"The victorious army was no sooner returned to camp than the people of Ravenna sent deputies to treat of surrendering their city; but when they had agreed or were upon the point of agreement, and the inhabitants being employed in preparing provisions to be sent to the camp were negligent in guarding the walls, the German and Gascon foot entered through the breach that had been made and plundered the town in a most barbarous manner, their cruelty being exasperated not only by their natural hatred to the name of the Italians, but by a spirit of revenge for the loss they had sustained in the battle. On the fourth day after this, Marcantonio Colonna gave up the citadel, into which he had retired, on condition of safety to their persons and effects, but obliging himself on the other hand, together with the rest of the officers, not to bear arms against the King of France nor the Pisan Council till the next festival of S. Mary Magdalen; and not many days after, Bishop Vitello, who commanded in the castle with a hundred and fifty men, agreed to surrender it on terms of safety for life and goods. The cities of Imola, Forli, Cesena, and Rimini, and all the castles of the Romagna, except those of Forli and Imola, followed the fortune of the victory and were received by the legate in the name of the council." The site of this great battle is marked by a monument, a square pilaster of marble, called the Colonna dei Francesi, adorned with bas-reliefs and inscriptions, raised in 1557 by the President of the Romagna, Pier Donato Cesi, on the right bank of the Ronco, some three miles from the city. We may recall Ariosto's verses: "Io venni dove le campagne rosse eran del sangue barbaro e latino che fiera stella dianzi a furor mosse. "E vidi un morto all' altro si vicino che, senza premer lor, quasi il terreno a molte miglia non dava il cammino. "E da chi alberga fra Garonna e Reno vidi uscir crudelta, che ne dovria tutto il mondo d'orror rimaner pieno." The League of Cambray had succeeded in breaking the real security and confidence of Venice; the death of Gaston de Foix, "the hero boy who died too soon," destroyed the energy of her ally, the French army, in Italy; and the battle of Novara, as I have said, in 1513, inducing that ally to withdraw from the peninsula, left the republic to be menaced by Cardona, who failed only to take Venice itself. Nor was that great government more fortunate in the long struggles which followed between Francis I. and Charles V. In 1523, seeing that the French were failing, Venice came to terms with the emperor, by that time the real arbiter of Italy. In 1527, though then in alliance with pope Clement VII, she seized once more Ravenna and the Romagna, but the emperor intervened, and by the peace of Cambray in 1529, which on payment of a fine confirmed Venice in her Lombard possessions as far as the Adda, she was compelled to restore Ravenna and the Romagna to the pope.