Thus in the brilliant sunshine of that Italian August, amid the plaudits of assembled Rome, amid banners and flowers, music and incense, the flash of steel and the blaze of decorations with the Borgian arms everywhere displayed--or, a grazing steer gules--Alexander VI passes to the Vatican, the aim and summit of his vast ambition.
Friends and enemies alike have sung the splendours of that coronation, and the Bull device--as you can imagine--plays a considerable part in those verses, be they paeans or lampoons. The former allude to Borgia as “the Bull,” from the majesty and might of the animal that was displayed upon their shield; the latter render it the subject of much scurrilous invective, to which it lends itself as readily. And thereafter, in almost all verse of their epoch, writers ever say “the Bull” when they mean the Borgia.
At the time of his father’s election to the throne of St. Peter, Cesare Borgia--now in his eighteenth year--was still at the University of Pisa.
It is a little odd, considering the great affection for his children which was ever one of Roderigo’s most conspicuous characteristics, that he should not have ordered Cesare to Rome at once, to share in the general rejoicings. It has been suggested that Alexander wished to avoid giving scandal by the presence of his children at such a time. But that again looks like a judgement formed upon modern standards, for by the standards of his day one cannot conceive that he would have given very much scandal; moreover, it is to be remembered that Lucrezia and Giuffredo, at least, were in Rome at the time of their father’s election to the tiara.
However that may be, Cesare did not quit Pisa until August of that year 1492, and even then not for Rome, but for Spoleto--in accordance with his father’s orders--where he took up his residence in the castle. Thence he wrote a letter to Piero de’Medici, which is interesting, firstly, as showing the good relations prevailing between them; secondly, as refuting a story in Guicciardini, wherewith that historian, ready, as ever, to belittle the Borgias, attempts to show him cutting a poor figure. He tells us(1) that, whilst at Pisa, Cesare had occasion to make an appeal to Piero de’Medici in the matter of a criminal case connected with one of his familiars; that he went to Florence and waited several hours in vain for an audience, whereafter he returned to Pisa “accounting himself despised and not a little injured.”