The Tyrant

The 15th century Italian Cardinal, respected military figure and alleged illegitimate son of a Catholic Pope, Cesare Borgia, wasn't just the inspiration of the famous book 'The Prince' by Niccolò Machiavelli, he is also the subject of the play "The Tyrant" by Rafael Sabatini. Straddling the line between two extreme views, the historical view of the villainous acts of a monster that Cesare is often portrayed in history as, and the more realistic view of a brilliant man erroneously slandered, as Sabatini held, a matter he seeks to show through a singular episode in his life. As the preface states, "In other words, I would show Cesare Borgia moving through a set of circumstances that should reveal his daring, his resource, his splendour, his athletic physical beauty, his personal magnetism, his intellectual acuteness, his ruthlessness, his merciless ambition, his typical fifteenth-century cruelty and his remorseless egotism, whilst at the same time in nothing suggesting that he could not in a different set of circumstances have perpetrated any or all of the villainies with which the popular conception charges him…"