Rafael Sabatini
The Life of Cesare Borgia
Biography of “The Prince”
e-artnow, 2020
Contact: [email protected]
EAN: 4064066400255
Table of Contents
Chapter I. The Rise of the House of Borgia
Chapter II. The Reigns Of Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII
Chapter I. The French Invasion
Chapter II. The Pope and the Supernatural
Chapter IV. The Murder of the Duke of Gandia
Chapter V. The Renunciation of the Purple
Chapter I. The Duchess of Valentinois
Chapter II. The Knell of the Tyrants
Chapter IV. Gonfalonier of the Church
Chapter V. The Murder of Alfonso of Aragon
Chapter VII. The Siege of Faenza
Chapter VIII. Astorre Manfredi
Chapter IX. Castel Bolognese and Piombino
Chapter X. The End of the House of Aragon
Chapter XI. The Letter to Silvio Savelli
Chapter XII. Lucrezia’s Third Marriage
Chapter XIII. Urbino and Camerino
Chapter XIV. The Revolt of the Condottieri
Chapter XV. Macchiavelli’s Legation
Chapter XVII. “The Beautiful Stratagem”
Chapter I. The Death of Alexander VI
PREFACE
This is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It is a record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human, strenuous age; a lustful, flamboyant age; an age red with blood and pale with passion at white-heat; an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour, dazzling light and impenetrable shadow; an age of swift movement, pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing contrasts.
To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct century—as we conceive our own to be—is for sedate middle-age to judge from its own standpoint the reckless, hot, passionate, lustful humours of youth, of youth that errs grievously and achieves greatly.
So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may pursue the study of us.
But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards of our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals for judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the purpose from the environment in which they had their being? How false must be the conception of them thus obtained! We view the individuals so selected through a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous and abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment of the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that is corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed, must appear similarly distorted.
Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait upon our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or Mayfair.
Mind