THEIR CATHOLIC MAJESTIES
THE BANISHMENT OF THE JEWS--INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS--THE SPANIARDS IN
ITALY--THE VICTORIES OF GONSALVO--THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA
The fall of Granada left the Catholic sovereigns free to turn their
attention more completely to the domestic affairs of the kingdom; and it
seems moreover to have increased the bigotry both of the Church and of
the Court, and to have added new zeal to the fury of the Inquisition.
The conquest of the Moorish kingdom was said by pious ecclesiastics to
be a special sign or manifestation of the approval by Heaven of the
recent institution of the Holy Office. The knights and nobles, proud of
their military successes, may have attributed the victory to causes more
flattering to their valor, their skill, and their perseverance. The
common people, as yet not demoralized, but gorged with plunder, and
invited to occupy without purchase the fairest province in the
Peninsula, were little disposed to quarrel with the policy of Ferdinand;
and far from feeling any pity for the sufferings of the vanquished
Moors, they sighed for new infidels to pillage. And new infidels were
promptly found.
The Inquisition so far had troubled itself but little with Christian
heretics. The early Spanish Protestantism of the thirteenth century had
died away. The later Spanish Protestantism of the sixteenth century had
not yet come into existence. Few men had done more than Averroes of
Cordova and Ramon Lull of Palma to awaken religious thought in Medieval
Europe; yet speculative theology has never been popular among the
Spanish people. It was against the Jews, renegade or relapsed, even more
than the avowedly unconverted, that the Holy Office directed all its
exertions until the end of the fifteenth century. By April, 1492,
although a great number of the unfortunate Hebrews had already found
their way to the Quemadero, there was still a very large Jewish
population in Spain, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the
most orderly, but, unhappily for themselves, the most wealthy of all the
inhabitants of the Peninsula.
The Spanish Jews, as we have seen, were treated on the arrival of the
Arab conquerors not only with consideration, but with an amount of favor
that was not extended to them under any other government in the world;
nor was this wise liberality, as time went on, displayed only by the
Moslem in Spain. At the Christian courts of Leon, of Castile, and of
Catalonia, the Jews were welcomed as lenders of money and as healers of
diseases, and as men skilled in many industrial arts; and they supplied
what little science was required in northern Spain, while their brethren
shared in the magnificent culture and extended studies of Cordova. When
the rule of the Arab declined, and Alfonso el Sabio held his court at
southern Seville, the learned Jews were his chosen companions. They
certainly assisted him in the preparation of his great astronomical
tables. They probably assisted him in his translation of the Bible.
Nor does this court favor appear to have caused any serious jealousy
among Christian Spaniards. The fellow-student of Alfonso X., the trusted
treasurer of Peter the Cruel, the accommodating banker of many a king
and many a noble--the Jew was for some time a personage of importance
rather than a refugee in the Peninsula. And during the whole of the
thirteenth century, while the Jews were exposed throughout western
Europe to the most dreadful and systematic persecutions, they enjoyed in
Spain not only immunity, but protection, not only religious freedom, but
political consideration.
Under Alfonso XI. they were particularly regarded, and even under Peter
the Cruel, who, though he tortured and robbed his Hebrew treasurer, did
not at any time display his natural ferocity in any form of religious
persecution. Yet, as we are told that his rival and successor, Henry of
Trastamara, sought popular favor by molesting the Jews, it would seem
that already by the end of the fourteenth century they were becoming
unpopular in Castile. But on the whole, throughout the Peninsula, from
the time of James I. of Aragon, who is said to have studied ethics under
a Jewish professor, to the time of John II. of Castile, who employed a
Jewish secretary in the compilation of a national “Cancionero,” or
ballad book, the Jews were not only distinguished, but encouraged, in
literature and abstract science, as they had always been in the more
practical pursuits of medicine and of commerce.
But in less than a century after the death of Alfonso X. the tide of
fortune had turned. Their riches increased overmuch in a disturbed and
impoverished commonwealth, and public indignation began to be displayed,
rather at their un-Christian opulence than at their Jewish faith.
Inquisition was made rather into their strongboxes than into their
theology; and it was their debtors and their rivals, rather than any
religious purists, who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, and
more especially in Aragon, stirred up those popular risings against
their race that led to the massacres and the wholesale conversions of
1391. The first attack that was made upon the persons and property of
the Jews was in 1388, and it was no doubt provoked by the preaching of
the fanatic archdeacon Hernando Martinez at Seville. But it was in
nowise religious in its character, and was aimed chiefly at the
acquisition and destruction of the property of the rich and prosperous
Hebrews. The outbreaks which took place almost simultaneously in all
parts of Spain were disapproved both by kings and councils. Special
judges were sent to the disturbed cities, and a considerable amount of
real protection was extended to the plundered people. No one said a word
about conversion; or at least the conversion was that of ancient Pistol,
the conversion of the property of the Jews into the possession of the
Christians. When the Jewish quarter of Barcelona was sacked by the
populace, and an immense number of Hebrews were despoiled and massacred
throughout the country, John of Aragon, indolent though he was, used his
utmost endeavors to check the slaughter. He punished the aggressors, and
he even caused a restitution of goods to be made to such of the victims
as survived.
The preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, during the early part of the
fifteenth century, was addressed largely to the Jews in Spain, but
little or no religious persecution seems to have been directed against
them in consequence of his harangues. On the contrary, we read of
friendly conferences or public disputations between Jewish and Christian
doctors in Aragon, where the Inquisition was, at least, nominally
established. Such conferences could hardly be expected to convince or
convert the advocates of either faith, but they tell at least of an
amount of toleration on the part of the Christian authorities of the day
that was certainly not to be found in Spain at the close of the century;
and there is no doubt that they were followed by a very large number of
conversions of the more malleable members of the Hebrew community. But
it is a far cry from St. Vincent Ferrer to the uncanonized Tomas de
Torquemada.
Yet, even in outward conformity to the established religion, the Jews,
as time went on, found no permanent safety from persecution and plunder.
John II. indeed had little of the bigot in his composition; it was
Politics and not Persecution that, under his successor, engrossed the
attention of clergy and laity in Castile; but, as soon as the power of
Isabella was formally established, the destruction of all that was not
orthodox, Catholic, and Spanish became the keynote of the domestic
policy of the new government of Spain.
The earliest efforts of the Spanish Inquisition were directed, as we
have seen, almost exclusively against those converted Jews, or the sons
and daughters of converts, who were known by the expressive name of New
Christians, a title applied also to Christianized Moslems, and which
distinguished both classes from the Old Christians or Cristianos Viejos,
who could boast of a pure Castilian ancestry. These New Christians, as a
whole, at the end of the fifteenth century, were among the richest, the
most industrious, and the most intelligent of the population, and they
were regarded with considerable envy by their poorer neighbors, whose
blue blood did not always bring with it either wealth or fortune. The
Rules and Regulations for the guidance of the Inquisitors were therefore
specially framed to include every possible act or thought that might
bring the members of the classes specially aimed at within the deadly
category of the Relapsed. If the “New Christian” wore a clean shirt, or
spread clean table-linen on a Saturday (Art. 4), if he ate meat in Lent
(7), observed any of the Jewish fasts (8-17), or sat at table with any
Jew of his acquaintance (19); if he recited one of the Psalms of David
without the addition of the Doxology (20), if he caused his child to be
baptized under a Hebrew name (23), he was to be treated as a renegade
and condemned to the flames.
