecclesiastical one?

Ann Maddox (7:04)

Well, papal court can be quite a brutal place, and some of them do quite a bit of military and political administration. As cardinals, you get a mix within the cardinal's court. But, yes, there is a point when the elder brothers have died, or in one case, which will come on to probably have been murdered, and then Cesare steps out of that ecclesiastical role to take on the position of that son who is going to be the military star, who is going to be the prince who will make the advantageous marriages. And it's a bit of a gamble, in one sense. He has got an income from his ecclesiastical landholdings, the benefices of 35,000 ducats a year. Now, that is an awful lot of money. I mean, it really puts you into the category of super rich at this point, and he is giving it up to try and have this secular military career. He is considerably helped by the politics of the time because he gets married to a French heiress, Charlotte d'albret, the sister of the King of Navarre. So, Naisi, Navarre, being on the borders between modern France and Spain, and he's able to do this because the French king needs an enormous favour from the pope. So this is Louis xii, the king of France, wants to get divorced. So we're in the uk, here in England, we're quite familiar with this concept of kings who want to get divorced and need a favor from the pope. Well, the French king was in this position at the time, time. And so Alexander VI extracted a lot of favours from Louis XII for Cesare in return for giving the dispensations that allowed him to divorce and remarry. So Cesare gets his Very flashy French match. He gets the promise of French support for a military campaign, initially against Milan and then more broadly in northern Italy. And, you know, he seems to get on rather well with his wife, although they only spend a very limited amount of time actually living together. So there he is. He has to. He's set up, but he has to lead his military campaign and really make that work.

Katherine (9:24)

And can you give me some sense of the context of this military campaign? What is he seeking to achieve?

Ann Maddox (9:31)

Cesare is trying to make himself Duke of the Romagna. So the Romagna is the part of Italy that, as things stand at this point, is under the rule of the Papal States. So you might be familiar, the Pope today is really only has the tiny, tiny little Vatican state in Rome, but go back 500 years, and the Pope ruled a whole swathe of lands across central Italy. So from Rome up to Bologna and across to several towns that are on the Adriatic coast, the idea is that Cesare is going to carve out a chunk of that, some of which has independent rulers and is contested by the papacy, some of which doesn't, and make himself an independent duchy. So he is off with French support, in the context of a much longer running war, to try and capture towns like Imola, which is most famous these days for their Formula One racing, and Foley, which is nearby. These various towns, also Urbino, which has been an independent duchy, in order to give himself a coherent territorial state up there.

Katherine (10:39)

And one of his most famous successes comes at one of those towns you've mentioned, at the siege of Forli. Could you tell me a bit about that siege and the larger political implications of its outcome?

Ann Maddox (10:51)

Yeah, I mean, this is a particularly interesting one because he and his French counterparts succeed in capturing Imola, they go on to Forli. And Forli is under the rule of Caterina Riario Sforza, who is a very, very formidable figure in this, at this point in the Italian Renaissance, she is related to both the Sforza rulers of Milan and to the della Rovera, rivals of the Borgias at the papal court, who have ruled a number of states in this area. So she is an extremely formidable figure. She has done a great deal to hold on to her castle, to fight off the besieging troops. But eventually, and she's done it before, in fact, this is not her first rodeo, this is a second time of actually trying, you know, leading military campaigns to defend herself. And effectively, in this instance, she. She has to give up. She's forced to surrender and she ends up as a hostage of Cesare So there's a great deal of kind of myth making around Caterina, including there's at one point this sort of story that there she is standing up on. On the castle walls when people have taken her children hostage and sort of lifting her skirts and saying, I have the means to make more children. You won't take me. Now. This is in fact something that's later invented by Machiavelli and isn't in the contemporary sources, but it gives you an ide some of the tales that were going around about Caterina at the time, you know, she. She ends up being captured by Cesare. There are reports of mistreatment. It's quite hard to know exactly what happened because there are. On the one hand, you know, violence against female captives is commonplace in wartime. On the other hand, her links to some very powerful families and the threat of revenge, should she be mistreated, might militate in favor of some more reasonable treatment of her. So we just don't know. But this is a story that feeds into a lot of the tales about Cesare's particularly bad reputation with women, a lot of which come in later on in his career and are not necessarily so apparent in the contemporary sources. So difficult balance to be clear about here, you know, without further documentation.

