Diane Girardo (4:58)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (5:00)

I suppose we should start with Lucretia Borgia's marriage at the age of 13 to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro and Gradara. How did such a marriage serve to strengthen the political alliances of the Borgias?

Diane Girardo (5:16)

The Pope was interested in building an alliance with the Duke of Milan and his various relatives. This marrying her to the son of one of the key people in this group brought them closer in alliance. Yes, it was very real, but it was also, you know, you have to stand back and look at the person in the picture. Lucretia was a very happy, joyful, lovely girl. She was 13. She was full of energy, happiness, and she really did things that surprise you. And she was very happy when she went there, she was happy. When she wrote letters to her father, everything was just happy. And the man was happy with her. She was happy with him. She had great sex with him, apparently. And so it wasn't such a big deal. And she wasn't in love with him, probably because she really fell in love with Alfonso Darragona, who was her second husband. But still, she was happy with this man, and there was no reason why she shouldn't be happy with him. When the lion broke down and the Pope decided to look to the south for his things, he thought that, well, they'd just annul the marriage. And actually they thought about a lot of other things, including killing him. And Lucretia heard this immediately, told him, get on your horse and ride away, because they're after you, they're going to get you. And he did. So they finally decided, well, the best thing to do, of course, was to either he died, which was. I mean, there were only two things that happened. Either he died or the marriage was illegal. Well, the marriage was illegal because he decided that he was impotent and he wasn't. And she had a happy time with the marriage. She said, yes, he was impotent, she knew he wasn't, everybody knew he wasn't. But this was the sort of fig leaf that they drew up. And he was furious at this, and he swore he was. He was absolutely beside himself because this is an affront to his masculinity. So he wrote a letter and he said her father wanted her back so that he could sleep with her. Okay, so that was the beginning of the whole narration about the secret marriage, actually.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (7:20)

Okay, so we have this damning allegation of incest at the time. Did people react to it? Was it publicly known?

Diane Girardo (7:31)

Well, publicly known, you know, lots of things didn't happen outside Broad General. It was only a few nobles who knew things that went on. So those people did, but nobody could read, you know, so you have to remember that the large bunch of people living there couldn't read. But the people who did read saw that as a damning feature in her perspective. Why? Because whenever you want to call into question the masculinity, the power of a male noble, I guess you call into question the integrity of the women. That is their chance to dig. This was really a damning feature for them. The worst thing that you could do for a man was to insult the dignity of the women. And she's the only woman in the family, so she got insulted a lot.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (8:23)

During the annulment proceedings. She retired to a convent for six months. And this fuels further rumors in this case that she's carrying an illegitimate child. What can you tell me about the so called infant Romanus?

Diane Girardo (8:37)

This is sort of a Long story. The papal envoy to her house in the San Sylvestro convent thought that they could bring their mail and stuff every day. Well, okay, she's 17, he's 19. Things happen. And they did happen. And this couple got involved and she got pregnant. Her brother found out about it after she got too big to let it go. And he was absolutely furious. He grabbed hold of. His name was Pedro, and he killed him, threw him in the Tiber. He also threw in the Tiber the woman who helped him. Because obviously you need somebody to help you. And she's the one who helped him. And obviously, I mean, none of this stuff is known, but everybody knows it anyway. And obviously his body and stuff were found. So Luprezia continued. She was actually examined and determined to be a virgin right before she gave birth. Yes. Sort of an insane moment, but that's what happened. The infants Romano, you know, everybody has said that he didn't exist. Guess what? He did. And he did in very specific ways. He was. And he was named as her son by the nobles. For example, when the Caetani family had lots of their stuff taken by the Pope. And they did it all very legally and matter of factly. One of the things that they did was listed all the people who gathered the stuff up in their behalf, including Lucia Borgia. And what did they say? Well, some of this went to her son, who was from her second marriage, Rodrigo. And some of it went to her other son, Giovanni. Hello. Where did Giovanni come from? He didn't come to Ferrara, but that's because the old duke was there. She and Alfonso knew that he was. I imagine that Alfonso knew, but I don't know for sure. But anyway, he came to Ferrara literally within a few months after Erco, they died. So I think that that was probably sort of clinching matter. And then when he was quite a bit older, there was all this money that was set aside for him that was paid monthly, that was from the papal accounts of various sorts that all went to him. And so, you know, he's always referred to as her brother. And, you know, this is fine. This is what everybody knew. But when she wrote to the. I guess it was the. I can't remember exactly who the letter was to, but she said, please be very careful when you get him. Because she was having a doctor look at him because she was concerned about him. She said, I want the best possible care for the. One of the people that's most dear to me in the world. And obviously this is Lucretia's son, Giovanni.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (11:14)

