approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and
near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity that every house in
the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled. the
peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the fresh-
grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat
on the bodies of the slain, on so-called 'Christian flesh.' When
Alexander VI withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII, then
returning from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that he
might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he proposed to
Guido a festival or tournament, or something else of the same kind,
which would bring the whole family together. Guido, however, was of
opinion 'that the most impressive spectacle of all would be to see the
whole military force of Perugia collected in a body,' whereupon the
Pope abandoned his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack
in which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won them the
victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad of scarcely
eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of followers against
hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with more than twenty wounds,
but recovered himself when Astorre Baglione came to his help, and
mounting on horseback in gilded amour with a falcon on his helmet,
'like Mars in bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.'

At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at school under
Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days are perhaps immortalized
in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something
of them, it may be, lives eternally in the large painting of St.
Michael: and if Astorre Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it
is in the figure of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.

The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly scattered