The Christian King Louis XII had a spasm of envy this year, in consequence of Duke Cesare’s phenomenal triumphs; and shewed some signs of interrupting the policy of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI with cries for a General Council. A model of his, bearing his effigy with the lilies of France and the legend _Perdam Babylonis Nomen_, made a great sensation in Rome.[50] But French motives never are disinterested. The moment another Power wins a success by expenditure of blood and treasure, that is the time for pretentious incompetent France, _cane che abbaia non morde_, to clamour for a share of what she never won, never could hope to win,—for what, with inconsequent impertinence, she calls “compensation”! The Holy Roman Church was not worse off, under the rule of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI, but better off than it had been before: but the election of His Holiness was always useful as a means of blackmail. However, Duke Cesare was Generalissimo of an enormous army. In addition to the four thousand condottieri and three hundred lancers with which he had begun the campaign, he had enlisted the many thousand mercenaries of the Tyrants whom he had dispossessed, and also recruited far and wide throughout Italy, where all the temperamental fighters gladly took service under the most successful general. And to these he added a foreign battalion of three thousand five hundred fantassini (infantry), pikemen and arbalisters, all Frenchmen, of whose quality the Christian King was well aware; and, therefore, sensible enough to refrain himself before a worse thing happened to him. Indeed, such was his anxiety to give evidence of his desire for peace that he actually offered,—he, the Christian King of France, the representative of the Angevin dynasty, offered to resign his claim to the kingdom of Naples in favour of Duke Cesare de Valentinois della Romagna. He was painfully anxious not to purchase a General Council at the cost of the conquest of France; and preferred that a Borgia sovereign, (if such a personage were to be,) should reign in Naples rather than in Paris.