They buried Giuliano that same evening, with all the honours due to his rank, amid the tears of an immense concourse of people—­stayed for a while from their savage man-hunt.  To the Medici shrine of San Lorenzo they bore him—­the yellow light of the wax candles revealing the tombs of Cosimo and Piero.

“There was not a citizen,” says Macchiavelli, “who, armed or unarmed, did not go to the palace of Lorenzo in this time of trouble, to offer him his person and his property—­such was the position and the affection that the Medici had acquired by their prudence and their liberality.”

Lorenzo came out on the loggia, and addressed the people massed in the street.  He thanked them for their devotion and assistance, but entreated them, for his dear, dead brother’s sake, to abstain from further atrocities and to disperse to their homes in peace.

Nevertheless, all the Pazzi and Salviati were proclaimed “Ammoniti” and they were pursued from house to house, whilst the peasants took up the hue and cry in the contado.  Bleeding heads and torn limbs were everywhere scattered in the streets; door-posts and curb-stones were dashed with gore; men and women and the children, too, were all relentless avengers of “Il bel Giulio’s” blood.  It is said that one hundred and eighty stark corpses were borne away by the merciful Misericordia and buried secretly!

Cavaliere Giacopo, who had escaped into the hilly country of the Falterona, near the source of the Arno, was recognised by a couple of countrymen, who were frequenters of the markets in Florence.  They seized him and took him to the city gate, where they sold him for fifty gold florins.  His shrift was short, for his purchasers, adherents of the Medici, hacked off his head in the street, and carried it upon a pole to the Ponte Vecchio!  Buried at Santa Croce, in the chapel of the Pazzi, his mutilated body was not left long in its grave.  It was pulled up, denuded of the shroud, and, with a rope tied round the feet, dragged by men and women and even children to the Lung’ Arno, and pitched, like a load of refuse, into the dusky river!

Several of the arch-conspirators hid for a while in various places, mostly in convents, but their time came for punishment.  The two priests, Antonio and Stefano, were, two days after the tragedy in the Duomo, brought out of the cellars of the Badia of the Benedictines at Santa Firenze, and killed, not swiftly and mercifully, but tortured and mutilated to the satisfaction of the rabble.

Bernard Bandino, after picking himself up at the New Sacristy doors, immediately realised the failure of the conspiracy, and, wise man that he was, put his own safety before all other considerations.  He worked his way through the struggling crowd in the Cathedral and got out by the south portal.  Luckily enough, the Cardinal’s horse had been left tethered by its affrighted groom hard by, so without awaiting news from the Archbishop, he vaulted into the saddle and made off at a hand gallop to the Porta Santa Croce.