_The Sorrow of Milan_
“Il povero Milano cridava, pensando di poter cridare, ma fu
una mala cosa per Milano.”—BURIGOZZO.
At Novara, Milan lost her independence for ever. The restoration of the
Sforza, witnessed twice over in the first thirty years of the sixteenth
century, was a mere puppet-show, barely concealing the hand of greater
Powers behind. The Gascon archers, who from the Castello walls amused
themselves by shooting to fragments the great clay model of ‘the Horse,’
had ruined as effectively the fair social fabric, as unique, as fragile,
and as incomplete, which Leonardo’s work symbolised in the person of its
founder, Francesco Sforza.
With the captivity of Lodovico began in fact that long foreign
subjugation of Milan which was to endure into modern times. Her
vicissitudes during the short period that still comes within the scope
of our mediæval story are too sad to linger over. Reoccupied by the
French after Novara, the city was mulcted in an enormous sum as the
penalty of rebellion, and instead of the comparatively mild régime under
a native governor, first instituted by Louis, she had to suffer the iron
rule of a foreign viceroy, whose aim was to stamp out every spark of
free and patriotic aspiration in the people.
But for several years Milan enjoyed at least outward peace, under the
triumphant Lilies, governed in succession by the Cardinal de Rohan, the
Sieur du Benin, and Charles d’Amboise, Sieur de Chaumont, the last of
whom ruled from 1505 to his death in 1511. In 1509 domination of the
French was shaken by a sudden reversal of policy on the part of Pope
Julius, who, having used their aid to humble Venice, suddenly made
friends with that Republic, and loudly roared to all Europe his
intention of driving the French out of Italy. The immediate result for
Milan was a great inroad of Swiss allies of the Pope, under that
terrible peasant priest, the Cardinal de Sion, and the devastation of
the fair Lombard provinces. The French, whose forces were weakened by
dispersion in various directions and could ill resist this furious
onslaught, endeavoured to dismay their adversary by raising a so-called
General Council for the reform of the Church, in the shape of a few
partisan cardinals, who sat solemnly in the Duomo at Milan and
pronounced futile sentences of excommunication and deposition against
the bellicose Pontiff.
But Julius, strong in alliance with the Emperor and the King of Spain,
laughed at the feeble thunders of his rebellious sons. The French found
better aid in the military genius of Gaston de Foix, the King’s nephew,
who succeeded Chaumont as Governor of Milan and commander of the army in
1511. With a stern and silent rapidity which amazed all Italy, the young
general of twenty-two swept through Lombardy, retaking lost cities,
relieving those beleaguered, and carrying his arms against the Papalists
and Imperialists right up to Ravenna, where he routed them utterly in
the famous battle of Easter Day, 1512. The victory, however, issued
fatally for the winners. The hero of it was borne dead from the field in
slow and mournful procession back to Milan, followed soon after by his
paralysed army in retreat before the renewed hosts which the inactivity
of the new French commander, Palissy, had allowed the dauntless Pope to
collect. Pressed on all sides in the Duchy by the Swiss, Palissy was
unable to maintain his position there either, and continuing their
retreat the French passed away over the Alps, abandoning all their
conquests in Lombardy, except the fortresses of Milan and Cremona.
And now once more a Sforza was proclaimed Lord of Milan, amid the
thunderous rejoicings of the people. But the son of Lodovico and
Beatrice, Massimiliano, whom the Pope and the Cardinal de Sion, for
their own political purposes, lifted to the throne of his ancestors at
this juncture, was nothing but the feeble tool of those two potentates,
a helpless and rotten bark tossed amid the storms of those contentious
times. For the little authority which he wielded, he was utterly unfit.
Bred up in exile at the Emperor’s Court, he had no affection for his
country, and regarded his new sovereignty merely as an opportunity for
extravagant pleasure and dissipation. The maintenance of his luxurious
Court, and of the huge army necessary to defend the State, demanded
enormous sums, to raise which he recklessly alienated the ducal
revenues, and continually imposed unexpected taxes on his subjects. To
satisfy rapacious allies and favourites, he flung away his fiefs,
seeming, as a chronicler says, to follow the proverb—_The fewer
possessions, the fewer cares._ While the light-minded youth forgot all
duties and cares of State, in feasting, jousting and the dance, the
resentment of the people was rising against him, his ministers and
captains were intriguing with his foes, and the roar of the great guns
at intervals from the Castello might have reminded him that the key of
Milan was still held by the enemy, and that Louis in France was quickly
preparing an expedition to reconquer Lombardy.
