“Half god, half beast,” the Princess Valeria once described him, without suspecting that the phrase describes not merely Bellarion, but Man. Aware of this, the anonymous chronicler who has preserved i...

“Half god, half beast,” the Princess Valeria once described him, without suspecting that the phrase describes not merely Bellarion, but Man. Aware of this, the anonymous chronicler who has preserved i...

They made their way towards the road, not directly, but by a course with which Fra Sulpizio⁠—as the friar announced himself named⁠—seemed singularly well acquainted. It led transversely across the for...

The event which was to deviate Bellarion so abruptly and brutally from the peaceful ways of a student and a scholar, and to extinguish his cherished hopes of learning Greek at Pavia under the far-fame...

These grounds into which he had stepped through that doorway in the red wall seemed, so far as the tall hedges of his hortus inclusus would permit him to discover, to be very spacious. Somewhere in th...

At about the time that the young Lord of Montferrat was sitting down belatedly to table with his tutor and his gentleman-in-waiting, a very bedraggled and chilled Bellarion, who for two hours had been...

You behold Messer Bellarion treading the giddy slope of high and mysterious adventure, fortuitously launched upon a course whose end he was very far from discerning, but which most certainly was not t...

Stimulated by the insistence of this apparently accredited and energetic representative of the Princess, Messer Barbaresco assembled in his house in the forenoon of the following day a half-dozen gent...

Bellarion and Barbaresco sat at supper, waited upon by an untidy and unclean old man who afforded all the service of that decayed establishment. The fare was frugal, more frugal far than the Convent o...

The High and Mighty Marquis Theodore Paleologo, Regent of Montferrat, gave audience as was his gracious custom each Saturday to all who sought it, and received petitions from all who proffered them. A...

They were very gay that night at the hospitable court of the Marquis Theodore. A comedy was performed early in the evening, a comedy which Fra Serafino in his chronicle describes as lascivious, by whi...

At Barbaresco’s a surprise awaited Messer Bellarion. The whole company of plotters swarmed about him as he entered the long dusty room of the mezzanine, and he found himself gripped at once between th...

Spigno set the lantern on the floor, and came forward. “No need to talk,” he muttered. “Roll over so that I can free your hands.” He drew his dagger and with it cut Bellarion’s bonds. “Take off your s...

The court of the Podestà of Casale was commonly well attended, and often some of the attendance would be distinguished. The Princess Valeria, for instance, would sometimes sit with the ladies in the l...

Bellarion was returned to the common gaol, which was perched high upon the city’s red wall, to herd once more with the vile pariahs there incarcerated. But not for long. Within an hour came an order f...

Bellarion took his way through the low-lying and insalubrious marshlands about Mortara where the rice-fields flourished as they had flourished almost ever since the grain was first introduced from Chi...

Bellarion took his way through the low-lying and insalubrious marshlands about Mortara where the rice-fields flourished as they had flourished almost ever since the grain was first introduced from Chi...

On the ground that they had far to travel, but in reality to spare this unwelcome prisoner, Bellarion was mounted on the crupper of Squarcia’s great horse, his lightly pinioned wrists permitting him t...

Facino Cane and Bellarion talked long together on the night of their first meeting, and as a result the road to Pavia was not resumed upon the morrow, nor yet upon the morrow’s morrow. It was written ...

Facino Cane took his ease at Abbiategrasso in those declining days of 1407 and zestfully devoted himself to the training and education of Bellarion. It was the first rest the great soldier had known i...

“They deafen us with their acclamations of you, those sons of dogs!” Thus the Duke, in angry greeting of the great condottiero, who was not only the last of his father’s captains to stand beside him i...

To have done what Bellarion had done was after all no great matter to the world of the court and would have attracted no attention there. But to have received the public thanks of Milan’s civic head a...

Shortly before midnight they rode out from the Palace of the old Broletto: Facino, attended by Bellarion for his esquire, a page bestriding a mule that was laden with his armour, and a half-dozen men-...

The morning sunlight falling across the valley flashed on the arms of Buonterzo’s vanguard, on the heights, even as Facino’s rearguard went splashing through the ford, which at its deepest did not com...

There are men to whom death has brought a glory that would never have been theirs in life. An instance of that is afforded by the history of Bellarion at this stage. Honest, loyal, and incapable of je...

