On the 28th of September arrived in Florence the ambassadors sent by Venice "to put," says Galluzzi,[190] "Bianca in possession of the prerogatives which the daughtership of St. Mark produced to her." It is rather difficult to understand what these prerogatives might have been; but it is probable that if the baggage of the ambassadors had been searched for them, they would have been found to consist in a certain quantity of engrossed parchment and sealing–wax, cased in some more or less splendidly adorned wrappage of velvet or cloth of gold. The ambassadors, however, Antonio Tiepolo and Giovanni Michiel, were assisted in bringing these "prerogatives" by a train of ninety gentlemen of the noblest houses in Venice. It was apparently thought necessary that the extrinsic pomp of this embassy should be in exact proportion to the intrinsic meanness of the business it was engaged on. For we are told that it outshone in taste and magnificence all former doings of the kind, even in the most palmy days of Venice. And all the ninety noble gentlemen who came to make _kotoo_ to Francesco's _cosa_, vied with each other in efforts of ostentation for the manifestation of their, own greatness. Beside these ninety, there came also the bride's father and brother, and the Patriarch of Aquileia, by no means behindhand, the holy man, in availing himself of his scrap of relationship to the "cosa," for the purpose of bringing his grey hairs into the sunshine of a princely countenance. And with these came other eighty, all calling themselves relations of the bride; and all were lodged in the Pitti palace, and treated with all sorts of junkettings and diversions, banquets, balls, tourneys, hunting–parties (with nets), bull–baiting, chariot races, comedies, &c. The task of thus entertaining his wife's relatives on this occasion is computed to have cost Francesco three hundred thousand ducats,[191] a sum which, allowing for the difference in the value of money, seems almost incredible. It happened to be a year of great scarcity in Tuscany. There was wide–spread and severe distress among the people, who looked on at this lavish and useless expenditure; and the sight did not contribute to conciliate the love of the Florentines to their new liege lady. [Sidenote: CORONATION.]