Francis Borgia

1510-1572. Jesuit.* Great-grandson of Pope Alexander VI and son of the duke of Gandia, he married Eleanor de Castro and had eight children. Charles V appointed him, after he had succeeded to his father's title, as viceroy of Catalonia, where he sought to reform the administration from corruption. His wife died in 1546 and a year later he was received privately into the Society of Jesus, being ordained priest in 1551. He was sent as commissary by Ignatius Loyola* to Spain and Portugal in 1554; he also had oversight of Jesuit work in the overseas empires. In 1561 he was summoned to Rome, where four years later he became the third general of the society. He had a deep interest in education and used his wealth to help found and build colleges or to improve what is now the Gregorian University of Rome. He was canonized by Clement X in 1671.

See M. Yeo, The Greatest of the Borgias (1936).