Chapter XI: Book IV (9)

“Yesterday morning, I was informed on good authority that His Holiness
has commanded the attendance of the Bishop of Venosa who was sick at
home, and of another physician of the City; and that these are not
allowed to leave him. I was informed that the Pope had vomitings and
fever yesterday: and that they have relieved him of nine ounces of
blood. During the day, His Holiness caused some cardinals to play at
cards before Him while He rested. I was informed also that last night
He slept fairly well. But to-day between the eighteenth and nineteenth
hour, (2–3 P.M.) there was a crisis like that of Saturday, of a kind
which makes His courtiers uneasy; and every one is unwilling to speak
of His condition. I have sought by all means to obtain information:
but the more I seek, the less I learn; for the physicians, the
chirurgeons, and the apothecaries are not allowed to quit the
Presence: from which I conclude that the malady is grave. The Duke of
the Romagna also, is very sick with fever, vomitings, and disorder of
the stomach. _It is not astonishing that His Holiness, and His
Excellency should be ill; for all the courtiers, especially those who
are in the palace, are in the same state, by reason of the unwholesome
conditions of the air, which, there, they breathe._”

The last sentence, in italics, is of exceedingly great importance. The operation of venesection did not effect a lysis, as appears from the dispatches of Giustiniani which continue the tale. On the fifteenth of August, he wrote to the Venetian Senate that it was difficult to get positive information: but that the affair was serious; and, that there was likely to be disorder in the City if the Pope died.

On the sixteenth of August, he wrote that the Pope and the Duke continued to be tormented with fevers, and that the Duke’s was the more violent. He added that the condition of the Pope must be aggravated by His anxieties and cares, and by the sickness of the Duke.

On the seventeenth of August, Giustiniani wrote again:

“Yesterday I wrote to Your Sublimity by Girolamo Passamonte the
courier, who arrived here. To-day I inform you that our Lord the Pope
has taken medicine. The fever continually torments Him, not without
danger. I am informed by a sure authority that the Bishop of Venosa,
chief-physician of His Blessedness and a familiar of the Cardinal
Giovantonio di Sangiorgio, (or, perhaps, the Cardinal of San Giorgio
_in Velum Aureum_, Rafaele Galeotto Sansoni-Riario,) has told his
steward that the sickness of the Pope is very dangerous, and that he
ought to make the said cardinal hasten hither; which thing has been
done.”

He adds that the partisans of Duke Cesare, expecting a riot on the death of the Pope, have made secure their property and have taken precautions to prevent ill news from being bruited abroad. This was ordinary political prudence.

On the eighteenth of August, the same Orator wrote,

“Early this morning, our Lord the Pope, knowing of the danger of His
sickness, has received His rites; and some cardinals have been
admitted into the presence of His Blessedness. The Viaticum was given
in secret; for His familiars try to conceal His condition as much as
possible. They say, that the Bishop of Venosa, early this morning
before the Communion, came from the Pope’s Chamber, weeping, and
saying to one of his people that the danger was very grave, and
complaining with chagrin of the inefficacy of some potions which,
yesterday, he had administered.... The Duke also is very sick. It has
been said to my secretary, _Sir Secretary, this is no time for
ceremonies or fine words. Tell the Orator to hasten to inform the
Senate of Venice that the Pope_ GRAVITER LABORAT. Also, the same
informant said that the Pope cannot live much longer without a
miracle.”

On the eighteenth of August, Giustiniani also wrote a second dispatch to the Doge of Venice, in which he said:

“To-day I sent the latest news to Your Sublimity by Lorenzo da
Camerino. After he was gone, Messer Scipione, a physician from the
palace, came to tell me that yesterday at the sixteenth hour (noon),
the Pope, wishing to rise for a certain need, was taken with a fit of
choking, and is in evil plight, going from bad to worse; and that in
his opinion His Holiness will die to-night:—and, from what he says, I
judge the malady to be an apoplexy. Such also is the opinion of this
physician so excellent is his art.”

The Orator adds that, now, Duke Cesare is neglected; and is preparing secretly to take refuge in the Mola of Hadrian.

