Ten young men on horseback and sixty-four on foot, armed and helmeted, concluded the splendid procession, which, as we need not say, formed the climax of this brilliant tournament. Lorenzo has made the following note of the festivity and its result: ‘In order to do as others, I appointed a tournament on the Piazza Santa Croce, with great splendour and at great expense, so that it cost about ten thousand gold florins. Although I was young and of no great skill, the first prize was awarded to me, namely, a helmet inlaid with silver and surmounted by a figure of Mars.’ We see that it was only a step from citizen to prince. The court poet was not wanting. A long poem in eight-lined stanzas describes the festival and those who took part in it, with all the details and profuse display of mythological learning, and not without allusions to a yet more glorious future. Whether it is by Luca Pulci or by his more famous and talented brother, the poet of the Morgante, remains undecided. It is hardly worthy of the latter, although it is not wanting in poetical beauty; its chief fault lies, not in the poverty of separate parts, but in the trivial subject and the fulsome multiplication of details. Comparison with a later poem on a similar subject throws into relief the deficiencies of this.[160] Long after the tournament at Sta. Croce had taken place, poets continued to celebrate the love of Lorenzo for Lucrezia Donati, and Lorenzo did not cease to record his feelings of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, as they rose and fell, in a series of sonnets and canzonets which have procured one of the foremost and honoured places among the poets of the fifteenth century for him in whose hand the fate of his native country lay for years. But while the poet occupied himself thus with the lady of his thoughts, the fortune of the man who was to be the head of his family and his state took a decisive turn. When he held the tournament he had been already betrothed for some time; indeed, the tournament was intended to celebrate his betrothal! Piero de’ Medici did not follow Cosimo’s principle of choosing for his son and heir a bride among the daughters of the land. He seems to have been indifferent to the aversion with which intermarriages with foreign baronial families were generally regarded at Florence. Corso Donati, the brother of Piccarda, had once aroused a rebellion against himself which cost him his life, by proposing to offer his hand to a daughter of Uguccione della Fagginola, the powerful partisan and friend of Dante. The news that Lorenzo de’ Medici intended to enter into an alliance with one of Rome’s oldest and greatest families was heard with displeasure at Florence, because the people suspected that the object was to raise himself above the ordinary position of a citizen, and to seek foreign support. Clarice degli Orsini[161] was the daughter of Jacopo, lord of Monterondo, and of his second wife, Maddalena, daughter of Carlo, lord of Bracciano, and sister of