Vicechancellor-Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza-Visconti now became aggressive, and successfully detached from the Pope the Houses of Colonna and Savelli; (the last, until their dynasty became extinct, held the office of Hereditary Marshal of the Holy Roman Church.) Colonna and Savelli then collected their retainers and menaced the Eternal City. On the eighteenth of September Don Fabrizio Colonna recaptured Ostia, and held it in the name of its renegade Cardinal-Bishop. French galleys transporting troops anchored in the mouth of Tiber. Crippled Naples dared not to advance on Milan leaving Rome unprotected. Then Madonna Caterina Sforza-Riario, countess and witch, (daughter of the great Francesco, and widow of the infamous Count Girolamo Riario of the Pazzi Conspiracy,) declared for France in her citadel of Imola, and made things worse for Naples and the Papacy by showing them that an enemy was in their midst. In this strait, and having no sovereign friend in Europe save the Majesty of Naples, the Lord Alexander P.P. VI applied to the Great Turk, the Sultán Bajazet. That wily oriental agreed to help, on condition that his brother and rival, the Sultán Djim, long years held hostage by the Papacy, should be delivered to his tender mercies. This the Pope’s Holiness refused, not caring to connive at fratricide; and so completed the isolation of Himself and King Don Alonso II. On the sixth of October, the Supreme Pontiff thundered from the Vatican a demand for the restitution of Ostia, (held by Don Pierfrancesco Colonna (?)) on pain of the Greater Excommunication. He “fills a great place in history because he so blended his spiritual and temporal authority as to apply the resources of the one to the purposes of the other.” (_North British Review._) At the same time, having intelligence of a Colonna plot to capture the Sultán Djim on behalf of France, He moved His mysterious ward from the Vatican by way of Lo Andare to the Mola of Hadrian on Tiber; and sent the Lord Francesco de’ Piccolhuomini, Cardinal of Siena, as Apostolic Envoy to the Majesty of France. But the Christian King would not receive him, saying that he was coming to Rome to see the Pope Himself.[28] * * * * *