rence, exclaimed aloud:
"Baglioni has put upon his head the cap of the biggest traitor upon
record."

V

The city was saved from wreckage by a lucky quarrel between the
Italian and Spanish troops in the Imperial camp. But no sooner was
Clement aware that Florence lay at his mercy, than he disregarded the
articles of capitulation, and began to act as an autocratic despot.
Before confiding the government to his kinsmen, the Cardinal Ippolito
and Alessandro Duke of Penna, he made Valori institute a series of
criminal prosecutions against the patriots. Battista della Palla and
Raffaello Girolami were sent to prison and poisoned. Five citizens
were tortured and decapitated in one day of October. Those who had
managed to escape from Florence were sentenced to exile, outlawry, and
confiscation of goods by hundreds. Charles V. had finally to interfere
and put a stop to the fury of the Pope's revenges. How cruel and
exasperated the mind of Clement was, may be gathered from his
treatment of Fra Benedetto da Foiano, who sustained the spirit of the
burghers by his fiery preaching during the privations of the siege.
Foiano fell into the clutches of Malatesta Baglioni, who immediately
sent him down to Rome. By the Pope's orders the wretched friar was
flung into the worst dungeon in the Castle of S. Angelo, and there
slowly starved to death by gradual diminution of his daily dole of
bread and water. Readers of Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs will remember
the horror with which he speaks of this dungeon and of its dreadful
reminiscences, when it fell to his lot to be imprisoned there.

Such being the mood of Clement, it is not wonderful that Michelangelo
should have trembled for his own life and liberty. As Varchi says, "He
had been a member of the Nine, had fortified the hill and armed the
bell-tower of S. Miniato. What was more annoying, he was accused,
though falsely, of proposing to raze the palace of the Medici, where
in his boyhood Lorenzo and Piero de' Medici had shown him honour as a
guest at their own tables, and to name the space on which it stood the
Place of Mules." For this reason he hid himself, as Condivi and Varchi
assert, in the house of a trusty friend. The Senator Filippo
Buonarroti, who diligently collected traditions about his illustrious
ancestor, believed that his real place of retreat was the bell-tower
of S. Nicolo, beyond the Arno. "When Clement's fury abated," says
Condivi, "he wrote to Florence ordering th