why the
Malatesti stood their ground so firmly as they did.

So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated in
Sigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti's general, the
perfidious Pandolfo. It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the
despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair
view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who
remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the
greatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of
the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance. To enumerate the
crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family,
mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci
credible, would violate the decencies of literature. A thoroughly
bestial nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualities
must be passed by in silence. It is enough to mention that he murdered
three wives in succession,[2] Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guinipera
d'Este, and Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, and
carved horns upon his own tomb with this fantastic legend
underneath:--

Porto le corna ch' ognuno le vede,
E tal le porta che non se lo crede.

He died in wedlock with the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti,
who had for some time been his mistress. But, like most of the
Malatesti, he left no legitimate offspring. Throughout his life he was
distinguished for bravery and cunning, for endurance of fatigue and
rapidity of action, for an almost fretful rashness in the execution of
his schemes, and for a character terrible in its violence. He was
acknowledged as a great general; yet nothing succeeded with him. The
long warfare which he carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro ended
in his discomfiture. Having begun by defying the Holy See, he was
impeached at Rome for heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, and
sacrilege, burned in effigy by Pope Pius II., and finally restored to
the bosom of the Church, after suffering the despoliation of almost
all his territories, in 1463. The occasion on which this fierce and
turbulent despiser of laws human and divine was forced to kneel as a
penitent before the Papal legate in the gorgeous temple dedicated to
his own pride, in order that the ban of excommunication might be
removed from Rimini, was one of those petty triumphs, interesting
chiefly for their picturesqueness, by which the Popes confirmed their
quest