Giovanni Borgia, 2nd Duke of Gandía
Giovanni Borgia, 2nd Duke of Gandía was the second child of Pope Alexander VI and Vannozza dei Cattanei and a member of the House of Borgia. He was the brother of Cesare, Gioffre, and Lucrezia Borgia. Giovanni Borgia was the pope's favourite son, and Alexander VI granted him important positions and honours. He was murdered in Rome on 14 June 1497. The case remained unsolved and is still considered one of the most notorious scandals of the Borgia era.
Early life
Giovanni Borgia was born in Rome around 1476 to Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and his mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei. He was the second son of the couple, after the firstborn Cesare. No exact birth dates are known for him and his brother, and Giovanni was long thought to be the couple's eldest son, but modern research agrees that he must have been younger than Cesare. Cesare and Giovanni were brought up together in a house provided by their father, probably supervised by his confidant, Adriana de Mila. An instrument of 29 January 1483, removed the guardianship of Giovanni from his mother's family and gave it to his older half-brother, Pier Luigi and another relative, Otto Borgia.Pier Luigi died in September 1488 and by his will, Giovanni succeeded him as the 2nd Duke of Gandía. The duchy was located in the Kingdom of Valencia, the Borgia's ancestral homeland, and it was cobbled together by Rodrigo Borgia in 1485 with the help of his patron, King Ferdinand II of Aragon. A marriage contract was written on 13 December 1488 for Giovanni and María Enríquez de Luna, the king's first cousin, who had been betrothed to his brother, Pier Luigi. Because Giovanni was only twelve years old, the wedding was postponed. The situation changed four years later when Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was elected pope as Alexander VI. A political alliance between the Crown of Aragon and the papacy made the long-planned union more urgent for both sides.
Years in Spain
In August 1493, Alexander VI sent his seventeen-year-old son to Spain equipped with a large amount of textiles, jewels, silver and portable goods. "He left Rome loaded with loot and was expected to return next year to make more," wrote the ambassador from Mantua, Giovanni Lucido Cattanei. Giovanni Borgia was received with great ceremony by the Catholic Monarchs in the Royal Palace of Barcelona. His wedding to María Enríquez was celebrated at the end of September 1493.Initially there were rumours, to the great dismay of the pope, that the marriage was not consummated. Alexander VI rebuked his son in a letter dated 30 November 1493, and repeatedly advised him to be a good husband. Eventually, María Enríquez gave birth to two children. Juan de Borja y Enríquez was born on 10 November 1494. A daughter, Isabel de Borja y Enríquez was born on 15 January 1497, seven months after Giovanni's departure to Rome; she grew up to be abbess of Santa Clara in Gandía with the name Francisca de Jesús.
Giovanni Borgia spent three years in Spain where he kept a sizeable court of 130 noblemen and their entourage. The pope was constantly worried about his reckless spending, and urged his son to live more moderately and expand his estate. Alexander VI was a keen businessman, and the region around Gandía was a major centre of sugarcane production where buying up lands of the cash-strapped local nobility was a smart plan. In this regard, Giovanni, like his brother before, simply acted as his father's manager in the duchy but his acquisitions were limited.
Alexander hoped that his son would receive large estates in the recently conquered Kingdom of Granada and become an important figure at the Spanish court. However, the Catholic Monarchs did not heap any more favours on the duke. Queen Isabella was particularly annoyed that the pope was so focused on the promotion of his children, and refused to provide any assistance in this regard. Still, the pope was relentless in this pursuit: he managed to get the new King of Naples, Alfonso II to grant the fiefdom of Tricarico and the counties of Carinola, Claramonte and Lauria, worth 12,000 ducats a year, to Giovanni on the occasion of his coronation in May 1494. Soon the Italian campaign of Charles VIII of France made these Neapolitan estates unavailable for the Borgias.
The young man was already homesick in 1494, and wrote letters to his father to send ships to take him back to Rome. "Each day seems like a year to me in the delay of those ships which His Holiness has written in recent days he will send soon", he wrote to his brother, Cesare. At this point, Giovanni Borgia was effectively a pawn in the hands of the Catholic Monarchs as his presence in Spain guaranteed the alliance between the House of Aragon and the papacy against the French.
