The Borgias: Power and Fortune
PAUL STRATHERN
(Atlantic Books, 400 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The Borgias have done more than anyone for the Black Legend of papal corruption. They have everything: greed, sexual rapacity, murder and a clutch of papal children, including Lucrezia, wife of three husbands, alleged poisoner, lover of poets. Throw in three Popes (one, Alexander VI, the only Pope to date to feature as boss-fight villain in a video game), a cluster of cardinals and a canonised saint (St Francis Borgia), and you have all the ingredients for an overwritten costume drama (actually, three so far). It is a fine old romp, some of which may even be true.

Scholars claim the Borgia legend was confected by a subsequent Pope, Julius II (Alexander’s arch-enemy), who executed a full-scale damnatio memoriae. They were not, really, much worse than other grand church families; some of their bad press may be down to nationality: Spanish arrivistes, they spoke incomprehensible Catalan among themselves, and staged bullfights in St Peter’s Square. Yet nothing has dislodged the accepted narrative, here retold.