_The Opening of the Gate_
“Il Duca perse lo Stato e la roba e la libertà, e nessuna sua opera si
finì per lui.”—LEONARDO DA VINCI.
If the great movements of history could ever be said to turn on the
existence of an individual, one might regard as the paradoxical result
of Galeazzo Maria’s death the loss of Italy’s freedom. The young
Milanese Brutus, in his noble rage against tyranny, little foresaw the
three centuries of dark and hopeless servitude which by the
unimpassioned workings of fate his blow would indirectly bring upon his
country. The exclamation of the cynical Sixtus IV. at the news of the
murder—_To-day is the peace of Italy dead_,—showed a clearer vision. The
scheming Pope saw and gauged the unstable elements in the situation—the
ambition of Naples and Venice, the helplessness of Duke Galeazzo’s
ten-year-old successor, the contagion of disorder throughout Italy;
remembered the aggressive Turk in the east, the adventurous Frank in the
north, and forthwith set to work to precipitate the inevitable upheaval
in the interests of his own family.
The trouble ahead was, however, as yet hidden. Milan kept calm. The
air-bubble expectations of the conspirators had perished at the touch of
reality. There was no attempt at a rising. The widowed Duchess assumed
without opposition the supreme authority as regent for her son, the
child Gian Galeazzo, with Cecco Simonetta as her chief minister. The
dead Duke’s brothers, Sforza, Duke of Bari, and Lodovico il Moro, were
absent in France, Ascanio the priest in Rome. But the situation was
pregnant with danger, as Simonetta well knew. He suspended all Galeazzo
Maria’s works of embellishment in the city, set the engineers and
builders to construct new defences, threw a strong garrison into the
Castle, and adopted every precaution against revolt. The chief menace
came from the nobles of the old Ghibelline party. They hated Simonetta,
who was a Sicilian and the creature of Francesco Sforza, with no
interest apart from his master’s House, which he strengthened by
depressing the great feudatories. The veteran minister was unpopular
with the people too, because he was a foreigner, and because of the
heavy taxes. Sforza and Lodovico, hurrying back from France, and joined
by Ascanio, found a powerful party, headed by the fiery and restless
soldier, Roberto di San Severino, ready to support them in overthrowing
the government. But Simonetta was on the watch. He seized one of the
chiefs of the disaffected party, and filled the city with troops. San
Severino promptly fled to Naples, and the three princes retreated to a
little distance, ready to escape. Their youngest brother, Ottaviano, a
youth of eighteen, who was involved in their plot, also rode hastily out
of the city, and finding himself pursued, leapt into the swollen Adda,
and was washed off his horse and drowned. A formal decree banishing the
elder princes was issued, and for the moment the danger was over and
Simonetta triumphed.
Naples, however, ambitious for a foothold in Milan, embraced the cause
of the exiles, and sent San Severino with an army to worry the ducal
territories. The brothers themselves, from their different places of
refuge, kept up communications with their partisans in the city, and
intrigued against the government. Simonetta’s power depended upon the
will of the Duchess Bona, a lady ‘of little good-sense,’ according to
Commines. Though she left the guidance of affairs entirely to the
minister, his influence could not compete with the charms of her
handsome Ferrarese secretary, Antonio Tassino, to whom she could deny
nothing. The inordinate presumption of this favourite soon conflicted
with Simonetta’s authority. Lodovico Sforza, who far away had eyes and
ears everywhere, was quick to profit by the dissension between these two
powers at Court. The death, in 1479, of the elder brother Sforza—from
excessive fat—helped to clear the path for the ambition of the Moro, who
was now created Duke of Bari by the King of Naples, in succession to
Sforza. To him the rebellious spirits in Milan looked henceforth as
their leader. A number of the great nobles, the Borromei, the Da
Pusterla—those old foes of the Dukes of Milan—the Marliani and others,
aided the upstart Tassino to turn the Duchess against her husband’s
faithful old servant. Beatrice da Este, wife of Lodovico’s half-brother
Tristan, and other ladies in her intimacy, plied her with complaints of
Simonetta, and entreated her to dismiss him and recall the banished
Moro, who with the mercenaries of Naples was now preying on her
territories. Tassino whispered the same persuasions between the
endearments which she permitted from him. At last, one day Lodovico
himself knelt before her, having at great risk returned to the city and
made his way secretly through the gardens into the Castello. Heedless of
his disobedience to her decree of banishment, the thoughtless woman
received him with the utmost joy, and the whole city burst into a frenzy
of welcome. Simonetta’s clear vision read the future. _Most illustrious
Duchess_, said he, _I shall lose my head, you your State_. Deaf to his
warning, Bona committed the government to her brother-in-law. Three days
later Simonetta was arrested and carried to the Castle of Pavia, where,
after he had lain a whole year in captivity, he was brought to trial,
before one of the most vindictive of his personal enemies, on a charge
of enormous crimes against the ducal House. He was tortured, and finally
beheaded in the Castle yard. For putting him to so merciful an end, Bona
took much credit to herself in an official notification of his trial and
death sent to the various Courts of Italy.
The minister disposed of, the turn of the favourite came. From being
Lodovico’s ally and tool, Tassino was now become a serious hindrance to
Lodovico. His arrogance was overweening. He had boundless power over
Bona, and was rapidly making himself absolute master in the palace. The
crisis arrived in a struggle over the Rocchetta, the inner Keep of the
Castle of Milan, which, with its strong garrison and impregnable
defences, gave its commander virtual dominion of the whole city. Tassino
persuaded the Duchess to appoint his father as Castellan, in the place
of Filippo Eustachio, who had been put in charge of it by Duke Galeazzo.
But Filippo, a staunch adherent of Lodovico’s, disobeyed her repeated
commands to give up the keys, and sturdily resisted all her efforts to
remove him, defying her threats and sentences, until the Moro had
prepared a swift and sudden stroke. One day, at Lodovico’s bidding,
Filippo and Gio. Francesco Pallavicino entered the apartments of the
little Duke, at an hour when most of his attendants were out of the way,
and snatching up the child, carried him across the narrow bridge which
led from the Corte Ducale into the Rocchetta, and delivered him into the
custody of his uncle. With the person of the sovereign in his
possession, behind the defence of drawbridges, portcullises and
artillery, and a strong body of soldiers faithful to himself, the Moro
could dictate terms to the Duchess. She had no alternative but to
surrender to him the regency and the guardianship of her son. As for
Tassino, seeing himself overreached, he fled incontinently, to escape a
worse fate, and stripped of everything but his perfumes and ivory combs,
which were bundled after him, he disappears ignobly out of history.
Bereft at once of lover, son and sovereignty, Bona was a piteous figure
of helpless rage and grief. She declared she would abandon the Duchy,
even if she had to climb out of the windows and cross the moat at the
risk of her life. Lodovico, however, gently detained her in the Castle
of Abbiategrasso, a virtual prisoner, until the subsidence of her
shallow passion enabled her to submit to the new order of things and
settle down, without power or authority, to a quiet life with her
children, in the Castello of Milan again.
Thus, by a series of successful palace intrigues, Lodovico Sforza made
himself supreme in Milan. He had still, however, to cope with the
resentment of the nobles who had helped him to power, and now found
themselves denied any share in it. Like all usurpers, Lodovico found
ingratitude necessary to self-preservation, and from the first he
studied to depress his more powerful subjects, choosing foreigners and
men of modest degree as his ministers and advisers. Roberto di San
Severino with many other nobles now took up arms against him. But they
were completely defeated by Constanzo Sforza, an able general and a
kinsman of the reigning House, and the turbulent San Severino,
transformed into the Moro’s bitterest foe, quitted the Duchy, and went
off to serve Venice in the war against Ferrara.
The masterly craft by which Lodovico Sforza had achieved his triumph,
roused the admiration and fear of all Italy, which increased as, with
the progress of time, he became the most conspicuous figure in Italian
politics. About the enigmatic personality of this prince, history has
confused our minds with contrary judgments, which romance has translated
into a various caricature. His peculiar association with Italy’s
greatest glory and greatest shame has thrown an exaggerated light and
shade upon his memory. The Italian historians of this period make him
the scapegoat for that calamity of Italy, which no one man, but the
ancient and inherent sin of the whole nation, brought about.
