Confusion enough prevailed in the house of the Ordelaffi, who had taken a firm footing in Forli in the last decades of the thirteenth century, and at times ruled over Cesena. Albornoz had no worse opponent than Cecco (Francesco) Ordelaffi, whom only Venetian protection saved from complete ruin. His son Sinibaldo had returned by means of Florentine support in 1375 to Forli, where he fell, ten years later, a victim to a conspiracy of his two nephews. Antonio, the son of one of the latter, had joined the Florentines during the wars of the last Visconti in Romagna, and in 1441 they received him into their Accomandigia, and obtained for him the investiture of Forli from Pope Nicholas V. His two sons Cecco and Pino ruled at first together, but the latter in 1466 rid himself by violence of the former, who had been as bitter an enemy of Florence as Cecco was an ardent friend of the Republic. With the Manfredi too, who ruled in Faenza from 1314, there was nothing but quarrels and repeated changes of party. The towns of Faenza and Imola belonged in common to the different members of the family, and in such a manner that the eldest always conducted the government. But at the death of Guido Antonio, Taddeo Manfredi took possession of Imola in 1448, to the prejudice of his uncle Astorre, to whom the administration should have passed, and a contest arose which Pope Pius II., Francesco Sforza, and Florence tried to appease, without however procuring a real peace. Taddeo passed from one side to another, fought first in Florentine, then in Aragonese, and then again in Florentine pay. His uncle was not more constant. He had taken up arms for the Visconti in 1440, had been taken prisoner in the battle of Anghiari, and brought to Florence. Freed from prison, he had murdered him into whose power he had fallen in the battle at Bologna, for which Francesco Sforza set a price of a thousand gold florins on his head. Yet he succeeded in reconciling himself with the Republic, in whose service he fought against the Neapolitans in the Chiana valley in 1452. Florence had repeatedly concluded defensive alliances with both lines of the Manfredi since the year 1384. The Alidosi, once reigning in Imola, which they lost now to the Church, now to the Visconti, and now to the Manfredi, had been obliged to content themselves with the little Castel del Rio in the territory of Imola, towards the mountains, with which in 1392 they had joined the Florentine Accomandigia. A younger family had associated itself with these elder dynasties. Alessandro Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, had in 1445 acquired the lordship over Pesaro, by the cession of Galeazzo Malatesta, maternal grandfather of his wife Costanza da Varano, and maintained it under many changes of fortune. Pope Nicholas V. had invested him with the government; he had been an essential support to his brother in the contest for Milan, and he afterwards performed mercenary service for King Ferrante and for Venice.[144]