The small state of that name in the March of Ancona had been ruled for nearly three hundred years by the Varana family, some of whom we have occasionally mentioned in these Memoirs. Exaggerating the domestic atrocities, then too frequent among Italians of their rank, they became revoltingly notorious, in 1433-4, for a complicated fratricide. Bernardo, Lord of Camerino, jealous of his brothers Giovanni and Pier-Gentile, the offspring of his father's second marriage, had them put to death by the agency of his own sons. Ere many months passed, his subjects, loathing the foul deed, suddenly rose against its authors. With sweeping vengeance they slew him, his brother german Gentil Pandolfo, and his six sons, dashing the heads of the little ones against the wall. The succession was thus opened to Giulio Cesare, son of Giovanni, who, in 1451, married the only daughter of Sigismondo Pandolfo, despot of Rimini.[*30] He lived to see the usurpations of Cesare Borgia, and, falling into the hands of Michelotto on the capture of La Pergola, the old man perished by the bowstring of that monster in 1502, along with his eldest son Venanzio, and two natural children. Venanzio had, in 1497, married Maria, the only sister of Duke Francesco Maria, of whom we have already had to tell a tale of scandal, and left one son Sigismondo. He was born in 1499, and escaped the fate of his father and uncles, from having been sent in infancy to Urbino. There he was educated; and we have seen him defending S. Leo, when scarcely beyond boyhood. After years of imprisonment and exile, his uncle Francesco Maria made an ineffectual attempt, on the death of Leo X., to vindicate his hereditary fief, from the usurpation of his paternal uncle, Giovanni Maria, its _de facto_ lord. Sigismondo sought consolation for his hard fortunes in low debauchery, until he fell in 1522 by the hand of assassins, at the supposed instigation of his usurping uncle, who, in 1527, had absolution of the foul deed, and to whose career we must now turn.[31] [Footnote *30: Cf. EDWARD HUTTON, _Sigismondo Malatesta_ (1906), p. 61.] [Footnote 31: Many details regarding these transactions have been given, vol. I., p. 411; vol. II., pp. 36, 317, 371, 419.]