Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in
proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as
it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a
fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were
really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst
example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the
faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their
power. And this, without being in the same category with Cesare Borgia.
The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, and, later on, the agents of
Charles V resorted to it whenever it suited their purpose. The
imagination of the people at last became so accustomed to facts of this
kind that the death of any powerful man was seldom or never attributed
to natural causes. There were certainly absurd notions current with
regard to the effect of various poisons. There may be some truth in the
story of that terrible white powder used by the Borgias, which did its
work at the end of a definite period, and it is possible that it was
really a 'venenum atterminatum' which the Prince of Salerno handed to
the Cardinal of Aragon, with the words: 'In a few days you will die,
because your father, King Ferrante, wished to trample upon us all.' But
the poisoned letter which Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI
would hardly have caused his death even if he had read it; and when
Alfonso the Great was warned by his physicians not to read in the Livy
which Cosimo de' Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice
not to talk like fools.
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