The king, with a decisive movement, then bore down with his cavalry upon the other confederates, who abandoned their position and their guns. The Swiss, driven back or vanquished on every side, gave the signal for retreat, and retired from the battle-field, leaving from seven to eight thousand dead. Carrying their wounded, they retook the Milan road in fairly good order and without pursuit, and entered that town with a haughty demeanour, and not as a defeated army. They were beaten, nevertheless, for they had just lost at Marignano that prestige, which, since Sempach, Granson, and Morat, and as late as at Novara, had made them invincible.[h]
This horrible butchery, however, hastened the conclusion of the wars which arose from the league of Cambray. The Swiss were not sufficiently powerful to maintain their sway in Lombardy; eight of their cantons, on the 7th of November, signed, at Geneva, a treaty of peace with Francis I, who compensated with considerable sums of money all the claims which they consented to abandon. On the 29th of November the other cantons acceded to this pacification, which took the name of “Paix perpétuelle,” and France recovered the right of raising such infantry as she needed among the Swiss. Raymond de Cardona, alarmed at the retreat of the Swiss, evacuated Lombardy with the Spanish troops. The French recovered possession of the whole duchy of Milan. Massimiliano Sforza abdicated the sovereignty for a revenue of 30,000 crowns secured to him in France. Leo X, ranging himself on the side of the victors, signed, at Viterbo, on the 13th of October, a treaty, by which he restored Parma and Piacenza to the French.
In a conference held with Francis at Bologna, between the 10th and 15th of the following December, Leo induced that monarch to sacrifice the liberties of the Gallican church by the concordat, to renounce the protection he had hitherto extended to the Florentines and to the duke of Urbino, although the former had always remained faithful to France. The pope seized the states of the duke of Urbino, and conferred them on his nephew, Lorenzo II de’ Medici. Amidst these transactions, Ferdinand the Catholic died, on the 15th of January, 1516, and his grandson Charles succeeded to his Spanish kingdoms. On the 13th of August following, Charles signed, at Noyon, a treaty, by which Francis ceded to him all his right to the kingdom of Naples as the dower of a newborn daughter, whom he promised to Charles in marriage. From that time Maximilian remained singly at war with the republic of Venice and with France. During the campaign of 1516, his German army continued to commit the most enormous crimes in the Veronese march; but Maximilian had never money enough to carry on the war without the subsidies of his allies; remaining alone, he could no longer hope to be successful. On the 14th of December he consented to accede to the treaty of Noyon; he evacuated Verona, which he had till then occupied, and the Venetians were once more put by the French in possession of all the states of which the league of Cambray had proposed the partition: but their wealth was annihilated, their population reduced to one-half, their constitution itself shaken, and they were never after in a state to make those efforts for the defence of the independence of Italy, which might have been expected from them before this devastating war.
[1516-1519 A.D.]
Had Italy been allowed to repose after so many disasters, she might still have recovered her strength and population; and when the struggle should have recommenced with the transalpine nations, she would have been found prepared for battle; but the heartless levity and ambition of Leo did not give her time. While the family of the Medici was becoming extinct around him, he dreamed only of investing it with new dignities; he refused the Florentines permission to re-establish their republic, and offered his alliance to whatever foreign monarch would aid him in founding on its ruins a principality for the bastard Medici. His third brother Giuliano, duke of Nemours, whom he had at first charged with the government of Florence, died on the 17th of March, 1516. Lorenzo II, son of his eldest brother Piero, whom he had made duke of Urbino, and whom he sent to command at Florence after Giuliano, rendered himself odious there by his pride and by his contemptible incapacity—he too died only three years afterwards, on the 28th of April, 1519. Leo supplied his place by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, afterwards Clement VII. This prelate was the natural son of the first Giuliano killed in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. He was considered the most able of the pope’s ministers, and the most moderate of his lieutenants. Giuliano II had also left an illegitimate son, Ippolito, afterwards cardinal; and Lorenzo II had a legitimate daughter, Catherine, afterwards queen of France, and an illegitimate son, Alexander, destined to be the future tyrant of Florence. Leo, whether desirous of establishing these descendants, or carried away by the restlessness and levity of his character, sighed only for war.
An Attendant of an Italian Prince, First Half of Sixteenth Century
[1519-1522 A.D.]
The emperor Maximilian died on the 19th of January, 1519, leaving his hereditary states of Austria to his grandson Charles, already sovereign of all Spain, of the Two Sicilies, of the Low Countries, and of the county of Burgundy. Charles and Francis both presented themselves as candidates for the imperial crown; the electors gave it to the former, on the 28th of June, 1519; he was from that period named Charles V. Italy, indeed the whole of Europe, was endangered by the immeasurable growth of this young monarch’s power. The states of the church, over which he domineered by means of his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, could not hope to preserve any independence but through an alliance with France. Leo at first thought so, and signed the preliminary articles of a league with Francis; but, suddenly changing sides, he invited Charles V to join him in driving the French out of Italy. A secret treaty was signed between him and the emperor, on the 8th of May, 1521. By this the duchy of Milan was to be restored to Francesco Sforza, the second son of Louis the Moor. Parma, Piacenza, and Ferrara were to be united to the holy see: a duchy in the kingdom of Naples was to be secured to the bastard Alessandro de’ Medici. The pope united his army to that of the emperor in the kingdom of Naples; the command of it was given jointly to Prospero Colonna and the marquis Pescara: war was declared on the 1st of August, and the imperial and pontifical troops entered Milan on the 19th of November: but in the midst of the joy of this first success, Leo X died unexpectedly, on the 1st of December, 1521.