Three months after this Otranto was re-taken. In the beginning of the year the plenipotentiaries of the Italian States had met at Rome to consider an alliance in which foreign countries were invited to join against the Infidels. Sixtus IV. bestirred himself actively. With help from various quarters, King Ferrante made great exertions to meet the danger that was threatening not only Apulia but all Italy. Alfonso of Calabria besieged Otranto with a large force. As he could not succeed in completely cutting off the approach by sea, the town might have held out a long time, particularly as a new Turkish army was gathering on the Albanian and Dalmatian coasts; but the death of the Grand Signor, and the strife of his two sons for the throne, put an end to the resistance of the place. On September 10, Otranto opened its gates, but it never recovered from these heavy strokes of fate. The duke, whose easy victory was commemorated by medals, did not keep to the conditions of the surrender. A year later, Rome, so lately threatened by the Turks, saw many of them within her walls, not as victors but as doubly vanquished; they were those who had taken service in the Neapolitan army, which thus once again—as in the days of Frederic II.—numbered unbelievers in its ranks.
CHAPTER II.
THE FERRARESE WAR.
The Pazzi conspiracy was only a prelude to the events which caused a Neapolitan army to stand as an enemy before the walls of Rome. The Pope and the Venetians had had no time to give free course to their spite against old enemies or former allies so long as the storm was hanging over the Apulian coast. Sixtus IV. even showed himself friendly to the Florentines, and Guid’Antonio Vespucci, who, towards the end of January 1481, returned to Rome as ambassador, endeavoured to strengthen this good understanding. But no sooner had the imminent danger from the East disappeared than the object of clearing the coast of Albania and Western Greece of the Turks, which might have been more easily attained then than at any previous period, passed out of sight. A dispute between Venice and Ferrara furnished an occasion for fresh strife. Ercole of Este refused to recognise any longer as valid certain old and burdensome obligations which kept him in a sort of dependence on the Republic with respect to the execution of justice in his capital by a Venetian vicegerent, and the procuring of salt from Venetian saltworks. The dispute rose to such a height that Venice threatened to take up arms; she thought the moment favourable on account of her alliance with the Pope. Sixtus IV. had sound reasons for avoiding everything that could favour the interference of Venice in the affairs of Ferrara and Romagna; but the requirements of prudent policy were driven into the background by the selfish ambition of his nephew, who hoped to strengthen his position in Romagna by Venetian influence. Duke Ercole vainly tried through Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere to make the Pope understand that it would be neither to the honour nor the advantage of the Holy See to leave him to be crushed by the superior power of Venice.[233]
Girolamo Riario went to Venice, where he was most honourably received and presented with the patriciate. War was decided on. King Ferrante sided with his son-in-law, as did also Milan and Florence. The alliance of Bologna and several of the lords of Romagna was secure; Siena and Genoa adhered to the Pope and Venice. Most of the captains of the Tuscan war undertook the leadership again, under somewhat altered circumstances. Besides Roberto Malatesta, the Venetians gained Roberto da Sanseverino, who had fallen out with Lodovico Sforza and given him a great deal of trouble in his own territory. The command of the Milanese troops was entrusted to the Duke of Urbino. The Florentines were led by Costanzo Sforza, to whom the general’s bâton had been solemnly presented October 2, 1481.[234] In the spring of 1482 the struggle began in several quarters at once.[235]
A large Venetian fleet sailed up the Po, while two armies attacked the Ferrarese territory—Sanseverino from the Lombard side and Malatesta from that of Romagna. Rovigo and the whole Polesina fell into the hands of the Venetians, whose commander-in-chief encamped, on May 28, before Ficcarolo—a castle situated on the Po to the north-west of Ferrara—intending to take it, and then to cross the river and attack the capital, Malatesta co-operating with him from the south side. But meanwhile the Duke of Urbino, with the Milanese troops, raised his camp at Stellata, on the right bank, to assist the besieged and cover Ferrara; and Malatesta was called away from the Po district to meet a threatened danger in an opposite quarter. Alfonso of Calabria had appeared at the Tronto, demanding a free pass to bring aid to his brother-in-law. The Pope had not yet declared himself; the envoys of Naples, Milan, Florence, and Ferrara were still in Rome. On the refusal of the pass they left the city, and the duke entered the States of the Church as an enemy. He met no serious resistance. Rome resounded with the clang of arms; as an annalist says, ‘The city which had hitherto been wont to produce only bulls and briefs now produced nothing but arms.’[236] Girolamo Riario had the post of captain-general for the Church, but his incapacity soon became apparent. The Neapolitans were at Grottaferrata; their horsemen made excursions to the very gates of the city; vineyards and fields were laid waste. This state of things continued for weeks. At last the Pope saw himself compelled to appeal for help to Venice, and she ordered Roberto Malatesta to go to the assistance of her hard-pressed ally. Meanwhile, the Florentines had made a diversion; Niccolò Vitelli, supported by Costanzo Sforza, had taken Città di Castello on June 19, and the whole country around had fallen into his hands.
