The ill-feeling against Milan remained even after this vexed question was settled and after Florence, from consideration for Lodovico, had refused to receive Riario’s murderers, who thereupon applied to Rome. Lorenzo declared that if the Duke of Bari’s demands were reasonable, Florence would always be willing to please him, but he must not come upon her with anything against the honour of the state; he also begged the Duke of Ferrara not to support such demands. About this time, towards the middle of May, he went to the baths, and his representative in politics, Pier Filippo Pandolfini, replied to Lodovico’s urgent demands for the restitution of Piancaldoli that it was in vain to ask for anything against their honour; Florence was no Pavia or Cremona, where the Duke of Milan could command. Scarcely had these first vexations passed off when a similar case occurred in which the Republic became still more deeply involved. The cause of the dispute this time was Faenza, the only state yet left to the Manfredi, and to which, as has been previously described, Florence stood in the relation of a protecting power. Galeotto Manfredi was married to Francesca Bentivoglio, one of the many daughters of the lord of Bologna; and in arranging this marriage Lorenzo had had a considerable share.[353] Her husband’s unfaithfulness excited the passionate woman to such a pitch of revenge that on May 31, 1488, she had him killed in their sleeping-chamber by hired assassins. She then, with her two sons, of whom the eldest was only three years old, hastened to the citadel and informed her father of what had been done. Giovanni Bentivoglio lost not a moment. He set out with the troops collected at the Forlì disturbances, and sent to Bergomino, the Milanese commissioner who was still in the latter town, directions to join him. At first all went well. The lord of Bologna and his troops were peaceably received in Faenza, and it seemed as if the proclamation of little Astorre Manfredi would settle everything; but some disagreement between the inhabitants and the rude mountaineers of the Lamone valley who had rushed into the town, caused a riot in which the Milanese commissioner and more than fifty of his men lost their lives, and Giovanni Bentivoglio saved his own with difficulty. When the worst of the tumult was put down, Astorre was proclaimed under the protection of the Republic of Florence, to whose commissioner Antonio Boscoli the more reasonable of the two parties had at once applied for mediation and support.