Yet Giuliano must be acquitted of the ingratitude and perfidy shown to his former friend by the Pope and his nephew Lorenzo. The hospitalities of Duke Guidobaldo had in his case fallen upon no arid soil. His fondest recollections of lettered intercourse and of youthful love were centred in Urbino. He remembered that it was Francesco Maria who, six years before, had interposed to screen him from the jealousies of the late Pontiff, and who had warmly urged the restoration of his family in Florence. He therefore firmly refused to acquiesce in any projects which would aggrandise himself at the Duke's cost; and, in token of good will, while on his way to France, made a detour to visit him at Gubbio, where he thus addressed him: "I have heard, my Lord, that it has been represented to you how the Pope has a mind to take your state from you, in order to give it me; but this is not true, for, on account of the kindness, favour, and benefits I ever have received from your Excellency and your house, I should never consent to it, however much desired by his Holiness, lest other princes of your rank should resolve, in consequence, never again to give such refuge at their courts as was granted to me and mine. Be assured, therefore, that, whilst I live, you not only will receive no molestation on my account, but will be ever regarded by me as an elder brother."[260] Upon these assurances, Francesco Maria not only suspended the defences of his duchy, which he had begun to put in order, but accepted an engagement for himself, with two hundred men-at-arms and a hundred light horse, under Giuliano, the pontifical captain-general. To secure himself, however, against all contingencies, he applied to the Pontiff for leave to bring into the field a thousand infantry, in addition to his usual following. The scruples of Giuliano did not in any way soften his brother, whose intrigues against Urbino are prominent in the curious despatch of his secretary Bibbiena, which Roscoe has printed under date the 16th of February.
Louis XII. died on the 1st of January, 1515, and was succeeded by his second and third cousin, Francis I. This event changed not the projects of Leo in behalf of his brother, whose marriage to the Princess of Savoy was solemnised in February, and who was received by the French monarch with kindness and distinction. To render his position fully worthy of the match, the Pope invested him with Parma, Piacenza, and Modena, yielding a revenue approaching to 48,000 ducats. He likewise settled a large pension upon the princess, and provided for the pair a magnificent palace in Rome, to which they were welcomed with a pomp unusual even in these days of pageantry.
Leo's position with reference to Francis I. was in many respects embarrassing, and the defence of his policy, elaborately undertaken by Roscoe, has established the writer's bias rather than the Pontiff's rectitude. That monarch was steadily pursuing those schemes upon the Milanese which Leo had the year before suggested to his predecessor; and the amicable relations established with the Medici by Giuliano's marriage gave him additional reason to rely upon the Pontiff's support in the struggle which must follow his descent upon Italy. But to restrain the French beyond their Alpine barrier was the favourite, as well as the natural policy of his Holiness, and it was that which tended most to the security of his brother's newly-acquired Lombard sovereignty. He therefore, in July, after some months of anxious vacillation, avowed his adherence to the league of the Emperor with the Kings of England and of Spain, to which Florence, Milan, and the Swiss were parties. Yet he was far from hearty in the cause, and, during the brief campaign which succeeded the arrival of a French army in Lombardy, the ecclesiastical contingent limited their efforts to watching the safety of Parma and Piacenza. Nor did the other allies show much more zeal, excepting the Swiss, whose impetuous valour brought on the pitched battle of Marignano on the 13th of September, and lost them the prestige which had stamped their infantry as invincible. The costly victory there gained by the French was speedily followed by a surrender of his claims upon Milan by Duke Maximiliano Sforza, who was content to enjoy for the remainder of his life a home and pension provided by his conqueror.[*261]
The principal object of Francis being thus effected, he was not indisposed to reconciliation with the Holy See, for which Leo had sedulously retained an opening by keeping Ludovico Canossa throughout the contest as an accredited agent at the French head-quarters. But the Pontiff met the usual reward of trimmers. The tardy accommodation offered by his envoy came too late to save Parma and Piacenza, for which alone he had become a party to the war. The French monarch would not hear of renouncing what he insisted were intrinsic portions of the Milanese, but offered to meet with the Pontiff and arrange in person a lasting amity, Bologna being named for the interview. Upon the diplomatic arrangements which there occupied these potentates in the end of the year we need not touch, further than to notice that the intercession of Francis in favour of the Duke of Urbino, which the latter had hastened, after the battle of Marignano, to bespeak by means of a special envoy, proved quite ineffectual. It obviously was dictated less by any interest in the Duke's welfare than by the wish to thwart a favourite project of his fickle ally, and it at once was met by reference to an article which the Pope had adroitly inserted in the treaty, that Francis should in no way interfere for the protection of any undutiful vassal of the Holy See. From Bologna Leo proceeded to Florence, where he remained most of the winter, maturing his schemes for the ruin of Francesco Maria.
