the history of the
house. Caesar was born in the month of April, 1476--the day is not
given--and Lucretia on the eighteenth of April, 1480. Their father, when
he was pope, gave their ages in accordance with these dates. In October,
1501, he mentioned the subject to the ambassador of Ferrara, and the
latter, writing to the Duke Ercole, said, "The Pope gave me to
understand that the Duchess (Lucretia) was in her twenty-second year,
which she will complete next April, in which month also the most
illustrious Duke of Romagna (Caesar) will be twenty-six."

If the correctness of the father's statement of the age of his own
children is questioned, it may be confirmed by other reports and
records. In despatches which a Ferrarese ambassador sent to the same
duke from Rome much earlier, namely, in February and March, 1483, the
age of Caesar at that time is given as sixteen to seventeen years, which
agrees with the subsequent statement of his father.[5] The son of
Alexander VI was, therefore, a few years younger than has hitherto been
supposed, and this fact has an important bearing upon his short and
terrible life. Mariana, therefore, and other authors who follow him, err
in stating that Caesar, Rodrigo's second son, was older than his brother
Giovanni. In reality, Giovanni must have been two years older than
Caesar. Venetian letters from Rome, written in October, 1496, describe
him as a young man of twenty-two; he accordingly must have been born in
1474.[6]

Lucretia herself came into the world April 18, 1480. This exact date is
given in a Valencian document. Her father was then forty-nine and her
mother thirty-eight years of age. The Roman or Spanish astrologers cast
the horoscope of the child according to the constellation which was in
the ascendancy, and congratulated Cardinal Rodrigo on the brilliant
career foretold for his daughter by the stars.

Easter had just passed; magnificent festivities had been held in honor
of the Elector Ernst of Saxony, who, together with the Duke of Brunswick
and Wilhelm von Henneberg had arrived in Rome March 22d. These gentlemen
were accompanied by a retinue of two hundred knights, and a house in the
Parione quarter had been placed at their disposal. Pope Sixtus IV loaded
them with honors, and great astonishment was caused by a magnificent
hunt which Girolamo Riario, the all-powerful nepot, gave for them, at
Magliana on the Tiber. These princes departed from Rome on the
fourteenth of April