Rome, and the populace
liberated the prisoners of the Inquisition and burned the building. They
howled for the Dominican monks, the guardians of the tribunal, that they
might burn them also, but at the entrance to the monastery they were
stopped by five mounted knights keeping guard over the doomed monks.
They were all of them nobles, and all had suffered from the Pope, and
they were led by Marcantonio Colonna, whose father and mother had been
persecuted by the Inquisition. They had ridden in haste to Rome when
they heard that Paul was dying to preserve order in the city.

"And at the sight of those calm knights," says Marion Crawford, "sitting
their horses without armour and with sheathed swords, the people drew
back while Colonna spoke; and because he also had suffered much at
Paul's hands they listened to him, and the great monastery was saved
from fire and the monks from death."

But though Revenge was restrained, Justice claimed the murderers of the
Duchess of Palliano. Their trial was deliberate, but in the end Cardinal
Carlo Caraffa met the same death which she had suffered, while her
husband, her brother, and their accomplice were beheaded in the Torre di
Nona.

The first use made by Colonna of his revenues was to equip the
battleship which he commanded at Lepanto, where he won the title of
Champion of Christendom.

The pitiful story of Eufrosina, who for a brief period was mistress of
Palliano, is a sad blot upon the Champion's otherwise honourable career.
Some authorities maintain that she was of good family, and that
Marcantonio had killed her husband for love of her; others that she was
a slave girl whom he had brought back from the Orient. All agree that
she was beautiful, but Colonna had not made her his duchess. Strangely
enough he offered the tiara of the murdered Violante to Felice Orsini,
daughter of the very man who had striven in vain to win Palliano by
force of arms. It was a tempting marriage, for it united the two great
rival houses of Rome, and Eufrosina was heartlessly cast aside. Her
after-history is a tragedy beside which the story just related pales to
an idyl.

[Illustration: Court of the Massimi Palace]

That she was a woman of extraordinary powers of fascination is proved by
the fact that, though it was notorious that she had been abandoned by
Marcantonio, Lelio Massimi, then the representative of one of the
proudest patrician families of Rome, did not hesitate to make her his
wif