The villa at Fiesole was nigh being the scene of a double murder, when, as Roscoe writes, “a pope, a cardinal, an archbishop, and several other ecclesiastics associated themselves with a band of ruffians to destroy two men who were an honour to their age and country; and purposed to perpetrate their crime at a season of hospitality....” The two men were Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, one of the best of the Medici; the conspirators were Sixtus IV, and his nephew Girolamo Riario, Francesco de’ Pazzi, whom jealousy of the Medici had led to settle at Rome, his uncle Jacopo de’ Pazzi, a gambler and a libertine, and all his ten nephews save two; Gugliemo, married to Lorenzo’s sister Bianca before their father’s death, and Renato, a man of letters. The Pope’s chief agent was the archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, a man of notoriously bad character, whose preferment to the see of Pisa Lorenzo had strenuously opposed, seconded by his brother Jacopo Salviati and by the son of Poggio Bracciolini the great scholar. Jacopo Poggio was of some repute in the world of letters and dedicated a commentary on Petrarch’s _Trionfo della Fama_ to Lorenzo. “I am aware,” he writes, “that what little I know is due to the help and valiant encouragement given to me in my youth by Cosimo thy grandfather.... I consider myself obliged and constrained out of gratitude to dedicate unto thee, his true and worthy heir, whatever fruit is born of his grave and weighty admonitions and exhortations; as a recognition that whatever virtues I possess derive from thy house.” The underlings were Bernardo Bandini, a man of ill-fame, Giovan Battista Montesicco, a condottiere engaged in the service of the Pope, Antonio Maffei, a priest from Volterra and Stefano da Bagnone, an apostolic scribe.