Books: Add Poison, to Taste

THE BORGIA TESTAMENT (312 pp.)—Nigel Balchin—Houghton Mifflin ($3).

Few men ever equaled Cesare Borgia’s record for quick promotion. Cesare was the bastard son of Vatican Vice-Chancellor Rodrigo Borgia and his mistress Vanozza de Catanei. When he was only six, he was made Canon of Valencia. At 15, he became Bishop of Pamplona; at 16, archbishop of Valencia; at 17, a cardinal. Only the papal throne itself stood ahead of young Cardinal Borgia, but since that was now occupied by his crafty father (who had become Pope Alexander VI), the frustrated youngster started looking around for other worlds to conquer.

History has recorded how Cesare tossed away his cardinal’s hat, put himself at the head of a gang of mercenaries, and went to work on the new job of making himself the toughest gangster in Renaissance Italy. Cesare had such a flair for disposing of his enemies without leaving awkward evidence around that historians have never been able to agree on the subtler details of his career. Did he bully and terrify his own father half to death? Was he guilty of incest with his beautiful sister Lucrezia? Did he murder his elder brother? Did he really earn the title one historian gave him: “Prince of Magnificent Treasons?”

Dreamy Lad. British Novelist Nigel Balchin (The Small Back Room; Mine Own Executioner) doesn’t know all the answers, and doesn’t much care. In Borgia Testament, which pretends to be an “autobiography” written by Cesare shortly before his death, Novelist Balchin is mainly interested in trotting out a brand-new explanation of Cesare’s willful ways. In Balchin’s view, Cesare was a man of vision, born before his time, who hoped to do what Garibaldi finally accomplished—unite all Italy.

It was in order to achieve this plan, Author Balchin believes, that Cesare schemed and wheedled troops from the French and raised his private horde of Swiss and Italian bandits. While his satiated father sat back weakly on his throne (some historians think, on the contrary, that Borgia senior was quite handy at murder), son Cesare stormed and conquered numerous fortresses in Italy. Men who got in his way were ruthlessly disposed of by his Spanish henchman, Don Michelotto, or quietly turned over to his bland and terrifying secretary, Agapito, who, in Author Balchin’s version, sounds comically like P. G. Wodehouse’s inimitable Jeeves, and who removes undesirable Borgia enemies as distastefully as if they were Bertie Wooster’s vulgar cravats and checked suits.

Failure of a Mission. History has presented the bloody Cesare as diabolical, dazzling and colorful. Author Balchin makes him look like an austere combination of Sir Stafford Cripps and Cesare’s own calloused admirer, the scholarly Niccolo Machiavelli. Cesare’s fall came when Julius II, a deadly enemy of the Borgias, became Pope. Cesare wound up in Spain, where he was killed in battle in 1507.

Author Balchin seems to find it sad that such an enterprising young man should have been thwarted in his precocious effort to create a unified Italy. Most readers, while enjoying the suavity of the Balchin tour de force, will still feel that Cesare was a lot blacker than Author Balchin’s whitewash suggests.