"Borgia Pope" is synonymous with every sin and corruption imaginable. The lurid stories have echoed through history of orgies in the Vatican, incest, fratricide, assassination by poison and strangulation, and of course nepotism, financial fraud, and ordinary war crimes. In The Borgias: The Hidden History G.J. Meyer does the most surprising thing, and offers a revisionist history of the Borgias that argues that Pope Alexander was an active church reformer, Cesare his nephew one of the great men of the age, and Lucrezia a perfect image of a Renaissance princess.

Meyer's basic thesis is that the lurid tales of the Borgias are baseless political slander, contemporary accounts written by their enemies and accepted as truth by the first generation of Italian historians, most of whom were not even born by the time the Borgias died. A convenient scapegoat for every excess of Renaissance Catholicism, the Borgias became a enduring symbol of evil, despite an utter lack of hard evidence for their gravest crimes. It's an interesting thesis, but at times I think Meyer leans too far to the other side, accepting uncritically every positive description of a Borgia, and De Roo's obscure geneaology which 'proves' that Cesare and Lucrezia couldn't have been Alexander's children. It's hard to argue that you're writing the only honest account of the Borgia, when you constantly call [some obscure Italian noble] a truly deprave sadist.

That said, Meyer has a real talent for making clear the tangled web of 15th century Italian politics, the evershifting alliances of the city-states, and the delicate balancing act of Rome between France and Italy. Whatever else they were, Pope Alexander and Cesare were players, and they nearly won, setting up Cesare as ruler of a unified Papal States, before an unlucky bout of malaria killed Alexander and upset Cesare's plans.