No one believed in the natural death of a prince: princes must be poisoned or poignarded.[2] Out of thirteen of the Carrara family, in little more than a century (1318-1435), three were deposed or murdered by near relatives, one was expelled by a rival from his state, four were executed by the Venetians.

Out of five of the La Scala family, three were killed by their brothers, and a fourth was poisoned in exile.
[1] See what Guicciardini in his _History of Florence_ says about the suspicious temper of even such a tyrant as the cultivated and philosophical Lorenzo de' Medici.

See too the incomparably eloquent and penetrating allegory of _Sospetto_, and its application to the tyrants of Italy in Ariosto's _Cinque Canti_ (C.2.

St.1-9).
[2] Our dramatist Webster, whose genius was fascinated by the crimes of Italian despotism, makes the Duke of Bracciano exclaim on his death-bed:-- 'O thou soft natural Death, thou art joint-twin To sweetest Slumber! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse, Whilst horror waits on princes.' Instances of domestic crime might be multiplied by the hundred.
Besides those which will follow in these pages, it is enough to notice the murder of Giovanni Francesco Pico, by his nephew, at Mirandola (1533); the murder of his uncle by Oliverotto da Fermo; the assassination of Giovanni Varano by his brothers at Camerino (1434); Ostasio da Polenta's fratricide (1322); Obizzo da Polenta's fratricide in the next generation, and the murder of Ugolino Gonzaga by his brothers; Gian Francesco Gonzaga's murder of his wife; the poisoning of Francesco Sforza's first wife, Polissena, Countess of Montalto, with her little girl, by her aunt; and the murder of Galeotto Manfredi, by his wife, at Faenza (1488).
To enumerate all the catastrophes of reigning families, occurring in the fifteenth century alone, would be quite impossible within the limits of this chapter.

Yet it is only by dwelling on the more important that any adequate notion of the perils of Italian despotism can be formed.