Wednesday, September 30, 2015

news bits late September 2015

The Pope in Havana met with Fidel Castro a couple weeks ago.
In Pope Francis's trip to the US & Cuba he spoke at the UN General Assembly,
and He spoke to the US Congress:
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 The US Congress' Speaker of the House of Representatives, Speaker John Boehner said he will retire next month. This surprise happened the day after Pope Francis spoke at Congress. The first time that a Pope has ever spoke there. There are ramifications and explicit reasons for his odd retirement. It will have unknowable effects.
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 The wars in the Fertile Crescent continue.

Syrian migrants most abundantly affect surrounding countries.

There is now Literal maps of literal fiction.

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Mars has been found to have evidence of water.
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The lunar eclipse coincided with the super moon on a full moon this year. It looked a pale orange color here.
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Renaissance in England, A 1950's View, For The World


As a preeminent example of mid 20th century thought describing what the European Renaissance meant for them, an English audience, JD Mackie lays out his case and bases it on familiar ground.
"... the Renaissance was not an event but a process."
"Birth ... is the result of long silent processes ... like most other births it moved from infancy to splendour and to decay. It did not come to all the countries of Europe at the same time, and it did not develop in the same way and at the same rate in different atmospheres."
"Yet wherever it was felt, and whatever form it took it represented the same thing. It was a rebellion of the facts against the theories."

Thought and institutions were not static Mackie asserts. But the "... basic theories of church, of state, of economics, of philosophy, of life generally were set in the frame of that universalism which survived amongst the ruins of the Roman empire. The world was the special creation of God and the centre of the universe. It was an ordered unity, reflecting the divine harmony of the New Jerusalem where Christ presided over the holy angels. Every individual, man or institution or idea, had being as part of the great whole from which it was derived."
[p.1]

"There was a single church ruled by the pope, in which all ecclesiastical authority originated, and ... a single state governed by the emperor, from which all temporal authority was derived."
"In philosophy there was one single truth from which proceeded all particular truths."
"In morality there was one single code of righteousness; legislation was the enunciation of the eternal right rather than the formation of anything new."
"In the realm of economics every article had its justum pretium [just price], and the customary rents and the customary wages represented the divine institution concerning these matters."

Despite these "...complete and satisfying theories, the actual facts had at no time tallied, and as the centuries passed the discrepancies became more and more apparent." [p.2]

Examples follow, but the point is hammered home that these discrepancies required reconciliation with the universal theories of truths. The particular could not be contrary to the principles that 'ruled' them. These processes of reconciliation worked to harmonise and show the truer or higher or more sublime reality of the theoretical truths.
"So ignoring, pretending, and philosophizing, the middle ages went on their way until the discrepancies between theory and fact grew too wide to be ignored by minds well practiced in the serach for truth."
"...it was clear enough that all questions could not be settled out of hand by an appeal to authority."
While Bernard of Chartres would say men in his day were 'dwarfs mounted on shoulders of giants', he implied they at least could see farther. In another interesting turn of phrase, Mackie positively attests that Abelard of Bath in the 12th century "... said that to accept authority in the face of common sense was the action of a senseless brute...".
With these 'critical faculties', "...the established ideas and the established institutions became steadily less able to endure criticism."
[p.3]

More examples follow including the deterioration of the Empire (specifically cited, that under Frederick the Great), the diminished power of Rome, and traditional sources of wealth were being transferred to the towns. "The impact of a critical spirit upon theories far removed from actuality is what is called the Renaissance. The inquiring spirit turned itself upon the universe..." and Copernicus, Columbus, de Gama, Magellan are mentioned. This inquiring spirit turned itself to human society and found they were not really 'divided by class or tenure' but by 'vertical lines of geography'.
"The world-state was a fiction, but the nation states were real and their relations were governed not so much by divinely appointed law as by human opportunism." It turned itself to the body and found it beautiful, not a 'clog upon the spirit'. It turned itself to the soul and found it 'possessed of an infinite yearning for God' that was not satisfied by 'authority or even other's experience' but had to find a 'personal satisfaction and security of its own'. The Renaissance in time grew and its own theories were turned back on itself.
But the "... essential feature of the early Renaissance was its reliance upon facts." [p.4]

"Its genius was to reveal and accept the thing which was actually there.[pp.4-5] Many of the facts were self-evident. The world was round... the human body was beautiful... the national state was actually ... governed [by]... a 'new monarchy'." [p.5]
These all took time and all was in accord with this new "...unconscious pursuit of realism."

