As the picture unrolls itself before us we are fain to turn away from the spectacle of anguish and all abomination during the hideous years of the Spanish occupation after 1525. The city preyed upon by the fiendish mercenaries, the people outraged, pillaged, and tortured till they yielded up their last mite of buried treasure. Multitudes flying from their homes to avoid worse things and sheltering in the country round, though that was infested by human beasts and wild ones only less cruel, or worse, stopped and bound, little children and all, by their ruthless tormentors, to prevent their escape. And withal siege, starvation; such a leanness of men from hunger as was an anguish to witness, the little bread which they possessed seized by the governor, the dying poor driven into so-called refuges, whence every days scores were carried out dead.
But the story of these thirty years is not entirely of gloom. If we turn from the people to the great Milanese nobility, we see a different aspect of life, no less tragic in a sense, but brilliant enough and glorified by the fine culture and rare artistic taste of the age. Within their sumptuous palaces and wide secluded gardens, defended by great names and powerful interests from the intrusions of marauding soldiery, or in pleasant country villas beside the lakes and placid rivers of Lombardy, whither they retired when pestilence or famine held sway in the city, they created for themselves that unreal world of ladies and cavaliers, arms and love, of which Ariosto sings. It was during these years that the courtly Dominican friar, Matteo Bandello, was Prior of the Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, and was collecting in the most elect circles those gay and scandalous tales, which, retold by his witty pen with introductions describing the circumstances in which he heard them, give a vivid picture of the incomparable cinquecento society of Milan, with its fine literary accomplishment, vivacious wit and over liberal manners—a society presided over by such gracious figures as Ippolita Sforza, the lady of Bandello’s own particular adoration, and Cecilia Gallerani, the Moro’s old favourite. Ippolita, a granddaughter of Duke Galeazzo Maria, was married to Alessandro Bentivoglio, a son of the deposed Lord of Bologna. She and Cecilia, now the Contessa Bergamini, and Camilla Scarampi made up a trio of Milanese poetesses and literary connoisseurs of finest discrimination and judgment and of wide renown. Apparently careless of the woes of their country, these ladies and others of their rank, with the graceful cavaliers and dilettante ecclesiastics who made their court, occupied themselves in romantic vanities, in amorous intrigues, and in learned and philosophic dalliance. Close relations united them with the other courts and aristocracies of North Italy, and the famous Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella da Este, was often the centre and queen of those elegant gatherings of beauty and wit and gallantry described by Bandello. History shows us that most typical lady of Italian society dancing with the King of France at the great ball which the usurping monarch gave in 1507, in the Castello of Milan, in the very halls where her sister and brother-in-law had once reigned—a spectacle significant of fallen Italy. Like the princes of the neighbouring States, the great nobles of Milan, once powerful in the story of their city, had lost all patriotic and independent spirit. The severe repression of party-passion, that unfailing symptom of vigorous life in an Italian community, by the French conquerors in 1500, reduced them to idleness and political nullity. They made friends with the new powers and entered their service, but they had no longer any real influence on affairs. The revolutions which placed the Sforza princes on the ducal throne in turn afforded the nobles opportunities of intrigue and brought home to them the terrible realities of foreign subjugation. In 1521, for example, those who had embraced the side of the old dynasty suffered the reprisals of the savage Lautrec, and on mere suspicion Milan was desolated of its noblest inhabitants by summary executions, banishment and forfeiture. These families were, however, restored to their old position by the elevation of Francesco Sforza to the Dukedom, and they made no attempt to rebel against the Imperial Eagle, which was their real master. When the intolerable persecution inflicted by the Spanish and German mercenaries from 1525 to 1529 maddened the people to repeated insurrection, not one of the nobles came forward to give them courage and to organise and direct their undisciplined efforts to effective action. A certain Pietro della Pusterla, of a House which through all the story of Milan had been distinguished as leaders of popular movements, seems to have assumed some authority over them, but even he abandoned them in the hour of need and danger.
These futile attempts exhausted the last remains of aspiration for liberty and self-government in the broken-spirited Milanese. They made no attempt to rebel against the settlement of 1530, which resigned them finally into the Emperor’s hands. Though utterly dismayed—tutto smarrito, says Burigozzo—by the heavy fine inflicted by Charles as a penalty for the rebellion of the Duchy, they resigned themselves to patientia and hope for better days to come.
