The first keen blade of sorrow that transfixed the Queen’s soul [says Bernaldez] was the death of the Prince; the second the death of Doña Isabel her eldest daughter, Queen of Portugal; the third the death of her grandson Don Miguel, for in him she had found consolation. From this time the life of the famous and very virtuous Queen Isabel, protector of Castile, was without pleasure; and her days and her health were alike shortened.
CHAPTER XII
THE ITALIAN WARS
1494–1504
A cloud of grief hung over Spain, but abroad her sun was rising. The union of Castile and Aragon, the Conquest of the Moors, the campaign against heresy, the discovery of unknown islands in the West—all these had brought her prominently before the eyes of Europe; while yet another harvest of glory still remained for Ferdinand’s diplomacy to reap on foreign shores.
In the early years of his rivalry with France the Pyrenees had formed his battleground, but for all his efforts, political or military, he had never succeeded in regaining Roussillon or Cerdagne nor in undermining French influence in Navarre. Diplomacy is a game where the practised hand will always be at an immense advantage; and Louis XI. proved more than a match for the young Aragonese opponent who was to succeed him eventually as the craftiest statesman in Europe.
Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare is said to be the only paternal sermon to which the Dauphin Charles was ever subjected; but since Louis XI.’s craven fear of his son denied the boy all but the most rudimentary education, there was little likelihood that he would be able to make use of so subtle a maxim. Ill-developed in brain as in body, his weak but obstinate nature nourished its vanity on schemes requiring the strength of a Hannibal or an Alexander for their realization. His father had with tireless energy extended the boundaries of France north, east, and south; employing the weapons of force, bribery, and lies, as the moment demanded. His success, save on moral grounds, might have prompted the continuation of his policy; but Charles chafed not at its immorality only its apparent pettiness of scope. To make peace with his neighbours, if necessary, by the surrender of lately-won possessions; and then, freed from Christian molestation, to lead an army in person that should add the kingdom of Jerusalem to French dominions—this was the fantasy that floated ever before his eyes.
A crusade! Mediæval Europe had heard that project discussed for many centuries. It had seen warriors take the Cross for reasons true and false, had watched their victories and their failures, and, by the end of the fifteenth century, was sufficiently disillusioned to smile in private when the idea was mentioned. The recovery of the Holy Sepulchre was a good excuse for governments to impose extra taxes, or for Venice to induce the weak-minded to wage her trade-wars in the Levant. If the Turk, as he threatened, grew stronger it might indeed become a matter of serious politics; but in the meantime, save in Spain or Bohemia, religious fervour stood at a discount.
Yet European statesmen were ready enough to twist the young French monarch’s desire for high-sounding glory to their own advantage. Ludovico, “Il Moro,” virtual ruler of Milan for his nephew Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, saw in an alliance with Charles VIII. a way of extricating himself from political troubles that were likely to overthrow the balance of power in Italy, and with it his own dominion.
“This Ludovico was clever,” says Philip de Commines who knew him, “but very nervous and cringing when he was afraid; a man without faith if he thought it to his advantage to break his word.”
At the time when Charles VIII., grown to years of manhood if not discretion, was centring his hopes on Jerusalem, Ludovico Sforza lived in a perpetual state of fear. Of old in alliance with the Aragonese House of Naples and the Medici at Florence, he had regarded with calm eyes the hostility of Venice on the eastern border of his duchy and the growing ambitions of the Papacy in Romagna. These five Powers,—Milan, Naples, Rome, and the republics of Venice and Florence, had controlled the peninsula, and in Machiavelli’s words made it their object “first that no armed foreigner should be allowed to invade Italy, second, that no one of their own number should be suffered to extend his territory.”
Slowly the balance thus established had been shaken, and mutual suspicion began to darken the relations between Naples and Milan. King Ferrante’s grand-daughter Isabella was wife of the rightful Duke, Gian Galeazzo, and in her letters home made piteous complaints of his uncle’s tyranny. Her husband was fully old enough to reign but was kept instead a prisoner at Pavia, his natural delicacy of constitution aggravated by this restraint. She herself was relegated to a merely secondary position; and her relations, who had intended her to act as their political agent, not unnaturally resented the forced seclusion in which she lived.