a Duke of Milan and Crown Prince of Naples were there; that the lords of Lombardy and Romagna, who passed their lives in arms, and the best Neapolitan warriors, the Sanseverini, Orsini, Davalos, &c., were in the field; when we consider, on the other hand, the miserable results of this eight months’ campaign, we shall anticipate the approaching complete decline of that system of war which Alberigo da Barbiano had inaugurated a century before, and which had passed through many glorious days of military art and valour, although an evil lay in the very existence of mercenary troops from which other countries had to suffer. The Neapolitan troops were certainly not among the worst, and had practised leaders. And yet how did they prosper? Even before they had marched out, there were the most unfavourable opinions as to their quality and discipline. ‘When you hear from ill-wishers,’ wrote the King on February 10, 1467, to one of his agents, ‘that our soldiers will run away as soon as they have passed the frontiers, you must not heed this, for, with God’s assistance, we hope to send them out in such excellence and order, that they would rather attract others than go over to them.’ But the result did not correspond with the expectation of the monarch, who, however, devoted untiring care to military affairs. The Duke of Calabria employed three months in crossing the Tronto and dragging his army through Tuscany and Umbria, while the enemy was in the heart of Romagna. The militia dispersed without fighting. ‘It grieves my very soul,’ wrote the King on August 1, ‘this flight of a part of our men-at-arms. But as the fault lies in their badness and cowardice, and not in the treatment they had experienced from us, we will bear it more easily.’ And on January 15, 1468, during the truce: ‘Most of the soldiers leave the camp and return home, which does not promote the general good, and is highly displeasing to us.’ The Duke of Calabria was amusing himself in the meantime in Florence and Milan, whither his consort had gone to sweeten for him the hard campaign, in which he never faced the foe. With the money advanced by the Florentine banks, those of the Medici, Strozzi, Gondi, &c., the desertion of the enemy’s horse and foot was purchased, while the Neapolitans, as they remained without pay, acted in friendly countries, in the districts of Arezzo and Cortona, as if they had to do with their enemies.