A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (ebook pc reader TXT) 📕

her father’s distant female relatives, and one of his mistresses, though not her mother. Lucrezia’s brother Cesare was just seventeen, and already had been consecrated—if that is the correct word— Bishop of Pamplona. In September of the following year, 1493, his father was to make him a Cardinal…

      (The tape here contains a fairly lengthy pause.)

      On thinking the matter over, it strikes me that the reader whose native habitat is the late twentieth century may require some preparation before being thrown into intimate association with the Borgia family. At the time when I set down these words, people have grown accustomed to an altogether different type of news emanating from the Vatican from that provided by jolly fat Rodrigo and his contemporaries. Here in the later nineteen hundreds we are accustomed to hear from Rome of stately ecumenical councils, of the celebration of religious feasts, of theological wrangles. An occasional canonization or—a serious matter—the solemn process by which some educator may be deprived of his full teaching authority. Now and then, every few years perhaps, a whiff of banking scandal, subtle and indirect. Once in a great while—no more often than that, the Lord be thanked!—someone takes a shot at the Pope.

      I must warn the reader that, five centuries ago, matters were considerably different. The news from the heart of Rome often concerned questions rather—how shall I say it?—rather more fundamental. Moral issues were then more starkly drawn. The Popes of the Renaissance, trying to defend their lands and cities as energetically as any other temporal monarchs of the time, were, with occasional gentle exceptions, more likely to hire assassins than to suffer at their hands. Among the Sacred College of Cardinals, only a few men seemed capable of remembering the holy calling that must once have influenced them to become priests.

      I was, as I have written elsewhere, quiescent in my tomb (or in a temporary sepulcher at least) at the time of the supposed transfusion of Pope Innocent VIII with the blood of several children, in an effort to keep life in his own aging, failing body. So I cannot comment intelligently on the truth of that most scandalous rumor. If true, it was an outrage, but hardly incredible given the morals prevailing at the time among the upper hierarchy in Rome—Savonarola, you did not exaggerate.

      In any event, Innocent died in Rome on 25 July of 1492, and in early August, for various political and financial reasons the conclave elected as his successor in office a Spanish Cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia. This man, as I have already mentioned, was the illegitimate father of both Cesare and Lucrezia, along with half a dozen other offspring of less historical importance. The new Pope, taking the name of Alexander VI, assumed the chair of St. Peter on 26 August; and whether the transfusion rumor involving his predecessor was true or not, Alexander was certainly no improvement. In Rodrigo Borgia, all authorities concur, the papacy attained its all-time nadir.

      As long as I am setting the events of the Renaissance in perspective, there are a few other matters that should be mentioned. The selection of a new Pope was not the only momentous event of the month. On 3 August, half an hour before sunrise, all unbeknownst to me at the time, and unremarked by the vast majority of my contemporaries, an itinerant navigator named Christopher Columbus set sail from the port of Palos, Spain, on his first trans-Atlantic expedition in search of the lands of the Great Khan. The seventeen-year-old youth Cesare Borgia at about the same time quietly left his school in Perugia and made his way to Rome to see what might happen to his father in the conclave. Also that year, in Spain, by order of the Inquisitor General Tomas Torquemada, all Jews were given three months either to accept Christianity or emigrate. Farther north, England’s Henry VII, following in the footsteps of his illustrious grandfather, was first fighting and then making peace in France. At the University of Cracow, in Poland, a young student who would eventually be known to the world as Copernicus was hard at work. And near me in Italy, although I did not know it then, Leonardo da Vinci was making his first sketch of a flying machine.

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      However great a claim the doings of Popes and Cardinals might have had on the popular attention, they were but little on my mind when I arrived in Rome. My search for Basarab, and of course for Bogdan as well, still ruled my mind and soul. The dusty roads and the clerical conflicts of Italy passed by me almost unobserved, except as they might lead me to a likely gathering place for foreign mercenaries.

      I rode alone, and traveled most of the time at night, having decided that any human attendants were almost certain to be more trouble than they were worth. Some of my devoted band of followers in Romania had volunteered to come with me, but I had discouraged them. Could you have met them, good reader, you would understand why.

      Having been only once molested by bandits—the encounter, at dusk, was brief indeed, and afterward I recovered a purse that one of the highwaymen had dropped—I reached Rome in due course. The Eternal City, then excited as it always was by papal turnover, was at least as much transformed as Florence had been since I had seen it last. A new bridge had quite recently been thrown across the Tiber, and the municipal water supply had been restored to a level of quality unknown since the time of the Caesars. Much of this civic improvement was the work of Sixtus IV, one of those Popes who had come and gone whilst I lay sleeping; the same man who in his spare time had once tried to arrange the murder of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as a means of settling some political dispute.

      I approached Rome in an optimistic state of mind. By this time my