POPE CLEMENT VIII (1590-1605 A.D.)
[1590-1600 A.D.]
The death of Sixtus V again agitated the conclave. The Medicean party at last arrived at finding a pope, if not hostile, at least less devoted to Spain—Urban VII. But he died at the end of seven days, and the struggle recommenced. The viceroy of Naples, to finish it, sent brigands. Olivares threatened the cardinals with a siege. Gregory XIV, a pope devoted to Spain, was elected; but only reigned seven months. A third struggle began, more fierce than the preceding ones. The cardinal of San Severino, supported by the Spaniards, failed one day of the papacy by a single vote. “Anxiety,” he himself said, “made me sweat blood.” Cardinal Aldobrandini, the creature of Sixtus V, much less devoted to the Spaniards, was at last elected on January 30th, 1592, and took the name of Clement VIII.
This was a victory for Italy. The abjuration of Henry IV, his entry into Paris in 1594, was another. It was celebrated in the peninsula as a national event. The pope, who up to then had managed the Spanish and only secretly received the ambassadors of Henry IV, no longer resisted the insistences of the grand duke of Florence. In vain the Spanish party left Rome with the cardinals, who led them; in vain the duke of Sessa, Philip II’s ambassador, threw his Abruzzian bandits on church lands. Supported by the Venetians, by the duke of Tuscany, by the emperor himself, to whom the Italians furnished help against the Turks, the pope carried all before him. He declared in solemn ceremony (September 8th, 1595) Henry to be reconciled with the Catholic church, thus re-establishing between the orthodox powers a favourable equilibrium to his own independence and the freeing of Italy. The peninsula, in effect, soon found she had gained a powerful support against Spain. Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio, dying in 1597, had left his heritage to Don Cesare his cousin, in default of a direct heir. Clement VIII claimed, as fief of the holy see, the town of Ferrara, hurled excommunication against Don Cesare, who aspired to all the heritage, and raised a loan to support an army of spiritual thunderbolts.
At first events did not seem to favour the holy see. The court of Spain, who thought it had somewhat against Clement VIII, was ill disposed. The grand duke of Tuscany, brother-in-law to Don Cesare, this time abandoned the pope. Even the Venetian Republic hindered him from recruiting soldiers in Dalmatia. Henry IV forgot what he owed to Venice, to the grand duke, and offered to send an army beyond the mountains to put the pope in possession of Ferrara. Don Cesare, obliged to yield, gave up the town after taking away the archives, the library, and the artillery of his predecessors. He thereafter contented himself with the title of duke of Modena and Reggio. The town of Ferrara lost all its advantages, all its éclat as capital, and soon saw rise in place of the ducal palace and the beautiful belvedere sung by her poets, a citadel which easily kept in awe a town promptly dispeopled.
Philip II, who for thirty years had allowed nothing to be done in Italy without his permission, was obliged to yield this time. He thus signed, before dying, the peace of Vervins, which announced the re-establishment of French power and the decadence of Spain. His successor, Philip III, abandoned even the most faithful of the servitors of his house in Italy—Charles Emmanuel I, duke of Savoy, from whom Henry IV, by the treaty of Lyons, received in 1600 Bugey, Valromey, and Gex, in exchange for the marquisate of Saluzzo.
Italy now turned with full hope towards France. The holy see had nothing but kindness for her. The learned cardinal Baronius repeated, to whoever cared to listen, that the papacy had never received of any nation so much service. “Can it be allowed,” cried the cardinal’s nephew, Aldobrandini, through whose hands all affairs passed, “can it be allowed that the Spanish should command in the house of a stranger in spite of him?” And it was not perhaps without reflection that he put millions in reserve and maintained an army of twelve thousand men. Not having had occasion to meddle with France since the Peace of Lyons, Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy began to understand that it was in Italy, at the expense of Spain, that he must seek aggrandisement. So he entered into intimate relations with Henry IV, so long time his enemy. In waiting for better things, he ended by organising the senate established by his father at Carignan on the model of the French parliaments. He reanimated agriculture and commerce and fortified Turin, an Italian city. He himself wrote a parallel between great men ancient and modern, and began to found the military power of his little state.
Ferdinand of Tuscany, only too happy to see Maria de’ Medici mount the French throne, did not long hold out before Henry IV. He was bold enough to send his admiral Inghirami, at the head of his fleet, to fight the Turks in the Adriatic, even seeking to seize from them the isle of Cyprus. In the north and south of Italy the Milanese and the Neapolitans themselves began to grow restless under the iron yoke of Spain. It was perhaps the time to attempt something. Cardinal Aldobrandini once proposed to Venice a league against Spain. But Cardinal Aldobrandini and Ferdinand were sworn foes. Henry IV, moreover, was not yet firmly enough established in France to act outside it.
There then remained only one alternative for the Neapolitan kingdom—one of those isolated revolts, so extraordinarily foolish, so frequent in the peninsula, which can only be explained by the misery of the people. A Dominican, Tommaso Campanella, a deep thinker if he had not been a still greater dreamer, tore himself from his philosophic elucidations and dreams to call, like a new Savonarola, his compatriots to liberty. He believed in the faith of the Apocalypse that the seventeenth century would be for Italy the signal for a cataclysm wherein would be engulfed the Spanish domination, and he formed the project of founding a kind of universal theocratic republic. He began first by Calabria, his country. Monks, not only Dominicans, but Franciscans and Augustines, drawn away by his eloquence, began to preach the doctrines of this new emissary from God, and blew upon the hardly extinct ashes of Neapolitan frenzy. Even many bishops and a few barons followed the monks. An army, recruited in part by bandits, went out from Calabria. The count of Lemos, viceroy of Naples, soon had the upper hand. The unfortunates who were seized perished in frightful torments. Tommaso Campanella, regarded as insane, was thrown in a dungeon, where he stayed twenty-seven years, and passed from the dream of a universal republic to that of a universal holy empire.