i, "who, armed or unarmed,
did not go to the palace of Lorenzo in this time of trouble, to offer
him his person and his property--such was the position and the affection
that the Medici had acquired by their prudence and their liberality."
Lorenzo came out on the loggia, and addressed the people massed in the
street. He thanked them for their devotion and assistance, but entreated
them, for his dear, dead brother's sake, to abstain from further
atrocities and to disperse to their homes in peace.
Nevertheless, all the Pazzi and Salviati were proclaimed "_Ammoniti_"
and they were pursued from house to house, whilst the peasants took up
the hue and cry in the _contado_. Bleeding heads and torn limbs were
everywhere scattered in the streets; door-posts and curb-stones were
dashed with gore; men and women and the children, too, were all
relentless avengers of "_Il bel Giulio's_" blood. It is said that one
hundred and eighty stark corpses were borne away by the merciful
_Misericordia_ and buried secretly!
Cavaliere Giacopo, who had escaped into the hilly country of the
Falterona, near the source of the Arno, was recognised by a couple of
countrymen, who were frequenters of the markets in Florence. They seized
him and took him to the city gate, where they sold him for fifty gold
florins. His shrift was short, for his purchasers, adherents of the
Medici, hacked off his head in the street, and carried it upon a pole to
the Ponte Vecchio! Buried at Santa Croce, in the chapel of the Pazzi,
his mutilated body was not left long in its grave. It was pulled up,
denuded of the shroud, and, with a rope tied round the feet, dragged by
men and women and even children to the Lung' Arno, and pitched, like a
load of refuse, into the dusky river!
Several of the arch-conspirators hid for a while in various places,
mostly in convents, but their time came for punishment. The two priests,
Antonio and Stefano, were, two days after the tragedy in the Duomo,
brought out of the cellars of the _Badia_ of the Benedictines at Santa
Firenze, and killed, not swiftly and mercifully, but tortured and
mutilated to the satisfaction of the rabble.
Bernard Bandino, after picking himself up at the New Sacristy doors,
immediately realised the failure of the conspiracy, and, wise man that
he was, put his own safety before all other considerations. He worked
his way through the struggling crowd in the Cathedral and got out by the
south portal. Luckily eno
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