cachinnos
profundebatur.'

[2] See Pontanus, _de Immanitate_, Aldus; 1518, vol. i. p. 320:
'Ferd. R.N. qui cervum aprumve occidissent furtimve palamve,
alios remo addixit, alios manibus mutilavit, alios suspendio
affecit: agros quoque serendos inderdixit dominis, legendasque
aut glandes aut poma, quae servari quidem volebat in escam
feris ad venationis suae usum.'

[3] Caracciolo, _de Varietate Fortunae_, Muratori, vol. xxii. p.
87, exposes this system in a passage which should be compared
with Infessura on the practices of Sixtus. De Comines, lib.
vii. cap. 11, may be read with profit on the same subject.

[4] See Caracciolo, loc. cit. pp. 88, 89, concerning the
judicial murder of Francesco Coppola and Antonello Perucci,
both of whom had been raised to eminence by Ferdinand, used
through their lives as the instruments of his extortion, and
murdered by him in their rich old age.

[5] See De Comines, lib. vii. cap. 11; Sismondi, vol. vii. p.
229. Read also the short account of the massacre of the Barons
given in the _Chronicon Venetum_, Muratori, xxiv. p. 15, where
the intense loathing felt throughout Italy for Ferdinand and
his son Alfonso is powerfully expressed.

This kind of tyranny carried in itself its own death-warrant. It needed
not the voice of Savonarola to proclaim that God would revenge the
crimes of Ferdinand by placing a new sovereign on his throne. It was
commonly believed that the old king died in 1494 of remorse and
apprehension, when he knew that the French expedition could no longer be
delayed. Alfonso, for his part, bold general in the field and able man
of affairs as he might be, found no courage to resist the conqueror. It
is no fiction of a poet or a moralist, but plain fact of history, that
this King of Naples, grandson of the great Alfonso and father of the
Ferdinand to be, quailed before the myriads of accusing dead that rose
to haunt his tortured fancy in the supreme hour of peril. The chambers
of his palace in Naples were thronged with ghosts by battalions, pale
specters of the thousands he had reduced to starvation, bloody phantoms
of the barons he had murdered after nameless tortures, thin wraiths of
those who had wasted away in dungeons under his remorseless rule. The
people around his gates muttered in rebellion. He abdicated in favor of
his son, took ship for Sicily, and died there conscience-strick