The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
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Title: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
Author: Jacob Burckhardt
Translator: S. G. C. Middlemore
Release date: February 1, 2000 [eBook #2074]
Most recently updated: October 21, 2014
Language: English
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THE
CIVILISATION OF THE
RENAISSANCE
IN ITALY
By
JACOB BURCKHARDT
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
S. G. C. MIDDLEMORE
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PREFACE.
Dr. BURCKHARDT’S work on the Renaissance in Italy is too well known, not
only to students of the period, but now to a wider circle of readers,
for any introduction to be necessary. The increased interest which has
of late years, in England, been taken in this and kindred subjects, and
the welcome which has been given to the works of other writers upon
them, encourage me to hope that in publishing this translation I am
meeting a want felt by some who are either unable to read German at all,
or to whom an English version will save a good deal of time and trouble.
The translation is made from the third edition of the original, recently
published in Germany, with slight additions to the text, and large
additions to the notes, by Dr. LUDWIG GEIGER, of Berlin. It also
contains some fresh matter communicated by Dr. BURCKHARDT to Professor
DIEGO VALBUSA of Mantua, the Italian translator of the book. To all
three gentlemen my thanks are due for courtesy shown, or help given to
me in the course of my work.
In a few cases, where Dr. GEIGER’S view differs from that taken by Dr.
BURCKHARDT, I have called attention to the fact by bracketing Dr.
GEIGER’S opinion and adding his initials.
THE TRANSLATOR.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
_THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART_
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
Political condition of Italy in the thirteenth century 4
The Norman State under Frederick II. 5
Ezzelino da Romano 7
CHAPTER II.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
Finance and its relation to culture 8
The ideal of the absolute ruler 9
Inward and outward dangers 10
Florentine estimate of the tyrants 11
The Visconti 12
CHAPTER III.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
Intervention and visits of the emperors 18
Want of a fixed law of succession. Illegitimacy 20
Founding of States by Condottieri 22
Relations of Condottieri to their employers 23
The family of Sforza 24
Giacomo Piccinino 25
Later attempts of the Condottieri 26
CHAPTER IV.
THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
The Baglioni of Perugia 28
Massacre in the year 1500 31
Malatesta, Pico, and Petrucci 33
CHAPTER V.
THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
The Aragonese at Naples 35
The last Visconti at Milan 38
Francesco Sforza and his luck 39
Galeazzo Maria and Ludovic Moro 40
The Gonzaga at Mantua 43
Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino 44
The Este at Ferrara 46
CHAPTER VI.
THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
The later Guelphs and Ghibellines 55
The conspirators 56
Murders in church 57
Influence of ancient tyrannicide 57
Catiline as an ideal 59
Florentine view of tyrannicide 59
The people and tyrannicide 60
CHAPTER VII.
THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
Venice in the fifteenth century 62
The inhabitants 63
Dangers from the poor nobility 64
Causes of the stability of Venice 65
The Council of Ten and political trials 66
Relations with the Condottieri 67
Optimism of Venetian foreign policy 68
Venice as the home of statistics 69
Retardation of the Renaissance 71
Mediæval devotion to reliques 72
Florence from the fourteenth century 73
Objectivity of political intelligence 74
Dante as a politician 75
Florence as the home of statistics: the two Villanis 76
Higher form of statistics 77
Florentine constitutions and the historians 82
Fundamental vice of the State 82
Political theorists 83
Macchiavelli and his views 84
Siena and Genoa 86
CHAPTER VIII.
FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
Envy felt towards Venice 88
Relations to other countries: sympathy with France 89
Plan for a balance of power 90
Foreign intervention and conquests 91
Alliances with the Turks 92
Counter-influence of Spain 94
Objective treatment of politics 95
Art of diplomacy 96
CHAPTER IX.
WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
Firearms 98
Professional warriors and dilettanti 99
Horrors of war 101
CHAPTER X.
THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
Relation of the Papacy to Italy and foreign countries 103
Disturbances in Rome from the time of Nicholas V. 104
Sixtus IV. master of Rome 105
States of the Nipoti in Romagna 107
Cardinals belonging to princely houses 107
Innocent VIII. and his son 108
Alexander VI. as a Spaniard 109
Relations with foreign countries 110
Simony 111
Cæsar Borgia and his relations to his father 111
Cæsar’s plans and acts 112
Julius II. as Saviour of the Papacy 117
Leo X. His relations with other States 120
Adrian VI. 121
Clement VII. and the sack of Rome 122
Reaction consequent on the latter 123
The Papacy of the Counter-Reformation 124
Conclusion. The Italian patriots 125
PART II.
_THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL._
CHAPTER I.
THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
The mediæval man 129
The awakening of personality 129
The despot and his subjects 130
Individualism in the Republics 131
Exile and cosmopolitanism 132
CHAPTER II.
THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
The many-sided men 134
The universal men 136
CHAPTER III.
THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
Dante’s feeling about fame 139
The celebrity of the Humanists: Petrarch 141
Cultus of birthplace and graves 142
Cultus of the famous men of antiquity 143
Literature of local fame: Padua 143
Literature of universal fame 146
Fame given or refused by the writers 150
Morbid passion for fame 152
CHAPTER IV.
MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
Its connection with individualism 154
Florentine wit: the novel 155
Jesters and buffoons 156
Leo X. and his witticisms 157
Poetical parodies 158
Theory of wit 159
Railing and reviling 161
Adrian VI. as scapegoat 162
Pietro Aretino 164
PART III.
_THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY._
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
Widened application of the word ‘Renaissance’ 171
Antiquity in the Middle Ages 172
Latin poetry of the twelfth century in Italy 173
The spirit of the fourteenth century 175
CHAPTER II.
ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.
Dante, Petrarch, Uberti 177
Rome at the time of Poggio 179
Nicholas V., and Pius II. as an antiquarian 180
Antiquity outside Rome 181
Affiliation of families and cities on Rome 182
The Roman corpse 183
Excavations and architectural plans 184
Rome under Leo X. 184
Sentimental effect of ruins 185
CHAPTER III.
THE OLD AUTHORS.
Their diffusion in the fourteenth century 187
Discoveries in the fifteenth century 188
The libraries 189
Copyists and ‘Scrittori’ 192
Printing 194
Greek scholarship 195
Oriental scholarship 197
Pico’s view of antiquity 202
CHAPTER IV.
HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
Its inevitable victory 203
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio 205
Coronation of the poets 207
CHAPTER V.
THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.
Position of the Humanists at the Universities 211
Latin schools 213
Freer education: Vittorino da Feltre 213
Guarino of Verona 215
The education of princes 216
CHAPTER VI.
THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.
Florentine citizens: Niccoli and Manetti 217
The earlier Medici 220
Humanism at the Courts 222
The Popes from Nicholas V. onwards 223
Alfonso of Naples 225
Frederick of Urbino 227
The Houses of Sforza and Este 227
Sigismodo Malatesta 228
CHAPTER VII.
THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY. LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.
The Papal Chancery 230
Letter-writing 232
The orators 233
Political, diplomatic, and funeral orations 236
Academic and military speeches 237
Latin sermons 238
Form and matter of the speeches 239
Passion for quotation 240
Imaginary speeches 241
Decline of eloquence 242
CHAPTER VIII.
LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.
Value of Latin 243
Researches on the Middle Ages: Blondus 245
Histories in Italian; their antique spirit 246
CHAPTER IX.
GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.
Ancient names 250
Latinised social relations 251
Claims of Latin to supremacy 252
Cicero and the Ciceronians 253
Latin conversation 254
CHAPTER X.
MODERN LATIN POETRY.
Epic poems on ancient history: The ‘Africa’ 258
Mythic poetry 259
Christian epics: Sannazaro 260
Poetry on contemporary subjects 261
Introduction of mythology 262
Didactic poetry: Palingenius 263
Lyric poetry and its limits 264
Odes on the saints 265
Elegies and the like 266
The epigram 267
CHAPTER XI.
FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The accusations and the amount of truth they contained 272
Misery of the scholars 277
Type of the happy scholar 278
Pomponius Laetus 279
The Academies 280
PART IV.
_THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN._
CHAPTER I.
JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.
Columbus 286
Cosmographical purpose in travel 287
CHAPTER II.
NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.
Empirical tendency of the nation 289
Dante and astronomy 290
Attitude of the Church towards natural science 290
Influence of Humanism 291
Botany and gardens 292
Zoology and collections of foreign animals 293
Human menagerie of Ippolito Medici 296
CHAPTER III.
THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
Landscapes in the Middle Ages 299
Petrarch and his ascents of mountains 301
Uberti’s ‘Dittamondo’ 302
The Flemish school of painting 302
Æneas Sylvius and his descriptions 303
Nature in the poets and novelists 305
CHAPTER IV.
THE DISCOVERY OF MAN.--SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.
Popular psychological ground-work. The temperaments 309
Value of unrhymed poetry 310
Value of the Sonnet 310
Dante and the ‘Vita Nuova’ 312
The ‘Divine Comedy’ 312
Petrarch as a painter of the soul 314
Boccaccio and the Fiammetta 315
Feeble development of tragedy 315
Scenic splendour, the enemy of the drama 316
The intermezzo and the ballet 317
Comedies and masques 320
Compensation afforded by music 321
Epic romances 321
Necessary subordination of the descriptions of character 323
Pulci and Bojardo 323
Inner law of their compositions 324
Ariosto and his style 325
Folengo and parody 326
Contrast offered by Tasso 327
CHAPTER V.
BIOGRAPHY.
Advance of Italy on the Middle Ages 328
Tuscan biographers 330
Biography in other parts of Italy 332
Autobiography; Æneas Sylvius 333
Benvenuto Cellini 333
Girolamo Cardano 334
Luigi Cornaro 335
CHAPTER VI.
THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.
The ‘Dittamondo’ 339
Descriptions in the sixteenth century 339
CHAPTER VII.
DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.
Boccaccio on Beauty 344
Ideal of Firenzuola 345
His general definitions 345
CHAPTER VIII.
DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.
Æneas Sylvius and others 349
Conventional bucolic poetry from the time of Petrarch 350
Genuine poetic treatment of country life 351
Battista Mantovano, Lorenzo Magnifico, Pulci 352
Angelo Poliziano 353
Man, and the conception of humanity 354
Pico della Mirandola on the dignity of man 354
PART V.
_SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS._
CHAPTER I.
THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.
Contrast to the Middle Ages 359
Common life of nobles and burghers in the cities 359
Theoretical criticism of noble birth 360
The nobles in different parts of Italy 362
The nobility and culture 363
Bad influence of Spain 363
Knighthood since the Middle Ages 364
The tournaments and the caricature of them 365
Noble birth as a requisite of the courtier 367
CHAPTER II.
OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.
Costume and fashions 369
The toilette of women 371
Cleanliness 374
The ‘Galateo’ and good manners 375
Comfort and elegance 376
CHAPTER III.
LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
Development of an ideal language 378
Its wide diffusion 379
The Purists 379
Their want of success 382
Conversation 383
CHAPTER IV.
THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.
Rules and statutes 384
The novelists and their society 384
The great lady and the drawing-room 385
Florentine society 386
Lorenzo’s descriptions of his own circle 387
CHAPTER V.
THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.
His love-making 388
His outward and spiritual accomplishments 389
Bodily exercises 389
Music 390
The instruments and the Virtuosi 392
Musical dilettantism in society 393
CHAPTER VI.
THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
Their masculine education and poetry 396
Completion of their personality 397
The Virago 398
Women in society 399
The culture of the prostitutes 399
CHAPTER VII.
DOMESTIC ECONOMY.
Contrast to the Middle Ages 402
Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti) 402
The villa and country life 404
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FESTIVALS.
Their origin in the mystery and the procession 406
Advantages over foreign countries 408
Historical representatives of abstractions 409
The Mysteries 411
Corpus Christi at Viterbo 414
Secular representations 415
Pantomimes and princely receptions 417
Processions and religious Trionfi 419
Secular Trionfi 420
Regattas and processions on water 424
The Carnival at Rome and Florence 426
PART VI.
_MORALITY AND RELIGION._
CHAPTER I.
MORALITY.
Limits of criticism 431
Italian consciousness of demoralization 432
The modern sense of honour 433
Power of the imagination 435
The passion for gambling and for vengeance 436
Breach of the marriage tie 441
Position of the married woman 442
Spiritualization of love 445
General emancipation from moral restraints 446
Brigandage 448
Paid assassination: poisoning 450
Absolute wickedness 453
Morality and individualism 454
CHAPTER II.
RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.
Lack of a reformation 457
Relations of the Italian to the Church 457
Hatred of the hierarchy and the monks 458
The mendicant orders 462
The Dominican Inquisition 462
The higher monastic orders 463
Sense of dependence on the Church 465
The preachers of repentance 466
Girolamo Savonarola 473
Pagan elements in popular belief 479
Faith in reliques 481
Mariolatry 483
Oscillations in public opinion 485
Epidemic religious revivals 485
Their regulation by the police at Ferrara 487
CHAPTER III.
RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
Inevitable subjectivity 490
Worldliness 492
Tolerance of Mohammedanism 492
Equivalence of all religions 494
Influence of antiquity 495
The so-called Epicureans 496
The doctrine of free will 497
The pious Humanists 499
The less pronounced Humanists 499
Codrus Urceus 500
The beginnings of religious criticism 501
Fatalism of the Humanists 503
Their pagan exterior 504
CHAPTER IV.
MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITIONS.
Astrology 507
Its extension and influence 508
Its opponents in Italy 515
Pico’s opposition and influence 516
Various superstitions 518
Superstition of the Humanists 519
Ghosts of the departed 522
Belief in dæmons 523
The Italian witch 524
Witches’ nest at Norcia 526
Influence and limits of Northern witchcraft 528
Witchcraft of the prostitutes 529
The magicians and enchanters 530
The dæmons on the way to Rome 531
Special forms of magic: the Telesmata 533
Magic at the laying of foundation-stones 534
The necromancer in poetry 535
Benvenuto Cellini’s tale 536
Decline of magic 537
Special branches of the superstition 538
CHAPTER V.
GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.
Last confession of Boscoli 543
Religious disorder and general scepticism 543
Controversy as to immortality 545
The pagan heaven 545
The Homeric life to come 546
Evaporation of Christian doctrine 547
Italian Thei 548
_PART I._
THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
This work bears the title of an essay in the strictest sense of the
word. No one is more conscious than the writer with what limited means
and strength he has addressed himself to a task so arduous. And even if
he could look with greater confidence upon his own researches, he would
hardly thereby feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To
each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilisation present a
different picture; and in treating of a civilisation which is the mother
of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us, it is
unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every
moment both on the writer and on the reader. In the wide ocean upon
which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the
same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other
hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application,
but lead also to essentially different conclusions. Such indeed is the
importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh investigation,
and may be studied with advantage from the most varied points of view.
Meanwhile we are content if a patient hearing be granted us, and if this
book be taken and judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty
of the history of civilisation that a great intellectual process must be
broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in
order to be in any way intelligible. It was formerly our intention to
fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the
Renaissance,’--an intention, however, which we have been able only to
fulfil[1] in part.
