In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the
past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny
and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and
disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of
this gray-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of
the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that
only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely
_sprezzatura_ of its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished
courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendor of their purfled silks
and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, has yielded to sullen
cynicism--the cynicism of arrested ruin and unreverend age. All that was
satisfying to the senses and distracting to the eyesight in their
transitory pomp has passed away, leaving a sinister and naked shell.
Remembrance can but summon up the crimes, the madness, the trivialities
of those dead palace-builders. An atmosphere of evil clings to the
dilapidated walls, as though the tainted spirit of the infamous Pier
Luigi still possessed the spot, on which his toadstool brood of
princelings sprouted in the mud of their misdeeds. Enclosed in this huge
labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of which I spoke. It is the once
world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in the year 1618 by Ranunzio
Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese with Margaret of Austria.
Giambattista Aleotti, a native of pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the
stately curves and noble orders of the galleries, designed the columns
that support the raftered roof, marked out the orchestra, arranged the
stage, and breathed into the whole the spirit of Palladio's most heroic
neo-Latin style. Vast, built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues
and blurred coats-of-arms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescos,
its hangings all in rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and
mildew and discolored gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and
now that ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of
day, is yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its
grand Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and
abide in the memory like a nightmare--like one of Piranesi's weirdest
and most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there at
noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers
of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and
pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such as
our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower
these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins
phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a
maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things
that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and
women: _questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi_. So clinging is the sense of
instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot tyranny
which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden day on Italy.
In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the
thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in
the dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but a symbol
of those hollow principalities which the despot and the stranger built
in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and
political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians
as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life,
surviving in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of
imperishable style! How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this
plank-built, plastered theatre, a glorious sham! The sham was seen
through then; and now it stands unmasked: and yet, strange to say, so
perfect is its form that we respect the sham and yield our spirits to
the incantation of its music.
The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and
even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the trumpets
which rang on July 6th, 1495, for the onset, sounded the _reveille_ of
the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of the struggle of
that day the Italians were already judged and sentenced as a nation. The
armies who met that morning represented Italy and France--Italy, the
Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibyl of Revolution. At the fall of
evening Europe was already looking northward; and the last years of the
fifteenth century were opening an act which closed in blood at Paris on
the ending of the eighteenth.
If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would take
the trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little village of
Fornovo--a score of bare gray hovels on the margin of a pebbly
river-bed beneath the Apennines. The fields on either side, as far as
eye can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here with
flax, like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and there with
clover red as blood. Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle like flamelets of
bright green upon the knotted vines, and the young corn is bending all
one way beneath a western breeze. But not less beautiful than this is
the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the nightingales louder here
than in the acacia-trees around Pavia. As we drive, the fields become
less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the level, sending down their
spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a
tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of the Taro, these hills begin to
narrow on either hand, and the road rises. Soon they open out again with
gradual curving lines, forming a kind of amphitheatre filled up from
flank to flank with the _ghiara_, or pebbly bottom, of the Taro. The
Taro is not less wasteful than any other of the brotherhood of streams
that pour from Alp or Apennine to swell the Po. It wanders, an impatient
rivulet, through a wilderness of boulders, uncertain of its aim,
shifting its course with the season of the year, unless the jaws of some
deep-cloven gully hold it tight and show how insignificant it is. As we
advance, the hills approach again; between their skirts there is nothing
but the river-bed; and now on rising ground above the stream, at the
point of juncture between the Ceno and the Taro, we find Fornovo. Beyond
the village the valley broadens out once more, disclosing Apennines
capped with winter snow. To the right descends the Ceno. To the left
foams the Taro, following whose rocky channel we should come at last to
Pontremoli and the Tyrrhenian Sea beside Sarzana. On a May-day of
sunshine like the present, the Taro is a gentle stream. A waggon drawn
by two white oxen has just entered its channel, guided by a contadino
with goat-skin leggings, wielding a long goad. The patient creatures
stem the water, which rises to the peasant's thighs and ripples round
the creaking wheels. Swaying to and fro, as the shingles shift upon the
river-bed, they make their way across; and now they have emerged upon
the stones; and now we lose them in a flood of sunlight.
