A Very Borgia Break Up | History's Worst Breakups

If people are still talking about your divorce and rumoured penis related issues 500 years later, it's safe to say you've had a bad break up. For the final episode in our Worst Breakups series, we’re heading back to Renaissance Rome to meet Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of history’s naughtiest pope, and her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, in a story that ended mired in controversy over incest and impotence. For this episode, Kate is joined by Catherine Fletcher, author of ‘The Beauty and the Terror’, ‘The Black Prince of Florence’ and ‘Our Man in Rome: The Divorce of Henry VIII’. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the place where all of your historical filth and smut can be found, where we're just being very rude, but we can all pretend that we're actually learning something at the same time. Hurrah, win, win. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering all the adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Right, proceed at your own caution.

• 1:01Kate Lister?

  Ah, the divorce courts of history. Echoy ceilings, rustling paper and terse lawyers talking to one another. There's a real mix here from all throughout history. Look, there's Charles and Diana, keeping very much to themselves. Henry and Catherine of Aragon are on opposite sides of the room. And Caesar and Pompey are dead on their feet. Well, they have been here a very, very long time. All these former lovers are busy providing all the evidence and information that they need to get the divorces or annulments that they want. Proof of infidelity, proof of neglect, proof that they never slept with their brother's widow and so forth. There's a crowd gathered round one couple, however. There's a rumour going round that the man is about to try and prove his virility to

• 1:45Kate Lister?

  the crowd gathered. I mean, anything but going into therapy, I guess, right? On with the show.

• 2:16Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. It's been a romantic month, hasn't it? And nothing puts me in the mood more than discussing history's worst breakups. To top them all off, I'm joined once again by Catherine Fletcher. Catherine has previously joined us to talk about the naughtiest Pope of all time. And today we're heading back to the 15th century Vatican to meet his daughter, La Crisia Borgia, and her first husband, Giovanni Sforza. With rumours of impotence, incest and a secret illegitimate Roman love child, could this take the cake as the worst breakup of all? Cloaks on, everybody, let's find out.

• 3:03Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Catherine Fletcher, how are you doing?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I am very well. Hello, Kate, thanks for having me back.

• 3:13Kate Lister?

  A pleasure. I mean, who else were we going to ask for this one? This is the latest instalment in our little mini-episode of history's worst breakups. And we have gone for La Crisia and Giovanni. Now, that's a fun topic.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  It's a very bad breakup. I mean, yeah, it really is.

• 3:33Kate Lister?

  If anyone's gonna see bad breakups, it's the Borjas, right?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they certainly can. And La Crisia's three marriages are quite something. So here we are in the first one, and it is gonna get nasty. It's not just gonna get nasty in a period, it's gonna get nasty for about four centuries afterwards, while historians argue over, like, was it true? You know, which side was to blame? What were they up to? Did it really happen? All the rest of it. So, yeah, lots, lots to get into.

• 4:03Kate Lister?

  See, that's a bad breakup, isn't it? If historians for centuries later are picking through the wreckage going, what really happened here? That's a bad breakup.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  That is, I mean, literally five centuries on, people are going, the secret baby? Really? So that's, that's where, that's where we are, you know? Was she actually having somebody else's child? What was going on? You know, there's plenty of scandal attached to this one.

• 4:26Kate Lister?

  All right. Okay. So set the scene, because there'll be people listening who maybe aren't sure who the main players are. Can you please introduce us to, is it Lucretia? Is that how we pronounce it?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you want to be Italian about it, it's Lucrezia or Lucretia. Lucrezia and Giovanni. And they get married in 1493. Now, who's Lucrezia? Lucrezia in 1493 is the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Now, we have talked about this guy before, Kate.

• 4:59Kate Lister?

  We have.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And he is one of, one of history's naughtiest popes. And Lucrezia is one of his many illegitimate children. And she, at the point of this marriage, is 13 years old.

• 5:14Kate Lister?

  Oh, whoa, time out. Whoa, whoa.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, I know. She's 13 years old. I mean, to be fair, she was betrothed when she was 12 years old, and they decided to wait a whole year for her to grow up a little bit before she got actually married.

• 5:30Kate Lister?

