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THE
CIVILISATION OF THE
RENAISSANCE
IN ITALY
By
JACOB BURCKHARDT
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
S. G. C. MIDDLEMORE
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PREFACE.
Dr. BURCKHARDT’S work on the Renaissance in Italy is too well known, not
only to students of the period, but now to a wider circle of readers,
for any introduction to be necessary. The increased interest which has
of late years, in England, been taken in this and kindred subjects, and
the welcome which has been given to the works of other writers upon
them, encourage me to hope that in publishing this translation I am
meeting a want felt by some who are either unable to read German at all,
or to whom an English version will save a good deal of time and trouble.
The translation is made from the third edition of the original, recently
published in Germany, with slight additions to the text, and large
additions to the notes, by Dr. LUDWIG GEIGER, of Berlin. It also
contains some fresh matter communicated by Dr. BURCKHARDT to Professor
DIEGO VALBUSA of Mantua, the Italian translator of the book. To all
three gentlemen my thanks are due for courtesy shown, or help given to
me in the course of my work.
In a few cases, where Dr. GEIGER’S view differs from that taken by Dr.
BURCKHARDT, I have called attention to the fact by bracketing Dr.
GEIGER’S opinion and adding his initials.
THE TRANSLATOR.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
_THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART_
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
Political condition of Italy in the thirteenth century 4
The Norman State under Frederick II. 5
Ezzelino da Romano 7
CHAPTER II.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
Finance and its relation to culture 8
The ideal of the absolute ruler 9
Inward and outward dangers 10
Florentine estimate of the tyrants 11
The Visconti 12
CHAPTER III.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
Intervention and visits of the emperors 18
Want of a fixed law of succession. Illegitimacy 20
Founding of States by Condottieri 22
Relations of Condottieri to their employers 23
The family of Sforza 24
Giacomo Piccinino 25
Later attempts of the Condottieri 26
CHAPTER IV.
THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
The Baglioni of Perugia 28
Massacre in the year 1500 31
Malatesta, Pico, and Petrucci 33
CHAPTER V.
THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
The Aragonese at Naples 35
The last Visconti at Milan 38
Francesco Sforza and his luck 39
Galeazzo Maria and Ludovic Moro 40
The Gonzaga at Mantua 43
Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino 44
The Este at Ferrara 46
CHAPTER VI.
THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
The later Guelphs and Ghibellines 55
The conspirators 56
Murders in church 57
Influence of ancient tyrannicide 57
Catiline as an ideal 59
Florentine view of tyrannicide 59
The people and tyrannicide 60
CHAPTER VII.
THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
Venice in the fifteenth century 62
The inhabitants 63
Dangers from the poor nobility 64
Causes of the stability of Venice 65
The Council of Ten and political trials 66
Relations with the Condottieri 67
Optimism of Venetian foreign policy 68
Venice as the home of statistics 69
Retardation of the Renaissance 71
Mediæval devotion to reliques 72
Florence from the fourteenth century 73
Objectivity of political intelligence 74
Dante as a politician 75
Florence as the home of statistics: the two Villanis 76
Higher form of statistics 77
Florentine constitutions and the historians 82
Fundamental vice of the State 82
Political theorists 83
Macchiavelli and his views 84
Siena and Genoa 86
CHAPTER VIII.
FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
Envy felt towards Venice 88
Relations to other countries: sympathy with France 89
Plan for a balance of power 90
Foreign intervention and conquests 91
Alliances with the Turks 92
Counter-influence of Spain 94
Objective treatment of politics 95
Art of diplomacy 96
CHAPTER IX.
WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
Firearms 98
Professional warriors and dilettanti 99
Horrors of war 101
CHAPTER X.
THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
Relation of the Papacy to Italy and foreign countries 103
Disturbances in Rome from the time of Nicholas V. 104
Sixtus IV. master of Rome 105
States of the Nipoti in Romagna 107
Cardinals belonging to princely houses 107
Innocent VIII. and his son 108
Alexander VI. as a Spaniard 109
Relations with foreign countries 110
Simony 111
Cæsar Borgia and his relations to his father 111
Cæsar’s plans and acts 112
Julius II. as Saviour of the Papacy 117
Leo X. His relations with other States 120
Adrian VI. 121
Clement VII. and the sack of Rome 122
Reaction consequent on the latter 123
The Papacy of the Counter-Reformation 124
Conclusion. The Italian patriots 125
PART II.
_THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL._
CHAPTER I.
THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
The mediæval man 129
The awakening of personality 129
The despot and his subjects 130
Individualism in the Republics 131
Exile and cosmopolitanism 132
CHAPTER II.
THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
The many-sided men 134
The universal men 136
CHAPTER III.
THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
Dante’s feeling about fame 139
The celebrity of the Humanists: Petrarch 141
Cultus of birthplace and graves 142
Cultus of the famous men of antiquity 143
Literature of local fame: Padua 143
Literature of universal fame 146
Fame given or refused by the writers 150
Morbid passion for fame 152
CHAPTER IV.
MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
Its connection with individualism 154
Florentine wit: the novel 155
Jesters and buffoons 156
Leo X. and his witticisms 157
Poetical parodies 158
Theory of wit 159
Railing and reviling 161
Adrian VI. as scapegoat 162
Pietro Aretino 164
PART III.
_THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY._
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
Widened application of the word ‘Renaissance’ 171
Antiquity in the Middle Ages 172
Latin poetry of the twelfth century in Italy 173
The spirit of the fourteenth century 175
CHAPTER II.
ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.
Dante, Petrarch, Uberti 177
Rome at the time of Poggio 179
Nicholas V., and Pius II. as an antiquarian 180
Antiquity outside Rome 181
Affiliation of families and cities on Rome 182
The Roman corpse 183
Excavations and architectural plans 184
Rome under Leo X. 184
Sentimental effect of ruins 185
CHAPTER III.
THE OLD AUTHORS.
Their diffusion in the fourteenth century 187
Discoveries in the fifteenth century 188
The libraries 189
Copyists and ‘Scrittori’ 192
Printing 194
Greek scholarship 195
Oriental scholarship 197
Pico’s view of antiquity 202
CHAPTER IV.
HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
Its inevitable victory 203
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio 205
Coronation of the poets 207
CHAPTER V.
THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.
Position of the Humanists at the Universities 211
Latin schools 213
Freer education: Vittorino da Feltre 213
Guarino of Verona 215
The education of princes 216
CHAPTER VI.
THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.
Florentine citizens: Niccoli and Manetti 217
The earlier Medici 220
Humanism at the Courts 222
The Popes from Nicholas V. onwards 223
Alfonso of Naples 225
Frederick of Urbino 227
The Houses of Sforza and Este 227
Sigismodo Malatesta 228
CHAPTER VII.
THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY. LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.
The Papal Chancery 230
Letter-writing 232
The orators 233
Political, diplomatic, and funeral orations 236
Academic and military speeches 237
Latin sermons 238
Form and matter of the speeches 239
Passion for quotation 240
Imaginary speeches 241
Decline of eloquence 242
CHAPTER VIII.
LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.
Value of Latin 243
Researches on the Middle Ages: Blondus 245
Histories in Italian; their antique spirit 246
CHAPTER IX.
GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.
Ancient names 250
Latinised social relations 251
Claims of Latin to supremacy 252
Cicero and the Ciceronians 253
Latin conversation 254
CHAPTER X.
MODERN LATIN POETRY.
Epic poems on ancient history: The ‘Africa’ 258
Mythic poetry 259
Christian epics: Sannazaro 260
Poetry on contemporary subjects 261
Introduction of mythology 262
Didactic poetry: Palingenius 263
Lyric poetry and its limits 264
Odes on the saints 265
Elegies and the like 266
The epigram 267
CHAPTER XI.
FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The accusations and the amount of truth they contained 272
Misery of the scholars 277
Type of the happy scholar 278
Pomponius Laetus 279
The Academies 280
PART IV.
_THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN._
CHAPTER I.
JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.
Columbus 286
Cosmographical purpose in travel 287
CHAPTER II.
NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.
Empirical tendency of the nation 289
Dante and astronomy 290
Attitude of the Church towards natural science 290
Influence of Humanism 291
Botany and gardens 292
Zoology and collections of foreign animals 293
Human menagerie of Ippolito Medici 296
CHAPTER III.
THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
Landscapes in the Middle Ages 299
Petrarch and his ascents of mountains 301
Uberti’s ‘Dittamondo’ 302
The Flemish school of painting 302
Æneas Sylvius and his descriptions 303
Nature in the poets and novelists 305
CHAPTER IV.
THE DISCOVERY OF MAN.--SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.
Popular psychological ground-work. The temperaments 309
Value of unrhymed poetry 310
Value of the Sonnet 310
Dante and the ‘Vita Nuova’ 312
The ‘Divine Comedy’ 312
Petrarch as a painter of the soul 314
Boccaccio and the Fiammetta 315
Feeble development of tragedy 315
Scenic splendour, the enemy of the drama 316
The intermezzo and the ballet 317
Comedies and masques 320
Compensation afforded by music 321
Epic romances 321
Necessary subordination of the descriptions of character 323
Pulci and Bojardo 323
Inner law of their compositions 324
Ariosto and his style 325
Folengo and parody 326
Contrast offered by Tasso 327
CHAPTER V.
BIOGRAPHY.
Advance of Italy on the Middle Ages 328
Tuscan biographers 330
Biography in other parts of Italy 332
Autobiography; Æneas Sylvius 333
Benvenuto Cellini 333
Girolamo Cardano 334
Luigi Cornaro 335
CHAPTER VI.
THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.
The ‘Dittamondo’ 339
Descriptions in the sixteenth century 339
CHAPTER VII.
DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.
Boccaccio on Beauty 344
Ideal of Firenzuola 345
His general definitions 345
CHAPTER VIII.
DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.
Æneas Sylvius and others 349
Conventional bucolic poetry from the time of Petrarch 350
Genuine poetic treatment of country life 351
Battista Mantovano, Lorenzo Magnifico, Pulci 352
Angelo Poliziano 353
Man, and the conception of humanity 354
Pico della Mirandola on the dignity of man 354
PART V.
_SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS._
CHAPTER I.
THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.
Contrast to the Middle Ages 359
Common life of nobles and burghers in the cities 359
Theoretical criticism of noble birth 360
The nobles in different parts of Italy 362
The nobility and culture 363
Bad influence of Spain 363
Knighthood since the Middle Ages 364
The tournaments and the caricature of them 365
Noble birth as a requisite of the courtier 367
CHAPTER II.
OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.
Costume and fashions 369
The toilette of women 371
Cleanliness 374
The ‘Galateo’ and good manners 375
Comfort and elegance 376
CHAPTER III.
LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
Development of an ideal language 378
Its wide diffusion 379
The Purists 379
Their want of success 382
Conversation 383
CHAPTER IV.
THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.
Rules and statutes 384
The novelists and their society 384
The great lady and the drawing-room 385
Florentine society 386
Lorenzo’s descriptions of his own circle 387
CHAPTER V.
THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.
His love-making 388
His outward and spiritual accomplishments 389
Bodily exercises 389
Music 390
The instruments and the Virtuosi 392
Musical dilettantism in society 393
CHAPTER VI.
THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
Their masculine education and poetry 396
Completion of their personality 397
The Virago 398
Women in society 399
The culture of the prostitutes 399
CHAPTER VII.
DOMESTIC ECONOMY.
Contrast to the Middle Ages 402
Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti) 402
The villa and country life 404
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FESTIVALS.
Their origin in the mystery and the procession 406
Advantages over foreign countries 408
Historical representatives of abstractions 409
The Mysteries 411
Corpus Christi at Viterbo 414
Secular representations 415
Pantomimes and princely receptions 417
Processions and religious Trionfi 419
Secular Trionfi 420
Regattas and processions on water 424
The Carnival at Rome and Florence 426
PART VI.
_MORALITY AND RELIGION._
CHAPTER I.
MORALITY.
Limits of criticism 431
Italian consciousness of demoralization 432
The modern sense of honour 433
Power of the imagination 435
The passion for gambling and for vengeance 436
Breach of the marriage tie 441
Position of the married woman 442
Spiritualization of love 445
General emancipation from moral restraints 446
Brigandage 448
Paid assassination: poisoning 450
Absolute wickedness 453
Morality and individualism 454
CHAPTER II.
RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.
Lack of a reformation 457
Relations of the Italian to the Church 457
Hatred of the hierarchy and the monks 458
The mendicant orders 462
The Dominican Inquisition 462
The higher monastic orders 463
Sense of dependence on the Church 465
The preachers of repentance 466
Girolamo Savonarola 473
Pagan elements in popular belief 479
Faith in reliques 481
Mariolatry 483
Oscillations in public opinion 485
Epidemic religious revivals 485
Their regulation by the police at Ferrara 487
CHAPTER III.
RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
Inevitable subjectivity 490
Worldliness 492
Tolerance of Mohammedanism 492
Equivalence of all religions 494
Influence of antiquity 495
The so-called Epicureans 496
The doctrine of free will 497
The pious Humanists 499
The less pronounced Humanists 499
Codrus Urceus 500
The beginnings of religious criticism 501
Fatalism of the Humanists 503
Their pagan exterior 504
CHAPTER IV.
MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITIONS.
Astrology 507
Its extension and influence 508
Its opponents in Italy 515
Pico’s opposition and influence 516
Various superstitions 518
Superstition of the Humanists 519
Ghosts of the departed 522
Belief in dæmons 523
The Italian witch 524
Witches’ nest at Norcia 526
Influence and limits of Northern witchcraft 528
Witchcraft of the prostitutes 529
The magicians and enchanters 530
The dæmons on the way to Rome 531
Special forms of magic: the Telesmata 533
Magic at the laying of foundation-stones 534
The necromancer in poetry 535
Benvenuto Cellini’s tale 536
Decline of magic 537
Special branches of the superstition 538
CHAPTER V.
GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.
Last confession of Boscoli 543
Religious disorder and general scepticism 543
Controversy as to immortality 545
The pagan heaven 545
The Homeric life to come 546
Evaporation of Christian doctrine 547
Italian Thei 548
_PART I._
THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
This work bears the title of an essay in the strictest sense of the
word. No one is more conscious than the writer with what limited means
and strength he has addressed himself to a task so arduous. And even if
he could look with greater confidence upon his own researches, he would
hardly thereby feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To
each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilisation present a
different picture; and in treating of a civilisation which is the mother
of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us, it is
unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every
moment both on the writer and on the reader. In the wide ocean upon
which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the
same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other
hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application,
but lead also to essentially different conclusions. Such indeed is the
importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh investigation,
and may be studied with advantage from the most varied points of view.
Meanwhile we are content if a patient hearing be granted us, and if this
book be taken and judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty
of the history of civilisation that a great intellectual process must be
broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in
order to be in any way intelligible. It was formerly our intention to
fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the
Renaissance,’--an intention, however, which we have been able only to
fulfil[1] in part.
The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a
political condition which differed essentially from that of other
countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal
system was so organised that, at the close of its existence, it was
naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it
helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy
had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth
century, even in the most favourable case, were no longer received and
respected as feudal lords, but as possible leaders and supporters of
powers already in existence; while the Papacy,[2] with its creatures and
allies, was strong enough to hinder national unity in the future, not
strong enough itself to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a
multitude of political units--republics and despots--in part of long
standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded simply
on their power to maintain it.[3] In them for the first time we detect
the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own
instincts, often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egoism,
outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture.
But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way
compensated, a new fact appears in history--the state as the outcome of
reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art. This new life
displays itself in a hundred forms, both in the republican and in the
despotic states, and determines their inward constitution, no less than
their foreign policy. We shall limit ourselves to the consideration of
the completer and more clearly defined type, which is offered by the
despotic states.
The internal condition of the despotically governed states had a
memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily,
after its transformation by the Emperor Frederick II.[4] Bred amid
treason and peril in the neighbourhood of the Saracens, Frederick, the
first ruler of the modern type who sat upon a throne, had early
accustomed himself, both in criticism and action, to a thoroughly
objective treatment of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal
condition and administration of the Saracenic states was close and
intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the
Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the
field all the resources at his command. Frederick’s measures (especially
after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal
state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of
will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree
to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown in the
West, the whole judicial and political administration by establishing
the right of appeal from the feudal courts, which he did not, however,
abolish, to the imperial judges. No office was henceforth to be filled
by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending
district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were
introduced; the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and
distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by
those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is
impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find,
not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were
forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special
permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The
University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of
study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth
unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan rulers that Frederick
traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving
to himself the monopoly of many commodities, and restricting in various
ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their
esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of
the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on
the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious
inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember
that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the
representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police,
and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of Saracens
who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria--men who
were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the Church. At
a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had long been
forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the
seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to
use the system which he found already at work.
At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper of the most
peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands
as the representative of no system of government or administration, for
all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern
part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less
importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The
conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle
Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or
else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here
for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by
wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of
any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his
successors, not even Cæsar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt of
Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and his fall led
to no return of justice among the nations, and served as no warning to
future transgressors.
It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of
Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional monarchy, in which the
prince was to be supported by an upper house named by himself, and a
representative body elected by the people; in vain did he concede to
the people the right of revolution.[5] Such theories found no echo
outside the lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for
Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century. Their
personality, already half legendary, forms the most important subject of
‘The Hundred Old Tales,’ whose original composition falls certainly
within this century.[6] In them Frederick is already represented as
possessing the right to do as he pleased with the property of his
subjects, and exercises on all, even on criminals, a profound influence
by the force of his personality; Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe
which all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the
centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eyewitnesses to the
half-mythical tragedy[7] of later poets.
Immediately after the fall of Frederick and Ezzelino, a crowd of tyrants
appeared upon the scene. The struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline was
their opportunity. They came forward in general as Ghibelline leaders,
but at times and under conditions so various that it is impossible not
to recognise in the fact a law of supreme and universal necessity. The
means which they used were those already familiar in the party struggles
of the past--the banishment or destruction of their adversaries and of
their adversaries’ households.
CHAPTER II.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
The tyrannies, great and small, of the fourteenth century afford
constant proof that examples such as these were not thrown away. Their
misdeeds cried forth loudly and have been circumstantially told by
historians. As states depending for existence on themselves alone, and
scientifically organised with a view to this object, they present to us
a higher interest than that of mere narrative.
The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no prince out of
Italy had at that time a conception, joined to almost absolute power
within the limits of the state, produced among the despots both men and
modes of life of a peculiar character.[8] The chief secret of government
in the hands of the prudent ruler lay in leaving the incidence of
taxation so far as possible where he found it, or as he had first
arranged it. The chief sources of income were: a land tax, based on a
valuation; definite taxes on articles of consumption and duties on
exported and imported goods; together with the private fortune of the
ruling house. The only possible increase was derived from the growth of
business and of general prosperity. Loans, such as we find in the free
cities, were here unknown; a well-planned confiscation was held a
preferable means of raising money, provided only that it left public
credit unshaken--an end attained, for example, by the truly Oriental
practice of deposing and plundering the director of the finances.[9]
Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the body-guard,
of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings were met, as well
as of the buffoons and men of talent who belonged to the personal
attendants of the prince. The illegitimacy of his rule isolated the
tyrant and surrounded him with constant danger; the most honourable
alliance which he could form was with intellectual merit, without regard
to its origin. The liberality of the northern princes of the thirteenth
century was confined to the knights, to the nobility which served and
sang. It was otherwise with the Italian despot. With his thirst of fame
and his passion for monumental works, it was talent, not birth, which he
needed. In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a
new position, almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy.
No prince was more famous in this respect than the ruler of Verona, Can
Grande della Scala, who numbered among the illustrious exiles whom he
entertained at his court representatives of the whole of Italy.[10] The
men of letters were not ungrateful. Petrarch, whose visits at the courts
of such men have been so severely censured, sketched an ideal picture of
a prince of the fourteenth century.[11] He demands great things from his
patron, the lord of Padua, but in a manner which shows that he holds him
capable of them. ‘Thou must not be the master but the father of thy
subjects, and must love them as thy children; yea, as members of thy
body.[12] Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the
enemy--with thy subjects goodwill is sufficient. By citizens, of course,
I mean those who love the existing order; for those who daily desire
change are rebels and traitors, and against such a stern justice may
take its course.’
Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction of the
omnipotence of the state. The prince is to be independent of his
courtiers, but at the same time to govern with simplicity and modesty;
he is to take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore
churches and public buildings, to keep up the municipal police,[13] to
drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; he is to
exercise a strict justice, so to distribute the taxes that the people
can recognise their necessity and the regret of the ruler to be
compelled to put his hands in the pockets of others; he is to support
the sick and the helpless, and to give his protection and society to
distinguished scholars, on whom his fame in after ages will depend.
But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system, and the merits
of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth century were not
without a more or less distinct consciousness of the brief and uncertain
tenure of most of these despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions
like these are naturally secure in proportion to the size of the
territory in which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly
tempted to swallow up the smaller. Whole hecatombs of petty rulers were
sacrificed at this time to the Visconti alone. As a result of this
outward danger an inward ferment was in ceaseless activity; and the
effect of the situation on the character of the ruler was generally of
the most sinister kind. Absolute power, with its temptations to luxury
and unbridled selfishness, and the perils to which he was exposed from
enemies and conspirators, turned him almost inevitably into a tyrant in
the worst sense of the word. Well for him if he could trust his nearest
relations! But where all was illegitimate, there could be no regular law
of inheritance, either with regard to the succession or to the division
of the ruler’s property; and consequently the heir, if incompetent or a
minor, was liable in the interest of the family itself to be supplanted
by an uncle or cousin of more resolute character. The acknowledgment or
exclusion of the bastards was a fruitful source of contest; and most of
these families in consequence were plagued with a crowd of discontented
and vindictive kinsmen. This circumstance gave rise to continual
outbreaks of treason and to frightful scenes of domestic bloodshed.
Sometimes the pretenders lived abroad in exile, and like the Visconti,
who practised the fisherman’s craft on the Lake of Garda,[14] viewed the
situation with patient indifference. When asked by a messenger of his
rival when and how he thought of returning to Milan, he gave the reply,
‘By the same means as those by which I was expelled, but not till his
crimes have outweighed my own.’ Sometimes, too, the despot was
sacrificed by his relations, with the view of saving the family, to the
public conscience which he had too grossly outraged.[15] In a few cases
the government was in the hands of the whole family, or at least the
ruler was bound to take their advice; and here, too, the distribution of
property and influence often led to bitter disputes.
The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the
Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which
the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to
an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Aguello
of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden sceptre, and show
himself at the window of his house, ‘as relics are shown.’ reclining on
embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by
kneeling attendants.[16] More often, however, the old Florentines speak
on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and
characterised well the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition
of the new princes.[17] ‘What mean their trumpets and their bells,
their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman--come, vultures?’ The
castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is a lofty and
solitary building, full of dungeons and listening-tubes,[18] the home of
cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service
of the despot,[19] who even becomes at last himself an object of pity:
he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust no
one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation of his
fall. ‘As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated, so grows in their
midst the hidden element which must produce their dissolution and
ruin.’[20] But the deepest ground of dislike has not been stated;
Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human
individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be
suffered to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest
dependents. The control of the individual was rigorously carried out,
even down to the establishment of a system of passports.[21]
The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the
tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar colour to
this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no
longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed
in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard
him cry to the devil ‘to come and kill him.’
The most complete and instructive type of the tyranny of the fourteenth
century is to be found unquestionably among the Visconti of Milan, from
the death of the Archbishop Giovanni onwards (1354). The family likeness
which shows itself between Bernabò and the worst of the Roman Emperors
is unmistakable;[22] the most important public object was the prince’s
boar-hunting; whoever interfered with it was put to death with torture;
the terrified people were forced to maintain 5,000 boar-hounds, with
strict responsibility for their health and safety. The taxes were
extorted by every conceivable sort of compulsion; seven daughters of the
prince received a dowry of 100,000 gold florins apiece; and an enormous
treasure was collected. On the death of his wife (1384) an order was
issued ‘to the subjects’ to share his grief, as once they had shared his
joy, and to wear mourning for a year. The _coup de main_ (1385) by which
his nephew Giangaleazzo got him into his power--one of those brilliant
plots which make the heart of even late historians beat more
quickly[23]--was strikingly characteristic of the man. Giangaleazzo,
despised by his relations on account of his religion and his love of
science, resolved on vengeance, and, leaving the city under pretext of a
pilgrimage, fell upon his unsuspecting uncle, took him prisoner, forced
his way back into the city at the head of an armed band, seized on the
government, and gave up the palace of Bernabò to general plunder.
