"A horrible war [raged] in the state of Urbino,
In fifteen hundred and seventeen,
[With] many troops brave and chosen
Led by the Duke Lorenzino,
When Francesco Maria into his duchy
Was returned, with capital troops,
Spaniards, Mantuans, and other clans,
Each one a paladin in arms;
Urbino then, and all the district,
Being in great peril and dread.
Oh, Virgin Mother! ever kind to us,
Often did the host approach our walls,
And God alone it was who defended them:
Therefore has been dedicated to thee this image by thy worshippers
Of Maciola, with their grateful vows."

In the war thus concluded, Francesco Maria struggled for eight months, single-handed and penniless, against the temporal and spiritual influence of the Holy See, backed by all the continental powers. Unable to carry his object by a coup-de-main, he was in the end vanquished by the superior resources of his oppressor. In a parting address to his subjects, he assumed the tone of victory, asserting that he withdrew, not under compulsion, but from consideration of their interests, which a prolonged struggle must have deeply compromised. Thus retiring with honour, he promised to return to them with glory, when he could do so without detriment to their welfare. He was escorted by l'Escu as far as Cento, whence he rejoined his family at Mantua, presenting his consort with sixty-four standards, taken during this brief and unequal campaign, wherein his talents had been developed, his character strengthened, his fame extended.

We have dwelt somewhat minutely—it may be tediously—upon these events, for the contest was one of vital moment to Francesco Maria, his duchy being at once the theatre of operations and the guerdon of victory. Yet this petty war was pregnant with results of wider interest; for the enormous drain of money it occasioned so aggravated the financial difficulties of the papacy, as to bring to a crisis those abuses which finally matured the Reformation. The Minio despatches abound in proofs of the desperate state to which the treasury was reduced, and of the simoniacal expedients resorted to for ready money. One of these may be noted as compromising Bembo, who so often re-appears in these pages. He and Sadoleto had, since Leo's accession, monopolised his private brieves, which afforded them a handsome return, from gratuities and bribes, to the exclusion of the other papal secretaries. Now, however, the latter offered to their needy master a purse of 25,000 ducats, if admitted to share the spoils, which was greedily accepted, without regard to vested interests; and his Holiness was delighted to find the purchase-money of his ordinary secretaryships thereby raised at once from 6000 to 7000 ducats each. The imposition of one tenth laid on the clergy, avowedly for the proposed Turkish crusade, was absorbed by this Urbino campaign, which was thought to have cost the Holy See thirty thousand men, and a million of scudi. Even Henry VIII. was applied to for a loan of 200,000 ducats, which he characteristically evaded by offering 100,000, on condition of levying for himself the clergy tenths. But let us take the Pontiff's own statement, volunteered to Minio:—"See, by your troth, what a business this is! The war costs us 700,000 ducats; and we have been so ill served by these ministers, that worse cannot be imagined: this very month we had to disburse 120,000. When we commenced the war we had some few funds, which we had not chosen to touch, but the Lord God has aided us. We should never have thought it possible to raise 100,000 ducats, and we have obtained 700,000; see how astonishing this is! Had we deemed it possible to obtain 700,000 ducats, we would have undertaken the expedition against the Turks single-handed."

But where was the minion for whom all this crime and misery had been perpetrated? From Ancona he paid a brief visit to the Vatican, on his way to Florence, where he slowly recovered from his severe wound, only to plunge deeper in debaucheries more congenial to his degraded character than the privations of military life. He was never named during the rest of the contest, but as soon as it was over he met his uncle at Viterbo, where, and in the neighbouring country, the papal court passed most of October in field sports. His hard-won sovereignty seems to have afforded him little satisfaction or interest; but in the following year he became an instrument for the further promotion of his uncle's ambition. His marriage having been negotiated through Cardinal Bibbiena to Madelaine de la Tour, daughter of Jean Count of Boulogne and Auvergne, a relation of the French monarch, the titular Duke of Urbino proceeded to Paris in the spring of 1518, for the double ceremonial of his own nuptials, and the Dauphin's baptism, at which he stood sponsor on the 25th of April, as proxy for the Pontiff. Both these events were celebrated with much festive merriment in the gay capital of France, and the young couple were overwhelmed by splendid dowries and wedding-gifts by the Pope and the Monarch. But their bridal joy was of brief duration. The Duchess died in childbed on the 23rd of April following, and was followed to the grave five days after by her husband, who expiated with his life the dissolute vices in which he had continuously indulged. Their child survived to be a scourge of the Huguenots, in the person of Catherine de' Medici, wife of Henry II. of France, mother of Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III.,—in the last of whom the line of Valois and the descendants of Duke Lorenzo became extinct.