  Oh, well then. Oh, my God.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  So, well, yeah, I know. So, as things go, in the period, yeah, this is still pushing things a bit, but it's not completely out of the question in terms of what goes on with aristocratic marriages.

• 5:45Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay. How old's he? How old's Giovanni?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  He is twice her age, at 26.

• 5:51Kate Lister?

  All right, okay.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah. She's 13 years old, being married off to a guy twice her age. And it is a dynastic match. And it's a better match than the family had been planning for her previously. Because since, you know, she, they first started chatting about who to marry her to, which was around when she was a child, Alexander VI has become Pope. And as Pope, he's in charge of one of the five large states in Italy, and so he can think about much more advantageous marriages for his children. And so he decides

• 6:28Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  that Lucrezia is going to get married to a member of the ruling house of Milan. Now, this is not accidental. These people, the Sportss, helped him get elected Pope. So he kind of owes them a favour. And one of the ways that you make these alliances between different countries is with a marriage. So Lucrezia's going to go off and marry Giovanni. Giovanni, who's twenty six, he's already a widower. His first wife had died in childbirth, which is going to be important for our story later on.

• 7:04Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  How she, how she died. Giovanni is the ruler of a town called Pesaro, which is on the Adriatic coast of Italy. And he's a relatively minor member of the ruling family in Milan, but you know, he's, he's a lord, he's got his own town to be in charge of. It's not a bad match, as these things go.

• 7:23Kate Lister?

  Is it weird that he would like to marry or wanted to marry or was offered to marry an illegitimate daughter, even if her dad's the Pope?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's why she's marrying a minor member of the family.

• 7:38Kate Lister?

  Ah, yes, yes.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  She's not marrying somebody in the main line of the ruling house of Milan. They would want to marry, you know, if they were going to marry an illegitimate daughter, it would be the illegitimate daughter of maybe the Holy Roman Emperor or the King of France, probably not an illegitimate daughter of the Pope. Rodrigo Borgia as Pope is a little bit unusual in just how public he is about his illegitimate children. I mean, lots of popes have them.

• 8:02Kate Lister?

  I remember you saying that, actually, yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots of popes have illegitimate children. They tend to be a bit more discreet than Rodrigo was. So when this pair go off and get married, in fact, they didn't go off and get married, they get married in the Vatican. They have a huge wedding ceremony, which is very public in the Vatican with all the Roman nobility there. You know, they decorate the place up, there's cloth of gold, there's velvet hangings, there's a bridesmaid, there's all the Roman nobility in attendance. Rodrigo, the Pope, Pope Alexander, has also brought his mistress, and she's brought all her friends. So it's this weird family wedding going on for the Pope's daughter in the Vatican.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  So you can imagine people are already raising eyebrows at the start of the marriage because it's not really what a Pope's meant to do. Nobody comments, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's not, you know, you can imagine if Pope today like started holding a wedding ceremony for his illegitimate daughter in the Vatican, it would be absolute outrageous scandal with his mistress. Yeah, quite publicly. So the board just says in your face about all this, which starts to upset various people. And you see that already in that the different versions that you get of the wedding are quite divided. So we've got one version of the wedding, which is extremely disapproving.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And this is written by the guy who is in charge of ceremonial matters at the Vatican, a guy called Johan Bergkamp, who really does not approve of the board just because they're breaking all the rules about how you are meant to operate properly. And he gives this description where the wedding breakfast ends up in a food fight, where all the guests are just taking these marzipans at confectionery. They've all got drunk. He's like, there were about 200, like, big basins of wine and cups all around the place. And the whole thing has just descended into absolute chaos as people start flinging things and the food gets trampled underfoot.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And he's just, he's very moralizing about this. This is a disgrace. This is, you know, a waste of food. It's outrageous. You know, you can really hear the tone of disapproval coming through. And then you get the other side of the story, which is people writing an account of the wedding who want to just pretend that that stuff didn't happen, so they don't mention it. And they move on to the evening when presumably everybody has sobered up a little bit. And they emphasise the fact that in the evening, the ladies had a bit of a dance. And then they watched a respectable comedy, a nice clean piece of theatre. And so they report that bit instead.

• 10:50Kate Lister?

