The opinions of contemporaries and later writers on Piero de’ Medici are pretty unanimous. Donato Acciaiuoli, then captain of Volterra, wrote immediately after the event to Lorenzo.[174] ‘When shall we find another so reasonable in council, so just, true, mild in character, so loving towards home, relations, friends, so worthy of respect, as your excellent father, who has been taken from us to our great sorrow. When we see the whole nation saddened at his loss—the neighbouring towns, ecclesiastics and laymen, people of every rank—how much must not you, his family, suffer, with myself and his other intimate friends, for whom the general loss was a personal one?’ The high character of the man who wrote these words gives them a higher value than that of an ordinary letter of condolence. ‘Florence,’ says Machiavelli, in the seventh book of the Florentine History, ‘could not perfectly recognise the value and kindness of this man, because he only survived his father for a few years, and this short time was occupied by internal difficulties of the State and his own illness.’ In a similar strain Francesco Guicciardini[175] says: ‘His death saddened the whole town on account of his reasonable and mild disposition. Of his zeal for the common good he gave proof in 1466, for he punished only where it was necessary, and would have proceeded still more cautiously had not many of his partizans urged him on.’ To these opinions we can add that of a man in whom the Medicean family traditions of the older time still lived, which he had known through his parents, Alessandri de Pazzi, Piero’s grandson. ‘He was,’ so speaks he of his grandfather,[176] ‘rather a good man and anxious for the good of all than the head of a party. Unfortunately, he was much troubled with rheumatism, and for some time nearly lamed by it. It thus chanced that his position was endangered in 1466. Not only were several friends from Cosimo’s time already dead, but fresh accessions to their number was small, because the Medici did not take so much pains to conciliate as formerly.’