into his own hands, confined
his nephew in an honorable prison, and acted in a way to make it clear
that he intended thenceforth to be Duke in fact.[3] It was the bad
conscience inseparable from this usurpation which made him mistrust the
princes of the house of Aragon, whose rights in Isabella, wife of the
young Duke, were set at nought by him. The same uneasy sense of wrong
inclined him to look with dread upon the friendship of the Medici for
the ruling family of Naples.

[1] His mother Clarice and his wife Alfonsina were both of them
Orsini. Guicciardini, in his 'Dialogo del Reggimento di
Firenze' (_Op. Ined._ vol. ii. p. 46), says of him: 'sendo nato
di madre forestiera, era imbastardito in lui il sangue
Fiorentino, e degenerato in costumi esterni, e troppo insolenti
e altieri al nostro vivere.' Piero, nevertheless, refused to
accept estates from King Alfonso which would have made him a
Baron and feudatory of Naples. See _Arch. Stor._ vol. i. p. 347.

[2] The young Duke was aged twenty-four in 1493.

[3] Lodovico had taken measures for cloaking his usurpation
with the show of legitimate right. He betrothed his niece
Bianca Maria, in 1494, to the Emperor Maximilian, with a dower
of 400,000 ducats, receiving in return an investiture of the
Duchy, which, however, he kept secret.

While affairs were in this state, and as yet no open disturbance in
Lorenzo's balance of power had taken place, Alexander VI. was elected to
the Papacy. It was usual for the princes and cities of Italy to
compliment the Pope with embassies on his assumption of the tiara; and
Lodovico suggested that the representatives of Milan, Florence, Ferrara,
and Naples should enter Rome together in a body. The foolish vanity of
Piero, who wanted to display the splendor of his own equipage without
rivals, induced him to refuse this proposal, and led to a similar
refusal on the part of Ferdinand. This trivial circumstance confirmed
the suspicions of Lodovico, who, naturally subtle and intriguing,
thought that he discerned a deep political design in what was really
little more than the personal conceit of a broad-shouldered
simpleton.[1] He already foresaw that the old system of alliances
established by Lorenzo must be abandoned. Another slight incident
contributed to throw the affairs of Italy into confusion by causing a
rupture between Rome and Naples. Lorenzo, by the marriage of his
daughter to