CHAPTER I.THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA.
Although the House of Borgia, which gave to the Church of Rome two popes and at least one saint,( 1) is to be traced back to the eleventh century, claiming as it does to have its source in the Kings of Aragon, we shall take up its history for our purposes with the birth at the city of Xativa, in the kingdom of Valencia, on December 30, 1378, of Alonso de Borja, the son of Don Juan Domingo de Borja and his wife Dona Francisca.
1 St.Francisco Borgia, S.J .-- great-grandson of Pope Alexander VI, born at Gandia, in Spain, in 1510.
To this Don Alonso de Borja is due the rise of his family to its stupendous eminence.

An able, upright, vigorous-minded man, he became a Professor and Doctor of Jurisprudence at the University of Lerida, and afterwards served Alfonso I of Aragon, King of Naples and the Two Sicilies, in the capacity of secretary.

This office he filled with the distinction that was to be expected from one so peculiarly fitted for it by the character of the studies he had pursued.
He was made Bishop of Valencia, created Cardinal in 1444, and finally--in 1455--ascended the throne of St.Peter as Calixtus III, an old man, enfeebled in body, but with his extraordinary vigour of mind all unimpaired.
Calixtus proved himself as much a nepotist as many another Pope before and since.

This needs not to be dilated upon here; suffice it that in February of 1456 he gave the scarlet hat of Cardinal-Deacon of San Niccolo, in Carcere Tulliano, to his nephew Don Roderigo de Lanzol y Borja.
Born in 1431 at Xativa, the son of Juana de Borja (sister of Calixtus) and her husband Don Jofre de Lanzol, Roderigo was in his twenty-fifth year at the time of his being raised to the purple, and in the following year he was further created Vice-Chancellor of Holy Church with an annual stipend of eight thousand florins.

Like his uncle he had studied jurisprudence--at the University of Bologna--and mentally and physically he was extraordinarily endowed.
From the pen-portraits left of him by Gasparino of Verona, and Girolamo Porzio, we know him for a tall, handsome man with black eyes and full lips, elegant, courtly, joyous, and choicely eloquent, of such health and vigour and endurance that he was insensible to any fatigue.