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Updated: May 20, 2025
As dowry Vannozza brought her husband, among other things, one thousand gold florins and an appointment as sollicitator bullarum. The contract clearly referred to this as Vannozza's second marriage. Would it not have been set down as the third, or in more general terms as new, if the alleged first marriage with Domenico d'Arignano had really been acknowledged?
December 4, 1503, she gave the Church of S. Maria del Popolo a deed of her house on the Piazza Pizzo di Merlo and of her family chapel, reserving the use of it during her life. The Augustinians on their part bound themselves to say a mass for Carlo Canale March 24th, another October 13th for Giorgio di Croce, and a third on the day of Vannozza's own death.
There is, however, no ground for this theory. In written instruments of that time she is explicitly called Madonna Vannozza de casa Catanei. None of Vannozza's contemporaries have stated what were the characteristics which enabled her to hold the pleasure-loving cardinal so surely and to secure her recognition as the mother of several of his acknowledged children.
Her charity was in one instance miraculously rewarded by a direct interposition of Providence, in a matter apparently trifling, but on which, humanly speaking, her dear sister Vannozza's existence seemed to turn.
This entirely removed the necessity for any such subsequent measures as those which are suggested by these chroniclers. Moreover, had Cardinal Roderigo desired to fasten the paternity of Cesare on another, there was ready to his hand Vannozza's actual husband, Giorgio della Croce. When exactly this man became her husband is not to be ascertained.
But there is a mystery about the precise respective ages of Vannozza's two eldest sons, and we fear that at this time of day it has become impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt which was the firstborn; and this in spite of the documents discovered by Gregorovius and his assertion that they remove all doubt and enable him definitely to assert that Giovanni was born in 1474 and Cesare in 1476.
This house may have belonged to her, for her second husband seems to have been a man without means, who hoped to make his fortune by his marriage and with the protection of the powerful cardinal. From a letter of Ludovico Gonzaga, dated February 19, 1488, we learn that this new marriage of Vannozza's was not childless.
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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