While Leo X. held the Papal chair, the duchy of Urbino was for a while wrested from the house of Della Rovere, and conferred upon Lorenzo de’ Medici.  Francesco Maria made a better fight for his heritage than Guidobaldo had done.  Yet he could not successfully resist the power of Rome.  The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this petty war; the Duke’s purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was obliged to use, proved worthless in the field.  Spaniards, for the most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals.  In 1517 the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo.  But this Medici did not live long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of France, never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her by inheritance.  The shifting scene of Italy beheld Francesco Maria reinstated in Urbino after Leo’s death in 1522.

This Duke married Leonora Gonzaga, a princess of the House of Mantua.  Their portraits, painted by Titian, adorn the Venetian room of the Uffizzi.  Of their son, Guidobaldo II., little need be said.  He was twice married, first to Giulia Varano, Duchess by inheritance of Camerino; secondly, to Vittoria Farnese, daughter of the Duke of Parma.  Guidobaldo spent a lifetime in petty quarrels with his subjects, whom he treated badly, attempting to draw from their pockets the wealth which his father and the Montefeltri had won in military service.  He intervened at an awkward period of Italian politics.  The old Italy of despots, commonwealths, and Condottieri, in which his predecessors played substantial parts, was at an end.  The new Italy of Popes and Austro-Spanish dynasties had hardly settled into shape.  Between these epochs, Guidobaldo II., of whom we have a dim and hazy presentation on the page of history, seems somehow to have fallen flat.  As a sign of altered circumstances, he removed his court to Pesaro, and built the great palace of the Della Roveres upon the public square.

Guidobaldaccio, as he was called, died in 1574, leaving an only son, Francesco Maria II., whose life and character illustrate the new age which had begun for Italy.  He was educated in Spain at the court of Philip II., where he spent more than two years.  When he returned, his Spanish haughtiness, punctilious attention to etiquette, and superstitious piety attracted observation.  The violent temper of the Della Roveres, which Francesco Maria I. displayed in acts of homicide, and which had helped to win his bad name for Guidobaldaccio, took the form of sullenness in the last Duke.  The finest episode in his life was the part he played in the battle of Lepanto, under his old comrade, Don John of Austria.  His father forced him to an uncongenial marriage with Lucrezia d’Este, Princess of Ferrara.  She left him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by the presence of Tasso and Guarini.  He bore her departure with