Note 272 — Front matter (continued 5)

The decisive documents, from the archives of the Duke of Ossuna, are published by Thuasne in his edition of Burchard's Diarium (Appendix to vol. iii.). Dr. Pastor (ii., 453) has a good summary of them, and there is other evidence in the Lucrezia Borgia of Gregorovius. See also the essay of Comte H. de L'Épinois, quoted above, and "Don Rodrigo de Borja und seine Söhne," by C.R. von Höfler, in the Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bd. 73. The chief original authorities are J. Burchard (Diarium, edited by Thuasne, 3 vols., 1884) and S. Infessura (Diario, in Muratori, iii.), and the despatches of the Italian ambassadors at Rome. Burchard and Infessura are gossipy and hostile, and must be controlled. Recent works on the Borgias are too apt to reproduce lightly the romantic statements of later Italian historians or contemporary Neapolitan enemies. The work of Bishop Mathew, to which I have referred, is less judicious than his volume on Hildebrand. Bishop Creighton's History of the Papacy is rather too indulgent to Alexander and needs supplementing by the documents in Pastor and Thuasne.