How to poison history
The Borgias weren't so bad after all. GJ Meyer tracks the sources of all that creepy stuff and finds it was made up
GJ Meyer’s contention that the Borgia family of early-Renaissance Italy doesn’t deserve its infamy might seem like being an apologist for Charlie Manson. Popular culture accepts that these people are monsters and surely no amount of erudite rationalising can alter the consensus.
But where Manson’s friends fail when they brandish ideology or upbringing against the horrific facts of his crimes, Meyer triumphs with a single argument: History holds no proof whatsoever that the Borgias were the demons we’ve been led to believe they were. Forget all that nonsense about incest, murder and sexually deviant popes.
Again and again in his wide-ranging and highly edifying book “The Borgias”, Meyer cites testimony that’s bare of any recrimination against the dynasty but instead is often full of praise. He shows by the family’s actions that their intentions were, for the most part, noble. And he exposes all the sordid charges against them for what they are – malicious propaganda.
The only doubt that remains after 450 pages is whether Meyer’s winning argument might have any effect at all on the thoroughly negative public opinion compounded over five centuries by pamphlets, books, operas, stage plays, movies, TV series, hit songs, kiddies’ cartoons and Internet memes.
Take Wikipedia as an obvious starting point. Its entry on Lucrezia Borgia affirms right off the top that she was “the daughter of Pope Alexander VI and Vannozza dei Cattanei”. Not true, says Meyer, and nor was Vannozza “one of the pope’s mistresses”, as also claimed here.
The Wiki authors at least fudge the next line when they say Lucrezia’s family “came to epitomise the ruthless Machiavellian politics and sexual corruption of the Renaissance papacy”. If they “came to epitomise” this, it was because their enemies made it so.
“Ruthless politics” abounded in Europe at the time, of course, to the everlasting glee of Niccolo Machiavelli. But Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat before he published his acute observations in “The Prince”, saw in Lucrezia’s brother Cesare a just and intelligent man who had Europe’s best interests at heart, or at least as long as they coincided with his own ambition for power.
Interestingly, Cesare comes off not too badly at Wikipedia’s hands, other than being (wrongly) named as the pope’s illegitimate son and (probably correctly) as having 11 bastards of his own. His purported father is in for a beating, though.
Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI, “is one of the most controversial of the Renaissance popes”, it says, “because he didn’t respect the clerical celibacy and had several legitimately acknowledged children. Therefore his surname became a byword for libertinism and nepotism”.
Now, Wiki immediately acknowledges that Alexander’s successors, Sixtus V and Urban VIII, “described him as one of the most outstanding popes since St Peter” and it later points out that nepotism was common and accepted back then. As for being a libertine, Wiki is uncharacteristically shy of imposing its “citation needed” advisory. There is no proof here.
Meanwhile over on its page about Vannozza, Wikipedia says “she is believed to have married Domenico d’Arignano, an officer of the Church, possibly at the arrangement of Borgia. She bore four children [including Cesare and Lucrezia] whom he openly acknowledged as his own.” But who is “he”?
Finally, to be done with Wiki at last, it deserves credit at least for this half-buried admission: “There is no evidence that the Borgias resorted to poisoning, judicial murder or extortion to fund their schemes and the defence of the Papal States. The only contemporary accusations of poisoning were from some of the servants of the Borgias, extracted under torture by Alexander’s bitter enemy and successor, Julius II.”
Just as the online community’s very own dictionary first has its way with Lucrezia and then confesses, “Very little is known of Lucrezia”, so too do the many sources that Meyer has consulted declare the family guilty of atrocities before agreeing there’s no actual evidence. What Meyer calls “the black Borgia myth” is a house of cards erected by political enemies and salacious (or lazy) authors.
I was in the middle of reading Meyer’s book when I came across John Kendrick Bangs’ semi-amusing 1902 farce “A House-Boat on the Styx”, in which famous male personages of the past enjoy the afterlife in a floating gentlemen’s club. Pressed to let the ladies come aboard for a look, they reluctantly agree – as long as Lucrezia Borgia isn’t among them, lest she poison their drinks.
Meyer mentions other scholars who long ago proposed a revision of the Borgia reputation, only to be ignored. Justice would be served if history could be upended. But, when everyone from the Three Stooges to the crew of the Starship Enterprise alludes to “Borgia” and “poison” as one and the same, and kids are playing the video game “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” featuring the Borgias as the incestuous antagonists, we shouldn’t hold our breath.
Read Meyer’s book, not just for the family facts as best as dusty history can relate them but also for the tremendous insight offered on life and politics in a Europe still emerging from the Dark Ages.
The Borgias: The Hidden History
By GJ Meyer
Published by Bantam, 2013
Available at Asia Books, Bt595
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey
