We are much pleased, both because we always have and still do feel the greatest love for yourself and your house, and also because we believe that nothing could be of greater advantage to you than this marriage.

Therefore we wish you the best of fortune, and we pray God, with you, that this alliance may increase your own power and fame and that of your State.[27] Eight days earlier the same king had sent his ambassador to Spain a letter, in which he asked the protection of Ferdinand and Isabella against the machinations of the Pope, whose ways he described as "loathsome"; in this he was referring, not to his political actions, but to his personal conduct.

Giulia Farnese, whom Infessura noticed among the wedding guests and described as "the Pope's concubine," caused endless gossip about herself and his Holiness.

This young woman surrendered herself to an old man of sixty-two whom she was also compelled to honor as the head of the Church.

There is no doubt whatever about her years of adultery, but we can not understand the cause of her passion; for however powerful the demoniac nature of Alexander VI may have been, it must by this time have lost much of its magnetic strength.
Perhaps this young and empty-headed creature, after she had once transgressed and the feeling of shame had passed, was fascinated by the spectacle of the sacred master of the world, before whom all men prostrated themselves, lying at her feet--the feet of a weak child.
There is also the suspicion that the cupidity of the Farnese was the cause of the criminal relations, for Giulia's sins were rewarded by nothing less than the bestowal of the cardinal's purple on her brother Alessandro.