In November that year news arrived in Ferrara of the death of her mother, Vannozza de’ Catanei, who, unlike Lucrezia, had always been spoken of with respect, in Rome on November 16, 1518. As well as her three inns in Rome and various other properties, Vannozza left several flocks of sheep beyond the city’s outskirts, all of which were bequeathed to various religious and charitable institutions in the city. The Venetian envoy Marin Sanudo wrote in his diary:
The day before yesterday died Madonna Vanozza, once the mistress of Pope Alexander and mother of the Duchess of Ferrara and the Duke Valentino… The death was announced, according to the Roman custom, in the following formal words: ‘Messer Paolo gives notice of the death of Madonna Vanozza, mother of the Duke of Gandía; she belonged to the Gonfalone Company.’ She was buried yesterday in Santa Maria del Popolo, with the greatest honours — almost like a cardinal. She was 76 years of age. She left all her property — which was considerable — to San Giovanni in Laterano. The Pope’s chamberlain attended the obsequies, which was unusual.
As Lucrezia’s pregnancy progressed, she no longer felt the inclination to bathe; at the age of thirty-nine, she felt herself to be growing too old for bearing children. On March 24 Francesco Gonzaga died; the following month she was not well enough to watch her nine-year-old son, Ippolito, be confirmed and be installed as archbishop of Milan, one of the premier sees in Europe. Soon afterward she complained that her head had grown too heavy for her. Her hair was then cut off and swept up on the floor. She felt, she said, that she was going blind.
On June 15 she gave birth prematurely to another girl, who was baptized Isabella Maria that same day, and this time the chronicler had no doubt that the child was sickly. Lucrezia herself contracted puerperal fever, and, pale and drawn, she took to her bed and thereafter rarely left it. Knowing that she had not long to live, she wrote a letter to Leo X:
Most Holy Father and Honoured Master, with all respect I kiss your Holiness’s feet and commend myself in all humility to your holy mercy. I approach the end of my life with pleasure, knowing that in a few hours I may… be released. Having arrived at this moment, I desire, as a Christian, although I am a sinner, to ask your Holiness in your mercy, to give me all possible consolation and your Holiness’s blessing for my soul… 22 June 1519 at Ferrara, in the fourteenth hour, your Holiness’s humble servant.
She died two days later, on June 24, 1519. Duke Alfonso lost consciousness during her funeral in the Church of Corpus Domini. Devastated with grief, he wrote to his nephew, now Marquis of Mantua, that ‘it has pleased our Lord God to call to Himself the soul of our most illustrious Duchess, our well beloved wife,’ and ‘I cannot write these lines without weeping[,] so hard is it to find myself separated from such a dear wife.’
— CHAPTER 29 — Saints and Sinners
ACCORDING TO THE standards of the time, Lucrezia had done her duty as Duchess of Ferrara, leaving her grieving husband with five children, three of whom were boys. Alfonso mourned his loss but in the end took another wife, choosing, much to the surprise of his courtiers, to marry his mistress, Laura Dianti, the lascivious daughter of a Ferrarese bonnet maker, who produced two more sons for him.
When Alfonso died on October 31, 1534,he was buried in a tomb next to his beloved Lucrezia in Corpus Domini and was succeeded by Ercole, for whom he had chosen as a bride Renée of France, the daughter of Louis XII and sister-in-law of the new king of France, Francis I. Ercole II recognized six children, two boys and four girls — two of his daughters, one illegitimate and one legitimate, were named Lucrezia, a testament to the love he bore her. Ippolito, destined from an early age for a career in the church, would be made a cardinal and be the French candidate for election in six conclaves. Renowned for his extravagant lifestyle and his patronage of the arts, he would spend much of his life in Rome, the city of Lucrezia’s birth, and be the patron of that splendid monument to Renaissance architecture and garden design, the Villa d’Este at Tivoli.
The baby Isabella, whose birth had killed Lucrezia, died just short of her second birthday, leaving Eleonora as the only surviving daughter; she became a nun at the age of eight and, ten years later, was made abbess of Corpus Domini, Lucrezia’s favourite retreat in times of trouble and the site of her tomb. Of the palace where Alfonso and Lucrezia lived, sadly little remains after the building was devastated by an earthquake in 1570.
When Ercole II died in 1559, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Alfonso II, who, despite his three wives, proved unable to produce an heir, a misfortune that became a useful pretext for Pope Clement VIII to succeed, where Julius II had failed, in restoring Ferrara to the Papal States, leaving Alfonso II’s illegitimate nephew, Cesare, as duke only of Modena.
Alexander VI had been extraordinarily ambitious for his children; yet, in the end, few traces of the Borgia name appear in the annals that trace the history of the illustrious families of Rome.
Cesare left three children: Louise, his legitimate daughter by Charlotte d’Albret, married into the upper echelons of the French aristocracy, and her descendants are still alive today. Little is known of his many illegitimate offspring; one daughter, Camilla, was brought up by Lucrezia in Ferrara, and, like her cousin Eleonora, she became a nun, choosing to be known as Sister Lucrezia in honour of her aunt and later becoming abbess of San Bernardino.
Jofrè’s descendants ruled as princes of Squillace to the end of the sixteenth century, when the title passed to the Borgia family in Spain, the descendants of Alexander VI’s favourite son, Juan, the second Duke of Gandía. His wife, Maria Enriquez, produced a son, another Juan, the third Duke of Gandía, and a daughter, Isabella, who, like her cousins in Ferrara, preferred the convent to the matrimonial bed. Juan III of Gandía produced seventeen children, the eldest of whom, Francisco, inherited the title only to abdicate several years later in 1546 in favour of his son, after the death of his wife, to become a Jesuit and then the order’s third general.
Francisco was in Ferrara in May 1572 when news reached him of the death of Pius V, and of the hopes of many influential people in the church that he should be elected as Pius V’s successor. He was too weak to travel but did return to Rome later that year and died two days later. In one of those curious accidents of which history is so fond, Alexander VI’s great-grandson would be canonized in 1671.
— BIBLIOGRAPHY —
PRIMARY SOURCES
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Translated by B. Reynolds. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975.
Burchard, Johannes. At the Court of the Borgia, excerpts from the Diarium. Edited and translated by Geoffrey Parker. London: Folio Society, 1963.
——. Le journal de Jean Burchard. Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1932.
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by George Bull. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976.
Cellini, Benvenuto. Autobiography. Translated by George Bull. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1956.
Giustinian, Antonio. Dispacci di Antonio Giustinian. Edited by P. Villari. 3 vols. Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1876.
Guicciardini, Francesco. The History of Florence. Edited by Mario Domandi. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.