In 1496 she was once more a widow, Giacomo Fea having been murdered by some of her own subjects, whom she punished as she had done the assassins of her first husband. Giovanni de’ Medici, envoy of Florence to the court of her son, married her the following year and died soon after, leaving her with an infant boy. After vainly trying to stem the invasion of her eldest son’s territories by Duke Valentino, who entered the citadel of Forli by treachery, she was made prisoner and sent to Rome; but after a short imprisonment was allowed to retire to Florence, where she dedicated herself to the education of her little son, Giovanni de’ Medici. Her letters, full of family troubles, complaining bitterly that she was left without sheets for her bed, forks or tablecloths, are sad reading. Pierfrancesco and Lorenzo de’ Medici attempted to contest her right to the villa and to the little that was left of the heritage of her third husband “the Magnificent Joanne de’ Medici”; and she lived in constant fear that Lorenzo, who had unlawfully assumed the tutelage of her son, would make away with him in order to dissipate the patrimony of his dead father. After a law suit she rescued the boy from the clutches of his uncle and smuggled him, with some waiting-women, into the nunnery of Anna-Lena. Here, dressed as a girl and jealously guarded by the faithful nuns, the future soldier Giovanni delle Bande Nere—the last of the great condottiere—passed eight months. It was only after the death of Lorenzo, in 1504, that he joined his mother at Castello, when she devoted all her remarkable energy to his education. Tutor succeeded tutor, for Madonna Caterina wished the boy to be an accomplished and learned gentleman; but he despised book-learning, and only cared for athletic exercises and out-door sports. “So you have your boy back,” wrote an old follower of her husband whom she commissioned to procure “a small and handsome horse” for the seven year old Giovanni. “If my father had come to life again I could not be more glad; and so it is with all the condottieri here in camp. The day your letter arrived the commissary was so overjoyed he could not eat. As to the horse, we will search among the condottieri here, and whosoever has one will be only too proud to give it. We shall, without fail, find what you want.”[45]