Chapter V: Part 5

“Here commenced a scene of horrors for which history has no language—poetry no pencil; neither innocent childhood nor helpless old age, neither youth, sex, rank, nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. Wives were abused in the arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their parents, and the defenceless sex exposed to the double sacrifice of virtue and life. No situation, however obscure, or however sacred, escaped the rapacity of the enemy. In a single church fifty-three women were found beheaded. The Croats amused themselves with throwing the children into the flames; Pappenheim’s Walloons with stabbing infants at the mother’s breast. Some officers of the league, horror-struck at the dreadful scene, ventured to remind Tilly that he had it in his power to stop the carnage. “Return in an hour,” was his answer; “I will see what I can do; the soldier must have some reward for his danger and toils.” These horrors lasted with unabated fury, till at last the smoke and flames proved a check to the plunderers. To augment the confusion and to divert the resistance of the inhabitants, the imperialists had, in the commencement of the assault, fired the town in several places. The wind rising rapidly, spread the flames, till the blaze became universal. Fearful indeed was the tumult amid clouds of smoke, heaps of dead bodies, the clash of swords, the crash of falling ruins, and streams of blood. The atmosphere glowed; and the intolerable heat forced at last even the murderers to take refuge in their camp. In less than twelve hours that strong, populous, and flourishing city, one of the finest in Germany, was reduced to ashes, with the exception of two churches and a few houses. The Administrator, Christian William, after receiving several wounds, was taken prisoner with three of the burgomasters. Most of the officers and magistrates had already met an enviable death. The avarice of the officers had saved four hundred of the richest citizens, in the hope of extorting from them an exorbitant ransom. But this humanity was confined to the officers of the league, whom the ruthless barbarity of the imperialists caused to be regarded as guardian angels.

“Scarcely had the fury of the flames abated, when the Imperialists returned to renew the pillage amid the ruins and ashes of the town. Many were suffocated by the smoke; many found rich booty in the cellars, where the citizens had concealed their more valuable effects. On the 13th of May Tilly himself appeared in the town, after the streets had been cleared of ashes and dead bodies. Horrible and revolting to humanity, was the scene that presented itself. The living crawling from under the dead, children wandering about with heart-rending cries, calling for their parents; and infants still suckling the breasts of their lifeless mothers. More than six thousand bodies were thrown into the Elbe to clean the streets; a much greater number had been consumed by the flames. The whole number of the slain was reckoned at not less than thirty thousand.

“The entrance of the general, which took place on the 14th, put a stop to the plunder, and saved the few who had hitherto contrived to escape. About a thousand people were taken out of the cathedral, where they had remained three days and two nights, without food, and in momentary fear of death. Tilly promised them quarter, and commanded bread to be distributed among them. The next day a solemn mass was performed in the cathedral, and a Te Deum sung amidst the discharge of artillery. The imperial general rode through the streets, that he might be able, as an eyewitness, to inform his master that no such conquest had been made since the destruction of Troy and Jerusalem. Nor was this an exaggeration, whether we consider the greatness, importance, and prosperity of the city razed, or the fury of its ravagers.”[5]

We have been led somewhat out of chronological order, in order to give a unity of impression with respect to the wrongs of Bohemia.

We now turn to Italy, among the stationary nations the mother country of constitutional liberty. And here we shall take for our guide the wise, the just, the liberal Sismondi, whose larger work upon the Republics of Italy ought to be translated into English, and studied by every American. We cannot take time and space here to introduce the history of the influence of the House of Austria upon Italy, by even a succinct account of the origin of the imperial claims there. It may be maintained, with some justice, that owing to previous circumstances of situation, the Constitution of the kingdom of Italy, its prosperity, and even its freedom, grew together, under the earlier German Emperors. “But,” says Sismondi, “the war of investitures, which lasted more than sixty years, having accomplished the dissolution of every tie between the different members of the kingdom of Italy, the peace of Constance, in 1183, by the establishment of a legal liberty, brought to a close the first and most noble struggle which the nations of modern Europe have ever maintained against despotism.” “By this peace, the emperor renounced all the regal privileges which he had hitherto claimed in the interior of towns. He acknowledged the right of the confederate cities to levy armies, to enclose themselves within fortifications, and to exercise, by their commissioners, within their own walls, both civil and criminal jurisdiction. The consuls of towns acquired, _by the simple nomination of the people_, all the prerogatives of imperial vicars. The cities of Lombardy were further authorised to _strengthen their confederation_ for the defence of these just rights. On the other side, they engaged to maintain certain rights of the Emperor, which were defined at the same time; and in order to avoid all disputes, it was agreed that these rights might always be bought off by the annual sum of 2000 marks of silver.”

There were, it is true, some struggles afterwards, with regard to these same rights, but the result of these struggles was, in the end, the greater independence of Italy; and it was in consequence of domestic troubles, of the ambition of the Popes within Italy, that the French were first called thither. When Rodolph of Hapsburgh became Emperor, he sacrificed imperial rights in Italy, which, on the whole, were more favourable to its freedom than the influence of the house of Anjou, which replaced them. But he did it without knowing it, and because his sole object at the moment was to gain from Pope Gregory X. a recognition of his title to the Empire. When he afterwards discovered what he had ignorantly done, he made some movements to resume them, but he was obliged, by Nicholas III., to acknowledge his own diplomas, and from that period, 1278, the republics as well as the principalities, situated in the whole extent of what is now called the States of the Church, held of the Holy See, and not of the Emperor.

