During these years of peace and of expansion for Milan, the suspicious fear with which the disproportionate prosperity of one power was always regarded by the rest of Italy had concentrated itself upon Lodovico Sforza. His extraordinary success and untiring activity, his powers of intrigue, his ability and resource, were the theme of every tongue. The extravagant adulations of his Court poets were repeated and unwillingly credited throughout Italy. With the vast wealth of Milan at his command what might he not do? Fear of Milan was an old habit. Was it she that should give Italy a master after all? Was this dark prince, mysteriously potent, to be the destroyer of her liberty at last?
Had men looked more closely into the monster of their imagination, they might have perceived that it was not Lodovico’s ambition that was most to be apprehended. The fatal situation which now developed seems to have been the product of two opposing fears. The Moro’s faith in himself and in his good fortune was a superstition which supported itself upon the lying prophecies of the astrologer ever at his side, and was at the mercy of every ill omen. His intrigues were often the devices of a man on the defensive, rather than the confident moves of a conqueror. To give a colour of justification to his now almost complete usurpation, he set casuists to work and evolved a specious doctrine, pronouncing himself lawful successor of his father, as the first son born to Francesco after he became Duke of Milan. By means of this argument, and the better persuasion of an enormous gift of gold, he obtained from the Emperor Maximilian the promise of the investiture of the Duchy, an obsolete legality which neither Francesco or Galeazzo had troubled to obtain in confirmation of the right won by the sword. These devices, however, aroused only derision and scandal in his own country, nor could they quiet his own uneasy mind. He felt Italy against him and was afraid. His particular dread of the House of Aragon never slept. Though old King Ferrante urged with pathetic sincerity the maintenance of the league which had preserved the peace of Italy for so many fortunate years, he might at any moment be succeeded by Alfonso of Calabria, who did not disguise his hatred of the Moro and his longing to right his daughter and son-in-law. Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in 1491, and peace was already threatened by the injudicious policy of his son Piero. The covetousness of Venice, the faithless selfishness of the Pope, completed a situation of general peril, which might easily beget a great combination to crush Lodovico and reinstate Gian Galeazzo, to be followed by a scramble for the States which all knew the young Duke incapable of governing.
The Moro resolved to anticipate the blow. With fatal confidence in his power to control the force which he was evoking, he opened the gate which it was Milan’s sacred duty to keep shut against the foreigner. He invited Charles VIII. of France to lead an army into Italy against the Princes of Aragon, and to recover the Kingdom of Naples for the House of Anjou.
Lodovico’s act did not perhaps at the time wear the magnitude of guilt which subsequent events gave it. Italy was so disunited, so lacking in any general principle of patriotism that her various tyrants had not scrupled to appeal at times to France or the Empire in their needs. Men were used to sporadic attempts of the Princes of Anjou to overthrow the Aragonese dynasty in Naples. But now that the Angevin claims were vested in the King of France, such attempts must be more perilous for Italy. Naples was not the only State to which France had pretensions. Louis of Orleans—next in succession to the throne of France after the sickly Charles and his infant son—claimed the Duchy of Milan itself through his ancestress Valentina Visconte. The success of the French enterprise in Naples could scarcely fail to be followed by a vindication of this other claim. Nothing but that strange and fatal belief in himself, which not only inspired Lodovico but had infected his contemporaries, could have blinded the Moro to the madness of his proceedings and induced Venice, Florence and the Pope to abet his projects at first by forming a new league with him and abandoning Naples to its fate. There was some strange glamour about this remarkable man which deluded his own generation. The Renaissance spirit felt itself represented and fulfilled in him. Its boundless confidence in human possibilities was exemplified by the reputation of almost superhuman powers with which it invested Lodovico Sforza. God in Heaven and the Moro on earth, so dared il Pistoia to sing, and the prince to hear. The tragic fall which awaited this exaltation is a part of the inward as well as outward history of an age when pride built so high, only to be smitten with incompleteness. Strangest of all, perhaps, was the self-deception of Lodovico himself, shown by the persistence in him, throughout his hopeless captivity, of this superstitious faith, after it had utterly failed him in the crisis of his life, so that in his last moments, in his prison at Loches, he could attribute his overthrow to nothing less than the direct intervention of God, to punish him for his sins, since only the sudden might of destiny, he said, could have subverted the counsels of human wisdom.
In inviting Charles, Lodovico doubtless thought to produce a temporary diversion, which should weaken Naples and produce a political upheaval, amid which he should be able to secure the ducal throne, and once seated in it, readjust by adroit diplomacy, the balance of power in the peninsula after the retirement of the invader in due course. But he had left out of account the respective conditions of France and Italy—the pent-up military fury in the noble classes in the first country, which raged for an outlet, the fatal weakness of disunion in the second, and the enervation which peace and unparalleled prosperity had produced in its people. He may have hoped to achieve his ends by the mere threat of French invasion, and counted on the indecision of the young king and his own subtle craft to keep the matter from going any further. Charles, however, whose weak head swam with the flatteries of venal councillors, and with romantic ideas imbibed from the tales of the Paladins, was easily persuaded to undertake the conquest of Naples as a preliminary step to the redemption of Christendom from the Turk.
