[4] See Caracciolo, loc. cit. pp. 88, 89, concerning the judicial murder of Francesco Coppola and Antonello Perucci, both of whom had been raised to eminence by Ferdinand, used through their lives as the instruments of his extortion, and murdered by him in their rich old age.

[5] See De Comines, lib. vii. cap. 11; Sismondi, vol. vii. p. 229.  Read also the short account of the massacre of the Barons given in the Chronicon Venetum, Muratori, xxiv. p. 15, where the intense loathing felt throughout Italy for Ferdinand and his son Alfonso is powerfully expressed.

This kind of tyranny carried in itself its own death-warrant.  It needed not the voice of Savonarola to proclaim that God would revenge the crimes of Ferdinand by placing a new sovereign on his throne.  It was commonly believed that the old king died in 1494 of remorse and apprehension, when he knew that the French expedition could no longer be delayed.  Alfonso, for his part, bold general in the field and able man of affairs as he might be, found no courage to resist the conqueror.  It is no fiction of a poet or a moralist, but plain fact of history, that this King of Naples, grandson of the great Alfonso and father of the Ferdinand to be, quailed before the myriads of accusing dead that rose to haunt his tortured fancy in the supreme hour of peril.  The chambers of his palace in Naples were thronged with ghosts by battalions, pale specters of the thousands he had reduced to starvation, bloody phantoms of the barons he had murdered after nameless tortures, thin wraiths of those who had wasted away in dungeons under his remorseless rule.  The people around his gates muttered in rebellion.  He abdicated in favor of his son, took ship for Sicily, and died there conscience-stricken in a convent ere the year was out.

Ferdinand, a brave youth, beloved by the nation in spite of his father’s and grandfather’s tyranny, reigned in his stead.  Yet even for him the situation was untenable.  Everywhere he was beset by traitors—­by his whole army at San Germano, by Trivulzi at Capua, by the German guide at Naples.  Without soldiers, without allies, with nothing to rely upon but the untried goodwill of subjects who had just reason to execrate his race, and with the conquerors of Italy advancing daily through his states, retreat alone was left to him.  After abandoning his castles to pillage, burning the ships in the harbor of Naples, and setting Don Federigo together with the Queen dowager and the princess Joanna upon a quick-sailing galley, Ferdinand bade farewell to his kingdom.  Historians relate that as the shore receded from his view he kept intoning in a loud voice this verse of the 127th Psalm:  ’Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’  Between the beach of Naples and the rocky shore of Ischia, for which the exiles were