Thesis
This is really more for myself than anything else! I found that it's actually really useful for me to keep this stuff in Cesare's character journal. :|a I. I tend to lose things.
The Process of Inclusion and Exclusion in Italian Renaissance Communities:
A Case Study on Ethnic Identity
The Borgia Family
Alfonso Borgia ascended to the papacy in 1455, taking the name of Callixtus III. He took advantage of this honor by bringing two of his nephews to Rome. One he raised to the position of Papal Gonfaloniere, or captain of the papal troops. The other, his sister’s son Rodrigo, already had an ecclesiastical career and he furthered it by turning him into the Cardinal of Valencia, the northeastern part of Spain that their family was from. In gratitude (and to more obviously mark their relation), Rodrigo took his maternal uncle’s last name, becoming Rodrigo Borgia and, after 1492, Pope Alexander VI-the infamous Borgia Pope. Cesare, Juan, and Lucrezia, the most well-known of Rodrigo’s children, were all born to Vannozza dei Cattanei in Rome between the years of 1474 and 1480. He turned Juan into gonfaloniere and Cesare into a cardinal, just as Alfonso had done for his two nephews in 1455. Many rumors swirled around the family during and after their lives, not least that Lucrezia was involved in incestuous relationships with Cesare and Rodrigo and that Cesare had been the one behind Juan’s violent death. These two infamous rumors have been proven almost certainly to be false: the clamor about Lucrezia’s incestuous behavior was started by Giovanni Sforza, her insulted and divorced first husband, while claims that Cesare had murdered his brother did not appear until several years after the fact and in spite of the existence of more likely culprits. In addition, the use of the notorious cantarella, a poison that was rumored to be a tasteless white powder alternatively able to kill several days after a single dose in order to hide the family from blame and capable to kill immediately after being administered, was clearly exaggerated if not altogether untrue.
After Juan’s murder in 1497, Cesare, becoming the first man to voluntarily renounce his position as cardinal, took up his brother’s old position as gonfaloniere and began the process of subduing and conquering the small states of the Romagna, purportedly to bring them back under the direct control of the church. Although called the Papal States in name, the church in reality exercised little control over them, to the point that many no longer paid the taxes they owed to the Holy See. They were in effect small autonomous territories and Cesare’s whirlwind victory over them after journeying to and receiving support and troops (and a marriage) from France was seen by many as beneficial both to the church and to the peninsula. Cesare’s alliance with France also marked a new chapter in the politics of the Vatican, as Rodrigo had ascended to the throne a staunch ally of Spanish Naples and the previous French king had invaded the peninsula in 1494, making it as far as the Vatican in the name of calling a council to overthrow Rodrigo before being convinced by diplomacy to turn back. This shift in political allegiance was also demonstrated by the sudden (and violent) end of Lucrezia’s second marriage to Alfonso de Aragon, illegitimate son of King Ferrante of Naples, and subsequent remarrage to Alfonso d’Este, an Italian who favored the French. Rodrigo died in 1503, most likely of malaria although rumors at the time cited both poison and the work of the devil, and Cesare’s fortunes declined sharply without his father’s support and political and financial backing. He was imprisoned in Rome by Julius II, set free, recaptured and sent to two different prisons in Spain, from which he eventually escaped. He died on the battlefield in Navarre in an attempt to help the small territory break from Spain and while seeking an alliance with the Holy Roman Empire in order to reclaim his lost territory in the Romagna, one day before the Ides of March.
Rodrigo and Cesare in particular have acquired a reputation in history as being vicious and bloodthirsty. Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his famous tome The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy that “the great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself and, above all, in his son Caesar Borgia”. Burckhardt, however, did not coin this image of the family; he merely repeated what had been said by previous generations. This reputation was not entirely deserved, as the family was much maligned by political enemies during both Rodrigo’s reign as pope and after his death, in large part because of the family’s relatively new arrival onto the Italian political scene where, as Joseph Muir pointed out ,“[p]ublic institutions structured the competition among families and factions to exert influence that served their own interests.” Tensions in Rome ran high, as several families-Orsini, Colonna, Sforza…-jockeyed for power and control of the Holy See. Outside of Rome this competition continued as the different city states and dukedoms competed with one another for territory and prestige. (Florence, for example, was for many years under the de facto control of the Medici family, who would in 1513 be able to claim a pope to their name as well.) Giuliano della Rovere, who would become Pope Julius II in 1503, was one of Rodrigo’s longstanding rivals, and one of the men behind much anti-Borgian writings, but he was by no means the only one who felt threatened by the arrival of the Borgias onto the political scene and who responded to this threat by proclaiming the family un-Italian and therefore barred from full acceptance into the social and political community of the peninsula. To properly understand the role this family played in the history of the Italian peninsula and the Italian Renaissance, it is necessary to understand both the schools of thought on this time and place in general and what the contemporaries of the Borgias had to say about them, especially in light of their somewhat controversial position as non-Italians occupying the highest religious and political position based in Italy.