With every act of his life thus at the mercy of spies and informers, his
last end was not unobserved by the Dominicans and the Familiars of the
Holy Office. If in the article of death he turned his weary face (31) to
the wall of his chamber, he was adjudged relapsed, and all his
possessions were forfeit; or if the sorrowing children of even the most
unexceptionable convert had washed his dead body with warm water (32)
they were to be treated as apostates and heretics, and were at least
liable to suffer death by fire, after their goods had been appropriated
by the Holy Office or by the Crown.
In the sentences which condemned to the stake, to confiscation, and to
penances which were punishments of the severest description, we find
enumerated such offenses as the avoiding the use of fat, and especially
of lard; preparing amive, a kind of broth much appreciated by the Jews;
or eating “Passover bread”; reading, or even possessing, a Hebrew Bible;
ignorance of the Pater noster and the Creed; saying that a good Jew
could be saved, and a thousand other equally harmless deeds or words.
But with the professed and avowed Jew, unpopular as he may have been
with his neighbors, and exposed at times to various forms of civil and
religious outrage, the Holy Office did not directly concern itself. The
Hebrew, like the Moslem, was outside the pale even of Christian inquiry.
There is no doubt that it was the success of the operations against the
Moors of Granada that suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella the
undertaking of a campaign, easier by far, and scarcely less lucrative,
against the unhappy descendants of Abraham who had made their home in
Spain.
The annual revenue that was derived by the Catholic sovereigns from the
confiscations of the Inquisition amounted to a considerable income; and
the source as yet showed no signs of drying up. Yet cupidity, marching
hand in hand with intolerance--the Devil, as the Spanish proverb has it,
ever lurking behind the Cross--the sovereigns resolved upon the
perpetration of an act of State more dreadful than the most
comprehensive of the Autos da Fe.
The work of the Holy Office was too slow. The limits of the Quemadero
were too small. Half a million Jews yet lived unbaptized in Spain. They
should be destroyed at a single blow. The Inquisition might be left to
reckon with the New Christians whose conversion was unsatisfactory.
As soon as the Spanish Jews obtained an intimation of what was
contemplated against them, they took steps to propitiate the sovereigns
by the tender of a donative of thirty thousand ducats, toward defraying
the expenses of the Moorish war; and an influential Jewish leader is
said to have waited upon Ferdinand and Isabella, in their quarters at
Santa Fe, to urge the acceptance of the bribe. The negotiations,
however, were suddenly interrupted by Torquemada, who burst into the
apartment where the sovereigns were giving audience to the Jewish
deputy, and drawing forth a crucifix from beneath his mantle, held it
up, exclaiming, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of
silver; Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand; here he
is, take him and barter him away.” The extravagant presumption of the
Inquisitor-general would not perhaps have been as successful as it was
had it not been obvious to the rapacious Ferdinand that thirty thousand
ducats was a trifle compared with the plunder of the entire body of Jews
in Spain. Yet the action of Torquemada was no doubt calculated to affect
the superstitious mind of Isabella, and even the colder spirit of
Ferdinand.
Whatever may have been the scruples of the Spanish sovereigns, the
fanaticism of the Spanish people had been at this critical juncture
stirred up to an unusual pitch of fury by the proceedings and reports of
the Holy Office in a case which has attracted an amount of attention so
entirely disproportionate to its apparent importance that it merits
something more than a passing notice.
In June, 1490, a converted Jew of the name of Benito Garcia, on his way
back from a pilgrimage to Compostella, was waylaid and robbed near
Astorga, by some of the Christian inhabitants. A Jew, converted or
otherwise, was a legitimate object of plunder. The contents of his
knapsack not being entirely satisfactory, and the ecclesiastical
authorities sniffing sacrilege in what was supposed to be a piece of the
consecrated wafer, Garcia, and not the robbers, was arrested, subjected
to incredible tortures, and finally handed over to the local
inquisitors.
His case was heard with that of other Conversos; first at Segovia and
afterward at Avila. Tortures were repeated. Spies were introduced in
various guises and disguises, but no confession could be extorted.
At length, after a year and a half of such practices, the endurance of
one of the accused gave way--the dreadful story affords some slight
notion of the methods of the Inquisition--and the unhappy man invented a
tale in accordance with what was demanded of him; the crucifixion of a
Christian child; the tearing out of his heart, the theft of the Host
from a Christian Church, and a magical incantation over the dreadful
elements, directed against Christianity, and more particularly against
the Holy Office. The Tribunal having been thus satisfied of the guilt
of the accused, a solemn Auto da Fe was held at Avila, on the 16th of
November, 1491, when two of the convicts were torn to death with red-hot
pincers; three who had been more mercifully permitted to die under the
preliminary tortures were burned in effigy; while the remaining
prisoners were visited only with the slight punishment of strangulation
before their consignment to the inevitable fire. That no boy, with or
without a heart, could be found or invented, by the most rigorous
examination; that no Christian child had disappeared from the
neighborhood of the unhappy Jews at the time of their arrest--this
surprised no one. In matters of Faith such evidences were wholly
superfluous. Secura judícat Ecclesia.
That these poor Hebrews should have suffered torture and death for an
imaginary sacrilege upon the person of an imaginary boy was indeed a
thing by no means unexampled in the history of religious fanaticism. But
the sequel is certainly extraordinary. With a view of exciting the
indignation of the sovereigns and of the people against the Jews at an
important moment, Torquemada devoted much attention to the publication
throughout Spain of the dreadful story of the murdered boy, the Niño of
La Guardia, the village where the crime is supposed to have taken place.
As to the name of the victim, the authorities did not agree. Some
maintained that it was Christopher, while others declared for John. But
the recital of the awful wickedness of the Jews lost none of its force
by adverse criticism. The legend spread from altar to altar throughout
the country. The Niño de la Guardia at once became a popular hero, in
course of time a popular saint; miracles were freely worked upon the
spot where his remains had not been found, and something over a century
later (1613) his canonization was demanded at Rome.
His remains, it was asserted by Francisco de Quevedo, could not be found
on earth, only because his body as well as his soul had been
miraculously carried up to heaven, where it was the most powerful
advocate and protector of the Spanish monarchy. The story, moreover, has
been twice dramatized--once by Lope de Vega--and no less than three
admiring biographies of this imaginary martyr have been published in
Spain within the last forty years of this nineteenth century.
