to some, he married him to Vannozza in
order to afford her an official husband and thus cloak his own relations
with her. It is an assumption which you will hesitate to accept. If we
know our Cardinal Roderigo at all, he was never the man to pursue his
pleasures in a hole-and-corner fashion, nor one to bethink him of a
cloak for his amusements. Had he but done so, scandalmongers would
have had less to fasten upon in their work of playing havoc with his
reputation. What is far more likely is that della Croce owed Cardinal
Roderigo's protection and the appointment as apostolic secretary to his
own complacency in the matter of his wife's relations with the splendid
prelate. However we look at it, the figure cut in this story by della
Croce is not heroic.

Between the years 1474 and 1476, Vannozza bore Roderigo two sons, Cesare
Borgia (afterwards Cardinal of Valencia and Duke of Valentinois), the
central figure of our story, and Giovanni Borgia (afterwards Duke of
Gandia).

Lucrezia Borgia, we know from documentary evidence before us, was born
on April 19, 1479.

But there is a mystery about the precise respective ages of Vannozza's
two eldest sons, and we fear that at this time of day it has become
impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt which was the firstborn;
and this in spite of the documents discovered by Gregorovius and his
assertion that they remove all doubt and enable him definitely to assert
that Giovanni was born in 1474 and Cesare in 1476.

Let us look at these documents. They are letters from ambassadors to
their masters; probably correct, and the more credible since they
happen to agree and corroborate one another; still, not so utterly and
absolutely reliable as to suffice to remove the doubts engendered by the
no less reliable documents whose evidence contradicts them.

The first letters quoted by Gregorovius are from the ambassador
Gianandrea Boccaccio to his master, the Duke of Ferrara, in 1493. In
these he mentions Cesare Borgia as being sixteen to seventeen years of
age at the time. But the very manner of writing--"sixteen to seventeen
years"--is a common way of vaguely suggesting age rather than positively
stating it. So we may pass that evidence over, as of secondary
importance.

Next is a letter from Gerardo Saraceni to the Duke of Ferrara, dated
October 26, 1501, and it is more valuable, claiming as it does to be the
relation of something which his Holiness told the writer. It is in t