Guicciardini, while recording his many virtues of mind and heart, is
glad to believe him guilty of the worst crimes of ambition and perfidy,
and to discover in him a fatal self-conceit. Paolo Giovio speaks of him
as _born for the undoing of Italy_. Modern inquirers have modified the
traditional view of the Moro, by showing the baselessness of some of the
worse charges against him, and by a diligent prying into all the details
of his domestic existence, they have at once humanised and belittled the
old picture of the man. Yet still the real Lodovico seems dark to us. It
is not for nothing that the name of _il Moro_—the Moor—given to the
dark-skinned boy in his childhood, has clung to him through history; it
shows the conviction of his contemporaries and of posterity that it
fitted not only his bodily appearance, but the complexion of his soul.
By his actions he must be judged. In the Italy of the Quattrocento, to
do evil that good might come was excellent morality. The best men
practised it, and differed only from the worst in the ends they pursued.
Lodovico’s usurpation of power had its immediate justification in the
salvation of the State. The prestige of his name, and his fine
statesmanship, could alone avert the civil war and anarchy which Bona’s
government was leading to, and oppose a barrier to the greed of Venice
and Naples for Lombardy. The deposition of a weak woman by a strong and
able man was an act unsingular in a country where beneath all law and
convention reigned the tacit conviction that character was the true
legitimacy. Once in power, he found that internal peace necessitated the
sacrifice of the turbulent elements of which he had served himself to
climb, and personal ingratitude became a public virtue. Freed from the
prepotence of these restless spirits, the citizens could pursue their
occupations undisturbed, and the prince could devote himself to his
great schemes for the improvement of agriculture, the facilitation of
commerce and the humanising of the people. It is these things—in which
he carried on the noblest tradition of the Sforza domination—which are
the Moro’s apology for much wrong-doing; it is these and not his
ceaseless political activity, and immense prestige as a statesman, which
make the story of Milan great during his reign, a period brilliant,
joyous and prosperous beyond compare.
Though in title only regent for the young Duke, Lodovico was absolute
sovereign. His extraordinary activity, resource and subtlety, backed by
the boundless wealth of Milan, soon made his influence felt abroad. For
the first year or two his cares at home kept him from interfering much
in general affairs. The balance of power in Italy, deprived of the
weight of Milan, wavered in consequence, and Sixtus IV., Naples and
Venice did their utmost to swallow up Florence. The safety of the great
Tuscan Republic, secured partly by the courage and address of Lorenzo
de’ Medici, but more by the timely knock of the Turk at the door of
Italy, at Otranto, was further assured by the fast-rising power of the
new ruler of Milan, who by uniting his State in 1484, in a fresh
alliance with Florence and Naples, restored to Italy that equilibrium
which had been first established by his great father, Francesco.
The eleven years that followed the Peace of Bagnolo (1484-95) were the
most splendid in the history of mediæval Italy. They were the
culmination of a great ascent, preceding as great a downfall. Pressing
upwards through the continual struggles, amid the phantoms and shadows
of the earlier centuries, the chosen spirits of humanity had at last
emerged upon a height, where, as in the light of unclouded morning, the
whole world seemed spread out before and behind them, heaven itself
within their reach, the gods themselves their fellows. In the general
material prosperity out of which the fine flower of Italian civilisation
in the Quattrocento had sprung, as in the cultured and artistic joy of
life which was its highest expression, Milan, led by Lodovico Sforza,
held a foremost place. Whatever may have been his secret motives, this
prince exerted himself ceaselessly to conceive and carry out projects of
enduring benefit to the country. Summoning the greatest brains in Italy
to his service, he set on foot immense hydraulic works, by means of
which wildernesses were converted into fruitful tracts, and new ways
opened for the passage of merchandise and general traffic. He widened
his father’s famous canal, the Naviglio Martesana, and the Naviglio
encircling the city, employing the inventive genius of Leonardo da
Vinci, to overcome the difficulty of the different levels by a system of
locks, still existing in Milan to this day. He joined these canals with
the ancient channel between Milan and Pavia, thus forming a navigable
waterway between the Adda and the Ticino. Large districts hitherto
unfertile owed their after prosperity to this enlightened ruler. He
fostered agriculture, founding model farms and introducing improved
breeds of cattle and horses. His pleasaunces and orchards round the
Castello at Milan, and his country palaces and villas were so beautiful
and fruitful that they were called earthly paradises. After a brief half
century of the Sforza rule, the Duchy of Milan was become a vast garden,
supporting an enormous population of hardworking peasants. Commerce
flourished more than ever, every way being opened to it by wise and
considerate measures. In the higher branches of industry the Moro’s
vitalising interest and enthusiasm was as effective. His splendid
patronage of art and letters made this city of prosperous traders the
richest centre in Italy of the æsthetic culture of the Renaissance.
Attracted by his liberality and large ideas, the rarest genius of the
age was at his command. Bramante of Urbino spent many years at Milan,
building cupolaed temples and colonnaded palaces, and transforming the
old mediæval city of the Visconti into the fair Renaissance vision of
the Moro’s desire. For Lodovico and for Milan, Leonardo da Vinci did his
greatest works. Perugino painted for the Moro the splendid Madonna with
the Archangels, now in the National Gallery, and in the stimulating
atmosphere a number of native artists of considerable distinction sprang
up. Lodovico equally favoured men of letters and scientific inquirers.
He invited them to Milan, and gave them great rewards, and did his
utmost by grants and personal care to raise the University of Pavia and
the schools founded at Milan by Galeazzo to a flourishing condition.
[Illustration: CANAL, VIA SAN MARCO]
But the merits of the Moro’s government were obscured to the people by
his tyrannic methods. The peasants, groaning under the oppression of
forced labour and of heavy and unjustly distributed taxation, were too
preoccupied by their immediate grievances to care for the rich harvest
which would ensue some day from the sacrifice of their sweat and their
scanty gains. In their belief the Prince sought only self-glorification
and the increase of the already fabulous ducal treasure. Their simple
lamentations sound in the pages of the chroniclers like a dull
threatening undertone in that wonderful symphony of rich and various
instruments which the life of the Milanese Court was at this time.
[Illustration: CANONICA OF ST. AMBROGIO]
One of the worst characteristics of a tyrant was, however, conspicuously
absent in Lodovico Sforza. He was not cruel. Galeazzo’s horrible ways of
enforcing the law no longer prevailed. The gallows vanished; fragments
of quartered traitors adorned the gates no more, and such pains as
justice or policy necessitated were administered out of the sight and,
if possible, knowledge of the Moro. Even Guicciardini describes the Moro
as _mild and merciful_. The sight of bodily suffering hurt his
fastidious delicacy, his love of fair and seemly appearance, his fine
sensibilities. His shrinking from blood was perhaps a sign of what may
explain much that seems dark in his history—fear; of the decadence which
fatally awaits races risen too swiftly to greatness. However that may
be, his mildness did not win the hearts of the people for a sovereign
who addressed them from behind the protection of iron bars and never
admitted them to free and friendly audience. An ever-widening gulf
divided their lives of elemental want and passion from the exquisite
existence of subtle and various delight within the impassable walls of
the Castello. It was for the Moro, we remember, that Leonardo sketched
the plans of an ideal city, with an upper system of streets in which the
sovereign and his chosen society of nobles and courtiers might pass,
uncontaminated by the breath and odour of the multitudes below.