The first attempt of the French in 1513, under Louis de la Tremouille
and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, met, however, with an unexpected and signal
defeat from the Swiss at Novara, which drove them back over the Alps.
This was followed by the capitulation of the French garrison in the
Castello of Milan, and Massimiliano seemed now firmly established in his
seat. But Julius II. was dead, and the whole political scene had shifted
once again. The Venetians were now ranged with France against the Papal
League, and the accession of Francis I. to the French throne, early in
1515, raised up against the Sforza a young and enthusiastic foe, who was
undaunted by the sad experiences of his two predecessors in their
Italian ventures. The King hastened to raise an enormous army, with
which he crossed the mountains in person, and, skilfully guided by
Trivulzio, surprised and made captive Prospero Colonna, general of the
ducal forces, who was awaiting him in a strong position. Advancing
unopposed, almost up to Milan, Francis seemed about to complete a
bloodless conquest, when a sudden rising of the Milanese themselves, and
the arrival of a great force of Swiss to the aid of the Duke, checked
his progress. And now at Marignano (Melegnano) outside Milan was fought
that mighty battle (14th September 1515), not of men, but of giants—as
the veteran Trivulzio affirmed—in which the fierce and stubborn Swiss
and the gallant French contended all one evening and again the next day,
till seven thousand of the mountaineers lay dead upon the field, and
their brave comrades, utterly exhausted, were forced to give way and fly
into Milan.
At news of the defeat Massimiliano retired into the Castello, abandoning
the city to the enemy. Here he might have held out awhile, but his
spirit was too small, and by the advice of Girolamo Morone, one of the
most astute statesmen of that day, and the chief stay of this generation
of the House of Sforza—who counted on the existence of a more promising
younger brother, Francesco—the incompetent prince renounced his Duchy to
the French King for a large pension. Retiring to France, this elder son
of the Moro disappears ingloriously out of the story of Milan.
The Duchy remained for the next six years in French possession, and was
ruled with comparative justice and beneficence by the Constable de
Bourbon, till the just, generous, and propitiatory impulses of the new
sovereign yielded to indifference and forgetfulness, and it was
abandoned to the cruel and arbitrary government of the Sieur de Lautrec,
brother of the King’s mistress, the Comtesse de Châteaubriant. His
tyranny helped to provoke another revolution in 1521, when the young
Emperor Charles V. united with Pope Leo X. in a new _Holy_ League, and
proclaiming his right to Milan as an imperial fief, sent an army to
invade the Duchy. Lautrec, having executed some of the noblest citizens
on suspicion of intriguing with the Imperialists, abandoned the city,
leaving the Castello garrisoned, and took up his stand four miles from
the city, at the Bicocca, where he suffered a tremendous defeat, which
lost Milan again to France. This turn of the tide carried Francesco,
Lodovico’s second son, to the ducal throne. The wild joy with which the
oppressed and suffering Milanese greeted this new Sforza, in whose name
they trusted with touching hopefulness for a return of the old glory of
their city, was not wholly misplaced. Duke Francesco II. has left a
memory of good repute. The misfortunes of his reign were not due to his
faults or weaknesses, but to the political circumstances of the time,
which deprived him of all real power, and made him a mere pawn in the
great game played between Charles V. and Francis I. with Italy for
stake. Milan was, in fact, dominated by the Spaniard, and the presence
of a great army of these foreigners was a crushing burden upon prince
and people. Though there to defend the city, they wrought little less
destruction and cruelty than the French, when the latter returned as
enemies in 1523, and advancing close to the capital, spread havoc and
desolation all around. Though unable to take Milan, they established
themselves in some of the neighbouring towns, and the approach of
Francis himself with a large army in the following year (1524) drove the
Duke into flight. The city, bereft of half its population and garrison
by a terrible pestilence, was utterly unable to make any defence against
the French monarch. Francis, having entered Milan in triumph, passed on
to besiege Pavia, which kept him heroically at bay through many months.
