XI.
Notwithstanding his deceptions in the affair of Genoa, and in spite of his supremacy in France, Orleans still cherished designs on Lombardy; and perhaps the chief cause why his Italian enterprises are less noticeable in the fifteenth than in the seventeenth century is due, not so much to his engrossment with affairs at home, as to the fact that in Benedict XIII. he found an ally infinitely less subtle and less brilliant than he had known in Clement VII. Benedict was little more than a captive in the hands of Orleans;[[41]] Clement had been an accomplice.
A greater than Clement failed him a little later. In the autumn of 1402, in the very flush and zenith of victory, Giangaleazzo Visconti died. A score of his captains soon were fighting for his kingdom. That vast territory, whose coherence existed only in the brain of one man, fell rapidly into fragments: city after city threw off the unwilling yoke of union, and what had almost begun to be a national Italy reverted in a few weeks to the old conditions of fragmentary independence. His two sons ruled in a narrowed Lombardy, and with no vista, as it seemed, on the ambitions of their father. In the very same year that the great Visconti died, Charles VI. sent to Genoa a small, restless, quixotic man of much ability, who to some extent filled the empty place of the dead Giangaleazzo. But if Marshal Boucicaut had much of the ambition, and all the audacity of the late Duke of Milan, he possessed nothing of his slow wise mind, of the deep and subtle duplicity that Machiavelli may have envied, or of the powers of combination, the cool tenacity to a grand idea, which foreshadowed the genius of another North Italian, Count Cavour. Moreover, while such share as Visconti meant to allow the French in Italy was destined by him for his son-in-law of Orleans, Boucicaut worked for the King. Thus, for the second time in his experience, the Frenchman found his greatest rival in France.
Of the two legitimate sons of the great Duke of Milan—one was a handsome young Nero, blood-mad, inept, given over to passion and cruelty; the other an astute child, timid, unscrupulous, who later should develop a trace of the genius of his father. At first their hold on their inheritance was so slight that Orleans determined on invading Lombardy, whether to defend or to supplant his nephews, who shall say? In October, 1403, he started for Lombardy, accompanied by 13 knights-banneret, 43 knights, 212 squires, 28 archers, 20 crossbow-men, and other soldiers.[[43]] On the way south he passed by Beaucaire, and had an interview with his charge, the Antipope Benedict. He took into his service the famous captain of adventure, Bernardon de Serres. He made friends with another mighty captain—an ancient enemy—the Count of Armagnac.[[42]] Vast and serious appeared his project of invasion, but, on the very verge of the Alps, suddenly, on January, 1404, he abandoned the prosperous enterprise, turned right about, and faced home for Paris.
What is the meaning of this sudden change of course, unexplained, and perhaps inexplicable? What was the object of the Lombard invasion? What was the cause which so unexpectedly suppressed it? Orleans believed himself to have a certain claim on Pisa, bequeathed by the great Visconti to his bastard son Gabriello-Maria. Gabriello Visconti was ill at ease in Pisa. A little later, in 1404, as we know, he offered his unruly city first to France, then to Florence. It is possible—it is even from the nature of things a necessary hypothesis—to suppose that in 1403 Gabriello had come to terms with Orleans, and that the rights on Pisa which Orleans vaunted as his own through Valentine Visconti were supported by some cession of the actual lord, her half-brother. But Orleans was not the only Frenchman capable of adventure and practice in Italy. By the time his army reached the frontier he found himself outwitted by a higher bidder, nearer at hand.
Jehan le Meingre, Marshal Boucicaut, Governor of Genoa, had intrigued with Gabriello and procured the city of Pisa for the King. A few months later, on the 15th of April, 1404,[[44]] a deed was drawn up declaring Pisa henceforth a fief of France.
At the first word of the matter Orleans had turned his back on his contemplated campaign and marched back to Paris, fury in his heart. Probably behind the interference of Boucicaut he divined the inspiration of Burgundy, his enemy;—Burgundy who, as events should prove, had unsuspected designs of his own upon the State of Pisa. Back in wrath marched Orleans: stalked indignant into Paris his men at his heels: found the King in his senses, and docile as was his wont. From him, on the 24th of May, Orleans extracted the deed which we append,[[45]] a deed that repudiates the action of Boucicaut, and transfers all the rights of France in Pisa to Orleans, who henceforth shall meet with neither let nor hindrance in his projects.
The deed was granted in Council, the King being then in his senses, and assisted by Berri, Bourbon, Tancarville, and others. The reader will remark the noteworthy absence of Burgundy. He will remember also that Berry, in 1405, will join Orleans in a defensive league against Jean-sans-Peur. It is possible that Burgundy knew nothing of the deed drawn up behind his back.
But it was too late for Orleans to profit by the King’s good-will. The Florentines were in Pisa, and an invasion against so powerful an enemy could not be undertaken.
For a moment Orleans was obliged to pause in his Italian policy—to pause only, not to abandon it, since in 1406[[48]] he still reclaimed authority on Pisa, and in the very year of his death was taking an active part in the affairs of Lombardy.[[47]] That pause was filled in a manner disastrous, fatal, yet natural enough in a man suffocating under a sense of bitter indignation and revolt. Burgundy had interfered with Orleans abroad. Very well; Orleans would interfere with Burgundy at home. Already the first steps were taken. In 1401, Orleans had married his cousin Mary Harcourt to the Duke of Gueldres, the enemy and the neighbour of Burgundy, with whom his rival now concluded an alliance and a league. In 1402, Orleans purchased from the King of the Romans the Duchy of Luxembourg. In 1405,[[46]] he assembled at Melun the entire strength of his faction, sending even to Asti for the Governor and his men. In 1405 also he allied himself with Berri and the Queen against Jean-sans-Peur. With the Court on one hand, and on the other Gueldres, the most reckless captain of his age;—with an army at his heels, and (through the county of Soissons, and down the banks of the Oise and the Marne), an uninterrupted passage through his own possessions into his new Duchy of Luxembourg: Orleans was a deadly enemy to Burgundy. A glance at the map will show the reader how, like a wedge or like a rivet, Luxembourg must split apart or hold together the domains of the Netherlands and the provinces of Franche Comté and Burgundy. In the hands of Orleans, Luxembourg was a wedge; and the domains of Burgundy were no longer a compact and formidable territory, but two principalities with Brussels for the capital of the one, and Dijon for the capital of the other. Should Orleans march an army into Luxembourg, should Gueldres come to his aid with an armed force, the suppression of the Dukedom of Burgundy would fall within the range of practical politics.
Henceforth, between these two princes the struggle for power should take on a new character and become the very struggle for existence. And while the people, abject, all in tears, prayed to Heaven: “Jesu Christ, send thou some man to deliver us from Orleans,” the hero of the people, Jean-sans-Peur the Belovèd, was urged by every motive of self-interest, every instinct of self-preservation, and with the assurance of popular immunity, to interrupt for ever the fatal progress of the tyrant.