tween the cousins. Yet Cesare has been charged with his death, and
accused of having poisoned him, and, amidst the host of silly, baseless
accusations levelled against Cesare, you shall find none more silly or
baseless than this. In other instances of unproven crimes with which he
has been charged there may be some vestiges of matter that may do duty
for evidence or be construed into motives; here there is none that
will serve one purpose or the other, and the appalling and rabid
unscrupulousness, the relentless malice of Borgian chroniclers is in
nothing so completely apparent as in this accusation.

Sanuto mentions the advices received, and the rumours which say that
Cesare murdered him through jealousy, knowing him beloved by the Pope,
seeing him a legate, and fearing that he might come to be given the
governorship of some Romagna fief.

When Gandia died and Cesare was accused of having murdered him, the
motive advanced was that Cesare, a papal legate, resented a brother who
was a duke. Now, Cesare, being a duke, resents a cousin's being a papal
legate. You will observe that, if this method of discovering motives is
pursued a little further, there is no man who died in Cesare's life-time
whom Cesare could not be shown to have had motives for murdering.

Sillier even than Sanuto's is the motive with which Giovio attempts to
bolster up the accusation which he reports: "He [Cesare] poisoned him
because he [Giovanni] favoured the Duke of Gandia."

That, apparently, was the best that Giovio could think of. It is hardly
intelligible--which is perhaps inevitable, for it is not easy to be
intelligible when you don't quite know, yourself, what you mean, which
must have been Giovio's case.

The whole charge is so utterly foolish, stupid, and malicious that it
would scarcely be worth mentioning, were it not that so many modern
writers have included this among the Borgia crimes. As a matter of
fact--and as a comparison of the above-cited dates will show--eighteen
days had elapsed between Giovanni Borgia's leaving Cesare at Forli and
his succumbing at Urbino--which in itself disposes of the matter. It
may be mentioned that this is a circumstance which those foolish or
deliberately malicious calumniators either did not trouble to ascertain
or else thought it wiser to slur over. Although, had they been pressed,
there was always the death of Djem to be cited and the fiction of the
slow-working poison specially invented to meet a