Tuscany was in his grasp; therefore he went to Fucecchio and entrenched himself with 20,000 foot and 4000 horse, leaving 5000 foot in Pisa with Guinigi.  Fucecchio is a walled city on the other side of Arno opposite S. Miniato.  There Castruccio waited; nor could he have chosen better, for the Florentines could not attack him without fording the river from S. Miniato, which they had taken, and dividing their forces.  This they were compelled to do, and Castruccio fell upon and beat them, leaving some 20,000 of them dead in the field, while he lost but fifteen hundred.  Nevertheless, that proved to be his last fight, for death found him at the top of his fortune; riding into Fucecchio after the battle, he waited a-horseback to greet his men at the great gate of the place which is still called after him.  Heated as he was with the fight, it was the evening wind that slew him; for he fell into an ague, and, neglecting it, believing himself sufficiently hardened, it presently killed him, and Pagolo Guinigi ruled in his stead, but without his fortune.

Following that strangely successful career, that for Macchiavelli at any rate seemed like a promise of the Deliverer that was to come, the first of modern historians gives us many of Castruccio’s sayings set down at haphazard, which bring the man vividly before us.  Thus when a friend of his, seeing him engaged in an amour with a very pretty lass, blamed him that he suffered himself to be so taken by a woman—­“You are deceived, signore,” says Castruccio, “she is taken by me.”  Another desiring a favour of him with a thousand impertinent and superfluous words—­“Hark you, friend,” says Castruccio, “when you would have anything of me, for the future send another man to ask it.”  Something of his dream of dominion may be found in that saying of his when one asked him, seeing his ambition, how Caesar died, and he answered, “Would I might die like him!” Blamed for his severity, perhaps over the Poggi affair, one said to him that he dealt severely with an old friend—­“No,” says he, “you are mistaken; it was with a new foe.”  Something of his love for Uguccione—­who certainly hated him, but whom he held in great veneration—­may be found in his answer to that man who asked him if for the salvation of his soul he never thought to turn monk.  “No,” says he, “for to me it will be strange if Fra Nazarene should go to Paradise and Ugguccione della Faggiuola to Hell.”  And Macchiavelli says that what was most remarkable was that, “having equalled the great actions of Scipio and Philip, the father of Alexander, he died as they did, in the forty-fourth year of his age, and doubtless he would have surpassed them both had he found as favourable dispositions at Lucca as one of them did in Macedon and the other in Rome.”  Just there we seem to find the desire of the sixteenth century for unity that found expression in the deeds of Cesare Borgia, the Discorsi of Niccolo Macchiavelli.

[Illustration:  THE TOMB OF ILARIA DEL CARETTO