During these years of peace and of expansion for Milan, the suspicious fear with which the disproportionate prosperity of one power was always regarded by the rest of Italy had concentrated itself upon Lodovico Sforza. His extraordinary success and untiring activity, his powers of intrigue, his ability and resource, were the theme of every tongue. The extravagant adulations of his Court poets were repeated and unwillingly credited throughout Italy. With the vast wealth of Milan at his command what might he not do? Fear of Milan was an old habit. Was it she that should give Italy a master after all? Was this dark prince, mysteriously potent, to be the destroyer of her liberty at last? Had men looked more closely into the monster of their imagination, they might have perceived that it was not Lodovico’s ambition that was most to be apprehended. The fatal situation which now developed seems to have been the product of two opposing fears. The Moro’s faith in himself and in his good fortune was a superstition which supported itself upon the lying prophecies of the astrologer ever at his side, and was at the mercy of every ill omen. His intrigues were often the devices of a man on the defensive, rather than the confident moves of a conqueror. To give a colour of justification to his now almost complete usurpation, he set casuists to work and evolved a specious doctrine, pronouncing himself lawful successor of his father, as the first son born to Francesco after he became Duke of Milan. By means of this argument, and the better persuasion of an enormous gift of gold, he obtained from the Emperor Maximilian the promise of the investiture of the Duchy, an obsolete legality which neither Francesco or Galeazzo had troubled to obtain in confirmation of the right won by the sword. These devices, however, aroused only derision and scandal in his own country, nor could they quiet his own uneasy mind. He felt Italy against him and was afraid. His particular dread of the House of Aragon never slept. Though old King Ferrante urged with pathetic sincerity the maintenance of the league which had preserved the peace of Italy for so many fortunate years, he might at any moment be succeeded by Alfonso of Calabria, who did not disguise his hatred of the Moro and his longing to right his daughter and son-in-law. Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in 1491, and peace was already threatened by the injudicious policy of his son Piero. The covetousness of Venice, the faithless selfishness of the Pope, completed a situation of general peril, which might easily beget a great combination to crush Lodovico and reinstate Gian Galeazzo, to be followed by a scramble for the States which all knew the young Duke incapable of governing.