Monsignor Burchard makes the following entry in his Diarium, a work of which the original is undiscovered, and copies only accessible to the student. He was perfectly qualified to speak on this subject from personal knowledge; the demise of the Pope being a ceremonial function which he would have to arrange and superintend. He says:

“On Wednesday the eighteenth of August between the twelfth and
thirteenth hour (8–9 A.M.) He (the Lord Alexander P.P. VI) confessed
Himself to the Lord Bishop Pietro of Culen who said mass in His
presence; and, after his Communion, administered the Sacrament of the
Eucharist to the Pope, who was seated on His bed; and then finished
the mass. Five cardinals were present, d’Oristano, di Cosenza, di
Monreale,[60] Casanueva, and di Constantinople, to whom the Pope said
that He felt ill. At the hour of vespers the said Bishop of Culen
administered the Sacrament of Extreme Unction to Him; and He died in
the presence of the datary and the bishop.”

This event took place in the third room of the Borgia Tower occupied by the Library counting from the Library side.

On the nineteenth of August, Giustiniani announced the news to the Senate, and added, “to-day He was carried _de moro_,[61] and shewn to the people; but His corpse was more hideous and monstrous than words can tell, and without human form. For decency, it was kept for some time covered; and before sunset they buried it in the presence of two of the cardinal-deacons attached to the palace.”

In reading this dispatch, it must be remembered that Giustiniani hated the Borgia; and that the Lord Alexander P.P. VI was an old man of an obese habit of body, Who had died of a fever in the height of summer, in a most unwholesome quarter of the City, and at a time when antiseptic treatment was unknown.

The Notary of Orvieto, on his return from Rome four days later, publicly described to his municipality all that he had seen of the _novendiali_; and added that he had kissed the feet of His Holiness in St. Peter’s[62]: but said nothing of any hideous or monstrous appearance of the corpse.

Soon after death, a rumour was heard to the effect that the Lord Alexander P.P. VI and Duke Cesare de Valentinois della Romagna had died envenomed.

For three months it was only a rumour. A new Pope was elected—Cardinal Francesco de’ Piccolhuomini of Siena, who took the name of the Lord Pius P.P. III out of respect to His Uncle, the Lord Pius P.P. II,[63]—and was dead after a two months’ reign.

Then Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, irreconcileable enemy of Borgia, attained the object of his ambition; and was elected Pope by the name of the Lord Julius P.P. II. And then the rumour took a concrete form.

On the tenth of November it definitely was said that, at the garden-supper of the fifth of August venom had been put into some wine by order of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI; that by a butler’s blunder that envenomed wine had been served to the Pope’s Holiness and to Duke Cesare: that the former being old had died therefrom; that the latter being young had endured heroic treatment for a cure. Some said that he had been plunged into the ripped-up belly of a live mule or bull amid the steaming palpitating entrails profusely to sweat the venom out of him: others, that he had been dipped in iced-water, and so cured.

Writing several years later, Messer Francesco Guicciardini and Messer Paolo Giovio added new details. Guicciardini definitely settled the falsehood in the form in which it generally appears. He gave a list of cardinals, also, and prelates who were to have been envenomed by the Lord Alexander P.P. VI that He might inherit their wealth. Giovio named and described the venom which, he said, the Borgia commonly used. He called it _Cantarella_[64]; and said it was a sugared powder, or a powder under the guise of sugar, which was of a wonderful whiteness, and of a rather pleasant taste. It did not overwhelm the vital forces in the manner of the active venoms by sudden and energetic action: but, by penetrating insensibly the veins, it slowly worked with mortal effect. (Paolo Giovio, Hist. II. 47. VIII. 205.) Is there any toxicological chymist who from this description can give the formula of this extraordinary venom?

The testimony of these two men is tainted. Messer Francesco Guicciardini, who wrote long after the event and solely from hearsay, was a Florentine. Whatever is, and was, of Florence, is cultured, pedantic, artificial, in the highest degree: whatever is, and was, of Rome, is nakedly natural, original, free, and absolute, in the highest degree. It was, and is, a habit of mind in the Florentine to decry Rome and all things Roman. Politically, Messer Francesco Guicciardini was an adherent of the House of Medici; and Medici were naturally the mortal foes of Borgia, seeing that Borgia had acquiesced in and profited by their expulsion from Florence. And he was in the pay of the Roman Colonna, who were Ghibelline by inherited tradition, _i.e._, upholders of the imperial against the papal prerogative. He was born in 1482; and was of the age of twenty-one years at the death of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI. In 1530, having exhorted the Lord Clement P.P. VII to punish Florence for insults which he (Guicciardini) had received in 1527, he turned traitor against the Medici, writing invectives against them till his death in 1540. He divinely wrote at all times a sonorous and courtly Tuscan, which makes his reader believe that one who could write so exquisitely must needs write truly. Yet he did not hesitate to boast that he had a pen of gold for his friends, and a pen of iron for his foes. Regretfully then it must be said that Messer Francesco Guicciardini does not deserve belief unless his statements can be corroborated.

