Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia has come down to us shrouded in rumour, painted as the femme fatale of Renaissance Italy, yet the woman beneath the legend was far more capable than the whispers allowed. Born in 1480, the illegitimate daughter of the man who would become Pope Alexander VI, she was raised among scholars rather than nuns, fluent in Spanish, Italian, French, Latin and Greek, gifted in poetry, music and, most tellingly, administration. Her Taurus Sun sits at the very top of her chart, in the tenth house, the Sun at noon on its throne: an earthy, Venusian pillar of solid values and shrewd judgment of worth, and a public life she could never fully escape. Little wonder her family traded her through three marriages, to Giovanni Sforza, to Alfonso of Aragon, and to Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, to advance their own fortunes. Her Leo Ascendant gave her the regal, magnetic presence of a born queen, while her Leo Moon, tucked in the hidden twelfth house, kept her true feelings dissolved and unreadable behind the mask. She governed Spoleto in her own right, a role usually reserved for cardinals, and ruled Ferrara with a quiet, luminous competence the gossips never credited.