_The Story of Milan_
[Illustration:
_S^t. Roch._
_Fresco by Borgognone._
]
_The Story of_ Milan
_by Ella Noyes, Illustrated by Dora Noyes_
[Illustration]
_London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden, W.C._ * * 1908
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_All Rights Reserved_
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“La cognitione del tempo preterito e del sito della terra è ornamento e
cibo delle menti umane.”
LEONARDO DA VINCI.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
_The Ambrosian City_ 1
CHAPTER II
_The Patarini_ 26
CHAPTER III
_The Free City_ 42
CHAPTER IV
_The Reign of Faction_ 62
CHAPTER V
_The Visconti_ 86
CHAPTER VI
_From Visconti to Sforza_ 116
CHAPTER VII
_The Opening of the Gate_ 147
CHAPTER VIII
_The Sorrow of Milan_ 189
CHAPTER IX
_Art in Milan_ 208
CHAPTER X
_The Duomo_ 224
CHAPTER XI
_The Basilica of St. Ambrogio_ 256
CHAPTER XII
_San Lorenzo. Romanesque Buildings_ 278
CHAPTER XIII
_Gothic and Renaissance Buildings_ 302
CHAPTER XIV
_The Brera Picture Gallery_ 335
CHAPTER XV
_Other Galleries and Museums_ 352
CHAPTER XVI
_The Castello_ 368
_Table of the Visconti_ 392
_Table of the Sforza_ 393
_Appendix_ 395
_Index_ 397
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_St. Roch, Fresco by Borgognone (Brera)_ _Frontispiece_
_The Duomo from Hotel Europe_ 3
_Atrium of St. Ambrogio_ 57
_Chiaravalle_ 70
_Via del Pesce_ 73
_Tower of S. Gottardo from the Cathedral_ 93
_The Snake of the Visconti_ 115
_Galeazzo Maria Sforza, by Piero Pollaiuolo _to face page_ 138
(Uffizi, Florence)_
_Bridge over Naviglio near San Marco_ 141
_Canal, Via San Marco_ 155
_Canonica of St. Ambrogio_ 157
_Lodovico il Moro, by Boltraffio (Trivulzio _to face page_ 176
Collection)_
_Scopetta of Lodovico il Moro_ 188
_Cupola of the Duomo, from the Roof_ 232
_Within the Duomo_ 237
_Putti, Guglia di Amadeo_ 249
_Giant Statues on the Duomo_ 251
_Side Aisle of Atrium, St. Ambrogio_ 262
_Capital in Atrium of St. Ambrogio_ 263
_Capital in Atrium of St. Ambrogio_ 264
_Ciborium, St. Ambrogio_ 267
_Sculpture on Pulpit in St. Ambrogio_ 273
_Chimney, Canonica of St. Ambrogio_ 277
_The Old Porta Ticinese_ 281
_Houses on the Naviglio_ 284
_Exterior of Portinari Chapel, St. Eustorgio_ 286
_Interior of St. Eustorgio_ 288
_Statue of Oldrado da Tresseno_ 298
_Palazzo dei Banchieri_ 300
_Doorway of Palazzo Borromeo_ 303
_Cortile of Palazzo Borromeo_ 305
_Last Supper, by Leonardo. Detail, Figure of _to face page_ 314
Christ_
_Last Supper, by Leonardo. Detail, St. John, St. _to face page_ 316
Peter and Judas_
_San Satiro_ 321
_Palazzo Visconti di Modrone—Garden on the 331
Naviglio_
_Putto, Fresco by Bramantino (Brera)_ _to face page_ 336
_Madonna, by Mantegna (Poldi-Pezzoli)_ _to face page_ 356
_Portrait of an Unknown, by Ambrogio de Predis, (?) _to face page_ 363
(Ambrosiana)_
_The Rocchetta, Castello_ 375
PREFACE
Everybody has been in Milan, but who knows Milan? The traveller in
search of the picturesque and mediæval sees nothing to arrest him—except
comfortable hotels—in a city which seems to tell only of yesterday. A
glance at the Cathedral, at St. Ambrogio, at the most famous of the
pictures, and he hurries on. Yet a little longer stay reveals a wealth
of artistic interest in the many fine churches, in the rich galleries
and museums, and much also that is worth learning even in the outward
aspect of the city in the present day. The historic buildings have
mostly fallen, the old crooked ways have given place to broad
thoroughfares, the picturesque life of the past has been smothered by
the sombre bustle of modern commercialism. But her heritage of beauty is
to some extent inalienable. She remains always Italian. Colour and
atmosphere lend an indestructible charm even to her modernity. The warm
brick of the buildings against the limpid blue sky, the gold and grey of
sunshine and shadow, the shining canals that border some of the further
streets with a still and pensive melancholy, make a lovely and
characteristic harmony still, as in the days of the Quattrocentist
artists who painted them in the backgrounds of their Madonnas and San
Roccos. And there are some old streets left, mostly in the heart of the
city, such as the Via del Pesce and the Via Tre Alberghi, long cobbled
alleys ribboned with triple lines of pavement, where the tall houses and
bowed-out balconies of curious ironwork, rusted by age and weather, if
they cannot remember the days of Milan’s earlier glory, must have known
at least something of the sad centuries of bondage which followed,
before they shook to the roar of the Cinque Giornate sixty years ago.
