the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli thought
indispensable to a successful despot. Son after son, brother with
brother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel in
peace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in all
transactions that could not be settled by the sword. Want of union,
with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble
families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty.
Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and
transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in
their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the
perfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, no
standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family.
Therefore the ablest Malatesta for the moment clutched what he could
of the domains that owned his house for masters. Partitions among sons
or brothers, mutually hostile and suspicious, weakened the whole
stock. Yet they were great enough to hold their own for centuries
among the many tyrants who infested Lombardy. That the other princely
families of Romagna, Emilia, and the March were in the same state of
internal discord and dismemberment, was probably one reason why the
Malatesti stood their ground so firmly as they did.

So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated in
Sigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti's general, the
perfidious Pandolfo. It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the
despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair
view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who
remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the
greatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of
the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance. To enumerate the
crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family,
mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci
credible, would violate the decenci