The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

The Duchy remained for the next six years in French possession, and was ruled with comparative justice and beneficence by the Constable de Bourbon, till the just, generous, and propitiatory impulses of the new sovereign yielded to indifference and forgetfulness, and it was abandoned to the cruel and arbitrary government of the Sieur de Lautrec, brother of the King’s mistress, the Comtesse de Châteaubriant. His tyranny helped to provoke another revolution in 1521, when the young Emperor Charles V. united with Pope Leo X. in a new Holy League, and proclaiming his right to Milan as an imperial fief, sent an army to invade the Duchy. Lautrec, having executed some of the noblest citizens on suspicion of intriguing with the Imperialists, abandoned the city, leaving the Castello garrisoned, and took up his stand four miles from the city, at the Bicocca, where he suffered a tremendous defeat, which lost Milan again to France. This turn of the tide carried Francesco, Lodovico’s second son, to the ducal throne. The wild joy with which the oppressed and suffering Milanese greeted this new Sforza, in whose name they trusted with touching hopefulness for a return of the old glory of their city, was not wholly misplaced. Duke Francesco II. has left a memory of good repute. The misfortunes of his reign were not due to his faults or weaknesses, but to the political circumstances of the time, which deprived him of all real power, and made him a mere pawn in the great game played between Charles V. and Francis I. with Italy for stake. Milan was, in fact, dominated by the Spaniard, and the presence of a great army of these foreigners was a crushing burden upon prince and people. Though there to defend the city, they wrought little less destruction and cruelty than the French, when the latter returned as enemies in 1523, and advancing close to the capital, spread havoc and desolation all around. Though unable to take Milan, they established themselves in some of the neighbouring towns, and the approach of Francis himself with a large army in the following year (1524) drove the Duke into flight. The city, bereft of half its population and garrison by a terrible pestilence, was utterly unable to make any defence against the French monarch. Francis, having entered Milan in triumph, passed on to besiege Pavia, which kept him heroically at bay through many months.

Meanwhile the Emperor was rapidly gathering force for the relief of his vassal State. From Naples came Lanoy with the garrison of that province; from Germany the ferocious giant Fründsberg, leading twelve thousand lanzknechts; while mercenaries from every part swarmed to the camps of Charles’ other commanders, the Constable de Bourbon and the Marquis of Pescara. This horde of hungry and rapacious villains, whom the Emperor left to gather supplies and pay out of the unfortunate country which it passed through, swooped down upon the gallant army of the King, which, falsely secure in its vainglory and sense of personal valour, allowed itself to be entrapped in the Park of Pavia, and on 24th February 1525, that vast and exquisite pleasaunce, created for the summer dalliance and the gay winter sports of the Dukes of Milan, became an awful red-mown field of all the chivalry of France. Never, perhaps, was such an oblation of knightly grace and virtue poured out to Death as on that day. One after another the gentlemen of France fell around their King. The famous veterans of the Italian wars died together with the youngest scions of their Houses, new come to this fatal Italy. Among many Milanese nobles who also fought in the King’s ranks and fell was Galeazzo di San Severino, who, after mourning for his friend and lord, the Moro, through several years of exile, had taken service with the conqueror and risen to the position of Grand Ecuyer of France.

Madame, tout est perdu sauf l’honneur, wrote Francis to his mother. Among other things the Duchy of Milan, but just retaken, was lost again, and this time for ever. Monseigneur le Roy being a prisoner at Pizzighettone, his army destroyed and the survivors of his gentlemen confined in different fortresses, Duke Francesco returned again under the imperial protection to his capital. But though he was beloved by his people, his restoration meant a renewal of the intolerable Spanish tyranny, and fresh exactions for the benefit of the Emperor’s treasury, worse than any the city had ever suffered before. The Duke himself groaned under a slavery for which the empty title and insignia of sovereignty little compensated him.

And now at the very height of Charles’ success, there seemed to come a hope of freedom for his oppressed vassal. Italy and the whole European world had been startled by the overwhelming victory of Pavia, and began to fear the further advance of a conqueror whose triumph was a menace to all. Pope Clement VII., whose projects for the aggrandisement of the Medici were hampered by Charles’ predominance in the peninsula, seized the opportunity to draw the Queen-Mother of France, Henry VIII. of England, Venice and the smaller Italian States into a vast alliance against the Emperor. This seemed the moment for Milan to throw off the yoke of Spain, and Francesco, or rather his chancellor, the able and faithful Morone, entered into secret relations with the League. He was, however, betrayed by the Marquis of Pescara, whom he had endeavoured to seduce from allegiance to Charles. Morone came near to losing his head, and the Duke himself was denounced for high treason to his feudal Lord, and was forced to take refuge in the Castello, where he was closely blockaded by Pescara and De Leyva; while the miserable citizens, who had found the Spanish troops intolerable enough as their allies and defenders, had now to suffer unspeakable things from them in the character of conquerors.

For many months the Duke held out in the hope of the relief promised by the League, till provisions grew short and famine appeared at hand. Meanwhile the city, driven to frenzy by its oppressors, rose again and again in desperate tumults, which were quelled each time by the Spanish generals with treacherous promises to relieve the general misery, and followed by severities and outrages more dreadful than ever, till the fair city became a very hell of slaughter, lust and rapine. In vain the forces of the League, under the brilliant young Giovanni de’ Medici, approached to the Duke’s succour. They were driven back by the Imperialists, and Francesco was at last forced by extremity of want to surrender the castle and abandon the city altogether (1526).

