Lucrezia Borgia: Family Myths
Was Lucrezia Borgia a poisoner of men or was she merely misunderstood? Who was this colorful Italian Renaissance woman?
The life of this famous lady is and forever will be shrouded in mystery and a layer of legend from which few real facts can be extricated. What is known about her is that she was the illegitimate daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) and his mistress, Vanozza de Cattanei, and the sister of the notorious Cesare Borgia. She was a member of a most corrupt Renaissance family whose very name to this day connotes brutality and murder for gain. Lucrezia in many ways was stuck in the middle of her family's greed for riches and political power, and she married three men chosen by both her brother and her father whose wealthy families offered profitable alliances with their own.
The father of her first child remains a mystery. The boy was possibly the result of an affair with her very own brother or may have been the son of a royal messenger named Perotto. Whatever the truth, Lucrezia concealed her pregnancy from the Roman populace and gave birth in a convent.
Rumors abound to this very day. One of the most persistent alludes to Lucrezia as a cold-blooded murderer, a woman who killed her family's enemies by poisoning them via a convenient opening in a hollow ring. This cannot be proven. Her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, who was forced by Rodrigo to agree to an annulment on the grounds that he was impotent, may have been responsible for starting the rumor of an incestuous relationship between Lucrezia's brother and her father.
Read the life story of this colorful woman, whose personal truth is trapped forever within the pages of history somewhere between legend and unshakeable myth.