So the impression you're giving me is that when it comes to figuring out the truth about what happened, when we're thinking about the Borgias, when we're thinking about the nature of these relationships, it's kind of a sifting of evidence. There's inference that's necessary from the surviving accounts because they were so good at rewriting history, you know. No, actually, her first husband had been impotent. No, she was a virgin on the eve of giving birth. You know, all of these things get changed in the official record. It's all very Orwellian. So there's. Trying to find out as a historian, what precisely happened is tricky, and it means kind of dealing with this difficult evidence and inferring from.

Diane Girardo (11:59)

Is very true that the historians. And they did it big time, but they did it for centuries. That's what they always did. Anybody who got a bad name for offending, for example, an emperor, that bad name stuck until today. Unless you really go down and look in very carefully and file and suddenly discover that maybe it isn't exactly quite the truth. I mean, they all did the same thing. What's interesting is they actually do the same thing today. I mean, everybody who's written a book said, no, no, there wasn't. She didn't have Giovanni because he died, and who knows what happened to him. Hello. He was born. He was born, he was bred. He was a page in the duke's papal court. He was everything that you wanted him to be. He wasn't very bright, I guess, but he was. Certainly he was alive. He was there, and he lived and wrote to them until, I think, the Ercole II wrote to him in exchange. You know, they exchanged letters before he died, but other than that, no. But the fact of the matter is, yes, historians have a lot to work out when they go too much in the face of this sort of historical mythology that grows up around these people, unfortunately.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (13:10)

So Lucrezo marries again, this time to Alfonso of Aragon, or Aragon. Can you tell me about their relationship? You mentioned that she fell in love.

Diane Girardo (13:19)

Well, it. Apparently she did. Apparently. I mean, all the evidence is that she fell in love and so did he. And I think she was at this time, 19, maybe, and he was 20. 19, something like that. And I mean, you know, when you're that age, I guess you can fall in love with anybody, and she could. And he was. Apparently, he was very handsome, he was very sweet, he was a lovely person. And they, again, great sex, and they had a really wonderful relationship. She had fallen in love with him as Far as I know. And that's about the only information that we have.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (13:56)

So how quickly did this union cease to be useful to Borgia interests? And why? And when that happened, how did she then navigate a divided loyalty between husband and family?

Diane Girardo (14:09)

Yeah, you know, it's hard to say exactly why this fall broke out, because, again, it's so difficult to trace this all of a sudden. Now reports with the Duke of Naples are suddenly wrong. They're problematical. They're whatever. And Alfonso displayed favoritism toward his own family. Now, what that favoritism meant, did he go there and live? No. Did he live in Rome? Yes. Did he live with Lucretia in the papal housing? Something. Yes. So it's a little bit difficult to sort it out, but the important thing is that they were married. She had an abortion, I think, or a miscarriage, and then she had the baby. And the baby was only about, I think, maybe six or seven months old. When your brother, who was, I think, offended by, and I think his offense was. Wasn't fondness for his lines, for the fairness, for equality or anything, he was just jealous and jealous of somebody who was basically. And not. We don't know much about him, but seems to have been a lovely person. That's about the best that we can do. Nonetheless. What happened was he was attacked at the night and stabbed four or five times and staggered into the Papal Palace. They were absolutely appalled. They raised him to recovery. They called whatever the police were. I mean, they did everything. Both Sancha and Lucrezia fed him by themselves for the next month or so, because they feared what would happen. They feared poison. They feared everything. And Lucretia spoke to her mother or spoke to her father repeatedly. You know, what is happening. Don't let this happen. And then finally one day, her brother's man at arms told her that they have business to do with her husband. And she said, but I'm not going to leave him. And he said, you have to, if you want to find how to do things, how to do things differently, go to the Pope. So she raced with Sancha to the Pope. By the time they got back, he was dead, strangled in his bed.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:18)

Indeed, yes. And why did blame quickly fall on her brother Cesare?