It was at the period when the Austrian family was first growing in power, by preying on those parts of Europe nearer at hand, that, from a variety of concurring causes, the Republics of Italy became the paramount power in the Peninsula. Sismondi has given a beautiful picture of its aspect at this time in his Italian Republics, Chap. V. We make a single extract:

“The cities, surrounded with thick walls, terraced, and guarded by towers, were, for the most part, paved with broad flagstones; while the inhabitants of Paris could not stir out of their houses without plunging into the mud. Stone bridges of an elegant and bold architecture were thrown over rivers; aqueducts carried pure water to the fountains. The palaces of the podestas and signorie united strength with majesty. The most admirable of those of Florence, the Palazzo Vecchio, was built in 1298. The Loggia in the same city, the church of Santa Croce, that of Santa Maria del Fiore, with its dome, so admired by Michæl Angelo, were begun by the architect Arnolfo, scholar of Nicolas di Pisa, between the years 1254 and 1300. The prodigies of this first born of the fine arts multiplied in Italy: a pure taste, boldness, and grandeur struck the eye in all the public monuments, and finally reached even private dwellings; while the princes of France, England, and Germany, in building their castles, seemed to think only of shelter and defence. Sculpture in marble and bronze soon followed the progress of architecture: in 1300, Andrea de Pisa, son of the architect Nicolas, cast the admirable bronze gates of the Baptistery at Florence: about the same time, Cimabue and Giotti revived the art of painting, Casella music, and Dante gave to Italy his divine poem, unequalled in succeeding generations. History was written honestly, with scrupulous research and with a graceful simplicity, by Giovanni Villani, and his school; the study of morals and philosophy began; and Italy, ennobled by freedom, enlightened nations till then sunk in darkness.

“The arts of necessity and luxury had been cultivated with not less success than the fine arts; in every street, warehouses and shops displayed the wealth that Italy and Flanders only knew how to produce. It excited the astonishment and cupidity of the French or German adventurer, who came to find employment in Italy, and who had no other exchange to make than his blood, against the rich stuffs and brilliant arms which he coveted. The Tuscan and Lombard merchants, however, trafficked in the barbarous regions of the West, to carry there the produce of their industry. Attracted by the franchises of the fairs of Champagne and Lyons, they went thither, as well to barter their goods, as to lend their capital at interest to the nobles, habitually loaded with debt; though at the risk of finding themselves suddenly arrested, their wealth confiscated, by order of the king of France, and their lives, too, sometimes endangered by sanctioned robbers, under the pretext of repressing usury. Industry, the employment of a superabundant capital, the application of mechanism and science to the production of wealth, secured the Italians a sort of monopoly through Europe; they alone offered for sale what all the rich desired to buy; and notwithstanding the various oppressions of the barbarian kings, notwithstanding the losses occasioned by their own often repeated revolutions, their wealth was rapidly renewed. The workmen, the interest of capital, and the profit of trade, rose simultaneously, while every one gained much and spent little; manners were still simple, _luxury was unknown_, and the future was not forestalled by accumulated debt.”

We might go on farther to speak of Pisa and Genoa. “It is difficult to comprehend how two simple cities could put to sea such prodigious fleets as those of Pisa and Genoa.” But we merely wish to point attention towards what Italy was, when left to develop its genius, unrestrained by foreign influence. We pass from this period of prosperity over two hundred years, to the time when Maximilian entered into the league of Cambray. In 1301, Boniface VIII. called Charles of Valois to intervene in the affairs of Tuscany; and the same year the Papal Court was transferred into France. In 1313, the emperor Henry VII. invaded Italy, to intervene in the affairs of Lombardy. In 1327, Louis IV. followed, for the same purpose; and later, Charles IV., his successor. This foreign influence was against republicanism, in favour of the aristocratical families who wished to tyrannise in their respective states. When Charles VIII. of France invaded Italy, in 1492, there was no longer to be found, throughout the peninsula, “that power of a people, whose every individual will tends to the public weal; whose efforts are all combined for the public benefit and the common safety. The princes of that country could appeal only to order and the obedience of the subject, not to the enthusiasm of the citizen, for the protection of Italian independence.”

The league of Cambray, (we here translate rather freely from Sismondi’s larger work), was the first enterprise in which all the civilised states of Europe joined, after the crusades. For the first time, the sovereigns of nations made an agreement to partition between themselves an independent state; reviving, by means of pedantic erudition, superannuated pretensions; and claiming imprescriptable rights of legitimacy. The crusades had united Europe on the foundation of religious zeal and enthusiasm;—in the league of Cambray was developed a new principle of union, the personal and momentary interest of the strong to despoil the weak. To this event we must assign the origin of the international law (du droit public), which, for the last three hundred and fifty years, has governed Europe. It commenced by the most crying injustice; and the diplomatic science which was, as it were, born with the sixteenth century, has served ever since to give pretexts to rapacity and bad faith.

