r Lombard dominions. She
refused the alliance Sforza offered and promised to assist Louis in
return for Cremona and its _contado_. In other words, she committed
treason to Italy and thus justified, if anything could justify, the
League of Cambray.

Sforza's first act was to urge the Turk, who needed no invitation, to
attack the republic, whose fleet in 1499 was utterly defeated at sea
by the Orientals, who presently raided into Friuli. Venice was forced
to accept a humiliating peace. It was in these circumstances that,
with all Italy alienated from her, the papacy began to act against
her.

Its first and most splendid effort to create a reality out of the
fiction of the States of the Church was the attempt of Cesare Borgia,
who actually made himself master of the whole of the Romagna. Venice
watched him with the greatest alarm, but chance saved her, for with
the death of Alexander VI., Cesare and his dream came to nothing.
Venice acted at once, for indeed even in her decline she was the most
splendid force in Italy. She induced by a most swift and masterly
stroke the leading cities of the Romagna to place themselves under her
protection. It was a great stroke, the last blow of a great and
desperate man; that it failed does not make it less to be admired.

The rock which broke the stroke as it fell and shattered the sword
which dealt it was Pope Julius II.

Louis and the emperor had come together, and when in June 1508 a truce
was made they would have been content to leave Venice alone; it was
the pope who refused, and by the end of the year had formed the
European League for the purpose of "putting a stop to losses,
injuries, rapine, and damage which Venice had inflicted not merely on
the Holy See, but also on the Holy Roman Empire, the House of Austria,
the Duchy of Milan, the King of Naples and other princes, seizing and
tyrannically occupying their territories, cities, and castles as
though she were conspiring to the common ill...." So ran the preamble
of the League of Cambray. It contemplated among other things the
return of Ravenna, Faenza, Rimini, and the rest of the Romagna to the
Holy See; Istria, Fruili, Treviso, Padua, Vicenza, and Verona being
handed to the emperor; Brescia, Bergamo, Crema, and Cremona passing to
France, and the sea-coast towns in Apulia to the king of Spain;
Dalmatia was to go to the king of Hungary and Cyprus to the duke of
Savoy.

[Illustration: ROCCA VENIZIANA]

In the spring of