Pesaro received him on the 22nd, after a slight hesitation as to their relations with the Church; but the citadel was held by eighty men, there being no artillery at hand to bring against it. In absence of cannon-balls, it was carried by paper pellets thrown in from cross-bows, on which were written offers of a thousand scudi to the castellan, and twenty-five to each soldier. The terms were accepted, and the money advanced by Alfonso of Ferrara. On the day of the Duke's arrival there, a deputation from Urbino laid its homage at his feet, and, being thus secure of his own subjects, he turned to succour his friends. Taught by the lesson of three successive pontificates, whose policy it had been to crush the feudatories of Umbria, he saw the necessity of making common cause with such of these as still maintained a precarious independence. He therefore undertook the re-establishment of his nephew, Sigismondo Varana, and of the Baglioni, ere he devoted himself to the consolidation of his own authority. After two days' repose in Pesaro, he marched by La Pergola to Fabriano, where, hearing that Sigismondo had been cordially received at Camerino, he, on the 28th, turned towards Perugia, and, by the 5th of January, had reinstated the Baglioni, notwithstanding a spiritless resistance by their uncle Gentile, and by the vacillating Vitelli. Contrary to his own judgment,--but, as we shall presently see, by a happy chance,--he was induced to accompany his Perugian allies with seven thousand men in a foray upon Tuscany, for the double purpose of annoying the Medici, by whom Gentile was supported, and of re-establishing Pandolfo Petrucci as tyrant of Siena.[*286] When, however, he found no responding movement from within, and that the army of Giovanni delle Bande Nere was hovering in the neighbourhood, he withdrew to Bonconvento, and endeavoured to gain credit for his forbearance by despatching to the magistracy of that city the following oily missive:-- "Most illustrious and most excellent Lords, much honoured Fathers: