Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/350

326 326 ITALIAN WARS. PART contracted an inauspicious marriage with his aunt, a lady nearly of his own age, to whom he had been II long attached. A careless and somewhat intem- perate indulgence in pleasure, succeeding the hardy life which he had been lately leading, brought on a 1496. flux which carried him off in the twenty-eighth ^''*' ' year of his age, and second of his reign. He was the fifth monarch, who, in the brief compass of three years, had sat on the disastrous throne of Naples. Ferdinand possessed many qualities suited to the turbulent times in which he lived. He was vigor- ous and prompt in action, and naturally of a high and generous spirit. Still, however, he exhibited glimpses, even in his last hours, of an obliquity, not to say ferocity of temper, which characterized many of his line, and which led to ominous conjectures as to what would have been his future policy. ^^ Accession of fJc was succccded on the throne by his uncle Freaenc II. •' Frederic, a prince of a gentle disposition, endeared to the Neapolitans by repeated acts of benevolence, and by a magnanimous regard for justice, of which the remarkable fluctuations of his fortune had elicited more than one example. His amiable virtues, how- ever, required a kindlier soil and season for their expansion ; and, as the event proved, made him no 34 Giannonc, Tstoria di Napoli, the Bishop of Teano, tobe bronplit lib. 29, cap. 2. — Summonte, Hist, to him, and laid at llie foot of his (li Napoli, lib. 6, cap. 2. — Peter couch, that he might be assured Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 188. ■with his own eyes of the execution While stretched on his deathbed, of the sentence. Istoria Viniziana, Ferdinand, according to Bembo, lib. 3, p. 189. caused the head of his prisoner.