the sum of 50,000 ducats to redeem their captured fortresses.

Gonzalo de Cordoba made a triumphal entry into Rome, bringing with him
Monaldo da Guerra, the unfortunate defender of Ostia, in chains. He was
received with great honour by the Duke of Gandia, accompanied by his
brother-in-law, Giovanni Sforza, and they escorted him to the Vatican,
where the Pope awaited him.

This was but one of the many occasions just then on which Giovanni
Sforza was conspicuous in public in close association with his
father-in-law, the Pope. Burchard mentions his presence at the blessing
of the candles on the Feast of the Purification, and shows him to us as
a candle-bearer standing on the Pope's right hand. Again we see him
on Palm Sunday in attendance upon Alexander, he and Gandia standing
together on the steps of the pontifical throne in the Sixtine Chapel
during the Blessing of the Palms. There and elsewhere Lucrezia's husband
is prominently in the public eye during those months of February and
March of 1497, and we generally see him sharing, with the Duke of
Gandia, the honour of close attendance upon the Pontiff, all of which
but serves to render the more marked his sudden disappearance from that
scene.

The matter of his abrupt and precipitate flight from Rome is one
concerning which it is unlikely that the true and complete facts will
ever be revealed. It was public gossip at this time that his marriage
with Lucrezia was not a happy one, and that discord marred their life
together. Lucrezia's reported grievance upon this subject reads a
little vaguely to us now, whatever it may have conveyed at the time. She
complained that Giovanni "did not fittingly keep her company,"(1) which
may be taken to mean that a good harmony did not prevail between them,
or, almost equally well, that there were the canonical grounds for
complaint against him as a husband which were afterwards formally
preferred and made the grounds for the divorce. It is also possible that
Alexander's ambition may have urged him to dissolve the marriage to
the end that she might be free to be used again as a pawn in his
far-reaching game.

1 "Che non gli faceva buona compagnia."

All that we do know positively is that, one evening in Holy Week, Sforza
mounted a Turkish horse, and, on the pretext of going as far as the
Church of Sant' Onofrio to take the air, he slipped out of Rome, and so
desperately did he ride that, twenty-four hours later, he was home i