The Borgias Read Online Free PDF Page B

while her third husband, Carlo Canale, made a handsome profit from his appointment as governor of Rome’s prison, the Torre Nuova, where the incarcerated men were charged for such privileges as they could afford.
    Vannozza’s were by no means the only children who were generally believed to have been fathered by Cardinal Rodrigo. There were at least three others, all older than Vannozza’s offspring, who were widely assumed to be his, although very few people in Rome knew who their mother was. Two of these children were girls – one of them, Gerolama, having been quietly married into an unassuming though noble family, died young; the other, Isabella, lived into old age, dying in the middle of the sixteenth century, an object of much curiosity that she haughtily ignored. The third was a son, named Pedro Luis after Rodrigo’s brother, and he was created Duke of Gandía but, like Gerolama, died young, having spent much of his short life as an apparently worthy officer in the army in Spain.
    Around 1483, when Cesare was eight years old and his brother Jofrè still a baby, Rodrigo had taken his children away from their mother and placed them in the care of his cousin Adriana da Mila. Despite her evident charms and his affection for her, Vannozza’s background made her unsuitable for the upbringing of their family; Adriana, on the other hand, was a Spanish noblewoman and had married into one of the most powerful clans in Rome, the Orsini. In 1489 her son, Orsino Orsini, was married in Rodrigo’s palace in Rome to Giulia Farnese, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl of very modest fortune. Giulia – ‘la Bella’ as she was known throughout Rome – now became Rodrigo’s new mistress, while her husband withdrew to his family’s country estate at Bassanello.
    Rodrigo seemed to be obsessed by the Farnese girl, his lovely carefree young mistress who now lived in a house shared with Adriana da Mila and the children of the pliable, good-natured Vannozza. Indeed, he appeared, for the first time in his life, to be capable of an intense jealousy, even of Giulia’s tiresome husband,whom she insisted on going to see in the country from time to time, provoking Rodrigo to write such letters as this:
    We have heard that you have again refused to return to us [from Bassanello] without Orsini’s consent. We know the evil of your soul and of the man who guides you but we would never have thought it possible for you to break your solemn oath not to go near Orsino. But you have done so . . . to give yourself once more to that stallion. We order you, under pain of eternal damnation, never again to go to Bassanello.
     
    Evidently alarmed by this letter, Orsini sent his wife back to the cardinal. Although almost forty years older than Giulia Farnese, Rodrigo was quite as virile as he had ever been; his sexual appetite was still said to be voracious. Sumptuous as were the meals served in his palace, he ate sparingly himself, often contenting himself with a single course. And while other cardinals were carried about Rome on litters or in carriages, he preferred to walk. He hunted; he wrestled; he enjoyed falconry; he took pride in having ‘the slender waist of a girl.’
    Sixtus IV had died in August 1484, and his successor was the affable and ineffective Giovanni Battista Cibò, Innocent VIII, not a man of much distinction. Having obtained the papal tiara by undertaking to grant favours to various cardinals the night before his election, he was soon reduced to creating various supererogatory offices and selling them to the highest bidder, to meet the vast debts incurred by his predecessor. His finances were further strained by the importunities of several illegitimate children andby his quarrel with King Ferrante I of Naples, who refused to pay his papal dues.
    Meanwhile Cardinal Rodrigo’s career prospered. Jovial and carefree by nature, he was nevertheless most conscientious in his attendance to the business of his office as