In the meantime Ercole d’Este, having no excuse for further delay, dispatched the escort--December 7th--for Rome, where it arrived the 23rd. In the cortège were Cardinal Ippolito and Fernando d’Este, brothers of the groom, with their suites, numbering more than five hundred persons. Valentino, accompanied by the French ambassador, Monseigneur de Trans, went to meet the princes. He embraced the cardinal affectionately, and when returning to the city rode on Ippolito’s left. At the gates they were met by nineteen other cardinals and their “families.” They were received by the Pope and his Court in the Vatican, after which Caesar conducted the princes to his sister’s apartments. The wedding gifts were magnificent--the least of all was that of Florence, a present of cloth of gold and silver to the value of 3,000 ducats. The betrothal took place December 28th, and the church ceremony the 30th. Burchard describes the wedding with a wealth of detail that would do credit to a modern society reporter; the gowns, the jewels, the presents, the guests, the bride, the groom--all are there; the games for the entertainment--all are described. Another move in the great political game had been made; the declining House of Naples had been eliminated as a factor in the Borgia plans by the murder of Alfonso of Aragon, and the support of the great House of Este, secured by the marriage of Ercole’s son, the future Duke of Ferrara, with Lucretia, who was apparently a passive instrument in the hands of Caesar and the Pope in their machinations. The final historical estimate of her is that she was not the virago, the baneful fiend she is represented to have been, but a colourless, characterless personality, wholly lacking in will, and completely under the control of Caesar and the Pope. She had none of the characteristics of Caterina Sforza. She left Rome to go to her future husband, who had been represented by a proxy, and she never returned. She appears to have made an excellent wife and mother. Caesar remained in Rome until February 17, 1502, when he and the Pope, accompanied by several cardinals, left for Piombino, where they arrived the 21st. On the 25th they sailed for Elba to inspect two strongholds which Caesar was having his engineers construct on the island. When they were returning, March 1st, there was a severe storm, which made it impossible for them to leave the vessels for five days, and Burchard remarks that the Pope and cardinals who were in the captain’s ship were so frightened that they fell ill. They did not succeed in getting back to Rome until the 11th of March. The strongholds on the island of Elba were probably built by Leonardo da Vinci, who had left Cesena in the fall of 1501 to go to Rome to confer with Caesar, and not by Antonio di Sangallo, who was engaged on the works in the vicinity of Civita Castellana during the early months of 1502.