III.
It was the 8th of November, and a Sunday evening towards sunset, when the army of Charles VIII. arrived in Pisa. The slanting rays of the autumn sun lit up a brilliant spectacle, bathed in the soft aërial richness of the miraculously warm St. Martin’s summer which, in 1494, succeeded to the rigours of the earlier months. Tired with their march across the wintry Apennines, the foreign soldiers found in Pisa a city full of friends. Tables were laid in the streets where all might sup on wine and meat and enjoy the hospitality of the city. Under foot the branches of pine and boughs of autumn roses exhaled their fresh aroma; and the ruined walls of the cracked and damp-stained palaces were hidden by the great squares of pale-crimson silk, gold brocade, and Turkey carpets that were hung from every window.
Along these altered streets, embellished for the festival, a train of priests, in stole and chasuble, carrying their holiest relics, went out to meet the King. But this, the arranged and official feature of his reception, faded, on the event, into absolute unimportance. All took place at first as had been designed. The great motley travel-stained crowd of the French army came trampling down the boughs of pine and roses; the priests met the soldiers; and finally the King came riding on his great black horse, Savoy, under the blue-silk canopy sustained by the nobles of Pisa: but when the people caught sight of this little young man, with the large head, bright eyes, thin legs, high shoulders, and quaint amiable air of elfin ugliness, then they forgot the dignity of an official reception. This was the King of France! This was the all-potent power which, at different moments of history had stretched its invited and benevolent ægis over Asti, Genoa, Savona, nay, even over Naples and haughty Florence, to shelter them from the cruelty of a tyrannic neighbour. But instead of the dread magnificent symbolic monarch they had expected to behold, lo, a benevolent, rather grotesque little youth, with the most shining and enthusiastic eyes, a kind ugly face, engaging rather timid manners, and a total lack of that anti-human splendour which these enslaved republicans had expected in a king. A great wave of love, of anticipated gratitude swept through the hearts of all these people: he was, he must be, their hero, their deliverer. It was with tears of passion streaming down their cheeks that men, women, even little children, rushed into the ranks of the astonished soldiery, seeing round each weather-beaten face the shimmer of an aureole, pressing, hurrying, thronging towards the King—crying all together in their sobbing voices “Libertate, Libertate!” while such as could master a word or two of French, stammered in their soft lisping Pisan accent, an appeal in the language of his distant country: “Liberté, liberté, cher Sire!” There was no affectation in this outburst of enthusiasm, nay, almost of idolatry. Any man who was stronger than Florence was a possible hero to the Pisans. The great motley army of Charles proved his force, and in the rugged amiable faces of master and of men the Pisans recognized the faculty of sympathy.
The Pisans had been to some extent prepared to find this virtue in the French by the correspondence of the Pisan exiles with Lodovico of Milan, whose trump-card was to secure if possible the liberation of Pisa by the French, and then, after their return to France, to offer himself as protector to the abandoned city. This plan was so well-contrived that, if only the first impulse were given, the machine must go on of itself; for the Pisans would certainly accept their liberty, if the French could be moved to grant it them; and, equally certainly, the French, after their return to France, could not afford to hold Pisa against not only Florence, but Milan, Venice, Genoa, and Lucca, who would none of them submit to hand a Mediterranean port to Charles. Lodovico was convinced that the Pisans would prefer the untried yoke of Milan to the hated bonds of Florence. The great thing was to give the first impulse.
To this end the Duke of Milan, when he had quitted the French camp the previous Tuesday, had left behind him Galeazzo di San Severino, the brilliant young husband of his natural daughter. Galeazzo had instructions to do his utmost in every way to induce the French to protect the Pisans in a rebellion against Florence. He did not waste so excellent an opportunity. No sooner were Charles and his nobles in the Medici palace and the uncouth French soldiers housed like sons and brothers in the homes of Pisa, than the adroit young San Severinesco called a private council of the chief Pisan nobles. He advised them, as a son of Milan, and as a friend and well-wisher of their own, to throw themselves at once and utterly upon the generosity of France. This was a tempting counsel; yet there were some, and among them the warlike Giulio della Rovere, Cardinal of Saint Peter ad Vincula, that were for patience. “What shall we do when France has left the city?” they asked of one another. “Milan will protect you!” cried Messer Galeazzo, with a burst of inspiring confidence.
The Pisans hesitated only for a moment. From Venice or from Milan they had always hoped to gain their liberty at last, or at the least a change of masters. France, backed by Milan, seemed the most desirable deliverer: the ancient suzerain of the city supported by its latest friend. It was difficult at that moment to imagine a stronger conjunction in Italy; for in 1494 Charles was spoken of as the second Charlemagne, and no one ventured to set a bound to the triumphs of Lodovico of Milan. “All that he desires,” the Venetian secretary was writing almost at this very time, “all that he desires, Fortune has conceded him, and all his plans come true.” For France and Milan to protect Pisa against the rest of Italy in 1494, was as if Russia and a stronger Servia to-day were to join their forces to secure Bulgaria against the anger of the other Balkan States.
Venice for a brief moment had sunk into the shade. She, who had manœuvred so deeply to unseat Arragon and Sforza by the help of France, beheld, to her immense chagrin, Charles VIII. following her own suggestions as to the enterprise of Naples with Lodovico Sforza as his mentor and ally. Milan had taken the place of Venice in the French Council; Milan, which the French should have conquered as their earliest prey. “It is extraordinary how that man succeeds,” wrote Marin Sanuto. “Yet it may chance that he outwit himself at last. Please God, he come to a good end! But I for one do not believe it!”
At Pisa Lodovico registered a new success. It was in vain that Vincula (for the first time in his life, says Guicciardini, the author of quiet counsels) represented to the assembled nobles the danger of the step. They were beside themselves with the hope of liberty; and indeed, all the French agree in telling us that their condition was truly desperate. “Piteous, and lamentable,” says Desrey, and Commines, a staunch Florentine in principle, allows that they were handled as cruelly as slaves. To men in such a plight, and counselled by a person so important as San Severino, no risk appears too great to run that leaves a chance for liberty.
And so that very night the Pisans, still in their gala-dresses, but with torn hair, faces of mourning, clasped hands and streaming eyes, thronged into the council-chamber of the astonished King. “It was lamentable,” writes an eye-witness, “to hear[eye-witness, “to hear] them tell the wrongs and grievances they endured.” It was as if, in the middle of their gala, one of them, with a significant irony, had raised the corner of the pale silk gala-hangings and had revealed the mouldering stone, the unsightly ruin underneath. As the Pisans exposed the real degradation of their slavery, the facile rash humanity of the French was touched to tears; and when Messer Simone Orlandi (an accomplished gentleman who could express himself in French) had finished his recital, it was not only the Pisans who, pale with indignation and with pity, turned to the King of France on the throne seated of Medici, and cried out to him, “Liberté, liberté, cher Sire!”
At this point an accomplished Legist, a Counsellor of the Parliament in Dauphiné, named Ribot, who also was a Master of Requests at Court, turned to the King and said: it was indeed a lamentable case, and that never, for sure, were any other men so hardly used as these. The King himself—touched to the heart, as were all these frank and simple Frenchmen, by the unsuspected misery beneath the gold brocades of this fantastic Italy, and not quite understanding (as Commines suggests) what it was the Pisans meant by this word Liberty—answered vaguely that he would be content they should enjoy it. This at least is the mild version of Commines, who was absent in Venice at the time; but Pierre Desrey, actually present at the scene, puts a stronger warrant in the mouth of Charles: “Il les assura de les conserver dans leurs franchises.”
That night the Florentines in Pisa—men in office, judges, merchants, and 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.