In the small hours of a June morning in 1497, a timber dealer named Giorgio sat in his boat on the Tiber, keeping watch over his woodpile. Around two o’clock he saw a rider come down the lane beside the hospital of San Girolamo, where the city’s sewage washed into the river. The rider sat a white horse, and slung across the animal’s back was a dead man, head hanging off one side, legs off the other. Two men on foot steadied the corpse so it would not slip into the mud before they were ready.

At the water’s edge they pulled the body down, took it by the hands and feet, swung it twice for momentum, and threw it as far out into the current as they could. The rider asked whether it had gone under. “Yes, my lord,” someone answered. Then a cloak floated back up to the surface, and the men threw stones at it until the cloth soaked through and sank, and the whole party rode away as calmly as they had come.

Days later, when the papal investigators found Giorgio and asked why he had never told anyone what he saw, his answer stunned everybody who heard it. In his years on that stretch of river, he said, he had watched perhaps a hundred bodies thrown into the water at that exact spot, and no one had ever once come around asking about any of them. The corpse the fisherman dragged up two days afterward changed that indifference in a hurry, because this particular dead man was the Pope’s favorite son. Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia, was twenty-one years old, still fully dressed, his gloves tucked in his belt, thirty ducats sitting untouched in his purse.

He had been stabbed nine times, one wound straight through the throat. His father, Pope Alexander VI, shut himself in his rooms and howled so loudly that people out in the streets could hear him through the walls of the Vatican. Within a few months, and then for the next five centuries, an enormous number of people came to believe that the man behind that white horse in the dark—or at least the man who paid for it—was the dead duke’s own brother, a twenty-one-year-old cardinal of the Holy Roman Church named Cesare Borgia. Everything Cesare grew up inside starts with his father.

Rodrigo Borgia was born near Valencia in Spain in 1431, into a family the Italians never stopped regarding as foreign. “Moriscos,” some sneered. Catalans. Outsiders.

His uncle Alonso had already carved the family’s path into the church, and when that uncle became Pope Calixtus III in 1455, young Rodrigo’s future was settled. His uncle made him a cardinal at twenty-five and handed him the office of vice-chancellor of the Roman Church, essentially the papacy’s chief administrator. Rodrigo held that job for thirty-five years, under four different popes, and he used every one of those years to become staggeringly rich. Palaces and silver, benefices stacked on benefices.

A Ferrarese envoy once wrote that Rodrigo’s income was surpassed by no cardinal alive, and that his palace made visiting royalty feel underdressed. He was also, by every surviving account, a man of ferocious appetites—charming, physically imposing well into old age, and completely unembarrassed about any of it. As a young cardinal he received a written rebuke from Pope Pius II for attending a garden party in Siena, where, the Pope had heard, the entertainment ran in a direction unbecoming to a churchman. Rodrigo apologized and carried on exactly as before.

Somewhere in the 1470s he took up with a Roman woman named Vannozza de’ Catanei, an innkeeper by trade—practical, discreet, good with money—and she bore him four children he acknowledged openly. Juan came first. Cesare was born on the 13th of September 1475, probably in Rome or at Subiaco in the hills outside it. Lucrezia was born in 1480, and Jofré the youngest.

Cardinals fathering children was hardly rare in that Rome. What set Rodrigo apart was the scale of his ambition for those children and the total absence of shame in pursuing it. By the time Cesare was a teenager, his father had moved on to a new mistress, and this one scandalized even Rome. Giulia Farnese was around eighteen or nineteen when the relationship began.

Rodrigo was pushing sixty. She was married, and married to Orsino Orsini, the son of Rodrigo’s own cousin, a young man with a lazy eye whom the Roman wits mocked without mercy. Giulia was so famously beautiful that people simply called her Giulia la Bella, and she lived for years in a palace next to the Vatican in a household that included Lucrezia Borgia, so that the Pope’s teenage daughter and the Pope’s teenage mistress were raised practically as sisters. A letter survives in which Rodrigo, by then Pope, scolds Giulia in a tone of jealous fury for traveling to see her actual husband, accusing her of ingratitude and of breaking her promise not to go near him.

The Vicar of Christ, in writing, raging that his young mistress had visited the man she was married to. Romans called her the bride of Christ behind their hands. That was the moral atmosphere of the household. Everything Cesare later did, he did as a man raised inside it, watching his father take whatever he wanted and pay no visible price.

The great prize came in the summer of 1492. Pope Innocent VIII died at the end of July, and the cardinals walked into conclave in the Sistine Chapel on the 6th of August. Rodrigo had been passed over before—too foreign, too worldly. But this time he came prepared.

The voting ground through several ballots, and at dawn on the 11th of August 1492 the sixty-one-year-old vice-chancellor got his two-thirds. Tradition holds that he could barely contain himself, that he cried out “I am Pope, I am Pope” while they dressed him in the white. He took the name Alexander VI. Almost immediately the whispers started about how the votes had been gathered.

His great rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, a hard-jawed man from Genoa whose hatred of the Borgias hangs over this entire story like weather, put it about that the election had been bought outright. One story circulated of four mule loads of silver moving from Rodrigo’s palace to the palace of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, whose switch had helped decide the outcome, and who conveniently received the vice-chancellorship Rodrigo was vacating. No formal charge of simony was ever proven while Alexander lived, and buying influence in a conclave came close to a professional norm in that era. But the story stuck, and never came off.

The legend of the Borgia Pope—the devil’s pope, the man who purchased the throne of St. Peter and turned the Vatican into a family business—largely begins in those August days. The children of Vannozza de’ Catanei woke up on the 12th of August 1492 as the children of the Pope. Juan was about sixteen, Cesare not quite seventeen, Lucrezia twelve, Jofré around ten.

Within days Rome understood that Alexander intended to rule through his family, and that the map of Italy was going to be redrawn around the futures of four illegitimate children. One envoy, the Ferrarese agent Boccaccio, went to visit Cesare that first year and left a description worth hearing almost whole. He found Cesare in a house in Trastevere, just back from hunting, dressed in silk, wearing a sword—looking, the envoy wrote, like a great lord rather than a churchman. “He possesses marked genius and a charming personality,” the report said.

“He bears himself like the son of a great prince. Above everything else, he is joyous and lighthearted. ” The archbishopric of Valencia brought him 16,000 ducats a year, and the envoy added dryly that the boy had never had any inclination for the priesthood. That was the boy: brilliant, expensively dressed, cheerful, and pointed by his father down a road he had not chosen.

Cesare’s childhood had been comfortable in the way only papal Rome could manage. A bull of Pope Sixtus IV, issued when the boy was about five, formally dispensed him from the stain of illegitimate birth so that he could hold church offices, and the offices started arriving before he could grow a beard. At seven he held a cathedral post in Valencia. Around 1489 he went off to the University of Perugia to study canon law, then on to Pisa for civil law under Filippo Decio, one of the most celebrated jurists in Italy.

The professors were impressed. More than one observer recorded that Cesare was exceptionally brilliant, and the compliments did not stop at his mind. One contemporary flatly called him the handsomest man in Italy—tall, well-made, auburn-haired, with his father’s easy charm and none of his father’s bulk. He could allegedly bend a horseshoe straight with his bare hands.

His father, meanwhile, had assigned each child a function the way a general assigns regiments. Juan, the adored second son, got the secular glory. He inherited the Spanish dukedom of Gandia from their older half-brother, married a cousin of the king of Spain, and was groomed to command the armies of the church. Lucrezia got the marriage market.

She was betrothed twice to Spanish nobles before she turned twelve, and both arrangements were torn up the moment her father’s election made her more valuable. In June of 1493, aged thirteen, she was married in the Vatican to Giovanni Sforza, lord of the little Adriatic city of Pesaro, to cement an alliance with the Sforza of Milan. Jofré, the baby, was married off at eleven or twelve to Sancha of Aragon, an illegitimate granddaughter of the King of Naples, a girl a few years older than her child husband—dark-eyed, restless, and by most accounts entirely uninterested in staying faithful to a twelve-year-old. And Cesare got the church, whether he wanted it or not.

Bishop of Pamplona at fifteen while still a student; the people of Pamplona were so appalled at receiving an absentee Spanish teenager that they had to be talked down from something close to revolt. Then, days after his father’s election, Archbishop of Valencia at seventeen. Then in September of 1493, a year into the new papacy, Alexander held a consistory and created his eighteen-year-old son a cardinal, in a pairing that says plenty: alongside him, Alessandro Farnese, the younger brother of the Pope’s mistress Giulia. Romans called Farnese the “Petticoat Cardinal.

” What they called the Pope’s boy, mostly, was Valencia, after his see. Several of the older cardinals were so disgusted by the appointments that they left Rome rather than attend. An eighteen-year-old with no vocation and no ordination, keeping a household full of hunting dogs, was now a prince of the church with a claim, in theory, to someday sit on St. Peter’s throne himself.

He played the part with about as much conviction as you would expect. The red robes came out for ceremonies. The rest of the time it was silk doublets and Spanish horses and money moving through his hands like water. He was witty, he was watchful, and visitors kept noticing the same two things about him: that he was delightful company, and that something underneath the delight made them uneasy.

His personal motto, stamped eventually on his sword and his banners, was three Latin words: *Aut Caesar, aut nihil*. Either Caesar or nothing. A cardinal’s hat in that sentence counts as nothing, because the hat was the problem. Cesare wanted what Juan had.

Juan, Duke of Gandia, was vain, lazy, and swaggering—a young man who wore too much jewelry and picked fights he could not finish. In 1496 Alexander made him Captain General of the Church and sent him to crush the Orsini clan’s castles around Rome. The campaign was a humiliation. Juan was wounded in the face at Soriano, his army scattered, and the war ended in an embarrassing negotiated settlement.

Then he was sent to take the fortress of Ostia and managed to be present while a Spanish professional did the actual work. Rome laughed at him. His father heard none of it, or chose to hear none of it. And in June of 1497 the Pope showered Juan with new titles carved out of papal territory.

It was understood that the family’s entire secular future ran through this one preening young man, while his older, sharper, hungrier brother stood beside the throne in scarlet, watching. On the evening of the 14th of June 1497, Vannozza de’ Catanei hosted a supper at her vineyard on the Esquiline Hill near the church of San Pietro in Vincoli—a farewell dinner in honor of Juan, who was shortly to travel south. Both of her elder sons were there, the Duke and the Cardinal, along with Jofré, Sancha, Lucrezia by some accounts, and a handful of guests. One more figure was present, and nobody at that table questioned afterward could or would say who he was: a man in a mask.

He had been coming to see Juan almost daily for about a month, arriving veiled or masked, speaking with the Duke privately, leaving. Whoever he was, he attended the farewell supper masked. When the party broke up late in the evening and the brothers rode back toward the Vatican together through the dark, the masked man rode with them, mounted behind Juan on the Duke’s own mule. Near the palace of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Juan reined in and told his brother he was going off on his own for the evening.

