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He angered Pius II by his excesses, and the first ray of light thrown upon Rodrigo's private life is an admonitory letter written by that pope, the eleventh of June, 1460, from the baths of Petriolo. Borgia was then twenty-nine years old. He was in beautiful and captivating Siena, where Piccolomini had passed his unholy youth.
The son of Alexander VI was, therefore, a few years younger than has hitherto been supposed, and this fact has an important bearing upon his short and terrible life. Mariana, therefore, and other authors who follow him, err in stating that Cæsar, Rodrigo's second son, was older than his brother Giovanni. In reality, Giovanni must have been two years older than Cæsar.
From Innocent VIII he had secured his son's appointment as prothonotary of the Church and even as Bishop of Pamplona. He appears as a prothonotary in a document of February, 1491, and at the same time the youngest of Rodrigo's sons, Giuffrè, a boy of about nine years, was made Canon and Archdeacon of Valencia. Cæsar went to Pisa, probably in 1491.
'You shall answer for this, he cried as he rose to his feet, and from that day the king never ceased to seek for an excuse to compass Don Rodrigo's banishment. At last he found one. The Moorish king of Toledo laid a complaint against the Cid that, in spite of his alliance with Alfonso of Castile, his lands had been ravaged and his people made captive.
The invasion of a Moorish host in Spain, under the eminent Caliph Jusef Ben Taxfin, chief of the Almoravides and conqueror of Morocco; the rapid subjugation of the independent Emirs, and the defeat of Alfonso's army at the battle of Zalaka, in 1087, recalled the Castilians to a sense of Rodrigo's worth.
And then Don Rodrigo's terror changed to wrath, and this exploded. He flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate denunciation. "It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into this. It was a trap she baited for my undoing." "It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith which I was told you lacked.
In this act Cæsar and his heirs, Don Giuffrè of Squillace; Don Juan, son of the murdered Gandia; Lucretia, as Duchess of Biselli, and her son and heir Rodrigo are explicitly named. There is likewise in the Este archives an instrument which was drawn up in Lucretia's chancellery, referring to the control of Rodrigo's property, and also others regarding the little Giovanni.
"Now, dog!" whispered the victor, "have you any thing to offer why I should not take your life as a minion of the tyrant Rodrigo?" "I scorn to ask my life of an unknown assassin," replied Landon; "but I am no minion of Rodrigo's, and I was even now seeking to escape his clutches." "If there was light here," said the stranger, "I could see whether you lied, friend, by your looks.
Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner mysteriously found means to send a warning that enabled Frey Miguel to forestall the Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival, the friar had abstracted from Espinosa's house a box of papers which he reduced to ashes. Unfortunately Espinosa had been careless. Four letters not confided to the box were discovered by the alguaziles.
Let us anticipate by saying that there is only a single authentic record which mentions Rodrigo's children and their mother together. This is the inscription on Vannozza's tomb in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome, in which she is named as the mother of Cæsar, Giovanni, Giuffrè, and Lucretia, while no mention is made of their older brother, Don Pedro Luis, nor of their sister Girolama.
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