e what emotions were aroused in Lucretia
when she first became aware of the real condition of her family. Her
mother's husband was not her father; she discovered that she and her
brothers were the children of a cardinal, and the awakening of her
conscience was accompanied by a realization of circumstances
which--frowned on by the Church--it was necessary to conceal from the
world. She herself had always hitherto been treated as a niece of the
cardinal, and she now beheld in her father one of the most prominent
princes of the Church of Rome, whom she heard mentioned as a future
pope.

The knowledge of the great advantages to be derived from these
circumstances certainly must have affected Lucretia's fancy much more
actively than the conception of their immorality. The world in which she
lived concerned itself but little with moral scruples, and rarely in the
history of mankind has there been a time in which the theory that it is
proper to obtain the greatest possible profit from existing conditions
has been so generally accepted. She soon learned how common were these
relations in Rome. She heard that most of the cardinals lived with their
mistresses, and provided in a princely way for their children. They told
her about those of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere and those of
Piccolomini; she saw with her own eyes the sons and daughters of
Estouteville, and heard of the baronies which their wealthy father had
acquired for them in the Alban mountains. She saw the children of Pope
Innocent raised to the highest honors; to her were pointed out his son
Franceschetto Cibo and his illustrious spouse Maddalena Medici. She knew
that the Vatican was the home of other children and grandchildren of the
Pope, and she frequently saw his daughter Madonna Teodorina, the consort
of the Genoese Uso di Mare, going and coming. She was eight years old
when his daughter Donna Peretta was married in the Vatican to the
Marchese Alfonso del Carretto with such magnificent pomp that it set all
Rome to talking.

Lucretia first became conscious of the position to which she and her
brothers might be called by their birth when she learned that her eldest
brother, Don Pedro Luis, was a Spanish duke. We do not know when the
young Borgia was raised to this dignity, but it was some time after
1482. The strong ties which existed between the cardinal and the Spanish
court doubtless enabled him to have his son created Duke of Gandia in
the kingdom of Valenci