How the association of learning and political crime 
     came about is shown by Villari as follows:

          “Those were days in which every Italian seemed a 
     born diplomatist: the merchant, the man of letters, the 
     captain of adventures, knew how to address and 
     discourse with kings and emperors, duly observing all 
     conventional forms, . . . The dispatches of our 
     ambassadors were among the chief historical and literary 
     monuments of those times. . . . 
          “It was then that adventurers, immovable by 
     threats, prayers or pity, were sure to yield to the verses of 
     a learned man. Lorenzo de’ Medici went to Naples, and by 
     force of argument persuaded Ferrante d’Aragona to put 
     an end to the war and conclude an alliance with him. 
     Alfonso the Magnanimous, a prisoner of Filippo Maria