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Historical person
1475–1507
Cesare Borgia was a son of Pope Alexander VI who abandoned a church career to become a military commander and territorial prince. Backed by papal and French power, he conquered parts of central Italy before his position collapsed after his father’s death; his rise influenced Machiavelli’s discussion of political power.
In Rozsa Gaston’s Anne and Louis, While France intervenes in Milan and Naples, papal diplomacy and figures such as Cesare Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli draw Anne and Louis deeper into the dangerous politics of Renaissance Italy. In Sarah Dunant’s In the Name of the Family, Cesare Borgia is extending papal power through the Romagna, combining military success with calculated terror. Other novels featuring Cesare Borgia include Sarah Dunant’s Blood & Beauty and Cecelia Holland’s City of God.
Series
Sarah Dunant’s Borgias novels reconstruct the rise and collapse of Pope Alexander VI’s family in Renaissance Italy. Beginning with Rodrigo Borgia’s election in 1492, the sequence follows Alexander, Cesare and Lucrezia as papal office, dynastic marriage and military ambition turn family loyalty into an instrument of government. Across…
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Rozsa Gaston’s four-volume Anne of Brittany sequence follows the last independently ruling Duchess of Brittany from her contested inheritance to her final years as queen of France. The novels move through the French–Breton conflict, Anne’s compelled marriage to Charles VIII, her restoration to ducal authority after his death…
All books in this series
Standalone books
