JULIUS II. AS CARDINAL

From a medal in the British Museum

The late Pope, following the practice of the times, had endowed his natural son Francesco Cibò (ancestor of the princes of Massa) with Anguillara, Cervetri, and other holdings to the north-west of Rome, and had married him to Madalena, sister of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Desirous of exchanging this precarious sovereignty for some more peaceful home, Francesco, by the influence of his brother-in-law, Pietro de' Medici, induced the King of Naples to advance 40,000 ducats to Gentile Virginio Orsini, for the purchase of these castles, which adjoined his fief of Bracciano. This slight circumstance served to kindle that train which the long series of events now alluded to had gradually prepared for combustion, and to ripen those jealousies already sown among the Peninsular powers. The Pope saw in it an accession of territory to one of those great barons of the Campagna whom he had resolved to humble; Ludovico il Moro, with the coward suspicions of guilt, watched every motion of Ferdinand, whose just indignation at his treatment of the Duke of Milan he had too good reason to dread. As soon, therefore, as he had ascertained that Pietro de' Medici, abandoning the cautious neutrality which his father had ever maintained between the Milanese and Neapolitan interests, had united with Ferdinand in the affair of Orsini, as well as in the less serious intrigue which had prevented the cementing of a general confederation he plotted to provide for the King full occupation at home.

Suddenly, however, the tangled policy of the Peninsular states assumed an aspect more favourable to Ludovico. The ambitious overtures of Alexander to obtain for his natural son Giuffredo the hand of Sancia of Aragon having been spurned by her father Alfonso, the impetuous Pontiff, in April, 1493, hastily concluded a defensive treaty with Milan and Venice, for the avowed purpose of expelling Orsini, the ally of Naples, from his recent acquisitions. These having been obtained by that feudatory, with the aid of his tried friend Ferdinand, and his relation Pietro de' Medici, he naturally looked to these two powers for support; and thus was Italy on the point of relapsing into her normal condition of feud. But the King of Naples, considering such a price extravagant for the mere gratification of family pride, had within a few weeks adjusted his differences with the Pope, by betrothing his granddaughter to Giuffredo Borgia. As if by repulsion of the magnetic poles, the accession of Ferdinand caused Il Moro to secede from the alliance he had just before joined, but from which he could no longer look for support in his lawless authority, and, judging his only security to consist in the depression of that monarch, he resolved to effect it at any price.

Upon these most inadequate grounds of personal pique, or personal apprehension, did Ludovico madly run upon the very danger against which he had been the first to prepare

"All the swords
In Italy, and her confederate arms."

In his eagerness to disable Ferdinand's anticipated vengeance upon his own crimes, he renewed the calamities of a succession-war in the south, and thereby laid open the Peninsula to a scourge whose chastisement fell most heavily upon himself. Instead of heading a league against foreign aggression, as he had just before proposed, he made overtures to Charles VIII., tempting him with the diadem of Naples as the reward of an invasion of Italy, and offering him free passage through the Milanese. His private quarrel with the usurper did not blind Ferdinand to the insanity of this step, and, forgetting his feelings as a parent, he united with the other powers in representing the peril of his policy. Gladly would Ludovico have withdrawn the false step he had hastily made; but it was too late. The demon of ambition was roused in the French king; the hour for retraction was passed; that of bitter repentance was at hand. Behind her Alpine barrier there was gathered an army, ready to burst upon fated Italy, and to pour upon her plains calamities unknown since the fall of the Western Empire.