New Takes on Borgias and Family Medici

Readers of history, like all readers, love an engrossing narrative: a conquest triumphant or repulsed, a great man brought to ruin by his flaws. The story doesn't have to have heroes and villains, but it doesn't hurt.

The intertwining chronicles of the Borgia and Medici dynasties offer rich material for such a narrative. Two of the wealthiest families in Renaissance Italy vied for supreme power, seizing thrones royal and ecclesiastic by force and cunning. The traditional version makes the Medici the heroes, philanthropic bankers who fostered the rise of humanism and science, commissioning masterpieces of art by Donatello, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci. The villains, the Borgias, have become a byword of evil, covering the full gamut of the deadly sins, spiced with rumors of incest and occasional applications of poison.

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