imony during their
minority. To the defence of this she now addressed herself with all the
resolution of her stern nature. Her life had been unfortunate, and of
horrors she had touched a surfeit. Her father, Galeazzo Sforza, was
murdered in Milan Cathedral by a little band of patriots; her brother
Giangaleazzo had died, of want or poison, in the Castle of Pavia, the
victim of her ambitious uncle, Lodovico; her husband, Girolamo Riario,
she had seen butchered and flung naked from a window of the very castle
which she now defended; Giacomo Feo, whom she had secretly married in
second nuptials, was done to death in Forli, under her very eyes, by a
party of insurrectionaries. Him she had terribly avenged. Getting her
men-at-arms together, she had ridden at their head into the quarter
inhabited by the murderers, and there ordered--as Macchiavelli tells
us--the massacre of every human being that dwelt in it, women and
children included, whilst she remained at hand to see it done.
Thereafter she took a third husband, in Giovanni di Pierfrancesco
de'Medici, who died in 1498. By him this lusty woman had a son whose
name was to ring through Italy as that of one of the most illustrious
captains of his day--Giovanni delle Bande Nere.

Such was the woman whom Sanuto has called "great-souled, but a most
cruel virago," who now shut herself into her castle to defy the Borgia.

She had begun by answering the Pope's Bull of attainder with the
statement that, far from owing the Holy See the tribute which it
claimed, the Holy See was actually in her debt, her husband, Count
Girolamo Riario, having been a creditor of the Church for the provisions
made by him in his office of Captain-General of the Pontifical forces.
This subterfuge, however, had not weighed with Alexander, whereupon,
having also been frustrated in her attempt upon the life of the Pope's
Holiness, she had proceeded to measures of martial resistance. Her
children and her treasures she had dispatched to Florence that they
might be out of danger, retaining of the former only her son Ottaviano,
a young man of some twenty years; but, for all that she kept him near
her, it is plain that she did not account him worthy of being entrusted
with the defence of his tyranny, for it was she, herself, the daughter
of the bellicose race of Sforza, who set about the organizing of this.

Disposing of forces that were entirely inadequate to take the field
against the invader, she entrenched