Carmelina Mangano is also a fictional character, though many women suffered similar plights in being stuffed into convents against their will. The Renaissance was an era of dowry inflation; even wealthy families found it very expensive to marry off more than one daughter. Spare daughters were usually sent to convents, and the result was a great many unwilling nuns leading very secular lives within convent walls. There are records of nuns who managed to smuggle lovers into their unlocked-at-night cells, and other nuns who donned men’s clothes and escaped over the convent wall in desperate attempts to forge a new life. There is record of a convent in Venice that boasted a religious relic of the hand of Santa Marta, patron saint of cooks, but there is no record of the relic ever being stolen.

I have taken some liberties with the facts in order to serve the story. Orsino Orsini’s exact death date is not known, but records indicate that it happened a year or two later than in this story. There is no indication that his death was murder, but it seems like a convenient mishap, and other notorious assassinations of the Renaissance were covered up by just such rigged “accidents.” And Juan Borgia was not recorded as a serial killer of low-born women, though his wild evenings of drinking, whoring, fighting, and killing stray dogs are well documented.

My supposition that Lucrezia Borgia gave birth to a child while waiting for her marriage to be annulled is based on the widespread rumors of the time. The young papal envoy Perotto is frequently named as the father of Lucrezia’s supposed child; not only is his death at Cesare’s hands suspicious, but he was one of the few men with access to the Pope’s daughter during her convent stay, However, there is no proof that Perotto’s relations with Lucrezia were anything other than formal; her pregnancy could well have been legitimate. Lord Sforza officially parted from his wife the Easter before her convent stay, but not all his travelings during that year have been recorded, and a private visit from the Count of Pesaro to his wife is not impossible: he fought hard to keep her, indicating that their marriage had its happy moments even if it ended sourly. If Lucrezia had borne a legitimate child to her husband, their union could not have been annulled and the Borgias would have lost their chance for the longed-for alliance with Naples—a reasonable explanation for the ruthless secrecy with which Cesare Borgia removed both Perotto and Lucrezia’s maid Pantisilea, who would have been the only other people besides the enclosed convent nuns to know about the pregnancy. If Lucrezia did give birth, we have no way of knowing if her child was a boy or a girl, whether it lived or died, or whether it was in fact the mysterious Roman Infante who was born at about the same time.