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She dreaded to think of the weeks that might pass before he returned. He had spoken of making a long journey and she knew that he had gone southward to Rimini to please the great Sigismondo Malatesta, who had heard of Beroviero's stained glass windows and mosaics in Florence and Naples, and would not be outdone in the possession of beautiful things. But no one knew more than that.
Can this story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare, by the frightful tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona, which was current in Boiardo's day? A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always cheerful, rational, civilized this is what the Italian Renaissance displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera.
Threatened by his kinsman Sigismondo, the tyrant of Rimini, and unable to hold Pesaro against his attack, he sold the city in 1445 for twenty thousand gold florins to Count Francesco Sforza, and the latter gave it as a fief to his brother Alessandro, the husband of a niece of Galeazzo.
The passions of the tyrants of this city were less ferocious than were those of the other dynasties of that age, perhaps because their domain was too small a stage for the dark deeds inspired by inordinate ambition although the human spirit does not always develop in harmony with the influences of nature. One of the most hideous of evil doers was Sigismondo Malatesta of mild and beautiful Rimini.
Only one piece of questionable practice the capture of Verucchio in 1462 by a forged letter pretending to come from Sigismondo Malatesta stained his character for honesty. To his soldiers in the field he was considerate and generous; to his enemies compassionate and merciful.
He was married to Violante, the daughter of Giovanni Bentivogli of Bologna, and in the first week of October he sent her, with their children, to seek shelter at her father's Court. Himself, he withdrew into his citadel the famous fortress of his terrible grandfather Sigismondo.
"Signor Sigismondo, the proposal is fair; it has a touch of reason, I allow; but unluckily it does not suit my interests. I am engaged in a delicate mission, and too much time has been already lost by the way to waste more without good cause. I have great pity for poor Jacques Colis " "Ha! thou knowest the sufferer's name, then; thy unlucky tongue hath betrayed thee, Maso"
The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard Cesare Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to the end which he had in view. In Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini, the same disinterested love of evil may also be detected.
It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the greatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance.
And up to seven years ago, she passed as the wife of a man whom I knew by the name of Sigismondo Rocca. When the announcement of her death appeared, I set enquiries on foot at once, with no result. Latterly, I have thought it must be true; but I have never been quite certain. She has reappeared now, it seems, partly because she has no resources, and partly in order to restore to me my son."
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