The little army of Charles, dragging its artillery with lacerated hands across the Apennines, cutting its way through the Venetian forces at Fornovo, arrived at last in Asti; and, when August came, the prospect of peace began to brighten before them. The King had come to terms with Florence; and—granted the inevitable treachery of the situation—the Treaty of Turin was not unkind. It is true that the King agreed to restore the city of Pisa, with the other Tuscan fortresses, to his ally of Florence; but on the express proviso of not merely an amnesty for the Pisans. Henceforth they were to trade by sea and land on equal terms with Florence, they were to enjoy the same civil rights, their ancient arts of navigation and ship-building were to be released from embargo, and their sequestered property was to be given back to their possession. Charles had put his muzzle on the hound; Pisa, though restored to her immemorial energy, should henceforth be protected by the chief ally of Florence.
It was, in fact, a comparative equality that Charles proposed. Still remaining an intrinsic part of the Florentine territory, as indeed the safety and prosperity of that Republic demanded, henceforth the admirable commercial situation of Pisa was not to be turned merely to a Florentine profit, nor were the Pisans to be entirely governed for Florentine ends and by a Florentine Council. In their government henceforth the Pisans themselves should have a place and a right; and the only exclusive advantage which the Florentines should retain would be that superior dignity, that reserve of power, with which a powerful mother-country inevitably controls her colonies and her dependencies. Henceforth in law, in all that can be assessed by franchise and by jurisdiction, the Pisans should stand on an equal footing with the Florentines.
This decided, Charles, satisfied he had been unfair to nobody, on August 16th, wrote from Turin a letter to Entragues, signed with his own signature and countersigned by Orange, Vincula, Briçonnet, Gié[Gié], De la Trémouille, Commines, and (somewhat to our surprise) Piennes. This list of names is eloquent of the triumph of the diplomatic party; Ligny is not there, nor D’Amboise nor Étienne de Beaucaire, though these were among the nearest of the Royal counsellors. It was, in fact, necessary that something should be done at once. Orleans and his men were still starving in beleaguered Novara; Montpensier and the army were fighting at desperate odds in Naples. Peace with Florence would immediately place in the hands of the King 70,000 ducats and 250 men-at-arms;[[131]] besides releasing the soldiers in Pisa, Murrone, Leghorn, Sarzana, Pietra Santa, and Librafatta, who with the Florentine contingent would be an efficient succour to Montpensier. But Florence would not pay the money until the fortresses were in her hand.
The King’s letter to Entragues arrived in Pisa on the 29th of August. “You may feel,” the letter ran,[[132]] “on account of your oath, a certain difficulty in placing the new Citadel of Pisa in other hands than ours, but we absolve and discharge you of that oath, and command you, so soon as you receive this letter, incontinent to deliver the said Citadel of Pisa into the hand of the Commissioners of Florence, provided that one or any of our Councillors assure you that the Government of Florence have accorded and agreed to our Articles.”
“A cause du serment que vous avez fait, vous pourriez différer de ne mettre la dicte Citadelle neufve de Pise en aultres mains que les nostres.” This phrase conveys the suggestion that on leaving Pisa, Charles had promised a permanent French protection to the city. At least it seems clear that Entragues had sworn to yield his position only to the French.