Hearing of Lorenzo's desperate state, the Pope despatched Cardinal Giulio de' Medici to maintain at Florence the supremacy of his house. The titular dukedom of Urbino passed, in terms of the new investiture, to the infant Catherine; but the territory was unceremoniously seized by his Holiness, notwithstanding the wish of its inhabitants for restoration of their legitimate sovereign. Montefeltro, with S. Leo and Maiuolo, was assigned to Florence, in security or compensation for 150,000 scudi said to have been advanced in the late war, and the remainder of the duchy was annexed to the Church. The walls of its capital, whose loyalty to its native princes amid all their reverses is finely commemorated in the current appellation of Urbino fidelissimo, were thrown down, and its metropolitan privileges transferred to Gubbio, which had shown itself less devoted to the della Rovere interests.

We may here mention the fate of Gian Paolo Baglioni, known to us, in 1502, as one of the confederates of La Magione, who, in the quaint words of an unpublished chronicle, escaped the violin-string of Michelotto at Sinigaglia "to fall into the pit which he had digged." We have more lately seen him, in 1517, buying off Francesco Maria from the city of Perugia, with a bribe shared by himself, and have at the same time alluded to the broils there raging between various members of his family. These it would be beyond our purpose to follow; but they were attended by a series of bad faith on his part, and of suffering on that of the people, which gained for him the merited title of tyrant of Perugia. Less, perhaps, with the intention of vindicating the latter, than of liberating himself from a talented and unscrupulous vassal, who, long accustomed to rule supreme in that city, ill brooked and scarcely yielded that obedience to the Holy See which Julius II. had imposed on him in 1506, Leo summoned Gian Paolo to Rome in 1520, with amicable professions. There he arrived on the 16th of March, and next day sought an audience of the Pontiff in S. Angelo, the gates of which were immediately closed upon him as a state prisoner. After he had lingered for some months in mysterious durance, unconscious of the charge brought against him, a plan was formed to liberate him, disguised as a woman who visited the castellan; but at that juncture the Pope, who, according to the gossip of a contemporary diarist, had dreamt at La Magliana of a mouse escaping from a trap, sent a summary order for his execution, which took place secretly on the 11th of June.

The singular good fortune which accumulated coronets and crowns on the brows of Charles V., until he found himself sovereign by inheritance of a large portion of Europe, here demands our notice. The Emperor Maximilian had, by Mary, daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, a son Philip, who predeceased him in 1506, after marrying Joanna, daughter and heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile. Joanna being disqualified by mental imbecility, the united crowns of Spain devolved, on the death of Ferdinand in 1516, to her son Charles, who already held the Netherlands through his grandmother, Mary of Burgundy. As representative of the house of Aragon, he was also sovereign of Naples and Sicily; but the former crown required the papal investiture, which Leo was loath to bestow, partly with a vague hope of reserving it for one of his own race, partly from aversion to the establishment of a new line of foreign rulers in the Italian peninsula. On the death of Maximilian in January 1519, without having formerly received the imperial crown, his grandson, Charles, stepped into Austria, as his natural heritage, and sought still further aggrandisement by offering himself candidate for the throne of Germany. Little as the balance of power was then comprehended in European policy, this young monarch's rapid acquisitions called forth many jealousies. Francis had a double motive for standing forward as a competitor for the empire;—the dignity was flattering to his gallant character and ambitious views, and he grudged it to a younger rival, whose overgrown territory already hemmed him in on every side. Leo, at heart disliking them equally, as ultramontane sovereigns formidable to Italy, on the ruins of whose freedom were based the successes of either, sought to play them off against each other, so as to weaken and embarrass both. But in spite of these intrigues, Charles was elected emperor on the 28th of June, 1519, when but nineteen years of age.