Touching the matter of the Borgia venom, and especially of the envenoming of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI and Duke Cesare, he is corroborated by Messer Paolo Giovio.

Messer Paolo Giovio was born in 1483, and was of the age of twenty years at the death of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI. He issued no books till twenty-one years later. His first was a quoad-scientific treatise on Roman Fishes (_De Piscibus Romanis_), published in 1524. He was a _dilettante_ of a kind. He practised amniomancy, or the art of divination by inspection of the membrane, Amnios, in which the unborn child is wrapped—fantastic effort of a seeker after Truth. He was one of those double-faced historians, who wrote one set of memoirs for the highest bidder; (Popes whom they despised, Dukes whom they privately reviled,) and a second set of memoirs for the enemies of the patrons of the first. His Life of the Lord Leo P.P. X (Giovanni de’ Medici) is a specimen. Even during his life, he was considered to be a flagrant liar. He used to say, with a dog-like knowledge of his masters the “people” who “desire to be deceived,” that the centuries would give his written lies the force of truth. He used an affected and flamboyant rather than a pure style; and was the inferior of Guicciardini. The Lord Clement P.P. VII (Giulio de’ Medici), to be rid of his incessant importunity, gave him the bishopric of Nocera; and he died in 1552.

Who, therefore, wishes to believe Messer Francesco Guicciardini uncorroborated, or corroborated by Messer Paolo Giovio, will do so on his own responsibility.

Let it be noted that both Giovio and Guicciardini were Roman Catholics. Their calumnies against the Lord Alexander P.P. VI are their own; and were not invented by dissenters from their creed. The said calumnies very naturally have been adopted by these last as articles of faith; and repeated usque ad nauseam; or resented, with the most unconvincing and inane half-heartedness, by a majority of modern and soi-disant enlightened Roman Catholics, who fear (positively they shew every sign of fear) to credit their own learned clergy of the present day, Leonetti, Velron, Cerri, and Ollivier, to say nothing of the laity, _e.g._, Comte Réné de Maricourt, who have laboured for justice to the maligned Borgia. Will these astonishingly inconsistent persons prefer to believe the opinion of an atheist, who was incidentally a man of common sense? It is Voltaire who, in speaking of Guicciardini’s statement, (that the Lord Alexander P.P. VI was the victim of venom which He had set for his cardinals, that, having killed them, He might take their treasure,) says,

“All the enemies of the Holy See have welcomed this horrible anecdote.
I myself do not believe it at all; and my chief reason lies in its
extreme improbability. It is evident that the envenoming of a dozen
cardinals at supper would have caused the Father and the son[65] to
become so execrable, that nothing could have saved them from the fury
of the Roman people, and of the whole of Italy. Such a crime never
could have been concealed. Even supposing that it had not been avenged
by all Italy leagued together, it was directly contrary to the
interests of Cesare (detto) Borgia. The Pope was on the verge of the
grave. The Borgia faction was powerful enough to elect one of its own
creatures: was it likely that the votes of cardinals would be gained
by envenoming a dozen of them? I make bold to say to Guicciardini,
‘Europe has been deceived by you, and you have been deceived by your
feelings. You were the enemy of the Pope; you have followed the advice
of your hatred. It is true that He had used vengeance cruel and
perfidious, against foes perfidious and cruel as Himself. Hence you
conclude that a Pope of the age of seventy-two years could not die a
natural death. You maintain, on vague rumour, that an aged sovereign,
whose coffers at that time contained more than a million of gold
ducats,[66] desired to envenom several cardinals that He might seize
their treasures. But were these treasures so important? The treasures
of cardinals nearly always were removed by their gentlemen before the
Popes could seize them. Why do you think that so prudent a Pope cared
to risk the doing of so very infamous a deed for so very small a gain;
a deed that could not be done without accomplices; and that sooner or
later must have been discovered? May I not trust the official accounts
of the Pope’s sickness, more than the mere rumours of the mob? That
official account declares the Pope to have died of a double-tertian
fever. There is not the slightest vestige of proof in favour of the
accusation which you have brought against His memory. His son
Borgia[67] happened to fall sick at the time when his Father died.
That is the sole foundation for the story of the venom.’”

It will appear that the death of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI, from venom, is improbable. It may also be said that it was impossible, for reasons here forthcoming.

