Among the writers who were his contemporaries stand foremost, Bonfadio, Campanaceo, Sigonio, Capelloni, Foglietta, Mascardi and Casoni. I do not mention foreigners, first among whom are Tuano and the Cardinal de Retz. I omit, too, the modern writers, since they have all followed with the assiduity of copyists the earlier historians, making no effort to study the public archives or even to criticise the text which they copied. Nevertheless, it is important to give the reader some account of the historians of that epoch; since the first duty of one who attempts to describe past events is to employ criticism in its widest sense, and so to separate the true from the false. Nor can this be done without carefully weighing the credibility of authors who have gone this way before us and taking account of the passions which governed them when they wrote.
The first historian of Fieschi was Bonfadio who was employed by the senate to write the annals of the Republic. He was a witness of the events which he described and on the very night of the rising, he went to the senate in company with Giovanni Battista Grimaldi. Yet we can yield him little faith; since, writing at the command of the government, he could not do less than speak harshly of the government’s enemies. He confesses that he had not in his hands the records of the conspirators’ trial. He ignores many facts, and never names the accomplices of Fieschi, scarcely suspecting that there were any. Having a mania for classic imitation, and borne away by the current of his times, he depicts Gianluigi as a man thirsting for base deeds and for blood; so, that if his immortal pages served to render the memory of Fieschi odious at a time when men had little concern for the honour of the vanquished, they are certainly too careless and too partial to satisfy the future. The unfortunate author, who was truthful in all other matters and failed in this only, because it treated of a plot against the powerful Doria, reaped bitter fruits for his great bias against Fieschi.
Not less unjust was Giuseppe Mario Campanaceo, who added to his history of the conspiracy a comparison between it and that of Catiline. “Both,” he says, “sprung from noble stock. Both were crushed under the ruin they plotted for others. In the one, a fierce look, a sanguinary countenance; in the other, a singular beauty and a virginal candour. The Roman was stained with bloody and licentious deeds; the Genoese bore the fame of goodness of heart and grace of manners. The Roman was verging towards age; the Genoese was in the freshness of his youth, yet he surpassed the conspirator of the Tiber as much in deceitfulness as Catiline excelled him in warlike exploits.”
If on minor points the narration of this writer is more accurate, it still bears the seal of the degraded time in which it was written. Though the author professes to have taken great pains to discover the truth, having spent a long time in Genoa for that purpose, it is very easy to see that he did not escape the contagion of party feeling and of the malevolence of the faction then dominant in Liguria. It is not strange, therefore, that he finds a mean and avaricious spirit in Gianluigi, while he describes Gianettino as an illustrious victim, rather, as the most virtuous knight of all Christendom.
Carlo Sigonio, in his life of Andrea Doria, and, among Genoese writers, Oberto Foglietto have treated the matter with elegance of diction but with unblushing plagiarism.
The same may be said of Lorenzo Capelloni, who described the conspiracy of Fieschi in a report to Charles V. He was too devoted to Cæsar, and to Doria, whose life he wrote, not to imitate the others whom we have mentioned in treating the attempt of Fieschi as a plot of like character with that of Cybo which he also described.
Agostino Mascardi, who was more of a rhetorician than an historian, tells us nothing new. Casoni was less devoted to the Spanish power and therefore more humane towards Fieschi, but he adopted without question the opinion professed by the party in power who never opened the archives of the state for the study of the historian.
We therefore conclude that a prudent and impartial criticism forbids us to give full faith to those who have given to Count Fieschi a dishonourable place in history.
In our opinion two qualifications are essential to the historian:—That he be able to collect the most accurate accounts of the facts, and that party spirit do not cloud the serenity of his mind. The writers whom we have mentioned lack these credentials. In fact, after studying the annals of the sixteenth century, we are satisfied that most of them were ignorant of the true causes of events. Sometimes they knew only a part of the facts; sometimes, acting under the influence of personal or political jealousy, they betrayed the truth by silence, by misrepresentation or by additions of what would serve their own purposes or the wishes of their masters.
The reader must judge whether we have truly balanced the account.