Chapter VIII: Part 8

The besiegers looked on overawed as she entered Orleans, and, riding round the walls, bade the people look fearlessly on the dreaded forts which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the strongest remained, and then the council of war resolved to adjourn the attack. “You have taken your counsel,” replied Jeanne, “and I take mine.” Placing herself at the head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown open, and led them against the fort. Few as they were, the English fought desperately, and the Maid, who had fallen wounded while endeavoring to scale its walls, was borne into a vineyard, while Dunois sounded the retreat. “Wait a while!” the girl imperiously pleaded, “eat and drink! So soon as my standard touches the wall you shall enter the fort.” It touched, and the assailants burst in. On the next day the siege was abandoned, and the force which had conducted it withdrew in good order to the north.

In the midst of her triumph, Jeanne still remained the pure, tender-hearted peasant-girl of the Vosges. Her first visit as she entered Orleans was to the great church, and there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a passion of devotion that “all the people wept with her.” Her tears burst forth afresh at her first sight of bloodshed and of the corpses strewed over the battle-field. She grew frightened at her first wound, and only threw off the touch of womanly fear when she heard the signal for retreat.

Yet more womanly was the purity with which she passed through the brutal warriors of a mediæval camp. It was her care for her honor that had led her to clothe herself in a soldier’s dress. She wept hot tears when told of the foul taunts of the English, and called passionately on God to witness her chastity. “Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale,” she cried to the English warrior whose insults had been foulest, as he fell wounded at her feet; “you called me harlot! I have great pity on your soul.” But all thought of herself was lost in the thought of her mission. It was in vain that the French generals strove to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was resolute to complete her task, and, while the English remained panic-stricken around Paris, the army followed her from Gien through Troyes, growing in number as it advanced, till it reached the gates of Rheims. With the coronation of Charles, the Maid felt her errand to be over. “O gentle king, the pleasure of God is done!” she cried, as she flung herself at the feet of Charles VII, and asked leave to go home. “Would it were his pleasure,” she pleaded with the archbishop, as he forced her to remain, “that I might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters and my brothers; they would be so glad to see me again!”

The policy of the French court detained her while the cities of the north of France opened their gates to the newly consecrated king. Bedford, however, who had been left without money or men, had now received re-enforcements, and Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, fell back behind the Loire, while the towns on the Oise submitted again to the Duke of Burgundy. In this later struggle Jeanne fought with her usual bravery, but with the fatal consciousness that her mission was at an end, and during the defense of Compiègne she fell into the power of the Bastard of Vendôme, to be sold by her captor into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, and by the duke into the hands of the English. To the English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after a year’s imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head. Throughout the long process which followed every art was employed to entangle her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the peasant-girl foiled the efforts of her judges. “Do you believe,” they asked, “that you are in a state of grace?” “If I am not,” she replied, “God will put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in it.” Her capture, they argued, showed that God had forsaken her. “Since it has pleased God that I should be taken,” she answered, meekly, “it is for the best.” “Will you submit,” they demanded, at last, “to the judgment of the Church militant?” “I have come to the King of France,” Jeanne replied, “by commission from God and from the Church triumphant above; to that Church I submit.... I had far rather die,” she ended, passionately, “than renounce what I have done by my Lord’s command.” They deprived her of mass. “Our Lord can make me hear it without your aid,” she said, weeping. “Do your voices,” asked the judges, “forbid you to submit to the Church and the Pope?” “Ah, no! Our Lord first served.”

Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it is no wonder that, as the long trial dragged on and question followed question, Jeanne’s firmness wavered. On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed firmly to God. “I hold to my Judge,” she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, “to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always been my lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had power over me.” It was only with a view to be delivered from the military prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared, in fact, among the English soldiery those outrages to her honor, to guard against which she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime, and she abandoned it; but a renewed insult forced her to resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy, which doomed her to death. A great pile was raised in the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated “witch” from the hands of the clergy and hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. “O Rouen, Rouen!” she was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city from the lofty scaffold, “I have great fear lest you suffer for my death.... Yes; my voices were of God!” she suddenly cried, as the last moment came; “they have never deceived me!” Soon the flames reached her, the girl’s head sank on her breast, there was one cry of “Jesus!” “We are lost,” an English soldier muttered, as the crowd broke up; “we have burned a saint!”

MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II.

BY EDWARD GIBBON.

[Surnamed the Great and the Victorious, born 1430, died 1481. His
main title to fame is that he consummated the dreams of his
predecessors, and after a siege of nearly two months, with a force
of two hundred and fifty thousand men and a large fleet, carried
the city of Constantinople by storm on May 29, 1453.]