At length from conquered Granada, on the 30th of March, 1492, the
dreadful edict went forth. By the 30th of July not a Jew was to be left
alive in Spain. Sisenand, indeed, nine hundred years before, had
promulgated such an edict. But the Visigoth had been too tender-hearted
to enforce it. Isabella, whose gentleness and goodness historians are
never tired of applauding, was influenced by no such considerations, and
the sentence was carried out to the letter. With a cruel irony, the
banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to
carry the money out of the kingdom, a provision which has obtained the
warm approval of more than one modern Spanish historian, by whom it is
accepted as a conclusive proof that this wholesale depopulation did not
and could not diminish the wealth of Spain!
Thus two hundred thousand Spaniards, men, women, and children of tender
years, rich and poor, men of refinement and of position, ladies reared
in luxury, the aged, the sick, the infirm, all were included in one
common destruction, and were driven, stripped of everything, from their
peaceful homes, to die on their way to some less savage country. For the
sentence was carried out with the most relentless ferocity. Every road
to the coast, we read, was thronged with the unhappy fugitives,
struggling to carry off some shred of their ruined homes. To succor them
was death; to pillage them was piety. At every seaport, rapacious
shipmasters exacted from the defenseless travelers the greater part of
their remaining possessions, as the price of a passage to some
neighboring coast; and in many cases the passenger was tossed overboard
ere the voyage was completed, and his goods confiscated to the crew. A
rumor having got abroad that the fugitives were in the habit of
swallowing jewels and gold pieces in order to evade the royal decree,
thousands of unhappy beings were ripped up by the greedy knife of the
enemy, on land or sea, on the chance of discovering in their mutilated
remains some little store of treasure.
And thus, north, south, east, and west, the Jews straggled and struggled
over Spain; and undeterred by the manifold terrors of the sea, a vast
multitude of exiles, whose homes in Spain once lay in sunny Andalusia,
sought and found an uncertain abiding place in neighboring Africa.
Of all Christian countries, it was in neighboring Portugal that the
greatest number of the exiles found refuge and shelter; until, after
five brief years of peace and comparative prosperity, the heavy hand of
Castilian intolerance once more descended upon them, and they were
driven out of the country, at the bidding of Isabella and her too
dutiful daughter, the hope of Portugal and of Castile.
But to every country in Europe the footsteps of some of the sufferers
were directed. Not a few were permitted to abide in Italy and Southern
France; some of the most distinguished found a haven in England; many
were fortunate enough to reach the Ottoman dominions, where, under the
tolerant government of the Turk, they lived and prospered, and where
their descendants, at many of the more important seaports of the Levant,
are still found to speak the Castilian of their forefathers.
That the edict of banishment was meant to be, as it so constantly was, a
doom of death, and not merely a removal of heretics, is clear from the
action of the Spanish sovereigns, who, at the instigation of Torquemada,
procured from the pliant Innocent VIII. a Bull enjoining the authorities
of every country in Christian Europe to arrest and send back to Spain
all _fugitive_ Jews under penalty of the Greater Excommunication.
More than once, indeed, the demand for extradition was made. But save in
the case of the Portuguese Jews, on the second marriage of the Princess
Isabella to the reigning sovereign of that country, no foreign prince
appears to have paid any heed to this savage edict. Nor was it, as a
rule, of any material advantage, either at Rome or at Seville, that it
should be put in force.
Avarice was perhaps the besetting sin of Rome in the fifteenth century;
nor was bigotry unknown throughout Western Europe. But in Spain, as the
century drew to a close, avarice and bigotry joined hand in hand, and
flourished under royal and noble patronage, preached by religion,
practiced by policy, and applauded by patriotism. It was not strange
that, under such teaching, the people of Castile should have rapidly
become demoralized, and that the great race should have begun to develop
that sordid and self-satisfied savagery which disgraced the name of the
Spaniard, in the heartless and short-sighted plunder of the new world
that lay before him.
Yet in all human affairs there is something that too often escapes our
observation, to explain, if not to excuse, what may seem the most
dreadful aberrations of the better nature of man. And it may be that the
uncompromising religious spirit, which has had so enormous an influence
for evil and for good upon the Spanish people, is to some extent the
result of their Semitic environment of eight hundred years.
Religious controversy indeed, between rival branches of the Christian
Church in the days of the Visigoths, developed religious animosities
before the first Moslem landed at Tarifa; yet the Arab and the Moor,
fired with the enthusiasm of a new and living faith, brought into their
daily life in Spain, in peace and in war, a deep and all-pervading
religious spirit--an active recognition of the constant presence of one
true God--unknown to the Roman or the Visigoth, which must have had an
enormous influence upon the grave and serious Spaniards who lived under
the rule of the Arab.
Nor was the Moslem the only factor in this medieval development. In no
other country in Europe was the Jew, as we have seen, more largely
represented, and more powerful, for the first fifteen centuries of our
era, than in Spain, whether under Christian or Moslem masters. But the
direct and simple monotheism of the Hebrew and the Arab, while it had so
great a direct influence upon Spanish Christianity, provoked as part of
the natural antagonism to the methods of the rival and the enemy, the
counter development of an excessive Hagiolatry, Mariolatry, and
Sacerdotalism.
It would be strange enough if the religious fervor which doomed to death
and torment so many tens of thousands of Semites in Spain should be
itself of Semitic suggestion. It is hardly less strange that the Greek
Renaissance, which revolutionized the Christian world, and whose
anti-Semitic influence to the present day is nowhere more marked than in
every department of religious thought, should by the irony of fate have
been forestalled by a writer, at once Spanish and Semitic; and when, by
the sixteenth century, the rest of modern Europe had been led by the
teaching of Averroes to accept the philosophy of Aristotle, Spain, the
earliest home of Hellenism, new born in Europe, had already turned again
to a religious Philistinism or Phariseeism of the hardest and most
uncompromising type, Semitic in its thoroughness, Greek only in its
elaborate accessories, and Spanish in its uncompromising rigor.
Thus it was that the Arab and the Jew, parents, in some sense, of the
religious spirit of Ximenez and of Torquemada, became themselves the
objects of persecution more bitter than is to be found in the annals of
any other European nation. The rigors of the Spanish Inquisition, and
the policy that inspired and justified it, are not to be fully explained
by the rapacity of Ferdinand, the bigotry of Isabella, the ambition of
Ximenez, or the cruelty of Torquemada. They were in a manner the
rebellion or outbreak of the old Semitic spirit against the Semite,
the ignorant jealousy of the wayward disciple against the master
whose teaching has been but imperfectly and unintelligently
assimilated--perverted, distorted, and depraved by the human or devilish
element which is to be found in all religions, and which seems ever
striving to destroy the better, and to develop the worser part of the
spiritual nature of man.
