Nothing illustrates the duplicity of the age better than this coalition of the head of the Christian Church and the King of France for the destruction of the House of Naples. Only four years before Caesar, as cardinal-legate, had crowned the last of the Aragonese Kings of Naples; three times Alexander had endeavoured to marry one of his children into this family, and he had become connected with it by the marriage of his son Giuffre with Doña Sancia, and that of his daughter Lucretia with Alfonso, Prince of Bisceglia, whom Caesar had murdered--and in this perfidious age the most perfidious of all was the head of the Christian Church. In 1499 Louis XII. had secured the Pope’s consent to his undertaking with respect to the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan. This, as we have seen, was one of those immoral bargains which powers and potentates still make at the expense of weaker States, although the bald egoism of the ruler is now less in evidence in these transactions than it was during the Renaissance. To-day the heads of government, being shorn of autocratic power, do not represent personal ambition or achievement; they are either simply survivals of mediaevalism or the representatives of some interest or faction--of an industrial unit of some sort; therefore in advanced countries the actual egoism of the ruler is of slight moment. In the age of the Borgia the personality of the ruler was more important; the extension of his power--in fact, his very tenure of office and position--depended on his physical strength, his cunning, his powers of dissimulation, his predilections, his ambitions, his morals. He was hampered by no constitutional restrictions and his dynasty required for its perpetuation something more than law; the domination of his family could be secured only by force and fraud. The heads of governments to-day being mere accidents of birth or the product of economic interests, their accession to positions of nominal power and their abandonment of those positions have no appreciable influence upon the destinies of States; they are products of one class of economic or social factors just as the despots of the Renaissance were the products of another group.