Hope began to desert him. He was sought, not by friends and admirers, but by officers of justice, and fleeing miserably from one refuge to another, was soon captured. In his dungeon, the mind of the young man—he was twenty-three—maintained its exaltation, though it was a wonder, says Corio, that amid such torments as he underwent, the afflicted spirit did not abandon the agonised body. He managed to compose a long relation in Latin of all the circumstances of the plot, a document of poignant human interest which shows the effect of the prevailing enthusiasm for antiquity upon a serious and lofty soul. Even at the last frightful moment, when the iron of the executioner was at his breast, the fainting youth had courage to animate himself in the tongue of Brutus and Cato with the words—Collect thyself, Hieronimo. The memory of thy deed shall live long. Mors acerba, fama perpetua!
CHAPTER VII
The Opening of the Gate
“Il Duca perse lo Stato e la roba e la libertà, e nessuna sua opera si finì per lui.”—Leonardo da Vinci.
If the great movements of history could ever be said to turn on the existence of an individual, one might regard as the paradoxical result of Galeazzo Maria’s death the loss of Italy’s freedom. The young Milanese Brutus, in his noble rage against tyranny, little foresaw the three centuries of dark and hopeless servitude which by the unimpassioned workings of fate his blow would indirectly bring upon his country. The exclamation of the cynical Sixtus IV. at the news of the murder—To-day is the peace of Italy dead,—showed a clearer vision. The scheming Pope saw and gauged the unstable elements in the situation—the ambition of Naples and Venice, the helplessness of Duke Galeazzo’s ten-year-old successor, the contagion of disorder throughout Italy; remembered the aggressive Turk in the east, the adventurous Frank in the north, and forthwith set to work to precipitate the inevitable upheaval in the interests of his own family.
The trouble ahead was, however, as yet hidden. Milan kept calm. The air-bubble expectations of the conspirators had perished at the touch of reality. There was no attempt at a rising. The widowed Duchess assumed without opposition the supreme authority as regent for her son, the child Gian Galeazzo, with Cecco Simonetta as her chief minister. The dead Duke’s brothers, Sforza, Duke of Bari, and Lodovico il Moro, were absent in France, Ascanio the priest in Rome. But the situation was pregnant with danger, as Simonetta well knew. He suspended all Galeazzo Maria’s works of embellishment in the city, set the engineers and builders to construct new defences, threw a strong garrison into the Castle, and adopted every precaution against revolt. The chief menace came from the nobles of the old Ghibelline party. They hated Simonetta, who was a Sicilian and the creature of Francesco Sforza, with no interest apart from his master’s House, which he strengthened by depressing the great feudatories. The veteran minister was unpopular with the people too, because he was a foreigner, and because of the heavy taxes. Sforza and Lodovico, hurrying back from France, and joined by Ascanio, found a powerful party, headed by the fiery and restless soldier, Roberto di San Severino, ready to support them in overthrowing the government. But Simonetta was on the watch. He seized one of the chiefs of the disaffected party, and filled the city with troops. San Severino promptly fled to Naples, and the three princes retreated to a little distance, ready to escape. Their youngest brother, Ottaviano, a youth of eighteen, who was involved in their plot, also rode hastily out of the city, and finding himself pursued, leapt into the swollen Adda, and was washed off his horse and drowned. A formal decree banishing the elder princes was issued, and for the moment the danger was over and Simonetta triumphed.
Naples, however, ambitious for a foothold in Milan, embraced the cause of the exiles, and sent San Severino with an army to worry the ducal territories. The brothers themselves, from their different places of refuge, kept up communications with their partisans in the city, and intrigued against the government. Simonetta’s power depended upon the will of the Duchess Bona, a lady ‘of little good-sense,’ according to Commines. Though she left the guidance of affairs entirely to the minister, his influence could not compete with the charms of her handsome Ferrarese secretary, Antonio Tassino, to whom she could deny nothing. The inordinate presumption of this favourite soon conflicted with Simonetta’s authority. Lodovico Sforza, who far away had eyes and ears everywhere, was quick to profit by the dissension between these two powers at Court. The death, in 1479, of the elder brother Sforza—from excessive fat—helped to clear the path for the ambition of the Moro, who was now created Duke of Bari by the King of Naples, in succession to Sforza. To him the rebellious spirits in Milan looked henceforth as their leader. A number of the great nobles, the Borromei, the Da Pusterla—those old foes of the Dukes of Milan—the Marliani and others, aided the upstart Tassino to turn the Duchess against her husband’s faithful old servant. Beatrice da Este, wife of Lodovico’s half-brother Tristan, and other ladies in her intimacy, plied her with complaints of Simonetta, and entreated her to dismiss him and recall the banished Moro, who with the mercenaries of Naples was now preying on her territories. Tassino whispered the same persuasions between the endearments which she permitted from him. At last, one day Lodovico himself knelt before her, having at great risk returned to the city and made his way secretly through the gardens into the Castello. Heedless of his disobedience to her decree of banishment, the thoughtless woman received him with the utmost joy, and the whole city burst into a frenzy of welcome. Simonetta’s clear vision read the future. Most illustrious Duchess, said he, I shall lose my head, you your State. Deaf to his warning, Bona committed the government to her brother-in-law. Three days later Simonetta was arrested and carried to the Castle of Pavia, where, after he had lain a whole year in captivity, he was brought to trial, before one of the most vindictive of his personal enemies, on a charge of enormous crimes against the ducal House. He was tortured, and finally beheaded in the Castle yard. For putting him to so merciful an end, Bona took much credit to herself in an official notification of his trial and death sent to the various Courts of Italy.
