The formal and official ceremony confirming the wedding of Lucrezia, the daughter of the second Borja pope Alexander VI, occured six months before the wedding, February 12, 1493. Chris Hibbert gives a painterly description that I assume comes mostly from Johann Burchard, the pope's Master of Ceremonies.
The first and second weeks of February found several witnesses being called and questioned before the inquisition in the 1494 case of Marina Gonzalez of Ciudad Real. Pages of their testimony answering the questions lain out here, can be found in Lu Ann Homza'a amazing collection of documents showing many particulars and their extensions, The Spanish Inquisition.
By 1495, the French king had left Rome and gone south to assume his claimed throne in Naples. His huge army was eating much of the stores and wasting fields and towns throughout Italy. Where to house his thousands of soldiers and their attendants, and how to feed them all became the problem that beset towns up and down the peninsula all year.
It was in February 1496 that Caterina Sforza began purchasing huge stocks of flour and one of salt to feed the poor and help preserve meat in Forli. A great famine had struck that winter, as few crops made it to harvest and then to the small towns after so much devastation the year before. [p. 189] Elizabeth Lev, in her bio of Caterina Sforza tells us this was the winter when syphillis, 'the French disease', first came to Italy and to Forli. [p. 188] Of course, they had brought that with them as well when they crossed the Alps the previous September. Or, so we are told. The doctors could find nothing that lessened it's symptoms.
Last year's jumble.
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