It was by this pass that Charles VIII. in 1495 returned from Tuscany,
when the army of the League was drawn up waiting to intercept and crush
him in the mouse-trap of Fornovo. No road remained for Charles and his
troops but the rocky bed of the Taro, running as I have described it
between the spurs of steep hills. It is true that the valley of the
Baganza leads, from a little higher up among the mountains, into
Lombardy. But this pass runs straight to Parma; and to follow it would
have brought the French upon the walls of a strong city. Charles could
not do otherwise than descend upon the village of Fornovo, and cut his
way thence in the teeth of the Italian army over stream and boulder
between the gorges of throttling mountain. The failure of the Italians
to achieve what here upon the ground appears so simple delivered Italy
hand-bound to strangers. Had they but succeeded in arresting Charles and
destroying his forces at Fornovo, it is just possible that then--even
then, at the eleventh hour--Italy might have gained the sense of
national coherence, or at least have proved herself capable of holding
by her leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo,
in spite of Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her
conscious of incompetence and convicted her of cowardice. After Fornovo,
her sons scarcely dared to hold their heads up in the field against
invaders; and the battles fought upon her soil were duels among aliens
for the prize of Italy.
In order to comprehend the battle of Fornovo in its bearings on Italian
history, we must go back to the year 1492, and understand the conditions
of the various states of Italy at that date. On April 8th in that year,
Lorenzo de' Medici, who had succeeded in maintaining a political
equilibrium in the peninsula, expired, and was succeeded by his son
Piero, a vain and foolhardy young man, from whom no guidance could be
expected. On July 25th, Innocent VIII. died, and was succeeded by the
very worst pope who has ever occupied St. Peter's chair, Roderigo
Borgia, Alexander VI. It was felt at once that the old order of things
had somehow ended, and that a new era, the destinies of which as yet
remained incalculable, was opening for Italy. The chief Italian powers,
hitherto kept in equipoise by the diplomacy of Lorenzo de' Medici, were
these--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of
Florence, the Papacy, and the Kingdom of Naples. Minor states, such as
the republics of Genoa and Siena, the duchies of Urbino and Ferrara, the
marquisate of Mantua, the petty tyrannies of Romagna, and the wealthy
city of Bologna, were sufficiently important to affect the balance of
power, and to produce new combinations. For the present purpose it is,
however, enough to consider the five great powers.
After the peace of Constance, which freed the Lombard Communes from
imperial interference in the year 1183, Milan, by her geographical
position, rose rapidly to be the first city of North Italy. Without
narrating the changes by which she lost her freedom as a Commune, it is
enough to state that, earliest of all Italian cities, Milan passed into
the hands of a single family. The Visconti managed to convert this
flourishing commonwealth, with all its dependencies, into their private
property, ruling it exclusively for their own profit, using its
municipal institutions as the machinery of administration, and employing
the taxes which they raised upon its wealth for purely selfish ends.
When the line of the Visconti ended, in the year 1447, their tyranny was
continued by Francesco Sforza, the son of a poor soldier of adventure,
who had raised himself by his military genius, and had married Bianca,
the illegitimate daughter of the last Visconti. On the death of
Francesco Sforza, in 1466, he left two sons, Galeazzo Maria and
Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro, both of whom were destined to play a
prominent part in history. Galeazzo Maria, dissolute, vicious, and cruel
to the core, was murdered by his injured subjects in the year 1476. His
son, Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight, would in course of time have
succeeded to the duchy, had it not been for the ambition of his uncle
Lodovico. Lodovico contrived to name himself as regent for his nephew,
whom he kept, long after he had come of age, in a kind of honorable
prison. Virtual master in Milan, but without a legal title to the
throne, unrecognized in his authority by the Italian powers, and holding
it from day to day by craft and fraud, Lodovico at last found his
situation untenable; and it was this difficulty of a usurper to
maintain himself in his despotism which, as we shall see, brought the
French into Italy.
