entered into it so heartily as not only to assail places in the debatable
ground, but in Apulia, which had been unequivocally assigned to their
rivals. [6]

In the mean while, the Spanish court fruitlessly endeavored to interest
the other powers of Europe in its cause. The emperor Maximilian, although
dissatisfied with the occupation of Milan by the French, appeared wholly
engrossed with the frivolous ambition of a Roman coronation. The pontiff
and his son, Caesar Borgia, were closely bound to King Louis by the
assistance which he had rendered them in their marauding enterprises
against the neighboring chiefs of Romagna. The other Italian princes,
although deeply incensed and disgusted by this infamous alliance, stood
too much in awe of the colossal power, which had planted its foot so
firmly on their territory, to offer any resistance. Venice alone,
surveying from her distant watch-tower, to borrow the words of Peter
Martyr, the whole extent of the political horizon, appeared to hesitate.
The French ambassadors loudly called on her to fulfil the terms of her
late treaty with their master, and support him in his approaching quarrel;
but that wily republic saw with distrust the encroaching ambition of her
powerful neighbor, and secretly wished that a counterpoise might be found
in the success of Aragon. Martyr, who stopped at Venice on his return from
Egypt, appeared before the senate, and employed all his eloquence in
supporting his master's cause in opposition to the French envoys; but his
pressing entreaties to the Spanish sovereigns to send thither some
competent person, as a resident minister, show his own conviction of the
critical position in which their affairs stood. [7]

The letters of the same intelligent individual, during his journey through
the Milanese, [8] are filled with the most gloomy forebodings of the
termination of a contest for which the Spaniards were so indifferently