In Giangaleazzo that passion for the colossal which was common to most
of the despots shows itself on the largest scale. He undertook, at the
cost of 300,000 golden florins, the construction of gigantic dykes, to
divert in case of need the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua,
and thus to render these cities defenceless.[24] It is not impossible,
indeed, that he thought of draining away the lagoons of Venice. He
founded that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia,[25]
and the cathedral of Milan, ‘which exceeds in size and splendour all
the churches of Christendom.’ The Palace in Pavia, which his father
Galeazzo began and which he himself finished, was probably by far the
most magnificent of the princely dwellings of Europe. There he
transferred his famous library, and the great collection of relics of
the saints, in which he placed a peculiar faith. King Winceslaus made
him Duke (1395); he was hoping for nothing less than the Kingdom of
Italy[26] or the Imperial crown, when (1402) he fell ill and died. His
whole territories are said to have paid him in a single year, besides
the regular contribution of 1,200,000 gold florins, no less than 800,000
more in extraordinary subsidies. After his death the dominions which he
had brought together by every sort of violence fell to pieces; and for a
time even the original nucleus could with difficulty be maintained by
his successors. What might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died
1412) and Filippo Maria (died 1417), had they lived in a different
country and among other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of
their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and
cowardice which had been accumulated from generation to generation.
Giovanni Maria, too, is famed for his dogs, which were no longer,
however, used for hunting, but for tearing human bodies. Tradition has
preserved their names, like those of the bears of the Emperor
Valentinian I.[27] In May, 1409, when war was going on, and the starving
populace cried to him in the streets, _Pace! Pace!_ he let loose his
mercenaries upon them, and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of
the gallows it was forbidden to utter the words _pace_ and _guerra_, and
the priests were ordered, instead of _dona nobis pacem_, to say
_tranquillitatem_! At last a band of conspirators took advantage of the
moment when Facino Cane, the chief Condottiere of the insane ruler, lay
ill at Pavia, and cut down Giovan Maria in the church of San Gottardo at
Milan; the dying Facino on the same day made his officers swear to stand
by the heir Filippo Maria, whom he himself urged his wife[28] to take
for a second husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice.
We shall have occasion to speak of Filippo Maria later on.
And in times like these Cola di Rienzi was dreaming of founding on the
rickety enthusiasm of the corrupt population of Rome a new state which
was to comprise all Italy. By the side of rulers such as those whom we
have described, he seems no better than a poor deluded fool.
CHAPTER III.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
The despotisms of the fifteenth century show an altered character. Many
of the less important tyrants, and some of the greater, like the Scala
and the Carrara, had disappeared, while the more powerful ones,
aggrandized by conquest, had given to their systems each its
characteristic development. Naples for example received a fresh and
stronger impulse from the new Arragonese dynasty. A striking feature of
this epoch is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent
dynasties of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things, apart
from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent and audacity win
the great prizes. The petty despots, to secure a trustworthy support,
begin to enter the service of the larger states, and become themselves
Condottieri, receiving in return for their services money and impunity
for their misdeeds, if not an increase of territory. All, whether small
or great, must exert themselves more, must act with greater caution and
calculation, and must learn to refrain from too wholesale barbarities;
only so much wrong is permitted by public opinion as is necessary for
the end in view, and this the impartial bystander certainly finds no
fault with. No trace is here visible of that half-religious loyalty by
which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal
popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and
calculation are the only means of advancement. A character like that of
Charles the Bold, which wore itself out in the passionate pursuit of
impracticable ends, was a riddle to the Italian. ‘The Swiss were only
peasants, and if they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for
the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got
possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not
be 5,000 ducats the greater.’[29] The mediæval features in the
character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long
become unintelligible to the Italian. The diplomatists of the South,
when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service,
when he maltreated his troops to punish them for a defeat, and then
threw the blame on his counsellors in the presence of the same troops,
gave him up for lost.[30] Louis XI., on the other hand, whose policy
surpasses that of the Italian princes in their own style, and who was an
avowed admirer of Francesco Sforza, must be placed in all that regards
culture and refinement far below these rulers.
Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the
fifteenth century. The personality of the ruler is so highly developed,
often of such deep significance, and so characteristic of the conditions
and needs of the time, that to form an adequate moral judgment on it is
no easy task.[31]
The foundation of the system was and remained illegitimate, and nothing
could remove the curse which rested upon it. The imperial approval or
investiture made no change in the matter, since the people attached
little weight to the fact, that the despot had bought a piece of
parchment somewhere in foreign countries, or from some stranger passing
through his territory.[32] If the Emperor had been good for anything--so
ran the logic of uncritical common sense--he would never have let the
tyrant rise at all. Since the Roman expedition of Charles IV., the
emperors had done nothing more in Italy than sanction a tyranny which
had arisen without their help; they could give it no other practical
authority than what might flow from an imperial charter. The whole
conduct of Charles in Italy was a scandalous political comedy. Matteo
Villani[33] relates how the Visconti escorted him round their territory,
and at last out of it; how he went about like a hawker selling his wares
(privileges, etc.) for money; what a mean appearance he made in Rome,
and how at the end, without even drawing the sword, he returned with
replenished coffers across the Alps. Nevertheless, patriotic enthusiasts
and poets, full of the greatness of the past, conceived high hopes at
his coming, which were afterwards dissipated by his pitiful conduct.
Petrarch, who had written frequent letters exhorting the Emperor to
cross the Alps, to give back to Rome its departed greatness, and to set
up a new universal empire, now, when the Emperor, careless of these
high-flying projects, had come at last, still hoped to see his dreams
realized, strove unweariedly, by speech and writing, to impress the
Emperor with them, but was at length driven away from him with disgust
when he saw the imperial authority dishonoured by the submission of
Charles to the Pope.[34] Sigismund came, on the first occasion at least
(1414), with the good intention of persuading John XXIII. to take part
in his council; it was on that journey, when Pope and Emperor were
gazing from the lofty tower of Cremona on the panorama of Lombardy, that
their host, the tyrant Gabino Fondolo, was seized with the desire to
throw them both over. On his second visit Sigismund came as a mere
adventurer, giving no proof whatever of his imperial prerogative, except
by crowning Beccadelli as a poet; for more than half a year he remained
shut up in Siena, like a debtor in gaol, and only with difficulty, and
at a later period, succeeded in being crowned in Rome. And what can be
thought of Frederick III.? His journeys to Italy have the air of
holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted
him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity it flattered to
entertain an emperor. The latter was the case with Alfonso of Naples,
who paid 150,000 florins for the honour of an imperial visit.[35] At
Ferrara,[36] on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a
whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty
titles; he created knights, counts, doctors, notaries--counts, indeed,
of different degrees, as, for instance, counts palatine, counts with the
right to create doctors up to the number of five, counts with the right
to legitimatise bastards, to appoint notaries, and so forth. The
Chancellor, however, expected in return for the patents in question a
gratuity which was thought excessive at Ferrara.[37] The opinion of
Borso, himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an annual
payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron was distributing
titles and diplomas to all the little court, is not mentioned. The
humanists, then the chief spokesmen of the age, were divided in opinion
according to their personal interests, while the Emperor was greeted by
some[38] of them with the conventional acclamations of the poets of
imperial Rome. Poggio[39] confessed that he no longer knew what the
coronation meant; in the old times only the victorious Inperator was
crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.[40]
With Maximilian I. begins not only the general intervention of foreign
nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to Italy. The first
step--the investiture of Ludovico Moro with the duchy of Milan and the
exclusion of his unhappy nephew--was not of a kind to bear good fruits.
According to the modern theory of intervention, when two parties are
tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its share, and
on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice were appealed
to no longer. When Louis XII. was expected in Genoa (1502), and the
imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal palace and
replaced by painted lilies, the historian, Senarega[41] asked what after
all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions had spared,
and what claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more about the
matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a _camera imperii_. In fact,
nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to any such questions. At
length, when Charles V. held Spain and the empire together, he was able
by means of Spanish forces to make good imperial claims; but it is
notorious that what he thereby gained turned to the profit, not of the
empire, but of the Spanish monarchy.
Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of
the fifteenth century, was the public indifference to legitimate birth,
which to foreigners--for example, to Comines--appeared so remarkable.
The two things went naturally together. In northern countries, as in
Burgundy, the illegitimate offspring were provided for by a distinct
class of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like; in Portugal an
illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by constant
effort; in Italy, on the contrary, there no longer existed a princely
house where, even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not
patiently tolerated. The Aragonese monarchs of Naples belonged to the
illegitimate line, Aragon itself falling to the lot of the brother of
Alfonso I. The great Frederick of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro at
all. When Pius II. was on his way to the Congress of Mantua (1459),
eight bastards of the house of Este rode to meet him at Ferrara, among
them the reigning duke Borso himself and two illegitimate sons of his
illegitimate brother and predecessor Leonello.[42] The latter had also
had a lawful wife, herself an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I. of
Naples by an African woman.[43] The bastards were often admitted to the
succession where the lawful children were minors and the dangers of the
situation were pressing; and a rule of seniority became recognised,
which took no account of pure or impure birth. The fitness of the
individual, his worth and his capacity, were of more weight than all the
laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age,
indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties. In the
sixteenth century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the
counter-reformation which then began, the whole question was judged more
strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate
children ‘is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from
eternity.’[44] Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici founded his claim to the
lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a
lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like
Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl.[45] At this time began those
morganatic marriages of affection which in the fifteenth century, on
grounds either of policy or morality, would have had no meaning at all.
But the highest and the most admired form of illegitimacy in the
fifteenth century was presented by the Condottiere, who, whatever may
have been his origin, raised himself to the position of an independent
ruler. At bottom, the occupation of Lower Italy by the Normans in the
eleventh century was of this character. Such attempts now began to keep
the peninsula in a constant ferment.
It was possible for a Condottiere to obtain the lordship of a district
even without usurpation, in the case when his employer, through want of
money or troops, provided for him in this way;[46] under any
circumstances the Condottiere, even when he dismissed for the time the
greater part of his forces, needed a safe place where he could establish
his winter quarters, and lay up his stores and provisions. The first
example of a captain thus portioned is John Hawkwood, who was invested
by Gregory XI. with the lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola.[47] When
with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the
scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one
already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian
outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the
death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly
aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the
Condottieri; and from the greatest of them, Facino Cane, the house of
Visconti inherited, together with his widow, a long list of cities, and
400,000 golden florins, not to speak of the soldiers of her first
husband whom Beatrice di Tenda brought with her.[48] From henceforth
that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their
Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became
more and more common. An old story[49]--one of those which are true and
not true, everywhere and nowhere--describes it as follows: The citizens
of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their
service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took
counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their
power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At
last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and then worship him as
our patron saint.’ And so they did, following the example set by the
Roman senate with Romulus. In fact, the Condottieri had reason to fear
none so much as their employers; if they were successful, they became
dangerous, and were put out of the way like Robert Malatesta just after
the victory he had won for Sixtus IV. (1482); if they failed, the
vengeance of the Venetians on Carmagnola[50] showed to what risks they
were exposed (1432). It is characteristic of the moral aspect of the
situation, that the Condottieri had often to give their wives and
children as hostages, and notwithstanding this, neither felt nor
inspired confidence. They must have been heroes of abnegation, natures
like Belisarius himself, not to be cankered by hatred and bitterness;
only the most perfect goodness could save them from the most monstrous
iniquity. No wonder then if we find them full of contempt for all sacred
things, cruel and treacherous to their fellows--men who cared nothing
whether or no they died under the ban of the Church. At the same time,
and through the force of the same conditions, the genius and capacity
of many among them attained the highest conceivable development, and won
for them the admiring devotion of their followers; their armies are the
first in modern history in which the personal credit of the leader is
the one moving power. A brilliant example is shown in the life of
Francesco Sforza;[51] no prejudice of birth could prevent him from
winning and turning to account when he needed it a boundless devotion
from each individual with whom he had to deal; it happened more than
once that his enemies laid down their arms at the sight of him, greeting
him reverently with uncovered heads, each honouring in him ‘the common
father of the men-at-arms.’ The race of the Sforza has this special
interest, that from the very beginning of its history we seem able to
trace its endeavours after the crown.[52] The foundation of its fortune
lay in the remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco’s father,
Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and sisters, all
brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid the perils of one of
the endless Romagnole ‘vendette’ between their own house and that of the
Pasolini. The family dwelling was a mere arsenal and fortress; the
mother and daughters were as warlike as their kinsmen. In his thirteenth
year Jacopo ran away and fled to Panicale to the Papal Condottiere
Boldrino--the man who even in death continued to lead his troops, the
word of order being given from the bannered tent in which the embalmed
body lay, till at last a fit leader was found to succeed him. Jacopo,
when he had at length made himself a name in the service of different
Condottieri, sent for his relations, and obtained through them the same
advantages that a prince derives from a numerous dynasty. It was these
relations who kept the army together when he lay a captive in the Castel
dell’Uovo at Naples; his sister took the royal envoys prisoners with her
own hands, and saved him by this reprisal from death. It was an
indication of the breadth and the range of his plans that in monetary
affairs Jacopo was thoroughly trustworthy; even in his defeats he
consequently found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the
peasants against the licence of his troops, and reluctantly destroyed or
injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known mistress, Lucia, the
mother of Francesco, in marriage to another in order to be free from a
princely alliance. Even the marriages of his relations were arranged on
a definite plan. He kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his
contemporaries, and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules:
‘Let other men’s wives alone; strike none of your followers, or, if you
do, send the injured man far away; don’t ride a hard-mouthed horse, or
one that drops his shoe.’ But his chief source of influence lay in the
qualities, if not of a great general, at least of a great soldier. His
frame was powerful, and developed by every kind of exercise; his
peasant’s face and frank manners won general popularity; his memory was
marvellous, and after the lapse of years could recall the names of his
followers, the number of their horses, and the amount of their pay. His
education was purely Italian: he devoted his leisure to the study of
history, and had Greek and Latin authors translated for his use.
Francesco, his still more famous son, set his mind from the first on
founding a powerful state, and through brilliant generalship and a
faithlessness which hesitated at nothing, got possession of the great
city of Milan (1447-1450).
His example was contagious. Æneas Sylvius wrote about this time:[53] ‘In
our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient
dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.’ One man in
particular, who styled himself ‘the man of fortune,’ filled the
imagination of the whole country: Giacomo Piccinino, the son of Niccolò.
It was a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in
founding a princely house. The greater states had an obvious interest in
hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the
better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the
troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when
he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognised their interest in
supporting him:[54] ‘If it were all over with him, we should have to go
back and plough our fields.’ Even while besieging him at Orbetello, they
supplied him with provisions; and he got out of his straits with honour.
But at last fate overtook him. All Italy was betting on the result, when
(1465), after a visit to Sforza at Milan, he went to King Ferrante at
Naples. In spite of the pledges given, and of his high connections, he
was murdered in the Castel dell’Uovo.[55] Even the Condottieri, who had
obtained their dominions by inheritance, never felt themselves safe.
When Roberto Malatesta and Frederick of Urbino died on the same day
(1482), the one at Rome, the other at Bologna, it was found[56] that
each had recommended his state to the care of the other. Against a class
of men who themselves stuck at nothing, everything was held to be
permissible. Francesco Sforza, when quite young, had married a rich
Calabrian heiress, Polissena Russa, Countess of Montalto, who bore him a
daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child, and seized the
inheritance.[57]
From the death of Piccinino onwards, the foundations of new States by
the Condottieri became a scandal not to be tolerated. The four great
Powers, Naples, Milan, the Papacy, and Venice, formed among themselves a
political equilibrium which refused to allow of any disturbance. In the
States of the Church, which swarmed with petty tyrants, who in part
were, or had been, Condottieri, the nephews of the Popes, since the time
of Sixtus IV., monopolised the right to all such undertakings. But at
the first sign of a political crisis, the soldiers of fortune appeared
again upon the scene. Under the wretched administration of Innocent
VIII. it was near happening that a certain Boccalino, who had formerly
served in the Burgundian army, gave himself and the town of Osimo, of
which he was master, up to the Turkish forces;[58] fortunately, through
the intervention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he proved willing to be
paid off, and took himself away. In the year 1495, when the wars of
Charles VIII. had turned Italy upside down, the Condottiere Vidovero, of
Brescia, made trial of his strength:[59] he had already seized the town
of Cesena and murdered many of the nobles and the burghers; but the
citadel held out, and he was forced to withdraw. He then, at the head of
a band lent him by another scoundrel, Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, son
of the Roberto already spoken of, and Venetian Condottiere, wrested the
town of Castelnuovo from the Archbishop of Ravenna. The Venetians,
fearing that worse would follow, and urged also by the Pope, ordered
Pandolfo, ‘with the kindest intentions,’ to take an opportunity of
arresting his good friend: the arrest was made, though ‘with great
regret,’ whereupon the order came to bring the prisoner to the gallows.
Pandolfo was considerate enough to strangle him in prison, and then show
his corpse to the people. The last notable example of such usurpers is
the famous Castellan of Musso, who during the confusion in the Milanese
territory which followed the battle of Pavia (1525), improvised a
sovereignty on the Lake of Como.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
It may be said in general of the despotisms of the fifteenth century
that the greatest crimes are most frequent in the smallest states. In
these, where the family was numerous and all the members wished to live
in a manner befitting their rank, disputes respecting the inheritance
were unavoidable. Bernardo Varano of Camerino put (1434) two of his
brothers to death,[60] wishing to divide their property among his sons.
Where the ruler of a single town was distinguished by a wise, moderate,
and humane government, and by zeal for intellectual culture, he was
generally a member of some great family, or politically dependent on it.
This was the case, for example, with Alessandro Sforza,[61] Prince of
Pesaro, brother of the great Francesco, and stepfather of Frederick of
Urbino (d. 1473). Prudent in administration, just and affable in his
rule, he enjoyed, after years of warfare, a tranquil reign, collected a
noble library, and passed his leisure in learned or religious
conversation. A man of the same class was Giovanni II., Bentivoglio of
Bologna (1462-1506), whose policy was determined by that of the Este and
the Sforza. What ferocity and bloodthirstiness is found, on the other
hand, among the Varani of Camerino, the Malatesta of Rimini, the
Manfreddi of Faenza, and above all among the Baglioni of Perugia. We
find a striking picture of the events in the last-named family towards
the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable historical
narratives of Graziani and Materazzo.[62]
The Baglioni were one of those families whose rule never took the shape
of an avowed despotism. It was rather a leadership exercised by means
of their vast wealth and of their practical influence in the choice of
public officers. Within the family one man was recognised as head; but
deep and secret jealousy prevailed among the members of the different
branches. Opposed to the Baglioni stood another aristocratic party, led
by the family of the Oddi. In 1487 the city was turned into a camp, and
the houses of the leading citizens swarmed with bravos; scenes of
violence were of daily occurrence. At the burial of a German student,
who had been assassinated, two colleges took arms against one another;
sometimes the bravos of the different houses even joined battle in the
public square. The complaints of the merchants and artisans were vain;
the Papal Governors and _Nipoti_ held their tongues, or took themselves
off on the first opportunity. At last the Oddi were forced to abandon
Perugia, and the city became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute
despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedral as barracks.
Plots and surprises were met with cruel vengeance; in the year 1491,
after 130 conspirators, who had forced their way into the city, were
killed and hung up at the Palazzo Comunale, thirty-five altars were
erected in the square, and for three days mass was performed and
processions held, to take away the curse which rested on the spot. A
nephew of Innocent VIII. was in open day run through in the street. A
nephew of Alexander VI., who was sent to smooth matters over, was
dismissed with public contempt. All the while the two leaders of the
ruling house, Guido and Ridolfo, were holding frequent interviews with
Suor Colomba of Rieti, a Dominican nun of saintly reputation and
miraculous powers, who under penalty of some great disaster ordered them
to make peace--naturally in vain. Nevertheless the chronicle takes the
opportunity to point out the devotion and piety of the better men in
Perugia during this reign of terror. When in 1494 Charles VIII.
approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and
near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity, that every house in
the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled, the
peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the
fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts
grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called ‘Christian flesh.’
When Alexander VI. withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII.,
then returning from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that he
might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he proposed to Guido
a festival or tournament, or something else of the same kind, which
would bring the whole family together. Guido, however, was of opinion,
‘that the most impressive spectacle of all would be to see the whole
military force of Perugia collected in a body,’ whereupon the Pope
abandoned his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack, in
which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won them the
victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad of scarcely
eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of followers against
hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with more than twenty wounds, but
recovered himself when Astorre Baglione came to his help, and mounting
on horseback in gilded armour with a falcon on his helmet, ‘like Mars in
bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.’
At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at school under
Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days are perhaps immortalised
in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something of
them, it may be, lives eternally in the great painting of St. Michael:
and if Astorre Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it is in the
figure of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.
The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly scattered in
terror, and were henceforth incapable of another enterprise of the kind.
After a time a partial reconciliation took place, and some of the exiles
were allowed to return. But Perugia became none the safer or more
tranquil: the inward discord of the ruling family broke out in frightful
excesses. An opposition was formed against Guido and Ridolfo and their
sons Gianpaolo, Simonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Gentile, Marcantonio and
others, by two great-nephews, Grifone and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of
the two was also nephew of Varano, Prince of Camerino, and brother of
one of the former exiles, Ieronimo della Penna. In vain did Simonetto,
warned by sinister presentiment, entreat his uncle on his knees to allow
him to put Penna to death: Guido refused. The plot ripened suddenly on
the occasion of the marriage of Astorre with Lavinia Colonna, at
Midsummer 1500. The festival began and lasted several days amid gloomy
forebodings, whose deepening effect is admirably described by Matarazzo.
Varano fed and encouraged them with devilish ingenuity: he worked upon
Grifone by the prospect of undivided authority, and by stories of an
imaginary intrigue of his wife Zenobia with Gianpaolo. Finally each
conspirator was provided with a victim. (The Baglioni lived all of them
in separate houses, mostly on the site of the present castle.) Each
received fifteen of the bravos at hand; the remainder were set on the
watch. In the night of July 15 the doors were forced, and Guido,
Astorre, Simonetto, and Gismondo were murdered; the others succeeded in
escaping.
As the corpse of Astorre lay by that of Simonetto in the street, the
spectators, ‘and especially the foreign students,’ compared him to an
ancient Roman, so great and imposing did he seem. In the features of
Simonetto could still be traced the audacity and defiance which death
itself had not tamed. The victors went round among the friends of the
family, and did their best to recommend themselves; they found all in
tears and preparing to leave for the country. Meantime the escaped
Baglioni collected forces without the city, and on the following day
forced their way in, Gianpaolo at their head, and speedily found
adherents among others whom Barciglia had been threatening with death.
When Grifone fell into their hands near S. Ercolono. Gianpaolo handed
him over for execution to his followers. Barciglia and Penna fled to
Varano, the chief author of the tragedy, at Camerino; and in a moment,
almost without loss, Gianpaolo became master of the city.
Atalanta, the still young and beautiful mother of Grifone, who the day
before had withdrawn to a country house with the latter’s wife Zenobia
and two children of Gianpaolo, and more than once had repulsed her son
with a mother’s curse, now returned with her step-daughter in search of
the dying man. All stood aside as the two women approached, each man
shrinking from being recognised as the slayer of Grifone, and dreading
the malediction of the mother. But they were deceived: she herself
besought her son to pardon him who had dealt the fatal blow, and he died
with her blessing. The eyes of the crowd followed the two women
reverently as they crossed the square with blood-stained garments. It
was Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards painted the world-famed
‘Deposition,’ with which she laid her own maternal sorrows at the feet
of a yet higher and holier suffering.
The cathedral, in the immediate neighbourhood of which the greater part
of this tragedy had been enacted, was washed with wine and consecrated
afresh. The triumphal arch, erected for the wedding, still remained
standing, painted with the deeds of Astorre and with the laudatory
verses of the narrator of these events, the worthy Matarazzo.
