According to this story, therefore, Alexander was aware of Catherine's murderous intentions at the time of that courteous reception we read of. But then, and for four months afterwards, no such accusation was heard of. At the end of that time Catherine was submitted to the humiliation of being confronted with the two men who testified to this accusation, before Alexander himself. To our ideas it would seem that there must have been various means of proving or disproving the facts in question. The letters might have been produced, and means of ascertaining their contagiousness devised. But juridical and medical science were in far too barbarous a state, and still more fatally the sentiment of fairness and appreciation of the desirableness of truth, far too much deadened for any such mode of proceeding to have been thought of. The witnesses maintained their story by their assertion; Catherine utterly denied that there was any truth in any part of it; and the whole scope of the examination seems to have been to see which party would most obstinately adhere to their assertion. [Sidenote: MEDIEVAL JURISPRUDENCE.] In an ordinary case the obstinacy would quickly have been more satisfactorily tested by placing the accused on the rack. But even a Pope, and that Pope Alexander VI., would hardly venture to apply the torture to Catherine Sforza. The examination, therefore appears to have resulted in a battledore-and-shuttlecock iteration of "You did," and "I did not," so much to the advantage of the lady, that one[144] of her biographers writes triumphantly of her, that "Although confronted with those who audaciously accused her of having sent them to Rome for that purpose, she, with a virile and intrepid mind, conquered by her obstinate constancy the wicked will of Alexander." This wicked will was not, however, so completely vanquished as to prevent the accused, though not convicted, Countess from being immediately transferred from the Belvidere to the castle of St. Angelo; to the prisons of which ill-omened fortress she was consigned on the 26th of June.