tivoglio
consented, only too happy to be quit of him at this price: the
conditions were the cession of Castello Bolognese, a fortress between
Imola and Faenza, the payment of a tribute of 9000 ducats, and the
keeping for his service of a hundred men-at-arms and two thousand
infantry. In exchange for these favours, Caesar confided to Bentivoglio
that his visit had been due to the counsels of the Mariscotti; then,
reinforced by his new ally's contingent, he took the road for Tuscany.
But he was scarcely out of sight when Bentivoglio shut the gates of
Bologna, and commanded his son Hermes to assassinate with his own hand
Agamemnon Mariscotti, the head of the family, and ordered the massacre
of four-and-thirty of his near relatives, brothers, sons, daughters, and
nephews, and two hundred other of his kindred and friends. The butchery
was carried out by the noblest youths of Bologna; whom Bentivoglio
forced to bathe their hands in this blood, so that he might attach them
to himself through their fear of reprisals.

Caesar's plans with regard to Florence were now no longer a mystery:
since the month of January he had sent to Pisa ten or twelve hundred men
under the Command of Regniero della Sassetta and Piero di Gamba Corti,
and as soon as the conquest of the Romagna was complete, he had further
despatched Oliverotto di Fermo with new detachments. His own army he had
reinforced, as we have seen, by a hundred men-at-arms and two thousand
infantry; he had just been joined by Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Citta,
di Castello, and by the Orsini, who had brought him another two or three
thousand men; so, without counting the troops sent to Pisa, he had under
his control seven hundred men-at-arms and five thousand infantry.

Still, in spite of this formidable company, he entered Tuscany declaring
that his intentions were only pacific, protesting that he only desired
to pass through the territories of the republic on his way to Rome, and
offering to pay in ready money for any victual his army might require.
But when he had passed the defiles of the mountains and arrived at
Barberino, feeling that the town was in his power and nothing could now
hinder his approach, he began to put a price on the friendship he had
at first offered freely, and to impose his own conditions instead of
accepting those of others. These were that Piero dei Medici, kinsman and
ally of the Orsini, should be reinstated in his ancient power; that six
Florentine c