To the princes of the Quattrocento the people were but the necessary
foundation of existence, ‘the mud on which proud man is built.’ And how
incomparable was the fair fabric, so based, and composed of all the
rarest elements of life. The story of the Moro’s Court is well-known to
English readers. The joyous figures that peopled it are familiar to us,
and the gorgeous pageants, the processions of princes and potentates and
fair ladies, the stupendous display of wealth and beauty, the tourneys,
feasts and dances, are tales oft told in biography and romance. In 1489
the long arranged marriage of the young Duke with Isabella of Aragon,
granddaughter of King Ferrante of Naples, was celebrated with
extraordinary pomp, and two years later the festivities were renewed for
the double nuptials of the Regent himself with Beatrice da Este,
daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and of her brother Alfonso,
heir-apparent of Ferrara, with Anna Sforza, sister of Gian Galeazzo. All
these splendours were far overpassed, however, in 1493, when the Moro’s
diplomacy was rewarded by an imperial alliance for the House of Sforza,
and Bianca Maria, the Duke’s remaining sister, rode forth from the
Castello in a chariot of gold to her marriage with the Emperor
Maximilian. The imagination reels with the descriptions of the rich
robes and jewels, the pavilions and triumphal arches, the garlands, the
blazoned hangings, the allegorical masques, the noise of music and of
applauding crowds on these occasions. One would feel that Milan must
have suffered an intolerable surfeit of colour and delight, did we not
know that the gorgeous riot was shaped into symmetry and order by the
supreme decorative taste of the Italian Quattrocento. All the beautiful
neo-pagan conceits, the new vision of the gods of Olympus granted to
that age, inspired these brief spectacles. Leonardo—Bramante—fashioned
those gorgeous edifices of an hour, built up that wonderful seeming,
ephemeral as the glories which it celebrated, and stayed those passing
moments for ever in the history of the world.
Though it was the desire to outdo every other princely Mæcenas which
impelled Lodovico to bid highest for the services of great artists and
scholars, it was not merely his liberality which held such a man as
Leonardo at Milan, but rather his large appreciation, his sympathy with
great and original ideas, his rare wisdom in leaving genius free to work
in its own way. He had this, moreover, in common with that unique among
the sons of the Italian Renaissance, that he, too, was a far seeker and
the designer of things never to be finished. Leonardo came to Milan
about 1483. There exists a copy, apparently in his own handwriting, of a
letter recommending himself to the Moro, in which he enumerates all his
qualifications for employment, beginning with his skill in the invention
of military engines, and ending with his capacity to carry out any work
in sculpture or painting _as well as any other man, be he who he may_.
Vasari tells us that on his arrival in Milan he offered Lodovico a
silver lute which he had fashioned himself in the form of a horse’s
head, and in such a manner that in beauty and sonority of tone it
surpassed every other instrument at the Court, and that the prince
quickly became enamoured of his admirable gifts and conversation. The
more intimate knowledge of the man revealed in his own notebooks has,
however, changed the traditional picture of Leonardo as a fine courtier
and brilliant wit and conversationalist, the centre of attraction at the
Court, enjoying great revenues from the Moro and dissipating them in
splendid living. We see him, instead, secluded with his pupils in the
pleasant home which Lodovico gave him on the outskirts of the city,
beside the Castello gardens, poring over some problem of construction or
hydrostatics, striving to create a flying-machine or other novel engine.
Or passing rapidly, according to his mood, from modelling the great
horse to his painting in the refectory of Sta. Maria della Grazie, or
tracing the exquisite contours of those beautiful favourites of the
Moro, Cecilia Gallerani and her successor, Lucrezia Crivelli, mocked and
allured in each shadowy face by that inscrutable smile of woman in which
the secret of life seemed to hide itself. He evidently cared little to
mingle with the social life of the Court, where perhaps he was neither
able nor willing to express to a circle, alive to intellectual interests
but enslaved by pedantry and charlatanism, those occult thoughts which
even in his writings he hid in left-handed hieroglyphics. Yet he must
have been a familiar presence in the palace, where he was constantly
summoned for some work which to us seems strangely disproportioned to
his genius—the arrangement of the water-supply for the Duchess’s bath,
the designing of triumphal arches for a wedding pageant, or the costumes
and accessories of some spectacular joust. Whatever it was, he did it
with the interest of one for whom there is no great nor small, and for
whom a moment as much as countless centuries holds eternity, and little
things and big manifest alike the divine law of necessity.
Leonardo’s figure overshadows for us all others of Lodovico il Moro’s
Milan. There were many others besides him, however, of highest
reputation at the time in the chosen circle of the Court. The Moro, in
his care for the intellectual improvement of his subjects, imported
poets from Tuscany to teach them the art of composing sonnets. Ancient
prejudice against all things Lombard withheld many of Leonardo’s
countrymen from accepting the Sforza’s offers of honours and emoluments.
But the sunshine of Court favour, come whence it might, was greedily
accepted by the Florentine Bernardo Bellincione, whose gift for
stringing together appropriate and flattering verses secured him the
position of Court poet for many years at Milan. Nor could any small
local passion restrain that bare-boned vagabond genius, Antonio
Camelli—called il Pistoia after his native city—from quenching his
perennial famine at the ducal table. But though he played the fool to
amuse his patrons, il Pistoia was of much rarer stuff than Bellincione.
Behind his cloak of buffoonery the tragedy of a serious and prophetic
spirit hid itself, and a fine satire inspired the sallies of his
fantastic muse. An irrepressible sonneteer, he poured forth streams of
verse at Milan. A number of his sonnets allude to the politics of the
day, and are of great interest.
These professors of poesy were very successful in propagating their art
in Milan. Francesco Tanzi, one of the many versifiers at Court, declared
that after the example of Bellincione, Milan was full of sonnets, and
all the rivers and canals ran with the water of Parnassus. The poetic
frenzy had invaded the whole of society, so that every young knight who
desired the favour of ladies and princes had needs be skilled in making
rhymes and improvising to the music of his lute. A flourishing school of
poetry rewarded the Moro’s patronage and encouragement, and its most
distinguished graduates were young nobles of the first rank—Gaspare
Visconte, of the same stock as the old ducal House, and Antonio di Campo
Fregoso, of a famous Genoese House. A singer of older and still higher
repute in the ducal circle was that mirror of the graceful and cultured
chivalry of the day, Niccolò da Correggio, who as the son of Beatrice da
Este, wife of Tristan Sforza, was constantly at Milan, in devoted
attendance upon his cousin, the younger Beatrice da Este. Marchesino
Stanza, Girolamo Tuttavilla, Galeazzo di San Severino, Galeotto di
Caretto, a lettered noble and chronicler of Montferrato, all swelled the
tuneful choir. The Moro himself is said to have included sonnet-making
among his myriad activities. Around these distinguished figures hovered
a host of lyrists of various rank and accomplishment, both natives and
pilgrims attracted from afar to this now famous shrine of the Muses. Men
of other occupations added their voices in moments of leisure. Among
these was Bramante, who, in the intervals of his labours as architect,
engineer, painter and master of revels, competed eagerly for the laurel
wreath.
The chief theme of their song, and the object of the gallant adoration
and service of all, was the younger Beatrice da Este, who at fifteen
came to Milan to be the Moro’s bride. To this child of tuneful Ferrara,
trained from childhood upwards in all the æsthetic traditions of its
famous Court, an atmosphere of poetry, music and art was as natural as
the air she breathed. With that full and eager vitality which she shared
with her father, Duke Ercole, and her sister, Isabella of Mantua, she
sought all beautiful and joyous things. In the Court of her rich and
indulgent lord she could satisfy every desire. For the rich equipment of
her person and her surroundings she had the rarest talent at her
command. Leonardo da Vinci devised curious girdles for her. That finest
of goldsmiths, Caradosso, carved the beautiful gems which she wore, and
spent his most delicate workmanship on pax or reliquary for her oratory.
To create her presentment in marble she could choose a Gian Cristoforo
Romano, most cultured and graceful of young sculptors. Her love of sweet
melody was fed by the crowd of skilled musicians who frequented this
Court, where their art was traditionally welcome. Besides the Flemish
priest Cordier, and the other ultramontane singers of Duke Galeazzo’s
celebrated choir, there were here the viol player, Jacopo di San
Secondo—the Apollo of Raphael’s Parnassus—whose strains were able to
soothe the Moro in moments of fever and pain, Atalante Migliorotti, the
friend and companion of Leonardo, and others numberless, nameless to us
now. An incomparable craftsman, Lorenzo di Pavia, made instruments for
her of purest tone, in cases of ivory and ebony most exquisitely worked.