This paper focuses on the Borgia family’s history, from Rodrigo’s taking on the red to Lucrezia’s death and examines primary documents from their lifetimes and utilizes research on the time period done by historians in the past. Although looking too closely at a single family, especially such a well-known one, threatens to veer into the study of great men, I would argue that in this case the subject can still be cultural history rather than biography, even if Renaissance studies in general are looked at in light of this particular example. It is not the intention here to look at the unique circumstances that shaped this family, but rather to show how both the circumstances and the people involved in them were not so unique at all but part of a broader social framework. The Borgia family is merely being used here as a microcosm, an opportune example of how these larger ideas and patterns played themselves out during this period. Their particular history is a convenient one in part because of the difficulty of finding suitable documents from this time period and in part because it does very neatly set up the problems of how to define and utilize ethnicity. Their situation was unusual because of the amount of resistance that it garnered and the length of time that artifacts testifying to this resistance have endured in relative public knowledge. The general outline of events and actions, however, was far more commonplace, even to the point that, as stated above, Rodrigo was hardly the first foreign pope-he was not even the first Spanish or the first Borgia pope. In this way, a study of the family that pays particular attention to the ways in which they negotiated (or refused to or failed to negotiate) the process of inclusion and exclusion into the Italian majority community and, by extension, into the obtainment of Italian ethnicity, is useful to studies of ethnicity and community in this period in general.
Historiography
The most well-known study of the Italian Renaissance is Jacob Burckhardt’s The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance, although it is more concerned with the political history of the time and does not devote much space to the idea of ethnicity, much less to pondering how it may have developed or how it influenced the people of the peninsula. Buckhardt argues that the Italian Renaissance was a period of great change, during which man moved away from superstition and towards rational thought and behavior. This Burckhardtian thesis reflected the whiggish view of progressive steps towards modernity that was popular at his time. It was in the Renaissance, Burckhardt argued, that
Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form. (Burckhardt 285)
His idea has been propagated by other authors and historians as well and went largely unchallenged for many years, causing a stagnation in Renaissance studies, as all new work would simply refer back to his text as the end-all source. They underwent a period of neglect and became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period but there was not much else to say about its break with the past and Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged since his work was so thorough and all-encompassing. The thesis of progress became stale because there was nothing new to say about it; if history was a march of advancement and the Renaissance sparked this advancement, then everything that could be studied in the Renaissance was merely a prototype of some form of modern society. Similarly, his argument that “the great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander [sic] himself and, above all, in his son Caesar Borgia” was taken up by other historians and understood as fact. It was not for many years that authors began to more seriously analyze the psychology and social influences at play behind what had become the Borgia mythos. Just as with the basic outline of the Renaissance put forth by Burckhardt, the conclusions about the family were already known and accepted. Even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Borgias as corrupt and evil and Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. It was only the great social change that took place in the 1970s that history began to be written in drastically new ways and the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy and the people who lived within it was reshaped.
Karl Oskar Kristeller revitalized Renaissance studies in the 1960s, and although he did hone in on various individuals, he did not look at the Borgias themselves. He argued that the Italian Renaissance should be understood as part of a continuum of change from the centuries before to the centuries after, but that at the same time the Renaissance should still be looked at as significant because continuity is not the same as stability, arguing that “the old and the new are inextricably intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the one or the other side, as has often been done.” Kristeller was writing in an era of change in historiography, as political history was no longer the only viable form that history could take, causing repercussions in all spheres of historical interest as new stories were discovered and studied. Kristeller himself focused most on the development of humanism during this period and pointed out that “the humanists themselves […] helped to shape the concept of the Renaissance [as a period of rebirth of classical learning at odds with the so-called Dark Ages that immediately preceded it] which has been so bitterly criticized by certain modern historians”. Kristeller was also a forerunner in the move towards looking at the social history of the Renaissance, as he stressed the fluidity of change and the importance of looking at more than the few “great men” who had attracted attention because of their actions on the battlefield or on the throne, and in this way encouraged historians with different interests or specialties to take a fresh look at this time period. After him, other texts on different aspects of social history in the Renaissance became more common, leading to, among other things, what information there is on ethnicity at this time period.
