The Borgias
A papal dynasty built on poison, ambition, and blood.
Rome, 1492. Rodrigo Borgia buys his way to the papal throne as Pope Alexander VI, and over the following decade his family — above all his ruthless son Cesare and his beautiful, much-maligned daughter Lucrezia — will use murder, poison, and political marriage to carve out a private empire from the wreckage of Renaissance Italy's warring city-states. Dumas tells the family's rise and fall as history, not fiction, in one of the most notorious true stories in his Celebrated Crimes — the tale that gave the Borgia name its lasting reputation as a byword for Renaissance intrigue.
A Name That Became a Synonym
Few family names in history carry the weight "Borgia" does — a byword for intrigue, poison, and ruthless ambition that has outlived the Renaissance itself. Dumas opens his account with the death of Lorenzo de' Medici and the corrupt papal election that follows, tracing how Rodrigo Borgia's rise to the papacy set in motion a decade of political marriages, assassinations, and conquest carried out in the family's name, largely at the hands of his son Cesare.
Cesare Borgia in particular has fascinated historians for centuries — a cardinal who resigned his office to become a military conqueror, later held up by Machiavelli himself as a model prince in The Prince. Dumas draws heavily on the same historical chronicles Machiavelli and other contemporaries left behind, giving his account an unusually well-documented foundation for a story that can otherwise sound almost too dramatic to be true.
Lucrezia's Contested Reputation
Of all the Borgias, Lucrezia has attracted the most enduring historical controversy. Popular legend for centuries cast her as a poisoner and seductress complicit in her family's crimes, an image Dumas's own account largely reflects; modern historians, however, have increasingly argued that Lucrezia was as much a political pawn — married off three times to cement her father's and brother's alliances — as a willing participant in their schemes. Reading Dumas's version today offers a window into how the Borgia legend was still being told in the nineteenth century, well before later historians began to reconsider it.
True Crime, Before the Novels
As with The Countess de Saint-Geran and Urbain Grandier, also on this site, this story comes from Dumas's Celebrated Crimes, written in 1839 and 1840, years before the historical novels that made him famous. The critic Edward Garnett later singled out the Borgias, alongside the Cenci and Urbain Grandier, as exactly the kind of larger-than-life true material perfectly suited to Dumas's narrative gifts — proof that his eye for drama was already fully formed before he ever wrote a word of fiction.
First Published
1839–1840, as part of the eight-volume Celebrated Crimes.
Setting
Rome and Italy, 1492–1503, during the reign of Pope Alexander VI.
Genre
True crime and political history, covering one of the Renaissance's most notorious families.
Part Of
Celebrated Crimes, Dumas's collection of true historical crime narratives.