that a standard may be set by which to judge the man and the family that
form the real subject of this work.

The history of this amazing Pope Alexander is yet to be written. No
attempt has been made to exhaust it here. Yet of necessity he bulks
large in these pages; for the history of his dazzling, meteoric son is so
closely interwoven with his own that it is impossible to present the one
without dealing at considerable length with the other.

The sources from which the history of the House of Borgia has been culled
are not to be examined in a preface. They are too numerous, and they
require too minute and individual a consideration that their precise
value and degree of credibility may be ascertained. Abundantly shall
such examination be made in the course of this history, and in a measure
as the need arises to cite evidence for one side or for the other shall
that evidence be sifted.

Never, perhaps, has anything more true been written of the Borgias and
their history than the matter contained in the following lines of Rawdon
Brown in his Ragguagli sulla Vita e sulle Opere di Marino Sanuto: "It
seems to me that history has made use of the House of Borgia as of a
canvas upon which to depict the turpitudes of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries."

Materials for the work were very ready to the hand; and although they do
not signally differ from the materials out of which the histories of half
a dozen Popes of the same epoch might be compiled, they are far more
abundant in the case of the Borgia Pope, for the excellent reason that
the Borgia Pope detaches from the background of the Renaissance far more
than any of his compeers by virtue of his importance as a political