The Family as a Strategic Unit - Mario Puzo's The Family

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The Family is the book Mario Puzo always wanted to write. Virtually all his ‘crime family’ sagas were inspired by the Borgias, and there are echoes and nods to the Borgias throughout his works and films. Mario Puzo never got a chance to finish writing The Family, which was completed by his longtime companion Carol Gino. Though this book is a departure from the crime sagas Puzo is best known for - it explores similar themes that will attract crime fiction and historical fiction aficionados. 

The Family is set during the Italian Renaissance and narrates a fictionalised account of the notorious Borgia family - focussing particularly on the patriarch - Rodrigo Borgia, who would go on to become Pope Alexander VI, his son Cesare Borgia who was the model for Nicollo Machieavelli’s The Prince, and his daughter Lucrezia whose name is often entangled in scandal & myth. 

Puzo’s crime family sagas have often been accused of being formulaic, but they’re always readable and very enjoyable. The setting though is vastly different. Instead of America, this book is set in Rome; instead of crime syndicates, this book is focussed on the Vatican and papacy. The parallels of intrigue and moral compromise between criminal enterprises and the Vatican of the time are not lost on anyone. 

Like Vito Corleone from The Godfather, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia is the patriarch and fountainhead / prime mover of The Family; his edicts have far reaching implications for commoners and royalty alike, and his family members play integral parts in his plans irrespective of their own wishes.

Pope Alexander VI uses his daughter Lucrezia Borgia as a pawn and as a tool. He exploits her sex multiple times by having her marry (and divorce) strategically, to suit his own ends. Her charms, beauty and obedience are used as currency. While popular myth paints Lucrezia as a femme fatale and an incestuous temptress, Puzo’s Lucrezia is described as something subtler - a child moulded by a patriarch who sees his offspring as extensions of his papal will. 

Each of Lucrezia’s three marriages is a maneuver towards a political union, firming up the Borgias grip on Italy. Borgia rationalises these as steps to secure his childrens’ own future. Marriage, as was the custom of the time, was a dynastic apparatus - unsentimental and tactical. Lucrezia’s marriages - first to Giovanni Sforzo, then to Alfonso of Aragon, then to Alfonso d’Este illustrate how the Pope used his power to annul marriages at his convenience - confirming his daughter’s innocence and stamping the ex-husband with impotence. In this manner The Family doesn’t just retell the Borgia’s tale - it functions as a philosophical prequel to The Godfather by unmasking the source and the original sin of ambition. 

Lucrezia’s marriages are contrasted with the marriage of Constance Corleone (Connie) to Carlo. While Rogrigo Borgia moves Lucrezia from marriage to marriage to cement his hold on temporal power, the Corleone patriarchs (first Vito, then Michael) keep Connie in a bad marriage till they find the correct opportunity to strike. The marriage was even originally conceived by Santiago Corleone (Sonny) - Vito’s eldest son, as a means to marry Connie to an Italian who was known and could possibly be controlled. The roles are reversed as Carlo looks at Connie as a step up and probably a foot into the Godfather’s inner circle. Vito and Michael indulge Carlo till they find a chance to remove him from their family. 

Cesare Borgia was named after Julius Caesar; Rogrigo Borgia’s megalomania was not limited to his son - it is rumoured that he chose the name Alexander after being elected Pope after Alexander the Great of Macedon. Cesare Borgia was also Niccolo Macheiavelli’s ideal for his most famous work - The Prince, which he dedicated to Cesare. 

Like Michael Corleone - Cesare too had no intention of following in his fathers footsteps and becoming a cardinal. He too was military minded and intended to become a soldier. But Rodrigo Borgia convinces him that his path to power lies with the priesthood, and he is inducted into the college of cardinals. 

Just like Vito Corleone diminishes Michael’s accomplishments in war because ‘he performs these miracles for strangers’, for Don Corleone (as for Borgia) bravery was wasteful if it serves others, if its dissipates power instead of consolidating it within the family. Rodrigo Borgia too knows that overt aggression and soldiery isn’t the most efficient way to power, and that he needs his son close by. 

