This bold bearing saved the cause of the young Riarii, without really endangering their persons. Giovanni Bentivoglio, Lord of Bologna, a faithful adherent of the Sforza, on the first news of this insurrection, put himself at the head of a thousand horse and eight hundred foot, and arrived in hot haste at the gates of Forlì. The conspirators, divided in their counsels, and distracted by the decisive course which the Countess had adopted, fled from the town without waiting to resist, and thus the revolution was at an end. Within two short weeks Caterina had been a happy wife, a bereaved widow, an outraged prisoner, a triumphant sovereign. She remembered her sorrows signally to avenge them; she threw aside her weeds to assume a robe of triumph; and issuing from the castle, proclaimed her son Ottaviano, Count of Forlì. But a deep stain attaches to the punishment which she must have sanctioned, if she did not direct it, and which was inflicted upon Count Orsi, father of the assassin, with an accumulation of horrors rarely exampled among even savage tribes. The old man, then in his eighty-sixth year, after being exposed on the great square to insults of the soldiery in presence of the whole populace, was bound to a board, and drawn twice round the piazza, his snow-white head projecting, and broken against the sharp stones; his quivering limbs were then hacked in pieces by armed ruffians, whose atrocious barbarities, as described by an eye-witness, are too revolting for detail. All this the sufferer endured with a heroism and resignation which produced on the spectators the usual effect of such brutal perversion of justice, and converted their abhorrence of the crime into sympathy with the criminal.