The Borgias

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.

A Genuine History of Italy in Upheaval

What distinguishes this account from a simple family scandal is how thoroughly Dumas grounds it in the broader convulsions reshaping Italy during these years. Charles VIII's real French invasion, Savonarola's fiery reform movement in Florence, and the shifting alliances among Naples, Milan, Venice, and the Papal States all get true attention alongside the Borgia family's own machinations. Dumas is telling the story of an entire fracturing political order, not just one ambitious family riding its currents — which is part of why Cesare Borgia's rise reads as more than personal ambition. He's exploiting a moment when nearly every established Italian power was simultaneously vulnerable.

The account follows Cesare's campaigns in considerable, real military detail — his methodical conquest of the Romagna, his calculated alliance with Louis XII of France, and his father's parallel consolidation of direct papal authority over Rome's fractious noble families. Readers expecting only scandal and poison will find just as much careful attention to real Renaissance statecraft, siege warfare, and the fragile, constantly shifting diplomacy that defined Italian politics during this pivotal decade.