Venice, the neighbor and constant foe of Milan, had become a close
oligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, which
threw her government into the hands of a few nobles. She was practically
ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Ever since the
year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath the Turk, the Venetians had
been more and more straitened in their Oriental commerce, and were
thrown back upon the policy of territorial aggrandisement in Italy, from
which they had hitherto refrained as alien to the temperament of the
republic. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice, therefore, became
an object of envy and terror to the Italian States. They envied her
because she alone was tranquil, wealthy, powerful, and free. They feared
her because they had good reason to suspect her of encroachment; and it
was foreseen that if she got the upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be
the property of the families inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus
alone that the Italians comprehended government. The principle of
representation being utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in
each city being regarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and
of everything belonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic
implied the political extinction of that town and the disfranchisement
of its inhabitants in favor of the conquerors.
Florence at this epoch still called itself a republic; and of all
Italian commonwealths it was by far the most democratic. Its history,
unlike that of Venice, had been the history of continual and brusque
changes, resulting in the destruction of the old nobility, in the
equalization of the burghers, and in the formation of a new aristocracy
of wealth. From this class of _bourgeois_ nobles sprang the Medici, who,
by careful manipulation of the State machinery, by the creation of a
powerful party devoted to their interests, by flattery of the people, by
corruption, by taxation, and by constant scheming, raised themselves to
the first place in the commonwealth, and became its virtual masters. In
the year 1492, Lorenzo de Medici, the most remarkable chief of this
despotic family, died, bequeathing his supremacy in the republic to a
son of marked incompetence.
Since the pontificate of Nicholas V. the See of Rome had entered upon a
new period of existence. The popes no longer dreaded to reside in Rome,
but were bent upon making the metropolis of Christendom both splendid as
a seat of art and learning, and also potent as the capital of a secular
kingdom. Though their fiefs in Romagna and the March were still held but
loosely, though their provinces swarmed with petty despots who defied
the papal authority, and though the princely Roman houses of Colonna and
Orsini were still strong enough to terrorize the Holy Father in the
Vatican, it was now clear that the Papal See must in the end get the
better of its adversaries, and consolidate itself into a first-rate
power. The internal spirit of the papacy, at this time, corresponded to
its external policy. It was thoroughly secularized by a series of
worldly and vicious pontiffs, who had clean forgotten what their title,
Vicar of Christ, implied. They consistently used their religious
prestige to enforce their secular authority, while by their temporal
power they caused their religious claims to be respected. Corrupt and
shameless, they indulged themselves in every vice, openly acknowledged
their children, and turned Italy upside down in order to establish
favorites and bastards in the principalities they seized as spoils of
war.
The kingdom of Naples differed from any other state of Italy. Subject
continually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire,
governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and the House
of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence or the free
institutions of the northern provinces; nor had it been Italianized in
the same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism, which assumed so
many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny of a noble house, nor
the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet the forceful sway of a
condottiere. It had a dynastic character, resembling the monarchy of one
of the great European nations, but modified by the peculiar conditions
of Italian state-craft. Owing to this dynastic and monarchical
complexion of the Neapolitan kingdom, semi-feudal customs flourished in
the south far more than in the north of Italy. The barons were more
powerful; and the destinies of the Regno often turned upon their feuds
and quarrels with the crown. At the same time the Neapolitan despots
shared the uneasy circumstances of all Italian potentates, owing to the
uncertainty of their tenure, both as conquerors and aliens, and also as
the nominal vassals of the Holy See. The rights of suzerainty which the
Normans had yielded to the papacy over their Southern conquests, and
which the popes had arbitrarily exercised in favor of the Angevine
princes, proved a constant source of peril to the rest of Italy by
rendering the succession to the crown of Naples doubtful. On the
extinction of the Angevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a
prince who had no valid title but that of the sword to its possession.
