The Life of Cesare Borgia | Page 5

work.
The history of this amazing Pope Alexander is yet to be written. No
attempt has been made to exhaust it here. Yet of necessity he bulks
large in these pages; for the history of his dazzling, meteoric son is so

closely interwoven with his own that it is impossible to present the one
without dealing at considerable length with the other.
The sources from which the history of the House of Borgia has been
culled are not to be examined in a preface. They are too numerous, and
they require too minute and individual a consideration that their precise
value and degree of credibility may be ascertained. Abundantly shall
such examination be made in the course of this history, and in a
measure as the need arises to cite evidence for one side or for the other
shall that evidence be sifted.
Never, perhaps, has anything more true been written of the Borgias and
their history than the matter contained in the following lines of Rawdon
Brown in his Ragguagli sulla Vita e sulle Opere di Marino Sanuto: "It
seems to me that history has made use of the House of Borgia as of a
canvas upon which to depict the turpitudes of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries."
Materials for the work were very ready to the hand; and although they
do not signally differ from the materials out of which the histories of
half a dozen Popes of the same epoch might be compiled, they are far
more abundant in the case of the Borgia Pope, for the excellent reason
that the Borgia Pope detaches from the background of the Renaissance
far more than any of his compeers by virtue of his importance as a
political force.
In this was reason to spare for his being libelled and lampooned even
beyond the usual extravagant wont. Slanders concerning him and his
son Cesare were readily circulated, and they will generally be found to
spring from those States which had most cause for jealousy and
resentment of the Borgia might--Venice, Florence, and Milan, amongst
others.
No rancour is so bitter as political rancour--save, perhaps, religious
rancour, which we shall also trace; no warfare more unscrupulous or
more prone to use the insidious weapons of slander than political
warfare. Of this such striking instances abound in our own time that
there can scarce be the need to labour the point. And from the form
taken by such slanders as are circulated in our own sedate and moderate
epoch may be conceived what might be said by political opponents in a
fierce age that knew no pudency and no restraint. All this in its proper
place shall be more closely examined.

For many of the charges brought against the House of Borgia some
testimony exists; for many others--and these are the more lurid,
sensational, and appalling covering as they do rape and murder,
adultery, incest, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain--no single grain of
real evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, at this time of day evidence is no
longer called for where the sins of the Borgias are concerned. Oft-
reiterated assertion has usurped the place of evidence--for a lie
sufficiently repeated comes to be credited by its very utterer. And
meanwhile the calumny has sped from tongue to tongue, from pen to
pen, gathering matter as it goes. The world absorbs the stories; it
devours them greedily so they be sensational, and writers well aware of
this have been pandering to that morbid appetite for some centuries
now with this subject of the Borgias. A salted, piquant tale of vice, a
ghastly story of moral turpitude and physical corruption, a hair-raising
narrative of horrors and abominations--these are the stock-in-trade of
the sensation- monger. With the authenticity of the matters he retails
such a one has no concern. "Se non é vero é ben trovato," is his motto,
and in his heart the sensation-monger--of whatsoever age--rather hopes
the thing be true. He will certainly make his public so believe it; for to
discredit it would be to lose nine-tenths of its sensational value. So he
trims and adjusts his wares, adds a touch or two of colour and what else
he accounts necessary to heighten their air of authenticity, to dissemble
any peeping spuriousness.
A form of hypnosis accompanies your study of the subject--a
suggestion that what is so positively and repeatedly stated must of
necessity be true, must of necessity have been proved by irrefutable
evidence at some time or other. So much you take for granted--for
matters which began their existence perhaps as tentative hypotheses
have imperceptibly developed into established facts.
Occasionally it happens that we find some such sentence as the
following summing up this deed or that one in the Borgia histories: "A
deal of mystery remains to