e di questa il marito invito il suocero a la vigna e lo uccise tagliandoli el capo, ponendo quello sopra uno legno con letere che diceva questo e il capo de mio suocero che a rufianato sua fiola al papa, et che inteso questo il papa fece metter el dito in exilio di Roma con taglia.  Questa nova venne per letere particular; etiam si godea con la sua spagnola menatali per suo fiol duca di Gandia novamente li venuto.’

[2] Her brother Alexander, afterwards Paul III., owed his promotion to the purple to this liaison, which was, therefore, the origin of the greatness of the Farnesi.  The tomb of Paul III. in the Tribune of S. Peter’s has three notable family portraits—­the Pope himself in bronze; his sister Giulia, naked in marble, as Justice; and their old mother, Giovanna Gaetani, the bawd, as Prudence.

The nepotism of Sixtus was like water to the strong wine of Alexander’s paternal ambition.  The passion of paternity, exaggerated beyond the bounds of natural affection, and scandalous in a Roman Pontiff, was the main motive of the Borgia’s action.  Of his children by Vannozza, he caused the eldest son to be created Duke of Gandia; the youngest he married to Donna Sancia, a daughter of Alfonso of Aragon, by whom the boy was honored with the Dukedom of Squillace.  Cesare, the second of this family, was appointed Bishop of Valentia, and Cardinal.  The Dukedoms of Camerino and Nepi were given to another John, whom Alexander first declared to be his grandson through Cesare, and afterwards acknowledged as his son.  This John may possibly have been Lucrezia’s child.  The Dukedom of Sermoneta, wrenched for a moment from the hands of the Gaetani family, who still own it, was conferred upon Lucrezia’s son, Roderigo.  Lucrezia, the only daughter of Alexander by Vannozza, took three husbands in succession, after having been formally betrothed to two Spanish nobles, Don Cherubino Juan de Centelles, and Don Gasparo da Procida, son of the Count of Aversa.  These contracts, made before her father became Pope, were annulled as not magnificent enough for the Pontiff’s daughter.  In 1492 she was married to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro.  But in 1497 the pretensions of the Borgias had outgrown this alliance, and their public policy was inclining to relations with the Southern Courts of Italy.  Accordingly she was divorced and given to Alfonso, Prince of Biseglia, a natural son of the King of Naples.  When this man’s father lost his crown, the Borgias, not caring to be connected with an ex-royal family, caused Alfonso to be stabbed on the steps of S. Peter’s in 1501; and while he lingered between life and death, they had him strangled in his sick-bed, by Michellozzo, Cesare’s assassin in chief.  Finally Lucrezia was wedded to Alfonso, crown-prince of Ferrara, in 1502.[1] The proud heir of the Este dynasty was forced by policy, against his inclination, to take to his board and bed a Pope’s bastard, twice divorced, once severed from her husband by murder, and soiled, whether justly or not, by atrocious rumors, to which her father’s and her brother’s conduct gave but too much color.  She proved a model princess after all, and died at last in childbirth, after having been praised by Ariosto as a second Lucrece, brighter for her virtues than the star of regal Rome.