Behind Lodovico’s back, amid the flames and smoke of the burning palaces, the streets and squares broke out into a garish splendour of decoration to welcome his conqueror. Four days later Gian Giacomo Trivulzio rode in at the head of the French, amid the wild enthusiasm of the mob. The General, elated at his triumphant return to his native city, promised them anything and everything in the name of their rich, powerful, and all benign new master, the King of France. They believed that the millennium was come.
They soon learnt their mistake. Meanwhile, Fate had dealt the decisive blow to the domination of the Sforza. The rock of their fortunes, the impregnable Castello, provided by the extreme care and thought of the Moro with every necessary for a lengthy siege, was after a few days basely sold to the enemy by the traitor Castellan. On reception of the news in his distant retreat Lodovico is said to have remained as if mute, and to have finally uttered these words only—Since Judas was there never a greater traitor than Bernardino Curzio.
This condemnation was echoed by the whole world, and with especial emphasis by the French themselves, who were amazed at such treachery and cowardice. But the Castellan was not the only traitor. Bernardino Fr. Visconte and others of Lodovico’s great ministers were his accomplices, and partakers of the spoil. Hardly was the old master gone, ere they bent before the new. Louis XII. followed his army in person to Milan, and entered in great state, wearing the ducal beretta, and greeted by the same artistic demonstrations of joy and loyalty as had so often celebrated the pompous occasions of the Moro’s rule. After a short stay he departed to France, leaving Trivulzio as governor, an imprudent choice, which inflamed the old faction spirit. Most of the nobles were Trivulzio’s hereditary enemies. They began at once to scheme his overthrow, aided by the French guards, who could not bear to see Gian Giacomo preferred before them to such high place. In the populace discontent soon reawakened. They found themselves in worse case than before. Their master was different, but the taxes remained the same, and in addition they had to endure the cruelties and excesses of the French troops. The partisans of the Sforza worked insidiously upon their minds and excited them to cries of ‘Moro, Moro,’ once again. The city seethed with intrigue and sedition. Every day tumults arose, and the brave Trivulzio, beset with snares and embarrassments, tried vainly with his frank methods and simple soldier’s choler to rule this mass of conflicting passions, greeds, sufferings and cunning ambitions.
While the way was thus being prepared in Milan for his restoration, Lodovico, in his exile at Innsbrück, was using every means to accomplish it, even to the desperate expedient of inciting the Turk to attack the Venetian State. At the same time he gathered together a strong body of Swiss and German mercenaries, and prepared to start for Italy as soon as he learnt from his friends in Milan that the moment was come. The French strength in the Duchy had been greatly diminished by the departure of large detachments for Naples and the Romagna, when the report ran through Milan that the Moro was come back and had retaken Como (1500). The whole city was immediately in an uproar, and the mob surged round the palace of the governor, who, after vainly endeavouring to quiet them, was forced to hide from their insults and threats. A few days later he left Milan. Immediately after, Lodovico’s forerunners, Cardinal Ascanio and two of the San Severini, rode in at the head of four thousand Swiss. Messer Galeazzo, flowering once more in the sunshine of his Lord’s success, had arrayed himself all in white, with a great feather on his head, and a pair of shoes on his feet much more fitted for the service of Venus than of Mars, as a sarcastic chronicler observes. The Duke himself followed a day later and re-entered his capital in state. But his triumph was only apparent. The Castello was now the bulwark of his enemy. It stood with its huge bastions and vast squares of parapets furnished with a thousand engines of war, frowning over the defenceless city. Even as the Moro paced in stately procession through the streets the bells rang out, and a terrified cry arose that the French had sallied from the fortress. The Duke was not strong enough to attempt its reduction, and unwilling to face the constant peril of its presence, he left the city, which he was never to see again, and removed to Pavia.
