alternatehistory.com

Being granddaughter of both Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’Medici and Pope Alexander VI, both considered by many as new men and being married (as third wife) to the heir of one of the oldest Italian dynasties was not easy...
Still Maddalena knew everything about how rule and organize splendid courts (her parents’ Urbino and Florence, ruled by her brother were a testimony of the greatness reached by the heirs of the union between the Borgias and the Medicis) and that made her at least accepted in Ferrara without too much troubles. Well that and the fact who her father was one the most powerful and surely the most dangerous of the Italian rulers so Duke Ercole decided who a triple alliance with the Borgias was the best way to secure his domains and married his son, widowed for the second time, to the eldest daughter of Cesare, offering his own granddaughter for the younger brother of her new step-mother (heir of his father’s Urbino) and marrying his grandson (heir of Ferrara) to Cesare‘s niece (ignoring the illegitimacy of both parents of the girl, as Ercole was keen to do, she was a good match being the great-niece of his late wife and an Aragon of Naples). Maddalena had never any illusion about her wedding so she was not disappointed at all and Alfonso, while initially reluctant was positively impressed by his new wife, who was a well know beauty (like all the Borgia women as her younger sister, her paternal aunt and the daughter of the latter, all called Lucrezia, also were renowned beauties), well educated, smart and determinate so they were an happy couple and she had not made regret her long late mother-in-law as Duchess of Ferrara. Her greatest regret was not being able to give a second living son to her husband (but at least her cousin/stepdaughter-in-law Lucrezia secured the line with three sons) and who her only child to become adult was a third daughter for Alfonso... Maddalena in the end was a popular Duchess and a patron of the arts who contributed to the splendor of Ferrara and of the house of Este, who well deserved to be counted among the great ladies of the Italian Renaissance (and she was related to many of them for either birth or marriage)