And, sure enough, in the following year the Spaniards under Raimondo da Cardona fell upon Tuscany, and, after the horrible sack and massacre of Prato, reinstated the Cardinal Giovanni dei Medici and Giuliano in Florence--their elder brother, Piero, had been drowned in the Garigliano eight years before. Piero Soderini went into exile, the Greater Council was abolished, and, while the city was held by their foreign troops, the Medici renewed the old pretence of summoning a parliament to grant a balìa to reform the State. At the beginning of 1513 two young disciples of Savonarola, Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, resolved to imitate Brutus and Cassius, and to liberate Florence by the death of the Cardinal and his brother. Their plot was discovered, and they died on the scaffold. "Get this Brutus out of my head for me," said Boscoli to Luca della Robbia, kinsman of the great sculptor, "that I may meet my last end like a Christian"; and, to the Dominican friar who confessed him, he said, "Father, the philosophers have taught me how to bear death manfully; do you help me to bear it out of love for Christ." In this same year the Cardinal Giovanni was elected Pope, and entered upon his splendid and scandalous pontificate as Leo X. "Let us enjoy the Papacy," was his maxim, "since God has given it to us." Although Machiavelli was ready to serve the Medici, he had been deprived of his posts at the restoration, imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of being concerned in Boscoli's conspiracy, and now, released in the amnesty granted by the newly elected Pope, was living in poverty and enforced retirement at his villa near San Casciano. It was now that he wrote his great books, the _Principe_ and the _Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio_. Florence was ruled by the Pope's nephew, the younger Lorenzo, son of Piero by Alfonsina Orsini. The government was practically what it had been under the Magnificent, save that this new Lorenzo, who had married a French princess, discarded the republican appearances which his grandfather had maintained, and surrounded himself with courtiers and soldiers. For him and for Giuliano, the Pope cherished designs of carving out large princedoms in Italy; and Machiavelli, in dedicating his _Principe_ first to Giuliano, who died in 1516, and then to Lorenzo, probably dreamed that some such prince as he described might drive out the foreigner and unify the nation. In his nobler moments Leo X., too, seems to have aspired to establish the independence of Italy. When Lorenzo died in 1519, leaving one daughter, who was afterwards to be the notorious Queen of France, there was no direct legitimate male descendant of Cosimo the elder left; and the Cardinal Giulio, son of the elder Giuliano, governed Florence with considerable mildness, and even seemed disposed to favour a genuine republican government, until a plot against his life hardened his heart. It was to him that