As the Florentines had done the most in enabling Sante Bentivoglio to seize on the power, so they made it easier for him to preserve it. The Bolognese ambassadors had represented how the position of the city was such that they must throw themselves into the arms of the Duke of Milan if the Holy See did not deal mercifully with them. ‘Beg his Holiness,’ so wrote the Signoria on February 3, 1446, to their ambassador to Pope Eugenius IV., Paolo da Diaceto,[145] ‘to be gracious towards the poor Bolognese people, who have been so afflicted by oppression and misery, by fierce civil discord and strife, that it must move everyone to pity. The Bolognese hope from the gentleness of his Holiness, and the authority of the Republic of Venice, that it may be possible to discover some decent form of paying the Pope a reasonable tribute; but remaining otherwise in their present freedom, without Papal legates or other officers in the name of the Church. Do you make the observation that with people who are accustomed to bloodshed and full of suspicion, violence does not suffice; and that one must rather temporise in order to attain from them afterwards by love what violence cannot effect.’ So much, indeed, Bologna did not attain in the agreement concluded at Rome with Pope Nicholas V. on August 24, 1447, for she was obliged to receive a legate who shared the administration with the senate and the city magistrates. But the choice of these bodies was free; the city had its own militia and unrestricted power over its revenue, while the Papal troops were bound to protect her from foreign enemies. It is clear that such a relation might easily afford an opportunity for difficulties, and it is to be accounted a merit in Sante Bentivoglio that none arose under his government. When he died on October 1, 1463, his party appointed Giovanni, the son of Annibale and Donnina Visconti, then twenty years old, as his successor. By a treaty concluded with Pope Paul II. in 1466, the latter acquired a legal power such as none had had before him. This treaty secured him a seat and two votes in the Senate, which consisted almost entirely of his partisans and was renewed every six months, and thus placed him at the head of the citizens who, after Sante’s death, had already shown themselves so complaisant that they had conferred upon the youthful Giovanni the dignity of Gonfaloniere, to which only men of mature age could usually attain. By his marriage with Ginevra Sforza of Pesaro, Giovanni Bentivoglio entered into relationship with Milan, in which he hoped to gain some support against any hostility on the part of the Pope. That he held fast to his friendship with Florence was, to say nothing of the tradition of his predecessors, caused by his connections with Sforza. We have seen that it was he who gave Piero de’ Medici information of the unfriendly movements of Ercole d’Este.[146]