Word: borgia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCREZIA BORGIA, by Maria Bellonci, made the famous daughter of profligate Pope Alexander VI a more human and attractive woman than the poisoner of legend, but still conveyed the horrors that went on around her and finally drove her to a hair shirt and piety...
Heydrich fascinates Hoettl, and he compares him to Cesare Borgia. "Both men were imbued with the same complete disregard for all ethical values . . . the same passion for power, the same cold intelligence, the same frigidity of heart, the same systematically calculated ambition, and even the same physical beauty of a fallen angel." Hoettl saddles Fallen Angel Heydrich with a satanic list of deeds. It was Heydrich, according to Hoettl, who worked out the plans for the mass extermination of the Jews and for the stringent Nazi subjugation of Czechoslovakia.* It was Heydrich who planted the idea in Hitler...
Papal Carpetbagging. Lucrezia's big trouble was her family. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, a crafty, sensual and deceptively charming Spaniard, got himself elected Pope in 1492 as Alexander VI. Alexander was an unashamedly worldly pontiff who made no effort to conceal Lucrezia and his seven other bastard children - indeed, thought nothing was too good for them. For eleven years, in one of history's most painstaking carpetbagging expeditions, he virtually turned the papacy and its pos sessions into a family preserve...
...Explains Author Bellonci: she was a Borgia, too, and the family ties of this fiery Spanish dynasty were, even for those days, remarkably strong. Enemies of the Borgias contended that the family ties extended to incest between Lucrezia and her father the Pope. But the few actual accusations of this crime came from bitterly hostile opponents and with no supporting evidence. Biographer Bellonci doubts their truth...
...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...