Lucrezia Borgia as Entrepreneur*

AbstractThe financial status of patrician women in Renaissance Italy remains obscure in all but a few cases, but the prevailing paradigm frames them as being dedicated to the well-being of their families, subordinating their interests to those of their spouses. Where known, their financial activities consist for the most part of supervising small farms, marketing livestock and produce, buying and selling properties, and lending money at interest. Lucrezia Borgia confounds this paradigm: she was a budding capitalist entrepreneur, leveraging her own capital by obtaining marshland at negligible cost and then investing in massive reclamation enterprises. She also raised livestock and rented parts of her newly arable land for short terms, nearly doubling her annual income in the process.