' Still, in spite of the strict
imposition of the State, much was to be learned from the more corrupt
members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay enough for
it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were traitors
among the highest officials; the popes, the Italian princes, and even
the second-rate Condottieri in the service of the government had
informers in their pay, sometimes with regular salaries; things went so
far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important
political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even
supposed that Lodovico il Moro had control of a definite number of
votes among the latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the
high rewards such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who
informed against them were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of
the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility,
could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by
two of that order, that the State should spend 70,000 ducats for the
relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the matter was
near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have had a
majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished the
two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.
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