house and passed under the
protection of a woman who exercised great influence upon him and upon
the entire Borgia family.

This woman was Adriana, of the house of Mila, a daughter of Don Pedro,
who was a nephew of Calixtus III, and first cousin of Rodrigo. What
position he held in Rome we do not know.

He married his daughter Adriana to Ludovico, a member of the noble house
of Orsini, and lord of Bassanello, near Civita Castellana. As the
offspring of this union, Orsino Orsini, married in 1489, it is evident
that his mother must have entered into wedlock at least sixteen years
before. Ludovico Orsini died in 1489 or earlier. As his wife, and later
as his widow, Adriana occupied one of the Orsini palaces in Rome,
probably the one on Monte Giordano, near the Bridge of S. Angelo, this
palace having subsequently been described as part of the estate which
her son Orsino inherited.

Cardinal Rodrigo maintained the closest relations with Adriana. She was
more than his kinswoman; she was the confidant of his sins, of his
intrigues and plans, and such she remained until the day of his death.

To her he entrusted the education of his daughter Lucretia during her
childhood, as we learn from a letter written by the Ferrarese ambassador
to Rome, Gianandrea Boccaccio, Bishop of Modena, to the Duke Ercole in
1493, in which he remarks of Madonna Adriana Ursina, "that she had
educated Lucretia in her own house."[12] This doubtless was the Orsini
palace on Monte Giordano, which was close to Cardinal Borgia's
residence.

According to the Italian custom, which has survived to the present day,
the education of the daughters was entrusted to women in convents, where
the young girls were required to pass a few years, afterwards to come
forth into the world to be married. If, however, Infessura's picture of
the convents of Rome is a faithful one, the cardinal was wise in
hesitating to entrust his daughter to these saints. Nevertheless there
certainly were convents which were free from immorality, such, for
example, as S. Silvestre in Capite, where many of the daughters of the
Colonna were educated, and S. Maria Nuova and S. Sisto on the Appian
Way. On one occasion during the papacy of Alexander, Lucretia chose the
last named convent as an asylum, perhaps because she had there received
her early spiritual education.

Religious instruction was always the basis of the education of the women
of Italy. It, however, consisted not in the cul