Sigismondo Malatesta, the papal vicar of Rimini and famed mercenary captain, has long enjoyed notoriety as a result of his defiant stance towards his overlords, the popes, who around the mid-fifteenth century had begun the laborious process of bringing the various parts of the Papal State under their direct control. The growing rift between the two culminated on 27 April 1462 when Pope Pius II, the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, not only excommunicated Sigismondo but performed what he called an “ironic canonization”. In a thirty-nine-page invective Pius accused the lord of Rimini of the most heinous crimes—including fratricide, unbridled lust, and paganism—and had his effigies burned in the squares of Rome. The invective had a lasting impact on the image Sigismondo came to enjoy in the coming centuries, and though twentieth- century historians have debunked many of Pius’s claims, modern poets and playwrights continue to find the lord of Rimini a source of inspiration. Going beyond the legend that Pius helped create, Anthony D’Elia’s new book takes us to the years that preceded Malatesta’s rift with the papacy, more precisely to the decade of 1448–1458 when Sigismondo used the resources he accumulated as mercenary captain across Italy to set up a vibrant Renaissance court in Rimini. D’Elia analyzes the works of the Rimini court humanists in order to recover the image that Sigismondo sought to fashion of himself, an image that was more heterodox, more ‘pagan’ than that of any other contemporary Italian lord.