#bc really alonso doesn't seem too fond of the rest of his valencian family

[ducavalentinos]

Several of Alonso's nephews and cousins, Isabella's son Rodrigo and Catalina's Luis Juan de Milà among them, were steered toward careers in the Church. This was customary because practical: it was in the ecclesiastical field that an uncle who was first a bishop and then a cardinal could be most helpful. Vatican records show Rodrigo and Luis Juan being singled out, as early as the reign of Eugenius IV, for benefices, offices generating ecclesiastical income, that would have been unimaginable without the intervention of a patron who had access to the pope's ear and the king of Aragon's as well. We see Rodrigo, still no more than a schoolboy, becoming the recipient of ecclesiastical revenues first from his hometown of Jàtiva, then from the cathedral of Barcelona, and finally from the cathedral of Valencia. In 1499, when Rodrigo was about eighteen and his uncle was in his fifth year as a cardinal resident in Rome, Pope Nicholas V issued a bull allowing him to keep his benefices (all of which were in Spain) even if he resided at a university or in Italy. This cleared the way for the youth to leave Spain for study at one of the great universities of Italy without sacrificing the income that permitted him to live in the style of a young lord -a cardinal's nephew. [...]Everything known about Rodrigo makes it reasonable to suppose that he was both an able student -not even his enemies would ever deny his intelligence- and a conscientious one, consistent hard work being one of his defining characteristics throughout his life.

G.J. Meyer - The Borgias