hungry and unpaid troops. And the facts
recorded of the state of discipline of the army are perfectly consistent
with such a supposition.

The Viceroy sent a messenger to Bourbon, while he was yet in Bologna,
informing him of the treaty signed with Clement, and desiring him
therefore to come no farther southward. Bourbon, bent, as Varchi says,
on deceiving both the Pope and the Viceroy, replied that, if the Pope
would send him two hundred thousand florins for distribution to the
army, he would stay his march. But, while this answer was carried back
to Rome, the tumultuous host continued its fearfully menacing advance;
and the alarm in Rome was rapidly growing to desperate terror. At the
Pope's earnest request, the Viceroy, "who knew well," says Varchi, "that
his holiness had not a farthing," himself took post and rode hard for
Florence with letters from Clement, hoping to obtain the money there.

The departure of the Viceroy in person, and the breathless haste of his
ride to Florence, speak vividly of this Spanish officer's personal
anxiety respecting the dreadful fate which threatened Rome. But the
Florentines do not seem to have been equally impressed with the
necessity of losing no time in making an effort to avert the calamity
from a rival city. It was after "much talking," we are told, that they
at last consented to advance a hundred fifty thousand florins, eighty
thousand in cash down, and the remainder by the end of October. It was
now April; and Bourbon had by this time crossed the Apennines, and was
with his army on the western slopes of the mountains, not far from the
celebrated monastery of Lavernia. Thither the Viceroy hurried with all
speed, accompanied by only two servants and a trumpeter; and having
"with much difficulty," says Varchi, come to speech with the general,
proffered him the eighty thousand florins. Upon which he was set upon by
the tumultuous troops, and "narrowly escaped being torn in pieces by
them." In endeavoring to get away from them and make his way back to
Florence, he fell into the hands of certain peasants near Camaldoli, and
was here again in danger of his life, and was wounded in the head. He
was, however, rescued by a monk of Vallombrosa, and by him conducted to
the neighboring little town of Poppi in the Casentino, or upper valley
of the Arno, whence he made his way to Siena, and so back to Rome, with
no pleasant tidings of what might be expected from Bourbon and his
brigand arm