DIGNA TANTO NOMINE, RARAE INTER MORTALES
FORMAE SPECIMEN DEDIT."

It was, in short, an age so universally immoral as scarcely to be termed
immoral, since immorality may be defined as a departure from the morals
that obtain a given time and in a given place. So that whilst from our
own standpoint the Cinquecento, taken collectively, is an age of grossest
licence and immorality, from the standpoint of the Cinquecento itself few
of its individuals might with justice be branded immoral.

For the rest, it was an epoch of reaction from the Age of Chivalry: an
epoch of unbounded luxury, of the cult and worship of the beautiful
externally; an epoch that set no store by any inward virtue, by truth or
honour; an epoch that laid it down as a maxim that no inconvenient
engagement should be kept if opportunity offered to evade it.

The history of the Cinquecento is a history developed in broken pledges,
trusts dishonoured and basest treacheries, as you shall come to conclude
before you have read far in the story that is here to be set down.

In a profligate age what can you look for but profligates? Is it just,
is it reasonable, or is it even honest to take a man or a family from
such an environment, for judgement by the canons of a later epoch? Yet
is it not the method that has been most frequently adopted in dealing
with the vast subject of the Borgias?

To avoid the dangers that must wait upon that error, the history of that
House shall here be taken up with the elevation of Calixtus III to the
Papal Throne; and the reign of the four Popes immediately preceding
Roderigo Borgia--who reigned as Alexander VI--shall briefly be surveyed