Alfonso of Aragon conquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his
hereditary dominion, settled in his Italian capital. Possessed with the
enthusiasm for literature which was then the ruling passion of the
Italians, and very liberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself
the surname of Magnanimous. On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his
Spanish kingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and
left the fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand. This
Ferdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was the
reigning sovereign in the year 1492. Of a cruel and sombre temperament,
traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by his subjects as much
as Alfonso had been loved. He possessed, however, to a remarkable
degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted a consummate
statesman; and though the history of his reign is the history of plots
and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcible assassinations, of
famines produced by iniquitous taxation, and of every kind of diabolical
tyranny, Ferdinand contrived to hold his own, in the teeth of a
rebellious baronage or a maddened population. His political sagacity
amounted almost to a prophetic instinct in the last years of his life,
when he became aware that the old order was breaking up in Italy, and
had cause to dread that Charles VIII. of France would prove his title to
the kingdom of Naples by force of arms.[D]
Such were the component parts of the Italian body politic, with the
addition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more or
less consistently to one or other of the greater states. The whole
complex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest,
animated by no common purpose, amenable to no central authority. Even
such community of feeling as one spoken language gives was lacking. And
yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of Europe, not
merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people intellectually and
spiritually one. The rapid rise of humanism had aided in producing this
national self-consciousness. Every state and every city was absorbed in
the recovery of culture and in the development of art and literature.
Far in advance of the other European nations, the Italians regarded the
rest of the world as barbarous, priding themselves the while, in spite
of mutual jealousies and hatreds, on their Italic civilization. They
were enormously wealthy. The resources of the papal treasury, the
private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the riches of the Venetian
merchants might have purchased all that France or Germany possessed of
value. The single duchy of Milan yielded to its masters seven hundred
thousand golden florins of revenue, according to the computation of De
Comines. In default of a confederative system, the several states were
held in equilibrium by diplomacy. By far the most important people, next
to the despots and the captains of adventure, were ambassadors and
orators. War itself had become a matter of arrangement, bargain, and
diplomacy. The game of stratagem was played by generals who had been
friends yesterday and might be friends again to-morrow, with troops who
felt no loyalty whatever for the standards under which they listed. To
avoid slaughter and to achieve the ends of warfare by parade and
demonstration was the interest of every one concerned. Looking back upon
Italy of the fifteenth century, taking account of her religious deadness
and moral corruption, estimating the absence of political vigor in the
republics and the noxious tyranny of the despots, analyzing her lack of
national spirit, and comparing her splendid life of cultivated ease with
the want of martial energy, we can see but too plainly that contact with
a simpler and stronger people could not but produce a terrible
catastrophe. The Italians themselves, however, were far from
comprehending this. Centuries of undisturbed internal intrigue had
accustomed them to play the game of forfeits with each other, and
nothing warned them that the time was come at which diplomacy, finesse,
and craft would stand them in ill stead against rapacious conquerors.
The storm which began to gather over Italy in the year 1492 had its
first beginning in the North. Lodovico Sforza's position in the Duchy of
Milan was becoming every day more difficult, when a slight and to all
appearances insignificant incident converted his apprehension of danger
into panic. It was customary for the states of Italy to congratulate a
new pope on his election by their ambassadors; and this ceremony had now
to be performed for Roderigo Borgia. Lodovico proposed that his envoys
should go to Rome together with those of Venice, Naples, and Florence;
but Piero de' Medici, whose vanity made him wish to send an embassy in
his own name, contrived that Lodovico's proposal should be rejected
both by Florence and the King of Naples. So strained was the situation
of Italian affairs that Lodovico saw in the repulse a menace to his own
usurped authority. Feeling himself isolated among the princes of his
country, rebuffed by the Medici, and coldly treated by the King of
Naples, he turned in his anxiety to France, and advised the young king,
Charles VIII., to make good his claim upon the Regno. It was a bold move
to bring the foreigner thus into Italy; and even Lodovico, who prided
himself upon his sagacity, could not see how things would end. He
thought his situation so hazardous, however, that any change must be for
the better. Moreover, a French invasion of Naples would tie the hands of
his natural foe, King Ferdinand, whose grand-daughter, Isabella of
Aragon, had married Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza, and was now the rightful
Duchess of Milan. When the Florentine ambassador at Milan asked him how
he had the courage to expose Italy to such peril, his reply betrayed the
egotism of his policy: "You talk to me of Italy; but when have I looked
Italy in the face? No one ever gave a thought to my affairs. I have,
therefore, had to give them such security as I could."
