[1] See what Guicciardini in his History of Florence says about the suspicious temper of even such a tyrant as the cultivated and philosophical Lorenzo de’ Medici.  See too the incomparably eloquent and penetrating allegory of Sospetto, and its application to the tyrants of Italy in Ariosto’s Cinque Canti (C. 2.  St. 1-9).

    [2] Our dramatist Webster, whose genius was fascinated by
    the crimes of Italian despotism, makes the Duke of Bracciano exclaim
    on his death-bed:—­

      ’O thou soft natural Death, thou art joint-twin
      To sweetest Slumber! no rough-bearded comet
      Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
      Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
      Scents not thy carrion:  pity winds thy corse,
      Whilst horror waits on princes.’

Instances of domestic crime might be multiplied by the hundred.  Besides those which will follow in these pages, it is enough to notice the murder of Giovanni Francesco Pico, by his nephew, at Mirandola (1533); the murder of his uncle by Oliverotto da Fermo; the assassination of Giovanni Varano by his brothers at Camerino (1434); Ostasio da Polenta’s fratricide (1322); Obizzo da Polenta’s fratricide in the next generation, and the murder of Ugolino Gonzaga by his brothers; Gian Francesco Gonzaga’s murder of his wife; the poisoning of Francesco Sforza’s first wife, Polissena, Countess of Montalto, with her little girl, by her aunt; and the murder of Galeotto Manfredi, by his wife, at Faenza (1488).

To enumerate all the catastrophes of reigning families, occurring in the fifteenth century alone, would be quite impossible within the limits of this chapter.  Yet it is only by dwelling on the more important that any adequate notion of the perils of Italian despotism can be formed.  Thus Girolamo Riario was murdered by his subjects at Forli (1488), and Francesco Vico dei Prefetti in the Church of S. Sisto at Viterbo[1] (1387).  At Lodi in 1402 Antonio Fisiraga burned the chief members of the ruling house of Vistarini on the public square, and died himself of poison after a few months.  His successor in the tyranny, Giovanni Vignate, was imprisoned by Filippo Maria Visconti in a wooden cage at Pavia, and beat his brains out in despair against its bars.  At the same epoch Gabrino Fondulo slaughtered seventy of the Cavalcabo family together in his castle of Macastormo, with the purpose of acquiring their tyranny over Cremona.  He was afterwards beheaded as a traitor at Milan (1425).  Ottobon Terzi was assassinated at Parma (1408), Nicola Borghese at Siena (1499).  Altobello Dattiri at Todi (about 1500), Raimondo and Pandolfo Malatesta at Rimini, and Oddo Antonio di Montefeltro at Urbino (1444).[2] The Varani were massacred to a man in the Church of S. Dominic at Camerino (1434), the Trinci at Foligno (1434), and the Chiavelli of Fabriano in church upon Ascension Day (1435).  This wholesale