the same weight as in other nations; and that the prescriptive right derived from possession, necessarily indeterminate, was greatly weakened in this case by the comparatively few years, not more than forty, during which the bastard line of Aragon had occupied the throne, a period much shorter than that after which the house of York had in England, a few years before, successfully contested the validity of the Lancastrian title. It should be added that Ferdinand's views appear to have perfectly corresponded with those of the Spanish nation at large; not one writer of the time, whom I have met with, intimating the slightest doubt of his title to Naples, while not a few insist on it with unnecessary emphasis. It is but fair to state, however, that foreigners, who contemplated the transaction. with a more impartial eye, condemned it as inflicting a deep stain on the characters of both potentates. Indeed, something like an apprehension of this, in the parties themselves, may be inferred from their solicitude to deprecate public censure by masking their designs under a pretended zeal for religion.

20

Before the conferences respecting the treaty were brought to a close, the Spanish armada under Gonsalvo, after a detention of two months in Sicily, where it was reinforced by two thousand recruits, who had been serving as mercenaries in Italy, held its course for the Morea. (September 21st, 1500.) The Turkish squadron lying before Napoli di Romania, without

20 See, in particular, the Doctor Salazar de Mendoza, who exhausts the subject—and the reader's patience-in discussing the multifarious grounds of the incontrovertible title of the house of Aragon to Naples Monarquía, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 12-15.

awaiting Gonsalvo's approach, raised the siege, and retreated precipitately to Constantinople. The Spanish general, then uniting his forces with the Venetians, stationed at Corfu, proceeded at once against the fortified place of St. George, in Cephalonia, which the Turks had lately wrested from the republic."

The town stood high on a rock, in an impregnable position, and was garrisoned by four hundred Turks, all veteran soldiers, prepared to die in its defence. We have not room for the details of this siege, in which both parties displayed unbounded courage and resources, and which was protracted nearly two months under all the privations of famine and the inclemencies of a cold and stormy winter."

At length, weary with this fatal procrastination, Gonsalvo and the Venetian admiral, Pesaro, resolved on a simultaneous attack on separate quarters of the town. The ramparts had been already shaken by the mining operations of Pedro Navarro, who in the Italian wars acquired such terrible celebrity in this department, till then little understood. The Venetian cannon,

"Giovio, Vitæ Illust. Virorum, tom. i. p. 226.—Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 9.—Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 19.-Gonsalvo was detained most unexpectedly in Messina, which he had reached July 19, by various embarrassments, enumerated in his correspondence with the sovereigns. The difficulty of obtaining supplies for the troops was among the most prominent. The people of the island showed no good will to the cause. Obstacles multiplied until it seemed as if they came from the devil himself; parecen ostaculos del diablo. Among others, he indicates the coldness of the viceroy. Part of these letters, as usual, is in cipher. Cartas á los Reyes Católicos fhâs en Messina á 15 y 21 de Setiembre de 1501, MS.

Giovio, Vitæ Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.-Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 14.

VOL. III.-2

larger and better served than that of the Spaniards, had opened a practicable breach in the works, which the besieged repaired with such temporary defences as they could. The signal being given at the appointed hour, the two armies made a desperate assault on different quarters of the town, under cover of a murderous fire of artillery. The Turks sustained the attack with dauntless resolution, stopping up the breach with the bodies of their dead and dying comrades, and pouring down volleys of shot, arrows, burning oil and sulphur, and missiles of every kind, on the heads of the assailants. But the desperate energy, as well as numbers, of the latter, proved too strong for them. Some forced the breach, others scaled the ramparts; and, after a short and deadly struggle within the walls, the brave garrison, four-fifths of whom, with their commander, had fallen, were overpowered, and the victorious banners of St. Jago and St. Mark were planted side by side triumphantly on the towers."

The capture of this place, although accomplished at considerable loss, and after a most gallant resistance by a mere handful of men, was of great service to the Venetian cause; since it was the first check given to the arms of Bajazet, who had filched one place after another from the republic, menacing its whole colonial territory in the Levant. The promptness and efficiency of King Ferdinand's succor to the Venetians gained him high reputation throughout Europe, and precisely of the kind which he most coveted, that of

23 Giovio, Vitæ Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.—Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 10. -Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib 4, cap. 25.-Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 167.

being the zealous defender of the faith; while it formed a favorable contrast to the cold supineness of the other powers of Christendom.

The capture of St. George restored to Venice the possession of Cephalonia; and the Great Captain, having accomplished this important object, returned in the beginning of the following year, 1501, to Sicily. Soon after his arrival there, an embassy waited on him from the Venetian senate, to express their grateful sense of his services; which they testified by enrolling hist name on the golden book, as a nobleman of Venice, and by a magnificent present of plate, curious silks and velvets, and a stud of beautiful Turkish horses. Gonsalvo courteously accepted the proffered honors, but distributed the whole of the costly largess, with the exception of a few pieces of plate, among his friends and soldiers."

In the mean while, Louis the Twelfth having completed his preparations for the invasion of Naples, an army, consisting of one thousand lances and ten thousand Swiss and Gascon foot, crossed the Alps, and directed its march towards the south. (June 1st, 1500.) At the same time a powerful armament, under Philip de Ravenstein, with six thousand five hundred additional troops on board, quitted Genoa for the Neapolitan capital. The command of the land-forces was given to the Sire d'Aubigny, the same brave and experienced officer who had formerly coped with Gonsalvo in the campaigns of Calabria."

24 Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 167.-Quintana, Españoles célebres, tom. i. p. 246.—Giovio, Vitæ Illust. Virorum, p. 228.—Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 4.

25 Jean d'Auton, Histoire de Louys XII. (Paris, 1622), part. 1, chap.

No sooner had D'Aubigny crossed the papal borders than the French and Spanish ambassadors announced to Alexander the Sixth and the college of cardinals the existence of the treaty for the partition of the kingdom between the sovereigns, their masters, requesting his Holiness to confirm it and grant them the investiture of their respective shares. In this very

reasonable petition his Holiness, well drilled in the part he was to play, acquiesced without difficulty; declaring himself moved thereto solely by his consideration of the pious intentions of the parties, and the unworthiness of King Frederick, whose treachery to the Christian commonwealth had forfeited all right (if he ever possessed any) to the crown of Naples."

From the moment that the French forces had descended into Lombardy, the eyes of all Italy were turned with breathless expectation on Gonsalvo and his army in Sicily. The bustling preparations of the French monarch had diffused the knowledge of his designs throughout Europe. Those of the king of Spain, on the contrary, remained enveloped in profound secrecy. Few doubted that Ferdinand would step forward to shield his kinsman from the invasion which menaced him, and, it might be, his own dominions in Sicily; and they looked to the immediate junc tion of Gonsalvo with King Frederick, in order that their combined strength might overpower the enemy before he had gained a footing in the kingdom. Great 44, 45, 48.- Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. p. 265.-Sainct-Gelais, Histoire de Louys XII. (Paris, 1622), p. 163.-Buonaccorsi, Diario, ?. 46.

26 Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 43.-Lanuza Historias, tom. i. lib. I, cap. 14.