The Borgia Family - Dissertation

Introduction

From films; to books, to programs, to paintings - The Borgia Dynasty has captivated the minds of people, from all ages, and walks of life. I was also intrigued by the ambiguous rumours that surround the family, and so have endeavoured to discover whether what makes The House of Borgia so infamous is a reflection of life, or in fact a spurious, and fictitious, collection of lies that taint their name.

We hear the gentle strum of a guitar, as cracked and aged portraits presenting: deception, murder, copulation, murder, bribery, adultery and torture flick across the screen, all accompanied by harmonized chanting of catholic choir boys. This is the opening of ShowTime's glamorous TV drama The Borgias, which enticed me amongst others, to explore the family so wrapped in debaucherous gossip that their history is unclear (The Borgias, 2011-13). Yet the Borgia's infamous dynasty hasn't just appeared upon television, but also (in interpretation) upon the silver-screen - in Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather'; a film which encompasses much of the corruption The Borgia's are so famous for – including blackmail (Hollingsworth, 2014, p. xi). The scale of this corruption is what one firstly planned to discover, to disentangle the myths, from the facts and discover the heart of the original crime family – and although my question may have changed, its core is still very much the same.

My reasoning for writing this dissertation was firstly, to quench my thirst for more knowledge about the family and secondly, to clarify whether the myths that surround the family are valid. I felt the need to almost defend them after following the ShowTime TV series, which portrayed them in a positive light, and really evoked an empathy and sympathy in me, towards them. After watching the series, I felt the need to discover more, to explore whether this sympathy I had with the characters on the screen was justifiable to feel for the characters that actually lived. My doubts that the characters portrayed in the TV show may not in fact be accurate came after studying Henry VIII and learning that many events in the The Tudors, a TV series made by the same company, never took place or were extremely inaccurate, and although I wished this wasn't the case, from my research - it appeared so. Once realising this it made me all the more eager to pursue this dissertation and really learn the truth behind the family.

When synthesising my ideas and trying to choose an appropriate question to study, I felt a desire to follow the Popes daughter Lucrezia intimately – this was due to the way she has been portrayed in History and in media, in fact there's a very famous opera on Lucrezia Borgia and she's widely famous for being a poisoner. Once delving into research, detailed accounts of Lucrezia seemed a little thin on the ground and so I decided to investigate a larger question involving a wider range of the family and characters of renaissance Italy.

I decided thus to focus upon corruption in the Borgia family; nepotism, simony, bribery, avarice, breaking of celibacy etc. From this change of title a far wider range of sources could be used and it really allowed me to explore many of the themes that the Borgia family are famous for, which I was most interested to disprove or prove.

From the start of this project my aim was to enlighten myself on The Borgia Family and to discover whether my brief knowledge on them was correct, or wholly inaccurate. This desire came from watching ShowTime's period drama which, as I discovered, loosely follows the story of The Borgia Dynasty – it focussed on Alexander VI's reign and based itself mainly upon the characters involved, rather than the big picture, and so I wished to retain this intimacy within my essay.

With regards to analysis I found to very important to constantly question the sources I was using, to cross-reference them with others to discover the most modal arguments and grasp how this verdict related to the question. Another key objective in my analysis was to ensure context was taken into account, when writing about a time period far removed from your own it's very important to understand what others were doing in such a time period, to relate the events one is judging on events of others, as this may change how one eventually answers the question.

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