The duplicity of Italian diplomacy has passed into a proverb, and by none was it more constantly practised than by the successors of St. Peter. The investiture of Roberto, although a specific stipulation of the new league, was constantly evaded by Paul, until, after months of procrastination, death released his Holiness from the engagement. His successor, Sixtus IV., was a friend of Federigo and of the Neapolitan Monarch, and through their mediation Malatesta obtained prompt performance of the obligation. Thus established in a seigneury, long the heritage of bastards, Roberto allied himself more intimately with the Count of Urbino, by espousing, on the 28th of March, 1472, his daughter Elisabetta (or Isabella, for the names were synonymous), then about nine years old; and thus were happily closed the long feuds of these rival races.[153] [Footnote 153: Her mother having been then married but eleven years, Berni is palpably wrong in calling the bride nineteen. Three years appear to have intervened between this betrothal and the nuptials, that the bride might attain the age of puberty. Roberto Malatesta had from his contemporaries the appellation of Magnifico, in common with others of like station. The authorities quoted by Roscoe (ch. ii., note 49), as proving this distinction to have been special to Lorenzo de' Medici, are comparatively modern, and do not countervail repeated instances of its adoption by personages of much less mark. Neither is Sismondi correct in considering it a generic title of such princes as possessed no other.] [Illustration: POPE SIXTUS IV. _From a miniature prefixed to the dedication copy of Platina's Lives of the Popes in the Vatican Library_]