The Bhutto family are not the first political dynasty drawn to life on the front line despite knowing that it could well be a firing line. Power has proved an equally fatal attraction to two generations of India's Gandhi family and to America's Kennedys. Similarly, the modern history of Lebanon could not be told without the attempts of various Gemayels to show themselves above the parapets and be slain in the process.

After the execution of Benazir Bhutto's father, the mysterious demise of one brother and the death in a police shoot-out of her other estranged brother while she was Prime Minister, her own assassination in the midst of a comeback campaign is a tragic twist almost beyond Shakespearean drama.

Assassination has always been an occupational hazard of the influential. Nobody who has even nominally ruled Afghanistan during the past two centuries could have done a proper risk assessment and concluded the odds were favourable. Yet, one Barakzai relative after another stepped forward, imagining the cycle of murder and usurpation would end with the introduction of his own superior statecraft.

Admittedly, for the Barakzais, alternative career options were limited. But given that the surviving members of the Bhutto clan could easily take the money and run, the extent to which their sense of mission, or entitlement, propels them to persist with political controversy is remarkable.

Yet while the Romanovs, Bourbons and Habsburgs endured their share of family mishap, you must go back to 14th-century Italy to find a European equivalent to the dangers that have engulfed the Bhuttos.

In Verona, the ruling family was the Della Scalas. Cangrande “Raging Dog” Della Scala was killed in 1359 by his brother Cansignorio who, in turn, murdered his other brother. Thereafter, Antonio assassinated his brother Bartolommeo, only to find himself forced out by his subjects who, in desperation, turned for help to the Milanese Visconti family.

The Veronese should have noticed that the Visconti coat of arms featured a serpent swallowing a baby. Having defeated his nephew, Lucchino Visconti married Pope Adrian V's niece. Unfortunately she poisoned him in 1349. A decade later, Matteo II met a similar fate at the hands of his brothers, one of whom, Bernabo, subsequently died in prison having been deposed by his nephew, Gian Galleazo, whose young son and successor, Giovanni, was assassinated in 1412. Unsurprisingly, the direct line had died out by 1447.

Great dynasties appear determined to seek out their apparent destiny, heedless of the risks involved. The tragedy is that, however noble their intentions, when the moderating institutions of civil society are enfeebled, they may find themselves in a family saga that more closely resembles The Godfather.

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