Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

A Follower of the Condottieri—The Raw Recruit—Division of the Dukedom of Milan—Carmagnola’s Turn—Growth in Wealth and Power—Disaffection—Venice Acquires His Services—War with Milan—A Leisurely Campaign—Carmagnola at the Height of His Glory—Fortune Turns Against the Venetians—Stirrings of Suspicion—Reception in Venice—The Senate Chamber—Growing Dusk—The Attack—End of His Part in the World—Another Story of the North—St. Raniero, the Patron of Pisa—The Power of Temperance.

Here is a story of Venice. In the early part of the Fifteenth Century a Northern soldier, riding home through the sweet-smelling summer twilight, dreaming in all probability of some dusky-eyed maiden of the border states, stopped by the side of a field to look about him for a shelter for the night. That he would be welcome at any inn, he was sure, for he was returning from the wars to spend his not very hard-earned prize money, of which his saddlebags were full.

One can imagine him, pushing back his helmet and regarding the fair countryside with the appreciative eye of the professional marauder, smacking his dusty lips at the thought of the weeks of hilarious wickedness that his loot would buy for him. The picture is not overdrawn, I can assure the reader, for they were little more than wild beasts, those followers of the great Condottieri, brought under an iron discipline, the yoke of which they were willing to bear, for a time, in return for the ample pay and the opportunities, which their service afforded them, of sacking unoffending towns and robbing and spearing harmless and unarmed citizens and ravishing their wives and daughters. Here and there, stray flowers in those acres of weeds, a fairly decent character appeared among them, but, from such accounts as can be found, these latter never seem to have stayed long in their ranks.

As it has been said, the rival bands that infested Italy and Southern France in those merry days never made any serious attempt to injure each other, unless driven to such unpleasant measures by the sternest necessity—or, to be sure, unless some particularly rich bit of loot was between them. As a general thing, though, they do not seem to have displayed even the common courage of the wolf. The longer a campaign could be dragged out the better for all concerned, was their motto, and they lived up to it, even to the point of punctiliously letting loose all the prisoners they took from each other after every engagement. A safer and more care-free life than theirs would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine. The people who hired them were, of course, utterly unable to cope with their enemies—with their enemies’ bravos, that is to say—by themselves, and were as completely helpless against their own servants; it was altogether an ideal state of things.

To return to our trooper, breathing his horse and, probably, smacking his lips over the prospect of the cheer with which his blood-spotted loot would provide him for the next month or so. Looking around in the early dusk, he noticed a boy, working desultorily in the fields, and, while his horse rested, he studied him. There was something in the way in which he carried his head, and the set of his chin and jaw, which sounded a sympathetic echo in the trooper’s breast. This was no common peasant, he told himself, and called out to the boy to come over and speak to him. Nothing loath, the youth obeyed, and the upshot of this conversation was that the boy elected to take the trooper’s advice and follow him.

The trooper, one imagines, must have been in the service of Facino Cane, a grizzled, deaf old soldier with a high reputation, as reputations went in those days, and it did not take the new recruit long to show his worth. Even when he was still young, Cane seems to have recognised in him an equal if not a superior and refused flatly to promote him, swearing that, if he was given one step, he would take all the rest for himself.

Francesco Bussone, better known as Carmagnola, retired into himself, and bided his time. Cane was great, and with Cane there was always profitable employment in plenty. So he decided to remain where he was; but, if Facino Cane continued to behave as he had been doing of late, it was not likely that he would last for very long, and in the happy and quite possible event of his being assassinated before long, Carmagnola would take his place. There would be no one, he felt sure, who would wish to oppose him, and, if there were, he thought he knew how to overcome their opposition. Cane had a splendid force under him—and they would need a leader, to be of any use to themselves. They would choose him for themselves. One can almost hear him saying to himself, as he leaves the chief’s presence and looks back at the door: “Eh! chì va piano va sano—chì va sano va lontano!” (“Who goes slowly, goes safely—who goes safely, goes far!”)

Cane, for his part, was neither going slowly nor safely. Giovanni, Duke of Milan, had but recently died. He had been as good a soldier as any Condottiere that ever drew sword and he had held his Dukedom together with his own good right arm. But now, in the hands of his eldest son, Gian Maria, the inheritance was falling to pieces. Gian Maria was a degenerate—a lunatic—it is even said that he fed his hounds with human flesh; and, in a very short time, the cities of the Dukedom—Piacenza, Parma, Cremona, Lodi—revolted, and the several Condottieri, who had formerly served Giovanni, seized the opportunity of realising their ambition, which was to become independent rulers themselves. There was no great difficulty about this, once a division of the spoil was agreed upon, for each had a small army at his back and the ability to use it. The inhabitants, helpless in the face of trained fighters, put forward no opposition, so that, in six months or less, six or seven Dukes existed where only one had existed before.

Cane seized upon Pavia, the younger son’s portion, and kept the heir a prisoner in his own court. Not long afterwards he dethroned the elder son, and, it is to be supposed, arranged his end for him at the hands of the Milanese. He, himself, died in Pavia within a day of the Duke’s assassination. No remark is made by historians on the subject of his death save that he died, but where the character of his ducal prisoner is considered and the excellent reasons he had for wishing his gaoler dead are taken into account, the latter’s end may, I think, be safely laid at Filippo Maria’s door.

So that, in the end, Carmagnola was right in his determination to wait upon events. Now his turn came. The soldiers were left leaderless, and Carmagnola seized the captainship instantly—at the age of twenty-two—while Filippo Maria as instantly married Cane’s widow, in order to get the old soldier’s estates, and, these being secured, brought a false accusation against her and had her executed.