It had not always been so. The Papal satellite had been a trusted envoy of the Florentine Government. Born in 1483, he had studied law at Ferrara and Padua, become an advocate on his return to Florence, married advantageously, and in 1512 discharged a mission to Spain, where he graduated in diplomacy under the eye of the most crafty and faithless prince of the Age of Perfidy, Ferdinand the Catholic. The revolution which restored the Medici occurred in his absence. He accepted the situation, but instead of serving the Government at home, passed into the employment of the Medicean Pope, Leo X., to whom he must have been highly recommended, for he immediately received the government of Modena, Reggio, and Parma, recently added to the states of the Church, in which he showed the utmost energy and sagacity in suppressing malefactors and preserving order. From 1524 to 1527 he was President of the Romagna, and until 1534, when he retired from the Pope’s service, Governor of Bologna, and all evidence goes to show that the Papal power was never more faithfully served than by the man who held it in such abhorrence. He cannot be acquitted of having favoured the overthrow of Florentine liberty in 1530, and is accused of acts of cupidity and vengeance which do not seem in harmony with his general character. He returned to his native city in 1534, hoping to play an important part under the restored dynasty; but the youthful Duke Cosmo, who needed no tutor in the arts of intrigue and dissimulation, gently thrust him aside, and the disappointed politician solaced his latter years with the composition of his history. Six years of literary leisure gave him a renown which his twenty years of active concern with the world’s business would never have procured him. He died in 1540, leaving his history still in want of the last touches.