and causing the prothonotary Colonna to be attacked in his own house,
took him prisoner, and put him to death. The mother of Colonna came to
St. Celso, in Banchi, where the corpse lay, and lifting the severed head
by its hair, she exclaimed: 'Behold the head of my son. Such is the
truth of the Pope. He promised that my son should be set at liberty if
Marino were delivered into his hands. He is possessed of Marino, and,
behold, we have my son--but dead. Thus does the Pope keep his word.'"

His successor, Innocent VIII, "in defiance of the conditions of his
election, sought with a still more profligate vileness to exalt and
enrich his seven illegitimate children." He had been elected on the
condition that he would make only one blood relative a cardinal, and
that certain other benefices of the Church should not be given to any
one related to him. The people called him Nocens (the Guilty One, or the
Harmful One) instead of Innocent, and immortalized the prolific
paternity of this saintly celibate in the following epigram:

Octo Nocens genuit pueros totidemque puellas,
Hunc merito poterit dicere Roma patrem,

that is,

Nocens begat eight boys and an equal number of maidens;
Rightly, then, Rome will be able to call this gentleman father.

"He carried on two wars with Ferdinand, king of Naples, until the year
1492, and brought forward Renatus, duke of Lorraine, as pretender to his
crown. True, he proceeded, as his predecessors had done, to encourage
princes and people to undertake expeditions against the Turks; but when
Dschem, the brother and rival of the Turkish Sultan Bajazet, was