having secured the investiture of Milan, prepared for the invasion of Naples.  The venal pope was easily bought over.  Even Ferdinand, the King of Arragon, was induced to loan his connivance to a plan for robbing a near relative of his crown, by the promise of sharing in the spoil.  A treaty of partition was entered into by the two robber kings, by which Ferdinand of Arragon was to receive Calabria and Apulia, and the King of France the remaining States of the Neapolitan kingdom.  The pope was confidentially informed of this secret plot, which was arranged at Grenada, and promised the plunderers his benediction, in consideration of the abundant reward promised to him.

The doom of the King of Naples was now sealed.  All unconscious that his own relative, Ferdinand of Arragon, was conspiring against him, he appealed to Ferdinand for aid against the King of France.  The perfidious king considered this as quite a providential interposition in his favor.  He affected great zeal for the King of Naples, sent a powerful army into his kingdom, and stationed his troops in the important fortresses.  The infamous fraud was now accomplished.  Frederic of Naples, to his dismay, found that he had been placing his empire in the hands of his enemies instead of friends; at the same time the troops of Louis arrived at Rome, where they were cordially received; and the pope immediately, on the 25th of June, 1501, issued a bull deposing Frederic from his kingdom, and, by virtue of that spiritual authority which he derived from the Apostle Peter, invested Louis and Ferdinand with the dominions of Frederic.  Few men are more to be commiserated than a crownless king.  Frederic, in his despair, threw himself upon the clemency of Louis.  He was taken to France and was there fed and clothed by the royal bounty.

Maximilian impatiently watched the events from his home in Austria, and burned with the desire to take a more active part in these stirring scenes.  Despairing, however, to rouse the German States to any effectual intervention in the affairs of southern Europe, he now endeavored to rouse the enthusiasm of the German nobles against the Turks.  In this, by appealing to superstition, he was somewhat successful.  He addressed the following circular letter to the German States: 

“A stone, weighing two hundred pounds, recently fell from heaven, near the army under my command in Upper Alsace, and I caused it, as a fatal warning from God to men, to be hung up in the neighboring church of Encisheim.  In vain I myself explained to all Christian kings the signification of this mysterious stone.  The Almighty punished the neglect of this warning with a dreadful scourge, from which thousands have suffered death, or pains worse than death.  But since this punishment of the abominable sins of men has produced no effect, God has imprinted in a miraculous manner the sign of the cross, and the instruments of our Lord’s passion in dark and bloody colors, on the bodies and garments of thousands.  The appearance of these signs in Germany, in particular, does not indeed denote that the Germans have been peculiarly distinguished in guilt, but rather that they should set the example to the rest of the world, by being the first to undertake a crusade against the infidels.”