Getting her men-at-arms together, she had ridden at their head into the quarter inhabited by the murderers, and there ordered--as Macchiavelli tells us--the massacre of every human being that dwelt in it, women and children included, whilst she remained at hand to see it done.
Thereafter she took a third husband, in Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de'Medici, who died in 1498.

By him this lusty woman had a son whose name was to ring through Italy as that of one of the most illustrious captains of his day--Giovanni delle Bande Nere.
Such was the woman whom Sanuto has called "great-souled, but a most cruel virago," who now shut herself into her castle to defy the Borgia.
She had begun by answering the Pope's Bull of attainder with the statement that, far from owing the Holy See the tribute which it claimed, the Holy See was actually in her debt, her husband, Count Girolamo Riario, having been a creditor of the Church for the provisions made by him in his office of Captain-General of the Pontifical forces.
This subterfuge, however, had not weighed with Alexander, whereupon, having also been frustrated in her attempt upon the life of the Pope's Holiness, she had proceeded to measures of martial resistance.

Her children and her treasures she had dispatched to Florence that they might be out of danger, retaining of the former only her son Ottaviano, a young man of some twenty years; but, for all that she kept him near her, it is plain that she did not account him worthy of being entrusted with the defence of his tyranny, for it was she, herself, the daughter of the bellicose race of Sforza, who set about the organizing of this.
Disposing of forces that were entirely inadequate to take the field against the invader, she entrenched herself in her fortress of Forli, provisioning it to withstand a protracted siege and proceeding to fortify it by throwing up outworks and causing all the gates but one to be built up.
Whilst herself engaged upon military measures she sent her son Ottaviano to Imola to exhort the Council to loyalty and the defence of the city.
But his mission met with no success.

Labouring against him was a mighty factor which in other future cases was to facilitate Cesare's subjection of the Romagna.

The Riarii--in common with so many other of the Romagna tyrants--had so abused their rule, so ground the people with taxation, so offended them by violence, and provoked such deep and bitter enmity that in this hour of their need they found themselves deservedly abandoned by their subjects.