The House of Montefeltro rose into importance early in the twelfth
century. Frederick Barbarossa erected their fief into a county in 1160.
Supported by imperial favour, they began to exercise an undefined
authority over the district, which they afterwards converted into a
duchy. But, though Ghibelline for several generations, the Montefeltri
were too near neighbours of the Papal power to free themselves from
ecclesiastical vassalage. Therefore in 1216 they sought and obtained the
title of Vicars of the Church. Urbino acknowledged them as semi-despots
in their double capacity of Imperial and Papal deputies. Cagli and
Gubbio followed in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth, Castel
Durante was acquired from the Brancaleoni by warfare, and Fossombrone
from the Malatestas by purchase. Numerous fiefs and villages fell into
their hands upon the borders of Rimini in the course of a continued
struggle with the House of Malatesta: and when Fano and Pesaro were
added at the opening of the sixteenth century, the domain over which
they ruled was a compact territory, some forty miles square, between the
Adriatic and Apennines. From the close of the thirteenth century they
bore the title of Counts of Urbino. The famous Conte Guido, whom Dante
placed among the fraudulent in hell, supported the honours of the house
and increased its power by his political action, at this epoch. But it
was not until the year 1443 that the Montefeltri acquired their ducal
title. This was conferred by Eugenius IV. upon Oddantonio, over whose
alleged crimes and indubitable assassination a veil of mystery still
hangs. He was the son of Count Guidantonio, and at his death the
Montefeltri of Urbino were extinct in the legitimate line. A natural son
of Guidantonio had been, however, recognised in his father's lifetime,
and married to Gentile, heiress of Mercatello. This was Federigo, a
youth of great promise, who succeeded his half-brother in 1444 as Count
of Urbino. It was not until 1474 that the ducal title was revived for
him.
Duke Frederick was a prince remarkable among Italian despots for private
virtues and sober use of his hereditary power. He spent his youth at
Mantua, in that famous school of Vittorino da Feltre, where the sons and
daughters of the first Italian nobility received a model education in
humanities, good manners, and gentle physical accomplishments. More than
any of his fellow-students Frederick profited by this rare scholar's
discipline. On leaving school he adopted the profession of arms, as it
was then practised, and joined the troop of the Condottiere Niccolo
Piccinino. Young men of his own rank, especially the younger sons and
bastards of ruling families, sought military service under captains of
adventure. If they succeeded they were sure to make money. The coffers
of the Church and the republics lay open to their not too scrupulous
hands; the wealth of Milan and Naples was squandered on them in
retaining-fees and salaries for active service. There was always the
further possibility of placing a coronet upon their brows before they
died, if haply they should wrest a town from their employers, or obtain
the cession of a province from a needy Pope. The neighbours of the
Montefeltri in Umbria, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona were all of
them Condottieri. Malatestas of Rimini and Pesaro, Vitelli of Citta di
Castello, Varani of Camerino, Baglioni of Perugia, to mention only a few
of the most eminent nobles, enrolled themselves under the banners of
plebeian adventurers like Piccinino and Sforza Attendolo. Though their
family connections gave them a certain advantage, the system was
essentially democratic. Gattamelata and Carmagnola sprang from obscurity
by personal address and courage to the command of armies. Colleoni
fought his way up from the grooms to princely station and the _baton_ of
S. Mark. Francesco Sforza, whose father had begun life as a tiller of
the soil, seized the ducal crown of Milan, and founded a house which
ranked among the first in Europe.
It is not needful to follow Duke Frederick in his military career. We
may briefly remark that when he succeeded to Urbino by his brother's
death in 1444, he undertook generalship on a grand scale. His own
dominions supplied him with some of the best troops in Italy. He was
careful to secure the good-will of his subjects by attending personally
to their interests, relieving them of imposts, and executing equal
justice. He gained the then unique reputation of an honest prince,
paternally disposed toward his dependants. Men flocked to his standards
willingly, and he was able to bring an important contingent into any
army. These advantages secured for him alliances with Francesco Sforza,
and brought him successively into connection with Milan, Venice,
Florence, the Church of Naples. As a tactician in the field he held high
rank among the generals of the age, and so considerable were his
engagements that he acquired great wealth in the exercise of his
profession. We find him at one time receiving 8000 ducats a month as
war-pay from Naples, with a peace pension of 6000. While Captain-General
of the League, he drew for his own use in war 45,000 ducats of annual
pay. Retaining-fees and pensions in the name of past services swelled
his income, the exact extent of which has not, so far as I am aware,
been estimated, but which must have made him one of the richest of
Italian princes. All this wealth he spent upon his duchy, fortifying its
cities, drawing youths of promise to his court, maintaining a great
train of life, and keeping his vassals in good-humour by the lightness
of a rule which contrasted favourably with the exactions of needier
despots.