The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a
political condition which differed essentially from that of other
countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal
system was so organised that, at the close of its existence, it was
naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it
helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy
had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth
century, even in the most favourable case, were no longer received and
respected as feudal lords, but as possible leaders and supporters of
powers already in existence; while the Papacy,[2] with its creatures and
allies, was strong enough to hinder national unity in the future, not
strong enough itself to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a
multitude of political units--republics and despots--in part of long
standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded simply
on their power to maintain it.[3] In them for the first time we detect
the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own
instincts, often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egoism,
outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture.
But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way
compensated, a new fact appears in history--the state as the outcome of
reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art. This new life
displays itself in a hundred forms, both in the republican and in the
despotic states, and determines their inward constitution, no less than
their foreign policy. We shall limit ourselves to the consideration of
the completer and more clearly defined type, which is offered by the
despotic states.
The internal condition of the despotically governed states had a
memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily,
after its transformation by the Emperor Frederick II.[4] Bred amid
treason and peril in the neighbourhood of the Saracens, Frederick, the
first ruler of the modern type who sat upon a throne, had early
accustomed himself, both in criticism and action, to a thoroughly
objective treatment of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal
condition and administration of the Saracenic states was close and
intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the
Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the
field all the resources at his command. Frederick’s measures (especially
after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal
state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of
will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree
to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown in the
West, the whole judicial and political administration by establishing
the right of appeal from the feudal courts, which he did not, however,
abolish, to the imperial judges. No office was henceforth to be filled
by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending
district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were
introduced; the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and
distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by
those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is
impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find,
not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were
forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special
permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The
University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of
study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth
unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan rulers that Frederick
traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving
to himself the monopoly of many commodities, and restricting in various
ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their
esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of
the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on
the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious
inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember
that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the
representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police,
and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of Saracens
who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria--men who
were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the Church. At
a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had long been
forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the
seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to
use the system which he found already at work.
At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper of the most
peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands
as the representative of no system of government or administration, for
all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern
part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less
importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The
conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle
Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or
else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here
for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by
wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of
any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his
successors, not even Cæsar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt of
Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and his fall led
to no return of justice among the nations, and served as no warning to
future transgressors.
It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of
Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional monarchy, in which the
prince was to be supported by an upper house named by himself, and a
representative body elected by the people; in vain did he concede to
the people the right of revolution.[5] Such theories found no echo
outside the lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for
Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century. Their
personality, already half legendary, forms the most important subject of
‘The Hundred Old Tales,’ whose original composition falls certainly
within this century.[6] In them Frederick is already represented as
possessing the right to do as he pleased with the property of his
subjects, and exercises on all, even on criminals, a profound influence
by the force of his personality; Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe
which all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the
centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eyewitnesses to the
half-mythical tragedy[7] of later poets.
Immediately after the fall of Frederick and Ezzelino, a crowd of tyrants
appeared upon the scene. The struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline was
their opportunity. They came forward in general as Ghibelline leaders,
but at times and under conditions so various that it is impossible not
to recognise in the fact a law of supreme and universal necessity. The
means which they used were those already familiar in the party struggles
of the past--the banishment or destruction of their adversaries and of
their adversaries’ households.
CHAPTER II.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
The tyrannies, great and small, of the fourteenth century afford
constant proof that examples such as these were not thrown away. Their
misdeeds cried forth loudly and have been circumstantially told by
historians. As states depending for existence on themselves alone, and
scientifically organised with a view to this object, they present to us
a higher interest than that of mere narrative.
The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no prince out of
Italy had at that time a conception, joined to almost absolute power
within the limits of the state, produced among the despots both men and
modes of life of a peculiar character.[8] The chief secret of government
in the hands of the prudent ruler lay in leaving the incidence of
taxation so far as possible where he found it, or as he had first
arranged it. The chief sources of income were: a land tax, based on a
valuation; definite taxes on articles of consumption and duties on
exported and imported goods; together with the private fortune of the
ruling house. The only possible increase was derived from the growth of
business and of general prosperity. Loans, such as we find in the free
cities, were here unknown; a well-planned confiscation was held a
preferable means of raising money, provided only that it left public
credit unshaken--an end attained, for example, by the truly Oriental
practice of deposing and plundering the director of the finances.[9]
Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the body-guard,
of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings were met, as well
as of the buffoons and men of talent who belonged to the personal
attendants of the prince. The illegitimacy of his rule isolated the
tyrant and surrounded him with constant danger; the most honourable
alliance which he could form was with intellectual merit, without regard
to its origin. The liberality of the northern princes of the thirteenth
century was confined to the knights, to the nobility which served and
sang. It was otherwise with the Italian despot. With his thirst of fame
and his passion for monumental works, it was talent, not birth, which he
needed. In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a
new position, almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy.
No prince was more famous in this respect than the ruler of Verona, Can
Grande della Scala, who numbered among the illustrious exiles whom he
entertained at his court representatives of the whole of Italy.[10] The
men of letters were not ungrateful. Petrarch, whose visits at the courts
of such men have been so severely censured, sketched an ideal picture of
a prince of the fourteenth century.[11] He demands great things from his
patron, the lord of Padua, but in a manner which shows that he holds him
capable of them. ‘Thou must not be the master but the father of thy
subjects, and must love them as thy children; yea, as members of thy
body.[12] Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the
enemy--with thy subjects goodwill is sufficient. By citizens, of course,
I mean those who love the existing order; for those who daily desire
change are rebels and traitors, and against such a stern justice may
take its course.’
Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction of the
omnipotence of the state. The prince is to be independent of his
courtiers, but at the same time to govern with simplicity and modesty;
he is to take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore
churches and public buildings, to keep up the municipal police,[13] to
drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; he is to
exercise a strict justice, so to distribute the taxes that the people
can recognise their necessity and the regret of the ruler to be
compelled to put his hands in the pockets of others; he is to support
the sick and the helpless, and to give his protection and society to
distinguished scholars, on whom his fame in after ages will depend.
But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system, and the merits
of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth century were not
without a more or less distinct consciousness of the brief and uncertain
tenure of most of these despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions
like these are naturally secure in proportion to the size of the
territory in which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly
tempted to swallow up the smaller. Whole hecatombs of petty rulers were
sacrificed at this time to the Visconti alone. As a result of this
outward danger an inward ferment was in ceaseless activity; and the
effect of the situation on the character of the ruler was generally of
the most sinister kind. Absolute power, with its temptations to luxury
and unbridled selfishness, and the perils to which he was exposed from
enemies and conspirators, turned him almost inevitably into a tyrant in
the worst sense of the word. Well for him if he could trust his nearest
relations! But where all was illegitimate, there could be no regular law
of inheritance, either with regard to the succession or to the division
of the ruler’s property; and consequently the heir, if incompetent or a
minor, was liable in the interest of the family itself to be supplanted
by an uncle or cousin of more resolute character. The acknowledgment or
exclusion of the bastards was a fruitful source of contest; and most of
these families in consequence were plagued with a crowd of discontented
and vindictive kinsmen. This circumstance gave rise to continual
outbreaks of treason and to frightful scenes of domestic bloodshed.
Sometimes the pretenders lived abroad in exile, and like the Visconti,
who practised the fisherman’s craft on the Lake of Garda,[14] viewed the
situation with patient indifference. When asked by a messenger of his
rival when and how he thought of returning to Milan, he gave the reply,
‘By the same means as those by which I was expelled, but not till his
crimes have outweighed my own.’ Sometimes, too, the despot was
sacrificed by his relations, with the view of saving the family, to the
public conscience which he had too grossly outraged.[15] In a few cases
the government was in the hands of the whole family, or at least the
ruler was bound to take their advice; and here, too, the distribution of
property and influence often led to bitter disputes.
The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the
Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which
the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to
an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Aguello
of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden sceptre, and show
himself at the window of his house, ‘as relics are shown.’ reclining on
embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by
kneeling attendants.[16] More often, however, the old Florentines speak
on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and
characterised well the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition
of the new princes.[17] ‘What mean their trumpets and their bells,
their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman--come, vultures?’ The
castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is a lofty and
solitary building, full of dungeons and listening-tubes,[18] the home of
cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service
of the despot,[19] who even becomes at last himself an object of pity:
he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust no
one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation of his
fall. ‘As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated, so grows in their
midst the hidden element which must produce their dissolution and
ruin.’[20] But the deepest ground of dislike has not been stated;
Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human
individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be
suffered to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest
dependents. The control of the individual was rigorously carried out,
even down to the establishment of a system of passports.[21]
The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the
tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar colour to
this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no
longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed
in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard
him cry to the devil ‘to come and kill him.’
The most complete and instructive type of the tyranny of the fourteenth
century is to be found unquestionably among the Visconti of Milan, from
the death of the Archbishop Giovanni onwards (1354). The family likeness
which shows itself between Bernabò and the worst of the Roman Emperors
is unmistakable;[22] the most important public object was the prince’s
boar-hunting; whoever interfered with it was put to death with torture;
the terrified people were forced to maintain 5,000 boar-hounds, with
strict responsibility for their health and safety. The taxes were
extorted by every conceivable sort of compulsion; seven daughters of the
prince received a dowry of 100,000 gold florins apiece; and an enormous
treasure was collected. On the death of his wife (1384) an order was
issued ‘to the subjects’ to share his grief, as once they had shared his
joy, and to wear mourning for a year. The _coup de main_ (1385) by which
his nephew Giangaleazzo got him into his power--one of those brilliant
plots which make the heart of even late historians beat more
quickly[23]--was strikingly characteristic of the man. Giangaleazzo,
despised by his relations on account of his religion and his love of
science, resolved on vengeance, and, leaving the city under pretext of a
pilgrimage, fell upon his unsuspecting uncle, took him prisoner, forced
his way back into the city at the head of an armed band, seized on the
government, and gave up the palace of Bernabò to general plunder.
In Giangaleazzo 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 golden 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.[24] It is not impossible,
indeed, that he thought of draining away the lagoons of Venice. He
founded that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia,[25]
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. King Winceslaus made
him Duke (1395); he was hoping for nothing less than the Kingdom of
Italy[26] or the Imperial crown, when (1402) he fell ill and died. 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. After his death the dominions which he
had brought together by every sort of violence fell to pieces; and for a
time even the original nucleus could with difficulty be maintained by
his successors. What might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died
1412) and Filippo Maria (died 1417), had they lived in a different
country and among other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of
their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and
cowardice which had been accumulated from generation to generation.
Giovanni Maria, too, is famed for his dogs, which were no longer,
however, used for hunting, but for tearing human bodies. Tradition has
preserved their names, like those of the bears of the Emperor
Valentinian I.[27] In May, 1409, when war was going on, and the starving
populace cried to him in the streets, _Pace! Pace!_ he let loose his
mercenaries upon them, and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of
the gallows it was forbidden to utter the words _pace_ and _guerra_, and
the priests were ordered, instead of _dona nobis pacem_, to say
_tranquillitatem_! At last a band of conspirators took advantage of the
moment when Facino Cane, the chief Condottiere of the insane ruler, lay
ill at Pavia, and cut down Giovan Maria in the church of San Gottardo at
Milan; the dying Facino on the same day made his officers swear to stand
by the heir Filippo Maria, whom he himself urged his wife[28] to take
for a second husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice.
We shall have occasion to speak of Filippo Maria later on.
And in times like these Cola di Rienzi was dreaming of founding on the
rickety enthusiasm of the corrupt population of Rome a new state which
was to comprise all Italy. By the side of rulers such as those whom we
have described, he seems no better than a poor deluded fool.
CHAPTER III.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
The despotisms of the fifteenth century show an altered character. Many
of the less important tyrants, and some of the greater, like the Scala
and the Carrara, had disappeared, while the more powerful ones,
aggrandized by conquest, had given to their systems each its
characteristic development. Naples for example received a fresh and
stronger impulse from the new Arragonese dynasty. A striking feature of
this epoch is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent
dynasties of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things, apart
from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent and audacity win
the great prizes. The petty despots, to secure a trustworthy support,
begin to enter the service of the larger states, and become themselves
Condottieri, receiving in return for their services money and impunity
for their misdeeds, if not an increase of territory. All, whether small
or great, must exert themselves more, must act with greater caution and
calculation, and must learn to refrain from too wholesale barbarities;
only so much wrong is permitted by public opinion as is necessary for
the end in view, and this the impartial bystander certainly finds no
fault with. No trace is here visible of that half-religious loyalty by
which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal
popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and
calculation are the only means of advancement. A character like that of
Charles the Bold, which wore itself out in the passionate pursuit of
impracticable ends, was a riddle to the Italian. ‘The Swiss were only
peasants, and if they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for
the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got
possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not
be 5,000 ducats the greater.’[29] The mediæval features in the
character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long
become unintelligible to the Italian. The diplomatists of the South,
when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service,
when he maltreated his troops to punish them for a defeat, and then
threw the blame on his counsellors in the presence of the same troops,
gave him up for lost.[30] Louis XI., on the other hand, whose policy
surpasses that of the Italian princes in their own style, and who was an
avowed admirer of Francesco Sforza, must be placed in all that regards
culture and refinement far below these rulers.
Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the
fifteenth century. The personality of the ruler is so highly developed,
often of such deep significance, and so characteristic of the conditions
and needs of the time, that to form an adequate moral judgment on it is
no easy task.[31]
The foundation of the system was and remained illegitimate, and nothing
could remove the curse which rested upon it. The imperial approval or
investiture made no change in the matter, since the people attached
little weight to the fact, that the despot had bought a piece of
parchment somewhere in foreign countries, or from some stranger passing
through his territory.[32] If the Emperor had been good for anything--so
ran the logic of uncritical common sense--he would never have let the
tyrant rise at all. Since the Roman expedition of Charles IV., the
emperors had done nothing more in Italy than sanction a tyranny which
had arisen without their help; they could give it no other practical
authority than what might flow from an imperial charter. The whole
conduct of Charles in Italy was a scandalous political comedy. Matteo
Villani[33] relates how the Visconti escorted him round their territory,
and at last out of it; how he went about like a hawker selling his wares
(privileges, etc.) for money; what a mean appearance he made in Rome,
and how at the end, without even drawing the sword, he returned with
replenished coffers across the Alps. Nevertheless, patriotic enthusiasts
and poets, full of the greatness of the past, conceived high hopes at
his coming, which were afterwards dissipated by his pitiful conduct.
