remarkably unhealthy, and deaths from fever had been frequent.  A circular letter to the German Princes, written probably by the Cardinal of Gurk, and dated August 31, 1503, distinctly mentioned fever as the cause of the Pope’s sudden decease, ex hoc seculo horrenda febrium incensione absorptum.[3] Machiavelli, again, who conversed with Cesare Borgia about this turning-point in his career, gave no hint of poison, but spoke only of son and father being simultaneously prostrated by disease.

    [1] The story is related by Cinthio in his Ecatommithi,
    December 9, November 10.

[2] The various accounts of Alexander’s death have been epitomized by Gregorovius (Stadt Rom, vol. vii.), and have been discussed by Villari in his edition of the Giustiniani Dispatches, 2 vols.  Florence, Le Monnier.  Gregorovius thinks the question still open.  Villari decides in favor of fever against poison.

    [3] Reprinted by R. Garnett in Athenaeum, Jan. 16, 1875.

At this distance of time, and without further details of evidence, we are unable to decide whether Alexander’s death was natural, or whether the singularly circumstantial and commonly accepted story of the poisoned wine contained the truth.  On the one side, in favor of the hypothesis of fever, we have Burchard’s testimony, which does not, however, exactly agree with Giustiniani’s, who reported apoplexy to the Venetian senate as the cause of death, and whose report, even at Venice, was rejected by Sanudo for the hypothesis of poison.  On the other side, we have the consent of all contemporary historians, with the single and, it must be allowed, remarkable exception of Machiavelli.  Paolo Giovio goes even so far as to assert that the Cardinal Corneto told him he had narrowly escaped from the effects of antidotes taken in his extreme terror to counteract the possibility of poison.

Whatever may have been the proximate cause of his sickness, Alexander died, a black and swollen mass, hideous to contemplate, after a sharp struggle with the venom he had absorbed.[1] ‘All Rome,’ says Guicciardini, ’ran with indescribable gladness to view the corpse.  Men could not satiate their eyes with feeding on the carcass of a serpent who, by his unbounded ambition and pestiferous perfidy, by every demonstration of horrible cruelty, monstrous lust, and unheard-of avarice, selling without distinction things sacred and profane, had filled the world with venom.’  Cesare languished for some days on a sick bed; but in the end, by the aid of a powerful constitution, he recovered, to find his claws cut and his plans in irretrievable confusion.  ‘The state of the Duke of Valence,’ says Filippo Nerli,[2] ‘vanished even as smoke in air, or foam upon the water.’

[1] ’Morto chel fu, il corpo comincio a bollire, e la bocca a spumare come faria uno caldaro al focho, assi persevero mentre che fu sopra terra; divenne anchor ultra modo grosso in tanto che in lui non apparea forma di corpo humano, ne dala larghezza ala lunghezza del corpo suo era differenzia alcuna’ (letter of Marquis of Mantua).

    [2] Commentari, lib, v.