The compass of this small volume has made it impossible to tell
otherwise than summarily of the great past of this city and of her
artistic riches to-day. I have had to pass over, or barely mention, many
noteworthy things. I am especially sorry that I could not include the
places of interest in the immediate neighbourhood. A visit to the
Certosa of Pavia, which sums up all the aims and achievements of Lombard
Renaissance art, is necessary for an appreciation of the Milanese
sculptors and painters, while the associations of the famous building
with Gian Galeazzo Visconte and with the Sforza princes, make it a part
of Milanese story. The old Church of Chiaravalle, with its incomparable
Lombard-Gothic tower and its trecento frescoes, and picturesque Monza,
where that historic emblem and wonder of twelfth century goldsmiths’
art, the Iron Crown of Lombardy, is preserved with other priceless
treasures, ought not to be missed by the traveller.
The main facts of Milanese story are well known, and may be found, not
only in the native chroniclers and historians, but also in many modern
books dealing with Milan and with Italian history generally. Mongeri’s
_L’Arte in Milano_, and the writings of Count Malaguzzi Valeri,
especially his _Milano_ in the series “Italia Illustrata”, have been my
chief help in the topographical and artistic part of this book, and I
have also made use of the works of Signor Luca Beltrami, Mrs. Ady and
others. For the painters and pictures I have depended on Morelli, the
acknowledged authority on Lombard art, and have consulted besides the
writings of Dr. Gustavo Frizzoni, of Mr. Herbert Cook, and other modern
critics.
E. N.
SUTTON VENY, WILTS,
_November 1907_
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The Story of Milan
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
_The Ambrosian City_
“Verenanda est Roma in Apostolo. Sed nec spernendum Mediolanum in
Ambrosio.”—ARNULPHUS.
Milan is to-day the most modern of Italian cities. Her Risorgimento in
the last century, accomplished with the pouring out of blood and the
efforts of a strenuous virtue, makes for her a mighty and sufficing past
in the near background, and she seems to stand wholly on this side of
it, triumphant and new-create. Neither Nature nor the further centuries
have, you feel, any longer part in her. Who of the numberless travellers
from the North, as they lose the vision of mountain, lake and green
champaign, just traversed, in the bustle and confinement of the crowded
streets, realises that this solid mass of brick and stone, this vast
hive of human beings, is the slow product of that enchanting country, of
its rivers and fertile soil, built up and moulded by human passion and
labour during thousands of years amid the changes and chances of
extraordinarily varied fortunes. Only when his eyes, lifted above the
regular roof-lines of the modern streets, light upon the Gothic
pinnacles of the Duomo, and a further acquaintance with the city
discovers, wedged among the growths of yesterday, the many relics of her
older past—the Castle of the fifteenth century Sforza, Renaissance
palaces and churches, St. Ambrogio and its compeers of the era of
liberty, a rare fragment of the older imperial civilisation—does he
become conscious of the long and painful course of the centuries, and
remember that he stands in the secular capital of Lombardy, on ground as
storied almost as the sacred dust of Rome.
The name alone of Lombardy calls up visions of continuous strife. There
the nations who have made their grave in Italy lie most thickly. The
sunny fruitful plains at the foot of the barren mountains have been
fattened from the beginning by human blood. The _love of figs_—a phrase
which has passed into the language of the Icelanders as an expression
for all passionate appetite—has again and again impelled the peoples of
the grudging North to storm the barrier of snows and seek the delusive
land of promise beyond. Principalities and kingdoms have been founded
there one after another, only to perish in turn, as if the soft land of
morass and meadow were some unstable quicksand created for the engulfing
of men. Etruscans, Insubri, Latins, Visigoths, Lombards, French and
Spaniards, have come and gone, in the midst of an almost incessant
warfare.
Yet through all the changes, a quiet, continuous labour was going on,
restraining and directing the courses of the rivers, draining the
marshes, taming the wild luxuriance of the land to fertile use and
order, and slowly building up out of the confusion of conflicting
elements the solid foundations of the present.
[Illustration: THE DUOMO FROM HOTEL EUROPE]
Seated in the centre of the plain which spreads out at the foot of the
Alps, and commanding the natural gateways between Italy and the
countries to north and west, Milan seems to have held from the first the
chief position among the cities of Lombardy. In the early centuries of
our era it was hardly less important in the North of Italy than Rome was
in the South. The line of the Po, cutting across the peninsula, or
perhaps more correctly, the Apennine chain, originally divided Italy
ethnologically and politically, a division which still endures to some
degree in the character and sentiments of the respective inhabitants on
either side. The Insubri, who drove out the Etruscans and settled in
Lombardy about the sixth century (B.C.), were a race of Gallic origin.
They had no ties of blood with the Romans, who subjugated them later,
and their country—called by the conquerors, Cisalpine Gaul—was as much a
foreign province of the Latin dominion as the Gaul beyond the Alps. On
the other hand their relationship and familiarity with that Gaul was so
close that it has influenced the sympathies of the Milanese people
throughout history, and has left a strong impress on their dialect. When
some centuries later the capital of the Empire was losing its
controlling power, and the bond uniting the members of that immense
artificial system was beginning to relax, Milan assumed an almost
independent position. As the seat of Diocletian and his colleague
Maximian, she could scorn abandoned Rome, looking with compassion from
her magnificent palaces and baths, her populous streets and mighty
walls, to the silent courts and colonnades of the Palatine Hill.
