crosspost: the Borgias' reputation [June 2014]

[anghraine]

Occasionally, I see people wondering why, if the Borgias were not really any worse than most Renaissance political families, they were so widely reviled and become a byword for corruption even in a very corrupt period. They must have done something that stood out from the others, right?

Um ... well.

“They [the Orsini] took to the streets and summoned their rural kinsmen to join them. It became dangerous to be a Spaniard, never mind a Borgia, anywhere in Rome. The Spanish were attacked if they left their home, and at least a few were killed. Houses were set afire, along with the warehouses of Spanish merchants. […] Calixtus was not yet dead when the contempt of the Roman citizenry for the Spanish interlopers they called "Catalans” rose to a murderous pitch.“

(G. J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History)

"Rodrigo returned to the Vatican–an act of some courage under the circumstances–and was with his uncle when he died the following day. Rome was in a state of near-anarchy. Rodrigo did nothing to protect his "palace”…and so it was stripped bare. He must have had relatively little worth stealing at this point, and trying to hold off the mob could only have inflamed its wrath. By in effect throwing open his doors he relieved some of the hostility directed at him as a Catalan"

(ditto)

“The reputation of the Catalans as tight-fisted merchants and ruthless fighters was widespread; as far as the Italians were concerned elements of race and religion also entered into it, particularly in the case of Valencia, a recently conquered Arab kingdom where Moors and Jews had lived side by side with Aragonese. […] Valencian Catalans in particular were referred to opprobriously by Italians as marrani, meaning secret Jews.”

(Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy)

When Rodrigo urged Innocent to hand the keys of the fortress of Sant'Angelo over to the College of Cardinals for safe keeping, Giuliano [della Rovere] insultingly reminded the Pope that Rodrigo was a Catalan.

(Sarah Bradford, Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times)

“It seems to us that these men of his who surround him are little men who have small consideration for behaviour and have all the appearance of marrani.” - chancellor of Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici about Cesare and his Valencian household as a student

“[Gian Paolo Baglioni] spoke at length of the great betrayal executed by the Duke, beginning to recognize his marrano faith more clearly” - Matarazzo of Perugia, describing how Baglioni incited the other condottieri to revolt against Cesare

The Venetian ambassador Giustinian avoided Cesare for fear of “the blandishments of the marrano duke”

“Marrano, ‘secret Jew,’ was the epithet most commonly thrown at Spaniards in Italy, and one which Cesare’s enemies frequently used to describe him.”

(Sarah Bradford, Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times)

Comments

[meridian_rose]

I remember at the start of The Borgias there was disgust shown at them making a "Spainard" outsider Pope and it came up a few times after, but this shows the true depth of hate they faced. I've not heard the "secret Jew" accusations before.

[anghraine]

Yeah, one of my least favourite thing about the series is how much they watered down that aspect—they even have della Rovere going out of his way to say they ~have no Jewish blood~, which seemed bizarre to me. It seemed they mostly wanted to avoid dealing with anti-Semitism altogether, but ... you can't fairly represent The Legend without touching on that (or anti-Catalanism at the least, but they almost never mentioned Valencia or Catalonia at all).