ors thereof were captives and exiles."

Whilst matters were thus going on in the north of Italy, Louis XII. was
preparing for his second great Italian venture, the conquest of the
kingdom of Naples, in which his predecessor Charles VIII. had failed. He
thought to render the enterprise easier by not bearing the whole burden
by himself alone. On the 11th of November, 1500, he concluded at Grenada
"with Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Castile and Arragon," a
treaty, by which the Kings of France and Spain divided, by anticipation,
between them the kingdom of Naples, which they were making an engagement
to conquer together. Terra di Lavoro and the province of the Abruzzi,
with the cities of Naples and Gaeta, were to be the share of Louis XII.,
who would assume the title of King of Naples and of Jerusalem; Calabria
and Puglia (Apulia), with the title of duchies, would belong to the King
of Spain, to whom Louis XII., in order to obtain this chance of an
accessary and precarious kingship, gave up entirely Roussillon and
Cerdagne, that French frontier of the Pyrenees which Louis XI. had
purchased, a golden bargain, from John II., King of Arragon. In this
arrangement there was a blemish and a danger of which the superficial and
reckless policy of Louis XII. made no account: he did not here, as he had
done for the conquest of Milaness, join himself to an ally of far
inferior power to his own, and of ambition confined within far narrower
boundaries, as was the case when the Venetians supported him against
Ludovie Sforza: he was choosing for his comrade, in a far greater
enterprise, his nearest and most powerful rival, and the most dexterous
rascal amongst the kings of his day. "The King of France," said
Ferdinand one day, "complains that I have deceived him twice; he lies,
the drunkard; I have deceived him more than ten times." Whether this
barefaced language were or were not really used, it expressed nothing but
the truth: mediocre men, who desire to remain pretty nearly honest, have
always the worst of it, and are always dupes when they ally themselves
with men who are corrupt and at the same time able, indifferent to good
and evil, to justice and iniquity. Louis XII., even with the Cardinal
d'Amboise to advise him, was neither sufficiently judicious to abstain
from madly conceived enterprises, nor sufficiently scrupulous and
clear-sighted to unmask and play off every act of perfidy and wickedness:
by uniting hims