Below is the complete list of Kate Quinn’s Borgia Chronicles books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Borgia Chronicles Books in Publication Order
- The Serpent and the Pearl (2013)
- The Lion and the Rose (2014)
About Borgia Chronicles
Kate Quinn’s Borgia Chronicles is a compact historical series, but it does not read like a minor side project. Set in Renaissance Rome during the rise of the Borgia family, the sequence consists of The Serpent and the Pearl followed by The Lion and the Rose, and Quinn’s own series page presents it as a connected two-book saga rather than a loose thematic pairing.
What gives the series its shape is Quinn’s decision not to tell the Borgias’ story only from the center of official power. Instead, she builds the books around figures drawn into the family’s orbit, especially Giulia Farnese, while allowing the famous Borgia names to exert pressure from within the Vatican, court life, and the shifting alliances of Rome. That approach matters because it keeps the novels from becoming a simple parade of notorious historical personalities. The Borgias remain powerful, dangerous, seductive presences, but the emotional experience of the series comes from watching outsiders and near-insiders try to survive proximity to that power. Quinn’s official descriptions emphasize exactly that pattern: a ruthless family controlling Rome and three outsiders caught in their web of blood, politics, and deceit.
The first book, The Serpent and the Pearl, establishes the core world of the series in 1492, at the moment of papal transition and Borgia ascent. The second, The Lion and the Rose, is explicitly framed as a continuation of that same saga, carrying forward not just the setting but the character dynamics and political dangers already in motion. That is why publication order matters here. This is not a case where two novels merely share a historical backdrop. The second book builds on the first book’s relationships, tensions, and established stakes, so reading them out of order would flatten much of what Quinn is trying to do with the developing court intrigue.
The series also marks an interesting point in Quinn’s career. Before she became best known for twentieth-century novels such as The Alice Network, she had already been writing ambitious historical fiction set in earlier eras. The Borgia books came after her Roman novels and show her moving from imperial Rome to Renaissance Italy without losing her core interests. She is still writing about women navigating systems built by male power, still interested in loyalty, status, sexuality, danger, and self-invention, and still drawn to historical periods where political struggle becomes inseparable from intimate life. In that sense, the Borgia Chronicles fits naturally beside the Empress of Rome books even though the setting has changed by more than a millennium.
What distinguishes these novels from a broader shelf of Renaissance historical fiction is their balance of glamour and menace. Quinn does not strip the Borgias of their legendary fascination, but she also does not use them as decorative scandal. The appeal lies in the feeling that every luxury has a cost and every alliance may conceal a trap. Rome is presented as spiritually exalted and politically corrupt at the same time, which gives the books their particular charge. The Vatican, noble households, private chambers, and public ceremony all become stages on which survival depends on reading motive correctly and moving carefully. That atmosphere is one of the series’ strongest achievements.
For readers looking at the list above, the most useful way to understand the Borgia Chronicles is as a single two-part arc. It is shorter than Quinn’s Roman saga and more narrowly focused, but it offers the same interest in historical power seen through personal vulnerability. Read in publication order, the series gives a concentrated version of what Quinn does well: vivid historical setting, emotionally charged danger, and a sharp understanding that life near the center of power is rarely secure, no matter how dazzling it looks.