Franceschetto Cibo determined to get rid of Anguillara, Cervetri, and other fiefs, which he had taken with his father’s connivance from the Church.  He found a purchaser in Virginio Orsini.  Alexander complained that the sale was an infringement of his rights.  Ferdinand supported the title of the Orsini to his new acquisitions.  This alienated the Pope from the King of Naples, and made him willing to join with Milan and Venice in a new league formed in 1493.

[1] Piero de’ Medici was what the French call a bel homme, and little more.  He was tall, muscular, and well-made, the best player at pallone in Italy, a good horseman, fluent and agreeable in conversation, and excessively vain of these advantages.

Thus the old equilibrium was destroyed, and fresh combinations between the disunited powers of Italy took place.  Lodovico, however, dared not trust his new friends.  Venice had too long hankered after Milan to be depended upon for real support; and Alexander was known to be in treaty for a matrimonial alliance between his son Geoffrey and Donna Sancia of Aragon.  Lodovico was therefore alone, without a firm ally in Italy, and with a manifestly fraudulent title to maintain.  At this juncture he turned his eyes towards France; while his father-in-law, the Duke of Ferrara, who secretly hated him, and who selfishly hoped to secure his own advantage in the general confusion which he anticipated, urged him to this fatal course.  Alexander at the same time, wishing to frighten the princes of Naples into a conclusion of the projected marriage, followed the lead of Lodovico, and showed himself at this moment not averse to a French invasion.

It was in this way that the private cupidities and spites of princes brought woe on Italy:  Lodovico’s determination to secure himself in the usurped Duchy of Milan, Ercole d’ Este’s concealed hatred, and Alexander’s unholy eagerness to aggrandize his bastards, were the vile and trivial causes of an event which, however inevitable, ought to have been as long as possible deferred by all true patriots in Italy.  But in Italy there was no zeal for freedom left, no honor among princes, no virtue in the Church.  Italy, which in the thirteenth century numbered 1,800,000 citizens—­that is, members of free cities, exercising the franchise in the government of their own states—­could show in the fifteenth only about 18,000 such burghers:[1] and these in Venice were subject to the tyranny of the Council of Ten, in Florence had been enervated by the Medici, in Siena were reduced by party feuds and vulgar despotism to political imbecility.  Amid all the splendors of revived literature and art, of gorgeous courts and refined societies, this indeed was the right moment for the Dominican visionary to publish his prophecies, and for the hunchback puppet of destiny to fulfill them.  Guicciardini deplores, not without reason, the bitter sarcasm of fate which imposed upon his