F. W. Kenyon: The Naked Sword. The Story of Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia! She slept with her lather and her brother, and poisoned hundreds of people.' Frank Kenyon encountered many such a comment as this when mentioning the subject of his coming novel, but the Lucrezia of history is not quite the evil incarnation of the legend.
True child of the Renaissance, she was impetuous of heart and strong in her lust for life and love-but the meshes of the golden hair which so enchanted the men who desired her were symbolic of the tangled treachery and scheming in which she herself was caught. Like her three brothers, she was the illegitimate child of Pope Alexander VI, whose plans for political dominion in Italy required that she be used in the marriage market to further his ambition. Betrothed at twelve, to a young Spanish nobleman, she found herself at fourteen-when the political wind had changed -married instead to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. By this time her brother Cesare, far more ruthless than her father, was the dominant figure in her life: her marriage was broken mercilessly and another wedding followed to Alfonso of Aragon, nephew of the King of Naples. Yet once again politics called for dissolution of the marriage, this time with the shedding of blood.... Only in her third marriage, to the future Duke of Ferrara, most powerful man in the Italy of her time, did she find escape and lasting happiness.
One of Frank Kenyon's most fascinating heroines, Lucrezia is drawn with the full colour and richly voluptuous splendour of the period of which she is the epitome, and the characters grouped round her are equally vital : her father, the Borgia pope, not altogether without nobility in his character; her intriguing, unscrupulous brother, instigator of the evil acts which threatened to overwhelm her life; her three husbands, strongly contrasted in personality; and Giulia Farnese, at once her lady of honour and her father's mistress. Their intertwined story is played out in scenes as sharp in their etching as the symbolic sword held naked above Lucrezia's head her wedding, signifying faithfulness death.

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