The Moro resolved to anticipate the blow. With fatal confidence in his power to control the force which he was evoking, he opened the gate which it was Milan’s sacred duty to keep shut against the foreigner. He invited Charles VIII. of France to lead an army into Italy against the Princes of Aragon, and to recover the Kingdom of Naples for the House of Anjou. Lodovico’s act did not perhaps at the time wear the magnitude of guilt which subsequent events gave it. Italy was so disunited, so lacking in any general principle of patriotism that her various tyrants had not scrupled to appeal at times to France or the Empire in their needs. Men were used to sporadic attempts of the Princes of Anjou to overthrow the Aragonese dynasty in Naples. But now that the Angevin claims were vested in the King of France, such attempts must be more perilous for Italy. Naples was not the only State to which France had pretensions. Louis of Orleans—next in succession to the throne of France after the sickly Charles and his infant son—claimed the Duchy of Milan itself through his ancestress Valentina Visconte. The success of the French enterprise in Naples could scarcely fail to be followed by a vindication of this other claim. Nothing but that strange and fatal belief in himself, which not only inspired Lodovico but had infected his contemporaries, could have blinded the Moro to the madness of his proceedings and induced Venice, Florence and the Pope to abet his projects at first by forming a new league with him and abandoning Naples to its fate. There was some strange glamour about this remarkable man which deluded his own generation. The Renaissance spirit felt itself represented and fulfilled in him. Its boundless confidence in human possibilities was exemplified by the reputation of almost superhuman powers with which it invested Lodovico Sforza. _God in Heaven and the Moro on earth_, so dared il Pistoia to sing, and the prince to hear. The tragic fall which awaited this exaltation is a part of the inward as well as outward history of an age when pride built so high, only to be smitten with incompleteness. Strangest of all, perhaps, was the self-deception of Lodovico himself, shown by the persistence in him, throughout his hopeless captivity, of this superstitious faith, after it had utterly failed him in the crisis of his life, so that in his last moments, in his prison at Loches, he could attribute his overthrow to nothing less than the direct intervention of God, to punish him for his sins, _since only the sudden might of destiny, he said, could have subverted the counsels of human wisdom_.