Katherine (13:20)

Interesting what you say about Caterina. And I wonder, given the state of the evidence that we have about her, is it possible to draw any conclusions about what her actions tell us about the role of women in Italian Renaissance society?

Ann Maddox (13:38)

She seems to me somebody who is. Is something of an exception to the rule about women in the Italian wars. Women in Italy are often more marginalized than women in Northern Europe from activity in warfare. We see less examples of them getting actively involved in, for example, military supply and such like, although there are. There are some examples of that, particularly when women are left in charge of estates in their husband's absence. What I think Katarina might tell us about is that the particular cases where women are allowed to take action, and that's during sieges, siege warfare is the one point when it becomes acceptable for women to get involved in the active defense of themselves and their cities. So there's both an individual exception to the rule in that Katarina does appear to push further than a lot of women. But there's also a segment, situational exception to the rule in that the siege allows you to do things that perhaps you might not otherwise do, whether that is helping fortify a city or going out there and pouring boiling oil over the ramparts of the castle, or whatever it happens to be.

Katherine (15:00)

And what should we make of Cesare's success? I mean, he's funded by the papacy, he's presumably got arms from France. France. But also he's depending, isn't he, on his own sort of intelligence, his technical, strategic intelligence, yes. If you were to evaluate his success, the cause of his success, which of these things would you highlight?

Ann Maddox (15:22)

I mean, he does very well, and I think. I mean, he gets a particularly good write up from Machiavelli quite early on, and Machiavelli is around at the time and actively observing. And then he writes about Cesare that this lord is truly splendid and magnificent, and in war there is no enterprise so great that it does not appear small to him. You know, he is popular with his soldiers and he has collected the best men in Italy. These things make him victorious and formidable, particularly when added to perpetual good fortune. And one of the things Cesare does seem to be able to do is to recruit soldiers locally to fight for him against some of the other lords of the area. And some of the analysis behind this suggests that what's going on is that the people of the Romagna are quite fed up with a lot of feuding aristocrats and a lack of social order in that region. And they actually quite like the idea of having a strongman leader who's going to come and be in charge, settle things down, stop some of the vendettas and feuds that are making their lives worse, and institute a proper system of justice that will function well and, you know, a government that they can respect. So one of the things that even quite critical writers tend to give Cesare some credit for is being a good governor in the Romagna. Not to say he's a perfect governor or that everybody absolutely appreciates what he's doing, but even, you know, somebody like Francesco Guicciardini, who is not generally a fan of Cesareo, says that, you know, Romagna was inclined to devotion to him because he'd learned from experience how much more tolerable it had been to serve altogether under a single powerful lord. So in that sense, he appears to be able to inspire people to go along with him. He's also very smart in terms of military tactics. He takes Urbino with a really impressive surprise attack. And he is very, very hot as well on dealing with people who threaten to betray him or conspire against him. Quite brutal in some.

Katherine (18:01)

One other thing that occurs to me, one of his strategies was to hire Leonardo da Vinci to design siege equipment. So how did technological innovation factor into his successes?

Ann Maddox (18:13)

One of the things we know about from Leonardo's drawings is in fact, not the flashy military equipment. It's something that seems to us much more basic, but that at the time was really innovative. And that is a map. Leonardo drew one of the first absolute sort of bird's eye, accurately measured maps of a city for Cesare, and that was a map of Imola. So when Cesare was trying to think about how to besiege Imola, how best to get his troops into the city, what was the exact topography of the city, he had Leonardo to do this very, very precise design. And if you search for this online, you'll find it in the Royal Collection website. And he produces an absolutely marvellous, correctly measured map of the city. And that, I think, helps Cesare as much as any of the designs of the rather adventurous siege machines that we all see. And we see the models of them today, which in fact, don't seem to have been used all that much in practice. They tend to stick to your tried and tested artillery. And we have some use of handguns and pike and shot formations coming in a little bit more now at this point. But, yeah, it's Leonardo's mapping skills, I think, that perhaps serve Cesare the most that's so interesting.

Katherine (19:33)

We assume it's the fancy machinery, but in actual fact, it's just knowing where things are.

Ann Maddox (19:38)

Yes.

