The way the war was carried on in the Duchy of Ferrara was regarded in Florence as very unsatisfactory. The Duke of Urbino had in nowise answered to the expectations formed of him. Jacopo Guicciardini remarked to the Ferrarese ambassador that the league had no head. Lorenzo de’ Medici was anxious, but said in reference to the Duke of Ferrara, ‘I cannot imagine you will lose, unless you fail for want of spirit. _Here_ all will be done that can be.’ The expedition against Città di Castello, he observed, had been made with the object of giving the duke breathing time. Ercole was always commending his interests to the Republic. If Ferrara fell into the hands of the Venetians, Florence would be likewise endangered. Military operations were not accounted sufficient; the old threat of a council was renewed. But just at this time the adventurous Archbishop of Carniola, whose character and history have never been thoroughly investigated, made a feeble attempt to revive the Synod of Basel, which had been dissolved for forty years. This man, a Dominican, whose name seems to have been Andrea Zuccalmaglio, was in Rome with commissions from the Emperor Frederic about the time of the Pazzi conspiracy. There he enjoyed high favour for a time, but afterwards he fell into such deep disgrace that he was not only deposed from his ecclesiastical dignity but imprisoned in the castle of St. Angelo, from whence the Emperor’s intercession liberated him in the summer of 1481. He betook himself, _viâ_ Florence, first to Bern and then to Basel, where, falsely giving himself out as still Frederic’s messenger, and finally assuming the title of cardinal, he proclaimed the opening of the great Assembly of the Church on the feast of the Annunciation, 1482. The moment for this proclamation was not badly chosen, for the Pope was just involving himself in a fresh war; but measures being immediately taken in Rome to put on their guard both foreign powers and the free city in which the fire threatened to kindle once more, the wretched man—whose sanity had begun to be doubted, and who was not joined by one single prelate from France or Germany—rushed into extremities, and in the beginning of the summer launched the wildest invectives against Francesco da Savona, who was no Pope but a son of the devil, against whom he called Christ and the œcumenical council to witness.