The Historians’ History of the World, Volume IX

A comprehensive narrative of the rise and development of nations
as recorded by over two thousand of the great writers of
all ages: edited, with the assistance of a distinguished
board of advisers and contributors,
by

HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, LL.D.

FRANCESCO BERTOLINI, J. BURCKHARDT, PIERRE ANTOINE DARU, S. ASTLEY
DUNHAM, F. GUICCIARDINI, W. C. HAZLITT, HEINRICH LEO, MACHIAVELLI,
F. A. MIGNET, H. E. NAPIER, LORENZO PIGNOTTI, A. VON REUMONT,
WILLIAM ROSCOE, J. C. L. S. DE SISMONDI, J. A. SYMONDS

ADHÉMAR, AMMIRATO, ANAFESTO, GUGLIELMUS APULIENSIS, ANGELO MARIA
BANDINI, CARLO BOTTA, FLAVIUS BLONDUS, BOCCACCIO, POGGIO
BRACCIOLINI, H. B. BRIGGS, LYTTON E. G. BULWER, BURCHARD
(or BURCHARDUS), ISAAC BUTT, CAFFARO, CAPPONI, GIOVANNI
DE CASTRO, BENVENUTO CELLINI, CARLO CIPOLLA, ANNA
COMNENA, ROBERT COMYN, ANTONIO COSCI, ANDREA
DANDOLO, DANTE, CARLO DENINA, G. B. DEPPING,
DUFFY, HUGO FALCANDUS, FICINO, FLODOARDUS, UBERTUS FOLIETA, E. A.
FREEMAN, GALILEO, GEBHARDT, E. GIBBON, P. L. GINGUENÉ, GIOVANNI
DIACONO, HENRY HALLAM, W. HEYD, KARL HILLEBRAND, WILLIAM
HUNT, J. LABARTHE, M. LAFUENTE, RICORDANO MALASPINA,
GOFREDUS MALATERRA, MÉMOIRES DE BAYARD, GIUSEPPE
MONTANELLI, E. MÜNTZ, MURATORI, F. T. PERRENS,
PETRARCH, GIOVANNI PONTANO, W. H. PRESCOTT,
E. PROCTOR, E. QUINET, J. REINACH, W. ROBERTSON, T. DE ROSSI,
JOHN RUSKIN, WILLIAM SPALDING, OTTOBONUS SCRIBA, SCRIBÆ,
MARCHIRIUS ET BARTHOLOMÆUS, ST. MARC, G. STELLA,
TEGRINI, G. B. TESTA, TRAVERSARI, GIORGIO VASARI, G.
VILLANI, M. VILLANI, P. VILLARI, F. M. A. VOLTAIRE,
WILLIAM WHEWELL, JULES ZELLER

THE DARK AGE

It has been observed again and again that the sweep of history is a continuous stream, and that all attempts to divide it into epochs are more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, one cannot escape the tendency to classify, and memory is greatly aided by such arbitrary divisions. The largest and perhaps the most uniformly accepted of such arbitrary parcelling out of history is the classification into ancient, mediæval, and modern. Everyone is aware that the general historian usually regards ancient history as closing either with the later decades of the fourth century, when the northern barbarians began their invasions, or, perhaps more generally, with the precise date 476, when the last emperor of old Rome was dethroned. The ensuing epoch, comprising a period of about a thousand years, is known as the mediæval period; which epoch is usually considered as closing with the discovery of the New World in 1492. The earlier centuries of this epoch are usually spoken of as constituting the dark age.

Such a division is arbitrary, but not altogether illogical. It has been urged that Rome itself did not know it had fallen in the year 476; and that the Roman Empire—even the Roman Republic, in the phrasing of the time—went on, as the minds of contemporaries conceived it, uninterruptedly for many centuries after the date which we of later time fix for the quietus of Roman imperial life. But few things are better established than the fact that a clear conception of history demands a certain opportunity for the observation of events in perspective. In other words a contemporary judgment is rarely, if ever, the best judgment regarding any epoch. In the multiplicity of details that are thrust necessarily upon the attention of the contemporary observer, large proportions are lost, and a confused mass of little things makes the picture as unintelligible as is the large canvas of the painter when viewed at too short a focus. With the historical view, as with the painting, one must recede to a certain distance before gaining a measurably true conception. And so looking back through the vista of centuries one is able to observe very clearly that the time of the alleged fall of the Western Roman Empire was a time of real crisis in the sweep of historical events. The erection of the one focal date is, to be sure, a quite unjustifiable[2] marking of boundary lines, unless it be regarded in the same way in which one thinks of the parallels of latitude and longitude on the globe. It is a convenient milestone, nothing more. But the epoch which it marks, if not to be limited to the confines of a single year, is none the less a true epoch; as no one can doubt who will consider the history of Rome in the aggregate during the first, second, and third centuries of the Christian era, and then will consider the history of the same city during the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. Obviously, a vast change has come over the spirit of civilisation in this time; the later centuries, contrasted with the earlier ones, may well be considered a dark age.

We have already shown that during its period the eastern division of the later Roman Empire was the seat of a culture which found expression in the production of an elaborate literature. But the West during this period was under quite different auspices. Rome had ceased to be important as a centre of civilisation; its chief citizens had removed to the city of Constantinople. Here in the West the half-civilised Herulians and Ostrogoths held almost undisputed sway from 476 till about the middle of the sixth century. Then for a century the Eastern Empire reasserted control over Rome and the legions of Narses and Longinus upheld the authority of the Byzantine emperors. But in 568 the Lombards under Alboin swept down into Italy and their supremacy was hardly disputed until the Carlovingians took a hand in Italian affairs, with the result that in 774 Charlemagne, capturing Desiderius in Pavia, assumed the title of king of the Lombards and virtually ended the Lombard kingdom.

In 781 Charlemagne crowned his son Pepin king of Italy, and in the memorable year 800 Charlemagne was himself crowned emperor of the West, reviving the title and a semblance of the glory of the old Imperium. Charlemagne’s successors retained nominal control over the empire, and disputed with the popes the real control of Italy. This warfare between the papal monarch and the emperors was a salient feature of the later centuries of the epoch. The power of the church had increased slowly and insidiously until in the ninth and tenth centuries the bishop of Rome aspired to real kingship over Italy,—even over the entire empire.

The five hundred years of Italian history outlined in this period contrast strangely (as has been said) in their world historical meaning with the half millennium of empire that preceded it, or with the other half millennium within which were comprised the events of the Roman commonwealth. Those earlier periods, as we glance back over them in perspective, bristle with great events; whereas this later epoch shows a bare plane of mediocrity, if not of decline. Yet we must not think of these later centuries as representing a time of relapse into actual barbarism. It was rather an epoch when the decadent civilisation was struggling against complete overthrow on the one hand, while the new civilisation was striving to make itself felt,—striving as yet ineffectually as regards the higher culture, yet none the less preparing the way for the future germination of a new life in the old empire.

There is no more fascinating effort open to the historian than to glance back through the mists of the centuries and attempt to penetrate the gloom of this dark age, and visualise its social conditions. At best such an attempt at reconstructing the distant past can be but partially successful. If it be true that “we view the world through our own eyes, each of us, and make from within us the things we see,” as Thackeray tells us regarding our contemporary environment, vastly more distorted must our image be of any past events. Where the monuments, art treasures, and the literature of a great[3] civilisation have been preserved to us, as in the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Greece, and Rome, we have aids and accessories for the reconstruction of the picture that enable us to view our rehabilitation with a certain confidence. But where these mementoes of the past are lost or altogether lacking, the picture must, indeed, be a vague and uncertain one,—the foggy tracery of the impressionist as contrasted with the firm outlines of a Michelangelo.

And such are the disadvantages that beset the task of reconstructing the image of Italy, or indeed of any other part of Europe, in the so-called dark age. It was a time when the wealth of the later empire had been transferred to the East. Western Europe was poverty-stricken; and this practical fact, perhaps more than any other one cause, operated to prevent the construction of such monuments of architecture and of art as the earlier centuries achieved. We have seen illustrated again and again that the seat of the greatest civilisation is almost sure to be the commercial and monetary centre of the world; and we shall see the same thing illustrated again with renewed force at a later day in Italy, when the gold of the Florentine tradesmen, the Medici, stimulates the art development of the later Renaissance. But in these post-imperial times Italy has no wealth in commerce, as compared with the new centre of the empire in Constantinople. Such Romans as remain in Italy are too poor to build palaces and amphitheatres comparable to those of their predecessors. They have enough to do to guard themselves against the invaders from the north. At best they can hardly repair the structures that the earlier civilisation has left them. We read that in Venice it was at one time made a legal offence, punishable with a fine of one thousand florins, to suggest any draft on the public treasury for repairing state buildings. According to the familiar tradition, the doge who finally had the temerity to violate the restriction, came before the council with the thousand florins in his hand when making the suggestion. This story illustrates the financial stress under which the Italian cities laboured even at a comparatively late period of the Middle Ages.

But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that the lapse in the material civilisation which undoubtedly took place in the later day of imperial Rome coincided with an entire change in the social conditions of the people. No trait in human nature is more fixed and more insistent than the tendency to cling to the ways of our forbears. Conservatism is the dominant motive of the mass of humanity. What our fathers thought and believed, we for the most part think and believe. The average man inherits his religion and his politics much as he inherits the colour of his eyes; and has scarcely more likelihood of changing one than the other. In the sweep of the centuries, ideas and customs do change, to be sure; but the changes, in so far as they pertain to long-standing principles or customs, are always slow and gradual.

Geologists of the nineteenth century demonstrated, after long study and much argument, that there are no cataclysmic vaults in the sweep of the geological and biological ages. The lesson thus taught regarding nature at large is one which the sociologist might apply to his own would-be science with advantage. In particular this lesson should be called to the attention of the student of history who would have us believe that there was a sudden and catastrophic change in the mentality of the people of Italy in the fifth century A.D. No one who appreciates the true character of human progress will be disposed to believe, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, that the Italian of the sixth century differed very greatly in his desires and aspirations[4] from his grandparent who lived while Rome was yet nominally governed by an Italian emperor. The successive hordes of barbarians that swept down from the north took booty wherever they could find it, and impoverished the country, but for the most part they were not imbued with the spirit of wanton destruction. We may well believe that they looked rather with awestruck admiration akin to reverence upon the wonderful monuments of a civilisation so different from anything they had previously witnessed. We know that relatively civilised nations of the north sacked Rome in the sixteenth century more disastrously than it was sacked by their alleged barbaric precursors of the earlier millennium. Moreover, these invaders from the north were not omnipresent. They came and went at relatively long intervals, and there were some territories that they did not greatly molest. And the history of invasions everywhere goes to show that after the moment of initial conquest the barbaric vanquisher becomes, in matters of custom and thought, a follower rather than a leader of the vanquished.

In the present case there can be no doubt that this rule held true. The nations of the north were gifted with potentialities that were rapidly developed through imitation of the southern civilisation. Long before the so-called dark ages ended, there began to be centres of civilisation in the north, and here and there a man of real genius—a Roger Bacon or an Abelard—appeared to prove the rapid forward sweep of the culture movement, since the highest genius never towers far above the culture level of its time. But this could not have come to pass if the invader from the north had entered Italy as an all-devastating eliminator of previous civilisations. He came to conquer, but he remained to learn the arts of civilisation.

In a word, then, we shall gain a truer picture of the state of Italy in the so-called dark age if we think of it as differing not so greatly in the ideals of its material civilisation from the Italy of the Roman Empire. There is no great architecture, no great art, no great literature; but we cannot believe that there were absolutely no aspirations towards these antique ideals. When we recall how much that was known to be produced in the earlier day has been utterly lost, we need not doubt that there were some productions even in the field of literature, of which we now have no knowledge, that we would gladly reclaim from oblivion. The cacoethes scribendi is too dominant an impulse to be quite absent from any generation; surely, human nature did not change so utterly in the dark age as to rout this impulse from the human mind. What chiefly did occur, apparently, was the direction of the literary impulse into an unfortunate channel—the channel of ecclesiasticism. This carried it to a maelstrom from which the would-be producer of literature was not able to disengage himself for many generations. A startling evidence of this is found in the fact that as Robinson[1] points out, there was no literary layman of renown from Boetius (d. 524 or 525 A.D.) to Dante (1265-1321 A.D.).

Let us think, then, of the dark age as a time when Italy was impoverished; a time when its material civilisation retrogressed; a time when the stress of new conditions thrust some of the old ideals into the background; but also as a time when the mixture of races was taking place that was to give new strength and fibre to a senescent people; and to make possible the resuscitation of the old ideals, the rehabilitation of the old material civilisation, the regeneration of the race.

THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

The regeneration is not to be effected, however, for some time to come. The 11th and the 12th centuries are at best to see only the dawning of the new day.

Culture of the creative kind is still in abeyance in Italy; there are still no writers of significance; there is little art except as practised in the illumination of manuscripts, and as foreshadowed in the beginnings of architecture. Nevertheless, there is a germative culture. Here and there a knight brings back a book from the East—for this is the age of the Crusades. Here and there a monk pores over a classic manuscript. Virgil was read and copied all through the dark age, as we know from the incontestable evidence of extant manuscripts. There is no manuscript of Horace in the uncial writing of the early centuries, yet he too must have been read in the West, along with all the other Latin classics that have come down to us, else these works would scarcely have been preserved; for the Greek authors alone found favour in the East. Still it is to be feared that the chief interest felt by many of the monks in the old-time manuscripts was directed towards the material on which they were written rather than towards the text itself. Hagiology often took the place of history and many an ancient manuscript has been partially preserved in palympsest, merely because a monk who wished to write the life of a saint was too careless to complete the erasure of the earlier writing.

Contemplating the monastic life, through which it is often asserted the germs of learning were preserved in the western world in this dark age, one receives an impression of racial stasis which does not really accord with the facts. If the monks were the preservers of the feeble torch of learning, it was the wandering and warring hosts of the outside world who were preparing their generation to receive the new light when it should again burst forth. The Scandinavian and German hosts from the north invaded Italy en masse, from time to time, as we have seen, and successive bands of crusaders made Italy their highway when journeying to and from the East. Many of these invaders found the southern clime congenial and took up their permanent abode there. Thus the Normans established a kingdom in Italy, and if the other hosts settled as individuals rather than as nations, their influence must have been none the less potent in bringing about that mixture of racial elements which makes for racial progress.

Equally important must have been the influence of the commercial spirit. The conquest of the Normans took from the Greek cities of southern Italy, Amalfi, Naples, and Gaeta, the commercial supremacy they had previously enjoyed. They were now superseded by Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. These cities kept fleets on the sea in constant contact with the East. As might have been expected, they led other Italian cities in power and influence, and were the first to show intimations of that quickening of life which presaged the new birth.

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The first half of the thirteenth century furnishes additional chapters in the old story of the fight between emperor and pope. Frederick II, the present incumbent of the imperial throne, is one of the most picturesque characters of the Middle Ages. He is a man of extraordinary versatility; master of many languages, including Greek and Arabic, patron of the arts, himself a poet, and what perhaps is most remarkable of all, considering his[6] scholarly proclivities, an advocate of the use of the vernacular out of which is developing a new Italian language. Frederick is far too broad and versatile a man to be confined within the narrow boundaries of the church; hence his life is made up of a series of wrangles with the popes. Yet he upholds the religious liberties of his subjects in Sicily; he prosecutes a successful crusade, and restores the influence of the western world in Jerusalem. He is under ban of excommunication when he undertakes this crusade, and now he is again denounced for having undertaken it. He rebels against the papal antagonism, and declares that he will wear his crown and uphold its authority despite ecclesiastical interference. We have seen like threats pronounced before, and have seen such an emperor as Henry IV fail to make good his menace. But Frederick adopts a novel plan which for a time proves expedient; he colonises Luceria with a population of Saracens, which can furnish him a band of thirty thousand infidel warriors to whom papal authority means nothing. Notwithstanding this aid, however, he is barely able to hold his own against the pope in the long run, and he dies just at the middle of the century, worn out in middle life by endless warrings.

During the ensuing half century Italy is little troubled by the emperors; papal authority is at its height, but a disunited Italy consumes its strength in internal dissensions. The developing civilisation has gradually focalised more and more towards the north and now its centre has come to be Tuscany,—the same geographical location which furnished the pre-Roman civilisation of the Etruscans. Florence is coming to be the chief city of Tuscany; it is the chief centre also of one of the most persistent and disastrous strifes that are convulsing Italy,—the warfare of the Guelf and Ghibellines. This dissension is in no sense confined to Florence, to be sure; it includes all Italy and even extends beyond the national bounds. The factions war with varying success. In 1260 the Guelfs at Florence meet with a signal reverse at the battle of Monteaperto. But eight years later at Theliacozza, the Ghibellines under Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, receive a most disastrous set-back.

An important feature of the epoch is the steady development of the half dozen cities; in particular the rivalry between the three chief maritime cities, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. Pisa has more than held her own until now, but in 1284 she receives her quietus in the duel with Genoa off the isle of Meloria; henceforth, she must yield supremacy to her conqueror and to Venice.

But, as has been said, the maritime cities no longer hold uncontested supremacy. Florence, “The Flower of Tuscany,” though lacking the advantage of geographical position, is able, nevertheless, to take a place among the commercial centres; thanks to her location on the highway between Germany and southern Italy, she perhaps profits more by that all essential mingling of the races to which reference has been made, than any of her sister cities. Just at the close of the century the warfare of the Guelfs and Ghibellines receives a new development in Florence through the strife of the factions that come to be known as the Bianchi and Neri; the dispute which began as a mere personal strife spreads its baneful influence over the entire community.

Notwithstanding all these dissensions, however, there is marked progress in civilisation during this century. The Italian cities can boast that their streets are paved, while the streets of Paris, the foremost city of the north, are mere beds of mud. The growing desire for education is evidenced in the founding of schools and universities in Italy. Just at the close of the century the since famous Palazzo Vecchio and the even more famous Santa[7] Croce were constructed. In the field of pictorial art there were also evidences of the new plane of culture to which Italy had attained, while scholarship found a worthy exponent in the celebrated Thomas Aquinas.

THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

For about a half century Italy has been free from the intrusions of the emperors, but now early in the fourteenth century Henry VII crosses the Alps. Unlike some of his predecessors, he meets a rather hearty welcome from several of the cities and from the pope. The Florentines, on the other hand, do not welcome him, and his coming leads to the usual turmoils. His sudden death—perhaps from poison—dissipates all the hopes based on the imperial presence. His successor, Louis of Bavaria, also comes to Italy and in association with the great general Castruccio makes war upon the Florentines, who have been forced much against their will to put themselves under the leadership of the duke of Naples. The Florentines hold their own fairly well against the outside invaders, but find themselves unable to tolerate the tyranny within their walls, and end by expelling the tyrant.

A striking feature of the century is the abandonment of Rome by the popes, who retire to Avignon for more than seventy years, from 1305 to 1377, an interval famous ever since as the Babylonish captivity. During the absence of the popes the Romans fared but ill. Lacking the papal power which made their city a centre of world influence, they are given over to minor dissensions. The famous Rienzi—“The last of the tribunes”—makes an heroic effort to restore order just at the middle of the century, and for a time dominates the situation; only to be overthrown ingloriously after a brief period of authority.

In the north the Visconti make themselves dominant in Milan and interfere perpetually in general politics, striving to subordinate all Italy to their influence. Florence was brought into repeated conflicts with the successive rulers of this family, and it was in these contests that the great English general, Sir John Hawkwood came to the fore. Leader of a band of mercenaries,—soldier of fortune in the most literal sense of the word,—this famous warrior fought first against the Florentines, and subsequently in their service. Despite some reverses he gained a reputation which led Hallam to consider him the first great commander since Roman times. This estimate perhaps does Hawkwood something more than justice; it overlooks the great Castruccio, to go no further. But undoubtedly Hawkwood was a redoubtable leader, and he was among the first of a series of condottioria who gave distinction to Italian armies during the ensuing century.

Genoa and Venice are drawn into a disastrous warfare; in fact the various dominant cities of Italy are almost perpetually quarrelling. Even the great plague which sweeps over Italy in 1348, despite its devastations—so graphically described by Boccaccio—serves to give scarcely more than a temporary lull to the dissensions. The insurrection of the Ciompi, the Great Schism, and the outbreak of the war of Chioggia are dissensions that mark the later decades of the century.

But all these political dissensions sink quite into insignificance in comparison with the tremendous intellectual development of the time. As we have seen, the western world has been preparing for centuries for the development of an indigenous culture. Now the promise meets fruition. It required but the waft of a breeze from the East to fan the smouldering embers[8] into flame. This vivifying influence came about partly through the emigration of large numbers of scholars from Constantinople; a migration incited chiefly by fear of the Turks. These scholars brought with them their love of the Greek classics and stimulated the nascent scholarship of Italy into a like enthusiasm. Soon there began and developed a great fashion of searching for classical manuscripts, and many half-forgotten authors were brought to light. It became the fashion to copy these manuscripts, as every gentleman’s house must now have a library. The revival of interest came about in time to save more than one classical author from oblivion, whose works would probably have perished utterly had they been subjected to another century of neglect. Such an author as Velleius Paterculus, for example, is known exclusively through a single manuscript, which obviously must have escaped destruction through mere chance; and everyone is aware how large a proportion of classical writers were not accorded even this measure of fortune. No doubt many authors were inadvertently allowed to perish even after this revival of interest, but the number must have been very small in proportion to those that were already lost.

But the revival of interest in the works of antiquity was by no means the greatest literary feature of the time. There came with it a creative impulse which gave the world the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, not to mention the lesser chroniclers. Their work evidenced that spontaneous outbreak of the creative impulse for which the classicism of the East had been preparing. How spontaneous it was, how little understood, even by its originators, is illustrated in the fact that both Dante, the creator of Italian poetry, and Boccaccio, the creator of Italian prose, regarded their work in the vernacular as relatively unimportant; basing their hopes of immortality upon their archaic Latin treatises, which the world promptly forgot. No better illustration could be furnished anywhere of that spontaneity of truly creative art to which we have had occasion more than once to refer.

Nor was it in literature alone that the time was creative. Pictorial art had likewise its new beginning in this epoch. Cimabue, indeed, had made an effort to break with the crude traditions of the eastern school of art in the latter part of the thirteenth century; his greater pupil Giotto developed his idea in the early decades of the fourteenth century, and gathered by him, the school of painters in Florence attempted, following their master, to go to nature and to reproduce what they saw. Their effort was a crude and tentative one, judged according to the canons of the later development; but it was the beginning of great things. In architecture the effort of the time was not doomed to be content with mere beginnings: “Giotto’s tower,” the famous Campanile, still stands in evidence of the relative perfection to which this department of art had attained. All in all, then, the fourteenth century was a time of wonderful development in Italy; the clarion note of Dante has been called the voice of ten silent centuries; it told of a new phase of the Renaissance.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

During the fifteenth century Italy enjoyed a period of relative immunity from outside interference. An emperor was crowned at Rome in the early days of the century, to be sure, and there were various efforts at interference by other powers, including the coming of Charles VIII in 1494. But, as a general thing, it was the Italians themselves who competed with one another, rather than outside powers who quarrelled with Italy as a whole. The great[9] forces were, as before, the few important cities. These were forever quarrelling one with another. Pisa became subordinate to Florence, and the latter city waxed steadily in greatness. In Milan the rule of the Visconti continued till towards the middle of the century, when, on the disappearance of the last member of that important family, the house of Sforza came to the fore and took to itself the task of dictatorship. In Naples King Ladislaus, and later Queen Joanna II, maintained regal influence and made their principality a world power. Thus in the middle of the century the four great powers were Naples, Milan, Venice, and Florence.

In these wars the mercenary leaders were much in evidence. These were men to whom fighting was simply a business,—a means to a livelihood. No question of patriotism was involved in their warfare; they gave their services to the state that offered the most liberal payment in gold or its equivalent. Half a dozen of these men gained particular distinction in the fifteenth century. These were Braccio, Fortebraccio, Sforza Attendola, and his son Francesco Sforza, Carmagnola, Niccolo Piccinino, and Colleno Coleoni. These men were variously matched against one another in the important wars.

Braccio and Sforza Attendola came into prominence in the papal wars, having to do with the Great Schism, and beginning about the close of the first decade of the fifteenth century. Braccio fought for Florence, and Sforza at first for Pope John XXIII, and subsequently for King Ladislaus of Naples, who at this time was the strongest ruler in Italy. This war concerned most of the powers of Italy, and involved Anjou and France as well. The death of Ladislaus helped to terminate the conflict, but at the same time precipitated a new war, by raising the question of succession to the throne of Naples.

In this war of the Neapolitan succession Fillipo Maria, duke of Milan, upheld the cause of the house of Anjou, while Florence sided with Alfonzo. The chief scene of the war was in the north where the forces of Milan and Naples competed with those of Florence and Venice. It was here that Carmagnola (born Francesco Dussone) was given the opportunity to show his genius as a leader. He served first under Fillipo, but subsequently entered the service of Venice and acquired new honours as the opponent of his old employer. In later campaigns his chief opponent was Francesco Sforza. The tragic end of Carmagnola will be recalled by every reader.

After the settlement of this war of the Neapolitan succession Fillipo Maria was soon embroiled again, this time with Pope Eugenius. The pope took refuge in Florence and the Tuscans, again supported by Venice, upheld him. Francesco Sforza now fought for the Florentines, his opponent, the leader of the Visconti’s army, being Niccolo Piccinino. But before the war was over the Visconti had gained Sforza back again. On the death of Fillipo the Milanese established a republic, avowing that they would never again submit to a tyrant. But necessity soon drove them to call on Francesco Sforza to aid them in a war against Venice, and their successful general presently usurped power, and established a new line of tyrants. In the later wars between Milan and Venice Colleno Coleoni appeared, and after bartering his services first to one party and then to the other, became permanently established as generalissimo of the land-forces of Venice in 1454.

One of the most striking features of this warfare was that it came to nothing. So many rival interests were involved, so kaleidoscopic were the shiftings of the various leaders, so utterly lacking is any great central cause of contention, that it is sometimes almost impossible to say where one war[10] ends and another begins. Each petty state is thinking of its own interests. And the only thing approaching a general principle of action is the fear on the part of each state that any other single state might gain too much influence over Italy as a whole. In other words the thought of maintaining a balance of power is in the mind of all such leaders as have no hope of making themselves supreme. As Florence at no time has a hope of becoming politically dominant, her efforts are always directed towards maintaining a balance of power, and where personalities do not enter into the matter, she tends in the main to champion the cause of the weaker party.

But despite the interest which necessarily attaches to all these political jarrings, the really world-historical importance of Florentine history during this period has to do not with wars, but with the marvellous internal culture development. Already in the van of the Renaissance movement Florence holds her proud position securely throughout the fifteenth century, and is incontestably the culture centre of the world.

This was the age of the Medici. It was then that Cosmo the Great and Lorenzo the Magnificent made their influence felt, and enjoyed practical dictatorship, though the form of government continued a democracy. The real source of Florentine influence was founded on the old familiar basis of commercial prosperity. We have seen how Florence in the previous century produced such men as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Giotto. The intellectual supremacy thus evidenced was maintained in the ensuing century, but the early part of that century has no names to show that are comparable to these in artistic greatness. The stamp of the times, at least of the first half of the fifteenth century, is industrial rather than artistic. This is the time when the gradually increasing commercial and industrial importance of Italy has culminated in unequivocal world supremacy. Venice and Florence are now the commercial centres of the world. In Florence various forms of craftsmanship have attained a degree of importance which will make them famous for all time. The guilds of woollen weavers, of cloth merchants, of silk weavers, and of money-changers have become institutions of world-wide influence. The money lenders of Florence are found plying their trade in every capital of Europe. Despite their extortions they are regarded everywhere as a necessary evil; and Florentine gold in this century exercises an influence almost as wide as the quondam influence of Roman arms. The Florentine money-changer holds almost unchallenged the position that the Jew occupied at a later day. Oddly enough, it may be noted that the Jew himself is barred from plying the trade of money lender in Florence until about the end of the first third of the fifteenth century when, paradoxical as it may seem, he is legally granted the privilege, to protect the borrower from the extortions of the native usurers of the city.

The rapid development of commerce and industry brings with it, not unnaturally, a great change in the habits of the Florentine people. Early in the century the houses in Florence are still simple and relatively plain in their equipment. The windows are barred by shutters, glass not being yet in common use; the stairways are narrow; the entrances unostentatious. But before the close of the century all this is changed. The power of wealth makes itself felt in the houses, equipments, and costumes of the people; in their luxurious habits of living; their magnificent banquets and demonstrations; and all that goes to make up a life of sensuous pleasure.

Most significant of all, however, is the influence which wealth has enabled one family to attain; for the power of the Medici is, in its essentials, the power of gold. It is a power wielded deftly in the hands of prominent[11] representatives of the family; a power that seems to make for the good of the city. Under Lorenzo the Magnificent every form of art is patronised and cultivated, and Florence easily maintains its supremacy as the culture centre of Italy. Such sculptors as Donatello, Berrochio, and their fellows; such painters as Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo, not to mention a varied company of almost equal attainments; and a company of distinguished workmen in all departments of the lesser arts, lend their influence to beautify the city under the patronage of Lorenzo. The school of art thus founded is to give the world such names as Michelangelo and Raphael in the succeeding generations. Curiously enough, by some unexplained oversight, the greatest painter of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, was led to make his greatest efforts in Milan and not in Florence during the life of Lorenzo, though he returned to the latter city not long after the death of the great patron of art.

As a patron of literature Lorenzo was no less active. He founded and developed a wonderful library in which the treasures of antiquity were collected, in the original or in copies, without regard to expense, from all parts of Europe. The art of book-making was carried to its highest development in this period. The manuscripts of the time are marvels of beauty. The ornamentation is beautiful, and the letters themselves are printed with a degree of regularity closely rivalling the uniformity of a printed page. And then not long after the middle of the century, just when this art of the scribe was at its height, the printing-press was introduced from Germany, and an easy mechanical means was at hand by which the most perfect technique could be attained. True, the connoisseur did not at first recognise the printed book as a possible rival of the old hand-made work. For a long time the collector continued to employ the hand workman, and the dilettante looked upon the printed book with much the same scornful glance which the modern collector of paintings bestows upon a chromo or lithograph. The first printing-press was set up, according to Von Reumont, at Subiaco in a Benedictine monastery in 1465. Some fifteen years later Vespasiano da Bisticci, writing about the library of the duke of Urbino, could proudly state that “All the volumes are of the most faultless beauty, written by hand, with elegant miniatures, and all on parchment. There are no printed books among them; the duke would have been ashamed to have them.”[2]

Notwithstanding the scornful attitude of the connoisseur, however, the art of printing books made its way rapidly. Hitherto the cost of production had rendered even the most ordinary book a luxury not to be possessed by any but the relatively wealthy. Naturally enough, an eager band of book lovers hailed the advent of the new method, despite its supposed artistic shortcomings; and before the end of the century there were printing-presses in all the important centres of Italy, and numberless classics, beginning with Virgil, had been given a vastly wider currency than had ever previously been possible. It is needless here to dwell upon the remoter influences of this rapid diffusion of classical treasures; but nowhere was the influence more important than in Italy.

Summarising in a few words the influences of the fifteenth century in Italy, it may be repeated that, as a whole, it is an epoch of industrial and commercial progress rather than of the greatest art. The culminating achievements of the century, the invention of the printing-press and the discovery of America were not Italian triumphs; though as the birthplace[12] of Columbus and the home of Amerigo Vespucci, Italy cannot well be denied a share in the finding of the New World. Indeed, the association of Italy with this great achievement is perhaps closer than might at first sight appear. For on the one hand, it is held that the geographical work of Toscanelli was directly instrumental in stimulating Columbus to the conception of a western passage to India; while, in another view, the influence of the spirit of exploration and discovery fostered by the commercial relations of Italy in making possible the feat of Columbus, must have been inestimable. Be all that as it may, the discovery of the New World—made in the last decade of the century, and, as it chanced in the same year in which Lorenzo de’ Medici died—may well be considered not merely as a culminating achievement of the century, but as symbolical of that commercial and industrial spirit for which the century is chiefly remarkable.

We have now advanced to the date which is usually named as closing the mediæval epoch, but what has been said about the arbitrary character of this classification should be borne in mind. The discovery of America in 1492 did indeed mark the beginning of a new era in one sense, since it opened up a new hemisphere to the observation and residence of civilised man. That discovery, too, prepared the way for the demonstration of the fact that the world is round; hence it became an important corner-stone in the building of that new structure of man’s conception of cosmology of which the master builders were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. But the building of this new structure,—a revolutionising of man’s conception of the cosmos,—did not come about in a year or a century; the superstitions based on the old conception of cosmology have not lost their hold on mankind even in our own day. It has even been suggested that the year 1859, when the promulgation of thought occurred which gave the death-blow to the old ideas of cosmogony, and which may be said for the first time to have rendered the old superstitions truly obsolescent,—that this year rather than the year 1492 might well be named as limiting the mediæval epoch. So perhaps it may be with more remote generations of the future, but for the twentieth century observer the older date will doubtless seem the better one. But, after all, the question is one of no moment. Considering the recognised arbitrariness of all such divisions it does not in the least matter as to the exact bounds given to the mediæval epoch.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The sixteenth century is a time of peculiar contrasts in Italy. The invasions which began with the coming of Charles VIII in 1494 continue and become more and more harassing. Italy comes to be regarded as the proper prey of the French and Spanish rulers. The Italian principalities, warring as ever with one another, welcome or repel the invaders in accordance with their own selfish interests. All this time there has been no unified government of Italy as a whole. Nominally the empire included all, but this was a mere theory which, for the most part, would not bear examination. Venice all along has claimed allegiance to the Eastern Empire, which since the middle of the fifteenth century has ceased to exist. Florence owes no allegiance to any outside power; it is strictly autonomous. The democratic feeling is still strong there notwithstanding the usurpations of the Medici. Venice and Florence with Siena and Lucca are the only republics remaining at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Of the scores of cities which formerly were republics, all the rest have come under[13] the influence of tyrants, or have been brought into unwilling subordination to neighbouring cities. And now an even greater humiliation is in store for many of them at the hands of the transalpine conquerors.

Venice, recovering from her duel to the death with Genoa—the war of Chioggia—continues to hold closely to her old traditions. Her commercial prosperity continues for a time, but is gradually lessened through the loss of eastern territories and through the rivalry brought about by the discovery of America and of a sea route to India. Florence, having thrown off in 1494 the thraldom imposed by the Medici, makes spasmodic efforts to return to the old purely democratic system; but fails in the end. In 1569 Cosmo de’ Medici is made Grand Duke of Tuscany, a position which his successors will continue to hold for seven generations (till 1737). In a word the spirit of democracy is virtually dead in Italy, and as yet no local tyrant arises who has the genius to unite the petty principalities into a unified kingdom.

But if political Italy is chaotic and unproductive in this century the case is quite different when we consider the civilisation of the time. The vivifying influences of the previous century produced a development particularly in the field of art, which now shows great results. The early decades of the sixteenth century constitute an epoch of the greatest art development in Italy. This is the age of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and of Titian, and of the host of disciples of these masters. Under the patronage of successive popes, the master painters are stimulated to their best efforts, and those wonderful decorations of the Vatican are undertaken which have been the delight of all later times.

The literary development, if it does not quite keep pace with the pictorial, nevertheless attains heights which it has only once before reached since classical times. All this culture development in a time of turmoil and political disaster seems anomalous, and, as just intimated, can only be explained as the fruitage of a development which had its origin in an earlier epoch. The validity of this explanation is illustrated in the rapid decline that takes place in Italy after the middle of the sixteenth century—an intellectual decline which is scarcely to be interrupted until the nineteenth century.

THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

After the wonderful development of the sixteenth century it is amazing to consider this time of deterioration. The day of great men is not altogether past—witness Galileo—but there are no such great poets, historians, artists, as in past generations. Even the events of the political world have small world-historical importance. Italy is the battle-ground of nations; it is a geographical territory but it is scarcely a state. It has no unity, it has no individuality; it has no important autonomous states as a whole that command the attention of the historian. The intellectual sceptre which Italy so long swayed has been passed on to the nations of the north. The ecclesiastical spirit is everywhere dominant.

The burning of Giordano Bruno in the last year of the sixteenth century and the persecution of Galileo for daring to uphold the new Copernican conception of cosmogony are typical features of the epoch. Chronologically the mediæval era is past, but the spirit of mediævalism still pertains in Italy; rather let us say that this unfortunate country has lapsed back into an archaic cast of thought after having led the world for generations.

The historian must note the play and counterplay of outside nations who use the territory of Italy as their chess-board, but as regards the Italian himself[14] the world historian might virtually disregard his existence during many generations. It is only towards the close of the eighteenth century when Italy came under the sway of Napoleon that there came about a reaction from the overbearing policy of this new tyrant; then a desire for liberty began to make itself felt in Italy, and to prepare the way for that struggle of a half century later which was to weld the disunited subject principalities into a unified and autonomous kingdom. But the intimations of this later development could hardly be appreciated by the contemporary observer who saw Italy ground beneath the heel of Napoleon, with no seeming chance of ever escaping from this humiliating position.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

With the overthrow of Napoleon there was but slight betterment in the immediate condition of Italy. An attempt was made by the powers that had overthrown the French usurper to restore the Italian principalities to something like their ante-revolutionary status. But, as has just been noted, the spirit of liberty was taking possession of the land and its long enslaved people began to dream of better things than they had known for centuries. But their efforts to secure the freedom so long renounced were at first only attempts; one petty rebellion after another seemed to come to nothing. But, at last, under the guidance of such leaders as Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel, the seemingly impossible was accomplished: outside influences were subordinated; the papal power over secular affairs was restricted and at last virtually overthrown; and for the first time in something like fourteen centuries the geographical territory of Italy came politically under the sway of a single ruler who owed no allegiance to alien lands: the dream of the visionaries was accomplished: an Italian kingdom ruled by an Italian king took the place of the enslaved, disunited principalities of the earlier centuries.

True, this achievement was not the culmination that some of the most ardent patriots, with Mazzini at their head, had dreamed of. The aim of that leader, as of many another, had been to achieve not a monarchical but a republican unity. In their enthusiastic estimate the monarchical form of government was obsolescent. Their enthusiasm harked back to the days when Venice and Florence had carried out with so much success the precepts of democracy. Their imagination was fired also by the example of that newer republic of the West, whose free institutions have inspired so much of emulation and so much of hatred in the minds of different classes of people among the older governments of Europe. But if the dreams of these enthusiasts were not to be realised, it sufficed for the more conservative reformers that the constitutional monarchy, embodying many of the precepts and principles of democracy, had at last brought Italy under the sway of a single sceptre.

FOOTNOTES

In taking up the history of Italy we shall, for convenience, go back to the year 476, when the last legitimate emperor of old Rome in the West was overthrown, and briefly recapitulate the story of events during the period of invasion that immediately followed. It will be recalled that we have already covered the period from 476 to 1024 in much detail in our study of the Western Empire, in Volume VII. It will be unnecessary, therefore, to treat this epoch here in anything but the barest outline; and even this will involve unavoidable repetitions. Since the later emperors of the Holy Roman Empire continued for some centuries to invade Italy periodically, and to claim control over its affairs, it will be almost impossible to avoid repetition here also; but inasmuch as such monarchs as Conrad II, Henry IV, and Frederick II are necessarily given full treatment in the volumes devoted to Germany, we shall deal somewhat briefly with their Italian incursions in the present connection. A similar duplication of matter will necessarily be involved in dealing with the mediæval popes, whose history has already been chronicled in the previous volume.

The story of temporal affairs in Italy lacks unity from the beginning of the period under consideration till well towards the close of the nineteenth century. For the most part, except during the relatively brief periods when a strong emperor claimed dominion over all Italy, the territory of the Italian peninsula was divided into numerous petty kingdoms, no one of which attained supremacy over the others. First one and then another became prominent, but often contemporaneous events of local importance, having but slight world-historical importance, confuse the picture, and make the presentation of the history of Italy extremely difficult. We must necessarily overlook a large number of such petty details, endeavouring to select such events as have real importance, and to weld them into a continuous narrative. But at best the story of Italian history lacks dramatic unity; the scene shifts from one principality to another too frequently to make possible a really harmonious presentation. We have really to do with a collection of cities[16] rather than with a nation. It is the old story of Greece over again; only here there are more cities competing for supremacy, with no one at any time quite so near success as Athens and Sparta respectively were at successive periods. Yet Milan, Venice, and Florence at times approached the goal if they did not quite attain it.a

Most of these cities were very old; the greater number flourished in at least equal splendour in the time of the Roman Empire; some, such as Milan, Verona, Bologna, Capua, were so considerable as to present an image of Rome, with their circus, their amphitheatre, their tumultuous and idle population, their riches and their poverty. Their administration was nearly republican, most commonly composed, after the example of Rome, of a curia, or municipal senate elected by the people, and of duumvirs, or annual consuls. In all these towns, among the first class of inhabitants were to be found the proprietors of the neighbouring land, lodged in palaces with their slaves and freedmen; secondly, the artisans and shopkeepers whom their necessities established around them; lastly, a crowd of idle people, who had preserved just enough of land to supply, with the strictest economy, the means of existence. It does not appear that there was any prosperous manufactory in Italy. All manual labour, as well in towns as in the country, was executed by slaves. Objects of luxury, for the most part, came from Asia. War had for a long time been the only occupation of the Italians; for a long period, too, the legions had been levied partly among the Romans, and partly among their allies in Italy: but, under the emperors, the distrust of the master seconded the luxurious effeminacy of the subject, the Italians finally renounced even war, and the legions were recruited only in Pannonia, Gaul, and the other provinces bordering on the Rhine and the Danube.

At a later period, the barbarians who menaced Rome were seduced by liberal pay to engage in its defence; and in the Roman armies the enemies of Rome almost entirely replaced the Romans. The country could not, as in modern states, supply the place of cities in recruiting the armies with a class of men accustomed to the inclemencies of the weather and inured to toil. The only labourers to be found were an oppressed foreign race, who took no interest in public affairs. The Romans cultivated their land either by slaves purchased from the barbarians and forced by corporal punishment to labour, or by coloni partiarii, to whom was given a small share in the harvest as wages; but, in order to oblige these last to content themselves with the least possible share, they were attached to the land, and nearly as much oppressed as slaves themselves. The proprietors of land varied as between these two systems, according as the price of slaves varied, or the colons (peasants, labourers) were more or less numerous; no cultivator of the land had any property in it.

The greater part was united in immense domains, sometimes embracing whole provinces, the administration of which was intrusted to freedmen, whose only consideration was, how to cultivate the land with the least possible expense, and how to extract from their labourers the greatest degree of work with the smallest quantity of food. The agriculturists, as well what were called freedmen as slaves, were almost all barbarians by birth, without any interest in a social order which only oppressed them, without courage for its defence, and without any pecuniary resources for themselves; their numbers also diminished with an alarming rapidity, partly from desertion, partly from new invasions of barbarians, who carried them off to sell as slaves in other Roman provinces, and finally from a mortality, the necessary consequence of poverty and starvation.

Italy, nevertheless, was supposed to enjoy a constant prosperity. During the entire ages of Trajan and the Antonines, a succession of virtuous and philosophic emperors followed each other; the world was in peace; the laws were wise and well administered; riches seemed to increase; each succeeding generation raised palaces more splendid, monuments and public edifices more sumptuous, than the preceding; the senatorial families found their revenues increase; the treasury levied greater imposts. But it is not on the mass of wealth, it is on its distribution, that the prosperity of states depends; increasing opulence continued to meet the eye, but men became more miserable; the rural population, formerly active, robust, and energetic, were succeeded by a foreign race, while the inhabitants of towns sank in vice and idleness, or perished in want, amidst the riches they had themselves created.

THE BARBARIAN INVADERS

It was into this Italy, such as despotism had made it, that the barbarians penetrated. Eager for the booty which it contained and could not defend, they repeatedly ravaged it during the last two centuries of the Western Empire. The mercenary troops that Rome had levied amongst them for its defence, preferring pillage to pay, frequently turned their arms against those they were engaged to defend. They vied with the Romans in making and unmaking emperors; and generally chose them from their own ranks, in order to secure to the soldier a greater share of the property of the citizen. The booty diminished as the avidity of these foreigners increased. The pomp of the Western Empire soon appeared, to an army thus formed, a useless expense. Odoacer, of the nation of the Heruli, chief of the mercenaries who then served in Italy, suppressed it by deposing, in 476, the last emperor. He took upon himself the title of king, and distributed among his soldiers one-third of the land in the most fertile provinces; he governed during seventeen years this still glorious country, as a rich farm which the barbarians had a right to cultivate for their sole use.

The mercenaries united under the sceptre of Odoacer were not sufficiently strong to defend Italy against a new invasion of barbarians. The Ostrogoths, encouraged by the Grecian sovereign of new Rome, the emperor of the East, arrived in 489, under the command of Theodoric, from the countries north of the Euxine to the borders of Italy; they completed the conquest of it in four, and retained possession of the peninsula sixty-four years, under eight successive kings. These new barbarians, in their turn, demanded and obtained a portion of land and slaves; they multiplied, it is true, but became rapidly enervated in a delicious climate where they had suddenly passed from the severest privations to the enjoyment of every luxury. They were at last conquered and subdued in the year 553 by the Romans of Constantinople, whom they despised as the degenerate successors of the same nation which their ancestors had vanquished.

The invasion of the Lombards in 568 soon followed the destruction of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths. Amongst the various hordes which issued from the north of Germany upon the southern regions, the Lombards were reputed the most courageous, the most cruel, and the proudest of their independence; but their number was inconsiderable, and they scarcely acknowledged any social tie sufficient to keep them united: accordingly, they never completed the conquest of Italy. From 568 to 774, twenty-one Lombard kings during 206 years succeeded each other without establishing their[18] dominion either on the lagunes, at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf, where such of the inhabitants of upper Italy as were personally the most exposed had taken refuge and founded the Venetian Republic; or on the shores of the Adriatic, now called Romagna, governed by a lieutenant of the emperor of Constantinople, under the title of exarch of the five cities of Pentapolis; or on Rome, defended only by the spiritual arms of the patriarch of the Western church; or on the southern coast, where the Greek municipalities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi governed themselves almost as independent republics. The Lombards, nevertheless, founded a kingdom in northern Italy, of which Pavia was the capital; and in southern Italy the duchy of Benevento, which still maintained its independence two centuries after the kingdom was subjugated.

From the middle of the eighth century the Lombards, masters of a country where the great towns still contained much wealth, where the land had lost nothing of its fertility, where the example of the vanquished had taught the vanquishers the advantage of reviving some agricultural industry, excited the envy of their neighbours the Franks, who had conquered and oppressed the Gauls, who despised all occupation but war, and desired no wealth but what the sword could give. They by repeated invasions devastated Italy; and at length, in 774, completed the destruction of the Lombard monarchy.

For more than twenty years the popes or bishops of Rome had been in the habit of opposing the kings of France to the monarchs of Lombardy, who were odious to them, at first as pagans, and afterwards as heretics. Chief of the clergy of the ancient capital, where the power of the emperors of Constantinople had been nominally established but never felt, they confounded their pretensions with those of the empire; and the Lombards having recently conquered the exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, they demanded that these provinces should be restored to Rome. The Frankish kings made themselves the champions of this quarrel, which gave them an opportunity of conquering the Lombard monarchy; but Charles, the king who accomplished this conquest, and who was the greatest man that barbarism ever produced, in treating with Rome, in subjugating Italy, comprehended all the beauty of a civilisation which his predecessors had seen only to destroy; he conceived the lofty idea of profiting by the barbarian force at his disposal to put himself at the head of the civilisation which he laboured to restore. Instead of considering himself as the king of the conquerors, occupied only in enriching a barbarous army with the spoils of the vanquished, he made it his duty and his glory to govern the country for its best interests, and for the common good. He did more: in concert with Pope Leo III, he re-established the monarchy of the conquered as a western Roman empire, which he considered the representative of right, in opposition to barbaric force; he received from the same pope, and from the Roman people, on Christmas Day in the year 800, the title of Roman emperor, and the name of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, which no one before had ever so well deserved.

CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

As king, and afterwards as emperor, he governed Italy, together with his other vast states, forty years; he pursued with constancy, and with increasing ability, the end he proposed to himself, viz., establishing the reign of the[19] laws, and a flourishing civilisation: but barbarism was too strong for him; and when he died in 814 it was re-established throughout the empire.

Italy had eight kings of the family of Charlemagne, reckoning his son and grandson, who reigned under him, and were, properly speaking, his lieutenants. Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, was deposed in 888; after which ten sovereigns, either Italian or Burgundian, but allied to the race of the Franks, disputed for seventy years more the crown of Italy and the empire. In 951 Otto I of Saxony, king of Germany, forced Berenger II, who then reigned, to acknowledge himself his vassal; in 961 Otto entered Italy a second time with his Germans, was crowned at Rome with the title of emperor, and sent Berenger II to end his days in a fortress in Germany.

Nearly five centuries elapsed from the fall of the ancient Roman Empire to the passing over of the renewed empire to the Germans. For a long space of time Italy had been pillaged and oppressed in turn by barbarians of every denomination, who wantonly overran the country only to plunder, and believed themselves valiant because, though in small numbers, they spread terror over a vast extent, and imagined by bloodshed to give a dignity to their depredations. The country, thus exposed to so many outrages, did not remain such as the Romans had left it. The Goth, Lombard, Frank, and German warriors, who had successively invaded Italy, introduced several of the opinions and sentiments of the barbarian race, particularly the habit of independence and resistance to authority. They divided with their kings the country conquered by their valour. They caused to be ceded to them vast districts, the inhabitants of which they considered their property equally with the land. The Lombard monarchy comprehended thirty dukedoms, or marquisates; their number diminished under Charlemagne and his successors; but at the same time there rose under them a numerous class of counts and vavaseurs, amongst whom every duke divided the province that had been ceded to him, under condition that they should swear fealty and homage, and follow him to the wars. The counts, in their turn, divided among the warriors attached to their colours the land apportioned to them. Thus was the feudal system, which made the possession of land the warrior’s pay, and constituted an hereditary subordination founded on interest and confirmed by oath from the king down to the lowest soldier, established at the same time throughout Europe. The Lombards had carried into Italy the first germs of this system which had been developed by the Franks and invigorated by the civil wars of Charlemagne and his successors; these wars rendered it necessary that every feudatory should fortify his dwelling to preserve his allegiance to his lord; and the country, which till then had been open and without defence, became covered with castles, in which these feudal lords established their residence.

About the same time—that is to say, in the ninth century—cities began to rebuild their ancient walls; for the barbarian kings who had everywhere levelled these walls to the ground no longer opposed their reconstruction, and the danger of being invaded by the rival princes who disputed the throne made them necessary; besides, at this epoch new swarms of barbarians from all parts infested Europe; the inhabitants of Scandinavia, under the name of Danes and Normans, ravaged England and France; the Hungarians devasted Germany and upper Italy; the Saracens, masters of Africa, infested the southern coasts of Italy and the isles: conquest was not the purpose of any of these invaders; plunder and massacre were their only objects. Permission to guard themselves against continual outrages could[20] not be withheld from the inhabitants of towns. Several thousand citizens had often been obliged to pay ransom to little more than a hundred robbers; but, from the time they were permitted by their emperors to rebuild their walls, to purchase or manufacture arms, they felt themselves in a state to make themselves respected. Their long suffering had hardened them, had accustomed them to privations and danger, and had taught them it was better to defend their lives than yield them up to every contemptible aggressor; at the same time, the population of cities, no longer living in idleness at the expense of the provinces of the empire, addicted themselves to industry for their own profit: they had, accordingly, some wealth to defend. The ancient curiæ and municipalities had been retained in all the towns of Italy by their barbarian masters, in order to distribute more equally the burdens imposed by the conquerors, and reach individuals more surely. The magistrates were the chiefs of a people who demanded only bread, arms, and walls.

In the meantime the dukes, marquises, counts, and prelates, who looked on these cities as their property, on the inhabitants as men who belonged to them, and laboured only for their use, soon perceived that these citizens were ill disposed to obey, and would not suffer themselves to be despoiled, since they had arms, and could defend themselves under the protection of their walls: residence in towns thus became disagreeable to the nobles, and they left them to establish themselves in their castles. They became sensible that to defend these castles they had need of men devoted to them; that, notwithstanding the advantage which their heavy armour gave them when fighting on horseback, they were the minority; and they hastened to enfranchise the rural population, to encourage their growth, to give them arms, and to endeavour to gain their affections. The effect of this change of rule was rapid: the rural population in the tenth and eleventh centuries increased, doubled, quadrupled in exact proportion to the land which they had to cultivate.

Otto I, his son Otto II, and his grandson Otto III were successively acknowledged emperors and kings of Italy, from 961 to 1002. When this branch of the house of Saxony became extinct, Henry II of Bavaria and Conrad the Salian of Franconia filled the throne from 1004 to 1039. During this period of nearly eighty years, the German emperors twelve times entered Italy at the head of their armies, which they always drew up in the plains of Roncaglia near Piacenza: there they held the states of Lombardy, received homage from their Italian feudatories, caused the rents due to be paid, and promulgated laws for the government of Italy. A foreign sovereign, however, almost always absent, known only by his incursions at the head of a barbarous army, could not efficaciously govern a country which he hardly knew, and where his yoke was detested. During these five reigns, the social power became more and more weak in Italy. The emperors were too happy to acknowledge the local authorities, whatever they were, whenever they could obtain from them their pecuniary dues: sometimes they were dukes or marquises, whose dignities had survived the disasters of various invasions and of civil wars; sometimes the archbishops and bishops of great cities, whom Charlemagne and his successors had frequently invested with duchies and counties escheated to the crown, reckoning that lords elected for life would remain more dependent than hereditary lords; sometimes, finally, they were the magistrates themselves, who, although elected by the people, received from the monarch the title of imperial vicars, and took part with the nobles and prelates in the plaids (placita), or diets of Roncaglia.

In the time of Conrad the Salian, the prelates almost throughout Lombardy joined the cities against the nobles; and from 1035 to 1039 there was a general war between these two orders of society. Conrad put an end to it, by a constitution which is considered to be the basis of feudal law. By this the inheritance of fiefs was protected from the caprices of the lords and of the crown,—the most oppressive conditions of feudal dependence were suppressed or softened,—and the few remaining slaves of the land were set free.

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY

The crown of Conrad the Salian passed in a direct line to his son, grandson, and great-grandson. The first, Henry III, reigned from 1039 to 1056; the second, Henry IV, from 1056 to 1106; the third, Henry V, from 1106 to 1125. The last two reigns were troubled by the bloody quarrel between the empire and the court of Rome, called the war of investitures. Rome had never made part of the monarchy of the Lombards. This ancient capital of the world, with the territory appertaining to it, had, since the conquest of Alboin, formed a dukedom, governed by a patrician or Greek duke, sent from Constantinople. The bishop of Rome, however, who, according to the ancient canonical forms, was elected by the clergy, the senate, and the people of his diocese, had much more authority over his flock than this foreign magistrate.

The pontiff, however, who now began to take exclusively the name of pope, had more than once successfully defended Rome with his spiritual arms when temporal ones had failed. When, in the year 717, an iconoclast, or enemy of images, filled the throne of Constantinople, the popes under the pretence of heresy rejected his authority altogether; a municipality, at the head of which were a senate and consuls, then governed Rome nearly as an independent state; the Greeks, occupied with their own dissensions, seemed to forget it; and Rome owed to this forgetfulness fifty years of a sort of liberty. The Romans found once more a faint image of their past glory; sometimes even the title of Roman Republic was revived. They approved, notwithstanding, of Pope Stephen II conferring on the princes of the Franks the dignity of patricians, in order to transfer to them the authority which the Greek magistrate exercised in their city in the name of the emperor of Constantinople; and the people gladly acquiesced when, in the year 800, Leo III crowned Charlemagne as augustus, and restorer of the Western Empire. From that period Rome became once more the capital of the empire. At Rome the chiefs of the empire were henceforth to receive the golden crown from the hands of the pope, after having received the silver one of the kingdom of Germany at Aachen, and the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan.

Great wealth and much feudal power were, by the gratitude of the emperors, attached to the see of Rome. The papacy became the highest object of ambition to the whole sacerdotal order; and, in an age of violence and anarchy, barons notorious for their robberies, and young libertines recommended only by the favour of some Roman ladies, not unfrequently filled the pontifical chair. The other bishops selected were often no better. The German emperors, on arriving at Rome, were sometimes obliged to put an end to such a scandal, and choose among the competitors, or depose a pope who put all Christendom to the blush. Henry III obliged the people to renounce the right which they had hitherto exercised, and so greatly abused, to take part in the election of popes. He, himself, named four[22] successively, whom he chose from among the most learned and the most pious of the clergy of Italy and Germany; and thus powerfully seconded the spirit of reform which began to animate the church from the eleventh century.

THE DISUNITED MUNICIPALITIES

The war of investitures, which lasted more than sixty years, accomplished the dissolution of every tie between the different members of the kingdom of Italy. Civil wars have at least this advantage—that they force the rulers of the people to consult the wishes of their subjects, oblige them to gain affections which constitute their strength, and to compensate, by the granting of new privileges, the services which they require. The prelates, nobles, and cities of Italy obeyed, some the emperor, others the pope; not from a blind fear, but from choice, from affection, from conscience, according as the political or religious sentiment was predominant in each. The war was general, but everywhere waged with the national forces. Every city armed its militia, which, headed by the magistrates, attacked the neighbouring nobles or towns of a contrary party. While each city imagined it was fighting either for the pope or the emperor, it was habitually impelled exclusively by its own sentiments: every town considered itself as a whole, as an independent state, which had its own allies and enemies; each citizen felt an ardent patriotism, not for the kingdom of Italy, or for the empire, but for his own city.

At the period when either kings or emperors had granted to towns the right of raising fortifications, that of assembling the citizens at the sound of a great bell, to concert together the means of their common defence, had been also conceded. This meeting of all the men of the state capable of bearing arms was called a parliament. It assembled in the great square, and elected annually two consuls, charged with the administration of justice at home, and the command of the army abroad. The militia of every city was divided into separate bodies, according to local partitions, each led by a gonfalonière, or standard-bearer. They fought on foot, and assembled round the carroccio, a heavy car drawn by oxen, and covered with the flags and armorial bearings of the city. A high pole rose in the middle of this car, bearing the colours and a Christ, which seemed to bless the army, with both arms extended. A priest said daily mass at an altar placed in the front of the car. The trumpeters of the community, seated on the back part, sounded the charge and the retreat. It was Heribert, archbishop of Milan,[3] contemporary of Conrad the Salian, who invented this car in imitation of the ark of alliance, and caused it to be adopted at Milan. All the free cities of Italy followed the example: this sacred car, entrusted to the guardianship of the militia, gave them weight and confidence. The nobles who committed themselves in the civil wars, and were obliged to have recourse to the protection of towns, where they had been admitted into the first order of citizens, formed the only cavalry.

The parliament, which named the consuls, appointed also a secret council, called a consilio di credenza, to assist the government, composed of a few members taken from each division; besides a grand council of the people, who prepared the decisions to be submitted to the parliament. The consilio[23] di credenza was, at the same time, charged with the administration of the finances, consisting chiefly of entrance duties collected at the gates of the city, and voluntary contributions asked of the citizens in moments of danger. As industry had rapidly increased, and had preceded luxury, as domestic life was sober, and the produce of labour considerable, wealth had greatly augmented. The citizens allowed themselves no other use of their riches than that of defending or embellishing their country. It was from the year 900 to the year 1200 that the most prodigious works were undertaken and accomplished by the towns of Italy. They began by surrounding themselves with thick walls, ditches, towers, and counter guards at the gates; immense works, which a patriotism ready for every sacrifice could alone accomplish. The maritime towns at the same time constructed their ports, quays, canals, and custom-houses, which served also as vast magazines for commerce. Every city built public palaces for the signoria, or municipal magistrates, and prisons; and constructed also temples, which to this day fill us with admiration by their grandeur and magnificence. These three regenerating centuries gave an impulse to architecture, which soon awakened the other fine arts.

The republican spirit which now fermented in every city, and gave to each of them constitutions so wise, magistrates so zealous, and citizens so patriotic and so capable of great achievements, had found in Italy itself the models which had contributed to its formation. The war of investitures gave wing to this universal spirit of liberty and patriotism in all the municipalities of Lombardy, in Piedmont, Venetia, Romagna, and Tuscany. But there existed already in Italy other free cities, of which the experience had been sufficiently long to prove that a petty people finds, in its complete union and devotion to the common cause, a strength often wanting in great states. The free cities which flourished in the eleventh century rose from the ruins of the Western Empire; as those in Italy which preceded them in the career of liberty rose from the ruins of the empire of the East.

When the Greeks resigned to the Lombards Italy, which a few years before they had conquered from the Ostrogoths, they still preserved several isolated ports and fortified places along the coast. Venice, at the extremity of the Adriatic; Ravenna, at the south of the mouth of the Po; Genoa, at the foot of the Ligurian Mountains; Pisa, towards the mouths of the Arno; Rome, Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, Bari, were either never conquered by the Lombards, or were in subjection too short a time to have lost their ancient walls and the habit of guarding them. These cities served as the refuge of Roman civilisation. All those who had preserved any fortune, independence of mind, or hatred of oppression, assembled in them to concert the means of resisting the insolence of their barbarian masters. The Grecian Empire maintained itself at Constantinople in all its ancient pride; but, with oriental apathy, it regarded these remains as still representing its province of Italy, while it did nothing for their defence. From time to time, a duke, an exarch, a patrician, a catapan, or other magistrate, was sent, with a title announcing the highest pretensions, but unaccompanied by any real force. The citizens of these towns demanded money and soldiers to repair and defend their fortifications; whilst the emperors, on the contrary, demanded that the money and soldiers of Italy should be sent to Constantinople. After some disputes, the Greek government found it prudent to abandon the question, and shut its eyes to the establishment of a liberty it despised, but which perhaps might be useful in the defence of these distant possessions; finally, the magistrates, whom these towns themselves nominated,[24] became the acknowledged depositories of the imperial authority. The disposal of their own money and soldiers was allowed them, on condition that nothing should be demanded of the emperors, who were satisfied to see their names at the head of every act, and their image on the coin, without exacting other acts of submission. This policy was not, however, exactly followed with respect to Ravenna, or afterwards to Bari. In these cities the representative of the emperor had fixed his residence with a Greek garrison. Ravenna, as well as the cities appertaining to it, denominated the Pentapolis, was conquered by the Lombards between 720 and 730. Bari became then the capital of the thema of Lombardy, which extended over a great part of Apulia. We have already shown how Rome passed from the Greek to the Western Empire: we suspect, rather than know, that Genoa and Pisa, after having been occupied by the Lombards, preserved their relations with Constantinople. The pallium, or silk flag, presented for some time to the emperors, was considered by them as a sort of tribute; but Venice on the upper sea, Gaeta, Naples, and Amalfi, on the lower, advanced more openly to independence.

THE ORIGIN OF VENICE

From the invasion by Attila in 452, the marshes called Lagune, formed at the extremity of the Adriatic by the slime deposited by seven or eight great rivers, amidst which arose innumerable islands, had been the refuge of all the rich inhabitants of Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, and other great cities of Venetia, who fled from the sabres of the Huns. The Roman Empire of the West survived this great calamity twenty-four years; but it was only a period of expiring agony, during which fresh disasters continually forced new refugees to establish themselves in the Lagune. A numerous population was at length formed there, supported by fishing, the making of salt, some other manufactories, and the commerce carried on by means of these many rivers. Beyond the reach of the barbarians, who had no vessels, forgotten by the Romans, and their successors the Ostrogoths, they maintained their independence under the administration of tribunes, named by an assembly of the people in each of the separate isles.b

The authentic record of maritime Venice commences with the arrival of the Lombards in Italy. Of the time previous to this period, the records are the work of posterior chroniclers written in an adulatory spirit towards the republican powers.

As Babbo rightly said with regard to the vaunted very ancient origin and liberty of Venice, it was flattering to the republics to be credited with[25] such old and sovereign power, “but the truth is that liberty and power do not rise to full force at once, but they gradually gain ground in obscurity and difficulty.” But criticism has for some time directed its attention to these inventions, and has finally silenced the Venetian traditions with their pretended foundations.

However, it is not to be inferred that the Venetian islands were uninhabited before the invasion of the Lombards, for there are documents which prove the contrary. But, as anyone can see, there is a great difference between the islands having inhabitants and being seats of an organised and free state as we are asked to believe.

It is now generally granted that, during the Roman sway and at the time of the temporary invasions, the stable populations of the islands remained subject to continental Venetia, and more particularly to the mother-city from which it received its magistrates. But when the foreign invasions became more lasting, the bonds of independence were necessarily loosened towards the mother-country, when they were not utterly broken.

The first document showing the emancipation of the islands from continental Venetia is the letter written by Cassiodorus to the tribune of the maritime places, in the year 538, in which he asks him to provide a transport to Ravenna for the wines and oils belonging to the Istrians. But if this letter shows that the inhabitants of the islands at the time of the Gothic rule had begun to elect their own magistrates instead of receiving them from the mother-country, it does not prove that the islands thenceforward had full political power, as Graswinkel of antiquity and Crivello of modern times would have us to believe. Because in this case the letter would not have been written in the name of the prefect of the place as well as in the name of the king, as it was customary with foreigners; neither would Cassiodorus have dared to use to the Venetian tribune the same language as he used in his letters to the provinciali of Istria, to the consulare of Liguria, and to the possessori of Syracuse, who were never thought to be independent magistrates. Moreover, Balbo notes that the vicinity of the lagunes to Ravenna, the capital and seat of the Gothic kings of Italy, renders every other supposition absurd.

Hence Romanin shows that this dependence of the islands on the Gothic dominion was more nominal than real. It is indisputable that it was changed into a sort of protectorate before it became a real republic, the rule of the east Goths being of too short duration to permit the confirmation of their own power, and moreover the nominal amnesty of the islands to the kingdom sufficiently satisfied the ambition of the Gothic kings and relieved them of undertaking their conquest. When Italy passed into the hands of the Greeks through the victories of Belisarius, the Venetian islands followed the fate of the mother-country; and it relapsed subsequently into the power of the Greeks after the short restoration of the Gothic rule. Moreover, the Greek sovereignty of the islands seemed to have become a mere military occupation; at least it appears so in the second half of the sixth century, when the migrations were made definitive to confirm the Lombard power in Italy.

To show how far removed from dependence on Constantinople the islands were at that time, we quote the authority of the chronicler Giovanni Diacono,h who dates the origin of the tribunal government and the conformation of the rank to the metropolises of the islands from the arrival of the Lombards. This fact, whilst showing on one side the autonomous position assumed by the islands towards the Byzantine Empire, proves on the other[26] that the dependence of the islands on the mother-country had now virtually ceased. Hence the tribunes after the second half of the sixth century assume the solemn title of tribunes of the islands of the maritime lagunes proposed by the corporations of the same, to show that their election had been made with the full authority of the islands without regard to the mother-cities. The form of the political relations of the islands with Constantinople can be gathered from the account given by the chronicler Altinate of Longinus’ visit to the islands in the year (584) before returning to his country.

Altinate relates that when Longinus asked the islanders to receive him into the lagunes, and thence to transport him to Constantinople in their ships, he tried to persuade them by saying that he required no oath of fidelity, but, if they wished to show themselves good servants of the empire and ready to fight their enemies, he would make known or send for what they wanted at Constantinople; he would ask the emperor for whatever they wanted by means of a writing which he himself would place in the hands of the emperor, which would increase the concessions to the islands to have open and free entry to all the ports of the empire in the ways of commerce. The Venetians, satisfied with such promises, after having announced to the exarch how they were situated, how they had made this sanctuary in the lagunes so as not to fear being subjugated by any emperor, or king, or any prince whatsoever in the world, they received him with great honour, and sent with him to Constantinople a deputation to ask the emperor for the things promised by the exarch. And the emperor gave to the Venetians a diploma by which they were to be held in honour by all the authorities of the capital and the state, and to receive the protection of the imperial forces for all the maritime district and complete security for their commerce in the kingdom; and thus the Venetians became subject to his dominion and became proud of the honour. We see from this account of the chronicler Altinate, which was confirmed by subsequent chroniclers, that the primary political relation of the Venetians with the empire was, like that with the Gothic kings of Italy, a relation of protection more than servitude.

“They recognised,” says Romanin, “the emperor as their lord, they bowed to servile formulas, ordained by the proud vanity of the Eastern court, they accepted the general custom of heading their acts with the name and the year of the reigning cæsar; but they continued to rule themselves with their own laws and with their own magistrates. They made wars and concluded treaties, which they could not have done in a state of subjection.”

And, supported by the authority of the Byzantine records, by the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus at Calcondila, this condition of political autonomy, enjoyed by the Venetians in the second half of the sixth century (according to the author of the Storia documentata di Venezia), reassumed the diverse conditions of life by which maritime Venice passed from her first appearance upon the theatre of history until the conquest of Italy by the Lombards. From the facts appearing among this accumulated matter he had to conclude that the islands were at first dependent on the Venetian territory to which they were annexed, that in the confusion arising from the barbaric invasions in which they found themselves cut off from the mother-country they had to provide for themselves and nominate their own magistrates, that they recognised the Gothic dominion which caused them no inconvenience, and they were left in possession of their own municipal government; and that finally, at the time of the Lombards, their constitution assumed a stable form, and their first relations with the kings of Italy and with the[27] emperors corresponded rather to those of a protectorate than to a real dependency. Impartial examination of subsequent events proves this fact, for full liberty in the reforms of their own government and laws without the intervention of any foreign power is evident; the wars were spontaneously undertaken and the treaties independently concluded. By such means everything went on naturally and progressively, as is seen by the records before us, and as we learn from the national history and story of events.

THE ORIGIN OF THE DOGESHIP

There are but few records of the period between the stipulation of the compromise with the emperor Maurice to the foundation of the Venetian dukedom, but they suffice to confirm the autonomous policy enjoyed by the Venetian islands at that time. The majority of these records refer to the wars engaged in by the Venetians with the Lombards. By these they became masters of Padua. At the time of King Agilulf they turned their arms against the islands to get them under their own sway. The increasing prosperity of the islands, and the idea that the wealth accumulated there had been mostly imported from the continent to protect it from the usurpation of conquerors, kindled a strong desire to complete its conquest. The external dangers of the islands were attended by the internal disputes from the ambitions and jealousies of the tribunes.

An imminent invasion of the Lombards was feared when the greater part of the country, recognising the gravity of the danger menacing them, summoned a general council to Heraclea under the presidency of the chief patriarch Aristoforo. And here it was unanimously agreed to introduce a stricter form of government by preventing the rivalries of the magistrates who were the chief fomenters of the internal dissensions. And following the example of great cities like Rome, Genoa, and Naples, which were saved by dukes, they agreed to appoint a chief magistrate with jurisdiction over all the islands with the title of “duke” (doge). Then, proceeding to the election of the person on whom this dignity was to be conferred, their choice fell upon Paolu Lucio, or Paoluccio Anafesto. Such was the origin of the Venetian dukedom as it is recorded by chroniclers. But if there is unity among them as to the causes which gave rise to the ducal power in maritime Venetia, there is none with regard to the time in which it was instituted. Some put it in the year 697, others relegate it to the first years of the next century. Among them there is Giovanni Diacono,h who puts the election of Paoluccio at the time of Anastasius II, emperor, and of Liutprand king of the Lombards. And as, according to the most ancient Venetian chronicler, Liutprand succeeded to the throne in 712 and Anastasius in 713, the election of Paoluccio could not have been before the latter year.

Therefore between the two extreme dates quoted by the chroniclers there is a difference of sixteen years, sufficient time to afford material for criticism. But the different points were defended and contested without result. Muratiri Leo defended the date of 697, which is the date given by Dandolo and his followers; Romanin oscillated between the two dates; Filiasi and Balbo were inclined to the medium course and put the election of Paoluccio in the year 706 or 707. But as neither the one nor the other adduces more authentic proofs in support of the closer date, we will remain firm in preferring that of 713, which is according to the most eminent author on Venetian matters. We are the more led to this preference by the cause to which the chroniclers[28] generally attribute the foundation of Venetian dukedom. For if it is true that the imminence of the Lombards led the inhabitants of the islands to institute a supreme magistrate, it could not have referred to the time preceding Liutprand in which the Lombards, either through flaccidness of purpose or through internal disputes, were incapable of thinking of new conquests or exercising fears or apprehensions among their neighbours. The chronicler Giovanni says nothing of the attributes of the new magistrate, and his silence on such an important subject is the more deplorable, as in the computations made by posterior chroniclers on the ducal authority we find names used of matters more contemporaneous to them than to the time of which they speak.

Andrea Dandolo,g the most authentic among them, describes in the following words the attributes of the first Venetian dukes: “They had,” says the doge chronicler, “the power and right to convoke the general meeting for public affairs, to appoint tribunes and judges to administer all matters private, lay, and ecclesiastical, save the mere spiritual; they had power in everything befitting the title of duke; and by their orders there the councils of the clergy took place and the election to the prelature was made by the clergy and the people, the election and the investiture being from their hands, as they had the power of appointment.” It is very doubtful whether the ducal attributes were originally so defined in detail. Anyhow, from the appearance of a military magistrate with the title of master of the militia alongside of the first duke, it can be inferred that the jurisdiction of the duke was limited to civil affairs. For the chronicler Giovanni,h in speaking of Paoluccio Anafesto, says that he judged his own with temperate justice. And here the verb to judge is used in a more definite and proper sense than in that used by the Lombard histories and documents respecting their dukes. It expresses that which is solely civil jurisdiction, whilst the jurisdiction of the Lombard dukes included the military jurisdiction as well as the civil.

We have an important document of the dogedom of Anafesto,i which shows how beneficial the institution of the ducal power was to the Venetians. This document is a convention of the doge with Liutprand, by which the Lombard king conceded to the Venetians the trade of the territories of the kingdom proper, and, defining the limits between the two states, it declared to be Venetian the territories between the Piave Major and the Piavicelli on the side of Heraclea. Such, according to the chronicler Giovanni, was the tenor of the treaty of peace concluded between Liutprand and the first doge of Venice. And we have authentic confirmation of its truth in its verification, made by Barbarossa in the year 1177, of that which pertained to the designation of the Venetian confines on the part of Italy.c

It was in 809 [or 810], in a war against Pepin, son of Charlemagne, that the Venetians made choice of the Island of the Rialto, near which they assembled their fleet bearing their wealth, and built the city of Venice, the capital of their republic. Twenty years afterward they transported thither from Alexandria the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, their chosen patron. His lion figured in their arms, and his name in their language whenever they would designate with peculiar affection their country or government.

VENICE IN THE TENTH CENTURY

While the Venetians disputed with the Lombards, the Frank and the German emperors, the little land on which stood their houses, they had also to dispute the sea that bathed them, with the Slavonians, who had established[29] themselves for the purpose of piracy on the eastern side of the Adriatic.b It was hardly five hundred years since the fugitives from Padua and Aquileia had sought refuge in the lagunes. Content with having found safety there and freedom to enlarge their town and extend their commerce, they had hitherto only made just wars, having only taken to arms to repulse pirates, help oppressed neighbours, or to defend their liberty against Pepin and the Hungarians.

Although many victories had given them a just appreciation of their strength, they had no aggression to reproach themselves with, unless perhaps that against the Saracens, but this war was undertaken at the solicitation of the Italian people, and on the request of the Eastern emperor. Moreover, in generally received ideas of this epoch, the Saracens, in their quality as infidels, were beyond the pale of common rights. The republic had never made incursions on the continent, for it would not be just to lay to its account the short expeditions of the two doges, who had no other object than their own interests.

This union of exiles and fishers had become a rich, powerful, warlike, yet at the same time a peaceful nation. The fruit of this moderation had been if not an existence exempt from trouble, at least a medium to the creation of an independent state, freeing itself little by little from the influence of the two empires between which it found itself—a state, moreover, which treated with its neighbours, counted many illustrious families, whose princes married kings’ daughters, yet in its entity did not extend beyond the lagunes and several points of the neighbouring coast. A new scene was to open up.

Commerce, that profession in which fortunes are continually being tried, is not a school of moderation. Successes inspire greediness and jealousy, and these latter the spirit of domination. Maritime commerce wanted ports where her ships could be gathered, authority where she bought, privileges where she sold, safety for navigation, and, above all, no rivals. This ambitious spirit is really the same as that of conquest. Venice will show us an example of it.

No choice of the Venetians was more justified by its great and lasting results than that of Doge Pietro Orseolo II in 991. He was the son of him who had abdicated the dogate fifteen years before. As in the life of all great men there is something of the marvellous, it was spread abroad that his father had announced that his son would be the glory of his country, and the holiness of Orseolo I gave to these paternal hopes all the authority of a prophecy.

Hardly was the new doge on the throne, than the factions which had torn Venice during the reign of his feeble predecessor calmed down or at any rate were quiet. Deliberations had been frequently troubled ones; the palace had more than once been stained with blood. Orseolo made a law by which[30] all acts of violence in the public assembly should be punished by a fine of twenty gold livres or the death of those who had not the wherewithal to pay. A statesman as well as a clever warrior, he occupied himself with forwarding commercial prosperity. He treated with all the Italian states for goods. He obtained from the emperor of the East that all subjects of the republic should be exempt from dues throughout the empire, not only in ports but inland, or at least that the dues should be reduced in the proportion of thirty gold sols to two. Finally he assured himself, by an embassy and presents, of the favour of Egyptian and Syrian sultans. The interior commerce of the Adriatic was itself an abundant source of riches for the Venetians. Favoured by concessions from the patriarch of Aquileia and the Italian kings, their ships went the whole length of Lombardy and Friuli to sell all sorts of foreign wares. They were welcome in the ports of Apulia and Calabria; on the eastern coast of the gulf they enjoyed some privileges, bought, it is true, by a tribute, but which were none the less profitable.

They got from Dalmatia firewood, wines, oils, hemp, linen, all kinds of grain and cattle. The eastern coast offered lead, mercury, and metals of every kind, wood for building, wools, cloth, house linen, cordage, dried fruits, and even slaves and eunuchs. Everywhere they possessed themselves of the exclusive commerce in salt and salted fish, and carried into every country the merchandise of the East. It was owing to a so extended commerce that Venice, until then without territory, armed fleets, and placed between two empires, knew how to resist one and make herself necessary to the other. These advantages were considerable, but to enjoy them peaceably it was necessary to be delivered from these Narentine pirates, who for one hundred and fifty years annoyed Venetian commerce with their continual inroads. They furnished no immediate cause for attack, only demanded the annual tribute which the republic had promised them, to which the doge answered that he would soon bring it himself. Their attacks were at that time directed against the peoples established the length of the Adriatic; the Istrians, Liburnians, and the Dalmatians.

Various nations had established themselves one after another on these coasts; at first they depended on their chiefs for protection; then those in Dalmatia came under the sway of the Eastern emperor, while those farther north looked to the ruler of the West. These two empires became feeble; various commercial towns sprang up on the sea coast which came by little and little to regard themselves as independent, and these would have found an assured source of prosperity in maritime pursuits were it not for the interference of the neighbouring Narentines. It would not be unreasonable to conjecture that Venice was not without some anxiety, even jealousy, with regard to these people settled on the east coast of the Adriatic, for they were independent, industrious, and good sailors.

Venetian historians relate that all these people, as if moved unanimously, sent deputies to Venice to implore help against the pirates, offering to give themselves to the republic if she would deliver them. There are very few people who will give themselves away, and there are no magistrates who have the right of giving away people. This deputation, if it be true that it took place, did more honour to the politics of those who received it than to the wisdom of those who sent it. However that may be, the Venetians hastened to collect a considerable armament to go and help, or overthrow, their neighbours, and the doge, after having received from the bishop’s hands the standard of the republic, went to sea in the spring of the year 997.d

It was on the 18th of May, 997, that the fleet left its moorings, and pointed its prows toward Grado, where it was met by the patriarch Vitali Sanudo, followed by a solemn procession of the clergy and the people. From Grado the whole armament sailed successively to Pirano, Omago, Emonia, Parenzo, Rovigno, Pola, Zara, Spalatro, Trau, Ossero, Arbo, Veglia, Sebenigo, Belgrado, Lenigrado, and Curzola. All those places appeared to welcome the Venetians as their deliverers, and each readily took an oath of allegiance to its suzerain. At Zara, where the merchants of Venice had formed their earliest settlements, and where the people exhibited peculiar fervour, Orseolo spent six days; and during that period arrived a deputation from Dircislaus, king of Croatia, whose alarm at the successful progress of the expedition rendered him desirous of conciliating the republic. The ambassadors of Dircislaus were dismissed without an audience. At Trau, he found the brother of the king, Cresimir by name, who implored his Serenity to aid him in establishing a joint claim to the throne of his father, from which he stated that he had been recently driven by the perfidy of Dircislaus. Orseolo entertained the matter favourably, and even consented shortly afterward (998), as a mark of his friendship and esteem, as well as on grounds of commercial policy, to the union of his own daughter, Hicela, with the son of the Croatian prince.

But the campaign was far from being at a close. A great impediment was still to be conquered. Lesina, the principal member of the Illyrican group, and the chief resort of the pirates, still remained untaken; and the doge, having sent ten galleys from Trau to ravage the coast of Narenta, hastened with the main squadron to accomplish that object. Orseolo entered the harbour without hesitation; and the usual summons to surrender having produced no effect, an order was given to commence the assault. The Lesinese shrank in dismay from the tempest of stones and darts which poured without cessation over their walls; the escarpment was scaled; a tower was invested and taken; the Venetians entered the town; and, after a brief interval of license and confusion, the arrival of the doge restored order. The judicious clemency of Orseolo conciliated the esteem of the vanquished; and such was the powerful effect which the reduction of a place, generally thought to be unassailable, produced on its neighbours that, so soon as she heard of the fall of Lesina, the little republic of Ragusa despatched an embassy to offer her allegiance to the conqueror. At the same time, the ten galleys which had undertaken to lay waste the coast of Narenta, rejoined the main squadron with forty Croatian prizes; and this collateral success, which might be partly instrumental in humiliating King Dircislaus, afforded no slight satisfaction to Orseolo. Having thus, in the course of a few months, completed the object of his expedition, the doge concluded the campaign by dictating terms to the sea-robbers of Narenta; and Orseolo, having returned to the capital, and communicated to the national Arrengo the wonderful success which had attended the arms of the republic, was proclaimed Doge of Venice and Dalmatia (998). The assumption of this lofty appellation seems to have been entirely in harmony with the notions of sovereignty generally prevalent at that epoch. The incomplete conquest and precarious tenure of a few hundred miles of the Dalmatian seaboard sufficed, in the eyes of the Venetians, to constitute Dalmatia itself into an integral portion of their dominions; and it is a circumstance strikingly characteristic of the age, that, in conferring new honours upon the crown, no attempt was made to discriminate between an immense tract of country in which the republic had little or no territorial interest and over a small[32] portion only of which she exercised the barest of feudal rights, and the islands, to which she enjoyed the fullest prescriptive and possessory title.[4]k

In the intervals of peace Orseolo nobly employed his fortune raising public monuments. His father had founded a hospital and rebuilt at his own expense the palace and church of St. Mark. The son had the cathedral of Grado rebuilt, others say the whole city, and many buildings in Heraclea. This magnificence may give an idea to what degree of splendour the great families had arrived. This particular one had only been raised to ducal dignity one generation.d

It would have been to expect from the illustrious citizens of Venice more than one could expect from the human race to ask them to forget the glory and splendour of their house, to raise themselves above domestic interests, to work only for the grandeur of the state, and make this generation consist in the equality of all the citizens. The tendency towards aristocracy was for a long time only the result of influence given by riches, office, the remembrance of service rendered, and the respect which attaches itself naturally to an illustrious name. This kind of aristocracy existed long before the legal one. In the political order there was no distinction between nobles and plebeians, and when a foreigner, or a prince even, was admitted to the quality of Venetian, they said to him, “Civem nostrum creamus”—“We make you our fellow-citizen.”

But the Venetian nobles had frequented the society of high French barons, and naturally took some of their opinions. On their side the people and the middle class, like the nobles, were also interested. If the very legitimate pride of the aristocrats made them desire power, the good sense of the other party advised them to claim a share. It was from the struggle between these interests that a new form of government arose. One historian has forgotten himself so far as to say that this revolution led things back to “a natural order, in which the lower orders were dominated by the upper.” The language has no more sense than dignity.c

PROSPERITY AND POLITICAL REFORMS

The settlement of the Venetian constitution prepared the republic for her brilliant career of commercial and political grandeur; and a new source of wealth and power had meanwhile been unfolding itself in her cupidity and ambition. No circumstance contributed more effectually to her subsequent prosperity than the religious wars of the Europeans for the recovery of the Holy Land from the Mohammedan infidels.

From the epoch of the Peace of Constance to the end of the twelfth century, the history of Venice is occupied by no occurrence which deserves to be recorded. But the first years of the thirteenth century are the most brilliant and glorious in the long annals of the republic. They are filled with the details of a romantic and memorable enterprise—the equipment of a prodigious naval armament, the fearless pursuit of a distant and gigantic adventure, the conquest of an ancient empire, the division of the spoil, and the consummation of commercial grandeur.

In the year 1198, Pope Innocent III, by the preaching of Fulk Neuilly, a French priest, had stirred up the greatest nobles of that kingdom to undertake a crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. Baldwin,[33] count of Flanders, enrolled himself in the same cause, and Boniface, marquis of Montferrat, accepted the command of the confederates. They were warned by the sad experience of former crusades not to attempt the passage to Asia by land; and the maritime states of Italy were the only powers which could furnish shipping for the transport of a numerous army. The barons therefore sent a deputation to Venice to entreat the alliance and negotiate for the assistance of the republic (1201 A.D.).

Henry Dandolo, who, at the extraordinary age of ninety-three, and in almost total blindness, still preserved the vigorous talents and heroism of youth, had been for nine years doge of Venice. He received the illustrious ambassadors with distinction; and after the object of their mission had been regularly laid before the councils of the state, announced to them in the name of the republic the conditions upon which a treaty would be concluded. As the aristocracy had not yet perfected the entire exclusion of the people from a voice in public affairs, the magnitude of the business demanded the solemn assent of the citizens, and a general assembly was convened in the square of St. Mark. There, before the multitude of more than ten thousand persons, the proud nobles of France threw themselves upon their knees to implore the assistance of the commercial republicans in redeeming the sepulchre of Christ. Their tears and eloquence prevailed. The terms of alliance had been left to the dictation of the doge and his counsellors; and for 85,000 marks of silver, less than £200,000 ($1,000,000), and not an unreasonable demand, the republic engaged to transport 4,500 knights with their horses and arms, 9,000 esquires, and 20,000 infantry, to any part of the coasts of the East which the service of God might require, to provision them for nine months, and to escort and aid them with a fleet of fifty galleys; but with the farther conditions that the money should be paid before embarkation, and that whatever conquests might be made, should be equally shared between the barons and the republic.

The Venetians demanded a year of preparation; and before that period had expired, both their fidelity to the engagement and the extent of their resources were conspicuously displayed. But all the crusaders were not equally true to their faith; many whose ardour had cooled, shamefully deserted their vows; others had taken ship for Palestine in Flanders, at Marseilles, and at other Mediterranean ports; and when the army had mustered at Venice, their numbers fell very short of expectation, and they were utterly unable to defray the stipulated cost of the enterprise. Though their noble leaders made a generous sacrifice of their valuables, above 30,000 marks were yet wanted to complete the full payment; and the republic, with true mercantile caution, refused to permit the sailing of the fleet until the amount of the deficiency should have been lodged in their treasury. The timid and the lukewarm already rejoiced that the crusade must be abandoned, when Dandolo suggested an equivalent for the remainder of the debt, by the condition that payment should be deferred if the barons would assist the republic in reducing the city of Zara, which had again revolted, before they pursued the ulterior objects of their voyage.

The citizens of Zara had committed themselves to the sovereignty of the king of Hungary, and the pope forbade the crusaders to attack the Christian subjects of a monarch who had himself assumed the cross. But the desire of honourably discharging their obligations prevailed with the French barons over the fear of papal displeasure, and, after some scruples, the army embarked for Zara (1202 A.D.). The aged doge having obtained permission from the republic to take the cross and lead the fleet, many of the citizens[34] followed his example in ranging themselves under the sacred banner, and the veteran hero sailed with the expedition of nearly five hundred vessels, the most magnificent armament, perhaps, which had ever covered the bosom of the Adriatic. Though Zara was deemed in that age one of the strongest cities in the world, the inhabitants were terrified or compelled into a surrender after a siege of only five days: their lives were spared, but their houses were pillaged, and their defences razed to the ground.

[It is unnecessary to follow further the remarkable fortunes of the Venetians and crusaders. The story of the capture of Constantinople has already been told in the history of the Eastern Empire and of the Crusades.]

The talents and heroism of the venerable Dandolo had won for the doges of Venice the splendid and accurate title of dukes of three-eighths of the Roman Empire; he died at Constantinople almost immediately after the Latin conquest, full of years and glory; and bequeathed to the republic the difficult office of governing a greater extent of dominion than had ever fallen to the inhabitants of a single city. All the islands of the Ionian, and most of those in the Ægean seas, great part of the shores of continental Greece, many of the ports in the Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, the city of Adrianople, and one-fourth of the eastern capital itself were all embraced in her allotment, and the large and valuable island of Candia was added to her possessions by purchase from the marquis of Montferrat to whom it had been assigned. But the prudence of her senate awakened Venice to a just sense of her own want of intrinsic strength to preserve these immense dependencies; and it was wisely resolved to retain under the public government of the state only the colony at Constantinople, with the island of Candia and those in the Ionian Sea. The subjects of the republic were not required to imitate the forbearance of the senate, and many of the great Venetian families were encouraged, or at least permitted, to found principalities among the ruins of the Eastern Empire, with a reservation of feudal allegiance to their country. In this manner most of the islands of the Ægean Archipelago were granted in fief to ten noble houses of Venice, and continued for several centuries subject to their insular princes.o

It was by slow and artfully disguised encroachments that the nobility of Venice succeeded in substituting itself for the civic power, and investing itself with the sovereignty of the republic. During the earlier period, the doge was an elective prince, the limit of whose power was vested in assemblies of the people. It was not till 1032 that he was obliged to consult only a council, formed from amongst the most illustrious citizens, whom he designated.[5] Thence came the name given them of pregadi (invited). The grand[35] council was not formed till 1172, 140 years later, and was from that time the real sovereign of the republic. It was composed of 480 members, named annually on the last day of September by twelve tribunes, or grand electors, of whom two were chosen by each of the six sections of the republic. No more than four members from one family could be named. The same counsellors might be re-elected each year. As it is in the spirit of a corporation to tend always towards an aristocracy, the same persons were habitually re-elected, and when they died their children took their places. The grand council, neither assuming to itself nor granting to the doge the judicial power, gave the first example of the creation of a body of judges, numerous, independent, and irremovable; such, nearly, as was afterwards the parliament of Paris. In 1179, it created the criminal quarantia; called, also, the vecchia quarantia, to distinguish it from two other bodies of forty judges created in 1229.d

OTHER MARITIME CITIES

The first magistrate of the republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi bore likewise the title of doge. These three cities, forgotten by the Greek emperors, and receiving no aid from them, still held by the ties of commerce to Greece. The inhabitants had devoted themselves with ardour to navigation; they trafficked in the Levant, and covered southern Italy with its rich merchandise. The country situated beyond the Tiber had been exposed to fewer invasions than upper Italy. It had not, however, entirely escaped. A Lombard chief entered it in 589, and founded the great duchy of Benevento, which comprehended nearly the whole southern part of the peninsula. This dukedom maintained itself independent of the kingdom of the Lombards at Pavia, and had not been involved in its fall. It defended itself with valour against Charlemagne and his successors, who attempted its conquest; but in 839, at the end of a civil war, it was divided into the three principalities of Benevento, Salerno, and Capua. The Saracens had established colonies, in the year 828, in Sicily, which till then had been subject to the Greek Empire; these Saracens, a few years afterwards, passed into southern Italy. The three republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi preserved their independence by exciting enmity between the Lombards and Saracens, who equally menaced them; but these barbarians soon sank into the languor produced by the charms of a southern climate. It seemed as if they had no longer courage to risk a life to which so many enjoyments were attached. When they fought, it was with effeminacy; and they hastened the termination of every war to plunge again into the voluptuous ease from which it had roused them. The citizens of the republics had the advantage over them of walls and defiles; and without being braver than the Lombards, maintained their independence against them for six centuries.

The republic of Pisa, which vainly sought to save from ruin these first Italian republics of the Middle Ages, was a city which navigation and commerce had enriched. Genoa, which soon became its rival, had escaped the pillage of these northern conquerors, and had preserved a constant intercourse with Constantinople and with Syria, from whence the citizens brought the rich merchandise which they afterwards dispersed throughout Lombardy. The Pisans and Genoese, invigorated by a seafaring life, were accustomed to defend with the sword the merchandise which they conveyed from one extremity to the other of the Mediterranean. They were often in conflict with the Saracens, like them addicted to maritime commerce, to which these[36] last frequently added piracy. The Saracens pillaged Genoa in the year 936. In 1004 they entered a suburb of Pisa, and again invested that city in the year 1011. Their colonies in Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Isles constantly menaced Italy. The Pisans, seconded by the Genoese, in their turn attacked Sardinia, in the year 1015; but completed the conquest only in 1050. They established colonies there, and divided it into fiefs between the most illustrious families of Pisa and Genoa. They also conquered the Balearic Isles from the Saracens, between the years 1114 and 1116.e The Pisan fleet of three hundred sail, commanded by the archbishop Pietro Moriconi, attacked the Balearic Isles, where as many as twenty thousand Christians were said to be held captive by the Moslems, and returned loaded with spoil and with a multitude of Christian and Moslem prisoners. The former were set at liberty or ransomed, and among the latter was the last descendant of the reigning dynasty. The chief eunuch, who had governed Majorca, perished in the siege. Immediately afterwards the fourteen years’ war with Genoa broke out. The two republics contested the dominion of the sea, and both claimed supreme power over the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. A papal edict awarding the supremacy of Corsica to the Pisan church proved sufficient cause for the war, which went on from 1118 to 1132. Then Innocent II transferred the supremacy over part of Corsica to the Genoese church, and compensated Pisa by grants in Sardinia and elsewhere. Accordingly, to gratify the pope and the emperor Lothair II, the Pisans entered the Neapolitan territory to combat the Normans. They aided in the vigorous defence of the city of Naples, and twice attacked and pillaged Amalfi, in 1135 and 1137, with such effect that the town never regained its prosperity. It has been said that the copy of the Pandects then taken by the Pisans from Amalfi was the first known to them, but in fact they were already acquainted with those laws. The war with Genoa never came to a real end. Even after the retaking of Jerusalem by the Moslems (1187), the Pisans and Genoese again met in conflict in the East, and performed many deeds of valour. They were always ready to come to blows, and gave still more signal proofs of their enmity during the Sicilian war in behalf of the emperor Henry VI. There could be no lasting peace between these rival powers until the one or the other should be crushed.l

When, towards the end of the eleventh century, the western world took up the dispute with the Saracens for the sepulchre of Jesus Christ, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa had already reached a high point of commercial power; these three cities had more vessels on the Mediterranean than the whole of Christendom besides. They seconded the crusaders with enthusiasm. They provisioned them when arrived off the coast of Syria, and kept up their communication with the West. The Venetians assert that they sent a fleet of two hundred vessels, in the year 1099, to second the First Crusade. The Pisans affirm that their archbishop Daimbert, who was afterwards patriarch of Jerusalem, passed into the East with one hundred and twenty vessels. The Genoese claim only twenty-eight galleys and six vessels; but all concurred with equal zeal in the conquest of the Holy Land; and the three maritime republics obtained important privileges, which they preserved as long as the kingdom of Jerusalem lasted.e

THE LOMBARD CITIES AND THEIR ALLIES

In the early days the Italian towns were only as yet larger groups of dwelling-houses, without political significance, such as every place acquires by more abundant and brisker communications, and by being the seat of[37] some sort of government administration; in short, when it becomes the centre of a certain district. The three principal classes of inhabitants were as a rule: (1) free Lombards; (2) tributary Romans; (3) serfs and villeins. There were as yet not sufficient noble retainers in the individual towns to form a class by themselves.

Among the Franks this state seemingly subsisted for some time, but the foundations upon which it rested were undermined. The tributary Romans became gradually either entirely free or really serfs; many of the free Lombards took knightly service with the kings of the Franks or their counts, and many more with bishops and abbots. Thus there grew up new class distinctions, and once more the population seemed to fall into three distinct classes: (1) noble retainers; (2) freemen; (3) bondsmen, villeins, and the remainder of the tributaries who tended more and more to become absorbed by the other classes. Simultaneously, however, there arose another kind of distinction. It gradually came to pass when the royal prerogative had become subjected to many changes, and could at best be regarded but as an uncertain protection, that the bishops counted far more noble retainers and serfs than the kings; and as the bishops at the same time exercised feudal authority over their retainers and villeins, a feeling of hostility sprang up between the nobles, freemen, and tributaries under the king’s official magistrates (the counts and gastalds) and the nobles, serfs, and tributaries under the bishop’s magistrates (the vogts). What had been established under the Franks then developed more fully under the Germans. The bishops also acquired authority over the freemen, exercising the same power as the counts, and began to assemble in one township men possessing quite different rights, but having the same claims to distinction, i.e., noble retainers and freemen of knightly descent. The serfs and villeins forming the third class still remained for a long time politically minors.

A great deal of friction between the noble retainers and the freemen of knightly descent was caused by their having to hold their lands in fief, to enter into the feudal service of the bishops, or to renounce knightly honours. Sanguinary fights took place without either party gaining any decisive victory; compacts were made between the different classes of citizens, and this was the origin of the common municipal constitution. From that time the importance of the aldermen as representatives of all the classes grew apace, whereas that of the episcopal magistrates sensibly decreased. This representative administration had no sooner been founded than it was again upset by a rupture between the spiritual and temporal powers; the strife was no longer between counts and bishops, or between the freemen and the retainers of the church, but between the king and the pope. The spiritual power became divided against itself; many bishops took up the cause of the king, and others that of the pope. The same thing happened with the temporal power, for there were as many princes and lords fighting against as for the king.

The representative administration of the cities was not attacked, but that body found it difficult to decide by which party they were to be governed, for each party, that of the king as well as that of the pope, presently had its own bishops in each city and its adherents among both nobles and freemen. The bishops were the only losers in this struggle, for in each faction they strove to outdo each other in the matter of liberality and in conceding their rights in order to win and retain more partisans. The victorious party, however, when the struggle was at an end, maintained the established representative administration, enriched by the many liberties and rights conceded by the bishops. The aldermen found their sphere of action greatly enlarged[38] and enriched, so that henceforth they assumed a position at the head of the municipality as councillors and magistrates. This government had developed on similar lines in all the cities, although the victory had remained sometimes with the papal and sometimes with the royal party; therefore the strife had been banished from the cities only to break out finally in the country, which became divided into two factions, at the head of which were the rival cities of Pavia and Milan.

At first Pavia belonged to the papal faction and Milan to the royal; but when the former realised that she needed more temporal assistance than the pope could afford her, and the latter city found that the king’s protection brought with it interference in internal affairs, which in a city of Milan’s power and wealth was soon felt to be oppressive, both parties changed badges, and Pavia followed the royal faction, while Milan flaunted the papal colours.j

This change of parties occurred during the reigns of Lothair II and Conrad III, who, from the year 1125 to 1152, placed in opposition the two houses of Guelfs and Ghibellines in Germany. Milan, having during the first half of the twelfth century experienced some resistance from the towns of Lodi and Como, razed the former, dispersing the inhabitants in open villages, and obliged the latter to destroy its fortifications. Cremona and Novara adhered to the party of Pavia; Tortona, Crema, Bergamo, Brescia, Piacenza, and Parma to that of Milan. Among the towns of Piedmont, Turin took the lead, and disputed the authority of the counts of Savoy, who called themselves imperial vicars in that country. Montferrat continued to have its marquises. They were among the few great feudatories who had survived the civil wars; but the towns and provinces were not in subjection to them, and Asti was more powerful than they were.

The family of the Veronese marquises, on the contrary, who from the time of the Lombard kings had to defend the frontier against the Germans, were extinct; and the great cities of Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, and Mantua, nearly equal in power, maintained their independence. Bologna held the first rank among the towns south of the Po, and had become equally formidable on the one side to Modena and Reggio, and on the other to Ferrara, Ravenna, Imola, Faenza, Forlì, and Rimini. Tuscany, which had also had its powerful marquises, saw their family become extinct with the countess Matilda, the contemporary and friend of Gregory VII. Florence had since risen in power, destroyed Fiesole, and, without exercising dominion over the neighbouring towns of Pistoia, Arezzo, San Miniato, and Volterra, or the more distant towns of Lucca, Cortona, Perugia, and Siena, was considered the head of the Tuscan League; and the more so that Pisa at this period thought only of her maritime expeditions. The family of the dukes of Spoleto had also become extinct, and the towns of Umbria regained their freedom; but their situation in the mountains prevented them from rising into importance. In fine, Rome herself indulged the same spirit of independence. An eloquent monk, the disciple of Abelard, who had made himself known throughout Europe, preached in 1139 a twofold reform in the religious and political orders; the name borne by him was Arnold of Brescia. He spoke to men of the ancient liberty which was their right, of the abuses which disfigured the church. Driven out of Italy by Pope Innocent II and the Council of Lateran, he took refuge in Switzerland, and taught the town of Zurich to frame a free constitution; but in the year 1143 he was recalled to Rome, and that city again heard the words, “Roman Republic,” “Roman senate,” “comitia of the people.” The pope branded[39] his opinions with the name of “heresy of the politicians”; and Arnold of Brescia, having been given up to him by the emperor, was burned alive before the gate of the castle of St. Angelo, in the year 1155. But his precepts survived and the love of liberty in Rome did not perish with him. In southern Italy, the conquests of the Normans had finally smothered the spirit of liberty; and the town of Aquileia in the Abruzzi alone preserved any republican privileges.b

FLORENCE

It appears that of all the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, the one which was to play the principal part in the history of civilisation was the last to appear on the world’s stage. Florence was still a mere unknown parish when Pisa, her neighbour, already covered the Mediterranean with her vessels; and while Milan and the towns of Lombardy were engaged in deadly fight against the empire, the Tuscan city stood perfectly aloof from the struggle of the two parties, which were dividing not only Italy, but the whole of Europe, and, from the Alps to the Sicilian straits, covering the peninsula with ruins and deluging it in blood.

Florence long had pursued her career in silence, growing rich by trade, increasing in size by the reduction of her neighbours, becoming powerful by the submission of the great, and she was neither more nor less powerful than all those small political centres which contributed so largely in bringing to light Italy’s exhaustless fertility in great men. In fact, it was owing to this large number of small states, to this multitude of diverse interests, that so many men were enabled to distinguish themselves, and found a scene for their activity, and that the curious medley which forms the Italian character was able to develop freely, and to bear its finest fruits. In this respect all the small towns of Italy are deeply interesting; to the historian as sources of valuable research, to the philosopher as subjects of observation of human nature. It is, however, natural that the state which exercised its influence for the longest period, in the most powerful manner, and over the widest extent of territory, should also attract the greatest attention from posterity. Great interest is always felt in the childhood of a famous man, even when it does not actually present so many curious details as the childhood of many men who have remained unknown; we like to see his first gropings, and in the features of some childish whim we imagine that we can perceive the plan of the great acts which illustrated his riper age.

In the same way the first symptoms of political life in Athens or in Rome have always attracted attention, while certain towns of Hellas or Latium, though probably far more developed in those obscure times, only interest us as far as they enable us to find traces of the road which these great centres of civilisation pursued when they first arose. So, in the dearth which exists of authentic documents on the origin and early centuries of Florence, in order to obtain a just and complete idea of what she was before the beginning of the thirteenth century, we are often obliged to illuminate the facts which have come down to us by the knowledge we have of Lucca, Pisa, Fiesole, Siena, Arezzo, and other towns of Tuscany.

The chroniclers, by surrounding the origin of Florence with numerous fables, have singularly concealed the real facts. However, it is probable that they were right in assigning it a Roman origin, and it is evident that in this first period and later on, Florence passed, as did the other states, through the successive phases which were experienced by the entire peninsula. Growing[40] under the protection of the imperial eagle, and submitting to the power of the bishop, like her sister-states, like them, also, she knew how, both to free herself from episcopal dominion and to oppose the empire. Although somewhat late, she followed the example of all the great towns of Italy in subduing the small surrounding towns and the country nobles, so as to increase her territory; she profited, but to a less extent than Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, by the commercial advantages of the Crusades. After undergoing the influence of the German invasion, she supported, more than any other state, the reaction of communal tendency against the Germanic tendency which was everywhere felt during the twelfth century. When, later on, tyranny (in the Greek sense of the word) confiscated democratic liberty, in every town, in favour of a powerful family or a superior individual, Florence produced the most accomplished type of the Italian tyrant.

However, turning back to the earliest historical facts proved by unimpeachable witnesses, we see by the very importance which the chroniclers attach to the traditions of Charlemagne, the second founder of their city, how significant for the whole of Italy, and especially for Florence, was the coronation of this emperor in Rome. They attribute the new wall round the city to him also, as well as the establishment of consular government; and their instinct was correct; for if these acts were not the direct work of Charlemagne, they certainly were the consequences of his work. The re-establishment of the Roman Empire must infallibly be followed by the restoration of the ancient municipalities, and in general by the whole of the Roman legislation, wherever it has been destroyed by the invasion. The town was henceforth governed by a marquis of Tuscany, as lieutenant of the empire, which was again re-established by Otto the Great, who appears to have particularly favoured the town of Florence.

At this period the solemn power of the imperial name was so great that the city, whose rule already extended over a great part of the surrounding country, and especially over the important town of Fiesole, would never have dared to oppose the emperor, if the disputes which arose towards the end of the eleventh century between the empire and the holy see, had not offered it the long-wished-for opportunity to escape from the marquisate of Tuscany. The majority of Florentines, for there were already two parties in the city, enthusiastically espoused the cause of the pope and the countess Matilda against the emperor Henry IV. A long siege could not shatter their fidelity. It is from this period, probably, that the establishment of consular government in Florence dates, which the old chroniclers attributed to Charlemagne, and which the other towns of Italy had long since adopted from Rome. This early constitution, which united justice and government in the hands of two, later on of four, and still later of six consuls, aided by a council of one hundred senators, was maintained almost intact till 1207, when the example of the other republics was followed and a podesta was intrusted with the jurisdiction. Although all the free inhabitants co-operated in the election of the magistrates, these latter were only chosen from among the urban nobility, composed indeed of ancient middle-class families who had long been wealthy, and of the descendants of Germanic immigrants.

Social Conditions

The population of Florence was then formed, as was that of the greater number of Italian towns, of two very distinct classes—the patricians and the people; the former included the descendants of noble families and the[41] burghers free since the conquest; the latter included all the other inhabitants of the town, the ancient tributaries of the bishop or the clients of the nobles whom they had freed. The descendants of these freed men, and also those of immigrants from other towns, were born free, earned much by the luxury of the upper classes, and were soon as rich as the patricians. So, later on, they desired, and were able to obtain for their special functionaries, entrance into the posts of the republic, and thus it was that popular revolutions took place in the thirteenth century. Before this time, the people were satisfied to assist in the election of magistrates without dreaming of claiming the honour for themselves. As for the nobles of the surrounding country who refused to submit to the government, they were pursued, their lands devastated and burned, even their fortresses were destroyed, so that in a short time Florence had sole rule over the neighbouring land. The entire century during which this constitution was in force, is filled with the sound of strife with the nobles. At one time the young republic subdued the rock of Fiesole, a veritable retreat of brigands; then the powerful family of the Buondelmonti, of Monte Buono. This family, so famous and so fatal to Florentine happiness, possessed a small castle about five miles distant from the town which, commanding the Siena road, enabled them to impose a toll upon all merchandise in its passage. Florence complained of this imposition, and being refused redress destroyed their castle, obliging them without further spoliation to become Florentine citizens; others followed; and so they continued adding bit after bit to their possessions by money, conquest, or persuasion, but still maintaining a close alliance with Pisa, which at this period, although the most commercial and military nation of Tuscany, was rivalled by Florence in ambition and warlike propensities if not in power and celebrity.

Municipal Wars

In the year 1144 all Tuscany was in arms, partly on account of these republics, but more from those dissensions that spring from mutual jealousy in rising states commencing the race of ambition and of blood, who league for war as a pastime, and regard the butchery of their fellow-creatures as legitimate amusement. Lucca and Pisa were in constant collision, and the friendship of the former with Siena, of the latter with Florence, occasioned a quadruple war between those states, each jealous of the other’s ascendency; the necessities of commerce, untouched as yet by its rivalry, kept peace between Pisa and Florence; and the distance of the other two diminished their points of contact and consequently their chances of quarrel.

Ulric, marquis or vice-marquis of Tuscany and imperial vicar, commanded the Florentine army, with which he advanced to the gates of Siena and burned a suburb; the Sienese demanded assistance from Lucca, who answered by declaring war on Florence, not only to draw the enemy from her ally, but also in aid of Count Guido Guerra of Modigliana, a Ghibelline chief and confederate of Siena, who had already suffered from Florentine aggression. Pisa on the other hand took the field at the request of the Florentines and Count Guido’s possessions were devastated by these combined forces while the Sienese, covertly advancing on Florence, fell into an ambuscade and were nearly all made prisoners. More bitter was the struggle between Pisa and Lucca where no exchange of prisoners took place, no ransom was accepted, and where a strong personal feeling of hatred pervaded every class; perpetual incarceration was with them the consequence of defeat, and we are told by the bishop of Fresingen that several years afterwards he saw “the[42] Lucchese officers, wasted, squalid, and miserable, in the dungeons of Pisa, drawing tears of compassion from every passing stranger.”

At this period, however, not Tuscany alone but all northern Italy seems to have been in similar confusion from similar causes; from jealousy, faction, and that ever boisterous passage between comparative bondage and complete independence, for Conrad with full employment in Germany was forced to leave Italy uncontrolled, a prey to angry passions, unsettled institutions, and political anarchy. The particular causes of discord between the Tuscan cities are now difficult to trace; vicinity, by multiplying the points of contact, increased the chances and was always a source of dissension; but the peculiar enmity between Siena and Florence, according to the Sienese historians, originated in the assistance given to Henry IV during the siege of 1081; an injury in itself not easily forgiven, but which, fostered as it was by national emulation, lasted until long after the ruin of both republics.

Elated by success and jealous of the counts Guidi by whose possessions she was nearly surrounded, Florence assembled an army in February, 1146, and besieged Monte Croce, a castello about nine miles distant which belonged to that family; but confidence in superiority of force created carelessness of conduct, and Count Guido aided by the people of Arezzo defeated them with great loss. For a time they were quieted by this sharp military lesson, and a crusade the following year under the emperor Conrad III carried off some of their more enterprising and devout spirits to Palestine; amongst them Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, who, after having been knighted by Conrad, fell in battle against the infidels.e

So while the towns of Lombardy were leaguing together boldly to defend the most cherished interests of independence, the little Tuscan republic was only busy extending her territory, and increasing at the expense of her neighbours, she was already the cunning Florence of the fifteenth century, for whom egoism is the fundamental principle of politics. However, it will not do to be unjust; while fighting and subduing the neighbouring nobles she was also striking a blow at expiring Germanism; it was the municipality triumphing over the members of the feudal body, as at Legnano it triumphed over their chief. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa was well aware of it; and when he came to Florence in 1184, after the Peace of Constance, he listened with interest to the complaints of the nobles, and was well pleased to take from the city the sovereignty which she had violently assumed over the surrounding country, contrary to written law. The Florentines submitted without a murmur to this severe sentence; they knew that they had only to wait and to let the storm pass over. In fact, four years later all the surrounding districts had once more submitted to the burghers.

Ten years later they gained still further advantage by the interregnum which left Germany a prey to the struggles of Otto IV and Philip of Swabia and made Italy “a widow of her king.” It was then that they formed a Guelf league on the model of the Lombard League, and succeeded in subduing that part of the rural nobility which had till then remained independent. The nobles were forced to take an oath of fidelity to the republic and to promise to live peacefully and quietly in the town.

In the midst of these political disturbances the trade and wealth of the city constantly increased. She had till then depended on Pisa, a much richer and more flourishing town, to which she acted, so to say, as bank; after destroying Fiesole, which dominated her completely by its position and hindered her commerce, in the twelfth century, she made a swift step forward and became, first the rival of Siena, later on that of Pisa itself.

This is the period which the Florentines of the following century were in the habit of lauding as the golden age of the republic. The people were still chivalrous and industrious; their manners were simple; dresses were made of coarse material, women were honest and modest; young girls were not married before the age of twenty; and men did not seek “the largest dowry, but the best reputation.”

It would, however, be a great mistake to think that this period of virtuous patriarchal customs, sobriety, and simple living was free from disturbance. This people of Florence was a passionate race who had not yet passed through two centuries of revolution, nor yet experienced the paternal and enervating despotism of the Medicis, nor seen the armies of Charles V. The state of the town was far from being a calm one, and whether, because judiciary affairs had increased to too great an extent, or because the consuls were lacking in requisite authority, it soon became necessary, in order to maintain order and justice in the town, to follow the example of the other republics and call in a foreign podesta.

“Vice increasing in the town,” says Malaspina,n “and cases of ill-will and disputes becoming more frequent among the citizens, it was decided in the interest of the republic, in order to facilitate the punishment of crime and to prevent all interception, bribery, or intimidation of justice, that a foreigner of gentle birth should be appointed to the office of podesta for one year, to decide all trials with his judges, to render justice, pronounce condemnation of wealth and body, and to carry out the laws of the republic of Florence. Nevertheless the government of the consuls did not cease, since it kept the direction of all other business, and in this manner the town was governed till the period when the first nation of Florence was formed.”m

As the two famous names of Guelf and Ghibelline originated in these two rival houses of Bavaria and Franconia, and by their pernicious influence destroyed Italian prosperity and happiness, a short account of them will not here be irrelevant, especially as they were the principal though remote source of that inveterate disunion which has left the peninsula a constant prey to transalpine ambition. For many ages these factions prowled over Italy like lions seeking whom they could devour; they divided city from city, house from house, family from family; they tore asunder all domestic ties, undermined the dearest affections, and scattered duty, obligations, and humanity to the winds. But these fatal appellations were originally nothing more than the distinctive names of two princely German families whose chiefs were rivals in personal ambition and feudal power. The enmity of one to the popes was reason sufficient for the other’s determined adherence to the holy see; and though mere leaders of a petty feud, their names became from circumstances the rallying cry of two great opinions which, penetrating with the wonted subtilty of religious and political rancour into the smallest branches of national life, affected Italy and Germany to the quick.

When Conrad III was crowned king of Italy, the last four emperors had been chosen from the house of Franconia, a family that received its name from the castle of Waiblingen, or Gueibelinga, situated amongst the Hertfeld Mountains in the diocese of Augsburg and which was called indiscriminately “Salic” or “Gueibelinga.” The rival house, originally of Altdorf, at this period governed Bavaria, and in consequence of several of its princes being named “Guelfo” or “Welf,” both the family and its partisans received that appellation. The two last Henrys of the Ghibelline house of Franconia had long contests with the church, as already related, while the Bavarian Guelfs on the contrary always declared themselves its protectors[44] from the days of Guelf IV, son of Albert Azzo, lord of Este, in 1076. From this branch is descended in a direct line the royal family of England and from his brother Folco the ancient marquises of Este, dukes of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio.

These things, springing as they did from rivalry and disappointment, sharpened hereditary feuds, while the pontiff’s support of Lothair augmented the Ghibellines’ enmity to holy church; these names were not, however, permanently attached to the two factions until 1210, when Innocent III drove the fourth Otto from the imperial throne and took young Frederick of Sicily under his charge. The pope was then supported by the Ghibellines; but when the same Frederick turned to rend the church, the Guelfic banner again waved over it, and there continued until the final dissolution of these adverse factions, long after the original cause of their quarrels had melted entirely away.e

Such were the changes which the space of seven centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire accomplished in Italy. Towards the end of the fifth century the social tie, which had made of the empire one body, became dissolved, and was succeeded by no other. The citizen felt nothing for his fellow-citizen; he expected no support from him, and offered him none. He could nowhere invoke protection; he everywhere saw only violence and oppression. Towards the beginning of the twelfth century the citizens of the towns of Italy had as little to expect from abroad. The emperor of the Germans, who called himself their sovereign, was, with his barbarian army, only one enemy more. But universally, where the circle of the same wall formed a common interest, the spirit of association was developed. The citizens promised each other mutual assistance. Courage grew with liberty; and the Italians, no longer oppressed, found at last in themselves their own defence.

When the inhabitants of the cities of Italy associated for their common defence, their first necessity was to guard against the brigandage of the barbarian armies, which invaded their country and treated them as enemies; the second, to protect themselves from the robberies of other barbarians who called themselves their masters. Their united efforts soon insured their safety; in a few years they found themselves rich and powerful; and these same men, whom emperors, prelates, and nobles considered only as freed serfs, perceived that they constituted almost the only public force in Italy. Their self-confidence grew with their power; and the desire of domination succeeded that of independence. Those cities which had accumulated the most wealth, whose walls enclosed the greatest population, attempted, from the first half of the twelfth century, to secure by force of arms the obedience of such of the neighbouring towns as did not appear sufficiently strong to resist them. These greater cities had no intention to strip the smaller of their liberty; their sole purpose was to force them into a perpetual alliance, so as to share their good or evil fortune, and always place their armed force under the standard of the dominant city.b

FOOTNOTES

FREDERICK BARBAROSSA IN ITALY

The long war of the investitures, between the Franconian emperors and the popes, had given the first impulse to the ambition of the Lombard cities for alliance; as general interests were involved, as it was a question of distant operations and common danger, the cities felt the necessity of alliances and of an active correspondence, which soon extended from one extremity of Italy to the other. The smaller towns soon found that this general policy was beyond their means, and that the great cities, in which commerce and wealth had accumulated knowledge, and which alone received the communications of the pope or of the emperor, naturally placed themselves at the head of the league formed in their provinces, either for the empire or for the church. These two leagues were not yet known in Italy by the names of Guelf and Ghibelline, which in Germany had been the war-cry of the two parties at the battle of Winsberg, fought on the 21st of December, 1140, and which had previously distinguished, the former the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, devoted to the pope, the latter, the emperors of the house of Franconia. But although these two names, which seem since to have become exclusively Italian, had not yet been adopted in Italy, the hereditary affection respectively for the two parties already divided the minds of the people for more than a century, and faction became to each a second country, often served by them with not less heroism and devotion than their native city.b

Such was the state of Italy, when the Germanic diet, assembled at Frankfort in 1152, conferred the crown on Frederick Barbarossa, duke of Swabia, and of the house of Hohenstaufen. This prince was nephew to Conrad III, whom he succeeded; he was allied to the two houses of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, which had contended with each other for the empire, and was regarded, with good reason, by the Germans as their most distinguished[46] chief. Frederick Barbarossa was not only brave, but understood the art of war, at least so far as it could be understood in an age so barbarous. He made himself beloved by the soldiers, at the same time that he subjected them to a discipline which others had not yet thought of establishing. He held his word sacred; he abhorred gratuitous cruelty, although the shedding of human blood had in general nothing revolting in it to a prince of the Middle Ages; but the prerogatives of his crown appeared to him sacred rights, which from pride, and even from conscience, he was disposed to preserve and extend. The Italians he considered in a state of revolt against the imperial throne and the German nation, and he believed it to be his first duty to reduce them to subjection.

Frederick Barbarossa, accordingly, in the month of October, 1154, entered Italy with a powerful German army, by the valley of Trent. He proposed to himself not only receiving there the crowns of Italy and the empire and reducing to obedience subjects who appeared to him to forget their duty to their sovereign, but also to punish in particular the Milanese for their arrogance, to redress the complaints which the citizens of Pavia and Cremona had brought against them, and to oblige Milan to render to the towns of Lodi and Como, which it had dismantled, all the privileges which Milan itself enjoyed. On arriving at Roncaglia, where the diets of the kingdom of Italy were held, he was assailed by complaints from the bishop and nobles against the towns, as well as by complaints against the Milanese from the consuls of Pavia, of Cremona, of Como, and of Lodi; while those of Crema, of Brescia, of Piacenza, of Asti and Tortona vindicated them. Before giving judgment on the differences submitted to his decision, Frederick announced his intention of judging for himself the state of the country, by visiting in person Piedmont and Montferrat. Having to pass through the Milanese territory on his way to Novara, he commanded the consuls of Milan to supply him with provisions on the road. The towns acknowledged that they owed the emperors upon their journeys the dues designated by the feudal words “foderum, parata, mansionaticum” (forage, food, and lodging); but the Germans, retarded in their march by heavy and continued rain, took two days to reach a stage which the Milanese supposed they would reach in one; provisions of course failed; and the Germans avenged themselves on the unhappy inhabitants by pillaging and burning the villages wherever sufficient rations were not found.

Frederick treated with kindness the towns of Novara and Turin, but those of Chieri and Asti had been denounced to him as entertaining the same sentiments as Milan; the inhabitants fled at his approach, and he plundered and burned their deserted houses. Arrived next before Tortona, he[47] ordered the inhabitants to renounce their alliance with the Milanese; but they, trusting to the strength of the upper town, into which they had retreated, while Frederick occupied the lower part, had the courage to refuse. The Germans began the siege of Tortona on the 13th of February, 1155. They could not prevent the entrance of two hundred Milanese, to assist in its defence. For sixty-two days did this brave people resist the attacks of the formidable army of Frederick, the numbers of which had been increased by the armed force of Pavia, and the other Ghibelline towns. The want of water compelled them at last to surrender; and the emperor allowed them to retire to Milan, taking only the few effects which each individual could carry away. Everything else was given up to the pillage of the soldiers, and the houses became a prey to the flames. The Milanese received with respect these martyrs of liberty, and every opulent house gave shelter and hospitality to some of the unhappy inhabitants of Tortona. Frederick meanwhile placed on his head, in the temple of Pavia, the iron crown of the kings of Lombardy, and began his march on Rome, to receive there the golden crown of the empire.

But the Germans who accompanied the emperor, notwithstanding the ardour with which they had undertaken this distant expedition, began to grow tired of so long an absence from their home. The license extended to their pillage and debauchery no longer appeared to them a sufficient compensation for tedious marches and the dangers of war. They pressed the emperor to advance towards Rome, and to avoid all quarrel with the great towns by which they passed, although almost all refused to admit them within their walls—providing subsistence and lodging for them in the suburbs only. The impossibility of maintaining discipline in a rapacious army, which beheld for the first time the unknown riches of commerce and the arts; the difficulty of avoiding quarrels between two nations, neither of which understood the language of the other, perhaps justified this precaution. Frederick thus passed by Piacenza, Parma, Bologna, and Florence. He was not received even into Rome; his troops occupied what was styled the Leonine city, or the suburb built round the Vatican; he was there crowned by the pope, Adrian IV, while his army was obliged to repel the Romans, who advanced by the bridge of St. Angelo and the Borgo[6] of Trastevere to disturb the ceremony. Frederick withdrew from Rome the following day; conducting his army into the mountains to avoid the great heat of summer. The citizens of Spoleto, not having supplied with sufficient haste the provisions he demanded, he attacked, took, and burned their city; sickness, however, began to thin the ranks of his soldiers; many also deserted,[48] to embark at Ancona. Frederick, with a weakened army, directed his march on Germany by the valleys of the Tyrol. The citizens of Verona, who would not admit the Germans within their walls, constructed for him a bridge of boats on the Adige, which he hastily passed over, but had hardly gained the opposite bank, when enormous pieces of wood, carried down by the impetuosity of the current, struck and destroyed the bridge. Frederick had no doubt that the Lombards had laid this snare for him, and flattered themselves with the breaking of the bridge whilst he should be in the act of passing over; but he was no longer sufficiently strong to avenge himself.

The emperor at length returned into Germany with his barbarian soldiers. He everywhere on his passage spread havoc and desolation; the line by which he marched through the Milanese territory was marked by fire; the villages of Rosate, Trecale, and Galiata, the towns of Chieri, Asti, Tortona, and Spoleto were burned. But whilst he thus proved his barbarism, he also proved his weakness. He did not dare to attack the stronger and more populous cities, which congratulated themselves on having shut their gates, and refused submission to him. Thus a year’s campaign sufficed to destroy one of the most formidable armies that Germany had ever poured into Italy; and the example of ancient times encouraged the belief that it would be long before the emperor could again put the Germans in motion. The Milanese felicitated themselves on having preserved their liberty by their courage and patriotism. Their treasury was indeed empty; but the zeal of their opulent citizens, who knew no other luxury than that of serving their country, soon replenished it. These men, who poured their wealth into the treasury of the republic, contented themselves with black bread, and cloaks of coarse stuff. At the command of their consuls, they left Milan to join their fellow-citizens in rebuilding, with their own hands, the walls and houses of Tortona, Rosate, Trecale, Galiata, and other towns, which had suffered in the contest for the common cause. They next attacked the cities of Pavia, Cremona, and Novara, which had embraced the party of the emperor, and subjected them to humiliating conditions; while they drew closer their bonds of alliance with the towns of Brescia and Piacenza, which had declared for liberty.

But Frederick had more power over Germany than any of his predecessors; he was regarded there as the restorer of the rights of the empire and of the German nation. He obtained credit for reducing Italy from what was called a state of anarchy and revolt, to order and obedience. His vassals accordingly flocked with eagerness to his standard, when he summoned them at the feast of Pentecost, 1158, to compel the submission of Italy. The battalions of Germany entered Lombardy at the same time by all the passes of the Alps. Their approach to Brescia inspired the inhabitants with so much terror, that they immediately renounced their alliance with Milan, and paid down a large sum of money for their ransom. The Milanese, on the contrary, prepared themselves for resistance. They had either destroyed or fortified all the bridges of the Adda, flattering themselves that this river would suffice to stop the progress of the emperor; but a body of German cavalry dashed boldly into the stream, and, swimming across the river, gained in safety the opposite bank. They then made themselves masters of the bridge of Cassano, and the whole army entered into the Milanese territory. Frederick, following the course of the Adda, made choice of a situation about four miles from the ruins of the former Lodi.[7] Here he ordered[49] the people of Lodi to rebuild their town, which would in future secure to him the passage of the Adda. He summoned thither also the militias of Pavia and Cremona, with those of the other towns of Lombardy, which their jealousy of Milan had attached to the Ghibelline party; and it was not till after they had joined him that he encamped, on the 8th of August, 1158, before Milan.

His engines of war, however, were insufficient to beat down the walls of so strong and large a town; and he resolved to reduce the Milanese by famine. He seized their granaries, burned their stacks of corn, mowed down the autumnal harvests, and announced his resolution not to raise the siege till the Milanese had returned to their duty. The few nobles, however, who had preserved their independence in Lombardy, proceeded to the camp of the emperor. One of them, the count of Blandrate, who had before given proofs of his attachment to the town of Milan, offered himself as a mediator, was accepted, and obtained terms not unfavourable to the Milanese. They engaged to pay a tribute to Frederick of nine thousand marks of silver, to restore to him his regal rights, and to the towns of Lodi and Como their independence. On their side, they were dispensed from opening their gates to the emperor. They preserved the right of electing their consuls, and included in their pacification their allies of Tortona and Crema. This treaty was signed the 7th of September, 1158.

Frederick, in granting an honourable capitulation to revolted subjects, whom he had brought back to their obedience, had no intention of renouncing the rights of his empire. He considered that he had preserved, untouched, the legislative authority of the diet of his kingdom of Italy. The Milanese, on the contrary, regarded their treaty as definitive; and were both astonished and indignant when Frederick, having assembled, towards the 11th of November following, the placita or diets of the kingdom at Roncaglia, promulgated by this diet a constitution which overthrew their most precious rights. It took the administration of justice from the hands of the consuls of towns, to place it in those of a single judge, and a foreigner, chosen by the emperor, bearing the name of podesta; it fixed the limits of the regal rights, giving them much more importance than had been contemplated by the Milanese when they agreed to acknowledge them; it deprived cities, as well as the other members of the empire, of the right of making private war; it changed the boundaries of territories appertaining to towns, and in particular took from Milan the little town of Monza, and the counties of Seprio and of Martesana, which the inhabitants had always regarded as their own property.

Just motives had made the emperor and the diet consider these innovations necessary for the public peace and prosperity; but the Milanese regarded them only as perfidious violations of the treaty. When the podesta[50] of the emperor arrived at Milan to take possession of the tribunal, he was sent contemptuously away. The Milanese flew to arms; and making every effort to repossess the different passes of the Adda, prepared to defend themselves behind this barrier. Frederick, on his side, assembled a new diet of the kingdom of Italy at Bologna, in the spring of 1159, and placed Milan under the ban of the empire.

The emperor did not yet attempt to reduce the Milanese by a regular siege. His army was neither sufficiently numerous to invest so large a town, nor his engines of war of sufficient force to make a breach in such strong walls; but he proclaimed his determination to employ all his power, as monarch of Germany and Italy, to ruin that rebellious town. The Milanese, accordingly, soon saw their corn mowed down, their autumn harvests destroyed, their vine stocks cut, the trees which covered their country either cut down or barked, their canals of irrigation broken; but the generous citizens of this new republic did not allow themselves to be discouraged by the superior force of such an enemy, or by the inevitable issue of such a contest. They saw clearly that they must perish; but it would be for the honour and the liberty of Italy; they were resolved to leave a great example to their countrymen, and to future generations.

The Siege of Crema

The people of Crema had remained faithful to the Milanese in their good and evil fortune; but the siege of that town presented fewer difficulties to the emperor than the siege of Milan. Crema was of small extent, and could be invested on every side; it was also more accessible to the engines of war, though surrounded by a double wall and a ditch filled with water. The Cremonese began the siege on the 4th of July, 1159; and on the 10th, Frederick arrived to direct it in person.c

The emperor regarded the inhabitants of the town as revolted subjects and he probably expected to have little difficulty in accomplishing their overthrow. Contrary to his expectations, however, the Cremascans proved not only brave but stubborn, and despite his best efforts they held out against him for about six months. The siege gave rise to many picturesque incidents and furnished typical illustrations of the methods of warfare of the time. Even before the first attack Frederick sought to frighten the Cremascans into submission by the barbarous execution of several of their citizens who had previously been sent to him as hostages. Nothing daunted, the inhabitants of the besieged city retaliated in kind; moreover, they gave proof of their intrepidity by sallying forth and attempting to defeat a portion of the besieging army in open combat. Their small numbers rendered this an act of hardihood, but it evidenced the spirit in which they were prepared to repel the assault.

Frederick, on his part, began the construction of the usual machines employed against walled cities. The chief of these consisted of great towers called cats, which were tower-like structures provided with battering-rams and with grappling-irons for tearing down walls. When these were ready, a road-bed was made for them by filling in the outer ditch with some two hundred casks and two hundred car-loads of gravel. Over this improvised causeway the largest cat was slowly rolled preparatory to the assault.

The Cremascans marshalled themselves on the walls opposite this point of attack and assailed the cat with great stones hurled by catapults, and with showers of blazing arrows which had been dipped in a composition of oil,[51] pitch, lard, and sulphur. These burning arrows were cut from the walls of the cat with scythes, but it was with difficulty that the flames could be extinguished, while the enemy’s projectiles threatened the complete destruction of the invading engine before it could be brought within close range of the walls.

Further enraged at the heroic resistance, Frederick resorted to one of those measures of barbarity which seem almost incredible when rehearsed to modern ears. He brought forth the Cremascan prisoners whom he had previously spared, bound them in chains and suspended them by ropes beneath their arms from the front of the cat. The Cremascans beheld with horror their friends and relatives thus used to shield the foe; but at length the needs of the many were held by the consul, Giovanni de Medici, to outweigh the interests of the unfortunate few, and the missiles of defence were again brought to bear upon the cat. Nine of the unfortunate Cremascans dangling from the cat were killed, and others were frightfully injured; but the occupants of the structure also suffered to such an extent that they were glad presently to retire and for the moment to acknowledge themselves beaten.

Where the invaders had failed by open attack, they in the end succeeded through the treachery of a Cremascan, one Marchisio, a mechanic of great ingenuity, whose skill had largely aided the besieged garrison in repulsing the enemy’s attack. Frederick found a way to approach this man and through bribery to gain him over. The importance laid upon this incident by the chroniclers of the siege illustrates the value that attached to individual effort in the warfare of those times. The reader of Roman history will recall how Archimedes long saved Syracuse from destruction by the ingenuity with which he contrived means to repel the assaults of the Romans. Warfare had but little changed in the interval of about fourteen hundred years—had, indeed, but little changed since the early days of the Egyptians and Babylonians—and the presence of one inventive mind might seemingly suffice to turn the tide for or against the besieged city. So now Marchisio, as the story goes, was able to point out at once to Frederick the inadequacy of his method of attack. He caused the emperor to abandon his cats, and to build in their place gigantic towers, the largest being, it is said, about one hundred cubits in height, and having attached to one of its upper stories a bridge no less than forty-six cubits long, which would enable its occupants to reach the wall of a city while their machine was yet at a considerable distance. The tower itself was further guarded from missiles by brass and iron plates.

In due course of time, these new machines being in readiness, a fresh attack was begun. The largest tower approached within grappling distance of the walls; the invaders poured over the bridge, despite the shower of[52] missiles that assailed them, and accomplished heroic deeds on the walls where they grappled with the Cremascans. Tradition usually preserves the names of one or two among the hardy warriors who figure in such a scene as this. In the present case the chroniclers have loved to record the deeds of one Berthold von Arach, represented as a giant in strength, who was said to have sprung down from the wall with a small band of followers and recklessly to have invaded the city itself. After performing the usual deeds of prowess, he at last succumbed to superior numbers, and the conqueror proudly affixed his scalp with its waving hair as a trophy to his own helmet.

Another warrior who was said to have distinguished himself on that day was Otto, count palatine of Bavaria. He it was whose efforts were held to have turned the tide of battle against the Cremascans on the wall and to have decided the fate of the day; though Conrad, his brother, who with him led the assault, performed equal deeds of daring and barely escaped with his life.

At last the Cremascans were driven to abandon their outer wall. On the morrow, despairing of further defence, they offered to capitulate, throwing themselves on the mercy of Frederick. “Sad is ever the lot of the vanquished,” cried the despairing consul as he approached the emperor. “Oh, sire, the hand of the Almighty is heavy upon us. We surrender and throw ourselves upon your mercy. But if our prayers can touch your heart let us not be delivered into the hands of the Cremonese, whose many false accusations have wrought our ruin.” The emperor accepted the capitulation, and extended more merciful terms than his attack in the earlier part of the siege might have led one to expect. He permitted the Cremascans with their wives and children to depart, as also the militias of Brescia and Milan; the Cremascans taking with them so much as they could carry, their allies going empty handed.a

“The surrender of Crema,” says Testa,d “took place on January 27th, 1160. When that unhappy multitude, which amounted to more than twenty thousand persons, came forth, some with a few household goods, some with little children in their arms, some carrying or supporting the women, the infirm, and the wounded, it is said that, to avoid the quarters of the Cremonese, they went close by the pavilion of the emperor; and that he, at the sight of so much sorrow and distress, became thoughtful and sad; until at last, seeing in the crowd an old and infirm Cremascan who, having come to a difficult place, could hardly get any further, moved by irresistible compassion, he went up to him, offered him his hand, and helped him to go forward with the rest. So strongly can the most opposite affections prevail in turn over the same heart!”

The siege of Crema exhausted the patience of the German army. At this period, soldiers were unaccustomed to such protracted expeditions. When they had accomplished their feudal service, they considered they had a right to return home. The greater number, accordingly, departed; but Frederick, with immovable constancy, declared he would remain, with the Italians only of the Ghibelline towns, to make war against the Milanese; and placing himself at the head of the militias of Pavia, Cremona, and Novara, carried on the war a whole year, during which his sole object was to destroy the harvests, and prevent the entrance of any kind of provision into Milan. In the month of June, 1161, a new army arrived from Germany to his aid. His subjects began to feel ashamed of having abandoned their monarch in a foreign country, amongst a people whom they accused of perfidy and rebellion. They returned with redoubled animosity, which was soon manifested by ferocious deeds; they tortured and put to death every peasant whom they surprised carrying provisions of any kind into Milan.

The rich citizens of the republic had aided the government in making large magazines, which were already in part exhausted; an accidental fire having consumed the remainder, hunger triumphed over courage and the love of liberty. For three entire years had the Milanese, since they had been placed under the ban of the empire, supported this unequal contest; when, in the beginning of March, 1162, they were reduced to surrender at discretion. In deep despair they yielded up their arms and colours, and awaited the orders of the emperor. Frederick, harsh and haughty, was not ferocious; never had he put to death by the executioner rebels or enemies whom he had vanquished. He suffered nearly a month to elapse before he pronounced his final determination; perhaps to augment the anxiety of the subdued, perhaps, also, to pacify his own wrath, which he at last vented on walls and inanimate objects, while he pardoned man. He ordered the town to be completely evacuated, so that there should not be left in it a single living being. On the 25th of March, he summoned the militias of the rival and Ghibelline cities, and gave them orders to raze to the earth the houses as well as the walls of the town, so as not to leave one stone upon another.

Those of the inhabitants of Milan whom their poverty, labour, and industry attached to the soil, were divided into four open villages, built at a distance of at least two miles from the walls of their former city. Others sought hospitality in the neighbouring towns of Italy; even in those which had shown most attachment to the emperor. Their sufferings, the extent of their sacrifices, the recollection of their valour, and the example of their noble sentiments, made proselytes to the cause of liberty in every city into which they were received. The delegates of the emperor also (for he himself had returned to his German dominions), the podestas whom he had established in every town, soon made those Lombards who had fought with him feel only shame and regret at having lent their aid to rivet his yoke on their own necks. All the privileges of the nation were violated; justice was sacrificed to party interest. Taxes continually augmenting had increased sixfold; and hardly a third part of the produce of the land remained to the cultivator. The Italians were universally in a state of suffering and humiliation; tyranny at length reached even their consciences.

RIVAL POPES

On the death of Pope Adrian IV, in September, 1159, the electing cardinals had been equally divided between two candidates; the one a Sienese, the other a Roman. Both were declared duly elected by their separate parties; the first, under the name of Alexander III; the second, under that of Victor III. Frederick declared for the latter, who had shown himself ready to sacrifice to him the liberties and independence of the church. The former had been obliged to take refuge in France, though almost the whole of Christendom did not long hesitate to declare for him. While one council assembled by Frederick at Pavia rejected him, another assembled at Beauvais not only rejected but anathematised Victor. Excommunication at length reached even the emperor; and Alexander, to strengthen himself against Frederick, endeavoured to gain the affections of the people, by ranging himself among the protectors of the liberties of Italy.

Frederick re-entered Italy in the year 1163, accompanied not by an army, but by a brilliant retinue of German nobles. He did not imagine that in a country which he now considered subdued, he needed a more imposing[54] force; besides, he believed that he could at all times command the militias of the Ghibelline towns; and, in fact, he made them this year raze to the ground the walls of Tortona. He afterwards directed his steps towards Rome, to support by his presence his schismatic pontiff; but, in the meantime, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, the most powerful towns of the Veronese marches, assembled their consuls in congress, to consider the means of putting an end to a tyranny which overwhelmed them. The consuls of these four towns pledged themselves by oath in the name of their cities to give mutual support to each other in the assertion of their former rights, and in the resolution to reduce the imperial prerogatives to the point at which they were fixed under the reign of Henry IV. Frederick, informed of this association, returned hastily into northern Italy, to put it down. He assembled the militias of Pavia, Cremona, Novara, Lodi, and Como, with the intention of leading them against the Veronese marches; but he soon perceived that the spirit of liberty had made progress in the Ghibelline cities as well as in those of the Guelfs; that the militias under his command complained as much of the vexations inflicted by his podestas as those against whom he led them; and that they were ill-disposed to face death only to rivet the chains of their country. Obliged to bend before a people which he considered only as revolted subjects, he soon renounced a contest so humiliating, and returned to Germany, to levy an army more submissive to him.

Other and more pressing interests diverted his attention from this object till the autumn of 1166. During this interval his anti-pope, Victor III, died; and the successor whom he caused to be named was still more strongly rejected by the church. On the other side, Alexander III had returned from France to Rome; contracted an alliance with William, the Norman king of the Two Sicilies; and armed the whole of southern Italy against the emperor.

IMPERIAL CAMPAIGNS AND REVERSES

When Frederick, in the month of October, 1166, descended the mountains of the Grisons to enter Italy by the territory of Brescia, he marched his army directly to Lodi, without permitting any act of hostility on the way. At Lodi, he assembled towards the end of November, a diet of the kingdom of Italy, at which he promised the Lombards to redress the grievances occasioned by the abuses of power by his podestas, and to respect their just liberties; he was desirous of separating their cause from that of the pope, and the king of Sicily; and to give greater weight to his negotiation, he marched his army into central Italy. The towns of Romagna and Tuscany had hitherto made few complaints, and manifested little zeal in defence of their privileges. Frederick hoped that, by establishing himself amongst them, he should revive their loyalty, and induce them to augment the army which he was leading against Rome. But he soon perceived that the spirit of liberty which animated the other countries of Italy worked also in these; he contented himself, accordingly, with taking thirty hostages from Bologna, and having vainly laid siege to Ancona, he, in the month of July, 1167, marched his army towards Rome.

The towns of the Veronese marches, seeing the emperor and his army pass without daring to attack them, became bolder: they assembled a new diet, in the beginning of April, at the convent of Pontida, between Milan and Bergamo. The consuls of Cremona, of Bergamo, of Brescia, of Mantua and Ferrara, met there, and joined those of the marches. The union of the[55] Guelfs and Ghibellines, for the common liberty, was hailed with universal joy. The deputies of the Cremonese, who had lent their aid to the destruction of Milan, seconded those of the Milanese villages in imploring aid of the confederated towns to rebuild the city of Milan. This confederation was called the League of Lombardy. The consuls took the oath, and their constituents afterwards repeated it, that every Lombard should unite for the recovery of the common liberty; that the league for this purpose should last twenty years; and, finally, that they should aid each other in repairing in common any damage experienced in this sacred cause, by any one member of the confederation; extending even to the past this contract for reciprocal security, the league resolved to rebuild Milan.

The militias of Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Mantua, Verona, and Treviso arrived the 27th of April, 1167, on the ground covered by the ruins of this great city. They apportioned among themselves the labour of restoring the enclosing walls; all the Milanese of the four villages, as well as those who had taken refuge in the more distant towns, came in crowds to take part in this pious work; and in a few weeks the new-grown city was in a state to repel the insults of its enemies. Lodi was soon afterwards compelled, by force of arms, to take the oath to the league; while the towns of Venice, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, and Bologna voluntarily and gladly joined the association.

Frederick, meanwhile, arrived within sight of Rome. The Romans dared to await him in the open field; he defeated them with great slaughter, and made himself master of the Leonine city. The inhabitants still defending themselves in the Vatican, he dislodged them by setting fire to Santa Maria, the adjoining church; Alexander, in his fright, escaped by the Tiber. After his retreat the Romans took the oath of fidelity to the emperor, without, however, receiving his army within their walls; but fever, and the suffocating heat of the Campagna, soon began, by its ravages, to avenge the Italians; from the first days of August an alarming mortality broke out in the camp of the emperor.

The princes to whom he was most attached, the captains in whom he had most confidence, two thousand knights, with a proportional number of common soldiers, were carried off in a few weeks. He endeavoured to flee from the destructive scourge; he traversed in his retreat Tuscany and the Lunigiana; but his route was marked with graves, in which every day, every hour, he deposited the bodies of his soldiers. He was no longer strong enough to vanquish even the opposition of the little town of Pontremoli, which refused him a passage; and it was by roads almost impracticable that he at length crossed the Apennines. He arrived at Pavia about the middle of September,[56] and attempted to assemble a diet; but the deputies of Pavia, Novara, Vercelli, and Como alone obeyed his summons. He harangued the assembly with great vehemence; and, throwing down his glove, challenged the rebellious cities to a pitched battle. He passed the winter in combating, with his small remaining army, the league of Lombardy; but in the month of March, 1168, he escaped from the Italians, and repassed Mont Cenis, to return and arm the Germans anew against Italy.

After his departure, Novara, Vercelli, Como, Asti, and Tortona also entered into the confederation, which resolved to found, as a monument of its power, and as a barrier against the Ghibellines of Pavia and Montferrat, a new city, on the confluence of the rivers Tanaro and Bormida. The Lombards named it Alexandria (Alessandria), in honour of the chief of the church, and of their league. They collected in it all the inhabitants of the different villages of that rich plain, which extends from the Po to the Ligurian Alps, and secured to them all the liberty and privileges for which they themselves had fought.

Frederick had sacrificed more time, treasure, and blood, to strengthen his dominion over Italy, than any of his predecessors; he had succeeded for a long period in associating the German nation in his ambition. He persuaded the Germans that their interest and their honour were concerned in the submission of the Italians. They began, however, to feel tired of a long contest, from which they derived no advantage; other interests, affairs more pressing, demanded the presence of the emperor at home; and Frederick was obliged to suspend for five years his efforts to subdue Italy. During this period the towns of Lombardy, in the plenitude of their power and liberty, corrected their laws, recruited their finances, strengthened their fortifications, and finally placed their militias on a better war establishment. Their consuls met also in frequent diets, where they bound themselves by new oaths to the common defence, and admitted fresh members into the confederation, which at length reached to the extremity of Romagna.

Frederick, however, did not entirely abandon Italy. He sent thither Christian, the elected archbishop of Mainz, and arch-chancellor of the empire, as his representative. This warlike prelate soon felt that there was nothing to be done in Lombardy; and he proceeded to Tuscany, where the Ghibelline party still predominated. His first pretension was to establish peace between the two maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa, which disputed with arms in their hands the commerce of the East. As he found a greater spirit of pride and independence in the Pisans, he caused to be thrown into a dungeon their consuls, who had presented themselves at the diet of the Tuscan towns convoked by him at San Ginasio, in the month of July, 1173; he arrested, at the same time, the consuls of the Florentines, their allies, while he studiously flattered those of Lucca, of Siena, of Pistoia, and the nobles of Tuscany, Romagna, and Umbria; promising to avenge them on their enemies: but, said he, “to do so more effectually, you must first co-operate with me in crushing the enemies of the emperor.” He thus succeeded in persuading them to second him in the attack which he meditated for the following spring on Ancona.

This city, the most southern of all those attached to the league of Lombardy, contained about twelve thousand inhabitants, enriched by maritime commerce, and confident in the strength of their almost unassailable position. Their town, beautifully situated on the extremity of a promontory, which surrounded a magnificent port, presented on the side open to the continent only precipitous rocks, with the exception of a single causeway. The citizens[57] had accordingly repulsed successively for ages all the attacks of the barbarians, and all the pretensions of the emperors. The archbishop Christian arrived before Ancona in the beginning of April, 1174, and invested the city with an army levied among the Ghibellines of Tuscany and Umbria. The people of Ancona repulsed their attack with their accustomed bravery. But hunger, more formidable than the sword, soon menaced them. The preceding harvests had failed; their granaries were empty; and an enemy’s fleet closed their port. They saw the harvest ripen, without the possibility of a single sack of corn reaching them. All human subsistence was soon exhausted; undismayed, however, they tried to support existence with the herbs and shell-fish which they gathered from their rocks, or with the leather which commerce had accumulated in their magazines. Such was the food on which had long subsisted a young and beautiful woman. Observing one day a soldier summoned to battle, but unable from hunger to proceed, she refused her breast to the child whom she suckled; offered it to the warrior; and sent him, thus refreshed, to shed his blood for his country.

But to whatever distress the people of Ancona were reduced, they rejected every proposal to capitulate. At length the succour invoked from the Guelfs of Ferrara and Romagna approached; Christian saw the fires which they lighted on the mountain of Falcognara, about four miles from Ancona; and, unable to give them battle with an army exhausted by the fatigues of a long siege, he hastily retreated.

FREDERICK ONCE MORE AGGRESSIVE

In the beginning of October, 1174, Frederick, at the head of a formidable army, again re-entered Italy. He passed from the county of Burgundy into Savoy, and descended by Mont Cenis. Suza, the first town to which he came on his passage, was taken and burned; Asti, in alarm, opened its gates, and purchased its security from pillage by a heavy contribution; but Alexandria stopped the progress of the emperor. This city, recently founded by the league of Lombardy, did not hesitate to enter into a contest with the imperial power for the sake of its confederates; although its mud walls were an object of derision to the Germans, who first gave this town the surname of Alessandria della paglia, or of straw. Nevertheless these walls of mud and straw, but defended by generous and devoted citizens, resisted all the efforts of the most valiant army and the most warlike monarch of Germany. Frederick consumed in vain four months in a siege, which was prolonged through the winter. The inundation of rivers more than once threatened him with destruction, even in his camp; sickness also decimated his soldiers. Finally, the combined army of the Lombard League advanced from Piacenza to Tortona; and on Easter Sunday of the year 1175, Frederick found himself obliged to raise the siege, and to march for Pavia, to repose his army.

This last check at length compelled the emperor to acknowledge the power of a people which he had been accustomed to despise. The chiefs of the Lombard army showed themselves well prepared for battle; but still respecting the rights of their monarch, declined attacking him. He entered into negotiations with them; all professed their ardent desire to reconcile the prerogatives of the emperor and the rights of the Roman church with those of liberty. Six commissioners were appointed to settle the basis of a treaty which should reconcile the several claims. They began by demanding that the armies on each side should be disbanded. Frederick did not[58] hesitate to comply; he dismissed his Germans, and remained at Pavia, trusting solely to the fidelity of his Italian Ghibellines. Legates from the pope arrived also to join the commissioners; and the negotiations were opened. But the demands of Frederick were so high as to render agreement almost impossible. He declared that he desired only his just rights; “but they must be those,” said he, “which have been exercised by my predecessors, Charlemagne, Otto, and the emperors Henry III and Henry IV.” The deputies of the towns opposed to this the concessions of Henry V and Lothair; but even these could no longer satisfy them. For the Italians, liberty had advanced with civilisation; and they could not now submit to the ancient prerogatives of their masters, without returning to their own ancient barbarism.

THE BATTLE OF LEGNANO; THE PEACE OF CONSTANCE

The negotiations were broken off, and Frederick sent to Germany for another army, which, in the spring of 1176, entered the territory of Como by the Grisons. The emperor joined it about the end of May, after traversing, without being recognised, the territory of Milan. It was against this great town that he entertained the most profound resentment, and meditated a new attack. He flattered himself that he should find the citizens still trembling under the chastisement which he had before inflicted on their city. On the 29th of May, he met the Milanese army between Legnano and Barano, about fifteen miles from Milan. Only a few auxiliaries from Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Novara, and Vercelli had yet joined them. An impetuous charge of the German cavalry made that of the Lombards give way. The enemy pressed forward so near the carroccio, as to give great alarm lest this sacred car should fall into their hands. But in the army of the Milanese there was a company of nine hundred young men, who had devoted themselves to its defence, and were distinguished by the name of “the company of death.” These brave youths, seeing the Germans gain ground, knelt down; and invoking God and St. Ambrose, renewed their vow to perish for their country; then rising, they advanced with such impetuosity that the Germans were disconcerted, divided, and driven back. The whole army, reanimated by this example, hastily pressed forward. The Germans were put to flight; their camp was pillaged; Frederick was separated from his companions in arms, and obliged to conceal himself, and it was not till he had passed several days, and encountered various dangers, that he succeeded in reaching Pavia, where the empress was already mourning his death.

The defeat of Legnano at length determined Frederick to think seriously of peace, and to abandon pretensions which the Lombards resisted with so much energy. New negotiations were opened with the pope; and Venice was chosen, in concert with him, as the place for holding a congress. This town had withdrawn its signature from the league of Lombardy; it was acknowledged foreign to the Western Empire, and might be considered neutral and indifferent in the quarrel between the emperor and the free towns. The pope, Alexander III, arrived at Venice on the 24th of March, 1177. The emperor, whose presence the Venetians feared, first fixed his residence at one of his palaces, near Ravenna; approached afterwards as far as Chioggia, and finally came even to Venice. The negotiation bore upon three different points—to reconcile the emperor to the church, by putting an end to the schism; to restore peace between the empire of the West and that of the East, and the[59] king of the Two Sicilies; and finally to define the constitutional rights of the emperor and of the cities of Lombardy.c Frederick was obliged to bend before the angry countenance of a proud priest, and offer his head as a footstool to the Roman bishop!

“I will tread upon the aspic and basilisk,” said the pontiff as he placed his foot upon the emperor’s neck, “and the lion and the dragon will I trample beneath my feet.” “Non tibi sed Petro,” replied the prince. “Et mihi et Petro,”[8] haughtily returned the priest while he pressed more firmly on the humbled monarch.b So at least the story goes. But unfortunately it is a narrative that cannot be accepted without many grains of allowance. Contemporary accounts do not give these picturesque details, and we are forced to conclude that the story of Frederick’s humiliation was embellished in after times with incidents quite foreign to the reality. But, divested of all apocryphal incidents, Frederick’s concessions to the pope constituted a distinct abasement of the imperial authority. If Alexander did not literally tread upon the neck of the emperor, he was certainly entitled to feel that he was figuratively grinding the secular “aspic and basilisk,” the royal “lion and dragon,” beneath his spiritual heel.a

Frederick had few subjects of dispute with the Grecian emperor, or the Norman king of the Sicilies; these parts of the treaty were not difficult to terminate. But that part which related to the league of Lombardy must be founded on a new order of ideas; it was the first pact that Europe had seen made between a monarch and his subjects; the first boundary line traced between authority and liberty. After long and vain attempts, the negotiators separated, contenting themselves only with obliging the emperor and the Lombards to conclude a truce of six years, bearing date from the 1st of August, 1177. During its existence, the rights on each side were to remain suspended; and the freedom of commerce was re-established between the cities which remained faithful to the emperor, and those which drew still closer their bonds of union by a renewal of the league of Lombardy.

The six years of repose, however, which this truce guaranteed, accustomed the emperor to submit to limitations of his authority. Thirty years had passed since the contest had begun between him and the Italian nation; age had now tempered his activity and calmed his pride. New incidents had arisen in Germany to fix his attention. His son, Henry VI, demanded to be associated in the sovereignty of his two kingdoms of Germany and Italy. A definitive peace only could restore to Frederick his rights and revenues in Lombardy, which his subjects there did not dispute, but which the truce held suspended. The adverse claims were honestly weighed at the Diet of Constance; reciprocal concessions were made both by the monarch and his subjects, and the Peace of Constance, the basis of new public rights for Italy, was at length signed on the 25th of June, 1183. By this peace the emperor renounced all regal privileges which he had hitherto claimed in the interior of towns. He acknowledged the right of the confederate cities to levy armies, to enclose themselves within fortifications, and to exercise by their commissioners within their own walls both civil and criminal jurisdiction. The consuls of towns acquired by the simple nomination of the people all the prerogatives of imperial vicars. The cities of Lombardy were further authorised to strengthen their confederation for the defence of their just rights, recognised by the Peace of Constance. But, on the other side, they engaged to maintain the just rights of the emperor, which were defined at the same time; and in order[60] to avoid all disputes, it was agreed that these rights might always be bought off by the annual sum of two thousand marks of silver. Thus terminated, in the establishment of a legal liberty, the first and most noble struggle which the nations of modern Europe have ever maintained against despotism.

The generous resistance of the Lombards, during a war of thirty years, had conquered from the emperors political liberty for all the towns of the kingdom of Italy. The right of obeying only their own laws, of being governed by their own magistrates, of contracting alliances, of making peace or war, and, in fine, of administering their own finances, with the exception only of a certain revenue payable into the imperial treasury, was more particularly secured by the Peace of Constance to the confederate cities of the league of Lombardy.

But the Germans easily comprehended the impossibility of refusing to their allies the privileges which their enemies had gained by conquest; the liberties, therefore, stipulated by the Peace of Constance, were rendered common to all the towns of Italy; and those which had been most distinguished by their attachment to the Ghibelline party were often found the most zealous for the establishment and preservation of all the rights of the people. The cities, however, did not consider themselves independent. They were proud of the title of members of the empire; they knew they must concur in its defence, as well as in the maintenance of internal peace; reserving only that it must be in pursuance of their free choice and deliberation. They were in a manner confederates of an emperor, who acted on them rather by persuasion than orders, rather as a party chief than as a monarch; and as he was habituated to this compromise with public opinion in his relations with the princes of the empire, he yielded with the less repugnance to his Italian subjects. It is a circumstance highly honourable to the princes of the house of Hohenstaufen, which continued to reign sixty-seven years after the Peace of Constance, that during this long period they made no attempt to infringe the conditions of the compact. They admitted, with good faith, all the consequences of the concessions made; they pardoned liberty, which the vulgar order of kings always regarded as a usurpation by the subjects of the rights of the crown.

DEATH OF FREDERICK; HIS SUCCESSOR

It was not long, however, before the struggle was renewed between the emperor and most of the towns. It was supported with not less devotion and not fewer sacrifices; it caused not less calamity whilst it endured; and[61] it was crowned, at its close, with results not less happy. But the cities did not, as in the preceding struggle, engage in it for their own immediate interest; they rather seconded the policy of the holy see, which sought the independence of the church and of Italy, and did not cease to fight for the attainment of this object till the extinction of the house of Hohenstaufen.

Frederick I survived the Peace of Constance seven years. During this period he visited Italy with his son Henry VI; he remained some time at Milan, where he was received with respect, and gained the affection of all the inhabitants, towards whom he testified the utmost trust, confidence, and kindness. Instead of endeavouring to intimidate Lombardy, and recover by intrigues his former power, he was occupied only with the marriage of his son Henry, whom he had previously crowned king of Germany, with Constanza, sole heiress of the Norman kings who had conquered the Two Sicilies. The union of this crown with that of Germany and of Lombardy would have reduced the pope to be no more than the first bishop of his states; it would have disarmed the two auxiliary powers which had supported the league of Lombardy against the emperor; and it alarmed the church, in proportion as it flattered his ambition. The endeavours to prevent or dissolve this union gave rise to a series of wars extending over a long period. Frederick Barbarossa did not see the commencement of them. When the news of the taking of Jerusalem by Saladin, on the 2nd of October, 1187, had thrown all Europe into consternation, Frederick, listening only to his religious and chivalric enthusiasm, placed himself at the head of the Third Crusade, which he led into the East by land, and died the 10th of June, 1190, of a stroke of apoplexy, caused by the coldness of the waters of the little river Calycadnus [Salef] in Asia Minor.

Henry VI had worn for five years the German and Italian crowns, when he received in Germany, where he then was with his wife, news of the death of William II, king of the Two Sicilies, to whom Constanza was successor; and a few months after, that of his father Frederick I. He immediately began his journey towards southern Italy. Tancred, a bastard of the race of the Norman kings, put in opposition to him by the Sicilians, defended, for some time with success, the independence of those provinces, but died in 1194; and Henry, who had entered the kingdom as conqueror, and had made himself detested for his cruelty, also died there suddenly, on the 28th of September, 1197. He left by his marriage with Constanza only one son, Frederick II, hardly four years old, who lost his mother in the following year; and was, under the protection of the pope, acknowledged, child as he was, king of the Two Sicilies; but the imperial and Lombard crowns were withheld from him for several years.

GROWING POWER OF THE NOBILITY

From the Peace of Constance to the death of Henry VI the free cities of Italy had, for the space of fifteen years, no contest to maintain against the emperors; but their repose and liberty were during this period constantly endangered by the pretensions of the nobility. The growing grandeur of the cities, and the decay of the imperial power, had left the nobles of Italy in a very ambiguous position.

They in some measure no longer had a country; their only security was in their own strength; for the emperor in resigning his power over the towns had not thought of giving an organisation to the nobles dispersed in[62] castles. All the families of Italian dukes, and almost all those of marquises and counts, had become extinct; those who remained had lost all jurisdiction over their inferiors; no feudal tenure was respected; no vassal appeared at the baronial court, to form the tribunal of his lord. The frontiers of the kingdom of Lombardy were called marches, after a German word adopted into almost all the European languages, and the commander of these frontiers was called marquis; but the families of the powerful Tuscan marquises were extinct, as well as those of the marquises of Ancona, of Fermo, of Camerino, of Ivrea, and of those of the Veronese and Trevisan marches. There remained, however, on these frontiers some families which bore the same title, and had preserved some wrecks of these ancient and powerful marquisates.

The nobles were not united by the hierarchical connection of the feudal system, but by the affections or antipathies of the Guelfs or Ghibellines. In general, the most powerful families among the nobles, those who had castles sufficiently strong, lands sufficiently extensive, and vassals sufficiently numerous to defend themselves, listening only to the ambition of courts, were attached to the Ghibelline party. Those families, on the contrary, who possessed castles capable of but little resistance, situated on accessible eminences, or in plains; those whose castles were near great towns, and too weak to support a contest with them, had demanded to be made citizens of the towns; they had served them in the wars of the league of Lombardy; they had since taken a principal share in the government, and they thus found themselves attached by common interests to the party of the Guelfs. Independent nobles were no more to be found in all the plains of Lombardy; there was not one who had not become citizen of some republic; but every chain of mountain was thick-set with castles where a nobility, choosing obedience to an emperor rather than to citizens, maintained themselves independent; these too, attracted sometimes by the wealth and pleasures of towns, and sometimes desirous of obtaining influence in the counsels of powerful republics, in order to restore them to the emperor, demanded to be made citizens, when they thought it would open the way to a share in the government; and as war was their sole occupation, they were often gladly received by the republics, which stood in need of good captains.

It was thus the Ghibelline family of Visconti, whose fiefs extended from the Alps to the Lago Maggiore, became associated with the republic of Milan. The house of Este, allied to the Guelfs of Saxony and Bavaria, and devoted to the pope, possessors of several castles built on the fertile chain of the Euganean hills, joined the republic of Ferrara; the parallel chain, which serves as a base to the Tyrolese Alps, was crowned with the castles of Ezzel, Ezzelino, or Eccelino, of Romano, a family enriched by the emperors, entirely devoted to the Ghibelline party, and in process of time attached to the republics of Verona and Vicenza. In like manner were situated on the northern side of the Apennines the fortresses of the Ghibelline nobles, who excited revolutions in the republics of Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, and Modena: on the southern side were the castles of other Ghibellines, in turns citizens and enemies of the republics of Arezzo, Florence, Pistoia, and Lucca; lower in the valleys of the Po, or in the upper vale of Arno, were the castles of the Guelfs, who had become decidedly citizens of the same republics.c

FOOTNOTES

Normans is the softened form of the word “Northman,” applied first to the people of Scandinavia in general, and afterwards specially to the people of Norway. In the form of “Norman” (Northmannus, Normannus, Normand) it is the name of those colonists from Scandinavia who settled themselves in Gaul, who founded the Norman duchy, who adopted the French tongue and French manners, and who from their new home set forth on new errands of conquest, chiefly in the British Islands and in southern Italy and Sicily. From one point of view the expeditions of the Normans may be looked on as continuations of the expeditions of the Northmen. As the name is etymologically the same, so the people are by descent the same, and they are still led by the old spirit of war and adventure.

But in the view of general history Normans and Northmen must be carefully distinguished. The change in the name is the sign of a thorough change, if not in the people themselves, yet in their historical position. Their national character remains largely the same; but they have adopted a new religion, a new language, a new system of law and society, new thoughts and feelings on all matters. Like as the Norman is still to the Northmen, the effect of a settlement of Normans is utterly different from the effect of a settlement of Northmen. There can be no doubt that the establishment of a Norman power in England was, like the establishment of the Danish power, greatly helped by the essential kindred of Normans, Danes, and English.[64] But it was helped only silently. To all outward appearances the Norman conquest of England was an event of an altogether different character from the Danish conquest. The one was a conquest by a people whose tongue and institutions were still palpably akin to those of the English. The other was a conquest by a people whose tongue and institutions were palpably different from those of the English. The Norman settlers in England felt no community with the earlier Danish settlers in England. In fact the Normans met with the steadiest resistance in a part of England which was largely Danish. But the effect of real, though unacknowledged, kindred had none the less an important practical effect. There can be no doubt that this hidden working of kindred between conquerors and conquered in England, as compared with the utter lack of all fellowship between conquerors and conquered in Sicily, was one cause out of several which made so wide a difference between the Norman conquest of England and the Norman conquest of Sicily.

These two conquests, wrought in the great island of the ocean and in the great island of the Mediterranean, were the main works of the Normans after they had fully put on the character of a Christian and French-speaking people, in other words, after they had changed from Northmen into Normans. The English and the Sicilian settlements form the main Norman history of the eleventh century. The tenth century is the time of the settlement of the Northmen in Gaul, and of the change in religion and language of which the softening of the name is the outward sign. By the end of it, any traces of heathen faith, and even of Scandinavian speech, must have been mere survivals. The new creed, the new speech, the new social system, had taken such deep root that the descendants of the Scandinavian settlers were better fitted to be the armed missionaries of all these things than the neighbours from whom they had borrowed their new possessions. With the zeal of new converts they set forth on their new errand very much in the spirit of their heathen forefathers. If Britain and Sicily were the greatest fields of their enterprise, they were very far from being the only fields. The same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Gaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world.c

We may for the present leave the ethnology and early history of the Northmen to the later history of Scandinavia, and fuller details of their invasions of France and England to the histories of those countries, giving here only a brief résumé of their wanderings, and a fuller account of their career in the powerful little kingdom in Sicily where they meddled busily with the affairs of all Europe, and much of Asia and Africa. This was, as Freemanc says, “the most brilliant time for Sicily as a power in the world.” Even under the Greeks it was not so prominent. But before reaching this period, some mention of their first appearances in continental European history is necessary.a

Evils still more terrible than political abuses were the lot of those nations who had been subject to Charlemagne. They, indeed, may appear to us little better than ferocious barbarians: but they were exposed to the assaults of tribes, in comparison with whom they must be deemed humane and polished. Each frontier of the empire had to dread the attack of an enemy. The Saracens of Africa possessed themselves of Sicily and Sardinia, and became masters of the Mediterranean Sea.

Much more formidable were the foes by whom Germany was assailed. The Slavonians, a widely extended people, whose language is still spoken upon half the surface of Europe, had occupied the countries of Bohemia,[65] Poland, and Pannonia, on the eastern confines of the empire, and from the time of Charlemagne acknowledged its superiority. But at the end of the ninth century, a Tatarian tribe, the Hungarians, overspreading that country which since has borne their name, and moving forward like a vast wave, brought a dreadful reverse upon Germany. All Italy, all Germany, and the south of France, felt the scourge; till Henry the Fowler, and Otto the Great, drove them back by successive victories within their own limits, where in a short time they learned peaceful arts, adopted the religion, and followed the policy of Christendom.

If any enemies could be more destructive than these Hungarians, they were the pirates of the north, known commonly by the name of Northmen (Normans). The love of a predatory life seems to have attracted adventurers of different nations to the Scandinavian seas, from whence they infested, not only by maritime piracy, but continual invasions, the northern coasts both of France and Germany. The causes of their sudden appearance are inexplicable, or at least could only be sought in the ancient traditions of Scandinavia. For undoubtedly the coasts of France and England were as little protected from depredations under the Merovingian kings, and those of the Heptarchy, as in subsequent times. Yet only one instance of an attack from this side is recorded, and that before the middle of the sixth century, till the age of Charlemagne. In 787, the Danes, as we call those northern plunderers, began to infest England, which lay most immediately open to their incursions. Soon afterwards they ravaged the coasts of France. Charlemagne repulsed them by means of his fleets; yet they pillaged a few places during his reign. It is said that, perceiving one day, from a port in the Mediterranean, some Norman vessels which had penetrated into that sea, he shed tears, in anticipation of the miseries which awaited his empire. In the ninth century, the Norman pirates not only ravaged the Balearic Isles, and nearer coasts of the Mediterranean, but even Greece.

THE NORMANS IN FRANCE

In Louis’ reign their depredations upon the coast were more incessant, but they did not penetrate into the inland country, till that of Charles the Bald. The wars between that prince and his family, which exhausted France of her noblest blood, the insubordination of the provincial governors, even the instigation of some of Charles’ enemies, laid all open to their inroads. They adopted a uniform plan of warfare both in France and England; sailing up navigable rivers in their vessels of small burden, and fortifying the islands which they occasionally found, they made these intrenchments at[66] once an asylum for their women and children, a repository for their plunder, and a place of retreat from superior force. After pillaging a town, they retired to these strongholds or to their ships; and it was not till 872 that they ventured to keep possession of Angers, which, however, they were compelled to evacuate.

Sixteen years afterwards, they laid siege to Paris, and committed the most ruinous devastations on the neighbouring country. As these Northmen were unchecked by religious awe, the rich monasteries, which had stood harmless amidst the havoc of Christian war, were overwhelmed in the storm. Perhaps they may have endured some irrecoverable losses of ancient learning; but their complaints are of monuments disfigured, bones of saints and kings dispersed, treasures carried away. St. Denis redeemed its abbot from captivity with 685 pounds of gold. All the chief abbeys were stripped about the same time, either by the enemy, or for contributions to the public necessity. So impoverished was the kingdom, that in 860 Charles the Bald had great difficulty in collecting 3000 pounds of silver, to subsidise a body of Northmen against their countrymen. The kings of France, too feeble to prevent or repel these invaders, had recourse to the palliative of buying peace at their hands, or rather precarious armistices, to which reviving thirst of plunder soon put an end. At length Charles the Simple, in 918, ceded a great province (Neustria), which they had already partly occupied, partly rendered desolate, and which has derived from them the name of Normandy. Ignominious as this appears, it proved no impolitic step. Rollo [Rolf or Hrolf an exile from Norway], the Norman chief, with all his subjects, became Christians and Frenchmen.d

France would have only had to congratulate herself upon the assignment she had been compelled to make to the Normans, had the Treaty of Saint-Clair ratified peace forever between the kingdom and this nation of pirates. Unfortunately such was not the case, and for a considerable time the Normans continued to add their ravages to the burden of the many sacrifices France had made, of all the calamities she had experienced.

Some years before, a number of pagans who were independent of Rollo, but of whose adventures but little is known, had established themselves at the mouth of the Loire. Rollo came and attacked them in their retreat, but they defended themselves valiantly, and the conqueror of the shores of the Seine was obliged to return to his domains, and leave the pagans in possession of the mouth of the Loire. Sometime afterwards, both companies united and fought together; this came about in the following manner. There was much indignation in France on account of the deplorable government of Charles the Simple, the last degenerate scion of the Carlovingian race. Rudolf or Ralph, duke of Burgundy, who was considered the only man capable of putting a stop to the anarchy in the kingdom and the ravages of the Normans, was proclaimed king.

Charles entreated the help of the Normans of the Seine, and those of the Loire. Accordingly they all came to join the forces of the fallen king, marched with them towards the Oise, marking their progress by their usual devastations. For the first time, the people of the north interposed in a civil war which did not concern them. Rudolf turned his forces against them, and put them to flight. They revenged themselves by killing the prisoners they had taken. Regnaud, leader of the Normans of the Loire, who had extended his inroads as far as Arras, was forced to retire to his strongholds. Immediately after this retreat, the Burgundians crossed the Epte and put Normandy to fire and sword. Rollo, who evidently had not expected[67] this invasion, made a truce with Rudolf, and gave him hostages, as a guarantee of his peaceable intentions, but, in his turn, set up claims which had to be satisfied. King Charles, he said, whose cause he had followed, had promised him more lands. To do no less than the dethroned monarch, Rudolf, according to Flodoard (or Frodoard),e the historian, bestowed upon Rollo, Bessin, and also Maine. The Normans of the Loire were treated in like manner, and it seems that a sum of money was granted to them, and that a tax had to be levied in all parts of France to pay it.

The kingdom continued to be very much agitated by political events. Although he twice sold peace to Rudolf and broke it again, the Norman duke embraced Count Heribert’s cause, who, forsaking Rudolf after seconding him ably, had gone over to the dethroned prince, his prisoner, and with the assent of Rollo and Hugh, had again proclaimed the unhappy Charles king. All seemed lost to Rudolf. But Charles was the puppet of his party; scarcely had he reascended the throne, than Heribert once more changed his mind, flung the phantom prince into prison again, and acknowledged Rudolf. Charles died sometime after in the castle of his jailer.

Whilst these events were taking place in the interior of France, the Breton generals, in the vicinity of Normandy, commenced, perhaps in revenge for the incursions of the Scandinavians, ravaging the territory of their neighbours, and invaded the province of Bayeux, but Rollo appeared with his warriors, engaged in battle with the aggressors and conquered them. One of the Breton counts, Beranger, yielded to the Normans; another, Alan, the chief instigator of the war, took refuge in England. The nobles who had fought under these two commanders established themselves in France, in Burgundy, or in Aquitaine; some of them followed Alan to England. All those who remained were obliged to acknowledge the suzerainty of the duke of Normandy. The neighbouring provinces, such as Anjou and Poitou, were henceforth delivered from the hostile irruptions of these turbulent chiefs. Thus, Rollo, in his old age, found himself the peaceful possessor of Normandy, and able to maintain order and peace therein.

It is said that Charles the Simple, while he was still upon the throne, secretly sent emissaries to Rouen to his daughter Gisela who had married Rollo; that this clandestine mission gave umbrage to the Normans, and that Rollo seized and publicly put to death the envoys of his father-in-law. Gisela died sometime afterwards; and Rollo lived as before with Popa, by whom he had two children, a son named William, and a daughter called Gerloc, who later received the Christian name of Adela or Adeline.

When William grew to man’s estate, the Norman nobles requested their duke to appoint his successor. He named his son, and he it was the Normans had in mind, in spite of his illegitimacy. The nobles swore fidelity and obedience to him beforehand. Rollo lived for five years after this important event, and died of old age at Rouen. The precise date of his death, and also his age, are unknown. Everything tends to show that it was about the year 930, that the death of the first and probably octogenarian duke of Normandy took place. His bravery, his steadfastness, the energy of his government are incontestable, but it is permissible to doubt the truth of the eulogies which the Norman monks in their chronicles have bestowed upon his devotion, and his respect for the clergy. It is possible he enriched the churches and convents, that he walked in processions, and with bare feet before the relics of St. Ouen, formerly taken to France, and which he forced his father-in-law to restore; but on the other hand we read in an English chronicle, that he sold or allowed to be sold many relics belonging to[68] the Norman churches, which were acquired by his ally, Athelstan, king of England.

A French historian, Adhémar,f even declares that, feeling his end approaching, Rollo caused a hundred Christian prisoners to be sacrificed to the northern idols, and he gave a hundred pounds in gold as a gift to the churches of Normandy in order to propitiate the pagan gods and the Christian deity at the same time. According to another historian it was at the moment that he was about to embrace the Christian faith that Rollo offered a last human sacrifice to the divinities of that worship he was forsaking. Perhaps that massacre of Christian prisoners, which he ordered when Rudolf drove him back from the north of France, was the cause of these strange tales.

Rollo was buried in the church he had built at Rouen; afterwards his remains were placed in a chapel of the cathedral itself. His tomb, facing that of his son, is still to be seen there.g

THE NORMANS COME TO ITALY

When the Northmen, or Normans, had embraced Christianity, in their attachment to pilgrimage to the Holy Land, they surpassed all the European people. This was consistent enough with the habits of men, the most enterprising, courageous, and valiant on earth. Two motives appear to have directed their route to Naples; Mounts Cassino and Gargano were illustrious for miracles; and from Naples, Gaeta, Amalfi, or Bari, parts which maintained a constant intercourse with the East, a passage to Syria might easily be obtained.

Early in the eleventh century, while forty of these adventurers were at Salerno, on their return from the Holy Land, a Saracen fleet anchored off the coast, and demanded heavy contributions as a reward for sparing the city. The Normans instantly asked Guiomar III, prince of the place, for arms. To the astonishment of the inhabitants, they mounted their steeds, caused the gates to be opened, and plunged into the midst of the misbelievers, many of whom they slew, the rest they forced precipitately to embark.[9] Guiomar, with the hope of retaining them at his court, offered them riches and honours as the condition; and when he found them resolved to revisit their homes, he brought them to proclaim his offers among their kindred and friends. It appears, however, that the Normans had no great reason to be dissatisfied with their own country; one knight only, Drengot by name, who, from a deadly feud with a noble of his nation, was not averse to foreign adventure, resolved to collect his kindred and dependents and sail for Italy.

On his arrival there with about one hundred followers, he found the yoke of the Greeks no less detested than the depredations of the Saracens; that the pope, emperor, and feudatory were alike prepared to reduce the maritime places and the mountain forts. For some time their success was thwarted by obstacles which valour could not surmount. On one occasion they were defeated by a greatly superior force, and their leader slain; and the emperor, Henry II, whose army they had joined, was compelled by a pestilence to abandon the north of Italy. But under Rainulf, the brother of Drengot, they resolved to establish a sovereignty for themselves; and in this view they[69] reduced Aversa, a fortress belonging to the duchy of Naples, which they fortified in opposition to the wish of that republic. That city, however, they had soon an opportunity of conciliating. When Pandulf IV, prince of Capua, took Naples by surprise, where open force would have failed, Sergius, master of the soldiers, and head of the commonwealth, fled to Aversa, implored the succours of the strangers, and with their aid expelled the garrison of Capua. The grateful chief erected Aversa into a fief, with which he invested the Norman leader as Count Rainulf. But this leader was not destined to lay the foundation of Norman sovereignty.

About this time and allured by the same hope of distinction, there arrived three sons of Tancred of Hauteville, an illustrious house of Normandy. In the war which ensued, both Greeks and Saracens were worsted, until all Apulia was wrested from the former, when the new conquests were partitioned among twelve counts, each with a town and territory. At the head of these adventurers was Guillaume Bras de Fer, eldest son of Tancred. But they acknowledged no subordination; they committed on churches and monasteries, Christians and infidels, friends and foes, excesses which neither Greek nor Saracen could have exceeded, until the pope, justly regarding them as the greatest curse of the country, formed a league to expel them.

At the head of a motley army of Romans, Germans, Greeks, Campanians, and Apulians, Leo IX himself took the field. Guillaume was dead, but his brother Humphrey (or Humbert) filled his place; Humphrey was assisted by Robert Guiscard [or Wiscard] another son of Tancred, and by the count of Aversa.i

CAPTURE OF THE POPE; ROBERT GUISCARD (1053 A.D.)

The Normans of Apulia could muster in the field no more than three thousand horse, with a handful of infantry; the defection of the natives intercepted their provisions and retreat; and their spirit, incapable of fear, was chilled for a moment by superstitious awe. On the hostile approach of Leo, they knelt without disgrace or reluctance before their spiritual father. But the pope was inexorable; his lofty Germans affected to deride the diminutive stature of their adversaries; and the Normans were informed that death or exile was their only alternative.

Flight they disdained; and, as many of them had been three days without tasting food, they embraced the assurance of a more easy and honourable death. They climbed the hill of Civitella, descended into the plain, and charged in three divisions the army of the pope. On the left, and in the centre, Richard, count of Aversa, and Robert, the famous Guiscard, attacked, broke, routed, and pursued, the Italian multitudes, who fought without discipline, and fled without shame. A harder trial was reserved for the valour of Count Humphrey, who led the cavalry of the right wing. The Germans have been described as unskilful in the management of the horse and lance; but on foot they formed a strong and impenetrable phalanx, and neither man, nor steed, nor armour could resist the weight of their long and two-handed swords. After a severe conflict they were encompassed by the squadrons returning from the pursuit, and died in their ranks with the esteem of their foes and the satisfaction of revenge.

The gates of Civitella were shut against the flying pope, and he was overtaken by the pious conquerors, who kissed his feet, to implore his blessing and the absolution of their sinful victory. The soldiers beheld in their enemy and captive the vicar of Christ; and though we may suppose the[70] policy of the chiefs, it is probable that they were infected by the popular superstition. In the calm of retirement, the well-meaning pope deplored the effusion of Christian blood, which must be imputed to his account; he felt that he had been the author of sin and scandal; and as his undertaking had failed, the indecency of his military character was universally condemned. With these dispositions, he listened to the offers of a beneficial treaty; deserted an alliance which he had preached as the cause of God, and ratified the past and future conquests of the Normans. By whatever hands they had been usurped, the provinces of Apulia and Calabria were a part of the donation of Constantine and the patrimony of St. Peter: the grant and the acceptance confirmed the mutual claims of the pontiff and the adventurers. They promised to support each other with spiritual and temporal arms; a tribute or quit-rent of twelve-pence was afterwards stipulated for every plough-land; and after this memorable transaction, the kingdom of Naples remained above seven hundred years a fief of the holy see.

The pedigree of Robert Guiscard, born about 1015, is variously deduced from the peasants and the dukes of Normandy; from the peasants, by the pride and ignorance of a Grecian princess; from the dukes, by the ignorance and flattery of the Italian subjects. His genuine descent may be ascribed to the second or middle order of private nobility. He sprang from a race of valvassors, or bannerets, of the diocese of the Coutances, in lower Normandy; the castle of Hauteville was their honourable seat; his father Tancred was conspicuous in the court and army of the duke; and his military service was furnished by ten soldiers or knights. Two marriages, of a rank not unworthy of his own, made him the father of twelve sons, who were educated at home by the impartial tenderness of his second wife. But a narrow patrimony was insufficient for his numerous and daring progeny; they saw around the neighbourhood the mischiefs of poverty and discord, and resolved to seek in foreign wars a more glorious inheritance. Two only remained to perpetuate the race, and cherish their father’s age; their ten brothers passed the Alps, and joined the Apulian camp of the Normans. The elder were prompted by native spirit; their success encouraged their younger brethren; and the first three in seniority, William, Drogo, and Humphrey, deserved to be the chiefs of their nation and the founders of the new republic.

Robert was the eldest of the seven sons of the second marriage; and even the reluctant praise of his foes has endowed him with the heroic qualities of a soldier and a statesman. His lofty stature surpassed the tallest of his army; his limbs were cast in the true proportion of strength and gracefulness; and to the decline of life he maintained the patient vigour of health and the commanding dignity of his form. Robert, at once and with equal dexterity, could wield in the right hand his sword, his lance in the left; in the battle of Civitella he was thrice unhorsed, and, in the close of that memorable day, he was adjudged to have borne away the prize of valour from the warriors of the two armies. His boundless ambition was founded on the consciousness of superior worth; in the pursuit of greatness he was never arrested by the scruples of justice, and seldom moved by the feelings of humanity; though not insensible of fame, the choice of open or clandestine means was determined only by his present advantage.

The surname of Guiscard[10] was applied to this master of political wisdom, which is too often confounded with the practice of dissimulation and deceit; and Robert is praised by the Apulian poetj for excelling the cunning of Ulysses and the eloquence of Cicero. According to the Greeks he departed from Normandy with only five followers on horseback and thirty on foot; yet even this allowance appears too bountiful: the sixth son of Tancred of Hauteville passed the Alps as a pilgrim, and his first military band was levied among the adventurers of Italy. His brothers and countrymen had divided the fertile lands of Apulia; but they guarded their shares with the jealousy of avarice; the aspiring youth was drawn forwards to the mountains of Calabria, and in his first exploits against the Greeks and the natives it is not easy to discriminate the hero from the robber. To surprise a castle or a convent, to ensnare a wealthy citizen, to plunder the adjacent villages for necessary food, were the obscure labours which formed and exercised the powers of his mind and body. The volunteers of Normandy adhered to his standard; and, under his command, the peasants of Calabria assumed the name and character of Normans.

As the genius of Robert expanded with his fortune, he awakened the jealousy of his elder brother, by whom, in a transient quarrel, his life was threatened and his liberty restrained. After the death of Humphrey, the tender age of his sons excluded them from the command; they were reduced to a private estate by the ambition of their guardian and uncle; and Guiscard was exalted on a buckler, and saluted count of Apulia, and general of the republic. With an increase of authority and of force, he resumed the conquest of Calabria, and soon aspired to a rank that should raise him forever above the heads of his equals. By some acts of rapine or sacrilege, he had incurred a papal excommunication; but Nicholas II was easily persuaded that the divisions of friends could terminate only in their mutual prejudice; that the Normans were the faithful champions of the holy see; and it was safer to trust the alliance of a prince, than the caprice of an aristocracy. A synod of one hundred bishops was convened at Melfi; and the count interrupted an important enterprise, to guard the person and execute the decrees of the Roman pontiff. His gratitude and policy conferred on Robert and his posterity the ducal title, with the investiture of Apulia, Calabria, and all the lands, both in Italy and Sicily, which his sword could rescue from the schismatic Greeks and the unbelieving Saracens.

This apostolic sanction might justify his arms; but the obedience of a free and victorious people could not be transferred without their consent; and Guiscard dissembled his elevation till the ensuing campaign had been illustrated by the conquest of Cosenza and Reggio. In the hour of triumph he assembled his troops and solicited the Normans to confirm, by their suffrage, the judgment of the vicar of Christ. The soldiers hailed with joyful acclamations their valiant duke; and the counts, his former equals, pronounced the oath of fidelity with hollow smiles and secret indignation.

CONQUEST OF SICILY; EASTERN INVASIONS (1060-1090 A.D.)

After this inauguration, Robert styled himself, “by the grace of God and St. Peter, duke of Apulia, Calabria, and hereafter of Sicily”; and it was the labour of twenty years to deserve and realise these lofty appellations. Such tardy progress, in a narrow space, may seem unworthy of the abilities of the chief and the spirit of the nation; but the Normans were few in number, their resources were scanty, their service was voluntary and precarious. The bravest designs of the duke were sometimes opposed by the free voice of his parliament of barons; the twelve counts of popular election conspired against his authority; and against their perfidious uncle the sons of Humphrey demanded justice and revenge. By his policy and vigour, Guiscard discovered their plots, suppressed their rebellions, and punished the guilty with death or exile; but, in these domestic feuds, his years and the national strength were unprofitably consumed.

After the defeat of his foreign enemies, the Greeks, Lombards, and Saracens, their broken forces retreated to the strong and populous cities of the sea coast. They excelled in the arts of fortification and defence; the Normans were accustomed to serve on horseback in the field, and their rude attempts could only succeed by the efforts of persevering courage. The resistance of Salerno was maintained above eight months; the siege or blockade of Bari lasted near four years. In these actions the Norman duke was the foremost in every danger; in every fatigue the last and most patient.

Roger, the twelfth and last of the sons of Tancred, had been long detained in Normandy by his own and his father’s age. He accepted a welcome summons; hastened to the Apulian camp; and deserved at first the esteem, and afterwards the envy, of his elder brother. Their valour and ambition were equal; but the youth, the beauty, the elegant manners of Roger, engaged the disinterested love of the soldiers and people. So scanty was his allowance for himself and forty followers, that he descended from conquest to robbery, and from robbery to domestic theft; and so loose were the notions of prosperity, that, by his own historian Malaterra,b at his special command, he is accused of stealing horses from a stable of Melfi. His spirit emerged from poverty and disgrace; from these base practices he rose to the merit and glory of a holy war; and the invasion of Sicily was seconded by the zeal and policy of his brother Guiscard.

After the retreat of the Greeks, the idolaters, a most audacious reproach of the Catholics, had retrieved their losses and possessions; but the deliverance of the island, so vainly undertaken by the forces of the Eastern Empire, was achieved by a small and private band of adventurers. In the first attempt, Roger braved, in an open boat, the real and fabulous dangers of Scylla and Charybdis, landed with only sixty soldiers on a hostile shore,[73] drove the Saracens to the gates of Messina, and safely returned with the spoils of the adjacent country. In the siege of Trani, three hundred Normans withstood and repulsed the forces of the island. In the siege of Palermo the Norman cavalry was assisted by the galleys of Pisa; and, in the hour of action, the envy of the two brothers was sublimed to a generous and invincible emulation. After a war of thirty years, Roger, with the title of Great Count, obtained the sovereignty of the largest and most fruitful island of the Mediterranean; and his administration displays a liberal and enlightened mind above the limits of his age and education. The Moslems were maintained in the free enjoyment of their religion and property.

To Robert Guiscard the conquest of Sicily was more glorious than beneficial; the possession of Apulia and Calabria was inadequate to his ambition; and he resolved to embrace or create the first occasion of invading, perhaps of subduing, the Roman Empire of the East. From his first wife, the partner of his humble fortunes, he had been divorced under the pretence of consanguinity; and her son Bohemond was destined to imitate, rather than to succeed, his illustrious father. The second wife of Guiscard was the daughter of the princess of Salerno; the Lombards acquiesced in the lineal succession of their son Roger; their five daughters were given in honourable nuptials, and one of them was betrothed in a tender age to Constantine, a beautiful youth, the son and heir of the emperor Michael.

But the throne of Constantinople was shaken by a revolution: the imperial family of Ducas was confined to the palace or the cloister; and Robert deplored and resented the disgrace of his daughter and the expulsion of his ally. A Greek, who styled himself the father of Constantine, soon appeared at Salerno, and related the adventures of his fall and flight. That unfortunate friend was acknowledged by the duke, and adorned with the pomp and titles of imperial dignity; in his triumphal progress through Apulia and Calabria, Michael was saluted with the tears and acclamations of the people; and Pope Gregory VII exhorted the bishops to preach, and the Catholics to fight, in the pious work of his restoration. After two years’ incessant preparations, the land and naval forces were assembled at Otranto, and Robert was accompanied by his wife, who fought by his side, his son Bohemond, and the representative of the emperor Michael.

Before the general embarkation the Norman duke despatched Bohemond with fifteen galleys to seize or threaten the Isle of Corfu. The Island of Epirus and the maritime towns were subdued by the arms or the name of Robert, who led his fleet and army from Corfu (we use the modern appellation) to the siege of Durazzo. In the prosecution of his enterprise the courage of Guiscard was assailed by every form of danger and mischance. In the most propitious season of the year, as his fleet passed along the coast, a storm of wind and snow unexpectedly arose; the Adriatic was swelled by the raging blast of the south, and a new shipwreck confirmed the old infamy of the Acroceraunian rocks. The sails, the masts, and the oars were shattered or torn away; the sea and shore were covered with the fragments of vessels, with arms and dead bodies; and the greatest part of the provisions was either lost or damaged.

The Normans had wept during the tempest; they were alarmed by the hostile approach of the Venetians, who had been solicited by the prayers and promises of the Byzantine court. The Apulian and Ragusian vessels fled to the shore; several were cut from their cables, and dragged away by the conqueror; and a sally from the town carried slaughter and dismay to the tents of the Norman duke. A seasonable relief was poured into Durazzo, and as[74] soon as the besiegers had lost the command of the sea, the islands and maritime towns withdrew from the camp the supply of tribute and provision. That camp was soon afflicted with a pestilential disease; five hundred knights perished by an inglorious death; and the list of burials (if all could obtain a decent burial) amounted to ten thousand persons. Under these calamities the mind of Guiscard alone was firm and invincible; and while he collected new forces from Apulia and Sicily, he battered or scaled or sapped the walls of Durazzo.

While the Roman Empire was attacked by the Turks in the East and the Normans in the West, the aged successor of Michael surrendered the sceptre to the hands of Alexius, an illustrious captain, and the founder of the Comnenian dynasty. The princess Anna,k his daughter and historian, observes, in her affected style, that even Hercules was unequal to a double combat; and, on this principle, she approves a hasty peace with the Turks, which allowed her father to undertake in person the relief of Durazzo.

Against the advice of his wisest captains Alexius resolved to risk the event of a general action. The princess Anna, who drops a tear on this melancholy event, is reduced to praise the strength and swiftness of her father’s horse, and his vigorous struggle when he was almost overthrown by the stroke of a lance which had shivered the imperial helmet. His desperate valour broke through a squadron of Franks who opposed his flight; and, after wandering two days and as many nights in the mountains, he found some repose of body, though not of mind, in the walls of Lychnidus. The victorious Robert reproached the tardy and feeble pursuit which had suffered the escape of so illustrious a prize; but he consoled his disappointment by the trophies and standards of the field, the wealth and luxury of the Byzantine camp, and the glory of defeating an army five times more numerous than his own.

A Venetian noble sold the city for a rich and honourable marriage. At the dead of night several rope-ladders were dropped from the walls, the light Calabrians ascended in silence, and the Greeks were awakened by the name and trumpets of the conqueror. Yet they defended the street three days against an enemy already master of the rampart; and near seven months elapsed between the first investment and the final surrender of the place. From Durazzo the Norman duke advanced into the heart of Epirus or Albania, traversed the first mountains of Thessaly, surprised three hundred English in the city of Castoria, approached Thessalonica, and made Constantinople tremble.

A more pressing duty suspended the prosecution of his ambitious designs. By shipwreck, pestilence, and the sword his army was reduced to a third[75] of the original numbers; and instead of being recruited from Italy, he was informed, by plaintive epistles, of the mischiefs and dangers which had been produced by his absence; the revolt of the cities and barons of Apulia, the distress of the pope, and the approach or invasion of Henry, king of Germany. Highly presuming that his person was sufficient for the public safety, he repassed the sea in a single brigantine, and left the remains of the army under the command of his son and the Norman counts, exhorting Bohemond to respect the freedom of his peers, and the counts to obey the authority of their leader. The son of Guiscard trod in the footsteps of his father; and the two destroyers are compared, by the Greeks, to the caterpillar and the locust, the last of whom devours whatever has escaped the teeth of the former.

After winning two battles against the emperor, he descended into the plain of Thessaly, and besieged Larissa, the fabulous realm of Achilles, which contained the treasure and magazines of the Byzantine camp. The courage of Bohemond was always conspicuous, and often successful; but his camp was pillaged by a stratagem of the Greeks; the city was impregnable; and the venal or discontented counts deserted his standard, betrayed their trusts, and enlisted in the service of the emperor. Alexius returned to Constantinople with the advantage, rather than the honour, of victory. After evacuating the conquests which he could no longer defend, the son of Guiscard embarked for Italy, and was embraced by a father who esteemed his merit, and sympathised in his misfortune.

Of the Latin princes, the allies of Alexius and enemies of Robert, the most prompt and powerful was Henry IV, king of Germany and Italy, and future emperor of the West. Henry was the severe adversary of the Normans, the allies and vassals of Gregory VII, his implacable foe. The long quarrel of the throne and mitre had been recently kindled by the zeal and ambition of that haughty priest; the king and the pope had degraded each other, and each had seated a rival on the temporal or spiritual throne of his antagonist. After the defeat and death of his Swabian rebel, Henry descended into Italy, to assume the imperial crown, and to drive from the Vatican the tyrant of the church. But the Roman people adhered to the cause of Gregory; their resolution was fortified by supplies of men and money from Apulia; and the city was thrice ineffectually besieged by the king of Germany.

In the fourth year he corrupted, it is said, with Byzantine gold, the nobles of Rome, whose estates and castles had been ruined by the war. The gates, the bridges, and fifty hostages, were delivered into his hands; the anti-pope, Clement III, was consecrated in the Lateran; the grateful pontiff crowned his protector in the Vatican; and the Emperor Henry fixed his residence in the capitol, as the lawful successor of Augustus and Charlemagne. The ruins of the Septizonium were still defended by the nephew of Gregory; the pope himself was invested in the castle of St. Angelo; and his last hope was in the courage and fidelity of his Norman vassal. Their friendship had been interrupted by some reciprocal injuries and complaints; but, on this pressing occasion, Guiscard was urged by the obligation of his oath, by his interest, more potent than oaths, by the love of fame, and his enmity to the two emperors. Unfurling the holy banner, he resolved to fly to the relief of the prince of the apostles; the most numerous of his armies, six thousand horse, and thirty thousand foot, was instantly assembled; and his march from Salerno to Rome was animated by the public applause and the promise of the divine favour.

Henry, invincible in sixty-six battles, trembled at his approach; recollected some indispensable affairs that required his presence in Lombardy; exhorted the Romans to persevere in their allegiance; and hastily retreated three days before the entrance of the Normans. In less than three years, the son of Tancred de Hauteville enjoyed the glory of delivering the pope, and of compelling the two emperors, of the East and the West, to fly before his victorious arms.

But the triumph of Robert was clouded by the calamities of Rome. By the aid of the friends of Gregory, the walls had been perforated or scaled; but the imperial faction was still powerful and active; on the third day, the people rose in a furious tumult; and a hasty word of the conqueror, in his defence or revenge, was the signal of fire and pillage. The Saracens of Sicily, the subjects of Roger, and auxiliaries of his brother, embraced this fair occasion of rifling and profaning the Holy City of the Christians; many thousands of the citizens, in the sight, and by the allies, of their spiritual father, were exposed to violation, captivity, or death; and a spacious quarter of the city, from the Lateran to the Colosseum, was consumed by the flames.

The deliverer and scourge of Rome might have indulged himself in a season of repose; but in the same year of the flight of the German emperor, the indefatigable Robert resumed the design of his eastern conquests. The zeal or gratitude of Gregory had promised to his valour the kingdom of Greece and Asia; his troops were assembled in arms, flushed with success and eager for action. By the union of the Greeks and Venetians, the Adriatic was covered with a hostile fleet. The dominion of the sea was disputed in three engagements, in sight of the Island of Corfu; in the two former, the skill and number of the allies were superior; but in the third, the Normans obtained a final and complete victory. The winter season suspended his progress; with the return of spring he again aspired to the conquest of Constantinople; but, instead of traversing the hills of Epirus, he turned his arms against Greece and the islands, where the spoils would repay the labour, and where the land and sea forces might pursue their joint operations with vigour and effect.

But in the Isle of Cephalonia, his projects were fatally blasted by an epidemical disease; Robert himself, in the seventieth year of his age, expired in his tent (July 17th, 1085); and a suspicion of poison was imputed, by public rumour, to his wife or to the Greek emperor. This premature death might allow a boundless scope for the imagination of his future exploits; and the event sufficiently declares, that the Norman greatness was founded on his life. Without the appearance of an enemy, a victorious army dispersed or retreated in disorder and consternation; and Alexius, who had trembled for his empire, rejoiced in his deliverance. Roger, his second son and successor, immediately sunk to the humble station of a duke of Apulia; the esteem or partiality of his father left the valiant Bohemond to the inheritance of his sword. The national tranquillity was disturbed by his claims, till the First Crusade against the infidels of the East opened a more splendid field of glory and conquest.

ROGER, GREAT COUNT OF SICILY (1101-1138 A.D.)

Of human life, the most glorious or humble prospects are alike and soon bounded by the sepulchre. The male line of Robert Guiscard was extinguished, both in Apulia and at Antioch, in the second generation; but his[77] younger brother became the father of a line of kings; and the son of the Great Count was endowed with the name, the conquests, and the spirit of the first Roger. The heir of that Norman adventurer was born in Sicily; and, at the age of only four years, he succeeded to the sovereignty of the island.l

This prince, who thus succeeded to such extensive states was dissatisfied with the title of duke; to obtain a higher one, he lent his aid to the anti-pope Anacletus II, who crowned him king of the Two Sicilies. This new dignity caused him to regard the republican institutions of Amalfi and Naples with dislike, perhaps with dread. He took the former, abolished its privileges, and subjected it to a feudal governor. His next step was to humble his proud barons, of whom some had too much power always to remain peaceful. It was attended with equal success; one after another all were subdued; but the chief, Robert, prince of Capua and Aversa, the descendant of Drengot, was destined to give him some trouble.

Naples, though nominally subject to the Norman princes, still preserved its own government, laws, and institutions, and was prepared to defend them to the last extremity. It opened its gates to Robert, and thereby afforded another stimulus to the vengeance of Roger. The republicans obtained the aid of a fleet from Pisa; Amalfi was forced to equip another to oppose them; the Pisans plundered Amalfi, their chief prize being a copy of the famous Pandects, an accident which is said to have changed the jurisprudence of half Europe; they were defeated, and forced to re-embark by the king, who invested Naples more closely than before. The besieged applied for relief to the emperor and the true pope, Innocent II. Lothair marched in person to their aid, while a Pisan fleet advanced by sea. The siege was raised; Robert of Capua was restored to his principality, and the whole country as far as Bari threw off its allegiance to the Normans.

But discord soon appeared between the pope, the emperor, and the Pisans; their combined forces retired, and Roger had little difficulty in regaining possession of his territories. The fate of Leo IV, a century before, did not deter Innocent II from taking the field against the excommunicated Normans; the result was the same; Innocent was defeated and made prisoner, and was glad to procure his liberation by confirming the regal title of Roger. He did more; he granted to the king the investiture not only of Capua, but of Naples, which had hitherto maintained something like independence, and over which he had assuredly no control. The republic, abandoned by its allies, was constrained to submit; the ducal crown was conferred on the king; the kingdom of the two Sicilies was admitted into the great family of nations.

ROGER II (1138-1154 A.D.)

The reign of Roger II was one of vigour, of success, and of internal tranquillity. He rendered tributary the Mohammedan tyrants of Tripoli and Tunis, built fortresses, churches, and monasteries, and administered justice with unparalleled severity, in regard not only to the poor, but to his haughty barons. The feudal system which had long before been introduced into Naples, he perfected; and extended its observance to Sicily, which had hitherto followed the policy of the Greeks and Saracens. By this revolution, the free colonists were at once transformed into vassals; new laws were introduced, which were calculated to confirm the ascendency of the nobles and prelates; and new fiscal impositions followed, more oppressive, we are[78] told, than any which had been invented by preceding conquerors. But here, as everywhere else, the same system also brought its advantages.

In their native hills and forests, the Normans, like the Lombards, and, we may add, like all other people of Scandinavian or of Germanic descent, had been accustomed to meet twice a year, not merely to advise their chief, but to form a sort of diet or parliament, where their more weighty affairs were discussed and decided. At first these assemblies consisted of the conquerors only; but in time the more influential inhabitants were permitted to attend them. During a long period, however—probably unto the reign of Frederick II—they consisted of two estates only, the nobles and the ecclesiastics; the great body of the people had no rights, and consequently no representation. But as the towns purchased their independence of the feudal tribunals, and constituted themselves into municipal corporations; as the number of these corporations was multiplied by charters from the crown the new communities were permitted to send deputies to their general meetings.

The kings, who so often suffered from the powers of a haughty aristocracy, were here, as elsewhere, sufficiently disposed to encourage the formation and influence of this third chamber, or arm of the legislature. Besides, the burgesses were generally more able to supply the wants of the state; they were attached to the crown which had called them into existence; and among them justice was administered, at least in the last resort, by the royal judges. This triple power of the legislature was established contemporaneously both in the island and on the continent; but in the former, which had less intercourse with the world, it has subsisted in greater vigour down to our own times.

But if Roger thus established his sovereignty, he had the mortification to lose his two eldest sons, and to see the succession depend on a third, who was at once vicious and imbecile. Soon after his death, which happened in 1154, troubles began to distract the realm.i

Since the decease of Robert Guiscard, the Normans had relinquished above sixty years their hostile designs against the Empire of the East. The policy of Roger solicited a public and private union with the Greek princes, whose alliance would dignify his real character; he demanded in marriage a daughter of the Comnenian family, and the first steps of the treaty seemed to promise a favourable event. But the contemptuous treatment of his ambassadors exasperated the vanity of the new monarch; and the insolence of the Byzantine court was expiated, according to the laws of nations, by the sufferings of a guiltless people. With a fleet of seventy galleys, George, the admiral of Sicily, appeared before Corfu; and both the island and city were delivered into his hands by the disaffected inhabitants, who had yet to learn that a siege is still more calamitous than a tribute. In this invasion, of some moment in the annals of commerce, the Normans spread themselves by sea, and over the provinces of Greece; and the venerable age of Athens, Thebes, and Corinth was violated by rapine and cruelty.

The silk-weavers of both sexes, whom George transported to Sicily, composed the most valuable part of the spoil; and in comparing the skilful industry of the mechanic with the sloth and cowardice of the soldier, he was heard to exclaim, that the distaff and loom were the only weapons which the Greeks were capable of using. The progress of this naval armament was marked by two conspicuous events, the rescue of the king of France, and the insult of the Byzantine capital. In his return by sea from an unfortunate crusade, Louis VII was intercepted by the Greeks, who basely violated the[79] laws of honour and religion. The fortunate encounter of the Norman fleet delivered the royal captive; and after a free and honourable entertainment in the court of Sicily, Louis continued his journey to Rome and Paris.

In the absence of the emperor, Constantinople and the Hellespont were left without defence, and without the suspicion of danger. The clergy and people—for the soldiers had followed the standard of Manuel—were astonished and dismayed at the hostile appearance of a line of galleys, which boldly cast anchor in front of the imperial city. The forces of the Sicilian admiral were inadequate to the siege or assault of an immense and populous metropolis; but George enjoyed the glory of humbling the Greek arrogance, and of marking the path of conquest to the navies of the West. He landed some soldiers to rifle the fruits of the royal gardens, and pointed with silver, or more probably with fire, the arrows which he discharged against the palace of the cæsars. This playful outrage of the pirates of Sicily, who had surprised an unguarded moment, Manuel affected to despise, while his martial spirit, and the forces of the empire, were awakened to revenge. The Archipelago and Ionian Sea were covered with his squadrons and those of Venice; in his homeward voyage George lost nineteen of his galleys, which were separated and taken; after an obstinate defence, Corfu implored the clemency of her lawful sovereign; nor could a ship, or a soldier of the Norman prince be found, unless as a captive, within the limit of the Eastern Empire. The prosperity and the health of Roger were already in a declining state; while he listened in his palace of Palermo to the messengers of victory or defeat, the invincible Manuel, the foremost in every assault, was celebrated by the Greeks and Latins as the Alexander or Hercules of the age.

A prince of such a temper could not be satisfied with having repelled the insolence of a barbarian. It was the right and duty, it might be the interest and glory, of Manuel to restore the ancient majesty of the empire, to recover the provinces of Italy and Sicily, and to chastise this pretended king, the grandson of a Norman vassal. The natives of Calabria were still attached to the Greek language and worship, which had been inexorably proscribed by the Latin clergy; after the loss of her dukes, Apulia was chained as a servile appendage to the crown of Sicily; the founder of the monarchy had ruled by the sword; and his death had abated the fear without healing the discontent of his subjects; the feudal government was always pregnant with the seeds of rebellion, and a nephew of Roger himself invited the enemies of his family and nation.

To the brave and noble Palæologus, his lieutenant, the Greek monarch entrusted a fleet and army; the siege of Bari was his first exploit, and in every operation, gold as well as steel was the instrument of victory. Salerno, and some places along the western coast, maintained their fidelity to the[80] Norman king; but he lost in two campaigns the greater part of his continental possessions; and the modest emperor, disdaining all flattery and falsehood, was content with the reduction of three hundred cities or villages of Apulia and Calabria, whose names and titles were inscribed on all the walls of the palace.

But these Italian conquests, this universal reign, soon escaped from the hand of the Greek emperor. His first demands were eluded by the prudence of Alexander III, who paused on this deep and momentous revolution; nor could the pope be seduced by a personal dispute to renounce the perpetual inheritance of the Latin name. After his reunion with Frederick, he spoke a more peremptory language, confirmed the acts of his predecessors, excommunicated the adherents of Manuel, and pronounced the final separation of the churches, or at least the empires, of Constantinople and Rome. The free cities of Lombardy no longer remembered their foreign benefactor, and he soon incurred the enmity of Venice. One hundred galleys were launched and armed in as many days; they swept the coasts of Dalmatia and Greece; but after some mutual wounds, the war was terminated by an agreement inglorious to the empire, insufficient for the republic. The lieutenant of Manuel informed his sovereign that his forces were inadequate to resist the impending attack of the king of Sicily. His prophecy was soon verified; the death of Palæologus devolved the command on several chiefs, alike eminent in rank, alike defective in military talents; the Greeks were oppressed by land and sea; and a captive remnant abjured all future hostility against the person or dominions of their conqueror.

Yet the king of Sicily esteemed the courage and constancy of Manuel, who had landed a second army on the Italian shore; he respectfully addressed the new Justinian; solicited a peace or truce of thirty years; accepted as a gift the regal title; and acknowledged himself the military vassal of the Roman Empire. The Byzantine cæsars acquiesced in this shadow of dominion, without expecting, perhaps without desiring, the service of a Norman army; and the truce of thirty years was not disturbed by any hostilities between Sicily and Constantinople. About the end of that period, the throne of Manuel was usurped by an inhuman tyrant, who had deserved the abhorrence of his country and mankind; the sword of William the Second, the grandson of Roger, was drawn by a fugitive of the Comnenian race; and the subjects of Andronicus might salute the strangers as friends, since they detested their sovereign as the worst of enemies. The Latin historians expatiate on the rapid progress of the four counts who invaded Romania with a fleet and army, and reduced many castles and cities to the obedience of the king of Sicily. The Greeks accuse and magnify the wanton and sacrilegious cruelties that were perpetrated in the sack of Thessalonica, the second city of the empire. The former deplore the fate of those invincible but unsuspecting warriors, who were destroyed by the arts of a vanquished foe. The latter applaud in songs of triumph the repeated victories of their countrymen on the sea of Marmora or Propontis, on the banks of the Strymon, and under the walls of Durazzo. A revolution which punished the crimes of Andronicus, had united against the Franks the zeal and courage of the successful insurgents; ten thousand were slain in battle, and Isaac Angelus, the new emperor, might indulge his vanity or vengeance in the treatment of four thousand captives. Such was the event of the last contest between the Greeks and Normans: before the expiration of twenty years, the rival nations were lost or degraded in foreign servitude; and the successors of Constantine did not long survive to insult the fall of the Sicilian monarchy.

WILLIAM THE BAD (IL MALO) (1154-1166 A.D.)

The sceptre of Roger successively devolved to his son and grandson; they might be confounded under the name of William; they are strongly discriminated by the epithets of the “bad” and the “good”; but these epithets, which appear to describe the perfection of vice and virtue, cannot strictly be applied to either of the Norman princes. When he was roused to arms by danger and shame, the first William did not degenerate from the valour of his race; but his temper was slothful; his manners were dissolute; his passions headstrong and mischievous; and the monarch is responsible not only for his personal vices but for those of Majo, the great admiral, who abused the confidence, and conspired against the life of his benefactor.

From the Arabian conquest, Sicily had imbibed a deep tincture of oriental manners; the despotism, the pomp, and even the harem of a sultan; and a Christian people was oppressed and insulted by the ascendant of the eunuchs, who openly professed, or secretly cherished, the religion of Mohammed. An eloquent historian of the times, Falcandus,m has delineated the misfortunes of his country; the ambition and fall of the ungrateful Majo; the revolt and punishment of his assassins; the imprisonment and deliverance of the king himself; the private feuds that arose from the public confusion; and the various forms of calamity and discord which afflicted Palermo, the island and the continent, during the reign of William the First, and the minority of his son.

WILLIAM THE GOOD (1166-1189 A.D.)

The youth, innocence, and beauty of William II, endeared him to the nation; the factions were reconciled; the laws were revived; and from the manhood to the premature death of that amiable prince, Sicily enjoyed a short season of peace, justice, and happiness, whose value was enhanced by the remembrance of the past and the dread of futurity. The legitimate male posterity of Tancred de Hauteville was extinct in the person of the second William; but his aunt, the daughter of Roger, had married the most powerful prince of the age; and Henry VI, the son of Frederick Barbarossa, descended from the Alps to claim the imperial crown and the inheritance of his wife. Against the unanimous wish of a free people, this inheritance could only be acquired by arms.

The historian Falcandus writes at the moment and on the spot, with the feelings of a patriot, and the prophetic eye of a statesman. “Constanza, the daughter of Sicily, nursed from her cradle in the pleasures and plenty, and educated in the arts and manners of this fortunate isle, departed long since to enrich the barbarians with our treasures, and now returns with her savage allies to contaminate the beauties of her venerable parent. Already I behold the swarms of angry barbarians; our opulent cities, the places flourishing in a long peace, are shaken with fear, desolated by slaughter, consumed by rapine, and polluted by intemperance and lust. I see the massacre or captivity of our citizens, the rapes of our virgins and matrons. In this extremity (he interrogates a friend) how must the Sicilians act? By the unanimous election of a king of valour and experience, Sicily and Calabria might yet be preserved; for in the levity of the Apulians, ever eager for new revolutions, I can repose neither confidence nor hope. Should Calabria be lost, the lofty towers, the numerous youth, and the naval strength of Messina, might guard the passage against a foreign invader. If the[82] savage Germans coalesce with the pirates of Messina; if they destroy with fire the fruitful region, so often wasted by the fires of Mount Ætna, what resource will be left for the interior parts of the island, these noble cities which should never be violated by the hostile footsteps of a barbarian?

“Catana has again been overwhelmed by an earthquake; the ancient virtue of Syracuse expires in poverty and solitude; but Palermo is still crowned with a diadem, and her triple walls enclose the active multitudes of Christians and Saracens. If the two nations, under one king, can unite for their common safety, they may rush on the barbarians with invincible arms. But if the Saracens, fatigued by a repetition of injuries, should now retire and rebel, if they should occupy the castles of the mountains and sea coast, the unfortunate Christians, exposed to a double attack, and placed as it were between the hammer and the anvil, must resign themselves to hopeless and inevitable servitude.” We must not forget, that a priest here prefers his country to his religion; and that the Moslems, whose alliance he seeks, were still numerous and powerful in the state of Sicily.m

The hopes or at least the wishes of Falcandus were at first gratified by the free and unanimous election of Tancred, the grandson of the first king, whose birth was illegitimate, but whose civil and military virtues shone without a blemish. During four years, the term of his life and reign, he stood in arms on the farthest verge of the Apulian frontier, against the powers of Germany; and the restitution of a royal captive, of Constanza herself, without injury or ransom, may appear to surpass the most liberal measure of policy or reason. After his decease, the kingdom of his widow and infant son fell without a struggle; and Henry pursued his victorious march from Capua to Palermo. The political balance of Italy was destroyed by his success; and if the pope and the free cities had consulted their obvious and real interest, they would have combined the powers of earth and heaven to prevent the dangerous union of the German Empire with the kingdom of Sicily.

But the subtle policy, for which the Vatican has so often been praised or arraigned, was on this occasion blind and inactive; and if it were true that Celestine III had kicked away the imperial crown from the head of the prostrate Henry, such an act of impotent pride could serve only to cancel an obligation and provoke an enemy. The Genoese, who enjoyed a beneficial trade and establishment in Sicily, listened to the promise of his boundless gratitude and speedy departure; their fleet commanded the Straits of Messina, and opened the harbour of Palermo; and the first act of his government was to abolish the privileges, and to seize the property, of these imprudent allies. The last hope of Falcandus was defeated by the discord of the Christians and Mohammedans; they fought in the capital; several thousands of the latter were slain; but their surviving brethren fortified the mountains, and disturbed above thirty years the peace of the island.

By the policy of Frederick II, sixty thousand Saracens were transplanted to Nocera in Apulia. In their wars against the Roman church, the emperor and his son Manfred were strengthened and disgraced by the service of the enemies of Christ; and this national colony maintained their religion and manners in the heart of Italy, till they were extirpated at the end of the thirteenth century by the zeal and revenge of the house of Anjou.

All the calamities which the prophetic orator had deplored, were surpassed by the cruelty and avarice of the German conqueror. He violated the royal sepulchres, and explored the secret treasures of the palace, Palermo, and the whole kingdom; the pearls and jewels, however precious, might be easily removed; but one hundred and sixty horses were laden with the gold and silver of Sicily. The young king, his mother and sisters, and the nobles of both sexes, were separately confined in the fortresses of the Alps; and on the slightest rumour of rebellion the captives were deprived of life, of their eyes, or of the hope of posterity. Constanza herself was touched with sympathy for the miseries of her country; and the heiress of the Norman line might struggle to check her despotic husband, and to save the patrimony of her newborn son, of an emperor so famous in the next age under the name of Frederick II.

Ten years after this revolution, the French monarchs annexed to their crown the duchy of Normandy; the sceptre of her ancient dukes had been transmitted, by a granddaughter of William the Conqueror, to the house of Plantagenet; and the adventurous Normans, who had raised so many trophies in France, England, and Ireland, in Apulia, Sicily, and the East, were lost either in victory or servitude, among the vanquished nations.l

In Sicily the circumstances of the conquest led the Norman settlers to remain far more distinct from the older races of the land than they did in England, and in the end not to lose themselves in those older races of the land but in the settlers of other races who accompanied them and followed them. So far as there ever was a Sicilian nation at all it might be said to be called into being by the emperor-king Frederick II. In his day a Latin element finally triumphed; but it was not a Norman French-speaking element of any kind. The speech of the Lombards at last got the better of the Greek, Arabic, and French; how far its ascendency can have been built on any survival of an earlier Latin speech which had lived alongside of Greek and Arabic, this is not the place to inquire.

NORMAN INFLUENCE

Of all the points to be insisted on, that which it is most necessary to bear in mind is the Norman power of adaptation to circumstances, the gift which in the end destroyed the race as a separate race. English history is utterly misconceived if it is thought that an acknowledged distinction between Normans and English went on, perhaps into the fourteenth century, perhaps into the seventeenth. Long before the earlier of those dates the Norman in England had done his work; he had unwittingly done much to preserve and strengthen the national life of a really kindred people, and, that work done, he had lost himself in the greater mass of that kindred people. In Sicily his work, far more brilliant, far more beneficent at the time, could not be so lasting. The Norman princes made Sicily a kingdom; they ruled it for a season better than any other kingdom was ruled; but they could not make it a Norman kingdom, nor could they themselves become national Sicilian[84] kings. The kingdom that they founded has now vanished from among the kingdoms of the earth, because it was only a kingdom and not a nation. In every other way the Norman has vanished from Sicily as though he had never been. His very works of building are hardly witnesses to his presence, because, without external evidence, we should never have taken them to be his. In Sicily, in short, he gave a few generations of unusual peace and prosperity to several nations living side by side, and then he, so to speak, went his way from a land in which he had a work to do, but in which he never was really at home. In England he made himself, though by rougher means, more truly at home among unacknowledged kinsmen. When in outward show he seemed to work the unmaking of a nation, he was in truth giving no small help towards its second making.c

FOOTNOTES

The death of Henry VI was followed by a general war throughout the empire, which gave fresh activity to the passions of the Italian nobles, and greater animosity to the opposing parties. The two factions in Germany had simultaneously raised to the empire the two chiefs of the houses of Guelf and Ghibelline. Philip I, duke of Swabia, and brother of Henry VI, had been named king of the Romans by the Ghibellines; and Otto IV, son of Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony, by the Guelfs. Their contest was prolonged to the 22nd of June, 1208, when Philip was assassinated by a private enemy. The Germans, wearied with eleven years of civil war, agreed to unite under the sceptre of his rival, Otto IV, whom they crowned anew. The following year he passed into Italy, to receive from the pope the golden crown of the empire.

