Borgia, Caesar, was "one of the greatest mon- sters of a time of depravity, when the court of Home was the scene of all the worst forms of crime. He was the son of Alexander VI and Catharine Va- nozza, who made him archbishop of Valencia at an early age, and afterward cardinal in 1493. He un- scrupulously made use of the most sacred things as means to the most iniquitous ends. His father hav- ing conferred upon his brother Giovanni the duchy of Benevento, with the counties of Terracina and Ponte- corvo, Caesar, as was believed, moved with envy, caused his brother to be assassinated. He obtained the duchy and counties for himself, and was permitted by his father to resign the purple and to devote him- self to the profession of arms. He was sent in 1498 to France, to convey to Louis XII a bull of divorce and dispensation from his marriage with Anne of Brittany. Louis rewarded him for the pope's complaisance with the duchy of Valentinois, a body-guard of 100 men, 20,000 livres of yearly revenue, and a promise of sup- port in his schemes of ambition. In 1499 Caesar mar- ried a daughter of the king of Navarre, and accom- panied Louis XII to Italy, where he undertook the conquest of the Romagna for the Holy See. The right- ful lords of that country, who fell into his hands, were murdered, notwithstanding that their lives had been guaranteed by his oath. In 1501 he was named by his father duke of Romagna. In the same year he wrest- ed the principality of Piombino from Jacopo d'Appia- no, but failed in an attempt to acquire Bologna and Florence. He took Camerino, and caused Giulio di Varano, the lord of that town, to be strangled along with his two sons. By treachery as much as by vio- lence he made himself master of the duchy of Urbino. A league of Italian princes was formed to resist him, but he kept them in awe by a body of Swiss troops, till he succeeded in winning some of them over by ad- vantageous offers, employed them against the others, and then treacherously murdered them on the day of the victory, 31st December, 1502, at Sinigaglia. He now seized their possessions, and saw no obstacle in the way of his being made king of Romagna, of the March, and of Umbria, when, on August 17th, 1503, his father died, probably of poison which he had pre- pared for twelve cardinals. Csesar also, who was a part}' to the design (and who, like his father, had long been familiar with that mode of dispatching those who stood in the way of his ambition, or whose wealth he desired to obtain), had himself partaken of the poison, and the consequence was a severe illness, exactly at a time when the utmost activity and presence of mind were requisite for his affairs. Enemies rose against him on all hands, and one of the most inveterate of them ascended the papal throne as Julius II. Caesar was arrested and conveyed to the castle of Medina del Campo, in Spain, where he lay imprisoned for two years. At length he contrived to make his escape to the king of Navarre, whom he accompanied in the war against Castile, and was killed on the 12th of March, 1507, by a missile from the castle of Biano. With all his baseness and cruelty, he loved and patronized learning, and possessed a ready and persuasive elo- quence. Machiavelli has delineated his character in his Principe.''1 — Chambers, Encyclopaedia, s. v.; Hoefer, Biog. Generate, vi, 711 ; Kanke, History of (he Popes.
Borgia, Francis. See Francis Borgia.
Borgia, Roderigo. See Alexander VI (Pope).
Borgian Manuscript (Codex Borgianus), a valuable uncial fragment of some thirteen leaves of the Greek Gospels (of which it is usually designated as Cod. T), with a Thebaic or Sahidic version on the op- posite (left) page. It derives its name from having belonged to the Velitian Musseum of " Prsesul Stcph. Borgia, collegii urbani de propaganda fide a secretis," and is now deposited in the library of the Propaganda
at Rome. Each page consists of two columns ; a sin- gle point indicates a break in the sense, but there are no other divisions. The breathings, both rough and smooth, are present. It contains the following pas- sages : Luke xxii, 20-xxiii, 20 ; John vi, 28-67 ; vii, 6-viii, 32 (in all 177 verses, since John vii, 53-viii, 11 are wanting). The portion belonging to John, both in I Greek and Egyptian, was carefully edited at Rome in [ 1789 by Giorgi, an Augustinian eremite, with a fac- ; simile. Birch had previously collated the Greek text. J The Greek fragment of Luke was first collated for the 4th ed. of Alford's Commentary by his brother, in ac- cordance with a suggestion by Tregelles, from a hint by Zoega {Gated, cedd. copt. qui in Museo Borgiano Velitris adservantur, Rom. 1810, p. 184). A few leaves in Greek and Thebaic, which once belonged to "Woide, and were printed with his other Thebaic fragments (in Ford's Appendix to the Codex Alexandrinus, Oxford, 1799), ev- idently once formed part of the Codex Borgianus (Tischendorf, New T<st. ed. 1859, p. clxvii). They con- tain 85 additional verses: Luke xii, 15-xiii, £2; John viii, 33-42. The Borgian MS. has been referred to the fourth or fifth century. It appears that the knorant monk who brought it from Egypt to Europe carelessly lost the greater part of it, so that what is left is but a sample. — Tregelles, in Home's Introd. new ed. iv, 180; Scrivener, Introduction, p. 116. See Manuscripts, Biblical.