Constantine completed her severance from Rome by dividing Italy into two
separate portions of the Empire, and making Milan the capital of the
northern half, with a government distinct from Rome. The old racial
boundaries were thus restored, and on these lines were built up the many
later schemes for the foundation of a Kingdom of Italy. And on these
lines there rose within the new ecclesiastical empire which was shaping
itself out of the ruins of the old Roman system, an episcopal dominion
extending over all Lombardy, and virtually independent of the Church of
Rome. Many centuries were to pass, and fierce struggles to take place,
before the Church of Milan was brought into subjection to the Papal See.
This work of unification, accomplished chiefly by the potent mind of
Gregory VII. in the eleventh century, in association with a growing
instinct of nationality in the Milanese people themselves, was one of
the most important steps in the process by which the various and alien
elements of the great Lombard city were converted into a component part
of the Italian nation.
We cannot pause to search into the origins of the city in that obscure
antiquity which Italian legend fills with the figures of diluvian and
Trojan heroes, on an equal plane of remoteness, or to inquire closely
into the mystery of her name, _Mediolanum_, as it is in the Latin
tongue, whence by derivation—influenced, doubtless, by the sweet
appellation _Mailand_, Land of May, which her green refreshing aspect
suggested to her Teutonic invaders—it has become Milano. The simplest
and most generally accepted explanation of the name is that it is a
bastard word, between Latin and Teutonic, signifying the Middle Land,
and suggested by the city’s central position in the Plain.
We must take up our story at the beginning of that barbarian inrush
through the yielding barriers of the Empire, which by mingling the
vigour of new blood with the effete products of Roman civilisation,
generated the travail of mediæval Italy, and out of that travail a
nation. Milan had already a great past, closely bound up with the
vicissitudes of the later Empire. From Diocletian and Constantine
downwards she was honoured almost constantly by the presence of
emperors. Julian was proclaimed Cæsar within her walls. Many edicts of
Constantius were published there, Valentinian made his residence in the
city, and there Theodosius spent long periods, and there died and was
buried. The Empress Justina and her young son, Valentinian II., had
their seat in Milan, and the slothful and degenerate Honorius ruled from
its palace the Empire of the West, till frightened out by the Goths. The
wealth and luxury of the city in the fourth century, her culture, her
innumerable fine houses, her magnificent walls, built by Maximian, her
circus, temples, theatres, baths, are celebrated in a famous epigram by
the Latin poet Ausonius, who proclaims her the paragon of Rome.
But at the end of this century the imperial era was rapidly declining
and giving way to a new order of things. A fresh period of irruptions
from the North was at hand, and within the ancient polity itself a new
organisation, the Christian Church, had arisen and was usurping
spiritual authority. Milan had been early conspicuous in the history of
Christianity. Legend names S. Barnabas himself as the founder and first
occupant of her See, and she had testified to the new faith in the days
of persecution by the blood of many martyrs. SS. Gervasio and Protasio,
the youthful warrior pair, SS. Nazaro and Celso, master and faithful
disciple, SS. Felix and Nabor, S. Valeria, San Vittore, and many others,
are recorded with picturesque and touching details in Milanese legends
and art. And in Milan the triumph of Christianity was first proclaimed,
since here Constantine subscribed his edict of toleration in 313. But
Christianity, established soon after as the State religion, had yet to
struggle with the difficulty of conflicting counsels and doctrines
within its own body. The tenets promulgated by the Council of Nicœa in
532 were by no means universally accepted by Christians in the fourth
century, and in North Italy the teachings of Arius were widely followed,
especially by the Gothic subjects of the Empire. Under the Empress
Regent Justina they were the religion of the imperial Court in Milan,
and the whole population was divided into fiercely hostile parties by
the doctrinal question.
It was at this critical point of her political and ecclesiastical
destinies that there appeared in Milan one of those epoch-making
characters who from time to time arise at moments of hesitation in the
history of human communities, and apparently initiate and determine
their subsequent course. The great figure of her Bishop Ambrose, Saint
and Doctor of the Church, scourge of the Arians, subduer of emperors,
stands for Milan at the opening of a new era, to which his dominant mind
gives impress, direction and inspiration. From this time forward, Milan
is no more the imperial, but the Ambrosian city. Throughout her mediæval
existence the consecrating memory of St. Ambrogio, her patron and
protector, set like a spiritual jewel in a hundred exquisite and
devoutly fantastic legends, is present in her government, her struggles
for liberty, her art and peaceful industry, her daily life and the
peculiar ritual of her religious worship.
