Pope Alexander VI: Renaissance Monster

The moment Alexander VI became pope the alert was given by Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici: ''Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious perhaps that his world has ever seen. And if we do not flee, he will inevitably devour us all.''Alexander and his son Cesare have historically been accused of bedding Alexander's daughter, and Cesare's sister, Lucrezia, and to support the accusation two papal bulls were issued in 1501, one stating that her child, Giovanni Borgia, was Cesare's, while the second, kept secret, stated the child was Alexander's.Alexander, Cesare and Lucrezia were present at the infamous Banquet of Chestnuts, during which, wrote William Manchester in his A World Lit Only by Fire: ''Servants kept score of each man's orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man's machismo by his ejaculative capacity.... After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes....''The most vile accusation took place in 1502 when Prince Astorre Manfredi's naked body came to the surface of the Tiber, caught in a fisherman's net, attached to that of his brother. Johann Burchard wrote that both boys had been participants in an orgy along with a large number of very young girls. Burchard states that in addition to Cesare ''a certain powerful person sated his lust'' on the boys, Burchard unable to give Alexander's name because he was in the service of the pope. The girls, all naked, had been tied together in the same fashion. The boys' bodies had torture marks, probably due to Micheletto, Cesare's assassin-in-residence, a homosexual known for his sadomasochism. Like Rome's early emperors, Alexander stole the wealth of cardinals--obliged to forfeit their fortunes to the church at the time of their deaths--by poisoning them, and it was during the dinner of the affluent Cardinal Castellesi that a servant inadvertently served Alexander the poison destined for the cardinal, a storybook ending in the life of a man of enormous intelligence, a tireless worker, a pope who wished the unification of Italy under his son Cesare, for the glorification of the Borgia.