all,
without respect for the seat he occupies. He cares for nothing save to
aggrandize his children, by fair means or foul, and this is his sole
desire. From the beginning of his Pontificate he has done nothing but
disturb the peace, molesting everybody, now in one way, now in another.
Rome is more full of soldiers than of priests, and when he goes abroad
it is with troops of men-at-arms about him, with helmets on their heads
and lances by their sides, all his thoughts being given to war and to
our hurt; nor does he overlook anything that can be used against us, not
only inciting in France the Prince of Salerno and other of our rebels,
but befriending every bad character in Italy whom he deems our enemy;
and in all things he proceeds with the fraud and dissimulation natural
to him, and to make money he sells even the smallest office and
preferment."

Thus Ferrante of the man whose friendship he had been seeking some six
weeks earlier, and who had rejected his advances. It is as well to know
the precise conditions under which that letter was indited, for extracts
from it are too often quoted against Alexander. These conditions known,
and known the man who wrote it, the letter's proper value is at once
apparent.

It was Ferrante's hope, and no doubt the hope of Giuliano della Rovere,
that the King of Spain would lend an ear to these grievances, and move
in the matter of attempting to depose Alexander; but an event more
important than any other in the whole history of Spain--or of Europe,
for that matter--was at the moment claiming its full attention, and the
trifling affairs of the King of Naples--trifling by comparison--went
all unheeded. For this was the year in which the Genoese navigator,
Cristofero Colombo, returned to tell of the new and marvellous world
he had discovered beyond the seas, and Ferdinand and Isabella were
addressing an appeal to the Pope--as Ruler of the World--to establish
them in the possession of the discovered continent. Whereupon the Pope
drew a line from pole to pole, and granted to Spain the dominion over
all lands discovered, or to be discovered, one hundred miles westward of
Cape Verde and the Azores.

And thus Ferrante's appeal to Spain against a Pope who showed himself so
ready and complaisant a friend to Spain went unheeded by Ferdinand and
Isabella. And what time the Neapolitan nursed his bitter chagrin, the
alliance between Rome and Milan was consolidated by the marriage of
Lucrezia