Meanwhile the Emperor was rapidly gathering force for the relief of his
vassal State. From Naples came Lanoy with the garrison of that province;
from Germany the ferocious giant Fründsberg, leading twelve thousand
lanzknechts; while mercenaries from every part swarmed to the camps of
Charles’ other commanders, the Constable de Bourbon and the Marquis of
Pescara. This horde of hungry and rapacious villains, whom the Emperor
left to gather supplies and pay out of the unfortunate country which it
passed through, swooped down upon the gallant army of the King, which,
falsely secure in its vainglory and sense of personal valour, allowed
itself to be entrapped in the Park of Pavia, and on 24th February 1525,
that vast and exquisite pleasaunce, created for the summer dalliance and
the gay winter sports of the Dukes of Milan, became an awful red-mown
field of all the chivalry of France. Never, perhaps, was such an
oblation of knightly grace and virtue poured out to Death as on that
day. One after another the gentlemen of France fell around their King.
The famous veterans of the Italian wars died together with the youngest
scions of their Houses, new come to this fatal Italy. Among many
Milanese nobles who also fought in the King’s ranks and fell was
Galeazzo di San Severino, who, after mourning for his friend and lord,
the Moro, through several years of exile, had taken service with the
conqueror and risen to the position of Grand Ecuyer of France.
_Madame, tout est perdu sauf l’honneur_, wrote Francis to his mother.
Among other things the Duchy of Milan, but just retaken, was lost again,
and this time for ever. Monseigneur le Roy being a prisoner at
Pizzighettone, his army destroyed and the survivors of his gentlemen
confined in different fortresses, Duke Francesco returned again under
the imperial protection to his capital. But though he was beloved by his
people, his restoration meant a renewal of the intolerable Spanish
tyranny, and fresh exactions for the benefit of the Emperor’s treasury,
worse than any the city had ever suffered before. The Duke himself
groaned under a slavery for which the empty title and insignia of
sovereignty little compensated him.
And now at the very height of Charles’ success, there seemed to come a
hope of freedom for his oppressed vassal. Italy and the whole European
world had been startled by the overwhelming victory of Pavia, and began
to fear the further advance of a conqueror whose triumph was a menace to
all. Pope Clement VII., whose projects for the aggrandisement of the
Medici were hampered by Charles’ predominance in the peninsula, seized
the opportunity to draw the Queen-Mother of France, Henry VIII. of
England, Venice and the smaller Italian States into a vast alliance
against the Emperor. This seemed the moment for Milan to throw off the
yoke of Spain, and Francesco, or rather his chancellor, the able and
faithful Morone, entered into secret relations with the League. He was,
however, betrayed by the Marquis of Pescara, whom he had endeavoured to
seduce from allegiance to Charles. Morone came near to losing his head,
and the Duke himself was denounced for high treason to his feudal Lord,
and was forced to take refuge in the Castello, where he was closely
blockaded by Pescara and De Leyva; while the miserable citizens, who had
found the Spanish troops intolerable enough as their allies and
defenders, had now to suffer unspeakable things from them in the
character of conquerors.
For many months the Duke held out in the hope of the relief promised by
the League, till provisions grew short and famine appeared at hand.
Meanwhile the city, driven to frenzy by its oppressors, rose again and
again in desperate tumults, which were quelled each time by the Spanish
generals with treacherous promises to relieve the general misery, and
followed by severities and outrages more dreadful than ever, till the
fair city became a very hell of slaughter, lust and rapine. In vain the
forces of the League, under the brilliant young Giovanni de’ Medici,
approached to the Duke’s succour. They were driven back by the
Imperialists, and Francesco was at last forced by extremity of want to
surrender the castle and abandon the city altogether (1526).
But the League was daily growing in strength and soon returned to the
attack. The Imperialists were closely besieged in their turn in Milan,
till the descent of Fründsberg with fresh hordes of mercenaries
compelled the assailants to retire and concentrate themselves on the
defensive against the once again overwhelming Imperialists. Lombardy was
now become the complete prey of the occupying armies. The ferocious and
undisciplined hosts that nominally served the Emperor no longer heeded
the commands of a master who gave them no pay, and was himself far away
in Spain. They were practically an independent robber horde, following
whom, and going where, they pleased, supporting and enriching themselves
on plunder, torturing and murdering peasants and citizens without
distinction, to squeeze from them their last possession. It meant
nothing to the soldiers that Charles was entering into negotiations for
peace with the League. Nor could their captains control them. The
Constable de Bourbon, who became Governor of Milan for the Emperor in
1526, promised the afflicted people to move the army from their midst,
but even if he had been sincere, he could not have kept his word. Yet
the army loved him above all their other leaders, this rebel and exiled
prince of France, who was an adventurer like themselves.