While fighting for the masters who offered him _condotta_ in the
complicated wars of Italy, Duke Frederick used his arms, when occasion
served, in his own quarrels. Many years of his life were spent in a
prolonged struggle with his neighbour Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the
bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the fatal error of
embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the Church, and who
died discomfited in the duel with his warier antagonist. Urbino profited
by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the history of this long desultory
strife with Rimini is a history of gradual aggrandisement and
consolidation for the Montefeltrian duchy.
In 1459, Duke Frederick married his second wife, Battista, daughter of
Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Their portraits, painted by Piero
della Francesca, are to be seen in the Uffizzi. Some years earlier,
Frederick lost his right eye and had the bridge of his nose broken in a
jousting match outside the town-gate of Urbino. After this accident, he
preferred to be represented in profile--the profile so well known to
students of Italian art on medals and bas-reliefs. It was not without
medical aid and vows fulfilled by a mother's self-sacrifice to death, if
we may trust the diarists of Urbino, that the ducal couple got an heir.
In 1472, however a son was born to them, whom they christened Guido
Paolo Ubaldo. He proved a youth of excellent parts and noble nature--apt
at study, perfect in all chivalrous accomplishments. But he inherited
some fatal physical debility, and his life was marred with a
constitutional disease, which then received the name of gout, and which
deprived him of the free use of his limbs. After his father's death in
1482, Naples, Florence, and Milan continued Frederick's war engagements
to Guidobaldo. The prince was but a boy of ten. Therefore these
important _condotte_ must be regarded as compliments and pledges for the
future. They prove to what a pitch Duke Frederick had raised the credit
of his state and war establishment. Seven years later, Guidobaldo
married Elisabetta, daughter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua.
This union, though a happy one, was never blessed with children; and in
the certainty of barrenness, the young Duke thought it prudent to adopt
a nephew as heir to his dominions. He had several sisters, one of whom,
Giovanna, had been married to a nephew of Sixtus IV., Giovanni della
Rovere, Lord of Sinigaglia and Prefect of Rome. They had a son,
Francesco Maria, who, after his adoption by Guidobaldo, spent his
boyhood at Urbino.
The last years of the fifteenth century were marked by the sudden rise
of Cesare Borgia to a power which threatened the liberties of Italy.
Acting as General for the Church, he carried his arms against the petty
tyrants of Romagna, whom he dispossessed and extirpated. His next move
was upon Camerino and Urbino. He first acquired Camerino, having lulled
Guidobaldo into false security by treacherous professions of good-will.
Suddenly the Duke received intelligence that the Borgia was marching on
him over Cagli. This was in the middle of June 1502. It is difficult to
comprehend the state of weakness in which Guidobaldo was surprised, or
the panic which then seized him. He made no efforts to rouse his
subjects to resistance, but fled by night with his nephew through rough
mountain roads, leaving his capital and palace to the marauder. Cesare
Borgia took possession without striking a blow, and removed the
treasures of Urbino to the Vatican. His occupation of the duchy was not
undisturbed, however; for the people rose in several places against him,
proving that Guidobaldo had yielded too hastily to alarm. By this time
the fugitive was safe in Mantua, whence he returned, and for a short
time succeeded in establishing himself again at Urbino. But he could not
hold his own against the Borgias, and in December, by a treaty, he
resigned his claims and retired to Venice, where he lived upon the
bounty of S. Mark. It must be said, in justice to the Duke, that his
constitutional debility rendered him unfit for active operations in the
field. Perhaps he could not have done better than thus to bend beneath
the storm.
The sudden death of Alexander VI. and the election of a Della Rovere to
the Papacy in 1503 changed Guidobaldo's prospects. Julius II. was the
sworn foe of the Borgias and the close kinsman of Urbino's heir. It was
therefore easy for the Duke to walk into his empty palace on the hill,
and to reinstate himself in the domains from which he had so recently
been ousted. The rest of his life was spent in the retirement of his
court, surrounded with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of
Italy. The ill-health which debarred him from the active pleasures and
employments of his station, was borne with uniform sweetness of temper
and philosophy.