The Legend of the Borgia Venom

One of the stock phrases used by biographers and historians of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries was “he (or she)—died in the odour of sanctity.” Another was “he (or she)—died not without suspicion of venom.” Both phrases are the merest expression of private opinion, the importance of which depends upon the integrity and knowledge of the user: but in no case do they amount to a dogmatic, final, infallible, or authoritative, decision.

When a person is said to have departed this life in the odour of sanctity, (a purely technical phrase, insusceptible of literal translation,) sooner or later the process of ecclesiastical law is begun for obtaining for the deceased the successive titles, _Venerable Servant of God_, _the Blessed ——_, and _Saint ——_. These titles, only being conferred after stringent examination of quality lasting many years and sometimes many centuries,[68] are taken to prove the pious opinion “died in the odour of sanctity” to have been founded on a verity.

But when a person is said to have died “not without suspicion of venom,” it is very rarely that steps are taken, juridically to examine that suspicion with a view to proving it to be founded on fact or falsehood. The world deliberately prefers to believe the worst of man, deliberately prefers suspicion. The expression in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries was as randomly and as inconsequently used as the cry for a General Council, by every one who found occasion to go “against the government”; and it certainly does not command respect by reason of its absurdly frequent repetition. It was the fashion for their enemies to accuse the Borgia of compassing the death of some by venom. It was also the fashion for the Borgia to retort upon their enemies in the same formula. There can be no human doubt that the Borgia and their enemies would have envenomed each the other, had they known how to do so with security and certainty. It was a habit of the Latin Races to see no distinction between venom and steel when the idea was to get rid of a foe. Cold northern nations, the English in particular, always have had a horror of venom, preferring boots, fists, bullet, or blade; indeed one of the most hideous penances ordained by English and Post-Reformation law was awarded to criminals who had envenomed the lieges. They were boiled alive. “This year, the XVII March, was boyled in Smithfield one Margaret Davis, a maiden which had poisoned three households that she dwelled in.” (Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1542.)

Perhaps to this habit, of regarding the use of venom as so horrible a crime, is due the fascination which those, who are supposed to have attained high eminence in its practice, have for Englishmen. Undoubtedly, Lord Alexander P.P. VI and Duke Cesare de Valentinois della Romagna are regarded as having been artists in venom, possessing knowledge far surpassing that of modern alchymists. They are believed to have envenomed their foes, named and unnamed, by the score; and, at last, to have fallen into the pit that they have digged for others.

Of the cases named, Cardinal Giovanni Borgia (detto Giuniore), the Sultan Djim, and Cardinal Orsini, are the most important. The improbability in the case of the first already has been shewn: Duke Cesare and he were friendly; their interests were asymptotic; and they were apart during the seventeen days before the cardinal died. The improbability in the case of the Sultan Djim lies in the fact that the Pope lost 40,000 ducats annually, and the only means of keeping the Turks from Christendom, by his death which was due to natural causes, and took place when he was in the hands of the Christian King Charles VIII at Naples, some weeks after he had left Rome. The improbability in the case of Cardinal Orsini is proved by the tainted source from which the charge emanated; by the publicity of all proceedings before and after his death; and by the sworn testimony of his leeches. Cases of this kind must be considered together; and rejected or accepted together; for rumours do not gain credibility from vociferous repetition: nor does it avail to plead that because advantages accrue from the death of such a one, therefore, the person benefited by the death is likely to have envenomed the deceased. Death is always advantageous to some one living: but in no case named did the Lord Alexander P.P. VI and Duke Cesare reap any gain whatever, but contrariwise loss. As for the statement, that the venom of the Borgia was a slow venom, slow in action, dirigible in absence, it safely may be said that no such venom existed then any more than it does now.

This slow venom is an invention of purveyors of a certain class of fiction, doing vast credit to their imaginative powers, but possessing no tangible existence. These writers of fiction are merchants who must supply their customers with goods upon demand. The Legend of the Borgia Venom is a department of their trade. The public has read it and cried for more according to the sample. The public is pleased to amuse itself. At other times the public has the humour to inform itself; and takes spiritual pastors, and masters, cunning in all learning, in all verities of past and present. From these, the truth is required for mental profit; from the others invention and imagination for mental recreation. The public pays and has the right to choose what it will buy. A grocer, who would venture to supply pickles instead of pepper ordered, would encounter his patron’s discontent. A teacher, who would venture to purvey fiction instead of fact required, would meet with similar disaster, one would think. But in sober earnest, the Legend of the Borgia Venom so very industriously has been propagated, that modern serious writers have adopted it as one of the items which safely may be included in their serious writings: and the public finding it there, in places where truth is expected to be, looks upon the false as true because it comes with the imprimatur of authority.