In 374 Auxentius, Bishop of Milan, died. He had been an Arian. A great
contention arose between the two doctrinal parties over the choice of
his successor. The city was in a state of uproar, and it became
necessary to summon the Prefect of the province to restore peace. A
brilliant young advocate named Ambrosius, of a Roman family of high
standing in the official world, had been lately appointed Prefect. He
came to the capital and convoked a public assembly in the chief church,
to assist at the election of a bishop. It was impossible, however, for
the two parties to agree in a selection; the powerful Court influence of
the Arians being balanced by a preponderance of orthodox Catholics among
the people. Suddenly, above the angry noise of dispute which filled the
church, a clear voice, as of a child, was heard to pronounce distinctly
three times over the words, _Ambrose is Bishop_. The _nolo episcopari_
of the young governor, vigorously expressed, and emphasised, according
to legend, by his flight from the city, nothing availed to save him from
the dignity which the unanimous will of the people now forced upon him,
and Ambrose, as yet unbaptized, was made Bishop of Milan. Whether the
apparent finger of Providence had been directed by some hidden
terrestrial agency, it is ungrateful to inquire. Ambrose, in deserting
the service of the decaying Empire for the government of the
metropolitan See of Lombardy, had undoubtedly found the right field for
his mighty energies. He was a great Christian, a man of profound
doctrine, of pure life and loftiest spiritual qualities. He was also the
most able of statesmen. None knew so well the power of this new polity
of the Christian Church amid the struggling confusion of forces in the
moribund Empire. He became paramount with his pupil, the young Emperor
Gratian, and used his influence to stamp mercilessly upon the last
embers of Paganism, overthrowing with unsparing arguments all the pleas
of the patrician Symmachus and the Conservative party in the Roman
Senate in favour of the preservation of the stately faith and customs of
their forefathers. The doctrinal unity of the Church itself was his next
great task. The Arian heresy was, as we have seen, strongly entrenched
in the palace of the Empress and her son, Valentinian II. Nevertheless,
Ambrose decreed a uniform orthodox worship in all the numerous churches
in the city. Justina protested, and demanded the use of the New Basilica
within the walls—the principal church in fact—for the Arians. This being
refused, she ordered the bishop to give up the Basilica Porciana,
outside the city. Ambrose meekly offered her his life and all his
possessions, everything except what she wanted, the church. “A temple of
God could not be given up by a priest.” Temporal arms were then moved
against him. But all the forces of the Empire together would have been
helpless against the martyr spirit of the Bishop. The Cathedral was his
fortress, and there he entrenched himself in the strength of his
holiness, surrounded by excited multitudes, whose ardour he inflamed by
fiery discourses, in which he likened the Empress to Eve bringing ruin
upon Adam, to Jezebel fighting Elijah, Salome destroying John Baptist,
till they vowed to die with him rather than suffer the temporal
authority to prevail over the spiritual. The very soldiers investing the
church, terrified by the dreadful anathemas pronounced upon them, rushed
in, not to do battle against the faithful, but to pray with them. For
days the people continued in the church with the Bishop, and on this
occasion, St. Augustine says, ‘It was first instituted that after the
manner of the Eastern Churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest
the people should faint through the weariness of sorrow’—a famous
evidence of the fact that St. Ambrose was the first to introduce the use
of music into the services of the Western Church.
It is interesting to note in the midst of that vast crowd of now
nameless and forgotten individuals a figure well known to all times
since, the small quiet African mother, Monica, who had followed her son
across the terrible winter seas, resolved in her invincible spirit to
guide his seeking soul into the haven of the true faith. And Augustine
himself, the young professor just appointed to the chair of rhetoric in
Milan, must have been present too, gazing upon the surprising scene of
this persecuted but dauntless pastor and his devoted flock. Every
vestige of the _basilica nova intramurana_, where the great struggle
took place, is now long gone. But its place is still the place of
Milan’s Cathedral, the great Gothic Duomo of later times. And the
episcopal palace of to-day occupies the same site—or near it—of the
dwelling of Ambrose, where Augustine, his heart swelling with eager
questions, would often enter uninvited, as all might freely do, and
watch the holy man in silence, restrained from speaking by the fear of
disturbing him as he sat reading in his moments of leisure and preparing
himself to expound to the people.
But it would be vain to seek to-day even for the place of that
fourth-century house upon the walls—Maximian’s walls—where Augustine
lodged with his mother and the marvellous boy Adeodatus, his son, fated
so early to die. Or for the little garden where he hid himself one day,
even from his faithful follower Alypius, and amid the throes of a
terrible spiritual anguish heard the unseen child’s voice chanting in
pure, untroubled tones, ‘_Take up and read, take up and read_,’ and
opening the volume of the Apostle saw the words which lifted his soul
out of the torture of conflicting desire into the serenity of faith at
last. Nor is any trace left of the original baptistery for males, on the
south side of the Cathedral, where the subsequent baptism of Augustine,
Adeodatus and Alypius, at the hands of Ambrose, was in all probability
performed. The place is occupied now by the Church of San Gottardo.
The conflict between Empress and Bishop was won by Ambrose. Justina’s
efforts to depose him and set up a new bishop were completely frustrated
by his timely discovery of the bodies of the Milanese martyrs, SS.
Gervasio and Protasio, a miraculous event which raised him to an
invincible position in the opinion of all Christendom. The triumph of
the great bishop, though it savours now of bigotry, was of deep and
far-reaching significance. It was the revolt of the new and as yet
hardly tried Church against the ancient imperial authority. It pointed
to the future. It initiated that obstinate and long-continued struggle
between the temporal and spiritual powers which makes the history of the
Middle Ages in Italy. For Milan and for Lombardy it meant more; it was a
protest against the influence of the foreigner, against a strange
domination in thought. The Arian heresy was alien and unnatural to
Italian sentiment; its followers were chiefly among the large population
of Goths settled by this time in Italy. Ambrose, in rallying round him
the masses of the people and conquering the established powers, was in
fact appealing to the elements out of which the Commune of later days
was to develop—to those instincts of liberty and nationality of which
the Mediæval Church was to be the glorious guide and champion.