Katherine (19:39)

So what impact did Cesare's actions then have on the stability of the Italian city states and the sort of larger political landscape, talking landscapes of the country as a whole?

Ann Maddox (19:51)

Well, I think he is really quite feared by the time he's finished in the Romagna, and he has really quite a solid grip on it. I mentioned before that he saw off some people who were conspiring against him, which included some of the Orsini family, who are a big baronial family with major holdings around the Papal States, but very much opponents of the Borgias at this time. Paolo Orsini and a couple of other mercenary leaders in Cesare's service tried to launch a coup against Cesare. At one point, he found out about it. He brought them into a meeting and, you know, deceived them into coming and just having an ordinary meeting with him and then arrested them and eventually had them all executed. So he is seen as somebody who is not going to tolerate attacks on his power. Where he perhaps gets into trouble a bit is by leaving the Romagna and trying to also take on military activity in Lazio around Rome. And that, towards the end of Alexander VI's papacy, arguably overstretches him a bit and puts him in a difficult position when it comes to maintaining those lands in the period of transition from his father to another pope. And this moment of transition was always going to be particularly difficult because Cesare had relied on the support of the papacy and he had relied on the support as well of the French. And both those things are potentially quite fragile because he cost the French money to supply an army to fight with him. And, you know, the papacy is not always going to be friendly. So this situation is one that, you know, in 1503 really comes to a head.

Katherine (21:47)

Let's talk a bit about his reputation for cruelty, ruthlessness. You've mentioned that he inspired Machiavelli to write the Prince. And I'd like to know to what extent you think his reputation stems from Machiavelli's depiction.

Ann Maddox (22:07)

I think in the modern portrayal of Machiavelli's description is very, very important. I mean, whether exactly he is the inspiration for the prince or not is something that the experts on that text will argue over all day and all night. There is a question about whether what Machiavelli is doing by the end in talking about Cesare's activities is actually discovering, discussing him as somebody who failed. And so he's an ironic example of what a prince should do because everybody reading the prince by the time it's written will know that Cesare in fact did not get through that transition after his father died. So on the one hand we have, yeah, the write up by Machiavelli sets the scene for the Cesare's part of the myth of the Borgias. And certainly there are some incidents where you can absolutely see Cesare acting very brutally. So for example, in terms of the murder of his brother in law, it is very clear that at one point in his life, Cesare commissions the murder, the garroting of his brother in law by one of his lieutenants. Now, exactly what his motives are for doing that are, you know, still remain a little bit mysterious. There's an argument that it's a crime of passion. After the brother in law tried to kill Cesare. There's all sorts of different interpretations. We have another case where in June 1502, the body of the Lord of Faenza, one of the places that Cesare has, has been up trying to conquer the body of its ruler is who had been taken as a prisoner of war, is found, you know, washing up in the Tiber. So that's one particular example of, you know, the lack of respect for treatment of people who, you know, you have taken prisoner. There's also in, in the context of this attempted coup against him, Cesare is responsible for the headless body of one of the condottieri turning up in the main square of a town called Cesena. And Machiavelli says about this, you know, nobody feels sure of the cause of his death, except that. So it has pleased the prince who shows that he can make and unmake men as he likes, according to their desserts. We can make up a little list of people who came to a nasty end under Cesare's oversight. I think, however, I think there's a caveat to that, which is that none of this is very unusual and Cesare gets a lot of stick for it. But if you go through the list of every Renaissance ruler, there are very few to whom it is not possible to attach some tales of assassination, murder, whether judicial murder or informally commissioned assassination, it's quite common. It is particularly common during this period of wartime. If you look at the Medici in the 1530s, there's a sex thing, succession of three murders that had vendetta between different members of the family. It's the same with Farnese family, you can find multiple examples of misdeeds. The. The della Rovera family. I could go on. So picking Cesare out seems to me to be more about the longer term myth of the Borgias is peculiarly the bad guys and rather less about what he actually personally did.

Katherine (26:07)

During his life. Another part of his reputation was for debauchery and sexual immorality. We've already talked about Katerina Sforza. How much truth is there to the story of the so called banquet of chestnuts?

