Note [29] page 9. Born in 1422, Duke Federico was in fact sixty years old when he died.
Note [30] page 9. In his Latin epistle to Henry VII of England, Castiglione says that Duke Guidobaldo began to be afflicted with gout at the age of twenty-one years.
Note [31] page 10. Alfonso II of Naples, (born 1448; died 1495), was the eldest son of Ferdinand I and Isabelle de Clermont. As Duke of Calabria, commanding the papal forces, he defeated the Florentine league in 1479, and in 1481 drove the Turks out of southern Italy. On his father’s death in 1494, he succeeded to the crown of Naples; but having rendered himself obnoxious to his subjects, he abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand just before the arrival of Charles VIII of France, and took refuge in a Sicilian convent, where he soon died, tortured by remorse for the hideous cruelties that he had perpetrated. His wife was Ippolita Maria, daughter of the first Sforza duke of Milan; while his daughter Isabella’s marriage to Giangaleazzo Sforza, the rightful duke, and the usurpation of the latter’s uncle Ludovico “il Moro” (see note [302]), became the immediate cause of the first French invasion of Italy by Charles VIII.
Note [32] page 10. Ferdinand II of Naples, (born 1469; died childless 1496), made a gallant but vain stand against the French, and retired to Ischia with his youthful wife-aunt Joanna. When Charles VIII evacuated Naples after a stay of only fifty days, Ferdinand was soon able, with the help of his cousin Ferdinand the Catholic’s famous general Consalvo de Cordova, to regain his dominions, but died a few weeks later. He seems to have had no lack of courage; by his mere presence he once overawed a mob at Naples, and he was beloved by the nation in spite of the odious tyranny of his father and grandfather.
Note [33] page 10. Pope Alexander VI, (born 1431; died 1503), was Roderigo, the son of Giuffredo (or Alfonso) Lenzuoli and Juana (or Isabella) Borgia, a sister of Pope Calixtus III, by whom the youth was adopted and whose surname he assumed. He was elected pope in 1492 through bribery, and while striving to increase the temporal power of the Church, directed his chief efforts towards the establishment of a great hereditary dominion for his family. Of his five children, two (Cesare and Lucrezia) played important parts in his plan. In 1495 he joined the league which forced Charles VIII to retire from Italy, although it had been partly at his instigation that the French invaded the peninsula. In 1498 Savonarola was burned at Florence by his orders. In 1501 he instituted the ecclesiastical censorship of books. He is believed to have died from accidentally taking a poison designed by him for a rich cardinal whose possessions he wished to seize. His private life was disgraced by orgies, of which the details are unfit for repetition. His contemporary Machiavelli says: “His entire occupation, his only thought, was deception, and he always found victims. Never was there a man with more effrontery in assertion, more ready to add oaths to his promises, or to break them.” While Sismondi terms him “the most odious, the most publicly scandalous, and the most wicked of all the miscreants who ever misused sacred authority to outrage and degrade mankind.”
FERDINAND II OF NAPLES
1469?-1496
From Alinari’s photograph (no. 11305) of an anonymous bronze bust in the National Museum at Naples.
Note [34] page 10. Pope Julius II, (born 1443; died 1513), was Giuliano, the second son of Raffaele della Rovere (only brother of Pope Sixtus IV) and Teodora Menerola. Made a cardinal soon after his uncle’s election, he was loaded with sees and offices, including the legateship of Picene and Avignon, which latter occasioned his prolonged absence from Italy and afforded him an escape from the wiles of his inveterate enemy Alexander VI. The outrages with which Alexander sought to punish his sturdy opposition to the scandals of the Borgian court, aroused in him a fierceness of spirit that was alien to the seeming mildness of his early character and became the bane of his own pontificate. His younger brother Giovanni married a sister of Duke Guidobaldo, a union that cemented the friendship between the two families and furnished the Duchy of Urbino an heir in the person of Francesco Maria della Rovere. When Julius engaged Michelangelo to design his tomb, the old basilica of St. Peter’s was found too small to contain it, whereupon the pontiff is said to have decreed that a new church be built to receive it, and blessed the laying of the first stone shortly before setting out on his campaign against Bologna in 1506. In 1508 he formed the League of Cambray for the recovery of certain papal fiefs appropriated by Venice at the time of Cesare Borgia’s downfall, and in 1511 the so-called Holy League for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Italian unity was the unavowed but real goal at which his policy aimed.
Although a munificent patron of art and letters, Julius was frugal and severe,—a man of action rather than a scholar or theologian. In giving Michelangelo directions for the huge bronze statue at Bologna, he said: “Put a sword in my hand; of letters I know nothing.” Another of his reported sayings is: “If we are not ourselves pious, why should we prevent others from being so?”