Captain General of the Church
The Duke of Gandía was finally able to return to Italy 1496 after the French army retreated. He arrived in Rome on 10 August without his pregnant wife and his two-year-old son who remained in Spain. He was received in Rome with great pomp and ceremony. All the cardinals, led by his brother, were waiting for him on the Campus Martius, as well as the ambassadors, the Roman nobles and the officials. On 26 October he was invested in St. Peter's Basilica as Captain General and Gonfalonier of the Church.The pope had great plans for his favourite son, and entrusted him with the campaign against the powerful Orsini family who controlled a large part of the Roman Campagna and had sided with the French against Alexander VI in the previous years. The twenty-year-old duke was completely inexperienced as a commander, therefore he was joined by a more knowledgeable condottiero, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. They were initially successful, forcing several Orsini strongholds to surrender while they advanced north from Rome to Lake Bracciano. But the strong castle of Bracciano was able to withstand the siege of the papal forces, and the troops suffered heavily from the harsh winter weather and the rain. Montefeltro was wounded, and the leadership of the campaign devolved mainly to Giovanni. The defendants of the castle insulted him by sending a donkey to his camp with a sign around the animal's neck reading:
There was even a rude personal message stuck under the animal's tail.
On 24 January 1497, the Borgia army suffered a heavy defeat at Soriano when the captains tried to fight the Orsini relief army led by Vitellozzo Vitelli and Carlo Orsini in the open field. Montefeltro was captured but Giovanni Borgia managed to escape with only minor injuries to his face.
At the Battle of Soriano "the men of the Church succumbed with great dishonor and loss", as Burchard put it in his diary; some five hundred soldiers were killed and many more were wounded, the Orsini captured all the cannons and scattered the papal forces. They quickly advanced to the walls of Rome and recaptured their lost strongholds. The pope now had no choice but to sign a peace treaty with his enemies in February 1497.
Giovanni's next military endeavour was more successful: he took part in the recapture of Ostia which was still held by forces loyal to the French. The campaign was led by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, an experienced Spanish general, and ended quickly with the surrender of the garrison on 9 March 1497. A few days later Córdoba held a victory parade in Rome, where he was accompanied by the Duke of Gandía and his brother-in-law, Giovanni Sforza. But Córdoba seems to have resented the favouritism shown towards the duke because on 19 March he refused to accept a blessed palm branch during the celebration of Palm Sunday in the chapel of the Apostolic Palace after Giovanni Borgia had received one. It was a surprising rebuke from an important ally of the Borgias.
Despite losing the war against the Orsini, the pope still tried to carve out a principality in Italy for his son. For this, he marked out territories that had belonged to the Patrimony of Saint Peter for centuries. On 7 June a secret consistory was held, in which the Duchy of Benevento and the cities of Terracina and Pontecorvo were granted to the Duke of Gandía and his legitimate descendants. Out of the cardinals present, only Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini raised his voice against the alienation of the lands of the papacy. Jerónimo Zurita claimed that the Spanish ambassador also objected and warned the pope that his plan was unacceptable.
Murder
Giovanni Borgia was murdered on the night of 14 June 1497 in Rome. According to Burchard he was last seen alive when he left a family dinner at the home of his mother, Donna Vannozza who owned a house near the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli. After the dinner, his brother, Cesare urged him to return to the Papal Palace but as they approached the Palace of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, the duke told his brother that he was going to find entertainment somewhere, and dismissed his retinue. He took only his valet and a masked man whose identity was unknown but who had already been accompanying Giovanni when he arrived at dinner, and had been visiting him almost daily at the palace for about a month. The duke rode to the Square of the Jews where he ordered the servant to wait for him until eight o'clock, and if he had not appeared by then, to return to the palace. Then he rode off with the masked man behind him on the back of his mule.When the duke did not return to the palace on the next morning, which was Thursday, 15th of June, his trusted servants became uneasy and one of them carried to the Pope the news of the late expedition of the duke and Cesare and the vain watch for the return of the former. The Pope was much disturbed by the news, but tried to persuade himself that the duke was enjoying himself somewhere with a girl and was embarrassed for that reason at leaving her house in broad daylight, and he clung to the hope that he might return at any rate in the evening. When this hope was not fulfilled, the Pope was stricken with deadly terror.
