The scribblers called him The Great, because they lived upon him, and were only idle ornaments of a luxurious court. He entertained the Romans with feasts and games, because he was a devotee of pleasure, and, according to the saying of the people, wished to enjoy the papacy. But the chases of Corneto and Viterbo, the infamies of Malliana, the suppers of the gods, and the fisheries of Bolsena were paid for with money borrowed at forty per cent. The people of the Romagna, bleeding under his insatiable collectors of revenue, prayed for the Turkish yoke, as a relief from that of the Popes. When it was his plain duty to restore his wasted provinces by permanent peace, he excited new wars, for whose conduct he had neither money, energy, nor talents. History has been strangely generous with Leo. His intrigues, his wrongheaded policy, the fictitious conspiracy of Florence,—for which Macchiavello was beheaded, Braccioli and Capponi killed, and many others imprisoned or banished,—still await a pen sharp enough to cut away his borrowed glories.
At the death of Maximilian of Austria, the electors conferred the empire on Charles V. of Spain, who was already master of the Two Sicilies. The power of Charles threatened the independence of Rome, and Leo formed a league with France, in the audacious hope of expelling the Spaniard from Italy. But he betrayed his ally for a dukedom in the kingdom, conferred on his bastard son Alexander de’ Medici. A war broke out, and the Papal and Imperial troops, led by Prospero Colonna and Marquis Pescara, had already occupied Milan, when the sudden death of Leo cut short his enterprises. His successor was the Flemish Van Trusen, under the title of Hadrian VI. He had never set foot in Italy, and was therefore called a barbarian. The corrupt prelates despised a Pope, under whom absolution cost only a ducat.
Hadrian was unable to continue the war, the Papal treasury having been drained by the prodigality of Leo. Besides the Rovere, Baglioni and Malatesta had seized the Papal dominions. The other states of Italy were not more fortunate than the Papal. Venice had been bleeding to death since the league of Cambray; Florence was under the heel of Julius de’ Medici; the lords of Mantua and Ferrara were in the grasp of a master; the Marquis of Monferrato and the Duke of Savoy were protected by French garrisons; the kingdom of Naples was barbarized and taxed to the verge of ruin by those Spanish hordes who from the poverty of their clothing were called the Bisogni.[11] Charles did not pay his armies a sous, and they had scarcely routed the French under Lautrec when they began a general pillage of Italy. Though the Pope was Charles’ ally the pontificial territory did not escape the common fate. The excesses of Ultramontane lust and avarice bred a terrible pestilence in Florence and in Rome; new wounds for Italy. When the plague had reached its height, the pontiff in an insane fright abolished the sanitary laws on the plea that they were offensive to Heaven and heretical. Thus the pestilence, encountering no obstacles, raged with unchecked violence.
We are told that in these straits, the Romans longing to find a barrier to such a flood of woes, sacrificed a bull with all the pagan ceremonies to the divinities of the ancient Republic. To such a degree had the atheism of the popes taken root among the people!
Julius, of the Medici family, succeeded to Hadrian VI.; but he did not bring peace to Italy. The French, led by Bonnivet made a new attempt to recover Lombardy. Prospero Colonna made them pay dearly for the enterprise; but Francis I. invaded Italy in force, and Milan, desolated by the plague, came into his power. Who at that period cared for the independence of Italy? Venice, Venice alone. In the battle of Pavia, Francis I. was beaten and captured. Venice seeing the knife pointed at her own breast by Imperial hands, proposed to Louisa of Savoy, mother of the captive French king and regent of France, a general league of the enemies of Spain, the mustering of armies and the liberation of the illustrious prisoner. The Pope opposed the scheme and bound himself closer to the emperor whose satellites he paid largely for leaving him in peace. The German leaders divided the money and went on robbing the subjects of the Pope.
In the meantime the treaty of Madrid (1526) released Francis I. from prison and he made haste to violate the stipulations extorted from him by force. He formed an alliance for the liberation of Italy, with the Pope, the Venitians and Francis Sforza. The French monarch proclaimed himself the apostle of liberty for oppressed people and awakened everywhere the spirit of resistance to the Spanish power. A strange delusion that the French monarch sought to enfranchise Italy seized upon the most illustrious men of our Peninsula. The Genoese were especially forward in urging the Pope to abandon the Imperial alliance and join the French league. Foremost among those who shared this delusion was Giammateo Ghiberti of Genoa, chancellor of Clement VII., a knight of stainless honour and a prelate uncontaminated by the moral leprosy which raged in the Roman court.