  It's a bit mad. It doesn't sound like, you know, all right, they had, I guess, a bit of fun, a bit of weird fun at their wedding. There's some scandal, there's some mistresses, but it's pretty on brand for this Pope. They sound like a reasonable match so far.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they should be a reasonable match. Lucrezia goes off to Pesaro, which is her husband's town. And so far as we can understand, the marriage goes reasonably well. There are no questions, there is no scandal about it. A war breaks out the following year. And her husband, being a lord in this period, what you do if you're a lord in this period generally is you go off to war. So he went off to war and the couple were separated for quite an extended period. And at a certain point, Lucrezia ended up living back in Rome. Again, that's not all that unusual. And there is a bit of a question, you know, should she have stayed in Pesaro and just run the family estates?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I don't think that was her personality particularly. I think she liked to be at the centre of things. You know, you're thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, you know, you want to be back with your friends. She was clearly pretty good friends with her sister in law, who was also in Rome a lot. And, you know, they, they, they had a circle there. That was where she'd grown up. So it seems pretty unsurprising that, given that husband wasn't around in Pesaro, that she would come back and effectively spend time living with the family.

• 12:19Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  This war is also part of a picture in terms of what happens with the marriage. Because Italy at this time is divided into many different states. There are five big ones, of which the Papacy and Milan are two. There are lots of small ones. You've also got France involved, you've got Spain involved, the Holy Roman Empire is involved. Everybody is involved in this war. It's the big war going on in Europe. And the smaller players in particular often shift alliances, swap sides. And at a certain point, the Pope decides that actually the alliance with Milan is not

• 13:01Speaker 01

  that useful to him anymore, and he would rather have an alliance with Naples. How do you cement an alliance? You do it with a marriage. Now, he's got one child married into Naples already, but the suggestion is perhaps he could upgrade Lucrezia to a better marriage to somebody more senior in the Kingdom of Naples.

• 13:33Kate Lister?

  We'll be back with Catherine after this short break.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Hi there, I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're going to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow. She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 14:48Kate Lister?

  Did they get along? Did they like each other? Like, oh, so the Pope's kind of angling to maybe I could do something here. But was this a happy marriage? Like, admittedly, he's away at war, but did they, did you get any sense that they got on, that they were happy together?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  So far as we can tell, there's not a lot of sources for this. She seems to have been fairly neutral on it. She, there's no record of her being massively like upset, and she's not greatly enthused about it all. And there are a lot of other things going on which at the time, which also come into this bigger picture, not least the fact that her brother Juan is murdered in the middle of 1497 as this whole process of talking about a split kicks off.

• 15:33Kate Lister?

  Oh dear. Right, okay.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  So, you know, which of Lucrezia's actions we can attribute to her being upset about the divorce, which of them are her being upset about her brother, which of them are her being upset about just a general situation, we don't quite know. Certainly, one of the things she does in the middle of it is to go off and live in a convent. But we could come on to that because that's, there's a whole other set of stories attached to that. But meanwhile, we've got this divorce going on in which, you know, it's a political divorce. It's about shifting of the lives.

• 16:10Kate Lister?

  So the Pope, he's come up with this plan, I could marry her off to somebody else. What's the mechanism for this? Does he just say, now you're divorced, abracadabra, boom, poof, done?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  No, it's quite difficult to get a divorce in this period. They don't really have divorce. Yes, yeah, you might have heard that. Another person had this problem, Henry VIII. Yes.

• 16:29Kate Lister?

  Yes, he did. I was just thinking, it's not that easy, is it?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  It's not that easy. So what the Pope does is he sets up a commission of cardinals to investigate whether all the paperwork for the marriage was originally in order.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And what he wants these cardinals to do, and what the mechanism generally for doing a divorce in this period is, is you find some error in the paperwork that means that the marriage wasn't properly valid. So this could be, for example, that the person was previously betrothed, but the betrothal hadn't been cancelled properly. And that can make the marriage invalid. So they're like, oh, well, no, this paper wasn't signed off by the right people, so therefore the marriage is invalid. Hey, presto, you're divorced. But the cardinals he puts in charge don't play ball with this. Because they are a little bit serious.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Possibly for political reasons, possibly just for religious reasons. I mean, people do take marriage pretty seriously in this period. It's a sacrament, it's something you do in a sight of God, you're not meant to cancel it for trivial reasons. So that doesn't work for him. It's like, okay. They don't find anything. They certainly don't find the error in the paperwork the Pope was hoping they would find or invent or whatever. Okay. You know, you don't even need to have a real error in the paperwork. You could have some fake paperwork. But they are not going along with this plan. So we then get, okay, okay, Plan B, there are some other reasons by which a marriage might not be valid.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  For example, if it's never been consummated. For example, if the groom could not consummate the marriage, if the groom was impotent, the guy couldn't get it up. You've got a reason for a divorce. So. I see. Plan B, we're gonna say that the marriage was never consummated because Giovanni was not capable.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  You can imagine this does not play particularly well with Giovanni because he is going to have to sign off the documents to confirm it.

