A spectacular, elegant, brilliant portrait of skulduggery, murder and sex in Renaissance Florence Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening Standard, Books of the Year 1531 after years of brutal war and political intrigue, the bastard son of a Medici Duke and a half-negro maidservant rides into Florence. Within a year, he rules the city as its Prince. Backed by the Pope and his future father-in-law the Holy Roman Emperor, the nineteen-year-old Alessandro faces down bloody family rivalry and the scheming hostility of Italys oligarchs to reassert the Medicis faltering grip on the turbulent city-state. Six years later, as he awaits an adulterous liaison, he will be murdered by his cousin in another mans bed.Nothing in sixteenth-century history is more astonishing Hilary Mantel