Note 41 — Chapter I · —How the King of France cajoled the English after the Duke of Burgundy’s Death, for fear they should have interrupted him in the Conquest of the Territories belonging to the said Duke.—1477.

Sixtus IV., previously called Francesco da Savona, or Della Rovere, was the son of a fisherman. By his talents he became general of the Franciscan order, and afterwards Cardinal. He was elected Pope on the 9th of August, 1471. “He was the first,” says Machiavelli, “who began to show how far a pope might go, and how much that which was previously regarded as sinful lost its iniquity when committed by a pontiff.” He died on the 13th of August, 1484, in the seventy-first year of his age.