f his own
wealth. From the day of his nomination onwards, his palace was
constantly filled with tailors, jewellers, and merchants of priceless
stuffs; magnificent clothes had been made for him, embroidered with
precious stones which he had selected from the family treasures. All his
jewels, perhaps the richest in Italy, were distributed about the liveries
of his pages, and one of them, his favourite, was to wear a collar of
pearls valued by itself at 100,000 ducats, or almost, a million of our
francs. In his party the Bishop of Arezzo, Gentile, who had once been
Lorenzo dei Medici's tutor, was elected as second ambassador, and it was
his duty to speak. Now Gentile, who had prepared his speech, counted on
his eloquence to charm the ear quite as much as Piero counted on his
riches to dazzle the eye. But the eloquence of Gentile would be lost
completely if nobody was to speak but the ambassador of the King of
Naples; and the magnificence of Piero dei Medici would never be noticed
at all if he went to Rome mixed up with all the other ambassadors. These
two important interests, compromised by the Duke of Milan's proposition,
changed the whole face of Italy.

Ludovico Sforza had already made sure of Ferdinand's promise to conform
to the plan he had invented, when the old king, at the solicitation of
Piero, suddenly drew back. Sforza found out how this change had come
about, and learned that it was Piero's influence that had overmastered
his own. He could not disentangle the real motives that had promised the
change, and imagined there was some secret league against himself: he
attributed the changed political programme to the death of Lorenzo dei
Medici. But whatever its cause might be, it was evidently prejudicial to
his own interests: Florence, Milan's old ally, was abandoning her for
Naples. He resolved to throw a counter weight into the scales; so,
betraying to Alexander the policy of Piero and Ferdinand, he proposed to
form a defensive and offensive alliance with him and admit the republic
of Venice; Duke Hercules III of Ferrara was also to be summoned to
pronounce for one or other of the two leagues. Alexander VI, wounded by
Ferdinand's treatment of himself, accepted Ludovico Sforza's proposition,
and an Act of Confederation was signed on the 22nd of April, 1493, by
which the new allies pledged themselves to set on foot for the
maintenance of the public peace an army of 20,000 horse and 6,000
infantry.

Fer