It stirred the latter into taking measures against the move he feared Ferrante might make to enforce Gian Galeazzo's claims.
Lodovico Maria went about this with that sly shrewdness so characteristic of him, so well symbolized by his mulberry badge--a humorous shrewdness almost, which makes him one of the most delightful rogues in history, just as he was one of the most debonair and cultured.
He may indeed be considered as one of the types of the subtle, crafty, selfish politician that was the ideal of Macchiavelli.
You see him, then, effacing the tight-lipped, cunning smile from his comely face and pointing out to Venice with a grave, sober countenance how little it can suit her to have the Neapolitan Spaniards ruffling it in the north, as must happen if Ferrante has his way with Milan.
The truth of this was so obvious that Venice made haste to enter into a league with him, and into the camp thus formed came, for their own sakes, Mantua, Ferrara, and Siena.

The league was powerful enough thus to cause Ferrante to think twice before he took up the cudgels for Gian Galeazzo.

If Lodovico could include the Pope, the league's might would be so paralysing that Ferrante would cease to think at all about his grandchildren's affairs.
Foreseeing this, Ferrante had perforce to dry the tears Guicciardini has it that he shed, and, replacing them by a smile, servile and obsequious, repaired, hat in hand, to protest his friendship for the Pope's Holiness.
And so, in December of 1492, came the Prince of Altamura--Ferrante's second son--to Rome to lay his father's homage at the feet of the Pontiff, and at the same time to implore his Holiness to refuse the King of Hungary the dispensation the latter was asking of the Holy See, to enable him to repudiate his wife, Donna Leonora--Ferrante's daughter.
Altamura was received in Rome and sumptuously entertained by the Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere.

This cardinal had failed, as we have seen, to gain the Pontificate for himself, despite the French influence by which he had been supported.

Writhing under his defeat, and hating the man who had defeated him with a hatred so bitter and venomous that the imprint of it is on almost every act of his life--from the facilities he afforded for the assignment to Orsini of the papal fiefs that Cibo had to sell--he was already scheming for the overthrow of Alexander.