The Duke of Milan left a daughter, Caterina, the fruit of a boyish intrigue, who was born in 1462, and became one of the most remarkable women of her time. On the election of Sixtus, her father, willing to conciliate by family ties a pontiff whose energy of character promised no ordinary career, offered her in marriage to Girolamo Riario, one of his favourite nephews, whom he had in 1480 created Count of Forlì, the dispossessed fief of the Ordelaffi. In order that the bride's dowry might tempt the ambitious Vicar of Christ, her father, in 1473, made over to her such rights to the sovereignty of Imola as he had obtained by purchase from its lords the Manfredi; and after the parties had been betrothed, that seigneury was confirmed to Girolamo by his Holiness as its ecclesiastical over-lord.[186] Caterina being, however, but in her eleventh year, the nuptials were postponed, and she meanwhile remained at Milan, cultivating the abstruse and ornamental branches which were then included in female education. Endowed with a lively genius, a ready apprehension, and a singularly retentive memory, she quickly mastered these studies, and acquired a rare facility of expressing herself with elegance and propriety. Her marriage was solemnised soon after her father's murder, and having being carried by her husband to Rome, she was welcomed with magnificent festivities by the Pope, who found in her a brilliancy of beauty and a courtesy of manner excelling all that rumour had anticipated. Out of the growing favour of Sixtus for Count Girolamo, seconded by his own ambitious intrigues, which aimed at an extended sovereignty, sprang the seeds of a new conspiracy not less atrocious than that of which the Duke of Milan was victim, and far more widely influencing the politics of Italy. [Footnote 186: The convention of Galeazzo Maria with Taddeo Manfredi, and the bull investing Riario, explain this transaction more fully than the authorities quoted by Sismondi, ch. lxxxiii. They are printed in vol. III. of BURRIEL'S elaborate _Life of Caterina Riario Sforza_.] * * * * *