The siege of Constantinople by the Turks attracts our first attention to the person and character of the great destroyer. Mahomet II was the son of the second Amurath; and though his mother had been decorated with the titles of Christian and princess, she is more probably confounded with the numerous concubines who peopled from every climate the harem of the sultan. His first education and sentiments were those of a devout Mussulman; and as often as he conversed with an infidel, he purified his hands and face by the legal rites of ablution. Age and empire appear to have relaxed this narrow bigotry; his aspiring genius disdained to acknowledge a power above his own, and in his looser hours he presumed (it is said) to brand the Prophet of Mecca as a robber and impostor. Yet the sultan persevered in a decent reverence for the doctrine and discipline of the Koran. His private indiscretion must have been sacred from the vulgar ear, and we should suspect the credulity of strangers and sectaries, so prone to believe that a mind which is hardened against truth must be armed with superior contempt for absurdity and error. Under the tuition of the most skillful masters, Mahomet advanced with an early and rapid progress in the paths of knowledge; and, besides his native tongue, it is affirmed that he spoke or understood five languages--the Arabic, the Persian, the Chaldean or Hebrew, the Latin, and the Greek. The Persian might indeed contribute to his amusement, and the Arabic to his edification; and such studies are familiar to the Oriental youth. In the intercourse of the Greeks and Turks, a conqueror might wish to converse with the people over whom he was ambitious to reign; his own praises in Latin poetry or prose might find a passage to the royal ear; but what use or merit could recommend to the statesman or the scholar the uncouth dialect of his Hebrew slaves?

The history and geography of the world were familiar to his memory; the lives of the heroes of the East, perhaps of the West, excited his emulation; his skill in astrology is excused by the folly of the times, and supposes some rudiments of mathematical science; and a profane taste for the arts is betrayed in his liberal invitation and reward of the painters of Italy. But the influence of religion and learning was employed without effect on his savage and licentious nature. I will not transcribe, nor do I firmly believe, the stories of his fourteen pages, whose bellies were ripped open in search of a stolen melon, or of the beauteous slave whose head he severed from her body, to convince the Janizaries that their master was not the votary of love. His sobriety is attested by the silence of the Turkish annals, which accuse three, and three only, of the Ottoman line of the vice of drunkenness.

But it can not be denied that his passions were at once furious and inexorable; that in the palace, as in the field, a torrent of blood was spilled on the slightest provocation; and that the noblest of the captive youth were often dishonored by his unnatural lust. In the Albanian war he studied the lessons, and soon surpassed the example, of his father; and the conquest of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and two hundred cities--a vain and flattering account--is ascribed to his invincible sword. He was doubtless a soldier, and possibly a general. Constantinople has sealed his glory; but if we compare the means, the obstacles, and the achievements, Mahomet II must blush to sustain a parallel with Alexander or Timour. Under his command, the Ottoman forces were always more numerous than their enemies; yet their progress was bounded by the Euphrates and the Adriatic, and his arms were checked by Huniades and Scanderbeg, by the Rhodian knights and by the Persian king.

In the reign of Amurath he twice (A.D. 1451, February 9--A. D. 1481, July 2) tasted of royalty, and twice descended from the throne; his tender age was incapable of opposing his father’s restoration, but never could he forgive the viziers who had recommended that salutary measure. His nuptials were celebrated with the daughter of a Turkoman emir, and after a festival of two months he departed from Adrianople with his bride to reside in the government of Magnesia. Before the end of six weeks he was recalled by a sudden message from the divan, which announced the decease of Amurath and the mutinous spirit of the Janizaries. His speed and vigor commanded their obedience; he passed the Hellespont with a chosen guard, and at a distance of a mile from Adrianople, the viziers and emirs, the imams and cadis, the soldiers and the people, fell prostrate before the new sultan. They affected to weep, they affected to rejoice. He ascended the throne at the age of twenty-one years, and removed the cause of sedition by the death, the inevitable death, of his infant brothers. The ambassadors of Europe and Asia soon appeared to congratulate his accession and solicit his friendship, and to all he spoke the language of moderation and peace. The confidence of the Greek emperor was revived by the solemn oaths and fair assurances with which he sealed the ratification of the treaty; and a rich domain on the banks of the Strymon was assigned for the annual payment of three hundred thousand aspers, the pension of an Ottoman prince, who was detained at his request in the Byzantine court. Yet the neighbors of Mahomet might tremble at the severity with which a youthful monarch reformed the pomp of his father’s household; the expenses of luxury were applied to those of ambition, and a useless train of seven thousand falconers was either dismissed from his service or enlisted in his troops. In the first summer of his reign he visited with an army the Asiatic provinces; but after humbling the pride, Mahomet accepted the submission, of the Caramanian, that he might not be diverted by the smallest obstacle from the execution of his great design.

