The Borgias — Paul Strathern

Strathern examines the Borgia family — Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI, and his children Cesare and Lucrezia — not as Gothic villains but as exemplary Renaissance power-brokers operating in a system where the papacy was a political institution like any other. The book is attentive to the gap between contemporary reputation and documented fact, and to the ways in which the Borgias were both products and creators of the political culture Machiavelli was simultaneously theorising.