But the preparations for the expedition were very dilatory, and more than two years passed before they were completed. During this time of suspense Italy was full of doubts and fears. Lodovico’s allies began to hesitate, and there were daily shiftings of policy in the various States, now in favour of Naples, now of France, all actuated by self-interest, which guided them finally in this crisis of their country’s fate to a despicable neutrality, waiting upon events. The Moro’s own policy was shifting and tortuous, even displaying at times an anxiety—little credited by his neighbours—to save Naples from the catastrophe which he himself was bringing upon her. Already he was working for a reaction against the French in the event of their success in Italy. But his advances to the opposite party won for him only the distrust of his friends, and in France many warned Charles of the folly of relying upon this man, homme sans foy, s’il voyoit son profit pour la rompre, as Commines pronounces him.
Meanwhile, careless apparently of the future, Italy continued her wild dance of pleasure. In Milan, gaiety and licence reigned supreme. Yet there are many signs that a sense of sin and of a reckoning at hand had begun to awaken. The sonnets of il Pistoia grew grave with prophecies to laughing Italy of the much weeping which time would soon draw from her, and of the shortness of the hours between her and her immense, irreparable sorrow. The superstitious Moro himself must have been shaken by the blind friar who is said to have appeared in the Piazza of Milan at the time of his negotiations with the French King, crying—Prince, show him not the way, else thou wilt repent it. From Florence came the echo of Savonarola’s annunciation, Gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. More poignant still to ears that could hear was the tremulous voice of the octogenarian King of Naples, warning Pope and Moro, again and again, of the peril clear to the terrible prevision of the dying—He who will may begin a war, but stop it, no!
But the voices cried in the wilderness. King Ferrante’s was spent by death early in 1494, and in the following autumn Charles appeared at last at the head of a splendid host, and was welcomed with immense pomp and revelry by Lodovico and Beatrice at Pavia. There in the Castle the young Duke lay dying. The King visited him, and the piteous spectacle roused the sympathy of the monarch and his followers, for whom the person of legitimate sovereignty had a sacredness unfelt by the Italians. Charles was, however, much embarrassed by the Duchess Isabella, who besought him to have mercy on her father, the King of Naples. She had better have prayed for herself, who was still a young and fair lady, observes Commines.
The invaders passed on, finding their path cleared before them, and their progress already an assured triumph. Their cruelty when they had first entered the country had terrified all inclination to oppose them out of the Italians. Piero de’ Medici’s shameful surrender, Florence’s welcome, the inactivity of the Pope, the speedy fall of Naples, all the details of the pitiful story are well-known. Charles had not gone far when Gian Galeazzo died. The cruel report at once arose, and was widely believed by both French and Italians, that Lodovico had had him poisoned, and the Moro’s memory has come down to our day loaded with this detestable sin. Modern inquiry has, however, shown how little foundation there is for the charge, disproving the preliminary accusations against Lodovico of starving and ill-treating the ducal couple, and making it clear that Gian Galeazzo was surrounded by physicians and carefully tended. It is evident that Lodovico’s temperament was incapable of such a crime—that he would have been repelled by the mere idea of murdering this nephew whom he had brought up, and who loved him with a pathetic fidelity to the last. Gian Galeazzo’s longing on his death-bed for the uncle, who was far away, riding in splendour beside the French King, his touching questions to one of Lodovico’s gentlemen whether he thought his Excellency the Moro li volesse bene—loved him, Gian Galeazzo—and whether he seemed sorry that he was ill, go far to dissipate the cruel suspicion. Nevertheless, the young Duke’s death relieved Lodovico’s conscience of its last scruple with regard to the Dukedom. He hastened back to Milan and had himself invested with the ducal mantle, cap and sceptre, in the midst of a stupendous pomp.
Meanwhile, the success of the French was producing the result anticipated by the Moro. Venice, awaking to the danger which the terrible prestige of the conqueror’s arms meant for all Italy, was ready to listen to Lodovico’s proposals for a remedy. The invaders were now to add to their experience of Italian pusillanimity an acquaintance with the craft which had superseded brute courage in this advanced nation. Scarcely had the French King turned his back on Lombardy, when the Venetian ambassadors were treating with the new Duke of Milan for an alliance against him. A few months later, Charles and his knights, sick with the Southern delights of their newly-conquered realm, and longing like homesick children for France, found their return barred by a powerful coalition of their late ally with Venice, the Emperor, the King of Spain, and nearly all the minor States of Italy. The story of their homeward march, more like a flight, need not be repeated here. At the approach of the French to his dominions, the faithless Lodovico trembled in his palace, in spite of the mighty host of allies which was awaiting them, while his people, beside themselves with fear of the cruel Northerners, and exasperated by the grievous taxation imposed upon them to oppose this evil which the Moro had himself provoked, murmured against him as the murderer of Gian Galeazzo, and the oppressor of the widowed Duchess and her son. Lodovico well knew that he could not lean upon his subjects in adversity. But the battle of Fornuovo (1495) relieved Lombardy of all fear of the French for the time, though the Italians let slip their chance of annihilating the hungry and enfeebled enemy, and crushing the Northern terror for ever. The irresistible conqueror of a year back, having with miraculous good fortune escaped with the best part of his troops to Asti, was compelled to negotiate for peace with Milan and Venice. At the meetings of the Duke and the Venetian Ambassadors with the representatives of Charles, Lodovico was accompanied by his young wife, who took part in all the discussions, and astonished everybody by her intelligence and wisdom. All through this critical period of the French invasion, Beatrice was the true helpmeet of her husband, sustaining by her courage and will his more sensitive temperament under the fears and doubts which assailed it.