What charges lie against Duke Cesare de Valentinois? It is Cappello who states that he drove away the women, and caused Prince Don Alonso to be strangled by Don Michelotto. Burchard appears ignorant of these details. It is Cappello who states that Duke Cesare admitted and defended the murder. Of this Burchard says nothing: he relates that the prince was strangled; and, from his mention of the interrogation of the leeches and of the hunchback, it would appear that others beside Duke Cesare were suspected. Cappello says that the prince was poignarded in head, arms, and thighs; Burchard, in head, right arm, and knee. Cappello speaks of a guard appointed by the Pope to watch the wounded man. Burchard does not record this. There are discrepancies between the two accounts; some, of reasonable importance: _e.g._, Burchard’s account of the forty knights who escorted the assassins from the City; and of the sending of the royal leech without mentioning any suspicions on the part of King Don Federigo. But nowhere can be found a proved accusation against Duke Cesare de Valentinois, or against the Holiness of the Pope. From a study of the various statements, (derisable though to some extent they be,) and of known facts, a reasonable enough history of the affair may be compiled, and one which happens to be exculpatory of Borgia. Don Alonso de Aragona Prince of Bisceglia, Salerno, etc., was a nephew of King Don Federigo of Naples. At the age of nineteen, he married Madonna Lucrezia Borgia, on political grounds to consolidate friendly relations then existing between Papacy and Regno. All accounts agree that this was a genuine love-match as well; and the chronicler Talini says of the prince, “he was the most beautiful youth that I have ever seen in Rome.” A year after the marriage Madonna Lucrezia bore him an heir, Don Roderico; who immediately was provided-for with the duchy of Sermoneta. The young Prince and Princess of Bisceglia lived in the palace of the Cardinal of Sante Maria _in Portico_ by the Vatican, in order to be near to the Pope. In the year 1500, the relations of Papacy and Regno had undergone a change. The Lord Alexander P.P. VI was now allied with France, the old and still-distrusted enemy of Naples; and King Don Federigo had joined the unmitigable handful of men who were blackmailing the Pope’s Holiness with threats of a General Council. The Prince of Bisceglia as a Neapolitan, therefore, would not be persona gratissima to the supporters of Borgia.