A legendary history, which is simply the reflection of these atrocities,
arose out of the early days of the Baglioni. All the members of this
family from the beginning were reported to have died an evil
death--twenty-seven on one occasion together; their houses were said to
have been once before levelled to the ground, and the streets of Perugia
paved with the bricks--and more of the same kind. Under Paul III. the
destruction of their palaces really took place.[63]
For a time they seem to have formed good resolutions, to have brought
their own party into order, and to have protected the public officials
against the arbitrary acts of the nobility. But the old curse broke out
again like a smouldering fire. Gianpaolo was enticed to Rome under Leo
X., and there beheaded; one of his sons, Orazio, who ruled in Perugia
for a short time only, and by the most violent means, as the partisan of
the Duke of Urbino (himself threatened by the Pope), once more repeated
in his own family the horrors of the past. His uncle and three cousins
were murdered, whereupon the Duke sent him word that enough had been
done.[64] His brother, Malatesta Baglione, the Florentine general, has
made himself immortal by the treason of 1530; and Malatesta’s son
Ridolfo, the last of the house, attained, by the murder of the legate
and the public officers in the year 1534, a brief but sanguinary
authority.
Here and there we meet with the names of the rulers of Rimini.
Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture, have been
seldom so combined in one individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta (d.
1467).[65] But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last
outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss.
Pandolfo, Sigismondo’s nephew, who has been mentioned already, succeeded
in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the Venetians refused to
abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt he might be chargeable with;
when his subjects (1497), after ample provocation,[66] bombarded him in
his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian
commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and
every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless
exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of Cæsar Borgia, a sort of
epidemic fell on the petty tyrants: few of them outlived this date, and
none to their own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by
insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 a
poor scholar, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled from the sack of Rome
to the hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni Francesco Pico, nephew of
the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to the sepulchral monument which
the prince was constructing for himself gave rise to a treatise, the
dedication of which bears the date of April in this year. The postscript
is a sad one.[67]--‘In October of the same year the unhappy prince was
attacked in the night and robbed of life and throne by his brother’s
son; and I myself escaped narrowly, and am now in the deepest misery.’
A pseudo-despotism without characteristic features, such as Pandolfo
Petrucci exercised from the year 1490 in Siena, then torn by faction, is
hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant and malicious, he
governed with the help of a professor of jurisprudence and of an
astrologer, and frightened his people by an occasional murder. His
pastime in the summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top of
Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After succeeding,
where the most prudent failed, in escaping from the devices of Cæsar
Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons maintained a
qualified supremacy for many years afterwards.
CHAPTER V.
THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
In treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient to discuss
the Aragonese, on account of its special character, apart from the rest.
The feudal system, which from the days of the Normans had survived in
the form of a territorial supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive
colour to the political constitution of Naples; while elsewhere in
Italy, excepting only in the southern part of the ecclesiastical
dominion, and in a few other districts, a direct tenure of land
prevailed, and no hereditary powers were permitted by the law. The great
Alfonso, who reigned in Naples from 1435 onwards (d. 1458), was a man of
another kind than his real or alleged descendants. Brilliant in his
whole existence, fearless in mixing with his people, mild and generous
towards his enemies, dignified and affable in intercourse, modest
notwithstanding his legitimate royal descent, admired rather than blamed
even for his old man’s passion for Lucrezia d’Alagna, he had the one bad
quality of extravagance,[68] from which, however, the natural
consequence followed. Unscrupulous financiers were long omnipotent at
Court, till the bankrupt king robbed them of their spoils; a crusade was
preached, as a pretext for taxing the clergy; the Jews were forced to
save themselves from conversion and other oppressive measures by
presents and the payment of regular taxes; when a great earthquake
happening in the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the
contributions of the dead. On the other hand, he abolished unreasonable
taxes, like that on dice, and aimed at relieving his poorer subjects
from the imposts which pressed most heavily upon them. By such means
Alfonso was able to entertain distinguished guests with unrivalled
splendour; he found pleasure in ceaseless expense, even for the benefit
of his enemies, and in rewarding literary work knew absolutely no
measure. Poggio received 500 pieces of gold for translating Xenophon’s
‘Cyropædeia.’
Ferrante,[69] who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son by a
Spanish lady, but was not improbably the son of a half-caste Moor of
Valentia. Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life
by the barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain
that he was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.
Restlessly active, recognised as one of the most powerful political
minds of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he
concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned profound
dissimulation and an irreconcileable spirit of vengeance, on the
destruction of his opponents. He had been wounded in every point in
which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though
related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies.
Extreme measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this
struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were exacted in the
same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick II. had introduced: the
Government alone dealt in oil and wine; the whole commerce of the
country was put by Ferrante into the hands of a wealthy merchant,
Francesco Coppola, who had entire control of the anchorage on the coast,
and shared the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by forced
loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by
contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides
hunting, which he practised regardless of all rights of property, his
pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him,
either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in
the costume which they wore in their lifetime.[70] He would chuckle in
talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of
the museum of mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got into
his power by treachery; some were even seized while guests at the royal
table. His conduct to his first minister, Antonello Petrucci, who had
grown sick and grey in his service, and from whose increasing fear of
death he extorted present after present, was literally devilish. At
length the suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the
barons gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died
Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo and Porzio
makes one’s hair stand on end. The elder of the King’s sons, Alfonso,
Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years a kind of co-regency with his
father. He was a savage, brutal profligate--described by Comines as ‘the
cruelest, worst, most vicious and basest man ever seen’--who in point of
frankness alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and who openly avowed his
contempt for religion and its usages.[71] The better and nobler features
of the Italian despotisms are not to be found among the princes of this
line; all that they possessed of the art and culture of their time
served the purposes of luxury or display. Even the genuine Spaniards
seem to have almost always degenerated in Italy; but the end of this
cross-bred house (1494 and 1503) gives clear proof of a want of blood.
Ferrante died of mental care and trouble; Alfonso accused his brother
Federigo, the only honest member of the family, of treason, and insulted
him in the vilest manner. At length, though he had hitherto passed for
one of the ablest generals in Italy, he lost his head and fled to
Sicily, leaving his son, the younger Ferrante, a prey to the French and
to domestic treason. A dynasty which had ruled as this had done must at
least have sold its life dear, if its children were ever to hope for a
restoration. But, as Comines one-sidedly, and yet on the whole rightly
observes on this occasion, ‘_Jamais homme cruel ne fut hardi_.’
The despotism of the Dukes of Milan, whose government from the time of
Giangaleazzo onwards was an absolute monarchy of the most thorough-going
sort, shows the genuine Italian character of the fifteenth century. The
last of the Visconti, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), is a character of
peculiar interest, and of which fortunately an admirable description[72]
has been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be
made by the passion of fear, is here shown with what may be called a
mathematical completeness. All the resources of the State were devoted
to the one end of securing his personal safety, though happily his cruel
egoism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived
in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbours, and
lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making his excursions
only in the country, where lay several of his splendid castles; the
flotilla which, drawn by the swiftest horses, conducted him to them
along canals constructed for the purpose, was so arranged as to allow of
the application of the most rigorous etiquette. Whoever entered the
citadel was watched by a hundred eyes; it was forbidden even to stand at
the window, lest signs should be given to those without. All who were
admitted among the personal followers of the Prince were subjected to a
series of the strictest examinations; then, once accepted, were charged
with the highest diplomatic commissions, as well as with the humblest
personal services--both in this Court being alike honourable. And this
was the man who conducted long and difficult wars, who dealt habitually
with political affairs of the first importance, and every day sent his
plenipotentiaries to all parts of Italy. His safety lay in the fact that
none of his servants trusted the others, that his Condottieri were
watched and misled by spies, and that the ambassadors and higher
officials were baffled and kept apart by artificially nourished
jealousies, and in particular by the device of coupling an honest man
with a knave. His inward faith, too, rested upon opposed and
contradictory systems; he believed in blind necessity, and in the
influence of the stars, and offering prayers at one and the same time to
helpers of every sort;[73] he was a student of the ancient authors, as
well as of French tales of chivalry. And yet the same man, who would
never suffer death to be mentioned in his presence,[74] and caused his
dying favourites to be removed from the castle, that no shadow might
fall on the abode of happiness, deliberately hastened his own death by
closing up a wound, and, refusing to be bled, died at last with dignity
and grace.
His step-son and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco Sforza
(1450-1466, see p. 24), was perhaps of all the Italians of the fifteenth
century the man most after the heart of his age. Never was the triumph
of genius and individual power more brilliantly displayed than in him;
and those who would not recognise his merit were at least forced to
wonder at him as the spoilt child of fortune. The Milanese claimed it
openly as an honour to be governed by so distinguished a master; when he
entered the city the thronging populace bore him on horseback into the
cathedral, without giving him the chance to dismount.[75] Let us listen
to the balance-sheet of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II., a
judge in such matters:[76] ‘In the year 1459, when the Duke came to the
congress at Mantua, he was 60 (really 58) years old; on horseback he
looked like a young man; of a lofty and imposing figure, with serious
features, calm and affable in conversation, princely in his whole
bearing, with a combination of bodily and intellectual gifts unrivalled
in our time, unconquered on the field of battle,--such was the man who
raised himself from a humble position to the control of an empire. His
wife was beautiful and virtuous, his children were like the angels of
heaven; he was seldom ill, and all his chief wishes were fulfilled. And
yet he was not without misfortune. His wife, out of jealousy, killed his
mistress; his old comrades and friends, Troilo and Brunoro, abandoned
him and went over to King Alfonso; another, Ciarpollone, he was forced
to hang for treason; he had to suffer it that his brother Alessandro set
the French upon him; one of his sons formed intrigues against him, and
was imprisoned; the March of Ancona, which he had won in war, he lost
again in the same way. No man enjoys so unclouded a fortune, that he has
not somewhere to struggle with adversity. He is happy who has but few
troubles.’ With this negative definition of happiness the learned Pope
dismisses the reader. Had he been able to see into the future, or been
willing to stop and discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
despotism, one prevading fact would not have escaped his notice--the
absence of all guarantee for the future. Those children, beautiful as
angels, carefully and thoroughly educated as they were, fell victims,
when they grew up, to the corruption of a measureless egoism. Galeazzo
Maria (1466-1476), solicitous only of outward effect, took pride in the
beauty of his hands, in the high salaries he paid, in the financial
credit he enjoyed, in his treasure of two million pieces of gold, in the
distinguished people who surrounded him, and in the army and birds of
chase which he maintained. He was fond of the sound of his own voice,
and spoke well, most fluently, perhaps, when he had the chance of
insulting a Venetian ambassador.[77] He was subject to caprices, such as
having a room painted with figures in a single night; and, what was
worse, to fits of senseless debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his
nearest friends. To a handful of enthusiasts, at whose head stood Giov.
Andrea di Lampugnano, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they murdered
him,[78] and thereby delivered the State into the power of his brothers,
one of whom, Ludovico il Moro, threw his nephew into prison, and took
the government into his own hands. From this usurpation followed the
French intervention, and the disasters which befell the whole of Italy.
The Moor is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a
kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgment.
Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the means he employed, he
used them with perfect ingenuousness; no one would probably have been
more astonished than himself to learn, that for the choice of means as
well as of ends a human being is morally responsible; he would rather
have reckoned it as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had
abstained from too free a use of the punishment of death. He accepted as
no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the Italians for his
political genius.[79] In 1496 he boasted that the Pope Alexander was his
chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his Condottiere, Venice his
chamberlain, and the King of France his courier, who must come and go at
his bidding.[80] With marvellous presence of mind he weighed, even in
his last extremity, all possible means of escape, and at length decided,
to his honour, to trust to the goodness of human nature; he rejected the
proposal of his brother, the Cardinal Ascanio, who wished to remain in
the Citadel of Milan, on the ground of a former quarrel: ‘Monsignore,
take it not ill, but I trust you not, brother though you be;’ and
appointed to the command of the castle, ‘that pledge of his return,’ a
man to whom he had always done good, but who nevertheless betrayed
him.[81] At home the Moor was a good and useful ruler, and to the last
he reckoned on his popularity both in Milan and in Como. In former years
(after 1496) he had overstrained the resources of his State, and at
Cremona had ordered, out of pure expediency, a respectable citizen, who
had spoken against the new taxes, to be quietly strangled. Since that
time, in holding audiences, he kept his visitors away from his person by
means of a bar, so that in conversing with him they were compelled to
speak at the top of their voices.[82] At his court, the most brilliant
in Europe, since that of Burgundy had ceased to exist, immorality of the
worst kind was prevalent: the daughter was sold by the father, the wife
by the husband, the sister by the brother.[83] The Prince himself was
incessantly active, and, as son of his own deeds, claimed relationship
with all who, like himself, stood on their personal merits--with
scholars, poets, artists, and musicians. The academy which he
founded[84] served rather for his own purposes than for the instruction
of scholars; nor was it the fame of the distinguished men who surrounded
him which he heeded, so much as their society and their services. It is
certain that Bramante was scantily paid at first;[85] Lionardo, on the
other hand, was up to 1496 suitably remunerated--and besides, what kept
him at the court, if not his own free will? The world lay open to him,
as perhaps to no other mortal man of that day; and if proof were wanting
of the loftier element in the nature of Ludovico Moro, it is found in
the long stay of the enigmatic master at his court. That afterwards
Lionardo entered the service of Cæsar Borgia and Francis I. was probably
due to the interest he felt in the unusual and striking character of the
two men.
After the fall of the Moor--he was captured in April 1500 by the French,
after his return from his flight to Germany--his sons were badly brought
up among strangers, and showed no capacity for carrying out his
political testament. The elder, Massimiliano, had no resemblance to him;
the younger, Francesco, was at all events not without spirit. Milan,
which in those years changed its rulers so often, and suffered so
unspeakably in the change, endeavoured to secure itself against a
reaction. In the year 1512 the French, retreating before the arms of
Maximilian and the Spaniards, were induced to make a declaration that
the Milanese had taken no part in their expulsion, and, without being
guilty of rebellion, might yield themselves to a new conqueror.[86] It
is a fact of some political importance that in such moments of
transition the unhappy city, like Naples at the flight of the Aragonese,
was apt to fall a prey to gangs of (often highly aristocratic)
scoundrels.
* * * * *
The house of Gonzaga at Mantua and that of Montefeltro of Urbino were
among the best ordered and richest in men of ability during the second
half of the fifteenth century. The Gonzaga were a tolerably harmonious
family; for a long period no murder had been known among them, and their
dead could be shown to the world without fear. The Marquis Francesco
Gonzaga[87] and his wife, Isabella of Este, in spite of some few
irregularities, were a united and respectable couple, and brought up
their sons to be successful and remarkable men at a time when their
small but most important State was exposed to incessant danger. That
Francesco, either as statesman or as soldier, should adopt a policy of
exceptional honesty, was what neither the Emperor, nor Venice, nor the
King of France could have expected or desired; but certainly since the
battle at Taro (1495), so far as military honour was concerned, he felt
and acted as an Italian patriot, and imparted the same spirit to his
wife. Every deed of loyalty and heroism, such as the defence of Faenza
against Cæsar Borgia, she felt as a vindication of the honour of Italy.
Our judgment of her does not need to rest on the praises of the artists
and writers who made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage;
her own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness, full of
kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello, Ariosto, and
Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court, small and powerless as it
was, and empty as they found its treasury. A more polished and charming
circle was not to be seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the
old Court of Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the
society of Ferrara was inferior to that of Mantua. In artistic matters
Isabella had an accurate knowledge, and the catalogue of her small but
choice collection can be read by no lover of art without emotion.
In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro
or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative of the princely
order. As a Condottiere--and in this capacity he served kings and popes
for thirty years after he became prince--he shared the political
morality of soldiers of fortune, a morality of which the fault does not
rest with them alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the
plan of spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and taxing his
people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two successors, Guidobaldo
and Francesco Maria, we read: ‘They erected buildings, furthered the
cultivation of the land, lived at home, and gave employment to a large
number of people: their subjects loved them.’[88] But not only the
state, but the court too, was a work of art and organization, and this
in every sense of the word. Federigo had 500 persons in his service; the
arrangements of the court were as complete as in the capitals of the
greatest monarchs, but nothing was wasted; all had its object, and all
was carefully watched and controlled. The court was no scene of vice and
dissipation: it served as a school of military education for the sons of
other great houses, the thoroughness of whose culture and instruction
was made a point of honour by the Duke. The palace which he built, if
not one of the most splendid, was classical in the perfection of its
plan; there was placed the greatest of his treasures, the celebrated
library.[89] Feeling secure in a land where all gained profit or
employment from his rule, and where none were beggars, he habitually
went unarmed and almost unaccompanied; alone among the princes of his
time he ventured to walk in an open park, and to take his frugal meals
in an open chamber, while Livy, or in time of fasting, some devotional
work, was read to him. In the course of the same afternoon he would
listen to a lecture on some classical subject, and thence would go to
the monastery of the Clarisse and talk of sacred things through the
grating with the abbess. In the evening he would overlook the martial
exercises of the young people of his court on the meadow of St.
Francesco, known for its magnificent view, and saw to it well that all
the feats were done in the most perfect manner. He strove always to be
affable and accessible to the utmost degree, visiting the artisans who
worked for him in their shops, holding frequent audiences, and, if
possible, attending to the requests of each individual on the same day
that they were presented. No wonder that the people, as he walked along
the street, knelt down and cried: ‘Dio ti mantenga, signore!’ He was
called by thinking people ‘the light of Italy.’[90] His gifted son
Guidobaldo,[91] visited by sickness and misfortune of every kind, was
able at the last (1508) to give his state into the safe hands of his
nephew Francesco Maria (nephew also of Pope Julius II.), who, at least,
succeeded in preserving the territory from any permanent foreign
occupation. It is remarkable with what confidence Guidobaldo yielded and
fled before Cæsar Borgia and Francesco before the troops of Leo X.; each
knew that his restoration would be all the easier and the more popular
the less the country suffered through a fruitless defence. When Ludovico
made the same calculation at Milan, he forgot the many grounds of hatred
which existed against him. The court of Guidobaldo has been made
immortal as the high school of polished manners by Baldassar
Castiglione, who represented his eclogue Thyrsis before, and in honour
of that society (1506), and who afterwards (1518) laid the scena of the
dialogue of his ‘Cortigiano’ in the circle of the accomplished Duchess
Elisabetta Gonzaga.
The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio
displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.[92] Within the
palace frightful deeds were perpetrated; a princess was beheaded (1425)
for alleged adultery with a step-son;[93] legitimate and illegitimate
children fled from the court, and even abroad their lives were
threatened by assassins sent in pursuit of them (1471). Plots from
without were incessant; the bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the
crown from the lawful heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards
(1493) to have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the
instigation of her brother Ferrante of Naples, was going to poison him.
This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of two bastards against
their brothers, the ruling Duke Alfonso I. and the Cardinal Ippolito
(1506), which was discovered in time, and punished with imprisonment for
life. The financial system in this State was of the most perfect kind,
and necessarily so, since none of the large or second-rate powers of
Italy were exposed to such danger and stood in such constant need of
armaments and fortifications. It was the hope of the rulers that the
increasing prosperity of the people would keep pace with the increasing
weight of taxation, and the Marquis Niccolò (d. 1441) used to express
the wish that his subjects might be richer than the people of other
countries. If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of the
prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that
in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the
capital, no houses were to be let.[94] Ferrara is the first really
modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the
bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes
and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true
capital; wealthy fugitives from all parts of Italy, Florentines
especially, settled and built their palaces at Ferrara. But the indirect
taxation, at all events, must have reached a point at which it could
only just be borne. The Government, it is true, took measures of
alleviation which were also adopted by other Italian despots, such as
Galeazzo Maria Sforza: in time of famine corn was brought from a
distance and seems to have been distributed gratuitously;[95] but in
ordinary times it compensated itself by the monopoly, if not of corn, of
many other of the necessaries of life--fish, salt meat, fruit, and
vegetables, which last were carefully planted on and near the walls of
the city. The most considerable source of income, however, was the
annual sale of public offices, a usage which was common throughout
Italy, and about the working of which at Ferrara we have more precise
information. We read, for example, that at the new year 1502 the
majority of the officials bought their places at ‘prezzi salati;’ public
servants of the most various kinds, custom-house officers, bailiffs
(massari), notaries, ‘podestà,’ judges, and even captains, _i.e._,
lieutenant-governors of provincial towns, are quoted by name. As one of
the ‘devourers of the people’ who paid dearly for their places, and who
were ‘hated worse than the devil,’ Tito Strozza--let us hope not the
famous Latin poet--is mentioned. About the same time every year the
dukes were accustomed to make a round of visits in Ferrara, the so
called ‘andar per ventura,’ in which they took presents from, at any
rate, the more wealthy citizens. The gifts, however, did not consist of
money, but of natural products.
It was the pride of the duke[96] for all Italy to know that at Ferrara
the soldiers received their pay and the professors of the University
their salary not a day later than it was due; that the soldiers never
dared lay arbitrary hands on citizen or peasant; that the town was
impregnable to assault; and that vast sums of coined money were stored
up in the citadel. To keep two sets of accounts seemed unnecessary; the
Minister of Finance was at the same time manager of the ducal household.
The buildings erected by Borso (1430-1471), by Hercules I. (till 1505),
and by Alfonso I. (till 1534), were very numerous, but of small size:
they are characteristic of a princely house which, with all its love of
splendour--Borso never appeared but in embroidery and jewels--indulged
in no ill-considered expense. Alfonso may perhaps have foreseen the fate
which was in store for his charming little villas, the Belvedere with
its shady gardens, and Montana with its fountains and beautiful
frescoes.
It is undeniable that the dangers to which these princes were constantly
exposed developed in them capacities of a remarkable kind. In so
artificial a world only a man of consummate address could hope to
succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his
claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought.
Their characters are not without dark sides; but in all of them lives
something of those qualities which Italy then pursued as its ideal. What
European monarch of the time so laboured for his own culture as, for
instance, Alfonso I.? His travels in France, England, and the
Netherlands were undertaken for the purpose of study: by means of them
he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of these
countries.[97] It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner’s work
which he practised in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his
skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom with
which he surrounded himself by masters of every art. The Italian princes
were not, like their contemporaries in the North, dependent on the
society of an aristocracy which held itself to be the only class worth
consideration, and which infected the monarch with the same conceit. In
Italy the prince was permitted and compelled to know and to use men of
every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a caste, were
forced in social intercourse to stand upon their personal qualifications
alone. But this is a point which we shall discuss more fully in the
sequel.
The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling house was a strange
compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian sense of well-calculated
interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject: personal admiration
was transformed into a new sentiment of duty. The city of Ferrara raised
in 1451 a bronze equestrian statue to their Prince Niccolò, who had died
ten years earlier; Borso (1454) did not scruple to place his own statue,
also of bronze, but in a sitting posture, hard by in the market; in
addition to which the city, at the beginning of his reign, decreed to
him a ‘marble triumphal pillar.’ And when he was buried the whole people
felt as if God himself had died a second time.[98] A citizen, who, when
abroad from Venice, had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed on
his return home, and condemned to banishment and the confiscation of his
goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty restrained from cutting him
down before the tribunal itself, and with a rope round his neck the
offender went to the duke and begged for a full pardon. The government
was well provided with spies, and the duke inspected personally the
daily list of travellers which the innkeepers were strictly ordered to
present. Under Borso,[99] who was anxious to leave no distinguished
stranger unhonoured, this regulation served a hospitable purpose;
Hercules I.[100] used it simply as a measure of precaution. In Bologna,
too, it was then the rule, under Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, that every
passing traveller who entered at one gate must obtain a ticket in order
to go out at another.[101] An unfailing means of popularity was the
sudden dismissal of oppressive officials. When Borso arrested in person
his chief and confidential counsellors, when Hercules I. removed and
disgraced a tax-gatherer, who for years had been sucking the blood of
the people, bonfires were lighted and the bells were pealed in their
honour. With one of his servants, however, Hercules let things go too
far. The director of the police, or by whatever name we should choose to
call him (Capitano di Giustizia), was Gregorio Zampante of Lucca--a
native being unsuited for an office of this kind. Even the sons and
brothers of the duke trembled before this man; the fines he inflicted
amounted to hundreds and thousands of ducats, and torture was applied
even before the hearing of a case: bribes were accepted from wealthy
criminals, and their pardon obtained from the duke by false
representations. Gladly would the people have paid any sum to this ruler
for sending away the ‘enemy of God and man.’ But Hercules had knighted
him and made him godfather to his children; and year by year Zampante
laid by 2,000 ducats. He dared only eat pigeons bred in his own house,
and could not cross the street without a band of archers and bravos. It
was time to get rid of him; in 1490 two students and a converted Jew
whom he had mortally offended, killed him in his house while taking his
siesta, and then rode through the town on horses held in waiting,
raising the cry, ‘Come out! come out! we have slain Zampante!’ The
pursuers came too late, and found them already safe across the frontier.