That Requiem Mass at Saint Ambrose’s for the repose of the soul of Bellarion was never sung. And this because, whilst the bells were solemnly tolling in summons to the faithful, Messer Bellarion, hims...

Gabriello Maria Visconti’s plans for the restoration of Ghibelline authority suffered shipwreck, as was to be expected in a council mainly composed of Guelphs. The weapon placed in their hands by Gabr...

If Facino Cane’s eyes grew wide in astonishment to see his countess ushered into that mean chamber by Carmagnola, wider still did they grow to behold the man who accompanied her and to consider their ...

In the torrid heat of the following noontide, Bellarion rode alone to visit Stoffel at Casalbagliano. He did not go round by the lines, but straight across country, which brought him past the inner po...

It wanted less than an hour to dawn when the mule-train came up to the southern gate of Alessandria, and its single leader disturbed the silence of the night by a shrill whistle thrice repeated. A mom...

The sequel you already guess, and its telling need not keep us long. That night Vignate and six hundred men, wearing their shirts over their armour, rode into as pretty an ambush about the village of ...

The Knight Bellarion rode alone in the hot glow of an August afternoon through the moist and fertile meadowland between Alessandria and San Michele. He was dejected by the sterility of worldly achieve...

The Knight Bellarion contrasted the manner of his departure from Casale a year ago with the manner of his return, and took satisfaction in it. There was more worldliness in his heart than he suspected...

The golden light of eventide lay on the terraced palace gardens, on the white temple mirrored in the placid lake, on granite balustrades where roses trailed, on tall, trim boxwood hedges that were cen...

On a day of September of the year of Our Lord 1409, a dust-laden horseman clattered into the courtyard of a palace near the Bridge of the Trinity in Florence, and announced himself a courier with lett...

On a day of September of the year of Our Lord 1409, a dust-laden horseman clattered into the courtyard of a palace near the Bridge of the Trinity in Florence, and announced himself a courier with lett...

The rest of this affair⁠—this campaign against the too-ambitious vicar of the King of France⁠—is a matter of history, which you may read in the chronicles of Messer Corio and elsewhere. With a powerfu...

A strong party of men-at-arms rode out of Genoa that morning, their corselets flashing in the sunshine, and took the upland road by the valley of the Scrivia towards Novi and Facino’s camp. In their m...

In the vast park of Pavia the trees stood leafless and black against the white shroud of snow that covered the chilled earth. The river Ticino gurgled and swirled about the hundred granite pillars whi...

The Epiphany mummeries were long overpast, the iron hand of winter was withdrawn from the land, and in the great forest of Pavia, where Gian Galeazzo had loved to hunt, the trees were breaking into bu...

Facino Cane, Count of Biandrate, Lord of Novara, Dertona, Varese, Rosate, Valsassina, and of all the lands on Lake Maggiore as far as Vogogna, was buried with great pomp in the Church of San Pietro in...

As Bellarion had calculated and disposed, so things fell out, and Filippo Maria Visconti in the twenty-second year of his age led to the altar the widowed Countess of Biandrate who was thirty-nine. As...

Dissensions at the very outset between Carmagnola and Bellarion protracted by some days the preparations for the departure of the army. This enabled Theodore of Montferrat fully to make his dispositio...

A letter survives which the Prince of Valsassina wrote some little time after these events to Duke Filippo Maria, in which occurs the following criticism of the captains of his day: “They are stout fe...

In the armoury of the castle of Quinto, Carmagnola paced like a caged panther, the half of his armour still hanging upon him, his blond head still encased in the close-fitting cap of bloodred velvet t...

Unanimously the captains voted for Bellarion’s death. The only dissentients were the Marquis and his sister. The latter was appalled by the swiftness with which this thing had come upon them, and shra...

My Lord of Carmagnola had shut himself up in a small room on the ground floor of the castle of Quinto to indite a letter to the High and Most Potent Duke Filippo Maria of Milan. A heavy labour this of...

When Bellarion proclaimed his intention of raising the siege of Vercelli, he had it in mind, in view of the hopelessness of being able to reduce the place reasonably soon, to draw Theodore into the op...

Theodore’s sally from Vercelli had been made at daybreak on that Friday morning. It had been shrewdly planned, for Theodore was no bungler, and, before he had brought more than half his men into actio...

When he recovered, he was lying on his sound side on a couch under the window, across which the curtains of painted and gilded leather had been drawn. An elderly, bearded man in black was observing hi...