The league of Cambray was an agreement between the Pope, Louis XII., and Maximilian I., to divide all the _terra firma_ of the Venetian states. Pope Julius II. had the best foundation for his claims, which were for a restitution to the States of the Church of what the Venetians had taken from them by violence and treachery, in the preceding century. As he could not obtain it from themselves, however, he consented to receive it from the hands of Louis XII. and Maximilian, who combined to despoil the republic. The claims of Louis XII. were made for provinces, which, when he had subjugated Milan, he had himself ceded to the Venetians as the price of their assistance to him, but which he now claimed on the score of the imprescriptable right of the Visconti family, of which he had become heir. Maximilian, on his side, regarded himself as the legitimate successor, not only of the most powerful German monarchs, but of the Roman emperors; and claimed all the powers which had been exercised by Frederic Barbarossa, Otho the Great, and even by Trajan and Augustus.

It is difficult to do justice to the absurdity of these claims. As to imprescriptible rights, says Sismondi: “Venice, which presented itself as the most ancient state of Christendom, as the only legitimate daughter of the Roman republic could plead rights anterior to those of all the sovereigns.” “The only basis of international law (du droit public), which can sustain profound examination, is that of national compact. The interest of nations requires the preservation of their repose; and to guarantee this repose, it may, in some instances, admit legitimacy, not as a right, but as a presumption of the national will. It may also admit prescription, not as a right, but as a presumption of the mutual satisfaction of all parties. It may admit treaties as the only means of disarming popular hatred, and of saving the vanquished from the rage of the vanquisher; but then it must admit also the violation of these same treaties, as the only and the necessary remedy, when cruel and dishonorable conditions have been imposed by the abuse of force. In this case the violation can even become just; for neither the government which has stipulated has the right to bind the nation to a shameful and ruinous thing, nor has the present generation a right, for its own advantage, to bind posterity to their ruin. National interest, which leaves a hope to the vanquished, on whom a dishonouring treaty has been imposed, teaches the vanquishers, for their own sake, not to abuse victory.” “But with whatever fallacious arguments the potentates who despoiled Venice coloured their pretensions, cupidity, jealousy, and envy, were the true motives which armed them. With less than three millions of subjects, upon a territory of less extent than a sixth part of France, of Spain, or of Germany, Venice ranked with the greatest empires. It had sustained in turn, the attacks of Muselmen, French, and Spaniards, without giving any signs of weakness; the richest commerce animated the capital; numerous manufactories flourished in all the surrounding cities; the fields prospered by an industrious agriculture; immense water-works had been achieved, which enriched the soil; and the people were happy. The subjects of the neighbouring monarchs, comparing their own poverty with so much strength, opulence, and security, were tempted to ask in what consisted the difference; and to answer to themselves, that, in Venice were seen neither the senseless luxury of a voluptuous court; nor the depradations of courtier-ministers and their subalterns; nor the petulant ignorance, and ruinous intrigues, of their young favourites. Venice, without pretending to give lessons, without being near perfection, was yet a living satire upon other governments; and the latter, by instinct and without being able to render an account of their motives, had long desired to destroy it.”

To give all an interest in the destruction of the only state sufficiently strong to maintain the independence of Italy, Louis and Maximilian agreed to divide between themselves all the _terra firma_ of the Venetians; to abandon to Ferdinand all the fortresses in Apulia; to the pope, the lordships in Romagna, and to the houses of Este and Gonzaga, the small districts near the Po.”

The war began, January 1509, by the Pope’s excommunicating the Doge and the Republic, and France commencing hostilities. In the war, there was nothing so terrible to the Venetians as the action of the German army of Maximilian. “No sooner did the Germans enter 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.” At the siege of Padua, after great efforts on the part of Maximilian, the incredible valour of the Venetians, who had driven into the city most of their forces, induced him to raise the siege. “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 the 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, &c.”

And Maximilian personally made himself responsible for these horrors.

“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 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 had 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.”

War, of course, was continued, and in the course of three years the French were driven from Italy, and an alliance formed between Venice and France, for the purpose of driving out the Germans. This alliance was inherited, or renewed by Francis I., who encountered the enemy at Marignano, in the battle of which Marshal Trivulzio declared that every other of the eighteen pitched battles he had seen seemed to him children’s play in comparison. At this battle of the giants, as he termed it, 20,000 dead were left on the field. “This horrible butchery hastened the conclusion of the wars which arose from the league of Cambray. On the 15th of January, 1516, a peace was signed between France and Spain, and Maximilian alone remained at war with the republic. During the campaign of that year, his German army continued to commit the most enormous crimes in the Veronese March. Want of money, however, in the end, compelled Maximilian to consent to the treaty of Noyon, already signed by the French king. He evacuated Verona on the 14th of December, 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 broken; and they were never after in a state to make those efforts for the independence of Italy, which might have been expected from them before this devastating war.”

