The Borgias

Some weeks ago now, seeking a change of diet from Marple, I came across a box of Borgias in the Epsom Branch of the outfit at reference 1, known in Epsom as 'Entertainment Exchange'. Which turned out to be a prequel for 'Game of Thrones': fancy dress, violence and sex in that order. Not quite as classy as its more successful successor, to the point of it being a bit of an effort to work our way through to the end. Maybe that is why the box was cheap - being nothing like that of an equivalent amount of Marple, or even Poirot.

After which I wondered what the relation of the series was to the truth and turned to amazon for help. From where it seems that while the Borgias of Rome are a well known family, there is not all that much in the way of popular history and I settled on a book called 'The Borgias and their enemies' by Christopher Hibbert, whom I had thought was a respectable popular historian. Thought, that is, without really knowing anything about him. And my particular copy was printed in the American style, with an irritating line in chapter headings and complete with ragged page cut. But not complete with either maps or pictures: some maps, in particular, would have been helpful.

Altogether a rather breathless and tiresome book, but there was enough there for it to be clear that the television series was only very loosely based on what is known about these people. Most of the incidents around which episodes were built had some basis in the record, but that was about it. I dare say the people responsible would say that their mission was first to entertain and second to get across the savour & flavour of the times - late fifteenth century Rome - with getting any facts right coming in third, some way down the track. Which, as I have explained on several occasions in the past, I think wrong, as, to my mind, if you are going to put real people centre stage in a work of fiction, you should get the main facts right.

But, apart from the Borgia family being nothing like as bad as their reputation would have it, at least by the standards of the (church of the) time, there were two points of interest.

First, the Borgia papal enterprise was funded by the discovery of an alum mountain near Rome, stuff which was needed in the important business of manufacturing textiles but which would otherwise have had to come from the Ottomans, at the time a rather important and threatening power, local sources having expired. I tried to check but completely failed to find out why the Italians could not simply have shipped the stuff over from Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight, a place where one might have thought one just had to shovel it into boats. No need for expensive mines at all.

Second, Lucrezia Borgia made a very virtuous end as the Duchess of Ferrara, where she was a noted patron and connoisseur of the arts of the time. She also had lots of children, although I have not been able to find out whether she was responsible for the third pope of Borgia descent, Innocent X.

While yesterday, I found that the most likely, proper picture of the lady, from the early sixteenth century turned up, not so long ago, in Australia. See reference 2 and ask for Lucrezia. Or above, and discard all the more salacious offerings turned up by google.

Reference 1: https://uk.webuy.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/.