Also with reference to the believing
countries of Europe, it was imprudent to let matters go so far that not
only travellers and pilgrims, but a whole embassy of Maximilian, King
of the Romans, were stripped to their shirts in the neighbourhood of
Rome, and that envoys had constantly to turn back without setting foot
within the city.
Such a condition of things was incompatible with the conception of
power and its pleasures which inspired the gifted Alexander VI (1492-
1503), and the first event that happened was the restoration, at least
provisionally, of public order, and the punctual payment of every
salary.
Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian
civilization, this pontificate might be passed over, since the Borgias
are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander spoke Spanish
in public with Cesare; Lucrezia, at her entrance to Ferrara, where she
wore a Spanish costume, was sung to by Spanish buffoons; their
confidential servants consisted of Spaniards, as did also the most ill-
famed company of the troops of Cesare in the war of 1500; and even his
hangman, Don Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastiano Pinzon Cremonese,
seem to have been of the same nation. Among his other achievements,
Cesare, in true Spanish fashion, killed, according to the rules of the
craft, six wild bulls in an enclosed court.
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