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his humanity reduced, brought down to a single image of cuckoldry and loss.
    His nature had always tended to the obsessive and in this period of loneliness the tendency became more pronounced, his studies were not so much a solace to him as a quest for encoded meanings. He was occupied with the relations between the Republic of Perugia and the Papacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and more particularly with the rise of the Baglioni family of Perugia, a story marked throughout by the extremest forms of rapacity and violence.
    At ease in his small room, with the ancient radiator creaking and occasionally uttering soft hisses, and the smoke from his cigarettes rising up toward the ceiling, he was considering the murder of Biordo Michelotti by the Guidalotti family in March of 1398, an event which for complex reasons had started the Baglioni on their road to power. He was seeking to establish some degree of complicity in this murder, or at least prior knowledge of it, on the part of the pope of the time, Boniface IX.
    An impressive figure, Michelotti, soldier and politician both.One of the most gifted commanders in the history of Perugia. In effect he had been the first ruler of the city, though far too prudent to adopt official titles. Prudent he had been, yes, but not able—as no man of his time was able—to see any real distinction between the fortunes of the city and his own. He had dreamed of recovering for Perugia, and so for himself, those former territories which had ensured the Republic her wealth and power. And he had gone a long way toward succeeding: in a series of brilliant campaigns, he had taken Assisi, Castiglione del Lago, La Fratta and Montalto and subjected them to the Comune of Perugia.
    Such a degree of success brought danger. These were territories that lay within the zone of papal expansion. There was evidence enough that Boniface had begun to find this gifted adventurer an obstacle to his plans.
    The leader of the conspiracy, Francesco Guidalotti, was a churchman, Abbot of San Pietro. He had been in Rome in the December of the previous year, only some three months before the murder. Monti had not yet succeeded in unearthing any definite indications of a papal audience, but this must have presumably been the purpose of Guidalotti’s visit. The chronicles asserted that he had been promised a cardinal’s hat.
    With an intensity that gathered and grew in that small room, amid the complaints of the antiquated plumbing, Monti began to run over again in his mind the events of that distant morning. Michelotti, only five months married, still in his bedchamber. The abbot arrives, accompanied by his two brothers Anibaldo and Giovanni. They ask to speak with Michelotti on a matter of great importance. He gets up from his bed, dresses, and without arminghimself, goes out to greet them in the room where they are waiting.
Why so trusting?
This was a tried and experienced soldier, a man accustomed from early youth to the practice of arms. Moreover, he was a man of shrewd judgment, passionate perhaps, but not rash—all his career went to show this. Was it that he trusted in the gratitude of the Guidalotti? They had been expelled once from the city for conspiring against him and in his generosity of spirit he had pardoned them, allowed them to return. Those we have pardoned do we always underrate? Did he not know, this man of affairs, that where there is hatred it can only be increased by favors?
    He had walked into the room where they waited. He had embraced Francesco in greeting, and while the abbot held him in the embrace, the two others attacked him from behind, stabbing him repeatedly with their poisoned daggers, first in the back and then, when he fell, in the chest and throat.
    Monti stirred and sighed. It had been a deed of appalling treachery and cowardice, and momentous in its results, bringing back the noble families Michelotti had exiled, the violent and ambitious clan of the Baglioni among them.