How certain excellent princes have been carried on their subjects’ shoulders to their royal tombs

SOMETIMES, moreover, it is not by their own but their people’s fault (for whom nevertheless it was of greater concern that their rulers should live longer) that princes happen to be snatched away by the eternal judge in an unseasonable death. ¹ In that case their death is considered the more lamentable the more they are seen to perish in the flower of life and when a fierce battle is impending. Just as their life has appeared more kindly and fair than the average, so their bodies are borne to burial with superior funeral rites and over very long distances to the royal monuments, or places of burial, on the shoulders of eminent men, who vie with each other in streaming in from different provinces.