Caesar Borgia: A Study of the Renaissance

by John Leslie Garner

The power of the Popes in Romagna, never very strong, had grown weaker during their absence in Avignon. Bologna had fallen into the grasp of the Pepoli; the Polentani had secured Ravenna; the Manfredi owned Faenza; the Ordelaffi enjoyed Forli; the Malatesta held sway over Rimini; the Varano disposed of the fortunes of Camerino; the Montefeltre of Urbino and Civitavecchia. The Campagna was harassed by bands of brigands led by members of these families, and in Rome complete anarchy obtained, the two great clans of Orsini and Colonna constantly fighting to secure the control.

The fifteenth century was filled with the contests of the tyrannies among themselves; the weaker were crushed by the stronger, who absorbed their territories, and thus the great states were formed and their heads became princes. Besides the struggles with outside rivals these princely houses were always at strife with other powerful families within their own domain; conspiracies and intrigue filled the day; the princes became more despotic; rivals, pretenders, disobedient or lukewarm retainers were systematically put to death; cruelty knew no bounds.

The people were callous or indifferent to the crimes of the lords because they were committed chiefly against their own rivals—that is, persons of their own rank. The populace had long since lost all hope of ruling, and they were dazzled by the splendour of the Court and the magnificence of the monuments erected by the reigning prince. The return of a modicum of the spoils, in the form of a monument of some sort, a library, or a hospital, to commemorate the name and fame of the brigand has always been found to be the most efficacious way to placate the despoiled rabble.

The Visconti of Milan was one of the greatest of the princely houses of Italy, and it reached the height of its power in the person of Gian Galeazo, who added greatly to the family domains. With the assistance of the Carrara of Padua he overthrew the Scala of Verona and Vicenza, and then proceeded to wrest Padua from his late allies, who, however, soon recovered the city. He put down the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Este of Ferrara, and the Paleologi of Montferrat, and in 1395 he induced the Emperor Winzel to confer the title of Duke of Milan on him. Having defeated a coalition formed against him, he seized Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Perugia, Assisi, Spoleto, and Bologna, and was preparing to appropriate Florence and make himself King of Italy when he suddenly died (1402). On his death his states rapidly fell away; the Pope recovered Bologna, Perugia, and Assisi, Florence took Pisa, while the Venetians grabbed Verona and Vicenza. In some of the cities families that had been despoiled by the Visconti returned to power, and other places fell into the hands of the condottieri, so that Gian Galeazzo’s sons found their estates reduced to Milan and Pavia. No better example could be found of the rise, growth, and extinction of an illegitimate power—that is, a power based on fraud, usurpation, and tyranny.

Filippo Maria, the last of the Visconti, died in 1447 and a republic was immediately proclaimed in Milan. Francesco Sforza, not wishing to assert such rights as he may have had to the succession as the husband of a natural daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti, placed his services at the command of the republic in the war against Venice. He, however, unexpectedly made peace with the enemy and turned his forces against Milan, and, although there was a party favourable to Sforza, the city made a brave resistance. Finally an uprising occurred, the republic was overthrown, and Francesco entered the city and was proclaimed duke in 1450.

Milan in the second half of the fifteenth century was one of the most powerful of the Italian states; and when Francesco Sforza died in 1466 he was succeeded by his son Galeazzo Maria, a dissolute and cruel man, who was assassinated in a church by three nobles in 1476. His son, Gian Galeazzo, at this time was only eight years old, consequently his mother, Bona of Savoy, assumed the regency. The brothers of the deceased duke, however, conspired against her, and finally Ludovico il Moro, the most determined and deceitful of them, succeeded in getting possession of the government, whereupon he compelled her to leave the duchy.

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Italy had awakened from the long slumber of the Middle Ages, during which her intellect had been paralysed by the superstitions and terrors inculcated by an ignorant and mercenary priesthood. She was emerging from the gloom into the new life which manifested itself, not only in the revival of learning and the prodigious blossoming of the fine arts, but also in the expansion of the human personality. Man had again discovered himself; he had become conscious of his faculties; he had found that he possessed a will that could carry him on to greatness in many fields of human activity. Hitherto superstitious, ignorant, and bigoted, he had been taught that if he ventured to use the intellect with which he had been endowed he would be eternally damned. Life to him was merely a painful pilgrimage between two eternities, through one of which he would be doomed to hell fire if in his mundane existence he dared to find any of the joy of living.

Finally some perspicacious souls began to doubt, and in the teachings of the newly discovered heathen philosophy they found a theory of life more humane, more natural, more charitable.

The arts had been entirely occupied with sacred subjects because in the Middle Ages the Church was their only patron. The gloom and superstition of mediaeval Christianity oppressed men’s souls, consequently the subjects selected were hideous and lugubrious in the extreme—emaciated saints, representations of the Last Judgment, human beings writhing in the torment of eternal wrath. The Almighty was not a god of pity and love, but one of vengeance. The teaching of the Nazarene was entirely distorted, just as it was by the Presbyterian divines in Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they proclaimed their mission to be “to thunder out the Lord’s wrath and to curse,” and endeavoured to frighten their hearers into the paths of virtue with horrible tales of men “scorched in hell-fire,” in “boiling oil, burning brimstone, scalding lead,” sufficiently summarised in one of Binning’s sermons: “You shall go out of one hell into a worse; eternity is the measure of its continuance, and the degrees of itself are answerable to its duration.” Such, according to the Scotch pastors, was the measure of God’s love.