Borgias Books in Order

The Borgias novels follow one of the most notorious families of the Italian Renaissance, tracing how a Spanish cardinal buys his way to the papal throne and turns kinship into a political weapon. Rather than repeating old scandals, the books ask what life inside that family might really have felt like.

In Blood & Beauty the story opens in late fifteenth century Rome, where Rodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI and sets out to secure power for his children. His brilliant, dangerous son Cesare and his young daughter Lucrezia move between palace chambers, battlefields and marriage beds as pawns, partners and sometimes rivals in their fathers plans.

Religion here is never just piety. The papal court is drenched in ceremony and corruption, with cardinals, ambassadors and mercenaries trading favours while the city outside seethes with poverty and resentment. Dunant uses that world of processions, poison rumours and diplomatic gossip to show how fragile the Borgias position really was.

In the Name of the Family picks up the story in the early sixteenth century, when Cesare rules chunks of central Italy by force of will, and a young Florentine diplomat called Niccolo Machiavelli is sent to watch him. As Cesare grows more ruthless and unstable, Machiavelli turns their conversations into hard lessons about power that will feed into his book The Prince.

At the same time Lucrezia, now in her early twenties and married yet again, has to navigate a new court, a new husband and the suspicions that cling to her family name. The novels give her space to be more than a stereotype, portraying a woman who learns to use charm, marriage and patronage to build a life on her own terms.

Across both books the series balances intimate scenes such as marriage negotiations, family arguments and private crises of faith with large scale events. Readers move from candlelit papal apartments to siege camps, from wedding feasts to plague ridden streets, watching alliances change almost overnight.

The result is a continuous story that runs from the first flush of Borgia success to their eventual fall, always asking where loyalty ends and survival begins. It is less about proving whether the legends are true than about showing how a real family might behave when history hands them almost unimaginable power.