Diane Girardo (16:23)

Because it was very obvious. And he said it. He said, he spoke to me, he looked at me from the window, and he said, I'm going to shoot you. And all this, of course, you fell. And, I mean, it was pretty obvious that it was Cesare, So there wasn't much to do about it. This was not Something that was a major problem in Rome because he was sort of one of those guys that just got killed. Life was very different, and unfortunately, people got killed for stuff.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:50)

Now she's once again married off for the third time, not long widowed, this time to Alfonso I d'Este. And this marriage came with a very sad requirement that she leave her son behind, as if to simulate the bringing of virginity into marriage. What do we know about her first years with this Alfonso? And did she ever see her son again?

Diane Girardo (17:15)

Yes, she did see him, actually, and so did her husband. She initially told her father, I don't want to marry anybody, because look what happened to my first two husbands. She didn't want to go into the convent, and she certainly didn't want anything else to happen. So forget it. But then they finally persuaded her to marry Alfonso d'este, and so finally she agreed. But you have to understand, this was a woman who cared deeply, who loved deeply, who brought joy to what she did. It's just. It's that simple. I don't know how to get around this with other people, because to me, it's just very, very simple. She was just happy. She was a happy person, mind you. She spent two hours in prayer every morning, and then she went about her business. She wrote letters, but she was happy. She was happy with what she did. There's a letter that she wrote early in her marriage with a friend of hers to another brother, and they just laughed and teased about what they did, and that's the way she was. That's simply the person that she was. Did she see her son again? There's actually some evidence that she did see him. This was kept apart by Ercole, but she saw him. And first time she saw him actually was in 1506. She was actually going to see him in the late summer. And then there's another letter that shows she's very limited persuasion of what letters are around. There's really only about 7 or 800 of them, and there's just not very many of them. But she actually had another scheduled meeting with her half brother, I guess you'd call him in the same place. But, you know, it's so difficult to find the letters. They're just missing. So we only know from little bits and pieces that are entangled in the web that some people prepare things around them. I mean, it's really kind of amazing how much we don't know about her. So she married and she had her son, and he died when he was 12, which was really just shocking to her. This was a real blow. And it was right in the middle of the salt wars between Julius II and Alfonso I. And she was just shattered. Shattered. But you have to remember too, when she married Alfonso and she came to to Ferrara, he wrote to his brother after a month and he said, it's very unusual for a man to marry a woman and to be happy. I can't believe I'm so happy with this woman. She just amazes me. And I'll tell you more about it in detail later. So what that tells you is and he was very present when she lost her her child because she had the malaria. And he was really just present and really there for her in a way that you can't imagine otherwise. And that was because they really had great sex. What is Dax, Are you tracking all.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (22:45)

When her father died in 1503, was it her marriage to Alfonso d'este that protected her from sharing in the Borgia downfall?

Diane Girardo (22:56)

Well, actually, yes. I think so. I think so. And they protected her. I mean, she could have gone any other way, but they protected her because they believed in her, they cared about her, they knew that she was vulnerable and they kept her safe at their side, as it were. I mean, it's really unfortunate that again, this is another story that is partially told. There was always a resentment against the father, Alfonso Alexander vi, because he was Spanish. He's Spanish, he's this, he's that. You know, they just dismiss him out of hand at that. And so all of our understanding of this man comes through sort of partial lenses, as it were. And it's really not fair. He was a brutal man, but he was also a very charming man and brutal when it took the right to be brutal, he thought. And he finally sort of gave in to his son. But still he was really a sort of. He wasn't a victim, but he was somehow caught in inevitable struggle between nationalities.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (24:02)

Okay, so let's just recap. We've had. Well, we. Lucretia's had three husbands so far. So we've had Giovanni Sforza, then we have, of course, Alfonso of Aragon. And now we're on Alfonso the First Death's day. And you're saying this relationship is a happy. In fact, they have eight children. But neither party was faithful during that nearly 20 year marriage. So can we talk about her affairs? Francesco II Gonzaga, Pietro Bembo, among others. How did they form part of the enduring mythology of Lucrezia Borgia as to sort of as a femme fatale?