Petrarch, who had written frequent letters exhorting the Emperor to
cross the Alps, to give back to Rome its departed greatness, and to set
up a new universal empire, now, when the Emperor, careless of these
high-flying projects, had come at last, still hoped to see his dreams
realized, strove unweariedly, by speech and writing, to impress the
Emperor with them, but was at length driven away from him with disgust
when he saw the imperial authority dishonoured by the submission of
Charles to the Pope.[34] Sigismund came, on the first occasion at least
(1414), with the good intention of persuading John XXIII. to take part
in his council; it was on that journey, when Pope and Emperor were
gazing from the lofty tower of Cremona on the panorama of Lombardy, that
their host, the tyrant Gabino Fondolo, was seized with the desire to
throw them both over. On his second visit Sigismund came as a mere
adventurer, giving no proof whatever of his imperial prerogative, except
by crowning Beccadelli as a poet; for more than half a year he remained
shut up in Siena, like a debtor in gaol, and only with difficulty, and
at a later period, succeeded in being crowned in Rome. And what can be
thought of Frederick III.? His journeys to Italy have the air of
holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted
him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity it flattered to
entertain an emperor. The latter was the case with Alfonso of Naples,
who paid 150,000 florins for the honour of an imperial visit.[35] At
Ferrara,[36] on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a
whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty
titles; he created knights, counts, doctors, notaries--counts, indeed,
of different degrees, as, for instance, counts palatine, counts with the
right to create doctors up to the number of five, counts with the right
to legitimatise bastards, to appoint notaries, and so forth. The
Chancellor, however, expected in return for the patents in question a
gratuity which was thought excessive at Ferrara.[37] The opinion of
Borso, himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an annual
payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron was distributing
titles and diplomas to all the little court, is not mentioned. The
humanists, then the chief spokesmen of the age, were divided in opinion
according to their personal interests, while the Emperor was greeted by
some[38] of them with the conventional acclamations of the poets of
imperial Rome. Poggio[39] confessed that he no longer knew what the
coronation meant; in the old times only the victorious Inperator was
crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.[40]
With Maximilian I. begins not only the general intervention of foreign
nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to Italy. The first
step--the investiture of Ludovico Moro with the duchy of Milan and the
exclusion of his unhappy nephew--was not of a kind to bear good fruits.
According to the modern theory of intervention, when two parties are
tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its share, and
on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice were appealed
to no longer. When Louis XII. was expected in Genoa (1502), and the
imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal palace and
replaced by painted lilies, the historian, Senarega[41] asked what after
all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions had spared,
and what claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more about the
matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a _camera imperii_. In fact,
nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to any such questions. At
length, when Charles V. held Spain and the empire together, he was able
by means of Spanish forces to make good imperial claims; but it is
notorious that what he thereby gained turned to the profit, not of the
empire, but of the Spanish monarchy.
Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of
the fifteenth century, was the public indifference to legitimate birth,
which to foreigners--for example, to Comines--appeared so remarkable.
The two things went naturally together. In northern countries, as in
Burgundy, the illegitimate offspring were provided for by a distinct
class of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like; in Portugal an
illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by constant
effort; in Italy, on the contrary, there no longer existed a princely
house where, even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not
patiently tolerated. The Aragonese monarchs of Naples belonged to the
illegitimate line, Aragon itself falling to the lot of the brother of
Alfonso I. The great Frederick of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro at
all. When Pius II. was on his way to the Congress of Mantua (1459),
eight bastards of the house of Este rode to meet him at Ferrara, among
them the reigning duke Borso himself and two illegitimate sons of his
illegitimate brother and predecessor Leonello.[42] The latter had also
had a lawful wife, herself an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I. of
Naples by an African woman.[43] The bastards were often admitted to the
succession where the lawful children were minors and the dangers of the
situation were pressing; and a rule of seniority became recognised,
which took no account of pure or impure birth. The fitness of the
individual, his worth and his capacity, were of more weight than all the
laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age,
indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties. In the
sixteenth century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the
counter-reformation which then began, the whole question was judged more
strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate
children ‘is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from
eternity.’[44] Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici founded his claim to the
lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a
lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like
Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl.[45] At this time began those
morganatic marriages of affection which in the fifteenth century, on
grounds either of policy or morality, would have had no meaning at all.
But the highest and the most admired form of illegitimacy in the
fifteenth century was presented by the Condottiere, who, whatever may
have been his origin, raised himself to the position of an independent
ruler. At bottom, the occupation of Lower Italy by the Normans in the
eleventh century was of this character. Such attempts now began to keep
the peninsula in a constant ferment.
It was possible for a Condottiere to obtain the lordship of a district
even without usurpation, in the case when his employer, through want of
money or troops, provided for him in this way;[46] under any
circumstances the Condottiere, even when he dismissed for the time the
greater part of his forces, needed a safe place where he could establish
his winter quarters, and lay up his stores and provisions. The first
example of a captain thus portioned is John Hawkwood, who was invested
by Gregory XI. with the lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola.[47] When
with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the
scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one
already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian
outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the
death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly
aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the
Condottieri; and from the greatest of them, Facino Cane, the house of
Visconti inherited, together with his widow, a long list of cities, and
400,000 golden florins, not to speak of the soldiers of her first
husband whom Beatrice di Tenda brought with her.[48] From henceforth
that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their
Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became
more and more common. An old story[49]--one of those which are true and
not true, everywhere and nowhere--describes it as follows: The citizens
of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their
service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took
counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their
power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At
last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and then worship him as
our patron saint.’ And so they did, following the example set by the
Roman senate with Romulus. In fact, the Condottieri had reason to fear
none so much as their employers; if they were successful, they became
dangerous, and were put out of the way like Robert Malatesta just after
the victory he had won for Sixtus IV. (1482); if they failed, the
vengeance of the Venetians on Carmagnola[50] showed to what risks they
were exposed (1432). It is characteristic of the moral aspect of the
situation, that the Condottieri had often to give their wives and
children as hostages, and notwithstanding this, neither felt nor
inspired confidence. They must have been heroes of abnegation, natures
like Belisarius himself, not to be cankered by hatred and bitterness;
only the most perfect goodness could save them from the most monstrous
iniquity. No wonder then if we find them full of contempt for all sacred
things, cruel and treacherous to their fellows--men who cared nothing
whether or no they died under the ban of the Church. At the same time,
and through the force of the same conditions, the genius and capacity
of many among them attained the highest conceivable development, and won
for them the admiring devotion of their followers; their armies are the
first in modern history in which the personal credit of the leader is
the one moving power. A brilliant example is shown in the life of
Francesco Sforza;[51] no prejudice of birth could prevent him from
winning and turning to account when he needed it a boundless devotion
from each individual with whom he had to deal; it happened more than
once that his enemies laid down their arms at the sight of him, greeting
him reverently with uncovered heads, each honouring in him ‘the common
father of the men-at-arms.’ The race of the Sforza has this special
interest, that from the very beginning of its history we seem able to
trace its endeavours after the crown.[52] The foundation of its fortune
lay in the remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco’s father,
Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and sisters, all
brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid the perils of one of
the endless Romagnole ‘vendette’ between their own house and that of the
Pasolini. The family dwelling was a mere arsenal and fortress; the
mother and daughters were as warlike as their kinsmen. In his thirteenth
year Jacopo ran away and fled to Panicale to the Papal Condottiere
Boldrino--the man who even in death continued to lead his troops, the
word of order being given from the bannered tent in which the embalmed
body lay, till at last a fit leader was found to succeed him. Jacopo,
when he had at length made himself a name in the service of different
Condottieri, sent for his relations, and obtained through them the same
advantages that a prince derives from a numerous dynasty. It was these
relations who kept the army together when he lay a captive in the Castel
dell’Uovo at Naples; his sister took the royal envoys prisoners with her
own hands, and saved him by this reprisal from death. It was an
indication of the breadth and the range of his plans that in monetary
affairs Jacopo was thoroughly trustworthy; even in his defeats he
consequently found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the
peasants against the licence of his troops, and reluctantly destroyed or
injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known mistress, Lucia, the
mother of Francesco, in marriage to another in order to be free from a
princely alliance. Even the marriages of his relations were arranged on
a definite plan. He kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his
contemporaries, and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules:
‘Let other men’s wives alone; strike none of your followers, or, if you
do, send the injured man far away; don’t ride a hard-mouthed horse, or
one that drops his shoe.’ But his chief source of influence lay in the
qualities, if not of a great general, at least of a great soldier. His
frame was powerful, and developed by every kind of exercise; his
peasant’s face and frank manners won general popularity; his memory was
marvellous, and after the lapse of years could recall the names of his
followers, the number of their horses, and the amount of their pay. His
education was purely Italian: he devoted his leisure to the study of
history, and had Greek and Latin authors translated for his use.
Francesco, his still more famous son, set his mind from the first on
founding a powerful state, and through brilliant generalship and a
faithlessness which hesitated at nothing, got possession of the great
city of Milan (1447-1450).
His example was contagious. Æneas Sylvius wrote about this time:[53] ‘In
our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient
dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.’ One man in
particular, who styled himself ‘the man of fortune,’ filled the
imagination of the whole country: Giacomo Piccinino, the son of Niccolò.
It was a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in
founding a princely house. The greater states had an obvious interest in
hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the
better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the
troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when
he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognised their interest in
supporting him:[54] ‘If it were all over with him, we should have to go
back and plough our fields.’ Even while besieging him at Orbetello, they
supplied him with provisions; and he got out of his straits with honour.
But at last fate overtook him. All Italy was betting on the result, when
(1465), after a visit to Sforza at Milan, he went to King Ferrante at
Naples. In spite of the pledges given, and of his high connections, he
was murdered in the Castel dell’Uovo.[55] Even the Condottieri, who had
obtained their dominions by inheritance, never felt themselves safe.
When Roberto Malatesta and Frederick of Urbino died on the same day
(1482), the one at Rome, the other at Bologna, it was found[56] that
each had recommended his state to the care of the other. Against a class
of men who themselves stuck at nothing, everything was held to be
permissible. Francesco Sforza, when quite young, had married a rich
Calabrian heiress, Polissena Russa, Countess of Montalto, who bore him a
daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child, and seized the
inheritance.[57]
From the death of Piccinino onwards, the foundations of new States by
the Condottieri became a scandal not to be tolerated. The four great
Powers, Naples, Milan, the Papacy, and Venice, formed among themselves a
political equilibrium which refused to allow of any disturbance. In the
States of the Church, which swarmed with petty tyrants, who in part
were, or had been, Condottieri, the nephews of the Popes, since the time
of Sixtus IV., monopolised the right to all such undertakings. But at
the first sign of a political crisis, the soldiers of fortune appeared
again upon the scene. Under the wretched administration of Innocent
VIII. it was near happening that a certain Boccalino, who had formerly
served in the Burgundian army, gave himself and the town of Osimo, of
which he was master, up to the Turkish forces;[58] fortunately, through
the intervention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he proved willing to be
paid off, and took himself away. In the year 1495, when the wars of
Charles VIII. had turned Italy upside down, the Condottiere Vidovero, of
Brescia, made trial of his strength:[59] he had already seized the town
of Cesena and murdered many of the nobles and the burghers; but the
citadel held out, and he was forced to withdraw. He then, at the head of
a band lent him by another scoundrel, Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, son
of the Roberto already spoken of, and Venetian Condottiere, wrested the
town of Castelnuovo from the Archbishop of Ravenna. The Venetians,
fearing that worse would follow, and urged also by the Pope, ordered
Pandolfo, ‘with the kindest intentions,’ to take an opportunity of
arresting his good friend: the arrest was made, though ‘with great
regret,’ whereupon the order came to bring the prisoner to the gallows.
Pandolfo was considerate enough to strangle him in prison, and then show
his corpse to the people. The last notable example of such usurpers is
the famous Castellan of Musso, who during the confusion in the Milanese
territory which followed the battle of Pavia (1525), improvised a
sovereignty on the Lake of Como.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
It may be said in general of the despotisms of the fifteenth century
that the greatest crimes are most frequent in the smallest states. In
these, where the family was numerous and all the members wished to live
in a manner befitting their rank, disputes respecting the inheritance
were unavoidable. Bernardo Varano of Camerino put (1434) two of his
brothers to death,[60] wishing to divide their property among his sons.
Where the ruler of a single town was distinguished by a wise, moderate,
and humane government, and by zeal for intellectual culture, he was
generally a member of some great family, or politically dependent on it.
This was the case, for example, with Alessandro Sforza,[61] Prince of
Pesaro, brother of the great Francesco, and stepfather of Frederick of
Urbino (d. 1473). Prudent in administration, just and affable in his
rule, he enjoyed, after years of warfare, a tranquil reign, collected a
noble library, and passed his leisure in learned or religious
conversation. A man of the same class was Giovanni II., Bentivoglio of
Bologna (1462-1506), whose policy was determined by that of the Este and
the Sforza. What ferocity and bloodthirstiness is found, on the other
hand, among the Varani of Camerino, the Malatesta of Rimini, the
Manfreddi of Faenza, and above all among the Baglioni of Perugia. We
find a striking picture of the events in the last-named family towards
the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable historical
narratives of Graziani and Materazzo.[62]
The Baglioni were one of those families whose rule never took the shape
of an avowed despotism. It was rather a leadership exercised by means
of their vast wealth and of their practical influence in the choice of
public officers. Within the family one man was recognised as head; but
deep and secret jealousy prevailed among the members of the different
branches. Opposed to the Baglioni stood another aristocratic party, led
by the family of the Oddi. In 1487 the city was turned into a camp, and
the houses of the leading citizens swarmed with bravos; scenes of
violence were of daily occurrence. At the burial of a German student,
who had been assassinated, two colleges took arms against one another;
sometimes the bravos of the different houses even joined battle in the
public square. The complaints of the merchants and artisans were vain;
the Papal Governors and _Nipoti_ held their tongues, or took themselves
off on the first opportunity. At last the Oddi were forced to abandon
Perugia, and the city became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute
despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedral as barracks.
Plots and surprises were met with cruel vengeance; in the year 1491,
after 130 conspirators, who had forced their way into the city, were
killed and hung up at the Palazzo Comunale, thirty-five altars were
erected in the square, and for three days mass was performed and
processions held, to take away the curse which rested on the spot. A
nephew of Innocent VIII. was in open day run through in the street. A
nephew of Alexander VI., who was sent to smooth matters over, was
dismissed with public contempt. All the while the two leaders of the
ruling house, Guido and Ridolfo, were holding frequent interviews with
Suor Colomba of Rieti, a Dominican nun of saintly reputation and
miraculous powers, who under penalty of some great disaster ordered them
to make peace--naturally in vain. Nevertheless the chronicle takes the
opportunity to point out the devotion and piety of the better men in
Perugia during this reign of terror. When in 1494 Charles VIII.
approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and
near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity, that every house in
the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled, the
peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the
fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts
grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called ‘Christian flesh.’
When Alexander VI. withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII.,
then returning from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that he
might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he proposed to Guido
a festival or tournament, or something else of the same kind, which
would bring the whole family together. Guido, however, was of opinion,
‘that the most impressive spectacle of all would be to see the whole
military force of Perugia collected in a body,’ whereupon the Pope
abandoned his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack, in
which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won them the
victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad of scarcely
eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of followers against
hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with more than twenty wounds, but
recovered himself when Astorre Baglione came to his help, and mounting
on horseback in gilded armour with a falcon on his helmet, ‘like Mars in
bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.’
At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at school under
Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days are perhaps immortalised
in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something of
them, it may be, lives eternally in the great painting of St. Michael:
and if Astorre Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it is in the
figure of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.
The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly scattered in
terror, and were henceforth incapable of another enterprise of the kind.
After a time a partial reconciliation took place, and some of the exiles
were allowed to return. But Perugia became none the safer or more
tranquil: the inward discord of the ruling family broke out in frightful
excesses. An opposition was formed against Guido and Ridolfo and their
sons Gianpaolo, Simonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Gentile, Marcantonio and
others, by two great-nephews, Grifone and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of
the two was also nephew of Varano, Prince of Camerino, and brother of
one of the former exiles, Ieronimo della Penna. In vain did Simonetto,
warned by sinister presentiment, entreat his uncle on his knees to allow
him to put Penna to death: Guido refused. The plot ripened suddenly on
the occasion of the marriage of Astorre with Lavinia Colonna, at
Midsummer 1500. The festival began and lasted several days amid gloomy
forebodings, whose deepening effect is admirably described by Matarazzo.
