would suffer him to advance unchecked in his career of conquest; and as
long as he continued between the French and the Orsini his position was
of necessity insecure. The former had to be cast off; the latter to be
extirpated; and yet he had not force enough to play an open game. 'He
therefore,' says Machiavelli, 'turned to craft, and displayed such skill
in dissimulation that the Orsini through the mediation of Paolo became
his friends again.' The cruelty of Cesare Borgia was only equalled by
his craft; and it was by a supreme exercise of his power of
fascination that he lured the foes who had plotted against him at La
Magione into his snare at Sinigaglia. Paolo Orsini, Francesco Orsini,
duke of Gravina, Vitellozzo Vitelli, and Oliverotto da Fermo were all
men of arms, accustomed to intrigue and to bloodshed, and more than one
of them were stained with crimes of the most atrocious treachery. Yet
such were the arts of Cesare Borgia that in 1502 he managed to assemble
them, apart from their troops, in the castle of Sinigaglia, where he had
them strangled. Having now destroyed the chiefs of the opposition and
enlisted their forces in his own service, Cesare, to use the phrase of
Machiavelli, 'had laid good foundations for his future power.' He
commanded a sufficient territory; he wielded the temporal and spiritual
power of his father; he was feared by the princes and respected by the
people throughout Italy; his cruelty and perfidy and subtlety and
boldness caused him to be universally admired. But as yet he had only
laid foundations. The empire of Italy was still to win; for he aspired
to nothing else, and it is even probable that he entertained a notion of
secularizing the Papacy. France was the chief obstacle to his ambition.
The alarm of Louis had at last been roused. But Louis' own mistake in
bringing the Spaniards into Naples afforded Cesare the means of shaking
off the French control. He espoused the cause of Spain, and by
intriguing now with the one power and now with the other made himself
both formidable and desirable to each. His geographical position between