But though Otto was the legitimate heir of the Guelfs of Bavaria, so long chiefs of the opposition to the imperial prerogatives, yet now wearing himself the crown, he was desirous of possessing it with these disputed rights; every one was denied him, and all his actions controlled by the pope. There was soon a declared enmity between the emperor and the pontiff who, rather than consent to any agreement, or to abate any of his pretensions, raised against the Guelf emperor the heir of the Ghibelline house, the young Frederick II, grandson of Frederick I, hardly eighteen years of age, and till then reigning under the pope’s tutelage over the Two Sicilies only. Frederick, excited and seconded by the pope, boldly passed through Lombardy in 1212, and arrived at Aachen, where the German Ghibellines awaited, and crowned him king of the Romans and Germans. Otto IV in the meantime returned to Germany, and was acknowledged by Saxony.

The civil war, carried on between the two chiefs of the empire, lasted till the 19th of May, 1218, when Otto died, without any attempt by either party to despoil his rival of his hereditary possessions. It was this civil war that caused the names of Guelf and Ghibelline to be exclusively substituted for those of party of the church and party of the empire. In fact, each noble family, and each city, seemed to consult only their hereditary affection, and not their political principles, in ranging themselves under either standard. The Guelfs placed themselves in opposition to the pope, to repel his Ghibelline candidate; and Milan, Piacenza, and Brescia braved even excommunication to resist him; while, on the contrary the Ghibellines of Pavia, Cremona, and of the marches armed themselves with zeal against an emperor of the Guelf blood.

During this period, while the minority of Frederick II left so much time to the cities of Italy to consolidate their independence, and to form real republics, the person most influential and most prominent in history was the pope, Innocent III, who reigned from 1197 to 1216. He caused his power to be felt in the remotest parts of Christendom, but he suffered to be constituted at Rome, under his own eye, a republic, the liberty of which he respected, and over which he assumed no authority. The thirteen districts of Rome each named annually four representatives or caporioni; their meeting formed the senate of the republic, who, with the concurrence of the people, exercised the sovereignty, with the exception of the judicial power. This power belonged as in other republics to a foreign military chief, chosen for one year, and assisted by civil judges, dependent on him, but bearing the name of senator, instead of podesta. We have still extant the form of oath taken by the first of these senators, named in 1207. By it he engages to guarantee security and liberty to the pope as well as to his brothers the cardinals, but promises no submission to him for himself.

In the beginning of the pontificate of Innocent III, two German generals, to whom Henry VI had given the titles of duke of Spoleto and marquis of Ancona, held in dependence and subjection the provinces nearest Rome. Innocent, to revive the spirit of liberty, sent thither two legates; and by their interference, the cities of these provinces, built for the most part in the mountains, and without any means of becoming either wealthy or populous, threw off the German yoke, and made alliance with those cities which from the preceding period had entered into the league of Lombardy; thus two Guelf leagues were formed, under the protection of the pope; one in the marches, comprehending the cities of Ancona, Fermo, Osimo, Camerino, Fano, Jesi, Sinigaglia, and Pesaro; the other in the duchy, comprehending those of Spoleto, Rieti, Assisi, Foligno, Nocera, Perugia, Agubbio, Todi, and Città di Castello. These leagues, however, in accustoming the cities of these two provinces to regard the pope as their protector, led them afterwards to submit without resistance to the sovereignty of the church.

Other legates had been about the same time sent into Tuscany by the pope; they convoked at St. Ginasio, a borough situated at the foot of the mountain of San Miniato, the diet of the towns of that country. These provincial diets were in the habit of assembling frequently, and had till then been presided over by an officer belonging to the emperor, in memory of whom the castle in which he resided is still called San Miniato al Tedesco. These diets settled the differences which arose between cities, and had succeeded in saving Tuscany from the civil wars between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. Pisa, which had been loaded with favours by the sovereigns of the house of Hohenstaufen, and which had obtained from them the dominion[87] of sixty-four castles or fortified towns on the shores of Tuscany, and over the isles of Corsica, Elba, Capraia, and Pianosa, proclaimed its determination of remaining faithful to the Ghibelline party, and its consuls withdrew from the diet convoked at St. Ginasio; but those of the cities of Florence, of Siena, of Arezzo, of Pistoia, and of Lucca accepted the protection of the pope, offered by his two legates, and promised to coalesce in defence of their common liberty.b

FACTIONS IN FLORENCE

We have already seen that the spirit of political as well as religious party began to rise as early as 1177, and excepting some short intervals of uneasy repose, remained in a state of violence until 1182. From this epoch there are no accounts of actual war within the city of Florence until 1215; but nearly five years of hard fighting between two great factions of undiminished force was unlikely to be followed by a dead calm except from exhaustion; or by any oblivion of injury in an age and country where revenge was a duty, not a crime.

The great power and independence of the newly created podesta, together with external hostilities, probably assisted in maintaining peace in a city that prided itself on being founded under the protection and ascendant of Mars, and therefore doomed by fate to everlasting troubles. Hence Roccuzzo de’ Mozzi is made by Dante to say:

Disputes which had so long occupied the attention of Italy were not without participation in Florence, where the quarrels of church and empire did not fail to create two adverse opinions, but as yet confined to words; the prevailing politics, being Guelfic and papal, while the opposition led by Uberti was entirely imperial, were accidental circumstances; but combined with and as it were grafted on local politics, drew a distinct line between contending factions and boded mischief.

In the year 1215, according to an ancient manuscript published from the Buondelmonti library, Messer Mazzingo Tegrini de’ Mazzinghi invited many Florentines of high rank to dine at his villa near Campi about six miles from the capital; while at table the family jester snatched a trencher of meat from Messer Uberto degli Infangati who, nettled at this impertinence, expressed his[88] displeasure in terms so offensive that Messer Oddo Arrighi de’ Fifanti as sharply and unceremoniously rebuked him; upon this Uberto gave him the lie and Oddo in return dashed a trencher of meat in his face.

Everything was immediately in confusion; weapons were soon out, and while the guests started up in disorder young Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, the friend and companion of Uberto, severely wounded Oddo Arrighi.

The party then separated and Oddo called a meeting of his friends to consider the offence; amongst them were the counts Gangalandi, the Uberti, Amidei, and Lamberti, who unanimously decided that the quarrel should be quietly settled by a marriage between Buondelmonte and Oddo’s niece, the daughter of Messer Lambertuccio di Capo di Ponte, of the Amidei family. This proposition appears to have been unhesitatingly accepted by the offender’s family as a day was immediately nominated for the ceremony of plighting his troth to the destined bride.

During the interim Madonna Aldruda or Gualdrada, wife of Forese de’ Donati, sent privately for young Buondelmonte and thus addressed him: “Unworthy knight! What! Hast thou accepted a wife through fear of the Fifanti and Uberti? Leave her that thou hast taken, choose this damsel in her place, and be henceforth a brave and honoured gentleman.” In so saying she threw open the chamber door and exposed her daughter to his view; the unexpected apparition of so much beauty, as it were soliciting his love, had its usual consequence; Buondelmonte’s better reason was overcome, yet he had resolution to answer, “Alas! it is now too late!” “No,” replied Aldruda; “thou canst even yet have her; dare but to take the step and let the consequences rest on my head.” “I do dare,” returned the fascinated youth, and stepping forward again plighted a faith no longer his to give.

Early on the 10th of February, the very day appointed for his original nuptials, Buondelmonte passed by the Porta Santa Maria amidst all the kinsfolk of his first betrothed, who had assembled near the dwellings of the Amidei to assist at the expected marriage, yet not without certain misgivings of his faithlessness. With a haughty demeanour he rode forward through them all, bearing the marriage ring to the lady of his choice and leaving her of the Amidei with the shame of an aggravated insult by choosing the same moment for a violation of one contract and the consummation of a second; for in those days, and for centuries after, the old Roman custom of presenting a ring long before the marriage ceremony took place was still in use.

Such insults were then impatiently borne; Oddo Arrighi assembled his kindred in the no longer existing church of Santa Maria sopra Porta to settle the mode of resenting this affront, and the moody aspect of each individual marked the character of the meeting and all the vindictive feeling of an injured family; there were, however, some of a more temperate spirit that suggested personal chastisement or at most the gashing of Buondelmonte’s face as the most reasonable and effectual retribution. The assembly paused, but Mosca de’ Lamberti starting suddenly forward exclaimed, “Beat or wound him as ye list, but first prepare your own graves, for wounds bring equal consequences with death.” “No. Mete him out his deserts and let him pay the penalty; but no delay. Up and be doing.”

This turned the scale and Buondelmonte was doomed, but according to the manners of that age, not in the field, which would have been hazardous, but by the sure though inglorious means of noonday murder; wherefore, at the very place where the insult was offered, beneath the battlements of the Amidei, nay under the casement of the deserted maiden, and in his way to a[89] happy expecting bride, vengeance was prepared by these fierce barons for the perjurer.

On Easter morning, 1215, the murderers concealed themselves within the courts and towers of the Amidei, which the young and heedless bridegroom was sure to pass, and he was soon after seen at a distance carelessly riding alone across the Ponte Vecchio on a milk-white palfrey, attired in a vest of fine woollen cloth, a white mantle thrown across his shoulders and the wedding garland on his head. The bridge was passed in thoughtless gaiety, but scarcely had he reached the time-worn image of the Roman Mars, the last relic of heathen worship then extant, when the mace of Schiatto degli Uberti felled him to the ground, and at the base of this grim idol the daggers of Oddo and his furious kinsmen finished the savage deed; they met him gay and adorned for the altar, and left him with the bridal wreath still dangling from his brow a bloody and ill-omened sacrifice. The tidings of this murder spread rapidly, and disordered the whole community of Florence; the people became more and more excited, because both law and custom had awarded due penalties for faithless men, and death was an unheard-of punishment.

Buondelmonte’s corpse was placed on a bier, with its head resting in the lap of his affianced bride, the young and beautiful Donati, who hung like a lily over the pallid features of her husband; and thus united were they borne through the streets of Florence. It was the gloomy dawning of a tempestuous day, for in that bloody moment was unchained the demon of Florentine discord; the name of Guelf and Ghibelline were then for the first time assumed by noble and commoner as the cry of faction; and long after the original cause of enmity had ceased, they continued to steep all Italy in blood.

It has been shown that there were already two parties existing in the commonwealth; but it was not until after this outrage that the whole community divided under the above appellations, one part siding with the Buondelmonti, who were for the most part Guelfic chiefs and adherents of the church; the other with the Uberti, leaders of the Ghibellines and partisans of the empire. Of seventy-two powerful families mentioned by Malespini, thirty-nine joined the Buondelmonti banner and thirty-three fought under the colours of their enemies; but many more houses of distinction took part in the civil war; many afterwards changed sides through quarrels with their chiefs; many of the Buondelmonti who before were Ghibellines now became Guelfs; the former were stigmatised with the epithet of “Paterini,” and the latter with that of “Traditori.”

Nevertheless an attempt at reconciliation was made in 1239, by marrying Neri Piccolino degli Uberti to the daughter of Rinieri Zingani de’ Buondelmonti, a lady celebrated for her wisdom, beauty, and talents. Trusting to this tie the Uberti and some friends repaired with confidence to visit Bertaldi de’ Buondelmonti of Campi, but were treacherously attacked and beaten back with some bloodshed; this renewed the war with greater violence and Neri dismissed his wife to her own relatives, declaring that he disdained to become the propagator of a traitorous brood from a deceitful stock. The unfortunate lady was then compelled by her father to marry Count Pannochino de’ Pannochieschi, on whose mercy she threw herself, imploring permission to retire into a convent; for though abandoned by her husband she protested that she was still his wife and therefore never could belong to another. Her motives were respected, her prayer generously granted, and she immediately took the veil in the convent of Montecelli.

Immediately after Buondelmonte’s death a low and angry murmur rolled sullenly through the whole Florentine population, and instinctive preparations were everywhere in progress for some dimly apprehended danger; as yet all was calm, but dark clouds were gathering around and the echo of distant thunder marked the coming storm. Each house was armed and fortified, towers were again mounted with warlike engines, serragli (barricades) were erected, the shops all closed, the people in painful doubt, and ancient citizens who remembered the troubles of other times looked on and trembled. Nor was their apprehension vain; the curse of heaven seemed to rest on this devoted city, and with but little cessation during three and thirty years did Florence reek with the blood of her children.c

The death of Innocent III [1216] and, two years afterwards, of Otto IV broke the unnatural alliance between a pope and the heir of a Ghibelline family. The Milanese, excommunicated by Innocent for having fought against Frederick II, did not the less persist in making war on his partisans; well convinced that the new pope, Honorius III, would soon thank them for it. They refused Frederick the iron crown of Lombardy, preserved at Monza, and contracted an alliance with the count Thomas of Savoy, and with the cities of Crema, Piacenza, Lodi, Vercelli, Novara, Tortona, Como, and Alessandria, to drive the Ghibellines from Lombardy. The Ghibellines defeated them on the 6th of June, 1218, in a great battle fought against the militias of Cremona, Parma, Reggio, and Modena, before Ghibello. This reverse of fortune calmed for some time their military ardour. The citizens of every town accused the nobles of having led them into war from family enmities and interests foreign to the city; at Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, and Modena, there were battles between the nobles and the people. Laws were proposed to divide the public magistracy in due proportions between them; finally the Milanese, in the year 1221, expelled all the nobles from their city.

FREDERICK II CROWNED EMPEROR

The young Frederick re-entered Italy; and, after some differences with Honorius III, received from him, on the 22nd of November, 1220, the crown of the empire. He afterwards occupied himself in establishing order in his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where, during his minority, the popes had encouraged a universal insubordination. Born in the march of Ancona, at Jesi, in December, 1194, he was Italian as well by language as by affection and character. The Italian language, spoken at his court, first rose above the patois in common use throughout Italy, regarded only as a corruption of Latin; he expressed himself with elegance in this language, which, from his time, was designated by the name of lingua cortigiana; he encouraged the first poets, who employed it at his court, and he himself made verses; he loved literature and encouraged learning; he founded schools and universities; he promoted distinguished men; he spoke, with equal facility, Latin, Italian, German, French, Greek, and Arabic; he had the intellectual suppleness and finesse peculiar to the men of the south, the art of pleasing, a taste for philosophy, and great independence of opinion, with a leaning to infidelity; hence he is accused of having written a book against the three revelations of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, entitled De Tribus Impostoribus, which no one has ever seen, and which perhaps never existed. His want of faith in the sacred character of the Roman church, and the sanctity of popes, is less doubtful; he was suspicious of them, and he employed all his address[91] to defend himself against their enterprises. Honorius III, desirous of engaging him to recover the Holy Land from the Saracens, made him, in 1225, marry Yolande de Lusignan, heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem; after which, Honorius and his successor Gregory IX pressed him to pass into Palestine. A malady stopped him, in 1227, just as he was about to depart; the pope, to punish him for this delay, excommunicated him. He still pursued him with his anathema when he went to the Holy Land the year following, and haughtily testified his indignation, because Frederick, in the year 1229, recovered Jerusalem from the hands of the sultan by treaty, rather than exterminate the infidels with the sword.

RENEWAL OF THE LOMBARD LEAGUE

Meanwhile the Guelf party again raised their standard in Lombardy; the republics of Milan, Bologna, Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Faenza, Mantua, Vercelli, Lodi, Bergamo, Turin, Alexandria, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso assembled their consuls in council at San Zenone in the Mantuan territory, on the 2nd of March, 1226. They renewed the ancient league of Lombardy for twenty-five years; and engaged to defend in concert, their own liberty and the independence of the court of Rome. Three years afterwards, they sent succour to Gregory IX, when he was attacked by Frederick II on his return from the Holy Land; and they were included in the treaty of peace between the pope and the emperor in 1230.

The pope, however, though defended by the arms of the Lombards, made them pay dearly for the favour which he showed in naming them to the emperor as his allies. He consented to protect their civil liberty only so far as they sacrificed to him their liberty of conscience. The same spirit of reformation which animated the Albigenses had spread throughout Europe; many Christians, disgusted with the corruption and vices of the clergy, or whose minds revolted against the violence on their reason exercised by the church, devoted themselves to a contemplative life, renounced all ambition and the pleasures of the world, and sought a new road to salvation in the alliance of faith with reason. They called themselves cathari, or the purified; paterini, or the resigned. The free towns had, till then, refused permission to the tribunals of the Inquisition, instituted by Innocent III, to proceed against them within their walls; but Gregory IX declared the impossibility of acknowledging as allies of the holy see republicans so indulgent to the enemies of the faith; at the same time, he sent among them the most eloquent of the Dominicans, to rouse their fanaticism. Leo da Perego, whom he afterwards made archbishop of Milan, had an only too fatal success in that city, where he caused a great number of paterini to be burned. St. Peter Martyr, and the monk Roland of Cremona, obtained an equal triumph in the other cities of Lombardy.

The monk John of Vicenza had the cities of the march assigned to him as a province, where the heretics were in still greater numbers than in Lombardy, and included in their ranks some of the most powerful nobles in the country; among others, Ezzelino II, of Romano. The monk John announced himself the minister of peace, not of persecution. After having preached successively in every town, he assembled, on the plain of Paquara, the 28th of August, 1233, almost the whole population of the towns of the march; he exhorted them to peace in a manner so irresistible, that the greatest enemies, setting aside their animosities, pardoned and embraced each other; and all,[92] with tears of joy, celebrated the warm charity of this man of God. This man of God, however, celebrated the festival of this reconciliation by judging and condemning to the flames sixty cathari in the single town of Verona, whose sufferings he witnessed in the public square; and afterwards obtained full power from the towns of Vicenza and Padua to act there in the like manner.

FREDERICK II AND THE LOMBARD LEAGUE

It was only a short period after the Peace of Paquara that Frederick II, believing he had sufficiently re-established his power in southern Italy, began to turn his attention towards Lombardy; he had no intention of disputing the rights guaranteed by his grandfather at the Peace of Constance; but it was his will that the cities should remain, what they ought to be by the treaty, members of the empire, and not enemies of the emperor. He had raised an army, over which he feared neither the influence of the monks nor the pope. He had transported from the mountains of Sicily, into the city of Luceria, in the capitanate, and into that of Nocera, in the principato, two strong colonies of Saracens, which could supply him with thirty thousand Mussulman soldiers, strangers, by their language and religion, to all the intrigues of the court of Rome. There was in the Veronese march a man endowed with great military talents, ambitious, intrepid, and entirely devoted to the emperor—Ezzelino III, of Romano, already powerful by the great fiefs he held in the mountains, and the number of his soldiers, whom Frederick made still more so, by placing him at the head of the Ghibelline party in all the cities. Ezzelino, born on the 4th of April, 1194, was precisely of the same age as the emperor. The pope had summoned him to arrest his father, and deliver him to the tribunal of the Inquisition as a paterino; but though Ezzelino knew neither virtue, pity, nor remorse, he was not sufficiently depraved for such a crime.

As Frederick was on the point of attacking the Guelfs of Lombardy on the south with the Saracens, while Ezzelino advanced on the east, he learned that his son Henry, whom he had in the year 1220 crowned king of Germany, in spite of his extreme youth, seduced by the Guelfs and the agents of the pope, had revolted against him. The Milanese, in 1234, sent deputies to offer him the iron crown, which they had refused to his father. The latter hastened into Germany, and ordered his son to meet him at Worms, where he threw himself at the feet of his father, and entreated forgiveness. Frederick deprived him of the crown, and sent him to Apulia, where he died a few years afterwards. The emperor was obliged to employ two years in[93] restoring order in Germany; he after that returned into Italy by the valley of Trento, and arrived, on the 16th of August, 1236, at Verona with three thousand German cavalry. A senate of eighty members, nobles and Ghibellines, then governed that republic; Frederick, by his address in managing men, engaged them to name Ezzelino captain of the people; this committed to him at the same time the command of the militia and the judicial power; and, in the state of excitement in which parties were much more occupied with the triumph of their faction than with the security of their liberty, gave him almost sovereign power. Frederick, obliged to return to Germany, left under the command of Ezzelino a body of German soldiers, and another of Saracens, with which this able captain made himself, the same year, master of Vicenza, which he barbarously pillaged, and the following year of Padua. This last was the most powerful city of the province, that in which the form of government was the most democratic, and in which the Guelfs had always exercised the most influence. Ezzelino judged it necessary to secure obedience by taking hostages from the richest and most powerful families; he employed his spies to discover the malcontents, whom he punished with torture, and redoubled his cruelty in proportion to the hatred which he excited.

THE BATTLE OF CORTENUOVA

The same year, 1237, Frederick approached Mantua, and thus giving courage to the Ghibelline party, made them triumph over the Guelfs, who had, till then, the ascendant in that city; he was joined there by ten thousand Saracens, whom he summoned from Apulia, and afterwards advanced into the Cremonese territory to attack the confederate army of the Guelfs, commanded by the consuls of Milan, who knew no other art of war but the bravery evinced in battle. Frederick was a more able captain; by manœuvring between Brescia and Cremona, he drew the Milanese beyond the Oglio, and finally succeeded, as they believed the campaign finished, in placing himself between them and their country at Cortenuova near Crema. The Guelfs, although thus cut off from retreat, boldly accepted battle on the 27th of November, 1237, and long disputed the victory. Their defeat was only the more bloody; it cost them ten thousand men killed or taken prisoners, with the loss of the carroccio. The fugitives followed during the night the course of the Oglio to enter the Bergamasque Mountains; they would all, however, have fallen into the hands of the Ghibellines, if Pagan della Torre, the lord of Valsassina, and a Guelf noble, had not hastened to their assistance, opened the defiles covered by his fortresses, and brought them thus safely to Milan. The citizens of this town never forgot so important a service; and they contracted with the house of della Torre an alliance which subsequently proved dangerous to their freedom.

The defeat of the Guelfs at Cortenuova alarmed the towns of Lombardy, the greater number of which detached themselves from Milan. Frederick, entering Piedmont the following year, gave preponderance to the Ghibelline party in the cities of Turin, Asti, Novara, Alexandria, and several others. The constitution was not changed when the power in council passed from one party to another; but the emperor generally reckoned his partisans among the nobility, while the people were devoted to the church; accordingly, the triumph of the aristocracy generally accompanied that of the Ghibelline party. Four cities only, Milan, Brescia, Piacenza, and Bologna, remained at the end of the year opposed to the imperial power. Frederick[94] began his attack on them by laying siege to Brescia; but the Brescians dared to face the storm; they supported, during sixty-eight days, the repeated attacks of the emperor, rendered all his efforts fruitless, and forced him at last to raise the siege with an army weakened and discouraged.

POPE AGAINST EMPEROR

In the meantime, Gregory IX redoubled his efforts to save the Guelf party from ruin. He saw, with alarm, an emperor, master of the Two Sicilies and of Germany, on the point of vanquishing all resistance in upper Italy. He anticipated that this monarch, whose Mussulman soldiers were constantly passing through the states of Rome, would escape the influence of the church, and soon evince no respect whatever for a religion which he was accused of not believing. Gregory had recourse to the two maritime republics of Venice and Genoa, which, in general occupied with their conquests and commerce in the East, seldom took any part in the politics of Italy. He represented to them that they would be soon deprived of the freedom of the seas, if they did not make some effort to save the champions of liberty and of the church in Lombardy. He at length obtained their agreement to contract an alliance with the four only surviving cities of the league of Lombardy; and finally, towards the beginning of the year 1239, he fulminated another sentence of excommunication against Frederick. This had a greater effect than Gregory ventured to hope. A considerable number of nobles of Guelf origin, seduced by court favours, had been won over to the imperial party. They perceived that, after the anathema of the pope, the emperor distrusted them. The marquis d’Este and the count di San Bonifazio were even warned that their heads were in danger, and they made their escape from the imperial camp; all the other Guelf nobles followed their example, and the Guelf cities gained captains habituated to arms and familiarised with higher ideas of politics.

Gregory began to think he should give still greater weight to the anathemas which he launched against the emperor if they were sanctioned by a council. In the year 1241 he convoked at Rome all the prelates of Christendom. Frederick, who had been established at Pisa since the autumn of the year 1239, exerted himself to prevent the meeting of a council which he dreaded. While the two other maritime republics had declared for the Guelfs, Pisa was entirely of the Ghibelline party. The people were enthusiastically attached to the emperor; and among the nobles, a few only, proprietors of fiefs in Sardinia, headed by the Visconti of Gallura, had forsaken him for the Guelfs. The Pisans, further excited by their jealousy of the Genoese, promised Frederick that they would brave for him all the thunders of the church, and assured him they knew well how to hinder the meeting of the council. A considerable number of French prelates had embarked at Nice for Ostia, on board Genoese galleys. Ugolino Buzzacherino de Sismondi, admiral of the Pisans, lay in wait with a powerful fleet before Meloria, attacked them on the 3rd of May, 1241, sunk three vessels, took nineteen, and made prisoners all the French prelates who were to join the council at Pisa. The republic loaded them with chains, but they were chains made of silver, and imprisoned them in the chapter house of the cathedral. Gregory, alarmed at this reverse of fortune, survived only a few months; he died the 21st of August, 1241; and the college of cardinals, reduced to a very small number, passed nearly two years before they could agree on a new choice.[95] At last, on the 24th of June, 1243, Senibaldi de’ Fieschi, of Genoa, who took the name of Innocent IV, was elected to the chair of St. Peter. His family, powerful in Genoa and in the Ligurian Mountains, was also allied to many noble families, who possessed castles on the northern side of the Apennines; and this position gave him great influence in the neighbouring cities of Placentia, Parma, Reggio, and Modena. The elevation of a Fieschi to the pontificate gave courage to the Guelf party in all these cities.

Frederick had recourse in vain to the new pope to be reconciled to the church; Innocent IV was determined to see in him only an enemy of religion and of the pontifical power, and a chief of barbarians, who in turns summoned his Germans and his Saracens to tyrannise over Italy. He drew closer his alliance with the cities of the league of Lombardy, and promised them to cause the emperor to be condemned and deposed by an ecumenical council, as his predecessor would have done; but instead of convoking the council in Italy, he fixed for that purpose on the city of Lyons, one-half of which belonged to the empire and the other to the kingdom of France. He determined on placing himself with the prelates whom he had summoned under the protection of St. Louis, who then reigned in France. He went from Rome to Genoa by sea, escaping the Pisan fleet which watched to intercept his passage; he excited by his exhortations the enthusiasm of the Guelfs of Genoa, and of the cities of Lombardy and Piedmont, which he visited on his passage; and arriving at Lyons, he opened, on the 28th of June, 1245, in the convent of St. Just, the council of the universal church. He found the bishops of France, England, and Germany eager to adopt his passions; so that he obtained from them at their third sitting, on the 17th of July, a sentence of condemnation against Frederick II. The council declared that for his crimes and iniquities God had rejected him, and would no longer suffer him to be either emperor or king. In consequence, the pope and the council released his subjects from their oath of allegiance; forbade them under pain of excommunication to obey him under any title whatever; and invited the electors of the empire to proceed to the election of another emperor, while the pope reserved to himself the nomination of another king of the Two Sicilies.

Frederick at first opposed all his strength of soul against the sentence of excommunication pronounced by the council on him. Causing his jewels to be brought him, and placing the golden crown of the empire on his head, he declared before a numerous assembly that he would still wear it, and knew how to defend it; but, notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the Ghibelline party, the devotion of his friends, and the progress of philosophical opinions, which he had himself encouraged, the man whom the church had condemned was in constant danger of being abandoned or betrayed. The mendicant monks everywhere excited conspiracies against him. They took advantage of the terrors inspired by sickness and age, to make sinners return, as they said, to the ways of salvation, and desired them to make amends for their past transgressions by delivering the church of God from its most dangerous enemy. Insurrections frequently broke forth in one or other of the Two Sicilies; still oftener the emperor discovered amongst his courtiers plots to destroy him, either by the dagger or poison; even his private secretary, his intimate friend, Pietro delle Vigne, whom he had raised from abject poverty, to whom he had entrusted his most important affairs, gave ear to the counsel of the monks, and promised to poison his master.

Frederick, on his part, became suspicious and cruel; his distrust fell on his most faithful friends; and the executions which he ordered sometimes[96] preceded the proofs of guilt. He had confided Germany to his son Conrad, and the exclusive government of the Veronese marches to Ezzelino. The hatred which this ferocious man excited by his crimes fell on the emperor. Ezzelino imprisoned in the most loathsome dungeons those whom he considered his enemies, and frequently put them to death by torture, or suffered them to perish by hunger; he was well aware that the relatives of these victims must also be his enemies; they were, in their turn, arrested; and the more he sacrificed to his barbarity, the more he was called upon to strike. The citizens of Milan, Mantua, Bergamo, and Brescia every day heard of new and horrible crimes committed by the governor of the marches; they conceived the greater detestation of the Ghibelline party, and entertained the firmer determination to repel Frederick. He, on the contrary, had no thoughts of attacking them; he established himself during the Council of Lyons at Turin, and thence entered into a negotiation with St. Louis, to obtain by his mediation a reconciliation with the church to which he made, in token of his submission, the offer to accompany Louis to the Holy Land.

The revolt of Parma, on the 16th of June, 1247, obliged Frederick to resume his arms at a moment when he was least disposed. The friends and relatives of Pope Innocent IV, the Guelf nobles of the houses of Corregio, Lupi, and Rossi, re-entering Parma, whence they had been exiled, triumphed over their adversaries, and in their turn expelled them from the city. Frederick was determined at any price to recover Parma. He sent for a numerous band of Saracens from Apulia, commanded by one of his natural sons, named Frederick, to whom he gave the title of king of Antioch. He assembled the Lombard Ghibellines, under the command of another of his illegitimate sons, named Hans or Hensius, called by him king of Sardinia, and whom he had made imperial vicar in Lombardy. Ezzelino arrived, too, at his camp from the Veronese march, with the militias of Padua, Vicenza, and Verona, and the soldiers whom he had raised in his hereditary fiefs.

On the other side, the Guelfs of Lombardy hastened to send succour to a city which had just sacrificed itself for them. The Milanese set the example; the militias of Mantua, Piacenza, and Ferrara followed it; and the Guelfs, who had been exiled from Reggio, Modena, and other Ghibelline cities, thinking they served their country in fighting for their faction, arrived in great numbers to shut themselves up in Parma. Frederick was prevented from hanging the hostages given previous to the revolt, before the walls of the city, by the militia of Pavia, who declared it was with the sword of Ghibelline soldiers only, and not with that of the executioner, that they would secure the throne of the emperor. The siege made little progress; the winter had begun, but Frederick persisted in his attempt. He proclaimed his determination to[97] raze Parma to the ground, and to transfer those of the inhabitants who should be spared into his fortified camp, of which he would make a new town, called Vittoria. This camp, which he quitted on a hawking party, on the 8th of February, 1248, was in his absence surprised by a sortie of a Guelf army from Parma, taken, and pillaged; his soldiers were dispersed, and the emperor had the humiliation of being forced to raise the siege.

THE GUELFS EXPELLED FROM FLORENCE; THE BATTLE OF FOSSALTA

Before this event, he had sent his son, the king of Antioch, into Tuscany with sixteen hundred German cavalry, to secure Florence to his party; where, since the death of Buondelmonte, the Guelfs and Ghibellines, always in opposition, had not ceased fighting. There was seldom an assembly, a festival, a public ceremony, without some offence given, either by one or other of the parties. Both flew to arms; chains were thrown across the streets; barricades were immediately formed, and in every quarter, round every noble family; the more contiguous, who had the most frequent causes of quarrel, fought at the same time in ten different places. Nevertheless the republic was supposed to lean towards the Guelf party; and the Florentine Ghibellines, in their relations with other people, had never sought to separate from their fellow-countrymen, or to place themselves in opposition to their magistrates. Frederick, fearing to lose Florence, wrote to the Uberti, the chiefs of the Ghibelline faction, to assemble secretly in their palace all their party, to attack afterwards in concert and at once all the posts of the Guelfs; whilst his son, the king of Antioch, should present himself at the gates, and thus expel their adversaries from the city. This plan was executed on the night of Candlemas, 1248; the barricades of the Guelfs were forced in every quarter, because they defended themselves in small bands against the whole of the opposite party. The Ghibellines, masters of the town, ordered all the Guelfs to quit it. They afterwards demolished thirty-six palaces belonging to the same number of the most illustrious families of that party; and intimidating the other cities of Tuscany, they constrained them to follow their example, and declare for the emperor.

Frederick II, after the check experienced by him at Parma, returned to his kingdom of Naples and Sicily, and left to his son Hensius, who established himself at Modena, the direction of the war in Lombardy. The pope, however, had sent a legate, the cardinal Octavian degli Ubaldini, to the Guelf cities, to engage them to pursue their victory, and punish the imperial party for what he called their revolt against the church. The powerful city of Bologna, already celebrated for its university, and superior to the neighbouring ones by its wealth, its population, and the zeal which a democratic government excites, undertook to make the Guelf party triumph throughout the Cispadane region. Bologna first attacked Romagna, and forced the towns of Imola, Faenza, Forlì, and Cervia to expel the Ghibellines, and declare for the church. The Bolognese next turned their arms against Modena. The Modenese cavalry, entering Bologna one day by surprise, carried off from a public fountain a bucket, which henceforth was preserved in the tower of Modena as a glorious trophy. The war which followed furnished Tassoni with the subject of his mock-heroic poem, La Secchia Rapita. The vengeance of the Bolognese was, however, anything but burlesque; after several bloody battles, the two armies finally met at Fossalta on the 26th of[98] May, 1249. Philip Ugoni of Brescia, who was this year podesta of Bologna, commanded the Guelf army, in which was united a detachment from the militias of all the cities of the league of Lombardy. The Ghibellines were led by king Hensius; each army consisted of from fifteen to twenty thousand combatants. The battle was long and bloody, but ended with the complete defeat of the Ghibelline party; King Hensius himself fell into the hands of the conquerors; he was immediately taken to Bologna, and confined in the palace of the podesta. The senate of that city rejected all offers of ransom, all intercession in his favour. He was entertained in a splendid manner, but kept a prisoner during the rest of his life, which lasted for twenty-two years.

DEATH OF FREDERICK II: THE SUCCESSION

This last check overwhelmed Frederick. He had now during thirty years combated the church and the Guelf party; his bodily as well as mental energy was worn out in this long contest. His life was embittered by the treason of those whom he believed his friends, by the disasters of his partisans, and by the misfortunes which had pursued him even in his own family. He saw his power in Italy decline; while the crown of Germany was disputed with his son Conrad, by competitors favoured by the church. He appeared to be at length himself disturbed by the excommunications of the pope, and the fear of that hell with which he had been so incessantly menaced. He implored anew the assistance and mediation of St. Louis of France, who was then in the isle of Cyprus. He provided magnificently for the wants of the crusade army, which this king commanded; he solicited leave to join it. He offered to engage never to return from the Holy Land, and to submit to the most humiliating expiations which the church could impose. He succeeded in inspiring St. Louis with interest and gratitude. Frederick, while waiting the effect of St. Louis’ good offices, seemed occupied solely in the affairs of his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where he restored order, and established a prosperity not to be seen elsewhere in Europe. On the 13th of December, 1250, he was seized with a dysentery, of which he died, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, at his castle of Florentino, in the capitanate where he had fixed his residence.

The Italian cities, which for the most part date the commencement of their liberty from the conflicts between the sovereigns of Italy and Germany, or the invasion of Otto the Great, in 951, had already, at the death of Frederick II, enjoyed for three centuries the protection and progressive improvement of their municipal constitutions. These three centuries, with reference to the rest of Europe, are utterly barbarous. Their history is everywhere obscure and imperfectly known. It records only some great revolution, or the victories and calamities of princes; the people are always left in the shade: a writer would have thought it beneath him to occupy himself about the fate of plebeians; they were not supposed to be worthy of history. The towns of Italy, so prodigiously superior to all others in wealth, intelligence, energy, and independence, were equally regardless of preserving any record of past times. Some grave chroniclers preserved the memory of an important crisis, but in general the cities passed whole centuries without leaving any written memorial; thinking it perhaps good policy not to attract notice, and to envelope themselves in obscurity. They, however, of necessity departed from this system in the last century, owing to[99] the two conflicts, in both of which they remained victorious. From 1150 to 1183, they had fought to obtain the Peace of Constance, which they regarded as their constitutional charter. From 1183 to 1250, they preserved the full exercise of the privileges which they had so gloriously acquired; but while they continually advanced in opulence, while intelligence and the arts became more and more developed, they were led by two passions, equally honourable, to range themselves under two opposite banners. One party, listening only to their faith, their attachment, and their gratitude to a family which had given them many great sovereigns, were ready to venture their all for the cause of the Ghibellines; the other, alarmed for the independence of the church, and the liberty of Italy, by the always increasing grandeur of the house of Hohenstaufen, were not less resolute in their endeavours to wrest from it the sceptre which menaced them. The cities of the Lombard League had reached the summit of their power at the period of this second conflict. During the interregnum which lasted from the death of Frederick II to the entrance into Italy of Henry VII in 1310, the Lombard republics, a prey to the spirit of faction, and more intent on the triumph of either the Guelf or Ghibelline parties, than on securing their own constitutions, all submitted themselves to the military power of some nobles to whom they had intrusted the command of their militias, and thus lost all their liberty.

On the death of Frederick II, his son, Conrad IV, king of Germany, did not feel himself sufficiently strong to appear in Italy, and place on his head, in succession, the iron crown at Monza, and the golden crown at Rome. He wished first of all to secure that of the Two Sicilies; and embarked at some port in Istria for Naples, in a Pisan vessel, during the month of October, 1251. The remainder of his short life was passed in combating and vanquishing the Neapolitan Guelfs. He died suddenly at Lavello, on the 21st of May, 1254. His natural brother, Manfred, a young hero, hardly twenty years of age, succeeded by his activity and courage in recovering the kingdom which Innocent IV had already invaded, with the intention of subduing it to the temporal power of the holy see. But Manfred, beloved by the Saracens of Luceria, who were the first to defend him, and admired by the Ghibellines of the Two Sicilies, was for a long time detained there by the attacks of the Guelfs, before he could in his turn pursue them through the rest of Italy. Conrad had left in Germany a son, still an infant, afterwards known under the name of Conradin; he was acknowledged king of Germany, under the name of Conrad V, by a small party only. The electors left the empire without a head; and when they afterwards proceeded to elect one in the year 1257, their suffrages were divided between two princes, strangers to Germany, where they had never set foot; one, an Englishman, Richard, earl of Cornwall; the other a Spaniard, Alfonso X of Castile.

THE POPE AND THE CITIES

Innocent IV was still in France when he learned of the death of Frederick II; he returned thence in the beginning of the spring of 1251; wrote to all the towns to celebrate the deliverance of the church; gave boundless expression to his joy; and made his entry into Milan, and the principal cities of Lombardy, with all the pomp of a triumph. He supposed that the republicans of Italy had fought only for him, and that he alone would henceforth be obeyed by them; of this he soon made them but too sensible. He treated[100] the Milanese with arrogance, and threatened to excommunicate them for not having respected some ecclesiastical immunity. It was the moment in which the republic, like a warrior reposing himself after battle, began to feel its wounds. It had made immense sacrifices for the Guelf party; it had emptied the treasury, obtained patriotic gifts from every citizen who had anything to spare; pledged its revenues, and loaded itself with debt to the extent of its credit. For the discharge of their debts, the citizens resigned themselves to the necessity of giving to their podesta, Beno de’ Gozzadini of Bologna, unlimited power to create new imposts, and to raise money under every form he found possible. The ingratitude of the pope, at a moment of universal suffering, deeply offended the Milanese; and the influence of the Ghibellines in a city where, till then, they had been treated as enemies, might be dated from that period.

Innocent IV pursued his journey towards Rome; but found the capital of Christendom still less disposed than the first city of Lombardy to obey him. The Romans in 1253 called another Bolognese noble, named Brancaleone d’Andolo, to the government of their republic; and gave him, with the title of senator, almost unlimited authority. The citizens, continually alarmed by the quarrels and battles of the Roman nobles, who had converted the Colosseum, the tombs of Adrian, Augustus, and Cæcilia Metella, the arches of triumph and other monuments of ancient Rome, into so many fortresses, whence issued banditti, whom they kept in pay, to pillage passengers and peaceable merchants, demanded of the government above all things vigour and severity. They forgot the guarantee due to the accused, in their attention to those only which were required by the public peace. The senator Brancaleone, at the head of the Roman militia, successively attacked these monuments, become the retreat of robbers and assassins; he levelled to the ground the towers which surmounted them; he hanged the adventurers who defended them, with their commanders the nobles, at the palace windows of the latter; and thus established by terror security in the streets of Rome. He hardly showed more respect to[101] Innocent than to the Roman nobility. The pope, in order to be at a distance from him, had transferred his court to Assisi. Brancaleone sent him word that it was not decorous in a pope to be wandering like a vagabond from city to city; and that, if he did not immediately return to the capital of Christendom of which he was the bishop, the Romans, with their senator at their head, would march to Assisi and send him out of it by setting fire to the town.

Thus, although the power of kings had given way to that of the people, liberty was in general ill understood and insecure. The passions were impetuous; a certain point of honour was attached to violence; the nobles believed they gave proof of independence by rapine and outrage; and the friends of order believed they had attained the highest purpose of government, when they made such audacious disturbers tremble. The turbulence and number of the noble criminals, the support which their crimes found in a false point of honour, form an excuse for the judicial institutions of the Italian republics, which were all more calculated to strike terror into criminals too daring to conceal themselves, than to protect the accused against the unjust suspicion of secret crimes. Order could be maintained only by an iron hand; but this iron hand soon crushed liberty. Nevertheless, among the Italian cities there was one which above all others seemed to think of justice more than of peace, and of the security of the citizen more than of the punishment of the guilty. It was Florence; its judicial institutions are, indeed, far from meriting to be held up as models; but they were the first in Italy which offered any guarantee to the citizen; because Florence was the city where the love of liberty was the most general and the most constant in every class; where the cultivation of the understanding was carried farthest; and where enlightenment of mind soonest appeared in the improvement of the laws.

FLORENTINE AFFAIRS; THE GUELFS RECALLED

The Ghibelline nobles had taken possession of the sovereignty of Florence with the help of the king of Antioch, two years before the death of his father, Frederick II; but their power soon became insupportable to the free and proud citizens of that republic, who had already become wealthy by commerce and who reckoned amongst them some distinguished literary men, such as Brunetto Latini, and Guido Cavalcanti, without having lost simplicity of manners, their sobriety of habits, or their bodily vigour.

Frederick II still lived, when by a unanimous insurrection, on the 20th of October, 1250, they set themselves free. All the citizens assembled at the same moment in the square of Santa Croce; they divided themselves into fifty groups, of which each group chose a captain and thus formed companies of militia: a council of these officers was the first-born authority of this newly revived republic. The podesta by his severity and partiality had rendered himself universally detested: they deposed him, and supplied his place by another judge, under the name of captain of the people, but soon afterwards decreed that the podesta and the captain should each have an independent tribunal, in order that they should exercise upon each other a mutual control; at the same time, they determined that both should be subordinate to the supreme magistracy of the republic, which was charged with the administration, but divested of the judicial power. They decreed that this magistracy, which they called the signoria, should be always present, always[102] assembled in the palace of the republic, ever ready to control the podesta or the captain, to whom they had been obliged to delegate so much power. The town was divided into six parts, each sestier, as it was called, named two anziani. These twelve magistrates ate together, slept at the public palace, and could never go out but together; their function lasted only two months. Twelve others, elected by the people, succeeded them; and the republic was so rich in good citizens, and in men worthy of its confidence, that this rapid succession of anziani did not exhaust their number. The Florentine militia at the same time attacked and demolished all the towers which served as a refuge to the nobles, in order that all should henceforth be forced to submit to the common law.

The new signoria was hardly informed of the death of Frederick, when by a decree of the 7th of January, 1251, they recalled all the Guelf exiles to Florence. They henceforth laboured to give that party the preponderance throughout Tuscany. They declared war against the neighbouring cities of Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, and Volterra; not to subjugate them, or to impose hard conditions, but to force them to rally round the party which they considered that of the church and of liberty. The year 1254, when the Florentines were commanded by their podesta, Guiscardo Pietra Santa, a Milanese, is distinguished in their history by the name of the “Year of Victories.” They took the two cities of Pistoia and Volterra; they forced those of Pisa and Siena to sign a peace favourable to the Guelf party; they refused to profit by a treason which had given them possession of the citadel of Arezzo and they restored it to the Aretini; lastly, they built in the Lunigiana, beyond the territory of Lucca, a fortress destined to shut the entry of Tuscany on the Ligurian side, which in memory of their podesta bears to this day the name of Pietra Santa. The signoria also showed themselves worthy to be the governors of a city renowned for commerce, the arts, and liberty. The whole monetary system of Europe was at this period abandoned to the depredations of sovereigns who continually varied the title and weight of coins—sometimes to defraud their creditors, at other times to force their debtors to pay more than they had received, or the tax-payers more than was due. During 150 years more the kings of France violated their faith with the public, making annually with the utmost effrontery some important change in the coins. But the republic of Florence, in the year 1252, coined its golden florin, of twenty-four carats fine, and of the weight of one drachma. It placed the value under the guarantee of publicity and of commercial good faith; and that coin remained unaltered as the standard for all other values as long as the republic itself endured.

FLORENCE AND SIENA AT WAR; THE BATTLE OF MONTAPERTI

A conspiracy of Ghibellines to recover their power in Florence and to concentrate it in the aristocratic faction, forced the republic, in the year 1258, to exile the most illustrious chiefs of that party. It was then directed by Farinata degli Uberti, who was looked upon as the most eloquent orator and the ablest warrior in Tuscany. All the Florentine Ghibellines were favourably received at Siena, although the two republics had mutually engaged in their last treaty not to give refuge to the rebels of either city. Farinata afterwards joined Manfred, whom he found firmly established on the throne of the Two Sicilies, and represented to him that, to guard his kingdom from all attack, he ought to secure Tuscany and give supremacy[103] to the Ghibelline party. He obtained from him a considerable body of German cavalry, which he led to Siena.

Hostilities between the two republics had already begun: the colours of Manfred had been dragged with contempt through the streets by the Florentines. Farinata resolved to take advantage of the irritation of the Germans, in order to bring the two parties to a general battle. He knew that some ignorant artisans had found their way into the signoria of Florence, and he tried to profit by their presumption. He flattered them with the hope that he would open to them one of the gates of Siena, if they ordered their army to present itself under the walls of that city. At the same time, his emissaries undertook to excite the ill will of the plebeians against the nobles of the Guelf party, who, being more clear-sighted, might discover his intrigues. Notwithstanding the opposition of the nobles in council, the signoria resolved to march a Guelf army through the territory of Siena.b

It is said[11] there were not less than thirty thousand, and auxiliary troops came from all the allied cities, or those subjected to the Florentines; but as the Ghibellines had been expelled from these cities, the latter had united at Siena and the Guelfs at Florence, and the two armies presented the sad spectacle of division and civil war in the whole of Tuscany. From Arezzo alone it is asserted that nearly five thousand came to the succour of the Florentines under the command of Donatello Tarlati, whilst another band of outlaws, conducted by their bishop, had joined in Siena, and if we are to believe Raffaello Roncioni, a chosen body of three thousand Pisans also came to Siena. The army of the Guelfs was superior in number to the Ghibellines, that faction being predominant in Tuscany, but probably there was not that disproportion which some historians wish to make us believe. The army of the Guelfs marched on as to certain victory, hoping to enter Siena without fighting; arrived upon the hills of Montaperti they halted to receive advice from the Sienese to proceed further.

Nothing is more capable of disconcerting a leader and an army than to see an enemy courageously advancing to meet them, whom they had believed either beaten or fugitive; thus the Florentine generals, who went to the certain conquest of Siena, when they perceived the enemy advancing boldly, at the head of whom was the German troop, so formidable an enemy to them, began to despair. They came to blows, and both sides fought with great valour; but the Florentines, unable to resist the attack made upon them by the Germans, gave way. Treachery aided to increase the consternation. Many Ghibellines, hidden in time of the battle, went over to the enemy. Among the rest, Bocca of the Abati, before going over to the other side, aimed a treacherous blow at Jacopo Vacca, of the family of the Pazzi, who carried the ensign of the republic, and brought him to the ground with the loss of an arm.

This act spread terror among the Florentines, who could no longer distinguish friends from foes; the only opposition was made around the triumphant chariot which contained the flags, and around the better part of the defenders, who were disposed rather to purchase for themselves an illustrious death by valour, than their safety by flight. A part of the broken army had taken refuge in the castle of Montaperti. The castle being taken by force, the refugees were cut to pieces. It is not easy to ascertain the number of killed in a battle, since the conquerors always exaggerate it, and the conquered conceal it; the latter, or the Florentine writers, acknowledge[104] only twenty-five hundred killed, and fifteen hundred prisoners—but the number must have been far greater.

This battle is reckoned among the most bloody of those times, and was fought on the 4th of September, 1260. The Sienese celebrated the victory with solemn pomp, in which the triumphant chariot (carroccio) of the Florentines was seen dragged upon the ground, and the name of City of the Virgin was taken by Siena on this occasion, as a devout attestation of gratitude to heaven for the happy issue.d

The Florentine Guelfs found themselves too much weakened by the defeat of Montaperti to maintain themselves in Florence. The circumference of the walls was too vast, and the population too much discouraged by the enormous loss which they had experienced to admit of defending the city. All those accordingly who had exercised any authority in the republic—all those whose names were sufficiently known to discover their party—left Florence for Lucca together, on horseback. The Guelfs of Prato, Pistoia, Volterra, and San Gemignano could not hope to maintain their ground when those of Florence failed. All abandoned their dwellings and joined the Florentines at Lucca. That city granted to the illustrious fugitives the church and portico of San Friano and the surrounding quarter, where they pitched their tents. The Ghibellines entered Florence on the 27th of September, immediately abolished the popular government, and formed a new magistracy, composed entirely of nobles, who took the oath of fidelity to Manfred, king of the Two Sicilies.

At a diet of the Ghibelline cities assembled at Empoli, the ambassadors of Pisa and Siena strongly represented that whilst Florence existed, the preponderance of the Ghibelline party in Tuscany could never be secure. They affirmed that the population of that proud and warlike city was entirely devoted to the Guelf party, that there was no hope of mitigating their hatred of the nobles and of the family of the last emperor, that democratic habits were become a sort of second nature to every one of the inhabitants; they concluded with demanding that the walls of Florence should be razed to the ground, and the people dispersed among the neighbouring towns. All the Ghibellines of Tuscany, all the deputies of the cities jealous of Florence received the proposition favourably. It was about to be adopted when Farinata degli Uberti rose, and repelled with indignation this abuse of the victory which he had just gained. He protested that he loved his country far better than his party; and declared that he would, with those same companions in arms whose bravery they had witnessed at the battle of Arbia, join the Guelfs and fight for them, sooner than consent to the ruin of what was in the world most dear to him. The enemies of Florence dared not answer him; and the diet of Empoli contented itself with decreeing that the league of Tuscany should take into pay one thousand of the soldiers of Manfred, to support in that province the preponderance of the Guelf party. Dante has immortalised Farinata as the saviour of Florence, and Bocca degli Abati as the traitor who placed it on the brink of destruction. His poem is filled with allusions to this memorable epoch.

THE TYRANT EZZELINO

While the Ghibellines thus acquired the preponderance in Tuscany, the tyrant fell who at the head of that party had caused so much blood to flow in the Trevisan march. Ezzelino was hereditary lord of Bassano and Piedmont:[105] he succeeded in making himself named captain of the people by the republics of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre, and Belluno. By this title he united the judicial with the military power; he was subject only to councils which he might assemble or not at his pleasure. It does not appear that there was any permanent magistracy like the signoria of Florence, to repress his abuse of power. Accordingly he soon changed the authority which he derived from the people into a frightful tyranny: fixing his suspicions upon all who rose to any distinction, who in any way attracted the attention of their fellow citizens, he did not wait for any expression of discontent, or symptom of resistance in the nobles, merchants, priests, or lawyers, who by their eminence alone became suspected, to throw them into prison and there, by the most excruciating torture, extract confessions of crimes that might justify his suspicions. The names which escaped their lips in the agony of torture were carefully registered in order to supply fresh victims to the tyrant. In the single town of Padua there were eight prisons always full, notwithstanding the incessant toil of the executioner to empty them; two of these contained each three hundred prisoners. A brother of Ezzelino, named Alberic, governed Treviso with less ferocity, but with a power not less absolute. Cremona was in like manner subject to a Ghibelline chief; Milan no longer evinced any repugnance to that party. In that city, as well as in Brescia, the factions of nobles and plebeians disputed for power.

Alexander IV, to destroy the monster that held in terror the Trevisan march, caused a crusade to be preached in that country. He promised those who combated the ferocious Ezzelino all the indulgences usually reserved for the deliverers of the Holy Land. The marquis d’Este, the count di San Bonifacio, with the cities of Ferrara, Mantua, and Bologna, assembled their troops under the standard of the church; they were joined by a horde of ignorant fanatics from the lowest class, anxious to obtain indulgences, but unsusceptible of discipline and incapable of a single act of valour. Their number, however, so frightened Ezzelino’s lieutenant at Padua, that he defended but feebly the passage of the Bacchiglione and the town. The legate Philip, elected archbishop of Ravenna, entered Padua at the head of the crusaders, on the 18th of June, 1256; but he either would not or could not restrain the fanatic and rapacious rabble which he had summoned to the support of his soldiers: for seven days the city was inhumanly pillaged by those whom it had received as its deliverers. As soon as Ezzelino was informed of the loss he had sustained, he hastened to separate and disarm the eleven thousand Paduans belonging to his army; he confined them in prisons, where all, with the exception of two hundred, met a violent or lingering death.

During the following two years the Guelfs experienced nothing but disasters: the legate whom the pope had placed at their head proved incompetent to command them; and the crowd of crusaders whom he called to his ranks served only to compromise them, by want of courage and discipline. The Ghibelline nobles of Brescia even delivered their country into the hands of Ezzelino after he had put the legate’s army to flight, in the year 1258. The following year this tyrant, unequalled in Italy for bravery and military talent, always an enemy to luxury, and proof against the seductions of women, making the boldest tremble with a look, and preserving in his diminutive person, at the age of sixty-five, all the vigour of a soldier, advanced into the centre of Lombardy in the hope that the nobles of Milan, with whom he had already opened a correspondence, would surrender this great city to him. He passed the Oglio and afterwards the Adda, with the most brilliant army he had ever yet commanded: but the marquis Palavicino, Buoso da Doara, the Cremonese chieftain, and other Ghibellines, his ancient associates, disgusted with his crimes, had secretly made an alliance with the Guelfs for his destruction.

When they saw that he had advanced so far from his home they rushed upon him from all sides. On the 16th of September, 1259, whilst he was preparing to retire, he found himself stopped at the bridge of Cassano. The Brescians, no longer obedient to his command, began their movement to abandon him; all the points of retreat were cut off by the Milanese, Cremonese, Ferrarians, and Mantuans: repulsed, pursued as far as Vimercato, and at last wounded in the foot, he was made prisoner and taken to Soncino: there, he refused to speak, rejected all aid of medicine, tore off all the bandages from his wounds, and finally expired, on the eleventh day of his captivity. His brother and all his family were massacred in the following year.

THE BEGINNING OF FEUDAL TYRANNY IN LOMBARDY

The defeat of Ezzelino, and the destruction of the family of Romano, may be regarded as the last great effort of the Lombards against the establishment of tyranny in their country. About this time the cities began to be accustomed to absolute power in a single person. In each republic, the nobles, always divided by hereditary feuds, regarded it as disgraceful to submit to the laws, rather than do themselves justice by force of arms: their quarrels, broils, and brigandage carried troubles and disorder into every street and public place. The merchants were continually on the watch to shut their shops on the first cry of alarm; for the satellites of the nobles were most commonly banditti, to whom they gave shelter in their palaces, and who took advantage of the tumult to plunder the shops. At the same time that the nobles irritated the plebeians by their arrogance, they ridiculed their incapacity, and endeavoured to exclude them from all the public offices. The people often, in their indignation, took arms; the streets were barricaded and the nobles, besieged in their town houses, were driven to take refuge in their castles; but if the militia of the towns afterwards presumed to pursue in the plains of Lombardy the nobles whom they forced to emigrate, they soon found themselves sadly inferior. In the course of this century, the nobles had acquired the habit of fighting on horseback with a lance and covered with heavy armour. Continual exercise could alone render them expert in the manœuvres of cavalry, and accustom them to the enormous weight of the[107] cuirass and helmet; on the other hand, this armour rendered them almost invulnerable. When they charged with couched lance, and with all the impetuosity of their war-horses, they overthrew and annihilated the ill-armed infantry opposed to them without experiencing themselves any damage. The cities soon felt the necessity of opposing cavalry to cavalry, and of taking into their pay either those nobles who made common cause with the people, or foreigners and adventurers who about this time began to exchange their valour for hire.

As the custom was prevalent of giving the command of the militia to the first officer of justice, in order to give him authority either to direct the public force against rebels or disturbers of order, or to discipline the soldier by the fear of punishment, no commander could be found who would undertake the military service of a town, without at the same time possessing the power of the judicial sword—such power as was intrusted to the podesta or captain of the people. It became necessary then to deliver into his charge what was named the signoria; and the more considerable this corps of cavalry, thus placed for a certain number of years at the service of the republic, the more this signoria, to which was attached the power of adjudging life or death in the tribunals, became dangerous to liberty.

Among the first feudal lords who embraced the cause of the people and undertook the service of a town, with a body of cavalry raised among their vassals, or among the poor nobles, their adherents, was Pagan della Torre, the lord of Valsassina. He had endeared himself to the Milanese by saving their army from the pursuit of Frederick II after the battle of Cortenuova. He was attached by hereditary affection to the Guelf party; and although himself of illustrious birth, he seemed to partake the resentment of the plebeians of Milan against the nobility who oppressed them. When he died, his brother Martino, after him Raymond, then Philip, lastly, Napoleon della Torre, succeeded each other as captains of the people, commanders of a body of cavalry which they had raised and placed at the service of the city; they were the acknowledged superiors of the podesta and the tribunals. These five lords succeeded each other in less than twenty years; and even the shortness of their lives accustomed the people to regard their election as the confirmation of a dynasty become hereditary. Other Guelf cities of Lombardy were induced to choose the same captain and the same governor as Milan, because they believed him a true Guelf, and a real lover of the people.

These towns found the advantage of drawing closer their alliance with the city which directed their party; of placing themselves under a more powerful protection; and of supporting their tribunals with a firmer hand. Martin della Torre had been elected podesta of Milan in 1256; three years later he obtained the title of elder, and lord of the people. At the same time, Lodi also named him lord. In 1263, the city of Novara conferred the same honour on him. Philip, who succeeded him in 1264, was named lord by Milan, Como, Vercelli, and Bergamo. Thus began to be formed among the Lombard republics, without their suspecting that they divested themselves of their liberty, the powerful state which a century and a half later became the duchy of Milan. But the pope, jealous of the house of della Torre, appointed archbishop of Milan Otto Visconti, whose family, powerful on the borders of Lake Maggiore, then shared the exile of the nobles and Ghibellines. This prelate placed himself at the head of their faction; and henceforward the rivalry between the families of Della Torre and Visconti made that between the people and the nobles almost forgotten.

PERENNIAL STRIFE OF GUELFS AND GHIBELLINES

The bitter enmity between the two parties of the Guelfs and Ghibellines was fatal to the cause of liberty. With the former, the question was religion—the independence of the church and of Italy, menaced by the Germans and Saracens, to whom Manfred granted not less confidence than Frederick II; with the latter, honour and good faith towards an illustrious family, and the support of the aristocracy as well as of royalty; but both were more intent on avenging offences a thousand times repeated, and guarding against exile, and the confiscation of property.

These party feelings deeply moved men who gloried in the sacrifices which they or their ancestors had made to either party; while they regarded as entirely secondary the support of the laws, the impartiality of the tribunals, or the equal participation of the citizens in the sovereignty. Every town of Lombardy forgot itself, to make its faction triumph; and it looked for success in giving more unity and force to power. The cities of Mantua and Ferrara, where the Guelfs were far the more numerous, trusted for their defence, the one to the count di San Bonifazio, the other to the marquis d’Este, with so much constancy, that these nobles, under the name of captains of the people, had become almost sovereigns. In the republic of Verona, the Ghibellines, on the contrary, predominated; and as they feared their faction might sink at the death of Ezzelino, they called to the command of their militia, and the presidency of their tribunals, Mastino della Scala; lord of the castle of that name in the Veronese territory; whose power became hereditary in his family. The marquis Pelavicino, the most renowned Ghibelline in the whole valley of the Po, whose strongest castle was San Donnino, between Parma and Piacenza, and who had formed and disciplined a superb body of cavalry, was named, alternately with his friend, Buoso da Doara, lord of the city of Cremona. Pavia and Piacenza also chose him almost always their captain; and this honour was at the same time conferred on him by Milan, Brescia, Tortona, and Alexandria. The Ghibelline party had, since the offence given by Innocent IV to the Guelfs of Milan, obtained the ascendency in Lombardy. The house of Della Torre seemed even to lean towards it; and it was all powerful in Tuscany. The city of Lucca had been the last to accede to that party in 1263; and the Tuscan Guelfs, obliged to leave their country, had formed a body of soldiers, which placed itself in the pay of the few cities of Lombardy still faithful to the Guelf party.

The court of Rome saw, with great uneasiness, this growing power of the Ghibelline party, firmly established in the Two Sicilies, under the sceptre of Manfred. Feared even in Rome and the neighbouring provinces, master in Tuscany, and making daily progress in Lombardy, Manfred seemed on the point of making the whole peninsula a single monarchy. It was no longer with the arms of the Italians that the pope could expect to subdue him. The Germans afforded no support. Divided between Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso of Castile, they seemed desirous of delivering themselves from the imperial authority, by dividing between foreigners an empty title; while each state sought to establish a separate independence at home, and abandon the supremacy of the empire over Italy. It was accordingly necessary to have recourse to other barbarians to prevent the formation of an Italian monarchy fatal to the power of the pontiff. Alexander IV died on the 25th of May, 1261; three months afterwards, a Frenchman, who took the name of Urban IV, was elected his successor; and he did not hesitate to arm the French against Manfred.

CHARLES OF ANJOU CONQUERS SICILY

His predecessor had already opened some negotiations, for the purpose of giving the crown of Sicily to Edmund, son of Henry III, king of England. Urban put an end to them by having recourse to a prince nearer, braver, and more powerful. He addressed himself to Charles count of Anjou, the brother of St. Louis, sovereign in right of his wife of the county of Provence. Charles had already signalised himself in war; he was, like his brother, a faithful believer, and still more fanatical and bitter towards the enemies of the church, against whom he abandoned himself without restraint to his harsh and pitiless character. His religious zeal, however, did not interfere with his policy; his interests set limits to his subjection to the church; he knew how to manage those whom he wished to gain; and he could flatter, at his need, the public passions, restrain his anger, and preserve in his language a moderation which was not in his heart. Avarice appeared his ruling passion, but it was only the means of serving his ambition, which was unbounded. He accepted the offer of the pope. His wife Beatrice, ambitious of the title of queen, borne by her three sisters, pawned all her jewels to aid in levying an army of thirty thousand men, which she led herself through Lombardy. He had preceded her. Having gone by sea to Rome, with one thousand knights, he made his entry into that city on the 24th of May, 1265. A new pope, like his predecessor a Frenchman, named Clement IV, had succeeded Urban, and was not less favourable to Charles of Anjou. He caused him to be elected senator by the Roman Republic, and invested him with the kingdom of Sicily, which he charged him to conquer; under the condition, however, that the crown should never be united to that of the empire, or to the sovereignty of Lombardy and Tuscany. A tribute of eight thousand ounces of gold, and a white palfrey, was, by this investiture, assigned to St. Peter.

The French army, headed by Beatrice, did not pass through Italy till towards the end of the summer of 1265; and in the month of February of the following year, Charles entered, at its head, the kingdom of Naples. He met Manfred, who awaited him in the plain of Grandella, near Benevento, on the 26th of February. The battle was bloody. The Germans and Saracens were true to their ancient valour; but the Apulians fled like cowards, and the brave son of Frederick II, abandoned by them on the field of battle, perished. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the price of this victory. Resistance ceased, but not massacre. Charles gave up the pillage of Benevento to his soldiers; and they cruelly put to death all the inhabitants. The Italians, who believed they had experienced from the Germans and Saracens of Frederick and Manfred all that could be feared from the most barbarous enemies, now found that there was a degree of ferocity still greater than that to which they had been accustomed from the house of Hohenstaufen. The French seemed always ready to give as to receive death. The two strong colonies of Saracens at Luceria and Nocera were soon exterminated, and in a few years there remained not in the Two Sicilies a single individual of that nation or religion, nor one German who had been in the pay of Manfred. Charles willingly consented to acknowledge the Apulians and Sicilians his subjects; but he oppressed them, as their conqueror, with intolerable burdens. While he distributed amongst his followers all the great fiefs of the kingdom, he so secured with a hand of iron his detested dominion that two years afterwards, when Conradin, the son of Conrad and the nephew of Manfred, arrived from Germany to dispute the crown, few malcontents in the Two Sicilies had the courage to declare for him.

The victory of Charles of Anjou over Manfred restored the ascendant of the Guelf party in Italy. Filippo della Torre, who for some time seemed to hesitate between the two factions, at last gave passage through the Milanese territory to the army of Beatrice. Buoso da Doara was accused of having received money not to oppose her on the Oglio. The count di San Bonifazio, the marquis d’Este, and afterwards the Bolognese, openly joined her party. After the battle of Grandella, the Florentines rose, and drove out, on the 11th of November, 1266, the German garrison, commanded by Guido Novello, the lieutenant of Manfred. They soon afterwards received about eight hundred French cavalry from Charles, to whom they entrusted for ten years the signoria of Florence; that is to say, they conferred on him the rights allowed by the Peace of Constance to the emperors. At the same time they re-established, with full liberty, their internal constitution; they augmented the power of their numerous councils, from which they excluded the nobles and Ghibellines; and they gave to the corporations of trade, into which all the industrious part of the population was divided, a direct share in the government.

THE FALL OF CONRADIN; GREGORY X; OTTO VISCONTI

It was about the end of the year 1267 that the young Conradin, aged only sixteen years, arrived at Verona, with ten thousand cavalry, to claim the inheritance of which the popes had despoiled his family. All the Ghibellines and brave captains, who had distinguished themselves in the service of his grandfather and uncle, hastened to join him, and to aid him with their swords and counsel. The republics of Pisa and Siena, always devoted to his family, but whose zeal was now redoubled by their jealousy of the Florentines, made immense sacrifices for him. The Romans, offended at the pope’s having abandoned their city for Viterbo, as well as jealous of his pretensions in the republic, from the government of which he had excluded the nobles, opened their gates to Conradin, and promised him aid. But all these efforts, all this zeal, did not suffice to defend the heir of the house of Hohenstaufen against the valour of the French. Conradin entered the kingdom of his fathers by the Abruzzi and met Charles of Anjou in the plain of Tagliacozzo, on the 23rd of August, 1268. A desperate battle ensued; victory long remained doubtful. Two divisions of the army of Charles were already destroyed; and the Germans, who considered themselves the victors, were dispersed in pursuit of the enemy; when the French prince, who, till then, had not appeared on the field, fell on them with his body of reserve, and completely routed them. Conradin, forced to fly, was arrested, forty-five miles from Tagliacozzo, as he was about to embark for Sicily. He was brought to Charles, who, without pity for his youth, esteem for his courage, or respect for his just right, exacted from the iniquitous judges before whom he subjected him to the mockery of a trial, a sentence of death. Conradin was beheaded in the market-place at Naples, on the 26th of October, 1268. With him perished several of his most illustrious companions in arms—German princes, Ghibelline nobles, and citizens of Pisa; and, after the sacrifice of these first victims, an uninterrupted succession of executions long continued to fill the Two Sicilies with dismay.

The defeat and death of Conradin established the preponderance of the Guelf party throughout the peninsula. Charles placed himself at the head of it; the pope named him imperial vicar in Italy during the interregnum of[111] the empire, and sought to annex to that title all the rights formerly exercised by the emperors in the free cities. Clement IV died on the 29th of November, 1268—one month after the execution of Conradin. The cardinals remained thirty-three months without being able to agree on the choice of a successor. During this interregnum—the longest the pontifical chair had ever experienced—Charles remained sole chief of the Guelf party, ruling over the whole of Italy, which had neither pope nor emperor. He convoked, in 1269, a diet of the Lombard cities at Cremona, in which the towns of Piacenza, Cremona, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, and Reggio, consented to confer on him the signoria; Milan, Como, Vercelli, Novara, Alessandria, Tortona, Turin, Pavia, Bergamo, and Bologna, declared they should feel honoured by his alliance and friendship, but could not take him for master. Italy already felt the weight of the French yoke, which would have pressed still heavier if the crusade against Tunis to which Charles of Anjou was summoned by his brother, St. Louis, had not diverted his projects of ambition.

The conclave assembled at Viterbo at length raised to the vacant chair Teobaldo Visconti, of Piacenza, who was at that time in the Holy Land. On his return to Italy, in the year 1272, he took the name of Gregory X. This wise and moderate man soon discovered that the court of Rome had overreached itself; in crushing the house of Hohenstaufen, it had given itself a new master not less dangerous than the preceding. Gregory, instead of seeking to annihilate the Ghibellines, like his predecessors, occupied himself only in endeavouring to restore an equilibrium and peace between them and the Guelfs. He persuaded the Florentines and Sienese to recall the exiled Ghibellines, for the purpose, as he announced, of uniting all Christendom in the defence of the Holy Land; and testified the strongest resentment against Charles, who threw obstacles in the way of this reconciliation. He relieved Pisa from the interdict that had been laid on it by the holy see. He showed favour to Venice and Genoa; both of which, offended by the arrogance and injustice of Charles, had made common cause with his enemies. He engaged the electors of Germany to take advantage of the death of Richard of Cornwall, which took place in 1271, and put an end to the interregnum by proceeding to a new election. The electors conferred the crown, in 1273, on Rudolf of Habsburg, founder of the house of Austria. The death of Gregory X, in the beginning of January, 1276, deprived him of the opportunity to develop the projects which these first steps seem to indicate; but Nicholas III, who succeeded him in 1277, after three ephemeral popes, undertook more openly to humble Charles, and to support the Ghibelline party. He forced the king of Sicily to renounce the title of imperial vicar, to which Charles had no title except during the interregnum of the empire; he still further engaged him to resign the title of senator of Rome, and the dignity of the signoria, which had been conferred on him by the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, by representing to him that his power over these provinces was contrary to the bull of investiture, which had put him in possession of the kingdom of Naples.

Rudolf of Habsburg, who had never visited Italy, and was ignorant of the geography of that country, was, in his turn, persuaded by the pope to confirm the charters of Louis le Débonnaire, of Otto I, and of Henry VI, of which copies were sent to him. In these charters, whether true or false, taken from the chancery at Rome, the sovereignty of the whole of Emilia or Romagna, the Pentapolis, the march of Ancona, the patrimony of St. Peter, and the Campagna of Rome, from Radicofani to Ceperano, were assigned to[112] the church. The imperial chancery confirmed, without examination, a concession which had never been really made. The two Fredericks, as well as their predecessors, had always considered this whole extent of country as belonging to the empire, and always exercised there the imperial rights. A chancellor of Rudolf arrived in these provinces to demand homage and the oath of allegiance, which were yielded without difficulty; but Nicholas appealed against this homage, and called it a sacrilegious usurpation. Rudolf was obliged to acknowledge that it was in contradiction to his own diplomas, and resigned his pretensions. From that period, 1278, the republics held of the holy see and not of the emperor.

A revolution, not long previous, in the principal cities of Lombardy, had secured the preponderance to the nobles and the Ghibelline party. These, having been for a considerable period exiled from Milan, experienced a continuation of disasters, and, instead of fear, excited compassion. While Napoleon della Torre, chief of the republic of Milan, was exasperating the plebeians and Guelfs with his arrogance and contempt of their freedom, he was informed that Otto Visconti, whom he had exiled, although archbishop of Milan, had assembled around him at Como many nobles and Ghibellines, with whom he intended making an attack on the Milanese territory. Napoleon marched to meet him; but, despising enemies whom he had so often vanquished, he carelessly suffered himself to be surprised by the Ghibellines at Desio, in the night of the 21st of January, 1277. Having been made prisoner, with five of his relatives, he and they were placed in three iron cages, in which the archbishop kept them confined. This prelate was himself received with enthusiasm at Milan, at Cremona, and Lodi. He formed anew the councils of these republics, admitting only Ghibellines and nobles, who, ruined by a long exile, and often supported by the liberality of the archbishop, were become humble and obsequious; their deference degenerated into submission, and the republic of Milan, henceforth governed by the Visconti, became soon no more than a principality.

GHIBELLINE SUCCESSES; THE SICILIAN VESPERS

Nicholas III, of the noble Roman family of the Orsini, felt a hereditary affection for the Ghibellines, and everywhere favoured them. A rivalry between two illustrious families of Bologna, the Gieremei and the Lambertazzi, terminated, in 1274, in the exile of the latter (who were Ghibellines) with all their adherents. The quarrel between the two families became, from that period, a bloody war throughout Romagna. Guido de Montefeltro, lord of the mountains in the neighbourhood of Urbino, who had never joined any republic, received the Ghibellines into his country; and in commanding them gained the reputation of a great captain. Nicholas III sent a legate to Romagna, to compel Bologna and all the Guelf republics to recall the Ghibellines, and establish peace throughout the province. He succeeded in 1279. Another legate on a similar mission, and with equal success, was sent to Florence and Siena. The balance seemed at last on the point of being established in Italy, when Nicholas died, on the 19th of August, 1280.

Charles, who had submitted without opposition, and without even manifesting any displeasure, to the depression of a party on which were founded all his hopes, and to a reconciliation which destroyed his influence in the Guelf republics, hastened to Viterbo as soon as he learned the death of the pope, fully resolved not to suffer another of his enemies to ascend the chair[113] of St. Peter. He caused three cardinals, relatives of Nicholas, whom he regarded as being adverse to him, to be removed by force from the conclave; and, striking terror into the rest, he obtained, on the 22nd of January, 1281, the election of a pope entirely devoted to him. This was a canon of Tours, who took the name of Martin IV. He seemed to have no higher mission than that of seconding the ambition of the king of the Two Sicilies, and serving him in his enmities. Far from thinking of forming any balance to his power, he laboured to give him the sovereignty of all Italy. He conferred on him the title of senator of Rome; he gave the government of all the provinces of the church to his French officers; he caused the Ghibellines to be exiled from all the cities; and he encouraged, with all his power, the new design of Charles to take possession of the Eastern Empire.

Constantinople had been taken from the Latins on the 25th of July, 1261; and the son of the last Latin emperor was son-in-law of Charles of Anjou. Martin IV excommunicated Michael Palæologus, the Greek emperor, who had vainly endeavoured to reconcile the two churches. The new armament, which Charles was about to lead into Greece, was in preparation at the same time in all the ports of the Two Sicilies. The king’s agents collected the taxes with redoubled insolence, and levied money with greater severity. The judges endeavoured to smother resistance by striking terror. In the meanwhile a noble of Salerno, named John da Procida, the friend, confidant, and physician of Frederick II and of Manfred, visited in disguise the Two Sicilies, to reanimate the zeal of the ancient Ghibellines, and rouse their hatred of the French and of Charles. After having traversed Greece and Spain to excite new enemies against him, he obtained assurances that Michael Palæologus and Constanza, the daughter of Manfred and wife of Don Pedro of Aragon, would not suffer the Sicilians to be destroyed, if these had the courage to rise against their oppressors. Their assistance was, in fact, promised—it was even prepared; but Sicily was destined to be delivered by a sudden and popular explosion, which took place at Palermo, on the 30th of March, 1282. It was excited by a French soldier, who treated rudely the person of a young bride as she was proceeding to the church of Montreal, with her betrothed husband, to receive the nuptial benediction. The indignation of her relations and friends was communicated with the rapidity of lightning to the whole population of Palermo. At that moment the bells of the churches were ringing for vespers; the people answered by the cry, “To arms—death to the French!”

The French were attacked furiously on all sides. Those who attempted to defend themselves were soon overpowered; others, who endeavoured to pass for Italians, were known by their pronunciation of two words, which they were made to repeat—ceci and ciceri, and were, on their mispronunciation, immediately put to death. In a few hours more than four thousand weltered in their blood. Every town in Sicily followed the example of Palermo. Thus the Sicilian Vespers overthrew the tyranny of Charles of Anjou and of the Guelfs; separated the kingdom of Sicily from that of Naples; and transferred the crown of the former to Don Pedro of Aragon, the son-in-law of Manfred, who was considered the heir to the house of Hohenstaufen.

Charles of Anjou, the first French king of the Two Sicilies, survived the Sicilian Vespers only three years. He died on the 7th of January, 1285, aged sixty-five years. At this period his son, Charles II, was a prisoner in the hands of the Sicilians; he was set at liberty in 1288, in pursuance of a treaty by which he acknowledged the separation and independence of the[114] two crowns of Naples and Sicily. The first was assigned to the Guelfs and the house of Anjou; the second to the Ghibellines and the house of Aragon; but Nicholas IV, by whose influence the treaty was made, broke it, released Charles from his oath, and authorised him to begin the war anew.

WANING INFLUENCE OF KING, EMPEROR, AND POPE

This war, which lasted twenty-four years, occupied the whole reign of Charles II. This prince was milder than his father, but weaker also. He had neither the stern character of Charles of Anjou, which excited hatred, nor his talents, which commanded admiration or respect. He always called himself the protector of the Guelf party, but ceased to be its champion; and neither the court of Rome, nor the Guelf republics, any longer demanded counsel, direction, or support from the court of Naples. He died on the 5th of May, 1309, and was succeeded by his son Robert. The influence of the emperors, as protectors of the Ghibelline party, during this period was almost extinct in Italy. Rudolf of Habsburg, who reigned with glory in Germany from 1273 to 1291, never passed the Alps to be acknowledged emperor and king of the Lombards; after him, Adolphus of Nassau, and his successor, Albert of Austria—the one assassinated in 1298, the other in 1308—remained alike strangers to Italy. The Ghibelline party was, accordingly, no longer supported or directed by the emperors, but it maintained itself by its own resources, by the attachment of the nobles to the imperial name, and still more by the self-interest of the captains, who, raised to the signoria either by the choice of the people or of their faction, created for themselves, in the name of the empire, a sovereignty to which the Italians unhesitatingly gave the name of tyranny.

Lastly, the third power, that of the pope, which till then had directed the politics of Italy, ceased about this time to follow a regular system, and consequently to give a powerful impulse to faction. Martin IV, whose life terminated two months after that of Charles I, had always acted as his creature, had seconded him in his enmities, in his thirst of vengeance against the Sicilians, and in his efforts to recover his dominion over Italy. But Honorius IV, who reigned after him, from 1285 to 1287, appeared to have no other thought than that of aggrandising the noble house of Savelli at Rome, of which he was himself a member; after him, Nicholas IV, from 1288 to 1292, was not less zealous in his efforts to do as much for that of Colonna. His predecessor, Nicholas III, had a few years previously set the example, by applying all his power as pope to the elevation of the Orsini. These are nearly the first examples of the nepotism of the popes, who had hardly yet begun to feel themselves sovereigns. They raised these three great Roman families above all their ancient rivals; almost all the castles in the patrimony of St. Peter, and in the Campagna of Rome, became their property. The houses of Colonna, Orsini, and Savelli, to support their nobility, soon began to traffic in their valour, by hiring themselves out with a body of cavalry to such as would employ them in war; whilst the peasants, their vassals, seduced by the spirit of adventure, and still more by the hope of plunder, abandoned agriculture to enlist in the troops of their liege lord. The effect of their disorderly lives was that the two provinces nearest Rome soon became the worst cultivated and the least populous in all Italy, although the treasures of Europe poured into the capital of the faithful. After Nicholas IV, a poor hermit, humble, timid, and ignorant, was raised,[115] in 1294, to the chair of St. Peter, under the name of Celestine V. His election was the effect of a sudden burst of religious enthusiasm, which seized the college of cardinals; although this holy senate had never before shown themselves more ready to consult religion than policy. Celestine V maintained himself only a few months on the throne; all his sanctity could not serve as an excuse for his incapacity; and the cardinal Benedict Cajetan, who persuaded him to abdicate, was elected pope in his place, under the name of Boniface VIII. Boniface, able, expert, intriguing, and unscrupulous, would have restored the authority of the holy see, which during the latter pontificates had been continually sinking, if the violence of his character, his ungovernable pride, and his transports of passion, had not continually thwarted his policy. He endeavoured at first to augment the power of the Guelfs by the aid of France; he afterwards engaged in a violent quarrel with the family of Colonna, whom he would willingly have exterminated; and, finally, taking offence against Philip the Fair, he treated him with as much haughtiness as if he had been the lowest of his vassals. Insulted, and even arrested, by the French prince, in his palace of Anagni, on the 7th of September, 1303, Boniface died a few weeks afterwards of rage and humiliation.

THE REPUBLIC OF PISA

The republic of Pisa was one of the first to make known to the world the riches and power which a small state might acquire by the aid of commerce and liberty. Pisa had astonished the shores of the Mediterranean by the number of vessels and galleys that sailed under her flag, by the succour she had given the crusaders, by the fear she had inspired at Constantinople, and by the conquest of Sardinia and the Balearic Isles. Pisa was the first to introduce into Tuscany the arts that ennoble wealth; her dome, her baptistery, her leaning tower, and her Campo Santo, which the traveller’s eye embraces at one glance, but does not weary of beholding, had been successively built from the year 1063 to the end of the twelfth century. These chefs-d’œuvre had animated the genius of the Pisans; the great architects of the thirteenth century were, for the most, pupils of Nicholas of Pisa. But the moment was come in which the ruin of this glorious republic was at hand; a deep-rooted jealousy, to be dated from the conquest of Sardinia, had frequently, during the last two centuries, armed against each other the republics of Genoa and Pisa; a new war between them broke out in 1282. It is difficult to comprehend how two simple cities could put to sea such prodigious fleets as those of Pisa and Genoa. In 1282, Ginicel Sismondi commanded thirty Pisan galleys, of which he lost the half in a tempest on the 9th of September; the following year Rosso Sismondi commanded sixty-four; in 1284, Guido Jacia commanded twenty-four, and was vanquished.b

These repeated losses obliged the Pisans to ask succour from the Venetians, in alliance with whom, in the Levant, they had often beaten the Genoese. Alberto Morosini, a Venetian, mayor of Pisa, endeavoured to effect a confederacy, but in vain; the Venetians chose to remain neutral. True policy, however, ought to have counselled them to support a power, by the ruin of which, their determined enemies, the Genoese, increased so much in strength; and they had reason enough afterwards to perceive their error. The last misfortune, instead of discouraging the Pisans, inflamed them still more with a desire for vengeance; they made one of their greatest efforts by[116] arming seventy-two galleys, the command of which was given to Count Ugolino, already very powerful in Pisa; the flower of the nobility and Pisan citizens accompanied it, to which were added other smaller vessels. But instead of attacking the Genoese fleet, only thirty galleys strong, which were in Sardinia under the command of Giacaria, and which they might have easily overpowered, they lost precious time by insulting the city of Genoa, showing themselves before the port, throwing against it a few mortars, and challenging the Genoese to battle; and after these useless bravadoes returning home.

Pisa Defeated by Genoa near Meloria

Nothing is more valuable in war than season and opportunity. The Genoese had recalled the army of Giacaria with all expedition from Sardinia and soon equipped a fleet of eighty-eight galleys with many other smaller vessels, the command of which was given to Obert Doria. Putting to sea, and hearing that the Pisan armament was near Meloria, they advanced to that port. Doria, fearing that the superior number of their vessels might oblige the Pisans to refuse battle, and retire into harbour, advanced with only fifty-eight galleys, ordering the division of Giacaria to remain behind with the remaining thirty. The Pisans accepted battle, which was fought on the 6th of August with all the fury and animosity of two nations seeking to destroy each other. The succour which arrived to the Genoese with Giacaria, and which the Pisans did not expect, probably decided the fate of that day. The galley upon which was the mayor of Pisa, Alberto Morosini, fought furiously with the admiral’s ship, commanded by Admiral Doria, who was joined, however, by other principal galleys commanded by Admiral Giacaria. Even the galley which bore the great Pisan standard was taken by the galley called St. Matthew (San Matteo), where were many of the family of Doria, and by the galley Finale the great standard was torn and broken down, and the defeat was complete. Twenty-seven Pisan galleys were taken, and seven sunk; the remainder, rendered unserviceable, with the advantage of night they saved themselves in the neighbouring Pisan port, and with three of these the count Ugolino escaped. The killed[117] amounted to four thousand, and many prisoners, among whom was the son of Count Ugolino.

These losses with those in anterior battles, amounted to about eleven thousand, and all of the most considerable persons. This event destroyed the maritime power of Pisa, which could never again recover itself and assume the rank of her rivals. Many illustrious republics, as ancient and modern history demonstrate, have risen after the most heavy losses. Pisa, however, was no longer in this condition, and various causes combined to prevent her regaining it; the first of which was the loss of her bravest and wisest citizens taken prisoners, and whom the Genoese, actuated by a cruel and useless policy, refused to set at liberty; and being kept in prison for nearly fifteen years, or so long as the war lasted, the greater part of them finished their life in wretchedness.d

Perfidy and Fall of Ugolino

While the republic was thus exhausted by this great reverse of fortune, it was attacked by the league of the Tuscan Guelfs; and a powerful citizen, to whom it had entrusted itself, betrayed his country to enslave it. Ugolino was count of the Gherardesca, a mountainous country situated along the coast, between Leghorn and Piombino; he was of Ghibelline origin, but had married his sister to Giovan di Gallura, chief of the Guelfs of Pisa and of Sardinia. From that time he artfully opposed the Guelfs to the Ghibellines; and though several accused him of having decided the issue of the battle of Meloria, others regarded him as the person most able, most powerful by his alliance, and most proper, to reconcile Pisa with the Guelf league. The Pisans, amidst the dangers of the republic, felt the necessity of a dictator. They named Ugolino captain-general for ten years; and the new commander did, indeed, obtain peace with the Guelf league; but not till he had caused all the fortresses of the Pisan territory to be opened by his creatures to the Lucchese and Florentines—a condition of his treaty with them which he dared not publicly avow. From that time he sought only to strengthen his own despotism, by depriving all the magistrates of power, and by intimidating the archbishop Roger degli Ubaldini, who held jointly with him the highest rank in the city. The nephew of Ubaldini, having opposed him with some haughtiness, was killed by him on the spot with his own hand. His violence, and the number of executions which he ordered, soon rendered him equally odious to the two parties; but he had the art, in his frequent changes from one to the other, to make the opposite party believe him powerfully supported by that with which he at the moment sided. In the summer of 1282 the Guelfs were exiled; but finding in the Ghibelline chiefs, the Gualandi Sismondi and Lanfranchi, a haughtiness which he thought he had subdued, he charged his son to introduce anew the Guelfs into the city. His project was discovered and prevented; the Ghibellines called the people on all sides to arms and liberty. On the 1st of July, 1288, Ugolino was besieged in the palace of the signoria; the insurgents, unable to vanquish the obstinate resistance opposed to them by himself, his sons, and his adherents, set fire to the palace; and, having entered it amidst the flames, dragged forth Ugolino, two of his sons, and two of his grandsons, and threw them into the tower of the Sette Vie. The key was given to the archbishop, from whom was expected the vigilance of an enemy, but the charity of a priest. That charity, however, was soon exhausted; the key after a few months was thrown into the river; and the wretched count[118] perished in those agonies of hunger, and of paternal and filial love, upon which poetry, sculpture, and painting have conferred celebrity.

The victory over Count Ugolino, achieved by the most ardent of the Ghibellines, redoubled the enthusiasm and audacity of that party, and soon determined them to renew the war with the Guelfs of Tuscany. Notwithstanding the danger into which the republic was thrown by the ambition of the last captain-general, it continued to believe, when engaged in a hazardous war, that the authority of a single person over the military, the finances, and the tribunals was necessary to its protection; and it trusted that the terrible chastisement just inflicted on the tyrant would hinder any other from following his example. Accordingly Guido de Montefeltro was named captain. He had acquired a high reputation in defending Forlì against the French forces of Charles of Anjou; and the republic had not to repent of its choice. He recovered by force of arms all the fortresses which Ugolino had given up to the Lucchese and Florentines. The Pisan militia, whom Montefeltro armed with crossbows, which he had trained them to use with precision, became the terror of Tuscany. The Guelfs of Florence and Lucca were glad to make peace in 1293.

FLORENCE; THE FEUD OF THE BIANCHI AND THE NERI

While the Pisans became habituated to trusting the government to a single person, the Florentines became still more attached to the most democratic forms of liberty. In 1282 they removed the anziani, whom they had at first set at the head of their government, to make room for the priori delle arti, whose name and office were preserved not only to the end of the republic, but even to our day. The corporation of trades, which they called the arti, were distinguished by the titles of major and minor. At first only three, afterwards six, major arti were admitted into the government. The college, consisting of six priori delle arti, always assembled, and living together, during two months, in the public palace, formed the signoria, which represented the republic. Ten years later, the Florentines completed this signoria, by placing at its head the gonfalonier of justice, elected also for two months, from among the representatives of the arts, manufactures, and commerce. When he displayed the gonfalon, or standard of the state, the citizens were obliged to rise and assist in the execution of the law. The arrogance of the nobles, their quarrels, and the disturbance of the public peace by their frequent battles in the streets, had, in 1292, irritated the whole population against them. Giano della Bella, himself a noble, but sympathising in the passions and resentment of the people, proposed to bring them to order by summary justice, and to confide the execution of it to the gonfalonier whom he caused to be elected. The Guelfs had been so long at the head of the republic, that their noble families, whose wealth had immensely increased, placed themselves above all law. Giano determined that their nobility itself should be a title of exclusion, and a commencement of punishment; a rigorous edict, bearing the title of “ordinance of justice,” first designated thirty-seven Guelf families of Florence, whom it declared noble and great, and on this account excluded forever from the signoria; refusing them at the same time the privilege of renouncing their nobility, in order to place themselves on a footing with the other citizens. When these families troubled the public peace by battle or assassination, a summary information, or even common report, was sufficient to induce the gonfalonier to attack them at the[119] head of the militia, raze their houses to the ground, and deliver their persons to the podesta, to be punished according to their crimes. If other families committed the same disorders, if they troubled the state by their private feuds and outrages, the signoria was authorised to ennoble them, as a punishment of their crimes, in order to subject them to the same summary justice. A similar organisation, under different names, was made at Siena, Pistoia, and Lucca. In all the republics of Tuscany, and in the greater number of those of Lombardy, the nobility by its turbulence was excluded from all the magistracies; and in more than one, a register of nobles was opened, as at Florence, on which to inscribe, by way of punishment, the names of those who violated the public peace.

However rigorous these precautions were, they did not suffice to retain in subjection to the laws an order of men who believed themselves formed to rule, and who despised the citizens with whom they were associated. These very nobles, to whom was denied all participation in the government of the republic, and almost the protection and equality of the law, were no sooner entered into their mountain castles, than they became sovereigns, and exercised despotic power over their vassals. The most cultivated and wooded part of the Apennines belonged to the republic of Pistoia. It was a considerable district, bordering on the Lucchese, Modenese, Bolognese, and Florentine territory, and was emphatically designated by the name of the “Mountain.” It was covered with castles belonging either to the Cancellieri, or Panciatichi, the two families most powerful in arms and wealth in all Italy; the first was Guelf, the second Ghibelline; and as the party of the former then ruled in Tuscany, they had obtained the exile of the Panciatichi from Pistoia. The Cancellieri took advantage of this exile to increase their power by the purchase of land, by conquest, and by alliance; in their family alone they reckoned one hundred men at arms.b

The Cerchi and the Donati were, for riches, nobility, and the number and influence of their followers, perhaps the two most distinguished families in Florence. Being neighbours, both in the city and the country, there had arisen between them some slight displeasure, which however had not occasioned an open quarrel, and perhaps never would have produced any serious effect if the malignant humours had not been increased by new causes. It happened that Lore, son of Gulielmo, and Geri, son of Bertacca, both of the family of Cancellieri, playing together, and coming to words, Geri was slightly wounded by Lore. This displeased Gulielmo; and, designing by a suitable apology to remove all cause of further animosity, he ordered his son to go to the house of the father of the youth whom he had wounded, and[120] ask pardon. Lore obeyed his father; but this act of virtue failed to soften the cruel mind of Bertacca, and having caused Lore to be seized, in order to add the greatest indignity to his brutal act, he ordered his servants to chop off the youth’s hand upon a block used for cutting meat and then said to him, “Go to thy father, and tell him that sword-wounds are cured with iron and not with words.”

The unfeeling barbarity of this act so greatly exasperated Gulielmo that he ordered his people to take arms for his revenge. Bertacca prepared for his defence, and not only that family, but the whole city of Pistoia, became divided. And as the Cancellieri were descended from a Cancelliere who had had two wives, of whom one was called Bianca (white), one party was named by those who were descended from her, Bianca; and the other, by way of greater distinction, was called Nera (black). Much and long-continued strife took place between the two, attended with the death of many men and the destruction of much property; and not being able to effect a union amongst themselves, but weary of the evil, and anxious either to bring it to an end or, by engaging others in their quarrel, increase it, they came to Florence, where the Neri, on account of their familiarity with the Donati, were favoured by Corso, the head of that family; and on this account the Bianchi, that they might have a powerful head to defend them against the Donati, had recourse to Veri de Cerchi, a man in no respect inferior to Corso.

This quarrel, and the parties in it, brought from Pistoia, increased the old animosity between the Cerchi and the Donati, and it was already so manifest, that the priors and all well-disposed men were in hourly apprehension of its breaking out, and causing a division of the whole city. They therefore applied to the pontiff, praying that he would interpose his authority between these turbulent parties, and provide the remedy which they found themselves unable to furnish. The pope sent for Veri, and charged him to make peace with the Donati, at which Veri exhibited great astonishment, saying that he had no enmity against them, and that as pacification presupposes war, he did not know, there being no war between them, how peace-making could be necessary. Veri having returned from Rome without anything being effected, the rage of the parties increased to such a degree that any trivial accident seemed sufficient to make it burst forth, as indeed presently happened.

It was in the month of May, during which, and upon holidays, it is the custom of Florence to hold festivals and public rejoicings throughout the city. Some youths of the Donati family, with their friends, upon horseback, were standing near the church of the Holy Trinity to look at a party of ladies who were dancing; thither also came some of the Cerchi, like the Donati, accompanied with many of the nobility, and, not knowing that the Donati were before them, pushed their horses and jostled them; thereupon the Donati, thinking themselves insulted, drew their swords, nor were the Cerchi at all backward to do the same, and not till after the interchange of many wounds, they separated. This disturbance was the beginning of great evils; for the whole city became divided, the people as well as the nobility, and the parties took the names of the Bianchi and the Neri. The Cerchi were at the head of the Bianca faction, to which adhered the Adimari, the Abati, a part of the Tosinghi, of the Bardi, of the Rossi, of the Frescobaldi, of the Nerli, and of the Manelli; all the Mozzi, the Scali, Gherardini, Cavalcanti, Malespini, Bostichi, Giandonati, Vecchietti, and Arrigucci. To these were joined many families of the people, and all the Ghibellines then in[121] Florence, so that their great numbers gave them almost the entire government of the city.

The Donati, at the head of whom was Corso, joined the Nera party, to which also adhered those members of the above-named families who did not take part with the Bianchi; and besides these, the whole of the Pazzi, the Bisdomini, Manieri, Bagnesi, Tornaquinci, Spini, Buondelmonti, Gianfigliazzi, and the Brunelleschi. Nor did the evil confine itself to the city alone, for the whole country was divided upon it, so that the captains of the Six Parts, and whoever were attached to the Guelfic party or the well-being of the republic, were very much afraid that this new division would occasion the destruction of the city, and give new life to the Ghibelline faction. They therefore sent again to Pope Boniface, desiring that, unless he wished that city which had always been the shield of the church should either be ruined or become Ghibelline, he would consider of some means for her relief. The pontiff thereupon sent to Florence, as his legate, Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, a Portuguese, who, finding the Bianchi, as the most powerful, the least in fear, not quite submissive to him, he interdicted the city, and left it in anger; so that greater confusion now prevailed than previously to his coming.

The minds of men being in great excitement, it happened that at a funeral which many of the Donati and the Cerchi attended, they first came to words and then to arms, from which however nothing but merely tumult resulted at the moment. However, having each retired to their houses, the Cerchi determined to attack the Donati, but, by the valour of Corso, they were repulsed and great numbers of them wounded. The city was in arms. The laws and the seigniory were set at nought by the rage of the nobility, and the best and wisest citizens were full of apprehension. The Donati and their followers, being the least powerful, were in the greatest fear, and to provide for their safety, they called together Corso, the captains of the Parts, and the other leaders of the Neri, and resolved to apply to the pope to appoint some personage of royal blood, that he might reform Florence, thinking by this means to overcome the Bianchi. Their meeting and determination became known to the priors, and the adverse party represented it as a conspiracy against the liberties of the republic. Both parties being in arms, the seigniory, one of whom at that time was the poet Dante, took courage, and from his advice and prudence, caused the people to rise for the preservation of order, and being joined by many from the country, they compelled the leaders of both parties to lay aside their arms, and banished Corso Donati, with many of the Neri. And as an evidence of the impartiality of their motives, they also banished many of the Bianchi, who, however, soon afterwards, under pretence of some justifiable cause, returned.

The Pope sends Charles of Valois as Conciliator (1301 A.D.)

Corso and his friends, thinking the pope favourable to their party, went to Rome, and laid their grievances before him, having previously forwarded a statement of them in writing. Charles of Valois, brother of the king of France, was then at the papal court, having been called into Italy by the king of Naples, to go over into Sicily. The pope, therefore, at the earnest prayers of the banished Florentines, consented to send Charles to Florence, till the season suitable for his going to Sicily should arrive. He therefore came, and although the Bianchi, who then governed, were very apprehensive, still, as the head of the Guelfs, and appointed by the pope, they did not[122] dare to oppose him. He had, however, agreed not to seek to acquire sovereign authority over the city, and is said to have pocketed 17,000 florins to bind the bargain.

Thus authorised, Charles armed all his friends and followers, which step gave the people so strong a suspicion that he designed to rob them of their liberty, that each took arms, and kept at his own house, in order to be ready, if Charles should make any such attempt. The Cerchi and the leaders of the Bianchi faction had acquired universal hatred, by having, whilst at the head of the republic, conducted themselves with unbecoming pride; and this induced Corso and the banished of the Nera party to return to Florence, knowing well that Charles and the captains of the Parts were favourable to them. And whilst the citizens, for fear of Charles, kept themselves in arms, Corso, with all the banished, and followed by many others, entered Florence without the least impediment. And although Veri de Cerchi was advised to oppose him, he refused to do so, saying that he wished the people of Florence, against whom he came, should punish him. However the contrary happened, for he was welcomed, not punished by them; and it behooved Veri to save himself by flight.

Corso, having forced the Pinti Gate, assembled his party at San Pietro Maggiore, near his own house, where, having drawn together a great number of friends and people desirous of change, he set at liberty all who had been imprisoned for offences, whether against the state or against individuals. He compelled the existing seigniory to withdraw privately to their own houses, elected a new one from the people of the Nera party, and for five days plundered the leaders of the Bianchi. The Cerchi and the other heads of their faction, finding Charles opposed to them, and the greater part of the people their enemies, withdrew from the city, and retired to their strongholds. And although at first they would not listen to the advice of the pope, they were now compelled to turn to him for assistance, declaring that instead of uniting the city, Charles had caused greater disunion than before. The pope again sent Matteo d’Acquasparta, his legate, who made peace between the Cerchi and the Donati, and strengthened it with marriages and new betrothals. But wishing that the Bianchi should participate in the employments of the government, to which the Neri who were then at the head of it would not consent, he withdrew, with no more satisfaction nor less enraged than on the former occasion, and left the city interdicted for disobedience.

Both parties remained in Florence, and were equally discontented, the Neri from seeing their enemies at hand, and apprehending the loss of their power, and the Bianchi from finding themselves without either honour or authority; and to these natural causes of animosity new injuries were added. Niccolo de’ Cerchi, with many of his friends, went to his estates, and being arrived at the bridge of Affrico, was attacked by Simone, son of Corso Donati. The contest was obstinate, and on each side had a sorrowful conclusion; for Niccolo was slain, and Simone was so severely wounded that he died on the following night.

This event again disturbed the entire city; and although the Neri were most to blame, they were defended by those who were at the head of affairs; and before sentence was delivered, a conspiracy of the Bianchi with Piero Ferrante, one of the barons who had accompanied Charles, was discovered, by whose assistance they sought to be replaced in the government. The matter became known by letters addressed to him by the Cerchi, although some were of the opinion that they were not genuine, but written and pretended[123] to be found by the Donati, to abate the infamy which their party had acquired by the death of Niccolo. The whole of the Cerchi were however banished with their followers of the Bianca party, of whom was Dante the poet, their property was confiscated, and their houses were pulled down,f Dante was at Siena at the time of the pretended conspiracy. It was decreed that if he ever returned to his native city he should be burned alive. Another of the banished was Ser Petracco di Parenzo dall’Incisa, whose son Francesco Petrarch saw the light in exile.h Charles, having effected the purpose of his coming, left the city, and returned to the pope to pursue his enterprise against Sicily, in which he was neither wiser nor more fortunate than he had been at Florence; so that with disgrace and the loss of many of his followers, he withdrew to France.f

FOOTNOTES

From the middle of the twelfth century we have seen nearly all the towns of northern Italy shake off the imperial yoke. Towards the end of the thirteenth the emperor Rudolf, instead of disputing their independence, offered to sell it to them for money. In the franchised communes there could no longer be any pretension to enslave fellow-citizens, but one could be made of governing them. Riches became a title for taking part in authority, by reason of the greater interest which the rich had in the preservation and order of society. It may be seen that a right derived from wealth is less extended than one derived from landed property. But in towns there could hardly be landed property properly so called. One could occupy a house, but not have those lands which, by their extent, position, and the number of men cultivating them, give power to their possessor.

Moreover, the privileged classes in towns distinguished themselves from those in the country by the moderation of their pretensions. The latter were always seen on horseback, clothed in armour, helmets on their heads, and bearing arms whose use they reserved to themselves. They always recalled the fact that their right was founded on their force and valiance. In towns this apparel could have no use; riches would bring clients, and seduction gain friends. Little by little the exercise of authority, in so far as it was prolonged, happy, and met with favour, became a right to new marks of confidence, these being the supposed debt of those governed to those governing, and also supposed in the latter an increase of experience, a transmission of knowledge, of good rules, and a just ambition to make a name illustrious.

The success of some lords had excited the ambition of all. But in the large towns the mass of the population opposed a strong resistance to them. Milan obliged its patricians to be content with a part of the magistrature.[125] After having excited general indignation by taking every office, the Milanese nobles saw themselves reduced to signing a treaty with the plebeians by which the latter were admitted to an equal share in all public functions, from an ambassador’s charge to that of public trumpeter. The prouder ones retired to their castles and revenged themselves for their nullity by devastating the country. But even these devastations augmented the strength of the towns—that is, their population. The inhabitants, dispersed in a country open to ravages from the lords, ran to seek shelter for their families or goods in a walled city. Lordly feudal tyranny peopled the towns where so much resentment fermented against it and where increased industry and riches finally furnished the people the means of crushing these small tyrants.

When the translation of the holy see to Avignon left Rome to herself, the tocsin of the Capitol obliged the barons to leave their fortified retreats to come and humiliate themselves before the popular tribune, and history shows us the Savelli, Frangipani, Colonna, and Orsini, standing with bare heads, in a submissive attitude, subscribing tremblingly to an oath of fidelity to the “law of good estate” in the hands of an innkeeper. Their palaces were no longer their refuges, their excess had no more the privilege of impunity. An attempt to revolt forced them to hear their condemnation as though they were the lowest criminals and to receive the pardon more humiliating still. In the greater part of the republics where war demanded a leader, but where abuse of power had made all the native nobles hateful, the rival factions called on a foreign magistrate to govern Rome, demanded a head from Bologna and Venice furnished one to Padua, Pisa, and Milan.

In those states where an unfertile soil tempted but a small part of the population to agriculture, and offered no great means of power to territorial lords, these latter saw their influence decrease in proportion as other fortunes rose by means of commerce. They had, however, to maintain themselves, the resources of the military service and, above all, the faction.[126] This was the condition of the nobles of Genoa, Pisa, and Florence. When they tried violently to reseize the power, they were suppressed and punished. Their fortresses were razed, and hatred against them was carried to an injustice by depriving them of rights which were common to all.

It was in these commercial towns that the citizens, rapidly enriched by fortunate enterprise, began to compare themselves with those ancient possessors of privileges and to claim a share. A nobility sprang up of quite different origin from the first, which disputed its authority, but was disposed, like the other, to retain and abuse it. It is seen that the influence of the privileged classes was modified according to circumstances. Lords established in Italy by right of conquest ceased at the time of the invasion of the Goths and other foreigners to be rulers, and were no more than powerful vassals when regular monarchies arose.

When the commons were freed from the domination of the emperors, the feudal lords retained their power where they had sufficient land to preserve their pre-eminence. They shared or lost it from that or other causes, particularly from commerce, which brought other means of power to life which rivalled theirs. When these two kinds of nobles ceased to be rivals, they agreed in order to rule. The hatred of the people against the nobles hurried towns under the yoke of some of these powerful men, who had made it believed that they sincerely took the popular side. That is what cost the republic of Milan her proud liberty. In Genoa some ambitious nobles took the same means to preserve influence. The Dorias and Spinolas contracted an alliance with the people, and aided with feigned zeal in the introduction of democratic forms into the government. Other republics fell into an excess of distrust. Injustice nourished hatreds and deprived the state of its most illustrious citizens.b

AN EMPEROR ONCE MORE IN ITALY

On the 25th of November, 1308, the diet of Germany named Henry VII of Luxemburg as successor to Albert of Austria; and this election suddenly brought Italy back to the same struggle for her independence which she had[127] so heroically supported against the two Fredericks. From the death of the second Frederick, fifty-eight years had passed since she had seen an emperor. Rudolf of Habsburg, Adolphus of Nassau, and Albert of Austria had too much to do in Germany to occupy themselves with this constantly agitated country, where they could demand obedience only with arms in their hands. Henry VII was a brave, wise, and just prince; but he was neither rich nor powerful. He secured to his son, by marriage, the crown of Bohemia, which had excited some jealousy among the Germans; and he believed it would be expedient, in order to avoid all quarrel in the empire, to quit it for some time. To flatter the national vanity, he determined on an expedition to Italy.

Henry, himself a Belgian, had no power but in Belgium and the provinces adjoining France. From Luxemburg he went through the county of Burgundy to Lausanne. Here he received, in the summer of 1310, the ambassadors of the Italian states, who came to do him homage. He entered Piedmont, by Mont Cenis, towards the end of September, accompanied by only two thousand cavalry, the greater part of whom were Belgians, Franc-Comtois, or Savoyards. This force would have been wholly insufficient to subdue Italy; but Henry VII presented himself there as the supporter of just rights, of order, and, to a certain degree, of liberty.

The lords of all Lombardy and Piedmont came to present themselves to Henry; some at Turin, others at Asti. He received them with kindness, but declared his determination to establish legal order, such as had been settled by the Peace of Constance, in all the cities of the empire; and to name in each an imperial vicar, who should govern in concert with the municipal magistrates. Philippone di Langusco, at Pavia; Simon da Colobiano, at Vercelli; William Brusato, at Novara; Antonio Fisiraga, at Lodi, in obedience to this intimation, laid down the sovereign power. At the same time, Henry everywhere recalled the exiles, without distinction of party; at Como and Mantua, the Ghibellines; at Brescia and Piacenza, the Guelfs; leaving out, however, the exiles of Verona, a powerful city, which he did not visit, and which was governed by Can’ Grande della Scala, the most able Ghibelline captain in Italy, the best soldier, the best politician, and the person whose services and attachment the emperor most valued. The rich and populous city of Milan required also to be treated with address and consideration. The archbishop Otto Visconti had retained the principal authority in his hands to a very advanced age. But long previously to his death, which took place in 1295, he had transferred to his nephew, Matteo Visconti, the title of captain of the people, and had accustomed the Milanese to consider him as his lieutenant and successor. Matteo did, in fact, govern after him, and with almost despotic power, from 1295 to 1302. He was also named lord of several other cities of Lombardy; at the same time he strengthened his family by many rich alliances. But Visconti had not the art to conciliate either the remains of national pride, or the love[128] of liberty which still subsisted among his subjects, or the jealousy of the other princes of Lombardy. A league to give the preponderance to the Guelf party in this province was formed by Alberto Scotto, lord of Piacenza, and by Ghiberto da Correggio, lord of Parma; they forced the Visconti to quit Milan, in 1302, and installed in their place Guido della Torre and his family, who had been exiles twenty-five years. When Henry VII presented himself before Milan, he found it governed by Guido della Torre and the Guelfs. Matteo Visconti and the Ghibellines were exiled. Henry exacted their recall; he was crowned in the church of St. Ambrose, on the 6th of January, 1311, and afterwards asked of the city a gratuity for his army of one hundred thousand florins. Till then the Italians had seen in the monarch only a just and impartial pacificator; but when he demanded money, the different parties united against him.

MILAN SEDITIONS; GENOA AND VENICE AT WAR

A violent sedition broke forth at Milan. The Della Torres and the Guelfs were forced to leave that city. Matteo Visconti and the Ghibellines were recalled, and the former restored to absolute power. The Guelfs, too, in the rest of Lombardy, rose and took arms against the emperor. Crema, Cremona, Lodi, Brescia, and Como revolted at the same time. Henry consumed the greater part of the summer in besieging Brescia, which at last, towards the end of September, 1311, he forced to capitulate. He granted to that town equitable conditions, impatient as he was to enter Tuscany; but, although Lombardy seemed subdued to his power, he left more germs of discontent and discord in it than he had found about a year before.

Henry VII arrived with his little army at Genoa, on the 21st of October, 1311. That powerful republic now maintained at St. Jean d’Acre, at Pera opposite to Constantinople, and at Kaffa in the Black Sea, military and mercantile colonies, which made themselves respected for their valour, at the same time that they carried on the richest commerce of the Mediterranean. Several islands in the Archipelago, amongst others that of Chios, had passed in sovereignty to Genoese families. The palaces of Genoa, already called the “superb,” were the admiration of travellers. Its sanguinary rivalry with Pisa had terminated by securing to the former the empire of the Tyrrhene Sea. From that time Genoa had no other rival than Venice.

An accidental rencounter of the fleets of these two cities in the sea of Cyprus lighted up between them, in 1293, a terrible war, which for seven years stained the Mediterranean with blood, and consumed immense wealth. In 1298, the Genoese admiral Lamba Doria, meeting the Venetian commander Andrea Dandolo at Corzuola or Corcyra the Black, at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf, burned sixty-six of his galleys, and took eighteen, which he brought into the port of Genoa, with seven thousand prisoners, suffering only twelve vessels to escape. The humbled Venetians, in the next year, asked and obtained peace. The Genoese, vanquishers in turn of the Pisans and Venetians, passed for the bravest, the most enterprising, and the most fortunate mariners of all Italy. The government of their city was entirely democratic; but the two chains of mountains which extend from Genoa, the one towards Provence, and the other towards Tuscany (called by the Italians Le Riviere di Genoa, because the foot of these mountains forms the shore of the sea), were covered with the castles of the Ligurian nobles; the peasantry were all dependent on them, and were always ready to make war for their[129] liege lords. Four families were pre-eminent for their power and wealth—the Doria and the Spinola, Ghibellines; the Grimaldi and the Fieschi, Guelfs. These nobles, incensed against each other by hereditary enmity, had disturbed the state by so many outrages that the people adopted, with respect to them, the same policy as that of the Tuscan republics, and had entirely excluded them from the magistracy. On the other hand, they had rendered such eminent and frequent services to the republic; above all, they had produced such great naval commanders, that the people, whenever the state was in danger, had always recourse to them for the choice of an admiral.

Seduced by the glory of these chiefs, the people often afterwards shed their blood in their private quarrels; but often, also, wearied by the continual disturbances which the nobles excited, they had recourse to foreigners to subdue them to the common law. The people were in a state of irritation against the Ligurian nobles, when Henry VII arrived at Genoa, in 1311; and to oblige them to maintain a peace which they were continually breaking, the Genoese conferred on that monarch absolute authority over the republic for twenty years. But when the emperor suppressed the podesta, and then the abbate or defender of the people, and afterwards demanded of the city a gift of sixty thousand florins, the Genoese perceived that they needed a government, not only to suppress civil discord, but also to protect rights not less precious than peace; an internal fermentation of increasing danger manifested itself; and Henry was happy to quit Genoa in safety, on the 16th of February, 1312, on board a Pisan fleet, which transported him with about fifteen hundred cavalry to Tuscany.[12]

HENRY’S CORONATION AND SUDDEN DEATH

Henry VII when he entered Italy, was impartial between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. He owed his election to the influence of the popes, and he was accompanied by cardinal legates, who were to crown him at Rome. He had no distrust either of Robert, then king of Naples, the son of Charles II, or of the Guelf cities. He had no hereditary affection for the Ghibellines, the zealous partisans of a family long extinct. He endeavoured, accordingly, to hold the balance fairly between the two parties, and to reconcile them wherever he was allowed; but experience had already taught him that the very name of elected emperor had a magic influence on the Italians, either to excite the devoted affection of the Ghibellines, or the terror and hatred of the Guelfs. It was with the latter that resistance to him had begun in the preceding year in Lombardy; and that revolt had burst forth on all sides since his departure. Robert, king of Naples, who assumed the part of champion of the Guelf party, already testified an open distrust of him; and Florence, which by its prudence, ability, wealth, and courage was the real director of that party, took arms to resist him, refused audience to his ambassadors, raised all the Guelfs of Italy against him, and finally constrained him to place that city under the ban of the empire. The republic of Pisa, on the other hand, whose affection for the Ghibelline party was connected with its hopes as well as its recollections, served him with a devotion, zeal, and prodigality which he had not met elsewhere. The Pisans had sent him, when at Lausanne, a present of sixty thousand florins, to aid him on his passage to Italy. They paid his debts at Genoa, and they gave him another present when he entered their city; finally, they placed at his disposal thirty galleys and six hundred crossbowmen, who accompanied him to Rome, where he received the golden crown of the empire from the hands of the pope’s legate, in the church of St. John Lateran, on the 29th of June, 1312. The Romans, who had taken arms against him, and had received within their walls a Neapolitan garrison, kept their gates shut during the ceremony, and would not suffer one of his soldiers to enter the city.

The coronation of the emperor at Rome was the term of service of the Germans; they took no interest afterwards in what was passing, or might be done in that country. They were anxious to depart; and Henry found himself at Tivoli, where he passed the summer, almost entirely abandoned by his transalpine soldiers. Had the Neapolitan king Robert been bolder, Henry would have been in great danger. In the autumn, however, the Ghibellines and Bianchi of central Italy rallied round him, and formed a formidable army, with which he marched to attack Florence, on the 19th of September, 1312. The Florentines, accustomed to leave their defence to mercenaries, whose valour was always ready for pay, made small account of a military courage which they saw so common among men whom they despised; but no people carried civil courage and firmness in misfortune further. Their army was soon infinitely superior in numbers to that of Henry; they carried on with perfect calmness their commerce and negotiations, as if their enemies had already departed for Germany, but they would not drive them out of their territory by giving battle; they preferred bearing patiently their depredations, and waiting till they had worn out their enthusiasm, exhausted their finances, and should depart of themselves, which they did on the 6th of January, 1313, finding they could obtain no advantage.

Henry, after giving some months of repose to his army, took the command of the militia of Pisa, and made war at their head against Lucca; at the[131] same time, he solicited from his brother, the archbishop of Trèves, a German reinforcement, which he obtained in the following month of July. On the 5th of August, 1313, Henry VII departed from Pisa, commanding twenty-five hundred ultramontane and fifteen hundred Italian cavalry, with a proportionate number of infantry. He began his march towards Rome, having been informed that Robert, called by the Florentines to their aid, advanced with all the forces of the Guelf party to oppose him. The declining military reputation of the Neapolitans inspired the Germans with little fear, and Robert had but a small number of French cavalry to give courage to his army; but the priests and monks, animated with zeal in defence of the ancient Guelf party and the independence of the church, seconded him with their prayers, and the report soon spread that they had seconded him in another manner and in their own way. The emperor took the road of San Miniato to Castel Fiorentino, arrived at Buon Convento, twelve miles beyond Siena, and stopped there to celebrate the festival of St. Bartholomew. On the 24th of August, 1313, he received the communion from the hands of a Dominican monk, and expired a few hours afterwards. It was said the monk had mixed the juice of Napel in the consecrated cup. It was said, also, that Henry was already attacked by a malady which he concealed. A carbuncle had manifested itself below the knee; and a cold bath, which he took to calm the burning irritation, perhaps occasioned his sudden and unexpected death.

RIVAL EMPERORS; ECCLESIASTICAL DISSENSIONS

The electors of the empire were not convoked at Frankfort to name a successor to Henry VII till ten months after his death. Ten, instead of seven princes presented themselves; two pretenders disputed the electoral rights in each of the houses of Saxony, Bohemia, and Brandenburg. The electors, divided into two colleges, named simultaneously, on the 19th of October, 1314, two emperors; the one, Ludwig IV of Bavaria; the other, Frederick III of Austria. Their rights appeared equal; their adherents in Germany were also of nearly equal strength; the sword only could decide; and war was accordingly declared and carried on till the 28th of September, 1322, when Frederick was vanquished and made prisoner at Mühldorf.

The church abstained, while the civil war lasted, from pronouncing between the two pretenders to the empire. Clement V did not witness their double election; he died on the 20th of April, 1314. It was necessary, two years afterwards, to use fraud and violence, to confine the cardinals in conclave at Lyons, for the purpose of naming his successor. They at last elected the bishop of Avignon. He was a native of Cahors, the devoted creature of King Robert of Naples, and took the name of John XXII. He was the first who made Avignon, which was his episcopal town, the residence of the Roman court, exiled from Italy. He was an intriguer, notoriously profligate, scandalously avaricious; he fancied himself, however, a philosopher, and took a part in the quarrel between the realists and nominalists; he made himself violent enemies in the schools, on the members of which he sometimes inflicted the punishment of death. While he used such violence towards his adversaries as heretics, he shook the credit of the court of Rome, by being himself accused of heresy. His great object was to raise to high temporal power the cardinal Bertrand de Poiet, whom he called his nephew, and who was believed to be his son. For that purpose he availed himself of the war between the two pretenders to the empire,[132] regarded by him as a prolongation of the interregnum, during which he asserted all the rights of the emperors devolved on the holy see. He charged Cardinal Bertrand to exercise those rights as legate in Lombardy, crush the Ghibellines, support the Guelfs, but above all, subdue both to the authority of the church and its legate.

The cardinal Bertrand de Poiet launched his excommunications and employed the soldiers whom his father had raised for him in Provence, particularly against Matteo Visconti, lord of Milan, one of the most able and powerful of the Ghibelline chiefs. Visconti made himself beloved by the Milanese, whom he had always treated with consideration. Without being virtuous, he had preserved his reputation unstained by crime. His mind was enlightened. To a perfect knowledge of mankind, he added quick-sightedness, prompt decision, and a certain military glory, heightened by that of four sons, his faithful lieutenants, who were all distinguished among the brave. The Italians gave him the surname of Great, at a period when, it is true, they were prodigal of that epithet. Matteo Visconti, in his war with the Lombard Guelfs, took possession of Pavia, Tortona, and Alessandria. He besieged, in concert with the Genoese Ghibellines, Robert king of Naples, who had shut himself up in Genoa, desirous of making that city the fortress of the Guelfs of Lombardy. Visconti compelled the retreat of Philip of Valois, who, before he was king, had entered Italy at the solicitation of the pope, in 1320.

The following year he vanquished Raymond de Cardona, a Catalonian, and one of the pope’s generals; he persuaded Frederick of Austria, who had sent his brother to aid the pope, to recall his Germans, making him sensible it could suit neither of the pretenders to the empire to weaken the Ghibellines, who defended in Italy the interests of whoever of the two remained conqueror. But, after having made war against the church party twenty years, without ever suspecting that he betrayed his faith, for he was religious without bigotry, age awakened in him the terrors of superstition; he began to fear that the excommunications of the legate would deprive him of salvation; he abdicated in favour of his eldest son Galeazzo, and died a few weeks afterwards, on the 22nd of June, 1322. The remorse and scruples of Matteo Visconti had carried trouble and disorder into his own party, and gave boldness to that of his adversaries. A violent fermentation at Milan at length burst forth; Galeazzo was obliged to fly, and the republic was proclaimed anew; but virtue and patriotism, without which it could not subsist, were extinguished; and after a few weeks Galeazzo was recalled, and reinvested with the lordship of Milan.

The two parties of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, since the death of Henry VII, no longer nearly balanced each other in virtue, talents, and patriotism. In the beginning of their struggle, there were almost as many republics on one side as the other; and sentiments as pure and a devotion as generous equally animated the partisans of the empire and of the church. But, in the fourteenth century, the faction of the Ghibellines had become that of tyranny—of the Guelfs that of liberty. The former displayed those great military and political talents which personal ambition usually develops. In the second were to be found, almost exclusively, patriotism, and the heroism which sacrifices to it every personal interest. The republic of Pisa alone, in Italy, united the love of liberty with the sentiments of the Ghibelline party. This republic had been thunderstruck by the death of Henry VII at a moment when a career of glory and prosperity seemed to open on him. Pisa, exhausted by the prodigious efforts which she had made to serve him, was true to herself,[133] when all the Guelfs of Tuscany rose at once, on the death of Henry, to avenge on her the terror which that monarch had inspired. She gave the command of her militia to Uguccione dà Faggiuola, a noble of the mountainous part of Romagna, which, with the March, produced the best soldiers in Italy. The Pisans, under the command of Faggiuola, obtained two signal advantages over the Guelfs. They took Lucca, on the 14th of June, 1314, while the Lucchese Guelfs and Ghibellines were engaged in battle in the streets of that city; and, on the 29th of August of the same year, they defeated, at Montecatini, the Florentines, commanded by two princes of the house of Naples, and seconded by all the Guelfs of Tuscany and Romagna. But the Pisans soon perceived that they were fighting, not for themselves, but for the captain whom they had chosen. Almost immediately after his victory, he began to exercise an insupportable tyranny over Pisa and Lucca. Fearing much more the citizens of these republics than the enemies of the states, he, on the slightest suspicion, employed the utmost severity against all the most illustrious families. At Lucca, he threw into a dungeon Castruccio Castracani, the most distinguished of the Ghibelline nobles, who had recently returned to that city with a brilliant reputation, acquired in the wars of France and Lombardy. A simultaneous insurrection at Lucca and Pisa, on the 10th of April, 1316, delivered these cities from Uguccione dà Faggiuola and his son.d

The Pisans put Uguccione’s partisans to death, and gave the government to Count Gaddo della Gherardesca. This news arrived at Lucca when the Lucchese were tumultuously demanding the liberty of Castruccio. Uguccione not daring to oppose the general wish, Castruccio was taken from prison and presented to the public loaded with chains. At this spectacle the people grew still more furious; Uguccione was obliged to fly; and the chains being taken off Castruccio, the latter, by a rare good fortune, was declared lord of Lucca on the very day which had been destined for his death.e

CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANI

Castruccio was the scion of a Ghibelline stock, and was devoted to the Ghibelline cause; for four years successively he was freely elected to command the Lucchese with almost sovereign power. He knew men and how to govern them; knew what enmities to despise or punish, and what friendships to win and retain. As a daring soldier and skilful general he was beloved by the troops, for he was not blind to merit and knew how to reward it, but cared little about the morality of his followers if they only did their duty and quietly submitted to the rigid discipline that he established and enforced. No man was more beloved by the people or more generally popular with every class of citizen; they admired his talents and were proud of his fame. In 1320 he felt so confident of his position in the public mind that he ventured to expel the Avocati, who with about 180 great Guelfic families now bid adieu to their country, and then boldly demanded the supreme authority; out of 210 senators there was but one voice against him, and the people unanimously confirmed this election. He was therefore a legitimate ruler. His economical management of the public revenue was exemplary and productive; he had amassed great treasure, and his system of military honours and rewards heightened and improved the warlike spirit of the people until it had acquired a more professional character. All the neighbouring predaceous chiefs were allured to his standard by the hope of future conquests,[134] and rough and unscrupulous as they were he made them all bend to his discipline.

Thus prepared on every hand to begin that career of ambition to which he felt himself more than equal, Matteo Visconti’s proposal was warmly received, and Philip of Valois’ expedition with the ready assistance of the Guelfic league were together considered an infringement of the general peace, or at least a sufficient excuse for retaliation on the part of the Ghibellines. Uguccione Faggiuola was dead, a circumstance that heightened the anxiety of both Castruccio and the Florentines, particularly the latter, whose dread of this veteran chief, blinding them as it did to the dangerous ambition of his successor, had never ceased since the disaster of Montecatini.

Such was the state of affairs in April, 1320, when Castruccio Castracani with some Pisan auxiliaries suddenly occupying Cappiano, Montefalcone, and the bridges of the Gusciano, broke into the Florentine territory carrying death and devastation as far as Cerreto Guidi, Vinci, and Empoli; then, getting possession of Santa Maria a Monte by treachery, returned in triumph to Lucca. Afterwards, invading Lunigiana and Garfagnana, he dispossessed Spinetto Malespina of several places necessary for his own military operations and then marched with all his force to aid the siege of Genoa. This city still maintained a fierce and bloody struggle with its own exiles and the Lombard Ghibellines; war raged not only round the walls but throughout the whole Riviera, or coast district; it extended to Sicily and Naples and involved even more distant countries in its action, so that the siege of Troy itself, as Villanid asserts, was hardly equal to it for heroic deeds, marvellous exploits, and hard-fought battles by land and water, without any cessation either in summer or winter.

The Florentines determined to prevent a junction that would probably have settled the fate of Genoa, therefore made a powerful diversion in the Lucchese states which compelled Castruccio to return ere he had joined the besiegers; avoiding an action they retreated to the frontier at Fucecchio while the enemy halted in front of Cappiano, both armies remaining nearly inactive until the advancing season drove them into winter quarters. To make amends for this inglorious campaign, more vigorous measures were pursued and an alliance was concluded with the marquis Spinetto Malespina, who, although a Ghibelline, had been too much injured by Castruccio on account of his friendship for Uguccione not to seize the first opportunity of revenge. Florentine troops were despatched to his aid, yet Castruccio was not apprehensive of anything in that quarter, but prepared with the help of a powerful body of Lombard Ghibellines for a more serious struggle on the side of Florence and soon marched to raise the siege of Monte Vettolini at the head of sixteen hundred men-at-arms. The Florentines, having only half that number, immediately retired and allowed him to devastate their territory with impunity for the last twenty days of June, after which he retired to chastise the Malespini in Lunigiana.

Discontent ran high in Florence and the retiring seigniory were much censured for their feeble conduct; the Agubbio faction was still powerful, and probably the inconvenience of a fluctuating administration was beginning to be felt, as the foreign affairs with a more complex character embraced a wider circle; to remedy this, twelve counsellors, two for each sesto under the denomination of “Buonuomini” were added to the new seigniory, but to continue six months in office instead of two, and without whose sanction nothing important could be undertaken. To check also the increasing intimacy, and consequent favouritism between citizens and foreign officers of state, which[135] led to great abuse, it was decreed that no stranger who brought a kinsman in his suite could have a place in the commonwealth, and that until ten years from his resignation of office he could not be re-elected. Some taxes were then reduced, the gold and silver currency reformed, and preparations made for a fresh campaign. Azzo of Brescia was appointed captain-general; one hundred and sixteen knights and one hundred and sixty mounted crossbowmen were enlisted and under the command of Jacopo da Fontana soon checked Castruccio’s incursions so as to protect the line of the Gusciana. But Philip of Valois’ expedition had in the meanwhile failed, and in Lombardy the Tuscans were defeated at Bardo in the Val-di-Taro, their captain the marquis of Cavalcabò was killed, Cremona recaptured, and Visconti everywhere victorious.

In Florence one of the first public measures in 1321 was to complete the whole circuit of public walls and strengthen it by flanking towers fifty-five feet high at regular intervals of more than one hundred and eighty feet apart; a work that was doubtless accelerated by their apprehension of Castruccio, which had now taken a more alarming character from some recent proceedings at Pistoia.

This ever-vexed city, harassed by external war and inward troubles, finally elected the abbate da Pacciana de’ Tedici, a tool of Castruccio, as their ruler; he was a weak intriguing man who, catching at a popular opinion, was suddenly floated into power by the stormy multitude without ballast enough to steady him. Castruccio made good use of him, and a truce was suddenly concluded with that leader against all the influence of Florence, by which, according to Villanid (though unnoticed by the anonymous author of the Istorie Pistolese),f an annual tribute of three thousand florins was to be paid by Pistoia. The dread of Castruccio was rapidly and generally spreading.

FLORENCE MENACED

He fortified Lucca, and prepared to invade Florentine territory. The Florentines sent a strong detachment of troops into Lombardy on condition that in the following summer the Genoese and other Guelfic powers were to attack Lucca on every side and annihilate the rising power of Castruccio. Scarcely had an army been assembled for this purpose, when intelligence arrived that their principal condottiere, Jacopo di Fontanabuona, had passed over with all his following to the enemy; he had been commissioned to make himself master of Buggiano and other places by treachery, but failed, and soon after joined Castruccio with two hundred men-at-arms.

Castruccio with this reinforcement and the possession of his enemy’s secrets crossed the Gusciano on the 13th of June, 1323, attacked Fucecchio and other places, ravaged the surrounding country, then passed the Arno, devastated the territory of San Miniato and Montepopoli with all the vale of Elsa, and marched quietly back to Lucca. On July 1st he suddenly reappeared in front of Prato, only ten miles from the capital, with six hundred men-at-arms and four thousand infantry; the citizens sent in terror to Florence for help, but paralysed by Fontanabuona’s treachery she was nearly destitute of regular troops. The citizens however had not quite forgotten the use of arms, and their spirit was still high; the shops were immediately closed, a candle was placed at the Prato gate, and every individual liable to serve summoned to the ranks ere it burned out, under the penalty of losing a limb; a proclamation being issued to announce that all exiles who instantly[136] joined the army would be pardoned and restored to their country. By these prompt measures, twenty-five hundred men-at-arms and twenty thousand infantry were in the field round Prato on the 2nd of July, only one day after Castruccio’s appearance, four thousand of whom were exiles!

Castruccio’s rash advance with so small a force might have ended disastrously if the Florentines had been well commanded; but he retired in the night and made an unmolested retreat to Serravalle, the discord in the Florentine camp, an offset from civil dissension, having saved him. Thus ended this singular campaign in which the army scarcely saw an enemy, but which brought back danger and revolution to the state. The Florentines now added three subalterns (pennoniere) to each urban company, so that the whole force became infinitely more flexible and divisible and better adapted to real service.

He soon recommenced his successful incursions, but was generally too weak to oppose the united strength of Florence; the moral effect of his character was however very imposing in both states and nothing was too daring either for his arms or conscience. His Ghibelline allies the Pisans were deeply engaged in war with the king of Aragon for the defence of Sardinia, which offered him a favourable occasion as he thought of becoming their master; the conspiracy was however discovered; the conspirator Betto or Benedetto Malepra de’ Lanfranchi with many others lost his head; all friendship or alliance with Lucca was renounced by Pisa, and 10,000 golden florins were offered for the head of Castruccio. About two months afterwards he suddenly left his capital at the head of a small detachment on the 19th of December, and by the treachery of an inhabitant of Fucecchio was admitted at night into the town during a deluge of rain, which at first concealed his aggression; the subsequent struggle was fierce and bloody; a great part of the place was taken, but alarm fires on the towers brought strong reinforcements from the neighbouring garrisons; Castruccio held on with desperate resolution against an overwhelming force of soldiers and citizens until, wounded, fatigued, and hopeless of success, he sullenly retired with the loss of banners and horses, but still unmolested; for the glory of repulsing him was deemed sufficient, and the habitual dread of his prowess left no appetite for a second encounter.

Nothing of importance occurred between Castruccio and the Florentines in the following year, for the former was busy with his intrigues against Pisa and Pistoia, and the latter employed reducing some petty chieftains in the Mugello, but still more seriously on the side of Arezzo where the bishop was[137] rapidly gaining ground against the Guelfs. Five hundred men-at-arms were engaged in France, and other preparations making for the day of battle which the Florentines foresaw must come before Castruccio could be arrested in the rapid course of his ambition; a new confederacy was therefore formed in March between Florence, Bologna, Siena, Perugia, Orvieto, and Agubbio; with other communities and Guelfic lords, for the recovery of Città di Castello, which was to be effected by a combined army of three thousand men-at-arms levied for three years, a great part of which was maintained by the Florentines.

Castruccio meanwhile had moved towards the Pistoian Mountains, and repairing the castle of Brandelli, whence there was a view of both Pistoia and Florence, called it Bellosguardo and gazed with a longing eye on either city. One was only his own in perspective, the other was almost in his grasp; and Filippo Tedici, who had driven his uncle from the government of Pistoia, and was in treaty with Castruccio and Florence, pretending the greatest alarm, demanded assistance of the latter, with whose aid he hoped to better his bargain. A body of troops was directly sent under command of the podesta, but discovering his object, this officer returned in disgust; upon which he made his terms with Castruccio, and Pistoia was suffered for a while to exist as an independent state. Florence had attempted to gain it by treachery but failed, and Castruccio, tired of Filippo’s intrigues, offered him 10,000 florins and his daughter Dialta in marriage for immediate possession of the city. This secured Filippo, who before daylight on the 5th of May, 1325, opened a gate to the Lucchese general; but the latter distrusting his ally would not enter until he had actually unhinged it, and then took possession of the place in the manner of the time by scouring the streets at the head of his cavalry and trampling upon all that came in his way.

The fall of Pistoia was an event of great importance; equally distant from Florence and Lucca and on the confines of both, it formed a rallying-point for the armies of either, and its friendship or enmity had considerable influence on every operation of the war; hence the eagerness of Florence at all times to preserve her authority there, and hence the general consternation when intelligence of its capture arrived at the capital.

THE FLORENTINE ARMY UNDER RAYMOND OF CARDONA

She might have bought it for the same price or even less than Castruccio, because Filippo felt himself too insecure not to make both friends and money by the sacrifice of his country; but failing, either from want of skill or perhaps dishonesty in her agents, she repeated her attempts to surprise the place, thus forcing him into the arms of Castruccio, and he poisoned his own wife to complete the union. Rumours of this event reached Florence while the magistrates were engaged in public festivities on the occasion of two foreign officers of state being dubbed knights by the republic, and the banquet was going on in the church of San Piero Scheraggio when the news was confirmed. In a moment the whole assembly fell into confusion, the tables were overturned, and every man was immediately armed and in his saddle; believing that a part of the town might still hold out, a rapid march was made as far as Prato, where hearing the whole truth they returned dejected and mortified to Florence. The following day brought some consolation in the arrival of Raymond of Cardona, who had been sent in the preceding November from Milan on a mission to Rome; he had promised to return, but was absolved[138] by the pope and sent instantly to Florence as commander-in-chief of the republican forces. His presence gave new spirit to the people, which was increased by the capture of Artimino on the 22nd of May.

One of the finest armies ever assembled by the republic soon took the field at the enormous expense of 3000 florins a day; the city bells tolled as a declaration of war; the public standard waved over San Piero a Monticelli; the soldati or mercenary troops first moved to Prato, and the cavallate with all the mass of civic infantry joined them on the following morning. One of the city bells which had been captured at Montale broke while in the act of sounding; three weeks before there had been a violent earthquake in Florence, and the following evening a broad stream of fiery vapour flared over the city. All these circumstances were dwelt upon with anxious and gloomy foreboding by numbers of citizens over whose mind the talents and success of Castruccio had gained a superstitious ascendency. The cavalry consisted of 500 gentlemen of the highest rank in Florence under the name cavallate or men-at-arms on horseback, all magnificently equipped and a hundred of them mounted on destrieri, the largest and finest war-horses of the time and which few could afford to purchase; none cost less than 150 golden florins [nearly £200 or $1000], yet there were 300 of these, natives and strangers, in the Florentine army. Besides the cavallate there were 1500 foreign cavalry in the pay of Florence, of whom 800 were French and German gentlemen of the highest rank and distinction; the general-in-chief, Raymond of Cardona, a Spanish condottiere, and his lieutenant, Borneo of Burgundy, were followed by a troop of 230 Catalan and Burgundian cavalry, and lastly there were 450 Gascons, French, Flemings, Italians, and men of Provence picked with great care from the veteran companies of Masnadieri, and all experienced soldiers. Fifteen thousand well-appointed infantry, between citizens and rural troops, completed the personal force of this fine army, and 800 canvas pavilions and other great tents, with 6000 ronzini and baggage horses attended its movements.

With the exception of 200 Sienese cavalry no allies had yet joined, but hostilities commenced on the 17th of June by devastating the Pistoian territory up to the gates of the capital, capturing many small places, insulting[139] Castruccio, who was in that city, by running for the Palio under its walls, and sending him repeated challenges to battle. Castruccio dryly answered that it was not the right time, and the Florentines marched directly to besiege Tizzano, a strong town about seven miles from Pistoia on the road to Florence; there every preparation was apparently made for a regular siege, while Cardona on the 9th of July sent his lieutenant Borneo with 500 picked men towards Fucecchio; and to engage Castruccio’s attention a strong detachment was at the same time directed to alarm Pistoia and the surrounding country. Borneo was joined at Fucecchio by 150 Lucchese exiles and a numerous infantry, besides some reinforcements from the garrisons in Val d’Arno. Carrying with him a pontoon bridge, apparently the first noticed by the early historians of these campaigns, he threw it silently over the Gusciana at Rosaiuolo during the night, and the whole division crossed that river without being perceived by the garrisons at the bridge of Cappiano or Montefalcone, scarcely a mile above and below the point of passage.

RAYMOND TEMPORISES

On hearing this, Raymond suddenly quitted Tizzano, passed the lofty range of Monte Albano, and by night-fall had joined his detachment and invested the fortified bridge and fortress of Cappiano. This was an unexpected stroke for the Lucchese general, who believed himself safe in that quarter, and would appear to have doubted the possibility of so sudden a passage of the Gusciana by any soldiers; so that this operation increased the fame of Cardona, the confidence of the league, and the spirit of the Florentines. His frontier line being thus broken, Castruccio immediately quitted Pistoia, and entering the Val di Nievole threw his army in position amongst the hills above Vivinaia, which he endeavoured to strengthen while he pressed for the co-operation of all his friends; Pisa disregarded this summons in consequence of his recent treachery; but from Lucca, Arezzo, La Marca, Romagna, and the Maremma he assembled thirteen hundred men-at-arms and a numerous infantry, with which he reinforced all his positions from Vivinaia to Porcari, strengthening the latter with additional works and troops to secure his communications with Lucca; and finally cut a trench from the hills to the marsh of Bientina which was guarded with the utmost solicitude.

The bridge of Cappiano was taken by Cardona on the 13th of July; the town itself next fell; two days after, Montefalcone was summoned and reduced in eight days, and thus the whole line of the Gusciana was cleared of the enemy. This rapid success brought numerous reinforcements from Siena, Perugia, Bologna, Agubbio, Grosseto, Montepulciano, Chiusi, Colle, San Gimignano, Volterra, San Miniato, Faenza, Imola, Count Battifolle, and the exiles from Lucca and Pistoia; all eager to assist in overwhelming this formidable chieftain; so that the army had already swelled to 3454 men-at-arms and a proportionate number of infantry. With this immense force Cardona advanced, and on the 3rd of August invested the strong fortress of Altopascio, which crowns a hill rising from the marshes north of the Bientina Lake; the place, although impregnable to an assault, was so damaged by the battering engines and so poisoned by heat, sickness, and the horrid stench of filthy matter which it was then usual to cast into besieged towns, that on hearing of the discomfiture of a Lucchese detachment sent from Pistoia to make a diversion towards Florence it immediately surrendered.

The capture of this place was succeeded by doubts, discussion, and delay; the troops had become sickly from heats and malaria, and the army proportionably reduced; discontent and intrigues were plentiful, and Castruccio, quick in the use of corruption, seized the favourable moment to bribe two Frenchmen of high rank, but was detected and baffled. Cardona himself, although proof against Castruccio’s temptations, was false and ambitious; he had seen Florence in periods of distress repeatedly surrender her liberties, and determined by getting her into difficulties to try if he also could not become her master; the fall of Altopascio elated him, his pockets were filled and his camp emptied by the bribes of rich citizens who, tired of a long campaign and alarmed at increasing sickness, cheerfully exchanged their money for leave of absence and the pleasures of the capital. The cavalry, being generally composed of these, was reduced along with the rest of the army to almost half its original number, and Cardona wished this; for his thoughts ran high, and hence his delays, discussions, and repeated demands to be invested with the same power in the city that he already exercised in the army; in order, as he said, to insure the necessary obedience. But finding that the government would not listen to his request, he lay idle amongst the Bientina marshes while Castruccio, with the eyes and activity of a lynx, strained every nerve to catch him in his toils, and succeeded; so that he who at first neglected the means of victory through bad faith, was at last through incapacity unable to save himself from destruction. Dissension arose both in the camp and city about the propriety of withdrawing the army to a more healthy quarter or boldly pushing on to Lucca; the most cautious advised the former course from a suspicion of the general’s views and the state of the troops; but their opponents prevailed both in camp and council, some of them even favouring Cardona’s wildest speculations. It was therefore resolved to advance towards Lucca; but instead of cutting through the enemy’s position while he was weak, by a direct movement, as might have been effected, a bad unhealthy post was occupied on the edge of the Sesto marsh, which decimated the troops while it still more augmented the gains of the general.

A BRILLIANT SKIRMISH

Castruccio did not fail to profit by this delay, although his army also had decreased from want of funds and sickness, and therefore could not long maintain its position without reinforcements, but he discovered in that of the enemy the seeds of certain victory. By reason, money, and promises he had already prevailed on Galeazzo Visconti to send his son with eight hundred horse into Tuscany; and with two hundred more from Passerino, lord of Mantua and Modena, he hoped soon to recover his ascendency; in the meanwhile his situation was very precarious, for Cardona by a vigorous effort might have cut his line of communication; the latter, now sensible of his errors and probably urged by the general discontent, had actually detached a hundred men-at-arms and a body of pioneers to clear a passage over the mountain. Castruccio’s outposts soon checked their progress and were followed by a stronger body then descending the hill in order of battle; skirmishing began, and voluntary reinforcements pushed out unordered from the Florentine camp below. It was entirely an encounter of cavalry; the green slopes of the hills were covered with armed and plumed knights, the whole scene resembled a tournament rather than a real battle and the effect is described as beautiful. Each party was broken four different times[141] and each reuniting in compact order returned unconquered to the charge; many lances were shivered, many gentlemen unhorsed, and arms and wounded and expiring men lay scattered on the mountain side. The Florentines with only half its numbers for three hours sustained and repulsed the charges of Castruccio’s chivalry, and might have finally prevailed if they had been well supported; but Cardona in complete order of battle looked on inactively, his troops cooped up in a narrow angle of the plain below whence they could not move without incurring danger. This did not escape Castruccio who therefore pushed boldly on with augmenting numbers and, though unhorsed by a German knight, wounded, and some of his bravest followers slain, by night-fall had succeeded in driving the enemy back to their entrenchments in face of a much superior army.

Forty men-at-arms were either killed or taken on the side of Florence, and many wounded, but all in front; for the Florentines did not turn, but battled proudly and retreated sullenly, more angry with their own commander than with the enemy; they made no prisoners but must have smote well in the conflict, for no less than a hundred of their opponents’ horses had galloped to the plain with empty saddles from the field of battle.

THE BATTLE OF ALTOPASCIO

The trumpets of either host answered each other in defiance until after dark, and neither choosing to own a defeat both remained under arms long after night set in; but the Florentines lost their spirit from that day’s fight and no longer trusted either in the faith or talents of their general. Castruccio, being anxious to keep the Spaniard in his difficult position, directed the governors of several towns in the Val di Nievole to entangle him in a fictitious intrigue with the expectation of their surrender, and Cardona, thus duped, notwithstanding every warning, chose to continue in this state of vain inactivity.

On hearing of Azzo Visconti’s arrival at Lucca with eight hundred men-at-arms he took fright and hastily retreated to Altopascio, whilst Castruccio, apprehensive of his escape, hurried back to the capital to accelerate the march of the Lombards. Visconti was so unwilling to proceed without repose or money that it required all the influence of Castruccio’s wife, seconded by the blandishments of the most beautiful women in Lucca and the payment of 6000 florins, to gain his promise of marching on the following morning; Castruccio then departed, leaving to the women the care of keeping the young Milanese chieftain to his engagement. On the morning of the 23rd of November the allied army paraded ostentatiously in front of Castruccio’s position, with flying colours and sound of many trumpets, daring him as it were to battle, and the latter fearful of losing such a moment sent out some troops to amuse them with a prospect of victory while he kept his main body in hand awaiting the junction of Visconti. This was completed at nine in the morning, when Castruccio was seen once more descending from the hills with three-and-twenty hundred men-at-arms in majestic movement towards the plain, while the greater part of his infantry remained in the mountain and took no part in the events of this day. An advanced squadron of 150 French and Italian gentlemen began the fight by a bold charge directly through Visconti’s line; but the second line or main body of Feditori, consisting of seven hundred horsemen under Borneo of Burgundy who had been corrupted by Azzo or Castruccio, turned when it was time to charge and fled[142] from the encounter. The whole army, whose confidence was already shaken, were confounded and some others began to fly; but had Raymond promptly moved forward to the support of his first line which had charged so effectively, the battle might still have been maintained on equal terms; instead of which he remained motionless and added to the general consternation.

Presently the main body of cavalry, scarcely tarrying to exchange a single lance-thrust, hurried off in universal confusion, leaving everything to the infantry who still maintained their ground with undaunted courage; but neither their arms nor discipline was calculated to stand alone against such masses of man and steel as came successively upon them, and after an obstinate resistance they also were discomfited. The battle lasted but a short time, few were killed in the fight but many in the pursuit, for Castruccio instantly sent on a detachment to Cappiano, took possession of the bridge which had already been abandoned, and cut off all direct means of escape. The slaughter was therefore considerable but uncertain; the prisoners, amongst whom were Raymond of Cardona and his son, were numerous; the carroccio, the martinella, with all the public standards, banners, and baggage of the army, were taken; Cappiano and Montefalcone soon capitulated, and Altopascio not many days after. Thus did the tide of fortune turn and bear forward Castruccio to prouder hopes and higher dignities. On the 27th of September his whole army assembled at Pistoia and was reinforced by that garrison, while Castruccio in all the confidence of victory dismantled the bridge and forts of Cappiano and Montefalcone, and secure in the possession of Pistoia left the rest of his frontier open to the Florentines, whose territory he ravaged for nearly seven weeks without interruption. Policy and necessity dictated this course, for his funds were exhausted, Azzo Visconti was still unsatisfied, and the army in arrears of pay; so that nothing but the plunder of Florentine citizens could supply his present necessities. Carmignano was his first conquest; he then marched to Lecore, to Signa, Campi, Brozzi, and Guaracchi; all were captured or fell a prey to flames and plunder; Peretola, within two miles of Florence, became for a while his headquarters, while from the Arno to the mountains he ravaged all the plain, a plain covered, then as now, but more richly, with magnificent villas and beautiful gardens, the delight of the citizens and the admiration of the world. All was destroyed. The wealth was plundered, the monuments of then reviving art were carried away and reserved for the conqueror’s triumph. Games were celebrated and races run on the very spot time out of mind reserved by the Florentines for their public spectacles. A course of horsemen began the sports; that of footmen followed; and afterwards, to make the insult still more disgusting,[143] a bevy of common prostitutes ran together in mockery, deriding the impotence of the Florentines, not one of whom had the courage to come forth and check these insulting spectacles. Yet the city was full of troops, and thousands had escaped from the fight, but the star of Castruccio shed its influence over them; their spirit was subdued, their courage wasted, and distrust of those great families whose kinsmen were prisoners to Castruccio, lest they should treat with him secretly, completely distracted their judgment. After another course of devastation the invaders reassembled on the 26th of October and repeated their insults to please Azzo Visconti, who thus revenged a similar proceeding of the Florentine auxiliaries, not long before, under the walls of Milan.

Castruccio next occupied Signa, as it gave him command of the Arno at this point with a free entrance into the Val di Pesa and all the southern country; he therefore reinforced and strengthened it, coined silver money there with the imperial image as an act of high sovereignty, and passed them current under the name of Castruccini.

CASTRUCCIO ADDS INSULT TO INJURY

Florence was during this time in a painful state of suspicion and dismay; all the prisoners’ kinsmen were regarded with distrust and deprived of office both within and without the city; half the Contado was a desert, its starving inhabitants huddled together in the capital where a wide-spreading mortality was the natural consequence. Deaths were so frequent that the public crier, whose business it was to proclaim the decease of a citizen according to ancient custom, was prohibited from exercising his calling during the continuance of the malady. Every precaution was adopted to secure the city; the walls were strengthened, San Miniato a Monte was fortified, and even the citadel of Fiesole repaired from mere apprehension of Castruccio, who threatened to restore it and beleaguer Florence; and this he probably would have done had not the bishop of Arezzo and the Ubaldini from incipient jealousy refused to lend their assistance. Fearful of internal war, all exiles but the regular Escettati of 1311 were restored to their country on payment of a trifling impost; assistance was demanded from King Robert and the allies, but with little success, for through terror of Castruccio only Colle and San Miniato Tedesco answered the call. King Robert afterwards sent some trifling aid; but still Florence did not despair, and a bold attempt was made to cut off Castruccio’s whole army in a pass of the Val di Marina near Calenzano. New taxes were imposed to the annual amount of 180,000 florins beyond the ordinary revenue; levies were made in Mantua and in Germany; Monte Buoni and other important posts were fortified to protect the district; yet in the middle of all this danger two hundred cavalry were magnanimously despatched to Bologna, which was sorely pressed, and its army soon after defeated at Monteveglio by Passerino lord of Mantua, with the assistance of Azzo Visconti and his followers, fresh from their Tuscan victories.

But this Milanese chief, ere he finally quitted Tuscany, offered a parting insult to Florence by holding public games in the very bed of the Arno. He then returned with 25,000 florins as his share of the general plunder, while Castruccio, loaded with prisoners and booty, resolved to enter his capital in triumph like a Roman conqueror.

The fame of this event attracted a crowd of spectators from all parts of Italy, eager to witness the revival of an ancient ceremony but more eager[144] to behold a hero whose reputation had already become familiar to the world. On the 10th of November, being the festival of St. Martin, Castruccio made this triumphal entry into Lucca; not in a car, but on a magnificent courser, and at some distance from the gates a solemn procession of the clergy, nobility, and almost all the women of exalted rank in the city received him like a royal personage. At the head of his procession were the prisoners of least note with uncovered heads, and arms crossed upon the breast, stooping as it were in humble supplication for the mercy of their emperor; next came the Florentine carroccio rolling heavily along, drawn by the same oxen and decked with the same trappings they had borne in the field, and overhung by the reversed and now degraded standard of that republic. Then followed other Florentine banners, those of the Guelf party and the kings of Naples, with flags and pennons of inferior note, and various communities, all trailing in the dirt and as it were sweeping the path of the conqueror. Immediately after this mortifying spectacle walked the same chiefs who had so often borne these flags to victory. Here Raymond of Cardona also had full leisure to contemplate the effects of his own dishonesty; and the gallant Urlimbach, a German knight who had unhorsed Castruccio, could also muse on the instability of fortune, as despoiled of arms and spurs he swelled the train of the victor. A multitude of noble captives followed in this insulting procession, which was closed by Castruccio and his legions in all the pride and insolence of victory. But nothing mortified the prisoners so much as being compelled to bear large waxen torches as offerings to St. Martin, the tutelar saint of Lucca and dear to her troops because of the Bacchanalian license usual at his festival on pretence of tasting the various flavours of the new-made wines, and because the saint himself had once been a soldier.

FLORENCE IN DESPAIR CALLS ON THE DUKE OF CALABRIA

Thus bearded at their very gates, insulted, ridiculed, the country a desert, Signa occupied by the enemy, Prato at his mercy, Montemurlo still unsuccoured and ready to fall, the Bolognese army, their only bulwark against Lombardy, defeated, their best chieftains prisoners, their army diminished, their expenses increased, their allies daunted, death raging within the city and destruction without, all things adverse to them, and fortune courting their enemies—under such a pressure the people at last gave way, and despair once more compelled them to a temporary surrender of their independence. Charles duke of Calabria was therefore, and perhaps not unexpectedly, offered the lordship of Florence for ten years on certain conditions.

It was decreed that the prince should remain for thirty months consecutively within the Florentine state, or at war in the enemy’s dominions, and the three succeeding summer months in addition should hostilities continue. That in time of war he was to maintain one thousand transalpine cavalry and have an annual allowance from the republic of 200,000 golden florins; half that sum in peace, with the obligation of maintaining only 450 men-at-arms. If in time of peace the duke wished to be absent, he was bound to appoint a lieutenant of the blood royal or of some other great and powerful family; also to nominate a vicar for the administration of justice, who was not to alter any part of the government, but on the contrary defend and maintain the priors and gonfalonier, the executor of the ordinances of justice, and the sixteen chiefs of companies. This decree, which passed on the 23rd of December, 1325, was despatched with a solemn embassy to[145] Naples and finished the transactions of that unfortunate year, which began so brightly for the Florentines.

Until the dictator’s arrival Florence gave the chief command of her army to Pierre de Narsi, a French knight of exalted rank who was made prisoner at Altopascio; he had just been ransomed, and smarting under the indignity of Castruccio’s triumph sought revenge and distinction ere he was compelled to relinquish his brief and hazardous dignity. Not being able to save Montemurlo which, after a courageous resistance, honourably capitulated on the 8th of January, he exerted himself less worthily by trying to raise insurrections at Signa and Carmignano, and even attempting the life of Castruccio. But his effort came to nothing.

CHARLES AND HIS ARMY

The duke of Calabria was detained for some months, but on the 30th of July he entered Florence followed by eleven hundred men-at-arms, one hundred of whom were knights of the Golden Spur. He was lodged in the podesta’s palace from whence the seat of justice was purposely, perhaps derisively removed, and formally acknowledged as lord of the Florentine Republic. It was the mark of misfortune, the stigma of disgrace; yet it excited the admiration of Italy; for Italy beheld the Florentine people, masters only of a small and not a very fruitful territory, after their repeated misfortunes, after so many defeats, such reverses and so much treasure lost—nay, at the very moment when they seemed to totter on the very brink of ruin, suddenly rise in their strength and like a giant refreshed with wine, by the power of their own resources as it were, command the service of so great a prince, and an army such as had never before been seen in Florence!

There were no less than two thousand men-at-arms assembled, most of them belonging to the highest ranks of society, independent of the cardinal legate’s court and followers which were far from trifling; and without reckoning the Florentine chivalry or a single knight of the Guelfic confederacy. So vast a development of national resources was the more remarkable because at this very time the ancient bank of the Scali and Amieri, which had already endured for 120 years with undiminished reputation, failed for the enormous sum of 400,000 florins, which being for the most part due in the city of Florence shook the republic to its centre and, excepting bloodshed, was considered equally ruinous with the battle of Altopascio itself.

The several contingents of the Guelfic league were afterwards summoned, and increased this fine army to 3450 men-at-arms besides the Florentine cavallate, never less than five hundred men, and a selection of some of the[146] best and bravest infantry in Tuscany. Sixty thousand florins were immediately raised by a partial and extraordinary tax on the richest citizens, and every diligence was used by the Florentines to insure success; yet this great army remained entirely passive, and they had the mortification to see their time and treasure idly wasted by him to whom they had surrendered their liberties in the expectation of a very different result. Seeing that nothing was to be expected from him, the Florentines contented themselves with fortifying Signa and the opposite town of Gangalandi in order to protect the agricultural labourers, and then quietly awaited the movements of both their masters. Castruccio had already driven Spinetto Malaspina from his dominions in Lunigiana and compelled him to take refuge with the protector of all unfortunate exiles, Cane della Scala; but the duke of Calabria tempted him once more to try his fortune by the invasion of that province while he with the Florentine army marched on Pistoia. Both these plans were executed and with more hope of success because the towns of Mammiano and Gavignana in the mountain of Pistoia had just revolted. Castruccio was not much alarmed, and though very ill, reduced both places in the middle of a severe winter, baffled the Florentine army which attempted in vain to relieve them, and finally compelled it to return in disgrace to the capital; then turning suddenly on Spinetto, once more drove him into exile.

Thus failed the first dilatory attempt of this brilliant army, and Florence became more desponding than ever; those that formerly used to tremble at the formidable name of Uguccione now acknowledged that he was only a sudden and startling noise, but that Castruccio was the thunderbolt itself which had stricken and consumed their country. The citizens were now utterly distracted and knew not where to turn, such was the confusion and so great the waste of men, money, and credit occasioned by his uncommon abilities and continual success; for in the midst of all Castruccio’s good fortune he had never, it was said, committed a rash or hazardous act; every event was calculated, few mistakes made, and victory attended him as his shadow.

To prevent the people of Lunigiana from revolting he destroyed all their fenced towns and augmented his army with the garrisons; the works of Montale near Pistoia were dismantled, and Montefalcone shared the same fate; for he used to say that those strongholds were the best which could make long marches and keep themselves near or distant according as they were wanted. The awe which his character impressed on the Guelfic lords of Italy caused Robert to be blamed for opposing the inexperience of his son to the power of so accomplished a general and exposing the descendant of a line of illustrious princes to the disgrace of being killed, defeated, or made prisoner by a simple gentleman of Lucca. Such was the “form and pressure of the time”! In consequence of this, as was supposed, Charles had instructions to tell the Florentines that unless they would consent to take eight hundred of his foreign cavalry into the pay of the confederacy he must return to Naples. This unexpected demand and infringement of every compact, after all their exertions, astonished the citizens; but there was no help and 30,000 florins were added to the 450,000 they had already thrown away upon the duke of Calabria, because few of the allies would submit to the extortion. Yet this was not all, and, as if to deride their weakness, he at the capricious request of the duchess repealed some of their sumptuary laws, the solemn decrees of the state, to which the citizens held with extreme tenacity; and they had the mortification to see their wives and daughters in the midst of the country’s misery, when they should rather have been clothed in mourning[147] for her slaughtered citizens, puffed up with such excess of vanity as to adorn their heads, says Villani,d with “long tresses of white and yellow silk instead of hair, which they wore in front; this decoration, because it displeased the Florentines as immodest and unnatural, they had already taken from the females and had made laws against it and other disorderly ornaments; but thus the inordinate appetite of women overcame the good sense of men.”

THE GHIBELLINES CALL ON LUDWIG OF BAVARIA

The Lombard Ghibellines, seeing so formidable a display of Guelfic power together with the more intimate union between the church and Naples, in spite of Castruccio’s success could not help feeling that their cause was in jeopardy, and therefore determined to support it by the imperial power; Parma and Bologna had already given themselves to Rome, the bishop of Arezzo was excommunicated and deposed; and besides Florence and Siena, San Miniato, Colle, San Gimignato, and Prato had made Charles their lord, the last even in perpetuity. This great extension of power gave the house of Anjou command over the greater part of Italy, and therefore no time was lost in despatching an embassy to implore the “Bavarian” (as Ludwig was called by those who did not wish to be anathematised) to meet the Italian Ghibellines or their ambassadors at Trent for the purpose of considering the best means of exalting the imperial dignity.

Until the year 1322 Ludwig of Bavaria had been so occupied in struggling for the crown with his rival Frederick of Austria that he had no leisure to meddle with the peninsula; but the decisive battle of Mühldorf, in which four thousand men-at-arms were killed in repeated charges on the field, and Frederick of Austria was made prisoner, left him at liberty to employ himself in foreign politics and turn his attention towards Italy. Pope John XXII, whom he informed of the victory at Mühldorf, not having before decided on the candidate he meant to support, received the letter of Ludwig as his friend, and promised to aid him in the consummation of peace; but when the pontiff heard of the assistance afforded to his worst enemy, the excommunicated Galeazzo Visconti, in 1323, and of the Bavarian’s having compelled Raymond of Cardona, the papal general, to raise the siege of Milan, his anger exceeded all bounds. He insisted that as pope he was the only legitimate ruler of the empire during a vacancy, the only judge between two competitors; and until his decision was known no king of the Romans could exist; it was, he said, a grave offence against God, and a palpable contempt of the church to have exercised the powers of royalty without its[148] sanction, and protected its enemies, especially Galeazzo Visconti and his brothers who had been declared heretics by the definitive sentence of a competent tribunal. Ludwig was therefore excommunicated, and again more solemnly in March, 1324, when he was also declared incapable of ever ascending the imperial throne. Frederick while in prison had been visited by Ludwig and treated with so much and such unusual generosity that he acknowledged him as emperor and was immediately liberated, ever after remaining his ally and intimate friend. Germany was then pacified, the pope’s intrigues there were all baffled, and the emperor prepared to visit Italy, to confirm his imperial dignity by a public coronation, and revenge himself on the pontiff.

In this disposition an invitation from the Italian Ghibellines was peculiarly well-timed, especially as Ludwig, weakened by long wars, remained without money, and Italy was always considered as an inexhaustible mine of treasure by transalpine nations. He therefore repaired to Trent about the middle of February where he was met by Azzo and Marco Visconti of Milan, Cane della Scala of Verona, Passerino Buonacossi of Mantua, Renaldo marquis of Este, the bishop of Arezzo, and ambassadors from Frederick of Sicily, Castruccio Castracani, the exiles of Genoa and all the other Ghibellines. Here the pope was declared heretical by a considerable body of the clergy and solemnly excommunicated, ridiculed, and defied; the imputation was not new, for this ambitious and mercenary pontiff was a zealous asserter of his own infallibility, wished to dictate absolutely to the church, and had made enemies of large bodies of the clergy—amongst others, of the Franciscan or minor friars, who insisted on Christ’s poverty and therefore, following his example, condemned all property in churchmen as preposterous and unbecoming. These monks had been bold enough to denounce John as heretical and excommunicated, upon which he burned some of them and deprived others of the little they possessed conforming to their own maxims; other causes had made other enemies amongst the secular clergy; so that Ludwig found himself zealously supported by a powerful body even in the church, and it was unanimously declared that as Christ had no property all priests who had were enemies to his sacred poverty.

SUCCESSES OF COUNT NOVELLO

A conspiracy against the life of Castruccio failing in its purpose, another excommunication of Ludwig and Castruccio, with all their adherents, was solemnly pronounced on the great festival of the patron saint of Florence by Cardinal Orsini; and immediately afterwards a noble army of twenty-five hundred horse and twelve thousand infantry under Count Novello encamped at Signa for three days on purpose to perplex the enemy; but suddenly quitting this, they moved on Fucecchio and, crossing the Gusciana by a bridge of boats previously prepared, appeared before Santa Maria a Monte.

This was the strongest fortress in Tuscany, but at that time somewhat weakened, because Castruccio had withdrawn a part of its garrison to strengthen Carmignano, the supposed object of attack, and had left but five hundred veterans with the people’s aid to defend it. Novello stormed and took this fortress and gave its people over to indiscriminate slaughter. He then attacked Artimino, which Castruccio had fortified so strongly as to apprehend no danger in that quarter. But flushed with his late victory, Novello at once gave the assault which was renewed for three days successively, the[149] last battle continuing without intermission from noon until night-fall; when, all the palisades and one of the gates being burned, the garrison, with the fate of Santa Maria before their eyes, surrendered on the 27th of August. Count Novello wished to proceed and carry Tizzano and Carmignano in the same manner, but Ludwig being now close to Pontremoli, he and his troops were ordered back to Florence.

It was now about thirteen months since the duke of Calabria had entered that city with the finest army that its vast resources had ever produced, and 500,000 florins had been expended on him by the community; yet, saving the capture of Santa Maria and Artimino, nothing had been done; wherefore the people became justly discontented, though compelled to suppress their ill-humour from a sense of present danger and the threatening progress of the emperor.

LUDWIG COMES TO ITALY

Ludwig was crowned at Milan on the 31st of May by the excommunicated Aretine prelate, the archbishop of Milan having refused to perform this office; but whether from a delay in the promised supplies accompanied by an insolent message from Galeazzo Visconti, as Villani avers, or from the complaints of Marco, Lodrisio, and Azzo Visconti against Galeazzo’s tyranny, or from suspicion of an attempt to poison the emperor,—as the sudden death of Stefano Visconti after tasting his drink, led others to suppose,—it is certain that on the 20th of July Galeazzo’s brothers, Lucchino and Giovanni, and his son Azzo were arrested along with that prince himself, and closely imprisoned; the strong castle of Monza being given up to Ludwig as the price of the latter’s safety. This revolution was effected at the public council of Milan after Visconti’s German troops had been seduced; an imperial vicar and twenty-four citizens were immediately appointed to govern the city thus suddenly restored to apparent independence, and 50,000 florins were granted to the emperor. This decided conduct pleased the Milanese and Guelfs as much as it alarmed the other Lombards, because it was Visconti himself that had brought Ludwig into Italy and he was the first to experience that monarch’s ingratitude.

A diet afterwards assembled near Brescia where several new bishops were created and about 200,000 florins collected from the Ghibelline states of Lombardy; Ludwig then crossed the Po near Cremona, and with two thousand men-at-arms marched through Parma, passed the mountains without any opposition from the papal troops stationed in those parts, and halted at Pontremoli on the 1st of September, 1327. Here he was received by Castruccio, but refused to sojourn at Lucca until Pisa, which had determined to shut her gates upon him, had been reduced. This city was at once invested. The siege lasted a month, and the city might have baffled Ludwig, but fresh discord, the curse of these licentious republics, caused it to be surrendered on condition that neither[150] their own exiles, nor Castruccio, nor any of his people should be admitted into the town; that their form of government should remain inviolate, and 60,000 florins be paid into the imperial treasury. On the 11th of October Ludwig entered Pisa, and three days after, the citizens, of their own accord but principally through fear of the populace, destroyed the capitulation and admitted both Castruccio and the exiles, while they threw themselves and their country on the emperor’s mercy. Justice was well administered, but dearly purchased by a contribution of 160,000 florins—enormous at any time, but peculiarly so at a moment when the Sardinian War and final loss of that province had reduced the whole community to the verge of ruin, and when, only a few days before, 5000 florins could not be demanded without the danger of revolution; so badly governed, or so short-sighted and capricious were the people.

CASTRUCCIO GOES TO ROME

After the settlement of Pisa, Ludwig and Castruccio repaired to Lucca, where the more powerful spirit of the latter was made manifest in its immediate ascendency and influence over his guest, whose splendid reception Castruccio followed up by a present of 50,000 florins; both chiefs then proceeded to Pistoia, from whose heights Castruccio pointed out the plain and towers of Florence, and showed the easy access which the possession of the one gave him to the territory of the other.

Returning to Lucca for the feast of St. Martin, the emperor took that opportunity of publicly placing on the head of Castruccio the ducal circle, investing him with the states of Lucca, Pistoia, Volterra, and the bishopric of Luni, conferring on him the privilege of quartering the royal arms of Bavaria with his own, besides an unscrupulous donation of the Pisan towns of Serrezzano, Rotina, Montecalvole, and Pietra Cassa. The ceremony of receiving the ducal coronet from an emperor’s hands, Castruccio’s great power, talents, and influence, and the universal feeling that this title would not long continue vain and empty, but become in substance as in name the first dukedom in Italy since the time of the ancient Lombards, altogether imparted a solemn and imposing character to the transaction which increased the apprehensions of every Italian Guelf; nor was the Ghibelline Pisa less anxious or discontented to see four of her walled towns quietly made over to Castruccio as a coronation gift—an earnest, as it seemed to be, of her own destiny.

The duke of Calabria, knowing that Castruccio was unwillingly compelled to follow Ludwig, who resumed his march towards Rome on the 15th of December, also prepared to quit Florence, leaving Philip Sanguineto with a thousand men-at-arms as his vicar. At a public feast he took leave of the Florentines, promising to return when the kingdom of Naples should be safe, and departed on the 27th of December, the same day that Castruccio by another road marched from Lucca to join the imperialists.

Charles governed despotically, like every ruler of that age; for liberty then consisted in the privilege of being eligible to govern and choose governors, rather than in being governed well; and although in doing so he tyrannically condemned a citizen of rank who with as much reason as insolence opposed the grant of a subsidy to King Robert, thereby proving that freedom no longer existed in Florence, yet he made himself a favourite with the citizens by great personal urbanity and his endeavours to reconcile private feuds, together with considerable liberality and a generally impartial[151] administration of justice. On the other hand, he was unpopular from his inactive, unwarlike character, and the excessive cost of his maintenance; this, according to Villani, who was employed in auditing the accounts, amounted in nine months to 900,000 florins; but as the greater part was circulated within the town, although a highly taxed people necessarily worked twice for the same money, it was still accompanied by great activity and some outward appearance of prosperity.

The emperor’s arrival at Viterbo was immediately felt in Rome, where a contest had previously arisen between Stefano Colonna seconded by Napoleone Orsini, who adhered to King Robert; and his own brother Sciarra Colonna, Jacobo Savelli, and Tebaldo di Santa Stazio, captains of the people; the first two had been expelled; for Castruccio’s arts and Ghibelline ducats had been long at work in that factious city which the pontiff’s absence at Avignon left in a state of continual agitation. It was generally governed by an oligarchy headed by the pope’s ministers and those of the king of Naples; by the Colonnas, Savelli, and Orsini; with occasional bursts of the most furious democracy; the senator administered justice; a council of fifty-two members nominally formed the government and was presided over by the prefect of Rome, two or three captains of the people along with the senator being elected by the popular voice. The Ghibelline chiefs sent privately to Ludwig, desiring that no heed should be given to the Roman ambassadors, who wished to settle the terms on which he was to be received, but that he should march directly to Rome; with this hint Castruccio, who was appointed to answer the embassy, immediately ordered the trumpets to sound to horse, saying courteously,“This is the emperor’s answer.” These messengers were detained, and Ludwig, suddenly appearing before the city, surprised the disaffected, confirmed the doubtful, and gave spirit to his adherents. He was crowned on the 16th of January, 1328.

During these transactions Benedetto da Orvieto, the duke of Calabria’s judicial vicar, arrived at Florence, where the citizens still found resources to complete the walls south of the Arno and erect the present Roman gate so as to secure that quarter of the town, which had been endangered by Castruccio’s late inroads on the Val di Greve. Neither was the duke’s lieutenant Philip Sanguineto inclined to sleep; by means of two Guelfic citizens of Pistoia, friends of Simone della Tosa, well acquainted with the weak points of that city, a plan was laid to surprise it and successfully executed. Having accurate measures of the walls and ditches, Sanguineto, with six hundred men-at-arms, the two Pistoians, and Simone della Tosa, but no other Florentine, repaired by night to Prato; he was there joined by two thousand infantry with the requisite besieging engines, ladders, and bridges, and continuing his march arrived under the weakest point of the Pistoian capital before daylight. The ditch was frozen hard enough to allow one man in armour to pass at a time, and thus a hundred men-at-arms gained the ramparts,[152] unperceived until the officer of the night visited the guards with his patrol; a short conflict then took place, the officer and patrol were put to death; but an alarm was given, the garrison was immediately under arms, and the whole city in confusion.

During this time bridges had been thrown over the ditch and engines set to work at the wall which, with the assistance of some friends within, was perforated sufficiently to allow of a man-at-arms leading his horse through; the assailants were soon united and an obstinate conflict followed with various success until broad daylight, when the Florentines succeeded in overcoming all opposition, and then, driving their enemy from the strong but as yet unfinished citadel, continued the plunder of Pistoia for eight successive days. This event was known at Rome only three days afterwards and raised Castruccio’s anger against Ludwig for compelling him to leave Tuscany. He instantly set off with five hundred horse and a thousand crossbowmen, and taking the Maremma road pushed eagerly forward with only twelve followers; after some days, travelling through a very dangerous country, Castruccio reached Pisa on the 9th of February, where he soon contrived by intrigue and influence to acquire supreme authority—a tolerable compensation for the loss of Pistoia.

CASTRUCCIO’S NEW CONQUEST; HIS SUDDEN DEATH

While Castruccio was steadying himself in the government of Pisa, Sanguineto and the Florentines were in high disputation about putting their recent conquests into a proper state of defence; the former insisting that he had done his part in capturing the town, while the citizens maintained that the duke was bound to discharge such expenses from his salary. The altercation continued and Pistoia remained unvictualled; but the Florentines, having gained some trifling advantages, grew as careless and confident as if fortune had never left their arms, while Castruccio hurried on his preparations for recapturing the neglected place. Nevertheless the Pisans and even his former adherents, now disliking his arbitrary sway, offered their city to Ludwig; he, fearful of alienating Castruccio, referred them to the empress, by whom it was accepted and her vicar immediately despatched to take the reins of government. Castruccio was not thus to be despoiled; he received the officer respectfully, but scoured the city with his horsemen in the manner of the age as a mark of sovereignty; then dismissed the imperial lieutenant loaded with gifts and caused himself to be elected and proclaimed absolute lord of Pisa for two years.

Thus master of new and abundant resources, he lost no time in profiting by the disputes at Florence, and immediately invested Pistoia with a thousand men-at-arms and numerous infantry; the place was strong, encompassed by a double ditch, and defended by Simone della Tosa with a sufficient garrison besides many Guelfic citizens. There was a protecting force at Prato only ten miles off and within sight of its signals, so that if the town had been well provisioned it might have withstood all Castruccio’s efforts until sickness compelled him to retreat. This chief, who had remained at Pisa to complete his preparations, joined the army on the 30th of May bringing strong reinforcements, and surrounded the town with a palisaded ditch and lines of circumvallation. Here he resolved to remain; nor did all the Florentine stratagems succeed in turning him from his purpose, not even when they collected a formidable army of twenty-six hundred men-at-arms and for three days successively defied him to battle, which he constantly pretended[153] to accept, while he only strengthened his camp with additional trenches, fresh palisades, and wide-branching abbati.

Seeing no chance of provoking him, the allies changed their position, and attacked the strongest point of his entrenchments with as little skill as success, instead of cutting off his supplies by Serravalle, which he would have been unable to prevent without a battle.

Sanguineto fell sick and had moreover quarrelled with some of the confederate chiefs, so that he deemed it best to retire and make a diversion elsewhere, leaving a strong convoy at Prato ready to succour the place when a fair occasion offered. On the 28th of July, after delivering another formal challenge which Castruccio was too sagacious to accept, the confederated army drew off towards Prato and thence marched in two divisions, one by Signa and the Gusciana to threaten Lucca, the other by the left bank of the Arno, which destroyed Pontadera and carried the rampart and Fosso Arnonico by storm. This was a great canal and breastwork excavated and fortified with towers by the Pisans in 1176, both as a national bulwark and an outlet for the superfluous waters of the Arno, of which river some have supposed it to be one of the three branches mentioned by Strabo. Thus was opened all the Pisan territory; San Casciano and Sansavino soon fell and Pisa saw herself insulted at her very gates with perfect impunity. Castruccio nevertheless remained immovable; he calculated on starvation and the moral effect of seeing a superior army retire without accomplishing anything, and accordingly on the 3rd of August Pistoia surrendered to sixteen hundred men-at-arms and the usual force of infantry, in face of an army of nearly double these numbers.

Thus victorious he returned in triumph to Lucca, more powerful, more dreaded, and more formidable than before; none of his important enterprises ever failed and Italy had not beheld such a captain for centuries. Lord of Pisa, Lucca, Lunigiana, and much of the eastern Riviera of Genoa, and master of three hundred walled towns, he was either courted or dreaded by every Italian prince from the emperor downwards. But Florence was in terror at his very name; and Galeazzo Visconti the once powerful lord of half Lombardy, who had been released by the emperor in the preceding March at Castruccio’s intercession, now served under his standard as a private individual. Visconti soon after expired at Pescia from the effects of a fever engendered by the labours of the Pistoian siege, and it was fatal to more than him: even Castruccio’s hour drew near; for the same fever, the consequence of his personal fatigues, was rapidly consuming him also. He feared the emperor’s resentment for the usurpation of Pisa and would have made peace with Florence, but was too much mistrusted and therefore failed. The malady increased; he informed those about him that he was going to die and that his death would be the signal for great revolutions; then, taking the necessary precautions to insure his three sons the quiet succession of his three great cities, and charging them to conceal his death until they were secure, he expired on the 3rd of September, 1328, in the forty-seventh year of his age and the twelfth of his rule over Lucca.

ESTIMATES OF CASTRUCCIO

Tegrimih his biographer says that Castruccio was a cruel avenger of his own wrongs; but as personal vengeance, never justifiable, assumes in princes a more sharp and bitter aspect, it would be difficult to say whether his conduct[154] to his subjects merited the name of severity or cruelty. With the soldiers he was universally popular, and in speaking to them his eloquence and grace of manner and diction were wonderfully adapted as well to his own dignity as to the mind and feelings of his audience. He would often calm a tumultuous soldiery by simply calling them sons, fathers, and brothers, and no army ever mutinied under his command. He was first in every danger, first to seize the ladder and mount the wall; first to swim across a river when swelled to a torrent; first in every individual act of skill and courage, as he was first in talent and command; and he gained the hearts of soldiers by his agreeable familiarity with the meanest among them. His great reputation as a warrior secured his ascendency in field and council; and such was his soldiers’ confidence that often by his mere name and appearance the fortune of battle was restored, fugitives were arrested, and the foe defeated. His arrival alone was frequently sufficient to force an enemy from fortified places or insure their immediate surrender. Whatever were his individual sentiments he always consulted his council, composed of the ablest men of Lucca, and more especially of those most learned in history; but when it was a pure question of war he sought the opinion of old military men well acquainted with the seat of intended hostilities. Uneducated himself, he yet delighted in the company and conversation of literary men; he improved and maintained the roads and bridges of his state, had numerous spies, amongst them many women, in all parts of the world, and was properly said to have the wings of an eagle.f

“This Castruccio,” says Villani,d “was in person tall, dexterous, and handsome; finely made, not bulky, and of a fair complexion rather inclining to paleness; his hair was light and straight and he bore a very gracious aspect. He was a valorous and magnanimous tyrant, wise and sagacious, of an anxious and laborious mind and possessing great military talents; was extremely prudent in war and successful in his undertakings. He was much feared and reverenced and in his time performed many great and remarkable actions. He was a scourge to his fellow-citizens, to the Pisans, the Pistoians, the Florentines, and all Tuscany, during the fifteen (twelve?) years in which he held the sovereignty of Lucca. He was very cruel in executing and torturing men, ungrateful for good offices rendered to him in his necessities, partial to new people and vain of the high station to which he had mounted, so that he believed himself lord of Florence and king of Tuscany.”

Although the first warrior of his age, says Pignotti, it is doubted whether he was greater in arms than in council; although he was born and had lived in the midst of revolutions, he never shed blood unless when necessity demanded it. He was one of those great men who, although ignorant of letters himself, knew their value, and esteemed the learned. An encourager of useful arts and manufactures, he generously rewarded whoever introduced new ones. The monuments of the numerous works of public utility which he undertook are still remaining, such as bridges, roads, and fortresses.

He was certainly an extraordinary man, and had the theatre of his actions been more extensive, and his means greater, he would have distinguished himself equally with any of the celebrated men of antiquity. In the small sphere, however, in which he was obliged to act, as a private individual, he became one of the most powerful princes of Italy; since, at his death, he possessed Lucca, Pisa, Pistoia, the Lunigiana, a great part of the coast to the east of Genoa, and innumerable castles; and if he had lived longer, in those times of revolution and the division of Italy into so many small sovereignties,[155] it may be conjectured that his greatness would not have stopped here. Henry, his eldest son, was heir to his father’s estates, but not to his father’s talents. The power of Lucca terminated with Castruccio, since shortly afterwards we see this city offered for sale, bought by a private citizen, and the cities and castles which were once occupied by Castruccio retaken by the Florentines. Upon the arrival of the emperor, the sovereignty of Pisa, and afterwards that of Lucca, were taken away from his sons.e

DUKE OF CALABRIA DIES: LUDWIG RETIRES

The death of the formidable and ambitious Castruccio saved Florence from the greatest danger which she had yet incurred; and, to complete her good fortune, the sovereign she had chosen to oppose Castruccio, the duke of Calabria, died also about the same time. He had distinguished himself only by his vices, his want of foresight, and his depredations. Ludwig of Bavaria, too, ceased to be formidable; he completed his discredit by his perfidy towards those who had been the most devoted to him. Salvestro de’ Gatti, lord of Viterbo, had been the first Ghibelline chief to open a fortress to him in the states of the church; Ludwig arrested him and put him to the torture to force him to reveal the place where he had concealed his treasure. The emperor had rendered himself odious and ridiculous at Rome by the puerility of his proceedings against John XXII, and his vain efforts to create a schism in the church. Having returned to Tuscany, he deprived the children of Castruccio of the sovereignty of Lucca, on the 16th of March, 1329, and sold it to one of their relatives who, a month afterwards, was driven out by a troop of German mercenaries which had abandoned the emperor to make war on their own account, that is to say, to live by plunder. Ludwig passed the summer of 1329 in Lombardy. Towards the end of the autumn he returned to Germany, carrying with him the contempt and detestation of the Italians. He had betrayed all who had trusted in him; and completely disorganised the Ghibelline party which had relied on his support.

CAN’ GRANDE DELLA SCALA

That party had just lost another of their most distinguished chiefs, Can’ Grande della Scala. He was the grandson of the first Mastino, whom the republic of Verona had chosen for master after the death of Ezzelino, in 1260. Can’ Grande reigned in that city from 1312 to 1329, with a splendour[156] which no other prince in Italy equalled. Brave and fortunate in war, and wise in council, he gained a reputation for generosity, and even probity, to which few captains could pretend. Among the Lombard princes, he was the first protector of literature and the arts. The best poets, painters, and sculptors of Italy, Dante, to whom he offered an asylum, as well as Uguccione dà Faggiuola, and many other exiles illustrious in war or politics were assembled at his court. He aspired to subdue the Veronese and Trevisan marches, or what has since been called the Terra Firma of Venice. He took possession of Vicenza, and afterwards maintained a long war against the republic of Padua, the most powerful in the district, and that which had shown the most attachment to the Guelf party and to liberty. But Padua gave way to all the excesses of democracy; the people evinced such jealousy of all distinction, such inconstancy in their choice, such presumption, that the imprudence of the chiefs as well as of the mob drew down the greatest disasters on the republic. The Paduans, repeatedly defeated by Can’ Grande della Scala from 1314 to 1318, sought protection by vesting the power in a single person; and fixed for that purpose on the noble house of Carrara, which had long given leaders to the Guelf party.

The power vested in a single person soon extinguished all the courage and virtue that remained; and on the 10th of September, 1328, Padua submitted to Can’ Grande della Scala. The year following he attacked and took Treviso, which surrendered on the 6th of July, 1329. He possessed himself of Feltre and Cividale soon after. The whole province seemed subjugated to his power; but the conqueror also was subdued. Attacked in his camp with a mortal disease, he gave orders on entering Treviso that his couch should be carried into the great church, in which, four days afterwards, on the 22nd of July, 1329, he expired. He was not more than forty-one years of age; Castruccio was forty-seven at his death. Galeazzo Visconti died at about the same age, less than a year before.

JOHN OF BOHEMIA COMES TO ITALY

The Ghibelline party, which had produced such great captains, thus saw them all disappear at once in the middle of their careers. Passerino de’ Bonacossi, tyrant of Mantua, who belonged to the same party, had been assassinated on the 14th of August, 1328, by the Gonzagas, who thus avenged an affront offered to the wife of one of them. They took possession of the sovereignty of Mantua, and kept it in their family till the eighteenth century. Of all the princes who had well received Ludwig of Bavaria in Italy, the marquis d’Este was the only one who preserved his power. He was lord of Ferrara; and even this prince, though a Guelf by birth, was forced by the intrigues of the pope’s legate to join the Ghibellines.

The Ghibelline party, which had been rendered so formidable by the ability of its captains, was now completely disorganised. The Lombards placed no confidence in those who remained, they had forgotten liberty and dared no longer aspire to it; but they longed for a prince capable of defending them, and who, by his moderation and good faith, could give them hopes of peace. They saw none such in Italy; Germany unexpectedly offered one. John, king of Bohemia, the son of Henry VII, arrived at Trent towards the end of the year 1330. The memory of his father was rendered dearer to the Italians by the comparison of his conduct with that of his successor; and John was calculated to heighten this predilection. He could not submit to[157] the barbarism of Bohemia, and inhabited, in preference, the county of Luxemburg, or Paris; and having acquired a spirit of heroism, by his constant reading or listening to the French romances of chivalry, he aspired to the glory of being a complete knight. All that could at first sight seduce the people was united in him—beauty, valour, dexterity in all corporeal exercises, eloquence, an engaging manner. His conduct in France and Germany, where he had been by turns warrior and pacificator, was noble. He never sought anything for himself; he seemed to be actuated only by the love of the general good or glory.

The Italians, justly disgusted with their own princes, eagerly offered to throw themselves into his arms; the city of Brescia sent deputies to Trent, to offer John the sovereignty of their republic. He arrived there, to take possession of it, on the 31st of December, 1330. Almost immediately after, Bergamo, Cremona, Pavia, Vercelli, and Novara followed the example of Brescia. Azzo Visconti himself, son of Galeazzo, who, in 1328, had repurchased Milan from Ludwig of Bavaria, could not withstand the enthusiasm of his subjects; he nominally ceded the government to John, taking henceforth the title of his vicar only. Parma, Modena, Reggio, and lastly Lucca also soon gave themselves to John of Bohemia. John, in all these cities, recalled indiscriminately the Guelf and Ghibelline exiles, restored peace, and made them at last taste the first-fruits of good government.

The Florentines did not find sufficient strength in the Guelf party to oppose the menacing greatness of the king of Bohemia. Robert of Naples was become old; he wanted energy, and his soldiers courage. The republic of Bologna, formerly so rich and powerful, had lost its vigour under the government of the legate, Bertrand de Poiet; those of Perugia and Siena had within themselves few resources, and those few their jealousy of Florence prevented their liberally employing. There remained no free cities in Lombardy; and all those in the states of the church, which during the preceding century had shown so much spirit, had fallen under the yoke of some petty tyrant, who immediately declared for the Ghibelline party. The Florentines felt the necessity of silencing their hereditary enmities and their ancient repugnances, and of making an alliance with the Lombard Ghibellines against John of Bohemia, with the condition that in dividing his spoils they should all agree to prevent the aggrandisement of any single power, and preserve between themselves an exact equilibrium, in order that Italy after their conquests should incur no danger of being subjugated by one of them. The treaty of alliance against the king of Bohemia, and the partition of the states which he had just acquired in Italy, was signed in the month of September, 1332. Cremona was to be given to Visconti; Parma to Mastino della Scala, the nephew and successor of Can’ Grande; Reggio to Gonzaga; Modena to the marquis d’Este; and Lucca to the Florentines.

John did not oppose to this league the resistance that was expected from his courage and talents. Of an inconstant character, becoming weary of everything, always pursuing something new, thinking only of shining in courts and tournaments, he soon regarded all these little Italian principalities, of which he had already lost some, as too citizen-like and unlordly: he sold every town which had given itself to him, to whatever noble desired to rule over it; and he departed for Paris on the 15th of October, 1333, leaving Italy in still greater confusion than before. The Lombard Ghibellines, confederates of the Florentines, succeeded, before the end of the summer of 1335, in taking possession of the cities abandoned by the king of Bohemia. Lucca, which alone fell to the share of Florence, was defended by a band of German[158] soldiers, who made it the centre of their depredations, and barbarously tyrannised over the Lucchese. Mastino della Scala offered to treat for the Florentines with the captains who then commanded at Lucca, and he succeeded in obtaining the surrender of the town to him, on the 20th of December, 1335. As soon as he became master of it he began to flatter himself that it would afford him the means of subjugating the rest of Tuscany; and, instead of delivering it as he had engaged to the Florentines, he sought to renew against them a Ghibelline league jointly with the Pisans and all the independent nobles of the Apennines.

LUCCA A BONE OF CONTENTION

The Florentines, forced to defend themselves against their ally, who after they had contributed to his elevation betrayed them, sought the alliance of the Venetians, who also had reason to complain of Mastino. A treaty was signed between the two republics on the 21st of June, 1336. The war, to which Florence liberally contributed in money, was made only in Lombardy and was successful. Padua was taken from Mastino on the 3rd of August, 1337, and, as that town showed no ardent desire of liberty, it was given in sovereignty to the Guelf house of Carrara. The Venetians took possession of Treviso, Castelfranco, and Ceneda. It was the first acquisition they had made beyond the Lagune, their first establishment on terra firma, which henceforward was to mingle their interests with those of the rest of Italy. But their ambition at this moment extended no further. Satisfied themselves, and sacrificing their allies, they made peace with Mastino della Scala on the 18th of December, 1338, without stipulating that the city of Lucca, the object of the war, should be given up to the Florentines, for which these had contracted a debt of 450,000 florins. The Florentines, successively betrayed by all their allies, saw the danger of their position augment daily; the Guelfs lost, one after the other, every supporter of their party; the vigour of the king of Naples, now seventy-five years of age, was gone. The pope, John XXII, had died at Avignon, on the 4th of December, 1334; and his successor, Benedict XII, like him a Frenchman, neither understood nor took any part in the affairs of Italy. A few months previous, on the 17th of March, 1334, the cardinal Bertrand de Poiet had been driven by the people from Bologna; and this ambitious legate,[159] no longer supported by the pope his father, had disappeared from the political scene.

But the Bolognese did not long preserve the liberty which they had recovered. One of their citizens, named Taddeo de Pepoli, the richest man in all Italy, had seduced the German guard which they held in pay, and by its aid took possession of the sovereignty of Bologna on the 28th of August, 1337. He then made alliance with the Ghibellines. The number of the free cities on the aid, or at least the sympathy, of which Florence could reckon continually diminished. The Genoese, from the commencement of the century, had consumed their strength in internal wars between the great Guelf and Ghibelline families; as long as they were free, however, the Florentines, without any treaty of alliance, regarded them as friendly; but the long-protracted civil wars had disgusted the people with the government; they rose on the 23rd of September, 1339, and overthrew it, replacing the signoria by a single chief, Boccanera, on whom they conferred the title of doge. It might have been feared that they had only given themselves a tyrant; but the first doge of Genoa was a friend to liberty; and the Genoese people, having imitated Venice in giving themselves a first officer in the state with that title, were not long before they carried the imitation further, by seeking to combine liberty with power vested in a single person. In the meanwhile Mastino della Scala suffered a Parmesan noble to take from him the city of Parma. As from that time he had no further communication with Lucca, he offered to sell it to the Florentines. The bargain was concluded in the month of August, 1341; but it appeared to the Pisans the signal of their own servitude, for it cut off all communication between them and the Ghibellines of Lombardy. They immediately advanced their militia into the Lucchese states, to prevent the Florentines from taking possession of the town; vanquished them in a great battle, on the 2nd of October, 1341, under the walls of Lucca; and, on the 6th of July following, took possession of that city for themselves.c

A republic like the Florentine, whose strength depends upon commerce, should take no part in wars which do not affect her. The conquests she can make are always more expensive than the revenues she can derive from them are important, and awaken the jealousy of the neighbouring states, engaging her in fresh broils with them. At the end of a war which had been carried on for the acquisition of Lucca, the republic found herself greatly in debt, without having been able to obtain the city; and the chief source of her riches, commerce, received a terrible shock in the failure of the trading firms of Peruzzi and Bardi. These commercial houses had lent to Edward III, king of England, an immense sum of money. The king was involved in a war with France; but, although he was for the most part conqueror, and had frequently invaded the French provinces, nevertheless the luxury and the magnificence of his court, the incalculable expenses of war, which are burdensome even to conquerors, rendered him unable to satisfy his creditors; and he was obliged to fail in his contracts with these merchants for 1,365,000 florins in gold. Giving money its value in those times we shall find it equivalent to about 7,000,000 sequins [about £3,052,000 or $15,260,000]; and such a sum being lost by the city of Florence, we may easily conceive what injury was done to her commerce. She might, indeed, have been given up for ruined; these temporary mischiefs, however, are easily repaired, when the primary fountains of riches are not exhausted or diverted into another channel, and as these remained untouched in Florence they very soon filled up the momentary deficiency. But this could not have happened at a more unlucky moment than when the public, which draws its revenues from private[160] individuals, was so much in debt. To this evil was added the dearth of provisions; and, what very frequently accompanies it, a pestilential fever whereby, if the old writers have not exaggerated, no less than fifteen thousand persons died that year within the walls of Florence.

In order somewhat to console the Florentines for these calamities, a very respectable embassy arrived from Rome. This city, in the absence of the pontiff, had been agitated by political convulsions, originating in the discord of the nobility, it having been reported that the Florentines had, in a great measure, suppressed their own discords by depriving the nobility of every share in the government. Roman ambassadors came to make themselves acquainted with the Florentine constitution, and with the means to prevent the great from disturbing the public tranquillity. But while the Romans were coming to learn the manner of living peaceably from the Florentines, domestic broils were upon the eve of recommencing in Florence. Andrea Bardi and Bardo Frescobaldi had been very much aggrieved by Jacopo Gabrielli, of Gubbio, lately created captain of the guard, and the executor of the despotic orders of those few who wished for the exclusive government in their own hands, from which both the nobility and the common people were entirely removed, as well as many of their own order. To these two, smarting under the pains of recent injuries, were united many others from the great who were deprived by law of any share in the government; together with others from the people, who, by an overbearing preponderance, were kept at a distance from it; and a conspiracy was planned to change the government. Their foreign friends, the Pazzi, Tarlati, Guidi, and Ubertini, etc., were to come to Florence, and on the 2nd of November the whole city was to rise and overturn the constitution. The conspiracy was discovered the day before its execution, by Andrea Bardi, who, either through fear or remorse, revealed the correspondence to Jacopo Alberti, one of the heads of the government. The latter, assembling, and there being no time to lose, ordered the public alarm-bell to be rung; and the people throughout the city took up arms against the traitors, whose succours had not yet arrived; hence those who were on the right bank of the Arno did not move; on the other side, too, arms were immediately taken up, and they endeavoured to defend themselves in the street called Bardi. Surrounded on every side by the armed people, they were about coming to blows, when the mayor Matteo of Ponte, a native of Brescia, a venerable man, interposed; and setting before the Bardi and Frescobaldi the imminent danger of being slaughtered with their families, he persuaded them to lay down their arms, promising them that the conspirators should leave Florence, out of which city he himself accompanied them in the night.

Fortune appeared to be playing with the Florentines, by offering and taking away from them, at the same time, the city of Lucca, always annoying them, whether they aimed at obtaining it by arms or by money. Mastino Scala, after the loss of Parma, which had been taken away from him by Azzo Correggio, seeing himself unable any longer to maintain Lucca, offered it to the Florentines for the sum of 250,000 florins in gold; the latter consented; but before it came to their hands, they were obliged to contend with the Pisans, who thought they would no longer be enabled to maintain their liberty if Lucca belonged to the Florentines. They would have been better pleased, as they were not able to conquer the Florentines by money, had Lucca remained free; various councils were held in which it was finally determined they should take up arms and contend for the possession of Lucca with the Florentines, and after some fruitless treaty with Mastino[161] they laid siege to it. They had collected many troops both from the Tuscan Ghibellines and the lords of Lombardy, particularly from Lucchino Visconti, whose friendship they had purchased with treachery.

One of the first Milanese citizens, Francis of Postierla, had married a near relative of Lucchino, the beautiful and virtuous Margaret Visconti who had rejected Lucchino when he fell in love with her. His ill will being made known to the husband, induced him to frame a conspiracy; upon the discovery of which Francis fled to Avignon, whence he was attracted by Lucchino to Pisa by the most insidious artifices. In spite of a safe passage, of which the rulers of Pisa had assured him, he was taken and consigned to Lucchino; who, in order to crown his barbarous brutality, ordered him to be beheaded, together with his beloved and unfortunate consort. For this act of perfidy the Pisans received powerful assistance from Lucchino, and were enabled to maintain their position in front of the Florentines.

The viceroy of Mastino was treating at the same time with the Pisans and putting up Lucca at auction. After various altercations about the payment of the money, the people of the Florentines were finally introduced into Lucca; but two strong places belonging to the Lucchese, the Cerruglio and Montechiaro, still remained in the hands of the Pisans, for which 70,000 florins in gold were deducted. The Pisans, however, would not depart; and remaining immovable in the plain of Lucca, the Florentines would have shown their sense by standing upon the defensive, and either by occupying important posts prevented the transport of provisions to the Pisan army, or harassed their country with inroads; but they were ashamed of leaving them quiet; and approaching the enemy, they offered them battle near the Ghiaia, which the Pisans did not refuse; and they fought with varying fortune. The victory inclined in the beginning in favour of the Florentines, and Giovanni Visconti son of Lucchino was made prisoner; but falling into disorder, in following up the enemy, they were routed and put to flight by a band which remained in guard of the camp. The archers took a great part in this victory, amongst whom were many Genoese, greatly renowned in this manner of warfare. The cavalry of the Florentines, so much more numerous than that of the Pisans, was in a great measure disabled for action by the arrows. The loss of the Florentines, in killed and prisoners, was not less than two thousand men. The Pisans, taking courage at this advantage, again surrounded Lucca. It was singular enough to behold the ambassadors of King Robert, appearing at this moment, demanding the possession of Lucca from the Florentines, as his own property, telling them Lucca had been given over to his hands since the year 1313, when it was taken from them by Uguccione dà Faggiuola. The prompt consent of the Florentines, however, did not occasion less astonishment, who thus lost a city they had so much desired and had purchased with so much treasure and blood.

The same ambassadors, having taken possession, went to Pisa, and intimated to that republic to raise the siege of a city which belonged to the king of Naples; but the Pisans, not yielding so easily, proposed rather to send ambassadors to the king. It may be conjectured that the king, as an ancient friend of the Florentines, acted in concert with them to make the Pisans retreat as the latter really suspected. Malatesta had been made general of the Florentines, and marched in order to raise the siege of Lucca; he was however artfully held at bay by the captain of the Pisans who, not having sufficient people to cope with the Florentines, and knowing how greatly Lucca was deficient in provisions, chose to fight by temporising.[162] The duke of Athens arrived at the Florentine army with one hundred French horse; and other reinforcements coming up, various operations took place upon the Serchio, where the Pisans, although inferior in number, made a brave defence; Malatesta, superior in force, could never dislodge them or force them to battle; and, after many attempts to relieve Lucca, he was obliged to retreat. The Lucchese, thus abandoned, were forced to come to terms with the Pisans, which were very moderate; since (having given time for the Florentines who were in it to retire) they were content to keep a garrison for fifteen years in the castle of Lucca, called Dell’Agosta in Ponte Tetto, and in the tower of Montuolo—which was to be paid, however, by the Lucchese; in all other respects they were free. Thus, after the waste of so much treasure and blood, Lucca, which had been so greatly desired, was held for a moment and again lost.

THE DUKE OF ATHENS MADE PROTECTOR OF FLORENCE

These unsuccessful events had, as usual, excited hatred against the rulers of the Florentine Republic. The latter, in order to cover themselves and distract the enemies’ attention and fury elsewhere, elected as governor and protector of the city and its states, Walter, duke of Athens and count of Brienne, of French extraction but brought up in Greece and Apulia. Since he had fulfilled the duties of the duke of Calabria in Florence, this man had acquired great reputation for wisdom and justice; and after the expiration of the period of Malatesta’s government was elected general and protector, with the most extensive power of administering justice within and without Florence. The duke was a man of vast ambition, and possessed sufficient talent to profit by the circumstances in which the city was placed, divided as it was into three orders of persons, the nobility, the rich middle class, and the common people. The government was entirely in the hands of the second; the other two orders, therefore, were necessarily discontented; and adding their old wrongs to the misfortunes which had happened to the republic from the improvident administration of those who governed, their complaints became more frequent and daring; but those most irritated, and probably with the most reason, were the nobility. The people, not content with having deprived them of every share in the government, would not even administer justice to them; they caused the laws to be put in force against them in the severest manner, which laws were silent for the most part in favour of the class that governed; and thus, even in the latter order, persons were not wanting to whom the government became odious, since the most important offices were concentrated in the hands of a few.

All these discontented persons united themselves with the duke, urgently beseeching him to make himself absolute master of the city, and promised to support him; thus preferring the slavery of their native country to a free but aristocratic government, in which they had no share. The duke both supported and fomented this good disposition towards him; and by some acts of vigour, which bore the colour of the most scrupulous justice, he drew upon himself the applauses of the discontented, and struck terror into the people, having brought to justice and made some of those persons feel the rigour of the laws, who, from being in the number who divided the principal offices amongst themselves, went unpunished and were consequently odious to the rest. Giovanni de’ Medici, among the most powerful, had been captain of Lucca. When arrested, he confessed under torture that he had permitted[163] Tarlati to escape from the camp (although fame reported he was guilty only of bad custody), and his head was taken off. William Altoviti, accused of barter, met with the same fate. Rosso Ricci and Naldo Rucellai were also arrested; the former had appropriated to himself the pay of the soldiers; the latter had received money from the Pisans in order to second their interests. The duke did not choose to punish them with death, fearful that too much blood might disgust the people; they were therefore first sentenced to the payment of a sum of money, Ricci to perpetual imprisonment, and Rucellai was banished to the confines of Perugia. These chastisements in four of the principal families, which had been accustomed to go unpunished, and were odious to the people and the nobility, drew down great applause upon the duke, who, considering his design already mature for making himself absolute master, and conscious he possessed the power, chose nevertheless to ask the government from the gonfalonier and the priors, who denied it him with modest but firm remonstrances.

But the magistracy, knowing the great favour he enjoyed from the public, in order not to excite a dangerous tumult, as the people were to assemble the morning following, agreed upon giving him the government for a year, under those limitations with which King Robert and the duke of Calabria had formerly enjoyed it. The evening before, the magistracy went with other respectable citizens to the duke, who, in order to gain greater respect for piety and moderation, inhabited the convent of Santa Croce, and after many discussions they feigned to agree to it. The conditions were signed by notaries on both sides, and approved by the oath of the duke, who came to the palace of the priors on the morning of the 8th of September, accompanied by the greater part of the nobility, by an innumerable concourse of armed people, and by his own troops. The gonfalonier made known the deliberations which had been held in the evening; and when it was heard that the seigniory of Florence was given to the duke for a year, many voices from the lower order of the people cried out, “For life!” (a vita). The doors of the palace being opened, he was conducted into it by the nobility, and installed absolute master, sending away the priors and the gonfalonier, who, preserving the name only, were removed elsewhere in order to represent a scenic farce. Fireworks were set off for joy. The arms of the duke were seen hung up at every corner; at the ringing of all the bells his banners were hoisted upon the tower; and the bishop Acciajuoli pronounced a homily, wherein he loudly extolled the praises due to the supposed virtues of the duke. All the cities of the republic too surrendered to him; he became, therefore, master of Florence, not with the limited authority by which the royal family of Naples had more than once held it, but with the absolute power, partly conceded to him and partly usurped.[164] Right of life and death over persons, distribution of employments, imposition of taxes or imposts—all were at his will; so much can a momentary delusion effect, when produced by the fury of parties!

GROWING UNPOPULARITY OF THE DUKE OF ATHENS

Those who were to gain most by the change were the great, so-called, who, being hitherto excluded from the employments and obliged to obey a government of merchants, had now every reason to hope that the duke, to whom their rank brought them nearer than the others, would grant them his favour together with no small share in the government. One of the first acts of the duke was to make peace, and afterwards an alliance with the Pisans, thinking it necessary to confirm the dominion; which very much displeased the Florentines. It is easier to acquire states than to maintain them. The favoured by the change can be few, and these produce endless discontents among those who either expected or thought the same reward due to them. The mind too, which in the execution of the enterprise, has been assiduously vigilant and active, when once it has obtained its end, is accustomed generally to relax, at a time when its vigilance ought to be increased. The duke thought he would be able to preserve by force what he had acquired by benevolence, and took into pay many foreign troops at the expense of the republic, an insufficient means against a populous city, which may be badly inclined.

He soon neglected the friendship of the great, and began to cultivate that of the common people, extending his favours to the lowest, in order to deserve their powerful support. Principal persons were put to death upon trivial pretences; others were fined heavily in money. To this were added the insolence and dissoluteness of the duke and his dependants towards the most honest women; amongst whom they endeavoured to introduce the libertine customs and manners of the French and Neapolitan courts, and substitute them in place of the modest and decent attributes of the republican Florentines. Not only common dissoluteness degraded his courtiers, but even vices which nature abhors. The seed of discontent was sown in all orders of people—in the nobility, besides the motives we have adduced, for not being admitted to the government, as they had expected; in the people for having lost it; in all orders on account of the increased impositions, so that three months had hardly elapsed before the government of the duke became detested with more vehemence than it had been before desired.

It was not difficult for the duke to perceive the change, and the increasing hatred of the people against him; but his manner of acting in these circumstances was not very judicious. It was natural to imagine that, in a new principality, some conspiracy might be planned against him; but he thought of gaining to himself the public affection by an air of confidence and extraordinary security, which he carried so far as not only to despise, but even to punish as calumniators whoever ventured to give him salutary advice. Matthew of Morozzo, for having warned him that the family of the Medici were conspiring to kill him, was, by an act of cruelty at once useless and imprudent, flayed and hanged; this terrible example, however, did not deter others, so great is the hope and courage of informers. Lambert Abatti followed Matthew in giving information and receiving punishment; for having disclosed to the duke that some noble Florentines were conspiring for his death, and that they held a council with John Riccio, a[165] captain of Mastino, he received the reward due to the trade of an informer. This cruel severity, without gaining him the good disposition of the Florentines, was adapted only to invite the discontented to conspire against him more openly. The duke, however, with an unexampled frivolity, appears to have cared more for words than actions; since, upon its being reported to him that Bettone of Cino, who had been already promoted by him, spoke ill of his government, he caused his tongue to be plucked out, to be stuck upon a lance, and the unfortunate Bettone to be dragged close to it upon a car through the city. He banished him afterwards to Romagna, where he died from the consequences of the wound.

Words cannot express how much, in an eloquent city, eager to examine and judge of public affairs, such a punishment at once disheartened and embittered the citizens against him, who thus saw even the liberty of speech denied them. All orders of the state were roused against the duke; three conspiracies were formed against him at the same time, and not one had any knowledge of the other. The bishop of Florence (himself Acciajuoli) was the head of the first; he had loaded the duke with excessive praises at his first installation, and was now ashamed of it. As the three conspiracies did not communicate with each other, the projects to get rid of the duke were various, none of which could be carried into execution; because, as suspicions increased, he had vigilantly put himself upon guard, although the conspirators for a considerable time remained concealed. Francis Brunelleschi, one of the adherents of the duke, received a hint of the conspiracy of the Medici from a Sienese, who came there, but who could only name Paul Marzecca, a Florentine citizen, and Simone of Monterappoli. These were arrested, and, being tormented, revealed the names of the conspirators, of whom Antonio Adimari was the ringleader, a man of great reputation, both for the qualities with which he was endowed and the greatness of his family. When summoned he appeared, and was detained; but the duke dared not put him to death.

THE DUKE DRIVEN FROM THE CITY

Frightened at the great number and the respectability of the conspirators, and not thinking he possessed a force sufficient to act against them, he sent for aid from various parts of Tuscany and to the lord of Bologna; a part of which arriving, he caused three hundred of the principal citizens to be summoned, many of whom were of the conspirators, under the pretext of wishing to consult with them, as he was sometimes wont to do. It was his intention to arrest them, put part of them to death, and keep the remainder in prison, and by this execution to terrify the rest of the city, scour it with armed men, and establish more firmly his dominion. The summons being made known, and so many being found in the list that it appeared clearly a list of proscribed, the number gave courage to each; in a short time the three conspiracies were united into one, and they determined, instead of offering their heads to the tyrant, to attack him courageously. The morning of St. Anne being arrived, which was destined for the enterprise, contentions between the people were purposely kindled, who coming to blows, all of a sudden the people appeared in arms; the streets were barricaded; the nobility and the people, forgetting their ancient contentions, embraced each other, and united in sustaining the common cause. The foreign soldiers of the duke, at the news of the rebellion, marched to his assistance; many could not gain the palace, and were either killed or made[166] prisoners. Some, however, came up and joined the guard, which was accustomed to remain there. A few of the nobles, who had remained faithful to him, and a part of the lowest order of people whom he had endeavoured to gain over, came to him; but these, seeing that the greater part of the city was in open rebellion against him, abandoned him. The priors, who had incautiously retired to the palace for safety at the beginning of the tumult, were retained as hostages by the duke. The soldiers, part foot and part horse, who were in the square in his defence, were very soon beaten by the infuriated mob, and dismounting retired for safety within the palace. All the streets that led to it were blockaded by the people, and no hope of succour nor other defence remained to the duke but the walls. These were very strong, and sufficiently provided with defenders; provisions, however, were wanting. He remained there besieged until the 3rd of August. In the meantime, having assembled the people in Santa Raparata, he gave power to the bishop, united with fourteen citizens, to reform the government. All the agents of the duke who came into the hands of the people were cruelly murdered and torn to pieces. This fate attended a notary of the protector (Simone Norcia), Arrigo Fei, who was discovered in the act of escape, disguised as a friar, with another Neapolitan. The people were not contented with a simple death, but murdered them publicly in the most cruel manner.

The duke, in the meantime, found himself pinched by hunger in the palace, and seeing himself reduced to a bad condition sought for an accommodation. The Sienese ambassadors had joined the Florentines with opportune aid. These, together with the bishop and with Count Simone, treated with the people, who, however, obstinately refused every accommodation, unless William of Assisi protector, with his son, and Cerettieri Visdomini were first given over to them. The duke refused; but the French soldiers, who were shut up there, protested they would not perish by hunger or by the sword for three persons they would not even have saved, and in the same evening threw the son of the conservatore out at the gate. He was a youth of fine aspect, of eighteen years of age, and was guilty of no other crime but that of being son of an odious man. This was sufficient for the mob to make a sacrifice of him; he was stabbed by a thousand cuts, and even torn to pieces by the teeth of the mob. The same end was made of the father, who had been spectator of the execution of his son. Being demanded[167] by loud shouts, and driven out from the palace, he was cut to pieces, carried in triumph through the city, and his blood and flesh tasted with a savage eagerness. It is strange to see how the people, united, can commit such atrocious actions, which any individual, taken abstractedly, could not be capable of; it would appear that the passions become multiplied in proportion as the number of the mob increases; and that, thinking to do themselves justice, an emulation in cruelty arises, which makes everyone vie with another in excesses of barbarity. This brutal occupation was the cause of the safety of Visdomini, who, being forgotten in that moment, was enabled to escape in the night. After so many cruelties, the people began to attend to treaties of accommodation. The duke gave full power to enter into them by the means of the bishop of Lecce, to fourteen elect, and to the bishop Acciajuoli. By this treaty he solemnly renounced, on the 3rd of August, before the Sienese ambassadors and Count Simone, the government of Florence and the other cities of the republic; and in token of renunciation laid down his mace before witnesses. He departed, on the 6th of August, accompanied by the count, who ordered him on the confines to confirm his abdication. He at first refused; but, upon being threatened with being taken back to Florence, he was induced to ratify it. He left behind him an atrocious and infamous memory; nor is any other praise due to his government than for the care he gave himself to unite the minds of many citizens who were alienated from one another by an inveterate and hereditary hatred.e

ATTEMPTED REFORMS

These events, taking place in the city, induced all the dependencies of the Florentine state to throw off their yoke; so that Arezzo, Castiglione, Pistoia, Volterra, Colle, and San Gemigniano rebelled. Thus Florence found herself deprived of both her tyrant and her dominions at the same moment, and in recovering her liberty taught her subjects how they might become free. The duke being expelled, and the territories lost, the fourteen citizens and the bishop thought it would be better to act kindly towards their subjects in peace, than to make them enemies by war, and to show a desire that their subjects should be free as well as themselves. They therefore sent ambassadors to the people of Arezzo, to renounce all dominion over that city, and to enter into a treaty with them; to the end that, as they could not retain them as subjects, they might make use of them as friends. They also, in the best manner they were able, agreed with the other places that they should retain their freedom, and that, being free, they might mutually assist each other in the preservation of their liberties. This prudent course was attended with a most favourable result; for Arezzo, not many years afterwards, returned to the Florentine rule, and the other places in the course of a few months returned to their former obedience. Thus it frequently occurs that we sooner attain our ends by a seeming indifference to them, than by more obstinate pursuit.

Having settled external affairs, they now turned to the consideration of those within the city; and after some altercation between the nobility and the people, it was arranged that the nobility should form one-third of the seigniory and fill one-half of the other offices. The city was hitherto divided into sixths; and hence there would be six seigniors, one for each sixth, except when, from some more than ordinary cause, there had been twelve or thirteen created; but when this had occurred they were[168] again soon reduced to six. It now seemed desirable to make an alteration in this respect, as well because the sixths were not properly divided as that, wishing to give their proportion to the great, it became desirable to increase the number. They therefore divided the city into quarters, and for each created three seigniors. They abolished the office of gonfalonier of justice, and also the gonfaloniers of the companies of the people; and instead of the twelve buonuomini, or good men, created eight counsellors, four from each party. The government having been established in this matter, the city might have been in repose if the great had been content to live in that moderation which civil society requires. But they produced a contrary result, for those out of office would not conduct themselves as citizens, and those who were in the government wished to be lords, so that every day furnished some new instance of their insolence and pride. These things were very grievous to the people, and they began to regret that for one tyrant put down there had sprung up a thousand. The arrogance of one party and the anger of the other, rose to such a degree that the heads of the people complained to the bishop of the improper conduct of the nobility, and what unfit associates they had become for the people; and begged he would endeavour to induce them to be content with their share of administration in the other offices, and leave the magistracy of the seigniory wholly to themselves.

The bishop was naturally a well-meaning man, but his want of firmness rendered him easily influenced. Hence, at the instance of his associates, he at first favoured the duke of Athens, and afterwards, by the advice of other citizens, conspired against him. At the reformation of the government he had favoured the nobility, and now he appeared to incline towards the people, moved by the reasons which they had advanced. Thinking to find in others the same instability of purpose, he endeavoured to effect an amicable arrangement. With this design he called together the fourteen who were yet in office, and in the best terms he could imagine advised them to give up the seigniory to the people, in order to secure the peace of the city; and assured them that if they refused, ruin would most probably be the result.

This discourse excited the anger of the nobility to the highest pitch, and Ridolfo de’ Bardi reproved him in unmeasured terms as a man of little faith, reminding him of his friendship for the duke, to prove the duplicity of his present conduct, and saying that in driving him away he had acted the part of a traitor. He concluded by telling him that the honours they had acquired at their own peril, they would at their own peril defend. Then they left the bishop, and in great wrath informed their associates in the government, and all the families of the nobility, of what had been done. The people also expressed their thoughts to each other, and as the nobility made preparations for the defence of their seigniors, they determined not to wait till they had perfected their arrangements; and therefore, being armed, hastened to the palace, shouting, as they went along, that the nobility must give up their share in the government. The uproar and excitement were astonishing. The seigniors of the nobility found themselves abandoned; for their friends, seeing all the people in arms, did not dare to rise in their defence, but each kept within his own house. The seigniors of the people endeavoured to abate the excitement of the multitude, by affirming their associates to be good and moderate men; but, not succeeding in their attempt, to avoid a greater evil, sent them home to their houses, whither they were with difficulty conducted. The nobility having left the palace, the office of the four councillors was taken from their party, and conferred upon twelve of the people. To the[169] eight seigniors who remained, a gonfalonier of justice was added, and sixteen gonfaloniers of the companies of the people; and the council was so reformed, that the government remained wholly in the hands of the popular party.

WAR OF THE FACTIONS IN FLORENCE

At the time these events took place there was a great scarcity in this city, and discontent prevailed both among the highest and lowest classes; in the latter for want of food, and in the former from having lost their power in the state. This circumstance induced Andrea Strozzi to think of making himself sovereign of the city. Selling his corn at a lower price than others did, a great many people flocked to his house; emboldened by the sight of these, he one morning mounted his horse, and, followed by a considerable number, called the people to arms, and in a short time drew together about four thousand men, with whom he proceeded to the seigniory, and demanded that the gates of the palace should be opened. But the seigniors, by threats and the force which they retained in the palace, drove them from the court; and then by proclamation so terrified them, that they gradually dropped off and returned to their homes, and Andrea, finding himself alone, with some difficulty escaped falling into the hands of the magistrates.

This event, although an act of great temerity, and attended with the result that usually follows such attempts, raised a hope in the minds of the nobility of overcoming the people, seeing that the lowest of the plebeians were at enmity with them. And to profit by this circumstance, they resolved to arm themselves, and with justifiable force recover those rights of which they had been unjustly deprived. Their minds acquired such an assurance of success, that they openly provided themselves with arms, fortified their houses, and even sent to their friends in Lombardy for assistance. The people and the seigniory made preparation for their defence, and requested aid from Perugia and Siena, so that the city was filled with the armed followers of either party. The nobility on this side of the Arno divided themselves into three parts; the one occupied the houses of the Cavicciulli, near the church of St. John; another, the houses of the Pazzi and the Donati, near the great church of St. Peter; and the third, those of the Cavalcanti in the New Market. Those beyond the river fortified the bridges and the streets in which their houses stood; the Nerli defended the bridge of the Carraja; the Frescobaldi and the Manelli, the church of the Holy Trinity; and the Rossi and the Bardi, the bridge of the Rubaconte and the Ponte Vecchio. The people were drawn together under the gonfalon of justice and the ensigns of the companies of the artisans.