The later and more famous triumph of Ambrose—when, before the doors of
the same Basilica Nova, he stood, armed only with the insignia of his
sacerdotal office, and barred the entrance of the sanctuary to the
blood-stained Emperor Theodosius, till, awed by his spiritual dignity,
the wearer of the purple sank before the white-robed priest and did
public penance for the massacre of Thessalonica—was another and greater
proof of the ascendency of the ecclesiastical over the imperial power.
But the significance of the scene reaches further, and embraces the
whole sphere of humanity. In standing bishop and kneeling king we see,
not the individuals and their immediate motives, ambitious, despotic,
superstitious, as they may partly have been, not even the struggle of
great transitory interests, but a wider, deeper, more enduring
principle—the recognition of the supremacy of spirit over brute force,
the victory of the Christian ideal of love and pity over the earthly
lusts of blood and revenge, of the religion which adores the helpless
Mother and Child over the deified Force of the ancient creeds.
Ambrose was now the most powerful man in the Empire, ruling the minds of
men by the sheer strength of character and lofty virtue. The Barbarians
in their distant lands testified to the might of his saintliness—this
man who, as a Frankish king asserted with awe, _says to the sun, ‘Stand
still,’ and it stands_. The two young Emperors, Gratian and Valentinian,
were tools in his hands, and Theodosius himself had to acknowledge the
Church in the person of Ambrose as a twin power in the realm. When the
Bishop died in 397, he bequeathed to his successors an episcopal
dominion so strengthened by his powerful personality, and glorified by
the sanctity of his life and doctrine, that it was ever after associated
with his name, and known as the Ambrosian Church. With its numerous and
wealthy dependent bishoprics, its Arch-Pontiff or Pope, its cardinals,
as the chief clergy were called later, and immense hierarchy, its
peculiar liturgy and ritual, this Church was accorded the title of
Holy—_Santa Chiesa_—and acknowledged as self-governing by Gregory the
Great himself.
The Milan of Ambrose and Augustine still belonged in outward aspect to
the imperial past. But a general decay, hastened by exorbitant taxation
and bad administration, was visible at this time throughout North Italy,
where many of the chief towns were, in Ambrose’s own words, _Corpses of
half-ruined cities_. At the opening of the fifth century the simulacrum
of Empire was attacked by the Goths under Alaric (402), and half a
century later (450) Attila, _Flagellum Dei_, passed with his Huns over
the face of Italy, uprooting the useless remains of the ancient world,
as a plough furrows a field for the new sowing. Milan came within his
course, but how deep and extensive was the ruin wrought by him there we
do not know. His was but the first operation in God’s tilling of that
rank soil for the new life it was to bear. In 538 the city suffered a
second and apparently more complete destruction, during the war of
Narses and Belisarius for the recovery of Italy from the Ostrogothic
dynasty established by Theodoric. Milan revolted from the Gothic King
Vitige and allied herself with the Eastern generals. Vitige despatched a
portion of his army, swelled by a host of Burgundians from the
mountains, ancestors, probably, of those Swiss who were to plague the
Milanese in later history. The city was closely invested, and after some
months, deceived in the expectation of succour from Belisarius, she fell
a victim to the revenge of the Goths. The historian Procopius describes
the three hundred thousand slain, the women sold as slaves, the
habitations razed to the ground, and his statement, in spite of obvious
exaggeration, is an indication of the awful havoc and desolation
inflicted upon the still soft, corrupt and luxurious city.
This blow seems to have crushed the vitality of Milan. For centuries she
remained in a weak and depressed condition. During the Lombard
domination, which swept away the brief authority of the Eastern Empire
established by the arms of Narses, her pre-eminence in North Italy was
usurped by Pavia, which Alboin and his successors chose as the capital
of their new realm, now first called _Lombardy_. The broken palaces of
the once imperial metropolis no longer sheltered sovereigns. The Lombard
kings delegated their authority in the city to a governor, whom they
called _Duke_—whence the name _Cordusio_, still used in the centre of
the city, a corruption of Corte Ducis, the palace or judgment-hall of
the Duke—and only approached from time to time to hold a Diet within the
vast melancholy area of her deserted circus. Even the successors of St.
Barnabas and St. Ambrose abandoned her, and transferred the See to
Genoa, where it remained till the next century, diminished in power and
prestige by its exile from the city of the Ambrosian tradition, while
the Roman Pontiffs, throughout the two centuries of Lombard supremacy,
were quietly increasing their influence and making good that claim to
supreme spiritual authority before which the Ambrosian Church was in the
end to succumb.
The return of the episcopal See to Milan indicates some degree of
revival in the city. But two hundred years more were to pass before her
Church resumed its old importance, and Milan her rightful rank in North
Italy. Under Charlemagne, who conquered Desiderio in 774, and created a
so-called Kingdom of Italy, Milan held only the third place among the
metropolitan Sees, yielding precedence after Rome to Ravenna. The
Frankish king, whose great scheme of a restored Roman Empire included a
united Latin Church under the Pope as supreme head, not only exalted the
spiritual authority of Rome over the other Sees, but even endeavoured to
suppress the peculiarities of the Ambrosian liturgy and force Milan into
uniformity with the rest of the Latin Church. He is said to have
descended upon the city and seized all the liturgical books, burning
some and carrying others away into Germany. But even his will was
helpless against the cherished custom of centuries. Some religious men,
so the chronicler declares, succeeded in hiding copies of the books, and
as soon as the Emperor had disappeared, they were unearthed and the old
rites resumed as before.
