“Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence’s leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia’s forces. Maybe it was both. But either way, Leonardo was no mere pawn or agent. He would not have gone to work for Borgia unless he wanted to.”
