The Life of Cesare Borgia | Page 3

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The Life of Cesare Borgia
Of France, Duke of Valentinois and Romagna, Prince of Andria and
Venafri Count of Dyois, Lord of Piombino, Camerino and Urbino,
Gonfalonier and Captain-General of Holy Church
A History and Some Criticisms
by Raphael Sabatini

PREFACE
This is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It is a
record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human,
strenuous age; a lustful, flamboyant age; an age red with blood and pale
with passion at white-heat; an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour,
dazzling light and impenetrable shadow; an age of swift movement,
pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing
contrasts.
To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct
century--as we conceive our own to be--is for sedate middle-age to
judge from its own standpoint the reckless, hot, passionate, lustful
humours of youth, of youth that errs grievously and achieves greatly.
So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless
procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with it,
as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the
youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we
waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to
accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages
as may pursue the study of us.
But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards of
our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals
for judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the
purpose from the environment in which they had their being? How
false must be the conception of