Summary: August 11, 1492, thanks to the maneuvers of his son Caesar, Roderic Borgia was elected pope under the name of Alexander VI. His ambition is to restore political influence in Rome, territories, an army and money. After installing his family in important positions, his power gradually becomes immense. Alongside the alliances that the pope made and unmade at the mercy of events, his son Caesar deviates from its path his enemies and those that hinder. Thus, by poison or the arm of his faithful henchman Micheletto, he gets rid of his older brother Francesco, successive husbands of his sister Lucrezia, his female conquests he gets tired, jealous husbands ... But the poison eventually turn against Alexander and Caesar who, by an unfortunate combination of circumstances, drink poisoned wine. Alexander dies but Cesar survives, physically weakened and abandoned by its allies. To stay thanks, he sells the voices of cardinals at his disposal for the election of Pope Pius III and that of Julius II, which does not prevent him from being taken prisoner on behalf of the King of Spain and to die Following a skirmish after his escape orchestrated by Micheletto. PROLOGUE On the 8th of April, 1492, in a bedroom of the Carneggi Palace, about three miles from Florence, were three men grouped about a bed whereon a fourth lay dying. The first of these three men, sitting at the foot of the bed, and half hidden, that he might conceal his tears, in the gold-brocaded curtains, was Ermolao Barbaro, author of the treatise 'On Celibacy', and of 'Studies in Pliny': the year before, when he was at Rome in the capacity of ambassador of the Florentine Republic, he had been appointed Patriarch of Aquileia by Innocent VIII. The second, who was kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might have been mistaken for a poet of the Augustan age. The third, who was standing up and leaning against one of the twisted columns of the bed-head, following with profound sadness the progress of the malady which he read in the face of his departing friend, was the famous Pico della Mirandola, who at the age of twenty could speak twenty-two languages, and who had offered to reply in each of these languages to any seven hundred questions that might be put to him by the twenty most learned men in the whole world, if they could be assembled at Florence. The man on the bed was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who at the beginning of the year had been attacked by a severe and deep-seated fever, to which was added the gout, a hereditary ailment in his family. He had found at last that the draughts containing dissolved pearls which the quack doctor, Leoni di Spoleto, prescribed for him (as if he desired to adapt his remedies rather to the riches of his patient than to his necessities) were useless and unavailing, and so he had come to understand that he must part from those gentle-tongued women of his, those sweet-voiced poets, his palaces and their rich hangings; therefore he had summoned to give him absolution for his sins-in a man of less high place they might perhaps have been called crimes-the Dominican, Giralamo Francesco Savonarola. It was not, however, without an inward fear, against which the praises of his friends availed nothing, that the pleasure-seeker and usurper awaited that severe and gloomy preacher by whose words all Florence was stirred, and on whose pardon henceforth depended all his hope for another world. Indeed, Savonarola was one of those men of stone, coming, like the statue of the Commandante, to knock at the door of a Don Giovanni, and in the midst of feast and orgy to announce that it is even now the moment to begin to think of Heaven. He had been born at Ferrara, whither his family, one of the most illustrious of Padua, had been called by Niccolo, Marchese d'Este, ...."