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Updated: June 18, 2025
"Peace, minion! draw back! way for the Signor Adrian Colonna, Baron di Castello, and Knight of the Empire." And at those two rival shouts, you saw waving on high the golden bear of the Orsini, with the motto "Beware my embrace!" and the solitary column on an azure ground, of the Colonna, with Adrian's especial device "Sad, but strong."
Before considering what happened in Florence after the expulsion of the Medici, it will be well to pause a moment and review the state in which Lorenzo had left his family. Piero, his eldest son, recognised as chief of the republic after his father's death, was married to Alfonsina Orsini, and was in his twenty-second year.
The owner buys all the books that come in his way: it is true that he will not read them; but he will have them magnificently bound, and ranged on the shelves with a mighty show, and there he will salute them several times a day, and will bring his friends and servants to make their acquaintance. Orsini is rebuked for his admiration of a dusty manuscript.
But he was neither imposing, nor, on the other hand, was he alluring. She wrote very frankly about him in a letter to the Count Orsini: My tastes are not the same as those of the king, who cares only for hunting and blacksmith work. You will admit that I should not show to advantage in a forge. I could not appear there as Vulcan, and the part of Venus might displease him even more than my tastes.
Long live Caesar! Long live the Borgias! Long live the Orsini! Long live the Duke of Romagna!"
They gave out that in Milan Louis XII had told Cardinal Orsini that the Pope's intention was to destroy the Orsini. To accept such a statement as true, we should have to believe in a disloyalty and a double-dealing on the part of Louis XII altogether incredible.
In the year 1532 it was arranged that Guidobaldo II, son of Francesco Maria and Eleonora Gonzaga, should marry Giulia Varano, although he himself wished to marry a certain Orsini. Guidobaldo acquiesced in this view and replied that he knew he had a father who would never compel him to take a wife like Lucretia Borgia, "one as bad as she and of so many disreputable connections."
Here and there little openings in the crowd marked the positions of the Cardinals and their parasites, of Queen Christina with her court, and of two or three of the greatest Roman ladies, such as the Princess Orsini and the Princess Rospigliosi, whose husbands were Princes of the Empire as well as Roman nobles.
The same uneasy sense of wrong inclined him to look with dread upon the friendship of the Medici for the ruling family of Naples. His mother Clarice and his wife Alfonsina were both of them Orsini. See Arch. Stor. vol. i. p. 347. The young Duke was aged twenty-four in 1493. Lodovico had taken measures for cloaking his usurpation with the show of legitimate right.
But two nominees died in quick succession; and when on the death of John XXI after a similarly short reign, Charles again interfered, he was met by the election of Nicholas III of the family of Orsini, who returned to Rome and spent the three years of his pontificate in neutralising Charles' power. For this purpose he used the new King of the Romans.
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