Regarding the manner in which the Duke governed the state he had thus acquired, we find the following passage in Sismondi: "This man, distinguished for so many crimes, was not destitute of countervailing qualities. Brave, eloquent, dexterous; lavish of favours, but ever careful of his finances; zealous in maintaining justice throughout his states; he knew how, by good government, to promote their rapid prosperity, and to endear himself alike to his subjects and to his soldiery, whilst dreaded and detested by neighbouring princes and nations. His early conquests in Romagna, having had time to taste the advantages of his rule, remained faithful to him on the death of Alexander, while his more recent acquisitions returned to the obedience of their hereditary lords. Though cruel and perfidious in his policy, he was enlightened as to what best ensured the happiness of the people: his dealings with them were marked by scrupulous impartiality, and the public security was inviolably preserved. Under his administration factious violence had been restrained, authorised robberies had ceased, talent had met with enlightened encouragement, military merit had been promoted, men of letters had been enriched by ecclesiastical preferment. In a word, his state had prospered, and no inhabitant could anticipate without fear a restoration of the old dynasties."
Such is the judgment of an historian who saw in these dynasties but the supplanters of democracies, in his eyes the only pure, virtuous, and popular forms of government. So blinded is he in this one-sided view that, imitating Machiavelli, he becomes an apologist of the Borgia, whose policy left no other results than the general breaking down of these princely families; a fact apparently atoning, in his estimation, as in that of his Florentine prototype, for crimes exceeding in a few years the accumulated enormities which during centuries had sprung from the unbridled passions of the petty sovereigns whom he decries. But, when removed from the influence of this prepossession, he admits, in the Biographie Universelle, that "Valentino systematised crime, carrying impudence and perfidy beyond all previous bounds. Many princes have shed more blood, have exacted more savage vengeance, have ordered punishments of greater atrocity, but no name is tainted by fouler infamy. Even his ferocity was an egotistic calculation, sacrificing everything for his own interests, recognising neither morals, religion, nor sentiment except as instruments for his purpose, to be crushed when they became inconvenient." Revolting as are the vices which these pages connect with Alexander and his family, only such are here introduced as belong to the thread of our narrative. Were it our object to bring the character of these monsters fully into view, the catalogue and its loathsome details must have been greatly extended: indeed, of the many gross outrages upon female honour and domestic peace with which history charges Cesare, a considerable proportion are attributed to his stay in his own capital of Cesena. To bring home these charges would be far more easy than to discover coeval authority for Sismondi's commendations.[*279] We are, however, told by a contemporary poet, Marcello Filosseno, that Romagna bore witness to the justice and clemency of the god-like Borgia, whom all nations far and near invited to rule over them, and willingly hailed as their master. The inflated terms of this compliment are surely sufficient contradiction of its truth; and its now forgotten author, aspiring to be the Petrarch of the modern Lucrezia, was naturally the slavering adulator of her kindred.[280]
On such a point the prosaic diary of Sanuto affords better evidence. Whilst passing the spring at Imola, the Duke of Romagna frequently occupied his mornings with bull-baiting, and generally spent the nights in dancing, masques, and varied dissipation. "No redress is obtained; force supersedes justice; the troops quarter at their own pleasure; whilst all cry out for vengeance on the Duke; for they plunder everything, to say nothing of the matrons and their daughters, of whom possession has been long since taken." As to the administration of his government, the facts stated by Machiavelli, and admitted by Sismondi, are these. The numerous and violent revolutions which had recently convulsed his new state left behind them their necessary consequences. Law and justice, public order and personal security, were alike prostrated; the country was in the hands of banditti, or military adventurers. To put an end to such misrule was the interest of the new sovereign, and he set about it in a characteristic manner. Selecting Ramirez d'Orco, the most savage and blood-thirsty of his captains,[281] he left him to govern the country with unlimited authority, and to clear it summarily of every suspected individual. As the benefits of order restored by such sanguinary means might be questioned even by those who had gained them, Borgia promptly disconnected himself from the instrument when the reformation was complete. At the close of 1502, there was one morning displayed in their piazza, to the appalled inhabitants of Cesena, the racked and dismembered corpse of their tyrannical viceroy, with a knife on one side, and a reeking block on the other; and this doom the Pope justified to the Venetian envoy on pretext of his treasonable intrigues with the confederates of La Magione.[282]
Of all the evil passions of men, the lust of power most grows by indulgence. His craving for sovereignty at length gratified, the Duke Valentino panted for new conquests. His advance upon Bologna was suddenly arrested by a notice from Louis of that city being under French protection. The opportunity had not yet arrived for attacking the Duke of Urbino, the cherished general of the Venetians, the scrupulously obedient vassal of the Church. The four Tuscan republics, exhausted by long intestine struggles and civil commotions, seemed an easy prey; and the exiled Medici, ever prompt to close with any offer against their native city, afforded the excuse for an inroad upon Florence by the Mugello, with the secret intention of appropriating it to himself. His schemes of selfish aggrandisement were, however, again reluctantly suspended, at the call of an ally with whose support he could not dispense. Louis was now marching upon Naples, and thither also Cesare directed his steps. But, ever prompt to plunder for his own gain, or the gratification of his troops, he on the route seized upon Piombino, the little fief of the Appiani, and, on the 3rd of September, sacked its capital. This he retained as a footing for further conquests, and consoled himself for foregoing his designs upon the Florentines, by accepting, in guerdon of his forbearance, a nominal rank in their service, with 36,000 zecchins of pay.
