proved unable to produce an heir, a misfortune that became a useful pretext for Pope Clement VIII to succeed, where Julius II had failed, in restoring Ferrara to the Papal States, leaving Alfonso II’s illegitimate nephew, Cesare, as duke only of Modena.
Alexander VI had been extraordinarily ambitious for his children; yet, in the end, few traces of the Borgia name appear in the annals that trace the history of the illustrious families of Rome.
Cesare left three children: Louise, his legitimate daughter by Charlotte d’Albret, married into the upper echelons of the French aristocracy, and her descendants are still alive today. Little is known of his many illegitimate offspring; one daughter, Camilla, was brought up by Lucrezia in Ferrara, and, like her cousin Eleonora, she became a nun, choosing to be known as Sister Lucrezia in honour of her aunt and later becoming abbess of San Bernardino.
Jofre’s descendants ruled as princes of Squillace to the end of the sixteenth century, when the title passed to the Borgia family in Spain, the descendants of Alexander VI’s favourite son, Juan, the second Duke of Gandia. His wife, Maria Enriquez, produced a son, another Juan, the third Duke of Gandia, and a daughter, Isabella, who, like her cousins in Ferrara, preferred the convent to the matrimonial bed. Juan III of Gandia produced seventeen children, the eldest of whom, Francisco, inherited the title only to abdicate several years later in 1546 in favour of his son, after the death of his wife, to become a Jesuit and then the order’s third general.
Francisco was in Ferrara in May 1572 when news reached him of the death of Pius V, and of the hopes of many influential people in the church that he should be elected as Pius V’s successor. He was too weak to travel but did return to Rome later that year and died two days later. In one of those curious accidents of which history is so fond, Alexander VI’s great-grandson would be canonized in 1671.
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