- For similarly named characters, please see Cesare Borgia
Cesare Borgia is a central character in the 2011 Showtime series The Borgias. He is the eldest son of Rodrigo Borgia and Vanozza dei Cattaneo. Cesare is the eldest brother of Juan, Lucrezia, and Giffore.
TV series
As the series begins Cesare is a Bishop. After his father becomes Pope Alexander VI he and other family allies are named Cardinals. Cesare eventually convinces his father to allow him to resign the cardinalate. Cesare served as his father's Consigliore and carried out a number of murders and other crimes to advance the family cause.
After Cesare thwarted an assassination attempt by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere's assassin Micheletto Corella he asked Corella to work for him. Corella jumped at the chance to become "God's Assassin" and left the employ of della Rovere for Cesare. Corella would become a close confidant of Cesare as well as his assassin and bodyguard. Corella carried out numerous assassinations on the orders of Cesare.
Cesare had a prodigious sexual appetite, which he sought to satisfy through a series of affairs. He carried on an affair with the married Ursula Bonadeo and then murdered her husband in order to make her available. Racked with guilt over this, Bonadeo rejected Cesare's love and became a nun. She later died when the convent she lived in was destroyed by Charles VIII of France.
He was especially close to his sister Lucrezia. The closeness of their relationship led to rumors of incest between the two. Finally after Lucrezia's second husband Alfonso refused her on her wedding night Lucrezia went to Cesare's room, and brother and sister proceeded to make love.
As last seen, Cesare headed north to Forli to attack the Sforza stronghold there. Cesare soon learned that Lucrezia's husband Alfonso was planning to kill him. When Alfonso confronted him Cesare managed to seriously injure the man. Doctors informed Cesare that Alfonso would die, but that it would take several days for Alfonso to do so and that it would be a very painful death. His sister provided poisons to help Cesare end Alfonso's life painlessly.
In The Borgia Apocalypse
NOTE: The Bogias was originally going to have four seasons, but when Neil Jordan thought about doing the fourth season, he didn't have the energy or even story to do ten episodes. Instead of that, he proposed Showtime to wrap up everything with a two-hour TV-Movie. He even wrote the screenplay, but the network refused, arguing it was too expensive and the season 3 ending worked as a series finale. Jordan would eventually published the screenplay as an e-book called The Borgia Apocalypse.
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