soldiers of the garrison—were driven at the sword’s point out of the
rebellious city. The statue of Marzocco on the bridge was hurled in a
thousand pieces into the muddy Arno; the standard of Florence was
dragged and trampled in the mire; and bonfires until morning hailed the
discomfiture of the King’s allies. On the morrow after noon Charles left
the city. He had placed a garrison of three hundred French soldiers in
the new citadel; he had appointed three commissioners to superintend
affairs; but he had taken no steps to impose the least restraint of
civil order upon this impassioned and suddenly enfranchised people.
Fortunately the nobles of the town took the matter into their wiser
hands. Twenty-four hours after the entry of the French, Pisa was a free
Republic governed by a Gonfalonier, six Priors, and a Balia of Ten, with
a new militia of its own, and, for the first time in eight and eighty
years, a Pisan garrison in the ancient citadel.
III.
If we ask, What right had the King of France to set at liberty the
subjects of his allies, lent to him in his need as a temporary gage? we
find the question difficult to answer. To statesmen like Commines or
Briçonnet there was something shocking and dishonourable in the
liberation of Pisa by the King, something that the tenderest palliation
for generous youth and inexperience could not attempt to justify. On the
other hand, to fresh enthusiastic spirits, such as Ligny or the King
himself, there was a degree of inhumanity in leaving the Pisans to their
obvious slavery which no code of political honour could extenuate.
These two parties, and these two counsels, marched with the King out of
Pisa into Empoli, where he slept that Monday night—doubtless in the same
bad inn that had so poorly housed the adventurous Medici just fifteen
nights ago. When, on the Tuesday, the King arrived at Signa he heard
that the city of Florence was in revolt. Florence and Pisa, unknown to
one another, had each regained their liberty upon the selfsame day. For
when the King of France came in sight of the group of domes and towers
along the Arno, his young guest at Sarzana, so recently the lord of all
this beauty, was escaping to Bologna across the mountains in disguise
with a price upon his head.
Charles, the pupil of the Duke of Milan, was not well inclined to
Florence; and he was not propitiated by the fact that Piero de’ Medici
had been expelled the city on account of the great concessions he had
made to France at the time of his fugitive visit to Sarzana. A month ago
the King had declared that Piero alone was his enemy, and that the city
was his friend; since the 30th of October he had changed his mind it was
the pliant Medici who now appeared his friend, and his anger was against
rebellious Florence.
Yet what had Florence done more audacious than that which Charles
himself had sanctioned in the Pisans? Florence had expelled the Medici;
Pisa the Florentines, almost at the selfsame hour. But the fact that the
Florentines condemned the loan of the fortresses hardened the heart of
the King, conscious that by the liberation of the Pisans he had
justified the greatest of their fears. This was, in fact, the direst
harm with which an enemy could threaten Florence; and Charles had done
it despite his name of friend. It was only natural that he should
nourish a grievance against the ally whom he had injured; and when on
the 17th of November the French entered Florence, it was remarked that
the King rode through the streets, lance on thigh, with the bearing of
an offended conqueror. His mind was as haughty as his mien, and he was
prepared to claim from the Republic the independence of Pisa and the
restoration of Piero to the chief place in the government.
But the Florentines were no less resolute than Charles. Capponi made his
famous threat, and the King, after ten days of vain parade of force,
swore a solemn treaty with the Florentines upon the 25th of the month.
By the terms of this convention it was arranged that Pisa and Leghorn
were to be left in the hands of the King till his return from Naples,
and then given back to Florence; the King was to decide between Genoa
and Florence as to the final disposal of Sarzana and Pietro Santa; the
King was to say no more till March concerning the restoration of the
Medici, when the Signory, if he desired, would reconsider the matter,
and meanwhile, by Royal request, the price was taken off the tyrants’
heads, and the wife and child of Piero were permitted to remain in
Florence. The Signory agreed to pay the King, in three terms, the sum of
120,000 ducats towards the expense of the campaign; but, for us, the
most important proviso of this treaty (which the student may consult in
the first volume of Desjardin’s “Négociations”) is one that secured a
complete amnesty for Pisa. Moreover Florence promised, in favour of the
King, to rule that city in the future with a more liberal and a gentler
hand.