Pleasure, everyone assumed. The Duke’s habits ran nocturnal, and Rome’s night streets offered a married twenty-one-year-old plenty of reasons to dismiss his escort. He kept only a single groom and the masked man. He told the groom to wait for him in the Piazza della Giudea, ordered him to come to the Vatican in the morning if he had not returned, and rode off into the dark with the stranger.

Nobody who loved him ever saw him alive after that corner. Morning came. No Duke. His household, knowing his habits, assumed he was sleeping late in some woman’s bed and would slip home embarrassed by noon.

Noon came. No Duke. By afternoon the Pope had been told, and the first cold current of fear went through the palace, because a search had turned up the groom, and the groom was lying in the street, mortally wounded, so badly hurt he could give no coherent account of anything. The Duke’s mule was found wandering, its harness disturbed, one stirrup leather cut.

Alexander, according to the diarist Johann Burchard, the German master of ceremonies whose dry Latin journal is our best window into this whole world, became agitated to the point of frenzy. Armed men began turning the city over. Houses were searched. Rumors ran ahead of the searchers.

Rome’s various clans barred their doors and armed their retainers, expecting the Pope’s grief to turn into a massacre of whoever got blamed. Then someone thought to question the boatmen along the Tiber, and they found Giorgio the timber dealer. And Giorgio told them, with that shattering indifference, what he had watched from his boat in the small hours of Wednesday morning. They dragged the river with nets.

On the 16th of June, toward evening, a fisherman’s net came up heavy, and Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia, was pulled out of the Tiber’s filth, still wearing everything he had ridden off in—doublet, cloak, boots, gloves at his belt, dagger still sheathed at his hip, and in his purse, untouched, thirty ducats. Robbery was off the table at a glance. What was on the body instead were nine wounds: stab wounds to the head, the body, the legs, and one driven through his throat. His hands had reportedly been tied.

Whoever did this had wanted him thoroughly, redundantly dead, and had wanted the world to know his money meant nothing to them. They washed him, dressed him in his ducal finery, and carried him that night by torchlight from Castel Sant’Angelo to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where his mother’s family had its chapel. Burchard noted the procession with his usual precision: over a hundred torchbearers, the Duke borne on a bier, looking, people said, almost alive, more handsome in death than in life. The Pope did not walk in the procession.

The Pope was in his apartments coming apart. Burchard recorded that when Alexander first learned the corpse was truly his son, he shut himself away and wept so violently, cried out so loudly, that the sound carried outside the room, and from Wednesday evening to Saturday he took no food, and did not sleep from Thursday morning until Sunday, when he finally appeared before the cardinals in consistory. He said, in an astonishing public confession of grief, that a greater calamity could not have befallen him, that he had loved the Duke of Gandia more than anyone in the world, and that he would give seven papacies, had he them, to restore his son to life. He went further.

God had done this, he said, in punishment for his sins, and he announced a commission to reform the church, to strip away its luxuries, starting with his own court. For a few weeks that summer, the most worldly pope of the age seemed truly broken into penitence. The reform commission quietly died. So did the investigation.

Within a week or two, the hunt for the killers of the Pope’s most beloved child simply stopped. Not one arrest was ever made, and no suspect was ever publicly named. Alexander declared he knew who was responsible, refused to say more, and forbade the matter to be pursued. A father who had screamed through the Vatican walls chose deliberately never to catch the men who put nine holes in his son.

People have been arguing about the reason ever since, and the ugliest explanation is the one that took root. Suspects in the early days were plentiful. The Orsini, whose castles Juan had lately besieged and whose kinsmen had died in papal custody, had motive dripping off them. Giovanni Sforza, Lucrezia’s humiliated husband, was whispered about.

Ascanio Sforza was suspected loudly enough that he refused for a time to come near the Vatican, since Juan had recently exchanged insults with a member of his household—insults that ended with the strangling of one of the cardinal’s servants. Even little Jofré came up, on account of Sancha, because Juan’s attentions to his own brother’s wife were common gossip. Notice something about that list: half the motives on it run through the Borgia family’s own bedrooms. And then slowly one name pushed out all the others.

In February of 1498, eight months after the murder, the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice sent his duke a dispatch containing one flat sentence: “I have learned that the death of the Duke of Gandia was the work of his brother, the Cardinal. ” No evidence attached, no source named, just the report of what informed Italians were now saying. Within a year or two it had hardened in embassies and chronicles into common knowledge. Cesare killed Juan.

The motives on offer were a braid of ambition and something fouler. Ambition first, and it cannot be denied that no living man profited more from that corpse. Juan’s death took the sword out of the dead hand and in time put it in Cesare’s. Everything Cesare became was only possible over his brother’s body.

Beyond ambition, the rumor mill offered jealousy, and it offered two women. Sancha of Aragon, sister-in-law to them both, said to be sharing her favors with both brothers. And in the darkest version, whispered then and printed later, the brothers’ own sister, Lucrezia, over whom this version claimed Juan and Cesare competed like rival suitors. Nothing survives that proves Cesare’s hand in it.

No witness placed him. No confession exists. Some modern historians think the Orsini remained the likeliest culprits, and Cesare was never formally accused by anyone in a position to know. What survives is the pattern around the fact: the stopped investigation, the father who would not name the man he said he knew, the brother who inherited the dead man’s entire future.

Contemporaries looked at that pattern and drew their conclusion almost unanimously. The reputation Cesare carried for the rest of his life—fratricide—was fixed by it before he had conquered a single town. What he does next, either way, is exactly what a man clearing his own path would do. A month after they buried Juan, Cesare rode south to Naples anyway, on his father’s business, to crown a new king as papal legate.

He came back with something that would quietly torture him for the remaining ten years of his life. Naples in the 1490s was the epicenter of a horrifying new epidemic the Italians called the “French disease,” because the French army had spread it during their invasion a couple of years before—and the French naturally called it the Neapolitan disease. Syphilis, in its first furious European generation, burning through bodies far faster and more visibly than the slower illness later centuries knew. Cesare, twenty-two years old and never restrained in his appetites, contracted it that summer.

We know this with unusual medical precision, because his personal physician, a Spanish doctor named Gaspar Torella, was one of the first men in Europe to write a treatise on the disease, and he built his case studies around a thinly disguised patient he called “a young cardinal. ” The sore appeared first on the genitals. Then came the fevers and the aching joints. And then the thing that mattered most to a man famous as the handsomest in Italy: the eruptions, pustules spreading across the face and body, weeping, crusting, scarring.

Torella tried ointments, potions, sweating baths—anything but the mercury treatments he considered poison. The disease retreated and returned, retreated and returned, on its own schedule, for the rest of Cesare’s life. That fact sits underneath everything that follows: the beautiful young prince watching his own face begin periodically to rot. Visitors in later years described the marks, and Paolo Giovio wrote of his countenance “blotched and eaten.

” A tradition grew that this is why Cesare took to wearing a mask in public, and why Rome came to know the figure of the masked duke moving through the streets after dark with armed men around him. Some of his biographers doubt the mask story, since it traces mostly to hostile pens, but the disfigurement itself is well attested, and the image welded itself onto him. A man whose motto promised Caesar or nothing, hiding his face. While Cesare was in Naples scratching at the first sores, his family back in Rome was busy demolishing his sister’s first marriage—and it opened the door on the most notorious accusation ever leveled at this family.

Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro had outlived his usefulness. The Milan alliance his marriage to Lucrezia represented was dead weight by 1497, and Alexander wanted his seventeen-year-old daughter back on the board for a better match. The problem was grounds. The solution the Borgias chose was, even by their standards, breathtaking in its cruelty.

The marriage, they announced, had never been consummated in three years because Giovanni Sforza was impotent, and Lucrezia remained a virgin. Sforza—who had a dead first wife who had died in childbirth, and would go on to father a child later in life—was ordered by his own relatives, who valued the Pope’s goodwill above their kinsman’s dignity, to sign a formal confession of his own impotence. They threatened to withdraw their protection if he refused. And everyone understood what happened to unprotected enemies of the Borgias.

So he signed. In December 1497 the annulment went through, and the Church solemnly certified Lucrezia Borgia to be an untouched virgin. In the words of the Perugian chronicler Matarazzo, all Italy laughed, because, he wrote with a hostile pen, it was common knowledge that she had been, and was then, the greatest whore there ever was in Rome. Sforza did not go quietly.

Stripped of his wife, his dowry, and his manhood in the eyes of Europe, he struck back with the only weapon left to him: an accusation so enormous it has never stopped echoing. Asked why the Pope really wanted the marriage dissolved, Sforza said that Alexander wanted Lucrezia back so that he could have her for himself—his own daughter. He reportedly went further and threw Cesare and Juan into the same charge. From a discarded husband’s mouth, in the middle of the ugliest divorce of the century, the claim was obviously venomous and obviously self-interested.

It was also, for the Borgias’ enemies, a gift beyond price. Incest joined poison and murder in the family legend that very winter, and writers from Guicciardini onward repeated it, elaborated it, and versified it. Alexander’s doting, unusual closeness to his daughter—the way he kept her near, gave her his correspondence to manage, even left her as a sort of regent in his apartments when he traveled—made the whisper easy to sustain. People saw a pope who could refuse his daughter nothing, and they filled in the rest with the worst.

What happened next inside that family did nothing to quiet anyone down. During the annulment proceedings, Lucrezia had withdrawn from her husband’s reach into the convent of San Sisto on the Appian Way. Messages between the Pope and his cloistered daughter were carried by a young Spanish chamberlain of the papal household, a good-looking man named Pedro Calderón, whom everyone called Perotto. At some point in those months, by the account of multiple contemporary observers, the messenger and the seventeen-year-old became lovers.

Set the dates side by side and you will see the catastrophe forming: while the Church was preparing to certify Lucrezia’s virginity to all Christendom, the Ferrarese ambassador and others began reporting that the Pope’s daughter was pregnant. Perotto’s body came out of the Tiber on the 14th of February 1498. Burchard put it with lethal dryness: Pedro Calderón, he wrote, had fallen—not of his own will—into the river, where he was found, and of this matter much was said in the city. The Venetian Marin Sanudo added the detail that completes the horror: found drowned alongside the chamberlain was one of Lucrezia’s ladies, a maid named Pantasilea, the woman who would have attended her mistress through those convent months and known everything worth knowing.

Two people who between them held the secret of the Pope’s daughter, both in the river within a day of each other. Nobody in Rome needed the crime explained to them, and nobody doubted whose work it was. One Venetian report a year later stated it outright: that Cesare had killed the Spaniard who had gotten his sister with child. An even more theatrical version circulated through diplomatic channels, and whether or not it happened this way, it shows you what informed people believed this family was.

