638 JF. Miller should submit to him. Delfico thinks that this article remained a dead letter/ as there are no traces of a foreign garrison on Monte Titano in the next few years ; but Albornoz made a demand for the payment of certain arrears due to the bishopric of Montefeltro, which was satisfactorily disposed of, thanks to the intervention of the ever- friendly counts. We hear, however, of fresh claims by the bishop of Montefeltro, which were not more successful than the others, and in 1368 that prelate visited San Marino, and protested that he claimed to exercise no temporal authority there. An even clearer proof of San Marino's independence is to be found in the account of the place and its government in the Dcscriptio of the province of Ro- magna, drawn up in 1 3 7 1 by the successor of Albornoz, Cardinal An- glicus Grimoaldi, and in one of the same cardinal's letters." " They do not admit," he writes, "the power of the Church, nor anyone ex- ercising jurisdiction in its name ; they govern themselves, and ad- minister their own justice in civil and criminal matters." But in i 375 a traitor, Giacomo Pelizzaro, acting at the instigation of the bishop and the podcsia of Montefeltro, plotted to betray his country', and was executed by the two heads of the community. He was one of the few traitors in all the fifteen and a half centuries of San Marino's history. Nothing of much interest occurred during the next three decades. The fortifications were completed, and a forger was sentenced to death. Pope Gregory XII., by arriving at Rimini during the papal schism in 1408, caused the citizens some alarm lest they should embrace the losing side in that great dispute ; but the Pope did not seek refuge, as at one time seemed probable, on the rocks of Monte Titano. Some years later the Malatesti accused them of having granted the famous condottiere, Braccio, a passage through their territory, and such was their alarm, that they tempo- rarily suspended their constitution and appointed a dictator. And, when Braccio turned his arms against their benefactor, Guido, count of Urbino, they ran the risk of being attacked by him. So close did their relations with Urbino become, that the count granted them in 1440 exemption from all dues on any property which they possessed in his territory, and a letter is preserved in the archives in which he writes to them that, if he had "only a single crust of bread," he would share it with them. The next period in the history of the republic was the most war- like which it has ever known. In this same year it took part in the war between Count Guido and Sigismondo Malatesta, with such success that at the peace of 144 1 the latter was compelled to pay it an indemnity by remitting the taxes due to him by those Repub- II. 94. 2 Text in Hauttecreur, 69-71 ; Delfico, I. 103-104.