The choicest spirit in literature and science supported the generous hopes of Ghiberti. Among them was Pietro Bembo who had been secretary to Leo X., Ludovico Canossa, the French ambassador in Venice, and Jacopo Sodoleto, an extraordinary genius whom the amorous overtures of the beautiful Imperia failed to degrade. Sodoleto, a man deeply religious and patriotic had urged Clement to make bold reforms in the bosom of the church. He founded in Rome, with the cöperation of Ghiberti, Bembo, Caraffa and many others, the oratorio of divine love, and he openly professed his belief in the doctrine of justification by faith, a dogma of the evangelical churches.
Around these leaders, the lovers of liberal studies and of their country, began to form a party, which included such men as Valeriano Pierio, Vida, Bini, Blasio, Negri, Navagero and even Berni, who, when he saw that Pope Clement neglected the advice of patriots and clung to Spain, prophesied that the Pope and his shearers would share the ruin of Italy. This awaking to liberty and the increasing aversion of the Italians to the Imperial power, stimulated the Spanish governors to harsher measures. The desertion of their party by the duke of Milan furnished the conquerors with a specious pretext for desolating whole provinces and draining the blood of the people by taxation and subsidies. This unfortunate country saw at that moment a spectacle of unbridled barbarity without parallel in history. The Spanish soldiers were quartered in the houses of the Milanese, and the citizen was treated not as a host but as a prisoner. His feet were tied to a bed, or to a beam; or he was thrown into a cellar, where he would be tormented into surrendering money or lands; or to the gratification of a more vile cupidity. When the unfortunate victim died of grief or, impelled by rage and despair, drowned himself in a well or threw himself from a window, the Bisogni immediately sought another house in which to renew the same barbarities. The Lombard provinces had not even the consolation of human pity. The duke of Urbino, commanding the armies of Venice and Rome, gave them no encouragement to hope. Indeed, he lacked the means for open war or even for skirmishing with the Spanish army. Germany poured down new soldiers. Shall we say soldiers? George Frandesperg marched at the head of fifteen thousand robbers, and swore to put a halter round the neck of the Pope and to pay his legions with the pillage of Italian cities.
Nor were foreigners the only tormentors of the bleeding peninsula. In Rome the Orsini supported the Pope the Colonna were partisans of Cæsar. Cardinal Pompeo collected eight thousand peasants on the Agro Romano and unleashed them against the Vatican. They made a general pillage and their leader compelled the Sultan of Christianity, as he styled the Pope, to break the league he had formed with Venice and France. Deeds were committed which history shrinks from recording. The Ultramontanes, not content with enslaving provinces, slaked their thirst in the blood of the people. The inhumanity of the Germans, the avarice of the Swiss—who even then made merchandise of their fealty—the rapacity of the Aragonese and the licentiousness of the Gauls reached and polluted everything in Italy.
It is true that there was this diversity in their manners, that the Swiss and Germans, despising the restraints of both law and religion, utterly despoiled the vanquished and revelled in every species of brutality; while the French divided the spoils with those to whom they belonged and seduced, instead of violating, the women. As for the Spaniards, words are inadequate to describe the cruelty with which they slaughtered and tore in pieces our conquered populations. Macchiavello has finely contrasted the French and the Spaniards of that time. “The Frenchman is equally prodigal of his own property and that of his neighbour and he robs with small concern whether he is to eat the booty, destroy it or make riot of it with the lawful owner. The spirit of the Spanish plunderer is different; when he robs you do not hope to see a shred of your own again.” Spanish despotism imprinted its bloody hands on the face of every province. Witness the pillage of Rome by the Constable of Bourbon—who perished there, perhaps by the hand of Cellini—for proof that the Goth Alaric and every other barbarian leader were less ferocious than a christian army. The Spanish hordes plundered all the wealth and precious vessels which the devotion of christendom had amassed in the churches of Rome during twelve centuries. The Spanish catholics were worse vandals than the German Lutherans. Whoever escaped the clutches of the one was put to death by the other, or at best only saved himself by paying heavy ransom. In Rome the most venerable things were put to unseemly uses. Drunken soldiers in sacred robes and mitres danced obscene dances in the streets and public squares, and their impious mockeries always ended in bloody saturnalia. The corpses of murdered citizens strewed the streets; and after nine months of this carnival of death, a fierce pestilence broke out to complete the desolation.