Word: borgias
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...double agent, Nicholas plots two of Borgia's famous villainies: the murder of Cesare's captains and the capture of Urbino, a fortress city, by brazenly doublecrossing an ally. But loyalty in this arena is more dangerous than treason, and Nicholas' devotion to a former lover proves his undoing-and almost his death. As usual, Holland, who writes refreshingly taut prose, dispenses with the ponderous plots and pageantry of the genre: her people matter much more than their costumes. By substituting mental thrust and parry for the metal kind, she proves that there can be more...
...Italian Popes of the 15th century were both members of Spain's notorious Borgia family. Alonso de Borgia, elected as Callistus III (1455-58), made the papacy a family affair. So did his nephew Rodrigo, who became Alexander VI in 1492 and named four nephews, as well as his illegitimate son Cesare, Cardinals. In 1503, both father and son fell gravely ill. Alexander died after a week's illness; Cesare survived. It is widely thought that the two master poisoners accidentally partook of the poisoned beverage that they had intended for a rival Cardinal...
...late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Borgia family brought the papacy to its nadir. After the death of the notorious Alexander VI in 1503, Cardinal Sforza succeeded in frustrating Borgia ambitions by having decrepit Cardinal Piccolomini elected Pius III. Rapacious Vatican bureaucrats, accustomed to plundering the apartments of every new Pope on the assumption that the Holy Father would need no further worldly goods, so stripped Pius' cell that he even had to buy back the bed in which he died of gout just 25 days later...
...partially obscuring Michelangelo's famous frescoes. For a quarter of an hour, the assembled Cardinals coughed, covered their mouths and rubbed their eyes until two windows were opened to clear the air. As the Cardinals broke for lunch, walking to the Pontifical Hall in the palace's Borgia apartments, intense discussions were under...
...thinking is shown most dramatically by studies of India's sacred monkey, the hanuman langur. In 1965, a naturalist wrote that the long-tailed black and gray langurs were "relaxed" and "nonaggressive." Now, a Harvard researcher has shown that the langur society operates more like the House of Borgia, complete with kidnaping, constant sexual harassment, group battles, abandonment of some wounded young by their mothers, and the regular practice of infanticide...