This then leads to a quick sketch by Mackie of what a 'new monarchy' might mean especially in relation to previous notions of medieval kings and princes.

These are just close notes I gathered from the first five pages of the first chapter in JD Mackie's 1957 corrected version of the 1952 edition of The Earlier Tudors 1485-1558. This of course was Mackie's installment of the massive collection of fourteen books then scheduled to be produced by Oxford then, called The Oxford History of England , which was edited by GN Clark. This edition of that, incidentally is a former library book from a Mt St Mary's Convent in Dodge City, Kansas. I bought it used in 2015.from a fabulous guy. He's a Greek-American migrant who has run the same bookshop in Wichita for at least thirty years. The book's in excellent shape.


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Thursday, September 24, 2015

In The Siege of Novara; Pietro Bembo Recalls September 1495

Summer turned to fall and the siege at Novara wore on. This siege by the Italian allies was advancing, while the bulk of French troops remained near Asti, to the west of Novara. There had been a number of setbacks for the French through the summer. Naples was rocked by revolts, the Italian allies in battle near Fornovo had forced the French to remain south of the Po, the troops and galleys stationed at Genoa had been forced to flee there, and the siege on Louis the Duke of Orleans at Novara was faltering. Baggage trains had been seized, the troops had little left to eat but bad grain and water, and a mysterious disease - probably syphillis - had begun afflicting everyone.

It was a decisive moment. Would the French stay or would they at last leave? Years later, the official historian for Venice, Pietro Bembo, would carefully tell the tale of the Battle of Fornovo as a Venetian victory saving Italy from the advances and scourges of the powerful French. Allowed access to Venetian state archives, Bembo could detail the benefices made to those actors and their heirs, as rewards to those who made this victory possible. But afterwards, as the Duke of Orleans was stuck under siege at Novara and the King and his massive army awaiting to the west, Bembo could instead paint the French as weakened, and poorly provisioned, their courage cooled.
"Meanwhile the king entered Asti a week after the battle [near Fornovo, 6July] and there called a halt to his retreat, his army worn out not only from fear and the effort of the march, but also from a certain want of supplies. For while the French are of almost all mankind the readiest and bravest at engaging in close combat and joining battle, yet their spirit is surprisingly weak and yielding when it comes to enduring more protracted labors and tolerating hunger, and in a short while all that fierce and ardent courage grows faint and cool." [p. 155]
A few days later, Bembo continues, messages came out of the French camp. Sent far and wide, they announced that all 'Venetians, Milanes and Genoese' were expelled form France and all Lombard lands, or those held by the French King Charles VIII. When Ludovico Sforza of Milan took his troops and allies in order to besiege Novara that summer, Bembo tells us, it was the Venetians that 'almost always got the better of them in the skirmishes'. After the fixed plan was agreed on to besiege the town with Louis and his 8000 cavalry and footsoldiers in it, Bembo says, they
"... began to suffer from a dearth of grain and supplies, which they had not given thought to before the enemies' arrival. The king's cavalrymen were secretly sent to them with pack-animals carrying grain, but were often intercepted by [Bernardo] Contarini, and those that had come from the town to help the cavalry were frequently killed and routed along with them." [p. 157]
The King then sent out word to gather fresh French and Swiss troops. Bembo tells us that the king's wife wrote back saying there were no more men willing to go over the Alps. This stands in stark contrast with matters just a year before. This wife of Charles, Anne of Brittany, though all of eighteen years old, had previously been married to Maximillian King of the Romans. She was essentially captured by Charles in 1491 and then married when Charles took the city of Rennes in a battle with Max. As the legal inheritor of Brittany, and in this context, when she married Charles, she brought her own army with her. The literature surrounding her is rich and varies over the last 200 years.