We now enter upon a period of European history which is but feebly
characterized by the term interesting, and which has been too accurately
chronicled and too severely investigated to be called romantic; when a
well-founded jealousy, or fear of the growing power of France, alone
supplies the key to the ever-changing foreign policy of the sovereigns
of Spain. Genuine State papers of the fifteenth century are by no means
numerous. In such of them, however, as are still extant, we find the
fear expressed over and over again that the kings of France would render
themselves “masters of the world,” would “establish a universal empire,”
or “subject the whole of Christendom to their dictation.” The best means
to avert such a danger appeared to contemporary statesmen to be the
foundation of another European State as a counterpoise. Ferdinand the
Catholic, ambitious, diplomatic, and capable, was the first prince who
undertook the enterprise.
Within less than three years after the Inquisition had been established
at Seville, Louis XI. of France, the old rival and colleague of John II.
of Aragon, had died in Paris, August 30, 1483. He was succeeded by his
son Charles VIII., a young prince whose ignorance was only equaled by
his vanity, and was if possible exceeded by his presumption. With such
an antagonist, Ferdinand of Aragon was well fitted to deal, with
advantage to himself and to Spain. To win over the Duchess of Bourbon,
who had virtually succeeded to the government of France on the death of
Louis XI., and to marry his eldest daughter Isabella to the young King
Charles VIII., were accordingly the first objects of his negotiations.
But in spite of all the flattery lavished on the duchess, Ferdinand did
not succeed in obtaining the crown for the Infanta. A more richly
dowered bride was destined for the King of France, to whom the
acquisition of the province of Brittany was of far greater importance
than the doubtful friendship of Spain; and after much public and private
negotiation, the Spanish embassador was reluctantly withdrawn from Paris
in the summer of 1487 (29th of July).
Disappointed in his dealing with the court of France, the ever-watchful
and persistent Ferdinand turned his eyes to England; and in the last
days of the year 1487 an embassador from the Spanish sovereigns,
Roderigo de Puebla, doctor of canon and civil law, arrived at the court
of London. Henry VII., who greatly desired to establish a closer
alliance with Spain, succeeded in flattering the new envoy, and
rendering him almost from the first subservient to his personal
interests. Yet the King of England and the Spanish embassador together
were no match for Ferdinand of Aragon. The negotiations between the
sovereigns were prolonged for two years, and in the end Henry was
worsted at every point. He had signed a treaty of offensive alliance
with Spain against France, with which power he wisely desired to
maintain friendly relations, and he had been prevailed upon to send some
English troops into Brittany to co-operate with a Spanish contingent
which never arrived, in the expulsion of the French from that country.
He had concluded further treaties of friendship and alliance with the
King of the Romans, who was actually encouraging Perkin Warbeck to
assert his claim to the crown of England, and with the Archduke Philip,
whom he personally and independently hated. And he had been forced to
content himself with the promise of a very modest dowry with the Spanish
princess who was affianced to his son Arthur, Prince of Wales.
Relatively too, as well as positively, he had been falsely borne in
hand. Maximilian, who had been no less ready than Henry with his
promises to Ferdinand, did not send a single soldier into Brittany, but
endeavored to overreach Henry, Charles, and Ferdinand by a hasty
marriage--by proxy--with the young duchess, without the consent or
knowledge of either England or Spain. Yet this diplomatic victory over
the very astute Englishman did not satisfy Ferdinand and Isabella, who,
fearful lest they should “become the victims of their honesty” if they
permitted Maximilian to surpass them in political perfidy, immediately
renewed secret negotiations with France, and declared themselves ready
to abandon the king, the duchess, and the emperor. Charles, they
promised, should obtain what he wished, without risking the life of a
single soldier, if only he would marry a Spanish Infanta. And they
offered him, not Isabella, their eldest born, but their second daughter,
Joanna.
Charles, however, had other views, and finding no cohesion or certainty
in Ferdinand’s league against him, strengthened his cause and his
kingdom by marrying the Duchess Anne of Brittany himself, and uniting
her hereditary dominions forever to the crown of France, a fair stroke
of policy for a foolish sovereign in the midst of crafty and
unscrupulous adversaries. (December 13, 1491.)
Ferdinand replied by calling on Henry VII. to fulfill his engagements
and invade France. Henry accordingly, on the 1st of October, 1492,
landed an army at Calais, and marched on Boulogne; while Ferdinand,
without striking a blow either for Spain or for England, took advantage
of the English expedition to extort from the fears and folly of Charles
VIII. the favorable conditions of peace and alliance that were embodied
in the celebrated Convention which was signed at Barcelona on the 19th
of January, 1493. By this instrument it was provided that each of the
high contracting parties should mutually aid each other against all
enemies, the Vicar of Christ alone excepted, that the Spanish sovereigns
should not enter into an alliance with any other power, to the prejudice
of the interests of France, and finally, that the coveted provinces of
Roussillon and Cerdagne, whose recovery had long been one of the chief
objects of Ferdinand’s ambition, should be immediately handed over to
Spain.
The services of England being no longer needed by the peninsular
sovereigns, Ferdinand abruptly broke off all further negotiations with
Henry VII.; the signatures of Ferdinand and Isabella to the treaty which
had already been ratified were disposed of by the simple but effective
expedient of cutting them out of the parchment with a pair of scissors;
and the contract of marriage between Arthur, Prince of Wales, and the
Infanta Catharine--having served its immediate diplomatic purpose--was
removed, for the time being,[7] from the sphere of practical politics.
It is sufficiently characteristic of both parties, that in the treaty of
Barcelona, between Charles and Ferdinand, Naples, the true objective of
the young king of France, was not even mentioned. Ferdinand, well
content with the immediate advantages obtained by the treaty, was by no
means imposed upon by such vain reticence, while Charles, pluming
himself upon the success of his diplomacy in his treaties with England,
with Spain, and with the empire, looked forward to establishing himself
without opposition on the throne of Naples, on his way to assume the
Imperial purple at Constantinople.
The kingdom of Naples, on the death of Alfonso the Magnanimous of
Aragon, had passed, we have already seen, to his illegitimate son
Ferdinand, who proved to be a tyrant of the worst Italian type,
worthless, contemptible and uninteresting. To expel this hated monarch,
for whom not one of his Neapolitan subjects would have been found to
strike a blow in anger, seemed but a chivalrous and agreeable pastime to
the vain and ignorant youth who had succeeded Louis XI. upon the throne
of France. His more experienced neighbors indeed smiled with some
satisfaction at his presumption. Yet, strange to say, the judgment of
the vain and ignorant youth was just; and the wise men, who ridiculed
his statesmanship, and scoffed at his military ineptitude, were doomed
to great and astounding disappointment.
Before the French preparations for the invasion of Italy were fairly
completed, in the early spring of 1494, Ferdinand of Naples died, and
was succeeded by his son Alfonso I., the cousin-german of Ferdinand of
Aragon. This change of rulers altered in no way the wild schemes of
Charles of France, nor, although the new king of Naples was far less
odious than his father had been in his own dominions, did it make any
important change in the condition of Italian politics. By the month of
June, 1494, the French preparations were so far advanced that Charles
judged it opportune to acquaint his Spanish allies with his designs on
Naples, and to solicit their active co-operation in his undertaking.
