Word: lucrezia
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...Lucrezia Borgia? To the incurable readers of melodrama and Sunday supplements, a woman of glowing and undimmed evil, literally the great femme fatale (usually poison) of the Italian Renaissance.* To modern historians, who have been quietly rehabilitating her, Lucrezia was a good deal less lurid but still deplorable: a woman who probably poisoned no soup herself but weakly watched the other Borgias doing such things...
...comes a woman's brief for Lucrezia. Author Maria Bellonci's argument: Lucrezia was no weakling; her tragedy lay in an excess of a virtue that all women used to be taught-womanly acquiescence to her family's menfolks. In her prize-winning (1939) life of Lucrezia, now translated into English, Italian Author Bellonci goes over the evidence with the thoroughness of a housewife at a serious job of spring renovation...
Papal Carpetbagging. Lucrezia's big trouble was her family. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, a crafty, sensual and deceptively charming Spaniard, got himself elected Pope in 1492 as Alexander VI. Alexander was an unashamedly worldly pontiff who made no effort to conceal Lucrezia and his seven other bastard children - indeed, thought nothing was too good for them. For eleven years, in one of history's most painstaking carpetbagging expeditions, he virtually turned the papacy and its pos sessions into a family preserve...
...Cesare, Lucrezia's brother, was the Pope's right-hand man in these endeavors. With his father's connivance, he poisoned, assassinated and generaled his way, temporarily, to supreme power in central Italy.- Lucrezia, as the young and marriageable member of ,the family, became a handy and well-used device in the family's dynastic ambitions...
...nubile 13 she was married to Giovanni Sforza, of the powerful Milanese Sforzas. But for her father, this was just the beginning. Four years later he forced Giovanni to an annulment on the pretext (scandalously false) that the marriage had never been consummated. Soon Lucrezia was sent higher up the political scale by marriage to the bastard son of the powerful King of Naples. This one lasted two years. Then Cesare had the fellow murdered, and husband No. 3 was found for Lucrezia : Alfonso d'Este, son of the even more powerful Duke of Ferrara...