In that telling, Cesare hunted Perotto through the palace with a drawn sword, and the young man fled to the Pope himself and clung to Alexander’s robes, and Cesare stabbed him right there under his father’s mantle, so that the blood jetted up into the Pope’s face. The sober record gives us only the two drowned bodies and Burchard’s raised eyebrow. The embellished record gives us blood on the papal vestments. Both versions end with the same corpses.

And then came the child. In March of 1498, right when the ambassadors said Lucrezia’s confinement would end, a baby boy appeared in the Borgia household named Giovanni, known to history by the label the Romans gave him: *l’infans Romanus*, the Roman Infant. Officially, at first, he came from nowhere. Three years later Alexander issued a papal bull to legitimize the boy’s future, declaring him to be the son of Cesare Borgia by an unmarried woman.

So far, tidy enough. But on the same day the Pope signed a second bull—this one kept secret—and in the second bull he declared the truth to be otherwise: that the boy Giovanni was in fact his own son, the child of the Pope. Two official documents, same child, same day, two different Borgia fathers, and the mother’s name in neither. When the secret bull eventually surfaced, it detonated under the family’s reputation, because everyone could do the reasoning aloud.

Why conceal the mother of a mere papal by-blow, when the Pope had acknowledged Vannozza’s children openly for decades? Unless the mother’s identity was the entire problem. Unless the mother was inside the household. The theory that the Roman Infant was Lucrezia’s child by Perotto is the mild version.

The theory the Borgias’ enemies preferred, holding those two bulls side by side, was that the contradictory paternity claims had a point, because the true paternity was something no document could say. Giovanni was raised a Borgia, was even briefly made Duke of Nepi as a toddler, and drifted through the rest of his life as a walking question mark, ending up years later in Lucrezia’s household in Ferrara, introduced awkwardly as her half-brother. The documents are real. The dates line up.

The two corpses in the Tiber are real. And the family never offered an explanation that survives. Rome drew its conclusions in 1498, and the word incest attached itself to the Borgia name so firmly that four of the next five centuries treated it as simple fact. Through all of this, Cesare was still a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church.

That was about to end in a way no one in the Church’s history had ever ended it. By the summer of 1498, with Juan a year in his tomb, Cesare had extracted from his father the thing he had wanted all along. On the 17th of August 1498, the twenty-two-year-old stood before the assembled cardinals and asked to be released from holy orders, pleading that he had never had a vocation, that his soul was in danger living a lie. The consistory, knowing perfectly well whose script this was, granted it.

Cesare Borgia became the first man ever to resign the cardinalate. He walked out of the Sacred College and, within days, into a French dukedom, because the whole maneuver had been pre-sold to the new king of France in one of the most cynical trades of the era. Louis XII had inherited the French throne that spring along with an inconvenient wife, and he wanted his marriage annulled so he could marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne of Brittany, and keep her duchy attached to France. Annulments were the Pope’s to give.

So a bargain took shape with almost insulting simplicity. Louis got his annulment plus a red hat for his chief minister. Cesare got the duchy of Valentinois in southern France, a princely income, a French military command, and a French royal bride to be arranged. Italians who had called him Valencia after his Spanish see could keep the nickname with one letter’s adjustment, and so he became permanently Il Valentino.

In October 1498 he sailed for France in a display of wealth that made onlookers blink. His horses reportedly shod with silver, his baggage train gleaming, the ex-cardinal dressed in white damask and jewels. After some months of negotiation—and the polite refusal of one appalled Neapolitan princess who declined to marry a priest’s bastard—he was wed in May 1499 to Charlotte d’Albret, a gentle, pious sixteen- or seventeen-year-old sister of the king of Navarre, said to be one of the loveliest young women at the French court. Cesare characteristically sent his father a report on the wedding night, and the Pope characteristically shared its contents around, the tally of the bridegroom’s performances to general Vatican amusement.

Four months later Cesare rode over the Alps beside the king of France at the invasion of Italy, and Charlotte, pregnant, stayed behind. He never saw her again. He never once laid eyes on the daughter she bore him. Those French months nearly broke him before the marriage saved him, and they show a Cesare we rarely get to see: humiliated and swallowing it.

His entry into Chinon to meet King Louis was staged as pure spectacle—pages in crimson and gold, mules in matching livery, the Duke glittering with rubies—and the French court, watching from the windows, laughed at him openly. Too much finery, the courtiers sniffed. Too much of the parvenu’s bastard dressed like a treasure barge. Worse was waiting inside.

The bride originally promised was Carlotta of Aragon, a princess of Naples raised at the French court, and Carlotta, to the astonishment of everyone who assumed royal girls did as they were told, refused him—refused him to his face, in effect, month after month—and the phrase attributed to her went around Europe on wings: that she did not wish to be known as “Madame la Cardinale,” the Cardinal’s wife. Cesare hung at the French court through a winter of this, a supplicant with dwindling leverage, holding the Pope’s precious annulment documents as his only card, and the ambassadors reported his mood curdling by the week. Some in Rome whispered gleefully that he would be sent home a laughingstock—a defrocked cardinal with no bride and no duchy. When Charlotte d’Albret was finally produced as the substitute and the deal closed, the humiliation ended overnight, and the French, who had mocked the overdressed Italian, now got to watch him ride south with their own king and their own lances to take whatever he wanted.

Nobody at Chinon was laughing by the following winter. The French alliance handed Cesare what he had traded his soul’s career for: an army. Louis took Milan in the autumn of 1499, and in return for papal support he lent his new Duke of Valentinois a core of French heavy cavalry and Swiss infantry—the best troops in Europe—for a project father and son had been designing together. The target was the Romagna, the band of territory running down Italy’s Adriatic flank.

Imola, Forlì, Pesaro, Rimini, Faenza, and the rest. On paper, every one of those cities belonged to the Pope. In practice, each was run by a local dynasty of papal vicars who paid Rome nothing, fought each other constantly, and squeezed their subjects with a brutality that had made the region a byword for misgovernment. Alexander issued a bull declaring the lot of them deposed for unpaid dues.

And in November 1499, his son crossed into the Romagna at the head of the Church’s armies to make the parchment real. Cesare was twenty-four. He would never again be anything but a man at war. Imola opened its gates almost gratefully in short order.

Forlì, the next city down the road, was a different animal entirely, because Forlì was held by Caterina Sforza. And Caterina Sforza was possibly the only person in this entire story who could look a Borgia in the eye without blinking. She was around thirty-six, a granddaughter of dukes, widowed by assassination more than once, and famous across Europe for two decades of conduct that had earned her the nickname “the Tigress of Forlì. ” When conspirators murdered her first husband and held her children hostage before the walls of this same fortress, she had, by the most repeated account, climbed to the ramparts, lifted her skirts, and shouted down at them that they were fools—she had the means to make more children.

She had personally hunted down her husband’s killers and had them butchered, their houses raised. When Cesare’s herald summoned her to surrender, she tried to solve the problem her own way first, dispatching messengers to Rome carrying letters for the Pope—sealed letters that had been rubbed against the corpse of a plague victim. The plot was discovered, the messengers arrested. Alexander complained to the ambassadors with what sounds like genuine indignation that the lady had tried to poison the Pope with the plague itself.

So it would be a siege in the dead of winter. Caterina put on armor and commanded the fortress of Ravaldino in person, directing her gunners from the walls, and for weeks she made the papal army bleed for every yard. Cesare rode out to the edge of the moat twice to negotiate with her, this armored woman on the rampart, and during the second parley the drawbridge began to rise with him nearly on it, and he spurred clear just ahead of what he ever afterward believed was an attempt to take him prisoner. The artillery ground the walls down through December and into January.

On the 12th of January 1500 the final assault went in through the breach. The garrison was slaughtered in the courtyards. Caterina fought in the melee until French soldiers physically seized her, and then began an episode that even hardened contemporaries recounted with distaste. Because she had surrendered to a French captain, by French custom she could not be held as a common prisoner, and Cesare resolved the technicality by taking personal custody of her.

She was moved into his quarters. Reports went around Italy—ambassadorial reports, chronicles—that the conqueror raped his thirty-six-year-old prisoner and kept her. And a remark was attributed to him afterward, passed along by his enemies, comparing her defense of her fortress favorably to her defense of her virtue. The remark’s paper trail is shaky; its earliest source is a biography of doubtful honesty, and the most careful local chronicler of Forlì does not confirm the assault.

What is beyond argument is what followed. She was hauled to Rome, paraded in his triumph, and when she refused to sign away her children’s claims to her cities, this granddaughter of dukes was thrown into the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo—the same fortress she had once held as its mistress—and left there for the better part of a year, until the French king’s honor finally forced her release. Machiavelli noted that all Italy sang verses in her praise. She retired to Florence, and told a correspondent later that had she been able to write everything that happened to her, she would shock the world.

Cesare came home to Rome in late February 1500, the Jubilee year, with pilgrims packing the city, and staged an entry that told everyone exactly who he now thought he was: a procession in black, hundreds of retainers in his livery, and the Duke himself in plain black velvet, gold chain at his neck, unreadable amid the color around him. Then, days later, carnival floats done up as the triumph of Julius Caesar, laurel wreaths, the whole classical apparatus, with his motto doing the talking. That spring and summer, Rome got to know its returning prince up close, and what it learned frightened it. In June, in an enclosed courtyard by St.

Peter’s, before the crowds, he staged a Spanish bullfight—went in mounted with a light lance, killed several bulls, then dismounted, took a two-handed sword to a fresh bull, and took its head off at the neck with one stroke. The Venetian envoy Paolo Capello wrote it up almost in awe: one blow, and the whole city talking. The strength was real, whatever else about him was performance. Capello’s dispatches from that year give us the fullest portrait of Cesare at his peak that any outsider managed.

“Physically most beautiful,” the envoy wrote, “tall and well-made, better looking than King Louis’s whole court. ” And in the same breath: “Every night, four or five murdered men are found in the streets of Rome—bishops, prelates, and others—and all the city trembles for fear of being murdered by the Duke. ” He recorded too a scene from inside the palace, an episode with a Spanish soldier named Perotto—the story we have already met—told to him as fact, the blood springing up into the Pope’s face. Ambassadors do not file poetry.

They file what their governments need to know. And what Venice apparently needed to know in 1500 was that the Pope’s son ran Rome by night, and that people who inconvenienced him stopped appearing at their windows. One murder from that summer stands apart from the anonymous nightly harvest, and it cut into the middle of the Borgia family itself. After the Sforza annulment, Lucrezia had been married again in 1498 to Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Bisceglie, an illegitimate son of the late king of Naples and, by wide agreement, one of the best-looking young men in Italy.

He was seventeen. Nobody plans for what happens next in an arranged marriage. They fell for each other properly. Contemporaries who had nothing kind to say about any Borgia noted that this couple was happy.

