he was a Florentine citizen like all the rest. But this tradition came to an end with Lorenzo. The further contents of the instructions will be referred to again. Innocent VIII. afterwards said to Pier Filippo Pandolfini, the new ambassador of the Republic, that after the Genoese quarrel had been laid aside Lorenzo would perceive there had never been a Pope who took the interests of his house so much to heart as he did. ‘For as I have learned by experience how great is his honesty and wisdom, I will most willingly be guided by his counsels.’[261] Lorenzo must have been the more anxious to obtain the lasting favour of the head of the Church since a change had taken place abroad which might possibly have an important influence on the political circumstances of Italy. A year before the death of Sixtus IV. the monarch was called away, who, amid all his dependence on the clergy and his devotion—approaching to superstition, and heightened by suspicion and torments of conscience—raised the most vehement opposition to the Pope and the papacy. Louis XI. died at the age of sixty, at his castle of Plessis-les-Tours, on the evening of August 30, 1483. Two years before, when out hunting, he had had his first apoplectic fit, which was repeated without destroying his clearness of intellect, though his physical strength gradually sank. He had seen his approaching end with a terror which prayers and sacraments could not soothe, which drove him ceaselessly from pilgrimage to pilgrimage whenever he was not staying at Plessis. There, tortured day and night by the consciousness of hatred which his cold treacherous tyranny had excited in the breasts of others, he shut himself in with a few confidants, surrounded by double and triple guards of all kinds. To the end of his days the king maintained friendly relations with Florence and the Medici; of all his political connections, this was perhaps the only one in which he never changed. In his instructions to the ambassadors sent to Rome in November 1478,[262] he expressly mentioned that the Florentines had always, time out of mind, shown themselves true and loyal friends to France, had never done anything against the crown, and lived according to the laws and customs given them by Charles the Great.[263] A few weeks before his death, Louis wrote to Lorenzo. Not content with having called to his bedside the holy hermit of Calabria, St. Francis of Paola, and procured relics without end from Rome, he tried through Lorenzo to obtain the episcopal ring of St. Zanobi, which was preserved at Florence in the Girolami family, and believed to have the power of curing skin-diseases. His wish was gratified. ‘Cousin and friend,’ thus wrote the dying man on July 9, 1483, from Notre-Dame de Cléry near Orleans, whither he had gone on a pilgrimage,[264] ‘I have seen the ring which you sent to Monsieur de Soliers (Palamède de Fobrin, governor of Provence). But I wish to know for certain whether it is