Diane Girardo (24:37)

Yeah. So let's stand back and talk about these affairs. Let's, for example, talk about Francesco Gonzaga. The picture that's given always is of Lucrezia Borgia's brother in law inviting her to Borgoforte and for two days where they spent time, et cetera, and who knows what they did. And blah, blah, blah. Three days, actually. Okay, so what did she really do? She really did exactly the opposite. She went there, she was surprised by him. She was with a group of people and included Nicolo Dedeo. And I think he had to write to Nicolo. I forget his last name. But anyway, he wrote to Alfonso first and said, you know, he came to this meeting and he spent all his time pleading and begging and so forth and please come and see the Marquis Isabella. And just for one night and all this. And she resisted. I have to go to my husband, because blah, blah, blah. And then finally she gave in. But she was surrounded by people. She was surrounded by all these people, people, men and women. So finally they did, but they went as a group. And actually this is to go back to the earlier point, this is one of the reasons that we do things, because when these people are writing books, okay, you're going to write a book about somebody who's really honest and vulnerable and doesn't do anything wrong. And that's okay. No, you have to have some poisoning or something. Something, a different end and so forth. None of these things are true. The letters that Pedro Bembo wrote to her, for example, were absolutely the letters that a detail oriented, middle class man who was looking up and in fact made it to the cardinal. This is the kind of letter that you wrote to somebody who you were positioned with, who you spoke to. And she was very accommodating. She wrote short letters to him, then he wrote to her. That's number one. And he wrote long letters. But they were very, very. They were his letters. They were absolutely. And if you want to draw a comparison, think for a minute to his relationship with. And I forget her name because it's. I think it's. I can't remember her name. But in any event, this is right before his relationship with Lucretia. And he met this woman and they were madly in love. So, okay, so that's the letters that we've got back and forth and they've got passionate moments, just all sorts of passion, despair and all this stuff. Okay? That's what he did when he was falling in love. He didn't do that with Lucretia. It was absolutely just simply not true.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (27:14)

So are you saying that the stories that we've inherited about Lucrezia having these affairs with Gonzaga, with Bembo have been overplayed? That they don't represent the evidence that we have?

Diane Girardo (27:26)

Well, not only that, but then she wrote to Francesco Gonzaga. This is after this Borgo Forte incident in 1505. She wrote to him in 1512 and she said, you know these letters that you write, I'm your sister, not your girlfriend, and I can't be treated this way. What's wrong with that? That's what you say to somebody who goes out of his way to make special pleas to you. What? She says, I'm your sister, not your friend, not your lover. How do you ever get around this? She was very clear to him. I don't know if she was that clear to anybody else, but she was definitely that clear to him.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (28:07)

So in other words, what you're saying is that we have got this picture of Lucretia that really doesn't have much root. In fact, no, it does.

Diane Girardo (28:19)

The poisoning doesn't. It has zero impact. It just didn't happen. The Fresco d'amore, they call it, they didn't happen. They just weren't. They weren't part of her life. I mean, here's what she did. She got up in the morning, she spent two hours in prayer. Two hours. Not one, not two. Two hours in prayer, okay? Then she got up and she then went and did her duties. She had to check on the Spenderia to see that, make sure that all the money and so forth was coming in. She had to check on her personal belongings. Everything was fine with that account. She had to write letters, and she wrote something like on the order of 40 or 50 letters a day. A day. Okay. I mean, where's the time for this.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (30:48)

So do you think we can get a better sense of her true character if we think about her instead actually as a businesswoman?

