The Life of Cesare Borgia | Page 9

rise of his family to its
stupendous eminence. An able, upright, vigorous-minded man, he
became a Professor and Doctor of Jurisprudence at the University of
Lerida, and afterwards served Alfonso I of Aragon, King of Naples and
the Two Sicilies, in the capacity of secretary. This office he filled with
the distinction that was to be expected from one so peculiarly fitted for
it by the character of the studies he had pursued.
He was made Bishop of Valencia, created Cardinal in 1444, and
finally--in 1455--ascended the throne of St. Peter as Calixtus III, an old
man, enfeebled in body, but with his extraordinary vigour of mind all
unimpaired.
Calixtus proved himself as much a nepotist as many another Pope
before and since. This needs not to be dilated upon here; suffice it that
in February of 1456 he gave the scarlet hat of Cardinal-Deacon of San
Niccoló, in Carcere Tulliano, to his nephew Don Roderigo de Lanzol y
Borja.
Born in 1431 at Xativa, the son of Juana de Borja (sister of Calixtus)
and her husband Don Jofrè de Lanzol, Roderigo was in his twenty-fifth
year at the time of his being raised to the purple, and in the following
year he was further created Vice-Chancellor of Holy Church with an
annual stipend of eight thousand florins. Like his uncle he had studied
jurisprudence--at the University of Bologna--and mentally and
physically he was extraordinarily endowed.
From the pen-portraits left of him by Gasparino of Verona, and
Girolamo Porzio, we know him for a tall, handsome man with black
eyes and full lips, elegant, courtly, joyous, and choicely eloquent, of
such health and vigour and endurance that he was insensible to any
fatigue. Giasone Maino of Milan refers to his "elegant appearance,

serene brow, royal glance, a countenance that at once expresses
generosity and majesty, and the genial and heroic air with which his
whole personality is invested." To a similar description of him
Gasparino adds that "all women upon whom he so much as casts his
eyes he moves to love him; attracting them as the lodestone attracts
iron;" which is, it must be admitted, a most undesirable reputation in a
churchman.
A modern historian(1) who uses little restraint when writing of
Roderigo Borgia says of him that "he was a man of neither much
energy nor determined will," and further that "the firmness and energy
wanting to his character were, however, often replaced by the
constancy of his evil passions, by which he was almost blinded." How
the constancy of evil passions can replace firmness and energy as
factors of worldly success is not readily discernible, particularly if their
possessor is blinded by them. The historical worth of the stricture may
safely be left to be measured by its logical value. For the rest, to say
that Roderigo Borgia was wanting in energy and in will is to say
something to which his whole career gives the loud and derisive lie, as
will--to some extent at least --be seen in the course of this work.
1 Pasquale Villari in his Machiavelli i suoi Tempi
His honours as Cardinal-Deacon and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy See
he owed to his uncle; but that he maintained and constantly improved
his position--and he a foreigner, be it remembered--under the reigns of
the four succeeding Popes--Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent
VIII-- until finally, six-and-twenty years after the death of Calixtus III,
he ascended, himself, the Papal Throne, can be due only to the
unconquerable energy and stupendous talents which have placed him
where he stands in history--one of the greatest forces, for good or ill,
that ever occupied St. Peter's Chair.
Say of him that he was ambitious, worldly, greedy of power, and a prey
to carnal lusts. All these he was. But for very sanity's sake do not let it
be said that he was wanting either in energy or in will, for he was
energy and will incarnate.

Consider that with Calixtus III's assumption of the Tiara Rome became
the Spaniard's happy hunting-ground, and that into the Eternal City
streamed in their hundreds the Catalan adventurers--priests, clerks,
captains of fortune, and others--who came to seek advancement at the
hands of a Catalan Pope. This Spanish invasion Rome resented. She
grew restive under it.
Roderigo's elder brother, Don Pedro Luis de Lanzol y Borja, was made
Gonfalonier of the Church, Castellan of all pontifical fortresses and
Governor of the Patrimony of St. Peter, with the title of Duke of
Spoleto and, later, Prefect of Rome, to the displacement of an Orsini
from that office. Calixtus invested this nephew with all temporal power
that it was in the Church's privilege to bestow, to the end that he might
use it as a basis to overset the petty tyrannies of Romagna, and to