Revenge For The Death of a Knight, later 1495

A reward for Giovanni Ghetti and the killers of Giacomo Feo was proclaimed by the chief of police in Forli. At first they escaped but soon they would be captured, killed and other conspirators found, tortured, and publicly reviled and shunned as the worst of examples. This was Caterina Sforza's revenge for the killing of her chosen knight, captain at arms and lover Giacomo Feo in the late summer of 1495. Her brutal fury and consistent penchant for violence would mark her actions over the next few years.

Giovanni Antonio Ghetti was found by citizens in the cemetery of Santa Croce where his head was split down to his teeth. He had long been a trusted servant in Caterina's court along with his wife Rosa, a trusted lady in attendance. She was found that night in the castle named il Ravaldino and she and her children were thrown down the well. The last of the Ghetti children, a five year old son, was found a few days later and his throat was slit.

Ghetti had been the guard five years earlier who had captured Tomasso Feo at the castle. Now, she recalled him, the older brother of her lover, and ordered him to burn down Ghetti's home. Foes of the slain Giacomo were rounded up and killed or jailed. More homes of co-conspirators like the Marcobelli, or Orcioli and even suspected foes were burned. An entire neighborhood of Forli was sacked. 

Eventually the priest Domenico da Bagnacavallo was captured and brought to il Ravaldino and tortured there to give up the names of the conspirators. He confessed that Cardinal Riario and her own son Ottaviano had agreed to the Feo assassination.

The priest was stripped and beaten in the town's center square and then dragged all over the city, brought back to the square and beaten, stabbed and then dismembered. A couple days after the funeral she sent a guard to gather her son from the nobleman Paolo Denti. He relased Ottaviano under protest in the wake of Caterina's cruelty. A crowd went with Ottaviano as the city's rightful heir. She refused an audience until he submitted to her demand that he enter solely and under guard. 

Italy filled up through the winter with stories of how Caterina Sforza treated her own children and her townspeople. Ottaviano was under house arrest and his step-brother, Scipione Riario a central part of these closed door negotiations, spent eighteen months in the dungeon. The mistress of Antonio Pavagliotta was captured with her children and they were killed. The other priest was found outside Ravenna, brought back and burnt over hot coals in the square on a market day, and then beheaded. The bodies of the assassins hung outside the castle walls, and their heads hung from the bell tower for almost a year and a half. 

Leone Cobelli the contemporary chronicler listed thirty-eight people killed in these reprisals with many others tortured, exiled or imprisoned. Cardinal Sforza wrote il Moro, Ludovico, and the letter ended up in the Milan State Archive. He wrote to his brother, the duke of Milan to describe how horrified the pope was at their niece's blood-thirsty passion. All this after a year of war up and down Italy. [pp.182-86]

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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