The previous difficulties of Boucicaut had been as nothing compared to this dilemma. How could he refuse his service to the King, his lord and suzerain? How, on the other hand, could he break his plighted word? The vassal and the man of honour struggled together in his breast; and from that long and cruel duel the man of honour emerged triumphant. So Boucicaut refused to desert his Florentine allies, refused to assist the Royal fief of Pisa.
As the Florentines pressed closer and closer round the beleaguered city, the Pisans for the third time contrived to smuggle out a messenger who was to make his way as best he could to Asti (the city of Orleans), and thence to France to beseech the King to send a messenger and reinforcements.[[125]] But the Pisan envoy was discovered in the Florentine camp, and Capponi, the General, drowned him in the sea.
So that when the news of his interception came to Paris, it was too late for aught but indignation. “The Florentine merchants had to suffer for it,” says Corio; and Desjardins (in his introduction to the Tuscan Statipassers), expresses his astonishment at the obstacles laid in the way of Florentine trade by Marshal Boucicaut that year. For human nature is not consistent, and though Boucicaut had indignantly refused to desert his allies of Florence, none the less he was wrath at their success, which meant the injury of France.
For on the 10th of October, 1406,[[126]] a Florentine army marched into Pisa, garrisoned the citadels, established their government, and marched back with many hostages to Florence. Pisa was honourably lost to France.[[127]] Pisa was lost, and great was the sting and smart of it. Railing and bitter names flung at Boucicaut, detention of the Florentine Ambassadors by Orleans,[Orleans,][[128]] wrath of the King himself, were each and all wholly unavailing. Florence was the King’s ally and too great a power to be rashly assailed; and Florence was firm in Pisa.
Had Orleans lived, he might indeed have undertaken an expedition into Italy. But in the middle of his disappointment he was murdered as we know. Messer Gabriel’ Maria went to Milan, where he lived half a captive,[[129]] half a traitor for some while; and then took refuge again in Genoa. But in the year 1409 being detected by Boucicaut in a plot of singular treachery against the French, he was ruthlessly beheaded. Three years later, in 1412, after Gabriele’s death that plot succeeded. Boucicaut and the French were expelled from Genoa; and the wars of Burgundy and Armagnac, the woes of Agincourt and the long invasion of the English, for thirty years diverted the French from their endeavours to colonize beyond the Alps.
II.
The Florentine conquest was the beginning of ninety years of slavery for Pisa—a terrible slavery, heavy with exaggerated imports, bitter with the tolerated plunder of private Florentines, humiliating with continual espionage. Ruin fell upon the lovely city; and as the waters of the sea crept slowly back over the reclaimed Maremma, they sapped the foundations of her fairest palaces. Malaria and decay went hand in hand along the streets; though round the ruined town, the only whole thing there, the strong forts of Florence, proclaimed the wealth and power of the oppressor. It was not that the Florentines were avaricious; they spent abundantly and lavishly on fortifications and garrisons for their soldiers; on a university in Pisa for their sons; and they paid the most imaginative of living Florentine painters to put his frescoes on the walls of the Pisan Campo Santo. But they spent their money in the Master’s way, declaring and sustaining the glory of Florence rather than alleviating the miseries of Pisa. And the Pisans themselves were unable either to supply the omissions of Florence, or to direct and advise a more efficient expenditure. They had descended into a nation of poor artizans, for all their ancient trades were now forbidden to them. Florence had secured the first place for her own manufactures, by absolutely prohibiting the wool-weaving, silk-spinning, ship-building, in which the Pisans had for so many centuries excelled. Moreover no Pisan might barter merchandise by land or sea. Restricted to the commonest handicrafts, they lost the resource of wealth; deprived of public office, denied the most ordinary civil rights, they sank into a mute and long-enduring slavery, secretly nourishing a spark of flame in their rebellious hearts.
Pisa was the Ireland of Florence, captive and yet unvanquished. Ever ready to revolt, never for an hour forgetful of her antique superiority. By means of the many exiles that Florence expelled from home, she kept continually in touch with the enemies of Florence. Men expelled for private crimes—the meanest of the Pisans—turned patriots in exile and dedicated the best of their souls to the service of an unhappy country. The Florentines, prosperous and successful, were divided among themselves into half-a-dozen different factions; and patriotism for them meant largely a pious self-satisfaction dashed with party principles. But the magic of an unfortunate glory, the pathos that hangs over the place of one’s birth when it has once been great and is fallen into ruin—this personal and omnipotent sentiment inspired every rank and every kind of Pisan. There was none of them that would have shrunk from any heroism, or (as it seemed to the Florentines) from any treachery, in order to reinstate his country in her ancient grandeur.
It was with Venice and with Milan that the Pisans held especial practice. It mattered little to them that at heart these two powers were deadly enemies; that ever since the death of Filippo Maria Visconti the Venetians had been plotting with Orleans to destroy the house of Sforza; that Lodovico il Moro left no chance unchallenged to limit the pretensions of his Adriatic rival. The Pisans were of neither party; their one political tenet was hatred of their conquerors, and (as a little later they declared) of the two, they preferred the Devil to the Florentines.
Such patience as theirs, ceaselessly labouring underground, never wearied, militant but not aggressive, does not fail to meet an opportunity. At last a favourable chance was offered to the Pisans. The King of France who in 1483 had disregarded the invitation of the Venetians, accepted, ten years later, the persuasions of Lodovico of Milan; and in the autumn of 1494, the armies of Charles VIII. poured into Italy.