Nothing remained but to release them, or to shut them up in dungeons, in order that the people might not say the Holy Father had arrested them without due cause.

The latter course was chosen.

Platina, the historian of the Popes, was one of the _abbreviatori_ whom Paul had cashiered, and one of the Platonists whom he had tortured.

The tale of Papal persecution loses, therefore, nothing in the telling; for if the humanists of the fifteenth century were powerful in anything it was in writing innuendoes and invectives.
Among other anecdotes, he relates how, while he was being dislocated on the rack, the inquisitors Vianesi and Sanga held a sprightly colloquy about a ring which the one said jestingly the other had received as a love-token from a girl.

The whole situation is characteristic of Papal Rome in the Renaissance.
[1] See _Les Arts a la Cour des Papes pendant le XV.