might appear.  The same dream floated, a few years later, before the imagination of the two Borgias; and Machiavelli wrote in his calm style that to make the Papal power hereditary was all that remained for nepotism in his days to do.[7] The opinion which had been conceived of the Cardinal of San Sisto during his two years of eminence may be gathered from the following couplets of an epigram placed, as Corio informs us, on his tomb:—­

  Fur, scortum, leno, moechus, pedico, cynaedus,
  Et scurra, et fidicen cedat ab Italia: 
  Namque illa Ausonii pestis scelerata senatus,
  Petrus, ad infernas est modo raptus aquas.

After the death of Pietro, Sixtus took his last nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, into like favor.  He was married to Giovanna, daughter of Federigo di Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and created Duke of Sinigaglia.  Afterwards he became Prefect of Rome, upon the death of his brother Lionardo.  This man founded the second dynasty in the Dukedom of Urbino.  The plebeian violence of the della Rovere temper reached a climax in Giovanni’s son, the Duke Francesco Maria, who murdered his sister’s lover with his own hand when a youth of sixteen, stabbed the Papal Legate to death in the streets of Bologna at the age of twenty, and knocked Guicciardini, the historian, down with a blow of his fist during a council of war in 1526.

[1] The infamous stories about Sixtus and Alexander may in part be fables, currently reported by the vulgar and committed to epigrams by scholars.  Still the fact remains that Infessura, Burchard, and the Venetian ambassadors relate of these two Popes such traits of character and such abominable actions as render the worst calumnies probable.  Infessura, though he expressed horror for the crimes of Sixtus, was yet a dry chronicler of daily events, many of which passed beneath his own eyes, Burchurd was a frigid diarist of Court ceremonies, who reported the rapes, murders, and profligacies of Alexander with phlegmatic gravity.  The evidence of these men, neither of whom indulges in satire strictly so called, is more valuable than that of Tacitus or Suetonius to the vices of the Roman emperors.  The dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors, again, are trustworthy, seeing they were always written with political intention and not for the sake of gossip.

    [2] See ch. iii. p. 113.

[3] As Julius II., by far the greatest name in his age.  Yet even Giuliano did not at first impress men with his power.  Jacobus Volaterranus (Mur. xxiii. 107) writes of him:  ’Vir est naturae duriusculae, ac uti ingenii, mediocris literaturae.’

    [4] For what follows read Corio, Storia di Milano, pp.
    417-20.

    [5] Mach. 1st.  Fior. lib. vii.; Corio, p. 420.

    [6] See Corio, p. 420.  Corio hints that the Venetians poisoned
    the Cardinal for fear of this convention being carried out.