A few years back, my
scant knowledge of the Borgia family was watered with an excellent family
portrait led by Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia.
I knew some bits and pieces of bribery, murder, and out-right
corruption, but the film opened my eyes as wide as you can imagine. I recently came across a fiction version of
the family, Lucrezia Borgia by John
Faunce. While I could not connect the
film to Faunce’s novel, I read page after page that recalled many incidents in
the film. I found it incredible that
Rodrigo was able to thoroughly corrupt and kill many cardinals and other heads
of state who did not bow to Pope Alexander VI.
Faunce’s version is
narrated by Lucrezia, the daughter of Rodrigo and brother to the gold-obsessed
Cesera Borgia. While Rodrigo was
stocking the Vatican library with hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and
books, the young Lucrezia became curious and determined to learn to read and
write Greek and Latin. Faunce writes,
“Odd, I thought, how these paper and leather objects do so easily and
pleasantly what the Inquisition’s fires, frequently fed with similar books,
have never done. Ink puts out even
hellfire. I pray, as daily I pick up my
quill, this book before me might have such reforming powers for some other
blond. Moonlight made my book reading
slow and there were thousands of books.
I couldn’t go the nights of the New Moon, since my reading lamp those
nights had fled the sky. But I learned
gradually to love the flipping pages of books, their smell, dust and everything
about them” (48). More than 500 years
ago, people had a reverence for paper and books.
The worst part of
this corrupt crew involved Pope Alexander VI himself. Faunce writes, “Papa didn’t care much about
Savonarola, Ascanio Sforza told me. // ‘Will the Medicis not toast me this
quarrelsome priest”’ Papa’d said casually over bruschetta to the Florentine
Ambassador. // ‘It would help our lawyers, Holiness, if you’d excommunicate
him.’ // And. of course, he did. So they
did, subjecting Savonarola to the ‘Trial by Fire,’ in which he was burned at
the stake. The ‘Trial’ part being that
if he were truly innocent, the fire shouldn’t burn him, of course. This seemed fair and satisfied everyone,
including the subsequently incinerated monk himself” (99-100). The hypocrisy of this punishment is
baffling. I cannot imagine the men who
ordered the stake set on fire really believed it would ever find anyone
innocent.
I find it hard to
believe the innocent mask Lucrezia drew for herself. Faunce writes, “I recall one day in
particular in those years. I was reading
on a chaise in Giovanni’s great room. He
had few books, but what he had were surprisingly good, especially the ones in
Greek. He told me they’d been salvaged
from a ship of Byzantine pirates and scholars, who’d shipwrecked below our
castle, all of them drowned or killed by rocks or shark-men. Bibliophiles and pirates? I wondered.
The modern age is full of learned men in the oddest places. As I was reading Pliny’s account of the
destruction of Pompey, fire-belching Vesuvius reminding me of my dragon
tapestry wedding-gift that now hung behind me” (100).
My head could only
shake at the cruelty, the greed, the lust for power and gold these “Men of the
Church” displayed toward their fellow humans.
Lucrezia Borgia by John Faunce
is a story which should not be forgotten.
5 stars.
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