The minister disposed of, the turn of the favourite came. From being Lodovico’s ally and tool, Tassino was now become a serious hindrance to Lodovico. His arrogance was overweening. He had boundless power over Bona, and was rapidly making himself absolute master in the palace. The crisis arrived in a struggle over the Rocchetta, the inner Keep of the Castle of Milan, which, with its strong garrison and impregnable defences, gave its commander virtual dominion of the whole city. Tassino persuaded the Duchess to appoint his father as Castellan, in the place of Filippo Eustachio, who had been put in charge of it by Duke Galeazzo. But Filippo, a staunch adherent of Lodovico’s, disobeyed her repeated commands to give up the keys, and sturdily resisted all her efforts to remove him, defying her threats and sentences, until the Moro had prepared a swift and sudden stroke. One day, at Lodovico’s bidding, Filippo and Gio. Francesco Pallavicino entered the apartments of the little Duke, at an hour when most of his attendants were out of the way, and snatching up the child, carried him across the narrow bridge which led from the Corte Ducale into the Rocchetta, and delivered him into the custody of his uncle. With the person of the sovereign in his possession, behind the defence of drawbridges, portcullises and artillery, and a strong body of soldiers faithful to himself, the Moro could dictate terms to the Duchess. She had no alternative but to surrender to him the regency and the guardianship of her son. As for Tassino, seeing himself overreached, he fled incontinently, to escape a worse fate, and stripped of everything but his perfumes and ivory combs, which were bundled after him, he disappears ignobly out of history. Bereft at once of lover, son and sovereignty, Bona was a piteous figure of helpless rage and grief. She declared she would abandon the Duchy, even if she had to climb out of the windows and cross the moat at the risk of her life. Lodovico, however, gently detained her in the Castle of Abbiategrasso, a virtual prisoner, until the subsidence of her shallow passion enabled her to submit to the new order of things and settle down, without power or authority, to a quiet life with her children, in the Castello of Milan again.
Thus, by a series of successful palace intrigues, Lodovico Sforza made himself supreme in Milan. He had still, however, to cope with the resentment of the nobles who had helped him to power, and now found themselves denied any share in it. Like all usurpers, Lodovico found ingratitude necessary to self-preservation, and from the first he studied to depress his more powerful subjects, choosing foreigners and men of modest degree as his ministers and advisers. Roberto di San Severino with many other nobles now took up arms against him. But they were completely defeated by Constanzo Sforza, an able general and a kinsman of the reigning House, and the turbulent San Severino, transformed into the Moro’s bitterest foe, quitted the Duchy, and went off to serve Venice in the war against Ferrara.
The masterly craft by which Lodovico Sforza had achieved his triumph, roused the admiration and fear of all Italy, which increased as, with the progress of time, he became the most conspicuous figure in Italian politics. About the enigmatic personality of this prince, history has confused our minds with contrary judgments, which romance has translated into a various caricature. His peculiar association with Italy’s greatest glory and greatest shame has thrown an exaggerated light and shade upon his memory. The Italian historians of this period make him the scapegoat for that calamity of Italy, which no one man, but the ancient and inherent sin of the whole nation, brought about. Guicciardini, while recording his many virtues of mind and heart, is glad to believe him guilty of the worst crimes of ambition and perfidy, and to discover in him a fatal self-conceit. Paolo Giovio speaks of him as born for the undoing of Italy. Modern inquirers have modified the traditional view of the Moro, by showing the baselessness of some of the worse charges against him, and by a diligent prying into all the details of his domestic existence, they have at once humanised and belittled the old picture of the man. Yet still the real Lodovico seems dark to us. It is not for nothing that the name of il Moro—the Moor—given to the dark-skinned boy in his childhood, has clung to him through history; it shows the conviction of his contemporaries and of posterity that it fitted not only his bodily appearance, but the complexion of his soul.
By his actions he must be judged. In the Italy of the Quattrocento, to do evil that good might come was excellent morality. The best men practised it, and differed only from the worst in the ends they pursued. Lodovico’s usurpation of power had its immediate justification in the salvation of the State. The prestige of his name, and his fine statesmanship, could alone avert the civil war and anarchy which Bona’s government was leading to, and oppose a barrier to the greed of Venice and Naples for Lombardy. The deposition of a weak woman by a strong and able man was an act unsingular in a country where beneath all law and convention reigned the tacit conviction that character was the true legitimacy. Once in power, he found that internal peace necessitated the sacrifice of the turbulent elements of which he had served himself to climb, and personal ingratitude became a public virtue. Freed from the prepotence of these restless spirits, the citizens could pursue their occupations undisturbed, and the prince could devote himself to his great schemes for the improvement of agriculture, the facilitation of commerce and the humanising of the people. It is these things—in which he carried on the noblest tradition of the Sforza domination—which are the Moro’s apology for much wrong-doing; it is these and not his ceaseless political activity, and immense prestige as a statesman, which make the story of Milan great during his reign, a period brilliant, joyous and prosperous beyond compare.