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

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

But Catherine was a wise princess, and in a very short time got a lesson in finance from her new scheme, which some other princes have failed to learn from the experience of centuries; and the unsuccessful toll-bars were quietly removed.

Another somewhat curious matter, in which we find Madama engaged about this time, was the providing Forlì, both on her own behalf and that of her subjects, with one of the most necessary conveniences of civilised life, of which the city had been destitute since the riots at the time of the Count's death. The banks and pawnshops of two wealthy Jews had been then broken into and pillaged, and their owners frightened into abandoning the city. And now if a Christian had need of a little ready cash, where was he to look for it? Money absolutely needed, and not a Jew within hail! Madama felt that this was a state of things calling for immediate remedy. So special overtures were made to a wealthy Israelite of Bologna to come and settle in Forlì. The Jew admitted the urgent necessity of the case, but bearing in mind recent events, deemed it no more than common prudence to stipulate, that an instrument should be drawn up and executed in due legal form, by which the sovereign, state, and municipality, of Forlì, should be bound to indemnify him for any loss to his capital or property that might occur from revolution or other violence. This was promptly acceded to; the Jew was installed in Forlì, to the great joy of its ever-orthodox, but often out-at-elbows, Christian population; and, by Madama's wise provision, her lieges could once again get their little bills done as heretofore.

Meantime, Innocent VIII. died; and in August of the same year, 1492, the Sacred College announced "Urbi et Orbi" that they had been inspired by the Holy Spirit to elect as Heaven's Vicegerent on earth, the Cardinal Roderigo Borgia; one, who may be safely assumed, without any careful scanning of the members of the college, to have been the worst of those offered to their choice, inasmuch as history has assigned to him the portentous pre-eminence of being the worst of the successors of St. Peter. English readers have no idea what this Pope, Alexander VI., was; and no English page can dare to tell them. Studious men, who feel, that, inasmuch as despite all change of time and circumstance, similar causes will, in the moral world as certainly as in the physical world, produce similar effects, it is therefore fitting that such cesspools of abominations should be sounded by those who for the sake of the general health ought to be conversant with every form of disease,—these may in the cynical unblushing dead Latin of Burckhardt the diarist, look on the loathsome picture of life in the Vatican under this Father of Christendom. For others let it suffice, that this man, chosen by the Church by infallible inspiration, for the infallible guidance of Christian souls, was such, that no human soul could be in communication with his without deep injury and degradation.

ALEXANDER VI.

This man, as Cardinal under Sixtus IV., had been his vice-chancellor, and a steady adherent of the Riarii. He was the sponsor chosen by the young Count and Countess to hold at the font their first-born son. And the friendship which existed, and was thus specially marked, between them and such a man as the Cardinal Borgia, cannot but be felt to have the force of unfavourable evidence in our estimate of them.

Catherine, however, considered the news of Borgia's elevation to be most important to her interests, and highly satisfactory. Two envoys on behalf of Forlì, and two on behalf of Imola, were despatched to Rome to compliment the new Pope on his election, and offer the homage of the Countess and her son. Being very well received by his Holiness, they begged that he would grant that a Jubilee, with plenary absolution, might be held for three successive years in two churches of the Franciscans in Forlì, which was graciously accorded, with the condition however that a fresh bull should be applied for each year; which was only laying a small tax on the profits of the Jubilee. Such a grant was not uncommon. But the result of the three years' speculation, as recorded by the Forlì historians, is curious. The first year brought 2500 lire, with which the monks of one church built a cloister, and the nuns of the other put a new roof to their chapel, and newly fitted out a miraculous Virgin. The second year's produce was almost nothing, because the brief enabling the convents to absolve from homicide did not arrive in time. And the third year, they got only 184 lire, because the Apostolic Court, having then more important matters in hand, again neglected to send the necessary brief in due time.

Up to this period the life of Catherine has been passed altogether in that good time,—those halcyon days for Italy described by Guicciardini in the opening of his great work, and marked by him as coming to an end in the fatal year, 1494. To readers more conversant with the regular well-ordered course of life in the nineteenth century than with that of the fifteenth, it may seem, that the little magic-lanthorn-like peeps at the men and things of that old time, offered to them in the foregoing pages, can hardly be deemed samples of that happy condition so regretfully commemorated by the great historian. Murders of princes, and awards of torture and death to their conspiring subjects, recurring in oscillations of pendulum-like regularity,—civil war in the streets of Rome, and monstrous corruption in her palaces,—lawless violence of the law-making classes, met by continually successful evasion of the law by those for whose oppression rather than protection it was intended: all this does not represent to our ideas a happy state of society.

But Guicciardini looks back to these days from amid the misfortunes of a far more disastrous period. The good old days,—when Italian throats were throttled only by Italian hands; when the tyrants were Italian tyrants not too strong to be occasionally knocked on the head by Italian rebels; when the wealth extorted from the people by splendid princes was at least scattered among them again by their splendour; when, in a word, Italy, manage it as they might, was for the Italians,—were sighed for as a golden age in that iron period, when the barbarian from beyond the Alps had come down upon them.

AN UNPLEASANT POSITION.

Charles VIII., of France, was the second Attila, who headed an inroad of barbarians, from whose gripe on some part of her body, soft Italy has never since been able to shake herself free. That ambitious Prince undertook to make good certain old standing genealogical claims to the sovereignty of Naples, long since advanced by France; and marched into Italy with an army for that purpose in the summer of 1494. It would lead us too far away into the great high-road of the history of that time, if we were to attempt to trace an intelligible picture of the dissensions and jealousies among the princes of Italy, which made that moment appear peculiarly opportune for the prosecution of his claims. We have only to deal with the immediate result of the great calamity to Forlì and its Countess.