A review by siria
The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro De' Medici by Catherine Fletcher

informative medium-paced

3.5

Catherine Fletcher's The Black Prince is a history of early sixteenth-century Florence as centered around the career of its first duke: Alessandro de' Medici. Fletcher does a good job in wringing as much information and personality as can be gleaned from the sometimes fragmented source base, and in bringing to life the whirl of Renaissance Florence. Alessandro's reign was a short one though—he was assassinated when only in his mid-20s—and much of the interest of his career has to come from the "what if?" of it all. This, combined with the fact that what general/historiographical interest Alessandro has attracted in the last two centuries or so has tended to centre around the question of whether or not he was mixed race, made me feel like Fletcher missed a trick in writing a fairly standard history of Medici Florence rather than a book which dealt as much with his cultural legacy as it did with the events of Alessandro's life.