But the League was daily growing in strength and soon returned to the attack. The Imperialists were closely besieged in their turn in Milan, till the descent of Fründsberg with fresh hordes of mercenaries compelled the assailants to retire and concentrate themselves on the defensive against the once again overwhelming Imperialists. Lombardy was now become the complete prey of the occupying armies. The ferocious and undisciplined hosts that nominally served the Emperor no longer heeded the commands of a master who gave them no pay, and was himself far away in Spain. They were practically an independent robber horde, following whom, and going where, they pleased, supporting and enriching themselves on plunder, torturing and murdering peasants and citizens without distinction, to squeeze from them their last possession. It meant nothing to the soldiers that Charles was entering into negotiations for peace with the League. Nor could their captains control them. The Constable de Bourbon, who became Governor of Milan for the Emperor in 1526, promised the afflicted people to move the army from their midst, but even if he had been sincere, he could not have kept his word. Yet the army loved him above all their other leaders, this rebel and exiled prince of France, who was an adventurer like themselves.

Before long Milan and the country round was changed into a bare desert, out of which even Spanish cruelty could no longer extract a subsistence. The thought of the unvisited regions farther on began to spread and agitate among the famished hordes; the names of Florence and Rome, cities of untold riches, were breathed from one to another, and as one man they rose at the offer of the Constable de Bourbon to lead them southwards. As a swarm of locusts lifts from a devastated plain, they swept suddenly away on the awful, irresistible course which ended in that final catastrophe of the Middle Ages, the Sack of Rome.

This tragic event, though hardly a part of the pious Emperor’s plans, made the last link in the chain which Spain was forging round Italy. Neither the Pope, nor Francis I., who had regained his liberty early in 1526, were able to offer any further serious resistance to the conqueror, though for some years yet the French continued to make desperate efforts to regain Milan, and the city had to endure both the tyranny of the Spanish governor, De Leyva, and the horrors of blockade. The Treaty of Barcelona between the Pope and the Emperor, and the peace signed by Charles and Francis at Cambrai—that Paix des Dames, arranged by the most famous ladies of France and Italy—followed by the Congress and Coronation of the Emperor at Bologna in 1530, secured peace at last for the tormented country by laying the destinies of Italy finally in the conqueror’s hands. Francesco Sforza, who threw himself on the Emperor’s mercy, was graciously pardoned and reinstated in his Dukedom. The return of this amiable prince inspired a faint joy in the exhausted people, and gradually, in spite of the enormous subsidies exacted by the Emperor, and the burdens imposed to drive off the attacks of the independent condottieri and pirates who ranged the disordered country, a certain amount of life and activity crept back into the cruelly-wronged city.

Such consolation and remedy for her wounds as his fettered powers and grave embarrassments allowed, Francesco administered, introducing order into the wild confusion of the government, and reviving trade and industry by careful regulations. But what a changed Milan from that in which his father and mother had reigned gloriously, in beautiful stainless palaces, surrounded by the finest productions of art, was this wrecked, defiled and devastated city, in whose deserted streets and suburbs nettles grew rankly, and wolves, grown used to feed on human flesh, roamed at will, attacking armed men, and snatching children from their mothers’ arms! ‘What an incredible evidence of the change of fortune,’ writes Guicciardini, ‘to those who had seen her not long before overflowing with inhabitants, and not only full of all gaiety and delight from the natural inclination of her inhabitants to feasting and pleasure, but because of the wealth of her citizens, the infinite number of her shops and industries, the delicacy and abundance of all the things which form man’s food, the superb apparel and equipages and sumptuous adornments of both her women and her men, more flourishing and happy than any other city of Italy.’

There is an interesting record of these years of tribulation in the chronicle of a Milanese mercer named Burigozzo, who, sitting in his dark-browed shop, set down from day to day, as they passed before his eyes, the vicissitudes of el povero Milano. His quaint simplicity and patriotic grief make his tale very moving. It is a picture of confusion, tumult and misery, relieved at first by brilliant gleams, such as the hollow pomps and glories of the entries of kings and conquerors, but darkening ever to a more tragic gloom and terror and despair as it passes from the milder sufferings of the period of French occupation to the unspeakable horrors—cose da non dire—committed by the Spaniards and lanzknechts of Pescara and De Leyva. All the great events of the time are made vivid to us in his pages. We hear the ceaseless noise of battle outside, the guns of the Castello, often directed upon the terror-stricken city itself, roaring continually and answered by the great bell of the Duomo sounding a martello, to summon the citizens to arms. These, maddened by exactions and cruelty, or inspired by hope of driving out oppressors, or excluding assailants, gather in thousands at the call. Suffering has made them merciless, and they attack and butcher parties of mercenaries in the streets. Once they make a holocaust of the old wooden Campanile of the Duomo, with a whole company of Spaniards within it. And through the streets, crowded with blaspheming and bestial soldiery, we see endless processions pass, white-robed children, men and women with bare feet and clad in sackcloth, monks, friars, all the hierarchy of the Cathedral, filling the air with penitential wailings and cries of misericordia, as they wind from the Duomo to St. Ambrogio to implore the help of the great patron saint of the once fortunate Milan. Churches crowded with suppliants; the excited populace pressing round some upstart prophet—some fierce bearded monk who drives the timid priests from altar and pulpit, and calls upon the people in the name of Christ to slaughter the French. In street and temple alike confusion and foulness, where so shortly before the genius of order had presided. Then upon the uproar falls the sick and heavy silence of the pestilence, and the mercer’s tale moves as with a hushed step, while, imprisoned for a whole month within his house, he watches his children die, himself by the grace of God untouched and well—while no sound is heard but the carts going by laden with the sick, and the ceaseless campana del corpo—while the graveyards spread and double in extent round the numberless churches. A hundred thousand persons perished, he tells us, during the summer months of 1524.