ances of overwhelming cumulative evidence
against the Curia. Sarpi's life was frequently attempted in the
following years. On one occasion, Cardinal Bellarmino, more mindful of
private friendship than of public feud, sent him warning that he must
live prepared for fresh attacks from Rome.

[Footnote 146: A full account of them is given by Bianchi Giovini in his
_Biografia_, chap. xvii.]

Indeed, it may be said that he now passed his days in continual
expectation of poison or the dagger. This appears plainly in Fulgenzio's
biography and in the pages of his private correspondence. The most
considerable of these later conspiracies, of which Fra Fulgenzio gives a
full account, implicated Cardinal Borghese and the General of the
Servite Order.[147] The history seems in brief to be as follows. One Fra
Bernardo of Perugia, who had served the Cardinal during their student
days, took up his residence in Rome so soon as Scipione Borghese became
a profitable patron. In the course of the year 1609, this Fra Bernardo
dispatched a fellow-citizen of his, named Fra Giovanni Francesco, to
Padua, whence he frequently came across to Venice and tampered with
Sarpi's secretary, Fra Antonio of Viterbo. These three friars were all
of them Servites; and it appears that the General looked with approval
on their undertaking. The upshot of the traffic was that Fra Antonio,
having ready access to Sarpi's apartments and person, agreed either to
murder him with a razor or to put poison in his food, or, what was
finally determined on, to introduce a couple of assassins into his
bedchamber at night. An accident revealed the plot, and placed a
voluminous cyphered correspondence in the hands of the Venetian
Inquisitor of State. Fra Fulgenzio significantly adds that of all the
persons incriminated by these letters, none, with the exception of the
General of the Servites, was under the rank of Cardinal. The wording of
his sentence is intentionally obscure, but one expression seems even to
point at the Pope.[148]

[Footnote 147: _Vita di F. Paolo_, pp. 67-70.]

At the close of this affair, so disgraceful to the Church and to his
Order, Fra Paolo besought the Signory of Venice on his bended knees, as
a return for services rendered by him to the State, that no public
punishment should be inflicted on the culprits. He could not bear, he
said, to be the cause of bringing a blot of infamy upon his religion, or
of ruining the career of any man. Fra Giovann