Of course it now rained satires--some of them in the form of sonnets,
others of odes.
It was wholly in the spirit of this system that the sovereign imposed
his own respect for useful servants on the court and on the people. When
in 1469 Borso’s privy councillor Ludovico Casella died, no court of law
or place of business in the city, and no lecture-room at the University,
was allowed to be open: all had to follow the body to S. Domenico, since
the duke intended to be present. And, in fact, ‘the first of the house
of Este who attended the corpse of a subject’ walked, clad in black,
after the coffin, weeping, while behind him came the relatives of
Casella, each conducted by one of the gentlemen of the Court: the body
of the plain citizen was carried by nobles from the church into the
cloister, where it was buried. Indeed this official sympathy with
princely emotion first came up in the Italian States.[102] At the root
of the practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the utterance of
it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal sincerity. One
of the youthful poems of Ariosto,[103] on the Death of Lionora of
Aragon, wife of Hercules I., contains besides the inevitable graveyard
flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages, some thoroughly
modern features: ‘This death had given Ferrara a blow which it would not
get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate in heaven,
since earth was not worthy of her; truly, the angel of Death did not
come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but
fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was
allayed.’ But we meet, also, with a sympathy of a different kind.
Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell us the
love-stories of the prince, even before his death, in a way which, to
later times, would seem the height of indiscretion, but which then
passed simply as an innocent compliment. Lyrical poets even went so far
as to sing the illicit flames of their lawfully married lords, _e.g._
Angelo Poliziano, those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano
Pontano, with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem
in question[105] betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the
Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the most
fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful! That the
greatest artists, for example Lionardo, should paint the mistresses of
their patrons was no more than a matter of course.
But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises of others; it
undertook to celebrate them itself. In the Palazzo Schifanoja Borso
caused himself to be painted in a series of historical representations,
and Hercules kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a
procession which was compared to the feast of Corpus Christi; shops were
closed as on Sunday; in the centre of the line walked all the members of
the princely house (bastards included) clad in embroidered robes. That
the crown was the fountain of honour and authority, that all personal
distinction flowed from it alone, had been long[106] expressed at this
court by the Order of the Golden Spur--an order which had nothing in
common with mediæval chivalry. Hercules I. added to the spur a sword, a
gold-laced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which there is no
doubt that regular service was required.
The patronage of art and letters for which this court has obtained a
world-wide reputation, was exercised through the University, which was
one of the most perfect in Italy, and by the gift of places in the
personal or official service of the prince; it involved consequently no
additional expense. Bojardo, as a wealthy country gentleman and high
official, belonged to this class. At the time when Ariosto began to
distinguish himself, there existed no court, in the true sense of the
word, either at Milan or Florence, and soon there was none either at
Urbino or at Naples. He had to content himself with a place among the
musicians and jugglers of Cardinal Ippolito till Alfonso took him into
his service. It was otherwise at a later time with Torquato Tasso, whose
presence at court was jealously sought after.
CHAPTER VI.
THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
In face of this centralised authority, all legal opposition within the
borders of the state was futile. The elements needed for the restoration
of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and the field prepared for
violence and despotism. The nobles, destitute of political rights, even
where they held feudal possessions, might call themselves Guelphs or
Ghibellines at will, might dress up their bravos in padded hose and
feathered caps[107] or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like
Macchiavelli[108] knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too
‘corrupt’ for a republic. Strange judgments fall on these two so-called
parties, which now served only to give an official sanction to personal
and family disputes. An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim[109]
advised to put them down, replied that their quarrels brought him in
more than 12,000 ducats a year in fines. And when in the year 1500,
during the brief return of Ludovico Moro to his States, the Guelphs of
Tortona summoned a part of the neighbouring French army into the city,
in order to make an end once for all of their opponents, the French
certainly began by plundering and ruining the Ghibellines, but finished
by doing the same to their hosts, till Tortona was utterly laid
waste.[110] In Romagna, the hotbed of every ferocious passion, these two
names had long lost all political meaning. It was a sign of the
political delusion of the people that they not seldom believed the
Guelphs to be the natural allies of the French and the Ghibellines of
the Spaniards. It is hard to see that those who tried to profit by this
error got much by doing so. France, after all her interventions, had to
abandon the peninsula at last, and what became of Spain, after she had
destroyed Italy, is known to every reader.
But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple mind,
we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power is
derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly
supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and
lose all traces of their violent origin. But from characters and
imaginations inflamed by passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind
could not be expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the
disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were
put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or else, without
reflecting even to this extent, they sought only to give a vent to the
universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune or
personal affront. Since the governments were absolute, and free from all
legal restraints, the opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom.
Boccaccio declares openly[111] ‘Shall I call the tyrant king or prince,
and obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the
commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies, spies, ambushes
and fraud; to do so is a sacred and necessary work. There is no more
acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant.’ We need not occupy
ourselves with individual cases; Macchiavelli,[112] in a famous chapter
of his ‘Discorsi,’ treats of the conspiracies of ancient and modern
times from the days of the Greek tyrants downwards, and classifies them
with cold-blooded indifference according to their various plans and
results. We need make but two observations, first on the murders
committed in church, and next on the influence of classical antiquity.
So well was the tyrant guarded that it was almost impossible to lay
hands upon him elsewhere than at solemn religious services; and on no
other occasion was the whole family to be found assembled together. It
was thus that the Fabrianese[113] murdered (1435) the members of their
ruling house, the Chiavistelli, during high mass, the signal being given
by the words of the Creed, ‘Et incarnatus est.’ At Milan the Duke Giovan
Maria Visconti (1412) was assassinated at the entrance of the church of
San Gottardo, Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) in the church of Santo
Stefano, and Ludovico Moro only escaped (1484) the daggers of the
adherents of the widowed Duchess Bona, through entering the church of
Sant’ Ambrogio by another door than that by which he was expected. There
was no intentional impiety in the act; the assassins of Galeazzo did not
fail to pray before the murder to the patron saint of the church, and to
listen devoutly to the first mass. It was, however, one cause of the
partial failure of the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and
Guiliano Medici (1478), that the brigand Montesecco, who had bargained
to commit the murder at a banquet, declined to undertake it in the
Cathedral of Florence. Certain of the clergy ‘who were familiar with the
sacred place, and consequently had no fear’ were induced to act in his
stead.[114]
As to the imitation of antiquity, the influence of which on moral, and
more especially on political, questions we shall often refer to, the
example was set by the rulers themselves, who, both in their conception
of the state and in their personal conduct, took the old Roman empire
avowedly as their model. In like manner their opponents, when they set
to work with a deliberate theory, took pattern by the ancient
tyrannicides. It may be hard to prove that in the main point--in forming
the resolve itself--they consciously followed a classical example; but
the appeal to antiquity was no mere phrase. The most striking
disclosures have been left us with respect to the murderers of Galeazzo
Sforza--Lampugnani, Olgiati, and Visconti.[115] Though all three had
personal ends to serve, yet their enterprise may be partly ascribed to a
more general reason. About this time Cola de’ Montani, a humanist and
professor of eloquence, had awakened among many of the young Milanese
nobility a vague passion for glory and patriotic achievements, and had
mentioned to Lampugnani and Olgiati his hope of delivering Milan.
Suspicion was soon aroused against him: he was banished from the city,
and his pupils were abandoned to the fanaticism he had excited. Some ten
days before the deed they met together and took a solemn oath in the
monastery of Sant’ Ambrogio. ‘Then,’ says Olgiati, ‘in a remote corner I
raised my eyes before the picture of the patron saint, and implored his
help for ourselves and for all _his_ people.’ The heavenly protector of
the city was called on to bless the undertaking, as was afterwards St.
Stephen, in whose church it was fulfilled. Many of their comrades were
now informed of the plot, nightly meetings were held in the house of
Lampugnani, and the conspirators practised for the murder with the
sheaths of their daggers. The attempt was successful, but Lampugnani was
killed on the spot by the attendants of the duke; the others were
captured: Visconti was penitent, but Olgiati through all his tortures
maintained that the deed was an acceptable offering to God, and
exclaimed while the executioner was breaking his ribs, ‘Courage,
Girolamo! thou wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is
eternal.’[116]
But however idealistic the object and purpose of such conspiracies may
appear, the manner in which they were conducted betrays the influence of
that worst of all conspirators, Catiline--a man in whose thoughts
freedom had no place whatever. The annals of Siena tells us expressly
that the conspirators were students of Sallust, and the fact is
indirectly confirmed by the confession of Olgiati.[117] Elsewhere, too,
we meet with the name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern of the
conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could hardly be discovered.
Among the Florentines, whenever they got rid of, or tried to get rid of,
the Medici, tyrannicide was a practice universally accepted and
approved. After the flight of the Medici in 1494, the bronze group of
Donatello[118]--Judith with the dead Holofernes--was taken from their
collection and placed before the Palazzo della Signoria, on the spot
where the ‘David’ of Michael Angelo now stands, with the inscription,
‘Exemplum salutis publicæ cives posuere 1495.’[119] No example was more
popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante,[120] lies with
Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his
treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against
Guiliano, Giovanni, and Guilio Medici failed (1513), was an enthusiastic
admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow his steps, only waited to find
a Cassius. Such a partner he met with in Agostino Capponi. His last
utterances in prison[121]--a striking evidence of the religious feeling
of the time--show with what an effort he rid his mind of these classical
imaginations, in order to die like a Christian. A friend and the
confessor both had to assure him that St. Thomas Aquinas condemned
conspirators absolutely; but the confessor afterwards admitted to the
same friend that St. Thomas drew a distinction and permitted
conspiracies against a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against
their will. After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro
(1537), and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,[122] which
is probably his own work, and certainly composed in his interest, and in
which he praises tyrannicide as an act of the highest merit; on the
supposition that Alessandro was a legitimate Medici, and, therefore,
related to him, if only distantly, he boldly compares himself with
Timoleon, who slew his brother for his country’s sake. Others, on the
same occasion, made use of the comparison with Brutus, and that Michael
Angelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly to ideas of this
kind, may be inferred from his bust of Brutus in the Uffizi. He left it
unfinished, like nearly all his works, but certainly not because the
murder of Cæsar was repugnant to his feeling, as the couplet beneath
declares.
A popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to the
monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic states of
the Renaissance. Each individual protested inwardly against despotism,
but was rather disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it,
than to combine with others for its destruction. Things must have been
as bad as at Camerino, Fabriano, or Rimini (p. 28), before the citizens
united to destroy or expel the ruling house. They knew in most cases
only too well that this would but mean a change of masters. The star of
the Republics was certainly on the decline.
CHAPTER VII.
THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
The Italian municipalities had, in earlier days, given signal proof of
that force which transforms the city into the state. It remained only
that these cities should combine in a great confederation; and this idea
was constantly recurring to Italian statesmen, whatever differences of
form it might from time to time display. In fact, during the struggles
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great and formidable leagues
actually were formed by the cities; and Sismondi (ii. 174) is of opinion
that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard confederation
against Barbarossa was the moment when a universal Italian league was
possible. But the more powerful states had already developed
characteristic features which made any such scheme impracticable. In
their commercial dealings they shrank from no measures, however extreme,
which might damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours
in a condition of helpless dependence--in short, they each fancied they
could get on by themselves without the assistance of the rest, and thus
paved the way for future usurpation. The usurper was forthcoming when
long conflicts between the nobility and the people, and between the
different factions of the nobility, had awakened the desire for a strong
government, and when bands of mercenaries ready and willing to sell
their aid to the highest bidder had superseded the general levy of the
citizens which party leaders now found unsuited to their purposes.[123]
The tyrants destroyed the freedom of most of the cities; here and there
they were expelled, but not thoroughly, or only for a short time; and
they were always restored, since the inward conditions were favourable
to them, and the opposing forces were exhausted.
Among the cities which maintained their independence are two of deep
significance for the history of the human race: Florence, the city of
incessant movement, which has left us a record of the thoughts and
aspirations of each and all who, for three centuries, took part in this
movement, and Venice, the city of apparent stagnation and of political
secrecy. No contrast can be imagined stronger than that which is offered
us by these two, and neither can be compared to anything else which the
world has hitherto produced.
* * * * *
Venice recognised itself from the first as a strange and mysterious
creation--the fruits of a higher power than human ingenuity. The solemn
foundation of the city was the subject of a legend. On March 25, 413, at
mid-day the emigrants from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto,
that they might have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations
of the barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the
presentiment of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio Sabellico,
who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow of his hexameters,
makes the priest, who completes the act of consecration, cry to heaven,
‘When we hereafter attempt great things, grant us prosperity! Now we
kneel before a poor altar; but if our vows are not made in vain, a
hundred temples, O God, of gold and marble shall arise to Thee.’[124]
The island city at the end of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket
of the world. It is so described by the same Sabellico,[125] with its
ancient cupolas, its leaning towers, its inlaid marble façades, its
compressed splendour, where the richest decoration did not hinder the
practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the
crowded Piazza before S. Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business of
the world is transacted, not amid shouting and confusion, but with the
subdued hum of many voices; where in the porticos round the square[126]
and in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money-changers and
goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and warehouses above their heads.
He describes the great Fondaco of the Germans beyond the bridge, where
their goods and their dwellings lay, and before which their ships are
drawn up side by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet laden
with wine and oil, and parallel with it, on the shore swarming with
porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto to the
square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers’ cabinets. So he
conducts the reader from one quarter of the city to another till he
comes at last to the two hospitals which were among those institutions
of public utility nowhere so numerous as at Venice. Care for the people,
in peace as well as in war, was characteristic of this government, and
its attention to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, excited the
admiration of other states.[127] Public institutions of every kind found
in Venice their pattern; the pensioning of retired servants was carried
out systematically, and included a provision for widows and orphans.
Wealth, political security, and acquaintance with other countries, had
matured the understanding of such questions. These slender fair-haired
men,[128] with quiet cautious steps, and deliberate speech, differed but
slightly in costume and bearing from one another; ornaments, especially
pearls, were reserved for the women and girls. At that time the general
prosperity, notwithstanding the losses sustained from the Turks, was
still dazzling; the stores of energy which the city possessed and the
prejudice in its favour diffused throughout Europe, enabled it at a much
later time to survive the heavy blows which were inflicted by the
discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the Mamelukes
in Egypt, and by the war of the League of Cambray.
Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed to the
frank loquacity of the scholars of his day, remarks elsewhere[129] with
some astonishment, that the young nobles who came of a morning to hear
his lectures could not be prevailed on to enter into political
discussions: ‘When I ask them what people think, say, and expect about
this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they
know nothing about the matter.’ Still, in spite of the strict
inquisition of the state, much was to be learned from the more corrupt
members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay enough for
it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were traitors
among the highest officials;[130] the popes, the Italian princes, and
even second-rate Condottieri in the service of the government had
informers in their pay, sometimes with regular salaries; things went so
far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important
political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even supposed
that Ludovico Moro had control of a definite number of votes among the
latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the high
rewards--such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who
informed against them--were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of
the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility,
could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by
two of that order, that the state should annually spend 70,000 ducats
for the relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the
matter was near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have
had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished
the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.[131] About this time a
Soranzo was hung, though not at Venice itself, for sacrilege, and a
Contarini put in chains for burglary; another of the same family came in
1499 before the Signory, and complained that for many years he had been
without an office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine
children, that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no trade
and had lately been turned on to the streets. We can understand why some
of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes whole rows of them, to
provide free lodging for their needy comrades. Such works figure in
wills among deeds of charity.[132]
But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes upon abuses of
this kind, they were greatly in error. It might be thought that the
commercial activity of the city, which put within reach of the humblest
a rich reward for their labour, and the colonies on the Eastern shores
of the Mediterranean, would have diverted from political affairs the
dangerous elements of society. But had not the political history of
Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the stormiest? The
cause of the stability of Venice lies rather in a combination of
circumstances which were found in union nowhere else. Unassailable from
its position, it had been able from the beginning to treat of foreign
affairs with the fullest and calmest reflection, and ignore nearly
altogether the parties which divided the rest of Italy, to escape the
entanglement of permanent alliances, and to set the highest price on
those which it thought fit to make. The keynote of the Venetian
character was, consequently, a spirit of proud and contemptuous
isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by the other
states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity within. The
inhabitants meanwhile were united by the most powerful ties of interest
in dealing both with the colonies and with the possessions on the
mainland, forcing the population of the latter, that is, of all the
towns up to Bergamo, to buy and sell in Venice alone. A power which
rested on means so artificial could only be maintained by internal
harmony and unity; and this conviction was so widely diffused among the
citizens that the conspirator found few elements to work upon. And the
discontented, if there were such, were held so far apart by the division
between the noble and the burgher, that a mutual understanding was not
easy. On the other hand, within the ranks of the nobility itself,
travel, commercial enterprise, and the incessant wars with the Turks
saved the wealthy and dangerous from that fruitful source of
conspiracies--idleness. In these wars they were spared, often to a
criminal extent, by the general in command, and the fall of the city was
predicted by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles ‘to give one
another pain’ should continue at the expense of justice.[133]
Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the Venetian
aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.
And when envy and ambition called for satisfaction an official victim
was forthcoming, and legal means and authorities were ready. The moral
torture, which for years the Doge Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered
before the eyes of all Venice, is a frightful example of a vengeance
possible only in an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand in
everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of
financial affairs and military appointments, which included the
Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had
overthrown so many powerful men before,--this Council was yearly chosen
afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consilio, and was
consequently the most direct expression of its will. It is not probable
that serious intrigues occurred at these elections, as the short
duration of the office and the accountability which followed rendered it
an object of no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the
proceedings of this and other authorities might be, the genuine Venetian
courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the Republic
had long arms, and if it could not catch him might punish his family,
but because in most cases it acted from rational motives and not from a
thirst for blood.[134] No state, indeed, has ever exercised a greater
moral influence over its subjects, whether abroad or at home. If
traitors were to be found among the Pregadi, there was ample
compensation for this in the fact that every Venetian away from home was
a born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that the
Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions of the
secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico Grimani had the
despatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which Ascanio
Sforza was sending to his brother Ludovico Moro, and forwarded them to
Venice; his father, then exposed to a serious accusation, claimed public
credit for this service of his son before the Gran Consilio; in other
words, before all the world.[135]
The conduct of the Venetian government to the Condottieri in its pay has
been spoken of already. The only further guarantee of their fidelity
which could be obtained lay in their great number, by which treachery
was made as difficult as its discovery was easy. In looking at the
Venetian army list, one is only surprised that among forces of such
miscellaneous composition any common action was possible. In the
catalogue for the campaign of 1495 we find 15,526 horsemen, broken up
into a number of small divisions.[136] Gonzaga of Mantua alone had as
many as 1,200, and Gioffredo Borgia 740; then follow six officers with a
contingent of 600 to 700, ten with 400, twelve with 400 to 200, fourteen
or thereabouts with 200 to 100, nine with 80, six with 50 to 60, and so
forth. These forces were partly composed of old Venetian troops, partly
of veterans led by Venetian city or country nobles; the majority of the
leaders were, however, princes and rulers of cities or their relatives.
To these forces must be added 24,000 infantry--we are not told how they
were raised or commanded--with 3,300 additional troops, who probably
belonged to the special services. In time of peace the cities of the
mainland were wholly unprotected or occupied by insignificant garrisons.
Venice relied, if not exactly on the loyalty, at least on the good sense
of its subjects; in the war of the League of Cambray (1509) it absolved
them, as is well known, from their oath of allegiance, and let them
compare the amenities of a foreign occupation with the mild government
to which they had been accustomed. As there had been no treason in their
desertion of St. Mark, and consequently no punishment was to be feared,
they returned to their old masters with the utmost eagerness. This war,
we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a century’s outcry
against the Venetian desire for aggrandisement. The Venetians, in fact,
were not free from the mistake of those over-clever people who will
credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate
conduct.[137] Misled by this optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar
weakness of aristocracies, they had utterly ignored not only the
preparations of Mohammed II. for the capture of Constantinople, but even
the armaments of Charles VIII., till the unexpected blow fell at
last.[138] The League of Cambray was an event of the same character, in
so far as it was clearly opposed to the interest of the two chief
members, Louis XII. and Julius II. The hatred of all Italy against the
victorious city seemed to be concentrated in the mind of the Pope, and
to have blinded him to the evils of foreign intervention; and as to the
policy of Cardinal Amboise and his king, Venice ought long before to
have recognised it as a piece of malicious imbecility, and to have been
thoroughly on its guard. The other members of the League took part in it
from that envy which may be a salutary corrective to great wealth and
power, but which in itself is a beggarly sentiment. Venice came out of
the conflict with honour, but not without lasting damage.
A power, whose foundations were so complicated, whose activity and
interests filled so wide a stage, cannot be imagined without a
systematic oversight of the whole, without a regular estimate of means
and burdens, of profits and losses. Venice can fairly make good its
claim to be the birthplace of statistical science, together, perhaps,
with Florence, and followed by the more enlightened despotisms. The
feudal state of the Middle Ages knew of nothing more than catalogues of
signorial rights and possessions (Urbaria); it looked on production as a
fixed quantity, which it approximately is, so long as we have to do with
landed property only. The towns, on the other hand, throughout the West
must from very early times have treated production, which with them
depended on industry and commerce, as exceedingly variable; but, even in
the most flourishing times of the Hanseatic League, they never got
beyond a simple commercial balance-sheet. Fleets, armies, political
power and influence fall under the debit and credit of a trader’s
ledger. In the Italian States a clear political consciousness, the
pattern of Mohammedan administration, and the long and active exercise
of trade and commerce, combined to produce for the first time a true
science of statistics.[139] The absolute monarchy of Frederick II. in
Lower Italy was organised with the sole object of securing a
concentrated power for the death-struggle in which he was engaged. In
Venice, on the contrary, the supreme objects were the enjoyment of life
and power, the increase of inherited advantages, the creation of the
most lucrative forms of industry, and the opening of new channels for
commerce.
The writers of the time speak of these things with the greatest
freedom.[140] We learn that the population of the city amounted in the
year 1422 to 190,000 souls; the Italians were, perhaps, the first to
reckon, not according to hearths, or men able to bear arms, or people
able to walk, and so forth, but according to ‘animæ,’ and thus to get
the most neutral basis for further calculation. About this time,[141]
when the Florentines wished to form an alliance with Venice against
Filippo Maria Visconti, they were for the moment refused, in the belief,
resting on accurate commercial returns, that a war between Venice and
Milan, that is, between seller and buyer, was foolish. Even if the duke
simply increased his army, the Milanese, through the heavier taxation
they must pay, would become worse customers. ‘Better let the Florentines
be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free city, they
will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen industry with them,
as the Lucchese did in their distress.’ The speech of the dying Doge
Mocenigo (1423) to a few of the senators whom he had sent for to his
bedside[142] is still more remarkable. It contains the chief elements of
a statistical account of the whole resources of Venice. I cannot say
whether or where a thorough elucidation of this perplexing document
exists; by way of illustration, the following facts may be quoted. After
repaying a war-loan of four million ducats, the public debt (‘il monte’)
still amounted to six million ducats; the current trade reached (so it
seems) ten millions, which yielded, the text informs us, a profit of
four millions. The 3,000 ‘navigli,’ the 300 ‘navi,’ and the 45 galleys
were manned respectively by 17,000, 8,000, and 11,000 seamen (more than
200 for each galley). To these must be added 16,000 shipwrights. The
houses in Venice were valued at seven millions, and brought in a rent of
half a million.[143] There were 1,000 nobles whose income ranged from 70
to 4,000 ducats. In another passage the ordinary income of the state in
that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats; through the disturbance of
trade caused by the wars it sank about the middle of the century to
800,000 ducats.[144]
If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical turn
which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important side
of modern political life, in that culture, on the other hand, which
Italy then prized most highly she did not stand in the front rank. The
literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and especially that
enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere.[145] The
aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence
was in itself not less remarkable than for commerce and politics; but
this aptitude was neither developed in themselves nor rewarded in
strangers as it was rewarded elsewhere in Italy. Filelfo, summoned to
Venice not by the state, but by private individuals, soon found his
expectations deceived; and George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the
Latin translation of Plato’s Laws at the feet of the Doge, and was
appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and
finally dedicated his ‘Rhetoric’ to the Signoria,[146] soon left the
city in dissatisfaction. Literature, in fact, like the rest at Venice,
had mostly a practical end in view. If, accordingly, we look through the
history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended to
his well-known book,[147] we shall find in the fourteenth century almost
nothing but history, and special works on theology, jurisprudence, and
medicine; and in the fifteenth century, till we come to Ermolao Barbaro
and Aldo Manucci, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance,
most scantily represented. Similarly we find comparatively few traces of
the passion, elsewhere so strong, for collecting books and manuscripts;
and the valuable texts which formed part of Petrarch’s legacies were so
badly preserved that soon all traces of them were lost. The library
which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the state (1468) narrowly escaped
dispersion and destruction. Learning was certainly cultivated at the
University of Padua, where, however, the physicians and the jurists--the
latter as the authors of legal opinions--received by far the highest
pay. The share of Venice in the poetical creations of the country was
long insignificant, till, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, her
deficiences were made good.[148] Even the art of the Renaissance was
imported into the city from without, and it was not before the end of
the fifteenth century that she learned to move in this field with
independent freedom and strength. But we find more striking instances
still of intellectual backwardness. This Government, which had the
clergy so thoroughly in its control, which reserved to itself the
appointment to all important ecclesiastical offices, and which, one time
after another, dared to defy the court of Rome, displayed an official
piety of a most singular kind.[149] The bodies of saints and other
reliques imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest were bought at
the greatest sacrifices and received by the Doge in solemn
procession.[150] For the coat without a seam it was decided (1455) to
offer 10,000 ducats, but it was not to be had. These measures were not
the fruit of any popular excitement, but of the tranquil resolutions of
the heads of the Government, and might have been omitted without
attracting any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances,
would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of the piety of
the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences of an Alexander
VI. But the state itself, after absorbing the Church to a degree unknown
elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical element in its
composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the state, appeared in twelve
great processions (‘andate’)[151] in a half-clerical character. They
were almost all festivals in memory of political events, and competed in
splendour with the great feasts of the Church; the most brilliant of
all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on Ascension Day.