She played herself upon these, and had a sweet voice. Many a time with
her devoted knight, Galeazzo di San Severino, model of all fashionable
graces, and himself an accomplished singer, and her favourite Daino,
most musical and delightful of fools, she and her ladies would make
harmonious concert. As became a daughter of Este, Beatrice extended a
princely patronage to scholarship and serious literature. Her secretary,
the learned Vincenzo Calmeta, tells us that she engaged men suitably
gifted to read aloud to her the _Divina Commedia_ and the works of other
Italian poets. She would give serious attention to literary debates,
such as the lively poetic contention we read of between Bramante and
Gaspare Visconte, on the respective merits of Dante and Petrarca.
Such encounters of sharp-sworded wit, so much in vogue at that time,
were conducted at Milan with less pedantry and self-conceit than in
Courts ruled by more strictly humanistic traditions. A freedom, gaiety
and freshness animated the intellectual atmosphere here. The Moro’s
extraordinary activity of mind and wide interests, Beatrice’s ardour,
and capacity for enjoyment, fired all around them. The Duchess’s
eagerness for culture was tempered by her love of sport and outdoor
life. Her hawks and her hounds were a primary passion in this Ferrarese
princess, and many a fair morning was passed in adventurous chase of the
wild creatures in her husband’s vast hunting demesnes. She was a
splendid horsewoman, and had unbounded courage. The lively sports in
which she indulged with her ladies and cavaliers were not always of a
refined order. The gaiety of the fifteenth century was ministered to by
jests and practical jokes of incredible coarseness, and by all the
obscenities of the allowed fools and monstrosities of nature who capered
in grotesquely brilliant garb round every Renaissance princess. Yet into
this full life the Duchess herself carried a redeeming innocence. In
spite of her free intercourse with the young nobles, no lightest shadow
ever rested on her fair fame.
The society in which she passed her bright, pure existence had, however,
but lately had Galeazzo Maria for leader and example, and had forgotten
all moral restrictions. When Beatrice came first to Milan she found her
husband’s mistress, the beautiful poetess Cecilia Gallerani, installed
in the palace itself. The whole of Milan was rotten beneath its fine
vestures and its art and learning. Wealth and luxury had encouraged the
love of pleasure natural in the people, and the ideal of freedom in
thought and manners, the search for novel experience and sensation, the
worship of the new old gods, born of the revived knowledge of antiquity,
had induced immorality and corruption more than elsewhere in this city
where voluptuous tastes were not restrained, as in the Florentines, by
natural temperance. Everywhere in the midst of the joyous revels lust
and evil passions were heaping up sins ready for the retribution to
come. Corio, an eyewitness of these times, preludes his story of the
great catastrophe by a vivid picture, adorned by the fashionable pagan
conceits, of Milanese life during these years before the fatal 1495,
when it seemed to the city and its Lord that everything was more firmly
established in peace than ever before. No one thought of other than
accumulating riches. Pomps and pleasures ruled the hours. _The Court of
our princes was splendid exceedingly, full of new fashions, dresses and
delights. Nevertheless, at this time virtue was so much lauded on every
side that Minerva had set up great rivalry with Venus, and each sought
to make her school the most brilliant. To that of Cupid came the most
beautiful youths. Fathers yielded to it their daughters, husbands their
wives, brothers their sisters, and so thoughtlessly did they thus flock
to the amorous hall that it was reckoned a stupendous thing by those who
had understanding. Minerva, she too, sought with all her might to adorn
her gentle Academy. Wherefore that glorious and most illustrious Prince
Lodovico Sforza had called into his pay—as far as from the uttermost
parts of Europe—men most excellent in knowledge and art. Here was the
learning of Greece, here Latin verse and prose flourished resplendently,
here were the poetic Muses; hither the masters of the sculptor’s art and
those foremost in painting had gathered from distant countries, and here
songs and sweet sounds of every kind and such dulcet harmonies were
heard, that they seemed to have descended from Heaven itself upon this
excelling Court._
We who know the after days of Milan watch the golden hours gliding by
towards the darkness ahead, and the glory centring round the two doomed
figures of Lodovico and Beatrice is pregnant for us with tragedy and
grief. Corio continues with a description of these princes, _in this so
vain felicity_, passing their time in divers pleasures, and speaks of
the magnificent jousts and tournaments and military shows, and of the
homage paid by the poets to the Moro as Lord both of war and peace. Yet,
he adds, with all this glory, pomp and wealth, which seemed as though
nothing could be added to it, Lodovico, not content, or unaware of his
felicity, must needs reach higher still, that his fall might be the
greater. And the chronicler, preparing himself to compose the cruel and
unheard-of tale, fears that compassion will not suffer him to arrive at
the piteous end without tears.
The Moro’s power was in fact unstably based. His was the right of
natural ability to rule. But beside him the lawful sovereign had grown
to manhood during these years. Gian Galeazzo Sforza—the engaging little
boy reading Cicero in Bramantino’s fresco, now in the Wallace
Collection—showed with advancing years little desire or capacity to
govern. Amiable, weakly, and self-indulgent, he was perfectly content to
leave the power to his uncle, for whom he had a love and admiration
which are a touching element in the relationship of the two men—usurper
and legitimate prince. Had they only been concerned, the Moro’s peculiar
difficulties might never have arisen. He seems to have regarded himself
sincerely at first as the vicegerent of his nephew. _Dum vivis tutus et
laetus vivo. Gaude, fili, protector tuus ero semper._ These words, in
the mouth of nephew and uncle, are the motto on a miniatured page in the
_History of Francesco Sforza_, by Gio. Simonetta, printed in 1490. The
picture shows Lodovico and Gian Galeazzo kneeling on the edge of a lake;
in the midst of the water a ship with a youth in it and a Moor at the
helm, and in the background a mulberry-tree (_moro_) spreading wide
branches. This allegory—one of many such that we read of—may have
expressed some real affection as well as self-exaltation in Lodovico,
though after-events give it a strange irony.
But the respective marriages of the two princes introduced another
element into the situation. Beatrice da Este was not only the joyous
spirit of festival and sport and all artistic delight, but a woman of
strong character and intelligence. She quickly gained influence over her
husband, and asserted herself in State affairs. The very narrowness of
her youth and sex gave her power over the complex and wide-minded Moro,
who adored her spirit and courage, and yielded to her as his great sire
Francesco had yielded to Bianca Maria. Beatrice wanted the semblance as
well as the substance of sovereignty, and the birth of her son, in 1492,
added the new ambition of a mother to her desire. Isabella of Aragon, on
her side, had a royal spirit; her soul swelled with rage and offended
pride when the regent showed no intention of relinquishing the
government to her husband. In vain she urged Gian Galeazzo to assume his
rights; her exhortations only passed straight from the confiding boy
into Lodovico’s ears. Her sense of wrong was further exasperated by
Beatrice, who usurped the homage and consequence which should have been
Isabella’s as consort of the sovereign. The rivalry between the
princesses began very soon after Beatrice’s appearance on the scene, and
that playful boxing-match of which we read, in which the Duchess of Bari
knocked down her of Milan, was the symbol of a contest which involved
fatal issues reaching far beyond the two women themselves.