Varano fed and encouraged them with devilish ingenuity: he worked upon
Grifone by the prospect of undivided authority, and by stories of an
imaginary intrigue of his wife Zenobia with Gianpaolo. Finally each
conspirator was provided with a victim. (The Baglioni lived all of them
in separate houses, mostly on the site of the present castle.) Each
received fifteen of the bravos at hand; the remainder were set on the
watch. In the night of July 15 the doors were forced, and Guido,
Astorre, Simonetto, and Gismondo were murdered; the others succeeded in
escaping.
As the corpse of Astorre lay by that of Simonetto in the street, the
spectators, ‘and especially the foreign students,’ compared him to an
ancient Roman, so great and imposing did he seem. In the features of
Simonetto could still be traced the audacity and defiance which death
itself had not tamed. The victors went round among the friends of the
family, and did their best to recommend themselves; they found all in
tears and preparing to leave for the country. Meantime the escaped
Baglioni collected forces without the city, and on the following day
forced their way in, Gianpaolo at their head, and speedily found
adherents among others whom Barciglia had been threatening with death.
When Grifone fell into their hands near S. Ercolono. Gianpaolo handed
him over for execution to his followers. Barciglia and Penna fled to
Varano, the chief author of the tragedy, at Camerino; and in a moment,
almost without loss, Gianpaolo became master of the city.
Atalanta, the still young and beautiful mother of Grifone, who the day
before had withdrawn to a country house with the latter’s wife Zenobia
and two children of Gianpaolo, and more than once had repulsed her son
with a mother’s curse, now returned with her step-daughter in search of
the dying man. All stood aside as the two women approached, each man
shrinking from being recognised as the slayer of Grifone, and dreading
the malediction of the mother. But they were deceived: she herself
besought her son to pardon him who had dealt the fatal blow, and he died
with her blessing. The eyes of the crowd followed the two women
reverently as they crossed the square with blood-stained garments. It
was Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards painted the world-famed
‘Deposition,’ with which she laid her own maternal sorrows at the feet
of a yet higher and holier suffering.
The cathedral, in the immediate neighbourhood of which the greater part
of this tragedy had been enacted, was washed with wine and consecrated
afresh. The triumphal arch, erected for the wedding, still remained
standing, painted with the deeds of Astorre and with the laudatory
verses of the narrator of these events, the worthy Matarazzo.
A legendary history, which is simply the reflection of these atrocities,
arose out of the early days of the Baglioni. All the members of this
family from the beginning were reported to have died an evil
death--twenty-seven on one occasion together; their houses were said to
have been once before levelled to the ground, and the streets of Perugia
paved with the bricks--and more of the same kind. Under Paul III. the
destruction of their palaces really took place.[63]
For a time they seem to have formed good resolutions, to have brought
their own party into order, and to have protected the public officials
against the arbitrary acts of the nobility. But the old curse broke out
again like a smouldering fire. Gianpaolo was enticed to Rome under Leo
X., and there beheaded; one of his sons, Orazio, who ruled in Perugia
for a short time only, and by the most violent means, as the partisan of
the Duke of Urbino (himself threatened by the Pope), once more repeated
in his own family the horrors of the past. His uncle and three cousins
were murdered, whereupon the Duke sent him word that enough had been
done.[64] His brother, Malatesta Baglione, the Florentine general, has
made himself immortal by the treason of 1530; and Malatesta’s son
Ridolfo, the last of the house, attained, by the murder of the legate
and the public officers in the year 1534, a brief but sanguinary
authority.
Here and there we meet with the names of the rulers of Rimini.
Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture, have been
seldom so combined in one individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta (d.
1467).[65] But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last
outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss.
Pandolfo, Sigismondo’s nephew, who has been mentioned already, succeeded
in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the Venetians refused to
abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt he might be chargeable with;
when his subjects (1497), after ample provocation,[66] bombarded him in
his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian
commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and
every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless
exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of Cæsar Borgia, a sort of
epidemic fell on the petty tyrants: few of them outlived this date, and
none to their own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by
insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 a
poor scholar, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled from the sack of Rome
to the hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni Francesco Pico, nephew of
the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to the sepulchral monument which
the prince was constructing for himself gave rise to a treatise, the
dedication of which bears the date of April in this year. The postscript
is a sad one.[67]--‘In October of the same year the unhappy prince was
attacked in the night and robbed of life and throne by his brother’s
son; and I myself escaped narrowly, and am now in the deepest misery.’
A pseudo-despotism without characteristic features, such as Pandolfo
Petrucci exercised from the year 1490 in Siena, then torn by faction, is
hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant and malicious, he
governed with the help of a professor of jurisprudence and of an
astrologer, and frightened his people by an occasional murder. His
pastime in the summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top of
Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After succeeding,
where the most prudent failed, in escaping from the devices of Cæsar
Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons maintained a
qualified supremacy for many years afterwards.
CHAPTER V.
THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
In treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient to discuss
the Aragonese, on account of its special character, apart from the rest.
The feudal system, which from the days of the Normans had survived in
the form of a territorial supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive
colour to the political constitution of Naples; while elsewhere in
Italy, excepting only in the southern part of the ecclesiastical
dominion, and in a few other districts, a direct tenure of land
prevailed, and no hereditary powers were permitted by the law. The great
Alfonso, who reigned in Naples from 1435 onwards (d. 1458), was a man of
another kind than his real or alleged descendants. Brilliant in his
whole existence, fearless in mixing with his people, mild and generous
towards his enemies, dignified and affable in intercourse, modest
notwithstanding his legitimate royal descent, admired rather than blamed
even for his old man’s passion for Lucrezia d’Alagna, he had the one bad
quality of extravagance,[68] from which, however, the natural
consequence followed. Unscrupulous financiers were long omnipotent at
Court, till the bankrupt king robbed them of their spoils; a crusade was
preached, as a pretext for taxing the clergy; the Jews were forced to
save themselves from conversion and other oppressive measures by
presents and the payment of regular taxes; when a great earthquake
happening in the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the
contributions of the dead. On the other hand, he abolished unreasonable
taxes, like that on dice, and aimed at relieving his poorer subjects
from the imposts which pressed most heavily upon them. By such means
Alfonso was able to entertain distinguished guests with unrivalled
splendour; he found pleasure in ceaseless expense, even for the benefit
of his enemies, and in rewarding literary work knew absolutely no
measure. Poggio received 500 pieces of gold for translating Xenophon’s
‘Cyropædeia.’
Ferrante,[69] who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son by a
Spanish lady, but was not improbably the son of a half-caste Moor of
Valentia. Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life
by the barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain
that he was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.
Restlessly active, recognised as one of the most powerful political
minds of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he
concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned profound
dissimulation and an irreconcileable spirit of vengeance, on the
destruction of his opponents. He had been wounded in every point in
which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though
related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies.
Extreme measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this
struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were exacted in the
same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick II. had introduced: the
Government alone dealt in oil and wine; the whole commerce of the
country was put by Ferrante into the hands of a wealthy merchant,
Francesco Coppola, who had entire control of the anchorage on the coast,
and shared the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by forced
loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by
contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides
hunting, which he practised regardless of all rights of property, his
pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him,
either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in
the costume which they wore in their lifetime.[70] He would chuckle in
talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of
the museum of mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got into
his power by treachery; some were even seized while guests at the royal
table. His conduct to his first minister, Antonello Petrucci, who had
grown sick and grey in his service, and from whose increasing fear of
death he extorted present after present, was literally devilish. At
length the suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the
barons gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died
Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo and Porzio
makes one’s hair stand on end. The elder of the King’s sons, Alfonso,
Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years a kind of co-regency with his
father. He was a savage, brutal profligate--described by Comines as ‘the
cruelest, worst, most vicious and basest man ever seen’--who in point of
frankness alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and who openly avowed his
contempt for religion and its usages.[71] The better and nobler features
of the Italian despotisms are not to be found among the princes of this
line; all that they possessed of the art and culture of their time
served the purposes of luxury or display. Even the genuine Spaniards
seem to have almost always degenerated in Italy; but the end of this
cross-bred house (1494 and 1503) gives clear proof of a want of blood.
Ferrante died of mental care and trouble; Alfonso accused his brother
Federigo, the only honest member of the family, of treason, and insulted
him in the vilest manner. At length, though he had hitherto passed for
one of the ablest generals in Italy, he lost his head and fled to
Sicily, leaving his son, the younger Ferrante, a prey to the French and
to domestic treason. A dynasty which had ruled as this had done must at
least have sold its life dear, if its children were ever to hope for a
restoration. But, as Comines one-sidedly, and yet on the whole rightly
observes on this occasion, ‘_Jamais homme cruel ne fut hardi_.’
The despotism of the Dukes of Milan, whose government from the time of
Giangaleazzo onwards was an absolute monarchy of the most thorough-going
sort, shows the genuine Italian character of the fifteenth century. The
last of the Visconti, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), is a character of
peculiar interest, and of which fortunately an admirable description[72]
has been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be
made by the passion of fear, is here shown with what may be called a
mathematical completeness. All the resources of the State were devoted
to the one end of securing his personal safety, though happily his cruel
egoism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived
in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbours, and
lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making his excursions
only in the country, where lay several of his splendid castles; the
flotilla which, drawn by the swiftest horses, conducted him to them
along canals constructed for the purpose, was so arranged as to allow of
the application of the most rigorous etiquette. Whoever entered the
citadel was watched by a hundred eyes; it was forbidden even to stand at
the window, lest signs should be given to those without. All who were
admitted among the personal followers of the Prince were subjected to a
series of the strictest examinations; then, once accepted, were charged
with the highest diplomatic commissions, as well as with the humblest
personal services--both in this Court being alike honourable. And this
was the man who conducted long and difficult wars, who dealt habitually
with political affairs of the first importance, and every day sent his
plenipotentiaries to all parts of Italy. His safety lay in the fact that
none of his servants trusted the others, that his Condottieri were
watched and misled by spies, and that the ambassadors and higher
officials were baffled and kept apart by artificially nourished
jealousies, and in particular by the device of coupling an honest man
with a knave. His inward faith, too, rested upon opposed and
contradictory systems; he believed in blind necessity, and in the
influence of the stars, and offering prayers at one and the same time to
helpers of every sort;[73] he was a student of the ancient authors, as
well as of French tales of chivalry. And yet the same man, who would
never suffer death to be mentioned in his presence,[74] and caused his
dying favourites to be removed from the castle, that no shadow might
fall on the abode of happiness, deliberately hastened his own death by
closing up a wound, and, refusing to be bled, died at last with dignity
and grace.
His step-son and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco Sforza
(1450-1466, see p. 24), was perhaps of all the Italians of the fifteenth
century the man most after the heart of his age. Never was the triumph
of genius and individual power more brilliantly displayed than in him;
and those who would not recognise his merit were at least forced to
wonder at him as the spoilt child of fortune. The Milanese claimed it
openly as an honour to be governed by so distinguished a master; when he
entered the city the thronging populace bore him on horseback into the
cathedral, without giving him the chance to dismount.[75] Let us listen
to the balance-sheet of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II., a
judge in such matters:[76] ‘In the year 1459, when the Duke came to the
congress at Mantua, he was 60 (really 58) years old; on horseback he
looked like a young man; of a lofty and imposing figure, with serious
features, calm and affable in conversation, princely in his whole
bearing, with a combination of bodily and intellectual gifts unrivalled
in our time, unconquered on the field of battle,--such was the man who
raised himself from a humble position to the control of an empire. His
wife was beautiful and virtuous, his children were like the angels of
heaven; he was seldom ill, and all his chief wishes were fulfilled. And
yet he was not without misfortune. His wife, out of jealousy, killed his
mistress; his old comrades and friends, Troilo and Brunoro, abandoned
him and went over to King Alfonso; another, Ciarpollone, he was forced
to hang for treason; he had to suffer it that his brother Alessandro set
the French upon him; one of his sons formed intrigues against him, and
was imprisoned; the March of Ancona, which he had won in war, he lost
again in the same way. No man enjoys so unclouded a fortune, that he has
not somewhere to struggle with adversity. He is happy who has but few
troubles.’ With this negative definition of happiness the learned Pope
dismisses the reader. Had he been able to see into the future, or been
willing to stop and discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
despotism, one prevading fact would not have escaped his notice--the
absence of all guarantee for the future. Those children, beautiful as
angels, carefully and thoroughly educated as they were, fell victims,
when they grew up, to the corruption of a measureless egoism. Galeazzo
Maria (1466-1476), solicitous only of outward effect, took pride in the
beauty of his hands, in the high salaries he paid, in the financial
credit he enjoyed, in his treasure of two million pieces of gold, in the
distinguished people who surrounded him, and in the army and birds of
chase which he maintained. He was fond of the sound of his own voice,
and spoke well, most fluently, perhaps, when he had the chance of
insulting a Venetian ambassador.[77] He was subject to caprices, such as
having a room painted with figures in a single night; and, what was
worse, to fits of senseless debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his
nearest friends. To a handful of enthusiasts, at whose head stood Giov.
Andrea di Lampugnano, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they murdered
him,[78] and thereby delivered the State into the power of his brothers,
one of whom, Ludovico il Moro, threw his nephew into prison, and took
the government into his own hands. From this usurpation followed the
French intervention, and the disasters which befell the whole of Italy.
The Moor is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a
kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgment.
Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the means he employed, he
used them with perfect ingenuousness; no one would probably have been
more astonished than himself to learn, that for the choice of means as
well as of ends a human being is morally responsible; he would rather
have reckoned it as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had
abstained from too free a use of the punishment of death. He accepted as
no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the Italians for his
political genius.[79] In 1496 he boasted that the Pope Alexander was his
chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his Condottiere, Venice his
chamberlain, and the King of France his courier, who must come and go at
his bidding.[80] With marvellous presence of mind he weighed, even in
his last extremity, all possible means of escape, and at length decided,
to his honour, to trust to the goodness of human nature; he rejected the
proposal of his brother, the Cardinal Ascanio, who wished to remain in
the Citadel of Milan, on the ground of a former quarrel: ‘Monsignore,
take it not ill, but I trust you not, brother though you be;’ and
appointed to the command of the castle, ‘that pledge of his return,’ a
man to whom he had always done good, but who nevertheless betrayed
him.[81] At home the Moor was a good and useful ruler, and to the last
he reckoned on his popularity both in Milan and in Como. In former years
(after 1496) he had overstrained the resources of his State, and at
Cremona had ordered, out of pure expediency, a respectable citizen, who
had spoken against the new taxes, to be quietly strangled. Since that
time, in holding audiences, he kept his visitors away from his person by
means of a bar, so that in conversing with him they were compelled to
speak at the top of their voices.[82] At his court, the most brilliant
in Europe, since that of Burgundy had ceased to exist, immorality of the
worst kind was prevalent: the daughter was sold by the father, the wife
by the husband, the sister by the brother.[83] The Prince himself was
incessantly active, and, as son of his own deeds, claimed relationship
with all who, like himself, stood on their personal merits--with
scholars, poets, artists, and musicians. The academy which he
founded[84] served rather for his own purposes than for the instruction
of scholars; nor was it the fame of the distinguished men who surrounded
him which he heeded, so much as their society and their services. It is
certain that Bramante was scantily paid at first;[85] Lionardo, on the
other hand, was up to 1496 suitably remunerated--and besides, what kept
him at the court, if not his own free will? The world lay open to him,
as perhaps to no other mortal man of that day; and if proof were wanting
of the loftier element in the nature of Ludovico Moro, it is found in
the long stay of the enigmatic master at his court. That afterwards
Lionardo entered the service of Cæsar Borgia and Francis I. was probably
due to the interest he felt in the unusual and striking character of the
two men.