The Mahometan, and more especially the Turkish casuists, have pronounced that no promise can bind the faithful against the interest and duty of their religion, and that the sultan may abrogate his own treaties and those of his predecessors. The justice and magnanimity of Amurath had scorned this immoral privilege; but his son, though the proudest of men, could stoop from ambition to the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit. Peace was on his lips, while war was in his heart; he incessantly sighed for the possession of Constantinople; and the Greeks, by their own indiscretion, afforded the first pretense of the fatal rupture.

From the first hour of the memorable 29th of May, when the beleaguered city was carried by storm, disorder and rapine prevailed in Constantinople till the eighth hour of the same day, when the sultan himself passed in triumph through the gate of St. Romanus. He was attended by his viziers, bashaws, and guards, each of whom (says a Byzantine historian) was robust as Hercules, dexterous as Apollo, and equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals. The conqueror gazed with satisfaction and wonder on the strange though splendid appearance of the domes and palaces, so dissimilar from the style of Oriental architecture. In the hippodrome, or _atmeidan_, his eye was attracted by the twisted column of the three serpents; and as a trial of his strength he shattered with his iron mace or battle-axe the under jaw of one of these monsters, which in the eyes of the Turks were the idols or talismans of the city. At the principal door of St. Sophia he alighted from his horse and entered the dome; and such was his jealous regard for that monument of his glory, that on observing a zealous Mussulman in the act of breaking the marble pavement, he admonished him with his cimeter, that, if the spoil and captives were granted to the soldiers, the public and private buildings had been reserved for the prince. By his command the metropolis of the Eastern Church was transformed into a mosque, the rich and portable instruments of superstition had been removed; the crosses were thrown down, and the walls, which were covered with images and mosaics, were washed and purified and restored to a state of naked simplicity. On the same day, or on the ensuing Friday, the _muezzin_ or crier ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the _ezan_, or public invitation, in the name of God and his prophet. The imam preached, and Mahomet II performed the _namaz_ of prayer and thanksgiving on the great altar where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Cæsars. From St. Sophia he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: “The spider hath wove his web in the imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.”

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI.

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

[Surnamed the “Magnificent,” born 1448, died 1492. The Medici
family had in the latter part of the fourteenth century become one
of the most influential and powerful in the Florentine Republic. It
had amassed vast wealth in the pursuits of commerce, and spent it
with the munificence of the most public-spirited princes. Cosmo de’
Medici about the year 1420 became the leading man of the state, and
practically exercised control over the republic, though without
definite authority, as ruler. The splendor of the family culminated
in his grandson Lorenzo, who for a quarter of a century held the
powers of the state in the palm of his hand, and made the city of
Florence the most brilliant center of literature, learning, art,
and refined luxury in Europe. Though he curtailed the liberties of
the people, the city reached under him the highest degree of
opulence and power it had ever attained. Eminent as statesman,
poet, and scholar, the enthusiastic patron of authors and artists,
munificent in his endowment of schools and libraries, he was the
most favorable example of the Italian tyrants of the middle ages;
and his life was the source of a stream of influences which helped
to revolutionize his own age and that which succeeded it.]

In one point Lorenzo was inferior to his grandfather. He had no commercial talent. After suffering the banking business of the Medici to fall into disorder, he became virtually bankrupt, while his personal expenditure kept continually increasing. In order to retrieve his fortunes it was necessary for him to gain complete disposal of the public purse. This was the real object of the constitutional revolution of 1480, whereby his privy council assumed the active functions of the state. Had Lorenzo been as great in finance as in the management of men, the way might have been smoothed for his son Piero in the disastrous year of 1494.

If Lorenzo neglected the pursuit of wealth, whereby Cosmo had raised himself from insignificance to the dictatorship of Florence, he surpassed his grandfather in the use he made of literary patronage. It is not paradoxical to affirm that in his policy we can trace the subordination of a genuine love of art and letters to statecraft. The new culture was one of the instruments that helped to build his despotism. Through his thorough and enthusiastic participation in the intellectual interests of his age, he put himself into close sympathy with the Florentines, who were glad to acknowledge for their leader by far the ablest of the men of parts in Italy.

