Viscontis, I stayed a little in Pavia. I found it a rather gloomy little
Lombard town, white-washed and paven. Here and there a wine-coloured
wall or tower broke the pallid monotony of the streets. The famous
fortress, where Isabel of Arragon eat her heart in bitterness so many
years, still exists, much rebuilt and altered indeed, but always a mass
of fine red colour. In Pavia, however, there was nothing so interesting
to me as those phantoms of vanished Viscontis and long-supplanted
Sforzas that seemed so strangely out of place in this sad little sordid
university town. And among these ranks of tragic shadows, the least
forgiven, the least beloved, was always the Duchess Beatrice.
I had known her too long, the youthful and charming Lady Macbeth of
Lombardy. I knew her as well as one can know a person, familiar through
the gossip of acquaintance, although unseen and distant. I had heard of
her as a haughty and ambitious woman, accepting with a smile the crimes
that placed the crown of Milan on her head. She appeared as some
Herodias of Luini’s, exquisite and sinister. And yet I knew she had been
dearly worshipped in her lifetime and long lamented in her tomb. There
are such Sirens, heartless and chill themselves, but capable of seizing
an honest love with the same hands that grasp at a blood-stained
treasure. Such, in my eyes, was the adored and evil wife of Lodovico il
Moro.
It was Christmas-time and cold; with difficulty I roused myself to visit
the Certosa. It is six miles, I suppose, from Pavia. The wretched
carriage slowly dragged along through the muddy country; and from the
whitened window one felt rather than saw the immense desolation of the
view. On either hand of the raised road, a sluggish canal, and beyond a
monotonous landscape of brown marshy pastures and bright green rice
fields flecked with water, across which the scant snow drifted. The road
seemed to extend for ever in front, unbroken, unturning. Suddenly in the
middle of the country the carriage stopped; I walked a few steps up a
muddy lane. To the right over a wall there appeared a great dome, with
rose-red minarets, with spires of pale red, ivory and marble, among
innumerable shaft-like towers tipped with cream-white columns. It is the
Certosa.
At another season and in better health I should have found much to
linger over in the great façade of the Certosa, fantastic, incoherent as
a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every inch of the front is covered thickly
with ornament in high relief—Roman emperors and paladins of chivalry,
eagles with praying angels on their outspread pinions, exquisite maidens
floating full-length on a dolphin’s back, Sirens suckling their
unearthly babes, hippogriffs, Prophets of Israel: strange, unexpected as
the visions of delirium, they are assembled there. But, alone, in the
bitter wind, I glanced at it all for a moment and entered the vast
foundation of Giangaleazzo Visconti. Great halls, enormous, cold,
spoiled as much as may be by the seventeenth century; a few good
pictures by Borgognone, many bad ones; posthumous portraits of the great
Viscontis: it was not so interesting as I had supposed.
Still I wandered on, making reflections on the difference of type in the
Sforza and Visconti heads: the older tyrants keen-faced, refined with
delicate, bone-less oval faces, and thin firm lips ridged out in a
narrow line. There is something wolf-like in the long pointed noses, the
pointed chins, low foreheads, as well as in the keen eyes, narrow and
high in the head; altogether an interesting type, subtle, cruel,
intellectual, and fierce. The Sforzas with their Wellington noses, their
strongly marked eyebrows, prim-pursed lips and rounded chins, seem a
square-faced kindly race of captains. Lodovico il Moro himself is there,
with the fat face and fine chin of the elderly Napoleon, the delicate
beak-like nose of Wellington; a small querulous neat-lipped mouth, and
immense eyebrows, stretched like the talons of an eagle across the low
forehead, complete the odd, refined physiognomy of the man. I looked at
him with interest for a moment. But there, straight before me, stood the
tomb of the wife he lost so young, the Duchess Beatrice.
To think that she is dead, and to think she was a woman! Impossible. She
is a lively child, fallen asleep in playtime: motionless, but full of a
contained vivacity. Her tumbled curls hang loosely round her shoulders,
and stand up in a little frizz above the rounded childish forehead. As
she lies there, a look of infantine candour is diffused over the soft,
adorable, irregular features. She has straight, brief eyebrows like a
little girl, but her closed eyelids are rounded like the petals of a
thick white flower, and richly fringed with lashes. The little nose is
of no particular shape—not quite a straight nose, but certainly not a
snub; it is the prettiest nose at Court, with a rounded end like a
child’s. The cheeks, too, are round apple-cheeks, not in the least like
the Herodias of Luini; and round is the neat bewitching chin. But her
chief beauty is her mouth—a mouth with the soft-closed lips of a dear
child pretending to be asleep, yet smiling as if to say, “Soon I shall
jump up and throw my arms round your neck, and you will be so
surprised!”