Both sides being thus arranged in order of battle, the people thought it imprudent to defer the contest, and the attack was commenced by the Medici and the Rondinelli, who assailed the Cavicciulli, where the houses of the latter open upon the piazza of St. John. Here both parties contended with great obstinacy, and were mutually wounded, from the towers by stones and other missiles, and from below by arrows. They fought for three hours; but the forces of the people continuing to increase, and the Cavicciulli finding themselves overcome by numbers, and hopeless of other assistance, submitted themselves to the people, who saved their houses and property; and having disarmed them, ordered them to disperse among their relatives and friends, and remain unarmed. Being victorious in the first attack, they easily overpowered the Pazzi and the Donati, whose numbers were less than those they had[170] subdued; so that there only remained on this side the Arno, the Cavalcanti, who were strong both in respect of the post they had chosen and in their followers. Nevertheless, seeing all the gonfaloniers against them, and that the others had been overcome by three gonfaloniers alone, they yielded without offering much resistance. Three parts of the city were now in the hands of the people, and only one in possession of the nobility; but this was the strongest, as well on account of those who held it, as from its situation, being defended by the Arno; hence it was first necessary to force the bridges. The Ponte Vecchio was first assailed and offered a brave resistance; for the towers were armed, the streets barricaded, and the barricades defended by the most resolute men; so that the people were repulsed with great loss. Finding their labour at this point fruitless, they endeavoured to force the Rubaconte bridge, but no better success resulting, they left four gonfaloniers in charge of the two bridges, and with the others attacked the bridge of the Carraja. Here, although the Nerli defended themselves like brave men, they could not resist the fury of the people; for this bridge, having no towers, was weaker than the others, and was attacked by the Capponi, and many families of the people who lived in that vicinity. Being thus assailed on all sides, they abandoned the barricades and gave way to the people, who then overcame the Rossi and the Frescobaldi; for all those beyond the Arno took part with the conquerors.

There was now no resistance made except by the Bardi, who remained undaunted, notwithstanding the failure of their friends, the union of the people against them, and the little chance of success which they seemed to have. They resolved to die fighting, and rather see their houses burned and plundered than submit to the power of their enemies. They defended themselves with such obstinacy that many fruitless attempts were made to overcome them, both at the Ponte Vecchio and the Rubaconte; but their foes were always repulsed with loss.

There had in former times been a street which led between the houses of the Pitti, from the Roman road to the walls upon Mount St. George. By this way the people sent six gonfaloniers, with orders to assail their houses from behind. This attack overcame the resolution of the Bardi, and decided the day in favour of the people; for when those who defended the barricades in the street learned that their houses were being plundered, they left the principal fight and hastened to their defence. This caused the Ponte Vecchio to be lost; the Bardi fled in all directions and were received into the houses of the Quaratesi, Panzanesi, and Mozzi. The people, especially the lower classes, greedy for spoil, sacked and destroyed their houses, and pulled down and burned their towers and palaces with such outrageous fury that the most cruel enemy of the Florentine name would have been ashamed of taking part in such wanton destruction.

The nobility being thus overcome, the people reformed the government; and as they were of three kinds, the higher, the middle, and the lower class, it was ordered that the first should appoint two seigniors, the two latter three each, and that the gonfalonier should be chosen alternately from either party. Besides this, all the regulations for the restraint of the nobility were renewed; and in order to weaken them still more, many were reduced to the grade of the people. The ruin of the nobility was so complete, and depressed them so much, that they never afterwards ventured to take arms for the recovery of their power, but soon became humbled and abject in the extreme. And thus [adds Macchiavelli] Florence lost the generosity of her character and her distinction in arms.i

THE GREAT PLAGUE

For more than thirty years the heavy chain of misfortune had been falling, link after link, on the devoted city of Florence; wars, sickness, poverty, famines, floods, fires, and sanguinary revolutions had successively tried the spirit of her sons; yet so great was its elasticity that they still rose superior, and still held on their wonted course of national enterprise. It was hoped that misfortune had at length exhausted her quiver, when they were again stricken in common with all the world by her most deadly shaft, the great and desolating plague of 1348.

This dreadful visitation, which began in the far East and rolled dismally over the western world, pressed with unwonted weight upon Florence, where the people were predisposed for disease by a succession of events that both morally and physically had affected the whole community. As far back as the year 1345 unusual and constant rains accompanied and followed by earthquakes continued from the end of July to the beginning of November; the harvests were nearly ruined; but few grapes appeared; tillage was interrupted, and the little wine that could be made had proved unwholesome.

The Arno again swamped half Florence; streams, swelled into torrents, rolled over banks and bridges and ravaged every district; Rifredi and Borghetto were ruined by the Terzolla; the Mugnone and Rimaggio did equal mischief, and an overwhelming flood was hourly expected in the capital.

The next year’s harvest failed, and the rain still poured down through April, May, and June, 1346, with storms and tempests, and a partial destruction of the smaller seeds; misfortune seemed busily brooding, but not for Florence alone; France and the rest of Italy were struck with equal apprehensions; corn and wine again failed; the poultry perished for lack of food; cattle of every kind were fearfully diminished; the price of oil became enormous, and fruit was almost entirely extinct. Land produced at the utmost a quarter, and in some places only a sixth, of the customary crops, and even that was unwholesome; want came like an armed man; the peasants abandoned their farms and robbed each other through sheer necessity; or else begged their bread in Florence, where the concourse of starving wretches was overwhelming.

No land could be tilled unless the owner provided sustenance in kind for his labourers besides the necessary seed, and this was almost impossible even at an enormous cost; in former scarcities corn was extravagantly dear but still to be had; now there was scarcely any even for the highest offers until the government, with infinite exertion and by mere dint of money, imported it from the Maremma, Romagna, Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria, Barbary, Tunis, and the archipelago. But even the receipt of this was difficult; for Pisa, equally distressed, detained all that entered Porto Pisano until her own market was supplied. Thirty thousand florins were nominally thus spent, one-third of which was supposed to have found its way into the coffers of dishonest and heartless peculators. Ten great ovens were erected by the government and[172] strongly barricaded, where by day and night men and women were constantly employed in making bread; this was distributed every morning at the sound of the great bell, to churches, convents, country parishes, and hungry creatures; but with exceeding difficulty, from the fierce pressure of starving multitudes. In April, 1347, it was found by the bread-tickets received that no less than ninety-four thousand people were daily furnished with two loaves each from these ovens. In this were not counted the citizens and their households who were already supplied and did not share in the public distribution, but bought better bread at more than double price from the numerous private ovens. It was exclusive also of religious mendicants and other systematic beggars who in infinite numbers crowded into Florence from the adjacent towns and districts, and were in continual altercation with the citizens. Yet none were refused, whether stranger or subject, and all classes joined hand and heart in relieving the general misery. The increase of grain from the wheat harvest of 1347 reduced the price, towards the end of June, which however soon mounted up again from the eagerness of bakers to purchase, in order to uphold the market by refusing to make more than a certain quantity. This plunged the city into confusion; tumults began, which the priors calmed by hanging the baker who commenced this system, and corn fell to its natural value which the harvest gradually diminished.

Death and sickness of course attended this suffering, and to alleviate the general distress the priors as early as March had decreed that nobody should be arrested for any debt under one hundred golden florins until the following August; and also, with a premium for importation, put a maximum price on the bushel of wheat; this was useless; because hunger backed by money overcame law, and corn sold for double the government value. For further alleviation all the prisoners in the public jails were released on a compromise with their creditors and enemies, as mortality had already begun in these places to the number of two or three in a day; public debtors for less than one hundred florins were also set at liberty on paying fifteen per cent. of their fines; but very few could take advantage of this, for all were suffering from poverty, hunger, and distress.

The effects now began to appear; women and children of the poorest classes sank under the woeful pressure; this lasted until November and carried off about four thousand souls; but it was worse in Prato, Pistoia, and Bologna, in Romagna, and throughout all France. In Turkey, Syria, Tatary, and India, sickness raged with unheard-of violence, giving rise and currency to a thousand marvellous tales, such as fire issuing from the earth and air, and consuming men, cattle, houses, trees, and even reducing the very earth and stones to cinders: those who escaped this, died of pestilence; and on the banks of the Tanaïs, at Trebizond, and in all the neighbouring countries, only one person in five was left among the living; in other places it is said to have rained great black maggots with eight legs, some alive, some dead, whose sting was death and whose corruption poisoned the atmosphere; but these are the least incredible of the numerous fables that this universal scourge generated in morbid imaginations, and in which all men, being terror-struck, believed implicitly. Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Crete, Rhodes, and the other eastern isles bowed before the pestilence; thence it travelled with the course of trade to Sicily, Sardinia, Elba, Corsica, and throughout the coasts of Italy; four Genoese galleys carried it to that city out of eight that had fled from the Euxine; Milan scarcely felt it, but as there were then no lazarettos it swept over the Alps, searched every vale in Savoy, ravaged Provence and Dauphiné, infected Burgundy and Catalonia; missed[173] Brabant, but holding on its course carried death and misery through the rest of Europe until 1350, when it had penetrated even the Boreal regions and nearly depopulated Iceland, which has never yet recovered from its touch.

“This disease,” says Giovanni Villani,d “was of such a nature that none survived its attack for three days; certain tumours appeared in the groins and under the arms; the patient then spit blood; and the priest that confessed him, and the neighbour who looked on him often took the malady, so that every sick creature was abandoned: no confession, no sacrament, no medicine, no attendance; yet the pope granted a pardon to every priest who administered the holy communion, or confessed, or visited and watched the dying man.”

This was in 1347, and solemn processions and offerings were made for three days together to avert the pestilence from Florence; in December the price of bread again augmented, because Romagna had absorbed every bushel of grain from the Mugello district; Venice was empty and in want; Louis of Hungary’s invasion of Apulia, together with pestilence on the coast, prevented her customary supplies from Sicily and southern Italy. Guards were placed round the Florentine state and grain was once more purchased, so that the year 1348 came in with fear and hope, but some diminution of misery. All these sufferings had painfully prepared a way for heavier calamities, and they struck with killing force on a sickly, weak, and desponding people.

Whether the great plague of 1348 fell with more fatal effects on Florence than other places may be doubtful; yet the descriptive pen of Boccaccio j has thrown a pall of immortality over this scene of universal desolation and of death.f

BOCCACCIO’S ACCOUNT OF THE PLAGUE IN FLORENCE

The year of our Lord’s incarnation, 1348, had already come, when in the noble city of Florence, lovely beyond all others of Italy, appeared the mortal pestilence which by the operation of superior bodies, or from wicked deeds, was by the just judgment of God for our correction let loose on mortals. It began some years before in the eastern countries and after having deprived them of an inconceivable mass of living beings rolled westward in a continued course from realm to realm with mournful augmentation. Human wisdom and human prudence availed not, for the city had already been cleansed of its impurities by officers especially appointed; entrance was denied to all infected persons, and every means employed to preserve the public health. Neither were humble supplications to the Almighty more successful, although made not once but repeatedly in religious processions and divers other ways by devout persons; for very early in spring the dismal signs glared horribly palpable and manifested themselves in wonderful ways; not as in the east where bleeding at the nose was a plain symptom of inevitable death, but at the beginning, both in male and female, there appeared about the groins and under the arm-pits certain tumours some of which increased to the size of a common apple, others to that of an egg; and those greater and these less, and were vulgarly called gavoccioli. And from the two parts of the body above mentioned these deadly gavoccioli within a brief space began to sprout and swell indiscriminately in every other; and soon after this the nature of the disease began to change into black or livid spots, which in many appeared on the arms, thighs, and other places; some large and few, others small and numerous; and as the gavocciolo at first was and[174] always remained a certain sign of death, so also were these spots on whomsoever they appeared.

For the cure of this malady neither the advice of medical men nor the virtues of any nostrum availed or profited; on the contrary, whether it were that the nature of the illness would not permit, or that the ignorance of doctors (of whom, besides regular physicians, the number of both sexes without a particle of knowledge was enormous) could not divine the cause and therefore could apply no remedy; not only few survived, but almost all about the third day from the appearance of these symptoms, some sooner, some later, most of them without fever or any other accident, expired.

There were some who fancied that to live moderately and avoid every excess would be most efficacious in resisting contagion, and so having formed their society they shrank from all the others by shutting themselves up in those houses where no sickness as yet existed; to live better they ate the most delicate food and drank the finest wines, but in great moderation, holding no intercourse with the outward world, nor permitting tales of death or sickness to reach their ears; but with music and every other diversion that their means afforded they continued to dwell in seclusion.

Others of a contrary opinion affirmed that drinking deep, and enjoyments, and singing, and rambling about for amusement, and satisfying every appetite, and mocking and ridiculing everything, was a sovereign antidote to all existing evil; and as they said so they did; for night and day, now at one tavern, now at another, onward they went; drinking without mode or measure, but mostly at other people’s houses, whatever pleased and delighted them; and this was easily done, for almost all, as if they had deserted life, abandoned the care of themselves and everything they possessed; wherefore most dwellings remained open to the world at large, and the stranger that entered used them as if he were the lawful owner; but with all this brutish sensuality they still kept aloof from the sick.

And in such affliction and misery was also the revered authority of our laws both divine and human that, deserted by their ministers, they had fallen to ruin and dissolution; for these like the rest were either sick or dead; or if any remnants existed they were useless; wherefore all persons were left to their own imaginings.

Many other people took a middle course between these two, neither restricting themselves in their food like the former, nor running to excess in drinking and dissipation like the latter, but made use of things moderately according to their wants; and instead of shutting themselves up they rambled about the town, some with bunches of flowers, some with odoriferous herbs, and others with fragrant mixtures of spices which they carried in their hands and continually applied to the nostrils, esteeming it an excellent thing to comfort the brain by their perfume because the air was loaded and disgusting with the stench of death, disease, and offensive medicaments. Some again entertained more unfeeling sentiments (as if they were haply more secure), declaring that there was no better, nor even so good a remedy for the plague as to fly before it; so, moved by this argument and caring only for themselves, numbers of both sexes abandoned their native city, their homes, their friendly meetings, their dearest relatives, and all their property, and sought those of the stranger; or else retired to the seclusion of their own country dwellings; as if the anger of God, being once moved thus to punish human wickedness, would spare the rod to them and strike only those enclosed within the walls; or, as if they counselled everyone to fly because the final hour of Florence was arrived.

Many died that haply might have lived by timely aid; so that between a want of that assistance which sufferers could not procure, and the malignant nature of this disease, the multitudes of those who daily and nightly expired in Florence would be terrible to hear, even without beholding; wherefore, almost of necessity, things contrary to all former habits were engendered amongst the surviving citizens.

It was a custom, and we still see it maintained, that in cases of death every female relation and neighbour should assemble within the house and there weep for his loss; and before the mansion every male kinsman and nearest neighbour also assembled, with other citizens in great numbers, attended by divers of the clergy according to the dead man’s quality; thence on the shoulders of his peers, with funeral pomp of torch and music, the corpse was slowly borne away to that church which he had previously chosen for a sepulchre. But when the pestilence raged most fiercely these things almost entirely ceased, and new customs superseded them; for people then died not only without such assemblies of wailing women, but passed from the world in many instances without even a single witness; and few were those to whom the piteous sobs and tears of relatives were in mercy conceded; but instead thereof was heard the laugh or the jest, or the convivial feast! and this custom the women in general, casting aside their sex’s softness, did for their own especial advantage most quickly learn.

There were but few whose bodies were accompanied to the church by more than ten or twelve of their neighbours; nor were even these honourable citizens, but certain gravediggers from the lowest classes named becchini who performed this mercenary service; they roughly shouldered the bier and moved hastily and carelessly along, not to the church which the deceased had selected, but to the nearest cemetery, led by some half-dozen priests with few lights and sometimes none, who, assisted by the becchini, and not troubling about a funeral service, tossed the body into any empty pit that they happened to find.

The treatment of the lower and a great portion of the middle classes was still worse, because the greater part of these being confined either by hope or poverty to their houses, thousands daily sickened, and being destitute of assistance were allowed to die; and many there were who daily and nightly terminated their existence in the streets, and many that expired in their own houses, the stench of whose carcasses was the first notice of their dissolution. Of these and other victims all places were full, and the neighbours, not less moved by the fear of putrid bodies than by charity towards the dead, with the assistance of public porters when they were to be had, dragged the corpses into the street and left them before their several doors where especially in the morning they were to be seen in heaps by those who wandered through the tainted thoroughfares.j

NAPIER’S REFLECTIONS ON THE PLAGUE

In this wide and wasting pestilence all Europe was more or less immersed; she was bereft of three-fifths of her population, and excepting Milan, together with a few places at the foot of the Alps, the whole of Italy was shaken to its centre. Genoa lost 40,000, Naples 60,000; and Sicily and Apulia the incredible number of 530,000 souls! The city of Trapani was completely depopulated; all died; and her silent walls and empty dwellings were alone left to tell the tale. Throughout Tuscany the harvest of death was proportionably great: Pisa lost four-fifths or, as some say, seven-tenths; Florence three-fifths; but Siena mourned for 80,000 of her buried citizens and never recovered from the blow.

Amongst the illustrious victims of this universal sacrifice were the celebrated Laura of Avignon and the historian Giovanni Villani of Florence. The latter, says Sismondi (and his words will suit all subsequent, as they are the echo of all antecedent writers), “was the most expert, faithful, elegant, and animated historian that Italy had yet produced: we have made habitual use of his history during more than half a century with that confidence which is due to a judicious contemporary author who had himself taken part in public affairs.” Villani was in fact much more than a mere historian, and like almost all Florentines became both merchant and politician; he travelled into France and the Netherlands, was several times in the seigniory, superintended the building of the present walls, directed the mint, and filled other high offices in the commonwealth. He served also against Castruccio, was one of the hostages delivered to Mastino della Scala, and spent a long life in public and private activity; but finally, ruined by the failure of the Bonaccorsi with whom he was in partnership, his latter days were apparently unhappy and he died amidst the misfortunes of his country.

Sickness gave way before the August sun, and all that remained of the Florentine people were free from disease at the new seigniory’s inauguration on the 1st of September, but what the remnant was we are not told; so small however that poverty disappeared, and riches abounded in consequence of accumulated inheritances. Yet instead, as some expected, of men’s hearts being softened and subdued and penitent, and turned to religion and virtue and moderation by so awful a catastrophe, Florence immediately became a theatre of luxury, riot, and debauchery. As if the hand of God were tired, and death was swallowed up in victory, feasting, taverns, and every kind of licentious revel occupied the people; both sexes, high and low, with new and fanciful attire, but more especially the latter, flaunted through the streets bedizened like players in the rich garments of illustrious families, all now extirpated. And as if these saturnalia were to be everlasting, few labourers would return to agriculture, fewer still to trade, and those few insisted on exorbitant remuneration. Unbounded pride and heartless prodigality were everywhere triumphant; the hand of death had removed the burden of poverty; the departure of death had removed the weight of terror, and the rebound was startling. With feelings numbed, and passions free, no wish was too vicious to indulge, no idea too strange for belief.

Superabundance of agricultural produce was looked for because of the scarcity of mouths, and the contrary happened; for everything fell short and long continued so, in some countries even to the most biting famine; manufactures of almost all kinds, clothes, everything necessary for the human body, were in like manner expected to appear spontaneously and in[177] profusion; but the reverse took place; most sorts of manufactured goods soon doubled their former cost, and all labour brought twice the money that it fetched before the pestilence; disputes, lawsuits, contests, disturbances of every class sprouted like nettles throughout the land, and Florence long and severely felt their evil consequences. Immense treasures too had been willed away by dying men to public charities, or in trust to corporate bodies for the poor; some directly, others after several successions, all now swept off by exterminating plague; amongst others there was left to the corporation of Orto-san-Michele alone the vast inheritance of 350,000 florins, a sum equal to one year’s revenue of the commonwealth. This was in trust for the poor; but there were no poor, no paupers, no destitution; death had murdered poverty. Money, houses, and other valuables abounded; the directors felt their hands at liberty, their conscience easy; and unbounded peculation was the result; the elections were kept close amongst themselves; they re-elected each other; power and profit moved round in a circle undisturbed by any external influence for three long years, until at last the angry voice of Florence destroyed this nefarious and disgraceful system. In a similar manner, but with better management, 25,000 florins were left to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and an equal sum to the new and useful company of “Misericordia”; so that the city most abounded in charitable resources at the very time when poverty was for the moment annihilated.

Many corrective laws for the various existing evils were promulgated by those magistrates who still retained their discretion and now resumed their power; one of these was to exonerate minors and married women from any legal responsibility in affairs of pecuniary and other property, unless with the consent of their relatives or guardians declared before a judge in the court of the above corporation of Orto-san-Michele, which had ex-officio their guardianship. At the same period, and no less to encourage population by the residence of students than for the dignity of Florence, a public college was founded for the first time, and able professors were appointed to the whole range of science, besides civil and canon law and dogmatic theology.

It might have been supposed that all accounts between debtor and creditor had been cancelled by the plague; but so many fraudulent bankruptcies had previously occurred and so unwholesome a system of mercantile credits had been allowed that it became an article of swindling speculation, and large orders were frequently given on long credit with a sole view to future insolvency. As a remedy there was now published a decree forbidding any citizen to buy or sell on credit, not only in the state itself but within a hundred miles of Florence, on pain of losing his reputation and a fine equal to the amount of the purchase money. Nor were sumptuary laws forgotten; for riches and luxury required control, and a check was therefore placed on the expense of marriage ceremonies which now were frequent in consequence of augmented wealth and thin population; but as these could not at once raise citizens to the state new scrutiny-lists became requisite for three years, which from necessity admitted the nobles to many public offices both in town and country.f

FOOTNOTES

We have seen much in recent chapters of the trials and disasters of Florence. We now have the more agreeable task of recording her triumphs. The record of petty quarrels and more pretentious warrings, through which Florence has thus far been called to our attention, might well have blinded our eyes to the observation of a remarkable culture development which went on coincidentally with these political jarrings. In point of fact, there was a most extraordinary intellectual development taking place in Italy in the later centuries of the so-called dark ages, and the focus and centre of that development was Florence; in proof of which that city now gave to the world within a single century a school of writers, led by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who virtually stamped the Italian language for the first time as a literary medium, and whose works marked the highest development of Italian creative genius. And contemporaneous with these writers were the artists Cimabue and Giotto, who gave an altogether similar impulse to art. All these men were Florentines, and so greatly did their influence preponderate over that of any other Italians of the epoch that Symondsb is fully justified in saying: “It may be affirmed without exaggeration that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we called Italian genius was in truth the genius of Florence.”

This seemingly sudden efflorescence of genius had its origin, as has been intimated, in a gradual development, which now for the first time produced tangible results. If, on the one hand, it may be urged that these great men were spontaneously creative, it must not be forgotten that their genius was nurtured in a bed of classicism. Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio were all classical scholars, the last named being a student of Greek as well as of Latin. All of them harked back to the great Roman writers as their models of style, and founded their culture on a study of ancient literature. But[179] each of them in turn broke away spontaneously from these ancient models when he came to his really creative efforts, and each put forth in the vernacular the works that were destined to give him perpetuity of fame. In their own day, to be sure, their Latin works were regarded as having great importance. Boccaccio never dreamed of placing his Italian writings on a par with his learned treatises on mythology, geography, and biography; and we are assured that for two centuries his name was famous all over Europe on account of these scientific works, while the Decameron was hardly known north of the Alps. “Petrarch himself,” says Burckhardt,c “trusted and hoped that his Latin writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from the memory of man.” Yet these would-be forgotten poems became a standard of taste for all the world, and have kept their position in the estimate of critics of each succeeding generation.

This sudden outburst of creative genius of a high order in Italy, while the rest of the western world was bound by uncreative traditions, has been variously explained. Burckhardt finds the explanation in circumstances that led, in Italy earlier than elsewhere, to the emancipation of the individual.a

In the Middle Ages, he says, both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognised himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of Italy.

In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free personality which in northern Europe either did not occur at all, or could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious wrong-doers in the sixteenth century described to us by Liutprand, some of the contemporaries of Gregory VII, and a few of the opponents of the first Hohenstaufen show us characters of this kind. But at the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante’s great poem would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national herald of his time. This fact appears in the most decisive and unmistakable form. The Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighbours. By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of dress for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own way.

Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools—the secretary, minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and influence.

But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of the Byzantine Empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did not cease to be considerable, and a church which, unlike that of the Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the state—all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a dilettante, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene, too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.

In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders, especially in Florentine history,[13] acquired so marked a personal character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob van Artevelde.

The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into a position like that of the subjects of the despotic states, with the difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (died 1446), whose work on domestic economy is the first complete programme of developed private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and thanklessness of public life is in its way a true monument of the age.

Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. “In all our more populous cities,” says Giovanni Pontano, “we see a crowd of people who have left their homes[181] of their own free will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes.” And, in fact, they were by no means only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.

The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, “My country is the whole world.” And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: “Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars, everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my bread will not fail me.” The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. “Only he who has learned everything,” says Ghiberti, “is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.” In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: “Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.”c

EUROPEAN CULTURE IN GENERAL

The oppression which weighed upon the rest of Europe contributed to the maintenance of barbarism, less by rendering difficult and sometimes dangerous the acquisition of knowledge, than by taking away all attraction from the exercise of the mind. Thought was a pain to those capable of judging the state of the human species; of studying the past, of comparing it with the present; and of thus foreseeing the future. Danger and suffering appeared on all sides. The men who, in France, Germany, England, and Spain, felt themselves endued with the power of generalising their ideas, either smothered them, not to aggravate the pain of thought, or directed them solely to speculations the farthest from real life—towards that scholastic philosophy which so vigorously exercised the understanding, without bringing it to any conclusion.

In Italy, on the contrary, liberty secured the full enjoyment of intellectual existence. Everyone endeavoured to develop the powers which he felt within him, because each was conscious that the more his mind opened the greater was his enjoyment; everyone directed his powers to a useful and practical purpose, because each felt himself placed in a state of society in which he might attain some influence, either for his own benefit or that of his fellow creatures. The first want which towns had experienced was that of their defence. Accordingly, military architecture had taken precedence in the arts. From its exercise the transition was easy to that of religious architecture, at a time when religion was indispensable to every heart—to civil architecture, then encouraged by a government in which everything was for all. The study and pursuit of the beautiful in this first of the fine arts had paved the way to all the others. From the pleasures of the imagination through the eye, men ascended to those derived from the soul; and hence the birth of poetry.d

The language of Provence had attained its highest degree of cultivation; Spain and Portugal had already produced more than one poet; and the langue d’Oil, in the north of France, was receiving considerable attention, while the Italian was not yet enumerated amongst the languages of Europe,[182] and the richness and harmony of its idiom, gradually and obscurely formed amongst the populace, were not as yet appreciated. But in the thirteenth century Dante arose to immortalise this hitherto neglected tongue, and, aided by his single genius, it soon advanced with a rapidity which left all competition at a distance.

The Lombardian duchy of Benevento, comprising the greater part of the modern kingdom of Naples, had preserved, under independent princes, and surrounded by the Greeks and the Saracens, a degree of civilisation which, in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, was unexampled throughout the rest of Italy. Many of the fine arts, and some branches of science, were cultivated there with success. The schools of Salerno communicated to the West the medical skill of the Arabs, and the commerce of Amalfi introduced into those fertile provinces not only wealth but knowledge. From the eighth to the tenth century, various historical works, written, it is true, in Latin, but distinguished for their fidelity, their spirit, and their fire, proceeded from the pen of several men of talent, natives of that district, some of whom clothed their compositions in hexameter verses, which, compared with others of the same period, display superior facility and fancy.

The influx of foreigners consequent upon the invasion of the Norman adventurers, who founded a sovereignty in Apulia, was not sufficiently great to effect a change in the language; and, under their government, the Italian or Sicilian tongue first assumed a settled form. The court of Palermo, early in the twelfth century, abounded in riches, and consequently indulged in luxurious habits; and there the first accents of the Sicilian muse were heard. There, too, at the same period, the Arabs acquired a degree of influence and credit which they have never possessed in any other Christian court. The palace of William I, like those of the monarchs of the East, was guarded by Mohammedan eunuchs. From them he selected his favourites, his friends, and sometimes even his ministers. To attach themselves to the arts and to the various avocations which contribute to the pleasures of life, was the peculiar province of the Saracens, by whom half of the island is still occupied. When Frederick II, at the end of the twelfth century, succeeded to the throne of the Norman monarchs, he transported numerous colonies of Saracens into Apulia and the principality, but he did not banish them from either his service or his court. Of them his army was composed; and the governors of his provinces, whom he denominated justiciaries, were chosen almost exclusively from their number. Thus was it the destiny of the Arabians, in the east as well as in the west of Europe, to communicate to the Latin nations their arts, their science, and their poetry.

From the history of Sicily, we may deduce the effects produced by Arabian influence on the Italian, or as it was then considered, the Sicilian poetry, with no less certainty than that with which we trace its connection, in the county of Barcelona and in the kingdom of Castile, with the first efforts of the Provençal and Spanish poets. William I, an effeminate and voluptuous prince, forgot, in his palace of Palermo, amidst his Moorish eunuchs, in the song and the feast, those commotions which agitated his realms. The regency of the kingdom devolved, at his decease, upon his widow, who entrusted the government to Gayto Petro, the chief of the eunuchs, connected with the Saracens of Africa. All the commerce of Palermo was monopolised by the infidels. They were the professors of every art, and the inventors of every variety of luxury. The nation accommodated itself to their customs; and in their public festivals it was usual for Christian and Moorish women to sing in concert to the music of their slaves. We may safely conclude that on[183] these occasions each party adopted their mother-tongue; and that the Italian females who, in the words of Hugo Falcandus,m responded, in melancholy cadence to the tambours of their Moorish attendants, would, in all probability, adapt Sicilian words to African airs and measures.

THE UNIVERSITIES AND NASCENT SCHOLARSHIP

The universities and schools which were already founded obtained more fame and became more active. The clash of arms, which had not prevented their flourishing, did not prevent new ones being formed. That same spirit of rivalry which armed one against the other, princes and nations, led them to vie one with the other in seeking, by every means, greater renown and greater glory for their little states. At one time professors were seen quietly continuing their lectures while fighting was going on under the walls of the town, or even in the streets and squares; at another time, the rostrum was overthrown, the professors were driven away, the scholars put to flight; but they soon returned, either under the same government or under the new one which had taken its place, and studies continued their course.

The University of Bologna suffered continual vicissitudes. At one time excommunicated by Clement V, the greater number of the scholars passed to the University of Padua, Bologna’s rival; at another time, in consequence of quarrels which broke out between the professors and the magistrates, or between the scholars and the citizens, whole classes deserted and settled in the neighbouring towns. But all these wrongs were righted. John XXII withdrew Clement’s interdict, and confirmed and increased the privileges of the university; the magistrates and citizens granted the amends demanded by professors and pupils; and this school, which was already famous, became more brilliant and more famous. A short time later, Milan, Pisa, Pavia, Piacenza, Siena, but especially Florence, rivalled with Padua, Bologna, and the University of Naples founded by Frederick II, which had so vastly increased under Robert of Naples. Boniface VIII had founded the University of Rome, his successors confirmed and even extended its privileges; but their bulls could not repair the harm done to the new university by their absence; it could not do aught but decline so long as their residence at Avignon left the unfortunate town of Rome almost deserted, and, as a climax, always a prey to sedition and torn by internal factions.

It must be remembered that in these universities and schools nothing was taught except, as in the preceding century, what were commonly called the seven arts. Literature, properly so called, was almost entirely ignored. The ancient authors, who, later on, formed the base of literary study, were scarcely beginning to be discovered. Libraries of schools and monasteries, even those which several princes had worked to form, mostly contained some of the works of the fathers, books on theology, law, medicine, astrology, and scholastic philosophy; and even these were few in number. It was in the course of the century then beginning that a praiseworthy eagerness for the discovery of ancient manuscripts arose in Italy, and, following Italy’s example, spread throughout Europe. The most deserted and dusty corners of private houses and convents were searched for the works of these authors, of whom till then nothing remained but the name, and of those who had left many works of which only the smallest part was known. This[184] revolution was principally due to Petrarch, and it is one of his strongest claims to glory.

One single example will prove the vastness of his work and how little advanced even the learned of that time were. A professor of the University of Bologna, writing to him on the subject of ancient authors, especially of poets, and wishing to include among the latter Plato[14] and Cicero, was ignorant of the name of Nævius, and even Plautius, and thought that Ennius and Statius were contemporaries. The ignorance of the copyists must be added to the imperfection of knowledge and the scarcity of books. In transcribing the best books they frequently disfigured them in such a manner that their authors themselves would have had trouble to recognise them. All this must be remembered to tone down the accounts found in histories of literature of the fine libraries given to certain universities, or founded in certain towns, formed by a certain prince and thrown open by his orders to the learned and to the public. When compared with our large libraries, they are insignificant book-cupboards—an absolute famine compared with appalling superabundance.

The science which obtained most assistance from them, and which was the most abundantly provided with books, was scholastic theology; it was therefore pursued more eagerly than ever. It was no longer the century of men like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura; but their example was quite recent, and their admirers and disciples entertained the hope of equalling them and even surpassing them in glory. Hence among theologians arose that eagerness, that general fervour to interpret the same books that their predecessors had interpreted, to explain the explanations themselves, to commentate the commentaries; to deepen the shadows while attempting to cast light upon them, and to obscure by explanation what was at first clear. These are not only the ideas, but the very words of the wise Tiraboschi; he added the very natural wish that none would disturb the repose of these indefatigable commentators in the profound oblivion and dust of the libraries where they lie buried. However, he does not include among them about a dozen doctors, whose fame it appears was very great in that century. We will only mention one of them—an Augustine monk named Denis, a native of St. Sépulcre—because he was the friend and spiritual adviser of Petrarch; this much may be said of him, all the rest may be relegated to the same place of refuge whose inviolability Tiraboschi reclaims for the mob of theologians of the century. There should be no rank in dust and oblivion. All authors of books which are unreadable or which teach nothing should sleep there alike.

LATIN AND THE VERNACULAR

A complete separation had now taken place between the ordinary language of the country and the Latin tongue. Of the latter, the women were ignorant. The general adoption of the language to which their delicacy gave new graces, and in which alone they were accessible to the gallantry of their admirers, was a necessary result. It was now submitted to rules, and enlivened by that sensibility of expression, of which a dead and pedantic language ceases to be susceptible. For a century and a half, in fact, it would seem that the Sicilians confined themselves to the composition of love-songs[185] alone. These primitive specimens of Italian poetry have been studiously preserved, and they have been analysed by M. Ginguené, with equal talent and learning. To his work, such of our readers as may wish to obtain a more particular knowledge of these relics will have satisfaction in referring; nor can they apply to a better source of information for more complete and profound details on the subject of Italian poetry than can possibly find a place in a condensed history of the general literature of the south.

The merit of amatory poetry consists, almost entirely, in its expression. Its warmth and tenderness of sentiment is injured by any exertion of mere ingenuity and fancy, in the pursuit of which the poet, or the lover, seems to lose sight of his proper object. Little more is required from him than to represent with sensibility and with truth the feelings which are common to all who love. The harmony of language is the best means of expressing that of the heart. But this principle seems almost entirely to have escaped the notice of the first Sicilian and Italian writers. The example of the Arabs and of the Provençals induced them to prefer ostentation to simplicity, and to exercise a false and affected taste in the choice of their poetical ornaments. In the best specimens of this school, we should find little to reward the labour of translating them; and we feel less inclined to draw the inferior pieces from their deserved obscurity. It is, therefore, principally with a view to the history of the language, and of the versification, that we turn over the pages of Ciullo d’Alcamo the Sicilian, those of Frederick II, and of his chancellor, Pietro delle Vigne, of Oddo delle Colonne, of Mazzeo di Ricco, and of other poets of the same class.

The language employed by the Sicilians in their poetical attempts was not the popular dialect, as it then existed among the natives of the island and as we still find it preserved in some Sicilian songs, scarcely intelligible to the Italians themselves. From the imperial court and that of the kings of Sicily, it had already received a more elegant form; and those laws of grammar which were originally founded upon custom had now obtained the ascendency over it, and prescribed their own rules. The lingua cortigiana, the language of the court, was already distinguished as the purest of the Italian dialects. In Tuscany it came into general use; and previous to the end of the thirteenth century it received great stability from several writers of that country, in verse as well as in prose, who carried it very nearly to that degree of perfection which it has ever since maintained. For elegance and purity of style, Ricordano Malaspina, who wrote the History of Florence in 1280, may be pronounced, at the present day, to be in no degree inferior to the best writers now extant.

THE MASTER POET, AND HIS THEME

No poet, however, had yet arisen, gifted with absolute power over the empire of the soul; no philosopher had yet pierced into the depths of feeling and of thought, when Dante, the greatest name of Italy, and the father of her poetry, appeared, and demonstrated the mightiness of his genius by availing himself of the rude and imperfect materials within his reach, to construct an edifice resembling, in magnificence, that universe whose image it reflects. Instead of amatory effusions addressed to an imaginary beauty, instead of madrigals full of sprightly insipidity, sonnets laboured into harmony, and strained or discordant allegories, the only models, in any modern language, which presented themselves to the notice of Dante, that great genius conceived, in his vast imagination, the mysteries of the invisible creation, and unveiled them to the eyes of the astonished world.

In the century immediately preceding, the energy of some bold and enthusiastic minds had been directed to religious objects. A new spiritual force, surpassing in activity and fanaticism all monastic institutions before established, was organised by St. Francis and St. Dominic, whose furious harangues and bloody persecutions revived that zeal which, for several centuries past, had appeared to slumber. In the cells of the monks, nevertheless, the first symptoms of reviving literature were seen. Their studies had now assumed a scholastic character. To the imagination of the zealot, the different conditions of a future state were continually present; and the spiritual objects which he saw with the eyes of faith were invested with all the reality of material forms, by the force with which they were presented to his view in detailed descriptions and in dissertations displaying a scientific acquaintance with the exact limit of every torment, and the graduated rewards of glorification.

A very singular instance of the manner in which these ideas were impressed upon the people is afforded by the native city of Dante, in which the celebration of a festival was graced by a public representation of the infernal tortures; and it is not unlikely that the first circulation of the work of that poet gave occasion to this frightful exhibition. The bed of the Arno was converted into the gulf of perdition, where all the horrors coined by the prolific fancy of the monks were concentrated. Nothing was wanting to make the illusion complete; and the spectators shuddered at the shrieks and groans of real persons, apparently exposed to the alternate extremes of fire and frost, to waves of boiling pitch, and to serpents. This scene occurred at Florence on the 1st of May, 1304.

It appears, then, that when Dante adopted, as the subject of his immortal poem, the secrets of the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, he could not possibly have selected a more popular theme. It had the advantage of combining the most profound feelings of religion with those vivid recollections of patriotic glory and party contentions which were necessarily suggested by the reappearance of the illustrious dead on this novel theatre.

At the close of the century, in the year 1300, and in the week of Easter, Dante supposes himself to be wandering in the deserts near Jerusalem, and to be favoured with the means of access to the realm of shadows. He is there met by Virgil, the object of his incessant study and admiration, who takes upon himself the office of guide, and who, by his own admirable description of the heathen hell, seems to have acquired a kind of right to reveal the mysteries of these forbidden regions. The two bards arrive at a gate, on which are inscribed these terrific words:e

The theme of the poem is too familiar to need further exposition here. It may be interesting to note, however, that the sequence of regions through which the poet journeys in witnessing the rewards of paradise is suggested by the ideas of cosmology that were prevalent in Dante’s time. The poem thus has interest from a scientific as well as from an artistic standpoint—an interest that is enhanced by the reflection that the time was almost at hand when a new system of cosmology would supplant the Ptolemaic one here suggested, and in so doing usher in a new scientific era, somewhat as the poem itself ushered in a new era of literature.a

The power of the human mind was never more forcibly demonstrated, in its most exquisite masterpieces, than in the poem of Dante. Without a prototype in any existing language, equally novel in its various parts and in the combination of the whole, it stands alone as the first monument of modern genius, the first great work which appeared in the reviving literature of Europe. In its composition, it is strictly conformable to the essential and invariable principles of the poetical art. It possesses unity of design and of execution; and bears the visible impress of a mighty genius, capable of embracing, at once, the parts and the whole of its scheme; of employing, with facility, the most stupendous materials, and of observing all the required niceties of proportion, without experiencing any difficulty from the constraint. In all other respects, the poem of Dante is not within the jurisdiction of established rules. It cannot with propriety be referred to any particular class of composition, and its author is only to be judged by those laws which he thought fit to impose upon himself. His modesty induced him to give his work the title of a comedy, in order to place it in a rank inferior to the epic, to which he conceived that Virgil had exclusive claims. Dante had not the slightest acquaintance with the dramatic art, of which he had, in all probability, never met with a single specimen; and from this ignorance proceeded that use of the word which now appears to us to be so extraordinary. In his native country, the title which he gave to his work was always preserved, and it is still known as The Divine Comedy. A name so totally different from every other seems to be happily bestowed upon a production which stands without a rival.

Dante the Man

The glory which Dante acquired, which commenced during his lifetime, and which raised him, in a little time, above the greatest names of Italy, contributed but little to his happiness. He was born in Florence in 1265, of the noble and distinguished family of the Alighieri, which was attached, in politics, to the party of the Guelfs.

Whilst yet very young, he formed a strong attachment to Beatrice, the daughter of Folco de’ Portinari, whom he lost at the age of twenty-five years. Throughout his future life, he preserved a faithful recollection of the passion which, during fifteen years, had essentially contributed to the[188] happy development of his feelings, and which was thus associated with all his noblest sentiments and his most elevated thoughts. It was probably about ten years after the death of Beatrice when Dante commenced his great work, which occupied him during the remainder of his life, and in which he assigned the most conspicuous station to the woman he had so tenderly loved. In this object of his adoration, he found a common point of union for images both human and divine; and the Beatrice of his paradise appears to us sometimes in the character of the most beloved of her sex, and sometimes as an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom. Far from considering the passion of love in the same light as the ancients, the father of modern poetry recognises it as a pure, elevated, and sacred sentiment, calculated to ennoble and to sanctify the soul; and he has never been surpassed, by any who have succeeded him, in his entire and affecting devotion to the object of his attachment. Dante was, however, induced by considerations of family convenience to enter into a new engagement. In 1291, a year after the death of Beatrice, he married Gemma de’ Donati, whose obstinate and violent disposition embittered his domestic life. It is remarkable that, in the whole course of his work, into which he introduces the whole universe, he makes no personal allusion to his wife; and he was actuated, no doubt, by motives of delicacy towards her and her family, when he passed over, in similar silence, Corso Donati, the leader of the faction of his enemies, and his own most formidable adversary.

In the battle of Campaldino, in 1289, Dante bore arms for his country against the Aretini, and also against the Pisans in the campaign of 1290—the year subsequent to that in which the catastrophe of Count Ugolino occurred. He subsequently assumed the magisterial functions, at the period so fatal to the happiness of his country, when the civil wars between the Bianchi and the Neri broke out. He was accused of a criminal partiality to the interest of the former faction, during the time when he was a member of the supreme council; and when Charles de Valois, the father of Philip VI, proceeded to Florence, to appease the dissensions of the two parties, Dante was sentenced, in the year 1302, to the payment of an oppressive fine and to exile. By the subsequent sentence of a revolutionary tribunal, he was condemned, during his absence, to be burned alive, with all his partisans.

From that period, Dante was compelled to seek an asylum at such of the Italian courts as were attached to the Ghibelline interest, and were not unwilling to extend their protection to their ancient enemies. To that party, which he had opposed in the outset of his career, his perpetual exile and his misfortune compelled him, ultimately, to become a convert. He resided, for a considerable time, with the marquis Malaspina, in the Lunigiana, with the count Busone da Gubbio, and with the two brothers Della Scala, lords of Verona. But, in every quarter, the haughty obstinacy of his character, which[189] became more inflexible in proportion to the difficulties with which he was surrounded, and the bitterness of his wit, which frequently broke out in caustic sarcasms, raised up against him new enemies. His attempts to re-enter Florence with his party, by force of arms, were successively foiled; his petitions to the people were rejected; and his last hope, in the emperor Henry VII, vanished on the death of that monarch. His decease took place at Ravenna, on the 14th of September, 1321, whilst he was enjoying the hospitable protection of Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of that city, who had always treated him rather as a friend than as a dependant, and who, a short time before, had bestowed upon him an honourable mark of his confidence by charging him with an embassy to the republic of Venice.

On the death of her great poet, all Italy appeared to go into mourning. On every side copies of his work were multiplied, and enriched with numerous commentaries. In the year 1350, Giovanni Visconti, archbishop and prince of Milan, engaged a number of learned men in the laborious task of illustrating and explaining the obscure passages of the Divina Commedia. Six distinguished scholars, two theologians, two men of science, and two Florentine antiquaries united their talents in this undertaking. Two professorships were instituted for the purpose of expounding the works of Dante. One of these, founded at Florence, in the year 1373, was filled by the celebrated Boccaccio. The duties of the other, at Bologna, were no less worthily discharged by Benvenuto d’Imola, a scholar of eminence. It is questionable whether any other man ever exercised so undisputed an authority and so direct an influence over the age immediately succeeding his own.

An additional proof of the superiority of this great genius may be drawn from the commentaries upon his works. We are there surprised to see his most enthusiastic admirers incapable of appreciating his real grandeur. Dante himself, in his Latin treatise entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, appears to be quite unconscious of the extent of his services to the literature of his country. Like his commentators, he principally values himself upon the purity and correctness of his style. Yet he is neither pure nor correct; but, what is far superior to either, he had the powers of creative invention. For the sake of the rhyme, we find him employing a great number of barbarous words, which do not occur a second time in his verses. But, when he is himself affected, and wishes to communicate his emotions, the Italian language of the thirteenth century, in his powerful hands, displays a richness of expression, a purity, and an elegance which he was the first to elicit, and by which it has ever since been distinguished. The personages whom he introduces are moving and breathing beings; his pictures are nature itself; his language speaks at once to the imagination and to the judgment; and it would be difficult to point out a passage in his poem which would not form a subject for the pencil. The admiration of his commentators has also been abundantly bestowed upon the profound learning of Dante, who, it must be allowed, appears to have been master of all the knowledge and accomplishments of the age in which he lived. Of these various attainments, his poem is the faithful depository, from which we may infer, with great precision, the progress which science had at that time made, and the advances which were yet necessary to afford full satisfaction to the mind.e

The importance ascribed by Dante’s contemporaries to his writings other than the famous poem is well illustrated in the comment of the historian Giovanni Villani who, commenting on the death and burial of Dante, says: “This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher and rhetorician; as[190] perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to his time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of The Early Life of Love, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and amongst other things three noble epistles; one he sent to the Florentine government complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian pope—all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the Commedia where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters, or cantos, of the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so loftily as may be said of it that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the Monarchia, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on three, which to judge from what is seen would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work, because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, of which he promised to make four books (but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death), where in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy.

“This Dante,” continues Villani, “from his knowledge, was somewhat presumptuous, harsh, and disdainful, like an ungracious philosopher; he scarcely deigned to converse with laymen; but for his other virtues, science, and worth as a citizen, it seems but reasonable to give him perpetual remembrance in this our chronicle; nevertheless his noble works left to us in writing bear true testimony of him and honourable fame to our city.”f

LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF DANTE

To the same period with Dante belongs Francesco Barberini, the disciple, like Dante, of Brunetto Latini, and author of a treatise in verse on moral philosophy, which, in conformity with the affected spirit of the times, he entitled I Documenti d’Amore. Cecco d’Ascoli was also the contemporary of Dante, and his personal enemy. His poem in five books, called L’Acerba, or rather, according to M. Ginguené, L’Acerva, “the heap,” is a collection of all the sciences of his age, including astronomy, philosophy, and religion. It is much less remarkable for its intrinsic merit than for the lamentable catastrophe of its author, who was burned alive in Florence as a sorcerer, in 1327, at the age of seventy years, after having long held the professorship of judicial astrology in the University of Bologna.

Cino da Pistoia, of the house of the Sinibaldi, was the friend of Dante, and was equally distinguished by the brilliancy of his talents in two different[191] departments: as a lawyer, by his commentary on the first nine books of the code, and, as a poet, by his verses addressed to the beautiful Selvaggia de’ Vergiolesi, of whom he was deprived by death, about the year 1307. As a lawyer, he was the preceptor of the celebrated Bartolo, who, if he has surpassed his master, yet owed much to his lessons. As a poet, he was the model which Petrarch loved to imitate; and, in this view, he perhaps did his imitator as much injury by his refinement and affectation as he benefited him by the example of his pure and harmonious style. Fazio de’ Uberti, grandson of the great Farinata, who, in consequence of the hatred which the Florentines entertained for his ancestor, lived and died in exile, raised himself to equal celebrity at this period by his sonnets and other verses. At a much later time of life, he composed a poem of the descriptive kind, entitled Dettamondo, in which he proposed to imitate Dante, and to display the real world, as that poet had portrayed the world of spirits. But it need hardly be said that the distance between the original and the imitation is great indeed.

In some respects all these poets, and many others whose names are yet more obscure, have common points of resemblance. We find, in all, the same subtlety of idea, the same incoherent images, and the same perplexed sentiments. The spirit of the times was perverted by an affected refinement; and it is a subject of just surprise that, in the very outset of a nation, simplicity and natural feeling should have been superseded by conceit and bombast. It is, however, to be considered that this nation did not form her own taste, but adopted that of a foreign country, before she was qualified, by her own improved knowledge, to make a proper choice. The verses of the troubadours of Provence were circulated from one end of Italy to the other. They were diligently perused and committed to memory by every poet who aspired to public notice, some of whom exercised themselves in compositions in the same language; and although the Italians, if we except the Sicilians, had never any direct intercourse with the Arabians, yet they derived much information from them by this circuitous route. The almost unintelligible subtleties with which they treated of love passed for refinement of sentiment; while the perpetual rivalry which was maintained between the heart and the head, between reason and passion, was looked upon as an ingenious application of philosophy to a literary subject. The causeless griefs, the languors, the dying complaints of a lover became a constituent portion of the consecrated language in which he addressed his mistress, and from which he could not without impropriety depart. Conventional feelings in poetry thus usurped the place of those native and simple sentiments which are the offspring of the heart.

PETRARCH

But, instead of dwelling upon these defects in the less celebrated poets, we shall attempt to exhibit the general spirit of the fourteenth century, as displayed in the works of the greatest man whom Italy, in that age, produced, whose reputation has been most widely spread, and whose influence has been most extensively felt, not only in Italy but in France, in Spain, and in Portugal. The reader will easily imagine that it is Petrarch, the lover of Laura, to whom we here allude.

Petrarch was the son of a Florentine, who, like Dante, had been exiled from his native city. He was born at Arezzo, on the night of the 19th of July, 1304, and he died at Arqua, near Padua, on the 18th of July, 1374.[192] During the century of which his life occupied the greater portion, he was the centre of Italian literature. Passionately attached to letters, and more especially to history and to poetry, and an enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, he imparted to his contemporaries by his discourses, his writings, and his example that taste for the recovery and study of Latin manuscripts which so eminently distinguished the fourteenth century; which preserved the masterpieces of the classical authors, at the very moment when they were about to be lost forever; and gave a new impulse, by the imitation of those admirable models, to the progress of the human intellect.

Petrarch, tortured by the passion which has contributed so greatly to his celebrity, endeavoured, by travelling during a considerable portion of his life, to escape from himself and to change the current of his thoughts. He traversed France, Germany, and every part of Italy; he visited Spain; and, with incessant activity, directed his attention to the examination of the remains of antiquity. He became intimate with all the scholars, poets, and philosophers from one end of Europe to the other, whom he inspired with his own spirit. While he imparted to them the object of his own labours, he directed their studies; and his correspondence became a sort of magical bond, which, for the first time, united the whole literary republic of Europe. At the age in which he lived, that continent was divided into petty states, and sovereigns had not yet attempted to establish any of those colossal empires, so dreaded by other nations. On the contrary, each country was divided into smaller sovereignties. The authority of many a prince did not extend above thirty leagues from the little town over which he ruled; while at the distance of a hundred, his name was unknown. In proportion, however, as political importance was confined, literary glory was extended; and Petrarch, the friend of Azzo di Correggio, prince of Parma, of Lucchino and of Galeazzo Visconti, princes of Milan, and of Francesco di Carrara, prince of Padua, was better known and more respected, throughout Europe, than any of those petty sovereigns. This universal reputation, to which his high acquirements entitled him, and of which he frequently made use in forwarding the interests of literature, he occasionally turned to account for political purposes. No man of letters, no poet was doubtless ever charged with so many embassies to great potentates—to the emperor, the pope, the king of France, the senate of Venice, and all the princes of Italy. It is very remarkable that Petrarch did not fulfil these duties merely as a subject of the state which had committed its[193] interests to his hands, but that he acted for the benefit of all Europe. He was intrusted with such missions on account of his reputation; and when he treated with the different princes, it was, as it were, in the character of an arbitrator, whose suffrage everyone was eager to obtain, that he might stand high in the opinion of posterity.

The prodigious labours of Petrarch to promote the study of ancient literature are, after all, his noblest title to glory. Such was the view in which they were regarded by the age in which he lived, and such also was his own opinion. His celebrity, notwithstanding, at the present day depends much more on his Italian lyrical poems than on his voluminous Latin compositions. These lyrical pieces, which were imitated from the Provençals, from Cino da Pistoia, and from the other poets who flourished at the commencement of that century, have served, in their turn, as models to all the distinguished poets of the south.

The Latin compositions upon which Petrarch rested his fame, and which are twelve or fifteen times as voluminous as his Italian writings, are now only read by the learned. The long poem entitled Africa, which he composed on the victories of the elder Scipio, and which was considered, in his own age, as a masterpiece worthy of rivalling the Æneid, is very fatiguing to the ear. The style is inflated, and the subject so devoid of interest and so exceedingly dull as absolutely to prevent the perusal of the work. His numerous epistles in verse, instead of giving interest to the historical events to which they allude, acquire it from that circumstance. The imitation of the ancients, and the fidelity of the copy, which in Petrarch’s eyes constituted their chief merit, deprive these productions of every appearance of truth. The invectives against the barbarians who had subjugated Italy are so cold, so bombastic, and so utterly destitute of all colouring suited to the time and place, that we might believe them to have been written by some rhetorician who had never seen Italy; and we might confound them with those which a poetic fury dictated to Petrarch himself, against the Gauls who besieged the capital.

His philosophical works, amongst which may be mentioned a treatise on Solitary Life, and another on Good and Bad Fortune, are scarcely less bombastic. The sentiments display neither truth nor depth of thought. They are merely a show of words on some given subject. The author pre-determines his view of the question, and never examines the arguments for the purpose of discovering the truth, but of vanquishing the difficulties which oppose him, and of making everything agree with his own system. His letters, of which a voluminous collection has been published—which is, however, far from being complete—are perhaps more read than any other of his works, as they throw much light upon a period which is well worthy of being known. We do not, however, discover in them either the familiarity of intimate friendship or the complete openness of an amiable character. They display great caution and studied propriety, with an attention to effect which is not always successful. An Italian would never have written Latin letters to his friends, if he had wished only to unfold the secrets of his heart; but the letters of Cicero were in Latin, and with them Petrarch wished to have his own compared. He was, evidently, always thinking more of the public than of his correspondent; and in fact the public were often in possession of the letter before his friend. The bearer of an elegantly written epistle well knew that he should flatter the vanity of the writer by communicating it; and he therefore often openly read it, and even gave copies of it, before it reached its destination.

It is difficult to say whether the extended reputation which Petrarch enjoyed, during the course of a long life, is more glorious to himself or to his age. We have elsewhere mentioned the faults of this celebrated man—that subtlety of intellect which frequently led him to neglect true feeling, and to abandon himself to a false taste; and that vanity which too often induced him to call himself the friend of cruel and contemptible princes, because they flattered him. But, before we part with him, let us once more take a view of those great qualities which rendered him the first man of his age—that ardent love for science to which he consecrated his life, his powers, and his faculties; and that glorious enthusiasm for all that is high and noble in the poetry, the eloquence, the laws, and the manners of antiquity. This enthusiasm is the mark of a superior mind. To such a mind, the hero becomes greater by being contemplated; while a narrow and sterile intellect reduces the greatest men to its own level, and measures them by its own standard.

This enthusiasm was felt by Petrarch, not only for distinguished men, but for everything that is great in nature, for religion, for philosophy, for patriotism, and for freedom. He was the friend and patron of the unfortunate Rienzi, who, in the fourteenth century, awakened for a moment the ancient spirit and fortunes of Rome. He appreciated the fine arts as well as poetry, and he contributed to make the Romans acquainted with the rich monuments of antiquity, as well as with the manuscripts which they possessed. His passions were tinctured with a sense of religion which induced him to worship all the glorious works of the Deity, with which the earth abounds; and he believed that, in the woman he loved, he saw the messenger of that heaven which thus revealed to him its beauty. He enabled his contemporaries to estimate the full value of the purity of a passion so modest and so religious as his own; while to his countrymen he gave a language worthy of rivalling those of Greece and Rome, with which, by his means, they had become familiar. Softening and ornamenting his own language by the adoption of proper rules, he suited it to the expression of every feeling, and changed, in some degree, its essence. He inspired his age with that enthusiastic love for the beauty, and that veneration for the study of antiquity, which gave it a new character, and which determined that of succeeding times. It was, it may be said, in the name of grateful Europe that Petrarch, on the 8th of April, 1341, was crowned by the senator of Rome, in the Capitol; and this triumph, the most glorious which was ever decreed to man, was not disproportioned to the authority which this great poet was destined to maintain over future ages.e

EARLY ITALIAN PROSE

Already, for half a century, Italian poetry had been cultivated with ardour and with success, and in Dante’s time there was scarcely a well-educated Florentine who could not at need rhyme a sonnet or write a short song in the vulgar tongue. It was not so easy to write in prose; for if the poet had a language and rules of style, there had not yet been a learned time for the prose writer; he had no fixed rules, the form in short which allows a writer to express his thought in the logical order necessary to convey all its shades of meaning, to show up its striking points, artistically to subordinate the less important or purely expletive parts. The poet, on the contrary, at his first attempt met with metrical forms, long adopted and practised in Provençal, a parent idiom, whose rules could, without any difficulty, be applied[195] to Italian. He found moreover that the Provençal poetry, whose prosody he borrowed, had taken with slight differences the same subjects which he wished to sing in Italian; so that he found a poetical storehouse, if the expression may be allowed, of comparisons, epithets, connecting links, phrases, and permissible inversions.

It was not so with prose. The Italian language, which could without difficulty adopt the Provençal metrical system, found no prose developed which it could take as a model. Latin was the only perfect type which it could imitate; but the complete absence of any declension, the relatively limited number of conjunctions, the impossibility of freeing itself completely from analytical order, which it experienced in common with all modern languages, did not allow it to be modelled on Cicero, as poetry was modelled on Bertrand de Born or Sordello. To reach this point of perfection two or three more centuries were needed, during which deep thinkers and great artists moulded this refractory material.

It is true that the Latin historians, who were perfectly known, might have been taken as examples to be copied and even imitated; for these writers had treated the same kinds of subject which were again about to be attempted. However, there was one difference: ancient history, after all, was far distant, and the resemblance between the subjects was more apparent than real; or at least, if this resemblance really existed, men were too interested in the events to be able to judge them and compare them with others as coldly as we are accustomed to do. To sing the praises of his lady’s eyes, to express sentiments of fidelity or sadness, to paint chivalrous tournaments, it suffices to have read or to have listened to the Provençal troubadours, and the same words, with very few changes, can almost be transported from one language into the other. Imagine, on the other hand, a poor chronicler of the Middle Ages imitating Sallust or Titus Livius: could the vernacular furnish him with a single word to render those of his model—and the prose writer, accustomed to think in Latin, could he find in Italian a single expression equivalent to his thought? Whence could he have drawn that common fund of ideas and formulas which is so necessary to write a real history, however matter of fact, however little philosophic it might be? Even in order to relate facts, putting aside all thought of interest, one must have ideas.

But the difficulty was far greater when abstract subjects were treated. There is even some confusion in the beautiful prose of Dante’s Convito, and even in the scholastic digressions of The Divine Comedy, although at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Italian language was already far more developed than one hundred years before; and, to go no further, some idea of the extreme difficulty of such an enterprise may be found by calling to mind the obstacles which had to be overcome by the first French and German philosophers who had the courage and self-denial to expose in their mother-tongues (which were then nearly formed) ideas reasoned in Latin; for a certain effort is needed to follow the French and German writings of Descartes and Wolff, while their Latin works present no difficulty. Therefore, besides the general and constant causes for the priority of poetry to prose, there was in Italy a special cause which contributed to develop poetry first in the vulgar tongue; this cause was the existence of Provençal poetry, already flourishing and cultivated.

A fact common alike to the literary history of Italy and to that of all other nations is that the first attempts in prose were generally historical writings. In fact, among all primitive people we see that the first use they[196] made of free speech was to decompose the epic poems, to give the importance of historical tradition to stories of popular imagination. Thus we see the Ionian chroniclers, up to Herodotus, add the history of contemporary events to the deeds of heroes of fable, just as the first Florentine chroniclers, till Villani, trace back the origin of their native town and its early history to Roman names whose traditions were doubtless retained in the popular poems prior to the Provençal school which reigned in Italy towards the middle of the fourteenth century, and relate, without metre or rhythm, what the Florentine woman of the time of Frederick Barbarossa sang, seated at her spindle:

However this may be, it was only about this time that the use of the vernacular spread little by little; that public treaties and commercial correspondence began to be written in this language, and the public already preferred to read in the Italian language stories and other works written originally in Latin or sometimes in Provençal. But these writings can scarcely be considered literary works; they cannot, therefore, be taken as the starting-point of a history of Italian prose.

Just as the first Italian poems had been written in Sicilian dialect, soon replaced by the Tuscan dialect, so the first somewhat important and truly literary work in Italian prose was written in Sicilian dialect, while nearly all the prose writers of the following period were Tuscans; and this fact is sufficiently explained by the general history of Italy in the thirteenth century.

While Florence and all the centre of the peninsula were in a state of civil war, or painfully working to attain an independent municipal life, Naples, the home of the Hohenstaufens and the capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was enjoying profound peace, royal luxury, great freedom of thought, and all the refinements of life, in the midst of institutions which may be considered perfect for their time. Queen Constanza had already granted special protection to the Provençal poets, and her son, Frederick II, only placed above the troubadours of the south of France the learned philosophers of Baghdad and Cordova, as if the great man only believed himself understood or appreciated by those whose glance was not troubled by religious, political, or local passions. The influence of this brilliant court, which united taste for science with frivolity, where serious discussions on law and philosophy alternated with the gay Provençal wisdom, and where displays of chivalry and love songs diverted the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages after the fatigues or annoyances of politics, this preponderant influence made the Sicilian nation for a time the chief actor in the history of Italy, and their language the dominant organ of the rising literature; and it is not surprising that the first great work in Italian prose was written in the dialect made popular by the beautiful songs of the emperor Frederick II and his famous chancellor Pietro delle Vigne, King Enzio, and the brave Manfred, his half-brother.

Matteo Spinelli, the contemporary of these poets of noble birth, has left a chronicle under the very characteristic title “journal,” which enables us to judge at once what Italian prose was at that period. If we quote this work of Spinelli’s first, it is not because we are unaware of the numerous and often vague attempts which preceded him; but all previous writings may be considered as uncertain groping. The language of these works is not even[197] completely Italian yet, and the true modern idiom has been considered to rise in all its individuality in the poems of Ciullo d’Alcamo and in the Journals of Spinelli. Moreover, the work of the Sicilian chronicler (although, as its name seems to indicate, it was a diary scarcely intended for publication) offers by its very extent more ample matter for literary and philological study than certain inscriptions, deeds, laws, decrees, and other documents of similar nature.

We do not mean to say that the Journals have nothing Latin about them, or that they are written in pure Italian or Sicilian. Latin words, even phrases, which recall the customs of a dead language, are frequently found in the midst of a speech in all other respects purely Italian; but these souvenirs are always isolated, and do not alter the general character of the tongue, which is essentially Sicilian. But what distinguishes the style of this delightful teller of stories is not only the sweetness characteristic of the dialect he employed, but also a certain carelessness, a certain freedom in the construction of his sentences. In the first prose writer of a language one certainly does not expect Ciceronian periods; it appears perfectly natural that all his sentences should be co-ordinate, instead of being subordinate to one another, and that he should simply join his propositions by copulative conjunctions, instead of arranging them in incidental phrases; but with Spinelli, we simply find conversational language, and nothing more; that is to say, his style is wanting in clearness. He writes as he would have spoken to an attentive audience, with all the assistance to be derived from gesture,[198] intonation, and expressive glance. This conversational style, applied to written works of great length, is often unintelligible unless interpreted by a clever reader, who recites it as an actor recites his rôle in a comedy. In the end it becomes wearisome by the very fact that the necessary explanation, which recitation would give, is wanting. But, on the other hand, there is an animation which the finest art could not produce—each word, each expression creates a picture. One might be listening to a loquacious barber, on the lookout for the gossip of the day, serving up hot the talk of the town.

This is Spinelli’s specialty; he must not be looked on as a historian, not even a political chronicler, but as a teller of stories, often amusing, nearly always animated. The events of contemporary history are only mentioned incidentally in the midst of town and country gossip. But apart from the style and light shade of irony which form one of the charms of Boccaccio, Spinelli’s stories are not less wanting in interest than the stories of the Decameron. This is the great merit of the Journals; their historic value is almost worthless, and, on account of serious errors (chiefly those of chronology), they become dangerous guides for the reader who takes them seriously and refers to them for information on the period and country in which Spinelli lived. There is a great difference to be seen when one passes from this expansive and unpretentious gossip to professional men of letters, to the somewhat pedantic orators of Florence, from the neglected Sicilian dialect to the already majestic and developed language of Tuscany.

The study of rhetoric was first cultivated in Florence, and we see, by Dante’s education, the importance attached to this branch of knowledge. However, the earliest rhetoricians, such as Buoncompagni and Guidotto of Bologna, seldom employed the vernacular. The honour of fixing, so to say, the Tuscan dialect, of raising the Italian patois to the rank which Latin had occupied exclusively till then, belongs to Brunetto Latini, of whom Villani tells us that he was “the first to polish the Florentines,” and to whom Dante, his pupil, raised a monument more durable than any other claim to immortality which the poor orator possessed: “You taught me how man can make himself immortal, and it is right that while I live my tongue should declare the gratitude which I feel.”g

BOCCACCIO

But these after all are only tentative efforts. The first writer to make use of the new vehicle as a medium for really artistic prose of a creative type was a Florentine of a slightly later epoch, the contemporary of Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, the famous author of the Decameron. Boccaccio was born at Paris, in 1313, and was the natural son of a merchant of Florence, himself born at Certaldo, a castle in the Val d’Elsa, in the Florentine territory. His father had intended him for a commercial life, but before devoting him to it, indulged him with a literary education. From his earliest years, Boccaccio evinced a decided predilection for letters. He wrote verses, and manifested an extreme aversion to trade. He revolted equally at the prospect of a commercial life, and the study of the canon law, which his father was desirous of his undertaking. To oblige his father, however, he made several journeys of business; but he brought back with him, instead of a love for his employment, a more extended information, and an increased passion for study.

He at length obtained permission to devote himself wholly to literature, and fixed on Naples as his place of residence, where letters then flourished under the powerful protection of Robert, the reigning monarch. He was quickly initiated in all the sciences at that time taught. He acquired also the rudiments of the Greek tongue, which, though then spoken in Calabria, was an abstruse study with the early scholars. In 1341, he assisted at the celebrated examination of Petrarch, which preceded his coronation at Rome; and, from that time, a friendship arose between him and the poet, which terminated only with their lives. At this period, Boccaccio, distinguished no less for the elegance of his person than for the brilliancy of his wit, and devoted to pleasure, formed an attachment to a natural daughter of King Robert, named Maria, who for several years had been the wife of a Neapolitan gentleman. This lady he has celebrated in his writings, under the name of Fiammetta. In the attachment of Boccaccio, we must not look for that purity or delicacy which distinguished Petrarch in his love for Laura. This princess had been brought up in the most corrupt court of Italy; she herself partook of its spirit, and it is to her depraved taste that the exceptionable parts of the Decameron, a work undertaken by Boccaccio in compliance with her request, and for her amusement, are to be attributed. On his side, Boccaccio probably loved her as much from vanity as from real passion; for, although distinguished for her beauty, her grace, and her wit, as much as for her rank, she does not seem to have exercised any extraordinary influence on his life; and neither the conduct nor the writings of Boccaccio afford evidence of a sincere or profound attachment.

Boccaccio quitted Naples in 1342, to return to Florence. He came back again in 1344, and returned for the last time in 1350. From that year, he fixed himself in his native country, where his reputation had already assigned him a distinguished rank. His life was thenceforth occupied by his public employments in several embassies; by the duties which his increasing friendship to Petrarch imposed on him; and by the constant and indefatigable labours to which he devoted himself for the advancement of letters, the discovery of ancient manuscripts, the elucidation of subjects of antiquity, the introduction of the Greek language into Italy, and the composition of his numerous works. After taking the ecclesiastical habit, in 1361, he died at Certaldo, in the mansion of his ancestors, on the 21st of December, 1375.

The Decameron, the work to which Boccaccio is at the present day indebted for his highest celebrity, is a collection of one hundred novels or tales. He has ingeniously united them, under the supposition of a party formed in the dreadful pestilence of 1348, composed of a number of cavaliers, and young, intelligent, and accomplished women, retired to a delightful part of the country, to escape the contagion. It was there agreed that each person, during the space of ten days, should narrate, daily, a fresh story. The company consisted of ten persons, and thus the number of stories amounted to one hundred. The description of the enchanting country in the neighbourhood of Florence, where these gay recluses had established themselves; the record of their walks, their numerous fêtes, and their repasts, afforded Boccaccio an opportunity of displaying all the treasures of his powerful and easy pen.

These stories, which are varied with infinite art, as well in subject as in style, from the most pathetic and tender to the most sportive, and, unfortunately, the most licentious, exhibit a wonderful power of narration; and his description of the plague in Florence, which serves as an introduction to them, may be ranked with the most celebrated historical descriptions which have descended to us. The perfect truth of colouring; the exquisite choice of circumstances, calculated to produce the deepest impression, and which place before our eyes the most repulsive scenes, without exciting disgust; and the emotion of the writer, which insensibly pervades every part, give to this picture that true eloquence of history which, in Thucydides, animates the relation of the plague in Athens. Boccaccio had, doubtless, this model before his eyes; but the events, to which he was a witness, had vividly impressed his mind, and it was the faithful delineation of what he had seen, rather than the classical imitation, which served to develop his talent.

The praise of Boccaccio consists in the perfect purity of his language, in his elegance, his grace, and above all in that naïveté which is the chief merit of narration, and the peculiar charm of the Italian tongue.

Unfortunately Boccaccio did not prescribe to himself the same purity in his images as in his phraseology. The character of his work is light and sportive. He has inserted in it a great number of tales of gallantry; he has exhausted his powers of ridicule on the duped husband, on the depraved and depraving monks, and on subjects, in morals and religious worship, which he himself regarded as sacred; and his reputation is thus little in harmony with the real tenor of his conduct. The Decameron was published towards the middle of the fourteenth century (in 1352 or 1353), when Boccaccio was at least thirty-nine years of age; and from the first discovery of printing, was freely circulated in Italy, until the Council of Trent proscribed it in the middle of the sixteenth century. At the solicitation of the grand duke of Tuscany, and after two remarkable negotiations between this prince and popes Pius V and Sixtus V, the Decameron was again published, in 1573 and 1582, purified and corrected.

Many of the tales of Boccaccio appear to be borrowed from popular recitation, or from real occurrences. We trace the originals of several, in the ancient French fabliaux; of some, in the Italian collection of the Centi Novelli; and of others, again, in an Indian romance, which passed through all the languages of the East, and of which a Latin translation appeared as early as the twelfth century, under the name of Dolopathos, or The King and the Seven Wise Men. Invention, in this class of writing, is not less rare than in every other; and the same tales, probably, which Boccaccio had collected in the gay courts of princes, or in the squares of the cities of Italy, have been[201] repeated to us anew in all the various languages of Europe. They have been versified by the early poets of France and England, and have afforded reputation to three or four imitators of Boccaccio. But, if Boccaccio cannot boast of being the inventor of these tales, he may still claim the creation of this class of letters. Before his time, tales were only subjects of social mirth. He was the first to transport them into the world of letters; and, by the elegance of his diction, the just harmony of all the parts of his subject, and the charm of his narration, he superadded the more refined gratifications of language and of art, to the simpler delight afforded by the old narrators.

It is unnecessary to speak here of Boccaccio’s other Italian works, beyond naming his romances Fiammetta and Filocopo, and his heroic poems La Teseide and Filostrato. The Latin compositions of Boccaccio are voluminous, and materially contributed, at the time they were written, to the advancement of letters. The most celebrated of these works are two treatises; the one on the genealogy of the gods, and the other on mountains, forests, and rivers. In the first, he gave an exposition of the ancient mythology; and in the second, rectified many errors in geography. These two works have fallen into neglect, since the discovery of manuscripts then unknown, and in consequence of the facilities which the art of printing, by opening new sources, has afforded to the study of antiquity. In the age in which they were composed, they were, however, equally remarkable for their extensive information and for the clearness of their arrangement; but the style is by no means so pure and elegant as that of Petrarch. But, while the claim to celebrity, in these great men, is restricted to the Italian poetry of Petrarch and to the novels of Boccaccio, our gratitude to them is founded on stronger grounds. They felt more sensibly than any other men that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity, without which we in vain strive to appreciate its treasures; and they each devoted a long and laborious life to the discovery and the study of ancient manuscripts. The most valued works of the ancients were at that time buried among the archives of convents, scattered at great distances, incorrect and incomplete, without tables of contents or marginal notes. Nor did those resources then exist, which printing supplies, for the perusal of works with which we are not familiar; and the facilities which are afforded by previous study, or the collation of the originals with each other, were equally wanting. It must have required a powerful intellect to discover, in a manuscript of Cicero, for example, without title or commencement, the full meaning of the author, the period at which he wrote, and other circumstances, which are connected with his subject; to correct the numerous errors of the copyists; to supply the chasms, which, frequently occurring at the beginning and the end, left neither title nor divisions nor conclusions, nor anything that might serve as a clew for the perusal; in short, to determine how one manuscript, discovered at Heidelberg, should perfect another, discovered at Naples. It was, in fact, by long and painful journeys that the scholars of those days equipped themselves for this task. The copying a manuscript, with the necessary degree of accuracy, was a work of great labour and expense. A collection of three or four hundred volumes was, at that time, considered an extensive library; and a scholar was frequently compelled to seek, at a great distance, the completion of a work, commenced under his own roof.

Petrarch and Boccaccio, in their frequent travels, obtained copies of such classics as they found in their route. Among other objects, Petrarch proposed to himself to collect all the works of Cicero; in which he succeeded[202] after a lapse of many years. Boccaccio, with a true love of letters, introduced the study of the Greek to the Italians, not only with the view of securing the interests of commerce or of science, but of enriching their minds, and extending their researches to the other half of the ancient world of letters, which had, till then, remained hidden from his contemporaries. He founded, in Florence, a chair for the teaching of the Greek language; and he himself invited thither, and installed as professor, Leontius Pilatus, one of the most learned Greeks of Constantinople. He received him into his own house, although he was a man of a morose and disagreeable temper; placed him at his table, as long as this professor could be induced to remain at Florence; inscribed himself among the first of his scholars, and procured at his own expense, from Greece, the manuscripts, which were thus distributed in Florence, and which served as subjects for the lectures of Leontius Pilatus. For the instruction of those days consisted in the public delivery of lectures with commentaries, and a book, of which there perhaps existed only a single copy, sufficed for some thousand scholars.

LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO

There is an infinite space between the three great men whose works we have just enumerated, and even the most esteemed of their contemporaries; and, though these latter have preserved, until the present day, a considerable reputation, yet we shall only pause to notice their existence, and the epoch to which they belong. Perhaps the most remarkable are the three Florentine historians of the name of Villani. Giovanni, the eldest, who died in the first plague, in 1348; Matteo, his brother, who died in the second plague, in 1361; and Filippo, the son of Matteo, who continued the work of his father to the year 1364, and who wrote a history of the literature of Florence, the first attempt of this kind in modern times. Two poets of this age shared with Petrarch the honours of a poetic coronation: Zanobi di Strada, whom the emperor Charles IV crowned at Pisa in 1355, with great pomp, but whose verses have not reached us; and Coluccio Salutati, secretary of the Florentine Republic, one of the purest Latinists, and most eloquent statesmen whom Italy in that age produced. The latter, indeed, did not live to enjoy the honour which had been accorded him by the emperor, at the request of the Florentines. Coluccio died in 1406, at the age of seventy-six, before the day appointed for his coronation, and the symbol of glory was deposited on his tomb; as, at a subsequent period, a far more illustrious crown was placed on the tomb of Tasso.

Of the prose writers of Tuscany, Franco Sacchetti, born at Florence about the year 1335, and who died before the end of the century, after filling some of the first offices in the republic, approaches the nearest to Boccaccio. He imitated Boccaccio in his novels, and Petrarch in his lyric poems; but the latter were never printed, while of his tales there have been several editions. Whatever praise be due to the purity and eloquence of his style, we find his pages more valuable as a history of the manners of the age, than attractive for their powers of amusement, even when the author thinks himself most successful. His 258 tales consist, almost entirely, of the incidents of his own time, and of his own neighbourhood; domestic anecdotes, which in general contain little humour; tricks, exhibiting little skill, and jests of little point; and we are often surprised to find a professed jester vanquished by the smart reply of a child or a clown, which scarcely deserves our[203] attention. After reading these tales, we cannot help concluding that the art of conversation had not made, in the fourteenth century, an equal progress with the other arts; and that the great men, to whom we owe so many excellent works, were not so entertaining in the social intercourse of life as many persons greatly their inferiors in merit.

Two poets of this time, of some celebrity, chose Dante for their model, and composed after him in terza rima, long allegories, partly descriptive, partly scientific. Fazio de’ Uberti, in his Dettamondo, undertook the description of the universe, of which the different parts, personified in turns, relate their history. Federigo Frezzi, bishop of Foligno, who died in 1416, at the Council of Constance, has, in his Quadriregio, described the four empires of Love, Satan, Virtue, and Vice. In both of these poets we meet, occasionally, with lines not unworthy of Dante; but they formed a very false estimate of the works of genius, when they regarded the Divina Commedia not as an individual poem, but as a species of poetry which anyone might attempt.

The passionate study of the ancients, of which Petrarch and Boccaccio had given an example, suspended, in an extraordinary manner, the progress of Italian literature, and retarded the perfection of that tongue. Italy, after having produced her three leading classics, sank, for a century, into inaction. In this period, indeed, erudition made wonderful progress; and knowledge became much more general, but sterile in its effects. The mind had preserved all its activity, and literary fame all its splendour; but the unintermitted study of the ancients had precluded all originality in the authors. Instead of perfecting a new language, and enriching it with works in unison with modern manners and ideas, they confined themselves to a servile copy of the ancients. A too scrupulous imitation thus destroyed the spirit of invention; and the most eminent scholars may be said to have produced, in their eloquent writings, little more than college themes. In proportion as a man was qualified by his rank, or by his talents, to acquire a name in literature, he blushed to cultivate his mother-tongue. He almost, indeed, forced himself to forget it, to avoid the danger of corrupting his Latin style; and the common people thus remained the only depositaries of a language which had exhibited so brilliant a dawn, and which had now again almost relapsed into barbarism.e

ART IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

Turning from literature to the not distantly related field of art, let us glance at some of the tentative efforts which prepared the way for the succession of Florentine masters that were presently to take the lead in this field and hold it for some centuries.

The Renaissance, that is, the resurrection, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, of ideas and forms of classic antiquity, was preceded by individual efforts which, though often failing to reach the mark, ought to be taken account of in the history of this great revolution. The plastic memories of the Græco-Roman world have played in the preoccupation of the Middle Ages a more considerable rôle than is usually thought. Mere force of events put our ancestors in the presence of ancient chefs-d’œuvre, and they had to look at them whether they would or not. Some saw in them only idolatrous monuments, and have found fault with them as such. Others attributed to them magic virtues; some have given themselves up to the admiration they[204] felt in looking at the immensity of Roman ruins, the richness of early materials, the perfection of the handiwork. These latter, it might be affirmed, are the most numerous. Even during the most sombre period of the Middle Ages, all Europe felt the fascination that Rome, the oldest city par excellence, exercised for twenty centuries. That which attracted from far and near thousands of visitors to the banks of the Tiber was not only the promise of indulgencies, a desire to pray on the tomb of martyrs, to contemplate basilics resplendent with gold and precious stones, but also memories left by the cæsars.

After having heard with a kind of incredulity the marvels of this incomparable city, one is further amazed by the number of its temples, palaces, baths, and amphitheatres. Have not reliable authors told us that she lately possessed thirty-six triumphal arches, twenty-eight libraries, 856 public baths, twenty-two equestrian statues in gilded bronze, eighty-four of the same in ivory, obelisks, and innumerable colossi?

From the twelfth century popular imagination laid hold of these pictures, transforming and amplifying them. Wondrous tales became current and were incorporated in works received as authoritative—the Descriptis plenaria Votius Urbis, the Graphia aurea urbis Romæ, and lastly the Mirabilia civitatis Romæ. Again at the end of the fifteenth century the valiant Charles VIII, wanting to give his subjects some idea of the town into which he had lately entered lance in hand, caused one of these records of another age to be translated for them. A few extracts will show with what strong faith these stories worthy of The Thousand and One Nights were received before the Renaissance:

“Inside the capital was the greater part of a golden palace adorned with precious stones and said to equal the third part of the world, in which there were as many statues of images as there are provinces in all the world. Each image had a tambourine round its neck, placed with mathematical art, so that if any region was in rebellion against the Romans, immediately the image of the province turned its back to the image of the city of Rome, which was the largest and dominated the others, and the tambourine at its neck sounded. Then immediately the Capitol guards told this to the senate, and people were forthwith sent to expugn that province.

“The horses and nude men denote that in the time of the emperor Tiberius there were two young philosophers, that is, Praxiteles and Phitas, who said they were so wise that anything the emperor said in his room, they not being there, could report word for word. And they did as they said, not demanding money for it, but to be always remembered, so the philosophers have two marble horses with their feet on the ground, which denote the princes of this century. And they who are naked on the horses denote that their arm, high and held out, and their bent backs speak of things to come, and as they are naked, so the science of this world was naked and open to their understanding.”

From admiration to imitation is only one step. Artists in their turn went to work and took without scruple from what was a common heritage. Doubtless many of these borrowings are unconscious or really only show up the immense inferiority of the copyist. But is the influence of the antique less striking? One must recall in this order of ideas the splendid creations of architects in the Roman period—the duomo, the campanile, and the baptistery of Pisa, the baptistery of Florence, and the basilica of San Miniato, the duomo of Lucca, and so many chefs-d’œuvre raised according to principles that innovators of the following age, the champions of Gothic style, were so audaciously to trample underfoot.

Nicholas Crescentius (son of the celebrated tribune) in the eleventh century, impelled by a desire to renew the ancient splendour of Rome, had the elegant little house at Ponte Rotto built of antique fragments. Similarly the emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1121-1190) had these former glories in mind, when he had graven on his seal a view of Rome with the Colosseum. But it was to his illustrious grandson Frederick II (1184-1250) that the honour is due of first pleading the cause of the Renaissance, and he should rightly be placed at the head of the precursors. We possess numerous witnesses of his love for the monuments of ancient art.

Now we see him striking Augustales, those curious imitations of Roman imperial money, bearing on one side an effigy crowned with laurels, with the epigraph AVG. IMP. ROM. and draped in the fashion of the cæsars; on the reverse an eagle with outspread wings with the epigraph FREDERICVS. Again he buys for a considerable sum (230 oz. of gold) an onyx cup and other curiosities. From Grotta Ferrata he takes away two bronzes, statues of a man and of a cow serving for a fountain, and carries them to Lucera. The church of St. Michael of Ravenna furnishes the monolithic columns he requires for his buildings at Palermo. Near Augusta in Sicily, he caused excavations to be made in the hope of discovering ancient remains. Once, it is true, yielding to urgent necessity he had several Roman monuments at Brindisi destroyed that he might use the materials in constructing a citadel. He tried just as he was departing for Palestine to make the town safe from any attacks, but political reasons outweighed his antiquarian scruples.

The work dreamed of by Frederick II as amateur was realised by his contemporary Nicholas of Pisa (1207?-1278) who, in the thirteenth century, held imitation of the antique as a principle, and used it as a mirror by which nature might be the more clearly shown. His attempt seems prodigious to us to-day; it supposes a power of initiative which Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Van Eyck have hardly equalled. Imitation with him was not confined to accessories—ornaments, costumes, armour—nor to types, nor to proportions of figures, which are all stumpy, as in the Roman sarcophagi of the decadence. The spirit of his work recalls ancient models.

“Nicholas,” says M. Gebhardt,n “in the pulpits of Pisa and Siena, and in the shrine of San Dominico at Bologna, recalls the traditions of a great art with a naïve gravity and assured taste. He is hardly a neo-Greek or a superstitious antiquary, but is imbued with the most generous principles of antique sculpture—the harmonious ordering of the scenes, the skilful employ of space where many persons move in a narrow frame, the majestic tranquillity of pose, the finely ordered draperies, the noble heads. But his eye and hand still express the fashion of primitive sculpture; the movements express awkward timidity, the faces are sometimes heavy. He gives an impression of Roman work at the end of the empire. Nicholas of Pisa (Niccolo Pisano), if he discovered and studied the Greek, did not renounce nature, and, in his best pieces, he has returned to a study of life. It is in this that he shows himself an intelligent disciple of the ancients. Apart from Nicholas of Pisa, the Italian masters each put their own personality in the antique; none were servile copyists, and it is Nicholas, the first and consequently the least learned, whose chisel has left the most instructive reminiscences.”

One of the most noted pupils and collaborators of Nicholas, Brother Guglielmo of Pisa (born about 1238, died after 1313), was inspired with like principles, but not so strongly. In the pulpit of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia, he has succeeded better than his master, in reconciling pagan reminiscences with Christian ideas.

The historic sentiment is one of the distinctive traits of the school of Nicholas of Pisa. It has recourse not only to antique marbles as models of style, but to documents as well. Whilst, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, painters and sculptors gave the costume of the period to sacred characters, their predecessors of the thirteenth century tried to restore, aided by archæology, the costumes of Christ and his family, the apostles, martyrs, as absolutely as did the Renaissance champions two hundred years later. Fra Guglielmo has pushed these scruples very far; his apostles wear the toga, tunic, and sandals, and hold a rolled volume in the hand.

In the Descent of the Holy Ghost he seeks, moreover, faithfully to reproduce the types of the primitive church, above all in the figures of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. As with the sculptors of sarcophagi in Rome, Milan, and the south of France, there is a complete absence of nimbi, showing to what extent Nicholas of Pisa and his like disdained mediæval tradition, at least as regards types, costumes, and attributes. In the scene just mentioned one remarks also the grouping of the apostles. They are placed in two ranks, one behind the other, just as in a curious mosaic in the chapel of St. Aguilino (church of St. Lawrence at Milan). An arrangement differing very little is found in another bas-relief on the pulpit—that is, Christ washing the disciples’ feet. The women’s dresses deserve special mention. In the Annunciation and Visitation, Mary and Elizabeth have the head half covered with a fold of their mantle so as to expose the forehead and the greater part of the hair. They might be Roman matrons.

In his quality as a member of the order of St. Dominican, Fra Guglielmo had more than once to reprove the too pagan tendencies of his master. The position of another disciple of Nicholas, Arnolfo of Cambio (died in 1310), the architect of the dome of Florence, was not less delicate, but for other reasons. One is surprised to see this master, the promoter of a style departing so singularly from antique tradition, returning to the latter when he exchanges the builder’s compass for the sculptor’s chisel. Let us hasten to add that the departure is not so great as one might think. In his tomb of the cardinal of Braye at Orvieto, Arnolfo has known how to give the Virgin a serene majesty, a simplicity which does not lack grandeur, without pushing imitation as far as his master. He shows still more entire independence in the tabernacle of St. Paul beyond the walls, near Rome. If one did not know Arnolfo to have been Nicholas’ disciple, it would be difficult to imagine it in looking at this hybrid monument.i

Without attempting even to name the other lesser schools of sculpture and of architecture that were beginning to make their influence felt, let us turn to culminating artistic achievements of the epoch, as represented in the work of the great Florentines Cimabue and Giotto.

The Tuscan School of Painters

It is an undisputed fact that the revival of painting, like that of sculpture, commenced in Tuscany. It is equally certain that about the middle of the thirteenth century, or a little later, which is the point at which improvement first manifested itself, the prevailing style was the Byzantine, introduced by Greek artists from Constantinople. But it has not by any means been clearly discerned wherein the peculiarities of that style consisted; and it has been usually assumed that it was a rude and defective manner which, as the first step in advance, the Italian painters had to discard. Materials are extant which justify a different conclusion, and evince that the introduction of this foreign taste, gross and faulty as it was, truly formed the first stage in improvement.

From the ninth century till the middle of the thirteenth, painting among the Byzantine artists differed from contemporary Italian works in several important particulars. In both quarters art was timidly imitative; but in the Eastern Empire the models from which it borrowed were more various than in the West, and the execution was usually better; the fashion of the drapery and ornament had a peculiar character of semi-oriental barbarism; and, while in both countries the drawing of the figure was generally bad, the common tendency of the Greeks was to lengthen it disproportionally, and that of the Italians to represent it as short and squab. But the most palpable distinctions were two in the technical treatment. First, in the oldest Italian paintings the vehicle of the colours is transparent, and the tone is therefore light and clear; in the works from Constantinople the tone is dark and yellowish, being produced by the use of some colouring matter which, if modern chemists have rightly analysed it, was wax. The second difference was this—that the Greeks, besides ornamenting their draperies richly with gilding, surrounded their figures with a golden ground; a barbarous practice, of which the oldest Italian works exhibit no trace. In those early productions of the thirteenth century, where we can trace the first ameliorations of art, we discover most, or all, of these peculiarities derived from the Greek style; some of them prevailed very long; and the most objectionable, the flaunting ground, was not entirely discarded even in the time of Raffaelle.

The oldest name celebrated in Italian painting is that of Cimabue, who, born about 1240, died in 1300. On the strength of his merit the Florentines claim the glory of having resuscitated art—a pretension which the school of Siena seems to have some right, in the person of Duccio, to contest with them. The works of Cimabue were Byzantine, in their style, in their colouring, and in their blaze of gold; and tradition says that he was taught in his youth by Greek artists. He improved, it is true, upon that school; but, though everything regarding him is obscure, there is no sufficient reason for believing that his improvement consisted in any departure from its principles. To him are commonly assigned some ill-preserved fresco paintings in the church of St. Francis at Assisi, which at all events give an idea of the masters from whom he learned; but his boldness and loftiness of conception are more clearly evinced by two rudely grand figures of Madonnas on wood, both at Florence, the more celebrated of the two in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the other in the Ducal Gallery.

To this great artist succeeds the Florentine Giotto (1276-1336), whose history and works are somewhat better known. The Italian novelists have preserved anecdotes of his wealth, his ugliness, and his profane wit. The story which describes him as a shepherd boy, discovered by Cimabue drawing rude figures on a stone, is perhaps too picturesque to be true; and his undoubted pieces display a marked dissimilarity in spirit to those of his alleged teacher, while they deviate also from the Byzantine style in colouring, if in nothing else, having a clear rosy hue which indicates a return to the older Italian method, though it is also an improvement on it. In the theory of his art, however, Giotto departed essentially from all his predecessors. When we combine the criticisms of the older writers with the few pictures which still can be certainly or probably identified as his, we may describe his characteristics as consisting in an attempt, made under manifold difficulties, but attended with surprising success, to establish, instead of the rude, vague, devotional loftiness of Cimabue, a beauty derived from a closer observation of life, as well as enlivened by a better and less formal expression of ordinary human feeling. His only existing work, which is ascertained by a genuine inscription, is one in the church of the Santa Croce in Florence, containing five divisions, of which that in the centre represents the Saviour crowning the Virgin. The gallery of the Florentine Accademia delle Arti contains some small compositions of his, representing, in a fashion half religious and half comic, events from the history of St. Francis. Frescoes in the upper church of that saint[209] at Assisi, assigned to Giotto by some critics, have been pronounced by others to be inferior, and unlike his genuine remains; but others on the vaulted roof of the subterranean part of the same building are undoubtedly his, and resemble the pieces of the academy both in execution and in spirit. Other pictures laying claim to his name occur in various galleries throughout Italy as well as elsewhere.e

Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm that has been bestowed upon the paintings of Giotto, it must frankly be admitted that these are to be regarded as remarkable only when viewed in relation to the art of the time in which they were produced. To extol them as masterpieces according to the standards that were developed by the later Florentines would be to throw criticism to the winds. But the architectural efforts of Giotto may be praised with less reserve. The Campanile of Florence has aroused the enthusiasm of most critics who have viewed it; Ruskink declares that “of living Christian works, none is so perfect as the tower of Giotto.”

The same writer speaks with equal enthusiasm of Giotto’s work in another field: “Of representations of human art under heavenly guidance,” he says, “the series of bas-reliefs which stud the base of this tower of Giotto must be held certainly the chief in Europe. Read but these inlaid jewels of Giotto once with patient following, and your hour’s study will give you strength for all your life.” This may be held by colder criticism to be an over-enthusiastic estimate, but few who have come under the spell of the Campanile will wish to modify the eloquent words in which Ruskin characterises that structure as a whole.a

Ruskin’s Estimate of Giotto’s Tower

“The characteristics of power and beauty,” he says, “occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto. In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something unpleasing—a mingling, as it seems to him, of over-severity with over-minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I well remember how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those gray walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the[210] height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud and chased like a sea-shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who raised it? I said that the power of human mind had its growth in the wilderness; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image of God’s daily work, and an arrested ray of some star or creation, be given chiefly in the places which he has gladdened by planting there the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far-away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that headstone of beauty above her towers of watch and war. Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he filled the heart of Italy; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet; and when you have numbered his labours and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this his servant no common nor restrained portion of his spirit, and that he was indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon his crown was that of David’s: ‘I took thee from the sheep-cote and from following the sheep.’”k

FOOTNOTES

The story of Cola di Rienzi furnishes a unique chapter in Italian history. It is the story of a patriot and reformer, whose early enthusiasm was not supported by true moral greatness, and whose efforts were thus foredoomed to failure, after a momentary semblance of success.

The date of the accession of Charles IV is coincident with that of the first and greatest rise of Rienzi to power in Rome. To disengage Rienzi from the atmosphere of romance into which he has been cast for the reader of to-day by the unguarded rhetoric in Lord Lytton’s novel, and its offspring the libretto of an opera by Richard Wagner, is a task which could serve little by its accomplishment. In whatever light we regard the tribune we are bound to admit that his history is an eloquent memorial of the sudden extinction of what at least appeared to be the most brilliant possibilities. Who can refuse an ear to the story that captivated the attention of Petrarch—that story whose fantastic glamour the poet never entirely shook from him even when his faith in the power of his friend was being rudely shaken? It is through Petrarch that the romantic vision of Rienzi’s career has been transmitted to us, and though we may smile at the poet’s unreal sense of government, we are left to wonder at his great imaginative sympathy with the dreams of the young Nicholas from the moment when he first heard them from the lips of his friend at Avignon (in 1343) to the time when it needed all his eloquence with the pope to save Rienzi from execution (in 1352). Against such a story, illustrated in numerous glowing letters of Petrarch,[212] Hallam’s cold sense of justice rebels. He quotes the words of the staunch republican Giovanni Villani,b a contemporary of Rienzi. “The design he formed was a fantastic work and one of short duration.” He reminds us of the passage in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, in which Oswald, Lord Nelvil, and the heroine happen upon the castle of St. Angelo in their intellectual perambulations through Rome. Nelvil is a descendant, in the direct line, of another English hero in French fiction, Edward, Lord Bumpton—the saddened English peer with beautiful manners and a heart all Rousseau. Corinne attacks the monuments with a conscientious zeal worthy of Baedeker and with more than Baedeker’s tenderness for the general spirit of reflection which such sights are wont to raise. But her critical faculty is never dormant. She couples Rienzi with Crescentius and Arnold of Brescia, calling them “those friends of Roman liberty who so often mistook their memories for hopes.” The phrase strikes a note of enthusiasm from Hallam which all the rhetoric of Rienzi himself fails to produce in the historian. Could Tacitus have excelled this, he asks?

But even robbed of the setting by which Petrarch has made it forever memorable, the story of Rienzi’s attitude towards the institutions of his time is in itself picturesque. Sismondic says of him, “He rejected with deep indignation the usurpation of two barbarians, the one German, calling himself Roman emperor; the other a Frenchman who called himself the pontiff of Rome.” In the disruption into which Rome was thrown by the contests of the noble families, Rienzi saw a possible foundation for creating a powerful sovereignty. The removal of the popes to Avignon made his designs appear all the more feasible. The people of Rome were to be the backbone of his strength. He won them by a singular eloquence to which Petrarch bears evidence even at that period when he is tempted to minimise the wisdom of his early enthusiasm for Rienzi. Rome was the prey of feudal anarchy: the municipal government was reduced to impotence. Seizing the opportune moment Cola di Rienzi (Nicola Gabrini), the son of an innkeeper, makes a brilliant coup d’état and becomes tribune elect of the people in 1347. The feuds of the families of Colonna, Orsini and Savelli have served the ends of the ambitious youth who at the age of thirty-four found himself in a position of power all the greater that it was comparatively undefined and absolutely unparalleled in the annals of history. We can hardly be surprised that the success of his endeavours, the material realisation of what even to Rienzi himself must have clearly possessed some of the attributes of a dream, should have misled him into the most extravagant abuses of power. He had dreamed even at that early period of the unification of Italy, and now it seemed as if he were the divine agent to bring about this unification. Sovereign princes became his allies. He surrounded himself with all the tokens of magnificence that occurred to a fertile and greedy imagination. He bathed in the porphyry font of Constantine; he assumed the dalmatic worn by the ancient emperors at their coronation, took the sceptre of government in his hand and placed seven crowns on his head symbolising the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; he even compared himself to Christ.

The novel of Lord Lytton is a genuine attempt to convey a picture of an achievement that offered an attractive subject for romantic treatment. It lacks the sincere ring of the silver eloquence of Petrarch—its main source of inspiration. It has little of the critical faculty revealed in the phrase quoted from Madame de Staël; it is a curious combination of diligent research, sympathetic insight, and a passion for high talk. In the case of one to whom contemporaries affix the epithet “fantastic” with noticeable frequency, the[213] difficulties of precise delineation are more than usually great. But such a chapter as that describing the climax of Rienzi’s power during his first and greatest tribunate is a valuable contribution towards that truth of narrative which lies midway between the barren enumeration of facts and the perfervid rhapsodies of those whom the facts have dazzled. For the main narrative of Rienzi’s picturesque career, however, we shall trust to the more prosaic, yet still appreciative, account of a recent Italian historian.a

THE RISE OF RIENZI

Cola di Rienzi, full of the glories of ancient Rome, thought it possible to realise politically the thoughts contained in his own works, and those of his friend Petrarch, and of other great minds of his century. One idea dominated Rienzi. He was the great dreamer of his time; but he was not mad in thinking that Rome should rise above the party spirit of Guelfs and Ghibellines which he equally blamed whilst lamenting the strife continually excited by the one against the other.

In 1342, after the election of Clement VI in Avignon, the thirteen good men who ruled Rome sent orators to the new pope asking him to return to St. Peter’s seat. They had done the same at the election of Clement V, John XXII, and Benedict XII. A young Roman, born to a tavern-keeper and a washerwoman about the time of the coronation of Henry VII, took part in the embassy. He was learned in Livy, Seneca, Cicero, and Valerius; he was enthusiastic over the deeds of Julius Cæsar; he had learned to read the ancient inscriptions which were no longer understood, and he loved to expound them to the degenerate citizens; and, whilst telling them of the good Romans and their great justice, he regretted not having been born in their time. He either did not know or he forgot the stormy scenes of the republic, the pusillanimity and the iniquity of the empire, and ignored the virtues and the victories of that Rome which now lay abandoned not only by her emperor, but even by her pope.

Being presented to Clement VI, Rienzi described to him the robberies of the lords at Rome, their misdeeds, and the desolation of the city; he spoke in such forcible words that Clement was astonished, and the elegance of the Latin language used by the gifted citizen seemed extraordinary. Petrarch also, who a few years previously had pressed Benedict XII to return to Rome, represented to the new pope the city that invited his return.

But Clement, more impressed by the miserable condition of Rome and the states of the church than by the ardent words of poet or orator, had no wish to leave Avignon. He authorised the jubilee for the year 1350, and he deputed the young Stefano Colonna and Bertoldo Orsini to be his vicars in Rome. He complimented Cola and appointed him notary of the chamber; but the latter now began to show his teeth. The murder of a brother for which he was unable to obtain justice had exasperated him against the bad judges of Rome; so now returning from Avignon in favour with the pope, he took courage to reprove them as kings of the “blood of the poor people”; he admonished them with mysterious pictures; and he had a presentment made of a ship about to sink in a stormy sea, under which was written: “This is Rome.”

In his increasing assurance, and ascendency over the people, Cola convoked them one day to the Lateran when he spoke in the vulgar tongue[214] so as to be understood by all. He showed the people the Lex Regia of Vespasian, which he had brought to light for the first time, and which he thought had been hidden by Boniface VIII out of hatred of the empire. In this the senate in the ancient Roman forms conferred the imperial power on Vespasian. Cola, who took it literally, extolled the authority of the Roman people: “See how fine the senate was, what authority it gave to the empire;” and he lamented the loss of so much greatness, and deplored above all the present desolation of the city, and implored the people not to disgrace themselves before the pilgrims who would come to Rome for the jubilee of 1350.

All the people applauded, and the nobles scoffed, but he replied in allegorical pictures and discourses. Rome was in a miserable condition; murder and rapine were practised on the highways with impunity, pilgrims were robbed and wounded, and honesty was out of court. Robert and Peter Colonna were senators, but they were not sufficient to restrain anarchy. Stefano Colonna, the elder, the valorous and terrible head of the powerful family of that name, was a cornet in the Roman military; and Cola thought that the time had arrived to summon the people to reorganise the city and to substitute the “good state” for the present disorder.

On the 20th of May, 1347, he assembled the populace and addressed it from the Campidoglio. Three standards were displayed before him—on the one was depicted Rome, and signified Liberty; upon another was St. Paul, who represented Justice; and upon the third was St. Peter, indicating Peace and Concord. He was accompanied by Raymond, bishop of Orvieto, the pope’s vicar in Rome for ecclesiastical matters. Cola spoke of the misery and servitude of the people of Rome, and as “he for the love of the pope and the salvation of the people exposed his person to every danger,” he then published his decrees for the prevention of murder, for the right distribution of justice, the organisation of the soldiery of the corporation and for the assistance of widows, orphans, and monasteries—the barons were to maintain the security of the thoroughfares and not to favour any malefactor. Stefano Colonna returned to Rome in indignation, but as he heard the sound of uproar and saw the people bearing arms, he fled to Palestrina and shut himself up in his family castle. The Orsini, Colonnas, and other barons who caused the desolation of the city by their incessant strifes were expelled. Those who had fled in terror at the sudden revolution responded to Cola’s invitation and gradually returned, took the oath, and offered their assistance to the city.

Cola di Rienzi hastened to restore peace by punishing the evil-doers, and reinstating justice and security. He then took the title of tribune, as head[215] of the people. The pontifical vicar had been appointed his colleague; but this was only nominal, for the true and sole head of Rome was Cola.

The distance of the pope from Rome gave the tribune freedom to establish his authority. Neither he nor the Roman people would have thought of the tribunate if the pope had been there; but his absence, and the faint hope of his return after his recent refusal, made a profound impression upon the Romans.

Now the idea of the empire and the republic dazzled the eyes of the new tribune. He wrote letters to the pope at Avignon, and to the cities of Tuscany, Lombardy, and Romagna, to Lucchino Visconti, lord of Milan, to the marquis of Ferrara, and to Ludwig the Bavarian at Naples.

He who called himself “Nicolaus severus et clemens, sancte romane reipublice liberator illustris,” reported himself to the territories of Italy as having assumed the title of tribune to repair the evils which oppressed Rome, and requested that on the 1st of August all should send two orators to treat on the welfare of the whole of Italy (della salute di tutta Italia). The fame of the ardent dreamer who sought to reinstate the Roman Empire, with Rome at the head and the Italian territories dependent upon it, and united almost in confederation, ran throughout Italy. The courier sent to Avignon said that thousands of people pressed upon Rienzi as he passed by to kiss the wand he bore. The pope gave a favourable reply.

The tribune, moreover, wishing to revive the pomp of old imperialism, made a triumphal course through the city, and visiting the church of St. Peter he was received by the clergy singing: “Veni Creator Spiritus.” He ordered the barons to concede to the restoration of the palace of the Campidoglio, the seat of the tribunate, and instituted the trained bands of cavalry and foot-soldiers according to the wards of the city, so that thirteen hundred infantry and three hundred and sixty cavalry were enrolled. All the barons had obeyed, with the exception of Giovanni da Vico, who by direct inheritance maintained the title of prefect of the city, in which dignity he had succeeded his father. He was descended from a family of German origin and of the imperial party which several times gave Rome reason for war. He had been vicar in Viterbo during the pontificate, and during its absence he had been tyrant; and he was not inclined to submit now to the tribune. But Cola, with the aid of Tuscany, the Campania, and the maritime provinces, forced him to obey the people of Rome. Cola then reinvested him with the prefecture and left him Viterbo; Cività Vecchia, Anagni, and the other territories submitted.

August approached, and the ambassadors arrived from Florence, Siena, Teramo, Spoleto, Rieti, Amelia, Tivoli, Velletri, Foligno, Assisi; the Venetians showed themselves favourable. The majority of the tyrants of Lombardy made light of embassies (like Taddeo, Pepoli of Bologna, Francesco Ordelaffi of Forlì, and Malatesta of Rimini) although many almost repented later of having treated the invitation so disrespectfully. It seems that Ludwig the Bavarian himself sent secret envoys to Rome because the tribune wished to conciliate him with the church. Also Louis of Hungary, who, by the murder of Andrea was Robert’s successor to the kingdom of Naples, aspired to that kingdom, and, accusing Joanna of complicity in the death of her husband, sent orators to demand justice; and he wrote letters to the tribune, as also did Joanna. Letters, moreover, arrived from Philip of France; but they came too late—when Cola had fallen.

Cola, wishing to unite the glamour of pomp with the honour of the tribune of Rome, was dressed as a cavaliere. In the presence of the orators[216] of the various Italian cities and amid a great concourse of people he proceeded in triumph towards the Lateran. Cavaliere Vico Scotto presented him with the sword and order of a cavaliere, and he had the vanity to bathe in Constantine’s bath, in which it was said that Constantine washed after being cured of leprosy by St. Silvester. Much was said by the people at this seeming act of profanation, and Cola was unconscious of the grave error that he made. His vanity began to be his ruin. Made a cavaliere, he addressed a speech to the people on the dignities lost by the citizens of Rome, he spoke of the empire and the popedom, and finally summoned before his presence the imperial electors and Ludwig the Bavarian and Charles IV of Bohemia who were pretendants to the empire under the ancient law of the election of the future emperor by the Roman people.d

Turning for the moment from the calm narrative of the historian, let us listen to the eloquent account in which Lord Lytton describes this remarkable scene.

LORD LYTTON ON THE SPEECH OF RIENZI

The bell of the great Lateran church sounded shrill and loud, as the mighty multitude, greater even than that of the preceding night, swept on. The appointed officers made way with difficulty for the barons and ambassadors, and scarcely were those noble visitors admitted ere the crowd closed in their ranks, poured headlong into the church, and took the way to the chapel of Boniface VIII. There, filling every cranny, and blocking up the entrance, the more fortunate of the press beheld the tribune surrounded by the splendid court his genius had collected, and his fortune had subdued. At length, as the solemn and holy music began to swell through the edifice, preluding the celebration of the mass, the tribune stepped forth, and the hush of the music was increased by the universal and dead silence of the audience. His height, his air, his countenance, were such as always commanded the attention of crowds; and at this time they received every adjunct from the interest of the occasion, and that peculiar look of intent yet suppressed fervour, which is, perhaps, the sole gift of the eloquent that nature alone can give.

“Be it known,” said he, slowly and deliberately, “in virtue of that authority, power, and jurisdiction, which the Roman people, in general parliament, have assigned to us, and which the sovereign pontiff hath confirmed, that we, not ungrateful of the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit—whose soldier we now are—nor of the favour of the Roman people, declare that Rome, capital of the world, and base of the Christian church, and that every city, state, and people of Italy, are henceforth free. By that freedom, and in the same consecrated authority, we proclaim that the election, jurisdiction, and monarchy of the Roman Empire appertain to Rome and Rome’s people, and the whole of Italy. We cite, then, and summon personally, the illustrious princes, Ludwig duke of Bavaria, and Charles king of Bohemia, who would style themselves emperors of Italy, to appear before us, or the other magistrates of Rome, to plead and to prove their claim between this day and the Day of Pentecost. We cite also, and within the same term, the duke of Saxony, the prince of Brandenburg, and whosoever else, potentate, prince, or prelate, asserts the right of elector to the imperial throne—a right that, we find it chronicled from ancient and immemorial time, appertaineth only to the Roman people—and this in vindication of our civil liberties, without derogation of the spiritual power of the church, the pontiff, and the sacred[217] college.[15] Herald, proclaim the citation, at the greater and more formal length, as written and entrusted to your hands, without the Lateran.”

As Rienzi concluded this bold proclamation of the liberties of Italy, the Tuscan ambassadors, and those of some other of the free states, murmured low approbation. The ambassadors of those states that affected the party of the emperor looked at each other in silent amaze and consternation. The Roman barons remained with mute lips and downcast eyes; only over the aged face of Stefano Colonna settled a smile, half of scorn, half of exultation. But the great mass of the citizens were caught by words that opened so grand a prospect as the emancipation of all Italy; and the reverence of the tribune’s power and fortune was almost that due to a supernatural being; so that they did not pause to calculate the means which were to correspond with the boast.

While his eye roved over the crowd, the gorgeous assemblage near him, the devoted throng beyond; as on his ear boomed the murmur of thousands and ten thousands, in the space without, from before the palace of Constantine (palace now his own!) sworn to devote life and fortune to his cause; in the flush of prosperity that yet had known no check; in the zenith of power, as yet unconscious of reverse, the heart of the tribune swelled proudly; visions of mighty fame and limitless dominion; fame and dominion once his beloved Rome’s, and by him to be restored, rushed before his intoxicated gaze; and in the delirious and passionate aspirations of the moment, he turned his sword alternately to the three quarters of the then known globe, and said, in an abstracted voice, as a man in a dream, “In the right of the Roman people this too is mine!”

Low though the voice, the wild boast was heard by all around as distinctly as if borne to them in thunder. And vain it were to describe the various sensations it excited; the extravagance would have moved the derision of his foes, the grief of his friends, but for the manner of the speaker, which, solemn[218] and commanding, hushed for the moment even reason and hatred themselves in awe; afterwards remembered and repeated, void of the spell they had borrowed from the utterer, the words met the cold condemnation of the well-judging; but at that moment all things seemed possible to the hero of the people. He spoke as one inspired—they trembled and believed; and, as rapt from the spectacle, he stood a moment silent, his arms still extended, his dark dilating eye fixed upon space, his lips parted, his proud head towering and erect above the herd, his own enthusiasm kindled that of the more humble and distant spectators; and there was a deep murmur begun by one, echoed by the rest, “The Lord is with Italy and Rienzi!”

The tribune turned, he saw the pope’s vicar astonished, bewildered, rising to speak. His sense and foresight returned to him at once, and, resolved to drown the dangerous disavowal of the papal authority for this hardihood, which was ready to burst from Raymond’s lips, he motioned quickly to the musicians, and the solemn and ringing chant of the sacred ceremony prevented the bishop of Orvieto all occasion of self-exoneration or reply.

The moment the ceremony was over, Rienzi touched the bishop, and whispered, “We will explain this to your liking. You feast with us at the Lateran. Your arm.” Nor did he leave the good bishop’s arm, nor trust him to other companionship, until to the stormy sound of horn and trumpet, drum and cymbal, and amidst such a concourse as might have hailed, on the same spot, the legendary baptism of Constantine, the tribune and his nobles entered the great gates of the Lateran, then the palace of the world.

Thus ended that remarkable ceremony and that proud challenge of the northern powers, in behalf of the Italian liberties, which, had it been afterwards successful, would have been deemed a sublime daring; which, unsuccessful, has been construed by the vulgar into a frantic insolence; but which, calmly considering all the circumstances that urged on the tribune, and all the power that surrounded him, was not, perhaps, altogether so imprudent as it seemed. And, even accepting that imprudence in the extremest sense, by the more penetrating judge of the higher order of character, it will probably be considered as the magnificent folly of a bold nature, excited at once by position and prosperity, by religious credulities, by patriotic aspirings, by scholastic visions too suddenly transferred from reverie to action, beyond that wise and earthward policy which sharpens the weapon ere it casts the gauntlet.e

RIENZI’S OPPONENTS; HIS FRIENDS; HIS PROCLAMATIONS

Germany was at this time divided, and Ludwig the Bavarian, who in the first years of his reign had found a rival in Frederick of Austria, and now another who was much more formidable in Charles, son of John of Bohemia, grandson of Henry VII, was no longer reconciled with the pope. In 1337 he approached the king of France, but here his friendship with Edward of England stopped the way of unanimity. His protests of submission provoked the declaration of the German electors on the independence of the empire of the pontificate (1338). The negotiation was continued in 1346. Ludwig wavered, and Clement VI again excommunicated him, enjoining the electors to fill the vacancy by the election of the king of the Romans.

Charles meanwhile, a candidate of the kingdom, came to Avignon to renew the promises of Henry VII. He was elected the same year. Ludwig, now weary of such a long strife, felt the need more than ever of reconciliation and peace.

Now the tribune with no other power than that of the name of Rome summoned before his tribunal the two rivals already adjudged by the pope without regard to the orders given by the pope, nor of those of the electors. “But the Roman Empire remains in Rome,” said Rienzi. “There is no name on earth more august than that of the Roman Republic; all the world recognises its supremacy. Rome is also the foundation of the church. Can the Roman Empire be found elsewhere than at Rome? Do we not find its laws among the Parthians, Persians, and Medes, and is it in Rome that we are not to find the Roman Empire? And if not at Rome, where is it to be?”

These were the ideas of Francesco Petrarch, who had become the firm and enthusiastic friend of the tribune, having first been thrown with him at Avignon. Thus when the daring attempt began to fail, the poet laureate was untiring in exhorting the tribune to insure the welfare of Rome and Italy. He was astounded at hearing many who were accredited with wisdom doubt the importance of the cause that Rome and Italy should be in concord.

The gentle spirit of Petrarch, intolerant at the pope’s residing at Avignon, and regretting his sojourn in Gaul, and complaining of the western Babylonia, now forgot his Colonna friends and incited Cola against the barons. Cæsar Augustus at one time had prohibited the Romans using the title of domini, and now everything is changed. “O miserabilem fortune vertiginem.” But in the meanwhile a great cause of discord had arisen. Raymond, alarmed at the tribune’s speeches, made a formal protest, but the voice of the notary who recorded it was drowned by musical instruments.

Cola withdrew all the privileges and the concessions given solely to the Roman people, and declared the Italian cities free; and on the 3rd of August in a festival which can be called that of the Italian cities he presented symbolical standards to the orators of some of the towns. Those of Perugia, Siena, and Todi received the standards; but those of Florence, to whom he wished to present a standard with Rome represented as an aged woman seated before two young ones, were not there to receive it, because they thought it would compromise the independence of their city, as they opined that one of the young women represented Florence.

Henceforward the Florentines, practised in the affairs of the world, knew that Cola’s enterprise “was a fantastic work of short durance.” Cola figured as a messenger of God, and took the title of “candidate of the Holy Spirit,” and had his titles engraved on a marble tablet on the door of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli. He afterwards wrote to the pope acquainting him with the deeds done, and wrote to the Italian cities repeating and delineating his programme with greater exactitude. He was to re-establish the laws of Rome; he declared that the monarchy of the world should belong to Rome and all Italy. He summoned the ruling authorities in Italy, the electors, and the German chancellors to appear in Rome before him, and the other officials of the pope and the Roman people to justify his laws (the 5th-6th of August). He wished to elect a new emperor at Rome, and whilst (August) the matter was being debated in Rome before him between Joanna of Naples and Louis of Hungary, his orators went to the different cities (November, December) asking them to send ambassadors to Rome for the coming festival of St. John, to treat on the election of the new emperor, maintaining that in antiquity his election was always looked for at the hands of the Romans and Italians, and to find means of preventing the Germans ever descending that side of the Alps.

Subsequently when Cola himself was forced to take refuge with Charles IV in Bohemia, he was astonished at the audacity with which, trusting in the[220] “majesty of the name of Rome,” he had cast down the gauntlet of defiance before the German emperor.

On the 15th of August he had himself crowned in the Lateran with several symbolical crowns, of oak, ivy, myrtle, laurel, olive, and silver. The comptroller placed a golden apple in his hand. Then he forbade the use of the names of Guelf and Ghibelline; he promulgated the Roman freedom of the city of all Italians, and believing himself a hero of antique type, he wrote of his coronation to the pope and to Charles IV. He gave feasts and dressed in sumptuous attire.

He also ignored the signification of Guelf and Ghibelline, the laws of the pope and the emperor, but all, according to Petrarch, was done in the name of Rome, amid whose present miseries vivified by history and ancient literature there arose before his eyes, drunk with enthusiasm, the temples and courts of august Rome. The nobility, not being impressed with his dreams, worked against him, and he was now in fear of treachery. He invited Stefano Colonna, the elder, and other of the chief barons of the Colonnas, the Orsini, and the Savelli, to a banquet and then kept them prisoners. He wished to have them all killed, and had the room adorned with white and red decorations as a sign of blood. Their approaching death was announced to them, but then his courage failed him for the execution of the sentence. Granting the prayers of several citizens he pardoned them, believed in the sincerity of their promises, liberated them, and covered them with honours. In all practical matters Rienzi’s weakness and lack of judgment were clearly shown.

But naturally discontent arose among the Roman people, and a fire and flame were kindled which could not be extinguished (the 15th of September). The liberated barons rushed to their castles, fortified Marino, and openly prepared for war, skirmishing even as far as the gates of Rome. Cola was thus forced to besiege Marino. In the meanwhile the causes of division with the pope increased. Clement VI was filled with suspicion against Cola, seeing that he arbitrarily ruled the territories of Sabina, which were under the pontifical sway. He sent to Rome the cardinal Bertrando di Deux (the pontifical legate in Italy until 1346), who subsequently co-operated in the ruin of the tribune. He came to Rome in October and Cola arrogantly appeared before him clad in the imperial dalmatic, to the sound of trumpets, the sceptre in his hand and crown upon his head, terrible and fantastic to look at.

DISASTER SUCCEEDS VICTORY

Clement had written to this legate saying that Cola had exceeded the limits of his authority, breaking the pontifical and imperial decrees and favouring Louis of Hungary against Joanna of Naples whom the pope held to be innocent of the accusation of complicity in the murder of her husband Andrea. He gave orders for Cola to revoke the very fatuous laws he had made and ordered him to be contented with the government of Rome. But Cola was unwilling to receive such admonitions, which prevented the fulfilment of his designs. The Colonnas in the meanwhile arrived from Palestrina, and favoured by the discontent commencing in Rome they entered upon the perilous venture of storming Rome at the gate of San Lorenzo. Among the chief barons were Stefano Colonna, the younger, and Giovanni his son, who died fighting. Cola felt certain of the prefect Da Vico,—who, however, secretly favoured the Colonnas, the Orsini, and the Savelli,—and had tried[221] to imbue the others with his enthusiasm, saying that St. Boniface, i.e., Boniface VIII, had appeared to him and assured him of victory over the Colonnas. They in fact were conquered (the 20th of November). Many of the most illustrious barons died in that fierce battle, which was the grave of the old Roman nobility. The tribune, being no warrior, could not boast of a real victory, but he nevertheless celebrated his triumph, and like the ancients, he had arms hung up in the temples, and he laid his steel sceptre and his crown of olive leaves at the feet of the Virgin in Santa Maria in Ara Cœli, boasting before the people of having done with his sword what neither pope nor emperor had been able to do.

The next day he made his son Lorenzo a cavalier (knight) at the scene of victory, sprinkling him with water from the ditch in which Stefano Colonna had fallen, and bathing him with blood and water, he said to him: “Thou shalt be a cavalier of victory”; and thus in vain and barbarous ceremonies he lost precious time in which he could easily have surprised Marino. The people murmured at seeing Rienzi sprinkle his son with the blood of the Colonnas, for he seemed like an Asiatic tyrant, who forgot the execution of justice in his love of eating and drinking.

Cola began to be suspicious of the populace, and fearing their fury he was in no hurry to assemble them for parliament. He had to cease governing Sabina, although in the name of the church he continued to issue laws and tracts. He approached the legate, but he did not recover the good will of the people, who now regarded him as a tyrant (December, 1347).

Together with a pontifical vicar, he assembled the parliament of the people, proposing a tax on salt, but in this the citizens did not concur, and soon afterwards a council was formed of twenty-nine sages. But scarcely were they assembled than he accused two of the members of treachery; a tumult arose, and Cola, alarmed, and to reassemble the sole public council and to excuse himself of any excess, said that he wished to hold the court in the name of the pope and according to the orders that the cardinal brought him in his name. But he postponed publishing them (the 10th of December), and thus from hesitancy to hesitancy, from vanity to vanity, he worked his own ruin.

The people were no longer with him, he was no longer the tribune of a few months previous—full of confidence and enthusiasm. He did not know how to keep the vicar on his side; and he withdrew to the legate at Montefiascone, who was commencing operations against the tribune, as he sided with the Colonnas and Savelli.

Letters arrived from the pope, accusing Cola of having summoned to his court the Bavarian and the Bohemian, and for having incited the Italian cities to assemble to elect the emperor, which he had asserted to be a matter independent of the church and the city of Rome; in fact he had incited the people to abandon him. Although Cola then abandoned (at least in appearance) all his pretensions, it was too late.

Petrarch had left Valchiusa to come to Rome to visit the tribune and the city, no longer in the hands of the barons, no longer decimated by massacres, but ruled by a vigorous hand of ancient Roman descent. When he arrived at Genoa, he heard on the way bad reports of Cola’s government. He then wrote to him to reprove his decadence, and quoting Cicero and Terence, he strove to inspire him with Roman steadfastness. “The foot must be well planted,” he said to him, “so as to be firm and not to present a ridiculous spectacle to the enemies.”

But these oratorical exhortations were fruitless—resistance had become impossible; the legate, the people, were all against him; and those who a few months before had hailed him as the restorer of the Roman Republic now grumbled at him as the “iniquitous one who wished to tyrannise by force.”

John Pipino of Altarmara who was put in prison by Robert had been set free by Andrew in 1343. When Andrew was killed he left the kingdom and went to Hungary, where he incited King Louis to go down to Italy to vindicate the death of his brother, whilst he went to Rome to await him. The tribune had banished him from Rome for the robberies he had committed near Terracina, but favoured by the enemies of Cola, he was able to fortify himself in the district of the Holy Apostles, under the protection of the Colonnas.

Cola liberated the prefect Da Vico; but he was mistaken in thinking to acquire a powerful friend, for he had already voted against the tribune; his orders were not followed. The tribune was now quite cast down and disheartened at seeing that the country which had glowed with the ardour of a whole populace was now destitute of one in his favour; and he fell to weeping and sighing.

The people meanwhile came to the Campidoglio, but full of a bad spirit and actuated by his enemies. Cola appeared before them and told them how much he had done in his tribunate; he justified his conduct, and said that if his fellow-citizens were not satisfied with him it was the fault of their jealousy, and that he would renounce power in the seventh month from that in which he had assumed it. But the eloquent language which had once affected Clement VI, and intoxicated the people with enthusiasm, was now received coldly, and not a voice rose in his defence.

Weeping, Cola came out on horseback, and to the sound of trumpets and with imperial accompaniments he passed through the city almost in triumph and shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo. When the tribune descended from his grandeur, he bewailed the others who were associated with him and he lamented over the unhappy people. The barons did not dare to set foot in Rome for three days, and they finally returned, with the legate, who disapproved of most of the deeds of the tribune, and condemned him as a heretic. The count Pipino was executed eight days afterwards in the Abruzzi, and a mitre was put upon his head with the inscription that he was mockingly called the “liberator of the people of Rome.”

Cola on the arrival of the king of Hungary fled to the Naples district from the dangers which menaced him.

ANARCHY AND JUBILEE IN ROME

Rome now returned to her old state of anarchy. The senators Bertoldo Orsini and Luca Savelli failed in maintaining a more orderly government than the senators preceding them. Stefano Colonna, the elder, died about this time (1348-1350); Werner von Urslingen, the fierce captain of the Great Company, had returned about a year before to this side of the Alps after having laid Romagna waste, and in November, 1347, he, with fifteen hundred armed soldiers, followed Louis of Hungary in Italy to the conquest of Naples. The confusion with which he filled the kingdom led to the victory of the Hungarians; then Urslingen was licensed, and it being easy to find them he gathered mercenaries under him, and marching towards Rome took and destroyed Anagni; but he did not get any further.

The Black Plague [described in our previous chapter], brought from the Levant in a Genoese galley in 1347, broke out in that year in some places of Tuscany, Romagna, and Provence. It ceased at the advent of winter, and broke out again with devastating force at the approach of spring, and ran riot over the whole of Italy, in 1348, excepting Milan and Piedmont. John Villani fell a victim to this terrible disease. Three-fifths of the population died in Florence, and two-thirds in Bologna. In Rome, on the contrary, it seems to have been less prevalent; at least we have no authentic records of the evil attending this city, now squalid and desolate. At the end of the following year the arrival of the pilgrims for the jubilee at Rome commenced. Germans and Hungarians came in great numbers. The arrival of the pilgrims was attended with no disorder. They were at first attacked by beggars when they reached the district of Rome, and some were killed; but subsequently the Romans had the roads protected. Countless were the Christians that went by thousands to the Holy City. The roads leading to the churches of St. Peter, St. John the Lateran, and St. Paul, and the highways outside the walls, were all crowded with people. Louis of Hungary came to Rome after having returned to his kingdom. Petrarch also came, but he neither found his old friends the Colonnas there, nor his new friend Cola, and he was grieved to see the Lateran half in ruins, the Vatican in disorder, and the church of the Apostles in ruins.

What feelings must have filled the heart of the poet on revisiting the Campidoglio and the district of the Apostles and the Colonna palace—in all Rome there was nothing to remind him of the happy days of his coronation! “Ah! it is not only we who are getting old that change, for the things about us deteriorate,” he said some years later.

Aribaldo, a Tuscan bishop, was legate in Rome during the jubilee; he died on the 17th of August, 1350. The pope some time previously had deputed him to continue the proceedings commenced by Cardinal Bertrand against Cola.

The jubilee over, Rome relapsed into anarchy soon after it had elected the thirteen good men; and Clement VI, whilst showing himself favourable to the new administration, nominated four cardinals to examine into matters, and he confided to them the main part of the government of Rome. To them Petrarch addressed a letter full of the ideas he had expressed in his epistle to Cola, and, incensed against the malevolent Roman barons, he spoke of the plebe Romana who in old times elected their magistrates; and without touching on the tribunate he added that the two senators of his time, the only advance on the conscript (conscritti) fathers, represented the two consuls of ancient times.

He did not descend to especial admonitions upon the mode of governing, but only maintained the necessity of restoring ancient liberty and freeing the house of the apostles from the tyrants who had laid it waste.

RIENZI IN EXILE; HIS RENEWED OPPORTUNITY; HIS DEATH

Cardinal Aribaldo had always been in fear of Cola; he suspected that the pope would change and desire the tribune’s return, and having been wounded on the road he had no hesitation in attributing the deed to the fugitive, who was leading a wandering life full of dangers. Cola travelled in the Abruzzi, and there met with the friars who retained faith in the poverty of Christ; and here Brother Angelo prophesied a great future for him.

In the meanwhile Ludwig the Bavarian died (the 11th of October, 1347) and there remained only Charles IV from whom Cola began to expect the fulfilment of his aspirations.d Petrarch had written a long letter to the emperor in 1350 inviting him to interest himself in Italy. “Let not solicitude for transalpine affairs, nor the love of your native soil detain you; but whenever you look upon Germany think of Italy. There you were born, here you were nurtured; there you enjoy a kingdom, here both a kingdom and an empire; and as I believe I may, with the consent of all nations and peoples, safely add, while the members of the empire are everywhere, here you will find the head itself.” Shortly after he had received this strange communication from Petrarch, the emperor was confronted with Rienzi himself at Prague. He listened to his proposals and then calmly handed him over to the pope at Avignon. Petrarch writing to Nelli about him in 1352 says: “Cola di Rienzi has recently come, or rather been brought a prisoner to the papal curia. He who was once the tribune of the city of Rome, inspiring terror far and wide, is now the most miserable of men.” Had it not been for Petrarch’s influence with the pope and the complexion of politics at the moment, Rienzi no doubt would have been killed. As it was, he was kept in prison while Clement lived.a

In the meanwhile the people in Rome had given full authority to Giovanni Cerrone (1351), to whom the pope had shown himself favourable, and had appointed him senator and captain. But he fell very soon. The prefect Giovanni da Vico, also under the ban of excommunication, did not wish to[225] submit to him and had re-occupied Viterbo, Toscanella, and other territories of the patrimony, and then Corneto and Orvieto. Cerrone could not subdue him, and with the same want of success he so alienated everybody from him that he had to quit the city, which relapsed into the usual anarchy. On the 6th of December, 1352, Clement VI died, leaving the pontifical seat settled in Avignon, as he had obtained the city from Queen Joanna of Naples for 8,000 florins.

His successor, Etienne d’Albert or Aubert, a Frenchman like his predecessors, took the name of Innocent VI. He was a just, austere, and severe man, a man of science and practical views. He began to reform the curia of Avignon, and sought to find a remedy for the present prostration of the pontificate by reconstructing the ecclesiastical state and dividing it among petty and great vicars, tyrants, and lords.

The condition of the lands of the church has been often touched upon, but it must now be examined more closely. The family of the prefect Da Vico ruled over Viterbo, Orvieto, Toscanella, Corneto, Cività Vecchia, Terni, Vertralla, etc. The lordships of the Malatesta of Rimini extended over Fano, Pesaro, Sinigaglia, Ascoli, Osima, Ancora, etc.; the Montefeltri ruled in Urbino and Cagli, the Varani in Camerino, the Da Montemilone in Tolentino, the Gabrieli in Gubbio, the Trinci in Foligno, the Da Mogliani in Fermo, the Alidosi in Imola, and the Manfredi in Faenza. The dominion of the Ordelaffi embraced Forlì, Forlimpopoli, Cesena, etc.; that of the Da Polentas, Ravenna, Cervia, etc. We omit the minor lordships.

Now Bologna was under the Visconti. Although the Da Varani, Di Camerini, the Alidosi of Imola, and the Estes from time to time renewed their declarations of fidelity and dependence, receiving under the title of vicars the lands they possessed, the tenure was of an uncertain character. Naturally such lordships were not always of the same extent, but they were increased and reduced according to the various political conditions and causes of war.

The man appointed by Innocent VI to undertake the difficult task of raising a state on such insecure and insufficient soil was a Spaniard. Don Gil Albornoz was born at Cuenca of illustrious family. Alfonso XI of Aragon procured him the archbishopric of Toledo; he fought the Moors who had invaded Andalusia and directed the siege of Algeciras; but when Peter the Cruel succeeded to the throne he fled from Spain to Avignon, where Clement VI promoted him to be cardinal (1350). This man, cultured, zealous, and with the habits of a knight and of a resolute character, was the friend and adviser of Innocent VI, who finding in him the man fitted to punish the tyrants, sent him as legate to Italy. He wished him to be accompanied by Cola di Rienzi, whom in accordance with the wish of the Romans he liberated from prison, being persuaded, as the pope said when announcing the liberation to the people of Rome, that if he had done evil, he had also done good (September, 1353). Thus Innocent VI combined the strongest and most courageous cardinal of the century with the man of fancies, the skilled politician, the only person who could excite the feeling of the Romans, and to these two men he entrusted the restoration of pontifical authority in Italy.

So Cola di Rienzi, who was the Roman of authority in 1347, being now persuaded of the real state of affairs, had to lower himself to take part in the party struggle; and as he had made himself a Ghibelline at the court of Charles IV at Prague so far as to boast of being the bastard of Henry VII, so he now adhered to the idea of Guelf in the prison of Avignon. The[226] prison of Avignon had not been too hard for him, for although he had been shut up in a tower he had been given a certain amount of liberty, and he had been able to follow his wish of studying the Bible, and the famous histories of Titus Livius, and several other books.

In Rome, at the beginning of 1353, Bertoldo Orsini and Stefano Colonna were senators, and amid the turbulent vortex of factions they had succeeded in occupying the lordship after the flight of Cerrone. The two senators were not loved, and before long they were hated by the people, who, harassed with want of provisions, rose up in fury on the 15th of February, 1353. Colonna fled to his palace, but Orsini put on his armour and descended the stairway to mount his horse in view of the people. Then braving the populace he advanced until his strength failed him and he was buried under a storm of stones.

The people then took a second tribune, Francesco Baroncelli, a friend of Cola’s, who governed according to his powers, but not with vigour. He was not recognised by the pope, who had different views on the government of the city. The Baroncelli were descended from a civil family, and he was the orator sent to Florence by Cola to announce his elevation to the tribune at the beginning of his reign.

Albornoz and Cola then left Avignon together to put down the tyrants and reorganise Rome. The cardinal Egidio (Gil), as he was called, was in Lombardy in the summer of 1353. Hordes of Tuscans increased the numbers of Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans in his following. He went down to Montefiascone which he made the centre of his doings in Romagna. Cola being in the service of the cardinal in the war was against the prefect Da Vico, who retook Viterbo, and other places in the patrimony, and being reinforced he had turned the anarchy of Rome to his own advantage. The resistance was obstinate and it only terminated after a long struggle on the 5th of June, when the prefect surrendered. Whilst Viterbo was fighting, and the tyrants Bernardo Polenta, lord of Ravenna and Cervia, Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini, Francesco Ordelaffi of Forlì were being expelled from Romagna, the Roman people looked once more for salvation from Cola, forgetting his bad government and the little peace he had procured them.

The feeling for Cola revived from the time he was incarcerated in the Avignon prison; and now that he was near Rome with the legate, it increased still more, although it was not the spontaneous, universal acclamation of 1347. Suspected by the Baroncelli of having communication with the prefect, the public aversion towards him increased, until at the end of 1353 rebellion broke out and the poor tribune was expelled and nearly killed.

The Romans devoted themselves to the legate and assisted him in the siege of Viterbo. The war and the negotiations proceeded prosperously for the church. Roman Tuscany, Umbria, and Sabina gradually gave in, and the way was being cleared for Cola to return to the government of Rome. But he had not the necessary money to provide an army of mercenaries, with which to maintain his dominion. The money he had in Perugia was from the two young brothers Moriale (Monreal). Fra Moriale was a gentleman of Provence by birth. The terrible freebooter from 1345 took part in the majority of the Italian wars, fought with Louis of Hungary in the Neapolitan enterprise, and in the neighbourhood of Rome both for and against the prefect Da Vico. Subsequently tired of serving, he formed (1352) a company of his own of fifteen hundred helmeted men and two thousand foot-soldiers, and marched against Malatesta da Rimini, against whom he had fought in the wars of Naples. The successful enterprises increased the company, into[227] which he introduced regulations like those of a regular standing army independent of every state. Pisa, Siena, Arezzo, Florence, and other cities of Tuscany and Romagna had dearly paid the price of immunity from his terrible devastations.

In the July of 1354 he sent his company under the rightful vicar, Count Lando, to fight for the league against the Visconti. Being a citizen of Perugia, he there amassed the treasures extorted by terror or gained by sacking the populations of all Italy. His brothers Arimbaldo, doctor of law, and Brettone, cavaliere di Narbona, lived there; and they with their brother’s permission gave Cola 4,000 florins to collect some followers and to make other necessary provisions.

Fra Moriale, wiser than the brothers, did not believe in the success of the enterprise. “My reason contradicts it,” said he; but he let the money be given whilst preparing “magnificent things” with his mercenaries.

Cola was made senator of Rome by the legate, and having enlisted sixty companies, with a few Perugian and Tuscan soldiery, he, on the 1st of August, 1354, made a solemn entry into Rome by the Castello gate, under triumphal arches and decorations of gold and silver. The people, joyous and shouting, accompanied him to the Campidoglio, where Cola made an eloquent speech, calling himself senator of Rome in the name of the pope. He formed his government; he made the two brothers of Fra Moriale captains of the militia; he announced his promotion to Florence, and he received the embassies from the neighbouring places. Cola was not the person he was of old to the Roman people, who were shocked at his intemperate way of living. He had become stout, and he consumed his time in eating and drinking. His former courage in restraining the barons had not been forgotten, and he received obedience from them.

Stefano Colonna, who had been senator in 1351, shut himself up in Palestrina, the Orsini shut themselves up in Marino, and from these fortified spots they laid waste the territory near Rome. Cola proceeded against Palestrina, as he was in need of the money with which to pay the German mercenaries, but he wished to find means of oppressing Stefano, the “poisonous serpent, the broken reed.” And he tried once more to bring ruin on the house of Colonna, “the cursed house whose pride had brought the city of Rome to poverty, whilst other places lived in wealth.”

So spoke Cola, and with a thousand Roman cavalry and soldiery, with the people of Tivoli and Velletri, and reinforcements from the neighbouring places, he laid siege to the famous Rock of the Colonnas. But the siege had not long commenced and the raising of the earthworks was not finished before disputes arose between the Velletrani and Tiburtini; but worse than that[228] was the arrival of Fra Moriale—for now that his brothers were with Cola, he was able to come to Rome, from whence he had been formerly banished. He came to defend the rights of his brothers, who could not get the new senator to repay the money lent to him—perhaps, moreover, he was moved by the terrible idea of taking possession of Rome, and sacking it for his mercenaries, and then making it the centre for great power. His fierce soldiers were already saying that “some fine city would be their spoil.” What spoil could be better than Rome!

It seems that the Colonnas, reduced to a desperate condition, treated with Moriale for the fall of the tribune. The latter, suspecting that Moriale was planning his death, returned suddenly to town, and left the siege of Palestrina without arranging for his return to it. In Rome he sent for Moriale, and he appeared before Cola, who took him and had him imprisoned in the Campidoglio, together with his brothers. At first Fra Moriale thought he could purchase his liberty. Being brought forward tied, and examined, he confessed he was the head of the Great Company. Then when sent back to prison, he knew there was no hope for him. In the morning, accompanied by his brothers, he was brought out of prison, and beheaded on the 29th of August, 1354.

The Romans of those days, only judging from the number and the greatness of his enterprises relative to the theatre in which they were enacted, compared him to Cæsar; but Innocent VI, with more reason, likened him to Holofernes and Attila. The destruction of the great terror of Italy was considered a great credit to Cola, as he would have caused as much harm in the future as he had in the past; but it must be remembered that Cola was most anxious to take possession of the riches of the brigand. “It seems,” says Matteo Villani,f “that he stained his fame with ingratitude and avarice”; and Fra Moriale himself, at the moment of his death, turned to the people and said, “I die for your poverty and my wealth.”

Muratorik gives the following unpleasant word-portrait of Rienzi at this period: “Formerly he was sober, temperate, abstemious; he had now become an inordinate drunkard; he was always eating confectionery and drinking. It was a terrible thing to be forced to see him. They said that in person he was of old quite meagre; he had become enormously fat; he had a belly like a tun; jovial like an Asiatic abbot. He was full of shining flesh (carbuncles?) like a peacock-red, and with a long beard; his face was always changing; his eyes would suddenly kindle like fire; his understanding, too, kindled in fitful flashes like fire.”

After the death of Moriale, Cola pursued the war against the Colonnas with ardour. He entrusted it to Riccardo degli Anibaldi, a doughty warrior. He gave orders from the Campidoglio to his officers, and it seems that he devoted attention and diligence to his soldiers. Cola also once more gave a proof of constancy and ardour. The want of money for the war forced him to increase or to again impose the taxes on wine and salt. The Romans bore it silently until it seemed that he even taxed the common foods. The pope conjured him to govern justly, and confirmed him as senator. But causes of complaint now arose; and it appeared that Cola’s weak nature broke under its own weight. He would first weep, and then laugh; he incurred everybody’s suspicion, and he patronised one and another without rhyme or reason, and would release people for money.

On the 4th of October he notified the legate at Montefiascone of his great danger and that he had received no help. The blow fell suddenly on the morning of the 8th of October. The Colonnas and Savelli were to the fore.[229] The people pressed to the palace crying, “Long live the people! death to the traitor Cola di Rienzi! death to the traitor who has made the tax, death!”

The tribune, unconscious of his danger, made no defence, nor sounded a bell. “I also,” he said, “am with the people; the pontifical confirmation has arrived; I have only to publish it to the council.” He was not afraid until he saw he was abandoned by all, and that the uproar increased. He wished to harangue the people from the window, but it was impossible, for they threw stones and sticks at him, crying still louder, “Death to the traitor!” Confusion filled the palace; he was doubtful of Brettone, the brother of Fra Moriale, who was a prisoner. He vacillated, he put on his helmet and took it off again, uncertain whether to meet death with the dignity of the ancient Romans or to take refuge in flight—he finally decided on the latter course.

The Romans were now firing the doors, when the tribune divested himself of all his arms, laid aside the insignia of dignity, cut off his beard, dyed his face black, and put on the door-keeper’s mantle and enveloped his head with a bed-cover. Thus disguised he descended the stairway to the outside door, and changing his voice, he mingled with the insurgents, himself crying “Down with the traitor!” He was outside the palace when he was recognised by his gold armlets, and conducted to the Place of the Lion in the Campidoglio where the sentences were given. Here he stood for the space of an hour, a wretched spectacle for the people who stood in silence and seemed frightened at what they had done and uncertain whether to pardon or sacrifice him. Cola stood firm and calm awaiting death, and the people seemed in no hurry to bathe their hands in the blood of him whom a few months previously they had accompanied in triumph to the Campidoglio, crowning him with olive leaves, and uttering shouts of joy.

Cecco del Vecchio gave him a blow in the stomach. The sight of blood changed compassion to fury. A notary wounded him with his sword. He was soon covered with wounds. He did not say a word, he did not utter a cry. He was taken to St. Mark’s, and he was tied by the feet to a pillar. His head was mangled and tufts of his hair strewed the way; he was riddled with wounds in every part of his body. There he remained two days, whilst rogues cast stones at him. On the third day Guigurth and Sciarretta Colonna had him taken over to the field of Augustus, where he was burned upon a pile of dry thistles. Such was the end of Cola di Rienzi, who made himself august tribune of Rome, and constituted himself the champion of the Romans.d “In the death, as in the life of Rienzi,” says Gibbon,g “the hero and the coward were strangely mingled.” Posterity will compare the virtues and failings of this extraordinary man; but in a long period of anarchy and servitude the name of Rienzi has often been celebrated as the deliverer of his country, and the last of the Roman patriots.

FOOTNOTES

In the present chapter we shall take up the history of Italy in the latter part of the fourteenth century and carry it forward to about the year 1500, with chief reference to the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily—which become united into the kingdom of the Two Sicilies—in the south, and the tyranny of the Visconti and Sforza at Milan in the north. The history of these principalities necessarily involves reference to most of the states of Italy, as they were constantly embroiled one with another. But for such incidental references, we shall reserve the more specific history of the important maritime republics, Venice and Genoa, and of the chief Tuscan republic, Florence, for separate treatment in later chapters. During the dominance of the Visconti in Milan in the latter half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, this principality dominated northern Italy and was much of the time in open warfare with Florence. The history of Florence will, therefore, be given considerable prominence, and our later chapters will be chiefly directed to the events of the period of the great Medici, Cosmo and Lorenzo, whose dictatorship in Florence, it will be recalled, coincides in time with the later events of the present chapter. The period now under consideration introduces a number of really important men, including Alfonso the Magnanimous, king of Sicily and Naples.

But the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the duchy of Milan, important as they must have seemed to their Italian contemporaries, had no very direct world-historical influences. They embroiled Italy and kept her in touch with the nations of the north, to her disadvantage; but their rulers had no[231] thought beyond self-aggrandisement, and no one of them attained sufficient influence to bring the entire peninsula under his control. Despite the picturesqueness of individual characters,[16] therefore, we shall be justified in dealing with the period somewhat briefly, reserving larger space for the more important developments that came about through the influence of the commercial republics.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES

On the death of Charles II of Naples (1309) his younger son Robert succeeded to the crowns of Naples and Provence to which he had no recognised or inherited right. They belonged to Carobert, the young king of Hungary, whose father was the elder son of Charles. But Naples was a papal fief, and Robert, who hastened to Avignon, had little difficulty in obtaining from Clement V who saw in this energetic vassal a formidable opponent of the Ghibellines, a sentence setting aside the claims of his nephew. At the same time he received the government of Ferrara as viceroy of the pope. Robert was no military genius, but he possessed both wisdom and address, and at once assumed the Guelf leadership in Italy. He was a prominent member of the great league formed at Florence against the designs of Henry VII, and the Tuscan republic went so far in 1312 as to confer a temporary dictatorship upon him, in anticipation of his assistance in resisting imperial aggression.

But Robert’s ambition was none less than the general sovereignty of Italy, and to this end he opposed Henry at every step. A Neapolitan army seized the principal fortresses of Rome in an attempt to prevent the emperor’s coronation, but the struggle was brought to an unexpected end the following year (1313) by Henry’s sudden death. It seemed now as if Robert would realise his dream, but a number of truly remarkable leaders arose to meet the crisis from the Ghibelline ranks. Against the talents and energies of Uguccione della Faggiuola, Castruccio Castracani, Matteo Visconti, and Cane della Scala, whose exploits have been detailed elsewhere, the Guelfic cause went swiftly to ruin. Robert saw his armies and his allies repeatedly overcome, and when he passed into Provence in 1318 he had obtained no success but that of raising the Ghibelline siege of Genoa, for which service that city surrendered its liberties into his hands for ten years. The plight of the Guelfs became more desperate day by day, but Robert remained in Provence insensible to their disasters, and only his greed of dominion roused him to the continued appeals of the Florentines. His command over that republic had expired in 1321, and now he promised aid on condition that his son Charles be made its absolute ruler for ten years. The Florentines stipulated[232] for the preservation of their liberties and agreed to his terms, and in 1326 the young duke of Calabria arrived in Tuscany with two thousand men.

During these years the kingdom of Naples saw little of its ruler, and was exposed to the ambition of the Aragonese rulers of Sicily. The fortunes of this Spanish house need not detain us. When Pedro I died in 1285, Aragon and Sicily were separated, and the late king’s second son James I received Sicily. He remained there but six years when he was called to the throne of Aragon, and left his younger brother Frederick regent. But James was faithless to his island subjects, and when his long standing difficulties with the pope were settled in 1295, he agreed to restore Sicily to the house of Anjou. Frederick placed himself at once at the head of the opposition to the transfer and in 1296 was rewarded with the crown. Frederick II was the restorer of Sicilian independence; and by 1302 James gave up the attempt of forcing the Sicilians to keep his perfidious agreement. Robert made several attempts to annex Sicily to his dominions. The first in 1314 ended in a truce. Frederick, who repulsed the ambitious monarch several times, died in 1337, and the great love of his subjects established his feeble son Peter II on the throne. Robert came again at Frederick’s death and also after that of Peter five years later, but the independent spirit of the islanders was never overcome; the projects were renounced and Sicily was left the peaceful possession of its dynasty. Henceforth it sinks into obscurity until reunited with Naples in 1435.a

The kings of Naples, about the middle of the fourteenth century, had sunk very low in power and consideration. Robert died on the 19th of January, 1343, at the age of eighty. He had given his granddaughter, Joanna, in marriage to her cousin Andrew, the son of the king of Hungary. Andrew was son of the eldest son of Charles II, and had a better right than Robert himself to the crown of Naples. The latter, whom his nephew regarded as a usurper, had been desirous of compounding the rights of the two branches of his family, by marrying Joanna to Andrew, and crowning them together; but these young people felt towards each other only hatred.b

In this baneful sentiment Andrew was encouraged by his Hungarian attendants, especially by his confessor. Other circumstances added to the disagreeableness of his situation: he was rude and unpolished; the Neapolitans, on the contrary, were the most polite people in Europe; nor could he conceal from himself that he was the ridicule of the court. He had other motives of discontent; his queen was suspected of an intrigue with Louis of Tarentum, a prince of the royal family, and to him, personally, she evidently bore an aversion. That he threatened one day to be revenged, is certain; that his threats inspired several, not even excepting Joanna, with fear, is equally undoubted; a plot was formed for his destruction—whether with her privity, has been disputed by one or two modern writers; but from her conduct before and after the tragical event, there is circumstantial evidence enough to implicate her in the guilt. One night (September 18th, 1345), the court having removed to a solitary place in the vicinity of Aversa, Andrew was called by the conspirators from the queen’s bed, under pretence of urgent business of state, and murdered in the corridor. That she was aware of the plot may be inferred—first, from her momentary reluctance to allow him to depart; secondly, from her endeavours to screen the assassins from the pursuit of justice; thirdly, from her marriage with Louis of Tarentum; and fourthly, from the extreme care taken by the functionaries whom the pope ordered to inquire into the murder to prevent the confessions of the tortured from being heard—in other words, the implication of[233] the queen. Some of the conspirators were executed; but, as the queen herself and her paramour escaped, this show of justice did not satisfy Louis, king of Hungary, who invaded Naples, expelled Joanna, punished some of the suspected nobles, and received the submission of the kingdom. Thence, however, he was soon driven by the fearful plague which devasted all Europe in its course, and which appears to have been more severely felt in Italy than anywhere else. The sway of the Hungarians was already disagreeable to the fickle Neapolitans; Joanna was recalled, and a desultory war followed. Louis returned to the scene; but as his troops, after fulfilling their usual feudal service, murmured to return, he was compelled to enter into a truce with Joanna, on the condition that her guilt or innocence should be left to the decision of the pope at Avignon; that if she were declared guilty, she would resign the crown, but that, if she were absolved, she should be allowed to retain it on paying a heavy sum as an indemnification for the expense of the war.

The decision of one so devoted as Clement VII to the interests of France could not be doubted. Her complicity in the plot was not denied; but it was gravely contended that witchcraft had been employed to seduce her; in the end she was absolved, and the indemnity to King Louis approved. Her subsequent reign continued to be one of guilt and disgrace. The great barons were too proud to obey her husband, whose imbecility she herself despised, and whose bed she dishonoured; the Grand Company of mercenaries ravaged the kingdom to the very gates of the capital; as both he and the people were too cowardly to oppose them, their retreat was purchased by money. After his death, she married a third husband, a prince of the house of Aragon; and, on his death, a fourth, Otto of Brunswick; but, as she had issue by none of the four, the heir to the crown was Charles, duke of Durazzo, the last male of the Neapolitan branch of Anjou, who was also heir to the throne of Hungary. At the court of the latter country, Charles had imbibed a feeling of hatred against the queen, whom he resolved to dethrone—a resolution to which he was impelled by Urban VI, who could never pardon her devotion to the anti-pope Clement. Her attempt to exclude him from the succession, by the adoption of the count of Anjou, and the step of Pope Urban, who, in 1380, declared her deposed from the Neapolitan throne, and preached a crusade against her, sealed her fate. The prince advanced to Rome, received the crown from the pope, and marched on Naples, which, like the rest of that cowardly kingdom, submitted to him, as it had done to every other invader from the downfall of the Western Empire. Otto, indeed, made a show of resistance; but his men abandoned him the moment the engagement commenced, and he fell, like Joanna, into the hands of the victor. Her death was sudden and violent; probably it was caused by suffocation with a feather bolster.

He had little reason to rejoice in this barbarity. He had soon to sustain an invasion of Naples by Louis of Anjou, who, as usual, was joined by a considerable number of adherents; and, though death rid him of a formidable rival, he had to support a quarrel with an arrogant pope, who excommunicated him and his army. During these transactions, Louis of Hungary died, and the nobles, preferring the rights of his daughter Maria to those of a distant relative, proclaimed her their sovereign. But Charles had partisans, who invited him to resume the crown; he hastened to Buda, forced the queen to abdicate, and was proclaimed in her stead; but, in the height of his success, he was assassinated by the creatures of the queen and her mother. This tragical event left Naples under the regency of his widow,[234] Margarita, during the minority of his son Ladislaus [or Lancelot], then only ten years of age; and her government was perpetually exposed to the intrigues of the French faction, which espoused the interests of a son, equally young, of Louis of Anjou, who was named after his father.h

The reign of Ladislaus, the son and successor of Charles III, presents a continued scene of perfidy and rapine. Whilst he successfully defended his Neapolitan crown against the attempts of the duke of Anjou, he seized for a moment that of Hungary; and availed himself of the great schism and the absence of the pope from Rome continually to harass and pillage the Romans. No treaties of amity could restrain his thirst for plunder; he thrice led his troops to attack the devoted city, seized on the castle of St. Angelo, and occupied Ostia, Viterbo, and great part of the patrimony of St. Peter. His ravages were suspended by a premature death; and in him providence is said to have anticipated a pest which in the next age became the scourge of European incontinence. Though three times married, Ladislaus left no legitimate issue. Unbounded in his lust, he forsook his wives for his more libidinous paramours. Constantia, his first queen, irreproachable in her fame, was divorced by her inconstant husband; Maria of Cyprus, the second, died through an effort to stimulate her own barrenness; and the third, the widow of Orsino, prince of Tarentum, was espoused for the acquisition of her territories, and abandoned to neglect and imprisonment immediately after the nuptial ceremonies. He was succeeded by his sister, Joanna II; but the royal bed of Naples acquired little purity by the exchange (1414).

Joanna II

Joanna was already the widow of William, son of Leopold II, duke of Austria, when the death of Ladislaus exalted her to the throne of Naples. Equally devoid of personal charms and mental delicacy, the princess scorned the irksome restraints of virtue and of rank. Her lovers were selected according to her caprice without reference to their station; and the fortunate possessor of her affections, on her accession to the crown, was Pandolfello Alopo, whom she raised, from the humble station of carver, to the office of grand-chamberlain. The irregularities of her life and the default of an[235] heir to the throne prompted her nobles to recommend a second marriage; and she fixed upon a prince of the house of Bourbon, Jacques de la Marche, the fourth in lineal succession from Robert, youngest son of St. Louis.

But if Joanna flattered herself that in her new husband she was to find a screen, and not a check to her vices, she was immediately undeceived; for no sooner was the obscure count exalted into the king of Naples, than he seized upon Alopo; and in the agonies of the rack the distracted lover betrayed his intercourse with his mistress. The grand-chamberlain was publicly beheaded, and the queen herself reduced to personal restraint of no great severity or duration. The people, indignant at seeing their queen thus imprisoned by a foreigner, burst into insurrection; and the king was compelled to seek shelter in the Castello dell’Ovo. His surrender was rewarded by the acknowledgment of his royal title, and a stipend of 40,000 ducats a year—a sum, says the historian, not exceeding the incomes of the Neapolitan gentry. The French monarch did not long enjoy this semblance of royalty. He found himself the sport of his faithless consort and her minions; his person was again insulted by imprisonment, and his countrymen were commanded to depart the kingdom. Having again recovered his liberty, he resolved no longer to be cheated by the dreams of ambition; and renouncing his adulterous queen and ungovernable subjects, he privately withdrew from Naples and retired into France, where he ended his days in the habit of a Franciscan friar (1438).

Amongst the most conspicuous of Joanna’s favourites were Giacomuzzo Attendolo, surnamed Sforza, and Ser Gianni Caracciolo, both distinguished for their personal beauty. The former, the son of a peasant of Cotignola in Romagna, had joined in early life the mercenary troops of Italy; and after serving with renown under the banners of Ferrara, of Florence, and of the church, entered the Neapolitan service, and was treated with distinction by the queen upon her accession to the throne. The jealousy of the minion Pandolfello Alopo procured the imprisonment of Sforza; but he was soon reconciled to his rival; and being released from his dungeon was created by Joanna grand constable of the kingdom. During the transient reign of Jacques de la Marche he had again languished in prison; but on his release was restored to his former dignity. Meanwhile a new favourite was daily gaining unbounded influence over the susceptible heart of Queen Joanna. Caracciolo, a man of birth and discretion, and of a handsome and graceful person, was promoted to the office of grand seneschal; and procured the removal of Sforza from court upon the honourable employment of checking the ravages of the mercenary Braccio. But the return of the victorious Sforza and the rivalry of the two favourites soon filled the city with confusion; and Joanna could only quiet the murmurs of her people by consenting to the banishment of the beloved Caracciolo. The place of his exile was, however, too near the city to prevent his interference in public affairs; and, from the island of Procida, Ser Gianni continued to exert his influence over his queen and mistress. He again procured the removal of Sforza for the purpose of dislodging Braccio from the patrimony of St. Peter; but he took care that his rival should be so poorly supported by troops that his defeat and ruin appeared inevitable.

This unfortunate collision between the favourites was destined to produce the most disastrous consequences, not merely to the kingdom of Naples but to the whole of Italy. Indignant at the preference shown to Caracciolo, Sforza abandoned his mistress, and encouraged Louis III the young duke of Anjou to make good his pretensions to the Neapolitan throne by invading[236] the kingdom of Joanna. In Naples, a strong spirit existed favourable to the claims of Louis. The inordinate affection of the queen for Caracciolo (who was now again restored to her arms) had estranged the nobility from her cause; and she deemed it prudent to seek the support of some foreign potentate sufficiently powerful to counteract the designs of her enemies. She therefore addressed herself to Alfonso V, king of Aragon, whom she promised to adopt as her successor on the throne of Naples. This offer being accepted by Alfonso, he set sail for his new inheritance, and received the formal adoption from the childless Joanna, with the title of duke of Calabria and possession of the Castel Nuovo. By this judicious step the queen extricated herself from the pressing danger; Louis of Anjou was staggered in his hopes, and after a feeble siege of Naples, yielded to necessity and abandoned his enterprise. Sforza now found means to seal his pardon, and was received with the utmost cordiality by Joanna and Alfonso.

The reappearance of his ancient rival at the Neapolitan court could not fail to awaken the jealous and angry feelings of Caracciolo, who had already perceived his authority endangered by the adoption of Alfonso. To sow the seeds of dissension was now his object, and the unbounded influence which he possessed over Joanna gave the utmost facility to his sinister designs. He succeeded in persuading the credulous queen that the Spaniard had resolved at once to usurp the succession, and designed to dethrone her and carry her by force into Catalonia. Terrified at this dismal suggestion, Alfonso became an object of distrust to Joanna. She shut herself up in the Castel Nuovo; and the seizure and imprisonment of the beloved Ser Gianni filled up the measure of her alarm and horror. Abjuring all further connection with the king of Aragon she summoned Sforza to her relief, and revoking her late adoption bestowed the succession upon Louis of Anjou. The partial defeat of Alfonso and the consequent exchange of prisoners once more restored Caracciolo to the queen; but the unhappy kingdom was delivered over to the miseries of war, the troops of Joanna being led by Sforza, and those of Alfonso by his rival Braccio. The disorders of his Spanish dominions withdrew the king for the present from Italy; and, with the exception of the Castel Nuovo, Joanna was left in quiet possession of the kingdom; but not before the two generals had perished in this desperate struggle. Sforza, in his eager attempt to swim the river Pescara, then unusually swollen by the influx of the sea, fell a sacrifice to his generous endeavour to save his drowning page; and borne down by the additional weight of his armour he sank to rise no more. His son Francesco Sforza narrowly escaped a similar fate, and was destined to attain a glorious and triumphant elevation. The death of Braccio was more congenial to his tumultuous life; he fell mortally wounded in a desperate conflict, wherein his forces were utterly routed.

After the retreat of Alfonso from Naples, Joanna continued to enjoy an unmolested reign. Age had quenched the fires of lust; the life of her once-loved Ser Gianni was sacrificed to jealousy and suspicion; and he was assassinated with the connivance, if not by the command, of his mistress. Her adopted son Louis expired in 1434, to the great grief of Joanna and her subjects. She herself survived but a few weeks, and died in 1435 in the sixty-fifth year of her age and twenty-first of her reign. With her ended the race of Durazzo. By her will she bequeathed the kingdom of Naples to René, duke of Anjou, brother of Louis; and the adopted heir languished in the prison of the duke of Burgundy when he was apprised of his nomination to the fairest kingdom of the earth. His wife Isabella assumed the regency in his absence, and took possession of Naples.

Alfonso the Magnanimous

The claims of Alfonso were now again to be urged, and he marched at the head of an army to enforce his pretensions. A singular misfortune which befell the king in his progress proved highly beneficial to his cause. Whilst he laid siege to Gaeta, a fleet from Genoa despatched by order of Filippo Visconti, the reigning duke of Milan, attacked and defeated the Spanish armament; and the king, his brother Juan, king of Navarre, Henry of Aragon, and a host of nobles, were sent prisoners to Milan. By a remarkable exercise of clemency and moderation, the duke restored his captives gratuitously to liberty; and even entered into a league with Alfonso, promising to assist him in the conquest of Naples.

Whilst a new fleet from Spain was again directed against Naples, René purchased his liberty; and repairing to his new dominions, maintained a doubtful contest with his rival during four years. In the middle of the year 1442 the final blow was struck by the entry of Alfonso into the capital, through the self-same aqueduct which nearly nine hundred years before had admitted the soldiers of Belisarius. The duke of Anjou, no longer able to contend with the fortunes of his rival, withdrew into France; and Alfonso at length obtained from Pope Eugenius IV the investiture of the kingdom of Naples, which his holiness had previously conferred upon René. After a pause of eleven years René was induced to reappear in Italy at the pressing instance of the duke of Milan, who tempted him to take up arms against Venice, under a promise to afford his assistance in wresting Naples from the Spaniard. But the French prince, now advanced in years, soon grew weary of the toils of a campaign, and readily yielded to the anxiety of his troops to return to their native regions.

Alfonso survived this event only five years, and died on the 27th of June, 1458. His paternal dominions, Aragon and Sicily, vested in default of legitimate issue in his brother Juan, king of Navarre; but he bequeathed the kingdom of Naples, his conquest, to his natural son Ferdinand.c Whatever may be thought of the claims subsisting in the house of Anjou, there can be no question that the reigning family of Aragon were legitimately excluded from the throne of Naples, though force and treachery enabled them ultimately to obtain it.

Alfonso, surnamed “the magnanimous,” was by far the most accomplished sovereign whom the fifteenth century produced. The virtues of chivalry were combined in him with the patronage of letters, and with more than their patronage—a real enthusiasm for learning, seldom found in a king, and especially in one so active and ambitious. This devotion to literature was, among the Italians of that age, almost as sure a passport to general[238] admiration as his more chivalrous perfection. Magnificence in architecture and the pageantry of a splendid court gave fresh lustre to his reign. The Neapolitans perceived with grateful pride that he lived almost entirely among them, in preference to his patrimonial kingdom, and forgave the heavy taxes, which faults nearly allied to his virtues—profuseness and ambition—compelled him to impose. But they remarked a very different character in his son. Ferdinand was as dark and vindictive as his father was affable and generous. The barons, who had many opportunities of ascertaining his disposition, began, immediately upon Alfonso’s death, to cabal against his succession, turning their eyes first to the legitimate branch of the family, and, on finding that prospect not favourable, to John, titular duke of Calabria, son of René of Anjou, who survived to protest against the revolution that had dethroned him.d

Ferdinand

The duke of Calabria believed that he should be assisted both by Francesco Sforza—who, before he was duke of Milan, had long fought, as his father had done before him, for the party of Anjou—and by the Florentine Republic, which had always been devoted to France. But Sforza judged that the security and independence of Italy could be maintained only so long as the kingdom of Naples did not fall into the hands of France. The French were already masters of Genoa and the gates of Italy; they would traverse in every direction and hold in fear or subjection every state in the peninsula, if they should acquire the sovereignty of Naples. For these reasons Sforza resisted all his friends, dependents, and even his wife, who vehemently solicited him for the house of Anjou; he also brought Cosmo de’ Medici over to his opinion, and thus prevented the republic of Florence from seconding a party towards which it found itself strongly inclined. The duke of Calabria, who had entered Naples in 1459, had begun successfully; but, receiving no assistance from abroad, he soon wearied and exhausted the people, who alone had to furnish him with supplies. He lost, one after the other, all the provinces which had declared for him, and was finally, in 1464, constrained to abandon the kingdom.

Ferdinand, to strengthen himself, kept in dungeons or put to death all the feudatories who had shown any favour to his rival; above all, he resolved to be rid of the greatest captain that still remained in Italy, Jacopo Piccinino, the son of Niccolo, and head of what was still called the militia, or school of Braccio. He sent to Milan, whither Piccinino, who had served the party of Anjou, had retired, and where he had married a daughter of Sforza, to invite him to enter his service, promising him the highest dignities in his kingdom. He gave the most formal engagements for his safety to Sforza, as well as to Jacopo himself. He received him with honours, such as he would not have lavished on the greatest sovereign. After having entertained him twenty-seven days in one perpetual festival, he found means to separate him from his most trusty officers, caused him to be arrested in his own palace, and to be immediately strangled. This happened on the 24th of June, 1465.e

Once firmly established on the throne of Naples, Ferdinand continued to hold his position and to render it more and more secure throughout the period of his life, which terminated in 1494. He was little respected, but he made himself pretty generally feared and was accounted the most astute politician of his time. In alliance with Pope Sixtus IV he made war against[239] Milan and Florence, and in 1479 the allied forces had reduced Lorenzo de’ Medici to such an extremity that the great Florentine was constrained to visit Naples in the hope of conciliating his enemy. Lorenzo frankly acknowledged the danger in which he found himself, but he made a shrewd political move in pointing out that he was not without resources, inasmuch as it was open to him to invite the French into Italy. He admitted that the coming of these outsiders could only benefit him through injuring his enemies, but as a last resource he professed himself ready to adopt this expedient. He strongly represented, however, that he much preferred to enter into an arrangement with Ferdinand instead of opening up their country to the incursions of what the Italians were pleased to call barbarians. Ferdinand was fully alive to his danger, and was prepared to listen to terms.a

Finally, Lorenzo offered him an indemnity in the republic of Siena, which the duke of Calabria, son of the king, already coveted. That state had made alliance with the pope and the king of Naples against Florence; had received, without distrust, the Neapolitan troops within its fortresses; and had repeatedly had recourse to the duke of Calabria to terminate, by his mediation, the continually renewed dissensions between the different orders of the republic. The duke of Calabria, instead of reconciling them, kept up their discord; and, by alternately granting succour to each party, was become the supreme arbitrator of Siena. Lorenzo de’ Medici promised to offer no obstacle to the transferring of that state in sovereignty to the duke of Calabria. On this condition, he signed his treaty with the king of Naples on the 6th of May, 1480. The republic of Siena would have been lost, and the Neapolitans, masters of so important a place in Tuscany, would soon have subjugated the rest, when an unexpected event saved Lorenzo de’ Medici from the consequences of his impudent offer. Muhammed II charged his grand vizir, Akhmet Giedik, to attempt a landing in Italy, which the latter effected, and made himself master of Otranto on the 28th of July, 1480. Ferdinand, struck with terror, immediately recalled the duke of Calabria, with his army, to defend his own states.

The Turks had no sooner been driven from Otranto by Alfonso, the eldest son of the king of Naples, on the 10th of August, 1481, than Sixtus excited a new war in Italy. His object was to aggrandise his nephew, Girolamo Riario, for whom he was desirous of forming a great principality in Romagna. With that view, he proposed to the Venetians to divide with him the states of the duke of Ferrara; but a league was formed, in 1482, by the king of Naples, the duke of Milan, and the Florentines, to defend the dukedom. The year following, Sixtus IV, fearing that he should not obtain for his nephew the best part of the spoils of the duke of Ferrara, changed sides, and excommunicated the Venetians, intending to take from them the provinces which he destined for Girolamo Riario. The new allies, without consulting him, soon afterwards made peace with the Venetians, at Bagnolo, on the 7th of August, 1484.e

Ferdinand had reason to desire peace rather than war, and his influence was valuable in maintaining a state of relative tranquillity in Italy throughout most of the later years of his reign. But his oppressive taxation led to a momentous event in the history of Italy. The Neapolitan nobles rebelled against their burdens and again aroused the dormant Angevin claim to activity. René II neglected his opportunity, but after Ferdinand, in 1492, had strengthened himself by an alliance with Piero de’ Medici, the jealous Lodovico Sforza appealed to the King of France. Ferdinand died in 1494, a few months before Charles VIII invaded Italy.a

THE TYRANTS OF LOMBARDY

While imperial power was declining in Italy, the free cities that had resisted it in the days of its might were gradually falling under the dominion of feudal tyrannies which rose upon the ruin of their republican institutions. The slow operation of unnoticed causes had insensibly led to the subversion of the liberties of communities once so powerful and free. In one important respect, the Italian municipalities differed essentially from those of other countries. They included in the roll of their citizens the nobility of the district in which they were situated. This, while it seemed to add, and did in fact add to the splendour of the cities, was yet one of the principal elements of their decay.

The great territorial lords of northern Italy were compelled to seek the protection and friendship of these powerful communities, and frequently submitted to their rule. Many of them were bound to reside for a certain portion of each year within the walls of the city whose citizenship they had sought or been compelled to accept. Otho Frigisensisi (Otto of Freising), the historian of the reign of Frederick I, complains: “The cities so much affect liberty, and are so solicitous to avoid the insolence of power, that almost all of them have thrown off every other authority and are governed by their own magistrates, insomuch that all that country is now filled with free cities, most of which have compelled the bishops to reside within their walls, and there is scarcely any nobleman, how great soever he may be, who is not subject to the laws and government of some city.” Elsewhere the same writer observes that the marquis of Montferrat was almost the only baron who had preserved his independence, and had not become subject to the laws of any city. The cities of Italy had been free before the institution of the feudal lordships, and were not, as in other places, dependent upon the privileges which it might suit the convenience of a baron to tolerate, or a monarch to create.

This admission of a territorial aristocracy into the association of the burghers, if at first it gave strength and elevation to these communities, subjected them on the other hand to the danger of falling under aristocratic influence. The great nobles built palaces in these towns; these palaces became feudal fortresses in the centre of the cities. Attended by armed retainers from their estates, they fortified their mansions, and in many instances commanded the city by these military strongholds. The citizens not only tolerated but encouraged this for the sake of the strength which the retainers of these noblemen brought to their military force. In the wars in which they were frequently engaged with each other, it was of no small[241] importance to one of these cities to command the vassals of a great lord. By the presence of such an aristocracy, sharing in all the councils of the community, the very principle of republican equality was insensibly destroyed. The nobleman who dwelt in his feudal castle frowning over the streets of the city, who was master of no inconsiderable portion of their army, and who brought into their assembly the influence both of wealth and power, was very likely to become, when any emergency gave the opportunity, the protector instead of the protected—the master instead of the subject of the state.

As the cities fell under the rule of princes, the number of these princes was speedily reduced. The lords of the more powerful brought those of the weaker under their sway. The dominion, at first confined to a city, soon included districts containing many cities within their limits. The duchy of Milan, erected by the emperor in favour of the Visconti, represented a sovereignty extending over the whole of the Milanese. Alessandro Medici, duke of Florence, soon merged that title in the higher one, which conferred on him the grand duchy of the Tuscan states.

Companies of Adventure

With the subjection of the cities to tyrants the habit became general of employing mercenary troops. Afraid of trusting to the militia of the citizens, these petty lords employed bands of hirelings, who, under the name of “companies of adventure,” sold their swords and services to anyone who would pay them. The emperors, on their visits, were in the habit of bringing in their train German guards, who frequently were not required to return with their master to their native land. These men were too glad to accept any service which retained them in the wealthy country and luxuriant climate to which they had come. The citizens even of the free cities were flattered by the strange argument which found a justification for the employment of mercenaries, in the philosophical reflection that the citizen who thus escaped military service was, in his attention to his proper business, contributing far more to the wealth and therefore to the greatness of the community than he could do in the profession of arms. The argument was specious. It would have been true if public spirit and patriotism formed no part of the possessions of the state. With this fatal habit of substituting mercenaries for the national militia passed away the greatness of the Italian cities. Milan had far degenerated from the days of Legnano when the mercenary ferocity of hirelings was substituted for the enthusiasm of her own free youth; and, under her once proud banners, the “company of adventurers” took the place of the “company of death.”f

The Visconti and Della Scalas had sent for many of these companies to Germany, believing that these men—who did not understand the language of the country, who were bound to it by no affection, and who were accessible to no political passion—would be their best defenders. They proved ready to execute the most barbarous orders, and for their recompense demanded only the enjoyments of an intemperate sensuality.

But the Lombard tyrants were deceived in believing the German soldier would never covet power for himself, and would continue to abuse the right of the stronger for the advantage of others only. These adventurers soon discovered that it would be better to make war and pillage the people for their own profit, without dividing the spoil with a master. Some men of high rank, who had served in Italy as condottieri (hired captains), proposed to their soldiers to follow them, make war on the whole world, and divide[242] the booty among themselves. The first company, formed by an Italian noble at the moment that the Visconti dismissed their soldiers, having made peace with their adversaries, made an attack suddenly on Milan, in the hope of plundering that great city, but was almost annihilated in a battle, fought at Parabiago, on the 20th of February, 1339. A German duke, known only by his Christian name of Werner, and the inscription he wore on his breast of “enemy of God, of pity, and of mercy,” formed, in 1343, another association, which maintained itself for a long time under the name of “the Great Company.” It in turns entered the service of princes, and, when they made peace, carried on its ravages and plunderings for its own profit. The duke Werner and his successors—the count Lando, a German, and the friar Moriale, knight of St. John—devastated Italy from Montferrat to the extremity of the kingdom of Naples. They raised contributions, by threatening to burn houses and harvests or by putting the prisoners whom they took to the most horrible tortures. The provinces of Apulia were, above all, abandoned to their devastations; and the king and queen of Naples made not a single effort to protect their people.

There now remained no more than six independent princes in Lombardy. The Visconti, lords of Milan, had usurped all the central part of that province; the western part was held by the marquis of Montferrat, and the eastern by the Della Scalas, lords of Verona, Carrara of Padua, Este of Ferrara, and Gonzaga of Mantua. These weaker princes felt themselves in danger, and made a league against the Visconti, taking into their service the Great Company; but, deceived and pillaged by it, they suffered greater evils than they inflicted on their enemies. When at last the money of the league was exhausted, and it could no longer pay the company, this band of robbers entered into the service of the republic of Siena, to be let loose on that of Perugia, of which the Sienese had conceived a deep jealousy. But the Florentines would not consent to their entering Tuscany, where their depredations had been already felt. They shut all the passes of the Apennines; they armed the mountaineers; they made these adventurers experience a first defeat at the passage of Scalella, on the 24th of July, 1358, and obliged them to fall back on Romagna. The legate Albornoz, to deliver himself from such guests, made them enter Perugia the year following. Never had the company been so brilliant and so formidable; it levied contributions on Siena, as well as Perugia; but vengeance and cupidity alike excited them against the Florentines. They determined on pillaging those rich merchants, whom they considered far from warlike, or forcing them to ransom themselves.

The marquis of Montferrat, desirous of taking the company into his service, pressed the republic of Florence, by his ambassadors, to do what the greatest potentates had always done—pay the banditti to be rid of them. He offered himself for mediator and guarantee, and promised a prompt and cheap deliverance; but the Florentine Republic protested it would not submit to anything so base; it assembled an army purely Italian, placing it under the command of an Italian captain, who was ordered to advance to the frontier and offer battle to the company. The robbers gave way in proportion to the firmness of the republic; they made the tour of the Florentine frontier by Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, always threatening, yet never daring to violate it. On the 12th of July, 1359, they sent the Florentine commander a challenge to battle, and afterwards failed to keep the rendezvous which they had given. They escaped at last from Tuscany, without having fought, and divided themselves in the service of different princes, humbled indeed, but too much accustomed to this disorderly life not to be anxious to begin it anew.

Florence Menaced by the Visconti

The republic of Florence was continually occupied, since the expulsion of the duke of Athens, in guarding against the ambition of the Visconti, which threatened the subjugation of all Italy. Azzo Visconti, the son of that Galeazzo who had been so treacherously used by Ludwig of Bavaria, had, in 1328, purchased the city of Milan from that emperor, and soon afterwards found himself master of ten other cities of Lombardy; but he died suddenly, in the height of his prosperity, the 16th of August, 1339. As he left no children, his uncle Lucchino succeeded him in the sovereignty. Lucchino was false and ferocious, but clever, and possessed in war the hereditary talent of the Visconti. He was called a lover of justice, probably because he punished criminals with an excess of cruelty, and maintained by terror a perfect police in his states. He died, poisoned by his wife, on the 23rd of January, 1349. His brother John, archbishop of Milan, succeeded him in power. The latter found himself master of sixteen of the largest cities in Lombardy—cities which, in the preceding century, had been so many free and flourishing republics. His ambition continually aspired to more extensive conquests; and, on the 16th of October, 1350, he engaged the brothers Pepoli to cede to him Bologna.

These nobles, who had usurped the sovereignty of their country, were at this time engaged in a quarrel with the legate, Gil Albornoz, who asserted that Bologna belonged to the holy see. The archbishop was already treated by the pope as an enemy, and preferred exciting still further his wrath, to the renunciation of so important an acquisition. When Clement VI summoned him to come and justify himself at the court of Avignon, he answered that he would present himself there at the head of twelve thousand cavalry and six thousand infantry. The pope, in his alarm, ceded to him the fief of Bologna, on the 5th of May, 1352, on condition of receiving from him an annual tribute of 12,000 florins. Florence saw with terror this city, which had so long been her most powerful and faithful ally, the Guelf city of letters, commerce, and liberty, thus pass under the yoke of a tyrant, who had designs upon her liberty also; who laid snares around her; who formed alliances against her with all the petty tyrants of Romagna, and all the Ghibelline lords of the Apennines. She was at peace with him, it was true; but she well knew that the Visconti neither believed themselves bound by any treaty, nor kept any pledge.

The number of free cities continually diminished. Pisa was still free, but had, from attachment to the Ghibelline party, made alliance with the Visconti. Siena and Perugia were free also, but weak and jealous; they were incessantly disturbed by internal dissensions. The Florentines could not[244] reckon on them. The archbishop of Milan suddenly ordered, towards the end of the summer, 1351, Giovanni Visconti da Oleggio, his lieutenant at Bologna, to push into Tuscany at the head of a formidable army, without any declaration of war. The republic had no ally, and but slight reliance on the mercenaries in its service; but the Florentines, who showed little bravery in the open field, defended themselves obstinately behind walls; and the great village of Scarperia, in the Mugello, although so ill fortified that the walls of many of the houses served instead of a surrounding wall, and having a garrison only of two hundred cuirassiers and three hundred infantry, stopped the Milanese general sixty-one days. He was at last obliged, on the 16th of October, to retire to Bologna.

The republics of Venice and Genoa were, it might have been thought, the natural allies to whom the Florentines should have had recourse for their common defence. Their interests were the same; and the Visconti had resolved not to suffer any free state to subsist in Italy, lest their subjects should learn that there was a better government than their own. Unhappily, these two republics, irritated by commercial quarrels in the East, were then engaged in an obstinate war with each other.

Genoa had sacrificed her liberty to her thirst of vengeance; for although the republic had not conferred the signoria on the archbishop Visconti without imposing conditions, it soon experienced that oaths are not binding on a prelate and a tyrant. The freedom of Venice also was in the utmost danger from the consequences of the same war.

Though the war of the maritime republics might have deprived Florence of the aid of Venice or Genoa, it had at least diverted the attention of Giovanni Visconti, made him direct his exertions elsewhere, and procured some repose to Tuscany. He died on the 5th of October, 1354, before he could renew his attacks; and his three nephews, the sons of his brother Stephen, agreed to succeed him in common. The eldest, who showed less talent for government and more sensuality and vice than his brothers, was poisoned by them the year following. The two survivors, Barnabò and Galeazzo, divided Lombardy between them, preserving an equal right on Milan and in the government. Their relative, Visconti da’ Oleggio, who was their lieutenant at Bologna, made himself independent in that city nearly about the same time that the Genoese, indignant at seeing all their conventions violated, rose in insurrection on the 15th of November, 1356, drove out the Milanese garrison, and again set themselves free.

Charles IV in Italy

The entry of Charles IV into Tuscany formed also a favourable diversion, by suspending the projects of the Visconti against the Florentines; but it cost them one hundred thousand florins, which they agreed to pay Charles by treaty on the 12th of March, 1355, to purchase his rights on their city, and to obtain his engagement that he should nowhere enter the Florentine territory. The republics of Pisa and Siena, who received him within their walls, paid still dearer for the hospitality which they granted him. The emperor encouraged the malcontents in both cities; he aided them to overthrow the existing governments; he hoped by so doing to make these republics little principalities, which he intended to bestow as an appanage on his brother, the patriarch of Aquileia; but after having caused the ruin of his partisans, after having ordered or permitted the execution of the former magistrates, who were innocent of any crime, insurrections of the people forced him to quit[245] both cities, without retaining the smallest influence in either. After he had quitted Italy, the Visconti were engaged in the war to which we have already alluded, against the marquises of Este, of Montferrat, Della Scala, Gonzaga, and Carrara. The siege of Pavia and the ravages of the Great Company exhausted their resources, but did not make them abandon their projects on Tuscany. The influence which they retained in the republic of Pisa, as chiefs of the Ghibelline party, seemed to facilitate their schemes.

Pisa, in losing its maritime power and its possessions in Sardinia, had not lost its warlike character; it was still the state in Italy where the citizens were best exercised in the use of arms, and evinced the most bravery. It had given proofs of it in conquering, under the eye of the Florentines, the city of Lucca, which it still retained. Nevertheless, since the peace made by the duke of Athens on the 14th of October, 1342, commercial interests had reconciled the two republics. The Florentines had obtained a complete enfranchisement from all imposts in the port of Pisa; they had established there their counting-houses, and attracted thither a rich trade. From that time the democratic party predominated in the Pisan Republic; at its head was a rich merchant, named Francesco Gambacorta, who attached himself to the Florentines, and to the maintenance of peace. His party was called that of the Bergolini; while that of the great Ghibelline families attached to the counts of la Gherardesca, who despised commerce and excited war, was called the Raspanti party. The Visconti sought the alliance of the latter; the moment did not appear to them yet arrived in which they could assume to themselves the dominion over all Tuscany. It was sufficient for their present views to exhaust the Florentine Republic by a war, which would disturb its commerce; to weaken the spirit of liberty and energy in the Pisans, by subduing them to the power of the aristocracy, in the hope that when once they had ceased to be free, and had submitted to a domestic tyrant, they would soon prefer a great to a little prince, and throw themselves into his arms. The revolution, which in 1355 had favoured the emperor in restoring power to the Raspanti, facilitated this project.

In pursuance of this view, the party of the Raspanti, at the suggestion of the Visconti, in 1357, began to disturb the Florentines in the enjoyment of the franchises secured to them at Pisa by the treaty of peace. The Florentines, guessing the project of the Lombard tyrant, instead of defending their right by arms, resolved on braving an unwholesome climate, and submitting to the inconvenience of longer and worse roads, transported all their counting-houses to Telamone, a port in the Maremma of Siena. They persisted till 1361 in despising all the insults of the Pisans, as well as in rejecting all their offers of reconciliation; at length, animosity increasing on both sides, the war broke out, in 1362. The Visconti supplied the Pisans with soldiers. France during this period had been laid waste by the war with the English; and as the sovereigns were rarely in a state to pay their troops, there had been formed, as in Italy, companies of adventurers, English, Gascon, and French, who lived at the cost of the country, plundering it with the utmost barbarity. The Peace of Bretigny permitted several of these companies to pass into Italy; they carried with them the plague, which made not less ravages in 1361 than it had done in 1348. The English company commanded by John Hawkwood, an adventurer, who rendered himself celebrated in Italy was sent to the Pisans by Barnabò Visconti. After various successes, the two republics, at last exhausted by the plague and by the rapacity and want of discipline of the adventurers whom they had taken into pay, made peace on the 17th of August, 1364. But the purpose of the Visconti was not[246] the less attained. The Pisans, having exhausted their resources, were at a loss to make the last payment of thirty thousand florins to their army; they were reduced to accept the offer made them by Giovanni Agnello, one of their fellow-citizens, of advancing that sum, on condition of being named doge of Pisa. The money had for this purpose been secretly advanced by Barnabò Visconti, to whom Agnello had pledged his word never to consider himself more than his lieutenant at Pisa. Thus the field fertilised by liberty became continually more circumscribed; and Florence, always threatened by the tyrants of Lombardy, saw around her those only who had alienated their liberty, and who had no longer any sentiment in common with the republic.

The chief magistrates of the Florentine Republic could not conceal from themselves the danger which now menaced the liberty of Italy. They found themselves closed in, blockaded as it were, by the tyrants, who daily made some new progress. The two brothers Visconti, masters of Lombardy, had at their disposal immense wealth and numerous armies; and their ambition was insatiable. They were allied, by marriage, to the two houses of France and England; their intrigues extended throughout Italy, and every tyrant was under their protection. At the same time, their own subjects trembled under frightful cruelties. They shamelessly published an edict, by which the execution of state criminals was prolonged to the period of forty days. In it the particular tortures to be inflicted, day by day, were detailed, and the members to be mutilated designated, before death was reached. On the other hand, their finances were in good order; they liberally recompensed their partisans, and won over traitors in every state inimical to them. They pensioned the captain of every company of adventurers, on condition that he engaged to return to their service whenever called upon. Meanwhile these captains with their soldiers overran, plundered, and exhausted Italy during the intervals of peace; reducing the country to such a state as to be incapable of resisting any new attack. All the Ghibellines, all the nobles who had preserved their independence in the Apennines, were allied to the Visconti. The march of these usurpers was slow, but it seemed sure. The moment was foreseen to approach when Tuscany would be theirs, as well as Lombardy; particularly as Florence had no aid to expect either from Genoa or Venice. These two maritime republics appeared to have withdrawn themselves from Italy, and to place their whole existence in distant regions explored by their commerce.

For a moment, the few Italian states still free were led to believe that the succour now so necessary to enable them to resist the Visconti would arrive both from France and Germany. The pope and the emperor announced their determination to deliver the country, over which they assumed a supreme right, from every other yoke. Urban V, moved by the complaints of the[247] Christian world, declared that his duty as bishop of Rome was to return and live there; and Charles IV protested that he would deliver his Roman Empire from the devastations of the adventurers, and from the usurpations of the Lombard tyrants. In 1367, Urban returned to Italy; and the same year formed a league with the emperor, the king of Hungary, the lords of Padua, Ferrara, and Mantua, and with the queen of Naples, against the Visconti. But when Charles entered Italy, on the 5th of May, 1368, he thought only of profiting by the terror with which he inspired the Visconti, to obtain from them large sums of money; in return for which he granted them peace. He afterwards continued his march through the peninsula, with no other object than that of collecting money.

His presence, however, caused some changes favourable to liberty. A festival was prepared for him at Lucca, on the 7th of September; on which day he intended confirming, by his investiture, the sovereignty of the doge Giovanni Agnello over Pisa and Lucca. But the stage on which Agnello had mounted gave way, and in the fall he broke his leg. The Pisans profited by this accident to recover their freedom, and the emperor kept Lucca for himself. At Siena he favoured a revolution which overthrew the ruling aristocracy; intending, on his return to that city, after a devotional visit to Rome, to take advantage of the disturbance, and get himself appointed to the signoria; but a sedition against him broke forth on the 18th of January, 1369. Barricades were raised on all sides; his guards were separated from him, and disarmed; his palace was broken into. No attempt, indeed, was made on his person; but he was left alone several hours in the public square, addressing himself in turn to the armed troops which closed the entrance of every street, and which, immovable and silent, remained insensible to all his entreaties. It was not till he began to suffer from hunger that his equipages were restored to him, and he was permitted to leave the town. He returned to Lucca, where he had already lived, in the time of his father, as prince royal of Bohemia. The Lucchese were attached to him, and placed in him their last hope to be delivered from a foreign yoke, which had weighed upon them since the year 1314. They declared themselves ready to make the greatest sacrifices for the recovery of their freedom; and they at the same time testified to him so much confidence and affection as to touch his heart. By a diploma, on the 6th of April, 1369, Charles restored them to liberty, and granted them various privileges; but, on quitting their city, he left in it a German garrison, with orders not to evacuate that town till the Lucchese had paid the price of their liberty. It was not till the month of April, 1370, and not without the aid of Florence and their other allies, that they could acquit the enormous sum of three hundred thousand florins, the price of the re-establishment of their republic. The Guelf exiles were then immediately recalled; a close alliance was contracted with Florence; and the signoria, composed of a gonfalonier and ten anziani, to be changed every two months, was reconstituted.

Urban V, on his arrival in Italy, endeavoured also to oppose the usurpations of the Visconti, who had just taken possession of San Miniato, in Tuscany, and who, even in the states of the church, were rendering themselves more powerful than the pope himself. Of the two brothers, Barnabò Visconti was more troublesome to him, by his intrigues. Urban had recourse to a bull of excommunication, and sent two legates to bear it to him; but Barnabò forced these two legates to eat, in his presence, the parchment on which the bull was written, together with the leaden seals and silken strings. The pope, frightened at the thought of combating men who seemed to hold[248] religion in no respect, and wearied, moreover, with his ill-success, was glad to return to the repose of Avignon, where he arrived in the month of September, 1370, and died the November following.

The “War of Liberation”

Gregory XI, who succeeded him, was ambitious, covetous, and false. He joined the Florentines in their war against the Visconti; but the legates, to whom he had entrusted the government of the ecclesiastical states, and who had rendered themselves odious by their rapacity and immorality, formed the project of seizing for themselves Tuscany, which they had engaged to defend. All the troops of the Florentines had been placed at their disposal, for the purpose of carrying the war into Lombardy. The cardinal legate, who commanded the combined army, resided at Bologna; the church having rescued that city from the grasp of Visconti da Oleggio, on the 31st of March, 1360. He signed a truce with Barnabò Visconti, in the month of June, 1375; and, before the Florentines could recall their soldiers, sent John Hawkwood with a formidable army to surprise Florence. The Florentines, indignant at such a shameless want of good faith on the part of the church, whose most faithful allies they had always been, vowed vengeance on the see of Rome. They determined to rouse the spirit of liberty in every city belonging to it, and drive out the French legates—more odious and perfidious than the most abhorred of the Italian tyrants. They, in the month of June, 1375, without placing any confidence in Barnabò Visconti, made an alliance with him against the priests, who had just deceived them under the faith of the most solemn oaths. They admitted the republics of Siena, Lucca, and Pisa into this league; they formed a commission of eight persons, to direct the military department, called “the eight of war”; they assembled a numerous army, and gave it colours, on which was inscribed, in golden letters, the word, “Liberty!” This army entered the states of the church, proclaiming that the Florentines demanded nothing for themselves—that not only would they make no conquests, but would accept dominion over no people who might offer themselves; they were desirous only of universal liberty, and would assist the oppressed with all their power, solicitous for the recovery of their freedom.

The army of liberty carried revolution into all the states of the church with an inconceivable rapidity; eighty cities and towns, in ten days, threw off the yoke of the legates. The greater number constituted themselves republics; a few recalled the ancient families of princes, who had been exiled by Gil Albornoz, and to whom they were attached by hereditary affection. Bologna did not accomplish her revolution before the 20th of March, 1376. This ancient republic, in recovering its liberty, vowed fidelity to the Florentines, to whom it owed the restoration of its freedom. The legates, beside themselves with rage, endeavoured to restrain the people by terror. John Hawkwood, on the 29th of March, 1376, delivered up Faenza to a frightful military execution; four thousand persons were put to death, property pillaged, and women violated. The pope, not satisfied with such rigour, sent Robert of Geneva, another cardinal legate, into Italy, with a Breton company of adventurers, considered as the most ferocious of all those trained to plunder by the wars of France. The new legate treated Cesena, on the 1st of February, 1377, with still greater barbarity. He was heard to call out during the massacre, “I will have more blood—kill all—blood, blood!” Gregory XI at last felt the necessity of returning to[249] Italy, to appease the universal revolt. He entered Rome on the 17th of January, 1377; although the Florentines, who had sent the standard of liberty to the senators and bannerets of Rome, and had made alliance with the Romans, expostulated on the danger they incurred if they admitted the pontiff within their walls.

The two parties, however, began to be equally weary of the war. Some of the cities enfranchised by the Florentines were already detached from the league. The Bolognese had made, on the 21st of August, 1377, a separate peace with the pope, who had agreed to acknowledge their republic. Barnabò Visconti carried on with the holy see secret negotiations, in which he offered to sacrifice to the church, his ally, the republic of Florence. This republic was then pressed for its consent to the opening of a congress for restoring peace to Italy, to be held at Sarzana, in the beginning of the year 1378; the presidency of the congress was given to Barnabò Visconti. The conference had scarcely opened when the Florentines perceived, with more indignation than surprise, that the Lombard tyrant, who had fought in concert with them, intended that they should pay to him and to the pope the whole expenses of the war. The negotiations took the most alarming turn, when the unexpected news arrived of the death of Gregory XI, on the 27th of March, 1378; and the congress separated without coming to any decision. The year which now opened was destined to bring with it the most important revolutions throughout Italy. Amidst those convulsions the Peace of Florence with the court of Rome, weakened by the great western schism, was not difficult to accomplish.

The Papal Schism

The pontifical chair had been transferred to France since the year 1305. Its exile from Italy lasted seventy-three years. The Christian world, France excepted, had considered it a scandal; but the French kings hoped by it to retain the popes in their dependence; and the French cardinals, who formed more than three-fourths of the Sacred College, seemed determined to preserve the pontifical power in their nation. They were, however, thwarted in this intention by the death of Gregory XI at Rome; for the conclave must always assemble where the last pontiff dies. The clamour of the Romans and the manifestation of opinion throughout Christendom were not without influence on the conclave. On the 8th of April, 1378, it elected—not, indeed, a Roman, whom the people demanded, but an Italian—Bartolommeo Prignani; who, having lived long in France, seemed formed to conciliate the prejudices of both parties. He was considered learned and pious. The cardinals had not, however, calculated on the development of the passions which a sudden elevation sometimes gives; or on the degree of impatience, arrogance, and irritability of which man is capable, in his unexpected capacity of master, though in an inferior situation he had appeared gentle and modest. The new pope, who took the name of Urban VI, became so violent and despotic, so confident of himself, and so contemptuous of others, that he soon quarrelled with all his cardinals. They left him; assembled again at Fondi; and, on the 9th of August, declared the holy see vacant; asserting that their previous election was null, having been forced by their terror of the Romans.

Consequently, on the 20th of September, they elected another pope. Their choice, no better than the former, fell on Robert, cardinal of Geneva, who had presided at the massacre of Cesena; he took the name of Clement VII. He was protected by Queen Joanna, with whom Urban had already[250] quarrelled. Clement established his court at Naples; but an insurrection of the people made him quit it the year following, and determined him on returning, with his cardinals, to Avignon. Urban VI, meanwhile, deposed as schismatics all the cardinals who had elected Clement, and replaced them by a new and more numerous college; but he agreed no better with these than with their predecessors. He accused them of a conspiracy against him; he caused many to be put to the torture in his presence and while he recited his breviary; he ordered others to be thrown into the sea in sacks and drowned; he quarrelled with the Romans and the new sovereign of Naples, whom he had himself named; he paraded his incapacity and rage through all Italy; and finally took refuge at Genoa, where he died, on the 9th of November, 1389. The cardinals who acknowledged him named a successor on his death, as the French cardinals did afterwards on the death of Clement VII, which took place on the 16th of September, 1394. The church thus found itself divided between two popes and two colleges of cardinals, who reciprocally anathematised each other. Whilst the Catholic faith was thus shaken, the temporal sovereignty of the pope, founded by the conquests of the cardinal Albornoz, was overthrown. Several of the cities enfranchised by the Florentines in the war of liberty, preserved their republican government; but the greater number, particularly in Romagna, fell again under the yoke of petty tyrants.

The terror in which the house of Visconti had held Florence and the other Italian republics began somewhat to subside. Barnabò, grown old, had divided the cities of his dominions among his numerous children. His brother, Galeazzo, had died on the 4th of August, 1378, and been replaced by his son, Gian Galeazzo, called count de Virtù, from a county in Champagne, given him by Charles V, whose sister he had married. Barnabò would willingly have deprived his nephew of his paternal inheritance, to divide it among his children. Gian Galeazzo, who had already discovered several plots directed against him, uttered no complaint, but shut himself up in his castle of Pavia, where he had fixed his residence. He doubled his guard, and took pains to display his belief that he was surrounded by assassins. He affected, at the same time, the highest devotion; he was always at prayers, a rosary in his hand, and surrounded with monks; he talked only of pilgrimages and expiatory ceremonies. His uncle regarded him as pusillanimous, and unworthy of reigning. In the beginning of May, 1385, Gian Galeazzo sent to Barnabò to say that he had made a vow of pilgrimage to our Lady of Varese, near the Lago Maggiore, and that he should be glad to see him on his passage. Barnabò agreed to meet him at a short distance from Milan, accompanied by his two sons. Gian Galeazzo arrived, surrounded, as was his custom, by a numerous guard. He affected to be alarmed at every sudden motion made near him. On meeting his uncle, however, on the 6th of May, he[251] hastily dismounted, and respectfully embraced him; but, while he held him in his arms, he said in German to his guards, “Strike!” The Germans, seizing Barnabò, disarmed and dragged him, with his two sons, to some distance from his nephew. Gian Galeazzo made several vain attempts to poison his uncle in the prison into which he had thrown him; but Barnabò, suspicious of all the nourishment offered him, was on his guard, and did not sink under these repeated efforts till the 18th of December of the same year.

Gian Galeazzo Visconti

All Lombardy submitted, without difficulty, to Gian Galeazzo. His uncle had never inspired one human being with either esteem or affection. The nephew had no better title to these sentiments. False and pitiless, he joined to immeasurable ambition a genius for enterprise, and to immovable constancy a personal timidity which he did not endeavour to conceal. The least unexpected motion near him threw him into a paroxysm of nervous terror. No prince employed so many soldiers to guard his palace, or took such multiplied precautions of distrust. He seemed to acknowledge himself the enemy of the whole world. But the vices of tyranny had not weakened his ability. He employed his immense wealth, without prodigality; his finances were always flourishing; his cities well garrisoned and victualled; his army well paid; all the captains of adventure scattered throughout Italy received pensions from him, and were ready to return to his service whenever called upon. He encouraged the warriors of the new Italian school; he well knew how to distinguish, reward, and win their attachment. Many young Italians, in order to train themselves to arms, had, from about the middle of this century, engaged in the German, English, and French troops which inundated Italy; and they soon proved that Italian valour, directed by the reflection and intelligence of a highly civilised nation, who carried their arms as well as tactics to perfection, had greatly the advantage over the brute courage of barbarians.

Alberic, count of Barbiano, a Romagnole noble, and an ancestor of the princes Belgiojoso, of Milan, formed a company, under the name of St. George, into which he admitted Italians only, and which, in 1378, he placed in the service of Urban VI. This company defeated, at Ponte Molle, that of the Bretons, attached to Clement VII, and regarded as the most formidable of the foreign troops. From that time, the company of St. George was the true school of military science in Italy. Young men of courage, talent, or ambition flocked into it from all parts; and all the captains who, twenty years later, attained such high renown, gloried in having served in that company.

Gian Galeazzo was no sooner firmly established on the throne of Milan, than he resumed his project of subjugating the rest of Italy; the two principalities of the Della Scala at Verona, and of the Carrara at Padua, were the first to tempt his ambition. The house of La Scala had produced, in the beginning of the century, some great captains and able politicians; but their successors had been effeminate and vicious—princes who hardly ever attained power without getting rid of their brothers by poison or the dagger. The house of Carrara, on the contrary, which gloried in being attached to the Guelf party, produced princes who might have passed for virtuous, in comparison with the other tyrants of Italy. Francesco da Carrara, who then reigned, his son, and grandson were men of courage, endued with great capacities, and who knew how to gain the affection of their subjects. The[252] republic of Venice never pardoned Carrara his having made alliance against her with the Genoese and the king of Hungary. After the death of the last named, Venice engaged Antonio della Scala to attack Padua, offering him subsidies to aid him in the conquest of that state. Carrara did all in his power to be reconciled to the prince, his neighbour, whom, in 1386, he repeatedly vanquished; as well as with the republic—always ready to repair the losses sustained by the lord of Verona. Unable to obtain peace, he was at last reduced to accept the proffered alliance of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who took Verona on the 18th of October, 1387. Instead of restoring to Carrara the city of Vicenza, as he had promised, he immediately offered his assistance to the Venetians against Padua; that republic was imprudent enough to accept the offer. Padua, long besieged, was given up to Visconti on the 23rd of November, 1388. A few days afterwards, Treviso was surrendered to him; so that the frontiers of the lord of Milan’s dominions extended even to the edge of the Lagune. He had no sooner planted his standard there, than he menaced Venice, which had so unwisely facilitated his conquests.

All the rest of Lombardy was dependent on the lord of Milan. The marquis of Montferrat was brought up at the court of Galeazzo, who governed his states as guardian of this young prince. Albert, marquis d’Este, had, on the 26th of March, 1388, succeeded his brother in the sovereignty of Ferrara, to the prejudice of his nephew Obizzo, whom he caused to be beheaded with his mother. He put to death by various revolting executions almost all his relations, at the suggestion of Gian Galeazzo, whose object was, by rendering him thus odious to the people, to make the lord of Ferrara feel that he had no other support than in him. According to the same infernal policy Gian Galeazzo accused the wife of the lord of Mantua, daughter of Barnabò, and his own cousin and sister-in-law, of a criminal intercourse with her husband’s secretary. He forged letters by which he made her appear guilty, concealed them in her apartment, and afterwards pointed out where they were to be found to Francesco da Gonzaga, who, in a paroxysm of rage, caused her to be beheaded, and the secretary to be tortured, and afterwards put to death, in 1390; it was not till after many years that he discovered the truth. Thus all the princes of Lombardy were either subdued or in discredit for the crimes which Visconti had made them commit, and by which he held them in his dependence; he then began to turn his attention towards Tuscany. In the years 1388 and 1389, the Florentines were repeatedly alarmed by his attempts to take possession of Siena, Pisa, Bologna, San Miniato, Cortona, and Perugia; not one attempt had yet succeeded; but Florence saw her growing danger, and was well aware that the tyrant had not yet attacked her, only because he reserved her for his last conquest.

The arrival at Florence of Francesco II of Carrara, who came to offer his services and his hatred of Gian Galeazzo to the republic, determined the Florentines to have recourse to arms. The lord of Milan, in receiving the capitulation of Padua, had promised to give in compensation some other sovereignty to the house of Carrara; but he had either poisoned Francesco I, or suffered him to perish in prison. Several attempts had been made to assassinate Francesco II in the province of Asti, whither he had been exiled. In spite of many dangers, he at last escaped, and fled into Tuscany, taking his wife, then indisposed, with him. He left her there, and passed into Germany, in the hopes of exciting new enemies against Gian Galeazzo; while the Florentines made alliance with the Bolognese against the lord of[253] Milan, and placed their army under the command of John Hawkwood, who ever afterwards remained in their service. Carrara, seconded by the duke of Bavaria, the son-in-law of Barnabò, whose death the duke was desirous of avenging, re-entered Padua on the 14th of June, 1390, by the bed of the Brenta, and was received with enthusiasm by the inhabitants, who regarded him more as a fellow-citizen than a master. He recovered possession of the whole inheritance of his ancestors.

The extensive commerce of the Florentines had accustomed them to include all Europe in their negotiations; and, as they liberally applied their wealth to the defence of their liberty, they easily found allies abroad. After having called the duke of Bavaria from Germany, in 1390, they, in the year following sent to France for the count d’Armagnac with a formidable army; but the Germans as well as the French found, with astonishment, that they could no longer cope with the new Italian militia, which had substituted military science for the routine of the transalpine soldier. Armagnac was vanquished and taken prisoner, on the 25th of July, 1391, by Jacopo del Verme, and died a few days afterwards. John Hawkwood, who, in the hope of joining him, had advanced far into Lombardy with the Florentine army, was placed in the most imminent peril.e He was in the heart of an enemy’s country; before him were the whole forces of Milan, victorious and now far superior in numbers, which approached to overpower him, and, in his rear, were three great rivers which he could not hope to pass with impunity in their presence. But the confidence which he felt in the resources of his own genius in no degree abandoned him. After remaining inactive behind his entrenchments, as if paralysed by terror, until the Milanese, their temerity and carelessness increasing as he tamely received their insults, were thrown off their guard, he suddenly fell upon them with so much impetuosity that he routed them and captured twelve hundred horse. Having thus gained his object of inspiring his enemy with respect, and deterring him from too close a pursuit, Hawkwood commenced a masterly retreat, and had repassed both the Oglio and Mincio before a single trooper of Gian Galeazzo dared appear on their banks.

But he had yet the rapid Adige to cross, and the difficulty was the greater as the enemy had already fortified themselves on the dykes, which confine the waters of that river to its bed. The Lombard plains are almost everywhere on a lower level than that of the streams which intersect them, and are only preserved from continual inundations by artificial embankments, between which the impetuous torrents that descend from the melting of Alpine snows are securely conducted to the sea. But when these dykes are burst or cut, the adjacent plains are at once flooded. Hawkwood, on reaching the range of low land which is known as the Veronese valley, found the Adige, the Po, and the Polesino before him on the north, the south, and the west, and Jacopo del Verme hanging on his rear; and in this situation the enemy suddenly cut the dykes of the Adige, and let the river loose from its bed upon him. The lower ground about the Florentine camp was at once inundated. As far as the eye could stretch, the country, in every direction but one, was converted into a vast lake of hourly increasing depth; the waters even menaced the rising spot on which the army lay; provisions began to fail; and Jacopo del Verme, his whole force guarding the only outlet, sent by a trumpet a fox enclosed in a cage to the English captain. Hawkwood received the taunting present with dry composure, and bade the messenger tell his general that his fox appeared nothing sad, and doubtless knew by what door he would quit his cage.

A leader of less courageous enterprise and skilful resource than Hawkwood might have despaired of bursting from the toils; but the wily veteran knew both how to inspire his troops with unlimited confidence in his guidance, and to avail himself of their devotion. Leaving his tents standing, he silently and boldly led his cavalry before daylight into the inundated plain towards the Adige; and, with the waters already at the horses’ girths, marched the whole of the same day and the following night beside the dykes of that river, until he found a spot where its bed had been left dry by the escape of the waters; and crossing it at length gave repose to his wearied troops on the Paduan frontiers. Part of his infantry had perished, and he had lost many men and horses in the mud, and in canals and ditches—the danger of which could not be distinguished amidst the general inundation; but the army of the league was saved, and Jacopo del Verme dared not pursue its hazardous retreat.i

After this campaign, the republic, feeling the want of repose, made peace with Galeazzo, on the 28th of January, 1392, well knowing that it could place no trust in him, and that this treaty was no security against his intrigues and treachery.

These expectations were not belied; for one plot followed another in rapid succession. The Florentines about this time reckoned on the friendship of the Pisans, who had placed at the head of their republic Pietro Gambacorta, a rich merchant, formerly an exile at Florence, and warmly attached to peace and liberty; but he was old, and had for his secretary Jacopo Appiano, the friend of his childhood, who was nearly of his own age. Yet Galeazzo found means to seduce the secretary; he instigated him to the assassination of Gambacorta and his children, on the 21st of October, 1392. Appiano, seconded by the satellites furnished him by the duke of Milan, made himself master of Pisa; but after his death his son, who could with difficulty maintain himself there, sold the city to Gian Galeazzo, in the month of February, 1399, reserving only the principality of Piombino, which he transmitted to his descendants. At Perugia, Pandolfo Baglione, chief of the noble and Ghibelline party, had, in 1390, put himself under the protection of Gian Galeazzo, who aided him in changing the limited authority conferred on him into a tyranny; but three years afterwards he was assassinated, and the republic of Perugia, distracted by the convulsions of opposing factions, was compelled to yield itself up to Gian Galeazzo, on the 21st of January, 1400.

The Germans observed with jealousy the continually increasing greatness of Visconti, which appeared to them to annihilate the rights of the empire, and dry up the sources of tribute, on a partition of which they always reckoned. They pressed Wenceslaus to make war on Gian Galeazzo. But that indolent and sensual monarch, after some threats, gave it to be understood that for money he would willingly sanction the usurpations of Gian Galeazzo; and, in fact, on the 1st of May, 1395, he granted him, for the sum of 100,000 florins, a diploma which installed him duke of Milan and count of Pavia, comprehending in this investiture twenty-six cities and their territory, as far as the Lagune of Venice. These were the same cities which, more than three centuries before, had signed the glorious league of Lombardy. The duchy of Milan, according to the imperial bull, was to pass solely to the legitimate male heir of Gian Galeazzo. This concession of Wenceslaus caused great discontent in Germany; it was one of the grievances for which the diet of the empire, on the 20th of August, 1400, deposed the emperor, and appointed Robert elector palatine in his stead. Robert[255] concluded a treaty of subsidy with the Florentines, or rather entered into their pay, to oppose Gian Galeazzo; but when, on the 21st of October, 1401, he met the Milanese troops, commanded by Jacopo del Verme, not far from Brescia, he experienced, to his surprise and discomfiture, how much the German cavalry were inferior to the Italian. He was saved from a complete defeat only by Jacopo da Carrara, who led a body of Italian cavalry to his aid. Robert found it necessary to retreat, with disgrace, into Germany, after having received from the Florentines an immense sum of money.

Gian Galeazzo Visconti continued his course of usurpation. In 1397, he attacked, at the same time, Francesco da Gonzaga at Mantua, and the Florentines, without any previous declaration of war. After having ravaged Tuscany and the Mantuan territory, he consented, on the 11th of May, 1398, to sign, under the guarantee of Venice, a truce of ten years, during which period he was to undertake nothing against Tuscany. That, however, did not prevent him, in 1399, from taking under his protection the counts of Poppi and Ubertini, in the Apennines; or from engaging the republic of Siena to surrender itself to him, on the 11th of November in the same year.e

In Gian Galeazzo that passion for the colossal which was common to most of the despots shows itself on the largest scale. He undertook, at the cost of 300,000 gold florins, the construction of gigantic dykes, to divert in case of need the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua, and thus to render these cities defenceless. It is not impossible, indeed, that he thought of draining away the lagunes of Venice. He founded that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia, and the cathedral of Milan, “which exceeds in size and splendour all the churches of Christendom.” The palace in Pavia, which his father Galeazzo began and which he himself finished, was probably by far the most magnificent of the princely dwellings of Europe. There he transferred his famous library, and the great collection of relics of the saints, in which he placed a peculiar faith. His whole territories are said to have paid him in a single year, besides the regular contribution of 1,200,000 gold florins, no less than 800,000 more in extraordinary subsidies.g

The plague broke out anew in Tuscany, and deprived the free states of all their remaining vigour. The magistrates, on whose prudence and courage they relied, in a few days sank under the contagion, and left free scope to the poorest intriguer. This happened at Lucca to the Guelf house of Guinigi, which had produced many distinguished citizens, all employed in the first magistracies. They perished under this disease nearly about the same time. A young man of their family, named Paulo Guinigi, undistinguished either for talent or character, profited by this calamity, on the 14th of October, 1400, to usurp the sovereignty. He immediately abjured the Guelf party, in which he had been brought up, and placed himself under the protection of Gian Galeazzo. At Bologna, also, the chief magistrates of the republic were in like manner swept away by the plague.

Giovanni Bentivoglio, descended from a natural son of that king Enzio so long prisoner at Bologna, took advantage of the state of languor into which the republic had fallen, to get himself proclaimed sovereign lord, on the 27th of February, 1401. He at first thought of putting himself under the protection of the duke of Milan; but Gian Galeazzo, coveting the possession of Bologna, instead of amicably receiving, attacked him the year following. Bentivoglio was defeated at Casalecchio, on the 26th of June, 1402. His capital was taken the next day by the Milanese general, he himself[256] made prisoner, and two days afterwards put to death. Another general of Galeazzo, in May, 1400, took possession of Assisi; the liberty of Genoa, Perugia, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Bologna had, one after the other, fallen a sacrifice to the usurper. The Cancellieri, in the mountains of Pistoia, the Ubaldini, in those of the Mugello, had given themselves up to the duke of Milan. The Florentines, having no longer communications with the sea, across the territories of Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Bologna, saw the sources of their wealth and commerce dry up. Never had the republic been in more imminent danger; when the plague, which had so powerfully augmented its calamities, came to its aid. Gian Galeazzo Visconti was seized with it at his castle of Marignano, in which he had shut himself up, to be, as he hoped, secure from all communication with man. He was carried off by the pestilence, on the 3rd of September, 1402.e

By his will he divided the greater portion of his dominions between his two legitimate sons; to the elder, Gian Maria, he bequeathed the duchy of Milan; to the second, Filippo Maria, the county of Pavia; but Pisa, Sarzana, and Crema were bestowed on his favourite bastard, Gabriello Visconti.

As the heir to the duchy had barely attained the age of fourteen, his father entrusted the government to his widow Caterina, to Francesco da Gonzaga, and to the principal commanders of his forces. But as these soldiers of fortune were interested only in their own advancement, the utmost confusion prevailed in Milan, and the duchess and her son were compelled to seek security in the citadel. The long-forgotten names of Guelf and Ghibelline again resounded through Lombardy; and in a short space of time the duchy was stripped of all its dependent cities. Some, indeed, maintained a nominal submission; but the rulers were too intent on their own interest to be relied on; and the pontifical army had little difficulty in procuring the restitution of Bologna and Perugia to the pope. Siena revolted from the ducal vicar; Cremona gave herself to Ugolino Cavalcabò; Parma and Reggio were seized by the condottiere Ottobuono de’ Terzi; Brescia, by another adventurer, Pandolfo Malatesta. Vercelli, Novara, and other towns in Piedmont fell into the hands of the marquises of Montferrat and Saluzzo. Verona, after an obstinate resistance, surrendered to Francesco da Carrara; and Vicenza escaped his power by being ceded, together with Feltre and Belluno, to the Venetians. Besides these heavy losses, domestic strife aggravated the misfortunes of Milan; and a fierce quarrel between the duchess and her son was terminated by her imprisonment and death. In the meantime the flame spread to Pavia, and the young count Filippo was consigned to a dungeon. The dominion of the bastard Gabriello over Pisa and Sarzana was of brief duration; and he was compelled to sell the former city to the Florentines, to the great indignation of her citizens.

Amidst these disasters, the young duke, now fast attaining his majority, evinced a fierceness and brutality of disposition which detached from him the last remnant of his adherents. Amongst his favourite diversions was the pastime of beholding his well-trained bloodhounds lacerate the limbs of those subjects who incurred his displeasure; and his repeated barbarities grew past endurance. At length a conspiracy was set on foot for his destruction; and during mass in the church of St. Gothard he was despatched by two blows. After his murder a struggle prevailed between his brother Filippo Maria and Astorre, the natural son of Barnabò Visconti, whose intrepidity caused him to be styled “the soldier without fear.” His efforts, however, to supplant the legitimate heir were unavailing; whilst defending the citadel of Monza his leg was shattered by a stone; and his death, which immediately ensued, left Filippo Maria in undisputed possession of the poor remains of his father’s once extensive dukedom (1412).

Filippo Maria Visconti

It was the good fortune of the new duke to retain amongst his commanders Francesco Bussone, surnamed Carmagnola; and by the skill and prowess of this renowned general many of the lost territories of Milan were rapidly recaptured. Bergamo, Piacenza, Como, and Lodi were again annexed to the duchy; Cremona, Parma, Brescia, Crema, and Asti once more submitted; and Genoa yielded to the arms of Carmagnola. These signal services were rewarded by the duke with wealth and honours; who united the meritorious warrior to one of his natural daughters, and even adopted him as his successor in the dukedom, by the name of Francesco Visconti.

His well-earned trophies, however, were not long to be worn by the gallant Carmagnola. Every day proved to him that, having reached the highest point in his sovereign’s favour, the fickleness or jealousy of the duke forbade him to look for a continuance of his regard. Without being able to ascertain the cause of his disgrace, he found himself deprived of his command, and even excluded from the ducal presence; and he indignantly quitted the court of Milan, denouncing vengeance on the ungrateful Filippo. As Venice was now in league with Florence and some less considerable states, in order to check the increasing power of the duke, Carmagnola offered his services to the Venetian government, and was entrusted with the command of the allied army. The capture of Brescia and other considerable cities soon reduced the duke to alarming extremities, and he was happy to purchase a respite from this ruinous warfare by ceding Bergamo and great part of the Cremonese to Venice. But the good fortune of Carmagnola forsook him in a new campaign against his former master; he received a complete overthrow by the Milanese troops under Niccolo Piccinino, a defeat which was rendered doubly disastrous by its mainly contributing to the discomfiture of the Venetian fleet two days afterwards. Whilst the Venetian galleys were attacked in the Po by those of Milan, the defeated general, encamped on the neighbouring shore, was repeatedly summoned to the assistance of his naval colleague. But though Carmagnola was still at the head of a considerable armament he made no effort to accede to the call; and under the eyes of the troops of Venice their fleet was entirely destroyed, with the loss of eight thousand prisoners (1431).

After a short peace, the restless and ambitious spirit of the duke of Milan again agitated Italy; and the papal dominions, as well as those of Florence, were the objects of his rapacity. After ravaging Romagna and defeating[258] the Florentines at Anghiera, the Milanese general Piccinino was recalled into Lombardy once more to the attack of Venice. But besides her trusty general Gattamelata, the republic had secured the services of Francesco Sforza, son of Giacomuzzo, the favourite of Joanna II, queen of Naples. Francesco, endowed with the military talents of his father, after leading the forces of the duke of Milan, saw reason to abandon his patron, and devoted himself to the service of Venice. He was now opposed to Piccinino, his former companion in arms, and the annals of Italy are swelled with the splendid exploits of these great commanders. But the genius of Sforza, if not superior to, was at least more fortunate than that of his rival; and his glory was completed by a triumphant campaign, in which he discomfited Piccinino and rescued Verona and Brescia from the hands of Filippo. During a short interval of peace the duke of Milan diligently laboured to recover the friendship of Sforza, who was won over by the offer of Cremona and the hand of Bianca, the natural daughter of Filippo. But the latter years of this inconstant prince were spent in turmoil and distraction, and his new son-in-law became the object of his bitterest persecution. Again reconciled to the duke, and again exposed to his malice, Sforza still had good reason for preserving his connection with Milan, since Filippo had no legitimate issue, and his marriage with Bianca encouraged hopes of his succession to the duchy. At the close of his life the duke again invoked the aid of Sforza against the Venetians, and immediately afterwards terminated his tumultuous reign.