• 18:48Kate Lister?

  I was just about to say, what's he doing in in all of this mess? Did he resist it? Did he go, oh, all right then? What was the, what was he doing?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think he was exactly happy to start with because it is a little bit of a slur on your honour to say, look, we're going to marry your wife to somebody more important than you are. You are a bit redundant to our plans now.

• 19:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  You know, look, you could accept the story that's a technical error in paperwork and just move on with your life. The very public story that you have a problem is a lot harder for Giovanni.

• 19:29Kate Lister?

  Or not harder in this case.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I mean, so it's a lot harder for Giovanni to um to deal with. So this is where it all starts kicking off. It's humiliating, you know, and it it starts to raise questions about his first marriage. Because remember I said his first wife died in childbirth. So if Giovanni is impotent or has become impotent, what's going on with the first wife? You know, had the first wife actually slept with somebody else to to have that baby. You know, he told, you know, you know, you know what I mean? It it just sort of opens up all sorts of routes to gossip here. It, you know, raises questions about, you know, Lucrezia hasn't got pregnant, so maybe that's also going to sort of shore up the rumours that he does have some kind of problem.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, the court of Rome, it's notoriously gossipy. You can imagine people saying all sorts. And Giovanni is understandably upset about this whole period and he, you know, and so there's a letter from one of the diplomats in Rome in which, you know, Giovanni has been telling him that, you know, he'd slept with his wife an infinity of times. He is absolutely clear that he, you know, they had been properly going at it. And then in this same letter, this is the same letter Giovanni hits back.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And he says that the reason the Pope is trying to take Lucrezia away from him is to sleep with her himself.

• 21:02Kate Lister?

  Oh, well played Giovanni. Okay.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Giovanni is like, okay, look, there's a reason why he's doing this. It's not about politics. It's because he has got incestuous desires on his own daughter. And that's why he wants her to be divorced, so he can get her back. Now, you know, this is not true. There is no evidence. I think where it comes from and why the rumor picks up a bit is partly because Borges are an unusually close family in Roman terms. I mean, popes don't usually behave with their illegitimate children like Rodrigo Borges behaves with his. They are unusually close and

• 21:47Speaker 01

  there is some suggestion that they're also quite physically affectionate, which isn't sort of the, quite the done thing in the etiquette of the court of Rome. And so things like, you know, kissing, hugging, et cetera, get interpreted through this prism as suggestive of something more.

• 22:08Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Which I don't think, I don't think any, any sort of historians really take that very seriously. But you can see how somebody who is upset at the slur on his own honour, like Giovanni, might put two and two together and make about seventeen and say,

• 22:27Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  this is what's going on. This is what it's really about. These people are a bit unnatural anyway. They don't behave like you're meant to. They're a bit foreign, you know, they're, they're from a Spanish dynasty. They're not like us Italians and start to sort of really spread those rumours about the problem, you know, the problems, the weirdness of this behaviour and spin out from there.

• 22:54Kate Lister?

  Is it true that the marriage was unconsummated? Do we have any information on that?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems unlikely to me that it would not have been consummated because people in this period are usually pretty hot on making sure the marriage is consummated precisely for this reason, that you don't want it to be declared invalid later on. Obviously, you know, the couple haven't spent loads and loads of time together because he's gone off to war, but there was plenty of time that they did spend together. I mean, it might have been the case that they didn't have a lot of sex because actually in marriages where the bride is very young, sometimes they decide not to because they're concerned about the impact of childbirth. They do, they do understand for all that the marriage at thirteen is quite, quite dubious

• 23:43Speaker 01

  to, you know, our standards today, and it sometimes even was back then. They do sometimes then delay more than just a one-off consummation because they don't really want to risk the pregnancy when she's still so young. So it's possible that that's a part of the picture. It's really hard to say. Nobody is writing down the details of this. We don't have those kind of household records. We just have to imagine. So Okay. Yeah, we get to this point, but I think, you know, if the marriage had not been consummated, somebody would have been dealing with that earlier.

