assumed the control, always under Leo X; while their cousin, Giulio,
also a Churchman, and the natural son of the murdered Giuliano,
was busy, behind the scenes, with the family fortunes.

Giuliano lived only till 1516 and was succeeded by his nephew
Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, a son of Peiro, a young man of no more
political use than his father, and one who quickly became almost
equally unpopular. Things indeed were going so badly that Leo X sent
Giulio de' Medici (now a cardinal) from Rome to straighten them out,
and by some sensible repeals he succeeded in allaying a little of
the bitterness in the city. Lorenzo had one daughter, born in this
palace, who was destined to make history--Catherine de' Medici--and
no son. When therefore he died in 1519, at the age of twenty-seven,
after a life of vicious selfishness (which, however, was no bar
to his having the noblest tomb in the world, at S. Lorenzo), the
succession should have passed to the other branch of the Medici
family, the descendants of old Giovanni's second son Lorenzo,
brother of Cosimo. But Giulio, at Rome, always at the ear of the
indolent, pleasure-loving Leo X, had other projects. Born in 1478,
the illegitimate son of a charming father, Giulio had none of the
great Medici traditions, and the Medici name never stood so low as
during his period of power. Himself illegitimate, he was the father
of an illegitimate son, Alessandro, for whose advancement he toiled
much as Alexander VI had toiled for that of Caesar Borgia. He had not
the black, bold wickedness of Alexander VI, but as Pope Clement VII,
which he became in 1523, he was little less admirable. He was cunning,
ambitious, and tyrannical, and during his pontificate he contrived not
only to make many powerful enemies and to see both Rome and Florence
under siege, but to lose England for the Church.