It was not three weeks since Charles had promised to maintain the Pisans
in their liberty, and those unhappy patriots who could not penetrate
(Commines declares that no Italian ever could) the shifting confusion of
the Court, did not know, and would have little cared to understand, that
Beaucaire and Ligny had held the balance yesterday, but Gannay, Gié, and
Briçonnet to-day. The only consolation that they could have found in
this unstability of favour was the chance that their advocates might
soon again succeed to power, and as a fact they had made a great point
in securing the sympathy of Ligny (the King’s cousin) and Piennes—two
young gentlemen of the King’s own age who were his inseparable
companions, wore armour like his own and the Royal colours. These two
gallants counted on their side the Seneschal of Beaucaire, one of the
King’s two especial counsellors. But the other, Briçonnet, supported the
Florentine party. The elder and more diplomatic statesmen, such as, Gié,
Gannay, and Commines, were all on the side of Florence.
Such was the position of the Court when, in the January of 1495, the
Pisans sent to Rome, as a last desperate advocate of their extremity, a
gentleman of their city, skilled in French, one Messer Burgundio Legolo,
or Lolo as the slurring Pisan voices gave the name. The King received
the ambassador graciously, but in the presence of the Florentine envoys;
and the party of pity, and the party of honour (if so we may name the
factions of Ligny and of Briçonnet) were both assembled when the Pisan
advocate began to address the King:
“Now for nearly ninety years,”[130] began Burgundio Lolo, “the city of
Pisa, once the greatest in Italy, once carrying her Empire into the
recesses of the East, has suffered the yoke of an intolerable servitude.
The cruel avarice of Florence has brought our city into so great a depth
of desolation that her streets are almost empty of inhabitants, for the
most of her citizens, unable to endure this grinding slavery, have gone
into a voluntary exile abandoning their native land. Those that remain,
incapable of plucking from their hearts the love of country, have indeed
renounced all else that renders life endurable. The acerb and cruel
exactions of foreign taxes, the insolent rapine of private Florentines,
the injustice that forbids us by art or trade or public office to
recruit our fallen fortunes, have left us an empty life, plundered of
all enjoyment: nay, dangerous even and deadly, for the clayey marshes
that our ancestors kept with exact and pious diligence, are now so
little drained, so long neglected that the waters of Maremma sap our
fairest palaces and our churches, our houses, our public buildings fall
into ruins while the miasma of those stagnant waters breeds a grievous
fever in our midst. And where shall we turn to forget our misery and our
dishonour? we, who are denied an outlet to our energy and our ambition?
As we pass the void hours of our leisure in the ruined streets of our
once glorious city, shall we not feel the pity of the ruin? shall we
look unmoved upon the dishonoured remnant of the magnificence of our
ancestors? Nay, since it is no shame to Pisa, after a long renown to be
fallen in decay—because in all the eminence of this world there is
inherent this fatality of corruption—were it not wiser, even for her
conquerors, in musing on her ancient greatness to turn their hearts to
pity, rather than to use so cruel an advantage over a city in whose
decadence they should, in truth, behold the inevitable presage of their
own?
Footnote 130:
See the speech—true, we may suppose, in fact if not in phrase—as
reported in Guicciardini’s “History.”
“Alas, so cruel, so insatiable, so impious has been the Florentine
dominion that, rather than return to that slavery, we would forfeit life
itself. And now at last a hope—a dear hope of liberty—has dawned upon
us; and we beseech you, O King of France, with tears—not only these few
visible tears of mine, but, invisible and ample, the lamentations of all
the distant city—here at your feet, O King, I beseech you to remember
what justice, what piety, what clemency of a magnanimous prince would
shine for ever round your name should you choose to be the Father and
Deliverer of Pisa, rather than the Minister of the slavery of Florence.”
There was a little silence. In these accents men seemed to hear an echo
of that natural law that lives immutable behind the convenience of
nations—νομὶμα ἄγραπτα κᾶσφαλὴ θεῶν. The King’s face glowed; and the
enthusiasm of Ligny and Piennes was reflected in the demeanour of
Beaucaire, a rash and low-born person moved by pity, moved by Pisan
money also (if we are to believe Guicciardini), moved certainly by
rivalry of Briçonnet. The other party waited somewhat anxiously for the
Florentine ambassador to answer Lolo. Soderini, Bishop of Volterra, was
a practical and eminent statesman, but on that excited audience his
words fell without wings to reach their hearts.
Florence, he said, had bought Pisa with good money. She had been kinder
than she need have been, for when the wilful Pisans yielded, half-dead
with famine, she had brought more victuals than firearms to finish their
subjection. She had the right to use her chattel as she would, and had
she been a thousand times more harsh who should come between a man and
his own? It was ridiculous to prate of the ancient grandeur of Pisa—God
had made an end of that long before the Florentines, and she had been a
poor bargain to Florence ever since the hour of her purchase.
So spoke the hard-headed Bishop of Volterra. But even as reported by a
Florentine historian these arguments do not make any great effect; and
it was quite clear, as he avows, that the Pisan advocate had made a far
deeper impression on the King. And as, that very week, Briçonnet was
sent to Florence upon a diplomatic mission, the party of Pisa remained
triumphant in the camp where with (Commines in Venice and Briçonnet in
Tuscany) Beaucaire and Ligny and Piennes held for the moment the whole
of Royal favour.
IV.
Louis de Ligny-Luxembourg, Grand Chamberlain of France, cousin of the
King through his Savoyard mother, was the son of that unfortunate Comte
de St. Pol decapitated by Louis XI. He was not only one of the great
nobles of France, but one of the first gentlemen in Europe, for his
house was ancient and illustrious by descent and especially fortunate in
marriage. Nevertheless the young man was poor; yet owing to his charming
manners, his courage and adroitness, he was a most important factor not
only in the Court of the King but in the Court of Orleans. The Count of
Ligny, chivalrous, amorous, and pitiful, flits, for a brief moment, like
the figure of Youth in an allegory—across the serious stage of the
Italian wars; and his tragic childhood and his melancholy marriage seem
to throw out with a brighter lustre the intrinsic brilliance of that
scintillating presence.
He was, say the French chroniclers, “prince gentil vaillant, adroit et
généreux,” a pattern for nobles and the beloved of ladies. Guicciardini,
looking from another point of view, calls him juvenile, inexperienced,
and light. To quote a final authority, Commines briefly gives the reason
for our dwelling on him: “Above all others,” says he, “this young
gentleman especially favoured the Pisans’ cause.”
Ligny had ever been a politician of Orleans’ party, that earlier faction
so long stimulated by intriguing Venice, which aimed not only at the
conquest of Naples, but also at securing Milan. With these two great
possessions at either end of Italy, it was clear that Pisa would make an
excellent half-way house. Pity for the Pisans was probably the essential
motor of Ligny’s action, yet there is no doubt he desired to further the
policy of Orleans. And before the winter was over, Ligny’s marriage gave
him a personal interest in the game.
In the early spring of 1495, Charles VIII. had arrived in Naples. With
that fatal lack of policy which was destined to frustrate a more than
mortal triumph, he began to lavish the possessions of the Neapolitan
aristocracy upon his favourites and countrymen. A wiser King would have
conciliated the native barons and wedded their interest to his own, so
that when he came to leave the country he should leave behind him a
whole nobility of viceroys. But Charles only thought of rewarding his
favourites of the hour. The daughter of the Prince of Altamura, the last
of her house, the heiress of immense possessions, was reserved for
Ligny.
Madonna Lionora was a young princess of more than common interest, the
last Altamura in the direct line, the last of that race which claimed to
be descended from the Three Kings of the East. It was easy to make the
Count of Ligny virtually the Prince of Altamura by marrying him to this
young girl. This was done, but Ligny was barely seven days the
bridegroom of his lovely Mage when the King, alarmed at the preparations
of the League, determined to march northwards. Ligny of course went with
him, leaving his bride behind him in a convent. And on the long road
northwards the desire to be near his young wife and his new possessions
gave a keener zest to the scheme of a Central Italian French dependency
of which Ligny himself should be made the governor. When the army
reached Siena, though the city was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, and
therefore implicated in the Anti-Gallic league, none the less the
Republic declared for France, demanding Ligny for her governor. The
young man left a garrison there under Gaucher de Tinteville, and went
with the King, hoping to pursue a like policy in Pisa.
