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

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

There is, indeed, no more curiously suggestive and striking proof of the chronic state of discontent, uneasiness, and discomfort, in which men lived in those good old times, than this wonderful readiness to turn any incident of sufficient interest to make a couple of score of tongues shout together, into an occasion for seeking to change for another the rider mounted on their galled shoulders, at whatsoever almost certain cost of ruin and destruction to them and theirs.

Them and theirs;—for another very noticeable trait of Italian social life in those centuries is the great strength of the clannish tie, which made all the members of a family responsible for, and generally partakers in the political crimes of any one among them. The fathers, sons, brothers, uncles of a baffled, detected, or overpowered conspirator, share his fate. Often the females of a family are involved in the condemnation. The whole race is to be rooted out. And such an award seems to have been generally accepted as natural, and to be expected, at least, if not as just, by the suffering party. In most cases the members of a political assassin's family adopted his views, and more or less actively shared his crime.

VENGEANCE.

In the present instance, the vengeance of the bereaved wife took a yet wider sweep. Not only were the families of the guilty men, even women and innocent children and infants at the breast, slaughtered indiscriminately; but the slightest cause of suspicion sufficed to involve others wholly unconnected with them in destruction.[134] This seems to have been the only occasion in the strangely varied life of Catherine, when evil passions, unmixed with political reasons, or calculations of expediency, governed her conduct, and urged her to excesses of cruelty. And it is impossible to avoid comparing the calm, judicial proceedings, and not wholly unreasonable chastisement, consequent upon the death of Riario, with the wild excesses of vindictive fury that followed that of Giacomo Feo. Surely it cannot be supposed that all this was simulated rage, acted out in such terrible earnest, merely to divert suspicion from herself as the murderess! Not even acquaintance with the unnatural atrocities so common in that age and clime, nor the wonderful deadness of the moral sense which prevailed, can justify so shocking a belief.

No! Either we must suppose, that passing years, the habits of despotism, familiarity with bloodshed, and much trouble and adversity had potently changed Catherine's character for the worse. Or we must, with perhaps more probability, seek an explanation of her altered conduct in the difference of the feelings the two bereavements may be supposed to have occasioned. In the first case, we have a princess decorously mourning; and with high stern justice punishing the political fanatics, who had taken from her a husband, the partner indeed of her greatness, and fellow-labourer in the toils of ambition; but one, who had been assigned to her solely for the purposes of that ambition, and whom no preference or personal sympathy had had any share in selecting. In the second instance, we have a woman, raging with tiger-like fury against the murderers of her love. This so faultlessly beautiful form, ruthlessly made a mangled corpse before her eyes, was the first and last love of this vehement and strong-willed woman;—her only taste of real natural heart's joy;—the one pet, private sanctuary of her life, not dedicated to the weary life-long toil of building up the Riario name. Hence the almost indiscriminate slaughter, hanging, quartering, torturing, banishments, and ruin, that scared all Forlì with fear who next might be the victim, when Giacomo Feo fell. Above forty persons, counting men, women, and children, were put to death, of whom the greater part were in all probability wholly innocent of any participation in the crime! More than fifty others suffered lesser degrees of persecution.

THE FUNERAL.

In the midst of these horrors, while the mutilated bodies of some of the victims were still hanging before the palace of the Podestà, exposed to the public view, a most magnificent funeral ceremony was performed in honour of the murdered Feo. Burriel describes the long line of ecclesiastical, military, and civic dignitaries, with pages, musicians, ladies, friars, soldiers, and three squires in cloth of gold, on horses similarly caparisoned, who bore the sword, spurs, helmet, and cuirass of the deceased, moving to the sound of loud-chanted dirges from the fortress to the cathedral. The procession must have passed with its wailing De profundis and Miserere chants, and its glittering heraldic braveries, by the spot where the ghastly remains of the victims, for whom was no "miserere," were polluting the air in the hot summer sunshine. And the entire scene in its setting of picturesque Italian city architecture, with its startling contrasts, and suggestiveness of unbridled passions, and deeds of lawless violence, would seem to be marked characteristically enough by the impress of medieval peculiarities. But Burriel says, that the similitude of the spectacle to that described by Virgil, as having taken place at the funeral of Pallas, son of King Evander, was so great, that it may be supposed that Catherine had modelled the one in imitation of the other!

By the combined soothing of funeral services, and gratified vengeance, the bereaved widow was, it should seem, sufficiently consoled, to engage herself, early in the year 1496, in extensive projects of palace building, and acquisition of parks and pleasure-grounds. The alterations and improvements, which Madama was now bent on, mark characteristically the change in the habits and desires of the powerful and wealthy, which was now beginning to manifest itself. Increasing magnificence and luxury demanded ampler opportunity for its display, and a pleasanter field for its enjoyment. Italian princes began to be no longer content to pass their lives immured in the high dungeon-like walls of ancient feudal mansions, in the heart of walled and gloomy cities.

And Catherine was not likely to be among the slowest to adopt any new mode of increased magnificence and splendour. There were, moreover, dark and sad reminiscences enough attached to the old seignorial residence in the piazza, to make it odious to the lady twice widowed there, under circumstances in themselves, and in their consequences, so painful to look back on.