The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

LESSER PRINCIPALITIES

Of the dukes of Parma, whose reigns filled the seventeenth century, not one deserved either the love of his people or the respect of posterity. The contemporary annals of the princes of Este were graced by more ability and virtue. But the reduction of the dominion of those sovereigns to the narrow limits of the duchies of Modena and Reggio diminished the consequence which their ancestors had enjoyed in Italy during the preceding century, before the seizure of Ferrara by the Roman see. Don Cesare of Este, whose weakness had submitted to this spoliation, reigned until the year 1628. His subjects of Modena forgave him a pusillanimity which had rendered their city the elegant seat of his beneficent reign. His son, Alfonso III, who succeeded him, was stricken with such wondrous affliction for the death of his wife, only a few months after his accession to the ducal crown, that he abdicated his throne, and retired into a Capuchin convent in the Tyrol. On this event, his son Francesco I assumed his sceptre in 1629, and reigned nearly thirty years. Joining in the wars of the times in upper Italy between France and Spain, and alternately espousing their opposite causes, Francesco I acquired the reputation of one of the ablest captains of his age, as he was also one of the best sovereigns. His skilful conduct and policy in these unimportant contests were rewarded by the extension of his territories; and in 1636, the little principality of Correggio (more famous in the annals of art than of war) was annexed to his imperial fiefs. Neither the short reign of his son and successor, Alfonso IV, which commenced in 1658 and ended in 1662, nor that of his grandson, Francesco II, which began with a feeble minority and terminated after a protracted administration of the same character, demand our particular notice; and in 1694, the cardinal Rinaldo, son of the first Francesco, succeeded his nephew, and entered upon a reign which was reserved for signal calamities in the first years of the new century.

In the affairs of Parma and Modena, during the century before us, there is scarcely anything to invite our attention; but the fortunes of Mantua, so obscure in the preceding age, were rendered somewhat remarkable in this by the wars which the disputed succession to its sovereignty occasioned. The reign of Vincente I, who, having succeeded to the ducal crowns of Mantua and Montferrat in 1587, still wore them at the opening of the seventeenth century, and that of his successor Francesco IV, were equally obscure and unimportant. But, on the death of Francesco, in 1612, some troubles arose, from the pretensions which the duke of Savoy advanced anew over the state of Montferrat. It was not until after several years that negotiations terminated the indecisive hostilities which were thus occasioned, and in which Spain interfered directly against the duke of Savoy, while France more indirectly assisted him. By the Treaty of Asti in 1615, and of Madrid in 1617, the duke of Savoy engaged to leave Montferrat to the house of Gonzaga, until the emperor should decide on his claims. The last duke of Mantua, Francesco IV, had left only a daughter: but as Montferrat was a feminine fief, that state descended to her; while her father’s two brothers, Ferdinando and Vincente II, reigned successively over Mantua without leaving issue. On the death of the latter of these two princes, both of whom shortened their days by their infamous debaucheries, the direct male line of the ducal house of Gonzaga became extinct; and the right of succession to the Mantua duchy devolved on a collateral branch, descended from a younger son of the duke Federigo II, who had died in 1540. This part of the family of Gonzaga was established in France, in possession of the first honours of nobility, and was now represented by Charles, duke de Nevers. By sending his son, the duke of Rethel, to Mantua in the last illness of Vincente II, Charles not only secured the succession to that duchy, which he might lawfully claim, but reannexed Montferrat to its diadem. For, on the very same night on which Vincente II expired, the duke of Rethel received the hand of Maria, the daughter of Francesco IV, and heiress of Montferrat; and the right of inheritance to all the states of the ducal line thus centred in the branch of Nevers.

[1630-1680 A.D.]

The new ducal house of Gonzaga did not commence its sovereignty over Mantua and Montferrat without violent opposition. The duke of Savoy renewed his claim upon the latter province; and Cesare Gonzaga, duke of Guastalla, the representative of a distant branch of that family, made pretensions to the duchy of Mantua. At the same time the Spanish government thought to take advantage of a disputed succession, for the purpose of annexing the Mantuan to the Milanese states; and the emperor Ferdinand II placed the duke of Nevers under the ban of the empire for having taken possession of its dependent fiefs without waiting for a formal investiture at its hands. The objects of Ferdinand were evidently to revive the imperial jurisdiction in Italy, and to enrich the Spanish dynasty of his family by the acquisition of these states. To promote these combined plans of the house of Austria an imperial army crossed the Alps, and surprised the city of Mantua, which was sacked with merciless ferocity (1630). At the same time the duke of Savoy concluded a treaty with Spain, for the partition of Montferrat; and the new duke of Mantua seemed likely to be dispossessed of the whole of his dominions. But fortunately for him, it was at this juncture that Cardinal Richelieu had entered on his famous design of humbling the power and ambition of both the Spanish and German dynasties of the house of Austria; and a French army, under Louis XIII in person, forcing the pass at Susa, crossed the Alps to support the Gonzagas of Nevers against all their enemies. We pass over the uninteresting details of the general war, which was thus kindled in northern Italy by the Mantuan succession. When Richelieu himself appeared on the theatre of contest, at the head of a formidable French army, all resistance was hopeless; and his success shortly produced an accommodation between the belligerents in the peninsula, by which the emperor was compelled, in the settlement of the matter, to bestow the disputed investiture of Mantua and Montferrat upon Charles of Nevers (1631).

The Old Lighthouse, Genoa

This prince, who thenceforth reigned at Mantua under the title of Carlo I, retained that duchy without further opposition. But in 1635 he was drawn, by the memory of the eminent services which France had rendered him, into an alliance with that power against Spain, in the new war which broke out between the rival dynasties of Bourbon and Austria. Such a connection could serve, however, only to destroy the repose and endanger the safety of his duchies. Neither Carlo I nor his son Carlo II, who succeeded him in 1637, could prevent Montferrat from being perpetually overrun and ravaged by the contending armies of France, Spain, the empire, and Savoy; and the Mantuan dukes abandoned almost every effort to retain the possession of that province until, after being for above twenty years the seat of warfare and desolation, it was at length restored to Carlo II by the general Peace of the Pyrenees.

Carlo II died in 1665; and his son Ferdinando Carlo commenced the long and disgraceful reign with which the sovereignty and race of the Gonzagas were to terminate early in the next century. This prince, more dissolute, more insensible of dishonour, more deeply buried in grovelling vice than almost any of his predecessors, was worthy of being the last of a family which, since its elevation to the tyranny of Mantua, had, during four centuries of sovereignty, relieved its career of blood and debauchery by few examples of true greatness and virtue. To gratify his extravagance, and indulge in his low and vicious excesses, Ferdinando Carlo crushed his people under grievous taxation. To raise fresh supplies, which his exhausted states could no longer afford, he shamelessly in 1680 sold Casale, the capital of Montferrat, to Louis XIV, who immediately occupied the place with twelve thousand men under his general Catinat. The sums which the duke thus raised, either by extortion from his oppressed subjects or from this disgraceful transaction, were dissipated in abandoned pleasures in the carnivals of Venice, among a people who openly evinced their contempt for him, and whose sovereign oligarchy passed a decree forbidding any of their noble body from mingling in his society.