According as we choose our point of view, we may regard him either as a tyrant, involving his country in debt and dangerous wars, corrupting the morals and enfeebling the spirit of the people, and systematically enslaving the Athens of the modern world for the sake of founding a petty principality; or else as the most liberal-minded noble of his epoch, born to play the first part in the Florentine Republic, and careful to use his wealth and influence for the advancement of his fellow-citizens in culture, learning, arts, and the amenities of life. Savonarola and the Florentine historians adopt the former of these two opinions. Sismondi, in his passion for liberty, arrays against Lorenzo the political assassinations he permitted, the enervation of Florence, the national debt incurred by the republic, and the exhausting wars with Sixtus carried on in his defense.

His panegyrists, on the contrary, love to paint him as the pacificator of Italy, the restorer of Florentine poetry, the profound critic, and the generous patron. The truth lies in the combination of these two apparently contradictory judgments. Lorenzo was the representative man of his nation at a moment when political institutions were everywhere inclining to despotism, and when the spiritual life of the Italians found its noblest expression in art and literature. The principality of Florence was thrust upon him by the policy of Cosimo, by the vote of the chief citizens, and by the example of the sister republics, all of whom, with the exception of Venice, submitted to the sway of rulers. Had he wished, he might have found it difficult to preserve the commonwealth in its integrity. Few but _doctrinaires_ believed in a _governo misto_; only aristocrats desired a _governo stretto_; all but democrats dreaded a _governo largo_. And yet a new constitution must have been framed after one of these types, and the Florentines must have been educated to use it with discretion, before Lorenzo could have resigned his office of dictator with any prospect of freedom for the city in his charge. Such unselfish patriotism, in the face of such overwhelming difficulties, and in antagonism to the whole tendency of the age, was not to be expected from an oligarch of the Renaissance born in the purple, and used from infancy to intrigue.

Lorenzo was a man of marvelous variety and range of mental power. He possessed one of those rare natures fitted to comprehend all knowledge and to sympathize with the most diverse forms of life. While he never for one moment relaxed his grasp on politics, among philosophers he passed for a sage, among men of letters for an original and graceful poet, among scholars for a Grecian sensitive to every nicety of Attic idiom, among artists for an amateur gifted with refined discernment and consummate taste. Pleasure-seekers knew in him the libertine who jousted with the boldest, danced and masqueraded with the merriest, sought adventures in the streets at night, and joined the people in their May-day games and carnival festivities. The pious extolled him as an author of devotional lauds and mystery-plays, a profound theologian, a critic of sermons. He was no less famous for his jokes and repartees than for his pithy apothegms and maxims, as good a judge of cattle as of statues, as much at home in the bosom of his family as in the riot of an orgy, as ready to discourse on Plato as to plan a campaign or to plot the death of a dangerous citizen.

An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was the epitome of his nation’s most distinguished qualities, that the versatility of the Renaissance found in him its fullest incarnation. It was the duty of Italy in the fifteenth century not to establish religious or constitutional liberty, but to resuscitate culture. Before the disastrous wars of invasion had begun, it might well have seemed even to patriots as though Florence needed a Mæcenas more than a Camillus. Therefore, the prince who in his own person combined all accomplishments, who knew by sympathy and counsel how to stimulate the genius of men superior to himself in special arts and sciences, who spent his fortune lavishly on works of public usefulness, whose palace formed the rallying-point of wit and learning, whose council-chamber was the school of statesmen, who expressed his age in every word and every act, in his vices and his virtues, his crimes and generous deeds, can not be fairly judged by an abstract standard of republican morality. It is nevertheless true that Lorenzo enfeebled and enslaved Florence. At his death he left her socially more dissolute, politically weaker, intellectually more like himself, than he found her. He had not the greatness to rise above the spirit of his century, or to make himself the Pericles instead of the Pisistratus of his republic. In other words, he was adequate, not superior to, Renaissance Italy.

This, then, was the man round whom the greatest scholars of the third period assembled, at whose table sat Angelo, Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michael Angelo Buonarotti, Luigi Pulci. The mere enumeration of these names suffices to awake a crowd of memories in the mind of those to whom Italian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo’s villas, where this brilliant circle met for grave discourse or social converse, heightening the sober pleasures of Italian country life with all that wit and learning could produce of delicate and rare, have been so often sung by poets and celebrated by historians that Careggi, Caffagiolo, and Poggio a Cajano are no less familiar to us than the studious shades of Academe. “In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence,” writes the austere Hallam, moved to more than usual eloquence in the spirit-stirring beauty of his theme, “on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most congenial accompaniment.” As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole or linger beneath the rose trees that shed their petals from Careggi’s garden walls, once more in our imagination “the world’s great age begins anew”; once more the blossoms of that marvelous spring unclose. While the sun goes down beneath the mountains of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden, and Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and the large Italian stars come forth above, we remember how those mighty master spirits watched the sphering of new planets in the spiritual skies. Savonarola in his cell below once more sits brooding over the servility of Florence, the corruption of a godless church. Michael Angelo, seated between Ficino and Poliziano, with the voices of the prophets vibrating in his memory, and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears, rests chin on hand and elbow upon knee, like his own Jeremiah, lost in contemplation, whereof the after-fruits shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medicean tombs. Then, when the strain of thought, “unsphering Plato from the skies,” begins to weary, Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo’s last made _ballatta_.

