Did you love The Medici miniseries and are you loving The Serpent Queen? Do you wonder why Netflix skipped several generations before resuming the Medici saga with Catherine, the cruel and devious "Serpent Queen" who was nothing like her great grandfather, Lorenzo Il Magnifico?
My guess is that Netflix abandoned the Medici because they were pushed out of power and exiled from Florence after Il Magnifico's death, for the first time in the family's four hundred year reign. Their story became that of the short-lived Republic of Florence and Niccolo Machiavelli, its second-in-command. Real history: the Republic repeatedly staved off Il Magnifico's inept oldest son, Catherine de' Medici's grandfather. Treachery, guile, and the slaughter of thousands of innocents opened a path for the family's return.
Machiavelli was then imprisoned and repeatedly tortured on order of Il Magnifico's youngest son--later a pope--for a crime he likely didn't commit.
Machiavelli, Murder and the Medici tells that story, as a backdrop to a murder mystery intertwined with the politics of the short-lived Florentine Republic and the Medici followers who helped overthrow it. If Amazon lets me I will give it away for free for a brief period after first publication. Watch for a link here.
After more than 500 Amazon reviews, all four previous Nicola Machiavelli "Real History Mysteries" average four out of five stars. All contain amazing Renaissance art. Machiavelli's fictional illegitimate daugher is the mystery-solving protagonist in each, traveling to meet famous historical figures such as the Borgias, the artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, the young Martin Luther, and Henry VIII early in his reign with his formidable first queen, Katherine of Aragon.
Films have always wrongly portrayed Niccolo Machiavelli as dour, dishonest and cynical based on The Prince, the "Machiavellian" book that made him infamous. Machiavelli, Murder and the Medici will show you the far more fascinating real man. He was a cameleon: a brilliand diplomat but also a jokester, a womanizer, a poet, a bon vivant, a Florentine patriot and a friend to many in the Florentine elite. It says much about him that he published a comic play as his first public act after his torture and imprisonment. All Italy enjoyed it--even the Medici pope who ordered his arrest and torture. It also speaks volumes that Machiavelli's The Prince was not published until after his death, though he pubished his histories, discourses and thousands of pages of other writings during his lifetime.
The Prince was intended only for the eyes of Catherine de' Medici's father, who never read it. He was a very different Lorenzo from his grandfather, Il Magnifico. Catherine was very much her father's daughter.