The King had not yet decided whether he would halt in Pisa or in
Florence. On the eve of Corpus Christi, Wednesday, the 17th of June, the
French reached Poggibonsi where the roads divide. Here they halted for a
day to keep the festival, and here the King was met by no less a
personage than Savonarola, accompanied by fifty notables of Florence.
This at the moment must have appeared terribly against the plans of
Ligny, for if there was a man in Italy whom the French regarded with a
curious, half-superstitious respect, it was this authoritative friar,
with the harsh sweetness in his voice, the saturnine head, the asper and
loving expression in his painful smile, who, as one authorized of
heaven, had foretold their advent before they were persuaded to the
step.
Poggibonsi, as I have said, is the last considerable town before the
ways divide that lead to Pisa and to Florence. At such a cross-road was
also the mind of Charles. Which turning should he take? “Keep your vows,
restore the cities, respect Florence, lest ye incur the awful judgment
of God, whose name, unless ye keep your oath, ye took in vain upon the
altar of St. John in Florence!” So thundered Savonarola; and there were
many things in favour of this plan; firstly, the strong personal
influence of the prophetic Ferrarese; secondly, the fact that Charles
was sore in need of ready money, and hoped to borrow it in Florence;
thirdly, at Poggibonsi he had heard that war was begun, that Orleans was
in Novara, and, therefore, he himself and his handful of troops in
desperate need of the Florentine army. A little persuasion and no doubt
the King would have gone to Florence; but Savonarola scorned to
persuade, he menaced. The city, he said, was armed to the teeth; she
would receive the King rather as a prodigal than a conqueror. If he
wished to conciliate her, let him keep his word; then, but only then,
she would shower her benefits upon the elect of God.
This accent was not so moving to the King as the entreaties of Burgundio
Lolo. Pisa, as Charles knew very well, would receive him as a hero and a
deliverer—but Pisa had neither men nor money.
In these uncertainties two days went by; the King alternately assuring
Savonarola that he would keep his word to Florence, and protesting that
he had not the heart to break that earlier promise given to the Pisans.
Out of this hobble there was no way except by broken vows and treachery.
It was a delicate question for a chivalrous prince, nourished, like
Charles, on Amadis and Arthur: for to keep faith with the Pisans would
be to ruin his ally; and to keep faith with Florence to hand over to
slavery a people who had solemnly placed themselves under his
protection. Nor were the political advantages quite easy to decide.
Florence, of course, offered men and money sorely needed; but Pisa
offered an asylum in case of reverses further north, or in case the
Florentines should prove as faithless as the rest of the Italians. For
Pisa was not merely a friendly city, but a city actually in the hands of
France. This was certainly an argument—“nevertheless,” says
Guicciardini, “I doubt if anything so logical could influence the King.
Much more potent with such as he were the tears, and entreaties of the
Pisans.” Those tears, invisible and ample as the waters of life,
Burgundio Lolo had quoted to the King at Rome; and after all these
months the memory of the Pisan advocate pleaded successfully against the
actual influence of Savonarola.
At last a straw decided the unsteady balance. At a village called
Campana, or Cassino, near to Florence, the King heard of a cruel raid
committed by the Florentines upon the Pisan town of Pontevalle. There
had been French soldiers in the fort; but when the French archers came
up to the rescue they found the little place untenanted save by dying
men, wheeling birds of prey, and corpses. The King was furious against
the Florentines; yet it was with the lightness of heart that follows the
taking of a difficult decision that he set his back against the town,
“et gaiement s’en alla dedans Pise.”
V.
History is not decided by oratory. The eloquence of Lolo, the menaces of
the Friar, had conspired with a momentary distress and anger, to lodge
the French in Pisa. It still remained to see what Charles would do. The
first move promised little; in order to guard against a second surrender
to the impulse of the moment Charles sent a messenger to Florence, and
promised to speak the final word, only when he should have arrived in
Lucca.
But if history is in fact decided by Necessity—that grim and resolute
Anankê who cuts the most different characters to her pattern, making of
a Louis XI., and a Henry V., so individual as princes, no more, when
once the coronation day is over, than able continuers of the policy she
imposes; if Necessity and the slow evolution of ideas control the
individual, and leave him scarce more independent than the nail, which
moves indeed, but only moves to follow the control of the attracting
magnet; yet it is not merely by the unbroken sequence of Law that the
world progresses. Comets and cataclysms, plagues and earthquakes, and in
the moral world, sudden, fierce contagions of enthusiasm or ecstasy
interrupt and modify their course.