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

[An Italian reformer, a member of the Dominican order of monks,
born 1452, executed 1498. His fervid eloquence as a preacher, and
his fierce denunciation of the vice and corruption of the Italian
Renaissance speedily made Savonarola a power to be reckoned with in
Florentine affairs. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the
prophet’s activity extended to political as well as religious
ideals, and he preached an austere theocratic republic and the
deposition of the Pope. The return of the Medici family to power
was the downfall of Savonarola’s hopes; and he and two of his
companion reformers were strangled and their bodies burned.]

We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillows of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola’s soul. Here for the first time he prophesied, “The Church will be scourged, then regenerated, and this quickly.” These are the celebrated three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic utterances adhered.

But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His voice was weak, his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him. Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had learned by heart each voice of the Old and New Testaments. Pondering on their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame which began to smolder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. “Midway upon the path of life,” he opened the book of Revelation; he figured to the people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue. He pictured to them their city flowing with blood. His voice, which now became the interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of Gascon de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia, her citizens recalled the apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.

As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of preaching. We have abundant material for judging what his features were, and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration. Fra Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of St. Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and grace of expression which his stern lineaments could assume. It is a picture of the sweet and gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar of God. In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen, uncompromising, beneath its heavy cowl. But the noblest portrait is an intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now to be seen in the Uffizi at Florence. Of this work Michael Angelo, himself a disciple of Savonarola, said that art could go no further. We are therefore justified in assuming that the engraver has not only represented fully the outline of Savonarola’s face, but has also indicated his peculiar expression.

A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders. Beneath it can be traced the curve of a long and somewhat flat skull, rounded into extraordinary fullness at the base and side. From a deeply sunken eye-socket emerges, scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that blazed with lightning. The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the stress of vehement emotion. The mouth has full, compressed, projecting lips. It is large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence; it is supplied with massive muscles, as if to move with energy and calculated force and utterance. The jaw-bone is hard and heavy, the cheek-bone emergent; between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestling in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener features of the classic orators. Savonarola was a visionary and a monk.

The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him. The wings of dreams have winnowed and withered that cheek as they passed over it. The spirit of prayer quivers upon those eager lips. The color of Savonarola’s flesh was brown; his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet strong; like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained, they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than by the evolution of fresh electricity. With Savonarola fasts were succeeded by trances, and trances by tempests of vehement improvisation. From the midst of such profound debility that he could scarcely crawl up the pulpit steps, he would pass suddenly into the plenitude of power, filling the Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his discourse by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon the lips of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx of embattled arguments and pointed illustrations, pouring his thought forth in columns of continuous flame, mingling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings of severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience to tears, at another freezing them with terror, again quickening their souls with prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ.

His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they advanced, the ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, till the sympathies of the whole people of Florence gathered round him, met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouth-piece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery _crescendo_, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar-steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing voice.

The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these sermons at times breaks off with these words: “Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on.” Pico della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of Savonarola’s voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through all its space with people, was like a clap of doom; a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his head stood on end, as he listened. Another witness reports: “These sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears that every one passed through the streets without speaking, more dead than alive.”

Such was the preacher, and such was the effect of his oratory. The theme on which he loved to dwell was this: “Repent! A judgment of God is at hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity--for the sins of the Church, whose adulteries have filled the world--for the sins of the tyrants who encourage crime and trample upon souls--for the sins of you people, you fathers and mothers, you young men, you maidens, you children that lisp blasphemy!” Nor did Savonarola deal in generalities. He described in plain language every vice; he laid bare every abuse; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of his hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults appallingly betrayed and ringed around with fire. He entered with particularity into the details of the coming woes. One by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies, the desolating wars that were about to fall on Italy. You may read pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives of what afterward took place in the sack of Prato, in the storming of Brescia, in the battle of the Ronco, in the cavern-massacre of Vicenza. No wonder that he stirred his audience to their center. The hell within them was revealed. The coming down above them was made manifest. Ezekiel and Jeremiah were not more prophetic. John crying to a generation of vipers, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” was not more weighty with the mission of authentic inspiration.

