Note 51 — 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.

Giacopo de Pazzi was the head of the family of that name, and at the time of this conspiracy was far advanced in years. He escaped from the city during the tumult; but on the following day he was made prisoner by the peasants of Romagna, who, regardless of his entreaties to put him to death, brought him to Florence, and delivered him up to the magistrates. He was immediately hanged from the palace windows; but, in consideration of his rank, his relatives were allowed to inter his body in the church of Santa Croce. “But,” says Machiavelli (p. 363), “as if to mark the event by some extraordinary circumstance, after having been laid in the tomb of his ancestors, he was disinterred like an excommunicated person, and thrown into a hole outside the city walls: from this grave he was taken, and with the halter in which he had been hanged, his body was dragged naked through the city, and, as if unfit for sepulture on earth, was thrown by the populace into the Arno, whose waters were then very high.” Such was the fate of a man who had enjoyed the highest honours of the republic, and for his services to the state had been rewarded with the privileges of equestrian rank.