The dispatches of Giustinian, Venetian ambassador to the Vatican from May 27, 1502, to April 26, 1505, edited by the profound scholar Professor Pasquale Villari, have been of the utmost value. The ambassador watched every move made by the Vatican as if the very life of his beloved republic depended on it, and with great perspicacity he followed the extraordinary political drama that was being enacted in Rome. Burchard’s diary is also an inexhaustible mine of information concerning the pontificate of Alexander VI. and the earlier years of the reign of Julius II. This Alsatian Master of Ceremonies is a wholly passionless recording machine, so automatic that one immediately discovers that he had no moral sense whatever. Only once does he display any feeling--when the swashbucklers of Charles VIII. placed some of their horses in “my stable, where they devoured my hay and oats, so I had them removed to the stable of one of my neighbours”--a very human act on the part of the Master of Ceremonies. On account of Burchard’s calm relation of the crimes and scandals connected with the reign of Alexander VI. efforts have been made to discredit the _Diarium_. It has been claimed that all the available manuscripts are not only inexact but also that they are largely fabrications of the enemies of the Papacy; it has also been maintained that Burchard’s original manuscript is not in existence. The diary was published complete for the first time by M. Thuasne (1883–5) in three octavo volumes. His text is derived from the Paris manuscript, an almost exact reproduction of that in the Chigi Palace which was copied from the original in the Vatican by order of Alexander VII.--Fabio Chigi. M. Thuasne has corroborated the statements of the diary in innumerable instances with notes from other sources and a large number of hitherto inedited documents.