“I began,” Savonarola writes himself with reference to a course of sermons delivered in 1491--“I began publicly to expound the Revelation in our Church of St. Mark. During the course of the year I continued to develop to the Florentines these three propositions: That the Church would be renewed in our time; that before that renovation God would strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement; that these things would happen shortly.” It is by right of the foresight of a new age, contained in these three famous so-called conclusions, that Savonarola deserves to be named the Prophet of the Renaissance. He was no apostle of reform; it did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute the discipline or to criticise the authority of the Church. He was no founder of a new order; unlike his predecessors, Dominic and Francis, he never attempted to organize a society of saints or preachers; unlike his successors, Caraffe the Theatine, and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia for the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for education. Starting with simple horror at the wickedness of the world, he had recourse to the old prophets. He steeped himself in Bible studies. He caught the language of Malachi and Jeremiah. He became convinced that for the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent. From that conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief that a new age would dawn. The originality of his intuition consisted in this, that while Italy was asleep, and no man trembled for the future, he alone felt that the stillness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its tranquillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown from the very nostrils of the God of hosts.

CÆSAR BORGIA.

BY CHARLES YRIARTE.

[Son of Pope Alexander VI, at first prelate, then soldier and
statesman, born about 1457, died 1507. All the contemporary annals
concur in giving Cæsar Borgia nearly every private vice, and stamp
him as murderer, sensualist, and a man of ruthless ambition.
Successively made bishop and cardinal in his earlier years, he was
finally secularized and became Duke of Romagna and Valentinois.
After having dispossessed the rulers of many small principalities
and united them into a duchy, he is believed to have nourished the
scheme of founding a united Italy. After some years of vicissitudes
Cæsar lost his political ascendency by the election of a pope
inimical to his interests, and his military power by the jealousy
of the Kings of France and Spain. A consummate soldier and
politician, he showed during the short period during which he
exercised the functions of a ruler all the traits of a wise,
upright, and public-spirited sovereign, in shining contrast with
the hideous crimes which had blackened his career as a man. Cæsar
Borgia was the model on which Machiavelli drew his “Prince,” in the
celebrated politico-historical treatise of that title.]

Was Cæsar merely going straight before him, led by the insatiable ambition which lays hands upon all within its reach, or was he aiming at a distinct end, at the realization of a vast conception? Granting that he had no dreams of reconstituting the kingdom of Central Italy himself, Florence at least felt herself threatened. As long ago as his first campaign, when, after making himself master of Imola and Forli, he was still besieging Cesena preparatory to his entry into Pesaro and his progress to Rome by way of Urbino, the Florentine Republic had sent Soderini on a mission to him, to find out his intentions and his terms. The following year, with increased anxiety, as she felt herself approached more closely through the taking of Arezzo, which had fallen into the hands of Cæsar’s troops, she sent him Machiavelli, the most clear-sighted of her secretaries. The spectacle of these two champions face to face is one unique in history. From the day when he arrived in the camp, Machiavelli, who had recognized in the Duke of Valentinois a terrible adversary, felt that it was of vital interest to the state that he should not lose sight of him for a moment. As a point of fact, he never left his side up to the day when he saw him hunted down like a wild beast, vanquished by destiny, fettered beyond all power of doing harm to any one.

Of course, we may refuse to accept the verdict of the secretary of the Florentine Republic. Gregorovius, the celebrated author of the “History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages,” goes so far as to say that it is a reproach to the memory of the founder of political science that he made a blood-stained adventurer like Cæsar the “Italian Messiah”--the precursor, in a word, of Italian unity. Again, P. Villari, in his fine work “N. Machiavelli e suoi tempi,” says that the Florentine secretary, though he was an eyewitness of the actual deeds of Valentinois, made of him an imaginary personage, to whom he attributed the great ideas by which he himself was animated.

Still, we have a right to point out that in history purpose is controlled by action. A great number of the heroic deeds and of the portentous decisions which have determined the lofty destiny of empires have not been the consequence of long premeditation; they have often been the result of the passions and desires of mankind, or simply that of the need of action natural to a vigorous mind. Undoubtedly the immediate object of Alexander VI was the aggrandizement of his children, and the increase of their territory; he cared only for the power of the Church insomuch as it augmented that of his own family, but the deeds accomplished by father and son contributed none the less to reconstitute the temporal dominion of the Church--a work which, after its completion by Julius II, was destined to continue for more than three centuries, from 1510 to 1860.