• 24:28Kate Lister?

  We're back with Catherine after this short break.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Hi there, I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're going to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with three hundred handmaidens in tow. She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Senat's history here.

• 25:44Kate Lister?

  So we've got this situation where the Pope's going, he's impotent, and Giovanni's going, he's a nonce and he's incestuous. Nobody knows what Lucrezia is doing at this point. Now what happens? Because this is now metastasized into we've got ego on the line, we've got masculinity on the line, we have reputation on the line. What's the next move?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  So the next move is that these rumours kind of multiply and these rumours about incest are seen as an attack, really, from Giovanni. Not just specifically saying the guy's a pervert, he's tried to shag his daughter, but more broadly, they are an attack on the Borgias, on the Pope, on the idea that this man, Rodrigo Borgia, is a proper person. And, you know, a proper person, a proper head of the family, you know, it's really a fundamental, it's a pretty fundamental accusation to make against somebody. And thinking about the Renaissance

• 26:47Speaker 01

  culture more generally, you know, this is the type of accusation that is levelled against the worst of the emperors. So the emperors who famously are meant to be doing incest are narrow and colloquial. So when you make this accusation, even if you're making it somewhat metaphorically, and it's not 100% clear whether Giovanni literally believes it or not, or whether he's just doing some mudslinging, it's something that associates Rodrigo with the ultimate bad guys of Roman history. So you can see how it works in that sense. But there's also a political context for this. And in terms of get here, you know,

• 27:29Speaker 01

  who's going to win? Is Giovanni going to back down? Is Rodrigo going to back down? What is Lucrezia going to do?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  The key people to make the difference are actually Giovanni's family. Because the Duke of Milan and the Cardinal Sforza, who's his senior relative, Rodrigo's ally in the court in Rome, actually do not want a massive falling out with the Pope. They think all this is a bit embarrassing for their family, but fundamentally that their younger relative should just suck it up, put up with the accusations, shut up and let them get back to building a normal diplomatic relationship with the Pope. One that, okay, they haven't got a marriage alliance anymore, but they want this problem to go away.

• 28:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I bet they do. I bet they do.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so eventually they do not want a whole scandal blowing up because their younger cousin is going around accusing the Pope and now the Pope's son as well of sleeping with their daughter or sister. So this is not, this is not great from their part of view. They want to put a lid on it. So they gradually put pressure on to Giovanni to go along with the divorce. I mean, meanwhile, there's a set of stories going around about Lucrezia, which also have potential to cause a lot of problems. The Lucrezia has taken herself off or been sent off, we don't quite know, to a convent.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And where she stays, really, until this is all sorted. And the letters and correspondence around this time when she goes after the convent are really quite interesting, but also very coded. So we get things like, hmm, some say she wants to become a nun. Others say other things, which it is really safe to put in writing. And one of the rumors that starts to go around is that Lucrezia is in fact pregnant. And so she is off in this convent, having a baby, which I see. Would be an enormous problem for a question about consummation of this marriage. Oh, yes, it would be.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  You know, screw up the argument that he is impotent, unless she's slept with somebody else, which is what the story starts to go around, that she's actually having an illegitimate child. And, you know, some, some people say, oh, no, th- this is all fake news, it's not happening, it's not made up. But there is a child, a child turns up at about the right date. Yes, yes. So as all is, so on the one hand, she's getting divorced for an odd consummation. And on the other hand, she's taken herself off to seclusion in a nunnery. And then there's a child. And the child is declared in two different papal documents

• 30:30Speaker 01

  to be either her father's or her brother's, not Lucrezia's. Oh. But the child exists, the child is, is known as the Roman infant. In a lot of the documents, it's a random Roman infant, poor kid. Who do you think this child is? Well, this is where the plot thickens even further. Because the following February, February, I think, fourteen ninety eight, a couple of bodies turn up in the river Tiber. And these are the bodies of a woman who's believed to be Lucrezia's maid and the man who's called Pedroto, Pedro Calderon, who's a member of her father's household

