professions of goodwill.  Suddenly the Duke received intelligence that the Borgia was marching on him over Cagli.  This was in the middle of June 1502.  It is difficult to comprehend the state of weakness in which Guidobaldo was surprised, or the panic which then seized him.  He made no efforts to rouse his subjects to resistance, but fled by night with his nephew through rough mountain roads, leaving his capital and palace to the marauder.  Cesare Borgia took possession without striking a blow, and removed the treasures of Urbino to the Vatican.  His occupation of the duchy was not undisturbed, however; for the people rose in several places against him, proving that Guidobaldo had yielded too hastily to alarm.  By this time the fugitive was safe in Mantua, whence he returned, and for a short time succeeded in establishing himself again at Urbino.  But he could not hold his own against the Borgias, and in December, by a treaty, he resigned his claims and retired to Venice, where he lived upon the bounty of S. Mark.  It must be said, in justice to the Duke, that his constitutional debility rendered him unfit for active operations in the field.  Perhaps he could not have done better than thus to bend beneath the storm.

The sudden death of Alexander VI. and the election of a Della Rovere to the Papacy in 1503 changed Guidobaldo’s prospects.  Julius II. was the sworn foe of the Borgias and the close kinsman of Urbino’s heir.  It was therefore easy for the Duke to walk into his empty palace on the hill, and to reinstate himself in the domains from which he had so recently been ousted.  The rest of his life was spent in the retirement of his court, surrounded with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of Italy.  The ill-health which debarred him from the active pleasures and employments of his station, was borne with uniform sweetness of temper and philosophy.

When he died, in 1508, his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, succeeded to the duchy, and once more made the palace of Urbino the resort of men-at-arms and captains.  He was a prince of very violent temper:  of its extravagance history has recorded three remarkable examples.  He murdered the Cardinal of Pavia with his own hand in the streets of Ravenna; stabbed a lover of his sister to death at Urbino; and in a council of war knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with a blow of his fist.  When the history of Italy came to be written, Guicciardini was probably mindful of that insult, for he painted Francesco Maria’s character and conduct in dark colours.  At the same time this Duke of Urbino passed for one of the first generals of the age.  The greatest stain upon his memory is his behaviour in the year 1527, when, by dilatory conduct of the campaign in Lombardy, he suffered the passage of Frundsberg’s army unopposed, and afterwards hesitated to relieve Rome from the horrors of the sack.  He was the last Italian Condottiere of the antique type; and the vices which Machiavelli exposed in that bad system of mercenary warfare were illustrated on these occasions.  During his lifetime, the conditions of Italy were so changed by Charles V.’s imperial settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere ceased to have any meaning.  Strozzi and Farnesi, who afterwards followed this profession, enlisted in the ranks of France or Spain, and won their laurels in Northern Europe.