no protective armour under their silken doublets.  Pacing the aisle behind the choir, they feared no treason.  And now the lives of both might easily have been secured, if at the last moment the courage of the hired assassins had not failed them.  Murder, they said, was well enough; but they could not bring themselves to stab men before the newly consecrated body of Christ.  In this extremity a priest was found who, ‘being accustomed to churches,’ had no scruples.  He and another reprobate were told off to Lorenzo.  Francesco de’ Pazzi himself undertook Giuliano.  The moment for attack arrived.  Francesco plunged his dagger into the heart of Giuliano.  Then, not satisfied with this death-blow, he struck again, and in his heat of passion wounded his own thigh.  Lorenzo escaped with a flesh-wound from the poniard of the priest, and rushed into the sacristy, where his friend Poliziano shut and held the brazen door.  The plot had failed; for Giuliano, of the two brothers, was the one whom the conspirators would the more willingly have spared.  The whole church was in an uproar.  The city rose in tumult.  Rage and horror took possession of the people.  They flew to the Palazzo Pubblico and to the houses of the Pazzi, hunted the conspirators from place to place, hung the archbishop by the neck from the palace windows, and, as they found fresh victims for their fury, strung them one by one in a ghastly row at his side above the Square.  About one hundred in all were killed.  None who had joined in the plot escaped; for Lorenzo had long arms, and one man, who fled to Constantinople, was delivered over to his agents by the Sultan.  Out of the whole Pazzi family only Guglielmo, the husband of Bianca de’ Medici, was spared.  When the tumult was over, Andrea del Castagno painted the portraits of the traitors head-downwards upon the walls of the Bargello Palace, in order that all men might know what fate awaited the foes of the Medici and of the State of Florence.[15] Meanwhile a bastard son of Giuliano’s was received into the Medicean household, to perpetuate his lineage.  This child, named Giulio, was destined to be famous in the annals of Italy and Florence under the title of Pope Clement VII.

XV

As is usual when such plots miss their mark, the passions excited redounded to the profit of the injured party.  The commonwealth felt that the blow struck at Lorenzo had been aimed at their majesty.  Sixtus, on the other hand, could not contain his rage at the failure of so ably planned a coup de main.  Ignoring that he had sanctioned the treason, that a priest had put his hand to the dagger, that the impious deed had been attempted in a church before the very Sacrament of Christ, whose vicar on earth he was, the Pope now excommunicated the republic.  The reason he alleged was, that the Florentines had dared to hang an archbishop.