of the House of Sforza, now brought low by the ruin of the chief among them. Cesare attacked Imola and Forli, which Sixtus had made the appanage of his nephew Girolamo Riario, and which since the assassination of that detestable tyrant had been governed by his widow, Caterina Sforza. The courageous spirit of this princess has gained her the good word of history, which she is far from deserving on any other ground. She was a feudal ruler of the worst type, and in her dominions and elsewhere in the Romagna Cesare was regarded as an avenger commissioned by Heaven to redress ages of oppression and wrong. The citadel of Forli surrendered on January 12, 1500. Caterina was sent to Rome, where she was honourably treated; and though suspected of complicity in an attempt to poison the Pope, was eventually allowed to retire to Florence. Cesare made a triumphal entry into Rome, but his projects received a temporary check from a revolution in Milan, where Ludovico Sforza recovered his dominions in February, only to lose them again with his liberty in April. The captive Duke and his brother the Cardinal were sent into France, and Cesare could resume his expedition against the other Romagnol vassals placed upon the Pope's black list as "vicars" in default, the Lords of Pesaro, Rimini, Faenza, and Camerino.
The summer of 1500, nevertheless, passed without further prosecution of Cesare's enterprise, partly because of the difficulty of obtaining the consent of the Venetians to an attack upon Faenza and Rimini; partly, perhaps, from the necessity of replenishing the treasury. It fitted well with the projects of the Borgia that 1500 was the Year of Jubilee. Rome was full of pilgrims, every one of whom made an offering, and the sale pf indulgences was stimulated to double briskness. Money poured into the papal coffers, and thence into Cesare's; religion got nothing except a gilded ceiling. Twelve new Cardinals were created, who paid on the average ten thousand ducats each for their promotion, and the traffic in benefices attained heights of scandal previously unknown. On the other hand Alexander is not, like most of his immediate predecessors and successors, reproached with any excessive taxation of his people. The progress which the Turks were then making in the Morea favoured his projects; he exerted himself to give the Venetians both naval and financial aid, and they in return not only withdrew their opposition to his undertakings, but enrolled him among their patricians. In October, 1500, Cesare marched into the Romagna at the head of ten thousand men. The tyrants of Rimini and Pesaro fled before him. Faenza resisted for some time, but ultimately surrendered; and after a while its Lord, the young Astorre Manfredi, was found in the Tiber with a stone about his neck. Florence and Bologna trembled and sought to buy Cesare off with concessions; the sagacious Venetians, says a contemporary, "looked on unmoved, for they knew that the Duke's conquests were a fire of straw which would go out of itself." Cesare
