And the facts suggest that such was the full measure of Federigo's scruples.
Meanwhile, to dissemble his reluctance to let Cesare have his daughter to wife, Federigo urged that he must first take the feeling of Ferdinand and Isabella in this matter.
While affairs stood thus, Charles VIII died suddenly at Amboise in April of that year 1498.

Some work was being carried out there by artists whom he had brought from Naples for the purpose, and, in going to visit this, the king happened to enter a dark gallery, and struck his forehead so violently against the edge of a door that he expired the same day--at the age of twenty-eight.

He was a poor, malformed fellow, as we have seen, and "of little understanding," Commines tells us, "but so good that it would have been impossible to have found a kinder creature." With him the Valois dynasty came to an end.

He was succeeded by his cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who, upon his coronation at Rheims, assumed the title of King of France and the Two Sicilies and Duke of Milan--a matter which considerably perturbed Federigo of Aragon and Lodovico Sforza.

Each of these rulers saw in that assumption of his own title by Louis XII a declaration of enmity, the prelude to a declaration of open war; wherefore, deeming it idle to send their ambassadors to represent them at the Court of France, they refrained from doing so.
Louis XII's claim upon the Duchy of Milan was based upon his being the grandson of Valentina Visconti, and, considering himself a Visconti, he naturally looked upon the Sforza dominion as no better than a usurpation which too long had been left undisturbed.