The Pope Who Ran The Church Like A Crime Family

On this day, the 11th of August 1492, a man named Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope, taking the name Alexander VI. And he would become one of the most notorious, corrupt, and scandalous men ever to sit on the throne of Saint Peter — the head of a family whose very name, Borgia, became a synonym for poison, murder, depravity, and corruption.

This is the story of the pope who was widely accused of buying the papacy, and then ran the Catholic Church like a family dynasty.

Rodrigo Borgia was worldly, ambitious, and ruthless, and he had spent decades scheming his way toward the top. And when the moment came in 1492, the accusation that has followed him ever since is that he did not win the papacy through holiness or merit — he bought it.

His election was widely attributed to simony: bribery, the buying and selling of holy office, one of the gravest sins in the Church.

The most famous story is that Borgia bribed a powerful rival cardinal, Ascanio Sforza, to swing the vote his way with a payment so large it had to be carried on the backs of four mules — “four mule-loads of silver.”

Now, in fairness, the bribery was never legally proven, and by the law of the time his election stood. But the reputation stuck so firmly that it became part of the legend of Alexander VI. The very next generation of popes, especially his old rival Giuliano della Rovere — who became Julius II — would seek to prevent future simoniacal elections and erase Borgia influence from Rome.

The Horror

And once he had the throne, Alexander VI made no great effort to hide what he was.

Most shocking of all to the faithful was his private life.

Popes were, of course, supposed to be celibate holy men. Alexander VI openly kept mistresses and paraded a whole brood of illegitimate children.

With his long-term mistress Vannozza dei Cattani, he had fathered at least four children whom everyone knew were his: Cesare, Lucrezia, Juan, and Joffre Borgia.

And even after becoming pope, in his sixties, he took as a lover the beautiful young Giulia Farnese, a woman decades his junior.

A pope with a mistress and a houseful of acknowledged children was a scandal even in an age well used to corrupt clergy.

But Alexander VI did more than merely sin privately.

He ran the entire Catholic Church as a family business, an engine for enriching and empowering the Borgias. This was nepotism on a breathtaking scale — and indeed the word “nepotism” grew out of the Renaissance practice of popes promoting relatives, often euphemistically called “nephews.”

Alexander made his son Cesare a cardinal at just eighteen years old.

When Cesare later grew bored of the Church, the pope allowed him to abandon his holy office and become a warlord instead — and Cesare Borgia carved out a bloody empire across central Italy through conquest, treachery, and terror, becoming so feared and ruthless that he served as one of the real-life models for Machiavelli’s handbook for rulers, The Prince.

And Alexander used his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, as a living bargaining chip, marrying her off three separate times to forge political alliances, and discarding her husbands when they were no longer useful.

One marriage was annulled.

Another husband, Alfonso of Aragon, ended up murdered — quite possibly on the orders of her brother Cesare.

Beyond his own children, the pope elevated numerous Borgia relatives and Spanish allies into powerful Church positions, including the College of Cardinals.

The Modern Relic

And then there are the darkest legends of all — the ones that made the Borgia name immortal.

The family became famous, above all, for poison.

It was said that the Borgias disposed of their enemies, and especially wealthy cardinals whose fortunes might revert to the papacy upon their deaths, using a secret and deadly poison called cantarella.

Rich, inconvenient men would dine at the Borgia table and conveniently drop dead soon after, their estates flowing into Borgia coffers.

And the scandals grew wilder still.

The most infamous is the so-called Banquet of Chestnuts, an alleged orgy held in the Vatican palace itself in 1501, at which, according to the account, fifty courtesans danced naked and crawled on the floor among lit candelabra to gather scattered chestnuts, while Pope Alexander, Cesare, and Lucrezia allegedly looked on and awarded prizes to the men who could perform with the women most often.

It is one of the most notorious parties in all of history.

But here, honesty demands a crucial twist — and it makes the Borgias even more fascinating.

A great deal of the most lurid material about them may not be entirely true.

Much of it comes from hostile chroniclers, political enemies, and later writers eager to turn the Borgias into monsters.

After Alexander VI died, his greatest rival, Giuliano della Rovere, finally became pope himself as Julius II. Julius worked to destroy Borgia influence in Rome and made sure that the family’s political power did not survive Alexander’s death.

The infamous Banquet of Chestnuts rests on the account of a single chronicler, Johann Burchard, the papal master of ceremonies. Some historians accept that an event took place; others doubt parts of the story or its most sensational details.

And the most shocking claims of all — the whispers of incest, that Lucrezia had slept with both her father and her brother, and the tales of systematic poisonings — have been challenged and, in some cases, outright rejected by modern historians.

The Borgias were foreigners, Spaniards dominating an Italian church, and they were remarkably successful, which made them a magnet for resentment, gossip, and slander.

Poor Lucrezia, painted for centuries as a monstrous poisoner and seductress, appears in reality to have been largely a pawn in her family’s schemes. She ended her life as a respected and pious Duchess of Ferrara.

So the truth is a fascinating mix.

Alexander VI was, without doubt, genuinely and brazenly corrupt — a pope elected amid grave accusations of simony, a man who kept mistresses, fathered a dynasty, and ran the Church for the enrichment of his ruthless family.

That much is real.

But layered over that real corruption is a “black legend,” a lurid mythology of poison, orgy, and incest, much of it amplified by his enemies to turn a worldly, dynasty-building pope into a cartoon of pure evil.

The relic of it all still exists in the Vatican.

The lavish Borgia Apartments, the private rooms where Alexander VI lived and schemed, were avoided by later popes after his death and remained largely unused for centuries. They were not literally sealed forever, but the Borgia memory was considered so tainted that his successors refused to make the rooms their own.

Alexander VI died in 1503, and Rome reacted with hostility, fear, and political calculation. He remains, five centuries later, the very definition of the corrupt churchman — the pope accused of buying his crown, who ruled through his children, and who gave the world a family name that still, to this day, means poison and betrayal.

How much of the darkness was real and how much was invented by his enemies, we may never fully untangle.

But the man who took the throne of Saint Peter on this day in 1492 earned his place as history’s most infamous pope the old-fashioned way: much of it he truly did, and the rest, his enemies were only too happy to make up.

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