We shall meet again with the names of the rulers
of Rimini. Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture
have been seldom combined in one individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta
(d. 1467). But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last
outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss.
Pandolfo, Sigismondo's nephew, who has been mentioned already,
succeeded in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the Venetians
refused to abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt he might be
chargeable with; when his subjects (1497), after ample provocation,
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.
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