Charles VIII. was young, light-brained, romantic, and ruled by
_parvenus_ who had an interest in disturbing the old order of the
monarchy. He lent a willing ear to Lodovico's invitation, backed as this
was by the eloquence and passion of numerous Italian refugees and
exiles. Against the advice of his more prudent counsellors, he taxed all
the resources of his kingdom, and concluded treaties on disadvantageous
terms with England, Germany, and Spain, in order that he might be able
to concentrate all his attention upon the Italian expedition. At the end
of the year 1493, it was known that the invasion was resolved upon.
Gentile Becchi, the Florentine envoy at the Court of France, wrote to
Piero de' Medici: "If the king succeeds, it is all over with
Italy--_tutta a bordello_." The extraordinary selfishness of the several
Italian states at this critical moment deserves to be noticed. The
Venetians, as Paolo Antonio Soderini described them to Piero de' Medici,
"are of opinion that to keep quiet, and to see other potentates of Italy
spending and suffering, cannot but be to their advantage. They trust no
one, and feel sure they have enough money to be able at any moment to
raise sufficient troops, and so to guide events according to their
inclinations." As the invasion was directed against Naples, Ferdinand of
Aragon displayed the acutest sense of the situation. "Frenchmen," he
exclaimed, in what appears like a prophetic passion when contrasted with
the cold indifference of others no less really menaced, "have never come
into Italy without inflicting ruin; and this invasion, if rightly
considered, cannot but bring universal ruin, although it seems to menace
us alone." In his agony Ferdinand applied to Alexander VI. But the Pope
looked coldly upon him, because the King of Naples, with rare
perspicacity, had predicted that his elevation to the papacy would prove
disastrous to Christendom. Alexander preferred to ally himself with
Venice and Milan. Upon this Ferdinand wrote as follows: "It seems fated
that the popes should leave no peace in Italy. We are compelled to
fight; but the Duke of Bari (_i.e._, Lodovico Sforza) should think what
may ensue from the tumult he is stirring up. He who raises this wind
will not be able to lay the tempest when he likes. Let him look to the
past, and he will see how every time that our internal quarrels have
brought powers from beyond the Alps into Italy, these have oppressed and
lorded over her."
Terribly verified as these words were destined to be--and they were no
less prophetic in their political sagacity than Savonarola's prediction
of the Sword and bloody Scourge--it was now too late to avert the coming
ruin. On March 1, 1494, Charles was with his army at Lyons. Early in
September he had crossed the pass of Mont Genevre and taken up his
quarters in the town of Asti. There is no need to describe in detail the
holiday march of the French troops through Lombardy, Tuscany, and Rome,
until, without having struck a blow of consequence, the gates of Naples
opened to receive the conqueror upon February 22, 1495. Philippe de
Comines, who parted from the king at Asti and passed the winter as his
envoy at Venice, has more than once recorded his belief that nothing but
the direct interposition of Providence could have brought so mad an
expedition to so successful a conclusion. "Dieu monstroit conduire
l'entreprise." No sooner, however, was Charles installed in Naples than
the states of Italy began to combine against him. Lodovico Sforza had
availed himself of the general confusion consequent upon the first
appearance of the French, to poison his nephew. He was, therefore, now
the titular, as well as virtual, Lord of Milan. So far, he had achieved
what he desired, and had no further need of Charles. The overtures he
now made to the Venetians and the Pope terminated in a league between
these powers for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Germany and
Spain entered into the same alliance; and De Comines, finding himself
treated with marked coldness by the Signory of Venice, despatched a
courier to warn Charles in Naples of the coming danger. After a stay of
only fifty days in his new capital, the French king hurried northward.