That Ferdinand should, under any possible circumstances, have been found
to spend the blood and treasure of Spain in assisting any neighbor,
stranger, or ally, in any enterprise, without direct advantage to
himself, was a supposition entirely extravagant. But that he should
assist a feather-headed Frenchman to dispossess a son of Aragon of a
kingdom from which his own ancestors had thrice driven a French
pretender, and where, if any change were to be made in the sovereignty,
his own rights of succession were far superior to the shadowy claims
derived from the hated Angevins: this was a thing so grotesquely
preposterous that it is hard to suppose that even Charles of France
should have regarded it as being within the bounds of possibility.
Ferdinand contented himself for the moment with expressions of
astonishment and offers of good advice, while Charles pushed forward his
preparations for the invasion of Italy. Don Alfonso de Silva, dispatched
by the court of Spain as a special envoy, came up with the French army
at Vienne, on the Rhone, toward the end of June, 1494. But he was
instructed rather to seek, than to convey, intelligence of any sort; nor
was it to be supposed that his grave remonstrances or his diplomatic
warnings should have had much effect upon the movements of an army that
was already on the march.
In August, 1494, thirty thousand men, hastily equipped, yet well
provided with the new and dreadful weapon that was then first spoken of
as a cannon, crossed the Alps, and prepared to fight their way to
Naples. But no enemy appeared to oppose their progress. The various
States of Italy, jealous of one another, if not actually at war, were
unable or unwilling to combine against the invader; the roads were
undefended; the troops fled; the citizens of the isolated cities opened
their gates, one after the other, at the approach of the strange and
foreign invader. The French army, in fine, after a leisurely promenade
militaire through the heart of Italy, marched unopposed into Rome on the
last day of the year 1494.
Ferdinand and Isabella had, in the first instance, offered no serious
opposition to the French enterprise, which appeared to them to be
completely impracticable; and they had awaited with diplomatic
equanimity the apparently inevitable disaster, which, without the loss
of a single Spanish soldier or the expenditure of a single maravedi,
would at once have served all the purposes of Ferdinand, and permitted
him to maintain his reputation for goodwill toward Charles, which might
have been useful in future negotiations. The astonishing success of the
French invasion took the Spanish sovereigns completely by surprise, and
it became necessary for Ferdinand to adopt, without haste, but with
prudent promptitude, a new policy at once toward France and toward the
various parties in Italy.
The boldest and the most capable of all the sovereigns of Italy, in
these trying times, was the Spanish Pontiff, who by a singular fate has
been made, as it were, the whipping boy for the wickedness of nineteen
centuries of popes at Rome, and who is known to every schoolboy and
every scribbler as the infamous Alexander VI. Roderic Lenzuoli, or
Llançol, was the son of a wealthy Valencian gentleman, by Juana, a
sister of the more distinguished Alfonso Borja, bishop of his native
city of Valencia.
Born at Valencia about 1431, Roderic gave evidence from his earliest
years of a remarkable strength of character, and of uncommon
intellectual powers. While still a youth, he won fame and fortune as an
advocate. But his impatient nature chafed at the moderate restraint of a
lawyer’s gown; and he was on the point of adopting a military career,
when the election of his uncle to the Supreme Pontificate as Calixtus
III. in 1455 opened for him the way to a more glorious future. At the
instance of the new Pope, Roderic adopted his mother’s name, in the
Italian form already so well known and distinguished at the court of
Rome, and taking with him his beautiful mistress, Rosa Vanozza, whose
mother he had formerly seduced, he turned his back upon his native
Valencia, and sought the fortune that awaited him at the capital of the
world.
Unusually handsome in person, vigorous in mind and body, masterful,
clever, eloquent, unscrupulous, absolutely regardless of all laws, human
or divine, in the gratification of his passions and the accomplishment
of his designs, Roderic, the Pope’s nephew, was a man made for success
in the society in which he was to find himself at Rome. On his arrival
at the Papal court in 1456 he was received with great kindness by his
uncle, and was soon created Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of St.
Nicholas _in Carcere Tulliano_, and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman
Church. On the death of Calixtus in 1458, the Cardinal Roderic Borgia
sank into comparative insignificance; and during the reigns of Pius II.,
Paul II., Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. we hear little of him but that
he was distinguished for his amours, for his liberality in the disposal
of his fortune, and for his attention to public business. Having thus
secured the goodwill of many of the cardinals and the affection of the
Roman people, he had no difficulty, on the death of Innocent VIII. in
July, 1492, in making a bargain with a majority of the members of the
Sacred College, in accordance with which he was elected Pope, and took
the title of Alexander VI. on the 26th of August, 1492.
His election was received by the Roman people with the utmost
satisfaction, and celebrated with all possible demonstrations of joy.
His transcendent abilities and his reckless methods could not fail to
render him obnoxious to his companions and his rivals in Italy; but it
is due rather to his foreign origin, his Valencian independence of
character, and above all his insolent avoidance of hypocrisy in the
affairs of his private life, that he has been made a kind of
ecclesiastical and Papal scapegoat, a Churchman upon whose enormous
vices Protestant controversialists are never tired of dilating, and
whose private wickedness is ingenuously admitted by Catholic apologists
as valuable for the purposes of casuistic illustration, as the one
instance of a divinely infallible judge whose human nature yet remained
mysteriously impure, and whose personal or individual actions may be
admitted to have been objectively blamable.
To measure the relative depths of human infamy is an impossible as well
as an ungrateful task. It is not given to mortals to know the secrets of
the heart. But bad as Alexander undoubtedly was, he was possibly no
worse than many of his contemporaries in the Consistory, less wicked
than some of his predecessors at the Vatican. The guilt of greater and
more vigorous natures passes for superlative infamy with the crowd; but
when dispassionately compared with that of his immediate predecessors,
Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII., the character of Alexander VI. is in
almost every respect less flagitious and more admirable.
So unblushing was the venality of the Holy See in the fourteenth century
that sacred dialecticians and jurists of high authority were found
seriously to argue that the Pope was not subjectively capable of
committing the offense of Simony. It might have been contended with
equal justice that in every other respect he was at once above, or
without, the scope of the entire moral law. Nor can it be said that the
fifteenth century brought any serious amendment.
From the death of Benedict XI., in 1303, to the death of Alexander VI.,
in 1503, the night was dark before the inevitable dawn; and in every
phase of human depravity, in every development of human turpitude, in
arrogance, in venality, in cruelty, in licentiousness, medieval Popes
may be found pre-eminent among contemporary potentates. Thus, if the
wickedness of Alexander was extravagant, it was by no means
unparalleled, even among the Popes of a single century. His cruelty was
no greater than that of Urban VI., or of Clement VII., or of John XXII.
