The Emperor, ever ready to abandon a falling cause, withdrew his contingent from the French service, and acknowledged the authority of the Lateran council, which had been opened on the 3rd of May. The Duke of Ferrara, too, thought it full time to make his peace with the Pope; while Louis, thus abandoned, could no longer maintain a footing in Italy, where but a few strongholds remained in his possession; and Milan was restored to Maximiliano Sforza, son of Ludovico il Moro. The overtures of Alfonso were, however, unavailing, being met in no generous spirit by his ecclesiastical overlord. On proceeding to Rome to plead his own cause, he was called upon to surrender his fief to the Holy See, and was treated as a prisoner. By the energetic aid of the Colonna chiefs, he escaped to his impenetrable swamps, and hastened to accredit Ariosto as his minister to appease the Pontiff, a mission which totally failed, the poet's silver tongue having barely obtained grace for himself as envoy of a rebel. Francesco Maria marched, by order of Julius, towards the Polesine, but malaria prevailing there after recent inundations, fever ravaged his army, and their leader averted the fate of his grandfather in these fens, by a timely retreat to his mountain air. We are gravely told by Giraldi that "the house of Ferrara mysteriously bears the name of the Deity" [_Est_], an idea which their repeated escapes by similar apparently special interpositions of Providence may have suggested. It was during the Ferrarese expedition, and avowedly at the Pope's urgent desire, that the Medici were re-established at Florence by the league. The Duke of Urbino's absence from that enterprise has been accounted for by Guicciardini and Giovio, as the result of personal feeling against the Cardinal Giovanni, and as contrary to his uncle's instructions. This innuendo becomes important from being the first symptom of misunderstanding between the dynasties of Urbino and Florence, and as apparently the origin of Guicciardini's prepossessions against Francesco Maria, which, adopted by subsequent writers, especially by Roscoe and Sismondi, have led to very general misrepresentations of his after policy and motives. The whole intercourse of that Duke with the Medici, down to 1515, affords a virtual contradiction of latent enmity at this juncture, and the special charge in question is inconsistent with the facts stated by Leoni, who avers that, had Francesco Maria not been then engaged in operations against Ferrara, he would gladly have accompanied the combined forces to Florence, and that he actually connived at their carrying with them a portion of his artillery, contrary to private instructions from his Holiness, who, when the moment for action arrived, is alleged to have favoured the independence of Florence, perhaps under some vague apprehension of eventual dangers from Medicean ambition.