A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

After thus winning golden opinions in Forlì, Girolamo and Catherine left that city for their other capital, Imola, on the 12th of August; having sojourned among the Forlivesi a little less than a month. There a similar welcome, and similar gala doings on a somewhat smaller scale, awaited them. There also their time was as busily occupied in making beneficent arrangements for the improvement of the town, and in striving to obtain the affections of their subjects; and their stay as short. For Girolamo was called away from these duties and interests more properly his own, by the necessity of attending to affairs of the Pope, which made it necessary for him to visit Venice. For this purpose he left Imola together with Catherine, on the 2nd of September, after a stay there of three weeks only.

All Italy was filled with uneasy suspicions and jealousies at this visit of the Pope's nephew, favourite, general and right-hand-man-in-ordinary to the powerful republic. Every little court was on thorns, and had spies on the alert to ascertain if possible the object and the degree of success attending the move. All sorts of things were suspected, asserted, and chattered of by these busy gentry; and subsequent historians have had to pick a somewhat thorny path amid their contradictory statements.[97] The most probable, and indeed scarcely doubtful explanation of the matter seems, however, sufficiently simple.

The Turks were in possession of Otranto. The Turkish raids were the constant terror and bugbear of Italy in these centuries, as were those of the Danes to our own island at an earlier period. Like the Danish inroads too to our monarchs, the aggressions of the Turks were sometimes a motive, and constantly a pretext to the popes for raising troops and money, and requiring the assistance of the other states of Italy. The Venetians had in the year before granted no such aid to Sixtus against the infidels. To obtain the promise of such now from the Signory was the avowed motive of the Count's visit. But no Italian potentate ever believed anything that was avowed. Besides, whenever the Pope was bent on hiding the real causes of movements, whose true scope was some iniquitous spoliation or ambitious scheme, he always had the Turks in his mouth.

FELONS IN ERMINE.

Now for the real motive. Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, had quarrelled with the Venetians. He was also in disgrace with Sixtus. In the war, which had ensued between the Pope and Florence, in consequence of the Pazzi affair, and the hanging of the Archbishop of Pisa, Duke Hercules had accepted the place of General on the Florentine side. For which highly irreligious conduct Heaven's vicar had excommunicated him, and declared him deprived of his dukedom. Hercules of Ferrara however declared, that excommunicated he might be, but that Duke of Ferrara he would live and die by the grace of his own right arm.

The business in hand therefore between Sixtus and the Republic was first to unite their force for the destruction of this audacious rebel, and then to decide who was to have the spoil. The Republic said they would have Ferrara;—and meant it. The Pope said that it should belong to the Church; but meant, that it should fall to the lot of Girolamo, and form the main pillar of that edifice of family greatness, for which Sixtus lived and laboured.

But in stating the high policy of princes with this naked brutality,—into which the necessity of brevity has betrayed the writer—there is a danger, that perverse and ill-constituted idiosyncrasies may picture to themselves Counts, high and mighty Signors, and even Heaven's Vicegerent himself under the figure and similitude of some Bill Sikes, Artful Dodger, and reverend Fagin contending with mutually deceptive intentions respecting some equally nobly won booty. It becomes the historian therefore to lose no time in having recourse to those means, which the time-honoured practice and general consent of the world have appointed for the decorous draping and nobilitating similar passages of history. Bill Sikes in Doge's bonnet and ermine cloak, a venerable Fagin duly tiara-ed and apostolically elected, and an Artful Dodger in knightly guise, with a lovely and brilliant she-dodger by his side, gracefully going through decorous festivities in ducal halls in the midst of admiring satellites, will offend no proprieties.

Hasten we then to the all-potent upholstery, which decently differences the monarch and the burglar.

Of these Venetian festivities, it so happens, that our old Roman friend Jacopo of Volterra has left us the account of an eye-witness. Taking a rare holiday from diary-writing in the capital of the world, he had gone, he tells us,[98] to visit certain relations at Lucca. And thence, led by the desire of seeing the world, "videndi studio," he visited Bologna, Ferrara, and Padua. In the latter city he heard that the Count Girolamo and his noble lady had just arrived at Venice, having passed not by the route of Padua, but by Comacchio and the marshes, for the sake of avoiding Ferrara. So our curious Jacopo, who like a gadabout gossip as he was, could not resist the temptation of being present on such an occasion, left his horses with the innkeeper at Padua; and hiring a boat on the Brenta, sailed for Venice—"Navigavi Venetias."