every sign of joy, putting all his house and
servants at their disposal. But scarcely had they retired to bed when he
sent a runner to Piacenza, to inform Carlo Orsini, at that time
commanding the Venetian garrison, that he was prepared to deliver up
Cardinal Ascanio and the chief men of the Milanese army. Carlo Orsini
did not care to resign to another so important an expedition, and
mounting hurriedly with twenty-five men, he first surrounded Conrads
house, and then entered sword in hand the chamber wherein Ascanio and his
companions lay, and being surprised in the middle of their sleep, they
yielded without resistance. The prisoners were taken to Venice, but
Louis XII claimed them, and they were given up. Thus the King of France
found himself master of Ludovico Sforza and of Ascania, of a legitimate
nephew of the great Francesco Sforza named Hermes, of two bastards named
Alessandro and Cortino, and of Francesco, son of the unhappy Gian
Galeazza who had been poisoned by his uncle.

Louis XII, wishing to make an end of the whole family at a blow, forced
Francesco to enter a cloister, shut up Cardinal Ascanio in the tower of
Baurges, threw into prison Alessandro, Cartino, and Hermes, and finally,
after transferring the wretched Ludovico from the fortress of
Pierre-Eucise to Lys-Saint-George he relegated him for good and all to
the castle of Loches, where he lived for ten years in solitude and utter
destitution, and there died, cursing the day when the idea first came
into his head of enticing the French into Italy.

The news of the catastrophe of Ludovica and his family caused the
greatest joy at Rome, for, while the French were consolidating their
power in Milanese territory, the Holy See was gaining ground in the
Romagna, where no further opposition was offered to Caesar's conquest.
So the runners who brought the news were rewarded with valuable presents,
and it was published throughout the whole town of Rome to the sound of
the trumpet and drum. The war-cry of Louis, France, France, and that of
the Orsini, Orso, Orso, rang through all the streets, which in the
evening were illuminated, as though Constantinople or Jerusalem had been
taken. And the pope gave the people fetes and fireworks, without
troubling his head the least in the world either about its being Holy
Week, or because the Jubilee had attracted more than 200,000 people to
Rome; the temporal interests of his family seeming to him far more
important th