Accordingly, with all the strength he could muster--a troop of 250
free lances, Germans and Burgundians, the same number of infantry from
Tuscany, with fifty young men of good families in Perugia--a very
tolerable army for the time--and the two young Provencals, along with
other youths to whom he had promised various offices, the new Senator
set out for Rome. He was now a legal official, with all the strength
of the Pope and constituted authority behind him; not a penny of money
it is true from the Legate, and only those four thousand florins in
his treasury: but with all the taxes and offerings in Rome in front of
him, and the highest promise of success. It was a very different
beginning from that of seven years ago, when young, penniless,
disinterested, with no grandeur to keep up, and no soldiers to pay, he
had been borne by the shouting populace to the Capitol to an unlimited
and impossible empire. He was now a sober man, experienced in the
world, forty, and trained by the intercourse of courts, in other ways
than those of his youth. He had now been taught how to scheme and
plot, to cajole and flatter, to play one party against another, and
change his plans to suit his circumstances. So far as we know, he had
no motive that could be called bad, except that of achieving the
splendour he loved, and surrounding himself with the paraphernalia of
greatness. The devil surely never before used so small a bribe to
corrupt a nature full of so many fine things. He meant to establish
the Buono Stato, probably as sincerely as of old. He had learned that
he could not put forth the same unlimited pretensions. The making of
emperors and sway of the world had to be resigned; but there is no
evidence that he did not mean to carry out in his new reign the high
designs for his city, and for the peace and prosperity of the
surrounding country, which he had so triumphantly succeeded in doing
for that one happy and triumphant moment in his youth.