It has been the singular good fortune of Leo X to have his name associated with the most brilliant epoch of letters and the arts since their revival. He has thus shared the glory of all the poets, philosophers, artists, men of learning and science, his contemporaries. He has been held up to posterity as one who formed and raised to eminence men who were in fact his elders, and who had attained celebrity before the epoch of his power. His merit consisted in showering his liberality on those whose works and whose fame had already deserved it. His reign, on the other hand, which lasted nine years, was marked by fearful calamities, which hastened the destruction of those arts and sciences to which alone the age of Leo owes its splendour. The misfortunes which he drew down on his successor was still more dreadful. The pope was himself a man of pleasure, easy, careless, prodigal; who expended in sumptuous feasts the immense treasures accumulated by his predecessors. He had the taste to adorn his palace with the finest works of antiquity, and the sense to enjoy the society of philosophers and poets; but he had never the elevation of soul to comprehend his duties, or to consult his conscience. His indecent conversation and licentious conduct scandalised the church; his prodigality led him to encourage the shameful traffic in indulgences, which gave rise to the schism of Luther; his thoughtlessness and indifference to human suffering made him light up wars the most ruinous, and which he was utterly unable to carry on; he never thought of securing the independence of Italy, or of expelling the barbarians: it was simply for the aggrandisement of his family that he contracted or abandoned alliances with the transalpine nations: he succeeded, indeed, in procuring that his brother Giuliano should be named duke of Nemours, and he created his nephew duke of Urbino; but he endeavoured also to erect for the former a new state, composed of the districts of Parma, Piacenza, Reggio, and Modena; for the latter, another, consisting of the several petty principalities which still maintained themselves in the states of the church. His tortuous policy to accomplish the first object, his perfidy and cruelty to attain the second, deserved to be much more severely branded by historians.
The sovereign pontiff and the republic of Venice were the only powers in Italy which still preserved some shadow of independence. Julius II had succeeded in uniting Romagna, the Marches, the patrimony and campagna of Rome, to the holy see. Amongst all the vassals of the church, he had spared only his own nephew, Gian Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino. On the defeat of the French, he further seized Parma and Piacenza, which he detached from the Milanese, without having the remotest title to their possession, as he also took Modena from the duke of Ferrara, whom he detested. Leo X found the holy see in possession of all these states, and was at the same time himself all-powerful at Florence. Even the moment of his elevation to the pontificate was marked by an event which showed that every vestige of liberty had disappeared from that republic. The partisans of the Medici pretended to have discovered at Florence a conspiracy, of which they produced no other proofs than some imprudent speeches, and some wishes uttered for liberty. The most illustrious citizens were, nevertheless, arrested; and Macchiavelli, with several others, was put to the torture. Pietro Boscoli and Agostino Capponi were beheaded; and those who were called their accomplices exiled. The two republics of Siena and Lucca were in a state of trembling subjection to the pontiff; so that all central Italy, peopled with about four million inhabitants, was dependent on him: but the court of Rome, since it had ceased to respect the ancient municipal liberties, never extended its authority over a new province without ruining its population and resources. Law and order seemed incompatible with the government of priests: the laws gave way to intrigue and favour; commerce gave way to monopoly. Justice deserted the tribunals, foresight the councils, and valour the armies. It was proverbially said that the arms of the church had no edge. The great name of pope still moved Europe at a distance, but it brought no real force to the allies whom he adopted.
[1513-1515 A.D.]
The republic of Venice, with a smaller territory, and a far less numerous population, was in reality much more powerful than the church. Venetian subjects, if they did not enjoy liberty, had at least a government which maintained justice, order, and the law; their material prosperity was judiciously protected. They in return were contented, and proved themselves devotedly attached to their government; but the wars raised by the league of Cambray overwhelmed that republic with calamity. The city of Venice, secure amidst the waters, alone escaped the invasion of the barbarians; though, even there, the richest quarters had been laid waste by an accidental fire. The country and the provincial towns experienced in turn the ferocity of the French, Swiss, Germans, and Spaniards. Three centuries and a half had elapsed since this same Veronese march, the cradle of the Lombard League, had repelled the invasion of Frederick Barbarossa. But while the world boasted a continual progress, since that period, in civilisation,—while philosophy and justice had better defined the rights of men,—while the arts, literature, and poetry had quickened the feelings, and rendered man more susceptible of painful impressions,—war was made with a ferocity at which men in an age of the darkest barbarism would have blushed. The massacre of all the inhabitants of a town taken by assault, the execution of whole garrisons which had surrendered at discretion, the giving up of prisoners to the conquering soldiers in order to be tortured into the confession of hidden treasure, became the common practice of war in the armies of Louis XII, Ferdinand, and Maximilian. Kings were haughty in proportion to their power; they considered themselves at so much the greater distance above human nature: they were the more offended at all resistance, the more incapable of compassion for sufferings which they did not see or did not comprehend. The misery which they caused presented itself to them more as an abstraction; they regarded masses, not individuals; they justified their cruelties by the name of offended majesty; they quieted remorse by considering themselves, not as men, but as scourges in the hand of God. Centuries have elapsed, and civilisation has not ceased to march forward; the voice of humanity has continued to become more and more powerful; no one now dares to believe himself great enough to be dispensed from humanity; nevertheless, those who would shrink with horror from witnessing the putting to death of an individual do not hesitate to condemn whole nations to execution. The crimes which remain for us to relate do not merit more execration than those of which we are ourselves the witnesses at this day. Kings, in their detestation of freedom, let loose upon unhappy Italy, in the sixteenth century, famine, war, and pestilence; as, from the same motive in a later time, they loosed upon heroic Poland, famine, war, and the cholera.
