Dumas's account of the Borgia family gives Cesare Borgia real narrative weight as a ruthless, capable conqueror carving out territory across central Italy through a mix of military skill and calculated cruelty. What the book doesn't dwell on is a detail that would have startled its original readers: this same Cesare Borgia was, within a few years of his death, held up by one of the Renaissance's most influential political thinkers as something close to an ideal ruler.
Machiavelli Actually Watched Him Work
Niccolò Machiavelli wasn't writing about Cesare Borgia from a distance or secondhand report. As a Florentine diplomat, he was sent on official missions to Cesare's court and observed the duke's methods firsthand, at close range, during the height of his power around 1502. What he saw impressed him enough that when he came to write The Prince roughly a decade later (his famous treatise on how a ruler acquires and holds power, as opposed to how moralists might wish they did) Cesare became his central, extended case study. An entire chapter of the book is devoted almost exclusively to analyzing Cesare's specific strategies and decisions.
The Move That Impressed Machiavelli Most
The episode Machiavelli returns to with the most admiration is Cesare's handling of Remirro de Orco, a lieutenant he had installed to brutally pacify the Romagna region on his behalf. Once the territory was subdued, Cesare had Remirro publicly executed and his body displayed in two pieces in the town square, a calculated act that let Cesare simultaneously claim credit for the region's newfound order while publicly disowning the harsh methods used to achieve it, redirecting popular anger toward his now-dead subordinate instead of himself. Machiavelli treats this not as gratuitous cruelty but as a masterclass in political theater: cruelty applied decisively, then visibly repudiated, to produce maximum stability with minimum lasting resentment toward the ruler himself.
"Well-Used" Versus "Badly-Used" Cruelty
This is the core of what Machiavelli actually took from studying Cesare: a distinction, laid out explicitly in The Prince, between cruelty applied all at once, decisively, and then abandoned in favor of stable governance (which Machiavelli calls "well-used") versus cruelty that drags on, escalating over time, which he considers "badly-used" and politically self-defeating. Cesare's rapid, methodical conquest of the Romagna, followed by his true efforts to establish functioning administration and justice in the territories he'd seized, exemplified the first approach. It's a colder, more analytically detached way of evaluating political violence than most readers expect from Renaissance political writing, and it's part of why The Prince remains controversial and widely read five centuries later.
Where the Real Story and Dumas's Account Diverge
Dumas's version, drawn largely from period chroniclers writing under Cesare's own family's patronage or, alternately, from hostile accounts written by his enemies after the Borgia family's fall, tends toward a more straightforwardly villainous portrait than Machiavelli's clinical admiration allows for. That's a reasonable narrative choice for a true-crime narrative aimed at general readers, but it's worth knowing that at least one of the sharpest political minds of the entire Renaissance looked at the same conduct Dumas condemns and drew a very different lesson from it: that Cesare's real failure wasn't excessive ruthlessness, but simple bad luck. Machiavelli's own analysis concludes that Cesare's ultimate downfall came from a set of circumstances almost entirely outside his control: his father Pope Alexander VI's sudden death from illness, arriving at the exact moment Cesare himself was incapacitated by the same sickness, leaving him unable to manage the political transition to a new, hostile pope while at his physical weakest.
A Reputation Still Being Argued Over
The gap between "calculating monster" and "the Renaissance's most instructive political operator" has never fully closed, and it says something about how historical reputations get made that both readings can point to the same documented actions as evidence. Dumas wrote for readers who wanted a thrilling true-crime narrative, and Cesare Borgia gave him one. Machiavelli wrote for readers, specifically, it's worth remembering, a Medici patron he was hoping to win favor with, who wanted a serious analysis of how power is won and kept, and Cesare gave him that too. Both men were looking at the same historical record and finding exactly what they needed in it.
Read Dumas's full account at The Borgias, or see the Historical Figures page for more on the real family behind the legend.