It cannot be said, therefore, that this third marriage of Catherine was unimportant or barren of results; though, upon her own fortunes, it had little influence; for Giovanni, whose health appears to have been for some time failing, died six months after the birth of his son, on the 14th of September, 1498.
AGAIN A WIDOW.
His physicians had sent him to one of the little bathing-places in the Apennines, called St. Piero, in Bagno. There finding himself becoming rapidly worse, he sent in haste to call Catherine from Forlì, who reached his bedside barely in time to receive his last words; and was thus, for the third time, left a widow at a moment when every appearance in the political horizon seemed to indicate that she was on the eve of events that would make the protection of a husband, and a powerful alliance, more necessary to her than it had ever yet been.
CHAPTER IX.
A nation of good haters.—Madama's soldier trade.—A new Pope has to found a new family.—Catherine's bounty to recruits.—A shrewd dealer meets his match.—Signs of hard times.—How to manage a free council.—Forlì ungrateful.—Catherine at bay.—"A Borgia! A Borgia!"—A new year's eve party in 1500.—The lioness in the toils.—Catherine led captive to Rome.
Dr. Samuel Johnson ought to have been a warm admirer of Italian character had he been acquainted with it; for he "liked a good hater." And assuredly the leading physiological characteristic which colours the whole course of Italian history, and furnishes the most universally-applicable master-key to the understanding of its intricacies, is the intensity of mutually-repellant aversion which has always existed among all the constituent elements of society. Private hatred between man and man; clan hatred between family and family; party hatred between blacks and whites, or longs and shorts, or any other distinctive faction-cry; political hatred between patricians and plebeians; social hatred between citizens and the inhabitants of the fields around their walls; and, by no means least though last, municipal hatred between one city and another, has ever been in Italy the master passion, vigorous in its action and notable in its results in proportion to the vigour of social life animating the body of the nation.
Orsini clans no longer level Colonna palaces with the soil in the streets of Rome; the story-graven flagstones of the old Florentine Piazza are no longer stained with the blood of Bianchi or Neri; Siena no more sends out her war-car against Pisa, nor does Genoa fit out fleets against Venice. Despotism has crushed out all vigour from the life and torpified every pulse; and having made a deathlike "solitude, calls it peace."