w comes it to be known that a poison so secret,
and working at such distances of time, was ever wielded by them?

The very nature of its alleged action was such as utterly to conceal the
hand that had administered it; yet here, on the first recorded occasion
of its alleged use, it was more or less common knowledge if Giovio and
Guicciardini are to be believed!

Sagredo(1) says that Djem died at Terracina three days after having been
consigned to Charles VIII, of poison administered by Alexander, to whom
Bajazet had promised a large sum of money for the deed. The same is
practically Giovio's statement, save that Giovio causes him to die at
a later date and at Gaeta; Guicciardini and Corio tell a similar story,
but inform us that he died in Naples.

1 In Mem. Storiche dei Monarchi Ottomani.

It is entirely upon the authority of these four writers that the Pope is
charged with having poisoned Djem, and it is noteworthy that in the four
narratives we find different dates and three different places given as
the date and place of the Turk's death, and more noteworthy still that
in not one instance of these four is date or place correctly stated.

Now the place where Djem died, and the date of his death, were public
facts about which there was no mystery; they were to be ascertained--as
they are still--by any painstaking examiner. His poisoning, on the
other hand, was admittedly a secret matter, the truth of which it was
impossible to ascertain with utter and complete finality. Yet of this
poisoning they know all the secrets, these four nimble writers who
cannot correctly tell us where or when the man died!

We will turn from the fictions they have left us--which, alas! have but
too often been preferred by subsequent writers to the true facts
which lay just as ready to their hands, but of course were less
sensational--and we will consider instead the evidence of those
contemporaries who do, at least, know the time and place of Djem's
decease.

If any living man might have known of a secret poison of the Borgias at
this stage, that man was Burchard the Caeremoniarius, and, had he known
of it, not for a moment would he have been silent on the point. Yet
not a word of this secret poison shall you find in his diaries, and
concerning the death of Djem he records that "on February 25 died at the
Castle of Capua the said Djem, through meat or drink that disagreed with
him."

Panvinio, who, being a Neapolitan, was not