When Maximilian died, January 19th, 1519, leaving his hereditary states of Austria to his grandson Charles, already sovereign of Spain, the two Sicilies, the Low Countries and Burgundy, Italy, indeed the whole of Europe, was endangered by the immeasurable growth of this young monarch’s power. “Leo X. therefore made preliminaries for an alliance with Francis I., in order to strengthen himself against him. But suddenly, with characteristic want of reflection, changing sides, he signed a secret treaty with Charles V. to engage him to drive the French out of Italy. The question for Italy was now no longer the distribution of its provinces between different potentates, but its very existence. Foreign nations for the future were to fight their battles on its ground, and at its expense. Leo’s inconsiderate action compromised the independence even of the States of the Church, where perhaps yet remained a germ of the individuality of Italy among the nations. Of all the misfortunes that ever came upon Italy, none was so terrible in its instant barbarity, or so hopeless for its future, (for it sealed its ruin,) as this war in Italy of Charles V. against Francis I. As our purpose is more especially to illustrate the character of Charles, as a member of the House of Hapsburgh, it is of no consequence that the object aimed at in this instance was the aggrandizement of Spain, rather than of the archduchy of Austria, which was now ceded to Ferdinand I. We are obliged, from this time, to look in two directions for the crimes of the family. While Ferdinand, in the East of Europe, was destroying Bohemian liberties, and encroaching upon Hungary, Charles began his successes in Lombardy with the siege of Pavia, which ended in the defeat of the French, and the imprisonment of Francis I.; and soon Italy fully comprehended that it was at the mercy of the conqueror.

It is not possible, in this slight work of ours, to explain intelligibly, to those not familiar with the history of this period, how it was, that at this moment all things concurred to put Italy so much into the power of a single man. Sismondi, in his larger work on the Italian republics, makes it perfectly clear. We must content ourselves with stating the fact; and alas for the country that had no hope for its rights but in the mercy and the justice of a member of the House of Hapsburgh!

“The evil destiny of Italy was accomplished by Charles V., although it was the French Charles VIII., who, by invading the country thirty-six years before, had opened its gates to the transalpine nations. They inflicted on her calamities beyond example in history; calamities so much the more keenly felt, as the sufferers were more civilized, the authors more barbarous. The French invasion ended in giving to the greatest enemies of France the dominion of that country, so rich, so industrious, and of which the possession was sought ardently by all. Never would the House of Austria have achieved the conquest of Italy, if Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I., had not previously destroyed the wealth and military organization of the nation; if they had not themselves introduced the Spaniards into the kingdom of Naples, and the Germans into the states of Venice; forgetful that both must soon after be subject to Charles V.”

We must, however, go back from these generalities, to a statement of the facts which we shall take from Sismondi’s Italian Republics.

“The secret treaty between Leo and the Emperor Charles V. was signed on May 8th, 1521.” “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 November: but in the midst of the joy of this first success, Leo X. died,” leaving “his successors in a state of distress, which was unjustly attributed to them, and which rendered them odious to the people; for the war into which he had plunged them, without any reasonable motive, was the most disastrous of all those which had yet afflicted unhappy Italy. There remained no power truly Italian that could take any part in it for her defence. Venice was so exhausted by the war of the league of Cambray, that she was forced to limit her efforts to the maintenance of her neutrality, and was hardly powerful enough to make even her neutral position respected. Florence remained subject to Giulio de’ Medici. The republics of Sienna and Lucca were tremblingly prepared to obey the strongest.” “The kingdom of Naples was governed and plundered by the Spaniards. After the French had lost the duchy of Milan, Francesco Sforza, who had been brought back by the imperialists, possessed only the name of sovereign. He had never been for a moment independent; he had never been able to protect his subjects from the tyranny of the Spanish and German soldiers, who were his guards. Finally, the marquis de Montferrat and the duke of Savoy had allowed the French to become masters in their states, and had no power to refuse them passage to ravage oppressed Italy anew.”

The first hostilities resulted in the French General’s evacuating Lombardy, partly through the defection of his Swiss allies. The next year Francis I. made himself master of Milan, and attempted the siege of Pavia, where he was attacked by Pescara, and, after a murderous battle, made prisoner. These transactions occupied more than two years, during which time the imperial army, unpaid and unprovisioned by Charles, lived at free quarters upon unhappy Lombardy. In the course of the year 1525, there was much negotiation with respect to the ransom of Francis, and efforts, nearly successful, were made by Jerome Molone of Milan, to arm all Italy in vindication of her independence; these were frustrated through the duplicity and treason of Pescara, who died on the 30th of November, 1525 at the age of thirty-six, abhorred by all Italy.

“Charles, abusing the advantages which he had obtained, imposed on Francis the treaty of Madrid, signed on the 14th of January, 1526, by which the latter abandoned Italy and the duchy of Burgundy. He was set at liberty on the 18th of March following, and almost immediately declared to the Italians that he did not regard himself bound by a treaty extorted from him by force. On the 22nd of May, he signed a league for the liberty of Italy with Clement VII., the Venetians, and Francesco Sforza, but still did not abandon the policy of his mother; instead of thinking in earnest of restoring Italian independence, and thus securing the equilibrium of Europe, he had only one purpose, that of alarming Charles with the Italians; and was ready to sacrifice them as soon as the emperor should abandon Burgundy. At the same time his supineness, love of pleasure, distrust of his fortune, and repugnance to violate the treaty of Madrid, hindered him from fulfilling any of the engagements which he had contracted towards the Italians; he sent them neither money, French cavalry, nor Swiss forces. Charles, on the other hand, sent no supplies to pay his armies to Antonio de Leyva, the constable Bourbon, and Hugo de Monçada, their commanders. These troops were therefore obliged to live at free quarters, and the oppression of the whole country was still more dreadful than it had ever been.

