The Council of Ancients, summoned by Bellarion’s heralds, assembled in the Communal Palace, to hear the terms of this brigand captain—as they conceived him—who had swooped upon their defenceless city.
He came attended by a group of officers. He was tall and soldierly of bearing, in full armour, save for his helm, which was borne after him by a page, and his escort, from the brawny, bearded Koenigshofen to the fierce-eyed, ferrety Giasone, was calculated to inspire dread in peaceful citizens. But his manner was gentle, and his words were fair.
“Sirs, your city of Casale has nothing to fear from this occupation, for it is not upon its citizens that we make war, and so that they give no provocation, they will find my followers orderly. We invite your alliance with ourselves in the cause of right and justice. But if you withhold this alliance we shall not visit it against you, provided that you do not go the length of actively opposing us.
“The High and Mighty Lord Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, weary of the encroachments upon his dominions resulting from the turbulent ambition of your Prince-Regent, the Marquis Theodore, has resolved to make an end of a regency which in itself has already become an usurpation, and to place in the authority to which his majority entitles him your rightful Prince, the Marquis Gian Giacomo Paleologo. I invite you, sirs, to perform your duty as representatives of the people by swearing upon my hands fealty to that same Marquis Gian Giacomo in the cathedral at the hour of vespers this evening.”
That invitation was a command, and it was punctually obeyed by men who had not the strength to resist. Meanwhile a measure of reassurance had been afforded the city by Bellarion’s proclamation enjoining order upon his troops. The proclamation was in no equivocal terms. It reminded the men that they were in occupation of a friendly city which they were sent to guard and defend, and that any act of pillage or violence would be punished by death. They were housed, some in the citadel, and the remainder in the fortress-palace of the Montferrine princes, where Bellarion himself took up his quarters.
In Theodore’s own closet, occupying the very chair in which Theodore had sat and so contemptuously received the unknown Bellarion on that day when the young student had first entered those august walls, Bellarion that night penned a letter to the Princess Valeria, wherein he gave her news of the day’s events. That letter, of a calligraphy so perfect that it might be mistaken for a page from some monkish manuscript of those days, is one of the few fragments that have survived from the hand of this remarkable man who was adventurer, statesman, soldier, and humanist.
“Most honoured and most dear lady,” he addresses her—“Riveritissima et Carissima Madonna.” The exordium is all that need concern us now.
Ever since at your own invitation I entered your service that evening in your garden here at Casale, where today I have again wandered reviving memories that are of the fairest in my life, that service has been my constant study. I have pursued it, by tortuous ways and by many actions appearing to have no bearing upon it, unsuspected by you when not actually mistrusted by you. That your mistrust has wounded me oftentimes and deeply, would have weighed lightly with me had I not perceived that by mistrusting you were deprived of that consolation and hope which you would have found in trusting. The facts afforded ever a justification of your mistrust. This I recognized; and that facts are stubborn things, not easily destroyed by words. Therefore I did not vainly wear myself in any endeavour to destroy them, but toiled on, so that, in the ultimate achievement of your selfless aims for your brother, the Marquis, I might prove to you without the need of words the true impulse of my every action in these past five years. The fame that came to me as a condottiero, the honours I won, and the increase of power they brought me I have never regarded as anything but weapons to be employed in this your service, as means to the achievement of your ends. But for that service accepted in this garden, my life would have been vastly different from all that it has been. No burden heavier than a scholar’s would have been mine, and today I might well be back with the brethren at Cigliano, an obscure member of their great brotherhood. To serve you, I have employed trickery and double-dealing until men have dubbed me a rogue, and some besides yourself have come to mistrust me, and once I went the length of doing murder. But I take no shame in any of these things, nor, most dear lady, need you take shame in that your service should have entailed them. The murder I did was the execution of a rogue; the conspiracy I scattered was one that would have made a net in which to take you; the deceits I have put upon the Marquis Theodore, chiefly when I made him serve my dear Lord Facino’s turn and seduced him into occupying Vercelli, so as subsequently to afford the Duke of Milan a sound reason for moving against him, were deceits employed against a deceiver, whom it would be idle to combat in honest fashion. In his eyes more than any other’s—for he is not the only victim of the duplicity I have used to place you ultimately where you should be—I am a double-dealing Judas. And it is said of me, too, that in the field as in the council, I prevail by subterfuge and never by straightforward blows. But my conscience remains tranquil. It is not what a man does or says that counts; but what a man intends. I have embraced as a part
