[281] Oliveriana MSS. No. 375; I., pp. 51, 75.
[*282] He seems to have received the news at La Magliana on November 25th. He returned to Rome at once. The illness was not considered serious till November 30th. He died on the evening of December 1st. Cf. Paris de Grassis, in Roscoe, Leo X., App. CCXII.-IV., and clerk's letters of December 1st and 2nd, in Brewer, Calendar (1824-5).
[283] Such is the opinion of a monkish chronicler who wrote in 1522. Vat. Urb. MSS. No. 1023, f. 297. Even in 1517 the Venetian envoy Giorgi reported him as afflicted by an internal plethoric disease, a catarrh, and fistula. Vettori discredits the rumours of poison, and Guicciardini says they were hushed up by his cousin the Cardinal, lest they should give umbrage to the French monarch, with whom it was his interest to stand well at the approaching conclave. On the whole, the opinion of most weight is that of the Master of ceremonies, who distinctly asserts that poison was detected on a post-mortem examination. Roscoe's innuendo inculpating Francesco Maria is a glaring proof of his aptitude to do scanty justice to that Duke, whose admitted hastiness of temper cannot, in absence of one contemporary or serious imputation, be considered any relevant ground for suspecting him of slow and stealthy vengeance. Another Venetian ambassador mentions, in proof of the utter exhaustion of the papal treasury, from the profusion of Leo and the greed of his Florentine retainers, that the wax lights used at his funeral had previously served for the obsequies of a cardinal.
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"Sacra sub extrema si forte requiritis hora Cur Leo non potuit sumere? vendiderat." Bibl. Magliabech. MSS., cl. vii., No. 345. |
[285] Vat. Urb. MSS. No. 921.
[*286] Fabio, not Pandolfo Petrucci. The latter died at S. Quirico, in Osenna, in May, 1512. Borghese Petrucci, his son, soon became the "best hated man in Siena." Four years after his father's death both he and Fabio were declared rebels. Leo X. put Raffaello Petrucci in Borghese's place. Raffaello died in 1522, and then some of the Nove brought back Fabio, who had married Caterina de' Medici, niece of the Pope. But after a rule of less than two years he was again an exile. "Thus," says Ferrari, "the Petrucci returned to their primitive obscurity." Cf. Langton Douglas, A History of Siena (Murray, 1902), p. 212.
[287] From the Italian original in the Archivio Diplomatico at Siena.
[288] Archivio Diplomatico of Florence, May 25, 1522.
[*289] Adrian Floriszoon, the son of a ship's carpenter named Floris. His education was chiefly theological; humanism had not penetrated Louvain.