Cesare Borgia

Cesare Borgia (b. 1475–d. 1507) came to prominence when his father, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, was elected Pope Alexander VI in 1492. A year later Alexander raised the teenage Cesare to the cardinalate, only for the young man to renounce his clerical career in 1498 and devote himself to the military unification of the Papal States. This meant playing off the competing interests of France and Spain in the early phases of the Italian Wars, in the course of which Cesare gained a French bride and a French title, duke of Valentinois (hence “Valentino” in Italian). Even as a cleric his name was linked with the murder of his brother Juan, duke of Gandia, in 1497; as a soldier and duke of the Romagna he gained a reputation for strong and ruthless leadership. The vicars who generally ruled their portions of the Papal States without interference from Rome were picked off one by one, until many of them and their fellow condottieri plotted against Cesare at Magione and were efficiently captured and killed by him in a coup at Senigallia (Sinigaglia), an episode that particularly impressed the Florentine envoy Niccolò Machiavelli. A few months later, in August 1503, Fortune’s wheel turned when Pope Alexander died and Cesare found himself at the mercy of his numerous enemies. The final portion of his life was spent fighting for his brother-in-law the king of Navarre, dying as violently as he had lived. Such a varied career means that Cesare can be found in a particularly wide variety of Reference Works. The drama of his life means that Biographies of him tend to be aimed at the general market. The serious student would be well advised to get the measure of these books and then set them aside, relying instead on Primary Sources and the assessments of the scholars whose works are featured here under the heading of Contexts. Some detailed material is available via Journals, but Collections of Papers are a mixed bag, ranging from academic conference proceedings to the most superficial of exhibition catalogues. Students looking for essay or dissertation material could mine all these sources in order to assess Cesare’s military significance. An alternative would be to focus on his reputation as Machiavelli’s Muse, a theme for which a good balance of primary and secondary sources is available. The same could even be said for the literary afterlife of Cesare and his closest relatives, though tutors might take some convincing of the academic rigor involved in tracing his progress From Fact to Fiction.