Influenced by his wife’s ambition, and the birth of his son—also perhaps
by the impossibility, when the hour came, of relinquishing the sweets of
power and sacrificing his vast projects and the fruits of his past
incessant labours to the claim of mere primogeniture represented by the
feeble and already failing Gian Galeazzo—Lodovico was evidently
scheming, after 1490, to make himself Duke of Milan. From the time of
the Moro’s marriage the ceremonial homage which had been paid till then
to the young Duke was gradually lessened. The tutelage which had been
proper in his boyhood was now used to emphasize his incapacity. No
single office or dignity was at his disposal. Ministers of State,
captains of fortresses, generals and magistrates, all were appointed by
Lodovico. At no point did his subjects come into contact with their real
sovereign. He was dependent for all supplies upon the Moro, who kept
absolute control of the immense Sforza treasure. The birth of his heir
was but scantily celebrated, while that of Lodovico’s a little later was
made the occasion of the most pompous rejoicings. The halls of the
sovereigns in the Corte Ducale were gradually deserted, while Lodovico
and Beatrice’s apartments in the Rocchetta were thronged. The
self-seeking courtiers knew well where their devotion was most
profitably placed. Besides, it was melancholy in the chambers of a
sickly prince and a sad princess ever brooding over her wrongs. The two
appeared less and less in public, and finally retired altogether to the
Castle of Pavia, and their pathetic figures were almost forgotten on the
joyous stage of Milanese life.
But they existed—a constant menace to the Moro, a weapon for his
thousand enemies in the State, and for jealous Italy outside. Isabella’s
piteous complaints to her grandfather, whom she implored to right her
husband, inflamed the long-standing Aragonese hatred of the Sforza. The
other powers—Venice, baulked in her greed of conquest by the strong hand
of the Moro, and ever nervous for the cities which she had wrested from
Milan in Filippo Maria’s time; Pope Alexander VI., who allowed no
gratitude to the Sforza, although through Cardinal Ascanio they had been
the means of his election, to interfere with his schemes for a new
Borgian Italy; Florence, politically and commercially jealous of the
Lombard State—all would have gladly seen the Moro overthrown and Milan
depressed.
During these years of peace and of expansion for Milan, the suspicious
fear with which the disproportionate prosperity of one power was always
regarded by the rest of Italy had concentrated itself upon Lodovico
Sforza. His extraordinary success and untiring activity, his powers of
intrigue, his ability and resource, were the theme of every tongue. The
extravagant adulations of his Court poets were repeated and unwillingly
credited throughout Italy. With the vast wealth of Milan at his command
what might he not do? Fear of Milan was an old habit. Was it she that
should give Italy a master after all? Was this dark prince, mysteriously
potent, to be the destroyer of her liberty at last?
Had men looked more closely into the monster of their imagination, they
might have perceived that it was not Lodovico’s ambition that was most
to be apprehended. The fatal situation which now developed seems to have
been the product of two opposing fears. The Moro’s faith in himself and
in his good fortune was a superstition which supported itself upon the
lying prophecies of the astrologer ever at his side, and was at the
mercy of every ill omen. His intrigues were often the devices of a man
on the defensive, rather than the confident moves of a conqueror. To
give a colour of justification to his now almost complete usurpation, he
set casuists to work and evolved a specious doctrine, pronouncing
himself lawful successor of his father, as the first son born to
Francesco after he became Duke of Milan. By means of this argument, and
the better persuasion of an enormous gift of gold, he obtained from the
Emperor Maximilian the promise of the investiture of the Duchy, an
obsolete legality which neither Francesco or Galeazzo had troubled to
obtain in confirmation of the right won by the sword. These devices,
however, aroused only derision and scandal in his own country, nor could
they quiet his own uneasy mind. He felt Italy against him and was
afraid. His particular dread of the House of Aragon never slept. Though
old King Ferrante urged with pathetic sincerity the maintenance of the
league which had preserved the peace of Italy for so many fortunate
years, he might at any moment be succeeded by Alfonso of Calabria, who
did not disguise his hatred of the Moro and his longing to right his
daughter and son-in-law. Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in 1491, and peace
was already threatened by the injudicious policy of his son Piero. The
covetousness of Venice, the faithless selfishness of the Pope, completed
a situation of general peril, which might easily beget a great
combination to crush Lodovico and reinstate Gian Galeazzo, to be
followed by a scramble for the States which all knew the young Duke
incapable of governing.
The Moro resolved to anticipate the blow. With fatal confidence in his
power to control the force which he was evoking, he opened the gate
which it was Milan’s sacred duty to keep shut against the foreigner. He
invited Charles VIII. of France to lead an army into Italy against the
Princes of Aragon, and to recover the Kingdom of Naples for the House of
Anjou.
Lodovico’s act did not perhaps at the time wear the magnitude of guilt
which subsequent events gave it. Italy was so disunited, so lacking in
any general principle of patriotism that her various tyrants had not
scrupled to appeal at times to France or the Empire in their needs. Men
were used to sporadic attempts of the Princes of Anjou to overthrow the
Aragonese dynasty in Naples. But now that the Angevin claims were vested
in the King of France, such attempts must be more perilous for Italy.
Naples was not the only State to which France had pretensions. Louis of
Orleans—next in succession to the throne of France after the sickly
Charles and his infant son—claimed the Duchy of Milan itself through his
ancestress Valentina Visconte. The success of the French enterprise in
Naples could scarcely fail to be followed by a vindication of this other
claim. Nothing but that strange and fatal belief in himself, which not
only inspired Lodovico but had infected his contemporaries, could have
blinded the Moro to the madness of his proceedings and induced Venice,
Florence and the Pope to abet his projects at first by forming a new
league with him and abandoning Naples to its fate. There was some
strange glamour about this remarkable man which deluded his own
generation. The Renaissance spirit felt itself represented and fulfilled
in him. Its boundless confidence in human possibilities was exemplified
by the reputation of almost superhuman powers with which it invested
Lodovico Sforza. _God in Heaven and the Moro on earth_, so dared il
Pistoia to sing, and the prince to hear. The tragic fall which awaited
this exaltation is a part of the inward as well as outward history of an
age when pride built so high, only to be smitten with incompleteness.
Strangest of all, perhaps, was the self-deception of Lodovico himself,
shown by the persistence in him, throughout his hopeless captivity, of
this superstitious faith, after it had utterly failed him in the crisis
of his life, so that in his last moments, in his prison at Loches, he
could attribute his overthrow to nothing less than the direct
intervention of God, to punish him for his sins, _since only the sudden
might of destiny, he said, could have subverted the counsels of human
wisdom_.
In inviting Charles, Lodovico doubtless thought to produce a temporary
diversion, which should weaken Naples and produce a political upheaval,
amid which he should be able to secure the ducal throne, and once seated
in it, readjust by adroit diplomacy, the balance of power in the
peninsula after the retirement of the invader in due course. But he had
left out of account the respective conditions of France and Italy—the
pent-up military fury in the noble classes in the first country, which
raged for an outlet, the fatal weakness of disunion in the second, and
the enervation which peace and unparalleled prosperity had produced in
its people. He may have hoped to achieve his ends by the mere threat of
French invasion, and counted on the indecision of the young king and his
own subtle craft to keep the matter from going any further. Charles,
however, whose weak head swam with the flatteries of venal councillors,
and with romantic ideas imbibed from the tales of the Paladins, was
easily persuaded to undertake the conquest of Naples as a preliminary
step to the redemption of Christendom from the Turk.
But the preparations for the expedition were very dilatory, and more
than two years passed before they were completed. During this time of
suspense Italy was full of doubts and fears. Lodovico’s allies began to
hesitate, and there were daily shiftings of policy in the various
States, now in favour of Naples, now of France, all actuated by
self-interest, which guided them finally in this crisis of their
country’s fate to a despicable neutrality, waiting upon events. The
Moro’s own policy was shifting and tortuous, even displaying at times an
anxiety—little credited by his neighbours—to save Naples from the
catastrophe which he himself was bringing upon her. Already he was
working for a reaction against the French in the event of their success
in Italy. But his advances to the opposite party won for him only the
distrust of his friends, and in France many warned Charles of the folly
of relying upon this man, _homme sans foy, s’il voyoit son profit pour
la rompre_, as Commines pronounces him.
