Anticipating changes which might occur upon the death of Ferdinand II. of Spain, he conceived hopes of throwing off foreign domination in Naples, and providing for it a king of Italian birth, in his own brother Giuliano the Magnificent. With this ulterior advancement in fancied perspective, he removed him from the management of affairs at Florence, and substituted his nephew Lorenzo, intending ere long to assert for the latter a titular as well as a virtual sovereignty, and to extend his sway over all Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara. These ambitious and revolutionary projects required powerful aid, which could be most readily secured by finding a sharer in the adventure. Such a one readily occurred in Louis XII., whose consent to copartnery could scarcely be doubted, when his long-cherished acquisition of the Milanese was offered as his share of its gains. It was no serious objection to this scheme that it inferred a total subversion of Leo's anti-gallican policy; and, intent only upon his new views, he secretly negotiated with the French King to bring once more into Lombardy those troops which, but the year before, he had been the chief means of ignominiously chasing beyond the Alps. Should this move place the great powers in general collision, there was all the fairer chance for papal ambition in the scramble; and it mattered little that Italy should again be laid in ashes, and saturated with blood, so that the Medici became arbiters of her destiny. With a view to these arrangements, Giuliano was betrothed in the following year to Filiberta of Savoy, maternal aunt of Francis, heir to the French crown. But a fatality seems to have attended most papal diplomacy: based upon nepotism or personal ambition, it was generally thwarted by its own fickleness or imbecility. Doubtful of the success of his scheme upon the crown of Naples (which Louis was little disposed to gratify, although prepared to concede to Giuliano the principality of Tarento), or impatient perhaps of waiting for its becoming vacant, the Pontiff turned his views upon Parma and Piacenza, as a convenient interim state for his brother, to be aggrandised by the purchase of Modena from the Emperor for 40,000 golden ducats. But here he was met by a difficulty of his own recent creation, for the establishment of Louis at Milan must have proved dangerous to the proposed principality of Giuliano; so, once more shuffling the cards, he prepared some new combinations for preventing the French expedition into Italy. One of these was an intrigue to detach the Venetian republic from the party of Louis, for which purpose he sent thither his adroit secretary Bembo, whose memorial to the senate has been printed by Roscoe. This attempt, however, entirely failed, and the King's death, on the 1st of January, alone prevented the detection of his faithless ally.[257]