Ann Maddox (26:23)

Well, yeah, this is an interesting one. This is a party supposedly given by cesare to which 50 Roman courtesans were invited. And they're supposed to have danced naked with the servants and competed to pick chestnuts up off the floor. And the men present are then sort of competing for the favors of these courtesans. It's written up in a very disapproving way in the diary of the papal masters. Master of ceremonies at this time, Johann Burkhardt. Now he was no fan of the Borgias, but on the other hand, he also usually wasn't a gossip about what they got up to. He wasn't recording every little detail of Cesare's indiscretions, but he did choose to record this, which, given that he was around at the time, might lean towards putting some weight on it. Now it's quite. Again, this is one of these things that it's quite hard to say. Maybe it happened exactly as written, maybe it happened on a somewhat lower scale. But Burkhardt is sort of writing. There were at least 50 courtesans, you know, when actually perhaps it had started off as a rather informal party and just got wildly out of hand when some gay crushers turned up. I mean, these are things that. It's quite hard to tell in retrospect exactly how much weight to put on the detail of the descriptions, but it's quite a specific description. It's not a sort of routine ritual that you get every year in Rome. Somebody does this party of the chestnuts. So perhaps there's something to it.

Katherine (27:57)

Now we'll talk about Cesare's possible role in his brother's murder in a different episode, but let's move on to think about what happened to Cesare with the death of his father. You've mentioned that Rodrigo borgio, Pope Alexander VI, dies in 1503. How did it affect Cesare's political standing?

Ann Maddox (28:18)

This is one moment when Cesare, I think, really miscalculates partly. He doesn't have a great deal of choice in the matter because both he and his father have been struck down by fever. I mean, there are tales of poisoning, but then every time anybody gets a fever in Rome, there's a tale about poisoning. So I don't know how much weight we can put on that. But Cesare isn't very well, which doesn't help him get his ducks in a row to deal with the succession. Initially, there's a compromise candidate called Cardinal Piccolomini, who is elected as Pope Pius III when the conclave opened. But he only lived for just over a month. And in the conclave that then follows, Giuliano Della Rovera, who is from a family that are no fans of the Borgias at all, becomes Pope Julius ii. Cesare tries to make a deal with Giuliano in which he will keep his territories in the Romagna. But Julius ii, the name that Giuliano takes as Pope Julius has absolutely no intention of sticking to this. And with the support of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, who refused to give Cesare any backing in this situation, he basically decides to outlaw Cesare and basically arrest him. So, effectively, Cesare ends up in a situation where the French are not going to continue to support him, because in one place, this diplomatic match is no longer useful to them. With, given that, you know, he's not the Pope's son anymore, they have a different pope that they're going to need to deal with. He isn't getting support from the Spanish. Spanish. So even though he has relatives in Spain, there's a whole set of Borgias over in Spain who are very well connected into the Spanish Royal family, they are not going to back him. And gradually his Romagna fortresses and cities surrender to the papal armies. So gradually his strongholds in Romagna surrender to the papal armies. He ends up in Naples, which is under the Spanish government, and he is shipped off as a prisoner to Spain. Now, in 1506, he manages to escape from prison and finds refuge in Navarre with his brother in law, the King of Navarre. But the following year, he goes back to war with the Navaresi army and he dies in a skirmish. So this is, you know, the rather, yeah, tragic fate, in a sense, of Cesare, who on the one hand showed so much military promise, but there is no advantage to being a great military commander if you do not have the political backing to sustain your holdings in the Romagna. When the crunch comes, to what extent.

Katherine (31:15)

Do you think that that would always have been the case with a new pope, you know, new broom? Important to see the downfall of the relatives of the previous pope, bar one, in this case, that month. Or does it really come down to that long standing personal animosity with the Borgias?

Ann Maddox (31:31)

I think that some of it is simply about time and how much time Cesare had, or rather didn't have to settle into the leadership of the Romagna. The conquest have only been there in place for one or two years. If he'd had a longer period of government, I think he might well have been able to sustain the state. And if there's a good comparison, 40 or so years on with a son of Pope Paul iii, Pierluigi Farnese, son of the Pope, again, does this same trick of trying to make himself an independent state, makes himself a state in Parma and Piacenza, but is actually around, I think, off the top of my head for about a decade before he's assassinated. And even after his assassination, the Farnese, with a bit of difficulty, managed to hold on to the state. So that, I think is a good example of if you have the time to consolidate your rule, it might be possible to make yourself a new state in this polity of quite, you know, considerable flux between rulers over the different bits of Italy. But in Cesare's case, he just wasn't sort of bedded in with governors with, with, you know, state officials who were going to be loyal definitely to him when somebody else turned up and said, no, hold on a minute, we are in charge now. We don't recognize Cesare's authority.