Bembo also reports that a hundred Germans and a hundred Swiss both joined the Venetians then because the king could not pay them. This also serves as a reminder that there were still cadres of armed soldiers from various places, marching off again to still more places, as a result of these wars in Italy. All this for a better price.
"The Venetians then burnt down the outlying buildings and moved their siege artillery closer.... As each day passed, then, the besieged Frenchmen were increasingly hard pressed by their total lack of resources, to the extent that they were compelled to eat their own horses. Many of them died through eating flour or bran bread that had been spoiled, and by drinking water, which the French and Germans are quite unaccustomed to." [p.157]
 It became increasingly difficult for Louis inside Novara to communicate at all with the King who was just down the road. Messengers and middlemen were stopped, captured, killed. When Louis complained of him being misled and abandoned, and again about lack of resources that now could last only a few days more, Charles at last sued for peace.
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quotes and pagination from Bembo, Pietro: History of Venice; edited and translated by Robert W Ulery, Jr.; in english and latin, The I Tatti Renaissance Library; The President and Fellows of Harvard College, USA 2007
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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Letters from Rome To Florence: Savonarola Must Stop; September 1495

In later September 1495, a letter was sent from Rome to the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce in Florence. The letter spoke of schisms and heresies and a certain Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican Friar then preaching that a 'New Jerusalem' was dawning in Florence. This formerly 'unattractive' cleric had found himself that year in the center of Florentine politics, and an adversary of sorts to Rome and the current pope, Alexander VI.

The letter itself, author Lauro Martines tells us, was penned by a 'clerk in the papal bureaucracy', Bartolomeo Floridi who, 'afterwards became a well-known forger'. But this letter took an extra long time to get to Florence, Martines assures us, dated on September 8. Whether by the writer's inability to deliver it to the right place, the Franciscan hesitation (or decisions) upon its delivery to them, or whatever methods used to ascertain its veracity, the whole city found out about it. And so did Savonarola. And he responded as well.

Previously, in July, Savonarola had received an invitation to come to Rome and visit with the pope. The Friar in the letter dated 31 July, complained of his ailments and the potential threats to the City or to himself, if he were to travel to Rome. This exchange came after the Battle of Fornovo and the slow retreat of the French train that summer of tired, hungry soldiers into the far reaches of northwestern Italy, near Asti. With the French out of the way for now, this Borgia pope, Alexander VI, found time to send a rebuking brief to this source of madness that came through the preaching of various heresies.

Friar Savonarola had been a popular preacher in Florence for some time. He had been preaching for the coming of the French King to Italy and against this Spanish-born Pope, also for quite awhile. He had allies and adherents, critics and enemies. He preached against the de'Medici, saw them deposed, he preached for the French King to come to Italy and save them all, and he did, and he preached against the wealth and depravities of Rome. His story and Florence's love affair with this extremely popular preacher, takes some time to explain. But for now, the reception of this letter set the city off, once again.

Savonarola had to stop preaching, the letter said, an official inquiry was to be set up by Sebastiano Maggi - the Friar's former mentor and confessor - and, most significantly, his monastery enclave San Marco in Florence would be reunited under the see of the Lombard Congregation whose centers lay outside the city. This would make these Lombard overseers Friar Savonarola's new bosses and his behavior and person placed under their jurisdiction. Savonarola's chief advisers were also to be removed from the city and sent to Bologna, and then, to separate sees in the Lombard Congregation, and outside Florentine territory.

Savonarola's reply is immediate, Martines says, using a concise, step by step rebuttal. He addressed his prophecies, his individual talks with God, the slurs about his supposed errors in judgement. He asserted that the pope was misled by dishonest men and that there were ten thousand in Florence that could attest to his orthodoxy and his personal recititude. He restates his reasons for not going to Rome and makes further claim that he could not leave his convent without an armed guard. The Vicar General of the Lombard Congregation amd his friars, his new bosses, he thought to be 'most suspect'. Friar Savonarola equated his personal safety with that of the entire City of Florence, since if he were to leave and his enemies captured him, then tyranny would ensue there. But if the pope sent someone who could question and point out his inaccuracies, he would recant, both in private and in public, and in front of everyone.

Savonarola would continue to preach and seek to 'renew' the church and thereby make Florence a 'New Jerusalem'. And while he would fail in that, he managed to open up discussion in the greater populations in how to and not to reform the church. Meanwhile, Florence would remain in the midst of another revolution even after the French left Italy.
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pp. 127-9; Martines, Lauro:  Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence Oxford University Press, Inc.,NY 2006


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Wednesday, September 16, 2015

news bits mid September 2015

Migrants and refugees are still stuck in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe looking for a way to continue and survive.