With him ended the dynasty of the Visconti in Milan. Without possessing the personal courage which distinguished many of his family, Filippo Maria Visconti was endowed with no common share of that keenness and subtlety which are frequently more efficacious than wisdom and valour. He has been praised for the clemency and generosity with which he treated his prisoners—no inconsiderable merit in an age full of perfidy and cruelty, when, the gates of the prison once closed upon the captive, his fate remained matter of doubt and secrecy. We have already seen his extraordinary moderation, when Alfonso of Aragon and his noble companions were led prisoners to Milan; nor are there wanting other examples of the magnanimous conduct of Filippo. But a dark stain rests upon his fame, from his unfeeling treatment of his duchess Beatrice, whose alliance and ample fortune had rendered him the most signal service, when in the outset of his reign he was beset by poverty and threatened with expulsion from his paternal inheritance. An improbable accusation of adultery with one of his domestics stretched the devoted victims on the rack; and condemned by the ravings of her imputed paramour the duchess suffered an ignominious death. In the last moments of her life Beatrice maintained a calmness which can seldom be commanded by guilt, and died with such solemn assertions of her innocence as seem to have convinced all save her obdurate husband (1418).

The House of Sforza

Though the Milanese had long acquiesced in the hereditary succession of the Visconti, Sforza beheld his hopes endangered by the spirit of liberty which now prevailed in Milan. The late duke left no less than four wills, each constituting a different successor, and bequeathing the duchy according to the momentary dictates of his capricious temper. By one of these, Bianca, the wife of Sforza, was declared his heir; but the people rejected this attempt to dispose of them and the state, and with loud shouts of[259] “liberty!” opposed the pretensions of Francesco. Despairing of present success, Sforza wisely resolved to temporise, and his views were soon favoured by the proceedings of Venice. Anxious to enrich herself with the spoils of Milan, that republic immediately commenced aggressions on the Milanese territory, and Sforza was called upon by the citizens to lead their army against the invaders. But while Sforza affected to defend the interests of Milan, he secretly negotiated with Venice; and at length, renouncing his allegiance to the Milanese, attacked their domains, and with the aid of the Venetians carried his conquests to the very gates of the city. In the height of his success Sforza found his prospects endangered by the perfidious policy of his ally. The senate, alarmed at his approaching power, now thought fit to intimate the necessity of suffering Milan to remain free under its new republican government, and even entered into a treaty with the Milanese for the preservation of their liberty and territory. The genius of Sforza triumphed in this emergency; he baffled the confederate hostility of Venice and Milan; and by a strict blockade of the city reduced the citizens to the last stage of famine. Within the walls a considerable party was ready to surrender into his hands; and the populace, maddened by hunger, anxiously besought their rulers to capitulate. An insurrection of a few plebeians drove the regents from the palace; and Sforza was received into the city with a burst of enthusiasm which saluted him by the title of duke of Milan.

For four years Sforza encountered the enmity of Venice, until the Peace of Lodi in 1454 put an end to their languid warfare. He governed Milan during sixteen years with prudence and moderation; and, already possessed of a splendid territory, he wisely abstained from risking his possessions by any wanton aggression upon the other states. He availed himself, however, of the internal commotions of Genoa, who in 1435 had revolted from Filippo Visconti, and now again placed herself under the dominion of Milan. He maintained the respect of the Italian, as well as foreign powers; rendered himself generally acceptable to his people; and peaceably transmitted his duchy to his posterity. In that age of treachery and perfidy, the means by which he had obtained his power left no stigma on his reputation; it was sufficient that his bad faith and dissimulation had been crowned with success.

On the death of Francesco Sforza, in 1466, he was succeeded by his eldest son Galeazzo Maria, a compound of ambition, lust, and cruelty. Contrary to the wishes of her brother Amadeus IX, duke of Savoy, he had espoused Bona, daughter of Duke Louis, and sister of Charlotte married to Louis XI, king of France. But the nuptial tie placed no restraint on his disorderly life; the dwellings of his subjects were perpetually invaded by his illicit passions,[260] and the honour of many noble families was violated by his amours. His savage disposition made him no less odious; and he delighted in aggravating the punishment of death by wanton and refined tortures. At length three young men of noble birth united in the design of destroying the tyrant. Carlo Visconti, Girolamo Olgiato, and Andrea Lampugnano had been educated under the same master, and imbibed, with the love of liberty, the dangerous lesson that the assassination of a tyrant confers immortal fame. Their patriotism, however, was not unmixed with personal motives, for all had been privately injured by the object of their vengeance. The bloody deed was accomplished on the festival of St. Stephen; Galeazzo fell beneath the daggers of the conspirators, as he entered the church of the Martyr between the ambassadors of Mantua and Ferrara. In the general confusion Olgiato effected his escape; but the other two were instantly put to death by the multitude. Nor did Olgiato long elude the pursuit of justice. His father, in horror at his guilt, refused him admission within his doors; and after a short concealment in the house of a friend he was dragged to execution, and died exulting in his ill-gained immortality.

The conspirators had believed that Milan would approve their murderous act, and rejoice in her liberation. But an indolent submission possessed the minds of the people, and the vices of their oppressor appear to have been forgotten in the emotions produced by his miserable fate. The young son of the murdered duke was quietly acknowledged as his successor; and as Gian Galeazzo Maria had only attained his eighth year, his mother, Bona of Savoy, was recognised as regent during his minority. Aided by her minister and favourite, Cecco Simonetta, the duchess soon found herself sufficiently strong to counteract the sinister machinations of her husband’s brothers, who were anxious to wrest the government out of her hands. Sforzino, duke of Bari, Lodovico Sforza, surnamed Il Moro, the Moor, Ottaviano, and the cardinal Ascanio were compelled to quit Milan—the first being banished to his duchy, the second to Pisa, and the cardinal to Perugia; whilst Ottaviano, in attempting his escape, was drowned in the river Adda.c

FOOTNOTES

THE AFFAIRS OF PISA AND GENOA

In the disputes between the emperors and the popes, the Pisans followed the Ghibelline, the Genoese, the Guelf party. Both republics, too, late in the twelfth century, often replaced their consuls by podestas, and both were the frequent theatre of strife between the nobles and the populace. In Genoa, from 1190 to 1216, there appears to have been a struggle whether consuls or the podesta should govern the state, for during that period we find both, and, from 1216 to 1252, podestas alone. But, as the popular assemblies were still convoked whenever any important decision was to be made, and as the podesta, like the consul, was elected, the citizens still retained some of their ancient privileges. These, however, were not the only changes in the form of the executive; the podesta was sometimes replaced by the capitano, sometimes by the abbate, and at other times by the anziano—dignities of which we find frequent instances in the thirteenth century. But none appear to have enjoyed a long lease of power; often the very next election, according as faction or prejudice or love of novelty prevailed, ended their name with their administration; they could, however, hope that in the perpetually revolving wheel of change their dignity might again attain the summit—a hope which was almost sure to be realised. “At present,” says the archbishop of Genoa, who wrote towards the close of the same century, “we have an abbot and elders; whether we must soon change them or not, no one can tell; but at least let us pray God that we may change for the better, so that we are governed well, no matter whether we obey consuls, or podestas, or captains, or abbots.”

The good prelate proceeds to illustrate this truth by quaintly comparing the different forms of government to three keys, one of gold, one of silver, the third of wood; though the material of these, he observes, is very differently estimated, one is in reality as good as another, provided it does its office, that of opening. The first capitano surnamed Boccanera, owed his election to the mob, whom he had gained by flattery, and whom he persuaded to be no longer governed by tyrannical podestas; his election was for ten years; a council of thirty-two elders was elected to aid, or, rather, to obey him; a judge, two secretaries, and twelve lictors were constantly to await his orders; and a knight and fifty archers were appointed his body-guard. A man with powers so ample was sure to become a tyrant; and we accordingly find that in the second year of his administration a conspiracy was formed to depose him. This time he triumphed; but when half his term was expired, a confederacy of the nobles, aided by the populace, compelled him to retire into private life.

Into the endless domestic quarrels of the Guelfs and Ghibellines at Genoa and Pisa, and the consequent alliances—alliances of momentary duration—contracted in both cities with the emperor, the pope, or the king of Naples, we cannot enter; and if we could, nobody would thank us for the wearisome detail. As in Lombardy, the nobles were often banished, and as often recalled. The year 1282 is more famous in the annals of both republics, as the origin of a ruinous war between them. Pisa, with her sovereignty over Corsica, Elba, and the greater part of Sardinia; with her immense commerce, her establishments in Spain, Asia, and Greece, her revenues and stores, had little to gain and much to lose, by contending with a poor and perhaps braver power. If Genoa had less wealth, she had equal enterprise, an equal thirst for gain, and equal ambition. Where so much rivalry existed, it would easily degenerate into discord; and petty acts of offence were followed by general hostilities. In one of their expeditions the fleet of the Pisans was almost destroyed by a tempest; a second, by the enemy; a third, after a bloody conflict off the isle of Meloria, was all but annihilated, and the loss in killed was five thousand, in prisoners eleven thousand. These prisoners the victors refused to ransom and for a reason truly Italian—that the retention of so many husbands in captivity would prevent their wives from renewing the population, and that Pisa must in consequence decline. This infernal policy succeeded; when, after sixteen years’ warfare, peace was made, scarcely a thousand remained to be restored to their country.

But Pisa had other enemies; all the cities of Tuscany, with Florence at their head, entered into an alliance with Genoa to crush the falling republic, which had rendered itself so obnoxious by its Ghibelline spirit. In this[263] emergency, convinced how feeble must be the divided efforts of its municipal magistrates, Pisa subjected itself to the authority of an able and valiant noble, Ugolino della Gheradesca, who dissipated the formidable confederacy, and, by some sacrifice of territory, procured peace. Not less distracted was the internal state of the republic, now the Ghibellines, now the Guelfs being called by the populace to usurp the chief authority. Though the Genoese had less domestic liberty, since they were more frequently under the control of some one tyrant, they were in general much more tranquil. In 1312 they submitted to the emperor Henry of Luxemburg, but evidently with the resolution of throwing off the yoke the moment he repassed the Alps; while the submission of the Pisans was sincere. Two years afterwards the capitano or dictator of the latter reduced Lucca, and humbled the Florentines; but such was his own tyranny that the people expelled him. His fate is that of all the petty rulers of Italy; yet, though after this expulsion the forms of a republic were frequently restored, the spirit was gone; there was no patriotism, no enlightened notions of social duties; violence and anarchy triumphed, until the citizens, preferring the tyranny of one to that of many, again created or recalled a dictator. The war of the Pisans with Aragon for the recovery of Sardinia was even more disastrous than that with the Genoese. It ended in the loss of that important island, which had formed a considerable source of their resources.

The evils, indeed, were partly counterbalanced by the conquest of Lucca, which had sometimes proved a troublesome neighbour; but nothing could restore them to their ancient wealth or power, so long as they were menaced by so many rival states, especially those of Tuscany, and so long as they were distracted by never-ceasing domestic broils. In fact, at one time, their existence depended only on the imperial support; at another, on the dissensions or misfortunes of their enemies.

The little republic of Genoa, which, in imitation of Venice, had forsaken its podestas, abbots, elders, and captains for a doge and senate—but a senate much less aristocratic than that of the ocean queen, was scarcely more enviable, though doubtless more secure. This republic, too, had its pretensions to Sardinia, and consequently a perpetual enemy in the Aragonese kings. Often vanquished, it implored the protection of the king of Naples or the duke of Milan, according as policy or inclination dictated. It had, however, a better defence in its natural position, in the barren rocks which skirted it to the north and east, and in the valour of its sailors; and when, as was sometimes the case, its protectors became its masters, the foreign garrison, being cut off from supplies both by sea and land, was soon compelled to surrender.

But Pisa had no such defence; and in 1369 she had the mortification to see the republic of Lucca restored to independence by the emperor Charles IV. On this occasion the Lucchese remodelled their constitution; they retained their anziani, or elders, with a gonfalonier at their head; both, however, in the fear of absolute sway, they renewed every two months. Ten anziani, with the gonfalonier, formed the seigniory, or executive government, and were assisted by a council of thirty-six, called boni homines, and elected every six months. Over these was the college of 180 members, who were annually elected.b

Of all the republics, Genoa, in the fourteenth century, was accounted the most wealthy and powerful. But after throwing off the yoke of Robert, king of Naples, the city was agitated by continual commotions, in which the Guelfs and Ghibellines were alternately expelled. The institution of an[264] officer called the abbot of the people, like that of the Roman tribunes, had been intended to repress the power of the nobles; and the attempt to dispense with this office was resisted by the commons, who chose for their abbot, Simone Boccanera, a nobleman of the Ghibelline party, and a zealous advocate for the popular cause. But his noble descent impelled him to decline an office which had hitherto been held by only one of the people; and the multitude overcame his scruples by changing the title of abbot to that of duke, or doge, in imitation of the Venetians (1339). A select few of the popular leaders were nominated as his council; but the authority of Boccanera appears to have been almost unlimited. He governed with firmness and discretion, and according to Giovanni Villani a conspiracy of the nobles was promptly and capitally punished. His reign was, however, suspended in 1344; the members of the noble families, Doria, Spinola, Fieschi, and Grimaldi reassembled in the suburbs, and the doge avoided a violent deposition by a secret retreat to Pisa. After some confusion, a nobleman, Giovanni da Murta, was proclaimed doge; but as renewed disorder convulsed the city, the contending factions agreed to submit their differences to Lucchino Visconti, and the rapacious arbitrator was prevented by death alone from occupying the distracted state.

After the death of Da Murta, a new doge was set up; but disorder within and defeat without induced Genoa to throw herself under the protection of Giovanni Visconti. On the death of that prelate she reassumed her independence; her original doge was recalled, and continued to rule until 1363. But from the death of Boccanera the state was torn by dissension for upwards of thirty years, and two rival families of the mercantile class, the Adorni, adherents of the Guelfs, and the Fregosi of the opposite party, alternately furnished Genoa with an ephemeral sovereign. In 1396 the reigning doge, Antonio Adorno, by an act of miserable impolicy, surrendered the state to Charles VI, king of France, who deputed the government to a renowned captain, Jean le Maingre, marshal of France, and lord of Boucicault. The stern severity of this approved soldier was manifested on his entry into the city; and two of the most refractory citizens, Battista Boccanera and Battista Luciardo, were at his command led out to execution. Boccanera’s head was severed from the body, and his companion was about to suffer, when a new commotion in the assembled crowd distracted the attention of the French guard. The criminal seized the propitious moment, and darting into the dense throng was lost among the multitude; but his place was instantly supplied by the officer whose neglect had permitted his escape, and whose head immediately rolled upon the ground at the mandate of the peremptory Boucicault. For eight years the Genoese were overawed by his rigorous government; but his absence favouring insurrection, the French lieutenant was assassinated, and the state was delivered from the yoke of France.

But the spirit of independence was extinguished in Genoa, and she withdrew herself from the bondage of France to acknowledge Filippo, duke of Milan, as her master. Revolt from Milan and reinstatement of the doge were immediately followed by his deposition, and a new form of government was introduced by creating ancients and captains of the people. After a few months’ duration this government was dissolved, and Raffaello Adorno was created doge, and permitted to retain his power for nearly four years. A new struggle between the rival families once more convulsed the city; and whilst Alfonso, king of Naples, threatened Genoa with a most formidable invasion, a grievous pestilence raged among her citizens. In this complication of distress, the doge, Pietro Fregoso, with the approbation of the principal[265] citizens, craved the protection of Charles VII, king of France; and the city being by treaty surrendered to that monarch was occupied in his name by John of Anjou. The union of the families Adorni and Fregosi enabled the Genoese to expel the French; an Adorno was for a moment raised to the duchy and then expelled by the Fregosi, and a Fregoso had scarcely mounted the throne ere he was displaced by his kinsman, the archbishop Paolo. The odious character of Paolo Fregoso threatened a speedy dissolution of his authority; and the keen-eyed Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, already regarded Genoa as his own. He obtained from Louis XI of France the cession of his rights; he secured a strong party amongst the discontented citizens; and a general revolt in April, 1464, enabled his friends to proclaim him lord of the city.

During the residue of the reign of Francesco and that of his son, Galeazzo Sforza, Genoa continued in repose; but the murder of the latter prince incited the family of Fieschi to attempt a revolt from Milan. The storm was, however, lulled by the presence of Lodovico and Ottaviano Sforza, the young duke’s uncles; and their creature Prospero Adorno was accepted by the people as their doge under the authority of the duke of Milan. A few months dispelled his authority; and Battistino Fregoso was proclaimed independent sovereign of Genoa.[17]

In the midst of these perpetual commotions, a new and singular association of private individuals took place in Genoa. The bank, or company, of St. George had been instituted about 1402, when a long course of warfare had drained the public treasury. The contributions, therefore, of private citizens were called in requisition, in security for the repayment of which the customs were pawned by the republic; whilst each lender participated in the receipts in proportion to the extent of his advances.

The administration of their affairs required frequent meetings of the body of creditors; and the palace over the custom-house being assigned to them, they organised a particular form of government. A great council of one hundred was established for deliberation on their common weal; whilst the supreme management of their affairs was entrusted to a directory of eight. The good order of their little government insured their prosperity; the increasing necessities of the republic required new advances; and the public lands were mortgaged to the bank, until that body became possessed of nearly all the territory appertaining to the state of Genoa. To the regulation and defence of this extending territory the company alone were attentive; and, without any interference on the part of the commonwealth, an annual election of their own officers furnished an adequate supply of governors and magistrates for the provinces. They wisely abstained from taking part in the unceasing changes in the government; and, alike indifferent to the cry of Adorni or Fregosi, were intent only on preserving their own independence, and securing from the successful ruler the due recognition of their[266] laws and privileges. The administration of this society formed a striking contrast to that of public affairs. Instead of tyranny, corruption, and licentiousness, the bank of St. George presented a model of order, good faith, and justice; and the people obtained thereby an influence in the state, which more effectually preserved their liberty than all their violent attempts to depress the aristocracy.

Naval Exploits

Notwithstanding the perpetual dissensions of Genoa, she long continued to maintain her naval renown; and whilst the plebeians were intent on the depression of the nobles, the family of Doria were conducting her fleets to the discomfiture of her enemies. Like her ancient rival Venice, she had long been acquainted with the Levant; and Galata and Pera, the suburbs of Constantinople, were the reward of services rendered to the Greek emperor.

After the peace of 1299 the Venetians, though strengthened by the alliance of the Aragonese, abstained for a time from renewing the contest; and the first attack upon the galleys of Genoa was punished by defeat and disgrace. A breach of faith on the part of Venice was resented by the seizure of all her traders in the Black Sea; but Genoa paid dearly for this aggression, and a signal defeat by the Venetians off Caristo nearly annihilated her fleet. In 1351 a powerful armament sailed from Venice under the command of Niccolo Pisani, one of the most distinguished commanders of his age; and a fierce encounter in the Dardanelles covered the sea with the fragments of the hostile vessels. But severely as the Genoese suffered on this occasion, they might fairly claim the victory, since the destruction of the Venetian and Aragonese galleys was more than double the loss which they themselves sustained; and Pisani admitted the defeat by leaving his enemies in possession of the scene of action. Even the seat of empire was threatened by the conquerors; and the Greek emperor averted their vengeance by the expulsion of his former allies from the capital. But the pride of Genoa soon afterwards sustained a severe check; her fleet, under Antonio Grimaldi, was surprised off Cagliari on the anniversary of the defeat of Caristo; and the loss of more than thirty ships and forty-five hundred prisoners reduced the public to despair. This disaster, however, was amply compensated by a splendid victory in the following year, achieved over Pisani by Andrea Doria and his nephew Giovanni; and to the bold and spirited manœuvre of the latter the success of the day was chiefly to be attributed. Whilst the Venetians lay within the harbour of Sapienza, a little island of the Morea, the younger Doria dashed into[267] the port with twelve galleys, and, placing his force between the shore and the enemy, commenced a furious assault. Meanwhile the residue of the Genoese fleet attacked the galleys of Pisani in front, and most complete victory was obtained. The Venetians suffered an enormous loss of both vessels and men; and amongst the six thousand prisoners led in triumph to Genoa was the renowned commander Niccolo Pisani.

The Genoese thus triumphant swept the coast of Barbary, assaulted and plundered Tripoli, and sold the city to a wealthy Saracen for 50,000 pieces of gold. A more important conquest was achieved eighteen years afterwards. At the coronation of Peter de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, a dispute for precedence arose between the consuls of Genoa and Venice, which the Cypriote authorities decided in favour of the latter. Irritated by this award, the Genoese attempted to assert their right by violence; and the Cypriotes, resenting an affront offered in the royal presence, flew to arms, and immediately put the offenders to death. Not content with this summary vengeance, they set on foot a general massacre through the island, and a single Genoese was left alive to convey the heavy tidings to the republic. A new fleet was forthwith sent from Genoa, commanded by Pietro Fregoso, and the island of Cyprus offered little resistance to the invaders. Nor can they be accused of want of moderation, since only three lives were sacrificed to the manes of their slaughtered countrymen. The king was restored to liberty, and even permitted to retain his title; but a yearly tribute of 40,000 florins was exacted by the conquerors.

A new offence soon kindled another war with Venice. So low had the Greek Empire fallen that the Genoese had taken upon themselves to dethrone the emperor Joannes Palæologus in favour of his son Andronicus, who promised them in return the island of Tenedos. But the deposed tyrant was supported by their ancient rival, who took advantage of the imperial schism to get possession of Tenedos; and Genoa, strengthened by the alliance of Louis, king of Hungary, Francesco da Carrara, lord of Padua, and the patriarch of Aquileia, declared war against the Venetians. The fleet of Genoa was commanded by Luciano Doria, that of Venice by Vittore Pisani. Fortune from the commencement favoured the Genoese; and in the month of May, 1379, a great and sanguinary battle off Chioggia was attended by a brilliant victory. The death of their admiral Doria, who fell in the first onset, inspired them with vindictive fury; and fifteen Venetian galleys and upwards of a thousand prisoners fell into the hands of the conquerors. Many of these were inhumanly butchered by the Genoese in revenge for the fall of Doria; whilst the defeated Pisani, returning to the capital, was plunged into a dungeon by the implacable government of Venice.

A reinforcement under Pietro Doria now enabled the Genoese to follow up their victory, and the island and city of Chioggia were captured with immense loss to the Venetians. The utmost consternation prevailed throughout Venice, and the most humiliating terms of peace were proposed by the disheartened senate. But the haughty Doria rejected all terms of accommodation. “Never, by the faith of God!” he exclaimed, “never, my lords of Venice, shall ye have peace till we have bridled those brazen horses of St. Mark’s; when they are bitted, ye may dare to talk of peace.”

Nothing can more strongly mark the consternation of the Venetian government than their yielding on this trying occasion to the outcries of the populace. In obedience to their urgent call Pisani was delivered from his dungeon and once more placed in command of the armament. Despair prompted the most vigorous preparations for defence; great rewards were[268] promised to all whose exertions should be most conspicuous; and nobility was to be the reward of the thirty citizens who should pre-eminently distinguish themselves in preserving the state. The great aim of Pisani was now to blockade the Genoese fleet, which had taken up its station within the port of Chioggia. This daring enterprise was achieved with incredible labour and severe loss on the part of the Venetians. By sinking vessels laden with stones at the mouths of the several channels which led into the Lagune, he rendered all egress impossible.g

The circumstances of the two combatants were thus entirely changed. But the Genoese fleet, though besieged in Chioggia, was impregnable, and their command of the land secured them from famine. Venice, notwithstanding her unexpected success, was still very far from secure; it was difficult for the doge to keep his position through the winter; and if the enemy could appear in open sea, the risks of combat were extremely hazardous. It is said that the senate deliberated upon transporting the seat of their liberty to Candia, and that the doge had announced his intention to raise the siege of Chioggia, if expected succours did not arrive by the 1st of January, 1380. On that very day, Carlo Zeno, an admiral, who, ignorant of the dangers of his country, had been supporting the honour of her flag in the Levant and on the coast of Liguria, appeared with a reinforcement of eighteen galleys and a store of provisions. From that moment the confidence of Venice revived. The fleet, now superior in strength to the enemy, began to attack them with vivacity. After several months of obstinate resistance, the Genoese, whom their republic had ineffectually attempted to relieve by a fresh armament, blocked up in the town of Chioggia, and pressed by hunger, were obliged to surrender. Nineteen galleys only out of forty-eight were in good condition, and the crews were equally diminished in the ten months of their occupation of Chioggia. The pride of Genoa was deemed to be justly humbled; and even her own historian Stellah confesses that God would not suffer so noble a city as Venice to become the spoil of a conqueror.

Each of the two republics had sufficient reason to lament their mutual prejudices and the selfish cupidity of their merchants, which usurps in all maritime countries the name of patriotism. Though the capture of Chioggia did not terminate the war, both parties were exhausted, and willing, next year, to accept the mediation of the duke of Savoy. By the Peace of Turin, Venice surrendered most of her territorial possessions to the king of Hungary. That prince and Francesco da Carrara were the only gainers. Genoa obtained the isle of Tenedos, one of the original subjects of dispute—a poor indemnity for her losses. Though, upon a hasty view, the result of this war appears more unfavourable to Venice, yet in fact it is the epoch of the decline[269] of Genoa. From this time she never commanded the ocean with such navies as in days gone by; her commerce gradually went into decay; and the fifteenth century, the most splendid in the annals of Venice, is, till recent times, the most ignominious in those of Genoa. But this was partly owing to internal dissensions, by which her liberty, as well as glory, was for a considerable space of time suspended.

THE AFFAIRS OF VENICE[18]

While Genoa lost even her political independence, Venice became more conspicuous and powerful than before.

The great Council of Venice, as established in 1172, was to consist of 480 citizens, equally taken from the six districts of the city, and annually renewed. But the election was not made immediately by the people. Two electors, called tribunes, from each of the six districts, appointed the members of the council by separate nomination. These tribunes, at first, were themselves chosen by the people; so that the intervention of this electoral body did not apparently trespass upon the democratical character of the constitution. But the great council, which was principally composed of men of high birth, and invested by the law with the appointment of the doge, and of all the councils of magistracy, seem, early in the thirteenth century, to have assumed the right of naming their own constituents. Besides appointing the tribunes, they took upon themselves another privilege; that of confirming or rejecting their successors, before they resigned their functions.

These usurpations rendered the annual election almost nugatory; the same members were usually renewed, and though the dignity of councillor was not yet hereditary, it remained, upon the whole, in the same families. In this transitional state the Venetian government continued during the thirteenth century; the people actually debarred of power, but a hereditary aristocracy not completely or legally confirmed. The right of electing, or rather of re-electing, the great council was transferred, in 1297, from the tribunes, whose office was abolished, to the council of Forty; they ballotted upon the names of the members who already sat, and whoever obtained twelve favouring balls out of forty retained his place. The vacancies occasioned by rejection or death were filled up by a supplemental list formed by three electors, nominated in the great council. But they were expressly prohibited, by laws of 1298 and 1300, from inserting the name of anyone whose paternal ancestors had not enjoyed the same honour. Thus an exclusive hereditary aristocracy was finally established. And the personal rights of noble descent were rendered complete in 1319, by the abolition of all elective forms. By the constitution of Venice as it was then settled, every descendant of a member of the great council, on attaining twenty-five years of age, entered as of right into that body, which of course became unlimited in its numbers.

These gradual changes between 1297 and 1319 were first made known by Sandi.i All former writers, both ancient and modern, fix the complete and final establishment of the Venetian aristocracy in 1297.

But an assembly so numerous as the great council, even before it was thus thrown open to all the nobility, could never have conducted the public affairs with that secrecy and steadiness which were characteristic of Venice; and without an intermediary power between the doge and the patrician multitude the constitution would have gained nothing in stability to compensate for the loss of popular freedom. The great council had proceeded, very soon after its institution, to limit the ducal prerogatives. That of exercising criminal justice, a trust of vast importance, was transferred in 1179, to a council of forty members annually chosen. The executive government itself was thought too considerable for the doge without some material limitations. Instead of naming his own assistants or pregadi, he was only to preside in a council of sixty members, to whom the care of the state in all domestic and foreign relations, and the previous deliberation upon proposals submitted to the great council was confided.

This council of pregadi, generally called in later times the senate, was enlarged, in the fourteenth century, by sixty additional members; and as a great part of the magistrates had also seats in it, the whole number amounted to between two and three hundred. Though the legislative power, properly speaking, remained with the great council, the senate used to impose taxes, and had the exclusive right of making peace and war. It was annually renewed, like almost all other councils at Venice, by the great council. But since even this body was too numerous for the preliminary discussion of business, six councillors, forming, along with the doge, the seigniory, or visible representative of the republic, were empowered to despatch orders, to correspond with ambassadors, to treat with foreign states, to convoke and preside in the councils, and perform other duties of an administration. In part of these they were obliged to act with the concurrence of what was termed the college, comprising, besides themselves, certain select councillors, from different constituted authorities.

It might be imagined, that a dignity so shorn of its lustre as that of doge, would not excite an overweening ambition. But the Venetians were still jealous of extinguished power; and while their constitution was yet immature, the great council planned new methods of restricting their chief magistrate. An oath was taken by the doge on his election, so comprehensive as to embrace every possible check upon undue influence. He was bound not to correspond with foreign states, or to open their letters, except in the presence of the seigniory; to acquire no property beyond the Venetian dominions, and to resign what he might already possess; to interpose,[271] directly or indirectly, in no judicial process, and not to permit any citizen to use tokens of subjection in saluting him.

As a further security, they devised a remarkably complicated mode of supplying the vacancy of his office. Election by open suffrage is always liable to tumult or corruption, nor does the method of secret ballot, while it prevents the one, afford in practice any adequate security against the other. Election by lot incurs the risk of placing incapable persons in situations of arduous trust. The Venetian scheme was intended to combine the two modes without their evils, by leaving the absolute choice of their doge to electors taken by lot.

It was presumed that, among a competent number of persons, though taken promiscuously, good sense and right principles would gain such an ascendency, as to prevent any flagrantly improper nomination, if undue influence could be excluded. For this purpose, the ballot was rendered exceedingly complicated, that no possible ingenuity or stratagem might ascertain the electoral body before the last moment. A single lottery, if fairly conducted, is certainly sufficient for this end. At Venice, as many balls as there were members of the great council present were placed in an urn. Thirty of these were gilt. The holders of gilt balls were reduced by a second ballot to nine. The nine elected forty, whom lot reduced to twelve. The twelve chose twenty-five by separate nomination. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine; and each of the nine chose five. These forty-five were reduced to eleven, as before; the eleven elected forty-one, who were the ultimate voters for a doge.

A hereditary prince could never have remained quiet in such trammels as were imposed upon the doge of Venice. But early prejudice accustoms men to consider restraint, even upon themselves, as advantageous; and the limitations of ducal power appeared to every Venetian as fundamental as the great laws of the English constitution do to ourselves. Many doges of Venice, especially in the Middle Ages, were considerable men; but they were content with the functions assigned to them, which, if they could avoid the tantalising comparison of sovereign princes, were enough for the ambition of republicans. For life the chief magistrates of their country, her noble citizens forever, they might thank her in their own name for what she gave, and in that of their posterity for what she withheld.

For some years after what was called the closing of the great council by the law of 1296, which excluded all but the families actually in possession, a good deal of discontent showed itself among the commonalty. Several commotions took place about the beginning of the fourteenth century, with the object of restoring a more popular regimen. Upon the suppression of the last, in 1310, the aristocracy sacrificed their own individual freedom along with that of the people, to the preservation of an imaginary privilege. They established the famous Council of Ten, that most remarkable part of the Venetian constitution. This council, it should be observed, consisted in fact of seventeen, comprising the seigniory, or the doge and his six councillors, as well as the ten properly so called. The Council of Ten had by usage, if not by right, a controlling and dictatorial power over the senate and other magistrates; rescinding their decisions, and treating separately with foreign princes. Their vast influence strengthened the executive government, of which they formed a part, and gave a vigour to its movements, which the jealousy of the councils would possibly have impeded. But they are chiefly known as an arbitrary and inquisitorial tribunal, the standing tyranny of Venice. Excluding the old council of Forty, a regular court of criminal[272] judicature, not only from the investigation of treasonable charges but of several other crimes of magnitude, they inquired, they judged, they punished, according to what they called reason of state.

The public eye never penetrated the mystery of their proceedings; the accused was sometimes not heard, never confronted with witnesses; the condemnation was secret as the inquiry, the punishment undivulged like both. The terrible and odious machinery of a police, the insidious spy, the stipendiary informer, unknown to the carelessness of feudal governments, found their natural soil in the republic of Venice. Tumultuous assemblies were scarcely possible in so peculiar a city, and private conspiracies never failed to be detected by the vigilance of the Council of Ten. Compared with the Tuscan republics, the tranquillity of Venice is truly striking. The names of Guelf and Ghibelline hardly raised any emotion in her streets, though the government was considered in the first part of the fourteenth century as rather inclined towards the latter party. But the wildest excesses of faction are less dishonouring than the stillness and moral degradation of servitude.j

On the death of Giovanni Dandolo in 1289, the long delay of the electors to name a successor furnished an excuse to the populace to resume their ancient privilege; and they tumultuously hailed Jacopo Tiepolo as their doge. But Tiepolo, wisely declining an honour thus irregularly conferred, withdrew for a time from Venice, and the Forty-one at length fixed on Pietro Gradenigo, a nobleman extremely obnoxious to the people. With him originated a measure which forever shut out the commonalty; and the Forty, who were entrusted with the annual election of the council, were enjoined to re-elect all such members of the old council as were not declared unfit by twenty-nine voices. Not to render the people desperate, three commissioners were appointed to make supplemental lists of such other citizens as might be fit to fill vacancies caused by the rejection of the former, or the death of existing members of the council; which lists were in like manner subject to the approval of the Forty. But as three commissioners were appointed by the council itself, it was easy to foresee that this body would be careful to name such persons only as favoured their own order; and lest the electors should err on the popular side, a decree was soon afterwards made, by which they were forbidden to insert any person in their lists, who himself or whose ancestor had not formerly belonged to the great council. In course of time the commissioners were wholly suppressed; the council was declared permanent; and all who could prove themselves descended from one of this body were entitled to inscribe their names in the Golden Book, and to enter this noble assembly at the age of twenty-five.

The Tiepolo Conspiracy, and the Council of Ten

These changes were not effected without some movement on the part of the people; and the suppression of a feeble conspiracy, and the punishment of its leaders, did not deter others from plotting against the power of the aristocracy. A numerous band of citizens, headed by Baiamonte Tiepolo (son of Jacopo), was formed, and extensive preparations were made for the subversion of the government. But detection having prematurely driven the conspirators into open revolt, they were easily overwhelmed and destroyed in the narrow streets of Venice; and this new conspiracy furnished an excuse for erecting that fearful tribunal—the Council of Ten. This formidable assembly, though originally only a temporary measure, was afterwards, in 1325, declared permanent. It was invested with arbitrary and[273] almost unlimited powers; under pretence of watching over the safety of the republic, the Ten gradually assumed the government of the state, made peace and war, disposed of the finances, and even abrogated the proceedings of the great council. Their spies and emissaries pervaded every quarter of the city; they seized, imprisoned, or put to secret death, without responsibility to any higher authority; whilst no rank was secure from their machinations. Even the doge himself might tremble at their vigilance and severity; and the fate of Marino Falieri, thirty years after the permanent institution of this council, forms a striking event in the annals of this extraordinary oligarchy.g

The Story of Marino Falieri

Falieri, who had passed his fifteenth lustre, had married a young lady of great beauty and elegance, and the union was naturally, perhaps inevitably, accompanied by suspicions on the part of the doting husband. They chiefly fell on the president of the old or “criminal forty” (so called to distinguish that tribunal from two others of less dignity, which took cognisance of minor matters), whom he somewhat rudely expelled from his house at an entertainment he had given to the nobility. The president felt the insult the more deeply, as his attentions had not been devoted to the wife of the doge, but to one of her women. In the impulse of the moment he wrote on the throne of the doge a verse which, whether founded on truth or not, he knew must sorely wound him, as reflecting on his honour and the fidelity of his consort. It ran:

(Marino Falieri of the beautiful wife; others enjoy her, he maintains her). Falieri discovered the writer, and denounced him to the public advocates; but, contrary to his expectation, those men, considering the offence a venial one, carried the cause, not before the tremendous Council of Ten, but the Criminal Forty—the very tribunal of which the accused was president. The culprit met with favour; he was condemned only to one month’s imprisonment.

From this moment the doge indulged uncontrolled animosity against the tribunal, and even the whole order of nobles, whom he regarded as the betrayers of his honour. It was followed by the hope of revenge. He knew the dissatisfaction entertained by both the plebeians and the less privileged nobles towards the government, and he artfully endeavoured to foment it. His reply to a citizen who one day complained before him that a wife or daughter had been dishonoured or insulted by a member of the grand council, produced great impression: “You will never obtain justice. Have not I myself been insulted, without the hope of adequate redress?” In a short time he organised a conspiracy, the object of which was to open the grand council to the nobility and the election of the members of all the public functionaries, of the doge himself, to the citizens at large. The evening before the day fixed for its execution, it was denounced by one of the conspirators; others were arrested and tortured; numbers were executed.b

But the demands of justice were not yet satisfied, and the law claimed a larger sacrifice, a nobler victim. The process against Marino Falieri followed. On the morning of Thursday, the 16th of April, 1355, the old man was led from his apartments, attired in his robes of state, to the great council[274] chamber, where he was confronted with his accusers and his judges. The bench was composed of the six privy councillors, nine of the decemvirs, and a giunta of twenty sages, which had been specially convoked to meet the extreme gravity of the occasion. The latter had a deliberative voice merely, and no vote.

The articles of arraignment were no sooner read than Falieri made a candid and unreserved confession. He avowed all. He stigmatised himself as the worst of criminals, and as one deserving of the highest penalty which it was in the power of the laws to inflict. Without further preamble it was then put to the vote, whether the accused should suffer death. Five of the privy council and the nine decemvirs recorded their suffrages in the affirmative. It was a majority of fourteen to one. One voice alone, it seemed, asked mercy for him who had in the eyes of the aristocracy aggravated the crime of treason by fraternising with tradesmen and plebeians. After the delivery of the verdict the condemned was led back to the palace. It had been ordered that “Marino Falieri, being convicted of conspiring against the constitution, should be taken to the head of the grand staircase of St. Mark’s, and there, being stripped of the ducal bonnet and the other emblems of his dignity, should be decapitated.” The sentence was one which could not fail to strike an icy chill into every heart. But it was received by the doge with a placid equanimity worthy of the hero of Lucca.

The execution took place on the following morning at the hour of tierce. Giovanni Mocenigo, the senior privy councillor, followed by his five colleagues, the decemvirs, the advocates of the commune, and the other great officers of state, advanced to meet his serenity, who had been conducted under guard from his own apartments to the great council saloon. Forming a circle round him, they escorted him to the fatal spot which had been selected for the horrid catastrophe. A stupendous concourse of persons of all conditions had congregated to witness the spectacle. A gloomy and awful stillness reigned throughout the Piazza. The doge, amid a silence in which a whisper or a sigh would have been audible, implored the forgiveness of his countrymen, and extolled the equity of the doom which he was about to undergo. He was then uncrowned and disrobed. A black cap was substituted for the biretta, and a cloak of the same colour was cast across his shoulders. At an appointed signal he laid his head on the block, and at a single stroke the executioner severed it from his body. Immediately after the removal of the latter, the doors of St. Mark’s were thrown open, and the crowd entered in wild disorder, eager to catch a glimpse of the mutilated corpse, which was there exposed to view preparatory to burial (Friday, April 17th, 1355).

Thus miserably perished, at the ripe age of seventy-seven, one of the greatest soldiers and statesmen whom Venice could boast; that same Falieri who during two and forty years of public services had earned as count of Valdemarino a splendid and enviable reputation. Such was the ignominious fall of a man whose versatile talents had enabled him to shine in every branch of official life, and whose uncontrollable passions brought his white hairs before the close of seven months from a throne to a scaffold. Falieri had survived most of his early friends, if not his domestic happiness; it was ruled that he should survive his honour also.

The ducal remains were interred without any mark of pomp at San Giovanni e Paolo, behind the monastery, and in the direction of the chapel of Santa Maria della Pace; and from a mixed motive of delicacy and pride the Ten directed their secretary to omit all direct allusions in the books of their transactions to his sentence and execution. The words, “Let it not be written” formed the sole clew afforded by the Misti to a great crime and a great tragedy. The effigy of Falieri found its place after the sepulture in the hall, where the portraits of all his predecessors were hung. It was not till twelve years posterior to the event which has been narrated that the Ten, by a decree dated the 16th of March, 1367, caused it to be cancelled, and a black crape arras to be substituted, surmounted by the words, “Hic est locus Marini Faletri decapitati pro criminibus.”

Three centuries had passed away, when some labourers digging near the spot accidentally exhumed a sarcophagus. The discovery did not at the moment attract much curiosity, but the sarcophagus was eventually opened, and it was then found to contain a skeleton with the skull placed between the knees. This peculiarity was designated to indicate that the person, whose spirit was once dwelling in the now uniformed clay, had died by the hand of the executioner; and if any doubt still remained, the half-defaced inscription on the urn served to show that the bones of the unhappy Falieri were there.k

Venetian Wars and Conquests

We have already earlier in this chapter told of the wars between Genoa and Venice, culminating in the humiliation of the former at Chioggia. The first success of Venice whetted the appetite of her people for further conquests. And the queen of maritime cities did not confine her aspirations to the scenes of her former victories.a

Her anxiety once more to display her banners upon terra firma induced Venice to lend her aid to Gian Galeazzo Visconti against the Carraras, under the promise of the restitution of Treviso, which she had lost during the war of the Chioggia. The bad faith of the lord of Milan would fain have defrauded the Venetians of their share of the spoil, had not dread of their power compelled their ally to be reluctantly honest in his spoliation. By their friendly demonstrations towards Caterina, the widowed duchess of Milan, the Venetians next obtained the cession of Vicenza, Feltre, and Belluno; and Francesco Novello da Carrara, who already counted Vicenza as his prey, was ever baffled in his hopes. His son-in-law, the marquis of Ferrara, was compelled to declare against him; and the citizens of Verona, worn out by siege and famine, opened their gates to the troops of Venice. This important acquisition was followed up by a succession of easy victories; the greatest part of the Paduan territory submitted without a struggle; and the capital itself, wasted by hunger and the plague, promised a speedy surrender. A last desperate sortie was repulsed with terrible slaughter; and treachery[276] opened the gates and admitted the forces of Venice. Carrara and his son Francesco Terzo had now no hope save in the clemency of the conquerors. They proceeded to Venice, were received with apparent cordiality, and immured in a dungeon. In this horrible vault they had the miserable satisfaction of embracing a son and brother, Jacopo da Carrara. After lingering nearly two months in this region of despair, the father was privately strangled in prison; and on the following day his two sons perished in a similar manner. Two brothers of this illustrious family still survived; of these, Ubertino terminated his life by sickness soon after the ruin of his house; and Marsilio expiated a rash attempt to regain Padua by a public execution in 1435. Thus by the destruction of the once potent families of Scala and Carrara, the tyrant of the Adriatic was predominant in Lombardy, and invested with a splendid territory, including Padua, Verona, and Vicenza. Fifteen years afterwards Friuli was wrested from the patriarch of Aquileia.g

An illustrious fugitive, Francesco Carmagnola, who arrived about this time at Venice, accomplished what Florence had nearly failed in, by discovering to the Venetians the project of the duke of Milan to subjugate them. Francesco Carmagnola had, by the victories he had gained, the glory he had acquired, and the influence he obtained over the soldiers, excited the jealousy, instead of the gratitude, of Filippo Maria, who disgraced him, and deprived him of his employment, without assigning any reason. Carmagnola returned to court, but could not even obtain an interview with his master. He retired to his native country, Piedmont; his wife and children were arrested, and his goods confiscated. He arrived at last, by Germany, at Venice; soon afterwards some emissaries of the duke of Milan were arrested for an attempt to poison him. The doge, Francesco Foscari, wishing to give lustre to his reign by conquest, persuaded the senate of Venice to oppose the increasing ambition of the duke of Milan.l

Francesco Carmagnola was amongst the first soldiers, if not the first captain of Italy, and well acquainted with all the troops, plans, secrets, and resources of Visconti, for his talents had recovered the duchy and he had long been that prince’s chief favourite and counsellor. Seeing Guido Torelli and others preferred before him, his enemies more heeded, and himself deprived of the Genoese government, he retired from court, but having secret notice, whether true or false, that Filippo intended to poison him, now fled to Venice and proved his sincerity, of which that government doubted, by this explanation. He also discovered many of Visconti’s secrets and his designs against Venice after the fall of Florence, most of which seem to have been corroborated by confidential letters of Visconti unfairly made use of by the Florentine government and sent to Ridolfi for that purpose.

A gentleman named Perino Turlo, who enjoyed the favour and confidence of Philip, was taken in an attack on Faenza, and being carried prisoner to Florence, there received his liberty accompanied by great attentions and flattery, and was finally dismissed (after declaring his belief that Philip wished the friendship of Florence) with an earnest entreaty to make peace between them. This was a scheme to ascertain Visconti’s real designs on Venice, in order to facilitate the pending negotiations with that state; but Perino soon returned with various propositions of peace which Philip, he said, most earnestly desired, and as a proof of his sincerity produced a carte-blanche besides several letters which the seigniory instantly despatched to Venice because they contained matter of infinite danger to that republic. Lorenzo Ridolfi lost no time in showing them, and the Venetians, seeing the liberal offers[277] therein made to Florence, the bold confidence of the Florentine ambassador in urging the league, the important communications and promises of Carmagnola, and the temptation of conquering Brescia which that captain had promised, determined to accept the alliance, and a treaty was completed early in 1426.

This league with Florence was to endure for ten years with conditions extremely favourable to Venice whose real sources of strength still lay in commerce, and whose geographical position gave her considerable advantages in treating with Florence, to whom her co-operation both in force and situation was of the last importance in a Lombard war. The Venetian territory in that province from its recent acquisition had not yet become an integral portion of her national strength; it was but a lucky addition to an already consolidated power—a power still rising, absorptive, and hitherto unweakened by expansion, which therefore might be again lost without much dismay, because no national interests had as yet taken root or identified themselves in any way with those provinces. But for Florence war with Milan was ever a matter of vitality, and especially after so many disasters; wherefore she eagerly consented to any conditions, and peace, truce, and war were now equally submitted to the fiat of that cunning and unbending aristocracy. Venice also made some jealous terms about the Alexandrian trade, was moreover to have every conquest that might be achieved in Lombardy, and Florence all those in Romagna and Tuscany not already belonging to the church. Sixteen thousand cavalry and eight thousand infantry were to constitute the minimum of the combined force, and strong armaments of galleys on the Main and flotillas on the Po were to act vigorously against Genoa and every other tangible point of Visconti’s territory. Pope Martin refused to join, but Siena followed Florence. Niccolo, marquis of Ferrara, accepted the command of the Florentines, and united with the league for the promised acquisition of Lugo and Parma if conquered. Amadeus, duke of Savoy, for his own especial objects, the lord of Mantua, and other Lombard seigniors all signed it, and Francesco, Count Carmagnola, was appointed generalissimo.

The Venetians alone brought into the field 8830 horse and 8000 foot, the Florentines 6110 of the former and 6000 of the latter at an expense of 4 and 3 florins a month respectively for every soldier of each arm. To oppose them, Filippo had 8550 horse and 8000 foot, his whole revenue amounting to 54,000 florins monthly. Other authors, and among them Cagnola, make the allied armies amount to much larger numbers and by the testimony of all there were full 70,000 of both hosts at Casa al Secco; but Cambi gives the name and following of each particular leader; those of Sforza, Piccinino, Pergola, and Tolentino being by far the most numerous of the private condottieri and equal to any of the sovereign princes.

War then commenced and Filippo withdrew his troops from Romagna; Carmagnola in performance of his promise marched directly on Brescia; by means of a secret understanding with the Avogadori family and other Guelfs all inhabiting one particular quarter of the city and all hating Visconti, he easily excited a revolt, and on the 17th of March, 1426, made such a lodgment there as immediately enabled him to lay close siege to the rest of the town. Brescia, one of the chief cities and most celebrated manufactory of arms in Italy, was then divided into three distinct fortified districts, each commanded by its citadel; and besides them a strong elevated castle which overlooked the whole.

At first Carmagnola was only master of the ground he stood on, but the battle soon began with all the fury of an assault and all the bitterness of civil[278] war until Francesco Sforza, who defended it, was forced to yield and the allies completed their lodgment. As this news spread to Milan and Florence, the whole force of war concentrated round Brescia; Arezzo and Romagna were soon cleared of troops, and reinforcements poured in from every quarter. One continued scene of war and blood, of fire, rape, and robbery attracted the attention of all Italy for eight successive months; so that, to use the words of Cavalcanti, “never was any tavern so deluged with water as this unfortunate city was with blood.” A ditch encompassed it so closely without that no succours could enter to mitigate the general suffering; within, nothing was heard but shrieks, weeping, and lamentation mingled with the shouts of struggling warriors and the clang of arms; with a masterly hand, almost incredible perseverance, and in face of the whole Milanese army led by the greatest captains of the day, did Carmagnola in a few months subdue the three citadels successively, and finally, aided by the Ghibellines themselves, in November, 1426, that almost impregnable castle, the last stronghold of Visconti, submitted to his arms. A well-directed artillery, which under the name of bombarde was now becoming common in sieges, materially assisted him, and the castle at the moment of its surrender is described as exhibiting the appearance of a porcupine from the innumerable arrows that covered its walls, all fixed in the seams of mortar; a fact that does more honour to the zeal than the training of Italian archers and crossbowmen. Thus fell Brescia, as much to the shame of the Milanese commanders as to the glory of Carmagnola, for its capture was admired as one of the greatest military exploits of that age and added a noble territory to the Venetian Republic.

Pope Martin, who in consequence of his alliance with Filippo had from that prince’s necessities recovered not only the papal cities in Romagna but others that never had legally belonged to the church, at last bethought himself of reconciling the belligerent states; and through his exertions and Filippo’s difficulties a general peace was signed at Venice on the 30th of December, 1426, by which Savoy retained possession of all her conquests on the Milanese state; Brescia and its territory remained to Venice; all places captured from Florence were restored and her merchants relieved by Filippo, as lord of Genoa, from the obligation hitherto imposed on them of embarking their English and French goods in Genoese bottoms. Milan was once more bound not to intermeddle with the affairs of Bologna, Romagna, Tuscany, or any state between that city and Rome, while Florence subscribed to the same conditions as regarded Bologna and that part of Romagna not subject to her sway.

To the great satisfaction of Florence this treaty was proclaimed early in 1427. She had up to the 9th of November with little or no advantage expended 2,500,000 florins, and her ordinary war expenses were estimated at about 70,000 a month. Upon this Giovanni Morelli, a cotemporary historian, exclaims: “Make war, promote war, nourish those who foment war; Florence has never been free from war, and never will until the heads of four leading citizens are annually chopped off upon the scaffold.” So true was it, as it would appear, if any credit may be given to cotemporary writers though influenced by the prevalent spirit of faction, that private gain was the great aliment of foreign and domestic war in Florence.

But the ink was scarcely dry on the treaty when Filippo, either repenting of what he had done or pursuing his secret intentions, with the certainty of forever losing Brescia if he executed the treaty, invited Carmagnola in person to take possession of Chiari, a fortified town forming a strong outwork to that city on the road to Milan. Niccolo Tolentino, suspecting treachery, dissuaded his general from doing so notwithstanding orders from the Venetian[279] seigniory, and his counsel was soon justified by information that the detachment sent on this duty was surrounded and cut to pieces within the walls. Visconti followed up this by the equipment of a large flotilla on the Po, the augmentation of his army with disbanded soldiers from the allies, and a sudden renewal of hostilities. The astonished league almost immediately took the field with what troops remained, the general having orders to make fierce war while a strong armament was preparing to meet the enemy afloat and attack all vulnerable points on the left bank of the Po.

The first encounter was at Gottolengo. Carmagnola had assembled his military cars (which in those days were an indispensable portion of all armies for the rapid movements of infantry), and filling them with crossbowmen attempted to surprise the enemy. The Milanese, however, were too experienced for this and mustering their whole force attacked him unexpectedly while in some confusion on his march, and nearly defeated the whole army; Carmagnola, however, rallied his people, and after restoring order began an obstinate contest.

The heat was excessive, the dust intolerable, the visors of helmets, the eyes and nostrils of the combatants were all choked up so that respiration became almost impossible. The Milanese were supplied with wine and water by the female peasantry, but such was the dust and obscurity that friend and foe seemed alike unknown and many of the allies received refreshment even from the hands of their enemies. Numbers fell from their horses overpowered by heat and dust; the plain was strewed with lances, shields, and wounded men; horses were galloping wildly about the field, some with saddles, some without; others had them turned under their bellies, and many men threw off all their armour to escape suffocation. Piccinino was conspicuous beyond the rest in knightly daring, and his lance’s point was felt throughout the throng; for this battle excepting amongst the infantry seems to have been a confused mass of single combats, more like the mêlée of a tournament than a scientific fight of disciplined soldiers; but the footmen, in firm well-ordered battalions, with lowered spears, charged and withstood the charges of the men-at-arms, killing both them and their horses. When the struggle had lasted some hours and the allies were ready to give way, the marquis of Mantua, hitherto deceived by false reports from a cowardly fugitive, came suddenly up with his followers and dashing forward saved all the cavalry and restored the day. The retreat was simultaneously sounded on both sides; each host had been three times broken, all but the infantry, who seem by their discipline to have preserved the rest.

The ducal forces throughout these two campaigns were smaller in numbers than the allies, but better soldiers and with a greater number of more able commanders; yet they were unsuccessful for want of a common chief, while Carmagnola was implicitly obeyed, and all his advantages were gained by bringing superior numbers against the weakest points of the enemy. To remedy this, Visconti appointed young Carlo Malatesta of Pesaro as his captain-general; a youth of no experience, but whose high rank and family reputation were likely to restrain the continual bickering of the chiefs.

Victories of Carmagnola

Meanwhile Carmagnola, angry at the somewhat disgraceful affair of Gottolengo, conceived the idea of surprising Cremona—a thoroughly Guelfic city and disaffected to every Ghibelline authority; with this view he took up a strong position at Sommo close to the town, entrenched and fortified his[280] camp with a thousand war-cars as was his custom, and trusted to those within the city for ultimate success. Filippo, for the above reasons, became alarmed; wherefore, assembling a large force and instantly embarking on the Po, he at once occupied and saved Cremona. A council of war was of opinion that the enemy should be attacked because Cremona secured their own safety in case of defeat, and a victory would almost insure the fall of Mantua. To protect that place the army was encamped in an open space about half a mile wide, contained between the city walls and the surrounding ditch, called Le Cerchie di Cremona, the defence of which involved that of the city itself; but as the circuit was large, a continual stream of armed peasantry came pouring in at their prince’s call, ranged under various flags and banners and augmenting the aggregate of both armies to full seventy thousand combatants. The allies were superior in the number of regular troops, the Milanese in experience and discipline, and held themselves fully equal to their antagonists independent of the peasantry; these, however, in the unsettled state of that time and country well knew how to handle their weapons though despised by the condottieri, who represented them to Filippo as useful to fill up ditches and as convenient marks for exhausting the adverse missiles and sparing the regular troops; however, their vast numbers would, it was said, excite fear, “the true harbinger of defeat.”

Battle being resolved on, a corps of light-armed troops was sent forward to begin, but these were quickly driven in on the main body by Taliano Furlano, one of the adverse chiefs who, seeing the Milanese cavalry already formed and the whole country as far as the eye could reach covered with banners, instantly turned to give the alarm. Carmagnola was soon in his saddle and personally directing the defence of a narrow pass protected by a broad and deep ditch, which the enemy would be compelled to win ere his main body could be attacked. This was quickly lined with veteran soldiers and the road within it flanked by a body of eight thousand infantry armed with the spear and crossbow, and posted in an almost impenetrable thicket closely bordering on the public way. This pass was called La Casa-al-Secco, and Agnolo della Pergola first appeared before it with his followers, supported by a crowd of peasantry; the ditch was deep, broad, and well defended, and an increasing shower of arrows galled his people so sorely that he at once resolved to use the rural bands as a means of filling it. Driving the peasant multitude forward, he ordered the regular troops to put every luckless clown to death who turned his face from the enemy; so that these wretches with the spear at their back and the crossbow in front fell like grass under the scythe of the husbandman. But they were more useful in death; by Agnolo’s command both killed and wounded, all who fell, were rolled promiscuously into this universal grave, covered up with mould and buried all together.

Here were to be seen distracted fathers with unsteady hand shovelling clods upon the bodies of dead and wounded sons; sons heaping earth on their fathers’ heads; brothers covering the bloody remains of brothers; uncles, nephews; nephews, uncles—all clotted in this horrid compost! If the wretches turned, a friend’s lance or dart went instantly through their bodies; if they stood, an enemy’s shaft or javelin no less sharply pierced them; alive, they filled the pit with sons and brothers, dead or wounded, with themselves! They worked and died by thousands; even the very soldiers that opposed them at last took pity and aimed their weapons only at armed men. “And as a reward for this,” exclaims Cavalcanti, “God lent us strength and courage.” Nevertheless, so many were thus cruelly sacrificed that the moat[281] was soon filled to the utmost level of its banks with earth and flesh and human blood, and then the knights giving spurs to their steeds dashed proudly over this infernal causeway! It was now that the fight commenced: fresh squadrons poured in on every side and all rushed madly to the combat, for on this bloody spot the day was to be decided. “Here,” says Cavalcanti, “began the fierce and mortal struggle; here every knight led up his followers and did noble deeds of arms; here were the shivered lances flying to pieces in the air, cavaliers lifeless on the ground and all the field bestrewed with dead and dying! Here too was seen young Carlo Malatesta, himself and courser cased complete in mail, and a golden mantle streaming from his shoulders! Whoever has not seen him has not seen the pride of armies! Here was store of blood, and lack of joy and fear and doubt hung hard on every mind! Nothing was heard but the clang of arms, the shock of lances, the tempest of cavalry, and the groans and cries and shouts of either host! The sun was flaming, the suffering dreadful, the thirst intolerable; everything seemed to burn, all conspired against the wish of men, but the Cremonese women brought refreshments to our enemies.”

The whole battle appears to have been concentrated in this pass, so that numbers made but little difference on either side; nevertheless the Milanese chivalry were severely handled by the veterans in the wood, who kept up a continual discharge of arrows on horse and man from the moment the ditch was passed, or else ran in with their lances and speared them. As many died from exhaustion and suffocation as from blows, for the battle was fought early in July and lasted from two hours after sunrise until evening; others it is said expired from the stench of carnage rapidly corrupted by excessive heat. Carmagnola, forced by circumstances into the thickest fight, was unhorsed, and a hard conflict between those who tried to save and those who wished to take him prisoner soon concentrated all the knightly prowess of both armies round his person; he was remounted, and dust and confusion saved him more than once, as they did Niccolo Piccinino, besides other leaders on both sides, from being recognised and captured. The squadrons charged and recharged in dust and darkness; no standards could be seen; the voice alone revealed a friend; and when a retreat was sounded whole troops of cavalry ranged themselves under adverse banners in total ignorance of their own position. One attack was made by a strong detachment upon the baggage and for a while placed the allies in great danger; but being finally repulsed with the loss of five hundred prisoners a retreat was sounded; the captives were equal, yet the victory of Casa-al-Secco was fairly claimed by Carmagnola.

Filippo previous to this battle had endeavoured to balance his ill success by a naval victory; the Venetian armament on the Po had been extremely active, and to check it he placed a strong squadron under the orders of Pacino Eustachio of Pavia with instructions to lose no time in bringing the enemy to action. The latter, commanded by Francesco Bembo, did not shun the encounter, which took place near Brescello; but losing three galleons in the commencement, Bembo, doubtful of consequences, with that rapid and bold decision that marks a superior mind, suddenly discontinued the contest and withdrawing all the crossbowmen from his remaining galleons manned them with the crews of others armed only with spears, swords, spontoons, battle-axes, and short arms of every description. These he placed in the van, while the galleons thus emptied were manned with crossbowmen alone and stationed close in the rear of his first line, with rigid orders under the penalty of death to kill either himself or any other man that should turn from the enemy. He then renewed the attack.

With the Milanese in front, in their rear the levelled crossbows ready to shoot into the first vessel that gave way, and themselves armed only with short weapons, the Venetian sailors were compelled either to fight hand to hand with their enemies or be transfixed without resistance by their own or adverse missiles. The Lombards were thus rendered the less formidable of the two, and the closer the fight the more safety, because free from the arrows of either squadron; thus excited the galleons were resolutely run alongside those of the enemy and lashed there, and the battle became more fierce and obstinate; the Venetian mariners, chiefly Greeks and Slavonians, are described as displaying all the courage, sagacity, and savage fury of those nations.

The scene was appalling; no room for tactics, no hope in flight; man encountered man with the eye and hand of death; the struggle was personal, unrelenting, resolute; a struggle for existence, not for victory; the Venetians, pressed by a double danger, had no other hope; the Greeks of Crete and Negropont with the Slavonian crews performed such deeds as have been rarely equalled and never yet surpassed. Springing with the force of tigers on their prey it many times happened that when the Italian spear had pierced a Slavonian body the wounded man would seize and draw himself forward on the slippery staff until he grappled his enemy, and then both rolled struggling into the stream below. Again, two running each other through at the same moment and sternly following up their thrust would close and wrestle as long as life endured, or fall while yet writhing into the bloody Po; for that great stream, full and broad and ample as it was, became strongly crimsoned. Pacino at last gave way, and with a few as yet ungrappled galleys made good his flight, but left fourteen captured vessels in the hands of Venice.

After the battle of Casa-al-Secco Carmagnola, who as Cavalcanti asserts was now at the head of fifty thousand fighting men, laid siege to Casalmaggiore on the Po and recaptured Bina which Sforza had surprised; he then reduced the former and both armies cautiously manœuvred, narrowly watching each other’s motions until the beginning of October, when the allies were besieging Pompeiano, a town situated about six miles from Brescia on the high-road to Crema. While Malatesta was absent with Filippo, the Milanese captains had so placed their army as to impede the enemy’s progress without risking a general engagement, but when Carlo returned he posted himself between Macalo (now Maclodio) and the allies, with an intention to succour the besieged. The two camps only four miles asunder were separated by what then was an extensive swamp, now a fertile plain; what was then fetid black and stagnant pools full of reeds and thorns, and swarming with snakes and every loathsome reptile, now abounding in corn and vines and mulberries. The high-road from Orci Novi on the Oglio to Pompeiano and Brescia ran like a causeway through this waste and passed by a wooden bridge over a channel of deep water that connected the opposite marshes. Adjoining the swamp[283] and bridge one side of the road was flanked by an extensive wood, so thick and wild and full of savage beasts that both men and domestic cattle shunned it. Just at the bridge-head the road entered a sort of enclosed space or basin of solid earth in the midst of the marshes, a sort of trap from which no army once entered and cut off from the bridge could hope to escape except by the destruction of a superior enemy.

Niccolo Tolentino, a leader of great influence, having examined this ground, advised Carmagnola to occupy the position while he and his friend Bernardino with a strong division of the army concealed themselves in the wood on the other side of the bridge and awaited Carlo’s advance, who it was supposed would run headlong into the trap. This suggestion was followed; the ambuscade was posted in the wood that night, and the other troops were under arms at daylight. Carlo Malatesta on the other hand, whether for the reasons mentioned by Corio or a wilful determination to fight, was on his march by dawn of day; he soon crossed the bridge and entered the trap with loud shouts of “Viva il Duca! Viva il Duca!” Carmagnola had marshalled his army in the shape of a crescent and slowly retired before him, but still deepening his centre as if fearful of the encounter. When he heard that all had entered, he exclaimed, “They are caught,” and from a rising ground shortly addressed his people before the battle.

The instant that the enemy’s rear was well over the bridge and engaged with their antagonists, Bernardino darted like lightning from the wood and seized it at the head of a thousand horse; he was rapidly followed by Tolentino with a much larger force, but leaving the latter to defend the bridge he snatched up a heavy and well pointed lance, and with two hundred men-at-arms dashed deep into the Milanese rear with loud cries and great confusion. The two horns of the crescent then rapidly closed in; Carmagnola charged in front; the crossbows played unceasingly from every thicket; “San Marco,” “Duca,” and “Marzocco” resounded through the field. “The shouts of men, the neighing of horses, the shock of lances, the tempest of swords was so great,” says Cavalcanti, “that the loudest thunder might have rolled above unheeded. The wild beasts fled in terror through the woods and in these infernal swamps many swarms of serpents were seen rustling through the reeds at the unwonted uproar! O reader, think how cruel must have been this conflict when so many animals, enemies to our nature, fled in so wild affright! All was terror and distraction; Niccolo held steadily to the bridge; many were driven into the marshes or dragged by their stirrups through them; the flights of arrows were sometimes so dense as to obscure the sun, and this deadly archery did infinite mischief; the air itself seemed changed and terrified, and this great multitude was full of groaning, blood, and death!” Every hope of victory at length vanished and the Milanese broke, surrendered, and fled in all directions. Carlo Malatesta and eight thousand prisoners laid down their arms, but, strange to say, almost all were then or subsequently permitted to escape by Carmagnola; and this first sowed the seeds of Venetian jealousy.

Guido Torelli, Piccinino, and Francesco Sforza escaped, and by the next morning all but four hundred prisoners had obtained their liberty; this produced strong remonstrances from the Venetian commissaries, upon which Carmagnola sent for the remaining captives and said to them, “Since my soldiers have given your comrades their liberty I will not be behind them in generosity; depart, you also are free.” This battle was the climax of Carmagnola’s glory: whether he was unwilling to reduce his old patron too low, or was secretly influenced by the desire of peace and the recovery of his wife[284] and children who were in Visconti’s hands, or by less honourable motives, seems uncertain; but his subsequent efforts were insignificant. There is no doubt, says Poggio, that he could that day have destroyed Filippo, if he had retained the prisoners who were the flower of that prince’s army; but according to the custom of modern soldiers they remained as lookers-on, intent only on dividing the booty, and let the men-at-arms go free.

None of this was lost on the Venetians; but not a reproach was heard, not a sentence uttered, no sign of displeasure reached his ear; he could still be useful, was adding bit by bit to their conquests, and as yet in too formidable a position to be struck; on the contrary, as was their usual custom when meditating the sacrifice of a victim, more deference was shown him, more respect paid him; but he was not forgotten.

Death of Frescobaldi; the War Ended and Renewed

The liberated army of Milan was soon remounted, equipped, and in the field; for most of these battles involved the waste of more money than blood, as dead men paid no ransoms; and Visconti had ample resources. He nevertheless became alarmed at his actual position, and sought new strength by rousing the emperor Sigismund against Venice, by marrying his daughter Maria to the duke of Savoy, and by stirring up the poor remnants of the Carrara and La Scala families to agitate Padua and Verona. He met these difficulties with an able head and a bold countenance, but was in fact a strange character and differing according to cotemporary writers from all other men. No stability, no confidence, no belief, no firmness of purpose; mutable as the wind, no regard to promises, unsteady in his friendships, and prone to sudden antipathies against those who were apparently his dearest friends; cunning, sagacious, vain of his own judgment, despising that of others; whimsically pacific and warlike by turns; fond of a solitary life, he was rarely visible but governed through his ministers and temporary favourites, and thence no doubt proceeded many of his worst misfortunes.

A slight check before Genoa, more important from the heroic death of Tommaso Frescobaldi than from any other injury, in some degree damped the joy of Florence for this recent victory. Frescobaldi had distinguished himself as Florentine commissary in the Aretine district by an able and vigorous conduct under very trying difficulties and a total neglect of him by the government; nevertheless he perseveringly withstood the Milanese forces until the siege of Brescia relieved him. Indignant at this treatment he personally and boldly reproached the Ten of War with their conduct, and in no measured terms. Niccolo d’Uzzano tried to soothe him and was respectfully heard; but Vieri Guadagni so impatiently rated him as to be told by Tommaso that nothing but his high official dignity was a protection from personal chastisement. Niccolo, who fully appreciated the worth of Frescobaldi, reproved Vieri for his intemperance, and that citizen was soon after sent as commissary to conduct the war against Genoa, where, for a while, his vigour and ability were no less conspicuous than before. At last Fregoso and the Florentines were defeated in an attempt to enter Genoa; and Tommaso, who fought to the last, after all were routed was wounded and made prisoner. The governor, a stern and cruel man, promised him life, liberty, and reward if he would divulge his government’s secrets and say who within the city of Genoa were in league with Campo Fregoso, but the alternative of death and torture if he refused. To this Frescobaldi firmly answered: “Obizzino, if for my silence on the subject of state[285] secrets thou wilt put me to death, abandon all hope of knowing those things that duty to my country and constancy of purpose, even did I know them, would prevent my revealing; and, as I have no hope of mercy from thee, so thou needst not expect any disclosures from me, for even if I were informed I would not tell thee.” He was instantly put to the torture, his wounds broke out afresh in the agony, but he died without uttering a syllable. A noble example for his living descendants!

Florence now wished earnestly for peace because she could no longer expect to gain anything by war, and a continually augmenting expense was exhausting her resources; the more equal action of the Catasto promoted this wish because the rich and great now bore the principal burden. They again argued, and rightly too, that if war continued, Filippo must lose his state, which Venice, not Florence, would gain by the very conditions of the league, and thence with augmented power become more formidable than Visconti himself, for there would then be none but Florence to oppose her. Naples, ruled by a weak, licentious woman, was distracted; the pontiff would not move; the emperor would be shut out by Venice, who held the keys of Italy, and France was far too distant; better, it was once more repeated, to have an unenduring enemy than an everlasting and powerful neighbour. Venice had now acquired a taste for Italian conquest, and the petty acquisitions of Carmagnola were still adding to her territory; but her suspicions were awake and she finally consented to treat, while Visconti was really anxious for peace in consequence of his recent overthrow. The sincerity of all parties soon produced its effects and the cardinal of Santa Croce at last restored tranquillity by accomplishing the signature of a treaty at Ferrara about the middle of April, 1428, after nearly five years of constant hostilities. The cost of this long and ruinous war, according to Cavalcanti, amounted to 3,500,000 florins—according to Macchiavelli, 3,050,000.

The Florentines gained nothing by it but a heavy debt and the institution of the Catasto; the Venetians, in addition to Brescia, gained part of the Cremonese state with Bergamo and its territory as far as the Adda, which now became their western boundary. Thus, says Cavalcanti, by the operation of wicked citizens our people were loaded with poverty, the Venetians with riches and territory; and pride and covetousness was the cause of all.

But the peace was not for long. The Florentines attacked Lucca; Piccinino came to its aid, and the general war recommenced. No less than fourteen towns revolted in favour of Piccinino during one night, all sending their keys, and generally imprisoning the Florentine authorities; yet amidst the sharp oppression and barbarity of the time, it is refreshing to find that some of the latter were spared in consequence of their just government, and, with their families, carried safe across the frontier by the revolted people; but such exceptions only prove the general rigour of Florentine sway.

In this state of things Micheletto Attendolo of Cotignolo, a nephew of Sforza, was made captain of the Florentine army, to which some spirit was soon after restored by an advantage gained at Colle against Count Alberigo da Barbiano, Piccinino’s successor by Bernardino degli Ubaldini and also by the gallant behaviour of Ramondo Mannelli and Papi Tedaldi, which cast still greater credit on the Florentine arms. Stung with a late defeat on the Po, where they were completely routed by a Genoese admiral, the Venetians sent a squadron to the Tuscan coast and Riviera of Genoa to revenge this injury; they however seem to have been shy of coming to a general engagement until the Florentines, tired of such harassing inactivity, fitted out two galleys under the above officers and either forced or shamed them into an attack on[286] the Genoese squadron. Principally by their own daring courage the latter were completely beaten near Portofino, and their admiral Francesco Spinola and eight galleys captured. But long ere this Niccolo Piccinino had ridden triumphant over most of the Florentine territory, capturing or destroying town after town from Pontremoli to the gates of Arezzo, which would also have fallen had he not unaccountably stopped to besiege the little fortress of Gargonza on his march. This unchecked career of victory riveted his favour with Filippo Visconti, while it raised the jealousy of Niccolo Tolentino, who was fed by that prince on promises alone; wherefore the latter quitted Milan in disgust and engaged with the Florentines, who lent him to the pontiff with two thousand followers, and the consequence of this defection was Piccinino’s recall to defend Lombardy now threatened by the league. Pope Martin V’s decease in February, 1431, brought joy to Florence which during all his reign he had never ceased to hate, and the election of Gabriel Condelmieri, cardinal of Siena and a Venetian, who assumed the pontificate as Eugenius IV, was scarcely less satisfactory. His first measure was an attempt to restore tranquillity; but this was done with so decided a leaning towards Florence as to disgust the Sienese, Visconti, and all her numerous enemies.

War therefore became certain, and the league between Florence and Venice was more closely riveted; but Siena, in concert with Genoa, both of whom had long been favouring Lucca and were encouraged by Piccinino, soon broke into open war; she commenced hostilities under Visconti’s general Alberigo, and by means of Genoa seduced the seignior of Piombino, a recent ward of the Florentines, to take up arms against them.

The incursions of these neighbours in Val d’Ambra increased Florentine difficulties, and an attempt was made to engage Francesco Sforza; but true to his own interest he was bought off by the promise of Visconti’s infant daughter Bianca in marriage.

To cope with him and Piccinino, Carmagnola, notwithstanding his strange conduct in the late war, was again placed at the head of the Venetian armies, and he advanced into the Cremonese state, but was defeated with great loss in a most terrible and bloody battle by Sforza on the 6th of June, 1431, at Soncino on the banks of the river Po.

The Great Naval Battle on the Po

A flotilla consisting of one hundred vessels of all descriptions was equipped on the Po, and, under Niccolo Trevigiano, moved straight on Cremona; Visconti had also prepared his squadron under the command of the Genoese admiral Grimaldi, or, as some say, Pacino Eustachio of Pavia, who had formerly suffered a defeat—probably both were employed; but Venice was too quick, and excelled the Milanese fleet in numbers, size,[287] and equipment, so that for some time they had command of the river. The hostile armaments ultimately met at Bina, near Cremona, and fought until night parted them, with the loss of seven Milanese galleys. Sforza and Piccinino, who had manned the squadron from their troops and feared an attack from Carmagnola during the next day’s fight, deceived the Venetian general by means of some pretended deserters who reported that they were preparing to attack him in the heat of the naval battle. Whether Carmagnola were really deceived, or, as the Venetians thought, had come unwillingly to war, is still unsettled; but he acted as if he were, and not only remained under arms all day but refused any succour to the admiral. Sforza and Piccinino on the contrary reinforced the fleet with almost all their troops, and next day, towards the end of June, the most obstinate naval battle then on record was the consequence.

The Venetian galleys took a position with their bows to the stream, and all chained together the better to resist it; the Milanese, less in number but crowded with men, bore gallantly down on their antagonists; both fleets were glittering with steel and rough with pikes and lances. The adverse admirals had a national hatred then far from extinct; the two Milanese generals served personally on board, inspiriting their troops as if on the field of battle; the defect of a weaker line of vessels was compensated by a stronger personal force on the side of Milan, while on that of Venice the last day’s success animated every breast to new and more daring courage.

Thus prepared, the fight began, and the struggle was long and fierce; but Grimaldi observed that the Po had risen during the night, and at that season was unlikely to remain so; he therefore watched its fall, and cheering his men to a little longer struggle seconded by the efforts of both generals, looked anxiously for the grounding of the large Venetian galleys, while his own lighter craft would still be afloat and able to attack them. All turned out fortunate; the stream began to fall, the water shoaled rapidly; the Venetians felt their galleys take the ground, and turning all their attention to this accident exposed themselves to the whole fury of Grimaldi who renewed the assault with double vigour. Sforza and Piccinino fought like private men; the latter was severely wounded in the neck and lamed for life, but all dashed boldly on to victory while the Venetians struggled for existence: their admiral’s galley at last struck, he himself escaping; but this was a signal of defeat, and Grimaldi remained the conqueror. About twenty-nine galleons and eight thousand prisoners were captured; the number of dead must have been immense, but is not recorded, and Venice was furious; yet the government looked in profound silence on Carmagnola with all the mystery of its nature; no reproach, not an outward sign was suffered to awaken his apprehensions; but a squadron immediately sailed to vindicate national honour on the Tuscan and Genoese coasts, the result of which has been already narrated.

On some erroneous suspicion of the Sienese, Count Alberigo was arrested and sent prisoner to Milan where the duke absolved him; but Bernardino, who had quitted the Florentines, succeeded and waged destructive war against them, while Micheletto remained so idle and indifferent, particularly in purposely neglecting a fair occasion of surprising Lucca, that Niccolo Tolentino was ordered to supersede him. This general had some immediate success, but receiving undue praise was imprudently tempted to attack Bernardino at a place called the Capanne in Val d’Elsa, where, at the moment of defeat, Micheletto came generously up to his rescue and routed the enemy with great slaughter.

The Revolt of Pisa; The Cruel Ruse of Baldaccio

This raised the public spirits; but meanwhile the whole rural population of Pisa revolted, and elected ten persons of a superior class with authority to govern and tax them for all the purposes of war, resolving to strike for Visconti while his forces were engaged in regular hostilities; besides which a strong body of rustic youth were completely armed and fought under their countryman Count Antonio da Pontedera, the most active of Visconti’s partisans. Thus in addition to foreign war an extensively organised rebellion pervaded the whole Pisan state, and these untrained clowns battled with such valour and bitterness as shows the excessive and universal detestation of Florentine rule, for no justly governed though conquered people would have fought so rancorously. “Like mad dogs, their bite is mortal,” said the men-at-arms: “we have not to grapple with village clowns, but with demons of hell.” Wherefore none of them were bold enough to meet this furious peasantry on equal terms; “unless,” says Cavalcanti, “it were those who loved rather the requiem of death than the pleasures of this world.”

Giovanni Fiesco, lord of Pontremoli, feeling the awkward position of his states, which were alternately the prey of both parties, now sold that town to Visconti; the war then became universal, malignant, destructive, and attended with far more than common horrors; there was no present mercy, and a dismal prospect for the future: famine stalked with withering footsteps over all the land; fear and suspicion lurked in every eye; and town and country, hamlet and village, castle and cottage, were promiscuously overwhelmed in one vast flood of unutterable woe.

The condition of Pisa was lamentable: Giuliano di Guccio was the Florentine captain or governor; Giuliano de’ Ricci the archbishop; both of them men of stern, determined, and implacable natures, and the city was pining from want. In this state, and probably fearful of a siege, Guccio issued a hard command, “which for him was extreme cruelty and for others tears.”

All the women, and their young and innocent children, without distinction, were sternly driven from the town and their own homes. “This unjust command was obeyed by the wretched victims, whose bitter cries drew tears of pity even from the depths of the earth. Alas, what a sight to behold these poor defenceless women and their nurslings thus cast forth: some with an infant on each arm and on the back behind, other little creatures clinging to their mothers’ skirts, naked and barefoot; and thus they hastened along tripping and weeping with the pain of their tender feet, and crying out with streaming eyes and uplifted faces, ‘Where are we going to, mother?’ and making all beholders weep to hear their sobbing voices and infantile questions, while the wretched women answered, ‘We are going where our own evil fortune and the cruelty of perverse men are sending us. O earth! Why art thou so hard-hearted as to sustain a life which compared to death is sharpness? O profound abyss, send forth thy messengers and let them drag us to thy dark recesses, for thy bowels are sweeter than honey when placed beside the bitterness of man! From some of us they have torn our husbands, from some brothers, from others fathers; and now they cast us out desolate among strange contending people, and we know not where to go! O God, provide for thy creatures and punish us according to our sins, proportion the punishment to the crime, and vouchsafe that support which will give us patience to bear this unmitigated woe.’” Uttering such lamentations they wandered towards Genoa but finally spread in all directions, and settled particularly about Porto Venere and Pontremoli.

The archbishop also had his share of this and other cruelties of a similar nature; the times made people hard, but it becomes a priest’s duty to try and soften them rather than ride by night, as this prelate is described in the memoirs of his own family, on a powerful war-horse, armed cap-à-pie, patrolling the streets to watch over the public tranquillity; and if any wretch came under his suspicion in these nocturnal rounds a waxen taper was instantly lighted and death and confiscation of property, or else exile, submitted to his choice before it had finished burning.

But the soldiers outdid even the priests. Baldaccio d’Anghiari was one of those favourite generals of the Florentines that rendered war more terrible by his natural or acquired ferocity. “He called homicide boldness and resolution; the want of audacity he described as fearfulness at alarming and doubtful things; fidelity was in his mind to be always subservient to the cause he advocated, and sheer brutality was designated as virtuous audacity. By such maxims he was led, and led others after him with wonderful fortune to the most perilous achievements, and he often put to death the enemies of Florence with his own hand, leaving others to linger away a life which he had made worse than death itself.” This man, thus described by a contemporary, took Collegioli, and in a sally that he made from that place captured, amongst a crowd of prisoners, one named Guasparri da Lucignano, who in person exactly resembled himself; it gave rise to a strange notion which he hastened to realise thus.

Next morning Guasparri was attired in Baldaccio’s garments while his men were ordered to give the Milanese war cry “Duca! Duca!” as if in open mutiny, and follow it up by murdering the prisoner, whose bloody and disfigured corpse was thrown from a tower into the ditch below. The remaining prisoners were then set free and the body shown to them as Baldaccio’s, against whom the troops affected to have mutinied; they were ordered to disperse without delay and spread the news of this wicked man’s death through the country, telling how the mutineers held the castle in the duke’s name and waited for assistance. The story soon got abroad and the Pisans in multitudes, armed and unarmed, crowded to see the joyful spectacle, when suddenly the true Baldaccio appeared with his troops, surrounded them, and sent them all prisoners to Florence.

Such atrocities, committed, not only without remorse or necessity, but as it would seem for mere military pastime, gave the wars of this epoch a character of barbarous vindictiveness and horror that was calculated to lay a heavy load on the consciences of their authors; and if Cosmo de’ Medici were really the fomenter of the Lucchese War, all his good acts and good qualities were but a sorry exchange for the mass of human suffering that his ambition inflicted and entailed upon his country. That he could have prevented it there is no doubt had he only seconded Niccolo da Uzzano; that he, on the contrary, strongly advocated and supported it is equally certain; and that it was unjust and void of political necessity can scarcely be questioned. Wherefore, putting aside all minor accusations, he must stand convicted of advocating and fostering an unjust and unnecessary war, waged with unusual horror, atrocious in its character, and destructive in its consequences.

The Fall of Carmagnola

The Venetians, from their incipient discontent at Carmagnola’s conduct after the victory of Macalo, had become deeply suspicious of his fidelity since the naval action near Cremona (1432), and this was further strengthened[290] by his conduct at Cremona itself. His own troops had scaled the walls and taken a gate of that city, where they defended themselves for two whole days, vainly expecting assistance from Carmagnola who was near at hand; at length exhausted with fatigue they could hold out no longer and were all cut to pieces. He afterwards allowed Piccinino to capture two fortified towns successively, under his very eyes and without an effort to save them; so that, whether treacherous or not, Venice had good cause for doubt and dissatisfaction. Carmagnola’s military movements are said to have been always slow and well considered; nor was he in the habit of permitting inclination to overcome reason; but the Venetian commissaries attached to his army never ceased to urge him on with all the confidence of ignorance; he, who was beyond measure proud and never restrained his tongue, answered them in the manner of Hawkwood to Andrea Vettori: “Go and prepare your broad cloths and leave me to command the army.” “Foolish people,” said Carmagnola, “are you going to teach one that was born in battles and nourished in blood? Go, mount your senseless horses and visit the Caspian, then talk to me of its wonders, and in such things I will place implicit faith; but be now content to trust my experience, for I am not less expert on land than you are at sea. You Venetians are rich in enterprise and prosperity, and if you deem me faithless, why then, deprive me of office and I will seek my own fortune.” The Venetians were both nettled and alarmed at this reproof, particularly at the hint of seeking his own fortune, which indicated an intention of returning to the duke, or, what would have been equally bad, attaching himself to the emperor who was already in Italy.

At what time they first began to entertain the idea of putting him to death does not appear, but Cavalcanti asserts that it was continually in debate and the secret closely kept for eight months by an assembly of two hundred senators without a suspicion getting abroad or a word being divulged on the subject. Finally his fate was decreed and in a manner congenial to the time and country.m The incidents of its consummation are too suggestive not to be given in some detail.

On the 28th of March, Foscari, in concert with all the members of the privy council, proposed, at a meeting of the college, “that the pregadi be dissolved, and that the Ten do take the matter into their own hands.” The three chiefs of the Ten proposed as an amendment, that “this body be not dissolved until the present business be out of hand.” But, on a division, the first motion was carried by a majority of two, and the dissolution was[291] decreed, the decemvirs resolving to deal with the matter before them “circumspectly, but vigorously.” In consideration of the gravity of the question, the tribunal demanded the assistance of a giunta of twenty senators; and these supplemental members, with the doge and the privy council, raised the number to seven and thirty. When the organisation of the conclave was nearly complete, a technical irregularity having been discovered, the whole process was cancelled; and the point, having been again submitted with all the previous forms, was again solemnly confirmed. The senate was charged, upon pain of forfeiture of goods and heads, to abstain from divulging any of these transactions, and to keep the decemviral decree of the 28th a profound secret.

On the following day, Giovanni da Impero, secretary of the Ten, a person of discreet character, and, according to the historian Sanuto, “with a face as pale as a ghost,” was furnished with the ensuing written instructions:

On the 30th, in consequence of an afterthought that Carmagnola might penetrate the plans of the seigniory, and endeavour to escape, the necessary orders were forwarded to the governors and captains of the republic to second Da Impero, and if the general fled to any spot within their jurisdiction, to detain him till further notice; and a circular, superscribed by the doge, was sent to all the officers serving immediately under Carmagnola, bidding them not be surprised at these proceedings, assuring them of the earnest good-will of the government, and soliciting their implicit obedience to the directions, which they might receive through the authorities at Brescia and the proveditor-general, Francesco Garzoni, Cornaro’s successor.

Having arrived at his destination, secretary Da Impero closeted himself in the first instance with the podesta of Brescia and the proveditor-general, and afterward proceeded to the quarters of the count at or near Tercera. “After the customary salutations,” he presented his credentials, which were as follows:

Carmagnola, too glad to have an excuse for quitting camp, blindly fell into the snare, and immediately started with the secretary of the Ten for Venice. At Padua, he was received with military honours by the local authorities; and he passed one night there, sharing the bed of Federigo Contarini, captain of Padua, “his very good friend.” On the 7th of April he reached the capital. A deputation of eight nobles was in waiting to receive him. At the entrance of the palace, Da Impero vanished, and the personal followers of the count were turned back with an announcement that “their master will dine with the doge, and will come home after dinner.” But his other companions remained, and ushered him into the hall of St. Mark’s.

As he passed through, the general observed that the doors closed behind him. He at once inquired where the doge was, declaring his wish to have an audience, “as he had much to say to his serenity.”

Leonardo Mocenigo, one of the sages of the council, stepped up to him and told him that Foscari, having had an accident in descending the staircase, was confined to his room, and could not receive him till the morrow.

Carmagnola then turned, with a gesture of impatience, on his heel, and prepared to retrace his steps, remarking: “The hour is late, and it is time for me to go home.”

When he arrived at the corridor which led to the Orba prison, however, one of the nobles in attendance gently arrested his progress with, “This way, my lord.”

At this moment, guards appeared, surrounded Carmagnola, and pushed him into the corridor. The last words which he was heard to utter were: “I am lost!” and, as he spoke, a deep-drawn sigh escaped from him. During two days, he refused to take any kind of nourishment. The trial began on the 9th of April with all the forms recognised and required in criminal procedure by the constitution; the examination was conducted by a special committee of nine persons—Luca Mocenigo, privy councillor; Antonio Barbarigo, Bartolommeo Morisini, and Marino Lando, chiefs of the Ten; Daniele Vetturi, Marco Barbarigo, and Luigi Veniero, inquisitors of the Ten; and Faustino Viaro and Francesco Loredano, avogadors of the commune.

On the 11th, the accused, having declined to make any answers, was put to the question. It happened that one of his arms had been fractured in the service of the republic; and the committee consequently objected to the use of the estrapade. But a confession was wrung from him by the application of the brazier. During Lent, the process was suspended. At its recommencement a mass of documents was submitted for investigation, and numerous witnesses were summoned. Independently of the confession, which was possibly of indifferent value, damning evidences of treasonable connivance with Visconti were adduced. On the propriety of conviction there was perfect unanimity; but in regard to the nature of the sentence opinions were divided. The doge himself and three of the privy council proposed perpetual imprisonment. The three chiefs of the Ten, and the avogadors of the commune were, under all the circumstances of aggravated guilt, in favour of capital punishment. A resort was had to the ballot, and, of seven and twenty persons entitled to vote, nineteen voted for death.

On the 5th of May, 1432, Francesco di Carmagnola was led as a public traitor to the common place of execution. He wore a scarlet vest with[293] sleeves, a crimson mantle, scarlet stockings, and a velvet cap alla Carmagnola; a gag was in his mouth; his hands were pinioned behind him according to usage; and there between the “red columns,” in the sight of all Venice, his head was severed from his body at the third stroke of the axe.

Thus fell, in the prime of life, the victim of his own blind and perverse folly, a man of the first order of talents, and within whose reach the most splendid opportunities had so recently been. The government of Venice had tolerated his errors [says Hazlitt] until his criminality was beyond a doubt. When his death was decreed, his corruption and treason were already sufficiently glaring. Yet there were subsequent discoveries, which made his case infinitely worse, and which procured an instant mitigation of the penalty against Niccolo Trevisano and the other officers concerned in the loss of the battle of the Po; and some justice, however tardy and inadequate, was rendered to the sufferers by the open declaration of a member of the seigniory in the great council, “that, if the government had at the time been in possession of that exact information which was now in its hands, its treatment of Trevisano and his comrades would have been very different.” It has been said by a modern writer, that “Carmagnola seems to have acted in so equivocal a manner as would have made him amenable to any court-martial with little chance of absolution.”k

There are other writers, however, who have regarded the guilt of Carmagnola as by no means so clearly proved, and there are many who would be disposed to approve the judgment of Pignotti,o who says, “Probably he was guilty, but the public have always the right to term injustice any act which decides the life and honour of a celebrated man without seeing proofs of his guilt, or at least must consider them very doubtful, as no person who possesses understanding can discover any reasonable motive for concealing them. The proof of this,” Pignotti continues, “may be found in the criminal system of the most polite nations, in particular in that which has formed the glory and personal security of the English people.”

This perhaps is a slight over-statement; there may be reasons of state that make it desirable to give publicity to all the facts where treason is involved. And certainly it would seem as if the Venetian authorities must have felt very sure of their ground before they decided to do away with their captain-general, when no man of similar capacity was at hand to take his place. Nevertheless, the question of the justice of the execution of Carmagnola remains one of the unsolved problems of history.

Deprived of their great general, the Venetians were crippled, while the cause of the Visconti was proportionately strengthened. Nevertheless, the war was brought to a close not long after. Sigismund, who had been crowned king of the Romans at Milan, was attacked by the Florentines and shut up in Siena. Partly through his influence the duke of Milan was led to sign a peace with the allies in 1433. The Venetians remained in possession of Brescia and Bergamo.a

Venice and the Turks

A little later, by the ruin and exile of the last of the noble family of Polenta, the Venetians grasped the state of Ravenna (1441). In addition to these possessions in Italy, Venice continued to enjoy extensive territories in the East, besides Dalmatia and Durazzo; with other places in Arbani, she was mistress of the chief cities in Morea and many of the Ionian Islands. But the taking of Constantinople by the Turks and the captivity of the[294] Venetians settled in Pera, threatened her power in the East, and she felt no repugnance to enter into a treaty with the enemies of her religion. After the usual negotiations, terms were concluded between Sigismund and Venice; by which her possessions were secured to her and her trade guaranteed to her throughout the empire. In virtue of this treaty, she continued to occupy Modon, Coron, Napoli di Romania (Nauplia), Argos, and other cities on the borders of the peninsula, together with Eubœa (Negropont), and some of the smaller islands. But this good understanding was interrupted in 1463, when the Turks contrived an excuse for attacking the Venetian territory. Under pretence of resenting the asylum afforded to a Turkish refugee, the pasha of the Morea besieged and captured Argos; and the republic felt itself compelled immediately to resent the aggression.

A reinforcement was sent from Venice to Napoli, and Argos was quickly recaptured. Corinth was next besieged, and the project of fortifying the isthmus was once more renewed. The promontory which unites the Peloponnesus to the continent measures scarcely six miles across between the gulfs of Ægina and Lepanto. In the early ages of Greece the narrowness of this pass had suggested the possibility and expediency of fortifying it by a rampart; under the emperor Justinian, the ancient fortifications were renewed; and in 1413 a strong wall, named Hexamilion from its length, was erected by the emperor Manuel. Upon the present occasion, the labour of thirty thousand workmen accomplished the work in fifteen days: a stone wall of more than twelve feet high, defended by a ditch and flanked by 136 towers, was drawn across the isthmus; in the midst the standard of St. Mark was displayed; and the performance of the holy service completed the new fortification. But the approach of the Turks, whose numbers were probably exaggerated by report, threw the Venetians into distrust and consternation; and unwilling to confide in the strength of their rampart they abandoned the siege of Corinth, and retreated to Napoli, from which the infidels were repulsed with the loss of five thousand men.

The Peloponnesus was now exposed to the predatory retaliations of the Turks and Venetians; and the Christians appeared anxious to rival or surpass the Mohammedans in the refinement of their barbarous inflictions. The names of Sparta and Athens may create a momentary interest; the former, denoted by the modern town of Mistra erected near its ruins; the latter, the poor remains of the ancient city, but still one of the richest and most[295] populous of Greek possessions. In the year 1465 Sigismondo Malatesta landed in the Morea, with a reinforcement of a thousand men; and, without effecting the reduction of the citadel, captured and burned Mistra. In the following year, Vittore Capello, with the Venetian fleet, arrived in the straits of Euripus, and landing at Aulis marched into Attica. After making himself master of the Piræus, he laid siege to Athens; her walls were overthrown; her inhabitants plundered; and the Venetians retreated with the spoil to the opposite shores of Eubœa.

The victorious career of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, for a time diverted the sultan from the war in the Morea; but when Matthias was induced to change his antagonists, and, instead of warring against the Turks, to turn upon his Christian brethren of Bohemia, Muhammed II solemnly bound himself by oath to abolish the idolatrous religion of Christ, and invited the disciples of the prophet to join him in his pious design. In the beginning of the year 1470, a fleet of 108 galleys, besides a number of smaller vessels, manned by a force 70,000 strong, issued from the harbour of Constantinople, and sailed for the straits of Euripus. Never since the days of Xerxes had those seas been cumbered by so vast a multitude; and in the same place, whither the Great King had once despatched his countless fleet, the vessels of the sultan were anchored. The army landed without molestation on the island, which they united to the mainland by a bridge of boats, and immediately proceeded to lay siege to the city of Negropont. Muhammed caused his tent to be pitched on a promontory of the Attic coast, and thence surveyed the operations of his soldiery.

The hopes of the besieged were now centred in the Venetian fleet, which, under the command of Niccolo Canale, lay at anchor in the Soronic Gulf. But that admiral, whilst he awaited a reinforcement, let slip the favourable opportunity of preventing the debarkation of the enemy, or of shutting up the Turks in the island by the destruction of their half-deserted fleet and bridge of boats. By an unaccountable inactivity, he suffered the city to be attacked, which, after a vigorous resistance of nearly a month, was carried by assault; and all the inhabitants who did not escape into the citadel were put to the sword. At length that fortress was also taken; and the barbarous conqueror, who had promised to respect the head of the intrepid governor, deemed it no violation of his word to saw his victim in halves. After this decisive blow, which reduced the whole island, Muhammed led back his conquering army to Constantinople. The Venetian admiral was forthwith superseded by a new commander, and sent loaded with irons to Venice, where his countrymen, by an unaccustomed exercise of moderation, were content to spare his life, and punished his delinquency by perpetual exile.

This success encouraged the Turks to attack the Venetians in their Italian territory; and the pasha of Bosnia invaded Istria and Friuli, and carried fire and sword almost to the gates of Udine. In the following year, however, the Turks were baffled in their attempt to reduce Scutari in Albania, which had been delivered by the gallant Scanderbeg to the guardian care of Venice. Some abortive negotiations for peace suspended hostilities until 1477, when the troops of Muhammed laid siege to Croia in Albania, which they reduced to the severest distress. But a new incursion into Friuli struck a panic into the inhabitants of Venice, who beheld, from the tops of their churches and towers, the raging flames which devoured the neighbouring villages. A hasty muster of all their available forces was made to defend the capital; but the Turks, distrustful of their strength, or satiated with plunder, once more withdrew into Albania. The siege of Croia was soon after terminated by its[296] surrender and the massacre of its inhabitants; and the sultan, in person, undertook the reduction of the stubborn city of Scutari.

But not even the presence of the sultan could accomplish the capture of that redoubted garrison. In vain did the janissaries scale the walls; in vain did the Turkish artillery thunder against the shivered barriers; whilst new assailants replaced those who fell overwhelmed by the javelins and stones launched on them by the besieged. For two days and a night the grand assault was kept up without intermission, until, weary of the useless sacrifice of his men, Muhammed resolved to convert the siege into a blockade. The surrounding country was harassed by the ravages of the Turks; but a new attempt upon Friuli was successfully resisted; and the infidels were compelled to confine their incursions to the frontiers of Germany.

These repeated aggressions on her territories made Venice every day more anxious to conclude a peace with the sultan; and a fresh negotiation was opened, wherein the republic submitted to conditions she had, on a former occasion, rejected. It was agreed that the islands of Negropont and Mytilene, with the cities of Croia and Scutari in Albania, and of Tenaro in the Morea, should be consigned to the Turk; whilst other conquests were to be reciprocally restored to their former owners. A tribute of 10,000 ducats was imposed upon Venice, and the inhabitants of Scutari were to be permitted to evacuate the city without molestation. Upon this footing a peace was concluded, which delivered Venice from a ruinous war of fifteen years. The poor remnant of the defenders of Scutari, now reduced to 500 men and 150 women, were suffered to depart from their homes; and being conducted to Venice were munificently provided for at the expense of the republic (1479).g

While Venice was thus contending with difficulty against Ottoman power for the preservation of her colonies, Genoa, with less vigour and fortune, had lost the whole of her possessions and influence in the Black Sea. With the sceptre of Constantinople, the Turks had acquired the key of the Euxine; the Genoese could no longer communicate by sea with their great colony at Kaffa, except at the pleasure of the sultan: and it was easy to foresee that Muhammed II would not permit them long to retain so valuable a dependency. Upon the occasion of some petty quarrel with the colonists of Kaffa, the Tatar governor of the Crimea besieged the place, and invited the co-operation of the sultan. The Turkish fleet appeared before the port, and easily effected a breach in the walls; the colonists were reduced to capitulate; and the last vestige of the Genoese power in the Euxine was destroyed (1475). The misfortunes of the Genoese were without a counterpoise; but the reverses of Venice in the late war were balanced by the acquisition of the large and beautiful island of Cyprus.

Ever since the conquest of Cyprus by Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and his gift of its crown to Guy of Lusignan, the descendants of that chieftain had preserved his inheritance with the kingly title. But a disputed succession and a civil war in 1459 entailed ruin on the dynasty of Lusignan. After a contest between the legitimate daughter, and James, the natural son of the late king, in which the latter prevailed, the Venetians bestowed on him their protection and the hand of Catherine Cornaro, a young lady of noble family, who was solemnly declared the adopted daughter of the republic. The new king of Cyprus, who had thus contracted the singular relation of son-in-law to the Venetian state, fulfilled its duties with fidelity and deference. But he died after only a short reign; and the republic immediately acted as the natural guardian of his widow and posthumous child. The Cypriotes, however, were not disposed to accept of the insidious protection of a foreign[297] state; and, during the absence of the Venetian fleet, they rebelled against the queen, and deprived her of the charge of her infant son. On his return, Mocenigo, the Venetian admiral, saw the importance of the crisis. He collected a strong body of land-forces from the republican colonies; he awed the islanders into submission, and occupied their fortresses with his troops; and from this epoch Cyprus may be numbered among the possessions of Venice. The infant son of James of Lusignan and Catherine Cornaro died; the republic faithlessly removed to Venice some natural children on whom, in default of legitimate issue, James had settled the succession; and, in 1489, the Venetian government at length wholly threw off the mask and completed their perfidious usurpation, by obliging the adopted daughter of their state to abdicate her kingdom. Catherine Cornaro had enjoyed no more than the shadow of royalty under the authority of the delegated counsellors of the Venetian senate: but that body were still fearful of her attempting to render herself independent by a second marriage; and after obtaining her solemn act of resignation in favour of the republic, they withdrew her from the island, and assigned her for life a castle and a revenue in their Lombard states.p

The Government of Venice.

The government of Venice had now assumed that perfection of oligarchical despotism which subsisted, with very little variation, from the year 1454 until the inglorious dissolution of the republic in 1797. The sovereign authority was vested in the great council; the government in the senate; the administration in the seigniory; the judicial authority in the quarantia; and the police in the Council of Ten. To these august assemblies the nobles were alone admissible; so that every member of the subordinate councils had a seat in the great council.

The doge was, in name at least, the head of the government, and as such presided over every council. The external marks of respect were conceded to his station, and the splendour of the ducal trappings was well contrived to dazzle the multitude. But from an absolute sovereign the duke of Venice had gradually dwindled down to a powerless pageant; and the aristocracy seem to have delighted in shackling their prince with irksome, though generally wise restrictions. No person if chosen was permitted to decline the dignity; and the dignity when once accepted could never be resigned unless by the consent of the great council. On the other hand, the doge was liable to deposition; and the history of the unfortunate Foscari evinces the rigorous treatment to which the sovereign was open. The doge was forbidden to quit the limits of Venice without special permission; to possess property out of the city; to exercise commerce; or to receive any gratuity from a foreign prince. His revenue was limited to 12,000 ducats, and his expenditure was matter of the severest scrutiny. In his public capacity he could make neither war nor peace; he could open no despatches save in the presence of the seigniory; nor could he return an answer to a foreign potentate without their approbation. His wife and family were also precluded from accepting presents. His brothers, his sons, and even his servants, were ineligible to public office; and his children were prohibited from contracting foreign marriages. After his death, his heirs were liable to be visited for the errors of his reign; and compellable to make good any malversation reported by the censors appointed to inquire into his administration.

The great council included all the nobles who had attained the age of twenty-five. We have already seen the artifices by which this noble body[298] shut the door of the assembly against all whose names were not registered in the Golden Book. But during the famous war of Chioggia the door was again unbarred; and faithful to her promise Venice admitted into her nobility those thirty citizens who were adjudged to have exerted themselves most strenuously in defence of their country. In this illustrious assembly the real sovereignty of Venice existed; from the great council emanated the senate and other councils; and it absorbed all other assemblies, since only its own members were eligible to the important departments of government. Its peculiar office was to make or repeal laws; to ballot for magistrates; and to approve of, or annul, the taxes proposed by the senate. The residue of the sovereign functions it was content to leave to the senate; and as the senators were themselves members of the council no great risk was incurred of any violent collision.

The chief restrictions imposed upon the nobles related to their intercourse with foreign powers. They were forbidden to acquire foreign property; to accept foreign presents; to hold communication with any foreign ambassador. All intermarriages of themselves and their children with foreigners were prohibited; but as too strict an adherence to this prohibition might have deprived the state of advantageous alliances, an ingenious evasion was contrived; and when the daughter of a Venetian noble was sought by a foreign potentate, the state adopted her as its own, and gave her in marriage as the daughter of St. Mark. Attempts were made from time to time to prohibit the nobles from trading; but the impolicy of such a restriction in a commercial state was too strongly felt to render the interdiction available.

The senate, which originally consisted of sixty members, elected annually by the great council from their own body, was afterwards increased by the addition of sixty extraordinary members: and the admission of various public functionaries, in virtue of their office, at length swelled this body to three hundred. To the senate the immediate functions of government were[299] entrusted; and they deliberated and decided upon many important points without any reference to the great council. They made war or peace; entered into treaties; appointed ambassadors and commanders; coined money; raised loans; and regulated the distribution of the finances. But they had no authority to make laws or impose taxes, unless these were afterwards approved and confirmed by the great council.

The executive power was vested in the seigniory which consisted of the doge and the six red counsellors nominated by the great council, one for every quarter of the city. To these were associated the three chiefs of the criminal quarantia, and sixteen sages; and this assembly of twenty-six was styled “the college.” They gave audiences to ambassadors of foreign princes; received memorials and manifestoes; and opened all public despatches, which they were bound to transmit for the perusal of the senate. To them also belonged the convoking of the senate; and by them the resolutions of the senate were to be effectuated.

The supreme judicial authority was lodged in a criminal tribunal of forty judges, and two civil tribunals, each also consisting of forty. These judges were all nominated from among the patricians by the great council; those of the criminal quarantia were ex-officio members of the senate; and as the judges of the civil courts passed on to the criminal, all became senators in rotation. These tribunals formed courts of appeal from others of inferior jurisdiction; and administered justice according to the civil law, modified by statutes and local customs. Their proceedings were encumbered by formalities, and were consequently tardy; but their decisions (which were given by ballot) are admitted to have evinced sagacity and integrity. In criminal matters, indeed, the friends of the accused were permitted to use private influence with the judges; but such culpable attempts at the perversion of justice were strictly forbidden in civil proceedings.

The terrible Council of Ten had already overawed Venice for more than a century, when a new engine of tyranny was introduced still more terrific. The Council of Ten being deemed too numerous a body for securing the desired promptness and mystery of their proceedings, it was resolved by the great council in 1454 to erect another tribunal, consisting of three members with the most unlimited authority over the lives and liberty of the community. The Council of Ten were empowered to nominate two of their black counsellors, and one member of the doge’s council; and were directed to prepare a body of statutes for the guidance of this new “Inquisition of State.” Three days after the passing of this decree the council were ready with these statutes; but the elaborate minuteness of their provisions clearly proves that much time and deliberation had been previously expended upon them. That this frightful tribunal[300] existed too soon became manifest; yet such was the mystery which enveloped its origin that no one presumed to fix the time of its establishment, until the modern historian of Venice in his laborious researches discovered a copy of this diabolical code. Such a tissue of refined cruelty and perfidy was surely never before given to the world; and the framers of the “Statutes of the Inquisition” appear to have been gifted with a subtle and relentless spirit of wickedness which might challenge the malignity of assembled fiends.

An attentive perusal of this manual of assassination can alone give an adequate notion of the precision and acuteness with which the depositaries of this unbounded power are enjoined to draw the unwary into their snares; or of the cold-blooded and uncompromising villainy recommended for the preservation of Venetian policy. Subject to these instructions, the three inquisitors were abandoned to their own discretion in selecting the time and place of seizure and investigation, the tortures to be employed, and the manner of destroying their victims. The nobles and citizens might thus be publicly exposed on a gibbet, or silently consigned to the adjacent canal. Innumerable spies pervaded the city; the recesses of domestic privacy and the inmost apartments of the ducal palace were alike laid open to the penetrating gaze of the Inquisition. Such was the mystery which surrounded the inquisitors that it was never known, except by the council, to which of their members this terrible office was entrusted; and an unguarded whisper in an inquisitor’s presence might in a moment be followed by incarceration and death.

A system, if possible more monstrous, was also encouraged at Venice. A number of iron mouths in different parts of the city gaped for accusations; and an anonymous charge deposited by a secret enemy was sufficient to drag the unconscious accused before his judges. No human being could enjoy security for an instant; the daggers and the poison of the Inquisition were always at hand; and the innocent might suddenly be torn from the midst of his friends and consigned to the burning heat of the leaden roofs, or forever immured in the wells, those dismal dungeons sunk lower than the surface of the canals, where they might sicken and perhaps die from the foul air.

Amidst these institutions, where the functions of the state were exclusively vested in the nobles, and the legislative, executive, and judicial powers united in one body, we may be at a loss to discover what security existed for the welfare of the subordinate classes. The three avogadors, one of whom was necessarily a member of the great council and senate, might, indeed, call upon the legislature to pause when any measure was proposed injurious to the public; but in this anxiety for the general good no safety was to be found for private life or liberty; and we have no means of ascertaining the quantity of individual misery inflicted by this odious government. But amidst the distraction of shows and pageants, the people might at least console themselves with the impartiality of their despotic rulers; since the nobles, and even the doge himself, were liable to feel the rigour of this unsparing oligarchy.

The annals of Venice present many glaring instances of her noblest sons perishing under the malice of an enemy, or sacrificed to the detestable policy of the state; and every page of her history is deformed by examples of perfidy and injustice. Without adverting to these, we will here briefly repeat the characteristic story of Foscari; and it is remarkable that the Inquisition of State originated at the close of this doge’s reign.

The Two Foscari

On the death of Tommaso Mocenigo in 1423, Francesco Foscari was raised to the ducal throne. A vigorous understanding, a bold and enterprising spirit, were the conspicuous qualities of the new doge; and during his long and warlike reign Venice attained a pitch of glory and power she had never before enjoyed. But whilst Foscari was thus increasing the prosperity of his country he was struggling with severe domestic affliction. Three of his sons were successively swept away to the grave; and the survivor was reserved but to augment the misery of his afflicted father. Jacopo, the youngest Foscari, was secretly accused before the Council of Ten of having received from Filippo, duke of Milan, presents of money and jewels, and immediately summoned to answer the accusation. The unhappy Francesco, who presided as doge, beheld his only son stretched upon the rack, heard his confession of guilt, and acquiesced in the sentence of perpetual banishment to Napoli di Romania. This sentence was, however, in some degree mitigated; and Trieste was fixed on as the place of his exile, whither he was allowed the consolation of being accompanied by his young wife. After residing there above five years a new calamity awaited him. On the 5th of November, 1450, Almoro Donato, one of the chiefs of the council, was assassinated; and the circumstance of a servant of Jacopo’s having been seen in Venice on that day was deemed sufficient to fasten suspicion on his master. The severities of the rack having extorted nothing from the servant, Jacopo was conducted to Venice, and in his father’s presence once more put to the torture. Far from admitting his participation in the murder, the unfortunate culprit vehemently asserted his innocence; but his protestations availed him nothing; and the inexorable council pronounced a sentence of perpetual banishment to the island of Candia.

The doge Francesco had already on two occasions expressed his desire of abdicating his dignity; but on each occasion the great council refused to permit his resignation. The cruel persecution of his son now redoubled his anxiety to descend from that eminence which exposed him more conspicuously to the malice of his enemies. But the council not only reiterated their refusal, but compelled him to bind himself by oath to retain the duchy until relieved by death.

During a five years’ residence at Canea in Candia, Jacopo Foscari had exerted every means in his power to obtain the reversal of his unmerited sentence. Wearied of the hopeless attempt to soften his obdurate countrymen,[302] he at length addressed a letter to Sforza, duke of Milan, entreating him to use his influence with the Venetian senate. To solicit foreign protection was an offence at Venice; and the letter, by design or accident, being intercepted, Jacopo was conveyed from Canea, and for the third time put to the rack before the Council of Ten. He immediately admitted the offensive letter, and rejoiced in the step he had taken, which once more restored him to his beloved country, and to the presence of his wife, his father, and all that was dearest to him upon earth. This touching avowal weighed little with the heartless tribunal, and he was sentenced to be imprisoned in a dungeon for a year, and then again carried back into Candia. After the expiration of his imprisonment, he was sent into exile and soon afterwards died. Meanwhile his innocence of the imputed murder was completely established: the real assassin of Donato confessed on his death-bed that his, not Jacopo’s, was the guilty hand.

The wretched father now sank under this accumulation of misery: he fled from public business; abstained from attendance in the councils; and at the age of eighty-four buried himself in retirement so suitable to his years and misfortunes. But the malice of his enemies was still unsatiated; it was resolved that he should be precipitated from a throne he had already thrice attempted to vacate. By an enormous stretch of power, the Council of Ten intimated to the doge in the name of the great council, that the state called for his resignation and absolved him from his oath. They condescended to offer him a pension of 1500 ducats, and peremptorily insisted on his quitting the ducal palace within eight days under pain of confiscation of his property. After a momentary struggle with his pride the old man bowed to the decree, and descended the Giants’ Staircase, which thirty-four years before he had mounted as the sovereign of Venice. The assembled populace beheld with pity and indignation the aged father of the republic pass slowly towards his private dwelling; but the murmurs of compassion were in a moment silenced by a menacing proclamation of the Ten. The electors proceeded to the choice of a new doge, and on the 30th of October, 1457, seven days after the deposition of Foscari, Pasquale Malipiero was declared duly elected. The tolling of the bell of St. Mark’s tower, which announced the election, awakened in the soul of Foscari a conflict of passions too furious for exhausted nature, and he survived the shock only a few hours. Notwithstanding the resistance of his widow, the council, who had thus hurried him to his grave, resolved upon the mockery of a magnificent funeral; and he was interred with all the splendour usual at a doge’s obsequies, the newly elected duke assisting in the habit of a senator.

One of the chief instruments of the ruin of Foscari was Giacomo Loredano, a noble, whose long-cherished rancour was thus formally entered on his commercial accounts: “Francesco Foscari, for the death of my father and uncle.” But the debt was now liquidated, and on the opposite page the cold-blooded Loredano wrote the discharge, “he has paid it.”g

FOOTNOTES

In the preceding chapter we have followed the political development of Venice, and seen that city acquire undisputed supremacy on the water and then reach out for land conquests as well. We shall now interrupt the rather depressing story of political wrangles, to consider the commercial prosperity of the new world-emporium.

“Venice,” says Burckhardt,b “recognised itself from the first as a strange and mysterious creation—the fruits of a higher power than human ingenuity. The key-note of the Venetian character was a spirit of proud and contemptuous isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by the other states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity within. The inhabitants meanwhile were united by the most powerful ties of interest in dealing both with the colonies and the possessions on the mainland; and forcing the population of the latter, that is of all the towns up to Bergamo, to buy and sell in Venice alone. A power which rested on means so artificial could only be maintained by internal harmony and unity. On the other hand, within the ranks of the nobility itself, travel and commercial enterprises, and the incessant wars with the Turks, saved the wealthy and dangerous from that fruitful source of conspiracies—idleness. A free government in the open air gave the Venetian aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.”

The Venetian did, in point of fact, seem to differ materially from his Italian neighbours. We have seen that the city did not come into prominence until a relatively late period of the Middle Ages. Isolated geographically, it held aloof from its neighbouring states and never conceded allegiance to the Western Empire. Nominally, it sought the protection of Constantinople; but in reality it neither needed nor received aid from that quarter, and its allegiance to the Eastern emperor was probably due largely to the harmlessness of his supposed authority. The seafaring life had developed here, as so often elsewhere, a hardy and liberty-loving race. The Venetian reminds us strongly of his prototype, the old-time Phœnician. But in one regard the citizen of Venice proved even more self-reliant than[304] his prototype: he insisted always on choosing his rulers; moreover, he not merely elected them, but he held them amenable to the law. We have seen a striking illustration of this in the preceding chapter, in the legal execution of the doge Marino Falieri. Seldom, if ever, has that incident been precisely duplicated. The doge of Venice, elected for life, was surrounded with all the semblance of royalty and was to all intents and purposes a sovereign. Yet when this distinguished incumbent of the office had proven himself disloyal to the constitution, he was adjudged in practically the same manner with his associates in crime, and subjected to the same punishment.

Nothing could be more characteristic than the manner in which the punishment of Falieri was carried out. Up to the very last the doge was treated with all respect. Even when led out to execution, he was still clothed in his ducal robes. The mandate of the law was carried out not in anger, but in sorrow; everything was legal, constitutional; there was no breach of dignity. A vast concourse of people waited at the door of the palace to view the corpse; but it was no clamouring mob: it was a quiet and orderly gathering of citizens. The fall of the sovereign had come about through no reign of terror such as pertained in latter-day France, when Louis XVI was executed; no revolution like that which brought Charles I to the block. The successor to the doge was elected in precisely the same manner as if the previous incumbent of this office had died a natural death. In all history, let it be repeated, there is scarcely a precise parallel for this exhibition of the far-reaching scope of Venetian justice.

We have now to view the real source of the power of this strange nation; a power based, as has repeatedly been suggested, upon the old familiar foundation of commercial prosperity. It was the independence born of this prosperity that made Venice feared and hated by all the other powers of Italy—feared and hated, but also admired. We read in Villanic that when in the early part of the fourteenth century Venice condescended to take common cause with Florence against the tyrant of Milan, the Florentines regarded it as a singular honour for their country to have become the confederate of the Venetians, “who, for their great excellence and power, had never allied themselves with any state or prince, except at their ancient conquest of Constantinople and Romania.” We learn, on the other hand, from the Venetians, how some of the wise men of their city regretted this same alliance with its attendant grasping after political conquests, on the mainland. A remarkable account has been preserved to us by Sanuto,d of the warning said to have been given to his people by the doge Mocenigo, who died in 1423, and whose alleged words we shall quote in some detail, because they furnish us with statistics that will serve as introductory to our further studies of the national commerce.

The doge asserted that the trade with Lombardy alone brought into Venice each year no less than 28,800,000 ducats.a “My lords,” he is reported as saying, “from the infirm state in which I find myself, I judge that I am drawing near the close of my career; and the obligations under which I lie to a country which has not only bred me, but has permitted me to attain such lofty prominence, and has showered upon me so many honours, have prompted me to call you together around me, in order that I may commend to your care this Christian city, and persuade you to live in concord with your neighbours, and to preserve this city, as I have done to the best of my ability. In my time, 4,000,000 ducats of the public debt have been paid though 6,000,000 remain, the latter of which were contracted for the war of Padua, Vicenza, and Verona. We have regularly paid the half-yearly interest on the[305] funds and the salaries of the public offices. Our city at present sends abroad for purposes of trade in various parts of the world 10,000,000 ducats a year, of which the interest is not less than 2,000,000. In this city there are 3000 vessels of smaller burden, which carry 17,000 seamen; 300 large ships carrying 8000 seamen; 45 galleys and dromons constantly in commission for the protection of commerce, which employ 11,000 seamen, 3000 carpenters, 3000 caulkers. Of silk cloth-workers there are 3000; of manufacturers of fustian, 16,000. The rent-roll is estimated at 7,050,000 ducats. The income arising from let houses is 150,000. We find 1000 gentlemen with means varying between 700 and 4000 ducats a year. If you continue to prosper in this manner, you will become masters of all the gold in Christendom. But, I beseech you, keep your fingers from your neighbours, as you would keep them out of the fire, and engage in no unjust wars, for in such errors God will not support princes. Everybody knows that the Turkish war has rendered you expert and brave in maritime enterprises. You have six able captains, competent to command large fleets. You have many persons well versed in diplomacy and in the government of cities, who are ambassadors of perfect experience. You have numerous doctors in different sciences, and especially in the law, who enjoy high credit for their learning among strangers. Your mint coins annually 1,000,000 ducats of gold and 200,000 ducats of silver, of minor pieces, 800,000. Of this sum 500,000 go to Syria, 100,000 to the Terra Firma, 100,000 to various other places, 100,000 to England. The remainder is used at home. You are aware that the Florentines send here every year 16,000 pieces of fine cloth, of which we dispose in Barbary, Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, Romania, the Morea, and Istria, and that they bring to our city monthly 60,000 (70,000?) ducats’ worth of merchandise, amounting annually to 840,000 or more, and in exchange purchase our goods to our great advantage.

“Therefore it behoves you to beware lest this city decline. It behoves you to exercise extreme caution in the choice of my successor, in whose power it will be, to a considerable extent, to govern the republic for good or for evil. Many of you are inclined to Messer Francesco Foscari, and do not, I apprehend, sufficiently know his impetuous character, and proud, supercilious disposition. If he is made doge, you will be at war continually. Those who now possess 10,000 ducats will have only 1000. Those who possess ten houses will be proprietors of one, and those who now own ten coats will be reduced to a single coat. You will lose your money and your reputation. You will be at the mercy of a soldiery. I have found it impossible to forbear expressing to you thus my opinion. May God help you to make the wisest choice! May he rule your hearts to preserve peace.”

Such [says Hazlitte] were the last words of a great and prophetic statesman. The glaze of death was soon upon those eyes. Those lips were soon mute. On the 4th of April, 1423, Tommaso Mocenigo expired, leaving his country more prosperous and opulent than she had ever yet been. Her treasury was full. Her debt was considerably reduced. The statistics of her taxation and expenditure exhibited a surplus of 1,000,000 a year. Her home and foreign trade was flourishing beyond any precedent. No European power was more highly respected, and the alliance of none was more eagerly sought and cultivated.e

These calculations of Mocenigo are declared by Hallamf to be so strange and manifestly inexact as to deserve little regard; they are, however, viewed with greater consideration by Daru,g and by Hazlitte. Doubtless they have not the accuracy of the reports of modern statisticians, yet, as a general statement[306] of what at least are approximate facts, they have the fullest interest, and the utmost significance. They furnish a clew to the power and greatness of this remarkable city; a city which in the year 1422 is said to have had a population of only 190,000, yet which was the most powerful state of Italy, and which after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was the uncontested world metropolis.

In considering the precise conditions of Venetian commerce and manufacture it will be well to take at the same time a general view of the commerce of late antiquity, that the conditions of trade in the East to which Venice fell heir may be understood.a

It was to their political and territorial situation that the Venetians owed their direction towards commercial operations—the cause of their prosperity. Fugitives from the Italian continent, refuged in small, uncultivated, barren islands, without certain communication with the continent, they saw nothing round them but the sea, in their hands a few fleeting possessions which they had saved from the general devastation, but which would soon be lost if work and industry could not fructify them.

Salt was the only product of the soil they trod. Fishery could only imperfectly provide a subsistence. But this fishery, this salt, became a means of exchange to provide things necessary for life. Nearly everything was lacking. The inhabitants of the lagunes were reduced to seek on the neighbouring continent grain, wood, metals, stone, even water. Happily for them their neighbours could bring them nothing. These people, desolated by continual war, were not given to navigation. If at that time, when so many fugitives took refuge in the lagunes, there had been near them a commercial maritime town eager to bring them all they wanted, such a town would have taken from them the few riches they had brought into the islands, and little by little these fugitives, instead of creating a country on uncultivated wastes, would have sought safety, ease, or work with the foreigner. But the rigour of their condition, the deprivation of all help condemned them to make great efforts, and their heroic works contributed also to their happiness and glory.

Again, they would hardly have believed it to be a good thing that the severity of their lot made them exert themselves on the sea. Continually obliged themselves to seek what was lacking, they necessarily acquired a habit of braving the ocean. When what they wanted was not to be found on the neighbouring coast they sought it on the opposite one. Gradually they noted at what points they could make their purchases or exchanges with most advantage. These frequent crossings, made on their own account, furnished occasion for becoming intermediaries for the two Adriatic shores. These journeys had at first for object only the provisioning of the islands. The spirit of commerce gave them wider views; their limits were extended, their means perfected. Art and cupidity essayed more difficult routes, and it was seen that this new town, placed in a position so easy to defend, almost on the borders which separate Europe from Asia, was called to become through the industry of its inhabitants the principal market for western peoples. Other local circumstances gave it the means of easy communication with a large number of consumers. Italy being separated from Germany by the Alps was impracticable for commerce. A port situated at the end of the Adriatic and the mouth of the Po would be the natural market for wools, silks, cotton, saffron, oil, manna, and all the other productions which Italy furnished to Hungary and Germany.

For the same reason, all that the north had to get from the Levant, Africa, and Spain had to pass by Venice. Journeys beyond the straits of[307] Gibraltar towards the eastern coast of Europe then meant a voyage of long duration. Navigation was so imperfect that the eastern peoples had not yet learned to seek Mediterranean products, and it was very rarely that they made expeditions, which meant so much expense, danger, and loss of time. The result was that the end of the Adriatic Sea was the sole point of communication with the navigable sea, and Venice was a mart offering equal security against all enemies and tempests. The Po, the Brenta, and the Adige seemed to empty into the basin of the lagunes expressly to offer the Venetians an easy route by which they could take without danger or great expense all productions demanded by eastern Italy. Also it was a constant care with this growing republic to assure free navigation and all kinds of franchise on these waters and their numerous affluents. About the year 713 the first doge of the republic concluded a peace with Liutprand, king of Lombardy, which preserved to Venetians commercial privileges in the ports and lands of this kingdom. Not only were they exempt, with their neighbours, from all dues, but they held sovereign rights in perpetuity, and the exercise of these gave them the means of making themselves a burden to their rivals. One even sees them, in the fifteenth century, offering to furnish Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, with ten thousand foot and ten thousand horse, if he would let them administer the custom-houses of his capital.

The republic did not give less attention to keeping the exclusive privilege of furnishing this continent with products of her own small territory. She perfected the art of extracting salt, and appropriated, as far as she could, all the salt beds of her coasts. She prevented her neighbours from exploiting those they had. The Venetians sold two qualities of salt—that manufactured by themselves in their lagunes, called Chioggia salt, and that drawn from the salt beds of Cervia, Istria, Dalmatia, Sicily, the African coasts, the Black Sea, and even Astrakhan. All these foreign salts were comprised under the name of sea-salt or ultramarine salt. The first was of superior quality and consequently of higher price. The Cervian salt beds belonged to the Bolognaise. With them the Venetians treated, and, to preserve the commerce of all the salt from this source, the latter determined the quantity[308] which should be allowed to be sold, establishing surveillance even on the place of fabrication. The republic even obtained the right to transport rocksalt which southern Germany and Croatia took from their mines. They forced the king of Hungary to close his. The coast people on the Adriatic were not allowed to send away their salt, while the inhabitants of Italy could not take any but Venetian salt.

For any subject of the republic to buy foreign salt was a crime. The house of the offender was razed, and he himself banished forever. Yet while Venice made this monopoly she furnished all these people, now her tributaries, with excellent salt at a very low price. Sales were effected by companies, which undertook to provision such and such a country. It is almost incredible how much treasure this one branch of commerce for fourteen centuries procured the Venetians. These privileges cost some bloodshed. But the defence of their pretensions and the wars they had to sustain against the corsairs and jealous neighbours put them under the necessity of forming a military marine. After some centuries of effort, the flag of St. Mark was seen proudly flying all along the Mediterranean. Venetian fleets made conquests, the republic founded rich colonies, extended its navigation and commerce in all then known seas, and arrogated the sovereignty of the Adriatic Sea. The continual wars which divided other peoples, their gross ignorance, their almost general isolation with regard to commerce and navigation, were so many favourable circumstances which gave the republic time to establish the power of her marine and the prosperity of her industry quite firmly.

VENICE IN THE LEVANT

After the fall of the Eastern Empire, Venice became mistress of nearly all the maritime points of that empire, and had immense advantages in all the Levant markets. Her merchants there enjoyed all the privileges of the natives, and in every port her ships found not only free harbourage but special protection. For eight centuries, that is from the epoch when the Venetians wanted to become conquerors over the Italian lands, legislation and politics had for their principal object the prosperity of commerce. Privileges from the foreigner, assured safety with them, facilities for the moving about of men, goods, and capital, the establishment of banks, perfecting of money, encouragement of industrial manufactures, a vigilant but not officious policy, a religious tolerance little known among other nations, all concurred to make for Venetian commercial greatness.

If to these advantages one adds the possibility of obtaining civic rights, and considers that a share in sovereignty was attached to this title, one can imagine what an influx of strangers augmented the population of Venice and increased its prosperity by bringing capital and new industries. One can conceive also how citizens of such a state would be attached to their country, and what would be the strength and resources of this government. One would feel at the same time that the republic would lose with regard to all these things when she adopted, or rather submitted to, an aristocratic government. It has been said that those of the citizens who arrogated all authority compensated the others by abandoning to them all the advantages resulting from commerce. Indeed, this has been given as a mark of disinterestedness and moderation from the aristocratic classes. But this is an error. It is evident that, in spite of a prohibitive law, the nobles continued to be merchants until that epoch when the republic was already shorn[309] of its power and commerce of its splendour. Instances of this are to be found at every step in history.

If one reflects on the influence that habits of work, emulation, riches, travel, and association with foreigners must necessarily have had on the manners of a people and the development of their intellectual faculties, one may guess that the Venetians must already have become a polished nation when other peoples, whom nature seemed to have placed in a different rank, were still barbarians. One is not surprised to read in the history of Charlemagne that the lords who composed his court were astonished to see, at the Pavia fair, valuable carpets, silken stuffs, gold tissues, pearls, and precious stones spread out by Venetian merchants. Doubtless these lofty barons very much despised the merchants and their business, but their pride would be lowered somewhat when Pepin was beaten by these same men; when European kings found themselves obliged to ask for Venetian ships to get into Palestine; and when the Baldwins, the Montmorencies, and the counts of Champagne and of Montfort contracted alliance with these merchants to conquer and share the empire of Constantinople.

This superiority of the Venetians over other European peoples—we except the Tuscans, whose literary glory gives them an infinite ascendency—was maintained until well into the fifteenth century. All French, German, and English towns were a formless mass of houses without architecture or monuments. The lords of these countries lived in melancholy fortresses, and hardly knew the meaning of luxury and art. At this epoch there was neither letters nor elegance except in Italy and the part of Spain occupied by the Moors. It would hardly be just to make out that all these advantages were derived from one sole cause. Venice no doubt owed her prosperity partly to the good fortune of having a regular government long before other nations. But this government which watched over the preservation of public fortune was not the cause of national wealth; that was entirely due to commerce. From the eighth century, the commerce of Venice with the East was sufficiently important to determine her to remain in alliance with the emperor Nicephorus, in spite of Charlemagne’s threats.

While, however, the Venetians enjoyed that opulence which is the just fruit of labour, they were kept by their sumptuary laws within the bounds of a wise economy—an economy which alone conserves the capital which feeds commerce and is sole regulator of the price of handiwork. Commerce has relations with the constitution. In the government of a despot it is founded on luxury, its only object being to procure the nation all that can minister to its pride, its luxuries, its fancies; in the government of many it is generally founded on economy. Standing between the voluptuous peoples of the East and the uncultivated European nations, the Venetians imitated the industry of the one and preserved the simplicity of the other.

During the first centuries of the Venetian Republic, all Europe was in an uncultured condition. Art had left ancient Italy to pass over to the empire and ornament the new capital of the world. But when Fortune arrived unexpectedly with gifts, she found no man ready to receive them. The peoples to whom Constantine had transported his throne had a taste for voluptuousness rather than a genius for activity. In this neighbourhood, a people of high antiquity, enlightened long before the barbarians of the West, owed to its traditions, its activity, its conquests, that variety of knowledge and works which distinguished civilised nations. The Venetians were continually changing the products of the East against merchandise from all Europe; to form such a chain of communication was much for a population of fishers.[310] But they carried their industry even further. They saw that the Grecian Empire received many useful things from far-off countries and from peoples almost unknown, but also a multitude of superfluities which were becoming needful for a society more refined. They established themselves as near as they could to the source of these objects, and such was the success of their activity and courage that they became first the carriers and then the commercial masters of pleasure-loving Constantinople.

The peninsula of the Tauric Chersonese, situated at the end of the Black Sea, had long been for the great cities of the Hellespont and the Greek seas what Sicily had been for Rome—an inexhaustible storehouse assuring subsistence to the population. This peninsula fed Athens, and paid an annual tribute of 180,000 measures of wheat to Mithridates. It had abundant salt beds and furnished wools and hides. These objects of first necessity acquired a new value through the vicinity of a town like Constantinople. Marco Polo, the Venetian, speaks of a journey made on this coast by his father towards the middle of the thirteenth century.

The abundance of sequins throughout the East proves that the Venetians had great commerce there—that their coin was taken confidently, and that they were obliged to pay for a part of their purchases in ready money. There is another fact by which one can judge of the great number of Venetians spread through the Greek Empire. When Manuel Comnenus, imitating the example of Mithridates, arrested in one day all subjects of the republic found in the state, the prisons could hardly suffice to contain them; they had to fill the churches and monasteries. The difficulty of protecting their establishments in Asia, the jealousy of the Genoese, and the revolutions of the Eastern Empire, obliged the Venetians many times to seek new routes to re-establish their constantly interrupted commercial relations.

The story of the vicissitudes which have changed so often the course of commerce—that commerce which like a river pours continually into the West, is one well worthy of attention. It seemed that Europe could not suffice for herself. The activity of its inhabitants exhausted itself in a thousand ways which produced needs foreign to its welfare. From all time they counted eastern merchandise among objects of the first necessity, and this commerce has occupied the industry of several peoples more or less fortunately placed.g

Let us go back to Roman times, and trace briefly the development of trade routes.

THE COMMERCIAL FOREBEARS OF THE VENETIANS

The crowd of barbarian people who inundated the Roman Empire at the end of its existence brought with it the germs of a new life; when Rome had succumbed, these germs began to develop themselves in all parts of Europe—races young and vigorous but still half barbarous came, all at once, into the foreground of history; mingled with the people whom Rome, up till now, had kept under the yoke, they founded new nationalities; it was a general transformation in the state, in society, and in the ways and customs. Nevertheless, this overthrow did not affect all the conditions of the life of the people in the same degree. In the domain of commercial life we do not find, on the threshold of the Middle Ages, any event which approaches in importance the discovery of the sea route to the East Indies and the discovery of America, events which coincide with the beginning of the modern epoch, and which have unexpectedly opened new paths for commerce.

Between antiquity and the Middle Ages the transition was less abrupt; the commercial intercourse and markets remained, generally, the same as of old. Since the conquests of Alexander had brought the civilised people of the West into contact with the remote East, the main currents of commerce set thitherward, for there was the source of production of those articles which had become necessary to the insatiable masters of the world. From the Indies were obtained those spices which the Greeks and Romans put into their food to heighten its flavour, the greater part of the perfumes which they sprinkled on their persons and in their apartments, and the ivory with which they made their precious utensils. China furnished the silk with which the women, and later on, with the growth of luxury, even the men of the imperial epoch loved to clothe themselves; for jewels, the mountains of Persia and India sent their precious stones; the Indian Ocean, its pearls.

Little by little, this commerce increased to such an extent, that in the time of Pliny, the Roman Empire expended each year in Asia, in payment of merchandise obtained from thence, 100,000,000 sesterces (about £800,000), of which India alone absorbed one-half. In the Middle Ages, the Levant was still the principal goal of the merchant of the West. The commodities which later generations brought from America, such as sugar and cotton, were then obtained from Smyrna, Asia Minor, or Cyprus; condiments from India, spices and especially pepper, were some of the most highly appreciated commodities at this period. But if we seek the origin of the delicate fabrics, or the carpets which were used at the courts and among the wealthy burghers of the Middle Ages, we have almost always to go to the East. Thence came the raw material, very often the tissue or the embroidery, and finally the name of the material.

As trade followed the same lines as in ancient days, so the great commercial routes remained the same. To obtain the products of the Levant, the merchantmen of the West, not knowing the route by the Cape of Good Hope, confined themselves to the short voyage through the Mediterranean or the waters which communicate directly with it. There they were certain to find, along the shore, markets already famous in ancient times, Alexandria, Tyre, Berytus, Antioch, Byzantium, Trebizond; the creation of a new market was a great exception. Merchandise still arrived at the ports of the Mediterranean or of the Pontus from the remote East by the old ways of the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf; that coming from the centre of Asia overland still followed the route we find already quoted in Greek and Roman geographies from the narratives of the merchants.

The only elements which had changed in commerce were the mediums; Italians, Provençals, and Catalans had taken the place of Greeks and Romans as commercial nations. But, with respect to this, do not let us forget that the transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages was gradual. In fact, when the empire was divided into two parts, the Byzantine half had inherited the commerce of the East as a natural result of its geographical situation. Having survived invasions, it played the part of medium in the commercial relations between the West and the East, until the time when the citizens of the sea-port towns of Italy, southern France, and Spain were grown strong enough to do without one.

We possess a sufficient number of documents dating from the time of Justinian (527-565 A.D.) to make a complete picture of the state of the East at this time, from the commercial point of view. The most remote countries of Asia with which the Greeks of Byzantium maintained a regular commerce were also those which furnished the most precious and choice products. For centuries, the silk industry had flourished in China, but the secret of it had been so well kept that strangers had never been able to learn the process of its manufacture. At length there came a time when another country was able, in its turn, to cultivate this important branch of industry. This good fortune fell to the lot of the small kingdom of Khotan, in the centre of Asia, in consequence of the marriage of its king with a Chinese princess who, it is said, betrayed the secret of her compatriots and, managing to elude the supervision of the custom-house officers, brought silkworms, eggs, and the seeds of the mulberry tree into her new country.

We cannot say with certainty whether, in the seventh century, the manufacture of silk had already spread from the East to the West, and passed beyond the borders of Khotan, but we may assume that the greater part of the silk which the western merchants received came from China. The Chinese exported their products themselves; but at this time, with rare exceptions, their ships only conveyed them as far as Ceylon, and their caravans did not go beyond the frontiers of Turkestan. There other nations received the precious wares and carried them farther west. But it is difficult to make a distinction, for the ancient classical writers, and those of the Byzantine epoch after them, gave the name of Seres, not only to the producers of silk, but also to the various peoples engaged in its distribution.

Such a silk-trading nation were the inhabitants of Sogdiana, in the lowlands of Bokhara, a race distinguished from the remotest times for their taste and aptitude for commerce. The silk was brought to them by caravans from China, and they, in their turn, conveyed it either to the markets of the north of Iran, or to those south of the Caspian Sea. Our sources of information do not, indeed, positively state this as a fact. In his chronicle, Theophanes of Byzantium j relates that the markets and ports frequented by the silk merchants had changed masters three times at short intervals; having originally been in the possession of the Persians, they were taken from them by the so-called White Huns (the Yue-thsi or Yuechi of the Chinese), and finally were occupied by the Turks.

By whatever route the silk was conveyed, the Persians always endeavoured to receive it first, and they watched jealously that it did not reach the Romans of the East by any other route than that which traversed their country or by any other hands than theirs. Nevertheless, a certain portion of the silk was despatched from China to Ceylon by sea; there it was transhipped and reached the Persian Gulf by the west coast of India and the south coast of Carmania. It is obvious that when Chinese wares followed the sea route,[313] they might escape the Persians, for from Ceylon it was possible to take them by the south of Arabia and Ethiopia. Herein lay a danger to the Persian monopoly which the emperor Justinian contrived to turn to his advantage. The Byzantines found it a great hardship to be reduced to having no other intermediaries for these, to them indispensable, articles than the Persians. There was no other nation with whom they were so frequently at war, and how could they see with indifference their own merchants supplying their enemies with enormous sums in payment for the silks they purchased; or how bear patiently the frequent interruptions to trade due to a state of warfare?

With a view to remedying these inconveniences, the emperor Justinian attempted in the year 532 to open a road for the silk trade through Ethiopia; the Ethiopians could, he thought, purchase the silk from the Indians, and sell it to the Byzantines. Their king, an ally of Byzantium, allured by the prospect of gain, entered into the emperor’s views. But when his subjects arrived at the ports which the vessels from India had just entered, they found the Persians masters of the situation in their double capacity of neighbours and ancient clients; they were forced to return empty-handed, and the Persians remained, for the nonce, in uncontested possession of their monopoly.

When it was proved that the Ethiopians were neither strong nor enterprising enough to wrest the silk trade from the hands of the Persians, the problem seemed, for an instant, insoluble. Happily Justinian succeeded in securing some silkworms’ eggs, brought back by missionary monks who had penetrated to the heart of the countries which produced them, probably to Khotan (about the year 552). Thus it is that the manufacture of silk was introduced into the Grecian Empire, and from the year 568 Justin II, the successor to Justinian, was able to show it in full activity to a Turkish ambassador who happened to be at his court. Many years elapsed, it is true, before sufficient raw silk was produced in Greece to satisfy the demands of the native industry. For a long time the greater part of the raw material and the better qualities of silk had to be brought from China, and the exorbitant claims of the Persian middlemen to be endured.

But the Persians were not merely transmitters, they were manufacturers also. Hwen Tsang, who traversed the eastern frontier of Persia at the beginning of the seventh century, says that the Persians were skilled in the weaving of silken or woollen stuffs and carpets, and that products of their industry were highly prized in the neighbouring kingdoms. They were assisted by foreign workmen, who came to settle in Persia voluntarily or under coercion from the Asiatic countries subject to Byzantium. By the adoption of an unwise system of monopoly ruinous to the silk-weavers of his country, Justinian promoted their emigration in large numbers to Persia, others were brought there by force by King Sapor II as part of the spoils he brought back from his victorious campaign in Mesopotamia and Syria. A tradition current several generations later traced the origin of the silk manufacture in Tuster, Susa, and other Persian cities, to the colonies of Greek craftsmen.

To satisfy the luxury of the Sassanidian court, quantities of stuffs of great value were necessary. When the victorious Greek army, led by the emperor Heraclius against the Persians, took possession of the royal castle of Dastagerd, in the year 627, they found there a quantity of raw silk and piles of silken garments, embroidered carpets, and other articles of this kind. It is permissible to suppose that they were of native manufacture. The spoil gained on this occasion comprised other things worthy of note. Large quantities of spices, evidently of Indian origin, pepper, ginger, aloes, and aloe-wood (agallochum) fell into the hands of the victors; they were consigned[314] to the flames with the rest, as it was impossible to carry everything off. Let us add that in the year 636-637, at the storming of Madain (Ctesiphon), the capital of the Sassanid Empire, by the Arabs, there were found large supplies of musk, amber, sandalwood, and enough camphor to freight a ship; this last produced nowhere but in the islands beyond India. The Arabs were so ignorant of its uses, that they proposed to use it to flavour their bread. All this proves to us that the luxury of the Sassanidian court was one of the principal causes which turned the stream of Levantine commerce towards Persia.

After the Persians had levied their supplies on the merchandise in transit, there yet remained enormous quantities which passed directly into the Byzantine Empire.h These goods were brought across Lake Aral or down the Oxus into the Caspian Sea. From this sea they entered the Volga, which flows into it, and thence were carried as far as that place, which is eighteen miles from the Tanaïs. Man had even tried to dig a canal of communication between the two rivers. Arrived in the Tanaïs, Asiatic productions thence descended into the Palus-Mæotis, crossed the Black Sea, and went to fill the stores of Constantinople, then the most flourishing town in the world. An Armenian king thought of shortening this journey by avoiding the Volga, Tanaïs, and Palus-Mæotis. He established direct communication between the Cyrus, which flows into the Caspian Sea, and the Phasis, which runs towards the end of the Pontus-Euxinus. The crossing by land was only fifteen leagues. One hundred and twenty bridges were thrown between the mountains to make this route practicable for commerce, and these still witness to the greatness, utility, and difficulties of the enterprise.

So long as commerce followed this route it enriched the maritime towns of Kaffa, Trebizond, Sinope, and Byzantium, on the Black Sea. The greed of the Tatars multiplied dangers on this route; they diverted towards Lake Aral the Gihon and the Sihun, two rivers which discharged into the Caspian Sea, and thus destroyed one of the communications between India and Europe. Saracen industry reopened communication with the Red Sea, Egypt, and Alexandria, and all the Syrian ports became marts for oriental merchandise. This furnished the opportunity to the Venetian trader. Never did people destined to rise to such great commercial enterprise begin under narrower circumstances. The Venetians had no territory. They were tributary to their neighbours for all necessaries of life, and had nothing to offer in exchange save fish and salt—natural products, of which man could not considerably augment the value. Yet, inasmuch as the profits of this commerce were mediocre, so it was important to extend them. To increase the consumption of fish, it was necessary to prepare it in such a way that it would keep; and to have no rivals in the sale of salt, it was imperative to sell at the lowest price.

The very poor profits that the islanders could make on these two objects furnished them the means of buying larger products from the neighbouring coasts. Wood from Dalmatia they made into boats, their islands became dockyards that provided means of navigation on the neighbouring rivers and ports. In proportion as the towns of Aquila, Padua, and Ravenna acquired prosperity, so handicraft became dearer, and the inhabitants more disdainful of this kind of work. Thus to the Venetians there resulted not only the advantage of selling objects augmented in value by their labour, but the still greater one of perfecting themselves in the art of naval construction, while other peoples did not make similar progress. Moreover, they always found plenty of material, and could consequently always increase their marine.[315] Their commerce becoming more profitable, they transported into their isles other rough products, higher priced and capable of receiving a still greater value when worked; flax and hemp to make naval equipage, iron to forge anchors and arms. These were the things which they bartered for the coveted products of the East. Growing still richer, they exercised their talents on things more valuable—wool, cotton, silk, silver, gold, even making a high-priced ware of such common material as glass.g

Indeed, the manufacture of ornamental glass vessels became so distinctively a Venetian specialty, and one carried to such unrivalled perfection, that a more detailed reference to this branch of manufacture may well occupy our attention.a

VENETIAN GLASS

The glass manufactories, to believe the Venetian authors, were almost contemporaneous with the founding of the city itself. A great event which marked the beginning of the twelfth century was the means of increasing their prosperity, and contributed to the introduction of art into a manufacture until then purely industrial. The Venetian Republic had, in short, participated in the taking of Constantinople by the Latins (1204), and imbued as she was with the spirit of commerce, she sought to derive every possible advantage from this victory, in favour of her dawning manufactures. The glass manufactories of the Eastern Empire were inspected by agents of the republic, and Greek workmen were allured to Venice. It is certain that, to date from the end of the thirteenth century, an uninterrupted series may be produced of acts of the Venetian government, which prove both the importance of the glass manufactories from that remote period, and the special interest ever taken by the state in the cultivation of the art, which, to use the expression of a Venetian writer, it guarded as the apple of its eye. In this it displayed great sagacity, since for many centuries the four quarters of the world were inundated by the various productions of the glass manufactories of Venice; and the sums of money procured to the republic by this branch of industry alone would utterly defy calculation.

From the end of the thirteenth century, the manufactories of glass had so multiplied in the interior of Venice, that the city was incessantly exposed to fires. In 1287, a decree of the great council prohibited any manufactory of glass to be established within the city, unless by the proprietor of the house in which it was to be carried on. As this exception in favour of the proprietors perpetuated the inconveniences which the government had endeavoured to guard against, a new decree was issued on the 8th of October, 1291, by which all the manufactories of glass still existing in the interior of Venice were ordered to be demolished and removed out of the city.

It was then that choice was made of the island of Murano, which is only separated from Venice by a canal of small extent, for establishing in it the manufactories of glass. In a few years, the whole island was covered with glass manufactories of various descriptions. But a new decree of the 11th of August, 1592, modified the rigour of the previous regulations in favour of the manufactories of small glassware (fabbriche di conterie) for the making of beads, false stones, and glass jewels. These were now allowed to be set up in the very interior of Venice, with the sole condition of their being insulated at least five paces from any habitation.

This favour granted to glass jewelry proceeded from the immense trade in it carried on by Venice at that period, and the government was[316] careful in no way to check a branch of industry which extended its relations in Africa and Asia, and consequently favoured the extension of its navy, upon which depended the increase of the power of the republic.

The Venetian glass-makers were soon engaged almost exclusively in this branch of its manufacture, a circumstance which may be accounted for as follows: About 1250, a Venetian Matteo Polo and his brother Niccolo, father of the celebrated Marco Polo, were attracted by commercial views to Constantinople. In 1256 they both visited the khan of Tatary, who inhabited the banks of the Volga. War having obliged them to leave the states of Bereke,[19] in which they had been stopping, they passed on to Bokhara, to the south of the Caspian Sea, and afterwards proceeded to the court of Kublai, great khan of the Tatars, whose sovereignty extended over the greater part of Asia. On their return to their own country, after twenty years’ absence, they found Marco Polo, whom they had left in the cradle. Their narrations inflamed the imagination of the young man, who desired to accompany his father and uncle in a new journey, on which they set out. Marco Polo went with them in 1271. In 1274 he arrived at the court of Kublai-Khan, attached himself to the service of that monarch, became governor of one of his provinces, and was trusted by him with the most important missions.

Extensive travels, and the duties of his high station, filled up the best years of Marco Polo’s life. On returning to Venice, in 1295, after having explored the greater part of Central Asia, the shores and islands of the Indian Ocean, and those of the Persian Gulf, he pointed out to his fellow-citizens, whose intrepidity as navigators was equal to their love of enterprise as merchants, the routes they must follow to spread the productions of European industry over Tatary, India, and even as far as China; he described the manners of the people who inhabited these immense regions, and their extraordinary predilection for beads, coloured stones, and jewels of every description, with which they were fond of adorning their persons and of decorating their garments. Nothing more was needed to excite the industrial and mercantile spirit of the Venetians. The glass-makers particularly devoted themselves more zealously than ever to the manufacture of beads and glass jewels (arte del margaritaio, arte del perlaio), a manufacture which, from that time, formed a totally distinct branch from that of glass vessels (fabbriche di vassellami o recipiendi di vetro e cristallo). The names of Cristoforo Briani and of Domenico Miotto have been handed down to us as having been the inventors of coloured beads (margarite), and as having also been the first glass-makers who turned their attention to the imitation of precious stones.

This Miotto having been successful in a large speculation he had made at Bassora, almost all the Venetian glass-makers applied themselves to the manufacture of these objects, which were soon dispersed over Egypt, Ethiopia, and Abyssinia, along the coasts of North Africa, over central Asia, India, and even as far as China.

This commercial movement would necessarily retard during the course of the fourteenth century, any progress in the manufacture of glass vessels; in fact, all the information existing upon the glass-making of Venice at this period refers for the most part only to the making of the margarite, which were a source of such commercial advantages to the republic. Carlo Marino quotes a document from which it appears that a certain Andolo de Savignon,[317] Genoese ambassador at the court of the emperor of China, obtained from the great council full powers to export this same glass jewellery to a very considerable amount. We learn also, from the inventories of the fourteenth century, that at that period richly ornamented vases of glass were still obtained from the East. Yet the manufacturers of glass vessels were already endeavouring to procure the documents most needed for the improvement of their productions. The learned Morelli has given an extract from a manuscript contained in the Naniana library, and dating from the fourteenth century, which gives an account of the processes employed by the Greeks for rendering glass colourless and spotless, for gilding and staining it, and for covering it with paintings.

The invasion of the Eastern Empire by the Turks, and the taking of Constantinople in 1453, which occasioned the immigration of so many artists into Italy, was beneficial to glass-making, as well as to the other industrial arts. To date from the fifteenth century, we find the manufacture of glass vessels taking a new direction. The Venetian glass-makers borrowed from the Greeks all their processes for colouring, gilding, and enamelling glass; and the Renaissance having restored a taste for the fine forms of antiquity, the art of glass-making followed the movement given by the great artists at that period who rendered Italy illustrious; and vases were produced in no wise inferior in form to those bequeathed by antiquity. Coccius Sabellicus,k a Venetian historian of the fifteenth century, affords us evidence of the admiration excited in his time by the beautiful and varied productions of the Venetian glass manufactories.

At the end of the fifteenth century, or rather in the first years of the sixteenth, the Venetian glass-makers distinguished themselves by a new invention, that of vases enriched with filagrees of glass, either white or coloured, which twisted themselves into a thousand varied patterns, and appeared as if encrusted in the middle of the paste of the colourless and transparent crystal. This invention, which, while it enriched the vases with an indestructible ornamentation, preserved at the same time their light and graceful forms, gave a new impulse to the manufactories of glassware, and caused their beautiful productions to be even more sought after by every nation of Europe. Accordingly the Venetian government used every possible precaution to prevent the secret of this new manufacture from being discovered, or Venetian workmen from carrying away this branch of industry to other nations.

Already, in the thirteenth century, a decree of the great council had prohibited the exportation, without the authority of the state, of the principal materials used in the composition of glass. On the 13th of February, 1490, the superintendence of the manufactories of Murano was intrusted to the chief of the Council of Ten, and, on the 27th of October, 1547, the council reserved to itself the care of watching over the manufactories to prevent the art of glass-making from being carried abroad. Yet all these precautions did not appear to have been sufficient, and the inquisition of the state, in the twenty-sixth article of its statutes, announced the following decision: “If a workman transport his art into a foreign country to the injury of the republic, a message shall be sent to him to return; if he does not obey, the persons most nearly related to him shall be put into prison. If, notwithstanding the imprisonment of his relatives, he persists in remaining abroad, an emissary shall be commissioned to put him to death.” M. Daru, who, in his Histoire de la république de Venise, has given us the text of this decree, which he had copied from the archives of the republic, adds that, in a document deposited in the archives of foreign affairs, two instances were recorded of[318] the execution of this punishment on some workmen whom the emperor Leopold had enticed into his states.

If the government of Venice thought it needful, on the one hand, to display all its severity against the glass-makers who should thus betray the interests of their country, it, on the other hand, loaded with favours those who remained faithful to its service, and great privileges were accorded to the island of Murano. From the thirteenth century, the inhabitants of Murano, for instance, obtained the rights of citizens of Venice, which rendered them admissible to all the high offices of the state.i

OTHER MANUFACTURES

Needless to say, glass production was not the only manufacturing industry that flourished in Venice. From an early time there were brass or iron foundries, or both, in operation there; but much more important forms of manufacture than these were the making of cloth-of-gold and of purple dye. These with glass-making were the most ancient, the most extensive, and the most celebrated of Venetian industries.a

The trade in cloths-of-gold in the form of mantles or pallii, for either sex, was prodigious; and the profit arising to the Venetians from this source alone was incalculably large; the courts of France and Germany, and more particularly the former, were among the best customers of the republic. Charlemagne himself was seldom seen without a robe of Venetian pattern and texture; and the constant intercourse which the patriarch Fortunato maintained with the son of Pepin, had at least the good effect of spreading the knowledge and appreciation of the manufactures of his country to the banks of the Seine and the Loire. It was a point of policy which the republic steadily observed from the beginning, to make every extension of territory, every treaty of peace, beneficial to her interests as a mercantile power.e

The activity of all this industry increased the population, and this led to increased consumption of every kind, this again leading to new speculations and returns. The Venetians were no longer satisfied to go and buy raw materials of the foreigner, but sought to make the country produce them. Troops of sheep were reared in Polesine, and were sent into the mountains[319] of eastern Istria. The hill-sides of Friuli were covered with mulberry trees. An attempt was made to naturalise the sugar-cane in the isles of the Levant.g

THE SLAVE TRADE

But after all it was as a commercial rather than as a manufacturing city that Venice was really great, and nature intended her for the former, not for the latter. It was in transporting or bartering with the produce of other peoples that her chief interest lay. In general, no more worthy passport to fame could be desired by a people than comes through such commercial enterprises. There was one phase of commerce, however, which forms an ugly blot on the otherwise pleasant picture. This is the slave trade. In carrying out this nefarious business the Genoese and Venetian merchants found, at one time, an important source of revenue. The chief market was Egypt.a

It appears that the mameluke sultans who governed Egypt from the middle of the thirteenth century, finding only insufficient resources for recruiting their armies in a native population little fitted for the profession of arms, had recourse to another quarter: the purchase of slaves, natives of the countries of the north. On the other hand, in order to fill their harems and those of the great men of the court, female slaves were brought in and were frequently renewed. They therefore sent agents in search of slaves of either sex wherever they could obtain them, even from Christian countries—Armenia Minor, for instance. The religion to which they had belonged was of little consequence; if they were Christians their new masters soon made converts of them. However, the Egyptian agents by preference visited the countries where Islam was the dominant religion, and vice versa the merchants from Mussulman countries brought troops of slaves to Egypt to sell them. So it was especially the ports of Adalia and Candelore, situated in that part of Asia Minor which had been subjugated by the Seleucidæ, which sent young boys and young girls into Egypt. When Hadrianopolis and Gallipoli had fallen into the power of the Osmanlis, it was from these two towns that Greek or Christian vessels started, carrying slaves by hundreds to Damietta or Alexandria.

But this trade attained its most flourishing condition in the countries bordering the Black Sea. The development of the power of the mameluke sultans in Egypt and the propagation of Islam in the great Mongol Empire of Kiptchak by the khan Bereke had occurred almost simultaneously, and these events were the occasion of an active exchange of correspondence and embassies between the masters of the two countries. From this time, the agents charged with the purchase of slaves for the sultans directed their search especially towards the northern shores of the Black Sea, and Sultan Bibars by embassies and presents succeeded in obtaining from Michael Palæologus, who, it appears, was not aware of the importance of the concession which he was asked to make, permission to send Egyptian trading vessels through the Bosporus. Permission was granted only for one vessel which was to make, once a year, the voyage to the Black Sea, there and back; but instead of only one there were often two, and their cargo on the return voyage consisted of slaves destined to reinforce the sultan’s troops. It must be observed that the condition in which this region then was could not have been more favourable to the development of this kind of trade. Although the Tatars were solidly settled in their empire of Kiptchak, there were still some unsubdued tribes, and between them the normal state was[320] one of war—skirmishing war in which Circassians, Russians, Magyars, and Alajans carried off, each in their turn, Tatar children whom they sold as slaves. Moreover the Tatars reserved the same fate for the prisoners whom they brought back from their raids in the Caucasus. And furthermore, among these savage tribes, when provisions were too dear or taxes too heavy, nothing was more common than to see parents selling their own children, especially their daughters. Naturally, it was only the strong, healthy, and well-formed who were put up for sale. But along the whole of the coast neither the Tatars nor the tribes whom they had subdued possessed large trading ports. Kaffa, Tana, etc., were in the hands of the Italians, and so it happened that the slave trade was concentrated in the Italian marts, and especially at Kaffa. This latter town was the habitual resort of the agents charged with the purchase of slaves for the sultans of Egypt; a certain number of them even lived there permanently.

The Genoese were obliged to permit the embarkation of slaves for Egypt to take place in their port of Kaffa; if they had placed difficulties in the way of the sultan’s agents, they would have risked compromising their own commercial relations with Egypt to the greatest extent, and even the existence of their colonies. Besides, this trade was severely controlled by the colonial authorities. Every slave passing through underwent examination; he was asked if he were Mussulman or Christian. If he was of the Christian faith or if he expressed a wish to be converted, the consul of Kaffa ransomed him and kept him in his possession; he allowed only Mussulmans to leave. Slaves who wished to become Christians also found a refuge in the bishop’s house, respected by the civil authorities. Moreover, the government watched with the greatest care that no inhabitant of Kaffa was carried away into slavery. Finally, there was a tax upon the slave trade, and the republic of Genoa enforced it energetically in 1431, in spite of the complaint of Sultan Barsabay, who, in retaliation, imposed a tax of 16,000 ducats on the Genoese merchants settled in Egypt.

So, legally, the slave trade was tolerated by the Genoese colonial authorities only for Mussulmans and on condition that the transport leaving for Egypt should be carried out by merchants of their religion and in their own ships. Captains of Genoese ships were formally forbidden, under pain of heavy fines, to ship mamelukes of either sex for the purpose of carrying them into Egypt, Barbary, or the parts of Spain occupied by the Saracens; no Genoese was allowed to take part in this trade in any manner whatever. In the same way, on the departure from Tana, the Venetian galleys were forbidden to receive on board Mussulman or Tatar slaves destined to be sent into Turkish territory. These rules, however, did not prevent certain Christians from the northern shores of the Black Sea from sending slaves into Egypt. In 1307, the colonists of Kaffa themselves stole Tatar children to sell them to the Mussulmans (that is, to send them to Egypt). In 1371, a certain Niccolo di S. Giorgio went to Kaffa and gave himself out as a “dealer in slaves.” We do not know if he traded with Egypt, but, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a Genoese, named Segurano Salvago, went himself with slaves of both sexes to the sultan of Egypt; another, named Gentile Imperiali, accepted the post of agent for the sultan at Kaffa for the purchase of slaves. Many Genoese also assisted indirectly in the transport of slaves to Egypt; the means consisted simply in hiring their vessels for this purpose to Mussulman slave merchants. Thus the complaints of Pope John XXII were well-founded, when before the whole world he accused the Genoese of contributing to increase the power of the infidels by furnishing them with[321] slaves. Nearly a century later, at Kaffa, Tana, and other places, Christians and Jews bought Zichians, Russians, Alajans, Mingrelians, and Abkas and sold them again to the Saracens, with a profit often ten times as great as the price of purchase. These unhappy people, who had been baptised according to the Greek rite, were forced to deny their faith, and might esteem themselves happy if they did not become the victims of the masters who employed them for their infamous pleasures. Informed of this scandal, Martin V thundered excommunication against all the Christians who took part in it, while as for the Jews, he decreed that those proved guilty of it should be condemned to wear special marks on their clothes (1425).

In this manner, there arrived every year in the great market of Cairo, by way of Damietta or of Alexandria, about two thousand mamelukes, whom the sultan caused to be priced by skilful experts. The subjects who fetched the highest prices were the Tatars; they were worth from 130 to 140 ducats a head; for a Circassian they paid from 110 to 120 ducats, for a Greek about 90, for an Albanian, a Slavonian or a Serbian, from 70 to 80. The merchants had the double advantage of making large profits and of receiving tokens of the sovereign’s gratitude for the services they rendered to Islam.

The eastern slaves sent towards the northern shores of the Black Sea did not all leave with the large convoys for Egypt and Mohammedan countries in general; there are many examples of sale and purchase by members of the colonies themselves. Among others a certain Fatima may be mentioned, whose name evidently proclaims her Mussulman origin. She was bought in the first place by a Genoese, named Nicoloso da Murto, and ceded by him to the prior of the church of St. Laurence of the Genoese, who sold her to a third Genoese for the sum of 400 new Armenian dirhems; bills of sale of a similar kind which took place at Famagusta are still in existence. Those who had taken the habit of having foreign slaves in their service, during their residence in the colonies of the Levant, brought the custom back with them, and by their example encouraged others to introduce into their houses slaves bought at a distance, instead of hired servants or work-people. No prohibition existed against this, and the slave trade in itself was not considered disgraceful, provided that the merchant abstained from trading with Egypt. A Genoese law of 1441 furnishes a decided proof of this. It forbids all captains of large galleys armed for war, which went to fetch goods from Romania or Syria, to receive slaves on board, but the reason was that all disposable space might be reserved for goods, and it makes an exception in the case where a merchant on board is bringing a slave with him for his personal service. There were other vessels specially destined to the transport of slaves, and in respect to them the law took only such measures as were necessary to prevent crowding, which would have an injurious effect on the health of the cargo; for example, a vessel with one deck could not take more than thirty slaves on board, a vessel with two decks not more than forty-five, and a vessel with three decks not more than sixty.

At this period it was an understood thing that a Christian might, without scruple, treat as a slave any infidel who fell into his hands; and, for the greater part, it was precisely the infidels, that is to say the pagans or Mussulmans who formed the objects of this trade. The majority of foreign slaves brought to the Occident came originally from the empire of Kiptchak, situated at the south of Russia, as it now exists, and belonged either to the Tatar race, the most important one of the country, or to one of the tribes under its power—tribes generally called by the same name; the Circassians and the Russians were far less numerous; then came the Turks and Saracens, a name[322] which was doubtless applied to the Egyptians and Syrians; and lastly, but in very small numbers, came Bulgarians, Slavonians, and Greeks. According to the ideas of the time, it was only in connection with the last named that any doubt could arise as to the legality of selling them as slaves, for they were Christians; but in practice men did not inquire too closely. As for those who were not members of the Christian religion, they were generally converted shortly after their arrival in the West and then exchanged their barbarous name for a Christian one; but, in spite of their conversion, their masters had no scruple in keeping them as slaves, and even in selling them again.

The very origin of the great majority of these slaves leads to the supposition that the nations which had colonies on the shores of the Black Sea, the Genoese and Venetians for example, were also the nations more especially addicted to trade in slaves. As a matter of fact hundreds, thousands even, were sent to Genoa and Venice, while they were far rarer at Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Barcelona. In 1368 there were such large numbers of them in Venice that their quarrelsome, undisciplined masses formed an actual danger to the safety of the city. The Tatars were not brought there separately, but sometimes whole families of them together. From the seaports the slaves were sometimes sent into the interior; thus we hear in 1463 of a confectioner of Vigevano who had a Circassian slave girl, just as Marco Polo had a Tatar slave at Venice. Merchants from Genoa and Kaffa even took slaves of both sexes to the court of the German Empire, and the emperor Frederick III gave them permission to exhibit them for sale.

One of the interesting sides of the question we are now studying is the proportion of slaves of either sex in different countries; there was a marked difference in this respect between Egypt and the West. In Egypt, in spite of a somewhat large demand for female slaves for the harems, there was a still larger demand for male slaves, for they formed the chief contingent of army-recruiting; in the West, on the contrary, preference was given to young girls, and for various reasons: possessing a more gentle disposition, they more easily adapted themselves to life in general; then they were more apt than men for the domestic services required of them; they learned manual work more easily; and lastly, most of them were the instruments of their master’s pleasure. Which was the more enviable fate—that of the men slaves in Egypt, or that of the women slaves in Italy? It would be difficult to say. The former underwent much rough treatment while they were in the ranks, but they could rise to high posts in the army, and have sometimes even been seen seated on the throne of the sultan: the others were treated more kindly; and indeed their master not infrequently set them free, either during his life or by his will, but they never occupied a really respected position among the people.

Youth and health were the two qualities most esteemed; if the slave was also beautiful, naturally his value increased. M. Cibrario has made a list of the sales of slaves, the greater number of which occurred at Genoa or Venice; he found fifty-three in the thirteenth century, twenty-nine in the fourteenth, and twenty-eight in the fifteenth; he noted that the prices increased from one century to the other; for example, in the thirteenth century they varied between 200 and 300 lire; in the following century bargains struck under 500 lire are rare; the highest price rose to about 1400 lire; in the fifteenth century the current price was more than 800 lire; in 1492 at Venice a young Russian girl was even sold for 87 ducats, that is 2093 lire. In Tuscany, Bongi found that prices varied from 50 to 75 gold crowns; the two highest prices were 85 and 132 gold crowns, and they also were paid for Russian slaves.

The most brilliant period of the slave trade at Genoa and Venice corresponds to the most prosperous time at Kaffa and Tana. But, in 1395, Tamerlane struck a blow at the colony of Tana from which it never recovered; then came the taking of Constantinople by Muhammed II; then this same sultan forbade the Venetians, through the whole extent of his empire, to transport Mussulman slaves; he only permitted Christian slaves to be taken. These various blows caused the ruin of this branch of trade; in 1459, loud complaint was made in the Venetian senate of the increasing rarity of slaves. However, Felix Fabri estimated that, at the end of the fifteenth century, there were still at Venice about three thousand slaves, natives of the north of Africa and of Tatary; he only mentions Slavonian slaves, without giving the number.h

THE DECLINE OF VENETIAN COMMERCE

Venetian commerce was at its height in the fifteenth century, and Venice was the undisputed business centre of the world, but not long after this the prosperity of the city began to decline. There was no very sudden change, but a gradual alteration brought about by changed exterior conditions.a Other European peoples had become commercial, and naturally ceased to procure from Venice what they could themselves provide. They became rivals to Venice in every market where the natives carried on only a passive commerce. Asiatic merchandise changed its course and no longer flowed into the Adriatic. Finally those arts which contributed to the perfecting of industry progressed among other nations so quickly that the Venetians could not keep pace. After the fifteenth century many causes made the commerce decline pretty rapidly. The first of these causes was the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, and the policy of Sultan Suleiman, who, in 1530, undertook to make all Asiatic merchandise pass by Constantinople, even that coming to Europe by Syria and Egypt. They had succeeded in making the divan understand that there was no advantage in making the merchandise take a long détour, resulting only in augmenting the price without profit to the seller. Direct communication with Egypt and Syria was allowed, but when the Turks were masters of nearly all Greece and the Albanian coasts, they accustomed caravans to arrive there bringing all the divers productions from the East. Then the Venetians, always prompt to seize on this merchandise at its landing point, themselves established at Spalato—which offered a sure and convenient port—a bank, a hospital, and a fair. In the seventeenth century Spalato became a commercial town more abundantly furnished than[324] any Levantine port, being particularly well situated to receive productions from Persia and the Black Sea.

The second cause of decadence was the ill treatment of European merchants by the Turks, who put a stop to the coming of the large Venetian fleets. A third was the discovery of America, and of a way to India by the Cape of Good Hope. A fourth was the ill-directed power of Charles V who, from the beginning of his reign in 1517, doubled the custom-house duties payable by the Venetians in his states, making them 20 per cent. on all goods imported or exported. This was practically a prohibitive tariff. Moreover Charles formally forbade entry to merchants who did not consent to stop direct trading with Africa and to bring into his town of Oran all merchandise they had to sell to the Moors. The new king of Spain wanted to make of this town, where there were already celebrated fairs, a central and general mart for all barbarian commerce. The Venetians would not submit, and had to choose between the commerce of Africa and Spain.

Under the reign of Philip II, son of Charles V, the jealousy of Spanish ministers against Venetian commerce continued to be shown. Many Venetian merchants were annoyed in their undertakings, many of their ships were retained in port or seized in open sea under various pretexts. It became necessary to take marines on board to protect them against this species of piracy. Finally, a fifth cause of the commercial decadence was the loss of the isles of Cyprus and Candia. One is perhaps surprised at the number of reasons which made for the downfall of Venetian commerce, yet we have not taken account of the rivalry of Hanseatic towns, leagued towards the end of the twelfth century. Their ambition was confined to creating a northern commerce, while that of Venice was to retain that of the south; the success of one meant partial failure of the other. The state of navigation was such that it was impossible to make a journey to the Baltic by the Mediterranean and return in one year. That is why the town of Bruges had been chosen as an intermediate mart, where merchandise from north and south could be exchanged.

THE BANK OF VENICE

It remains to say a few words on the Bank of Venice. Its antiquity, which goes back to the twelfth century, that is further than any other known bank, proves the priority of the Venetians in all commercial establishments. This bank was a depot which opened a credit to investors to facilitate payments and bills of exchange; that is, instead of paying real money, cheques could be drawn on the bank. Bills on this bank could be payable at sight, and the bank always justified public confidence. In the early days there had been plenty of private banks, supported entirely by public confidence. These were principally held by nobles. Later on the government profited by suppressing them, in accordance with the law which forbade commerce to aristocrats, and established a sole national bank, placing it under the care of a prince, and taking account of all funds deposited therein. This bank was a depository pure and simple. The banker held no right of retention or commission and paid no interest. In order to insure capitalists paying in, it was necessary that the credit of the bank should be such that notes on the bank should count in business as real money.

This is how it was managed. First there was an office where cheques presented were cashed promptly in coin. By proving themselves able to do this, fewer demands of the kind were made. There were in Venice several[325] kinds of money. The best was chosen for the bank. It was ruled that it would only take or pay ducats of full value, whose quality was finer and alloy less common. It resulted then that drawers of a bill on private bankers had to run the risk of being paid in money of base alloy, whilst the holder of credit on the bank was sure of receiving the best value. This system won bank money a preference over that of current coin and augmented the credit of the establishment.

Little by little the government introduced the custom of making certain payments in bills on the bank instead of in coin. It began by admitting these bills in public depositories without difficulty, and when this usage was established a law regulated that money would be given at the bank for bills of exchange, whether from home or abroad, when these exceeded 300 ducats. It was forbidden to refuse these bills when there was no contrary convention. This was almost giving them a forced value, yet no violence was offered to public confidence. Thus specie was virtually multiplied by making bank bills do duty for it. The value of these bills being rigorously sustained, and their redemption in the best coin assured on demand, this convenient form of currency naturally became popular. As a result, the government found itself in possession of a large mass of funds which it could use for itself without paying interest. It would be very difficult to state the amount deposited in this central commercial bank. It necessarily varied. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century there were 5,000,000 ducats sterling; at the end of that century 14,000,000 or 15,000,000.g

FOOTNOTES

In an earlier chapter we left the affairs of Florence shortly after the time of the great plague in the middle of the fourteenth century. Succeeding chapters have outlined the history of the Neapolitan kingdom, of the Lombard tyrannies, and of the maritime republics, and, in so doing, have necessarily brought us pretty constantly in contact with Florentine affairs. We are now to give more specific attention to the great Tuscan city, with regard to its internal conditions during the last century following the great plague. The central events of this period have to do with the struggles that culminated in the insurrection of the ciompi, and the momentary assumption of power by the masses.

The growing discontent of the workmen gives us an illustration of the old-time conflict between capital and labour. The attempt of the wool manufactures to put themselves on a political equality with the supposedly higher arts was one of those socialistic movements which from time to time have made themselves felt among all European civilised peoples. Nothing comparable to this was ever seen in the old Orient, under despotic governments which subordinated and enslaved the individual; but such uprisings occurred in Rome under the commonwealth, and were only prevented from frequent repetition in imperial Rome by the pauperising ministrations of the paternal government. The violent outbreak of such a movement in Florence evidences the wide prevalence there of the democratic spirit, and the discontent that is the natural accompaniment of conditions making it possible for the individual to better his social state. Again and again in Italy of this period men came up from the masses and acquired the utmost distinction. Where such a defiance of hereditary traditions is possible there must be a state of social unrest; but, on the other hand, it is precisely this state of unrest that makes a great progressive civilisation possible. The present socialistic uprising in Florence did not reach more than a temporary success, so far as the precise ambitions of its promoters were concerned; but, doubtless it contributed their numberless ancillary channels to the augmentation[327] of the great stream of progress that was sweeping humanity forward toward the deep waters of the Renaissance.

While our present concern has to do solely with these internal affairs of Florence, it will be well to bear in mind the external political conditions with which these struggles of the guilds were contemporary, as they have been already outlined in previous chapters. It must be recalled that during all this time of internecine strife Florence was pretty well occupied with external warfares as well. This was the half-century when the tyrants of Milan were making their power secure, and were reaching out with more and more expectant grasp for the lands of influence that might make them supreme in all Italy. Galeazzo Visconti was the enemy of Florence during the early decades of the period, and his son Gian Galeazzo, who succeeded him in 1385—just after the period of the ciompi’s insurrection—terrorised northern Italy throughout the remainder of the century. It was in the wars of these Lombard tyrants that Sir John Hawkwood appeared. First he warred for Visconti; then, lured by the gold of Florence, he turned enemy to his old employer. Opposed to Hawkwood in his later campaigns was that other great leader of mercenaries, Jacopo del Verme, the leader whose famous feat of cutting the dams and flooding the plain about Hawkwood’s army gave the redoubtable Englishman an opportunity to make that famous retreat which is one of the most picturesque incidents of military annals.

Almost precisely contemporary with the insurrection of the ciompi, was the termination of the so-called Babylonish Captivity of the popes at Avignon, an event soon followed by the Great Schism and its attendant dissensions. In the same decade, too, occurred the famous overthrow of the Genoese by Venice in the war of Chioggia. All these events have been treated elsewhere and will be disregarded in the present chapter; but, as has been said, it will be well for the reader to bear in mind these great political upheavals which furnish the setting for the local insurrections in Florence, and which were of necessity closely associated with them in the minds of contemporaries.a

SOCIAL UPHEAVALS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Democracy had not had for the Florentines the disadvantage sometimes attributed to it—that of making great enterprises impossible. It was their ruling spirit; and, being neither an expedient of empiricism nor yet a deduction of theory, it had not limited the advance of their external power which absorbed their former rivals, Arezzo and Pistoia, and reduced Siena to a tributary state. But in the interior of their town itself they had always opposed a weak resistance to those fatal quarrels which so often caused them to fall into a state of anarchy. Nobles deprived of their rights, and finding in persecution that sustenance of life which would soon have failed them had they been left to degenerate in their narrow caste; burghers in possession of the privileges of which they had despoiled the nobles, and which they guarded fiercely, like a new garden of the Hesperides; lastly the people, who climbed to the assault as the burghers had climbed before them—all kept up an agitation with a contrary aim, but incessant, weakening the power of the state. No stability was left to the state; never had Dante’s words been truer with regard to what was woven in October and no longer existed in mid-November. If one day, against their will, the burghers grudgingly consented to the institution of casting lots which[328] meant the ruin of their pretensions to oligarchy, shortly after they withdrew with one hand what they had given with the other; they replaced in the bags of the electoral colleges the names which had been drawn from the priors’ bags, and vice versa, so that the same names could be frequently drawn. But the triumph of their cunning was a short one! The democratic instinct framed a law which made this abuse impossible (December, 1339); henceforth the tickets drawn from the bags were destroyed, and no one who filled one office could receive a second, till the bags had been entirely emptied.

These continual changes in the institutions were not accomplished without disturbances which were a constant cause of alarm, even if they did not lead to taking up arms. Macchiavelli declares that the abasement of the nobles was a cause of prosperity for Florence, because the magistrates were more respected. How can this be believed when the rich burghers are seen reproducing the excesses and abuses of those whom they succeeded in power? A petition of August 27th, 1352, accused them of pride, arrogance, and injustice, and obtained the concession that those accused of misdoing should be punished as nobles. What threat could have been more effective in holding them back on the brink of the precipice? However, they fell to the bottom. The following year their acts of brigandage formed a constant topic. Each night some daring robbery was committed. They forced the tills of the money-changers; carried away clothes and cloth from the tailors—forty-five articles on one occasion—two hundred halves of salted pigs from a pork butcher; from others, beds with mattresses, ticken, and covers. In spite of the traffic, which was great even after the curfew, the robbers were never surprised at work. In vain did the podesta, Paolo Vaiani, a severe Roman eager for justice, put on foot all the men at his disposal, and even himself keep watch. After several nights spent in the open air, he at last discovered certain men carrying bales to the walls and throwing them over; their accomplices loaded a boat with them and took them to Pisa. But they were men of low rank, many of whom believed they were only helping a bankrupt and saving his possessions from confiscation—the least of offences, if it was one at all, according to the ideas of those times. These men received the bastinado; the others were hanged.

The principal criminals were still to be discovered—those who prudently remained in the background undeterred in their shameful exploits by these examples in anima vili. After long investigation and examination it was at last discovered that the thieves were “honourable citizens,” who met with trumpets, lutes, and other musical instruments, as if for the purpose of giving a serenade. Certain young men of good family stood at either end of the street and begged the passers-by to take another road, because the musicians wished to remain unrecognised. The deafening noise made the request appear rational, and so the place was left free for houses and shops to be pillaged in the darkness of the night, without attracting suspicion, without fear of interruption. One of the leaders of the band was Bordone Bordoni, of an old and wealthy burgher family, whose members succeeded each other, almost without interruption, in public offices. Put to torture, he confessed. His brother Gherardo, one of the ambassadors sent the previous year to Charles IV, pleaded his cause with the priors, and they, indulgent towards a criminal of their own rank, opposed the capital sentence which the people demanded and which the podesta wished to pronounce. Finding it impossible to bend this severe Roman to their desire, they disbanded his body-guard. They believed that without these latter he would be forced to[329] submit. But he refused to accept this ridiculous situation, indignantly gave up the rod, emblem of command, and retired to Siena (March 11th, 1353).

Immediately the town was roused. Men declared that justice was no longer to be had by the humble. The least fault caused them to be slaughtered; if, however, a man of powerful position was banished for a crime, he posed as a victim of political proscription. If the podestas were cashiered when they were anxious to render justice, who would be willing to come to Florence? The walls were covered with angry inscriptions, insulting the priors. Those who succeeded them hastened to disavow a compromising fellowship; yielding to the general sentiment, they sent an envoy to Siena to beg the podesta to return, promising strict obedience. Paolo Vaiani did not yield immediately; he enumerated his grievances: corn had increased in price, and his salary was not sufficient for his expenses. If he returned, it must be with an increase of 2,000 florins—more than was needful, says one of the chroniclers. He had Bordone beheaded, and sent many of his accomplices into exile. By this means he calmed the people, and at last cleansed Florence of these miscreants of high rank. But their relatives were left to rekindle the almost extinguished fire. Gherardo Bordoni accused the Mangioni and the Beccanugi of his brother’s death. To avenge him he took advantage of the disorder in the town caused by the approach of the Grand Company (1354). With his consorti and his followers he pursued his enemies even to their homes, and killed two women who, according to the custom of the time, were enjoying the cool of the evening on the threshold. The troops of the seigniory tried to restore order, but they were powerless. The militia of the suburbs, with their gonfalons, were called out. This time five of the Bordoni and twelve of their accomplices were condemned to confiscation of goods and capital punishment, unless they preferred to go into exile (July, 1354).

Far more serious, and with more disastrous results in this city constantly a prey to the disputes of its families, was the rivalry of the Ricci and the Albizzi. Macchiavelli compares it with that of the Buondelmonti and the Uberti, in which history, not clear-sighted, and misinformed, so long saw the generative act of Florentine annals. A discussion was going on concerning the origin of the Albizzi. According to some, they came from Arezzo, and consequently were Ghibellines. On the contrary, others, their friends, declared that they had been driven thence because they were Guelfs. True or false, the accusation of being Ghibellines was not without danger at a time when the announced approach of Charles IV was awakening former terrors. When minds are agitated, the least incident appears important, and furnishes food for hatred. The Albizzi have servants at Casentino to defend their property? It is a lie! They are there to attack the Ricci. An ass brushed against one of the Ricci at Mercato Vecchio, and the driver was beaten for his negligence? Evidently the Ricci are attacking the Albizzi. And thus two large families took up arms, and with them the entire city. It was not easy to disarm them, and they were always ready to take up arms again. If an occasion for doing so did not soon appear, they would employ ruse instead of force.

The detail of events is wanting; but by the measures taken for or against the great, the fluctuations of public opinion may be seen, or rather the ephemeral preponderance of one or other of the two factions. At one time popular government restores to the nobles, provided they be of the Guelf faction, the right to hold posts of secondary importance, and suppresses the[330] big drum used to issue denunciations against them (April 10th, 1355). Twelve days instead of five, fifteen days instead of ten, as the case may be, are allowed their enemies to bring an action against them, and consequently for them to escape. They are allowed to enter the public palace, and to rebuild their ruined houses. No more bail, no relatives responsible beyond the third degree. At another time (August 21st, 1355), “in order to preserve and defend popular liberty and innocence, especially that of weak and unhappy persons,” it was decreed that nobles condemned for homicide, acts of wounding, robbing, incendiarism, adultery, etc., “shall no longer be allowed, nor yet their descendants, to live in the home of their family.” It was perceived that the burghers were becoming infused with the spirit of the nobles, and in consequence the difficulties of passing from one rank to the other were increased; three-quarters of the votes were required in the ballot, a majority difficult to realise, and it became, moreover, an obstacle to the cancelling of sentences and to the recall of exiles. When the seigniory was merciful to the nobles, it was a sign that the Albizzi were in power; when it was severe to them, it was under the influence of the Ricci.

Most frequently the Ricci were in power. They held community of ideas with the medium crafts, and with them they forbade the holding of office by the fourteen lesser crafts, an accomplished fact which was nevertheless always contested; they maintained the inexorable law of divieto, which held at a distance the numerous relatives of a burgher in office, without injuring the lower classes, who either had few relatives or else did not know them. The nobles and the burghers forgot, as did the Albizzi, that this government had been able to bring to a happy conclusion the unfortunate affair of Telamone, without engaging in war; to create a fleet, though they had no shore; to drive away the free companies, without paying them shameful ransoms; to keep their engagements with the Visconti, without offending the legate; and to restore order, which, precarious as it may seem to us, then appeared satisfactory. They saw only the crime of these lower classes in being so numerous in office, as arrogant at having obtained position as they were eager to obtain it, despotic, as their class always is, thinking only of their own interests, and each of them believing himself a king. These reproaches are heard in every age in the writings of the chroniclers, always disposed to[331] despise what lies before their eyes; and, moreover, how many men can be found who do not deserve such reproaches? The optical illusion which distance gives is necessary to perceive in the rich burghers only, as we see them in the past, “the old friends of their country, despisers of their own wealth to increase that of the republic”; and it requires the contrary error, which comes from too close a neighbourhood, to perceive only the failings of the lower class in a government where the lesser crafts dominated. “It is wonderful,” said Matteo Villani,c “that Florence did not perish then.” The simple statement of facts shows us what to think on this subject. How many times, under other governments, has Florence not been seen on the brink of ruin, yet ever rising with powerful force which nothing could destroy.

Another historian of Florence, Signor Gino Capponi,d blames Dante for lamenting the confusion of ranks, the introduction into the city of men from Certaldo, Campi, and Signa, who became merchants and money-changers and formed the nerve of the new race, and he approves the rich burghers who were now the objects of the same complaints which they formerly brought against the nobles. But it should be remembered that in each seigniory of that time, at the most, three members out of nine were of the lowest crafts, and that old families still kept their share. If the people of the middle classes who make the laws agreed by preference with the lowest classes, it certainly was no proof that the lowest classes were unreasonably exacting; and it leads one to think that the rich burghers were extremely so, especially in refusing to admit any newcomer to a share in the power.b

MACCHIAVELLI’S ACCOUNT OF THE CIOMPI INSURRECTION

After the victory of Charles the government was formed of the Guelfs of Anjou and it acquired great authority over the Ghibellines. But time, a variety of circumstances, and new divisions had so contributed to sink this party feeling into oblivion, that many of Ghibelline descent now filled the highest offices. Observing this, Uguccione, the head of the family of the Ricci, contrived that the law against the Ghibellines should be again brought into operation, many imagining the Albizzi to be of that faction, they having arisen in Arezzo, and come long ago to Florence. Uguccione by this means hoped to deprive the Albizzi of participation in the government, for all of Ghibelline blood who were found to hold offices would be condemned in the penalties which this law provided. The design of Uguccione was discovered to Piero son of Filippo degli Albizzi, and he resolved to favour it; for he saw that to oppose it would at once declare him a Ghibelline; and thus the law which was renewed by the ambition of the Ricci for his destruction, instead of robbing Piero degli Albizzi of reputation, contributed to increase his influence, although it laid the foundation of many evils. Piero having favoured this law, which had been contrived by his enemies for his stumbling-block, it became the stepping-stone to his greatness; for, making himself the leader of this new order of things, his authority went on increasing, and he was in greater favour with the Guelfs than any other man.

As there could not be found a magistrate willing to search out who were Ghibellines, and as this renewed enactment against them was therefore of small value, it was provided that authority should be given to the capitani to find who were of this faction; and, having discovered, to signify and admonish them that were, not to take upon themselves any office of government; to which admonitions, if they were disobedient, they became[332] condemned in the penalties. Hence, all those who in Florence were deprived of the power to hold offices were called ammoniti, or “admonished.” The capitani, in time acquiring great audacity, admonished not only those to whom the admonition was applicable, but any others at the suggestion of their own avarice or ambition; and from 1356, when this law was made, to 1366, there had been admonished above two hundred citizens. The captains of the Parts and the sect of the Guelfs were thus become powerful; for everyone honoured them for fear of being admonished; and most particularly the leaders, who were Piero degli Albizzi, Lapo da Castiglionchio, and Carlo Strozzi. The insolent mode of proceeding was offensive to many; but none felt so particularly injured with it as the Ricci; for they knew themselves to have occasioned it, they saw it involved the ruin of the republic, and their enemies the Albizzi, contrary to their intention, become great in consequence.

On this account Uguccione de’ Ricci, being one of the seigniory, resolved to put an end to the evil which he and his friends had originated, and with a new law provided that to the six captains of Parts an additional three should be appointed, of whom two should be chosen from the companies of minor artificers, and that before any party could be considered Ghibelline, the declaration of the capitani must be confirmed by twenty-four Guelfic citizens, appointed for the purpose. This provision tempered for the time the power of the capitani, so that the admonitions were greatly diminished, if not wholly laid aside. Still the parties of the Albizzi and the Ricci were continually on the alert to oppose each other’s laws, deliberations, and enterprises, not from a conviction of their inexpediency, but from hatred of their promoters. In such distractions the time passed from 1366 to 1371, when the Guelfs again regained the ascendant. There was in the family of the Buondelmonti a gentleman named Benchi, who, as an acknowledgment of his merit in a war against the Pisans, though one of the nobility, had been admitted amongst the people, and thus became eligible to office amongst the seigniory; but when about to take his seat with them, a law was made that no nobleman who had become of the popular class should be allowed to assume that office. This gave great offence to Benchi, who, in union with Piero degli Albizzi, determined to depress the less powerful of the popular party with admonitions, and obtain the government for themselves. By the interest which Benchi possessed with the ancient nobility, and that of Piero with most of the influential citizens, the Guelfic party resumed their ascendency, and by new reforms among the “parts” so remodelled the administration as to be able to dispose of the offices of the captains and the twenty-four citizens at pleasure. They then returned to the admonitions with greater audacity than ever, and the house of the Albizzi became powerful as the head of this faction. On the other hand, the Ricci made the most strenuous exertions against their designs; so that anxiety universally prevailed, and ruin was apprehended alike from both parties.

The seigniory, induced by the necessity of the case, gave authority to fifty-six citizens to provide for the safety of the republic. It is usually found that most men are better adapted to pursue a good course already begun, than to discover one applicable to immediate circumstances. These citizens thought rather of extinguishing existing factions than of preventing the formation of new ones, and effected neither of these objects. The facilities for the establishment of new parties were not removed; and out of those which they guarded against, another more powerful arose, which brought the republic into still greater danger. They, however, deprived three of the family of the Albizzi, and three of that of the Ricci, of all the offices of[333] government, except those of the Guelfic party, for three years; and amongst the deprived were Piero degli Albizzi and Uguccione de’ Ricci. They forbade the citizens to assemble in the palace, except during the sittings of the seigniory. They provided that if anyone were beaten, or possession of his property detained from him, he might bring his case before the council and denounce the offender, even if he were one of the nobility; and that if it were proved, the accused should be subject to the usual penalties. This provision abated the boldness of the Ricci, and increased that of the Albizzi; since, although it applied equally to both, the Ricci suffered from it by far the most; for if Piero was excluded from the palace of the seigniory, the chamber of the Guelfs, in which he possessed the greatest authority, remained open to him; and if he and his followers had previously been ready to admonish, they became after this injury doubly so. To this predisposition for evil, new excitements were added.

The Eight “Saints of War”

The papal chair was occupied by Gregory XI. He, like his predecessors, residing at Avignon, governed Italy by legates, who, proud and avaricious, oppressed many of the cities. One of these legates, then at Bologna, taking advantage of a great scarcity of food at Florence, endeavoured to render himself master of Tuscany, and not only withheld provisions from the Florentines, but in order to frustrate their hopes of the future harvest, upon the approach of spring, attacked them with a large army, trusting that being famished and unarmed he should find them an easy conquest. He might perhaps have been successful, had not his forces been mercenary and faithless, and, therefore, induced to abandon the enterprise for the sum of 130,000 florins, which the Florentines paid them. People may go to war when they will, but cannot always withdraw when they like. This contest, commenced by the ambition of the legate, was continued by the resentment of the Florentines, who, entering into a league with Barnabò of Milan, and with the cities hostile to the church, appointed eight citizens for the administration of it, giving them authority to act without appeal, and to expend whatever sums they might judge expedient, without rendering an account of the outlay.

This war against the pontiff, although Uguccione was now dead, reanimated those who had followed the party of the Ricci, who, in opposition to the Albizzi, had always favoured Barnabò and opposed the church, and this, the rather, because the eight commissioners of war were all enemies of the Guelfs. This occasioned Piero degli Albizzi, Lapo da Castiglionchio, Carlo Strozzi, and others to unite themselves more closely in opposition to their adversaries. The Eight carried on the war, and the others admonished during three years, when the death of the pontiff put an end to the hostilities, which had been carried on with so much ability and with such entire satisfaction to the people, that at the end of each year the Eight were continued in office, and were called santi, or holy, although they had set ecclesiastical censures at defiance, plundered the churches of their property, and compelled the priests to perform divine service. So much did citizens at that time prefer the good of their country to their ghostly consolations, and thus showed the church that if as her friends they had defended, they could as enemies depress her; for the whole of Romagna, the Marches, and Perugia were excited to rebellion.

Yet whilst this war was carried on against the pope, they were unable to defend themselves against the captains of the Parts and their faction; for[334] the insolence of the Guelfs against the Eight attained such a pitch, that they could not restrain themselves from abusive behaviour, not merely against some of the most distinguished citizens, but even against the Eight themselves; and the captains of the Parts conducted themselves with such arrogance that they were feared more than the seigniory. Those who had business with them treated them with greater reverence, and their court was held in higher estimation; so that no ambassador came to Florence without commission to the captains. Pope Gregory being dead, and the city freed from external war, there still prevailed great confusion within; for the audacity of the Guelfs was insupportable, and as no available mode of subduing them presented itself, and as it was thought that recourse must be had of being prepared against this calamity, the leaders of the party assembled to arms, to determine which party was the stronger. With the Guelfs were all the ancient nobility, and the greater part of the most powerful popular leaders, of which number, as already remarked, were Lapo, Piero, and Carlo. On the other side, were all the lower orders, the leaders of whom were the eight commissioners of war, Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozzi, and with them the Ricci, Alberti, and Medici. The rest of the multitude, as most commonly happens, joined the discontented party.

It appeared to the heads of the Guelfic faction that their enemies would be greatly strengthened, and themselves in considerable danger in case a hostile seigniory should resolve on their subjugation. Desirous, therefore, to take into consideration the state of the city, and that of their own friends in particular, they found the ammoniti so numerous and so great a difficulty, that the whole city was excited against them on this account. They could not devise any other remedy than that, as their enemies had deprived them of all the offices of honour, they should banish their opponents from the city, take possession of the palace of the seigniory, and bring over the whole state to their own party—in imitation of the Guelfs of former times, who found no safety in the city till they had driven all their adversaries out of it. They were unanimous upon the main point, but did not agree upon the time of carrying it into execution. It was in the month of April, in the year 1378, when Lapo, thinking delay unadvisable, expressed his opinion that procrastination was in the highest degree perilous to themselves, as in the next seigniory, Salvestro de’ Medici would very probably be elected gonfalonier, and they all knew he was opposed to their party. Piero degli Albizzi, on the other hand, thought it better to defer, since[335] they would require forces, which could not be assembled without exciting observation, and if they were discovered, they would incur great risk. He thereupon judged it preferable to wait till the approaching feast of St. John, on which, being the most solemn festival of the city, vast multitudes would be assembled, amongst whom they might conceal whatever numbers they pleased. To obviate their fears of Salvestro, he was to be admonished, and if this did not appear likely to be effectual, they would admonish one of the “colleagues” of his quarter, and upon re-drawing, as the ballot-boxes would be nearly empty, chance would very likely occasion that either he or some associate of his would be drawn, and he would thus be rendered incapable of sitting as gonfalonier.

They therefore at last came to the conclusion proposed by Piero, though Lapo consented reluctantly, considering the delay dangerous, and that, as no opportunity can be in all respects suitable, he who waits for the concurrence of every advantage either never makes an attempt, or, if induced to do so, is most frequently foiled. They admonished the colleague, but did not prevent the appointment of Salvestro, for the design was discovered by the Eight, who took care to render all attempts upon the drawing futile.

Salvestro Alamanno de’ Medici was therefore drawn gonfalonier, and, being of one of the noblest popular families, he could not endure that the people should be oppressed by a few powerful persons. Having resolved to put an end to their insolence, and perceiving the middle classes favourably disposed, and many of the highest of the people on his side, he communicated his design to Benedetto Alberti, Tommaso Strozzi, and Giorgio Scali, who all promised their assistance. They, therefore, secretly drew up a law which had for its object to revive the restrictions upon the nobility, to retrench the authority of the capitani di parte, and also to recall the ammoniti to their dignity.

In order to attempt and obtain their ends, at one and the same time, having to consult, first the colleagues and then the councils, Salvestro being provost (which office for the time made its possessor almost prince of the city), he called together the colleagues and the council on the same morning, and the colleagues being apart, he proposed the law prepared by himself and his friends, which, being a novelty, encountered in their small number so much opposition that he was unable to have it passed.

Salvestro, seeing his first attempt likely to fail, pretended to leave the room for a private reason, and, without being perceived, went immediately to the council, and taking a lofty position from which he could be both seen and heard, said that, considering himself invested with the office of gonfalonier not so much to preside in private cases (for which proper judges were appointed, who have their regular sittings) as to guard the state, correct the insolence of the powerful, and ameliorate those laws by the influence of which the republic was being ruined, he had carefully attended to both these duties, and to his utmost ability provided for them, but found the perversity of some so much opposed to his just designs as to deprive him of all opportunity of doing good, and them not only of the means of assisting him with their counsel, but even hearing him. Therefore, finding he no longer contributed either to the benefit of the republic or of the people generally, he could not perceive any reason for his longer holding the magistracy, of which he was either undeserving, or others thought him so, and would therefore retire to his house, that the people might appoint another in his stead, who would either have greater virtue or better fortune than himself. And having said this, he left the room as if to return home.

Mob Violence

Those of the council who were in the secret, and others desirous of novelty, raised a tumult, at which the seigniory and the colleagues came together, and finding the gonfalonier leaving them, entreatingly and authoritatively detained him, and obliged him to return to the council room, which was now full of confusion. Many of the noble citizens were threatened in opprobrious language; and an artificer seized Carlo Strozzi by the throat, and would undoubtedly have murdered him, but was with difficulty prevented by those around. He who made the greatest disturbance, and incited the city to violence, was Benedetto degli Alberti, who, from a window of the palace, loudly called the people to arms; and presently the courtyards were filled with armed men, and the colleagues granted to threats what they had refused to entreaty. The capitani di parte had at the same time drawn together a great number of citizens to their hall, to consult upon the means of defending themselves against the orders of the seigniors; but when they heard the tumult that was raised, and were informed of the course the councils had adopted, each took refuge in his own house.

Let no one, when raising popular commotions, imagine he can afterwards control them at his pleasure, or restrain them from proceeding to the commission of violence. Salvestro intended to enact his law, and compose the city; but it happened otherwise; for the feelings of all had become so excited, that they shut up the shops; the citizens fortified themselves in their houses; many conveyed their valuable property into the churches and monasteries, and everyone seemed to apprehend something terrible at hand. The companies of the arts met, and each appointed an additional officer or syndic; upon which the priors summoned their colleagues and these syndics, and consulted a whole day how the city might be appeased with satisfaction to the different parties; but much difference of opinion prevailed, and no conclusion was come to. On the following day the arts brought forth their banners, which the seigniory, understanding, and being apprehensive of evil, called the council together to consider what course to adopt. But scarcely were they met, when the uproar recommenced, and soon the ensigns of the arts, surrounded by vast numbers of armed men, occupied the courts. Upon this the council, to give the arts and the people hope of redress, and free themselves as much as possible from the charge of causing the mischief, gave a general power, which in Florence is called balia, to the seigniors, the colleagues, the Eight, the capitani di parte, and to the syndics of the arts, to reform the government of the city for the common benefit of all. Whilst this was being arranged, a few of the ensigns of the arts and some of the mob, desirous of avenging themselves for the recent injuries they had received from the Guelfs, separated themselves from the rest, and sacked and burned the house of Lapo da Castiglionchio, who, when he learned the proceedings of the seigniory against the Guelfs, and saw the people in arms, having no other resource but concealment or flight, first took refuge in Santa Croce, and afterwards, being disguised as a monk, fled into the Casentino, where he was often heard to blame himself for having consented to wait till St. John’s day, before they had made themselves sure of the government. Piero degli Albizzi and Carlo Strozzi hid themselves upon the first outbreak of the tumult, trusting that when it was over, by the interest of their numerous friends and relations, they might remain safely in Florence.

The house of Lapo being burned, as mischief begins with difficulty but easily increases, many other houses, either through public hatred or private[337] malice, shared the same fate; and the rioters, that they might have companions more eager than themselves to assist them in their work of plunder, broke open the public prisons, and then sacked the monastery of the Agnoli and the convent of Santo Spirito, whither many citizens had taken their most valuable goods for safety. Nor would the public chambers have escaped these destroyers’ hands, except out of reverence for one of the seigniors who, on horseback and followed by many citizens in arms, opposed the rage of the mob.

This popular fury being abated by the authority of the seigniors and the approach of night, on the following day the balia relieved the admonished, on condition that they should not for three years be capable of holding any magistracy. They annulled the laws made by the Guelfs to the prejudice of the citizens; declared Lapo da Castiglionchio and his companions rebels, and with them many others, who were the objects of universal detestation. After these resolutions, the new seigniory were drawn for, and Luigi Guicciardini was appointed gonfalonier, which gave hope that the tumults would soon be appeased; for everyone thought them to be peaceable men and lovers of order. Still the shops were not opened, nor did the citizens lay down their arms, but continued to patrol the city in great numbers.

Presently a disturbance arose, much more injurious to the republic than anything that had hitherto occurred. The greatest part of the fires and robberies which took place on the previous days was perpetrated by the very lowest of the people; and those who had been the most audacious were afraid that, when the greater differences were composed, they would be punished for the crimes they had committed; and that, as usual, they would be abandoned by those who had instigated them to the commission of crime. To this may be added the hatred of the lower orders towards the rich citizens and the principals of the arts, because they did not think themselves remunerated for their labour in a manner equal to their merits. For in the time of Charles I, when the city was divided into arts, a head or governor was appointed to each, and it was provided that the individuals of each art should be judged in civil matters by their own superiors. These arts were at first twelve; in the course of time they were increased to twenty-one, and attained so much power that in a few years they grasped the entire government of the city; and as some were in greater esteem than others, they were divided into major and minor; seven were called the “major,” and fourteen the “minor arts.” From this division, and from other causes, arose the arrogance of the capitani di parte; for these citizens, who had formerly been Guelfs, and had the constant disposal of that magistracy, favoured the followers of the major and persecuted the minor arts and their patrons; and hence arose the many commotions already mentioned. When the companies of the arts were first organised, many of those trades, followed by the lowest of the people and the plebeians, were not incorporated, but were ranged under those[338] arts most nearly allied to them; and, hence, when they were not properly remunerated for their labour, or their masters oppressed them, they had no one of whom to seek redress, except the magistrate of the art to which theirs was subject; and of him they did not think justice always attainable. Of the arts, that which always had the greatest number of these subordinates was the woollen; which being the most powerful body, and first in authority, supported the greater part of the plebeians and lowest of the people.

The lower classes, then, the subordinates not only of the woollen, but also of the other arts, were discontented, from the causes just mentioned; and their apprehension of punishment for the burnings and robberies they had committed did not tend to compose them. Meetings took place in different parts during night, to talk over the past, and to communicate the danger in which they were. When one of the most daring and experienced, in order to animate the rest, spoke thus: “If the question now were whether we should take up arms, rob and burn the houses of the citizens, and plunder churches, I am one of those who would think it worthy of further consideration, and should, perhaps, prefer poverty and safety to the dangerous pursuit of an uncertain good. But as we have already armed, and many offences have been committed, and those who are first in arms will certainly be victors, to the ruin of their enemies and their own exaltation; thus honours will accrue to many of us, and security to all.” These arguments greatly inflamed minds already disposed to mischief so that they determined to take up arms as soon as they had acquired a sufficient number of associates, and bound themselves by oath to mutual defence, in case any of them were subdued by the civil power.

Whilst they were arranging to take possession of the republic, their design became known to the seigniory, who, having taken a man named Simone, learned from him the particulars of the conspiracy, and that the outbreak was to take place on the following day. Finding the danger so pressing, they called together the colleagues and those citizens who with the syndics of the arts were endeavouring to effect the union of the city. It was then evening, and they advised the seigniors to assemble the consuls of the trades, who proposed that whatever armed force was in Florence should be collected, and with the gonfaloniers of the people and their companies meet under arms in the piazza next morning. It happened that whilst Simone was being tortured, a man named Niccolo da San Friano was regulating the palace clock, and becoming acquainted with what was going on, returned home and spread the report of it in his neighbourhood, so that presently the piazza of Santo Spirito was occupied by above a thousand men. This soon became known to the other conspirators, and San Pietro Maggiore and San Lorenzo, their places of assembly, were presently full of them, all under arms.

At daybreak, on the 21st of July, there did not appear in the piazza above eighty men in arms friendly to the seigniory, and not one of the gonfaloniers; for knowing the whole city to be in a state of insurrection they were afraid to leave their homes. The first body of plebeians that made its appearance was that which had assembled at San Pietro Maggiore; but the armed force did not venture to attack them. Then came the other multitudes, and finding no opposition, they loudly demanded their prisoners from the seigniory; and being resolved to have them by force if they were not yielded to their threats, they burned the house of Luigi Guicciardini; and the seigniory, for fear of greater mischief, set them at liberty. With this addition to their strength they took the gonfalon of justice from the bearer, and[339] under the shadow of authority which it gave them, burned the houses of many citizens, selecting those whose owners had publicly or privately excited their hatred. Many citizens, to avenge themselves for private injuries, conducted them to the houses of their enemies; for it was quite sufficient to insure its destruction, if a single voice from the mob called out, “To the house of such a one,” or if he who bore the gonfalon took the road towards it. All the documents belonging to the woollen trade were burned, and after the commission of much violence, by way of associating it with something laudable, Salvestro de’ Medici and sixty-three other citizens were made knights, amongst whom were Benedetto and Antonio degli Alberti, Tommaso Strozzi, and others similarly their friends; though many received the honour against their wills. It was a remarkable peculiarity of the riots that many who had their houses burned were on the same day and by the same party made knights; so close were the kindness and the injury together. This circumstance occurred to Luigi Guicciardini, gonfalonier of justice.

In this tremendous uproar, the seigniory, finding themselves abandoned by their armed force, by the leaders of the arts, and by the gonfaloniers, became dismayed; for none had come to their assistance in obedience to orders; and of the sixteen gonfalons, the ensign of the Golden Lion and of the Vaio, under Giovenco della Stufa and Giovanni Cambi, alone appeared; and these, not being joined by any other, soon withdrew. Of the citizens, on the other hand, some, seeing the fury of this unreasonable multitude and the palace abandoned, remained within doors; others followed the armed mob, in the hope that, by being amongst them, they might more easily protect their own houses or those of their friends. The power of the plebeians was thus increased and that of the seigniory weakened. The tumult continued all day, and at night the rioters halted near the palace of Stefano, behind the church of St. Barnabas. Their number exceeded six thousand, and before daybreak they obtained by threats the ensigns of the trades, with which and the gonfalon of justice, when morning came, they proceeded to the palace of the provost, who refusing to surrender it to them, they took possession of it by force.

The seigniory, desirous of a compromise, since they could not restrain them by force, appointed four of the colleagues to proceed to the palace of the provost, and endeavour to learn what was their intention. They found that the leaders of the plebeians, with the syndics of the trades and some citizens, had resolved to signify their wishes to the seigniory. They therefore returned with four deputies of the plebeians, who demanded that the woollen trade should not be allowed to have a foreign judge; that there should be formed three new companies of the arts; namely, one for the wool-combers and dyers, one for the barbers, doublet-makers, tailors, and such like, and the third for the lowest class of people. They required that the three new arts should furnish two seigniors; the fourteen minor arts, three; and that the seigniory should provide a suitable place of assembly for them. They also made it a condition that no member of these companies should be expected during two years to pay any debt that amounted to less than 50 ducats; that the bank should take no interest on loans already contracted and that only the principal sum should be demanded; that the condemned and the banished should be forgiven, and the admonished should be restored to participation in the honours of government. Besides these, many other articles were stipulated in favour of their friends, and a requisition made that many of their enemies should be exiled and admonished. These demands, though[340] grievous and dishonourable to the republic, were for fear of further violence granted, by the joint deliberation of the seigniors, colleagues, and council of the people. But in order to give it full effect, it was requisite that the council of the commune should also give its consent; and, as they could not assemble two councils during the same day, it was necessary to defer it till the morrow. However, the trades appeared content, the plebeians satisfied; and both promised that, these laws being confirmed, every disturbance should cease.

On the following morning, whilst the council of the commune were in consultation, the impatient and volatile multitude entered the piazza, under their respective ensigns, with loud and fearful shouts, which struck terror into all the council and seigniory; and Guerrente Marignolli, one of the latter, influenced more by fear than anything else, under pretence of guarding the lower doors, left the chamber and fled to his house. He was unable to conceal himself from the multitude, who, however, took no notice, except that, upon seeing him, they insisted that all the seigniors should quit the palace, and declared that if they refused to comply, their houses should be burned and their families put to death.

The law had now been passed; the seigniors were in their own apartments; the council had descended from the chamber, and without leaving the palace, hopeless of saving the city, they remained in the lodges and courts below, overwhelmed with grief at seeing such depravity in the multitude, and such perversity or fear in those who might either have restrained or suppressed them. The seigniory, too, were dismayed and fearful for the safety of their country, finding themselves abandoned by one of their associates, and without any aid or even advice; when, at this moment of uncertainty as to what was about to happen, or what would be best to be done, Tommaso Strozzi and Benedetto Alberti, either from motives of ambition (being desirous of remaining masters of the palace), or because they thought it the most advisable step, persuaded them to give way to the popular impulse, and withdraw privately to their own homes. This advice, given by those who had been the leaders of the tumult, although the others yielded, filled Alamanno Acciajuoli and Niccolo del Bene, two of the seigniors, with anger; and, reassuming a little vigour, they said, that if the others would withdraw they could not help it, but they would remain as long as they continued in office, if they did not in the meantime lose their lives. These dissensions redoubled the fears of the seigniory and the rage of the people, so that the gonfalonier, disposed to conclude his magistracy in dishonour than in danger, recommended himself to the care of Tommaso Strozzi, who withdrew him from the palace and conducted him to his house. The other seigniors were, one after another, conveyed in the same manner, so that Alamanno and Niccolo, not to appear more valiant than wise, seeing themselves left alone, also retired, and the palace fell into the hands of the plebeians and the eight commissioners of war, who had not yet laid down their authority.

Michele di Lando

When the plebeians entered the palace, the standard of the gonfalonier of justice was in the hands of Michele di Lando, a wool-comber. This man, barefoot, with scarcely anything upon him, and the rabble at his heels, ascended the staircase, and, having entered the audience chamber of the seigniory, he stopped, and turning to the multitude said, “You see this palace is now yours, and the city is in your power; what do you think ought to be[341] done?” To which they replied, they would have him for their gonfalonier and lord; and that he should govern them and the city as he thought best. Michele accepted the command; and, as he was a cool and sagacious man, more favoured by nature than by fortune, he resolved to compose the tumult and restore peace to the city. To occupy the minds of the people, and give himself time to make some arrangement, he ordered that one Nuto, who had been appointed bargello, or sheriff, by Lapo da Castiglionchio, should be sought. The greater part of his followers went to execute this commission; and, to commence with justice the government he had acquired by favour, he commanded that no one should either burn or steal anything; while, to strike terror into all, he caused a gallows to be erected in the court of the palace. He began the reform of government by deposing the syndics of the trades, and appointing new ones; he deprived the seigniory and the colleagues of their magistracy, and burned the balloting purses containing the names of those eligible to office under the former government. In the meantime, Ser Nuto, being brought by the mob into the court, was suspended from the gallows by one foot; and those around having torn him to pieces, in little more than a moment nothing remained of him but the foot by which he had been tied.

The eight commissioners of war, on the other hand, thinking themselves, after the departure of the seigniors, left sole masters of the city, had already formed a new seigniory; but Michele, on learning this, sent them an order to quit the palace immediately; for he wished to show that he could govern Florence without their assistance. He then assembled the syndics of the trades, and created as a seigniory, four from the lowest plebeians, two from the major, and two from the minor trades. Besides this, he made a new selection of names for the balloting purses, and divided the state into three parts; one composed of the new trades, another of the minor, and the third of the major trades. He gave to Salvestro de’ Medici the revenue of the shops upon the Ponte Vecchio; for himself he took the provostry of Empoli, and conferred benefits upon many other citizens, friends of the plebeians, not so much for the purpose of rewarding their labours, as that they might serve to screen him from envy.

It seemed to the plebeians that Michele, in his reformation of the state, had too much favoured the higher ranks of the people, and that they themselves had not a sufficient share in the government to enable them to preserve it; and hence, prompted by their usual audacity, they again took arms, and coming tumultuously into the court of the palace, each body under their particular ensigns, insisted that the seigniory should immediately descend and consider new means for advancing their well-being and security. Michele, observing their arrogance, was unwilling to provoke them, but without further yielding to their request, blamed the manner in which it was made, advised them to lay down their arms, and promised that then would be conceded to them, what otherwise, for the dignity of the state, must of necessity be withheld. The multitude, enraged at this reply, withdrew to Santa Maria Novella, where they appointed eight leaders for their party, with officers and other regulations to insure influence and respect; so that the city possessed two governments, and was under the direction of two distinct powers. These new leaders determined that eight, elected from their trades, should constantly reside in the palace with the seigniory, and that whatever the seigniory should determine must be confirmed by them before it became law. They took from Salvestro de’ Medici and Michele di Lando the whole of what their former decrees had granted them, and distributed to many of their party[342] offices and emoluments to enable them to support their dignity. These resolutions being passed, to render them valid they sent two of their body to the seigniory, to insist on their being confirmed by the council, with an intimation, that if not granted they would be vindicated by force. This deputation, with amazing audacity and surpassing presumption, explained their commission to the seigniory, upbraided the gonfalonier with the dignity they had conferred upon him, the honour they had done him, and with the ingratitude and want of respect he had shown towards them. Coming to threats towards the end of their discourse, Michele could not endure their arrogance, and sensible rather of the dignity of the office he held than of the meanness of his origin, determined by extraordinary means to punish such extraordinary insolence, and drawing the sword with which he was girt, seriously wounded, and caused them to be seized and imprisoned.

When the fact became known, the multitude were filled with rage, and thinking that by their arms they might insure what without them they had failed to effect, they seized their weapons, and with the utmost fury resolved to force the seigniory to consent to their wishes. Michele, suspecting what would happen, determined to be prepared, for he knew his credit rather required him to be first in the attack than to wait the approach of the enemy, or, like his predecessors, dishonour both the palace and himself by flight. He therefore drew together a good number of citizens (for many began to see their error), mounted on horseback, and followed by crowds of armed men, proceeded to Santa Maria Novella, to encounter his adversaries. The plebeians, who, as before observed, were influenced by a similar desire, had set out about the same time as Michele, and it happened that, as each took a different route, they did not meet in their way, and Michele, upon his return, found the piazza in their possession. The contest was now for the palace, and joining in the fight, he soon vanquished them, drove part of them out of the city, and compelled the rest to throw down their arms and escape or conceal themselves, as well as they could. Having thus gained the victory, the tumults were composed, solely by the talents of the gonfalonier, who in courage, prudence, and generosity surpassed every other citizen of his time, and deserves to be enumerated among the glorious few who have greatly benefited their country; for, had he possessed either malice or ambition, the republic would have been completely ruined, and the city must have fallen under greater tyranny than that of the duke of Athens. But his goodness never allowed a thought to enter his mind opposed to the universal welfare: his prudence enabled him to conduct affairs in such a manner that a great majority of his own faction reposed the most entire confidence in him; and he kept the rest in awe by the influence of his authority.

By the time Michele di Lando had subdued the plebeians the new seigniory was drawn, and amongst those who composed it were two persons of such[343] base and mean condition that the desire increased in the minds of the people to be freed from the ignominy into which they had fallen; and when, upon the 1st of September, the new seigniory entered office and the retiring members were still in the palace, the piazza being full of armed men, a tumultuous cry arose from the midst of them, that none of the lowest of the people should hold office amongst the seigniory. The obnoxious two were withdrawn accordingly. The name of one was Il Tira, of the other Baroccio, and in their stead were elected Giorgio Scali and Francesco di Michele. The company of the lowest trade was also dissolved, and its members deprived of office, except Michele di Lando, Lorenzo di Puccio, and a few others of better quality. The honours of government were divided into two parts, one of which was assigned to the superior trades, the other to the inferior; except that the latter were to furnish five seigniors, and the former only four. The gonfalonier was to be chosen alternately from each.

Momentary Peace; Renewed Insurrections

The government, thus composed, restored peace to the city for the time; but though the republic was rescued from the power of the lowest plebeians, the inferior trades were still more influential than the nobles of the people, who, however, were obliged to submit for the gratification of the trades, of whose favour they wished to deprive the plebeians. The new establishment was supported by all who wished the continued subjugation of those who, under the name of the Guelfic party, had practised such excessive violence against the citizens. And as amongst others thus disposed, were Giorgio Scali, Benedetto Alberti, Salvestro de’ Medici, and Tommaso Strozzi, these four almost became princes of the city. This state of the public mind strengthened the divisions already commenced between the nobles of the people and the minor artificers, by the ambition of the Ricci and the Albizzi; from which, as at different times very serious effects arose, and as they will hereafter be frequently mentioned, we shall call the former the popular party, the latter the plebeian. This condition of things continued three years, during which many were exiled and put to death; for the government lived in constant apprehension, knowing that both within and without the city many were dissatisfied with them. Those within, either attempted or were suspected of attempting, every day some new project against them; and those without, being under no restraint, were continually, by means of some prince or republic, spreading reports tending to increase the disaffection.

Gianozzo da Salerno was at this time in Bologna. He held a command under Charles of Durazzo, a descendant of the kings of Naples, who, designing to undertake the conquest of the dominions of Queen Joanna, retained his captain in that city, with the concurrence of Pope Urban, who was at enmity with the queen. Many Florentine emigrants were also at Bologna, in close correspondence with him and Charles. This caused the rulers in Florence to live in continual alarm, and induced them to lend a willing ear to any calumnies against the suspected. Whilst in this disturbed state of feeling it was disclosed to the government that Gianozzo da Salerno was about to march to Florence with the emigrants, and that great numbers of those within were to rise in arms, and deliver the city to him. Upon this information many were accused, the principal of whom were Piero degli Albizzi and Carlo Strozzi; and after these, Cipriano Mangione, Jacopo Sacchetti, Donato Barbadori, Filippo Strozzi, and Giovanni Anselmi, the[344] whole of whom, except Carlo Strozzi, who fled, were made prisoners; and the seigniory, to prevent anyone from taking arms in their favour, appointed Tommaso Strozzi and Benedetto Alberti, with a strong armed force, to guard the city. The arrested citizens were examined, and although nothing was elicited against them sufficient to induce the capitano to find them guilty, their enemies excited the minds of the populace to such a degree of outrageous and overwhelming fury against them, that they were condemned to death, as it were, by force. Nor was the greatness of his family, or his former reputation, of any service to Piero degli Albizzi, who had once been, of all the citizens, the man most feared and honoured. Someone, either as a friend to render him wise in his prosperity, or an enemy to threaten him with the fickleness of fortune, had upon the occasion of his making a feast for many citizens sent him a silver bowl full of sweetmeats, amongst which a large nail was found, and being seen by many present, was taken for a hint to him to fix the wheel of fortune which, having conveyed him to the top, must, if the rotation continued, also bring him to the bottom. This interpretation was verified, first by his ruin, and afterwards by his death.

