But his benefice yields him over 16,000 ducats." It may not be amiss--though perhaps no longer very necessary, after what has been written--to say a word at this stage on the social position of bastards in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to emphasize the fact that no stigma attached to Cesare Borgia or to any other member of his father's family on the score of the illegitimacy of their birth.
It is sufficient to consider the marriages they contracted to perceive that, however shocking the circumstances may appear to modern notions, the circumstance of their father being a Pope not only cannot have been accounted extraordinarily scandalous (if scandalous at all) but, on the contrary, rendered them eligible for alliances even princely.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we see the bastard born of a noble, as noble as his father, displaying his father's arms without debruisement and enjoying his rank and inheritance unchallenged on the score of his birth, even though that inheritance should be a throne--as witness Lucrezia's husband Giovanni, who, though a bastard of the house of Sforza, succeeded, nevertheless, his father in the Tyranny of Pesaro and Cotignola.
Later we shall see this same Lucrezia, her illegitimacy notwithstanding, married into the noble House of Este and seated upon the throne of Ferrara.

And before then we shall have seen the bastard Cesare married to a daughter of the royal House of Navarre.

Already we have seen the bastard Francesco Cibo take to wife the daughter of the great Lorenzo de'Medici, and we have seen the bastard Girolamo Riario married to Caterina Sforza--a natural daughter of the ducal House of Milan--and we have seen the pair installed in the Tyranny of Imola and Forli.

A score of other instances might be added; but these should suffice.
The matter calls for the making of no philosophies, craves no explaining, and, above all, needs no apology.

It clears itself.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--more just than our own more enlightened times--attributed no shame to the men and women born out of wedlock, saw no reason--as no reason is there, Christian or Pagan--why they should suffer for a condition that was none of their contriving.
To mention it may be of help in visualizing and understanding that direct and forceful epoch, and may even suggest some lenience in considering a Pope's carnal paternity.