affairs of the day with a Pope who, grown to manhood in a convent, had been drawn, at the approach of old age, into a whirl of business and difficulties which have given a most unenviable reputation to his pontificate, otherwise not without its good sides. The history of the city of Rome preserves the memory of this visit of Ferrante of Aragon, who, by his observation to Sixtus IV. that he could not be master of Rome so long as it was impossible to move freely in the streets, is said to have induced the Pope to widen them by removing the balconies and outbuildings, which had sometimes also served military purposes. There were now two leagues, which divided Italy geographically into two halves; but for the present they stood rather beside than opposed to one another. The whole political state of the peninsula in the fifteenth century had the characteristics of condottiere war in it, in the motives as well as in the forms, in the rendezvous and the evolutions, in the mutually dubious and bargaining demeanour to friends as well as foes. They formed alliances to injure those with whom an old alliance still existed; ambassadors were with those against whom they went to war; private persons were attacked before the war had broken out; the leaders were enticed away alternately by this party and by that, even after they had taken pay. In November 1475 the ambassadors of Venice, Florence, and Milan, went to Rome, summoned by the Pope, to take part in the congress convened on account of the Turkish danger. The imposing expedition of 1472, commanded in the Pope’s name by the Cardinal Olivieri Carafa, had obtained but slender results. The loss of Caffa, which had ensued in 1475, the ancient Genoese depôt on the Black Sea, was not only heavy in itself, but also because the connection with Persia, which alone still resisted, was threatened by it. The negotiations lasted for months; what they effected is seen by the fact that not long afterwards Turkish stragglers reached Friuli. While they thus remained in continual connection with the Pope, the friendship between the Medici and King Ferrante was outwardly undisturbed. In the summer of 1477 it would still have been held to be complete. The king, who had been for twelve years the widower of Isabella di Chiaromonte, and long a grandfather, determined to marry again. The ground was of a political nature. King Juan of Aragon and Sicily had never forgiven the separation of Naples from his brother’s dominions. Alfonso of Aragon had, indeed, thought he could proceed with Naples as with a conquered country; but on the side of Spain it was objected that Naples and Sicily were Hohenstaufen inheritance, and rightfully accruing to the house of Aragon through Manfred’s daughter, although in consequence of the Anjou usurpation it had long been lost to them. The mystery of Ferrante’s birth, who was said by some to be the son of a barber’s wife, and by others that of Alfonso’s sister-in-law, the consort of his