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Let me begin, then, with the men of Ferrara. Benvenuto Garofalo was born at Ferrara in the year 1481, to Piero Tisi, whose elders had their origin in Padua.

This last decade of Lorenzo's life from his thirty-first to his forty-second year was memorable in many respects. In the year 1481 he was again exposed to the danger of assassination. Battista Frescobaldi and two assistants in the Church of the Carmeli, and again on Ascension Day, made an attempt to stab him, but were frustrated by the vigilance of Lorenzo's friends.

Even in the larger commercial towns, such as Frankfurt, Nürnberg, or Augsburg, it was common to keep cows, pigs, and sheep, and, as a matter of course, fowls and geese, in large numbers within the precincts of the town itself. In Frankfurt in 1481 the pigsties in the town had become such a nuisance that the Rath had to forbid them in the front of the houses by a formal decree.

The Ambassage which king Iohn the second, king of Portugall, sent to Edward the fourth king of England, which in part was to stay one Iohn Tintam, and one William Fabian English men, from proceeding in a voyage which they were preparing fot Guinea, 1481, taken out of the booke of the workes of Garcias de Resende, which intreateth of the life and acts of Don Iohn the second, king of Portugall.

Many more captures of this kind on the coast of Barbary and Guinea, are recorded to have been made in those early times by the Portugueze; who, in the year 1481, erected their first fort at D'Elmina on that coast, from whence they soon opened a trade for slaves with the inland parts of Guinea.

The wife of Columbus, Dona Filippa, was without fortune, and Columbus, having none himself, felt he must work for the support of himself and his family. The future discoverer, therefore, set to work to make picture-books, terrestrial globes, maps, and nautical charts, and continued in this employment until 1481, but without at the same time abandoning his scientific and literary pursuits.

This indeed is but natural, since it could not be expected of the Marquis and his associates that they should know they were making history. We learn that in 1481 Gian Pietro della Viola, a Florentine by birth, accompanied Clara Gonzaga when she became the Duchess of Montpensier and that he returned to Mantua in 1484 the year after "Orfeo" was probably produced.

The cardinal's relations with Vannozza continued until about 1482, for after the birth of Lucretia she presented him with another son, Giuffrè, who was born in 1481 or 1482. After that, Borgia's passion for this woman, who was now about forty, died out, but he continued to honor her as the mother of his children and as the confidant of many of his secrets.

Those were the closing days of the ancient period of the most abominable of all the Inquisitions, that of Spain, before the establishment by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1481 of the modern Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula: that terrible jurisdiction extended to everybody, dead as well as living, absent as well as present, princes and subjects, rich and poor, all were liable alike on the bare suspicion of such an insignificant matter as heresy, to corporal punishment, pecuniary fines, confiscation of property, and loss of life, by being burnt at the stake, or, as occurred to Savonarola, towards the close of the century, first strangled by the hangman, and then committed to the flames.

In 1481 he had been sent to the convent of S. Marco, in Florence, when Lorenzo de' Medici had been at the head of affairs for some twelve years. The Pazzi conspiracy, in which Giuliano de' Medici lost his life, had come in 1478, and Lorenzo was fixed more firmly than ever in the affections of the people.