On June 22 Commines left Milan with a suite of twenty-five horsemen. ‘The lord of Argenton,’ thus wrote the duchess to her ambassador in Rome, ‘leaves us to-day for Florence. He is commissioned to persuade all the powers to withdraw from their obedience to the Pope, the king of France deeming it necessary for the weal of Christendom to assemble a general council as soon as a disposition favourable to it evinces itself. His Majesty will immediately summon one in the kingdom.’ Three days before, Lorenzo de’ Medici had thanked the king for his sympathy, and given him information of the excommunication proclaimed against him and the strife in prospect. ‘God is my witness that I am conscious of having done nothing against the Pope but that I live, that I did not allow myself to be killed, that grace from above protected me. This is my sin; this my crime for which I deserve destruction and exclusion from the Church. But we have the canon laws, we have natural and political justice, we have truth and innocence, and we have God and man.’[253] The lord of Argenton, who had obtained auxiliary troops as well from Savoy as from Milan, was received at Florence with open arms. ‘We went to meet him,’ wrote the Milanese ambassadors,[254] ‘with the deputies of the league and many citizens, with the Lord Lorenzo, Lorenzino his cousin, and a troop of armed men for his guard.’ Commines found the city in the midst of preparations for war. He offered the assistance of the king against the Pope’s measures, both spiritual and military. In his memoirs he does not say much of this embassy. ‘The favour of the king was useful to them in some measure, but not so much as I could have wished. I could offer them no army, and had nothing excepting my suite.’[255] Of his journey to Rome and the affairs there, he says not a word. That they were not without fear in high ecclesiastical circles is shown by a letter addressed to the Pope by the Cardinal of Pavia on July 16, from San Lorenzo alle Grotte on the Lake of Bolsena, in which he speaks of the opposition extending within and without Italy, and gives the advice to gain time till the cardinals were again more numerously assembled in Rome. ‘Certain intelligence has reached me that the French king is sending an ambassador to us, a man of high standing in France, who has received peremptory instructions. If the ban against the Florentines be not removed, if the sharers and accomplices in the murder of Giuliano de’ Medici be not punished, and if peace be not restored, the king will have no scruple in pronouncing the withdrawal of obedience, and appealing to the council.’ When the cardinal wrote thus, Commines must have been long in Rome, as he passed through Perugia on July 9, accompanied by the Florentine ambassador Guid’Antonio Vespucci. Of the negotiation with the Pope nothing is known. That Sixtus IV. did not allow himself to be frightened by the king’s threats is shown by the fact that the war began at once. That