THE LEAGUE OF CAMBRAY
[1504-1509 A.D.]
The league against Venice, signed at Cambray, on the 10th of December, 1508, by Margaret of Austria, daughter of Maximilian, and the cardinal d’Amboise, prime minister of Louis, was only the completion of the secret Treaty of Blois, of the 22nd of September, 1504. No offence had been given, to justify this perfidious compact. Maximilian, who detested Louis, had the same year endeavoured to attack him in the Milanese; but the Venetians refused him a passage; and after three months’ hostilities, the treaty between the emperor and the republic was renewed, on the 7th of June, 1508. Louis XII, whom the Venetians defended, and Maximilian, with whom they were reconciled, had no other complaint against them than that they had no king, and that their subjects thus excited the envy of those who had. The two monarchs agreed to divide between them all the Terra Firma of the Venetians, to abandon to Ferdinand all their fortresses in Apulia, to the pope the lordships in Romagna, to the houses of Este and Gonzaga the small districts near the Po; and thus to give all an interest in the destruction of the only state sufficiently strong to maintain the independence of Italy.
France was the first to declare war against the republic of Venice, in the month of January, 1509. Hostilities commenced on the 15th of April; on the 27th of the same month the pope excommunicated the doge and the republic. The Venetians had assembled an army of forty-two thousand men, under the command of the impetuous Bartolommeo d’Alviano and the cautious Pitigliano. The disagreement between these two chiefs, both able generals, caused the loss of the battle of Agnadello, fought on the 14th of May, 1509, with the French, who did not exceed thirty thousand. Half only, or less, of the Venetian army was engaged; but that part fought heroically, and perished without falling back one step. After this discomfiture, Bergamo, Brescia, Crema, and Cremona hastily surrendered to the conquerors, who planted their banners on the border of Ghiara d’Adda, the limits assigned by the treaty of partition. Louis signalised this rapid conquest by atrocious cruelties; he caused the Venetian governors of Caravaggio and of Peschiera to be hanged, and the garrison and inhabitants to be put to the sword; he ruined, by enormous ransoms, all the Venetian nobles who fell into his hands; seeking to vindicate to himself his unjust attack by the hatred which he studied to excite.
The French suspended their operations from the 31st of May; but the emperor, the pope, the duke of Ferrara, the marquis of Mantua, and Ferdinand of Aragon profited by the disasters of the republic to invade its provinces on all sides at once. The senate, in the impossibility of making head against so many enemies, took the generous resolution of releasing all its subjects from their oath of fidelity, and permitting them to treat with the enemy, since it was no longer in its power to defend them. In letting them feel the weight of a foreign yoke, the senate knew that it only rendered more dear the paternal authority of the republic; and, in fact, those citizens who had eagerly opened their gates to the French, Germans, and Spaniards, soon contrasted, in despair, their tyranny with the just and equal power which they had not had the courage to defend. The Germans, above all, no sooner entered the Venetian cities, than they plunged into the most brutal debauchery; offending public decency, and exercising their cruelty and rapacity on all those who came within their reach. Notwithstanding this, the native nobles joined them. They were eager to substitute monarchy for republican equality and freedom, but their insolence only aggravated the hatred which the Germans inspired. The army of the republic had taken refuge at Mestre, on the borders of the Lagune, when suddenly the citizen evinced a courage which the soldier no longer possessed. Treviso, in the month of June, and Padua on the 17th of July, drove out the imperialists; and the banners of St. Mark, which had hitherto constantly retreated, began once again to advance.
Doorway of St. Mark’s School, Venice
The war of the league of Cambray showed the Italians, for the first time, what formidable forces the transalpine nations could bring against them. Maximilian arrived to besiege Padua in the month of September, 1509. He had in his army, Germans, Swiss, French, Spaniards, Savoyards; troops of the pope, of the marquis of Mantua, and of the duke of Modena; in all more than one hundred thousand men, with one hundred pieces of cannon. He was, notwithstanding, obliged to raise the siege, on the 3rd of October, after many encounters, supported on each side with equal valour. But these barbarians, who came to dispute with the Italians the sovereignty of their country, did not need success to prove their ferocity. After having taken from the poor peasant, or captive, all that he possessed, they put him to the torture to discover hidden treasure, or to extort ransom from the compassion of friends. In this abuse of brute force, the Germans showed themselves the most savage, the Spaniards the most coldly ferocious. Both were more odious than the French; although the last mentioned had bands called flayers (écorcheurs), formed in the English wars, and long trained to grind the people.
[1509-1511 A.D.]
Pope Julius II soon began to hate his accomplices in the league of Cambray. Violent and irascible, he had often shown in his fits of passion that he could be as cruel as the worst of them. But he had the soul of an Italian. He could not brook the humiliation of his country, and its being enslaved by those whom he called barbarians. Having recovered the cities of Romagna, the subject of his quarrel with the Venetians, he began to make advances to them. At the end of the first campaign, he entered into negotiations; and on the 21st of February, 1510, granted them absolution. He was aware that he could never drive the barbarians out of Italy but by arming them against each other; and as the French were those whom he most feared, he had recourse to the Germans. It was necessary to begin with reconciling the Venetians to the emperor; but Maximilian, always ready to undertake everything, and incapable of bringing anything to a conclusion, would not relax in a single article of what he called his rights. As emperor, he considered himself monarch of all Italy; and although he was always stopped on its frontier, he refused to renounce the smallest part of what he purposed conquering. He asserted that the whole Venetian territory had been usurped from the empire; and before granting peace to the republic, demanded almost its annihilation.