Thus was the army saved from destruction by
the coolness and decision of its leader, and the companies of San
Marco and Verona, purged from the imputation of perfidy, were from
that day embodied in a single battalion.
Having so happily scotched the vipers that endangered his safety, the
Duke of Urbino made his descent upon Perugia. After a short siege,
during which he extended his forays as far as Spoleto and Orvieto,
spreading alarm to the gates of Rome, that city capitulated on the
26th of May, receiving Carlo Baglioni as its master, and paying a
ransom of 10,000 scudi, which Vermiglioli, the biographer of Gian
Paolo, alleges the latter, with the bad faith usual in that age,
to have shared, although the money had been raised from his own
adherents. The same authority now estimates the Duke's army at twelve
thousand men, with which it was his intention to make a diversion
into the Florentine territory. But hearing that the Legate had taken
the field, he hurried back across the Apennines, though too late
to save Fossombrone and La Pergola. His wish of engaging the enemy
having been foiled by their retreat into Pesaro, he had recourse to
his former tactics of removing the seat of war from his own state,
and turned his arms against the more wealthy towns of the Marca. Many
of these, including Fabriano, Ancona, and Recanati, compounded for
exemption from military violence, by paying seven or eight thousand
ducats each. Corinaldo was saved by a well-timed sally, but Jesi,
contrary to the wish of Francesco Maria, was sacked by his Spaniards,
to whom his orderly and methodical way of laying the country under
contributions, and pillaging only the refractory, was far from
acceptable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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