Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/383

Rh the Duke Francesco Maria, who murdered his sister's lover with his own hands, when a youth of sixteen, and stabbed the Papal Legate to death in the streets of Bologna, when at the age of twenty, and knocked Guicciardini, the historian, down with a blow of his fist during a council of war in 1526.

"Christendom beheld in Sixtus the spectacle of a Pope who trafficked in the bodies of his subjects, and the holy things of God, to squander basely-gotten gold upon abandoned minions. The peace of Italy was destroyed by desolating wars in the advancement of the same worthless favourites. Sixtus destroyed to annex Ferrara to the dominions of Girolamo Riario. Nothing stood in his way but the House of Este, firmly planted for centuries and connected by marriage or alliance with the chief families of Italy. The Pope, whose lust for blood and broils were equalled only by his avarice and his libertinism, rushed with wild delight into a project which involved the discord of the whole peninsula. He made treaties with Venice and unmade them, stirred up all the passions of the despots and set them together by the ears, called the Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy, and when, finally, tired of fighting for his nephew, the Italian powers concluded the peace of Bagnolo, he died of rage in 1484. The Pope did actually die of disappointed fury, because peace had been restored to the country he had mangled for the sake of a favourite nephew."

This Pope seemed unable to exist without some cringing favourite about his person. In 1463 he made his valet, a lad of no character and parts, of base birth, with nothing but his good looks and obsequiousness to speak for him—Cardinal and Bishop of Parma, when his age was only twenty. Sixtus was always impecunious. To replenish his treasury he had two resources. One was the public sale of places about the Court, and of benefices and of ecclesiastical privileges. "Our churches, priests, altars, sacred rites, our prayers, even heaven and our God, are