The Bed and the Throne

Book excerpt: "Brilliant, vain, generous, calculating, Isabella D'Este played the Renaissance game with an expertise that outflanked Popes and Emperors, using her brains, her charm, and her unswerving purpose to psych her opponents. An accomplished flirt, an astute statesman, she kept Mantua, the state ostensibly ruled by her husband, intact and safe from a series of powerful predators: Cesare Borgia, the Republic of Venice, a succession of Popes, the King of Naples, two Kings of France. Toward the end of her life, she turned over to her son one of the few independent principalities of sixteenth-century Italy"--from front jacket flap.