Diane Girardo (30:54)

Yes, that's exactly right. It's a businesswoman in a very specific way. She had very good relationships, actually, with a number of priests, in fact, in her diaries or in her. I guess not diaries, but her journale. Yeah, account books or. Yeah, account books, basically that she kept. Not that she kept. That somebody kept for her. These are private expenses and there's no explanation given for private expenses. And the diary, the guy who wrote the diary said, we tried to get it from her, but she said, you don't need to know. Okay, so what are private expenses? Okay, on the one hand, it could be, well, this is her lover, this is her passion, and blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, it could be, I don't want my husband to know that I'm making gifts and donations and friends to people who I care about that simply. She's very direct about what she did. She was very sweet about what she did. He didn't get pissed at her, he didn't get anything. But he saw her as being sort of under the thumb of the priests and the monks who came and visited and so forth saw her as under his thumb. And they were outraged and they didn't think that they were at all, as a matter of fact. But that's another story. So what she did was she engaged in this dialogue. He was a priest. She engaged in this dialogue with him in written form. And she asked him, she's so rich that how is it possible for somebody so rich to get into heaven without this incredible richness? How can she avoid this? How can she skip this, as it were, and go someplace else? So he wrote to her and he said, you know, you have to do the things that you have to do because you're a duchess and you. Certain things are required and you have to dress up and so forth. But then you have to ask yourself, what do I do with the extra? And if I have extras, what do I find for the extras to come? What do I do with them to make things better? And the simple thing, the thing that she saw as very remarkable in this way, she really saw that her. Her goal was to transform the barren sort of half a year long, it's underwater and it's sort of off and on underwater the whole year long throughout the duchy. She would change that and spend little by little, place by place, making agreements to do exactly that. So, for example, she would. The men of Arellano, for example, they had lost out on their, their ability to pay rent because the lines were too long. The, the people just simply could not pay. And I know it's a little complicated, but she agreed to take over the property. She would allow them to continue using their stuff until she got it completely drained and cleaned, and then they would be able to use it for their purposes as well. And what they would do then, but they would also make the spaces available to other people and they would make the land available to other people so that they would also grow and be fruitful, as it were.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (33:55)

How unusual was it for landowners to take part in land reclamation on this scale at this sort of time?

Diane Girardo (34:02)

It's actually, we don't know of any. Who do? I mean, certainly in Italy, we just don't know of any. For example, Isabella, for example, she had a little farm, a little canyon, a little place that she worked and it was all very lovely, but it was a place, it was a little place and a little garden and stuff. I mean, it was really small.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (34:22)

That's Lucrezia's sister in law.

Diane Girardo (34:23)

Yes. Lucrezia, on the other hand, she had something like on the order of 25,000 etere, which are 50,000 acres spread across the duchy. And these are all these down and out sort of places where she would make them then become feeble again, become unfeeble again, so that people would work them, she provided housing for the people who lived there, she would provide other kinds of things. The women would score and dress her, they would do all sorts of things and then she would then give them food and so forth, and they would produce the goods that were necessary to keep on. Now that was the beginning of the 16th century. By the end of the 16th century and into the 17th, it was now become clear that this was actually a terrible, terrible thing that was happened, because little by little the people who were small farmers, small this and that, were basically turned their property over to the big landowners who bought up property and they became basically serfs.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (35:27)

So I've also struck by the fact that this is a married woman holding onto titles of land in her own name, which is quite unusual, at least in northern Europe. How unusual was it in Italy at the time? And what does it tell us about Lucretia's character that she so fiercely protected her own interests.

Diane Girardo (35:46)

Well, she protected them, but not for herself. She protected them not for her children. She protected them for the benefits that they brought to the people who worked them. She only did it for six years. So that's. I mean, that's basically six years from 1513 to 1519. So it's six years. And so in that six years, she didn't do it for her children, she didn't do it for her husband, she didn't do it for any reason. She did it for the people who lived there. And so that there would be wealth and prosperity in her ambience, in her environment around her. So that the, the, the property was stolen, for example. She would not stolen, she would step in and say, I will purchase this property because it's worthless. I will give you one half the strength of the dollar and then I will do the retail on it to get this thing ready for production and then you can come along and then take part in replenishing this as we go along. That was the whole scheme as it was, and it was a big scheme. I mean, she's really kind of amazing, all the things that she did. I mean, she was absolutely insistent on this. And we only find traces of this in these letters and the diaries, in these few remaining characters that were somehow saved by the. I guess by the workers who send the whole thing up in flames in 1945, rather than have people figure out what was problematic about it. So they did all this stuff because they wanted things to be better, basically.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (37:21)