When he died, in 1508, his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
succeeded to the duchy, and once more made the palace of Urbino the
resort of men-at-arms and captains. He was a prince of very violent
temper: of its extravagance history has recorded three remarkable
examples. He murdered the Cardinal of Pavia with his own hand in the
streets of Ravenna; stabbed a lover of his sister to death at Urbino;
and in a council of war knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with a blow
of his fist. When the history of Italy came to be written, Guicciardini
was probably mindful of that insult, for he painted Francesco Maria's
character and conduct in dark colours. At the same time this Duke of
Urbino passed for one of the first generals of the age. The greatest
stain upon his memory is his behaviour in the year 1527, when, by
dilatory conduct of the campaign in Lombardy, he suffered the passage of
Frundsberg's army unopposed, and afterwards hesitated to relieve Rome
from the horrors of the sack. He was the last Italian Condottiere of the
antique type; and the vices which Machiavelli exposed in that bad system
of mercenary warfare were illustrated on these occasions. During his
lifetime, the conditions of Italy were so changed by Charles V.'s
imperial settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere ceased
to have any meaning. Strozzi and Farnesi, who afterwards followed this
profession, enlisted in the ranks of France or Spain, and won their
laurels in Northern Europe.
While Leo X. held the Papal chair, the duchy of Urbino was for a while
wrested from the house of Della Rovere, and conferred upon Lorenzo de'
Medici. Francesco Maria made a better fight for his heritage than
Guidobaldo had done. Yet he could not successfully resist the power of
Rome. The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this petty
war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was
obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the most
part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to
degenerate into a guerrilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517
the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live
long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of
France, never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her by
inheritance. The shifting scene of Italy beheld Francesco Maria
reinstated in Urbino after Leo's death in 1522.
This Duke married Leonora Gonzaga, a princess of the house of Mantua.
Their portraits, painted by Titian, adorn the Venetian room of the
Uffizzi. Of their son, Guidobaldo II., little need be said. He was twice
married, first to Giulia Varano, Duchess by inheritance of Camerino;
secondly, to Vittoria Farnese, daughter of the Duke of Parma. Guidobaldo
spent a lifetime in petty quarrels with his subjects, whom he treated
badly, attempting to draw from their pockets the wealth which his father
and the Montefeltri had won in military service. He intervened at an
awkward period of Italian politics. The old Italy of despots,
commonwealths, and Condottieri, in which his predecessors played
substantial parts, was at an end. The new Italy of Popes and
Austro-Spanish dynasties had hardly settled into shape. Between these
epochs, Guidobaldo II., of whom we have a dim and hazy presentation on
the page of history, seems somehow to have fallen flat. As a sign of
altered circumstances, he removed his court to Pesaro, and built the
great palace of the Della Roveres upon the public square.
Guidobaldaccio, as he was called, died in 1574, leaving an only son,
Francesco Maria II., whose life and character illustrate the new age
which had begun for Italy. He was educated in Spain at the court of
Philip II., where he spent more than two years. When he returned, his
Spanish haughtiness, punctilious attention to etiquette, and
superstitious piety attracted observation. The violent temper of the
Della Roveres, which Francesco Maria I. displayed in acts of homicide,
and which had helped to win his bad name for Guidobaldaccio, took the
form of sullenness in the last Duke. The finest episode in his life was
the part he played in the battle of Lepanto, under his old comrade, Don
John of Austria. His father forced him to an uncongenial marriage with
Lucrezia d'Este, Princess of Ferrara. She left him, and took refuge in
her native city, then honoured by the presence of Tasso and Guarini. He
bore her departure with philosophical composure, recording the event in
his diary as something to be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the Duke
abandoned himself to solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the
economy of his impoverished dominions. He became that curious creature,
a man of narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult
of self, is fain to pass for saint and sage in easy circumstances. He
married, for the second time, a lady, Livia della Rovere, who belonged
to his own family, but had been born in private station. She brought him
one son, the Prince Federigo-Ubaldo. This youth might have sustained the
ducal honours of Urbino, but for his sage-saint father's want of wisdom.
The boy was a spoiled child in infancy. Inflated with Spanish vanity
from the cradle, taught to regard his subjects as dependants on a
despot's will, abandoned to the caprices of his own ungovernable temper,
without substantial aid from the paternal piety or stoicism, he rapidly
became a most intolerable princeling. His father married him, while yet
a boy, to Claudia de' Medici, and virtually abdicated in his favour.
Left to his own devices, Federigo chose companions from the troupes of
players whom he drew from Venice. He filled his palaces with harlots,
and degraded himself upon the stage in parts of mean buffoonery. The
resources of the duchy were racked to support these parasites. Spanish
rules of etiquette and ceremony were outraged by their orgies. His bride
brought him one daughter, Vittoria, who afterwards became the wife of
Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Then in the midst of his low
dissipation and offences against ducal dignity, he died of apoplexy at
the early age of eighteen--the victim, in the severe judgment of
history, of his father's selfishness and want of practical ability.
This happened in 1623. Francesco Maria was stunned by the blow. His
withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son
had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station. The
life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty
studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. A powerful and
grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at this juncture pressed
Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of Urbino devolved his
lordships to the Holy See. He survived the formal act of abdication
seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added his duchy to the Papal
States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples to the bounds of Venice
on the Po.