was in the army of Cesare Borgia a young Sicilian officer, Ferrante da Isola by name, who through his military genius, his wisdom in council and his cunning in strategy rose rapidly to be one of the Duke's most trusted captains.
This Ferrante was a bastard of the Lord of Isola's; but considering his father's numerous legitimate progeny, he perceived that in his native Sicily little scope could await his considerable ambitions. All his possessions were youth and courage, a long active body and a handsome face, a quick brain and a blithe, mercurial heart. With these he went forth from his father's house in quest of a market where such wares should command their price. He had come to Rome in the autumn of 1500, the year of the Papal Jubilee, the very season in which Cesare Borgia was arming for the second campaign of the Romagna. He had found ready employment; promotion had followed swiftly during the war, in which he had been constantly conspicuous by his valour and address; and, at length, when Tiberti was killed before Faenza by the bursting of a gun, the command that had been Tiberti's was given to Ferrante. Thus within six months of joining Cesare's army he found himself a full-blown captain with a condotta of horse under his control, admitted to the Duke's councils, and enjoying the confidence, and in some measure the friendship, of his master.
To have achieved so much in so little time augured well for the future. Ferrante felt that high destinies awaited him, and in this assurance he permitted himself the luxury of falling in love.
The thing came about in the following summer, as the army emerged from the Bolognese on its homeward-march—an army much reduced in numbers by the troops that had been left to garrison the conquered states, and still further to be reduced by the forces to be sent against Piombino. Cesare Borgia lay in the pleasant city of Lojano and rested what time he awaited the solicited sanction of the Signory of Florence to march his troops through Tuscany, and considered at the same time some easy means of reducing the little state of San Ciascano which, despite the fall of Faenza, still held stubbornly against the Duke.
This San Ciascano wa.s something of a thorn in the flesh of Valentinois. To reduce it were, after all, an easy matter were he to move against it in force, and devote two or three weeks to besieging and bombarding it. But other matters claimed his attention. The Pope was urging his return to Rome; the King of France required his support in the Neapolitan campaign, and it was not the time to turn aside and spend perhaps a month in combating the stubbornness of those hill-folk; nor could he spare any portion of his forces for the work, since ail that he could spare must go against Piombino.
His only course, therefore, was to send some of the troops left in the Romagna to do this work; and this was a matter that required consideration and careful planning. Guile should best serve his purposes—as it ever did— if the chance but offered to employ it. So he schemed and planned what time he waited in Lojano, and in the meantime our gallant young Ferrante cast eyes of ardent longing upon Cassandra, the only daughter of the noble and High and Mighty House of Genelleschi.
The captain had first beheld her in the Church of the Annunziata, whither he had gone to inspect a much-vaunted fresco by Messer Masaccio—for he was something of a dabbler in the arts himself, and had at one time studied painting, though we have no evidence of the results that followed. It would seem, however, that on this occasion the Madonna of the Annunciation from the brush of Messer Masaccio was entirely obscured in the eyes of our young captain by the Madonna Cassandra of the House of Genelleschi.
Had you questioned him, as he came forth from the church at sunset, he could not have told you so much as the colour of the veil of the Madonna in the picture he had gone to see, whilst he could have described with tedious minuteness every lineament, every detail of colouring, every particular of shape and every item of raiment of the living madonna whom he had seen by chance, and upon whom his eyes had fed for a full hour. And not a doubt but that he would have waxed rhapsodical in the telling, being of a sudden plunged into that mood of amorous ecstasy that will make a poet of the meanest of us.
And yet there would have been no need; for there in front, with an elderly woman in attendance, tripped the lady herself, so that you might behold her and be spared Ferrante's long-winded rhapsodies.