The Process of Inclusion and Exclusion in Italian Renaissance Communities:
A Case Study on Ethnic Identity
The Borgia Family
Alfonso Borgia ascended to the papacy in 1455, taking the name of Callixtus III. He took advantage of this honor by bringing two of his nephews to Rome. One he raised to the position of Papal Gonfaloniere, or captain of the papal troops. The other, his sister’s son Rodrigo, already had an ecclesiastical career and he furthered it by turning him into the Cardinal of Valencia, the northeastern part of Spain that their family was from. In gratitude (and to more obviously mark their relation), Rodrigo took his maternal uncle’s last name, becoming Rodrigo Borgia and, after 1492, Pope Alexander VI-the infamous Borgia Pope. Cesare, Juan, and Lucrezia, the most well-known of Rodrigo’s children, were all born to Vannozza dei Cattanei in Rome between the years of 1474 and 1480. He turned Juan into gonfaloniere and Cesare into a cardinal, just as Alfonso had done for his two nephews in 1455. Many rumors swirled around the family during and after their lives, not least that Lucrezia was involved in incestuous relationships with Cesare and Rodrigo and that Cesare had been the one behind Juan’s violent death. These two infamous rumors have been proven almost certainly to be false: the clamor about Lucrezia’s incestuous behavior was started by Giovanni Sforza, her insulted and divorced first husband, while claims that Cesare had murdered his brother did not appear until several years after the fact and in spite of the existence of more likely culprits. In addition, the use of the notorious cantarella, a poison that was rumored to be a tasteless white powder alternatively able to kill several days after a single dose in order to hide the family from blame and capable to kill immediately after being administered, was clearly exaggerated if not altogether untrue.
After Juan’s murder in 1497, Cesare, becoming the first man to voluntarily renounce his position as cardinal, took up his brother’s old position as gonfaloniere and began the process of subduing and conquering the small states of the Romagna, purportedly to bring them back under the direct control of the church. Although called the Papal States in name, the church in reality exercised little control over them, to the point that many no longer paid the taxes they owed to the Holy See. They were in effect small autonomous territories and Cesare’s whirlwind victory over them after journeying to and receiving support and troops (and a marriage) from France was seen by many as beneficial both to the church and to the peninsula. Cesare’s alliance with France also marked a new chapter in the politics of the Vatican, as Rodrigo had ascended to the throne a staunch ally of Spanish Naples and the previous French king had invaded the peninsula in 1494, making it as far as the Vatican in the name of calling a council to overthrow Rodrigo before being convinced by diplomacy to turn back. This shift in political allegiance was also demonstrated by the sudden (and violent) end of Lucrezia’s second marriage to Alfonso de Aragon, illegitimate son of King Ferrante of Naples, and subsequent remarrage to Alfonso d’Este, an Italian who favored the French. Rodrigo died in 1503, most likely of malaria although rumors at the time cited both poison and the work of the devil, and Cesare’s fortunes declined sharply without his father’s support and political and financial backing. He was imprisoned in Rome by Julius II, set free, recaptured and sent to two different prisons in Spain, from which he eventually escaped. He died on the battlefield in Navarre in an attempt to help the small territory break from Spain and while seeking an alliance with the Holy Roman Empire in order to reclaim his lost territory in the Romagna, one day before the Ides of March.
Rodrigo and Cesare in particular have acquired a reputation in history as being vicious and bloodthirsty. Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his famous tome The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy that “the great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself and, above all, in his son Caesar Borgia”. Burckhardt, however, did not coin this image of the family; he merely repeated what had been said by previous generations. This reputation was not entirely deserved, as the family was much maligned by political enemies during both Rodrigo’s reign as pope and after his death, in large part because of the family’s relatively new arrival onto the Italian political scene where, as Joseph Muir pointed out ,“[p]ublic institutions structured the competition among families and factions to exert influence that served their own interests.” Tensions in Rome ran high, as several families-Orsini, Colonna, Sforza…-jockeyed for power and control of the Holy See. Outside of Rome this competition continued as the different city states and dukedoms competed with one another for territory and prestige. (Florence, for example, was for many years under the de facto control of the Medici family, who would in 1513 be able to claim a pope to their name as well.) Giuliano della Rovere, who would become Pope Julius II in 1503, was one of Rodrigo’s longstanding rivals, and one of the men behind much anti-Borgian writings, but he was by no means the only one who felt threatened by the arrival of the Borgias onto the political scene and who responded to this threat by proclaiming the family un-Italian and therefore barred from full acceptance into the social and political community of the peninsula. To properly understand the role this family played in the history of the Italian peninsula and the Italian Renaissance, it is necessary to understand both the schools of thought on this time and place in general and what the contemporaries of the Borgias had to say about them, especially in light of their somewhat controversial position as non-Italians occupying the highest religious and political position based in Italy.