Meanwhile, careless apparently of the future, Italy continued her wild
dance of pleasure. In Milan, gaiety and licence reigned supreme. Yet
there are many signs that a sense of sin and of a reckoning at hand had
begun to awaken. The sonnets of il Pistoia grew grave with prophecies to
laughing Italy of the much weeping which time would soon draw from her,
and of the shortness of the hours between her and her immense,
irreparable sorrow. The superstitious Moro himself must have been shaken
by the blind friar who is said to have appeared in the Piazza of Milan
at the time of his negotiations with the French King, crying—_Prince,
show him not the way, else thou wilt repent it_. From Florence came the
echo of Savonarola’s annunciation, _Gladius Domini super terram cito et
velociter_. More poignant still to ears that could hear was the
tremulous voice of the octogenarian King of Naples, warning Pope and
Moro, again and again, of the peril clear to the terrible prevision of
the dying—_He who will may begin a war, but stop it, no!_
But the voices cried in the wilderness. King Ferrante’s was spent by
death early in 1494, and in the following autumn Charles appeared at
last at the head of a splendid host, and was welcomed with immense pomp
and revelry by Lodovico and Beatrice at Pavia. There in the Castle the
young Duke lay dying. The King visited him, and the piteous spectacle
roused the sympathy of the monarch and his followers, for whom the
person of legitimate sovereignty had a sacredness unfelt by the
Italians. Charles was, however, much embarrassed by the Duchess
Isabella, who besought him to have mercy on her father, the King of
Naples. _She had better have prayed for herself, who was still a young
and fair lady_, observes Commines.
The invaders passed on, finding their path cleared before them, and
their progress already an assured triumph. Their cruelty when they had
first entered the country had terrified all inclination to oppose them
out of the Italians. Piero de’ Medici’s shameful surrender, Florence’s
welcome, the inactivity of the Pope, the speedy fall of Naples, all the
details of the pitiful story are well-known. Charles had not gone far
when Gian Galeazzo died. The cruel report at once arose, and was widely
believed by both French and Italians, that Lodovico had had him
poisoned, and the Moro’s memory has come down to our day loaded with
this detestable sin. Modern inquiry has, however, shown how little
foundation there is for the charge, disproving the preliminary
accusations against Lodovico of starving and ill-treating the ducal
couple, and making it clear that Gian Galeazzo was surrounded by
physicians and carefully tended. It is evident that Lodovico’s
temperament was incapable of such a crime—that he would have been
repelled by the mere idea of murdering this nephew whom he had brought
up, and who loved him with a pathetic fidelity to the last. Gian
Galeazzo’s longing on his death-bed for the uncle, who was far away,
riding in splendour beside the French King, his touching questions to
one of Lodovico’s gentlemen whether he thought his Excellency the Moro
_li volesse bene_—loved him, Gian Galeazzo—and whether he seemed sorry
that he was ill, go far to dissipate the cruel suspicion. Nevertheless,
the young Duke’s death relieved Lodovico’s conscience of its last
scruple with regard to the Dukedom. He hastened back to Milan and had
himself invested with the ducal mantle, cap and sceptre, in the midst of
a stupendous pomp.
Meanwhile, the success of the French was producing the result
anticipated by the Moro. Venice, awaking to the danger which the
terrible prestige of the conqueror’s arms meant for all Italy, was ready
to listen to Lodovico’s proposals for a remedy. The invaders were now to
add to their experience of Italian pusillanimity an acquaintance with
the craft which had superseded brute courage in this advanced nation.
Scarcely had the French King turned his back on Lombardy, when the
Venetian ambassadors were treating with the new Duke of Milan for an
alliance against him. A few months later, Charles and his knights, sick
with the Southern delights of their newly-conquered realm, and longing
like homesick children for France, found their return barred by a
powerful coalition of their late ally with Venice, the Emperor, the King
of Spain, and nearly all the minor States of Italy. The story of their
homeward march, more like a flight, need not be repeated here. At the
approach of the French to his dominions, the faithless Lodovico trembled
in his palace, in spite of the mighty host of allies which was awaiting
them, while his people, beside themselves with fear of the cruel
Northerners, and exasperated by the grievous taxation imposed upon them
to oppose this evil which the Moro had himself provoked, murmured
against him as the murderer of Gian Galeazzo, and the oppressor of the
widowed Duchess and her son. Lodovico well knew that he could not lean
upon his subjects in adversity. But the battle of Fornuovo (1495)
relieved Lombardy of all fear of the French for the time, though the
Italians let slip their chance of annihilating the hungry and enfeebled
enemy, and crushing the Northern terror for ever. The irresistible
conqueror of a year back, having with miraculous good fortune escaped
with the best part of his troops to Asti, was compelled to negotiate for
peace with Milan and Venice. At the meetings of the Duke and the
Venetian Ambassadors with the representatives of Charles, Lodovico was
accompanied by his young wife, who took part in all the discussions, and
astonished everybody by her intelligence and wisdom. All through this
critical period of the French invasion, Beatrice was the true helpmeet
of her husband, sustaining by her courage and will his more sensitive
temperament under the fears and doubts which assailed it.
Peace at last concluded, the French finally made their way home, leaving
so weak a hold on Naples that the Aragonese quickly reinstated
themselves. In the universal joy at the disappearance of the invaders it
appeared to all that the Moro had saved Italy. His prestige, of late
clouded, was now more brilliant than ever. Securely seated on the ducal
throne, strong in the new alliance in which his initiative had bound
Italy, he seemed indeed to have succeeded in all his calculations and
schemes. Those seeds of future danger—the fatal knowledge of Italy’s
weakness, which the French had acquired, the declaration of the Duke of
Orleans, that he should return to conquer his rightful heritage of
Milan—were unheeded. In his new exaltation the Moro vaunted himself the
child of fortune, and believed himself to be, as astrologers, poets,
courtiers, ambassadors told him, arbiter of the destinies of Italy, and
incarnation of almost divine wisdom and prudence. He put his trust more
and more in destiny, and prompted by his venal astrologer, Ambrogio da
Rosate, thought to read in the stars his triumph. As if blinded by the
gods in preparation for the sacrifice, he passed all bounds in his
arrogance. The old jealousy and distrust of his fellow-sovereigns now
revived with new force. His jester’s vainglorious trumpeting—_the Pope
is my chaplain, Venice my treasurer, the Emperor my chamberlain, and the
King of France my courier_, was repeated in every city of Europe, as if
Lodovico himself had seriously spoken it. The many guests at the
Castello of Milan told everywhere of the painting on the walls there,
depicting Italy as a queen, and the Moro, with a _scoppetta_—his
personal emblem—brushing the dust from her robes, whereon were inscribed
the different Italian cities. These boasts of exaggerated
self-confidence rankled in his contemporaries. But while they hated him,
they feared him too. More than ever now all Italy waited upon his
motions.
[Illustration:
LODOVICO IL MORO, BY BOLTRAFFIO (TRIVULZIO COLLECTION)
_To face p._ 176.] [_Anderson, Rome_
]
The months that followed the conclusion of peace with Charles were
joyous beyond compare. In the summer of this year (1496) the Duke and
Duchess had a meeting with the Emperor, and returned loaded with
honours, which added a new lustre to Lodovico’s fame.
Suddenly, at the height of his fortune, Fate struck her first blow at
the Moro. Beatrice died (1497).
The golden days of Milan changed all at once to gloom. Silence shut down
upon the dancing and sweet music. The Duke, to whom even his children
and State seemed no longer worth living for, sat for nine days in a
darkened chamber alone, refusing all comfort, while in Sta. Maria delle
Grazie the monks chanted incessant masses for Beatrice’s soul. The Moro
was overwhelmed. _He who had ever lived happy, now began to feel great
anguish_, says the Venetian Sanuti. The fabric of his dreams had crashed
upon him. What were kingdoms to him without that clear-sighted and
dauntless spirit at his side? Not only was his strong affection rent,
but his profound faith in his good fortune was awfully shaken. As if the
evil augury had to declare itself unmistakably, on the night of
Beatrice’s death a large part of the walls of the vast pleasaunce which
he had created round the Castello fell with a great crash, ruined by no
storm or wind, or agency perceptible to human sense. From this moment,
so much is man’s destiny affected by his own spirits, all Lodovico’s
misfortunes began. He entered on that downward course which was to drag
so much to ruin with it—and to the husband’s loss of the blessing of
this Beatrice, the poet of the Italian Renaissance ascribes not only the
fall of Moro, Sforza, and Visconte Snake together, but the captivity of
Italy.
