The Tragedies of the Medici by Edgcumbe Staley
page 62 of 270 (22%)
page 62 of 270 (22%)
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atrocities and to disperse to their homes in peace.
Nevertheless, all the Pazzi and Salviati were proclaimed "_Ammoniti_" and they were pursued from house to house, whilst the peasants took up the hue and cry in the _contado_. Bleeding heads and torn limbs were everywhere scattered in the streets; door-posts and curb-stones were dashed with gore; men and women and the children, too, were all relentless avengers of "_Il bel Giulio's_" blood. It is said that one hundred and eighty stark corpses were borne away by the merciful _Misericordia_ and buried secretly! Cavaliere Giacopo, who had escaped into the hilly country of the Falterona, near the source of the Arno, was recognised by a couple of countrymen, who were frequenters of the markets in Florence. They seized him and took him to the city gate, where they sold him for fifty gold florins. His shrift was short, for his purchasers, adherents of the Medici, hacked off his head in the street, and carried it upon a pole to the Ponte Vecchio! Buried at Santa Croce, in the chapel of the Pazzi, his mutilated body was not left long in its grave. It was pulled up, denuded of the shroud, and, with a rope tied round the feet, dragged by men and women and even children to the Lung' Arno, and pitched, like a load of refuse, into the dusky river! Several of the arch-conspirators hid for a while in various places, mostly in convents, but their time came for punishment. The two priests, Antonio and Stefano, were, two days after the tragedy in the Duomo, brought out of the cellars of the _Badia_ of the Benedictines at Santa Firenze, and killed, not swiftly and mercifully, but tortured and mutilated to the satisfaction of the rabble. |
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