Although Rodrigo’s relations with Vannozza ceased about 1482 he continued to interest himself in her material welfare. Her husband, Giorgio de Croce, died in 1486, whereupon the cardinal, in order that she might not be without a home and a protector, married her to Carlo Canale of Mantua, a scholarly, but complaisant, individual who had been secretary to that great patron of letters Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, upon whose death in 1483 Carlo had gone to Rome to enter the service of Cardinal Sclafenati. Rodrigo, probably thinking that Carlo’s talents might be useful, selected him to be the husband of his widowed mistress; and avarice or ambition induced Carlo to acquiesce in the arrangement. The nuptial contract was drawn up June 8, 1486, and to her husband Vannozza brought as marriage portion a thousand gold ducats and an appointment as _sollicitator bullarum_. The contract describes this as her second marriage, thus making it doubtful whether she was ever married to Domenico d’Arignano, who, Burchard says, “had been married by Rodrigo to a certain woman who had borne the cardinal a son, whom he had always maintained and recognised as his own, and whom he had made Bishop of Pamplona.”[12] With the assistance of her cardinal lover she had amassed a considerable fortune, a part of which by her will she eventually devoted to the purchase of her soul’s salvation. She appears to have been a strong, coarse woman, penurious and avaricious. Records are extant showing that she was charged with stealing, through the agency of her paid servants, eleven hundred and sixty sheep from Ludovico Mattei in 1504, and she was found guilty. In 1502 a complaint was likewise lodged against Donna Vannozza de’ Catanei by Nardo Antonazzi, a goldsmith of the Regola Quarter, for refusing to pay for a silver cross he had made for her in 1500. The jeweller, however, lost his case. Tomasi says that Vannozza was of ignoble condition and that she succeeded with the consummate art of the courtesan in dominating any one she wished to control, and that she was an insatiable harpy. The same writer states that Cardinal Rodrigo had spent his youth in cultivating his natural gifts with the aid of all the tricks and artifices known to the courtier, and that he was a perfidious, bloodthirsty, and voracious beast of prey, but one who knew how to insinuate himself into the favour of all men. Such were the antecedents of Caesar Borgia, and if his parentage was bad the environment in which he grew up was worse. Caesar, if we accept his father’s statement, was born in April, 1476, for in 1501 the Pope, in conversation with the Ferrarese ambassador, remarked: “The Duchess Lucretia will complete her twenty-second year next April, and in the same month the Most Illustrious Duke Caesar will be twenty-six.”