One party held in the Vatican was attended by Pope Alexander VI and 50 courtesans, who after dinner danced “fully dressed and then naked”
achieved many remarkable things. They reformed and rebuilt Rome; they were patrons of geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci; and they influenced the course of world events for centuries. It is, for example, thanks to a single Borgia ruling in 1494 that Brazil now speaks Portuguese, whereas most of South America uses Spanish.
Mr Strathern’s even-handed book shows how this rosy judgment was possible—if not, now, entirely plausible. The Borgias, he writes, “were often better than they appeared”. The first Borgia pope, Callixtus III, did the job for only three years, from 1455 to 1458. When his nephew, Alexander VI, came to power in 1492 the Eternal City was suffering from the eternal problems of banditry, corruption and violence.
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