Note 271 — Front matter (continued 5)

The letter is given in Raynaldus, Annales Ecclesiastici, year 1460, n. 31, and is translated in Bishop Mathew's Life and Times of Rodrigo Borgia (1912), p. 35. It is misrepresented in Baron Corvo's Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901, p. 64). The chief apologist for Alexander, A. Leonetti (Papa Alessandro VI., 1880), made the easy suggestion that the letter was a forgery, but Cardinal Hergenroether found the original in the Vatican archives. See the able essay by Comte H. de L'Épinois (another Catholic writer) in the Revue des Questions Historiques (April 1, 1881), p. 367. He shows, by the use of original documents, that the apologetic efforts of Ollivier, Leonetti, and a few others, are futile. Of these efforts the leading Catholic historian of the Papacy, Dr. L. Pastor, observes: "In the face of such a perversion of the truth, it is the duty of the historian to show that the evidence against Rodrigo is so strong as to render it impossible to restore his reputation" (The History of the Popes, ii., 542).