Giasone Maino of Milan refers to his "elegant appearance, serene brow, royal glance, a countenance that at once expresses generosity and majesty, and the genial and heroic air with which his whole personality is invested." To a similar description of him Gasparino adds that "all women upon whom he so much as casts his eyes he moves to love him; attracting them as the lodestone attracts iron;" which is, it must be admitted, a most undesirable reputation in a churchman.
A modern historian( 1) who uses little restraint when writing of Roderigo Borgia says of him that "he was a man of neither much energy nor determined will," and further that "the firmness and energy wanting to his character were, however, often replaced by the constancy of his evil passions, by which he was almost blinded." How the constancy of evil passions can replace firmness and energy as factors of worldly success is not readily discernible, particularly if their possessor is blinded by them.

The historical worth of the stricture may safely be left to be measured by its logical value.

For the rest, to say that Roderigo Borgia was wanting in energy and in will is to say something to which his whole career gives the loud and derisive lie, as will--to some extent at least--be seen in the course of this work.
1 Pasquale Villari in his Machiavelli i suoi Tempi His honours as Cardinal-Deacon and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy See he owed to his uncle; but that he maintained and constantly improved his position--and he a foreigner, be it remembered--under the reigns of the four succeeding Popes--Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent VIII--until finally, six-and-twenty years after the death of Calixtus III, he ascended, himself, the Papal Throne, can be due only to the unconquerable energy and stupendous talents which have placed him where he stands in history--one of the greatest forces, for good or ill, that ever occupied St.Peter's Chair.
Say of him that he was ambitious, worldly, greedy of power, and a prey to carnal lusts.

All these he was.

But for very sanity's sake do not let it be said that he was wanting either in energy or in will, for he was energy and will incarnate.
Consider that with Calixtus III's assumption of the Tiara Rome became the Spaniard's happy hunting-ground, and that into the Eternal City streamed in their hundreds the Catalan adventurers--priests, clerks, captains of fortune, and others--who came to seek advancement at the hands of a Catalan Pope.