A crusade! Mediæval Europe had heard that project discussed for many centuries. It had seen warriors take the Cross for reasons true and false, had watched their victories and their failures, and, by the end of the fifteenth century, was sufficiently disillusioned to smile in private when the idea was mentioned. The recovery of the Holy Sepulchre was a good excuse for governments to impose extra taxes, or for Venice to induce the weak-minded to wage her trade-wars in the Levant. If the Turk, as he threatened, grew stronger it might indeed become a matter of serious politics; but in the meantime, save in Spain or Bohemia, religious fervour stood at a discount. Yet European statesmen were ready enough to twist the young French monarch’s desire for high-sounding glory to their own advantage. Ludovico, “Il Moro,” virtual ruler of Milan for his nephew Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, saw in an alliance with Charles VIII. a way of extricating himself from political troubles that were likely to overthrow the balance of power in Italy, and with it his own dominion. “This Ludovico was clever,” says Philip de Commines who knew him, “but very nervous and cringing when he was afraid; a man without faith if he thought it to his advantage to break his word.” At the time when Charles VIII., grown to years of manhood if not discretion, was centring his hopes on Jerusalem, Ludovico Sforza lived in a perpetual state of fear. Of old in alliance with the Aragonese House of Naples and the Medici at Florence, he had regarded with calm eyes the hostility of Venice on the eastern border of his duchy and the growing ambitions of the Papacy in Romagna. These five Powers,—Milan, Naples, Rome, and the republics of Venice and Florence, had controlled the peninsula, and in Machiavelli’s words made it their object “first that no armed foreigner should be allowed to invade Italy, second, that no one of their own number should be suffered to extend his territory.” Slowly the balance thus established had been shaken, and mutual suspicion began to darken the relations between Naples and Milan. King Ferrante’s grand-daughter Isabella was wife of the rightful Duke, Gian Galeazzo, and in her letters home made piteous complaints of his uncle’s tyranny. Her husband was fully old enough to reign but was kept instead a prisoner at Pavia, his natural delicacy of constitution aggravated by this restraint. She herself was relegated to a merely secondary position; and her relations, who had intended her to act as their political agent, not unnaturally resented the forced seclusion in which she lived.