Besides, in such an hour as this, the consciousness of the danger in which he stood by virtue of the Pope's death and his own most inopportune sickness, which disabled him from taking action to make his future secure, must have concerned him to the exclusion of all else.
Meanwhile, however, Rome was quiet, held so in the iron grip of Michele da Corella and the ducal troops.

The Pope's death was being kept secret for the moment, and was not announced to the people until nightfall, by when Corella had carried out his master's orders, including the seizure of the Pope's treasure.

And Burchard tells us how some of Valentinois's men entered the Vatican--all the gates of which were held by the ducal troops--and, seizing Cardinal Casanova, they demanded, with a dagger at his throat and a threat to fling his corpse from the windows if he refused them, the Pope's keys.

These the cardinal surrendered, and Corella possessed himself of plate and jewels to the value of some 200,000 ducats, besides two caskets containing about 100,000 ducats in gold.

Thereafter the servants of the palace completed the pillage by ransacking the wardrobes and taking all they could find, so that nothing was left in the papal apartments but the chairs, a few cushions, and the tapestries of the walls.
All his life Alexander had been the victim of the most ribald calumnies.
Stories had ever sprung up and thriven, like ill weeds, about his name and reputation.