The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human
development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this
sense deserves the name of the first modern state in the world. Here the
whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair
of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly
critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the
social and political condition of the state, and as incessantly
describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of
political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but
also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above
all other states in the world, the home of historical representation in
the modern sense of the phrase. The spectacle of ancient Rome and a
familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence;
Giovanni Villani[152] confesses that he received the first impulse to
his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately
on his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000 pilgrims of that year
may have been like him in gifts and tendencies and still did not write
the history of their native cities! For not all of them could encourage
themselves with the thought: ‘Rome is sinking; my native city is rising,
and ready to achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its
past history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and
as long as my life shall last.’ And besides the witness to its past,
Florence obtained through its historians something further--a greater
fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.[153]
Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable state,
but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and
independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this
history.[154]
In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so
bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The descriptions of
them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear
evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.
And what a politician is the great victim of these crises, Dante
Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile! He uttered his scorn of
the incessant changes and experiments in the constitution of his native
city in verses of adamant, which will remain proverbial so long as
political events of the same kind recur;[155] he addressed his home in
words of defiance and yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his
countrymen. But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole world; and
if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it, was no more than an
illusion, it must yet be admitted that the youthful dreams of a new-born
political speculation are in his case not without a poetical grandeur.
He is proud to be the first who had trod this path,[156] certainly in
the footsteps of Aristotle, but in his own way independently. His ideal
emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only, the heir of
the universal sway of Rome to which belonged the sanction of nature, of
right and of the will of God. The conquest of the world was, according
to this view, rightful, resting on a divine judgment between Rome and
the other nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this
empire, since under it he became Man, submitting at his birth to the
census of the Emperor Augustus, and at his death to the judgment of
Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate these and other
arguments of the same kind, but Dante’s passion never fails to carry us
with him. In his letters he appears as one of the earliest
publicists,[157] and is perhaps the first layman to publish political
tracts in this form. He began early. Soon after the death of Beatrice he
addressed a pamphlet on the state of Florence ‘to the Great ones of the
Earth,’ and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the
time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes, and
cardinals. In these letters and in his book ‘De Vulgari Eloquio’ the
feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is constantly recurring that
the exile may find elsewhere than in his native place an intellectual
home in language and culture, which cannot be taken from him. On this
point we shall have more to say in the sequel.
To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep
political reflexion as fresh and practical observations, together with
the elements of Florentine statistics and important notices of other
states. Here too trade and commerce had given the impulse to economical
as well as political science. Nowhere else in the world was such
accurate information to be had on financial affairs. The wealth of the
Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII. amounted to
twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be incredible on any less
trustworthy authority.[158] Here only, at Florence, do we meet with
colossal loans like that which the King of England contracted from the
Florentine houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum
of 1,365,000 gold florins (1338)--their own money and that of their
partners--and nevertheless recovered from the shock.[159] Most important
facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this
time:[160] the public income (over 300,000 gold florins) and
expenditure; the population of the city, here only roughly estimated,
according to the consumption of bread, in ‘bocche,’ _i.e._ mouths, put
at 90,000, and the population of the whole territory; the excess of 300
to 500 male children among the 5,800 to 6,000 annually baptized;[161]
the school-children, of whom 8,000 to 10,000 learned reading, 1,000 to
1,200 in six schools arithmetic; and besides these, 600 scholars who
were taught Latin grammar and logic in four schools. Then follow the
statistics of the churches and monasteries; of the hospitals, which held
more than a thousand beds; of the wool-trade, with its most valuable
details; of the mint, the provisioning of the city, the public
officials, and so on.[162] Incidentally we learn many curious facts;
how, for instance, when the public funds (‘monte’) were first
established, in the year 1353, the Franciscans spoke from the pulpit in
favour of the measure, the Dominicans and Augustinians against it.[163]
The economical results of the black death were and could be observed and
described nowhere else in all Europe as in this city.[164] Only a
Florentine could have left it on record how it was expected that the
scanty population would have made everything cheap, and how instead of
that labour and commodities doubled in price; how the common people at
first would do no work at all, but simply give themselves up to
enjoyment; how in the city itself servants and maids were not to be had
except at extravagant wages; how the peasants would only till the best
lands, and left the rest uncultivated; and how the enormous legacies
bequeathed to the poor at the time of the plague seemed afterwards
useless, since the poor had either died or had ceased to be poor.
Lastly, on the occasion of a great bequest, by which a childless
philanthropist left six ‘danari’ to every beggar in the city, the
attempt is made to give a comprehensive statistical account of
Florentine mendicancy.[165]
This statistical view of things was at a later time still more highly
cultivated at Florence. The noteworthy point about it is that, as a
rule, we can perceive its connection with the higher aspects of history,
with art, and with culture in general. An inventory of the year
1422[166] mentions, within the compass of the same document, the
seventy-two exchange offices which surrounded the ‘Mercato Nuovo;’ the
amount of coined money in circulation (two million golden florins); the
then new industry of gold spinning; the silk wares; Filippo Brunellesco,
then busy in digging classical architecture from its grave; and Lionardo
Aretino, secretary of the republic, at work at the revival of ancient
literature and eloquence; lastly, it speaks of the general prosperity of
the city, then free from political conflicts, and of the good fortune of
Italy, which had rid itself of foreign mercenaries. The Venetian
statistics quoted above (p. 70), which date from about the same year,
certainly give evidence of larger property and profits and of a more
extensive scene of action; Venice had long been mistress of the seas
before Florence sent out its first galleys (1422) to Alexandria. But no
reader can fail to recognise the higher spirit of the Florentine
documents. These and similar lists recur at intervals of ten years,
systematically arranged and tabulated, while elsewhere we find at best
occasional notices. We can form an approximate estimate of the property
and the business of the first Medici; they paid for charities, public
buildings, and taxes from 1434 to 1471 no less than 663,755 gold
florins, of which more than 400,000 fell on Cosimo alone, and Lorenzo
Magnifico was delighted that the money had been so well spent.[167] In
1472 we have again a most important and in its way complete view of the
commerce and trades of this city,[168] some of which may be wholly or
partly reckoned among the fine arts--such as those which had to do with
damasks and gold or silver embroidery, with woodcarving and ‘intarsia,’
with the sculpture of arabesques in marble and sandstone, with portraits
in wax, and with jewellery and work in gold. The inborn talent of the
Florentines for the systematisation of outward life is shown by their
books on agriculture, business, and domestic economy, which are markedly
superior to those of other European people in the fifteenth century. It
has been rightly decided to publish selections of these works,[169]
although no little study will be needed to extract clear and definite
results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in recognising
the city, where dying parents begged the Government in their wills to
fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practise a regular
profession.[170]
For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no state in the
world possesses a document like the magnificent description of Florence
by Varchi.[171] In descriptive statistics, as in so many things besides,
yet another model is left to us, before the freedom and greatness of the
city sank into the grave.[172]
This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly
accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we have
already referred.
Florence not only existed under political forms more varied than those
of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally, but it reflected
upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of the relations of
individuals and classes to a variable whole. The pictures of the great
civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as they are delineated in
Froissart, and the narratives of the German chroniclers of the
fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in
comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the
story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the
nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the
proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the
primacy of a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed
forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean
despotism--all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors
are laid bare to the light.[173] At length Macchiavelli in his
Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living
organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is
the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies
without our province to determine whether and in what points
Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the
case in his life of Castruccio Castracane--a fancy picture of the
typical despot. We might find something to say against every line of the
‘Istorie Fiorentine,’ and yet the great and unique value of the whole
would remain unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo
Pitti, Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of
illustrious names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us!
The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine
republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the
highest and most original life which the world could then show may
appear to one but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another
a devilish delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to
a third may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an
object of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was for
ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once powerful
and now conquered rivals like Pisa--a rule of which the necessary
consequence was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly
an extreme one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded
Florence to accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances,
would have been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal
union of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than
the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to
the scaffold.[174] From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph
sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarised it with
foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who
does not admire the people, which was wrought up by its venerated
preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time
in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole
history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The
glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem,
when looked at from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best
results shine forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were
‘fools,’ as Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon
Florence, but he confesses himself that they achieved things which
seemed incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would have
got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than that Florence
ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of
its enemies. It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and
gardens, and the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it
would have been the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling
memories.
In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the
earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so
also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was
always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually
changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison
a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The great modern
fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a
combination of existing forces and tendencies,[175] was constantly
cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli is not wholly free from
it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious
distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of
the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices,
sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive
the rich and the poor alike. They naïvely fetch their examples from
classical antiquity, and borrow the party names ‘ottimati,’
‘aristocrazia,’[176] as a matter of course. The world since then has
become used to these expressions and given them a conventional European
sense, whereas all former party names were purely national, and either
characterised the cause at issue or sprang from the caprice of accident.
But how a name colours or discolours a political cause!
But of all who thought it possible to construct a state, the greatest
beyond all comparison was Macchiavelli.[177] He treats existing forces
as living and active, takes a large and an accurate view of alternative
possibilities, and seeks to mislead neither himself nor others. No man
could be freer from vanity or ostentation; indeed, he does not write for
the public, but either for princes and administrators or for personal
friends. The danger for him does not lie in an affectation of genius or
in a false order of ideas, but rather in a powerful imagination which he
evidently controls with difficulty. The objectivity of his political
judgment is sometimes appalling in its sincerity; but it is the sign of
a time of no ordinary need and peril, when it was a hard matter to
believe in right, or to credit others with just dealing. Virtuous
indignation at his expense is thrown away upon us who have seen in what
sense political morality is understood by the statesmen of our own
century. Macchiavelli was at all events able to forget himself in his
cause. In truth, although his writings, with the exception of very few
words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the
Florentines themselves treated him at last as a criminal,[178] he was a
patriot in the fullest meaning of the word. But free as he was, like
most of his contemporaries, in speech and morals, the welfare of the
state was yet his first and last thought.
His most complete programme for the construction of a new political
system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to Leo X.,[179] composed
after the death of the younger Lorenzo Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519),
to whom he had dedicated his ‘Prince.’ The state was by that time in
extremities and utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not
always morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he
hopes to set up the republic in the form of a moderate democracy, as
heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of concessions to the
Pope, to the Pope’s various adherents, and to the different Florentine
interests, cannot be imagined; we might fancy ourselves looking into the
works of a clock. Principles, observations, comparisons, political
forecasts, and the like are to be found in numbers in the ‘Discorsi,’
among them flashes of wonderful insight. He recognises, for example, the
law of a continuous though not uniform development in republican
institutions, and requires the constitution to be flexible and capable
of change, as the only means of dispensing with bloodshed and
banishments. For a like reason, in order to guard against private
violence and foreign interference--‘the death of all freedom’--he wishes
to see introduced a judicial procedure (‘accusa’) against hated
citizens, in place of which Florence had hitherto had nothing but the
court of scandal. With a masterly hand the tardy and involuntary
decisions are characterised, which at critical moments play so important
a part in republican states. Once, it is true, he is misled by his
imagination and the pressure of events into unqualified praise of the
people, which chooses its officers, he says, better than any prince, and
which can be cured of its errors by ‘good advice.’[180] With regard to
the government of Tuscany, he has no doubt that it belongs to his native
city, and maintains, in a special ‘Discorso’ that the reconquest of Pisa
is a question of life or death; he deplores that Arezzo, after the
rebellion of 1502, was not razed to the ground; he admits in general
that Italian republics must be allowed to expand freely and add to their
territory in order to enjoy peace at home, and not to be themselves
attacked by others, but declares that Florence had always begun at the
wrong end, and from the first made deadly enemies of Pisa, Lucca, and
Siena, while Pistoja, ‘treated like a brother,’ had voluntarily
submitted to her.[181]
It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other
republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and this unique
city--the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the
modern European spirit. Siena suffered from the gravest organic
maladies, and its relative prosperity in art and industry must not
mislead us on this point. Æneas Sylvius[182] looks with longing from his
native town over to the ‘merry’ German imperial cities, where life is
embittered by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary
officials, and by no political factions.[183] Genoa scarcely comes
within range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took
almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera
was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher
culture.[184] Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a character, and
disturbed so violently the whole course of life, that we can hardly
understand how, after so many revolutions and invasions, the Genoese
ever contrived to return to an endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing
to the fact that nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the
same time almost without exception active men of business.[185] The
example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what insecurity wealth
and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of
distant colonies, are compatible.
Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
As the majority of the Italian states were in their internal
constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful
adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign
countries also a work of art. That nearly all of them were the result of
recent usurpations, was a fact which exercised as fatal an influence in
their foreign as in their internal policy. Not one of them recognised
another without reserve; the same play of chance which had helped to
found and consolidate one dynasty might upset another. Nor was it always
a matter of choice with the despot whether to keep quiet or not. The
necessity of movement and aggrandisement is common to all illegitimate
powers. Thus Italy became the scene of a ‘foreign policy’ which
gradually, as in other countries also, acquired the position of a
recognised system of public law. The purely objective treatment of
international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples,
attained a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty
and grandeur of its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression of a
bottomless abyss.
Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the
outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long
accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or
gradually so to reduce its strength that one state after another must
fall into her hands.[186] But on a closer view it is evident that this
complaint did not come from the people, but rather from the courts and
official classes, which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while
the mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence.
Even Florence,[187] with its restive subject cities, found itself in a
false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial jealousy
and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of
Cambray actually did strike a serious blow at the state (p. 68), which
all Italy ought to have supported with united strength.
The other states, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly,
and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which
their evil conscience might suggest. Ludovico Moro, the Aragonese kings
of Naples, and Sixtus IV.--to say nothing of the smaller powers--kept
Italy in a state of constant and perilous agitation. It would have been
well if the atrocious game had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the
nature of the case that intervention and help should at last be sought
from abroad--in particular from the French and the Turks.
The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of
France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking _naïveté_ its
old Guelph preference for the French.[188] And when Charles VIII.
actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with
an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed
unaccountable.[189] In the imagination of the Italians, to take
Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a wise, just, and
powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the difference that he
was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of
France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long
before all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and
Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what
inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their part, tried to
make use of France in a wholly different way. When the Franco-English
wars came to an end, when Louis XI. began to cast about his diplomatic
nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish
adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It
became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of
time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and
that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of
what was to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as
1642.[190] The mortal terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during
the Burgundian war, in which he was apparently the ally of Charles as
well as of Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from
both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.[191] The plan of an
equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by Lorenzo
the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic spirit,
which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and
the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the
best. When Louis XI. offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of
Naples and Sixtus IV., he replied, ‘I cannot set my own advantage above
the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the
French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do
so, Italy is lost.’[192] For the other princes, the King of France was
alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they
threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out
of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could
make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent
VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return
as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.[193]
Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the
expedition of Charles VIII.[194] And when Charles was back again on the
other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of
intervention had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was
understood too late that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had
become great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied
with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence and
territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised Italian
states, and indeed to copy them, only on a gigantic scale. Schemes of
annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely
multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of
Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held
the Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the
philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the
barbarians all came to a bad end.
Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too, with as
little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other
political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had
at various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken,
and Frederick II. had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the
Oriental nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived
the old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western
Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as
was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them,
there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not
conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II. and his
successors. And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of
it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the
cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of
Alfonso King of Naples.[195] From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta
nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks
into Italy.[196] But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom
Mohammed--at the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments,
especially of Venice[197]--had once wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards
hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II. against the Venetians.[198] The same
charge was brought against Ludovico Moro. ‘The blood of the slain, and
the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to God for
vengeance against him,’ says the state historian. In Venice, where the
government was informed of everything, it was known that Giovanni
Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of the Moor, had entertained the
Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan.[199] The two most respectable
among the Popes of the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died
in the deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed
amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to lead in
person; their successors embezzled the contributions sent for this
purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded the indulgences
granted in return for them into a private commercial speculation.[200]
Innocent VIII. consented to be gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a
salary paid by the prisoner’s brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI.
supported the steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further
a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter threatened
him with a Council.[201] It is clear that the notorious alliance
between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new or unheard of.
Indeed, we find instances of whole populations to whom it seemed no
particular crime to go over bodily to the Turks. Even if it were only
held out as a threat to oppressive governments, this is at least a proof
that the idea had become familiar. As early as 1480 Battista Mantovano
gives us clearly to understand that most of the inhabitants of the
Adriatic coast foresaw something of this kind, and that Ancona in
particular desired it.[202] When Romagna was suffering from the
oppressive government of Leo X., a deputy from Ravenna said openly to
the Legate, Cardinal Guilio Medici: ‘Monsignore, the honourable Republic
of Venice will not have us, for fear of a dispute with the Holy See; but
if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put ourselves into his hands.’[203]
It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the enslavement
of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least
secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it
under the Turkish rule.[204] By itself, divided as it was, it could
hardly have escaped this fate.
If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of this period
deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and
unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by
fear, passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern
fashion, with its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each
possessed he held in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant
nobility to foster in the mind of the prince the mediæval sense of
honour, with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors
were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular case
and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose services were
used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no pride of
caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the class
of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows
clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the
Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably
more accurate acquaintance with its own country and that of its
neighbours, than was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated
the economical and moral capacities of friend and foe down to the
smallest particular. The rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born
masters of statistical science. With such men negotiation was possible;
it might be presumed that they would be convinced and their opinion
modified when practical reasons were laid before them. When the great
Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of Filippo Maria Visconti, he
was able to satisfy his gaoler that the rule of the House of Anjou
instead of his own at Naples would make the French masters of Italy;
Filippo Maria set him free without ransom and made an alliance with
him.[205] A northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way,
certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like that of
Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of self-interest is
shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo the Magnificent, to the
universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante
at Naples--a man who would be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner,
and was by no means too scrupulous to do so.[206] For to arrest a
powerful monarch, and then to let him go alive, after extorting his
signature and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis
XI. at Péronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;[207] so that
Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or else not to
come back at all. The art of political persuasion was at this time
raised to a point--especially by the Venetian ambassadors--of which
northern nations first obtained a conception from the Italians, and of
which the official addresses give a most imperfect idea. These are mere
pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious
etiquette, was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank
speaking in diplomatic intercourse.[208] A man like Macchiavelli appears
in his ‘Legazioni’ in an almost pathetic light. Furnished with scanty
instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of inferior
rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his
pleasure in picturesque description. From that time Italy was and
remained the country of political ‘Istruzioni’ and ‘Relazioni.’ There
was doubtless plenty of diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy
alone at so early a period has preserved documentary evidence of it in
considerable quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the life
of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the hand of Pontano
and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander VI., gives us the highest
opinion of this class of political writing, although it is only quoted
incidentally and as one of many written. And how many other despatches,
as important and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of
this and later times, still remain unknown or unedited![209]
A special division of this work will treat of the study of man
individually and nationally, which among the Italians went hand in hand
with the study of the outward conditions of human life.
CHAPTER IX.
WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
It must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed
the character of a product of reflection.[210] Throughout the countries
of the West the education of the individual soldier in the middle ages
was perfect within the limits of the then prevalent system of defence
and attack: nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts of
besieging and of fortification. But the development both of strategy and
of tactics was hindered by the character and duration of military
service, and by the ambition of the nobles, who disputed questions of
precedence in the face of the enemy, and through simple want of
discipline caused the loss of great battles like Crécy and Maupertuis.
Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of
mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organisation; and
the early introduction of fire-arms did its part in making war a
democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable
to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of
the gun-founder, and of the artillerist--men belonging to another class
than the nobility--was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was
felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the
soul of the small and admirably-organised bands of mercenaries, would
suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a
distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the
introduction at least of the musket, which had been lately invented in
Germany.[211] We read that Paolo Vitelli,[212] while recognising and
himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of
the captured ‘schioppettieri,’ of the enemy, because he held it unworthy
that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid
low by a common, despised foot soldier. On the whole, however, the new
discoveries were accepted and turned to useful account, till the
Italians became the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of
fortifications and in the means of attacking them.[213] Princes like
Federigo of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the
subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian I. appears
superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there existed a
comprehensive science and art of military affairs; here, for the first
time, that impartial delight is taken in able generalship for its own
sake, which might, indeed, be expected from the frequent change of party
and from the wholly unsentimental mode of action of the Condottieri.
During the Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco
Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter were
attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei Pandoni, commissioned
by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign.[214] It is
written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in
the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Cæsar’s
Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like.
Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether
Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,[215] Piccinino through
the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But
something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army;
the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks,
praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to
posterity.[216] Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich
in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of
educated men in general as well as of specialists, while the
contemporary narratives of northerners, such as the ‘Burgundian War’ by
Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact
dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest _dilettante_ who has ever
treated in that character[217] of military affairs, was then busy
writing his ‘Arte della Guerra.’ But the development of the individual
soldier found its most complete expression in those public and solemn
conflicts between one or more pairs of combatants which were practised
long before the famous ‘Challenge of Barletta’[218] (1503). The victor
was assured of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to
the Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer regarded
as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit, and to the
minds of the spectators seemed to be both the decision of an exciting
competition and a satisfaction for the honour of the army or the
nation.[219]
It is obvious that this purely rational treatment of warlike affairs
allowed, under certain circumstances, of the worst atrocities, even in
the absence of a strong political hatred, as, for instance, when the
plunder of a city had been promised to the troops. After the four days’
devastation of Piacenza, which Sforza was compelled to permit to his
soldiers (1447), the town long stood empty, and at last had to be
peopled by force.[220] Yet outrages like these were nothing compared
with the misery which was afterwards brought upon Italy by foreign
troops, and most of all by the Spaniards, in whom perhaps a touch of
Oriental blood, perhaps familiarity with the spectacles of the
Inquisition, had unloosed the devilish element of human nature. After
seeing them at work at Prato, Rome, and elsewhere, it is not easy to
take any interest of the higher sort in Ferdinand the Catholic and
Charles V., who knew what these hordes were, and yet unchained them. The
mass of documents which are gradually brought to light from the cabinets
of these rulers will always remain an important source of historical
information; but from such men no fruitful political conception can be
looked for.
CHAPTER X.
THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
The Papacy and the dominions of the Church[221] are creations of so
peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the general
characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only occasionally.
