its inhabitants, who celebrated by thanksgivings and festivals their release from a tyrant's odious yoke. The misery of these intestine wars is illustrated by an anecdote mentioned of this assault, that the Count conceived it necessary to stimulate the ardour of his soldiery by promising them the pillage of this his own city; and he is stated to have earned the praise of a most just and lenient prince, by restraining their fury until he had placed the women in safety. [Footnote 83: Sanzi exults over the cowardly confederates in a triplet, whose sound ingeniously echoes the sense:-- "Cum pompa excelsa, al suon di molte trombe, Empiendo l'aria d'alte voci humane Par che ogni valle del remor ribombe." The ruin occasioned by this campaign is supposed to have overtaken the poet's family, and to have induced them to exchange their roof-tree at Colbordolo for the more secure shelter of Urbino, where Raffaele was born.] During the year 1447, there occurred two deaths of great moment to Italy, those of Pope Eugenius IV. and Filippo Maria Duke of Milan. Gabriele Condolmiere of Venice owed his promotion to his countryman Gregory XII., whose nephew he is said to have been, and received the triple tiara in March, 1431, when but forty-eight years of age. His reign was one of turbulence, for the convulsions consequent upon his policy disorganised Italy, and threatened Christendom with a new schism. Putting himself at once in hostility with the Colonna, whose power had grown formidable under their kinsman Martin V., he exposed Rome to be pillaged by their lawless bands. Soon after, he was glad to fly in disguise to Florence, leaving his capital in the hands of a republican faction, and oppressed by the partisans of Braccio. As the last hope of recovering a portion of his territory from the various condottieri who ravaged it, and "dreading a perilous contest more than an ignominious peace,"[84] he recognised Francesco Sforza, the most influential of them, as Lord or Marquis of La Marca, and created him Gonfaloniere of the Church. But with the bad faith which marked the age, he sought to rid himself of the instrument as soon as his purpose was served. Restless in his policy, headstrong in his counsels, to him in a great measure was owing that perturbed state of Italy, which, when once become normal, continued, until the descent of the French in 1492, to realise the graphic description of Machiavelli: "Peace it cannot be called, whilst the princes were frequently fighting; neither can such struggles well be regarded as warfare, where men were not slain, nor cities sacked, nor sovereignties sacrificed; for so feeble became these strifes, that they were commenced without alarm, were conducted without risk, and closed without damage."[85] Nor was his management of spiritual interests more commendable. His quarrel with the Council of Basle gave him a rival antipope, and might have cost