Herr Eugene Burckhardt’s very learned modern work, _The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy_, of which an English Translation is accessible, is a case in point. It purports to be gravely written, and is a mine of accurate information. Yet, among continuous ropes of pearls of wisdom, occasionally one is startled by the discovery of a bead so base, that one wonders how it has escaped detection and damnation. Here is an example,

“Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian
civilization, this pontificate (1492–1503) might be passed over, since
the Borgia are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander
spoke Spanish in public with Caesar; Lucrezia at her entry into
Ferrara, where she wore a Spanish costume, was sung to by Spanish
Buffoons: their confidential servants consisted of Spaniards, as did
most of the ill-famed company of the troops of Caesar in the war of
1500; and even his Hangman Don Michelotto, _and his Poisoner Sebastian
Pinzon_, seem to have been of the same nation.”

That is a specimen of the slipshod way in which serious writers are false to their trust, of the half-truths which they make to serve for the truth about the Borgia. It is exceedingly necessary to lay great stress upon the Spanish origin of the Borgia, lest odium undeserved should light on their adopted country Italy. They were very fine examples of their race: but never let it be forgotten that their vices, (for, being men, they had their vices) were Spanish and not Italian vices. Herr Burckhardt does well to emphasize this fact, and to enrich and illuminate it with a wealth of illustration: but when he comes to speak of Don Michelotto as Duke Cesare’s Hangman, and of Sebastian Pinzon as his Poisoner, with the light and easy freedom which one uses in speaking of “the unquestioned things that are”; then one is compelled to conjure up the horrible and fantastic picture of the Generalissimo of the Pontifical Army stalking about the continent of Europe with an official Hangman and an official Poisoner in his entourage. Don Michelotto was a captain of Duke Cesare’s condottieri, a valued confidential servant, perhaps, on sudden occasion, as at Sinigaglia, his _executeur des hautes œuvres_: but never a professional Hangman. And Sebastian Pinzon? Is it to be believed that Duke Cesare—for this really is what Herr Burckhardt’s amazing statement implies—did so much venenation in the way of business, that it was as necessary to have a Lord High Poisoner attached to his staff as a Groom of the Stola or a Clerk of the Hanaper?[69] The thing is absurd; worthy of comic opera, not of serious history. But the origin of Herr Burckhardt’s error shall be traced.

Giustiniani the Orator of Venice, to whom the Borgia were intensely antipathetic, and who neglected no opportunity of relating rumours detrimental to them, sent to his government a dispatch dated the twentieth of July 1502, stating, that the Most Illustrious Lord Giambattista Ferrari, Cardinal-Presbyter of the Title of San Crisogono, vulgarly called the Cardinal of Modena, had died; that, in accordance with his testament, his goods and benefices had been distributed; that his archbishopric of Capua had been given to the young and lusty Lord Cardinal Prince Ippolito d’Este (now of the age of twenty-four years and a person of fashion;) that his bishopric of Modena had been given to his brother; that the greater part of his goods had been given to his secretary Messer Sebastiano Pinzoni; that this last bequest was called “the price of blood” for the secretary had envenomed his master, to have his goods; that the Pope had endowed the said secretary with a canonry in Padua, the prefecture of Sant’ Agata in Cremona, a benefice in Rome, another in Mantua valued at five hundred ducats, and had received him _inter familiares_.

Now there is no word in that dispatch which implicates Duke Cesare. We learn that Messer Sebastiano Pinzoni, secretary to the Cardinal of Modena, was said, by rumour, to have envenomed his master in order to profit thereby; and also that the said secretary had been patronised by the Lord Alexander P.P. VI. That is all. It would be unpleasant to think of the Pope’s Holiness as the patron of a murderer: yet that would be the obvious conclusion, if the matter ended here. But it does not. There is further record of Messer Sebastiano Pinzoni, which makes it clear that his crime at first was unknown to the Pope; and that on its discovery he was forced to take refuge in flight. It is Monsignor Burchard who records in his Diarum under date Wednesday the twentieth of November 1504, that the Ruota (the supreme secular tribunal of the Holy Roman Church) delivered sentence against Sebastiano Pinzoni, Apostolic Scribe, who was contumacious and absent, depriving him of all benefices and offices, for that he had slain with venom the Lord Cardinal of Modena his patron who had raised him from the dung-hill.[70] Ciacconi says that the Cardinal of Modena was envenomed by Sebastiano Pinzoni, his gentleman-of-the-bedchamber; who, being imprisoned on another charge in the reign of the Lord Leo P.P. X, when put to the Question, confessed this crime, which he before had denied.