Civil war in Yemen continues.
Of course war continues in Syria.
______________________________________________________________ It was seven long years ago that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
The world waits for the Federal Reserve Board meeting to see if they will raise the benchmark for lending interest rates for US banks. For the first time in nine years they may actually do it.
As example of the far-reaching consequences of austere fiscal policies, in Japan, they are cutting social science expenditures.
With longstanding benchmark lending rates at zero, state governments in the US have not been able to keep pace with expenditures. Kansas, due to its own failure to spend money and consequent credit downgrade and their tax cuts for the wealthiest contributors, is now seeing hospital closures in addition to school closures amid further budget cuts.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Letter 19: Alessandra Strozzi On Death of Cosimo de' Medici: Sptember 15, 1464

In the summer of 1464 Cosimo de'Medici died. The ramifications would be felt across Italy and beyond. But in those days, for a family exiled by the Medicean powers, a family of Florence, when the enemy's patron died, the hopes for a return could be raised again. In a few deft sentences Alessandra Strozzi gave her son a brief but hopeful snapshot of the mood she sensed in the days after the death of such an important man.
"There's no doubt that this death has given many of the citizens some new ideas about how the land should be governed, but so far nothing much has been heard, partly because it's so recent and partly because Dietisalvi has been sick. I haven't heard anything except that they are expecting to enjoy themselves."

This letter is dated September 15, 1464 and Cosimo died on the first of August. According to our translator's notes, Dietisalvi's last name was Neroni and had previously been a supporter of Cosimo. In time he would lead an opposition against Cosimo's son Piero. Dietisalvi, our translator tells us, would be exiled in 1466. Gregory also notes, it was the opponents of Piero that were the ones 'enjoying themselves.'

The very next thing Alessandra Strozzi mentions in the letter to her son is her son's concerns.
"So far as your affairs are concerned and those of others in your position, it's not being discussed, so you've done the right thing not to write to anyone about it.. There was no need for me to stay in Florence on that account, because I would have been looking the plague in the face while a good twenty people were dying of it a day."
Alessandra's son Filippo was a banker working in Naples in competition to the Medici banking interests. To whatever degree Filippo was or was not involved in these things, this matter, of course was about politics and power as well. In Naples, in Florence, to competitors and supporters all this information would be worked over and every possible outcome and course of action needed to be discussed and held close. Until the right moment. Alessandra understood all this and thus her prudent advice.
But her admission that she was not in Florence with all this going on may show she was merely not in any loop of communication. It was common for the wealthy to retire in the summer heat to country homes and avoid the disease that could still ravage a city. The plague had many reoccurrences in these decades. It was also common to receive guests while being a guest at a friends' house. This is how Alessandra comes to conclude people weren't talking about these weighty issues in the late summer of 1464.
"If I'd heard the slightest hint of a discussion of this matter, but no one mentioned it. The citizens are in the country because of the plague, and no one feels like discussing it much. But by All Saints' or therabouts we should hear something."
She tells him not to worry about her or how people on her end of matters will deal with things. She seems almost too insistent not to worry about her.
"You needn't doubt that when we hear something we'll talk to whoever, wherever we need to, and we won't fail to make use of our friends and relations, either from lack of money or from not wanting to, and we won't forget anything. But first we're waiting to hear what's being said about it and to get some idea what those in charge might be thinking.... Dietislavi has been sick ... and doesn't carry too much weight. Your Messer A isn't as well placed as you think he is...".
In a careful warning, she tells her son the supposed leaders may not be so. But she remains hopeful about the political system in Florence noting the 'good Signoria', 'experienced priors' and a seemingly weak man currently stationed as Gonfalonier of Justice. By this time both of these had become relatively weak institutions, corrupted by money. This seems for Alessandra not such a bad thing if they have to wait longer for a decision. She encouraged Filippo to be in contact with Giovanni Bonsi and Tomasso Davizzi.
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from pp. 119-21, translated with notes by Heather Gregory: Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi : Bilingual Edition, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997
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Death of a Knight In Forli: August 27, 1495

In the Medici Archive of the Florence State Archives, Elizabeth Lev tells us there is a letter from the Florentine ambassador Puccio Pucci. In it he warns that Caterina Sforza Countess of Forli would send her children, her allies, and her possessions to the grave, her soul to hell and her state to the Turk, before she would give up her knight Giacomo Feo. This position on her part was seen as a liability for many actors across Italy in 1495. The man himself came from no family, he had no interests backing him and no outside loyalties to anyone that the Countess did not control. Common culture of the time discerned that this was the kind of man no one else could trust.

