How does an assassin spy wield power in Renaissance Italy?
Micheletto, the spy/assassin who works for Cesare Borgia in The Borgias (Showtime) is easily one of my favorite characters. Not because I am bloodthirsty like him—I’m far from it. But I find him fascinating because of how he claims agency and power in a world designed to deprive people like him from having any at all.
Want to catch up on the discussions about this show so far? I started dissecting characters when I was covering narrative rebellion via a podcast. You can find episodes about Rodrigo, Cesare, and Lucrezia Borgia here.
Who was Micheletto?
Fair warning: From here on out, there will be spoilers. I don’t feel bad about it because the show is not new.
Micheletto was born in Forli, which, during the timeline of the show, is predominantly controlled by Caterina Sforza. He is first introduced as an assassin hired by one of the cardinals of the College of Cardinals to poison father and son dynamic duo Rodrigo and Cesare Borgia shortly after Rodrigo becomes Pope. He and Cesare have a scuffle in the kitchen after Marcel from Friends the cute monkey they cast takes one for the Borgia team. Cesare could kill Micheletto, but instead offers to employ him.
Micheletto could totally fight his way out of the kitchen, but it’s unlikely the cardinals will have more work for him after his failure, and Cesare could probably sound the alarm before he escapes, so he figures sure, why not — he’ll work for the most infamous family in the city. After all, someone has to commit murders for them until Cesare is ready to kill all by his lonesome.
In the show, Micheletto is interesting because of this but also because he is a gay man, illiterate though he has a photographic memory and can memorize and reproduce text he’s seen, and because he has a soft spot for Lucrezia and her infant son. (There’s a really great moment when they are talking and Micheletto reveals how much he cares and wants them to be reunited after the king of Naples separates them.)
How does Micheletto claim agency and power?
Forgetting for a moment that he’s pretty physically powerful as a fighter, and that he wields the power of the knowledge of the art of… assassinry?… Micheletto’s truest moments of claiming his agency and power come toward the end of the series.
By this point, Cesare has gone a bit mad with power and has made Micheletto do some stuff he didn’t want to do… like murdering the young man he fell in love with who was also a spy for the main enemy of the Borgias. That character’s death was so sad, but also really gross because Micheletto basically holds his boyfriend while the guy bleeds out. If blood makes you queasy, skip that scene and just know it was sad, k?
Anyway, after that, Micheletto disappears. Cesare cannot find him at all but he’s learned how to write “Goodbye” and does so in his murdered boyfriend’s lifeblood on the floor of his very minimalist apartment. Minimalist because he owns like… a desk, a chair, and a blanket. Anyway, I was cheering for Micheletto at that point because he finally reached a level where he wasn’t going to debase himself in service of Cesare’s ambition anymore.
Or so we think.
He returns, briefly, in the last episode, to help Cesare plan how to topple Forli. It seems like he does this out of loyalty but I also think he does this because Forli was a city where he could never be himself growing up. The only place he could have a date night was in the cemetery. Now, that might be the favorite spot of some people’s, and that’s fine, but it’s not super romantic.
So Cesare thinks he’s back for good and gets all excited about that, but Micheletto is like… nope, dude, I just came to tell you this one thing. TL;DR: I value my soul at least a tiny little bit and I’m not going to be your murder monkey anymore. (Yes, I intentionally brought back the monkey.)
We have no idea what Micheletto is going to do after that. He leaves, presumably to go kill for someone with a bit less ambition or insanity. Because Cesare has totally lost it by this point, and is so full of his own sense of importance that everyone around him will either be his prisoner, pawn, or lose their life. (Incidentally, historically, apparently his wife and daughter hated him. Can’t blame them.)
So Micheletto walks off into the sunset between Tuscany and Rome, having claimed his own agency and power.
It’s a brilliant ending for him, even if I wanted to see how he fared after that.
What’s this got to do with writing?
SO much. But we’re going to focus on the idea of a character who starts out pretty dark (an assassin/spy in Micheletto’s case) and starts working for someone who has way more power and agency, gets sucked into doing things that are too depraved even for them, but finally the last straw breaks and they claim their own agency and power.
For the exercise paired with this discussion, I’m prompting you to create such a character. Write the moment they claim their agency and power, and do it without their former directive force (person, institution, etc.) facing any negative consequences by their hand (in the same way Micheletto does not hurt Cesare — in fact he helps him one last time).
Write about a 500-1,000-word scene and then pop back here to share how it went in comments!
