bombarded him in his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to
escape, a Venetian commissioner brought him back, stained as he was
with fratricide and every other abomination. Thirty years later the
Malatesta were penniless exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of
Cesare Borgia, a sort of epidemic fell on the petty tyrants; few of
them outlived this date, and none to t heir own good. At Mirandola,
which was governed by insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived
in the year 1533 a poor scholar, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled
from the sack of Rome to the hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni
Francesco Pico, nephew of the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to
the sepulchral monument which the prince was constructing f or himself
gave rise to a treatise, the dedication of which bears the date of
April of this year. The postscript is a sad one. In October of the same
year the unhappy prince was attacked in the night and robbed of life
and throne by his brother's son; and I myself escaped narrowly, and am
now in the deepest misery.'

A near-despotism, without morals or principles, such as Pandolfo
Petrucci exercised from after 1490 in Siena, then torn by faction, is
hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant and malicious, he
governed with the help of a professor of juris prudence and of an
astrologer, and frightened his people by an occasional murder. His
pastime in the summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top
of Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After
succeeding, where the most prudent failed, in escaping from the devices
of Cesare Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons
maintained a qualified supremacy for many years afterwards.

The Greater Dynasties