Meantime Savelli battered the citadel with cannon brought from Cesena and Forlimpopoli, and Feo battered the city from his rampart, but without much mischief being done on either side. On the 29th, the army of the Duke of Milan and the Bolognese were before the walls of Forlì. A duly accredited envoy from the Duke entered the town, and had a long secret interview with Savelli. Communications passed also between Catherine in the fortress and her friends outside the city. The fort of Ravaldino seems during the whole time of the rebellion to have had free means of communication, for ingress and egress, with the open country beyond the walls of the city; so that Catherine might at any time have escaped had she not preferred to hold the citadel. The preservation of her dominions, and very possibly her life, were entirely due to the possession of this stronghold. And the incidents of this rebellion in Forlì, which may be taken as a very perfect type of hundreds of similar events of constant recurrence in the history of the petty principalities and municipalities of Italy in those centuries, throw a very sufficient light on the paramount importance attached by the rulers of those cities to the possession of such a place of refuge, and the proportionably vast sums they expended in erecting and maintaining them. The great difficulty in the matter always was to find some _Castellano_ sufficiently trustworthy for it to be safe to confide the fortress to his keeping. The great power arising from the absolute command of a building so strong as to be impregnable to any means of attack that citizens could bring against it, and from which the inmates might do much damage to the city with very little danger of suffering any injury themselves, was so great and so tempting, that the governors of these fortresses were rarely to be depended on. It might be almost said, that in cases of difficulty and temptation treachery was the rule, and fidelity to the lord the exception. And it not unfrequently occurred, that the _Castellano_ within his walls felt himself to be more than a match for his master and sovereign outside them: a state of things of which some of the episodes in the history of Forlì narrated in these pages have shown us a few symptoms. [Sidenote: THE ORSI ARE OFF.] By the evening of the 29th, it was sufficiently evident that it was all up with the hopes of the insurgents in Forlì. The game was clearly played out and lost. To make their situation still more desperate, a great number of written papers signed by Catherine were found scattered about the great square and streets of the town soon after dusk that evening. These contained strong exhortations from the Countess to her faithful subjects of Forlì, to put summarily to death all the leaders of the conspiracy before they could escape from the city; and promises of favour and rewards to any man whose dagger should be the means of making an end of any one of them.