Moving quickly through the Papal States and Tuscany, he engaged his
troops in the passes of the Apennines near Pontremoli, and on July 5th,
1495, took up his quarters in the village of Fornovo. De Comines reckons
that his whole fighting force at this time did not exceed nine thousand
men, with fourteen pieces of artillery. Against him at the opening of
the valley was the army of the League, numbering some thirty-five
thousand men, of whom three fourths were supplied by Venice, the rest by
Lodovico Sforza and the German emperor. Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of
Mantua, was the general of the Venetian forces; and on him, therefore,
fell the real responsibility of the battle.
De Comines remarks on the imprudence of the allies, who allowed Charles
to advance as far as Fornovo, when it was their obvious policy to have
established themselves in the village and so have caught the French
troops in a trap. It was a Sunday when the French marched down upon
Fornovo. Before them spread the plain of Lombardy, and beyond it the
white crests of the Alps. "We were," says De Comines, "in a valley
between two little mountain flanks, and in that valley ran a river which
could easily be forded on foot, except when it is swelled with sudden
rains. The whole valley was a bed of gravel and big stones, very
difficult for horses, about a quarter of a league in breadth, and on the
right bank lodged our enemies." Any one who has visited Fornovo can
understand the situation of the two armies. Charles occupied the village
on the right bank of the Taro. On the same bank, extending downward
towards the plain, lay the host of the allies; and in order that Charles
should escape them, it was necessary that he should cross the Taro, just
below its junction with the Ceno, and reach Lombardy by marching in a
parallel line with his foes.
All through the night of Sunday it thundered and rained incessantly; so
that on the Monday morning the Taro was considerably swollen. At seven
o'clock the king sent for De Comines, who found him already armed and
mounted on the finest horse he had ever seen. The name of this charger
was Savoy. He was black, one-eyed, and of middling height; and to his
great courage, as we shall see, Charles owed life upon that day. The
French army, ready for the march, now took to the gravelly bed of the
Taro, passing the river at a distance of about a quarter of a league
from the allies. As the French left Fornovo, the light cavalry of their
enemies entered the village and began to attack the baggage. At the same
time the Marquis of Mantua, with the flower of his men-at-arms, crossed
the Taro and harassed the rear of the French host; while raids from the
right bank to the left were constantly being made by sharp-shooters and
flying squadrons. "At this moment," says De Comines, "not a single man
of us could have escaped if our ranks had once been broken." The French
army was divided into three main bodies. The vanguard consisted of some
three hundred and fifty men-at-arms, three thousand Switzers, three
hundred archers of the Guard, a few mounted crossbow-men, and the
artillery. Next came the Battle, and after this the rear-guard. At the
time when the Marquis of Mantua made his attack, the French rear-guard
had not yet crossed the river. Charles quitted the van, put himself at
the head of his chivalry, and charged the Italian horsemen, driving them
back, some to the village and others to their camp. De Comines observes,
that had the Italian knights been supported in this passage of arms by
the light cavalry of the Venetian force, called Stradiots, the French
must have been outnumbered, thrown into confusion, and defeated. As it
was, these Stradiots were engaged in plundering the baggage of the
French; and the Italians, accustomed to bloodless encounters, did not
venture, in spite of their immense superiority of numbers, to renew the
charge. In the pursuit of Gonzaga's horsemen Charles outstripped his
staff, and was left almost alone to grapple with a little band of
mounted foemen. It was here that his noble horse, Savoy, saved his
person by plunging and charging till assistance came up from the French,
and enabled the king to regain his van.
It is incredible, considering the nature of the ground and the number of
the troops engaged, that the allies should not have returned to the
attack and have made the passage of the French into the plain
impossible. De Comines, however, assures us that the actual engagement
only lasted a quarter of an hour, and the pursuit of the Italians three
quarters of an hour. After they had once resolved to fly, they threw
away their lances and betook themselves to Reggio and Parma. So complete
was their discomfiture, that De Comines gravely blames the want of
military genius and adventure in the French host. If, instead of
advancing along the left bank of the Taro and there taking up his
quarters for the night, Charles had recrossed the stream and pursued the
army of the allies, he would have had the whole of Lombardy at his
discretion. As it was, the French army encamped not far from the scene
of the action in great discomfort and anxiety. De Comines had to bivouac
in a vineyard, without even a mantle to wrap round him, having lent his
cloak to the king in the morning; and as it had been pouring all day,
the ground could not have afforded very luxurious quarters. The same
extraordinary luck which had attended the French in their whole
expedition now favored their retreat; and the same pusillanimity which
the allies had shown at Fornovo prevented them from re-forming and
engaging with the army of Charles upon the plain. One hour before
daybreak on Tuesday morning the French broke up their camp and succeeded
in clearing the valley. That night they lodged at Fiorenzuola, the next
at Piacenza, and so on; till on the eighth day they arrived at Asti
without having been so much as incommoded by the army of the allies in
their rear.