His immorality was, at least, more human than that of Paul II. and of
Sixtus IV., nor were his amours more scandalous than those of Innocent
VIII. His sacrilege was less dreadful than that of Sixtus IV. His
covetousness could hardly have exceeded that of Boniface IX.; his
arrogance was less offensive than that of Boniface VIII. If he was
unduly subservient to Ferdinand and Isabella in his toleration of the
enormities of Torquemada, his necessities as an Italian sovereign
rendered the Spanish alliance a matter of capital importance. As a civil
potentate and as a politician, he was not only wiser, but far less
corrupt than Sforza, less rapacious than Ferdinand, more constant than
Maximilian of Germany, less reckless than Charles of France. His
administrative ability, his financial enlightenment, his energy as
regards public works, were no less remarkable than his personal
liberality, his affability, and his courage. His division of the New
World by a stroke of the pen was an assumption of imperial power which
was at least justified by the magnitude of its success. As he sat in his
palace on the Mons Vaticanus, he was the successor, not of Caligula, but
of Tiberius--not of Commodus, but of Diocletian.
Of the misfortunes of his eldest son, created by Ferdinand Duke of
Gandia; of the wickedness of his second son, the fifteenth century
Cæsar, who succeeded his father as Cardinal Archbishop of Valencia; of
the profligacy of his daughter, so unhappily named Lucretia; of the
marriage of his youngest son Geoffrey to a daughter of Alfonso of
Naples, as a part of the treaty of alliance between the kingdom of the
Two Sicilies and the States of the Church, in 1494; of the alliance
between Alexander and Bajazet, and the poisoning of the Sultan’s
brother, Zem, after thirteen years’ captivity, on receipt of an
appropriate fee; of the elevation of a facile envoy to the full rank of
Cardinal, to please the Grand Turk; of all these things nothing need be
said in this place.
We are more immediately concerned to know that on New Year’s Day, 1495,
Pope Alexander VI., a refugee, if not actually a prisoner, in the Castle
of St. Angelo, was fain to accept the terms that were imposed upon him
by the victorious Frenchmen--masters for the nonce of Italy and of Rome.
As Charles VIII. was marching through Italy, and was approaching, all
unopposed, the sacred city of Rome, Alexander VI., anxious at all
hazards to obtain the assistance of his countrymen in the hour of
danger, had sent an envoy to the Spanish court representing the critical
state of affairs in Italy, assuring the king and queen of his constant
goodwill, in spite of certain disputes as to the Papal authority in
Spain, and conveying to them, with other less substantial favors, the
grant of the Tercias, or two-ninths of the tithes throughout all the
dominions of Castile, an impost which, until the middle of the present
century, formed a part of the revenues of the Spanish monarchy. He also
conceded to the Spanish crown the right of dominion over the whole of
northern Africa, except Fez, which had been given to the King of
Portugal.
A projected marriage between the Duke of Calabria, eldest son of the
King of Naples, and the Infanta Maria, daughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella, served to give the King of Spain an opportunity for
negotiating with the Neapolitan court; and Ferdinand at the same time
dispatched the celebrated Garcilaso de la Vega as his embassador, with
instructions to return the most comforting assurances to the Pope at
Rome. Yet he refrained from making any definite promises, or from
committing himself to any definite policy. He was not a man to do
anything rashly; and he preferred to await the course of events.
Meanwhile, having sent a second mission from Guadalajara to the French
court or camp, with good advice for his young friend and ally Charles
VIII., Ferdinand betook himself with Isabella to Madrid, where the
Spanish sovereigns devoted themselves to the preparation and equipment
of an army to be dispatched at an opportune moment to any part of Italy
where subsequent events might render its presence necessary. As, for
various reasons, it was impossible that either Ferdinand or Isabella
should accompany their army abroad, it became necessary to select a
general. Among all the skillful leaders and gallant knights who had
signalized themselves in the wars of Granada, it was somewhat difficult
to decide upon a commander. But Isabella had never lost sight of
Gonsalvo de Cordova, in whom she discerned traces of rare military
talent; and from the moment the Sicilian expedition was planned she
determined that he should be captain-general of the royal forces. The
greater experience and apparently superior claims of many who had
distinguished themselves in battle against the Moors were urged by
Ferdinand without avail. The command was given to Gonsalvo de Cordova.
But while the Spanish fleet, under the gallant Count of Trivento, was
riding at anchor at Alicante, and Gonsalvo was preparing to embark his
army on board the ships in that harbor, the Spanish sovereigns
dispatched a final embassy to Charles in Italy. On the 28th of January,
1495, as the king was leaving Rome on his way toward Naples, the
embassadors, Juan de Albion and Antonio de Fonseca, arrived at the
Vatican. They found Pope Alexander smarting under the humiliation of his
recent treaty with the invader, and willing to assist them in any scheme
for his discomfiture. They accordingly followed the French army with all
speed, overtook it within a few miles of Rome, and immediately demanded
an audience of Charles, even before his troops had come to a halt. They
delivered up to him their credentials as he was riding along, and
peremptorily required him to proceed no further toward Naples. The
haughty tone of the Spaniards, as may be supposed, excited the greatest
indignation in the breast of Charles and those who surrounded him; high
words arose on both sides, and finally Fonseca, giving way to a
simulated transport of rage, produced a copy of the once prized treaty
of Barcelona, tore it to pieces, and threw down the fragments at
Charles’s feet. Paul Jove seems to think that this violent and
unjustifiable conduct on the part of the Spanish embassador was entirely
unpremeditated; but it is certain that the whole scene had been
preconcerted with either Ferdinand or the Pope. Zurita and the other
chroniclers are silent on the point, but Peter Martyr in one of his
letters affirms that the mutilation of the treaty in Charles’s presence
was included in the secret instructions given to Fonseca by Ferdinand.
The envoys, as was expected, were promptly ordered to quit the French
camp; and retiring with all speed to Rome, they hastened to transmit to
Spain the earliest intelligence of the success of their mission. They
were also permitted to inform their sovereigns of the new honor that had
been conferred upon them by his Holiness Alexander VI., in the shape of
the grant to them and to their heirs forever on the throne of Spain of
the title of “Catholic Kings.”
Meanwhile Charles VIII. had reached Naples, which had at once opened its
gates to the invaders, and the Castel Nuovo and the Castel d’Uovo were
reduced to submission by their well-served artillery. King Alfonso
abdicated the crown, and Fabricio Colonna ravaged the whole kingdom of
Naples to the very gates of Brindisi, dispersing the little band of
troops that had been collected by Don Cæsar of Aragon, illegitimate
brother of the king; while Perron dei Baschi and Stuart d’Aubigny
overran the whole country almost without striking a blow; and the
greater part of the Neapolitan nobility gave their adhesion to the
French. Nothing, however, could be more impolitic or more ungrateful
than the manner in which Charles made use of his unexpectedly acquired
authority, and it soon became evident that the new state of affairs in
Naples would not be of very long duration. The moment for the judicious
interference of Ferdinand of Aragon had not been long in arriving.