So we've got this extraordinary land reclamation, this entrepreneurial activity, really, the construction of a new palazzo. These economic pursuits seem to me to be something that perhaps set her apart from other elite women at the time. And I'm really struck by the fact that quite often when we talk about Lucretia Borgia, she's compared unfavorably with her sister in law, Isabella d'Este, a woman who seems to perfectly embody the female Renaissance ideal. But are you suggesting, actually we need a new way of thinking about Lucretia?

Diane Girardo (37:58)

We do. Very simply, we do. And I don't like to unfavorably compare Isabella because Isabella had her characteristics, mind you. I mean, they were two very different people. They were radically different. And in fact, Isabella was how. How shall I put it? She was absolutely ferocious in her desire to get things. So get, get whatever it was. She had these huge correspondences with all these people because she wanted to get things. Lucretia board. She didn't want to get things, she wanted to give her money out so that land could be bought. She bought it at rock bottom prices. Sometimes it didn't cost her a cent. And she did all of this stuff on behalf of the people who then lived there. She didn't do it for herself, she didn't do it for her children. And that was the thing that was always said, oh, well, they did stuff nice for the children. No, she didn't do it for them either. She did it for the benefit of the people who were living there and ultimately for the benefit of the county of the duchy of Ferrara. And so I don't like to do these uncomfortable things because I think it makes people look bad. But she was absolutely just very direct, very simple, very straightforward. And she always made a point, whatever the point was, because, I mean, if there was somebody who resented that she was furnishing the land, for example, she would say, let's split it in half. Boom, we'll split it in half. You're not going to carry any of the burden that I'm going to carry by this that we're doing. And again and again and again, she did the same thing over and over again. So you become to realize that's what she did.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (39:38)

So to finish, then it's clear that what you've told us about her economic life, her spiritual life, her domestic life is so often overlooked in the narratives about her. And instead, you know, we focus on this continued debate on about her morality. How do you think, Professor Gerardo, that we go about reconciling what the historical evidence tells us of her character with this enduring salaciousness of her reputation?

Diane Girardo (40:09)

Unfortunately, it's just we do what we do. I mean, I compiled all of her letters and I put them together and I showed them from the earliest letter that she wrote to Francesco Gonzaga, interestingly enough, to almost the last one to Francesco Gonzaga and all 800 of them in between. And the point was to show, okay, this was a woman who cared. Now, that was one thing. Then we looked at her jewelry. Okay, she had many, many pieces of jewelry. She had literally hundreds, hundreds, 400 pieces of jewelry, quote, unquote, understood as jewelry. Not one, not one single piece celebrated herself or anything about the Sa family. They all celebrated Christ, all of them, every one of them.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (41:00)

Well, you've certainly given us a very different picture of this woman than I have ever heard or read before. Thank you so much for coming on to share it with us.

Diane Girardo (41:08)

Thank you very much for having me.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (41:10)

And that concludes our special series of episodes on the Borgias. The rise of the Borgias came at a price. Their ruthless methods and naked ambition made them many enemies. Cesare's military campaigns, while successful, drained the papal treasury and destabilized the political balance in Italy. Moreover, their actions contributed to growing dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church that would eventually lead to the Protestant Reformation. Their blatant use of the papacy for personal gain exemplified the corruption that reformers railed against. But as the Borgia's star faded, their legacy lingered. Their rise and fall served as a cautionary tale of power's corrupting influence and the dangers of unchecked ambition. Today, their story, some true, some rumor, continues to captivate us, offering a window into a tumultuous period of history where the sacred and profane often intertwined. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do return for more fascinating episodes from Not Just the Tudors from History.

Diane Girardo (42:19)

Hit foreign.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (42:48)

Hey corporate types. Billy Idol here. Just because you use workday to drive long term success, it doesn't make you a rock star. Rock stars drive fast cars, not business operations.

Diane Girardo (43:00)

Be a finance and HR rockstar with Workday.

Ryan Reynolds (43:03)

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