f adventure. After surviving three
massacres of kith and kin, he returned as despot at the age of twelve to
Camerino, and became a general of distinction. But he was not destined
to end his life in peace. Cesare Borgia finally murdered him, together
with three of his sons, when he had reached the age of sixty. Less
romantic but not less significant in the annals of tyranny is the story
of the Trinci. A rival noble of Foligno, Pietro Rasiglia, had been
injured in his honor by the chief of the ruling house. He contrived to
assassinate two brothers, Nicola and Bartolommeo, in his castle of
Nocera; but the third, Corrado Trinci, escaped, and took a fearful
vengeance on his enemy. By the help of Braccio da Montone he possessed
himself of Nocera and all its inhabitants, with the exception of Pietro
Rasiglia's wife, whom her husband flung from the battlements. Corrado
then butchered the men, women, and children of the Rasiglia clan, to the
number of three hundred persons, accomplishing his vengeance with
details of atrocity too infernal to be dwelt on in these pages. It is
recorded that thirty-six asses laden with their mangled limbs paraded
the streets of Foligno as a terror-striking spectacle for the
inhabitants. He then ruled the city by violence, until the warlike
Cardinal dei Vitelleschi avenged society of so much mischief by
destroying the tyrant and five of his sons, in the same year. Equally
fantastic are the annals of the great house of the Baglioni at Perugia.
Raised in 1389 upon the ruins of the bourgeois faction called Raspanti,
they founded their tyranny in the person of Pandolfo Baglioni, who was
murdered together with sixty of his clan and followers by the party
they had dispossessed. The new despot, Biordo Michelotti, was stabbed in
the shoulders with a poisoned dagger by his relative, the abbot of S.
Pietro. Then the city, in 1416, submitted to Braccio da Montone, who
raised it to unprecedented power and glory. On his death it fell back
into new discords, from which it was rescued again by the Baglioni in
1466, now finally successful in their prolonged warfare with the rival
family of Oddi. But they did not hold their despotism in tranquillity.
In 1500 one of the members of the house, Grifonetto degli Baglioni,
conspired against his kinsmen and slew them in their palaces at night.
As told by Matarazzo, this tragedy offers an epitome of all that is
most, brilliant and terrible in the domestic feuds of the Italian