These nuggets of ‘career advice’ are aimed at having their sons learn from their own mistakes and not having to reinvent the wheel of learning for themselves. The patriarch knows the difference between overt violence and violence cloaked in legitimacy, executed by a catspaw. This strategy is voiced by Michael Corleone in The Godfather 3 film, when he tells his bastard nephew that he doesn’t need more gangsters - he needs more lawyers. A philosophically identical statement was made by Vito Corleone in The Godfather book (or possibly by Don Domenico Clericuzio in The Last Don) when he fell in love with America the day he realised that you could steal more money as a banker with knowledge of accountancy and finance, than as a gangster with a crew and guns. 

Both men chafe at their father’s vision; neither of them are puppets. Their journeys are marked by a recurring theme for assert their individuality within a system that sees them as instruments. Yet, like Michael Corleone, Cesare too cannot escape his destiny; the priesthood is antithetical to his nature - he wants to fight and rape and pillage and command armies, and become a warlike figure of his own choosing. 

By drawing parallels between organized crime empires and the Vatican, Mario Puzo isn’t trying to shock the reader, he’s revealing continuity and exposing corruption as a structural feature of power and not as a deviation. Rodrigo Borgia becomes the manifestation of corruption, his court - a place that thrives on bribery, coercion and assassination, all cloaked in righteousness. The reader sees the Vatican as a great syndicate with a facade, rivalries and codes. 

Mario Puzo portrays the Vatican as the tragic, royal court of the Borgias. He shows us his inspirations for contemporary crime sagas, and portrays the Borgia episode as the origin of crime in Rome, which it is not. Rome was a cesspit of vice, Borgia was just the first among equals here. 

Pope Alexander VI - Rodrigo Borgia may be the template from which all of Puzo’s Patriarchs descend. He didn’t introduce corruption to the Vatican, he just improved and tried to perfect the rotten system. Depravity, simony and nepotism were not introduced by Rodrigo Borgia - they were institutional norms that Rodrgio Borgia took to the most efficient extreme. 

The moral erosion in the Vatican had been there for decades. By the time Rogrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI in 1492, Popes were known to have fathered illegitimate children, positions in the church were openly offered to the highest bidders, and the word ‘nepotism’ was coined around this time based on favours accrued to ‘nephews’ of Cardinals. 

Rodrigo Borgia was a veteran of four conclaves, having spent most of his time as Vice Chancellor to the Pope - becoming virtually indispensable on account of his connections, intimate knowledge and visceral cunning. His personal magnetism made him an indispensable diplomat of the Vatican long before he became Pope, and he counted members of the royal families of Eupope among his closest friends and confidants - even becoming godfather to some of their children. Borgia wasn’t a wolf among sheep, he was a wolf among wolves. 

Over the centuries, the Borgias have been many things to many people. To Protestant reformers they were the symbols of Catholic decadence, to military & political historians like Macheiavelli they were the model of what powerful people needed to be; to artists like Leonardo da Vinci they were patrons and symbols. To Mario Puzo they were a timeless lesson in power. 

Omerta, or the Sicilian code of silence manifests itself when a mafiosi who is apprehended by law enforcement denies the existence of the mafia. The mafia - known as the ‘cosa nostra’ - translates to ‘this thing of ours’ - a nameless, faceless, informal organization. The mafiosi’s association is never acknowledged, to the extent that the FBI considered an turned gangsters admission of this (the elocution) a major moral victory for law enforcement and a psychological blow to organized crime. 

There is a sly nod to this ‘code of silence’ even among the Vatican; in the film Godfather 3, as Michael Corleone and his lawyer emerge from a difficult round of protracted negotiations with the Vatican officers, their bankers and their fellow stakeholders in the fictional multinational European real-estate firm Immobiliare. He comments in frustration that he’s back with the Borgias (paraphrased). His comment is heard by Tom Hagen’s son who is a man of the cloth at the Vatican. Hagen Jr laughs off ‘Uncle’ Michael’s comment and says that those times are over. It's left to the viewer to decide and interpret whose viewpoint is more accurate.