[2] The mothers of Charles VIII. and Gian Galeazzo were
    sisters, princesses of Savoy.

[3] Sismondi does not discuss the fact minutely, but he inclines to believe that Gian Galeazzo was murdered.  Michelet raises a doubt about it, though the evidence is such as he would have accepted without question in the case of a Borgia.  Guicciardini, who recounts the whole matter at length, says that all Italy believed the Duke had been murdered, and quotes Teodoro da Pavia, one of the royal physicians, who attested to having seen clear signs of a slow poison in the young man.  Pontano, de Prudentia, lib. 4, repeats the accusation.  Guicciardini only doubts Lodovico’s motives.  He inclines to think the murder had been planned long before, and that Charles was invited into Italy in order that Lodovico might have a good opportunity for effecting it, while at the same time he had taken care to get the investiture of the Duchy from the Emperor ready against the event.

What was this beautiful land in the midst of which they found themselves, a land whose marble palaces were thronged with cut-throats in disguise, whose princes poisoned while they smiled, whose luxuriant meadows concealed fever, whose ladies carried disease upon their lips?  To the captains and the soldiery of France, Italy already appeared a splendid and fascinating Circe, arrayed with charms, surrounded with illusions, hiding behind perfumed thickets her victims changed to brutes, and building the couch of her seduction on the bones of murdered men.  Yet she was so beautiful that, halt as they might for a moment and gaze back with yearning on the Alps that they had crossed, they found themselves unable to resist her smile.  Forward they must march through the garden of enchantment, henceforth taking the precaution to walk with drawn sword, and, like Orlando in Morgana’s park, to stuff their casques with roses that they might not hear the siren’s voice too clearly.  It was thus that Italy began the part she played through the Renaissance for the people of the North. The White Devil of Italy is the title of one of Webster’s best tragedies.  A white Devil, a radiant daughter of sin and death, holding in her hands the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and tempting the nations to eat:  this is how Italy struck the fancy of the men of the sixteenth century.  She was feminine, and they were virile; but she could teach and they must learn.  She gave them pleasure; they brought force.  The fruit of her embraces with the nations was the spirit of modern culture, the genius of the age in which we live.