During the siege of Forli an event occurred, of secondary importance, except as evidence of the mystery surrounding the paternity of Duke Cesare. The Most Worshipful Lord Giovanni Borgia (detto Giuniore) Cardinal-Presbyter of the Title of Santa Maria _in Via Lata_ died at Urbino. He was one of the bastards of that beautiful splendid sneak and coward Don Pedro Luis de Lançol y Borgia, (Duke of Spoleto, younger brother of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI, who had been named Prefect of Rome and Castellan of Santangelo by his Uncle, the Lord Calixtus P.P. III, and who died in his flight from Rome in 1458). The said Most Worshipful Lord Cardinal Giovanni Giuniore had been Bishop of Melfi since 1492. In 1496, he was elevated to the Sacred College, and given command of the condottieri which the Lord Alexander P.P. VI was preparing against France; and, when Duke Cesare renounced his scarlet early in 1499, he had ceded to this cardinal his Metropolitan Archbishopric of Valencia. The Lord Giovanni Giuniore had held Legations to Umbria, Bologna, Ravenna and France, and was acting as Legate to Umbria when he died at Urbino. Duke Cesare himself announced this death to the Pope in a letter written from Forli, and dated the sixteenth of January 1500, in these words: “I have news of the death of Cardinal Borgia, _my brother_, who died at Urbino.” Duke Cesare wrote a kind of Latin neither Golden nor Silvern but particular to himself, as also was his Italian and there is no known instance of his using “frater” or “fratello” in the tertiary sense of “cousin.” If the dead Cardinal and the Duke were uterine brothers, then Don Pedro Luis was their father; and Duke Cesare was not the son, but the nephew, of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI. The death of the Cardinal, however, has been alleged by some chroniclers to have been caused by venom administered by Duke Cesare. The charge is essentially absurd. There was no motive; for Cardinal and Duke were comrades, _brothers-in-arms_, equally engaged in the reduction of the rebellious Romagna; there could have been no jealousy, for they occupied separate and independent ranks, (of which Duke Cesare had chosen his,) the Cardinal Giovanni Giuniore as Legate, being the older man (41), and Duke Cesare the younger (26) as Generalissimo: nor was the Cardinal rich enough to make his death desirable. But, at all events, it was impossible that Duke Cesare should envenom him for the simple reasons that the two were many miles apart during seventeen days before the death, and that no venom of slow action was known to the Fifteenth Century any more than it is to the Twentieth. * * * * * At the Seventh Consistory of the sixteenth (or twentieth) of March 1500, the Lord Alexander P.P. VI named three cardinals, who were (α) the Lord Don Didaco Hurtado de Mendoza, a Spaniard; Cardinal-Presbyter of the Title of Santa Sabina: (he was afterwards called “The Cardinal of Spain:”)