The writer desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the authorities named below, especially to Alvisi for the details of the campaigns in the Romagna, and to Yriarte for genealogical data and particulars regarding Caesar’s life after his seizure by Gonsalvo de Cordova. Yriarte appears finally to have settled the mooted question of the descent of Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI.; and to have proved that he was a Borgia on both the maternal and paternal sides, and not merely on his mother’s; that he was Borja y Borja and not Llan?ol y Borja; and that he never had the name of Lenzo,2 consequently did not relinquish it and assume that of his mother’s brother.

The dispatches of Giustinian, Venetian ambassador to the Vatican from May 27, 1502, to April 26, 1505, edited by the profound scholar Professor Pasquale Villari, have been of the utmost value. The ambassador watched every move made by the Vatican as if the very life of his beloved republic depended on it, and with great perspicacity he followed the extraordinary political drama that was being enacted in Rome.

Burchard’s diary is also an inexhaustible mine of information concerning the pontificate of Alexander VI. and the earlier years of the reign of Julius II. This Alsatian Master of Ceremonies is a wholly passionless recording machine, so automatic that one immediately discovers that he had18 no moral sense whatever. Only once does he display any feeling—when the swashbucklers of Charles VIII. placed some of their horses in “my stable, where they devoured my hay and oats, so I had them removed to the stable of one of my neighbours”—a very human act on the part of the Master of Ceremonies.

On account of Burchard’s calm relation of the crimes and scandals connected with the reign of Alexander VI. efforts have been made to discredit the Diarium. It has been claimed that all the available manuscripts are not only inexact but also that they are largely fabrications of the enemies of the Papacy; it has also been maintained that Burchard’s original manuscript is not in existence.

The diary was published complete for the first time by M. Thuasne (1883–5) in three octavo volumes. His text is derived from the Paris manuscript, an almost exact reproduction of that in the Chigi Palace which was copied from the original in the Vatican by order of Alexander VII.—Fabio Chigi. M. Thuasne has corroborated the statements of the diary in innumerable instances with notes from other sources and a large number of hitherto inedited documents.

Burchard, recording the crimes and scandals of the Vatican under Alexander VI., has been compared with Procopius flaying the vices of the Court of Justinian—but the comparison is inapt. Burchard himself had bought the office of Papal Master of Ceremonies, and he had no sense of shame. Alexander tolerated him and Caesar evidently did not think him worth putting to death. As Master of Ceremonies he was minute, trivial,19 exact, indispensable; to him the salvation of a thousand souls was far less important than the proper donning of a vestment or the swinging of a censer. As a recorder of what was going on about him he was matchless because he was utterly passionless; fearless he undoubtedly was—perhaps because of his stupidity; he was a mere piece of mechanism; his function was to record, to chronicle everything—fact and rumour—and not to judge, not to analyse. As complacently as a modern newspaper reporter describes the reception given by a pork packer, he depicts the banquet of harlots given by Alexander VI. in the Vatican—and with much less opulence of adjective. That Christ’s Vicar on earth should go about the apartment pouring confetti in the bodices of the women, whom he had just entertained with “certain obscene comedies,” did not seem to the Master of Ceremonies worthy of any special comment. He merely records; never does he show surprise, contempt, hate; he never criticises, never censures. He is entirely different from Infessura, who, as an Italian and a patriot, betrays his hatred of the Papacy on every page. Burchard, the Alsatian, apparently had little, if any, personal concern with Italian politics, and it is precisely his lack of feeling that renders his diary the most valuable authority extant on the pontificate of Alexander VI.

Burchard was born about the middle of the fifteenth century; he was early intended for the priesthood, but soon abandoned his theological studies to take up the law; he appeared in Rome in 1481 and immediately secured a position as apostolic prothonotary. He decided to purchase20 the office of Master of Ceremonies, when a vacancy should occur, and with this end in view engaged in a long course of study. In 1483 he attained his ambition.