During this year, a league of the Powers was formed under the Elect-Emperor Maximilian directed against Venice; and Duke Alfonso, whose dominions marched with those of that Republic, threw in his lot with its foes. While he was engaging the Venetians on the Romagna frontier, the Duchess Lucrezia ruled as Regent in Ferrara. She administered government of the state with the same sweet womanly thoroughness as she shewed in the administration of the government of her domestic affairs. History is rich in records relating to this lovely lady. She superintended the household matters of her palaces with a minute attention to detail which, to the modern middle-classes, would appear amazing in a Sovereign Duchess. To set a fashion of rare liberal-mindedness she appointed the Jewess Mazzolino to the care of her extensive wardrobe, and Messer Ludovico as her physician. Her régime was of the simple patriarchal type of the old Duke Ercole, who, on the occasion of an outbreak of plague in 1500, issued an Edict which said that “Duke Ercole d’Este, for good reasons to him known, _and because it always is well to be on good terms with God_,” ordained religious processions every day throughout Ferrara. A second quaint Edict of the same fatherly potentate, (which incidentally speaks for the meticulously cleanly personal habits of the Borgian Era, so strenuously maintained on a previous page of this book,) proclaims that “inasmuch as bakers are known to knead their dough with feet that, frequently, are unclean, such practices must not continue except on penalty of fine or imprisonment: but the dough must be worked with clean hands _and nails_.”