The death of Ferdinand of Spain in January, 1516, soon reawoke the ambitious hopes of Francis, by reminding him of his predecessor's dormant claims upon the Neapolitan crown. But a new combination of circumstances gave another turn to his thoughts. The efforts of the Venetians to recover Verona and Brescia from Maximilian brought the latter into Lombardy at the head of fifteen thousand Swiss troops, by whom Lautrec, the French general, was for a time hard pressed, and Leo, ever anxious to conciliate a conqueror, hastily sent Cardinal Bibbiena with reinforcements to the Emperor's camp. Yet the storm, passing off suddenly and harmlessly, left few traces besides jealousy, which the prudence of that wily legate scarcely prevented from arising in the mind of Francis towards his slippery ally.
These vacillations on the part of Leo have been slightly touched upon, in order to clear the ground for displaying his ambitious nepotism in its proper field,—the duchy of Urbino. This, his prevailing weakness, had met with many disappointments. No opening occurred for its exercise in the direction of Naples. Parma and Piacenza had passed from his grasp, by reluctant surrender to a professing ally. But, worst of all, his favourite brother Giuliano, the object in whom centred most of his schemes, had been removed by death on the 17th of March, not without surmise of poison from the jealousy of his nephew Lorenzo.[*262] Although his great popularity favoured the ambitious views which were thrust upon him by the Pontiff, his mind lay rather towards elegant pursuits and splendid tastes, than to such high aspirations. Indeed, the Venetian ambassador, Capello, represents his dying request to Leo as in favour of Urbino[*263]; but the Pope waived the discussion of a point upon which his resolution was taken. Lorenzo, his successor in the papal favour, was a much more willing, though less conciliatory, instrument of his Holiness's designs.
Lorenzo de' Medici was eldest son of Pietro, the first-born of Lorenzo the Magnificent.[*264] He was born on the 13th of September, 1492, and his youth was passed amid many trials. His father, after ten years of exile from Florence, had been drowned in the Garigliano, in 1504, and, four years thereafter, his sister Clarissa's marriage with Filippo Strozzi involved him in a second banishment. He was of good person and gallant presence, endowed with a stirring spirit, but destitute of generous or heroic qualities. Giorgi, another Venetian envoy, even considered him scarcely inferior in cunning and capacity to the redoubted Valentino. The government of Florence was committed to him by Leo, on his uncle Giuliano being called to a higher destiny, and feeling his advancement restrained by the prior claims, as well as by the moderation of the latter, he is believed to have removed him by poison; at all events he was immediately named to succeed him as gonfaloniere of the Church.
This renewed outrage upon Francesco Maria's military rank,[*265] and the death of the only individual of the Medici upon whom he had any reliance, warned him of the approaching crisis in his fate. The influence of Alfonsina degli Orsini in favour of her son Lorenzo stimulated the Pontiff's projects, unwarned by a prediction of Giuliano that, by following the courses of the Borgia, he would probably suffer their fate. The immediate pretext, adopted for outpouring the accumulated vials of papal wrath, was the Duke's declining to march his troops into Lombardy under Lorenzo as gonfaloniere, in consequence, as Giraldi informs us, of information that his death was resolved upon should he trust his person within his rival's power. Accordingly, Leo was no sooner returned to Rome, than, affecting to consider this refusal, as the act of overt rebellion by a subject against his sovereign, he issued a severe monitory against his feudatory, summoning him thither to answer various vague or irrelevant charges, one of these being the Cardinal of Pavia's slaughter, of which he had already received no
"Ragged and forestalled remission,"
on a report subscribed by Leo himself. Various diplomatic functionaries at the papal court vainly interceded that he should appear by attorney, instead of surrendering in person; and he meanwhile garrisoned Urbino, Pesaro, and S. Leo. The Duchess Dowager, whose arms had frequently received and fondled the infant Lorenzo, while her husband's court sheltered the elder members of his house, hastened to Rome as a mediatrix; but it was with difficulty she made her way to the Pope's presence, and she obtained no mercy for her nephew, nor protection for her own alimentary provisions out of the duchy, his Holiness refusing to listen to any propositions until the Duke had obeyed the monitory by appearing at Rome before the 2nd of April. In consequence of his failure to do so, a bull of excommunication went forth on the 27th, depriving him of his state, and all dignities held of the Holy See, and absolving his subjects from allegiance, on pain of ecclesiastical censures. By a gratuitous exercise of malevolence, the papal influence was employed with the King of Spain for confiscation of Sora, and his other patrimonial holdings in Naples, thus visiting him with instant beggary. On the 18th of August, his dukedom and ecclesiastical baton were conferred upon the unworthy Lorenzo, who, in the following month, was also invested with the prefecture of Rome.