Frescoes by Correggio
CHAPTER XIV. THE “LAST DAY OF ITALY”
[1494-1530 A.D.]
The period was at length arrived when Italy—which had restored intellectual light to Europe, reconciled civil order with liberty, recalled youth to the study of laws and of philosophy, created the taste for poetry and the fine arts, revived the science and literature of antiquity, given prosperity to commerce, manufactures, and agriculture—was destined to become the prey of those very barbarians whom she was leading to civilisation. Her independence must necessarily perish with her liberty, which was hitherto the source of her grandeur and power. In a country covered with republics three centuries before, there remained but four at the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici; and in those, although the word “liberty” was still inscribed on their banners, that principle of life had disappeared from their institutions. Florence, already governed for three generations by the family of the Medici, corrupted by their licentiousness, and rendered venal by their wealth, had been taught by them to fear and to obey. Venice with its jealous aristocracy, Siena and Lucca, each governed by a single caste of citizens, if still republics, had no longer popular governments or republican energy. Neither in those four cities, nor in Genoa, which had surrendered its liberty to the Sforzas, nor in Bologna, which yielded to the Bentivoglios, nor in any of the monarchical states, was there to be found throughout Italy that power of a people whose every individual will tends to the public weal, whose efforts are all combined for the public benefit and the common safety. The princes of that country could appeal only to order and the obedience of the subject, not to the enthusiasm of the citizen, for the protection of Italian independence and of their own.
Immense wealth, coveted by the rest of Europe, was, it is true, always accumulating in absolute monarchies, as well as in republics; but if, on the one hand, it furnished the pay of powerful armies, on the other, it augmented the danger of Italy, by exciting the cupidity of its neighbours. The number of national soldiers was very considerable; their profession was that which led the most rapidly to distinction and fortune. Engaged only for the duration of hostilities, and at liberty to retire every month, instead of spending their lives in the indolence of garrisons or abandoning the freedom of their will, they passed rapidly from one service to another, seeking only war, and never becoming enervated by idleness. The horses and armour of the Italian men-at-arms were reckoned superior to those of the transalpine nations, against which they had measured themselves in France during “the war of the public weal.” The Italian captains had made war a science, every branch of which they thoroughly knew. It was never suspected for a moment that the soldier should be wanting in courage; but the general mildness of manners and the progress of civilisation had accustomed the Italians to make war with sentiments of honour and humanity towards the vanquished. Ever ready to give quarter, they did not strike a fallen enemy. Often, after having taken from him his horse and armour, they set him free; at least, they never demanded a ransom so enormous as to ruin him. Horsemen who went to battle clad in steel were rarely killed or wounded, so long as they kept their saddles. Once unhorsed, they surrendered. The battle, therefore, never became murderous. The courage of the Italian soldiers, which had accommodated itself to this milder warfare, suddenly gave way before the new dangers and ferocity of barbarian enemies. They became terror-struck when they perceived that the French caused dismounted horsemen to be put to death by their valets, or made prisoners only to extort from them, under the name of ransom, all they possessed. The Italian cavalry, equal in courage and superior in military science to the French, were for some time unable to make head against an enemy whose ferocity disturbed their imaginations.
While Italy had lost a part of the advantages which, in the preceding century, had constituted her security, the transalpine nations had suddenly acquired a power which destroyed the ancient equilibrium. Up to the close of the fifteenth century, wars were much fewer between nation and nation than between French, Germans, or Spaniards among themselves. Even the war between the English and the French, which desolated France for more than a century, sprang not from enmity between two rival nations, but from the circumstance that the kings of England were French princes, hereditary sovereigns of Normandy, Poitou, and Guienne. Charles VII at last forced the English back beyond sea, and reunited to the monarchy provinces which had been detached from it for centuries. Louis XI vanquished the dukes and peers of France who had disputed his authority; he humbled the house of Burgundy, which had begun to have interests foreign to France. His young successor and son, Charles VIII, on coming of age, found himself the master of a vast kingdom in a state of complete obedience, a brilliant army, and large revenues; but was weak enough to think that there was no glory to be obtained unless in distant and chivalrous expeditions. The different monarchies of Spain, which had long been rivals, were united by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castile, and by the conquest which they jointly made of the Moorish kingdom of Granada. Spain, forming for the first time one great power, began to exercise an influence which she had never till then claimed. The emperor Maximilian, after having united the Low Countries and the county of Burgundy, his wife’s inheritance, to the states of Austria, which he inherited from his father, asserted his right to exercise over the whole of Germany the imperial authority which had escaped from the hands of his predecessors. Lastly, the Swiss, rendered illustrious by their victories over Charles the Bold, had begun, but since his death only, to make a traffic of their lives, and enter the service of foreign nations. At the same time, the empire of the Turks extended along the whole shore of the Adriatic, and menaced at once Venice and the kingdom of Naples. Italy was surrounded on all sides by powers which had suddenly become gigantic, and of which not one had, half a century before, given her uneasiness.
[1492-1494 A.D.]
France was the first to carry abroad an activity unemployed at home, and to make Italy feel the change which had taken place in the politics of Europe. Its king, Charles VIII, claimed the inheritance of all the rights of the second house of Anjou on the kingdom of Naples. Those rights, founded on the adoption of Louis I of Anjou by Joanna I, had never been acknowledged by the people or confirmed by possession. For the space of a hundred and ten years Louis I, II, and III, and René, the brother of the last, made frequent but unsuccessful attempts to mount the throne of Naples. The brother and the daughter of René, Charles of Maine and Margaret of Anjou, at last either ceded or sold those rights to Louis XI. His son, Charles VIII, as soon as he was of age, determined on asserting them. Eager for glory, in proportion as his weak frame and still weaker intellect incapacitated him for acquiring it, he, at the age of twenty-four, resolved on treading in the footsteps of Charlemagne and his paladins; and undertook the conquest of Naples as the first exploit that was to lead to the conquest of Constantinople and the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre.