lk and gold. "She spoke Spanish, Greek, Italian, and French, and a
little Latin, very correctly, and she wrote and composed poems in all
these tongues," said the biographer Bayard in 1512. Lucretia must have
perfected her education later, during the quiet years of her life, under
the influence of Bembo and Strozzi, although she doubtless had laid its
foundation in Rome. She was both a Spaniard and an Italian, and a
perfect master of these two languages. Among her letters to Bembo there
are two written in Spanish; the remainder, of which we possess several
hundred, are composed in the Italian of that day, and are spontaneous
and graceful in style. The contents of none of them are of importance;
they display soul and feeling, but no depth of mind. Her handwriting is
not uniform; sometimes it has strong lines which remind us of the
striking, energetic writing of her father; at others it is sharp and
fine like that of Vittoria Colonna.

None of Lucretia's letters indicate that she fully understood Latin, and
her father once stated that she had not mastered that language. She
must, however, have been able to read it when written, for otherwise
Alexander could not have made her his representative in the Vatican,
with authority to open letters received. Nor were her Hellenic studies
very profound; still she was not wholly ignorant of Greek. In her
childhood, schools for the study of Hellenic literature still flourished
in Rome, where they had been established by Chrysoleras and Bessarion.
In the city were many Greeks, some of whom were fugitives from their
country, while others had come to Italy with Queen Carlotta of Cyprus.
Until her death, in 1487, this royal adventuress lived in a palace in
the Borgo of the Vatican, where she held court, and where she doubtless
gathered about her the cultivated people of Rome, just as the learned
Queen Christina of Sweden did later. It was in her house that Cardinal
Rodrigo made the acquaintance, besides that of other noble natives of
Cyprus, of Ludovico Podocatharo, a highly cultivated man, afterwards his
secretary. He it was, probably, who instructed Borgia's children in
Greek.

In the cardinal's palace there was also a humanist of German birth,
Lorenz Behaim, of Nurenburg, who managed his household for twenty years.
As he was a Latinist and a member of the Roman Academy of Pomponius
Laetus, he must have exercised some influence on the education of his
master's children. Generally there