The political changes of the ninth and tenth centuries favoured the
revival of the Lombard See. With the disruption of Charlemagne’s swollen
empire, and the removal of the temporal support, the spiritual
sovereignty of Rome and the unity of the Church broke down, at least in
practice, and the grand and comprehensive idea of a single rule of
Christendom under the twin sceptres of Emperor and Pope—that inspiration
of great minds in the Middle Ages—failed now, as later, of realisation.
Amid the ungoverned turbulence of the Roman nobles and citizens the
Papacy gradually sank to the lowest depths of corruption and impotence,
and any deference to its authority once paid by the Milanese primates
was soon forgotten.
For a while the Carlovingian kingdom of Italy held together in spite of
constant wars, and under Louis II. Lombardy enjoyed a period of peace
and great prosperity. But after his death in 875, the country, rent by
the struggles of various claimants to the throne, and overrun by Huns
and Saracens, was gradually reduced to a state of chaos, out of which
the power of the feudal barons emerged as the only effective authority.
The Counts and Viscounts, as the imperial ministers were properly
called, lost their authority, or else preserved it as an hereditary and
almost independent right from father to son, fitting themselves as time
went on into the graduated order of the feudal system, which was
extending itself into the whole organisation of society. The one stable
power, that of the Church, based on an inextinguishable tradition,
became paramount in the city, and in virtue of its vast possessions
assumed the temporal as well as the spiritual dominion. By the tenth
century the Archbishops of Milan appear as great feudal princes, the
most powerful in North Italy, and practically independent of the
Emperor. This position was largely due to the spirit and ability of the
two great prelates of the previous century, Angilberto (824-59), and
Ansperto (868-81). Ansperto openly refused the obedience claimed from
him by John VIII. By assembling and presiding over the Diet of the
princes of North Italy at Pavia, which elected Charles the Bald as
successor to Louis II., and afterwards crowning the new monarch, he
arrogated the right of conferring the Crown of Italy independently of
the Papal approval. He appears in this election as a great temporal
prince, leading the North Italian States, and expressing the revolt of
Lombardy against the pretensions of the Pope in the Lateran to the
heritage of the power which once dominated the world from the Capitol.
Throughout the struggles of the next twenty years for the possession of
the throne, Ansperto’s support was always given in opposition to the
Pope. When summoned by John VIII. to a Council at Rome in 879, to answer
for his offences against the Holy See, he shut the door against the
papal legates, so that they were compelled to the undignified proceeding
of shouting the pontiff’s complaint through the keyhole; and he and all
his vast flock, which included, with the suffragan Sees, the whole of
Lombardy, were totally indifferent to the excommunication stammered
against them by the enraged and helpless Pope.
Archbishop Ansperto was the chief restorer of the city as well as of the
Church of Milan. He rebuilt and repaired the broken walls, the buildings
ruined by the barbarians, and by his wise and resolute government gave a
much-needed security to the life and property of the citizens. It was a
greatly increased power which he transmitted to his successors, who
wielded it with the same autocratic spirit. In the confusion of the
Carlovingian break-up, when no one knew who was the rightful sovereign
of the old Lombard kingdom, or who held the prerogative of electing him,
the Archbishops of Milan assumed the part of king-makers, and laid the
Crown, now on the head of an Italian prince, now on that of some heir of
the Carlovingian tradition. The constant aim of the archbishops was to
increase and consolidate their power, and the weakness of the royal
authority gave them their chance. The story of the city in these two
centuries is chiefly composed of the contests of the Primates with the
successive wearers of the Lombard crown, who in their turn endeavoured
to tyrannise over the See by seizing the right to elect its occupant,
and filling it with their own rapacious and arrogant favourites. These
royal appointments were violently opposed by the people, so that the
city was distracted by constant schisms and civil warfare. From 948 to
953 the strife between Adelmano, the choice of the citizens, and
Manasses, an ambitious and intriguing foreign priest, whom Berengarius
had appointed to the See, filled Milan with tumult and bloodshed, during
which the Ambrosian Church was despoiled of much of its treasure. The
election in 953 of a third aspirant, Walperto, to whom the others gave
way, closed at last the miserable war. With the coronation of Otho the
Great (964) in St. Ambrogio, by this archbishop, who had crossed the
Alps in person to summon the German prince to the deliverance of Italy
from the cruel tyranny of Berengarius, a blessed period of peace and
consequent prosperity began for Milan, favourable to the development of
those popular forces in the city—hitherto depressed by constant terror
and insecurity—which were to make her history in the coming centuries.
