But this change of persons spoiled all. The priest, though more
irreligious, was less expert. Giuliano was indeed stabbed to death
by Bandini di Pazzi, at the moment of the Elevation of the Host, but
Lorenzo escaped with a flesh wound from the inexperienced hand of
the priest, and fled into the sacristy. The congregation, the whole
populace of Florence, rose as a man, and pursued the murderers. The
Archbishop Salviati di Pazzi, and some of the others, were seized and
hung from the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico, the same day; and the
eighteen-year-old Cardinal Raphael Riario was flung into prison.
Sixtus was furious at the failure of the plot, and demanded the
liberation of his great nephew, the boy-Cardinal, and at the same time
the expulsion of the Medici from Florence. As the citizens refused to
do this, he excommunicated Lorenzo di Medici, and all the heads of the
Republic, and placed Florence under an interdict. After a few days
the boy was released; but that was as far as the Florentines would
go. Accordingly the Pope, his nephew Riario, and the King of Naples,
who had entered into league with the Pope, raised armies to attack
Florence, and a savage war of revenge raged for years. It was not till
1481 that a descent of the Turks on Otranto made Sixtus tremble for his
own safety, and forced him to make peace with Florence.
After the death of Pietro, Sixtus took his nephew, Giovanni della
Rovere, into the favour that Pietro had enjoyed. He married him to
Giovanna, daughter of the Duke of Urbino, and created him Duke of
Sinigaglia. This fellow founded the second dynasty of the Dukes of
Urbino.
[Illustration: SAVONA]
“The plebeian violence of the Della Rovere temper,” says Mr. Addington
Symonds, “reached a climax in Giovanni’s son, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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