It was in April 1478 that Francesco Salviati came to Florence in order to execute an errand with reference to the affairs of Romagna. Everything was talked over in the houses of the Pazzi and in their villa at Montughi. The number of accomplices was so considerable that we can hardly understand how the project never came to the hearing of the Medici. A nephew of Girolamo Riario, Raffaello Sansoni, was studying at the time at the university of Pisa. Sixtus IV. had granted, on December 10, 1477, the cardinal’s purple to this youth of sixteen, who was not exactly distinguished by brilliant intellectual gifts, still less by learning. The young man, who henceforward bore his mother’s name, began his long career as ecclesiastical prince, a position for which he was but little suited, among circumstances the memory of which was revived when he, as an aged man, was again involved in an intrigue against the Medici. Girolamo caused his nephew to be summoned to Florence, in order to employ him in the execution of the plot as a tool without a will. The other instruments were of a different kind. Jacopo Salviati followed the inspirations of his brother, the archbishop, with whom two other relations were associated. Jacopo Bracciolini, the son of Poggio, a clever literary man, forgot the old connections of his father and his own with the Medici in order to join with their enemies. He had come to Florence in the second half of January, and delivered a letter from Riario[227] to Lorenzo, which said that the writer had chosen this learned, virtuous, and upright man for service with the young cardinal, to instruct the latter in moral conduct, and begged Lorenzo to grant him full confidence in all that regarded the aforesaid cardinal, and support where he needed it. Of Antonio Maffei of Volterra, the brother of the learned Raffaello, it is said that no personal motives led him to take part in it, but sorrow over the misfortunes of his native city, of which he regarded Lorenzo as the destroyer. Bernardo Bandini, the descendant of an ancient family, son of a man who under King Ferrante had presided over the first Court of Justice in Naples, is said to have been induced to join by the ruinous state of his fortune. The clerk Stefano da Bagnone had served Jacopo Pazzi as scribe, and was then pastor at Montemurlo, in the territory of Pistoja, the castle which nearly sixty years later was celebrated by a defeat of the Strozzi and their friends in a battle against Cosimo de’ Medici, the second Duke of Florence. Another accomplice was Napoleone Franzesi, of San Gemignano, belonging to a family which had attained no enviable fame at the beginning of the fourteenth century, through that Musciatto who, with Guillaume de Nogaret, organised the attempt against Pope Boniface VIII., and was also one of the most important tools in some of King Philip the Fair’s dishonourable money transactions. All were ready to strike the