excellent in every art, and, according to the standard of those days, not without military glory." In these happy years, and in the decades that preceded them, Italian politics was a domestic game between the five principal powers, Papacy, Naples, Florence, Venice, and Milan, who treated one another's border cities as stakes. They made leagues and counter-leagues, waged innumerable little wars, fought bloodless skirmishes, flourished their swords, blew their trumpets, and made a good deal of commotion; but they were all Italians, they all knew the rules of the game, however irregular and complicated those rules might appear to an outsider, and if there were bloody heads, they were all in the family. With 1494 came the change. History seemed to turn back a thousand years; the French poured over the Alps from the northwest, the Imperial soldiers of the House of Hapsburg from the northeast, and the Spaniards from their province of Sicily to the south. _Milan, 1466-1535_ Our chronicle had better begin with the duchy of Milan. There, on the death of Francesco Sforza (1466), his son, Galeazzo Maria, succeeded to the throne. This duke was a typical Italian ruler, brilliant in display, liberal in giving, harsh in taxing, interested in art and scholarship, crafty and cruel in politics, and shamelessly dissolute in private life. Fearful stories of his brutality are told. He was literally insufferable, and was assassinated (1476). It is interesting to see the great classical influence, which stimulated the arts and the humanities, quickening the spirits of young men and giving an antique lustre to murder. The story goes that a schoolmaster of Milan, who had drilled his boys in Plutarch, till Plutarch's world seemed to live again, burst out in his lecture, "Will none among my pupils rise up like Brutus and Cassius to free his country from this vile yoke and merit eternal renown?" Three of his pupils, stimulated by private wrongs to emulate the classical example, murdered the duke in a church. All three were put to death. The last to die was skewered on iron hooks and cut to pieces alive. "I know," he said, "that for my wrongdoings I have deserved these tortures and more besides, could my poor flesh endure them; but as for the noble act for which I die, that comforts my soul. Instead of repenting it, were I to live my life ten times again, ten times again to perish in these tortures, none the less would I consecrate all my life's blood, and all my might, to that noble purpose."