The peace, however, soon bred in the city a restless vigour which could
find no other vent than war. Under Ariberto d’Intimiano, who was elected
archbishop in 1018, Milan, now restored to undisputed pre-eminence over
her rival Pavia and the rest of the Lombard cities, started upon a
career of conquest. In Ariberto the archiepiscopal pallium cloaked a
potent statesman and warrior, who well knew how to defend that temporal
power which the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages looked upon as the best
guarantee of their spiritual authority. When the Emperor Henry II., who
followed the Othos, died in 1024, and the uncertainty as to his
successor on the Lombard throne threatened new trouble to Italy,
Ariberto hastened to Germany, and on his sole authority, according to
one chronicler, though others say that he was supported by a party of
Italian magnates, offered the kingdom to Conrad the Salic. Two years
later (1026) he reasserted the right of the Primate of Milan to crown
the King of Italy, by laying the circlet on the new monarch’s brow
within the city itself. At Conrad’s subsequent coronation in Rome as
Emperor, the Archbishop of Milan was the most important of the imposing
company of ecclesiastical princes who attended on the occasion. His
dignified withdrawal from a contest with the Archbishop of Ravenna for
the place of highest honour was followed by a formal recognition of his
primacy in a Papal Bull, while with less self-restraint his vast train
of followers reduced the company of the Ravennese prelate to proper
submission by apostolic blows and knocks in the streets of Rome, amid a
tremendous uproar. Milan’s ecclesiastical superiority to Ravenna and all
other Italian Sees was thus triumphantly settled.
Ariberto’s ambition for the glory and predominance of Milan was well
supported by the people. They followed the militant prelate with
enthusiasm to the subjugation of Pavia, which had refused to acknowledge
Conrad as king (1027), and a little later they made a furious assault
under his command upon the little neighbouring city of Lodi, and forced
its freedom-loving inhabitants to submit to Ariberto’s yoke and accept a
bishop of his choosing. Thus Milan, impelled by the pride and ambition
and necessity of expansion bred of strength and riches, was the first to
provoke that spirit of hatred and revenge among the sister cities of
Lombardy, which could only be expiated by centuries of bloodshed and
sorrow.
But neither leader nor people had any doubt of the righteousness of
their military enterprises, which were indeed invested with a sort of
religious consecration. Ariberto instituted the use of a sacred Car in
times of war, which bore aloft in the midst of the host the tokens of
the Christian Covenant, the Cross and the Altar of Sacrifice, in
sanctifying association with the Vexillum of the city. Round these
emblems of their faith and of their existence as a community the citizen
soldiers would rally, bearing the Car forward to victory with
irresistible enthusiasm in moments of advantage, or defending it with
despairing resolve when defeat threatened. Thus was originated the
_Caroccio_, adopted afterwards by all the Communes of Italy—an exalted
and beautiful idea, which, though often debased by association with
enterprises of greed or revenge, became also the guide and inspiration
of the Lombard peoples in their noble struggle for liberty in the
succeeding centuries.
That struggle was already foreshadowed in Ariberto’s time. The pride of
the Archbishop and the city which he governed soon came into violent
contact with the will of the Emperor. Conrad resented the prelate’s
increasing encroachment upon the royal prerogatives. Besides the
sovereign right of making war, the Archbishop claimed the privilege of
investing the bishops of his jurisdiction and the secular nobles also
with their fiefs. His assumption of autocratic authority provoked a
large party of the lesser nobles, who made an insurrection against him
in 1036, and being defeated and driven out of the city, united with the
aggrieved citizens of Lodi and broke into open warfare. A fierce battle
was fought at Campo Malo, in which Ariberto appears to have been
worsted. The Emperor, regarding the moment as favourable for asserting
his authority, crossed the Alps (1037) to restore peace. But on arriving
in Milan he did not find the humility and submission which he expected,
and offended, or perhaps alarmed, by the haughtiness of the Prince
Prelate and the excited temper of the populace, he retired to Pavia, and
there summoned Ariberto to appear before a Diet, to answer the
accusations of his enemies. The Archbishop obeyed, and without allowing
him time for defence, Conrad commanded his arrest. He was carried to
Piacenza and there kept in captivity. But Conrad had hardly reckoned
with the power which lay behind his great vassal. Instead of accepting
this chastisement with resignation, Milan broke into an uproar of
lamentation at the news of her pastor’s imprisonment. With fastings,
processions and litanies, with oblations, and benefactions to the poor,
the pious citizens hoped to propitiate Heaven on his behalf, while the
more worldly-minded sought to procure his rescue. At last, after two
months, Ariberto himself found a means of escape with the aid of the
Abbess of the great convent of San Sisto in Piacenza. This lady, at the
request of a trusty servant whom the prelate managed to send to her,
despatched to him twenty mules laden with divers kinds of delicate
meats, and ten waggon loads of wine, out of the goodly stores of the
convent. With these provisions Ariberto made a great feast for his
Teuton guards, who soon stupefied themselves with the good wine. The
Milanese chronicler Landolfo describes the scene—‘ ... They became
beyond measure intoxicated—persisting in their potations until the
middle of the night, and each one provoking his neighbour to drink more
and more.... They began to quarrel and threaten one another with rolling
eyes and terrible voices, and then to weep with thick tears pouring down
their faces, and so drunk were they with the wine that they did not know
what they were doing, and their limbs would not serve their office so
that they fell down prostrate. The servants of Ariberto, seeing them in
this plight, were immensely rejoiced, and carrying them away one by one,
laid them out on well prepared couches as if they had been dead men....’