Before long Milan and the country round was changed into a bare desert,
out of which even Spanish cruelty could no longer extract a subsistence.
The thought of the unvisited regions farther on began to spread and
agitate among the famished hordes; the names of Florence and Rome,
cities of untold riches, were breathed from one to another, and as one
man they rose at the offer of the Constable de Bourbon to lead them
southwards. As a swarm of locusts lifts from a devastated plain, they
swept suddenly away on the awful, irresistible course which ended in
that final catastrophe of the Middle Ages, the Sack of Rome.
This tragic event, though hardly a part of the pious Emperor’s plans,
made the last link in the chain which Spain was forging round Italy.
Neither the Pope, nor Francis I., who had regained his liberty early in
1526, were able to offer any further serious resistance to the
conqueror, though for some years yet the French continued to make
desperate efforts to regain Milan, and the city had to endure both the
tyranny of the Spanish governor, De Leyva, and the horrors of blockade.
The Treaty of Barcelona between the Pope and the Emperor, and the peace
signed by Charles and Francis at Cambrai—that _Paix des Dames_, arranged
by the most famous ladies of France and Italy—followed by the Congress
and Coronation of the Emperor at Bologna in 1530, secured peace at last
for the tormented country by laying the destinies of Italy finally in
the conqueror’s hands. Francesco Sforza, who threw himself on the
Emperor’s mercy, was graciously pardoned and reinstated in his Dukedom.
The return of this amiable prince inspired a faint joy in the exhausted
people, and gradually, in spite of the enormous subsidies exacted by the
Emperor, and the burdens imposed to drive off the attacks of the
independent condottieri and pirates who ranged the disordered country, a
certain amount of life and activity crept back into the cruelly-wronged
city.
Such consolation and remedy for her wounds as his fettered powers and
grave embarrassments allowed, Francesco administered, introducing order
into the wild confusion of the government, and reviving trade and
industry by careful regulations. But what a changed Milan from that in
which his father and mother had reigned gloriously, in beautiful
stainless palaces, surrounded by the finest productions of art, was this
wrecked, defiled and devastated city, in whose deserted streets and
suburbs nettles grew rankly, and wolves, grown used to feed on human
flesh, roamed at will, attacking armed men, and snatching children from
their mothers’ arms! ‘What an incredible evidence of the change of
fortune,’ writes Guicciardini, ‘to those who had seen her not long
before overflowing with inhabitants, and not only full of all gaiety and
delight from the natural inclination of her inhabitants to feasting and
pleasure, but because of the wealth of her citizens, the infinite number
of her shops and industries, the delicacy and abundance of all the
things which form man’s food, the superb apparel and equipages and
sumptuous adornments of both her women and her men, more flourishing and
happy than any other city of Italy.’
There is an interesting record of these years of tribulation in the
chronicle of a Milanese mercer named Burigozzo, who, sitting in his
dark-browed shop, set down from day to day, as they passed before his
eyes, the vicissitudes of _el povero Milano_. His quaint simplicity and
patriotic grief make his tale very moving. It is a picture of confusion,
tumult and misery, relieved at first by brilliant gleams, such as the
hollow pomps and glories of the entries of kings and conquerors, but
darkening ever to a more tragic gloom and terror and despair as it
passes from the milder sufferings of the period of French occupation to
the unspeakable horrors—_cose da non dire_—committed by the Spaniards
and lanzknechts of Pescara and De Leyva. All the great events of the
time are made vivid to us in his pages. We hear the ceaseless noise of
battle outside, the guns of the Castello, often directed upon the
terror-stricken city itself, roaring continually and answered by the
great bell of the Duomo sounding _a martello_, to summon the citizens to
arms. These, maddened by exactions and cruelty, or inspired by hope of
driving out oppressors, or excluding assailants, gather in thousands at
the call. Suffering has made them merciless, and they attack and butcher
parties of mercenaries in the streets. Once they make a holocaust of the
old wooden Campanile of the Duomo, with a whole company of Spaniards
within it. And through the streets, crowded with blaspheming and bestial
soldiery, we see endless processions pass, white-robed children, men and
women with bare feet and clad in sackcloth, monks, friars, all the
hierarchy of the Cathedral, filling the air with penitential wailings
and cries of _misericordia_, as they wind from the Duomo to St. Ambrogio
to implore the help of the great patron saint of the once fortunate
Milan. Churches crowded with suppliants; the excited populace pressing
round some upstart prophet—some fierce bearded monk who drives the timid
priests from altar and pulpit, and calls upon the people in the name of
Christ to slaughter the French. In street and temple alike confusion and
foulness, where so shortly before the genius of order had presided. Then
upon the uproar falls the sick and heavy silence of the pestilence, and
the mercer’s tale moves as with a hushed step, while, imprisoned for a
whole month within his house, he watches his children die, himself by
the grace of God untouched and well—while no sound is heard but the
carts going by laden with the sick, and the ceaseless _campana del
corpo_—while the graveyards spread and double in extent round the
numberless churches. A hundred thousand persons perished, he tells us,
during the summer months of 1524.
