sfaction. He made ample provision for the proper
administration of justice and the preservation of the peace; he recalled
the fuorusciti exiled by the unscrupulous Pandolfaccio, and he saw them
reinstated in the property of which that tyrant had dispossessed them.
As his lieutenant in Rimini, with strict injunctions to preserve law
and order, he left Ramiro de Lorqua, when, on November 2, he departed to
march upon Faenza, which had prepared for resistance.

What Cesare did in Rimini was no more than he was doing throughout the
Romagna, as its various archives bear witness. They bear witness no less
to his vast ability as an administrator, showing how he resolved the
prevailing chaos into form and order by his admirable organization and
suppression of injustice. The same archives show us also that he found
time for deeds of beneficence which endeared him to the people, who
everywhere hailed him as their deliverer from thraldom. It would not be
wise to join in the chorus of those who appear to have taken Cesare's
altruism for granted. The rejection of the wild stories that picture
him as a corrupt and murderous monster, utterly inhuman, and lay a dozen
ghastly crimes to his account need not entail our viewing Cesare as an
angel of deliverance, a divine agent almost, rescuing a suffering people
from oppression out of sheer humanitarianism.

He is the one as little as the other. He is just--as Collenuccio wrote
to Ercole d'Este--"great of spirit and of ambition, athirst for
eminence and fame." He was consumed by the desire for power and worldly
greatness, a colossus of egotism to whom men and women were pieces to
be handled by him on the chess-board of his ambition, to be sacrificed
ruthlessly where necessary to his ends, but to be husbanded and guarded
carefully where they could serve him.

With his eyes upon the career of Cesare Borgia, Macchiavelli was anon to
write of principalities newly-acquired, that "however great may be the
military resources of a prince, he will discover that, to obtain firm
footing in a province, he must engage the favour and interest of the
inhabitants."

That was a principle self-evident to Cesare--the principle upon which
he acted throughout in his conquest of the Romagna. By causing his new
subjects to realize at once that they had exchanged an oppressive for a
generous rule, he attached them to himself.

CHAPTER VII. THE SIEGE OF FAENZA

The second campaign of the Romagna had o