Much patientia was necessary before those days came. The country round was depopulated, and it was long before the old abundance flowed again into the city. There were times when bread lacked and the people murmured against the helpless Duke. Prices remained very high and there was little trade. A visit, however, from Charles V. in 1533, expected with fear and dismay by the citizens, to whom his name was only associated with ravaging lanzknechts and Spaniards, brought them, to their joyful surprise, good luck—a great influx of custom and rich payment for their goods, instead of robbery.
In 1534 a brief reflection of its old glory brightened the city on the arrival of a bride for the Duke, the sixteen-year-old Cristina of Sweden, whose portrait by Holbein is in the National Gallery. The streets and squares were magnificently decked for her reception. The young princess, whose countenance, says the chronicler, was more divine than human, rode in under a golden baldaquin, surrounded by twelve of the noblest gentlemen of the city, so splendidly arrayed that each appeared an Emperor, and with such great white plumes in their caps that her Excellency seemed to move in the midst of a forest. The joy with which she was greeted was, however, shallow enough, and changed quickly to groans when the money for the Duchess’ maintenance had to be squeezed out of the people by a special tax.
The fine bridal feast was soon followed by a still more pompous, but lugubrious pageant, when eighteen months later (1535), the last Duke of Milan was carried to his tomb in the great temple founded by the first Duke, Gian Galeazzo Visconte. Always delicate of constitution, and worn out by the great anxieties of his life, Francesco fell a victim to a severe illness in 1535. He left no child to inherit the ducal throne.
There still survived, however, a Sforza, Gian Paolo, son of the Moro by Lucrezia Crivelli. This prince set off immediately for Rome, to press the Pope to support his claim to the Dukedom. But on his way he was seized with sickness and died. Men said that he was poisoned by those to whom his existence was an inconvenience.
Thus was spent the dynasty of the Sforza, and Milan devolved as a vacant fief to the Empire. This great city, once the seat of Roman Emperors, the crowning place of Carlovingian and German monarchs, the capital of North Italy, and for centuries the heart of the most powerful principality in the peninsula, was now to sink to a mere provincial position, to become an impotent fragment of dismembered and captive Italy.
We need not occupy ourselves with the further vicissitudes of the city under the now settled dominion of Spain, which all the chivalrous and repeated efforts of France in the sixteenth century was unable to overthrow. It is enough to note her transference from Spanish to Austrian rule after the War of Succession in the early years of the seventeenth century, and her continued subjection to the House of Hapsburg—with the brief Napoleonic interruption of 1796 to 1815—till in 1848 she rid herself by insurrection of the Austrian garrison, and ten years later became free and national at last as a member of the new-born Kingdom of Italy.
Her mediæval life ended with her mediæval liberty. Its robust passions, its vigorous and restless activity of body and mind, the sense of human power, the wide-ranging speculation, the audacious flights of the spirit, which mark its florescence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, turned to weariness, disillusion and despair. Individuality lost itself in the bonds of convention and submission. In art, in literature, everywhere—decay. On thought, on science, the blight fell. The same hand which had stilled the political aspirations of Milan was laid heavily upon her soul. The prepotence of Spain and the revival of dogmatic zeal in the Papacy meant the employment of every engine of oppression against that spiritual freedom which Italy had used both for good and for evil. The Holy Office was set up in the Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, and our friend Burigozzo lived long enough to see the pitiful ceremonies of the public recantations and penances of heretics before the door of the Duomo. But the most powerful agent of the Catholic reform in Milan was the famous Cardinal Archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, known to religious history as San Carlo. As Ambrose stands at the entrance of Milan’s mediæval era, with back turned upon the ruined Empire behind, and strong gaze broadening down the centuries of new faith, new hope, new ideals, so Carlo Borromeo stands at its close, as sternly facing towards the past, and closing the door upon the new world of thought and knowledge beyond. Her independent story is consecrated at its beginning and at its end by the mighty personality of a saint, who, whatever his influence upon her actual progress, gives by his example of will, of courage, and of spiritual exaltation, an everlasting inspiration to mankind.