According to Burchard, the banquet was given in Cesare's apartments in the Palazzo Apostolico. Fifty prostitutes or courtesans were in attendance for the entertainment of the banquet guests. Burchard describes the scene in his Diary: Alexander Lee notes that, "The so-called 'Banquet of the Chestnuts'...is, for example, attested only in Burchard's memoirs, and is not only intrinsically implausible, but was also dismissed as such by many contemporaries."
Vatican researcher Right Reverend Monsignor Peter de Roo, rejected the story of the "fifty courtesans" as described in Louis Thuasne's edition of Burchard's diary. While granting that Cesare Borgia may have indeed given a feast at the Vatican, de Roo attempts, through exhaustive research, to refute the notion that the Borgias—certainly not the pope—could have possibly participated in "a scene truly bestial" such as Burchard describes, on grounds that it would be inconsistent with:
Alexander VI's essentially decent but much maligned character
Burchard's otherwise "decent ways" of writing
The majority consensus of writers at the time, who either questioned the story, or rejected it as outright falsehood.
De Roo believes that a more credible explanation for the alleged "orgy" is a later interpolation of events by those hostile to Alexander:
's book A World Lit Only by Fire, embellishes the story: "Servants kept score of each man's orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man's machismo by his ejaculative capacity....After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes." Professional historians, however, have dismissed or ignored the book because of its numerous factual errors and its dependence on interpretations that have not been accepted by experts since the 1930s at the latest. In a review for Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, Jeremy duQuesnay Adams remarked that Manchester's work contained "some of the most gratuitous errors of fact and eccentricities of judgment this reviewer has read in quite some time." The banquet is depicted in episode 4 of season 3 of the ShowtimeTV seriesThe Borgias. In the show, the Banquet is shown to be a trap to blackmail otherwise disloyal members of the College of Cardinals, and is officiated by Giulia Farnese, and witnessed by Burchard who chronicles the debaucheries of the Cardinals while hidden behind a screen. None of the Borgia family are seen to be present, and loyal Cardinals such as Cardinal Farnese are warned not to accept the invitation. In the series, the event takes place in c. 1499.