As the picture unrolls itself before us we are fain to turn away from
the spectacle of anguish and all abomination during the hideous years of
the Spanish occupation after 1525. The city preyed upon by the fiendish
mercenaries, the people outraged, pillaged, and tortured till they
yielded up their last mite of buried treasure. Multitudes flying from
their homes to avoid worse things and sheltering in the country round,
though that was infested by human beasts and wild ones only less cruel,
or worse, stopped and bound, little children and all, by their ruthless
tormentors, to prevent their escape. And withal siege, starvation; _such
a leanness of men from hunger as was an anguish to witness_, the little
bread which they possessed seized by the governor, the dying poor driven
into so-called refuges, whence every days scores were carried out dead.
But the story of these thirty years is not entirely of gloom. If we turn
from the people to the great Milanese nobility, we see a different
aspect of life, no less tragic in a sense, but brilliant enough and
glorified by the fine culture and rare artistic taste of the age. Within
their sumptuous palaces and wide secluded gardens, defended by great
names and powerful interests from the intrusions of marauding soldiery,
or in pleasant country villas beside the lakes and placid rivers of
Lombardy, whither they retired when pestilence or famine held sway in
the city, they created for themselves that unreal world of ladies and
cavaliers, arms and love, of which Ariosto sings. It was during these
years that the courtly Dominican friar, Matteo Bandello, was Prior of
the Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, and was collecting in the most
elect circles those gay and scandalous tales, which, retold by his witty
pen with introductions describing the circumstances in which he heard
them, give a vivid picture of the incomparable cinquecento society of
Milan, with its fine literary accomplishment, vivacious wit and over
liberal manners—a society presided over by such gracious figures as
Ippolita Sforza, the lady of Bandello’s own particular adoration, and
Cecilia Gallerani, the Moro’s old favourite. Ippolita, a granddaughter
of Duke Galeazzo Maria, was married to Alessandro Bentivoglio, a son of
the deposed Lord of Bologna. She and Cecilia, now the Contessa
Bergamini, and Camilla Scarampi made up a trio of Milanese poetesses and
literary connoisseurs of finest discrimination and judgment and of wide
renown. Apparently careless of the woes of their country, these ladies
and others of their rank, with the graceful cavaliers and dilettante
ecclesiastics who made their court, occupied themselves in romantic
vanities, in amorous intrigues, and in learned and philosophic
dalliance. Close relations united them with the other courts and
aristocracies of North Italy, and the famous Marchioness of Mantua,
Isabella da Este, was often the centre and queen of those elegant
gatherings of beauty and wit and gallantry described by Bandello.
History shows us that most typical lady of Italian society dancing with
the King of France at the great ball which the usurping monarch gave in
1507, in the Castello of Milan, in the very halls where her sister and
brother-in-law had once reigned—a spectacle significant of fallen Italy.