The ambitious Cæsar himself was turning aside the current for his own particular advantage. When Julius II assumed the triple crown, the officers who held the fortresses of Romagna with one accord refused to give them up to the Church, considering them as the lawful conquest and personal property of their leader. Machiavelli looked only at the results; this is the justification of the opinion which he expresses concerning Valentinois in his book, “Il Principe,” in the “Legazione,” the “Descrizione dei fatti di Romagna,” and the “Decennale.” He was present when these things were done; he calculated the effect of the events he witnessed. From his observation of Cæsar at work, he noted the strength of his will and the resources of his mind, his strategic talents, and his administrative faculty; and as within certain limits the acts of Valentinois tended toward a distinct goal, an ideal not unlike that at which he himself aimed, the Florentine secretary was not the man to be squeamish about ways and means. What did it matter to him whose hand struck at the despots of the petty principalities of Italy? What cared he about the personal ambition of the man who, after overthrowing them, busied himself at once with the organization of their states, gave them laws, kept them under stern discipline, and ended by winning the affections of the people?

Once the idea of union was accepted, a prince of more blameless private life would succeed Cæsar, and there was always so much progress made toward the realization of the great conception. The Sforza had fallen; the princes of the houses of Este and Mantua were not equal to such a task; Lorenzo de’ Medici was no soldier. Impatient to reach his end, Machiavelli cast his eyes around in vain; nowhere could he find a personality capable of great undertakings. Cæsar alone, with his youth and daring, quick to seize an opportunity, free from scruples, imposing by his magnificence--Cæsar, who always went straight to the very core of a matter, a consummate soldier, full of high purposes and lofty schemes--seemed the one man capable of aiming at the goal and attaining it. From that time forward, the secretary made him the incarnation of his ideal prince, removing from his character the hideous elements which lurked beneath the fair exterior of the skillful diplomate and hardy soldier.

Of these “high purposes” of which Machiavelli speaks we have also other proofs, without speaking of the, in a manner, prophetic declaration of the young cardinal who, at twenty, fixed his eyes on the example of the Roman Cæsar, and took as his motto “CUM NUMINE CÆSARIS OMEN.” Some of the contemporaries of the Duke of Valentinois have expressed themselves in distinct terms regarding him. We have here some real revelations of his personal intentions which are free from the _après coup_ of the judgments pronounced by later historians. Speaking of the war which the Spaniards were carrying on to prevent the Pope from extending his dominions beyond the Neapolitan frontier, Signor Villari recognizes the fact that Alexander VI had declared his intention of making Italy “all one piece.” As for Cæsar, we read in the dispatches of Collenuccio, the ambassador of Ferrara, that Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, had taken into his service a secretary who had been for some time in Cæsar’s employ, and that this person averred that he had heard the Duke of Romagna say that he had “deliberately resolved to make himself _King of Italy_.” Here we have it in so many words.

As regards Machiavelli, could we collect in one page all the traits of character sketched from nature, scattered here and there in his dispatches to the Florentine Signoria, we should have a literary portrait of Valentinois, signed with the name of the most sagacious observer that ever honored Italian diplomacy. Cæsar had never learned the art of war, yet it would be impossible to pass with greater facility from the Consistory to the camp than he did. He was no mere warrior. Brave and impetuous as he was, he had more serious work in hand than the exchanging of sword-thrusts. He was at once a general, a strategist, and an administrator. Hardly had he taken a town when he made laws for it, and organized its administration; the breaches in its fortifications were repaired, and its defense and retention made as safe as if the conquest were final. No sooner had Imola, Forli, and Cesena fallen into his power, than he sent for Leonardo da Vinci to provide for a sufficient supply of water, to repair the fortresses, and to erect public monuments. He founded _Monts de Piété_, set up courts of justice, and did the work of civilization everywhere. The cities which fell under his sway never misunderstood his efforts; they looked back on the time of his supremacy with regret.

“This lord is ever noble and magnificent; when his sword is in his
hand, his courage is so great that the most arduous undertakings
seem easy to him; in the pursuit of glory or advantage he shrinks
from no toil or fatigue. He has the good-will of his soldiers; he
has secured the best troops in Italy: it is thus that he makes
himself formidable and victorious. Add to this, that fortune is
constantly favorable to him. He is of solitary habits, and he
possesses craft, promptness, the spirit of order and good fortune;
he has an extraordinary power of profiting by opportunity very
secret (_molto segreto_). He controls himself with prudence; (_gran
conoscitore della occasione_.”)