The deliberate choice and adaptation of political expedients, which
gives so great an interest to the other states, is what we find least of
all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or
supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this state
undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century,
when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown
into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and a great statesman
and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who again brought the
ecclesiastical state into complete subjection. The danger of a final
dissolution was still greater at the time of the schism, when neither
the Roman nor the French Pope was rich enough to reconquer the
newly-lost state; but this was done under Martin V., after the unity of
the Church was restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the
same danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and remained a
thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in and near Rome itself, the
Papacy was defied by the great families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli,
and Anguillara; in Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic
republics had almost ceased to exist, for whose devotion the Papacy had
showed so little gratitude; their place had been taken by a crowd of
princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty and obedience
signified little. As self-dependent powers, standing on their own
merits, they have an interest of their own; and from this point of view
the most important of them have been already discussed (pp. 28 sqq., 44
sqq.).
Nevertheless, a few general remarks on the Papacy can hardly be
dispensed with. New and strange perils and trials came upon it in the
course of the fifteenth century, as the political spirit of the nation
began to lay hold upon it on various sides, and to draw it within the
sphere of its action. The least of these dangers came from the populace
or from abroad; the most serious had their ground in the characters of
the Popes themselves.
Let us, for this moment, leave out of consideration the countries beyond
the Alps. At the time when the Papacy was exposed to mortal danger in
Italy, it neither received nor could receive the slightest assistance
either from France, then under Louis XI., or from England, distracted by
the wars of the Roses, or from the then disorganized Spanish monarchy,
or from Germany, but lately betrayed at the Council of Basel. In Italy
itself there were a certain number of instructed and even uninstructed
people, whose national vanity was flattered by the Italian character of
the Papacy; the personal interests of very many depended on its having
and retaining this character; and vast masses of the people still
believed in the virtue of the Papal blessing and consecration;[222]
among them notorious transgressors like that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who
still prayed to be absolved by Alexander VI., when the Pope’s son had
him slaughtered.[223] But all these grounds of sympathy put together
would not have sufficed to save the Papacy from its enemies, had the
latter been really in earnest, and had they known how to take advantage
of the envy and hatred with which the institution was regarded.
And at the very time when the prospect of help from without was so
small, the most dangerous symptoms appeared within the Papacy itself.
Living, as it now did, and acting in the spirit of the secular Italian
principalities, it was compelled to go through the same dark experiences
as they; but its own exceptional nature gave a peculiar colour to the
shadows.
As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, small account was taken
of its internal agitations, so many were the Popes who had returned
after being expelled by popular tumult, and so greatly did the presence
of the Curia minister to the interests of the Roman people. But Rome not
only displayed at times a specific anti-papal radicalism,[224] but in
the most serious plots which were then contrived, gave proof of the
working of unseen hands from without. It was so in the case of the
conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro against Nicholas V. (1453), the very Pope
who had done most for the prosperity of the city, but who, by enriching
the cardinals, and transforming Rome into a papal fortress, had aroused
the discontent of the people.[225] Porcaro aimed at the complete
overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices,
who, though their names are not handed down to us,[226] are certainly
to be looked for among the Italian governments of the time. Under the
pontificate of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous
declamation against the gift of Constantine, with the wish for the
speedy secularisation of the States of the Church.[227]
The Catilinarian gang, with which Pius II. had to contend[228] (1460),
avowed with equal frankness their resolution to overthrow the government
of the priests, and its leader, Tiburzio, threw the blame on the
soothsayers, who had fixed the accomplishment of his wishes for this
very year. Several of the chief men of Rome, the Prince of Tarentum, and
the Condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, were accomplices and supporters of
Tiburzio. Indeed, when we think of the booty which was accumulated in
the palaces of wealthy prelates--the conspirators had the Cardinal of
Aquileia especially in view--we are surprised that, in an almost
unguarded city, such attempts were not more frequent and more
successful. It was not without reason that Pius II. preferred to reside
anywhere rather than in Rome, and even Paul II.[229] was exposed to no
small anxiety through a plot formed by some discharged abbreviators,
who, under the command of Platina, besieged the Vatican for twenty days.
The Papacy must sooner or later have fallen a victim to such
enterprises, if it had not stamped out the aristocratic factions under
whose protection these bands of robbers grew to a head.
This task was undertaken by the terrible Sixtus IV. He was the first
Pope who had Rome and the neighbourhood thoroughly under his control,
especially after his successful attack on the House of Colonna, and
consequently, both in his Italian policy and in the internal affairs of
the Church, he could venture to act with a defiant audacity, and to set
at nought the complaints and threats to summon a council which arose
from all parts of Europe. He supplied himself with the necessary funds
by simony, which suddenly grew to unheard-of proportions, and which
extended from the appointment of cardinals down to the granting of the
smallest favours.[230] Sixtus himself had not obtained the papal dignity
without recourse to the same means.
A corruption so universal might sooner or later bring disastrous
consequences on the Holy See, but they lay in the uncertain future. It
was otherwise with nepotism, which threatened at one time to destroy the
Papacy altogether. Of all the ‘nipoti,’ Cardinal Pietro Riario enjoyed
at first the chief and almost exclusive favour of Sixtus. He soon drew
upon him the eyes of all Italy,[231] partly by the fabulous luxury of
his life, partly through the reports which were current of his
irreligion and his political plans. He bargained with Duke Galeazzo
Maria of Milan (1473), that the latter should become King of Lombardy,
and then aid him with money and troops to return to Rome and ascend the
papal throne; Sixtus, it appears, would have voluntarily yielded it to
him.[232] This plan, which, by making the Papacy hereditary, would have
ended in the secularization of the papal state, failed through the
sudden death of Pietro. The second ‘nipote,’ Girolamo Riario, remained a
layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From this time the ‘nipoti,’
by their endeavours to found principalities for themselves, became a new
source of confusion to Italy. It had already happened that the Popes
tried to make good their feudal claims on Naples in favour of their
relatives;[233] but since the failure of Calixtus III. such a scheme was
no longer practicable, and Girolamo Riario, after the attempt to conquer
Florence (and who knows how many other places) had failed, was forced to
content himself with founding a state within the limits of the papal
dominions themselves. This was, in so far, justifiable, as Romagna, with
its princes and civic despots, threatened to shake off the papal
supremacy altogether, and ran the risk of shortly falling a prey to
Sforza or the Venetians, when Rome interfered to prevent it. But who, at
times and in circumstances like these, could guarantee the continued
obedience of ‘nipoti’ and their descendants, now turned into sovereign
rulers, to Popes with whom they had no further concern? Even in his
lifetime the Pope was not always sure of his own son or nephew, and the
temptation was strong to expel the ‘nipote’ of a predecessor and replace
him by one of his own. The reaction of the whole system on the Papacy
itself was of the most serious character; all means of compulsion,
whether temporal or spiritual, were used without scruple for the most
questionable ends, and to these all the other objects of the Apostolic
See were made subordinate. And when they were attained, at whatever cost
of revolutions and proscriptions, a dynasty was founded which had no
stronger interest than the destruction of the Papacy.
At the death of Sixtus, Girolamo was only able to maintain himself in
his usurped principality of Forli and Imola by the utmost exertions of
his own, and by the aid of the House of Sforza. He was murdered in 1488.
In the conclave (1484) which followed the death of Sixtus--that in which
Innocent VIII. was elected--an incident occurred which seemed to furnish
the Papacy with a new external guarantee. Two cardinals, who, at the
same time, were princes of ruling houses, Giovanni d’Aragona, son of
King Ferrante, and Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Moor, sold their votes
with the most shameless effrontery;[234] so that, at any rate, the
ruling houses of Naples and Milan became interested, by their
participation in the booty, in the continuance of the papal system. Once
again, in the following Conclave, when all the cardinals but five sold
themselves, Ascanio received enormous sums in bribes, not without
cherishing the hope that at the next election he would himself be the
favoured candidate.[235]
Lorenzo the Magnificent, on his part, was anxious that the House of
Medici should not be sent away with empty hands. He married his daughter
Maddalena to the son of the new Pope--the first who publicly
acknowledged his children--Franceschetto Cybò, and expected not only
favours of all kinds for his own son, Cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo
X., but also the rapid promotion of his son-in-law.[236] But with
respect to the latter, he demanded impossibilities. Under Innocent VIII.
there was no opportunity for the audacious nepotism by which states had
been founded, since Franceschetto himself was a poor creature who, like
his father the Pope, sought power only for the lowest purpose of
all--the acquisition and accumulation of money.[237] The manner,
however, in which father and son practised this occupation must have led
sooner or later to a final catastrophe--the dissolution of the state. If
Sixtus had filled his treasury by the rule of spiritual dignities and
favours, Innocent and his son, for their part, established an office for
the sale of secular favours, in which pardons for murder and
manslaughter were sold for large sums of money. Out of every fine 150
ducats were paid into the papal exchequer, and what was over to
Franceschetto. Rome, during the latter part of this pontificate, swarmed
with licensed and unlicensed assassins; the factions, which Sixtus had
begun to put down, were again as active as ever; the Pope, well guarded
in the Vatican, was satisfied with now and then laying a trap, in which
a wealthy misdoer was occasionally caught. For Franceschetto the chief
point was to know by what means, when the Pope died, he could escape
with well-filled coffers. He betrayed himself at last, on the occasion
of a false report (1490) of his father’s death; he endeavoured to carry
off all the money in the papal treasury, and when this proved
impossible, insisted that, at all events, the Turkish prince, Djem,
should go with him, and serve as a living capital, to be advantageously
disposed of, perhaps to Ferrante of Naples.[238] It is hard to estimate
the political possibilities of remote periods, but we cannot help asking
ourselves the question, if Rome could have survived two or three
pontificates of this kind. Even with reference to the believing
countries of Europe, it was imprudent to let matters go so far that not
only travellers and pilgrims, but a whole embassy of Maximilian, King of
the Romans, were stripped to their shirts in the neighbourhood of Rome,
and that envoys had constantly to turn back without setting foot within
the city.
Such a condition of things was incompatible with the conception of power
and its pleasures which inspired the gifted Alexander VI. (1492-1503),
and the first event that happened was the restoration, at least
provisionally, of public order, and the punctual payment of every
salary.
Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian
civilization, this pontificate might be passed over, since the Borgias
are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander spoke Spanish in
public with Cæsar; Lucretia, at her entrance to Ferrara, where she wore
a Spanish costume, was sung to by Spanish buffoons; their confidential
servants consisted of Spaniards, as did also the most ill-famed company
of the troops of Cæsar in the war of 1500; and even his hangman, Don
Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastian Pinzon,[239] seem to have been
of the same nation. Among his other achievements, Cæsar, in true Spanish
fashion, killed, according to the rules of the craft, six wild bulls in
an enclosed court. But the Roman corruption, which seemed to culminate
in this family, was already far advanced when they came to the city.
What they were and what they did has been often and fully
described.[240] Their immediate purpose, which, in fact, they attained,
was the complete subjugation of the pontifical state. All the petty
despots,[241] who were mostly more or less refractory vassals of the
Church, were expelled or destroyed; and in Rome itself the two great
factions were annihilated, the so-called Guelph Orsini as well as the
so-called Ghibelline Colonna. But the means employed were of so
frightful a character, that they must certainly have ended in the ruin
of the Papacy, had not the contemporaneous death of both father and son
by poison suddenly intervened to alter the whole aspect of the
situation. The moral indignation of Christendom was certainly no great
source of danger to Alexander; at home he was strong enough to extort
terror and obedience; foreign rulers were won over to his side, and
Louis XII. even aided him to the utmost of his power. The mass of the
people throughout Europe had hardly a conception of what was passing in
Central Italy. The only moment which was really fraught with
danger--when Charles VIII. was in Italy--went by with unexpected
fortune, and even then it was not the Papacy as such that was in peril,
but Alexander, who risked being supplanted by a more respectable
Pope.[242] The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy
lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his son Cæsar Borgia.
In the nature of the father, ambition, avarice, and sensuality were
combined with strong and brilliant qualities. All the pleasures of power
and luxury he granted himself from the first day of his pontificate in
the fullest measure. In the choice of means to this end he was wholly
without scruple; it was known at once that he would more than compensate
himself for the sacrifices which his election had involved,[243] and
that the simony of the seller would far exceed the simony of the buyer.
It must be remembered that the vice-chancellorship and other offices
which Alexander had formerly held had taught him to know better and turn
to more practical account the various sources of revenue than any other
member of the Curia. As early as 1494, a Carmelite, Adam of Genoa, who
had preached at Rome against simony, was found murdered in his bed with
twenty wounds. Hardly a single cardinal was appointed without the
payment of enormous sums of money.
But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence of his son
Cæsar Borgia, his violent measures assumed that character of devilish
wickedness which necessarily reacts upon the ends pursued. What was done
in the struggle with the Roman nobles and with the tyrants of Romagna
exceeded in faithlessness and barbarity even that measure to which the
Aragonese rulers of Naples had already accustomed the world; and the
genius for deception was also greater. The manner in which Cæsar
isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other
relations or courtiers, whenever their favour with the Pope or their
position in any other respect became inconvenient to him, is literally
appalling. Alexander was forced to acquiesce in the murder of his
best-loved son, the Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly
dread of Cæsar.[244]
What were the final aims of the latter? Even in the last months of his
tyranny, when he had murdered the Condottieri at Sinigaglia, and was to
all intents and purposes master of the ecclesiastical state (1503) those
who stood near him gave the modest reply, that the Duke merely wished to
put down the factions and the despots, and all for the good of the
Church only; that for himself he desired nothing more than the lordship
of the Romagna, and that he had earned the gratitude of all the
following Popes by ridding them of the Orsini and Colonna.[245] But no
one will accept this as his ultimate design. The Pope Alexander himself,
in his discussions with the Venetian ambassador, went farther than this,
when committing his son to the protection of Venice: ‘I will see to it,’
he said, ‘that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to
you.’[246] Cæsar certainly added that no one could become Pope without
the consent of Venice, and for this end the Venetian cardinals had only
to keep well together. Whether he referred to himself or not we are
unable to say; at all events, the declaration of his father is
sufficient to prove his designs on the pontifical throne. We further
obtain from Lucrezia Borgia a certain amount of indirect evidence, in so
far as certain passages in the poems of Ercole Strozza may be the echo
of expressions which she as Duchess of Ferrara may easily have permitted
herself to use. Here too Cæsar’s hopes of the Papacy are chiefly spoken
of;[247] but now and then a supremacy over all Italy is hinted at,[248]
and finally we are given to understand that as temporal ruler Cæsar’s
projects were of the greatest, and that for their sake he had formerly
surrendered his cardinalate.[249] In fact, there can be no doubt
whatever that Cæsar, whether chosen Pope or not after the death of
Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost,
and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could not
as Pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody, could have
secularised the States of the Church, and he would have been forced to
do so in order to keep them.[250] Unless we are much deceived, this is
the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Macchiavelli treats
the great criminal; from Cæsar, or from nobody, could it be hoped that
he ‘would draw the steel from the wound,’ in other words, annihilate the
Papacy--the source of all foreign intervention and of all the divisions
of Italy. The intriguers who thought to divine Cæsar’s aims, when
holding out to him hopes of the kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been
dismissed with contempt.[251]
But all logical conclusions from his premisses are idle, not because of
the unaccountable genius which in fact characterized him as little as it
did the Duke of Friedland, but because the means which he employed were
not compatible with any large and consistent course of action. Perhaps,
indeed, in the very excess of his wickedness some prospect of salvation
for the Papacy may have existed even without the accident which put an
end to his rule.
Even if we assume that the destruction of the petty despots in the
pontifical state had gained for him nothing but sympathy, even if we
take as proof of his great projects the army, composed of the best
soldiers and officers in Italy, with Lionardo da Vinci as chief
engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1503, other facts nevertheless
wear such a character of unreason that our judgment, like that of
contemporary observers, is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of
this kind is the devastation and maltreatment of the newly won state,
which Cæsar still intended to keep and to rule over.[252] Another is
the condition of Rome and of the Curia in the last decades of the
pontificate. Whether it were that father and son had drawn up a formal
list of proscribed persons,[253] or that the murders were resolved upon
one by one, in either case the Borgias were bent on the secret
destruction of all who stood in their way or whose inheritance they
coveted. Of this money and movable goods formed the smallest part; it
was a much greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the
clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death, and that
he received the revenues of their offices while vacant, and the price of
these offices when they were filled by the successors of the murdered
men. The Venetian ambassador, Paolo Capello[254] announces in the year
1500: ‘Every night four or five murdered men are discovered--bishops,
prelates and others--so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being
destroyed by the Duke (Cæsar).’ He himself used to wander about Rome in
the night time with his guards,[255] and there is every reason to
believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from
showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his
insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on the persons of those unknown to
him.
As early as the year 1499 the despair was so great and so general that
many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put to death.[256] But those
whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence, fell victims to
their poison. For the cases in which a certain amount of discretion
seemed requisite, a white powder[257] of an agreeable taste was made use
of, which did not work on the spot, but slowly and gradually, and which
could be mixed without notice in any dish or goblet. Prince Djem had
taken some of it in a sweet draught, before Alexander surrendered him to
Charles VIII. (1495), and at the end of their career father and son
poisoned themselves with the same powder by accidentally tasting a
sweetmeat intended for a wealthy cardinal, probably Adrian of
Corneto.[258] The official epitomiser of the history of the Popes,
Onufrio Panvinio,[259] mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio, and
Michiel, whom Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth,
Giovanni Borgia, whom Cæsar took into his own charge--though probably
wealthy prelates seldom died in Rome at that time without giving rise to
suspicions of this sort. Even tranquil students who had withdrawn to
some provincial town were not out of reach of the merciless poison. A
secret horror seemed to hang about the Pope; storms and thunderbolts,
crushing in walls and chambers, had in earlier times often visited and
alarmed him; in the year 1500,[260] when these phenomena were repeated,
they were held to be ‘cosa diabolica.’ The report of these events seems
at last, through the well-attended jubilee[261] of 1500, to have been
carried far and wide throughout the countries of Europe, and the
infamous traffic in indulgences did what else was needed to draw all
eyes upon Rome.[262] Besides the returning pilgrims, strange white-robed
penitents came from Italy to the North, among them disguised fugitives
from the Papal State, who are not likely to have been silent. Yet none
can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of Christendom might
have gone, before they became a source of pressing danger to Alexander.
‘He would,’ says Panvinio elsewhere,[263] ‘have put all the other rich
cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he
not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by
death.’ And what might not Cæsar have achieved if, at the moment when
his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sick-bed! What a
conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all his weapons, he
had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had
judiciously reduced by poison--and this at a time when there was no
French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses
itself in an abyss.
Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III. was elected,
and, after his speedy death, that which chose Julius II.--both elections
the fruits of a general reaction.
Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II. in all essential
respects he was the saviour of the Papacy. His familiarity with the
course of events since the pontificate of his uncle Sixtus had given him
a profound insight into the grounds and conditions of the Papal
authority. On these he founded his own policy, and devoted to it the
whole force and passion of his unshaken soul. He ascended the steps of
St. Peter’s chair without simony and amid general applause, and with him
ceased, at all events, the undisguised traffic in the highest offices of
the Church. Julius had favourites, and among them were some the reverse
of worthy, but a special fortune put him above the temptation to
nepotism. His brother, Giovanni della Rovere, was the husband of the
heiress of Urbino, sister of the last Montefeltro Guidobaldo, and from
this marriage was born, in 1491, a son, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
who was at the same time Papal ‘nipote’ and lawful heir to the duchy of
Urbino. What Julius elsewhere acquired, either on the field of battle or
by diplomatic means, he proudly bestowed on the Church, not on his
family; the ecclesiastical territory, which he found in a state of
dissolution, he bequeathed to his successor completely subdued, and
increased by Parma and Piacenza. It was not his fault that Ferrara too
was not added to the dominions of the Church. The 700,000 ducats, which
were stored up in the castle of St. Angelo, were to be delivered by the
governor to none but the future Pope. He made himself heir of the
cardinals, and, indeed, of all the clergy who died in Rome, and this by
the most despotic means; but he murdered or poisoned none of them.[264]
That he should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an
unavoidable necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at a time
when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer or anvil, and when
personality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If,
despite all his high-sounding ‘Away with the barbarians!’ he
nevertheless contributed more than any man to the firm settlement of the
Spaniards in Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to
the Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And to whom,
sooner than to Spain, could the Church look for a sincere and lasting
respect,[265] in an age when the princes of Italy cherished none but
sacrilegious projects against her? Be this as it may, the powerful,
original nature, which could swallow no anger and conceal no genuine
good-will, made on the whole the impression most desirable in his
situation--that of the ‘Pontefice terribile.’ He could even, with a
comparatively clear conscience, venture to summon a council to Rome, and
so bid defiance to that outcry for a council which was raised by the
opposition all over Europe. A ruler of this stamp needed some great
outward symbol of his conceptions; Julius found it in the reconstruction
of St. Peter’s. The plan of it, as Bramante wished to have it, is
perhaps the grandest expression of power in unity which can be imagined.
In other arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope
live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance
that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of a wholly
different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for his predecessors.
The entrance into Bologna, at the end of the ‘Iter Julii Secundi,’ by
the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendour of its own, and Giovan
Antonio Flaminio,[266] in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the
patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.
In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced
the simony of the Papal elections.[267] After his death in 1513, the
money-loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition by proposing that
the endowments and offices hitherto held by the chosen candidate should
be equally divided among themselves, in which case they would have
elected the best-endowed cardinal, the incompetent Rafael Riario.[268]
But a reaction, chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred
College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered the
miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected--the famous
Leo X.
We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the
Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy
was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we
do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis,
Riario, and Corneto (1517) which at most could have occasioned a change
of persons, and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of
creation of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the
additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real
merit.[269]
But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread during the
first two years of his office were perilous to the last degree. He
seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation, the kingdom of Naples
for his brother Giuliano, and for his nephew Lorenzo a powerful North
Italian state, to comprise Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.[270] It
is clear that the Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would
have become a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would
have been no further need to secularise it.
The plan found an insuperable obstacle in the political conditions of
the time. Giuliano died early. To provide for Lorenzo, Leo undertook to
expel the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, but reaped from
the war nothing but hatred and poverty, and was forced, when in 1519
Lorenzo followed his uncle to the grave, to hand over the hardly-won
conquests to the Church.[271] He did on compulsion and without credit
what, if it had been done voluntarily, would have been to his lasting
honour. What, partly alone, and partly in alternate negotiations with
Francis I. and Charles V., he attempted against Alfonso of Ferrara, and
actually achieved against a few petty despots and Condottieri, was
assuredly not of a kind to raise his reputation. And this was at a time
when the monarchs of the West were yearly growing more and more
accustomed to political gambling on a colossal scale, of which the
stakes were this or that province of Italy.[272] Who could guarantee
that, since the last decades had seen so great an increase of their
power at home, their ambition could stop short of the States of the
Church? Leo himself witnessed the prelude of what was fulfilled in the
year 1527; a few bands of Spanish infantry appeared--of their own
accord, it seems--at the end of 1520, on the borders of the Pontifical
territory, with a view of laying the Pope under contribution,[273] but
were driven back by the Papal forces. The public feeling, too, against
the corruptions of the hierarchy had of late years been drawing rapidly
to a head, and men with an eye for the future, like the younger Pico
della Mirandola, called urgently for reform.[274] Meantime Luther had
already appeared upon the scene.
Under Adrian VI. (1522-1523), the few and timid improvements, carried
out in the face of the great German Reformation, came too late. He could
do little more than proclaim his horror of the course which things had
taken hitherto, of simony, nepotism, prodigality, brigandage, and
profligacy. The danger from the side of the Lutherans was by no means
the greatest; an acute observer from Venice, Girolamo Negro, uttered his
fears that a speedy and terrible disaster would befall the city of Rome
itself.[275]
Under Clement VII. the whole horizon of Rome was filled with vapours,
like that leaden veil which the scirocco draws over the Campagna, and
which makes the last months of summer so deadly. The Pope was no less
detested at home than abroad. Thoughtful people were filled with
anxiety,[276] hermits appeared upon the streets and squares of Rome,
foretelling the fate of Italy and of the world, and calling the Pope by
the name of Antichrist;[277] the faction of the Colonna raised its head
defiantly; the indomitable Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, whose mere
existence[278] was a permanent menace to the Papacy, ventured to
surprise the city in 1526, hoping with the help of Charles V., to become
Pope then and there, as soon as Clement was killed or captured. It was
no piece of good fortune for Rome that the latter was able to escape to
the Castle of St. Angelo, and the fate for which himself was reserved
may well be called worse than death.