After the fall of the Moor--he was captured in April 1500 by the French,
after his return from his flight to Germany--his sons were badly brought
up among strangers, and showed no capacity for carrying out his
political testament. The elder, Massimiliano, had no resemblance to him;
the younger, Francesco, was at all events not without spirit. Milan,
which in those years changed its rulers so often, and suffered so
unspeakably in the change, endeavoured to secure itself against a
reaction. In the year 1512 the French, retreating before the arms of
Maximilian and the Spaniards, were induced to make a declaration that
the Milanese had taken no part in their expulsion, and, without being
guilty of rebellion, might yield themselves to a new conqueror.[86] It
is a fact of some political importance that in such moments of
transition the unhappy city, like Naples at the flight of the Aragonese,
was apt to fall a prey to gangs of (often highly aristocratic)
scoundrels.
* * * * *
The house of Gonzaga at Mantua and that of Montefeltro of Urbino were
among the best ordered and richest in men of ability during the second
half of the fifteenth century. The Gonzaga were a tolerably harmonious
family; for a long period no murder had been known among them, and their
dead could be shown to the world without fear. The Marquis Francesco
Gonzaga[87] and his wife, Isabella of Este, in spite of some few
irregularities, were a united and respectable couple, and brought up
their sons to be successful and remarkable men at a time when their
small but most important State was exposed to incessant danger. That
Francesco, either as statesman or as soldier, should adopt a policy of
exceptional honesty, was what neither the Emperor, nor Venice, nor the
King of France could have expected or desired; but certainly since the
battle at Taro (1495), so far as military honour was concerned, he felt
and acted as an Italian patriot, and imparted the same spirit to his
wife. Every deed of loyalty and heroism, such as the defence of Faenza
against Cæsar Borgia, she felt as a vindication of the honour of Italy.
Our judgment of her does not need to rest on the praises of the artists
and writers who made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage;
her own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness, full of
kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello, Ariosto, and
Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court, small and powerless as it
was, and empty as they found its treasury. A more polished and charming
circle was not to be seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the
old Court of Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the
society of Ferrara was inferior to that of Mantua. In artistic matters
Isabella had an accurate knowledge, and the catalogue of her small but
choice collection can be read by no lover of art without emotion.
In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro
or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative of the princely
order. As a Condottiere--and in this capacity he served kings and popes
for thirty years after he became prince--he shared the political
morality of soldiers of fortune, a morality of which the fault does not
rest with them alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the
plan of spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and taxing his
people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two successors, Guidobaldo
and Francesco Maria, we read: ‘They erected buildings, furthered the
cultivation of the land, lived at home, and gave employment to a large
number of people: their subjects loved them.’[88] But not only the
state, but the court too, was a work of art and organization, and this
in every sense of the word. Federigo had 500 persons in his service; the
arrangements of the court were as complete as in the capitals of the
greatest monarchs, but nothing was wasted; all had its object, and all
was carefully watched and controlled. The court was no scene of vice and
dissipation: it served as a school of military education for the sons of
other great houses, the thoroughness of whose culture and instruction
was made a point of honour by the Duke. The palace which he built, if
not one of the most splendid, was classical in the perfection of its
plan; there was placed the greatest of his treasures, the celebrated
library.[89] Feeling secure in a land where all gained profit or
employment from his rule, and where none were beggars, he habitually
went unarmed and almost unaccompanied; alone among the princes of his
time he ventured to walk in an open park, and to take his frugal meals
in an open chamber, while Livy, or in time of fasting, some devotional
work, was read to him. In the course of the same afternoon he would
listen to a lecture on some classical subject, and thence would go to
the monastery of the Clarisse and talk of sacred things through the
grating with the abbess. In the evening he would overlook the martial
exercises of the young people of his court on the meadow of St.
Francesco, known for its magnificent view, and saw to it well that all
the feats were done in the most perfect manner. He strove always to be
affable and accessible to the utmost degree, visiting the artisans who
worked for him in their shops, holding frequent audiences, and, if
possible, attending to the requests of each individual on the same day
that they were presented. No wonder that the people, as he walked along
the street, knelt down and cried: ‘Dio ti mantenga, signore!’ He was
called by thinking people ‘the light of Italy.’[90] His gifted son
Guidobaldo,[91] visited by sickness and misfortune of every kind, was
able at the last (1508) to give his state into the safe hands of his
nephew Francesco Maria (nephew also of Pope Julius II.), who, at least,
succeeded in preserving the territory from any permanent foreign
occupation. It is remarkable with what confidence Guidobaldo yielded and
fled before Cæsar Borgia and Francesco before the troops of Leo X.; each
knew that his restoration would be all the easier and the more popular
the less the country suffered through a fruitless defence. When Ludovico
made the same calculation at Milan, he forgot the many grounds of hatred
which existed against him. The court of Guidobaldo has been made
immortal as the high school of polished manners by Baldassar
Castiglione, who represented his eclogue Thyrsis before, and in honour
of that society (1506), and who afterwards (1518) laid the scena of the
dialogue of his ‘Cortigiano’ in the circle of the accomplished Duchess
Elisabetta Gonzaga.
The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio
displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.[92] Within the
palace frightful deeds were perpetrated; a princess was beheaded (1425)
for alleged adultery with a step-son;[93] legitimate and illegitimate
children fled from the court, and even abroad their lives were
threatened by assassins sent in pursuit of them (1471). Plots from
without were incessant; the bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the
crown from the lawful heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards
(1493) to have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the
instigation of her brother Ferrante of Naples, was going to poison him.
This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of two bastards against
their brothers, the ruling Duke Alfonso I. and the Cardinal Ippolito
(1506), which was discovered in time, and punished with imprisonment for
life. The financial system in this State was of the most perfect kind,
and necessarily so, since none of the large or second-rate powers of
Italy were exposed to such danger and stood in such constant need of
armaments and fortifications. It was the hope of the rulers that the
increasing prosperity of the people would keep pace with the increasing
weight of taxation, and the Marquis Niccolò (d. 1441) used to express
the wish that his subjects might be richer than the people of other
countries. If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of the
prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that
in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the
capital, no houses were to be let.[94] Ferrara is the first really
modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the
bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes
and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true
capital; wealthy fugitives from all parts of Italy, Florentines
especially, settled and built their palaces at Ferrara. But the indirect
taxation, at all events, must have reached a point at which it could
only just be borne. The Government, it is true, took measures of
alleviation which were also adopted by other Italian despots, such as
Galeazzo Maria Sforza: in time of famine corn was brought from a
distance and seems to have been distributed gratuitously;[95] but in
ordinary times it compensated itself by the monopoly, if not of corn, of
many other of the necessaries of life--fish, salt meat, fruit, and
vegetables, which last were carefully planted on and near the walls of
the city. The most considerable source of income, however, was the
annual sale of public offices, a usage which was common throughout
Italy, and about the working of which at Ferrara we have more precise
information. We read, for example, that at the new year 1502 the
majority of the officials bought their places at ‘prezzi salati;’ public
servants of the most various kinds, custom-house officers, bailiffs
(massari), notaries, ‘podestà,’ judges, and even captains, _i.e._,
lieutenant-governors of provincial towns, are quoted by name. As one of
the ‘devourers of the people’ who paid dearly for their places, and who
were ‘hated worse than the devil,’ Tito Strozza--let us hope not the
famous Latin poet--is mentioned. About the same time every year the
dukes were accustomed to make a round of visits in Ferrara, the so
called ‘andar per ventura,’ in which they took presents from, at any
rate, the more wealthy citizens. The gifts, however, did not consist of
money, but of natural products.
It was the pride of the duke[96] for all Italy to know that at Ferrara
the soldiers received their pay and the professors of the University
their salary not a day later than it was due; that the soldiers never
dared lay arbitrary hands on citizen or peasant; that the town was
impregnable to assault; and that vast sums of coined money were stored
up in the citadel. To keep two sets of accounts seemed unnecessary; the
Minister of Finance was at the same time manager of the ducal household.
The buildings erected by Borso (1430-1471), by Hercules I. (till 1505),
and by Alfonso I. (till 1534), were very numerous, but of small size:
they are characteristic of a princely house which, with all its love of
splendour--Borso never appeared but in embroidery and jewels--indulged
in no ill-considered expense. Alfonso may perhaps have foreseen the fate
which was in store for his charming little villas, the Belvedere with
its shady gardens, and Montana with its fountains and beautiful
frescoes.
It is undeniable that the dangers to which these princes were constantly
exposed developed in them capacities of a remarkable kind. In so
artificial a world only a man of consummate address could hope to
succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his
claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought.
Their characters are not without dark sides; but in all of them lives
something of those qualities which Italy then pursued as its ideal. What
European monarch of the time so laboured for his own culture as, for
instance, Alfonso I.? His travels in France, England, and the
Netherlands were undertaken for the purpose of study: by means of them
he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of these
countries.[97] It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner’s work
which he practised in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his
skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom with
which he surrounded himself by masters of every art. The Italian princes
were not, like their contemporaries in the North, dependent on the
society of an aristocracy which held itself to be the only class worth
consideration, and which infected the monarch with the same conceit. In
Italy the prince was permitted and compelled to know and to use men of
every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a caste, were
forced in social intercourse to stand upon their personal qualifications
alone. But this is a point which we shall discuss more fully in the
sequel.
The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling house was a strange
compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian sense of well-calculated
interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject: personal admiration
was transformed into a new sentiment of duty. The city of Ferrara raised
in 1451 a bronze equestrian statue to their Prince Niccolò, who had died
ten years earlier; Borso (1454) did not scruple to place his own statue,
also of bronze, but in a sitting posture, hard by in the market; in
addition to which the city, at the beginning of his reign, decreed to
him a ‘marble triumphal pillar.’ And when he was buried the whole people
felt as if God himself had died a second time.[98] A citizen, who, when
abroad from Venice, had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed on
his return home, and condemned to banishment and the confiscation of his
goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty restrained from cutting him
down before the tribunal itself, and with a rope round his neck the
offender went to the duke and begged for a full pardon. The government
was well provided with spies, and the duke inspected personally the
daily list of travellers which the innkeepers were strictly ordered to
present. Under Borso,[99] who was anxious to leave no distinguished
stranger unhonoured, this regulation served a hospitable purpose;
Hercules I.[100] used it simply as a measure of precaution. In Bologna,
too, it was then the rule, under Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, that every
passing traveller who entered at one gate must obtain a ticket in order
to go out at another.[101] An unfailing means of popularity was the
sudden dismissal of oppressive officials. When Borso arrested in person
his chief and confidential counsellors, when Hercules I. removed and
disgraced a tax-gatherer, who for years had been sucking the blood of
the people, bonfires were lighted and the bells were pealed in their
honour. With one of his servants, however, Hercules let things go too
far. The director of the police, or by whatever name we should choose to
call him (Capitano di Giustizia), was Gregorio Zampante of Lucca--a
native being unsuited for an office of this kind. Even the sons and
brothers of the duke trembled before this man; the fines he inflicted
amounted to hundreds and thousands of ducats, and torture was applied
even before the hearing of a case: bribes were accepted from wealthy
criminals, and their pardon obtained from the duke by false
representations. Gladly would the people have paid any sum to this ruler
for sending away the ‘enemy of God and man.’ But Hercules had knighted
him and made him godfather to his children; and year by year Zampante
laid by 2,000 ducats. He dared only eat pigeons bred in his own house,
and could not cross the street without a band of archers and bravos. It
was time to get rid of him; in 1490 two students and a converted Jew
whom he had mortally offended, killed him in his house while taking his
siesta, and then rode through the town on horses held in waiting,
raising the cry, ‘Come out! come out! we have slain Zampante!’ The
pursuers came too late, and found them already safe across the frontier.
Of course it now rained satires--some of them in the form of sonnets,
others of odes.
It was wholly in the spirit of this system that the sovereign imposed
his own respect for useful servants on the court and on the people. When
in 1469 Borso’s privy councillor Ludovico Casella died, no court of law
or place of business in the city, and no lecture-room at the University,
was allowed to be open: all had to follow the body to S. Domenico, since
the duke intended to be present. And, in fact, ‘the first of the house
of Este who attended the corpse of a subject’ walked, clad in black,
after the coffin, weeping, while behind him came the relatives of
Casella, each conducted by one of the gentlemen of the Court: the body
of the plain citizen was carried by nobles from the church into the
cloister, where it was buried. Indeed this official sympathy with
princely emotion first came up in the Italian States.[102] At the root
of the practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the utterance of
it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal sincerity. One
of the youthful poems of Ariosto,[103] on the Death of Lionora of
Aragon, wife of Hercules I., contains besides the inevitable graveyard
flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages, some thoroughly
modern features: ‘This death had given Ferrara a blow which it would not
get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate in heaven,
since earth was not worthy of her; truly, the angel of Death did not
come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but
fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was
allayed.’ But we meet, also, with a sympathy of a different kind.
Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell us the
love-stories of the prince, even before his death, in a way which, to
later times, would seem the height of indiscretion, but which then
passed simply as an innocent compliment. Lyrical poets even went so far
as to sing the illicit flames of their lawfully married lords, _e.g._
Angelo Poliziano, those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano
Pontano, with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem
in question[105] betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the
Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the most
fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful! That the
greatest artists, for example Lionardo, should paint the mistresses of
their patrons was no more than a matter of course.
But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises of others; it
undertook to celebrate them itself. In the Palazzo Schifanoja Borso
caused himself to be painted in a series of historical representations,
and Hercules kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a
procession which was compared to the feast of Corpus Christi; shops were
closed as on Sunday; in the centre of the line walked all the members of
the princely house (bastards included) clad in embroidered robes. That
the crown was the fountain of honour and authority, that all personal
distinction flowed from it alone, had been long[106] expressed at this
court by the Order of the Golden Spur--an order which had nothing in
common with mediæval chivalry. Hercules I. added to the spur a sword, a
gold-laced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which there is no
doubt that regular service was required.
The patronage of art and letters for which this court has obtained a
world-wide reputation, was exercised through the University, which was
one of the most perfect in Italy, and by the gift of places in the
personal or official service of the prince; it involved consequently no
additional expense. Bojardo, as a wealthy country gentleman and high
official, belonged to this class. At the time when Ariosto began to
distinguish himself, there existed no court, in the true sense of the
word, either at Milan or Florence, and soon there was none either at
Urbino or at Naples. He had to content himself with a place among the
musicians and jugglers of Cardinal Ippolito till Alfonso took him into
his service. It was otherwise at a later time with Torquato Tasso, whose
presence at court was jealously sought after.
CHAPTER VI.
THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
In face of this centralised authority, all legal opposition within the
borders of the state was futile. The elements needed for the restoration
of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and the field prepared for
violence and despotism. The nobles, destitute of political rights, even
where they held feudal possessions, might call themselves Guelphs or
Ghibellines at will, might dress up their bravos in padded hose and
feathered caps[107] or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like
Macchiavelli[108] knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too
‘corrupt’ for a republic. Strange judgments fall on these two so-called
parties, which now served only to give an official sanction to personal
and family disputes. An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim[109]
advised to put them down, replied that their quarrels brought him in
more than 12,000 ducats a year in fines. And when in the year 1500,
during the brief return of Ludovico Moro to his States, the Guelphs of
Tortona summoned a part of the neighbouring French army into the city,
in order to make an end once for all of their opponents, the French
certainly began by plundering and ruining the Ghibellines, but finished
by doing the same to their hosts, till Tortona was utterly laid
waste.[110] In Romagna, the hotbed of every ferocious passion, these two
names had long lost all political meaning. It was a sign of the
political delusion of the people that they not seldom believed the
Guelphs to be the natural allies of the French and the Ghibellines of
the Spaniards. It is hard to see that those who tried to profit by this
error got much by doing so. France, after all her interventions, had to
abandon the peninsula at last, and what became of Spain, after she had
destroyed Italy, is known to every reader.
But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple mind,
we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power is
derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly
supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and
lose all traces of their violent origin. But from characters and
imaginations inflamed by passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind
could not be expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the
disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were
put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or else, without
reflecting even to this extent, they sought only to give a vent to the
universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune or
personal affront. Since the governments were absolute, and free from all
legal restraints, the opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom.
Boccaccio declares openly[111] ‘Shall I call the tyrant king or prince,
and obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the
commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies, spies, ambushes
and fraud; to do so is a sacred and necessary work. There is no more
acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant.’ We need not occupy
ourselves with individual cases; Macchiavelli,[112] in a famous chapter
of his ‘Discorsi,’ treats of the conspiracies of ancient and modern
times from the days of the Greek tyrants downwards, and classifies them
with cold-blooded indifference according to their various plans and
results. We need make but two observations, first on the murders
committed in church, and next on the influence of classical antiquity.
So well was the tyrant guarded that it was almost impossible to lay
hands upon him elsewhere than at solemn religious services; and on no
other occasion was the whole family to be found assembled together. It
was thus that the Fabrianese[113] murdered (1435) the members of their
ruling house, the Chiavistelli, during high mass, the signal being given
by the words of the Creed, ‘Et incarnatus est.’ At Milan the Duke Giovan
Maria Visconti (1412) was assassinated at the entrance of the church of
San Gottardo, Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) in the church of Santo
Stefano, and Ludovico Moro only escaped (1484) the daggers of the
adherents of the widowed Duchess Bona, through entering the church of
Sant’ Ambrogio by another door than that by which he was expected. There
was no intentional impiety in the act; the assassins of Galeazzo did not
fail to pray before the murder to the patron saint of the church, and to
listen devoutly to the first mass. It was, however, one cause of the
partial failure of the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and
Guiliano Medici (1478), that the brigand Montesecco, who had bargained
to commit the murder at a banquet, declined to undertake it in the
Cathedral of Florence. Certain of the clergy ‘who were familiar with the
sacred place, and consequently had no fear’ were induced to act in his
stead.[114]
As to the imitation of antiquity, the influence of which on moral, and
more especially on political, questions we shall often refer to, the
example was set by the rulers themselves, who, both in their conception
of the state and in their personal conduct, took the old Roman empire
avowedly as their model. In like manner their opponents, when they set
to work with a deliberate theory, took pattern by the ancient
tyrannicides. It may be hard to prove that in the main point--in forming
the resolve itself--they consciously followed a classical example; but
the appeal to antiquity was no mere phrase. The most striking
disclosures have been left us with respect to the murderers of Galeazzo
Sforza--Lampugnani, Olgiati, and Visconti.[115] Though all three had
personal ends to serve, yet their enterprise may be partly ascribed to a
more general reason. About this time Cola de’ Montani, a humanist and
professor of eloquence, had awakened among many of the young Milanese
nobility a vague passion for glory and patriotic achievements, and had
mentioned to Lampugnani and Olgiati his hope of delivering Milan.
Suspicion was soon aroused against him: he was banished from the city,
and his pupils were abandoned to the fanaticism he had excited. Some ten
days before the deed they met together and took a solemn oath in the
monastery of Sant’ Ambrogio. ‘Then,’ says Olgiati, ‘in a remote corner I
raised my eyes before the picture of the patron saint, and implored his
help for ourselves and for all _his_ people.’ The heavenly protector of
the city was called on to bless the undertaking, as was afterwards St.
Stephen, in whose church it was fulfilled. Many of their comrades were
now informed of the plot, nightly meetings were held in the house of
Lampugnani, and the conspirators practised for the murder with the
sheaths of their daggers. The attempt was successful, but Lampugnani was
killed on the spot by the attendants of the duke; the others were
captured: Visconti was penitent, but Olgiati through all his tortures
maintained that the deed was an acceptable offering to God, and
exclaimed while the executioner was breaking his ribs, ‘Courage,
Girolamo! thou wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is
eternal.’[116]
But however idealistic the object and purpose of such conspiracies may
appear, the manner in which they were conducted betrays the influence of
that worst of all conspirators, Catiline--a man in whose thoughts
freedom had no place whatever. The annals of Siena tells us expressly
that the conspirators were students of Sallust, and the fact is
indirectly confirmed by the confession of Olgiati.[117] Elsewhere, too,
we meet with the name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern of the
conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could hardly be discovered.
Among the Florentines, whenever they got rid of, or tried to get rid of,
the Medici, tyrannicide was a practice universally accepted and
approved. After the flight of the Medici in 1494, the bronze group of
Donatello[118]--Judith with the dead Holofernes--was taken from their
collection and placed before the Palazzo della Signoria, on the spot
where the ‘David’ of Michael Angelo now stands, with the inscription,
‘Exemplum salutis publicæ cives posuere 1495.’[119] No example was more
popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante,[120] lies with
Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his
treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against
Guiliano, Giovanni, and Guilio Medici failed (1513), was an enthusiastic
admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow his steps, only waited to find
a Cassius. Such a partner he met with in Agostino Capponi. His last
utterances in prison[121]--a striking evidence of the religious feeling
of the time--show with what an effort he rid his mind of these classical
imaginations, in order to die like a Christian. A friend and the
confessor both had to assure him that St. Thomas Aquinas condemned
conspirators absolutely; but the confessor afterwards admitted to the
same friend that St. Thomas drew a distinction and permitted
conspiracies against a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against
their will. After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro
(1537), and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,[122] which
is probably his own work, and certainly composed in his interest, and in
which he praises tyrannicide as an act of the highest merit; on the
supposition that Alessandro was a legitimate Medici, and, therefore,
related to him, if only distantly, he boldly compares himself with
Timoleon, who slew his brother for his country’s sake. Others, on the
same occasion, made use of the comparison with Brutus, and that Michael
Angelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly to ideas of this
kind, may be inferred from his bust of Brutus in the Uffizi. He left it
unfinished, like nearly all his works, but certainly not because the
murder of Cæsar was repugnant to his feeling, as the couplet beneath
declares.
A popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to the
monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic states of
the Renaissance. Each individual protested inwardly against despotism,
but was rather disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it,
than to combine with others for its destruction. Things must have been
as bad as at Camerino, Fabriano, or Rimini (p. 28), before the citizens
united to destroy or expel the ruling house. They knew in most cases
only too well that this would but mean a change of masters. The star of
the Republics was certainly on the decline.
CHAPTER VII.
THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
The Italian municipalities had, in earlier days, given signal proof of
that force which transforms the city into the state. It remained only
that these cities should combine in a great confederation; and this idea
was constantly recurring to Italian statesmen, whatever differences of
form it might from time to time display. In fact, during the struggles
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great and formidable leagues
actually were formed by the cities; and Sismondi (ii. 174) is of opinion
that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard confederation
against Barbarossa was the moment when a universal Italian league was
possible. But the more powerful states had already developed
characteristic features which made any such scheme impracticable. In
their commercial dealings they shrank from no measures, however extreme,
which might damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours
in a condition of helpless dependence--in short, they each fancied they
could get on by themselves without the assistance of the rest, and thus
paved the way for future usurpation. The usurper was forthcoming when
long conflicts between the nobility and the people, and between the
different factions of the nobility, had awakened the desire for a strong
government, and when bands of mercenaries ready and willing to sell
their aid to the highest bidder had superseded the general levy of the
citizens which party leaders now found unsuited to their purposes.[123]
The tyrants destroyed the freedom of most of the cities; here and there
they were expelled, but not thoroughly, or only for a short time; and
they were always restored, since the inward conditions were favourable
to them, and the opposing forces were exhausted.
Among the cities which maintained their independence are two of deep
significance for the history of the human race: Florence, the city of
incessant movement, which has left us a record of the thoughts and
aspirations of each and all who, for three centuries, took part in this
movement, and Venice, the city of apparent stagnation and of political
secrecy. No contrast can be imagined stronger than that which is offered
us by these two, and neither can be compared to anything else which the
world has hitherto produced.
* * * * *
Venice recognised itself from the first as a strange and mysterious
creation--the fruits of a higher power than human ingenuity. The solemn
foundation of the city was the subject of a legend. On March 25, 413, at
mid-day the emigrants from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto,
that they might have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations
of the barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the
presentiment of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio Sabellico,
who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow of his hexameters,
makes the priest, who completes the act of consecration, cry to heaven,
‘When we hereafter attempt great things, grant us prosperity! Now we
kneel before a poor altar; but if our vows are not made in vain, a
hundred temples, O God, of gold and marble shall arise to Thee.’[124]
The island city at the end of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket
of the world. It is so described by the same Sabellico,[125] with its
ancient cupolas, its leaning towers, its inlaid marble façades, its
compressed splendour, where the richest decoration did not hinder the
practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the
crowded Piazza before S. Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business of
the world is transacted, not amid shouting and confusion, but with the
subdued hum of many voices; where in the porticos round the square[126]
and in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money-changers and
goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and warehouses above their heads.
He describes the great Fondaco of the Germans beyond the bridge, where
their goods and their dwellings lay, and before which their ships are
drawn up side by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet laden
with wine and oil, and parallel with it, on the shore swarming with
porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto to the
square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers’ cabinets. So he
conducts the reader from one quarter of the city to another till he
comes at last to the two hospitals which were among those institutions
of public utility nowhere so numerous as at Venice. Care for the people,
in peace as well as in war, was characteristic of this government, and
its attention to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, excited the
admiration of other states.[127] Public institutions of every kind found
in Venice their pattern; the pensioning of retired servants was carried
out systematically, and included a provision for widows and orphans.
Wealth, political security, and acquaintance with other countries, had
matured the understanding of such questions. These slender fair-haired
men,[128] with quiet cautious steps, and deliberate speech, differed but
slightly in costume and bearing from one another; ornaments, especially
pearls, were reserved for the women and girls. At that time the general
prosperity, notwithstanding the losses sustained from the Turks, was
still dazzling; the stores of energy which the city possessed and the
prejudice in its favour diffused throughout Europe, enabled it at a much
later time to survive the heavy blows which were inflicted by the
discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the Mamelukes
in Egypt, and by the war of the League of Cambray.
Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed to the
frank loquacity of the scholars of his day, remarks elsewhere[129] with
some astonishment, that the young nobles who came of a morning to hear
his lectures could not be prevailed on to enter into political
discussions: ‘When I ask them what people think, say, and expect about
this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they
know nothing about the matter.’ Still, in spite of the strict
inquisition of the state, much was to be learned from the more corrupt
members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay enough for
it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were traitors
among the highest officials;[130] the popes, the Italian princes, and
even second-rate Condottieri in the service of the government had
informers in their pay, sometimes with regular salaries; things went so
far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important
political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even supposed
that Ludovico Moro had control of a definite number of votes among the
latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the high
rewards--such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who
informed against them--were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of
the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility,
could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by
two of that order, that the state should annually spend 70,000 ducats
for the relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the
matter was near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have
had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished
the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.[131] About this time a
Soranzo was hung, though not at Venice itself, for sacrilege, and a
Contarini put in chains for burglary; another of the same family came in
1499 before the Signory, and complained that for many years he had been
without an office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine
children, that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no trade
and had lately been turned on to the streets. We can understand why some
of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes whole rows of them, to
provide free lodging for their needy comrades. Such works figure in
wills among deeds of charity.[132]
But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes upon abuses of
this kind, they were greatly in error. It might be thought that the
commercial activity of the city, which put within reach of the humblest
a rich reward for their labour, and the colonies on the Eastern shores
of the Mediterranean, would have diverted from political affairs the
dangerous elements of society. But had not the political history of
Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the stormiest? The
cause of the stability of Venice lies rather in a combination of
circumstances which were found in union nowhere else. Unassailable from
its position, it had been able from the beginning to treat of foreign
affairs with the fullest and calmest reflection, and ignore nearly
altogether the parties which divided the rest of Italy, to escape the
entanglement of permanent alliances, and to set the highest price on
those which it thought fit to make. The keynote of the Venetian
character was, consequently, 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 with the possessions on the
mainland, 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; and this conviction was so widely diffused among the
citizens that the conspirator found few elements to work upon. And the
discontented, if there were such, were held so far apart by the division
between the noble and the burgher, that a mutual understanding was not
easy. On the other hand, within the ranks of the nobility itself,
travel, commercial enterprise, and the incessant wars with the Turks
saved the wealthy and dangerous from that fruitful source of
conspiracies--idleness. In these wars they were spared, often to a
criminal extent, by the general in command, and the fall of the city was
predicted by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles ‘to give one
another pain’ should continue at the expense of justice.[133]
Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the Venetian
aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.
And when envy and ambition called for satisfaction an official victim
was forthcoming, and legal means and authorities were ready. The moral
torture, which for years the Doge Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered
before the eyes of all Venice, is a frightful example of a vengeance
possible only in an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand in
everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of
financial affairs and military appointments, which included the
Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had
overthrown so many powerful men before,--this Council was yearly chosen
afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consilio, and was
consequently the most direct expression of its will. It is not probable
that serious intrigues occurred at these elections, as the short
duration of the office and the accountability which followed rendered it
an object of no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the
proceedings of this and other authorities might be, the genuine Venetian
courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the Republic
had long arms, and if it could not catch him might punish his family,
but because in most cases it acted from rational motives and not from a
thirst for blood.[134] No state, indeed, has ever exercised a greater
moral influence over its subjects, whether abroad or at home. If
traitors were to be found among the Pregadi, there was ample
compensation for this in the fact that every Venetian away from home was
a born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that the
Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions of the
secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico Grimani had the
despatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which Ascanio
Sforza was sending to his brother Ludovico Moro, and forwarded them to
Venice; his father, then exposed to a serious accusation, claimed public
credit for this service of his son before the Gran Consilio; in other
words, before all the world.[135]
The conduct of the Venetian government to the Condottieri in its pay has
been spoken of already. The only further guarantee of their fidelity
which could be obtained lay in their great number, by which treachery
was made as difficult as its discovery was easy. In looking at the
Venetian army list, one is only surprised that among forces of such
miscellaneous composition any common action was possible. In the
catalogue for the campaign of 1495 we find 15,526 horsemen, broken up
into a number of small divisions.[136] Gonzaga of Mantua alone had as
many as 1,200, and Gioffredo Borgia 740; then follow six officers with a
contingent of 600 to 700, ten with 400, twelve with 400 to 200, fourteen
or thereabouts with 200 to 100, nine with 80, six with 50 to 60, and so
forth. These forces were partly composed of old Venetian troops, partly
of veterans led by Venetian city or country nobles; the majority of the
leaders were, however, princes and rulers of cities or their relatives.
