The Borgias by G.J. Meyer

Alfonso had it within his means to help Skanderbegsubstantially, and without question he was greatly in Skanderbeg’s debt. There being no particular need to care about the fate of Albania at the moment, however, it was not in the king’s nature to be distracted from his own immediate priorities, especially the status of his son Ferrante in the aftermath of Calixtus’s refusal to issue a bull (a document bearing the papal seal and therefore official) declaring the young man to be legitimate. It was by now clear that so long as Calixtus remained alive, Ferrante’s path to the crown would be anything but assured.
    Lurking in the background through all this was the question of whether Ferrante was actually Alfonso’s son. Doubts about his paternity had stalked Ferrante all his life. From his infancy people had whispered that his real father was a half-Moorish functionary at the Aragonese court, and alternatively that Ferrante’s supposed mother had pretended to give birth to him in order to spare the wife of one of the king’s brothers the humiliation of being exposed as an adulteress. Whatever the truth—and the rumors may have been rooted in nothing more substantial than a belief the great Alfonso couldn’t possibly have fathered such an unappealing human being—by the late 1450s Calixtus was in as good a position as anyone still living to know it. At the time of Ferrante’s birth he had been Alfonso’s secretary, and at the center of Aragonese court life, for some five years.
    There being nothing in Calixtus’s life story to cast doubt on his integrity or his respect for the prerogatives of royalty, his unbending opposition to Ferrante remains an enticing mystery.Niccolò Machiavelli, who was still eleven years from being born when Alfonso died and appears to have had little evidence to draw on, would later allege that the pope was scheming to make one of his own nephews the king of Naples. This is implausible for many reasons, not least the existence of other, far more formidable claimants. Perhaps by this point Calixtus’s hatred for Alfonso had grown so powerful as to overwhelm his usual equanimity. Possibly he was repelled by the prospect of a bastard becoming anointed king of the great kingdom of Naples; having been born and raised in a culture far more feudal than Italy’s, he is likely to have taken a sternly disapproving view of illegitimate birth. Additionally, he had seen enough of the world to understand the threat to stability that sons born out of wedlock could pose when they laid claim to thrones, and the wisdom of the ancient precept that no bastard shouldever become king. And it is in no way impossible that he believed—and had reason to believe—that Ferrante was not even Alfonso’s bastard.
    Finally and most interestingly, there is the fact that the pope knew Ferrante intimately: had overseen his education, functioned as a kind of guardian, and personally escorted him to Italy when Alfonso summoned him there. Ferrante’s own life story, as we shall see, makes it possible to suspect that Calixtus, knowing what kind of man he was, foresaw what kind of ruler he would be and found the prospect horrifying.

Background
 
 AMAZING ITALY
    THE ITALY FOR WHICH ALONSO DE BORJA LEFT SPAIN IN THE 1440s, and to which many of his relatives later began migrating in hopes of benefiting from his exalted position, was a place that lightning had struck twice. A full thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was once again the wonder of the world: the richest region in all of Europe because by a wide margin the most economically advanced. Its cities were incomparably the biggest, most beautiful, and most vibrant, and in fields as diverse as education and architecture, banking and art, it was leading the way to modernity.
    In one area only was Italy conspicuously backward. Politically it was so fragmented, in such disarray, that strictly speaking there was no such thing as “Italy.” From