On the morning of 15 June, the servant Giovanni had ordered to wait for him at the Square of the Jews was found fatally wounded and unresponsive, and despite being taken into a house and given care, could neither be saved nor give any account of his master's fate before dying. On the same morning, Giovanni's mule was found or returned to the palace, riderless and with one of its stirrups cut.
Although it was traditionally assumed that Giovanni was killed in or near the Square of the Jews where he had left his valet, in a letter to his brother Cardinal Ascanio Sforza gave a different location for the murder: "The Duke was last seen that night close to the cross in the street leading to Santa Maria del Popolo; it is thought that the crime was committed somewhere near this cross, because both horsemen and others on foot were seen there." Notably, the street he described was the same one that ran along the riverbank where Giovanni's body was later confirmed to have been disposed of.
Alexander VI ordered that all the houses on the banks of the Tiber should be thoroughly searched including the Palace of Ascanio Sforza. The cardinal fully supported this action but nothing was found. Sforza's private correspondence also indicates that his conscience was clear.
Later a witness, a Slavonian timber dealer named Georgio made a statement that led to the discovery of Giovanni's body. He had been lying in his boat on the Tiber on the night of the murder to guard his wood and watched as five men had thrown a corpse into the river next to the fountain at the Hospital of Saint Jerome.
At about two o'clock in the morning two men came out of a lane by the hospital on to the public road along the river. They looked about cautiously to see whether any one was passing and when they did not see anybody they disappeared again in the lane. After a little while two others came out of the lane, looked about in the same way and made a sign to their companions when they discovered nobody. Thereupon a rider appeared on a white horse who had a corpse behind him with the head and arms hanging down on one side and the legs on the other and supported on both sides by the two men who had first appeared. The procession advanced to the place where the refuse is thrown into the river. At the bank they came to a halt and turned the horse with its tail to the river. Then they lifted the corpse, one holding it by its hands and arms, the other by the legs and feet, dragged it down from the horse and cast it with all their strength into the river. To the question of the rider if it was safely in, they answered, 'Yes, Sir!' Then the rider cast another look at the river and, seeing the cloak of the corpse floating on the water, asked his companions what that black thing was floating there. They answered, 'the cloak,' whereupon he threw stones at the garment to make it sink to the bottom. Then all five, including the other two who had kept watch and now rejoined the rider and his two companions, departed and took their way together through another lane that leads to the Hospital of St. James.
When asked why he had not reported the murder the witness replied: "In my day I have seen as many as a hundred corpses thrown into the river at that place on different nights without anybody troubling himself about it, and so I attached no further importance to the circumstance".
Fishermen and boatmen were summoned to drag the river; on 16 June, Giovanni's body was recovered from the Tiber.
It was just before vespers when they found the duke still fully clad, with his stockings, shoes, waistcoat and cloak, and in his belt there was his purse with thirty ducats. He had nine wounds, one in the neck through the throat, the other eight in the head, body and legs.The corpse was thrown into the river at the point besides the fountain where the refuse of the streets is usually dumped into the water, near or beside the Hospital of Saint Hieronymus of the Slavonians on the road which runs from the Angel's Bridge straight to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo.
Other contemporary sources gave fundamentally different accounts of the murder. These are clearly much less reliable than Burchard's but must have preserved a few crumbs of the rumours circulating at the time. The Venetian Domenico Malipiero claimed that the duke left the banquet with his brother-in-law, Giovanni Sforza who tortured and murdered him in a vineyard. He did this out of jealousy, because Giovanni Borgia had an incestuous relationship with his sister, Lucrezia, Sforza's wife. Malipiero admits that all this is just hearsay.
A contemporary Spanish chronicler, Andrés Bernáldez in his Historia de los reyes católicos also stated, that Giovanni Sforza murdered the duke with his own hands, because they had a quarrel during the siege of Ostia, and the duke executed four of Sforza's men. To take revenge, Sforza used a masked woman to trap Giovanni Borgia. This woman told the duke, who was drunk and captive of his vices, that his mistress, Madama Damiata, was waiting for him in the Campo Santo. The body, placed in a sack, was thrown from the Ponte Sisto into the river. After the murder, Sforza hid in the palace of his relative, Cardinal Ascanio, with whom he planned the crime together. Bernáldez's account remained unknown for a long time as it was not published until 1870, but it clearly shows what information reached Spain about the murder.