n ecclesiastic had Gandia
lived? We cannot see that it does. Indeed, such evidence as there is,
when properly considered, points in the opposite direction, even if no
account is taken of the fact that this was not the first occasion on
which it was proposed that Cesare should abandon the ecclesiastical
career, as is shown by the Ferrarese ambassador's dispatches of March
1493.

It is contended that Gandia was a stumbling-block to Cesare, and that
Gandia held the secular possessions which Cesare coveted; but if that
were really the case why, when eventually (some fourteen months after
Gandia's death) Cesare doffed the purple to replace it by a soldier's
harness, did he not assume the secular possessions that had been his
brother's?

His dead brother's lands and titles went to his dead brother's son,
whilst Cesare's career was totally different, as his aims were totally
different, from any that had been Gandia's, or that might have been
Gandia's had the latter lived. True, Cesare became Captain-General of
the Church in his dead brother's place; but for that his brother's death
was not necessary. Gandia had neither the will nor the intellect
to undertake the things that awaited Cesare. He was a soft-natured,
pleasure-loving youth, whose way of life was already mapped out for him.
His place was at Gandia, in Spain, and, whilst he might have continued
lord of all the possessions that were his, it would have been Cesare's
to become Duke of Valentinois, and to have made himself master of
Romagna, precisely as he did.

In conclusion, Gandia's death no more advanced, than his life could have
impeded, the career which Cesare afterwards made his own, and to say
that Cesare murdered him to supplant him is to set up a theory which the
subsequent facts of Cesare's life will nowise justify.

It is idle of Gregorovius to say that the logic of the crime is
inexorable--in its assigning the guilt to Cesare--fatuous of him to
suppose that, as he claims, he has definitely proved Cesare to be his
brother's murderer.

There is much against Cesare Borgia, but it never has been proved, and
never will be proved, that he was a fratricide. Indeed the few really
known facts of the murder all point to a very different conclusion--a
conclusion more or less obvious, which has been discarded, presumably
for no better reason than because it was obvious.

Where was all this need to go so far afield in quest of a probable
murderer imbued with poli