The House of Borgia

What It Is

Christopher Hibbert's account of a Spanish family that arrived in Rome in the fifteenth century and, within two generations, was running the Church. It was published in the United States in 2008 as The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519, and in Britain as The House of Borgia. Hibbert died that December. This was among the last things he wrote.

The method is unchanged from his Medici book of thirty years earlier: people first, then rooms, then politics. He is very good on the physical reality of Renaissance Rome — a city of pilgrims, banditry, malaria and building sites, in which the papacy was a temporal monarchy with an army, a treasury and enemies inside the walls.

The period is tight, under a century, and the cast is small enough to hold. This is a shorter and faster book than the Medici, and it moves.

Why It Matters

The Borgias are the reason Europe carries a permanent fantasy about ecclesiastical corruption, and the fantasy is older and better documented than the facts. Almost everything the popular imagination knows about them has come down through their enemies: rival Roman families, a hostile diarist, generations of Protestant polemic, and then a nineteenth-century appetite for Italian wickedness. Some of it will survive scrutiny. A great deal of it may not. Sorting one from the other is the work.

The second reason to read it is Machiavelli. The Prince is half-legible without this world; Machiavelli was in the room, watching a Borgia at close range and taking notes, and the realism that made his book notorious was drawn from life. This is that life.

The limitation is that Hibbert narrates rather than adjudicates. He is sober about the wilder accusations, but he is not a historian who will stop the story to interrogate a source in front of you, and a reader who wants the case argued — where the propaganda originated, which chronicler can be trusted, what the archives in Rome and Valencia will actually support — will finish this wanting more. That reader should go to G. J. Meyer's The Borgias: The Hidden History, which mounts the full revisionist defence, or to Sarah Bradford, who wrote the standard modern lives of Cesare and of Lucrezia.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours. Among the easiest books on this list to read, and among the harder ones to keep straight, because the Borgias recycle their names as ruthlessly as the Medici did, and because for most of the period half of Italy is at war with the other half.

Read a short account of the Italian Wars first, even a single page of one. The French, the Spanish, the Venetians and the Holy Roman Emperor are all live pieces on this board, and Hibbert assumes you know why they are on the peninsula at all.

Keep a list of the popes to hand. A pope here is a political actor with a term of office, and knowing who holds the throne at a given moment is most of what you need to follow the manoeuvring.

Which Edition to Read

• The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519 (Harcourt, 2008) — recommended. The American edition, and the one you will actually be able to find. Complete text, plates, genealogy and a usable index. The cost: the notes are light for a subject where the reliability of the sources is the entire question, and you will often want to know where a claim came from and be unable to find out. View on Amazon →
• The House of Borgia (Constable, 2009; reissued as The Borgias in 2011). The British edition. Same book, different title. Buy whichever is nearer.
• The ebook. Searchable, which helps with the name problem. The cost: you lose the plates, and in a book about a family whose faces are famous that costs more than usual.

The text is identical in all of them, so take the cheapest. The real decision is your second book: Hibbert to have the story told well, Meyer to have it argued, Bradford to have it documented.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read every accusation twice. Once for what is alleged, and once for who is alleging it. On this subject the sources are the story, and the reader who tracks the provenance of the gossip gets a far better book than the reader who simply enjoys it.

Watch the money and the marriages. Papal politics in this period runs on benefices, dowries and alliances, and the family's sharpest instrument was the marriage contract, not the dagger.

Do not read it as a companion to the television series. It is a correction to it.

And if you have read Hibbert on the Medici, notice what changes. The Medici set out to buy respectability, and Florence had a price for it. Rome was a harder market, and what it charged is the subject of this book.