Like the princes of the neighbouring States, the great nobles of Milan,
once powerful in the story of their city, had lost all patriotic and
independent spirit. The severe repression of party-passion, that
unfailing symptom of vigorous life in an Italian community, by the
French conquerors in 1500, reduced them to idleness and political
nullity. They made friends with the new powers and entered their
service, but they had no longer any real influence on affairs. The
revolutions which placed the Sforza princes on the ducal throne in turn
afforded the nobles opportunities of intrigue and brought home to them
the terrible realities of foreign subjugation. In 1521, for example,
those who had embraced the side of the old dynasty suffered the
reprisals of the savage Lautrec, and on mere suspicion Milan was
desolated of its noblest inhabitants by summary executions, banishment
and forfeiture. These families were, however, restored to their old
position by the elevation of Francesco Sforza to the Dukedom, and they
made no attempt to rebel against the Imperial Eagle, which was their
real master. When the intolerable persecution inflicted by the Spanish
and German mercenaries from 1525 to 1529 maddened the people to repeated
insurrection, not one of the nobles came forward to give them courage
and to organise and direct their undisciplined efforts to effective
action. A certain Pietro della Pusterla, of a House which through all
the story of Milan had been distinguished as leaders of popular
movements, seems to have assumed some authority over them, but even he
abandoned them in the hour of need and danger.
These futile attempts exhausted the last remains of aspiration for
liberty and self-government in the broken-spirited Milanese. They made
no attempt to rebel against the settlement of 1530, which resigned them
finally into the Emperor’s hands. Though utterly dismayed—_tutto
smarrito_, says Burigozzo—by the heavy fine inflicted by Charles as a
penalty for the rebellion of the Duchy, they resigned themselves to
_patientia_ and hope for better days to come.
Much _patientia_ was necessary before those days came. The country round
was depopulated, and it was long before the old abundance flowed again
into the city. There were times when bread lacked and the people
murmured against the helpless Duke. Prices remained very high and there
was little trade. A visit, however, from Charles V. in 1533, expected
with fear and dismay by the citizens, to whom his name was only
associated with ravaging lanzknechts and Spaniards, brought them, to
their joyful surprise, good luck—a great influx of custom and rich
payment for their goods, instead of robbery.
In 1534 a brief reflection of its old glory brightened the city on the
arrival of a bride for the Duke, the sixteen-year-old Cristina of
Sweden, whose portrait by Holbein is in the National Gallery. The
streets and squares were magnificently decked for her reception. The
young princess, whose countenance, says the chronicler, was more divine
than human, rode in under a golden baldaquin, surrounded by twelve of
the noblest gentlemen of the city, so splendidly arrayed that each
appeared an Emperor, and with such great white plumes in their caps that
her Excellency seemed to move in the midst of a forest. The joy with
which she was greeted was, however, shallow enough, and changed quickly
to groans when the money for the Duchess’ maintenance had to be squeezed
out of the people by a special tax.
The fine bridal feast was soon followed by a still more pompous, but
lugubrious pageant, when eighteen months later (1535), the last Duke of
Milan was carried to his tomb in the great temple founded by the first
Duke, Gian Galeazzo Visconte. Always delicate of constitution, and worn
out by the great anxieties of his life, Francesco fell a victim to a
severe illness in 1535. He left no child to inherit the ducal throne.
There still survived, however, a Sforza, Gian Paolo, son of the Moro by
Lucrezia Crivelli. This prince set off immediately for Rome, to press
the Pope to support his claim to the Dukedom. But on his way he was
seized with sickness and died. Men said that he was poisoned by those to
whom his existence was an inconvenience.
Thus was spent the dynasty of the Sforza, and Milan devolved as a vacant
fief to the Empire. This great city, once the seat of Roman Emperors,
the crowning place of Carlovingian and German monarchs, the capital of
North Italy, and for centuries the heart of the most powerful
principality in the peninsula, was now to sink to a mere provincial
position, to become an impotent fragment of dismembered and captive
Italy.
We need not occupy ourselves with the further vicissitudes of the city
under the now settled dominion of Spain, which all the chivalrous and
repeated efforts of France in the sixteenth century was unable to
overthrow. It is enough to note her transference from Spanish to
Austrian rule after the War of Succession in the early years of the
seventeenth century, and her continued subjection to the House of
Hapsburg—with the brief Napoleonic interruption of 1796 to 1815—till in
1848 she rid herself by insurrection of the Austrian garrison, and ten
years later became free and national at last as a member of the new-born
Kingdom of Italy.
