He had conceived, perhaps, that one pope must
be as supine as another, and that Paul III would prove no more redoubtable
than Clement VIII. To his bitter cost did he discover his mistake. Beyond
the Po he was surprised by the Pontifical army under Ferrante Orsini, and
there his force was cut to pieces.
My father himself escaped and with him some other gentlemen of Piacenza,
notably one of the scions of the great house of Pallavicini, who took a
wound in the leg which left him lame for life, so that ever after he was
known as Pallavicini il Zopo.
They were all under the pope's ban, outlaws with a price upon the head of
each, hunted and harried from State to State by the papal emissaries, so
that my father never more dared set foot in Mondolfo, or, indeed, within
the State of Piacenza, which had been rudely punished for the
insubordination it had permitted to be reared upon its soil.
And Mondolfo went near to suffering confiscation. Assuredly it would have
suffered it but for the influence exerted on my mother's and my own behalf
by her brother, the powerful Cardinal of San Paulo in Carcere, seconded by
that guelphic cousin of my father's, Cosimo d'Anguissola, who, after me,
was heir to Mondolfo, and had, therefore, good reason not to see it
confiscated to the Holy See.
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