In November 1499 Lucrezia gave birth to their son Rodrigo, named for the Pope, and for a moment the Pope’s daughter had something resembling an ordinary life. Her brother’s foreign policy killed it. Alfonso was Naples, and the family had gone over to France, and France wanted Naples, and so Lucrezia’s husband turned overnight from asset into obstacle—a piece of the old alliance walking around the Vatican with a claim on the Pope’s daughter. On the evening of the 15th of July 1500, Alfonso crossed St.

Peter’s Square after visiting the Pope, with only a couple of attendants, and a group of armed men rose from the steps of the basilica itself and fell on him with blades. They cut his head open, carved into his right arm and his thigh, and were dragging the bleeding nineteen-year-old toward the river, where a party of forty horsemen waited to complete the delivery, when his attendants’ shouting brought the papal guard, and the attackers broke off and escaped through the Porta Pertusa. Alfonso was carried into the Vatican pouring blood, and they laid him in a chamber of the Borgia Tower, and for a while nobody knew if he would live out the night. He was young and strong, and he had two ferocious nurses.

Lucrezia and his sister Sancha barricaded themselves into the sick room and ran it like a fortress. Convinced, along with the whole city, that they knew exactly who had ordered the botched job, the two women took no chances that a Borgia might finish it quietly. They cooked his food themselves in the room on their own fire, tasting everything, and had the king of Naples send a trusted physician north. The Pope, whatever he privately understood, posted sixteen guards on the door.

For a month it worked. The wounds closed. Alfonso got up, walked, joked. The ambassador dispatches turned cautiously optimistic.

One of them also recorded a sentence circulating that week, attributed to Cesare, unapologetic and unmistakable: that he had not wounded Alfonso, but that if he had, the young man had richly deserved it. And a second remark, colder, passed along in the same weeks: what did not happen at lunch, it ran, could still happen at dinner. Dinner came on the 18th of August 1500. That afternoon, by the fullest accounts, Cesare’s chief enforcer entered the sick room with armed men.

The enforcer was Michelotto Corella—Don Michelotto to the Spaniards—and his hands run like a dark thread through the rest of this story. He was the man Cesare sent when something needed to stop breathing. Michelotto announced that a plot against the Duke had been uncovered, and arrested Alfonso’s uncle and the Neapolitan envoy right off the sick-room floor. Lucrezia and Sancha erupted, demanding to know how prisoners could be taken from under the Pope’s own protection, and Michelotto, with perfect courtesy, suggested the ladies take their protest to his Holiness directly.

He would, of course, release the men if the Pope so ordered. The two women ran from the room to find Alexander. You can see the trick from five hundred years away. When they came back minutes later, the guards were shut out of the chamber, and Alfonso of Aragon was dead.

Michelotto had strangled him in his sick bed—a nineteen-year-old convalescent, throttled in the sheets he was healing in. The official line, delivered with a straight face, was that the Duke had suffered a hemorrhage. Burchard in his diary permitted himself one of the driest sentences he ever wrote: that since the doctors and a hunchback who nursed him could not agree that the wounds had killed him, the physicians were arrested, examined, and released, as those who ordered the examination well knew the answer. Alfonso was buried quickly, at night, without ceremony, in a chapel by St.

Peter’s—the funeral of an inconvenience. Lucrezia’s grief was loud enough to become a diplomatic fact. Ambassadors reported the Pope’s daughter weeping day and night, refusing food, and that her tears irritated both her father and her brother until she was packed off to the castle at Nepi with her infant son to mourn out of earshot. Letters she signed that autumn survive, and in the signature line she called herself “the most unhappy princess of Nepi.

” She was twenty years old, and the second marriage—the one that had actually been a marriage—was in the ground with a strangled teenager, and everyone she might have blamed shared her blood or her table. As for Cesare, a visit to her at Nepi is recorded, brief and businesslike, on his way to a war. The family absorbed the murder the way it absorbed everything, and the machine rolled forward. By the autumn of 1500, the papal treasury had been refilled by a device—the creation of twelve new cardinals at a price of roughly 10,000 ducats a hat—and Cesare marched again.

The second Romagna campaign moved like a landslide. Pesaro fell in October without a fight, Giovanni Sforza, the discarded husband, fleeing ahead of the army rather than test what his former brother-in-law had in mind for him. Rimini’s ruling family, the last debased remnants of the Malatesta, sold out and left. That put Cesare in front of Faenza as winter closed in.

And Faenza is where this story acquires one of its saddest ghosts. Faenza was ruled—loved is nearer the truth—by Astorre Manfredi, a boy of sixteen, the last of a dynasty that had held the town for two centuries. The citizens’ attachment to their young lord ran deep enough that when the Borgia army arrived, this small city, with no prospect of relief, chose to fight. Through a miserable winter siege the town’s people held the walls beside their teenager—women hauling shot, shopkeepers standing to arms—and they threw back assaults from the finest army in Italy well into the spring.

Even Cesare’s own camp talked about them with admiration. When the end came in April 1501, starved out and breached, Faenza negotiated a surrender whose terms Cesare granted readily: full honor of war, no sack, and, in the article that mattered most, a guarantee of Astorre’s liberty—the boy to go free wherever he wished. He chose, for reasons that break your heart in hindsight, to stay a while in the entourage of his glamorous conqueror, who received him warmly, and observers noted the pretty, melancholy ex-lord riding in the Duke’s train. Then in June he was quietly moved to Rome, and the gates of Castel Sant’Angelo closed on him.

Guarantee or no guarantee. He stayed in those dungeons for about a year. What was done to him inside them, no record says directly. On or around the 9th of June 1502, Burchard’s diary notes: the body of Astorre Manfredi was pulled from the Tiber, a stone tied around his neck, drowned.

He was seventeen or eighteen. Fished out with him, the same entry records, were two young men with their arms bound, and a woman, and others. The Venetian ambassador Giustiniani reported the whisper running through Rome that the young lords of Faenza had been thrown into the river by night, and among the things said in the city, repeated by chroniclers then and historians after, was that the beautiful boy had been used for someone’s pleasure in that castle before he was disposed of. His town had trusted a signed guarantee from Cesare Borgia.

The Tiber, by this point in our story, had become the family’s filing system—and we are nowhere near done adding to it. Between the fall of Faenza and Astorre’s murder came an episode of mass horror that tends to get skipped in the romantic versions of Cesare’s career, and it should not be. In the summer of 1501 he marched south as a commander in the French invasion of Naples, and on the 24th of July the Franco-Papal army stood before the city of Capua. Negotiations for surrender were actually in progress when, by treachery or confusion, soldiers got inside the walls, and what followed was one of the most infamous massacres of the Italian Wars.

The army went through Capua killing for the better part of a day. Contemporary estimates of the dead run from three or four thousand up toward six thousand—soldiers first, then civilians, priests at their altars, anyone. Chroniclers dwelt on the fate of the women hunted through the streets, violated in churches where they had taken sanctuary, and dozens of them—one account says forty or more—chose the town wells and cisterns instead, drowning themselves to escape the soldiery. Guicciardini, writing later with every anti-Borgia motive but from good sources, added a detail aimed straight at Cesare: that the handsomest of the captured women were brought before the Duke, who inspected them and kept a selection for himself.

However you portion blame between French troops, Italian troops, and their commanders, Capua’s blood went into the ledger under his name, and Italy noticed that the Pope’s son presided over the butchery of an Italian city and came home to Rome in higher standing than ever. Home to Rome, in fact, to the very season that produced the single most notorious dinner party in the history of the papacy. Everyone half-knows this episode, and everything about it hangs on a single witness. Our witness is once more Johann Burchard, the papal master of ceremonies—a man whose entire career was liturgical correctness, and whose private diary has no appetite for sensation: page after page of candle counts and complaints about cardinals who do not know the rubrics.

In that diary, under the date of the 30th of October 1501, sits the following entry. That evening, Duke Cesare Borgia gave a supper in his apartments in the Apostolic Palace, and fifty honest courtesans of the city were present—that word “honest” meaning, in the usage of the day, high-class. After the meal they danced with the servants and others there, clothed at first, and then naked. Candelabra bearing lit candles were then set on the floor, and chestnuts were scattered among them, and the naked courtesans crawled on hands and knees between the candle flames picking up the chestnuts, while, the entry continues, the Pope, the Duke, and his sister Lucrezia looked on.

Finally, prizes were announced—silk doublets, shoes, caps, and finery—for the men who could perform carnally with the courtesans the greatest number of times, and the contest was duly held in the sight of all present, and the prizes distributed by judgment of the spectators. The Banquet of Chestnuts, set down by the palace’s own protocol officer. The Vatican, the Pope of Rome watching, his children beside him, and a population contest with door prizes. Ever since the diary surfaced, people have fought over the entry.

Burchard was not at the party, so he was recording what the palace was saying; some historians point out he had a punctilious German’s distaste for the Borgia court and may have written down gossip. Against the doubts stands the character of the diarist: sober to the point of tedium, still employed in that palace with everything to lose by inventing filth about his masters, and never known to retract it. And it does not float alone. An anonymous open letter circulating the following year, addressed to a Roman noble named Silvio Savelli, cataloged the outrages of the Borgias for all Europe and described prostitutes performing in the papal apartments in terms that match, and at least one guest reference to courtesans greeting visitors there with a most shocking sight survives independently.

The Pope’s defenders at the time denied nothing specifically. They simply raged at the letter’s existence. So the story stuck—and it stuck for the same reason every story in this catalog stuck. By 1501, nothing was implausible anymore.

What Alexander did about the Savelli letter shows how criticism was processed in that household. The Pope himself oddly took it with a shrug, remarking that Rome was a free city and people wrote what they pleased, and even that libel against himself amused him. Cesare processed it differently. A masked man who had been going about Rome repeating slanders against the Duke was seized—and this is Burchard again, dated December 1501—the man’s right hand was cut off, and his tongue was cut out, and the tongue was hung from the severed hand’s little finger, and the whole arrangement was displayed at a church window for two days, so every literate and illiterate soul in the city could study what commentary cost.

The Pope, pressed by an ambassador about his son’s severity, gave the answer that has been quoted ever since: “The Duke is good-natured,” Alexander said, “but he cannot tolerate insults. ”

The winter of 1501 into 1502 brought the family a genuine triumph of the respectable sort. Lucrezia’s third marriage was landed, and it was a coup: Alfonso d’Este, heir to the ancient duchy of Ferrara, one of the proudest houses in Italy. The Este were appalled at the connection and haggled like fishwives, extracting a dowry so enormous—100,000 ducats plus territories and tax breaks—that the old duke was accused of selling his son.

But the Pope’s daughter got her way out of Rome. And when the roof falls in on this family, Lucrezia alone will be standing somewhere the wreckage cannot reach her. She left Rome in January 1502 in a bridal procession of a thousand people. And the night before she departed, her father and brother reportedly sat with her privately for hours.

Whatever was said in that room, she never came back to Rome—not once—for the rest of her life. Cesare spent that spring assembling the next act. And in June 1502 he pulled off the most audacious land grab of his career, an operation that made every prince in Italy check the locks. His army was marching ostensibly against the little state of Camerino.