Louis XII, after having lost the Milanese, through his infatuated ambition to reconquer the small province of the Cremonese, which he had himself ceded to the republic of Venice, felt anew the desire of being reconciled with that republic, his first ally in Italy. The Venetians, who knew that without their money, artillery, and cavalry, the Swiss could never have faced the French, much less have driven them out of Italy, saw that their allies did not appreciate their efforts and sacrifices. Maximilian, who in joining never granted them peace, but only a truce, reasserted his claims on Verona and Vicenza, and would not consent to allow the Venetians any states in terra firma but such as they purchased from him at an enormous price. The pope, to enforce the demands of Maximilian, threatened the Venetians with excommunication; and their danger after victory appeared as great as after defeat. Andrea Gritti, one of their senators,—made prisoner after the battle of Agnadello, and the same who, during his captivity at Constantinople, had signed the peace of his country with the Turks,—again took advantage of his captivity in France to negotiate with Louis. He reconciled the republic with that monarch, who had been the first to attack it; and a treaty of alliance was signed at Blois, on the 24th of March, 1513. This was, however, a source of new calamity to Venice. A French army, commanded by La Trémouille, entered the Milanese, and on its approach the Germans and Spaniards retired. The Swiss, who gloried in having re-established Massimiliano Sforza on the throne of his ancestors, were, however, resolved not to abandon him. They descended from their mountains in numerous bodies, on the 6th of June, 1513; attacked La Trémouille at the Riotta, near Novara; defeated him, and drove him back with all the French forces beyond the Alps. The Spaniards and the soldiers of Leo X next attacked the Venetians without any provocation: they were at peace with the republic, but they invaded its territory in the name of their ally Maximilian. They occupied the Paduan state, the Veronese, and that of Vicenza, from the 13th of June till the end of autumn. It was during this invasion the Spaniards displayed that heartless cruelty which rendered them the horror of Italy; that cupidity which multiplied torture, and which invented sufferings more and more atrocious, to extort gold from their prisoners. The Germans in the next campaign overran the Venetian provinces; and, notwithstanding the savage cruelties and numerous crimes of which the country had just been the theatre, yet the German commander found means to signalise himself by his ferocity.
The Battle of Marignano; Last Years of Leo
Francis I succeeded Louis XII on the 1st of January, 1515; on the 27th of June he renewed his predecessor’s treaty of alliance with Venice; and on the 15th of August entered the plains of Lombardy, by the marquisate of Saluzzo, with a powerful army. He met but little resistance in the provinces south of the Po; but the Swiss meanwhile arrived in great force to defend Massimiliano Sforza, whom, since they had reseated him on the throne, they regarded as their vassal. Francis in vain endeavoured to negotiate with them: they would not listen to the voice of their commanders; democracy had passed from their landsgemeinde into their armies, popular orators roused their passions; and on the 13th of September they impetuously left Milan to attack Francis I at Marignano (Melegnano). Deep ditches lined with soldiers bordered the causeway by which they advanced; their commanders wished by some manœuvre to get clear of them, or make the enemy change his position; but the Swiss, despising all the arts of war, expected to command success by mere intrepidity and bodily strength.[d]
As soon as Francis I became aware that the Swiss were marching against him he made vigorous preparations to receive them. The duchy of Milan, which with prudent negotiation he hoped to obtain, could only be gained by a complete victory.
His army was drawn up on three lines on the road leading from Marignano to Milan; the advance-guard, commanded by the high constable of Bourbon, encamped in the village of San Giuliano, a short distance below San Donato; the main body of the army, the command of which the king had reserved for himself, was at Santa Brigitta, within bowshot of the high constable; the rear-guard, placed under the command of the duke of Alençon, was at about the same distance from the king’s main body. The army, thus disposed in echelons, held the highway of Milan on its left, and protecting its right by the river Lambro, occupied a territory covered with trenches and intersected with small irrigation canals, which would guard it from the sudden attacks of the Swiss infantry, and also sometimes be inconvenient for the deploying and the charges of its own cavalry, wherein lay a principal portion of its strength.
Francis I hastily made his arrangements to face the danger, and withstand the shock of an encounter with the Swiss army. As he himself said in the animated description of the battle he sent to his mother, the regent, he “placed his German foot-soldiers in order.” He had formed two corps of them, each nine thousand strong, and placed them on the sides of the avenue by which the Swiss were advancing, besides the picked corps of six thousand lansquenets of the Black Companies. The Gascon archers and the French adventurers, under Pedro Navarro, occupied, not far from there, a very strong position near the heavy artillery, which was ably led by the seneschal of Armagnac.