The Borgias

Em pleno Renascimento, Roma se encontra em uma fase de grande decadência. Sob o papado de Inocêncio VIII, a cidade é controlada por corruptos e tomada de pilantras de toda espécie.

Quando o papa morre, tem-se o ambiente perfeito para a ascensão de Rodrigo Bórgia no Vaticano. Não ser o preferido nem ter a maioria dos votos não é obstáculo para um político hábil em matar, caçar, perseguir, extorquir e humilhar.

No primeiro álbum da série Bórgia, se vê justamente as artimanhas de Rodrigo para, a despeito de sua vida desregrada e polêmica, conquistar o cargo de líder do Cristianismo - que, naquela época, significava praticamente um reinado sobre tudo que era conhecido.

Great dynasties of the world: The Borgias

Ian Sansom on a clan still synonymous with badness

• Ian Sansom
• The Guardian, Saturday 17 July 2010
• Article history

The most notorious family in Italian history was Spanish. Rodrigo Borgia – who went on to become one of the baddest of the bad popes – was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1431. In his classic book, The Bad Popes (1969), ER Chamberlin calls Rodrigo the "Spanish Bull". Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici, Pope Leo X, and no shrinking violet himself, famously compared Rodrigo to a wolf. "Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious perhaps that this world has ever seen. And if we do not flee, he will inevitably devour us all."

Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather (1969), spent 20 years working on a novel about the Borgias, The Family (2002), and describes Rodrigo in fine purple prose as "a mountainous man, tall enough to carry his weight". He is, to all intents and purposes, Don Corleone, the Godfather.

Rodrigo Borgia's uncle, Alfonso de Borja, was Pope Callixtus III. Through family preferment, Rodrigo became first a bishop, then a cardinal, then vice-chancellor of the Holy See. His position in the church allowed him to become fabulously wealthy and to take numerous mistresses, with whom he fathered a number of children. With his favourite, Vannozza dei Cattanei, he fathered a son, Cesare, born in 1475, and a daughter, Lucrezia, in 1480. These two became their father's helpmeets. Lucrezia was just 12 when her father bribed his way to becoming pope – reputedly with four mules carrying sacks of silver – and by the time she was 13 he'd married her off to Giovanni Sforza, a member of a powerful family who Rodrigo regarded as useful allies. When the Sforzas proved not to be useful allies, Rodrigo simply announced that Giovanni was impotent and had the marriage annulled. Historians agree that it was Giovanni who then began to spread rumours of the Borgias' incest and orgies, for which they became renowned.
Lucrezia's second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Bisceglie, fared even worse than the hapless Giovanni. When Alfonso was found to be dispensable, Cesare had him strangled by a henchman. Lucrezia, apparently, was heartbroken.
Unsentimental and undeterred, her father and brother then managed to get Lucrezia married off to Alfonso d'Este, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara – again, a marriage of political and papal convenience. The writer Kathryn Hughes has described Lucrezia as "handed round like a parcel to suit her father's political game". The Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it rather more nicely: "Though legend has associated her with her father and her brother Cesare in extremes of iniquity, she can in fact hardly be accused of more than resignation to their will."

Sarah Bradford, in Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (2004), debunks many of the myths surrounding Lucrezia – there probably was no poison ring, though it does seem likely that her brother Cesare did indeed stage the infamous chestnut banquet in 1501, in which naked courtesans scrambled around for chestnuts, to the delight of onlooking prelates, a scene vividly brought to life in the 2006 Spanish film, Los Borgia.

The Borgias have become a byword for badness: they are the great dynasty of the debauched and the depraved. Lucrezia in particular remains an icon of transgressive womanhood. Lord Byron was obsessed with her – he stole a lock of her hair. In 2008, researchers at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Australia, discovered that an overlooked painting by Dosso Dossi, Portrait of a Youth, is, in fact, a portrait of Lucrezia. She is holding a knife.

The Borgias virou seriado.Clique aqui para ler sobre.