The Throne

By Franco Bernini

Translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky

Europa Editions 2024

Franco Bernini’s 2023 novel Il trono, narrating the tempestuous 1502 relationship between Cesare Borgia and Niccolo Machiavelli, now has an English-language translation by Oonagh Stransky, issued in a sturdy hardcover from Europa Editions as The Throne. The pairing would have struck contemporaries as drastically uneven: a story split between some anonymous Florentine bureaucrat and one of the highest-flying captains of the era, son of the Pope, Duke of Valentinois, known across Italy as Valentino. To our contemporary eyes, the pairing seems equally uneven: some long-forgotten Renaissance lordling and the immortal author of The Prince. 

In The Throne, Machiavelli has no intimations of immortality. He’s sent by the Signoria in Florence to attach himself to the Borgia prince, learn his attitude and especially his weaknesses, and report everything back to his superiors for future use, a suitably Machiavellian mission that’s complicated by a great many things, from quick assignations of lust to genuine love (for Dionara, intriguingly if too briefly featured) to a growing fascination with Cesare himself, as the two spend time together and contemplate a book, the Res gestae Caesaris, which will chronicle in suitably flattering detail Valentino’s exploits a warrior, city-builder, and visionary. 

This necessarily involves a good deal of travel on horseback, and these dusty journeys fill out the novel’s 400 pages. Machiavelli marvels at his first sight of the Adriatic (“he was, after all,” the narrative informs us, “born inland”). He spots a small fishing boat struggling in a sudden storm and watches from the shore, helpless but transfixed: “Unable to do anything to help them and realizing their lives are in danger, he is distressed, but at the same time he finds their suffering fascinating to watch from where he stands at a safe distance.” And if these incidents weren’t enough to warn you about Bernini’s weakness for heavy-handed allegories and elbow-ribbing foreshadowing, his Machiavelli also visits the Rubicon, where “that fateful January night when the general decided to challenge Rome and become its king.” 

The Throne’s literary provenance isn’t difficult to trace. Like it, Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels or Antonio Scurati’s Mussolini novels rhetorically rehabilitate history’s storied villains and dress out more intimate versions of their stories in a hurtling present-tense narration. The reading premise of The Throne is identical to those earlier works, even though the organizing conceit is entirely different, since Machiavelli wasn’t in any sense a villain, that role being reserved here for Cesare Borgia. 

This Borgia has big dreams. He wants to conquer cities, bring legions under his banner, cobble together from lowly buildings a grand palace for himself and his family, and, as a side project, commission this glib, grubbing new flunky to write about his exploits. Readers conversant with Renaissance history will know how few of Cesare’s projects ever came to fruition, so they won’t be surprised to learn that even this side project fails. Borgia becomes disillusioned with the growing book and excoriates its author in the worst possible way, by telling him he’s not a real writer. Wounded, Machiavelli responds, “My words will live on in perpetuity!” To which Cesare responds, “Why do you say such meaningless things?” 

Long before that point, readers will probably be asking that same question, and they’ll be genuinely puzzled by leaden follow-ups like the kind that follow. “Will he ever be able to express the words that fill his heart?” Machiavelli ponders. “What if it’s true that he isn’t really cut out to be a writer? Sometimes he worries about that.” 

This kind of flat mumbling happens throughout The Throne, even at moments that are meant to be the dramatic high points of the book. When Machiavelli’s done watching those poor fishermen drown, he just rides on. When he reaches the Rubicon, he takes out a book and reads. When he watches Valentino cruelly murder someone he loves, his objections barely rise above a quibble. When, much later in the narrative, he’s savagely tortured by the very city he’s served for so long, he screams and screams, but readers will find it fascinating to watch from where they stand at a safe distance. Whereas other historical novelists have against all odds made their monstrous main characters compelling, Bernini manages something even more impressive although less wanted: he makes a Florentine bland. 

His hindsight sits on the book like a persistent head cold. Everything posterity knows about Machiavelli or thinks it knows is front-loaded onto the innocent year 1502, when no one knew those things and all the tension of Machiavelli not knowing those things is simply ignored. Instead, Bernini has seen the famous Santi di Tito portrait of Machiavelli (made long, long after the time of this novel), the one with what looks like a conniving grin, and he has to work that backwards into the book: “Niccolo knew that sometimes, when his face relaxed, it looked like he was sneering or laughing at something. In actual fact, it was just his personal way of detaching from reality.” This sort of thing is so forced (the smirk could easily have been an impacted wisdom tooth) that it consistently reminds the reader of the very things it should be trying to make them forget. 

The Throne is billed as the first book of a projected trilogy, and that’s mind-boggling. The events covered in this volume are by far the most dramatic things that happened to Machiavelli; the following quarter-century is mostly filled with resentful rutting, ridiculous ambitions, and creeping multiple drafts. How on Earth that kind of material can carry 800 more pages when Bernini couldn’t make Cesare Borgia interesting remains to be seen.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News