The conduct of the French at Naples showed pretty clearly to the
Italian States the mistake they had made in permitting Charles to enter
the country, and they were not slow to accept the suggestions of the
Spanish embassador, Don Lorenzo Suarez de Mendoza y Figueras, that they
should form a league with the object of expelling the French from Italy.
The attitude of the Duke of Orleans, who had remained at Asti, toward
the duchy of Milan, and the favorable reception accorded by Charles to
Giovanni Trivulzio, Cardinal Fregosi, and Hybletto dei Fieschi, the
chiefs of the banished nobles, and the sworn enemies of Ludovico Sforza,
showed that prince how little he had to expect from the French alliance;
and the conduct of Charles toward the Florentines, and indeed toward
every government whose dominion he had traversed throughout Italy,
terrified and enraged every statesman from Milan to Syracuse.
The envoys of the various states assembled at Venice. The deliberations
in the council chamber were brief and decisive; and such was the secrecy
with which the negotiations were conducted that the astute statesman and
historian Philip de Commines, who then represented France at the court
of Venice, remained ignorant that any league or convention was even
contemplated by the various powers, until he was informed by the Doge
Agostino Barberigo, on the morning of the 1st of April, 1495, that the
treaty had been signed on the previous day. The avowed objects of this
Most Holy League, which was entered into by Spain, Austria, Venice,
Milan and the Court of Rome, were the recovery of Constantinople from
the Turks, and the protection of the interests of the Church; but the
secret articles of the treaty, as may be supposed, went much further,
and provided that Ferdinand should employ the Spanish armament, now on
its way to Sicily, in re-establishing his kinsman on the throne of
Naples; that a Venetian fleet of forty galleys should attack the French
positions on the Neapolitan coasts, that the Duke of Milan, the original
summoner, should expel the French from Asti, and blockade the passage of
the Alps, so as to prevent the arrival of further re-enforcements, and
that the Emperor and the King of Spain should invade France on their
respective frontiers, while the expense of all these warlike operations
should be defrayed by subsidies from the allies. The Sultan Bajazet II.,
though not included in the League, offered, and was permitted, to assist
the Venetians both by sea and land against the French. Thus we see the
strange spectacle of the Pope and the Grand Turk--the Prince of
Christendom and the Prince of Islam--united against the first Christian
Power of Europe, under the leadership of The Most Christian King.
Within six weeks of the signature of this important treaty, Charles
VIII. of France had caused himself to be crowned at Naples, with
extraordinary pomp, not only as king, but as emperor; and, having thus
gratified his puerile vanity, he abandoned his fantastic empire, and
flying from the dangers that threatened him in Italy he returned to
Paris. His army in Naples was intrusted to his cousin, Gilbert de
Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier, who was invested with the title of viceroy,
and instructed by the fugitive king to maintain his position in the
country against all opponents.
It is not within the scope of this history to give any detailed account
of the retreat of the French through Italy, of the wonderful passage of
the Apennines at Pontremoli, and the still more wonderful victory of
Fornovo on the Taro, when the French, whose entire force did not exceed
ten thousand soldiers, completely routed the Italian army of thirty-five
thousand men, under the command of Gonzago, marquis of Mantua. The
French forces that remained in southern Italy were doomed to a very
different fate. The command of the French army had been intrusted to the
celebrated Stuart d’Aubigny, a knight of Scottish ancestry, who had been
invested by Charles VIII. with the dignity of Constable of France, and
who was accounted one of the most capable officers in Europe. But a
greater captain than D’Aubigny was already on his way from Castile, who
was in a single campaign to restore the reputation of the Spanish
infantry to the proud position which they had once occupied in the
armies of ancient Rome.
Landing at Reggio in Calabria, on the 26th of May, 1495, with a force of
all arms not exceeding five thousand fighting men, Gonsalvo de Cordova
speedily possessed himself of that important base of operations,
established himself on the coast, captured several inland towns, was
victorious in many skirmishes, and would soon have overrun the whole of
Calabria, had not the rashness of Frederic, the young king of Naples,
who had succeeded but a few months before to the crown which Alfonso had
abdicated after a reign of less than one year, led to a disastrous check
at Seminara. But Gonsalvo rapidly reorganized his army, and showing
himself, like a great general, no less admirable in repairing a defeat
than in taking advantage of a victory, he had kept D’Aubigny so
completely in check that he had been unable even to go to the assistance
of Montpensier, who was in sore straits in Naples. The citizens soon
opened their gates to their lawful sovereign, and Montpensier retreated
with his remaining forces to Avella, on the banks of the Lagni, twenty
miles northeast of the city of Naples, whither Gonsalvo promptly marched
to besiege him. Having received intelligence in the course of his
march--Gonsalvo was ever well informed--that a strong body of French,
with some Angevin knights and nobles, were on their way to effect a
junction with D’Aubigny, he surprised them by a night attack in the
fortified town of Lino, where he captured every one of the Angevin
lords, no less than twenty in number, and immediately marching off to
Avella with his spoils and prisoners, and an immense booty, he arrived
at Frederic’s camp early in July, just thirteen months after their
separation on the disastrous field of Seminara.
On hearing of Gonsalvo’s approach, the king marched out to meet him,
accompanied by Cæsar Borgia, the Papal Legate, and many of the principal
Neapolitan nobles and commanders, who greeted the victorious Castilian
with the proud title of “The Great Captain,” by which he was already
known to some of his contemporaries, and by which he has ever since been
distinguished by posterity. At Avella he found a re-enforcement of five
hundred Spanish soldiers, a welcome addition to his small force, which
amounted on his arrival to only two thousand one hundred men, of whom
six hundred were cavalry. With such an army, less numerous than a modern
German regiment, did Gonsalvo overrun Calabria, out-general the most
renowned French commanders, and defeat their gallant and
well-disciplined forces, emboldened by uninterrupted success.
The siege operations at Avella, which had been conducted without energy
by the Neapolitans, received a new impetus from the presence of the
Spaniard, who displayed such skill and vigor that in a few days the
French, defeated at every point, were glad to sue for terms, and on the
21st of July, 1496, signed a capitulation which virtually put an end to
the war. It was meet that Gonsalvo should now pay a visit to his
countryman at the Vatican, and having, on his way to Rome, delivered the
town of Ostia from the dictatorship of a Basque adventurer of the name
of Guerri, the last remaining hope of the French in Italy, he was
received by Alexander VI. with such splendor that his entry into the
city is said to have resembled rather the _triumph_ of a victorious
general into ancient Rome than the visit of a modern grandee.
