A more mischievous document than Capello’s Relazione can seldom have found its way into the pages of history; it is the prime source of several of the unsubstantiated accusations against Cesare Borgia upon which subsequent writers have drawn--accepting without criticism--and from which they have formed their conclusions as to the duke’s character. Even in our own times we find the learned Gregorovius following Capello’s relation step by step, and dealing out this matter of the murder of the Duke of Biselli in his own paraphrases, as so much substantiated, unquestionable fact. We find in his Lucrezia Borgia the following statement: “The affair was no longer a mystery. Cesare himself publicly declared that he had killed the duke because his life had been attempted by the latter.” To say that Cesare “publicly declared that he had killed the duke” is to say a very daring thing, and is dangerously to improve upon Capello. If it is true that Cesare made this public declaration how does it happen that no one but Capello heard him? for in all other documents there is no more than offered us a rumour of how Alfonso died. Surely it is to be supposed that, had Cesare made any such declaration, the letters from the ambassadors would have rung with it. Yet they will offer you nothing but statements of what is being rumoured! Nor does Gregorovius confine himself to that in his sedulous following of Capello’s Relation. He serves up out of Capello the lying story of the murder of Pedro Caldes. “What,” he says of Cesare, to support his view that Cesare murdered Alfonso of Aragon, “could be beyond this terrible man who had poignarded the Spaniard Pedro Caldes...under the Pope’s very cloak, so that his blood spurted up into the Pope’s face?” This in his History of Rome. In his Lucrezia Borgia he almost improves upon it when he says that “The Venetian ambassador, Paolo Capello, reports how Cesare Borgia stabbed the chamberlain Perotto, etc., but Burchard makes no mention of the fact.” Of the fact of the stabbing, Burchard certainly makes no mention; but he does mention that the man was accidentally drowned, as has been considered. It is again--and more flagrantly than ever--a case of proving Cesare guilty of a crime of which there is no conclusive evidence by charging him with another, which--in this instance--there is actually evidence that he did not commit. But this is by the way.