• 31:14Speaker 01

  and is rumored to have got her pregnant in this time when she was away from her husband, living in Rome. Oh. So now the rumors sort of escalate that these two have been murdered to keep them quiet, to squash the rumor. That the child was Lucrezia's by getting rid of the key witness. And of course, what actually happens is this only amplifies the rumors. So we don't know, we don't know whose child the Roman infant in fact is. Is it Lucrezia's? Is it Rodrigo's? Is it Cesare's? So what's interesting, what this could get is a being called Giovanni, like, like, like the divorced husband, which is kind of weird.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  But there's still to this day, there's a debate between historians about whether or not that might be Lucrezia's baby.

• 32:06Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I bet there is.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Some of the sources suggest that she treated him much later on, rather more like she was treating her own children than she treated the other Borgia bastards. I personally am not sure that this is strong enough evidence to be sure. But I think that, you know, the circumstantial evidence of Lucrezia disappearing, then the people who might be witnesses to all this, it's certainly enough to explain why there were rumors going around about Lucrezia's behaviour in this period. And why, of course, if you think about, on the one hand, Giovanni is being accused of impotence, the husband.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  And then, you know, even while the divorce process is still going on, the rumors start to circulate that his wife has gone off to have another man's child.

• 33:03Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's a hot mess, this, isn't it?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Understand why he's upset.

• 33:07Kate Lister?

  This is a right mess.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a complete mess, isn't it? And there are so many different tang of layers to it. There's the politics, there's what the couple themselves were actually doing, there's the mudslinging, there's all the rumors and the fact, you know, for me as a historian, the fact that we actually have tiny, tiny fragments of speculation and a lot of people do this thing where they say. I have heard many rumours about this, which I will not write down because they are such bad rumours, which is the kind of source that just guys.

• 33:39Kate Lister?

  No, write them down.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Please, like, just write them down.

• 33:41Kate Lister?

  Write the rumours down.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Write them down, yes. So we don't know, but that's where we've got, we've got rumours of an illegitimate child. And we've, we've got this sort of mudslinging of, on the one hand, impotence, and on the other hand, incest.

• 33:56Kate Lister?

  It, it's really nasty. Does Giovanni agree to the divorce then? What happens?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  He does. He agrees to the divorce.

• 34:03Kate Lister?

  Yeah, he sounds like the weak point in all of this. If everyone's pressuring him, including his family.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  I think everybody just wants this to go away.

• 34:10Kate Lister?

  Yes, just shut up about your penis, Giovanni, please.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  You know, La Crezia moves on to her second marriage. By all accounts, the second marriage is a genuinely happy one. And I think that's, you know, it's actually a good outcome for her for a little while. Yeah, until the second husband gets murdered, but that's another story. So she has a bit of happiness in the middle of what's quite a nasty situation in terms of, you know, her life course. But yeah, she marries this Neapolitan prince. They seem to do quite well for a while. Giovanni goes off. He can never go back to his hometown while the Borges are still around and in power. At one point, La Crezia's brother Cesare tries to take over his lands.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  So you could, the, the military response to being accused of incest is like, actually, I'm going to invade your town. So there's not, no comeback for him on these accusations.

• 35:11Kate Lister?

  Was there ever any suggestion that he would have to be tested for impotence? Because that does happen when somebody makes an accusation that the marriage couldn't be consummated. Um, you, you see that in sort of medieval records going through into the early modern period is that a group of wise matrons would be summoned to test the member.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  No, because I think in this case, everybody understands that it's just a convenient fiction.

• 35:36Kate Lister?

  It's a lie.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Nobody's really saying he's impotent. They're just saying that because they need to say that to get the marriage ended. So.

• 35:43Kate Lister?

  Yeah, you wouldn't want to prove that, would you?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Obviously, they're like, you know, testing is a bad idea in this circumstance because actually he would clearly pass the test. That's not the problem. The problem is we just want to agree on an excuse, however embarrassing it may be for this guy. And it is very embarrassing for him to claim that he cannot perform with women.

• 36:05Kate Lister?

