The Life of Cesare Borgia | Page 7

C��l��bres, it is none the less a work of fiction.
This Tommaso Tommasi, whose real name was Gregorio Leti--and it is under this that such works of his as are reprinted are published nowadays--was a most prolific author of the seventeenth century, who, having turned Calvinist, vented in his writings a mordacious hatred of the Papacy and of the religion from which he had seceded. His Life of Cesare Borgia was published in 1670. It enjoyed a considerable vogue, was translated into French, and has been the chief source from which many writers of fiction and some writers of "fact" have drawn for subsequent work to carry forward the ceaseless defamation of the Borgias.
History should be as inexorable as Divine Justice. Before we admit facts, not only should we call for evidence and analyse it when it is forthcoming, but the very sources of such evidence should be examined, that, as far as possible, we may ascertain what degree of credit they deserve. In the study of the history of the Borgias, we repeat, there has been too much acceptance without question, too much taking for granted of matters whose incredibility frequently touches and occasionally oversteps the confines of the impossible.
One man knew Cesare Borgia better, perhaps, than did any other contemporary, of the many who have left more or less valuable records; for the mind of that man was the acutest of its age, one of the acutest Italy and the world have ever known. That man was Niccol? Macchiavelli, Secretary of State to the Signory of Florence. He owed no benefits to Cesare; he was the ambassador of a power that was ever inimical to the Borgias; so that it is not to be dreamt that his judgement suffered from any bias in Cesare's favour. Yet he accounted Cesare Borgia--as we shall see--the incarnation of an ideal conqueror and ruler; he took Cesare Borgia as the model for his famous work The Prince, written as a grammar of statecraft for the instruction in the art of government of that weakling Giuliano de'Medici.
Macchiavelli pronounces upon Cesare Borgia the following verdict:
"If all the actions of the duke are taken into consideration, it will be seen how great were the foundations he had laid to future power. Upon these I do not think it superfluous to discourse, because I should not know what better precept to lay before a new prince than the example of his actions; and if success did not wait upon what dispositions he had made, that was through no fault of his own, but the result of an extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune."
In its proper place shall be considered what else Macchiavelli had to say of Cesare Borgia and what to report of events that he witnessed connected with Cesare Borgia's career.
Meanwhile, the above summary of Macchiavelli's judgement is put forward as a justification for the writing of this book, which has for scope to present to you the Cesare Borgia who served as the model for The Prince.
Before doing so, however, there is the rise of the House of Borgia to be traced, and in the first two of the four books into which this history will be divided it is Alexander VI, rather than his son, who will hold the centre of the stage.
If the author has a mercy to crave of his critics, it is that they will not impute it to him that he has set out with the express aim of "whitewashing"--as the term goes--the family of Borgia. To whitewash is to overlay, to mask the original fabric under a superadded surface. Too much superadding has there been here already. By your leave, all shall be stripped away. The grime shall be removed and the foulness of inference, of surmise, of deliberate and cold-blooded malice, with which centuries of scribblers, idle, fantastic, sensational, or venal, have coated the substance of known facts.
But the grime shall be preserved and analysed side by side with the actual substance, that you may judge if out of zeal to remove the former any of the latter shall have been included in the scraping.
The author expresses his indebtedness to the following works which, amongst others, have been studied for the purposes of the present history:
Alvisi, Odoardo, Cesare Borgia, Duca di Romagna. Imola, 1878. Auton, Jean d', Chroniques de Louis XII (Soc. de l'Hist. de France). Paris, 1889. Baldi, Bernardino, Della Vita e Fatti di Guidobaldo. Milano, 1821. Barth��lemy, Charles, Erreurs et Mensonges Historiques. Paris, 1873. Bernardi, Andrea, Cronache Forlivese, 1476-1517. Bologna, 1897. Bonnaff��, Edmond, Inventaire de la Duchesse de Valentinois, Paris, 1878. Bonoli, Paolo, Istorie della Citt�� di Forli. Forli, 1661. Bourdeilles, Pierre, Vie des Hommes Illustres. Leyde, 1666. Brown, Rawdon, Ragguagli Sulla Vita e sulle Opere di Marino Sanuto. Venezia, 1837. Buonaccorsi, Biagio, Diario. Firenze, 1568.