Katherine (33:02)

And I'm struck by the fact that he goes to seek refuge with his brother in law, the King of Navarre, and becomes a General serves under him. And yet this man who has been a great military commander isn't able to earn success in that situation either.

Ann Maddox (33:23)

No. And I wonder whether that is partly about him being seen as too much of a foreigner to be able to do the kind of thing he had been able to do in the Romagna, in Romania. I mean, obviously the Borgias are originally Spanish, but they've been living in Italy for a long time. Cesare is born in Italy, brought up there. He and the people of the Romagna have an interest in getting behind him as a strongman ruler, as a better alternative to some of the lords they previously had in Navarre. I'm just not sure that there's a parallel situation that enables him to run the same tactics. And I mean, for all that he has had some tactical success, he isn't, I think, at this time, on the list of the really, really top military commanders who are doing major, major innovations. He might have got there eventually had he lived longer. But thinking about, he's born in 1475, he's barely into his 30s when he dies. So considering how little time he had, what he managed to accomplish in the military sphere is really quite impressive. And the people who have the great reputations in this period are all 10, 20 years his senior when they get those reputations and the accidents of war happen. I mean, this is part of the deal that even the most impressive of military commanders do end up being shot on the battlefield, falling victim to a stray hike somewhere, whatever it happens to be.

Katherine (34:59)

Twenty years after he was buried, Cesare's tomb was demolished. His body was exhumed and reburied in unconsecrated ground by the Bishop of Kalahara. It's a fierce testament to Cesare's enduring reputation. Is it a reputation he deserves?

Ann Maddox (35:18)

I don't think it's a reputation he deserves. I think there are some really very, very nasty rumours that go around about the Borgias after their death. Some of the rumours really tie them to the devil and so say, you know, even talk about demons rising out of the dead body of Pope Alexander. They're sort of quite, quite horrific stories. And on some occasions the stories tie into what we now call the black legend of Spain. The particular idea that the Spanish as a nation are unusually cruel, are unusually brutal, and that connects that to the roots of the Spanish nation as including, as well as Christians, Jews and Muslims. And one of the rumors that goes around about Cesare, contemporary rumor, is that the Borgias are of Jewish descent. So you actually get a kind of anti Semitic element of some of the Borgia myth which says these people aren't even properly Christian, partly because they're Spanish, and by implication because the Spanish are not necessarily of pure blood. And so I think when we talk about some of the Borgian myth, it's quite important to be aware of where that comes from and the fact that it gets tied in in part to that story of the Spanish which circulates within also within Italy and other Catholic countries, and then into Protestant tales about the Pope as the Antichrist, in which, of course, any tale about misconduct of the Pope feeds into a narrative about the Catholic Church being fundamentally a dreadful, dreadful institution, responsible for all sorts of brutal, greedy, lustful and generally inappropriate behavior at its very top. So I think in two different ways we see this myth of the Borgias arising, in which Cesare's conduct, which while of many cases, in many cases is not particularly desirable, but is also not out of line with what other commanders do in the context of war, becomes inflated and dramatized into this shocking tale of lascivious, brutal misconduct.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (37:56)

Katherine, please come back next time and tell me about the unsolved murder of Juan Borgia.

Ann Maddox (38:02)

Very happy to thanks for listening to.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (38:05)

Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. If you haven't heard it yet, do go and find our previous episode on the Rise of the Borgias. And do join me for the next episode in this series on the Borgias, when Katherine Fletcher and I will look more closely at one of history's greatest cold cases, the murder of Juan Borgia.

Amanda Lifford (38:42)

ACAST Powers the World's Best Podcasts Here's a show that we recommend.

Professor Catherine Fletcher (38:50)

We all have bad days and sometimes bad weeks and maybe even bad years. But the good news is we don't have to figure out life all alone. I'm comedian Chris Duffy, host of ted's how to Be a Better Human podcast. And our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life. Actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day to day better. Whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house, each episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life's ups and downs. Find how to be a better human wherever you're listening to this.

Amanda Lifford (39:25)

ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.