After this execution the city was full of consternation, for both victors and vanquished were alike in fear; but the worst effects arose from the apprehensions of those possessing the management of affairs; for every accident, however trivial, caused them to commit fresh outrages, either by condemnations, admonitions, or banishment of citizens; to which must be added, as scarcely less pernicious, the frequent new laws and regulations which were made for defence of the government, all of which were put in execution to the injury of those opposed to their faction. They appointed forty-six persons, who, with the seigniory, were to purge the republic of all suspected by the government. They admonished thirty-nine citizens, ennobled many of the people, and degraded many nobles to the popular rank. To strengthen themselves against external foes, they took into their pay John Hawkwood, an Englishman of great military reputation, who had long served the pope and others in Italy. Their fears from without were increased by a report that several bodies of men were being assembled by Charles of Durazzo for the conquest of Naples, and many Florentine emigrants were said to have joined him. Against these dangers, in addition to the forces which had been raised, large sums of money were provided; and Charles, having arrived at Arezzo, obtained from the Florentines 40,000 ducats, and promised he would not molest them. His enterprise was immediately prosecuted, and having occupied the kingdom of Naples, he sent Queen Joanna a prisoner into Hungary. This victory renewed the fears of those who managed the affairs of Florence, for they could not persuade themselves that their money would have a greater influence on the king’s mind than the friendship which his house had long retained for the Guelfs, whom they so grievously oppressed.

This suspicion, increasing, multiplied oppressions; which again, instead of diminishing the suspicion, augmented it; so that most men lived in the utmost discontent. To this the insolence of Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozzi (who by their popular influence overawed the magistrates) also contributed, for the rulers were apprehensive that by the power these men possessed with the plebeians they could set them at defiance; and hence it is evident that not only to good men, but even to the seditious, this government appeared tyrannical and violent. To put a period to the outrageous conduct of Giorgio, it happened that his servant accused Giovanni di Cambio of practices against the state, but the capitano declared him innocent.

Upon this, the judge determined to punish the accuser with the same penalties that the accused would have incurred had he been guilty; but Giorgio Scali, unable to save him either by his authority or entreaties, obtained the assistance of Tommaso Strozzi, and with a multitude of armed men, set the informer at liberty and plundered the palace of the capitano, who was obliged to save himself by flight. This act excited such great and universal animosity against him, that his enemies began to hope they would be able to effect his ruin, and also to rescue the city from the power of the plebeians, who for three years had held her under their arrogant control.

To the realisation of this design the capitano greatly contributed; for the tumult having subsided, he presented himself before the seigniors, and said he had cheerfully undertaken the office to which they had appointed him, for he thought he should serve upright men who would take arms for the defence of justice, and not impede its progress. But now that he had seen and had experience of the proceedings of the city, and the manner in which affairs were conducted, that dignity which he had voluntarily assumed with the hope of acquiring honour and emolument he now more willingly resigned, to escape from the losses and danger to which he found himself exposed. The complaint of the capitano was heard with the utmost attention by the seigniory, who promising to remunerate him for the injury he had suffered and provide for his future security, he was satisfied. Some of them then obtained an interview with certain citizens who were thought to be lovers of the common good, and least suspected by the state; and in conjunction with these, it was concluded that the present was a favourable opportunity for rescuing the city from Giorgio and the plebeians, the last outrage he had committed having completely alienated the great body of the people from him. They judged it best to profit by the occasion before the excitement had abated, for they knew that the favour of the mob is often gained or lost by the most trifling circumstance; and more certainly to insure success, they determined, if possible, to obtain the concurrence of Benedetto Alberti, for without it they considered their enterprise to be dangerous.

Benedetto was one of the richest citizens, a man of unassuming manners, an ardent lover of the liberties of his country, and one to whom tyrannical measures were in the highest degree offensive; so that he was easily induced to concur in their views and consent to Giorgio’s ruin. His enmity against the nobles of the people and the Guelfs, and his friendship for the plebeians, were caused by the insolence and tyrannical proceedings of the former; but finding that the plebeians had soon become quite as insolent, he quickly separated himself from them; and the injuries committed by them against the citizens were done wholly without his consent. So that the same motives which made him join the plebeians induced him to leave them.

Having gained Benedetto and the leaders of the trades to their side, they provided themselves with arms and made Giorgio prisoner. Tommaso fled. The next day Giorgio was beheaded, which struck so great a terror into his party, that none ventured to express the slightest disapprobation, but each seemed anxious to be foremost in defence of the measure. On being led to execution, in the presence of that people who only a short time before had idolised him, Giorgio complained of his hard fortune, and the malignity of those citizens who, having done him an undeserved injury, had compelled him to honour and support a mob, possessing neither faith nor gratitude. Observing Benedetto Alberti amongst those who had armed themselves for[346] the preservation of order, he said, “Do you, too, consent, Benedetto, that this injury shall be done to me? Were I in your place and you in mine, I would take care that no one should injure you. I tell you, however, this day is the end of my troubles and the beginning of yours.” He then blamed himself for having confided too much in a people who may be excited and inflamed by every word, motion, and breath of suspicion. With these complaints he died, in the midst of his armed enemies delighted at his fall. Some of his most intimate associates were also put to death, and their bodies dragged about by the mob.

The death of Giorgio caused very great excitement; many took arms at the execution in favour of the seigniory and the capitano; and many others, either for ambition or as a means for their own safety, did the same. The city was full of conflicting parties, which each had a particular end in view, and wished to carry it into effect before they disarmed. The ancient nobility, called “the great,” could not bear to be deprived of public honours; for the recovery of which they used their utmost exertions, and earnestly desired that authority might be restored to the capitani di parte. The nobles of the people and the major trades were discontented at the share the minor trades and lowest of the people possessed in the government; whilst the minor trades were desirous of increasing their influence, and the lowest people were apprehensive of losing the companies of their trades and the authority which these conferred.

Such opposing views occasioned Florence, during a year, to be disturbed by many riots. Sometimes the nobles of the people took arms; sometimes the major, and sometimes the minor trades and the lowest of the people; and it often happened that, though in different parts, all were at once in insurrection. Hence many conflicts took place between the different parties or with the forces of the palaces; for the seigniory, sometimes yielding and at other times resisting, adopted such remedies as they could for these numerous evils. At length, after two assemblies of the people, and many balias appointed for the reformation of the city; after much toil, labour, and imminent danger, a government was appointed, by which all who had been banished since Salvestro de’ Medici was gonfalonier were restored. They who had acquired distinctions or emoluments by the balia of 1378 were deprived of them. The honours of government were restored to the Guelfic party; the two new companies of the trades were dissolved, and all who had been subject to them assigned to their former companies. The minor trades were not allowed to elect the gonfalonier of justice; their share of honours was reduced from a half to a third; and those of the highest rank were withdrawn from them altogether. Thus the nobles of the people and the Guelfs repossessed themselves of the government, which was lost by the plebeians after it had been in their possession from 1378 to 1381, when these changes took place.

The new establishment was not less injurious to the citizens, or less troublesome at its commencement than that of the plebeians had been; for many of the nobles of the people who had distinguished themselves as defenders of the plebeians were banished with a great number of the leaders of the latter, amongst whom was Michele di Lando; nor could all the benefits conferred upon the city by his authority, when in danger from the lawless mob, save him from the rabid fury of the party that was now in power. His good offices evidently excited little gratitude in his countrymen.

As these banishments and executions had always been offensive to Benedetto Alberti, they continued to disgust him, and he censured them both[347] publicly and privately. The leaders of the government began to fear him, for they considered him one of the most earnest friends of the plebeians. It appeared as if, at any moment, something might occur, which, with the favour of his friends, would enable him to recover his authority, and drive them out of the city. Whilst in this state of suspicion and jealousy, it happened that while he was gonfalonier of the companies, his son-in-law, Filippo Magalotti, was drawn gonfalonier of justice; and this circumstance increased the fears of the government, for they thought it would strengthen Benedetto’s influence, and place the state in the greater peril. Anxious to provide a remedy, without creating much disturbance, they induced Bese Magalotti, his relative and enemy, to signify to the seigniory that Filippo, not having attained the age required for the exercise of that office, neither could nor ought to hold it.

The question was examined by the seigniors, and part of them out of hatred, others in order to avoid disunion amongst themselves, declared Filippo ineligible to the dignity, and in his stead was drawn Bardo Mancini, who was quite opposed to the plebeian interests, and an inveterate foe of Benedetto. This man, having entered upon the duties of his office, created a balia for reformation of the state, which banished Benedetto Alberti and admonished all the rest of his family except Antonio. Not to give a worse impression of his virtue abroad than he had done at home, he made a journey to the sepulchre of Christ, and whilst upon his return died at Rhodes. His remains were brought to Florence, and interred with all possible honours by those who had persecuted him, when alive, with every species of calumny and injustice. The family of the Alberti was not the only injured party during these troubles of the city; for many others were banished and admonished.

It was customary to create the balia for a limited time; and when the citizens elected had effected the purpose of their appointment, they resigned the office from motives of good feeling and decency, although the time allowed might not have expired. In conformity with this laudable practice, the balia of that period, supposing that they had accomplished all that was expected of them, wished to retire; but when the multitude were acquainted with their intention, they ran armed to the palace, and insisted that, before resigning their power, many other persons should be banished and admonished. This greatly displeased the seigniors; but without disclosing the extent of their displeasure, they contrived to amuse the multitude with promises, till they had assembled a sufficient body of armed men, and then took such measures that fear induced the people to lay aside the weapons which madness had led them to take up. Nevertheless, in some degree to gratify the fury of the mob, and to reduce the authority of the plebeian trades, it was provided that, as the latter had previously possessed a third of the honours, they should in future have only a fourth. That there might always be two of the seigniors particularly devoted to the government, they gave authority to the gonfalonier of justice, and four others, to form a ballot purse of select citizens, from which, in every seigniory, two should be drawn.

This government, from its establishment in 1381, till the alterations now made, had continued six years; and the internal peace of the city remained undisturbed until 1393. During this time, Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, usually called the count of Virtù, imprisoned his uncle Barnabò, and thus became sovereign of the whole of Lombardy. As he had become duke of Milan by fraud, he designed to make himself king of Italy by force. In 1391 he commenced a spirited attack upon the Florentines; but such various changes occurred in the course of the war that he was frequently in greater[348] danger than the Florentines themselves, who, though they made a brave and admirable defence, must have been ruined if he had survived. As it was, the result was attended with infinitely less evil than their fears of so powerful an enemy had led them to apprehend; for the duke, having taken Bologna, Pisa, Perugia, and Siena, and prepared a diadem with which to be crowned king of Italy at Florence, died before he had tasted the fruit of his victories, or the Florentines began to feel the effect of their disasters.e

The democratic party at Florence, directed by the Alberti, Ricci, and Medici, were deprived of power in 1381, in consequence of the abuse which their associates, the ciompi, had made of their victory. From that time their rivals, the Albizzi, directed the republic for the space of fifty-three years, from 1381 to 1434, with a happiness and glory till then unexampled. No triumph of an aristocratic faction ever merited a more brilliant place in history. The one in question maintained itself by the ascendency of its talents and virtues, without ever interfering with the rights of the other citizens, or abusing a preponderance which was all in opinion. It was the most prosperous epoch of the republic—that during which its opulence acquired the greatest development; that in which the arts, sciences, and literature adopted Florence as their native country; that in which were born and formed all those great men, of whom the Medici, their contemporaries, have reaped the glory, without having had any share in producing them; that, finally, in which the republic most constantly followed the noblest policy: considering itself as the guardian of the liberty of Italy, it in turns set limits to the ambition of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, of Ladislaus, king of Naples, and of Filippo Maria, duke of Milan. Tommaso degli Albizzi, and after him Niccolo da Uzzano, had been the chiefs of the aristocracy at this period of glory and wisdom. To those succeeded Rinaldo, son of Tommaso degli Albizzi, who forgot, a little more than his predecessors, that he was only a simple citizen. Impetuous, arrogant, jealous, impatient of all opposition, he lost the pre-eminence which his family had so long maintained.

Rinaldo degli Albizzi saw, with uneasiness, a rival present himself in Cosmo, son of Giovanni de’ Medici, who revived a party formerly the vanquishers of his ancestors. This man enjoyed a hereditary popularity at Florence, because he was descended from one of the demagogues who, in 1378, had undertaken the defence of the minor arts against the aristocracy; he at the same time excited the jealousy of the latter by his immense wealth, which equalled that of the greatest princes of Italy.[350] Although the Albizzi saw with distrust the family of their rivals attain the supreme magistracy, they could not exclude from it Giovanni de’ Medici, who was gonfalonier in 1421. His son Cosmo, born in 1389, was priore in 1416; he was the head of a commercial establishment which had counting-houses in all the great cities of Europe and in the Levant; he at the same time cultivated literature with ardour. His palace, one of the most sumptuous in Florence, was the resort of artists, poets, and learned men; of those, among others, who about this time introduced the Platonic philosophy into Italy. The opulence of Cosmo de’ Medici was always at the service of his friends. There were very few poor citizens at Florence to whom his purse was not open.e

THE RISE, REVERSES, AND POWER OF COSMO DE’ MEDICI

Even in the lifetime of his father, Cosmo had engaged himself deeply, not only in the extensive commerce by which the family had acquired its wealth, but in the weightier concerns of government. After the death of Giovanni de’ Medici, Cosmo supported and increased the family dignity. His conduct was uniformly marked by urbanity and kindness to the superior ranks of his fellow-citizens, and by a constant attention to the interests and the wants of the lower class, whom he relieved with unbounded generosity. By these means he acquired numerous and zealous partisans of every denomination; but he rather considered them as pledges for the continuance of the power he possessed than as instruments to be employed in extending it to the ruin and subjugation of the state. “No family,” says Voltaire,f “ever obtained its power by so just a title.”

The authority which Cosmo and his descendants exercised in Florence, during the fifteenth century, was of a very peculiar nature, and consisted rather in a tacit influence on their part, and a voluntary acquiescence on that of the people, than in any prescribed or definite compact between them. The form of government was ostensibly a republic, and was directed by a council of ten citizens, and a chief executive officer called the gonfalonière, or standard-bearer, who was chosen every two months. Under this establishment the citizens imagined they enjoyed the full exercise of their liberties; but such was the power of the Medici that they generally either assumed to themselves the first offices of the state, or nominated such persons as they thought proper to those employments. In this, however, they paid great respect to popular opinion. That opposition of interests so generally apparent between the people and their rulers, was at this time scarcely perceived at Florence, where superior qualifications and industry were the surest recommendations to public authority and favour. Convinced of the benefits constantly received from this family, and satisfied that they could at any time withdraw themselves from a connection that exacted no engagements, and required only a temporary acquiescence, the Florentines considered the Medici as the fathers, and not as the rulers of the republic. On the other hand, the chiefs of this house, by appearing rather to decline than to court the honours bestowed on them, and by a singular moderation in the use of them when obtained, were careful to maintain the character of simple citizens of Florence and servants of the state. An interchange of reciprocal good offices was the only tie by which the Florentines and the Medici were bound, and perhaps the long continuance of this connection may be attributed to the very circumstance of its having been in the power of either of the parties, at any time, to dissolve it.

But the prudence and moderation of Cosmo, though they soothed the jealous apprehensions of the Florentines, could not at all times repress the ambitious designs of those who wished to possess or to share his authority. In the year 1433, Rinaldo de’ Albizzi, at the head of a powerful party, carried the appointment of the magistracy. At that time Cosmo had withdrawn to his seat at Mugello, where he had remained some months, in order to avoid the disturbances that he saw were likely to ensue; but at the request of his friends he returned to Florence, where he was led to expect that a union of the different parties would be effected, so as to preserve the peace of the city. In this expectation he was, however, disappointed. No sooner did he make his appearance in the palace, where his presence had been requested, on pretence of his being intended to share in the administration of the republic, than he was seized upon by his adversaries, and committed to the custody of Federigo Malavolti. He remained in this situation for several days, in constant apprehension of some violence being offered to his person; but he still more dreaded that the malice of his enemies might attempt his life by poison. During four days, a small portion of bread was the only food which he thought proper to take.

The generosity of his keeper at length relieved him from this state of anxiety. In order to induce him to take his food with confidence, Malavolti partook of it with him. In the meantime, his brother Lorenzo, and his cousin Averardo, having raised a considerable body of men from Romagna and other neighbouring parts, and being joined by Niccolo da Tolentino, the commander of the troops of the republic, approached towards Florence to his relief; but the apprehensions that, in case they resorted to open violence, the life of Cosmo might be endangered, induced them to abandon their enterprise. At length Rinaldo and his adherents obtained a decree of the magistracy against the Medici and their friends, by which Cosmo was banished to Padua for ten years, Lorenzo to Venice for five years, and several of their relations and adherents were involved in a similar punishment.

Cosmo would gladly have left the city pursuant to his sentence, had he been allowed to do so, but his enemies thought it more advisable to retain him till they had established their authority; and they frequently gave him to understand that if his friends raised any opposition to their measures, his life should answer it. He also suspected that another reason for his detention was to ruin him in his credit and circumstances, his mercantile concerns being then greatly extended. As soon as these disturbances were known, several of the states of Italy interfered in his behalf. Three ambassadors arrived from Venice, who proposed to take him under their protection, and to engage that he should strictly submit to the sentence imposed on him. The marquis of Ferrara also gave a similar proof of his attachment. Though their interposition was not immediately successful, it was of great importance to Cosmo, and secured him from the attempts of those who aimed at his life. After a confinement of nearly a month, some of his friends, finding in his adversaries a disposition to gentler measures, took occasion to forward his cause by the timely application of a sum of money to Bernardo Guadagni, the gonfalonier, and to Mariotto Baldovinetti, two of the creatures of Rinaldo. This measure was successful. He was privately taken from his confinement by night, and led out of Florence. For this piece of service Guadagni received 1,000 florins, and Baldovinetti 800. “They were poor souls,” says Cosmo in his Ricordi, “for if money had been their object, they might have had 10,000, or more, to have freed me from the perils of such a situation.”

From Florence, Cosmo proceeded immediately towards Venice, and at every place through which he passed, experienced the most flattering attention and the warmest expressions of regard. On his approach to that city he was met by his brother Lorenzo and many of his friends, and was received by the senate with such honours as were bestowed by that stately republic only on persons of the highest quality and distinction. After a short stay there, he went to Padua, the place prescribed for his banishment; but on an application to the Florentine state, by Andrea Donato, the Venetian ambassador, he was permitted to reside on any part of the Venetian territories, but not to approach within the distance of 170 miles of Florence. The affectionate reception which he had met with at Venice induced him to fix his abode there, until a change of circumstances should restore him to his native country.

Amongst the several learned and ingenious men who accompanied Cosmo in his banishment, or resorted to him during his stay at Venice, was Michellozzo Michellozzi, a Florentine sculptor and architect, whom Cosmo (according to Vasarig) employed in making models and drawings of the most remarkable buildings in Venice, and also in forming a library in the monastery of St. George, which he enriched with many valuable manuscripts, and left as an honourable monument of his gratitude, to a place that had afforded him so kind an asylum in his adversity. During his residence at Venice, Cosmo also received frequent visits from Ambrogio Traversari, a learned monk of Camaldoli, near Florence, and afterwards superior of the monastery of that place. Though chiefly confined within the limits of a cloister, Traversari had, perhaps, the best pretensions to the character of a polite scholar of any man of that age. From the letters of Traversari,h now extant, we learn that Cosmo and his brother not only bore their misfortunes with firmness, but continued to express on every occasion an inviolable attachment to their native place. The readiness with which Cosmo had given way to the temporary clamour raised against him, and the reluctance which he had shown to renew those bloody rencounters that had so often disgraced the streets of Florence, gained him new friends. The utmost exertions of his antagonists could not long prevent the choice of such magistrates as were known to be attached to the cause of the Medici; and no sooner did they enter on their office, than Cosmo and his brother were recalled, and Rinaldo, with his adherents, was compelled to quit the city. This event took place about the expiration of twelve months from the time of Cosmo’s banishment.

From this time the life of Cosmo de’ Medici was one of almost uninterrupted prosperity. The tranquillity enjoyed by the republic, and the satisfaction and peace of mind which he experienced in the esteem and confidence of his fellow-citizens, enabled him to indulge his natural propensity to the promotion of science, and the encouragement of learned men. The study of the Greek language had been introduced into Italy, principally by the exertions of the celebrated Boccaccio, towards the latter part of the preceding century, but on the death of that great promoter of letters it again fell into neglect. After a short interval, another attempt was made to revive it by the intervention of Emmanuel Chrysoloras, a noble Greek, who, during the interval of his important embassies, taught that language at Florence and other cities of Italy, about the beginning of the fifteenth century. His disciples were numerous and respectable. Amongst others of no inconsiderable note were Ambrogio Traversari, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, the two latter of whom were natives of Arezzo, whence they took the name of Aretino, Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino Veronese, and Francesco Filelfo, who,[353] after the death of Chrysoloras, in 1415, strenuously vied with each other in the support of Grecian literature, and were successful enough to keep the flame alive till it received new aid from other learned Greeks, who were driven from Constantinople by the dread of the Turks, or by the total overthrow of the Eastern Empire. To these illustrious foreigners, as well as to those eminent Italians, who shortly became their successful rivals, even in the knowledge of their national history and language, Cosmo afforded the most liberal protection and support. Of this the numerous productions inscribed to his name, or devoted to his praise, are an ample testimony. In some of these he is commended for his attachment to his country, his liberality to his friends, his benevolence to all. He is denominated the protector of the needy, the refuge of the oppressed, the constant patron and support of learned men.

“You have shown,” says Poggio,i “such humanity and moderation in dispensing the gifts of fortune, that they seem to have been rather the reward of your virtues and merits, than conceded by her bounty. Devoted to the study of letters from your early years, you have by your example given additional splendour to science itself. Although involved in the weightier concerns of state, and unable to devote a great part of your time to books, yet you have found a constant satisfaction in the society of those learned men who have always frequented your house.” In enumerating the men of eminence who distinguished the city of Florence, Flavio Biondo (Flavius Blondus)j adverts in the first instance to Cosmo de’ Medici—“a citizen who, whilst he excels in wealth every other citizen of Europe, is rendered much more illustrious by his prudence, his humanity, his liberality, and what is more to our present purpose, by his knowledge of useful literature, and particularly of history.”

Cosmo and the Revival of Learning

That extreme avidity for the works of the ancient writers which distinguished the early part of the fifteenth century announced the near approach of more enlightened times. Whatever were the causes that determined men of wealth and learning to exert themselves so strenuously in this pursuit, certain it is that their interference was of the highest importance to the interests of posterity, and that if it had been much longer delayed, the loss would have been in a great degree irreparable; such of the manuscripts as then existed of the ancient Greek and Roman authors being daily perishing in obscure corners, a prey to oblivion and neglect. It was therefore a circumstance productive of the happiest consequences, that the pursuits of the opulent were at this time directed rather towards the recovery of the works of[354] the ancients than to the encouragement of contemporary merit; a fact that may serve in some degree to account for the dearth of original literary productions during this interval. Induced by the rewards that invariably attended a successful inquiry, those men who possessed any considerable share of learning devoted themselves to this occupation, and to such a degree of enthusiasm was it carried that the discovery of an ancient manuscript was regarded as almost equivalent to the conquest of a kingdom.

As the natural disposition of Cosmo led him to take an active part in collecting the remains of the ancient Greek and Roman writers, so he was enabled, by his wealth and his extensive mercantile intercourse with different parts of Europe and of Asia, to gratify a passion of this kind beyond any other individual. To this end he laid injunctions on all his friends and correspondents, as well as on the missionaries and preachers who travelled into the remotest countries, to search for and procure ancient manuscripts, in every language and on every subject. Besides the services of Poggio and Traversari, Cosmo availed himself of those of Cristoforo Buondelmonte, Antonio da Massa, Andrea de Rimino, and many others. The situation of the Eastern Empire, then daily falling into ruins by the repeated attacks of the Turks, afforded him, as Bandinik notes, an opportunity of obtaining many inestimable works in the Hebrew, Greek, Chaldaic, Arabic, and Indian languages. From these beginnings arose the celebrated library of the Medici, which, after having been the constant object of the solicitude of its founder, was after his death further enriched by the attention of his descendants, and particularly of his grandson Lorenzo; and after various vicissitudes of fortune, and frequent and considerable additions, has been preserved to the present times under the name of the Bibliotheca Mediceo-Laurentiana.

Amongst those who imitated the example of Cosmo de’ Medici was Niccolo Niccoli, another citizen of Florence, who devoted his whole time and fortune to the acquisition of ancient manuscripts; in this pursuit he had been eminently successful, having collected together eight hundred volumes of Greek, Roman, and oriental authors; a number in those times justly thought very considerable. Several of these works he had copied with great accuracy, and had diligently employed himself in correcting their defects and arranging the text in its proper order. In this respect he is justly regarded by Mehus as the father of this species of criticism. He died in 1436, having by his will directed that his library should be devoted to the use of the public, and appointed sixteen curators, amongst whom was Cosmo de’ Medici. After his death, it appeared that he was greatly in debt, and that his liberal intentions were likely to be frustrated by the insolvency of his circumstances. Cosmo therefore proposed to his associates, that if they would resign to him the right of disposition of the books, he would himself discharge all the debts of Niccolo, to which they readily acceded. Having thus obtained the sole direction of the manuscripts, he deposited them for public use in the Dominican monastery of San Marco, at Florence, which he had himself erected at an enormous expense. This collection was the foundation of another celebrated library in Florence, known by the name of the Bibliotheca Marciana, which is yet open to inspection.

In the arrangement of the library of San Marco, Cosmo had procured the assistance of Tommaso Calandrino (or Parentucelli), who drew up a scheme for that purpose, and prepared a scientific catalogue of the books it contained. In selecting a coadjutor, the choice of Cosmo had fallen upon an extraordinary man. Though Tommaso was the son of a poor physician of Sarzana, and ranked only in the lower order of the clergy, he had the[355] ambition to aim at possessing specimens of these venerable relics of ancient genius. His learning and his industry enabled him to gratify his wishes, and his perseverance surmounted the disadvantages of his situation. In this pursuit he was frequently induced to anticipate his scanty revenue, well knowing that the estimation in which he was held by his friends would preserve him from pecuniary difficulties. With the Greek and Roman authors no one was more intimately acquainted, and as he wrote a very fine hand, the books he possessed acquired additional value from the marginal observations which he was accustomed to make in perusing them.

By rapid degrees of fortunate preferment, Tommaso was, in the short space of twelve months, raised from his humble situation in the lower orders of the church, to the chair of St. Peter, and in eight years, during which time he enjoyed the supreme dignity by the name of Nicholas V, acquired a reputation that has increased with the increasing estimation of those studies which he so liberally fostered and protected. The scanty library of his predecessors had been nearly dissipated or destroyed by frequent removals between Avignon and Rome, according as the caprice of the reigning pontiff chose either of those places for his residence; and it appears from the letters of Traversari, that scarcely anything of value remained. Nicholas V is therefore to be considered as the founder of the library of the Vatican. In the completion of this great design, it is true, much was left to be performed by his successors; but Nicholas had before his death collected upwards of five thousand volumes of Greek and Roman authors, and had not only expressed his intention of establishing a library for the use of the Roman court, but had also taken measures for carrying such intention into execution.

Whilst the munificence of the rich and the industry of the learned were thus employed throughout Italy in preserving the remains of the ancient authors, some obscure individuals in a corner of Germany had conceived, and were silently bringing to perfection, an invention which, by means equally effectual and unexpected, secured to the world the result of their labours. This was the art of printing with movable types. The coincidence of this discovery with the spirit of the times in which it had birth was highly fortunate. Had it been made known at a much earlier period, it would have been disregarded or forgotten, from the mere want of materials on which to exercise it; and had it been further postponed, it is probable that, notwithstanding the generosity of the rich and the diligence of the learned, many works would have been totally lost, which are now justly regarded as the noblest monuments of the human intellect.

Nearly the same period of time that gave the world this important discovery, saw the destruction of the Roman Empire in the East. In the year 1453, the city of Constantinople was captured by the Turks, under the command of Muhammed II, after a vigorous defence of fifty-three days. The encouragement which had been shown to the Greek professors at Florence, and the character of Cosmo de’ Medici as a promoter of letters, induced many learned Greeks to seek a shelter in that city, where they met with a welcome and honourable reception. Amongst these were Demetrius Chalcondyles, Joannes Andronicus Calistus, Constantine, and Andreas Joannes Lascaris, in whom the Platonic philosophy obtained fresh partisans, and by whose support it began openly to oppose itself to that of Aristotle. Between the Greek and Italian professors a spirit of emulation was kindled that operated most favourably on the cause of letters. Public schools were instituted at Florence for the study of the Greek tongue. The facility of diffusing their[356] labours by means of the newly discovered art of printing stimulated the learned to fresh exertions; and in a few years the cities of Italy vied with each other in the number and elegance of works produced from the press.

Last Years of Cosmo

Towards the latter period of his life, a great part of the time that Cosmo could withdraw from the administration of public affairs, was passed at his seats at Careggi and Caffaggiolo, where he applied himself to the cultivation of his farms, from which he derived no inconsiderable revenue. But his happiest hours were devoted to the study of letters and philosophy, or passed in the company and conversation of learned men. When he retired at intervals to his seat at Careggi, he was generally accompanied by Ficino, where, after having been his protector, he became his pupil in the study of the Platonic philosophy. For his use, Ficino began those laborious translations of the works of Plato and his followers which were afterwards completed and published in the lifetime and by the liberality of Lorenzo. Amongst the letters of Ficino is one from his truly venerable patron, which bespeaks most forcibly the turn of his mind, and his earnest desire of acquiring knowledge, even at his advanced period of life.

“Yesterday,” says he, “I arrived at Careggi—not so much for the purpose of improving my fields as myself. Let me see you, Marsilio, as soon as possible, and forget not to bring with you the book of our favourite Plato, De summo bono, which I presume, according to your promise, you have ere this translated into Latin; for there is no employment to which I so ardently devote myself as to find out the true road to happiness. Come then, and fail not to bring with you the Orphean lyre.” Whatever might be the proficiency of Cosmo in the mysteries of his favourite philosopher, there is reason to believe that he applied those doctrines and precepts which furnished the litigious disputants of the age with a plentiful source of contention, to the purposes of real life and practical improvement. Notwithstanding his active and useful life, he often regretted the hours he had lost. “Midas was not more sparing of his money,” says Ficino,l “than Cosmo was of his time.”

The wealth and influence that Cosmo had acquired had long entitled him to rank with the most powerful princes of Italy, with whom he might have formed connections by the intermarriage of his children; but being apprehensive that such measures might give rise to suspicions that he entertained designs inimical to the freedom of the state, he rather chose to increase his interest among the citizens of Florence by the marriage of his children into the most distinguished families of that place. Piero, his eldest son, married Lucretia Tornabuoni, by whom he had two sons—Lorenzo, born on the first day of January, 1448, and Giuliano, born in the year 1453. Piero had also two daughters, Nannina, who married Bernardo Rucellai, and Bianca, who became the wife of Gulielmo de’ Pazzi. Giovanni, the younger son of Cosmo, espoused Cornelia de’ Alessandri, by whom he had a son who died very young. Giovanni himself did not long survive. He died in the year 1461, at forty-two years of age. Living under the shade of paternal authority, his name scarcely occurs in the pages of history; but the records of literature bear testimony that in his disposition and studies he did not derogate from the reputation of that characteristic attachment to men of learning by which his family was invariably distinguished.

Besides his legitimate offspring, Cosmo left also a natural son, Carlo de’ Medici, whom he liberally educated, and who compensated the disadvantages[357] of his birth by the respectability of his life. The manners of the times might be alleged in extenuation of a circumstance apparently inconsistent with the gravity of the character of Cosmo de’ Medici; but Cosmo himself disclaimed such apology, and whilst he acknowledged his youthful indiscretion, made amends to society for the breach of a salutary regulation, by attending to the morals and the welfare of his illegitimate descendant. Under his countenance, Carlo became proposto of Prato, and one of the apostolic notaries; and as his general residence was at Rome, he was frequently resorted to by his father and brothers for his advice and assistance in procuring ancient manuscripts and other valuable remains of antiquity.

The death of Giovanni de’ Medici, on whom Cosmo had placed his chief expectations, and the weak state of health that Piero experienced, which rendered him unfit for the exertions of public life in so turbulent a place as Florence, raised great apprehensions in Cosmo that at his decease the splendour of his family would close. These reflections embittered the repose of his latter days. A short time before his death, being carried through the apartments of his palace, after having recently lost his son, he exclaimed with a sigh, “This is too great a house for so small a family.” These apprehensions were in some degree realised by the infirmities under which Piero laboured during the few years in which he held the direction of the republic; but the talents of Lorenzo soon dispelled this temporary gloom, and exalted his family to a degree of reputation and splendour, of which it is probable that Cosmo himself had scarcely formed an idea.d

While Cosmo de’ Medici thus fixed the public attention by his private life, Neri Capponi gained the suffrages of the people by his public conduct. Charged, as ambassador, with every difficult negotiation—in war, with every hazardous enterprise—he participated in all the brilliant successes of the Florentines, as well during the domination of the Albizzi as during that of the Medici. From the year 1434 to 1455, in which Neri Capponi died, these two chiefs of the republic had six times assembled the parliament to make a balia; and, availing themselves of its authority, which was above the law, they obtained the exile of all their enemies, and filled the balloting purses of the magistracy with the names of their own partisans, to the exclusion of all others. It appears that all the efforts of their administration were directed towards calming the passions of the public, and maintaining peace without, as well as repose within, the state. They had, in fact, succeeded in preventing Florence from being troubled with new factions, or engaged in new wars; but they drew on the republic all the evils attending an aristocratic government. Medici and Capponi had not been able to find men who[358] would sacrifice the liberties of their country without allowing them to gratify their baser passions. These two heads of the republic, therefore, suffered their subordinate agents to divide among themselves all the little governments of the subject cities, and every lucrative employment; and these men, not satisfied with this first injustice, made unequal partitions of the taxes, increasing them on the poor, lowering them on the rich, and exempting themselves. At last they began to sell their protection, as well with respect to the tribunals as the councils; favour silenced justice; and, in the midst of peace and apparent prosperity, the Florentines felt their republic, undermined by secret corruption, hastening to ruin.

When Neri Capponi died, the council refused to call a new parliament to replace the balia, whose power expired on the 1st of July, 1455. It was the aristocracy itself, comprehending all the creatures of Cosmo de’ Medici, that, from jealousy of his domination, wished to return to the dominion of the laws. The whole republic was rejoiced, as if liberty had been regained. The election of the signoria was again made fairly by lot—the catasto was revised, the contributions were again equitably apportioned, the tribunals ceased to listen to the recommendations of those who, till then, had made a traffic of retributive justice. The aristocracy, seeing that clients no longer flocked to their houses with hands full, began to perceive that their jealousy of Cosmo de’ Medici had only injured themselves. Cosmo, with his immense fortune, was just as much respected as before; the people were intoxicated with joy to find themselves again free; but the aristocracy felt themselves weak and abandoned. They endeavoured to convoke a parliament without Cosmo; but he baffled their efforts, the longer to enjoy their humiliation. He began to fear, however, that the Florentines might once more acquire a taste for liberty; and when Lucas Pitti, rich, powerful, and bold, was named gonfalonier, in July, 1458, he agreed with him to reimpose the yoke on the Florentines. Pitti assembled the parliament; but not till he had filled all the avenues of the public square with soldiers or armed peasants. The people, menaced and trembling within this circle, consented to name a new balia, more violent and tyrannical than any of the preceding. It was composed of 352 persons, to whom was delegated all the power of the republic. They exiled a great number of the citizens who had shown the most attachment to liberty, and they even put some to death.e

Cosmo now approached the period of his mortal existence, but the faculties of his mind yet remained unimpaired. About twenty days before his death, when his strength was visibly on the decline, he entered into conversation with Ficino, and whilst the faint beams of a setting sun seemed to accord with his situation and his feelings, began to lament the miseries of life and the imperfections inseparable from human nature. As he continued his discourse, his sentiments and his views became more elevated, and from bewailing the lot of humanity, he began to exult in the prospect of that happier state towards which he felt himself approaching. Ficino replied by citing corresponding sentiments from the Athenian sages, and particularly from Xenocrates; and the last task imposed by Cosmo on his philosophic attendant was to translate from the Greek the treatise of that author on death. Having prepared his mind to wait with composure the awful event, his next concern was the welfare of his surviving family, to whom he was desirous of imparting, in a solemn manner, the result of the experience of a long and active life. Calling into his chamber his wife Contessina, and his son Piero, he entered into a narrative of all his public transactions; he gave a full account of his extensive mercantile connections, and adverted to the state of[359] his domestic concerns. To Piero he recommended a strict attention to the education of his sons. He requested that his funeral might be conducted with as much privacy as possible, and concluded his paternal exhortations by declaring his willingness to submit to the disposal of providence whenever he should be called upon. These admonitions were not lost on Piero, who communicated by letter to Lorenzo and Giuliano the impression which they had made upon his own mind. At the same time, sensible of his own infirmities, he exhorted them to consider themselves not as children but as men, seeing that circumstances rendered it necessary to put their abilities to an early proof. “A physician,” says Piero, “is hourly expected to arrive from Milan, but, for my own part, I place my confidence in God.” Either the physician did not arrive, or Piero’s distrust of him was well founded, for, about six days afterwards, being the first day of August, 1464, Cosmo died, at the age of seventy-five years, deeply lamented by a great majority of the citizens of Florence, whom he had firmly attached to his interest, and who feared for the safety of the city from the dissensions that were likely to ensue.

Roscoe’s Estimate of Cosmo

The character of Cosmo de’ Medici exhibits a combination of virtues and endowments rarely to be found united in the same person. If in his public works he was remarkable for his magnificence, he was no less conspicuous for his prudence in private life. Whilst in the character of chief of the Florentine Republic he supported a constant intercourse with the sovereigns of Europe, his conduct in Florence was divested of all ostentation, and neither in his retinue, his friendships, nor his conversation, could he be distinguished from any other respectable citizen. He well knew the jealous temper of the Florentines, and preferred the real enjoyment of authority to that open assumption of it which could only have been regarded as a perpetual insult by those whom he permitted to gratify their own pride in the reflection that they were the equals of Cosmo de’ Medici.

In affording protection to the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture, Cosmo set the great example to those who by their rank and their riches could alone afford them effectual aid. The countenance shown by him to those arts was not of that kind which their professors generally experience from the great; it was not conceded as a bounty, nor received as a favour, but appeared in the friendship and equality that subsisted between the artist and his patron. In the erection of the numerous public buildings in which Cosmo expended incredible sums of money, he principally availed himself of the assistance of Michellozzo Michellozzi and Filippo Brunelleschi—the first of whom was a man of talents, the latter of genius. Soon after his return from banishment, Cosmo engaged these two artists to form the plan of a mansion for his own residence. Brunelleschi gave scope to his invention, and produced the design of a palace which might have suited the proudest sovereign in Europe; but Cosmo was led by that prudence which, in his personal accommodation, regulated all his conduct, to prefer the plan of Michellozzi, which united extent with simplicity, and elegance with convenience. With the consciousness, Brunelleschi possessed also the irritability of genius, and in a fit of vexation he destroyed a design which he unjustly considered as disgraced by its not being carried into execution. Having completed his dwelling, Cosmo indulged his taste in ornamenting it with the most precious remains of ancient art, and in the purchase of vases, statues, busts, gems, and medals, expended no inconsiderable sum.

Nor was he less attentive to the merits of those artists whom his native place had recently produced. With Masaccio, a better style of painting had arisen; and the cold and formal manner of Giotto and his disciples had given way to a more natural and expressive composition. In Cosmo de’ Medici this rising artist found his most liberal patron and protector. Some of the works of Masaccio were executed in the chapel of the Brancacci, where they were held in such estimation that the place was regarded as a school of study by the most eminent artists who immediately succeeded him. Even the celebrated Michelangelo, when observing these paintings many years afterwards, in company with his honest and loquacious friend Vasari, did not hesitate to express his decided approbation of their merits. The reputation of Masaccio was emulated by his disciple, Filippo Lippi, who executed for Cosmo and his friends many celebrated pictures, of which Vasarig has given a minute account. Cosmo, however, found no small difficulty in controlling the temper and regulating the eccentricities of this extraordinary character. If the efforts of these early masters did not reach the true end of the art, they afforded considerable assistance towards it; and whilst Masaccio and Filippo decorated with their admired productions the altars of churches and the apartments of princes, Donatello gave to marble a proportion of form, a vivacity of expression, to which his contemporaries imagined that nothing more was wanting; Brunelleschi raised the great dome of the cathedral of Florence; and Ghiberti cast in bronze the stupendous doors of the church of St. John, which Michelangelo deemed worthy to be the gates of paradise.

In his person, Cosmo was tall; in his youth, he possessed the advantage of a prepossessing countenance; what age had taken from his comeliness it had added to his dignity; and in his latter years, his appearance was so truly venerable as to have been the frequent subject of panegyric. His manner was grave and complacent, but upon many occasions he gave sufficient proofs that this did not arise from a want of talents for sarcasm; and the fidelity of the Florentine historians has preserved many of his shrewd observations and remarks. When Rinaldo de’ Albizzi, who was then in exile, and meditated an attack upon his native place, sent a message to Cosmo, importing that the hen would shortly hatch, he replied, “She will hatch with an ill grace out of her own nest.” On another occasion, when his adversaries gave him to understand that they were not sleeping, “I believe it,” said Cosmo, “I have spoiled their sleep.” “Of what colour is my hair?” said Cosmo, uncovering his head to the ambassadors of Venice, who came with a complaint against the Florentines. “White,” they replied. “It will not be long,” said Cosmo, “before that of your senators will be so, too.” Shortly before[361] his death, his wife inquiring why he closed his eyes, “That I may accustom them to it,” was his reply.

If, from considering the private character of Cosmo, we attend to his conduct as the moderator and director of the Florentine Republic, our admiration of his abilities will increase with the extent of the theatre upon which he had to act. So important were his mercantile concerns, that they often influenced in a very remarkable degree the politics of Italy. When Alfonso, king of Naples, leagued with the Venetians against Florence, Cosmo called in such immense debts from those places as deprived them of resources for carrying on the war. During the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, one of his agents in England was resorted to by Edward IV for a sum of money, which was furnished to such an extraordinary amount, that it might almost be considered as the means of supporting that monarch on the throne, and was repaid when his successes enabled him to fulfil his engagement. The alliance of Cosmo was sedulously courted by the princes of Italy; and it was remarked that by a happy kind of fatality, whoever united their interests with his, was always enabled either to repress or to overcome their adversaries. By his assistance the republic of Venice resisted the united attacks of Filippo, duke of Milan, and of the French nation; but when deprived of his support, the Venetians were no longer able to withstand their enemies. Whatever difficulties Cosmo had to encounter, at home or abroad, they generally terminated in the acquisition of additional honour to his country and to himself. The esteem and gratitude of his fellow-citizens were fully shown a short time before his death, when by a public decree he was honoured with the title of Pater Patriæ, Father of his Country, an appellation which was inscribed on his tomb, and which, as it was founded on real merit, has ever since been attached to the name of Cosmo de’ Medici.d

“With all his faults,” says Von Reumont,c “Cosmo was certainly a remarkable man. More than anyone else he contributed to keep alive not only the forms but much of the spirit of civil equality and dignity, after it had become impossible to avoid a party government leading sooner or later to the preponderance of one family.”

Marsilio Ficinol described Cosmo as “a man intelligent above all others, pious before God, just and high-minded towards his fellow-men, modest in everything that concerned himself, active in his private affairs, but still more careful and prudent in public ones. He did not live for himself alone,” adds the eulogist, “but for the service of God and his country.”

COSMO’S SUCCESSOR

During the later years of Cosmo’s life Lucas Pitti came to regard himself as the future chief of the state. It was about this time that he undertook the building of that magnificent palace which formed the residence of the grand dukes. The republican equality was not only offended by the splendour of this regal dwelling, but the construction of it afforded Pitti an occasion for marking his contempt of liberty and the laws. He made of this building an asylum for all fugitives from justice, whom no public officer dared pursue when once he took part in the labour. At the same time individuals, as well as communities, who would obtain some favour from the republic, knew that the only means of being heard was to offer Lucas Pitti some precious wood or marble to be employed in the construction of his palace.

When Cosmo de’ Medici died, on the 1st of August, 1464, Lucas Pitti felt himself released from the control imposed by the virtue and moderation of that great citizen. Cosmo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, then forty-eight years of age, supposed that he should succeed to the administration of the republic, as he had succeeded to the wealth of his father, by hereditary right; but the state of his health did not admit of his attending regularly to business, or of his inspiring his rivals with much fear. To diminish the weight of affairs which oppressed him, he resolved on withdrawing a part of his immense fortune from commerce, recalling all his loans made in partnership with other merchants, and laying out this money in land. But this unexpected demand of considerable capital occasioned a fatal shock to the commerce of Florence, at the same time that it alienated all the debtors of the house of Medici, and deprived it of much of its popularity. The death of Sforza also, which took place on the 8th of March, 1466, deprived the Medicean party of its firmest support abroad. Francesco Sforza, whether as condottiere or duke of Milan, had always been the devoted friend of Cosmo. His son, Galeazzo Sforza, who succeeded him, declared his resolution of persisting in the same alliance; but the talents, the character, and, above all, the glory of his father, were not to be found in him. Galeazzo seemed to believe that the supreme power which he inherited brought him the right of indulging every pleasure—of abandoning himself to every vice without restraint. He dissipated by his ostentation the finances of the duchy of Milan; he stained by his libertinism the honour of almost all the noble families; and he alienated the people by his cruelty.

The friends of liberty at Florence soon perceived that Lucas Pitti and Piero de’ Medici no longer agreed together; and they recovered courage when the latter proposed to the council the calling of a parliament, in order to renew the balia, the power of which expired on the 1st of September, 1465: his proposition was rejected. The magistracy began again to be drawn by lot from among the members of the party victorious in 1434. This return of liberty, however, was but of short duration. Pitti and Medici were reconciled; they agreed to call a parliament, and to direct it in concert; to intimidate it, they surrounded it with foreign troops.

But Medici, on the nomination of the balia, on the 2nd of September, 1466, found means of admitting his own partisans only, and excluding all those of Lucas Pitti. The citizens who had shown any zeal for liberty were all exiled; several were subjected to enormous fines. Five commissioners, called accoppiatori, were charged to open, every two months, the purse from which the signoria were to be drawn, and choose from thence the names of the gonfalonier and eight priori, who were to enter office. These magistrates were so dependent on Piero de’ Medici, that the gonfalonier went frequently to his palace to take his orders, and afterwards published them as the result of his deliberations with his colleagues, whom he had not even consulted. Lucas Pitti ruined himself in building his palace. His talents were judged to bear no proportion to his ambition; the friends of liberty, as well as those of Medici, equally detested him, and he remained deprived of all power in a city which he had so largely contributed to enslave.

Italy became filled with Florentine emigrants; every revolution, even every convocation of parliament, was followed by the exile of many citizens. The party of the Albizzi had been exiled in 1434; but the Alberti, who had vanquished it, were, in turn, banished in 1466; and among the members of both parties were to be found almost all the historical names of Florence—those names which Europe had learned to respect, either for immense credit in commerce, or for the lustre which literature and the arts shed on them.

Italy was astonished at the exile of so many illustrious persons. At Florence, the citizens who escaped proscription trembled to see despotism established in their republic; but the lower orders were in general contented, and made no attempt to second Bartolommeo Colleoni, when he entered Tuscany, in 1467, at the head of the Florentine emigrants, who had taken him into their pay. Commerce prospered; manufactures were carried on with great activity; high wages supported in comfort all who lived by their labour; and the Medici entertained them with shows and festivals, keeping them in a sort of perpetual carnival, amidst which the people soon lost all thought of liberty.

Piero de’ Medici was always in too bad a state of health to exercise in person the sovereignty he had usurped over his country; he left it to five or six citizens who reigned in his name. Tommaso Soderini, Andrea de’ Pazzi, Luigi Guicciardini, Matteo Palmieri, and Pietro Minerbetti, were the real chiefs of the state. They not only transacted all business, but appropriated to themselves all the profit; they sold their influence and credit; they gratified their cupidity or their vengeance: but they took care not to act in their own names, or to pledge their own responsibility; they left that to the house of Medici. Piero, during the latter months of his life, perceived the disorder and corruption of his agents. He was afflicted to see his memory thus stained, and he addressed them the severest reprimands; he even entered into correspondence with the emigrants, whom he thought of recalling, when he died, on the 2nd of December, 1469. His two sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano, the elder of whom was not twenty-one years of age, were presented by Tommaso Soderini to the foreign ambassadors, to the magistrates, and to the first citizens of the ruling faction; which last he warned, that the only means of maintaining their party was to preserve the respect of all for its chiefs. But the two younger Medici, given up to all the pleasures of the age, had yet no ambition. The power of the state remained in the hands of the five citizens who had exercised it under Piero.

PIERO’S SONS AND THE CONSPIRACIES

Italy had reached the fatal period at which liberty can no longer be saved by a noble resistance, or recovered by open force. There remained only the dangerous and, most commonly, the fatal resource of conspiracy. So far from experiencing the repugnance we now feel to assassination as a means of delivering our country, men of the fifteenth century perceived honour in a murder, virtue in the sacrifice, and historic grandeur in conspiracy. Danger alone stopped them; but that danger must be terrible. Tyrants, feeling themselves at war with the universe, were always on their guard; and as they owed their safety only to terror, the punishment which they inflicted, if victorious, was extreme in its atrocity. Yet these terrors did not discourage the enemies of the existing order, whether royalist or republican. Never had there been more frequent or more daring conspiracies than in this century. The ill success of some never deterred others from immediately treading in their steps.

The first plot was directed against the Medici. Bernardo Nardi, one of the Florentine citizens, who had been exiled from his country in the time of Piero de’ Medici, accompanied by about a hundred of his partisans, surprised the gate of Prato, on the 6th of April, 1470. He made himself master of the public palace, and arrested the Florentine podesta; he took possession of the citadel[364] and afterwards, traversing the streets, called on the people to join him, and fight for liberty. He intended to make this small town the stronghold of the republican party, whence to begin his attack on the Medici. But although he had succeeded by surprise in making himself master of the town, the inhabitants remained deaf to his voice, and not one answered his call—not one detested tyranny sufficiently to combat it, at the peril of the last extremity of human suffering. The friends of the government, seeing that Nardi remained alone, at last took arms, attacked him on all sides, and soon overpowered him by numbers. Nardi was made prisoner, led to Florence, and there beheaded with six of his accomplices; twelve others were hanged at Prato.

In 1476 a conspiracy was formed, at Milan, against Galeazzo Sforza, whose yoke became insupportable to all who had any elevation of soul. There was no crime of which that false and ferocious man was not believed to be capable. Among other crimes, he was accused of having poisoned his mother. It was remarked of him that, enjoying the spectacle of astonishment and despair, he always preferred to strike the most suddenly and cruelly those whom he had given most reason to rely on his friendship.

Not satisfied with making the most distinguished women of his states the victims of his seduction or his violence, he took pleasure in publishing their shame—in exposing it to their brothers or husbands. He not unfrequently gave them up to prostitution. His extravagant pomp exhausted his finances, which he afterwards recruited by the most cruel extortion on the people. He took pleasure in inventing new and most atrocious forms of capital punishment; even that of burying his victims alive was not the most cruel. At last, three young nobles, of families who had courageously resisted the usurpation of Francesco Sforza, and who had themselves experienced the injustice and outrages of his son, resolved to deliver their country from this monster; not doubting that, when he had fallen, the Milanese would joyfully unite in substituting a free government for a tyranny.

Girolamo Olgiati, Carlo Visconti, and Andrea Lampugnani resolved, in concert, to trust only to themselves, without admitting one other person into their secret. Their enthusiasm had been excited by the lessons of their literary instructor, Colas di Montano, who continually set before them the grandeur of the ancient republics, and the glory of those who had delivered them from tyranny. Determined on killing the duke, they long exercised themselves in the handling of the dagger, to be more sure of striking him, each in the precise part of the tyrant’s body assigned to him. Animated with a[365] religious zeal, not less ardent than their republican enthusiasm, they prepared themselves by prayer, by vows to St. Stephen, and by the assistance of the mass, for the act which they were about to perform. They made choice of the 26th of December, 1476, St. Stephen’s Day, on which they knew that the duke Galeazzo would go in state to the church of the saint. They waited for him in that church; and when they saw him advance between the ambassadors of Ferrara and Mantua, they respectfully approached him, their caps in hand. Feigning to keep off the crowd, they surrounded him, and struck him all at the same instant, in the midst of his guards and courtiers. Galeazzo Sforza fell dead under their weapons; and the crowd which filled the church saw the tumult and heard the cries, without comprehending the cause.

The three conspirators endeavoured to escape from the church, to call the people to arms and liberty; but the first sentiments which they encountered were astonishment and terror. The guards of the duke drew their swords only to avenge him. Lampugnani, in attempting to avoid them, got entangled in the trains of the kneeling women, was thrown down, and killed by an esquire of Galeazzo; a few steps from him, Visconti also was put to death by the guards. But Olgiati had the misfortune to escape, in this first moment, from all who pursued him; and, running through the streets, called loudly to arms and liberty; not one person answered the call. He afterwards sought to conceal himself, but was discovered, seized, and put to the most excruciating torture. In the interval between that infliction and his death, he wrote or dictated the narrative demanded of him, and which has been handed down to us. It is composed in a strain of the noblest enthusiasm, with a deep religious feeling, with an ardent love of liberty, and with the firm persuasion that he had performed a good action. He was again delivered to the executioner to have his flesh torn with red-hot pincers. At the time of his martyrdom he was only twenty-two years of age.e

The Pazzi Conspiracy

The public agitation excited by the assassination of the duke of Milan had scarcely subsided, before an event took place at Florence of a much more atrocious nature, inasmuch as the objects destined to destruction had not afforded a pretext, in any degree plausible, for such an attempt. Accordingly, we have now to enter on a transaction that has seldom been mentioned without emotions of the strongest horror and detestation; and which, as has justly been observed, is an incontrovertible proof of the practical atheism of the times in which it took place—a transaction in which a pope, a cardinal, an archbishop, and several other ecclesiastics associated themselves with a band of ruffians, to destroy two men who were an honour to their age and country; and purposed to perpetrate their crime at a season of hospitality, in the sanctuary of a Christian church, and at the very moment of the elevation of the Host, when the audience bowed down before it, and the assassins were presumed to be in the immediate presence of their God.

At the head of this conspiracy were Sixtus IV and his nephew, Girolamo Riario. Raffaello Riario, the nephew of this Girolamo, who, although a young man then pursuing his studies, had lately been raised to the dignity of cardinal, was rather an instrument than an accomplice in the scheme. The enmity of Sixtus to Lorenzo had for some time been apparent, and if not occasioned by the assistance which Lorenzo had afforded to Niccolo Vitelli, and other independent nobles, whose dominions Sixtus had either threatened[366] or attacked, was certainly increased by it. The destruction of the Medici appeared, therefore, to Sixtus as the removal of an obstacle that thwarted all his views, and by the accomplishment of which the small surrounding states would soon become an easy prey. There is, however, great reason to believe that the pope did not confine his ambition to these subordinate governments, but that if the conspiracy had succeeded to his wish, he meant to have grasped at the dominion of Florence itself. The alliance lately formed between the Florentines, the Venetians, and the duke of Milan, which was principally effected by Lorenzo de’ Medici, and by which the pope found himself prevented from disturbing the peace of Italy, was an additional and powerful motive of resentment. One of the first proofs of the displeasure of the pope was his depriving Lorenzo of the office of treasurer of the papal see, which he gave to the Pazzi, a Florentine family, who, as well as the Medici, had a public bank at Rome, and who afterwards became the coadjutors of Sixtus in the execution of his treacherous purpose.

The conspiracy, of which Sixtus and his nephew were the real instigators, was first agitated at Rome, where the intercourse between the count Girolamo Riario and Francesco de’ Pazzi, in consequence of the office held by the latter, afforded them an opportunity of communicating to each other their common jealousy of the power of the Medici, and their desire of depriving them of their influence in Florence; in which event it is highly probable that the Pazzi were to have exercised the chief authority in the city, under the patronage, if not under the avowed dominion, of the papal see. The principal agent engaged in the undertaking was Francesco Salviati, archbishop of Pisa, to which rank he had lately been promoted by Sixtus, in opposition to the wishes of the Medici, who had for some time endeavoured to prevent him from exercising his episcopal functions. If it be allowed that the unfavourable character given him by Politian is exaggerated, it is generally agreed that his qualities were the reverse of those which ought to have been the recommendations to such high preferment. The other conspirators were Jacopo Salviati, brother of the archbishop; Jacopo Poggio, one of the sons of the celebrated Poggio Bracciolini, and who, like all the other sons of that eminent scholar, had obtained no small share of literary reputation; Bernardo Bandini, a daring libertine, rendered desperate by the consequences of his excesses; Giovan Battista Montesicco, who had distinguished himself by his military talents as one of the condottieri of the armies of the pope; Antonio Maffei, a priest of Volterra, and Stefano de Bagnone, one of the apostolic scribes, with several others of inferior note.

In the arrangement of their plan, which appears to have been concerted with great precaution and secrecy, the conspirators soon discovered that the dangers which they had to encounter were not so likely to arise from the difficulty of the attempt, as from the subsequent resentment of the Florentines, a great majority of whom were strongly attached to the Medici. Hence it became necessary to provide a military force, the assistance of which might be equally requisite whether the enterprise proved abortive or successful. By the influence of the pope, the king of Naples, who was then in alliance with him, and on one of whose sons he had recently bestowed a cardinal’s hat, was also induced to countenance the attempt.

These preliminaries being adjusted, Girolamo wrote to his nephew, the cardinal Riario, then at Pisa, ordering him to obey whatever directions he might receive from the archbishop. A body of two thousand men were destined to approach by different routes towards Florence, so as to be in readiness at the time appointed for striking the blow.

Shortly afterwards, the archbishop requested the presence of the cardinal at Florence, whither he immediately repaired, and took up his residence at a seat of the Pazzi, about a mile from the city. It seems to have been the intention of the conspirators to effect their purpose at Fiesole, where Lorenzo then had his country residence, to which they supposed that he would invite the cardinal and his attendants. Nor were they deceived in this conjecture, for Lorenzo prepared a magnificent entertainment on this occasion; but the absence of Giuliano, on account of indisposition, obliged the conspirators to postpone the attempt. Being thus disappointed in their hopes, another plan was now to be adopted; and on further deliberation it was resolved that the assassination should take place on the succeeding Sunday, in the church of the Reparata, since called Santa Maria del Fiore, and that the signal for execution should be the elevation of the Host. At the same moment, the archbishop and others of the conspirators were to seize upon the palace, or residence of the magistrates, whilst the office of Jacopo de’ Pazzi was to endeavour, by the cry of “Liberty!” to incite the citizens to revolt.

The immediate assassination of Giuliano was committed to Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini, and that of Lorenzo had been intrusted to the sole hand of Montesicco. This office he had willingly undertaken whilst he understood that it was to be executed in a private dwelling, but he shrank from the idea of polluting the house of God with so heinous a crime. Two ecclesiastics were therefore selected for the commission of a deed from which the soldier was deterred by conscientious motives. These were Stefano da Bagnone, the apostolic scribe, and Antonio Maffei.

The young cardinal having expressed a desire to attend divine service in the church of the Reparata, on the ensuing Sunday, being the 26th day of April, 1478, Lorenzo invited him and his suite to his house in Florence. He accordingly came with a large retinue, supporting the united characters of cardinal and apostolic legate, and was received by Lorenzo with that splendour and hospitality with which he was always accustomed to entertain men of high rank and consequence. Giuliano did not appear, a circumstance that alarmed the conspirators, whose arrangements would not admit of longer delay. They soon, however, learned that he intended to be present at the church. The service was already begun, and the cardinal had taken his seat, when Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bandini, observing that Giuliano was not yet arrived, left the church and went to his house, in order to insure and hasten his attendance. Giuliano accompanied them, and as he walked between them they threw their arms round him with the familiarity of intimate friends, but in fact to discover whether he had any armour under his dress; possibly conjecturing, from his long delay, that he had suspected their purpose. At the same time, by their freedom and jocularity, they endeavoured to obviate any apprehensions which he might entertain from such a proceeding. The conspirators, having taken their stations near their intended victims, waited with impatience for the appointed signal. The bell rang, the priest raised the consecrated wafer, the people bowed before it, and at the same instant Bandini plunged a short dagger into the breast of Giuliano.

On receiving the wound, he took a few hasty steps and fell, when Francesco de’ Pazzi rushed upon him with incredible fury, and stabbed him in different parts of his body, continuing to repeat his strokes even after he was apparently dead. Such was the violence of his rage that he wounded himself deeply in the thigh. The priests who had undertaken the murder of Lorenzo were not equally successful. An ill-directed blow from Maffei,[368] which was aimed at the throat, but took place behind the neck, rather roused him to his defence than disabled him. He immediately threw off his cloak, and holding it up as a shield in his left hand, with his right he drew his sword, and repelled his assailants. Perceiving that their purpose was defeated, the two ecclesiastics, after having wounded one of Lorenzo’s attendants who had interposed to defend him, endeavoured to save themselves by flight. At the same moment, Bandini, his dagger streaming with the blood of Giuliano, rushed towards Lorenzo; but meeting in his way with Francesco Nori, a person in the service of the Medici, in whom they placed great confidence, he stabbed him with a wound instantaneously mortal. At the approach of Bandini, the friends of Lorenzo encircled him, and hurried him into the sacristy, where Politian and others closed the doors, which were of brass. Apprehensions being entertained that the weapon which had wounded him was poisoned, a young man attached to Lorenzo sucked the wound. A general alarm and consternation commenced in the church; and such was the tumult that ensued that it was at first believed that the building was falling in; but no sooner was it understood that Lorenzo was in danger, than several of the youth of Florence formed themselves into a body, and receiving him into the midst of them, conducted him to his house, making a circuitous turn from the church, lest he should meet with the dead body of his brother.

While these transactions passed in the church, another commotion arose in the palace, where the archbishop, who had left the church, as agreed upon before the attack on the Medici, and about thirty of his associates, attempted to overpower the magistrates, and to possess themselves of the seat of government. Leaving some of his followers stationed in different apartments, the archbishop proceeded to an interior chamber, where Cesare Petrucci, then gonfalonier, and the other magistrates were assembled. No sooner was the gonfalonier informed of his approach than, out of respect to his rank, he rose to meet him. Whether the archbishop was disconcerted by the presence of Petrucci, who was known to be of a resolute character, of which he had given a striking instance in frustrating the attack of Bernardo Nardi upon the town of Prato, or whether his courage was not equal to the undertaking, is uncertain; but instead of intimidating the magistrates by a sudden attack, he began to inform Petrucci that the pope had bestowed an employment on his son, of which he had to deliver to him the credentials. This he did with such hesitation, and in so desultory a manner, that it was scarcely possible to collect his meaning. Petrucci also observed that he frequently changed colour, and at times turned towards the door, as if giving a signal to someone to approach.

Alarmed at his manner, and probably aware of his character, Petrucci suddenly rushed out of the chamber, and called together the guards and attendants. By attempting to retreat, the archbishop confessed his guilt. In pursuing him, Petrucci met with Jacopo Poggio, whom he caught by the hair, and throwing him on the ground, delivered him into the custody of his followers. The rest of the magistrates and their attendants seized upon such arms as the place supplied, and the implements of the kitchen became formidable weapons in their hands. Having secured the doors of the palace, they furiously attacked their scattered and intimidated enemies, who no longer attempted resistance. During this commotion, they were alarmed by a tumult from without, and perceived from the windows Jacopo de’ Pazzi, followed by about one hundred soldiers, crying out, “Liberty!” and exhorting the people to revolt. At the same time they found that the insurgents had forced the gates of the palace, and that some of them were entering to defend their companions. The magistrates, however, persevered in their defence, and repulsing their enemies, secured the gates till a reinforcement of their friends came to their assistance. Petrucci was now first informed of the assassination of Giuliano, and the attack made upon Lorenzo. The relation of this treachery excited his highest indignation. With the concurrence of the state counsellors, he ordered Jacopo Poggio to be hung in sight of the populace, out of the palace windows, and secured the archbishop, with his brother, and the other chiefs of the conspiracy. Their followers were either slaughtered in the palace, or thrown half alive through the windows. One only of the whole number escaped. He was found some days afterwards concealed in the wainscots, perishing with hunger, and in consideration of his sufferings received his pardon.

The young cardinal Riario, who had taken refuge at the altar, was preserved from the rage of the populace by the interference of Lorenzo, who appeared to give credit to his asseverations that he was ignorant of the intentions of the conspirators. Ammiratom asserts that his fears had so violent an effect upon him that he never afterwards recovered his natural complexion. His attendants fell a sacrifice to the resentment of the citizens. The streets were polluted with the dead bodies and mangled limbs of the slaughtered. With the head of one of these unfortunate wretches on a lance, the populace paraded the city, which resounded with the cry of “Palle! Palle!” (Perish the traitors.) Francesco de’ Pazzi, being found at the house of his uncle, Jacopo, where on account of his wound he was confined to his bed, was dragged out naked and exhausted by loss of blood, and being brought to the palace, suffered the same death as his associate. His punishment was immediately followed by that of the archbishop, who was hung through the windows of the palace, and was not allowed even to divest himself of his prelatical robes. The last moments of Salviati, if we may credit Politian, were marked by a singular instance of ferocity. Being suspended close to Francesco de’ Pazzi, he seized the naked body with his teeth, and relaxed not from his hold even in the agonies of death.

Jacopo de’ Pazzi had escaped from the city during the tumult, but the day following he was made a prisoner by the neighbouring peasants, who, regardless of his entreaties to put him to death, brought him to Florence, and delivered him up to the magistrates. As his guilt was manifest, his execution was instantaneous, and afforded from the windows of the palace another spectacle that gratified the resentment of the enraged multitude. His nephew Renato, who suffered at the same time, excited in some degree the commiseration of the spectators. Devoted to his studies, and averse to[370] popular commotions, he had refused to be an actor in the conspiracy, and his silence was his only crime. The body of Jacopo had been interred in the church of Santa Croce, and to this circumstance the superstition of the people attributed an unusual and incessant fall of rain that succeeded these disturbances. Partaking in their prejudices, or desirous of gratifying their revenge, the magistrates ordered his body to be removed without the walls of the city. The following morning it was again torn from the grave by a great multitude of children who, in spite of the restrictions of decency and the interference of some of the inhabitants, after dragging it a long time through the streets, and treating it with every degree of wanton opprobrium, threw it into the river Arno. Such was the fate of a man who had enjoyed the highest honours of the republic, and for his services to the state had been rewarded with the privileges of the equestrian rank. The rest of the devoted family were condemned either to imprisonment or to exile, excepting only Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, who, though not unsuspected, was first sheltered from the popular fury in the house of Lorenzo, and was afterwards ordered to remain at his own villa, about twenty-five miles distant from Florence.

Although most diligent search was made for the priests who had undertaken the murder of Lorenzo, it was not till the third day after the attempt that they were discovered, having obtained a shelter in the monastery of the Benedictine monks. No sooner were they brought from the place of their concealment, than the populace, after cruelly mutilating them, put them to death, and with difficulty were prevented from slaughtering the monks themselves. Montesicco, who had adhered to the cause of the conspirators, although he had refused to be the active instrument of their project, was taken a few days afterwards, as he was endeavouring to save himself by flight, and beheaded, having first made a full confession of all the circumstances attending the conspiracy, by which it appeared that the pope was privy to the whole transaction. The punishment of Bernardo Bandini was longer delayed. He had safely passed the bounds of Italy, and had taken refuge at length in Constantinople; but the sultan Muhammed, being apprised of his crime, ordered him to be seized and sent in chains to Florence, at the same time alleging as the motive of his conduct the respect which he had for the character of Lorenzo de’ Medici. He arrived in the month of December in the ensuing year, and met with the due reward of his treachery. An embassy was sent from Florence to return thanks to the sultan, in the name of the republic.d

LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT IN POWER

The ill success of the conspiracy of the Pazzi strengthened, as always happens, the government against which it was directed. The Medici had been content till then to be the first citizens of Florence: from that time Lorenzo looked upon himself as the prince of the city; and his friends, in speaking of him, sometimes employed that title. In addressing him, the epithet of “most magnificent lord” was habitually employed. It was the mode of addressing the condottieri, and the petty princes who had no other title. Lorenzo affected in his habits of life an unbounded liberality, pomp, and splendour, which he believed necessary to make up for the real rank which he wanted. The Magnificent, his title of honour, is become, not without reason, his surname with posterity. On the failure of the conspiracy, he was menaced by all Italy at once. The pope fulminated a bull against him[371] on the 1st of June, 1478, for having hanged an archbishop. He demanded that Lorenzo de’ Medici, the gonfalonier, the priori, and the balia of Eight should be given up to him, to be punished according to the enormity of their crime. At the same time he published a league, which he had formed against them with Ferdinand of Naples and the republic of Siena. He gave the command of the army of the league to Federigo di Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, and ordered him to advance into Tuscany.e

The Florentines now prepared for war, by raising money and collecting as large a force as possible. Being in league with the duke of Milan and the Venetians, they applied to both for assistance. As the pope had proved himself a wolf rather than a shepherd, to avoid being devoured under false accusations they justified their cause with all available arguments, and filled Italy with accounts of the treachery practised against their government, exposing the impiety and injustice of the pontiff, and assured the world that the pontificate which he had wickedly attained he would as impiously fill.

The two armies, under the command of Alfonso, eldest son of Ferrando and duke of Calabria, who had as his general Federigo, count of Urbino, entered the Chianti, by permission of the Sienese, who sided with the enemy, occupied Radda with many other fortresses, and having plundered the country, besieged the Castellina. The Florentines were greatly alarmed at these attacks, being almost destitute of forces, and finding their friends slow to assist; for though the duke sent them aid, the Venetians denied all obligation to support the Florentines in their private quarrels, since the animosities of individuals were not to be defended at the public expense. The Florentines, in order to induce the Venetians to take a more correct view of the case, sent Tommaso Soderini as their ambassador to the senate, and, in the meantime, engaged forces, and appointed Ercole, marquis of Ferrara, to the command of their army. Whilst these preparations were being made, the Castellina were so hard pressed by the enemy, that the inhabitants, despairing of relief, surrendered, after having sustained a siege of forty-two days.

The enemy then directed their course towards Arezzo, and encamped before San Savino. The Florentine army, being now in order, went to meet them, and having approached within three miles, caused such annoyance that Federigo d’Urbino demanded a truce for a few days, which was granted, but proved so disadvantageous to the Florentines that those who had made the request were astonished at having obtained it; for, had it been refused, they would have been compelled to retire in disgrace. Having gained these few days to recruit themselves, as soon as they were expired they took the castle in the presence of their enemies. Winter being now come, the forces of the pope and the king retired for convenient quarters to the Sienese territory. The Florentines also withdrew to a more commodious situation, and the marquis of Ferrara, having done little for himself and less for others, returned to his own territories.

At this time, ambassadors came to Florence from the emperor, the king of France, and the king of Hungary, who were sent by their princes to the pontiff. They solicited the Florentines also to send ambassadors to the pope, and promised to use their utmost exertion to obtain for them an advantageous peace. The Florentines did not refuse to make trial, both for the sake of publicly justifying their proceedings, and because they were really desirous of peace. Accordingly, the ambassadors were sent, but returned without coming to any conclusion of their differences. The Florentines, to avail themselves of the influence of the king of France, since they were attacked by one part of the Italians and abandoned by the other, sent to him as their[372] ambassador Donato Acciajuoli, a distinguished Latin and Greek scholar, whose ancestors had always ranked high in the city; but whilst on his journey he died at Milan. To relieve his surviving family and pay a deserved tribute to his memory, he was honourably buried at the public expense, provision was made for his sons, and suitable marriage portions given to his daughters, and Guid’ Antonio Vespucci, a man well acquainted with pontifical and imperial affairs, was sent as ambassador to the king in his stead.

The attack of Signor Roberto upon the Pisan territory, being unexpected, greatly perplexed the Florentines; for having to resist the foe in the direction of Siena, they knew not how to provide for the places about Pisa. To keep the Lucchese faithful, and prevent them from furnishing the enemy either with money or provisions, they sent as ambassador Piero di Gino Capponi, who was received with so much jealousy, on account of the hatred which that city always cherishes against the Florentines from former injuries and constant fear, that he was on many occasions in danger of being put to death by the mob; and thus his mission gave fresh cause of animosity rather than of union. The Florentines recalled the marquis of Ferrara, and engaged the marquis of Mantua; they also as earnestly requested the Venetians to send them Count Carlo, son of Braccio, and Deifobo, son of Count Jacopo, and after many delays, they complied; for having made a truce with the Turks, they had no excuse to justify a refusal, and could not break through the obligation of the league without the utmost disgrace. The counts Carlo and Deifobo came with a good force, and being joined by all that could be spared from the army, which, under the marquis of Ferrara, held in check the duke of Calabria, proceeded towards Pisa, to meet Signor Roberto, who was with his troops near the river Serchio, and who, though he had expressed his intention of awaiting their arrival, withdrew to the camp at Lunigiana, which he had quitted upon coming into the Pisan territory, while Count Carlo recovered all the places that had been taken by the enemy in that district.

The Florentines, being thus relieved from the attack in the direction of Pisa, assembled the whole force between Colle and Santo Geminiano. But the army, on the arrival of Count Carlo, being composed of Sforzeschi and Bracceshi, their hereditary feuds soon broke forth, and it was thought that if they remained long in company they would turn their arms against each other. It was therefore determined, as the smaller evil, to divide them; to send one party, under Count Carlo, into the district of Perugia, and establish the other at Poggibonzi, where they formed a strong encampment in order to prevent the enemy from penetrating the Florentine territory. By this they also hoped to compel the enemy to divide their forces; for Count Carlo was understood to have many partisans in Perugia, and it was therefore expected[373] either that he would occupy the place, or that the pope would be compelled to send a large body of men for its defence. To reduce the pontiff to greater necessity, they ordered Niccolo Vitelli, who had been expelled from Città di Castello, where his enemy Lorenzo Vitelli commanded, to lead a force against that place, with the view of driving out his adversary and withdrawing it from obedience to the pope. At the beginning of the campaign, fortune seemed to favour the Florentines; for Count Carlo made rapid advances in the Perugino, and Niccolo Vitelli, though unable to enter Castello, was superior in the field, and plundered the surrounding country without opposition. The forces also at Poggibonzi constantly overran the country up to the walls of Siena.

These hopes, however, were not realised; for, in the first place, Count Carlo died while in the fullest tide of success, though the consequences of this would have been less detrimental to the Florentines had not the victory to which it gave occasion been nullified by the misconduct of others. The death of the count being known, the forces of the church, which had already assembled in Perugia, conceived hopes of overcoming the Florentines, and encamped upon the lake, within three miles of the enemy. On the other side, Jacopo Guicciardini, commissary to the army, by the advice of Roberto da Rimino, who, after the death of Count Carlo, was the principal commander, knowing the ground of their sanguine expectations, determined to meet them; and coming to an engagement near the lake, upon the site of the memorable rout of the Romans by Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, the papal forces were vanquished. The news of the victory, which did great honour to the commanders, diffused universal joy at Florence, and would have insured a favourable termination of the campaign, had not the disorders which arose in the army at Poggibonzi thrown all into confusion; for the advantage obtained by the valour of the one was more than counterbalanced by the disgraceful proceedings of the other. Having made considerable booty in the Sienese territory, quarrels arose about the division of it between the marquis of Mantua and the marquis of Ferrara, who, coming to arms, assailed each other with the utmost fury; and the Florentines, seeing they could no longer avail themselves of the services of both, allowed the marquis of Ferrara and his men to return home.

The Florentines Routed at Poggibonzi

The army being thus reduced, without a leader, and disorder prevailing in every department, the duke of Calabria, who was with his forces near Siena, resolved to attack them immediately. The Florentines, finding the enemy at hand, were seized with a sudden panic; neither their arms nor their numbers, in which they were superior to their adversaries, nor their position, which was one of great strength, could give them confidence; but observing the dust occasioned by the enemy’s approach, without waiting for a sight of them, they fled in all directions, leaving their ammunition, carriages, and artillery to be taken by the foe. Such cowardice and disorder prevailed in the armies of those times that the turning of a horse’s head or tail was sufficient to decide the fate of an expedition. This defeat loaded the king’s troops with booty and filled the Florentines with dismay, for the city, besides the war, was afflicted with pestilence, which prevailed so extensively that all who possessed villas fled to them to escape death. This occasioned the defeat to be attended with greater horror; for those citizens whose possessions lay in the Val di Pesa and the Val d’Elsa, having retired to them, hastened to[374] Florence with all speed as soon as they heard of the disaster, taking with them not only their children and their property, but even their labourers; so that it seemed as if the enemy were expected every moment in the city.

Those who were appointed to the management of the war, perceiving the universal consternation, commanded the victorious forces in the Perugino to give up their enterprise in that district and march to oppose the enemy in the Val d’Elsa, who, after their victory, plundered the country without opposition; and although the Florentine army had so closely pressed the city of Perugia that it was expected to fall into their hands every instant, the people preferred defending their own possessions to endeavouring to seize those of others. The troops, thus withdrawn from the pursuit of their good fortune, were marched to San Casciano, a castle within eight miles of Florence, the leaders thinking they could take up no other position till the relics of the routed army were assembled. On the other hand, the enemy being under no further restraint at Perugia, and emboldened by the departure of the Florentines, plundered to a large amount in the districts of Arezzo and Cortona; whilst those who under Alfonso, duke of Calabria, had been victorious near Poggibonzi, took the town itself, sacked Vico and Certaldo, and after these conquests and pillagings encamped before the fortress of Colle, which was considered very strong; and as the garrison was brave and faithful to the Florentines, it was hoped they would hold the enemy at bay till the republic was able to collect its forces. The Florentines being at San Casciano, and the enemy continuing to use their utmost exertions against Colle, they determined to draw nearer, that the inhabitants might be the more resolute in their defence and the enemy assail them less boldly. With this design they removed their camp from San Casciano to Santo Geminiano, about five miles from Colle, and with light cavalry and other suitable forces were able every day to annoy the duke’s camp.

All this, however, was insufficient to relieve the people of Colle; for, having consumed their provisions, they were compelled to surrender on the 13th of November, to the great grief of the Florentines and joy of the enemy, more especially of the Sienese, who, besides their habitual hatred of the Florentines, had a particular animosity against the people of Colle.

It was now the depth of winter, and the weather so unsuitable for war that the pope and the king, either designing to hold out a hope of peace or more quietly to enjoy the fruit of their victories, proposed a truce for three months to the Florentines, and allowed them ten days to consider the reply. The offer was eagerly accepted; but as wounds are well known to be more painful after the blood cools than when they were first received, this brief repose awakened the Florentines to a consciousness of the miseries they had endured; and the citizens openly laid the blame upon each other, pointing out the errors committed in the management of the war, the expenses uselessly incurred, and the taxes unjustly imposed. These matters were boldly discussed, not only in private circles, but in the public councils; and one individual even ventured to turn to Lorenzo de’ Medici and say, “The city is exhausted and can endure no more war; it is therefore necessary to think of peace.”

Lorenzo was himself aware of the necessity, and assembled the friends in whose wisdom and fidelity he had the greatest confidence, when it was at once concluded that, as the Venetians were lukewarm and unfaithful, and the duke in the power of his guardians, and involved in domestic difficulties, it would be desirable by some new alliance to give a better turn to their affairs. They were in doubt whether to apply to the king or to the pope;[375] but having examined the question on all sides, they preferred the friendship of the king as more suitable and secure; for the short reigns of the pontiffs, the changes ensuing upon each succession, the disregard shown by the church towards temporal princes, and the still greater want of respect for them exhibited in her determinations, rendered it impossible for a secular prince to trust a pontiff, or safely to share his fortune; for an adherent of the pope would have a companion in victory, but in defeat must stand alone, whilst the pontiff was sustained by his spiritual power and influence.

Lorenzo’s Embassy to Naples

Having therefore decided that the king’s friendship would be of the greatest utility to them, they thought it would be most easily and certainly obtained by Lorenzo’s presence; for in proportion to the confidence they evinced towards him, the greater they imagined would be the probability of removing his impressions of past enmities. Lorenzo, having resolved to go to Naples, recommended the city and government to the care of Tommaso Soderini, who was at that time gonfalonier of justice. He left Florence at the beginning of December, and having arrived at Pisa, wrote to the government to acquaint them with the cause of his departure. The seigniory, to do him honour, and enable him the more effectually to treat with the king, appointed him ambassador from the Florentine people, and endowed him with full authority to make such arrangements as he thought most useful for the republic.

At this time Roberto da San Severino, with Lodovico and Ascanio (Sforza, their elder brother, being dead), again attacked Milan, in order to recover the government. Having taken Tortona, and the city and the whole state being in arms, the duchess Bona was advised to restore the Sforzeschi, and to put a stop to civil contentions by admitting them to the government. The person who gave this advice was Antonio Tassino, of Ferrara, a man of low origin, who, coming to Milan, fell into the hands of the duke Galeazzo, and was given by him to his duchess for her valet. He, either from his personal attractions, or some secret influence, after the duke’s death attained such influence over the duchess, that he governed the state almost at his will. This greatly displeased the minister Cecco, whom prudence and long experience had rendered invaluable; and who, to the utmost of his power, endeavoured to diminish the authority of Tassino with the duchess and other members of the government. Tassino, aware of this, to avenge himself for the injury, and secure defenders against Cecco, advised the duchess to recall the Sforzeschi, which she did, without communicating her design to the minister, who, when it was done, said to her, “You have taken a step which will deprive me of my life, and you of the government.” This shortly afterwards took place, for Cecco was put to death by Lodovico, and Tassino being expelled from the dukedom, the duchess was so enraged that she left Milan, and gave up the care of her son to Lodovico who, becoming sole governor of the dukedom, caused, as will be hereafter seen, the ruin of Italy.

Lorenzo de’ Medici had set out for Naples, and the truce between the parties was in force, when, quite unexpectedly, Lodovico Fregoso, being in correspondence with some persons of Sarzana, entered the place by stealth, took possession of it with an armed force, and imprisoned the Florentine governor. This greatly offended the seigniory, for they thought the whole had been concerted with the connivance of King Ferdinand. They complained to the duke of Calabria, who was with the army at Siena, of a breach of the[376] truce; and he endeavoured to prove, by letters and embassies, that it had occurred without either his own or his father’s knowledge. The Florentines, however, found themselves in a very awkward predicament, being destitute of money, the head of the republic in the power of the king, themselves engaged in a long-standing war with the latter and the pope, in a new one with the Genoese, and entirely without friends; for they had no confidence in the Venetians, and on account of its changeable and unsettled state they were rather apprehensive of Milan. They had thus only one hope, and that depended upon Lorenzo’s success with the king.

Lorenzo arrived at Naples by sea, and was most honourably received, not only by Ferdinand, but by the whole city, his coming having excited the greatest expectation; for it being generally understood that the war was undertaken for the sole purpose of effecting his destruction, the power of his enemies invested his name with additional lustre. Being admitted to the king’s presence, he spoke with so much propriety upon the affairs of Italy, the disposition of her princes and people, his hopes from peace, his fears of the results of war, that Ferdinand was more astonished at the greatness of his mind, the promptitude of his genius, his gravity and wisdom, than he had previously been at his power. He consequently treated him with redoubled honour, and began to feel compelled rather to part with him as a friend, than detain him as an enemy. However, under various pretexts he kept Lorenzo from December to March, not only to gain the most perfect knowledge of his own views, but of those of his city; for he was not without enemies, who would have wished the king to detain and treat him in the same manner as Jacopo Piccinino; and, with the ostensible view of sympathising for him, pointed out all that would, or rather what they wished should result from such a course; at the same time opposing in the council every proposition at all likely to favour him. By such means as these the opinion gained ground that, if he were detained at Naples much longer, the government of Florence would be changed. This caused the king to postpone their separation more than he would have otherwise done, to see if any disturbance were likely to arise. But finding everything going quietly on, Ferdinand allowed him to depart on the 6th of March, 1479, having, with every kind of attention and token of regard, endeavoured to gain his affection, and formed with him a perpetual alliance for their mutual defence. Lorenzo returned to Florence, and upon presenting himself before the citizens, the impressions he had created in the popular mind surrounded him with a halo of majesty brighter than before. He was received with all the joy merited by his extraordinary qualities and recent services, in having exposed his own life to the most imminent peril, in order to restore peace to his country. Two days after his return, the treaty between the republic of Florence and the king, by which each party bound itself to defend the other’s territories, was published. The places taken from the Florentines during the war were to be given up at the discretion of the king; the Pazzi confined in the tower of Volterra were to be set at liberty, and a certain sum of money, for a limited period, was to be paid to the duke of Calabria.

Peace with Honour

As soon as this peace was publicly known, the pope and the Venetians were transported with rage; the pope thought himself neglected by the king; the Venetians entertained similar ideas with regard to the Florentines, and complained that, having been companions in the war, they were not allowed[377] to participate in the peace. Reports of this description being spread abroad, and received with entire credence at Florence, caused a general fear that the peace thus made would give rise to greater wars; and therefore the leading members of the government determined to confine the consideration of the most important affairs to a smaller number, and formed a council of seventy citizens, in whom the principal authority was invested. The new regulation calmed the minds of those desirous of change, by convincing them of the futility of their efforts. To establish their authority, they in the first place ratified the treaty of peace with the king, and sent as ambassadors to the pope, Antonio Ridolfi and Piero Nasi. But, notwithstanding the peace, Alfonso, duke of Calabria, still remained at Siena with his forces, pretending to be detained by discords amongst the citizens, which, he said, had risen so high, that while he resided outside the city they had compelled him to enter and assume the office of arbitrator between them. He took occasion to draw large sums of money from the wealthiest citizens by way of fines, imprisoned many, banished others, and put some to death; he thus became suspected, not only by the Sienese but by the Florentines, of a design to usurp the sovereignty of Siena; nor was any remedy then available, for the republic had formed a new alliance with the king, and was at enmity with the pope and the Venetians. This suspicion was entertained not only by the great body of the Florentine people, who are subtle interpreters of appearances, but by the principal members of the government; and it was agreed, on all hands, that the city never was in so much danger of losing her liberty.

The Turkish emperor, Muhammed II, had gone with a large army to the siege of Rhodes, and continued it for several months; but though his forces were numerous, and his courage indomitable, he found them more than equalled by those of the besieged, who resisted his attack with such obstinate valour that he was at last compelled to retire in disgrace. Having left Rhodes, part of his army, under the pasha Akhmet, approached Velona, and, either from observing the facility of the enterprise, or in obedience to his sovereign’s commands, coasting along the Italian shores, he suddenly landed four thousand soldiers, and attacked the city of Otranto, which he easily took, plundered, and put all the inhabitants to the sword. He then fortified the city and port, and having assembled a large body of cavalry, pillaged the surrounding country. The king, learning this, and aware of the redoubtable character of his assailant, immediately sent messengers to all the surrounding powers, to request assistance against the common enemy, and ordered the immediate return of the duke of Calabria with the forces at Siena.

This attack, however it might annoy the duke and the rest of Italy, occasioned the utmost joy at Florence and Siena; the latter thinking she had recovered her liberty, and the former that she had escaped a storm which threatened her with destruction. These impressions, which were not unknown to the duke, increased the regret he felt at his departure from Siena; and he accused fortune of having, by an unexpected and unaccountable accident, deprived him of the sovereignty of Tuscany. The same circumstance changed the disposition of the pope; for although he had previously refused to receive any ambassador from Florence, he was now so mollified as to be anxious to listen to any overtures of peace; and it was intimated to the Florentines that, if they would condescend to ask the pope’s pardon, they would be sure of obtaining it. Thinking it advisable to seize the opportunity, they sent twelve ambassadors to the pontiff, who, on their arrival, detained them under different pretexts before he would admit them[378] to an audience. However, terms were at length settled, and what should be contributed by each in peace or war.

The messengers were then admitted to the feet of the pontiff, who, with the utmost pomp, received them in the midst of his cardinals. They apologised for past occurrences, first showing they had been compelled by necessity, then blaming the malignity of others, or the rage of the populace, and their just indignation, and enlarging on the unfortunate condition of those who are compelled either to fight or die; saying that, since every extremity is endured in order to avoid death, they had suffered war, interdicts, and other inconveniences brought upon them by recent events, that their republic might escape slavery, which is the death of free cities. However, if in their necessities they had committed any offence, they were desirous to make atonement, and trusted in his clemency, who, after the example of the blessed Redeemer, would receive them into his compassionate arms.

The pope’s reply was indignant and haughty. After reiterating all the offences against the church during the late transactions, he said that, to comply with the precepts of God, he would grant the pardon they asked, but would have them understand that it was their duty to obey; and that, upon the next instance of their disobedience, they would inevitably forfeit the liberty which they had just been upon the point of losing; for those merit freedom who exercise themselves in good works and avoid evil; that liberty, improperly used, injures itself and others; that to think little of God, and less of his church, is not the part of a free man, but a fool, and one disposed to evil rather than good, and to effect whose correction is the duty not only of princes but of every Christian. So that in respect of the recent events, they had only themselves to blame, who, by their evil deeds, had given rise to the war, and inflamed it by still worse actions, it having been terminated by the kindness of others rather than by any merit of their own. The formula of agreement and benediction was then read; and, in addition to what had already been considered and agreed upon between the parties, the pope said that, if the Florentines wished to enjoy the fruit of his forgiveness, they must maintain fifteen galleys, armed and equipped, at their own expense, so long as the Turks should make war upon the kingdom of Naples. The ambassadors complained much of this burden in addition to the arrangement already made, but were unable to obtain any alleviation. However, after their return to Florence, the seigniory sent, as ambassador to the pope, Guid’ Antonio Vespucci, who had recently returned from France, and who by his prudence brought everything to an amicable conclusion, and obtained many favours from the pontiff, which were considered as presages of a closer reconciliation.

Having settled their affairs with the pope, Siena being free, themselves released from the fear of the king by the departure of the duke of Calabria from Tuscany, and the war with the Turks still continuing, the Florentines pressed the king to restore their fortresses, which the duke of Calabria, upon quitting the country, had left in the hands of the Sienese. Ferdinand, apprehensive that if he refused they would withdraw from the alliance with him, and by new wars with the Sienese deprive him of the assistance he hoped to obtain from the pope and other Italian powers, consented that they should be given up, and by new favours endeavoured to attach the Florentines to his interests.

The castles being restored, and this new alliance established, Lorenzo de’ Medici recovered the reputation which first the war and then the peace, when[379] the king’s designs were doubtful, had deprived him of; for at this period there was no lack of those who openly slandered him with having sold his country to save himself, and said that in war they had lost their territories, and in peace their liberty. But the fortresses being recovered, an honourable treaty ratified with the king, and the city restored to her former influence, the spirit of public discourse entirely changed in Florence, a place greatly addicted to gossip, and in which actions are judged by the success attending them, rather than by the intelligence employed in their direction; therefore, the citizens praised Lorenzo extravagantly, declaring that by his prudence he had recovered in peace what unfavourable circumstances had taken from them in war, and that by his discretion and judgment he had done more than the enemy with all the force of their arms.

Further Papal Wars

The invasion of the Turks had deferred the war which was about to break forth from the anger of the pope and the Venetians at the peace between the Florentines and the king. But as the beginning of that invasion was unexpected and beneficial, its conclusion was equally unlooked for and injurious; for Muhammed dying suddenly, dissensions arose amongst his sons; and the forces which were in Apulia, being abandoned by their commander, surrendered Otranto to the king. The fears which restrained the pope and the Venetians being thus removed, everyone became apprehensive of new troubles. On the one hand was the league of the pope and the Venetians, and with them the Genoese, Sienese, and other minor powers; on the other, the Florentines, the king, and the duke, with whom were the Bolognese and many princes. The Venetians wished to become lords of Ferrara, and thought they were justified by circumstances in making the attempt, and hoping for a favourable result. Their differences arose thus: the marquis of Ferrara affirmed he was under no obligation to take salt from the Venetians, or to admit their governor; the terms of convention between them declaring that, after seventy years, the city was to be free from both impositions. The Venetians replied that, so long as he held the Polesine, he was[380] bound to receive their salt and their governor. The marquis refusing his consent, the Venetians considered themselves justified in taking arms, and that the present moment offered a suitable opportunity; for the pope was indignant against the Florentines and the king; and to attach the pope still further, the count Girolamo, who was then at Venice, was received with all possible respect, first admitted to the privileges of a citizen, and then raised to the rank of a senator—the highest distinctions the Venetian senate can confer. To prepare for the war, they levied new taxes, and appointed to the command of the forces, Roberto da San Severino, who being offended with Lodovico, governor of Milan, fled to Tortona, whence, after occasioning some disturbances, he went to Genoa, and whilst there, was sent for by the Venetians, and placed at the head of their troops.

These circumstances becoming known to the opposite league, induced it also to provide for war. The duke of Milan appointed as his general Federigo d’Urbino; the Florentines engaged Costanzo, lord of Pesaro; and to sound the disposition of the pope, and know whether the Venetians made war against Ferrara with his consent or not, King Ferdinand sent Alfonso, duke of Calabria, with his army, across the Tronto, and asked the pontiff’s permission to pass into Lombardy to assist the marquis, which was refused in the most peremptory manner. The Florentines and the king, no longer doubtful concerning the pope’s intentions, determined to harass him, and thus either compel him to take part with them, or throw such obstacles in his way as would prevent him from helping the Venetians, who had already taken the field, attacked the marquis, overrun his territory, and encamped before Figaruolo, a fortress of the greatest importance. In pursuance of the design of the Florentines and the king, the duke of Calabria, by the assistance of the Colonna family (the Orsini had joined the pope) plundered the country about Rome, and committed great devastation; whilst the Florentines, with Niccolo Vitelli, besieged and took Città di Castello, expelling Lorenzo Vitelli, who held it for the pope, and placing Niccolo in it as prince.

The pope now found himself in very great straits; for the city of Rome was disturbed by factions, and the country covered with enemies. But acting with courage and resolution, he appointed Roberto da Rimini to take the command of his forces; and having sent for him to Rome, where his troops were assembled, told him how great would be the honour if he could deliver the church from the king’s forces and the troubles in which it was involved; how greatly indebted not only himself, but all his successors would be, and that not mankind merely, but God himself would be under obligations to him. The magnificent Roberto, having considered the forces and preparations already made, advised the pope to raise as numerous a body of infantry as possible, which was done without delay. The duke of Calabria was at hand, and constantly harassed the country up to the very gates of Rome, which so roused the indignation of the citizens that many offered their assistance to Roberto, and all were thankfully received. The duke, hearing of these preparations, withdrew a short distance from the city, that in the belief of finding him gone, the magnificent Roberto would not pursue him, and also in expectation of his brother Federigo, whom their father had sent to him with additional forces. But Roberto, finding himself nearly equal to the duke in cavalry, and superior in infantry, marched boldly out of Rome, and took a position within two miles of the enemy. The duke, seeing his adversaries close upon him, found he must either fight or disgracefully retire. To avoid a retreat unbecoming a king’s son, he resolved to face the enemy; and a battle ensued which continued from morning till midday. In this engagement,[381] greater valour was exhibited on both sides than had been shown in any other during the last fifty years, upwards of a thousand dead being left upon the field.

The troops of the church were at length victorious; for her numerous infantry so annoyed the ducal cavalry that they were compelled to retreat, and Alfonso himself would have fallen into the hands of the enemy, had he not been rescued by a body of Turks, who remained at Otranto, and were at that time in his service. The lord of Rimini, after this victory, returned triumphantly to Rome, but did not long enjoy the fruit of his valour; for having, during the heat of the engagement, taken a copious draught of water, he was seized with a flux, of which he very shortly afterwards died. The pope caused his funeral to be conducted with great pomp, and in a few days sent the count Girolamo towards Città di Castello to restore it to Lorenzo, and also endeavour to gain Rimini, which being by Roberto’s death left to the care of his widow and a son who was quite a boy, his holiness thought might be easily won; and this would certainly have been the case, if the lady had not been defended by the Florentines, who opposed him so effectually as to prevent his success against both Castello and Rimini.

Whilst these things were in progress at Rome and in Romagna, the Venetians took possession of Figaruolo and crossed the Po with their forces. The camp of the duke of Milan and the marquis was in disorder; for the count of Urbino, having fallen ill, was carried to Bologna for his recovery, but died. Thus the marquis’ affairs were unfortunately situated, whilst those of the Venetians gave them increasing hopes of occupying Ferrara. The Florentines and the king of Naples used their utmost endeavours to gain the pope to their views; and not having succeeded by force, they threatened him with the council, which had already been summoned by the emperor to assemble at Bâle; and by means of the imperial ambassadors, and the co-operation of the leading cardinals, who were desirous of peace, the pope was compelled to turn his attention towards effecting the pacification of Italy. With this view, at the instigation of his fears, and with the conviction that the aggrandisement of the Venetians would be the ruin of the church and of Italy, he endeavoured to make peace with the league, and sent his nuncios to Naples, where a treaty was concluded for five years, between the pope, the king, the duke of Milan, and the Florentines, with an opening for the Venetians to join them if they thought proper. When this was accomplished, the pope intimated to the Venetians that they must desist from war against Ferrara. They refused to comply, and made preparations to prosecute their design with greater vigour than they had hitherto done; and having routed the forces of the duke and the marquis at Argenta, they approached Ferrara so closely as to pitch their tents in the marquis’ park.

The league found they must no longer delay rendering him efficient assistance, and ordered the duke of Calabria to march to Ferrara with his forces and those of the pope, the Florentine troops also moving in the same direction. In order to direct the operations of the war with greater efficiency, the league assembled a diet at Cremona, which was attended by the pope’s legate, the count Girolamo, the duke of Calabria, the seignior Lodovico Sforza, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, with many other Italian princes; and when the measures to be adopted were fully discussed, having decided that the best way of relieving Ferrara would be to effect a division of the enemies’ forces, the league desired Lodovico to attack the Venetians on the side of Milan, but this he declined, for fear of bringing a war upon the duke’s territories, which it would be difficult to quell. It was therefore resolved[382] to proceed with the united forces of the league to Ferrara, and having assembled four thousand cavalry and eight thousand infantry, they went in pursuit of the Venetians, whose force amounted to twenty-two hundred men-at-arms, and six thousand foot. They first attacked the Venetian flotilla, then lying upon the river Po, which they routed with the loss of above two hundred vessels, and took prisoner Antonio Justiniano, the purveyor of the fleet. The Venetians, finding all Italy united against them, endeavoured to support their reputation by engaging in their service the duke of Lorraine, who joined them with two hundred men-at-arms; and having suffered so great a destruction of their fleet, they sent him, with part of their army, to keep their enemies at bay, and Roberto da San Severino to cross the Adda with the remainder, and proceed to Milan, where they were to raise the cry of “The duke and the lady Bona!”—his mother; hoping by this means to give a new aspect to affairs there, believing that Lodovico and his government were generally unpopular.

This attack at first created great consternation, and roused the citizens in arms, but eventually produced consequences unfavourable to the designs of the Venetians; for Lodovico was now desirous to undertake what he had refused to do at the entreaty of his allies. Leaving the marquis of Ferrara to the defence of his own territories, he, with four thousand horse and two thousand foot, and joined by the duke of Calabria with twelve thousand horse and five thousand foot, entered the territory of Bergamo, then Brescia, next that of Verona, and, in defiance of the Venetians, plundered the whole country; for it was with the greatest difficulty that Roberto and his forces could save the cities themselves. In the meantime, the marquis of Ferrara had recovered a great part of his territories; for the duke of Lorraine, by whom he was attacked, having only at his command two thousand horse and one thousand foot, could not withstand him. Hence, during the whole of 1483 the affairs of the league were prosperous.

The winter having passed quietly over, the armies again took the field. To produce the greater impression upon the enemy, the league united their whole force, and would easily have deprived the Venetians of all they possessed in Lombardy, if the war had been conducted in the same manner as during the preceding year; for by the departure of the duke of Lorraine, whose term of service had expired, they were reduced to six thousand horse and five thousand foot, whilst the allies had thirteen thousand horse and five thousand foot at their disposal. But, as is often the case where several of equal authority are joined in command, their want of unity decided the victory to their enemies. Federigo, marquis of Mantua, whose influence kept the duke of Calabria and Lodovico Sforza within bounds, being dead, differences arose between them which soon became jealousies. Giovanni Galeazzo, duke of Milan, was now of an age to take the government on himself,[383] and had married the daughter of the duke of Calabria, who wished his son-in-law to exercise the government and not Lodovico; the latter, being aware of the duke’s design, studied to prevent him from effecting it. The position of Lodovico being known to the Venetians, they thought they could make it available for their own interests, and hoped, as they had often before done, to recover in peace all they had lost by war; and having secretly entered into treaty with Lodovico, the terms were concluded in August, 1484.

When this became known to the rest of the allies, they were greatly dissatisfied, principally because they found that the places won from the Venetians were to be restored; that they were allowed to keep Rovigo and the Polesine, which they had taken from the marquis of Ferrara, and besides this retain all the pre-eminence and authority over Ferrara itself which they had formerly possessed. Thus it was evident to everyone they had been engaged in a war which had cost vast sums of money, during the progress of which they had acquired honour, and which was concluded with disgrace; for the places wrested from the enemy were restored without themselves recovering those they had lost. They were, however, compelled to ratify the treaty, on account of the unsatisfactory state of their finances, and because the faults and ambition of others had rendered them unwilling to put their fortunes to further proof.

The Florentines, after the pacification of Lombardy, could not remain quiet; for it appeared disgraceful that a private gentleman should deprive them of the fortress of Sarzana; and as it was allowed by the conditions of peace not only to demand lost places, but to make war upon any who should impede their restoration, they immediately provided men and money to undertake its recovery. Upon this, Agostino Fregoso, who had seized Sarzana, being unable to defend it, gave the fortress to the bank of St. George, which readily accepted it, undertook its defence, put a fleet to sea, and sent forces to Pietrasanta to prevent all attempts of the Florentines, whose camp was in the immediate vicinity. The Florentines found it would be essentially necessary to gain possession of Pietrasanta, for without it the acquisition of Sarzana lost much of its value, being situated between the latter place and Pisa; but they could not, consistently with the treaty, besiege it, unless the people of Pietrasanta, or its garrison, were to impede their acquisition of Sarzana. To induce the enemy to do this, the Florentines sent from Pisa to the camp a quantity of provisions and military stores, accompanied by a very weak escort, that the people of Pietrasanta might have little cause for fear, and by the richness of the booty be tempted to the attack. The plan succeeded according to their expectation; for the inhabitants of Pietrasanta, attracted by the rich prize, took possession of it.

This gave legitimate occasion to the Florentines to undertake operations against them; so leaving Sarzana they encamped before Pietrasanta, which was very populous, and made a gallant defence. The Florentines planted their artillery in the plain, and formed a rampart on the hill, that they might also attack the place on that side. Jacopo Guicciardini was commissary of the army; and while the siege of Pietrasanta was going on, the Genoese took and burned the fortress of Vada, and, landing their forces, plundered the surrounding country. Bongianni Gianfigliazzi was sent against them with a body of horse and foot, and checked their audacity, so that they pursued their depredations less boldly. The fleet continuing its efforts went to Leghorn, and by pontoons and other means approached the new tower, playing their artillery upon it for several days, but being unable to make any impression they withdrew.

In the meantime the Florentines proceeded slowly against Pietrasanta, and the enemy taking courage attacked and took their works upon the hill. This was effected with so much glory, and struck such a panic into the Florentines, that they were almost ready to raise the siege, and actually retreated a distance of four miles; for their generals thought that they would retire to winter quarters, it being now October, and make no further attempt till the return of spring.

When this discomfiture was known at Florence, the government was filled with indignation; and, to impart fresh vigour to the enterprise, and restore the reputation of their forces, they immediately appointed Guid’ Antonio Vespucci and Bernardo del Neri commissaries, who, with vast sums of money, proceeded to the army, and intimated the heavy displeasure of the seigniory, and of the whole city, if they did not return to the walls; and what a disgrace, if so large an army and so many generals, having only a small garrison to contend with, could not conquer so poor and weak a place. They explained the immediate and future advantages that would result from the acquisition, and spoke so forcibly upon the subject, that all became anxious to renew the attack. They resolved, in the first place, to recover the rampart upon the hill; and here it was evident how greatly humanity, affability, and condescension influence the minds of soldiers; for Guid’ Antonio Vespucci, by encouraging one and promising another, shaking hands with this man and embracing that, induced them to proceed to the charge with such impetuosity, that they gained possession of the rampart in an instant. However, the victory was not unattended by misfortune, for Count Antonio da Marciano was killed by a cannon-shot. This success filled the townspeople with so much terror that they began to make proposals for capitulation; and to invest the surrender with imposing solemnity, Lorenzo de’ Medici came to the camp, when, after a few days, the fortress was given up. It being now winter, the leaders of the expedition thought it unadvisable to make any further effort until the return of spring, more particularly because the autumnal air had been so unhealthful that numbers were affected by it. Guid’ Antonio Vespucci and Bongianni Gianfigliazzi were taken ill and died, to the great regret of all, so greatly had Antonio’s conduct at Pietrasanta endeared him to the army.

Upon the taking of Pietrasanta, the Lucchese sent ambassadors to Florence, to demand its surrender to their republic, on account of its having previously belonged to them, and because, as they alleged, it was in the conditions that places taken by either party were to be restored to their original possessors. The Florentines did not deny the articles, but replied that they did not know whether, by the treaty between themselves and the Genoese, which was then under discussion, it would have to be given up or not, and therefore could not reply to that point at present; but in case of its restitution, it would first be necessary for the Lucchese to reimburse them for the expenses they had incurred and the injury they had suffered, in the death of so many citizens; and that when this was satisfactorily arranged, they might entertain hopes of obtaining the place. The whole winter was consumed in negotiations between the Florentines and Genoese, which, by the pope’s intervention, were carried on at Rome; but not being concluded upon the return of spring, the Florentines would have attacked Sarzana had they not been prevented by the illness of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the war between the pope and King Ferdinand; for Lorenzo was afflicted not only by the gout, which seemed hereditary in his family, but also by violent pains in the stomach, and was compelled to go to the baths for relief.

The more important reason was furnished by the war, of which this was the origin. The city of Aquila, though subject to the kingdom of Naples, was in a manner free; and the count di Montorio possessed great influence over it. The duke of Calabria was upon the banks of the Tronto with his men-at-arms, under pretence of appeasing some disturbances amongst the peasantry, but really with a design of reducing Aquila entirely under the king’s authority, and sent for the count di Montorio, as if to consult him upon the business he pretended then to have in hand. The count obeyed without the least suspicion, and on his arrival was made prisoner by the duke and sent to Naples. When this circumstance became known at Aquila, the anger of the inhabitants arose to the highest pitch; taking arms they killed Antonio Cencinello, commissary for the king, and with him some inhabitants known partisans of his majesty. The Aquilani, in order to have a defender in their rebellion, raised the banner of the church, and sent envoys to the pope, to submit their city and themselves to him, beseeching that he would defend them as his own subjects against the tyranny of the king. The pontiff gladly undertook their defence, for he had both public and private reasons for hating that monarch; and Signor Roberto da San Severino, an enemy of the duke of Milan, being disengaged, was appointed to take the command of his forces, and sent for with all speed to Rome. He entreated the friends and relatives of the count di Montorio to withdraw their allegiance from the king, and induced the princes of Altimura, Salerno, and Bisignano to take arms against him. The king, finding himself so suddenly involved in war had recourse to the Florentines and the duke of Milan for assistance. The Florentines hesitated with regard to their own conduct, for they felt all the inconvenience of neglecting their own affairs to attend to those of others, and hostilities against the church seemed likely to involve much risk. However, being under the obligation of a league, they preferred their honour to convenience or security, engaged the Orsini, and sent all their own forces under the count di Pitigliano towards Rome, to the assistance of the king. The latter divided his forces into two parts; one, under the duke of Calabria, he sent towards Rome, which, being joined by the Florentines, opposed the army of the church; with the other, under his own command, he attacked the barons, and the war was prosecuted with various success on both sides. At length, the king, being universally victorious, peace was concluded by the intervention of the ambassadors of the king of Spain, in August, 1486, to which the pope consented; for having found fortune opposed to him he was not disposed to tempt it further. In this treaty all the powers of Italy were united, except the Genoese, who were omitted as rebels against the republic of Milan, and unjust occupiers of territories belonging to the Florentines. Upon the peace being ratified, Roberto da San Severino, having been during the war a treacherous ally of the church, and by no means formidable to her enemies, left Rome; being followed by the forces of the duke and the Florentines, after passing Cesena, he found them near him, and urging his flight reached Ravenna with less than a hundred horse. Of his forces, part were received into the duke’s service, and part were plundered by the peasantry. The king, being reconciled with his barons, put to death Jacopo Coppola and Antonello d’Aversa and their sons, for having, during the war, betrayed his secrets to the pope.

The pope having observed, in the course of the war, how promptly and earnestly the Florentines adhered to their alliances, although he had previously been opposed to them from his attachment to the Genoese, and the assistance they had rendered to the king, now evinced a more amicable[386] disposition, and received their ambassadors with greater favour than previously. Lorenzo de’ Medici, being made acquainted with this change of feeling, encouraged it with the utmost solicitude; for he thought it would be of great advantage, if to the friendship of the king he could add that of the pontiff.

The pope had a son named Francesco, upon whom designing to bestow states and attach friends who might be useful to him after his own death, he saw no safer connection in Italy than Lorenzo’s, and therefore induced the latter to give him one of his daughters in marriage. Having formed this alliance, the pope desired the Genoese to concede Sarzana to the Florentines, insisting that they had no right to detain what Agostino had sold, nor was Agostino justified in making over to the bank of St. George what was not his own. However, his holiness did not succeed with them; for the Genoese, during these transactions at Rome, armed several vessels, and, unknown to the Florentines, landed three thousand foot, attacked Sarzanello, situated above Sarzana, plundered and burned the town near it, and then, directing their artillery against the fortress, fired upon it with their utmost energy. This assault was new and unexpected by the Florentines, who immediately assembled their forces under Virginio Orsini, at Pisa, and complained to the pope that, whilst he was endeavouring to establish peace, the Genoese had renewed their attack upon them. They then sent Piero Corsini to Lucca, that by his presence he might keep the city faithful; and Pagolantonio Soderini to Venice, to learn how that republic was disposed. They demanded assistance of the king and of Signor Lodovico, but obtained it from neither; for the king expressed apprehensions of the Turkish fleet, and Lodovico made excuses, but sent no aid. Thus the Florentines in their own wars were almost always obliged to stand alone, and found no friends to assist them with the same readiness they practised towards others. Nor did they, on this desertion of their allies (it being nothing new to them), give way to despondency; for having assembled a large army under Jacopo Guicciardini and Piero Vettori, they sent it against the enemy, who had encamped on the river Magra, at the same time pressing Sarzanello with mines and every species of attack. The commissaries being resolved to relieve the place, an engagement ensued, when the Genoese were routed, and Lodovico de’ Fieschi, with several other principal men, made prisoners. The Sarzanesi were not so depressed at their defeat as to be willing to surrender, but obstinately prepared for their defence, whilst the Florentine commissaries proceeded with their operations, and instances of valour occurred on both sides.

The siege being protracted by a variety of fortune, Lorenzo de’ Medici resolved to go to the camp, and on his arrival the troops acquired fresh courage, whilst that of the enemy seemed to fail; for perceiving the obstinacy of the Florentines’ attack, and the delay of the Genoese in coming to their relief, they surrendered to Lorenzo, without asking conditions, and none were treated with severity except two or three who were leaders of the rebellion. During the siege, Lodovico had sent troops to Pontremoli, as if with an intention of assisting the Florentines; but having secret correspondence in Genoa, a party was raised there who gave the city to Milan.r

LAST YEARS OF LORENZO

From this period until the death of Lorenzo Italy remained at peace and little of any moment occurred at Florence. Lorenzo’s power augmented daily, and like a deep and rapid stream looked clear and smooth and beautiful[387] until crossed by some obstacle; then its force mounted up and swept everything violently away. Nor was it alone in Florence that its strength and volume were felt; Lorenzo’s true object and interest, like Ferdinand’s, was peace, and they held the balance in their hand; the unquiet nature of Alfonso was doubtful and dangerous, but Lorenzo ruled the unextinct energies of a powerful republic with the decision and unity of an absolute monarch and would allow no seeds of discord to be sown without an instantaneous effort to destroy; he influenced all the smaller states, and the vast weight of Florence cast on the side of one or other of the greater was never without its consequences. Disputes for instance occurred this year between Lodovico Sforza and Alfonso of Calabria about the former’s virtually usurping the whole sovereign authority of Milan from his nephew; and these, partly by persuasion, and partly by threats of placing himself on the side of the injured party, Lorenzo settled as he did most others; for he was well convinced that nothing would prove more dangerous to his own authority than any increase of power in either of these potentates. By such judicious management he maintained the peace of Italy, well knowing that no ties, whether of relationship, or obligation, or personal attachment, would ever have the beneficial effects that are produced by fear on sovereign princes.

If Cosmo purchased the liberties of Florence, Lorenzo received back the money with interest, not in power alone, but in gold and silver: under the gonfaloniership of Piero Alamanni in July and August, 1490, the disorder of his finances had become so great as to make a fresh grant of public money absolutely necessary to restore them, and in the year 1491, other fraudulent means were adopted to make up the deficiency. His extensive commercial establishments were necessarily left in the hands of agents who, puffed up with the importance of their master’s name, squandered his substance while they neglected his affairs; from the beginning his credit had been sustained by occasional grants of public money to a large amount; but now the evil was so alarmingly increased that a violent effort of the commonwealth became necessary to remove it, and that effort no less than public bankruptcy! On the 13th of August, 1490, a balia of seventeen members with the full powers of the whole Florentine nation was created to examine the condition of the coinage, the state of the various gabelle, and the public finances as connected with the private necessities of Lorenzo; to ascertain also what was spent on the occasion of making his son a cardinal, which with subsequent donations amounted to 50,000 florins. The disorder both of the public revenues and the private resources of the Medici was extreme, the former having even been anticipated and spent by his own and his agents’ extravagance: the portions of young women, already mentioned as forming a public stock based on national faith and moral integrity, were the first and greatest sufferers; this branch of the public debt which previously paid three per cent. per annum was at once reduced by the authority of the commission to half that interest; and the instantaneous fall of public credit reduced the luoghi di monte, or shares of 100 florins of public stock, from twenty-seven to eleven and a half! The young women who married were allowed a sufficient sum from their portions to pay the contract duty, which of course immediately returned to the treasury; the remainder was reserved, and a payment of seven per cent. promised at the end of twenty years!

One consequence of this was a sudden check to marriage; and when the portions were invested in public securities, dowers of 1500, 1800, and even 2000 florins were given by parties of equal rank to make up the deficiency between real and nominal portions, where 1100 had previously served.[388] There were consequently few marriages except those accomplished by force of ready money, and even for these Lorenzo’s permission became necessary!

“Now,” says Giovanni Cambi,n with all the indignation that might be expected from the son of the persecuted Neri, “now let all reflect on what it is to set up tyrants in the city and create balias, and assemble parliaments.” The depreciated currencies of Siena, Lucca, and Bologna affected that of Florence, so that to keep the silver coin in the country it was in like manner depreciated; this measure was considered fair and necessary at the moment by many; but for the people’s quiet, who first and most sensibly feel such evils and who now justly began to murmur, it was announced as a measure for enabling government to pay those marriage portions which had been stopped the previous year. The public for a season appear to have acquiesced in this, not immediately perceiving that they were paying Lorenzo de’ Medici’s debts; but when this new money, called the quattrino bianco was issued at one-fifth more than its real value and not taken by the treasury for more than its actual worth, the citizens saw plainly that they were defrauded and that every species of taxation was virtually augmented by it to that amount, whereupon a deep murmur of indignation pervaded the community. Their anger was vain; Lorenzo’s private necessities required the sacrifice, and his power enforced it!

When Innocent VIII made Lorenzo’s son, Giovanni de’ Medici, a cardinal ere the boy had completed the age of fourteen, being rather ashamed of his work he accompanied this honour by a stipulation that the hat was not to be worn for three years. That time had now elapsed; Innocent sent the long-desired insignia, and thus prepared the way for a pontificate which encouraged Italian genius and established Medicean grandeur. The ceremony of assuming this hat was performed with great pomp on the 10th of March, 1492, and on the 9th of the following April Lorenzo breathed his last at Careggi in the forty-fourth year of his age.

On his death-bed Lorenzo is said to have sent for Girolamo Savonarola (whom he had always unsuccessfully courted), to confess and grant him absolution. The monk first demanded whether he placed entire faith in the mercy of God, and was answered in the affirmative. He next asked if Lorenzo were ready to surrender all the wealth which he had wrongfully acquired. And this, after some hesitation, was also answered in the affirmative. The third question was if he would re-establish popular government and restore public liberty; but to this he would give no answer, or according to others gave a decided negative; upon which the uncompromising churchman quitted him without bestowing absolution. The authenticity of this anecdote has been questioned, but it is in keeping with the character of both men.p

VON REUMONT’S ESTIMATE OF LORENZO

Lorenzo de’ Medici was called from this world at the age of forty-three years—a short life in which to have accomplished so much, to have achieved fame so widespread and enduring. In the character of this remarkable man, the foremost representative of a remarkable period, we find the irresistible onward impulse of creative power united to a deep knowledge of the stages that succeed each other in the development of the new; we find the highest degree of receptivity combined with a student’s seriousness and capacity for taking pains; we see a keen and joyous appreciation of art go hand in hand with the practical sense necessary to the proper conduct of[389] life; we find him to possess, in a word, all the qualities that go to make the statesman, the poet, the citizen, and the prince.

He knew no fatigue under the multiplicity of public affairs that fell to him as head of a peculiarly constituted state; with sure and rapid view he could take cognisance of the whole mass of business while giving his attention to the smallest details. In his later years he became wary and discreet, never acting save as the result of deep reflection, holding steadfastly to the goal he had set himself, conscious, but not unduly, of the dignity of his position and that of the state he represented. In his home and family life he was gay and companionable. As a husband he was not above reproach, it is true; but he was tenderly attached to the wife he had not chosen, devoted to the excellent mother with whom he had many qualities in common, and to his children he was always a generous provider, a wise counsellor and guide. He had the faculty of attracting to himself people of the widest diversity of character, and was capable of forming warm and lasting friendships; amid all the cares of state he was never too busy to render assistance to a friend, and was as ready to exert himself in behalf of the low as of the high.

It is not to be denied, however, that he possessed a share of the weaknesses and failings of his times, which were chiefly apparent in his political life, superior as it was in consistency and honesty of purpose to that of most foreign or Italian statesmen of his day. His interior policy, in particular, has received sharp blame, as much for its refashioning of the constitution to permit an increase in personal power as for the corrupt methods employed to gain undisputed control over the state funds. As regards the latter charge it is difficult to see how in later years—had longer life been granted to Lorenzo—a catastrophe could have been avoided, unless a protracted peace had allowed the maintenance of a perfect balance in the state expenditures. In respect to the first shortcoming many contemporaries expressed the opinion that Lorenzo’s fixed and secret aim was to create for himself a principality, to attain which end he was merely awaiting a favourable opportunity—the appointment to the office of gonfalonier, for example, when he should have reached the proper age.

When all has been weighed and judged, undoubtedly the worst evil in the rule of Lorenzo the Magnificent is just this lack of agreement between form and fact, this diversion of the highest authority from its proper centre. Personality had become the most powerful factor in all departments of the administration—the political, the financial, the judicial. Nevertheless if Florence was free from the excesses that disgraced every other Italian state, if Lorenzo’s rule was mild and blameless compared to that of Cosmo, not only the continuance of peace, the assured position of the country, and the habit on the part of the people of submitting to such a rule were to be thanked for it, but the views and ability of the man who stood at the head. Lorenzo de’ Medici was determined to be obeyed, but he was no tyrant: on the one hand too keen-sighted a reader of men, and too well-versed in the traditions of his people; on the other he was of a nature too magnanimous and richly endowed, too open, too necessitous of friendship to fall into an extreme of despotism. Above all he was a citizen of Florence, and if left to himself, would have allowed nothing in his outer circumstances to distinguish him from the rest of his fellow-citizens; but after the Pazzi conspiracy it was deemed necessary that he should be accompanied everywhere by a guard, formed at first of four trusted friends, later of twelve paid members of the nobility.

As regards his arbitrary administration of the state finances opinions varied even in his own time. Had he not diverted to his own purposes a portion of the public funds, argued some, he would have been ruined, and his ruin would have entailed that of countless others. All that he took from first to last, as well to preserve his credit as to carry on an extravagant mode of life, was as nothing compared to the losses an incompetent ruler would have brought upon the state; one ill-considered or untimely public regulation alone would have cost the treasury dearer than Lorenzo’s entire rule. The final aim of all the Medici, so ran the general opinion, was their own profit or advancement, but they remained Florentine citizens to the end, and in most cases their interests and those of their city were identical. To the kindly disposed who rendered this judgment after Lorenzo’s death, the answer was indeed given that the aim of the Medici had been none the less sole dominion, because it was given the form of democracy by the destruction of the patrician influence, and the raising to favour of members of the lower classes; that a subtle, crafty tyranny, like that of Cosmo de’ Medici, or one tempered by generosity and benevolence, like Lorenzo’s, was the more dangerous for the people inasmuch as it paved the way for a severer form.

In the ninth chapter of his History of Florence Guicciardiniq gives a masterly summing up of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s influence over the city that gave him birth. “Florence,” he says, “did not become free under Lorenzo de’ Medici, but a better master no city could have had. Incalculable good resulted to it as the outpouring of his own benevolent nature, while the evils that are inseparable from tyranny in any form were limited in their workings—rendered almost harmless, in fact, when his will came into play. There were doubtless many who rejoiced at his death; but all who took any part in the administration regretted it deeply, even those who thought they had grounds of complaint against him, for none could tell what a change of rulers might bring about.”c

We must now interrupt the story of political development, to make a casual survey of the culture of the time of the Medici and the succeeding generation. Scholarship had progressed pretty steadily since the days of Petrarch. “Even the early part of the fifteenth century,” says Roscoe,j “produced scholars as much superior to Petrarch and his coadjutors, as they were to the monkish compilers and scholastic disputants who immediately preceded them; and the labours of Leonardo Aretino, Gianozzo Manetti, Guarino Veronese, and Poggio Bracciolini, prepared the way for the still more correct and classical productions of Politiano, Sannazaro, Pontano, and Augurelli.”

Now there came a fresh impulse through the arrival of numerous Greek scholars from the East, and their example led to a more philosophical study of classical languages. The establishment of public libraries in Italy began now to be a prominent feature of the culture development. Cosmo de’[392] Medici was particularly active in this direction; his son Piero steadily pursued the same object; and Lorenzo brought the work to a culmination in the final development of the Laurentian library. The interest in the classics was probably influential in retarding the development of Italian literature. Nevertheless, the influence of Lorenzo de’ Medici was directed also towards the field of creative literature, and he himself was prominent in the restoration of Italian poetry.a He attempted to restore the poetry of his country, to the state in which Petrarch had left it; but this man, so superior by the greatness of his character, and by the universality of his genius, did not possess the talent of versification in the same degree as Petrarch. In his love verses, his sonnets, and canzoni, we find less sweetness and harmony. Their poetical colouring is less striking; and it is remarked that they display a ruder expression, more nearly allied to the infancy of the language. On the other hand, his ideas are more natural, and are often accompanied by a great charm of imagination.

The most talented literary protégé of Lorenzo was the famous scholar, Angelo Politiano. Politiano was born on the 24th of July, 1454, at Monte Pulciano (Mons Politianus), a castle, of which he adopted the name, instead of that of Ambrogini, borne by his father. He applied himself with ardour to those scholastic studies which engaged the general mind in the fifteenth century. Some Latin and Greek epigrams, which he wrote between the age of thirteen and seventeen, surprised his teachers and the companions of his studies. But the work which introduced him to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and which had the greatest influence on his age, was a poem on a tournament, in which Julian de’ Medici was the victor, in 1468. From that time, Lorenzo received Politiano into his palace; made him the constant companion of his labours and his studies; provided for all his necessities, and soon afterwards confided to him the education of his children. Politiano, after this invitation, attached himself to the more serious studies of the Platonic philosophy, of antiquity, and of law; but his poem in honour of the tournament of Julian de’ Medici remains a monument of the distinguished taste of the fifteenth century. This celebrated fragment commences like a large work, but unfortunately was never finished.c

We need not now mention the other minor poets of the age. Suffice it that, all in all, the age of the Medici cannot be called a time of really great literary development. It produced no Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio. But it witnessed a tremendous advance in general culture, due in part to the study of the classics, and it prepared the way for Ariosto and Tasso.

FIFTEENTH CENTURY ART

The real glory of the time was its achievement in the field of the graphic arts. In this field also the epoch was transitional; but the transition carries us, in the latter part of the epoch, to heights never previously attained. At the beginning of the fifteenth century such work as that of Giotto represents the highest standard of accomplishment; before the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leonardo da Vinci had produced his greatest masterpiece. In other words, the fundamental problems of the pictorial art which the fourteenth century had failed to solve had yielded to the researches of this later generation. The laws of perspective had been perfected by Brunelleschi and Masaccio; anatomy had been studied as never previously by the Florentines Ghiberti and Donatello; and a large number of earnest investigators, turning to nature on the one hand for their model, while developing[393] a pictorial sense by observation combined with reflection, had prepared the way for the final realisation of the value of light and shadow and of the proper distribution of the parts of a composition which reached approximate perfection at the hands of Leonardo.

A brief but comprehensive estimate of the art development of the first half of the fifteenth century has been left us by Vasari, himself an artist contemporary with Michelangelo. Viewing the work of his predecessors from the standpoint of the final culmination of the sixteenth century,—the time of Michelangelo,—Vasari combines the judgment of a tolerably keen critic with the sympathies of a fellow-student. His estimate thus has double value.a

Vasari’s Estimate of Fifteenth Century Art

In this period, he says, the arts will be seen to have infinitely improved at all points; the compositions comprise more figures; the accessories and ornaments are richer, and more abundant; the drawing is more correct, and approaches more closely to the truth of nature; and, even where no great facility or practice is displayed, the works yet evince much thought and care; the manner is more free and graceful; the colouring more brilliant and pleasing, insomuch that little is now required to the attainment of perfection in the faithful imitation of nature. By the study and diligence of the great Filippo Brunelleschi, architecture first recovered the measures and proportions of the antique, in the round columns as well as in the square pilasters, and the rusticated and plain angles. Care was taken that all should proceed according to rule; that a fixed arrangement should be adhered to, and that the various portions of the work should receive each its due measure and place. Drawing acquired force and correctness, a better grace was imparted to the buildings erected, and the excellence of the art was made manifest: the beauty and variety of design required for capitals and cornices were restored; and, while we perceive the ground plans of churches and other edifices to have been admirably laid at this period, we also remark that the fabrics themselves are finely proportioned, magnificently arranged, and richly adorned, as may be seen in that astonishing erection, the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore, in Florence, and in the beauty and grace of its lantern; in the graceful, rich, and variously ornamented church of Santo Spirito; and[394] in the no less beautiful edifice of San Lorenzo; or again, in the fanciful invention of the octangular church of the Angioli; in the light and graceful church and convent belonging to the abbey of Florence; and in the magnificent and lordly commencement of the Pitti Palace, to say nothing of the vast and commodious edifice constructed by Francesco di Giorgio, in the church and palace of the Duomo, at Urbino; of the strong and rich castle of Naples; or of the impregnable fortress of Milan, and many other remarkable erections of that time.

What is here said of architecture, may with equal propriety be affirmed of painting and sculpture, in both of which are still to be seen many extraordinary works executed by the masters of the period, as that of Masaccio in the church of the Carmine, for example, where the artist has depicted a naked figure shivering with the cold, besides many spirited and life-like forms, in other pictures. Meantime the art of sculpture made so decided an improvement as to leave but little remaining to be accomplished. The method adopted by the masters of the period was so efficient, their treatment so natural and graceful, their drawing so accurate, their proportions so correct that their statues began to assume the appearance of living men, and were no longer lifeless images of stone, as were those of the earlier day. Of this there will be found proof in the works of the Sienese, Jacopo della Quercia, which, as compared with earlier works, possess more life and grace, with more correct design, and more careful finish; those of Filippo Brunelleschi exhibit a finer development and play of the muscles, with more accurate proportions, and a more judicious treatment—remarks which are alike applicable to the works produced by the disciples of these masters. Still more was performed by Lorenzo Ghiberti, in his work of the gates of San Giovanni, fertility of invention, judicious arrangement, correct design, and admirable treatment, being all alike conspicuous in these wonderful productions, the figures of which seem to move and possess a living soul. Donato [Donatello] also lived at the same period. His productions are equal to good works of antiquity. He is the type and representative of all the other masters of the period; since he united with himself the qualities which were divided among the rest, and which must be sought among many, imparting to his figures a life, movement, and reality which enables them to bear comparison with those of later times—nay even, as has been said, with the ancients themselves.

Similar progress was made at the same time in painting which the excellent and admirable Masaccio delivered entirely from the manner of Giotto, as regards the heads, the carnations, the draperies, the buildings, and colourings; he also restored the practice of foreshortening, together with more natural attitudes, and a much more effectual expression of feeling in the gestures and the movements of the body, art seeking to approach the truth of nature by more correct design, and to exhibit so close a resemblance to the countenance of the living man that each figure might at once be recognised as the person for whom it was intended. Thus the masters constantly endeavoured to reproduce what they beheld in nature, and no more; their works became, consequently, more carefully considered and better understood. This gave them courage to impose rules of perspective, and to carry the foreshortenings precisely to the point which gives an exact imitation of the relief apparent in nature and the real form. Minute attention to the effects of light and shade, and to various difficulties of the art, succeeded, and efforts were made to produce a better order of composition. Landscapes also were attempted. Tracts of country, trees, shrubs, flowers, the clouds,[395] the air, and other natural objects were depicted with some resemblance to the realities represented, insomuch that we may boldly affirm that these arts had not only become ennobled, but had attained that flower of youth from which the fruit afterwards to follow might reasonably be looked for, and hope entertained that they would shortly reach the perfection of their existence.d

We must not pause even to mention the names of all the distinguished company of artists, a good proportion of them Florentines, who flourished in the time of Masaccio and in the immediate succeeding generation, although this list includes such names as Ghirlandajo, Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, Perugino, and Botticelli; the last named in particular is still the delight of all who love the spirituelle in art; the others are known and esteemed by all students of painting, and by the countless hosts of travellers who flock yearly to the churches and galleries of Italy to see their works. We must pause for a moment, however, to consider the work of the great master, whose accomplishment was in some sense to eclipse their efforts, the versatile genius, Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci

Without question Leonardo was the most colossal intellect of the century;[20] indeed, he has been called by Hamertone the most comprehensive genius of any age. Scarcely any other intellectual hero ever so completely won the admiration of his contemporaries and the unqualified approval of posterity. Vasari’s estimate of Leonardo voices the contemporary judgment regarding him.a

The richest gifts, he says, are occasionally seen to be showered, as by celestial influence, on certain human beings—nay, they sometimes supernaturally and marvellously congregate in one sole person; beauty, grace, and talent being united in such a manner that to whatever the man thus favoured may turn himself, his every action is so divine as to leave all other men far behind him, and manifestly to prove that he has been specially endowed by the hand of God himself, and has not obtained his pre-eminence by human teaching, or the power of man. This was seen and acknowledged by all men in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, in whom, to say nothing of his beauty of person, which yet was such that it has never been sufficiently extolled, there was a grace beyond expression which was rendered manifest without thought or effort in every act and deed; and who had besides so rare a gift of talent and ability that to whatever subject he turned his[396] attention, however difficult, he presently made himself absolute master of it. Extraordinary power was in his case conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring; his gifts were such that the celebrity of his name extended most widely, and he was held in the highest estimation, not in his own time only, but also, and even to a greater extent, after his death—nay, this he has continued, and will continue in all succeeding ages.d

Our present concern is chiefly with Leonardo as an artist, but it is impossible not to consider the other phases of his multifarious genius. Hallam has briefly summarised his position as a writer and scientific investigator.a

As Leonardo was born in 1452, he says, we may presume his mind to have been in full expansion before 1490. His Treatise on Painting is known as a very early disquisition of the rules of the art. But his greatest literary distinction is derived from those short fragments of his unpublished writings that appeared not many years since; and which, according, at least, to our common estimate of the age in which he lived, are more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind, than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, and Kepler, and Mæstlin, and Maurolycus, and Castelli, and other names illustrious, the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are anticipated by Da Vinci, within the compass of a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge.

In an age of so much dogmatism, he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature. If any doubt could be harboured, not as to the right of Leonardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which, probably, no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be on a hypothesis, not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record. The extraordinary works of ecclesiastical architecture in the Middle Ages, especially in the fifteenth century, as well as those of Toscanelli and Fioravanti, which we have mentioned, lend some countenance to this opinion; and it is said to be confirmed by the notes of Fra Mauro, a lay brother of a convent near Venice, on a planisphere constructed by him, and still extant. Leonardo himself speaks of the earth’s annual motion, in a treatise that appears to have been written about 1510, as the opinion of many philosophers in his age.f

Among the almost numberless scraps of manuscript left us by Leonardo is a letter which he addressed to Ludovico il Moro, duke of Milan, in 1483. The original of this letter exists in the author’s own orthography, and it gives his own estimate of his accomplishments at the age of thirty-one. It will be borne in mind, of course, that this letter is addressed to a prince who would be likely to value the services of a practical engineer more than those of a mere painter. This, no doubt, explains in part the subordinate place given to Leonardo’s capacity as sculptor and painter, which, as will be seen, is only mentioned after ten other specifications. Nevertheless, it was while in Milan that Leonardo executed his greatest work, the famous Last Supper. The letter is as follows:a

Having seen and sufficiently considered the works of all those who repute themselves to be masters and inventors of instruments for war, and found that the form and operation of these works are in no way different from those in common use, I permit myself, without[397] seeking to detract from the merit of any other, to make known to your excellency the secrets I have discovered, at the same time offering with fitting opportunity, and at your good pleasure, to perform all those things which, for the present, I will but briefly note below.

(1) I have a method of constructing very light and portable bridges, to be used in the pursuit of, or retreat from, the enemy, with others of a stronger sort, proof against fire or force, and easy to fix or remove. I have also means for burning and destroying those of the enemy.

(2) For the service of sieges, I am prepared to remove the water from the ditches, and to make an infinite variety of fascines, scaling-ladders, etc., with engines of other kinds proper to the purposes of a siege.

(3) If the height of the defences or the strength of the position should be such that the place cannot be effectually bombarded, I have other means, whereby any fortress may be destroyed, provided it be not founded on stone.

(4) I have also most convenient and portable bombs, proper for throwing showers of small missiles, and with the smoke thereof causing great terror to the enemy, to his imminent loss and confusion.

(5) By means of excavations made without noise, and forming tortuous and narrow ways, I have means of reaching any given ... (point?), even though it be necessary to pass beneath ditches or under a river.

(6) I can also construct covered wagons, secure and indestructible, which, entering among the enemy, will break the strongest bodies of men; and behind these the infantry can follow in safety and without impediment.

(7) I can, if needful, also make bombs, mortars, and field-pieces of beautiful and useful shape, entirely different from those in common use.

(8) Where the use of bombs is not practicable, I can make crossbows, mangonels, ballistæ, and other machines of extraordinary efficiency and quite out of the common way. In fine, as the circumstances of the case shall demand, I can prepare engines of offence for all purposes.

(9) In case of the conflict having to be maintained at sea, I have methods for making numerous instruments, offensive and defensive, with vessels that shall resist the force of the most powerful bombs. I can also make powders or vapours for the offence of the enemy.

(10) In time of peace, I believe that I could equal any other, as regards works in architecture. I can prepare designs for buildings, whether public or private, and also conduct water from one place to another.

Furthermore, I can execute works in sculpture, marble, bronze, or terra-cotta. In painting also I can do what may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

I can likewise undertake the execution of the bronze horse, which is a monument that will be to the perpetual glory and immortal honour of my lord your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above named things shall seem to any man to be impossible and impracticable, I am perfectly ready to make trial of them in your excellency’s park, or in whatever other place you shall be pleased to command, commending myself to you with all possible humility.g

Leonardo liked better to theorise, observe, and commit his inferences and perceptions to his memorandum-book, than to weary himself with those slavish details which are essential to the production of every immortal work. From these causes, aided by his extreme fastidiousness of taste and love for minute finish, his works were few, and scarcely one of them was ever completed. But this very universality of capacity, with his eagerly inquiring spirit, qualified him to supply the defects under which art yet laboured: no one has as good a claim as he, to be considered the parent of the highest school in his art; and no artist, before or since, has ever united in himself so many of the most illustrious qualities of genius.

His most characteristic excellence, in his own profession, is his tone of feeling and imagination, which is mild, graceful, and poetically devotional; too ethereal for effectively depicting scenes from active life, but admirably harmonised to religious subjects. To these merits in the poetical elements of his art, he added others not less valuable in the practical; for not only was he the first who exhibited minutely scientific anatomical knowledge, but he set a perfect example of relief and harmony in colouring, for which,[398] especially in that rich dark style which is common with him, his pictures and those of his school are at this day a banquet to the eye.h

We possess pictures enough of this great master, says Grimm,i to prevent us from considering the accounts of the magic of his art as empty exaggeration. We are ever inclined to be incredulous. Leonardo’s paintings, however, possess such a charm, that the truest description falls far short of them. We should scarcely consider them possible, if we did not see them with our eyes. He possesses the secret of letting us almost read the beating of the heart in the countenance of those whom he represents. He seems to see nature in constant holiday brightness, and never otherwise. Our feelings become gradually so deadened, that perceiving the same loss among our friends, we at length believe, that the fresh spring-like appearance of nature and life, which opened before us so long as we were children, was only the delusion of happiness, and that the dimmer light in which they appear to us subsequently, affords the more true view. But let us step before Leonardo’s finest works, and see if the dreams of ideal existence do not appear natural and significant! As splinters of metal are drawn to the magnet as it moves through iron filings, and adhere to it in a thousand fine points, while the grains of sand fall powerless away, so there are men, who, passing through the lifeless throng of constant intercourse, carry away with them, involuntarily, only the traces of the genuine metal in it, in this following their nature alone, which absorbs it on every side. They are rare privileged men to whom this is awarded. Leonardo belonged to these favoured ones of fate.i

THE END OF THE MEDIÆVAL EPOCH

While Leonardo was in his prime the period usually marked as terminating the Middle Ages was passed. Recent students are much less disposed than were students of the earlier generation to emphasise the division of past time into epochs; and of course it cannot be too often emphasised that the year 1492 marked no decisive turning-point in the estimate of contemporary minds. Nevertheless, the close of the fifteenth century has by common consent been regarded as marking the culmination of that intellectual development in Italy which has long been spoken of as the Renaissance. Scholars of to-day are fond of pointing out that the real re-birth of culture began away back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and we have seen how far[399] this new development had progressed in the time of Dante and Petrarch. Nevertheless, despite the illogicality of such divisions, classifications of time, like the minor classifications of the zoölogist, have utility as aids to memorising and to vivid presentation of the facts of history, that make them all but indispensable. And doubtless the popular mind at least will long cling to the term “Renaissance” and apply it more particularly to that great final development of the graphic arts which reached its culmination late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century and which had such exponents as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and their minor confrères.

It is quite impossible to attempt anything like an elaborate discussion of the culture of this period within present spatial limits. We can at best glance at the work of the great central figure of the epoch, Michelangelo, and, letting him typify the period, content ourselves with scarcely more than mentioning the names of his great contemporaries.a

THE AGE OF MICHELANGELO

But he who bears the palm from all [says Vasari with an enthusiasm which all posterity has echoed], whether of the living or the dead; he who transcends and eclipses every other, is the divine Michelangelo Buonarotti, who takes the first place, not in one of these arts only, but in all three. This master surpasses and excels not only all those artists who have well-nigh surpassed nature herself, but even all the most famous masters of antiquity, who did, beyond all doubt, vanquish her most gloriously; he alone has triumphed over the later as over the earlier, and even over Nature herself, which one could scarcely imagine to be capable of exhibiting anything, however extraordinary, however difficult, that he would not, by the force of his most divine genius, and by the power of his art, design, judgment, diligence, and grace, very far surpass and excel; nor does this remark apply to painting and the use of colours only, wherein are, nevertheless, compromised all corporeal forms, all bodies, direct or curved, palpable or impalpable, visible or invisible, but to the exceeding roundness and relief of his statues also. Fostered by the power of his art, and cultivated by his labours, the beautiful and fruitful plant has already put forth many and most noble branches, which have not only filled the world with the most delicious fruits, in unwonted profusion, but have also brought three noble arts to so admirable a degree of perfection, that we may safely affirm the statues of this master to be, in all their parts, more beautiful than the antique. If the heads, hands, arms, or feet of the[400] one be placed in comparison with those of the other, there will be found in those of the modern a more exact rectitude of principle, a grace more entirely graceful, a much more absolute perfection, in short, there is also in the manner, a certain facility in the conquering of difficulties, than which it is impossible even to imagine anything better; and what is here said applies equally to his paintings, for if it were possible to place these face to face with those of the most famous Greeks and Romans, thus brought into comparison, they would still further increase in value, and be esteemed to surpass those of the ancients in as great a degree as his sculptures excel all the antique.d

Painting, sculpture, and architecture, with fortification, theology, and poetry, employed by turns the universal genius of the great Florentine. Born of a distinguished family, who reluctantly gave way to his inclination, he was first instructed in painting: and for his study of this art as well as of sculpture, the antiques in Florence and Rome, and the anatomy of the human body, were actively laid under contribution. Indeed, his profound anatomical knowledge gave at once the most prominent feature to his style of design, and the most dangerous of the examples which he furnished to his indiscriminating imitators; and among his grandest figures some are exact reproductions of the Torso of the Belvedere. The influence which this extraordinary man exercised over every department of art, was as great in painting as in any of his other pursuits; but his predilection for sculpture, assisted perhaps by other motives, diverted him from the use of the pencil, and his works were consequently few.

He despised oil-painting, and it is doubtful whether there exists a single genuine picture of his executed in that way. Florence contains a doubtful piece in oils representing the Fates, and a composition of a Holy Family in distemper, which is acknowledged to be that which he produced for Angelo Doni. But several masterpieces, still extant, are believed to have been painted after his designs. Rome contains two of these,—Daniele da Volterra’s Deposition from the Cross, in the church of the Trinità de’ Monti, and an Annunciation by Marco Venusti, in the sacristy of the Lateran. The finest, however, of all the works in which his assistance has been traced, is the oil-painting of the Raising of Lazarus, executed by the Venetian Fra Sebastiano del Piombo, who, after acquiring great excellence in his native school, went to Rome and studied design under Buonarroti. He was prompted to attempt the Lazarus by his master, who desired to eclipse, by a union of Florentine drawing with Venetian colour, the great picture of the Transfiguration, on which Raphael was then engaged. Michelangelo unquestionably designed the principal group in Sebastiano’s piece; and the strength of expression, the grandeur of composition and style, and the anatomical knowledge, favour the belief that he actually painted a great part of it. The figure of Lazarus, seated on his coffin, assisting in disengaging himself from the grave-clothes, and gazing up at the Saviour in the first return of consciousness, amazed, grateful, and adoring, is in every respect inspired by the patriarchal sublimity and powerful expression which belong to the master.

But Buonarroti’s genius shone forth unclouded in his immense series of paintings in fresco, which still adorn Rome in the Sistine chapel of the Vatican. Their history is as characteristic as the works themselves. Before leaving Florence he had begun, and he afterwards at intervals finished, a work which, now lost, is described as having more than any other evinced his anatomical skill and power of expression. This was the famous cartoon[401] of Pisa, figuring the Florentine soldiers bathing in the Arno and called to arms on a sudden attack by the Pisans. In 1504 Julius II invited him to Rome and employed him as a sculptor; but some years later the same pontiff ordered him to paint in fresco the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Dissatisfied with his assistants he executed the whole of the immense ceiling with his own hands, in the space of twenty months, finishing it in 1512 or 1513. The universal admiration excited by this stupendous work did not tempt the artist to prosecute painting further; and his next great undertaking, the Last Judgment, which fills the end of the same chapel, was not commenced till the pontificate of Paul III, and was completed, after eight years’ labour, in 1541. His last frescoes, the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul, both in the Pauline chapel of the Vatican, were the offspring of old age, and bodily, though not mental, exhaustion.

The frescoes of the Sistine chapel represent, from the pages of the Bible, the outlines of the religious history of man. The spirit which animates them is the stern awfulness of the Hebrew prophets; the milder graces of the new covenant glimmer faintly and unfrequently through; the beauty and repose of classicism are all but utterly banished. The master’s idea of godhead is that of superhuman strength in action, and the divinity which he thus conceives he imparts to all his figures of the human race. The work, as a whole, is one which no other mind must venture to imitate; but of those very qualities which make it dangerous as a model in art, none could be removed without injuring its severe sublimity.

The ceiling is divided into numerous compartments, each of which contains a scene selected from the Old Testament:—the Creator forming the elements, the earth, the first man;—the creation of Eve, and the fall of man, in which feminine grace for a moment visits the fancy of the artist;—the expulsion from Eden;—the deluge, and the subsequent history of Noah;—the brazen serpent, the triumphs of David and of Judith, and the symbolical history of Jonah. The absorbed greatness which animates the principal figures of these groups, is repeated in the ornamental divisions of the ceiling, where are the Sibyls, and those unparalleled figures of the prophets, which are the highest proofs of the painter’s religious grandeur.

The Last Judgment, a colossal composition, sixty feet in height by thirty in breadth, and embracing an almost countless number of figures, is a more ambitious and also a more celebrated work, but is far from being so completely successful. No artist but Michelangelo could have made it what it is; but it might have been made much greater by him,—the painter of the[402] Eve, the Delphic Sibyl, the Lazarus, and the Prophets. Its faults are many;—an entire absence of beauty and of repose;—vagueness and monotony of character, which is increased by the general nudity of the figures;—ostentatious display of academic attitudes and anatomy;—and, in some prominent personages, especially the Judge, an absolute meanness and grossness of conception. The merits of this wonderful monument of genius are less easily enumerated. Its heaven is not the heaven either of art or of religion; but its hell is more terribly sublime than anything which imagination ever framed. Vast as the piece is, its composition is simple and admirable, and nothing ever approached to its perfect unity of sentiment. Every thought and emotion are swallowed up in one idea,—the presence of the righteous Judge: with the exception of a single unobtrusive group composed by a reunited wife and husband, every one in the crowd of the awakened dead stands solitary, waiting for his doom.

Michelangelo as Sculptor

The character of this great man’s sculpture was as vast, as strong, as eagerly bent on the exhibition of science and the representation of violent action, as were his wonderful paintings; but the plastic art was still less fitted than the pictorial, for being guided by these principles uncontrolled. Though he adored the antiques for their anatomy, he was blind to their beauty and repose: his own ideal was a ruder one, which neither his skill nor that of any other was qualified fully to express; and yet his vigour and feeling do in a few instances overcome all material obstacles, leading him to the very verge of sublimity, and not far from the true path of art.

His purest works are those of his youth, executed while his imagination was still filled by the Grecian statues, which, with Ghirlandajo’s other pupils, he had studied in the gardens of the Medici. There is much antique calmness in the fighting groups on the bas-relief which, preserved by the Buonarroti family in Florence, is the earliest of his known specimens; and his Bacchus with the young Faun in the Uffizi, an effort of his twenty-fourth year, possessing indifferent and somewhat inaccurate forms, approaches, in its softly waving lines and gentleness of expression, nearer to the Greek than any other work of its author. The Pieta of St. Peter’s is characterised, especially in the figure of the mother, by much of the same temper, which is not lost even in the colossal David of the Florentine Piazza del Granduca.

His genius had free scope in the three greatest of his works: the Monument of Pope Julius II, and the Tombs of Julian and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The first of these, planned by the old priest himself with his characteristic boldness and magnificence, but curtailed in its execution by the parsimony of his heirs, furnished occupation to the artist, at intervals, during many years. Statues merely blocked out, which were intended to belong to it, are now in the gardens of the Pitti palace; two slaves are in the Louvre; the remainder of the monument, being the only part that was finished by the master, consists of the celebrated sitting figure of Moses, in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The lawgiver of the Hebrews, a massy figure in barbaric costume, with tangled goat-like hair and beard, and horns like Ammon or Bacchus, rests one arm on the tables of the law, looking forward with an air of silent and gloomy menace. The strength of the work is unquestionable; its value as being, with the Victory, the most characteristic of its author’s works, is equally clear; its sublimity admits of greater doubt. The tombs of the two Medici, finished earlier than the Moses, are[403] works of a far higher and purer strain; being really the finest that Michelangelo ever produced. Upon each of the two sarcophagi rests a sitting figure in armour, the likeness of the dead man who reposes within. On each side of Lorenzo is a reclining statue, the one representing Twilight, the other Dawn; and Julian’s tomb is in like manner flanked by the recumbent figures of Night and Day. The statue of Lorenzo is a fine and simple portrait: that of Julian has scarcely ever been surpassed for its air of dignified and thoughtful repose. The Dawn is a majestic female; the Twilight is a grand male figure, looking down. The Day is unfinished, but fine—a bold male form; the Night is a drooping, slumbering, sad-looking female.

RAPHAEL

The one great rival of Michelangelo, and the one painter whom posterity has been disposed to rank even above him in genius is Raphael. This wonderful man was the son of an obscure painter in Urbino. He studied under Perugino, and is believed to have profited largely also through study of the works of Leonardo and of Michelangelo, but particularly from Narcaccio.a To Michelangelo’s cartoons as well as to his Sistine ceiling, Raphael certainly owed deep obligations. In his twenty-sixth year, invited by his kinsman Bramante, he migrated to Rome, where he laboured with unwearied industry from that time till his death, which took place when he[404] was thirty-seven years old, and about to be raised by Leo X to the rank of a cardinal.

Raphael found the mechanism of art nearly complete, and its application no longer exclusively ecclesiastical. These two circumstances gave full play to that union of powers, which his mind possessed to an unequalled extent. Far less correct than Michelangelo in drawing and anatomy, less profound in his study of the antique, and less capable of dealing with those loftiest themes that may be said to hover on the very brink of impracticability, he yet possessed knowledge of a high order, an elevated sense of sublimity and energy within his own sphere, an extensive and felicitous invention, and a feeling of beauty and grace which was the very purest and most divine that art has ever boasted. The idealism of his genius was united to a perception of character and expression, and a dramatic power of representing human action, which he used with the happiest effect when his subject called for their exercise. His admirers are influenced more by their own prepossessions than by his peculiar merits, when they give the preference to his Madonnas, saints, angels, or apostles, to his portraits, or to his historical and epic compositions.

The general progress of Raphael’s manner may be traced with sufficient certainty. He appears at first as little more than the ablest pupil of Pietro; inspired by all the warmth and tenderness of the Perugian school, but embarrassed by all his master’s timidity and littleness. When he had become acquainted with the bolder spirit and the better mechanism of the Florentines, we see how his genius gradually extricated itself, and how, though still guided by the devotional temper of his youthful models, he attained greater freedom both in handling and invention. In his earliest works at Rome he struggles to emerge into a sphere wider than either of these: his idealism is not lost, but it is strengthened by a more intimate acquaintance with life and nature; and both his fancy and his power of observation are rendered gradually more efficient by an improved technical skill, by greater ease and strength of drawing, by greater mastery of colour as well as of light and shade, and by rapid approaches towards that unity of conception and that breadth of design, which ennoble his finest works.

Till we find Raphael in Rome, we must be contented to trace his progress by his altar-pieces, and two or three portraits. Of genuine pictures belonging to this youthful period, and still in Italy, several possess very high merit; and one of these,—the Borghese Entombment,—painted[405] after the artist had nearly emancipated himself from the Umbrian trammels, is equal to the best of his works both in expression and composition.

His great frescoes cover the walls and part of the roofs, in four of the state-rooms belonging to the old Vatican palace. The first chamber, called that of the Segnatura, was finished in 1511; and under the reign of the same pope, Julius II, the next apartment, named, from its main subject, that of the Heliodorus, was partly painted. After the accession of Leo X, the artist completed that chamber, and proceeded to the third, that of the Incendio, which he finished in 1517. For the fourth, the hall of Constantine, he left the designs, which were painted by his surviving pupils. Under Leo he also designed the small frescoes in the arcade called Raphael’s Loggie; and in the same pontificate he produced the celebrated Cartoons.h

With this brief summary, and with no more than a mere mention of the great Venetian painters, Titian and Tintoretti, and that other great contemporary painter Correggio, we must turn from the art of the period to catch the barest glimpse of the two or three literary figures of the time, before we turn back to the sweep of political events. Michelangelo himself was a poet, but we shall not attempt to deal here with this side of the multiform genius of that extraordinary man. Instead we shall turn to the central literary figure of the epoch, Ariosto.a

Ariosto

Lodovico Ariosto was born on the 8th of September, 1474, at Reggio, of which place his father was governor, for the duke of Ferrara. He was intended for the study of jurisprudence, and, like many other distinguished poets, he experienced a long struggle between the will of his father, who was anxious that he should pursue a profession, and his own feelings, which prompted him to the indulgence of his genius. After five years of unprofitable study, his father at length consented to his devoting himself solely to literature.

The Orlando Furioso of Ariosto is a poem universally known. It has been translated into all the modern tongues; and by the sole charm of its adventures, independently of its poetry, has long been the delight of the youth of all countries. It may therefore be taken for granted, that all the world is aware that Ariosto undertook to sing the Paladins and their amours at the court of Charlemagne, during the fabulous wars of this monarch against the Moors. If it were required to assign an historical epoch to the events contained in this poem, we must place them before the year 778, when Orlando was slain at the battle of Roncesvalles, in an expedition which Charlemagne made, before he was emperor, to defend the frontiers of Spain. But it may be conjectured, that the romance writers have confounded the wars of Charles Martel against Abd el Rahman, with those of Charlemagne; and have thus given rise to the traditions of the invasion of France by the Saracens, and of those unheard-of perils, from which the west of Europe was saved by the valour of the Paladins. Every reader knows that Orlando, of all the heroes of Ariosto the most renowned for his valour, became mad, through love for Angelica; and that his madness, which is only an episode in this long poem, has given its name to the whole of the composition, although it is not until the twenty-third canto that Orlando is deprived of his senses.

It does not appear that Ariosto had the intention of writing a strictly epic poem. He had rejected the advice of Bembo, who wished him to compose[406] his poem in Latin, the only language, in the opinion of the cardinal, worthy of a serious subject. Ariosto thought, perhaps, that an Italian poem should necessarily be light and sportive. He scorned the adopted rules of poetry, and proved himself sufficiently powerful to create new ones. His work may, indeed, be said to possess an unity of subject; the great struggle between the Christians and the Moors, which began with the invasion of France, and terminated with her deliverance. This was the subject which he had proposed to himself in his argument. The lives and adventures of his several heroes, contributed to this great action; and were so many subordinate episodes, which may be admitted in epic poetry, and which, in so long a work, cannot be considered as destroying the unity.

The poem of Ariosto is, therefore, only a fragment of the history of the knights of Charlemagne and their amours; and it has neither beginning nor end, further than any particular detached period may be said to possess them. This want of unity essentially injures the interest and the general impression which we ought to derive from the work. But the avidity with which all nations, and all ages, have read Ariosto, even when his story is despoiled of its poetic charms by translation, sufficiently proves that he had the art of giving to its individual parts an interest which it does not possess as a whole.

Machiavelli

From Ariosto we turn to his great contemporary, the illustrious secretary of the Florentine republic, Niccolo Machiavelli, a man of profound thought, and the most eloquent historian and most skilful politician that Italy has produced. But a distinction less enviable has attached his name to the infamous principles which he developed, though probably with good intentions, in his treatise, entitled Il Principe; and his name is, at the present day, allied to everything false and perfidious in politics.

Machiavelli was born at Florence, on the 3rd of May, 1469, of a family which had enjoyed the first offices in the republic. We are not acquainted with the history of his youth; but at the age of thirty he entered into public business as chancellor of the state, and from that time he was constantly employed in public affairs, and particularly in embassies. He was sent four times, by the republic, to the court of France; twice to the imperial court; and twice to that of Rome. Among his embassies to the smaller princes of Italy, the one of the longest duration was to Cæsar Borgia, whom he narrowly observed at the very important period when this illustrious villain was elevating himself by his crimes, and whose diabolical policy he had thus an opportunity of studying at leisure. In the midst of these grave occupations his satiric gaiety did not forsake him; and it was at this period that he composed his comedies, his novel of Belfagor, and some stanzas and sonnets which are not deficient in poetical merit. He had a considerable share in directing the councils of the republic as to arming and forming its militia; and he assumed more pride to himself from this advice, which liberated the state from the yoke of the Condottieri, than from the fame of his literary works. The influence to which he owed his elevation in the Florentine Republic was that of the free party which contested the power of the Medici and at that time held them in exile. When the latter were recalled in 1512 Machiavelli was deprived of all his employs and banished. He then entered into a conspiracy against the usurpers, which was discovered, and he was put to the torture, but without wresting from him, by extreme agonies, any confession which could impeach either himself or those who had confided in[407] his honour. Leo X, on his elevation to the pontificate, restored him to liberty.

Machiavelli has not, in any of his writings, testified his resentment of the cruel treatment he experienced. He seems to have concealed it at the bottom of his heart; but we easily perceive that torture had not increased his love of princes, and that he took a pleasure in painting them as he had seen them, in a work in which he feigned to instruct them. It was, in fact, after having lost his employs that he wrote on history and politics, with that profound knowledge of the human heart which he had acquired in public life, and with the habit of unweaving, in all its intricacies, the political perfidies which then prevailed in Italy. He dedicated his treatise of the Principe, not to Lorenzo the Magnificent, but to Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, the proud usurper of the liberties of Florence, and of the estates of his benefactor, the former duke of Urbino, of the house of Rovere. Lorenzo thought himself profound when he was crafty, and energetic when he was cruel; and Machiavelli, in showing, in his treatise of the Principe, how an able usurper, who is not restrained by any moral principle, may consolidate his power, gave to the duke instructions conformable to his taste. The true object, however, of Machiavelli could not be to secure on his throne a tyrant whom he hated, and against whom he had conspired. Nor is it probable that he only proposed to himself to expose to the people the maxims of tyranny in order to render them odious; for an universal experience had, at that time, made them known throughout all Italy, and that diabolical policy which Machiavelli reduced to a system was, in the sixteenth century, that of all the states.

It was also at this period of his life that Machiavelli wrote his History of Florence, dedicated to Pope Clement VII, and in which he instructed the Italians in the art of uniting the eloquence of history with depth of reflection. He has attached himself, much less than his predecessors in the same line, to the narration of military events. But his work, as a history of popular passions and tumults, is a masterpiece. He was again employed in public affairs by the pope, and was charged with the direction of the fortifications, when death deprived his country of his further services, on the 22nd of June, 1527, three years before the termination of the Florentine Republic.c

FOOTNOTES

The period was at length arrived when Italy—which had restored intellectual light to Europe, reconciled civil order with liberty, recalled youth to the study of laws and of philosophy, created the taste for poetry and the fine arts, revived the science and literature of antiquity, given prosperity to commerce, manufactures, and agriculture—was destined to become the prey of those very barbarians whom she was leading to civilisation. Her independence must necessarily perish with her liberty, which was hitherto the source of her grandeur and power. In a country covered with republics three centuries before, there remained but four at the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici; and in those, although the word “liberty” was still inscribed on their banners, that principle of life had disappeared from their institutions. Florence, already governed for three generations by the family of the Medici, corrupted by their licentiousness, and rendered venal by their wealth, had been taught by them to fear and to obey. Venice with its jealous aristocracy, Siena and Lucca, each governed by a single caste of citizens, if still republics, had no longer popular governments or republican energy. Neither in those four cities, nor in Genoa, which had surrendered its liberty to the Sforzas, nor in Bologna, which yielded to the Bentivoglios, nor in any of the monarchical states, was there to be found throughout Italy that power of a people whose every individual will tends to the public weal, whose efforts are all combined for the public benefit and the common safety. The princes of that country could appeal only to order and the obedience of the subject, not to the enthusiasm of the citizen, for the protection of Italian independence and of their own.

Immense wealth, coveted by the rest of Europe, was, it is true, always accumulating in absolute monarchies, as well as in republics; but if, on the one hand, it furnished the pay of powerful armies, on the other, it augmented the danger of Italy, by exciting the cupidity of its neighbours. The number of national soldiers was very considerable; their profession was that which led the most rapidly to distinction and fortune. Engaged[409] only for the duration of hostilities, and at liberty to retire every month, instead of spending their lives in the indolence of garrisons or abandoning the freedom of their will, they passed rapidly from one service to another, seeking only war, and never becoming enervated by idleness. The horses and armour of the Italian men-at-arms were reckoned superior to those of the transalpine nations, against which they had measured themselves in France during “the war of the public weal.” The Italian captains had made war a science, every branch of which they thoroughly knew. It was never suspected for a moment that the soldier should be wanting in courage; but the general mildness of manners and the progress of civilisation had accustomed the Italians to make war with sentiments of honour and humanity towards the vanquished. Ever ready to give quarter, they did not strike a fallen enemy. Often, after having taken from him his horse and armour, they set him free; at least, they never demanded a ransom so enormous as to ruin him. Horsemen who went to battle clad in steel were rarely killed or wounded, so long as they kept their saddles. Once unhorsed, they surrendered. The battle, therefore, never became murderous. The courage of the Italian soldiers, which had accommodated itself to this milder warfare, suddenly gave way before the new dangers and ferocity of barbarian enemies. They became terror-struck when they perceived that the French caused dismounted horsemen to be put to death by their valets, or made prisoners only to extort from them, under the name of ransom, all they possessed. The Italian cavalry, equal in courage and superior in military science to the French, were for some time unable to make head against an enemy whose ferocity disturbed their imaginations.

While Italy had lost a part of the advantages which, in the preceding century, had constituted her security, the transalpine nations had suddenly acquired a power which destroyed the ancient equilibrium. Up to the close of the fifteenth century, wars were much fewer between nation and nation than between French, Germans, or Spaniards among themselves. Even the war between the English and the French, which desolated France for more than a century, sprang not from enmity between two rival nations, but from the circumstance that the kings of England were French princes, hereditary sovereigns of Normandy, Poitou, and Guienne. Charles VII at last forced the English back beyond sea, and reunited to the monarchy provinces which had been detached from it for centuries. Louis XI vanquished the dukes and peers of France who had disputed his authority; he humbled the house of Burgundy, which had begun to have interests foreign to France. His young successor and son, Charles VIII, on coming of age, found himself the master of a vast kingdom in a state of complete obedience, a brilliant army, and large revenues; but was weak enough to think that there was no glory to be obtained unless in distant and chivalrous expeditions. The different monarchies of Spain, which had long been rivals, were united by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castile, and by the conquest which they jointly made of the Moorish kingdom of Granada. Spain, forming for the first time one great power, began to exercise an influence which she had never till then claimed. The emperor Maximilian, after having united the Low Countries and the county of Burgundy, his wife’s inheritance, to the states of Austria, which he inherited from his father, asserted his right to exercise over the whole of Germany the imperial authority which had escaped from the hands of his predecessors. Lastly, the Swiss, rendered illustrious by their victories over Charles the Bold, had begun, but since his death only, to make a traffic of their lives, and enter[410] the service of foreign nations. At the same time, the empire of the Turks extended along the whole shore of the Adriatic, and menaced at once Venice and the kingdom of Naples. Italy was surrounded on all sides by powers which had suddenly become gigantic, and of which not one had, half a century before, given her uneasiness.

France was the first to carry abroad an activity unemployed at home, and to make Italy feel the change which had taken place in the politics of Europe. Its king, Charles VIII, claimed the inheritance of all the rights of the second house of Anjou on the kingdom of Naples. Those rights, founded on the adoption of Louis I of Anjou by Joanna I, had never been acknowledged by the people or confirmed by possession. For the space of a hundred and ten years Louis I, II, and III, and René, the brother of the last, made frequent but unsuccessful attempts to mount the throne of Naples. The brother and the daughter of René, Charles of Maine and Margaret of Anjou, at last either ceded or sold those rights to Louis XI. His son, Charles VIII, as soon as he was of age, determined on asserting them. Eager for glory, in proportion as his weak frame and still weaker intellect incapacitated him for acquiring it, he, at the age of twenty-four, resolved on treading in the footsteps of Charlemagne and his paladins; and undertook the conquest of Naples as the first exploit that was to lead to the conquest of Constantinople and the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre.

Charles VIII entered Italy in the month of August, 1494, with thirty-six hundred men-at-arms or heavy cavalry; twenty thousand infantry, Gascons, Bretons, and French; eight thousand Swiss, and a formidable train of artillery. This last arm had received in France, during the wars of Charles VII, a degree of perfection yet unknown to the rest of Europe. The states of upper Italy were favourable to the expedition of the French. The duchess of Savoy and the marchioness of Montferrat, regents for their sons, who were under age, opened the passages of the Alps to Charles VIII. Lodovico the Moor, regent of the duchy of Milan, recently alarmed at the demand made on him by the king of Naples, to give up the regency to his nephew, Giovanni Galeazzo, then of full age, and married to a Neapolitan princess, had himself called the French into Italy; and to facilitate their conquest of the kingdom of Naples, opened to them all the fortresses of Genoa which were dependent on him. The republic of Venice intended to remain neutral, reposing in its own strength, and made the duke of Ferrara and the marquis of Mantua, its neighbours, adopt the same policy; but southern Italy formed for its defence a league, comprehending the Tuscan republics, the states of the church, and the kingdom of Naples.

At Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici left three sons; of whom Piero II, at the age of twenty-one, was named chief of the republic. His grandfather, Piero I, son of Cosmo, oppressed with infirmities and premature old age, had shown little talent, and no capacity for the government of a state.[411] Piero II, on the contrary, was remarkable for his bodily vigour and address; but he thought only of shining at festivals, tilts, and tournaments. It was said that he had given proofs of talent in his literary studies, that he spoke with grace and dignity; but in his public career he proved himself arrogant, presumptuous, and passionate. He determined on governing the Florentines as a master, without disguising the yoke which he imposed on them; not deigning to trouble himself with business, he transmitted his orders by his secretary, or some one of his household, to the magistrates.

Piero de’ Medici remained faithful to the treaty which his father had made with Ferdinand, king of Naples, and engaged to refuse the French a free passage, if they attempted to enter southern Italy by Tuscany. The republics of Siena and Lucca, too feeble to adopt an independent policy, promised to follow the impulse given by Medici. In the states of the church, Rodrigo Borgia had succeeded to Innocent VIII, on the 11th of August, 1492, under the name of Alexander VI. He was the richest of the cardinals, and at the same time the most depraved in morals, and the most perfidious as a politician. The marriage of one of his sons (for he had several) with a natural daughter of Alfonso, son of Ferdinand, had put the seal to his alliance with the reigning house of Naples. That house then appeared at the summit of prosperity. Ferdinand, though seventy years of age, was still vigorous: he was rich, he had triumphed over all his enemies; he passed for the most able politician in Italy. His two sons, Alfonso and Frederick, and his grandson, Ferdinand, were reputed skilful warriors; they had an army and a numerous fleet under their orders. However, Ferdinand dreaded a war with France, and he had just opened negotiations to avoid it when he died suddenly, on the 25th of January, 1494. His son, Alfonso II, succeeded him; while Frederick took command of the fleet, and the young Ferdinand that of the army, destined to defend Romagna against the French.

It was by Pontremoli and the Lunigiana that Charles VIII, according to the advice of Lodovico the Moor, resolved to conduct his army into southern Italy. This road traversing the Apennines from Parma to Pontremoli, over poor pasture lands, and descending through olive groves to the sea, the shore of which it follows at the foot of the mountains, was not without danger. The country produces little grain of any kind. Corn was brought from abroad, at a great expense, in exchange for oil. The narrow space between the sea and the mountains was defended by a chain of fortresses, which might long stop the army on a coast where it would have experienced at the same time famine and the pestilential fever of Pietrasanta. Piero de’ Medici, upon learning that the French were arrived at Sarzana, and perceiving the fermentation which the news of their approach excited at Florence, resolved to imitate that act of his father which he had heard the most praised—his visit to Ferdinand at Naples. He departed to meet Charles VIII. On his road he traversed a field of battle, where three hundred Florentine soldiers had been cut to pieces by the French, who had refused to give quarter to a single one. Seized with terror, on being introduced to Charles, he, on the first summons, caused the fortresses of Sarzana and Sarzanello to be immediately surrendered. He afterwards gave up those of Librafratta, Pisa, and Livorno (Leghorn), consenting that Charles should garrison and keep them until his return from Italy, or until peace was signed, and thus establishing the king of France in the heart of Tuscany. It was contrary to the wish of the Florentines that Medici had engaged in hostilities against the French, for whom they entertained an hereditary[412] attachment; but the conduct of the chief of the state, who, after having drawn them into a war, delivered their fortresses, without authority, into the hands of the enemy whom he had provoked, appeared as disgraceful as it was criminal.

Piero de’ Medici, after this act of weakness, quitted Charles, to return in haste to Florence, where he arrived on the 8th of November, 1494. On his preparing, the next day, to visit the signoria, he found guards at the door of the palace, who refused him admittance. Astonished at this opposition, he returned home, to put himself under the protection of his brother-in-law, Paolo Orsini, a Roman noble, whom he had taken, with a troop of cavalry, into the pay of the republic. Supported by Orsini, the three brothers Medici rapidly traversed the streets, repeating the war-cry of their family, “Palle! Palle!”—without exciting a single movement of the populace, upon whom they reckoned, in their favour. The friends of liberty, the Piagnoni, on the other hand, excited by the exhortations of Savonarola, assembled, and took arms. Their number continually increased. The Medici, terrified, left the city by the gate of San Gallo, traversed the Apennines, retired first to Bologna, then to Venice, and thus lost, without a struggle, a sovereignty which their family had already exercised sixty years. The same day, the 19th of November, 1494, on which the Medici were driven out of Florence, the Florentines were driven out of Pisa.d

CHARLES VIII; HIS ARMY (1494 A.D.)

The French army was now ready to march on Florence. It consisted of thirty-six hundred men-at-arms; six thousand foot-archers from Brittany; six thousand crossbowmen from the central provinces; eight thousand Gascon infantry, at that time the most esteemed in France; all armed with arquebuses and two-handed swords; and eight thousand Swiss or German pikemen and halberdiers. An immense number of attendants followed and increased this splendid force which was led by the king, the duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XII, the duke of Vendôme; the count of Montpensier; Louis de Ligne, lord of Luxemburg; Louis de la Trémouille and other great seigniors; besides the seneschal of Beaucaire, Briçonnet, bishop of St. Malo, both confidential advisers of Charles; and, though last not least, his father’s old and faithful counsellor Philip de Comines, lord of Argenton, who has left so interesting and instructive a history of his own times to posterity. The French man-at-arms or lance (a name which seems to have been gradually dropped in Italy after the disappearance of transalpine condottieri by whom it was introduced) consisted of six horsemen, of which two were archers; they were nearly all French subjects, and all gentlemen, who were neither enrolled nor removed at the general’s pleasure nor paid by him as in Italy, but received their salary direct from the crown. Their squadrons were always maintained complete, and every man was well equipped both with arms and horses, for their circumstances were equal to it, and there was a good spirit and an honourable emulation to distinguish themselves not only for the sake of glory but promotion; and the same spirit existed among the leaders and generals, who were all lords and barons or of illustrious family and nearly all native Frenchmen. None of the subordinate chiefs commanded more than a hundred lances, and when these were complete they looked only to glory and promotion, which were pursued with a singular devotion to the king whom they considered the source of both. The result[413] of this spirit and this equality was a steadiness in their service, an absence of any desire, whether from avarice or ambition, to change their masters, and a similar absence of any rivalry with other captains for a larger command.

All this differed from the Italian army in which the men-at-arms were at this time principally composed of the lower ranks of society, of strangers from other states, the subjects of other princes; all depending on the condottieri, with whom they agreed for their salary and by them alone was it paid, yet without any generous stimulus to honour, glory, or good service—but on the contrary the certainty of an unfeeling dismissal when no longer wanted. The generals themselves were rarely the subjects of those they served and frequently had different ends and interests, which were sometimes even directly inimical. Amongst them there was abundance of hatred and rivalry and consequent absence of discipline: nor had they always a prefixed period of service; wherefore being entire masters of their troops they left their numbers incomplete, though paid for; defrauded their employers; demanded shameful contributions from them in emergencies, and then tired of the service, or stimulated by ambition or avarice or some other temptation they were not only fickle but unfaithful. Nor was there less difference in the infantry of France and Italy; the latter fought in compact and well-ordered battalions, but scattered over the country and taking advantage of its banks and ditches and all its local peculiarities. The Swiss in French pay on the contrary combated in large masses of an invariable number of rank and file, and never breaking this order they presented themselves like a strong, solid, and almost unconquerable wall where there was sufficient space to deploy their battalions; with similar discipline and similar order did the French and Gascon infantry fight, but not with equal bravery. In their ordnance however the French were far superior to the Italians and sent so great a quantity both of battering and field artillery to Genoa for this war, and of so superior a nature, that the Italian officers were astonished. Hitherto in Italy this warlike arm whether used in the field or fortress had been of a very cumbrous construction; the largest were denominated bombarde and were made both of brass and iron, but of great size—difficult of transport, difficult to place, and difficult to discharge; much time was consumed in loading; a long interval passed after every round; and the effect in general was comparatively trifling with reference to the time and labour employed, there being always a sufficient interval after each discharge for the garrison to repair the damage at their leisure. The French had already cast much lighter pieces of brass ordnance to which they seem to be the first who gave[414] the name of cannon, and used iron shot instead of stone balls: these were placed on lighter carriages, and instead of bullocks as in Italy, they were drawn by horses and kept pace with the army. They were placed in battery with a rapidity that astonished the Italians, and their fire was so quick and well-directed that what had previously been many days’ work amongst the latter was accomplished in a few hours by the Frenchmen; so that this alone made their army formidable to all Italy independent of their native ferocity and valour.e

Charles VIII, on receiving from Piero de’ Medici the fortresses of Librafratta, Pisa, and Livorno, in the Pisan states, engaged to preserve to the Florentines the countries within the range of these fortresses, and to restore them at the conclusion of the war. But Charles had very confused notions of the rights of a country into which he carried war, and was by no means scrupulous as to keeping his word. When a deputation of Pisans represented to him the tyranny under which they groaned, and solicited from him the liberty of their country, he granted their request without hesitation, without even suspecting that he disposed of what was not his, or that he broke his word to the Florentines; he equally forgot every other engagement with them. Upon entering Florence, on the 17th of November, at the head of his army, he regarded himself as a conqueror, and therefore as dispensed from every promise which he had made to Piero de’ Medici—he hesitated only between restoring his conquest to Piero, or retaining it himself. The magistrates in vain represented to him that he was the guest of the nation, and not its master; that the gates had been opened to him as a mark of respect, not from any fear; that the Florentines were far from feeling themselves conquered, whilst the palaces of Florence were occupied not only by the citizens but by the soldiers of the republic. Charles still insisted on disgraceful conditions, which his secretary read as his ultimatum. Piero Capponi suddenly snatched the paper from the secretary’s hand, and tearing it, exclaimed, “Well, if it be thus, sound your trumpets, and we will ring our bells!” This energetic movement daunted the French; Charles declared himself content with the subsidy offered by the republic, and engaged on his part to restore as soon as he had accomplished the conquest of Naples, or signed peace, or even consented to a long truce, all the fortresses which had been delivered to him by Medici. Charles after this convention departed from Florence, by the road to Siena, on the 28th of November. The Neapolitan army evacuated Romagna, the patrimony of St. Peter, and Rome, in succession, as he advanced. He entered Rome on the 31st of December, without fighting a blow.d

Some very interesting details of the king’s entry into Rome and his reception there by the pope have been preserved to us in a diary kept by one John Burchard, “master of ceremonies of the chapel of Pope Alexander VI.” A few extracts from this diary are here given:

Charles VIII in Rome: A Contemporary Account

From the diary of John Burchard, master of ceremonies of the chapel of Pope Alexander VI (1494-1495). “Book of notes collected by me, John Burchard of Strasburg, protonotary of the apostolic see, etc.”

The 19th and 21st, 22nd and 23rd of December the troops of the king of France made excursions as far as San Lazaro and across the meadows which surround the castle of St. Angelo. They had even formed the plan of seizing Rome by treachery at night in one direction, while the Colonna would enter from another with the aid of a thousand Frenchmen who were to come[415] down the river from the environs of Ostia; but a high wind so disturbed their intentions that they could not put them into execution. They wished, in truth, to enter the city by the Porto San Paolo, fire, pillage it, and commit a thousand other atrocities, and the author of the project was, they say, Cardinal Gurck, who himself would have come to the gate of the city, had not the fierce storm compelled him to go back.

This same cardinal was one of the principal abettors of the king of France’s march upon Rome. He had, in fact, decided the inhabitants of Aquapendente and other lands of the church to grant passage to the king of France, by vaunting the liberality and affability of that prince and of the French in general; he assured them that the French would take nothing without paying for it, not even a fowl, an egg, or the slightest thing, affirming also that our holy father had promised the king he would let him cross the estates of the church. By such discourse and similar he induced the people to let the king of France and his troops in, contrary to the pope’s express wish. And to prove to the German officials who were in the city that he was looking after their interests, he wrote an open letter which he caused to be distributed among the most prominent of them in the city:

To our brothers and friends the prelates and other dignitaries of the German nation and the estates of the Most Illustrious Archduke Philip: residents of this city:

We call on God who sounds all hearts and loins to witness that we have made every effort with the Most Christian King, as well in the name of our Sovereign Pontiff and in our own, to induce friendship and good feeling between the Pope and the King; nevertheless we have not as yet been able to succeed; we do not know to whom to attribute the fault, but it certainly is not to the King of France who has no other desires than to conduct himself as a submissive son towards the Sovereign Pontiff and the Holy See according to the example of his predecessors. Doubtless the principal obstacle to this arrangement comes from the gravity of our offences towards God, and if he does not let Himself be appeased by the prayers of pious souls, this alliance and the consequent peace between Christian princes cannot take place. In any case as it is to be feared that the troops of the Most Christian King and his allies will in a few days invade the city, if the enemies, which the King has in Rome, oppose the ratification of the above mentioned agreement. I have used my influence with the Prince that his troops may cause no harm to foreigners, to whatever nation they may belong, residing for the moment in Rome, at least unless they are found in arms against his Majesty. In consequence, the King wishes and directs that all subjects of the Most Serene King of the Romans, and the Most Illustrious Prince, Archduke of Austria, be not treated by his troops with less respect than his own subjects and all the Roman citizens. To this effect he has sent me to my Lord Count of Montpensier, his relative and lieutenant-general, to let him know on the part of the King that he must take measures to prevent the troops from committing any outrage or annoyance upon the above mentioned residents of Rome and especially upon the Most Reverend Cardinals, foreigners of all nations, Roman citizens, and finally the subjects of the Emperor and the Archduke.

I have wished to make known to you this determination that in case (from which God preserve us) of the King’s troops entering Rome in arms, you would be informed of his Most Christian Majesty’s good intentions; if you would protect the more easily your persons and your property, I advise you in case of tumult, to take refuge, with the permission of the Lord Secretary, the Cardinal of Lyons, in my palace; I am writing at the moment to the said Secretary to ask that he be pleased to give you this shelter; indeed I have not forgotten that God created me out of nothing, that He raised me to the dignity and responsibilities of the Cardinalate, at the prayers of the King of the Romans and the electors of the Empire. This is why, as long as I shall live, I shall force myself, through gratitude, to render service to the Emperor, the Archduke Philip, and all their subjects with the same devotion as if I were born in their states. Adieu, dearly beloved brethren. Pray God to hear our desires which are for universal peace among all Christians and universal war against the Turks.

Your friend and brother,

Cardinal Gurck.

Formello, 23rd December.

December 25th, feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most reverend cardinal Mont-Real, who was to say high mass, was appointed by[416] the holy father, on receipt of what had been learned of the king of France’s intentions concerning his entry into Rome, to go to that prince and beg him to send one of his men who would consult with the pope as to the manner in which he would make his entry. The morning of the same day our holy father the pope before going to his chapel called all the cardinals, with the exception of the cardinal of Alessandria who was to say mass, together in the hall known as Papagallo, and announced the arrival of the king of France, in the presence of the duke of Calabria.

On Friday the 26th of the same month, our holy father betook himself to the large chapel of the palace where he received the king’s ambassadors who, to the number of three, had been sent the night previous. They were: the grand marshal of the realm, Messire Jean de Gannay first president of the parliament of Paris, and one other—all laymen. I caused them to be placed—the grand marshal on the steps of the pontifical throne, in front and above the senator; the two others on the bench of the lay ambassadors, where were seated two ambassadors from the king of Naples, who, refusing to recognise the new-comers on pretext that they knew nothing of their characters as ambassadors, got up and left the place; but on the information I gave them by special order of the pope that they were ambassadors of the king of France, they came back to their bench and yielded the point. The king’s envoys were accompanied by a large number of Frenchmen, several of whom, forgetting all decorum, tried to place themselves close to the prelates and even in their seats. I was obliged to make them get out and assign them more suitable positions. Whereupon the pope called me to him and said in great irritation that I was compromising his interests, that the French must be let place themselves where they wished; I replied to his holiness, who thus let himself be carried away a little, that his wish being known to me I would let them place themselves where they wished without making any observation.

Wednesday December 31st, at early morning, I set out on horseback by order of our holy father the pope to meet the king of France, to inform him of the order of his reception according to the ceremonial, to learn his wishes and execute all that his majesty would prescribe for me: I was accompanied by the reverend father in Jesus Christ, the lord Bartolommeo, bishop of Nepi, the pope’s secretary; by Lord Jerome Porcario, auditor of the Rote, by the dean Coronato de Planca; and by Marius Milorius, Christopher Buzolus,[417] chancellor of Rome, and Jacob de Sinibaldis—Roman citizens. At Galera, two miles from the city, we met the most reverend cardinals of San Pietro in Vincoli, Gurck and Savelli, to whom I made homage without descending from my horse. A short time after we came upon the king to whom we made our respectful salutations, but still remained on horseback on account of the mud and the bad weather.

The bishop of Nepi having explained to the king what the holy father charged him with saying touching the prince’s reception, on my side I made known to his majesty the object of our errand. The king replied that he desired to enter Rome without pomp; he then listened to Lord Jerome Porcario who spoke on behalf of his Roman colleagues, placing the citizens and all they possessed at the king’s disposition. The king made a short reply without explaining what he was going to do about the offer Porcario had just made him. The Romans withdrew. On the king’s invitation I accompanied him for the space of about four miles; he questioned me on the ceremonial, the pope, and the cardinals, of Valentino’s (Cesare Borgia) rank and position, plying his questions so that I could scarce answer one satisfactorily. In the outskirts of Burghetto two Venetian ambassadors presented themselves before the king; they were soon followed by the most reverend cardinal Ascagni, who, without descending from his mule, uncovered himself before the king; the prince did the same to the cardinal; both then resumed their headgear, and the most reverend cardinal Ascagni rode on the king’s left hand and accompanied him over the Milvian bridge and as far as the palace of St. Mark, ordinary residence of the most reverend cardinal of Benevento. We arrived there towards the second hour of the night, over roads deep with mud. From the palace of the most reverend cardinal of Lisbon, close to the church of San Laurentio, to the palace of St. Mark the whole route was lighted up with fires, torches, and candles, and from nearly all the houses came shouts of “Francia! Francia! Columna! Columna! Vincula! Vincula!”

This same day before the king’s entry into Rome, the keys of all the city gates were delivered into the hands of the grand marshal of the king of France, according to the command of that prince and with the pope’s consent. The French said in fact, and indeed it was quite true, that on a former occasion the keys had been similarly turned over to the duke of Calabria during his visit to Rome, and that the king of France should have the same rights. The following days, all the most reverend cardinals residing in Rome visited the king of France in turn, according to custom, except the cardinals of Naples and of Orsini, who, lodged in the apostolic palace in apartments which the holy father had assigned them, did not leave the palace and make this visit. Before his entry I had informed the king on the way that, in receiving the cardinals’ visits, he should himself go forward to meet them, conduct them to the door on leaving, give them his hand, and I instructed him in other similar customs. But he acted entirely differently. He neither went forward to meet them nor conducted them to the door; the members of his suite did not pay the respects expected of them. The nearest courtyard to the king’s apartments in the palazzo San Marco was strewn with straw and not even cleaned; candles were fastened to the doors and chimney places—in fact, one would have thought himself in a pig pen.

Saturday, January 3rd, the partisans of the Colonna and the French wrecked the residences of the most reverend cardinal of Naples’ nephew, of Jacob de Comititibus’ son, and of Lord Bartolommeo de Lucca, valet-de-chambre of our holy father the pope. The French, that they might lodge[418] themselves in their own fashion, forced an entrance into the houses from all sides, threw out even beasts and movables, burned the woodwork, and ate and drank their fill without paying for anything, all of which caused great talk among the people. In consequence of this, the king of France caused an order to be published all over the city forbidding the entering of houses by force under penalty of death. Monday, January 5th, pontifical vespers were said in the great chapel of the palace and in the pope’s presence. Before his holiness left the Papagallo chamber several Frenchmen were admitted to kiss his foot.

Sunday, January 11th, it was agreed between our holy father the pope and Philip de Bresse, the king of France’s uncle, that his holiness would deliver for six months the sultan Djem, brother of the Grand Turk, to the king of France, who would at once pay twenty thousand ducats to the pope and would pledge himself, under the security of the Florentine and Venetian merchants, to return the same sultan Djem to the pope immediately the six months had expired; the king of France could receive the crown of Naples without prejudice to the right of any others; and that the cardinals of San Pietro in Vincoli, Gurck, Savelli, and Colonna would be safe from all reproach.

Sunday, January 18th, the holy father sent for me by one of the pages and told me that the next day a public consistory would be held to receive the king of France. According to the wishes of his holiness, I arranged that the president of the parliament of Paris should say a few words in the king’s name, a speech in which his majesty would recognise his holiness the pope as the true vicar and successor of St. Peter. The holy father further made known to me his intention of saying mass pontifically and publicly in the basilica of St. Peter on the following Tuesday, the feast of St. Sebastian, in honour of the king, asking me what place the prince should occupy and which mass to celebrate. He counted, in fact, on saying the mass of the Holy Ghost, the office of which he knew best. I replied to his holiness that the mass to celebrate was that of St. Sebastian; and as for the king he would occupy a special seat placed in front of the cardinals’ bench, between that bench and the chair of the cardinal of Naples, who would assist. As a matter of fact, it was not the cardinal’s duty to fulfil that function on this day; but there was no objection to his doing so, as it was the custom to assist his holiness on all days when he was not familiar with the office. While we were conversing, the king of France arrived at the pontifical palace; the pope, informed of his coming, went to meet him at the palace entrance. The pope wore a white camail, a rich stole, and white cap, a costume scarcely suitable under the circumstances. His majesty came to settle definitely with the pope the articles of agreement already concluded and signed, upon which a difference had already risen between them concerning the securities to be given by the king for the return of the Turk at the end of six months.

The agreement stated, in effect, that the king would furnish several nobles and prelates of his realm of the pope’s choosing, for security; the president claimed that this clause must be limited to ten persons only, while the pope demanded thirty or forty. The discussion on this point was prolonged for three or four hours; finally the pope entered an apartment in which two papal chairs had been placed, followed by the king, whom he made sit in one of these chairs, after which he seated himself in the other, on the king’s right. On the pope’s side were the cardinals of St. Anastasia and St. Alessandria. On the king’s side, the most reverend cardinals of St. Denis and St. Malo, the two papal secretaries, the datary, and several others.

The articles of agreement were read and agreed to. Two notaries were called in—namely, the noble Stephen de Harnia for the pope, and the noble Oliver Yvan, clerk of Mans, for the king. These wrote out the treaty in French for his majesty, and in Latin for his holiness.

Monday, January 19th, the great hall of the apostolic palace was arranged in the usual manner for the public consistory, at which the reception of the king of France and the ceremony of obedience were to take place.

The king placed himself on the left of the sovereign pontiff, and I motioned him to pronounce the formula of obedience. He said that he was going to do it immediately; but at that moment the president of the parliament of Paris advanced to the pope’s feet and, kneeling, explained that the king had come in person to take the oath of obedience; but before doing so he wished to obtain three favours from his holiness, according to the customary privilege of vassals before the oath or homage of their obedience. He asked the confirmation of the rights granted to him the most Christian king, the queen his spouse, to the dauphin his son, and to all the others included in the book whose title he mentioned; next, the investiture of the kingdom of Naples for himself; and, finally, the annulling of the clause concerning the security to guarantee the return of the Grand Turk’s brother to the pope—an article agreed to the day before with the others. The pope replied that he willingly confirmed the privileges which were the subject of the first demand, as they had been established by custom; but as for the investiture of the kingdom of Naples, since that was an affair in which another was interested, it could not be decided until after mature deliberation and consultation with the cardinals, among whom he would make every effort that his majesty should receive the satisfaction he desired; and as regards Djem—the Grand Turk’s brother—he desired to agree unanimously with the king and the sacred college, hoping that there would be no point of difference between them concerning that article. After receiving this reply the king, who was standing on the pope’s left, pronounced the following words:

“Holy father, I have come to make obedience and reverence to your holiness in the manner that my predecessors the kings of France have done.”

After which the president, of whom we have spoken and who remained on his knees, got up and, standing before his holiness, enlarged in these words upon what the king had just said:

“Most holy father, there is an ancient custom among Christian princes, especially the most Christian kings, to testify through their ambassadors to their veneration for the holy see and for the popes whom the Almighty has put at the head of the church; but the king here present, having formed the design of visiting the tomb of the holy apostles, has come in person to perform this duty. Thus he recognises you, holy father, as the head of all the faithful, as the true vicar of Jesus Christ and as the legitimate successor of the holy apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, willingly granting you that filial obedience which the kings of France, his predecessors, were accustomed to profess to the popes. This is why the king offers himself and all dependent on him to the service of your holiness and of the holy see.”

Tuesday, January 27th, the sultan Djem, brother of the Grand Turk, was taken from the castle of St. Angelo to the palace of St. Mark and delivered into the hands of the king of France.

Wednesday, January 28th, the king of France and his people, all in arms, visited the pope, with whom the king of France remained alone for some time. He then withdrew, and was escorted by the pope as far as the gallery leading to the main apartments, where the king knelt and uncovered. The pope[420] likewise bared his head in order to embrace him; the king pretended to wish to kiss the pope’s feet, but he would not allow it. The king departed and mounted the horse that was waiting for him at the entrance of the private garden, where he waited some time for Cardinal Valentino who was going with him to Naples; finally the latter, after taking leave of the pope, came to the place where the king was waiting, mounted his mule in cardinal’s robes, and presented the king with six superb horses. The king then started with Cardinal Valentino on his left; the other cardinals, whose escort the king did not wish for, retired. The king made straight for Marino, where he arrived during the course of the day. The cardinals of San Pietro in Vincoli, Savelli, and Colonna, and the auditor of the chamber also left Rome with the king. During the evening Cardinal Gurck followed the king. The Grand Turk’s brother had already left for Marino.f

Charles goes to Naples

The first resistance which Charles encountered was on the frontiers of the kingdom of Naples; and having there taken by assault two small towns, he massacred the inhabitants. This instance of ferocity struck Alfonso II with such terror, that he abdicated the crown in favour of his son, Ferdinand II, and retired with his treasure into Sicily. Ferdinand occupied Capua with his whole army, intending to defend the passage of the Volturno. He left that city to appease a sedition which had broken out at Naples; Capua, during his absence, was given up through fear to the French, and he was himself forced, on the 21st of February, to embark for Ischia. All the barons, his vassals, all the provincial cities, sent deputations to Charles; and the whole kingdom of Naples was conquered without a single battle in its defence. The powers of the north of Italy regarded these important conquests with a jealous eye; they, moreover, were already disgusted by the insolence of the French, who had begun to conduct themselves as masters throughout the whole peninsula. The duke of Orleans, who had been left by Charles at Asti, already declared his pretensions to the duchy of Milan, as heir to his grandmother, Valentina Visconti. Lodovico Sforza, upon this, contracted alliances with the Venetians, the pope, the king of Spain, and the emperor Maximilian, for maintaining the independence of Italy; and the duke of Milan and the Venetians assembled near Parma a powerful army, under the command of the marquis of Mantua.

Charles VIII had passed three months at Naples in feasts and tournaments, while his lieutenants were subduing and disorganising the provinces. The news of what was passing in northern Italy determined him on returning to France with the half of his army. He departed from Naples, on the 20th of May, 1495, and passed peaceably through Rome, whilst the pope shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo. From Siena he went to Pisa, and thence to Pontremoli, where he entered the Apennines. Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, awaited him at Fornovo, on the other side of that chain of mountains. Charles passed the Taro, with the hope of avoiding him; but was attacked on its borders by the Italians, on the 6th of July. He was at the time in full march; the divisions of his army were scattered, and at some distance from each other. For some time his danger was imminent; but the impetuosity of the French, and the obstinate valour of the Swiss, repaired the fault of their general. A great number of the Italian men-at-arms were thrown in the charges of the French cavalry, many others were brought down by the Swiss halberds, and all were instantly put to death by[421] the servants of the army. Gonzaga left thirty-five hundred dead on the field, and Charles continued his retreat. On his arrival at Asti, he entered into treaty with Lodovico Sforza, for the deliverance of the duke of Orleans, whom Sforza besieged at Novara. He disbanded twenty thousand Swiss, who were brought to him from the mountains, but to whose hands he would not venture to confide himself. On the 22nd of October, 1495, he repassed the Alps, after having ravaged all Italy with the violence and rapidity of a hurricane. He had left his relative, Gilbert de Montpensier, viceroy at Naples, with the half of his army; but the people, already wearied with his yoke, recalled Ferdinand II. The French, after many battles, successively lost their conquests, and were at length forced to capitulate at Aversa (Atella), on the 23rd of July, 1496.

The invasion of the French not only spread terror from one extremity of Italy to the other, but changed the whole policy of that country, by rendering it dependent upon that of the transalpine nations. While Charles VIII pretended to be the legitimate heir of the kingdom of Naples, the duke of Orleans, who succeeded him under the name of Louis XII, called himself heir to the duchy of Milan. Maximilian, ambitious as he was inconsistent, claimed in the states of Italy prerogatives to which no emperor had pretended since the death of Frederick II in 1250. The Swiss had learned, at the same time, that at the foot of their mountains there lay rich and feeble cities which they might pillage, and a delicious climate, which offered all the enjoyments of life; they saw neighbouring monarchs ready to pay them for exercising there their brigandage. Finally, Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs of Aragon and Castile, announced their intention of defending the bastard branch of the house of Aragon, which reigned at Naples. But, already masters of Sicily, they purposed passing the strait and were secretly in treaty with Charles VIII, to divide with him the spoils of the relative whom they pretended to defend. Amidst these different pretensions and intrigues, in which Italian interests had no longer any share, the spirit of liberty revived in Tuscany once more, but only to exhaust itself in a new struggle between the Florentines and Pisans. The French garrisons which Charles had left in Pisa and Librafratta, instead of delivering them to the Florentines, according to his order, had given them up to the Pisans themselves on the 1st of January, 1496. The allies, who had fought Charles at Fornovo, reproached the Florentines with their attachment to that monarch, and took part against them with the Pisans. Lodovico Sforza, and the Venetians, sent reinforcements to the latter, and the emperor Maximilian himself brought them aid. Thus, the only Italians who had at heart the honour and independence of Italy exhausted themselves in unequal struggles and in fruitless attempts.d

FLORENTINE AFFAIRS; SAVONAROLA

The Florentine Republic was the only friendly power that Charles had left in Italy; a friendship, though false, in every way important and almost indispensable to France in the prosecution of her Italian conquests, but equally so to Florence as her widest and richest field of commerce. Yet so far from trying to conciliate the latter, that monarch not only broke his oath and retained her fairest possessions, but left his wildest soldiers to protect her revolted subjects; his Gascon infantry, when unchecked by the royal presence, and imbued with all the Pisan hatred of Florence, carried on their[422] warlike operations in a spirit of barbarity as yet unknown to the Italians. Among other excesses they fancied that the Florentines swallowed their gold and jewels before every encounter in order to preserve something if taken prisoners; wherefore all their suspected captives were killed and ripped open to make a thorough search for those embowelled treasures: for such cruelty, however, they paid full dearly when made prisoners at Ponte di Sacco, in despite of every effort of the Florentine commissaries.e

At the moment when Florence expelled the Medici, that republic was bandied between three different parties. The first was that of the enthusiasts, directed by Girolamo Savonarola; who promised the miraculous protection of the Divinity for the reform of the church and the establishment of liberty. These demanded a democratic constitution—they were called the Piagnoni. The second consisted of men who had shared power with the Medici, but who had separated from them; who wished to possess alone the powers and profits of government, and who endeavoured to amuse the people by dissipations and pleasures, in order to establish at their ease an aristocracy—these were called the Arabiati. The third party was composed of men who remained faithful to the Medici, but not daring to declare themselves, lived in retirement—they were called Bigi. These three parties were so equally balanced in the balia named by the parliament, on the 2nd of December, 1494, that it soon became impossible to carry on the government. Girolamo Savonarola took advantage of this state of affairs to urge that the people had never delegated their power to a balia which did not abuse the trust. “The people,” he said, “would do much better to reserve this power to themselves, and exercise it by a council, into which all the citizens should be admitted.” His proposition was agreed to: more than eighteen hundred Florentines furnished proof that either they, their fathers, or their grandfathers had sat in the magistracy; they were consequently acknowledged citizens, and admitted to sit in the general council. This council was declared sovereign, on the 1st of July, 1495; it was invested with the election of magistrates, hitherto chosen by lot, and a general amnesty was proclaimed, to bury in oblivion all the ancient dissensions of the Florentine Republic.

So important a modification of the constitution seemed to promise this republic a happier futurity. The friar Savonarola, who had exercised such influence in the council, evinced at the same time an ardent love of mankind,[423] deep respect for the rights of all, great sensibility, and an elevated mind. Though a zealous reformer of the church, and in this respect a precursor of Luther, who was destined to begin his mission twenty years later, he did not quit the pale of orthodoxy; he did not assume the right of examining doctrine; he limited his efforts to the restoration of discipline, the reformation of the morals of the clergy, and the recall of priests, as well as other citizens, to the practice of the Gospel precepts: but his zeal was mixed with enthusiasm; he believed himself under the immediate inspiration of providence; he took his own impulses for prophetic revelations, by which he directed the politics of his disciples, the Piagnoni. He had predicted to the Florentines the coming of the French into Italy; he had represented to them Charles VIII as an instrument by which the Divinity designed to chastise the crimes of the nation; he had counselled them to remain faithful to their alliance with that king, the instrument of providence, even though his conduct, especially in reference to the affairs of Pisa, had been highly culpable.

This alliance however ranged the Florentines among the enemies of Pope Alexander VI, one of the founders of the league which had driven the French out of Italy; he accused them of being traitors to the church and to their country for their attachment to a foreign prince. Alexander, equally offended by the projects of reform and by the politics of Savonarola, denounced him to the church as a heretic, and interdicted him from preaching. The monk at first obeyed, and procured the appointment of his friend and disciple the Dominican friar, Buonvicino of Pescia, as his successor in the church of St. Mark; but on Christmas Day, 1497, he declared from the pulpit that God had revealed to him that he ought not to submit to a corrupt tribunal; he then openly took the sacrament with the monks of St. Mark, and afterwards continued to preach. In the course of his sermons, he more than once held up to reprobation the scandalous conduct of the pope, whom the public voice accused of every vice and every crime to be expected in a libertine so depraved—a man so ambitious, perfidious, and cruel—a monarch and a priest intoxicated with absolute power.

In the meantime, the rivalry encouraged by the court of Rome between the religious orders soon procured the pope champions eager to combat Savonarola: he was a Dominican—the general of the Augustines, that order whence Martin Luther was soon to issue. Friar Mariano di Ghinazzano signalised himself by his zeal in opposing Savonarola. He presented to the pope Friar Francis of Apulia, of the order of minor Observantines, who was sent to Florence to preach against the Florentine monk, in the church of Santa Croce. This preacher declared to his audience that he knew Savonarola pretended to support his doctrine by a miracle. “For me,” said he, “I am a sinner; I have not the presumption to perform miracles; nevertheless, let a fire be lighted, and I am ready to enter it with him. I am certain of perishing, but Christian charity teaches me not to withhold my life, if, in sacrificing it, I might precipitate into hell a heresiarch, who has already drawn into it so many souls.”

This strange proposition was rejected by Savonarola; but his friend and disciple, Friar Domenico Buonvicino, eagerly accepted it. Francis of Apulia declared that he would risk his life against Savonarola only. Meanwhile, a crowd of monks, of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, rivalled each other in their offers to prove by the ordeal of fire, on one side the truth, on the other the falsehood, of the new doctrine. Enthusiasm spread beyond the two convents; many priests and seculars, and even women and children,[424] more especially on the side of Savonarola, earnestly requested to be admitted to the proof. The pope warmly testified his gratitude to the Franciscans for their devotion. The signoria of Florence consented that two monks only should devote themselves for their respective orders, and directed the pile to be prepared. The whole population of the town and country, to which a signal miracle was promised, received the announcement with transports of joy.

On the 7th of April, 1498, a scaffold, dreadful to look on, was erected in the public square of Florence: two piles of large pieces of wood, mixed with fagots and broom, which should quickly take fire, extended each eighty feet long, four feet thick, and five feet high; they were separated by a narrow space of two feet, to serve as a passage by which the two priests were to enter, and pass the whole length of the piles during the fire. Every window was full; every roof was covered with spectators; almost the whole population of the republic was collected round the place. The portico called the Loggia de’ Lanzi, divided in two by a partition, was assigned to the two orders of monks. The Dominicans arrived at their station chanting canticles, and bearing the holy sacrament. The Franciscans immediately declared that they would not permit the host to be carried amidst flames. They insisted that the friar Buonvicino should enter the fire, as their own champion was prepared to do, without this divine safeguard. The Dominicans answered, that they would not separate themselves from their God at the moment when they implored his aid. The dispute upon this point grew warm. Several hours passed away. The multitude, which had waited long, and begun to feel hunger and thirst, lost patience; a deluge of rain suddenly fell upon the city, and descended in torrents from the roofs of the houses—all present were drenched. The piles were so wet that they could no longer be lighted; and the crowd, disappointed of a miracle so impatiently looked for, separated, with the notion of having been unworthily trifled with. Savonarola lost all his credit; he was henceforth rather looked on as an impostor. Next day his convent was besieged by the Arabiati, eager to profit by the inconstancy of the multitude; he was arrested, with his two friends, Domenico Buonvicino and Silvestro Marruffi, and led to prison. The Piagnoni, his partisans, were exposed to every outrage from the populace—two of them were killed; their rivals and old enemies exciting the general ferment for their destruction. Even in the signoria the majority was against them, and yielded to the pressing demands of the pope. The three imprisoned monks were subjected to a criminal prosecution. Alexander VI despatched judges from Rome, with orders to condemn the accused to death. Conformably with the laws of the church, the trial opened with the torture. Savonarola was too weak and nervous to support it: he avowed in his agony all that was imputed to him; and, with his two disciples, was condemned to death. The three monks were burned alive, on the 23rd of May, 1498, in the same square where, six weeks before, a pile had been raised to prepare them a triumph.

THE FRENCH IN MILAN

The expedition of Charles VIII against Naples had directed towards Italy the attention of all the western powers. The transalpine nations had learned that they were strong enough to act as masters, and if they pleased as robbers, in this the richest and most civilised country of the earth. All[425] the powers on the confines henceforth aspired to subject some part of Italy to their dominion. They coveted their share of tribute from a land so fruitful of impost, from those cities in which industry employed such numbers, and accumulated so much capital. Cupidity put arms in their hands, and smothered every generous feeling. The commanders were rapacious; the soldiers thought only of pillage. They regarded the Italians as a race abandoned to their extortions, and vied with each other in the barbarous methods which they invented for extorting money from the vanquished, until at last they completely destroyed the prosperity which had provoked their envy.

Charles VIII died at Amboise, on the 7th of April, 1498, the day destined at Florence for the trial by fire of the doctrine of Savonarola. Louis XII, who succeeded that monarch, claimed, as grandson of Valentina Visconti, to be the legitimate heir to the duchy of Milan, although, according to the law acknowledged by all Italy, and confirmed by the imperial investure granted to the father of Valentina, females were excluded from all share in the succession. This monarch, at his coronation, took with the title of king of France those of duke of Milan and king of Naples and Jerusalem. It was to the duchy of Milan that he seemed particularly attached, apparently as having been the object of his ambition before he came to the throne. He preserved during his whole reign, as if he were simply duke of Milan, a feudal respect for the emperor as lord paramount, which was as fatal to France as to Italy.

After having thus announced to the world his pretensions to the duchy of Milan, Louis hastened to secure his possession of it by arms. He easily separated his antagonist, Lodovico Sforza, from all his allies. The emperor Maximilian had married the niece of Lodovico, to whom he had granted the investure of his duchy; but Maximilian forgot, with extreme levity, his promises and alliances. A new ambition, a supposed offence, even a whim, sufficed to make him abandon his most matured projects. The Swiss had just then excited his resentment; and to attack them the more effectually, he signed with Louis XII a truce, in which Lodovico Sforza was not included, and was therefore abandoned to his enemy. The Venetians were interested still more than the emperor in defending Lodovico, but were incensed against him; they accused him of having deceived them, as well in the war against Charles VIII as in that for the defence of Pisa. They suspected him of having suggested to Maximilian the claims which he had just made on all their conquests in Lombardy, as having previously appertained to the empire. They were obliged, moreover, to reserve all their resources to resist the most formidable of their enemies. Bajazet II had just declared war against them. Bands of robbers continually descended from the mountains of Turkish Albania to lay waste Venetian Dalmatia. The Turkish pashas offered their support to every traitor who attempted to take from the Venetians any of their stations in the Levant. Corfu very nearly fell into the hands of the Turks; at length hostilities openly began. The Turks attacked Zara; all the Venetian merchants established at Constantinople were put into irons, and Scander Pasha, sanjak of Bosnia, passed the Isonzo on the 29th of September, 1499, with seven thousand Turkish cavalry. He ravaged all the rich country which extends from that river to the Tagliamento, at the extremity of the Adriatic, and spread terror up to the lagunes which surround Venice. Invaded by an enemy so formidable, against whom they were destined to support, for seven years, a relentless war, the Venetians would not expose themselves to the danger of maintaining another war against the French. On the 15th of April, 1499, they signed, at Blois, with Louis, a treaty, by which they contracted an alliance against Lodovico Sforza and abandoned the conquest[426] of the Milanese to the king of France, reserving to themselves Cremona and the Ghiara d’Adda.

Lodovico Sforza found no allies in any other part of Italy. Since the execution of Savonarola at Florence, the faction of the Arabiati had succeeded that of the Piagnoni in the administration, without changing its policy. The republic continued to guard against the intrigues of the Medici, who entered into an alliance with every enemy of their country, in order to bring it back under their yoke. Florence continued her efforts to subdue Pisa; but, fearing to excite the jealousy of the kings of France and Spain, did not assemble for that purpose either a numerous army or a great train of artillery. She contented herself with ravaging the Pisan territory every year, in order to reduce that city by famine. Even these expeditions were suspended when those powerful monarchs found it convenient to make a show of peace. The cities of Siena, Lucca, and Genoa, actuated by their jealousy of Florence, sent succour to Pisa. Pope Alexander VI, who had been always the enemy of Charles VIII, now entered into an alliance with Louis XII; but on condition that Cesare Borgia, son of Alexander, should be made duke of Valentinois in France and of Romagna in Italy—the French king assisting him against the petty princes, feudatories of the holy see, who were masters of that province. The king of Naples, Frederick, who had succeeded his nephew Ferdinand on the 7th of September, 1496, was well aware that he should, in his turn, be attacked by France; but although he merited, by his talents and virtues, the confidence of his subjects, he had great difficulty in re-establishing some order in his kingdom, which was ruined by war, and had neither an army nor an exchequer to succour his natural ally, the duke of Milan.

A powerful French army, commanded by the sires De Ligny and D’Aubigny, passed the Alps in the month of August, 1499. On the 13th of that month they attacked and took by assault the two petty fortresses of Arazzo and Annone, on the borders of the Tanaro; putting the garrisons, and almost all the inhabitants, to the sword. This ferocious proceeding spread terror among the troops of Lodovico Sforza. His army, the command of which he had given to Galeazzo San Severino, dispersed; and the duke, not venturing to remain at Milan, sought for himself, his children, and his treasure refuge in Germany, with the emperor Maximilian. Louis XII, who arrived afterwards in Italy, made his entry into the forsaken capital of Lodovico on the 2nd of October. The trembling people, wishing to conciliate their new master, saluted him with the title of duke of Milan, and expressed their joy in receiving him as their sovereign. The rest of Lombardy also submitted without resistance; and Genoa, which had placed itself under the protection of the duke of Milan, passed over to that of the king of France.

Louis returned to Lyons before the end of the year; the fugitive hopes which he had excited already gave way to hatred. The insolence of the French, their violation of all national institutions, their contempt of Italian manners, the accumulation of taxes, and the irregularities in the administration rendered their yoke insupportable. Lodovico Sforza was informed of the general ferment, and of the desire of his subjects for his return. He was on the Swiss frontier, with a considerable treasure; a brave but disorderly crowd of young men, ready to serve anyone for pay, joined him. In a few days five hundred cavalry and eight thousand infantry assembled under his banner; and, in the month of February, 1500, he entered Lombardy at their head. Como, Milan, Parma, and Pavia immediately opened their gates to him: he next besieged Novara, which capitulated. Louis, meanwhile,[427] displayed great activity in suppressing the rebellion: his general, Louis de la Trémouille, arrived before Novara, in the beginning of April, with an army in which were reckoned ten thousand Swiss. The men of that nation in the two hostile camps, opposed to each other for hire, hesitated, parleyed, and finally took a resolution more fatal to their honour than a battle between fellow-countrymen could have been. Those within Novara not only consented to withdraw themselves, but to give up to the French the Italian men-at-arms with whom they were incorporated, and who were immediately put to the sword or drowned in the river. They permitted La Trémouille to arrest in their ranks Lodovico Sforza and the two brothers San Severino, who attempted to escape in disguise. They received from the French the wages thus basely won, and afterwards, rendered reckless by the sense of their infamy, they in their retreat seized Bellinzona, which they ever after retained. Thus, even the weakest of the neighbours of Italy would have their share in her conquest. Lodovico Sforza was conducted into France, and there condemned to a severe captivity, which, ten years afterwards, ended with his life. The Milanese remained subject to the king of France from this period to the month of June, 1512.

The facility with which Louis had conquered the duchy of Milan must have led him to expect that he should not meet with much more resistance from the kingdom of Naples. Frederick also, sensible of this, demanded peace; and, to obtain it, offered to hold his kingdom in fief, as tributary to France. He reckoned, however, on the support of Ferdinand the Catholic, his kinsman and neighbour, who had promised him powerful aid and had given him a pledge of the future by sending into Sicily his best general, Gonsalvo de Cordova, with sixty vessels and eight thousand chosen infantry. But Ferdinand had previously proposed to Louis a secret understanding to divide between them the spoils of the unhappy Frederick. While the French entered on the north to conquer the kingdom of Naples, he proposed that the Spaniards should enter on the south to defend it; and that, on meeting, they, instead of giving battle, should shake hands on the partition of the kingdom—each remaining master of one-half. This was the basis of the Treaty of Granada, signed on the 11th of November, 1500. In the summer of 1501 the perfidious compact was executed by the two greatest monarchs of Europe.

THE FRENCH AND SPANIARDS IN NAPLES

The French army arrived at Rome on the 25th of June, at the same time that the army of Gonsalvo de Cordova landed in Calabria. The former, from the moment they passed the frontier, treated the Neapolitans as rebels, and hanged the soldiers who surrendered to them. Arrived before Capua, they entered that city while the magistrates were signing the capitulation, and massacred seven thousand of the inhabitants. The treachery of Ferdinand inspired the unhappy Frederick with still more aversion than the ferocity of the French. Having retired to the island of Ischia, he surrendered to Louis, and was sent to France, where he died, in a captivity by no means rigorous, three years afterwards. The Spaniards and French advanced towards each other, without encountering any resistance. They met on the limits which the treaty of Granada had respectively assigned to them; but the moment the conquest was terminated, jealousy appeared. The duke de Nemours and Gonsalvo de Cordova disputed upon the division of the kingdom; each claimed for his master some province not named in the treaty.

Hostilities at last began between them on the 19th of June, 1502, at Atripalda. Louis, while the negotiation was pending, delayed sending reinforcements to his general. After a struggle, not without glory, and in which La Palisse and Bayard first distinguished themselves, D’Aubigny was defeated at Seminara on the 21st of April, and Nemours at Cerignola on the 28th of the same month, 1503. The French army was entirely destroyed, and the kingdom of Naples lost to Louis XII. Louis had sent off, during the same campaign, a more powerful army than the first, to recover it; but, on arriving near Rome, news was received of the death of Alexander VI, which took place on the 18th of August, 1503. The cardinal D’Amboise, prime minister of Louis, detained the army there to support his intrigues in the conclave: when it renewed its march, in the month of October, the rainy season had commenced. Gonsalvo de Cordova had taken his position on the Garigliano, the passage of which he defended, amidst inundated plains, with a constancy and patience characteristic of the Spanish infantry. During more than two months the French suffered or perished in the marshes: a pestilential malady carried off the flower of the army, and damped the courage and confidence of the remainder. Gonsalvo, having at last passed the river himself, on the 27th of December, attacked and completely destroyed the French army. On the 1st of January, 1504, Gaeta surrendered to him; and the whole kingdom of Naples was now, like Sicily, but a Spanish possession.

Thus the greater part of Italy had already fallen under the yoke of the nations which the Italians denominated barbarian. The French were masters of the Milanese and of the whole of Liguria; the Spaniards of the Two Sicilies; even the Swiss had made some small conquests along the Lago Maggiore; and this was the moment in which Louis XII called the Germans also into Italy. On the 22nd of September of the same year in which he lost Gaeta, his last hold in the kingdom of Naples, he signed the Treaty of Blois, by which he divided with Maximilian the republic of Venice, as he had divided with Ferdinand the kingdom of Naples. Experience ought to have taught him that Maximilian, like Ferdinand, would reserve for himself the conquests made in common. The future ought to have alarmed him; for Charles, the grandson and heir of Maximilian of Austria, and of Ferdinand of Aragon, of Mary of Burgundy, and of Isabella of Castile, was already born. It was foreseen that he would unite under his sceptre the greatest monarchies in Europe; and Louis, instead of guarding against his future greatness, had[429] promised to give him his daughter in marriage. It was the thoughtlessness of Maximilian, and not the prudence of Louis, that delayed during four years the execution of the Treaty of Blois.

NORTHERN ITALY

During this interval, Genoa—which had never ceased to consider herself a republic, although the signoria had been conferred first on Ludovico Sforza, and next on Louis XII, as duke of Milan—learned from experience that a foreign monarch was incapable of comprehending either her laws or liberty. According to the capitulation, one-half of the magistrates of Genoa should be noble, the other half plebeian. They were to be chosen by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens; they were to retain the government of the whole of Liguria and the administration of their own finances, with the reservation of a fixed sum payable yearly to the king of France. But the French could never comprehend that nobles were on an equality with villeins; that a king was bound by conditions imposed by his subjects; or that money could be refused to him who had force. All the capitulations of Genoa were successively violated; while the Genoese nobles ranged themselves on the side of a king against their country: they were known to carry insolently about them a dagger, on which was inscribed “Chastise villeins”; so impatient were they to separate themselves from the people, even by meanness and assassination. That people could not support the double yoke of a foreign master and of nobles who betrayed their country. On the 7th of February, 1507, they revolted, drove out the French, proclaimed the republic, and named a new doge; but time failed them to organise their defence. On the 3rd of April Louis advanced from Grenoble with a powerful army. He soon arrived before Genoa: the newly raised militia, unable to withstand veteran troops, were defeated. Louis entered Genoa on the 29th of April; and immediately sent the doge and the greater number of the generous citizens, who had signalised themselves in the defence of their country, to the scaffold.

Independent Italy now comprised only the states of the church, Tuscany, and the republic of Venice; and even these provinces were pressed by the transalpine nations on every side. The Spaniards and French alternately spread terror through Tuscany and the states of the church; the Germans and Turks held in awe the territories of Venice. The states of the church were at the same time a prey to the intrigues of the detestable Alexander, and his son Cesare Borgia. More murders, more assassinations, more glaring acts of perfidy were committed within a short space, than during the annals of the most depraved monarchies. Cesare Borgia, whom his father created duke of Romagna in 1501, had previously despoiled and put to death the petty princes who reigned at Pesaro, Rimini, Forlì, and Faenza. He had, in like manner, possessed himself of Piombino in Tuscany, the duchy of Urbino, and the little principalities of Camerino and Sinigaglia. He had caused to be strangled in this last city, on the 31st of December, 1502, four tyrants of the states of the church, who followed the trade of condottieri. These princes had served in his pay, and, alarmed by his intrigues, had taken arms against him; but, seduced by his artifices, they placed themselves voluntarily in his power. Cesare Borgia had made himself master of Città di Castello, and of Perugia; and was menacing Bologna, Siena, and Florence, when, on the 18th of August, 1503, he and his father drank, by mistake,[430] a poison which they had prepared for one of their guests. His father died of it, and Borgia himself was in extreme danger. In thirteen months he lost all his sovereignties, the fruits of so many crimes. Attacked in turn by Pope Julius II, who had succeeded his father, and by Gonsalvo de Cordova, he was at last sent into Spain, where he died in battle, more honourably than he deserved.

