Vulgar words in The Life of Cesare Borgia (Page 1)
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 332 ~ ~ ~
(3) And we know that the numerous bastards of Innocent VIII--Roderigo's immediate precursor on the Pontifical Throne--were openly acknowledged by their father.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 409 ~ ~ ~
Now, bastards were by canon law excluded from the purple, and it is probably upon this circumstance that both Infessura and Guicciardini have built the assumption that some such means as these had been adopted to circumvent the law, and--as so often happens in chronicles concerning the Borgias--the assumption is straightway stated as a fact.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 545 ~ ~ ~
He proceeded to provide for some seven bastards, and that provision appears to have been the only aim and scope of his pontificate.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 548 ~ ~ ~
The most conspicuous of his bastards was Francesco Cibo--conspicuous chiefly for the cupidity which distinguished him as it distinguished the Pope his father.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 622 ~ ~ ~
We find, in this bastard of the great and brilliant Alfonso a cruel, greedy, covetous monster, so treacherous and so fiendishly brutal that we are compelled to extend him the charity of supposing him to be something less than sane.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 881 ~ ~ ~
It may not be amiss--though perhaps no longer very necessary, after what has been written--to say a word at this stage on the social position of bastards in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to emphasize the fact that no stigma attached to Cesare Borgia or to any other member of his father's family on the score of the illegitimacy of their birth.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 883 ~ ~ ~
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we see the bastard born of a noble, as noble as his father, displaying his father's arms without debruisement and enjoying his rank and inheritance unchallenged on the score of his birth, even though that inheritance should be a throne--as witness Lucrezia's husband Giovanni, who, though a bastard of the house of Sforza, succeeded, nevertheless, his father in the Tyranny of Pesaro and Cotignola.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 885 ~ ~ ~
And before then we shall have seen the bastard Cesare married to a daughter of the royal House of Navarre.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 886 ~ ~ ~
Already we have seen the bastard Francesco Cibo take to wife the daughter of the great Lorenzo de'Medici, and we have seen the bastard Girolamo Riario married to Caterina Sforza--a natural daughter of the ducal House of Milan--and we have seen the pair installed in the Tyranny of Imola and Forli.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 914 ~ ~ ~
But on the terms now put forward, Alexander was willing to negotiate, and so a peace was patched up between Naples and the Holy See, the conditions of which were that Orsini should retain the fiefs for his lifetime, but that they should revert to Holy Church on his death, and that he should pay the Church for the life-lease of them the sum of 40,000 ducats, which already he had paid to Francesco Cibo; that the peace should be consolidated by the marriage of the Pope's bastard, Giuffredo, with Sancia of Aragon, the natural daughter of the Duke of Calabria, heir to the throne of Naples, and that she should bring the Principality of Squillace and the County of Coriate as her dowry.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,201 ~ ~ ~
So in the Consistory of June 1 he published a Bull whereby Gentile Virginio Orsini, Giangiordano Orsini, and his bastard Paolo Orsini and Bartolomeo d'Alviano, were declared outlawed for having borne arms with France against the Church, and their possessions were confiscated to the State.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,243 ~ ~ ~
In his reign we have seen the murderer commonly given to choose between the hangman and the purchase of a pardon, and we have seen the moneys so obtained providing his bastard, the Cardinal Francesco Cibo, with the means for the luxuriously licentious life whose gross disorders prematurely killed him.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,271 ~ ~ ~
In Rimini the great House of Malatesta was represented by Pandolfo--Roberto Malatesta's bastard and successor--a degenerate so detested by his subjects that he was known by the name of Pandolfaccio (a contumelious augmentative, expressing the evil repute in which he was held).
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,317 ~ ~ ~
This distinguished poet, dramatist, and historian was a native of Pesaro who had been exiled ten years earlier by Giovanni--which was the tyrant's way of showing his gratitude to the man who, more than any other, had contributed to the bastard Sforza's succession to his father as Lord of Pesaro and Cotignola.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,384 ~ ~ ~
This Castagnini was arrested, thrown into prison, and his possessions confiscated, whilst the Council placed the citadel in the hands of four of its own members together with Gianevangelista Manfredi--Astorre's half-brother, and a bastard of Galeotto's.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,545 ~ ~ ~
To this rather sickly and melancholy lad, who had behind him a terrible family history of violence, and to his bastard brother, Gianevangelista, the duke accorded the most gracious welcome.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,556 ~ ~ ~
But to have allowed Astorre Manfredi, or even his bastard brother, to live would have been bad policy from the appallingly egotistical point of view which was Cesare's--a point of view, remember, which receives Macchiavelli's horribly intellectual, utterly unsentimental, revoltingly practical approval.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,113 ~ ~ ~
Gentile and Gianpaolo Baglioni, Cardinal Gianbattista Orsini, Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, Paolo Orsini, the bastard son of the Archbishop of Trani, Pandolfo Petrucci--Lord of Siena--and Hermes Bentivogli were all present.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,195 ~ ~ ~
What else was the Norman bastard William, who conquered England?
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,204 ~ ~ ~
When it can be shown that every other of those conquerors who cut heroic figures in history were purest altruists, it will be time to damn Cesare Borgia for his egotism.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,895 ~ ~ ~
He may, to some extent, have counted upon the fact that, of Cardinal della Rovere's bastard children, only a daughter--Felice della Rovere--survived.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,896 ~ ~ ~
Raffaele, the last of his bastard boys, had died a year ago.