By a series of those falsehoods, which only the powerful can venture on,
but which bring ruin upon the weak, Clement brought about the advance of
the Germano-Spanish army under Bourbon and Frundsberg (1527). It is
certain[279] that the Cabinet of Charles V. intended to inflict on him a
severe castigation, and that it could not calculate beforehand how far
the zeal of its unpaid hordes would carry them. It would have been vain
to attempt to enlist men in Germany without paying any bounty, if it had
not been well known that Rome was the object of the expedition. It may
be that the written orders to Bourbon will be found some day or other,
and it is not improbable that they will prove to be worded mildly. But
historical criticism will not allow itself to be led astray. The
Catholic King and Emperor owed it to his luck and nothing else, that
Pope and cardinals were not murdered by his troops. Had this happened,
no sophistry in the world could clear him of his share in the guilt. The
massacre of countless people of less consequence, the plunder of the
rest, and all the horrors of torture and traffic in human life, show
clearly enough what was possible in the ‘Sacco di Roma.’
Charles seems to have wished to bring the Pope, who had fled a second
time to the Castle of St. Angelo, to Naples, after extorting from him
vast sums of money, and Clement’s flight to Orvieto must have happened
without any connivance on the part of Spain.[280] Whether the Emperor
ever thought seriously of the secularisation of the States of the
Church,[281] for which everybody was quite prepared, and whether he was
really dissuaded from it by the representations of Henry VIII. of
England, will probably never be made clear.
But if such projects really existed, they cannot have lasted long: from
the devastated city arose a new spirit of reform both in Church and
State. It made itself felt in a moment. Cardinal Sadoleto, one witness
of many, thus writes: ‘If through our suffering a satisfaction is made
to the wrath and justice of God, if these fearful punishments again open
the way to better laws and morals, then is our misfortune perhaps not of
the greatest.... What belongs to God He will take care of; before us
lies a life of reformation, which no violence can take from us. Let us
so rule our deeds and thoughts as to seek in God only the true glory of
the priesthood and our own true greatness and power.’[282]
In point of fact, this critical year, 1527, so far bore fruit, that the
voices of serious men could again make themselves heard. Rome had
suffered too much to return, even under a Paul III., to the gay
corruption of Leo X.
The Papacy, too, when its sufferings became so great, began to excite a
sympathy half religious and half political. The kings could not tolerate
that one of their number should arrogate to himself the rights of Papal
gaoler, and concluded (August 18, 1527) the Treaty of Amiens, one of the
objects of which was the deliverance of Clement. They thus, at all
events, turned to their own account the unpopularity which the deeds of
the Imperial troops had excited. At the same time the Emperor became
seriously embarrassed, even in Spain, where the prelates and grandees
never saw him without making the most urgent remonstrances. When a
general deputation of the clergy and laity, all clothed in mourning, was
projected, Charles, fearing that troubles might arise out of it, like
those of the insurrection quelled a few years before, forbad the
scheme.[283] Not only did he not dare to prolong the maltreatment of the
Pope, but he was absolutely compelled, even apart from all
considerations of foreign politics, to be reconciled with the Papacy
which he had so grievously wounded. For the temper of the German people,
which certainly pointed to a different course, seemed to him, like
German affairs generally, to afford no foundation for a policy. It is
possible, too, as a Venetian maintains,[284] that the memory of the sack
of Rome lay heavy on his conscience, and tended to hasten that expiation
which was sealed by the permanent subjection of the Florentines to the
Medicean family of which the Pope was a member. The ‘nipote’ and new
Duke, Alessandro Medici, was married to the natural daughter of the
Emperor.
In the following years the plan of a Council enabled Charles to keep the
Papacy in all essential points under his control, and at one and the
same time to protect and to oppress it. The greatest danger of
all--secularisation--the danger which came from within, from the Popes
themselves and their ‘nipoti,’ was adjourned for centuries by the German
Reformation. Just as this alone had made the expedition against Rome
(1527) possible and successful, so did it compel the Papacy to become
once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise
itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself
at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. The institution thus
developed during the latter years of Clement VII., and under Paul III.,
Paul IV., and their successors, in the face of the defection of half
Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great
and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism, with its
attempts at territorial aggrandisement,[285] and which, in alliance with
the Catholic princes, and impelled by a new-born spiritual force, found
its chief work in the recovery of what had been lost. It only existed
and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it
can be said with perfect truth that, the moral salvation of the Papacy
is due to its mortal enemies. And now its political position, too,
though certainly under the permanent tutelage of Spain, became
impregnable; almost without effort it inherited, on the extinction of
its vassals, the legitimate line of Este and the house of Della Rovere,
the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino. But without the Reformation--if,
indeed, it is possible to think it away--the whole ecclesiastical State
would long ago have passed into secular hands.
* * * * *
In conclusion, let us briefly consider the effect of these political
circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.
It is evident that the general political uncertainty in Italy during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was of a kind to excite in the
better spirits of the time a patriotic disgust and opposition. Dante and
Petrarch,[286] in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the
object of the highest efforts of all her children. It may be objected
that this was only the enthusiasm of a few highly-instructed men, in
which the mass of the people had no share; but it can hardly have been
otherwise even in Germany, although in name at least that country was
united, and recognised in the Emperor one supreme head. The first
patriotic utterances of German Literature, if we except some verses of
the ‘Minnesänger,’ belong to the humanists of the time of Maximilian
I.[287] and after, and read like an echo of Italian declamations, or
like a reply to Italian criticism on the intellectual immaturity of
Germany. And yet, as a matter of fact, Germany had been long a nation in
a truer sense than Italy ever was since the Roman days. France owes the
consciousness of its national unity mainly to its conflicts with the
English, and Spain has never permanently succeeded in absorbing
Portugal, closely related as the two countries are. For Italy, the
existence of the ecclesiastical State, and the conditions under which
alone it could continue, were a permanent obstacle to national unity, an
obstacle whose removal seemed hopeless. When, therefore, in the
political intercourse of the fifteenth century, the common fatherland is
sometimes emphatically named, it is done in most cases to annoy some
other Italian State.[288] The first decades of the sixteenth century,
the years when the Renaissance attained its fullest bloom, were not
favourable to a revival of patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and
artistic pleasures, the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme
interests of self-development, destroyed or hampered the love of
country. But those deeply serious and sorrowful appeals to national
sentiment were not heard again till later, when the time for unity had
gone by, when the country was inundated with Frenchmen and Spaniards,
and when a German army had conquered Rome. The sense of local patriotism
may be said in some measure to have taken the place of this feeling,
though it was but a poor equivalent for it.
_PART II._
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
CHAPTER I.
THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
In the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms, lies,
not the only, but the chief reason for the early development of the
Italian. To this it is due that he was the first-born among the sons of
modern Europe.
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was
turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half
awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and
childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen
clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a
race, people, party, family, or corporation--only through some general
category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an _objective_
treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this
world became possible. The _subjective_ side at the same time asserted
itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual
_individual_,[289] and recognised himself as such. In the same way the
Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian
had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew
themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show
that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of
Italy.
In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free
personality which in Northern Europe either did not occur at all, or
could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious
wrongdoers in the sixteenth century described to us by Luidprand, some
of the contemporaries of Gregory VII., and a few of the opponents of the
first Hohenstaufen, show us characters of this kind. But at the close of
the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the
charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures
meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante’s great poem
would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for
the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy
the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth,
was the most national herald of his time. But this unfolding of the
treasures of human nature in literature and art--this many-sided
representation and criticism--will be discussed in separate chapters;
here we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself. This fact
appears in the most decisive and unmistakeable form. The Italians of the
fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any
shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and
seeming[290] unlike his neighbours.[291]
Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the
individuality not only of the tyrant or Condottiere himself,[292] but
also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools--the secretary,
minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the
inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their
enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain
the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and
influence.
But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same
impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret
opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content
with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of
the Byzantine empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often
hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their
persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character
through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with
regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the
different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in
the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display
and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did
not cease to be considerable, and a Church which, unlike that of the
Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the
State--all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of
individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the
cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics,
and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a
_dilettante_, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms
of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be
required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect
information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point
of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene,
too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.
In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable
to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing
party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of
the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders,
especially in Florentine history,[293] acquired so marked a personal
character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to
them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob von Arteveldt.
The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into
a position like that of the subjects of the despotic States, with the
difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases
the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their
individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for
instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446), whose work on domestic
economy[294] is the first complete programme of a developed private
life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the
dangers and thanklessness of public life[295] is in its way a true
monument of the age.
Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the
exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. ‘In all our more
populous cities,’ says Giovanni Pontano,[296] ‘we see a crowd of people
who have left their homes of their own free-will; but a man takes his
virtues with him wherever he goes.’ And, in fact, they were by no means
only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native
place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical
condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the
Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in
itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said,
finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond
even this in the words, ‘My country is the whole world.’[297] And when
his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote
back: ‘Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars;
everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing
ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people. Even my
bread will not fail me.’[298] The artists exult no less defiantly in
their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. ‘Only he who has
learned everything,’ says Ghiberti,[299] ‘is nowhere a stranger; robbed
of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every
country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.’ In the same
strain an exiled humanist writes: ‘Wherever a learned man fixes his
seat, there is home.[300]
CHAPTER II.
THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
An acute and practised eye might be able to trace, step by step, the
increase in the number of complete men during the fifteenth century.
Whether they had before them as a conscious object the harmonious
development of their spiritual and material existence, is hard to say;
but several of them attained it, so far as is consistent with the
imperfection of all that is earthly. It may be better to renounce the
attempt at an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and talent
had in the life of Lorenzo Magnifico. But look at a personality like
that of Ariosto, especially as shown in his satires. In what harmony are
there expressed the pride of the man and the poet, the irony with which
he treats his own enjoyments, the most delicate satire, and the deepest
goodwill!
When this impulse to the highest individual development[301] was
combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the
elements of the culture of the age, then arose the ‘all-sided
man’--‘l’uomo universale’--who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were
of encyclopædic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages, for
this knowledge was confined within narrow limits; and even in the
twelfth century there were universal artists, but the problems of
architecture were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture and
painting the matter was of more importance than the form. But in Italy
at the time of the Renaissance, we find artists who in every branch
created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest
impression as men. Others, outside the arts they practised, were masters
of a vast circle of spiritual interests.
Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a
philosopher, by others a theologian,[302] pours forth in all his
writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the
interest of the subject, feels himself carried away. What power of will
must the steady, unbroken elaboration of the ‘Divine Comedy’ have
required! And if we look at the matter of the poem, we find that in the
whole spiritual or physical world there is hardly an important subject
which the poet has not fathomed, and on which his utterances--often only
a few words--are not the most weighty of his time. For the plastic arts
he is of the first importance, and this for better reasons than the few
references to contemporary artists--he soon became himself the source of
inspiration.[303]
The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men. There
is no biography which does not, besides the chief work of its hero,
speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the limits of dilettantism.
The Florentine merchant and statesman was often learned in both the
classical languages; the most famous humanists read the ethics and
politics of Aristotle to him and his sons;[304] even the daughters of
the house were highly educated. It is in these circles that private
education was first treated seriously. The humanist, on his side, was
compelled to the most varied attainments, since his philological
learning was not limited, as it now is, to the theoretical knowledge of
classical antiquity, but had to serve the practical needs of daily life.
While studying Pliny,[305] he made collections of natural history; the
geography of the ancients was his guide in treating of modern geography,
their history was his pattern in writing contemporary chronicles, even
when composed in Italian; he not only translated the comedies of
Plautus, but acted as manager when they were put on the stage; every
effective form of ancient literature down to the dialogues of Lucian he
did his best to imitate; and besides all this, he acted as magistrate,
secretary, and diplomatist--not always to his own advantage.
But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided,
tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and
culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth
century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants--Leon
Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is
only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no
mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture.
We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to
distinction.
In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the
first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with
astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s
head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was
heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled
under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in
walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master,
and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the
pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many
years, till exhaustion brought on a severe illness. In his
twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense
of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all
the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity,
cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions,
down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their
craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially
excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was
excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’[308] in which he showed at
one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide
landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and
with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which
others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement
which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To
all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art,
which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the
Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose
writings--novels and other works--of which some have been taken for
productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous
dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310]
in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and
many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog.
Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in
Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of
Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the
world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty
sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many
columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew
he imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve,
giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of
his nature has yet to be spoken of--the sympathetic intensity with which
he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees
and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he
honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough.
Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by
nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful
landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close
and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of
prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the
family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years
before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and
the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and
sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the
Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’
And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as
the master to the _dilettante_. Would only that Vasari’s work were here
supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal
outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly
conceived.
CHAPTER III.
THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
To this inward development of the individual corresponds a new sort of
outward distinction--the modern form of glory.[312]
In the other countries of Europe the different classes of society lived
apart, each with its own mediæval caste sense of honour. The poetical
fame of the Troubadours and Minnesänger was peculiar to the knightly
order. But in Italy social equality had appeared before the time of the
tyrannies or the democracies. We there find early traces of a general
society, having, as will be shown more fully later on, a common ground
in Latin and Italian literature; and such a ground was needed for this
new element in life to grow in. To this must be added that the Roman
authors, who were now zealously studied, and especially Cicero, the most
read and admired of all, are filled and saturated with the conception of
fame, and that their subject itself--the universal empire of Rome--stood
as a permanent ideal before the minds of Italians. From henceforth all
the aspirations and achievements of the people were governed by a moral
postulate, which was still unknown elsewhere in Europe.
Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called
is Dante. He strove for the poet’s garland[313] with all the power of
his soul. As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact
that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be
esteemed the first in his own walks.[314] But even in his prose writings
he touches on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal
acquaintance with famous men is disappointing, and explains how this is
due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to envy, and partly to
the imperfections of the hero himself.[315] And in his great poem he
firmly maintains the emptiness of fame, although in a manner which
betrays that his heart was not set free from the longing for it. In
Paradise the sphere of Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones[316] as
on earth strove after glory and thereby dimmed ‘the beams of true love.’
It is characteristic that the lost souls in hell beg of Dante to keep
alive for them their memory and fame on earth,[317] while those in
Purgatory only entreat his prayers and those of others for their
deliverance.[318] And in a famous passage,[319] the passion for
fame--‘lo gran desio dell’eccellenza’--is reproved for the reason that
intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to the times, and may
be surpassed and eclipsed by greater successors.
The new race of poet-scholars which arose soon after Dante quickly made
themselves masters of this fresh tendency. They did so in a double
sense, being themselves the most acknowledged celebrities of Italy, and
at the same time, as poets and historians, consciously disposing of the
reputation of others. An outward symbol of this sort of fame was the
coronation of the poets, of which we shall speak later on.
A contemporary of Dante, Albertinus Musattus or Mussattus, crowned poet
at Padua by the bishop and rector, enjoyed a fame which fell little
short of deification. Every Christmas Day the doctors and students of
both colleges at the University came in solemn procession before his
house with trumpets and, as it seems, with burning tapers, to salute
him[320] and bring him presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he
fell into disgrace with the ruling tyrant of the House of Carrara.
This new incense, which once was offered only to saints and heroes, was
given in clouds to Petrarch, who persuaded himself in his later years
that it was but a foolish and troublesome thing. His letter ‘To
Posterity’[321] is the confession of an old and famous man, who is
forced to gratify the public curiosity. He admits that he wishes for
fame in the times to come, but would rather be without it in his own
day.[322] In his dialogue on fortune and misfortune,[323] the
interlocutor, who maintains the futility of glory, has the best of the
contest. But, at the same time, Petrarch is pleased that the autocrat of
Byzantium[324] knows him as well by his writings as Charles IV.[325]
knows him. And in fact, even in his lifetime, his fame extended far
beyond Italy. And the emotion which he felt was natural when his
friends, on the occasion of a visit to his native Arezzo (1350), took
him to the house where he was born, and told him how the city had
provided that no change should be made in it.[326] In former times the
dwellings of certain great saints were preserved and revered in this
way, like the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Dominican convent at
Naples, and the Portiuncula of St. Francis near Assisi; and one or two
great jurists also enjoyed the half-mythical reputation which led to
this honour. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the people at
Bagnolo, near Florence, called an old building the ‘Studio’ of Accursius
(b. about 1150), but, nevertheless, suffered it to be destroyed.[327] It
is probable that the great incomes and the political influence which
some jurists obtained as consulting lawyers made a lasting impression on
the popular imagination.
To the cultus of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of
their graves,[328] and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he
died. In memory of him Arquà became a favourite resort of the Paduans,
and was dotted with graceful little villas.[329] At this time there were
no ‘classic spots’ in Northern Europe, and pilgrimages were only made to
pictures and relics. It was a point of honour for the different cities
to possess the bones of their own and foreign celebrities; and it is
most remarkable how seriously the Florentines, even in the fourteenth
century--long before the building of Santa Croce--laboured to make their
cathedral a Pantheon. Accorso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the
jurist Zanobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there
erected to them.[330] Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Magnifico
applied in person to the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse of
the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the answer
that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in the
shape of distinguished people, for which reason they begged him to spare
them; and, in fact, he had to be contented with erecting a
cenotaph.[331] And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which
Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis,[332] remained
sleeping tranquilly by the side of San Francesco at Ravenna, ‘among
ancient tombs of emperors and vaults of saints, in more honourable
company than thou, O Home, couldst offer him.’ It even happened that a
man once took away unpunished the lights from the altar on which the
crucifix stood, and set them by the grave, with the words, ‘Take them;
thou art more worthy of them than He, the Crucified One!’[333]
And now the Italian cities began again to remember their ancient
citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never forgotten its tomb
of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had become attached to the
name, and the memory of it had been revived by Petrarch and Boccaccio,
who both stayed in the city.
The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed that they
possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder Antenor, but also
those of the historian Livy.[334] ‘Sulmona,’ says Boccaccio,[335]
‘bewails that Ovid lies buried far away in exile; and Parma rejoices
that Cassius sleeps within its walls.’ The Mantuans coined a medal in
1257 with the bust of Virgil, and raised a statue to represent him. In
a fit of aristocratic insolence,[336] the guardian of the young Gonzaga,
Carlo Malatesta, caused it to be pulled down in 1392, and was
afterwards forced, when he found the fame of the old poet too strong
for him, to set it up again. Even then, perhaps, the grotto, a couple of
miles from the town, where Virgil was said to have meditated,[337] was
shown to strangers, like the ‘Scuola di Virgilio’ at Naples. Como
claimed both the Plinys[338] for its own, and at the end of the
fifteenth century erected statues in their honour, sitting under
graceful baldachins on the façade of the cathedral.
History and the new topography were now careful to leave no local
celebrity unnoticed. At the same period the northern chronicles only
here and there, among the list of popes, emperors, earthquakes, and
comets, put in the remark, that at such a time this or that famous man
‘flourished.’ We shall elsewhere have to show how, mainly under the
influence of this idea of fame, an admirable biographical literature was
developed. We must here limit ourselves to the local patriotism of the
topographers who recorded the claims of their native cities to
distinction.
In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and of the
bones and relics in their churches.[339] With these the panegyrist of
Padua in 1440, Michele Savonarola,[340] begins his list; from them he
passes to ‘the famous men who were no saints, but who, by their great
intellect and force (_virtus_) deserve to be added (_adnecti_) to the
saints’--just as in classical antiquity the distinguished man came close
upon the hero.[341] The further enumeration is most characteristic of
the time. First comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua
with a band of Trojan fugitives; King Dardanus, who defeated Attila in
the Euganean hills, followed him in pursuit, and struck him dead at
Rimini with a chess-board; the Emperor Henry IV., who built the
cathedral; a King Marcus, whose head was preserved in Monselice (_monte
silicis arce_); then a couple of cardinals and prelates as founders of
colleges, churches, and so forth; the famous Augustinian theologian, Fra
Alberto; a string of philosophers beginning with Paolo Veneto and the
celebrated Pietro of Albano; the jurist Paolo Padovano; then Livy and
the poets Petrarch, Mussato, Lovato. If there is any want of military
celebrities in the list, the poet consoles himself for it by the
abundance of learned men whom he has to show, and by the more durable
character of intellectual glory; while the fame of the soldier is buried
with his body, or, if it lasts, owes its permanence only to the
scholar.[342] It is nevertheless honourable to the city that foreign
warriors lie buried here by their own wish, like Pietro de Rossi of
Parma, Filippo Arcelli of Piacenza, and especially Gattamelata of Narni
(d. 1642),[343] whose brazen equestrian statue, ‘like a Cæsar in
triumph,’ already stood by the church of the Santo. The author then
names a crowd of jurists and physicians, among the latter two friends of
Petrarch, Johannes ab Horologio and Jacob de Dondis, nobles ‘who had not
only, like so many others, received, but deserved, the honour of
knighthood.’ Then follows a list of famous mechanicians, painters, and
musicians, which is closed by the name of a fencing-master Michele
Rosso, who, as the most distinguished man in his profession, was to be
seen painted in many places.
By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular
admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars
built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections
of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius
Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (_Mulierum_
_virtutes_), Hieronymus (_De Viris Illustribus_), and others: or they
wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was
done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’ and Boccaccio in the
‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at
least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages.[344]
By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with
greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of
character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished
contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino,
Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese,[345] and lastly of Paolo Giovio.[346]
The North of Europe, until Italian influence began to tell upon its
writers--for instance, on Trithemius, the first German who wrote the
lives of famous men--possessed only either legends of the saints, or
descriptions of princes and churchmen partaking largely of the character
of legends and showing no traces of the idea of fame, that is, of
distinction won by a man’s personal efforts. Poetical glory was still
confined to certain classes of society, and the names of northern
artists are only known to us at this period in so far as they were
members of certain guilds or corporations.
The poet-scholar in Italy had, as we have already said, the fullest
consciousness that he was the giver of fame and immortality, or, if he
chose, of oblivion.[347] Petrarch, notwithstanding all the idealism of
his love to Laura, gives utterance to the feeling, that his sonnets
confer immortality on his beloved as well as on himself.[348] Boccaccio
complains of a fair one to whom he had done homage, and who remained
hard-hearted in order that he might go on praising her and making her
famous, and he gives her a hint that he will try the effect of a little
blame.[349] Sannazaro, in two magnificent sonnets, threatens Alfonso of
Naples with eternal obscurity on account of his cowardly flight before
Charles VIII.[350] Angelo Poliziano seriously exhorts (1491) King John
of Portugal[351] to think betimes of his immortality in reference to the
new discoveries in Africa, and to send him materials to Florence, there
to be put into shape (_operosius excolenda_), otherwise it would befall
him as it had befallen all the others whose deeds, unsupported by the
help of the learned, ‘lie hidden in the vast heap of human frailty.’ The
king, or his humanistic chancellor, agreed to this, and promised that at
least the Portuguese chronicles of African affairs should be translated
into Italian, and sent to Florence to be done into Latin. Whether the
promise was kept is not known. These pretensions are by no means so
groundless as they may appear at first sight; for the form in which
events, even the greatest, are told to the living and to posterity is
anything but a matter of indifference. The Italian humanists, with their
mode of exposition and their Latin style, had long the complete control
of the reading world of Europe, and till last century the Italian poets
were more widely known and studied than those of any other nation. The
baptismal name of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was given, on account
of his book of travels--certainly at the proposal of its German
translator into Latin, Martin Waldseemüller (Hylacomylus)[352]--to a new
quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio, with all his superficiality
and graceful caprice, promised himself immortality,[353] his expectation
has not altogether been disappointed.
Amid all these preparations outwardly to win and secure fame, the
curtain is now and then drawn aside, and we see with frightful evidence
a boundless ambition and thirst after greatness, independent of all
means and consequences. Thus, in the preface to Macchiavelli’s
Florentine history, in which he blames his predecessors Lionardo Aretino
and Poggio for their too considerate reticence with regard to the
political parties in the city: ‘They erred greatly and showed that they
understood little the ambition of men and the desire to perpetuate a
name. How many who could distinguish themselves by nothing praiseworthy,
strove to do so by infamous deeds! Those writers did not consider that
actions which are great in themselves, as is the case with the actions
of rulers and of states, always seem to bring more glory than blame, of
whatever kind they are and whatever the result of them may be.’[354] In
more than one remarkable and dreadful undertaking the motive assigned by
serious writers is the burning desire to achieve something great and
memorable. This motive is not a mere extreme case of ordinary vanity,
but something demonic, involving a surrender of the will, the use of any
means, however atrocious, and even an indifference to success itself. In
this sense, for example, Macchiavelli conceives the character of Stefano
Porcaro (p. 104);[355] of the murderers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (p.