  Does he ever live this down? Does he, does he go on to have more wives? What's his deal?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does. He gets married again. He marries a woman called Ginevra Tiepolo. And he had two sons with her and he had another two illegitimate daughters. So clearly he was on the case to demonstrate that he was not very intelligent.

• 36:31Kate Lister?

  He must have just been desperate to have sex with people. Please have my baby. As soon as these babies turn around, look, look, they're here.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Look, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, while people in the period like understand that this would have been an excuse to dissolve the marriage, and it's not really a slur against him. But when it's put to him as the alternative to the paperwork technicality solution, he clearly has at least a moment when he is absolutely losing it at the prospect of being, you know, publicly declared a guy who cannot get it up. And you know, you have to, you have to sympathize a bit with, with his situation here.

• 37:16Kate Lister?

  I'd say that's not a nice thing to have to like put down on a piece of paper. Did, did like, did he have to return the dowry or anything else? Did they at least pay him off well for this madness?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  So in theory, he was meant to return the dowry. But at least some interpretation suggests that he didn't.

• 37:37Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I'd keep it. I'd keep all of it.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And it was, it was, it was thirty one thousand ducats. The, um, the dowry, and that is a lot of money. So if you were a one of the lower paid cardinals in Rome at this time, you might be on around three thousand a year. So it's ten years of

• 37:55Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  lower ranking cardinal's income. You know, that's not bad. It's not super rich billionaire type money. But it's a very nice, you know, amount of cash that is going to keep you very, very comfortably.

• 38:09Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  In, you know, without having to work for a living. So he is not doing very badly in those circumstances.

• 38:17Kate Lister?

  Does he ever make it up with the Borgias? I mean, don't they excommunicate him later on? That would suggest no.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't ever make it up with the Borgias. He has to wait until the Borgias are out of power and the next Pope Julius the Second comes into power. Julius hates the Borgias and Julius confirms Giovanni back in his lordship of Pesaro and everything is fine again. And I think perhaps that reflects a bit of a broader feeling about the Borgias in the papacy that the Borgias were, you know, and some of this, I think, is a certain amount of Italian prejudice against the Borgias for having Spanish roots. We comes through in quite nasty ways at certain points. But I think at the end of the day, there are also quite a lot of people relieved to see the Borgias out of power in 1503.

• 39:08Kate Lister?

  Through the back of them. Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:10Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, was there good that came out of forcing this couple to divorce on kind of trumped up charges of impotence and all the rest of it? I guess what I'm asking is, did the Pope get what he wanted in the end? Was it worth it to do this?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  I think the Pope got what he wanted, which was for the moment in alliance with Naples and a reasonably okay relationship with the rulers of Milan, who eventually forced Giovanni to accept it. I think Lucrezia, for a while, got to marry somebody that she preferred. So it was a good outcome for her. She did all right for a while. Unfortunately, that also doesn't have a good ending in a different way, but she had a bit of happiness in the middle of there. And Giovanni, yeah, he had to wait it out. But we're only talking six years. It's not a very long time in the scheme of things. And then he could move on with the wife, with the kids, with the mistresses and the other kids.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  You know, live the typical aristocratic life of the period.

• 40:13Kate Lister?

  He must have, like, that must have just hung around his neck, though. Like, to be accused of something like that on paper and have to sign to it. It must have been forever embarrassing.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's indicative that still, I think, if you go to his Wikipedia entry, it says something like Giovanni is mainly known for being accused of impotence in the divorce. You know, like, he's mainly known as the foremost husband in the Cretes, you know. And then they give, and then that's by far the largest section of his Wikipedia. Can you imagine that that's, that's the thing that you were known for in your life? You go down in history 500 years later, people like us are still making podcasts about your bad divorce and your penis problems. Yeah, what can I say? It's not, it's not the legacy you really want to leave, is it?

• 41:01Kate Lister?

  No, it's not. That is a bad breakup. That is a bad breakup. Catherine, you have been marvelous to talk to, poor Giovanni. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  So they can find my website at catherinefletcher.info and they can find links to all my books there. This topic is mainly covered in The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance.

• 41:28Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You have been wonderful.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Thank you, Kate.

• 41:36Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Catherine for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got glitz, glam, bombshells and murders. We are heading to the golden age of Hollywood. What was Tinseltown like at its peak and what scandals nearly brought it down? If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandals and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.