Menace: portrait of Cesare Borgia by Altobello Melone, 15th-16th century

In the summer of 1502, the youthful Cesare Borgia was on his third rampage through the Romagna region of northern Italy, brutally seizing city after city in the name of his father, Pope Alexander VI, before consigning their leaders to particularly grisly deaths. When Borgia started menacing the proud city-state of Florence, it sent two unlikely emissaries to appease him: the poet Niccolò Machiavelli and the artist Leonardo da Vinci.

Already a cardinal at 25, and renowned as "the most handsome man in Italy", Borgia was the illegitimate son of a murderous tyrant who had bought himself the papacy to secure control of the nation for his family rather than his office. At 33, Machiavelli was Florence's ablest negotiator-cum-spy, as much an erudite James Bond as a canny Henry Kissinger. Fifty-year-old Leonardo, an artist famous for his inability to finish commissions, was employed in this instance for his developing skills as a military engineer.

Machiavelli correctly divined that Borgia's threats towards Florence were a daring bluff, yet he and Leonardo had little choice but to tag along through the winter that constitutes the red meat of Paul Strathern's richly detailed study. The succession of betrayals and counter-betrayals, strategic marriages and cynical murders, amid the heedless carnage required by Borgia to secure the dukedom conferred on him by his father, cumulatively grows dizzying. But it proved as crucially formative a year in the lives of the writer and the artist as in the fluctuating fortunes of the Borgia family.

Thanks in part to Machiavelli's shrewd counsel and Leonardo's ahead-of-its-time ingenuity, young Cesare stitched up Romagna, while back in Rome, his father dealt with the bigger strategic picture, juggling threats from France and Spain as much as those closer to home from Pisa and Venice. Alliances kept shifting with events; threats from Italian families such as the Medicis were as potentially lethal as the territorial ambitions of the French and Spanish crowns. Italy's long struggle to become a unified nation is presaged here as tragically as in Verdi's historical operas.

With the pope's death the following year, Borgia's fortunes began to nosedive; his mistake, as seen by Machiavelli, was to fail to reproduce his father's intuitive grasp of broader geopolitics. Illness, imprisonment and exile to Spain preceded his death at the age of just 31 in a madcap escapade deemed by his (probably) incestuous sister, Lucrezia, so reckless as to be "a form of suicide". Machiavelli and Leonardo would also both die in exile from their home city, and out of its favour, at the respective ages of 58 and 67.

In its hour of greatest peril, Florence still proved the creative crucible of the Renaissance. Leonardo's ride through the Apennine mountains on Borgia's behalf provided him with the backdrop for the Mona Lisa. Already his young rival, Michelangelo, was at work on the 18-foot-high block of Carrera marble that would become his David. "As in ancient Greece," writes Strathern, "such achievements frequently occur when the civilisation that produced them is under threat."

He tops and tails his triple biography with potted lives of Leonardo and Machiavelli, their experiences tailored to show Borgia's supposed influence on their thinking. Leonardo's inexhaustible inventiveness, for instance, saw him continuing to design ingenious weapons of mass destruction, but refusing to publish them because of what he had seen of man's inhumanity to man. Machiavelli would base The Prince – his posthumous claim to fame – on the "pluralist" version of the "new science" of politics as practised by Cesare Borgia.

Borgia may be this book's central figure, but the uninitiated will learn as much about the other two protagonists as indeed about endemic Italian in-fighting. In an era when publishers are obsessed by celebrity biographies, this is an upscale example of the slice-of-life genre now looming large in non-fiction, zeroing in on a particular moment when famous names memorably crossed paths.

"The complexities and subterfuges of Italian politics during this period did not lend themselves to epic form; this was no era of heroes or mythic adventures," writes Strathern of Machiavelli's "Decennale primo", his late attempt at a terza rima poem on a Dantean scale. The same, alas, can at times be said of Strathern's own book, which is littered with clichés: people invariably ride "hell for leather", for instance, or "as fast as their horses could carry them". Infuriatingly, moreover, neither the author nor his editor know the correct place in any sentence for the word "only", which occurs all too often. Such caveats aside, this is a cleverly crafted study of a pivotal moment in European history, culture and thought.



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Machiavelli was Florence's ablest negotiator-cum-spy, as much an erudite James Bond as a canny Henry Kissinger.