57), the documents tell us about the same; and the assassination of Duke
Alessandro of Florence (1537) is ascribed by Varchi himself to the
thirst for fame which tormented the murderer Lorenzino Medici (p. 60).
Still more stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio.[356]
Lorenzino, according to him, pilloried by a pamphlet of Molza on
account of the mutilation of some ancient statues at Rome, broods over
a deed whose novelty shall make his disgrace forgotten, and ends by
murdering his kinsman and prince. These are characteristic features of
this age of overstrained and despairing passions and forces, and remind
us of the burning of the temple of Diana at Ephesus in the time of
Philip of Macedon.
CHAPTER IV.
MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
The corrective, not only of this modern desire for fame, but of all
highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially when
expressed in the victorious form of wit.[357] We read in the Middle Ages
how hostile armies, princes, and nobles, provoked one another with
symbolical insult, and how the defeated party was loaded with symbolical
outrage. Here and there, too, under the influence of classical
literature, wit began to be used as a weapon in theological disputes,
and the poetry of Provence produced a whole class of satirical
compositions. Even the Minnesänger, as their political poems show, could
adopt this tone when necessary.[358] But wit could not be an independent
element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual
with personal pretentions, had appeared. Its weapons were then by no
means limited to the tongue and the pen, but included tricks and
practical jokes--the so-called ‘burle’ and ‘beffe’--which form a chief
subject of many collections of novels.
The ‘Hundred Old Novels,’ which must have been composed about the end of
the thirteenth century, have as yet neither wit, the fruit of contrast,
nor the ‘burla,’ for their subject;[359] their aim is merely to give
simple and elegant expression to wise sayings and pretty stories or
fables. But if anything proves the great antiquity of the collection, it
is precisely this absence of satire. For with the fourteenth century
comes Dante, who, in the utterance of scorn, leaves all other poets in
the world far behind, and who, if only on account of his great picture
of the deceivers,[360] must be called the chief master of colossal
comedy. With Petrarch[361] begin the collections of witty sayings after
the pattern of Plutarch (Apophthegmata, etc.).
What stores of wit were concentrated in Florence during this century, is
most characteristically shown in the novels of Franco Sacchetti. These
are, for the most part, not stories but answers, given under certain
circumstances--shocking pieces of _naïveté_, with which silly folks,
court-jesters, rogues, and profligate women make their retort. The
comedy of the tale lies in the startling contrast of this real or
assumed _naïveté_ with conventional morality and the ordinary relations
of the world--things are made to stand on their heads. All means of
picturesque representation are made use of, including the introduction
of certain North Italian dialects. Often the place of wit is taken by
mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy, and obscenity; one or two
jokes told of Condottieri[362] are among the most brutal and malicious
which are recorded. Many of the ‘burle’ are thoroughly comic, but many
are only real or supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph
over another. How much people were willing to put up with, how often the
victim was satisfied with getting the laugh on his side by a retaliatory
trick, cannot be said; there was much heartless and pointless malice
mixed up with it all, and life in Florence was no doubt often made
unpleasant enough from this cause.[363] The inventors and retailers of
jokes soon became inevitable figures,[364] and among them there must
have been some who were classical--far superior to all the mere
court-jesters, to whom competition, a changing public, and the quick
apprehension of the audience, all advantages of life in Florence, were
wanting. Some Florentine wits went starring among the despotic courts of
Lombardy and Romagna,[365] and found themselves much better rewarded
than at home, where their talent was cheap and plentiful. The better
type of these people is the amusing man (l’uomo piacevole), the worse is
the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and
banquets with the argument, ‘If I am not invited, the fault is not
mine.’ Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young
spendthrift,[366] but in general they are treated and despised as
parasites, while wits of higher position bear themselves like princes,
and consider their talent as something sovereign. Dolcibene, whom
Charles IV., ‘Imperator di Buem,’ had pronounced to be the ‘king of
Italian jesters,’ said to him at Ferrara: ‘You will conquer the world,
since you are my friend and the Pope’s; you fight with the sword, the
Pope with his bulls, and I with my tongue.’[367] This is no mere jest,
but a foreshadowing of Pietro Aretino.
The two most famous jesters about the middle of the fifteenth century
were a priest near Florence, Arlotto (1483), for more refined wit
(‘facezie’), and the court-fool of Ferrara, Gonnella, for buffoonery.
We can hardly compare their stories with those of the Parson of
Kalenberg and Till Eulenspiegel, since the latter arose in a different
and half-mythical manner, as fruits of the imagination of a whole
people, and touch rather on what is general and intelligible to all,
while Arlotto and Gonnella were historical beings, coloured and shaped
by local influences. But if the comparison be allowed, and extended to
the jests of the non-Italian nations, we shall find in general that the
joke in the French _fabliaux_,[368] as among the Germans, is chiefly
directed to the attainment of some advantage or enjoyment; while the wit
of Arlotto and the practical jokes of Gonnella are an end in themselves,
and exist simply for the sake of the triumph of production. (Till
Eulenspiegel again forms a class by himself, as the personified quiz,
mostly pointless enough, of particular classes and professions). The
court-fool of the Este saved himself more than once by his keen satire
and refined modes of vengeance.[369]
The type of the ‘uomo piacevole’ and the ‘buffone’ long survived the
freedom of Florence. Under Duke Cosimo flourished Barlacchia, and at the
beginning of the seventeenth century Francesco Ruspoli and Curzio
Marignolli. In Pope Leo X., the genuine Florentine love of jesters
showed itself strikingly. This prince, whose taste for the most refined
intellectual pleasures was insatiable, endured and desired at his table
a number of witty buffoons and jack-puddings, among them two monks and a
cripple;[370] at public feasts he treated them with deliberate scorn as
parasites, setting before them monkeys and crows in the place of savoury
meats. Leo, indeed, showed a peculiar fondness for the ‘burla’; it
belonged to his nature sometimes to treat his own favourite
pursuits--music and poetry--ironically, parodying them with his
factotum, Cardinal Bibbiena.[371] Neither of them found it beneath him
to fool an honest old secretary till he thought himself a master of the
art of music. The Improvisatore, Baraballo of Gaeta, was brought so far
by Leo’s flattery, that he applied in all seriousness for the poet’s
coronation on the Capitol. On the anniversary of S. Cosmas and S.
Damian, the patrons of the House of Medici, he was first compelled,
adorned with laurel and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his
recitations, and at last, when all were ready to split with laughter, to
mount a gold-harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a
present to Rome by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, while the Pope looked
down from above through his eye-glass.[372] The brute, however, was so
terrified by the noise of the trumpets and kettle-drums, and the cheers
of the crowd, that there was no getting him over the bridge of S.
Angelo.
The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which here meets us in the case
of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry.[373] It
was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of
Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedian into his plays. But the
same maturity of culture which at a certain period produced parody among
the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the fourteenth
century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch’s sonnets and others of the
same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this
form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant
invitation to parody was offered by the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and Lorenzo
Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the
‘Inferno’ (‘Simposio’ or ‘I Beoni’). Luigi Pulei obviously imitates the
Improvisatori in his ‘Morgante,’ and both his poetry and Bojardo’s are
in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of
the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately undertaken by the
great parodist Teofilo Folengo (about 1520). Under the name of Limerno
Pitocco, he composed the ‘Orlandino,’ in which chivalry appears only as
a ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas. Under the
name of Merlinus Coccajus he described the journeys and exploits of his
phantastic vagabonds (also in the same spirit of parody) in half-Latin
hexameters, with all the affected pomp of the learned Epos of the day.
(‘Opus Macaronicorum’). Since then caricature has been constantly, and
often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus.
About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical analysis of wit
was undertaken, and its practical application in good society was
regulated more precisely. The theorist was Gioviano Pontano.[374] In his
work on speaking, especially in the third and fourth books, he tries by
means of the comparison of numerous jokes or ‘facetiæ’ to arrive at a
general principle. How wit should be used among people of position is
taught by Baldassar Castiglione in his ‘Cortigiano.’[375] Its chief
function is naturally to enliven those present by the repetition of
comic or graceful stories and sayings; personal jokes, on the contrary,
are discouraged on the ground that they wound unhappy people, show too
much honour to wrong-doers, and make enemies of the powerful and the
spoiled children of fortune;[376] and even in repetition, a wide reserve
in the use of dramatic gestures is recommended to the gentleman. Then
follows, not only for purposes of quotation, but as patterns for future
jesters, a large collection of puns and witty sayings, methodically
arranged according to their species, among them some that are admirable.
The doctrine of Giovanni della Casa, some twenty years later, in his
guide to good manners, is much stricter and more cautious;[377] with a
view to the consequences, he wishes to see the desire of triumph
banished altogether from jokes and ‘burle.’ He is the herald of a
reaction, which was certain sooner or later to appear.
Italy had, in fact, become a school for scandal, the like of which the
world cannot show, not even in France at the time of Voltaire. In him
and his comrades there was assuredly no lack of the spirit of negation;
but where, in the eighteenth century, was to be found the crowd of
suitable victims, that countless assembly of highly and
characteristically-developed human beings, celebrities of every kind,
statesmen, churchmen, inventors, and discoverers, men of letters, poets
and artists, all of whom then gave the fullest and freest play to their
individuality? This host existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and by its side the general culture of the time had educated
a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born critics and railers, whose
envy called for hecatombs of victims; and to all this was added the envy
of the famous men among themselves. In this the philologists notoriously
led the way--Filelfo, Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and others--while the
artists of the fifteenth century lived in peaceful and friendly
competition with one another. The history of art may take note of the
fact.
Florence, the great market of fame, was in this point, as we have said,
in advance of other cities. ‘Sharp eyes and bad tongues’ is the
description given of the inhabitants.[378] An easy-going contempt of
everything and everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society.
Macchiavelli, in the remarkable prologue to his ‘Mandragola,’ refers
rightly or wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general
habit of evil speaking, and threatens his detractors with the news that
he can say sharp things as well as they. Next to Florence comes the
Papal court, which had long been a rendezvous of the bitterest and
wittiest tongues. Poggio’s ‘Facetiæ’ are dated from the Chamber of Lies
(_bugiale_) of the apostolic notaries; and when we remember the number
of disappointed place-hunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of
the favourites, of idle, profligate prelates there assembled, it is
intelligible how Rome became the home of the savage pasquinade as well
as of more philosophical satire. If we add to this the wide-spread
hatred borne to the priests, and the well-known instinct of the mob to
lay any horror to the charge of the great, there results an untold mass
of infamy.[379] Those who were able protected themselves best by
contempt both of the false and true accusations, and by brilliant and
joyous display.[380] More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when
they found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more deeply in
slander.[381] In course of time calumny became universal, and the
strictest virtue was most certain of all to challenge the attacks of
malice. Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made
a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the
people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527,[382] Giovio gives us to
understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet
straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a genuine Curial in
these matters.[383] He generally begins by telling his story, then adds
that he does not believe it, and then hints at the end that perhaps
after all there may be something in it. But the true scape-goat of Roman
scorn was the pious and moral Adrian VI. A general agreement seemed to
be made to take him only on the comic side. Adrian had contemptuously
referred to the Laöcoon group as ‘idola antiquorum,’ had shut up the
entrance to the Belvedere, had left the works of Raphael unfinished, and
had banished the poets and players from the court; it was even feared
that he would burn some ancient statues to lime for the new church of
St. Peter. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco
Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as people
said,[384] the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the satires
themselves. The vengeance for this was the famous ‘Capitolo’ against
Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by hatred, but by contempt for the
comical Dutch barbarian;[385] the more savage menaces were reserved for
the cardinals who had elected him. The plague, which then was prevalent
in Rome, was ascribed to him;[386] Berni and others[387] sketch the
environment of the Pope--the Germans by whom he was governed[388]--with
the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the modern _feuilletoniste_
turns black into white, and everything into anything. The biography
which Paolo Giovio was commissioned to write by the Cardinal of Tortosa,
and which was to have been a eulogy, is for any one who can read between
the lines an unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous--at least
for the Italians of that time--to hear how Adrian applied to the Chapter
of Saragossa for the jaw-bone of St. Lambert; how the devout Spaniards
decked him out till he looked ‘like a right well-dressed Pope;’ how he
came in a confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took
counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly break off the
most important business when dinner was announced; and lastly, at the
end of an unhappy reign, how he died of drinking too much
beer--whereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by
midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, ‘Liberatori Patriæ
S. P. Q. R.’ It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general
confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of
compensation because he was ‘no poet,’ that is to say. no pagan.[389]
But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim. After
the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along
with the unrestrained wickedness of private life.
* * * * *
But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in Rome, the
greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino. A glance at his life
and character will save us the trouble of noticing many less
distinguished members of his class.
We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life (1527-1557),
which he passed in Venice, the only asylum possible for him. From hence
he kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege, and
here were delivered the presents of the foreign princes who needed or
dreaded his pen. Charles V. and Francis I. both pensioned him at the
same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other.
Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself more closely to
Charles, because he remained master in Italy. After the Emperor’s
victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of adulation passed into the most
ludicrous worship, in observing which it must not be forgotten that
Aretino constantly cherished the hope that Charles would help him to a
cardinal’s hat. It is probable that he enjoyed special protection as
Spanish agent, as his speech or silence could have no small effect on
the smaller Italian courts and on public opinion in Italy. He affected
utterly to despise the Papal court because he knew it so well; the true
reason was that Rome neither could nor would pay him any longer.[390]
Venice, which sheltered him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed. The
rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar
extortion.
Aretino affords the first great instance of the abuse of publicity to
such ends. The polemical writings which a hundred years earlier Poggio
and his opponents interchanged, are just as infamous in their tone and
purpose, but they were not composed for the press, but for a sort of
private circulation. Aretino made all his profit out of a complete
publicity, and in a certain sense may be considered the father of modern
journalism. His letters and miscellaneous articles were printed
periodically, after they had already been circulated among a tolerably
extensive public.[391]
Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the
advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with
liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science;
his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, ‘Veritas odium
parit.’ He never, consequently, found himself in the false position of
Voltaire, who was forced to disown his ‘Pucelle’ and conceal all his
life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his name to all he
wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious ‘Ragionamenti.’ His literary
talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and
things, would have made him a considerable writer under any
circumstances destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine
work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well
as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in
some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais.[392]
In such circumstances, and with such objects and means, he set to work
to attack or circumvent his prey. The tone in which he appealed to
Clement VII. not to complain or to think of vengeance,[393] but to
forgive, at the moment when the wailings of the devastated city were
ascending to the Castle of St. Angelo, where the Pope himself was a
prisoner, is the mockery of a devil or a monkey. Sometimes, when he is
forced to give up all hope of presents, his fury breaks out into a
savage howl, as in the ‘Capitolo’ to the Prince of Salerno, who after
paying him for some time refused to do so any longer. On the other
hand, it seems that the terrible Pierluigi Farnese, Duke of Parma,
never took any notice of him at all. As this gentleman had probably
renounced altogether the pleasures of a good reputation, it was not easy
to cause him any annoyance; Aretino tried to do so by comparing his
personal appearance to that of a constable, a miller, and a baker.[394]
Aretino is most comical of all in the expression of whining mendicancy,
as in the ‘Capitolo’ to Francis I.; but the letters and poems made up of
menaces and flattery cannot, notwithstanding all that is ludicrous in
them, be read without the deepest disgust. A letter like that one of his
written to Michelangelo in November 1545[395] is alone of its kind;
along with all the admiration he expresses for the ‘Last Judgment’ he
charges him with irreligion, indecency, and theft from the heirs of
Julius II., and adds in a conciliating postscript, ‘I only want to show
you that if you are “divino,” I am not “d’acqua.”’ Aretino laid great
stress upon it--whether from the insanity of conceit or by way of
caricaturing famous men--that he himself should be called divine, as one
of his flatterers had already begun to do; and he certainly attained so
much personal celebrity that his house at Arezzo passed for one of the
sights of the place.[396] There were indeed whole months during which he
never ventured to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in
with some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did he
escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies,[397] although they
failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a famous sonnet.
Aretino died in his house, of apoplexy.
The differences he made in his modes of flattery are remarkable: in
dealing with non-Italians he was grossly fulsome;[398] people like Duke
Cosimo of Florence he treated very differently. He praised the beauty of
the then youthful prince, who in fact did share this quality with
Augustus in no ordinary degree; he praised his moral conduct, with an
oblique reference to the financial pursuits of Cosimo’s mother Maria
Salviati, and concluded with a mendicant whine about the bad times and
so forth. When Cosimo pensioned him,[399] which he did liberally,
considering his habitual parsimony--to the extent, at last, of 160
ducats a year--he had doubtless an eye to Aretino’s dangerous character
as Spanish agent. Aretino could ridicule and revile Cosimo, and in the
same breath threaten the Florentine agent that he would obtain from the
Duke his immediate recall; and if the Medicean prince felt himself at
last to be seen through by Charles V. he would naturally not be anxious
that Aretino’s jokes and rhymes against him should circulate at the
Imperial court. A curiously qualified piece of flattery was that
addressed to the notorious Marquis of Marignano, who as Castellan of
Musso (p. 27) had attempted to found an independent state. Thanking him
for the gift of a hundred crowns, Aretino writes: ‘All the qualities
which a prince should have are present in you, and all men would think
so, were it not that the acts of violence inevitable at the beginning of
all undertakings cause you to appear a trifle rough (_aspro_).’[400]
It has often been noticed as something singular that Aretino only
reviled the world, and not God also. The religious belief of a man who
lived as he did is a matter of perfect indifference, as are also the
edifying writings which he composed for reasons of his own.[401] It is
in fact hard to say why he should have been a blasphemer. He was no
professor, or theoretical thinker or writer; and he could extort no
money from God by threats or flattery, and was consequently never goaded
into blasphemy by a refusal. A man like him does not take trouble for
nothing.
It is a good sign of the present spirit of Italy that such a character
and such a career have become a thousand times impossible. But
historical criticism will always find in Aretino an important study.
_PART III._
THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
Now that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization has
been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity, the
‘new birth’ of which has been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up
the whole period. The conditions which have been hitherto described
would have sufficed, apart from antiquity, to upturn and to mature the
national mind; and most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain
to be noticed would be conceivable without it. But both what has gone
before and what we have still to discuss are coloured in a thousand ways
by the influence of the ancient world; and though the essence of the
phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival,
it is only with and through this revival that they are actually
manifested to us. The Renaissance would not have been the process of
worldwide significance which it is, if its elements could be so easily
separated from one another. We must insist upon it, as one of the chief
propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity
alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which
achieved the conquest of the western world. The amount of independence
which the national spirit maintained in this union varied according to
circumstances. In the modern Latin literature of the period, it is very
small, while in plastic art, as well as in other spheres, it is
remarkably great; and hence the alliance between two distant epochs in
the civilisation of the same people, because concluded on equal terms,
proved justifiable and fruitful. The rest of Europe was free either to
repel or else partly or wholly to accept the mighty impulse which came
forth from Italy. Where the latter was the case we may as well be spared
the complaints over the early decay of mediæval faith and civilisation.
Had these been strong enough to hold their ground, they would be alive
to this day. If those elegiac natures which long to see them return
could pass but one hour in the midst of them, they would gasp to be back
in modern air. That in a great historical process of this kind flowers
of exquisite beauty may perish, without being made immortal in poetry or
tradition is undoubtedly true; nevertheless, we cannot wish the process
undone. The general result of it consists in this--that by the side of
the Church which had hitherto held the countries of the West together
(though it was unable to do so much longer) there arose a new spiritual
influence which, spreading itself abroad from Italy, became the breath
of life for all the more instructed minds in Europe. The worst that can
be said of the movement is, that it was anti-popular, that through it
Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and
uncultivated classes. The reproach will appear groundless when we
reflect that even now the fact, though clearly recognised, cannot be
altered. The separation, too, is by no means so cruel and absolute in
Italy as elsewhere. The most artistic of her poets, Tasso, is in the
hands of even the poorest.
The civilisation of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth
century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and
basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as
an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies--this civilisation had
long been exerting a partial influence on mediæval Europe, even beyond
the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charles the Great was a
representative was, in face of the barbarism of the seventh and eighth
centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear under no other
form. Just as in the Romanesque architecture of the North, beside the
general outlines inherited from antiquity, remarkable direct imitations
of the antique also occur, so too monastic scholarship had not only
gradually absorbed an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but
the style of it, from the days of Eginhard onwards shows traces of
conscious imitations.
But the resuscitation of antiquity took a different form in Italy from
that which it assumed in the North. The wave of barbarism had scarcely
gone by before the people, in whom the former life was but half effaced,
showed a consciousness of its past and a wish to reproduce it. Elsewhere
in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed this or the
other element of classical civilisation; in Italy the sympathies both of
the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the side of
antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol of past greatness.
The Latin language, too, was easy to an Italian, and the numerous
monuments and documents in which the country abounded facilitated a
return to the past. With this tendency other elements--the popular
character which time had now greatly modified, the political
institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and other
northern forms of civilisation, and the influence of religion and the
Church--combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which was
destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole western world.
How antiquity began to work in plastic art, as soon as the flood of
barbarism had subsided, is clearly shown in the Tuscan buildings of the
twelfth and in the sculptures of the thirteenth centuries. In poetry,
too, there will appear no want of similar analogies to those who hold
that the greatest Latin poet of the twelfth century, the writer who
struck the key-note of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We
mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called ‘Carmina Burana.’ A
frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of
heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the
saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the
rhymed verses. Reading them through at a stretch, we can scarcely help
coming to the conclusion that an Italian, probably a Lombard, is
speaking; in fact, there are positive grounds for thinking so.[402] To a
certain degree these Latin poems of the ‘Clerici vagantes’ of the
twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless, a
product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the
song ‘De Phyllide et Flora’[403] and the ‘Æstuans Interius’ can have
been a northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom
we owe ‘Dum Dianæ vitrea sero lampas oritur.’ Here, in truth, is a
reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more
striking from the mediæval form of the verse in which it is set forth.
There are many works of this and the following centuries, in which a
careful imitation of the antique appears both in the hexameter and
pentameter of the metre in the classical, often mythological, character
of the subject, and which yet have not anything like the same spirit of
antiquity about them. In the hexameter chronicles and other works of
Gulielmus Apuliensis and his successors (from about 1100), we find
frequent traces of a diligent study of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and
Claudian; but this classical form is after all here a mere matter of
archæology, as is the classical subject in collectors like Vincent of
Beauvais, or in the mythological and allegorical writer, Alanus ab
Insulis. The Renaissance is not a mere fragmentary imitation or
compilation, but a new birth; and the signs of this are visible in the
poems of the unknown ‘Clericus’ of the twelfth century.
But the great and general enthusiasm of the Italians for classical
antiquity did not display itself before the fourteenth century. For this
a development of civic life was required, which took place only in
Italy, and there not till then. It was needful that noble and burgher
should first learn to dwell together on equal terms, and that a social
world should arise (see p. 139) which felt the want of culture, and had
the leisure and the means to obtain it. But culture, as soon as it freed
itself from the fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages, could not at once
and without help find its way to the understanding of the physical and
intellectual world. It needed a guide, and found one in the ancient
civilisation, with its wealth of truth and knowledge in every spiritual
interest. Both the form and the substance of this civilisation were
adopted with admiring gratitude; it became the chief part of the culture
of the age.[404] The general condition of the country was favourable to
this transformation. The mediæval empire, since the fall of the
Hohenstaufen, had either renounced, or was unable to make good, its
claims on Italy. The Popes had migrated to Avignon. Most of the
political powers actually in existence owed their origin to violent and
illegitimate means. The spirit of the people, now awakened to
self-consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to
rest. And thus the vision of the world-wide empire of Italy and Rome so
possessed the popular mind, that Cola di Rienzi could actually attempt
to put it in practice. The conception he formed of his task,
particularly when tribune for the first time, could only end in some
extravagant comedy; nevertheless, the memory of ancient Rome was no
slight support to the national sentiment. Armed afresh with its culture,
the Italian soon felt himself in truth citizen of the most advanced
nation in the world.
It is now our task to sketch this spiritual movement, not indeed in all
its fulness, but in its most salient features, and especially in its
first beginnings.[405]