‘I have heard of the duke’s death,’ wrote Luigi Pulci to him from Mugello, where he was residing on his estate, on January 3, 1477.[212] ‘I am sorry, imagining that you are so. I have not been in the city, for I fear that it would avail nothing. Wherever I may be, you know that you have a servant who is always ready to obey you; and if you wish that I should go to our lord Roberto (Sanseverino), or elsewhere, I will mount at the first signal. In many respects I think it well that the aforesaid lord is there; he cannot want for ways and means. All the better am I pleased, therefore, that he is quite in your interests, and you can dispose of him there or here as you will.’ In regard to this last, however, Luigi Pulci was much mistaken. Roberto da Sanseverino, who had exercised so great an influence on the development of Milanese affairs, was not the man Pulci thought him. He was descended from one of the most illustrious families of Naples, that of the Princes of Salerno and Bisignano, who had made themselves a name on other fields than those of policy and war. He was the son of Leonetto da Sanseverino and of Lisa Attendolo of Cotignola, daughter of Sforza, the famous condottiere, a woman who had inherited the heroism of her father, and he was born about the year 1420. Trained to be an excellent soldier under his uncle, Francesco Sforza, he rose quickly to a position of distinction, when the former had become Duke of Milan. When in the barons’ war against Ferrante of Aragon, he led a Milanese auxiliary corps to Naples, the king made him Count of Cajazzo, in gratitude for his services. He was a man of restless mind, to whom the confusion, more personal than political, which had ensued after Galeazzo Maria’s death offered a wide field of activity. It was he who had principally assisted in disturbing Lorenzo’s Milanese policy. This policy tended to support the duchess-dowager and preserve the existing government. For this purpose Messer Luigi Guicciardini was commissioned to be active. He had been sent to Milan immediately after the duke’s death, where, with Soderini, who afterwards remained alone there, he was of great service, from the authority of the Republic and his personal distinction. Bona of Savoy saw her position soon endangered by her brothers-in-law and their party. Galeazzo Maria had left no less than five brothers, Sforza, Filippo, Lodovico, Ascanio, Ottaviano. Except the second, who had a taste for cultivating science and a quiet life, they were all characters calculated to inspire the head of a newly-risen family with anxiety. Ascanio dedicated himself to the ecclesiastical order and became apostolic pronotary, but this did not restrain the restless ambition which made the life of this man, afterwards so much spoken of, a chain of negotiations, intrigues, and vicissitudes of fortune. Sforza, who had inherited from his father the dukedom of Bari in Apulia, granted him by King Ferrante, and Lodovico,