More than any family in history, the Borgias have been accused of virtually every imaginable offense from wholesale corruption and sacrilege to murder and incest. Their very name evokes the darkest, deadliest impulses of human nature far beyond their own time and place.

But how much of what we think we know about them is true? In the end, the Borgias were defeated. The death in 1503 of Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, and the capture and death of Cesare Borgia in 1507 ended their tenure on the world stage. With those deaths, their enemies were free to give unfettered license to every rumor, accusation, and slander against them. History is, after all, written by the victors.

Attempting to separate fact from fiction about the Borgias is difficult but the effort is worthwhile if only because it tells us how far their enemies felt they had to go to destroy the memory of those who, even their worst adversaries admitted, were more brilliant, daring, and visionary than any other family of their time.

So what did the Borgias do--and what didn’t they? Here’s a look at the principle charges against them.

Rodrigo Borgia bought the papacy. The papal conclave that elected him in 1492 was the most corrupt in history.

At a time when all church offices routinely changed hands in return for “considerations”, the papacy itself was hardly an island of purity in a sea of corruption. Johann Burchard, Master of Ceremonies to several popes including Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, wrote in his memoirs that Borgia had been able to bribe all but five of the voting cardinals. Other documents, including from foreign ambassadors of the time, give the appearance that Borgia’s purchase of the papacy was widely known in the immediate aftermath of the conclave. However, the situation is complicated by evidence that political rivalries provided an opening for Borgia to insert himself as a compromise candidate, made more appealing by his reputation for effective leadership over decades as Vice-Chancellor of the Curia, effectively the administrative head of the Church. That is not to say that he did not offer inducements in support of his election but it is simplistic to believe that the College of Cardinals elected him only for pecuniary reasons.

The Borgias poisoned their enemies.

During a time when highly contagious, lethal diseases such as typhoid, typhus, and cholera routinely afflicted even the most privileged, many deaths were ascribed to poison that may very well have had natural causes. The rivalries between the great families in Italy and the common disinclination to believe that a person of power and celebrity can be destroyed by mundane forces combined to create a climate in which poison was always the first suspect in any great death regardless of the true circumstances. While that is not to say that poison wasn’t used as a weapon, lacking reliable medical information, it is impossible to tell how widespread its use really was. The Borgias never showed any hesitation about killing their enemies but they appear to have relied far more on the sword and the dagger then on subtler methods.

As Pope, Borgia kept a mistress, fathered bastards, and presided over orgies held in the Vatican.

Thanks to the patronage of his uncle, Pope Callixtus III, Rodrigo Borgia rose quickly within the ranks of the Church. He became a cardinal at the age of twenty-five but did not take holy orders for more than a decade afterward, finally becoming a priest in 1468 at the age of thirty-seven. Like many prelates of the day, there is no evidence that he ever embraced celibacy. The exact number of his children is unknown, being overshadowed by the four who are best known, his children by his long-term mistress, Vannozza dei Cantenai--Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofre. Before becoming Pope, Borgia acquired a new mistress, the young Giulia Farnese who was reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Italy. She remained his mistress after his ascension to the papacy and may have had at least one child by him. The rumors of Borgia’s sexual license date from his days as a young cardinal. In 1458, Pope Pius II reprimanded Borgia for participating in “licentious dances” and other inappropriate activities. As for staging orgies in the Vatican, the most notorious social event associated with the Borgias was the "Ballet of the Chestnuts" held on 30 October, 1501 in the apartments of Cesare Borgia with the Pope among the invited guests. There dancers were said to have performed sexual acts for the amusement of the audience. It should be noted, however, that the report dates from several years after Pope Alexander VI's death when a new pope was intent on destroying the last vestiges of the power held by the Borgias.

Cesare Borgia killed his brother Juan out of jealousy.

Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI's son, Juan Borgia, was last seen alive on the night of June 14, 1497. Several days later, his body was dragged from the Tiber. He had been stabbed to death. His grief-stricken father launched an intense investigation only to end it abruptly a week later. The consensus among outsiders was that the responsible parties had been identified and the Borgias wanted to deal with them privately. There is persuasive evidence that the plot to kill Juan was hatched by the Orisinis, who had ample motive and opportunity. The Borgias also seem to have believed they were guilty; they nursed their hostility toward the Orsinis into a full-fledged vendetta. But within a year of Juan's death, a rumor was circulating in Rome that Cesare was the true mastermind behind his brother's death, benefiting as he did from it. The rumor appears to have no foundation in fact and was probably spread by either the Orsinis themselves or Cesare's irate brother-in-law, Giovanni Sforza. Despite being without credence, the charge that Cesare killed his brother lingers to this day.

Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, committed incest with his daughter, Lucrezia. Her brother, Cesare also had an incestuous relationship with her.

Of all the accusations hurled against the Borgias, this is surely the most inflammatory. The charge of incest dates from the period during which Lucrezia’s first marriage--to Giovanni Sforza--was being dissolved on grounds that Sforza was impotent. He retaliated by claiming that Lucrezia had committed incest with her father, later also accusing her brothers Cesare and Juan of being intimate with her. The accusations on both sides seem to have been rooted in a particularly nasty divorce rather than in reality but the incest charges were picked up by the Borgias’ enemies and made to stick. The situation was further complicated by rumors that during the period when she was divorcing Sforza, Lucrezia withdrew to a convent where she gave birth to a baby not fathered by her soon-to-be-former husband. In 1501, two rather mysterious papal decrees were issued regarding the parentage of a ‘Giovanni Borgia’, born in 1498. The decrees alternately name Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI as the child’s father with the mother unnamed. The child eventually went to live with Lucrezia after she married Alfonso d'Este, duke of Ferrara. She referred to him throughout the remainder of her life as her half-brother.

So who were the Borgias? Were they the utterly immoral villains history has painted them or were they in reality far more complex human beings riding the whirlwind of their time whose brilliance and seductiveness still fascinate us today?