This paper focuses on the Borgia family’s history, from Rodrigo’s taking on the red to Lucrezia’s death and examines primary documents from their lifetimes and utilizes research on the time period done by historians in the past. Although looking too closely at a single family, especially such a well-known one, threatens to veer into the study of great men, I would argue that in this case the subject can still be cultural history rather than biography, even if Renaissance studies in general are looked at in light of this particular example. It is not the intention here to look at the unique circumstances that shaped this family, but rather to show how both the circumstances and the people involved in them were not so unique at all but part of a broader social framework. The Borgia family is merely being used here as a microcosm, an opportune example of how these larger ideas and patterns played themselves out during this period. Their particular history is a convenient one in part because of the difficulty of finding suitable documents from this time period and in part because it does very neatly set up the problems of how to define and utilize ethnicity. Their situation was unusual because of the amount of resistance that it garnered and the length of time that artifacts testifying to this resistance have endured in relative public knowledge. The general outline of events and actions, however, was far more commonplace, even to the point that, as stated above, Rodrigo was hardly the first foreign pope-he was not even the first Spanish or the first Borgia pope. In this way, a study of the family that pays particular attention to the ways in which they negotiated (or refused to or failed to negotiate) the process of inclusion and exclusion into the Italian majority community and, by extension, into the obtainment of Italian ethnicity, is useful to studies of ethnicity and community in this period in general.
Historiography
The most well-known study of the Italian Renaissance is Jacob Burckhardt’s The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance, although it is more concerned with the political history of the time and does not devote much space to the idea of ethnicity, much less to pondering how it may have developed or how it influenced the people of the peninsula. Buckhardt argues that the Italian Renaissance was a period of great change, during which man moved away from superstition and towards rational thought and behavior. This Burckhardtian thesis reflected the whiggish view of progressive steps towards modernity that was popular at his time. It was in the Renaissance, Burckhardt argued, that
Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form. (Burckhardt 285)
His idea has been propagated by other authors and historians as well and went largely unchallenged for many years, causing a stagnation in Renaissance studies, as all new work would simply refer back to his text as the end-all source. They underwent a period of neglect and became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period but there was not much else to say about its break with the past and Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged since his work was so thorough and all-encompassing. The thesis of progress became stale because there was nothing new to say about it; if history was a march of advancement and the Renaissance sparked this advancement, then everything that could be studied in the Renaissance was merely a prototype of some form of modern society. Similarly, his argument that “the great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander [sic] himself and, above all, in his son Caesar Borgia” was taken up by other historians and understood as fact. It was not for many years that authors began to more seriously analyze the psychology and social influences at play behind what had become the Borgia mythos. Just as with the basic outline of the Renaissance put forth by Burckhardt, the conclusions about the family were already known and accepted. Even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Borgias as corrupt and evil and Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. It was only the great social change that took place in the 1970s that history began to be written in drastically new ways and the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy and the people who lived within it was reshaped.
Karl Oskar Kristeller revitalized Renaissance studies in the 1960s, and although he did hone in on various individuals, he did not look at the Borgias themselves. He argued that the Italian Renaissance should be understood as part of a continuum of change from the centuries before to the centuries after, but that at the same time the Renaissance should still be looked at as significant because continuity is not the same as stability, arguing that “the old and the new are inextricably intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the one or the other side, as has often been done.” Kristeller was writing in an era of change in historiography, as political history was no longer the only viable form that history could take, causing repercussions in all spheres of historical interest as new stories were discovered and studied. Kristeller himself focused most on the development of humanism during this period and pointed out that “the humanists themselves […] helped to shape the concept of the Renaissance [as a period of rebirth of classical learning at odds with the so-called Dark Ages that immediately preceded it] which has been so bitterly criticized by certain modern historians”. Kristeller was also a forerunner in the move towards looking at the social history of the Renaissance, as he stressed the fluidity of change and the importance of looking at more than the few “great men” who had attracted attention because of their actions on the battlefield or on the throne, and in this way encouraged historians with different interests or specialties to take a fresh look at this time period. After him, other texts on different aspects of social history in the Renaissance became more common, leading to, among other things, what information there is on ethnicity at this time period.