Some of the tributes to Lucretia Borgia from her contemporaries are highly laudatory. Among her friends were some of the best people of the time. Aldus Manutius praises her to the skies, lauds her benevolence to the poor, her care for the afflicted and her ability as a ruler. There is no doubt at all that she was one of these wonderful women of the Renaissance whose administrative ability must be admired more than any other quality. During the absence of her husband she ruled the State with wonderful prudence, and yet with a justice tempered always with mercy. It was through her that a law was passed, protecting the Jews of Ferrara, that became a model for other similar legislation in the cities of Italy. It is interesting to trace the change of attitude of mind toward her on the part of those who either did not care for her or were actually bitterly opposed to her. Her sister-in-law, Isabella D'Este, became a real friend, as her letters attest, though at first she did not like at all the idea of the union of the house of D'Este with that of the Borgias, and it required all her father's force of will and all his political astuteness besides to secure her presence at the marriage. The letters of ten years later reveal a most intimate friendship between these two women. Within a year after her marriage she had completely won her husband, who was altogether indifferent at the beginning and who married her because of his father's insistence and entirely for political reasons. When her first baby died at birth her husband was most solicitous for her, anxious about her health and made a vow that he would go on a pilgrimage to Loretto for her recovery, a vow which he fulfilled just as soon as her convalescence was assured. The biographer of Bayard, the famous French Chevalier of the time, _sans peur et sans reproche_, declared apropos of the visit of Bayard to Madonna Lucretia at Ferrara: "I venture {304} to say that neither in her time nor for many years before has there been such a glorious princess. For she is beautiful and good, gentle and amiable to everyone." Gregorovius declares in his "Lucretia Borgia, According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day": [Footnote 26] "Lucretia had won universal esteem and affection; she had become the mother of her people. She lent a ready ear to the suffering and helped all who were in need. She put aside, as Jovius, a contemporary, said, 'the pomps and vanities of the world to which she had been accustomed from childhood and gave herself up to pious works and founded and endowed convents and hospitals.'" She died at the early age of forty, so that the nearly twenty years of service for others represent not the aftermath of a long stormy life, when human passions had burnt themselves out, but the ripe years of maturity and highest vitality. [Footnote 26: Translated by Garner, Appleton, 1913, New York.]