Driven by a momentary resentment, a gust of pity and remembrance, into
Pisa, Charles was no sooner in the city than the King resumed his empire
over the Man. He sent, as I have said, an embassy to Florence,
reassuring as best he could the potent and wealthy city, putting off his
answer, and asking meanwhile for an instalment of money and three
hundred lances. The Florentines sent no money and only eighty lances,
and Charles perceived that the least extra strain would break the
slender thread that still bound her to the French. Henceforth he steeled
his royal heart against impolitic pity. It was in vain that he looked on
the statue of himself upon the bridge, embellished in sculpture,
resolute, heroic, Saviour of the City, trampling underfoot the Lion of
Florence and the Viper of Milan. It was in vain, that, at the entrance
of the army, the little children of Pisa dressed in white satin sown
with _fleur-de-lis_ rushed to the gates to meet the soldiers, crying in
their high, sweet, confident voices, “Viva Francia!” It was in vain
that, in the early morning, as the King returned from the intenerating
Sacrament of the Mass, he met in the streets the fairest ladies of the
town, barefoot, dishevelled, dressed like slaves in coarse mourning
garments, who dropped before him on their knees, sighing and wailing for
liberty.
The most that Charles could do was to defer, to temporize, to vacillate;
he could not be brought to pledge himself to more. He, with a remnant of
his army, was alone in an inimical country, subject at any moment to
encounter the forces of Venice, Milan, Spain, the Emperor and the Pope;
meanwhile Florence was his one efficient friend. Florence to him had
been a leal and honest ally; dare he desert her? ought he to repay her
sacrifice with ruin? And yet this faithful Florence had behaved to Pisa
in a fashion cruel and anti-human beyond words. And Pisa also had
trusted him; Pisa was tenderly his friend. Could he fling the wounded
hare which had taken refuge under his royal mantle to the fierce eyes
and gaping jaws of the hound which served him?
The question wrung the conscience of the man. But, for the King, the
matter was easily decided. His first duty was to his country and his
troops; Florence could help him to reach the forces of Orleans in safety
and with some degree of glory; but Pisa could furnish no active aid at
all.
Meanwhile, the army had become fired with entirely different
convictions. Suddenly King Charles, the adored conqueror, the second
Charlemagne, the unlettered and ugly little captain whose soldiers’
devotion so amazed the Milanese, beheld himself in the midst of his
troops almost without authority. The army, like one man, rose and spoke
on behalf of the Pisans.
Insulated in this shelter of Pisa, with the offended Florentines
continually harassing his outposts, with in front the fastnesses of the
Apennines, and (God alone knew where) the five-toothed Trap of the
League into which his little force must fall—in this terrible
complication Charles beheld himself menaced by no less than the mutiny
of his own army. And for what? Not on account of the light head and
imprudent heart that had brought this handful of soldiers to fight such
fearful odds. This rebellion was inspired purely by the pity inspired by
men whose situation was certainly less hazardous than the peril of their
indignant champions.
But all day long the army surged in front of the palace clamouring
“Liberty! liberty!” in more virile voices than the Pisans’. The army
infected the Court; and one day, when the King sat playing draughts
alone with M. de Piennes, forty or fifty gentlemen of the Royal
household with their partisans forced their way into his chamber and
declaimed the woes of Pisa. Charles was indignant, and spoke so roughly,
that they took their persuasions and menaces elsewhere. Even the poor
archers, says Commines, moved by pity for the tears and lamentations of
the Pisans, threatened those whom they believed persuaded the King to
keep his oath at Florence. A private archer menaced Briçonnet; others
used rude language to Marshal de Gié; and for three nights President
Gannay durst not sleep in his lodgings. The Frenchmen infected the
Swiss; and these ferocious giants, who a few days later should massacre
man, woman, and child at Pontremoli, proved themselves as passionate in
their apology for liberty. “Do you want money?” cried young Sallezart
their paymaster. “Is it mere money that leads you to this infamy? Take
rather our collars, our buckles, and our silver ornaments; stop our
wages and spend the sum of our arrears. We will pay you as well as
Florence! only set the Pisans free!”