Filelfo’s arrogance and bad temper, and his fondness for invective and satire, soon brought him into trouble with the literary circle of Florence, and finally with the Medici, and he was compelled to withdraw to Siena, where he remained four years with a stipend of 350 florins. From there, after a brief visit to Bologna, he removed to Milan, where his emoluments were much larger than any heretofore received, and where, in the absence of any other scholars of equal attainments or assumptions, he had the satisfaction of being the accepted literary leader of the capital. In addition to his professional salary, he received large sums and presents for addresses, orations, and commemorative poems, which he was always ready to prepare. Such a combination of rhetoric and literature was peculiarly characteristic of the Italy of the time, and may be said to constitute a distinct phase in the history of compensation for intellectual productions. Filelfo published, in two ponderous volumes, his Satires, Odes, and other fugitive pieces, under the title of _Convivia Mediolanensia_. Notwithstanding the considerable sums which Filelfo earned through his lectures and through his various rhetorical productions, he seems always to have been in need of money. His tastes were expensive, while his three wives had borne him no less than twenty-four children. In his later years he gained the reputation of being very greedy of gold and of making impudent demands which bore very much the character of blackmail. Gregorio Lollio, writing (in 1452) to the Cardinal of Pavia, describes Filelfo in the following words: “He is calumnious, envious, vain, and so greedy of gold that he metes out praise or blame according to the gifts he gets, both despicable as proceeding from a tainted source.”[419] From Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, he received a liberal stipend. Pope Nicholas V., after reading some of his Satires (which Symonds characterises as “infamous”) presented him with 500 ducats. Travelling from Rome to Naples, Filelfo received more presents from Alfonso, who dubbed him a knight. Continuing his journey, he secured honours and rewards in Ferrara from Duke Borso, in Mantua from Marchese Gonzaga, and in Rimini from Gismondo Malatesta. After the death of Sforza, he accepted, in 1475, from Pope Sixtus IV., a professional Chair in Rome, with a salary of 600 florins. He soon, however, quarrelled with the Pope, and withdrew to Florence, where Lorenzo de’ Medici provided a post for him as Professor of Greek Literature. Filelfo died in Florence in his eighty-third year. He had probably received larger emoluments for his work as an instructor, as a rhetorician, and as a man of letters, than any man of his generation, but he died without any means, and was buried by the charity of the Florentines. His career, in its activities, vicissitudes, controversies, successes, and bitternesses, was very typical of the lives of the Italian scholars of the period.