seven great crown offices which
are independent of royal control.

He demanded for his eldest son, whom Ferdinand the Catholic had just made
Duke of Gandia, the principality of Tricarico, the counties of
Chiaramonte, Lauria, and Carinola, an income of 12,000 ducats, and the
first of the seven great offices which should fall vacant.

He demanded that Virginio Orsini, his ambassador at the Neapolitan court,
should be given a third great office, viz. that of Constable, the most
important of them all.

Lastly, he demanded that Giuliano delta Rovere, one of the five cardinals
who had opposed his election and was now taking refuge at Ostia, where
the oak whence he took his name and bearings is still to be seen carved
on all the walls, should be driven out of that town, and the town itself
given over to him.

In exchange, he merely pledged himself never to withdraw from the house
of Aragon the investiture of the kingdom of Naples accorded by his
predecessors. Ferdinand was paying somewhat dearly for a simple promise;
but on the keeping of this promise the legitimacy of his power wholly
depended. For the kingdom of Naples was a fief of the Holy See; and to
the pope alone belonged the right of pronouncing on the justice of each
competitor's pretensions; the continuance of this investiture was
therefore of the highest conceivable importance to Aragon just at the
time when Anjou was rising up with an army at her back to dispossess her.

For a year after he mounted the papal throne, Alexander VI had made great
strides, as we see, in the extension of his temporal power. In his own
hands he held, to be sure, only the least in size of the Italian
territories; but by the marriage of his daughter Lucrezia with the lord
of Pesaro he was stretching out one hand as far as Venice, while by the
marriage of the Prince of Squillace with Dona Sancia, and the territories
conceded to the Duke of Sandia, he was touching with the other hand the
boundary of Calabria.

When this treaty, so advantageous for himself, was duly signed, he made
Caesar Cardinal of Santa Maria Novella, for Caesar was always complaining
of being left out in the distribution of his father's favours.

Only, as there was as yet no precedent in Church history for a bastard's
donning the scarlet, the pope hunted up four false witnesses who declared
that Caesar was the son of Count Ferdinand of Castile; who was, as we
know, that valuable person Don Manuel Melchior, and