Her mediæval life ended with her mediæval liberty. Its robust passions,
its vigorous and restless activity of body and mind, the sense of human
power, the wide-ranging speculation, the audacious flights of the
spirit, which mark its florescence in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, turned to weariness, disillusion and despair. Individuality
lost itself in the bonds of convention and submission. In art, in
literature, everywhere—decay. On thought, on science, the blight fell.
The same hand which had stilled the political aspirations of Milan was
laid heavily upon her soul. The prepotence of Spain and the revival of
dogmatic zeal in the Papacy meant the employment of every engine of
oppression against that spiritual freedom which Italy had used both for
good and for evil. The Holy Office was set up in the Convent of Sta.
Maria delle Grazie, and our friend Burigozzo lived long enough to see
the pitiful ceremonies of the public recantations and penances of
heretics before the door of the Duomo. But the most powerful agent of
the Catholic reform in Milan was the famous Cardinal Archbishop, Carlo
Borromeo, known to religious history as San Carlo. As Ambrose stands at
the entrance of Milan’s mediæval era, with back turned upon the ruined
Empire behind, and strong gaze broadening down the centuries of new
faith, new hope, new ideals, so Carlo Borromeo stands at its close, as
sternly facing towards the past, and closing the door upon the new world
of thought and knowledge beyond. Her independent story is consecrated at
its beginning and at its end by the mighty personality of a saint, who,
whatever his influence upon her actual progress, gives by his example of
will, of courage, and of spiritual exaltation, an everlasting
inspiration to mankind.
Carlo Borromeo was a scion of the great patrician family of that name in
Milan, founded far back in the mists of mediæval antiquity by a certain
pilgrim, the _buon romeo_ from whom it took its name. The House was
conspicuous in the story of the city, and was foremost in consequence
and in wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Carlo was born
in the ecclesiastical purple. His uncle, Pius IV., of the Milanese House
of Medici, created him a cardinal in 1559, at the age of nineteen, and
heaped benefices upon him. In 1560 he became Archbishop of Milan on the
retirement of Cardinal Ippolito II. d’Este, who had occupied the See for
a great number of years in succession to his uncle Ippolito I. The young
Cardinal was now wealthier than any other prince of the Church. A few
years later, however, he renounced all his benefices, _which having he
was great, and casting away, greater_, as his biographer observes. He
retained the Archbishopric only, and taking up his abode in the city, he
devoted himself to the government of his diocese, with an immense zeal
and fervour of reform. The Jesuits, the Teatini, and other of the new
and reformed orders which sprang up in obedience to the religious
impulse of the time, were introduced by him into Milan, and he
suppressed the immensely wealthy and influential order of the Umiliati,
and alienated its revenues to the support of the new communities and to
the furtherance of his great schemes. An ascetic of purest and most
exemplary life, he indulged as representative of the Church in a
boundless pride and pomp. He was a despot, and his despotism opposed
itself to all independence of thought. He extended his ecclesiastical
jurisdiction to its utmost limits, and seizing delinquents almost under
the nose of the civil authorities, filled the dungeons of the episcopal
palace with them. His imperious will came into conflict with the
governors, but his powerful influence in the bigoted Court of Spain gave
him supremacy, and he was in fact the ruler of Milan. His splendid
temper of Milanese patrician vented itself in grandiose schemes for the
building, restoration and ornamentation of churches and religious
institutions. But as his authority was exerted to suppress all
individuality and spontaneity in literature and thought, so his rich
patronage was lent only to the decadence in art. A nobler manifestation
of the man was seen during the pestilence of 1576, when, with heroic
self-forgetfulness, he fulfilled his duty as chief pastor of the
afflicted people, succouring them by every means in his power. His
exalted figure, with cross borne high, leading processions of penitent
and supplicatory citizens through the streets, is one of the saintly
pictures of history.
Carlo Borromeo died in 1584, having lived but just forty-six years.
Beyond him is the long sleep of Milan. Under the pall of stillness her
historic virtues lie dormant, her historic names inglorious. But not
dead. When the long-deferred moment of the awakening comes, the old
courage, the old faith, the old sense of fellowship arises stronger and
more lively than before, and the names of old resound again among the
champions of Lombard and Italian freedom, in the prisons of repressive
tyranny, round the barricades of the Cinque Giornate, on the fields of
Custozza, Novara, Solferino, side by side with the patriots sprung of
the nameless blood which long ago watered the rich tilth of Legnano.