Lorenzo was sent, ostensibly on business connected with some alum-works and the bank, directed by his maternal uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni, to Rome, where he was honourably received by the Pope, the court, and numerous friends of the family. But Piero had doubtless the intention of making him personally acquainted with the customs and life of a city which was of the utmost importance for Florence and the Medicean family, and where Cosimo had always striven to preserve an influence. He had scarcely arrived there when an event happened which attracted the attention of all Italy, and the Medici in particular. On March 8, 1466, Francesco Sforza died, after a long illness, at the age of sixty-six. He had attained by craft and violence the throne which he maintained bravely, and developed capacities of government hitherto unknown at Milan. The last and most successful of the great _condottieri_ of Italy, he laid down arms in order to exercise the arts of peace for the last twelve years of his life. In later times Machiavelli, who witnessed the swift and sad change in Lombardy under one of the sons and the grandsons of the first Sforza, said, in his reflections on Titus Livius, that nothing, however great and important it might be, could give Milan or Naples their freedom, because all their limbs were decayed; the reproach of having made them so belongs far less to Francesco than to the Visconti, for his government healed many wounds, opened many resources, and restored peace to the land, to which it had long been unknown. As at the Duke’s death his eldest son, Galeazzo Maria, was absent in France, where he had been sent with a body of troops to assist King Louis XI. in the civil war which had broken out soon after his accession to the throne, the widowed Duchess Bianca Maria seized the reins of government with a firm hand, assured herself of the consent of the most eminent men of the State, and prepared a festal reception and peaceful accession to power for her son, who entered Milan on the 20th of the same month.