The Three Husbands of Lucrezia Borgia

Her first lover was found dead in a river. Her second husband was strangled in his bed. Perhaps it's no surprise that in popular culture, Lucrezia Borgia has become a femme fatale, a black widow murderess who stepped over husbands in order to achieve her own ends. But the real Lucrezia is a figure far more complex and tragic than the stereotypes might lead you to believe. [Support Noble Blood on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales. Noble Blood merch is available here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood]

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Badly Researched and Contradictory

First, I love this Podcast so it hurt me to write that headline, honestly, but I've studied, researched, dissected, and analyzed the Italian Renaissance and specifically the Borgia family because of what they were able to do faced with the facts that they were born hated because the were originally from Valencia. Lucrezia is the central figure of the episode so it seems that although her entire family was discussed like they had been equally and thoroughly researched, it is more and more obvious that this was not the case. Juan, or Giovanni, was pretty much dismissed, and was stated incorrectly as the second son, but it is still unclear if Cesare was the eldest or Juan was the eldest, because of the papal bull that the Pope prior to the Borgia pope granted to make Rodrigo's 4 children legitimate, and not bastards. Juan was given control of the Vatican army and Cesare was made a Bishop at 15 and then made a Cardinal at 18 when the Rodrigo was made Pope in 1492 and took the name Pope Alexander VI. Back to the episode, there is no proof that Cesare had an affair with Sancia, but Juan did. Juan was mysteriously murdered and it remains unsolved, but Cesare became the only person to ever resign from the cardinalate, which still remains true to this day, and quickly was made general captain of the Papal military. Their mother Vannoza was not known as the great Italian beauty as mentioned in the episode. She was Spanish. Rodrigo's main mistress, Julia "La Bella" Farnese was known, during her time, as the great Italian beauty. In the episode, the narrator makes it seem like getting Lucrezia's an annulment for her wedding to Giovanni Sforza was because Cesare told everyone to trusts him that Giovanni was impotent, and she goes on to make it sound like Cesare was a mumbling fool and repeatedly told everyone to trust him. This was just lazy writing and I think she didn't want to go into how cunning the entire annulment machination was orchestrated and why Giovanni signed it when he knew it would humiliate him. Cesare never sat down with his sister and told her they were going to murder her husband. There's no evidence that their marriage was a good one at all. Lucrezia understood her role that she had to play and she had no love for Giovanni and wouldn't have cared if he was murdered, she was a Borgia. She only made things difficult when she did love somebody. She had an affair when she was married to Giovanni so things couldn't have been that great, and there's no proof that Cesare murdered the baby daddy. Basically, the Borgia family was already hated by all the powerful Italian families because they were Spaniards and they adopted the "us vs them" mentality because of this reason and also, the many assassination attempts made on their family, which were often thwarted by Cesare and his "executioner" and best friend, Micheletto de Corella, and entirely different kind of monster that would be worth making a biopic movie for sure. He was an assassin of the highest tier, he has a wikipedia page chronicling some of his known assassinations, all very powerful people, he killed two treasonous generals with a violin string at the same time. But anyway, this episode is riddled with common misconceptions that can easily be clarified in the contemporary biographies written about them by unbiased historians that lived during the 15th century. It really seemed like this episode was quickly thrown together by using wikipedia or the television show that was on Showtime called The Borgias. A brilliant show, but not historically accurate in every regard. But the main disservice that is done to this episode is by not going into more detail about the atmosphere of the time period that all of this took place in. It was a violent, duplicitous time, where the most violent and deceptive were the ones who survived. And George R.R. Martin has already stated his inspiration for the Lannister family and it was not The Borgias. But The Borgias were an inspiration for "The Red Wedding" scene as it was heavily modeled after something that Cesare Borgia pulled off that was historically recorded by historians as a "most beautiful deception" because he had found out some of his generals were planning to conspire against him, and he swiftly and brilliantly took care of that. This episode just seemed to miss the mark completely about Lucrezia being a poor pawn being used for political reasons. She was, but she was aware of this and did a good job at doing what was expected of her considering the time she lived in and the position of power she was born in to. The Borgias are often thought of as the beginning of the Italian Mafia and for very good reasons.
As I said, I love this Podcast, and have enjoyed every episode except for this one. I was excited to hear about it but greatly disappointed when listening to it. I was saying, "No! No! What?" out loud and had to put in my two sense, even if it's worth less than 2 cents to anyone who reads it. I don't care, I'm doing it for the Borgia family and everything they overcame in a place and time where they were unfairly hated and had to use the same weapons being used against them and they just proved to be better at it than everyone else. Can't hate on anyone for that.