Lucrezia Borgia
Lucrezia Borgia was married three times by her father the pope for reasons of state, had one marriage annulled on a plea of non-consummation while she was visibly pregnant, watched her brother's men murder her second husband in her own apartments, and then spent seventeen years as a competent, popular and pious duchess of Ferrara, which is the part of her life that the legend left out. She was born in 1480, the daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and his mistress Vannozza, and became a piece on the board when he was elected Alexander VI in 1492. She was married at thirteen to Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro to bind Milan, unmarried from him in 1497 when Milan was no longer needed, married in 1498 to Alfonso of Aragon, a bastard of the Neapolitan house, to bind Naples, and widowed in 1500 when Cesare had him strangled because Naples was now the enemy. The third marriage, in 1502 to Alfonso d'Este, heir of Ferrara, was bought with a dowry of a hundred thousand ducats and the Este's fear of Cesare's army, and it is the one that lasted. She governed Ferrara as regent when Alfonso went to war, which under Julius II he did for years. She ran the court that Ariosto wrote in and Bembo wrote to, and his love letters to her survive, with a lock of her hair, in the Ambrosiana. She founded a convent, sponsored a bank, bought and drained marshland, and bore Alfonso eight children, of whom the survivors inherited the duchy. The stories - the poison ring, the incest with father and brother, the orgies - are the pamphlets of her father's enemies, repeated by Guicciardini and made into an opera by Donizetti. There is no evidence for any of them beyond the fact of who her family were. She died in June 1519 of a fever after the birth of her last child, at thirty-nine, in the Franciscan habit she had asked for, and Ferrara mourned her.
- Lived: 1480 CE – 1519 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: duchess, noblewoman, patron
