The evil was great, but it had not yet reached its worst height. The increasingly demoralised condition of the administration of finance displayed itself in another way, which must have utterly ruined the credit of the State at the first serious political crisis. This was connected with the Medici finances. Lorenzo’s pecuniary difficulties had been in no wise removed by the precautionary measures of 1480. His manner of life, establishments, purchases, the provisions for his children, his by no means disinterested liberality, the bribes in money paid for his influence abroad, required large sums. To try to meet these requirements with the produce of his personal property (because he considered this more secure and honourable),[377] would have been chimerical. He had limited his banking-business and commercial speculations; and to draw upon them never entered his head. During his very last years he did a great deal of business in Rome. Innocent VIII. was financially still more dependent on him than on his own Genoese fellow-countrymen, and he allowed him corresponding advantages. In 1489 he sold him 30,000 hundredweight of alum at a very low price, in compensation for losses sustained in the days of his predecessor; and the alum trade passed almost entirely into Lorenzo’s private hands. The farm-rent paid by him for the works of Tolfa amounted to 100,000 florins. In May of the same year Lorenzo furnished the Pope with a loan to the same amount for one year; one-third of the sum in cash, the other two-thirds in silk and woollen stuffs. For the repayment, two-tenths, amounting to 60,000 florins, were referred to the Florentine clergy, the rest to the revenues of Città di Castello.[378] In 1490 Lorenzo redeemed from the Centurioni of Genoa a valuable tiara which had been pledged to them.[379] Cosimo Sassetti, one of the partners in the Medici bank at Lyons, was also a papal collector in 1490. In the case of smaller loans, princes sent valuables as pledges; the Marquis of Mantua gave a precious stone for the sum of 4,000 gold florins, and when at a marriage-feast he wanted to have it back, his brother-in-law, Ercole d’Este, offered the salt-office of Modena for security in its place. These transactions went on under Lorenzo’s eldest son and even later.[380] But the profits were uncertain, for all the parties concerned were not skilful and prudent. Even supposing that Lorenzo drew an income of 15,000 to 20,000 gold florins from the old family estate, and about 10,000 from the newly-acquired and gradually increasing one in the Pisan territory, still it was terribly insufficient for his outlay. He was driven to all kinds of shifts, at times even somewhat mean ones, such as must have been sometimes very unpleasant to him; as, for instance, in 1484, when he had to take a loan of 4,000 ducats from Lodovico Sforza, or sell for the same price the house given by Duke Francesco to his grandfather.[381] During the