[141] These intrigues are most succinctly explained by Pignotti, but Machiavelli and Sismondi may be consulted, as well as Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, ch. II.

[142] Machiavelli speaks as if Bartolomeo continued in the Venetian service, and Roscoe appears to adopt this view; but the best authorities bear out Sismondi's statement, which I have followed.

[143] Vat. Urb. MSS. No. 941, printed in the Specilegium Romanum of Cardinal Mai, I., 94.—Archivio Diplomatico di Firenze, May 15, 1467.

[144] Ricotti, III., p. 208, quotes these authorities. Our account of the battle endeavours to reconcile the Urbino writers with the generally received facts. Muzio says above 40,000 men were engaged in it. Berni estimates the Count's force at eighty-three squadrons of horse and two thousand foot against ninety-six squadrons and thrice as many infantry; the killed he states at 500, and the wounded at the same number, chiefly on the side of Colleoni. The Ferrarese diarist, speaking of an engagement fought close to his capital, may be preferred to Machiavelli. He considers the loss on both sides at 500 killed, and 1000 mortally wounded, besides "above 1000 horses ripped up;" and mentions Saturday, the 23rd of July, as the date of the battle. Roscoe, in a succinct account of the campaign, cites three authorities for his facts, but two of these refer to points of unimportant detail (one of them quoting a recent writer, whose information is at second hand), while the third establishes a view entirely passed by in the text. I mention this in no spirit of cavilling, but to show the inutility of a system of copious and indiscriminate reference by foot-notes, which, without pretending to establish every momentous statement, constantly distracts attention from the continuous narrative. Corio, a contemporary at the court of Milan, has, by confusing his master's two visits to Florence, misrepresented this engagement as fought in 1471. He mentions some incidents of it, one of which, whether accurate or not, is characteristic of such battles. Federigo, towards the close of the conflict, meeting Alessandro Sforza, whose daughter he had married, but who then fought against him, exclaimed, "Oh, my lord and father! we have already done enough;" to which Sforza replied, "This I leave you to determine;" whereupon both commanders called off their troops. Another anecdote represents Galeazzo Maria as severely blaming the Count of Urbino for not securing a decided victory by a more vigorous onset; to which the latter replied he was nowise to blame, and would leave it to any one cognisant of the art of war to say if he had not proceeded after the rules of military tactics. But so little was the Duke satisfied with this plea, that, when the Count went afterwards to visit him at Milan, he threatened to decapitate him, and would have done so but for the intervention of his secretary Simonetta, a personal friend of Federigo. The latter, taking the hint, soon retired, and made the best of his way home. Notwithstanding Corio's authority, and Galeazzo Maria's impetuous temper, this story appears apocryphal: see our immediate context, [p. 189].

[145] So described by Ricotti, who apparently has declined reducing this measurement to an intelligible quantity. The cubit of Vitruvius was of six, sixteen, or thirty-six palms, a Roman palm being nine inches and a half. Dr. Johnson defines the cubit as eighteen or twenty-one Paris inches. Such want of precision in weights, measures, and money, occasions constant and often inextricable embarrassment in mediæval history.

[146] Such, at least, is the key afforded by Sansovino to the obscure couplet inscribed on his tomb in his great edifice of S. Francesco:—

"Porto le corna ch'ogn'uno le vede,
E tal le porta che non se lo crede."

Baldi asserts for all his wives an unblemished reputation, and charges him with the murder of but two of them. Mazzuchelli alleges that he jilted or repudiated the first, and made away with the next two.

[*147] It is perhaps needless to assert the partiality of this verdict on the life and character of Sigismondo Malatesta. That, after a considerable study of all the available sources of his life and times, I have come to a very different conclusion regarding him, it is perhaps not altogether egotistical to point out. If I send the reader, then, to my own work on this extraordinary man (Sigismondo Malatesta, by Edward Hutton, Dent, 1906), it is that there is no other work concerned with him in the English language. As for Dennistoun, most of what he says, even though it were just in its conclusions, is inaccurate in detail. To begin with, Sigismondo was only "detested" by his enemies; the people of Rimini appear to have loved him, supporting him in his troubles, and loyally standing by his wife Isotta after his death. His bravery is sufficiently proved by a thousand encounters, notably that (described at page 150 of my book) when he outwitted his captors and spent the whole night in a marsh up to his neck in water; or that in which he set out to kill the Pope in the Vatican, and would have done so but that he found him surrounded by cardinals, armed. That his domestic morals were bad, "even in that age of laxity," I am not eager to deny; but no single crime of this sort laid at his door, chiefly by his bitterest enemy Pio II., who in his relations with Sigismondo always seems least himself, can be proved—I have tried to prove them—and all can be very easily denied. As for his three wives, which, according to Dennistoun, he "sacrificed to jealousy or vengeance," it will be sufficient to say that the first Madonna Ginevra d'Este appears to have died of fever at Villa Scolca while Sigismondo was besieging Forlimpopoli, and in any case the d'Este remained his close friends after her death. Neither Clementini (op. cit.) nor Battaglini (op. cit.) nor Broglio, in his unpublished life, know anything of the supposed murder, which, so far as I know, was first laid at Sigismondo's door by Pio II., who hated him for his treachery to Siena. Sigismondo's second wife was Madonna Polissena, daughter of Francesco Sforza. Again, when she died of plague in Rimini, Sigismondo was absent in Lombardy. (Cf. Clementini, op. cit. II., 363, who accuses Pio II. of this second libel also.) As for his third wife Isotta, who had been his mistress, she outlived him, and was killed at last, as is supposed, by her stepson Roberto, in the service of Pope Paul II., who coveted Rimini, and would have had it but that Roberto outwitted him. What motive Sigismondo can have had in murdering his two wives, both daughters of powerful houses, does not appear. To Dennistoun "the sole redeeming trait" in his character was his love of Isotta; but we, less strict perhaps than in middle Victorian times, shall always love and honour him as one of the earliest and most sincere of Italian humanists and patrons of learning and art, a true lover of beauty and a protector of scholars and poets. As for the "deification of his paramour" ([p. 194]), I do not know what it means; but if it refers to the "Divine" Isotta, it was a common mode of address in that age: and for the decoration of the Tempio, they are not pagan gods (alas!), but the planets we see there; they illustrate a poem Sigismondo wrote in his youth. Dennistoun ([note, p. 194]) insists that Sigismondo had three wives before Isotta, though Sismondi would have put him right there. He has been misled probably by an early betrothal of Sigismondo to the daughter of Carmagnuola, who, on her father's execution by the Venetians, was repudiated.

[148] According to his epitaph, on the 7th ides, being the 9th of October, 1468. Sismondi, chap. lxxxi., says on the 13th; calls him father-in-law of Count Federigo; and speaks of his having but two wives besides Isotta. He certainly had three; while his connection with the house of Urbino arose from his brother Domenico having married the sister of Federigo, and his son Roberto espousing a daughter of that Count. Nothing can be more terse and graphic than the sketch of his character by Pius II. in his Commentaries, book II., p. 51.