extirpation of three reigning families introduces one of the most romantic episodes in the history of Italian despotism.  From the slaughter of the Varani one only child, Giulio Cesare, a boy of two years old, was saved by his aunt Tora.  She concealed him in a truss of hay and carried him to the Trinci at Foligno.  Hardly had she gained this refuge, when the Trinci were destroyed, and she had to fly with her burden to the Chiavelli at Fabriano.  There the same scenes of bloodshed awaited her.  A third time she took to flight, and now concealed her precious charge in a nunnery.  The boy was afterwards stolen from the town on horseback by a soldier of adventure.  After surviving three massacres of kith and kin, he returned as despot at the age of twelve to Camerino, and became a general of distinction.  But he was not destined to end his life in peace.  Cesare Borgia finally murdered him, together with three of his sons, when he had reached the age of sixty.  Less romantic but not less significant in the annals of tyranny is the story of the Trinci.  A rival noble of Foligno, Pietro Rasiglia, had been injured in his honor by the chief of the ruling house.  He contrived to assassinate two brothers, Nicola and Bartolommeo, in his castle of Nocera; but the third, Corrado Trinci, escaped, and took a fearful vengeance on his enemy.  By the help of Braccio da Montone he possessed himself of Nocera and all its inhabitants, with the exception of Pietro Rasiglia’s wife, whom her husband flung from the battlements.  Corrado then butchered the men, women, and children of the Rasiglia clan, to the number of three hundred persons, accomplishing his vengeance with details of atrocity too infernal to be dwelt on in these pages.  It is recorded that thirty-six asses laden with their mangled limbs paraded the streets of Foligno as a terror-striking spectacle for the inhabitants.  He then ruled the city by violence, until the warlike Cardinal dei Vitelleschi avenged society of so much mischief by destroying the tyrant and five of his sons, in the same year.  Equally fantastic are the annals of the great house of the Baglioni at Perugia.  Raised in 1389 upon the ruins of the bourgeois faction called Raspanti, they founded their tyranny in the person of Pandolfo Baglioni, who was murdered together with sixty of his clan and followers by the party they had dispossessed.  The new despot, Biordo Michelotti, was stabbed in the shoulders with a poisoned dagger by his relative, the abbot of S. Pietro.  Then the city, in 1416, submitted to Braccio da Montone, who raised it to unprecedented power and glory.  On his death it fell back into new discords, from which it was rescued again by the Baglioni in 1466, now finally successful in their prolonged warfare with the rival family of Oddi.  But they did not hold their despotism in tranquillity.  In 1500 one of the members of the house, Grifonetto degli Baglioni, conspired against his kinsmen and slew them in their palaces at night.  As told by Matarazzo, this