The Borgia meanwhile crouched within the Castle of S. Angelo.  How would the Conqueror, now styled Flagellum Dei, deal with the abomination of desolation seated in the holy place of Christendom?  At the side of Charles were the Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Giuliano della Rovere, urging him to summon a council and depose the Pope.  But still closer to his ear was Briconnet, the ci-devant tradesman, who thought it would become his dignity to wear a cardinal’s hat.  On this trifle turned the destinies of Rome, the doom of Alexander, the fate of the Church.  Charles determined to compromise matters.  He demanded a few fortresses, a red hat for Briconnet, Cesare Borgia as a hostage for four months, and Djem, the brother of the Sultan.[1] After these agreements had been made and ratified, Alexander ventured to leave his castle and receive the homage of the faithful.

Charles staid* a month in Rome, and then set out for Naples.  The fourth and last scene in the Italian pageant was now to be displayed.  After the rich plain and proud cities of Lombardy, beneath their rampart of perpetual snow; after the olive gardens and fair towns of Tuscany; after the great name of Rome; Naples, at length, between Vesuvius and the sea, that first station of the Greeks in Italy, world-famed for its legends of the Sibyl and the sirens and the sorcerer Virgil, received her king.  The very names of Parthenope, Posilippo, Inarime, Sorrento, Capri, have their fascination.  There too the orange and lemon groves are more luxuriant; the grapes yield sweeter and more intoxicating wine; the villagers are more classically graceful; the volcanic soil is more fertile; the waves are bluer and the sun is brighter than elsewhere in the land.  None of the conquerors of Italy have had the force to resist the allurements of the bay of Naples.  The Greeks lost their native energy upon these shores and realized in the history of their colonies the myth of Ulysses’ comrades in the gardens of Circe.  Hannibal was tamed by Capua.  The Romans in their turn dreamed away their vigor at Baiae, at Pompeii at Capreae, until the whole region became a byword for voluptuous living.  Here the Saracens were subdued to mildness, and became physicians instead of pirates.  Lombards and Normans alike were softened down, and lost their barbarous fierceness amid the enchantments of the southern sorceress.

[1] See above, p. 416, for the history of this unfortunate prince.  When Alexander ceded Djem, whom he held as a captive for the Sultan at a yearly revenue of 40,000 ducats, he was under engagements with Bajazet to murder him.  Accordingly Djem died of slow poison soon after he became the guest of Charles.  The Borgia preferred to keep faith with the Turk.

Naples was now destined to ruin for Charles whatever nerve yet remained to his festival army.  The witch too, while brewing for the French her most attractive potions, mixed with them a deadly poison—­the virus of a fell disease, memorable in the annals of the modern world, which was destined to infect the nations of Europe from this center, and to prove more formidable to our cities than even the leprosy of the Middle Ages.[1]