This is a source of constant frustration for his brother Cesare, who is much more intelligent and authoritative despite his position as a cleric, which Juan often mocks him for. Although Juan is initially able to outclass his brother easily in swordfighting and riding, Cesare's time spent with Micheletto eventually makes him equal to Juan in these categories by early Season Two. The conflict between Lucrezia and Juan reaches violence when Juan murders Lucrezia's fleeing lover Paolo, who is the father to her child, Giovanni.
Though Juan attempts to disguise the murder as a suicide, Lucrezia uncovers the falsified suicide note that the illiterate Paolo was incapable of writing. Lucrezia attempts to murder or maim Juan by dropping a chandelier on him and his lover. Attempting to diffuse the situation, Alexander orders Juan to go to Spain and learn some dignity and chivalry from his cousins, so that he might "become the Borgia he was always meant to be".
He travels with the Conquistadores for a time in the Americas, eventually returning to Rome in a triumphal procession. His feud with Cesare and Lucrezia, however, remains strong, despite an initially warm reunion. Juan boasts to his father that his wife is pregnant with a son. In private, however, he suffers from an unspecified venereal disease most probably syphilis , which his physician instructs him to medicate with mercury and opium; Juan soon becomes addicted to the latter, frequently visiting a Muslim-owned opium den.
By and large the way they operated was no different from what powerful families of Italy had been doing for hundreds of years, and would continue to do. Murder, bribery, simony, corruption, and shady political dealings were all par for the course in Italy during the Renaissance, and the Borgias played the game with the best of them.
Yet they ended up more vilified than most, as well as accused of evils they never committed—the rumors of incest between Lucrezia and her father and brothers, for instance, have no historical basis in fact.
And yet buried beneath all the rumors and scandals is a historical murder that remains unsolved to this day: the murder of Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia, the second son of Rodrigo Borgia and his longtime mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei. Yet once an entire day passed without his reappearance, Pope Alexander grew greatly worried about the whereabouts of his favorite son, especially after it came to light that, upon leaving the party, Juan had sent his companions including his brother Cesare and his attendants away to embark on some mysterious errand—it had been assumed at the time that he was meeting a woman.
Duly alarmed, the pope sent his men out into the streets of Rome to search for Juan. While standing guard on the riverbank, he described seeing a rider on a white horse appear with a body slung across the saddle, accompanied by four men on foot. Their grisly deed completed, they all retreated down an alley and into the night. After receiving this information, Pope Alexander ordered the river be searched, and in short order the body of Juan Borgia was pulled from the Tiber. He had a total of nine stab wounds, dispersed across his neck, head, legs, and torso.
He was fully clothed, and a purse containing 30 ducats was still attached to his belt, thus ruling out robbery as a possible motive. So who was responsible? Suspects abounded and rumors spread, not only within the Vatican and in the streets of Rome but eventually within the courts of Europe. Cesare and Juan had long had a fierce, intense rivalry, to the point of hatred. Cesare was resentful at having been forced to follow his father into the church and had always preferred a military career, which Juan had been given instead, and promptly made a hash of.
He was considered the handsomest man in Italy, there were inevitably rumours of incest with his sister Lucrezia and he had syphilis from his early twenties. His father put Cesare in command of the papal army in , when he was still only about twenty. In alliance with the French the two of them set out to bring the central Italian cities back under direct papal control and carve out an Italian kingdom for Cesare himself.
The doctors sank him in a huge jar of iced water as a cure and he somehow survived the shock, but the cardinals chose as the new pope a dedicated enemy of the Borgias, Giuliano della Rovere, who succeeded as Julius II. When Italy was at last united in the nineteenth century, Cesare could be hailed as a forerunner of Italian unity, though his motives were entirely self-interested. He was now arrested and packed off to prison in Spain. He managed to escape and took service with his brother-in-law, King John of Navarre.
He planned to return to Italy before long, but meanwhile there was a rebellion against King John to contend with and Cesare took command of a 5,strong Basque army to deal with the rebels. One of the rebels was Luis de Beaumonte, lord of the castle of Viana.
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