dia, 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 who played
the father's part with just as much solemnity as he had played the
husband's.

The wedding of the two bastards was most splendid, rich with the