By your leave, all shall be stripped away.

The grime shall be removed and the foulness of inference, of surmise, of deliberate and cold-blooded malice, with which centuries of scribblers, idle, fantastic, sensational, or venal, have coated the substance of known facts.
But the grime shall be preserved and analysed side by side with the actual substance, that you may judge if out of zeal to remove the former any of the latter shall have been included in the scraping.
The author expresses his indebtedness to the following works which, amongst others, have been studied for the purposes of the present history: Alvisi, Odoardo, Cesare Borgia, Duca di Romagna.

Imola, 1878.
Auton, Jean d', Chroniques de Louis XII (Soc.

de l'Hist.

de France).
Paris, 1889.
Baldi, Bernardino, Della Vita e Fatti di Guidobaldo.