Louis XII.
granted him the duchy of Anjou and a suitable pension. He died in
1504.]

[Note 2: Upon the death of Innocent VIII., four members of the
Sacred College were conspicuous _papabili_: Raffaele Riario and
Giuliano della Rovere, nephews of Sixtus IV., and Roderigo Borgia and
Ascanio Sforza. Borgia was elected and took the title of Alexander VI.
He rewarded Cardinal Sforza for his timely assistance in securing
his elevation, by giving him the Vice-Chancellorship he had himself
occupied as Cardinal, the town of Nepi and the Borgia Palace in Rome.
Dissensions between Alexander and the Sforza family soon became acute;
Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro and sometime husband of Lucrezia
Borgia, was expelled, and his brother, Cardinal Ascanio was included
in the papal disfavour. He sought refuge in Lombardy, where he was
taken prisoner by Louis XII., of France. Peter Martyr had foreseen,
in a measure, the turbulent events of Alexander's pontificate; the
Spanish sovereigns charged him to express to Cardinal Sforza their
disapproval of his action in supporting the Borgia party, that
Cardinal, though a Spaniard, being _persona non grata_ to them; and in
so doing he wrote to his friend the dubious augury, "God grant he may
be grateful to you." Ep. 119.]

I have narrated in a preceding book how the Admiral Columbus, after
having visited the cannibal islands, landed at Hispaniola on the
fourth day of the nones of February, 1493, without having lost a
single vessel. I shall now recount what he discovered while exploring
that island and another neighbouring one, which he believed to be a
continent.

According to Columbus, Hispaniola is the island of Ophir mentioned in
the third book of Kings.[3] Its width covers five degrees of south
latitude, for its north coast extends to the twenty-seventh degree and
the south coast to the twenty-second; its length extends 780 miles,
though some of the companions of Columbus give greater dimensions.[4]
Some declare that it extends to within forty-nine degrees of Cadiz,
and others to an even greater distance. The calculation concerning
this has not been made with precision.

[Note 3: Ortelius, in his _Geographia Sacra_, gives the name of
Ophir to Hayti; and it was a commonly held opinion that Solomon's
mines of Ophir were situated in America. Columbus shared this belief,
and he later wrote of Veragua, when he discovered the coasts of
Darien, that he was positive the gold mines there were th