[112]. Corio, book vii.
“Nuove del mexe de Zener. 1497 O.S.
“Chome a Milano nel Castello a dì 3, la duchessa, moglie dil ducha presente Lodovico, chiamata Beatrice, figlia dil ducha di Ferrara, poi parturido uno fiol morto; etiam la era morta 5 hore dopo el puto. Di la qual morte el ducha steva in gran mesticia, serade le fenestre in una camera a lume di candela. Et è da saper, come vidi una lettera, che detta Duchessa morite a dì 2 zener, a hora 6 di note, et che in quel zorno era stada di bona voglia in carretta per Milano, et fatto ballar in Castello fin hore 2 di note. Et lassò do soli figlioli, uno chiamato Maximiliano ch’è Conte di Pavia e l’altro, Sforza, di anni 3. La qual morte el Ducha non poteva tolerar, per il grande amor le portava et diceva non si voller più[più] curar ne de figlioli, ne di Stato, ne di cossa mondana; et apena voleva viver. Stava in una camera per mesticia tutta di panni negri, et cussi stete per 15 zorni. Et che in questa notte instessa in che la Duchessa morite, caschò a terra li muri dil suo zardin, non essendo sta ni vento ni terra moto; el qual da alcuni fu tolto per mal augurio.”
“Diarii di Marino Sanudo, January 9, 1496.”
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.