The Venetians had the same success on the eastern frontier of the duchy.

Milan and Cremona alone remained to be occupied.

Ludovic Sforza "appeared before his troops and his people like the very spirit of lethargy," says a contemporary unpublished chronicle, "with his head bent down to the earth, and for a long while he remained thus pensive and without a single word to say.

Howbeit he was not so discomfited but that on that very same day he could get his luggage packed, his transport-train under orders, his horses shod, his ducats, with which he had more than thirty mules laden, put by, and, in short, everything in readiness to decamp next morning as early as possible." Just as he left Milan, he said to the Venetian ambassadors, "You have brought the King of France to dinner with me; I warn you that he will come to supper with you." "Unless necessity constrain him thereto," says Machiavelli [treatise Du Prince, ch.

xxi.], "a prince ought never to form alliance with one stronger than himself in order to attack others, for, the most powerful being victor, thou remainest, thyself, at his discretion, and princes ought to avoid, as much as ever they can, being at another's discretion.
The Venetians allied themselves with France against the Duke of Milan; and yet they might have avoided this alliance, which entailed their ruin." For all his great and profound intellect, Machiavelli was wrong about this event and the actors in it.