Acquiescent Woman

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCREZIA BORGIA (343 pp.)--Mario Bellonc!--Harcourt, Brace ($5).

Who was Lucrezia Borgia? To the incurable readers of melodrama and Sunday supplements, a woman of glowing and undimmed evil, literally the great femme fatale (usually poison) of the Italian Renaissance.* To modern historians, who have been quietly rehabilitating her, Lucrezia was a good deal less lurid but still deplorable: a woman who probably poisoned no soup herself but weakly watched the other Borgias doing such things.

Now comes a woman's brief for Lucrezia. Author Maria Bellonci's argument: Lucrezia was no weakling; her tragedy lay in an excess of a virtue that all women used to be taught--womanly acquiescence to her family's menfolks. In her prize-winning (1939) life of Lucrezia, now translated into English, Italian Author Bellonci goes over the evidence with the thoroughness of a housewife at a serious job of spring renovation.

Papal Carpetbagging. Lucrezia's big trouble was her family. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, a crafty, sensual and deceptively charming Spaniard, got himself elected Pope in 1492 as Alexander VI. Alexander was an unashamedly worldly pontiff who made no effort to conceal Lucrezia and his seven other bastard children -- indeed, thought nothing was too good for them. For eleven years, in one of history's most painstaking carpetbagging expeditions, he virtually turned the papacy and its pos sessions into a family preserve.

Cesare, Lucrezia's brother, was the Pope's right-hand man in these endeavors. With his father's connivance, he poisoned, assassinated and generaled his way, temporarily, to supreme power in central Italy.-- Lucrezia, as the young and marriageable member of ,the family, became a handy and well-used device in the family's dynastic ambitions.

At a nubile 13 she was married to Giovanni Sforza, of the powerful Milanese Sforzas. But for her father, this was just the beginning. Four years later he forced Giovanni to an annulment on the pretext (scandalously false) that the marriage had never been consummated. Soon Lucrezia was sent higher up the political scale by marriage to the bastard son of the powerful King of Naples. This one lasted two years. Then Cesare had the fellow murdered, and husband No. 3 was found for Lucrezia : Alfonso d'Este, son of the even more powerful Duke of Ferrara.

Cesare's Swordplay. Lucrezia grieved over such quick and bloody changes. (Says Biographer Bellonci: "She had al ways been contented with her husbands as long as she was able to keep them.") Still, although she tried desperately to save the life of her second husband, she forgave her brother for this and other crimes.

Why? Explains Author Bellonci: she was a Borgia, too, and the family ties of this fiery Spanish dynasty were, even for those days, remarkably strong. Enemies of the Borgias contended that the family ties extended to incest between Lucrezia and her father the Pope. But the few actual accusations of this crime came from bitterly hostile opponents and with no supporting evidence. Biographer Bellonci doubts their truth.

By herself, Lucrezia was a good-humored, good-looking blonde who enjoyed fine clothes and good conversation. She bathed daily -- an eccentricity in the 16th century -- and tried to cultivate a naturally kind heart. But whenever an emergency came up, she proved that she could rule as well as take the menfolks' orders. The. Pope had such confidence in her that he left her in charge of the Vatican when he was away.

Lucrezia's official duties were so taxing, in fact, that she never had too much of a social life. Beyond her husbands, she had only two known lovers -- well under par for her time and station. Both affairs ended badly. One lover, a papal messenger named Perotto, was put to the sword by brother Cesare in the Pope's throne room. The second, Lucrezia's brother-in-law,contracted syphilis in another affair and went off to live in seclusion.

Taffeta & Hair Shirts. Lucrezia never poisoned anybody -- at least so far as Author Bellonci knows. The other crimes laid at her door were all the work of her brother Cesare or, in some cases, of Pope Alexander. At Ferrara, where she spent the last 17 years of her life, she won the affections of the court and the townspeople by her pleasantness in good times, and her bravery in bad. But even there, she did not escape trouble. She soon found herself in the middle of a family squabble, when one of her husband's brothers had gouged out the eyes of a third.

Toward the end of her life, after her father and brother had died, Lucrezia turned to religion. She wore a hair shirt underneath her taffeta, and in 1518 joined an order of the laity, the Third Order of St. Francis.

The next year, after the birth of her ninth child, she came down ill. Lucrezia felt old and very weary. "The poor woman," said her courtiers, "is having great difficulty in departing." The next day, at 39, she died.

* Victor Hugo fattened the legend in his play, Lucrezia Borgia, in which Lucrezia poisons a roomful of banqueters only to discover that her lovechild, Gennaro, is among them. Unappreciatively, Gennaro stabs her, to the accompaniment of Latin plain chant, as monks arrive with coffins for all. This imaginary incident made such a good spectacle that Donizetti wrote an opera around it. *The Florentine Ambassador Machiavelli met Cesare in the course of diplomatic business, was so taken with Cesare's forthright approach that he used him as an exemplar of the successful ruler in the famed treatise, The Prince.

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