To these forces must be added 24,000 infantry--we are not told how they
were raised or commanded--with 3,300 additional troops, who probably
belonged to the special services. In time of peace the cities of the
mainland were wholly unprotected or occupied by insignificant garrisons.
Venice relied, if not exactly on the loyalty, at least on the good sense
of its subjects; in the war of the League of Cambray (1509) it absolved
them, as is well known, from their oath of allegiance, and let them
compare the amenities of a foreign occupation with the mild government
to which they had been accustomed. As there had been no treason in their
desertion of St. Mark, and consequently no punishment was to be feared,
they returned to their old masters with the utmost eagerness. This war,
we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a century’s outcry
against the Venetian desire for aggrandisement. The Venetians, in fact,
were not free from the mistake of those over-clever people who will
credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate
conduct.[137] Misled by this optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar
weakness of aristocracies, they had utterly ignored not only the
preparations of Mohammed II. for the capture of Constantinople, but even
the armaments of Charles VIII., till the unexpected blow fell at
last.[138] The League of Cambray was an event of the same character, in
so far as it was clearly opposed to the interest of the two chief
members, Louis XII. and Julius II. The hatred of all Italy against the
victorious city seemed to be concentrated in the mind of the Pope, and
to have blinded him to the evils of foreign intervention; and as to the
policy of Cardinal Amboise and his king, Venice ought long before to
have recognised it as a piece of malicious imbecility, and to have been
thoroughly on its guard. The other members of the League took part in it
from that envy which may be a salutary corrective to great wealth and
power, but which in itself is a beggarly sentiment. Venice came out of
the conflict with honour, but not without lasting damage.
A power, whose foundations were so complicated, whose activity and
interests filled so wide a stage, cannot be imagined without a
systematic oversight of the whole, without a regular estimate of means
and burdens, of profits and losses. Venice can fairly make good its
claim to be the birthplace of statistical science, together, perhaps,
with Florence, and followed by the more enlightened despotisms. The
feudal state of the Middle Ages knew of nothing more than catalogues of
signorial rights and possessions (Urbaria); it looked on production as a
fixed quantity, which it approximately is, so long as we have to do with
landed property only. The towns, on the other hand, throughout the West
must from very early times have treated production, which with them
depended on industry and commerce, as exceedingly variable; but, even in
the most flourishing times of the Hanseatic League, they never got
beyond a simple commercial balance-sheet. Fleets, armies, political
power and influence fall under the debit and credit of a trader’s
ledger. In the Italian States a clear political consciousness, the
pattern of Mohammedan administration, and the long and active exercise
of trade and commerce, combined to produce for the first time a true
science of statistics.[139] The absolute monarchy of Frederick II. in
Lower Italy was organised with the sole object of securing a
concentrated power for the death-struggle in which he was engaged. In
Venice, on the contrary, the supreme objects were the enjoyment of life
and power, the increase of inherited advantages, the creation of the
most lucrative forms of industry, and the opening of new channels for
commerce.
The writers of the time speak of these things with the greatest
freedom.[140] We learn that the population of the city amounted in the
year 1422 to 190,000 souls; the Italians were, perhaps, the first to
reckon, not according to hearths, or men able to bear arms, or people
able to walk, and so forth, but according to ‘animæ,’ and thus to get
the most neutral basis for further calculation. About this time,[141]
when the Florentines wished to form an alliance with Venice against
Filippo Maria Visconti, they were for the moment refused, in the belief,
resting on accurate commercial returns, that a war between Venice and
Milan, that is, between seller and buyer, was foolish. Even if the duke
simply increased his army, the Milanese, through the heavier taxation
they must pay, would become worse customers. ‘Better let the Florentines
be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free city, they
will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen industry with them,
as the Lucchese did in their distress.’ The speech of the dying Doge
Mocenigo (1423) to a few of the senators whom he had sent for to his
bedside[142] is still more remarkable. It contains the chief elements of
a statistical account of the whole resources of Venice. I cannot say
whether or where a thorough elucidation of this perplexing document
exists; by way of illustration, the following facts may be quoted. After
repaying a war-loan of four million ducats, the public debt (‘il monte’)
still amounted to six million ducats; the current trade reached (so it
seems) ten millions, which yielded, the text informs us, a profit of
four millions. The 3,000 ‘navigli,’ the 300 ‘navi,’ and the 45 galleys
were manned respectively by 17,000, 8,000, and 11,000 seamen (more than
200 for each galley). To these must be added 16,000 shipwrights. The
houses in Venice were valued at seven millions, and brought in a rent of
half a million.[143] There were 1,000 nobles whose income ranged from 70
to 4,000 ducats. In another passage the ordinary income of the state in
that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats; through the disturbance of
trade caused by the wars it sank about the middle of the century to
800,000 ducats.[144]
If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical turn
which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important side
of modern political life, in that culture, on the other hand, which
Italy then prized most highly she did not stand in the front rank. The
literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and especially that
enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere.[145] The
aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence
was in itself not less remarkable than for commerce and politics; but
this aptitude was neither developed in themselves nor rewarded in
strangers as it was rewarded elsewhere in Italy. Filelfo, summoned to
Venice not by the state, but by private individuals, soon found his
expectations deceived; and George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the
Latin translation of Plato’s Laws at the feet of the Doge, and was
appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and
finally dedicated his ‘Rhetoric’ to the Signoria,[146] soon left the
city in dissatisfaction. Literature, in fact, like the rest at Venice,
had mostly a practical end in view. If, accordingly, we look through the
history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended to
his well-known book,[147] we shall find in the fourteenth century almost
nothing but history, and special works on theology, jurisprudence, and
medicine; and in the fifteenth century, till we come to Ermolao Barbaro
and Aldo Manucci, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance,
most scantily represented. Similarly we find comparatively few traces of
the passion, elsewhere so strong, for collecting books and manuscripts;
and the valuable texts which formed part of Petrarch’s legacies were so
badly preserved that soon all traces of them were lost. The library
which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the state (1468) narrowly escaped
dispersion and destruction. Learning was certainly cultivated at the
University of Padua, where, however, the physicians and the jurists--the
latter as the authors of legal opinions--received by far the highest
pay. The share of Venice in the poetical creations of the country was
long insignificant, till, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, her
deficiences were made good.[148] Even the art of the Renaissance was
imported into the city from without, and it was not before the end of
the fifteenth century that she learned to move in this field with
independent freedom and strength. But we find more striking instances
still of intellectual backwardness. This Government, which had the
clergy so thoroughly in its control, which reserved to itself the
appointment to all important ecclesiastical offices, and which, one time
after another, dared to defy the court of Rome, displayed an official
piety of a most singular kind.[149] The bodies of saints and other
reliques imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest were bought at
the greatest sacrifices and received by the Doge in solemn
procession.[150] For the coat without a seam it was decided (1455) to
offer 10,000 ducats, but it was not to be had. These measures were not
the fruit of any popular excitement, but of the tranquil resolutions of
the heads of the Government, and might have been omitted without
attracting any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances,
would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of the piety of
the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences of an Alexander
VI. But the state itself, after absorbing the Church to a degree unknown
elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical element in its
composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the state, appeared in twelve
great processions (‘andate’)[151] in a half-clerical character. They
were almost all festivals in memory of political events, and competed in
splendour with the great feasts of the Church; the most brilliant of
all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on Ascension Day.
The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human
development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this
sense deserves the name of the first modern state in the world. Here the
whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair
of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly
critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the
social and political condition of the state, and as incessantly
describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of
political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but
also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above
all other states in the world, the home of historical representation in
the modern sense of the phrase. The spectacle of ancient Rome and a
familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence;
Giovanni Villani[152] confesses that he received the first impulse to
his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately
on his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000 pilgrims of that year
may have been like him in gifts and tendencies and still did not write
the history of their native cities! For not all of them could encourage
themselves with the thought: ‘Rome is sinking; my native city is rising,
and ready to achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its
past history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and
as long as my life shall last.’ And besides the witness to its past,
Florence obtained through its historians something further--a greater
fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.[153]
Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable state,
but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and
independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this
history.[154]
In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so
bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The descriptions of
them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear
evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.
And what a politician is the great victim of these crises, Dante
Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile! He uttered his scorn of
the incessant changes and experiments in the constitution of his native
city in verses of adamant, which will remain proverbial so long as
political events of the same kind recur;[155] he addressed his home in
words of defiance and yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his
countrymen. But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole world; and
if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it, was no more than an
illusion, it must yet be admitted that the youthful dreams of a new-born
political speculation are in his case not without a poetical grandeur.
He is proud to be the first who had trod this path,[156] certainly in
the footsteps of Aristotle, but in his own way independently. His ideal
emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only, the heir of
the universal sway of Rome to which belonged the sanction of nature, of
right and of the will of God. The conquest of the world was, according
to this view, rightful, resting on a divine judgment between Rome and
the other nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this
empire, since under it he became Man, submitting at his birth to the
census of the Emperor Augustus, and at his death to the judgment of
Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate these and other
arguments of the same kind, but Dante’s passion never fails to carry us
with him. In his letters he appears as one of the earliest
publicists,[157] and is perhaps the first layman to publish political
tracts in this form. He began early. Soon after the death of Beatrice he
addressed a pamphlet on the state of Florence ‘to the Great ones of the
Earth,’ and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the
time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes, and
cardinals. In these letters and in his book ‘De Vulgari Eloquio’ the
feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is constantly recurring that
the exile may find elsewhere than in his native place an intellectual
home in language and culture, which cannot be taken from him. On this
point we shall have more to say in the sequel.
To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep
political reflexion as fresh and practical observations, together with
the elements of Florentine statistics and important notices of other
states. Here too trade and commerce had given the impulse to economical
as well as political science. Nowhere else in the world was such
accurate information to be had on financial affairs. The wealth of the
Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII. amounted to
twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be incredible on any less
trustworthy authority.[158] Here only, at Florence, do we meet with
colossal loans like that which the King of England contracted from the
Florentine houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum
of 1,365,000 gold florins (1338)--their own money and that of their
partners--and nevertheless recovered from the shock.[159] Most important
facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this
time:[160] the public income (over 300,000 gold florins) and
expenditure; the population of the city, here only roughly estimated,
according to the consumption of bread, in ‘bocche,’ _i.e._ mouths, put
at 90,000, and the population of the whole territory; the excess of 300
to 500 male children among the 5,800 to 6,000 annually baptized;[161]
the school-children, of whom 8,000 to 10,000 learned reading, 1,000 to
1,200 in six schools arithmetic; and besides these, 600 scholars who
were taught Latin grammar and logic in four schools. Then follow the
statistics of the churches and monasteries; of the hospitals, which held
more than a thousand beds; of the wool-trade, with its most valuable
details; of the mint, the provisioning of the city, the public
officials, and so on.[162] Incidentally we learn many curious facts;
how, for instance, when the public funds (‘monte’) were first
established, in the year 1353, the Franciscans spoke from the pulpit in
favour of the measure, the Dominicans and Augustinians against it.[163]
The economical results of the black death were and could be observed and
described nowhere else in all Europe as in this city.[164] Only a
Florentine could have left it on record how it was expected that the
scanty population would have made everything cheap, and how instead of
that labour and commodities doubled in price; how the common people at
first would do no work at all, but simply give themselves up to
enjoyment; how in the city itself servants and maids were not to be had
except at extravagant wages; how the peasants would only till the best
lands, and left the rest uncultivated; and how the enormous legacies
bequeathed to the poor at the time of the plague seemed afterwards
useless, since the poor had either died or had ceased to be poor.
Lastly, on the occasion of a great bequest, by which a childless
philanthropist left six ‘danari’ to every beggar in the city, the
attempt is made to give a comprehensive statistical account of
Florentine mendicancy.[165]
This statistical view of things was at a later time still more highly
cultivated at Florence. The noteworthy point about it is that, as a
rule, we can perceive its connection with the higher aspects of history,
with art, and with culture in general. An inventory of the year
1422[166] mentions, within the compass of the same document, the
seventy-two exchange offices which surrounded the ‘Mercato Nuovo;’ the
amount of coined money in circulation (two million golden florins); the
then new industry of gold spinning; the silk wares; Filippo Brunellesco,
then busy in digging classical architecture from its grave; and Lionardo
Aretino, secretary of the republic, at work at the revival of ancient
literature and eloquence; lastly, it speaks of the general prosperity of
the city, then free from political conflicts, and of the good fortune of
Italy, which had rid itself of foreign mercenaries. The Venetian
statistics quoted above (p. 70), which date from about the same year,
certainly give evidence of larger property and profits and of a more
extensive scene of action; Venice had long been mistress of the seas
before Florence sent out its first galleys (1422) to Alexandria. But no
reader can fail to recognise the higher spirit of the Florentine
documents. These and similar lists recur at intervals of ten years,
systematically arranged and tabulated, while elsewhere we find at best
occasional notices. We can form an approximate estimate of the property
and the business of the first Medici; they paid for charities, public
buildings, and taxes from 1434 to 1471 no less than 663,755 gold
florins, of which more than 400,000 fell on Cosimo alone, and Lorenzo
Magnifico was delighted that the money had been so well spent.[167] In
1472 we have again a most important and in its way complete view of the
commerce and trades of this city,[168] some of which may be wholly or
partly reckoned among the fine arts--such as those which had to do with
damasks and gold or silver embroidery, with woodcarving and ‘intarsia,’
with the sculpture of arabesques in marble and sandstone, with portraits
in wax, and with jewellery and work in gold. The inborn talent of the
Florentines for the systematisation of outward life is shown by their
books on agriculture, business, and domestic economy, which are markedly
superior to those of other European people in the fifteenth century. It
has been rightly decided to publish selections of these works,[169]
although no little study will be needed to extract clear and definite
results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in recognising
the city, where dying parents begged the Government in their wills to
fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practise a regular
profession.[170]
For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no state in the
world possesses a document like the magnificent description of Florence
by Varchi.[171] In descriptive statistics, as in so many things besides,
yet another model is left to us, before the freedom and greatness of the
city sank into the grave.[172]
This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly
accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we have
already referred.
Florence not only existed under political forms more varied than those
of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally, but it reflected
upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of the relations of
individuals and classes to a variable whole. The pictures of the great
civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as they are delineated in
Froissart, and the narratives of the German chroniclers of the
fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in
comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the
story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the
nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the
proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the
primacy of a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed
forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean
despotism--all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors
are laid bare to the light.[173] At length Macchiavelli in his
Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living
organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is
the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies
without our province to determine whether and in what points
Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the
case in his life of Castruccio Castracane--a fancy picture of the
typical despot. We might find something to say against every line of the
‘Istorie Fiorentine,’ and yet the great and unique value of the whole
would remain unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo
Pitti, Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of
illustrious names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us!
