When it was desired to reward and exalt a subject, the sovereigns of the Borgian Era had the naïve habit of dispossessing one of their enemies, and conferring the vacated fief on their new protégé. In order to enrich Prince Don Alonso with the principality of Salerno, the Majesty of Naples had deprived the noble Neapolitan House of Sanseverini. In order to enrich His grandson the baby Don Roderico with the duchy of Sermoneta, the Holiness of the Pope had despoiled the noble Roman House of Caïetani. And it readily will be understood that Caïetani and Sanseverini were extremely likely to view these losses with anything but resignation. Regarding the edict of Duke Cesare de Valentinois, that none should go armed between the Mola and the Vatican, it must be admitted that this was only a very ordinary precautionary measure. The district named is the immediate precincts of the pontifical palaces of peace and war, which were connected by the fortified gallery-passage, through the Region of Borgo, called Lo Andare; and the baring of arms within the presence of royalty was, at all times, and in all courts, a capital crime. Duke Cesare as Generalissimo was responsible for the maintenance of order; and he was no laggard in any official capacity. If then, the truth of the stabbing on the steps of St. Peter’s and the strangulation in the Borgia Tower be granted, they might be defended as an execution of the death penalty prescribed for a breach of the law, such as the fiery Neapolitan prince is extremely likely to have committed. Royal or patrician criminals were frequently done to death in private, by quasi-assassination, to avoid the degradation of the touch of the public carnifex. Again, granting the said stabbing and strangling, and regarding them as an act of private vengeance on the part of Duke Cesare against the prince; it should be remembered that people had the custom of defending their lives by slaughtering an enemy who set archers to shoot at them in the garden.