‘Beatrice bea, vivendo, il suo consorte,
E lo lascia infelice alla sua morte.
Anzi tutta Italia, che con lei
Fia trionfante e senza lei, captiva.’[3]
Footnote 3:
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto xlii.
The gate which the Moro had thought to shut so easily upon the departed
stranger was once more ajar. A second French expedition threatened
Italy, and Milan in particular. Early in 1497, the great captain Gian
Giacomo Trivulzio, head of the party in Milan hostile to the Sforza, and
a bitter personal foe of the Moro, who had abandoned his country and was
high in the French service, made a raid into the ducal dominions. At the
same time his partisans stirred up the discontent of the people, and
inspired their volatile minds with desire for a change of masters. And
soon the League began to show its internal weakness. The interests of
the two chief parties in it were fatally opposed. Venice found her
designs on Pisa thwarted by Lodovico and in her rage began to ponder the
advantages of making friends with the French. Out of the struggle for
Naples now renewed between the French garrison and the Aragonese she
might by a prudent policy, when both combatants were exhausted, secure
the sea-kingdom of the South, and might not a second descent of the
French King, lasting long enough to overthrow the Sforza and no more,
put rich Lombardy at last within her reach? With such hopes the grave
senators flattered their ambition and forgot their faith to Italy. The
Pope, for his own interests, had turned his back on the Sforza, and was
parleying with the common foe, while in Florence the Frate and the
people still looked to Charles for the establishment of the Kingdom of
God on earth and the restitution of Pisa.
The King, however, swayed by opposite counsels, let the months go by,
and the Moro, with desperate trust in his own statesmanship, still hoped
to save his Dukedom. In spite of his anxieties and embarrassments, his
unconquerable instinct of order maintained the fair aspect of his
dominions. But on the great artistic projects of his triumphant days an
arresting spell was laid. The resources of the State were exhausted in
war and defensive preparations. The people were already taxed to
rebellion, and no supplies were forthcoming for his painters and
sculptors. Leonardo asked in vain for the bronze for casting the statue
of Francesco Sforza. The clay model, raised in front of the Castello in
1493, on the occasion of Bianca Maria’s marriage with Maximilian, had
remained there since, and it seemed more and more likely that this high
thought of prince and artist combined would never take on any but an
ephemeral form.
The brief, uneasy quiet was broken by a stroke of fate. Charles VIII.
died suddenly (1498), and was succeeded by the Duke of Orleans. Louis
XII. had no sooner ascended the throne than he announced his immediate
intention of invading Milan.
Once more put to the trial, Italy proved again unfaithful to herself.
And the pity of it was that the fault lay in her long-rooted political
conditions, not in the will of the people. The sentiment of patriotism
was strong in the country, and _bon italiano_ was the current expression
for one who hated and opposed the French. Yet it could not avail to
overcome the conflict of interests among the different States, which
was, after all, the blind continuous struggle of the national instinct,
whether represented for the moment by Republic, hereditary tyrant or
military usurper, towards the creation of a single and united kingdom.
This time Venice was the arbiter of the situation. Answering the Moro’s
piteous and self-humiliating appeals for help and protection only by
cruel taunts of perfidy, the Republic concluded an alliance with the
French (1498).
The Moro’s old disloyalties were now repaid to him tenfold. He looked
round him in vain for a friend. The reward of usurpers and short
tyrannic dynasties based on force, not love, met him in an alienated
people, who refused to endure hardship or make sacrifices to save him,
but looked instead to any change of government as desirable. His armies,
composed chiefly of foreigners, were undisciplined and rebellious,
serving only for pay. They were badly generaled by the Duke’s
favourites. Lodovico, with all his ability, had little judgment in his
choice of servants. He was led by his affections, which betrayed him.
Chief among his trusted officers were the San Severini brothers—the
Conte di Caiazzo, Galeazzo, famous champion of the tourney-lists, and
the Moro’s son-in-law, and the gruff Gaspare, better known as Fracasso.
They were the sons of Roberto di San Severino, but Lodovico had kept
them always beside him and heaped honours and places upon them.
Galeazzo, the prime favourite, had the chief command of his army.
Francesco Bernardino Visconte, Antonio Maria Pallavicino, Antonio
Trivulzio and the rest, all were alike unprepared in heart to sacrifice
themselves for the sovereign in whose sunshine they had warmed
themselves. The slight tie that bound together the various elements of
the State could not endure against fear, ambition, greed and hereditary
hate. The situation was further aggravated by the arrogance and
exactions of the ducal favourites which excited the rage of the people
and increased Lodovico’s unpopularity.
Events moved rapidly. In March 1499 the treaty between France, Venice
and the Pope was publicly proclaimed. Louis was to conquer Milan, and
Venice, as the price of assistance, was to share the spoils. Florence
was nominally the Moro’s ally, but had neither means nor will to help
him now. Naples was too weak to count, and Lodovico’s one friend, the
unstable and spendthrift Maximilian, gave only empty promises. The Duke
was left to make his desperate defence alone. In spite of his energetic
preparations the presage of doom lay heavy on his soul, and affected all
around him. He believed that Fortune, once his friend, was now contrary,
and that God was angry with him.
In June the French army arrived in Asti, and immediately invaded the
ducal territories. Every obstacle fell before them. Treachery and fear
delivered castles and cities one after another into their hands. The
Conte di Caiazzo made secret terms with them, and withdrew his troops
from action. The rapid progress of the invaders brought them soon to the
strong city of Alessandria, in which Galeazzo di San Severino and the
main Milanese army lay to check their advance upon the capital itself.
Here they met a promise of resistance, but the place had not been
besieged many days when for some extraordinary and unexplained reason it
was delivered to them. Some say that Galeazzo was seized with despair,
others that he was deceived by a forged order to retire. Anyhow, one
morning before daybreak he stole out with a few other nobles and
galloped to Milan, and his army, when they found their general gone,
incontinently fled in all directions.
No obstacle now remained between the enemy and Milan. With the same
fatal spirit of despair which had undermined the whole defence, Lodovico
gave himself up for lost. Though his great Castle at Milan was the
strongest fortress in Europe, its garrison nearly three thousand, its
artillery enormous in number and size, its munitions of war and all
necessaries infinite, he could see no salvation except in abandoning the
city and seeking aid in person from the Emperor. There may have been
something of the instinct of bending before the storm in his decision.
He knew that he could not hold the city, where the insurgent mob was
already sacking the palaces of his favourites. If the citadel only stood
firm, however, there was every chance of some revolution of the
political wheel carrying him back before long. But blinded again by
affection, he made a fatal mistake in his choice of a Castellan. In
spite of many warnings he confided the entire command of the castle to
one Bernardino da Corte, whom he had brought up from childhood and
loaded with favours, charging him to guard it faithfully against the
enemy, and promising to relieve him before three months were past.
Lodovico Sforza’s departure from the city which his father had won and
he himself had ruled gloriously for many years; the tears and kisses
with which he parted from his little motherless sons, sending them
before him into Germany; his last visit, attended by weeping monks, to
the tomb of his wife in Sta. Maria delle Grazie; his rapid ride out of
the city next morning, after a night of fever and anguish, accompanied
by a very few friends and followers, while the people’s cry changed from
‘Moro, Moro’ to ‘Franza, Franza,’ even as he passed—these things are all
recorded with deep compassion by Corio, whose chronicle sadly concludes
with this downfall of the House which he had served from boyhood.
Behind Lodovico’s back, amid the flames and smoke of the burning
palaces, the streets and squares broke out into a garish splendour of
decoration to welcome his conqueror. Four days later Gian Giacomo
Trivulzio rode in at the head of the French, amid the wild enthusiasm of
the mob. The General, elated at his triumphant return to his native
city, promised them anything and everything in the name of their rich,
powerful, and all benign new master, the King of France. They believed
that the millennium was come.