The round head rises from a long plump throat. The small figure too is
slender and plump at once, and very small, full of life still, it seems,
under the pretty tight silk dress, with the slashed and purfled sleeves,
and the long train of brocade, so lovingly, so carefully arranged not to
encumber nor hide those little pattened feet, that were so fain of
dancing and seem so ready to awake and dance again. This, then, is the
famous Beatrice!—I looked and looked, at last I understood not only her,
but the love of Lodovico: “And so, dear child, thou canst not live
without a crown?—Ah well! What shouldst thou know of murder, dishonour,
and the ruin of great states? Thou wilt never understand these gloomy
things, and I shall pay the price—Ah God in heaven, I thank Thee for the
gift of an immortal soul, since I may lose it for the pleasure of this
child!”
Perhaps it was in this way that Lodovico reasoned; or perhaps it may be
that at heart Macbeth is no less ambitious than his wife. Who knows? The
wife, at least, must stand for something. At least, some share in the
ruin of their country must be accorded to these three women—Bonne, who
recalled Lodovico to Milan; Isabel, who inspired the war of Arragon and
Sforza; and Beatrice, whose ambition urged her husband to invite the
French to Italy.
THE FLIGHT OF PIERO DE’ MEDICI.
(OCTOBER-NOVEMBER, 1494.)
When, in the October of 1494, the King of France marched south from
Asti, a torpor of stupefaction fell upon the princes of Italy. For the
last three years there was no one of them but had coquetted more or less
with France; there was no one of them but was the enemy of that arrogant
house of Arragon which had lost Scutari to Venice, and which had dared
reprove the usurpation of Milan by Lodovico Sforza. Charles was coming
into Italy to dethrone these evil and malignant princes, “fathers of all
treason,” as the author of “De Bello Gallico” has called them; “tyrants
by whom I think that Nero himself would seem a saint.” But now that the
French were actually in Lombardy, it struck the Italian despots with
ominous force that he might not be content with only Naples. Few of them
had any just title to their possessions; none of them, save Venice,
could resist the power of France. “The princes of Italy,” wrote the
Venetian secretary, “aghast at this passing of the mountains, tried to
arrange that the King should pass no farther south, each one doubting
for his own estate, and doubting most of all the enthusiasm of his own
subjects.” For if the tyrants of Italy dreaded the advent of the French,
the populace—the poor, starved, degraded slaves of these illegal
despots—welcomed their coming with open arms. “They were so called and
cried upon,” goes on our author, “so invoked by all the populace of
Italy, that there was none who could withstand them, for all the people
said _Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini_.”
Sorely he was needed, that _Flagellum Dei_, of whom the inspired voice
of Savonarola prophesied daily in the great Cathedral of Florence.
Sorely he was required. For that autumnal Italy which at their coming
the Frenchmen found so fair, was no more than a waving green enchanted
garden full of poisons—poisons for the body, swift or slow, used without
scruple by Venice and Milan as a means to power, by Rome as an easy way
to wealth, by Naples for the vile gratification of cruel passions. The
terrible pages from the “Secreta Secretissima,” published by Lamansky in
1884, the folios of Marino Sanuto’s “Diaries,” the chronicles which fill
the “Archivio Storico,” are full of tragic murders, the more tragical
because so commonplace; and the quiet, impartial voice of Philippe de
Commines falters when he speaks of “les pitiez d’Italie.”
