[Footnote 271: 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).] [Footnote 272: 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.] [Footnote 273: M. Brosch, the scholarly author of a study of Julius II. (_Papst Julius II._, 1878), observes that research in the Rovere archives has discovered no trace of the Paolo Riario who is assigned as the father of Sixtus's nephews, and concludes that they were his natural sons. But Paolo Riario is expressly mentioned in the funeral oration on Cardinal Pietro Riario, and is more fully described in Leone Cobelli's _Cronache Forlivesi_. There is no sound reason to impeach the chastity of this Pope, as even Creighton does.] [Footnote 274: The gold ducat is estimated at about ten shillings of English money, but probably this does not express its full purchasing power.] [Footnote 275: See the dispatches quoted in Thuasne's Burchard, vol. ii.]