he help of the knights, the Pope, and the Venetians, treated him
generously with a yearly allowance of forty thousand scudi; and
secured the good grace of Innocent VIII. with the present of the holy
lance.[116]

To this extraordinary gift of Bayazid we owe one of the masterpieces
of the Renaissance, the _ciborio della santa lancia_, begun by
Innocent VIII. and finished by the executors of his will, Lorenzo Cibo
and Antoniotto Pallavicino, in 1495. Unfortunately we have now only a
drawing of it by the unskilful hand of Giacomo Grimaldi;[117] it was
taken to pieces in 1606, and a few of its panels, medallions, and
statues, which were of the school of Mino da Fiesole, were removed to
the Sacred Grottos, where no one is allowed to see them. Grimaldi, who
wrote the proces-verbal of the demolition of the ciborium, says that
the desecration and the removal of the relics took place on
Septuagesima Sunday, January 22, about seven in the evening; at nine
o'clock lightning struck the unfinished roof of the basilica; heavy
pieces of masonry fell with a crash; mosaics were wrenched from their
sockets, and fissures and rents produced in various parts of the
building. In the same night the Tiber overflowed its banks, and the
turbulent waters rushed as far as the palace of Cardinal Rusticucci in
the direction of the Vatican.

The inscription on the tomb of Innocent VIII. mentions, among the
glories of his pontificate, the discovery of a new world. Thirty years
before his election Constantinople had been taken by the infidels; but
the conquests made in the West brought a compensation for the losses
sustained on the shores of the Bosphorus. Innocent lived to hear of
the capture of Granada and of the conquest of Ferdinand of Aragon, in
the Moorish provinces of southern Spain; and just at that time the
Hispano-Portuguese branch of the great Latin family seems to have
burst forth with renewed vitality and religious enthusiasm, destined
to give Rome new victories and new worlds. Bartolomeo Diaz had already
doubled the Cape of Good Hope; the sea route to India was opened. The
Pope could once again consider himself the master of the world, and
was able to present John II. of Portugal with "the lands of Africa,
whether known or unknown." Death overtook the gentle and peaceful
pontiff on July 26, 1492. Eight days after his demise another
Genoese,[118] another worthy representative of the strong Ligurian
race, set sail from the harbor of Palos