... I wrote that Madonna Clarice was ill, she died three days ago, but I did not send the news at once as it did not seem to me of much importance. Now that I am despatching the courier with letters from Naples I inform Your Excellency. She died last Wednesday at 24 of the clock and was buried without pomp that evening. The Magnificent Lorenzo is at Filetta taking the waters and the baths and the doctors advise him strongly not to come to Florence, also his friends have written to persuade him to remain and finish his cure, and this he will do. To-day, according to the custom here, the funeral service will take place at 21 of the clock. The whole city and the ambassadors of H.M., of Milan, and myself, have been invited. But before I received the invitation I went with the Milanese ambassador to the house of the Magnificent Lorenzo, and we condoled with Piero, the Magnificent’s eldest son, in the names of our Lords in such words as seemed fitted to the occasion.--Florence, August 1, 1488.[361] Lorenzo’s grief for the loss of Clarice, to whom he was sincerely but not passionately attached, was mitigated by the information that his heart’s desire--the nomination of his second son Giovanni, a boy of fourteen, to the cardinalate--would not be long delayed. The lad was already abbot of Font Doulce, in the gift of the King of France, of Passignano in Tuscany bestowed on him by the Pope, of Miramondo given by Lodovico il Moro, and of the great abbey of Monte Cassino _in commendam_ given to him by Ferrante, King of Naples. Innocent VIII. had declared he would make no cardinals under the age of thirty, but in March 1489 he yielded to Lorenzo’s entreaties, on the understanding that the nomination was to be kept secret for three years, and was exceedingly irate when it was divulged. Messer Aldrovandini, _Ambassador of Ferrara to the Republic of Florence, to_ Duke Ercole d’Este ... Some Corsicans on the pretence of buying wheat from the Castellan of Monte-acute, a castle in the Maremma belonging to Siena, entered in, slew the Castellan and seized the castle. The Sienese have sent a Commissary with troops, and have applied for help to the Signoria of Florence, who have ordered the Count of Pitigliano, their captain, to send his men to the aid of the Sienese--January 10, 1489.[362]