Quote of the Day (Jacob Burckhardt, on the Borgias)

“Whether it were that father [Rodrigo Borgia, a.k.a. Pope Alexander VI] and son [Cesare Borgia] had drawn up a formal list of proscribed persons, or that the murders were resolved upon one by one, in either case the Borgias were bent on the secret destruction of all who stood in their way or whose inheritance they coveted. Of this, money and movable goods formed the smallest part; it was a much greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death, and that he received the revenues of their offices while vacant, and the price of these offices when they were filled by the successors of the murdered men. The Venetian ambassador Paolo Capello reported in the year 1500: 'Every night four or five murdered men are discovered -- bishops, prelates and others -- so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the Duke (Cesare).' He himself used to wander about Rome in the night-time with his guards, and there is every reason to believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on persons unknown to him.”—Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860)

As soon as you take Hollywood to task for peddling dubious history, they bring up that Shakespeare wasn’t exactly accurate about Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part I, or about the title character in Richard III.

So I don’t hold out much hope that the new Showtime series The Borgias will reflect historical reality. The image accompanying this post is a good example. While the real Pope Alexander VI was, to put it charitably, a hefty fellow, actor Jeremy Irons has that Cassius-like “lean and hungry look.” Still less do I think that most viewers will go beyond the Neil Jordan production to learn more about the infamous family on their own initiative.

But once in awhile, I tire of cursing the darkness and instead light a single candle, and you can consider this “Quote of the Day” a kind of public-service announcement in that regard. If you want to know more about the family, you can do a lot worse than this.

Burckhardt’s classic study of the Renaissance doesn’t focus on the Borgias. But his few pages devoted to the family are, as this passage indicates, as extraordinarily vivid as they are concise—and they have the advantage of not being juiced up by Hollywood.

I’ve written previously about the “warrior-pope” who succeeded “Borgia pope” Alexander VI, Julius II. I wasn’t too high on Julius as a man of God, or even as a human being. But Buckhardt makes the case that, compared with his predecessor, “in all essential respects he was the saviour of the Papacy.” It seems that, no matter what else he did, at least he didn’t resort to rampant simony, nepotism and murder as ecclesiastical policy.

So get yourself a real history of the Borgias or, better yet, the entire Renaissance. It’ll have all the pageantry, violence and sex of a Hollywood production, but those won’t be the only qualities on display in these works, and you might come out learning something of infinitely greater value.