“The defection of the duke of Milan, in particular, gave a pretence to Antonio de Leyva to treat the wretched Milanese with redoubled rigour, as if they could be responsible for what Leyva called the treachery of their master. The Spanish army was quartered on the citizens of Milan; and there was not a soldier who did not make his host a prisoner, keeping him bound at the foot of the bed, or in the cellar, for the purpose of having him daily at hand, to force him, by blows or fresh torture, to satisfy some new caprice; as soon as one wretched person died of his sufferings, or broke his bond and ended his sufferings by a voluntary death, either precipitating himself through a window or into a well, the Spaniard passed into another house to recommence on its proprietor the same torture. The Venetians and the Pope had united their forces, under the command of the duke of Urbino, who, exaggerating the tactics of Prospero Colonna, was ambitious of no other success in war than that of avoiding battle. He announced to the Senate of Venice, that he would not approach Milan till the French and Swiss, whose support he had been promised, joined him. This inaction, while witnessing so many horrors, reduced the Italians to despair. Sforza, who had been nine months blockaded in the castle of Milan, and who always hoped to be delivered by the duke of Milan, whose colours were in sight, supported the last extremity of hunger before he surrendered to the Spaniard, on the 24th of July, 1526. The Pope, meanwhile, was far from suspecting himself in any danger, but his personal enemy, Pompeo Colonna, took advantage of the name of the Imperial party to raise in the papal state 8000 armed peasants, with whom, on the 20th of September, he surprised the Vatican, pillaged the palace, as well as the temple of St. Peter, and constrained the Pope to abjure the alliance of France and Venice. About the same time, George de Frundsberg, a German condottiere, entered Lombardy with 13,000 adventurers, whom he had engaged to follow him, and serve the emperor without pay, contenting themselves with the pillage of that unhappy country.

The constable Bourbon, to whom Charles had given the chief command of his forces in Italy, determined to take advantage of this new army, and unite it to that for which at Milan he had now no further occasion; but it was not without great difficulty that he could persuade the Spaniards to quit that city, where they had enjoyed the savage pleasure of inflicting torture on their hosts. At length, however, he succeeded in leading them to Pavia. On the 30th of January, 1527, he joined Frundsberg, who died soon after of apoplexy. Bourbon now remained alone charged with the command of this formidable army, already exceeding 25,000 men, and continually joined on its route by disbanded soldiers and brigands intent on pillage. The constable had neither money, equipments, nor artillery, and very few cavalry; every town shut its gates on his approach, and he was often on the point of wanting provisions. He took the road of Southern Italy, and entered Tuscany, still uncertain whether he should pillage Florence or Rome. The marquis of Saluzzo, with a small army, retreated before him; the duke of Urbino followed in his rear, but always keeping out of reach of battle. At last, Bourbon took the road to Rome, by the valley of the Tiber. On the 5th of May, 1527, he arrived before the Capital of Christendom. Clement, long alarmed at his march, had, on the 15th of March, signed a truce of eight months with the viceroy of Naples, and dismissed his troops, never imagining that one of the emperor’s lieutenants would not respect the engagements of the other. On the approach of Bourbon, however, the walls of Rome were again mounted with the engines of war. The next day, the 6th of May, this renegade prince led his troops to the assault of the city. He was killed near the Janiculum, while mounting the first scaling ladder. His fall did not stop the terrific band of robbers which he led. The victorious army scaled the walls, which were ill defended, and spread terror through the quarters of the Borgo, Vatican, and Trastevere. In a few hours they were masters of the whole city, Clement having neglected to destroy the bridges of the Tiber.

“The capital of Christendom was then abandoned to a pillage unparalleled in that most calamitous period of the first triumph of barbarism over civilization: neither Alaric the Goth, nor Genseric the Vandal, had treated it with like ferocity. Not only was all that could be seized in every house and every shop carried off, but the peasants of the fiefs of Colonna took possession of the heavy furniture which did not tempt the cupidity of the soldier. From the day when these barbarians entered the city, all personal protection was withdrawn; women were abandoned to the outrages of the victors; and sanctuaries, enriched by the veneration of Christendom for twelve centuries, were devoted to spoliation. Men, women, and children were seized, whenever their captors could flatter themselves that they had concealed some treasure, or that there was any one sufficiently interested for them to pay their ransom. Every house resounded with the cries and lamentations of wretched persons thus subjected to the torture; and this dreadful state of crime and agony lasted not merely days, _but was prolonged for more than_ NINE _months_: it was not till the 17th of February, 1528, that the prince of Orange, one of the French lords, who had accompanied Bourbon in his rebellion, finally withdrew from Rome all of this army that vice and disease had spared. The Germans, indeed, after the first few days, had sheathed their swords to plunge into drunkenness and the most cruel debauchery; but the Spaniards, up to the last hour of their stay in Rome, indefatigable in their cold-blooded cruelty, continued to invent fresh torture to extort new ransoms from all who fell into their hands; even the plague, the consequence of so much suffering, moral and physical, which broke out amidst all these horrors, did not make the rapacious Spaniard loose his prey.

