Renaissance Rivals, the long-awaited sequel to the global bestseller Leonardo’s Swans, tells the story of the brutal rivalry between two of history’s most fascinating power women: Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, celebrated in her own lifetime as “The First Lady of the World,” and Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara, daughter of the infamous Pope Alexander VI and one of the most maligned women in history.
Before Maggie O’Farrell’s doomed duchess in The Marriage Portrait, there were the women who built the courts, forged alliances, and commanded works of artistic genius. In both Renaissance Rivals and Leonardo’s Swans, Essex invites readers to step back one generation into the glittering courts of Renaissance Italy, where beauty, intellect, marriage, and ambition could determine the fate of nations.
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Walking Through the World of Renaissance Rivals
By Karen Essex
I have spent years walking through the world of Renaissance Rivals.
Whenever I write about the past, I want to stand where my characters stood, move through the rooms they inhabited, and linger long enough to take in something of the air they breathed. Books and letters give me facts. Places give me atmosphere.
For Renaissance Rivals, those places were above all Mantua and Ferrara, two beautifully preserved cities in northern Italy that I return to with enormous affection.
Most visitors to Italy make their way to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan. Mantua and Ferrara are often overlooked, which is part of their charm. They are smaller, quieter, and far less overwhelmed by tourism. Walking their streets, one can still feel the scale of Renaissance court life in a way that is harder to grasp in the larger cities.
They are exquisite, almost museum-quality towns, filled with palaces, churches, courtyards, frescoes, arcades, and broad stone streets. One can pause without being swept along by a crowd. One can sit in a piazza, look up at a palace window, and imagine who might once have stood there watching a procession pass below.
Today, Mantua and Ferrara feel elegant and self-contained, but during the Renaissance, they were centers of immense political, cultural, and dynastic power. The rulers of these comparatively small states negotiated and warred with popes, kings, emperors, generals, and the wealthiest families in Europe.
This is the world into which Isabella d’Este was born. Her family had ruled Ferrara for centuries, building one of the oldest and most formidable dynasties in Italy. Her father, Ercole d’Este, was known as “the Diamond,” a name that referred not merely to the family emblem, but to his hardness, calculation, and ability to make cold political decisions.
He was among the wealthiest and most powerful rulers of his era. His children were raised with the understanding that they belonged to a dynasty whose survival mattered more than personal inclination.
Isabella was educated accordingly. She learned languages, music, literature, politics, and the social graces expected of a Renaissance princess. She was trained to represent her family, bear heirs, and defend the prestige of the Este name.
Ferrara still carries the grandeur of that world. I have walked through the Castello Estense, with its towers, moat, passageways, state rooms, and darker chambers. I have wandered its streets imagining the processions that once brought brides, ambassadors, soldiers, and visiting princes into the city. The scale of the court becomes easier to understand when one stands inside it.
The Este family lived within a fortified political machine. At a recent keynote I gave about Renaissance women, an attendee noted that the palaces felt more like fortresses than luxurious residences.
“Of course,” I replied. “They were palaces designed as defense systems. Every room had a purpose. Every entrance could be watched and defended.” The Castello was not built primarily for comfort or display, but to protect the family and uphold its power.
When Lucrezia Borgia arrived in Ferrara in 1502 to marry Isabella’s brother Alfonso, she entered not simply a household, but a dynasty.
She came carrying the notorious Borgia name, the wealth of the papal court, and a reputation shaped by enemies who had portrayed her as a seductress, poisoner, and accomplice to the crimes of her father and brother.
Lucrezia arrived in Ferrara as a young woman who had already survived two politically arranged marriages, the annulment of the first, and the murder of her second husband. Walking through Ferrara, I often imagined what that arrival must have felt like.
Lucrezia was leaving Rome, the city of her father’s power, for a court that distrusted her. I spent considerable time in Rome, especially at the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo, the forbidding fortress used by Lucrezia’s father, Pope Alexander VI. Those immense, shadowed spaces helped me absorb the atmosphere of Lucrezia’s early life: the splendor and ceremony of the papal court, the presence of weaponry and armed power, and the sense that refuge and imprisonment could exist within the same walls.
In Ferrara, Lucrezia was now entering the family of Isabella d’Este, one of the most admired women in Europe. Every gesture, gown, jewel, and word would be scrutinized. While Ferrara offered her a chance to begin again, it also presented a new arena in which she would have to prove herself.
