Florence, but was obliged to yield to the brother-in-law of the all-powerful Rinaldo Orsini. It was said in Rome that the Pope, who had presented Count Girolamo with the rich possessions of his brother the cardinal, and yet was obliged to pay his debts, had offered his benefices, among which was the archbishopric, valued at three thousand gold florins, to the highest bidder, by which means money was raised. This, however, was not to be regarded as simony.[216] Francesco had only received the lesser consecration, and may have had no vocation for the priesthood; but this was not the objection raised against him in Florence, and the man preferred to him did not do his spiritual dignity the least credit. When, therefore, the Pope invested him with Pisa, the most important and wealthy bishopric of Tuscany, the Republic refused to allow him to assume it for three years, and he nursed his hatred in Rome, where soon others shared it with him. That this hatred was personal and directed against Lorenzo de’ Medici is easily to be understood, and even excusable under existing circumstances. They had accustomed themselves to regard Lorenzo as the head of the State, and to ascribe good and evil to his influence. Another complication arose, all the more serious because, not to mention pope and king, whose suspicions it increased, it excited another and a neighbour state against the Republic. The old connections of the Fortebracci of Montone with Florence have been mentioned. In the first times of the rise of the Medici, Braccio Fortebraccio had been the favourite hero of the Florentine people, who, on his account, had deeply insulted Pope Martin V. His son Oddo had been killed in the Visconti wars in the spring of 1425 by the peasants of the Val di Lamone, who, seventy years before, had made short work of the wild freebooters of the so-called Great Company in their mountain passes. Another son of Braccio’s had remained, Carlo, still a child at his father’s death. Having grown up in military service in Piccinino’s troop, he had attained the reputation of a skilful captain, and lived in the pay of Venice, which always needed numerous troops for Italy, as well as for her possessions in the Levant. He was striking in appearance; at the age of fifty-five he seemed to have renounced all ordinary habits of life, wore a long beard, forbore to change his clothes, and slept without a tent under the open sky in the fields.[217] When his _condotta_ came to an end, instead of beginning another he determined to carve out his fortune in his own home. His father and brother had once ruled over Perugia; he therefore relied upon the old attachment of a part of the citizens, and the love of novelty which was never extinguished in those half-free cities. In the spring of 1477 he set out with a considerable troop of mercenaries for Umbria. Such private enterprises of _condottieri_ were nothing new in Italy; Jacopo Piccinino had attempted something similar