of Navarre to wife. By largesse of bribery and hollow promises
he brought to his side the great families of Rome, his natural enemies,
and the great Condottieri with their men-at-arms. When by their aid he
had established and extended his government he mistrusted their good
faith. With an infinity of fascination and cunning, without haste and
without rest, he lured these leaders, almost more cunning than himself,
to visit him as friends in his fortress of Sinigaglia. 'I doubt if they
will be alive to-morrow morning,' wrote Machiavelli, who was on the
spot. He was right. Caesar caused them to be strangled the same night,
while his father dealt equal measure to their colleagues and adherents
in Rome. Thenceforth, distrusting mercenaries, he found and disciplined
out of a mere rabble, a devoted army of his own, and having
unobtrusively but completely extirpated the whole families of those
whose thrones he had usurped, not only the present but the future seemed
assured to him.

He had fulfilled the first of Machiavelli's four conditions. He rapidly
achieved the remaining three. He bought the Roman nobles so as to be
able to put a bridle in the new 'Pope's mouth.' He bought or poisoned or
packed or terrorised the existing College of Cardinals and selected new
Princes of the Church who should accept a Pontiff of his choosing. He
was effectively strong enough to resist the first onset upon him at his
father's death. Five years had been enough for so great an undertaking.
One thing alone he had not and indeed could not have foreseen. 'He told
me himself on the day on which (Pope) Julius was created, that he had
foreseen and provided for everything else that could happen on his
father's death, but had never anticipated that, when his father died, he
too should have been at death's door.' Even so the fame and splendour of
his name for a while maintained his authority against his unnumbered
enemies. But soon the great betrayer was betrayed. 'It is well to cheat
those who have been masters of treachery,' he had said himself in his
hours of brief authority. His wheel had turned full cycle. Within three
years his fate, like that of Charles XII., was destined to a foreign
strand, a petty fortress, and a dubious hand. Given over to Spain he
passed three years obscurely. 'He was struck down in a fight at Viana in
Navarre (1507) after a furious resistance: he was stripped of his fine
armour by men who did not know his name or quality and