Not only poison for the enviable, slavery for the conquered, famine and
cruelty for the poor, and treachery among the princes of the earth; for
all alike there was a corrupt and horrible dissolution of moral
restraints. “There is no city in Italy,” records the Venetian, “not Rome
or Naples, not Bologna, Florence, Milan, or Ferrara, not my own Venice
even, that is holier than the Cities of the Plain.” Milan, with the
frescoes of Leonardo fresh upon the walls; Venice, where the
girl-madonnas of Giovanni Bellini were not yet all begun; Florence,
peopled with the saints of Botticelli, with the angels of the aged
Gozzoli upon the walls of Piero de’ Medici’s palace; Ferrara, where the
youthful Ariosto dwelt—these homes of the brightest and the fairest art
were morally no better than the Rome of the Borgias or the Naples of
Ferdinand and Alfonso. They were vile dens of corruption. And yet the
painted angels of Florence, the saints of Lombardy, were _not_ a mere
external fashion, a refined hypocrisy; they were the expression of a
movement in Italian hearts deeper than even this permeating evil—pure
underneath the mask of their perversion. When the French came into
Lombardy they found a contagion of spiritual enthusiasm among the
people; they encountered holy women who neither ate, drank, nor slept,
but dwelt in a continual ecstasy; and as they went along the roads the
poorer inhabitants came out to meet them, bearing palms in their hands,
and having on their pale and haggard faces a strange exalted smile.
“Blessed is he,” they sang, “who cometh in the name of the Lord;” for
the people were eager to be quit of the sin that hemmed them round. They
embraced the knees of their conquerors, and suffered willingly a great
deal of hardship at their hands, glad to be purified for ever by the
Scourge of God.
Had it not been for the welcome that they met, the French could never
have penetrated into Italy. They came ill-provided, without good
generals, without money. “There’s not a penny in the treasury,” wrote
Orleans to Ridolfi, in October, “and I have spent four thousand ducats
of my own to pay the troops.” The Italian despots trusted that this lack
of means would cause the French to retire before the winter, and Orleans
was in secret treaty with them to this end. Milan, says this interested
advocate, would be enough to satisfy the honour of France—Milan and a
yearly homage paid by Naples to the Crown of France.[114] But these
designs were frustrated by the enthusiasm with which the French were
received in the invaded provinces. The women brought their jewels to pay
the troops; the men threw open the gates of the cities; every difficulty
was overridden, for, says Commines, touched with the grave exaltation of
Italy, “God was Himself our leader: _Dieu monstroit conduire
l’entreprise_.”
Footnote 114:
See Desjardins I., “Négociations diplomatiques dans la Toscane.”
“At our first arrival,” he goes on, “the people honoured us as saints,
supposing all faith and virtue to be in us; but this opinion endured not
long.” The rude French soldiery—Gascons, Normans, Swiss, and German
mercenaries—pathetically ignorant of the fancied aureole playing round
their weatherbeaten faces, marched through Italy as through any other
conquered country. At Rapallo they put the town to the sword; they took
Fivizzano by a murderous assault; they shed much blood at Pontremoli;
for they could not understand that they seemed the Elect of Heaven, and
they sought by fierce reprisals to keep up a military prestige. But if
in Lombardy, in Lunigiana, the rude passage of the troops had to some
extent dispelled the illusions of the people—where the army had not yet
arrived the cities with open gates awaited it in holy awe. Arragon
retired from point to point without a battle fought. The subjects of
Catarina Sforza threatened her with rebellion if she refused submission
to the French; Bologna, against the will of Bentivoglio, insisted on
making peace with Charles. And in the Duomo of Florence, where
Savonarola preached of the Purifying Scourge of God, the people shouted,
“Franza, Franza!” where they were only used to sob in bitter patience,
“Misericordia.” And to these enthusiasts, impatient of Medicean luxury,
it was no drawback that the King, their deliverer, was a mere ugly
youth, “more a monster than a man,” as Guicciardini plainly states,
quite uncultured, and knowing neither Greek nor Latin. “In fact,” as the
Milanese Corio remarked, “an uninstructed person, though none the less
able to address his soldiery in telling terms, so that for love of him
they dash upon the enemy, shouting, ‘Alive or dead!’” In the autumn of
1494 this ugly, bright-eyed youth had inspired an equal devotion in the
populace of Florence.
The people were led by the monk Savonarola; but many of the old
Florentine families (the Nerli, Gualterotti, Sonderini, Capponi) were no
less anxious than the people to banish their _parvenu_ tyrant. Out of
all the crowd of monks, enthusiasts, bankers, patricians, and
politicians which made up the popular party, two _silhouettes_ stand
strongly forth. One is the preacher Savonarola—a man of middle height,
of dark complexion, and sanguine, bilious temperament. At forty-two his
face is lined with seams and wrinkles—a harsh, strong face with a sweet
expression, like Samson’s honey in the lion’s mouth; eyes that flash and
flame from under shaggy black eyebrows and shed their spiritual gleam
over the heavy Roman nose and the large mouth with the loose, thick lips
of the orator firmly closed and drawn into a painful smile; a kind,
noble, spiritual, tragic face, with something mad in it, or something at
the least that must pass for mad in this uninspired and transitory
world.
