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Seizing the domain by force of arms from the existing Duke, whom he excommunicated, the Pope endowed the title and territory upon Lorenzo, requiring the College of Cardinals to confirm the deed. The incumbent Duke, a della Rovere nephew of Julius’ who shared his late uncle’s vigor, fought back. When his envoy came to Rome, bearing the Duke’s challenge to Lorenzo, he was seized despite a safe-conduct and tortured for information. To prosecute his war on Urbino, the Pope imposed taxes throughout the Papal States on the ground that the Duke was a rebel. This shameless campaign turned opinion against him, but, like Julius or any other autocrat, Leo ignored the effect of his actions on the public. With relentlessness he showed in little else, he pursued the war for two years. At the end of that time, Lorenzo and his French wife were both dead, leaving only an infant daughter whose unexpected destiny as Catherine de’ Medici was to marry the son of Francis I and to become Queen—and ruler—of France. This whirl of fortune’s wheel, however, came too late for Leo; nor did it prevent the decline of the Medici. Into the empty war on Urbino Leo had poured a total of 800,000 ducats, a plunge into indebtedness that meant the financial wreck of the Papacy. It led the wrecker not to retrenchment, but, through more tortuous devices, to the greatest scandal of the age.

The Petrucci conspiracy was an obscure and vicious affair that has baffled everyone from that day to this. Leo professed to discover through betrayal by a servant a conspiracy of several cardinals to assassinate him. Led by the young Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci of Siena, who nursed a personal grievance, the plot depended on poison to be injected by a suborned doctor in the course of lancing a boil on the Pope’s buttock. Arrests were made, informers tortured, suspect cardinals grilled. Lured to Rome on a safe-conduct, Petrucci and others of the accused were imprisoned, the violation being condoned by Leo on the ground that no poisoner could be considered a safe risk. Hearings produced awful revelations; confessions were induced; whispered reports of the proceedings bewildered and terrified Rome. Forced to plead guilty, Cardinal Petrucci was executed by strangling with an appropriate red silk noose at the hand of a Moor because protocol did not permit a Christian to put to death a Prince of the Church. Faced with this example, the other accused cardinals accepted pardons at a cost of enormous fines, up to 150,000 ducats from the richest, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, yet another of the nipoti of Sixtus IV, in this case a great-nephew.

So farfetched was the plot that the inference could not be avoided that the Pope, perhaps seizing upon some informer’s tattle, had promoted the whole affair for the sake of the fines. Recent investigations in Vatican archives suggest that the plot may in fact have been real, but what counts is the impression made at the time. Coming on top of public indignation at Leo’s war on Urbino, the Petrucci conspiracy further discredited the Papacy, besides alarming and antagonizing the cardinals. Whether to nullify their hostility or to fend off bankruptcy, or both, Leo in an act of astonishing boldness created 31 new cardinals in a single day, collecting from the recruits over 300,000 ducats. The wholesale creation is said to have been conceived by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici as a paving stone on his own path to the Papacy. Demoralization by now was such that no movement of rebellion in the College followed.

The amiable Leo, foundering in his own transactions, turned less amiable, or perhaps had never been so benign as popularly supposed. The Petrucci affair was not the only unpleasantness. To incorporate Perugia into the Papal States, its dynastic ruler, Gianpaolo Baglioni, had to be eliminated. A “monster of iniquity,” Baglioni deserved no mercy, but the Pope once again resorted to treachery. He invited Baglioni to Rome on a safe-conduct, seized and imprisoned him on arrival and after the usual torture had