“A struggle between the Italians, feebly seconded by the French, and the generals of Charles V., was prolonged yet more than two years after the sack of Rome; but it only added to the desolation of Italy, and destroyed alike in all the Italian provinces, the last remains of prosperity.” “The banditti whom Charles V. called his soldiers, whom he never paid, and who showed no disposition to obedience, were cantoned at Milan, Rome, and the principal cities of Italy: they divided their time between debauchery, and the infliction of torture on their hosts; their officers were unable to induce them to leave the towns, and advance towards the enemy. The people, in the excess of suffering, met every change with eagerness, and received Lantrec (the French commander) as a deliverer.” He passed the Tronto on the 10th of February, 1528; lost valuable time in Apulia, where he took and sacked Melfi on the 23d of March, and did not arrive till the 1st of May before Naples.

“The prince of Orange had just entered the city with the army which had sacked Rome, but of which the greater part had been carried off by a dreadful mortality, the consequence and punishment of its vices and crimes. Instead of vigorously attacking them, Lantrec, in spite of the warm remonstrances of his officers, persisted in reducing Naples by blockade; thus exposing his army to the influence of a destructive climate.”... “The inhabitants of Naples experienced the most cruel privations, and sickness soon made great havoc amongst them: but a malady not less fatal broke out in the French camp.” “In the middle of June, the French reckoned 25,000 men; by the 2d of August not 4000 were left fit for service.” “Lantrec himself died on the 15th of August, and almost all his officers.” The marquis de Saluces, on whom the command devolved, felt the necessity of a retreat, but knew not how to secure it in presence of such a superior force. He tried to escape from the imperialists, by taking advantage of a tremendous storm in the night of the 29th of August: but was soon pursued and overtaken at Aversa, where, on the 30th, he was forced to capitulate. The magazines and hospitals at Capua were, at the same time, given up to the Spaniards. The prisoners and the sick were crowded together in the stables of the Magdalen, where contagion acquired new force. The Spaniards foresaw it, and watched with indifference the agony and death of all; for nearly all of that brilliant army perished—a few invalids only ever returned to France.

“During this campaign, another French army, conducted by François de Bourbon, Count de St. Pol, had entered Lombardy, at the moment when Henry, duke of Brunswick, led thither a German army. Henry, finding nothing more to pillage, announced that his mission was to punish a rebellious nation, and put to the sword ALL _the inhabitants_ of the villages through which he passed. Milan was at once a prey to famine and the plague, aggravated by the cupidity and the cold-blooded ferocity of Leyva, who seized ALL the provisions brought in from the country; and to profit by the general misery, resold them at an enormous price.”

“The winter passed in suffering and inaction. The following year, Leyva surprised the Count de St. Pol, at Landriano, on the 21st of June, 1529, and made him prisoner with all his principal officers. This was the last military incident of this dreadful war.”

“Peace was ardently desired on both sides; negotiations were actively carried on; but every potentate sought to deceive his ally, in order to obtain better conditions from his adversary. Margaret of Austria, the sister of the emperor’s father, and Louisa of Savoy, the mother of the king of France, met at Cambray; and in a conference, to which no witnesses were admitted, arranged what was called “Le traité des dames.” Clement VII. had, at the same time, a nuncio at Barcelona, who negotiated with the emperor. The latter was impatient to arrange the affairs of Italy, in order to pass into Germany. On the 20th of June, 1529, Charles signed at Barcelona a treaty of perpetual alliance with the Pope: by it he engaged to sacrifice the republic of Florence to the Pope’s vengeance, and to place in the service of Clement, in order to accomplish it, all the brigands who had previously devastated Italy. Florence was to be given in sovereignty to the bastard Alexander de’ Medici, who was to marry an illegitimate daughter of Charles V. On the 5th of August following, Louis and Margaret signed the treaty of Cambray, by which Francis abandoned, without reserve, all his Italian allies to the caprices of Charles; who, on his side, renounced Burgundy, and restored to Francis his two sons, who had been retained as hostages. Charles arrived at Genoa, on board the fleet of Andrea Doria, on the 12th of August. The Pope awaited him at Bologna, into which he made his entry on the 5th of November. He summoned thither all the princes of Italy, or their deputies, and treated them with more moderation than might have been expected after the shameful abandonment of them by France. As he knew the health of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, to be in a declining state, which promised but few years of life, he granted him the restitution of his duchy, for the sum of 900,000 ducats, which Sforza was to pay at different times; they had not all fallen due when that prince died, on the 24th of October, 1535, without issue, and his estates escheated to the emperor. On the 23d of December, 1529, Charles granted peace to the Venetians, who restored him only some places in Apulia, and gave up Ravenna and Cernia to the Pope.

