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tors in it taken and beheaded, among whom were Tommaso
Lupacci and Lambertuccio Frescobaldi. This defeat caused
the Florentines great anxiety, and despairing of preserving
their liberty, they sent envoys to King Ruberto of Naples,
offering him the dominion of their city; and he, knowing of
what immense importance the maintenance of the Guelph
cause was to him, accepted it. He agreed with the Floren-
tines to receive from them a yearly tribute of two hundred
thousand florins, and he send his son Carlo to Florence with
four thousand horsemen.
Shortly after this the Florentines were relieved in some
degree of the pressure of Castruccio’s army, owing to his
being compelled to leave his positions before Florence and
march on Pisa, in order to suppress a conspiracy that had
been raised against him by Benedetto Lanfranchi, one of
the first men in Pisa, who could not endure that his father-
land should be under the dominion of the Lucchese. He had
formed this conspiracy, intending to seize the citadel, kill
the partisans of Castruccio, and drive out the garrison. As,
however, in a conspiracy paucity of numbers is essential to
secrecy, so for its execution a few are not sufficient, and in
seeking more adherents to his conspiracy Lanfranchi en-
countered a person who revealed the design to Castruccio.
This betrayal cannot be passed by without severe reproach
to Bonifacio Cerchi and Giovanni Guidi, two Florentine
exiles who were suffering their banishment in Pisa. There-
upon Castruccio seized Benedetto and put him to death,
and beheaded many other noble citizens, and drove their
families into exile. It now appeared to Castruccio that both

1 0 The Prince