The emperor derived no advantage from imprisoning the Pope, wasting his provinces and butchering his people. A pressing want of money induced Charles to restore Julius to his throne, as the same motive had led him to liberate the French king. It seems incredible that the master of Spain, the Netherlands, Sicily, the Lombard provinces and Mexico should have drawn no profit from his vast possessions. The Lutheran movement in Germany, the threats of France, the distrust of the king of England, the secret intrigues of the Pope and the doubtful fidelity of some Italian princes, whom Venice was inciting to revolt, may have conspired to palsy his arms in the very moment of victory.
A little before the sack of Rome, Odo di Foix, lord of Lautrec and general of France avenged the defeat of his sovereign at Pavia by capturing this city and subjecting it to an eight day’s pillage. The edifices were so ruined and the population so thinned that Leandro Alberti writes;—“The sight of it excited compassion.” It is melancholy satisfaction to write, that, of the crowds of foreigners who poured into Italy to plunder and ravage, very few returned to their native lands. The Peninsula became their sepulchre—of the French particularly—who to speak truth, seldom committed those excesses which were common to the Spaniards and Germans. It may be added, too, that it has always been the misfortune of France to make useless conquests in Italy. Her army which, after the destruction of Melfi, advanced to the siege of Naples, counting more than twenty-five thousand men, was so thinned by pestilential fevers that two months afterwards it did not contain four thousand men fit for duty. The frightful plague did not spare Lautrec, and after the treaty of Antwerp only a few skeletons were permitted to set foot on the soil of France. The army which deluged Rome with blood met with a more calamitous fate. Shut up in Naples under the Prince of Orange, governor of that city, it was attacked and mowed down by a pestilence which was at once the consequence and punishment of its insane license. Even Francis Bourbon, count of San Polo, who, the Bisogni having left nothing to plunder, put the villages and hamlets through which he passed to fire and sword, was totally defeated and made prisoner in Landriano (1529) by the ferocious Antonio di Leyva, the scourge of Lombardy.
The kings becoming weary, the people being drained of their blood, the necessity of peace was strongly felt. Charles V., who had no title to greatness, but the extent of his dominions, who was crooked in design and avaricious of spirit, hastened to form an incestuous union with the Pope, and the fruit of their embraces was the slavery of Florence. Cæsar bound himself to immolate the Republic to the vengeance of Clement and put under Papal pay the hordes of assassins who had already desolated the greater part of the Peninsula. The bastard Alexander de’ Medici married a bastard daughter of the emperor; whence the treaty of Cambray by which France delivered Italy, bound hand and foot to Charles Fifth, recovering Bourgogne and his children for the shameful desertion. He ignominiously lost in this treaty the honour which he preserved stainless in his defeat and capture at Pavia. This king had strange contradictions in his character. He promised, with apparent sincerity, liberty to nations and then abandoned them at caprice; he was hated by people whom he overwhelmed with public burdens, but loved by the learned whom he protected and honoured. He offered his hand to the heretics of Germany, and burned under a slow fire the heretics of France. He invited the Turks into Italy and betrayed the Venitians and Florentines; but he kept faith with his bitter enemy, granting Charles V. safe conduct through French territory.
The pontiff being about to crown Charles in Bologna with the Lombard and Imperial diadems, the latter ordered the Italian princes, as his vassals, to pay him homage on that occasion (1530). Alfonso d’Este, Frederick Gonzaga, the dukes of Urbino and Savoy, and the Marquis of Monferrato submitted to him; the Republics of Genoa, Siena and Lucca counted themselves happy in being permitted to retain their old form of government, and Florence which under the influence of Nicolò Capponi had elected Christ for its king, now vainly defended by the brave Ferruccio was forced to humble herself to slavery. That portion of North Italy which in modern language is called Piedmont was involved in equal if not greater disasters. On account of its situation between Austria and France, it was overrun and desolated by barbarian invaders from 1494 to 1559. “We do not believe,” say the commissioners of Henry VIII. of England, “that it is possible to find in all Christendom greater wretchedness than reigns in this country. The best towns are either in ruins or depopulated. There are few districts in which food is to be found. The extensive plain, fifty miles in length, which lies between Vercelli and Pavia, once so fertile in cereals and wines, is reduced to a desert. The fields are uncultivated; except three poor women gathering a few grapes, we saw not the shadow of a human creature. There, they neither sow nor reap; the country sides are growing wild, and the uncultivated vines are returning to their primitive state.”
