world.

With his double equipment as a lieutenant of the French king and as a
condottiere of the Pope, he began by reviving the dormant authority of
Rome, where nominal feudatories held vicarious sway. In the place of
many despots struggling not for objects of policy, but for their own
existence, there appeared a single state, reaching from sea to sea,
from the Campagna to the salt-marshes by the delta of the Po, under a
papal prince and gonfaloniere, invested with rights and prerogatives
to protect the Holy See, and with power to control it. Rome would
have become a dependency of the reigning house of Borgia, as it had
been of less capable vassals, and the system might have lasted as long
as the brain that devised it. Lorenzo de' Medici once said that his
buildings were the only works that would outlast him; and it is common
in the secular characters of that epoch, unlike the priesthood, not to
believe in those things that are abiding, and not to regard
organisations that are humble and obscure at first and bloom by slow
degrees for the use of another age.

Caesar's enterprise was not determined or limited by the claims of the
Vatican. He served both Pope and king, and his French alliance
carried farther than the recovery of the Romagna. Florence became
tributary by taking him into pay. Bologna bought him off with a heavy
ransom. Venice inscribed his name in the illustrious record of its
nobility. None could tell where his ambition or his resources would
end, how his inventive genius would employ the rivalry of the
invaders, what uses he would devise for the Emperor and the Turk. The
era of petty tyranny was closed by the apparition of one superior
national tyrant, who could be no worse than twenty, for though his
crimes would be as theirs, they would not be useless to the nation,
but were thoughtfully designed and executed for the sake of power, the
accepted object of politics in a country where the right was known by
the result. Caesar was not an unpopular master, and his subjects were
true to him in his falling fortunes. The death of Alexander and the
decline of the French cause in the South cut short his work in the
autumn of 1503. Della Rovere, Cardinal Vincula, whose title came from
the Church of St. Peter in Chains, the inflexible enemy of the
Borgias, was now Julius II; and after a brief interval he was strong
enough to drive Caesar out of the country; while the Venetians,
entering the Romagna un