After establishing his sway in the Milanese, the French King proceeded to the conquest of Naples. The league remained in force by which all the Peninsular powers were brought to afford a voluntary or constrained approbation of this enterprise; and, since the ruin of Ludovico Sforza, Federigo had no ally. Of all the smaller feudatories, the Colonna alone adhered to his falling cause, and the Pope availed himself of this pretext to break down their strength and appropriate their great estates, as he had already done those of their rivals the Orsini. Duke Guidobaldo adopted the only prudent policy left in his option, and obtained the nominal protection of Louis by sending fifty lances to co-operate with his Neapolitan expedition. On its results we cannot linger. The French King halted in Rome for a few days, whilst Alexander, on the 28th of June, declared Federigo deprived of his crown. The latter had turned towards Ferdinand of Spain, hoping that policy would combine with family ties to procure from him support in this exigency; but he was doomed to experience the hollowness of such hopes. A treaty, signed on the 11th of November, 1500, was produced, by which his kingdom had been secretly partitioned between Louis and Ferdinand; the northern portion, with the capital, was assigned to the former, and the southern, with the dukedom of Calabria, became an appanage of the Spanish monarchy, the maritime cities of Monopoli, Otranto, Brindisi, and Trani being reserved for the Venetians.[*283] At Capua alone were the French arms resisted, and after a short siege that city was delivered over to the worst horrors of a sack, Duke Valentino reserving for himself forty of the most beautiful maidens of the place. The King of the Two Sicilies, seeing his cause desperate, abdicated a short-lived sovereignty, which in happier circumstances he might have usefully and honourably wielded. He was permitted to retire to France, as titular Duke of Anjou, with a pension of 30,000 ducats, and died there in 1504. But he lived long enough to see his dominions pass from his conqueror, and the French driven from Lower Italy by the Spaniards. His last public act was to reconcile these powers, who, on plundering him of his dominions, had quarrelled over the spoil. After struggles protracted during two years, and brightened by the last blaze of expiring chivalry, Gonsalvo, the Great Captain, established over Naples the Spanish monarchy, which during the next two centuries swayed that fine country with an iron rod, the wounds whereof still rankle in its vitals. Thus was firmly planted in the Peninsula an influence which quickly overshadowed, and eventually crushed, her nationality, and which, even when finally withdrawn, left upon her intellectual powers and material prosperity a malignant blight that continues to spread its poison.
