Sarah Dunant, In the Name of the Family (Random House 2017)
Rodrigo Borgia sits on the papal throne, dreaming of creating a Borgia state in Italy ‘through the brawn of his son and the loins of his daughter’. Cesare is aboard a galley off the coast of Piombino, chafing at the delays to his ambition. Lucrezia, 21 and on her third marriage, is on her way to Ferrara, parading her charms and her dowry at every ducal court along the way.
Lucrezia, eager to spend her dowry and establish her own court, deftly handles her snooty in-laws and a husband who expends most of his energy on fat prostitutes and metallurgy. She is in perilous childbed.
Cesare, supposedly cured of the pox, believes he’s invincible. He blazes a fiery trail of conquests while ‘half of Italy looks over their shoulder to make sure his shadow is not falling across their path’. Pisa and Urbino declare for Borgia; Florence appeals to Louis king of France and would-be Naples only to see Louis and Cesare walking arm in arm.
Pope Alexander weaves his way through interminable ceremonies, ‘playing politics like a winning hand of cards’. He plunders the Church to fund his son’s warfare and hurries to create new cardinals loyal to Borgia.
Lucrezia’s child is stillborn, and after near death, she is nursed back to health by the nuns of Corpus Domini. The poet Pietro Bembo, ‘surely a master of the rules of court dalliance with a great lady’, comes to Ferrara, and a chaste affair begins. ‘An invisible thread of attraction is drawn between them so that if either pulls on it even by a fraction the other is aware.’ Sister-in-law Isabella of Mantua threatens to cause a scandal. Her ‘ladies’ noses are known to reach around corners and through closed doors’. Cesare, having put down a conspiracy of erstwhile allies, Christmases in Cesena, where ‘the ladies seem to relish the progress of their own damnation’. The Pope plunders the estates of his son’s vanquished foes.
This is superb history and haute litérature, featuring really beautiful prose. Will Michelangelo’s colossal new statue David be ‘powerful enough to shield the city from the Borgia Goliath’? Dinner at the household of Florentine diplomat Machiavelli, though whose eyes much of this story is told, ‘feels crowded though there are only two at the table’.
The Borgias’ lust for power and fierce love for each other makes a wonderful story, and Dunant does it more than justice.
Susie Helme 
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