Let it be admitted that Sebastiano Pinzoni envenomed his master, then. But Herr Burckhardt brings no evidence to prove that he was connected with Duke Cesare; nor is it established that he was employed by His Excellency in any capacity, private, or official. But every crime of every criminal in the Borgian Era is attributed to Borgia as a matter of course; and Herr Burckhardt, writing serious history, introduces fiction, and passes off Sebastiano Pinzoni as Duke Cesare’s Poisoner!

To turn from the historian to the novelist will afford a little recreation in this quest of the Venom of the Borgia; and, also, the diversion will not be unprofitable: for the novelist is an exceedingly important person by reason that he commands an infinitely wider audience than the historian, and influences, forms, or moulds, an infinitely larger section of opinion. M. Alexandre Dumas in his Crimes Célèbres has much to say about the Borgia. Knowing, as a practised hand, that the best fiction is that which has a substratum of fact and an air of truth, M. Dumas quotes the precious Messer Paolo Giovio and his _Cantarella_ which already has been mentioned here. Further, with a wealth of “corroborative detail calculated to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” he describes the preparation of a liquid venom which, he says, the Borgia used. A bear was caught and made to swallow a strong dose of arsenic. When this began to take effect, the bear was suspended by his hind-legs head-downward; and incontinent he would fall into convulsions, while from his throat there poured a copious deadly stream of foam, which was collected on a silver plate, bottled in vials hermetically sealed; and this was the liquid Venom of the Borgia.

There were plenty of bears in the Apennines, perhaps, even in the Alban Hills within twenty miles of Rome; so the bear is probable enough. Having caught his bear, Duke Cesare would convey him to the Vatican—a large palace truly, but rather too full of people to be desirable as a private venom-factory. On a dark night in a lonely courtyard, the Pope’s Holiness and the Duke’s Excellency would administer the arsenic to the bear. The method of administration is not described, nor the slinging up of the beast prior to his convulsions, nor the picture of the aged Pontiff skipping round with the silver plate in His solicitude that no drop of the fluid should be lost, nor the solemn bottling of the vials, nor their hermetic sealing with what seal? The Ring of the Fisherman? And M. Dumas carefully omits to say that the nasty mess so secretly and arduously obtained would have been far less venomous than the original dose of arsenic; which, administered neat, without the intervention of an ill-used bear, certainly would have slain: but which would be deprived of most, if not of all, of its venomous potency, by its submission to the digestive processes of M. Dumas’ improbable and impossible bear.

* * * * *

Undoubtedly, there were the same venomous substances in and on this earth in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, as there are now: some few were known; but many more, and these the most sure and deadly, were not even dreamed of, _e.g._, strychnine, prussic acid, or the hideous bacilli, accessible as dust to any Twentieth Century medico who, on the sole condition that he is not instigated by criminal motives, with perfect security to himself can envenom and slay a street, a district, or a city. In the year 1164, Abd-el-Mumin-ben-Ali the Moorish King of Spain chased from his dominions all Jews and Christians who refused the faith of Islam. Among these, to Egypt went the celebrated Moses ben-Maimon. All that was known, he knew; and he knew sixteen venoms; litharge, verdigris, opium, arsenic, spurge or milk-wort, cashew-nut, hemlock, henbane, stramonium or thorn-apple, hemp, mandrake, venomous fungi, plantain, black-nightshade or felon-wort, belladonna, and cantharides. To these, were added in the Borgian Era four centuries later, the tri-sulphite of arsenic, orpiment, antimony, corrosive sublimate, aconite or wolfsbane or monkshood, and perhaps white hellebore, and black or Christmas-Rose; making two and twenty substances known to be venomous.

Undoubtedly, much damage might be done with this arsenal of venoms: but only in the event of the existence of the will to use them, and of the knowledge of the method of their exhibition.

Undoubtedly, there was the will. The fact that Madonna Caterina Sforza-Riario (author of a wonderful collection of recipes, domestic and medicinal, a good housewife as well as witch and warrior,) was said to have attempted the envenoming of the Pope’s Holiness, as described in