The Cardinal's Hat: Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince

The Cardinal’s Hat is the fascinating story of how Ippolito d’Este, the second son of Lucretia Borgia, became the Archbishop of Milan. Through his own letters and ledgers, recently uncovered in the basement of an archive in the Northern Italian town of Modena, Mary Hollingsworth has pieced together a fascinating and undeniably titillating tale of a real-life Renaissance cardinal and how he achieved his ambition to acquire the coveted cardinal’s hat—a road to power and wealth in Sixteenth-century Italy that has little to do with piety.