The same sickness of doubt, indecision and fear, the same presentiment of failure which had attended the Moro for so long, now seemed to attack this great adventure for the redemption of his fortunes. He neglected to strike a decisive blow at the French before they could be reinforced, and contented himself with retaking a few cities with as little shedding of blood as possible. In vain Fracasso and his bolder captains exhorted him to more energetic steps. His fierce Swiss mercenaries, to whom he refused the satisfaction of sacking the conquered towns, grew violent and rebellious. His treasury was exhausted, nor could all the expedients of Cardinal Ascanio in Milan, even the appropriation of the treasure of the Duomo and the other great churches, raise enough money to content the voracious Swiss, of whom new hosts were continually swarming into the city on their way to the camp, clamouring for employment and pay. The citizens, terrified by these rude allies, squeezed of every penny to supply the Duke’s necessities, found their plight worse than ever. Hearing of the great reinforcements even now pouring down from the mountains to swell the French army, they trembled with fear of the consequences of their rebellion against Louis XII. In Novara, where the Moro now lay, despair and confusion prevailed among the leaders, while the temper of the Swiss mercenaries grew daily more ominous.
The French army, gradually increasing in number and strength, was encamped at Mortara, a few miles away, and constantly made bold dashes up to the very walls of Novara. A battle could no longer be avoided. On the 4th of April the enemy advanced to within a mile of Novara and challenged the Italians to the combat. Lodovico’s army issued forth in noble array, but it was nothing more than hollow show. The whole of the Swiss, who formed its greater part, refused to fight, on the pretext that they could not shed the blood of their fellow-countrymen engaged in the French ranks. Their leaders had in fact secretly treated with the enemy. Returning into Novara, followed in wild confusion and panic by the rest of the army, they proceeded to arrange terms of capitulation with De Ligny, the French commander. The promises, entreaties, tears even of the unhappy Moro, could not move them from their purpose. All he could obtain was a promise that they would carry him into safety disguised in the midst of their ranks when they abandoned Novara. And even this small mercy was a sham and a treachery. Someone among them warned the French generals of the arrangement, and a careful scrutiny of the troops, as in accordance with the agreement with the French they marched out unmolested, soon detected the Duke by his well-known features and complexion and the undisguisable height and majesty of his person. With him were captured also Galeazzo di San Severino and one or two other nobles.
Thus unbloodily, as if by the decree of Fate, fell Lodovico Sforza. We watch his dark and mournful figure—more dignified in adversity than when tossed amid the rude and difficult circumstances of active war—as it passes slowly out of Italy in its vesture of tragedy, conducted with respectful compassion by the chivalrous French, taunted and reviled by his own countrymen. It bears a significance reaching far beyond the immediate event and the immediate victim. So much was passing away with it. Italy, that fair queen whose robes the too-aspiring Prince had desired to brush free from every stain, was a captive with him, befouled and bloodied by the ignorant barbarian, and all the joy and exaltation of her wonderful Quattrocento was to fail, and her new-found strength and hope, with its sky-aspiring projects but half realised, to be bound down in the sad fetters of disillusion, despair, and a new spiritual tyranny, while the grand ideal of the Renaissance was to travel away with her freedom and find its perfect fulfilment elsewhere.
As Lodovico Sforza was the first to utter the fatal invitation to the French, he was fitly the first scapegoat. But, not alone in his sin, he was not alone in the punishment. If we condemn him for starting the ruin of his country by delivering Naples to Charles, what shall we say of Venice, Florence and the Pope, who each for their own selfish interests completed it by selling Milan to Louis? The inexorable retribution did not fail to fall upon them also. The first years of the sixteenth century are its history. Alexander, dying, dragged down that son and that earthly dominion for which he had given his soul. Venice, shaken nigh to destruction in her turn, by an iniquitous combination, had to forget her wide dreams of empire and be content with a narrow liberty, passing into stagnation and decay. Julius, continuer of Alexander’s worldly policy, may well have seen with prophetic eye, when death called him too, his unaccomplished scheme of a renovated Church,—Papacy and Empire in one, head of a new heaven on earth, which should lay the sword of temporal and spiritual victory at the feet of the purified Venus, Madonna with her Son upon her knee, shrink to the monastic ideals and the rigid excluding tyranny of the Catholic reaction. Last of all, Florence, most constant of the lovers of liberty, with her most melancholy fall filled up the cup of expiation and sealed the final subjugation of the country.
SCOPETTA OF LODOVICO IL MORO