This was the man who for a good four years was virtually the ruler of
Florence; this was the man who, more than any other, helped on the cause
of France in Italy. “A man of holy life,” says Commines, who knew him.
And Guicciardini describes him: “Full of charity, of natural goodness,
and religion—so clever in philosophy, one would think he himself had had
the making of it; without a trace of lust or avarice; but if he had a
vice it was simulation, the prompting of a proud ambition.” One more
voice arrests us: “A treacherous friar, worthy the end of the wicked.”
But it is Marino Sanuto who speaks, the political enemy of Savonarola
and a personal stranger to his qualities.
Behind the strong profile of the friar we note another head, also worthy
of remark. This is Piero Capponi, a man of old Florentine family,
republican by descent. Sturdily built and square, with brilliant eyes,
he has a certain air of a courser sniffing battle; brief and resolute in
speech, vigorously mature in age, he seems the very embodiment of virile
energy. He is rich, for an astrologer at his birth having foretold his
death in battle, he was persuaded by his father to devote himself to
commerce. The man worked at money-getting with the restless, dominant
force he put into everything he did, and made his fortune in a sort of
fury. Then he threw up his career, having enough, and entered public
life at thirty years of age. A republican, his restless need of activity
made him accept the Medicean service. He had been ambassador in France,
and was as French as Savonarola. “See them near, like ghosts,” he used
to say, “and there is nothing to be afraid of in these French.” Although
at this time the right arm of the Republic, his patrician birth, his
acquaintance with the magnificence of princes, made him recoil from the
extremer measures of the monk. A man of the greatest spirit, the
staunchest energy, the very width of his views and his natural love of
change made him a danger to a peaceful but imperfect Government. Born to
be a great captain, he loved, above all things, a difficult campaign;
and he spent his life in fighting alternately his enemies and his
friends, until at last the astrologer’s prediction, true in spite of
human prudence, set a bridle on his martial soul.
These two men represent the two parties who chiefly desired the advent
of the French—the enthusiasts, the poor, the children of Savonarola, and
the powerful burghers, as rich and may be better born than Piero de’
Medici, who resented their tyrant’s views on the republic, who resented
almost more his alliance with the detested Spanish autocrats of Naples.
On the other side—the side of the Orsini, of Cardinal Bibbiena, of
Bernardò del Nero, and the aristocratic party, there is but one man that
can arrest us as Capponi or Savonarola must arrest us, and that is Piero
de’ Medici himself.
Piero and the King of France were mortal enemies; the King of Naples had
no more resolved ally than Medici, though the French inclinations of the
city prevented him from showing the true colour of his opinions. He was,
in fact, “immoderately bound up with Arragon, and determined to chance
the same fortune,” as Guicciardini tells us; since in return for this
alliance he had arranged that Ferdinand of Naples should support him in
turning his old republic into a new monarchy. Naples in those days
represented in Italy the kingdom as distinguished from the Signory; it
was the natural pole-star of the aristocrat. And Piero was drawn to the
south as much by sentiment as by inclination; his mother Clarice, his
young wife Alfonsina, both came of the Roman family of Orsini.
In 1494 Piero de’ Medici was about four-and-twenty years of age. He was
beautiful in person and very vigorous. He was clever at games and
sports; he had a charming way of pronouncing his words, a winning voice,
and a great facility in making impromptu verses. But this handsome,
graceful personage was not popular in Florence. He was haughty and
arrogant beyond expression, subject to furies of animal anger, proud,
and cruel. He would have men waylaid at night in the street and beaten
violently by private bravos. He was so absolute, that even in matters he
did not pretend to understand, he would govern all according to his
fancy. And this aristocrat of a free republic was as fiery, vain,
careless, and impatient as he was presumptuous. While the people
murmured “Franza” with white excited faces; while Savonarola was
thundering his prophecies of the _Flagellum Dei_; while news of the
massacres and the irresistible advance of France struck a religious
terror into Tuscany—the young head of the state left the garrisons
unprovided and unguarded; not a week’s provisions in Sarzana or Pietra
Santa; not a handful of infantry in the fastnesses of the hills. While
winds of rebellion, war, and outrage swept the city, he, the one man
unmoved, was to be seen as usual playing _pallone_ in the public
streets, a light-minded aristocrat, full of a certain easy and handsome
bravado, caring for no one’s safety, not even for his own.
