They burst out of obscurity in Spain not only to capture the great prize of the papacy, but to do so twice. Throughout a tumultuous half century as popes, statesmen, warriors, lovers, and breathtakingly ambitious political adventurers they held center stage in the glorious and blood drenched pageant known to us as the Italian Renaissance, standing at the epicenter of the power games in which Europe’s kings and Italy’s warlords gambled for life and death stakes.