the Duchy as grand vizier during three reigns extending over a period of half a century, governed Milan as regents for the young Duke.  But Lodovico, feeling himself powerful enough to assume the tyranny, beheaded Simonetta at Pavia in 1480, and caused Madonna Bona, the Duke’s mother, on the pretext of her immorality, to quit the regency.  Thus he took the affairs of Milan into his own hands, confined his nephew in an honorable prison, and acted in a way to make it clear that he intended thenceforth to be Duke in fact.[3] It was the bad conscience inseparable from this usurpation which made him mistrust the princes of the house of Aragon, whose rights in Isabella, wife of the young Duke, were set at nought by him.  The same uneasy sense of wrong inclined him to look with dread upon the friendship of the Medici for the ruling family of Naples.

[1] His mother Clarice and his wife Alfonsina were both of them Orsini.  Guicciardini, in his ’Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze’ (Op.  Ined. vol. ii. p. 46), says of him:  ’sendo nato di madre forestiera, era imbastardito in lui il sangue Fiorentino, e degenerato in costumi esterni, e troppo insolenti e altieri al nostro vivere.’  Piero, nevertheless, refused to accept estates from King Alfonso which would have made him a Baron and feudatory of Naples.  See Arch.  Stor. vol. i. p. 347.

    [2] The young Duke was aged twenty-four in 1493.

[3] Lodovico had taken measures for cloaking his usurpation with the show of legitimate right.  He betrothed his niece Bianca Maria, in 1494, to the Emperor Maximilian, with a dower of 400,000 ducats, receiving in return an investiture of the Duchy, which, however, he kept secret.

While affairs were in this state, and as yet no open disturbance in Lorenzo’s balance of power had taken place, Alexander VI. was elected to the Papacy.  It was usual for the princes and cities of Italy to compliment the Pope with embassies on his assumption of the tiara; and Lodovico suggested that the representatives of Milan, Florence, Ferrara, and Naples should enter Rome together in a body.  The foolish vanity of Piero, who wanted to display the splendor of his own equipage without rivals, induced him to refuse this proposal, and led to a similar refusal on the part of Ferdinand.  This trivial circumstance confirmed the suspicions of Lodovico, who, naturally subtle and intriguing, thought that he discerned a deep political design in what was really little more than the personal conceit of a broad-shouldered simpleton.[1] He already foresaw that the old system of alliances established by Lorenzo must be abandoned.  Another slight incident contributed to throw the affairs of Italy into confusion by causing a rupture between Rome and Naples.  Lorenzo, by the marriage of his daughter to Franceschetto Cibo, had contrived to engage Innocent VIII. in the scheme of policy which he framed for Florence, Naples, Milan, and Ferrara.  But on the accession of Alexander,