between the Duchess and Lorenzo, who received perfumed waters from the Castle of Capuano. If the Neapolitan Crown-Princess thus wrote, it is no wonder that one of the victims of Mohammedan conquest and Christian feud which the East then sent to Italy, Caterina, Queen of Bosnia—the most unhappy of queens (‘omnium reginarum infortunatissima’), as she called herself—adopted a yet humbler tone. From Rome, where the unfortunate princess had found refuge in 1466, and, like so many princely exiles before and after, lived by the Pope’s support, till, after twelve years, she was buried in Sta. Maria Araceli, she turned on January 28, 1472, to Lorenzo and Giuliano, with whom she had already been in communication for two years. The Medici bank in Rome was charged with the payment of her annual pension; she begged for cash, instead of being obliged, as frequently happened, to take payment in kind. She also appealed to old connections of the Medici with her family, which might have been through the mediation of Mathias Corvinus, and to the universally famed magnanimity of the brothers, which befitted their position. At the same time she recommended herself and her interests to their mother, ‘the illustrious lady whom she loved as a sister’—expressions which the Duchess of Milan, Bianca Maria Visconti Sforza, had employed seven years before in a letter to Madonna Lucrezia. While Italian and other princes stood on this footing with the Medici, their clients must have been numerous in Florence itself. It is a proof of the tact with which they understood how to manage their fellow-citizens, that while making use of them they never forgot their equality of rank, but treated them as confidants as well as friends. In the first rank of these was Luigi Pulci, whom we have already known as court-poet and _protégé_ of their mother. In the autumn of 1470 he accompanied Madonna Lucrezia to Fuligno, from whence he proceeded to Camerino, lying in the mountains between Umbria and the border land, to execute a commission given him by Lorenzo to Giulio Cesare Varano, lord of the little town and state. The Varani had risen in the latter times of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, and had gradually, as usual, by the administration of civil offices, attained a lordship restricted by the church, and often endangered by quarrels and insurrections. From the fourteenth century they had repeatedly entered the Neapolitan service. In the Malatesta war, the lord of Camerino had fought on the Papal side; he had an intention of breaking with the Florentines. When Lorenzo sent Luigi Pulci to him, with what commission is not known, he received him with the greatest deference. ‘He assured me,’ wrote Pulci to his patron,[187] ‘that there was no one in all Italy for whom he would do what he would for you. Your father had once procured him a Florentine condotta, and he was much indebted to yourself.’