The streets were lined with enthusiastic crowds, the windows were filled
with admiring spectators, the very tops of the houses were covered with
lookers-on, as Gonsalvo marched into and through the city, preceded by
bands of music, and accompanied by his victorious army. The entire
garrison of Ostia, with Manuel Guerri at their head, mounted on a
wretched horse, was led captive to the Vatican, where Roderic Borgia, in
the full splendor of his tiara and pontifical robes, and surrounded by
his cardinals, sat on his throne awaiting the coming of his victorious
countryman. When Gonsalvo reached the foot of the throne, he knelt down
to receive the pontifical benediction, but Alexander raised him in his
arms, and presented to him the Golden Rose, the highest and most
distinguished honor that a layman could receive from the hands of the
sovereign Pontiff.
The Great Captain now returned to Naples, into which city he made an
entry scarcely less splendid than that into Rome; and he received at the
hands of Frederic more substantial honors than those of a golden rose,
in the shape of the dukedom of Santangelo, with a fief of two towns and
seven dependent villages in the Abruzzo. From Naples the new duke sailed
for Sicily, which was then in a state of open insurrection, in
consequence of the oppressive rule of Giovanni di Nuccia, the Neapolitan
viceroy. By the intervention of Gonsalvo, the inhabitants were satisfied
to return to their allegiance; and order was restored without the
shedding of a single drop of blood. After some further services to the
state, and to the cause of peace, services both diplomatic and military,
in Naples, in Sicily and in Calabria, adding in every case to his
reputation as a soldier and a statesman, and above all as a great
Castilian gentleman, Gonsalvo returned to his native Spain, where he was
received with the applause and respect that is not always granted to
great men by their own sovereigns, or even by their own countrymen.
His last service to King Frederic and his people, ere he quitted the
country, was no less honorable than wise. Frederic was engaged in the
siege of the last city in the kingdom of Naples that refused to
recognize the dominion of Aragon, the ancient and noble city of Diano,
whose inhabitants, vassals of that Prince of Salerno who was attached
to the Angevin cause, refused to listen to the terms which were
proposed. Gonsalvo took charge of the operations; and the citizens,
convinced of the hopelessness of holding out any longer against so
vigorous a commander, surrendered a few days afterward at discretion.
Gonsalvo, whether touched at their bravery and their forlorn condition,
or merely being adverse from severity for which he saw no reason,
obtained from the king favorable terms for the garrison.
The expulsion of the French from Naples put an end, as might have been
supposed, to The Most Holy League. For the high contracting parties,
finding themselves secure from immediate danger, conceived themselves no
longer bound by its provisions. Maximilian, ever penniless and generally
faithless, had made no attempt to engage in any operations on the French
frontier, nor had any one of the allies contributed to defray the heavy
charges incurred by the Spanish sovereigns in fulfilling their part of
the agreement. The Venetians were rather occupied in securing for
themselves as much of the Neapolitan territory as they could acquire, by
way of indemnification for their own expenses. The Duke of Milan had
already made a separate treaty with Charles VIII. Each member of the
league, in fact, after the first alarm had subsided, had shown himself
ready to sacrifice the common cause to his own private advantage; and
Ferdinand of Aragon, who had already suspended his operations on the
frontiers of Spain in October, 1496, had no difficulty in agreeing to a
further truce as regarded Naples and Italy, which was signed on the 5th
of March, 1497.
The Spaniards had borne the entire burden of the late war. They had
been virtually abandoned by their allies, and their unassisted
operations had led to the deliverance of Naples, to the safety of the
Italian States, and the humiliation and the defeat of the French. Their
immediate objects having been thus happily accomplished, Ferdinand and
Isabella proposed to Charles VIII., without shame or hesitation, that
the French and Spaniards should enter into an immediate treaty of
alliance, with a view to drive out the reigning sovereign of Naples, and
divide his kingdom between themselves! Meanwhile the Castilian envoy to
the Holy See endeavored to induce Alexander VI. to withhold the
investiture of his kingdom from Frederic, the new sovereign of Naples,
on the ground that he was friendly to the Angevin party in Italy, the
hereditary enemies of Spain. But Alexander paid no heed to Garcilaso de
la Vega. Charles showed himself not only willing but eager to treat with
Fernando de Estrada; but unwilling at once to abandon all his claims to
Italian sovereignty, he offered to cede Navarre to Ferdinand, and keep
all Naples to himself. Proposals and counter proposals thus passed
between France and Spain; but before any definite programme had been
agreed to, the negotiations were cut short by the sudden death of the
French monarch, in the tennis court at Amboise, on the eve of Easter,
1498.
The success of the Spanish arms under Gonsalvo de Cordova in Italy was
but the beginning of a long career of triumph. From the great victory at
Seminara, in 1503, to the great defeat of Rocroy, in 1643, the Spanish
infantry remained unconquered in Europe. The armies of Castile had been,
indeed, as Prescott has it, “cooped up within the narrow limits of the
Peninsula, uninstructed and taking little interest in the concerns of
the rest of Europe.” But the soldiers and sailors of Aragon and
Catalonia had fought with distinction, not only in Italy and in Sicily,
but in the furthest east of Europe, for two hundred years before the
Great Captain of the United Kingdom set foot on the shores of Calabria.
Yet the victories of Gonsalvo were the beginning of a new era, and his
life is interesting, not only as that of a brave soldier and an
accomplished general, who flourished at a very important period of the
history of Europe; but it is further and much more interesting as being
the history of a man who united in himself many of the characteristics
of ancient and modern civilization, and who himself appears as a sort of
middle term between medieval and modern times.
In personal valor, in knightly courtesy, in gaudy display, he was of his
own time. In astute generalship, and in still more astute diplomacy, an
envoy not an adventurer, the servant and not the rival of kings, he
belongs to a succeeding age, when the leader of a victorious army is
prouder to be a loyal subject than a rash rebel. The Castilian lords of
earlier days had ever been brave knights; their followers had ever been
hardy and untiring combatants. But Gonsalvo was not only a tactician,
but a strategist. The men whom he commanded were soldiers. Newly armed
and admirably disciplined, the regiments were no longer the followers of
some powerful nobleman; they formed a part of the national army of
Spain. The short sword of their Celtiberian ancestors was once more
found in their hands. The long lances of the Swiss mercenaries were
adopted with conspicuous success. The drill-sergeant took the place of
the minstrel in the camp.
Nor was this revolution in the art of war confined to the conduct of the
Spanish troops in the field. Before the close of the campaign a national
militia, or rather a standing army, had taken the place of the brave but
irregular levies of medieval Spain. A royal ordinance regulated the
equipment of every individual, according to his property. A man’s arms
were declared free from seizure for debt, even by the Crown, and smiths
and other artificers were restricted, under severe penalties, from
working up weapons of war into articles of more pacific use. In 1426 a
census was taken of all persons capable of bearing arms; and by an
ordinance issued at Valladolid, on February 22d of the same year, it was
provided that one out of every twelve inhabitants, between twenty and
forty-five years of age, should be enlisted for the service of the
State, whether in the conduct of a foreign war or the suppression of
domestic disorder.