Borgias

The Borgias: The Hidden History by GJ Meyer, 431 pages

Everyone knows that after Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, he commenced an orgy of depravity the likes of which Rome had not seen since the days of Caligula and Nero.  Together with his bastard children, Cesare and Lucrezia, Alexander organized a criminal campaign of self-aggrandizement on a massive scale, while still finding time for some recreational murder and incest.

It's a wonderful story, featuring the darkest corruption in the holiest of places, playing upon popular prejudice and prurience, and as such it has been told and retold, most recently in hit TV shows and novels.  The only problem, according to GJ Meyer, is that very little of it is true.  Most of it is based on rumors spread by the rivals of the Borgias, given added currency by growing Italian nationalism and the Spanish origins of the family, their undisguised ambitions, and the almost complete collapse of their power after the death of Alexander, all of which was taken up and amplified by anti-Catholic polemicists in the centuries following the Reformation, eventually becoming engrained in conventional history alongside the Black Legend.  Going further than merely pointing out the obvious problems with the Borgia legend - the obviously invented operatic scenes, the supposed poisons whose effects are different from every poison known to modern medical science, the many positive accounts of Rodrigo's character before his election and Lucrezia's character after his death - Meyer challenges the most deeply ingrained myth of all, presenting strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that Cesare, Lucrezia, and their siblings were not, in fact, the illegitimate children of Rodrigo Borgia, but the legitimate children of his nephew.

The Borgias is not merely a debunking of myths.  Meyer turns the true story of the Borgias into a compelling story of ambition and intrigue, all while admirably informing the reader on the politics and culture of Renaissance Italy, a haphazard collection of independent and semi-independent states continually forming alliances and feuds with each other and the French and Spanish empires beyond the peninsula.