These three months Entragues and his men had lived as the saviours of Pisa with the Pisans, feted by the citizens, lodged not only in the citadel but in the palace of the Medici upon Lung’ Arno; no longer an insignificant portion of the motley hosts of France, but the beloved guests and masters of this exquisite Southern city. They had the advantage of the port from which to ship a succour to or from the armies in the South; they enjoyed the great pine-woods of the sea, full of game for hunting; they had grown to love the wide, soft views of fertile plains bounded by a dim line of blue mountains where their comrades held the frontier castles. The position of the French in Pisa was not only felicitous, but strong; and they were required to abandon it into the hands of the Florentines, allies, it is true, of their king, but to them desperate and deadly enemies with whom, in defiance of the truce, they had continually waged an aggravated and embittering guerilla war of raids and plunder. And these three months, which had increased the original suspicion and dislike which the French army entertained of Florence, had been spent in befriending and helping the Pisans, for whom even at the first they had felt so divine a rage of pity, and whom they were now commanded to betray. Most of the men had probably made relations in the town. Entragues as we know from Guicciardini, was much in love with, and probably deeply influenced by, the daughter of Messer Luca del Lante; and a little later he married either this or some other Pisan lady, for Marin Sanuto speaks of San Cassano, the Pisan Ambassador at Venice, as “el cugnato d’Andrages.” Thus passion, no less than resentment, and the sense of well-being as well as compassion bound Entragues to Pisa. Add to this, incredible as it may seem, the sentiment of loyalty; for long as was the reign of Louis XI., it had not been long enough to extirpate the feudal idea, and Entragues, although the subject of the King, felt himself in a far more intimate degree the vassal of Orleans, and the lieutenant of Ligny. Now, as I have said, the names of Orleans and Ligny are conspicuously absent from the signatures below the letter of the King. To yield Pisa would have been to reverse their policy; and it is possible (to Commines, Guicciardini, Giulini, Porto Venere, and other contemporaries, it appeared quite certain) that Orleans or Ligny wrote to Entragues, and bade him resist the decision of the King. This much at least is sure: Entragues refused to yield the fortresses.
Vainly the King reiterated his urgent letters—imploring letters, still preserved in the Florence Archives under the dates of the 29th and 31st of August, the 25th of September, the 1st and 22nd of October—letters, beseeching, commanding the evacuation of the garrisons, but all in vain. Not only Pisa, but Sarzana, Pietra Santa, Librafatta, and Murrone, obstinately held out against the royal mandate; only the Governor of Leghorn, on the 17th of September, yielded to the entreaties of his sovereign. Meanwhile in Naples, in Gaeta, Taranto, and Atella, in all the desolate villages of the wild Abbruzzi, the famished and abandoned army looked northwards, in vain, day after day across the mountains. Winter began to whistle shrilly across the windy hills; blue mists and subtle fevers rose out of the marshy valleys; corn failed, and a cruel famine began to devastate the land; and still the promised reinforcements never came. Of that gallant army nearly every soldier should perish by hunger, shipwreck, or malaria; for the troops that were to bring them a succour out of Tuscany never left the cities where they dwelt.
On the 18th of September, Entragues drew up a formal treaty with the Signory of Pisa. If in three months the King did not re-enter Tuscany, he bound himself to evacuate the citadel, and leave it in the hands of Pisa. Meanwhile they were to supply him every month with the two thousand ducats necessary to pay and provision the garrison; and on his abandonment of the fortress they were to purchase his artillery and to give him the sum of 20,000 (or as Sanuto has it, 30,000) ducats for himself. These terms were not excessive: the Florentines a few years ago had cheerfully paid 150,000 ducats as the price of Pietro Santa, a less important place. It was, however, as much as Pisa could pay: and to raise the sum the ladies of Pisa cheerfully sold the brightest of their jewels. And the Pisans in their gratitude for the staunchness and moderation of Entragues awarded him a large estate, newly confiscated from the Florentines, and a palace in the city. “It cannot be for money that he did it,” remarks Guicciardini, “for certainly the Florentines would have given him twice as much.” It was probably out of friendship and pity, out of a genuine enthusiasm, out of an antiquated sentiment of feudal devotion, combined with a desire to make a profit, that Entragues committed this fatal and disastrous error.
VII.
The Florentines were indeed in a peculiarly evil case; for Charles, who was their ally, found himself powerless to procure them the restitution of Pisa; and the Italian cities were resolved that, at no risk, must Pisa pass to the ally of Charles. That post, in the hands of the friends of France, would mean not merely a door always open from Marseilles into Tuscany, but a continual supply of help to the French garrisons in Naples. It was certain that Pisa must be kept, yet Pisa was too weak to stand alone; plot and counter-plot darkened the decision as to which great State the port of Pisa should belong.