exploit them for purposes far less easy to condone.

As a nepotist Sixtus was almost unsurpassed in the history of the
Papacy. Four of his nephews and their aggrandizement were the particular
objects of his attentions, and two of these--as we have already
said--Piero and Girolamo Riario, were universally recognized to be his
sons.

Piero, who was a simple friar of twenty-six years of age at the time
that his father became Pope, was given the Archbishopric of Florence,
made Patriarch of Constantinople, and created Cardinal to the title of
San Sisto, with a revenue of 60,000 crowns.

We have it on the word of Cardinal Ammanati(1)--the same gentleman who,
with Roderigo de Lanzol y Borja made so scandalously merry in de Bichis'
garden at Siena--that Cardinal Riario's luxury "exceeded all that had
been displayed by our forefathers or that can even be imagined by our
descendants"; and Macchiavelli tells us(2) that "although of very low
origin and mean rearing, no sooner had he obtained the scarlet hat than
he displayed a pride and ambition so vast that the Pontificate seemed
too small for him, and he gave a feast in Rome which would have appeared
extraordinary even for a king, the expense exceeding 20,000 florins."

1 In a letter to Francesco Gonzaga.

2 Istorie Florentine.

Knowing so much, it is not difficult to understand that in one year or
less he should have dissipated 200,000 florins, and found himself in
debt to the extent of a further 60,000.

In 1473, Sixtus being at the time all but at war with Florence, this
Cardinal Riario visited Venice and Milan. In the latter State he was
planning with Duke Galeazzo Maria that the latter should become King of
Lombardy, and then assist him with money and troops to master Rome and
ascend the Papal Throne--which, it appears, Sixtus was quite willing
to yield to him--thus putting the Papacy on a hereditary basis like any
other secular State.

It is as well, perhaps, that he should have died on his return to Rome
in January of 1474--worn out by his excesses and debaucheries, say some;
of poison administered by the Venetians, say others--leaving a mass of
debts, contracted in his transactions with the World, the Flesh, and the
Devil, to be cleared up by the Vicar of Christ.

His brother Girolamo, meanwhile, had married Caterina Sforza, a natural
daughter of Duke Galeazzo Maria. She brought him as her dowry the City
of Imola, and in addition to this he receive