In Tuscany, the republic of Florence found itself surrounded with enemies. The Medici, continuing exiles, had entered into alliances with all the tyrants in the pontifical states: they took part in every plot against their country; at the same time, they sought the friendship of the king of France, who was more disposed to favour a prince than a republic. Piero de’ Medici had accompanied the army sent, in 1508, against the kingdom of Naples, and lost his life at the defeat of the Garigliano. His death did not deliver Florence from the apprehension which he had inspired. His brothers Giovanni and Giuliano carried on their intrigues against their country. The war with Pisa, too, which still lasted, exhausted the finances of Florence. The Pisans had lost their commerce and manufactures; they saw their harvests, each year, destroyed by the Florentines: but they opposed to all these disasters a constancy and courage not to be subdued. The French, Germans, and Spaniards in turn sent them succour; not from taking any interest in their cause, but with the view of profiting by the struggle which they protracted. Lucca and Siena also, jealous of the Florentines, secretly assisted the Pisans; but only so far as they could do it without compromising themselves with neighbours whom they feared. Lucca fell, by degrees, into the hands of a narrow oligarchy. Siena suffered itself to be enslaved by Pandolfo Petrucci, a citizen, whom it had named captain of the guard, and who commanded obedience, without departing from the manners and habits of republican equality.

In the new position of Italy, continually menaced by absolute princes, whose deliberations were secret, and who united perfidy with force, the Florentines became sensible that their government could not act with the requisite discretion and secrecy, while it continued to be changed every two months. Their allies even complained that no secret could be confided to them, without becoming known, at the same time, to the whole republic. They accordingly judged it necessary to place at the head of the state a single magistrate, who should be present at every council, and who should be the depositary of every communication requiring secrecy. This chief, who was to retain the name of gonfalonier, was elected, like the doge of Venice, for life; he was to be lodged in the palace, and to have a salary of 100 florins a month. The law which created a gonfalonier for life was voted on the 16th of August, 1502; but it was not till the 22nd of September following that the grand council chose Pietro Soderini to fill that office. He was a man universally respected; of mature age, without ambition, without children; and the republic never had reason to repent its choice. The republic, at the same time, introduced the authority of a single man into the administration, and suppressed it in the tribunals. A law of the 15th of April, 1502, abolished the offices of podesta and of captain of justice, and supplied their places by the ruota; a tribunal composed of five judges, of whom four must agree in passing sentence: each, in his turn, was to be president of the tribunal for six months. This rotation caused the name of ruota to be given to the supreme courts of law at Rome and Florence.

The most important service expected from Soderini was that of subjecting Pisa anew to the Florentine Republic: he did not accomplish this until[431] 1509. That city had long been reduced to the last extremity: the inhabitants, thinned by war and famine, had no longer any hope of holding out; but Louis XII and Ferdinand of Aragon announced to the Florentines that they must be paid for the conquest which Florence was on the point of making. Pisa had been defended by them since 1507, but only to prevent its surrendering before the amount demanded was agreed on: it was at length fixed at 100,000 florins to be paid to the king of France, and 50,000 to the king of Aragon. This treaty was signed on the 13th of March; and on the 8th of June, 1509, Pisa, which had cruelly suffered from famine, opened its gates to the Florentine army: the occupying army was preceded by convoys of provisions, which the soldiers themselves distributed to the citizens. The signoria of Florence abolished all the confiscations pronounced against the Pisans since the year 1494; they restored to them all their property and privileges. They tried, in every way, to conciliate and attach that proud people; but nothing could overcome their deep resentment, and their regret for the loss of their independence. Almost every family, which had preserved any fortune, emigrated; and the population, already so reduced by war, was still further diminished after the peace.

The republic of Venice was condemned, by the war which it had to support against the Turkish Empire, from 1499 to 1503, to make no effort for maintaining the independence of Italy against France and Aragon. It had solicited the aid of all Christendom, as if for a holy war, against Bajazet II; and, in fact, alternately received assistance from the kings of France, Aragon, and Portugal, and from the pope: but these aids, limited to short services on great occasions, were of little real efficacy. They aggravated the misery of the Greeks among whom the war was carried on, caused little injury to the Turks, and were of but little service to the Venetians. The Mussulmans had made progress in naval discipline; the Venetian fleet could no longer cope with theirs; and Antonio Grimani, its commander, till then considered the most fortunate of the citizens of Venice, already father of a cardinal, and destined, long after, to be the doge of the republic, was, on his return to his country, loaded with irons. Lepanto, Pylos, Modon, and Coron, were successively conquered from the Venetians by the Turks; the former were glad at last to accept a peace negotiated by Andrea Gritti, one of their fellow-citizens, a captive at Constantinople. By this peace they renounced all title to the places which they had lost in the Peloponnesus, and restored to Bajazet the island of Santa Maura, which they had, on their side, conquered from the Turks. This peace was signed in the month of November, 1503.

The period in which the republic of Venice was delivered from the terror of the Turks was also that of the death of Alexander VI, and of the ruin of his son, Cesare Borgia. The opportunity appeared to the signoria favourable for extending its possessions in Romagna. That province had been long the object of its ambition. Venice had acquired by treachery, on the 24th of February, 1441, the principality of Ravenna, governed for 166 years by the house of Polenta. In 1463, it had purchased Cervia, with its salt marshes, from Malatesta IV, one of the princes of Rimini; upon the death of Cesare Borgia, it took possession of Faenza, the principality of Manfredi; of Rimini, the principality of Malatesta; and of several fortresses. Imola and Forlì, governed by the Alidosi and the Ordelaffi, alone remained to be subdued, in order to make Venice mistress of the whole of Romagna. The Venetians offered the pope the same submission, the same annual tribute, for which those petty princes were acknowledged pontifical vicars. But Julius II, who had succeeded Borgia, although violent and irascible, had a strong sense of[432] his duty as a pontiff and as an Italian. He was determined on preserving the states of the church intact for his successors. He rejected all nepotism, all aggrandisement of his family; and would have accused himself of unpardonable weakness, if he suffered others to usurp what he refused to give his family. He haughtily exacted the restitution of all that the Venetians possessed in the states of the church; and as he could not obtain it from them, he consented to receive it from the hands of Louis and Maximilian, who combined to despoil the republic. He, however, communicated to the Venetians the projects formed against them, and it was not till they appeared resolved to restore him nothing, that he concluded his compact with their enemies.

THE LEAGUE OF CAMBRAY

The league against Venice, signed at Cambray, on the 10th of December, 1508, by Margaret of Austria, daughter of Maximilian, and the cardinal d’Amboise, prime minister of Louis, was only the completion of the secret Treaty of Blois, of the 22nd of September, 1504. No offence had been given, to justify this perfidious compact. Maximilian, who detested Louis, had the same year endeavoured to attack him in the Milanese; but the Venetians refused him a passage; and after three months’ hostilities, the treaty between the emperor and the republic was renewed, on the 7th of June, 1508. Louis XII, whom the Venetians defended, and Maximilian, with whom they were reconciled, had no other complaint against them than that they had no king, and that their subjects thus excited the envy of those who had. The two monarchs agreed to divide between them all the Terra Firma of the Venetians, to abandon to Ferdinand all their fortresses in Apulia, to the pope the lordships in Romagna, to the houses of Este and Gonzaga the small districts near the Po; and thus to give all an interest in the destruction of the only state sufficiently strong to maintain the independence of Italy.

France was the first to declare war against the republic of Venice, in the month of January, 1509. Hostilities commenced on the 15th of April; on the 27th of the same month the pope excommunicated the doge and the republic. The Venetians had assembled an army of forty-two thousand men, under the command of the impetuous Bartolommeo d’Alviano and the cautious Pitigliano. The disagreement between these two chiefs, both able generals, caused the loss of the battle of Agnadello, fought on the 14th of May, 1509, with the French, who did not exceed thirty thousand. Half only, or less, of the Venetian army was engaged; but that part fought heroically, and perished without falling back one step. After this discomfiture, Bergamo, Brescia, Crema, and Cremona hastily surrendered to the conquerors, who planted their banners on the border of Ghiara d’Adda, the limits assigned by the treaty of partition. Louis signalised this rapid conquest by atrocious cruelties; he caused the Venetian governors of Caravaggio and of Peschiera to be hanged, and the garrison and inhabitants to be put to the sword; he ruined, by enormous ransoms, all the Venetian nobles who fell into his hands; seeking to vindicate to himself his unjust attack by the hatred which he studied to excite.

The French suspended their operations from the 31st of May; but the emperor, the pope, the duke of Ferrara, the marquis of Mantua, and Ferdinand of Aragon profited by the disasters of the republic to invade its provinces on all sides at once. The senate, in the impossibility of making[433] head against so many enemies, took the generous resolution of releasing all its subjects from their oath of fidelity, and permitting them to treat with the enemy, since it was no longer in its power to defend them. In letting them feel the weight of a foreign yoke, the senate knew that it only rendered more dear the paternal authority of the republic; and, in fact, those citizens who had eagerly opened their gates to the French, Germans, and Spaniards, soon contrasted, in despair, their tyranny with the just and equal power which they had not had the courage to defend. The Germans, above all, no sooner entered the Venetian cities, than they plunged into the most brutal debauchery; offending public decency, and exercising their cruelty and rapacity on all those who came within their reach. Notwithstanding this, the native nobles joined them. They were eager to substitute monarchy for republican equality and freedom, but their insolence only aggravated the hatred which the Germans inspired. The army of the republic had taken refuge at Mestre, on the borders of the Lagune, when suddenly the citizen evinced a courage which the soldier no longer possessed. Treviso, in the month of June, and Padua on the 17th of July, drove out the imperialists; and the banners of St. Mark, which had hitherto constantly retreated, began once again to advance.

The war of the league of Cambray showed the Italians, for the first time, what formidable forces the transalpine nations could bring against them. Maximilian arrived to besiege Padua in the month of September, 1509. He had in his army, Germans, Swiss, French, Spaniards, Savoyards; troops of the pope, of the marquis of Mantua, and of the duke of Modena; in all more than one hundred thousand men, with one hundred pieces of cannon. He was, notwithstanding, obliged to raise the siege, on the 3rd of October, after many encounters, supported on each side with equal valour. But these barbarians, who came to dispute with the Italians the sovereignty of their country, did not need success to prove their ferocity. After having taken from the poor peasant, or captive, all that he possessed, they put him to the torture to discover hidden treasure, or to extort ransom from the compassion of friends. In this abuse of brute force, the Germans showed themselves the most savage, the Spaniards the most coldly ferocious. Both were more odious than the French;[434] although the last mentioned had bands called flayers (écorcheurs), formed in the English wars, and long trained to grind the people.

Pope Julius II soon began to hate his accomplices in the league of Cambray. Violent and irascible, he had often shown in his fits of passion that he could be as cruel as the worst of them. But he had the soul of an Italian. He could not brook the humiliation of his country, and its being enslaved by those whom he called barbarians. Having recovered the cities of Romagna, the subject of his quarrel with the Venetians, he began to make advances to them. At the end of the first campaign, he entered into negotiations; and on the 21st of February, 1510, granted them absolution. He was aware that he could never drive the barbarians out of Italy but by arming them against each other; and as the French were those whom he most feared, he had recourse to the Germans. It was necessary to begin with reconciling the Venetians to the emperor; but Maximilian, always ready to undertake everything, and incapable of bringing anything to a conclusion, would not relax in a single article of what he called his rights. As emperor, he considered himself monarch of all Italy; and although he was always stopped on its frontier, he refused to renounce the smallest part of what he purposed conquering. He asserted that the whole Venetian territory had been usurped from the empire; and before granting peace to the republic, demanded almost its annihilation.

It was with the aid of the Swiss that the pope designed to liberate Italy. He admired the valour and piety of that warlike people; he saw, with pleasure, that cupidity had become their ruling passion. The Italians, who needed the defence of the Swiss, were rich enough to pay them; and a wise policy conspired for once with avarice; for the Swiss republics could not be safe if liberty were not re-established in Italy. Louis XII, by his prejudice in favour of nobility, had offended those proud mountaineers, whom, even in his own army, he considered only as revolted peasants. Julius II employed the bishop of Sion, whom he afterwards made cardinal, to irritate them still more against France. In the course of the summer of 1510, the French, according to the plan which Julius had formed, were attacked in the Milanese by the Swiss, in Genoa by the Genoese emigrants, at Modena by the pontifical troops, and at Verona by the Venetians; but, notwithstanding the profound secrecy in which the pope enveloped his negotiations and intrigues, he could not succeed, as he had hoped, in surprising the French everywhere at the same time. The four attacks were made successively, and repulsed. The sire de Chaumont, lieutenant of Louis in Lombardy, determined to avenge himself by besieging the pope in Bologna, in the month of October. Julius feigned a desire to purchase peace at any price; but, while negotiating, he caused troops to advance; and, on finding himself the stronger, suddenly changed his language, used threats, and made Chaumont retire. When Chaumont had placed his troops in winter quarters, the pope, during the greatest severity of the season, attacked the small state of Mirandola, which had put itself under the protection of France, and entered its capital by a breach, on the 20th of January, 1511.

The pope’s troops, commanded by the duke of Urbino, experienced in the following campaign a signal defeat at Casalecchio, on the 21st of May, 1511. It was called “the day of the ass-drivers,” because the French knights returned driving asses before them loaded with booty. The loss of Bologna followed; but Julius II was not discouraged. His legates laboured, throughout Europe, to raise enemies against France. They at last accomplished a league, which was signed on the 5th of October, and which was called “holy,”[435] because it was headed by the pope. It comprehended the kings of Spain and England, the Swiss, and the Venetians. Louis XII, to oppose an ecclesiastical authority to that of the pontiffs, convoked, in concert with Maximilian, whom he continued to consider his ally, an œcumenical council. A few cardinals, who had separated from the pope, clothed it with their authority; and Florence dared not refuse to the two greatest monarchs of Europe the city of Pisa for its place of meeting, although the whole population beheld with dread this commencement of a new schism.d

The combined forces were to be placed under the command of Raymond de Cardona, viceroy of Naples, a person of polished and engaging address, but without the resolution or experience requisite to military success. The rough old pope sarcastically nicknamed him “Lady Cardona.” It was an appointment that would certainly never have been made by Queen Isabella. Indeed, the favour shown this nobleman on this and other occasions was so much beyond his deserts as to raise a suspicion in many that he was more nearly allied by blood to Ferdinand than was usually imagined.

THE BATTLE OF RAVENNA

Early in 1512, France, by great exertions and without a single confederate out of Italy, save the false and fluctuating emperor, got an army into the field superior to that of the allies in point of numbers, and still more so in the character of its commander. This was Gaston de Foix, duke of Nemours and brother of the queen of Aragon. Though a boy in years—for he was but twenty-two—he was ripe in understanding, and possessed consummate military talents. He introduced a severer discipline into his army, and an entirely new system of tactics. He looked forward to his results with stern indifference to the means by which they were to be effected. He disregarded the difficulties of the roads and the inclemency of the season, which had hitherto put a check on military operations. Through the midst of frightful morasses, or in the depth of winter snows, he performed his marches with a celerity unknown in the warfare of that age. In less than a fortnight after leaving Milan he relieved Bologna (February 5th), then besieged by the allies, made a countermarch on Brescia, defeated a detachment by the way, and the whole Venetian army under its walls, and, on the same day with the last event, succeeded in carrying the place by storm. After a few weeks’ dissipation of the carnival, he again put himself in motion, and, descending on Ravenna, succeeded in bringing the allied army to a decisive action under its walls. Ferdinand, well understanding the peculiar characters of the French and of the Spanish soldier, had cautioned his general to adopt the Fabian policy of Gonsalvo, and avoid a close encounter as long as possible.

This battle, fought with the greatest numbers, was also the most murderous which had stained the fair soil of Italy for a century (April 11th, 1512). No less than eighteen or twenty thousand, according to authentic accounts, fell in it, comprehending the best blood of France and Italy. The viceroy Cardona went off somewhat too early for his reputation. But the Spanish infantry, under the count Pedro Navarro, behaved in a style worthy of the school of Gonsalvo. During the early part of the day, they lay on the ground, in a position which sheltered them from the deadly artillery of Este, then the best mounted and best served of any in Europe. When at length, as the tide of battle was going against them, they were brought into the[436] field, Navarro led them at once against a deep column of lansquenets who, armed with the long German pike, were bearing down all before them. The Spaniards received the shock of this formidable weapon on the mailed panoply with which their bodies were covered, and, dexterously gliding into the hostile ranks, contrived with their short swords to do such execution on the enemy, unprotected except by corselets in front, and incapable of availing themselves of their long weapon, that they were thrown into confusion and totally discomfited. It was repeating the experiment more than once made during these wars, but never on so great a scale, and it fully establishes the superiority of the Spanish arms.

The Italian infantry, which had fallen back before the lansquenets, now rallied under cover of the Spanish charge; until at length the overwhelming clouds of French gendarmerie headed by Ives d’Alègre, who lost his own life in the mêlée, compelled the allies to give ground. The retreat of the Spaniards, however, was conducted with admirable order, and they preserved their ranks unbroken, as they repeatedly turned to drive back the tide of pursuit. At this crisis, Gaston de Foix, flushed with success, was so exasperated by the sight of this valiant corps going off in so cool and orderly a manner from the field, that he made a desperate charge at the head of his chivalry, in hopes of breaking it. Unfortunately, his wounded horse fell under him. It was in vain his followers called out, “It is our viceroy, the brother of your queen!” The words had no charm for a Spanish ear, and he was despatched with a multitude of wounds. He received fourteen or fifteen in the face; “good proof,” says Bayard’s secretary and biographer, called the loyal serviteur,j “that the gentle prince had never turned his back.”

There are few instances in history, if indeed there be any, of so brief and at the same time so brilliant a military career as that of Gaston de Foix; and it well entitled him to the epithet his countrymen gave him of “the thunderbolt of Italy.” He had not merely given extraordinary promise, but in the course of a very few months had achieved such results as might well make the greatest powers of the peninsula tremble for their possessions. His precocious military talents, the early age at which he assumed the command of armies, as well as many peculiarities of his discipline and tactics, suggest some resemblance to the beginning of Napoleon’s career.

Unhappily, his brilliant fame is sullied by a recklessness of human life, the more odious in one too young to be steeled by familiarity with the iron trade to which he was devoted. It may be fair, however, to charge this on the age rather than on the individual, for surely never was there one characterised by greater brutality and more unsparing ferocity in its wars. So little had the progress of civilisation done for humanity. It is not until a recent period that a more generous spirit has operated; that a fellow-creature has been understood not to forfeit his rights as a man because he is an enemy; that conventional laws have been established, tending greatly to mitigate the evils of a condition which, with every alleviation, is one of unspeakable misery; and that those who hold the destinies of nations in their hands have been made to feel that there is less true glory, and far less profit, to be derived from war than from the wise prevention of it.

The defeat at Ravenna struck a panic into the confederates. The stout heart of Julius II faltered, and it required all the assurances of the Spanish and Venetian ministers to keep him staunch to his purpose. King Ferdinand issued orders to the great captain to hold himself in readiness for taking the command of forces to be instantly raised for Naples. There could be no better proof of the royal consternation.

The victory of Ravenna, however, was more fatal to the French than to their foes. The uninterrupted successes of a commander are so far unfortunate, that they incline his followers, by the brilliant illusion they throw around his name, to rely less on their own resources than on him whom they have hitherto found invincible; and thus subject their own destiny to all the casualties which attach to the fortunes of a single individual. The death of Gaston de Foix seemed to dissolve the only bond which held the French together. The officers became divided, the soldiers disheartened, and, with the loss of their young hero, lost all interest in the service.g

The ministers of Louis thought they might, after the battle of Ravenna, safely dismiss a part of their army; but Maximilian, betraying all his engagements, abandoned the French to their enemies. Without consenting to make peace with Venice, he gave passage through his territory to twenty thousand Swiss, who were to join the Venetian army, in order to attack the French. He, at the same time, recalled all the Germans who had enlisted under the banner of France. Ferdinand of Aragon and Henry VIII of England almost simultaneously attacked Louis, who, to defend himself, was obliged to recall his troops from Italy. In the beginning of June, they evacuated the Milanese; of which the Swiss took possession, in the name of Massimiliano Sforza, son of Lodovico il Moro (the Moor). On the 29th of the same month, a revolution drove the French out of Genoa; and the republic and a new doge were again proclaimed. The possessions of France were soon reduced to a few small fortresses in that Italy which the French thought they had subdued. But the Italians did not recover their liberty by the defeat of only one of their oppressors. From the yoke of France, they passed under that of the Swiss, the Spaniards, and the Germans; and the last they endured always seemed the most galling. To add to their humiliation, the victory of the Holy League enslaved the last and only republic truly free in Italy.

Florence was connected with France by a treaty concluded in concert with Ferdinand the Catholic. The republic continued to observe it scrupulously, even after Ferdinand had disengaged himself from it. Florence had fulfilled towards all the belligerent powers the duties of good neighbourhood and neutrality, and had given offence to none; but the league, which had just driven the French out of Italy, was already divided in interest, and undecided on the plan which it should pursue. It was agreed only on one point, that of obtaining money. The Swiss lived at discretion in Lombardy, and levied in it the most ruinous contributions: the Spaniards of Raymond de Cardona insisted also on having a province abandoned to their inexorable avidity; Tuscany was rich and not warlike. The victorious powers who had assembled in congress at Mantua proposed to the Florentines to buy themselves off with a contribution; but the Medici, who presented themselves at this congress, asked to be restored to their country, asserting that they could extract much more money by force, for the use of the Holy League, than a republican government could obtain from the people by gentler means. Raymond de Cardona readily believed them, and in the month of August, 1512, accompanied them across the Apennines, with five thousand Spanish infantry as inaccessible to pity as to fear. Raymond sent forward to tell the Florentines that, if they would preserve their liberty, they must recall the Medici, displace the gonfalonier Soderini, and pay the Spanish army 40,000 florins. He arrived at the same time before the small town of Prato, which shut its gates against him; it was well fortified, but defended only by the ordinanza, or country militia. On the 30th of August, the Spaniards made a breach in[438] the wall, which these peasants basely abandoned. The city was taken by assault; the militia, which would have incurred less danger in fighting valiantly, were put to the sword; five thousand citizens were afterwards massacred, and others, divided among the victors, were put to lingering tortures, either to force them to discover where they had concealed their treasure, or to oblige their kinsmen to ransom them out of pity; the Spaniards having already pillaged all they could discover in holy as well as profane places.

The terror caused at Florence, by the news of the massacre of Prato, produced next day a revolution. A company of young nobles, belonging to the most illustrious families, who, under the title of Society of the Garden Ruccellai, were noted for their love of the arts, of luxury and pleasure, took possession, on the 31st of August, of the public palace; they favoured the escape of Soderini, and sent to tell Raymond de Cardona that they were ready to accept the conditions which he offered. But all treaties with tyrants are deceptions. Giuliano de’ Medici, the third son of Lorenzo, whose character was gentle and conciliatory, entered Florence on the 2nd of September, and consented to leave many of the liberties of the republic untouched. His brother, the cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo X, who did not enter till the 14th of the same month, forced the signoria to call a parliament on the 16th. In this pretended assembly of the sovereign people, few were admitted except strangers and soldiers: all the laws enacted since the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 were abolished. A balia, composed only of the creatures of that family, was invested with the sovereignty of the republic. This balia showed itself abjectly subservient to the cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, his brother Giuliano, and their nephew Lorenzo, who now returned to Florence after eighteen years of exile, during which they had lost every republican habit, and all sympathy with their fellow-citizens. None of them had legitimate children; but they brought back with them three bastards,—Giulio, afterwards Clement VII, Ippolito, and Alessandro,—who had all a fatal influence on the destiny of their country. Their fortune, formerly colossal, was dissipated in their long exile; and their first care, on returning to Florence, was to raise money for themselves, as well as for the Spaniards, who had re-established their tyranny.

The three destructive wars—viz., that of the French and Swiss in the Milanese, that of the French and Spaniards in the kingdom of Naples, that of the French, Spaniards, Germans, and Swiss, in the states of Venice—robbed Italy of her independence. The country to which Europe was indebted for its progress in every art and science, which had imparted to other nations the medical science of Salerno, the jurisprudence of Bologna, the theology of Rome, the philosophy, poetry, and fine arts of Florence, the tactics and strategy of the Bracceschi and Sforzeschi schools, the commerce and banks of the Lombards, the process of irrigation, the scientific cultivation both of hills and plains—that country now belonged no more to its own inhabitants! The struggle between the transalpine nations continued, with no other object than that of determining to which of them Italy should belong; and bequeathed nothing to that nation but long-enduring, hopeless agonies. Julius II in vain congratulated himself on having expelled the French, who had first imposed a foreign yoke on Italy; he vowed in vain that he would never rest till he had also driven out all the barbarians; but he deceived himself in his calculations: he did not drive out the barbarians, he only made them give way to other barbarians; and the new-comers were ever the most oppressive and cruel. However, this project of national liberation, which the pope alone could still entertain in Italy with any prospect of[439] success, was soon abandoned. Eight months after the expulsion of the French from the Milanese, and five months after the re-establishment of the Medici at Florence, Julius II, on the 21st of February, 1513, sank under an inflammatory disease. On the 11th of March, Giovanni de’ Medici succeeded him, under the name of Leo X—eleven months after the latter had been made prisoner by the French at the battle of Ravenna, and six months after the Spanish arms had given him the sovereignty of his country, Florence.

THE AGE OF LEO X

It has been the singular good fortune of Leo X to have his name associated with the most brilliant epoch of letters and the arts since their revival. He has thus shared the glory of all the poets, philosophers, artists, men of learning and science, his contemporaries. He has been held up to posterity as one who formed and raised to eminence men who were in fact his elders, and who had attained celebrity before the epoch of his power. His merit consisted in showering his liberality on those whose works and whose fame had already deserved it. His reign, on the other hand, which lasted nine years, was marked by fearful calamities, which hastened the destruction of those arts and sciences to which alone the age of Leo owes its splendour. The misfortunes which he drew down on his successor was still more dreadful. The pope was himself a man of pleasure, easy, careless, prodigal; who expended in sumptuous feasts the immense treasures accumulated by his predecessors. He had the taste to adorn his palace with the finest works of antiquity, and the sense to enjoy the society of philosophers and poets; but he had never the elevation of soul to comprehend his duties, or to consult his conscience. His indecent conversation and licentious conduct scandalised the church; his prodigality led him to encourage the shameful traffic in indulgences, which gave rise to the schism of Luther; his thoughtlessness and indifference to human suffering made him light up wars the most ruinous, and which he was utterly unable to carry on; he never thought of securing the independence of Italy, or of expelling the barbarians: it was simply for the aggrandisement of his family that he contracted or abandoned alliances with the transalpine nations: he succeeded, indeed, in procuring that his brother Giuliano should be named duke of Nemours, and he created his nephew duke of Urbino; but he endeavoured also to erect for the former a new state, composed of the districts of Parma, Piacenza, Reggio, and Modena; for the latter, another, consisting of the several petty principalities which still maintained themselves in the states of the church. His tortuous policy to accomplish the first object, his perfidy and cruelty to attain the second, deserved to be much more severely branded by historians.

The sovereign pontiff and the republic of Venice were the only powers in Italy which still preserved some shadow of independence. Julius II had succeeded in uniting Romagna, the Marches, the patrimony and campagna of Rome, to the holy see. Amongst all the vassals of the church, he had spared only his own nephew, Gian Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino. On the defeat of the French, he further seized Parma and Piacenza, which he detached from the Milanese, without having the remotest title to their possession, as he also took Modena from the duke of Ferrara, whom he detested. Leo X found the holy see in possession of all these states, and was at the same time himself all-powerful at Florence. Even the moment of his elevation to the pontificate was marked by an event which showed that every[440] vestige of liberty had disappeared from that republic. The partisans of the Medici pretended to have discovered at Florence a conspiracy, of which they produced no other proofs than some imprudent speeches, and some wishes uttered for liberty. The most illustrious citizens were, nevertheless, arrested; and Macchiavelli, with several others, was put to the torture. Pietro Boscoli and Agostino Capponi were beheaded; and those who were called their accomplices exiled. The two republics of Siena and Lucca were in a state of trembling subjection to the pontiff; so that all central Italy, peopled with about four million inhabitants, was dependent on him: but the court of Rome, since it had ceased to respect the ancient municipal liberties, never extended its authority over a new province without ruining its population and resources. Law and order seemed incompatible with the government of priests: the laws gave way to intrigue and favour; commerce gave way to monopoly. Justice deserted the tribunals, foresight the councils, and valour the armies. It was proverbially said that the arms of the church had no edge. The great name of pope still moved Europe at a distance, but it brought no real force to the allies whom he adopted.

The republic of Venice, with a smaller territory, and a far less numerous population, was in reality much more powerful than the church. Venetian subjects, if they did not enjoy liberty, had at least a government which maintained justice, order, and the law; their material prosperity was judiciously protected. They in return were contented, and proved themselves devotedly attached to their government; but the wars raised by the league of Cambray overwhelmed that republic with calamity. The city of Venice, secure amidst the waters, alone escaped the invasion of the barbarians; though, even there, the richest quarters had been laid waste by an accidental fire. The country and the provincial towns experienced in turn the ferocity of the French, Swiss, Germans, and Spaniards. Three centuries and a half had elapsed since this same Veronese march, the cradle of the Lombard League, had repelled the invasion of Frederick Barbarossa. But while the world boasted a continual progress, since that period, in civilisation,—while philosophy and justice had better defined the rights of men,—while the arts, literature, and poetry had quickened the feelings, and rendered man more susceptible of painful impressions,—war was made with a ferocity at which men in an age of the darkest barbarism would have blushed. The massacre of all the inhabitants of a town taken by assault, the execution of whole garrisons which had surrendered at discretion, the giving up of prisoners to the conquering soldiers in order to be tortured into the confession of hidden treasure, became the common practice of war in the armies of Louis XII, Ferdinand, and Maximilian. Kings were haughty in proportion to their power; they considered themselves at so much the greater distance above human nature: they were the more offended at all resistance, the more incapable of compassion for sufferings which they did not see or did not comprehend. The misery which they caused presented itself to them more as an abstraction; they regarded masses, not individuals; they justified their cruelties by the name of offended majesty; they quieted remorse by considering themselves, not as men, but as scourges in the hand of God. Centuries have elapsed, and civilisation has not ceased to march forward; the voice of humanity has continued to become more and more powerful; no one now dares to believe himself great enough to be dispensed from humanity; nevertheless, those who would shrink with horror from witnessing the putting to death of an individual do not hesitate to condemn whole nations to execution. The crimes which[441] remain for us to relate do not merit more execration than those of which we are ourselves the witnesses at this day. Kings, in their detestation of freedom, let loose upon unhappy Italy, in the sixteenth century, famine, war, and pestilence; as, from the same motive in a later time, they loosed upon heroic Poland, famine, war, and the cholera.

Louis XII, after having lost the Milanese, through his infatuated ambition to reconquer the small province of the Cremonese, which he had himself ceded to the republic of Venice, felt anew the desire of being reconciled with that republic, his first ally in Italy. The Venetians, who knew that without their money, artillery, and cavalry, the Swiss could never have faced the French, much less have driven them out of Italy, saw that their allies did not appreciate their efforts and sacrifices. Maximilian, who in joining never granted them peace, but only a truce, reasserted his claims on Verona and Vicenza, and would not consent to allow the Venetians any states in terra firma but such as they purchased from him at an enormous price. The pope, to enforce the demands of Maximilian, threatened the Venetians with excommunication; and their danger after victory appeared as great as after defeat. Andrea Gritti, one of their senators,—made prisoner after the battle of Agnadello, and the same who, during his captivity at Constantinople, had signed the peace of his country with the Turks,—again took advantage of his captivity in France to negotiate with Louis. He reconciled the republic with that monarch, who had been the first to attack it; and a treaty of alliance was signed at Blois, on the 24th of March, 1513. This was, however, a source of new calamity to Venice. A French army, commanded by La Trémouille, entered the Milanese, and on its approach the Germans and Spaniards retired. The Swiss, who gloried in having re-established Massimiliano Sforza on the throne of his ancestors, were, however, resolved not to abandon him. They descended from their mountains in numerous bodies, on the 6th of June, 1513; attacked La Trémouille at the Riotta, near Novara; defeated him, and drove him back with all the French forces beyond the Alps. The Spaniards and the soldiers of Leo X next attacked the Venetians without any provocation: they were at peace with the republic, but they invaded its territory in the name of their ally Maximilian. They occupied the Paduan state, the Veronese, and that of Vicenza, from the 13th of June till the end of autumn. It was during this invasion the Spaniards displayed that heartless cruelty which rendered them the horror of Italy; that cupidity which multiplied torture, and which invented sufferings more and more atrocious, to extort gold from their prisoners. The Germans in the next campaign overran the Venetian provinces; and, notwithstanding the savage cruelties and numerous crimes of which the country had just been the theatre, yet the German commander found means to signalise himself by his ferocity.

The Battle of Marignano; Last Years of Leo

Francis I succeeded Louis XII on the 1st of January, 1515; on the 27th of June he renewed his predecessor’s treaty of alliance with Venice; and on the 15th of August entered the plains of Lombardy, by the marquisate of Saluzzo, with a powerful army. He met but little resistance in the provinces south of the Po; but the Swiss meanwhile arrived in great force to defend Massimiliano Sforza, whom, since they had reseated him on the throne, they regarded as their vassal. Francis in vain endeavoured to negotiate with them: they would not listen to the voice of their commanders; democracy had passed from their landsgemeinde into their armies, popular orators roused[442] their passions; and on the 13th of September they impetuously left Milan to attack Francis I at Marignano (Melegnano). Deep ditches lined with soldiers bordered the causeway by which they advanced; their commanders wished by some manœuvre to get clear of them, or make the enemy change his position; but the Swiss, despising all the arts of war, expected to command success by mere intrepidity and bodily strength.d

As soon as Francis I became aware that the Swiss were marching against him he made vigorous preparations to receive them. The duchy of Milan, which with prudent negotiation he hoped to obtain, could only be gained by a complete victory.

His army was drawn up on three lines on the road leading from Marignano to Milan; the advance-guard, commanded by the high constable of Bourbon, encamped in the village of San Giuliano, a short distance below San Donato; the main body of the army, the command of which the king had reserved for himself, was at Santa Brigitta, within bowshot of the high constable; the rear-guard, placed under the command of the duke of Alençon, was at about the same distance from the king’s main body. The army, thus disposed in echelons, held the highway of Milan on its left, and protecting its right by the river Lambro, occupied a territory covered with trenches and intersected with small irrigation canals, which would guard it from the sudden attacks of the Swiss infantry, and also sometimes be inconvenient for the deploying and the charges of its own cavalry, wherein lay a principal portion of its strength.

Francis I hastily made his arrangements to face the danger, and withstand the shock of an encounter with the Swiss army. As he himself said in the animated description of the battle he sent to his mother, the regent, he “placed his German foot-soldiers in order.” He had formed two corps of them, each nine thousand strong, and placed them on the sides of the avenue by which the Swiss were advancing, besides the picked corps of six thousand lansquenets of the Black Companies. The Gascon archers and the French adventurers, under Pedro Navarro, occupied, not far from there, a very strong position near the heavy artillery, which was ably led by the seneschal of Armagnac.

The Swiss then came up. They had made the distance between Milan and the French camp without stopping. “It is not possible,” says the king, “to advance with greater fury or more boldly.” The discharge of the artillery forced them to take shelter for a moment in a hollow. Then, with levelled pikes, they fell upon the French army. The high constable of Bourbon, and Marshal de la Palice at the head of the men-at-arms of the advance-guard, charged, but were not able to break through them. Thrown back themselves upon their infantry, they were pursued by the Swiss, who attacked the lansquenets with fury and put them to rout. The day was declining, and the battle, begun late (between four and five o’clock), was assuming the same appearance as at Navarre. The largest company of Swiss, having driven back the men-at-arms and overthrown the lansquenets, was marching upon the guns to seize them, turn them against the French army, and thus complete her defeat.

But there were braver hearts and more resolute spirits amongst those commanding at Marignano than at Navarre. Francis I, armed cap-à-pie, mounted on a great charger whose caparison was covered in fleur-de-lis and his initial, F, crowned, had flung himself in this victorious moment before the Swiss at the head of two hundred men-at-arms, as well as eight hundred horsemen. After having valiantly charged one of their companies[443] and forced them to throw down their pikes, he had attacked a large company which he was not able to overcome but compelled to retreat. Then, proceeding in the direction of his threatened artillery, he there rallied five or six thousand lansquenets, and more than three thousand men-at-arms, with whom he made a firm stand against the largest detachment of the Swiss, who were not able to seize and remove the pieces of cannon as they intended. The better to impede these Swiss, Francis I discharged a charge of artillery upon them, which dislodged them and obliged them to return to a trench they had crossed and there take shelter.

The high constable, on his side, having rallied a large company of men-at-arms and the majority of the infantry, had attacked five or six thousand Swiss with much vigour, and had driven them back to their own places. Night fell whilst both sides were fighting thus—the Swiss without succeeding in carrying the French camps, the French unable to completely repulse the attacks of the Swiss. They continued fighting with pertinacity and no little confusion for several hours by the dim light of the moon, still veiled by the clouds of dust. The hostile troops had some difficulty in recognising each other in this vast and confused struggle. Towards eleven o’clock at night, the moonlight having failed them, darkness prevented their continuing this desperate conflict. The Swiss had had the advantage at the commencement of the battle, as they had broken through the French lines, but things had been less favourable to them at the finish, as they had been partly driven back to their own. In spite of their efforts, having attacked that day without vanquishing, they awaited the morrow to recommence the battle.

Both sides passed the night under arms in the position occupied at the cessation of action owing to the darkness, and not far from each other. Francis I, after many charges, had returned to the artillery, who, firing opportunely upon the Swiss battalions, had several times broken through them, and were shortly to prove to be of even more powerful assistance. Showing the foresight of a general after showing the intrepidity of a soldier, he caused Duprat, the chancellor, who had followed him on this campaign, to write three most important letters, which were confided to trusty messengers. The first was addressed to the Venetian general, Bartolommeo d’Alviano, whom he enjoined to set out immediately, and to come from Lodi with his customary promptitude, so as to join the forces he commanded to those of Francis on the following day. The second exhorted Louis d’Ars, who occupied Pavia, to carefully guard his stronghold which might, in case of disaster, serve as a point of retreat. In the third he warned Lautrec of the attack of the Swiss, and advised him not to remit or allow to be taken[444] the money he carried about him, in execution of the violated treaty of Gallarate. These precautions taken, he “spent the rest of the night,” so he wrote after the battle, “in the saddle, his lance in hand, and his helmet on his head,” and only rested for a few moments, leaning on a gun-carriage.

An hour before dawn he prepared everything for the coming battle. He took up a position slightly in the rear, and more favourable than the one he had occupied the preceding day. Instead of leaving his army drawn up in three lines, he placed his men abreast in only one line. Remaining in the centre of his battle array, he called upon the high constable of Bourbon to form his right wing with the advance-guard, and his brother-in-law, the duke of Alençon, to form his left wing with the rear-guard. The guns, well placed and defended, were by well-directed firing, to harass the enemy on their march, and could only be approached by them with difficulty. It was in this order that Francis I awaited the attack of the Swiss.

The leaders of the allies had held a council of war during the night, to consult as to the next day’s battle and how to render it more decisive. At daybreak they closed up their huge battalions and set out somewhat ponderously. They seemed at first to be proceeding in a body towards the centre of the French army, but some discharges of artillery which pierced their ranks caused them to retreat in the direction of the positions they had occupied during the night. There they formed into three detachments which marched on the main body and the two wings of the French. The first detachment, supported by the six small guns of the Swiss, advanced towards Francis I, whose steadfast attitude and powerful artillery kept it at a certain distance. Whilst this detachment of eight hundred men faced and attacked the king, the two other detachments of about equal strength had flung themselves upon the two wings commanded by the high constable and the duke of Alençon, hoping to scatter them, so as to then surround, and thus easily overcome, the main body of the army. Whether the Swiss had less confidence than the day before, or whether they were met with even more courage and steadfastness, they saw their enemies facing their pikes as they had never done yet. The high constable with his lansquenets and men-at-arms, and Pedro Navarro with the Gascon archers and the adventurers, resisted the detachment attacking the right wing, and, after a sharp struggle, drove it back. In the left wing the duke of Alençon was at first less fortunate. Whilst the king stopped the advance of the central column of the Swiss, and the high constable victoriously drove back the left one, the right column had turned and assailed the forces of the duke of Alençon, which had been scattered and had retreated in confusion. In spite of the terror of the fugitives, who had precipitately fled from the field of battle, and were spreading along the road to Pavia the news of the victory of the Swiss, the conflict remained at this point.

D’Aubigny and Aymar de Prie, having rallied the troops, did their utmost to repair the disaster of the duke of Alençon, and bravely charged the enemy. They were struggling with them when Bartolommeo d’Alviano, who had started early from Lodi, arrived about ten o’clock from that side of the battle-field. At the head of his armed men and his light cavalry, he at once fell upon the Swiss with the cry of “Saint Mark!” This unexpected attack disconcerted them. They feared the whole Venetian army would be upon them, and they retreated. Closely pursued, they fell back towards the centre, where the allies’ battalions, placed opposite Francis I, had not been able to make any progress. They discharged and received cannon-shots during several hours, possibly awaiting the victorious issue[445] of the two attacks of the right and left wings to attempt more securely to break through the main body of the army. They made one last and vigorous effort. A company of five thousand men were told off, and marched with the resolution of despair as far as the French lines. But, taken obliquely by the artillery, charged by Francis I and his men-at-arms, attacked with hatchets and pikes by the valiant lansquenets of the Black Company, stationed in the centre with the king, pierced by the arrows of the Gascon archers, who had hastened from the right side where they had gained the mastery, the Swiss company was cut to pieces and none escaped.

The king, with a decisive movement, then bore down with his cavalry upon the other confederates, who abandoned their position and their guns. The Swiss, driven back or vanquished on every side, gave the signal for retreat, and retired from the battle-field, leaving from seven to eight thousand dead. Carrying their wounded, they retook the Milan road in fairly good order and without pursuit, and entered that town with a haughty demeanour, and not as a defeated army. They were beaten, nevertheless, for they had just lost at Marignano that prestige, which, since Sempach, Granson, and Morat, and as late as at Novara, had made them invincible.h

This horrible butchery, however, hastened the conclusion of the wars which arose from the league of Cambray. The Swiss were not sufficiently powerful to maintain their sway in Lombardy; eight of their cantons, on the 7th of November, signed, at Geneva, a treaty of peace with Francis I, who compensated with considerable sums of money all the claims which they consented to abandon. On the 29th of November the other cantons acceded to this pacification, which took the name of “Paix perpétuelle,” and France recovered the right of raising such infantry as she needed among the Swiss. Raymond de Cardona, alarmed at the retreat of the Swiss, evacuated Lombardy with the Spanish troops. The French recovered possession of the whole duchy of Milan. Massimiliano Sforza abdicated the sovereignty for a revenue of 30,000 crowns secured to him in France. Leo X, ranging himself on the side of the victors, signed, at Viterbo, on the 13th of October, a treaty, by which he restored Parma and Piacenza to the French.

In a conference held with Francis at Bologna, between the 10th and 15th of the following December, Leo induced that monarch to sacrifice the liberties of the Gallican church by the concordat, to renounce the protection he had hitherto extended to the Florentines and to the duke of Urbino, although the former had always remained faithful to France. The pope seized the states of the duke of Urbino, and conferred them on his nephew, Lorenzo II de’ Medici. Amidst these transactions, Ferdinand the Catholic died, on the 15th of January, 1516, and his grandson Charles succeeded to his Spanish kingdoms. On the 13th of August following, Charles signed, at Noyon, a treaty, by which Francis ceded to him all his right to the kingdom of Naples as the dower of a newborn daughter, whom he promised to Charles in marriage. From that time Maximilian remained singly at war with the republic of Venice and with France. During the campaign of 1516, his German army continued to commit the most enormous crimes in the Veronese march; but Maximilian had never money enough to carry on the war without the subsidies of his allies; remaining alone, he could no longer hope to be successful. On the 14th of December he consented to accede to the treaty of Noyon; he evacuated Verona, which he had till then occupied, and the Venetians were once more put by the French in possession of all the states of which the league of Cambray had proposed the partition: but their wealth was annihilated, their population reduced to one-half, their constitution itself shaken, and[446] they were never after in a state to make those efforts for the defence of the independence of Italy, which might have been expected from them before this devastating war.

Had Italy been allowed to repose after so many disasters, she might still have recovered her strength and population; and when the struggle should have recommenced with the transalpine nations, she would have been found prepared for battle; but the heartless levity and ambition of Leo did not give her time. While the family of the Medici was becoming extinct around him, he dreamed only of investing it with new dignities; he refused the Florentines permission to re-establish their republic, and offered his alliance to whatever foreign monarch would aid him in founding on its ruins a principality for the bastard Medici. His third brother Giuliano, duke of Nemours, whom he had at first charged with the government of Florence, died on the 17th of March, 1516. Lorenzo II, son of his eldest brother Piero, whom he had made duke of Urbino, and whom he sent to command at Florence after Giuliano, rendered himself odious there by his pride and by his contemptible incapacity—he too died only three years afterwards, on the 28th of April, 1519. Leo supplied his place by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, afterwards Clement VII. This prelate was the natural son of the first Giuliano killed in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. He was considered the most able of the pope’s ministers, and the most moderate of his lieutenants. Giuliano II had also left an illegitimate son, Ippolito, afterwards cardinal; and Lorenzo II had a legitimate daughter, Catherine, afterwards queen of France, and an illegitimate son, Alexander, destined to be the future tyrant of Florence. Leo, whether desirous of establishing these descendants, or carried away by the restlessness and levity of his character, sighed only for war.

The emperor Maximilian died on the 19th of January, 1519, leaving his hereditary states of Austria to his grandson Charles, already sovereign of all Spain, of the Two Sicilies, of the Low Countries, and of the county of Burgundy. Charles and Francis both presented themselves as candidates for the imperial crown; the electors gave it to the former, on the 28th of June, 1519; he was from that period named Charles V. Italy, indeed the whole of Europe, was endangered by the immeasurable growth of this young monarch’s power. The states of the church, over which he domineered by means of his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, could not hope to preserve any independence but through an alliance with France. Leo at first thought so, and signed the preliminary articles of a league with Francis; but, suddenly changing sides, he invited Charles V to join him in driving the French out of Italy. A secret treaty was signed between him and the emperor, on the[447] 8th of May, 1521. By this the duchy of Milan was to be restored to Francesco Sforza, the second son of Louis the Moor. Parma, Piacenza, and Ferrara were to be united to the holy see: a duchy in the kingdom of Naples was to be secured to the bastard Alessandro de’ Medici. The pope united his army to that of the emperor in the kingdom of Naples; the command of it was given jointly to Prospero Colonna and the marquis Pescara: war was declared on the 1st of August, and the imperial and pontifical troops entered Milan on the 19th of November: but in the midst of the joy of this first success, Leo X died unexpectedly, on the 1st of December, 1521.

SUCCESSORS OF LEO; FRANCIS I AND CHARLES V

Death opportunely delivered Leo from the dangers and anxieties into which he had thoughtlessly precipitated himself. His finances were exhausted; his prodigality had deprived him of every resource; and he had no means of carrying on a war which he had only just begun. He left his successors in a state of distress which was unjustly attributed to them, and which rendered them odious to the people; for the war into which he had plunged them, without any reasonable motive, was the most disastrous of all those which had yet afflicted unhappy Italy. There remained no power truly Italian that could take any part in it for her defence. Venice was so exhausted by the war of the league of Cambray that she was forced to limit her efforts to the maintenance of her neutrality, and was hardly powerful enough to make even her neutral position respected. Florence remained subject to the cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. The republics of Siena and Lucca were tremblingly prepared to obey the strongest: all the rest depended on the transalpine power; for an unexpected election, on the 9th of January, 1522, had given a Flemish successor to Leo X, under the name of Adrian VI. This person had been the preceptor of Charles V, and had never seen Italy, where he was regarded as a barbarian. The kingdom of Naples was governed and plundered by the Spaniards. After the French had lost the duchy of Milan, Francesco Sforza, who had been brought back by the imperialists, possessed only the name of sovereign. He had never been for a moment independent; he had never been able to protect his subjects from the tyranny of the Spanish and German soldiers, who were his guards. Finally, the marquis de Montferrat and the duke of Savoy had allowed the French to become masters in their states, and had no power to refuse them passage to ravage oppressed Italy anew.

The marshal Lautrec, whom Francis I had charged to defend the Milanese, and who still occupied the greater part of the territory, was forced by the Swiss, who formed the sinews of his army, to attack the imperialists on the 29th of April, 1522, at Bicocca. Prospero Colonna had taken up a strong position about three or four miles from Milan, on the road to Monza: he valued himself on making a defensive war—on being successful without giving battle. The Swiss attacked him in front, throwing themselves, without listening to the voice of their commander, into a hollow way which covered him, and where they perished, without the possibility of resistance. After having performed prodigies of valour, the remainder were repulsed with dreadful loss. In spite of the remonstrances of Lautrec, they immediately departed for their mountains; and he for his court, to justify himself. Lescuns, his successor in the command, suffered the imperialists to surprise and pillage Lodi; and was at last forced to capitulate at Cremona on the[448] 6th of May, and evacuate the rest of Lombardy. Genoa was not comprehended in the capitulation, and remained still in possession of the French; but, on the 20th of May, that city was also surprised by the Spaniards, and pillaged with all the ferocity which signalised that nation. It was one of the largest depots of commerce in the West, and the ruin of so opulent a town shook the fortune of every merchant in Europe. The general of Charles then, judging Lombardy too much exhausted to support his armies, led them to live at discretion in the provinces of his ally, the pope. They raised among the states still calling themselves independent enormous subsidies to pay the soldiers, for which purpose Charles never sent money. The plague, breaking out at the same time at Rome and Florence, added to the calamities of Italy so much the more that Adrian VI abolished, as pagan superstition or acts of revolt against providence, all the sanitary measures of police which had been invented to stop the spread of contagion. The pope died on the 14th of September, 1523; and the Romans, who held him in horror, crowned his physician with laurel, as the saviour of his country.

The death of Adrian, however, saved no one. The cardinal Giulio de’ Medici was chosen his successor, on the 18th of November, under the name of Clement VII. This man had passed for an able minister under his cousin Leo X, because prosperity still endured, and the pontifical treasury was not exhausted; but when he had to struggle with a distress which he, however, had not caused, his ignorance in finance and administration, his sordid avarice, his pusillanimity, his imprudence, his sudden and ill-considered resolutions, his long indecisions, made him alike odious and contemptible. He was not strong enough to resist the tide of adversity. He found himself, without money and without soldiers, engaged in a war without an object; he was incapable of commanding, and nowhere found obedience.

The French were not disposed to abandon their title to Lombardy, the possession of which they had just lost. Before the end of the campaign, Francis sent thither another army, commanded by his favourite, the admiral Bonnivet. This admiral entered Italy by Piedmont; passed the Ticino on the 14th of September, 1523; and marched on Milan. But Prospero Colonna, who had chosen, among the great men of antiquity, Fabius Cunctator for his model, was admirable in the art of stopping an army, of fatiguing it by slight checks, and at last forcing it to retreat without giving battle. Bonnivet, who maintained himself on the borders of Lombardy, was forced, in the month of May following, to open himself a passage to France by Ivrea and Mont St. Bernard. The chevalier Bayard was killed while protecting the retreat of Bonnivet, in the rear-guard. The imperialists had been joined, the preceding year, by a deserter of high importance, the constable Bourbon, one of the first princes of the blood in France, who was accompanied by many nobles. Charles V put him, jointly with Pescara, at the head of his army, and sent him into Provence in the month of July; but, after having besieged Marseilles, he was soon constrained to retreat. Francis I, who had assembled a powerful army, again entered Lombardy, and made himself master of Milan: he next laid siege to Pavia, on the 28th of October. Some time was necessary for the imperialists to reassemble their army, which the campaign of Provence had disorganised. At length it approached Pavia, which had resisted through the whole winter. The king of France was pressed by all his captains to raise the siege, and to march against the enemy; but he refused, declaring that it would be a compromise of the royal dignity, and foolishly remained within his lines. He was attacked by Pescara on the 24th of February, 1525; and, after a murderous battle, made prisoner.

For several months, while Francis I was besieging Pavia, he appeared the strongest power in Italy; and the pope and the Venetians, alarmed at his proximity, had treated with him anew, and pledged themselves to remain neutral. The imperial generals, after their victory, declared that these treaties with the French were offences against their master, for which they should demand satisfaction. Always without money, and pressed by the avidity of their soldiers, they sought only to discover offenders, as a pretence to raise contributions, and to let their troops live at free quarters. The pope and the Venetians were at first disposed to join in a league for resisting these exactions; and they offered Louise of Savoy, regent of France, their aid to set her son Francis at liberty. But Clement VII had not sufficient courage to join this league; he preferred returning again to the alliance of the emperor and the duke of Milan, for which he paid a considerable sum. As soon as the imperial generals had received the money, they refused to execute the treaty which they had made with him, and the pope was obliged to go back to the Venetians and Louise of Savoy.

Meanwhile Girolamo Morone, chancellor of the duke of Milan, an old man regarded as the most able politician of his time, made overtures, which revived the hope of arming all Italy for her independence. Francesco Sforza found himself treated by the Germans and Spaniards with the greatest indignity in his own palace: his subjects were exposed to every kind of insult from an unbridled soldiery; and when he endeavoured to protect them, the officers took pleasure in making him witness aggravations of injustice and outrage. The man, however, who made the German yoke press most severely on him was the marquis Pescara, an Italian, but descended from the Catalonian house of Avalos, established in the kingdom of Naples for more than a century. He manifested a sort of vanity in associating himself with the Spaniards: he commanded their infantry; he adopted the manners as well as pride of that nation. Morone, nevertheless, did not despair of awakening his patriotism, by exciting his ambition. The kingdom of Naples, which had flourished under the bastard branch of the house of Aragon when the family of Avalos first entered it, had sunk, since it had been united to Spain, into a state of the most grievous oppression. Morone determined on offering Pescara the crown of Naples, if he would join his efforts to those of all the other Italians, for the deliverance of his country. Success depended on him: he could distribute the imperial troops, which he commanded, in such a manner as that they could oppose no resistance. The duke of Milan had been warned that Charles V intended taking his duchy from him to confer it on his brother Ferdinand of Austria. The kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan were ready to pass over from the emperor’s party to that of France, provided the French king would renounce all his claims to both, acknowledge Pescara king of Naples, Francesco Sforza duke of Milan; and restore to Italy her independence, after having delivered her from her enemies.

This negotiation was at first successful; each of the governments to which the proposition of concurring in the independence of Italy was addressed, seemed to agree to it. France renounced all pretensions to Lombardy and the Two Sicilies; Switzerland promised to protect, on its side, the land of ancient liberty, and to furnish it with soldiers; Henry VIII of England promised money; Pescara coveted the crown, and Sforza was impatient to throw off a yoke which had become insupportable to him; but, unhappily, the negotiation was intrusted to too many cabinets, all jealous, perfidious, and eager to obtain advantages for themselves by sacrificing their[450] allies. Clement was desirous of obtaining from the emperor a more advantageous treaty, by threatening him with France; the queen regent of France endeavoured to engage Charles to relax his rigour towards her son, by threatening him with Italy; Pescara, reserving the choice of either betraying his master or his allies, as should prove most profitable to him, had warned Charles that he was engaged in a plot which he would reveal as soon as he had every clew to it. The duchess of Alençon, sister of Francis, sent by her mother to negotiate at Madrid, spoke still more clearly. She offered Charles to abandon Italy, the project respecting which she disclosed, provided the emperor, in restoring her brother to liberty, would renounce his purpose of making him purchase it at the price of one of the provinces of France. Pescara, finding that his court knew more than he had told, determined on adopting the part of provocative agent instead of rebel; he had only to choose between them. On the 14th of October, 1525, he invited Morone to a last conference in the castle of Novara. After having made him explain all his projects anew, while Spanish officers hid behind the arras heard them, he caused him to be arrested, seized all the fortresses in the state of Milan, and laid siege to the castle, in which the duke had shut himself up. He denounced to the emperor as traitors the pope, and all the other Italians his accomplices; but while he played this odious part, he was attacked by a slow disease, of which he died on the 30th of November, 1525, at the age of thirty-six, abhorred by all Italy.

Charles, abusing the advantages which he had obtained, imposed on Francis the treaty of Madrid, signed on the 14th of January, 1526; by which the latter abandoned Italy and the duchy of Burgundy. He was set at liberty on the 18th of March following; and almost immediately declared to the Italians that he did not regard himself bound by a treaty extorted from him by force. On the 22nd of May, he joined a league for the liberty of Italy with Clement VII, the Venetians, and Francesco Sforza, but still did not abandon the policy of his mother: instead of thinking in earnest of restoring Italian independence, and thus securing the equilibrium of Europe, he had only one purpose—that of alarming Charles with the Italians; and was ready to sacrifice them as soon as the emperor should abandon Burgundy. At the same time, his supineness, love of pleasure, distrust of his fortune, and repugnance to violate the Treaty of Madrid, hindered him from fulfilling any of the engagements which he had contracted towards the Italians; he sent them neither money, French cavalry, nor Swiss forces. Charles, on the other hand, sent no supplies to pay his armies to Antonio de Leyva, the constable Bourbon, and Hugo de Monçada, their commanders. These troops were therefore[451] obliged to live at free quarters, and the oppression of the whole country was still more dreadful than it had ever yet been.

The defection of the duke of Milan, in particular, gave a pretence to Antonio de Leyva to treat the wretched Milanese with redoubled rigour, as if they could be responsible for what Leyva called the treachery of their master. The Spanish army was quartered on the citizens of Milan; and there was not a soldier who did not make his host a prisoner, keeping him bound at the foot of the bed, or in the cellar, for the purpose of having him daily at hand, to force him, by blows or fresh torture, to satisfy some new caprice. As soon as one wretched person died under his sufferings, or broke his bonds and ended his sufferings by voluntary death, either precipitating himself through a window or into a well, the Spaniard passed into another house to recommence on its proprietor the same torture.

The Venetians and the pope had united their forces, under the command of the duke of Urbino, who, exaggerating the tactics of Prospero Colonna, was ambitious of no other success in war than that of avoiding battle. He announced to the senate of Venice that he would not approach Milan till the French and Swiss, whose support he had been promised, joined him. His inaction, while witnessing so many horrors, reduced the Italians to despair. Sforza, who had been nine months blockaded in the castle of Milan, and who always hoped to be delivered by the duke of Urbino, whose colours were in sight, supported the last extremity of hunger before he surrendered to the Spaniards, on the 24th of July, 1526. The pope, meanwhile, was far from suspecting himself in any danger; but his personal enemy, Pompeo Colonna, took advantage of the name of the imperial party to raise in the papal state eight thousand armed peasants, with whom, on the 20th of September, he surprised the Vatican, pillaged the palace, as well as the temple of St. Peter, and constrained the pope to abjure the alliance of France and Venice. About the same time, George of Frundsberg, a German condottiere, entered Lombardy with thirteen thousand adventurers, whom he had engaged to follow him, and serve the emperor without pay, contenting themselves with the pillage of that unhappy country.

The constable Bourbon, to whom Charles had given chief command of his forces in Italy, determined to take advantage of this new army, and unite it to that for which at Milan he had now no further occasion; but it was not without great difficulty that he could persuade the Spaniards to quit that city where they enjoyed the savage pleasure of inflicting torture on their hosts. At length, however, he succeeded in leading them to Pavia. On the 30th of January, 1527, he joined Frundsberg, who died soon after of apoplexy. Bourbon now remained alone charged with the command of this formidable army, already exceeding twenty-five thousand men, and continually joined on its route by disbanded soldiers and brigands intent on pillage. The constable had neither money, equipments, nor artillery, and very few cavalry; every town shut its gates on his approach, and he was often on the point of wanting provisions. He took the road of southern Italy, and entered Tuscany, still uncertain whether he should pillage Florence or Rome. The marquis of Saluzzo, with a small army, retreated before him; the duke of Urbino followed in his rear, but always keeping out of reach of battle. At last, Bourbon took the road to Rome, by the valley of the Tiber. On the 5th of May, 1527, he arrived before the capital of Christendom. Clement had on the 15th of March signed a truce with the viceroy of Naples and dismissed his troops. On the approach of Bourbon the walls of Rome were again mounted with engines of war.d

CAPTURE AND SACK OF ROME

Bourbon encamped in the fields near Rome on the 5th of May and with military insolence sent a trumpeter to the pope to ask for passage through the city, that he might lead his army into the kingdom of Naples. The next day at daybreak he attacked Borgo on the side of the mountain and the church of Santo Spirito, resolved to conquer or die (for indeed no other hope was left him) and a fierce battle was begun. Fortune favoured him in approaching, for a thick fog arose before day which enabled him more securely to establish his army in the place where the battle commenced. From the first Bourbon fought desperately at the head of his troops, not only because he had no refuge if the victory failed him but also because it appeared to him that the German infantry proceeded coldly to the assault. The assault was but begun when he was wounded by an arquebuse and fell dead.b The fall of Bourbon was due to Benvenuto Cellini, if we may accept the statements of that somewhat egotistical autobiographer. Cellini was participating in the defence of Rome and has left us a vivid account of many of its incidents. He tells us that he had gone with one Alexander del Bene to the walls of Campo Santo, and that finding the enemy irresistible they had determined to return with the utmost speed, but that before doing so he was determined to perform some manly action.a “Having taken aim with my piece,” he says, “where I saw the thickest crowd of the enemy, I fixed my eye on a person who seemed to be lifted up by the rest: but the misty weather prevented me from distinguishing whether he was on horseback or on foot. Then turning suddenly about to Alexander and Cecchino, I bade them fire off their pieces, and showed them how to escape every shot of the besiegers. Having accordingly fired twice for the enemy’s once, I softly approached the walls, and perceived that there was an extraordinary confusion among the assailants, occasioned by our having shot the duke of Bourbon: he was, as I understood afterwards, that chief personage whom I saw raised by the rest.”c The fall of Bourbon, far from cooling the ardour of his soldiers did but increase it, and after fighting furiously for two hours they entered Borgo at last, assisted by the weakness of the defences and the faint resistance of the enemy.

As it is always difficult to carry an assault without cannon, the besiegers lost about a thousand men. As soon as the imperial army had forced an entrance, everyone took to flight, and many made for the castle, leaving the suburbs at the mercy of the conquerors. The pope, who awaited the event in the Vatican, when he heard that the enemy was in the city, immediately fled to the castle with many cardinals. Here he considered whether he should stay where he was, or if he might escape through Rome with the light cavalry of his guard and reach a place of safety.

News was brought him by Berard de Padone, of the imperial army, of the death of Bourbon and that the troops, full of consternation at their loss, were disposed to come to terms. The pope sent an envoy to their chiefs and unfortunately gave up the idea of flight, while he and his captains had never been so irresolute in taking measures for their own defence as they were on this occasion. The Spaniards, finding no attempt was made to defend the Trastevere, entered it at noon without any resistance. They had no difficulty in entering Rome by the Ponte Sisto at five o’clock the same evening. Here, as is usual in such cases, everything was in confusion, and all the court and citizens had taken to flight except those who trusted in the name of their party, and certain cardinals who were known for their adherence to Cesare, and therefore thought themselves safer than the[453] rest. Then the soldiers sacked the city on every side without distinction of friend or foe.

It is impossible to estimate the extent of the spoil because of the accumulation of riches, and rare and precious things belonging to the courtiers and merchants, and of the quality and number of the prisoners for whom heavy ransoms were paid. But worst of all, the soldiers, especially the Germans, who were rendered cruel and insolent by their hatred for the Roman church, seized several prelates and having dressed them in their pontifical robes and the insignia of their office, mounted them on asses and led them with scorn and derision through the streets of Rome.

Four thousand men or thereabout perished in the battle or in the fury of pillage. The palaces of the cardinals were all sacked (including that of Cardinal Colonna, who was not with the army) excepting those palaces in which the merchants had taken refuge with their personal effects and those of many others, and which were spared from pillage upon payment of large sums of money. Many who had thus compounded with the Spaniards were pillaged by the Germans or obliged to compound with them also. The marchioness of Mantua paid 50,000 ducats to save her palace, this sum being furnished by the merchants who had taken refuge there; it was rumoured that 10,000 went to her son Don Ferrand. The cardinal of Siena, who had inherited his adherence to the emperor from his ancestors, was taken prisoner by the Germans, who sacked his palace though he had compounded for it with the Spaniards. They led him bareheaded through Borgo with many blows, and he only escaped from their hands by payment of 5,000 ducats. The cardinals of Minerva and Ponzetto met with a similar misfortune; they were taken prisoner by the Germans and paid their ransom, but they were first led through Rome in a vile procession. The Spanish and German prelates, who did not expect insult from their compatriots, were taken prisoner and treated as cruelly as the rest.

On every side arose the cries and lamentations of Roman ladies and nuns dragged off by bands of soldiers to satisfy their lust. Everywhere arose the wails of those who were being horribly tortured to force them to pay ransom, and reveal where their property was concealed. All the holy things, the sacrament, and relics of saints, of which the churches were full, lay scattered on the ground stripped of their ornaments and further outraged by the barbarous Germans. Whatever escaped the soldiers (which was everything of little value) was pillaged by the peasants of the lands of Colonna who arrived later; but Cardinal Colonna who arrived next day saved many ladies who had taken refuge in his palace. It was said that the spoil in money, gold, silver, and precious stones amounted to 1,000,000 ducats, and that the ransoms amounted to a much higher sum.

While the imperial army was taking Rome, Count Guido at the head of the light cavalry and eight hundred arquebusiers appeared on the Ponte de Salara, expecting to enter the city that evening; for in spite of the letter of the bishop of Verona he had continued on his way, not wishing to lose the glory of having helped to save the capital. But being informed of what had occurred, he resolved to withdraw to Orticoli where he rejoined the rest of his troops. As it is human nature to judge mildly and favourably of one’s own actions and to look with the utmost severity on the actions of others, there were some who greatly blamed the count for having missed so good an opportunity; for the imperial troops all intent on pillage, ransacking the houses, seeking hidden treasures, taking prisoners and removing their booty to a safe place, were scattered about the city in disorder, heedless of their[454] banners and of the commands of their captains. Therefore many believed that if Count Guido had promptly led his men into Rome and marched upon the castle, which was not besieged nor guarded by any from without, he might not only have liberated the pope but also have achieved a more glorious success. The enemy was so intent on plunder that it would have been difficult to assemble a large number upon any sudden alarm. This was most certainly proved a few days later when by command of the captains, or upon some alarm, the call to arms was sounded and not a soldier rallied to his banner. However, men often persuade themselves that if a certain act had been done or omitted, certain results would have followed; whereas if the matter had been put to the proof, experience would often show them their mistake.b

The capital of Christendom was thus abandoned to a pillage unparalleled in the most calamitous period—that of the first triumph of barbarism over civilisation: neither Alaric the Goth nor Genseric the Vandal had treated it with like ferocity. This dreadful state of crime and agony lasted not merely days, but was prolonged for more than nine months: it was not till the 17th of February, 1528, that the prince of Orange, one of the French lords who had accompanied Bourbon in his rebellion, finally withdrew from Rome all of this army that vice and disease had spared. The Germans, indeed, after the first few days, had sheathed their swords, to plunge into drunkenness and the most brutal debauchery; but the Spaniards, up to the last hour of their stay in Rome, indefatigable in their cold-blooded cruelty, continued to invent fresh torture to extort new ransoms from all who fell into their hands; even the plague, the consequence of so much suffering, moral and physical, which broke out amidst all these horrors, did not make the rapacious Spaniard loose his prey.

The struggle between the Italians, feebly seconded by the French, and the generals of Charles V, was prolonged yet more than two years after the sack of Rome; but it only added to the desolation of Italy, and destroyed alike in all the Italian provinces the last remains of prosperity. On the 18th of August, 1527, Henry VIII of England and Francis I contracted the Treaty of Amiens, for the deliverance, as the two sovereigns announced, of[455] the pope. A powerful French army, commanded by Lautrec, entered Italy in the same month, by the province of Alessandria. They surprised Pavia on the 1st of October, and during eight days barbarously pillaged that great city, under pretence of avenging the defeat of their king under its walls. After this success, Lautrec, instead of completing the conquest of Lombardy, directed his march towards the south; renewed the alliance of France with the duke of Ferrara, to whose son was given in marriage a daughter of Louis XII, sister of the queen of France. He secured the friendship of the Florentine Republic, which, on the 17th of the preceding May, had taken advantage of the distress and captivity of the pope to recover its liberty and to re-establish its government in the same form in which it stood in 1512. The pope, learning that Lautrec had arrived at Orvieto, escaped from the castle of St. Angelo on the 9th of December, and took refuge in the French camp. The Spaniard Alarcon had detained him captive, with thirteen cardinals, during six months, in that fortress; and, though the plague had broken out there, he did not relax in his severity. After having received 400,000 ducats for his ransom, instead of releasing him, as he had engaged to the next day, it is probable that he suffered him to escape, lest his own soldiers should arrest him in order to extort a second ransom.

Lautrec passed the Tronto to enter the Abruzzi with his powerful army on the 10th of February, 1528. The banditti whom Charles V called his soldiers, whom he never paid, and who showed no disposition to obedience, were cantoned at Milan, Rome, and the principal cities in Italy: they divided their time between debauchery and the infliction of torture on their hosts; their officers were unable to induce them to leave the towns and advance towards the enemy. The people, in the excess of suffering, met every change with eagerness, and received Lautrec as a deliverer. He would probably have obtained complete success, if Francis had not just at this moment withheld the monthly advance of money which he had promised. That monarch, identifying his pride of royalty with prodigality, exhausted his finances in pleasures and entertainments; his want of economy drew on him all his disasters.

Lautrec, on his side, although he had many qualities of a good general, was harsh, proud, and obstinate: he piqued himself on doing always the opposite of what he was counselled. Disregarding the national peculiarities of the French, he attempted in war to discipline them in slow and regular movements. He lost valuable time in Apulia, where he took and sacked Melfi, on the 23rd of March, with a barbarity worthy of his adversaries, the Spaniards: he did not arrive till the 1st of May before Naples. The prince of Orange had just entered that city with the army which had sacked Rome, but of which the greater part had been carried off by a dreadful mortality, the consequence and punishment of its vices and crimes. Instead of vigorously attacking them, Lautrec, in spite of the warm remonstrances of his officers, persisted in reducing Naples by blockade; thus exposing his army to the influence of a destructive climate. The imperial fleet was destroyed, on the 28th of May, in the gulf of Salerno, by Filippino Doria, who was in the pay of France. The inhabitants of Naples experienced the most cruel privations, and sickness soon made great havoc amongst them: but a malady not less fatal broke out at the same time in the French camp. The soldiers, under a burning sun, surrounded with putrid water, condemned to every kind of privation, harassed by the light cavalry of the enemy, infinitely superior to theirs, sank, one after the other, under pestilential fevers. In the middle of June, the French reckoned in their camp twenty-five thousand men; by the[456] 2nd of August there did not remain four thousand fit for service. At this period all the springs were dry, and the troops began to suffer from hunger and thirst. Lautrec, ill as he was, had till then supported the army by his courage and invincible obstinacy; but, worn out at last, he expired in the night of the 15th of August: almost all the other officers died in like manner. The marquis of Saluzzo, on whom the command of the army devolved, felt the necessity of a retreat, but knew not how to secure it in presence of such a superior force. He tried to escape from the imperialists, by taking advantage of a tremendous storm, in the night of the 29th of August; but was soon pursued, and overtaken at Aversa, where, on the 30th, he was forced to capitulate. The magazines and hospitals at Capua were, at the same time, given up to the Spaniards. The prisoners and the sick were crowded together in the stables of the Magdalen, where contagion acquired new force. The Spaniards foresaw it, and watched with indifference the agony and death of all; for nearly all of that brilliant army perished—a few invalids only ever returning to France.

During the same campaign another French army, conducted by François de Bourbon, count of St. Pol, had entered Lombardy, at the moment when Henry, duke of Brunswick, led thither a German army. Henry, finding nothing more to pillage, announced that his mission was to punish a rebellious nation, and put to the sword all the inhabitants of the villages through which he passed. Milan was at once a prey to famine and the plague, aggravated by the cupidity and cold-blooded ferocity of Leyva, who still commanded the Spanish garrison. Leyva seized all the provisions brought in from the country; and, to profit by the general misery, resold them at an enormous price. Genoa had remained subject to the French, and was little less oppressed; none of its republican institutions was any longer respected: but a great admiral still rendered it illustrious. Andrea Doria had collected a fleet, on board of which he summoned all the enterprising spirits of Liguria: his nephew Filippino, who had just gained a victory over the imperialists, was his lieutenant. The Dorias demanded the restoration of liberty to their country as the price of their services: unable to obtain it from the French, they passed over to the imperialists. Assured by the promises of Charles, they presented themselves, on the 12th of September, before Genoa, excited their countrymen to revolt, and constrained the French to evacuate the town: they made themselves masters of Savona on the 21st of October, and a few days afterwards of Castelletto. Doria then proclaimed the republic,[457] and re-established once more the freedom of Genoa, at the moment when all freedom was near its end in Italy. The winter passed in suffering and inaction. The following year, Antonio de Leyva surprised the count de St. Pol at Landriano, on the 21st of June, 1529, and made him prisoner, with all the principal officers of the French army. The rest dispersed or returned to France. This was the last military incident in this dreadful war.

Peace was ardently desired on all sides; negotiations were actively carried on, but every potentate sought to deceive his ally in order to obtain better conditions from his adversary. Margaret of Austria, the sister of the emperor’s father, and Louise of Savoy, the mother of the king of France, met at Cambray; and, in conference to which no witnesses were admitted, arranged what was called “le traité des dames.” Clement VII had at the same time a nuncio at Barcelona, who negotiated with the emperor. The latter was impatient to arrange the affairs of Italy, in order to pass into Germany. Not only had Suleiman invaded Austria, and, on the 13th of September, arrived under the walls of Vienna, but the reformation of Luther excited in all the north of Germany a continually increasing ferment. On the 20th of June, 1529, Charles signed at Barcelona a treaty of perpetual alliance with the pope: by it he engaged to sacrifice the republic of Florence to the pope’s vengeance, and to place in the service of Clement, in order to accomplish it, all the brigands who had previously devastated Italy. Florence was to be given in sovereignty to the bastard Alessandro de’ Medici, who was to marry an illegitimate daughter of Charles V. On the 5th of August following, Louise and Margaret signed the Treaty of Cambray, by which France abandoned, without reserve, all its Italian allies to the caprices of Charles; who, on his side, renounced Burgundy, and restored to Francis his two sons, who had been retained as hostages.

Charles arrived at Genoa, on board the fleet of Andrea Doria, on the 12th of August. The pope awaited him at Bologna, into which he made his entry on the 5th of November. He summoned thither all the princes of Italy, or their deputies, and treated them with more moderation than might have been expected after the shameful abandonment of them by France. As he knew the health of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, to be in a declining state, which promised but few years of life, he granted him the restitution of his duchy for the sum of 900,000 ducats, which Sforza was to pay at different terms: they had not all fallen due when that prince died, on the 24th of October, 1535, without issue, and his estates escheated to the emperor. On the 23rd of December, 1529, Charles granted peace to the Venetians; who restored him only some places in Apulia, and gave up Ravenna and Cervia to the pope. On the 20th of March, Alfonso d’Este also signed a treaty, by which he referred his differences with the pope to the arbitration of the emperor. Charles did not pronounce on them till the following year. He conferred on Alfonso the possession of Modena, Reggio, and Rubiera, as fiefs of the empire; and he made the pope give him the investiture of Ferrara. On the 25th of March, 1530, a diploma of the emperor raised the marquisate of Mantua to a duchy, in favour of Federigo de Gonzaga. The duke of Savoy and the marquis of Montferrat, till then protected by France, arrived at Bologna, to place themselves under the protection of the emperor. The duke of Urbino was recommended to him by the Venetians, and obtained some promises of favour. The republics of Genoa, Siena, and Lucca had permission to vegetate under the imperial protection; and Charles, having received from the pope, at Bologna, on the 22nd of February and 24th of March, the two crowns of Lombardy and of the empire,[458] departed in the beginning of April for Germany, in order to escape witnessing the odious service in which he consented that his troops should be employed against Florence.

THE FALL OF FLORENCE

The Florentines who, from 1512, had been victims of all the faults of Leo X and Clement VII, who had been drawn into all the oscillations of their policy, and called upon to make prodigious sacrifices of money for projects with which they had not even been made acquainted, were taught under these popes to detest the yoke of the Medici. When the constable of Bourbon approached their walls in his march to Rome, on the 26th of April, 1527, they were on the point of recovering their liberty; the cardinal De Cortona, who commanded for the pope at Florence, had distributed arms among the citizens for their defence, and they determined to employ them for their liberation; but the terror which this army of brigands inspired did the cardinal the service of repressing insurrection. When, however, they heard soon after of the taking of Rome, and of the captivity of the pope, all the most notable citizens presented themselves in their civic dress to the cardinal De Cortona; declared firmly, but with calmness, that they were henceforth free; and compelled him, with the two bastard Medici whom he brought up, to quit the city. It was on the 17th of May, 1527, that the lieutenant of Clement obeyed; and the constitution, such as it existed in 1512, with its grand council, was restored without change, except that the office of gonfalonier was declared annual. The first person invested with this charge was Niccolo Capponi, a man enthusiastic in religion, and moderate in politics; he was the son of Pietro Capponi, who had braved Charles VIII. In 1529, he was succeeded by Baldassare Carducci, whose character was more energetic, and opinions more democratic. Carducci was succeeded, in 1530, by Raffaelle Girolami, who witnessed the end of the republic.

Florence, during the whole period of its glory and power, had neglected the arts of war; it reckoned for its defence on the adventurers whom its wealth could summon from all parts to its service; and set but little value on a courage which men, without any other virtue, were so eager to sell to the highest bidder. Since the transalpine nations had begun to subdue Italy to their tyranny, these hireling arms sufficed no longer for the public safety. Statesmen began to see the necessity of giving the republic a protection within itself. Macchiavelli, who died on the 22nd of June, 1527, six weeks after the restoration of the popular government, had been long engaged in persuading his fellow citizens of the necessity of awakening a military spirit in the people; it was he who caused the country militia, named l’ordinanza, to be formed into regiments. A body of mercenaries, organised by Giovanni de’ Medici, a distant kinsman of the popes, served at the time as a military school for the Tuscans, among whom alone the corps had been raised; it acquired a high reputation under the name of bande nere. No infantry equalled it in courage and intelligence. Five thousand of these warriors served under Lautrec in the kingdom of Naples, where they almost all perished. When, towards the year 1528, the Florentines perceived that their situation became more and more critical, they formed, among those who enjoyed the greatest privileges in their country, two bodies of militia, which displayed the utmost valour for its defence. The first, consisting of three hundred young men of noble families, undertook the guard of the palace, and[459] the support of the constitution; the second, of four thousand soldiers drawn only from among families having a right to sit in the council general, were called the civic militia; both soon found opportunities of proving that generosity and patriotism suffice to create, in a very short period, the best soldiers. The illustrious Michelangelo was charged to superintend the fortifications of Florence; they were completed in the month of April, 1529. Lastly, the ten commissioners of war chose for the command of the city Malatesta Baglioni of Perugia, who was recommended to them as much for his hatred of the Medici, who had unjustly put his father to death, as for his reputation for valour and military talent.

Clement VII sent against Florence, his native state, that very prince of Orange, the successor of Bourbon, who had made him prisoner at Rome; and with him that very army of robbers which had overwhelmed the holy see, and its subjects, with misery and every outrage. This army entered Tuscany in the month of September, 1529, and took possession of Cortona, Arezzo, and all the upper Val d’Arno. On the 14th of October the prince of Orange encamped in the plain of Ripoli, at the foot of the walls of Florence; and, towards the end of December, Ferdinando di Gonzaga led on the right bank of the Arno another imperial army, composed of twenty thousand Spaniards and Germans, which occupied without resistance Pistoia and Prato. Notwithstanding the immense superiority of their forces, the imperialists did not attempt to make a breach in the walls of Florence; they resolved to make themselves masters of the city by a blockade. The Florentines, on the contrary, animated by preachers who inherited the zeal of Savonarola, and who united liberty with religion as an object of their worship, were eager for battle; they made frequent attacks on the whole line of their enemies, led in turns by Malatesta Baglioni and Stefano Colonna. They made nightly sallies, covered with white shirts to distinguish each other in the dark, and successively surprised the posts of the imperialists; but the slight advantages thus obtained could not disguise the growing danger of the republic. France had abandoned them to their enemies; there remained not one ally either in Italy or the rest of Europe; while the army of the pope and emperor comprehended all the survivors of those soldiers who had so long been the terror of Italy by their courage and ferocity, and whose warlike ardour was now redoubled by the hope of the approaching pillage of the richest city in the West.

The Florentines had one solitary chance of deliverance. Francesco Ferrucci, one of their citizens, who had learned the art of war in the bande nere, and joined to a mind full of resources an unconquerable intrepidity and an ardent patriotism, was not shut up within the walls of Florence; he had been named commissary-general, with unlimited power over all that remained without the capital. Ferrucci was at first engaged in conveying provisions from Empoli to Florence; he afterwards took Volterra from the imperialists, and, having formed a small army, proposed to the signoria to seduce all the adventurers and brigands from the imperial army, by promising them another pillage of the pontifical court, and succeeding in that, to march at their head on Rome, frighten Clement, and force him to grant peace to their country. The signoria rejected this plan as too daring. Ferrucci then formed a second, which was little less bold. He departed from Volterra, made the tour of Tuscany, which the imperial troops traversed in every direction, collected at Livorno, Pisa, the Val di Nievole, and in the mountains of Pistoia, every soldier, every man of courage, still devoted to the republic; and, after having thus increased his army, he intended to fall on the imperial camp before[460] Florence and force the prince of Orange, who began to feel the want of money, to raise the siege. Ferrucci, with an intrepidity equal to his skill, led his little troop, from the 14th of July to the 2nd of August, 1530, through numerous bodies of imperialists, who preceded, followed, and surrounded him on all sides, as far as Gavinana, four miles from San Marcello, in the mountains of Pistoia. He entered that village about midday, on the 2nd of August, with three thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry. The prince of Orange at the same time entered by another gate, with a part of the army which besieged Florence. The different corps, which had on every side harassed Ferrucci in his march, poured in upon him from all quarters; the battle instantly began, and was fought with relentless fury within the walls of Gavinana. Philibert de Châlons, prince of Orange, in whom that house became extinct, was killed by a double shot, and his corps put to flight, but other bands of imperialists successively arrived, and continually renewed the attack on a small force exhausted with fatigue; two thousand Florentines were already stretched on the field of battle, when Ferrucci, pierced with several mortal wounds, was borne bleeding to the presence of his personal enemy, Fabrizio Maramaldi, a Calabrese, who commanded the light cavalry of the emperor. The Calabrese stabbed him several times in his rage, while Ferrucci calmly said, “Thou wouldst kill a dead man!” The republic perished with him.

When news of the disaster at Gavinana reached Florence, the consternation was extreme. Baglioni, who for some days had been in treaty with the prince of Orange, and who was accused of having given him notice of the project of Ferrucci, declared that a longer resistance was impossible, and that he was determined to save an imprudent city, which seemed bent upon its own ruin. On the 8th of August he opened the bastion, in which he was stationed, to an imperial captain, and planted his artillery so as to command the town. The citizens in consternation abandoned the defence of the walls to employ themselves in concealing their valuable effects in the churches; and the signoria acquainted Ferdinando di Gonzaga, who had succeeded the prince of Orange in the command of the army, that they were ready to capitulate. The terms granted on the 12th of August, 1530, were less rigorous than the Florentines might have apprehended. They were to pay a gratuity of 80,000 crowns to the army which besieged them, and to recall the Medici. In return, a complete amnesty was to be granted to all who had acted against that family, the pope, or the emperor. But Clement had no intention to observe any of the engagements contracted in his name. On the 20th of August, he caused the parliament, in the name of the sovereign people, to create a balia, which was to execute the vengeance of which he would not himself take the responsibility; he subjected to the torture, and afterwards punished with exile or death, by means of this balia, all the patriots who had signalised themselves by their zeal for liberty. In the first month 150 illustrious citizens were banished; before the end of the year there were more than one thousand sufferers; every Florentine family, even among those most devoted to the Medici, had some one member among the proscribed.

Alessandro, the bastard Medici, whom Clement had appointed chief of the Florentine Republic in preference to his cousin Ippolito, did not return to his country till the 5th of July, 1531; he was the bearer of a rescript from the emperor, which gave Florence a constitution nearly monarchial; but, so far from confining himself within the limits traced, Alessandro oppressed the people with the most grievous tyranny. Cruelty, debauchery, and extortion[461] marked him for public hatred. On the 10th of August, 1535, he caused to be poisoned his cousin, the cardinal Ippolito, who undertook the defence of his fellow countrymen against him. He at last, on the 6th of January, 1537, was himself assassinated by his kinsman and companion in licentiousness, Lorenzino de’ Medici.

But the death of Alessandro did not restore freedom to his country. The agents of his tyranny, the most able but also the most odious of whom was the historian Guicciardini, needed a prince for their protector. They made choice of Cosmo de’ Medici, a young man of nineteen, descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brother of the former Cosmo. On the 9th of January, 1537, they proclaimed him duke of Florence, hoping to guide him henceforth at their pleasure; but they were deceived. This man, false, cool-blooded, and ferocious, who had all the vices of Filippo II, and who shrank from no crime, soon got rid of his counsellors, as well as of his adversaries. Cosmo I, in 1569, obtained from the pope, Pius V, the title of grand duke of Tuscany, a title that the emperor would not then acknowledge, though he afterwards, in 1575, granted it to the son of Cosmo. Seven grand dukes of that family reigned successively at Florence. The last, Gian Gastone, died on the 9th of July, 1737.d

Right had disappeared, cries Quinet, leaving an immense gap—in fact a gulf which opened under the nation’s feet and into which she went head foremost, almost dragging her conquerors after her. To understand these times we must remember that there had been no real conquest because no national resistance. No one in the fifteenth century had really defended the sovereignty of Italy. When Europe presented herself she entered as into a vacant heritage, devoid of humanity. Italy did not defend herself, because practically non-existent. She had not been able to pull herself together. Never has such a thing been seen on the earth: a great people invaded, and this invasion finding no obstacle. The foreigners who entered, by the always open breach of the papacy, came with precaution. They sounded the land, thinking to find a people, and only found an illusion. Reassured, they came on restrainedly. Europe overflowed the empty places.

In her last moments Italy made profession of worshipping only strength, crying with Macchiavelli, “Woe to the conquered!” She reserved for her defeat none of those life doctrines which nourish even corpses and prevent their crumbling to powder. Her theories were only for the victorious. Now that she was conquered she was taken in her own trap, and could not well revive because she had pronounced her own death sentence.

Evil had arrived at such a pitch that two things were equally necessary: Luther’s reform to break Catholicism; the chastisement of Italy to restore that which threatened to disappear—the human conscience. Each town was smitten by the arms proper to her. Venice fell slowly but noiselessly, like a body drowned by the doges in the lagunes. There were other cities which languished as if they had been poisoned. As for Florence, who had gained so many subjects, she perished, put up and sold at auction like poisoners bought and sold for the pleasure of choking them.

In reality, the papacy had the honour of aiming the two decisive blows. Julius II, in the league of Cambray, crushed Venice. Clement VII, in league with Charles V, crushed Florence. These two vital centres once destroyed, all was lost.i

The evil destiny of Italy was accomplished. Charles VIII, when he first invaded that country, opened its gates to all the transalpine nations: from that period Italy was ravaged, during thirty-six years, by Germans,[462] French, Spaniards, Swiss, and even Turks. They inflicted on her calamities beyond example in history; calamities so much the more keenly felt, as the sufferers were more civilised, and the authors more barbarous. The French invasion ended in giving to the greatest enemies of France the dominion of that country, so rich, so industrious, and of which the possession was sought ardently by all. Never would the house of Austria have achieved the conquest of Italy, if Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I had not previously destroyed the wealth and military organisation of the nation; if they had not themselves introduced the Spaniards into the kingdom of Naples, and the Germans into the states of Venice; forgetting that both must soon after be subject to Charles V. The independence of Italy would have been beneficial to France; the rapacious and improvident policy which made France seek subjects where it should only have sought allies, was the origin of a long train of disasters to the French.

A period of three centuries of weakness, humiliation, and suffering, in Italy, began in the year 1530; from that time she was always oppressed by foreigners, and enervated and corrupted by her masters. These last reproached her with the vices of which they were themselves the authors. After having reduced her to the impossibility of resisting, they accused her of cowardice when she submitted, and of rebellion when she made efforts to vindicate herself. The Italians, during this long period of slavery, were agitated with the desire of becoming once more a nation: as, however, they had lost the direction of their own affairs, they ceased to have any history which could be called theirs; their misfortunes have become but episodes in the histories of other nations.d

The first circumstance, after the fall of Florence, which interrupted the ignominious repose of Italy, was the renewal of hostilities between Francis I and the emperor. During the expedition of Charles V against Tunis, the French monarch availed himself of the distraction of the imperial strength to commence his offensive operations. His troops broke into the territories of the duke of Savoy, against whom he had some causes of dissatisfaction, and easily wrested all Savoy, and the greater part of Piedmont, from that feeble prince; while the imperialists took possession of the remainder of his states, under pretence of defending them. Meanwhile the death of Francesco Sforza, who left no posterity, revived the long wars for the possession of the Milanese state. On the one hand, Francis I, alleging that he had only ceded that duchy to Sforza and his descendants, insisted that his rights returned to him in full force by the decease of that prince without issue; on the other, Charles V anticipated his designs by seizing the duchy as a lapsed fief of the empire. Francis I, after some hollow negotiations with his crafty rival, once more staked the decision of his pretensions on a trial of arms. Lombardy became again the theatre of furious contests between the French and the imperialists; but the usual fortunes of Francis still pursued[464] him; and although his troops inflicted a sanguinary defeat on their opponents in the battle of Cerisole, the fruits of their victory were lost by the necessity, under which the French monarch was placed, of turning his strength to the defence of the northern frontiers of his own kingdom. The peace of Crespy, in 1544, left Charles in possession of Lombardy; and though Francis still retained part of the dominions of the duke of Savoy, the despotic authority of his rival over Italy remained unshaken.

The tranquillity restored to the peninsula by the peace of Crespy was not materially disturbed for several years. This period was indeed signalised by the abortive conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa, and earlier by the separation of Parma and Piacenza from the papal dominions, and their erection into a sovereign duchy. These territories, which originally formed part of the Milanese states, had first been annexed to the holy see by the conquests of Julius II; they had frequently changed masters in the subsequent convulsions of Italy; and their possession had finally been confirmed to the papacy by the consent of Francesco Sforza. By the subserviency of the sacred college, the reigning pontiff, Paul III, of the family of Farnese, was suffered to detach these valuable dependencies from the holy see, and to bestow them upon his son with the ducal dignity. But neither the trifling change which was wrought in the divisions of Lombardy by the creation of the duchy of Parma and Piacenza, nor the dangerous conspiracy of Fiesco, affected the general aspect and the quietude of Italy.

Shortly after the death of Pope Paul III, however, the determination of the emperor to spoil his family obliged Ottavio Farnese, the reigning duke of Parma, to throw himself into the arms of Henry II, the new monarch of France; and thus a new war was kindled in Lombardy and Piedmont, in which the French appeared, as the defenders of Ottavio, against the forces of Charles V and of the new pope, Julius III (1551). The war of Parma produced no memorable event, until it was extended into Tuscany by the revolt of Siena against the grievous oppression of the Spanish garrison, which the people had themselves introduced to curb the tyranny of the aristocratical faction of their republic. After expelling their Spanish masters, the Sienese invited the aid of the French for the maintenance of their liberties against the emperor (1552).c

THE SIEGE AND FALL OF SIENA

Cosmo I, duke of Florence, had promised to remain neutral in the war lighted up anew between the French and the imperialists; he nevertheless, on the 27th of January, 1554, attacked, without any declaration of war, the Sienese, whose city he hoped to take by surprise. Having failed in this attack, he gave the command to the ferocious Medecino, marquis of Marignano, who undertook to reduce it by famine. The first act of Marignano was to massacre without mercy all the women, children, aged, and sick, whom the Sienese, beginning to feel the want of provisions, had sent out of the town; every peasant discovered carrying provisions into Siena was immediately hung before its gates. The villages and fortresses of the Sienese, for the most part, attempted to remain faithful to the republic; but in all those which held out until the cannon was planted against their walls, the inhabitants were inhumanly put to death.d

To oppose Marignano, and the formidable army which he assembled, the king of France made choice of Pietro Strozzi, a Florentine nobleman, who had[465] resided long in France as an exile, and who had risen by his merit to high reputation as well as command in the army. He was the son of Filippo Strozzi, who, in the year 1537, had concurred with such ardour in the attempt to expel the family of Medici out of Florence, in order to re-establish the ancient republican form of government, and who had perished in the undertaking. The son inherited the implacable aversion of the Medici, as well as the same enthusiastic zeal for the liberty of Florence which had animated his father, whose death he was impatient to revenge. Henry flattered himself that his army would make rapid progress under a general whose zeal to promote his interest was roused and seconded by such powerful passions; especially as he had allotted him, for the scene of action, his native country, in which he had many powerful partisans, ready to facilitate all his operations.

But how specious soever the motives might appear which induced Henry to make this choice, it proved fatal to the interests of France in Italy. Cosmo, as soon as he heard that the mortal enemy of his family was appointed to take the command in Tuscany, concluded that the king of France aimed at something more than the protection of the Sienese, and saw the necessity of making extraordinary efforts not merely to reduce Siena, but to save himself from destruction. At the same time the cardinal of Ferrara, who had the entire direction of the French affairs in Italy, considered Strozzi as a formidable rival in power, and, in order to prevent his acquiring any increase of authority from success, he was extremely remiss in supplying him either with money to pay his troops, or with provisions to support them. Strozzi himself, blinded by his resentment against the Medici, pushed on his operations with the impetuosity of revenge, rather than with the caution and prudence becoming a great general.

At first, however, he attacked several towns in the territory of Florence with such vigour as obliged Medecino, in order to check his progress, to withdraw the greater part of his army from Siena, which he had invested before Strozzi’s arrival in Italy. As Cosmo sustained the whole burden of military operations, the expense of which must soon have exhausted his revenues; as neither the viceroy of Naples nor governor of Milan was in condition to afford him any effectual aid; and as the troops which Medecino had left in the camp before Siena could attempt nothing against it during his absence, it was Strozzi’s business to have protracted the war, and to have transferred the seat of it into the territories of Florence; but the hope of ruining his enemy by one decisive blow precipitated him into a general engagement, not far from Marciano. The armies were nearly equal in number; but a body of Italian cavalry, in which Strozzi placed great confidence, having fled without making any resistance, either through the treachery or the cowardice of the officers who commanded it, his infantry remained exposed to the attacks of all Medecino’s troops. Encouraged, however, by Strozzi’s presence and example, who, after receiving a dangerous wound in endeavouring to rally the cavalry, placed himself at the head of the infantry, and manifested an admirable presence of mind, as well as extraordinary valour, they stood their ground with great firmness, and repulsed such of the enemy as ventured to approach them. But those gallant troops being surrounded at last on every side, and torn in pieces by a battery of cannon which Medecino brought to bear upon them, the Florentine cavalry broke in on their flanks, and a general rout ensued. Strozzi, faint with the loss of blood, and deeply affected with the fatal consequences of his own rashness, found the utmost difficulty in making his escape with a handful of men.

Medecino returned immediately to the siege of Siena with his victorious forces, and as Strozzi could not, after the greatest efforts of activity, collect so many men as to form the appearance of a regular army, he had leisure to carry on his approaches against the town without molestation. But the Sienese, instead of sinking into despair upon this cruel disappointment of their only hope of obtaining relief, prepared to defend themselves to the utmost extremity, with that undaunted fortitude which the love of liberty alone can inspire. This generous resolution was warmly seconded by Montluc, who commanded the French garrison in the town. The active and enterprising courage which he had displayed on many occasions had procured him this command; and as he had ambition which aspired to the highest military dignities, without any pretensions to attain them but what he could derive from merit, he determined to distinguish his defence of Siena by extraordinary efforts of valour and perseverance. For this purpose, he repaired and strengthened the fortifications with unwearied industry; he trained the citizens to the use of arms, and accustomed them to go through the fatigues and dangers of service in common with the soldiers; and as the enemy were extremely strict in guarding all the avenues to the city, he husbanded the provisions in the magazines with the most parsimonious economy, and prevailed on the soldiers, as well as the citizens, to restrict themselves to a very moderate daily allowance for their subsistence. Medecino, though his army was not numerous enough to storm the town by open force, ventured twice to assault it by surprise; but he was received each time with so much spirit, and repulsed with such loss, as discouraged him from repeating the attempt, and left him no hopes of reducing the town but by famine.

With this view he fortified his camp with great care, occupied all the posts of strength round the place, and having cut off the besieged from any communication with the adjacent country, he waited patiently until necessity should compel them to open their gates. But their enthusiastic zeal for liberty made the citizens despise the distresses occasioned by the scarcity of provisions, and supported them long under all the miseries of famine: Montluc, by his example and exhortations, taught his soldiers to vie with them in patience and abstinence; and it was not until they had withstood a siege of ten months, until they had eaten up all the horses, dogs, and other animals in the place, and were reduced almost to their last morsel of bread, that they proposed a capitulation (1555). Even then they demanded honourable terms; and as Cosmo, though no stranger to the extremity of their condition, was afraid that despair might prompt them to venture upon some wild enterprise, he immediately granted them conditions more favourable than they could have expected.

The capitulation was made in the emperor’s name, who engaged to take the republic of Siena under the protection of the empire; he promised to maintain the ancient liberties of the city, to allow the magistrates the full exercise of their former authority, to secure the citizens in the undisturbed possession of their privileges and property; he granted an ample and unlimited pardon to all who had borne arms against him; he reserved to himself the right of placing a garrison in the town, but engaged not to rebuild the citadel without the consent of the citizens. Montluc and his French garrison were allowed to march out with all the honours of war.

Medecino observed the articles of capitulation, as far as depended on him, with great exactness. No violence or insult whatever was offered to the inhabitants, and the French garrison was treated with all the respect due to their spirit and bravery. But many of the citizens suspecting, from the[467] extraordinary facility with which they had obtained such favourable conditions, that the emperor, as well as Cosmo, would take the first opportunity of violating them, and disdaining to possess a precarious liberty, which depended on the will of another, abandoned the place of their nativity, and accompanied the French to Montalcino, Porto Ercole, and other small towns in the territory of the republic. They established in Montalcino the same model of government to which they had been accustomed at Siena, and appointing magistrates with the same titles and jurisdiction, solaced themselves with this image of their ancient liberty.e

The Spaniards retained possession of Siena for two years, and did not surrender it to the duke of Florence until the 19th of July, 1557. After the subjugation of Siena, there remained in Italy only three republics, Lucca, Genoa, and Venice, unless it may be permitted to reckon San Marino, a free village, situated on the summit of a mountain of Romagna, which has alike escaped both usurpation and history until our own time.d

In the same year that witnessed the fall of Siena (1565), Charles V began putting into execution his intention to abdicate the various crowns of his vast dominions.

AN ITALIAN ESTIMATE OF THE ABDICATION OF CHARLES V

It has never been doubted that the ambition of Charles V was great and insatiable, and that this alone was his dominant passion. It was therefore a greater marvel that he should voluntarily despoil himself of all authority and dignity. But a close examination of the question will show that his action had its origin in that very ambition. After thirty years of continual warfare, journeys, negotiations, and perils, he realised that he was no happier than before, and perhaps higher motives prompted him to think upon the vanity and frailty of human greatness; or satiety and weariness having disgusted him with kingship and power, he thought to win the praise of men by other means, and to seek tranquillity and repose in private life.

But it is most probable that after his reverses in Germany Charles recognised the impossibility of attaining to that absolute monarchy which he longed for, and experienced in himself that change of feeling to which the human heart is naturally inclined; and that the excessive longing for sovereignty over the whole world was succeeded by total lethargy and a longing for quiet and inaction, more especially as he was suffering from ill health and was beginning to feel the weight of years. The care which he had taken to accustom Prince Philip, his only son, to the cares of government, sending him to Italy and investing him with the duchy of Milan in 1540, might lead one to believe that he had long since conceived and matured the design of renouncing his authority before he died; and that he would have done so much sooner if matters had been in such a state that he could have withdrawn with dignity, and without laying himself open to a charge of weakness.

In the meanwhile Henry II, no more resolved to keep peace with Charles V than firmly persuaded that this was the sincere desire of the latter, had leagued himself with the German princes, the enemies of the emperor, and hostilities were begun on both sides without any formal declaration of war. Thus while the French attacked Toul, Verdun, and Metz in Lower Germany, the German allies, whose chief leaders were Maurice, duke and elector of Saxony, Duke Albert of Mecklenburg, and Albert of Brandenburg, markgraf of Kulmbach and Bayreuth, showed such spirit in their encounter[468] with the imperial army in the direction of the Tyrol that the emperor himself, surprised at Innsbruck, withdrew hastily into Dalmatia to the lands of his brother Ferdinand, leaving all his baggage as spoil to the enemy. This fresh blow further confirmed him in his resolution to withdraw from the world. After the flight from Innsbruck it was observed that he suffered from a melancholy humour, and in Villach in Carinthia shut himself in his room for several days, giving no audiences and despatching no business. Having recruited his army he marched towards Flanders, where he vainly attempted to besiege Metz, which was occupied by the king of France. Still further saddened by this proof of his altered fortune, he almost entirely abandoned the administration of his dominions, partly to Prince Philip and partly to his favourite the bishop of Arras, and his sister the widowed queen of Hungary.

In order to evade the cares of government, which had now become distasteful to him, he reduced himself to a private house in Brussels, where, says Segin,g “he took great interest in clock-making, delighting in such machinery and in talking with the workmen and watching their work.” He began the formal abdication of his crown by making over the kingdom of Naples to his son (1554). Julius III approved this abdication, and received in the name of King Philip the homage paid to him by the kings of Naples as feudatories of the holy see. Thus the states of Milan and Naples changed their ruler somewhat earlier than Spain. But this separation of the kingdom of Naples and duchy of Milan from Spain, to which they were justly united, the former because of the ancient right of the king of Aragon, and the latter because of the will of Charles, who bestowed it upon the heir presumptive of the throne of Spain, was only temporary, for the next year (1555) Charles further bestowed the Low Countries upon his son, and a little later (1556) the kingdom of Spain and the dominions of the new world.f

RENEWED HOSTILITIES; THE TREATY OF CATEAU-CAMBRÉSIS

At the time of the abdication of Charles V the flames of war which had raged in Europe with such intense violence during the greater part of his long reign seemed already expiring in their embers. But they were rekindled in Italy, almost immediately after the accession of Philip II, by the fierce passions of Paul IV, a rash and violent pontiff. In his indignation at the opposition which Charles V had raised against his election, and moreover to gratify the ambition of his family, Paul IV had already instigated Henry II of France to join him in a league to ruin the imperial power in Italy; and he now, in concert with the French monarch, directed against Philip II the hostile measures which he had prepared against his father.

Philip II, that most odious of tyrants, whose atrocious cruelty and imbecile superstition may divide the judgment between execration and contempt, shrank with horror from the impiety of combating the pontiff, whom he had regarded as the vicegerent of God upon earth. He therefore vainly exhausted every resource of negotiation, before he was reconciled by the opinion of the Spanish ecclesiastics, whom he anxiously consulted, to the lawfulness of engaging in such a contest. At length he was prevailed upon to suffer the duke of Alva to lead the veteran Spanish bands from the kingdom of Naples into the papal territories. The advance of Alva to the gates of Rome, however, struck consternation into the sacred college; and the haughty and obstinate pontiff was compelled by the terror of his cardinals to conclude a truce with[469] the Spanish general, which he immediately broke on learning the approach of a superior French army under the duke de Guise (1556).

This celebrated captain of France, to whom the project was confided of conquering the kingdom of Naples from the Spaniards, was, however, able to accomplish nothing in Italy which accorded with his past and subsequent fame. Crossing the Alps at the head of twenty thousand men, he penetrated, without meeting any resistance, through Lombardy and Tuscany to the ecclesiastical capital. If he could effect the reduction of the kingdom of Naples, it was imagined that the Spanish provinces in northern Italy must fall of themselves; and having, therefore, left the Milanese duchy unassailed behind him, he passed on from Rome to the banks of the Garigliano, where he found Alva posted with an inferior force to oppose him. The wily caution of the Spanish general and the patient valour of his troops disconcerted the impetuosity of the French and the military skill of their gallant leader: and disease had already begun to make fearful havoc in the ranks of the invaders, when Guise was recalled, by the victory of the Spaniards at St. Quentin, to defend the frontiers of France.c

The confusion at Rome was great. But the pope, though considerably grieved, gave no external sign of being disturbed or alarmed. “The ambassador of France has just assured me,” wrote the bishop of Anglone on the 25th of August, 1557, “that the pope felt greatly the constable’s defeat, and is troubled; yet in spite of his affliction he does not say cease, but that his courage is greater than ever, and, from what he sees and believes, his holiness is more than ever disposed to continue the friendly relations, as he well knows he cannot bear the cost alone and has need of the king’s aid.” Nevertheless, Paul IV could not be unmindful that he was left alone to face the victorious enemy, bolder in their pretensions, as they knew themselves superior to their adversary.

The pope therefore took the resolution of checking the victorious march of the duke of Alva, and saving Rome by coming to terms. Cardinal Caraffa[470] attempted through the medium of Alessandro Placidi to negotiate with the Spanish viceroy, but the conditions imposed were too onerous to be accepted by the pontifical court. Cosmo intervened in favour of the latter, being anxious for peace, and a peace was signed upon most honourable terms for the pope, who through the sagacity of Silvestro Aldobrandini recovered all he had lost, and was enabled to confirm the sentences against the rebellious vassals, while King Philip promised to send a solemn embassy to him, asking grace and pardon.

But in a secret article of the treaty (an article which the pope ignored), the duchy of Paliano, the apparent cause of the war, remained in the hands of the Spanish. The duke of Alva had therefore to repair to Rome, and, though much against his will, was forced to bow before the pontiff and ask pardon for having made war on the church. The pope, who could hardly believe that he was free from a war into which he had been dragged without foreseeing all the consequences, received him with great benignity and sent the rosa benedetta to his wife the vice-queen. The duke of Ferrara was not included in the peace, but Cosmo prevailed upon Philip to receive him into favour, which was to the great advantage of the duke, who was now on friendly terms with the Venetians, having taken part in the fight between the pope and Spain without the republic’s consent, and who saw himself threatened by Duke Ottavio Farnese, anxious to enlarge his dominions at the expense of the house of Este; while his people, exhausted by a disastrous war, ardently longed for peace.

De Guise left Rome on the same day as the duke of Alva entered the town; he proceeded in all haste to France, where his arrival was eagerly looked for, and was appointed lieutenant-general with full powers. At the head of the French army he entered the field, though the season was far advanced. While feigning to bear down on the frontier of Flanders, he suddenly turned and fell upon Calais, the last place which the English held in France—an important dominion, as it secured them an easy and safe passage into the heart of the country. In eight days De Guise took possession of the place; a success due not so much to valour as to his usual foresight, he having seized the moment when the fort was left denuded of its garrison. This victory avenged St. Quentin and partly smoothed the way to a general peace.

First a truce was spoken of, then a general disarming, then a disbanding of foreign troops; but ultimately the two powers appointed their plenipotentiaries, who on the 12th of October, 1558, assembled at Cercamps, to formulate their proposals. Negotiations were long and difficult, especially respecting the question of the possession of Calais, being suspended on the 17th of November, 1558, on account of the death of Mary Tudor, queen of England; they were resumed at Cateau-Cambrésis in the following year, and finally peace was signed between England and France in the first place, between France and Spain in the second. The conditions were as follows: France restored Marienburg, Thionville, Damvillers, Montmédy, in exchange for St. Quentin, Ham, Catalet, and Thérouanne; she kept Calais and restored without compensation Bovigny and Bouillon to the bishop of Liège, while Philip kept Hesdin. In Italy the French evacuated Montferrat, Milan, Corsica, Montalcino, Siena, Piedmont, excepting the forts of Turin, Chieri, Pinerolo, Chivasso, Villanova d’Asti, which she held in pledge, and which by the Treaty of Fossano, signed by the cardinal of Lorraine in the name of the king of France, were restored to Emmanuel Philibert in exchange for the forts of Savigliano and Perosa.

The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis left Savoy, Bresse, and Bugey free, but not so the duchy of Saluzzo, which held by France was occupied by Henry IV and definitely abandoned to Piedmont in 1601, in exchange for Bresse and Bugey. The restitution of the forts of Piedmont on the part of France put the seal on the separation of this power from northern Italy. Two marriages were arranged to make the peace binding, one between Philip II, left a widower a short time previously, and Elizabeth of Valois, eldest daughter of Henry, and the other between Margaret, sister of the latter, and the duke of Savoy.

The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, completed fifty years later by that of Vervins, was the fundamental treaty of Europe until the Treaty of Westphalia. Few diplomatic acts have had such lasting results. The convention of the 2nd of April, 1559, answered the momentary needs of Europe; defined the limits of the possessions of every nation; broke the power of the house of Habsburg, which inclined to universal monarchy; lessened the authority of Philip II in Italy and the Low Countries, and compelled the said monarch to keep within the limits of the Iberian peninsula; and assured liberty to the rest of Europe, so recently threatened by the omnipotence of Charles V.h

But in its consequences to Italy, this famous treaty was particularly important. To detach the duke of Parma from the French interest during the late war, Philip had already restored to him the part of his states which Charles V had formerly seized: to confirm the fidelity of Cosmo I, afterwards grand duke of Tuscany, he had assigned Siena to the sceptre of the Medici, and retained only in Tuscany the small maritime district which was destined to form a Spanish province, under the title of lo stato degli presidi—the state of the garrisons. The general pacification confirmed these cessions of Philip; it also restored to the house of Savoy the greater part of its possessions, which the French and Spanish kings engaged to evacuate; and it left the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan under the recognised sovereignty of Spain.

Thus the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis may be considered to have finally regulated the limit and the existence of these Italian principalities and provinces which, under despotic government, whether native or foreign, had embraced almost the whole surface of the peninsula; and it left only the shadow of republican freedom to Venice, Genoa, Lucca, and—if it be worth naming—to the petty community of San Marino in the ecclesiastical states. But this same pacification is yet more remarkable, as the era from which Italy ceased to be the theatre of contention between the monarchs of Spain and Germany and France, in their struggle for the mastery of continental Europe. Other regions were now to be scathed by their ambition, and other countries were to succeed to that inheritance of warfare and all its calamities, of which Italy had reaped, and was yet to reap, only the bitterest fruits.c

A new phase now began for Italy; she no longer resisted servitude but became resigned, nay hastened to it. That same brilliant genius that had strayed in the slippery paths of the Renaissance expiated its pagan scepticism in the rigours of penitence and sometimes in the weaknesses of superstition.

Pius IV set the example of resignation. Entirely occupied in embellishing Rome, he had built the Porta Pia, opened up the via Montecavallo; protected the coasts against barbaric pirates by the Borgo, Ancona, and Cività-Vecchia fortifications, and had no other object than peace in his relations with foreign powers. Solicited by the Savoy ambassador to help his master in recovering Geneva, now turned Protestant, “What are we[472] coming to,” he said to him, “that such propositions should be made to me? I desire above all things peace.” He was convinced that the holy see could not long maintain itself without help from the princes, and above all made much of those who reigned over Italy. He thought once of conferring the title of king on Cosmo, or at least of making him archduke. He refused nothing to his vassal Philip II for the kingdom of Naples, and allowed him to oppose the formality of the exequatur to his own decrees. Still less did he combat the measures which the king took in Milan to restrain the privileges left by Charles V to the senate and the last communal liberties.

The holy see, it is true, gained spiritually what she lost temporally. In the last sessions of the Council of Trent, which she had the glory of reopening in 1563, Pope Pius IV, by politic concessions made to the prince, strengthened the religious reforms which it had seemed possible might be seized from him. By ceasing to invoke his right over crowned heads he obtained one thing—there was no more talk of reforming the church by reforming the head of it. The council, instead of putting itself above him, bowed before his authority. Not only was tradition maintained, and dogma in all its rigour, but the power of the holy see in all of its Catholicity was raised and extended. The pope remained sole judge of the changes to be worked in discipline, was infallible in matters of faith, supreme interpreter of canons, uncontested head of bishops, and Rome could console herself for the definite loss of a part of Europe by seeing her power doubled in the Catholic nations of the south who rallied religiously round her.

The lay sovereigns of Italy had not this compensation. Cosmo de’ Medici could freely restrain by terror his subjects of Florence and Siena, who still feared him. He could fortify Grossetto, Leghorn; found the order of the cavaliers of St. Stephen against pirates; construct galleys, hollow out canals, irrigate and try to repeople and make the Maremma healthy; but in seizing the little town of Foligliano from Niccolo Orsini he roused the discontent of the sovereigns, and did not appease them save by accepting the hand of the archduchess Johanna, an Austrian princess, for his son. The duke of Savoy, Emmanuel Philibert, who had given a victory to Philip II over the king of France at St. Quentin, recovered, through favour of the troubles in France, all his Piedmontese towns. But neither from the king of Spain nor the pope did he obtain the help he needed to reduce Geneva.

Under Pope Pius V (1566) the work of Catholic restoration and weakening of the peninsula was finished. This holy but inflexible old man, admired by the people for his always bare head, long white beard, and countenance beaming with piety, got the Roman Inquisition admitted into all the Italian states, and severely watched over faith and customs. Bishops were bound to keep in residence, monks and nuns forced to strict seclusion. The Collegium Germanicum, founded by the Jesuits, became a forcing house for priests for Italy and Germany. Abuses had partly disappeared; scandals diminished in Rome. Cardinals eminent for their piety gave tone to the Roman court—among these the politic Gallio di Como, the administrator[473] Salviati, San Severino, the man of the Inquisition, and Madruzzi, surnamed the Cato of the sacred college. Tiepolo, the Venetian ambassador, a little later rendered the Holy City this witness: “Rome strives to conquer the disrepute into which she had fallen; she has now become more Christian in her customs and manner of living.” In Lombardy, the archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, a worthy emulator of Pius V, did not content himself with reforming the churches and clergy, the monks and nuns. He restrained public amusement, watched over the regularity of marriages and the general conduct of the laity: his zeal even led him beyond the limit of his powers. He aspired to lend his religious decrees the aid of military force, and the governor of Milan bowed to the ascendency of a zeal free from all political ambition.

This reform, quite ecclesiastical and for discipline, had not, unfortunately, anything practical or strong. Worship was re-established without reformation of men’s characters. The faith was strengthened without correction of manners. Minds were dominated without souls being uplifted. One great action stands out during this epoch. Pius V determined a league against the Turks and among the Italian and Spanish states. Under the leadership of Don John, the vassals of Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, Naples, and the church states carried a glorious victory at Lepanto (1571).i So great and so glorious was this victory, that we must give it more than passing notice. As one of the great decisive battles between the Orient and the Occident, it had really world-historical significance. We shall adopt the enthusiastic narrative of the Spanish historian Lafuente.a

A SPANISH ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE OF LEPANTO

The Turkish fleet in Lepanto had been reinforced with ships, victuals, artillery, and soldiers drawn from the Morea and Modon, so that it numbered no less than 240 galleys, and a multitude of galiots, foists, and other craft, with 120,000 men, soldiers and rowers. Pertev Pasha and Ali Uluch, as also the viceroy of Alexandria and other Turkish generals, counselled Ali Pasha not to fight or to risk in one battle the loss of the conquests made in Cyprus. But Ali, as commander-in-chief of the fleet, rejected their advice as cowardly. The reason of this was that a famous corsair, disguised as a fisherman, had been able to approach and reconnoitre the Christian galleys, and whether to encourage the Mussulmans, or because he had not seen the whole fleet, had greatly underestimated their numbers, and had assured the pasha of a certain, indeed almost infallible victory.

Don John’s generals, amongst whom were Giovanni Andrea Doria, Ascanio de la Corna, and Sebastian Veniero, also feared engaging in a battle; and some, declaring that it would be rashness, came forward to advise him to retreat. “Gentlemen,” replied the son of Charles V, “it is no longer the hour for advising, but for fighting;” and he continued disposing the order of battle.

Besides his natural valour, his confidence had been heightened by the report he had received that Ali Uluch, the Algerian, had separated from the Turkish fleet. Both commanders were deceived and confident, both counted on the victory, both were equally anxious for battle; it would seem that they were moved by a mysterious force. Don John passed from ship to ship encouraging the Christians. “Brothers,” he cried in sonorous accents to the Spaniards, “we are here to vanquish or die, if God so wishes it. Do not[474] give your arrogant enemy occasion to cry out with haughty impiety, ‘Where is your God?’ Fight with faith in his holy name; killed or victorious, you shall enjoy immortality.” And to the Venetians: “The day has come to avenge insults; you hold in your hands the remedy to your sufferings, wield your swords with courage and anger.” And the fire of his words inflamed the hearts of the combatants with warlike ardour.

Ali Pasha, who was confident of victory, thinking that the whole of the Christian fleet was in sight, when the greater part of it was hidden from him by the Curzolari Islands, was dumfounded, and cursed the corsair who had deceived him, when upon his sailing into the open he discovered its magnitude, saw the multitude of sails and the admirable order in which it was disposed.

Don John also perceived that he had been mistaken in the number of the enemy’s ships, and that it was uncertain whether Ali Uluch had deserted; he fully weighed the danger into which he had run, but remembered who he was, fixed his eyes on a crucifix which he always wore, then raised them to heaven, and placing his trust in God resolved to fight with the presentiment of victory. The wind, which at first had been contrary to the Christians, presently turned against the infidels, rendering the operations of their ships difficult, and being favourable to the Christian fleet, which raised their courage. Among other things Don John caused the beakheads of all the galleys to be cut away, commencing with his own flag-ship, which measure, as afterwards proved, was of great advantage.

Six Venetian galleasses sailed as a vanguard, the left wing formed of sixty galleys was commanded by the provveditore Barbarigo; Giovanni Andrea Doria commanded the right which was composed of nearly an equal number of sail; in the centre division, composed of sixty-three galleys, was the generalissimo Don John of Austria in his flag-ship, having on each side the two generals of Rome and Venice, Colonna and Veniero, and in the rear his lieutenant, Requesens, chief knight commander of Castile. The rear-guard or relief squadron, of thirty-five galleys, was commanded by Don Alvaro de Bazan, marquis of Santa Cruz.

The Turkish fleet, more numerous than the Christian, formed a half moon and was also divided into three bodies. The right, of fifty-five galleys, was commanded by the viceroy of Alexandria, Muhammed Siroko; the left wing, composed of ninety-three, by Ali Uluch of Algiers, and the two pashas, Pertev and Ali, were in the centre with ninety-six sail, with their corresponding relief force or rear-guard. So that each division faced the corresponding division of the enemy, and the standard of the Grand Turk fluttered in front of the holy standard of the league.

The wind had fallen, the waters of the gulf were tranquil, and the sun shone out from a blue and clear sky, as though God wished that no element should disturb the struggle of men, that nature should oppose no obstacle to the battle which was to decide the triumph of the cross or the crescent. If the reflection of the polished arms, the shining shields, and burnished helmets of the Christians dazzled the Mussulmans, the eyes of the allies were wounded by the gilded poop lanterns, the silver and gold inscriptions of the Turkish standards, the stars, the moon, the double-edged scimitars, which shone from the ships of the Ottoman admirals. Nothing could be discerned on the horizon but banners and pendants of varied colours. For a brief space the two fleets surveyed one another in mutual wonder; this impressive silence was broken by a broadside discharged from Ali’s galley, which was answered by another from Don John’s flag-ship.

The first boom of the artillery, which was the signal for battle, was followed instantly by the usual clamour and shouting, with which the Moors commence a fight. The Turkish right wing commanded by the viceroy of Alexandria first engaged with the Christian left, commanded by the provveditore Barbarigo. The Venetians fought unshielded with the furious courage and passion of men fighting the murderers of their compatriots. Doria the Genoese engaged with Ali Uluch the Algerian, who captured the flag-ship of Malta, and put all her defenders to the sword, with the exception of the prior and two other knights, who, covered with wounds, were saved by being counted among the dead.

Ali Pasha and Don John of Austria sought each other with equal hatred, until with a terrible shock their two galleys rushed together, the fire of the artillery and arquebuses from the Spanish ship doing deadly work on the men of the Turkish galley. The action became general, and the contending galleys changed about; the sea was white with the foam of the troubled waves, the smoke of the artillery and arquebuses darkened the sky, turned midday into night, the sparks flying from the swords and shields as they clashed together seemed like lightning flashing from black clouds. Ships were engulfed in the waves, Turks and Christians fell in a muddled heap, clasped together like brothers, with the hatred of enemies, by the side of a sinking ship; greedy flames devoured others; a Turkish ship would be seen flying a Christian flag, and a Spanish galley guided by a Turkish commandant. Swords broken, they fought hand to hand; all was destruction and death, until the sea became reddened with blood. “Never,” says the author of the Memories of Lepanto, “had the Mediterranean witnessed on her bosom, nor shall the world again see, a conflict so obstinate, a butchery so terrible, men so valiant and so enraged.”

With his youthful and untiring arm Don John of Austria wielded his sword unceasingly, his person being ever exposed to danger; youthful also in the battle appeared the veteran Sebastian Veniero; Colonna did justice to his illustrious name; Requesens showed himself a worthy lieutenant of the valiant prince Don John; the prince of Parma proved that the blood of Charles V ran in his veins; the wounds he received did not check Urbino; Figueroa, Zapata, Carillo, every captain of the flag-ship worked like men well used to battle, setting little value on their lives, when the flag-ship was hard pressed, because Ali and Pertev Pasha also fought like heroes with their janissaries.

Don Alvaro de Bazan came to the rescue, as though his galley was moved by lightning, and mowed down Mussulmans, clearing all before him, though balls turned against his shield. Like a whirlwind he moved, nor did his fire slacken though ships were engulfed at his side and captains fell lifeless before him. Ali Uluch held Doria in desperate conflict; the marquis of Santa Cruz, leaving the flag-ship in safety, rushed to his assistance, regained the flag-ship of Malta, relieved the Genoese, and put the Algerian to ignominious flight.

It is impossible to relate the special deeds of prowess of every captain and every soldier in the stupendous struggle, in which the janissaries, who held themselves to be the most valiant warriors of the world, were to learn that there were Christian soldiers more valiant, more audacious, and more daring than they. Nevertheless we cannot omit making special mention of a Spanish soldier who, prostrated with fever on board Giovanni Andrea Doria’s galley, but feeling a more fierce fever burning in his breast, that is to say, the fire of courage and the desire of battle, left his bed and begged the[476] captain to station him at the post of greatest danger. In vain his comrades, in vain the captain himself, tried to convince him that he was more in a condition to be curing his body than exposing it to danger. The soldier insisted, the soldier fought valiantly, the soldier was wounded in the breast and left hand, but yet he would not retreat, for the maxim of this soldier was, that wounds received in battle are stars which guide to the heaven of glory. The stubborn soldier stood firm, and could not be prevailed upon to retire that he might be attended to, until his galley had ceased to battle, the captain Francisco de San Pedro being killed in the fight. The reader will understand why, in the midst of numerous other deeds of prowess, we have singled that of this soldier in particular, for he will have divined that this soldier was no other than Miguel de Cervantes, who, then unknown to the world as a soldier, became afterwards famous as a writer.

But it is now time to draw this furious fight to a close, the result of it being for a time doubtful. The Turks had already suffered a great loss when Pertev Pasha, pressed by Don Juan de Cordova, fell into the sea, and his galley was boarded by Paulo Jordan Urbino, the seraskier being forced to swim to a small boat in which to escape. But the Christians did not set up the cry of victory until they saw Ali Pasha, after the vigorous and stubborn efforts of himself and the three hundred janissaries of his flag-ship, fall on the gangway wounded in the forehead by a ball from one of Don John’s arquebusiers.

Another cut off his head and presented it to the Christian generalissimo, who with noble generosity censured the action with horror, and ordered such trophies to be thrown into the sea; nevertheless he could not prevent the head of the Turkish admiral from being raised and exhibited on the point of a spear. The Christian’s cry of victory resounded through the air, and was carried by the winds to the shore.

The last engagement was between the galleys of Ali Uluch and Giovanni Andrea Doria, but on the approach of Don John, the viceroy of Algiers hastened to effect his escape, with forty vessels saved from the general destruction; and so great was his haste that neither Giovanni Andrea nor Alvaro de Bazan could give chase. Nevertheless well-nigh all his men perished, either drowned in the waves, when jumping in terror to the shore, or killed among the rocks by the Venetians.

In this memorable battle the Turks lost 220 ships; of this number 130 fell into the hands of the Christians, more than 90 were engulfed in the sea, or reduced to ruins by fire, 40 alone escaped; 25,000 Turks fell in battle, 50,000 were taken prisoners; the allies took from them 17 heavy cannon, and 250 of smaller calibre, more than 12,000 Christians, captives of the Mussulmans, employed as rowers, saw their chains broken and precious liberty recovered. The Christian losses were also great, about 8,000 valiant soldiers and sailors were killed, 2,000 of these were Spaniards, 800 of the papal army, and the rest Venetians. Only 15 ships were lost. On the other hand the gilded poop lanterns, the purple banners embroidered in gold and silver, the stars and moon, the pasha’s pennons, were precious trophies which the allies won in the battle.

Such in brief, concludes Lafuente, was the famous naval battle of Lepanto, the most famous ever recorded in the annals of nations, for the number of ships, the exertions and valour of the combatants, for the complete destruction of a fleet as formidable as was the Ottoman fleet. The janissaries were no longer invincible; the Sublime Porte was to lose its supremacy in the Mediterranean.j

THE GENERAL CONDITION OF ITALY

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John,” Pius V could cry in his enthusiasm over the victory of Lepanto. But besides this victory there was little to arouse enthusiasm in Italy; scandals and baseness prevailed everywhere. The Medici offered the worst examples of this. Dreadful rumours circulated on the sudden and close deaths of Cosmo’s two sons. It was confidently said that one, Giovanni, had in a fit of jealousy during a hunting party assassinated his brother Garcias, and that Cosmo had slain the fratricide some days later in the arms of his mother. The third, Francesco, although married to the archduchess Johanna, publicly contracted a liaison which seemed to give rise every day to fresh scandals, and Cosmo in the recesses of his palace indulged in stormy passions made worse by a sombre melancholy. All this did not hinder Pope Pius V, in 1569, from conferring on Cosmo, by what right is not known, the title of grand duke. This act showed to what depths the Italian princes had sunk. The other small sovereigns, whose lives were also not the most exemplary, showed themselves very jealous. The dukes of Ferrara and Savoy protested at the courts of Madrid and Vienna, and aspired to guard the right of precedence, which the pope had also just changed. At least they would be of the first rank among slaves. The right of precedence, such as it was in the general servitude, remained the object of the princes’ feverish rivalry. To maintain this their wise men used a good deal of heraldic and feudal science. Their ambassadors fought at the courts of Madrid and Vienna.

Loss of liberty was not compensated for by material prosperity. This was clearly shown during the reigns of Gregory XIII at Rome and Francesco I at Florence.

Gregory XIII, although of less deep piety than his predecessor, was carried along in his spiritual government by the vigorous impulse given by Pius V. He founded an international college at Rome, and accomplished a work truly European by the reform of the calendar in 1582. His attempts to regulate economic conditions were not so successful. Francesco de’ Medici, more docile still than his father to the Spanish yoke, obtained by concessions in 1576, from the emperor and the Spanish king, that recognition of his grand-ducal title which Cosmo had refused, with the right of precedence over the other dukes. With less reverence than ever he established Bianca Capello in his palace, she losing nothing of his affection for having given him a child by another father; she even became his wife after the death of the archduchess. Quite a Spanish prince, he separated himself entirely from the people. After the fashion of Philip II he only lived in the midst of courtesans and favourites, who began to form a nobility in a state which was formerly largely democratic. But through his negligence all the elements of order and prosperity in Tuscany were lost. The city of Leghorn alone slightly developed, thanks to the commercial privileges he granted her, but the rest of the country became deserted compared to what it had been under Cosmo I. Pisa, from twenty-two thousand inhabitants, fell to eight thousand; and in 1575 a conspiracy was necessary to overthrow that voluptuous tyrant who had no thought for the morrow.

In the Milanese, where the governors respected the débris of ancient liberties, there was still some activity. Milanese arms and embroideries were sought after, woollen-weavers were very busy in Como and the capital. The work of canalisation went on. Milan passed as Italy’s most populous city and had 150,000 inhabitants. But at Naples the exigencies and venality of the[478] administration exhausted all sources of prosperity. Whilst rich families in Lombardy, the Marignani, the Sforza, the Serboni, the Borromei, and the Trivulzi, displayed a princely luxuriousness, the Neapolitan nobility, quickly ruined by court life, retired to their châteaux and lived by oppressing the peasants. Even the townsfolk, crushed by taxation, and above all by the caprice of viceroys, were ruined. The miserable tax-payers, after all their furniture had been sold, were even driven to strip off their roofs and sell the material. Towns fell into decay. Localities formerly very flourishing, like Giovinazzo in Apulia, completely disappeared. A whole province was desolated; Calabria was now only crossed by caravans.

In the whole peninsula brigandage was organised, as in great epochs of misery. The discontented, the banished, ruined people, and bad subjects united in bands under bold and adventurous chiefs and wrought sanguinary revenge. The Apennine gorges, the little châteaux there, became the refuge for these outlaws or bandits who replaced the condottieri, and were as a last and wild protestation of national independence. The people, far from despising them, called them the bravi. Grandees, princes, even cardinals often went to these men to seek help needed to execute vengeance or even to satisfy their cupidity. Marco Bernardi of Cosenza in Calabria; Pietro Leonello of Spoleto in the Marches; Alfonso Piccolomini, lord of Montemarciano, and his noble family in the Apennines, became the terror of the peninsula. It needed a real military Spanish expedition to destroy Marco Bernardi and his band. Alfonso Piccolomini seized châteaux and even small towns in the papal states. Pope Gregory XIII augmented his military forces and gave Cardinal Sforza the fullest power to rid the patrimony of St. Peter of this brigandage. Gregory XIII could not, however, disarm Piccolomini but by pardoning him and restoring his goods. Such was the state to which imperial and pontifical restoration had reduced the peninsula towards the end of the sixteenth century. But at the threshold of the seventeenth century two energetic men tried to raise Italy and even put her in the way of profiting by the restoration of France, her natural protector, since she had fallen under the Spanish yoke: these were Sixtus V, sovereign pontiff, and Ferdinand I, grand duke of Tuscany.

POPE SIXTUS V; FERDINAND, GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY

Felice Peretti [Sixtus V], one of a poor slave family who had taken refuge at Montalto, had been raised in the rough school of poverty. He had often in his youth guarded the fruit or taken care of swine. Received into a Franciscan convent, he had risen by showing a mixture of theologic[479] erudition and facility in administration, which evidenced a decided mind and firm character. He was sixty-four and somewhat infirm when called to the papacy (1585). This honour seemed to tend to rejuvenescence, a fact which gave rise to a report that the day after his exaltation he had thrown away his crutches. He was the first for some time who understood that the pope, as temporal sovereign, cannot be absorbed exclusively in religious duties without imperilling that same spiritual power, and he undertook first to destroy brigandage and raise the finances of the holy see. From the first day, most energetic measures were taken against the brigands. A price was set on the heads of the leaders; their relatives were rendered responsible and liable for all their misdeeds. The holy father found good all the measures exercised against them. No pity was to be expected from him. “As long as I live,” he said the very day of his coronation, “every criminal shall suffer capital punishment.” At the end of two years, ambassadors congratulated the pope on the safety of the roads in the pontifical domain.

Gregory XIII had, as Sixtus V said, eaten the revenues of three pontiffs: his own, those of his predecessor, and those of his successor. Sixtus V exercised considerable economies in the expenses of the pontifical chamber. He created a number of venal duties, and established monti on the consumption of wine, wood, and even small industries. In a short time he had paid his debts, and could put aside annually a million gold crowns: a reserve destined to pay for great events such as a crusade, a famine, or an invasion of St. Peter’s domain. The ordinary excess of receipts was employed by him in embellishing Rome. Since Sixtus IV had joined the two shores of the Tiber by the bridge which bears his name, the lower part of the town had been entirely rebuilt; beyond the river rose the marvels of the Vatican, the Belvedere, the Loggia, and the palace of the Chigi; beyond these, the Cancellaria of Julius II, the Farnese and Orsini palaces. But the heights of the town were always abandoned; the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and the palace of the Conservatori on the Capitoline no longer attracted the inhabitants. Sixtus V, to repeople these beautiful and celebrated heights, conducted greatly needed water there by means of works which rivalled those of the Romans. He caused to flow, sometimes under ground, sometimes in aqueducts, to the Capitoline and Quirinal, that aqua felice which gave in four hours 20,537 cubic metres of water and nourished twenty-seven fountains. He planned a great number of streets, facilitated communication between the higher and the lower towns, and doubled, as it were, the town of Rome.

The former Franciscan monk also caused a reaction against paganism in art; and was happy in celebrating in his works the triumph of the Christian faith. He surmounted with a cross the beautiful obelisk which the architect Fontana had raised with so much trouble and delight on the Piazza di San Pietro. He knocked down the statues of Trajan and Antoninus from the triumphal columns of those emperors to put up St. Peter and St. Paul, and to build his churches and realise his plans destroyed the monuments of antiquity, even the beautiful temple of Severus. He even sacrificed to this Christian vandalism the beautiful tomb of Cæcilia Metella. But before all, this positive mind had always one end in view—public utility; and Rome really rose under his pontificate.

The death of the grand duke of Florence, Francesco, was as favourable to Tuscany as that of Gregory XIII to the church states. Duke Francesco and Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici, rarely in accord, were still embroiled after the[480] accession of Pope Sixtus V. In the autumn of 1587, Francesco having fallen ill, Ferdinand came to Florence and there was reconciled with him. But some days after the fever of Francesco grew worse, Bianca Capello herself was attacked by the same illness. The husband and wife whose passion for each other had troubled the court of Tuscany, even of Italy, died within two days of each other, and Cardinal Ferdinand became duke of Florence. A thousand rumours were set afloat to damage him, but the new duke soon stifled them by benefits bestowed. An enlightened man, with practical good sense and resolution, Ferdinand I repaired the miseries caused by the negligence of Francesco. The prosperity of Leghorn was taken in hand; the town of Pisa helped by the opening of a canal which put her in communication with Leghorn at that point where the Genoese were soon to assist at a yearly fair. The course of the Arno received a more advantageous direction; there was much done in the way of draining inundated lands, and the prospect of repeopling the Maremma was reundertaken by increasing the water-supply and damming the overflow of Lake Fucecchio. Ferdinand kept a navy sufficiently considerable to drive the Barbary pirates back to Bona, and tried to reanimate art and letters, which had been the glory of his country and his ancestors.

Pope Sixtus V and Ferdinand were so constituted as to understand each other. Their foreign policy began to betray more independence. Sixtus V pursued as far as Spanish territory the brigands who were sometimes protected by them. Ferdinand sent away all the Spaniards whom Francesco had taken into pay, and confided his fortresses to Italians whom he could trust. Both men had come to a good understanding with the Venetian republic. The pope particularly was fond of that town, which had helped him to destroy the brigands. He often assured her that he would willingly shed his blood for her. They also attached to themselves the Gonzagas of Mantua and Genoa, threatened by Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, who hoped to obtain everything from Spain by proving himself her most zealous partisan. It was already a scene of resistance. But help must be sought from without. France, preyed upon for twenty-five years by the horrors of a religious war which paralysed all foreign politics, could hardly stand against the efforts and intrigues of Philip II. Ferdinand and Venice favoured as much as they could the restoration of a strong and national power. The republic guessed first what the future would be, and had the courage to recognise Henry IV before all the other states. After her, Ferdinand entered into friendly relations with the new king; and while the duke of Savoy seized from him Barcelonnette and Antibes, he threw himself into the château d’If and put an efficient garrison there.

Sixtus V hesitated. He threatened to break with the republic, for which he had promised to shed his blood. He allowed himself, however, to be persuaded to relent, and even received M. de Luxembourg, the envoy of Henry IV, in private audience. The Spanish ambassador begged, threatened. Sixtus went down before such boldness. Philip II again began to send bandits to the pontifical territory, and intercepted the convoys laden with grain which Ferdinand had caused to come for the provisionment of Tuscany.

Sixtus V went so far as to speak of excommunicating the Catholic king of Spain. This energetic man, however, bent under so great a task, and died the 7th of August, 1590, pursued by the cowardly maledictions of the people, who broke his statues, and decided that that honour should not again be given to living popes.

POPE CLEMENT VIII (1590-1605 A.D.)

The death of Sixtus V again agitated the conclave. The Medicean party at last arrived at finding a pope, if not hostile, at least less devoted to Spain—Urban VII. But he died at the end of seven days, and the struggle recommenced. The viceroy of Naples, to finish it, sent brigands. Olivares threatened the cardinals with a siege. Gregory XIV, a pope devoted to Spain, was elected; but only reigned seven months. A third struggle began, more fierce than the preceding ones. The cardinal of San Severino, supported by the Spaniards, failed one day of the papacy by a single vote. “Anxiety,” he himself said, “made me sweat blood.” Cardinal Aldobrandini, the creature of Sixtus V, much less devoted to the Spaniards, was at last elected on January 30th, 1592, and took the name of Clement VIII.

This was a victory for Italy. The abjuration of Henry IV, his entry into Paris in 1594, was another. It was celebrated in the peninsula as a national event. The pope, who up to then had managed the Spanish and only secretly received the ambassadors of Henry IV, no longer resisted the insistences of the grand duke of Florence. In vain the Spanish party left Rome with the cardinals, who led them; in vain the duke of Sessa, Philip II’s ambassador, threw his Abruzzian bandits on church lands. Supported by the Venetians, by the duke of Tuscany, by the emperor himself, to whom the Italians furnished help against the Turks, the pope carried all before him. He declared in solemn ceremony (September 8th, 1595) Henry to be reconciled with the Catholic church, thus re-establishing between the orthodox powers a favourable equilibrium to his own independence and the freeing of Italy. The peninsula, in effect, soon found she had gained a powerful support against Spain. Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio, dying in 1597, had left his heritage to Don Cesare his cousin, in default of a direct heir. Clement VIII claimed, as fief of the holy see, the town of Ferrara, hurled excommunication against Don Cesare, who aspired to all the heritage, and raised a loan to support an army of spiritual thunderbolts.

At first events did not seem to favour the holy see. The court of Spain, who thought it had somewhat against Clement VIII, was ill disposed. The grand duke of Tuscany, brother-in-law to Don Cesare, this time abandoned the pope. Even the Venetian Republic hindered him from recruiting soldiers in Dalmatia. Henry IV forgot what he owed to Venice, to the grand duke, and offered to send an army beyond the mountains to put the pope in possession of Ferrara. Don Cesare, obliged to yield, gave up the town after taking away the archives, the library, and the artillery of his predecessors. He thereafter contented himself with the title of duke of Modena and Reggio. The town of Ferrara lost all its advantages, all its éclat as capital, and soon saw rise in place of the ducal palace and the beautiful belvedere sung by her poets, a citadel which easily kept in awe a town promptly dispeopled.

Philip II, who for thirty years had allowed nothing to be done in Italy without his permission, was obliged to yield this time. He thus signed, before dying, the peace of Vervins, which announced the re-establishment of French power and the decadence of Spain. His successor, Philip III, abandoned even the most faithful of the servitors of his house in Italy—Charles Emmanuel I, duke of Savoy, from whom Henry IV, by the treaty of Lyons, received in 1600 Bugey, Valromey, and Gex, in exchange for the marquisate of Saluzzo.

Italy now turned with full hope towards France. The holy see had nothing but kindness for her. The learned cardinal Baronius repeated, to[482] whoever cared to listen, that the papacy had never received of any nation so much service. “Can it be allowed,” cried the cardinal’s nephew, Aldobrandini, through whose hands all affairs passed, “can it be allowed that the Spanish should command in the house of a stranger in spite of him?” And it was not perhaps without reflection that he put millions in reserve and maintained an army of twelve thousand men. Not having had occasion to meddle with France since the Peace of Lyons, Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy began to understand that it was in Italy, at the expense of Spain, that he must seek aggrandisement. So he entered into intimate relations with Henry IV, so long time his enemy. In waiting for better things, he ended by organising the senate established by his father at Carignan on the model of the French parliaments. He reanimated agriculture and commerce and fortified Turin, an Italian city. He himself wrote a parallel between great men ancient and modern, and began to found the military power of his little state.

Ferdinand of Tuscany, only too happy to see Maria de’ Medici mount the French throne, did not long hold out before Henry IV. He was bold enough to send his admiral Inghirami, at the head of his fleet, to fight the Turks in the Adriatic, even seeking to seize from them the isle of Cyprus. In the north and south of Italy the Milanese and the Neapolitans themselves began to grow restless under the iron yoke of Spain. It was perhaps the time to attempt something. Cardinal Aldobrandini once proposed to Venice a league against Spain. But Cardinal Aldobrandini and Ferdinand were sworn foes. Henry IV, moreover, was not yet firmly enough established in France to act outside it.

There then remained only one alternative for the Neapolitan kingdom—one of those isolated revolts, so extraordinarily foolish, so frequent in the peninsula, which can only be explained by the misery of the people. A Dominican, Tommaso Campanella, a deep thinker if he had not been a still greater dreamer, tore himself from his philosophic elucidations and dreams to call, like a new Savonarola, his compatriots to liberty. He believed in the faith of the Apocalypse that the seventeenth century would be for Italy the signal for a cataclysm wherein would be engulfed the Spanish domination, and he formed the project of founding a kind of universal theocratic republic. He began first by Calabria, his country. Monks, not only Dominicans, but Franciscans and Augustines, drawn away by his eloquence, began to preach the doctrines of this new emissary from God, and blew upon the hardly extinct ashes of Neapolitan frenzy. Even many bishops and a few barons followed the monks. An army, recruited in part by bandits, went out from Calabria. The count of Lemos, viceroy of Naples, soon had the upper hand. The unfortunates who were seized perished in frightful torments. Tommaso Campanella, regarded as insane, was thrown in a dungeon, where he stayed twenty-seven years, and passed from the dream of a universal republic to that of a universal holy empire.

This attempt sufficed to put the Spanish government, already full of distrust, still more on their guard. Philip III, at Rome, roused Cardinal Farnese, head of his faction, against Aldobrandini. The garrisons of Tuscany were strengthened; Fuentes, governor of Milan, assembled sufficient troops to scare the whole peninsula. He would have done more, if the king of Spain, Philip III, and his minister, the duke of Lerma, satisfied with maintaining their domination, had not taken every precaution not to rouse the intervention of Henry IV from beyond the Alps.i

Fully to appreciate the character of the times just treated, one must recall the state of contemporary civilisation. We have been brought somewhat[483] in contact with the conditions in Germany, France, and Spain, because these countries were in constant political association with Italy. To complete the picture, it should be recalled that the sixteenth century was the age of Henry VIII and Elizabeth in England; therefore, the time of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. It was the age also of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin; the time when the spirit of the Reformation was actively battling with the old ecclesiasticism, and when the counter influence of the Inquisition made itself felt everywhere. Italy being relatively uninfluenced by the Reformation was also relatively free from the excesses of the Inquisition. Nevertheless, it furnished just at the close of the century a most striking illustration of inquisitorial power in the persecution, imprisonment, and finally the execution by burning at the stake of the famous philosopher, Giordano Bruno.

But the Italian civilisation of the time presents some more attractive features. The artistic impulses of the Renaissance, at which we have glimpsed in an earlier chapter, could not be blotted out in a single generation; and it must be recalled that Michelangelo lived until the year 1564; so the art movement did not pass its climax before the middle of the century. In the field of literature the activities of the earlier generation were unabated. “Among the numbers of men who had devoted themselves to letters,” says Sismondi,k “Italy produced at this glorious epoch, at least thirty poets, whom their contemporaries placed on a level with the first names of antiquity, and whose fame, it was thought, would be commensurate with the existence of the world. But even the names of these illustrious men begin to be forgotten; and their works, buried in the libraries of the learned, are now seldom read.

“The circumstances of their equality in merit has doubtless been an obstacle to the duration of their reputation. Fame does not possess a strong memory. For a long flight, she relieves herself from all unnecessary encumbrances. She rejects, on her departure, and in her course, many who thought themselves accepted by her, and she comes down to late ages, with the lightest possible burthen. Unable to choose between Bembo, Sadoleti, Sanazzaro, Bernardo Accolti, and so many others, she relinquishes them all.”

There is one name, however, that stands out from amidst this company in a secure position. This is the name of Torquato Tasso, the famous author of the Gerusalemme Liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered”), a poem dealing with the First Crusade, which by common consent has high rank among the great epics, and which placed its author in contemporary estimation, as in that of posterity, on an approximate level with Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto. The appearance of Tasso in this epoch is another illustration of that fruitage of literary genius in times of political degeneration to which reference has previously been made.a

The general aspect of Italy, during the whole course of the seventeenth century, remained unchanged by any signal revolution. The period which had already elapsed between the extinction of national and civil independence and the opening of the period before us had sufficed to establish the permanency of the several despotic governments of the peninsula, and to regulate the limits of their various states and provinces. If we except some popular commotions in Naples and Sicily, the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor had wholly ceased. Servitude had become the heirloom of the people; and they bowed their necks unresistingly and from habit to the grievous yoke which their fathers had borne before them. Their tyrants, domestic and foreign, revelled or slumbered on their thrones.

The Italian princes of the seventeenth century were more voluptuous and effeminate, but perhaps less ferocious and sanguinary, than the ancient Visconti, the Scala, the Carrara, the Gonzaga. But the condition of their subjects was not the less degraded. Their sceptres had broken every mouldering relic of freedom; and their dynasties, unmolested in their seats, were left (we except that of Savoy) to that quiet and gradual extinction which was insured by the progress of mental and corporeal degeneracy—the hereditary consequences of slothful and bloated intemperance. The seventeenth century, however, saw untroubled to its close the reign of several ducal houses, which were to become extinct in the following age.

Compared with that of the preceding century, the history of Italy at this period may appear less deeply tinged with national crime, and humiliation, and misery; for the expiring throes of political vitality had been followed by the stillness of death. But, as a distinguished writer has well remarked, we should greatly err if, in observing that history is little more than the record of human calamity, we should conclude that the times over which it is silent are necessarily less characterised by misfortune. History can seldom penetrate into the recesses of society, can rarely observe the shipwreck of domestic peace and the destruction of private virtue. The happiness and the wretchedness of families equally escape its cognisance. But we know that, in the country and in the times which now engage our attention, the frightful corruption of manners and morality had sapped the most sacred relations of life. The influence of the Spanish sovereignty over a great part of the peninsula had made way for the introduction of many Castilian prejudices; and these were fatally engrafted on the vices of a people already too prone to licentious gallantry. The merchant-noble of the Italian republics had been taught to see no degradation in commerce; and some of the numerous members of his household were always engaged in pursuits which increased the wealth and consequence of their family.

But the haughty cavalier of Spain viewed the exercise of such plebeian industry with bitter contempt. The Spanish military inundated the peninsula; and the growth of Spanish sentiment was encouraged by the Italian princes. They induced their courtiers to withdraw their capital from commerce, that they might invest it in estates, which descended to their eldest sons, the representatives of their families; and the younger branches of every noble house were condemned to patrician indolence, poverty, and celibacy. It was to recompense these younger sons, thus sacrificed to family pride, and forever debarred from forming matrimonial connections, that the strange and demoralising office of the cicisbeo, or cavaliere servente, was instituted: an office which, under the guise of romantic politeness, and fostered by the dissolute example of the Italian princes and their courts, thinly veiled the universal privilege of adultery.

This pernicious and execrable fashion poisoned the sweet fountain of domestic happiness and confidence at its sources. The wife was no longer the intimate of her husband’s heart, the faithful partner of his joys and cares. The eternal presence of the licensed paramour blasted his peace; and the emotions of paternal love were converted into distracting doubts or baleful indifference. The degraded parent, husband, son, fled from the pollution which reigned within his own dwelling, himself to plunge into a similar vortex of corruption. All the social ties were loosened: need we demand of history if public happiness could reside in that land, where private morality had perished.

GENERAL CONDITIONS

In attempting to bring the unimportant fortunes of Italy during the seventeenth century into a general point of view, we should find considerable and needless difficulty. In the beginning of the century, a quarrel between the popedom and Venice appeared likely to kindle a general war in the peninsula; but the difference was terminated by negotiation (1627).

Twenty years later, the disputed succession of the duchy of Mantua created more lasting troubles, and involved all Lombardy in hostilities; in which the imperialists, the Spaniards, the French, and the troops of Savoy once[486] more mingled on the ancient theatre of so many sanguinary wars and calamitous devastations. But this uninteresting struggle, if not marked by less cruelty and rapine towards the inhabitants of the country, was pursued with less destructive vigour and activity than in the preceding century; nor were the French arms attended by those violent alternations of success and failure which had formerly inflicted such woes upon the peninsula. From the epoch at which Henry IV excluded himself from Italy by the Savoyard treaty, until the ambitious designs of Cardinal Richelieu involved France in the support of the pretensions of the Grisons over the Valtelline country against Spain, the French standards had not been displayed beyond the Alps. But from the moment at which the celebrated minister of Louis XIII engaged in this enterprise, until the Peace of the Pyrenees, the incessant contest of the French and Spanish monarchies, in which the dukes of Savoy and other Italian powers variously embarked, was continually extended to the frontiers of Piedmont and Lombardy.

The arms of the combatants, however, seldom penetrated beyond the northern limits of Italy; and their rivalry, which held such a fatal influence on the peace of other parts of the European continent, can scarcely be said to have materially affected the national affairs of the peninsula. Meanwhile, the few brief and petty internal hostilities which arose and terminated among the Italian princes were of still less general consequence and interest. The subsequent gigantic wars into which Louis XIV, by his insatiable lust of conquest, forced the great powers of Europe, were little felt in Italy until the close of the century—except in the territories of the dukes of Savoy. Thus, altogether, instead of endeavouring to trace the history of Italy during the seventeenth century as one integral and undivided subject, it will be more convenient still to consider the few important events in the contemporary annals of her different provinces as really appertaining, without much connection, to distinct and separate states.

The immediate dominion of the Spanish monarchy over great part of Italy lasted during the whole of the seventeenth century. Naples, Sicily, Milan, and Sardinia were exposed alike to the oppression of the Spanish court, and to the inherent vices of its administration. Its grievous exactions were rendered more ruinous by the injudicious and absurd manner of their infliction; by the private rapacity of the viceroys, and the peculation of their officers. Its despotism was aggravated by all the wantonness of power, and all the contemptuous insolence of pride. But of these four subject states, the last two, Milan and Sardinia, suffered in silence; and except that the Lombard duchy was almost incessantly a prey to warfare and ravages from which the insular kingdom was exempted, a common obscurity and total dearth of all interest equally pervade the annals of both. But the fortunes of the two kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were more remarkable from the violent efforts of the people, ill conducted and unsuccessful though these were, to shake off the intolerable yoke of Spain.

The decline of the Spanish monarchy, which had already commenced in the reign of Philip II, continued rapidly progressive under his successors, the third and fourth Philip, and the feeble Charles II, so the necessities of the Spanish government became more pressing, and its demands more rapacious and exorbitant. Of the revenue of about 6,000,000 gold ducats, which the viceroys extorted from the kingdom, less than 1,500,000 covered the whole public charge, civil and military, of the country; and after all their own embezzlements and those of their subalterns, they sent yearly to Spain more than 4,000,000, no part of which ever returned. Thus was[487] the kingdom perpetually drained of wealth, which nothing but the lavish abundance of nature in that most fertile of regions could in any degree have renovated. But even the luxuriant opulence of Naples could neither satisfy the avarice of the court of Madrid, nor protect the people from misery and want under a government whose impositions increased with the public exhaustion, and were multiplied with equal infatuation and wickedness upon the common necessaries of life. In this manner, duties were established upon flesh, fish, oil, and even upon flour and bread; and the people found themselves crushed under taxation, to pay the debts and to feed the armies of Spain. Their wealth and their youth were alike drawn out of their country, in quarrels altogether foreign to the national interests; in the unfortunate and mismanaged wars in the Spanish court in Lombardy and Catalonia, and in the Low Countries and Germany. Meanwhile, as during the last century, the interior of the kingdom was almost always infested with banditti, rendered daring and reckless of crime by their numbers and the defenceless state of society; and so ill-guarded were the sea coasts that the Turkish pirates made habitual descents during the whole course of the century, ravaged the country, attacked villages and even cities, and carried off the people into slavery.

It cannot excite our surprise that the evils of the Spanish administration filled the Neapolitans with discontent and indignation; we may only wonder that any people could be found abject enough to submit to a government at once so oppressive and feeble. The first decided attempt to throw off the foreign yoke had its origin among an order in which such a spirit might least be anticipated. In the last year of the sixteenth century, Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar, had, on account, says Giannone, of his wicked life and the suspicion of infidelity, incurred the rigours of the Roman Inquisition. On his release he laboured, in revenge for the treatment which he had received at Rome, to induce the brethren of his own order, the Augustines, and the Franciscans, to excite a religious and political revolution in Calabria. He acquired among them the same reputation for sanctity and prophetic illumination which Savonarola had gained at Florence a hundred years[488] before. He secretly inveighed against the Spanish tyranny; he declared that he was appointed by the Almighty to overthrow it, and to establish a republic in its place; and he succeeded in enlisting the monastic orders and several bishops of Calabria in the cause. By their exhortations, a multitude of people and banditti of the province were roused to second him, and his design was embraced by great numbers of the provincial barons, whose names the historian declares that he suppresses from regard to their descendants. Campanella relied likewise on the assistance of the Turks in the meditated insurrection. But the secret of so extensive a conspiracy could not be preserved; the government got notice of it before it was ripe for execution; and Campanella and his chief priestly associates, with other conspirators, were adroitly arrested. Many of them were put to death under circumstances of atrocious cruelty; but Campanella himself, in the extremity of his torments, had the consummate address to render his confession so perplexed and incoherent that he was regarded as a madman, and sentenced only to perpetual imprisonment; from which he contrived at length to escape. He fled to France, and peaceably ended his life many years afterwards at Paris.

After the suppression of this conspiracy, Naples was frequently agitated at different intervals by commotions, into which the lower people were driven by misery and want. These partial ebullitions of popular discontent were not, however, marked by any very serious character until the middle of the century, when the tyranny of the viceregal government and the disorders and wretchedness of the kingdom reached their consummation. The Spanish resources of taxation had been exhausted on the ordinary articles of consumption; the poor of the capital and kingdom had been successively compelled to forego the use of meat and bread by heavy duties; and the abundant fruits of their happy climate remained almost their sole means of support. The duke of Arcos, who was then viceroy, could find no other expedient to meet the still craving demands of his court upon a country already drained of its life-blood, than to impose a tax upon this last supply of food; and his measure roused the famishing people to desperation.

An accidental affray in the market of Naples swelled into a general insurrection of the populace of the capital; and an obscure and bold individual from the dregs of the people immediately rose to the head of the insurgents. Tommaso Aniello, better known under the name of Masaniello, a native of Amalfi and servant of a fisherman, had received an affront from the officers of the customs and sought an occasion of gratifying his lurking vengeance. Seizing the moment when the popular exasperation was at its height, he led the rioters to the attack and demolition of the custom-house. The flames of insurrection at once spread with uncontrollable violence; the palace of the viceroy was pillaged; and Arcos himself was driven for refuge to one of the castles of Naples. The infuriated populace murdered many of the nobles, burned the houses of all who were obnoxious to them, and filled the whole capital with flames and blood. Their youthful idol Masaniello, tattered and half naked, with a scaffold for his throne and the sword for his sceptre, commanded everywhere with absolute sway.

The viceroy, terrified into virtue at these excesses, which the long oppression of his court and his own tyranny had provoked, and finding the insurrection spreading through the provinces, consented to all the demands of Masaniello and his followers. By a treaty which he concluded with the insurgents, he solemnly promised the repeal of all the taxes imposed since the time of Charles V, and engaged that no new duties should thenceforth be[489] levied; he guaranteed the ancient and long-violated privileges of parliament; and he bound himself by oath to an act of oblivion. A short interval of calm was thus gained; but the perfidious viceroy employed it only in gratifying the vanity of Masaniello by caresses and entertainments; until, having caused a potion to be administered to him in his wine at a banquet, he succeeded in unsettling his reason. The demagogue then by his extravagances and cruelties lost the affection of the people; and Arcos easily procured his assassination by some of his own followers.

The viceroy had no sooner thus deprived the people of their young leader, whose native talents had rendered him truly formidable, than he immediately showed a determination to break all the articles of his compact. But the people, penetrating his treachery, flew again to arms; and the insurrection burst forth in the capital and provinces with more sanguinary fury than before. Again Arcos dissembled; and again the deluded people had laid down their arms; when, on the appearance of a Spanish fleet before Naples, the citadels and shipping suddenly opened a tremendous cannonade on the city; and at the same moment some thousand Spanish infantry disembarked and commenced a general massacre in the streets. The Neapolitans were confounded and panic-stricken at the aggravated perfidy; but they were a hundred times more numerous than the handful of troops which assailed them. When they recovered from their first consternation, they attacked their enemies in every street; and after a frightful carnage on both sides, the Spaniards were driven either into the fortresses or the sea.

After this conflict, the people, who, since the death of Masaniello, had fallen under the influence of Gennaro Annese, a soldier of mean birth, resolved fiercely and fearlessly to throw off the Spanish yoke altogether. It chanced that Henry, duke of Guise, who by maternal descent from the second line of Anjou had some hereditary pretensions to the Neapolitan crown, was at this juncture at Rome on his private business; and to him the insurgents applied, with the offer of constituting him their captain-general. At the same time they resolved to erect Naples into a republic under his presidency; and the duke, a high-spirited prince, hastened to assume a command which opened so many glorious prospects of ambition. The contest with the Spanish viceroy, his fortresses, and squadron, was then resumed with new bloodshed, and with indecisive results. But though the Neapolitans had hailed the name of a republic with rapture, they were, of all people, by their inconsistency and irresolution, least qualified for such a form of government. In this insurrection, they had for some time professed obedience to the king of Spain, while they were resisting his arms; and even now they wavered, and were divided among themselves. On the one hand, the duke de Guise, outraged by their excesses, and grasping perhaps at the establishment of an arbitrary power in his own person, began to exercise an odious authority, and showed himself intolerant of the influence of Annese: on the other, that leader of the people was irritated at finding himself deprived of all command. In his jealousy of Guise, he basely resolved to betray his countrymen to the Spaniards; and in the temporary absence of the duke, who had left the city with a small force to protect the introduction of some supplies, he opened the gates to the enemy (1648 A.D.). When the Spanish troops re-entered the capital the abject multitude received them with loud acclamations; and the duke of Guise himself, in endeavouring to effect his flight, was made prisoner, and sent to Spain. In one of those gloomy Spanish dungeons he was kept a prisoner and mourned for some years the vanity of his ambition.

Thus, in a few hours, was the Spanish yoke again fixed on the necks of the prostrate Neapolitans; and it was riveted more firmly and grievously than ever. As soon as their submission was secured, almost all the men who had taken a prominent share in the insurrection, and who had been promised pardon, were seized, and under various pretences of their having mediated new troubles, were either publicly or privately executed. The traitor Gennaro Annese himself shared the same fate—a worthy example that neither the faith of oaths, nor the memory of eminent services are securities against the jealousy and vengeance of despotism. That despotism had no longer anything to fear from the degraded people who had returned under its iron sceptre. The miseries of Naples could not increase; but they were not diminished until the death of Charles II and the extinction of the Austrian dynasty of Spain in the last year of the century.

The sister kingdom of Sicily had long shared the lot of Naples, in all the distresses which the tyrannical and impolitic government of Spain could inflict upon the people. The Sicilians were only more fortunate than their continental neighbours, as the inferior wealth and resources of their island rendered them a less inviting prey to the insatiable necessities of Spain, to the drain of her wars, and the rapacity of her ministers. But even in Sicily, which by the excellence of its soil for raising corn seems intended to be the granary of Italy, the Spanish government succeeded in creating artificial dearth and squalid penury; and in the natural seat of abundance, the people were often without bread to eat. Their misery goaded them at length nearly to the commission of the same excesses as those which have just been described at Naples. A few months earlier than the revolt under Masaniello the lower orders rose at Palermo, chose for their leader one Giuseppe d’Alessi, a person of as low condition as the Neapolitan demagogue, and under his orders put their viceroy, the marquis of los Velos, to flight. But this insurrection at Palermo was less serious than that of Naples and, after passing through similar stages, was more easily quelled. The Sicilian viceroy, like Arcos, did not scruple at premeditated violation of the solemnity of oaths. Like him, he swore to grant the people all their demands, and a total amnesty; and yet, after perfidiously obtaining the assassination of the popular leader, he caused the inhabitants to be slaughtered in the streets, their chiefs to be hanged, and the burdens which he had been forced to remove to be laid on again.

This detestable admixture of perfidy and sanguinary violence bent the spirit of the Palermitans to the yoke, and Sicily relapsed into the tameness of suffering for above twenty-seven years; until this tranquillity was broken, during the general war in Europe, which preceded the Treaty of Nimeguen, by a new and more dangerous insurrection. The city of Messina had, until this epoch, in some measure enjoyed a republican constitution and was governed by a senate of its own, under the presidency only of a Spanish lieutenant, with very limited powers. This freedom of the city had insured its prosperity: its population amounted to sixty thousand souls, its commerce flourished, and its wealth rivalled the dreams of avarice. The Neapolitan historian asserts that the privileges of the people had rendered them insolent; but there is more reason to believe that the Spanish government looked with a jealous and unfriendly eye upon a happy independence, which was calculated to fill their other Sicilian subjects with bitter repinings at the gloomy contrast of their own wretched slavery. Several differences with successive viceroys regarding their privileges had inspired the citizens of Messina with discontent; and at length they rose in open rebellion against[491] their Spanish governor, Don Diego de Soria, and expelled him from the city (1674 A.D.). Despairing of defending their rights, without assistance, against the whole power of the Spanish monarchy, they had then recourse to Louis XIV, and tempted him with the offer of the sovereignty of their city, and the eventual union of their whole island with the French dominions. Louis eagerly closed with a proposal, which opened at least an advantageous diversion in his war against Spain. He was proclaimed king of Sicily at Messina, and immediately despatched a small squadron to take possession of the city in his name.

The arrival of his force was succeeded, early in the following year, by that of a formidable French fleet, under the duke de Vivonne; and the Messinese, being encouraged by these succours, rejected all the Spanish offers of indemnity and accommodation. On the other hand, the court of Madrid, being roused to exertion by the danger of losing the whole island, had fitted out a strong armament to secure its preservation and the recovery of Messina; and a Dutch fleet under the famous De Ruyter arrived in the Mediterranean to co-operate with the Spanish forces. The war in Sicily was prosecuted with fury on both sides for nearly four years; and several sanguinary battles were fought off the coast, between the combined fleets and that of France. In all of these the French had the advantage: in one, the gallant De Ruyter fell; and in another, the French, under Vivonne and Duquesne, with inferior force, attacked the Dutch and Spanish squadrons of twenty-seven sail of the line, nineteen galleys, and several fire-ships at anchor, under the guns of Palermo, and gained a complete victory. This success placed Messina in security, and might have enabled both Naples and Sicily to throw off the onerous dominion of Spain. But the spiritless and subjugated people evinced no disposition to rise against their oppressors; and all the efforts of the French eventually failed in extending the authority of their monarch beyond the walls of Messina.

The French king had lost the hope of possessing himself of all Sicily, and was already weary of supporting the Messinese, when the conferences for a general peace were opened at Nimeguen. There, dictating as a conqueror, he might at least have stipulated for the ancient rights of the Messinese, and insisted upon an amnesty for the brave citizens, who, relying on the sacred obligation of protection, had utterly provoked the vengeance of their Spanish governors by placing themselves under his sceptre. But, that his pride might not suffer by a formal evacuation of the city as a condition of the approaching peace, he basely preferred the gratification of this absurd punctilio to the real preservation of honour and the common dictates of humanity. His troops were secretly ordered to abandon Messina before the signature of peace; and so precipitate was the embarkation that the wretched inhabitants, stricken with sudden terror at their impending fate, despairing of pardon from their former governors, and hopeless of successful resistance against them, had only a few hours to choose between exile and anticipated death. Seven thousand of them hurried on board the French fleet, without having time to secure even their money or portable articles, and the French commander, fearing that his vessels would be overcrowded, sailed from the harbour; while two thousand more of the fugitives yet remained on the beach with outstretched arms, in the last agonies of despair, vainly imploring him with piercing cries not to abandon them to their merciless enemies.

The condition of the Messinese who fled for refuge to France, and of those who remained in the city, differed little in the event. Louis XIV, after affording the former an asylum for scarcely more than one short year,[492] inhumanly chased them in the last stage of destitution from his dominions. About five hundred of them, rashly venturing to return to their country, under the faith of Spanish passports, were seized on their arrival at Messina, and either executed or condemned to the galleys. Many others, even of the highest rank, were reduced to beg their bread over Europe, or to congregate in bands, and rob on the highways; and the miserable remnant, plunged into the abyss of desperation, passed into Turkey, and fearfully consummated their wretchedness by the renunciation of their faith. Their brethren, who had not quitted Messina, had meanwhile at first been deluded with the hope of pardon by the Spanish viceroy of Sicily. But the amnesty which he published was revoked by special orders from Madrid; and all, who had been in any way conspicuous in the insurrection, were either put to death or banished. Messina was deprived of all its privileges; the town-house was razed to the ground; and on the spot was erected a galling monument of the degradation of the city—a pyramid surmounted by the statue of the king of Spain, cast with the metal of the great bell which had formerly summoned the people to their free parliaments. The purposes of Spanish tyranny were accomplished: the population of Messina had dwindled from sixty to eleven thousand persons; and the obedience of the city was insured by a desolation from which it has never since risen to its ancient prosperity.

Thus were the annals of Naples and Sicily distinguished only, during the seventeenth century, by paroxysms of popular suffering. The condition of central Italy was more obscure and tranquil; for the maladministration of its rulers did not occasion the same resistance. Yet if the papal government was less decidedly tyrannical and rapacious than that of Spain, the evils, which had become inherent in it during preceding ages, remained undiminished and incurable; and agricultural and commercial industry was permanently banished from the Roman states. Meanwhile the succession of the pontiffs was marked by few circumstances to arrest our attention. To Clement VIII, who reigned at the opening of the century, succeeded in 1604 Leo XI, of the family of Medici, who survived his election only a few weeks; and on his death the cardinal Camillo Borghese was raised to the tiara by the title of Paul V. Filled with extravagant and exploded opinions of the authority of the holy see, Paul V signalised the commencement of his pontificate by the impotent attempt to revive those pretensions of the papal jurisdiction and supremacy over the powers of the earth, which, in the dark ages, had inundated Italy and the empire with blood. He thus involved the papacy in disputes with several of the Catholic governments of Europe, and in a serious difference with Venice in particular. After his merited defeat on this occasion, he cautiously avoided to compromise his authority by the repetition of any similar efforts; and during the remainder of his pontificate of sixteen years, his only cares were to embellish the ecclesiastical capital, and to enrich his nephews with vast estates in the Roman patrimony, which thus became the hereditary possessions of the family of Borghese.

Paul V, on his death in 1621, was succeeded by Gregory XV, whose insignificant pontificate filled only two years; and in 1623 the conclave placed the cardinal Maffeo Barberini in the chair of St. Peter, under the name of Urban VIII. This pope, during a reign of twenty-one years, was wholly under the guidance of his two nephews, the cardinal Antonio and Taddeo Barberini, prefect of Rome. These ambitious relatives were not satisfied with the riches which he heaped upon them; and their project of acquiring for their family the Roman duchies of Castro and Ronciglione, fiefs held of the church by the house of Farnese, involved the papacy in a war with[493] Parma. Odoardo Farnese, the reigning duke of Parma, had contracted immense debts to charitable foundations at Rome, of which he neglected to pay even the interest. He thus afforded Taddeo Barberini, as prefect of that capital, a pretext for summoning him before the apostolic chamber; and on his contemptuous neglect of the citation, the Barberini obtained an order for sequestrating his Roman fiefs. The duke of Parma had recourse to arms for his defence; the pope excommunicated him; and hostilities commenced between him and Taddeo, who acted as general of the church. But this war of the Barberini, as it has been named, the only strictly Italian contest of the century, produced no decisive result. It was invested with a ridiculous character by the cowardice of Taddeo and the papal troops, who, to the number of eighteen thousand, fled before a handful of cavalry under the duke Odoardo. After this disgraceful check, the Barberini were but too happy to obtain a suspension of arms; and the war was shortly terminated by a treaty, which left the combatants in their original state (1644).

Urban VIII, or rather his nephews, had thus failed in gaining possession of the fiefs of Castro and Ronciglione; but the pope had succeeded some years before in securing to the holy see a much more important acquisition, which he did not venture to appropriate to his family. This was the duchy of Urbino, which had remained under the sovereignty of the family of Rovere since the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Julius II had induced the last prince of the line of Montefeltro to adopt his nephew for a successor. The house of Rovere had for 120 years maintained the intellectual splendour of the little court of Urbino, the most polished in Italy; but Urban VIII persuaded the aged duke, Francesco Maria, who had no male heirs, to abdicate his sovereignty in favour of the church. The duchy of Urbino was annexed to the Roman states; and the industry and prosperity for which it had been remarkable under its own princes immediately withered.c

GALILEO AND THE CHURCH

During the pontificate of Urban VIII, an interesting controversy between science and theology reached a culmination in the persecution of Italy’s most famous scientist of the century, Galileo. This great experimental philosopher had developed the telescope, and in 1610 made the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter. This discovery, along with others almost equally interesting, was announced in Galileo’s Nuncius Sidereus, published at Venice in 1610.a

The title of this work will best convey an idea of the claim it made to public notice: “The Sidereal Messenger, announcing great and very wonderful spectacles, and offering them to the consideration of everyone, but especially of philosophers and astronomers; which have been observed by Galileo Galilei, etc., by the assistance of a perspective glass lately invented by him; namely, in the face of the moon, in innumerable fixed stars in the milky-way, in nebulous stars, but especially in four planets which revolve round Jupiter at different intervals and periods with a wonderful celerity; which, hitherto not known to any one, the author has recently been the first to detect, and has decreed to call the Medicean stars.”

The interest this discovery excited was intense; and men were at this period so little habituated to accommodate their convictions on matters of science to newly observed facts that several of “the paper-philosophers,” as Galileo termed them, appear to have thought they could get rid of these new objects by writing books against them. The effect which the discovery[494] had upon the reception of the Copernican system was immediately very considerable. It showed that the real universe was very different from that which ancient philosophers had imagined, and suggested at once the thought that it contained mechanism more various and more vast than had yet been conjectured. And when the system of the planet Jupiter thus offered to the bodily eye a model or image of the solar system according to the views of Copernicus, it supported the belief of such an arrangement of the planets, by an analogy all but irresistible.

Later in the same year Galileo observed and reported the phases of the planet Venus, thus further corroborating the Copernican doctrine. This doctrine when first promulgated by Copernicus had apparently excited no very great alarm among the theologians of the time. But its assertion and confirmation by Galileo now provoked a storm of controversy, and was visited by severe condemnation. Galileo’s own behaviour appears to have provoked the interference of the ecclesiastical authorities; but there must have been a great change in the temper of the times to make it possible for his adversaries to bring down the sentence of the Inquisition upon opinions which had been so long current without giving any serious offence.

The heliocentric doctrine had for a century been making its way into the minds of thoughtful men, on the general ground of its simplicity and symmetry. Galileo appears to have thought that now, when these original recommendations of the system had been reinforced by his own discoveries and reasonings, it ought to be universally acknowledged as a truth and a reality. And when arguments against the fixity of the sun and the motion of the earth were adduced from the expressions of Scripture, he could not be satisfied without maintaining his favourite opinion to be conformable to Scripture as well as to philosophy; and he was very eager in his attempts to obtain from authority a declaration to this effect. The ecclesiastical authorities were naturally averse to express themselves in favour of a novel opinion, startling to the common mind, and contrary to the most obvious meaning of the words of the Bible; and when they were compelled to pronounce, they decided against Galileo and his doctrines. He was accused before the Inquisition in 1615; but at that period the result was that he was merely recommended to confine himself to the mathematical reasonings upon the system, and to abstain from meddling with the Scripture. Galileo’s zeal for his opinions soon led him again to bring the question under the notice of the pope, and the result was a declaration of the Inquisition that the doctrine of the earth’s motion appeared to be contrary to the sacred Scripture. Galileo was prohibited from defending and teaching this doctrine in any manner, and promised obedience to this injunction. But in 1632 he published his Dialogo delli due Massimi[495] Sistemi del Mondo, Tolemaico e Copernicano;g and in this, he defended the heliocentric system by all the strongest arguments which its admirers used. Not only so, but he introduced into this Dialogue a character under the name of Simplicius, in whose mouth was put the defence of all the ancient dogmas, and who was represented as defeated at all points in the discussion; and he prefixed to the Dialogue a notice, To the Discreet Reader, in which, in a vein of transparent irony, he assigned his reasons for the publication. “Some years ago,” he says, “a wholesome edict was promulgated at Rome, which, in order to check the perilous scandals of the present age, imposed silence upon the Pythagorean opinion of the motion of the earth. There were not wanting,” he adds, “persons who rashly asserted that this decree was the result, not of a judicious inquiry, but of a passion ill-informed; and complaints were heard that counsellors, utterly unacquainted with astronomical observations, ought not to be allowed, with their undue prohibitions, to clip the wings of speculative intellects. At the hearing of rash lamentations like these, my zeal could not keep silence.” And he then goes on to say that he wishes, by the publication of his Dialogue, to show that the subject had been fully examined at Rome. The result of this was that Galileo was condemned for his infraction of the injunction laid upon him in 1616; his Dialogue was prohibited; he himself was commanded to abjure on his knees the doctrine which he had taught; and this abjuration he performed.

The ecclesiastical authorities having once declared the doctrine of the earth’s motion to be contrary to Scripture and heretical, long adhered in form to this declaration, and did not allow the Copernican system to be taught in any other way than as an “hypothesis.”f

THE SUCCESSORS OF URBAN VIII

Urban VIII was succeeded in 1644 by Innocent X, who revived with more success the pretensions of the holy see to the fiefs of Castro and Ronciglione. The unliquidated debts of the house of Farnese were still the pretext for the seizure of these possessions; but the papal officers were expelled from Castro, and the bishop, whom Innocent had installed in that see, was murdered by order of the minister of Ranuccio II, duke of Parma. The pope was so highly exasperated by these acts, that he directed his whole force against Castro; the Parmesan troops were repulsed in an attempt to succour the place; and when famine had compelled it to surrender, the pope, confounding the innocent inhabitants with the perpetrators of the assassination, caused the city to be razed to its foundations, and a pyramid to be erected on the ruins commemorative of his vengeance. The restitution of these fiefs to the house of Parma was made a condition of the peace of the Pyrenees; but Alexander VII, who succeeded Innocent X in 1656, contrived after many negotiations to obtain permission to hold them in pledge, until Ranuccio II should discharge the debts of his crown. By the failure of the duke to satisfy this engagement, the disputed states remained finally annexed to the popedom.

The pontificate of Alexander VII proved, however, an epoch of grievous humiliation for the pride of the holy see. In 1660, an affray was occasioned at Rome through the privileges, arrogantly claimed by the French ambassadors, of protecting all the quarter of the city near their residence from the usual operations of justice; and Louis XIV determined, in the insolence of his power, to support a pretension which would be intolerable to the meanest[496] court in Europe. He sent the duke of Créqui as his ambassador to Rome, with a numerous and well-armed retinue, to brave the pope in his own capital. Créqui took formal military possession of a certain number of streets near the palace of his embassy, according to the extent over which the right of asylum had been permitted by usage to his predecessors. He placed guards throughout this circuit, as if it had been one of his master’s fortresses; and the papal government, anxious to avoid a rupture with the haughty monarch of France, overlooked the usurpation. But every effort to preserve peace was ineffectual against the resolution which had been taken on the opposite side to provoke some open quarrel. The duke of Créqui’s people made it their occupation to outrage the police of Rome, and to insult the Corsican guard of the pope. Still, even these excesses of the French were tolerated by Alexander, until they rose to such a height that the peaceful citizens dared no longer to pass through the streets by night. At length the Corsican guards were goaded into a fray with the followers of the embassy, which brought matters to the crisis desired by Louis. While the Corsicans were violently irritated by the death of one of their comrades in the broil, they happened to meet the carriage of the duchess of Créqui; they fired upon and killed two of her attendants, and the duke immediately quitted Rome, as if his master had received in his person an unprovoked and mortal affront.

Alexander VII soon found that Louis XIV was resolved to avail himself of the most serious colouring which could be given to this affair. The king expelled the pope’s nuncio from France; he seized upon Avignon and its papal dependencies; and he assembled an army in Provence, which crossed the Alps to take satisfaction in Rome itself. The pope at first showed an inclination to assert the common rights of every crown with becoming spirit; and he endeavoured to engage several Catholic princes to protect the dignity of the holy see. But none of the great powers were in a condition at that juncture to undertake his defence. His own temporal strength was quite unequal to a struggle with France; the spiritual arms of the Vatican had now fallen into contempt; and he had the bitter mortification of being obliged to submit to the terms of accommodation which Louis XIV imperiously dictated. The principal of these were the banishment of all the persons who had taken a part in the insult offered to the train of the French ambassador; the suppression of the Corsican guard; the erection of a column, even in Rome, with a legend to proclaim the injury and its reparation: and, finally, the mission of one of the pope’s own family to Paris to make his apologies. All these humiliating conditions were subscribed to, and rigorously enforced. Cardinal Chigi, the nephew of Alexander VII, was the first ecclesiastic despatched to any monarch, to demand pardon for the holy see.

Alexander VII did not survive this memorable epoch of degradation for the papacy above three years. He was succeeded in 1667 by Clement IX, who wore the triple crown over two years, and was replaced in 1670 by Clement X. The unimportant reign of this pope occupied seven years, and closed in 1676. The pontificate of his successor, Innocent XI, was more remarkable for the renewal of the quarrel respecting the privileges of the French embassy. To terminate the flagrant abuses which these privileges engendered, Innocent published a decree that no foreign minister should thenceforth be accredited at the papal court, until he had expressly renounced every pretension of the kind. This reasonable provision was admitted without opposition by all the Catholic monarchs, except Louis XIV: but he alone refused to recognise its justice; and on the death of the duke d’Estrées, his ambassador at Rome, he sent the marquis de Lavardin to succeed him, and to enforce the maintenance of the old privileges. For this purpose, Lavardin was attended by a body of eight hundred armed men; and the sovereignty of the pope was again insolently braved in his own capital. The guards of Lavardin violently excluded the papal police from all access to the quarter of the city which they occupied; and Innocent at length excommunicated the ambassador. This proceeding would at Paris have excited only ridicule; but in Rome the outraged pride of the court, and the prejudices which still enveloped the ancient throne of papal supremacy and superstition, excluded Lavardin from the pale of society; and he found the solitude in which he was left so irksome that he at last petitioned to be recalled.

The pontificate of Innocent XI terminated in 1689; and it was not until three years after his death that Louis XIV was at length persuaded to desist from the assertion of a pretended right, which could have no other object than to gratify his pride at the expense of multiplying crime and anarchy, in the chosen seat of the religion which he professed. This was the last event in the papal annals of the seventeenth century which deserves to be recorded. We have already found the reigns of several of the popes entirely barren of circumstance; and after that of Innocent XI, we should be altogether at a loss how to bestow a single comment upon the obscure pontificates of his next three successors: of Alexander VIII, who died in 1691; of Innocent XII; and of Clement XI, who was placed in the chair of St. Peter in the last year of the century.

The two contests with the popedom, which the house of Farnese maintained for the possession of the fiefs of Castro and Ronciglione, were almost the only remarkable circumstances in the annals of the duchy of Parma during this century. Ranuccio I, the son of the hero Alessandro Farnese, who wore the ducal crown at its commencement, resembled his father in no quality but mere courage. His long reign was distinguished only for its habitual tyranny and avarice; and for the wanton cruelty with which he caused a great number of his nobility and other subjects to be put to death in 1612, that he might confiscate their property under the charge of a conspiracy, which appears to have had no real existence. He was succeeded in 1622 by his son, Odoard, whose misplaced confidence in his military talents plunged his subjects into many calamities. Vainly imagining that the martial virtues of his grandfather Alessandro were hereditary in his person, he eagerly sought occasion of entering on a career of activity and distinction in the field, for which his egotistical presumption and his excessive corpulence equally disqualified him. By engaging, in 1635, in the war between France and Spain in northern Italy, as the ally of the former power, he[498] exposed his states to cruel ravages; and though, in the subsequent war of the Barberini he was indebted to the misconduct of the papal army for the preservation of his fiefs, that contest did not terminate until he had consumed the resources of his duchy by his prodigality and ignorance.

The death of Odoard, in 1646, relieved his subjects from the apprehension of a continuance of similar evils from his restless temper; and the mild and indolent character of his son Ranuccio II seemed to promise an era of greater tranquillity. But Ranuccio was always governed by unworthy favourites, who oppressed his people; and it was one of these ministers, whose violence, as we have seen, provoked the destruction of Castro, and entailed the loss of its dependencies on the duchy of Parma. The long and feeble reign of Ranuccio II, thus marked only by disgrace, was a fitting prelude to the extinction of the sovereignty and existence of the house of Farnese. Buried in slothful indulgence and lethargy, the members of the ducal family were oppressed with hereditary obesity, which shortened their lives. Ranuccio II himself survived to the year 1694; but he might already anticipate the approaching failure of the male line of his dynasty. Odoard, the eldest of his sons, had died before him of suffocation, the consequence of corpulence; the two others, Don Francesco and Don Vincente, who were destined successively to ascend the throne after him, resembled their brother in their diseased constitutions; and the probability that these princes would die without issue rendered their niece, Elizabeth (Elisabetta) Farnese, daughter of Odoard, sole presumptive heiress of the states of her family.

LESSER PRINCIPALITIES

Of the dukes of Parma, whose reigns filled the seventeenth century, not one deserved either the love of his people or the respect of posterity. The contemporary annals of the princes of Este were graced by more ability and virtue. But the reduction of the dominion of those sovereigns to the narrow limits of the duchies of Modena and Reggio diminished the consequence which their ancestors had enjoyed in Italy during the preceding century, before the seizure of Ferrara by the Roman see. Don Cesare of Este, whose weakness had submitted to this spoliation, reigned until the year 1628. His subjects of Modena forgave him a pusillanimity which had rendered their city the elegant seat of his beneficent reign. His son, Alfonso III, who succeeded him, was stricken with such wondrous affliction for the death of his wife, only a few months after his accession to the ducal crown, that he abdicated his throne, and retired into a Capuchin convent in the Tyrol. On this event, his son Francesco I assumed his sceptre in 1629, and reigned nearly thirty years. Joining in the wars of the times in upper Italy between France and Spain, and alternately espousing their opposite causes, Francesco I acquired the reputation of one of the ablest captains of his age, as he was also one of the best sovereigns. His skilful conduct and policy in these unimportant contests were rewarded by the extension of his territories; and in 1636, the little principality of Correggio (more famous in the annals of art than of war) was annexed to his imperial fiefs. Neither the short reign of his son and successor, Alfonso IV, which commenced in 1658 and ended in 1662, nor that of his grandson, Francesco II, which began with a feeble minority and terminated after a protracted administration of the same character, demand our particular notice; and in 1694, the cardinal Rinaldo, son of the first Francesco, succeeded his nephew, and entered upon[499] a reign which was reserved for signal calamities in the first years of the new century.

In the affairs of Parma and Modena, during the century before us, there is scarcely anything to invite our attention; but the fortunes of Mantua, so obscure in the preceding age, were rendered somewhat remarkable in this by the wars which the disputed succession to its sovereignty occasioned. The reign of Vincente I, who, having succeeded to the ducal crowns of Mantua and Montferrat in 1587, still wore them at the opening of the seventeenth century, and that of his successor Francesco IV, were equally obscure and unimportant. But, on the death of Francesco, in 1612, some troubles arose, from the pretensions which the duke of Savoy advanced anew over the state of Montferrat. It was not until after several years that negotiations terminated the indecisive hostilities which were thus occasioned, and in which Spain interfered directly against the duke of Savoy, while France more indirectly assisted him. By the Treaty of Asti in 1615, and of Madrid in 1617, the duke of Savoy engaged to leave Montferrat to the house of Gonzaga, until the emperor should decide on his claims. The last duke of Mantua, Francesco IV, had left only a daughter: but as Montferrat was a feminine fief, that state descended to her; while her father’s two brothers, Ferdinando and Vincente II, reigned successively over Mantua without leaving issue. On the death of the latter of these two princes, both of whom shortened their days by their infamous debaucheries, the direct male line of the ducal house of Gonzaga became extinct; and the right of succession to the Mantua duchy devolved on a collateral branch, descended from a younger son of the duke Federigo II, who had died in 1540. This part of the family of Gonzaga was established in France, in possession of the first honours of nobility, and was now represented by Charles, duke de Nevers. By sending his son, the duke of Rethel, to Mantua in the last illness of Vincente II, Charles not only secured the succession to that duchy, which he might lawfully claim, but reannexed Montferrat to its diadem. For, on the very same night on which Vincente II expired, the duke of Rethel received the hand of Maria, the daughter of Francesco IV, and heiress of Montferrat; and the right of inheritance to all the states of the ducal line thus centred in the branch of Nevers.

The new ducal house of Gonzaga did not commence its sovereignty over Mantua and Montferrat without violent opposition. The duke of Savoy renewed his claim upon the latter province; and Cesare Gonzaga, duke of Guastalla, the representative of a distant branch of that family, made pretensions to the duchy of Mantua. At the same time the Spanish government thought to take advantage of a disputed succession, for the purpose of annexing the Mantuan to the Milanese states; and the emperor Ferdinand II placed the duke of Nevers under the ban of the empire for having taken possession of its dependent fiefs without waiting for a formal investiture at its hands. The objects of Ferdinand were evidently to revive the imperial jurisdiction in Italy, and to enrich the Spanish dynasty of his family by the acquisition of these states. To promote these combined plans of the house of Austria an imperial army crossed the Alps, and surprised the city of Mantua, which was sacked with merciless ferocity (1630). At the same time the duke of Savoy concluded a treaty with Spain, for the partition of Montferrat; and the new duke of Mantua seemed likely to be dispossessed of the whole of his dominions. But fortunately for him, it was at this juncture that Cardinal Richelieu had entered on his famous design of humbling the power and ambition of both the Spanish and German dynasties of the[500] house of Austria; and a French army, under Louis XIII in person, forcing the pass at Susa, crossed the Alps to support the Gonzagas of Nevers against all their enemies. We pass over the uninteresting details of the general war, which was thus kindled in northern Italy by the Mantuan succession. When Richelieu himself appeared on the theatre of contest, at the head of a formidable French army, all resistance was hopeless; and his success shortly produced an accommodation between the belligerents in the peninsula, by which the emperor was compelled, in the settlement of the matter, to bestow the disputed investiture of Mantua and Montferrat upon Charles of Nevers (1631).

This prince, who thenceforth reigned at Mantua under the title of Carlo I, retained that duchy without further opposition. But in 1635 he was drawn, by the memory of the eminent services which France had rendered him, into an alliance with that power against Spain, in the new war which broke out between the rival dynasties of Bourbon and Austria. Such a connection could serve, however, only to destroy the repose and endanger the safety of his duchies. Neither Carlo I nor his son Carlo II, who succeeded him in 1637, could prevent Montferrat from being perpetually overrun and ravaged by the contending armies of France, Spain, the empire, and Savoy; and the Mantuan dukes abandoned almost every effort to retain the possession of that province until, after being for above twenty years the seat of warfare and desolation, it was at length restored to Carlo II by the general Peace of the Pyrenees.

Carlo II died in 1665; and his son Ferdinando Carlo commenced the long and disgraceful reign with which the sovereignty and race of the Gonzagas were to terminate early in the next century. This prince, more dissolute, more insensible of dishonour, more deeply buried in grovelling vice than almost any of his predecessors, was worthy of being the last of a family which, since its elevation to the tyranny of Mantua, had, during four centuries of sovereignty, relieved its career of blood and debauchery by few examples of true greatness and virtue. To gratify his extravagance, and indulge in his low and vicious excesses, Ferdinando Carlo crushed his people under grievous taxation. To raise fresh supplies, which his exhausted states could no longer afford, he shamelessly in 1680 sold Casale, the capital of Montferrat, to Louis XIV, who immediately occupied the place with twelve thousand men under his general Catinat. The sums which the duke thus raised, either by extortion from his oppressed subjects or from this disgraceful transaction, were dissipated in abandoned[501] pleasures in the carnivals of Venice, among a people who openly evinced their contempt for him, and whose sovereign oligarchy passed a decree forbidding any of their noble body from mingling in his society.

TUSCANY

From the affairs of Mantua, we may pass to those of Tuscany; but the transition is attended with little augmentation of interest. A common dearth of attraction marks the annals of most of the despotisms of Italy; and when Tuscany descended to the rank of a duchy, her pre-eminence of splendour survived only in the past, and her modern story sank into the same ignominious obscurity with that of Parma, and Modena, and Mantua. We are reminded only of the existence of the solitary republic which survived in this quarter of Italy, to wonder how Lucca escaped subjugation to the power whose dominions encircled and hemmed in her narrow territory; and we are permitted to contemplate her ancient republican rivals, Florence, Siena, and Pisa, only as the capital and the provincial cities of the ducal sovereigns of Tuscany. Of these princes of the house of Medici, four reigned successively during the seventeenth century. At its commencement, the ducal crown was worn by Ferdinand I, whose personal vices and political talents have been already noticed. After the failure of his project to throw off the Spanish yoke, his efforts were exclusively devoted to the encouragement of commerce and maritime industry among his subjects; and the enlightened measures to which he was prompted by a thorough knowledge of the science of government, and a keen perception of his own interests, were rewarded with signal success. To attract the trade of the Mediterranean to the shores of Tuscany, he made choice of the castle of Livorno (Leghorn) for the seat of a free port. He improved the natural advantages of its harbour, which had already excited the attention of some of his predecessors, by several grand and useful works; he invested the town which rose on the site with liberal privileges; and from this epoch, Livorno continued to flourish, until it attained the mercantile prosperity and opulence which have rendered it one of the first maritime cities of the peninsula. The skilful policy which Ferdinand I pursued in this and other respects produced a rapid influx of wealth into his states; and before his death, which occurred in 1609, he had amassed immense treasures.

Several of the first princes of the ducal house of Medici seemed to have inherited some portion of that commercial ability by which their merchant ancestors had founded the grandeur of their house; and they profited by the contempt or ignorance which precluded other Italian princes from rivalling them in the cultivation of the same pursuits. Cosmo II, the son and successor of Ferdinand, imitated his example with even more earnest zeal, and with more brilliant success. But on his death, in 1621, the minority of his son Ferdinand II destroyed the transient prosperity of the ducal government. The rich treasury of the two preceding dukes was drained in furnishing troops and subsidies to Spain and Austria; and Ferdinand, who was left under the guardianship of his grandmother and mother, was only released from female tutelage on attaining the age of manhood, to exhibit during his long reign all the enfeebling consequences of such an education. His character was mild, peaceable, and benevolent; and his administration responded to his personal qualities. From this epoch, the political importance of Tuscany entirely ceased; the state was stricken with moral paralysis; and lethargy[502] and indolence became the only characteristics of the government and the people.

Ferdinand II, however, was not destitute of talents; and the enthusiasm with which the grand-duke and his brother promoted the cultivation of science at least protected his inactive reign from the reproach of utter insignificance. But his son, Cosmo III, who ascended his throne in 1670, reigned with a weakness which was relieved by no intellectual tastes. Unhappy and suspicious in his temper, his life was embittered by domestic disagreements with his duchess; fanatical and bigoted, he was constantly surrounded and governed by monks; and at the close of the seventeenth century, Florence, once the throne of literature, the fair and splendid seat of all the arts which can embellish and illumine life, was converted into the temple of gloomy superstition and hypocrisy.

PIEDMONT AND SAVOY

While the other ducal thrones of Italy were thus for the most part filled only by slothful voluptuaries, that of Savoy seemed reserved for a succession of sovereigns, whose fearless activity and political talents constantly placed their characters in brilliant contrast with the indolence and imbecility of their despicable contemporaries.c The history of this house shows in a striking manner how the destinies of a nation may depend on the fortunes of a princely family. During eight centuries the princes of Savoy have, in the words of Charles Emmanuel III, “treated Italy as an artichoke to be eaten leaf by leaf.” Their work is now perfected in the freedom of the state.

The descent of Humbert the Whitehanded, the founder of the family, is uncertain, but he was probably a son of Amadeus, the great-grandson of Boson of Provence. In reward for services rendered to Rudolf III of Arles, Humbert obtained from him in 1027 the counties of Savoy and Maurienne, and from the emperor Conrad the Salic, Chablais, and the lower Valais. On his death in 1048 he was succeeded perhaps by his eldest son, Amadeus I, but eventually by his fourth son, Otho, who, by his marriage with Adelaide of Susa, obtained the counties of Turin and the Val d’Aosta, and so acquired a footing in the valley of the Po. Otho was succeeded in 1060 by his son Amadeus II, who maintained a judicious neutrality between his brother-in-law, the emperor Henry IV, and the pope. In reward for his mediation he obtained from the former, after Canossa, the province of Bugey. The accession of his son Humbert II in 1080 brought fresh increase of territory in the valley of the Tarantaise, and in 1091 this prince succeeded to the dignities of his grandmother, Adelaide. Amadeus III came to the throne in 1103, and in 1111 his states were created counties of the empire by Henry V. On his way home from the crusades in 1149 Amadeus died at Nicosia, and was succeeded by his son Humbert III. The prince took the part of the pope against Barbarossa, who ravaged his territories until Humbert’s death in 1188. The guardians of his son Thomas reconciled their ward and the emperor. He received from Henry VI accessions of territory in Vaud, Bugey, and Valais, with the title of imperial vicar in Piedmont and Lombardy. He was followed in 1233 by Amadeus IV. A campaign against the inhabitants of Valais ended in the annexation of their district, and his support of Frederick II against the pope caused the erection of Chablais and Aosta into a duchy.

In 1253 his son Boniface succeeded to his states at the age of nine, but after giving proofs of his valour by defeating the troops of Charles of Anjou before Turin, he was taken prisoner and died of grief (1263).

The Salic law now came into operation for the first time, and Peter, the uncle of Boniface, was called to the throne. This prince, on the marriage of his nieces, Eleanor and Sancha of Provence, with Henry III of England and Richard, earl of Cornwall, had visited England, where he had been created earl of Richmond, and built a palace in London, afterwards called Savoy House. In return he recognised the claims of Richard to the imperial throne, and received from him Kyburg, in the diocese of Lausanne. At his death in 1268 he was succeeded by his brother Philip I, who died in 1285, when their nephew Amadeus V came to the throne. This prince, surnamed the Great, united Baugé and Bresse to his states in right of his wife Sibylla, and later on lower Faucigny and part of Geneva. For his second wife he married Mary of Brabant, sister of the emperor Henry VII, from whom he received the seigniory of Aosta. His life was passed in continual and victorious warfare, and one of his last exploits was to force the Turks to raise the siege of Rhodes. He died in 1323. His son Edward succeeded him, and dying in 1329, was followed by his brother Aymon. This prince died in 1343, when his son Amadeus VI ascended the throne. His reign was, like his grandfather’s, a series of petty wars, from which he came out victorious and with extended territory, until he died of the plague (1383). The promising reign of his son Amadeus VII was cut short by a fall from his horse in 1391. Before his death, however, he had received the allegiance of Barcelonnette, Ventimiglia, Villafranca, and Nice, so gaining access to the Mediterranean.

His son Amadeus VIII now came to the throne, under the guardianship of his grandmother Bona (Bonne) de Bourbon. On attaining his majority he first directed his efforts to strengthening his power in the outlying provinces. The states of Savoy now extended from the Lake of Geneva to the Mediterranean, and from the Saône to the Sesia. Amadeus threw all the weight of his power on the side of the emperor, and Sigismund in 1416 erected the counties of Savoy and Piedmont into duchies. At this time, too, the duke recovered the fief of Piedmont, which had been granted to Philip, prince of Achaia, by Amadeus V. The county of Vercelli afterwards rewarded him for joining the league against the duke of Milan, but in 1434 a plot against his life made him put into execution a plan he had long formed, of retiring to a monastery. He accordingly made his son Louis lieutenant-general of the dukedom, and assumed the habit of the knights of St. Maurice. But he was not destined to find the repose he sought. The prelates assembled at the council of Bâle voted the deposition of Pope Eugenius IV, and elected Amadeus in his place, as Felix V. He abdicated his dukedom definitely, but without much gain in temporal honours, for the schism continued until the death of Eugenius in 1447, shortly after which it was healed by the honourable submission of Felix to Nicholas V. The early years of Louis’ reign were under the guidance of his father, and peace and prosperity blessed his people; but he afterwards made an alliance with the dauphin which brought him into conflict with Charles VII of France, though a lasting reconciliation was soon effected. His son Amadeus IX succeeded in 1465, but, though his virtues led to his beatification, his bodily sufferings made him assign the regency to his wife Yolande, a daughter of Charles VII. He died in 1472, when his son Philibert I succeeded to the throne and to his share in the contests of Yolande with her brother and brothers-in-law. His reign lasted[504] only ten years, when he was succeeded by his brother Charles I. This prince raised for a time by his valour the drooping fortunes of his house, but he died in 1489 at the age of thirty-one, having inherited from his aunt, Charlotte of Lusignan, her pretensions to the titular kingdoms of Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Armenia. He was succeeded by his son Charles II, an infant, who, dying in 1496, was followed by Philip II, brother of Amadeus XI. He died in 1497, leaving Philibert II, who succeeded him, and Charles III, who ascended the throne on his brother’s death in 1504. In spite of himself Charles was drawn into the wars of the period, but the decisive victory of Francis at Marignano gave the duke the opportunity of negotiating the conference at Bologna which led to the conclusion of peace in 1516. Charles was less fortunate in the part he took in the wars between Francis I and Charles V, the brother-in-law of his wife. He tried to maintain a strict neutrality, but his attendance at the emperor’s coronation at Bologna in 1530 was imperative in his double character of kinsman and vassal. The visit was fatal to him, for he was rewarded with the county of Asti, and this so displeased the French king that on the revolt of Geneva to Protestantism in 1532, Francis sent help to the citizens. Berne and Fribourg did likewise, and so expelled the duke from Lausanne and Vaud. Charles now sided definitely with the emperor, and Francis at once raised some imaginary claims to his states. On their rejection the French army marched into Savoy, descended on Piedmont, and seized Turin (1536). Charles V came to the aid of his ally, and invested the city, but was obliged to make peace. France kept Savoy, and the emperor occupied Piedmont, so that only Nice remained to the duke. On the resumption of hostilities in 1541 Piedmont again suffered. In 1544 the Treaty of Crespy restored his states to Charles, but the terms were not carried out, and he died of grief in 1553. His only surviving son, Emmanuel Philibert, succeeded to the rights, but not the domains of his ancestors. On the abdication of Charles V the duke was appointed governor of the Low Countries, and in 1557 the victory of St. Quentin marked him as one of the first generals of his time. Such services could not go unrewarded, and the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis restored him his states, with certain exceptions still to be held by France and Spain. One of the conditions of the treaty also provided for the marriage of the duke with Margaret of France, sister of Henry II. The evacuation of the places held by them was faithfully carried out by the contracting powers, and Emmanuel Philibert occupied himself in strengthening his military and naval forces, until his death in 1580 prevented the execution of his ambitious designs. His son Charles Emmanuel I, called the Great, threw in his lot with Spain, and in 1590 invaded Provence and was received by the citizens of Aix. His intention was doubtless to revive the ancient kingdom of Arles, but his plans were frustrated by the accession of Henry IV to the throne of France.e

By his treaty with Henry, in the year 1601, Charles Emmanuel exchanged his Savoyard county of Bresse for the Italian marquisate of Saluzzo. By this arrangement, the duke of Savoy sacrificed a fertile province to acquire a barren and rocky territory; but he excluded the French from an easy access into Piedmont, and strengthened his Italian frontier. By consolidating his states, he gained a considerable advance towards the future independence of his family; and the superiority of his policy over that of Henry IV in this transaction occasioned the remark of a contemporary, that the French king had bargained like a peddler, and the Savoyard duke like a king.

From this epoch, the house of Savoy became almost exclusively an Italian power, and its princes, to use the language of one of their historians, thenceforth[505] viewed the remains of their transmontane possessions only as a nobleman, moving in the splendour of a court, regards the ancient and neglected fief from which he derives his title. Charles Emmanuel found that the improvement effected in the geographical posture of his states immediately increased his importance; and his alliance was courted both by France and Spain. But during the remainder of his long reign, his own restless and overweening ambition, and the natural difficulties of his situation, placed as he was with inferior strength between two mighty rivals, entailed many calamities on his dominions. He made an unsuccessful attempt in 1602 to surprise Geneva by an escalade in the night, and after a disgraceful repulse concluded a peace, which recognised the independence of that republic. Ten years later, he endeavoured, as we have seen, to wrest Montferrat from the house of Gonzaga; but being violently opposed by Spain, and weakly supported by France, he was compelled, after several years of hostilities, to submit his claim to the decision of the emperor—or, in other words, to abandon it altogether. Such checks to his ambition were, however, of little importance, in comparison with the reverses consequent upon the share which he took in the war of the Mantuan succession (1628).

In that contest he was induced, by the hope of partitioning Montferrat with the Spaniards, to unite with them against the new duke of Mantua and the French his supporters; and he suffered heavily in this alliance. When Louis XIII, at the head of a gallant army, forced the strong pass of Susa against the duke and his troops, and overran all Piedmont, Charles Emmanuel was compelled to purchase the deliverance of his states by signing a separate peace, and leaving the fortress of Susa as a pledge in the hands of the conquerors. They insisted further that he should act offensively against his former allies; but Louis XIII and his great minister Richelieu were no sooner recalled into France by the war against the Protestants, than the versatile duke, resenting their tyranny, immediately resumed his league with Spain.

The possession of Susa rendered the French masters of the gates of the Savoyard dominions; and as soon as Richelieu had triumphantly concluded the war against the Huguenots, he returned to the Alps. He was invested by his master with a supreme military command, which disgraced his priestly functions; and he poured the forces of France again into Piedmont. All Savoy was conquered by the French king in person; and above half of Piedmont was seized by his forces under the warlike cardinal. Amidst so many cruel reverses, oppressed by the overwhelming strength of his enemies, and abandoned by his Spanish allies, who made no vigorous efforts to arrest the progress of the French, Charles Emmanuel suddenly breathed his last, after a reign of fifty years (1630).

Victor Amadeus I, his eldest son and successor, was the husband of Christina, daughter of Henry IV of France, and therefore disposed to ally himself with her country. Almost immediately after his accession to the ducal crown, he entered into negotiations with Richelieu, which terminated in a truce. In the following year, the general peace, which concluded the war of the Mantuan succession, was signed at Cherasco (1631). By this treaty, the new duke of Savoy recovered all his dominions except Pinerolo (Pignerol), which he was compelled to cede to the French; who, although Richelieu restored Susa to Victor Amadeus, thus retained possession of the passes of the Alps by Briançon and the valley of Exilles. Victor Amadeus was not inferior to his father either in courage or abilities; but he was not equally restless and intriguing. Submitting to circumstances beyond[506] his control, he endured the ascendency which France had acquired over his states, and the yet more galling pride of Richelieu, with temper and prudence. To the close of his short reign he maintained with good faith a close alliance with Louis XIII, which indeed it was scarcely optional with him to have rejected, and which, in 1634, involved him, as an auxiliary, in a new war undertaken by Richelieu against the house of Austria.

The death of Victor Amadeus in 1637, while this contest was yet raging, was the prelude to still heavier calamities for his house and his subjects than either had known for nearly a century. He left two infant sons, the eldest of whom dying almost immediately after him, the succession devolved upon the other, Charles Emmanuel II, a boy of four years of age. By his testament, Victor Amadeus committed the regency of his states, and the care of his children, to his duchess Christina. The government of that princess was in the outset assailed by the secret machinations of Richelieu, and by the open hostility of the brothers of her late husband. Richelieu designed to imprison the sister, and to despoil the nephew of his own master; and he would have annexed their states to the French monarchy, under the plea that the care of the young prince and the regency of his duchy belonged of right to Louis XIII, as his maternal uncle. When the vigilance of Christina defeated the intention of the cardinal to surprise her at Vercelli, the sister of Louis XIII had still to endure all the despotic influence of her brother’s minister. The conduct of her husband’s relations left her however no alternative but to purchase the aid of the French against them.

Both the brothers of Victor Amadeus, the cardinal Maurice, and Prince Thomas (founder of the branch of Savoy-Carignano), had quarrelled with the late duke, and withdrawn from his court to embrace the party of his enemies; the one entered the service of the emperor, the other that of the king of Spain in the Low Countries. On the death of Victor Amadeus, they returned to Piedmont only to trouble the administration of Christina by themselves laying claim to the regency; and at length, on her resisting their pretensions, they openly asserted them in arms. The two princes were supported by the house of Austria; the duchess-regent was protected by France; and the whole country of Savoy and Piedmont was at once plunged into the aggravated horrors of foreign and civil war. In the first year of this unhappy contest, the capital was delivered into the hands of Prince Thomas by his partisans; and the regent, escaping with difficulty on this surprise into the citadel of Turin, was compelled to consign the defence of that fortress to the French, who treacherously retained the deposit for eighteen years. In like manner, they acquired possession of several important places; the Spaniards on their part became masters of others; and while the regent and her brothers-in-law were contending for the government of Piedmont, they were betrayed by the ill faith and ambition of their respective protectors.

A reconciliation in the ducal family was at length effected by the tardy discovery that mutual injuries could terminate only in common ruin. The two princes deserted the party of Spain, and succeeded in recovering for their house most of the fortresses which they had aided the Spaniards in reducing. The duchess-mother retained the regency; and the princes were gratified with the same appanages by which she had originally offered to purchase their friendship. Still the French remained all powerful in Piedmont; and if death had not interrupted the projects of Richelieu, it is probable that the ducal house of Savoy would have been utterly sacrificed to his skilful and unprincipled policy, and that its dominions would have been permanently annexed to the monarchy of France. Even under the government of his[507] more pacific successor, Mazarin, it was not until the year 1657 that the French garrison was withdrawn from the citadel of Turin; and this act of justice was only extorted from that minister as the price of his niece’s marriage into the ducal family of Savoy. The exhaustion of Spain and the internal troubles of France had totally prevented the active prosecution in northern Italy of the long war between those powers. But the embers of hostility were not wholly extinguished in Piedmont until the Peace of the Pyrenees, by which Charles Emmanuel II recovered all his duchy except Pinerolo and its Alpine passes, and these the French still retained (1659).

The termination of the minority of Charles Emmanuel II, in 1648, had put an end to the intrigues of his uncles. But the duke continued to submit to the ambitious and able control of his mother until her death; and his subsequent reign was in no respect brilliant. His states, however, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees, enjoyed a long interval of repose; and though the early close of his life in 1675 subjected them to another minority, it proved neither turbulent nor calamitous, as his own had done. His son, the celebrated Victor Amadeus II, was only nine years old when he nominally commenced his reign under the regency of his mother. The princess, a daughter of the French house of Nemours, had all the ambition without the talents which had distinguished the duchess Christina. Surrounded by French favourites and by the partisans of that nation, she was wholly subservient to the will of Louis XIV; and Victor Amadeus, on attaining the age of manhood, gave the first indications of the consummate political ability for which he became afterwards so famous, by his decent address in dispossessing his reluctant parent and her faction of all influence in public affairs, without having recourse to actual violence.

The policy of the duke soon excited the suspicion of Louis XIV; and after exhausting all the resources of negotiation and intrigue for some years, to gain him over to his purpose of wresting Milan from the Spaniards, the French monarch resolved to disarm him. But Victor Amadeus penetrated his designs, and anticipated their execution. He was too good a politician, and too sensible of his own weakness, not to discover that, if he consented to open a free passage to Louis XIV through his dominions, and to aid him in effecting the conquest of Lombardy, he should speedily be despoiled in his turn, and reduced to the rank of a vassal of the French crown. He therefore acceded to the league of Augsburg between the empire, England, Spain, and Holland; and his subjects eagerly seconded him in his resolution rather to encounter the dangers of a contest with the gigantic power of France, than to submit without a struggle to the imperious and humiliating demands of Louis.

The commencement of the war in Piedmont was marked by a torrent of misfortune, which might have overwhelmed a prince of less fortitude than Victor Amadeus with sudden despair. Although he was joined by a Spanish army at the opening of hostilities, the French, who commanded the gates of Italy by the possession of Pinerolo had already assembled in force in Piedmont. They were led by Catinat, who deserves to be mentioned among the most accomplished and scientific captains of his own or of any age; and the superior abilities of this great commander triumphed over the military talents of the young duke. At the battle of Staffarda (1690) in the first campaign, the allies were totally defeated; and great part both of Savoy and Piedmont was almost immediately afterwards reduced by the conquerors. Victor Amadeus was however undismayed; he continued the war with energy and skill; and the support of his allies and his own activity had the effect of balancing the[508] fortune of the contest. Penetrating into France, in 1692, he was even enabled to retaliate upon his enemies by this diversion, for the ravage of his dominions; and although Catinat, in the fourth campaign, inflicted at Marsaglia upon the Piedmontese, Austrian, and Spanish armies, under the duke in person and the famous prince Eugene, a yet more calamitous and memorable defeat than that at Staffarda, the allies speedily recovered from the disaster.

But it comes not within our purpose to repeat the often-told tale of military operations, which belong to the general history of Europe. After six years of incessant warfare, Victor Amadeus was still in an attitude to render his neutrality an important object for France to gain, and one which he had himself every reason to desire. So that it could be attained with advantage to himself, he was little scrupulous in abandoning his allies; and the conditions which he extorted from Louis XIV had all the results of victory. By the separate peace concluded between France and Savoy at Turin, Louis XIV abandoned the possession of Pinerolo and restored all his conquests in Savoy and Piedmont; but the most material stipulation of the treaty was the neutrality of all Italy, to which the contracting parties equally bound themselves to oblige all other powers to accede. To enforce this article, Victor Amadeus did not hesitate to join his arms to those of France against his former allies; and the entrance of his forces, in conjunction with the army of Catinat, into the Milanese territories, immediately compelled the emperor and the king of Spain to consent to a suspension of arms in the peninsula.

The allies of Victor Amadeus might justly reproach him with a desertion of their cause, and perhaps even with the aggravation of perfidy; but he deserved the gratitude of Italy, if not for his selfish policy, at least for its fruits. In closing the gates of his own frontiers, he had skilfully provided also for the repose of the peninsula and its evacuation by the French. All Italy regarded him as a liberator; the security of his own dominions was effected, and his power and consequence were prodigiously augmented. Thus, by establishing the independence of his states, he prepared the claim of his house to the assumption of the royal title among the powers of Europe, to which he elevated it in the beginning of the new century.

The increasing power of the sovereigns of Piedmont was a foreboding of evil for the only republic of the Middle Ages which had partially escaped the storms of despotism in that quarter of Italy; and Genoa had already gained, during the seventeenth century, sufficient experience of the dangers of her vicinity to the princes of the house of Savoy. In the Grison war, between France and the house of Austria, the republic was involved by her[509] dependence upon Spain; and the share which she took in the contest enabled the duke of Savoy, then in alliance with France, to draw down the weight of the French arms upon her. Besides being actuated by the usual rapacity of his ambition, with the hope of annexing the Genoese territory to his states, Charles Emmanuel I had several causes of offence against the republic. Her rulers had before given assistance to the Spaniards against him; they had attempted to control him in the purchase of the fief of Zucarel from the family of Carretto; and the populace of Genoa had insulted him by defacing his portrait in their city during the excesses of a riot. He therefore pointed out Genoa to his allies for an easy and important conquest; and while he overran the Ligurian country, a French army of thirty thousand men under the constable de Lesdiguières advanced to the siege of the republican capital. Though the Genoese were unprovided against this sudden attack, they were animated by the brave spirit, and the eloquence of one of their fellow-citizens, a member of the illustrious house of Doria, to oppose a firm resistance to the besiegers; and their gallant defence of the city was converted into a triumph, at the moment when they were reduced to extremity. A powerful Spanish armament, equipped with unusual vigour, arrived to their succour from Naples and Milan; the French were compelled to raise the siege; and the peace, which shortly followed these hostilities, served only to cover the duke of Savoy with the disgrace of merited failure in his designs against the existence of the republic.

The secret hostility which Charles Emmanuel cherished against Genoa menaced her, a few years later, with more imminent perils; since the revengeful spirit of the duke was associated with the discontent of a large party in the republic. We have formerly noticed the constitution of the sovereign oligarchy of Genoa, and its tendency, by the extinction of some noble houses, and the reduction of numbers in others, to narrow the circle of political rights. The surviving body, meanwhile, were sparing in the use of the law, which authorised them to admit ten new families annually to a share in their privileges of sovereignty. The senate either began to elude it altogether, or applied it only to childless or aged individuals. Thus, before the middle of the seventeenth century, the number of persons whose names appeared in the libro d’oro—the golden volume of privileged nobility—had dwindled to about seven hundred. A law was then passed, by which the whole of these exclusive proprietors of the rights of citizenship thenceforth took their seats in the great council, on reaching the age of manhood, instead of entering it by rotation, as had formerly been the practice, when the republic was represented by a more comprehensive aristocracy.

While the arrogance and the individual importance of the members of the oligarchy were increased in proportion to this diminution in their numbers, another class, that of the unprivileged aristocracy of birth and wealth, had multiplied in the state. Many ancient houses, possessors of rural fiefs in Liguria, and invested with titles of nobility, had been originally omitted in the roll of citizenship; many other families of newer pretensions had since acquired riches and distinction by commercial industry, and accidents of fortune; and the union of all these constituted an order, which rivalled the oligarchy in the usual sources of pride, and far outweighed them in numbers. Affected superiority and contempt on the one hand, and mortification and envy on the other, produced reciprocal hatred between these branches of the Genoese aristocracy; and their divisions inspired the duke of Savoy with the hope of plunging the state into an anarchy, by which he might profit.

Pursuing his master’s views, the ambassador of Charles Emmanuel at Genoa selected a wealthy merchant of the unprivileged aristocracy, Giulio Cesare Vachero, for the agitator and leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the oligarchical constitution. Vachero, although engaged in the occupation of commerce, aspired to move in the sphere of nobility. His immense riches, his numerous retinue, his splendid establishment, rivalled the magnificence of the Fregosi, the Adorni, the popolani grandi of other days. He always appeared armed and in martial costume—the characteristics of the gentleman of the times; he was surrounded by bravos; and he unscrupulously employed these desperate men in the atrocious gratification of his pride and his vengeance. He found sufficient occupation for their poniards in the numerous petty affronts, which the privileged nobles delighted to heap on a person of his condition. Vachero was stung to the soul by all the scorn and disdain which the highly born affect for upstart and unwarranted pretensions—by the contemptuous denial of the courtesy of a passing salutation, the supercilious stare, the provoking smile of derision, the taunting innuendo, the jest, the sneer. Every one of these slights or insults offered to himself or his wife was washed out in the blood of the noble offenders (1628).

But all these covert assassinations could not satiate the revengeful spirit nor heal the rankling irritation of Vachero; and he was easily instigated by the arts of the Savoyard ambassador to organise a plot, and to place himself at its head, for the destruction of the oligarchy. He knew that his discontent was shared by all the citizens like himself, whose names had not been admitted into the libro d’oro; and he reckoned on the co-operation of very many of the feudal seigniors of Liguria, whose ancient houses had never been inserted in that register, and who found their consequence eclipsed in the city, by their detested and more fortunate rivals of the oligarchy. He readily induced a numerous party to embrace his design; he secretly increased the force of his retainers and bravos; and he lavished immense sums among the lower people, to secure their fidelity without entrusting them with his plans. The day was already named for the attack of the palace of government: it was determined to overpower the foreign guard; to cast the senators from the windows; to massacre all the individuals embraced in the privileged order; to change the constitution of the republic; and finally, to invest Vachero with the supreme authority of the state, by the title of doge, and under the protection of the duke of Savoy. But at the moment when the conspiracy was ripe for execution, it was betrayed to the government by a retainer of Vachero, who had been appointed to act a subordinate share in it. Vachero himself, and a few other leading personages in the plot, were secured before the alarm was given to the rest, who immediately fled. The guilt of Vachero and his accomplices was clearly established; the proofs against them were even supported by the conduct of the duke of Savoy, who openly avowed himself the protector of their enterprise; and notwithstanding his arrogant threat of revenging their punishment upon the republic, the senate did not hesitate to order their immediate execution.

The insolent menaces of Charles Emmanuel were vain; and the firmness of the Genoese government produced no material consequences. During the distractions which closed his own reign, and which, filling that of his son, extended through the minority of his grandsons, the republic remained undisturbed by the aggressions of the house of Savoy. In this long period of above forty years, the repose of Genoa was disturbed neither by any other foreign hostilities, nor by intestine commotions. A second war, which at length broke out between the republic and the duchy of Savoy, during the[511] reign of Charles Emmanuel II, scarcely merits our notice, for its circumstances and its conclusion were alike insignificant; and during the remainder of the seventeenth century, the Genoese oligarchy were only startled from their dream of pride and security by a single event—the most humiliating, until our own times at least, in the long annals of their republic.