So Machiavelli warned the Florentines not to treat Cæsar “like the other barons, but as a new power in Italy, with whom they might conclude treaties and alliances, rather than offer him an appointment as _condottiere_.” The purely military element, which was Machiavelli’s speciality, did not escape the attention of the secretary. Once he had found the right man, the next requisite was the proper tool to work with--that is, the army; and so, when he saw these well-disciplined battalions, and the perfect order that reigned among them, the system of supplies secured by treaties, the regular equipment, and, above all, the formidable artillery, “in which department Cæsar alone is as strong as all the sovereigns of Italy put together,” the Secretary of the Republic recognized in Cæsar a born commander, for whom he prophesied the most lofty career.

Cæsar’s life was very short, and the vicissitudes of his fortune followed each other in rapid succession. In youth he was a murderer, in youth a conqueror, and in youth he died. His period of activity as a general extended from the autumn of 1499 to April, 1503, and his actual reign as Duke of Romagna lasted only two years.

On the 26th of January, 1500, having accomplished the first half of his task, he entered Rome as a conqueror--on which occasion a representation was given of the triumph of Cæsar with the various episodes of the life of the Roman Cæsar shown in _tableaux vivants_, suggested by the painter Mantegna. Eleven allegorical cars started from the Piazza Navona, Borgia himself, crowned with laurel, representing in his own person the conqueror of the world. Before his departure for his second campaign, he had, as we have already seen, caused the assassination of Lucrezia’s second husband, Alfonso de Bisceglie, to prepare for the third marriage of his sister, who was this time to become Duchess of Ferrara, and thus secure him an alliance which would forward his projects as Duke of Romagna. On the 27th of September, 1500, he left Rome again to complete his work, but returned quickly to take part in the war which the King of France had carried into the Neapolitan kingdom, when he possessed himself of the city of Capua, thus acquitting his obligation toward his protector, Louis XII. On the 29th of November his father changed his title of Vicar of the Holy See to that of Duke of Romagna.

The year 1503 proved an eventful one for him. No longer contented with his duchy, he prepared to attack Bologna and to threaten Florence. The day before he set forth on this great undertaking, on the 5th of August, he assisted, together with Alexander VI, at a banquet given in the vineyard of the Cardinal of Corneto, at the gates of Rome. On their return both were taken ill so suddenly that the cardinal was suspected of having poisoned them. The old man breathed his last on the 18th of August. Cæsar, younger and more vigorous, struggled against his malady with extraordinary energy. He wrapped himself, as in a cloak, in the still quivering carcass of a newly disemboweled mule to overcome the shiverings brought on by fever, and then was thrown, still covered with blood, into a vessel of iced water, to bring about the reaction necessary to save his life. This man of iron seemed to prevail against Nature herself. He knew that, once his father dead and himself unable to move, all his enemies would rush upon him at once to crush him. It was the decisive moment of his life. He first sent his bravo, Micheletto, to seize the pontifical treasure, thus making sure of a sum of three hundred thousand ducats, the sinews of resistance. The nine thousand men-at-arms under his orders, the one disciplined force in the city, made him master of Rome; the Sacred College set all their hopes upon this dying man, for he alone possessed sufficient authority to prevent anarchy.

It is a strange spectacle--the representatives of all nations accredited to the Holy See assembling at his bedside to negotiate with him, and Cæsar, weak and helpless as he is, making himself responsible for the preservation of order, while the Sacred College formed itself into conclave to elect the new Pope. In order not to put any pressure upon the cardinals by his presence, the Duke of Valentinois retired to Nepi. He left Rome, carried on the shoulders of his guards, livid and shivering with fever. Around his litter walked the ambassadors of Spain, France, and the empire, and mingled with the troops could be seen his mother Vanozza, his brother Squillace, and his sister-in-law Sancha--all three in danger of their lives in excited Rome. One of the Borgias had been killed, and Fabio Orsini, descendant of one of the Roman barons ruined by Alexander VI, had steeped his hands in the detested blood, and sworn to visit all who bore that hated name with the same fate.

CARDINAL WOLSEY.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Thomas Wolsey, born of low origin 1471, died 1530. After a
university education and taking priest’s orders he was rapidly made
private chaplain to Henry VII, and, on the accession of Henry VIII,
he became the favorite of the new king, and soon afterward lord
chancellor and cardinal. Wolsey’s diplomatic and ministerial genius
became one of the great powers in Europe while he managed English
affairs, a period of about eleven years, and at home his
magnificence rivaled that of the king himself. His fall from power
grew out of his opposition to the king’s marriage with Anne
Boleyn.]