The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic — Volume 3

by William Hickling Prescott

With the emperor Maximilian, notwithstanding repeated treaties, he was on scarcely better terms. That prince was connected with Spain by the matrimonial alliances of his family, and no less averse to France from personal feeling, which, with the majority of minds, operates more powerfully than motives of state policy. He had, moreover, always regarded the occupation of Milan by the latter as an infringement, in some measure, of his imperial rights. The Spanish government, availing itself of these feelings, endeavored through its minister, Don Juan Manuel, to stimulate Maximilian to the invasion of Lombardy. As the emperor, however, demanded, as usual, a liberal subsidy for carrying on the war, King Ferdinand, who was seldom incommoded by a superfluity of funds, preferred reserving them for his own enterprises, to hazarding them on the Quixotic schemes of his ally. But, although the negotiations were attended with no result, the amicable dispositions of the Austrian government were evinced by the permission given to its subjects to serve under the banners of Gonsalvo, where indeed, as we have already seen, they formed some of his best troops. [5]

But while Louis the Twelfth drew so little assistance from abroad, the heartiness with which the whole French people entered into his feelings at this crisis, made him nearly independent of it, and, in an incredibly short space of time, placed him in a condition for resuming operations on a far more formidable scale than before. The preceding failures in Italy he attributed in a great degree to an overweening confidence in the superiority of his own troops, and his neglect to support them with the necessary reinforcements and supplies. He now provided against this by remitting large sums to Rome, and establishing ample magazines of grain and military stores there, under the direction of commissaries for the maintenance of the army. He equipped without loss of time a large armament at Genoa, under the marquis of Saluzzo, for the relief of Gaeta, still blockaded by the Spaniards. He obtained a small supply of men from his Italian allies, and subsidized a corps of eight thousand Swiss, the strength of his infantry; while the remainder of his army, comprehending a fine body of cavalry, and the most complete train of artillery, probably, in Europe, was drawn from his own dominions. Volunteers of the highest rank pressed forward to serve in an expedition, to which they confidently looked for the vindication of the national honor. The command was intrusted to the maréchal de la Trémouille, esteemed the best general in France; and the whole amount of force, exclusive of that employed permanently in the fleet, is variously computed from twenty to thirty thousand men. [6]

In the month of July, the army was on its march across the broad plains of Lombardy, but, on reaching Parma, the appointed place of rendezvous for the Swiss and Italian mercenaries, was brought to a halt by tidings of an unlooked-for event, the death of Pope Alexander the Sixth. He expired on the 18th of August, 1503, at the age of seventy-two, the victim, there is very little doubt, of poison he had prepared for others; thus closing an infamous life by a death equally infamous. He was a man of undoubted talent, and uncommon energy of character. But his powers were perverted to the worst purposes, and his gross vices were unredeemed, if we are to credit the report of his most respectable contemporaries, by a single virtue. In him the papacy reached its lowest degradation. His pontificate, however, was not without its use; since that Providence, which still educes good from evil, made the scandal, which it occasioned to the Christian world, a principal spring of the glorious Reformation. [7]

The death of this pontiff occasioned no particular disquietude at the Spanish court, where his immoral life had been viewed with undisguised reprobation, and made the subject of more than one pressing remonstrance, as we have already seen. His public course had been as little to its satisfaction; since, although a Spaniard by birth, being a native of Valencia, he had placed himself almost wholly at the disposal of Louis the Twelfth, in return for the countenance afforded by that monarch to the iniquitous schemes of his son, Caesar Borgia.

The pope's death was attended with important consequences on the movements of the French. Louis's favorite minister, Cardinal D'Amboise, had long looked to this event as opening to him the succession to the tiara. He now hastened to Italy, therefore, with his master's approbation, proposing to enforce his pretensions by the presence of the French army, placed, as it would seem, with this view at his disposal.

The army, accordingly, was ordered to advance towards Rome, and halt within a few miles of its gates. The conclave of cardinals, then convened to supply the vacancy in the pontificate, were filled with indignation at this attempt to overawe their election; and the citizens beheld with anxiety the encampment of this formidable force under their walls, anticipating some counteracting movement on the part of the Great Captain, which might involve their capital, already in a state of anarchy, in all the horrors of war. Gonsalvo, indeed, had sent forward a detachment of between two and three thousand men, under Mendoza and Fabrizio Colonna, who posted themselves in the neighborhood of the city, where they could observe the movements of the enemy. [8]

At length Cardinal D'Amboise, yielding to public feeling, and the representations of pretended friends, consented to the removal of the French forces from the neighborhood, and trusted for success to his personal influence. He over-estimated its weight. It is foreign to our purpose to detail the proceedings of the reverend body, thus convened to supply the chair of St. Peter. They are displayed at full length by the Italian writers, and must be allowed to form a most edifying chapter in ecclesiastical history. [9] It is enough to state, that, on the departure of the French, the suffrages of the conclave fell on an Italian, who assumed the name of Pius the Third, and who justified the policy of the choice by dying in less time than his best friends had anticipated;— within a month after his elevation. [10]

The new vacancy was at once supplied by the election of Julius the Second, the belligerent pontiff who made his tiara a helmet, and his crosier a sword. It is remarkable, that, while his fierce, inexorable temper left him with scarcely a personal friend, he came to the throne by the united suffrages of each of the rival factions of France, Spain, and, above all, Venice, whose ruin in return he made the great business of his restless pontificate. [11]

No sooner had the game, into which Cardinal D'Amboise had entered with such prospects of success, been snatched from his grasp by the superior address of his Italian rivals, and the election of Pius the Third been publicly announced, than the French army was permitted to resume its march on Naples, after the loss,—an irreparable loss,—of more than a month. A still greater misfortune had befallen it, in the mean time, in the illness of Trémouille, its chief; which compelled him to resign the command into the hands of the marquis of Mantua, an Italian nobleman, who held the second station in the army. He was a man of some military experience, having fought in the Venetian service, and led the allied forces, with doubtful credit indeed, against Charles the Eighth at the battle of Fornovo. His elevation was more acceptable to his own countrymen than to the French; and in truth, however competent to ordinary exigencies, he was altogether unequal to the present, in, which he was compelled to measure his genius with that of the greatest captain of the age. [12]

The Spanish commander, in the mean while, was detained before the strong post of Gaeta, into which Ives d'Allègre had thrown himself, as already noticed, with the fugitives from the field of Cerignola, where he had been subsequently reinforced by four thousand additional troops under the marquis of Saluzzo. From these circumstances, as well as the great strength of the place, Gonsalvo experienced an opposition, to which, of late, he had been wholly unaccustomed. His exposed situation in the plains, under the guns of the city, occasioned the loss of many of his best men, and, among others, that of his friend Don Hugo de Cardona, one of the late victors at Seminara, who was shot down at his side, while conversing with him. At length, after a desperate but ineffectual attempt to extricate himself from his perilous position by forcing the neighboring eminence of Mount Orlando, he was compelled to retire to a greater distance, and draw off his army to the adjacent village of Castellone, which may call up more agreeable associations in the reader's mind, as the site of the Villa Formiana of Cicero. [13] At this place he was still occupied with the blockade of Gaeta, when he received intelligence that the French had crossed the Tiber, and were in full march against him. [14]