Now, that the great Florentine family of the Pazzi should hate, worry, and conspire against the great Florentine family of the Medici, was as intelligible, as much according to the habitudes of the place and time, and as natural, as that one butcher's mastiff should fly at the throat of another. And if the deed of that Easter Sunday had involved no other persons in its causes and consequences, than the Medici and the Pazzi, the destruction of the losing party would have been the natural ending and completion of the story. But, in the first place, an Archbishop had been publicly hung in Florence;—a deed more difficult to be wiped out, than the blood of scores of laymen, whether Medici or Pazzi. And, in the second place, the municipal and commercial rivalry and hatred of those two families had been exasperated and put into fatal action by being involved with the yet more culpable hatred of the Riarii for the rival parvenu princes of the Medicean race. Both Medici and Pazzi were bankers in Rome. The former had held the lucrative appointment of treasurers to the Apostolic chamber. Sixtus IV. took this from them, and gave it to the Pazzi. These were friends and allies of the Riarii. And there seems no reason to doubt the assertion of the Florentine writers, that Girolamo was one of the conspirators, if not the original contriver of the whole scheme. The Pope launched his interdict against Florence, in punishment for the execution of the Archbishop; and followed up this spiritual attack by a less formidable secular one. The republicans were able to defend themselves against the latter; but were obliged by the former tremendous weapon to humiliate themselves before the Papal throne. It is clear enough, in short, that all the sympathies of the Pope after the deed were with the perpetrators of it. Was he a consenting and abetting party to it before the fact? This is a question, which has occupied the attention and investigations of historians, anxious to decide the matter according to their respective prepossessions, more perhaps than its importance deserves. One more crime, however dark, added to the list of those which history has heaped up at the door of the _Servi servorum_, can effect but little any of the vexed questions raised between the defenders and the accusers of Popes and Papacy. A synod of the Tuscan prelates, which met in July of the year 1478, solemnly accused Sixtus of having instigated the murder. The Florentine historians are nearly unanimous in making the same accusation. And most of the arguments on the point have been based on consideration of this testimony. But we have less suspected evidence to the same purpose in the direct assertion of Stefano Infessura, the Roman diarist. Having briefly told the circumstances and upshot of the attempt, he adds:[85] "These things were ordered by Pope Sixtus, together with the Count Girolamo, and others, to take away the dominion [of Florence] from