His family had contrived to join him by now, and the time passed pleasantly away for the grizzled and somewhat war-worn captain. He had punished Filippo, and had, besides, secured what promised to be the most profitable employment upon which he had ever entered. He knew the Visconti; he must have been quite sure that Filippo had no intention of giving up the struggle as tamely as that, and when it recommenced he would, he imagined, be able to dictate the terms under which he could condescend to serve. He was right in both conjectures. No sooner was the peace signed than Filippo turned his energies to the accumulation of a force with which to open a campaign in the spring. Besides this he assembled a fleet for the purpose of attacking Mantua and Ferrara. This the Venetians destroyed near Cremona on May 21, 1427. Filippo, who had, up till now, taken small thought of anything except numbers and talent, soon began to feel, as so many others have done before and since, the extreme difficulty of getting any cohesive action from a force which, split up into many small bodies, gave its allegiance to six or seven separate commanders, all of equal merit, and all claiming, on their records, the right to administer the whole. Carmagnola, on the other hand, being a Condottiere himself, allowed no one, however distinguished his birth or his position, even to approach his throne, much less share it. The Venetian authorities themselves he handled as roughly as he dared, and they, as Mocenigo had prophesied, found themselves under a despotism which made the rule of the dreaded “Ten” a kindergarten affair in comparison. Filippo, exercising a purely imaginary authority, gave the command of his troops to Nicolo Piccino, a pupil of the celebrated Braccio, and he attacked Carmagnola at Casalecco on July 12, but so thick was the dust under foot that before they had well engaged they became invisible and separated without shock. It was a leisurely campaign. Whatever might be the anxiety of the principals to settle the quarrel, their defenders were not to be hurried, and it was not until October 11 that Carmagnola was called upon to fight a pitched battle. He had been spending most of his time in the interval at the baths of Albano, where he took a cure for rheumatism. Suspicion is a disease among some people, and though its workings are not by any means confined to one class, it must be owned that power of any kind has always been a happy breeding-ground for it. With the rulers of Venice it was hereditary, and, since it was unsafe openly to suspect each other, they invariably lavished their venomous mistrust upon their servants and instruments. But true to their Latinity, they gave their victim no chance of feeling it or even of defending himself. In silence they judged, in silence they acted, and always with such a wealth of deception, cunning, and falsehood as to proclaim their own cowardice and meanness from the housetops.