No merry-makings ever held under the auspices of Pope Alexander VI at the Vatican had escaped being the source of much scandalous rumour, but none had been so scandalous and disgraceful as the stories put abroad on this occasion.

These found a fitting climax in that anonymous Letter to Silvio Savelli, published in Germany--which at the time, be it borne in mind, was extremely inimical to the Pope, viewing with jaundiced eyes his ever-growing power, and stirred perhaps to this unspeakable burst of venomous fury by the noble Este alliance, so valuable to Cesare in that it gave him a friend upon the frontier of his Romagna possessions.
The appalling publication, which is given in full in Burchard, was fictitiously dated from Gonzola de Cordoba's Spanish camp at Taranto on November 25.

A copy of this anonymous pamphlet, which is the most violent attack on the Borgias ever penned, perhaps the most terrible indictment against any family ever published--a pamphlet which Gregorovius does not hesitate to call "an authentic document of the state of Rome under the Borgias"-- fell into the hands of the Cardinal of Modena, who on the last day of the year carried it to the Pope.
Before considering that letter it is well to turn to the entries in Burchard's diary under the dates of October 27 and November 11 of that same year.

You will find two statements which have no parallel in the rest of the entire diary, few parallels in any sober narrative of facts.
The sane mind must recoil and close up before them, so impossible does it seem to accept them.
The first of these is the relation of the supper given by Cesare in the Vatican to fifty courtesans--a relation which possibly suggested to the debauched Regent d'Orleans his fetes d'Adam, a couple of centuries later.
Burchard tells us how, for the amusement of Cesare, of the Pope, and of Lucrezia, these fifty courtesans were set to dance after supper with the servants and some others who were present, dressed at first and afterwards not so.

He draws for us a picture of those fifty women on all fours, in all their plastic nudity, striving for the chestnuts flung to them in that chamber of the Apostolic Palace by Christ's Vicar--an old man of seventy--by his son and his daughter.