uit her to have the Neapolitan Spaniards ruffling
it in the north, as must happen if Ferrante has his way with Milan.
The truth of this was so obvious that Venice made haste to enter into
a league with him, and into the camp thus formed came, for their own
sakes, Mantua, Ferrara, and Siena. The league was powerful enough thus
to cause Ferrante to think twice before he took up the cudgels for Gian
Galeazzo. If Lodovico could include the Pope, the league's might would
be so paralysing that Ferrante would cease to think at all about his
grandchildren's affairs.

Foreseeing this, Ferrante had perforce to dry the tears Guicciardini has
it that he shed, and, replacing them by a smile, servile and obsequious,
repaired, hat in hand, to protest his friendship for the Pope's
Holiness.

And so, in December of 1492, came the Prince of Altamura--Ferrante's
second son--to Rome to lay his father's homage at the feet of the
Pontiff, and at the same time to implore his Holiness to refuse the King
of Hungary the dispensation the latter was asking of the Holy See, to
enable him to repudiate his wife, Donna Leonora--Ferrante's daughter.

Altamura was received in Rome and sumptuously entertained by the
Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. This cardinal had failed, as we have
seen, to gain the Pontificate for himself, despite the French influence
by which he had been supported. Writhing under his defeat, and hating
the man who had defeated him with a hatred so bitter and venomous
that the imprint of it is on almost every act of his life--from the
facilities he afforded for the assignment to Orsini of the papal fiefs
that Cibo had to sell--he was already scheming for the overthrow of
Alexander. To this end he needed great and powerful friends; to this end
had he lent himself to the Cibo-Orsini transaction; to this end did he
manifest himself the warm well-wisher of Ferrante; to this end did he
cordially welcome the latter's son and envoy, and promise his support to
Ferrante's petition.

But the Holy Father was by no means as anxious for the friendship of
the old wolf of Naples. The matter of the King of Hungary was one that
required consideration, and, meanwhile, he may have hinted slyly there
was between Naples and Rome a little matter of two fiefs to be adjusted.

Thus his most shrewd Holiness thought to gain a little time, and in that
time he might look about him and consider what alliances would suit his
interests best.

At this Cardina