Charles III., the unfortunate, was ruling over these desolated provinces and his subjects suffered every species of indignity, outrage and despotism. To render matters, if possible, a little worse, Gonzaga urged the Emperor to reduce to a swamp all that wide plain between the Alps and the Po to form a barrier to French invasion of Lombardy.
In fine, there was no city in all Italy which was not conquered and oppressed by foreign armies. Of Genoa I shall speak in its place. It is worth while to mention Nice, where in 1538 Paul III. held the congress at which a truce was concluded between Cæsar and Francis I. Five years afterwards, Francis marched upon and besieged it with the help of the Turks. This siege is memorable in Italian history for the heroic spirit of Segurana, but after the death at the sword’s point of all her bravest defenders, the city was forced to surrender. The citizens abandoned their homes, though they had obtained a promise of immunity for their property from pillage by the soldiery. The Turks kept faith, while the French violated their pledges, thus giving rise to a general desire among Italians to become subject to the Turks, from a conviction that they could no longer endure the weight of their misfortunes. There were writers as Vives, who speaking of Italy, (1529) sought to discourage this sentiment, telling the Italians that the Turks would heap worse miseries upon them. But it is incredible that Soliman could have equalled the endless tortures inflicted by Francis I. and Charles V. Segni says: “More than two hundred thousand persons killed in war, more than a hundred cities and important castles sacked and destroyed, so many thousands of innocent men and women destroyed by pestilence and famine that one cannot number them, matrons debauched, maidens ravished, abominable practices with children, an endless catalogue of crimes against religion and nature committed against each other by christians, all owe their origin to the implacable enmity of two men, who were born and have grown old in eternal hatred to each other. They are not weary of shedding the blood of their fellows; they continue to fight and will fight to the end of their lives.”[12] He proceeds:—“Afflicted peoples cannot do better than pray God to destroy or subject them both to the sway of the grand Turk, so that the world may come under the power of a single monarch, who, though he be a barbarian and an enemy to our laws, may give us a little repose wherein to rear our children to a life, of poverty indeed, but free from the burdens of our miserable existence.”
The people of Germany, always restless under the yoke of ancient Rome, were rising against the Papal power, which had taken the place of the ancient empire. At the voice of Luther laying bare the festering diseases of the Roman court, the learned of Italy were moved. The Pope comprehended that there was no other means of extirpating the seeds of reform which had already sprung up in Italy but to ally himself with catholic Spain: she was in the zenith of her glory. Such captains as Cortes and Pizzaro sailed away with a galley and returned conquerors of a new world. Who better than the compatriots of Torquemada could suffocate in blood the free voices of the disciples of Huss and Wicliffe? From that moment the compact of Charlemagne was renewed between Charles V. and the Roman theocracy, and through it the Spaniards tightened their grasp on Milan, Naples, Palermo and Cagliari, and established their ascendency over the whole Peninsula.
From Charles V. dates our humiliation and slavery. From his time the Peninsula has had no proper history. Its vicissitudes and calamities are only episodes of the great drama enacted by the nations who have fought against each other for our blood. The council of Trent was not an act of national life. It grew out of the philosophic spirit of reform and the scandals of the Roman court, and was initiated by Germany and France while England was separating herself from the catholic church. This celebrated synod shows nothing but the conflict between the church and the empire, between the reformers and the courtiers of Rome struggling to maintain their privileges, between the Popes who fought to maintain their abuses and the secular princes who secretly laboured to shake off the priestly yoke. The Italian people had no part in it. The religious discussions upon divine grace, predestination and justification by faith did not reach us, who were everywhere plotting to recover our independence and freedom.
In fact this is the century of popular conspiracies, which were always strangled by degenerate nobles and foreign armies. It is true that the most illustrious Italians sided with the people and died for their righteous cause; but these were vain struggles. From the day that Lorenzino de’Medici, for whom the Spanish power (which Duke Alexander was consolidating in Italy) was too bitter, formed the design of restoring the Republic and then, bought by promises of lascivious embraces, stifled his own purpose, the spark of liberty took fire and in every city the plebeians rose against their foreign oppressors.