Pazzi Conspiracy

Della Rovere Famiglia

Sixtus IV's family, the della Rovere, was from Liguria (near Genoa, on the coast) and was of only local importance. It was Francesco who elevated the family; indeed, it was just this sort of career that was a standard rags-to-riches (well, not exactly rags) that was well known in the late Middle Ages. Bright son makes bishop or abbot or cardinal, and makes the fortune of the whole family.

Girolamo Riario, Count of Imola

One of the chief conspirators. One of Sixtus' fifteen nephews, he was the one for whom the pope acquired the town of Imola. When the Medici opposed this, Girolamo became their bitter enemy.

Cardinal Raffaele Sansoni Riario

Raffaele was a grand-nephew of Pope Sixtus and was all of seventeen years old at the time of the conspiracy, a newly-minted cardinal. He had been sent to the University of Pisa to study law and was intended to be another who would make the family's fortunes with a great career in the Church. He was a success, too; he held sixteen archbishoprics in his lifetime.

That was all in the future, however. In the matter of the Pazzi Conspiracy, he was an innocent tool. He had no knowledge of the conspiracy but was manipulated by the conspirators to be in Florence and at the Palazzo de' Medici when the plot culminated.