They soon learnt their mistake. Meanwhile, Fate had dealt the decisive
blow to the domination of the Sforza. The rock of their fortunes, the
impregnable Castello, provided by the extreme care and thought of the
Moro with every necessary for a lengthy siege, was after a few days
basely sold to the enemy by the traitor Castellan. On reception of the
news in his distant retreat Lodovico is said to have remained as if
mute, and to have finally uttered these words only—_Since Judas was
there never a greater traitor than Bernardino Curzio_.
This condemnation was echoed by the whole world, and with especial
emphasis by the French themselves, who were amazed at such treachery and
cowardice. But the Castellan was not the only traitor. Bernardino Fr.
Visconte and others of Lodovico’s great ministers were his accomplices,
and partakers of the spoil. Hardly was the old master gone, ere they
bent before the new. Louis XII. followed his army in person to Milan,
and entered in great state, wearing the ducal beretta, and greeted by
the same artistic demonstrations of joy and loyalty as had so often
celebrated the pompous occasions of the Moro’s rule. After a short stay
he departed to France, leaving Trivulzio as governor, an imprudent
choice, which inflamed the old faction spirit. Most of the nobles were
Trivulzio’s hereditary enemies. They began at once to scheme his
overthrow, aided by the French guards, who could not bear to see Gian
Giacomo preferred before them to such high place. In the populace
discontent soon reawakened. They found themselves in worse case than
before. Their master was different, but the taxes remained the same, and
in addition they had to endure the cruelties and excesses of the French
troops. The partisans of the Sforza worked insidiously upon their minds
and excited them to cries of ‘Moro, Moro,’ once again. The city seethed
with intrigue and sedition. Every day tumults arose, and the brave
Trivulzio, beset with snares and embarrassments, tried vainly with his
frank methods and simple soldier’s choler to rule this mass of
conflicting passions, greeds, sufferings and cunning ambitions.
While the way was thus being prepared in Milan for his restoration,
Lodovico, in his exile at Innsbrück, was using every means to accomplish
it, even to the desperate expedient of inciting the Turk to attack the
Venetian State. At the same time he gathered together a strong body of
Swiss and German mercenaries, and prepared to start for Italy as soon as
he learnt from his friends in Milan that the moment was come. The French
strength in the Duchy had been greatly diminished by the departure of
large detachments for Naples and the Romagna, when the report ran
through Milan that the Moro was come back and had retaken Como (1500).
The whole city was immediately in an uproar, and the mob surged round
the palace of the governor, who, after vainly endeavouring to quiet
them, was forced to hide from their insults and threats. A few days
later he left Milan. Immediately after, Lodovico’s forerunners, Cardinal
Ascanio and two of the San Severini, rode in at the head of four
thousand Swiss. Messer Galeazzo, flowering once more in the sunshine of
his Lord’s success, had arrayed himself all in white, with a great
feather on his head, and a pair of shoes on his feet much more fitted
for the service of Venus than of Mars, as a sarcastic chronicler
observes. The Duke himself followed a day later and re-entered his
capital in state. But his triumph was only apparent. The Castello was
now the bulwark of his enemy. It stood with its huge bastions and vast
squares of parapets furnished with a thousand engines of war, frowning
over the defenceless city. Even as the Moro paced in stately procession
through the streets the bells rang out, and a terrified cry arose that
the French had sallied from the fortress. The Duke was not strong enough
to attempt its reduction, and unwilling to face the constant peril of
its presence, he left the city, which he was never to see again, and
removed to Pavia.
The same sickness of doubt, indecision and fear, the same presentiment
of failure which had attended the Moro for so long, now seemed to attack
this great adventure for the redemption of his fortunes. He neglected to
strike a decisive blow at the French before they could be reinforced,
and contented himself with retaking a few cities with as little shedding
of blood as possible. In vain Fracasso and his bolder captains exhorted
him to more energetic steps. His fierce Swiss mercenaries, to whom he
refused the satisfaction of sacking the conquered towns, grew violent
and rebellious. His treasury was exhausted, nor could all the expedients
of Cardinal Ascanio in Milan, even the appropriation of the treasure of
the Duomo and the other great churches, raise enough money to content
the voracious Swiss, of whom new hosts were continually swarming into
the city on their way to the camp, clamouring for employment and pay.
The citizens, terrified by these rude allies, squeezed of every penny to
supply the Duke’s necessities, found their plight worse than ever.
Hearing of the great reinforcements even now pouring down from the
mountains to swell the French army, they trembled with fear of the
consequences of their rebellion against Louis XII. In Novara, where the
Moro now lay, despair and confusion prevailed among the leaders, while
the temper of the Swiss mercenaries grew daily more ominous.
The French army, gradually increasing in number and strength, was
encamped at Mortara, a few miles away, and constantly made bold dashes
up to the very walls of Novara. A battle could no longer be avoided. On
the 4th of April the enemy advanced to within a mile of Novara and
challenged the Italians to the combat. Lodovico’s army issued forth in
noble array, but it was nothing more than hollow show. The whole of the
Swiss, who formed its greater part, refused to fight, on the pretext
that they could not shed the blood of their fellow-countrymen engaged in
the French ranks. Their leaders had in fact secretly treated with the
enemy. Returning into Novara, followed in wild confusion and panic by
the rest of the army, they proceeded to arrange terms of capitulation
with De Ligny, the French commander. The promises, entreaties, tears
even of the unhappy Moro, could not move them from their purpose. All he
could obtain was a promise that they would carry him into safety
disguised in the midst of their ranks when they abandoned Novara. And
even this small mercy was a sham and a treachery. Someone among them
warned the French generals of the arrangement, and a careful scrutiny of
the troops, as in accordance with the agreement with the French they
marched out unmolested, soon detected the Duke by his well-known
features and complexion and the undisguisable height and majesty of his
person. With him were captured also Galeazzo di San Severino and one or
two other nobles.
Thus unbloodily, as if by the decree of Fate, fell Lodovico Sforza. We
watch his dark and mournful figure—more dignified in adversity than when
tossed amid the rude and difficult circumstances of active war—as it
passes slowly out of Italy in its vesture of tragedy, conducted with
respectful compassion by the chivalrous French, taunted and reviled by
his own countrymen. It bears a significance reaching far beyond the
immediate event and the immediate victim. So much was passing away with
it. Italy, that fair queen whose robes the too-aspiring Prince had
desired to brush free from every stain, was a captive with him, befouled
and bloodied by the ignorant barbarian, and all the joy and exaltation
of her wonderful Quattrocento was to fail, and her new-found strength
and hope, with its sky-aspiring projects but half realised, to be bound
down in the sad fetters of disillusion, despair, and a new spiritual
tyranny, while the grand ideal of the Renaissance was to travel away
with her freedom and find its perfect fulfilment elsewhere.
As Lodovico Sforza was the first to utter the fatal invitation to the
French, he was fitly the first scapegoat. But, not alone in his sin, he
was not alone in the punishment. If we condemn him for starting the ruin
of his country by delivering Naples to Charles, what shall we say of
Venice, Florence and the Pope, who each for their own selfish interests
completed it by selling Milan to Louis? The inexorable retribution did
not fail to fall upon them also. The first years of the sixteenth
century are its history. Alexander, dying, dragged down that son and
that earthly dominion for which he had given his soul. Venice, shaken
nigh to destruction in her turn, by an iniquitous combination, had to
forget her wide dreams of empire and be content with a narrow liberty,
passing into stagnation and decay. Julius, continuer of Alexander’s
worldly policy, may well have seen with prophetic eye, when death called
him too, his unaccomplished scheme of a renovated Church,—Papacy and
Empire in one, head of a new heaven on earth, which should lay the sword
of temporal and spiritual victory at the feet of the purified Venus,
Madonna with her Son upon her knee, shrink to the monastic ideals and
the rigid excluding tyranny of the Catholic reaction. Last of all,
Florence, most constant of the lovers of liberty, with her most
melancholy fall filled up the cup of expiation and sealed the final
subjugation of the country.
[Illustration: SCOPETTA OF LODOVICO IL MORO]