Lucrezia Borgia

Just to say her name is to evoke the image of an adventurous woman living in a corrupt and venal age, a woman around whom swirled rumours of incest and murder, of wild orgies and flagrant immorality. The Lucrezia Borgia which emerges from Miss Haslip's admirable study, however, is both something more and something less than this.

Lucrezia was indeed a woman who lived with violence and sudden death; and yet she never lost the laughing gaiety, the irresistible charm for which she was so admired in her time. She was, it is true, very much a pawn in the hands of her ambitious family, but yet, as a woman of grace and intelligence, she was also very much a person in her own right.

She was, in sum, one of the great women of the Italian Renaissance, and as such we have given her a place of honour in our series on 'Women Who Made History'