when I lost him, no one regarded me or helped me in my distress, but I have been forsaken by all. Messer Antonio has shown greater sympathy with me and my son than has been evinced all this time by the whole world, in the midst of all the strokes of fate.’ Cosimo de’ Medici did not content himself with rendering his old opponents harmless; he took care also that none of his adherents should become too powerful and dangerous to him. Therefore, remarks Francesco Guicciardini, he retained the Signoria, as well as the taxes, in his hand, in order to be able to promote or oppress individuals at will. In other things the citizens enjoyed greater freedom and acted more according to their own pleasure than later, in the days of his grandson, for he let the reins hang loose if he was only sure of his own position. It was just in this that his great art lay, to guide things according to his will, and yet to make his partisans believe that he shared his authority with them. It was necessary, however, that there should be one against the others, as was the case with Neri Capponi. To weaken the respect in which the latter was held when his name was in all mouths after the great victory over the Duke of Milan in 1440, Cosimo is said to have commanded the murder of the captain, Baldaccio da Anghiari, who remained in the service of the Republic, and was an intimate friend of Neri. The sanguinary deed was executed in the palace, whither the unsuspecting man had been summoned by command of the Gonfaloniere Bartolommeo Orlandini. Thus the share of Cosimo and his motives are veiled in obscurity, but the suspicion has never been removed from him.[85] The name of the Casa Annalena still recalls Baldaccio’s widow, of the family of the Malateste of Rimini, who founded here a convent for destitute women and girls, the extensive buildings and gardens of which were employed for other purposes at the dissolution of the monastic orders in 1808.