Bellarion the Fortunate

by Rafael Sabatini

A letter survives which the Prince of Valsassina wrote some little time after these events to Duke Filippo Maria, in which occurs the following criticism of the captains of his day: 'They are stout fellows and great fighters, but rude, unlettered, and lacking culture. Their minds are fertile, vigorous soil, but unbroken by the plough of learning, so that the seeds of knowledge with which they are all too sparsely sown find little root there.'

At Carpignano, when they came there three days after breaking camp, they found that all had fallen out as Bellarion calculated. A detachment of horse one hundred strong had been sent in haste with the necessary implements to destroy the bridge. That detachment Stoffel had surrounded, captured, disarmed, and disbanded.

They crossed, and after another three days marching down the right bank of the Sesia they crossed the Cervo just above Quinto, where Bellarion took up his quarters in the little castle owned there by the Lord Girolamo Prato, who was with Theodore in Vercelli.

Here, too, were housed the Princess and her brother and the Lord of Carmagnola, the latter by now recovered from his humiliation in the matter of his bridges to a state of normal self-complacency and arrogance.

An eighteenth-century French writer on tactics, M. Dévinequi, in his 'L'Art Militaire au Moyen Age,' in the course of a lengthy comparison between the methods of Bellarion Cane and the almost equally famous Sir John Hawkwood, offers some strong adverse criticisms upon Bellarion's dispositions in the case of this siege of Vercelli. He considers that as a necessary measure of preparation Bellarion when at Quinto should have thrown bridges across the Sesia above and below the city, so as to maintain unbroken his lines of circumvallation, instead of contenting himself with ferrying a force across to guard the eastern approaches. This force, being cut off by the river, could, says M. Dévinequi, neither be supported at need nor afford support.

What the distinguished French writer has missed is the fact that, once engaged upon it, Bellarion was as little in earnest about the siege of Vercelli as he was about Carmagnola's bridges. The one as much as the other was no more than a strategic demonstration. From the outset—that is to say, from the time when arriving at Quinto he beheld the strong earthworks Theodore had thrown up—he realised that the place was not easily to be carried by assault, and it was within his knowledge that it was too well victualled to succumb to hunger save after a siege more protracted than he himself was prepared to impose upon it.

But there was Carmagnola, swaggering and thrasonical in spite of all that had gone, and there was the Princess Valeria supporting the handsome condottiero with her confidence. And Carmagnola, not content that Bellarion should girdle the city, arguing reasonably enough that months would be entailed in bringing Theodore to surrender from hunger, was loud and insistent in his demands that the place be assaulted. Once again, as in the case of the bridges, Bellarion yielded to the other's overbearing insistence, went even the length of inviting him to plan and conduct the assaults. Three of these were delivered, and all three repulsed with ease by an enemy that appeared to Bellarion to be uncannily prescient. After the third repulse, the same suspicion occurred to Carmagnola, and he expressed it; not, however, to Bellarion, as he should have done, but to the Princess.

'You mean,' she said, 'that some one on our side is conveying information to Theodore of our intentions?'

They were alone together in the armoury of the Castle of Quinto whose pointed windows overlooked the river. It was normally a bare room with stone walls and a vaulted white ceiling up which crawled a troop of the rampant lions of the Prati crudely frescoed in a dingy red. Bellarion had brought to it some furnishings that made it habitable, and so it became the room they chiefly used.

The Princess sat by the table in a great chair of painted leather, faded but comfortable. She was wrapped in a long blue gown that was lined with lynx fur against the chill weather which had set in. Carmagnola, big and gaudy in a suit of the colour of sulphur, his tunic reversed with black fur, his powerful yet shapely legs booted to the knee, strode to and fro across the room in his excitement.