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By herself, Lucrezia was a good-humored, good-looking blonde who enjoyed fine clothes and good conversation. She bathed daily — an eccentricity in the 16th century — and tried to cultivate a naturally kind heart. But whenever an emergency came up, she proved that she could rule as well as take the menfolks' orders. The. Pope had such confidence in her that he left her in charge of the Vatican when he was away.
Lucrezia's official duties were so taxing, in fact, that she never had too much of a social life. Beyond her husbands, she had only two known lovers — well under par for her time and station. Both affairs ended badly. One lover, a papal messenger named Perotto, was put to the sword by brother Cesare in the Pope's throne room. The second, Lucrezia's brother-in-law,contracted syphilis in another affair and went off to live in seclusion.
Taffeta & Hair Shirts. Lucrezia never poisoned anybody — at least so far as Author Bellonci knows. The other crimes laid at her door were all the work of her brother Cesare or, in some cases, of Pope Alexander. At Ferrara, where she spent the last 17 years of her life, she won the affections of the court and the townspeople by her pleasantness in good times, and her bravery in bad. But even there, she did not escape trouble. She soon found herself in the middle of a family squabble, when one of her husband's brothers had gouged out the eyes of a third.
Toward the end of her life, after her father and brother had died, Lucrezia turned to religion. She wore a hair shirt underneath her taffeta, and in 1518 joined an order of the laity, the Third Order of St. Francis.
The next year, after the birth of her ninth child, she came down ill. Lucrezia felt old and very weary. "The poor woman," said her courtiers, "is having great difficulty in departing." The next day, at 39, she died.
* Victor Hugo fattened the legend in his play, Lucrezia Borgia, in which Lucrezia poisons a roomful of banqueters only to discover that her lovechild, Gennaro, is among them. Unappreciatively, Gennaro stabs her, to the accompaniment of Latin plain chant, as monks arrive with coffins for all. This imaginary incident made such a good spectacle that Donizetti wrote an opera around it. *The Florentine Ambassador Machiavelli met Cesare in the course of diplomatic business, was so taken with Cesare's forthright approach that he used him as an exemplar of the successful ruler in the famed treatise, The Prince.