open day, together with two of her gentlewomen and her coachman, she was cut to pieces and left on the road.[210] In 1690 at Naples Don Carlo Gesualdo, son of the Prince of Venosta, assassinated his wife and cousin Donna Maria d’Avalos, together with her lover, Fabricio Caraffa, Duke of Andri.  This crime was committed in his palace by the husband, attended by a band of cut-throats.[211] In 1577, at Milan, Count Giovanni Borromeo, cousin of the Cardinal Federigo, stabbed his wife, the Countess Giulia Sanseverina, sister of the Contessa di Sala, at table, with three mortal wounds.  A mere domestic squabble gave rise to this tragedy.[212] In 1598, in his villa of Zenzalino at Ferrara, the Count Ercole Trotti, with the assistance of a bravo called Jacopo Lazzarini, killed his wife Anna, daughter of the poet Guarini.  Her own brother Girolamo connived at the act and helped to facilitate its execution.  She was accused—­falsely, as it afterwards appeared from Girolamo’s confession—­of an improper intimacy with the Count Ercole Bevilacqua.  I may add that Count Ercole Trotti’s father, Alfonso, had murdered his own wife, Michela Granzena, in the same villa.[213]

[Footnote 210:  Mutinelli, Storia Arcana, vol. ii. p. 64.]

[Footnote 211:  Ib. vol. ii. p. 162.]

[Footnote 212:  Ib. vol. i. p. 343.]

The Medici.

The history of the Medicean family during the sixteenth century epitomizes the chief features of social morality upon which I have been dwelling in this chapter.  It will be remembered that Alessandro de’ Medici, the first Duke of Florence, poisoned his cousin Ippolito, and was himself assassinated by his cousin Lorenzino.  To the second of these crimes Cosimo, afterwards Grand Duke of Tuscany, owed the throne of Florence, on which, however, he was not secure until he had removed Lorenzino from this world by the poignard of a bravo.  Cosimo maintained his authority by a system of espionage, remorseless persecution, and assassination, which gave color even to the most improbable of legends.[214]

[Footnote 213:  I Guarini, Famiglia Nobile Ferrarese (Bologna, Romagnoli, 1870), pp. 83-87.]

[Footnote 214:  In addition to the victims of his vengeance who perished by the poignard, he publicly executed in Florence forty-two political offenders.]

But it is not of him so much as of his children that I have to speak.  Francesco, who reigned from 1564 till 1587, brought disgrace upon his line by marrying the infamous Bianca Capello, after authorizing the murder of her previous husband.  Bianca, though incapable of bearing children, flattered her besotted paramour before this marriage by pretending to have borne a son.  In reality, she had secured the co-operation of three women on the point of child-birth; and when one of these was delivered of a boy, she presented this infant to Francesco, who christened him Antonio de’Medici.  Of the three mothers