Forli and Imola were the principal towns of Romagna, the patrimony of Catherine Sforza and Girolamo Riario, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. When the new married pair first came to their little State from Rome the Renaissance was at its height, and the ambitious bride sought, so far as possible, to surround herself with its splendours. Their reign in the east was not happy; Girolamo proved a tyrant, and was promptly assassinated by his followers, leaving Catherine and her five children completely in the power of his murderers, who made her give up her claims to her little kingdom. She consented, or pretended to consent. She conspired with the Governor of the fortress, Tommaso Feo, and appeared on its ramparts dressed as a warrior. She refused to surrender, and when it was recalled that she had left her children behind as hostages she cruelly replied: “In time I shall have others.” Catherine Sforza was a bloodthirsty vixen, surely.
Forli was Catherine Sforza’s own city, and her defence of it against the Borgias was one of the celebrated sieges of history. She held out two years, and then only gave in because she was betrayed. Her very reason of warring with the Borgias reflects greatly on her credit. She refused simply to allow her son to marry the aging Lucrezia; “not so much on account of her age,” said Catherine, “as her morals.” Princely marriages are often carried out on different lines to-day.
Almost within sight of Forli is Faënza, a city which was under the domination of the Manfredi when Cæsar Borgia took it into his head to move against it. A young prince by the name of Astor III, but eighteen years of age, beloved by all for his amiability, grace and youth, held its future in his hands. When the key of Faënza, Brisighella, fell to the Borgia’s captain of artillery in the early days of November in 1500, the emperor-like Cæsar himself came forward and took command. He offered life to the dwellers within the walls if they would surrender, but they would have none of it, for, as the Borgia wrote in a letter to the Duc d’Urbino, dated from “the pontifical camp before Faënza,” a “dramatic defence was made by the citizens of the town.” This “dramatic defence” was such that it compelled Borgia and his papal soldiers to go into winter quarters. The struggle was the longest that Borgia had yet undertaken in his campaigns, and the women of Faënza, as did Catherine Sforza at Forli, covered themselves with glory.
A daughter of a soldier of the garrison, Diamante Jovelli, put herself at the head of a band of Amazons who took entire charge of the commissariat, the handling of the munitions of war, and served as sentinels, repairing the walls even when breached—rough work for women. “The women of Faënza have saved the honour of Italy,” wrote Isabella d’Este in 1501 to her husband, the Duke of Mantua, and Cæsar Borgia himself committed himself to paper with the following words: “Would that I had an entire army of the women of Faënza.” The city fell in due time, and the crafty Cæsar honoured the gallant Manfredi, “crowned with the laurels of valour and misfortune,” by allowing him “a guard of honour and all his proper dignities.” Later the Borgia repented of his generosity, and sent the young and gallant prince to Rome, and imprisoned him in the Castle of Sant’Angelo for a year.
Faënza is a very ancient town, and less populous to-day than it was fifty years ago, when also it was less populous than it was five hundred years ago.
Imola, the seventh place of importance on the Æmilian itinerary counting from Rimini, was the ancient Forum Cornelii, but by Charlemagne’s time it had already become known by its present name. In the middle ages Imola’s geographical position, midway between Bologna and Romagna, made it an important acquisition in the contests for power. It was successfully held by many different chiefs, and was united to the States of the Church under Julius II. As one of the stations on the Æmilian Way, it was a place of some importance; it is mentioned by Cicero, and by Martial:—
“Si veneris unde requiret,
Æmiliæ dices de regione viæ.
Si quibus in terris, qua simus in urbe rogabit,
Corneli referas me, licet, esse Foro.”
The fortress château of Imola was almost identical in form with that of Forli, quadrilateral with four great towers at the angles, and a crenelated battlement at the skyline.
Cæsar Borgia brought this fortress to ignoble surrender in 1499, but since the fortress was then quite independent of the city he had still another task before him before the inhabitants actually came within his powers. A fortnight after the capture of the fortress the city itself fell. Imola was a part of the marriage dot of Catherine Sforza, who confided its defence to Dionigi di Naldo while she busied herself at Forli, where she reigned as widow and inheritor of Riario Sforza.
On towards Bologna one passes Castel San Pietro, a thirteenth century fortified town still sleeping its dull time away since no war or rumours of war give it concern. Quaderna, even less progressive and important to-day than its neighbour, was the important station of Claternum in the days when traffic on the great Æmilian way was greater than now.