o. On every hand the marriage was said to be a love-match, and of
it had been born, in November of 1499, the boy Roderigo.

On July 15, 1500, at about the third hour of the night, Alfonso was
assaulted and grievously wounded--mortally, it was said at first--on the
steps of St. Peter's.

Burchard's account of the affair is that the young prince was assailed
by several assassins, who wounded him in the head, right arm, and knee.
Leaving him, no doubt, for dead, they fled down the steps, at the foot
of which some forty horsemen awaited them, who escorted them out of the
city by the Pertusa Gate. The prince was residing in the palace of the
Cardinal of Santa Maria in Portico, but so desperate was his condition
that those who found him upon the steps of the Basilica bore him into
the Vatican, where he was taken to a chamber of the Borgia Tower, whilst
the Cardinal of Capua at once gave him absolution in articulo mortis.

The deed made a great stir in Rome, and was, of course, the subject
of immediate gossip, and three days later Cesare issued an edict
forbidding, under pain of death, any man from going armed between Sant'
Angelo and the Vatican.

News of the event was carried immediately to Naples, and King Federigo
sent his own physician, Galieno, to treat and tend his nephew. In the
care of that doctor and a hunchback assistant, Alfonso lay ill of his
wounds until August 17, when suddenly be died, to the great astonishment
of Rome, which for some time had believed him out of danger. In
recording his actual death, Burchard is at once explicit and reticent to
an extraordinary degree. "Not dying," he writes, "from the wound he had
taken, he was yesterday strangled in his bed at the nineteenth hour."

Between the chronicling of his having been wounded on the steps of St.
Peter's and that of his death, thirty-three days later, there is no
entry in Burchard's diary relating to the prince, nor anything that can
in any way help the inquirer to a conclusion; whilst, on the subject of
the strangling, not another word does the Master of Ceremonies add
to what has above been quoted. That he should so coldly--almost
cynically--state that Alfonso was strangled, without so much as
suggesting by whom, is singular in one who, however grimly laconic, is
seldom reticent--notwithstanding that he may have been so accounted by
those who despaired of finding in his diary the confirmation of such
points of view as they happen to have chosen a