The scheme was a wild one, yet, considering the power and wealth of the Sforza family, not so wholly impracticable as might appear.

The same dream floated, a few years later, before the imagination of the two Borgias; and Machiavelli wrote in his calm style that to make the Papal power hereditary was all that remained for nepotism in his days to do.[7] The opinion which had been conceived of the Cardinal of San Sisto during his two years of eminence may be gathered from the following couplets of an epigram placed, as Corio informs us, on his tomb:-- Fur, scortum, leno, moechus, pedico, cynaedus, Et scurra, et fidicen cedat ab Italia: Namque illa Ausonii pestis scelerata senatus, Petrus, ad infernas est modo raptus aquas.
After the death of Pietro, Sixtus took his last nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, into like favor.

He was married to Giovanna, daughter of Federigo di Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and created Duke of Sinigaglia.
Afterwards he became Prefect of Rome, upon the death of his brother Lionardo.

This man founded the second dynasty in the Dukedom of Urbino.
The plebeian violence of the della Rovere temper reached a climax in Giovanni's son, the Duke Francesco Maria, who murdered his sister's lover with his own hand when a youth of sixteen, stabbed the Papal Legate to death in the streets of Bologna at the age of twenty, and knocked Guicciardini, the historian, down with a blow of his fist during a council of war in 1526.
[1] The infamous stories about Sixtus and Alexander may in part be fables, currently reported by the vulgar and committed to epigrams by scholars.

Still the fact remains that Infessura, Burchard, and the Venetian ambassadors relate of these two Popes such traits of character and such abominable actions as render the worst calumnies probable.