The calculation of the Borgia was, that, in the general scramble consequent upon the French invasion, their selfish schemes might be readily promoted.[284] Besides investing Cesare with the best portion of Romagna, and erecting Nepi with many of the Colonna estates into a dukedom for Giovanni, another natural son born after his elevation to the tiara, Alexander had pursued his ambitious views for his too favourite daughter Lucrezia, and after marrying her to Don Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglia, in 1498, had endowed her with the sovereign duchy of Spoleto. But the French alliance subsequently superseded his original design of basing the grandeur of his house upon the Aragon dynasty of Naples; and, prompt to free himself from the trammels of a falling cause, he was suspected of sanctioning the assassination of his son-in-law the Duke, in July, 1500, by the paid cut-throats of Cesare, whose blows not proving fatal, the unhappy prince was strangled in bed a few weeks later. The Venetian report, lately quoted from Ranke,[285] tends, however, to acquit his Holiness of this enormity, which was consummated by the bow-string of his son's agent Michelotto; indeed it represents Lucrezia as affectionately tending the invalid, and, with his sister the Princess of Squillace, cooking his food as a security against the potions of her remorseless brother, whose remark that "what failed at dinner might be managed at supper," was a pregnant hint of his sinister designs. At all events, this outrage seems to have deeply disgusted Lucrezia, but, after a brief interval, she reappeared at the court of her father, who, on quitting his capital several times during 1501, left the executive in her hands, exhibiting the novel scandal of the papacy under petticoat government. In the following year she willingly lent herself to the fourth nuptials which he had arranged for her.[*286] Once more the states of the Church were enjoined to celebrate her marriage with festivities worthy of royalty, the bridegroom being Alfonso, heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, who, by this discreditable connection, earned the towns of Cento and Pieve, with a dowry of 100,000 ducats, and the protection of the Borgia. The ceremony was performed by the Pontiff in person, who presented his daughter with jewels to the value of 100,000 scudi. Comedies, bull-fights, and illuminations were exhibited over all Rome in her honour, this lavish expenditure being defrayed out of sums raised by the indiscriminate sale of benefices, and indulgences for the pretended Turkish crusade. Of these revels, as described by Burchard, it is quite impossible to stain our pages with any account; their disgusting impurities would have disgraced the orgies of a brothel.[*287] The dukedom of Sermoneta was about the same time erected out of the Gaetani estates for her infant son Roderigo, born in November, 1499, during her marriage with the Duke of Bisceglia, but of doubted paternity: she having soon after lost the favour of her brother Cesare, which had brought upon her much scandal, this fief was seized by him, on the paltry excuse that being a woman she could not maintain possession of it.
In the following January, the bride set out for her new capital, and the Pope wrote desiring that the Duchess of Urbino should attend her to Ferrara. Considering how lately Lucrezia had been wife of her brother-in-law Giovanni Sforza, this was an honour she would gladly have dispensed with, but the habitual deference shown by Guidobaldo to the wishes of his Holiness prevented her declining what was expressed as a compliment, though subsequent events soon showed that it was but a cloak to ulterior projects of a very difficult character. The Duchess of Ferrara arrived at Urbino on the 18th of January, 1502, with the extravagant accompaniment of two thousand attendants and a hundred and fifty horses, who were all entertained by the Duke in Gubbio, Cagli, and Urbino, at an expense of about 8000 ducats.[288] Escorted by her hosts, she next day proceeded to Pesaro, visiting as a passing guest the city which had lately owned her as its mistress. For the second time she entered it a bride, greeted by bell-chimes and bonfires, and met by a hundred children bearing olive-branches. But their wands of peace mingled strangely with the gorgeous liveries of her brother, who in right of the sword, held the state of him who had on the former occasion been her husband. Even when at the height of her dissolute career, she was characterised by a contemporary as liberal and savia (which may either mean learned or discreet); and to her taste and patronage, rather than to Duke Alfonso, is ascribed the literary tone which graced the court of Ferrara. As years wore on she is represented as having purified her thoughts, and, weaning them from earthly gauds and sensual joys, to have concentrated them on devotional contemplations. Her death took place in child-bed on the 24th of June, 1519, and the following letter of condolence from the Doge of Venice to her husband indicates the regard which she had gained in that capital:—
"We have this morning heard with great concern the death of your most illustrious consort, to whom, on account of the excellent qualities possessed by her Ladyship, we ever have extended our affection and entire goodwill, knowing them to be fully reciprocated by her. With the paternal love which we bear to you and her, we condole with your Excellency as if we had lost a daughter of our own. Yet our grief is somewhat mitigated, knowing it to be a dispensation of nature which none can escape, and remembering the past religious life of her Excellency. And so we implore your Lordship that, in this so distressing event, you will have recourse to your usual and natural prudence for the alleviation of your grief, submitting to the will of our Lord God, in which we ought all to acquiesce."[289]
* Note.—The following account of the state of the Romagna before Cesare's conquest cannot be ignored, and must be accepted as accurate; cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi, III., 29: "La Romagna, innanzi che in quella fussero spenti da Papa Alessandro VI. quelli signori che la comandavano, era uno esempio d'ogni scelleratissima vita, perchè quivi si vedeva per ogni leggiera cagione seguire uccisioni e rapine grandissime. Il che nasceva dalla tristizia di quei principi, non dalla natura trista degli uomini, come loro dicevano. Perchè sendo quelli principi poveri, e volendo vivere da ricchi, erano sforzati volgersi a molte rapine, e quelle per varj modi usare; e intra l'altre disoneste vie che e' tenevano, facevano leggi e proibivano alcuna azione; dipoi erano i primi che davano cagione della inosservanza di esse, nè mai punivano gl'inosservanti, etc." Cesare ruled well, introducing many reforms, and, avoiding excessive taxes, established some sort of security both for life and for property.