Note *147 — Chapter IX

It is perhaps needless to assert the partiality of this verdict on the life and character of Sigismondo Malatesta. That, after a considerable study of all the available sources of his life and times, I have come to a very different conclusion regarding him, it is perhaps not altogether egotistical to point out. If I send the reader, then, to my own work on this extraordinary man (Sigismondo Malatesta, by Edward Hutton, Dent, 1906), it is that there is no other work concerned with him in the English language. As for Dennistoun, most of what he says, even though it were just in its conclusions, is inaccurate in detail. To begin with, Sigismondo was only "detested" by his enemies; the people of Rimini appear to have loved him, supporting him in his troubles, and loyally standing by his wife Isotta after his death. His bravery is sufficiently proved by a thousand encounters, notably that (described at page 150 of my book) when he outwitted his captors and spent the whole night in a marsh up to his neck in water; or that in which he set out to kill the Pope in the Vatican, and would have done so but that he found him surrounded by cardinals, armed. That his domestic morals were bad, "even in that age of laxity," I am not eager to deny; but no single crime of this sort laid at his door, chiefly by his bitterest enemy Pio II., who in his relations with Sigismondo always seems least himself, can be proved—I have tried to prove them—and all can be very easily denied. As for his three wives, which, according to Dennistoun, he "sacrificed to jealousy or vengeance," it will be sufficient to say that the first Madonna Ginevra d'Este appears to have died of fever at Villa Scolca while Sigismondo was besieging Forlimpopoli, and in any case the d'Este remained his close friends after her death. Neither Clementini (op. cit.) nor Battaglini (op. cit.) nor Broglio, in his unpublished life, know anything of the supposed murder, which, so far as I know, was first laid at Sigismondo's door by Pio II., who hated him for his treachery to Siena. Sigismondo's second wife was Madonna Polissena, daughter of Francesco Sforza. Again, when she died of plague in Rimini, Sigismondo was absent in Lombardy. (Cf. Clementini, op. cit. II., 363, who accuses Pio II. of this second libel also.) As for his third wife Isotta, who had been his mistress, she outlived him, and was killed at last, as is supposed, by her stepson Roberto, in the service of Pope Paul II., who coveted Rimini, and would have had it but that Roberto outwitted him. What motive Sigismondo can have had in murdering his two wives, both daughters of powerful houses, does not appear. To Dennistoun "the sole redeeming trait" in his character was his love of Isotta; but we, less strict perhaps than in middle Victorian times, shall always love and honour him as one of the earliest and most sincere of Italian humanists and patrons of learning and art, a true lover of beauty and a protector of scholars and poets. As for the "deification of his paramour" (p. 194), I do not know what it means; but if it refers to the "Divine" Isotta, it was a common mode of address in that age: and for the decoration of the Tempio, they are not pagan gods (alas!), but the planets we see there; they illustrate a poem Sigismondo wrote in his youth. Dennistoun (note, p. 194) insists that Sigismondo had three wives before Isotta, though Sismondi would have put him right there. He has been misled probably by an early betrothal of Sigismondo to the daughter of Carmagnuola, who, on her father's execution by the Venetians, was repudiated.