[Note 8:  From Burchard’s Diarium, 1483-1506, and from the Chronicle of Pulgar we learn that Antonio Geraldini and Juan de Medina, the latter afterwards Bishop of Astorga, accompanied the embassy.]

To Ascanio Sforza, who spared neither entreaties nor reproaches to detain him, assuring him that during his lifetime his merits should not lack recognition, Martyr replied that the disturbed state of Italy, which he apprehended would grow worse, discouraged him; adding that he was urged on by an ardent desire to see the world and to make acquaintance with other lands.  To Peter Marsus, he declared he felt impelled to join in the crusade against the Moors.  Spain was the seat of this holy war, and the Catholic sovereigns, who had accomplished the unity of the Christian states of the Iberian peninsula, were liberal in their offers of honours and recompense to foreigners of distinction whom they sought to draw to their court and camp.  Spain may well have seemed a virgin and promising field, in which his talents might find a more generous recognition than Rome had awarded them.  Upon his arrival there, he showed himself no mean courtier when he declared to the Queen that his sole reason for coming was to behold the most celebrated woman in the world—­herself.  Perhaps the sincerest expression of his feelings is that contained in a letter to Carillo.  (Ep. 86. 1490):  Formosum est cuique, quod maxime placet:  id si cum patria minime quis se sperat habiturum, tanta est hujusce rei vis, ut extra patriam quaeritet patria ipsius oblitus.  Ego quam vos deservistis adivi quia quod mihi pulchrum suaveque videbatur in ea invenire speravi.  The divine restlessness, the Wanderlust had seized him, and to its fascination he yielded.  The opportunity offered by Tendilla was too tempting to be resisted.  Summing up the remonstrances and reproaches of his various friends, he declared that he held himself to deserve rather their envy than their commiseration, since amidst the many learned men in Italy he felt himself obscure and useless, counting himself indeed as passerunculus inter accipitres, pygmeolus inter gigantes.

Failing to turn his friend from his purpose, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza exacted from him a promise to send him regular and frequent information of all that happened at the Spanish Court.  It is to this pact between the two friends that posterity is indebted for the Decades and the Opus Epistolarum, in which the events of those singularly stirring years are chronicled in a style that portrays with absolute fidelity the temper of an age prolific in men of extraordinary genius and unsurpassed daring, incomparably rich in achievements that changed the face of the world and gave a new direction to the trend of human development.

On the twenty-ninth of August the Spanish ambassador, after taking leave of Innocent VIII.,[9] set out from Rome on his return journey to Spain, and with him went Peter Martyr d’Anghera.