While the Teutons lay thus and ‘snored terribly,’ the prisoner slipped
quietly off to the river Po hard by, where he found a ship, sent by the
Abbess, in readiness for him. Into this he entered, and soon reached
Milan in safety, while his guards, awaking, half stupid from their
drunken slumbers, went seeking for him everywhere with hideous clamour.
The fugitive was soon followed by the irate Emperor, with a great army,
and Milan was closely besieged. Mighty deeds of valour were performed on
either side, according to the Milanese chroniclers. But all the efforts
of the great Emperor and his hosts were unavailing against the city,
defended by its ancient Roman walls and by an enormous population. After
a few months he raised the siege, and endeavoured with equal futility to
overthrow Ariberto by deposing him and setting up another archbishop.
His persecution of Milan provoked, the chroniclers tell us, a signal
manifestation of the Divine wrath, in the person of St. Ambrose himself,
who appeared one day in the midst of terrible thunder and lightning as
the Emperor was listening to the Mass, and caused such consternation
among those present that many fell down dead. Thus, worsted by
supernatural as well as earthly means, Conrad retired to Suabia in 1038,
leaving the Archbishop master of the situation, and to all intents and
purposes potentate of Lombardy.
But this crowning height to which Ariberto had brought the See of Milan
was the brink of a signal downfall. The greatest, he was also the last
of the strong ecclesiastical princes of Milan. Silently, steadily during
these last centuries of revived vigour and prosperity a new force had
been developing in the city, and acquiring conscious existence—the
People. The wars of Ariberto’s reign had endowed this force with the
knowledge of arms and a sense of its own power. It was the nameless,
irresistible will of the masses of the citizens which had carried
Ariberto to victory over the Emperor, and this very victory tended to
the undoing of the Archbishop and his order, by weakening the feudal
system with which the episcopal and aristocratic power of Milan was now
inextricably bound up. It had been the part of the Church of St. Ambrose
to give the consecrating impulse and inspiration to the revolt of the
new world against the decaying order of the Roman Empire, and under its
latest representative to lead the city, as we have just seen, to victory
over the Head of feudalism. But now in its turn this great force for
civilisation and humanity was to be corrupted by temporal power and
possession—to renounce its mission as guide and sanctifier, and assume
instead the part of opposition to the vital and progressive elements of
the community. Ariberto and his clergy were, in fact, the
representatives in Milan of feudalism and aristocracy. The hierarchy of
St. Ambrose was composed of the great nobles of the city, in whose
families the high ecclesiastical offices and benefices had became
hereditary possessions. These arch-Priests, arch-Deacons, Cimiliarchs,
Decumani—the Cardinals or Ordinaries, as the highest orders of the
clergy were called—were great feudal magnates, forming the strongest
class of the Milanese nobility. Ranged beneath them in ecclesiastic and
feudal rank were the lesser clergy, just as the secular aristocracy was
divided into the two degrees of Captains—_Capitani_—and their vassals,
called Vavasours—_Valvassori_. Below these came the undistinguished
masses of the people, merchants, artisans, and peasants, mostly serfs,
and all absolutely subjected to the arbitrary government of the nobles.
The first revolt against this system was that already mentioned, which
resulted in the battle of Campo Malo, and arose within the privileged
class itself, being an attempt of the Valvassori and minor clergy to
shake off the heavy yoke of their feudal superiors. But a much more
fatal discord in the community began in 1042, when the whole populace
joined with the discontented Valvassori, and broke out into fierce
rebellion against the nobles. One Lanzone, a noble who had deserted his
own order, was their leader. A civil war raged for many months, filling
the streets with daily tumult and bloodshed, and at last the Archbishop
and the magnates were forced to abandon the city. Invoking the aid of
the nobles in the neighbouring communities, they returned with a strong
army and invested the city. The struggle was waged with hideous ferocity
on both sides, neither giving mercy to prisoners or wounded. The
besiegers built six great strongholds round the walls, commanding the
principal gates, and effectually shutting out all succour of food or
arms. Two long and terrible years went by, till the plight of the
citizens grew desperate. Pallid and lean from famine and sickness, still
they fought on with invincible souls, in the midst of the deserted
palaces and falling towers of this city which, the chronicler tells us,
no longer seemed, as of yore, the seat of noble kings, but rather a
desolate Babylon. At last Lanzone resolved to go to Germany and seek the
help of Conrad’s successor, Henry III. But the Emperor, mindful of his
father’s experience of Milan, would only grant it on condition that his
army should occupy the city, and that the people should swear fealty to
himself. But the new-born democracy, groping its way to liberty through
a thousand obstacles, instinctively rejected these conditions,
preferring its native tyrants to a foreign yoke. Lanzone skilfully used
the fear of imperial interference to persuade the besiegers to agree to
a reconciliation. Peace was concluded, all mutual wrongs being forgiven,
the nobles restored to their homes and possessions, and a share in the
government secured to the people.
The one sacrifice offered upon the altar of this new covenant between
the classes was the leader Lanzone himself, who, at the first
opportunity, was arrested and put to death by the aristocratic party.
But his work was done, and the foundation of the future Republic had
been laid. Archbishop Ariberto, now ill and aged, had taken refuge
during the troubles at Monza, and returned to his own city, only to die
(1045). His career fitly closes with the first signs of the collapse of
the social order which he embodied.