Thus far matters seemed to be going in favour of the Duke of Ferrara and his allies. The Pope was angry as well as distressed, and in his anger and distress he did not disdain the policy followed by one Italian state after another, to the ruin of Italy, the policy of seeking help from a foreign power. To Louis XI. he addressed the bitterest complaints against Ferrante, seeking to stir up the French king to an expedition against Naples, where the prevailing discontent was in his favour, and he offered the Dauphin an opportunity of becoming a standard-bearer of the Church.[237] Raimond Pérault, afterwards Bishop of Saintes and Cardinal, was sent to the king with positive proposals. Louis XI. was too practical to enter upon such far-reaching and uncertain projects, but, as in all similar proposals, the seed sown did not fall on barren soil. Meanwhile things had changed in Italy. Ficcarolo surrendered after a siege of rather more than a month, and the enemy crossed the Po unimpeded by the troops of the Duke of Urbino, which were no match for the Venetians, especially when their leader, having been seized with fever in the low unhealthy neighbourhood of the river, had to be carried to Bologna. Ferrara was threatened, and a Venetian fleet alarmed the coast of Apulia. But the heaviest blow was yet to come. On August 21, at Campomorto, on the road from Rome to Porto d’Anzo, Alfonso of Calabria was completely defeated by Malatesta, with heavy loss of men and artillery.[238] The victor died at Rome on September 8, of fever which he had caught in the infected Campagna. At the same time the other side lost their best general, Federigo da Montefeltro, who closed his eventful life in Bologna. These two, opposed to each other on the battle-field, but connected by the closest family ties, each ignorant of the other’s mortal danger, commended in their last hour their states and families to each other’s care. Girolamo Riario had tried to profit both by the victory and the death of Malatesta, on the one hand to retake Città di Castello, and on the other to get Rimini into his own power. Both attempts were frustrated by the Florentines, who supported Vitelli and enabled Roberto’s widow, Elisabetta di Montefeltro, to preserve for her little step-son Pandolfo his paternal inheritance. Still the situation was very serious. Roberto Sanseverino established himself on the right bank of the Po, and raised strong fortifications at Pontelagoscuro, close to Ferrara. The duke began seriously to think of abandoning his capital and withdrawing to Modena, but the Florentine plenipotentiary, Bongianni Gianfigliazzi, restrained him. Lodovico Sforza was kept in check by a rising in the Parmesan territory.
The way the war was carried on in the Duchy of Ferrara was regarded in Florence as very unsatisfactory. The Duke of Urbino had in nowise answered to the expectations formed of him. Jacopo Guicciardini remarked to the Ferrarese ambassador that the league had no head. Lorenzo de’ Medici was anxious, but said in reference to the Duke of Ferrara, ‘I cannot imagine you will lose, unless you fail for want of spirit. Here all will be done that can be.’ The expedition against Città di Castello, he observed, had been made with the object of giving the duke breathing time. Ercole was always commending his interests to the Republic. If Ferrara fell into the hands of the Venetians, Florence would be likewise endangered. Military operations were not accounted sufficient; the old threat of a council was renewed. But just at this time the adventurous Archbishop of Carniola, whose character and history have never been thoroughly investigated, made a feeble attempt to revive the Synod of Basel, which had been dissolved for forty years. This man, a Dominican, whose name seems to have been Andrea Zuccalmaglio, was in Rome with commissions from the Emperor Frederic about the time of the Pazzi conspiracy. There he enjoyed high favour for a time, but afterwards he fell into such deep disgrace that he was not only deposed from his ecclesiastical dignity but imprisoned in the castle of St. Angelo, from whence the Emperor’s intercession liberated him in the summer of 1481. He betook himself, viâ Florence, first to Bern and then to Basel, where, falsely giving himself out as still Frederic’s messenger, and finally assuming the title of cardinal, he proclaimed the opening of the great Assembly of the Church on the feast of the Annunciation, 1482. The moment for this proclamation was not badly chosen, for the Pope was just involving himself in a fresh war; but measures being immediately taken in Rome to put on their guard both foreign powers and the free city in which the fire threatened to kindle once more, the wretched man—whose sanity had begun to be doubted, and who was not joined by one single prelate from France or Germany—rushed into extremities, and in the beginning of the summer launched the wildest invectives against Francesco da Savona, who was no Pope but a son of the devil, against whom he called Christ and the œcumenical council to witness.