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Kirkus Reviews
THE BORGIAS
By Ivan Cloulas
Pub Date: April 10th, 1989
ISBN: 531-15101-8
Renaissance scholar and French National Archives Conservator-in-Chief
Cloulas makes his American debut with this chronicle of two centuries in
the life of the infamous Borgias. A dynasty in an age of dynasties that
included the Medici, the Sforzas, and the Estes, the Borgias' influence
extended through two centuries (1377-1572), their name synonymous with
luxury, incest, political intrigue, and murder. To set the record straight,
Cloulas, a Borgia apologist, has scaled "a mountain of documents" in order
to fashion a revisionist reconstruction of a family legend that's told with all the coloristic and textual
opulence of a master fresco. The cast of characters includes Cesare Borgia (nicknamed Valentino, he was
reputed the handsomest man in Italy--as well as the most ruthless; he almost certainly murdered his
brother, and probably slept with his sister--an enigmatic man who was at once the enlightened patron of
Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli's model Prince) and Lucrezia Borgia (shamelessly pimped, in effect,
from the age of 13 on by her family, as was the custom, into successive marriages of alliance to successive
client-princes, "The Belle of Ferrara" would in later life become a leading patroness of the Italian
Renaissance). But this Renaissance Dynasty is not all lavish sets, costumes, and amorous intrigue. For the
backdrop of the melodrama within the palace walls includes the invention of movable type, the union of
Ferdinand and Isabella, demands for Church reform (in a time when the clergy not only tolerated but
ardently supported prostitution) by the proto-Protestant reformer Savonarola, the Fall of Byzantium, and
the rise of Renaissance humanism. Although not the tome to choose for scholarly insights into, say, the
role of the Medici in the rise of Western capital, Cloulas' work does vividly illuminate the very rich hours
of that historic time.