Mantua, Isabella’s city, creates a different sensation. It is surrounded by water, its palaces rising from a landscape that can feel serene, luminous, and slightly dreamlike. I have spent many hours walking through Mantua, returning to the Ducal Palace, lingering in courtyards, and imagining Isabella moving through those spaces both in times of pleasure and political panic.
Mantua was a small state surrounded by more powerful neighbors. Though ruled by the ancient and venerable Gonzaga family, its survival depended upon military alliances, diplomacy, marriages, intelligence, and the skill of its rulers. Isabella understood that power could be cultural as well as military.
She transformed her court into one of the artistic and intellectual centers of the Renaissance. She commissioned great painters such as Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. She collected antiquities and sought advice on her collection from Michelangelo. She cultivated musicians and writers and created rooms that expressed her learning and ambition.
Her famous studiolo, or private study, fascinates me because it feels so personal. This was a room designed to reflect her mind. Paintings, books, antiquities, and precious objects were arranged not simply for beauty, but to establish who Isabella believed herself to be. She was creating her own legacy while she was still alive.
Standing in Mantua, it is easy to understand why she cared so fiercely about reputation and control. Her authority was never entirely secure. It depended upon her marriage, her children, her birth family, her husband’s political fortunes, and her ability to command respect in a world governed by men.
Isabella could not afford to be dismissed. That is one reason the arrival of Lucrezia Borgia in the Este family mattered so deeply to her.
Lucrezia was younger, beautiful, wealthy, and already famous. She brought papal influence and a talent for winning affection. Over time, she became a respected duchess, administrator, patron, and political figure in Ferrara.
The supposedly scandalous outsider proved to be formidable. The rivalry between Isabella and Lucrezia unfolded across these two cities, though their world extended into Milan, Venice, Rome, France, and the territories of the Holy Roman Emperor.
I have followed their paths through all of them. In Milan, I walked through the Castello Sforzesco and stood beneath ceilings decorated by Leonardo da Vinci. In Venice, I imagined the women arriving in state, competing for the attention of the Doge and the Senate. In Rome, I traced the world of the papal court, where religion, politics, family ambition, art, and corruption were inseparable.
Yet Mantua and Ferrara remain the places where I feel closest to them. Perhaps this is because the cities are intimate enough to encourage imagination. One can walk from palace to church to piazza and begin to understand how closely the political and private worlds overlapped.
A woman might leave her apartments to attend a performance or Mass and know that every detail of her appearance would be observed. A family dinner might contain the seeds of a military alliance or a betrayal. A visiting ambassador might note where she stood, whom she greeted, and which jewels she wore.
At the same time, danger was everywhere. France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, Milan, and the papacy all competed for influence across the Italian peninsula. Cities changed hands. Husbands were captured. Popes died. Alliances collapsed. Children failed to survive. A woman’s position could be transformed by a single death or military defeat.
That instability forms the true setting of Renaissance Rivals. The novel takes place amid extraordinary beauty, yet none of that beauty is safe. Isabella and Lucrezia inhabit palaces filled with frescoes, music, silk, jewels, and great works of art. They also live within a world of invasions, dynastic marriages, espionage, assassination, and political calculation.
Mantua and Ferrara are serene now. In their age, they were stages upon which some of the most ambitious families in Europe fought for survival. Each time I return, I try to look past the quiet streets and preserved rooms. I imagine the sound of horses entering a courtyard, the weight of ceremonial gowns, the arrival of messengers carrying news from Rome, and the tension of two women measuring one another across a crowded hall.
Research tells me what happened but walking through these places helps me understand how it might have felt.
Karen Essex is the national and international bestselling author of RUN, DARLING, KLEOPATRA, PHARAOH, LEONARDO'S SWANS, STEALING ATHENA, DRACULA IN LOVE, AND BETTIE PAGE: LIFE OF A PINUP LEGEND. All feature iconic women—powerful women that seduced the world and ruled it.
Essex is also an active screenwriter and speaker, and an award-winning journalist. She divides her time between Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Europe. Her novels are published in twenty-nine languages.
Leonardo’s Swans, the prequel to Renaissance Rivals, was a runaway bestseller in Italy and won the prestigious Premio Roma for Foreign Fiction.
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