[Footnote *184: Murder in church was a crime peculiar to that time. It might seem that the "tyrants" were so well guarded that it was impossible to lay hands on them save at mass; for on no other occasion was the whole family gathered together. To say nothing of the clergy and the Pope who murdered Giuliano and tried to murder Lorenzo de' Medici in S. Maria del Fiore, it was in church the Fabrianesi murdered their Signori the Chiavistelli (1435), the Milanesi Duke Giovan Maria Visconti (1412), and Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476). Ludovico Sforza only escaped the same end because by chance he entered S. Ambrogio by a door that was not watched. For the whole subject see REUMONT, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, pp. 387-97, especially 396, and BURCKHARDT, _The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance_ (trs. Middlemore, 1878), vol. I., p. 79.] [Footnote 185: It is painful to find an author of our age, and especially one of Sismondi's merited reputation and influence, so warped by anti-despotic feelings as to become the apologist of assassination. The phrase we use is startling, but surely not misapplied to those passages in vol. XI., pp. 44 to 47, and p. 114, where, by innuendo, if not by argument, motives which led to the murder of Galeazzo Maria, and two years later to that of Giuliano de' Medici, are shielded from infamy by ingenious special-pleading, worthy the pen of Machiavelli or the morality of Loyola. I refer to the comments of Roscoe in his volume of Additional Illustrations to his _Lorenzo de' Medici_, pp. 114 to 119.] The steady support long given by the Duke of Urbino to the Sforzan dynasty suggested him as his most valuable stay in this crisis of peril, and in obedience to a summons of the widowed Duchess he made ready to march northward. The policy of the Holy See and of Naples, whose batons he jointly held, clearly tended towards Lombardy; but, unlike most successful conspiracies, the murder of Galeazzo Maria led to no revolution, and Federigo returned to vindicate the papal authority against the turbulent Carlo Braccio, who, ambitious of his father's fame and fortunes, and instigated by Lorenzo de' Medici, threatened Perugia from his stronghold of Montone. The ruin of so petty an opponent added no laurel to the victor's already loaded chaplet.