brother the Grand Master of San Jago, was opposed to this in the king’s family. At the time we have mentioned, when the Neapolitan line of the Aragonese seemed fully secured by children and grandchildren as well as by investitures and alliances, new claims appeared, nevertheless, in Spain. The means of resisting these was a union of the two lines: Ferrante married his uncle’s daughter, Juana. On June 11, the Duke of Calabria quitted Naples to fetch his future stepmother. Several of the great barons of the empire accompanied him. Received at Rome with great splendour, he landed on the 29th at Piombino, where a wooden mole had been built, forty feet long, and covered with branches and flowers. On July 1 he reached Pisa. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who towards the end of May had received the Duchess of Ferrara at his house in this town—when she was on her way to her father, and, passing through Lucca, arrived here—and had splendidly entertained her till she embarked at Leghorn,[207] had come down the Arno in two great barques to meet the duke, and escorted him to a palace fitted up for him, where he resided for three days as the guest of the Republic. Lorenzo failed not to give rich presents on this as on all similar occasions. On July 9 the duke was in Nice, on the 25th in Barcelona, from whence, on September 11, the new queen reached Naples, where Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, as Papal legate, performed the marriage ceremony and the coronation.[208] Bongianni Gianfigliazzi and Pierfilippo Pandolfini presented the newly-married pair with the congratulations of the Republic. Not much above a quarter of a century later this queen shared the complete ruin of the house which she now entered, a ruin in which her own brother aided by lending a hand to the successor of him with whom King Ferrante had refused to ally himself, when he rejected the proposals made him by Louis XI. to the disadvantage of his Spanish relations. CHAPTER IX. MILAN, GENOA, AND SIENA.