When Louis XIV became master of Casale by purchase from the duke of Mantua, he demanded of the republic of Genoa permission to establish a depot at the port of Savona, for the free supply of salt to the inhabitants of his new city, and the transit of warlike stores and recruits for his garrison. The Genoese government were sufficiently acquainted with the character of the French monarch to anticipate that their compliance with this demand would terminate in his appropriating the port of Savona altogether to himself; and cautiously exerting the option of refusal which they unquestionably possessed, they eluded the application. With equal right and more boldness, they fitted out a few galleys to guard their coasts against any surprise, and to protect their revenue on salt. Louis imperiously required them to disarm this squadron; and then, driven beyond all the limits of endurance, and justly incensed at such an insult upon the independence of the republic, the senate treated the summons with contempt.

But the oligarchy of Genoa had not sufficiently measured the weakness of their state, or the implacable and unbounded pride of the powerful tyrant. A French armament of fourteen sail of the line, with a long train of frigates, galleys, and bomb ketches, suddenly appeared before Genoa, and a furious bombardment of three days, in which fifty thousand shells and carcasses are said to have been thrown into the place, reduced to a heap of ruins half the numerous and magnificent palaces, which had obtained for Genoa the appellation of “the Proud.” The senate were compelled to save the remains of their capital from total destruction by an unqualified submission; and the terms dictated by the arrogance of the French monarch, obliged the doge and four of the principal senators, to repair in their robes of state to Paris, to sue for pardon and to supplicate his clemency. The epithets of glory have often been prostituted on the character of Louis XIV, by those who are easily dazzled with the glare of false splendour; but of all the wholesale outrages upon humanity which disgraced the detestable ambition of that heartless destroyer of his species, this unprovoked assault upon a defenceless people, merely to gratify his insatiable vanity, was—if we except the horrible devastation of the Palatinate—the most barbarous and wanton.

VENICE

While Genoa was either wholly subservient to the influence of Spain, with difficulty repulsing the machinations of the princes of Savoy, or enduring all the insulting arrogance of France, her ancient rival was holding her political course with more pretensions to independence and dignity. Throughout the age before us, Venice seemed roused to the exertion of the few remains of her ancient spirit and strength. Starting with renewed vigour from the languor and obscurity of the preceding century, the republic evinced a proud resolution to maintain her prescriptive rights, and even in some measure aspired to assert the lost independence of Italy. Her efforts in this latter respect, indeed, deserve to be mentioned, rather for the courage which dictated them, than for their results. The relative force of the states of Europe had too essentially changed; the commercial foundations[512] of her own prosperity were too irretrievably ruined to render it possible that she should rear her head again above other powers of the second order, or become the protectress and successful champion of the peninsula. But, in the seventeenth century, the annals of Venice were at least not stained with disgrace. Even her losses, in a protracted and unequal contest with the Turks, were redeemed from shame by many brilliant acts of heroism in her unavailing defence; and the unfortunate issue of one war was balanced by the happier results of a second. But the firmness of the republic was conspicuous, and her success unalloyed.

The first of the struggles, in which Venice was called upon to engage in this century, was produced, soon after its opening, by that violent attempt of Pope Paul V, to which we have before alluded, to revive the monstrous and exploded doctrine of papal jurisdiction and supremacy over the temporal affairs of the world (1605). The Venetians had, even in the dark ages, been remarkable for their freedom from the trammels of superstition, and consistent in repelling the encroachments of ecclesiastical power. Upon no occasion would the senate either permit the publication or execution of any papal decree in their territories, until it had received their previous sanction; or suffer an appeal to the court of Rome from any of their subjects, except by their own authority, and through the ambassador of the republic. The jurisdiction of the Council of Ten was as despotic and final over the Venetian clergy as over all other classes in the state; and while ecclesiastics were rigidly excluded from all interference in political affairs, and from the exercise of any civil functions, the right of the secular tribunals to judge them in every case not purely spiritual was a principle, from which the government never departed either in theory or practice. Of all the extravagant privileges claimed by the Romish church for its militia, the exemption of the ecclesiastical body from taxation (unless as the immediate act of the popes) was the only one recognised by the Venetian government; and, to annul this, immunity was a project which had more than once been entertained.

With a spirit similar to that which retained the clergy under due subjection, universal religious toleration was a steady maxim of the Venetian senate. The public and peaceable worship of the Mussulman, the Jew, the Greek, the Armenian, had always been equally permitted in the republican dominions; and in later times even the Protestant sects had met in the capital and provinces with a like indulgence. The iniquitous principles of the oligarchical administration forbid us from attributing to its conduct in these respects any higher or more enlightened motive than the interested and necessary policy of a commercial state. But it is a striking proof of the ability and stern vigilance of this government, that, notwithstanding its universal toleration and rejection of ecclesiastical control, no pretence was left for the popes to[513] impugn its zealous fidelity to the Romish church; and that, at a time when all Europe was convulsed by the struggle of religious opinions, Venice alone could receive into her corrupted bosom the elements of discord, without shaking the foundations of her established faith or sustaining the slightest shock to her habitual tranquillity.

The fierce temper with which Paul V seated himself on the papal throne, and the systematic determination of the Venetian senate to submit to no ecclesiastical usurpations, could not fail to bring the republic into collision with so rash and violent a pontiff. Accordingly Paul V had scarcely commenced his reign, when he conceived offence at the refusal of the senate to provoke a war with the Turks, by assisting the Hungarians at his command with subsidies against the infidels. His dissatisfaction with the republic was increased by her obstinacy in levying duty upon all merchandise entering the papal ports in the Adriatic—a matter in which, assuredly, religion was in nowise interested; and it reached its height when the senate passed a law, or rather revived an old one, forbidding the further alienation of immovable property in favour of religious foundations; which indeed, even in their states, were already possessed of overgrown wealth.

At this juncture the Council of Ten, acting upon its established principle of subjecting priests to secular jurisdiction, caused two ecclesiastics, a canon of Vicenza, named Sarraceno, and an abbot of Nervesa, to be successively arrested and thrown into prison, to await their trials for offences with which they were charged. Their alleged crimes were of the blackest enormity: rape in one case; assassination, poisonings, and parricide in the other. The pope, as if the rights of the church had been violently outraged by these arrests, summoned the doge and senate to deliver over the two priests to the spiritual arm, on pain of excommunication; and he seized the occasion to demand, under the same penalty, the repeal of the existing regulations against the increase of the ecclesiastical edifices and property. But the doge and senate, positively refusing to retract their measures, treated the papal menaces with contempt; and Paul V then struck them, their capital, and their whole republic with excommunication and interdict (1606).

The Venetian government endured the anathemas, so appalling to the votaries of superstition, with unshaken firmness. In reply to the papal denunciations of the divine wrath against the republic, they successfully published repeated and forcible appeals to the justice of their cause, and to the common-sense of the world. The general sentiment of Catholic Europe responded to their arguments; and their own subjects, filled with indignation at the unprovoked sentence against the state, zealously seconded their spirit. In private the doge had not hesitated to hold out to the papal nuncio an alarming threat that the perseverance of his holiness in violent measures would impel the republic to dissolve her connection altogether with the Roman see; and the open procedure of the senate was scarcely less bold. On pain of death, all parochial ministers and monks in the Venetian states were commanded to pay no regard to the interdict, and to continue to perform the offices of religion as usual. The secular clergy yielded implicit obedience to the decree; and when the Jesuits, Capuchins, and other monastic orders endeavoured to qualify their allegiance, between the pope and the republic, by making a reservation against the performance of mass, they were immediately deprived of their possessions, and expelled from the Venetian territories.

The pope, finding his spiritual weapons ineffectual against the constancy of the Venetians, showed an inclination to have recourse to temporal arms.[514] He levied troops, and endeavoured to engage Philip III of Spain and other princes in the support of his authority. At the same time, both the Spanish monarch and Henry IV of France, the ally of the republic, began to interest themselves in a quarrel which nearly concerned all Catholic powers, and threatened Europe with commotion. In reality, both sovereigns aspired to the honour of being the arbiter of the difference. But the feint of arming to second the pope, by which Philip III hoped to terrify the republic into submitting to his mediation, had only the effect of determining the senate to prefer the interposition of his rival; and Henry IV became the zealous negotiator between the pope and the republic.

Paul IV discovered at length that Spain had no serious resolution to support him by arms, and that, without the application of a force which he could not command, it was vain to expect submission from so inflexible a body as the Venetian oligarchy. He was therefore reduced to the most humiliating compromise of his boasted dignity. Without obtaining a single concession on the point in dispute, he was obliged to revoke his spiritual sentences. The doge and senate could not even receive an absolution; they refused to alter their decree against the alienation of property in favour of the church; and though they consigned the two imprisoned ecclesiastics to the disposal of Henry IV, they accompanied this act with a formal declaration, that was intended only as a voluntary mark of their respect for that monarch their ally, and to be in no degree construed into an abandonment of their right and practice of subjecting their clergy to secular jurisdiction. Even their deference for Henry IV could not prevail over their resentment and suspicion of the banished Jesuits: they peremptorily refused to reinstate that order in its possessions; and it was not until after the middle of the century that the Jesuits obtained admission again into the states of the republic. Thus, with the signal triumph of Venice, terminated a struggle, happily a bloodless one, which was not less remarkable for the firmness of the republic than important for its general effects in crushing the pretensions of papal tyranny. For its issue may assuredly be regarded as having relieved all Roman Catholic states from future dread of excommunication and interdict—and therefore from the danger of spiritual engines, impotent in themselves, and formidable only when unresisted.

With the same unyielding spirit which characterised their resistance to papal and ecclesiastical usurpation, the Venetian senate resolved to tolerate no infringement upon the tyrannical pretension of their own republic to the despotic sovereignty of the Adriatic. Before the contest with Paul V, their state had already been seriously incommoded by the piracies of the Uscochi. This community, originally formed of Christian inhabitants of Dalmatia and Croatia, had been driven, in the sixteenth century, by the perpetual Turkish invasions of their provinces, to the fastness of Clissa, whence they successfully retaliated upon their infidel foes by incursions into the Ottoman territories. At length, overpowered by the Turks, and dispersed from their stronghold, these Uscochi, or refugees, as their name implies in the Dalmatian tongue, were collected by Ferdinand, archduke of Austria (afterwards emperor), and established in the maritime town of Segna to guard that post against the Turks. In their new station, which, on the land side, was protected from access by mountains and forests, while numerous inlets and intricate shallows rendered it difficult of approach from the sea, the Uscochi betook themselves to piracy; and, for above seventy years, their light and swift barks boldly infested the Adriatic with impunity. Their first attacks were directed against the infidels; but irritated by the interference of the[515] Venetians, who, as sovereigns of the Adriatic, found themselves compelled by the complaints and threats of the Porte to punish their freebooting enterprises, they began to extend their depredations to the commerce of the republic.

It was to little purpose that the senate called upon the Austrian government to restrain its lawless subjects; their representations were either eluded altogether, or failed in obtaining any effectual satisfaction. The Uscochi, a fearless and desperate band, recruited by outlaws and men of abandoned lives, became more audacious by the connivance of Austria; and the republic was obliged to maintain a small squadron constantly at sea to protect her commerce against them. At length, after having recourse alternately, for above half a century, to fruitless negotiations with Austria, and insufficient attempts to chastise the pirates, the republic seriously determined to put an end to their vexatious hostilities and increasing insolence. The capture of a Venetian galley and the massacre of its crew in 1615, and an irruption of the Uscochi into Istria, brought affairs to a crisis. The Austrian government, then directed by the archduke Ferdinand of Styria, instead of giving satisfaction for these outrages, demanded the free navigation of the Adriatic for its vessels; and the senate found an appeal to arms the only mode of preserving its efficient sovereignty over the gulf. The Venetian troops made reprisals on the Austrian territory; and an open war commenced between the archduke and the republic.

The contest was soon associated, by the interference of Spain, with the hostilities then carried on between that monarchy and the duke of Savoy in northern Italy respecting Montferrat. For protection against the enmity of the two branches of the house of Austria, Venice united herself with Savoy, and largely subsidised that state. She even sought more distant allies, and a league, offensive and defensive, was signed between her and the seven united provinces. Notwithstanding the difference of religious faith, which, in that age constituted in itself a principle of political hostility, the two republics found a bond of union, stronger than this repulsion, in their common reasons for opposing the Spanish power. They engaged to afford each other a reciprocal assistance in money, vessels, or men, whenever menaced with attack; and in fulfilment of this treaty, a strong body of Dutch troops arrived in the Adriatic. Before the disembarkation of this force, the Venetians had already gained some advantages in the Austrian provinces on the coasts of that sea; and the archduke was induced by the appearance of the Dutch, and his projects in Germany, to open negotiations for a general peace in northern Italy.

The same treaty terminated the wars of the house of Austria respecting Montferrat and the Uscochi. Ferdinand of Austria gave security for the dispersion of the pirates, whom he had protected; and thus the Venetian republic was finally delivered from the vexatious and lawless depredations of those freebooters, who had so long annoyed her commerce and harassed her subjects (1617). It does not appear that the force of this singular race of pirates, who had thus risen into historical notice, ever exceeded a thousand[516] men; but their extraordinary hardihood and ferocity, their incessant enterprise and activity, their inaccessible position, and the connivance of Austria, had rendered them formidable enemies. Their depredations, and the constant expense of petty armaments against them, were estimated to have cost the Venetians in thirty years a loss of more than 20,000,000 gold ducats; and no less a question than the security of the dominion of the republic over the Adriatic was decided by the war against them.

Although Spain and Venice had not been regularly at war, the tyrannical ascendency exercised by the Spanish court over the affairs of Italy, occasioned the Venetians to regard that power with particular apprehension and enmity; and the spirit shown by the senate in the late contest had filled the Spanish government with implacable hatred towards the republic. By her alliances and her whole procedure, Venice had declared against the house of Austria, and betrayed her disposition to curb the alarming and overspreading authority of both its branches in the peninsula. The haughty ministers of Philip III secretly nourished projects of vengeance against the state, which had dared to manifest a systematic hostility to the Spanish dominion; and they are accused, even in apparent peace, of having regarded the republic as an enemy whom it behoved them to destroy. At the epoch of the conclusion of the war relative to Montferrat and the Uscochi, the duke of Osuna was viceroy of Naples, Don Pedro de Toledo, governor of Milan, and the marquis of Bedmar, ambassador at Venice from the court of Madrid. To the hostility entertained against the republic by these three ministers, the two former of whom governed the Italian possessions of Spain with almost regal independence, has usually been attributed the formation, with the connivance of the court of Madrid, of one of the most atrocious and deep-laid conspiracies on record. The real character of this mysterious transaction must ever remain among the unsolved problems of history; for even the circumstances which were partially suffered by the Council of Ten to transpire were so imperfectly explained, and so liable to suspicion from the habitual iniquity of their policy, as to have given rise to a thousand various and contradictory versions of the same events. Of these we shall attempt to collect only such as are scarcely open to doubt.

The Venetians had no reason to hope that the exasperation of the Spanish government, at the part which they had taken in the late war in Italy, would die away with the termination of hostilities; and it appeared to the world a consequence of the enmity of the court of Madrid towards the republic that the duke of Osuna, the viceroy of Naples, continued his warlike equipments in that kingdom with undiminished activity, notwithstanding the signature of peace. The viceroy, indeed, pretended that his naval armaments were designed against the infidels; and when the court of Madrid recalled the royal Spanish fleet from the coasts of Italy, the duke of Osuna sent the Neapolitan squadron to sea under a flag emblazoned with his own family arms. But it was difficult to suppose, either that a viceroy dared to hoist his personal standard unsanctioned by his sovereign and would be suffered to engage in a private war against the Ottoman Empire, or that he would require for that purpose the charts of the Venetian lagunes, and the flat-bottomed vessels fitted for their navigation, which he busily collected. The republic accordingly manifested serious alarm, and sedulously prepared for defence.

Affairs were in this state, when one morning several strangers were found suspended from the gibbets of the square of St. Mark. The public consternation increased when, on the following dawn, other bodies were also found[517] hanging on the same fatal spot—also of strangers. It was at the same time whispered that numerous arrests had filled the dungeons of the Council of Ten with some hundreds of criminals; and there was, too, certain proof that many persons had been privately drowned in the canals of Venice. To these fearful indications that the state had been alarmed by some extraordinary danger, the terrors of which were magnified by their obscurity, were shortly added further rumours that several foreigners serving in the fleet had been poniarded, hanged, or cast into the sea. The city was then filled with the most alarming reports: that a conspiracy of long duration had been discovered; that its object was to massacre the nobility, to destroy the republic, to deliver the whole capital to flames and pillage; that the Spanish ambassador was the mover of the horrible plot. Venice was filled with indignation and terror; yet the impenetrable Council of Ten preserved the most profound silence, neither confirming nor contradicting the general belief. The life of the marquis of Bedmar was violently threatened by the populace: he retired from Venice; the senate received a new ambassador from Spain without any signs of displeasure; and, finally, it was not until five months after the executions that the government commanded solemn thanksgiving to be offered up to the Almighty for the preservation of the state from the dangers which had threatened its existence.

On the extent of these dangers nothing was ever certainly known; but amongst the persons executed the most conspicuous was ascertained to be a French naval captain of high reputation for ability and courage in his vocation, Jacques Pierre, who, after a life passed in enterprises of a doubtful or piratical character, had apparently deserted the service of the viceroy of Naples to embrace that of the republic. This man, and a brother adventurer, one Langlade, who had been employed in the arsenal in the construction of petards and other fireworks, were absent from Venice with the fleet when the other executions took place; and they were suddenly put to death while on this service. Two other French captains named Regnault and Bouslart, with numerous foreigners, principally of the same nation, who had lately been taken into the republican service, were privately tortured and executed in various ways in the capital; and altogether 260 officers and other military adventurers are stated to have perished by the hands of the executioner for their alleged share in the conspiracy. The vengeance or shocking policy of the Council of Ten proceeded yet further; and so careful was that body to bury every trace of this inexplicable affair in the deepest oblivion, that Antoine Jaffier, also a French captain, and other informers, who had revealed the existence of a plot, though at first rewarded, were all in the sequel either known to have met a violent death, or mysteriously disappeared altogether. Of the three Spanish ministers, to whom it has been customary to assign the origin of the conspiracy, the two principal were distinguished by opposite fates. The marquis of Bedmar, after the termination of his embassy, found signal political advancement, and finished by obtaining a cardinal’s hat, by the interest of his court with the holy see. But the duke of Osuna, after being removed from viceroyalty, was disgraced on suspicion of having designed to renounce his allegiance, and to place the crown of Naples on his own head; and he died in prison.

Whether the safety of Venice had really been endangered or not by the machinations of Spain, the measures of that power were observed by the senate with a watchful and jealous eye; and, for many years, the policy of the republic was constantly employed in endeavours to counteract the projects of the house of Austria. In 1619, the Venetians perceived with[518] violent alarm that the court of Madrid, under pretence of protecting the Catholics of the Valtelline against their rulers, the Protestants of the Grison confederation, was labouring to acquire the possession of that valley, which, by connecting the Milanese states with the Tyrol, would cement the dominions of the Spanish and German dynasties of the Austrian family. The establishment of this easy communication was particularly dangerous for the Venetians, because it would envelop their states, from the Lisonzo to the Po, with an unbroken chain of hostile posts, and would intercept all direct intercourse with Savoy and the territories of France. The senate eagerly therefore negotiated the league between these last two powers and their republic, which, in 1623, was followed by the Grison war against the house of Austria. This contest produced little satisfactory fruits for the Venetians; and it did not terminate before the Grisons, though they recovered their sovereignty over the Valtelline, had themselves embraced the party of Spain.

The Grison war had not closed, when Venice was drawn, by her systematic opposition to the Spanish power, into a more important quarrel—that of the Mantuan Succession, in which she of course espoused the cause of the Gonzaga of Nevers. In this struggle the republic, who sent an army of twenty thousand men into the field on her Lombard frontiers, experienced nothing but disgrace; and the senate were but too happy to find their states left, by the Peace of Cherasco in 1631, precisely in the same situation as before the war; while the prince whom they had supported remained seated on the throne of Mantua. This pacification reconciled the republic with the house of Austria, and terminated her share in the Italian wars of the seventeenth century. Her efforts to promote the deliverance of the peninsula from the Spanish power can scarcely be said to have met with success; nor was the rapid decline of that monarchy, which had already commenced, hastened, perhaps, by her hostility. But she had displayed remarkable energy in the policy of her counsels; and the recovery of her own particular independence was at least triumphantly effected. So completely were her pretensions to the sovereignty of the Adriatic maintained that, when in the year 1630, just before the conclusion of the Mantuan War, a princess of the Spanish dynasty wished to pass by sea from Naples to Trieste, to espouse the son of the emperor, the senator refused to allow the Spanish squadron to escort her, as an infringement upon their right of excluding every foreign armament from those waters; but they gallantly offered their own fleet for her service. The Spanish government at first rejected the offer; but the Venetians, says Giannone, boldly declared that, if the Spaniards were resolved to prefer a trial of force to their friendly proposal, the infanta must fight her way to her wedding through fire and smoke. The haughty court of Madrid was compelled to yield; and the Venetian admiral, Antonio Pisani, then gave the princess a convoy in splendid bearing to Trieste with a squadron of light galleys.

Venetian Wars with the Turks

Throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, the affairs of Venice had little connection with those of the older Italian states; and in tracing the annals of the republic, our attention is wholly diverted to the Eastern theatre of her struggles against the Ottoman power. It was a sudden and overwhelming aggression which first broke the long interval of peace between the Turkish and Venetian governments. Under pretence of taking[519] vengeance upon the knights of Malta, for the capture of some Turkish vessels, the Porte fitted out an enormous expedition; and 348 galleys and other vessels of war, with an immense number of transports, having on board a land-force of fifty thousand men, issued from the Dardanelles with the ostensible design of attacking the stronghold of the order of St. John (1645). But instead of making sail for Malta, the fleet of the sultan steered for the shores of Candia; and unexpectedly, and without any provocation, the Turkish army disembarked on that island. The Venetians, although the senate had conceived some uneasiness on the real destination of the Ottoman expedition, were little prepared for resistance; but they defended themselves against this faithless surprise with remarkable courage, and even with desperation. During a long war of twenty-five years, the most ruinous which they had ever sustained against the infidels, the Venetian senate and all classes of their subjects displayed a zealous energy and a fortitude worthy of the best days of their republic. But the resources of Venice were no longer what they had been in the early ages of her prosperity; and although the empire of the sultans had declined from the meridian of its power, the contest was still too disproportionate between the fanatical and warlike myriads of Turkey and the limited forces of a maritime state. The Venetians, perhaps, could not withdraw from the unequal conflict with honour; but the prudent senate might easily foresee its disastrous result.

The first important operation of the Turkish army in Candia was the siege of Canea, one of the principal cities of the island. Before the end of the first campaign, the assailants had entered that place by capitulation; but so gallant was the defence that, although the garrison was composed only of two or three thousand native militia, twenty thousand Turks are said to have fallen before the walls. Meanwhile, at Venice, all orders had rivalled each other in devotion and pecuniary sacrifices to preserve the most valuable colony of the state; and notwithstanding the apathy of Spain, the disorders of France and the empire, and other causes, which deprived the republic of the efficient support of Christendom against a common enemy, the senate were able to reinforce the garrisons of Candia, and to oppose a powerful fleet to the infidels. The naval force of the republic was still indeed very inferior in numbers to that of the Moslems; but this inferiority was compensated by the advantages of skill and disciplined courage; and throughout the war the offensive operations of the Venetians on the waves strikingly displayed their superiority in maritime science and conduct. For many successive years, the Venetian squadrons assumed and triumphantly maintained their station, during the seasons of active operations, at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and blockaded the straits and the port of Constantinople. The Mussulmans constantly endeavoured with furious perseverance to remove the shame of their confinement by an inferior force; but they were almost always defeated. The naval trophies of Venice were swelled by many brilliant victories, but by five in particular: in 1649 near Smyrna; in 1651 near Paros; in 1655 at the passage of the Dardanelles; and, in the two following years, at the same place. In these encounters, the exploits of the patrician families of Morosini, of Grimani, of Mocenigo emulated the glorious deeds of their illustrious ancestors; and their successes gave temporary possession to the republic of some ports in Dalmatia, and of several islands in the Archipelago.

But, notwithstanding the devotion and courage of the Venetians on their own element, and their desperate resistance in the fortresses of Candia, the war in that island was draining the life-blood of the republic, without affording one rational hope of ultimate success. The vigilance of the Venetian[520] squadrons could not prevent the Turks from feeding their army in Candia with desultory and perpetual reinforcements of janissaries and other troops from the neighbouring shore of the Morea; and whenever tempests, or exhaustion, or the overwhelming strength of the Ottoman armaments compelled the republican fleet to retire into port, the numbers of the invading army were swollen by fresh thousands. The exhaustless stream of the Ottoman population was directed with unceasing flow towards the scene of contest: the Porte was contented to purchase the acquisition of Candia by the sacrifice of hecatombs of human victims. To raise new resources, the Venetian senate were reduced to the humiliating expedient of offering the dignity of admission into their body and the highest offices of state to public sale: to obtain the continued means of succouring Candia, they implored the aid of all the powers of Europe. As the contest became more desperate, their entreaties met with general attention; and almost every Christian state afforded them a few reinforcements. But these were never simultaneous or numerous; and though they arrested the progress of the infidels, they only protracted the calamitous struggle.

In 1648 the Turkish army had penetrated to the walls of Candia, the capital of the island; and for twenty years they kept that city in a continued state of siege. But it was only in the year 1666 that the assaults of the infidels attained their consummation of vigour, by the debarkation of reinforcements which raised their army to seventy thousand men, and on the arrival of Akhmet Kiupergli, the famous Ottoman vizir, to assume in person the direction of their irresistible force. This able commander was opposed by a leader in no respect inferior to him, Francesco Morosini, captain-general of the Venetians; and thenceforth the defence of Candia was signalised by prodigies of desperate valour, which exceed all belief. But we, in these days, are surprised to find that the Turks, in the direction of their approaches, and the employment of an immense battering train, showed a far superior skill to that of the Christians. The details of the siege of Candia belong to the history of the military art; but the general reader will best imagine the obstinacy of the defence from the fact that, in six months, the combatants exchanged thirty-two general assaults and seventeen furious sallies; that above six hundred mines were sprung; and that four thousand Christians and twenty thousand Mussulmans perished in the ditches and trenches of the place.

The most numerous and the last reinforcements received by the Venetians was six thousand French troops, despatched by Louis XIV under the dukes of Beaufort and Navailles. The characteristic rashness of their nation induced these commanders, contrary to the advice of Morosini, to hazard an imprudent sortie, in which they were totally defeated, and the former of these noblemen slain. After this disaster, no entreaty of Morosini could prevent the duke of Navailles from abandoning the defence of the city, with a precipitation as great as that which had provoked the calamity. The French re-embarked; the other auxiliaries followed their example; and Morosini was left with a handful of Venetians among a mass of blackened and untenable ruins. Thus deserted, after a glorious though hopeless resistance which has immortalised his name, Francesco Morosini ventured on his sole responsibility to conclude a treaty of peace with the vizir, which the Venetian senate, notwithstanding their jealousy of such unauthorised acts in their officers, rejoiced to confirm. The whole island of Candia, except two or three ports, was surrendered to the Turks; the republic preserved her other possessions in the Levant; and the war was thus terminated by the[521] event of a siege, in the long course of which the incredible number of 120,000 Turks and 30,000 Christians are declared to have perished (1669).

Notwithstanding the unfortunate issue of this war, the Venetian republic had not come off without honour from an unequal struggle, which had been signalised by ten naval victories and by one of the most stubborn and brilliant defences recorded in history. Although, therefore, a prodigious expenditure of blood and treasure had utterly drained the resources of the republic, her courage was unsubdued, and her pride was even augmented by the events of the contest. The successes of the infidels had inspired less terror than indignant impatience and thirst of revenge; and the senate watched in secret for the first favourable occasion of retaliating upon the Mussulmans. After the Venetian strength had been repaired by fifteen years of uninterrupted repose and prosperous industry, this occasion of vengeance was found, in the war which the Porte had declared against the empire in 1682. An offensive league was signed between the emperor, the king of Poland, the czar of Muscovy, and the Venetians. The principal stipulation of this alliance was that each party should be guaranteed in the possession of its future conquests from the infidels; and the republic immediately fitted out a squadron of twenty-four sail of the line, and about fifty galleys.

There appeared but one man at Venice worthy of the chief command—that Francesco Morosini, who had so gallantly defended Candia, and whom the senate and people had rewarded with the most flagrant ingratitude. A strange and wanton accusation of cowardice was too palpably belied by every event of his public life to be persisted in, even by the envy which his eminent reputation had provoked, and by the malignity that commonly waits upon public services, where they have been unfortunate. But a second and unprovoked charge of malversation had been followed by imprisonment. Still, however, devoting himself to his country’s cause, and forgetting his private injuries, Morosini shamed his enemies by a noble revenge; and, once more at the head of the Venetian armaments, he led them to a brilliant career of victory. The chief force of the Ottoman Empire was diverted to the Austrian War; and the vigorous efforts of the republican armies were feebly or unsuccessfully resisted by the divided strength of the Mussulmans. In the first naval campaign, the mouth of the Adriatic was secured by the reduction of the island of Santa Maura, one of the keys of that sea; and the neighbouring continent of Greece was invaded. In three years more, Morosini consummated his bold design of wresting the whole of the Morea from the infidels. In the course of the operations in that peninsula, the count of Königsmark, a Swedish officer who was entrusted with the command of the Venetian land-forces under the captain-general, inflicted two signal defeats in the field upon the Turkish armies. Modon, Argos, and Napoli di Romania, the capital of the Morea, successfully fell after regular sieges.c

The year 1687 was not so propitious for the Venetians; nevertheless Morosini rendered himself master of Lepanto and Corinth. The conquest of the Morea was nearly completed. At this time the senate voted for the great captain a bust in bronze, bearing the inscription: “Francisco Maurocenico Peloponnesiaco adhuc viventi Senatus.” This honour redoubled the ardour of Morosini. After conquering Sparta he turned to Attica, and laying siege to Athens easily took it. It was in this assault on Athens that a shell struck the Parthenon, of which the Turks had made a powder magazine, and reduced that celebrated edifice to ruins. Morosini, who to skill in war and love of country added admiration for the great and beautiful, did his best[522] to save what he could of this venerated relic, and exclaimed: “Oh Athens, protector of Art, to what art thou reduced!” Thus was ancient Greece avenged on ancient barbarism. But different rulers had left too deep furrows on this sacred soil to enable the republic of Venice, already enfeebled, to recall it to life; there reigned the silence of a past which could never be renewed.

In 1688 the Venetian fleet leaving the Gulf of Ægina operated against the island of Negropont (Eubœa), but was unable to take it, not only on account of the resistance offered by the Turks, but because sickness had begun to decimate the ranks, and a band of Germans fighting for the republic were withdrawn. The Venetians were however continually gaining victories in Dalmatia, while the Turks were frequently discomfited in Hungary; so that the latter began to make proposals for peace. The demands of the allies, however, were so exorbitant that the negotiations failed, and the Turks decided to continue the war to the utmost of their power, a decision which was influenced by the turbulent state of Europe. Morosini was not discouraged by this new boldness on the part of the Turks; he had now been raised to the supreme dignity of the dogeship, and wished by some fresh, great deed to prove that the republic had done wisely in reposing complete faith in him. He had in his mind the design of attempting once more the conquest of Negropont; but the forces there being already under other leaders, he decided to take Monembasia, which would make the conquest of the Morea quite complete. But the siege had scarcely begun when Morosini fell ill, and he was obliged to surrender his command to Girolamo Cornaro and return to Venice. The porte brought forward fresh proposals for peace, but they were rejected.

The emperor wished to employ all his forces against the French; he was not disinclined to listen to suggestions for an agreement. Knowing this, the Venetians understood how much it was to their interest to conduct carefully the enterprise which they had in hand, so that if peace should be concluded it might be to their advantage. So Cornaro assailed Monembasia with great ardour until he finally mastered it, after which he attacked the Ottoman fleet and defeated it at Mytilene. After the taking of Vallona, which was dismantled, an illness ended Cornaro’s honoured life. Domenico Mocenigo who succeeded him in his command was very different from his predecessor. An attempt made by him to conquer Candia failed through his cowardice; he was punished by the senate, who deprived him of his command and begged Morosini to place himself once more at the head of the army. Morosini, though well on in years, started at once from Monembasia the 24th of May, 1693. On this occasion, however, he did nothing very remarkable beyond acquiring possession of some islands—among others Salamis; partly because the season was unfavourable, and the Turks were strongly fortified in the Hellenic territory which still remained to them. He died not long after (January 9th, 1694), and was succeeded in his command by Antonio Zeno.

The new commander, while the troops were gaining fresh victories in Dalmatia, took Scio; but he afterwards allowed a favourable opportunity of defeating the Turkish fleet to escape him, and did not even trouble to keep Scio which he had conquered. He was called upon to give an account of his conduct, and thrown into prison where he died before sentence had been pronounced against him. His successor, Alessandro Molin, was more fortunate. It seemed as though the star of Venice was once more declining, and the enemy’s forces again became threatening. The Turks, recovering[523] from the defeats they had sustained, again attempted the reconquest of the Morea. But not only were they unsuccessful in this, but Molin determined to meet them off Scio and there gained over them a signal victory. Equally auspicious for Venice were the years 1696, 1697, 1698, in which last, on September 20th, the purveyor extraordinary, Girolan Dolfin, gained another naval victory by which supremacy of the sea was secured to the republic and the dominion of the Archipelago guaranteed. But already the other great victory of Zenta, within the military boundaries, was gained by Prince Eugene of Savoy on September 11th; and as the Turks lost their grand vizir, seventeen pashas, thirty thousand soldiers dead and three thousand prisoners, the sultan was convinced that the only thing which remained for him to do was to sue once more for peace, the more so as Cornale, who succeeded Molin as commander, had in various encounters defeated the Ottoman army and, closing the passage of the Dardanelles, had several times reduced Constantinople to starvation. The Christian powers were not this time deaf to the request of the sultan. They perceived the necessity of making peace with the East, since the hopes and fears growing out of the war of the Spanish Succession had given rise to contentions of all kinds among the three cabinets.

Through the mediation of England and Holland—after the overcoming of many difficulties brought forward principally by the Venetians, who feared that they might lose in peace what they had gained in war, or that they would not receive from the empire, a rival power, all due regard for their interests—on the 13th of November, 1693, the imperial plenipotentiaries, with those of Poland, Russia, Venice, and the Turks, assembled in congress at Karlowitz, a town on the Danube to the south of Peterwardein.d

By the Treaty of Karlowitz, which the republic, in concert with the empire, concluded with the Ottoman Porte, Venice retained all her conquests in the Morea (including Corinth and its isthmus), the islands of Algina and Santa Maura, and some Dalmatian fortresses which she had captured; and she restored Athens and her remaining acquisitions on the Grecian continent (1699).c

Italy’s condition when she left the death-stricken hands of the dynasty of Charles V made a lively impression on her new sovereigns. It showed what could be done towards the unhappiness of a country by foreign rule—a rule which only thought from day to day of gathering fruits of conquest, without even trying to assure those of the morrow.

For a century and a half the governors of Milan and Naples, and following their example the independent sovereigns, egoists, or oppressors, with rare exceptions, had allowed ancient evils to subsist or replaced them by new ones. They had only sought to exploit to their own profit the privileges, the old institutions of the Middle Ages, instead of reforming or ameliorating them. Nobles and clergy in particular had been left in possession of their old rights over the chase, fishing, mills, furnaces, justice even, and were the real instruments of domination. Thence arose the strangest position of affairs.

Legislations, ancient and contradictory customs which in the south went back to the Normans, the Hohenstaufens, and the Angevins, or in the north at Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena, survived in institutions of lost republics, formed an inextricable chaos where the arbitrator reaped a rich harvest. Privileges and jurisdictions, both feudal and clerical, confused or perverted the systems of judicial and political administration; taxation varied in every country and for every person; power made itself oppressively but universally felt. The general tax-collectors, to whom finance was given over, and venal officials, who represented authority, still further augmented disorder. Lastly the power of the holy see, taking a more active part in political institutions in Italy than anywhere else, came as a final burden.

In the country the rights of primogeniture, mortgage, trusteeship, and free pasturage condemned the land to sterility. In towns the old corporations, statutes, and recent monopolies killed all commerce and industry. There were hardly any natural products in this the most fertile country of Europe, still less of manufactured products in towns which formerly had[525] filled the markets of Europe with their exports, and the bad condition of the roads overburdened with turnpikes did not allow of transit over a peninsula so admirably situated and which in the Middle Ages had served as a link between Europe and the Levant. Moreover the deserted state of Apulia recalled the times of the decadence of the Roman Empire. In the kingdom of Naples the royal pasturage had an extent of fifty miles in length and fifteen miles in breadth. In Tuscany and the papal states the Maremma reached as far as the Mediterranean coasts. The greater part of the towns in central and southern Italy were depopulated, their palaces deserted, the houses fallen into ruins and never repaired. Even literature and art, which had maintained themselves up to that time, had now shared the common fate.h

Politically the eighteenth century, like the sixteenth, began in Italy with fifty years of warfare; but the sufferings of the country, although often heavy, were always much lighter than those which had prevailed during the great struggle between France and the house of Charles V.

There broke out successively four European wars, into all of which the Italians were dragged by their foreign masters.f The first of these was the war of the Spanish Succession; the second, the war of the Quadruple Alliance; the third, the war of the Polish Succession; the fourth, the war of the Austrian Succession. A brief review of the effect upon Italy of these wars will form the chief topic of the present chapter. But before taking up the sweep of these political events, it may be of interest to glance at the internal conditions of the most interesting of Italian states, Tuscany, and witness the passing of its famous family of Medici, which now becomes extinct after three centuries of domination. Cosmo III, who occupied the ducal throne at the close of the century, continued to reign until 1723.a

Although neither public nor private conditions were very satisfactory under his government, the brilliancy of the court gave no indication that times were bad. There never was a time of greater luxury, nor had so many rich gifts ever found their way into foreign lands before. Cosmo had an abnormal craving for notoriety. He wished to pass for the most magnificent of sovereigns, while his ever-increasing leaning towards piety gave rise to the most singular contrasts between his private and his court life—contrasts which were intensified by the habits and surroundings of his sons and for a time of his own brother also. The latter, Francesco Maria, when cardinal, knew no moderation in his expenditure, and the learned French Benedictines who saw him in Rome, in 1687, report that the grand duke was forced on account of his extravagance to recall him to Siena, and then describe how refreshments alone cost him daily twenty-five louis d’or. Besides monks of all orders, who were always to be found in the palace (the prince had founded near the Ambrogiana an Alcantarian[21] monastery which was maintained at his expense), individuals of all nations presented themselves at court. The ambassadors took the greatest pains to gratify Cosmo’s wishes: Czar Peter sent him four Calmucks, and from the Danish king, Frederick IV, he received Greenlanders. The residences were filled with treasures and curiosities of all kinds, and the princely vineyards and gardens were of the choicest. At the end of the winter of 1719, King Frederick IV of Denmark spent nearly six weeks in Florence, which he had already visited as crown prince in 1692 under the incognito of the count of Schaumburg. The great trouble which the ceremonial gave, in spite of the incognito on[526] that occasion, is described by the prince’s attendant, Hans Heinrich von Ahlefeld, in his account of the journey. An inscription on the archway of the Porta San Gallo commemorates the visit of the Scandinavian monarch, whose predecessor, Christian I, had passed through that very gate 235 years before. Cosmo celebrated the visit of his exalted guest, in spite of the Lenten season, by balls and music. A large print which represents the evening progress of the princess Violante Beatrice at the time of the investment of Siena on April 12th, 1717, gives some idea of the brilliancy and ceremonial as well as of the costumes and uniforms in customary use on official occasions: the princess drove through the gaily decorated town in her state carriage, almost entirely made of crystal and drawn by six horses, surrounded by pages and halberdiers bearing torches, and followed by the magnificent carriages of the nobility on to the Piazza del Campo, whose every tower and roof was brilliantly illuminated and which was filled to overflowing by a surging crowd. The privations and losses of later years so depressed Cosmo, however, that he could think of nothing but his religious exercises, and the distinguished flower of Florentine youth went into foreign lands to seek compensation for the restrictions imposed upon them at home. When in 1720 the electoral princess of the Palatinate, who was by no means a pleasure-seeker, felt it incumbent upon her to break through this severe régime by encouraging the carnival festivities, the whole nation showed unmistakably how hateful this morose existence had been to them.b

Cosmo III died at an advanced age on October 31st, 1723, leaving as his successor his son Giovan Gastone. The country at this time was plunged in debt, industries had decayed, prosperity was destroyed. The new archduke drove away the monks and priestly flatterers that had surrounded his father, suppressed several pensions that had been awarded, converted heretics, Turks, and Jews—lightened, in a word, many of the burdens that oppressed the land without displaying the energy necessary to remove the worst evils from which it suffered. He held at a distance his German wife, who had lately entered with alacrity upon the duties of her position as reigning archduchess in Florence. In matters pertaining to exterior politics he followed closely in the footsteps of his father. Entertaining little hope of setting aside the decisions of the Quadruple Alliance, he took good care to fix the allodial estates of the house of Medici and to indicate which portions could be looked upon as territorial and which must be ceded to the electress of the Palatinate as compensation for the future transfer of the feudal tenure to another family of the Medici female line.

A new turn was given to Tuscan affairs in 1725, while the belief still prevailed that the infante Charles would shortly arrive from Spain with an armed force with the intention of so establishing himself in Tuscany that his position and that of his successors could not be shaken either by the negotiations at Cambray or the pretensions of the emperor. Instead of this solution the Madrid court secretly despatched to Vienna Baron de Ripperda, an able Belgian who had recently gone over to the Catholic church. This envoy succeeded in effecting a separate contract between the emperor and Philip V whereby Tuscany and Parma were to be held as possessions of the infante Charles and his successors without the establishment there of foreign garrisons, exactly in accordance with the provisions of the Quadruple Alliance. Although this agreement (which brought to a close the congress of Cambray) dispelled the fears of the archduke as to an irruption of the Spaniards into his domains before his death, and made possible an undisturbed continuance of his dissolute mode of life, fresh mistrust arose between the[527] courts of Vienna and Madrid which created renewed tension in the affairs of the Italian states.c

Giovan Gastone loved conviviality, and during the first years of his reign he took part in the social functions given by the most distinguished families in the capital. Florence seemed to be suddenly transformed. The new sovereign put a stop to the prying censorship of morals with which his predecessor had tormented his subjects of all classes. After he had once made the regulations that seemed to him urgently needed, he refused to hear anything more about the affairs of administration, and he prohibited all reports on the life and doings of his subjects. The doors of his palace were closed to all the monks and clergy, and to the converts and neophytes that Cosmo had loved to gather round him. The palace, however, gained nothing by the changed company in which Giovan Gastone indulged, more especially during the last sad years of his reign. When his father’s pensions to his clerical protégés ceased, the ill-deserved gratuities bestowed upon the depraved clients of Giuliano Dami, the ruspanti (as they were called from their weekly doles of the goldpieces known as ruspo) were much worse. The depravity of morals from which the whole of Italy suffered had never been worse. And Giovan Gastone’s indifference increased with his ill-health. “The present court,” writes Johann Georg Keysler in January, 1730, “is very quiet and dreary. The sister of the grand duke has turned dévote and frequents cloisters and churches more than the court. The grand duchess, widow of the elder brother, is of a lively disposition, it is true, and particularly gracious to foreigners, but perhaps she shrinks from the thought of passing for a lover of vanities in the eyes of her sister-in-law. The grand duke himself has not left his room since last July. No traveller or foreign minister is admitted to an audience with him, and he spends most of his time in bed, partly on account of the discomforts of asthma and dropsy from which he suffers, and partly on account of the strong drinks and liquors which he takes.”

The presence of the infante Don Charles roused this gloomy court for the last time. The prince shot hares and game in the Boboli Gardens and drove through the corridor between the palace and the Uffizzi in a little carriage drawn by a stag. As soon as he had gone everything returned to its former gloom. Giovan Gastone did not leave his couch again. Only once, just before the last crisis, when he felt himself a little better, he was carried in his arm-chair to the window on the ground-floor, while the surging crowds thronged the square. He doled out money by handfuls and bought masses of things that were offered to him, such as books, pictures, stuffs and all the thousand and one strange things which were exposed for sale at this curious fair. Thus did the last of the Medici bid his last farewell to the Florentine people.b

Gastone had no bounds to his profusion and the dissipation of their wealth; and when he died (1737), his reign had inflicted many deep wounds on the prosperity of Tuscany. The death of his sister, a few years afterwards, completed the extinction of the sovereign house of Medici. A distant collateral branch of the same original stock, descended from one of the ancestors of the great Cosmo, was left to survive even to these times; but no claim to the inheritance of the ducal house was ever recognised in its members. Francis of Lorraine, the consort of Maria Theresa of Austria, to whom this inheritance was assigned by the Peace of Vienna, naturally resided little in Tuscany, and his elevation to the imperial crown seemed to consign the grand duchy to the long administration of foreign viceroys.[528] But the governors chosen by Francis were men of ability and virtue, who strove to ameliorate the condition of the people; and on the death of the emperor Francis (1765), his will, in consonance with the spirit of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, gave to Tuscany a sovereign of its own. This was his second son, Peter Leopold, to whom he bequeathed the grand duchy, while his eldest, Joseph II, succeeded to his imperial crown. Leopold was only eighteen years of age when he commenced a reign which exhibited to admiration the rare spectacle of a patriot and a philosopher on the throne.e We shall have occasion to make further reference to the life of this remarkable prince later on. Now we must take up the development of Italian history in general from the beginning of the century. Our first concern is with the wars that grew out of the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain.a

ITALY IN THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

Charles II of Spain died without sons in the year 1700, and several sovereigns, amongst whom was Victor Amadeus II, laid claim to the throne and made alliances to obtain it, or at least to divide the vast inheritance among themselves. Before dying, Charles had appointed Philip duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV, to be his successor, and although the country was exhausted and a terrible war could be foreseen, the king of France accepted the inheritance for his grandson with the famous saying, “The Pyrenees are no more.” Philip V was in fact recognised in Madrid, but a European war of thirteen years’ duration followed.

The duke of Savoy was undecided what side to adopt, but willing or unwilling he was compelled to side with France, and to give in marriage to Philip V his daughter Maria Louisa, who in spite of her youth showed great judgment, and during her husband’s absence on his campaign in Italy, governed the kingdom in a wise and intelligent manner. Clement XI, exalted in that year to the pontifical see, would not side with France, but intervened to prevent war; and, seeing that he was unsuccessful, endeavoured—but in vain—to form a league among the Italian princes to save Italy from again becoming the arena of European wars. To this pope, sincerely and courageously Italian, praise is due. Eugene of Savoy, conqueror of the Turks, was despatched from Hungary to Italy against the Franco-Piedmontese, and it must have grieved him to turn his arms against his kinsman.

For two years the war was continued without any definite results, though the French were worsted at Chiari, and their mediocre General Villeroi was taken prisoner at Cremona; later at Luzzara in Modena the victory was uncertain. Meanwhile Eugene, more than ever disgusted with the arrogance of the French, endeavoured to separate the duke from the league, and had no trouble in persuading him to abandon it. Louis XIV avenged himself by taking prisoner all the Piedmontese on his territory. The duke arrested the French ambassador, and appealed to his people saying, “I prefer the honour of dying arms in hand to the shame of suffering myself to be oppressed.” Having renewed his troops, he confronted the enemy’s arms almost alone (Eugene had returned to fight in Germany); his courage appeared to become stronger in danger.

Fortune does not always favour the good and brave, and Victor lost many towns and was reduced to defending his own capital. A desperate attack was made on the latter, but the citizens maintained their ancient reputation.

Before giving orders for the bombardment, La Feuillade, who commanded the besiegers, sent word to the duke to inquire where he was quartered, that he might spare him. “On the walls of the citadel,” replied the duke. The defence being well ordered, the duke made a sally with a few brave and tried followers. Thus threatened at close quarters, hearing distant rumours of trouble, suffering, and every kind of want, the intrepid men of Turin held out. The fury of the artillery, the laying of mines, the assaults, lasted three months, but day and night the citizens above and below ground watched and combated. Even from the orphanage the orphans came forward to labour in the mines. Aid was expected, but it came not; though the ever active Eugene was commissioned to bring reinforcements. Eventually the two princes met, and together from the hill of Superga they drew up the plan of battle, the duke promising to erect there a church in thanksgiving if the victory was his.

Turin was in peril. On the 29th of August a large number of the enemy reached a postern of the citadel unseen; a mine was laid at the spot, but could not be fired without danger; in this imminent peril Pietro Nicco d’Andorno, of Biella, made the companies retire, and like a new Decius offered himself to die; the match being applied, he was buried with the French under the ruins. This great deed brought glory on Turin, and the fame of it shall live forever in the country. Nevertheless the French occupied the castle of Pianezza, on the left bank of the Dora Riparia; it was imperative that the Piedmontese should dislodge them from this place, but for this it was necessary to take them unawares and they knew not how. But an old peasant woman, by name Maria Bricca, discovered on the night of the 5th of September that instead of keeping watch the French were amusing themselves, and she immediately ran to give the news in the Italian camp. At the head of the soldiers she led the way by a subterranean passage into the castle, and, hatchet in hand, crying “Viva Savoia” she informed the enemy they were prisoners.

Two days later Victor and Eugene, uniting their talents and forces, inflicted on the French a crushing defeat, so that twenty thousand were left dead on the field and the survivors fled beyond the Alps. The Franco-Spaniards evacuated Naples; and the Austrians, solely because they were the new lords, were greeted as friends and liberators. The war was continued outside Italy, and later the exhausted powers were brought to signing the Treaty of Utrecht 1713, confirmed the following year at Rastatt. By this treaty Austria obtained Milan, Naples, and Sardinia; Victor Amadeus obtained the far distant Sicily, Montferrat, Lomellina, and Val di Susa, with[530] the title of king; a few small states were distributed—Mantua, Mirandola, and afterwards, Guastalla.

This aggrandisement of the house of Savoy and also that of Prussia was specially insisted upon by England, then the peacemaker of the continent and arbitrator in this peace, for which reason she intervened between France and Austria, and preserved European equilibrium. Thus were favoured the legitimate ambitions of two minor states, Piedmont and Prussia, that aimed at a high mark, and in the similarity of their fortunes they became the bulwarks of two nations, the hope and pride of two countries.d

WAR OF THE QUADRUPLE ALLIANCE

It was by the ambitious intrigues of an Italian princess and an Italian priest, that the repose of the peninsula was again disturbed, only four years after this pacification. Giulio Alberoni, the son of a peasant, and originally a poor curate near Parma, had risen by his talents and artful spirit to the office of first minister of Spain. Philip V, on the death of his queen, Maria Louisa of Savoy, had espoused the princess Elizabeth Farnese; and Alberoni, by means of this marriage, of which he was regarded as the author, enjoyed the favour of the new queen, and acquired an absolute ascendency over the feeble mind of her husband.

His first object was to obtain a cardinal’s hat for himself; and being indulged with that honour by the pope, the next and more comprehensive scheme of his ambition was to signalise his public administration. To his energetic and audacious conceptions, it seemed not too gigantic or arduous an undertaking to recover for the Spanish monarchy all its ancient possessions and power in Italy, which had been totally lost by the Peace of Utrecht. He duped the wily Victor Amadeus, and enlisted him in his views by the promise of the Milanese provinces in exchange for Sicily; and the disgust which the stern and haughty insolence of the imperial government had already excited in the peninsula, rendered the pope, the grand duke of Tuscany, and other Italian princes, not adverse to the designs of the Spanish minister.

But the great powers of Europe looked with far different eyes upon his unquiet ambition. The personal interest and feelings of the duke of Orleans, who now governed France during the minority of Louis XV, placed him in opposition to Philip V; and the duke discovered a plot laid by Alberoni, through the Spanish ambassador at Paris, to deprive him of the regency of France, to which the cardinal persuaded his master to assert his claim as the nearest relative of Louis XV. The intrigues held with the Scottish Jacobites by Alberoni, who had formed a chimerical scheme of placing the pretender on the throne of Great Britain, and thus securing a new and grateful ally for Spain, rendered George I as jealous as the duke of Orleans of the designs of the court of Madrid. For their mutual protection against the machinations of Alberoni, the British monarch and the French regent negotiated a defensive league between Great Britain, France, and Holland, which, by the accession of the emperor to its objects, shortly swelled into the famous Quadruple Alliance (1718).

Besides the provision of the contracting parties for their mutual defence, the Quadruple Alliance laboured at once to provide for the continued repose of Italy, and to gratify the ambition both of the family of Austria and of the Spanish house of Bourbon. Although Parma and Piacenza were not feminine fiefs, the approaching extinction of the male line of Farnese gave Elizabeth the best subsisting claim to the succession of her uncle’s states. To the grand duchy of Tuscany she had also pretensions by maternal descent, after the failure of the male ducal line of Medici; which, like that of Farnese, seemed to be fast approaching its termination. As, therefore, the children of the young queen were excluded from the expectation of ascending the Spanish throne, which the sons of Philip by his first marriage were of course destined to inherit, the idea was conceived of forming an establishment in Italy for Don Charles, her first-born; and the Quadruple Alliance provided that the young prince should be guaranteed in the succession both of Parma and Piacenza, and of Tuscany, on the death of the last princes of the Farnese and Medicean dynasties. It was to reconcile the emperor to this admission of a Spanish prince into Italy, that Sicily was assigned to him in exchange for Sardinia. The weaker powers and the people were alone sacrificed. While the princes of Parma and Tuscany were compelled to endure the cruel mortification of seeing foreign statesmen dispose by anticipation of their inheritance, during their own lives, and without their option; and while, with a far more flagrant usurpation of natural rights, the will of their subjects was as little consulted—it was resolved to compel Victor Amadeus to receive, as an equivalent for his new kingdom of Sicily, that of Sardinia, which boasted not a third part of either its population or general value.

The provisions of the Quadruple Alliance were haughtily rejected by Alberoni, who had already entered on the active prosecution of his designs upon the Italian provinces. Having hitherto endeavoured, during his short administration, to recruit the exhausted strength of Spain, he now plunged that monarch headlong into a new contest, with such forces as had been regained in four years of peace; and his vigorous, but overwrought direction of the resources of the state, seemed at first to justify his presumption. A body of eight thousand Spaniards was disembarked on the island of Sardinia, and at once wrested that kingdom from the feeble garrisons of the imperialists (1717). In the following year, a large Spanish fleet of sixty vessels of war, convoying thirty-five thousand land-forces, appeared in the Mediterranean; and notwithstanding the previous negotiations of Alberoni with Victor Amadeus, Sicily was the first object of attack. Against this[532] perfidious surprise, the Savoyard prince was in no condition to defend his new kingdom; and though his viceroy at first endeavoured to resist the progress of the Spanish arms, Victor Amadeus, sensible of his weakness and inability to afford the necessary succours for preserving so distant a possession, made a merit of necessity, and assented to the provisions of the Quadruple Alliance (1718). Withdrawing his troops from the contest, he assumed the title of king of Sardinia, though he yet possessed not a foot of territory in that island.

Meanwhile the powers of the Quadruple Alliance, finding all negotiations hopeless, had begun to act vigorously against the Spanish forces. Even before the open declaration of war, to which England and France had now recourse to reduce the court of Spain to abandon its designs, Sir George Byng, the British admiral in the Mediterranean, had not hesitated to attack the Spanish fleet, which he completely annihilated off the Sicilian coast. This disaster overthrew all the magnificent projects of Alberoni. The British admiral poured the imperial troops from the Italian continent into Sicily; and the Spaniards rapidly lost ground, and made overtures for evacuating the island. The enterprises of the court of Madrid were equally unfortunate in other quarters; and Philip V, at last discovering the impracticability of Alberoni’s schemes, sacrificed his minister to the jealousy of the European powers, and acceded to the terms of the Quadruple Alliance (1719). Victor Amadeus was placed in possession of the kingdom of Sardinia, which his house has retained ever since this epoch with the regal title. The cupidity of the emperor was satisfied by the reunion of the crowns of the Two Sicilies in his favour; and the ambitious maternal anxiety of the Spanish queen was allayed by the promised reversion of the states of the Medici and of her own family to the infante Don Charles (1720).

For thirteen years after the conclusion of the war of the Quadruple Alliance, Italy was left in profound and uninterrupted repose. The first half of the eighteenth century was completely the age of political chicanery; and the intricate negotiations, which engrossed the attention and only served to expose the laborious insincerity of the statesmen of Europe, seemed to be ever threatening new troubles. But the treaties, which followed that of the Quadruple Alliance in thick succession for many years, had no other effect in Italy than to secure the Parmesan succession to the infante Don Charles of Spain. Francesco and Antonio, the two surviving sons of the duke Ranuccio II of Parma and Piacenza, who died in 1694, had both inherited the diseased and enormous corpulence of their family. Neither of them had issue; the duke Francesco terminated his reign and life in 1727; and Antonio, his successor, survived him only four years. The death of the youngest of her uncles realised the ambitious hopes which Elizabeth Farnese had cherished of conveying the states of her own house to her son (1731). The male line of Farnese having thus become extinct, the youthful Don Charles, with a body of Spanish troops, was quietly put in possession of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and reluctantly acknowledged by the last prince of the Medici as his destined successor in the grand duchy of Tuscany.

THE WAR OF THE POLISH SUCCESSION

The final settlement of the Parmesan and Tuscan succession seemed to eradicate the seeds of hostilities in Italy; but it had become the unhappy fortune of that country to follow captive in the train of foreign negotiation,[533] and to suffer and to bleed for the most distant broils of her foreign masters. Only two years had elapsed after the elevation of the Spanish prince to the ducal throne of Parma, when Italy was suddenly chosen as the field for the decision of a quarrel which had originated in the disputed election of a king of Poland. Upon this occasion, the two branches of the Bourbon dynasty united in the same league against the house of Austria, and resolved to attack its possessions in Italy. Charles Emmanuel III, the new king of Sardinia, joined their formidable confederacy, and the imperial strength in the peninsula was crushed under its weight.

While Charles Emmanuel, at the head of the French and Piedmontese troops, easily conquered the whole Milanese states in a short time, the Spaniards at Parma, being delivered of all apprehension for the issue of the war in Lombardy, found themselves at liberty to divert their views to the south. A Spanish army of thirty thousand men disembarked in the peninsula under the duke of Montemar, and joined Don Charles; and that young prince, at the age of seventeen, assuming the nominal command-in-chief of the forces of Spain in Italy, led them to attempt the conquest of the Sicilies. The duke of Montemar, who guided his military operations, gained for him a complete and decisive victory at Bitonto in Apulia over the feeble imperial army, which was intrusted with the defence of southern Italy. The opposition of language, and manners, and character, between the Germans and Italians, rendered the cold sullen tyranny of Austria peculiarly hateful to the volatile Neapolitans; and they eagerly threw off a yoke to which time had not yet habituated them. The capital had already opened its gates before the battle of Bitonto; and the provinces hastened to offer a ready submission to the conquerors. The Sicilians imitated the example of their continental neighbours; and at Naples and Palermo Don Charles received the crowns of the Two Sicilies (1735).

For the facility with which the Spaniards had effected these conquests, they were principally indebted to the powerful operations of the French in Lombardy, and to the vigour with which the armies of Louis XV pressed those of the emperor in Germany, and prevented him from despatching sufficient succours to his Italian dependencies. The court of Madrid now began to cherish again the hope of recovering the whole of the Italian provinces, which the Spanish monarchy had lost by the Peace of Utrecht; and the duke of Montemar conducted his army into Lombardy to unite with the French and Piedmontese in completing the expulsion of the Austrians from the peninsula. But the emperor, discouraged by so many reverses, made overtures of peace; and the French cabinet was not disposed to indulge the ambition of Spain with further acquisitions.

Negotiations for a general peace were opened, to which Philip V was compelled to accede; and at length the confirmation of the preliminaries by the Peace of Vienna once more changed the aspect of Italy. The crowns of Naples and Sicily were secured to Don Charles. The provinces of Milan and Mantua were left to the emperor; the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were annexed to his Lombard possessions to recompense him in some measure for the loss of the Sicilies; and the extinction of the house of Medici by the death of the grand duke Giovan Gastone, while the negotiations were yet pending, completed a new arrangement for the succession of Tuscany. Francis, duke of Lorraine, who had lately received the hand of Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter and heiress of the emperor, took possession of the grand duchy, in exchange for his hereditary states; and Charles VI was gratified by this favourable provision for his son-in-law and destined[534] successor in the imperial dignity. Finally, the king of Sardinia, in lieu of the ambitious hopes, with which he had been amused, of possessing all the Milanese duchy, was obliged to content himself with the acquisition of the valuable districts of Tortona and Novara.

THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION

This general accommodation among the arbiters of Italy procured only a brief interval of repose for the degraded people of the peninsula, before they were exposed to far greater evils than those which they had suffered in the short course of the late war. The emperor Charles VI died only two years after the confirmation of the Peace of Vienna; and the very powers who by that treaty had guaranteed the famous Pragmatic Sanction—or act by which the emperor, as he had no son, was allowed to settle his hereditary states upon his daughter Maria Theresa—conspired to rob her of those dominions. The furious war of the Austrian Succession which followed, filled Italy during seven years with rapine and havoc.

In the year after the death of Charles VI, a Spanish army under the duke of Montemar, disembarked on the Tuscan coast to attempt further conquests in Italy; and although these troops arrived to attack the territories of his consort, the new grand duke was obliged to affect a neutrality and to permit their free passage through his dominions. On the other hand, the king of the Sicilies, who desired to aid his father’s forces in their operations, was equally compelled to accept a neutrality, by the appearance of a British squadron in the bay of Naples, and the threatened bombardment of that city. This humiliation, to which the exposed situation of his capital reduced him, did not, however, prevent the Neapolitan monarch at a later period from taking part in the war. But his engagement in the contest had only the effect of drawing the Austrian arms into southern Italy, and inflicting the ravages of a licentious soldiery upon the neutral states of the church and the frontiers of Naples (1742).

But northern Italy was the constant theatre of far more destructive hostilities; and the Italian sovereign, who acted the most conspicuous part in the general war of Europe, was Charles Emmanuel III, the king of Sardinia. That active and politic prince, pursuing the skilful but selfish and unscrupulous system of aggrandisement, which had become habitual to the Savoyard dynasty, made a traffic of his alliance to the highest bidder. He first offered to join the confederated Bourbons; but the court of Spain could not be induced to purchase his adherence by promising him an adequate share of the Milanese states, which the Spaniards were confident of regaining. Charles Emmanuel therefore deserted the Bourbon alliance to range himself in the party of Maria Theresa. But it was not until he had extorted new cessions of territory from that princess in Lombardy, and large subsidies from England which protected her, that he entered seriously and vigorously into the war, as the auxiliary of Austria and England. As soon as Charles Emmanuel began to declare himself against the Bourbon cause, his states became immediately the prey of invasion. Although the Spanish dynasty pretended to lay claim to the whole succession of the house of Austria, the real motive which actuated the court of Madrid in these wars was the ambition of the queen of Spain, Elizabeth Farnese, to obtain an establishment in Italy for another of her sons, the infante Don Philip; and that prince, leading a Spanish army from the Pyrenees through the south of[535] France, overran and occupied all Savoy, which was mercilessly pillaged by his troops. But Don Philip was unable to penetrate into Piedmont; and meanwhile the duke of Montemar, with the Spanish army already in Italy, had been oppressed successfully by the Austrians and Piedmontese on these opposite frontiers of Lombardy.

But Charles Emmanuel, even after he had formally pledged himself to England and Austria, was perpetually carrying on secret and separate negotiations with the Bourbons; and it was only because he could not obtain all the terms which he demanded of them, and because he was also as suspicious of their ill-faith as he was conscious of his own, that he maintained his alliances unchanged to the end of the war (1743). His states were almost constantly the theatre of hostilities, equally destructive to his subjects, whether success or failure alternately attended his career. Yet he displayed activity and skill and courage, scarcely inferior to the brilliant qualities which had distinguished his father, Victor Amadeus. When, however, the infante Don Philip had been joined by the prince of Conti with twenty thousand men, all the efforts of the Sardinian monarch, though he headed his troops in person, could not resist the desperate valour of the French and Spanish confederates; who, forcing the tremendous passes of the Alps, broke triumphantly into Piedmont, and for some time swept over its plains as conquerors (1744). But reinforced by the Austrians, Charles Emmanuel, before the end of the same campaign, turned the tide of fortune, and obliged the allies to retire for the winter into France. They still retained possession of the duchy of Savoy, and crushed the inhabitants under every species of oppression.

In the following year, Genoa declared for the Bourbon confederation; and the Spanish and French forces under Don Philip, being thus at liberty to form a junction in the territories of that republic with the second Spanish army from Naples, the king of Sardinia and the Austrians were utterly unable to resist their immense superiority of numbers (1745). In this campaign, Parma and Piacenza were reduced by the duke of Modena, the ally of France and Spain; Turin was menaced with bombardment; Tortona fell to the Bourbon arms; Pavia was carried by assault; and Don Philip, penetrating into the heart of Lombardy, closed the operations of the year by his victorious entry into Milan.

But such were the sudden vicissitudes of this sanguinary war, that the brilliant successes of the Spanish prince were shortly rendered nugatory by a growing misunderstanding between the courts of Paris and Madrid, and by the arrival of large reinforcements for the Austrian army in the peninsula (1746). Don Philip lost, in less than another year, all that he had acquired in the preceding campaign. He was driven out of Milan; he was obliged to evacuate all Lombardy; and the French and Spanish forces were finally compelled, by the increasing strength of the Austrians, to recross the Alps, and to make their retreat into France. The king of Sardinia and his allies carried the war into Provence, without meeting with much success; and the French in their turn endeavoured once more to penetrate into Piedmont. But while that quarter of Italy was threatened with new ravages, the peninsula was saved from further miseries by the signature of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).

One of the declared purposes of the European powers in their assembled congress was to give independence to Italy; and if that object could have been attained without the restoration of ancient freedom, and the revival of national virtue among the Italians, the provisions of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle[536] would have been wise and equitable. The Austrians were permitted to retain only Milan and Mantua; and all other foreign powers consented to exclude themselves from the peninsula. The grand duke Francis of Lorraine, now become emperor, engaged to resign Tuscany to a younger branch of his imperial house. The throne of the Two Sicilies was confirmed to Don Charles and his heirs, to form a distinct and independent branch of the Spanish house of Bourbon; and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were elevated anew into a sovereign state in favour of Don Philip, who thus became the founder of a third dynasty of the same family. The king of Sardinia received some further accessions of territory, which were detached from the duchy of Milan; and all the other native powers of Italy remained, or were re-established, in their former condition.

FORTY YEARS OF “LANGUID PEACE” FOR DIVIDED ITALY

Thus was Italy, after two centuries of prostration under the yoke of other nations, relieved from the long oppression of foreigners. A small portion only of her territory remained subject to the empire; and all the rest of the peninsula was divided among a few independent governments.

But after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Italy was still as little constituted as before to command the respect or the fear of the world. Her people for the most part cherished no attachment for rulers to whom they were indebted neither for benefits nor happiness, in whose success they could feel no community of interest, and whose aggrandisement could reflect no glory on themselves.

The condition of Italy after the nominal restoration of her independence, offers, as a philosophical writer has well remarked, a striking lesson of political experience. The powers of Europe, after having in some measure annihilated a great nation, were at length awakened to a sense of the injury which they had inflicted upon humanity, and upon the general political system of the world. They laboured sincerely to repair the work of destruction; there was nothing which they did not restore to Italy, except what they could not restore—the extinguished energies and dignity of the people. Forty years of profound peace succeeded to their attempt; and these were only forty years of effeminacy, weakness, and corruption—a memorable example to statesmen that the mere act of their will can neither renovate a degraded nation, nor replenish its weight in the political balance; and that national independence is a vain boon, where the people are not interested in its preservation, and where no institutions revive the spirit of honour, and the honest excitement of freedom.

During these forty years of languid peace (from the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to the epoch of the French Revolution) the general history of Italy presents not a single circumstance for our observation; and it only remains for us to pass in rapid review the few domestic occurrences of any moment in the different Italian states of the eighteenth century. The affairs of the Sicilies, of the popedom, of the states of the house of Savoy, of the duchies of Tuscany and Modena, of the republics of Genoa and Venice, and of the Milanese and Mantuan provinces, may each require a brief notice. But the obscure or tranquil fortunes of Lucca, and of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, would scarcely merit a separate place in this enumeration.

The duchies of Parma and Piacenza, which had once more been separated from that of Milan to form the independent appanage of a Spanish prince,[537] relapsed into the deep oblivion from which the dispute for their possession had alone drawn them. Don Philip reigned until the year 1765, and his son, Don Ferdinand, succeeded him. The administration of both of these princes was, in a political sense, marked by no important event; but the literary and scientific tastes of Don Philip entitle him to be mentioned with respect, and shed some beneficial influence on his ducal states.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND SICILY

The transition of the crowns of Naples and Sicily, from the extinguished Spanish branch of the house of Austria to the collateral line of Germany, and from that dynasty again to a junior member of the Spanish Bourbons, has already been noticed; and we take up the annals of the Sicilies from the epoch only at which the infante Don Charles was confirmed in the possession of their throne by the Treaty of Vienna. This sovereign, who reigned at Naples under the title of Charles VII, but who is better known by his later designation of Charles III of Spain, governed southern Italy above twenty-one years.

The general reputation of his character has perhaps been much over-rated; but, as the monarch of the Sicilies, he undoubtedly laboured to promote the welfare of his kingdom. The war of the Spanish Succession paralysed all his efforts during the first half of his reign; but after the restoration of tranquillity in 1748, he devoted himself zealously and exclusively to the pacific work of improvement. He was well seconded by the virtuous intentions, if not by the limited talents, of his minister Tanucci. The principal error of both proceeded from their ignorance of the first principles of finance; and the cultivated mind and theoretical knowledge of Tanucci fitted him less for the active conduct of affairs than for the station of professor of law, from which the king had raised him to his friendship and confidence.

It has been objected as a second mistake of Charles, or his minister, that the system of government which they adopted contemplated only the continuance of peace, and contained no provision against the possibility of war. No attempt was made either to kindle a martial spirit in the people, or to rouse them to the power of defending themselves from foreign aggression and insult. The army, the fortifications, and all warlike establishments were suffered to fall into utter decay; and the military force of the kingdom, which was nominally fixed at thirty thousand men, was kept so incomplete that it rarely exceeded half that number. The only security for the preservation of honourable peace at home was forgotten in a system which neglected the means of commanding respect abroad; but Charles occupied himself, as if he indulged the delusive hope of maintaining his subjects in eternal tranquillity. He studiously embellished his capital; and the useful public works, harbours, aqueducts, canals, and national granaries, which preserve the memory of his reign, are magnificent and numerous.

The laudable exertions of Charles were but just beginning to produce beneficial effects, when he was summoned by the death of his elder brother, Ferdinand VI of Spain, who left no children, to assume the crown of that kingdom (1759). According to the spirit of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, his next brother, Don Philip, duke of Parma, should have succeeded to the vacant throne of the Sicilies; but Charles III was permitted to place one of his own younger sons in the seat which he had just quitted. His eldest son betrayed such marks of hopeless idiocy that it was necessary to set him[538] altogether aside from the succession to any part of his dominions; the inheritance of the Spanish throne was reserved for the second, who afterwards reigned under the title of Charles IV; and it was to the third that the sceptre of the Sicilies was assigned.

This prince, who under the name of Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily reigned till 1825, was then a boy of nine years of age. Charles appointed a Neapolitan council of regency to govern in his son’s name; but the marquis Tanucci remained the real dictator of the public administration; and the new monarch of Spain continued to exercise a decisive influence over the councils of the Two Sicilies during the whole of his son’s minority, and even for some time after its expiration. It was by the act of Tanucci, and in conjunction with the policy of Charles, that the Jesuits were expelled from the Two Sicilies and from Spain at the same epoch; that the ancient usurpations of the holy see were boldly repressed; and that the progress of other useful reforms was zealously forwarded.

It was the most fatal negligence of Charles III, and the lasting misfortune of his son, that the education of Ferdinand IV was entrusted to the prince of San Nicandro, a man utterly destitute of ability or knowledge. The young monarch, who was not deficient in natural capacity, was thus permitted to remain in the grossest ignorance. The sports of the field were the only occupation and amusement of his youth; and the character of his subsequent reign was deplorably influenced by the idleness and distaste for public affairs in which he had been suffered to grow up. The marriage of Ferdinand with the princess Carolina of Austria put a term to the ascendency of Charles III over the Neapolitan councils. His faithful servant Tanucci lost his authority in the administration; some years afterwards he was finally disgraced; and the ambitious consort of Ferdinand, having gained an absolute sway over the mind of her feeble husband, engrossed the direction of the state. Her assumption of the reins of sovereignty was followed by the rise of a minion, who acquired as decided an influence over her spirit as she already exercised over that of the king. This was the famous Acton, a low Irish adventurer, who, after occupying some station in the French marine, passed into Tuscany, and was received into the service of the grand duke. He had the good fortune to distinguish himself in an expedition against the pirates of Barbary; and thenceforth his elevation was astonishingly rapid. He became known to the queen, and was entrusted with the direction of the Neapolitan navy. Still young, and gifted with consummate address, he won the personal favour of Carolina; he governed while he seemed implicitly to obey her; and without any higher qualifications, or any knowledge beyond the narrow circle of his profession, he was successively raised to the office of minister of war and of foreign affairs. The whole power of government centred in his person; and Acton was the real sovereign in the Sicilies, when the corrupt court and the misgoverned state encountered the universal shock of the French Revolution.e

THE STATES OF THE CHURCH

On the outline of government and policy in the ecclesiastical state, as these features presented themselves in the seventeenth century, very little has to be either altered or added, if we would make the picture true for the age that succeeded. It is necessary indeed to pay, at the outset, that tribute of respect which is deserved by the personal character of most of the sovereigns[539] who ruled on the Seven Hills during the eighteenth century. Never had the bishops of Rome been so decorous, so generally unexceptionable in morals; seldom had they numbered so many men of sincere and earnest piety; never had the list included names more illustrious for talent and learning. Two popes in particular, Prospero Lambertini and the accomplished Antonio Ganganelli, would have reflected honour upon any throne in Christendom.

But those venerable priests, who, for a few years before they sank into the grave, left the altar and the closet, the breviary and the pen, to wear the triple crown and wield the keys of St. Peter, discovered by sad experience what everyone who has administered that office must have discovered before he had slept a month under the roof of the Vatican. Genius becomes a public calamity, virtue itself is paralysed into despair, when, after a lifetime spent in the library or the cloister, they are summoned, in the decrepitude of old age, to discharge duties more complicated, more difficult, requiring greater versatility and greater energy in action than those which belong to any other sovereignty in the world. Where the whole edifice of government must be overturned before effectual repair can be wrought upon any of its parts, differences in the character of successive rulers are confined in their results to individual and temporary interests. In regard to the permanent improvement or deterioration of the state, Rodrigo Borgia was as innocent as the irreproachable Barnaba Chiaramonti; Clement VII was as wise as Sixtus V; and the hermit-pope Pietro di Murrhone, with his gentle and pious ignorance, was not more helpless than Julian della Rovere, who wore armour beneath his sacerdotal robe.

The most unpleasing task which the popes of the eighteenth century had to perform was that of accommodating their prerogatives over the Catholic states to those opinions of independence which were now rooted in every cabinet of Europe. The priestly chiefs bowed with infinite reluctance to this hard necessity; some of them disgraced themselves by persecuting foreign inquirers, like Giannone and Genovesi; and, but for the activity and talent of Clement XIV, who yielded gracefully what he had no power to withhold, the papal court might have suffered losses infinitely more injurious than the sacrifice which it was obliged to make of its able servants the Jesuits. Pius VI, on whose head were to break the thunders of the French Revolution, was more a man of the world than any of his recent predecessors. Long employed in offices of the government, and familiar in an especial degree with the business of the Roman exchequer, he distinguished himself by endeavours zealous and incessant, but utterly unsuccessful, to introduce internal ameliorations. The sluggish imbecility of the papal rule cannot be better proved than by the fact that, till the middle of the eighteenth century, while internal taxes and restrictions ground the faces of the people, there was no duty (though, at several points of time, there were absolute prohibitions) on the importation of foreign manufactures; and that one of the most vaunted measures of this reign was the organisation of a force to protect the frontiers against smuggling; a measure of which, amidst all their recent tariffs, the popes do not appear to have ever dreamed.

In the details of his new system of foreign duties on merchandise, as well as in many of his regulations for agriculture and internal trade, Pius and his advisers proved singularly how much they were still in the dark as to the principles of political economy. His partial abolition of the innumerable baronial tolls did not confer benefits half sufficient to counterbalance the evils produced by his arbitrary restrictions on the corn-trade; his expensive[540] operations for draining the Pontine marshes were rendered useless by his gift the reclaimed lands to his nephew; and his depreciation of the currency by excessive issues of paper money was an anticipation of one of the worst errors committed by the leaders of the French Revolution.

THE SARDINIAN KINGDOM

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, the counts of Savoy were precluded from prosecuting further that policy which had gained for them an extensive dominion and a kingly name. But, even amidst the wars which had preceded this period, and still more energetically after their close, the able and ambitious Victor Amadeus continued that system of internal improvement, to whose results he looked forward as likely to make him the sovereign of a people rich as well as warlike, rivals of their southern neighbours in literature and art, as they had already outstripped them in energy and public spirit.

In his endeavours for the intellectual improvement of the higher ranks (for whom exclusively his institutions were designed), he succeeded as ill as an arbitrary king may be expected to succeed when he aims at amending a corrupted, martial, and ignorant aristocracy. For commerce he was able to effect greatly more, through those regulations imposed on the silk-manufacture, which, however alien their narrow spirit may be to the genuine principles of commerce, were found to be not ill-calculated to check an equally narrow spirit abroad, and were accordingly imitated in Milan and the eastern provinces. Several excellent laws aided the rural population. One enactment expressly recognised, in contradiction to all older practice, agricultural leases for a fixed term of years, usually from nine to eighteen; and not only so, but the lawgivers studiously left loopholes for evading a rule which they were in terms obliged to enact, for making the endurance of such leases dependent on the survivance of the landlord who had granted them. This characteristic artifice shows the influence of the higher classes, against whom however Victor Amadeus carried by arbitrary interference his great and beneficial measure for an equalisation of public burdens. For, before he abdicated the throne, all the estates in Piedmont, without distinction of tenure, were subjected to an impartial land-tax, assessed in conformity to a general valuation, which likewise furnished the materials for levying all local burdens on the communes, such as those for roads, schools, and costs of administration.

When we add such improvements as these to the changes which we perceived to be in progress during the seventeenth century, we shall wonder, if we learn nothing more, how it should have happened that the subjects of this kingdom were not only the first to throw themselves into the arms of the revolutionary French, but have since complained of their government more bitterly than any other Italians. It is not difficult to find the reasons. All the reforms of the Piedmontese princes were made for their own ends, not for the sake of the people, who were kept peremptorily in subjection to the king, and left in total dependence on his character for their share of individual comfort; the nobles, likewise, being disarmed as well as the commonalty, the crown was freed from the only check on its conduct; and bitter discontents arose both from that abject submission to the priesthood, and from that childish fear of change, which for the last few generations have distinguished the princes. But, at the same time, amidst the innovations which were introduced after the middle of the seventeenth century, it[541] had been found expedient to conciliate the alarmed aristocracy by leaving its members in possession of many personal and empty, yet invidious privileges; and the consequence was a haughtiness on the part of the upper ranks met by sullen defiance among the multitude, a mutual mistrust among all orders, ready to kindle into deadly hatred.

Charles Emmanuel III, notorious in the early years of his reign for his ingratitude towards a father who had resigned the throne in his favour, was more creditably distinguished in later life by his endeavours to reconcile the conflicting wishes of the different orders of society, and to purify completely the administration of justice. His nobles complained of the number of commoners whom he promoted to public posts: the suitors in the courts of law marvelled at the conduct of a king who so far distrusted his own judgment, and so far honoured the judicial servants of his crown, as to refuse granting any briefs of dispensation from judicial sentences, unless after consultation with the judges by whom the decision had been pronounced. He was less prudent in his management of the military force, which he weakened greatly by the promotion of inefficient officers, the nobility being always preferred, and a commoner finding it all but impossible to rise to high rank. This abuse became greatly more flagrant in the reign of his successor, who gave the last impulse to the growing discontent of his subjects, by his superstitious subservience to confessors and bigots, and not less by increasing his army to an unreasonable size, and taxing the people severely for its pay and subsistence.

Sardinia, rude, poor, and lawless, like other provinces of Spain, was little improved by its new sovereign, Victor Amadeus II. In his son, however, it found the best ruler it had seen for ages. Much was done by him to weaken feudalism, encourage agriculture, and extirpate the bands of robbers; two universities were founded, and the inferior schools somewhat improved; and the year 1738 was a remarkable epoch in the island, from the reforms which it witnessed in every department.

THE FOUR REPUBLICS

The history of Lucca offers no fact worthy of being mentioned. Its oligarchy grew more and more exclusive, and the peasant landholders in its rural districts became impoverished through the excessive division of property by succession.

The miniature republic of San Marino had retreated into its wonted obscurity since 1739, when the fallen intriguer, Cardinal Alberoni, then papal legate in Romagna, repeated at its expense that treachery by which he had formerly convulsed all Europe. Alleging that the government of San Marino had become a narrow oligarchy, which was true but did not justify his interference, he conquered its territory with a single company of soldiers and a few officers of police. The people appealed to Clement XII, who ordered them to determine their own fate in a general meeting: they unanimously voted against submission to the church, and the papal troops were withdrawn.

In 1746, the Genoese commonalty, unsupported by the nobles, showed, in their expulsion of the Austrians, a spirit worthy of their fathers. With this bold insurrection the history of the republic of Genoa closes for half a century. In 1718 it had increased its territory, by purchasing the imperial fief of Finale; but within a few years it lost Corsica.

The revolted Corsicans allowed their country to be formed into a mock kingdom in 1736, by the foolish ambition of Theodore von Neuhof, a German[542] baron; and, after they had been deserted by him, they continued to resist the united forces brought against them by the Genoese and Louis XV of France. The islanders now established a republic, which, from 1755, was headed by the celebrated Pasquale Paoli: and the contest for freedom was maintained manfully till Genoa, tired of an expensive war, and deeply indebted to France, ceded Corsica to that power on receiving an acquittance. Louis renewed the attack with increased vigour, and the besieged republicans resisted bravely till the struggle became utterly hopeless. Paoli emigrated to England, and the island became a French province in 1768, the year before it gave birth to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The commerce of Venice was nearly at a end; her manufactures were insignificant; her flag was insulted on her own Adriatic by every power of Europe. She still, however, possessed an Italian territory, peopled by two millions and a half of subjects; her Dalmatian and Albanian provinces and the Ionian Isles had half a million more. Her taxes had been nearly doubled in the eighteenth century, and amounted, in 1789, to about 11,600,000 ducats (£1,919,800 or $9,599,000); her public credit was bad; and her debt was 44,000,000 ducats (£7,283,300 or $36,416,500). The gloomy government remained unchanged. The Council of Ten had resisted frequent attempts to overturn it: an attack in 1761 was checked by arrests and imprisonments in monasteries; and the Ten and the Three still exercised, though more cautiously than before, their singular functions. Their spies cost annually, in the eighteenth century, about 200,000 ducats; and more than one secret execution was laid to their charge. But licentiousness was more prevalent than cruelty; infamous women were pensioned as informers by the state; and in the public gaming-houses, amidst the masked gamesters, senators, officially appointed, presided undisguised.

In 1768, the nobles, displeased with the church, named a commission to inquire into the state of its revenues. The report, which is still extant, is curious. The commissioners estimate the gross income at 4,274,460 ducats (£719,100, $3,595,500). Of this sum, 2,734,807 ducats were permanent, being derived from lands, money invested, or perpetual rents. The remainder was casual, being made up of the alms bestowed on mendicant orders, and of the prices paid for temporary masses. The whole number of masses for which the clergy received payment was prodigious, being not less than 8,938,459. Of these the parochial and other secular clergymen celebrated 4,250,060; the monastic orders celebrated the rest, being 4,688,399, of which 3,107,682 were masses on perpetual foundations. On the latter class the Venetian commissioners sarcastically remark that the whole number of the monks and friars was 7,638, of which only 3,272 were in priest’s orders, and entitled to say mass; and that, consequently, if the monks performed all the masses for which they took payment, each of their priests would have to officiate fourteen or fifteen hundred times a year.

MILAN AND TUSCANY

For seventeen years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the duchies of Milan and Mantua, forming one province, and the grand duchy of Tuscany as another, were governed by viceroys appointed by Maria Theresa and her husband Francis. On the emperor’s death in 1765, the two Lombard duchies continued to constitute a province of the empire under his son Joseph II; but Tuscany was formed into an independent sovereignty for Peter Leopold,[543] the new emperor’s younger brother. All these sovereigns were remarkable persons: the sons were worthy of their heroic mother; and Leopold, free from that ambition which stained the names of Maria Theresa and Joseph with the infamous partition of Poland, was one of the greatest men that ever filled a throne.

The statistical results of this period were highly pleasing. Austrian Lombardy, at length enabled to profit in some measure by its singular physical advantages, was, in 1790, by far the most flourishing province in Italy; while Tuscany also was prosperous, and in some respects more decidedly so than Joseph’s duchies. The institutions of both states were wonderfully improved; and the history of these changes is one of the most interesting pages in the annals of modern Italy.

That the long servitude of the Italians had ruined their character as well as their national resources, could not have been more clearly proved than by the bitter opposition with which they met all the reforms introduced by their new masters. There was hardly an improvement of any importance, especially in Lombardy, that was not absolutely forced upon the natives; and the most sweeping changes were skilfully evaded, some of them during more than a generation. Much of this delay was attributable to the wonted slowness of the Austrian court; but much also was produced by the passive resistance of the people. The great system of administration, the first draft of which had been laid before the empress in 1739, did not come into activity till 1755, and its introduction makes that year an important epoch for northern Italy.

A few only of the features which distinguished the plan of taxation can be here described. One of the worst evils to be removed was the subdivision of the state into seven districts, each of which, like a separate kingdom, has its duties on mercantile imports, exports, and transits. This abuse was swept away by a single stroke of the pen; and similar restrictions on agricultural produce shared the same fate. The excise was subjected to good regulations, and the customs based on principles as fair as any that then prevailed in Europe. Lastly, a new survey and valuation formed the rule for an equitable assessment of the land-tax. A dispassionate and well-qualified judge was able to find in the system but four serious defects: an insufficient check on the land-valuators; the retention of the unwise mercantile-tax; the imposition of a capitation-tax on the peasantry and others who paid no land-tax; and the permission to the church, which possessed a third of the lands in the state, and had till now paid no taxes for them, to retain too many of its Spanish privileges.

But the portion of the plan that most interests us is the administrative. In the general government, the obnoxious senate was retained, and formed a very injurious barrier between the subjects and the throne, generating petty cabals, and assisting in keeping up that tendency to secrecy and plotting which had been triumphant under the Spaniards. In the provincial government, the leading principle was, to subject everything in the last instance to the control of the boards of administration at Milan, while the immediate administration of every province was put under a delegate appointed by the sovereign; although, at the same time, a considerable part of the actual management was consigned to a provincial council established in every chief city. The local statutes of the old republics or petty principalities, which it was not in all cases considered safe to touch, created many diversities in the execution of this plan; but the general rule was to introduce in the provincial councils members of three orders: the representatives of the cities, who were nobles, and elected by[544] their own class in each town; the representatives elected by the landholders of the province; and the mercantile men who represented, and were elected by, the corporation of merchants. The council so formed devolved its ordinary powers on a committee of its own body, called the prefects of government. Communal councils were also instituted, according to regulations laid down in a prolix code. Each of them administered the patrimony of the commune, under the presidency of a chancellor appointed by the sovereign. Their own members were five for each commune: three representatives of the landholders, one representative of the mercantile body, and one representative of those who were subject to the capitation-tax. They were elected annually in a meeting of all the landholders rated on the books for the land-tax; soldiers and churchmen, however, being ineligible. The same constituency also elected the consul, who was an inferior criminal judge, and the syndic, who had dignity without any real duties.

Joseph, seconded by his excellent viceroy Count Firmian, under whom served Verri, Carli, Neri, and other enlightened Italians, followed out the plan of amelioration which had been thus delineated for him. He improved the courts of justice and the judicial procedure, especially in criminal causes, abolishing, at the suggestion of Beccaria, torture and secret trials. He annulled or diminished the most vexatious of the feudal privileges, and imposed checks on the perpetual destination of estates. He patronised agriculture, and extended commerce and manufactures by the construction of roads, as well as by the abolition of some remaining imposts and restrictions. When the death of his mother, in 1780, freed him from her remonstrances on ecclesiastical matters, he commenced with his accustomed impetuosity a series of changes in that department, which Pius VI considered so dangerous that he made a fruitless journey to Vienna in the hope of procuring their repeal. The most material of those measures were the following: all dissenters were to enjoy toleration; the bishops were forbidden, as they had already been forbidden by other princes, to act upon any papal bull but such as should be transmitted to them by the government; the monastic clergy were declared to be dependent, not on the general of their order who lived in Rome, but directly on the resident bishop of the diocese within which their cloister was situated; lastly, all nunneries were suppressed, except those which pledged themselves to occupy their members in the education of the young. The emperor’s death interrupted the consolidation of his famous system for giving uniformity to his system of government throughout all the Austrian dominions. The decree of 1786, which promulgated this new constitution, divided the Italian provinces into eight circles, in each of which the local administration was to be vested in a chamber closely dependent upon the government. This departure from the late arrangement created in Lombardy universal discontent.

Sometimes unjust and cruel, often misjudging and imprudent, always headstrong, passionate, and despotic, doing good to his subjects by force, and punishing as ungrateful all who refused to be thus benefited, Joseph was[545] an unconscious instrument in the hand of providence for advancing in southern Europe the great revolution of his time. One inveterate evil was extirpated, that another might be substituted for it, which, being less deeply rooted, was destined in its turn to wither and die away. “At length,” said a noble-minded Italian in the last stage of the emperor’s reign, “the obstacles which hindered the happiness of nations have mainly disappeared. Over the greater part of Europe despotism has banished feudal anarchy; and the manners and spirit of the times have already weakened despotism.”

The reforms in the grand duchy of Tuscany went infinitely further than those of Joseph and his mother in the provinces of the Po. They were commenced during the life of Francis, by the prince of Craon, his viceroy at Florence; and the plan was formed, even thus early, for consolidating into one common code all those contradictory laws which, subsisting in the old Tuscan communities, had been maintained since the subjection of all to the duchy. But it was reserved for younger hands to construct this noble edifice.

Till we reflect that Leopold’s scheme of legislation for Tuscany was devised and executed long before that change of opinions which the French Revolution diffused through the whole of Europe, we are not fully aware how very far he stood in advance of his age. In his new code the criminal section was especially bold, inasmuch as it swept away at once torture, confiscation, secret trial, and even the punishment of death. Imprisonment for debt, forbidden by one of his laws unless the claim exceeded a certain amount, was afterwards abolished altogether. All privileged jurisdictions were destroyed, and the public courts fortified in their independence and authority. Restrictions on agriculture were totally removed; and large tracts of common were brought into cultivation by being divided among poor peasants in property, subject only to a small crown-rent. The grand duke discontinued the ruinous system of farming out the taxes; he diminished their amount, and abandoned most of the government monopolies. Notwithstanding, he was able, before he left Italy, to pay off the greater part of a large national debt; for, under his new system, and especially through the absolute freedom which he allowed to commerce, industry flourished so wonderfully, that his revenue suffered hardly any diminution.

Leopold’s ecclesiastical reforms were equally daring, and gave deep offence to the papal government. They were chiefly designed for improving the condition of the parochial clergy, and for curbing the monastic orders. He suppressed the Inquisition; he imposed severe limitations on the profession of monks and nuns; he made the regular clergy dependent, not merely (as his brother had done) on their bishop, but directly on the priest of the parish; he taxed church-lands like those belonging to laymen; he even seized arbitrarily several large estates which had been destined to useless ecclesiastical purposes, and applied their proceeds towards increasing the insufficient incomes of the priests in rural parishes. This step, as well as several others, formed parts of his great scheme against tithes, of which he gradually introduced a general commutation.

In the system which this great man enforced there were unquestionably many defects. There was something (though not much) of his brother’s hasty disregard for obstacles arising from foreign quarters; a fault which made his scheme for free trade in some respects injurious to his subjects, and forced him in his later years to resume a few restrictions. There was a disposition to overstrain the principles of reform, manifested when he totally abolished trading corporations, or when, in the last year of the period, he annulled at a blow all rights of primogeniture, and all substitutions in[546] succession to land. There was a jealous watchfulness over details, a temper exceedingly useful but very irritating, which displayed itself with equal force in the severe system of police, and in the curious circular letter which he addressed to the nobles, requesting that their ladies might be made to dress more economically. There was some fickleness of purpose, though much less than those have believed, who forget the existence of that chaos of local laws and privileges, through which he had for years to pilot his way, embarrassed, misled, and thwarted at every step. Lastly, there were two absolute wants. Leopold did not, because in a single generation he could not, renovate the heart and mind of his people; and therefore the degenerate Florentines murmured at his strictness of rule, and ridiculed his personal peculiarities. He did not give to his subjects a representative constitution; and therefore his fabric of beneficent legislation crumbled into fragments the moment his hand ceased to support its weight.

It is said, indeed, that he had sketched a constitution before he left Tuscany; but, at all events, his reforms in the local administration went very far towards this great end. His purpose, in which, as in so much besides, he was obstructed by a multiplicity of special statutes and customs, was to introduce over the duchy one uniform system of municipal government, embracing all districts, rural as well as urban. During his whole reign, step after step led him towards this result, by organising new communal councils in various provinces, which had at length comprehended nearly the whole state. At the same time there was extended to the new boards the privilege conferred first on those in the Florentine territory, of managing their local patrimony as of old, without dependence upon the supreme government. The polity of Alessandro de’ Medici, which still prevailed in Florence, was annulled in 1781; and the elective board which administered the affairs of the city thenceforth consisted of a gonfalonier, as president, eleven priors, and twenty councillors.f

A Tuscan Estimate of Leopold

The reforms of Leopold I (Emperor Leopold II) did not suffice to drag Tuscany from the abyss into which she had been cast by the sbirocracy of the Medici. A fallen people would rise again to the enthusiasm of grand ideas, but what grand idea did Leopold I place at the head of the regenerative movement? He corrected clerical abuses, but did not enkindle the religious[547] faith of the people after the example of the ardent preachers of the Crusades of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century reformers. He recognised equality in civil laws, but did not make a social credo of it like the French republicans.

Leopold’s idea was a paternal government, a sort of family council, where the most touching accord would reign between the prince and the assembly elected by the commons. He wanted to make another Arcadia of Tuscany, an Arcadia simply occupied with its well-being and material progress, foreign to the use of arms and neutral in all aspects of war. But this was not the way to model character and make free citizens. The shock given to Europe by the French Revolution and the results therefrom had quite other effects. When Italy owed to the France of ’89 that moral shock which stirred up men’s minds and made them enter into communication with the universal conscience, it did not need more to convict of error those who reproached the French Revolution with having upset the reforms of Italian princes without any compensation. Abstention in this gigantic struggle was impossible. It was imperative to fight either for the powers of the past or for those of the future; so this worship of principles became the great passion of souls, and character regained all its old vigour. The Restoration came to check this salutary movement.

The sleeping sbirocracy inaugurated by Fossombroni went back to the Medici traditions and the meanness of the old régime was again substituted for the moral and political grandeur of the French epoch. But it was thenceforth impossible to stifle the germs of the new life. We shall see these germs, in spite of most unfavourable conditions, fructifying in Tuscany as in other parts of Italy; we shall see the country of Michelangelo coming out of its abasement and paying the Italian revolution the tribute of its genius, its love, and its blood.g

ITALY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE

For the sovereigns of Italy, as well as for the people, the first three years of the revolutionary age formed a time of abortive plans and earnest preparation.

Events of immediate interest cut short two visionary designs, of which, although both must have failed of success, yet either, by the very attempt, might have given another colour to the history of Europe. A few aspiring cardinals, looking back to Gregory VII and Sixtus V, devised an Italian league, to be headed by the pope; and at the court of Turin, which took example from its own more recent annals, there was planned a campaign against its Austrian neighbours. But Rome was destined to fall a passive victim to foreign aggression; and the ambitious king of Sardinia became the scapegoat of the prince whose Lombard crown he had wished to transfer to his own brows.

The emperor Joseph died in the beginning of the year 1790, and Leopold, leaving Tuscany to his second son Ferdinand, received both the hereditary dominions of Austria and the imperial dignity. He extricated himself skillfully from the foreign wars into which his brother had plunged; but neither the internal discontents of the Low Countries, nor the dangers which threatened Louis XVI, were evils so easily remedied. He employed his diplomacy in endeavouring, by means of a European congress, to impose constitutional limitations on all the contending parties in France; but disappointment in[548] this scheme, and fresh revolts among his own provinces, embittered every moment of his life. He was tempted to become a leading party in the fatal Treaty of Pilnitz, which may be truly said to have destroyed the French monarchy; and in the spring of 1792, his death, at the age of forty-four, saved him from beholding the calamities which speedily followed. His hereditary estates descended to his eldest son Francis, who likewise succeeded him as emperor; and the policy of the new reign, warlike as well as anti-revolutionary from its very opening, accelerated the contest which soon desolated Europe.

Two other Italian courts, besides those of Lombardy and Tuscany, were deeply interested in the fate of the royal family in Paris. The queen of Naples was, like Marie Antoinette, a daughter of Maria Theresa; and the two brothers of Louis XVI were sons-in-law of the king of Sardinia. The advisers of Ferdinand prepared for the struggle by strengthening the artillery and marine, by reconciling themselves with the see of Rome, by imposing extraordinary taxes, and by seizing the money deposited in the national banks; but to these measures were added others of a different cast, designed for crushing the dreaded strength of public opinion. Arbitrary commissions were organised for trying political offences; spies were set to watch Cirillo, Pagano, Conforti, Delfico, and other men of liberal views; foreign books and newspapers were excluded; and Filangieri’s work was burned by the hands of the common hangman. In the other extremity of the peninsula, the count d’Artois imitated at Turin, on a smaller scale, the court of emigrant nobles which surrounded Monsieur at Coblenz. Simultaneously with that alliance between the emperor and the king of Prussia, which produced the abortive invasion of France in 1792, there was concluded an Italian league, headed openly by Naples and Rome, and secretly joined by Victor Amadeus, while the grand duke of Tuscany, as well as the Venetians and the Genoese, remained determinedly neutral.

Time of the French Republic under the National Convention

The little cloud which rose over the tennis-court at Versailles, had already overshadowed all the thrones in Europe; and that of Sardinia was the first on which it discharged its tempest. Where both parties were resolved on war, a pretence was readily found. Semonville, sent to negotiate for a passage for the French armies through Piedmont, was reported to have propagated revolutionary doctrines on his way: he was ordered to quit the king’s dominions, and a second envoy was refused leave to cross the frontier.

On the 18th of September, 1792, the national assembly declared war against the king of Sardinia; and an invasion of his states immediately ensued. The Savoyards, discontented and democratic, had no will to fight; the Piedmontese, ill-officered as well as mutinous, had neither will nor ability; and within a fortnight Savoy and the county of Nice were in the possession of the French troops. The atrocities, however, which took place at Paris during the autumn of that year, and the execution of the king in the beginning of the next, not only gave fresh vigour to the operations of the allied sovereigns, but added new members to their league. In 1793 a British fleet occupied Corsica; while the Austrians and Piedmontese vainly tried to fight their way against Kellermann through Savoy to Lyons. During the succeeding summer, the republicans, entering Italy with one army by the Alps, and with another through the neutral territory of Genoa,[549] maintained a more energetic campaign, which left them masters of all the passes leading down into Piedmont. At the same time Pasquale Paoli, supported by England, arranged a constitution for Corsica, which acknowledged George III as its king.

In the course of the year 1795, the alarm produced by the recent successes of the French not only disarmed some of their most active enemies, but gained for them allies in Italy itself, the stronghold of legitimate monarchy. Ferdinand of Tuscany, a cautious or timid man, anxious to preserve the commerce of Leghorn, and seeing no reason why he should sacrifice his people to the ambition or revenge of the greater European courts, was the first crowned head that recognised the new democratic state. In February of this year, he concluded a treaty with France, disclaiming his enforced connection with the allies, and binding himself to a strict neutrality. Soon afterwards the coalition lost three of its members, Holland, Prussia, and Spain. Within the Alps the war languished; and the Austrians and Piedmontese were able, till the end of the autumn, to keep the invading armies cooped up in the northwestern corner of the peninsula. Meanwhile that fermentation of men’s minds, which had its centre in Paris, was diffusing itself over most of the Italian provinces, among those classes that were predisposed to receive such an impulse.

Tuscany was the quarter in which the new opinions met with the least countenance. Although the grand duke had been tempted to depart from some of his father’s commercial and agricultural laws, his plan of polity remained so far entire that the constitutionalists had really little to complain of. In ecclesiastical matters, however, the priesthood renewed with success those instigations by which many of them long before had crippled the efforts of their bold reformer; and Leopold had not been twelve months at Vienna, when the peasantry clamorously demanded the re-establishment of certain religious fraternities and forms of worship which he had abolished as superstitious and hurtful. In the eastern provinces of the papal state there was much silent discontent among all classes; but in Rome itself, although a few men held democratic opinions, the only outbreak that happened was that of January, 1793, when Bassville, the French secretary of legation, an active republican agent, was stoned to death by the populace. In Parma, Duke Ferdinand had recently alarmed the thinking part of his subjects by introducing the papal Inquisition, and by exhibiting himself, in strong contrast to his early habits, as a religious formalist and devotee. The duke of Modena was perhaps more unpopular than he deserved to be. In the republics opinions were greatly divided, though from dissimilar causes. San Marino was a cipher; Lucca was made passive, not only by her own insignificance, but by a general indifference towards change; the Venetians were distracted by two opposite feelings, their fear of Austrian encroachment and their hatred of Parisian democracy; the Genoese, although the revolutionary party was strong among them, not only dreaded the destruction of their commerce, but were personally interested in the French funds.

In the remaining sections of the peninsula, the extreme south and the extreme north, were to be found the most zealous disciples of the Revolution. In the kingdom of Naples, both on the mainland and in Sicily, conspiracies were repeatedly discovered, and the plotters executed, several of them having been previously tortured to enforce a discovery of their accomplices. Even the ministers of state charged each other with treason; and Acton procured the imprisonment of the chevalier De’ Medici, with several other men high in office. The people, although strong in prejudice, were at[550] this time discontented with the increased taxation, and the renewal of arbitrary interference by the government; many of the nobles were as eager as the middle classes in their wishes for general amelioration; and the church herself, whose property the rulers were every day seizing to satisfy the necessities of the exchequer, was not at first able to discover whether republicanism or legitimate monarchy was likely to be her most dangerous enemy. Throughout Austrian Lombardy the desire of change became almost universal. The people at large were disgusted by public burdens heavily augmented, and by the coarse insolence of the German satellites who exacted them; those classes, which had enjoyed the semblance of political power under the constitution of Maria Theresa, were provoked by that mixture of military command and absolute foreign rule which, since Leopold’s death, had been substituted for it; and reflecting men perceived, in the attitude which the cabinet of Vienna had now decidedly assumed, no prospect of improvement or relief if the allied sovereigns should be victorious. Piedmont was a still more favourable soil for republicanism, and there its principles soon rooted themselves very deeply. On the mainland, more than one conspiracy was discovered and punished; while the Sardinians, finding themselves treated as rebels when they sent deputies to demand those reforms which they conceived themselves to have merited by their brave resistance to the French fleet, broke out into open revolt, killed several members of the government, and were with difficulty dissuaded by the viceroy from giving up the island to France.

The Campaign of 1796 and its Consequences

The Italians were soon to learn that their wishes and interests were matters of as absolute indifference to those who now contended on their soil, as they had been during the whole preceding course of their modern history. Their future master, the French general Bonaparte, receiving from the Directory the command of the army of Italy, avowed on quitting Paris his determination to finish the war in a month by complete success or utter defeat. That which seemed to others an idle bravado, suggested by sudden elevation to a young and self-confident man, was, in the mind of the speaker himself, a pledge to be literally fulfilled. He began his attack on the 12th of April, 1796, and on the 15th of May he entered Milan in triumph as the conqueror of all Lombardy and Piedmont.

This wonderful campaign embraced several of Napoleon’s most celebrated victories. The battles of Montenotte, Millesimo, and Dego, fought on three successive days in April, amidst the mountains which lie northwest from Genoa, drove back into the plain Beaulieu’s Austrian army, and its Piedmontese allies under Colli. Victor Amadeus, not less inconstant than imprudent, deserted the contest in premature despair; and in May his ambassadors at Paris signed a discreditable peace, by which he gave up Savoy and Nice to the French Republic, admitted garrisons into some of his fortresses, dismantled the rest, and paid heavy contributions to the invaders. Bonaparte, pursuing the Austrians into Lombardy, intimidated the duke of Parma into an armistice, which was purchased by a large payment in money, and the surrender of twenty works of art, to be selected by French commissioners, and placed in the museum at Paris. The bloody passage of the bridge of Lodi, where Napoleon himself, with the generals of his staff, charged in person up to the mouths of the enemy’s guns, left the plain of the Po completely open to his armies, and kindled among the young conqueror’s soldiers[551] that devoted confidence which bore them onward through years of victory. Milan received a provisional government and national guard, but had to contribute heavily for the support of the republican troops; and the duke of Modena, also, could not obtain an armistice without furnishing liberal supplies, to which, according to the rule thenceforth invariably followed by the invaders, was added the surrender of the choicest pictures from his gallery.

Already feared as well as honoured abroad, General Bonaparte next proceeded to intimidate the government at home. To Carnot’s order for marching upon Rome and Naples with one division of the army, while Kellermann, with another, should keep his hold of Lombardy, he replied by transmitting his resignation, and denouncing the project as ruinous. In the south, said he, there are no enemies worth conquering; the possession of Italy must be contested with the Austrians, and the plains of the Po ought to be the scene of the struggle. While he waited for the answer to his bold remonstrance, the peasantry, excited by the priests and some of the nobles, rose in several quarters against him. At Milan the disturbance was easily quieted; but at Pavia it was not suppressed till the town was taken by storm, and given up to be plundered by the soldiery. This terrible example produced its effect; the Italians trembled and submitted, and the French and Germans were left to fight their battles undisturbed. Meanwhile, the Directory, aware, as their general well knew, that they could not dispense with his services, sent an approval of all his plans, and confirmed him in the undivided command of the army, stipulating only that he should satisfy the honour of France by humbling, in his own way, the pope and the king of Naples. He received these instructions while occupying the line of the Adige; and, after having distributed troops on different points in the north, he himself prepared to march as far southwards as might be necessary for frightening his adversaries in that quarter. Before he had time to cross the Apennines, the king of Naples had lost heart, and made humiliating submissions, concluding an armistice, afterwards changed into a treaty of peace. The pope, left totally defenceless, and seeing the conqueror holding Bologna in person, concluded a truce on harder terms than any which had been yet exacted. The citadel of Ancona was to be given up with all its stores; the French were also to retain possession of the provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, where both the chief cities had organised free governments for themselves; the papal treasury was to pay large contributions in money and provisions; and Paris was to be adorned by a hundred works of art, and five hundred manuscripts from the Vatican. Having thus dealt with the enemies of the republic, Bonaparte next proceeded to dispose of the grand duke of Tuscany, its earliest friend. On a pretence that the neutrality had been violated, he seized the port of Leghorn, confiscated the goods of English traders which lay there, and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to capture their merchant-ships.

The wars of 1796 were not yet at an end. In September a second Austrian army of sixty thousand men, under the veteran marshal Wurmser, marched through the Tyrol; but his active adversary had already returned northwards; and a campaign of six days in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Garda, and along the valley of the Brenta, forced the shattered remains of the imperial forces to take refuge in the strong fortress of Mantua, which the French had already attacked, and now invested anew. In November a third Austrian army, under Alvinzi, placed its enemy in extreme peril; but the desperate battle of Arcola, fought near Verona during three whole days,[552] drove this host likewise back into the mountains. The military events of the year were closed by the revolt of the Corsicans against the English, after which the French envoy Saliceti established in the island a provisional democratic government.

But there were yet other tasks to be performed. The French had excited in the minds of all the Italians wishes which it was very far from easy to gratify. The Lombards demanded an independent and republican organisation; but the Directory, anticipating the chances of war, which might make it necessary to buy a peace with Austria, dared not as yet to do more than throw out vague encouragements. The pope, whose eastern provinces entertained similar desires, was not so dangerous; and Bonaparte, without consulting his masters, freed them from any embarrassment into which they might have been thrown by their recent treaty with the duke of Modena. That prince’s capital was disaffected, and Reggio had already openly revolted. Napoleon, professing to have discovered that the duke had violated the neutrality, deposed his administration, and declared the provinces free. By his instigation, also, deputies from Bologna, Ferrara, Reggio, Mirandola, and Modena, chosen respectively by the lawyers, landholders, and merchants, assembled in the end of 1796, and erected the two papal legations with the Modenese duchy into a commonwealth. This state, lying wholly between the Po and Rome, was called the Cispadane Republic.

The contest among the foreigners for the soil of Italy was ended in the spring of 1797. In January of that year, Alvinzi’s army, increased by reinforcements to fifty thousand men, attacked that under Bonaparte, amounting to about forty-five thousand, at Rivoli, between the river Adige and the Lake of Garda. This bravely fought battle closed in the total rout of the Austrians; and early next month, Wurmser, compelled by disease and famine, surrendered Mantua. The last effort of the emperor, who sent the archduke Charles across the northeastern frontier of Italy, was as unfortunate as the preceding ones; the hereditary states of Austria were invaded by the victorious general in person; and their sovereign submitted in April, when the French army lay within twenty-five leagues of Vienna.

But, before crossing the Alps, the young conqueror had humbled another enemy. Pius VI, not altogether without provocation, had broken the convention of Bologna, and raised troops to assist the emperor; upon which, Bonaparte, after his victory over Alvinzi, marching rapidly southward, overthrew the papal troops under Colli, and dictated at Tolentino, in February, the terms of a humiliating peace. The pope formally relinquished to the Cispadane Republic, not only the legation of Bologna and Ferrara, already ceded, but the province of Romagna in addition; he yielded to the French Republic his territories of Avignon and the neighbouring Venaissin; he left Ancona in the hands of its troops, till a general peace should be concluded; he engaged to pay large contributions as the ransom of those other provinces which the enemy had just seized; and he renewed the obligation to deliver manuscripts and works of art, which accordingly were soon carried away.

The peace with the emperor was not arranged so easily. Its outlines were contained in the preliminaries of Leoben, signed on the 18th of April, 1797; and the main difficulties were obviated at the expense of Venice, whose government, regarded with dislike by both parties, had acted so as to forfeit all claims on the indulgence of the one, without being able to earn much gratitude from the other. Besides yielding the Austrian Netherlands and the frontier of the Rhine, Francis entirely renounced his provinces in Lombardy, and agreed to acknowledge the new Italian republics. In compensation for[553] these sacrifices, he was to receive, almost entire, the mainland provinces of Venice, including Illyria, Istria, and upper Italy as far west as the Oglio; the districts of Bergamo and Brescia, with the Polesine, all lying beyond that river, being intended to form part of the Cispadane Republic. These Venetian territories were already in revolt, and had declared themselves free commonwealths, demanding protection from the French, who had excited them to insurrection, and now coolly abandoned most of them to a new master. For the injustice contemplated towards these unfortunate Lombards no palliation could be offered, and none was ever attempted; but for the wrong threatened to the Venetian Republic itself, pretexts speedily presented themselves.

Before the preliminaries were signed, Colonel Junot had been despatched to Venice, to demand satisfaction for a slaughter of some soldiers in the towns bordering on the Lake of Garda. In Verona also, about the same time, the populace of the city and district, headed by a few of the nobles and clergy, attacked, robbed, and murdered the French and their partisans; and on the 17th of April, there broke out a general massacre. The Veronese mob, and the Venetian troops, drove the foreigners into the citadel, and held the town three days, committing horrible cruelties on all who were suspected of being favourable to the enemy; but, on the 20th of the same month, a detachment of the French stormed the place, and revenged their friends by numerous executions, in the course of which there perished several noblemen, and a Capuchin friar, whose eloquence had been the prop of the insurrection. On the approach of the same evening, a French privateer, in escaping from an Austrian vessel, ran into the harbour of Venice, in violation of the ordinary law; upon which a scuffle ensued with the Slavonian sailors, and the French captain and several of his crew were killed. Bonaparte received at once the welcome news of both occurrences—the taking of Verona, and the outrage on the ship. He instantly ordered the French envoy at Venice to depart, but not till he should have demanded that the commandant of the port and the three inquisitors of state should be put in prison for trial. The cowardly senate, without a moment’s hesitation, arrested those men, ordered the public prosecutors to draw up indictments against them, and instructed[554] the deputies who attended at the general’s headquarters to offer the most humble submissions.

Bonaparte told them abruptly that their aristocratic constitution was out of date, and he intended to annul it. Without waiting for an answer he declared war on Venice, whose leaders had already foreseen his sentence, and endeavoured to palliate its effects. A few of the principal nobles held a secret meeting in the apartments of the imbecile Lodovico Manin, the hundred-and-twentieth and last doge, where they resolved to summon the grand council, and propose alterations in the constitution. About the very time when the lords of the Adriatic crouched thus abjectly, the last instance of Venetian spirit was exhibited in Treviso by Angelo Giustiniani, the governor of the province, who, on giving up his sword to the French general, reproached him to his face with his betrayal of Venice. Napoleon listened quietly to his invectives, and dismissed him unharmed.

Next day, while the city resounded with impotent preparations for defence, about half of the members of the grand council met to decree its dissolution. The doge prefaced, by a long speech, a motion for authorising the envoys to treat with the victorious general regarding alterations on the constitution. The motion was seconded by Pietro Antonio Bembo, and carried almost unanimously. Bonaparte, however, insisted that the council should by a formal act depose itself, and create a democracy. His agents used in the city the necessary means of allurement and intimidation; and on the 12th of May, 1797, the grand council met for the last time. The people gathered in the square of St. Mark; the sailors belonging to the ships of war, already ordered to leave the harbour, made a confused noise; and, a few musket-shots being fired, a universal panic seized the nobles. There was a sudden cry for the question; it was put, and the abolition of the constitution was carried by 512 voices to 20, five members declining to vote. The people were surprised to see their chiefs leaving the palace dejected; but the cause was soon explained. A tumult arose; the mob attacked the houses of several French partisans, and finding one man with a tricolour cockade in his pocket, nailed it upon his forehead. Order being restored, a provisional administration was established; and, on the 16th of May, a definitive treaty was signed at Milan between France and the new republic of Venice. The representative form of government was recognised; the infant state received, on its own petition, a garrison of French troops; while a fine, and the delivery of pictures and manuscripts, were secretly stipulated. When, soon afterwards, the Venetian envoys who had signed this convention demanded that Bonaparte should procure a ratification of it, he coolly reminded them of a fact which he himself had probably recollected a few days earlier—that, when the treaty was arranged, their mandate had expired by the dissolution of their constituency, the grand council. He therefore declared that the compact was null, and that the Directory must be left to determine for themselves in relation to the revolutionised state.

At this time, however, it was the conqueror’s wish, by an act equally unjust towards another section of the Italians, to compensate to the Venetians in some measure the spoliation they had suffered. He designed to incorporate with Venice his newly formed Cispadane Republic, while a transpadane republic should contain the Venetian districts of Bergamo and Brescia, in addition to the emancipated provinces in central Lombardy, no longer liable to be claimed by Austria. But Venice was destined to be the victim of a treachery yet more inexcusable. The cession of Mantua to the Austrians, which was involved in the plan sketched at Leoben, was viewed[555] with disapprobation in Paris; while the Venetians were considered at once too aristocratic to be safe neighbours, and too weak to be useful allies. Francis, on the other hand, was extremely desirous to command the head of the Adriatic; and his plenipotentiaries and the French general treated secretly for exchanging the islands and duchy of Venice for the fortress and province of Mantua.

In the meantime, the new position of matters altered Bonaparte’s views as to the organisation of upper Italy. The inhabitants of the Cispadane Republic, whose constitution, though framed, had never been formally approved, were easily induced to accept a plan submitted to them, for uniting all the free provinces of the north into one powerful state; and, on the 30th of June, 1797, was announced the formation of the new commonwealth, which was named the Cisalpine Republic. A proclamation, signed by Bonaparte, declared that the French Republic had succeeded by conquest to the possession of that Italian territory formerly held by the house of Austria and other powers; but that, relinquishing its claims, it pronounced the new state independent, and, convinced equally of the blessings of liberty and the horrors of revolution, bestowed upon it its own constitution, “the fruit of the experience of the most enlightened nation in the world.” The prescribed polity accordingly bestowed the right of citizenship on all men born and residing in the state (except beggars or vagabonds), who should have attained the age of twenty-one, and demanded inscription on the roll. The active franchise was vested in assemblies elective and primary, the executive in a directory of five members, and the making of the laws, with other deliberative functions, in a legislative body and council of ancients—all in close imitation of the French constitution of 1795. Napoleon, as usual, reserved to himself the power of naming, for the first time, the members of the Directory and of both councils. That the choice of these bodies, as well as of such functionaries as were to be appointed by them, would fall on persons zealous in the republican cause, was a thing unavoidable as well as proper; but it was universally admitted that the selection was, with very few exceptions, exceedingly judicious. The president and first director was the ex-duke Serbelloni, who did not long remain in active life; and three of the other directors, men both able and honest, were Alessandri a nobleman of Bergamo, Moscati a physician, and Paradisi a distinguished mathematician. Count Porro of Milan was minister of police; Luosi, a lawyer of Mirandola, was minister of justice; and the secretary of the Directory was Sommariva, a retired advocate of Lodi, who has since been so well known in Paris for his patronage of the fine arts. In the committee who framed the constitution, we find the names of Mascheroni the poet and man of science, and of Melzi d’Eril, whose talents, integrity, and independence were afterwards well proved in a higher sphere. Melzi was a noble Milanese of Spanish extraction, and uncle to Palafox, the defender of Saragossa.

The republic at first embraced the Austrian duchy of Milan, the Venetian provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, and Polesine, the Modenese principalities of Modena, Reggio, Mirandola, and Massa-Carrara, and the three papal legations of Ferrara. Bologna, and Romagna. In the following autumn the province of Mantua was incorporated with it. About the same time the Alpine district of the Valtelline, including Chiavenna and Bormio, was claimed as a dependency by the Grisons, but denied its subjection. Bonaparte, chosen arbiter, adjudged all the disputed territories to be independent, upon which their inhabitants offered themselves, and were received, as members of the Cisalpine Republic.

The aristocracy of Genoa did not long survive that of Venice. Internal factions were quieted by a convention in June, 1797, in which the principle of democracy was recognised, and a provisional government named by the French commander-in-chief. The defeated nobles, entering into alliance with a few unscrupulous ministers of the church, were able to convince the populace that their foreign friends wished to destroy the ancient faith; and it is said that, for the benefit of the better educated class, there was printed a falsified copy of the proposed constitution, containing an article which declared the Catholic religion to be abolished in the state. In September several thousand armed peasants attacked the city, but were beaten with great slaughter by General Duphot, at the head of the national guards and French troops; and, on the 2nd of December, there was publicly laid before the people, and approved, a constitution of the same sort as the Cisalpine, under which the Genoese state was styled the Ligurian Republic.

The fate of Venice had been already settled. Its interests formed no part of those difficulties which made the negotiations of the autumn so stormy; and on the 17th of October, 1797, the treaty of Campo-Formio established peace definitively between France and Austria, to which latter the island-city was given up without reserve or conditions. The fleets of the Directory seized the Ionian Islands, the Austrians occupied the mainland, and on the 18th of January, 1798, the French troops, in Venice since the preceding spring, evacuated it, and admitted the soldiers of the emperor.

Though Pius VI still retained his western and southeastern provinces, he was about to lose these also. His subjects were now universally infected with the prevalent love of change; Urbino, Macerata, and other places, repeatedly declared themselves republican and independent; and the Directory watched but for a plausible pretence to strike the last blow. In December, 1797, a quarrel between some of the French partisans in Rome and the papal soldiery produced a riot, in the course of which the democratic party fled for refuge to the Corsini palace, occupied by Joseph Bonaparte, the ambassador of France. The military pursued them, and in the confusion General Duphot was shot upon the staircase. The Parisian government exclaimed against this violation of public law, recapitulated all the offences already committed by the papal court, refused to accept its apologies, and in February, 1798, an army under Berthier occupied its capital. Their general demanded that the pope should resign his temporal sovereignty, retaining his universal bishopric, and receiving a large pension. Pius, obstinately refusing, was carried into Tuscany, and thence into France, where he died. The nobles and cardinals were plundered; and though the people at large were better treated, yet, with the characteristic fickleness of their race, they attempted in the Trastevere a revolt, which was not quelled without much bloodshed. The French soldiers and subalterns themselves, not only defrauded of their pay but disgusted by the rapine of the superior officers and commissaries, mutinied both in Rome and Mantua; and General Masséna, the worst offender, found it prudent to resign his command.

On the 20th of March, 1798, the constitution of the Roman or Tiberine Republic was formally proclaimed. Like the rest, it was a servile copy from that of the French, which, however, it was thought necessary in this instance to disguise under classical names. The state was at first composed of the Agro Romano, with the Patrimony (Patrimonium Petri), Sabina, Umbria, the territories of Orvieto, Perugia, Macerata, Camerino, and Fermo; but the March of Ancona, which had been temporarily formed into a separate commonwealth, was soon added to it.

The Expulsion of the French from Italy (1798-1799 A.D.)

The years 1798 and 1799 formed a strong contrast to those which immediately preceded them. Within and without, in finance, in diplomacy, and in war, France was alike unfortunate. In the beginning of this period her champion Bonaparte sailed for Egypt with his Italian army; and the fields where these brave men had gained their laurels were now to be the scene of repeated and disastrous defeats, inflicted upon those who attempted to retain their conquests.

The French owed this result in some measure to their own misconduct; for, little as the Italians were able to influence permanently the destiny of their native land, the resentment which was kindled throughout the country by the behaviour of the foreigners, aided materially in precipitating their second change of masters. The policy pursued systematically by the French Republic towards those new commonwealths, which she professed to regard as her independent allies, would have been insufferably irritating even though it had been administered by agents prudent and honourable. Each state was obliged not only to receive a large body of French soldiers, but to defray the expenses of their subsistence. The Cisalpine Republic, by a treaty which its legislative councils long refused to ratify, was compelled to admit an army of twenty-five thousand men, and to pay annually for its support eighteen millions of francs; even its own native troops were placed under the command of the French generals; the members of its administration were forcibly displaced if, like Moscati and Paradisi, they refused to obey orders transmitted from Paris; and some of the most patriotic Lombards, such as Baron Custodi and the poet Fantoni, were imprisoned for that opposition which the foreign rulers called incivism. The constitution itself soon gave way; for, on the last day of August, 1798, an irregular meeting of the councils substituted for it a new one, dictated by Trouvé the French envoy at Milan; and his plan again made room for other changes, enforced by his successor the notorious Fouché, and by Fouché’s successor Rivaud. The opposition party in Paris remonstrated in vain; and the Lombards began to hate equally the French nation, and those of themselves who were[558] unfortunate enough to hold places of authority. A few honest patriots, headed by General Lahoz of Mantua, and the Cremonese Birago, who had been minister at war, organised a secret society for establishing Italian independence; and in the Ligurian and Roman states a similar spirit was rapidly spreading, although it worked less strongly. There, indeed, the grievances were not of so outrageous a kind, and consisted mainly in the extortions and oppressions practised incessantly by the generals and agents of the Directory, than which no government on earth had ever servants more shamefully dishonest.

But the French Republic, before losing its hold of Italy, had the fortune for a short time to possess the whole peninsula. The sovereigns of continental Europe, having lost sight of Napoleon, began to recover courage; and no sooner did the intelligence arrive that Nelson had destroyed the enemy’s fleet at Abukir, than a new league was formed, in which Italy was made one of the principal objects. The first move was made, imprudently and prematurely, by the king of Naples, or rather by his queen and her advisers, who, raising an army of eighty thousand men, invaded the Roman territories. In November, 1798, they seized the capital, where their soldiers behaved with an insolent cruelty which made the citizens, although heartily sick of the French, wish fervently to have them back again. The Austrian general Mack, who had been placed at the head of the Neapolitan troops, showed on a small scale that incapacity which afterwards more signally disgraced him; his soldiers were undisciplined, indolent, and lukewarm; and Championnet, reconquering the papal provinces with a French army not half so large as that of his adversary, pursued him southward, and, almost without striking a blow, became master of the kingdom of Naples.

The only resistance really formidable was offered when the republican troops approached the metropolis. The weak king had already fled, and, embarking on board the English fleet, crossed into Sicily. The peasantry hung on the rear of the invaders, and massacred stragglers; and the lazzaroni, that wild race who formed in those days so large a proportion of the populace, rose in fury on the report that a convention was concluded by the governor Prince Pignatelli. The fierce rabble filled the streets, howling acclamations to the king, the holy Catholic faith, and their tutelary saint Januarius; they drove out the regency, butchered the suspected democrats, and, with arms, though without either discipline or officers, poured out to meet the enemy on the plains. The French cannon mowed them down like grass; but for three whole days they again and again returned to meet the charge, and several thousands of them fell before they gave way. The wrecks of this irrationally brave multitude next defended the city, which the assailants had to gain street by street. Championnet, accompanied by Faypoult, the commissioner of the Directory, took formal possession of Naples, divided all the mainland provinces into departments, and formed them into one state, called the Parthenopean Republic. A commission of citizens was appointed to prepare a constitution, in which the chief part of the task was performed by Mario Pagano. The plan which was finally approved was in substance the same as the other Italian charters; but its author had added to the ordinary features two original ones—a tribunal of five censors, whose functions as correctors of vice were not likely to do much good, and an ephorate or court of supreme revision for laws and magistracies, which promised better fruits.

The nobles in the provinces were much divided in their opinions; but many of them still fondly remembered the lessons which they had learned[559] from Filangieri and his scholars; and the middle classes, having yet experienced no evils but those of absolute and feudal monarchy, listened with eagerness to the promises held out by the republicans. In the huge metropolis the adherents of the king were powerless; many were willing, from the usual motives, to worship the rising sun; a few lettered enthusiasts were sincere in their hopes of witnessing at length that regeneration which their country so greatly needed; and the lazzaroni themselves became submissive and well-disposed, as soon as the saints, through the agency of their accredited servants, had declared in favour of freedom and democracy.

Says Botta:i “Championnet understood perfectly the importance which those fiery spirits attached to their religious belief. Accordingly he placed a guard of honour at the church of St. Januarius, and sent to those who had charge of it a polite message, intimating that he should be particularly obliged if the saint would perform the usual miracle of the liquefaction of his blood. The saint did perform the miracle; and the lazzaroni hailed it with loud applause, exclaiming, that after all it was not true that the French were a godless race, as the court had wished them to think; and that now nothing should ever make them believe but that it was the will of heaven that the French should possess Naples, since in their presence the blood of the saint had melted.”

Piedmont had already fallen. Ginguené, who afterwards wrote the history of Italian literature, had failed, as ambassador at Turin, in executing with proper cunning the plans of Talleyrand; but his successor soon contrived to irritate into open resistance the new prince Charles Emmanuel, a weak, bigoted, conscientious man. General Joubert seized the province and citadel of Turin; and the king, executing on the 9th of December, 1798, a formal act of abdication of his sovereignty over the mainland, was allowed to retire into Sardinia. The provisional government named for Piedmont, among whom was the historian Botta, found it impossible to rule the impoverished and distracted country; repose was the universal wish, and a union with the all-powerful neighbour seemed the only probable means of obtaining it. Early in the ensuing spring Piedmont was organised on the model of the French Republic, as the last step but one towards a final incorporation.

There remained to be destroyed no more than two of the old Italian governments. In January, 1799, Lucca, then occupied by French troops under General Miollis, abolished its oligarchy, and assumed a directorial and democratic constitution, after the fashionable example. In March, the Directory, now assured of a fresh war with Austria, seized all the large towns in Tuscany, placed the duchy under the protection of a French commissioner, and allowed the grand-duke Ferdinand to retire to Vienna with a part of his personal property.

But a storm was now about to break upon the heads of the French in every quarter of Italy; and the year 1799 became for the grim Suvaroff that which 1796 had been for Bonaparte. In the end of March the Austrian general Bellegarde crossed the Alps, beat back the republican forces in the north, and joined the Russians, raising the allied army to a strength of sixty thousand, while its opponents in the peninsula did not amount to a third of the number. The gallant Moreau, the French commander-in-chief, had the hard task of fighting for the honour of his nation without a chance of victory; and Macdonald, the new commandant of Naples, was ordered to cut his way to his superior through the whole length of Italy; an undertaking which he accomplished with great loss but signal bravery. The allies overran the Milanese and Piedmont;[560] and the Directory sent two new armies under Championnet and Joubert, both of which were defeated. Most of those Italians who had taken a lead in the republican governments fled into France, and those who remained behind were imprisoned and otherwise punished. The peasantry in almost every province rose and aided the allies. Naples was lost in June, and Rome immediately followed. Ancona, desperately defended by General Monnier, capitulated in October; and at the end of the year Masséna commanded, within the walls of Genoa, besieged, famished, and about to surrender, the only French troops that were left in Italy.

Although the military events of this year do not possess such importance as to deserve minute recital, yet one chapter of its history, embracing the horrible fate which befell Naples, is both painfully interesting in itself, and strikingly illustrative of the disorganised state of society in that quarter. The spectacle which was exhibited in the overgrown metropolis of that kingdom was indeed so unlike anything we should expect to witness in modern times that we endeavour to find a partial solution of the problem in the moral and statistical position of the city. We can find no parallel without reverting to the period of the Roman Empire.

The municipal constitution of Naples, whose main features have already been incidentally described, was the model for all the cities in the kingdom, except Aquila, whose polity was copied from Rome. Thefts and robberies were rare, the homicides were estimated at about forty annually, and some vices the government chose to overlook. The municipal administration, with a jurisdiction extending only over the markets and the university, belonged to the eletti or representatives of the piazze, seggi, or sedili, of which there were six, composed exclusively of nobles. These patricians, meeting in open porticoes, several of which may still be seen in ruins, chose annually deputies in each piazza, and the deputies chose the eletto. A seventh piazza was formed for the popolo or plebeian burghers; but care was taken that this class should have no real power. They were divided locally into twenty-nine wards, for each of which the king every year named a capitano; and the twenty-nine captains, who were held to compose the piazza of the people, appointed as the eletto del popolo a citizen, not noble, suggested by the crown. The seven eletti, with a syndic chosen by the six noble eletti, formed the municipal council, and met twice a week in a convent, from which the board derived its usual name of the tribunal of San Lorenzo. Many functions of the municipality were devolved upon nine deputations of citizens, chosen periodically by the patrician piazze.

But of the popolo, a very large number, said to have amounted in the end of the eighteenth century to thirty thousand or more, were known in ordinary language by the name of lazzari or lazzaroni. These were the lowest of the inhabitants, including, of course, many who had no honest means of livelihood, but consisting mainly of those who, though they gained their bread by their labour, did not practise any sort of skilled industry. Their distinctive character, as compared with the populace of other great cities, lay in two points. First, the usual cheapness of fruits and other vegetables enabled them to subsist on the very smallest earnings; while the mildness of the climate made them, during the greater part of the year, nearly independent both of clothing and shelter. Accordingly, many of them were literally homeless, spending the day in the streets as errand-porters, fruit-sellers, day-labourers, or mere idlers, and sleeping by night on the steps of churches or beneath archways; while all of them were for a great part of their time unemployed. These circumstances produced their second peculiarity, that strong spirit of union which had at one time extended to a regular organisation. They were the only class in Italy[561] whom the Spaniards feared; the viceroys named them in their edicts with deference, and received deputations from them to complain of grievances; and in the seventeenth century they were even allowed to meet tumultuously once a year in the piazza del Mercato, and name by acclamation their temporary chief or capo-lazzaro. Since the accession of the Bourbons, it is true, they were less closely banded together, and their custom of electing an annual head seems to have fallen into disuse; but we have already seen, and shall immediately discover still more dreadful proofs, that the ancient temper was not yet extinct.

We cannot fail to be struck with the likeness which this unwieldy and dangerous commonalty bore to the populace of imperial Rome; and the system which was pursued for furnishing the city with provisions was another point of close resemblance. During four hundred years every conceivable plan for preventing scarcity by restrictive laws had been tried without effect. An assize of bread and flour, fixed in 1401, was followed in 1496 by the building of public magazines, in which the eletti kept a large stock of grain; and at the same time there was established a strict monopoly in favour of a prescribed number of flour-merchants and bakers. The municipality lost enormously by this system; for dearths became frequent, and the corporation then, exactly like the Roman senate and emperors, sold their corn at a heavy loss, and lowered the price of the bread. Since 1764 the city had been supplied by eighteen privileged bakers, by the macaroni-makers, and one or two subordinate crafts; these tradesmen paid rent to the government for their shops; and not only were they obliged to buy the greater part of their flour from the public granaries, but had to deposit corn of their own in large quantities, as a security for their engagements, being bound likewise to purchase this grain from the distant provinces. In the year 1782 it was ascertained from official returns that, in the nineteen years preceding, the corporation had lost 2,632,645 ducats, or about £436,000. They had spent this money without earning so much as thanks; for there was a general prejudice against their establishments, and, both at Naples and at Palermo, where there was a similar system, more than two-thirds of the people made their own bread at home, except when the price of grain rose, on which everyone flocked to the public bakehouses.

Such was the scene, and such were the principal actors, in that fearful tragedy of which we are now to be spectators.

Scarcely had the Parthenopean Republic been proclaimed when the ferocious cardinal Ruffo landed at Reggio, bringing with him from Sicily a patent as royal vicar. In Calabria, and the other southern provinces, he soon organised numerous tumultuary hordes, several of whose captains were the most practised robbers, a few bands being commanded by military subalterns, and some by parish priests. Proni, one of the leaders, was a convicted assassin; De’ Cesari was a notorious highwayman, as was Michele Pezzo, better known by the name of Fra Diavolo, or Friar Beelzebub; and Mammone Gaetano, a miller of Sora, was the worst monster of all. The brigands crowded to serve under their favourite captains; many old soldiers enlisted, and the peasants, aroused by their clergymen, joined in thousands, and quickly learned the trade of murder. The French despatched against them General Duhesme, who was accompanied by a young Neapolitan, Ettore Caraffa, count of Ruvo, a man every way worthy to be pitted against the cardinal and his associates. The two parties swept over the kingdom like a plague, from Reggio to the mountains of the ulterior Abruzzo; and the war, if it deserves the name, soon became on both sides a struggle of revenge and[562] extermination. Prisoners were put to the torture; villages and towns were burned, and their inhabitants massacred; Caraffa had the barbarous satisfaction of exterminating his rebellious vassals; and Ruffo’s followers, enamoured of bloodshed and pillage, speedily ceased to ask whether their victims were republicans or royalists.

The cardinal, soon reducing the southern districts, advanced upon Naples; and the French, unable to cope with him, evacuated the city, leaving but weak garrisons in the three castles. The republican government lost authority at once, and the legislative councils were insulted in their halls by bands of armed ruffians. No plan of defence seems to have been matured, although the leading men did all they could to inspirit the people. In the theatres, which continued open, Alfieri’s tragedies were received with shouts, and interrupted by vehement addresses from persons in the crowd; friars preached freedom and resistance in the churches and on the streets; and the superstitious lazzaroni were for a time kept in check, by seeing the saints anew manifest their favour to the revolution.[22] The few native troops which still were under arms were sent out and defeated in the plain; and, when the royalists approached, abject terror alternated with the resolution of despair. Most members of the councils and administration retired into the lower forts, the Castel dell’Ovo and Castelnuovo.

There were in Naples about two thousand Calabrese, men of all ranks, nobles, priests, and peasants, driven from their homes by Ruffo’s hordes. They alone were firm. A part of them took up their post in the city; the rest, unprovided with artillery, marched out and garrisoned the castle of Viviena, beyond the bridge of the Maddalena. The royalists surrounded them, their heavy guns battered down the walls of the fort, and the assailants entered by storm. The republicans fought like hungry tigers, not a man surrendered or fled; and, when all but a handful had fallen, Antonio Toscani, a priest of Cosenza, who commanded this little remnant, threw a match into the powder-magazine beside him, and perished in the common destruction of friends and enemies. The streets were for a time defended by the remaining Calabrese, while Prince Caraccioli, the king’s admiral, who had joined the popular party, kept up a fire on the royalists from a few small vessels in the harbour; but a body of the lazzaroni suddenly attacked the republicans in the rear, their[563] ranks were broken, and the city was lost. Ruffo took possession of it on the 14th of June, 1799.

Dark as are the crimes which stain the history of our race, humanity has seldom been disgraced by scenes so horrible as those which followed. Universal carnage was but one feature of the atrocity; the details are sickening, many of them utterly unfit to be told. Some republicans were strangled with designed protraction of agony; others were burned upon slow fires; the infuriated murderers danced and yelled round the piles on which their victims writhed; and it is even said that men were seen to snatch the flesh from the ashes, and greedily devour it. The lazzaroni, once more loyal subjects, eagerly assisted in hunting down the rebels; during two whole days the massacre was uninterrupted, and death without torture was accepted as mercy.

The two lower castles surrendered on a capitulation with the cardinal which stipulated that the republicans should, at their choice, remain unmolested in Naples or be conveyed to Toulon; and two prelates with two noblemen, who were prisoners in the forts, were consigned to Colonel Méjean, the French commandant of the Castel Sant’ Elmo, as hostages for the performance of the convention. The last incidents of this bloody tale cannot be told without extreme reluctance by any native of the British Empire; for they stain deeply one of the brightest names in the national history. While the persons protected by the treaty were preparing to embark, the English fleet under Nelson arrived, bringing the king, the minister Acton, and the ambassador Sir William Hamilton, with his wife, who was at once the queen’s confidante and the evil genius of the brave admiral. The French commandant, treacherous as well as cowardly, surrendered the castle, and gave up the hostages without making any conditions. The capitulation was declared null, although the cardinal indignantly remonstrated, and retired from the royal service on failing to procure its fulfilment. The republicans were searched for and imprisoned; and arbitrary commissions sat to try them. Under the sentences passed by such courts, in the metropolis and the provinces, four thousand persons died by the hand of the executioner.

Among them were some whose names appeared with distinction on the file of literature: Domenico Cirillo, the naturalist, who refused to beg his life; the eloquent and philosophical Mario Pagano; Lorenzo Baffi, the translator of some of the Herculanean manuscripts, who rejected poison offered to him by his friends in prison; Conforti, a learned canonist, and writer on ethics and history; Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a woman of much talent, who had edited a democratic newspaper. Mantonè, an artillery officer, who had been the republican minister-at-war, made on his trial no defence but this, “I have capitulated.” On board one of the ships was executed the aged Admiral Caraccioli, with whose name we are but too well acquainted. Another victim, the count of Ruvo, does not inspire so much compassion, unless we are to believe, as his whole conduct leads one to suspect, that he was absolutely insane. Being sentenced to be beheaded, he insisted on dying with his eyes unbandaged, laid himself upon the block with his face uppermost, and watched steadily the descending axe. Superstitious folly closed scenes which had begun in treachery and revenge. St. Januarius, for having wrought republican miracles, was solemnly deposed by the lazzaroni, with the approval of the government; and in his place was substituted, as patron of the city, St. Anthony of Padua, who, through the agency of the church, had revealed a design said to have been formed by the advocates of democracy, for hanging all the loyal populace. The new protector, however, proved inefficient; and the old one was soon reinstated.

Bonaparte Reconquers Italy

The fortunes of France, sunk to the lowest ebb, were about to swell again with a tide fuller than ever. While the restored sovereigns of Italy were busied in reorganising their states and punishing their revolted subjects, Paris saw the “heir of the Revolution” take possession of his inheritance. Bonaparte, having returned from the East, was master of France, and resolved to be master of Europe. He was nominated first consul under the constitution called that of the year Eight, which was proclaimed on the 26th day of December, 1799.

In May, 1800, the main body of the French army, led by Napoleon in person, effected its celebrated passage of the Great St. Bernard. The invaders, pouring from the highlands, overran Lombardy, and attacked Piedmont. The Austrian general Melas, with forty thousand men, was stationed near Alessandria, when the first consul, somewhat inferior in strength, advanced against him; and on the 14th of June the two hosts encountered each other on the bloody field of Marengo. In the evening, when the French had all but lost the battle, Desaix came up and achieved the victory at the cost of his life; the Austrians were signally defeated, and the reconquest of Italy, so far as it was judged prudent to attempt it, was already secured. Melas concluded an armistice which gave the enemy possession of Genoa, Savona, and Urbino, with all the strong places in Piedmont and Lombardy as far east as the Oglio. Napoleon reorganised the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics, created a provisional government in Piedmont, and returned to Paris.

Meanwhile, the old pope having died the preceding year, a conclave, which opened at Venice in March, 1800, had raised to the papal chair Cardinal Chiaramonti, a native of Cesena and bishop of Imola, who, since the annexation of his see to the Cisalpine commonwealth, had favoured liberal opinions in politics. He was allowed by all parties to return to Rome, and assume the government of the provinces which had formed the Tiberine Republic. The king of Naples was left unmolested, but Tuscany, at first given up to the Austrians, was seized in a short time by the French.

The negotiations for a lasting peace proved abortive, and a new war speedily commenced, which was chiefly waged on the northern side of the Alps, and ended in December, 1800, with Moreau’s victory over the Austrians at Hohenlinden. In the beginning of the following year, the Peace of Lunéville restored matters in northern Italy nearly to the same position which they had occupied under the Treaty of Campo-Formio; but Tuscany was erected into the kingdom of Etruria, and given to Louis, son of the duke of Parma, though the French were to retain Elba, Piombino, and the coast-garrisons. The new king’s father (whose duchy was given to France), and the grand duke of Tuscany, were to be compensated in Germany for the loss of their Italian states. The king of Naples, after invading the Roman provinces, and giving Murat the trouble of marching an army as far as Foligno to meet him, abandoned his engagements with England, and concluded an alliance with the French Republic.

Napoleon, restoring the Catholic religion in France, and endeavouring to maintain a good understanding with the court of Rome, proceeded to rearrange the republican states of Italy. According to his usual policy, however, he tried to make all his changes appear to have proceeded from the wish of the people themselves; and, through honest conviction in many cases, and selfish subserviency in many more, he was easily able to procure converts to his opinions.f

THE GROWING DESIRE FOR LIBERTY

If the great desire of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century was incontestably to become a nation, a desire all the more ardent because it was so recent, since it dated back only forty years, was she ready to take action and undertake her own government? It is doubtful. Not that the Italian middle-class educated in the school of French philosophers and convinced of the principles of ’89 was not thenceforth capable to assume the power, and even to obtain the adhesion of the rural masses to the new ideas, in spite of their ignorance and submission to the clergy; but because a nation cannot exist without a leader—and there was no leader. Under the successive domination of so many foreign tyrannies, all these noble towns, each of which had formerly been a small state and had astonished the world with its magnificence, had fallen, one after the other, to the rank of prefectures without moral authority and without credit. As she had borne the burden of her cosmopolitism for three centuries, Italy was now about to expiate, during a shorter period, but still severely, this hatred of all concentration which had been, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the strongest and most constant of her passions. The municipal spirit of antiquity, which had inspired all the towns of the peninsula during the whole of the Middle Ages, had been, even more than the Catholic and universal spirit of papacy, the rock on which the modern principle of national unity had been wrecked. The Ghibellines had incarnated this principle in the house of Hohenstaufen, and the Guelfs for many years in the house of Anjou, but it had been overthrown in Italy at the very moment when it was triumphing over all the rest of Europe. And hence it doubtless was that arose the incomparable lustre of Italian civilisation at the dawn of the Renaissance, that universal blossoming of literature and art even in the most humble towns where there was then more intellectual culture than in the greatest cities of Germany, of England, or even of France. But from the same cause also arose that marvellous and fruitful intensity of individual and municipal life, that phenomenon, almost unique in history, of a nation repulsing the idea of unity, similar to a nebula refusing to take form. The law of development carried into effect by the various states of Latin Europe had been the successive agglomeration of all the elements of the same or similar origin round a central nucleus, their crystallisation round a concrete sovereignty, and if the expression may be allowed, one soul in common. But Italy had systematically evaded this law of centralisation, a law not only historical but physical, which in politics as in nature is the indispensable condition of all progress. She was therefore at the end of the fifteenth century the hydra with a hundred heads. Then the hundred heads fell one after the other under the blows of the great French, German, and Spanish invasions; the nation itself had almost perished. And now that the nation had slowly formed again she sought for a head in vain. If she wished to live, and she wished it with invincible passion, she in turn must realise what all the other nations of Europe had accomplished so many centuries ago, and, forsaking her past, she must set to work to take a central sovereignty. Nationality is unity, and unity can only be formed round a common centre.j

FOOTNOTES

The mind of Bonaparte was capable of exercising the most contrary qualities in the prosecution of his designs. Having reconciled himself to the pope, defeated Austria, and deluded Alexander, being also confident of peace with England, he applied himself to bringing into effect that which he had so long conceived in his own mind, and had so pertinaciously pursued. He was anxious that the first impulse should come from Italy, fearing that a certain residuum of republican opinions in France might prove a bad consequence, if the way were not smoothed for his design by some exciting precedent. Thus, having conquered Italy by the arms of France, he sought to vanquish France by the obsequious concessions of Italy.

His Italian machinations were opened with imposing effect; and in Lombardy his most devoted adherents were artfully employed in disseminating the idea of the insecurity arising to the Cisalpine Republic from the temporary nature of its government.

Whilst these ideas were disseminated amongst the people, Petiet negotiated with the chiefs of the republic, in order that the imperative commands of the consul might appear to be the desires and the spontaneous supplications of the nation. When the consultations were concluded at Paris for the design, and at Milan for its execution, a decree was issued by the legislative council of the Cisalpine Republic, commanding an extraordinary consulto to proceed to Lyons, in order there to frame the fundamental laws of the state, and to give information to the consul.b

In December, 1801, at Lyons, a deputation of four hundred and fifty citizens, from the Cisalpine Republic, offered to Napoleon, then first consul, the presidency of their government for a term of years. He accepted the gift, and in January, 1802, with the assent of the deputies, promulgated a constitution for their state, which was now named the Italian Republic. In June following, the Ligurian Republic likewise accepted an altered charter, which received modifications in December. The Piedmontese, wearied of anarchy and of their despot, General Menou, consented, for the second time, that their country should be made a province of France; and the formal annexation took place in September of the same year.

The gradual changes of view in Bonaparte and his countrymen are curiously illustrated by the successive constitutions which their influence established in Italy. In 1802, at home as well as abroad, they were immeasurably distant from the universal citizenship and primary assemblies of 1793; southern polity differed in several prominent points from that which had been imposed on their own country. It is best exemplified by the constitution of the Italian Republic, which was closely copied in the Ligurian; and these charters were considered at the time, not without probability, as experiments by which, as we have said, the first consul tried the temper of his future subjects on his own side of the Alps. In the first place, this system boldly shook off democracy; for the citizens at large were disfranchised, not indeed in words, but in reality: a step which had not been fully taken in France, even by Bonaparte’s consular constitution. Next, the Italian acts divided among the colleges, or bodies of the middle and upper classes (boards elected with something like freedom of choice), most of those functions which in Paris were committed to the consul’s favourite tool, the self-appointed senate. Lastly, the mass of the people being thus disarmed, and the educated leaders lulled into acquiescence, the president of the state received a power far beyond even that which he exercised over his French fellow-citizens.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC

The details of the constitution given to the Italian Republic are historically curious, in relation both to what went before and to what followed.

It at once narrowed the franchise, declaring citizenship to be dependent on a property-qualification, which was to be fixed by the legislature; but this right carried, by itself, not a particle of political power. The elective functions were vested exclusively in three colleges and a board of censors, which were to be convoked once at least in two years, for short sessions. The college of the possidenti or landholders was composed of three hundred citizens, rated for the land-tax on property worth not less than 6,000 Milanese livres, or about £170. It was self-elected, and met at Milan. The college of the dotti or savants contained two hundred citizens, eminent in art, theology, ethics, jurisprudence, physics, or political science. It sat at Bologna. The college of the commercianti or merchants consisted of two hundred citizens, elected by the board itself from among the most distinguished mercantile men or manufacturers. Its seat was Brescia. Members of all the colleges[568] held their places for life. The censors were a committee of twenty-one named by the colleges at every sitting. This commission, assembling at Cremona, nominated the council of state, the legislative body, the courts of revision and cassation, and the commissaries of finance, all from lists submitted by the colleges. It was likewise authorised to impeach public servants for malversation in office.

The administration was vested in a president (who could name a vice-president), a council of state, a cabinet of ministers, and a legislative council. The president was elected by the first of these bodies, and held his office for ten years. He possessed the initiative in all laws, and in all diplomatic business, and also the whole executive power, to be exercised through the ministry.

The council of state was particularly designed for advising in foreign affairs, and for sanctioning by its decrees all extraordinary measures of the president. The ministers lay under a broad personal responsibility, both for acts and omissions. The legislative council, chosen, like the ministry, by the president, had a deliberative voice in all drafts of law; and the preparation and carrying through of bills were to be mainly intrusted to it.

The legislative body, which possessed the functions indicated by its name, consisted of seventy-five members, one-third of whom were to go out every two years. It was to be convoked and prorogued by the government; but its sittings were to last not less than two months in every year.

The Catholic clergy were recognised as the ministers of the national church, and as entitled to possess the ecclesiastical revenues. The administration named the bishops, who again appointed the parish priests, subject to the approval of the government. An unqualified toleration was promised to all other creeds.

The tenor of this charter, and the position which Napoleon held in virtue of it, made it more natural than usual that he should, as his countrymen had invariably done in similar cases, nominate for the first time all the members of the government. The choice was in general wise and popular. Melzi d’Eril was vice-president.

Under this new order of things, while the Neapolitan government ruled with jealousy and little wisdom, and the court of Rome with kindness but feebly, the remainder of the peninsula was subject, either in reality or both in reality and in name, to the French Republic. Sustained by foreign influence, the northern and central regions of Italy began to enjoy a prosperity and quiet to which for years they had been strangers. The new commonwealths were as far as ever from being nationally independent; some parts of the country were avowedly provinces of France; and everywhere the political privileges of individuals had, as we have seen, shrunk far within the limits to which they had stretched immediately after the Revolution. But the absence of national independence, although a great evil, was counterbalanced by many advantages; and the curtailment of public rights, as bitter experience had proved, was a blessing both to the state and to its citizens.

NAPOLEON MAKES ITALY A KINGDOM

On the 18th day of May, 1804, the senate declared Napoleon emperor of the French, “through the grace of God and the principles of the republic.” The pope, after much hesitation, consented to bestow on the new empire the sanction of the church; and accordingly, journeying to Paris in the dead of winter, he officiated at the coronation in Notre Dame.

The Italians could not reasonably expect that they should be allowed to stand solitary exceptions to the new system of their master; and the principal citizens in Lombardy were speedily prepared, by arguments or inducements suited to the occasion, for taking such steps as should place them, with an appearance of voluntary submission, under the monarchical polity. The vice-president Melzi was sent to Paris at the head of a deputation from the Italian Republic. In March, 1805, these envoys waited on the emperor, and presented to him an instrument purporting to contain the unanimous resolution of the constituted authorities of the state, whereby they offered to him and his male descendants, legitimate, natural, or adopted, the crown of their republic, which they consented should be transformed into “the kingdom of Italy.” The resolutions were immediately embodied in a constitutional statute, by which Napoleon accepted the sovereignty, but pledged himself to resign it in favour of one who should be born or adopted his son, as soon as Naples, the Ionian Isles, and Malta should be evacuated by all foreign troops. In April the emperor-king passed through Piedmont in triumph, and on the 26th of May his coronation was performed in the cathedral of Milan. The archbishop of the see, Cardinal Caprara, who had been his principal assistant in negotiating with the pope, attended at the ceremony, and was allowed to consecrate the insignia; but the “iron crown” of Lombardy, the distinctive symbol of royal power, was, like the diadem of France, placed on Napoleon’s head by his own hand.

“This part of the ceremonial,” says Denina,c “differed from the ancient usage. It left no room for supposing that the crowned monarch acknowledged himself to derive from any other than God, or the power which by the divine will he held in his hands, that proud ensign of sovereignty, of which he thus publicly took possession.”

He did not leave the peninsula till he had not only organised the government and constitution of his own kingdom of Italy, but completed material changes on the adjacent states. Before the coronation, the doge and senate of Genoa, warned that the independence of the Ligurian Republic could not be guaranteed, and jealously averse, it is said, to a union with the new kingdom, petitioned for annexation to France. Their lord condescendingly granted the prayer which he had himself dictated; and the formal incorporation was completed in October, 1805. In March of the same year, the principality of Piombino had been given to his sister Elisa Bonaparte, as a fief of the French Empire; and in July the territories belonging to the republic of Lucca were erected into another principality for her husband, Pasquale Bacciocchi. The only parts of upper Italy that remained unappropriated were the provinces of the ex-duke of Parma, which, though occupied by the French, were not formally incorporated either with the empire or the kingdom of Italy. The viceroyalty of the latter was conferred on Eugène Beauharnais, the son of the empress Josephine. None of the great powers in Europe acknowledged the new kingdom, and indeed none of them was asked to do so.

The legitimate sovereigns did not leave their plebeian brother to enjoy unmolested so much as the first year of his reign. An invasion of Italy under the archduke Charles ended in the defeat of the Austrians by Masséna upon the Adige; and in December, 1805, the great battle of Austerlitz forced the emperor Francis to conclude the unfavourable Treaty of Presburg. In respect to the Italian peninsula, he acknowledged Napoleon’s kingly title, and acquiesced in all his other arrangements; but, further, he was compelled to surrender Venice with its provinces as he had received them at the Peace[570] of Campo-Formio, consenting that they should be united with the kingdom of Italy. In January, 1806, the island-city was occupied by French troops under General Miollis.

Napoleon seized the opportunity of the new acquisition, for founding that hereditary noblesse with Italian titles, whose ranks were speedily filled by his most useful servants, civil as well as military. There were specified certain districts which the emperor reserved the right of erecting into dukedoms, appropriating to their titular possessors a fifteenth part of the revenues derived from the provinces in which they lay, and setting aside for the same purpose the price of large tracts of national lands. In Parma and Piacenza were to be three of these fiefs—in Naples, recently conquered, six—and in the Venetian provinces twelve, among which were Dalmatia, Treviso, Bassano, Vicenza, Rovigno, and other demesnes whose titles acquired a new interest from the celebrity of the men who bore them. Two other dukedoms, conferred respectively on Marshal Bernadotte and the minister Talleyrand, were formed from the papal districts of Pontecorvo and Benevento. The emperor of the French, now lord paramount of the kingdom enclosing these territories, seized them without troubling himself to invent any pretext; coolly assuring the pope that the loss would be compensated afterwards, but that the nature of the indemnification would materially depend upon the holy father’s good behaviour.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND THE PAPACY

The king of Naples, lately the abject vassal of the French, had allowed a body of Russians and English to land without resistance. Cardinal Ruffo, who resented the tragedy of 1799, and despised the intriguing of Acton, was sent to deprecate the conqueror’s wrath, but returned home a confirmed Bonapartist; and Napoleon, who wanted a throne for one of his brothers, proclaimed to his soldiers that the dynasty of the Bourbons in lower Italy had ceased to reign. His army crossed the frontier in January, 1806, upon which the king fled to Sicily; his haughty wife lingered to the last moment, and then reluctantly followed. Joseph Bonaparte, meeting no resistance except from the foreigners who composed the garrison of Gaeta, entered the metropolis early in February, and, after quietly hearing mass said by Ruffo in the church of St. Januarius, was proclaimed king of Naples and Sicily. After some fighting, chiefly in Calabria, the whole country within the Faro of Messina submitted to its new sovereign, although in several districts the allegiance was but nominal. In the following summer Sir Sidney Smith took Capri, and prevailed on Sir John Stuart to land in the Calabrian Gulf of St. Eufemia; but the only result was the brilliant victory gained by the British regiments over the French at Maida. The royalist partisans disgraced their cause by cruelties which no exertions of the English officers were able to stop; and, after the enemy had increased materially in strength, the expedition was compelled to return to Sicily.

During that year Napoleon was occupied with the war against Prussia, which was terminated by the battle of Jena; and in 1807 he had commenced his system of intrigue in Spain, the first fruit of which was another appropriation in Italy. The widowed queen of Etruria, who acted as regent for her son Charles Louis, was unceremoniously ejected from his states, which in May, 1808, were formed into three departments of France, while the princess of Piombino was established at Florence with the title of grand duchess of Tuscany. About the same time—upon the proposal or pretext[571] that the Bourbons of Parma should be made sovereigns of Portugal—their duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla were finally annexed to France.

The principal event of that year was the opening campaign of the French in Spain and Portugal. The schemes of the military autocrat in that quarter, destined to be the first step in his road to destruction, led him to recall his brother Joseph from the throne of Naples, which, on his leaving Italy for Madrid, was bestowed on Joachim Murat, grand duke of Berg and Cleves, one of the emperor’s bravest generals, and husband of his sister Caroline. The new king’s only title was an edict issued by Napoleon at Bayonne, on the 15th of July, 1808, in which he announces that he has granted to Joachim the throne of Naples and Sicily, vacant by the accession of Joseph to that of Spain and the Indies. The showy and gallant soldier began his reign by driving Sir Hudson Lowe out of the island of Capri;[23] and when the Carbonari, a sect of republicans recently organised, had co-operated with the royalists in raising disturbances throughout Calabria, he sent into the province his countryman, General Manhés, recommended for such service by having previously pacified, or depopulated, the Abruzzi. The envoy, executing his commission with heartless severity, made that secluded region orderly and peaceful, for the first time perhaps in its modern history.

The next year overturned the papal throne. The turmoil which the Revolution raised in the Gallican church had been quieted by the concordat of 1801; but a code of regulations issued by the first consul for carrying the principles of that compact into effect in France, and a decree issued by the vice-president Melzi for the same purpose in Lombardy, had been both disavowed by Pius as unauthorised by him, and as contrary not only to the spirit of the concordat, but to the principles of the church of Rome. The reconciliation which ensued was but hollow; and Napoleon determined that his dominion over Italy, now extending from one end of the peninsula to the other, should not be defied; and the papal state was openly claimed as a fief held under Napoleon, the successor of Charlemagne. The remonstrances of Pius on ecclesiastical matters, indeed, were urged in a tone that could not have failed to irritate a temper like that of the emperor.

In January, 1808, as is more fully described in the history of France, seven thousand soldiers under Miollis, professing to march for Naples, turned aside and seized Rome; and in April an imperial decree, founding its reasons on the pope’s refusal of the alliance, on the danger of leaving an unfriendly power to cut off communication in the midst of Italy, and on the paramount sovereignty of Charlemagne, annexed irrevocably to the kingdom of Italy the four papal provinces of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino.

In May, 1809, Napoleon dated from the palace of Schönbrunn at Vienna a decree which annexed to the French Empire those provinces of the papal state which had not been already seized. The pope was to receive an annuity of two millions of francs, and to confine his attention to the proper duties of his episcopal office. Pius issued a very firm manifesto, went through the form of excommunicating Napoleon and all ecclesiastics who should obey him. On the night between the 5th and 6th of July, the French soldiers and the police broke into his apartments, and seized his person. He was transported into France, and thence back to Savona, where he was kept a close prisoner till 1811. In June, 1810, the kingdom of Italy received its last accession of territory, the southern or Italian Tyrol being then incorporated with it.

It appears, as the result of the events which have now been summarily related, that, from the middle of 1810 till the fall of Napoleon in 1814, the political divisions of Italy were the following:

The mainland was divided into four sections, or, more properly, into three, since Lucca falls really under the first. (1) A large proportion of it had been incorporated with France, whose territories on the western coast now stretched southward to the frontier of Naples. These Italian provinces of the French Empire lay chiefly on the western side of the Apennine, where they included the following districts—Nice, with Savoy, since 1792; Piedmont, since 1802; Genoa, since 1805; Tuscany, since 1808; and the western provinces of the Roman see, since 1809. On the northeast of the mountain chain, France had only Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, which were annexed to it in 1808. Within the Neapolitan frontier it had the duchies of Benevento and Pontecorvo. (2) On the western side of the mountains, the imperial territory was interrupted by the little independent principality comprehending Lucca and Massa-Carrara. This petty state, however, was possessed by members of the emperor’s family, and was practically one of his French provinces. (3) Central and eastern Lombardy, with some districts of the Alps, and a part of the peninsula proper, composed the kingdom of Italy, of which Napoleon wore the crown. Its territories comprehended, first, the whole of Austrian Lombardy; secondly, the Valtelline, with Chiavenna and Bormio; thirdly, Venice and its mainland provinces, from the Oglio on the west to the Isonzo, which had been latterly fixed as the eastern frontier; fourthly, that part of the Tyrol which forms the valley of the Adige; fifthly, the territories of the dukes of Modena and Reggio, except Massa-Carrara; sixthly, the papal provinces of Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna, of Urbino, Macerata, Camerino, and Ancona. (4) The kingdom of Naples consisted of the same provinces on the mainland which had been governed by the Bourbons; and since the year 1806, it had been ruled by sovereigns belonging to the imperial family of France. The legitimate monarchs still possessed the two great islands—the ex-king of Naples holding Sicily, the king of Sardinia the isle which gave him his title.

To the Neapolitan[24] as well as the papal states, no change of masters or of polity could at the time of the Revolution have been an evil; the Venetian provinces, likewise, were then ill-governed and oppressed; upon Lombardy, the leaden hand of Austria had again begun to lie heavy; and in Tuscany itself there was much that required amendment, both in the character of the new rulers and in that of the people. The spirit of local jealousy, too, and the total want of military spirit not less than of national pride, were things that the Revolution aided powerfully in rooting out, although the Italians paid dearly for the benefit. The resources of the country, in agriculture and in manufactures, were developed with a success which nothing in its modern[573] history had yet paralleled; and the prosperity was checked only, and driven into new channels, by that unwise and revengeful policy by which Napoleon for years, beginning with the Berlin decree of 1806, attempted to place the British Empire and its colonies in a state of blockade.

Even that arbitrary temper which, in the later years of his reign, converted his rule into an unmixed despotism, was never shown on the south of the Alps with the same fierceness which it assumed in the other provinces of his kingdom. In his secret soul, Napoleon Bonaparte was proud of that southern pedigree which, by every artifice down to the petty trick of misspelling his family name, he strove to make his transalpine subjects forget; himself an Italian in feeling, much rather than a Frenchman, he understood and sympathised with the character of his countrymen, in its weakness as well as in its strength, in its capacities for improvement as well as in its symptoms of decay; he flattered the populace, he breathed his own fiery spirit into the army, he honoured the learned and scientific, he employed and trusted those intelligent men who panted for a field of political action. He taught the people to feel themselves a mighty nation; and those whom he so ennobled have not yet forgotten their stern benefactor. If Napoleon chastised Italy with whips, he chastised France with scorpions; and the one region not less than the other has profited by the wholesome discipline.

After the fall of the popedom, an attempt was made to give unity and a show of independence to the Italian provinces of the empire, by uniting them into one general government, the administration of which, conferred at first on Louis Bonaparte, was afterwards given to the prince Borghese, the head of a noble Roman family of the first rank, who had married Pauline, one of the emperor’s sisters. The French scheme of taxation was introduced, with very slight modifications; and in 1812, the Italian provinces (excluding Nice) yielded to the exchequer fully half as much as was contributed by all the other territories lately added to the empire, including as these did some of the richest commercial cities in Europe. The gross sum raised by taxes of all kinds during that year was 95,712,349 francs, or nearly four millions sterling, which gave 62,644,560 francs as the net return to the treasury; and it is worthy of notice, likewise, that the cost of collection here was considerably less, in proportion, than in the other recent acquisitions. The revenue was liberally spent in organising efficient courts of law (whose text-book was of course the Code Napoléon), in executing works of usefulness as well as pomp, such as roads, bridges, and public buildings, in investigating the antiquities of Rome and other places, and in advancing arts and manufactures, by premiums and similar encouragements.

Arbitrary as was his method of imposing the new law-book, nothing which Napoleon did for Italy was half so distinguished a benefit. Another importation from France was the military conscription, which, in some particulars advantageous, was in most respects a severe evil. The annual levies ordered during the six years which ended with 1814, amounted in all to ninety-eight thousand men, rising from six thousand in 1806, to fifteen thousand, which was the demand during each of the last four years; but only a portion of these troops were ever called into active service. Still the emperor’s foreign wars, especially those in Spain and Russia, cost to his Cisalpine provinces the lives of thousands. That restoration of hereditary aristocracy which was effected in France, took place in Italy likewise, by a decree of 1808, bestowing on the sovereign the power of conferring titles, and allowing the nobles so created to institute majorats, or devises of lands in favour of their eldest sons, or others whom they might select to transmit their honours.

We have yet to survey the finances of the kingdom, that branch of its polity which, in both its departments, the receipt and the expenditure, has been more loudly blamed than any other. Part of the censure is fully deserved; but very much of it is overcharged, and not a little is utterly unfounded. Two heavy faults pervaded the whole system: first, that multiplication of taxes, both in number and amount, which Napoleon, constantly immersed in foreign wars, imposed with a more direct view to the filling of his own exchequer than to the comfort or prosperity of his subjects; secondly, that dependent situation of Lombardy which caused her interests to be sacrificed in several instances to those of France.

THE ISLANDS OF SICILY AND SARDINIA

In the meantime, while the whole peninsula was subject to the French emperor, or to his vassal-princes, the English had preserved Sicily for King Ferdinand.

When the court first removed to that island, the discontent of the lower orders was general; and on its breaking out into violence at Messina and elsewhere, the marquis Artali subdued the spirit of the people by cruelties which no remonstrances of the British could stop. The British, indeed, were not popular; and they soon lost the favour of the imperious queen, who entered into secret dealings with Napoleon. The reckless extravagance of the court, rendering necessary an excessive taxation, completed the disgust of the nation; and the barons, in their parliament of 1810, besides protecting themselves and others by refusing the supplies, except on conditions which made the collection of them all but impossible, voluntarily aided the popular cause, by abolishing many of their own feudal privileges.

Matters were coming to a bloody crisis, when Lord William Bentinck, the new ambassador at Palermo, executed the resolutions of the English government. The queen was forced to consent that her husband should resign his power to his son, as vicar or regent, while Bentinck was named captain-general of Sicily. Parliament was summoned in 1812, and framed a charter which, after violent resistance from Caroline, was ratified by the prince-vicar.

The history of Sardinia, during the French reign on the mainland, possesses neither interest nor importance enough to detain us long. Its king, Charles Emmanuel, weary of the world, abdicated in 1802 and retired to Rome, where he lived many years in devotional exercises, receiving a pension from Napoleon on his seizure of the city, and becoming a Jesuit when that order was restored. His brother and successor, Victor Emmanuel, held his island-crown by the same tenure as his Sicilian neighbour, or, in other words, by the protection of the English fleet.d

THE RISE OF NATIONAL SPIRIT

When Francis II of Austria renounced the imperial German crown on the 6th of August, 1806, Austria seems to have renounced its authority over Italy, though that country had hitherto found its main support in Austrian rule. In all encroachments of Austria in Italy, outside of its own province, the Italians later took it as a precedent that in 1806 Austria of itself renounced the ancient rights of the Holy Roman Empire.

The political convictions had for long been blunted, the political passions concerning the contributions and frauds of French proconsuls and their[575] tools subsided as the fire of a burnt-out house. The more dangerous Italians were made barons and counts, and Melzi, prominent for his character and intellect, had been made a duke. The rage which still smouldered in individuals over the degradation of Italy is shown in the writings of Count Alfieri, who was born in Piedmont, 1743, and died at Florence, 1804; and of Niccolo Ugo Foscolo, born of a Greek mother, in Venice, 1772, and deceased in London, 1827. While far from stainless themselves, these men were panegyrists of patriotic celibacy and suicide, and possessed a sort of volcanic genius, that urged them on to write something great. Classic antiquity, stalking about in a phenomenally high cothurnus, was their religion. Alfieri declared that the papacy was irreconcilable with the freedom of Italy; both writers arrived at a certain desperate calm out of sheer admiration for England. To teach the Italian people to feel their political misfortune was their mission, and in its performance they remained the grand-masters of the desperate party. Some of the youth of Italy ignited their negative patriotism, their hatred of the tyrant and disdain of the lower classes at the fire of these doctrines; but for all their straining after effect both poets possessed more genuine patriotic passion than was ever evinced by their imitators, and were heroes of patriotic virtue compared to many who coldly traded on the passions of others.

A lasting after-effect of the republic was the complete abolition of feudal rights, which gave the Lombard and Venetian nobles a position of singular freedom.

In 1805, as we have seen, Napoleon appointed Eugène Beauharnais, son of Josephine, viceroy; later he made him his successor in the kingdom of Italy, with the order to govern it after the simple system: “The emperor wills it!” The new ruler himself wrote to Napoleon that the kingdom of Italy would pay 30,000,000 francs to France yearly. Eugène married the daughter of King Max of Bavaria, with whom he shared Tyrol in the division suggested by their nationality.

Two days after the wedding, the 16th of January, 1806, Napoleon adopted Eugène. Ancona and all Venice being now added to it, the “kingdom of Italy” numbered 6,500,000 souls to 1,530 square miles. Even the courts, or rather their counsellors, worthy of the necessities of the time, observed that from the union of all these fragments the idea of nationality was slowly arising.

Balboe says of this time: “It was vassalage, no doubt; but a vassalage that shared the pride, the joys, the triumphs of the ruler. It was a time of universal self-respect, and from it dates the first utterance by the people of the name of Italy with increased love and honour; all over Italy the petty[576] municipal and provincial jealousies which had taken root centuries before, and flourished even in the Utopian republic of a day, began to decline.”

We must not forget that Balbo belonged to the Piedmontese; hence the highest military nobility. The families whose sons had to pass through fire and be sacrificed to the Moloch of Napoleon’s ambition, could not then have shared his sentiments. Out of 30,000 Italians scarcely 9,000 returned from Spain. It caused a still more painful impression when Napoleon announced that of the 27,000 men of the kingdom of Italy who had gone to Russia, scarcely a thousand remained, especially as he made the announcement dryly, without a word of acknowledgment, and only ordered the raising of a new army. The remainder of Italy, partly incorporated to France and partly Neapolitan, had similar losses to bear.f

THE FALL OF NAPOLEON

In the winter of 1812 the emperor’s great army perished among the snows of Russia. Germany rose against him as one man; the battle of Leipsic completed his ruin; and before the end of 1813, he retained none of his foreign territories but Italy. As he had used the influence of religion to strengthen his rising power, so he now again caught at its support to arrest his fall. Calling the imprisoned pope to Fontainebleau after his return from the fatal campaign in the north, he prevailed on him to subscribe a concordat, which yielded some of the disputed points, and gave again to the French Empire the patronage of the see of Rome. But the advisers of Pius in this step had been Cardinal Ruffo and men who, like him, watched the times from a secular point of view: and different sentiments were suggested to the pontiff by those other friends, the cardinals Pacca, Gabrielli, Litta, and De Pietro, who were next admitted to his closet. He retracted his consent, and Napoleon lost the hold which he had thus hoped to gain both on France and Italy.

In the meantime, the nation had been called on to take an active share in the closing struggle maintained by their conqueror; the kingdom of Italy, except the sullen aristocracy of Venice, came forward with cheerfulness and spirit to furnish extraordinary contributions of men and money. Piedmont was equally zealous and active. Little was done to aid Napoleon, and nothing whatever to secure the independence of Italy after his dethronement. Jealousies, local and personal, though they had been lulled asleep, were not destroyed; opinions and desires differed by innumerable shades; and, above all, there was no chief, no man that could have led the nation into battle, defying the fearful odds which would have been brought against it. Neither for the establishment of an independent peninsular monarchy, nor for that of a federation or a single republic, were there materials among those who guided the destinies of the country; Murat and Eugène Beauharnais were equally ill-fitted to sustain the part of Robert the Bruce; and among all their Italian generals there was no Kosciuszko.

In the summer of 1813, the Austrian armies defiled from the southern passes of the Alps; and after several indecisive engagements with the forces of Eugène, they had gained, before the end of the campaign, a great part of northern Italy. Meanwhile, King Joachim, marching his troops northwards, seized the papal provinces, and astonished Europe by proclaiming himself the ally of Austria. He had concluded a bargain, by which Francis, on condition of receiving his assistance, guaranteed the Neapolitan throne to himself and his heirs. In the ensuing spring, a body of English and Sicilians[577] took Leghorn (Livorno) and were thence led by Lord William Bentinck against Genoa, which surrendered without resistance.

But the contest was already over; for on the 11th of April, 1814, Napoleon signed, at Fontainebleau, his act of abdication. Upon receiving this intelligence, Eugène attempted to secure Lombardy for himself. The senators declined to comply with his wish. A riot ensued, in which Prina, the unpopular minister of finance, was torn in pieces by the mob, and Méjean with difficulty escaped. The viceroy sought refuge with the king of Bavaria, one of whose daughters was his wife. German armies forthwith took possession of all the chief towns and places of strength in the peninsula.

In the course of the same year, the legitimate princes of Italy returned one by one to their thrones, as the congress of Vienna settled their claims. But the history of Napoleon’s empire will not be closed until we have anticipated a period of some months, in order to behold the fall of the last of those sovereignties which he had erected on the south of the Alps.

This was Naples, which for some time remained in an anomalous position. The emperor Francis, however desirous he might be, durst not break his own engagements; but France, Spain, and Sicily protested against all resolutions of the congress, so long as Joachim should be permitted to retain his kingdom. His own imprudence soon removed the difficulty. In March, 1815, on hearing that Napoleon had left Elba and effected a landing, he offered to Austria to join in the war against him, on condition of receiving a general acknowledgment of his title. The answer was evasive, and he hastened to gain for himself all he could. With an army of fifty or sixty thousand men, ill-trained, and not well inclined, he marched as far as Ravenna, whence a German force of ten thousand drove him back within his own frontier. He fled by sea, while his metropolis surrendered to the English fleet; and, in June, 1815, Ferdinand landed at Baja, and took possession of all his old provinces on the mainland.

After the battle of Waterloo, the dethroned Joachim wandered through France, and crossed to Corsica; whence, with about two hundred followers, he sailed for Italy, in the chimerical hope of conquering his lost kingdom. He landed in Calabria, where the soil yet reeked with the blood shed by Manhés; the peasants seized him, and delivered him to the military. A court-martial, receiving its commission from Naples, convicted him of treason; and on the 13th of October, 1815, he was shot in Pizzo, meeting an inglorious death with the same courage which he had always shown in the field of battle.d

FOOTNOTES

In the plenitude of his despotic authority, Napoleon had destroyed all the former order of things. He had trampled down the ancient republics, and obliterated even the names of the most time-honoured principalities. The queenly splendour of Venice had not saved the most glorious of republics from his iron grasp. Lucca had found no safety in those republican institutions, the origin of which is lost in the obscurity of remote antiquity. Imperial Rome herself had attracted no respect to the throne of the vicegerent of heaven upon earth. The pontiff, from whose hands Napoleon had received the chrism that gave him the sacred character of an anointed king, was carried away a prisoner under an escort of French dragoons.

No national government was left. In the worst days of foreign invasion the pontiff, with bitter truth, said to the doge of Venice, “There is nothing Italian left in Italy except my tiara and your ducal hat.” Under the dominion of Napoleon, both the tiara and the ducal hat were gone. The pope was a prisoner in France, and Venice was a province of the emperor’s Italian kingdom. The only remnant of Italian nationality—and, placed on the head of a stranger, it could scarcely be said to belong to Italy—was the Lombards’ iron crown. Such was the condition of Italy with which the sovereigns at Paris, and in the congress of Vienna, had to deal.b

The restoration of the legitimate dynasties, partially effected in 1814, was completed the following year; and all the most important relations of the Italian states were fixed in the course of that period, by successive acts of the congress of Vienna.

The house of Austria received its ancient territories of the Milanese and Mantua; but to these were added Venice and all its mainland provinces, together with those districts which Napoleon had taken from the Grisons. In this manner, profiting by deeds of spoliation which he had professedly taken up arms to avenge, the emperor Francis became master of all Lombardy, as far westward as the Ticino, and as far south as the Po: and on[579] the 7th of April, 1815, he proclaimed the erection of these territories, extending eastward to the mountains forming the right bank of the Isonzo, into a monarchical state called the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom.

The king of Sardinia [Victor Emmanuel I], who still retained his insular dominion, received back Piedmont and Savoy; while in addition to these, by a resolution which excited deep indignation in Italy, and was charged against the English government as a violation of express pledges, were given all the provinces of the Genoese Republic, which their new ruler erected into a duchy. The female line of the house of Este, represented by Francis, grandson of the last duke Ercole, and son of the archduke Ferdinand of Austria, received, as an independent ducal state, the principalities of Modena, Reggio, and Mirandola, to which Massa-Carrara was soon added.

Lucca, proclaimed a duchy, passed to the infanta Maria Louisa, formerly queen of Etruria: but, the court of Madrid having protested against the resolution which disallowed the claims of that princess to the principality of Parma, a new arrangement was concluded in 1817. By the original plan, Parma, with Piacenza and Guastalla, had been bestowed as an independent duchy on the ex-empress of the French, Marie Louise [Napoleon’s wife], with the remainder to her son, the young duke of Reichstadt: the subsequent treaty provided that, on the death of the former, the ex-queen of Etruria or her heirs should receive Parma and its annexed provinces, giving up Lucca to be incorporated into Tuscany.

The archduke Ferdinand returned to that Tuscan duchy which he had inherited from his father Leopold; and, besides the isle of Elba, and some trifling extensions of frontier, he now received uncontrolled possession of the garrison-state.

The pope was confirmed in his sovereignty over the states of the church as far north as the Po, and including the Neapolitan districts of Benevento and Pontecorvo; but his French provinces were not restored.

To the old king of Naples were given his dominions in their former extent;[25] and on the 8th of December, 1816, he declared himself, by the title of Ferdinand I, the founder of a new dynasty, whose realm, embracing both the mainland provinces and the island, was named the united kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The petty San Marino was formally recognised as the last surviving representative of the Italian republics; and a French peer, who possessed Monaco, an imperial fief on the coast near Nice, had influence enough to preserve for his lands the nominal rank of an independent state.

In styling himself merely king of Lombardy and Venice, the emperor Francis assumed a title which expressed the real amount of his power much less properly than it would have been denoted by that more ambitious name which Napoleon had given to a monarchy embracing but a few more Italian provinces. Without any further condition Austria was mistress of the half of Italy. Naples alone was left to dispute with the pope about his claims of feudal homage, which were finally compromised in 1818, for an annual payment of 12,000 crowns to Rome. The dangers, however, which encompassed the restored sovereigns were made the pretence for conferring on the Austrians a temporary right of interference far more active than any ancient[580] privilege. They were allowed to garrison Piacenza during the reign of Marie Louise, and Ferrara and Comacchio permanently; while the king of Naples accepted as a favour, and agreed to subsidise largely, a German army which was to protect him from his own subjects during a fixed term of years.d

MARRIOTT ON THE RESTORATION

Looking no longer to the past but to the future, the most interesting feature of the Restoration still remains to be noticed. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the dukes of Savoy had acquired Piedmont, and thus succeeded in straddling the Alps. Their geographical position, as the prince de Ligne had cynically said, did not permit them to behave like honest men. Consequently by rather tortuous, but in the main successful, diplomacy they managed in the eighteenth century to add the royal crown of Sardinia to the ducal crowns of Piedmont and Savoy; and never was a European war concluded, however remote the principal combatants might be, but the house of Savoy was able to acquire several of the towns of Lombardy, stripping it, as the saying goes, like an artichoke, leaf by leaf. Their position was still further strengthened in 1815 by the acquisition of the annihilated republic of Genoa.

Such was the Italy of 1815, little if at all better than Metternich’s “geographical expression.”[26] But for all that the Italy of 1815 was not the Italy of the ante-Napoleonic days. Strive as they might, the diplomatists of Vienna could not set back the hands of time, nor erase from the minds of the Italian people the newly awakened recollection of their ancient fame; they could not stifle, strive as they might, their newly conceived but none the less passionate longing for the realisation of their national identity. A more accurate or more eloquent expression of this feeling could hardly be found than in the letter addressed, thirty years afterwards, by Mazzini nominally to Sir James Graham, really to the English people:

ERRORS OF THE MONARCHY

The condition of Italy, in 1815, was one in which old things struggled with new. Her soldiers, after having served with credit under Napoleon, were either hastily disbanded, or called upon to transfer their allegiance to[581] powers against which they had often been arrayed. The transition from war to peace is apt to bear hardly upon men whose services are no longer required, and whose career is brought to a close. Where feelings of good-will and mutual confidence exist, such hardships are felt, but do not rankle. From the restored governments of Italy the veterans of Napoleon’s armies obtained little sympathy. Their case was not generously or wisely considered, and their feelings, as well as claims, were disregarded. Distinction, whether military or civil, obtained under the French Empire, was viewed with narrow-minded aversion. At a crisis when the greatest delicacy was required, the generous confidence and noble forbearance which win the allegiance of the heart were wanting; and the prejudices of retrogradist counsellors were allowed to prevail. At Milan, disgust was excited by the presence of a German army, and by the employment of foreign officials. At Turin, and still more at Naples, royalist factions were allowed to monopolise and abuse the powers of the state.

Thus peace, which had been hailed with so much joy, was robbed of its sweetness; the exactions of the French were forgotten, and the impartiality of their administration began to be regretted. Then it was that the Carbonari became dangerous, not only by their alliance with the resuscitated embers of Jacobinism—smothered, but not extinguished, by Bonaparte—but by the strength which they derived from a general feeling of disappointment.f

The civil and political reforms which had been instituted at the end of the last century were abandoned. The Jesuits were restored; many suppressed monasteries were re-established; and the mortmain laws were repealed. Elementary education was narrowed in its limits, and thrown into the hands of the clergy. Professors suspected of liberal views were expelled from the universities, and the press was placed under the most rigid supervision. All persons who had taken part in the Napoleonic governments, or who were known to entertain patriotic opinions, found themselves harassed, watched, spied on, and reported. The cities swarmed with police agents and informers. The passport system was made more stringent, and men were frequently refused even a few days’ leave of absence from their homes. The Code Napoléon was withdrawn from those provinces which had formed part of the Italian kingdom, while, in the papal states, the administration was placed again in the hands of ecclesiastics.

This political and spiritual reign of terror, which had for its object the crushing of Italian liberalism, was sanctioned and supported by Austria. Each petty potentate bound himself to receive orders from Vienna, and, in return for this obedience, the emperor guaranteed him in the possession of his throne. The Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, powerfully defended and connected with Austria by land and sea, became one huge fortress, garrisoned with armed men in perpetual menace of the country. Under these conditions the Italians were half maddened, and thousands of otherwise quiet citizens, either in the hope of finding redress and protection, or only from a feeling of revenge, joined secret revolutionary societies; for it must not be supposed that the Revolution had left the Italians as passive as it found them.

A new spirit was astir, which was not likely to be checked by the arrangements of the European congress—the spirit of national independence. During the convulsions caused by Napoleon’s conquest of Italy the allied powers had themselves fostered this spirit, in order to oppose French rule. The Austrians, the English, and Murat, in turn, had publicly invited the Italians to fight for their national independence. And now the people, who[582] relied upon the proclamations and expected the fulfilment of so many promises, found themselves by the consent of Europe delivered over, tied and gagged, to a foreign oppressor. To take but one example: Ferdinand, when he quitted Naples in May, 1815, addressed a proclamation to his subjects, solemnly engaging to respect the laws that should in his absence be decreed by a constitution. In June he pledged himself at Vienna to introduce into his kingdom no institutions irreconcilable with those which Austria might establish in her own dependencies. Accordingly in 1816 he put an end to the Sicilian constitution of 1812.g

Among the means which were effective in first rousing Italy from her lethargy, and in fostering the will to acquire her independence at all costs, the secret society of the Carbonari[27] undoubtedly occupies the front rank. The Carbonari acted in two ways; by what they did and by what they caused to be done by others who were outside their society, and perhaps unfavourable to it, but who were none the less sensible of the pressure it exercised. The origin of Carbonarism has been sought in vain; as a specimen of the childish fables that once passed for its history may be noticed the legend that Francis I of France once stumbled on a charcoal burner’s hut when hunting “on the frontiers of his kingdom next to Scotland,” and was initiated into the rites similar to those in use among the sectaries of the nineteenth century. Those rites referred to vengeance which was to be taken on the wolf that slew the lamb; the wolf standing for tyrants and oppressors, and the lamb for Jesus Christ, the sinless victim, by whom all the oppressed were represented.

The Carbonari themselves generally believed that they were heirs to an organisation started in Germany before the eleventh century, under the name of the Faith of the Kohlen-Brenners [charcoal burners], of which Theobald de Bri, who was afterwards canonised, was a member. Theobald was adopted as patron saint of the modern society, and his fancied portrait figured in all the lodges. The religious symbolism of the Carbonari, their oaths and ceremonies, and the axes, blocks, and other furniture of the initiatory chamber, were well calculated to impress the poorer and more ignorant and excitable of the brethren. The Vatican affected to believe that Carbonarism was an offshoot of freemasonry, but, in spite of sundry points of resemblance, such as the engagements of mutual help assumed by members, there seems to have been no real connection between the two. The practical aims of the Carbonari may be summed up in two words: freedom and independence.

A Genoese of the name of Malghella, who was Murat’s minister of police, was the first person to give a powerful impetus to Carbonarism, of which he has even been called the inventor, but the inference goes too far. Malghella ended miserably; after the fall of Murat he was arrested by the Austrians, who consigned him as a new subject to the Sardinian government, which immediately put him in prison. Whatever was truly Italian in Murat’s policy must be mainly attributed to him. As early as 1813 he urged the king to declare himself frankly for independence, and to grant a constitution to his Neapolitan subjects. But Malghella did not find the destined saviour of Italy in Murat; his one lasting work was to establish Carbonarism on so strong a basis that, when the Bourbons returned, there were thousands,[583] if not hundreds of thousands, of Carbonari in all parts of the realm. The discovery was not a pleasant one to the restored rulers, and the prince of Canosa, the new minister of police, thought to counteract the evil done by his predecessor by setting up an abominable secret society called the Calderai del Contrapeso (Braziers of the Counterpoise), principally recruited from the refuse of the people, lazzaroni, bandits, and let-out convicts, who were provided by government with 20,000 muskets, and were sworn to exterminate all enemies of the church of Rome, whether Jansenists, freemasons, or Carbonari. This association committed some horrible excesses, but otherwise it had no results. The Carbonari closed in their ranks, and learned to observe more strictly their rules of secrecy.

From the kingdom of Naples, Carbonarism spread to the Roman states, and found a congenial soil in Romagna, which became the focus whence it spread over the rest of Italy. It was natural that it should take the colour, more or less, of the places where it grew. In Romagna, where political assassination is in the blood of the people, a dagger was substituted for the symbolical woodman’s axe in the initiatory rites. It was probably only in Romagna that the conventional threat against informers was often carried out. The Romagnols invested Carbonarism with the wild intensity of their own temperament, resolute even to crime, but capable of supreme impersonal enthusiasm. The ferment of expectancy that prevailed in Romagna is reflected in the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, whom young Count Pietro Gamba made a Carbonaro, and who looked forward to seeing the Italians send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens, as to the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence. His lower apartments, he writes, were full of the bayonets, fusils, and cartridges of his Carbonari cronies: “I suppose that they consider me as a dépôt, to be sacrificed in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object—the very poetry of politics. Only think—a free Italy! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus!” The movement on which such great hopes were set was to begin in the kingdom of Naples in the spring of 1820.h

THE INSURRECTIONS OF 1820-1821

In 1820 and 1821 the discontents of the people, and the disappointment of many in the educated classes, broke out into insurrection, first at Naples, and then in Piedmont. There were no symptoms of concert, even between the Neapolitans and the Piedmontese; and the plots which arose elsewhere seem to have been produced by causes altogether local. But the immediate encouragement of the Italian revolt was furnished by the revolution in Spain,[28] and by the principle of non-intervention, which the allied sovereigns had adopted in reference to that country. The Italians vainly hoped that the same rule would be followed in their case.

On the 2nd of July, 1820, there broke out a mutiny among the troops. The insurgents were headed by two or three subaltern officers, who were Carbonari; and the whole army, having deserted the king, placed itself under its own generals. The revolt was joined by the people from all the provinces, and a remonstrance was sent to the government, demanding a[584] representative constitution. The old king deposited his power in the hands of the crown prince Francis, as vicar, having first, however, promised to grant the nation their request, and to publish the charter in eight days. Unfortunately, the ultra-party, who were at this stage in possession of all the power, came forward instantly with a demand that the constitution should be that of the Spanish cortes, first published in 1812, and recently reinstituted. The prince-vicar acceded to this proposal.

A new difficulty soon arose. The Sicilians revolted and demanded a separate constitution and parliament, which the government refused to grant. Bloody disturbances took place at Palermo, which the Neapolitans suppressed by sending across an armed force.

The Neapolitan parliament was opened on the 1st of October, 1820, by the king in person, in the large church of the Spirito Santo. In the same month the three crowned heads who formed the Holy Alliance, attended by ministers from most of the other European powers, met at Troppau. The sovereigns of Russia, Austria, and Prussia resolved to violate their own late precedents of non-intervention, and to put down the Neapolitan constitution by force of arms. The weak monarch was easily convinced that his promises had been extorted and therefore were not binding, and the Neapolitans did not learn their danger until the Germans, 43,000 strong, were within a few days’ march of the frontier. A skirmish took place near Rieti, on the 7th of March, 1821; and next morning Pépé’s army had melted down to a few hundreds. The war was at an end.

On the 15th of May the king returned to Naples; and the Austrians left him strong garrisons, both on the mainland and in Sicily. The promise of complete amnesty, which had made part of his message to the parliament, was instantly forgotten. Courts-martial and criminal juntas were set down everywhere; a hundred persons at least were executed, among whom were Morelli and Silvati, two of the officers who had headed the first mutiny. Carrascosa and Pépé escaped; and Colletta, and two other generals, were allowed to live under surveillance in remote provinces of Austria.

The Neapolitan constitutionalists had hardly dispersed, when another military insurrection broke out in Piedmont. It was headed by several noblemen and officers of rank, and secretly favoured by Charles Albert, prince of Carignano, a kinsman of the royal family, who later became king of Sardinia.

On the 10th of March, 1821, several regiments simultaneously mutinied. On the 12th the insurgents seized the citadel of Turin, and on the 13th the king abdicated in favour of his absent brother, Charles Felix, appointing the prince of Carignano regent, who next day took the oaths to the Spanish constitution. On the 16th the new king, Charles Felix, repudiated the acts of the regent; and in the night of the 21st Charles Albert fled to the camp of the Austrians. On the 8th of April the German army joined the royal troops at Novara, and beat the insurgents; the junta dissolved itself on the 9th; and on the 10th the king was in possession of Turin and of the whole country.

While these stormy scenes were acting in the two extremities of the peninsula, no district of Italy remained altogether undisturbed.

Arrests took place in several quarters of the papal state, but most of all in the eastern provinces. In the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, the government professed to have discovered dangerous plots, as to which we know nothing with certainty except the existence of an association of well-educated and high-principled men at Milan, who laboured in the cause of education[585] by instituting schools, and attempted to aid public enlightenment by a periodical called the Conciliatore, which the Austrians speedily suppressed. Those members of this society who became best known to the world were the counts Porro and Confalonieri, and the poet Silvio Pellico. These with many others were seized, and several were condemned to die. None of them were actually put to death, but whatever may have been the political offences of those unfortunate Milanese who, like him and Pellico, pined or died in the dungeons of Spielberg, it is at least certain that there was no truth whatever in most of the charges which the Austrians at the time allowed their journals to propagate against them.

THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1831

The effect produced by those abortive revolutions was very disastrous to Italy. They introduced over the whole country a hateful system of espionage, caused by suspicion in the rulers and dislike in the subjects, which was not soon relaxed, and has still left painful traces. However, the measures of this sort which were adopted, with some which occasionally removed causes of complaint, were effectual in keeping the people tolerably quiet for about ten years. In Sicily a conspiracy broke out in 1822, and in 1828 a weak insurrection at Salerno was suppressed. Tuscany and Lombardy remained tranquil under a mild despotism and thirty thousand Austrian bayonets; but the French Revolution of 1830[29] gave an example which was followed next year by the states of the church, by Modena, and by Parma.

We may be assisted in discovering causes for the insurrection in the papal states, by examining one or two of the principal acts of the government after the death of Pius VII, which took place in 1823. On the 5th of October, 1824, the new pope Leo XII issued a motu-proprio which annihilated at a blow the charter of 1816. The administration both of Leo and his successor, Pius VIII, was conducted in accordance with the spirit thus indicated. The arbitrary proceedings of the police became a universal pest; the administration of criminal justice was again secret, irresponsible, and inhumanly tedious; and, both in that department and in civil causes, the judges were openly charged with general venality. Besides all the old burdens, some new or obsolete ones were imposed, especially the focalico, a tax[586] on every hearth, which weighed very heavily on the peasantry; and the customs were increased exorbitantly, while the government-monopolies were extended.

In Modena, it seemed to have been resolved to sweep away every vestige that the French had left behind them. The old laws of the Este had been re-enacted, but were every day infringed by edicts of the prince, and by special commissions of justice. The taxes were raised to nearly five times their amount under Napoleon; and for the elective functionaries of the communes, the sovereign substituted young noblemen, chosen by himself.

The insurrection began in Modena, where, in the night of the 3rd of February, 1831, a body of conspirators were arrested in the house of Ciro Menotti. The people rose, and the duke fled to Mantua. On the 4th, being just two days after the election of Pope Gregory XVI, Bologna was in open revolt. The rebellion spread over the greater part of the Roman state. At the same time, the ex-empress Marie Louise fled from Parma, which was likewise in tumult. The subjects of the papal provinces declared openly against the temporal sovereignty of the pope, and on the 26th of February, deputies from all the revolted states united in proclaiming a new republic. The allied sovereigns did not lose a day in putting down the insurrection. On the 9th of March the duke of Modena with an Austrian army retook his capital; and, after some resistance, the Germans, before the end of the same month, had restored to the holy see all its possessions. In Modena, Menotti and Borelli, the leaders of the revolt, were hanged, and more than a hundred others were imprisoned for life. In Parma, Marie Louise acted mercifully, and voluntarily redressed some of the grievances of which her subjects, perhaps with less reason than their neighbours, had complained. In the papal states no executions took place, but many men were condemned to imprisonment for longer or shorter periods.

The leading powers of Europe interposed to recommend concessions by the pope to his subjects; and, on the 5th of July, 1831, the holy father issued a motu-proprio, which, for the third time since 1814, altered the administration. It resumed much of the charter of 1816, retaining the division into delegations, and the subdivision of these into districts; but it narrowed greatly the functions of the congregations, which were merely to have a consultative voice. And the new act did not give to the people even that share in election which, as to the communal boards, the decree of Consalvi had bestowed on them.

The subjects of the papal state did not conceal their disappointment at the pretended reforms. In January, 1832, the eastern districts were again in insurrection; and the slaughter of forty inhabitants of Forlì, men, women, and children, drove the people of the country nearly mad. Before the end of the month, the revolt was again suppressed by the Austrian grenadiers. This new interposition, however, at length aroused the French king, Louis Philippe, probably a little ashamed of the part he had already acted. On the 22nd of February, 1832, a French squadron, anchoring off Ancona, landed troops, which seized the town and citadel. Austria and its satellites professed high indignation at this interference; but the act seems to be quite defensible on diplomatic grounds, in the position which France occupied as a guarantee of the papal kingdom. In the kingdom of Naples, Francis, the prince-vicar of 1820, succeeded his father, and ruled feebly but not unkindly for a few years, after which his throne devolved on his son, Ferdinand, then a youth of twenty-one.d

Thus the enterprise of 1831, though extensively supported, had been undertaken without any fixed plan and, as we have seen, ended in complete[587] discomfiture. The scattered and persecuted sette [societies], when once more rallied and united, carried on their operations under a new name; and the ill-starred faction, which was destined to mislead and vitiate the national impulse of 1848, assumed the title of Young Italy. “Austria,” says Gualterio, “acquired in this society a new ally.”

In 1831, a young Genoese, Giuseppe Mazzini [born in 1808], obtained celebrity by the publication of a letter in which he exhorted Charles Albert, who had just succeeded to the throne, to undertake the liberation of Italy. The boldness and self-confidence displayed in this production was admired by the cervelli bollenti of the day; and the exiles and refugees, whose disappointment was recent and who were smarting under persecution, were predisposed towards one whose counsels were uttered with oracular authority, and who cheered them with new and undefined hopes.

Mazzini soon became the acknowledged centre of the new sect, of which the establishment was contemporary with that of “Young France” and “Young Germany,” and which was intended to transform and assimilate those already in existence, and to give them unity of purpose and command.[30]f

SASSONE ON MAZZINI AND “YOUNG ITALY”

To reconstruct a nation torn and bowed down under the most enervating of clerical and monarchal despotisms requires first of all the creation of citizens and the organisation of a large and strong association based on national right. An association depending on the entire people and opening up to them at the same time a larger horizon than the miserable position they had occupied in the peninsula—such was the generous idea which fermented in the head of Mazzini, that great exile of Italian independence, when he took up at Marseilles his idea already elaborated during his captivity at Savona and founded the society and paper of “Young Italy.” It was under the influence of the same principles, and driven by his unshakable faith in the future of Italy, that he, with several friends devoted like himself to the popular cause, undertook to develop the intelligence of poor Italian workmen in London.

The statutes of the new society destined to replace the Carbonari, and created by Mazzini and a group of exiles, was based on national law and[588] accessible to all Italians. By its strong popular organisation it was destined to keep the Austrian forces in perpetual check over the whole peninsula until the day of help. And thus by the simplicity of its resources it would defy the surveillance of a most vigilant police. Religious ideas and patriotic thoughts were blended and confounded in the thoughts of this apostle of Italian liberty. They might be summed up in two words—Dio e popolo.

The object of Young Italy was inscribed on its national banner of red, green, and white: on one side it bore the words, “Liberty, Equality, Humanity;” on the other, “Unity, Independence.”

All initiates into Young Italy were obliged to pay into the society’s funds a monthly contribution of fivepence, or more, if they were able.

When initiated each new associate had to pronounce the following promise in the presence of the initiator:

The arrangement of degrees was as simple as possible. Rejecting the interminable hierarchy of Carbonarism, the society had only two degrees: initiator and initiated. A central committee resided abroad to league themselves together as much as possible with democratic foreign elements, and generally to direct the enterprise. Signs of recognition between the affiliated were suppressed as being pre-eminently dangerous. The order word, a cut card, a special handshake, sufficed to accredit those travelling for the central committee to provincial committees and reciprocally. These signs of recognition were renewable every three months. A cypress branch (in memory of martyrs) was the symbol of the society. The general word of order, Ora e sempre, alluded to the constancy necessary to the vindication of Italian rights.j

FYFFE’S ESTIMATE OF MAZZINI

At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country’s regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital conditions of Italian revival—the expulsion of the foreigner and the establishment of a single national government—proves him to have been a thinker[589] of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to united Italy services which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great republican scarcely less than to its ablest friends.k

SYMONDS ON THE PROBLEMS AND THE LEADERS

Though the spirit infused into the Italians by Mazzini’s splendid eloquence aroused the people into a sense of their high destinies and duties, though he was the first to believe firmly that Italy could and would be one free nation, yet the means he sanctioned for securing this result, and the policy which was inseparable from his opinions, proved obstacles to statesmen of more practical and sober views. It was the misfortune of Italy at this epoch that she had not only to fight for independence, but also to decide upon the form of government which the nation should elect when it was constituted. All right-thinking and patriotic men agreed in their desire to free the country from foreign rule, and to establish national self-government. But should they aim at a republic or a constitutional monarchy? Should they be satisfied with the hegemony of Piedmont? Should they attempt a confederation, and if so, how should the papacy take rank, and should the petty sovereigns be regarded as sufficiently Italian to hold their thrones?

These and many other hypothetical problems distracted the Italian patriots. It was impossible for them, in the circumstances, first to form the nation and then to decide upon its government; for the methods to be employed in fighting for independence already implied some political principle. Mazzini’s manipulation of conspiracy, for instance, was revolutionary and republican; while those who adhered to constitutional order, and relied upon the arms of Piedmont, had virtually voted for Sardinian hegemony. The unanimous desire for independence existed in a vague and nebulous condition. It needed to be condensed into workable hypothesis; but this process could not be carried on with the growth of sects perilous to common action.

The party of Young Italy, championed by Mazzini, was the first to detach itself, and to control the blindly working forces of the Carbonari movement by a settled plan of action. It was the programme of Young Italy to establish a republic by the aid of volunteers recruited from all parts of the peninsula. When Charles Albert came to the throne, Mazzini, as we have seen, addressed him a letter, as equal unto equal, calling upon the king to defy Austria and rely upon God and the people. Because Charles Albert (who, in spite of his fervent patriotism and genuine liberality of soul, was a man of mixed opinions, scrupulous in his sense of constitutional obligation,[590] melancholy by temperament, and superstitiously religious) found himself unwilling or unable to take this step, the Mazzinisti denounced him as a traitor to 1821, and a retrogressive autocrat.

In his exile at Geneva, Mazzini now organised an armed attempt on Savoy. He collected a few hundred refugees of all nations, and crossed the frontier in 1833. But this feeble attack produced no result beyond convincing Charles Albert that he could not trust the republicans. Subsequent attempts on the king’s life roused a new sense of loyalty in Piedmont, and defined a counter-body of opinion to Mazzini’s. The patriots of a more practical type, who may be called moderate liberals, began, in one form or another, to aim at achieving the independence of Italy constitutionally by the help of the Sardinian kingdom. What rank Sardinia would take in the new Italy remained an open question.

The publication of Vincenzo Gioberti’s treatise, Il Primato morale e civile degli Italiani, in 1843, considerably aided the growth of definite opinion. His utopia was a confederation of Italian powers, under the spiritual presidency of the papacy, and with the army of Piedmont for sword and shield. This book had an immense success. It made timid thinkers feel that they could join the liberals without sacrificing their religious or constitutional opinions. At the same date Cesare Balbo’s Speranze d’Italia exercised a somewhat similar influence, through its sound and unsubversive principles. In its pages Balbo made one shrewd guess, that the Eastern question would decide Italian independence.

Massimo d’Azeglio, who also was a Piedmontese; the poet Giusti, the baron Ricasoli, and the marchese Gino Capponi in Tuscany; together with Alessandro Manzoni at Milan, and many other writers scattered through the provinces of Italy, gave their weight to the formation of this moderate liberal party. These men united in condemning the extreme democracy of the Mazzinisti, and did not believe that Italy could be regenerated by merely manipulating the insurrectionary force of the revolution. On political and religious questions they were much divided in detail, suffering in this respect from the weakness inherent in liberalism. Yet we are already justified in regarding this party as a sufficient counterpoise to the republicans; and the man who was destined to give it coherence, and to win the great prize of Italian independence by consolidating and working out its principles in practice, was already there.

The count Camillo Benso di Cavour had been born in 1810, two years later than Mazzini. He had not yet entered upon his ministerial career, but was writing articles for the Risorgimento, which at Turin opposed the Mazzinistic journal Concordia, and was devoting himself to political and[591] economical studies. It is impossible to speak of Mazzini and Cavour without remembering the third great regenerator of Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi. At this date he was in exile; but a few years later he returned, and began his career of popular deliverance in Lombardy.

Mazzini the prophet, Garibaldi the knight-errant, and Cavour the statesman, of Italian independence, were all natives of the kingdom of Sardinia. But their several positions in it were so different as to account in no small measure for the very divergent parts they played in the coming drama. Mazzini was a native of Genoa, which ill tolerated the enforced rule of Turin. Garibaldi came from Nice, and was a child of the people. Cavour was born in the midst of that stiff aristocratical society of old Piedmont which has been described so vividly by D’Azeglio in his Ricordi. The Piedmontese nobles had the virtues and the defects of English country squires in the last century. Loyal, truthful, brave, hard-headed, tough in resistance, obstinately prejudiced, they made excellent soldiers, and were devoted servants of the crown. Moreover, they hid beneath their stolid exterior greater political capacity than the more genial and brilliant inhabitants of southern and central Italy.

Cavour came of this race and understood it. But he was a man of exceptional quality. He had the genius of statesmanship—a practical sense of what could be done, combined with rare dexterity in doing it, fine diplomatic and parliamentary tact, and noble courage in the hour of need. Without the enthusiasm, amounting to the passion of a new religion, which Mazzini inspired, without Garibaldi’s brilliant achievements, and the idolatry excited by this pure-hearted hero in the breasts of all who fought with him and felt his sacred fire, there is little doubt that Cavour would not have found the creation of United Italy possible. But if Cavour had not been there to win the confidence, support, and sympathy of Europe, if he had not been recognised by the body of the nation as a man whose work was solid and whose sense was just in all emergencies, Mazzini’s efforts would have run to waste in questionable insurrections, and Garibaldi’s feats of arms must have added but one chapter more to the history of unproductive patriotism.

While, therefore, we recognise the part played by each of these great men in the liberation of their country, and while we willingly ignore their differences and disputes, it is Cavour whom we must honour with the title of the maker of United Italy.

POPE PIUS IX AND HIS LIBERAL POLICY

From this digression, which was necessary in order to make the next acts in the drama clear, we now return to the year 1846. Misrule had reached its climax in Rome, and the people were well-nigh maddened, when Gregory XVI died and Pius IX was elected in his stead.[31] It seemed as[592] though an age of gold had dawned; for the greatest of all miracles had happened. The new pope declared himself a liberal, proclaimed a general amnesty to political offenders, and in due course granted a national guard, and began to form a constitution. The Neo-Guelfic school of Gioberti believed that their master’s utopia was about to be realised.

Italy went wild with joy and demonstrations. The pope’s example proved contagious. Constitutions were granted in Tuscany [February 11, 1848], Piedmont [March 4th], and Rome [March 14th]. The duke of Lucca fled, and his domain was joined to Tuscany. Only Austria and Naples declared that their states needed no reforms. On the 2nd of January, 1848, a liberal demonstration at Milan served the Austrians for pretext to massacre defenceless persons in the streets. These Milanese victims were hailed as martyrs all over Italy, and funeral ceremonies, partaking of the same patriotic character as the rejoicings of the previous year, kept up the popular agitation. On the 12th of January Palermo rose against King Ferdinand II, and Naples followed her example on the 27th. The king was forced in February to grant the constitution of 1812, to which his subjects were so ardently attached.g

FOOTNOTES

Only two powers, a spiritual and a worldly, the Jesuits and the Austrians, seemed to stand in the way of attaining Italian unity. Consequently the glowing hatred of the Italians directed itself against both. “Evvivas” for Gioberti, the enemy of the Jesuits, and “Death to the Germans” (Tedeschi) against Austria, mingled with the cries of acclamation for “Pio nono.” Irritation in the commercial dealings between Italians and Austrians in Padua, Milan, and the whole of upper Italy, mockeries, jests, scornful songs, and threats against the “Germans,” associations to repress tobacco and the lottery, in order to diminish the Austrian income, hostile demonstrations, and insulting agreements, increased the bitterness and anger of both nations to such a degree that the Austrian soldier lived in the cities of the Lombardic-Venetian kingdom as in the land of an enemy. Tumults and insulting demonstrations resulted in sanguinary scenes, so that the Austrian government finally declared martial law in Lombardy, in order to be able to put down the excitement and rebellion by force.

The February revolution of 1848 in Paris, incited those states in which military and revolutionary revolts were already under way to new efforts, and brought the fermentation to an outbreak in other states where the excitement had not yet ripened into action. In Italy the ideas of independence[594] and national unity which had so long appeared in literature came to the surface and aroused the revolutionary spirits. When Charles Albert, king of Sardinia and Piedmont, without an actual declaration of war, sent his army into Milanese territory and drew his sword against Austria, the whole peninsula was seized by the warlike movement. Not only were the Italian governments carried away by the force of public opinion to send troops and to preserve a constitutional attitude; armed troops of volunteers also marched into the field so that the whole land of the Apennines was under arms against Austria.

Soon a double trend of opinion became perceptible; whereas Mazzini and his associates urged a popular war and republican institutions, the more moderate sought to establish national independence under the cross of Savoy, in conjunction with the constitutional king Charles Albert. The latter tendency prevailed after some wavering; in Milan and Venice the union with Piedmont was resolved upon. The princes of Parma and Modena who had allied themselves with Austria had to leave their states; even the grand duke of Tuscany, although giving way to the national and independent impulses, had to surrender his land to democrats and republicans for a short time. The pope also agreed to a constitution and appointed a lay ministry with advanced views; nevertheless the government and the body of popular representatives were to concern themselves only with the worldly and political matters of the papal state.

THE WAR BETWEEN NAPLES AND SICILY

A state of war of insupportable animosity and irritation reigned over the whole of the Subalpine dual monarchy, when the February revolution of 1848 in Paris threw a firebrand into this inflammable material. In 1847, Metternich is said to have written to the field-marshal Radetzky: “It is not easy to fight larvæ and fantastic shapes and yet this is our ceaseless warfare, ever since the appearance of a liberal pope upon the scene.” These larvæ and fantastic shapes were now to gain body and substance.

In Sicily, where already a provincial government under the leadership of a few heads of the nobility like Ruggiero Settimo, Peter Lanza, Prince of Butera, etc., had taken charge of public affairs in Palermo and other places, negotiations with King Ferdinand, with Lord Minto as an intermediary, led to no agreement. A union of the two kingdoms, which according to the “ultimatum” of the Sicilians could have its only bond in the person of the monarch, was in opposition to Ferdinand’s desire for rule. Accordingly Sicily held to its outspoken independence from Naples and rejected every approach to an understanding with King Ferdinand II.

The Sicilian national representatives, divided into two chambers, elected the popular and respected noble Ruggiero Settimo, as president of the provisory government, and on April 13th adopted the resolution: “The throne of Sicily is declared vacant. Ferdinand Bourbon and his dynasty are forever removed from the Sicilian throne. Sicily shall be governed constitutionally and as soon as its constitution has been revised an Italian prince shall be called to the throne.” When Ferdinand, under the stress of events before Verona and in Rome, allowed himself to be moved by reactionary influence to dissolve the chambers of deputies on the very day of their opening “on account of their assuming illegal authority and exceeding their limits of power,” when he suppressed an uprisal of the militia and of the radicals by his Swiss guards and by the unloosed populace in a barricade battle, and, as[595] Queen Caroline had done fifty years before, gave up the well-to-do population of his capital to the murderous and plundering greed of crowds of lazzaroni, then the cloth which had covered the two kingdoms was completely torn asunder. The frivolous, uneducated, and powerless people of Naples endured the hard yoke of military despotism and of a reactionary camarilla; but Sicily held all the more firmly to the exclusion of the Bourbons and proceeded to elect a new king after the new constitution had been rapidly revised in favour of democratic views. After many proposals, in which foreign influences also had a hand, the highest state authorities, the government, senate, and commune, united in the resolve to call the second son of Charles Albert, Prince Albert Amadeus of Savoy, duke of Genoa, to be the constitutional king of Sicily. But the fate of the beautiful, unfortunate island was not yet fulfilled, the sanguinary drama not yet played out. The news of the election reached the royal camp when the star of the Italian army was already in the descendant.

Charles Albert consequently declined the crown for his son in order not to incense France or England against him. Ferdinand, however, swore to preserve the integrity of his kingdom and took measures to subjugate the island from the citadel of Messina [Sept. 7th-9th], where there was a strong and well-equipped Neapolitan garrison. There now broke out a civil war full of horror, and with scenes of wild barbarity, patriotic heroism, and fanatic passion. General Filangieri, an energetic warrior from the time of Murat, bombarded Messina, so that thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets, many houses were burned, and the greater part of the surviving inhabitants sought safety and protection on the foreign ships in the harbour. From that time on Ferdinand II was designated as “King Bomba.”

After some time a truce was brought about through the intervention of France and England. In April, 1849, however, the war broke out anew. A numerous company of foreigners, commanded by the Pole, Mieroslawski, came to the aid of the Sicilians, but the military training and the better equipment of the Neapolitan mercenaries, especially of the Swiss, carried the day in the battle of Catania (April 6th, 1849).

On May 14th the Neapolitan army made its entry into Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and the unfortunate island, over which the tricoloured flag had waved for more than a year, became again enchained to the military dominion of the Bourbons. The heads of the provisory government, all of them men of culture and of noble birth and character, sought refuge among strangers. Filangieri, elevated to the rank of duke of Taormina, became governor of Sicily.

REVOLT AGAINST THE POPE; ROME A REPUBLIC

In the papal states, the enthusiasm for the pope declined when he did not satisfy the exaggerated demands quickly and completely enough, and when he earnestly rejected the desired declaration of war against Austria as incompatible with his position and religious dignity. Even the expulsion of the Jesuits, who were oppressed and threatened in all the Italian states, and the maintenance of a constitution as the “fundamental principle for the worldly rule of the papal state,” did not succeed in winning back his former popularity. The celebrated allocution in a consistory of cardinals, with the determined declaration that he would not wage war with Austria, was generally interpreted as the beginning of a reactionary change. What was the position, then, of the Roman troops and volunteers under the able general[596] Durand which the liberal government had sent to join the army of fighters for independence across the Po? They were looked upon as rebels until Pius himself placed them under the protection of Charles Albert.

The allocution was the first backward step from the flag of national uprisal. Pius IX, therefore, soon became as much an object of hatred and enmity on the part of the patriots as he had before been their idol. In vain did he nominate the liberal champion Mamiani as president of the ministry, a position which as yet only clericals had held, and the historian Farini as under secretary of state; the feeling that the head of the church had been faithless to the national cause alienated the hearts of the Roman people more and more. He also had to endure the mortification of having his peace proposals rejected by Austria, proud over her new successes at arms. The reactionary coup d’état in Naples was regarded as the direct result of the allocution, and influenced the popular passions more and more against spiritual rule.

The clever Italian Rossi of Carrara, who had once taught law in Geneva, and had then occupied an influential position in Paris with Louis Philippe and Guizot, and had executed important diplomatic missions, was called by Pius IX to form a constitutional ministry, in order more tightly to seize the reins of government which threatened to slip out of the weak hands of the princes of the church. But, by his energetic measures against the increasing anarchy, Rossi so drew upon himself the hatred of the Roman democrats that at the opening of the chambers he was murdered on the steps of the senate on the very spot upon which Cæsar once fell.

Thereupon the unrestrained populace, led by the democratically inclined Charles Lucien Bonaparte, surrounded the Quirinal and forced the pope, through threats, to name a radical ministry, in which the advocate Galletti and the old democrat Sterbini had the greatest influence, next to Mamiani who had been recalled. From that time law and order disappeared from the holy city. The chamber of deputies was without power, and became so weakened by the withdrawal of many members that it was scarcely competent to form legal resolutions; the democratic popular club, together with the rude mob of Trastevere, controlled matters. Many cardinals withdrew; Pius IX was guarded like a prisoner.

Enraged at these acts and threatened as to his safety, the pope finally fled to Gaeta, in disguise, aided by the Bavarian ambassador Count Spaur. Here he formed a new ministry and entered a protest against all proceedings in Rome. This move procured at first the most complete victory for[597] the republican party in the Tiberian city. A new constitutional assembly was summoned, which in its first sitting deprived the papacy of its worldly authority, established the Roman republic, and resolved to work for the union of Italy under a democratic-republican form of rule. A threat of excommunication from the pope was met with scorn by the popular union. A provisory government under the direction of three men undertook the administration of the free state, while the constitutional assembly laid hands on the church lands in order to form small farms out of them for the poor, and Garibaldi organised a considerable militia out of insurrectionary volunteers and democrats.

Garibaldi of Nice (born July 4th, 1807) was a bold insurrectionary leader who had wandered about in America and elsewhere as a political refugee for a long time, and who, on his return to his native country, had taken an active part in the struggle of the Piedmontese and Lombards against Austria. The unfortunate outcome of the renewed war in upper Italy, which had brought a large number of refugees to Rome, and the arrival of Mazzini, who for so long had been the active head of the “young Italy” party and the soul of the democratic propaganda, increased the revolutionary excitement in Rome. The union of revolutionary forces determined the powers protecting the papal states, whose help the pope had summoned, to common action and armed intervention.

THE FRENCH RESTORE THE POPE

While the Austrians after severe battles took possession of Bologna and Ancona, the Neapolitans from the south entered Roman territory, and a French army under General Oudinot, the son of the marshal, landed in Cività Vecchia and surrounded Rome, which was in a state of intense excitement. It was in vain that the French declared they came as friends, to protect order and legal liberty, to prevent Austrians and Neapolitans from occupying the papal state and its capital, and to forestall a counter revolution in favour of a reactionary and clerical movement; the democrats rejected the proffered hand of peace and propitiation, and prepared an obstinate opposition to the attacking enemy. The first assault of the French failed, May 2nd, 1849. After a brave fight against the insurgents, who were well placed and well armed, Oudinot, with severe losses, had to retreat to the sea and await reinforcements. In order to separate their opponents the triumvirs then entered into negotiations with the French general and decided on an eight days’ truce, which Garibaldi made good use of to attack the Neapolitan troops near Velletri and drive them back over the border (May 19th). Oudinot now began a new attack. But this time also they met with such[598] determined resistance at the Pancrazio gate and in other places that they did not finally gain possession of the city, under treaty, until after weeks of sanguinary fighting (July 3rd). The barricades were at once cleared, the provisory government dissolved, and a foreign military rule established.

