The Story of the Borgias

xi, 345 pp. Red boards. Gilt titles and gilt decor. Top page ridge gilt. The story of the Borgia family has always been one of strangely fascinating interest; but a lurid legend grew up about their lives, which culminated in the creation of the fantastic monstrosities of Victor Hugo's play and Donizetti's Opera. For three centuries their name was a byword for the Vilest infamy but in our own day there has been an extraordinary swing of the pendulum, which is hard to account for. Quite a number of para doxical writers have proclaimed to an astonished and mystified world that Pope Alexander VI was both a wise prince and a gentle priest whose motives and actions have been maliciously misrepresented; that Cesare Borgia was a noble minded and enlightened statesman, who, three centuries in advance of his time, endeavoured to form a united Italy by the only means then in anybody's power; and that Lucrezia Borgia was a paragon of all the virtues. CONTENTS: Introduction; The Rise of the Borgia; The French Invasion; Divorce and Murder; Cesare Borgia, Duke and Romagna; Lucrezia Borgia, Princess of Este; The Culmination; The Downfall; Life in a Fifteenth-Century City; Lurcrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara; A Saint of the House of Borgia; Index.