In 1495 young Ottaviano Riario, Caterina's son turned sixteen and thus came of age to inherit his father's etstates. Antonio Ordelaffi is listed as the antagonist who set the Orciolo and Marcobelli families to revolt. That uprising was crushed says Lev, but Feo put the city of Forli on lock down and no one was allowed in or out except on Giacomo's approval.

A teenage Ottaviano was said to vent an impassioned plea at Giacomo for his minority position regarding the young husband of his mother and was slapped into silence by Feo. A plot was hatched by a guard captain within Forli. Giovanni Antonio Ghetti is listed as the trusted captain that set some retainers against Giacomo Feo. Ghetti's wife Rosa, was Caterina' favorite lady in waiting. Lev says this woman and her husband knew the dangerous devotion Caterina had for her knight. A family member to Ghetti, Domenico joined them with a couple priests. One of these, Antonio Pavagliotta needed money for his mistress and three children in order to join them. The other, Lev says, wanted to tender favor with the powerful Cardinal Riario.

Caterina, the children and Giacomo had gone on a picnic outside Forli on August 27, 1495. It was a nice day, they went on a hunt and then ate. On the way back, they were so happy with the day, they were singing. They crossed the bridge with Giacomo and Ottaviano behind the Countess and the youngest in a carriage. When Caterina crossed the gate, the trusted captain Ghetti stepped forward in front of Giacomo on horseback. They greeted merrily and Ghetti's allies closed in behind Giacomo Feo and stabbed him in the back. He fell into the arms of his assailants. Caterina instantly knew what was happening, jumped out of the carriage onto a horse and raced for the fortress. Young Ottaviano and Cesare rushed to the home of a nearby nobeleman, Paolo Denti.

Ghetti and the clerics went into the town's piazza calling out the names Caterina and Ottaviano, claiming to have destroyed the traitor Feo. They claimed to have liberated the town from the usurping tyrant. Caterina's chief of police came out to see the bloodied killers Ghetti and the clerics. He returned to the fortress Ravaldino only to come back again with a number of guards to arrest Ghetti and his conspirators. The culprits struggled free and escaped into the crowd and then the town. But then a reward was announced. One hundred ducats to whoever captured Ghetti or the conspirators, dead or alive. It only took a few days at most for them to be found and cut down.
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from pp 178-82 by Elizabeth Lev, The Tigress of Forli: Renaissance Italy's most courageous and notorious countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de'Medici : 2011, USA, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing Company
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Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Giacomo Baraballo, 'arch-poet', Sept 1513: In Pope Leo X's Court

Leo X, that younger de' Medici pope in the years 1513-21, had a great fondness for the arts. Silvio A. Bedini delightfully gives a number of examples of this in his 1997 book The Pope's Elephant. A quick look begins here.
"A new era in arts and letters was dawning in Rome with the reign of Pope Leo X. Humanists achieved greater influence in his time, and rhetoric was idolized at the court to such a degree that it led to a new form of entertainment, featuring disputations and literary contests.... 
The pope particularly loved music and his household accounts record numerous payments for the purchase of instruments and the service of musicians.... he used his gardens as settings for banquets and concerts....
In addition to his affinity for the arts, the pope demonstrated a great love of buffoonery. Historians have claimed that this pleasure in vulgarity, which was not prevalent in royal courts of the period, derived from Florentine taste and custom." [pp. 88-9]
Some commenters, Bedini relates (and Domenico Gnoli detailed), thought these entertainments came about because of the lack of ladies at the papal court, allowing for 'greater license and grosser expression'. Others say the pope was combatting melancholy due to the stresses of the job and his physical frailties. Leo was said to pay a lot to those who could amuse him.

