The father’s statement concerning the age of his children, which was promptly reported to Duke Ercole of Ferrara by the ambassador, is confirmed by various dispatches and letters, among which are two sent by Gianandrea Boccaccio to the same person February 5 and March 11, 1493, which are now in the state archives of Modena. These dispatches give Caesar’s age at that time as “sixteen or seventeen years.” He was, therefore, somewhat younger than has for a long time been supposed, and was not as old as his brother Giovanni. At the time of Caesar’s birth his father was about forty-five and his mother, Vannozza, thirty-four. Of her four children Caesar is the most interesting as a psychological and historical study, not on account of his crimes, for every petty Italian state had its criminal despot at that time, but because he displayed a calculating cunning, a shrewdness in statecraft, and a fidelity to purpose which is rarely met with in men of his years, and which made him pre-eminent among personalities of his own stamp. Whether or not Caesar was striving to consolidate the numerous Italian states and eventually construct a great central kingdom in the peninsula, as Machiavelli believed, is difficult to determine. Caesar’s activity, however, reveals something more than the unreasoned efforts of a ferocious egoist to gratify an unbounded but vague ambition. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Italy offered great prizes to the resolute adventurer, and Caesar’s horizons may have been wider than the domain of St. Peter. What is known of his boyhood and youth is, in comparison with a knowledge of the environment in which he grew up, of slight value. A bull of Sixtus IV., issued in April, 1480, in which he is described as the “son of a Cardinal-Bishop and a certain married woman,” relieved him of the necessity of proving himself of legitimate birth; and an Act signed by Ferdinand the Catholic in 1481 provides for his legitimation and naturalisation. These steps were necessary before he could be invested with the various offices his father, the all-powerful Cardinal of San Niccolò in Carcere Tulliano, was determined he should enjoy. While still a child privileges of all sorts were bestowed upon him. July 10, 1482--Caesar was then about six--Sixtus IV. granted him the revenues of the prebends and canonicates of the cathedral of Valencia; and by a second bull, dated April 5, 1483, presented him with another canonicate and a benefice belonging to the archdiaconate of Xativa; the following year the Pope appointed him provost of Albar, and finally--September 12, 1484--when according to the bull he was nine years of age, he was made treasurer of Carthagena.