“On the 20th of March, Alphonso d’Este also signed a treaty, by which he referred his differences with the Pope to the arbitration of the emperor. Charles did not pronounce on them till the following year. He conferred on Alphonso the possession of Modena, Reggio, and Rubbiera, as fiefs of the empire; and he made the Pope give him the investiture of Ferrara. On the 15th of March, 1530, a diploma of the emperor raised the marquisate of Mantua to a duchy, in favor of Frederick de Gonzaga. The duke of Savoy and the marquis de Montferrat, till then protected by France, arrived at Bologna, to place themselves under the protection of the emperor. The duke of Urbino was recommended to him by the Venetians, and obtained some promises of favor. The republics of Genoa, Sienna, and Lucca, had permission to vegetate under the imperial protection; and Charles, having received from the Pope at Bologna, on the 22d of February and 24th of March, the two crowns of Lombardy and of the empire, departed in the beginning of April for Germany, in order to escape witnessing the odious service, in which he consented that his troops should be employed against Florence.”

“A period of three centuries of weakness, humiliation, and suffering, in Italy, began in the year 1530: from that time she has been always oppressed by foreigners, and enervated and corrupted by her masters. These last have reproached her with the vices of which they were themselves the authors. After having reduced her to the impossibility of resisting, they have accused her of cowardice when she submitted, and of rebellion when she made efforts to vindicate herself. The Italians, during this long period of slavery, have been agitated with the desire of becoming once more a nation; as, however, they had lost the direction of their own affairs, they ceased to have any history which could be called theirs; their misfortunes have become but episodes in the histories of other nations.”

Sismondi closes his history of the Italian Republics, with an account of the successive fall of all the republics, which still remained independent after the coronation of Charles V. Florence had been on the point of recovering its liberty from the tyranny of the Medici, when the constable Bourbon approached the walls in his march to Rome, on the 26th of April, 1527; but the terror inspired by that army of brigands, repressed the movement. When they heard, however, of the taking of Rome, the Florentines rose with firmness, expelled the Medici, and restored the republic. Michæl Angelo completed the fortifications of Florence, in 1529. On the other hand, “Clement VII. sent against his native city that very prince of Orange, the successor of Bourbon, who had made him prisoner at Rome; and with him that very army of robbers which had overwhelmed the Holy See, and its subjects, with misery and every outrage. This army entered Tuscany, September, 1529.” Florence capitulated, after immense but vain efforts at defence, on the 12th of August, 1530.

Into Sienna, Charles V. introduced a Spanish garrison, but the Siennese, unable to bear the pride, cupidity, and ferocity of the Spanish, drove them out the 11th of August, 1552. In 1555, after incredible sufferings, it capitulated, the 2nd of April, 1555. The Spaniards retained possession, nevertheless, for two years, and death and exile were the lot of the generous citizens to whom amnesty had been promised.

In 1556 Burtamachi of Lucca made an attempt to restore liberty to the Tuscan cities, which were all to be organized with popular constitutions and confederate. The plot was discovered, Burtamachi executed, and the city given up to a small oligarchy for the next two hundred and fifty years. “Genoa, which had received the name of republic through Charles V.’s connivance (who had needed its services in the war of 1528), was governed by a narrow aristocracy, founded by Andrea Doria, who at the same time “attached his country to the house of Austria, with a submission which the greater number of Genoese felt as a deep humiliation.” In 1547 the conspiracy of the French nearly destroyed this government; Vachero’s conspiracy, in 1628, was also abortive. “But the spirit of the ancient Italian republics was not extinguished among the people of Genoa, as among the nobles.” In the war of the Austrian succession, in 1746, they made alliance with the Bourbons. “The Austrians appeared before Genoa; and the senate, which dared not arm the population, opened their gates to them. The Austrians abused, as they have ever done, the favours of fortune. They exacted from Genoa a contribution of 9,000,000 of florins to the empire, a sum which that city was not in a condition to pay. They seized all the money in the bank, all the plate of the churches, and even the property of individuals.” To these injuries they added insults which at length roused the people, who, having no other arms, attacked their oppressors with stones from the streets, and tiles torn from the houses, till, notwithstanding a firing by the soldiers that filled many houses with the dead, the streets were covered with dead Austrians, and the rest fled in terror. These mostly perished on the barren mountains around the city; for the Genoese retained their advantage till the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle secured their republic against Austria, under the protection of the French.

Venice employed all the sixteenth century in endeavouring to repair the disasters of the league of Cambray. Its policy was, especially during the seventeenth century, to throw off the yoke of Austria, but it knew its own weakness too well to make an open movement. During the Thirty Years’ War, however, it gave succour to the Protestants of Germany, to Bethlehem Gabor, and to Ragotski in Hungary. “But the attacks of the Turks made it necessary for the Venetians to make friendly advances to Austria; and as its own government grew more aristocratic, and odious with despotism, it became more and more timid. It attempted to be neutral in the war of the Spanish succession. In the French war of 1796 it actually took the side of Austria; but when Bonaparte declared war against it, in 1797, Austria, with characteristic ingratitude, refused all assistance; and at the peace of Santo Formio took possession of Venice, and part of its states. But after the French made themselves masters of Vienna, she was obliged by the treaty of Presburg to restore Venice to the kingdom of Italy.