Suddenly, by forced marches through the mountains, it appeared instead at the passes above Urbino—the refined, art-stuffed duchy of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, an ally, a man who had lent Cesare his own artillery for the Camerino operation days earlier. Guidobaldo got the warning after supper and had time to grab almost nothing. He fled through the night in his doublet, escaping over back trails while Borgia troops occupied his palace—one of the loveliest in Europe, whose library and treasures Cesare shipped out by the mule train. The stolen state was seized without a battle, on pure treachery against a friend, and Cesare received the ambassadors of a stunned Italy in Guidobaldo’s own halls.

One of the diplomats who came up to Urbino that month, sent by Florence to gauge this suddenly terrifying neighbor, was a thirty-three-year-old secretary named Niccolò Machiavelli. Here, in the looted palace of Urbino, the most consequential admiration in political history begins, and Machiavelli’s dispatches home start painting the portrait the world still uses. “This lord is truly splendid and magnificent,” he wrote, “so confident in war that the greatest enterprise seems small to him, never resting, arriving in one place before you’ve heard he left another, well-loved by his soldiers. Secret, sudden.

” The secretary had found his specimen. Camerino fell weeks later, and its fate answered anyone still wondering whether Urbino was an aberration. The city’s seventy-year-old lord, Giulio Cesare da Varano, was taken prisoner along with his sons. The old man was moved from castle to castle for a few months and then strangled in his cell—a cord around a seventy-year-old throat, some accounts putting Michelotto’s hands on it.

Two of his sons, Venanzio and Annibale, were strangled in their turns later at the fortress of Cattolica. A third son escaped to fight another day. The Borgias had learned not to exile fallen ruling families. Since exiles come back, they processed them.

That summer in Urbino, one more remarkable figure joined the payroll, and the juxtaposition still startles people. Cesare hired Leonardo da Vinci, poached from Milan, as his architect and general engineer, with a passport signed in Cesare’s hand ordering every subject to give the bearer free passage and every assistance. For roughly eight months the greatest mind of the Renaissance traveled the Romagna, inspecting fortresses for the most feared man in Italy, sketching harbor works at Piombino, drawing his famous aerial map of Imola—a map so exact it hardly looks like the work of its century, made so his employer could plan the defense of a stolen city. Leonardo’s notebooks from those months record engineering notes and little sketches, and, with an eloquence historians still argue over, not one single word of opinion about his employer.

In the same weeks, at the same court, Machiavelli was taking notes on power and Leonardo was mapping its fortifications. Cesare Borgia, at twenty-seven, employed the author of *The Prince* and the painter of the *Last Supper* simultaneously, and both of them worked for him while men were being strangled in his castles. The strangled men had friends, though, and in the autumn of 1502 the friends finally compared notes. Cesare’s captains—the condottieri who had done so much of his conquering—were mercenary lords of exactly the type he had been eliminating, and each of them had begun quietly measuring the distance between himself and the nearest cord.

Vitellozzo Vitelli, the brooding artillery master of Città di Castello—syphilitic, vengeful, and personally devoted to hating Florence. Oliverotto da Fermo, a young man whose record sets the moral caliber of this circle. A year earlier, Oliverotto had returned to his hometown of Fermo, been welcomed by the uncle who had raised him like a son, thrown a banquet in that uncle’s honor, and at the height of the evening had his soldiers murder his uncle and every leading citizen at the table, seizing the city over their bodies. He was, in other words, a man who understood exactly what a dinner invitation could be—and history was sharpening a very pointed irony for him on that score.

Alongside these two stood the Orsini—Paolo and Francesco, Duke of Gravina, princes of the great Roman clan whose destruction the Borgias openly intended—plus Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia and a few smaller fry. In October 1502 they met at a castle called La Magione, by Lake Trasimeno, and swore to bring the dragon down before it ate them each in turn. Urbino rose in revolt on the news. Guidobaldo came home to weeping crowds, and for a few weeks Cesare’s whole edifice wobbled.

Cesare held steady, holed up at Imola with money and French reinforcements on the way, and he did something more unsettling than rage. He charmed. Letters went out to each conspirator individually, warm and reasonable, wounded in tone. Old friends should not let misunderstandings fester.

Machiavelli, posted to his court through that whole autumn and filing dispatches to Florence nearly daily, watched the performance with professional wonder, writing home that the Duke let no one fathom him, that his secrecy was absolute, that he never announced a thing until it was already done. One by one the plotters, who mistrusted each other even more than they mistrusted him, came crawling back to terms. A treaty was signed restoring everyone to command. All forgiven.

Paolo Orsini, vainest of the lot, even stood personal guarantor for the Duke’s good faith. Machiavelli left us a picture of the winter court where all this ripened. Through those months at Imola and then Cesena, the secretary lived in the Duke’s orbit and found the experience maddening in ways his dispatches keep circling. Audiences happened at midnight or two in the morning, when they happened at all.

The Duke fully dressed, fully alert, working through papers while Italy slept. Nothing leaked. Machiavelli wrote home in a tone hovering between complaint and awe that in this court things are done in the most secret manner, that the Duke never speaks of a thing until it is already accomplished, and that he does not communicate his designs to any man alive until the hour of execution. Florence kept demanding predictions, and their man on the ground kept answering, in effect, that predicting this prince was like predicting lightning.

Meanwhile, the court itself performed normality at full volume. That December in Cesena, with the captains’ fates already decided in the Duke’s head, Cesare threw the town a carnival—wrestling matches and bullfights in the square, the conqueror mingling cheerfully with the locals, dancing with their daughters, and the Romagnol crowds adored it. Contemporaries noted how easily he wore the common touch, this masked nocturnal creature, when he chose to. Five days after Cesena, Senigallia.

The chronology alone is a portrait. Before settling accounts with his captains, Cesare had one piece of internal business to finish, and it produced the most famous single image of his entire career. Two years running, the governance of his conquered Romagna had been in the hands of a Spanish lieutenant, Ramiro de Lorca—a hard man handed unlimited powers and a simple brief: make the province orderly. Ramiro had done it with a cruelty that became legendary even by the standards of this story—summary hangings and torture as administrative routine.

One anecdote of his methods, a boy, some tellings make him a page who had annoyed him, shoved into a fire. May or may not have grown in the telling, but the hatred it expressed was real, and provincial-wide. The remarkable part is that the brutality worked: the Romagna, bandit country for a century, became truly safe and well-ordered under him. By late 1502, though, Ramiro had served every purpose he could serve, and grain-hoarding accusations, and worse, hints that he had been in contact with the Magione plotters, gave grounds enough.

Two days before Christmas he was summoned to Cesena, arrested at dinner, and dropped into a cell. St. Stephen’s morning, the 26th of December 1502, brought the people of Cesena into their central piazza through the winter cold, and they found Ramiro de Lorca displayed for them. His body lay on a mat in the middle of the square, cut into two pieces.

Beside the halves, arranged with curatorial care, sat the wooden block on which it had evidently been done and a bloody executioner’s knife, some accounts adding the axe. His head stood apart on a lance. No proclamation accompanied it, and no list of crimes—just the governor in two pieces, and his hands still, one report says, in the gloves he had been wearing. The message was left for its audience to compose, and its audience included Machiavelli in town with the court, who sent Florence a dispatch admitting that the reason for the execution was not fully known, beyond that “such was the pleasure of the prince, who shows us that he can make and unmake men as he likes, according to their desserts.

” Years later, writing *The Prince*, Machiavelli returned to that morning in the piazza and gave it the sentence that keeps forever: “The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at one and the same time satisfied and stupefied. ” Satisfied comes first. The province had hated Ramiro, and their hatred had been harvested, sliced neatly in half, and served back to them as a gift. With all the cruelty of two years’ governance loaded onto the dead man, and the Duke standing clean beside the result, Machiavelli offered it to future princes as a model of how to use a servant.

Use him up, then use his corpse. Five days after Cesena, the reconciled captains got their turn. And what happened at Senigallia on the last day of 1502 was studied across Europe for a generation as the perfect crime of statecraft. Machiavelli, who was riding with the court and spoke to the participants within hours, later wrote it up as a standalone essay, so we have this one almost minute by minute.

The setup was elegant. Under the peace treaty, the captains had gone back to conquering for Cesare, and their new joint assignment was the little Adriatic port of Senigallia. The town surrendered, but its citadel commander announced he would hand the keys to no one but the Duke in person. Perfectly reasonable.

So Cesare traveled up the coast to accept the surrender, writing ahead to his captains in the friendliest terms to wait for him there so they could all meet at last, embrace, and plan the winter campaign together. They were nervous, these men who had sworn his death fourteen weeks earlier. Vitellozzo Vitelli in particular, riding to the rendezvous, is described by Machiavelli as if dragged—so gloomy that people remarked on it—as though, the secretary wrote afterward, he knew. He had reportedly told his own people that this reconciliation smelled of the grave, and come anyway on Paolo Orsini’s smiling assurances.

New Year’s Eve came, and the captains obligingly moved their own troops out of Senigallia to quarters in the countryside, clearing the town for the Duke’s entry—exactly as asked. Around midday, Cesare arrived at the river outside the walls, where the four of them—Vitellozzo, Oliverotto, Paolo Orsini, and the Duke of Gravina—rode out to greet him. Vitellozzo came unarmored, in a plain black cloak, on a mule. Cesare embraced them one by one with every show of affection.

His own escort, coordinated in advance down to the choreography, closed around the party with pairs of trusted men falling in beside each captain—honor guards, to all appearances. Noticing Oliverotto absent at first, Cesare sent Michelotto to fetch him from his troops, and the whole cheerful cavalcade passed through the gate into Senigallia, right up to the palace prepared for the Duke. The captains made to take their leave at the door. Cesare, all warmth, insisted they come inside to confer.

They dismounted, walked in with him, and the moment the doors were shut behind them, the trap snapped. Armed men took all four. Cesare excused himself, stepped out, and gave two sets of orders: the first, for his soldiers to fall upon the captains’ now-scattered troops in the countryside; the second, concerning the prisoners. Then he went off to deal with correspondence.

Machiavelli, arriving in the chaos as Borgia soldiers began sacking the town, was granted an audience that same evening and found the Duke in the best humor of their acquaintance—glowing, joking, pointing out that he had done Florence an enormous favor tonight. The secretary went back to his lodgings and sent Florence the coldest sentence of his diplomatic career: “It is my opinion,” he wrote, “that they will not be alive tomorrow morning. ” Half right. That night, in a room of the palace, Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto da Fermo were sat back to back on a bench, or a chair by some accounts, and Michelotto Corella strangled them both with one cord, twisting it tight from behind—a double garrote.