The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine
republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the
highest and most original life which the world could then show may
appear to one but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another
a devilish delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to
a third may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an
object of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was for
ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once powerful
and now conquered rivals like Pisa--a rule of which the necessary
consequence was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly
an extreme one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded
Florence to accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances,
would have been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal
union of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than
the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to
the scaffold.[174] From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph
sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarised it with
foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who
does not admire the people, which was wrought up by its venerated
preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time
in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole
history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The
glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem,
when looked at from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best
results shine forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were
‘fools,’ as Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon
Florence, but he confesses himself that they achieved things which
seemed incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would have
got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than that Florence
ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of
its enemies. It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and
gardens, and the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it
would have been the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling
memories.
In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the
earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so
also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was
always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually
changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison
a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The great modern
fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a
combination of existing forces and tendencies,[175] was constantly
cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli is not wholly free from
it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious
distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of
the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices,
sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive
the rich and the poor alike. They naïvely fetch their examples from
classical antiquity, and borrow the party names ‘ottimati,’
‘aristocrazia,’[176] as a matter of course. The world since then has
become used to these expressions and given them a conventional European
sense, whereas all former party names were purely national, and either
characterised the cause at issue or sprang from the caprice of accident.
But how a name colours or discolours a political cause!
But of all who thought it possible to construct a state, the greatest
beyond all comparison was Macchiavelli.[177] He treats existing forces
as living and active, takes a large and an accurate view of alternative
possibilities, and seeks to mislead neither himself nor others. No man
could be freer from vanity or ostentation; indeed, he does not write for
the public, but either for princes and administrators or for personal
friends. The danger for him does not lie in an affectation of genius or
in a false order of ideas, but rather in a powerful imagination which he
evidently controls with difficulty. The objectivity of his political
judgment is sometimes appalling in its sincerity; but it is the sign of
a time of no ordinary need and peril, when it was a hard matter to
believe in right, or to credit others with just dealing. Virtuous
indignation at his expense is thrown away upon us who have seen in what
sense political morality is understood by the statesmen of our own
century. Macchiavelli was at all events able to forget himself in his
cause. In truth, although his writings, with the exception of very few
words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the
Florentines themselves treated him at last as a criminal,[178] he was a
patriot in the fullest meaning of the word. But free as he was, like
most of his contemporaries, in speech and morals, the welfare of the
state was yet his first and last thought.
His most complete programme for the construction of a new political
system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to Leo X.,[179] composed
after the death of the younger Lorenzo Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519),
to whom he had dedicated his ‘Prince.’ The state was by that time in
extremities and utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not
always morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he
hopes to set up the republic in the form of a moderate democracy, as
heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of concessions to the
Pope, to the Pope’s various adherents, and to the different Florentine
interests, cannot be imagined; we might fancy ourselves looking into the
works of a clock. Principles, observations, comparisons, political
forecasts, and the like are to be found in numbers in the ‘Discorsi,’
among them flashes of wonderful insight. He recognises, for example, the
law of a continuous though not uniform development in republican
institutions, and requires the constitution to be flexible and capable
of change, as the only means of dispensing with bloodshed and
banishments. For a like reason, in order to guard against private
violence and foreign interference--‘the death of all freedom’--he wishes
to see introduced a judicial procedure (‘accusa’) against hated
citizens, in place of which Florence had hitherto had nothing but the
court of scandal. With a masterly hand the tardy and involuntary
decisions are characterised, which at critical moments play so important
a part in republican states. Once, it is true, he is misled by his
imagination and the pressure of events into unqualified praise of the
people, which chooses its officers, he says, better than any prince, and
which can be cured of its errors by ‘good advice.’[180] With regard to
the government of Tuscany, he has no doubt that it belongs to his native
city, and maintains, in a special ‘Discorso’ that the reconquest of Pisa
is a question of life or death; he deplores that Arezzo, after the
rebellion of 1502, was not razed to the ground; he admits in general
that Italian republics must be allowed to expand freely and add to their
territory in order to enjoy peace at home, and not to be themselves
attacked by others, but declares that Florence had always begun at the
wrong end, and from the first made deadly enemies of Pisa, Lucca, and
Siena, while Pistoja, ‘treated like a brother,’ had voluntarily
submitted to her.[181]
It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other
republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and this unique
city--the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the
modern European spirit. Siena suffered from the gravest organic
maladies, and its relative prosperity in art and industry must not
mislead us on this point. Æneas Sylvius[182] looks with longing from his
native town over to the ‘merry’ German imperial cities, where life is
embittered by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary
officials, and by no political factions.[183] Genoa scarcely comes
within range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took
almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera
was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher
culture.[184] Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a character, and
disturbed so violently the whole course of life, that we can hardly
understand how, after so many revolutions and invasions, the Genoese
ever contrived to return to an endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing
to the fact that nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the
same time almost without exception active men of business.[185] The
example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what insecurity wealth
and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of
distant colonies, are compatible.
Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
As the majority of the Italian states were in their internal
constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful
adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign
countries also a work of art. That nearly all of them were the result of
recent usurpations, was a fact which exercised as fatal an influence in
their foreign as in their internal policy. Not one of them recognised
another without reserve; the same play of chance which had helped to
found and consolidate one dynasty might upset another. Nor was it always
a matter of choice with the despot whether to keep quiet or not. The
necessity of movement and aggrandisement is common to all illegitimate
powers. Thus Italy became the scene of a ‘foreign policy’ which
gradually, as in other countries also, acquired the position of a
recognised system of public law. The purely objective treatment of
international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples,
attained a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty
and grandeur of its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression of a
bottomless abyss.
Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the
outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long
accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or
gradually so to reduce its strength that one state after another must
fall into her hands.[186] But on a closer view it is evident that this
complaint did not come from the people, but rather from the courts and
official classes, which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while
the mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence.
Even Florence,[187] with its restive subject cities, found itself in a
false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial jealousy
and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of
Cambray actually did strike a serious blow at the state (p. 68), which
all Italy ought to have supported with united strength.
The other states, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly,
and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which
their evil conscience might suggest. Ludovico Moro, the Aragonese kings
of Naples, and Sixtus IV.--to say nothing of the smaller powers--kept
Italy in a state of constant and perilous agitation. It would have been
well if the atrocious game had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the
nature of the case that intervention and help should at last be sought
from abroad--in particular from the French and the Turks.
The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of
France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking _naïveté_ its
old Guelph preference for the French.[188] And when Charles VIII.
actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with
an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed
unaccountable.[189] In the imagination of the Italians, to take
Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a wise, just, and
powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the difference that he
was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of
France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long
before all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and
Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what
inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their part, tried to
make use of France in a wholly different way. When the Franco-English
wars came to an end, when Louis XI. began to cast about his diplomatic
nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish
adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It
became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of
time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and
that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of
what was to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as
1642.[190] The mortal terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during
the Burgundian war, in which he was apparently the ally of Charles as
well as of Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from
both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.[191] The plan of an
equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by Lorenzo
the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic spirit,
which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and
the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the
best. When Louis XI. offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of
Naples and Sixtus IV., he replied, ‘I cannot set my own advantage above
the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the
French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do
so, Italy is lost.’[192] For the other princes, the King of France was
alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they
threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out
of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could
make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent
VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return
as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.[193]
Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the
expedition of Charles VIII.[194] And when Charles was back again on the
other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of
intervention had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was
understood too late that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had
become great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied
with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence and
territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised Italian
states, and indeed to copy them, only on a gigantic scale. Schemes of
annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely
multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of
Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held
the Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the
philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the
barbarians all came to a bad end.
Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too, with as
little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other
political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had
at various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken,
and Frederick II. had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the
Oriental nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived
the old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western
Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as
was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them,
there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not
conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II. and his
successors. And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of
it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the
cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of
Alfonso King of Naples.[195] From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta
nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks
into Italy.[196] But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom
Mohammed--at the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments,
especially of Venice[197]--had once wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards
hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II. against the Venetians.[198] The same
charge was brought against Ludovico Moro. ‘The blood of the slain, and
the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to God for
vengeance against him,’ says the state historian. In Venice, where the
government was informed of everything, it was known that Giovanni
Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of the Moor, had entertained the
Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan.[199] The two most respectable
among the Popes of the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died
in the deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed
amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to lead in
person; their successors embezzled the contributions sent for this
purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded the indulgences
granted in return for them into a private commercial speculation.[200]
Innocent VIII. consented to be gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a
salary paid by the prisoner’s brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI.
supported the steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further
a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter threatened
him with a Council.[201] It is clear that the notorious alliance
between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new or unheard of.
Indeed, we find instances of whole populations to whom it seemed no
particular crime to go over bodily to the Turks. Even if it were only
held out as a threat to oppressive governments, this is at least a proof
that the idea had become familiar. As early as 1480 Battista Mantovano
gives us clearly to understand that most of the inhabitants of the
Adriatic coast foresaw something of this kind, and that Ancona in
particular desired it.[202] When Romagna was suffering from the
oppressive government of Leo X., a deputy from Ravenna said openly to
the Legate, Cardinal Guilio Medici: ‘Monsignore, the honourable Republic
of Venice will not have us, for fear of a dispute with the Holy See; but
if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put ourselves into his hands.’[203]
It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the enslavement
of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least
secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it
under the Turkish rule.[204] By itself, divided as it was, it could
hardly have escaped this fate.
If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of this period
deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and
unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by
fear, passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern
fashion, with its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each
possessed he held in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant
nobility to foster in the mind of the prince the mediæval sense of
honour, with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors
were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular case
and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose services were
used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no pride of
caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the class
of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows
clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the
Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably
more accurate acquaintance with its own country and that of its
neighbours, than was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated
the economical and moral capacities of friend and foe down to the
smallest particular. The rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born
masters of statistical science. With such men negotiation was possible;
it might be presumed that they would be convinced and their opinion
modified when practical reasons were laid before them. When the great
Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of Filippo Maria Visconti, he
was able to satisfy his gaoler that the rule of the House of Anjou
instead of his own at Naples would make the French masters of Italy;
Filippo Maria set him free without ransom and made an alliance with
him.[205] A northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way,
certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like that of
Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of self-interest is
shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo the Magnificent, to the
universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante
at Naples--a man who would be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner,
and was by no means too scrupulous to do so.[206] For to arrest a
powerful monarch, and then to let him go alive, after extorting his
signature and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis
XI. at Péronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;[207] so that
Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or else not to
come back at all. The art of political persuasion was at this time
raised to a point--especially by the Venetian ambassadors--of which
northern nations first obtained a conception from the Italians, and of
which the official addresses give a most imperfect idea. These are mere
pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious
etiquette, was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank
speaking in diplomatic intercourse.[208] A man like Macchiavelli appears
in his ‘Legazioni’ in an almost pathetic light. Furnished with scanty
instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of inferior
rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his
pleasure in picturesque description. From that time Italy was and
remained the country of political ‘Istruzioni’ and ‘Relazioni.’ There
was doubtless plenty of diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy
alone at so early a period has preserved documentary evidence of it in
considerable quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the life
of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the hand of Pontano
and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander VI., gives us the highest
opinion of this class of political writing, although it is only quoted
incidentally and as one of many written. And how many other despatches,
as important and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of
this and later times, still remain unknown or unedited![209]
A special division of this work will treat of the study of man
individually and nationally, which among the Italians went hand in hand
with the study of the outward conditions of human life.
CHAPTER IX.
WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
It must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed
the character of a product of reflection.[210] Throughout the countries
of the West the education of the individual soldier in the middle ages
was perfect within the limits of the then prevalent system of defence
and attack: nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts of
besieging and of fortification. But the development both of strategy and
of tactics was hindered by the character and duration of military
service, and by the ambition of the nobles, who disputed questions of
precedence in the face of the enemy, and through simple want of
discipline caused the loss of great battles like Crécy and Maupertuis.
Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of
mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organisation; and
the early introduction of fire-arms did its part in making war a
democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable
to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of
the gun-founder, and of the artillerist--men belonging to another class
than the nobility--was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was
felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the
soul of the small and admirably-organised bands of mercenaries, would
suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a
distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the
introduction at least of the musket, which had been lately invented in
Germany.[211] We read that Paolo Vitelli,[212] while recognising and
himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of
the captured ‘schioppettieri,’ of the enemy, because he held it unworthy
that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid
low by a common, despised foot soldier. On the whole, however, the new
discoveries were accepted and turned to useful account, till the
Italians became the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of
fortifications and in the means of attacking them.[213] Princes like
Federigo of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the
subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian I. appears
superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there existed a
comprehensive science and art of military affairs; here, for the first
time, that impartial delight is taken in able generalship for its own
sake, which might, indeed, be expected from the frequent change of party
and from the wholly unsentimental mode of action of the Condottieri.
During the Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco
Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter were
attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei Pandoni, commissioned
by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign.[214] It is
written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in
the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Cæsar’s
Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like.
Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether
Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,[215] Piccinino through
the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But
something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army;
the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks,
praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to
posterity.[216] Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich
in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of
educated men in general as well as of specialists, while the
contemporary narratives of northerners, such as the ‘Burgundian War’ by
Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact
dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest _dilettante_ who has ever
treated in that character[217] of military affairs, was then busy
writing his ‘Arte della Guerra.’ But the development of the individual
soldier found its most complete expression in those public and solemn
conflicts between one or more pairs of combatants which were practised
long before the famous ‘Challenge of Barletta’[218] (1503). The victor
was assured of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to
the Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer regarded
as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit, and to the
minds of the spectators seemed to be both the decision of an exciting
competition and a satisfaction for the honour of the army or the
nation.[219]
It is obvious that this purely rational treatment of warlike affairs
allowed, under certain circumstances, of the worst atrocities, even in
the absence of a strong political hatred, as, for instance, when the
plunder of a city had been promised to the troops. After the four days’
devastation of Piacenza, which Sforza was compelled to permit to his
soldiers (1447), the town long stood empty, and at last had to be
peopled by force.[220] Yet outrages like these were nothing compared
with the misery which was afterwards brought upon Italy by foreign
troops, and most of all by the Spaniards, in whom perhaps a touch of
Oriental blood, perhaps familiarity with the spectacles of the
Inquisition, had unloosed the devilish element of human nature. After
seeing them at work at Prato, Rome, and elsewhere, it is not easy to
take any interest of the higher sort in Ferdinand the Catholic and
Charles V., who knew what these hordes were, and yet unchained them. The
mass of documents which are gradually brought to light from the cabinets
of these rulers will always remain an important source of historical
information; but from such men no fruitful political conception can be
looked for.
CHAPTER X.
THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
The Papacy and the dominions of the Church[221] are creations of so
peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the general
characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only occasionally.
The deliberate choice and adaptation of political expedients, which
gives so great an interest to the other states, is what we find least of
all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or
supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this state
undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century,
when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown
into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and a great statesman
and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who again brought the
ecclesiastical state into complete subjection. The danger of a final
dissolution was still greater at the time of the schism, when neither
the Roman nor the French Pope was rich enough to reconquer the
newly-lost state; but this was done under Martin V., after the unity of
the Church was restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the
same danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and remained a
thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in and near Rome itself, the
Papacy was defied by the great families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli,
and Anguillara; in Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic
republics had almost cease
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