Perhaps the greatest of the buffoons was Fra Mariano of the Fetti line, from Florence. Another was the Abbot of Gaeta, one Giacomo Baraballo, also from Florence. Bedini explains that when Pope Leo was confirmed, Baraballo hurried to Rome where he was "... duly registered among the scutiferi or shield-bearers."
"Perhaps the most memorable entertainment of the period took place at the conferring of Roman citizenship upon Leo's brother, Giuliano de' Medici, in September 1513. For the occasion a great wooden theater in the classical style was erected on the Campidoglio and decorated with paintings by the major artists in Rome. One of the featured events was the reading of poetry and recitation of the Penulo of Plautus. Seventy-two poets were convened to comment on a poem entitled Epulum by Simone Seculo; notable among them was the Abbot of Gaeta, who signed himself modestly 'Baraballo, arch-poet'." [p.91]
Fra Mariano himself had even described this act of Baraballo as that of  "... a prince and inventor of a new madness." Apparently, the new Pope had such a good time with this, and since the patron saints of his family were the paired Saints Cosmo and Damiano, Leo X decided to have a festival every year in this manner, and in those saints' honor in Rome. The Abbot Baraballo was to play a central role in this, the following year as well, in 1514. But that time he would sit atop the prized white elephant that the pope kept for his entertainment. This elephant is the focus in this, Bedini's extensively detailed work.
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Silvio A Bedini: The Pope's Elephant; Penguin Books, NY, NY 2000

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news bits early Sept2015

Current news this early September seems split between the massive refugee crisis in Europe and, in the US, with whatever Donald Trump is saying. Yesterday was also International Literacy Day. So, here are some other things.

Editors from The Nation say the US' wars in the Mid-East is the prime source of this refugee crisis.

Of course the wars are not over. After months of bombing Yemen, Saudi Arabia admits the UN to deliver aid there. 4 min audio

The White House Press Corp made a little video combatting the negative opinions of former Vice-President Dick Cheny regarding the current negotiated deal with Iran limiting the production of nuclear materials. They called it 'Wrong then, Wrong Now'. 2:30 minute video

A report compiled by a former Clinton-era economist shows that over the last 30-40 years, real wages and savings declined most considerably under President George W Bush, last decade. Article by Phillip Inman for the guardian.

In Baltimore, MD, a settlement for $6.4 million was accepted by the family for the wrongful death of Freddie Gray.

In competition for the US Open Tennis Championship, Serena and Venus Williams squared off.

Long-time Pew Research pollster and broadcaster Andrew Kohut dies at 73.

Archaeologists find yaupon holly, a cacao-based cousin to yerba mate in pottery remnants in the American southwest. This plant which was indigenous to the American southeast can thus be recognized as a caffeinated drink used ritually and traded over longer distances than was previously thought, 1000 years ago.

The 400th anniversary of the publication of the second part of Cervantes' Don Quixote gets celebrated. 8 min audio

Pope Francis, in an interesting commentary, gets noticed for encyclical on climate change and tieing this notion to liberation theology. That these ideas relate, are in fact, strongly related, that it comes from a 'South American pope', and that many liberals around the world would rather not see the associations reveal much about today's biases. This links the encyclical in English.

Among the photos sent back from the Pluto flyby last month includes this one of some gleaming material on dwarf-planet Ceres.
Today also marked the death of James IV King of Scotland in 1513, on Flodden Field. He was the last monarch of the entire UK who was killed in battle,
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Friday, September 4, 2015

brief footnotes for Lev, detailing Giacomo Feo's demise

This is just a few notes detailing footnoted sources for Elizabeth Lev's book on Caterina Sforza regarding the assassination of Giacomo Feo in Forli, Italy some 520 years ago.

The circumstances of his death are drawn from the respective Chronache Forlivesi of both Andrea Bernardi and Leone Cobelli.
Bernardi: vol 1, A2, p.98
Cobelli: p.394

The likely prior animosities, and prelude to this incident are linked to the Pre-Principality Medici Archives in the Florence State Archives - filza 54 c. 165

The description of the honorary procession into the Forli market square the day after the murder probably came from Leone Cobelli.

The resulting actions, reprisals, and fallout come also from Cobelli, p. 384 and the Milan State Archives. Thses were reprinted in Pier Desiderio Pasolini's Caterina Sforza in 3 volumes, Rome: Loescher, 1893. Lev supplies her own translations of quotations of this material.
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from Elizabeth Lev, The Tigress of Forli: Renaissance Italy's most courageous and notorious countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de'Medici : 2011, USA, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing Company
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