Thus, after Italy lost its liberty, in the first half of the fifteenth century, four of the five nominal republics became narrow aristocracies.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte effected a momentary resurrection of this beautiful country. “Five millions and a half of inhabitants in the kingdom of Italy were put in possession of a constitution, securing the participation of numbers in the government, which is the essence of a republic.” Six millions and a half in the kingdom of Naples received institutions less advanced, it is true; but even there the law had succeeded arbitrary power; public and oral evidence had succeeded secret information and the torture; equality, the feudal system of education, instead of retrograding, had been rendered progressive; and thought, as well as religious conscience, had recovered freedom. Finally, five millions and a half, (Piedmontese, Genoese, Parmesans, Tuscans, and Romans,) were temporarily united to France, “secure that at no very distant period, when their political education should be accomplished, they would again be incorporated in that Italy to the future liberty and glory of which they now directed every thought.”

“It has been the work of the _coalition_ to destroy all; to place Italy again under the galling yoke of Austria; to take from her, with political liberty, civil and religious freedom, and even freedom of thought; to corrupt her morals, and to heap upon her the utmost degree of humiliation. Italy is unanimous in abhorring this ignominious yoke; Italy, to break it, has done all that could be expected of her. In a struggle between an established government and a nation, the former has all the advantage; it has in its favour rapidity of communication, certainty of information, soldiers, arsenals, fortresses, and finances. The people have only their unarmed hands, and their masses _unaccustomed to act together_: nevertheless, in every struggle with its oppressors, during these fifteen years, in Italy, (Sismondi wrote in 1832,) the victory has remained with the people. At Naples, in Sicily, in Piedmont, in the states of the Church, at Modena and Parma, unarmed masses have seized the arms of the soldiers; men chosen by the people have taken the places of the despots in their palaces. The Italians, everywhere victorious over their own tyrants, have, it is true, been everywhere forced back under the yoke, with redoubled cruelty, by the league of foreign despots. Attacked before they could have given themselves a government, or formed a treasury, arsenals, or an army, by the sovereign of another nation, who reckons not less than 30,000,000 of subjects, they did not attempt a hopeless resistance, which would have deprived them of every chance for the future.”

“Europe will know no repose till the nation which, in the dark ages, lighted the torch of civilization with that of liberty, shall be enabled herself to enjoy the light which she created.”

But we must now turn our regards upon SPAIN, which the Austrian family, in the person of the ruthless conqueror of Italy, had taken into its _Christian_ (?) guardianship, by right of his mother, Joanna of Castile.

It is not perhaps sufficiently well known, that Spain, as well as the other countries of Europe, received from its Gothic and Vandalic ancestors the germs of constitutional government, which, from peculiar circumstances attending the Saracen conquest, were preserved in singular purity in the several kingdoms of Spain, that were afterwards united under Ferdinand and Isabella. Robertson, in a view of the state of Europe, which he prefixes to his biography of Charles V., says:—

“Notwithstanding the singular revolution which the invasion of the Moors occasioned in Spain, and the peculiarity of its fate, in being so long subject to the Mahomedan yoke, the customs introduced by the Vandals and Goths had taken such deep root, and were so thoroughly incorporated with the frame of its government, that in every province which the Christians recovered from the Moors, we find the condition of individuals, as well as the political constitution, nearly the same as in other nations of Europe.”

“The royal prerogative was circumscribed within such narrow bounds as reduced the power of the sovereign almost to nothing. The privileges of the nobility were great in proportion, and extended so far as to border on absolute independance. The immunities of the cities were likewise greater than in other feudal kingdoms; they possessed considerable influence in the arts, and they aspired at obtaining more.”

In Spain also, as in other countries where the germs of constitutional liberty existed, as the best legacy of their northern ancestry, there was a struggle for development, which the conservative historians uniformly stigmatize as “turbulence” and “want of respect to law,” though in fact it is an aspiration for a government of laws rather than of persons.

“In 1492,” says Robertson, “in the principality of Catalonia, which was annexed to the kingdom of Aragon, the impatience of the people to obtain the redress of their grievances having prompted them to take arms against their sovereign John II., they, by a solemn deed, recalled the oath of allegiance which they had sworn to him, declared him and his posterity to be unworthy of the throne, and endeavoured to establish a republican form of government, in order to secure the perpetual enjoyment of that liberty after which they aspired. Nearly about the same period, the indignation of the Castilian nobility against the weak and flagitious administration of Henry IV. having led them to combine against him, they arrogated, as one of the privileges belonging to their order, the right of trying and of passing sentence on their sovereign. That the exercise of this power might be as public and solemn, as the pretension to it was bold, they summoned all the nobility of their party to meet at Avila; a spacious theatre was erected in a plain, without the walls of the town; an image, representing the king, was seated on a throne, clad in royal robes, with a crown on its head, a sceptre in its hand, and the sword of justice by its side.