Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy by Sarah Bradford

recognize the end of my life and feel that within a few hours I shall be out of it, having however first received all the holy sacraments of the Church: And at this point, as a Christian although a sinner, it came to me to beseech your Beatitude that through your benignity you might deign to give from the spiritual Treasury some suffrage with your holy benediction to my soul: and thus devotedly I pray you: And to your grace I commend my lord Consort and my children, all servants of your Beatitude. ‘In Ferrara the 22nd day of June 1519 at the fourteenth hour.’ The humble servant of your Beatitude, Lucretia da este. 5
    Still Lucrezia did not die, but clung to life. Despite her piety, she felt in need of the highest benediction in the world to help her in the next. The Borgia past weighed heavily upon her; she had her young children and she did not want to leave them. In a postscript to his letter of the 22nd di Prosperi wrote, ‘at this 23rd hour the Duchess still lives’, but her burial had already been arranged. Even her death was not easy: on the morning of the 24th the doctors gave her up for dead, ‘seeing the great fits and convulsions that came upon her’. They tried every way they could ‘to open up the ways to purgation as they are wont to do in treating births’, but whatever they tried failed, as did the continual orations and prayers of the convents of Ferrara. Alfonso never left her except to eat and rest a little. ‘And thus the poor little woman is in her death throes without recognizing anyone or being able to speak . . .’, di Prosperi wrote.‘. . . May God have mercy on her soul and give comfort and good patience to the Lord when she does die, because truly his Excellency is grieving greatly. And yesterday in the procession he was as weak as if he had suffered a fever for some days. Wherefore it is now known truly the love that he bore her.’
    Lucrezia died that night ’at the fifth hour’, just over two months past her thirty-ninth birthday. Alfonso, ‘in anguish of my soul’, wrote two personal letters, to Federico Gonzaga, his nephew, and to an unnamed friend. To the first, he wrote, ‘I cannot write without tears, so grave is it to find myself deprived of such a sweet, dear companion as she was to me, for her good ways and for the tender love there was between us. In so bitter a case I ask your consoling help but I know that you too will share my grief; and I would prefer someone to accompany my tears than to offer me consolation . . .’ 6 To the second, he wrote how his ‘most beloved consort, after an illness of several days with continual fever and catarro of the worst kind [which may have been tubercular], having received the sacraments of the Church with that devotion which was in conformity with the rest of her life, has given up her spirit to God: leaving me in the greatest imaginable anguish of soul [for it is] the most unexpected and the greatest loss. I am writing to you about this grief that oppresses me so greatly and to those who love me because . . . it seems that it may give me some relief in my sorrow . . .’ 7

Postscript
    Lucrezia was buried in the convent of Corpus Domini. Today she lies under a simple marble slab with Alfonso and two of their children, Alessandro and Isabella, her last born, who survived her by only two years, and Alfonso’s mother, Eleonora d’Aragona. Beside them is the tomb of Lucrezia and Alfonso’s eldest son, Duke Ercole II; in another lie his daughter, Lucrezia’s granddaughter, also named Lucrezia, who died as a nun in the convent, and Eleonora d’Este, Lucrezia’s only surviving daughter, who also became a nun in Corpus Domini.
    In 1570 a devastating earthquake struck Ferrara, shattering much of the beauty of the city Lucrezia had known. Her grandson, Alfonso II, rebuilt the Castello but many churches and palaces still lay in ruins when he died, the last ruler of Lucrezia and Alfonso’s legitimate line, in 1597. The following year,