Two of the most feared soldiers in Italy, dying trussed together like poultry, face outward, each man’s convulsions shaking the other’s spine. Their last words got out through the executioners and made the rounds of every court in Europe. Oliverotto, the man who had murdered his uncle at a banquet, wept and blamed everything on Vitellozzo. Vitellozzo, syphilitic, exhausted, asked one thing: that the Pope be petitioned to grant him a plenary indulgence—forgiveness for his sins—before he died.

Whether anyone paused the strangling to pray is not recorded. The Orsini pair were kept alive a little longer, purely for timing. And here the family coordination glitters at its coldest. Word had to reach Senigallia that the Pope had done his half.

In Rome, Alexander, on receiving the agreed signal, invited the aged Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini to the Vatican and arrested him at the door, sweeping up the clan’s other available members the same morning. Once confirmation arrived in camp, Paolo Orsini and the Duke of Gravina were taken out on the road on the 18th of January 1503, at a castle called Sarteano by one account, and strangled in their turn. Paolo Orsini had guaranteed Cesare’s good faith with his honor. The honor and the guarantee were buried in the same hole.

Italy’s reaction to Senigallia measures the moral temperature of the age. Horror, yes, in some quarters, but running right alongside it, open admiration. Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, arbiter of Renaissance taste, sent Cesare a gift of a hundred carnival masks with a note congratulating him on his success. Louis of France reportedly praised the deed as worthy of a Roman.

And the Pope’s own court took to calling that New Year’s Eve “the beautiful deception”—*il bel inganno*—a phrase people used the way you would compliment a painting. Meanwhile, in Rome, the elderly Cardinal Orsini sat in a Borgia cell, and in February he sickened and died there. Nobody in Italy entertained the possibility of natural causes, because his mother was seen, while he still lived, trying to buy his life—the old woman and the cardinal’s mistress. The mistress, dressed as a man to get through the door, brought the Pope a pearl of great price that Alexander had wanted, hoping to purchase mercy.

The Pope took the pearl. The cardinal came out of the castle feet first anyway, and his property, of course, reverted to the papal treasury. That word poison has been circling this story from the start, and the Borgia specialty comes in two layers: the legend and the ledger. The legend says the family kept a proprietary preparation called cantarella—white, faintly sweet, arsenic at its heart by most guesses—deployable in wine or sweetmeats, its dosing supposedly calibrated so death could be scheduled days or weeks out, and carried, in the story’s most theatrical furnishing, in a hollow ring the Duke wore, its cover sliding aside above a victim’s cup.

Chemistry cannot confirm a scheduled-death poison, and the ring belongs to the novelists. The ledger, though, is real. Under Church law, a cardinal’s property at death passed to the papacy, and Alexander’s later years show a striking mortality among precisely the richest members of the College. Each death followed at once by a very well-documented transfer of assets.

Cardinal Orsini, February 1503—we have just watched. Cardinal Michiel of Venice, one of the wealthiest men in the College, died in April 1503 after two days of violent vomiting, and his palaces were sealed by papal officers before the body cooled; the estate reckoned at over 150,000 ducats. And in the case of Michiel, uniquely, the story comes with an ending, because the following year, under the next pope, a man from Michiel’s own kitchen was arrested, put to torture, and confessed that he had administered poison to his master—on commission, he said, from the Borgias—naming his paymasters before he was hanged. A confession extracted on the rack for the benefit of the Borgias’ worst enemy is not laboratory evidence, and summer Rome killed rich and poor alike with malarial fevers that mimic every symptom in these accounts.

Set the deaths in a row, though, follow the money after each one, and you understand why every wealthy churchman in Rome by 1503 treated a dinner invitation from the palace as a medical event. Contemporaries even priced the phenomenon. The Venetian envoy relayed the going joke that the Pope fattened his cardinals like capons for the table. Standing over all of it was the strangest political partnership in Europe: the old Pope and the young Duke.

Ambassadors by 1503 were reporting a dynamic between father and son that had quietly inverted. Alexander adored Cesare, funded him, defended him, boasted of him. The envoys agreed on all that—and also on the other thing, that the Pope was afraid of him. The Venetian dispatches say it almost in those words: that the Pope loves his son and fears him too.

Visitors described Alexander waiting on Cesare’s convenience, excusing his son’s absences, his silences, his refusals to appear, in the plaintive tones of a parent managing a dangerous adult child. The seventy-year-old Pope remained a force—cunning, tireless, cheerful, hosting his suppers and his dancing girls to the end. But the direction of the family had passed downward, and everyone transacting with the Vatican understood that the white-haired man on the throne was increasingly the public face of the masked man in the tower. One ambassador summarized the arrangement with a merchant’s clarity: that the Pope now did nothing of importance except what the Duke wished.

Cesare’s own habits in these months, as the ambassadors describe them, had settled into something nocturnal and strange. He rose in the afternoon, gave audiences after dark or not at all, kept even his father waiting on his schedule, and went about, when he went about, masked. Giustiniani the Venetian complained that securing an interview with the most powerful man in Italy was like negotiating with an apparition. By the spring of 1503, the good-natured Duke controlled the Romagna, Urbino, and Camerino, held Tuscany and the great houses of Rome in fear, commanded the best small army in Italy, and stood at twenty-seven, closer to founding a Borgia kingdom in central Italy than anyone had a right to expect a Pope’s bastard could ever come.

Every piece of it rested on one aging, energetic seventy-two-year-old life in the Vatican. Cesare knew that better than anyone, and had—he later insisted—planned for every version of his father’s death. What he had not planned for was the sequence the summer actually delivered. August in Rome was the killing season.

Everyone knew it: the marshes breathing fever over the city, the rich decamping to hill towns if they could. On the 6th of August 1503, the Pope and his son did something men of their experience should perhaps have skipped. They rode out to a vineyard supper in the evening air, at the villa of Cardinal Adriano da Corneto—one of those wealthy churchmen we have just discussed—and dined outdoors into the night. Within the week, several of the party were ill.

The cardinal host sickened and eventually recovered. Alexander went down on the 12th of August with fever and vomiting. Cesare went down at nearly the same hour, worse. Rome, being Rome, produced its explanation instantly, and the explanation was almost gleeful: poison, obviously, and better still, their own.

The story that swept the city and then Italy and then into the chronicles ran that the Borgias had come to that supper intending to remove their rich host by the usual method, that flasks had been prepared, and that a servant—confused, or suborned, or simply thirsty—had poured the wrong wine. So the poisoners drank their own vintage. Divine justice arranged as farce. Historians incline heavily toward the duller killer, the season’s malaria—tertian fever, which was cutting through the whole city that month—and the Ferrarese ambassador wrote home, while both men lay sick, that given the season and the bad air, the illness was no surprise to anyone.

The legend never cared. The Borgias had spent eleven years teaching Italy to reason exactly this way about sudden illness after dinner. They were, in the end, convicted by their own jurisprudence. For six days the two of them burned in parallel rooms in the Vatican, and the drama split in half.

In one room, a seventy-two-year-old body losing. They bled Alexander heavily—thirteen ounces on the 15th of August—and the cardinals gathered, and on the 18th he confessed, heard mass, received extreme unction, and died at Vespers. In the other room, the strongest constitution in Italy, fighting for its life at the exact moment that life’s entire architecture depended on being on horseback. Cesare’s fever burned so high that his physicians reached for the heroic measures of the age.

They lowered him, so the main account runs, into a great jar of ice-cold water—shock therapy—and the immersion stripped the skin from much of his body, so that he came out flayed and shrieking, but alive. A wilder version, impossible to verify and repeated for centuries, has him plunged instead into the opened belly of a mule, the animal’s heat drawing out his own. Either way, he lived—wrecked, peeling, unable to stand—while down the corridor his father went cold, and everything he had built began to slide. He could still give orders.

Before the Pope’s death was announced to the city, Michelotto Corella and armed men entered the papal apartments, put a dagger to the throat of the cardinal in charge, and emptied the treasury—chests of gold, plate, and jewels, by the standard account something in the range of a few hundred thousand ducats, carried out over the dying, or just dead, Pope. The Borgias’ last transaction in the Vatican was a robbery at knifepoint conducted around their patriarch’s deathbed. Once the men with the chests were clear, the palace servants, unpaid and suddenly unafraid, did their own smaller looting of the papal wardrobe, and the body of Alexander VI was left for a while essentially alone. What happened to that body over the next two days is the most notorious corpse scene of the Renaissance.

And our sober diarist Burchard, who handled the arrangements, wrote it down in clinical detail—so this is testimony, not legend. In the August heat, the dead Pope began to decompose at freakish speed. By the time the body lay in state, the face had gone the color, Burchard wrote, of mulberry—purple-black, covered in blue-black spots. The nose swelled, the tongue engorged and doubled over, forcing the lips apart, and foam crept from the mouth’s corners.

The belly inflated until the trunk was, in his phrase, as wide as it was long. The features slid until nothing recognizable as Rodrigo Borgia remained, and the smell filled the basilica. Romans crowded in anyway, jeering to see the devil’s pope in this condition, and the marshals had to hold them off, though barely, because the mood in the city was carnival. Nobody official wanted to touch what remained.

The funeral itself degenerated into a brawl between clergy and soldiers mid-service, over the candles, and when the moment came to coffin him, the carpenters had misjudged—or the body had outgrown every estimate—and the coffin proved too narrow and too short. Burchard records the solution without adornment: the bearers rolled the swollen corpse in an old carpet, and then punched it, kneaded it, and stamped it down into the box, working it in like luggage, without candles or lights, and without a single priest attending the body of the 214th Pope of Rome. Six laborers making jokes as they worked, one witness said. The dead man’s own master of ceremonies wrote later that in twenty years he had never seen anything so squalid.

Romans repeated for years that on the night of the death, the devil had been seen leaping from the bedchamber in the shape of a black dog, come to collect on the bargain of 1492, and priests of the next generation reportedly refused to say masses for Alexander’s soul, on the grounds that the transaction was final. Upstairs, Cesare lay peeled and feverish on his bed, conscious enough to understand precisely what was collapsing hour by hour. Cesare said it himself later, to Machiavelli, in the conversation the secretary made famous: he had foreseen his father’s death from the beginning, he said, and prepared an answer for every consequence of it—every rival and every scenario—except one. It had never entered his calculations that when the day came, he himself would also be at the point of death.

All the contingency planning in Italy, and the one variable he never priced was his own bloodstream. The machine did exactly what Cesare feared. The Romagna’s enemies moved on his cities within days. The Orsini came howling back into Rome for revenge.

His French patron and the Spanish both started bidding for his soldiers over his head. And in the conclave chamber, the real decision was forming. The first conclave gave him a reprieve, electing a frail compromise pope, Pius III, kindly disposed toward Cesare, who confirmed his titles. Pius reigned for twenty-six days and died.