Although the field of Fornovo was in reality so disgraceful to the
Italians, they reckoned it a victory upon the technical pretence that
the camp and baggage of the French had been seized. Illuminations and
rejoicings made the piazza of St. Mark in Venice gay, and Francesco da
Gonzaga had the glorious Madonna della Vittoria painted for him by
Mantegna, in commemoration of what ought only to have been remembered
with shame.
A fitting conclusion to this sketch, connecting its close with the
commencement, may be found in some remarks upon the manner of warfare
to which the Italians of the Renaissance had become accustomed, and
which proved so futile on the field of Fornovo. During the Middle Ages,
and in the days of the Communes, the whole male population of Italy had
fought light armed on foot. Merchant and artisan left the counting-house
and the workshop, took shield and pike, and sallied forth to attack the
barons in their castles, or to meet the emperor's troops upon the field.
It was with this national militia that the citizens of Florence freed
their _Contado_ of the nobles, and the burghers of Lombardy gained the
battle of Legnano. In course of time, by a process of change which it is
not very easy to trace, heavily armed cavalry began to take the place of
infantry in mediaeval warfare. Men-at-arms, as they were called, encased
from head to foot in iron, and mounted upon chargers no less solidly
caparisoned, drove the foot-soldiers before them at the points of their
long lances. Nowhere in Italy do they seem to have met with the fierce
resistance which the bears of the Swiss Oberland and the bulls of Uri
offered to the knights of Burgundy. No Tuscan Arnold von Winkelried
clasped a dozen lances to his bosom that the foeman's ranks might thus
be broken at the cost of his own life; nor did it occur to the Italian
burghers to meet the charge of the horsemen with squares protected by
bristling spears. They seem, on the contrary, to have abandoned military
service with the readiness of men whose energies were already absorbed
in the affairs of peace. To become a practised and efficient man-at-arms
required long training and a life's devotion. So much time the burghers
of the free towns could not spare to military service, while the petty
nobles were only too glad to devote themselves to so honorable a
calling. Thus it came to pass that a class of professional fighting-men
was gradually formed in Italy, whose services the burghers and the
princes bought, and by whom the wars of the peninsula were regularly
farmed by contract. Wealth and luxury in the great cities continued to
increase; and as the burghers grew more comfortable, they were less
inclined to take the field in their own persons, and more disposed to
vote large sums of money for the purchase of necessary aid. At the same
time this system suited the despots, since it spared them the peril of
arming their own subjects, while they taxed them to pay the services of
foreign captains. War thus became a commerce. Romagna, the Marches of
Ancona, and other parts of the papal dominions supplied a number of
petty nobles whose whole business in life it was to form companies of
trained horsemen, and with these bands to hire themselves out to the
republics and the despots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains.
They sold their service to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively
of principle or patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from
the camp of one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that
true military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war.
A species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a
view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of
ransom, bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on
either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present
foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general of
the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his own
ranks? Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance,
warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual
subtlety; and, like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of
warfare was essentially transitional. The cannon and the musket were
already in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turn the
shamfight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventure into
something terribly more real. To men like the Marquis of Mantua war had
been a highly profitable game of skill; to men like the Marechal de Gie
it was a murderous horse-play; and this difference the Italians were not
slow to perceive. When they cast away their lances at Fornovo, and
fled--in spite of their superior numbers--never to return, one
fair-seeming sham of the fifteenth century became a vision of the past.