Garibaldi with his faithful followers climbed over the Apennines and after a thousand dangers and adventures escaped in a little boat to Genoa and from there to America. Of his companions the greater part fell into the hands of the Austrians; some of them were shot, others imprisoned in Mantua. Mazzini escaped to Switzerland, and when he was driven out from thence went to England where he continued his agitations. Pope Pius remained for a long time in his voluntary exile, and persevered in his anger towards the ungrateful city. Not until April, 1850, did he return. Quiet was preserved in Rome by a French garrison; only the bands of robbers who roamed through the country under desperate leaders bore testimony to the deep decay of social organisation, and to the impotency of the government.

REVOLUTIONS IN TUSCANY AND ELSEWHERE

The grand duke Leopold of Tuscany succeeded for a long time in keeping the favour of his subjects, by his liberal reforms, by banishing the Jesuits, and by taking part, although forced to do so, in the war against Austria. But here also the radical agitation finally succeeded in undermining the soil and in effecting the summoning of a constitutional assembly. By the activity of the demagogues public affairs soon fell into anarchy so that the grand duke found himself obliged to leave Tuscany with his family. The former ministers appeared at the head of the provisory government. In Leghorn the associates of Mazzini fanned the revolutionary fire. When the flames were too high, however, the conservative party put forth its strength and effected a revulsion of feeling. A moderate liberal government, under Gino Capponi, the Ricasoli brothers and others, took charge of affairs and invited the grand-duke, who had been residing in Gaeta, to return. He hesitated for some time until the Austrians under General d’Aspre had occupied Leghorn and the republican party had lost. Then only did Leopold re-enter his capital, Florence, and re-establish the old order (July 27th, 1849).

Duke Francis V of Modena, who had absolutistic inclinations, and Duke Charles of Parma, who had assumed the reins of government only a short time before, both of whom had placed themselves under Austrian military supremacy, did not succeed in withstanding the March storms. They left their states and attached themselves to Austria. Radetzky’s entry into Milan was for them also the day of return.

CHARLES ALBERT’S WAR WITH AUSTRIA

The most remarkable change in affairs was taking place in upper Italy. Charles Albert, king of Piedmont and Sardinia, a man with no steadfastness of character, had paid for the liberal sins of his youth by absolutism, but had then, in accordance with the spirit of the time, raised the flag of Italian nationality and independence, had granted a liberal constitution and summoned a patriotic ministry. He now thought the appropriate moment had come to gain the favour of the Italian people and the possession of the united kingdom of Lombardy and Venice, together with the dominion over Italy by a warlike incursion upon Austrian territory. United with the Lombards who had arisen against the Austrians after some hesitation,[599] established a provisory government, and after an obstinate battle in the streets March 18th, 1848, and at the barricades of Milan lasting for several days had obliged the gray-headed field-marshal Radetzky to retreat with his troops; in alliance with the Venetians, who, after the liberation of their capital through the capitulation of the Austrian count Zichy, had joined the general national uprisal and supported by countless volunteers (Crociati) of middle Italy, Charles Albert marched against Mincio, advanced to the northern borders of Italy, and, after the victorious encounter at Goito (April 8th, 1848), threatened Peschiera, which with Verona, Mantua, and Legnago formed the celebrated “Quadrilateral” of fortification. Everywhere waved the tricoloured flag; most of the cities, with the exception of the strongholds of Mantua and Verona, joined the insurgents. The war took on the character of a crusade. The priesthood, from the newly appointed bishop of Milan down to the lowest brother, worked for the national cause, for the independence of Italy, and gave to the revolution the blessing of the church.

But soon the situation changed. On the 6th of May a sanguinary battle took place at Santa Lucia in which the Austrian army maintained the field against the enemy. The encounter at Santa Lucia was a turning-point in the war. Charles Albert began to doubt as to his reaching his end by arms and hoped to get better terms from the oppressed court at Vienna through the intervention of England. The source of the war between Adige and Mincio strengthened the king in his desire for peace. On the 11th of June the field marshal forced the city of Vicenza to surrender after a sanguinary battle, while the king of Piedmont occupied Rivoli, a place famous in the history of war, and undertook the siege of Mantua. The papal troops and volunteers were allowed free exit. At this time Garibaldi arrived in Charles Albert’s camp in order to take part in the war of independence. The Italians fought for freedom and nationality; the Austrians for dominion and military glory.

On the 25th of July, on a hot summer day Count Radetzky gained a victory at Custozza which established Austria’s military glory in the most brilliant fashion. The aged field marshal then advanced rapidly into Lombardy, driving before him the enemy, who were again conquered at Goito and Volta, and at the beginning of August he stood at the gates of Milan. Threatened by the mob and reviled and persecuted as a traitor, Charles Albert had left the city under the cover of night and accepted the armistice of Vigevino (August 9th, 1848) which he owed more to the generosity of the victor than to the intervening diplomacy of foreign powers. Radetzky, as gentle and humane as he was brave and powerful, stained his victory by no cruelty. A wholesale emigration made Milan a deserted city. Continued hostile demonstrations in the Lombard city made the measures of the Austrian governor more severe. Troops were quartered in the houses of the patriots; the palaces of prominent emigrants were turned into barracks, contributions were exacted, property of the nobles was confiscated. On the day after the conclusion of the truce Peschiera surrendered to General Haynau.

Thereby, however, the war between Sardinia and Austria was not concluded. The events in Vienna filled the Italians with new hopes; the efforts abroad to effect a peaceful solution between Piedmont and Austria came to nothing; the proposed congress in Brussels did not assemble; only a final decision by arms could dampen the inflamed spirits. Charles Albert, reviled by the people, pushed by the radicals, threatened by the republicans in his rulership, led astray by wounded princely pride, in his desperation formed[600] the resolution to again try the fortune of war. In March (1849) a large Sardinian army, in which were several Polish leaders, crossed the Lombard border in order to make a second attempt to drive the Austrians out of Italy. But the sanguinary victories of the Austrian army at Montara and Novara March 23rd, 1849, put a quick stop to these undertakings and shattered the hopes of the Italian patriots.

CHARLES ALBERT ABDICATES: VICTOR EMMANUEL II SUCCEEDS

Charles Albert, despairing of his success but holding the feeling of his military and princely honour deep in his heart, abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II, fled from the land of his fathers and in distant Portugal sought a resting place for the short remainder of his days. He died in the firm belief that the power and future of Italy rested in the Piedmontese dynasty.g

Charles Albert, great only in misfortune, was not unworthy of magnanimous treatment and was now very willing to receive it. He had risked all to redeem the word pledged to the fatherland, and his plans of ambition and aggrandisement were frustrated and shattered, his sword and courage completely broken. Italy, both republican and reactionary, had left him alone on the place of election with his people; he feared and mistrusted the French Republic; he must have been tired of all the fine counsels, empty promises of England. He awaited death with calmness, and devoutly performed the last duties of the Catholic Christian; on the afternoon of the 26th of July, 1849, he succumbed to a third stroke of apoplexy.

The impression wrought by his death was that of an expiation, a sacrifice to the fatherland; his remains were brought to Genoa on the Piedmontese war vessel Monzambano. His body was worshipped as that of a martyr and saint, and thousands followed it to its grave on the lovely summit of Superga, eastward of Turin.

Besides his rare patience and courage, Charles Albert possessed no prominent intellectual qualities; if in the one sense he was a brave soldier, he also proved himself a very indifferent general. As a prince he had good intentions, but was wanting in all application, desire for instruction, and in determination to such a point that cunning and dissimulation were indispensable to him. Nevertheless he was a man, and the great dangers, the deep suffering which he had to undergo for a cause also borne by the noblest of the people, conciliated and glorified his memory; thus he left his successor and his state a very promising but weighty legacy.h

The young king Victor Emmanuel concluded a truce March 26th, 1849, with the victorious field marshal, but this aroused so much disfavour throughout the country that the chamber of deputies refused to ratify it and a revolt broke out in Genoa. Not until the treaty had been cancelled and the revolt put down by force, did the people succumb to the inevitable. The new chambers later confirmed the peace with Austria, which placed a great burden of debt on the country to pay for the expenses of the war. From that time the Sardinian kingdom advanced on the way of liberal reform and healthy internal development.

VENICE FAILS TO ACQUIRE FREEDOM

Only Venice, on account of the unconquerable security of its position, was able to resist the Austrian besieging army for months longer and to defy all attacks and attempts at conquest. Not until all hope of a happy outcome of the war had disappeared, after the defeat of the insurgents in all places, and not until the city had been reduced to a state of greatest misery through distractions within, and the enemy without, did Venice surrender to the Austrians under treaty. On August 30th, 1849, the field marshal made his triumphal entry into the city of lagoons. Manin, who had borne the greatest part in the heroic defence of Venice, fled to France, where, rejecting all proffered aid, he supported himself as an instructor in languages. The former dictator of Venice and the former prisoner of Spielberg, Pallavicino Trivulzio were the founders and creators of the Italian national union, in which the republicans and constitutionalists, in the fifties, rallied around the cross of Savoy for the liberation and union of the fatherland. Manin was not to live to see the day of Italy’s independence. He died on September 22nd, 1857. Ten years later his ashes were transported to Venice and buried in his liberated native city.

After the fall of Milan and Venice the double eagle spread its wings once more over the kingdom of Lombardy and Venice; in middle and upper Italy the banners of the legitimate rulers were once more erected and the Italian tricolours had a place only in Sardinia. Pius IX proclaimed his deep repentance for his sins of liberalism. However much foolhardiness and blind passion the Italian revolution may have brought to light, one point cannot be denied—the honour of the nation was rescued. For centuries the object of the scorn and contempt of other nations, the Italians showed that they also knew how to bear arms; and although this time also it was no less their own lack of order than the military superiority of their opponents which caused their surrender, yet by this uprisal the hope was awakened and strengthened that for them also the day would dawn, upon which national unity and legal freedom would lay the foundation of a happier and more worthy popular life.

After the defeat of their attempt to obtain liberty the patriots recognised the necessity of a closer union with the Sardinian-Piedmontese royal house, under the flag of which the organisation of a united Italy could alone be hoped for. This idea was seized by no one with greater zeal than by the former dictator of Venice, Daniele Manin, during his exile in Paris.

By means of pamphlets and newspaper articles, in union with Pallavicino, he sought to prepare his countrymen for a fresh national uprisal under the cross of Savoy. A propaganda of which “the head was Manin, the arm Pallavicino” worked for the realisation of the principle: “Independence and unity under Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy.” The fruit of this national[602] movement was the Italian national union. Manin did not live to see its result, but his ideas kept gaining new followers. In La Farina the patriotic club obtained a more active and fiery co-labourer. Introduced to Cavour by Pallavicino, the active Sicilian undertook the rôle of mediator between the minister and the national union.

The propositions of Cavour, though not given the sanction of the congress, were made the programme of all the reform parties in the Italian peninsula. Piedmont which numbered, including Savoy and the island from which the kingdom took its name, scarcely five million inhabitants, could hope to form one member of the great Italian federation only after it had succeeded in breaking the rule and influence of Austria. All attempts to free Italy by force of arms having hitherto met with ill-success it was seen that Austria must first be spiritually undermined and weakened before recourse was again had to the sword. When Austria, setting its faith according to custom in the power of the bayonet and the influence of the clergy, sought to keep the people in subjection by means of spiritual pressure and a carefully organised police, Sardinia followed exactly the opposite course and weakened the power of the clergy, introduced greater political freedom and endeavoured in every way to win the confidence of the Italian people. Reforms were instituted in the system of taxation, foreign traffic and commerce were encouraged, the number of convents was reduced, and freedom of the press was allowed. In all these measures Cavour, as minister of commerce, was the moving spirit. The army was strengthened in important points, the fortification of Alexandria was begun, and the land defences all over the kingdom were placed in a state of readiness.

In March, 1854, the despotic voluptuary Duke Charles III of Parma, who hated democrats and patriots and mistrusted all people of culture, was murdered in the open street, and two years later the prison-director Cereali, and the war-auditor Bordi, both objects of popular hatred, were assassinated in the same manner. Most terrible of all was the situation in Naples and Sicily, that part of the world fashioned by nature to be a paradise, but turned by man into a place of damnation. Ferdinand II made use of the years of European reaction to stamp out every inclination toward freedom and equal rights among his people, to fill the prisons with his political adversaries and to carry on all over his realm, a rule of despotism in which the spy-system, and judicial and official tyranny came to full luxuriance of growth. The king witnessed from his balcony the placing in chains by a special flogging-committee, of the political prisoners who numbered, it is said, from first to last 22,000.

In November the former member of parliament, Baron Bentioigna, headed an insurrection to force the readoption of the constitution of 1812, but he was defeated by the king’s troops and afterwards shot with many of his companions. In December the life of the king was attempted by a Mazzinist soldier. Armed bands, united in a secret society called the “Camorra,” perpetrated robbery and murder through all the land. Not daring to remain longer in the capital the king moved with his family to the castle of Caserta, which he kept closely guarded, allowing entrance to none but his most intimate friends. The presence of Mazzini in Genoa in the summer of 1857 brought the excitement over the whole peninsula up to fever-heat and led to several serious attempts at insurrection in Leghorn, Naples, and Capri. These insurrections were suppressed, but the causes of the discontent still remained, and the rebellious spirit was only the more ready to assert itself again at the first favorable opportunity.

LOUIS NAPOLEON’S INTERVENTION

That war between Sardinia and Austria was merely a question of time became apparent to everyone toward the end of the fifties. Fortunately for Sardinia, Austria’s position was an isolated one owing to the enmity which her attitude during the Crimean War had won for her from Russia, and her inborn jealousy and distrust of Prussia. The many-headed German confederation was not in a position to interfere in political questions of world-importance, and it was Napoleon’s most earnest endeavour to reconcile Russia with France and Sardinia that a restoration of the alliance which had received its death-blow in the Crimean War might be made impossible for the future. It was not long before Russian men-of-war were to be seen in the Mediterranean, and Napoleon’s efforts on behalf of France were no less successful. The cautious emperor Napoleon might not have been so ready to champion the weaker side had it not been for the attempt on his life made by Orsini, as described in volume XIII.

The emperor had once held close relations with the Italian patriots, had even been a member of an Italian secret society, and now, regarded by his former associates as a traitor to their cause, he was condemned by them to death. In February a letter written by Orsini was made public in which he adjured the emperor to restore to Italy the independence it had lost in 1849 through France’s fault; to free it forever from the Austrian yoke. “Without Italian independence,” the letter closed, “the peace of Europe, even your majesty’s own safety is but an empty dream. Free my unhappy fatherland and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you into the next world.”

On the 13th of March Orsini and Pieri perished on the scaffold, the two remaining accomplices having been deported to America. The courage with which Orsini met death, and the love of country he manifested up to his last breath aroused universal sympathy. What Orsini living had failed to bring about, he accomplished dead. While the murderous attempt was made the pretext for robbing France of all freedom by means of the security law of the 28th of January, Napoleon in conjunction with Cavour—who with artful smoothness calmed his imperial associate’s anger toward Italy, the hotbed of conspiracies—proceeded to carry out the wishes of Orsini.

Several weeks later Cavour held a secret conference with Napoleon at which plans regarding Italy were perfected. “Italy to be free as far as Adria; the whole of upper Italy to be united in a kingdom, France to be enlarged by the annexation of Savoy,” these were the terms agreed upon in the interview. It was further proposed that the bond between the two reigning houses should be made still firmer by the betrothal of Prince Napoleon Bonaparte with Clotilde, the daughter of Victor Emmanuel.[32]

AUSTRIA DECLARES WAR: MAGENTA AND SOLFERINO

In 1859 war was brought close in sight by Victor Emmanuel’s announcement at the opening of the chamber of deputies in Turin that Sardinia could no longer remain insensible to the cries for help that were arising on all sides. Austria proceeded at once to strengthen her army, to place the whole of Lombardy under martial law, and by every means possible sought to secure her power and possessions in Italy. Austria was severely blamed[604] by the neutral powers for beginning hostilities, and it seemed as though with the death of Field Marshal Radetzky Austria’s military star had set forever. To Franz Gyulay, a member of the Hungarian nobility who had filled many offices but had in none of them given proofs of marked ability, fell the command.

By shameful inactivity the Austrians allowed the Sardinians time to concentrate their 80,000 men around the fortress of Alessandria, where they were joined in May by several divisions of French troops, Garibaldi, meanwhile, with his “Alpine hunters” guarding the foot of the mountain whence he could harass the right wing of the Austrians and support the operations of the main army. The popularity of his name drew volunteers to his banner in flocks, and his appearance in the northern lake-region aroused the wildest enthusiasm among the people. About the middle of May Napoleon himself arrived in Italy; although he left the actual lead to able and experienced generals, he took his place at the head of the troops.

Count Stadion, sent out to reconnoitre with 12,000 men, came upon the French near Montebello May 20th, 1859, and was forced to retreat. The battle of Magenta followed, June 4th, in which the victory fell to the French.[33] The bravery of the Austrians in this engagement, although they suffered from the greatest lack of necessary equipments, excited the admiration even of the enemy. Never did the defects of the Austrian administration become so glaringly apparent as during the campaign in Italy. Lombardy was the prize at stake in this battle of Magenta. Gyulay, incapable of rallying his scattered forces for a new attempt, immediately gave orders for a general retreat. Milan was evacuated in the next two days so hastily that the movement bore the character of a flight, the fortifications around Pavia and Piacenza were blown up, and the army of occupation was recalled from all its garrisons.

On the 8th of June, Napoleon, at the side of Victor Emmanuel, made a triumphal entry into Milan, where he addressed the people in high-sounding speeches, the Austrians, meanwhile, continuing their retreat as far as the Mincio, where they took up a new position in the middle of a quadrangle of fortifications, Peschiera, Verona, Mantua, and Legnago.

The misfortunes that had befallen Austria confirmed and strengthened Sardinia in its ideal of Italian unity, and helped to bring about the fall of the lesser Italian sovereignties. In April the archduke Leopold of Tuscany had been forced to leave Florence and place himself under the protection of Austria. A provisory government was established under the protectorate of the king of Piedmont. But this arrangement did not meet Napoleon’s views. His secret design was to give the Tuscan throne to his cousin, Louis Napoleon, the son-in-law of Victor Emmanuel, that there might gradually grow up in Italy a circle of states tributary to France which would hinder the dream of Italian unity from ever being realised.

Unionist enthusiasm had already burned too high, however, for political or diplomatic schemes to avail against it. All over the land the flag of united Italy was raised, and conjunction demanded with Sardinia. Bologna declared itself free from the pope and invoked the dictatorship of the king of Sardinia. Many other cities of the pontifical state followed this example, indeed the greater part of the pontifical possessions would have fallen away from Rome[605] had not the terrible storming of Perugia by the pope’s Swiss guard spread such dismay that Ancona, Ferrara, and Ravenna for a while remained true.

When Austria became convinced that from neither Prussia nor Germany was help to be expected, it determined to try again single-handed the fortunes of war. Following the example of Napoleon the emperor Francis Joseph led his troops in person, and the incapable Gyulay was allowed to sink into oblivion. But even under the new leaders Austria’s operations were not crowned with success; the second encounter with the allied troops which took place beyond the Mincio resulted in a defeat for the Austrians—once more on account of serious strategical errors.

Napoleon, informed of the weak points of this position, sent his main column against the defective centre which occupied a hill near Solferino. After a murderous battle, June 24th, 1859, the height was captured by the French, despite the heroic resistance of the Austrians, and the imperial army was divided into two parts. A second blow struck by Napoleon near Cavriani met with a like success, the Austrian leaders having issued conflicting orders that brought the troops into much confusion. Benedek, who had twice repulsed the Sardinians near San Martino, continued the battle several hours after it was practically lost to the Austrians; then a severe storm came up which enabled them to retire in good order. In this engagement Marshal Niel distinguished himself above all the other leaders on the French side. It was a bloody day, with a loss of 13,000 resulting to the Austrians. On the side of the allies the loss was even heavier owing to the greater peril to which they had been exposed in attacking the height. The victory of Solferino was a fresh leaf in the laurel-crown of France, and contributed not a little to confirm Napoleon in possession of the throne.

For various reasons Napoleon, a man of caution and, self-control, determined to soften as much as possible the sting of defeat to his humiliated foe, and despatched to Francis Joseph proposals of truce which were accepted and confirmed at Villafranca. Three days later a personal meeting took place between the emperors at which the preliminaries of peace were arranged. Napoleon represented earnestly to the young Francis Joseph how isolated Austria stood among the nations. It was agreed that Lombardy should be ceded to France with the exception of Peschiera and Mantua, that Italy[606] should form a confederacy of states under the general direction of the pope, and that the restoration of the sovereigns of Tuscany and Modena, stipulated by Austria, should take place unhindered. For the final settlement of these points, plenipotentiaries from both realms were to meet at Zurich.

The terms of peace agreed upon at Villafranca, and ratified in all essential respects at Zurich, dealt the death-blow to Austria’s influence in the Apennine peninsula, and laid the foundation, to an extent far exceeding Napoleon’s expectations, for the national unity of Italy. The rest could be left in the hands of the Italians themselves. Far from restoring their former masters to the throne the subjects of the expulsed or fugitive princes hastened to confirm in a general assembly the disposition of the old dynasties, and annexed themselves to Sardinia.

THE PAPACY VS. UNITY

We have seen how, before the battle of Solferino, Modena and Parma as well as Tuscany had declared in favour of union with Piedmont. After the Peace of Villafranca the states south of the Po united under Garibaldi in a military league which had for object the repulsion of all attacks from without and the hindrance of all attempts at restoration on the part of the particularists and reactionists within. Even Bologna and a great part of the Romagna withdrew from the pontifical state and petitioned Victor Emmanuel to take them under his protection. This request was not refused however hot might be the wrath of the holy father. Under the leadership of D’Azeglio the necessary steps towards union with Sardinia were taken throughout Romagna, and by New Year of 1860, a specially established ministry deliberated on the affairs of the new-fledged state of middle Italy, to which was given the name of Emilia, from the old Via Æmilia of Rome.

Neither the curses of the Vatican nor the wrath of the ultramontanes all over Europe could retard in the least degree the march of events. Although the confederation decided upon at Villafranca and Zurich was never made a fact, owing to the disinclination of Austria and the pope to institute the necessary reforms, the neutral attitude maintained by England and France yet materially assisted Italy to realise her dream of national unity. Towards the end of 1859 a pamphlet published in Paris entitled Pope and Congress first startled the world with the thought that it was time the temporal power of the pope should cease, that his rule ought hereafter to be confined to the precincts of Rome itself. This naturally threw the whole Catholic world in an uproar, and elicited from the pope repeated violent denunciations, yet in the course[607] of time the idea became an accomplished fact. Napoleon had never forgotten that the holy father had refused him consecration at the time of his coronation.

The union of the middle Italian state’s with Sardinia was the forerunner of all those “annexations” which was soon to transform completely the character of the peninsula. Napoleon was willing to permit the expansion of the upper Italian kingdom provided Savoy and the countship of Nice be ceded to France. From the time of Cavour’s resumption of his place in the ministry in January, Napoleon and the crafty minister exerted every art known to diplomacy to bring about the end they had in view. At last in March, 1860, the popular vote was obtained which gave Savoy and Nice to France and made Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and the Roman legations a part of the kingdom of Sardinia. The pope excommunicated all who had taken part or even connived at this despoliation of Rome; but the papal bull, once so formidable a weapon, had in the course of time lost much of its early terrors. The 2nd of April witnessed the opening of the first Italian parliament, in which were representatives not only from Sardinia and Lombardy, but from Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and the Roman legations. “Our fatherland is no longer the Italy of Rome,” declared the crown speech, “nor of the Middle Ages; neither shall it be the arena wherein shall meet for combat the ambitions of all nations. Now and forever it is the Italy of the Italians.”

GARIBALDI DRIVES THE BOURBONS FROM SICILY

With the Peace of Zurich and the “annexation” that followed closed the first act in the drama of Italy’s freedom. The way had been paved thereto by the conviction that had gained ground among the cultivated classes since 1848 that only by a union of the whole country under the constitutional monarchy of Sardinia could any stable and permanent national position be obtained. To accomplish this end all the revolutionary and nationalist forces made common cause, and chose as their scene of action the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, which had lately passed into the hands of Francis II, the inexperienced son of Ferdinand II. The French and Russian ambassadors had in vain endeavoured, after the Peace of Villafranca, to bring about an alliance between Naples and Piedmont, thinking thus to frustrate all the efforts of the revolutionists; but the policy of tradition, which persisted in placing trust in Austria, prevailed even with the new king. By his refusal to espouse the cause of Italian unity Francis II precipitated the fall of the Bourbon dynasty and the dissolution of the Neapolitan-Sicilian kingdom.

The project of attacking a kingdom that had at its command a well-organised military force of 150,000 men was indeed a bold one; but tyranny had prepared the ground for the operations of the secret societies, and the indifference with which the warnings of the French and Russian ambassadors were received, together with the dismissal of the Swiss mercenaries, robbed the throne of its strongest and most trustworthy support at the precise moment when Garibaldi and his associates had planned to strike a decisive blow.

On the 6th of May Garibaldi set sail with 1,062 volunteers from Genoa without suffering any hinderance from the Sardinian authorities, and on the 11th of May landed at Marsala, on the west coast of Sicily. To the protest of the king of Naples and of the German courts against the impunity allowed a band of “sea-robbers,” Turin made reply that since the expedition was a private enterprise undertaken by Garibaldi and his associates, the Piedmontese[608] authorities had no right to interfere. Before Garibaldi’s departure, however, Cavour had written to Persano: “We must support the revolution, but it must have all the appearance, in the eyes of Europe, of a volunteer enterprise.”[34]

After Garibaldi had disembarked with his immediate followers he withdrew to the mountains and gathered about him, near Salemi, the scattered fragments of his volunteer corps. On the 14th of May, when the number of men had increased to 4,000 he issued a proclamation in which, in the name of Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy, he declared himself dictator over the realm of Sicily.

After several successful encounters with the king’s troops Garibaldi pressed towards the capital by way of Calatafimi and Misilmeri, keeping his confederates informed of his movements by means of watch-fires at night. On the 27th of May he stood before Palermo and immediately gave the signal for attack. In a few hours the city, whose population had risen with one accord to support the invaders, had nearly passed into the hands of Garibaldi, when General Lanza, who had been despatched to the island by the young king with an important force, caused the city to be so heavily bombarded by the citadel and ships of war in the harbour, that the next day more than half of it lay in ruins. By the intermediary of the English admiral a truce was arranged which ended with the withdrawal of the Neapolitan troops and ships, and the delivering over of the city to the revolutionists.

Almost incalculable were the effects of these events in Palermo. By them the monarchy was shaken to its base and the name of Garibaldi carried into every corner of the world. At the court of Naples confidence was totally destroyed. In vain the king sought to prop his tottering throne by restoring the constitution of 1848.

Six weeks after the victory at Palermo the “dictator” Garibaldi set sail for Messina without having fulfilled the expectations of Turin that he would announce the annexation of Sicily to Sardinia. In three days he took the fortress of Milazzo, and shortly after the commander of Messina effected[609] a truce by the terms of which the city, with the exception of the citadel, was to be evacuated by the Neapolitan troops. Europe learned with astonishment of the first rapid successes of the great agitator, but his exploits on the mainland were to excite still greater wonder. His further progress through the southern part of the peninsula was one long triumph; nowhere was resolute opposition offered him. On the 5th of September he arrived at Eboli, not far from Salerno. The very name of Garibaldi exercised a potent spell over the people; to them he appeared as the instrument of God on earth, the discharger of a providential mission.

On the 6th of September Francis II left Naples and withdrew, with the 40,000 men who still remained to him, to the fortresses of Gaeta and Capua. The day following Garibaldi made his formal entrance into Naples in the midst of the acclamations of the people. He established a provisory government, but still deferred sending news of annexation to Piedmont. The leaders of the radical parties had filled the popular demi-god with distrust against the policy of Cavour and it was not until he was joined by Pallavicino, the martyr of Spielberg, that he again made common cause with the unionists. The foreign powers preserved a strictly neutral attitude throughout, and Napoleon’s efforts to effect the united intervention of France and England failed before the determined resistance of Palmerston and Russell.

While these events were in progress the excitement of the Italian people reached fever-heat. The fall of the Bourbon dynasty in Naples, which was now seen to be imminent, would make the union of the Apennine peninsula under the sceptre of Victor Emmanuel almost an accomplished fact. The boast of Garibaldi that from the Quirinal itself, its national capital, he would announce the birth of the United Italian kingdom, found an echo in the hearts of the people who made it apparent in every way that they would be satisfied with no less a victory. But the papal government at Rome opposed threats of excommunication to every effort of the French emperor towards reform, and a cry of horror arose from the devout all over Europe at the danger to which religion would be exposed should there be any further encroachments upon the temporal power of the pope.

There were thus but two ways left open to Napoleon; either to allow the Italian revolution to have free play, in which case Garibaldi would without doubt make an end of the temporal supremacy of the pope and select Rome as the capital of the Italian kingdom, or to permit an alliance between Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel whereby a natural limit would be placed to the revolution, and the danger that Mazzini and the “Action” party might gain the upper hand would be removed. Napoleon chose the latter course. There is little doubt of his having sent word to the king that the latter might add Umbria and the Marches to his realm, and send his forces to occupy Naples provided he would leave Rome to the occupation of the French. However this may be, in the early days of September two divisions of the Sardinian army, under the minister of war Fanti and General Cialdini, drew near the border of the papal states.

The entrance of the Piedmontese troops was the signal for a general uprising of the people. In Pesaro, Montefeltre, Sinigaglia, and Urbino provisory governments were established, and deputations were sent to Turin. The Sardinian field-marshal laid before General Lamoricière and the papal court the demand that the people should be allowed to follow their will in all the papal states; this being rejected with indignation General Fanti advanced into Umbria, while Cialdini proceeded to the occupation of the Marches. On both sides great bravery was shown, but the papal troops[610] were finally defeated and put to rout. Lamoricière fled with only a handful of followers, to Ancona which was obliged to surrender, after having been besieged by Cialdini on the land side and by the Sardinian admiral Persano from the sea. A few days later Victor Emmanuel arrived in Ancona and assumed command in person of all his forces.

The intention of the king in taking over the command of the army had been to effect, in conjunction with Garibaldi, the conquest of the kingdom of Naples. The attempt on the part of the volunteers to press forward as far as Capua had been balked by their defeat at Cajazzo. Although the open and straightforward revolutionist leader had little liking for Cavour, the man of devious ways and unidealistic views, he felt himself drawn by many common qualities towards the king in whom he beheld the “liberator” of Italy. Thus it was not difficult for his friend Pallavicino to induce him to adopt for his watchword, “One undivided Italy under the sceptre of the house of Savoy.” When Victor Emmanuel took up his position at the head of the united troops in Sessia, Garibaldi laid at his feet the dictatorship of Naples, and transferred to him the mission of making Italy free and giving her a place among the nations of the earth. “I am ready to obey you, Sire,” he said; then, after riding into Naples at the side of the king and commending his followers to the monarch’s favour and protection, he retired to a small property he possessed on the lonely island of Capri, refusing all honours and rewards. This was the greatest moment in the agitated life of the Italian patriot, the one in which he achieved the conquest of himself.

From now on, the war operations assumed a more definite character. After the capture of Capua by the Piedmontese and Garibaldians, King Francis, with the remnant of his best troops, was driven into the fort of Gaeta, while Victor Emmanuel, after a visit to Palermo, took possession of the double kingdom of Sicily and disbanded the Garibaldian troops, dismissing some of them to their homes and taking others into the Sardinian army.

Gaeta had now become the last bulwark of the kingdom of Naples and the Bourbon dynasty. The valorous defence of the sea-port town, during which the unfortunate young queen Maria of Bavaria displayed remarkable heroism, was afterward to constitute the one praiseworthy period in the short regency of Francis II.

The appeals for help of the beleaguered Bourbon king to the different powers of Europe failing to bring about any armed intervention, and his manifestos addressed to the Sicilian people resulting in no uprisings in his favour, lack of food and ammunition finally compelled the king to capitulate. On the 13th of February, 1861, he embarked on a French ship for Rome where he resided for the next ten years, constantly supported by the hope that his partisans in Naples would bring about a counter-revolution which would reinstate him on the throne. The following month the citadel of Messina also surrendered to General Cialdini.

With this event the kingdom of both Sicilies came to an end, and the supremacy of the Bourbons was forever destroyed in the beautiful peninsula. On the 18th of February, King Victor Emmanuel assembled in Turin about his throne representatives from all those states which acknowledged his rule, and with their joyful acquiescence adopted for himself and his legitimate descendants the title of “king of Italy.” (Law of March 17th, 1861.) The protests of the dethroned princes as well as of the pope and the emperor of Austria were received as so many empty words.

In this manner the impossible had been accomplished; the various states of Italy with the exception of Austrian Venice in the northwest and the papal[611] city of Rome with its surroundings, had been united into a single kingdom. Cavour’s statecraft, Victor Emmanuel’s firmness and decision, Garibaldi’s patriot devotion, the political tact shown by the educated classes, had all contributed to bring about the wonderful result; and now that it had been brought about, equally powerful factors would be needed to make permanent the newly acquired possessions of freedom and unity.

A safe and satisfactory solution of the “Roman question” could be attained only by gradually accustoming the Catholic world to the idea of the separation of the spiritual power from the temporal. According to Cavour’s idea the papacy should be relieved from all obligations of worldly rule that it might the better achieve the full glory of its special mission—the spiritual guidance of Catholic Christendom. “A free church is a free state,” was the watchword of the question as understood by Cavour; but an offer which he made to the pope embodying those conditions was indignantly refused; it would be indeed a work of time to reconcile the Catholic world to the idea of a church without territorial possessions.

THE DEATH OF CAVOUR AND THE REVOLT OF GARIBALDI

Such being the condition of affairs the seditious utterances of a band of agitators calling themselves “Italians of the Italians” caused Cavour no little trouble and annoyance. Garibaldi himself, who had passed the greater part of his life in arms against monarchical power, and who in his idealism and self-sacrificing love of freedom and country was incapable of seeing existing conditions exactly as they were, was not a stranger to some of these new revolutionary movements. On the 20th of April, 1861, he appeared in the Turin parliament to condemn the action taken in disbanding his army of volunteers, and to protest against the treatment accorded some of his former comrades-at-arms. He was finally pacified and induced to return to his lonely island life by the persuasive representations of Cavour.

Shortly afterward, June 6th, 1861, occurred the death of Count Cavour, the greatest statesman the world had seen since Cardinal Richelieu. He was but fifty-one years of age, and his untimely end was undoubtedly brought about by overwork and the feverish anxiety in which his later years were passed. “For twelve years,” he declared, “I have been a conspirator in the cause of my country’s freedom—a most unique conspirator; I have avowed my aim in parliament and in every court of Europe, and now at the last I have for fellow-conspirators twenty-five millions of Italians.” His life-work had not quite reached completion, his last idea was little more than the vision of a dream; but he had at last the satisfaction of seeing his own creation, the young kingdom of Italy, advancing on the road to maturity.g

The chief thought which had haunted him in the midst of his delirium was the south. “Oh! there is great corruption down there, but it is not their fault, poor things. The country is demoralised but it is not by hurting it that it will improve.” And above all that the state should not force itself upon it, nor impose upon it the means of absolute governors. This was the chief thought of his brief illness and it was also his political testament. To-day after many years the boundless faith placed by the great minister in the salutary influence of liberty has been solemnly confirmed by the facts. The south relinquished brigandage and accomplished the work of annexation without ever veiling the statue of liberty.

The highest praise that can be given to Count Cavour was made by a great statesman whose name was not less celebrated than that of the great[612] minister, Lord Palmerston. “The name of Cavour,” he said before the British parliament, “will always live, and will be embalmed in the memory, in the gratitude, and in the admiration of the human race. The story of which he is the ornament is truly wonderful, and the most romantic in the annals of the world. We have seen a people under his direction and authority wake up from the sleep of two centuries.”c

It behoved Cavour’s successor, Ricasoli, to follow closely in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor and confine his attention to the interior up-building of the state. He repeated Cavour’s attempt to negotiate with Rome for the establishment of a free church in a free state, but the Florentine statesman was looked upon as almost a foreigner by the papal advisers, and France unqualifiedly rejected the intervention he proposed. He resigned his office in March, 1862, whereupon Rattazzi was appointed head of the ministry.

The first official acts of the new minister were to take back into the army Garibaldi’s former volunteers, and to proclaim that the parliamentary decree of March 27th, 1861, which designated Rome as the future capital of the kingdom, must be carried out. Garibaldi being summoned from his island to assume the lead in all these undertakings the “Action” party were again fired with revolutionary ardour. Not only Rome and Venice were to be conquered, but all the Italian-speaking populations of the Tyrol and the other side of Adria were to be united under the banner of the new kingdom. Soon the tide of agitation swelled so high that the administration saw itself obliged to take strong measures to protect the country from a general war. Among the most turbulent leaders who were taken prisoners were many friends and followers of Garibaldi.

It was a misfortune for Italy that no regular sphere of activity was offered this devoted patriot in the interior administration of his country, where his high and noble qualities might have been utilised without much power of initiative being left to his defective political sense. He determined now to repeat against Rome the course of procedure that had succeeded with Naples two years ago. He set sail from Genoa and landed at Palermo where a large force of armed volunteers crowded under his banner, thirsting to strike some decisive blow that would shake from Italy the last survival of foreign rule, and to win for the kingdom its natural capital. Inasmuch as a rumour was spreading abroad which might find credence in foreign countries that the administration was secretly shielding the undertaking, and as Napoleon himself[613] had threatened to occupy Naples if the Turin cabinet did not at once take steps to crush the revolutionary movement, the king now issued a proclamation declaring all men traitors to the flag of Italy who overstepped the limits of the law and participated in any unwarrantable act of violence or aggression.

Nevertheless, Garibaldi persisted in his design which was to “enter Rome as a conqueror or die within its walls.” On the 24th of August he landed at Melito, and passing Reggio whose strong fortifications he did not venture to attack, advanced at once into the Calabrian mountains. Meanwhile, General Cialdini had despatched a division of the main army under Colonel Pallavicini, in pursuit of the volunteers, and at Aspromonte a serious encounter took place. Garibaldi, wounded and taken prisoner, together with many of his followers, was brought back in a government steamer to Barignano, on the Gulf of Spezia, where he endured a long and painful malady.[35]

FLORENCE BECOMES THE CAPITAL

After several fruitless attempts on the part of French diplomats to bring about some kind of an understanding between the pope and Victor Emmanuel, an agreement was entered into by France and Italy, according to which the royal residence was to be transferred from Turin to Florence, and the French troops of occupation were gradually to be withdrawn from Rome. With the pope it was agreed that no hindrance should be placed in the way of the organisation, by the papal authorities, of an army which should be sufficiently large to support the authority of the holy father and to preserve peace in the interior and on the borders, but not large enough to offer resistance to the army of the king.

The provisions of this “September convention” aroused great dissatisfaction in Turin. Let Rome be chosen as the national capital and no outcry would be raised, but why should the Piedmontese be expected to make a sacrifice in favour of Florence? Sullen displeasure soon gave place to open protestations and street excesses. Instead of trying to put down the disturbance by mild measures the ministry made the mistake of using harsh ones. A great number of rioters were killed or wounded. The distress of the city, which had so long been loyal to himself and his house, pained the king deeply; and dissolving the present ministry he gave the formation of a new one into the hands of General Lamarmora, a Piedmontese by birth.

Peace succeeded quickly upon this change, but the city was none the less obliged to undergo its fate. During the following month parliament decreed the transfer of the royal residence, and preparations were at once begun for moving the court and all the paraphernalia of government to the ancient city on the Arno. On the morning of the 3rd of February, without notice or farewell, Victor Emmanuel left behind him his former capital and proceeded to Florence, where he was henceforth to have his abode.

Anger was felt in Rome that France and Italy should have held a convention without seeking the co-operation of the pope. The latter, to show how few concessions he was willing to make to modern ideas, shortly after astonished the world by publishing an Encyclica and Syllabus in which, in[614] an array of maxims and admonitions, he condemned and cast aside as worthless all the attainments of modern times in the different fields of philosophy, science, and religion. These remarkable expressions of belief, revealing as they did a degree of enlightenment not far exceeding that of the Middle Ages, made plain to the world how hopeless would be any attempt to come to an understanding with the man who could frame them, and how unwilling and morally incapable he was of recognising the rights and necessities of present-day humanity.

The Italian chamber of deputies proceeded in its very next session to institute further changes and reforms. Civil marriage was introduced, the suppression of convents, as well as the secularisation of churchly possessions, was decided upon, and the abolition of capital punishment was proposed. In spite of the difficult financial position in which the kingdom was placed as a result of the war of freedom in which it had been engaged, and the expenses consequent upon its reorganisation, Victor Emmanuel declared his readiness to assume a great part of the Roman debt provided the papacy would give its recognition to the new state. This attempt met with the same success that had attended all others: to every overture the pope opposed his usual reply, “Non possumus.”g

THE WAR OF 1866 AND ANNEXATION OF VENICE

Italy still looked with hungry eyes at the rich Venetian territory which still remained to Austria. In 1866 Prussia and Austria fell into disputes which culminated in war, as described in the histories of Austria and Prussia. In March, Prussia was glad to secure the alliance of Italy, promising to continue war until Austria gave up to Italy the whole mainland of Venice except the city itself and the quadrilateral of fortresses. June 20th Italy declared war on Austria, which sent an army of 180,000 into the peninsula, and 27 ships. Against these Italy raised 300,000 men as well as a fleet of 36 vessels. The quadrilateral, however, gave the Austrians an excellent base, as Bertolinic says, as well as a formidable bulwark. The Italians lacked strategists, and though the king and Prince Humbert [Umberto] led them, they met with no success. March 24th they were surprised with loss, and at Custozza where, according to Bertolini,c they had only 52,000 men to the Austrians’ 75,000, they fought a drawn battle, but retreated after a loss of 3,000 men and 4,000 prisoners. Garibaldi’s volunteers, after some slight success at Monte Suello July 3rd, were surprised and completely routed at Vezza, July 5th. He retrieved his fortunes, however, at Ampola (July 16th-19th), Bezzea and Lardaro (July 21st), when word came of an armistice. The navy was also badly defeated at Lissa, July 17th. Admiral Persano on July 18th bombarded the Austrian shore batteries, but although he succeeded in temporarily silencing most of the guns he was unable to effect a landing. Two days later the Austrian fleet appeared in the harbour and at once gave battle to the Italian fleet. In this fight the Italian admiral seems to have lost his head completely, and to have given either conflicting orders, or no orders at all. The result was a complete victory for the Austrians.

The Prussians had, however, gone from victory to victory, finally reaching the triumph of Sadowa, or Königgrätz, July 5th. Austria in despair and in need of troops made Napoleon III a present of Venetia. The Italians felt it an “ignominy” to accept Venetia as a gift from the French, but finally terms were agreed upon with Austria direct, by which Italy received all the[615] Venetian provinces, and the Iron Crown of the Lombards, the freedom of service of all Lombards in the Austrian army. Italy assumed the Lombardo-Venetian debt of 64,000,000 francs and agreed to pay 35,000,000 francs to Austria. October 19th, 1866, the Italian flag was hoisted on St. Mark’s. A plebiscite was taken and 647,384 citizens voted for the union under the constitutional monarchy of Victor Emmanuel, while only 69 voted against it. November 7th Victor Emmanuel made his formal entry into Venice amidst great enthusiasm.a

FOOTNOTES

The minister Ricasoli, who had the good fortune to associate his name with the union of Venetia to the kingdom of Italy, lived only a few months after the conclusion of peace with Austria. He had decided to reopen negotiations with the Roman court to determine at least those matters which had a purely ecclesiastical character. To this end he sent Tonello to Rome to treat on the business of the vacant episcopal seats. The affair was successful from the point of view of the Italian government; but it was not equally so with regard to that of the interest of the country.

Encouraged by this success the minister composed a plan of laws in which the relations of the church with the state were regulated upon the principle of the entire independence of the two powers. This hybrid law managed by Ricasoli with the ministers of finance and justice was presented to the chamber on the 17th of January, 1867. Before it was pronounced the country had expressed its discontent by means of the press. The Venetian provinces protested in public reunions, but the government prohibited these meetings. At the elections, however, the abstention of the clericals from the voting brought in a majority of the new chamber for the party opposed to the ecclesiastical law, and the minister, seeing the parliamentary party, sent in his resignation which was accepted.

Then Rattazzi reappeared upon the scene “like the doctor in extremis,” to use the phrase of Princess Rattazzi,c the author of his memoir. With him there returned those seditious and equivocal circumventions which again distressed Italy as the work of that fatal man. Borne upon the shields of the party of action which regarded him as its mind, as it had looked upon Garibaldi as its arm, he suddenly prepared for the work. And in the meantime while Sicily was a martyr to cholera and parliament was occupied in the important business of the liquidation of the Ecclesiastical Act, the party of action was agitating for hastening the solution of the Roman question. This question, as aforesaid, entered upon a new phase after the departure of the French from Rome and a short time after the solution of the Venetian question.

THE REVOLT OF GARIBALDI

The first announcement of the new proposals of the party of action was a proclamation from Garibaldi, published in July of 1867, which invited the Romans to rebel and the Italians to hold themselves in readiness to help him. The agitation once created, it was increased and fomented by every means; and as the waves rose the words of the great patriot became more ardent and violent. At Geneva at the council of peace, and at Balgirate before a maddened multitude the hero incited them against “the covey of vipers” which had made its nest at Rome; and on the 16th of September he published an address to Romans in which he promised them the aid of 100,000 youths “who feared they were too many to share the miserable glory of expelling from Italy the mercenaries and jugglers.” The deeds followed the words. At Florence and other places secret preparations were made for an armed expedition into the Roman states and many young men were sent towards the frontier.

The words of the government were clear, but its deeds were obscure, and in fact the orders given by Rattazzi to the political authorities were so flaccid and vague that it would have been thought they were only a show, and that the minister secretly approved the designs of Garibaldi. What a difference between Cavour and Rattazzi! With Cavour as an ally Garibaldi made an epic, with Rattazzi a double tragedy. Two ways were open to Rattazzi, either to act according to the declaration made in the official diary of the 21st of September, or to act in the opposite way; sooner a war with France than a Mentana. He followed neither the one nor the other course but steered between the two, and brought fresh disaster upon his unhappy country.

When Garibaldi left Florence for Arezzo, to assume command of the volunteers stationed on the borders, the government, which had let him go so far, removed him from command and had him taken to the fortress of Alessandria. But it did nothing to disperse the volunteers who had received from Garibaldi himself the word of command to prosecute the undertaking; and soon afterwards terrified at his ardour the government sent the prisoner free to Caprera, without even exacting a promise to remain quietly there, thinking it was sufficient guarantee to have the island watched by a few warships. Meanwhile a band of Garibaldians of about 200 men entered Viterbo and there instituted a provisionary government under the name of “committee of insurrection.” At the same time two other companies passed the frontier.

But grave news arrived at that time from France. The French journals announced that preparations for a fresh Roman expedition were in progress at the port of Toulon, and following this announcement there came a note (October 19th) from the government saying that France would intervene with her forces if the Italian government did not put a stop to the Garibaldian movement. And whilst the government was discussing the course to take in such a contingency the news came that Garibaldi had fled from Caprera. It was the coup de grace of the minister Rattazzi. The same evening that Garibaldi arrived at Florence he sent in his resignation, and the king deputed Cialdini to form a new ministry (October 20th). Now followed the strange events which showed the embarrassment of the government. On one side it strove by means of the marquis Pepoli to persuade the emperor Napoleon that it was strong enough to suppress the Garibaldian movement; and on the other it let Garibaldi speak in public, stir the people, and go to Terni to head the movement raised by him. The central committee of Florence became a true war committee, although it continued to call itself one of succour, and it announced to all Italy in its proclamation of the 22nd of October that the insurrection had broken out in Rome.

But the news was not true. The reported Roman insurrection consisted in an attempt at rebellion by a hundred youths led by Cairoli, which, not being seconded by the people, was easily quelled. The misfortune of the first attempt did not quench the ardour of the patriots nor temper the audacity of the leaders of the enterprise. A victory gained October 25th by Garibaldi at Monterotondo over the papal troops fomented the enthusiasm of the insurgent youths so that they feared no danger, nor were they checked by any obstacle.

THE FRENCH INTERVENE AGAIN: MENTANA, OCTOBER 31ST

The dangers and obstacles increased immeasurably. After long vacillation the emperor seeing the impotence of the Italian government to end the Garibaldian invasion had determined on French intervention in the Roman state. Cialdini’s attempt having failed, the king committed to General Menabrea the task of forming a new administration. The new ministry made known its intentions in a royal proclamation dated October 27th, in which it repudiated the flag raised in the papal states, and invited the volunteers to enlist at once in the royal army. This proclamation aimed at a double result, the crushing of the Garibaldian invasion and the prevention of French intervention. But neither the one nor the other was achieved.

When the Italian government learned that the French had disembarked at Civitavecchia, they then decided to intervene and the royal troops occupied several places in the pontifical states. Although resolved to intervene, the government thought it well to offer to Garibaldi an opportunity of retiring with honour from an enterprise which, in the present state of affairs, could not be carried on without useless bloodshed and the exposing of the country to grave peril. But Garibaldi, far from accepting this anchor of salvation, as soon as he knew that the French had landed at Civitavecchia issued a proclamation to his followers encouraging them to remain intrepid in the struggle and inviting them to unite with him at Tivoli so that the unification of the country might be compassed by some means (October 31st). The volunteer column had scarcely passed Mentana when Garibaldi received the news of a vigorous attack on his vanguard by the papal zouaves. Hearing this the general returned to Mentana to avoid the danger of having[619] his left flank turned and endeavoured to keep in his rear the rest of the troops that were in the district (November 3rd). He did not go far before the enemy appeared. Repulsed at the first attack, they shortly returned with formidable reinforcements among which were 1,500 Frenchmen. The volunteers could ill stand against an enemy so superior in numbers and armed with good weapons. The châssepots did horrible execution. Garibaldi ordered a retreat, took leave of his followers, and, having taken steps for disbanding the volunteer corps, he recrossed the frontier. The Italian government ignorant of his intentions had him arrested and kept in custody until the excitement had calmed down.

The châssepots had conquered; the compact of September was destroyed; Rome was once more in the hands of the French, and Turin wept for a sacrifice which had been in vain. The royal troops commanded by Cadorna remained in the pontifical territories, but the French minister having protested against this occupation, the government, not wishing further to aggravate an already strained situation, ordered them to be recalled and the king took advantage of this act of abnegation to send a letter to the emperor Napoleon in which he conjured him, in the interest of the Napoleonic dynasty, to break definitely with the clerical party and order the immediate recall of the troops from Rome.

But Napoleon III was deaf to this advice, which was nevertheless wise; he would not break the hybrid union with the clerical party, and reaped from it, as recompense, the union in the same grave of the papal monarchy and the Napoleonic empire. The answer to Pepoli’s letter was given by the French minister of foreign affairs, Rouher, the faithful executor and interpreter of his masters’ policy. In the discussion which took place in the legislative assembly on the new expedition to Rome, this minister said that the Italians had “never had Rome.”

“We will show him his ‘Never (jamais),’” exclaimed Victor Emmanuel in good Piedmontese, and he was not satisfied until the petulant minister had apologised for the unfortunate word, saying it had escaped him in the heat of an impromptu speech.

The king asked the same Menabrea to form a new ministry under his presidency. Of the old ministers seven remained. The truce, which by tacit consent was now enjoyed, gave the new ministry an opportunity of occupying themselves seriously with financial questions, which since the war of 1866 had again become very grave. This war had in fact cost Italy six hundred millions besides the debt contracted by the acquisition of Venetia; the forced tariff had raised the price of gold to fifteen per cent., causing grave damage to private contracts, and to the state, which was obliged each year to acquire gold for the payment of the interest of government securities abroad; and with the increase of the tax on gold had come the depression of Italian consols, which had fallen to 36 per cent., and in consequence sinister rumours were circulating in the country and abroad to the effect that Italy would soon be bankrupt. In the midst of the lugubrious prognostications made about her she displayed fresh activity and vigour; and in the act which enabled her to support the new subsidies imposed by the diminished finances of the state, she initiated a new era of economical prosperity, which was soon to bring forth splendid and unexpected fruit.

The Florentine, Cambrai Digny, was then at the head of the financial department. He made himself the defender of the threatened honour of his country, and demanded that for great evils extreme remedies should be employed.

THE ROMAN QUESTION RENEWED

While parliament was occupied with the financial question, the minister, Menabrea, was working to induce the French government to put in force again the September convention, and to recall her troops from Rome. The Italian minister offered to guarantee to the pope perfect liberty for the exercise of his spiritual power, and to assume for Italy a considerable part of the pontifical debt. In guarantee of the serious nature of his offer, he pointed to the elements of the authority to be henceforth recognised in the kingdom, which would lead to the disappearance of all traces of agitation and to the closing forever of the era of factious revolutions, of conspiracies and of individual initiative. But the French government did not share these rose-coloured visions of the Italian minister, and brought forward information proving the existence of Mazzinian workings in the peninsula. Menabrea, seeing there was nothing more to do, resigned his diplomatic position in the chamber of deputies at the end of March, 1869.

No better effect resulted from another much more important attempt, made this time by the king, Victor Emmanuel. Moved by the desire of re-establishing with Napoleon III the friendly relations interrupted by the events of 1867, and of assuring the preservation of peace in Europe, which the strained relations existing between France and Prussia threatened to disturb, he took the initiative of proposing a triple alliance between Italy, France, and Austria, of which the fundamental condition was the evacuation of Rome by the French troops, and the formal recognition of the principle of non-intervention in Italian affairs. The three contracting powers would then have acted together in all important questions of European politics, guaranteeing reciprocally the integrity of their respective territories and not taking any resolution of general importance without the consent of all. But neither the persuasions of the emperor of Austria nor those of his cousin, Prince Jerome, were able to influence Napoleon’s decision. He held firm to his refusal with regard to the evacuation of Rome, and as this was the fundamental, the whole plan was abortive, and this on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War.

The year 1868 was celebrated by the marriage of the crown prince to his cousin Margaret of Savoy. The fiancée of Prince Humbert, an archduchess of Austria, having died, the minister Menabrea proposed to the king the granddaughter of the duke of Genoa as a wife for his son. The proposal pleased the king and the prince, and on the 22nd of April the marriage was celebrated. The new year opened with painful events, the application of the tax on flour giving rise to tumults and seditious movements which obliged the government to use measures of great severity. In Emilia and Roumania scenes of bloodshed and destruction occurred. General Cadorna, sent to this province to re-establish order, fulfilled his thankless task in such a way as to merit the praise of parliament.

The agitation by which the country was disturbed in 1869, was the work of the Mazzinians. Mazzini had proclaimed from London, “Italy must free herself from a monarchy, since it has shown that it will not and cannot give to Italy, either unity, independence, or liberty.” And the disciples of the prophet speedily translated the republican words into action, raising tumults and discussions in all the principal cities of Italy. As we have seen, the French government had given warning of the Mazzinian sect, deriving from thence a reason for refusing the evacuation of Rome by the French troops. The Mazzinians, to insure success, had endeavoured to corrupt the army, especially[621] making their insidious advances to inferior officers. A few allowed themselves to be drawn into the trap and expiated their perjury with their lives. The case of Corporal Barsanti aroused general interest. He was a young man of twenty, the support and hope of his aged parents, but the minister of war Govone declared that if the army were not to be demoralised an example must be made, and Barsanti was shot August 27th, 1870, in the neighbourhood of Milan. A few days before this execution Mazzini by Govone’s orders had been arrested in Milan and brought under a strong guard to the fortress of Gaeta. With the removal of the chief, the republican agitation died away to give place to another and a very different one, which was that of the restoration of Rome to Italy and the final fall of the pope’s temporal power.

PAPAL INFALLIBILITY PROCLAIMED (1869 A.D.)

The ministry of Lanza and Sella found itself from its birth face to face with extraordinary circumstances, demanding the greatest secrecy on the part of the Italian government if dangers and misfortunes were to be averted from the state. The convocation of the Vatican council was fixed for December 8th, 1869. In the speech from the crown, Victor Emmanuel had expressed the hope that from this assembly would issue some expression conciliating faith and science, religion and civil life. The assembly proclaimed instead the dogma of papal infallibility, thus setting the seal to the antithesis between church and state. As with the preceding ministry so with the new; the financial question was their principal care. The Franco-Prussian War broke out about the middle of July, 1870.

ROME TAKEN FROM THE POPE (1870 A.D.)

The ruin of the Napoleonic principality in 1870 removed half of the obstacles which had hitherto prevented Italy from solving the Roman question in a manner conformable to national interests. At the first French reverses the imperial government had recalled the garrison from Rome, declaring that they trusted to their loyalty for the faithful observance of the convention of September 15th. This was a strange appeal to the loyalty of the Italian government regarding what had been so disloyally set aside by the imperial government. However, the minister Lanza kept faithfully to the convention, impelled by a sentiment of noble honesty, so that it might not seem that Italy had taken advantage of the powerlessness caused by the defeats sustained by her ancient ally, to lay hands upon Rome. But when the empire fell and was succeeded by a republic all causes for scruples vanished and the duty of the government to settle the Roman question for the good of the nation could no longer be delayed.

In vain had Victor Emmanuel sent his envoy to Rome with an autograph letter in which he appealed to the heart of the pope “with the affection of a son, the loyalty of a king, and the soul of an Italian,” that he would permit the royal troops, already posted in the outskirts of Rome, to enter and occupy such positions in the Roman territory as was necessary for the maintenance of order and the safe-guarding of the pontiff. Pius IX held firmly to his refusal, saying he would yield to force but not to injustice.

Then it was necessary to resort to force. The government gave orders to General Raffaelle Cadorna to pass the borders with his troops, at the same time informing the European governments, by means of a circular letter, of[622] the resolution taken and justifying its action by pointing out the impossibility of reconciling Italy with papal Rome and the necessity of procuring peace and security for Italy. The note then reassured the powers as to the steps Italy would take for the safeguard of the pope’s spiritual power so that his liberty and independence might be complete. On September 11th Cadorna entered the pontifical territories. On the 17th the Italian soldiers were at Civitavecchia, and on the 19th under the walls of Rome.

But Pius IX had determined on his course of conduct and was resolved to pursue it at any cost. His views were expressed in his letter written September 19th to General Kanzler, the commander-in-chief of the papal forces. In it Pius IX ordered Kanzler to treat with the enemy on the slightest breach of the walls of Rome “as the defence was solely to be sufficient to serve as proof of an act of violence and nothing more.” And so it happened; at half-past five on the morning of September 21st the Italian soldiers opened fire between the Pia and the Sorlara gates and at the gate of St. John and St. Pancras, and hardly was a breach made when the papal troops ceased fire and hoisted the white flag on all the batteries. A messenger was sent to Cadorna and it was speedily agreed that Rome should surrender all but the Leonine city,[36] which should for the present remain under the jurisdiction of the pope. Then the papal troops were awarded the honours of war, but were obliged to lay down arms and flags. The peasant soldiers were sent back to their homes and all foreigners despatched to their respective countries at the expense of the Italian government.[37]

THE PLEBISCITE

General Cadorna’s first act was to nominate a provisional government which should direct the affairs of the state until the people had decided which form of government they wished to have. October 2nd was fixed for the plebiscite. The people of the Roman provinces were called upon to answer whether they wished to be united under the constitutional government of Victor Emmanuel and his royal descendants. Out of 167,548 inscribed, 135,291 responded to the appeal; the ballot gave 133,681 ayes and 1,507 noes. Thus the Roman people placed with their own hands the burial stone on the kingdom of the popes.[38]

Victor Emmanuel in receiving the plebiscite declared that he was firmly resolved to uphold the liberty of the church and the independence of the sovereign pontiff. Thus was accomplished the last act of the redemption of Italy. The generation which had in its youth beheld Italy downtrodden, now in its maturer years had the joy of seeing her rise again a nation, free and united. And whoever writes the history of this great event can add to the ancient glories of liberty this new and more splendid triumph that under her ægis a nation arose and a principle made it one.

This year so fruitful in events closed with another extraordinary fact,—the offer of the Spanish crown to Prince Amadeo the second son of the Italian king. Having obtained the consent of his august father the young prince accepted a crown, which, offered to him under the most favourable auspices, was soon to become a crown of thorns. Two years had scarcely passed after his accession to the throne when as described in the history of Spain the young king surrounded by traitorous ministers and generals abdicated (February 11th, 1873) having miraculously escaped an attempt to assassinate him (February 18th, 1872).

Towards the end of 1870 Rome was visited by a terrible inundation of the Tiber which submerged a great part of the city. The clericals declared it to be the finger of God. Victor Emmanuel hastened to the scene of the disaster bestowing on the unfortunate Romans the comfort of his presence, his deeds, and his help. It is by such means that kings gain the love of their people and kingdoms are fortified.

While Gadda was preparing in Rome the premises for the transfer of the ministry, parliament was occupied with the law of the guarantees, thanks to which the co-existence in Rome of the two powers and the two governments each having complete liberty and independence of the other, was rendered possible. This was something quite new in history, and many, not all clericals, thought it impossible; but it became necessary when Pius IX who had rejected the advice of the Jesuits counselling him to leave Rome, voluntarily elected to stay.e

The taking possession of Rome by King Victor Emmanuel and the voluntary retirement of Pius IX to the Vatican closes the revolutionary era to which these two personages have given their names. It had led on the one hand to the constitutional unity of Italy, and on the other to the suppression of the states of the church,—the last vestige of ecclesiastical immunities of the Middle Ages to the exclusively spiritual constitution of the sovereign pontiff of universal Catholicism,—two of the most important changes accomplished in the history of politics and European civilisation.

The last years of the king’s and the pope’s lives spent behind the walls of the same city, have no further interest than what is offered by the application of the principles of a successful revolution and the experiment of the co-existence of two powers, rivals for long years, under new conditions of proximity and the dying down of the tempest.f

The law of guarantees voted by the chamber April 5th, 1871, declared that the person of the pontiff was sacred and inviolable, and royal honours were to be paid to him in the territory of his kingdom; that the holy see should have an annual donation of 3,225,000 lire; that the apostolic palaces of the Vatican and the Lateran neighbourhood, and Castel Gondulfo, with all their appurtenances and dependencies, should be at his disposal; that the pontiff should have complete liberty to perform the functions of his spiritual ministry; that the envoys from foreign countries to the holy see should enjoy all the usual prerogatives and immunities, according to international custom, regarding diplomatic agents; that the seminaries, academies, colleges, and Catholic institutions founded in Rome and the suburbs for the education of ecclesiastics should continue to be subservient to the holy see alone without any control from the scholastic authorities of the kingdom.

By this same law the relations of the state with the church were also regulated. All restriction on the right of the meeting of members of the Catholic clergy was abolished. The government of the kingdom renounced the right of nomination and preferment to the greater benefices. The bishops[624] were exempted from taking the oath of allegiance to the king and the exequatur and the royal placet were abolished, and every other form of governmental assent in the publication and execution of acts of ecclesiastical authority. For hitherto there had been no separate provision for such acts, and these acts of authority regarding the disposal of ecclesiastical funds and the preferment to benefices great or small, excepting to those of Rome and the suburban sees, had been subject to the exequatur and royal placet. These were the principal enactments of the law of papal guarantees.

As might have been foreseen the pope did not accept them but the governments of Europe on the contrary acknowledged the law, recognising that it was impossible to arrange anything better calculated to secure the independence of the pontiff.

ROME AGAIN THE CAPITAL OF ITALY (1871 A.D.)

In June, 1871, in pursuance of the engagements given by the government the transference of the capital was effected. On Sunday, July 2nd, the king made his solemn entry into Rome. What memories must have been evolved by this entry of the king of Italy into the eternal city, for from the triumphs of the Roman rulers, republicans or cæsars, to the expeditions of the Frank and German kings of the Middle Ages, Rome was full of splendid memories. But the former came to celebrate the triumph of their violence over some unfortunate nation, and the latter to revive the cæsarean institutions under the title of their ascendency over the other Christian nations of Europe—their empire over Italy.

In Victor Emmanuel’s entry into Rome force was replaced by the right of a nation to live free under the leadership of the great mother of Italy, from whom it had till now been separated. The pope did not come to meet and bless the king, but he who has the benediction of his country is in safety, and as he reached the Quirinal he exclaimed: “At last we are here and here we will stay.”[39]

To this solemn entry of the king of Italy to Rome other memorable events quickly succeeded. The inauguration of the Mont Cenis tunnel broke[625] down the barrier of the Alps between Italy and France. Nations overthrow the barriers which nature has placed between them to facilitate the interchange of their products to their mutual benefit. It is the eve of fraternity among nations initiated on the ruins of centuries of strife.

On November 27th the Italian parliament assembled for the first time in Rome at Montecitorio. The speech from the throne was as the circumstances demanded, majestic and solemn. “Here where our people,” it said, “after being dispersed through many centuries, are gathered for the first time in the majesty of their representatives; here where we recognise the mother-country of our dreams, all things speak to us of greatness. At the same time all things remind us of our duty.” And further on it was announced that national unity had been accomplished without the interruption of friendly relations with other countries.

The Lanza ministry had already entered upon the fourth year of its existence; and it was the first time since the founding of the kingdom of Italy that a ministry had lasted so long. And hardly was the transfer completed when the truce between the parties was broken, and the fall of the ministry ensued. In its latter days Italy had seen the death of three great patriots—Mazzini in 1872, Manzoni and Rattazzi in the following year. The time has not yet arrived for us to judge these men with a temperate mind or with a heart free from passion. Mazzini died at Pisa, March 10th, 1872; he had lived long enough to see Italy free and united; and although this did not correspond with his ideal of Italy, he could take pleasure in the thought of having helped so much to compass her resurrection and to introduce the conception of national unity which had for centuries been the ideal of philosophers, so that it became a national idea and a historical fact. Rattazzi died at an unfortunate moment on the eve of the accession to power of the Left. He could have instilled discipline into this heterogeneous party and rendered it a useful instrument of government after having been for sixteen years the party of opposition. He was taken away just when he could have rendered such great service to the country, the country which he loved so much though bad fortune had made him seem to be its evil genius.

THE MINGHETTI MINISTRY (1873-1876 A.D.)

The task of forming a new ministry was given by the king to Marco Minghetti who was leader of the opposition which was in the majority against the fallen ministry. The first note of the new ministry was a triumph of foreign policy. The visit of Victor Emmanuel to the emperors of Austria and Germany in their respective capitals in September, 1873, had placed a seal on the friendship of the two Transalpine powers.

Successful as was the foreign policy of the government, it was counterbalanced by its unfortunate home policy. It will be forever a stain on its honour that on August 2nd, 1874, the minister Cantelli ordered the arrest and imprisonment of twenty-nine republicans who had assembled under the presidency of Aurelio Saffi in the Villa Ruffi to discuss the course to be adopted by their party with regard to questions interesting to the country and the line of conduct to be pursued in the event of a general election. However, the judicial authorities were perfectly just to the twenty-nine, and acquitting them all showed that if a police-ridden and licentious ministry was still possible in Italy, the era of partisan and corruptible magistracy was over. In 1874 the visits of the emperor of Austria to Venice and of the[626] emperor of Germany to Milan helped to distract the attention of the country from the tumult which reigned in parliamentary parties and the revolution which they were preparing. The successor of Barbarossa came in October, 1874, to greet the king of Italy in the Lombardian metropolis and there to consecrate by his presence the elevation of the Italy which his predecessors had for so many centuries oppressed and martyrised. This splendid epilogue of the epic which had taken Italy from Novara to Rome was the fruit of the new civilisation which repeats by the will of the nation the judicial reason of its political existence; and this was primarily due to the miracle of a king in whom the glorious epic was personified.

But although the ministry had had its share in this marvellous event it had not succeeded in strengthening its existence, and already the members of the government, after having cradled themselves in rose-coloured hopes, on the eve of the reopening of parliament, in the autumn of 1875, felt the ground tremble beneath their feet. The opposition had become more audacious and more aggressive. It was the Right which had constituted the kingdom, after it had been set free by force of arms and made it really respected abroad and orderly and tranquil at home, as Minghetti said on the eve of giving up the government of it to the Left. Minghetti sent in his resignation which was accepted. The king intrusted to Depretis, the leader of the opposition, the task of forming a new cabinet. The Left, after having been the opposition for sixteen years, became the governing party.

DEATH OF VICTOR EMMANUEL AND PIUS IX

Less than two years had passed since the accession to power of the Left when Italy was stunned by a calamity as great as it was unexpected. At the end of 1877 the king went to Turin to pass Christmas. Going on a hunting expedition at the foot of the Alps he remained two days defying the cold of the season. On his return to Rome he felt very unwell, having shivering fits and nausea; but he paid no attention, thinking it was a passing indisposition. He took to his bed January 6th. Three days later Victor Emmanuel was no more.

At this time Pope Pius IX was also on his death-bed. Hearing that Victor Emmanuel was at the point of death he gave his consent to the Viatico being carried to him, though the Quirinal was a forbidden spot. And when he heard that he was dead he exclaimed that he had died as a Christian, a sovereign, and an honest man. A few days later he followed him to the tomb.

What a multitude of thoughts arise in the mind as we see these two tombs open almost contemporaneously, one to receive the remains of the last pope-king, and the other those of the first king of Italy. In these two men are[627] personified one of the greatest epochs of history, an epoch fertile in the most glorious events which can take place in a nation. It is the epoch of a free state and a risen nation. And these two men were the artificers of the prodigious event—Pius IX by the religious impulse given to the Italian revolution in its first phases; Victor Emmanuel by having constituted himself the champion of independence of unity and of the liberty of Italy. From this moment the two men drifted apart. Pius IX resumed the life traced for him by papal tradition. Victor Emmanuel remained faithful to his mission and did his duty to the last day of his life. A grateful nation by the mouth of its representatives proclaimed him “The Father of his country.”e

FOOTNOTES

The entry of Francesco Crispi into the Depretis cabinet (December, 1877) had placed at the ministry of the interior a strong hand and sure eye at a moment when they were about to become imperatively necessary. Crispi was the only man of truly statesmanlike calibre in the ranks of the Left. Formerly a friend and disciple of Mazzini, with whom he had broken on the question of the monarchical form of government which Crispi believed indispensable to the unification of Italy, he had afterwards been one of Garibaldi’s most efficient coadjutors and an active member of the “party of action.” Passionate, not always scrupulous in his choice and use of political weapons, intensely patriotic, loyal with a loyalty based rather on reason than sentiment, quick-witted, prompt in action, determined and pertinacious, he possessed in eminent degree many qualities lacking in other liberal chieftains.c

Of Crispi, a less moderate opinion is given in the work of Bolton King and Thomas Okeyd:

“Crispi was a much abler man than Depretis. He had, at all events, grandiose politics, a considerable capacity of leading men, a force and an[629] insistence that fascinated Italy, and for a time made him more worshipped and more hated than any Italian statesman of this generation. He was as unscrupulous as Depretis in his methods, and he had a hardy inconsistency that came not so much from any deliberate dishonesty as from an impulsiveness that made him the slave to the passion of the moment, quite forgetful of the promises and the policy of yesterday.

“At one moment he paraded his friendliness to France, a month or two later he was irritating her by hot and foolish speeches. Now he posed as an anti-clerical and free-thinker; now he spoke as one who longed for reconciliation with the Vatican. In 1886 he said that the ‘workman must be freed from the slavery of capital’; in 1894 he charged socialism with ‘raising the right of spoliation to a science.’ The wildest fancies, madcap adventures, anything that was showy and dazzling stood for statesmanship.

“In 1894 he believed, on the vaguest of forged evidence, that the Sicilian socialists were plotting to surrender the island to France. When the Russian exiles crowded into Italy after the assassination of Alexander II, Crispi, then an ex-minister and over sixty years old, preached a crusade of civilised nations against Russia. He was a savage, passionate fighter, who stuck at no severity, however unjust or unconstitutional, towards a political opponent, and whose intolerance grew till the ex-democrat became essentially a despot.”d

Hardly had Crispi assumed office when the unexpected death of Victor Emmanuel II, as previously described, stirred national feeling to an unprecedented depth, and placed the continuity of monarchical institutions in Italy upon trial before Europe. For thirty years Victor Emmanuel had been the central point of national hopes, the token and embodiment of the struggle for national redemption. He had led the country out of the despondency which followed the defeat of Novara and the abdication of Charles Albert, through all the vicissitudes of national unification to the final triumph at Rome. His disappearance snapped the chief link with the heroic period and removed from the helm of state a ruler of large heart, great experience, and civil courage, at a moment when elements of continuity were needed and vital problems of internal reorganisation had still to be faced.

Crispi adopted the measures necessary to insure the tranquil accession of King Humbert with a quick energy which precluded any radical or republican demonstrations. His influence decided the choice of the Roman Pantheon as the late monarch’s burial-place, in spite of formidable pressure from the Piedmontese, who wished Victor Emmanuel II to rest with the Sardinian kings at Superga. He also persuaded the new ruler to inaugurate, as King Humbert I, the new dynastical epoch of the kings of Italy, instead of continuing as Humbert IV the succession of the kings of Sardinia.

Before the commotion caused by the death of Victor Emmanuel had passed away, the decease of Pius IX, February 7th, 1878, had, as we have seen, placed further demands upon Crispi’s sagacity and promptitude. Like Victor Emmanuel, Pius IX had been bound up with the history of the Risorgimento, but, unlike him, had represented and embodied the anti-national, reactionary spirit. Having once let slip the opportunity which presented itself in 1846-1848, of placing the papacy at the head of the unitary movement, he had seen himself driven from Rome, despoiled piecemeal of papal territory, reduced to an attitude of perpetual protest, and finally confined, voluntarily, but still confined, within the walls of the Vatican. Ecclesiastically, he had become the instrument of the triumph of Jesuit influence, and had in turn set his seal upon the dogma of the immaculate conception,[630] the syllabus, and papal infallibility. Yet, in spite of all, his jovial disposition and good-humoured cynicism saved him from unpopularity, and rendered his death an occasion of mourning. Notwithstanding the pontiff’s bestowal of the apostolic benediction in articulo mortis upon Victor Emmanuel, the attitude of the Vatican had remained so inimical as to make it doubtful whether the conclave would be held in Rome.

Crispi, whose strong anti-clerical convictions did not prevent him from regarding the papacy as pre-eminently an Italian institution, was determined both to prove to the Catholic world the practical independence of the government of the church and to retain for Rome so potent a centre of universal attraction as the presence of the future pope. The sacred college of cardinals having decided to hold the conclave abroad, Crispi assured them of absolute freedom if they remained in Rome, or of protection to the frontier, should they migrate; but warned them that, once evacuated, the Vatican would be occupied in the name of the Italian government and be lost to the church as headquarters of the papacy.

The cardinals thereupon overruled their former decision, and the conclave was held in Rome, the new pope, Cardinal Pecci, being elected on the 20th of February, 1878, without let or hindrance. The Italian government not only prorogued the chamber during the conclave to prevent unseemly inquiries or demonstrations on the part of deputies, but by means of Mancini, minister of justice and Cardinal di Pietro, assured the new pope protection during the settlement of his outstanding personal affairs, an assurance of which Leo XIII, on the evening after his election, took full advantage. At the same time the duke of Aosta, commander of the Rome army corps, ordered the troops to render royal honours to the pontiff should he officially appear in the capital.

King Humbert addressed to the pope a letter of congratulation upon his election, and received a courteous reply. The improvement thus signalised in the relations between Quirinal and Vatican was further exemplified on the 18th of October, 1878, when the Italian government accepted a papal formula with regard to the granting of the royal exequatur for bishops, whereby they, upon nomination by the holy see, recognised state control over, and made application for, the payment of their temporalities.c

IRREDENTISM, THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE AND “TRASFORMISMO”

The partnership of Depretis and Crispi in the cabinet had a short life. Crispi was attacked as a bigamist, and while the courts declared his earlier marriage in 1853 null and void and ratified his later marriage, the popular outcry compelled his resignation. The election of the leader of the Left, Cairoli, who was an enemy of Depretis and who defeated him on a taxation question, led Depretis to resign. Cairoli formed a new cabinet with Count Corti in charge of foreign affairs. He represented Italy at the congress of Berlin in 1878, where he witnessed Austrian triumphs over Italian policy. This caused a fall in his popularity and the activity of revolutionary bodies called irredentists, from their desire for the “redemption” of Trent and Trieste from Austria, provoked an agitation which led Corti to resign in October. In November a wretch named Passanante attempted to assassinate the king at Naples. The king defended himself with his sabre, but there was an outburst of public indignation against the ministry in spite of the fact that Cairoli had bravely thrown himself in front of his sovereign and received a serious dagger-wound.

Cairoli resigned and Depretis came back into power, only to yield again to Cairoli in July, 1879. Cairoli’s foreign policy was again so weak as to merit the epigram of Bonghi,e that it was “marked by enormous mental impotence balanced by equal moral weakness.” In November Cairoli was compelled to call Depretis to his aid in the face of a financial crisis, which was made the more dangerous by Depretis’ plan for spending over forty million pounds on the building of railways.

It was a railway which brought about a misunderstanding with France, and gave Italy another humiliation in her foreign affairs. Italian influence in Tunis was threatened by French aggression, and a railway built there by an English company was the subject of a rivalry between the two countries. The English courts prevented the French from buying it, whereupon the Italians secured it at a price estimated at eight times its value. The next year, 1881, the French, after some difficulties with a Tunisian tribe, seized Tabarca and Biserta, compelling the bey of Tunis, who had protested in vain to the powers, to accept a French protectory. This caused great excitement in Italy, and Cairoli was forced to resign by a vote of want of confidence.

On account of the dissensions in the party of the Left the king appealed to the leader of the Right, Sella, but the Left reunited against this loss of power and Depretis became minister, suffering a new humiliation in the massacre of Italian workmen at Marseilles on the return of French soldiers from Tunis. Riots in Rome during a procession carrying the remains of Pius IX from St. Peter’s to San Lorenzo showed further governmental feebleness.

A new problem now agitated the politics of Italy. There was an opportunity to strengthen Italy’s position in the eyes of Europe by entering a triple alliance with Germany and Austria. The Right strongly favoured this, but the Centre wished to keep on good terms especially with France, while Crispi and others in the Left leaned towards Austria. The irredentist agitation and a fear that Austria might throw her influence in favour of the papacy decided the matter in favour of the triple alliance. The visit to Austria of King Humbert and his queen Margherita furthered the matter. The opposition of Depretis was finally overcome and the offensive and defensive treaty of the triple alliance was signed May 20th, 1882. The treaty was, however, kept a secret until March, 1883. But the position of Italy in the alliance was not one of much honour, and while it minimised the chances of a restoration of the papal power, it brought Italy into some danger from France. On March 17th, 1887, the alliance was renewed on better terms for Italy.

In the meanwhile, in 1881, the suffrage had, by lowering the tax qualifications, been enlarged from 600,000 to 2,000,000; at the same time it had been extended to practically every man able to read and write. The state ownership and building of railways, whose income was far less than estimated, together with the forced currency and the expenditures on public works and various financial experiments, as well as a tendency to vote public works in return for local support, have kept Italian finances in a critical condition, though, in general, the industrial affairs of Italy have shown a steady improvement and sanitary legislation has received attention. The increase of the army and of the navy has also been marked, the new army bill of 1882 having given great satisfaction to Garibaldi just before his death at Caprera, June 2nd, 1882.

The long tenure of power by the Left had at the same time caused dissensions in its ranks and frequent compromises with factions of the Right, causing a gradual partisan “transformation,” called the trasformismo,—it was[632] really another name for chaos. This state of affairs is generally blamed to Depretis who, in his four recompositions of his cabinet between 1881 and his death, July 29th, 1887, had made many alliances with the Right. It is customary to heap upon his memory the blame for a large part of the financial and political distresses of the country. He had a large influence also in the none too fortunate colonial policy of Italy.

In 1884, in return for lending support to the British policy in regard to Egypt, Italians were encouraged to seize Beilul and Massawa. England also invited Italy to join her in pacifying the Soudan, an invitation the more cordially accepted from the massacre in Assab of an exploring party under the Italian royal commissioner. In January, 1885, an Italian expedition occupied Beilul and Massawa and began to extend the zone of occupation. This aroused the negus of Abyssinia and Alula, the ras of Tigré who attacked the Italian exploring parties. The Abyssinians massacred a force of five hundred officers and men and mutilated the dead at Dogali, January 26th, 1887. All Italy was horrified at this atrocity and Crispi, having been called to Depretis’ cabinet, threw his influence to the vindication of the country’s dignity. The negus of Abyssinia, though he had 100,000 men against Italy’s 20,000, opened negotiations for peace and turned against the Mahdists by whom he was defeated and killed March 10th, 1889. A war of succession arose in which an ancient enemy of the negus, Menelek, king of Shoa, signed the treaty of Ucciali, which the Italians construed as a protectorate.

But King Menelek, having received the submission of his rival Mangashá, became more independent in his tone towards the Italians. After an Italian expedition under General Baratieri had achieved great success in Eritrea over the Mahdists, Menelek, in 1893, repudiated the Treaty of Ucciali. His coalition with Mangashá, in which he was easily defeated in January, 1895, led Baratieri to push on to Adowa and even to Axum, the holy city of Abyssinia. In December, however, the Abyssinians arose and the Italian forces suffered several defeats, ending in the great disaster of Adowa March 1st, 1896, where the Italians lost 6,000 men and nearly 4,000 prisoners. Baratieri fled precipitately, leaving his troops to follow; but General Baldissera, who had been previously sent to replace Baratieri, succeeded in making terms with Menelek and securing the release of the prisoners.

THE POWER OF CRISPI

Shortly after the death of Depretis, Crispi, now sixty-eight years old, came into power and assumed that predominance which he held for so many years. Efforts at conciliation with the Vatican, where the pope called himself a prisoner, had no success. Crispi was strongly in favour of the Triple Alliance and did little to conciliate French feeling. He had much support from the Right until, in 1891, he lost his temper during a speech and rebuked them for their interruptions. Such feeling was raised against him that he resigned and was succeeded by the marquis de Rudini, the leader of the Right. Crispi had been accused of “megalomania,” but he had, by cultivating the friendship of Bismarck and paying him a visit, so strengthened Italy’s position that the Rudini cabinet seemed weak by comparison and fell in 1892, being succeeded by Giolitti, whose administration ushered in “what proved to be the most unfortunate period of Italian history since the completion of national unity.” Bank scandals and other revelations of corruption brought about the fall of the cabinet, weakened by its attitude towards an insurrection due to popular discontent in Sicily.

The strong hand of Crispi put an end to the riots upon his return in December, 1893, to the ministry, and heroic efforts were made by his minister of finance, Sonnino, whose measures were so severe, however, that Crispi became the victim of an unusually violent war of defamation, in which his political and private life was exposed to all imaginable accusation, just or otherwise. An attack was made upon his life by an anarchist and a few months later a mass of stolen documents were brought before the chamber by Giolitti, who endeavoured to prosecute Crispi but was compelled by a counter-suit to flee to Berlin. The radical leader Cavalotti made another attempt to prove Crispi guilty of embezzlement. The effort failed, though public respect for the condition of politics suffered a great diminution. Crispi had gained a great majority at the election of 1895, but fell before the disaster at Adowa in 1896.

His successor Rudini gave assistance to Cavalotti’s effort to disgrace Crispi, but without success, as has been said, and after a persecution of two years a parliamentary commission vindicated Crispi of dishonesty, though finding him guilty of irregularity. Public discontent brought about, in May, 1898, riots in the south of Italy. These were put down with an inexcusable severity especially at Milan where the repression amounted almost to a massacre. The month before Crispi, who had resigned his seat in parliament, had been returned by an enormous majority from Palermo. In June the Rudini ministry fell and Luigi Pelloux, a general of Savoy, succeeded, but he resigned after a defeat at the polls in June, 1900, and was followed by a moderate liberal cabinet under Saracco.

DEATH OF KING HUMBERT, OF CRISPI, AND OF LEO XIII

Shortly after, July 29th, 1900, an anarchist named Bresci assassinated King Humbert while he was returning from the distribution of prizes at an athletic carnival at Monza. King Humbert was a monarch whose personal magnetism and courage and whose tenderness to his people had atoned for his lack of great political distinction. During the flood of 1882, and after the earthquake of 1883, and during the cholera epidemic of 1884, he had risked his own life to aid the sufferers. He governed in strict accord with the constitution. His death brought genuine public grief, for his generosity had won him the name “Humbert the Good.”

The prince of Naples, his only son, succeeded the king, and took the title Victor Emmanuel III. He was born on November 11th, 1869, and had married the princess Helena of Montenegro in October, 1896. A daughter, the Princess Yolanda-Margherita of Savoy, was born to them June 1st, 1901.

On the 12th of August, 1901, Crispi died, leaving behind him a reputation for forcefulness of character and for intense national feeling, though there are many acts which his most fervent admirers deeply regret.

The Saracco cabinet had fallen in February, 1901, and was succeeded by the ministry of Zanardelli who recalled Giolitti, giving him the portfolio of the interior. The ministry was noteworthy for its somewhat socialistic spirit which tacitly encouraged great labour agitations; there were 600 strikes during the first six months of 1901. The general result was some amelioration of the condition of the labouring classes and the increase of the socialist strength. Italian finances have also been somewhat improved.

Pope Leo XIII died after a long illness, July 20th, 1903. While keeping to the policy of his predecessor in his attitude towards the Italian government he had brought the Catholic church to a far higher position of esteem in the eyes of all nations, even of those predominantly Protestant. His successor, Cardinal Sarto, the patriarch of Venice, took the name of Pius X and seems to be inclined to a policy of friendship towards the Italian government, a policy which the king seems eager to foster. In recent years Italian literature and science have been making large progress in cosmopolitan favour, and Italy seems destined to a re-illumination of her ancient splendours.a

Chapter I. The Dark Age

c Francesco Bertolini, Storia delle Dominazioni in Italia (in Villari’s Storia Politica d’Italia).

f Giovanni Batista Testa, History of the War of Frederic I against the Communes of Lombardy.

l Pasquale Villani, the article “Pisa” in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

m Karl Hillebrand, Dino Campagni: Étude Historique et Littéraire sur l’Époque de Dante.

n Malaspina Ricordano, Istoria fiorentina, in Muratori’s “Rerum Italicarum Scriptores,” vol. VIII.

Chapter II. Imperial Aggressions of the Twelfth Century

Chapter III. The Normans in Sicily

c E. A. Freeman, articles on “Normans” and “Sicily” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

j Guglielmus Apuliensis, Rerum in Apulia, Campania, Calabria et Sicilia libri.

m Hugo Falcandus, Historia Sicula, in Muratori’s “Rerum Italicarum Scriptores,” vol. VII.

Chapter IV. The Thirteenth Century

Chapter V. The Free Cities and the Empire (First Half of the Fourteenth Century)

Chapter VI. The Vanguard of the Renaissance

Chapter VII. Rome under Rienzi

i Petrarch, Letter to the Roman People (from Robinson and Rolfe’s Petrarch, the first Modern Scholar and Man of Letters).

Chapter VIII. The Despots and Tyrants of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Chapter IX. The Maritime Republics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

h G. Stella, Annales Genuenses, in seventeenth volume of Muratori’s collection.

Chapter X. The Commerce of Venice

Chapter XI. The Guilds and the Seigniory in Florence

Chapter XII. Florence under the Medici

k Angelo Maria Bandini, Letters sopra i principi e progressi della Biblioteca Laurenziani.

o Tribaldo de Rossi, Ricordanze di Tribaldo de Rossi, Del. degli Erud. Toscan.

Chapter XIII. Aspects of Renaissance Culture

Chapter XIV. The “Last Day of Italy”

f John Burchard (or Bucardus), Diary of John Burchard (in Cimber’s “Archives Curieuses de l’Histoire de France”).

Chapter XV. The Beginning of the Age of Slavery

b J. A. Symonds, article “Italy” in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

h Callegare, “Preponderanze straniere” in Storia politica d’Italia scritta da una Società di Professori.

Chapter XVI. A Century of Obscurity

d Antonio Cosci, L’Italia durant le Preponderanza Straniere (in Villari’s work).

e H. B. Briggs, article “Savoy” in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

f William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time.

g Galileo, Dialogo delli due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo, Tolemaico e Copernicano.

Chapter XVII. The Eighteenth Century

b Alfred von Reumont, Geschichte Toscanas seit dem Ende des Florentinischen Freistaats.

i Carlo Botta, History of Italy during the Consulate and Empire of Napoleon Buonaparte.

Chapter XVIII. The Napoleonic Régime (1800-1815 A.D.)

Chapter XIX. Ineffectual Struggles (1815-1847 A.D.)

Chapter XX. The Liberation of Italy (1848-1866 A.D.)

Chapter XXI. The Completion of Italian Unity (1867-1878 A.D.)

d H. Wickham Stead, “History of Italy,” in the New Volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Chapter XXII. 1878-1903

Bacci, V., Ricordi del Risorgimento Italiano, Milano, 1890.—Balzani, Ugo, Early Chroniclers of Italy, London, 1883.

This volume, one of the series of Early Chroniclers of Europe, contains accounts and criticisms of all the principal chroniclers of the Middle Ages from Cassiodorus to Villani. Including, as it does in many instances, brief extracts from the originals, it gives a very clear idea of the sources of the mediæval history of Italy.

Barth, H., Crispi, Leipsic, 1893.—Bartholomeus Scriba, see Annales Genuenses.—Bartoli, A., I primi due Secoli della Litteratura Italiana, Milano, 1880, 1 vol.—Beaumont-Vassy, E. F., Vicomte de, Histoire des États Européens depuis le Congrès de Vienne, Paris, 1843-1853, 6 vols. (vol. V has sub-title États Italiens).—Bergante, Count A., I nostri tempi, Milano, 1884.—Bersezio, V., Il regno di Vittorio Emanuele II, Trent’ anni di vita italiana,[640] Torino, 1878-1893, 7 vols.—Berti, D., Il conte di Cavour avanti il 1848, Roma, 1886.—Bertocci, Giuseppe, Repertorio Bibliografico delle Opere stampate in Italia nel Secolo XIX, 1876-1887, vols. 1-3.—Bertolini, F., Memorio del Risorgimento Italiano, Milano, 1899; “Storia delle dominazioni Germaniche in Italia,” in Storia politica d’Italia, Milano, 1900.—Bianchi, N., La politica di Massimo d’Azeglio 1848-1859, Torino, 1883; La Casa di Savoia e la Monarchia italiana, Torino, 1884.—Blanc, J., Bibliographie italico-française, Milano, 1886.—Blasi, R., La Nuova Italia, Torino, 1891.—Bonetti, A. M., I Martiri Italiani, Modena, 1891.—Boraschi, G., Garibaldi nella Storia, Pinerolo, 1884.—Bordone, J. P. T., Garibaldi 1807-1882, Paris, 1891.—Bosco, G., Compendium of Italian History, London, 1881, 1 vol.—Botta, Carlo G. G., History of Italy during Consulate and Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, London, 1828, 2 vols.; Storia d’Italia, Paris, 1837, 14 vols.—Breganze, L., A. Depretis ed i suoi Tempi, Verona, 1894.—Breslau, H., Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Italien, Leipsic, 1889.—Browning, O., Guelphs and Ghibellines 1256-1409, London, 1893.—Bulle, C., Geschichte des Königreiches Italien, Berlin, 1890.—Bulwer Lytton, E., Rienzi.—Burchardus, Johannes, Diarium (incomplete) in Labarthe and Cimber’s Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France.

The diary of Johannes Burchardus (died 1506), master of ceremonies at the papal court and later Bishop of Horta, is of great importance on account of its reliability. It covers the years 1483-1506, and is concerned principally with the relations of France and England.

Burckhardt, J., Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 3rd edition, Leipsic, 1877.

As Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897) combines rare literary skill with great erudition and keen criticism of sources, his is one of the most useful of German works on the Renaissance.

Butt, Isaac, History of Italy from Abdication of Napoleon I, London, 1860, 2 vols.

Caffaro, see Annales Genuenses.—Callegare, E., “Preponderanze straniere,” in Storia politica d’Italia.—Cantù, Cesare, Histoire des Italiens, Paris, 1859, 12 vols.

Cesare Cantù (1805-1895) was at the same time an ardent republican and a devoted churchman, and his history, owing largely to its popular character and its partisan spirit, brought its author into wide repute in his own country.

Cappeletti, L., Storia di Carlo Alberto, Roma, 1891; Storia di Vittorio Emanuele II e del suo regno, Roma, 1892-1893, 3 vols.—Capponi, Gino, Geschichte der florentinischen Republik (trans. by H. Dütschke), Leipsic, 1876, 2 vols.—Carducci, G., Studi Litterari, Livorno, 1874; La vita italiana nel cinquecento, Milano, 1894, 3 vols.—Cassiodorus, Magnus Aurelius, Letters (trans. with introduction by T. Hodgkin), Oxford, 1889.

Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus held the highest offices in the Ostrogothic kingdom from Theodoric to Vitiges. His letters, which contain the decrees of Theodoric and of his successors, are the best source of our knowledge of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.

Castro, G., Piccola Storia d’Italia, Milano, 1888; Patria, Milano, 1882.—Cellini, Benvenuto, Memoirs (trans. by T. Roscoe), London, 1850; (trans. by J. A. Symonds), London, 1887.

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), certainly the most celebrated if not the greatest of goldsmiths, was also the author of one of the most famous and remarkable autobiographies ever written. Although he was born and died at Florence, a large part of his life was spent in restless wandering, for he was continually embroiled in feuds and implicated in assassinations in consequence of which he was frequently forced to sudden flight. His principal works were executed for Pope Clement VII, Francis I of France and Cosmo de’ Medici the Great. Besides his work in gold and silver Cellini also distinguished himself in die-cutting and enamelling and executed a few pieces of sculpture on a grander scale. Of these the most famous is the bronze statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa which stands in front of the old ducal palace at Florence. This is one of the most typical monuments of the Italian Renaissance, a work full of the fire of genius and of the grandeur of terrible beauty. In his autobiography he sets forth with the utmost directness and animation the history of these works, as well as his amours and hatreds and his varied adventures. He relates his homicides with devout complacency and frequently runs into extravagances that it is impossible to credit but at the same time difficult to set down as deliberate falsehoods. Cellini also wrote treatises on the goldsmith’s art, on sculpture and on design.

Cesaresco, Countess E. Martinengo, The Liberation of Italy, London, 1895; Cavour, London, 1898.—Cesaroni, E., La Tradizione unitaria in Italia, Torino, 1887.—Chaillot, L., L’unita Italiana, Roma, 1882.—Chierici, L., Carlo Alberto e il suo ideale, Roma, 1892.—Cipolla, C., Pubblicazioni sulla storia mediævale italiana, Venezia, 1892; “Storia delle signorie italiane,” in Storia politica d’Italia, Milano, 1900.—Colletta, Gen. P., History of the Kingdom of Naples 1734-1825 (trans. by S. Horner), Edinburgh, 1858, 2 vols.—Compagni, Dino, Istoria Fiorentina dal 1280 al 1312, Firenze, 1728 (Muratori, vol. 9).

Dino Compagni, a contemporary of Dante, was a man of strict integrity and straightforward character who held high office in Florence for many years, and after his retirement wrote his chronicle of the years during and just after his own political life. His personal[641] share in the events he relates makes his chronicle reliable, while its simple, direct style and the spirit of passionate patriotism with which it is pervaded lend it unusual interest.

Comyn, Sir R., History of the Western Empire, London, 1851, 2 vols.—Corpi, F., Il risorgimento italiano, Biografii Storico-politichi, Milano, 1884.—Corradino, C., Storia d’Italia 474-1494, Torino, 1886.—Corti, S., Breve del risorgimento italiano, Roma, 1885.—Cosci, A., “L’Italia durante le Preponderanze straniere,” in Storia politica d’Italia.—Costa de Beauregard, A., Les dernières années du roi Charles Albert, Paris, 1890.—Crowe, J. A., and Caval-Caselle, G. B., A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century, etc., London, 1884-1866, 3 vols.; History of Painting in North Italy, etc., from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century, London, 1871, 2 vols.

Macaulay, T. B., Machiavelli, Essay on, London and New York.—Machiavelli, N., History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy, London, 1847; Works translated by Detmold, Boston, 1882, 4 vols.—Malaspini, Ricordano and Giacotto, L’Istoria antica dell’origine di Fiorenza sino all’anno 1281, con l’aggiunta dal detto anno per insino al 1286, Fiorenze, 1566. (Also in Muratori, vol. VIII.)

Of Ricordano and Giacotto Malaspini we possess but very meagre and uncertain information. The chronicle bearing their names was long believed to be the earliest work on Italian history written in the vernacular, but its authenticity has recently been questioned. Villani contains much of the same matter in nearly the same words. It is conjectured that the so-called Malaspini were of later date than Villani and that they either copied from him or both copied from a common source that has not come down to us. All this, however, does not detract from the picturesqueness and interest of their chronicle, nor from its reliability as to the facts narrated in it.

Malaterra, G., Historia Sicula, Cæsaraugusta, 1578.

Godofredus Malaterra, a Benedictine monk, has left us a very valuable history of the Normans in Sicily, written at the command of Count Roger. It ends with the year 1099.

Manso, F., Geschichte des ostgothischen Reiches in Italien, Breslau, 1824.—Manucardi, F., Reminiscenze storiche, Torino, 1890.—Manzoni, A., La rivoluzione francese e la[643] rivoluzione italiana del 1859, Milano, 1889.—Marchirius Scriba, see Annales Genuenses.—Marriott, J. A. R., The Makers of Modern Italy, London, 1889.—Masi, E. Fra libri di storia della rivoluzione italiana, Bologna, 1887; Il segreto del Re Carlo Alberto, Bologna, 1890.—Maulde la Clavière, M. A. R. de, La Diplomatie au temps de Machiavel, Paris, 1892-1893, 3 vols.—Mazade, Charles de, Le Comte de Cavour, Paris and London, 1877.—Mazzini, J., Life and Writings of, London, 1864-1870, 6 vols.; Essays (trans. by T. Okey), London, 1894.—Mignet, F. H., Histoire de la Rivalité de François I et de Charles V, Paris, 1876, 2 vols.—Montanelli, G., Mémoires sur l’Italie, Paris, 1859, 2 vols.—Montarola, B., Bibliografia del risorgimento Italiano, Roma, 1884.—Monumenta Germaniæ historica, ed. by G. H. Pertz, G. Waitz, and E. Dümmler, Hanover and Berlin, 1826, etc., 35 vols.—Müntz, E., Les Précurseurs de la Renaissance, Paris, 1881.—Muratori, L. A., Italicarum rerum scriptores, Mediolani, 1723-1751, 25 vols.; Annali d’Italia, Milano, 1744-1749, 12 vols.

Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), for many years librarian of the duke of Modena, devoted his long life to ardent and energetic labour in various fields of scholarship. His principal work, the Scriptores, is a great storehouse of contemporary documents covering the entire Middle Ages from 500 to 1500 and is the most important collection of the sort.

Mussatus, Albertinus, De Gestis Heinrici VII Cæsaris, Historia Augusta. De Gestis Italicorum post Mortem Heinrici VII. In Muratori, vol. X.

Albertinus Mussatus (1261-1330?) had in his lifetime a wide reputation as a writer of Latin poetry and was also a prominent political and military leader in his native city of Padua. While a friend and admirer of the emperor Henry VII, Mussatus is however quite impartial and trustworthy as a historian. His style is much more careful and polished than that of most chroniclers and part of his work is even composed in verse. His works are of the first importance among the sources for that period.

Saint Maro, C. H. L. de, Histoire d’Italie depuis la chute de l’empire d’Occident, Paris, 1761-1770, 6 vols.—Salimbene, Chronicon Fra Salimbene Parmensis, Parma, 1857.

[644]

A collection of stories without order or design, which gives, however, a very minute picture of the condition of Italy in the thirteenth century.

Sanctis, F. de, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, Napoli, 1870.—Sansi, A., Storia del Comune di Spoleto dal secolo XII al XVII, Foligno, 1879-1884, 2 vols.—Sarti, T., Il Parlamento subalpino e nazionale, Terni, 1890.—Sassone, F., France et Italie 1820-1886, Geneva, 1886.—Scheffer-Boichorst, P., Florentiner Studien, Leipsic, 1874.—Schmidt, D. L., Zur Geschichte der Langobarden, Leipsic, 1889.—Sewell, E. M., Outline History of Italy, London, 1895.—Sheppard, William, Life of Poggio Bracciolini, Liverpool, 1837.—Sichirollo, G. L. S., Compendio della storia d’Italia nel medio evo, 1890.—Silvagni, D., Rome, its Princes, Priests, and People, London, 1886-1887, 3 vols.—Simonsfeld, H., Andreas Dandolo und seine Geschichtswerke, Munich, 1876; Venetianische Studien, Munich, 1878.—Sismondi, J. C. L. Simonde de, History of the Italian Republics, London, 1832; Literature of the South of Europe (tr. by Roscoe), London, 1846, 2 vols.

Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) achieved much distinction through his works on history and literature, particularly his Italian Republics and his History of France. He was exceedingly laborious and for the most part free from prejudice, but was somewhat lacking in penetration and historical grasp. Of the Italian Republics Mignet says: “Sismondi has traced this history with vast learning, a noble spirit, a vigorous talent, sufficient art, and much eloquence.”

Spalding, William, Italy and the Italian Islands, New York, 1842, 3 vols.—Spano, M., Reminiscenze sulle lotte degli Italiani per la loro independenza, Roma, 1886.—Stella, G. and J., Annales Genuenses ab a. 1298-1435; in Muratori, vol. XXVI.

Georgius and Johannes Stella take up the history of Genua at the point where the work of Caffaro and his successors stops and bring it down to their own day (1435).

Summonte, G., Storia della città e regno di Napoli, Napoli, 1601-1634, 4 vols.—Sweetser, M. F., Titian, Boston, 1878.—Symonds, J. A., Renaissance in Italy, London and New York, 1875-1886, 7 vols.; Short History of the Renaissance in Italy, London, 1893; article, “Italy,” in Encyclopædia Britannica.

John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) was a man of intense ardour and sympathy who, having a passion for Italy, made the study of the Renaissance in that country the work of the greater part of his life. His writing is always brilliant and terse, though his views are sometimes not clearly defined nor unbiased.

THE NORTH ITALIAN STATES AND REPUBLICS

FROM THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURY (476-1000 A.D.)

The deposition of Romulus Augustulus (476) opens a new era for the Italian people. The entire peninsula comes under the titular sway of the Eastern emperor, Odoacer the Herulian chief ruling as king of his own people, and as regent over the rest of the inhabitants. This mixed Teutonic and Roman government is continued by the Ostrogothic dynasty beginning with Theodoric, who in 493 at the commission of the emperor overthrows and replaces Odoacer. The chief strength of the Ostrogoths lies in northern Italy; they have little influence over the descendants of the Greek colonists in the south. The ties between Italy and Constantinople having become very weak, Justinian I plans the reconquest of Italy. By the efforts of Belisarius and Narses this is accomplished in 553; the Ostrogothic kingdom falls. Italy is again a real member of the Roman Empire, ruled in the emperor’s name by the exarch whose capital is at Ravenna. This state of affairs lasts but fifteen years. Narses, the first exarch, recalled to Constantinople in 565, and disaffected with his treatment by the empress, is said to have invited Alboin the Lombard chief to invade the Italian peninsula. In 568 he crosses the Alps, and in three years is master of nearly the whole of northern Italy. The political unity of the peninsula is broken, not to be repaired until the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Lombards penetrate through the middle of the peninsula. Venice, founded about 452 by families from Aquileia and Pavia fleeing from Attila, remains untouched. So does Genoa and its Riviera. Rome does not acknowledge the Lombard rule at Pavia, neither does the country east of the Apennines from the Po to Ancona where the exarch rules at Ravenna, nor the duchy of Naples, the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and the southernmost province of Calabria. The duchies of Spoleto and Benevento have Lombard rulers, but they are nearly independent of Pavia. Such is the condition of Italy at the end of the sixth century.

Before the close of the next hundred years Constans II (662) makes a vain attempt to restore the empire in Italy. The protecting power of Constantinople becomes weaker and weaker, and in 713 the Venetian islands unite for the purpose of self-government. Paoluccio Anafesto, the first doge, is elected and a council of tribunes[647] and judges chosen. This government lasts until 737 when in a popular tumult the doge Orso is killed, his ducal office abolished, and replaced by an annually elected maestro della milizia (master of the military); but in five years (742) the life-holding office of doge is restored. Meanwhile the growing Lombard power has encroached on the exarch’s dominions; the iconoclastic controversy has virtually alienated the sympathies of the Italian people from the Eastern emperor, and in 752 the Byzantine possessions in northern Italy are conquered by Aistulf the Lombard king, and the exarch flees from Ravenna. Pepin comes from France at the call of the pope, seizes Aistulf’s conquests which he hands over to Stephen (755), and from this gift arises the temporal sovereignty of the pope, which lasts until 1870. In 774 Charlemagne puts an end to the Lombard dominion in northern Italy, and his Italian kingdom extends from the Alps to Terracina. This is included in the Western Empire when it is restored in 800.

Thus the political map of Italy at the beginning of the ninth century shows Rome the head of an empire governing the greater part of the peninsula; Gaeta, Naples, Calabria, Apulia, Sicily, and Sardinia still give their allegiance to Constantinople. Venice, though quite independent, acknowledges the Eastern emperor, and the duke of Benevento pays tribute to him of the West.

In 810 the people of Venice remove the seat of government from the mainland to the present city and the building of St. Mark’s is begun.

In 827 the Saracens begin their attacks on Italy and Sicily. Their fortunes are varied, but by 890 the fall of the Carlovingian dynasty has enabled the Greeks to take many cities from the Saracens and raise a new power that comprises southern Italy as far north as Salerno. This territory ruled by a patrician or catapan remains a part of the Eastern Empire until 1043. Charlemagne does not overthrow the political system in the north, and the great lords retain their territories they have enjoyed since the days of Theodoric. With the decay of Charlemagne’s dynasty, these local rulers correspondingly increase their power, and the bishops appointed to the cities have become almost independent sovereigns. This local ascendency is never suppressed by the emperor, and to it is due the rise of the mediæval Italian republics.

At the beginning of the tenth century we find these great territorial lords and bishops the chief powers in northern Italy—among them the archbishop of Milan, the duke of Friuli, and the count of Tuscany, the latter asserting his predominance since the time of Boniface I in 823. The obedience they pay the king of Italy is merely nominal, and indeed the king is constantly at war with his great vassals. From the deposition of Charles the Fat (888) to the intrusion of Otto I into the affairs of Italy (961) the crown of that country is the bone of contention between the great lords of Friuli and Benevento. The Magyars and Saracens also repeatedly invade the land, and the defended cities rise in power and importance.

With the advent of Otto I their municipal liberty is not much curtailed. The government of the city is generally carried on by two or more consuls chosen by popular vote. In 997 the Venetians’ conquest of the Adriatic coast and islands as far as Ragusa, put themselves in a more independent attitude towards the Eastern emperor.

THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

The untimely death of Otto III (1002) is an important event in the development of the Italian cities. In the resulting dispute for the crown, Pavia upholds the Lombard nobles in their choice of Arduin. Milan crowns the German king Henry II.

1003 War between Pisa and Lucca, the first waged between the mediæval Italian cities.

1004 Henry burns Pavia. Milan and Pavia wake to independent life and action in this struggle. The Saracens capture a portion of Pisa.

1011 Second attack of the Saracens on Pisa, which now assumes the offensive.

1017 The Pisans drive the Saracens from Sardinia and take the island.

1018 Heribert becomes archbishop of Milan, and the most powerful lord in northern Italy.

1024 On death of Henry II, Heribert invites Conrad II of Germany to Italy and gives him the iron crown of Lombardy (1026).

1026 The Venetians expel their doge Ottone Orseolo, but recall him in 1031. The people of Lodi resent Heribert’s appointing their bishop, and a war ensues in which Heribert is successful.

1036 Battle of Campo Malo, between Heribert and the opponent factions. Heribert summons the emperor to his aid, but the latter, offended at the independence of the Milanese, retires to Pavia.

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1037 At Diet of Roncaglia Conrad enacts decree that all fiefs shall be hereditary. This is to check the power of the ecclesiastical lords. Siege of Milan by Conrad, who has to retire on account of pestilence.

1039 Siege of Milan raised at death of Conrad. Heribert devises the carroccio.

1041 The people of Milan, headed by Lanzo, drive the nobles out of Milan.

1044 Peace restored in Milan.

1045 Death of Heribert.

1048-1055 During the pontificate of Leo IX, attempts to enforce celibacy of clergy are vigorously resisted in Milan.

1055 The countess Matilda begins her rule in Tuscany.

1063 The foundations of the cathedral at Pisa are laid.

1075 Gregory VII approves the Pisan code of laws—a revival of the Pandects of Justinian.

1077 The Norman conquests of southern Italian cities put the trade of the Mediterranean into the hands of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. For a century and a half Pisa has the largest trade.

1080 The countess Matilda’s army is defeated near Mantua.

1084 Great defeat of the Venetian fleet by Robert Guiscard.

1091 Capture of Mantua and Ravenna by Henry IV.

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

At the beginning of the twelfth century Milan and the other Lombard cities have become independent municipalities, a result achieved principally through the war of investitures.

1101 Ferrara submits to the countess Matilda, who has obtained practically the power of a queen.

1110 Peace made between Pisa and Lucca, which have been at war for six years.

1111 The Milanese attack and destroy Lodi and Como. The leadership of Milan in Lombardy is now confirmed.

1114 Revolt of Mantua, which is subdued by the countess Matilda. The Pisans descend upon the Saracens in the Balearic Isles, and return with rich booty and many prisoners.

1115 Death of the countess Matilda. Beginning of the struggle between pope and emperor for her great domain. In 1102 she deeded them to the pope. With Matilda’s death begins the rise of Florence and other Tuscan cities to independence.

1118 War breaks out between Genoa and Pisa over the supremacy of Sardinia and Corsica, a papal edict having awarded the Pisan church control in Corsica. Consecration of the Pisan cathedral.

1123 Victory of the Venetian fleet over the Egyptians off Joppa.

1124 The Venetians receive a third of the city of Tyre at its conquest by the crusaders.

1125 Capture of Samos, Andros, and Spalato by the Venetians.

1132 Peace between Genoa and Pisa. Innocent II gives the Genoese church partial supremacy in Corsica and grants to the Pisans in Sardinia and elsewhere.

1135 The Pisans proceed against the Normans in southern Italy. Naples and Amalfi attacked. Amalfi recovered by Roger I.

1137 Second attack of the Pisans in southern Italy. Roger recovers his lost possessions.

1140 The Genoese acquire Ventimiglia.

1144 War breaks out among the Italian cities. Venice against Ravenna; Verona and Vicenza against Padua and Treviso; Florence and Pisa against Lucca and Siena.

1150 The Venetians regain Dalmatia, which has been captured by pirates.

1151 Defeat of the Milanese by the Cremonese at Castelnuovo. The carroccio is captured.

1152 Election of Frederick Barbarossa as king of Germany and Italy. Building of the baptistery of Pisa begun.

1153 Frederick determines to re-establish the imperial authority in the Italian cities. Lodi and Como ask his protection against Milan.

1154 Frederick enters Italy. Diet of Roncaglia, where Frederick hears complaints against Milan and Tortona. He assumes the Lombard crown at Pavia.

1155 Frederick captures and razes Tortona. Milan prepares for war.

1156 Milan rebuilds Tortona and defeats Pavia.

1157 Establishment of the Bank of Venice.

1158 Milan again destroys Lodi. Second appearance of Frederick in Italy. Siege of Milan, which surrenders on account of famine. Diet at Roncaglia. The Bolognese jurists expound the code of Justinian to Frederick, who removes the consuls and substitutes the podesta as ruling officer in the Italian cities.

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1159 The Milanese refuse to obey the podesta.

1160 Surrender of Crema to Frederick. The city is abandoned to the cruelty of Cremona. Lucca obtains its independence from Welf of Tuscany.

1162 Surrender of Milan after a nine months’ siege. It is totally destroyed. Lombardy submits to Frederick.

1163 The cities of the Veronese March, assisted by Venice, form a league against Frederick.

1167 Siege of Ancona by Frederick, who has returned to Italy the previous year. Brescia, Bergamo, Mantua, Verona, Cremona, Treviso, and other north Italian cities form the Lombard League to regain their liberties from Frederick. It begins to rebuild Milan.

1168 Frederick, with his army nearly annihilated by the plague, returns to Germany.

1169 The league builds Alessandria. The pope and Eastern emperor join the league against Frederick. Other cities enter the league. Pavia and Montferrat alone remain loyal to the empire.

1171 The Eastern emperor Manuel I seizes the Venetian possessions in his dominions. Stephen, king of Hungary, captures many Dalmatian cities from Venice. Venice recovers Zara, takes Ragusa, and attacks Negropont.

1172 Capture of Scio by the Venetians.

1173 The Venetian fleet returns from the East and infects the city with the plague. Tumults break out and the doge is slain.

1174 Fifth expedition of Frederick to Italy. The Campanile of Pisa is begun.

1175 Peace partially restored between Genoa and Pisa by Frederick’s mediation.

1176 Frederick threatens Milan. He is defeated disastrously at Legnano by the Milanese and a few allies. He opens negotiations with the pope for peace.

1177 Reconciliation between Frederick and the pope at Venice. Six years’ truce concluded with the Lombard cities. They do not ask for more than municipal autonomy, and the Italians lose their greatest opportunity of becoming a powerful nation.

1181 Bela, king of Hungary, recovers Zara and other cities from Venice.

1183 The truce with Frederick is made permanent by the peace of Constance. Venice is not included. The communes have their right to self-government by consuls and to wage warfare confirmed. These privileges are extended to the Tuscan cities, among which Florence is becoming the most powerful.

1194 Battle between the Genoese and Pisan fleets in the harbour of Messina.

1198 Establishment of the republic of Florence.

1199 General war among the Lombard cities owing to a quarrel between Parma and Piacenza.

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The acquisition of independence by the cities brings about constant feuds between the people and the nobles. The latter have become more or less financially dependent upon the citizens and are forced to reside a portion of the year in the cities. Here in their palaces they carry on their feuds, in defiance of all civil authority. The consuls are powerless to curb them, and from this state of affairs arises the office of podesta (the name taken from Frederick Barbarossa’s official, but having no connection with the empire). The podesta is always the citizen of another city and holds his office for one year. His function is to arbitrate and keep peace between the citizens and nobles, and the powers delegated to him pave the way for the despots of later times.

1202 The crusaders capture Zara for Venice in fulfilment of a bargain made with the doge Dandolo, who disregards Pope Innocent III’s threats of excommunication for this. The Venetians accompany the crusaders to Constantinople.

1204 In the division of the Eastern Empire after the capture of Constantinople the Venetians receive about three-eighths of the empire of Romania. Most of this they make no attempt to take possession of. Formation of Guelfic leagues in Umbria and Tuscany, looking to the pope for protection. Pisa, strongly Ghibelline, holds aloof.

1205 The Venetians exchange a portion of Thessaly with Boniface of Montferrat for Crete. Venice decides on a policy of allowing her nobles to take her acquisitions, holding these as fiefs of the republic.

1208 The Genoese are defeated in an attempt to capture Crete.

1209 The Ghibellines expel the Guelfs from Ferrara.

1215 The Buondelmonte (Guelf) and Amidei (Ghibelline) feud begins in Florence. It lasts thirty-three years.

1218 Milan forms a league to drive the Ghibellines from Lombardy. It is defeated at Ghibello; this causes great trouble between the Lombard nobles and citizens.

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1221 The Milanese expel the nobles from the city.

1222 First war between Pisa and Florence. Foundation of the University of Padua.

1226 Renewal of the Lombard League for twenty-five years.

1227 Frederick II appoints Ezzelino da Romano to conduct warfare against the Guelfs in the Veronese March. They are defeated in Verona and Vicenza.

1228 Victory of Pisa over the united forces of Florence and Lucca near Barga.

1233 The cities of the Veronese March conclude the peace of Paquara through the efforts of the monk Giovanni da Vicenza. It lasts only a few days.

1234 Montferrat, Milan, Brescia, and other cities join the rebellion of Frederick’s son Henry. The Pisans renew war with the Genoese.

1236 Frederick takes the field against the Lombards. Ezzelino is in control in Verona, Vicenza, and Padua.

1237 Frederick defeats the Milanese and their allies at Cortenuova. The carroccio is captured and sent to Rome as a trophy. Tiepolo, podesta of Milan, son of the doge of Venice, put to death.

1238 The pope allies himself with Venice and Genoa against Frederick, who establishes Ghibelline supremacy in Turin, Asti, Novara, and Alessandria. Frederick unsuccessfully besieges Brescia.

1239 The Guelf fortunes begin to revive, owing to the pope’s excommunication of Frederick. Ravenna taken by the Venetians and Bolognese.

1240 The Venetians and Azzo d’Este take Ferrara. Frederick recovers Ravenna.

1241 The Pisan and Sicilian fleets capture a number of Genoese galleys, bearing the French cardinals and bishops to the pope’s council at Rome. Frederick besieges Genoa.

1243 Frederick’s son Enzio is driven from Milan.

1247 Revolt of Parma against Frederick, who besieges the town.

1248 Frederick raises the siege of Parma. Revolution in Florence places the city in Ghibelline hands.

1249 The Bolognese defeat Enzio at Fossalta. He is imprisoned for the rest of his life. Ezzelino da Romano takes Belluno and the marquisate of Este.

1250 The Florentines free themselves from Ghibelline rule. They establish the signoria. With death of Frederick, the great power of the emperors in Italy comes to an end.

1251 The Florentines recall the Guelf exiles and wage war on neighbouring cities to compel them to serve under the Guelf banner.

1252 The first florin coined at Florence.

1254 The Florentine “Year of Victories.” Many triumphs over the Tuscan cities.

1256 The marquis Azzo recovers Este and captures Padua.

1258 The Ghibelline leaders exiled from Florence.

1259 Defeat and capture of Ezzelino da Romano at the bridge of Cassano. He dies of his wounds.

1260 The Ghibellines headed by Manfred win a great victory at Montaperti. They regain Florence. The popular government is abolished. One composed of nobles swearing allegiance to Manfred is substituted.

1264 By this time the head of the Della Torre family holds the office of lord of the people in Milan, and other Lombard cities have conferred the same title upon him. The office has become hereditary, and we have the beginnings of the future duchy of Milan. The pope, jealous of the Della Torre’s growing power, appoints Otto Visconti, of a powerful local family, archbishop of Milan. The people refuse to receive him and are excommunicated by the pope. Beginning of the Della Torre-Visconti feud. The Pelavicini are now predominant in the valley of the Po and the Della Scala in the Veronese March.

1266 After Charles of Anjou’s victories in the south, the Florentines destroy their Ghibelline government.

1267 The Florentines intrust the signoria to Charles of Anjou for ten years. Their constitution is restored. The Ghibelline cities in the north go to Conradin’s assistance.

1269 Charles summons a diet of all Lombard cities at Cremona. Some confer the signoria on him; others offer him an alliance. He calls himself imperial vicar. The pope becomes jealous of Charles’ power.

1270 The Doria and Spinola families obtain control of Genoa and support the Ghibellines. War between Bologna and Venice.

1277 The pope forces Charles to resign the title of imperial vicar. The Visconti obtain the ascendency in Milan and henceforth rule the city.

1280 The count of Savoy takes up his residence in Turin. Faenza becomes subject to Bologna.

1282 War breaks out between Pisa and Genoa.

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1284 Disastrous naval defeat of the Pisans by the Genoese, off the island of Meloria. The power of Pisa is broken. Ugolino della Gherardesca made captain-general of Pisa. He makes a disgraceful peace with the Guelfs.

1288 Deposition of Ugolino, who is starved to death. The marquis of Este is elected lord of Modena.

1292 Guido di Montefeltro of Pisa victorious over the Florentines.

1293 Peace between Pisa and Florence. A long war breaks out between Venice and Genoa.

1296 The Ghibellines expel the Guelfs from Genoa. The Venetians seize Genoese possessions in the Crimea.

1297 The Venetians shut out membership in the Grand Council to all but members of the noble families.

1298 The Genoese destroy the Venetian fleet off the Dalmatian coast.

1299 Peace between Venice and Genoa through mediation of Matteo Visconti. It is favourable to Genoa.

1300 Florence divided between the Neri (violent Guelfs) and Bianchi (moderate Guelfs) factions. Pope Boniface VIII invites Charles of Valois to Italy to check the Bianchi.

THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Civil wars begin to decline. The despots, growing out of the captains of the people, begin to grasp the free cities.

1301 The Florentines admit Charles of Valois into the city. The Neri overcome the Bianchi and drive them out. Dante is among the expelled.

1302 The Visconti are expelled from Milan and the Della Torre return.

1304 Florence is partially burned in civil riots.

1306 The Este family lose their supremacy in Modena. The Doria are expelled from Genoa.

1308 Domestic feuds in the Este family. The Venetians assist one of them to take Ferrara.

1309 The papal legate expels the Estes from Ferrara. It is governed for the pope by King Robert of Naples, the Guelf leader.

1310 Henry VII of Luxemburg enters Italy. He confers title of imperial vicar on the reigning lords of the Lombard towns. The Venetians establish the Council of Ten.

1311 Henry receives the iron crown of Lombardy. The Guelfs driven from Milan and the Visconti restored. General Guelf uprising against Henry. Unsuccessful siege of Brescia. The Genoese confer absolute authority over the city upon Henry for twenty years.

1312 Henry withdraws from an attack on Florence.

1313 Death of Henry as he is preparing to attack Robert. Henry’s visit has afforded the despots a means of consolidating their power. The Visconti rule in Milan, the Scaligeri in Verona, the Carraresi in Padua. Uguccione dà Faggiuola in Lucca. The Ghibellines keep up the struggle in Pisa, Lucca, and other places.

1315 Uguccione wins many victories over the Guelfs in Lombardy and Tuscany.

1317 The Este family is restored in Ferrara. Civil war in Genoa.

1318 Robert saves Genoa from the Ghibellines and is made ruler of the city for ten years.

1319 The Ghibellines renew attack on Genoa after Robert’s departure. Brescia accepts a governor from Robert.

1320 Unsuccessful attempt of Philip of Valois to crush the Visconti.

1321 The Ghibellines at Genoa defeat an army sent against them by Robert. Siege of Cremona by Galeazzo Visconti.

1322 Surrender of Cremona to Galeazzo. His brother Marco defeats the papal and Neapolitan army. Excommunication of the Visconti family. Frederick of Austria refuses to take part in the strife.

1323 The papal army captures Alessandria and Tortona. It is driven from Milan by the Visconti with the help of Ludwig of Bavaria, who is excommunicated for giving his assistance. Massacre of the Pisans in Sardinia by the Aragonese.

1324 Galeazzo defeats the papal and Neapolitan army at Monza. Robert refuses to make peace.

1325 Castruccio Castracani of Lucca makes himself lord of Pistoia and with the Visconti attacks Florence.

1326 The Pisans abandon Sardinia to the Aragonese. The Florentines make Charles, son of Robert, governor of the city in return for the promise of Robert’s assistance against Castracani.

1327 Ludwig IV of Germany receives the Lombard crown at Milan. He imprisons Galeazzo Visconti.

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1328 Death of Castracani. Ludwig seizes Pisa and sells Lucca. Death of the Guelf leader. Carlo Luigi di Gonzaga makes himself master of Mantua, and assumes title of imperial vicar. Padua submits to Can Grande della Scala. Ludwig liberates Galeazzo Visconti, who dies.

1329 Treviso submits to Can Grande della Scala, who dies shortly afterward. Ludwig returns to Germany. His attempts to establish the Ghibellines in Germany have ended in failure in Italy.

1330 John, king of Bohemia, comes to Italy to assume the leadership of the Ghibellines. He receives the sovereignty of Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and other republics. Azzo Visconti nominally cedes to him the lordship of Milan. John reconciles the Guelf and Ghibelline factions in these cities.

1332 Jealous of John’s power the Della Scala and Visconti unite with the Guelfs of Florence against him, in consequence of which

1333 John leaves Italy. The Estes repulse an attack of the papal army on Ferrara.

1334 The papal legate loses Bologna.

1335 After many disputes the Lombard Ghibellines take possession of the cities abandoned by John. Lucca, which has been allotted to Florence, is seized by Mastino della Scala and war results, in which Florence is unsuccessful. Alliance of Florence and Venice against Mastino. The Visconti regain Como and Crema. The Doria and Spinola families again triumphant in Genoa.

1337 Padua taken from Mastino by Florence and Venice and given to the Guelf family of Carrara. The Venetians capture Treviso and other cities, their first Italian possessions beyond the Lagune. Taddeo de’ Pepoli makes himself master of Bologna.

1338 Florence and Venice make peace with Mastino della Scala who allies himself with the Ghibellines.

1339 The Genoese, disgusted with the government of their signoria, replace it by a single chief, Boccanera, who takes title of doge. First appearance of the Free Companies in Italy.

1341 Mastino attempts to sell Lucca to the Florentines. This alarms the Pisans, who raise an army and seize Lucca.

1342 The Florentines having taken a sudden fancy to Walter de Brienne, duke of Athens, who is in Florence on his way to France, make him their lord for life.

1343 Disgusted with his selfish administration the Florentines expel the duke of Athens and regain their freedom. Werner forms the “Great Company.”

1344 The Genoese expel their doge and elect one from the nobility.

1345 Mediation of Lucchino Visconti in Genoa’s civil troubles.

1346 Revolt of Zara suppressed by the Venetians. Parma and Piacenza submit to Lucchino Visconti.

1347 Rienzi made tribune in Rome.

1348 The great plague in Italy.

1350 War breaks out between Venice and Genoa over the seizure of some Venetian ships by the Genoese. The Pepoli cede Bologna to Giovanni Visconti, brother and successor of Lucchino.

1351 Giovanni Visconti makes an unwarranted attack on the Tuscan cities. The Florentines drive his army back. The Genoese fleet under Paganino Doria wins many victories on the Adriatic and in Negropont.

1352 Defeat of the Venetians and Aragonese by the Genoese in the Bosporus. The Eastern emperor gives the Genoese the entire command of the Black Sea.

1353 Fra Moriale organises his free company. Genoa allies herself with Hungary. After a disastrous defeat by Venice and Aragon off the Sardinian coast, she gives up to Giovanni Visconti who refits the fleet which

1354 destroys that of Venice in the Morea. Death of Giovanni Visconti; he is succeeded by his three nephews. Charles IV of Germany arrives in Italy and refuses to join the Visconti. Rienzi returns to Rome from exile. He is made senator, abuses his power and is killed.

1355 Conspiracy of Marino Falieri, doge of Venice. He is beheaded. Charles IV received by Pisa and Siena, who pay dearly for their hospitality. Venice makes peace with Genoa. The Raspanti restored in Pisa. The Genoese take Tripoli with the help of Venice.

1356 The Genoese throw off the yoke of the Visconti. League of north Italian lords goes to war with the Visconti. The marquis of Montferrat takes Asti from them. Louis of Hungary renews struggle with Venice. Jacopo de’ Bussolari delivers Pavia from the Visconti.

1357 Zara, Spalato, and other towns lost to Louis by Venice. The league assisted by Count Lando’s Free Company defeats the Visconti on the Oglio. The Raspanti party in Pisa at instigation of the Visconti begins to annoy the Florentines.

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1358 Peace between the Visconti and the league. The Venetians abandon Istria and Dalmatia to Louis. The Visconti again besiege Pavia. The Florentines defeat the Great Company.

1359 Pavia capitulates to Galeazzo Visconti. Siege of Bologna by Barnabò Visconti.

1360 Cardinal Albornoz takes Bologna and Barnabò Visconti is finally driven away. Chair of Greek literature founded at Florence.

1361 Barnabò Visconti renews the siege of Bologna. Sir John Hawkwood invited into Italy. Foundation of the University of Pavia by Galeazzo Visconti.

1363 Defeats for the Visconti in several places. Sir John Hawkwood and his company enter service of Pisa. Pisa defeats Florence.

1364 The Visconti make peace with the league. Peace between Pisa and Florence. Giovanni Agnello is made doge of Pisa.

1367 Formation of a new league against the Visconti. It includes the emperor, the king of Hungary, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, and Naples. Barnabò threatens Venice.

1368 Charles IV enters Italy. The Visconti pay him a large sum for peace. Barnabò Visconti invades Mantua.

1369 Charles returns to Germany. Pisa receives its freedom. Barnabò makes war on Florence, which is assisted by the pope.

1370 Lucca buys its independence from the emperor. Galeazzo Visconti takes Casale. The Florentines capture San Miniato. The Eastern emperor Joannes V held in Venice for debt.

1371 Barnabò Visconti captures Reggio.

1372 War breaks out between Venice and Genoa.

1373 Venice makes war on Padua, which is compelled to accept humiliating peace. Genoa attacks Cyprus, restoring it to the house of Lusignan.

1375 Truce between the Visconti and their enemies. The papal legate sends Sir John Hawkwood against the Florentines, who vow vengeance on the holy see and the French legates. They unite with Barnabò Visconti against the church and admit Siena, Pisa, and Lucca into the league, and form the “eight of war.” Eighty cities and towns throw off the yoke of the legate.

1377 The papal forces punish Faenza and Cesena severely. The league engages Sir John Hawkwood. It begins to break up. Bologna makes peace with the pope.

1378 Barnabò makes secret negotiations to betray Florence to the pope. Florence makes peace with Rome. The Venetians besiege the Genoese in Cyprus. Defeat of the Genoese fleet off Antium. Revolt in Florence. Sedition of the ciompi. Silvestro de’ Medici chosen gonfalonier. Death of Galeazzo Visconti, succeeded by his son Gian Galeazzo.

1379 The Venetian fleet almost annihilated by the Genoese off Pola. Pietro Doria captures Chioggia and attacks Venice. Siege of Treviso by Francesco da Carrara. The town is relieved by Barnabò Visconti.

1380 The Genoese surrender to the Venetians and make treaty of peace.

1381 Venice cedes Treviso to Duke Leopold of Austria to save it from Francesco da Carrara, who has again laid siege to it. Treaty of Turin. The Albizzi assume the government of Florence.

1384 Leopold of Austria sells Treviso to Francesco da Carrara.

1385 “The Reformers” driven out of Siena. Gian Galeazzo has his uncle Barnabò put to death, and takes possession of his dominions, making many reforms. He thus becomes the most powerful ruler in Italy. The Milan cathedral is started.

1387 Gian Galeazzo, having made an alliance with Francesco da Carrara of Padua whom Antonio della Scala of Verona is attacking on behalf of the Venetians, seizes Verona and Vicenza, the latter of which he refuses to give Carrara as promised. He now offers himself to the Venetians against Padua.

1388 Galeazzo takes Padua, holds it, captures Treviso, and threatens Venice. He makes many unsuccessful attempts on the Tuscan cities. Nice joined to Savoy.

1389 Florence makes alliance with Bologna against Gian Galeazzo engaging Sir John Hawkwood.

1390 Gian Galeazzo attacks Bologna. He is resisted by Hawkwood. Francesco Novello da Carrara, assisted by the duke of Bavaria, takes Padua from Gian Galeazzo. The Florentines engage the count of Armagnac to invade Lombardy.

1391 Armagnac defeated at Alessandria.

1392 Florence makes peace with Gian Galeazzo. At instigation of Gian Galeazzo, Jacopo Appiano murders Piero Gambacorti, the ruler of Pisa, and makes himself master of the city.

1393 Civil war in Genoa.

1394 Death of Sir John Hawkwood.

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1395 Gian Galeazzo purchases from the emperor Wencelaus the title of duke of Milan, and count of Pavia with the investiture of the twenty-six cities once included in the Lombard League. The title is to be hereditary.

1396 The Genoese ask the protection of France.

1397 Gian Galeazzo renews war against Florence and Mantua.

1398 The French governor of Genoa is compelled to retire on account of civil discord in the city. Ten years’ peace between Gian Galeazzo and Florence and Mantua.

1399 The son of Jacopo Appiano sells Pisa to Gian Galeazzo, reserving Piombino for himself. Gian Galeazzo receives promise of surrender from Siena.

1400 Perugia submits to Gian Galeazzo. Paolo Guinigi usurps sovereignty of Lucca and places himself under Gian Galeazzo’s protection.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

1401 Rupert of Germany enters Italy to suppress Gian Galeazzo, but is defeated. Gian Galeazzo proclaimed sovereign lord of Bologna.

1402 Gian Galeazzo dies of the plague. He divides his possessions between his two young sons Giovanni Maria (duke of Milan) and Filippo Maria (count of Pavia) under the care of their mother Caterina and the condottieri in his service. The latter place themselves at the head of various cities. The Guelfs and Ghibellines recover power in many places.

1403 The dominions of Gian Galeazzo begin to break up. Bologna and Perugia are restored to the papal states. Siena places herself under the protection of Florence. The Venetians defeat a French and Genoese fleet.

1404 Francesco Novello da Carrara seizes Verona from the Visconti. Venice takes Vicenza and leagues with Francesco di Gonzaga of Mantua to take Verona from the lord of Padua. Caterina Visconti imprisoned and poisoned.

1405 The Venetians with the lord of Mantua capture Verona and Padua. Jean Boucicault, French governor of Genoa, to whom the Pisans have given the protection of their cities, offers to sell it to Florence. The Pisans resist, and war with Florence results.

1406 Francesco da Carrara and his sons executed at Venice. Pisa surrenders to Florence.

1408 Ladislaus of Naples attacks Tuscany, ravages Arezzo and Siena, and seizes Cortona.

1409 Florence, in alarm at Ladislaus’ ambitions, calls on Louis of Anjou to prosecute his claim to Naples. Boucicault attempts to take Milan. During his absence the Genoese drive the French from their city. Louis returns to Provence.

1410 The Florentine army under Braccio da Montone occupies Rome. Ladislaus accepts offers of peace.

1411 War breaks out between Hungary and Venice.

1412 The Milanese murder the cruel Giovanni Maria Visconti. Filippo Maria seizes the city and marries the widow of Facino Cane. The Venetians drive the Hungarians from Treviso and regain part of Friuli.

1416 Amadeus VIII joins Piedmont to Savoy.

1417 Muzio Attendolo Sforza, in the pay of Naples, drives Braccio da Montone and the Florentine army from Rome.

1418 Filippo Maria has his wife executed.

1419 The Milanese general, Francesco Carmagnola, recovers Bergamo for Filippo Maria.

1420 Carmagnola recovers Parma, Cremona, and Brescia for Milan. The Venetians recover Dalmatia and Friuli from the Hungarians.

1421 Genoa submits to Carmagnola, but reserves her liberties.

1424 Filippo Maria defeats the Florentines. Disgrace of Carmagnola.

1425 Continued defeats of the Florentines. Venice unites with Florence and employs Carmagnola.

1426 Florence, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Siena, Savoy, and Naples unite against Filippo Maria. Francesco Sforza, son of Muzio Attendolo, enters his service. Carmagnola takes Brescia from Milan.

1427 The Venetians destroy a fleet collected by Filippo Maria to conquer Mantua and Ferrara. Carmagnola defeats badly the duke of Milan’s army near Macalo. Savoy withdraws from the league and receives territory from Filippo Maria.

1428 Peace made between Milan and the allies. The Florentines attack and take possession of Lucca.

1430 Niccolo Piccinino, the Milanese general, drives the Florentines from Lucca. Venice and Florence reunite against Milan and the war recommences.

1431 Francesco Sforza defeats Carmagnola at Soncino. The Milanese destroy the Venetian fleet. The marquis of Montferrat is defeated by Sforza. The allied fleets defeat the Genoese.

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1432 The signoria of Venice suspect Carmagnola’s loyalty. They invite him to Venice and behead him. Sigismund sells the title of marquis of Mantua to Giovanni di Gonzaga.

1433 Francesco Sforza occupies the March of Ancona, which the pope cedes to him the following year. Peace of Ferrara between Milan and the allies. Treaty between Sigismund and Siena and Florence. Rinaldo degli Albizzi, head of the oligarchy of Florence, imprisons and banishes Cosmo de’ Medici, the leader of the opposition.

1434 The Florentines recall Cosmo de’ Medici and place him at the head of the government. The banished Albizzi flee to Milan and persuade the duke to make war on Florence.

1435 Filippo Maria leagues with Alfonso of Naples against the pope. The Genoese throw off the protection of Milan and restore their independent government.

1436 Renewal of the league between Florence and Venice against Milan. Genoa joins it. Francesco Sforza enters the service of the allies.

1438 Sforza returns to the duke of Milan, who has promised him his daughter in marriage.

1439 The duke of Milan fails to keep his promise and Sforza returns to the allies. He is successful against Milan.

1441 Peace made between Milan and the allies. Sforza marries Filippo Maria’s daughter. Venice acquires the principality of Ravenna.

1443 Pope Eugenius IV plots to wrest the March of Ancona from Sforza. Alfonso of Naples and the duke of Milan aid him. Sforza defeats Piccinino at Monteloro.

1444 Sforza holds out against the alliance, which presses him hard.

1446 Florence and Venice go to the aid of Sforza.

1447 Sforza loses the March of Ancona. Death of Filippo Maria. The duchy is claimed by Alfonso of Naples, the duke of Orleans, and by Sforza. Milan and other Lombard cities restore their independence, but Sforza makes himself master of Milan and captures Piacenza. Other cities submit to him.

1448 Sforza goes to war with Venice. He takes a large portion of their territory, burns their fleet, and wins a great victory at Caravaggio; then makes an alliance with Venice against Milan, which is afraid of his treachery and shuts him out of the city.

1449 The Venetians, realising Sforza’s schemes to enslave Italy, desert him and join the Milanese. Sforza besieges Milan.

1450 The Milanese finally decide to admit Sforza and recognise him as their duke.

1452 Sforza, having made alliance with Florence, Genoa, and Mantua, goes to war with Venice. Frederick III sells Borso d’Este, Reggio, and the duchy of Modena.

1454 Pope Nicholas V brings about the Peace of Lodi, signed by Milan and Venice.

1455 Alfonso of Naples signs the Peace of Lodi, and joins with the pope and the north Italian states in a league against the Turks.

1457 Genoa and Naples go to war. The Council of Ten in Naples deposes the great doge Francesco Foscari, who dies of grief.

1458 The Neapolitans besiege Genoa. Cosmo de’ Medici and Lucas Pitti plan to force despot rule upon Florence.

1461 The Genoese free themselves from Naples.

1462 The Venetians ally themselves with Matthias Corvinus against the Turks.

1463 Venice purchases Cervia from Malatesta IV.

1464 Sforza obtains control of Genoa. Death of Cosmo de’ Medici. His son Piero succeeds to the presidency of Florence.

1466 The Pitti family is defeated in its attempt to subjugate Florence. The Alberti party is banished. Death of Francesco Sforza. His son Galeazzo Maria succeeds. He misgoverns the duchy and alienates the people from him.

1469 Death of Piero de’ Medici. His sons Lorenzo and Giuliano succeed, but the governing power remains in the hands of the five citizens who exercised it under Piero.

1470 The Turks take Negropont in Eubœa from the Venetians. Florence, Modena, Milan, Naples, and the pope form a holy league against the Turks. Venice and the knights of Rhodes make alliance with the sultan of Persia for the same purpose. The conspiracy of Nardi against the Medici.

1471 The pope confers the duchy of Ferrara upon Borso d’Este.

1472 The fleet of the Holy League drives the Turks from the Grecian archipelago and ravages Smyrna.

1473 The Turks reach the borders of Friuli.

1475 The Venetians garrison the island of Cyprus. The Turks capture the Genoese ports in the Crimea.

1476 Conspiracy at Ferrara in favour of Niccolo d’Este. It fails. Assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza at Milan, the result of the Olgiate conspiracy. His son Giovanni Galeazzo Maria succeeds under regency of his mother.

1477 Revolt of Matteo de’ Fieschi at Genoa.

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1478 The Pazzi conspiracy in Florence, aided by Sixtus IV. Giuliano is murdered. Lorenzo, wounded, escapes. The people massacre most of the conspirators, among them the archbishop of Pisa, for which deed Sixtus excommunicates Florence. The pope, and Naples, and other Italian states begin war on Florence. The Genoese restore their government.

1479 Venice makes peace with the Turks, giving up Scutari and fortresses in Illyria and the Morea. Sixtus IV induces the Swiss to declare war on Milan. They win a victory at Giornico. Defeat of the Florentines by the Neapolitans at Poggio Imperiale. The situation of Lorenzo becomes critical. The pope demands his expulsion from Florence. He goes to Naples. Lodovico Sforza (Il Moro), uncle of the young Giovanni Galeazzo Maria, undertakes the government of Milan.

1480 Lorenzo makes treaty with Ferdinand of Naples. On return to Florence he makes the yoke more oppressive. The pope in fear of the Turks, who have landed in Italy, becomes reconciled to Lorenzo and makes treaty with him.

1481 All states of Italy (Venice excepted) unite against the Turks and recover Otranto, lost the previous year. Sixtus and the Venetians attempt to seize Ferrara and divide it between them.

1482 Milan, Florence, and Naples form a league to prevent Venice and the pope from carrying out their designs.

1483 Sixtus now sides with the league and excommunicates Venice for persisting in the attack on Ferrara.

1484 Peace of Bagnolo between Ferrara and Venice; the former gives up some of her possessions.

1485 Innocent VIII begins a war upon Florence, but makes peace the following year.

1487 Lorenzo de’ Medici wrests Sarzana from the Genoese, who put themselves again under Milan’s protection.

1489 Galeotto Manfredi, lord of Faenza, stabbed by his wife as he is about to sell his principality to the Venetians. Savonarola arrives in Florence and begins to preach reform in the church.

1492 Death of Lorenzo de’ Medici. His son Piero succeeds.

1493 Lodovico il Moro, wishing to retain his power in Milan, plots to get rid of his enemy the king of Naples, and invites Charles VIII of France to revive the Angevin claim to Naples.

1494 The emperor Maximilian makes Lodovico duke of Milan. Giovanni Galeazzo Maria banished to Pavia. Alfonso II of Naples attacks Genoa but is defeated by the Swiss. Charles VIII enters Italy. Sudden and mysterious death of Giovanni Galeazzo Maria. Charles enters Tuscany. Piero surrenders Sarzana and offers to give up Pisa and other cities. The people rise and drive Piero out of Florence. Charles grants the Pisans their liberty and proceeds to Rome.

1495 Lodovico, alarmed at Charles’ success, forms a league against him, with the pope, the emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand of Spain, in Venice. Charles leaves Naples and with difficulty returns to France. Formation of the Grand Council by advice of Savonarola to govern Florence.

1496 Maximilian comes to Italy with an army, but returns to Germany after a quarrel with Venice. Florence attempts to regain Pisa.

1498 The Venetians and Florentines struggle for the possession of Pisa. Milan aids the Florentines. Execution of Savonarola. Death of Charles VIII in France. His successor, Louis XII, takes title of duke of Milan and claims the duchy.

1499 Louis makes a treaty with the Venetians for the conquest of Milan. The French army enters Italy. Flight of Lodovico il Moro to Germany. Louis XII enters Milan. The rest of Lombardy submits. Genoa comes under French protection. The Florentines tire of the war with Pisa and make peace.

1500 The Milanese tire of the oppressive French. Lodovico returns with an army. Como, Milan, Parma, and Pavia open their gates. Novara taken after a siege. Lodovico is betrayed at Novara into the hands of Louis de la Trémouille, the French general, and sent to France in captivity. Milan again subject to the French. The French army marches to Naples.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

1501 Cesare Borgia begins his conquest of the petty states of Romagna. He takes Pesaro, Rimini, Forlì, and Faenza.

1502 Cesare seizes the duchy of Urbino with the aid of Louis. He wars with the Orsini and plans to capture Pisa, and marries his sister Lucrezia to the son of the duke of Ferrara. The Florentines create the office of gonfalonier for life.

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1503 At death of Pope Alexander VI the dominions of Cesare are taken from him by Julius II. Venice seizes Faenza and Rimini, which enrages the pope. The Venetians make peace with the Turks, renouncing their possessions in the Peloponnesus. Death of Piero de’ Medici with the French army in Naples. Pietro Soderini chosen gonfalonier of Florence.

1504 Louis signs treaty of Blois with Maximilian, in which they propose to divide the republic of Venice between them. Florence makes another attempt to take Pisa.

1506 Julius II attacks Perugia and Bologna.

1507 Unable to endure the yoke of the French and their own nobles, the Genoese drive out the French and restore the republic. Louis at once captures Genoa and puts the doge and other prominent citizens to death.

1508 Unsuccessful invasion of Italy by Maximilian. The Venetians defeat him and he is compelled to make truce, yielding them Trieste. The infamous League of Cambray formed by the pope, the emperor, Spain, and France against Venice. Savoy, Mantua, and Ferrara also join.

1509 France declares war on Venice. The Venetians, badly defeated at Agnadello, give up their possessions in northern Italy. The Venetians regain Padua. The Florentines capture Pisa.

1510 Julius begins to fear his foreign allies and resolves to drive the barbarians from Italy with the aid of the Swiss. He absolves the Venetians and pits the Spanish against the French. The French are attacked in Genoa, Modena, and Verona.

1511 Julius captures Mirandola; the French take Bologna from him. Julius forms the holy league with the Spaniards, English, Swiss, and Venetians against France.

1512 Gaston de Foix relieves the French, besieged in Bologna by the Spaniards; retakes Brescia, and fights a great battle at Ravenna with the pope and his allies, in which he is killed. Maximilian abandons the French. The Swiss occupy Milan and restore Massimiliano Sforza, son of Lodovico. The pope regains Bologna and Ferrara, and seizes Parma and Piacenza from the Milanese. The Medici return to Florence and resume their former position. Genoa expels the French. Italy passes from the yoke of France to that of the Swiss, Spaniards, and Germans.

1513 Giovanni de’ Medici becomes Pope Leo X. Alliance between the Venetians and the French. The latter enter the duchy of Milan, but are defeated by the Swiss mercenaries at Novara. The Spaniards attack Venice on behalf of Maximilian, and occupy Verona, Padua, and Vicenza, acting with great cruelty.

1514 The French are driven out of their last fortresses in Italy.

1515 Francis I, the new French king, asserts his claim to Milan, recovers Genoa, and badly defeats the Swiss at Marignano. He enters Milan, and the Swiss leave Italy forever, after making peace with Francis. Massimiliano Sforza abdicates. Venice captures Bergamo and Peschiera. Peace between Francis and Leo. The latter gives up Parma and Piacenza.

1516 The Venetians capture Brescia and lay siege to Verona. Treaty of Noyon between Francis and Charles I of Spain. Maximilian agrees to it. By its terms Venice recovers all the territory taken from her by the League of Cambray.

1517 Verona restored to Venice. France and Venice renew their alliance. Leo turns the duke of Urbino out of his duchy and gives it to Lorenzo de’ Medici.

1518 Treaty of peace signed between Maximilian and Venice.

1519 Death of Lorenzo. The pope annexes Urbino to his states and attempts to seize Ferrara. Charles V succeeds to the imperial title.

1521 Leo makes treaty with Charles to drive the French from Italy. The allies enter Milan; the Sforza are restored. Death of Leo stops attempts on Ferrara.

1522 The French, defeated, evacuate Lombardy, but retain Genoa, which is pillaged by the Spaniards.

1524 The French attempt to recover Lombardy. Francis besieges Pavia.

1525 Battle of Pavia. Defeat and capture of Francis. The way for Spanish dominion is opened in Italy. The marquis of Pescara betrays the Sforza party into the hands of the emperor.

1526 Francis, liberated, treats with the pope, the Venetians, and Francesco Sforza, to deliver Italy from the Spaniards. Surrender of Sforza and Milan to the Spaniards. The constable De Bourbon leads the imperial forces to Rome.

1527 Capture and sack of Rome by the Spaniards. The pope a prisoner, escapes to Orvieto. The Florentines restore their republican government and drive Alessandro de’ Medici from the city. A French army under Lautrec enters Lombardy, conquers Pavia, Genoa, and many other cities. The duke of Ferrara seizes Modena, and the Venetians Ravenna.

1528 Andrea Doria drives the French from Genoa, and re-establishes the republic.

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1529 Treaty of Barcelona between Charles and the pope, restoring the Medici to Florence. Peace of Cambray between Francis and Charles, in which France relinquishes all claims on Italy to Spain. Francesco Sforza and the duke of Ferrara submit to Charles. Venice gives up Ravenna and Cervia to the pope. The republics of Lucca, Genoa, and Siena make themselves dependent on Charles. The marquis of Montferrat and the duke of Savoy join the Spanish party and the former is made duke.

1530 Charles crowned king of Italy and emperor at Bologna. Fall of Florence before the imperial army, after a brave defence by Francesco Ferrucci. End of the republic. Charles decides the papal claims on Ferrara in favour of Alfonso d’Este.

1531 Return of Alessandro de’ Medici to Florence with title of duke of Cività di Penne, obtained from the emperor. The pope relinquishes Modena to Alfonso and makes him duke of Ferrara.

1535 On death of Francesco Sforza, Charles takes possession of the duchy of Milan and makes his son Philip governor. For this act France again attempts to gain a foothold in Italy and sends an army into Savoy.

1536 Capture of Turin by the French. Sack and burning of Nice. Montferrat is given to the duke of Mantua.

1537 Assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici. Cosmo of the younger branch is made duke.

1538 League of Genoa and Venice against the Turks. Andrea Doria breaks the alliance and is defeated by the Algerine corsair Barbarossa.

1540 Peace between Venice and the Turks; all the former’s possessions in the Morea are given up. Paul III forms the Society of Jesus.

1545 Pope Paul III makes Parma and Piacenza into a duchy for his son Pier Luigi Farnese.

1546 Cosmo thwarts the plot of Francesco Burlamacchi of Lucca to restore the liberty of the Tuscan republics. Burlamacchi executed at Milan.

1547 Gian Luigi de’ Fieschi, with the aid of the French, forms a conspiracy to throw off the yoke of the Spaniards and Andrea Doria. Genoa is seized, but Fieschi is drowned and the Doria remain in control. The duke of Parma is assassinated. The imperial troops seize Piacenza; the pope seizes Parma.

1552 Pope Julius III gives Parma back to Pier Luigi’s son, Ottavio. The Sienese drive out the Spanish garrison and admit a French one.

1553 The French, aided by the Turks, capture a portion of Corsica from the Genoese, most of which Andrea Doria recovers the following year.

1554 Cosmo de’ Medici makes a sudden attack on Siena. The marquis of Marignano undertakes to reduce the city.

1555 Surrender of Siena after a siege of fifteen months. The Spaniards take possession. Pope Paul IV induces Henry II of France to break his treaty of peace with Spain. The duke of Alva invades the papal states. The duke of Guise and the pope oppose him.

1557 The duke of Alva forces the French to retreat. The pope makes peace with the Spaniards. Philip gives Cosmo full sovereignty over Siena.

1559 The French-Spanish war terminated by the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. It leaves the king of Spain undisputed lord of Italy. Savoy and Piedmont (except a few towns) are restored to Emmanuel Philibert. The only remaining republics are Venice, Genoa, Lucca, and San Marino. Venice alone is of any importance.

1562 Turin and four other towns are restored by the French to Emmanuel Philibert. He transfers his capital to Turin, and his house becomes thoroughly Italian.

1569 Pope Pius V makes Cosmo de’ Medici grand duke of Tuscany. The emperor protests.

1570 The Turks take Cyprus from the Venetians.

1571 The combined fleets of Venice, Spain, the pope, and the knights of Malta, defeat the Turks in the Gulf of Lepanto. This victory delivers Italy from the infidel, but the allies do not follow it up.

1573 Venice is forced to make peace with the Turks. She gives up Cyprus and pays a large tribute.

1575 The emperor acknowledges the title of grand duke of Tuscany.

1576 Great devastation made by the plague in Italy.

1578 Failure of a conspiracy at Florence against the grand duke of Tuscany.

1580 Charles Emmanuel succeeds his father as duke of Savoy.

1582 Charles Emmanuel fails in an attempt to capture Genoa.

1586 Death of Ottavio Farnese, duke of Parma. His son Alessandro succeeds.

1588 The duke of Savoy taking advantage of Francis’ distracted condition, conquers Saluzzo.

1589 The duke of Savoy invades Provence.

1590 The French drive Charles Emmanuel from Provence.

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1597 Death of Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara. Pope Clement VIII claims his dominions (Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio) from his kinsman and heir, Cesare d’Este. France sides with the pope, and Spain with the duke.

1598 Cesare gives up Ferrara to the pope and retires to Modena and Reggio, where he rules as duke.

1600 Henry IV of France proceeds against the duke of Savoy.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

1601 Peace of Lyons between Henry IV and Charles Emmanuel. The latter is allowed to keep Saluzzo, but gives up Bresse, Bugey, and the Pays de Gex, his possessions in Burgundy.

1606 Pope Paul V attempts to compel Venice to acknowledge his ecclesiastical supremacy. Hitherto the Venetians have recognised no chief above their own patriarch. They prepare for war with the pope. Henry IV mediates. The Venetians in a veiled manner admit the papal supremacy, but refuse to readmit the Jesuits, and the pope removes the interdiction.

1613 On the death of Francesco, the duke of Mantua and Montferrat, his brother Ferdinand succeeds. Charles Emmanuel invades Montferrat on behalf of his daughter, the late duke’s widow. Philip III of Spain orders him to evacuate the duchy and the duke of Savoy goes to war with Spain.

1615 The Spanish governor of Milan attacks Charles Emmanuel. Venice and the imperial party come to hostilities over the piracies of the Uscochi, subjects of the empire.

1617 Venice makes alliance with the Dutch.

1618 Conspiracy of Don Pedro de Toledo, governor of Milan, the duke of Osuna, and the marquis of Bedmar to destroy Venice. It is betrayed to the Council of Ten and thwarted.

1620 The Catholics in the Grisons revolt against the Protestant government. Philip III sends the governor of Milan to help the Catholics. He occupies the Valtelline.

1624 France, Savoy, and Venice unite against Spain in the war in the Grisons.

1625 The duke of Savoy and a French army make an attempt to capture Genoa. The Germans and Spaniards invade Savoy and the duke is obliged to abandon the siege.

1626 On the death of the last of the Della Rovere family the duchy of Urbino is annexed to the papal states.

1627 On the death of the duke of Mantua, Charles Emmanuel again seizes Montferrat.

1628 France and Venice oppose the duke of Savoy. Spain and Austria assist him. The Spaniards seize Casale. Plot of Vachero and others in Genoa to place the city under the protection of Charles Emmanuel. It is discovered and its leader executed.

1629 Treaty of Susa between France and Savoy. Spain and the emperor refuse to ratify it.

1630 Death of Charles Emmanuel, succeeded by his son Victor Amadeus I. The imperial army seizes Mantua.

1631 The Montferrat question settled by the treaty of Cherasco. Mantua and Montferrat are given to Charles, duke of Nevers. Savoy gets a small portion of Montferrat and Pinerolo is ceded to France.

1637 On death of Victor Amadeus a contest over the regency for his young son, Charles Emmanuel II, begins.

1639 Capture of Turin by Prince Thomas of Savoy in the contest for the regency.

1642 The duke’s mother Christina obtains the regency of Savoy under the protection of France. This leads to the implication of Italy in the wars of Louis XIII with Germany and Spain. Civil war breaks out in Italy. The ducal families take the side of Spain.

1645 War breaks out between Venice and the Turks. The latter seize a portion of Candia.

1651 The Venetians win a great naval victory from the Turks near Scio.

1655 The Spaniards besiege Reggio without success. Prince Thomas of Savoy and the duke of Modena with a French army fail in an attempt to capture Pavia. Naval victory of the Venetians over the Turks in the Dardanelles.

1656 Continued naval victories of the Venetians; they hire mercenaries from the pope, and admit the Jesuits into their city.

1659 The wars of Louis XIV and Spain ended by the treaty of the Pyrenees. France retains possession of Pinerolo.

1669 After a long siege the Turks take Candia from the Venetians. Crete is lost.

1670 After a long reign Ferdinand II, grand duke of Tuscany, dies, succeeded by his son Cosmo III.

1675 Death of Charles Emmanuel II of Savoy. Victor Amadeus II succeeds.

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1684 The French fleet bombards Genoa, whose citizens have refused to allow Louis XIV to establish a depot at Savona. Venice, encouraged by Sobieski’s victories over the Turks, leagues with the emperor and the Poles against them.

1685 The doge of Genoa and four senators go to Paris to apologise and make terms with Louis XIV. The Venetians under Francesco Morosini take many towns in the Morea from the Turks.

1686 The duke of Savoy forbids all religions but the Catholic to exist in Savoy.

1687 The Venetians complete the conquest of the Morea. They seize Lepanto, Corinth, and Athens.

1690 Toleration of the Protestants is restored in Savoy, which joins the league against France. The French take Saluzzo and other territory from Savoy.

1691 The progress of the French in Savoy is stopped by a German army. Continued success of the Venetians in Greece.

1694 Siege of Casale by the duke of Savoy.

1695 The war with the Turks begins to turn against the Venetians.

1696 The duke of Savoy makes peace with France, which gives up Pinerolo to him.

1699 Treaty of Karlowitz between Venice and the Turks. The former is confirmed in her conquests in Greece.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1701 The war of the Spanish Succession is begun in Italy. Tuscany and Mantua side with the French. Prince Eugene of Savoy defeats the French army.

1702 Prince Eugene captures Cremona and besieges Mantua. The duke of Vendôme drives him off. Victory of the French and Spaniards at Santa Vittoria.

1704 The duke of Savoy goes over to the Austrian side. The French are supreme in Savoy and Modena.

1706 Battle of Turin and great defeat of the French, who lose all their conquests in Italy. The duke of Savoy recovers his possessions and obtains Montferrat. Charles III is proclaimed king of Spain.

1708 The emperor Joseph I claims the duchy of Mantua on the death of the last duke. The pope attempts to resist, but is overcome and submits to Joseph’s claim.

1713 The Peace of Utrecht. For his services in the war of the Spanish Succession, Victor Amadeus II receives Sicily with the title of king and is crowned at Palermo. The emperor Charles receives Milan, Mantua, Sardinia, and Naples. Italy passes from the power of Spain to that of Austria.

1714 The pope lays claim to Sicily and issues a bull against Victor Amadeus, who ignores it. Philip V marries Elizabeth Farnese, which makes him heir to Parma and Piacenza, and a claimant of Tuscany.

1715 The Turks go to war with the Venetians and reconquer the Morea.

1716 The emperor assists the Venetians. Prince Eugene captures Temesvar. The combined fleet captures Santa Maura.

1717 In the dispute with Austria over the succession to the grand duchy of Tuscany, Philip V of Spain unexpectedly conquers Sardinia. The allied armies make headway against the Turks.

1718 The Quadruple Alliance—Great Britain, France, Austria, and the Netherlands—formed against Philip, to take Lombardy from him. War with the Turks ended by the Peace of Passarowitz. Venice gives up the struggle against the infidels after five hundred years. She is now in full decline and takes no part in the eighteenth-century wars. The Spaniards invade Sicily.

1719 The Spaniards defeated and driven off from Messina. They leave the island.

1720 Philip agrees to the terms of the Quadruple Alliance. For his adherence to Philip, Victor Amadeus is compelled to exchange Sicily for Sardinia, and his realm is henceforth called the kingdom of Sardinia. Sicily is reunited to Naples.

1723 Gian Gastone succeeds to the grand duchy of Tuscany.

1730 Victor Amadeus abdicates in favour of his son, Charles Emmanuel III. The Corsicans revolt against the Genoese to rid themselves of tyranny.

1731 Death of the last duke of Parma. Don Charles of Spain succeeds. Victor Amadeus attempts to regain his crown, but is defeated by Charles Emmanuel and imprisoned in the castle of Rimini, where he dies in 1732. Charles Emmanuel destroys all temporal power of the pope in his realm.

1733 The war of the Polish Succession begins. France makes alliance with Spain and Sardinia. They plan to drive the Austrians from Italy; to establish Don Charles on the throne of the Two Sicilies and in the duchies; and to give Milan to Charles Emmanuel. The latter seizes Milan.

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1734 Victory of Charles Emmanuel at Guastalla.

1735 Don Charles goes to Sicily and is crowned king.

1737 Death of Gian Gastone, grand duke of Tuscany, the last of the Medici.

1738 The Treaty of Vienna settles the disputes of the war of the Polish Succession. Duke Francis of Lorraine receives Tuscany. Parma and Piacenza are given to Austria, which keeps Milan and Mantua. Don Charles acknowledged king of the Two Sicilies. Charles Emmanuel acquires Novara, and Tortona is separated from Milan.

1740 War of the Austrian Succession begins. The Bourbon houses of Spain, France, and the Sicilies oppose the Habsburg-Lorraine party in the succession of Maria Theresa.

1741 Charles Emmanuel joins the Habsburg cause.

1742 The king of Sardinia attacks Reggio and Modena. The Spanish army invades Savoy, but is driven back.

1743 The Sardinians defeated by the French and Spaniards, who seize Parma and Milan. Francis of Lorraine, elected emperor, sends an Austrian army against them.

1745 Defeat of the French and Spaniards by the king of Sardinia and the Austrians at Piacenza. The Genoese compelled to admit the Austrians into the city, but they afterwards expel them.

1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the war, and redivides Italy. Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla are made into a duchy for Don Philip, brother of Charles III of the Two Sicilies. The Austrians keep Milan and Tuscany. Venice, Lucca, and San Marino remain free, so does Genoa, but, with the duchy of Modena, it is placed under the protection of France. Until the French Revolution Italy ceases to be a matter of dispute between the European nations.

1755 Pasquale Paoli takes command of the Corsicans in their continued struggle to free themselves from Genoa. He plans to establish a republic in the island.

1765 Death of the emperor Francis. Tuscany, which, since his assumption of the emperorship, has been practically an Austrian province, is given to his son Leopold and becomes a separate state once more.

1768 Genoa, wearied of the struggle with Corsica, cedes it to France.

1773 Death of Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia, succeeded by his son, Victor Amadeus III.

1790 Leopold, succeeding to the empire, makes his son, Ferdinand III, grand duke of Tuscany.

1792 The French army captures Savoy and Nice and makes them part of the republic.

1793 Victor Amadeus joins the alliance against France.

1796 The French army under Napoleon Bonaparte crosses the Alps. Victor Amadeus surrenders his claim to Savoy and Nice, and gives up Alessandria and Tortona after Bonaparte’s many victories. The French invade the Austrian dominions and enter Milan. Bonaparte enters Bologna and founds the Cispadane Republic, with Bologna as capital. Death of Victor Amadeus, succeeded by his son, Charles Emmanuel IV. Defeat of the Austrians at Arcola.

1797 Defeat of the Austrians at Rivoli completes conquest of Lombardy. Mantua surrenders to Bonaparte. He declares war on Venice and enters the city. Revolt against the republican party in Genoa; Bonaparte interferes and establishes the Ligurian Republic. He forms Lombardy, Parma, Modena, the papal state of Bologna, Ferrara, Romagna, and part of Venice into the Cisalpine Republic, with capital at Milan. Treaty of Campo-Formio recognises the new republics and gives the remainder of Venice to Austria.

1798 The French army enters Rome and forms the Tiberine Republic. Pope Pius VI sent a captive to France. The French take Piedmont and Charles Emmanuel retires to Sardinia.

1799 The French garrison gives up Rome to the English. The French directory declares war against Austria and Tuscany. The allies under Kay and Suvarroff defeat the French many times in northern Italy. Milan is taken. The Austrians take Ancona and Coni.

1800 Bonaparte recovers his lost possessions in Italy. Battle of Marengo. Genoa and Tuscany given up to Bonaparte.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1801 Bonaparte deposes Ferdinand III; makes Tuscany into the kingdom of Etruria, and gives it to Louis, son of the duke of Parma.

1802 The Cisalpine becomes the Italian Republic and Bonaparte is president. Piedmont annexed to France. Charles Emmanuel abdicates in favour of his brother Victor Emmanuel I.

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1803 Death of Louis of Etruria. His wife, Maria Louisa, rules as regent for his young son, Charles Louis.

1805 The emperor Napoleon makes the Italian Republic into a kingdom and is crowned king; Eugène Beauharnais viceroy. The Ligurian Republic is annexed to France. Lucca is made a principality, and with the kingdom of Etruria given to Elisa Bonaparte.

1806 By the conditions of the Peace of Pressburg the Venetian possessions of Austria are added to the kingdom of Italy. Pauline Bonaparte cedes Guastalla to the kingdom.

1807 Elisa Bonaparte cedes Etruria to the kingdom of Italy.

1809 Napoleon seizes the papal states and occupies Rome. He is excommunicated by the pope.

1810 The papal states are added to the French Empire.

1814 The English capture Genoa. The pope returns to Rome by Napoleon’s permission. Fall of Napoleon. Genoa, instigated by England, makes a vain attempt to restore the Ligurian Republic.

1815 By the Treaty of Paris and Congress of Vienna, Victor Emmanuel I receives back the kingdom of Sardinia with the addition of Genoa. Venice and Milan are formed into the Lombardo-Venetian province of Austria. Lucca is given to the Parmesan Bourbons who are to recover Parma and Piacenza at the death of Maria Louisa, Napoleon’s wife, to whom they are allotted as a duchy. Ferdinand III is restored to Tuscany, and he is to receive Lucca when the Parmesan house takes possession of its own territory. Francis IV is made duke of Modena and he is to receive Lunigiana from the grand duke of Tuscany when the latter takes possession of Lucca. The papal states are restored to Pope Pius VII. San Marino remains undisturbed, the only Italian republic. Murat drives the pope from Rome, but is defeated and escapes to Corsica. All the Italian sovereigns are in strict alliance with Austria through whose influence they hold their thrones.

1821 The people of Turin and Alessandria demand constitutional governments, and war with Austria. Rather than grant any concession Victor Emmanuel abdicates in favour of his brother Charles Felix. The movement is suppressed by Austria.

1824 Leopold II succeeds as grand duke of Tuscany.

1825 By Charles Felix’s order the poor in his kingdom are forbidden instruction in reading and writing.

1830 Duke Francis of Modena intrigues with the liberal party, in an attempt to obtain the succession to Sardinia.

1831 Revolt of Ciro Menotti in Modena. Francis deserts the liberals. The duke of Modena and the duchess of Parma forced to flee. Republican revolt in Romagna against the pope. He calls on Austria for aid, which is given. The duke of Modena and duchess of Parma are restored; the revolt in Romagna put down. Execution of Menotti and his companions. Disappointment of the liberals in not receiving help from France. Mazzini founds the “Young Italy” party. Death of Charles Felix and the end of the elder branch. Charles Albert of the Savoy-Carignano line succeeds. Mazzini calls on him to defy Austria.

1832 The French, jealous of the Austrian garrisons in the papal states, seize Ancona.

1833 Mazzini makes a raid on Savoy. It fails and he flees to England.

1837 Charles Albert issues a new code for his kingdom.

1838 The French and Austrians withdraw their garrisons from the papal states.

1844 Revolt of the Bandiera at Cosenza.

1846 Cardinal Mastai Ferretti is elected pope (Pius IX). He declares himself a liberal and begins a new policy of reform. The Austrians remonstrate.

1847 Pius forms the national guard in his states. The Austrians seize Ferrara. Charles Albert turns from the Austrian party and declares for reform and the liberation of Italy. Death of the duchess of Parma. The Bourbons return from Lucca, which is added to Tuscany.

1848 Metternich refuses to grant any of the demanded reforms in Lombardo-Venetia. Following the example of Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, the king of Sardinia, the grand duke of Tuscany, and the pope, grant their people liberal constitutions. The revolutionary troubles in Vienna and Hungary incite Lombardo-Venetia to insurrection. The Milanese drive Marshal Radetzky and the Austrian troops out of the city. Other cities join the Milanese. The duke of Modena flees. Venice rises against the Austrians. They leave the city, and a provincial form of government is set up under Daniele Manin. Charles Albert declares war on Austria. Peschiera surrenders to him and he defeats Radetzky at Goito. Lombardo-Venetia votes for annexation to Sardinia. Charles Albert is badly defeated by Radetzky at Custozza and makes armistice. The Austrians re-enter Milan. All the provinces except[663] Venice return to Austrian rule. Insurrection in Rome. Assassination of the pope’s minister, Count Rossi. Pius flees to Gaeta.

1849 Revolt in Tuscany; the grand duke flees to Gaeta and a provincial government is set up in Florence. A republic is declared in Rome with Mazzini at the head. Gioberti retires and Rattazzi assumes the leadership of the democratic party in Piedmont. The war with Austria is renewed and Charles Albert is completely defeated by Radetzky at Novara. He abdicates in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II. Genoa attempts to restore the republic, but the revolt is put down. The French, jealous of Austria’s power, send an army to restore the pope. Rome is defended by Garibaldi, but is forced to capitulate. The French garrison the city and declare for the papal government. The Florentines recall Leopold, and the duke of Modena returns. Venice surrenders to the Austrians. Treaty of peace between Sardinia and Austria. Italy’s struggle for liberty is crushed.

1850 The pope returns to Rome. His policy is now entirely against reform. The Siccardi law, abolishing ecclesiastical courts and privileges, passed in Piedmont. Reform progresses quickly under Victor Emmanuel.

1853 Count d’Azeglio resigns office of chief minister in Piedmont; succeeded by Count Cavour, who allies himself with Rattazzi and the democratic party. He begins his work for the unification of Italy.

1855 Sardinia makes alliance with England and France against Russia. A Sardinian army is sent to the Crimea.

1856 At Congress of Paris, Cavour lays the grievances of Italy before the European powers and obtains assurance of Napoleon III’s assistance.

1858 Cavour meets Napoleon at Plombières and arranges for a Franco-Italian war against Austria.

1859 Austria demands disarmament of Sardinia. France and Sardinia declare war. Napoleon declares he will free Italy. Romagna frees itself from the pope. A revolt in Tuscany causes the grand duke to flee. Battle of Magenta forces the Austrians out of Lombardy. Great victory of the allies at Solferino. Peace of Villafranca. Austria gives up western Lombardy to Sardinia. The exiled dukes are to be restored. Fear of Prussia deters Napoleon from carrying out his high purpose, and he simply agrees to an Italian confederation of which Austria, as ruler of Venice, will be a member. Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and Romagna, object to the confederation and ask for annexation to Sardinia, which decides Victor Emmanuel not to agree to Napoleon’s plan.

1860 Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and Romagna vote to become subject to Sardinia. Napoleon agrees to this in return for the cession of Savoy and Nice to France. Garibaldi liberates southern Italy. The people of the Two Sicilies vote for annexation to Sardinia. Umbria and the Marches also annexed. Only Rome and Venice remain to be liberated.

1861 First Italian parliament at Turin. Victor Emmanuel declared king of Italy. Death of Cavour.

1862 Garibaldi invades Sicily with a volunteer army. Owing to objections from France, the Italian ministry is forced to oppose him. He is defeated and wounded at Aspromonte.

1864 The September convention. Napoleon agrees to a gradual withdrawal of the French troops from Rome. Victor Emmanuel promises not to attack the pope’s territory. Florence is made the capital of Italy.

1866 The Prusso-Austrian war breaks out. Alliance of Italy and Prussia. The Italian army is defeated several times, but after the Prussian victory of Königgrätz (Sadowa) Austria cedes Venice to France. Treaty of Vienna. Venice with the Quadrilateral of fortresses (Verona, Legnago, Peschiera, and Mantua) is given to Italy. Austria keeps the Istrian and Dalmatian provinces. The withdrawal of the French troops from Rome is completed.

1867 Mazzini urges the Italian people to seize Rome. Garibaldi makes the attempt. He defeats the papal troops at Monte Rotondo. Victor Emmanuel pleads to have his agreement to the September convention respected. The French regarrison Rome. Garibaldi surrenders to the French and papal forces at Mentana, and is arrested by the Italian government.

1870 The French leave Rome at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Mazzini incites the republicans to seize Rome. He is arrested and imprisoned at Gaeta. The fall of Napoleon III releases Victor Emmanuel from the agreement of the September convention and he enters Rome. The pope appeals in vain to the king of Prussia and retires to the Vatican. The papal territories are annexed, and the unity of Italy is complete.

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1871 The capital of Italy transferred to Rome.

1874 The Jesuits are ordered to leave Italy. Garibaldi enters the chamber of deputies and takes the oath of allegiance.

1878 Death of Victor Emmanuel, succeeded by his son Humbert.

1882 Death of Garibaldi.

1885 Italy assumes the government of Massowah.

1887 Formation of the “Triple Alliance” between Italy, Germany, and Austria. War begins in Massowah.

1888 Italy annexes Massowah. War with the Abyssinians begins.

1891 Treaty with Great Britain concerning the boundaries of territories in East Africa. Renewal of the Triple Alliance. Commercial treaty with Austria and Germany. Dispute with the United States over the massacre of eleven Italian prisoners at New Orleans.

1892 Indemnity paid by the United States. Diplomatic relations renewed.

1893 The Aigues-Mortes riots. The bank scandals.

1895 Treaty with France respecting Tunis. Disastrous defeat of the Italians at Adowa in Abyssinia. Treaty of peace with Abyssinia recognising independence of Ethiopia.

1898 Bread riots in many places owing to rise of prices. An Italian fleet attempts to enforce payment of the award to Signor Cerruti for robbery and imprisonment by Colombia. The matter is peacefully adjusted.

1900 Assassination of Humbert. His son Victor Emmanuel III succeeds.

1903 Italy allied with England and Germany to enforce payment of debt by Venezuela. The matter is settled by arbitration. Death of pope Leo XIII; cardinal Sarto succeeds as Pius X.

THE KINGDOM OF THE TWO SICILIES

The Hohenstaufens (1198-1266 A.D.)

1198 Frederick II, son of the emperor Henry VI who has conquered Sicily from the Normans, crowned king of Sicily (Frederick I of Sicily) with his mother Constanza as regent. Death of Constanza. Pope Innocent III assumes the guardianship of Frederick, aged four.

1200 Innocent sends an army to Sicily which defeats Markwald, who has claimed the guardianship of Frederick.

1201 Markwald, regent of Sicily. He dies and is succeeded by Capparone. Sicily continues to be the prey of rebellious nobles and adventurers.

1208 Frederick takes up the reins of government.

1210 The emperor Otto IV threatens to invade Sicily, which he claims as part of the empire.

1211 Innocent excommunicates Otto and offers the crown of Germany to Frederick.

1212 Frederick leaves Sicily to dispute the German crown with Otto. He is crowned king of Germany at Mainz. Civil disorders recommence in Sicily.

1215 Innocent crowns Frederick king of Germany at Aachen.

1220 Frederick crowned emperor at Rome. He returns to Sicily and transfers a large colony of Saracens from the mountains to Nocera.

1231 Frederick has a compilation made of the Norman laws and ordinances.

1233 Frederick revisits Sicily to quell the republican pretensions of the eastern cities.

1243 Saracen revolt in the mountainous districts.

1250 At Frederick’s death the crown passes to his son, Conrad king of the Romans. In Conrad’s absence his natural brother Manfred is regent.

1251 Innocent IV, in his attempts to further the cause of William of Holland, excommunicates Conrad, and incites rebellions in Sicily and southern Italy. Manfred puts them down.

1252 Innocent rejects offers of peace from Conrad, who then attacks the pope. Capua is captured and Naples besieged.

1253 Surrender of Naples to Conrad. Innocent offers Richard, earl of Cornwall, the crown of Sicily, but he declines it.

1254 Death of Conrad; his son Conradin, two years of age, succeeds him. Manfred retains the regency. He opposes the papal forces which have advanced into Apulia, and defeats them at Foggia. Manfred takes Nocera.

1255 The citizens of Messina expel the papal governor. The legate, having lost a large convoy, agrees to peace with Manfred. Pope Alexander IV, who has offered the crown of Sicily to Prince Edmund of England, refuses to ratify the peace. The English parliament will not vote funds to enable Edmund to take the Sicilian throne.

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1256 Manfred drives the papal authorities from Sicily and makes himself supreme there.

1258 On false rumour of Conradin’s death Manfred is crowned at Palermo. He assumes the leadership of the Ghibellines in Italy.

1259 Alexander IV excommunicates Manfred.

1260 Manfred sends aid to the exiled Ghibellines of Florence, enabling them to win the battle of Montaperti.

1263 Pope Urban IV offers Sicily and Apulia to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France.

1264 The pope proclaims a crusade against Manfred.

1265 Charles of Anjou is crowned king of Sicily at Rome by the pope. With an army of crusaders he proceeds against Manfred.

The House of Anjou (1266-1282 A.D.)

1266 Defeat and death of Manfred at battle of Benevento. Charles I acknowledged king. He enters Naples in triumph. The seat of government is transferred from Palermo to Naples. Charles at once makes himself unpopular by his oppression.

1267 The pope makes Charles ruler of Tuscany and the citizens of Florence offer him the signoria for ten years. The Ghibellines induce Conradin to enter Italy and proceed against Charles.

1268 Defeat and capture of Conradin at the battle of Tagliacozzo. Conradin beheaded at Naples. This disaster crushes the hopes of the Ghibellines in Italy. Louis IX and Pope Clement IV protest against Charles’ cruelties.

1269 Charles captures Nocera and scatters the Saracen population.

1270 Charles joins Louis IX at Tunis in the last crusade. After death of Louis, Charles makes treaty with the ruler of Tunis and exacts tribute. The French and Genoese fleets, returning, are wrecked on the coast of Sicily. Charles seizes the ships and plunders them for his own benefit.

1274 The Genoese, who have united with the citizens of other Italian cities to resist the cruelties of Charles, defeat his fleet.

1275 Pedro of Aragon, husband of Manfred’s daughter Constanza, begins his attempt to gain the Sicilian throne.

1277 Charles assumes the government of the principality of Achaia. He plans to attack the Eastern Empire, but the pope forbids him to do so.

1281 The agitation in Sicily against Charles incited by Pedro of Aragon and his emissary Giovanni di Procida reaches a high pitch. The Byzantine emperor Michael also contributes to it.

1282 The Sicilian Vespers. Massacre of the French in Sicily. Charles lays siege to Messina. Pedro arrives and forces him to retire to Calabria. Pedro proclaimed king of Sicily. The pope excommunicates him. The kingdom is separated.

FIRST SEPARATION OF THE KINGDOM

Naples (House of Anjou, and the Pretenders of the Second House of Anjou) (1282-1435 A.D.)

The term “kingdom of Naples” is here used merely for convenience. It was never officially employed except by Philip, son of Charles V, and later by Joseph Bonaparte and Murat. The continental portion of the Two Sicilies was always known as “Sicily on this side the Pharos,” referring to the lighthouse at Messina; the island portion was called “Sicily beyond the Pharos.” So there were often two Sicilian kingdoms and two kings of Sicily.

1283 Capture of Reggio by Pedro.

1284 Capture of Charles’ son Charles, prince of Salerno, by the Aragonese admiral Roger de Lauria, in a sea-fight off Naples. He is sent to Aragon a prisoner.

1285 Death of Charles I. His son, Charles II, still a prisoner, is acknowledged king at Naples.

1287 Roger of Artois, regent of Naples, attempts to recover Sicily, but Roger de Lauria destroys his fleet.

1288 Charles is liberated by the terms of a treaty between Aragon and France. He assumes the throne of Naples but resigns that of Sicily.

1289 Charles is released by the pope from his resignation of the Sicilian crown. A two years’ truce is effected between Naples and Sicily.

1292 Defeat of the Neapolitans by Roger de Lauria in Calabria.

1296 The Sicilians invade Calabria, and take Squillace and other places.

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1297 The pope invests Robert duke of Calabria with Sardinia and Corsica.

1300 Siege of Messina by Robert. Disease compels him to abandon it.

1309 Death of Charles, succeeded by his son Robert the Wise. He assumes the government of Ferrara as viceroy of the pope.

1312 Robert, in an attempt to prevent the coronation of Henry VII, seizes the principal fortresses of Rome.

1314 The pope makes Robert senator of Rome and viceroy of Naples. Robert fails in an attempt to capture Sicily. He makes a three years’ truce.

1317 Robert’s garrison is expelled from Ferrara.

1318 Robert relieves the Ghibelline siege of Genoa and is appointed governor for ten years.

1322 Durazzo restored to the kingdom of Naples.

1325 Robert fails in an attempt to capture Palermo.

1338 Another attempt of Robert on Sicily ends in failure.

1343 Death of Robert, succeeded by his granddaughter Joanna I. Her husband, Andrew of Hungary, is not crowned with her. He allows his Hungarian followers to usurp all political power.

1345 Murder of Andrew of Hungary perhaps by order of Joanna. His cousin, the duke of Durazzo, incites the Neapolitans against the queen.

1347 King Louis of Hungary invades Naples to avenge his brother’s death. Joanna flees to Avignon with her lover, Louis of Tarentum, and marries him. She resigns her claims on Sicily and makes treaty with the Sicilian king, Louis.

1348 Louis of Hungary holds Naples. He has the duke of Durazzo put to death. The plague compels Louis to return to Hungary and he takes Andrew’s son with him. Avignon is sold by Joanna to the pope who gives Louis of Tarentum the title of king. Joanna and Louis return to Naples. Louis takes the Free Company, headed by Werner, into his employ.

1349 Werner deserts Louis for the Hungarians.

1350 Louis of Hungary again invades Naples.

1351 Peace between Joanna and Louis of Hungary, who leaves Naples.

1353 Niccolo Acciajuoli successfully invades Sicily and captures Palermo and other towns for the kingdom of Naples.

1357 Rebellion of the duke of Durazzo. Acciajuoli returns to Naples.

1358 The duke of Durazzo’s rebellion is ended by his reconciliation with the crown.

1362 Death of Louis of Naples. Joanna marries James of Majorca, but he does not assume the title of king.

1365 Death of Niccolo Acciajuoli. The king of Sicily recovers Palermo and Messina.

1372 Peace between Naples and Sicily.

1375 Death of James of Majorca.

1376 Joanna marries Otto, duke of Brunswick, who does not assume the royal title.

1378 Joanna supports Clement VII against Urban VI.

1379 Urban proclaims a crusade against Clement and Joanna. He induces Charles of Durazzo, Joanna’s heir, to attempt conquest of Naples. To thwart him Joanna adopts Louis of Anjou, and makes him her heir.

1380 Excommunication of Joanna.

1381 Conquest of Naples by Charles (III) of Durazzo, who takes throne and imprisons Joanna and her husband. Clement gives Joanna’s Provençal dominions to duke Louis of Anjou.

1382 Louis of Anjou as Joanna’s heir attacks Charles, who puts Joanna to death and takes Sir John Hawkwood into his service.

1384 Death of the pretender Louis I and disbandment of his army. He leaves his claim to his son, Louis II. Excommunication of Charles, who besieges the pope in Nocera.

1386 Charles, invited to take the Hungarian throne, leaves Naples to his young son Ladislaus, under the regency of the latter’s mother, Margaret. Charles assassinated in Hungary. The pope gives the crown of Naples to Louis of Anjou.

1387 Contests in Naples between the supporters of Ladislaus and Louis. This struggle continues for many years, wrecks the kingdom, and destroys its influence in Italy.

1388 Urban marches upon Naples with an army to subdue the factions. He is injured and his army disbands.

1389 Louis II is crowned king of Naples by the anti-pope Clement at Avignon.

1397 Ladislaus recovers some of the territory that Louis has occupied.

1399 Ladislaus recovers the city of Naples, and Louis returns to Provence.

1408 Ladislaus takes possession of Rome.

1409 The adherents of Pope Alexander V expel Ladislaus from Rome, and invite Louis of Anjou to prosecute his claim to Naples.

1410 Louis’ fleet on the way to Naples is totally defeated by the Genoese allies of Ladislaus.

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1411 Excommunication of Ladislaus by Pope John XXIII. Louis defeats Ladislaus at Roccasecca, but from want of supplies is obliged to return to Provence.

1412 Ladislaus concludes a treaty of peace with John XXIII.

1413 Ladislaus again takes possession of Rome and most of the papal states.

1414 Death of Ladislaus. He is succeeded by his sister Joanna II. The Neapolitan army leaves Rome, retaining only the castle of St. Angelo.

1415 Joanna marries Jacques de Bourbon, who takes all authority from her.

1416 Joanna regains her power. Muzio Attendolo Sforza, her constable, whom Jacques has imprisoned, is liberated and his position is restored.

1417 Sforza expels Braccio from Rome. Death of Louis II. His son Louis III succeeds as pretender.

1419 Sforza recovers Spoleto from Braccio. Jacques de Bourbon returns to France.

1420 Joanna makes Alfonso of Aragon her heir. She asks his protection against Louis III, who is urged by pope Martin to seize the throne of Naples.

1422 Alfonso threatens to recognise the anti-pope, and the pope ceases his hostilities. Sforza and Braccio unite to defend Naples.

1423 Joanna quarrels with Alfonso. She annuls the adoption and substitutes Louis of Anjou in his place. War with Aragon breaks out. The Genoese go to the assistance of Naples.

1424 The Genoese take Naples for Queen Joanna. Death of Muzio Attendolo Sforza. His son Francesco succeeds to the leadership of the Neapolitan forces. Death of Braccio.

1425 Francesco Sforza leaves the Neapolitans and enters service of the duke of Milan.

1434 Death of Louis III. Joanna adopts his brother René as her heir.

1435 Death of Joanna. René of Anjou succeeds, but Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily claims the kingdom. The Visconti and Genoese uphold René, who is a prisoner in the hands of the duke of Burgundy.

Sicily (House of Aragon) (1282-1435 A.D.)

1282 After Pedro III of Aragon (Pedro I of Sicily) drives Charles of Naples out of Sicily, a parliament at Palermo chooses him king. The pope excommunicates him and his people.

1283 Pedro obliged to return to Aragon, which the pope has given to Charles of Valois. He leaves the island to his wife Constanza and his great admiral Roger de Lauria, who prosecutes the war against Charles and wins a victory off Malta.

1284 Roger de Lauria captures the son of Charles and sends him to Aragon.

1285 Death of Pedro. Aragon and Sicily are separated. Pedro’s second son James I receives Sicily. Roger de Lauria captures Gallipoli and Tarentum.

1287 Roger de Lauria destroys the fleet prepared by Robert of Artois, regent of Naples, for the conquest of Sicily.

1289 Siege of Gaeta by Roger de Lauria. Two years’ truce between Naples and Sicily.

1291 James returns to Aragon to succeed his brother Alfonso as king, leaving his younger brother Frederick regent in Sicily. The Sicilians seize some territory in Calabria.

1292 Roger de Lauria defeats the Neapolitans and then invades the Eastern Empire and takes Scios.

1295 James of Aragon becomes reconciled to the pope; the French claim on Aragon is annulled, and James binds himself by the treaty of Agnani to restore Sicily to the Angevins. Frederick and Constanza prepare to prevent this.

1296 Frederick II crowned king of Sicily. The Sicilians are excommunicated, and invade Calabria.

1297 Roger de Lauria captures Otranto. He then deserts the Sicilians and goes over to James of Aragon, who promises the pope to make war on Frederick.

1298 Roger di Flor enters Frederick’s service.

1299 James of Aragon besieges Syracuse, and the duke of Calabria invades Sicily with some success. Great victory of the Sicilians at Falconara.

1300 The duke of Calabria besieges Messina. Disease ravages his army and he is obliged to withdraw.

1302 A treaty of peace concluded between Charles II of Naples and Frederick. The latter receives title of king of Trinacria for life, and Charles has undisputed right to that of king of Sicily. Frederick is to marry Charles’ daughter. The terms of the treaty are not meant to be carried out, and Frederick resumes the title of king of Sicily.

1303 Roger di Flor forms the Catalan Grand Company out of his Sicilian mercenaries.

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1313 Alliance of Frederick with the emperor Henry VII against the pope and Robert of Naples.

1314 Sicily is attacked by Robert, who agrees to a three years’ truce.

1317 Robert again attacks Sicily and makes another truce.

1325 Robert attacks Sicily for the third time, but is obliged to return to Naples after an attempt to capture Palermo.

1337 Death of Frederick. His son Pedro II succeeds. The kingdom sinks into obscurity.

1338 Robert fails in a fourth attack on Sicily.

1339 Robert takes the Lipari Islands from Sicily.

1342 Death of Pedro. His son Luis succeeds under the regency of Pedro’s brother Juan.

1354 Niccolo Acciajuoli, grand seneschal of Naples, successfully invades Sicily on behalf of Queen Joanna. He captures Palermo and other territory.

1355 Death of Luis. His younger brother Frederick III succeeds, and to the duchy of Athens as well.

1357 Acciajuoli returns to Naples.

1365 Frederick recovers the territory seized by Acciajuoli on the latter’s death.

1372 Treaty of peace between Naples and Sicily.

1376 Death of Frederick, succeeded by his daughter Maria and her husband Martin I, son of Martin of Aragon.

1386 Nerio Acciajuoli, governor of Corinth, seizes the duchy of Athens.

1402 Death of Maria; Martin sole sovereign.

1409 Martin goes to Sardinia for his father to quell an insurrection. He dies. His father Martin II succeeds. Sicily is united to Aragon with Martin I’s second wife Blanche of Navarre as regent.

1410 Death of Martin, the last of his line. The thrones of Aragon and Sicily remain vacant until

1412 when the succession is decided in favour of Ferdinand (I) the Just, regent of Castile.

1416 Death of Ferdinand, succeeded by his son Alfonso (I) the Magnanimous. He is a man of cultivated tastes and great liberality.

1432 Alfonso arrives in Sicily with a fleet to force his claim to the succession of Naples. In 1420 Queen Joanna made him her heir, but in 1423 annulled the adoption.

1435 On death of Joanna, Alfonso besieges Gaeta. Naval battle of Ponza. Alfonso and his brother captured by the Genoese allies of René. They are sent as prisoners to Milan, where Alfonso pleads his cause so successfully that Filippo Maria Visconti, who fears the French influence, withdraws his support from René, releases Alfonso and recognises him as the successor to Joanna. Surrender of Gaeta to Alfonso’s brother Don Pedro.

SECOND UNION (1435-1458 A.D.)

1436 Alfonso is proclaimed king at Gaeta and other places.

1438 René is released by the duke of Burgundy and arrives at Naples to prosecute his claim.

1440 Alfonso, having taken Aversa, lays siege to Naples.

1442 Surrender of Naples to Alfonso. He is now acknowledged by the whole kingdom. René returns to Provence.

1443 Alfonso acknowledged by Pope Felix V. He attempts to wrest the March of Ancona for the pope from Francesco Sforza, and involves himself in a war with the Italian states. Florence and Venice side with Sforza.

1447 Alfonso claims the duchy of Milan on death of Filippo Maria Visconti.

1450 Alfonso makes peace with Florence and Venice.

1455 Alfonso joins the Holy League against the Turks.

1457 Alfonso goes to war with Genoa.

1458 Death of Alfonso. His natural son Ferdinand I receives Naples. Sicily, with Aragon and Sardinia, goes to Alfonso’s brother Juan, king of Navarre.

SECOND SEPARATION

Naples—the Bastard Line of Aragon (1458-1503 A.D.)

1459 Ferdinand’s cruelties cause the nobles to ask the help of John, governor of Genoa, and son of René of Anjou, against the king. The terms of the Peace of Lodi prevent Francesco Sforza from lending assistance.

1460 Defeat of Ferdinand on the Sarno. The pope and Sforza now send assistance.

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1461 Scanderbeg, with a force of Albanians, comes to the assistance of Ferdinand.

1462 Ferdinand defeats John at Troja, and forces him to give up his attempt on Naples.

1470 Ferdinand joins the Holy League of the pope against the Turks.

1478 Ferdinand joins Sixtus IV in his war on the Florentines.

1479 Ferdinand makes peace with Lorenzo de’ Medici, which arouses the pope against him.

1480 The Turks capture Otranto. Sixtus and Ferdinand become reconciled.

1481 Otranto recovered from the Turks by a general league of Christian princes.

1485 Oppressed by taxation, the Neapolitan nobles revolt against Ferdinand.

1486 Innocent VIII takes the side of the Neapolitan nobles. They send for René II, duke of Lorraine, grandson of René of Anjou, with offers of the crown. René delays acceptance and the opportunity passes. Aragon, Milan, and Florence uphold Ferdinand. Lorenzo de’ Medici finally reconciles the nobles to Ferdinand, who breaks his promises and punishes them cruelly.

1492 Piero de’ Medici makes alliance with Ferdinand.

1493 Alarmed at this alliance, Lodovico (Il Moro) Sforza invites Charles VIII of France to invade Naples in the interests of the Angevin claim.

1494 Death of Ferdinand as he is preparing to resist the French invasion. His son Alfonso II succeeds. Charles enters Italy. The Neapolitan fleet is defeated off Genoa.

1495 Alfonso abdicates in favour of his son Ferdinand II and retires to a monastery. Charles enters Naples; Ferdinand flees. Lodovico now becomes alarmed at Charles’ progress and forms a league against him. Charles leaves Naples in charge of a viceroy and hurriedly returns to France. Ferdinand returns to Naples. Most of his kingdom returns to his allegiance.

1496 The viceroy dies and the French garrison leaves Naples. Venice seizes Brindisi and Otranto for debt. Death of Ferdinand, succeeded by his uncle Frederick II.

1501 Louis XII of France and Ferdinand of Spain and Sicily agree by Treaty of Granada to conquer Naples and divide it between them. The conquest is easily accomplished by the duke of Nemours and Gonsalvo de Cordova. Frederick surrenders his rights to the French king and is given the duchy of Anjou.

1502 France and Spain begin to quarrel over the partition of Naples.

1503 Ferdinand adds Naples to the kingdom of Sicily.

Sicily—the Royal Line of Aragon (1458-1503 A.D.)

1458 Juan of Aragon, hitherto known as king of Navarre, receives Sicily “beyond the Pharos,” as part of his dominions on death of his brother Alfonso. Henceforth it is ruled by viceroys.

1479 Death of Juan, succeeded by his son Ferdinand the Catholic.

1501 Treaty of Granada and conquest of Naples by Ferdinand and Louis XII.

1502 Quarrel of France and Spain over the division of Naples. The pope and Cesare Borgia side with France.

1503 Gonsalvo de Cordova wins several victories over the French, and finally utterly defeats them at Mola. The kingdoms of Sicily “on this side the Pharos” (Naples) and Sicily “beyond the Pharos” are united under Ferdinand, and the king is known as Ferdinand III.

THIRD UNION

The Royal Line of Spain (1503-1516 A.D.)

1504 Peace between France and Spain. Louis gives up all claim on Naples.

The Austro-Spanish Dynasty (1516-1700 A.D.)

1516 Death of Ferdinand. Succeeded by his grandson Charles IV (V of Germany). A revolt in Sicily is put down the following year. Sicily is used as a starting-point for the African wars.

1554 Charles gives his son Philip the title of king of Naples, on Philip’s marriage to Mary of England.

1556 Abdication of Charles V. Philip I (II of Spain) receives the Two Sicilies as part of his dominions. The kingdom becomes merely a Spanish province. Pope Paul IV wishes to drive the Spaniards from Naples and makes a league with Henry II of[670] France for that purpose. Francis, duke of Guise, grandson of René II of Lorraine, plans to obtain the crown of Naples.

1557 The duke of Guise marches on Naples and lays siege to Civitella. The duke of Alva, Philip’s viceroy, defeats him, and he retreats northward. Henry II recalls him to France.

1565 The Inquisition is in full force throughout Philip’s dominions. Reformed opinions have spread rapidly in Naples.

1598 Death of Philip, succeeded by his son Philip II (III of Spain). The national assemblies are suppressed.

1618 Osuna, viceroy of Naples, plots with the governor of Milan and Spanish ambassador at Venice, to seize the throne of the Two Sicilies and destroy Venice. The Venetian Council of Ten frustrates the plot.

1621 Death of Philip, succeeded by his son Philip III (IV of Spain). The people are heavily taxed.

1647 Insurrection of Masaniello at Naples over a tax on fruit. The duke of Arcos, the viceroy, is driven into the castle of St. Elmo. Insurrection at Palermo. The duke of Arcos makes terms with the people. Assassination of Masaniello. The revolt subsides, but soon breaks out again. Don John of Austria sent to preserve order, but is forced to withdraw. The popular leader, Gennaro Annese, sends for the duke of Guise, who readily responds. But he ignores Annese, and the latter betrays Naples to Don John. Guise is sent a prisoner to Spain. Annese put to death.

1665 Death of Philip, succeeded by his young son Charles V (II of Spain) under the regency of his mother, Maria Anna of Austria.

1672 Rising in Messina against the oppressions of the Spanish governor. He is driven from the city.

1674 The people of Messina send to Louis XIV (whom Spain has taken sides against in the Dutch war) and proclaims him king of Sicily. Louis sends a fleet to Sicily. His troops occupy Messina.

1676 French naval victories over the Dutch allies of Spain off Stromboli, Catania, and Palermo.

1678 The Dutch war settled by the peace of Nimeguen. Louis withdraws his troops from Sicily. The Sicilians are now more oppressed than ever.

1693 Great earthquake in Sicily. Messina, Catania, and Syracuse nearly destroyed by a violent eruption of Mount Etna.

1694 Great earthquake at Naples.

1700 Death of Charles. End of the Austro-Spanish dynasty. The Two Sicilies acknowledge Philip IV (V of Spain) grandson of Louis XIV.

From the End of the Austro-Spanish Dynasty to the Peace of Utrecht (1700-1713 A.D.)

1701 The emperor Leopold claims the Two Sicilies for the archduke Charles. The war of the Spanish Succession begins.

1702 Philip arrives at Naples and marches northward.

1706 After the battle of Turin the French are driven out of Italy and Charles VI is proclaimed king of the Two Sicilies.

1708 Pope Clement XI invests Charles with the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

THIRD SEPARATION (1713-1720 A.D.)

1713 Peace of Utrecht. Charles VI (now emperor Charles VI) receives the dominions of Sicily on this side the Pharos (Naples) together with Milan and Sardinia. The island of Sicily is given to Victor Amadeus of Savoy with the title of king.

1717 Philip V takes Sardinia from the Austrians.

1718 Philip invades Sicily. Victor Amadeus sides with him, hoping to acquire Lombardy. Formation of the Quadruple Alliance against Philip.

1719 Philip is driven from Sicily by the allies and negotiates for peace.

FOURTH UNION (1720-1806 A.D.)

1720 Philip accepts the terms of the alliance. Victor Amadeus is compelled to exchange Sicily for Sardinia. Charles VI is once more king of the Two Sicilies, which becomes part of the German Empire.

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1733 War of the Polish Succession begins. Philip V leagues with France and Sardinia to drive the Austrians from Italy. Philip’s son Don Charles, the duke of Parma and heir to Tuscany, is to receive the Two Sicilies.

The Bourbons (1734-1806 A.D.)

1734 Don Charles enters Naples and is proclaimed king. An army arrives from Spain to his assistance. Defeat of the Austrians at Bitonto and capture of Gaeta by Don Charles.

1735 Don Charles crosses to Italy. The island surrenders to him and he is crowned as Charles VII.

1738 The war is settled by the Treaty of Vienna. Charles VII acknowledged king of the Two Sicilies and gives up his claim to Tuscany and to Parma.

1740 Charles joins the alliance against Maria Theresa in the struggle for the Austrian succession.

1743-1748 The Two Sicilies compelled to remain neutral in the war of the Austrian Succession by the presence of a British fleet.

1759 Charles inherits the throne of Spain and resigns the Two Sicilies to his young son Ferdinand IV.

1767 The Jesuits are expelled from the kingdom.

1782 The Inquisition is abolished.

1796 Ferdinand makes a treaty of peace with the French Republic.

1798 The French army invades Neapolitan territory.

1799 Surrender of Naples. Ferdinand flees to Sicily. Naples is formed into the Parthenopæan Republic by the French. The English fleet under Nelson appears and assists a Calabrian army under Cardinal Ruffo to regain Naples and restore Ferdinand. Ruffo works a barbarous vengeance on the republicans.

1805 The emperor Napoleon makes a treaty of neutrality with Ferdinand. Terrible earthquake at Naples.

FOURTH SEPARATION

The Kingdom of Naples (1806-1815 A.D.)

1806 Napoleon forces Ferdinand to flee and makes his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Naples. He makes many reforms and starts to suppress the brigands, who under the Bourbons have overrun the kingdom. Ferdinand remains ruler of Sicily. The French defeated by the British at Maida. Queen Caroline of Sicily organises an insurrection in Calabria.

1808 Joseph Bonaparte is transferred to the throne of Spain and Joachim Murat is made king of Naples. He calls himself king Joachim Napoleon. He takes Capri from the British.

1810 Murat attempts to invade Sicily, but is prevented by the British.

1811 The guerilla warfare against the brigands ends in their almost entire extermination. This makes Murat unpopular.

1813 Murat becomes offended at Napoleon during the Russian campaign and returns to Naples.

1814 Murat makes alliance with Austria and seizes the principality of Benevento.

1815 Murat declares his intention of restoring the unity of Italy. The Austrians proceed against him and he is totally defeated at Tolentino and escapes to France. After Waterloo he goes to Corsica and attempts to regain Naples, is taken prisoner in Calabria and executed.

The Kingdom of Sicily (1806-1815 A.D.)

1806-1815 Ferdinand continues to rule in Sicily.

FIFTH UNION

The Bourbon Dynasty (1815-1860 A.D.)

1815 Ferdinand re-established in the Two Sicilies by the Congress of Vienna. He now calls himself Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and returns to his tyrannical rule.

1819 The Society of the Carbonari becomes powerful. General Pépé joins it.

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1820 Sudden revolt of the Carbonari under Pépé. Ferdinand is compelled to grant a new constitution.

1821 At conference of Laibach, the great powers decide to suppress the revolutionary movement in Naples. An Austrian army invades the kingdom; Pépé is defeated and the constitutional government overthrown.

1825 Death of Ferdinand, succeeded by his son Francis I.

1828 An insurrection of the Carbonari is suppressed.

1830 Death of Francis. His son Ferdinand II, “King Bomba,” succeeds.

1840 Settlement with England of the dispute concerning the sulphur trade.

1844 Execution of the Bandiera in Calabria.

1848 Revolutionary outbreaks begin at Palermo. Ferdinand grants a constitutional government to his subjects. Violent outbreaks in Naples. The national guard is almost annihilated by the royal troops and the lazzaroni. The constitution is withdrawn. A Neapolitan army under General Pépé marches to the assistance of Charles Albert. Ferdinand bombards Messina to bring the people to terms, and earns the sobriquet of “King Bomba.”

1849 The French and English ambassadors attempt to mediate between Ferdinand and the people of Sicily; the latter reject the offered terms. Palermo surrenders. Ferdinand sends an army to assist Pius IX, but it is badly defeated by Garibaldi at Palestrina and Velletri. The liberal leaders arrested in Naples.

1850 The liberal leaders condemned to imprisonment for life.

1855 The allied powers—England, France, and Sardinia—protest in vain to Ferdinand against his misgovernment.

1856 England and France withdraw their ambassadors from the Two Sicilies. Milano attempts to assassinate the king.

1858 Amnesty granted to political offenders.

1859 Death of Ferdinand II, succeeded by his son Francis II. Diplomatic relations resumed.

1860 The foreign ambassadors petition France for reform. A revolutionary movement begins in Palermo, Messina, and Catania. Garibaldi arrives at Marsala with five thousand volunteers from Genoa and assumes title “Dictator of Sicily.” He takes Palermo and defeats the royal troops at Milazzo. All Sicily except Messina surrenders to him. Francis promises reforms. State of siege declared at Naples. Garibaldi refuses to obey Victor Emmanuel’s command to stop. He enters Messina, and the Neapolitans agree to evacuate. Francis restores the constitution of 1848. The count of Trani is proclaimed king by the army. Garibaldi crosses to Italy and defeats the royal army at Reggio and San Giovanni. Francis flees to Gaeta, and Garibaldi enters Naples, assumes the dictatorship, and institutes reforms. He defeats the royalists on the Volturno. Victor Emmanuel enters the Abruzzi. The kingdom votes for annexation to Piedmont. The Two Sicilies is annexed to the kingdom of Italy.

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VOLUME IX
ITALY
	PAGE
Introduction. The Scope of Italian History: A Prefatory Characterisation	1
CHAPTER I
Italy in the Dark Age (476 ca.-1100 A.D.)	15
The Barbarian invaders, 17. Charlemagne and his successors, 18. The empire and the papacy, 21. The disunited municipalities, 22. The origin of Venice, 24. The origin of the dogeship, 27. Venice in the tenth century, 28. Prosperity and political reforms, 32. Other maritime cities, 35. The Lombard cities and their allies, 36. Florence, 39. Social conditions, 40. Municipal wars, 41.
CHAPTER II
Imperial Aggressions of the Twelfth Century (1152-1200 A.D.)	45
Frederick Barbarossa in Italy, 45. The siege of Crema, 50. Rival popes, 53. Imperial campaigns and reverses, 54. Frederick once more aggressive, 57. Battle of Legnano; peace of Constance, 58. Death of Frederick; his successor, 60. Growing power of the nobility, 61.
CHAPTER III
The Normans in Sicily (787-1204 A.D.)	63
The Normans in France, 65. The Normans come to Italy, 68. Capture of the pope; Robert Guiscard, 69. Conquest of Sicily; Eastern invasions, 72. Roger, great count of Sicily, 76. Roger II, 77. William the Bad (il Malo), 81. William the Good, 81. Norman influence, 83.
CHAPTER IV
The Thirteenth Century	85
Factions in Florence, 87. Frederick II crowned emperor, 90. Renewal of the Lombard League, 91. Frederick II and the Lombard League, 92. Battle of Cortenuova, 93. Pope against emperor, 94. The Guelfs expelled from Florence; battle[viii] of Fossalta, 97. Death of Frederick II: the succession, 98. The pope and the cities, 99. Florentine affairs; the Guelfs recalled, 101. Florence and Siena at war; battle of Montaperti, 102. The tyrant Ezzelino, 104. The beginning of feudal tyranny in Lombardy, 106. Perennial strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines, 108. Charles of Anjou conquers Sicily, 109. The fall of Conradin; Gregory X; Otto Visconti, 110. Ghibelline successes; the Sicilian Vespers, 112. Waning influence of king, emperor, and pope, 114. The republic of Pisa, 115. Pisa defeated by Genoa near Meloria, 116. Perfidy and fall of Ugolino, 117. Florence; the feud of the Bianchi and the Neri, 118. The pope sends Charles of Valois as conciliator, 121.
CHAPTER V
The Free Cities and the Empire (1300-1350 A.D.)	124
An emperor once more in Italy, 126. Milan seditions; Genoa and Venice at war, 128. Henry’s coronation and sudden death, 130. Rival emperors; ecclesiastical dissensions, 131. Castruccio Castracani, 133. Florence menaced, 135. The Florentine army under Raymond of Cardona, 137. Raymond temporises, 139. A brilliant skirmish, 140. Battle of Altopascio, 141. Castruccio adds insult to injury, 143. Florence in despair calls on the duke of Calabria, 144. Charles and his army, 145. The Ghibellines call on Ludwig of Bavaria, 147. Successes of Count Novello, 148. Ludwig comes to Italy, 149. Castruccio goes to Rome, 150. Castruccio’s new conquest; his sudden death, 152. Estimates of Castruccio, 153. Duke of Calabria dies; Ludwig retires, 155. Can’ Grande Della Scala, 155. John of Bohemia comes to Italy, 156. Lucca a bone of contention, 158. The duke of Athens made protector of Florence, 162. Growing unpopularity of the duke of Athens, 164. The duke driven from the city, 165. Attempted reforms, 167. War of the factions in Florence, 169. The Great Plague, 171. Boccaccio’s account of the plague in Florence, 173. Napier’s reflections on the plague, 176.
CHAPTER VI
The Vanguard of the Renaissance (ca. 1250-1400 A.D.)	178
European culture in general, 181. The universities and nascent scholarship, 183. Latin and the vernacular, 184. The master poet, and his theme, 186. Dante the man, 187. Lesser contemporaries of Dante, 190. Petrarch, 191. Early Italian prose, 194. Boccaccio, 198. Lesser contemporaries of Petrarch and Boccaccio, 202. Art in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries, 203. The Tuscan school of painters, 207. Ruskin’s estimate of Giotto’s tower, 209.
CHAPTER VII
Rome under Rienzi (1347-1354 A.D.)	211
The rise of Rienzi, 213. Lord Lytton on the speech of Rienzi, 216. Rienzi’s opponents; his friends; his proclamations, 218. Disaster succeeds victory, 220. Anarchy and jubilee in Rome, 223. Rienzi in exile; his renewed opportunity; his death, 224.[ix]
CHAPTER VIII
Despots and Tyrants of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (ca. 1309-1496 A.D.)	230
The kingdom of Naples, 231. Joanna II, 234. Alfonso the Magnanimous, 237. Ferdinand, 238. The tyrants of Lombardy, 240. Companies of adventure, 241. Florence menaced by the Visconti, 243. Charles IV in Italy, 244. The “war of Liberation,” 248. The papal schism, 249. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, 251. Filippo Maria Visconti, 257. The house of Sforza, 258.
CHAPTER IX
The Maritime Republics in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries	261
The affairs of Pisa and Genoa, 261. Naval exploits, 266. The affairs of Venice, 269. The Tiepolo conspiracy, and the council of Ten, 272. The story of Marino Falieri, 273. Venetian wars and conquests, 275. Victories of Carmagnola, 279. Death of Frescobaldi; the war ended and renewed, 284. The great naval battle on the Po, 286. The revolt of Pisa; the cruel ruse of Baldaccio, 288. The fall of Carmagnola, 289. Venice and the Turks, 293. The government of Venice, 297. The two Foscari, 301.
CHAPTER X
The Commerce of Venice	303
Venice in the Levant, 308. The commercial forebears of the Venetians, 310. Venetian glass, 315. Other manufactures, 318. The slave trade, 319. The decline of Venetian commerce, 323. The bank of Venice, 324.
CHAPTER XI
The Guilds and the Seigniory in Florence (1350-1400 A.D.)	326
Social upheavals of the middle of the fourteenth century, 327. Macchiavelli’s account of the Ciompi insurrection, 331. The eight “saints of war,” 333. Mob violence, 336. Michele di Lando, 340. Momentary peace; renewed insurrections, 343.
CHAPTER XII
Florence under the Medici (1434-1492 A.D.)	349
The rise, reverses, and power of Cosmo de’ Medici, 350. Cosmo and the revival of learning, 353. Last years of Cosmo, 356. Roscoe’s estimate of Cosmo, 359. Cosmo’s successor, 361. Piero’s sons and the conspiracies, 363. The Pazzi conspiracy, 365. Lorenzo the Magnificent in power, 370. The Florentines routed at Poggibonzi, 373. Lorenzo’s embassy to Naples, 375. Peace with honour, 376. Further papal wars, 379. Last years of Lorenzo, 386. Von Reumont’s estimate of Lorenzo, 388.[x]
CHAPTER XIII
Aspects of Later Renaissance Culture	391
Fifteenth century art, 392. Vasari’s estimate of fifteenth century art, 393. Leonardo da Vinci, 395. The end of the mediæval epoch, 398. The age of Michelangelo, 399. Michelangelo as sculptor, 402. Raphael, 403. Ariosto, 405. Machiavelli, 406.
CHAPTER XIV
The “Last Day of Italy” (1494-1530 A.D.)	408
Charles VIII; his army, 412. Charles VIII in Rome; a contemporary account, 414. Charles goes to Naples, 420. Florentine affairs; Savonarola, 421. The French in Milan, 424. The French and Spaniards in Naples, 428. Northern Italy, 429. The league of Cambray, 432. Battle of Ravenna, 435. The age of Leo X, 439. Battle of Marignano; last years of Leo, 441. Successors of Leo; Francis I and Charles V, 447. Capture and sack of Rome, 452. The fall of Florence, 458.
CHAPTER XV
The Beginning of the Age of Slavery (1530-1600 A.D.)	463
The siege and fall of Siena, 464. An Italian estimate of the abdication of Charles V, 467. Renewed hostilities; the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, 468. A Spanish account of the battle of Lepanto, 473. The general condition of Italy, 477. Pope Sixtus V; Ferdinand, grand duke of Tuscany, 478. Pope Clement VIII, 481.
CHAPTER XVI
A Century of Obscurity (1601-1700 A.D.)	484
General conditions, 485. Galileo and the church, 493. The successors of Urban VIII, 495. Lesser principalities, 498. Tuscany, 501. Piedmont and Savoy, 502. Venice, 511. Venetian wars with the Turks, 518.
CHAPTER XVII
Italy in the Eighteenth Century (1701-1800 A.D.)	524
Italy in the war of the Spanish Succession, 528. War of the Quadruple Alliance, 530. War of the Polish Succession, 532. War of the Austrian Succession, 534. Forty years of “languid peace” for divided Italy, 536. The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, 537. The states of the church, 538. The Sardinian kingdom, 540. The four republics, 541. Milan and Tuscany, 542. A Tuscan estimate of Leopold, 546. Italy in the revolutionary age, 547. Time of the French Republic under the national convention, 548. The campaign of 1796 and its consequences, 551. The expulsion of the French from Italy, 557. Bonaparte reconquers Italy, 564. The growing desire for liberty, 565.[xi]
CHAPTER XVIII
The Napoleonic Régime (1801-1815 A.D.)	566
The constitution of the republic, 567. Napoleon makes Italy a kingdom, 568. The kingdom of Naples and the papacy, 570. The islands of Sicily and Sardinia, 574. The rise of national spirit, 574. The fall of Napoleon, 576.
CHAPTER XIX
Ineffectual Struggles (1815-1848 A.D.)	578
Marriott on the Restoration, 580. Errors of the monarchy, 581. The insurrections of 1820-1821, 583. The revolutions of 1831, 585. Sassone on Mazzini and “young Italy,” 587. Fyffe’s estimate of Mazzini, 588. Symonds on the problems and the leaders, 589. Pope Pius IX and his liberal policy, 591.
CHAPTER XX
The Liberation of Italy (1848-1866 A.D.)	593
The war between Naples and Sicily, 594. Revolt against the pope; Rome a republic, 595. The French restore the pope, 597. Revolutions in Tuscany and elsewhere, 598. Charles Albert’s war with Austria, 598. Charles Albert abdicates: Victor Emmanuel II succeeds, 600. Venice fails to acquire freedom, 601. Louis Napoleon’s intervention, 603. Austria declares war: Magenta and Solferino, 603. The papacy versus unity, 606. Garibaldi drives the Bourbons from Sicily, 607. The death of Cavour and the revolt of Garibaldi, 611. Florence becomes the capital, 613. The war of 1866 and annexation of Venice, 614.
CHAPTER XXI
The Completion of Italian Unity (1867-1878 A.D.)	616
The revolt of Garibaldi, 617. The French intervene again: Mentana, October 31st, 618. The Roman question renewed, 620. Papal infallibility proclaimed, 621. Rome taken from the pope, 621. The plebiscite, 622. Rome again the capital of Italy, 624. The Minghetti ministry, 625. Death of Victor Emmanuel and Pius IX, 626.
CHAPTER XXII
Recent History (1878-1903 A.D.)	628
Irredentism, the Triple Alliance and “Trasformismo,” 630. The power of Crispi, 632. Death of King Humbert, of Crispi, and of Leo XIII, 633.
Brief Reference-List of Authorities by Chapters	635
A General Bibliography of Mediæval and Modern Italy	639
A Chronological Summary of Italian History	646

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

THE HISTORIANS’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Contributors, and Editorial Revisers.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION THE SCOPE OF ITALIAN HISTORY: A PREFATORY CHARACTERISATION

THE DARK AGE

THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER I. ITALY IN THE DARK AGE

THE BARBARIAN INVADERS

CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY

THE DISUNITED MUNICIPALITIES

THE ORIGIN OF VENICE

THE ORIGIN OF THE DOGESHIP

VENICE IN THE TENTH CENTURY

PROSPERITY AND POLITICAL REFORMS

OTHER MARITIME CITIES

THE LOMBARD CITIES AND THEIR ALLIES

FLORENCE

Social Conditions

Municipal Wars

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER II. IMPERIAL AGGRESSIONS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

FREDERICK BARBAROSSA IN ITALY

The Siege of Crema

RIVAL POPES

IMPERIAL CAMPAIGNS AND REVERSES

FREDERICK ONCE MORE AGGRESSIVE

THE BATTLE OF LEGNANO; THE PEACE OF CONSTANCE

DEATH OF FREDERICK; HIS SUCCESSOR

GROWING POWER OF THE NOBILITY

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER III. THE NORMANS IN SICILY

THE NORMANS IN FRANCE

THE NORMANS COME TO ITALY

CAPTURE OF THE POPE; ROBERT GUISCARD (1053 A.D.)

CONQUEST OF SICILY; EASTERN INVASIONS (1060-1090 A.D.)

ROGER, GREAT COUNT OF SICILY (1101-1138 A.D.)

ROGER II (1138-1154 A.D.)

WILLIAM THE BAD (IL MALO) (1154-1166 A.D.)

WILLIAM THE GOOD (1166-1189 A.D.)

NORMAN INFLUENCE

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER IV. THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

FACTIONS IN FLORENCE

FREDERICK II CROWNED EMPEROR

RENEWAL OF THE LOMBARD LEAGUE

FREDERICK II AND THE LOMBARD LEAGUE

THE BATTLE OF CORTENUOVA

POPE AGAINST EMPEROR

THE GUELFS EXPELLED FROM FLORENCE; THE BATTLE OF FOSSALTA

DEATH OF FREDERICK II: THE SUCCESSION

THE POPE AND THE CITIES

FLORENTINE AFFAIRS; THE GUELFS RECALLED

FLORENCE AND SIENA AT WAR; THE BATTLE OF MONTAPERTI

THE TYRANT EZZELINO

THE BEGINNING OF FEUDAL TYRANNY IN LOMBARDY

PERENNIAL STRIFE OF GUELFS AND GHIBELLINES

CHARLES OF ANJOU CONQUERS SICILY

THE FALL OF CONRADIN; GREGORY X; OTTO VISCONTI

GHIBELLINE SUCCESSES; THE SICILIAN VESPERS

WANING INFLUENCE OF KING, EMPEROR, AND POPE

THE REPUBLIC OF PISA

Pisa Defeated by Genoa near Meloria

Perfidy and Fall of Ugolino

FLORENCE; THE FEUD OF THE BIANCHI AND THE NERI

The Pope sends Charles of Valois as Conciliator (1301 A.D.)

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER V. THE FREE CITIES AND THE EMPIRE

AN EMPEROR ONCE MORE IN ITALY

MILAN SEDITIONS; GENOA AND VENICE AT WAR

HENRY’S CORONATION AND SUDDEN DEATH

RIVAL EMPERORS; ECCLESIASTICAL DISSENSIONS

INTRODUCTION
THE SCOPE OF ITALIAN HISTORY: A PREFATORY CHARACTERISATION