And in the second conclave of that autumn, the wheel came round at last to the man who had been waiting eleven years in the wings of this story: Giuliano della Rovere, the Borgias’ oldest, most durable enemy, the cardinal who had fled Rome in the nineties rather than share a city with them. What followed measures how desperate the flayed man in the Vatican had become. Della Rovere came to Cesare with terms. Cesare still commanded, nominally, the votes of the Spanish cardinals—enough to matter—and Della Rovere offered everything for them: confirmation as gonfalonier of the Church, protection, his state, even a marriage tying their families.

Cesare delivered the votes. Della Rovere became Pope Julius II, in the shortest conclave on record, a few hours—and then, at his own unhurried pace, set about breaking every promise he had made. And Machiavelli, watching Cesare consent to the election, wrote down the professional verdict he would later carve into chapter seven: here the Duke made his one great fatal error, the only decision in his whole career the secretary was willing to call a blunder. He should never have allowed a man he had injured to reach the papacy.

“Whoever thinks that among great personages new benefits cause old injuries to be forgotten,” Machiavelli concluded, “deceives himself. ”

Julius wanted the Romagna for the Church—meaning for himself—and wanted the Borgia name under his heel, and he had waited eleven years, and patient hatred, it turns out, was the one weapon in Italy Cesare had no counter for. Machiavelli was in Rome for all of it, sent to watch the conclave, and his dispatches from those weeks give us the last close portrait of Cesare anyone bothered to paint, and it is a portrait of disintegration. The secretary, who had spent a year describing an inscrutable force of nature, now described a man visibly coming apart.

The Duke was changed, he reported—irresolute, suspicious, veering between unfounded confidence and rages that alarmed his own household. One day Cesare talked grandly of the armies he would raise. The next he raved against fortune, against the Spanish cardinals, against everyone who had failed him. His illness sat on his face, the sallow ruin of it shocking visitors who remembered the handsomest man in Italy.

As the winter deepened and Julius tightened the screws, the Duke was, little by little, slipping into his grave. Julius demanded the surrender of the Romagna fortresses. Cesare refused, was detained, bargained, gave up some castles, was rearrested when the passwords he supplied turned out sour, and spent the winter as a prisoner in the Vatican’s Torre Borgia—lodged, with a jailer’s sense of humor or without one, in the very apartments where Michelotto had strangled Alfonso of Aragon three years before. Word of that address choice reached Lucrezia in Ferrara, who was writing everywhere on her brother’s behalf.

His last fortresses had fallen or sold themselves by the spring of 1504. His soldiers were wearing other men’s colors. And Michelotto himself had been caught and put to torture by the new regime, questioned specifically—the record notes—about the deaths of Alfonso of Aragon and the drowned young lords of Faenza and half a dozen others. Whatever the strangler said under torture has not survived, and a Roman tribunal, remarkably, later turned him loose.

The man walked away from this entire narrative into a minor military job in Florence—of all destinations, hired on Machiavelli’s recommendation, of all sponsors. Cesare himself was shipped south to Naples under a Spanish safe conduct. And there, in May 1504, the Spanish captain Gonzalo de Córdoba, on orders from King Ferdinand, tore up the safe conduct and arrested him. In August they put him on a ship for Spain.

And Italy, which had spent five years learning to sleep badly because of him, watched Il Valentino leave in chains. He was twenty-eight. He would never see Italy again. Spain gave him two years of stone rooms.

The first was the castle of Chinchilla, inland from Valencia, a fortress on a crag in his family’s own ancestral country. And even there, ruined and closely guarded, he remained recognizably himself. The story told of Chinchilla, preserved in the Spanish accounts, is that during a walk on the tower platform with the castle’s governor, Cesare, chatting pleasantly about the view, suddenly seized the man and tried to throw him bodily over the parapet—a hundred feet to the rocks—planning to take the keys from a corpse. The governor, younger and a wrestler, broke the grip and pinned him.

After that, they moved the prisoner somewhere more serious: the castle of La Mota at Medina del Campo on the Castilian plain, a keep whose walls still stand today, and whose tower held him through 1505 and into 1506, in a cell near the top, roughly a hundred feet above the base of the wall. His name still had gravity, though, even from a cell. Ferdinand of Spain and the French crown went on wondering whether the caged general might be worth aiming at somebody. His brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, worked channels for his release, and his sister never stopped—letters and envoys from Ferrara pushed for him year after year, and money moved.

And in this catalog of family horror, it stands out that the one bond that never frayed was between the two siblings Europe accused of incest: the brother who had strangled her husband, and the sister who, somehow, by every evidence we have, loved him anyway—and was loved back, insofar as this man loved anyone. Queen Isabella died. Castile wobbled between factions, and in the confusion, sympathetic grandees—the Count of Benavente chief among them—decided the famous prisoner was worth stealing. The escape came on the night of the 25th of October 1506, and it went wrong in the exact way you would expect a hundred-foot rope descent to go wrong.

A rope had been smuggled up to the cell over time. A servant went down first, and the rope came up short—far short, by some accounts—and the man had to drop the remaining distance in the dark, and the fall shattered him. Cesare went next, hand over hand down the tower, and either the alarm was raised and the rope was cut from above, or the same shortfall claimed him too, and he dropped from a height onto the ground below—smashed his hands, by most accounts broke bones, and tore himself badly enough that he could not stand. The waiting horseman slung him across a saddle like baggage.

His servant, too broken to move and impossible to carry, was left where he lay beneath the wall, and the guards found him there. What became of that loyal man, the accounts do not bother to record. Cesare was carried cross-country, hidden, healed enough to ride, and smuggled by stages to the coast and around to the little Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, where his brother-in-law, King John, reigned, and where, in December 1506, the ruined Duke rode into Pamplona—the city that had once, sixteen years earlier, received him on paper as its fifteen-year-old absentee bishop. Europe took notice, the way you notice a wolf missing from its trap.

Machiavelli, hearing the news in Italy, thought the story so improbable he initially discounted it. What was left of him, at thirty-one, Navarre now saw up close. The beauty that had been proverbial was gone. The face scarred and marked by the disease, the body carrying the tower fall badly, the fortune gone, the duchies gone, the French pension—and even his French wife’s revenues, formally stripped by King Louis, who had no further use for him.

Two things remained: the name, and the craft. King John of Navarre had a civil war on his hands, a rebellion led by the Count of Lerín, backed by Ferdinand of Spain, and in his battered brother-in-law he possessed one of the most experienced captains alive. So Cesare Borgia’s last title was Captain General of the little army of Navarre, and his last war was a hill campaign against a border count, about as far from the throne of central Italy as European soldiering could offer. He took the work seriously.

That has to be said. Contemporaries describe him reorganizing the Navarrese forces with all the old precision. And when the army moved against the rebel-held town of Viana in the first days of March 1507, the Captain General rode at its head. Viana’s town surrendered quickly, and the siege settled around the castle above it, where Lerín’s garrison held out, awaiting resupply.

The night of the 11th of March brought the weather for it: a storm off the mountains, rain in sheets, visibility nothing. Under its cover, a convoy from Lerín’s son slipped through the siege lines, delivered bread and men to the castle, and slipped back out. At first light on the 12th of March 1507, the besiegers discovered the humiliation, and the man who had taken Urbino by a forced march and gutted his own captains at a handshake reacted to this village-scale trickery with a fury that the chroniclers describe as something close to possession. He armed, took horse, and led a pursuit out of the town gate at the gallop.

And here the last of his luck expressed itself, because he rode better and faster than every man behind him. In the rain and broken country the pursuit strung out, and the Captain General of Navarre, alone, far ahead of his own troops, went down into a ravine after the enemy rear guard. The men he was chasing were three of Lerín’s knights—professional soldiers. And when they saw a single rich armored horseman plunging into the gully behind them, cut off from any support, they simply turned around.

What happened at the bottom of that ravine took a few minutes, and no one on his side saw it. They came at him from more than one direction. A lance caught him at the armpit—the joint in the armor—and went deep, and he was brought off his horse, and on the ground the three of them made thorough work with lances and blades. When his body was recovered, it carried more than twenty separate wounds.

Some counts say twenty-three, others twenty-five. And the men who did it had no idea who they had killed. To them he was expensive armor and a fine horse. So they stripped him where he lay—the engraved armor, the weapons, the clothing, everything down to the skin—and left him.

When the pursuing Navarrese finally found the body, the most feared man of the age lay naked in the mud of a Spanish gully, unrecognizable to strangers, rainwashed, punctured like a practice target, and someone, in the one gesture of the whole scene resembling respect, had covered his genitals with a flat red stone—a broken roof tile, by the commonest telling. That was the entire funeral honor of the field: a tile. King John of Navarre, to his credit, refused to let it end in the mud. The body was carried up into Viana, washed and laid out, and the king gave his brother-in-law a state funeral with the honors of a Captain General—the little Navarrese court in mourning behind the coffin of a man most of Europe was toasting the death of.

He was buried in front of the high altar of the church of Santa María in Viana, in a marble tomb with an inscription that survives in transcription and says, in essence: here lies in a little earth he whom all the world feared, he who held peace and war in his hand. Even the tomb was not allowed to rest. A generation or two later, a bishop of Calahorra on visitation, scandalized that such a man lay in consecrated ground before an altar—some say his family had old scores against the Borgias—ordered the tomb demolished and the remains cast out of the church. Local tradition, doing the bishop one better, holds that the bones were deliberately re-interred outside, under the public way in front of the church door, so that men and beasts would walk over Cesare Borgia until the end of time.

For about four hundred years, that is precisely what happened: generations of Viana’s farmers, and their carts, and their children, crossed daily over the trampled remains of the man Machiavelli called the model of the new prince. The bones were dug up and examined in 1886, identified, studied, re-interred; exhumed and verified once more in 1945; in 1953 the town moved him to a marble slab outside the church wall, labeled “General of the armies of Navarre and the Church”—still not quite inside. And only in 2007, on the five-hundredth anniversary of the ravine, after long argument and by permission of the Archbishop of Pamplona, was what remains of Cesare Borgia finally carried back through the doors of Santa María and laid inside the church—five centuries after a bishop threw him out of it. The archbishop’s stated reasoning had a shrug in it: whatever the man’s sins, five hundred years is long enough, and the Church forgives.

The news out of Viana traveled slowly, and where it landed shows who this man had actually mattered to, underneath the fear. In France, at a quiet manor called La Motte-Feuilly, it reached the wife he had spent perhaps four months with, eight years earlier, and never once revisited. Charlotte d’Albret was around twenty-four or twenty-five, raising their daughter Louise, a girl of six who had never in her life seen her father’s face. Charlotte had every reason in the world to remarry—a young, well-born, well-dowered widow of a notorious husband who had abandoned her before the child came.

Instead, she put on full mourning and never took it off. She draped her rooms in black, hung her walls in black, had her furnishings—and even, tradition says, her plate—done in black, and lived the remaining seven years of her life as a professional widow to a man Europe was celebrating the death of, devoted to prayer, to charity, and to the daughter. She died in 1514, still in black, still his. Louise Borgia grew up, inherited what could be salvaged of the Valentinois claims, married twice into the high French nobility, and carried the blood quietly forward.

