Caesar acquitted himself well, displaying a dignity beyond his years. He was invested with special privileges for the occasion; the symbols of the spiritual as well as of the temporal power--the flabel, the sedia gestatoria, the globe, and the sword--were borne before the Pope’s representative, who exerted himself to secure the goodwill of the new sovereign, who invested him, as the representative of the son of the unfortunate Duke of Gandia, with Benevento, the barony of Fiumara, and the county of Montefoscolo. August 22nd, to the great relief of Frederic, whose exchequer was suffering severely on account of the entertainment, Caesar set out to return to Rome; as he did not reach the city until the 5th of the following month, he may have spent some time inspecting the estates granted Gandia’s son by the newly-crowned King. The morning of the 6th--says Burchard--all the cardinals who were in the city went to meet Caesar at Santa Maria Nuova, and later all were received by his Holiness, and the Master of Ceremonies adds, “neither father nor son uttered a word, but the Pope, having blessed him, descended from the throne.” In this circumstance some writers discover evidence of Caesar’s guilt. The Pope, accompanied by the Cardinals of Valencia and of Agrigentum, with an escort of a thousand men, went to Ostia, October 17th, to spend a few days. The large guard was made necessary by the proximity of the Orsini. The Pope and his family were in grave danger, and now that Gandia was dead who was to defend them? Giuffre was scarcely twenty, and he had cast his fortunes with the House of Aragon; moreover, he showed none of Caesar’s resoluteness. At the coronation of the King of Naples the legate had used a sword upon which was engraved the motto _Cum Numine Caesaris Amen_ and _Caesar Borgia Cardinalis Valentianus_, and which is now in the possession of the Gaetani family of Rome. All the engravings on the blade represent scenes of war, and it is therefore reasonable to assume that the cardinal’s dreams turned more to military glory than to ecclesiastical honours, and Gregorovius says, “the allusions to the Caesar of the Roman Empire show what ideas were already seething in the cardinal’s brain.” In November, 1497, the Spanish physician Gaspare Torrella dedicated to the youthful cardinal a work on a loathsome disease which had been spread in Italy by the soldiers of Charles VIII., and which was in consequence called the “French sickness.” Caesar himself evidently had suffered from it, for the author states that the world owed the cardinal a debt of gratitude for subjecting himself to his treatment.[18] A work by Sebastiano Aquilano of Padua on the same subject was dedicated to Ludovico Gonzaga, Bishop of Mantua.