pened for Cesare as easily as
had the first. So far his conquest had been achieved by little more than
a processional display of his armed legions. Like another Joshua, he
reduced cities by the mere blare of his trumpets. At last, however,
he was to receive a check. Where grown men had fled cravenly at his
approach, it remained for a child to resist him at Faenza, as a woman
had resisted him at Forli.

His progress north from Pesaro was of necessity slow. He paused, as
we have seen, at Rimini, and he paused again, and for a rather longer
spell, at Forli, so that it was not until the second week of November
that Astorre Manfredi--the boy of sixteen who was to hold Faenza--caught
in the distance the flash of arms and the banners with the bull device
borne by the host which the Duke of Valentinois led against him.

At first it had been Astorre's intent to follow the examples set him by
Malatesta and Sforza, and he had already gone so far as to remove his
valuables to Ravenna, whither he, too, meant to seek refuge. But he was
in better case than any of the tyrants so far deposed inasmuch as his
family, which had ruled Faenza for two hundred years, had not provoked
the hatred of its subjects, and these were now ready and willing to
stand loyally by their young lord. But loyalty alone can do little,
unless backed by the might of arms, against such a force as Cesare was
prepared to hurl upon Faenza. This Astorre realized, and for his own
and his subjects' sake was preparing to depart, when, to his undoing,
support reached him from an unexpected quarter.

Bologna--whose ruler, Giovanni Bentivogli, was Astorre's grandfather--in
common with Florence and Urbino, grew daily more and more alarmed at
the continual tramp of armed multitudes about her frontiers, and at the
steady growth in numbers and in capacity of this splendid army which
followed Casare--an army captained by such enemies of the Bentivogli as
the Baglioni, the Orsini, and the exiled Malvezzi.

Bentivogli had good grounds for his anxiety, not knowing how long he
might depend upon the protection of France, and well aware that, once
that protection was removed, there would be no barrier between Bologna
and Cesare's manifest intentions concerning her.

Next to Cesare's utter annihilation, to check his progress was the
desire dearest just then to the heart of Bentivogli, and with this end
in view he dispatched Count Guido Torella to Faenza, in mid-October,
with an of