Her descendants thread into the French aristocracy, and the line eventually brushes against names as unexpected as royalty itself. Louise was the legitimate child. Cesare had at least two others born of unnamed women during the Italian years, and their fates make one of the quietest ironies in this whole account. The boy, Girolamo, grew into trouble, drifting through the courts of his aunt’s Ferrara and beyond, and surfaces in the records attached to a murder case—his father’s blood running true.

The girl is the astonishment. Camilla Lucrezia Borgia, illegitimate daughter of the most feared man in Italy, was taken in by her aunt Lucrezia at Ferrara, raised gently, and entered the convent of San Bernardino there, where she spent the rest of a long life as a nun, and eventually as abbess, renowned across the city for learning and holiness. She lived until 1573—nearly seventy years after the ravine at Viana—and when she died, the Ferrarese spoke of her as something close to a saint. Contemporaries who knew her lineage marveled at it in writing: the daughter of Cesare Borgia and the grand-niece of Alexander VI, dying in the odor of sanctity behind convent walls.

In Ferrara, the news reached Lucrezia. She was twenty-six, Duchess of Ferrara in waiting, and by the accounts from her court, she shut herself away and was heard through the door repeating her brother’s name. One of her attendants recorded that she called out for him through the night. She ordered memorial masses, and paid for years afterward for prayers for his soul—from her own purse, discreetly, in a court that preferred the Borgia connection unmentioned.

The rest of her life is its own story, but the shape of it matters here as the counterweight to everything we have watched. The woman half of Europe’s pamphleteers had cast as a poisoner and worse became, over seventeen years in Ferrara, one of the most respected ducal consorts in Italy—a patron of poets, an able administrator who governed the state competently when her husband was at war, increasingly religious, wearing under the brocade a penitential hair shirt in her final years. Her body, meanwhile, did to her what dynastic marriage did to most women of her rank: pregnancy after pregnancy. And in June of 1519, at thirty-nine, she was delivered of a premature stillborn daughter and took childbed fever.

Knowing exactly where things stood, she dictated a letter to the reigning Pope, Leo X. And it survives, and it is among the most quietly devastating documents this family produced: having suffered greatly in a difficult labor, she wrote, her illness now pressed her so far that she believed her end near—and so, as a Christian, although a sinner, she asked the Holy Father for a last blessing for her soul. She died on the 24th of June 1519, ten days after the birth, with her husband, by his own account in a grieving letter, unable to bear it without tears. Of Vannozza’s four children, the daughter with the blackest legend was the only one who got a deathbed, a sacrament, and a husband weeping honestly beside her.

Vannozza de’ Catanei herself—the innkeeper matriarch—outlived three of her four children, kept her taverns and vineyards, grew rich, grew pious, endowed chapels, and died in Rome in 1518, at seventy-six, given, remarkably, a semi-official funeral with the papal court in attendance. The mother of the Borgias buried with honors by a Rome that had spat on her son’s name. Sancha of Aragon died young in 1506, still in her twenties. Little Rodrigo of Bisceglie, Lucrezia’s son by the strangled Alfonso, was left behind in the south when his mother went north to Ferrara; the Este had no interest in raising Borgia baggage, and mother and son essentially never saw each other after her remarriage.

He died at twelve, in 1512, and observers at Ferrara recorded Lucrezia’s collapse at the news—a mother mourning a child she had been made to abandon. Giulia Farnese la Bella had slipped out of the Pope’s favor a few years before the end, replaced by younger company, and went back to being a provincial nobleman’s wife, then a widow managing her little territory with notable competence, dying in 1524 with her scandal already passing into legend. And her brother, the Petticoat Cardinal, got the last laugh of the whole era. Alessandro Farnese, whose red hat had been the price of his sister’s bed, became Pope Paul III in 1534, and reigned for fifteen years.

The Borgia scandal machine ended up manufacturing, at one remove, a future pope. Johann Burchard, the diarist whose careful Latin we have leaned on all day, served the next pontificate as smoothly as he had served the last, was rewarded with a bishopric by Julius II, and died in 1506 with his *Liber Notarum* locked away, having outlasted nearly everyone he wrote about—and never once, in all those pages, told us what he felt about any of it. And the Infans Romanus, Giovanni, the boy of the two contradictory bulls, wandered adulthood as a minor courtier, trading on a surname that opened doors and then closed them, turning up in Lucrezia’s Ferrara household under the diplomatically impossible label of her brother, and dying obscurely past mid-century—the last man alive who might have known what he actually was, if even he knew. One more figure claims his paragraph: the man with the cord.

Michelotto Corella—strangler of Alfonso of Aragon, of Vitellozzo and Oliverotto, of the Varano, quite possibly of others we have filed under “drowned” or “vanished”—survived his torture in Julius’s Rome, was inexplicably released, and was then hired, on the recommendation of Niccolò Machiavelli, as a security official for the Republic of Florence, where the citizens could enjoy the protection of the most practiced pair of hands in Italy. He died a few years later, obscurely, possibly violently, in the Milanese. Nothing in the record suggests a single bad night’s sleep. The strangest survivor of all, though, was a manuscript.

Machiavelli’s own career was wrecked in 1512, when the Medici retook Florence and he was jailed, tortured on the rope, and exiled to his farm. And it was there, in 1513—embittered and unemployed—that he wrote the little book that made his name a permanent adjective. *The Prince* is many things, and one of the things it is—chapter seven especially—is a memorial to Cesare Borgia, by the man who watched him work. Machiavelli sets him up explicitly as the pattern for anyone who acquires power through fortune and other men’s arms, and then, in a sentence that has scandalized readers for five centuries, declares that he does not know what better precepts he could offer a new prince than the example of the Duke’s actions.

He walks his student through the syllabus we have just lived: the elimination of rivals, the beautiful deception of Senigallia cited with something like connoisseurship, and Cesena, where the carving of Ramiro de Lorca becomes a lesson in the economy of cruelty—one spectacular act discharging two years of accumulated hatred onto a scapegoat’s corpse. Reviewing the whole career, the secretary finds a single entry for the debit column—permitting the election of Julius—and rules the rest of the collapse an act of weather, “the extraordinary and extreme malice of fortune. ”

Later readers have been less generous, pointing out that a state stapled together by treachery in four years came apart in four months the moment its author could not sit a horse, and that a system with exactly one load-bearing life in it—an elderly pope—was perhaps not the marvel its admirer claimed. Both readings can be true at once.

Machiavelli was not naive about what he had seen. He had stood in Senigallia while the town burned, and written home about men who would not see morning. He simply concluded, from inside a peninsula being eaten alive by foreign armies, that Italy’s disease was past gentle medicine—and Cesare Borgia was the most gifted surgeon he ever watched cut. *The Prince* circulated in manuscript, was printed after its author’s death, went straight onto the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, and made its model immortal.

Every ruler and would-be ruler who has thumbed it since—and the list runs from emperors to dictators—has been taking, at one remove, instruction from the career of the man under the paving stones of Viana. The legend proper, the Borgia legend as the world knows it, grew from many mouths, and tracing who fed it explains a great deal about which stories reached us and in what condition. Start with the fact that the family manufactured enemies on an industrial scale, and that nearly all of them outlived it: the dispossessed lords of the Romagna and their heirs; the Sforza whom they had cuckolded in print; the Orsini and Colonna they had tried to exterminate; the Neapolitan house whose prince was strangled in his sickbed. Every one of these had stories to tell, and every reason to tell them at maximum volume.

Julius II spent a decade actively encouraging the blackening, reportedly refusing to live in the Borgia apartments because the sight of his predecessor’s portraits on the walls disgusted him—and the frescoed rooms were locked up and left dark for centuries, a sealed crime scene in the middle of the Vatican. The chroniclers who fixed the era on paper—Guicciardini above all—wrote as Florentine patriots with scores to settle, and where the record offered two versions, they reached for the darker with both hands. Then the Reformation arrived, and for Protestant Europe the Borgias were a gift beyond accounting: the papacy’s own case against itself. The pamphlets ran the incest, the poison, and the chestnuts through the printing presses of half a continent.

By the time the nineteenth-century romantics took the material up, it had marinated for three hundred years. Victor Hugo built his play *Lucrèce Borgia* around a poisoning matriarch in 1833; Donizetti had it singing on the stage of La Scala within the year; and Alexandre Dumas installed the family in his celebrated *Crimes Célèbres*, with the cantarella and the hollow ring polished to a high novelistic gleam. Every later generation found the family a new stage, and the hollow ring kept flipping open on cue in each retelling. Underneath five centuries of that, the verifiable sediment sits where we found it today: in Burchard’s dry Latin, in the two contradictory bulls, and in the bodies pulled from the river with their hands bound.

Strip every rumor out of this story. Keep only what the most skeptical accounting allows, and you are still left with a strangled son-in-law; a strangled seventy-year-old and his strangled sons; two strangled generals on one bench; a governor in two pieces in a public square; a teenager with a stone tied to his neck; a chamberlain and a maid drowned within a day of each other; a sacked city’s wells stopped with the bodies of women; and a brother in the Tiber with nine holes in him and his money untouched. The legend needed remarkably little help. And still—and this may be the most Borgia fact of all—the machine they built for their own aggrandizement ended up serving everyone but them.

Julius kept the Romagna that Cesare had unified and welded it permanently into the Papal States. The Church harvested the whole conquest—every siege, every strangling—at no cost to its own reputation. All of it built to a dead Spaniard. And yet the natives of the Romagna, flawed as contemporary observers genuinely were, mourned him.

Machiavelli noted with some wonder that the province, which had known only extortionate little tyrants for a century, remembered Borgia rule as the best government it had ever had—fair courts and safe roads—and towns held out for him, in his name, months after his fall, longer than anyone held out for any of the restored old families. The men he dispossessed were mostly worse than he was, just smaller. It stands as the last twist of a story that refuses to sit still: the one place on earth where people had actually lived under Cesare Borgia, rather than merely heard about him, was the one place that wanted him back. Which leaves us in Viana, where this ended, and where you can still stand today.

The town keeps him now with something between embarrassment and pride: a bust near the church, the slab, the anniversary observances. Down the road, the ravine where three knights who did not know his name put more than twenty holes in him is ordinary Spanish farmland, and nothing marks it. Inside Santa María, under the floor, lies whatever four hundred years of foot traffic left of the man—the trampled residue of *aut Caesar, aut nihil*. Of the two options in his motto, he managed in the end to achieve both: Caesar for four years, nothing for five hundred.

And the Church he was thrown out of took him back in 2007, with a shrug and a blessing. Five centuries of interest forgiven. The doors closing behind the bones of the brother who was suspected and the Duke who was feared—the naked dead man in the rain, with a broken tile for a shroud.

That is where I will leave him.