But even Piero, as he knocked the tennis-ball against the palace front,
must now and then have felt a certain twinge of anxiety. For every day
brought news of the farther retreat of Arragon, and only success, and
brilliant success, could justify the Arragonese alliance in the eyes of
the Florentines. Already that aristocratic alliance had touched the
mercantile republic in a sensitive point: in June the King of France had
expelled the Florentine bankers and merchants out of his kingdom. This
meant ruin to many honourable families, and decided the burghers to join
the party of Savonarola, so weakening the Medicean faction that people
whispered it was Capponi who had thus advised King Charles, in order to
disgust the impoverished merchants with their tyrant. But the documents
published in Desjardins contradict this supposition. It was from
Lodovico il Moro, the determined enemy of Florence and of Piero, that
King Charles accepted this happy suggestion.
The burghers were all for France, in order to regain their commerce. The
people, under Savonarola, the Republican families under Capponi, desired
nothing more than the advent of King Charles. The very cousins of Piero
himself had become so French, that a year ago he had exiled them to
their country villas, where they lived in comfortable durance,
surrounded by the light of popular martyrdom. To resist all these varied
forces, Piero, on his side, could count a few old friends of his father,
such as Bernardò del Nero and his secretary Bibbiena, an ambitious
priest, and his wife’s brother, Pagolo Orsini, captain of the forces of
the republic.
The situation was grave indeed, but he took it lightly, with a facile
temerity that would not condescend to prudence. On the 3rd of October
his ambassador at Milan wrote that the French spoke of wintering in Pisa
and Sarzana. Yet not a single fortress had a week’s provisions. So late
as the 22nd of October, in answer to a last appeal from France, he sent
the Bishop of Arezzo to King Charles with a vague, exasperating,
indecisive answer. The same week the two cousins of Piero escaped from
their villas, and rode post-haste to the French camp. “Sire,” they cried
to Charles, “be not angry with Florence. The tyrant is against you, but
you have the faithful devotion of the people.” The King was well
inclined to believe the two young men with whom he had often practised,
and who had suffered a year’s imprisonment for his sake. “We do not
confuse the people of Florence with the governor,” answered the Council.
“The last alone is the King’s enemy.” And, departing from Piacenza, the
armies of France marched on the Florentine territories.
In a few days they were on the Tuscan border. At Fivizzano and
Pontremoli they had so avenged a slight resistance that the gates flew
open at their approach. Who dare resist the Scourge of God? Terror and
awe bent every head before them. In Florence the populace surged along
the narrow streets, and declared they would not resist the King of
France. Three days after Piero had sent off the Bishop of Arezzo, a
popular tumult seemed ready to burst at any moment.
What could he do? The French were now within fifty miles of Pisa, and
though the mountain fortresses ought to have kept them at bay all the
winter long, Piero remembered too late that he had forgotten to
provision them; that he had neglected to call the Pisan hostages into
Florence, and that Pisa hated her cruel mistress, and was certain to
revolt to France. Only one course suggested itself to the desperate
young man, and this course was so adventurous, romantic, and unusual,
that it captivated at once his unsteady imagination. Many years ago,
when Arragon had worsted Florence on the battlefield, Lorenzo de’ Medici
had gone as his own ambassador to Naples, running, it is true, a great
risk of steel or poison, but by his fascinating address making a devoted
friend of an exasperated enemy. Piero determined to follow the example
of his father. On the 26th of October he heard that the French were
arriving before Sarzana, within two days’ march of Florence. On the
evening of that day the tyrant of Florence secretly escaped from his own
palace, left the city in the dusk of evening, and rode through the chill
autumn night as far as Empoli.
II.
“EMPOLI, _26 Oct., 1494_.
“_Piero de’ Medici to the Signory of Florence._
“Because I believe I ought not to suffer imputation or reproach for that
which, according to my mind and feeble judgment, appeared to me the most
salutary remedy to preserve my menaced country, I depart from you to
offer myself to the most Christian king, and to turn on to my own head
the storm that menaces my native land. Nor is there any consequent
punishment, but I would rather suffer it in my own person than behold it
inflicted on this republic.