With Leo X. died the last legitimate descendant of Cosimo Pater Patriae, and the Medici palace was inhabited by the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, son of the Magnificent Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano, by a lady of the Gorini family. He left his mark on the Palazzo by closing the open loggia on the first floor, where Cosimo had always received the citizens who visited him, thus turning it into a long gallery. Even the thorough-going old Republican Jacopo Nardi admits that the Cardinal’s rule was better than any the city had known for many a long year, and everything went smoothly until in 1522 a plot was discovered to murder him. Most of the conspirators, belonging to well-known Florentine families, fled, but young Diaceto and his friend Alamanni were beheaded. The old Palazzo Medici was too small to contain the crowd of citizens of all classes who flocked thither to assure the Cardinal of their heart-felt joy at his escape. According to Ammirato their joy was sincere, for the city would probably have been attacked by the Imperial forces, which had just sacked Genoa and would have seized on such a good excuse as the murder of the Cardinal-Governor to obtain so rich a prize. In November, 1523, the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici became Pope under the title of Clement VII. and his election was hailed with demonstrations of joy in Florence. Ippolito, the handsome illegitimate son of Giuliano, Duc de Nemours, was sent from Rome under the charge of Silvio Passerini, Cardinal of Cortona, installed in the Palazzo Medici with great magnificence and, although he was only thirteen years of age, declared eligible to all offices of state in the Republic. Alessandro, the reputed son of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, but more probably the child of Clement himself, together with the young Duchess Catherine, was sent to Poggio a Cajano, a Medici villa about nine miles out of Florence. The two lads hated one another, so the Pope thought it best to separate them. Ippolito was handsome, his manners were engaging and he already had a right royal way of spending money. Alessandro, commonly supposed to have been the son of a Moorish slave woman, a report his crisped hair, thick lips and swarthy complexion, tended to confirm, was ugly, violent in temper and abrupt in manner. The appointment of Passerini was not a happy one. “Besides being,” writes Varchi, “like most prelates, extremely avaricious, he had neither the intellect to understand the Florentine character, nor the judgment to manage it had he understood it.” The sack of Rome, and the imprisonment of Clement in Castel S. Angelo, offered too good an opportunity for the Republican party in Florence to lose, and the dreaded cry of _Popolo, Libertà_, resounded in the streets. Ridolfi had come into town with his young pupil Alessandro, and the anxiety of the inmates of Palazzo Medici was not lessened by a visit from their imperious kinswoman, Clarice, daughter of Piero de’ Medici, who had just escaped from Rome with her