Chapter XI (2)

All that follows sound like a passage in some ancient novel of adventure. The Duchess sends to Genoa to Il Moro, who, coming at night to Milan, is secretly admitted by the Duchess and her lover through the garden gate of the palace. Lodovico returns not alone; Bari is dead but, in place of the lost brother, Roberto di Sanseverino a great captain, dare-devil, incorrigible, comes at his heels: a man whom Simonetta had exiled with the sons of Francesco Sforza, a Ghibelline _à l’outrance_, a personal enemy of Cecco. These were the men whom Bonne, weary of her ancient counsellor’s respectability, called home, “through great simplicity,” as Commines declares, “supposing they would do the said Cecco no harm, and the truth is that so they had both of them sworn and promised.”

When Sanseverino and Il Moro were safe in the palace, the Duchess sent for Simonetta and told him all she had done. She must have been alarmed to see the horror and consternation on the faithful secretary.[111] “Duchessa Illustrissima,” said the man, with the quiet of despair, “he will cut off my head, that is all; a little time more and he will send you packing!” The Duchess probably remembered these words when, the third day after their return, Il Moro and Sanseverino caused the man who had signed their exile to be carried through the streets of Milan in a wine barrel, and then—still in this ridiculous tumbril—taken to the fortress at Pavia. There was Simonetta imprisoned; but once inside the gates his lot appeared to mend. Lodovico il Moro frequently rode across to Pavia to take counsel with the wise old statesman and learn his views of the world. He went indeed so often that the people of Milan began to murmur and to say that Lodovico, recalled by a Ghibelline _coup d’étât_, was a Guelf in disguise. To reassure them on that head, in the month of October, 1480, Lodovico intimated to Simonetta—not without many apologies—that, in deference to popular prejudice, he must even consent to lose his head. And in that very month, the first part of the secretary’s prophecy came true.

Footnote 111:

“Cecco ed i suoi colleghi oltra modo d’animo furono consternati”
(Corio, book vii.).

The second half was for a while delayed. Duchess Bonne found no reason to regret the step which had relieved her of an inconvenient old servant. “They used the lady very honourably in her judgment, seeking to content her humour in all things,” said Commines, who knew them all.

“But all matters of importance they two despatched alone, making her privy but to what pleased them; and no greater pleasure could they do her than to communicate nothing with her. For they permitted her to give this Anthony Tassino what she would; they lodged him hard by her chamber; he carried her on horseback behind him in the town; and in her house was nothing but feasting and dancing.” The Duchess had never led a happier life; but all that jollity endured but half a year. One day Lodovico took out his little nephews to walk in Milan; children are ever interested in things of warfare; he took them to the Rocca—the impregnable fortress—he took them inside; he did not bring them home.

English readers know what to expect when an ambitious uncle, in the Middle Ages, leaves two little Princes in the Tower. But no midnight assassin cut short the days of Giangaleazzo and his brother Ermes. They were more useful to their uncle, living—at least until he had made his own position surer: for at present he only ruled in Milan as Tutor and Regent of the little Duke. But, by whatever title, he ruled effectually, and soon he rid his palace of the tearful and frivolous presence of Madame Bonne, whom he exiled from her duchy “for immorality,” and who carried her inept remonstrances and her tarnished honour to find a none too chivalrous asylum at the court of her brother-in-law, Louis XI. of France, a man impatient of unsuccessful women.

Meanwhile Lodovico il Moro flourished in Milan. Under his cultured and dignified rule it became a magical city, a capital of masterpieces. There in 1483, Leonardo da Vinci took up his abode, cast his bronze statue of Francesco Sforza, painted pictures, and founded a school of Lombard painters, little less exquisite, mysterious, and sensual than himself. The Choir of Singers, whom Galeazzo Maria Sforza had brought across the Alps, increased, and the singing and playing of Milan became a thing of note. Temples and palaces sprang up as by enchantment; and learned humanists—grave Romans, bearded Greeks, astute Orientals—from all the centres of knowledge in the world, came to lecture on law, science, and the classics, in brilliant Milan. Nor was the Court of Venus, says Corio, less distinguished than the Court of Minerva. “All were willing to concede their best and fairest to the Court of Cupid; fathers their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters.” And the laxity of Lombard manners which had scandalized the very Court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in 1471, was not less abandoned, not less luxurious, although more natural and freer from cruelty under the sceptre of the Regent Lodovico who appears at the head of this princely retinue, a man majestic, suave, omniscient, as any Duke of Shakespeare’s plays.

And yet the real Duke was seldom seen, seldom heard. It was polite to suppose him still a child. None the less every one knew he had been born in the year 1469, amid incredible rejoicings; and many had seen the great Lorenzo de’ Medici when he came to the christening, and had looked on the magnificent necklace of diamonds which he had given the Duchess. “Ah, you shall be godfather to all my children!” the Duke Galeazzo Maria had cried with cordial _naïveté_. And now—ah, Time’s revenges!—the Duke was murdered, the Duchess in exile, and the babe whom all men had welcomed—a prisoner rather than a ward in the hands of the ambitious Regent!

Men began to murmur, and when Giangaleazzo was about eighteen his uncle found himself unable any longer to defer his marriage. Years ago the child had been betrothed to Isabel of Arragon, the granddaughter of the King of Naples. She came to Milan in 1487. A little later Lodovico himself married a young wife, Beatrice, daughter of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.

So long as there had been no woman at the head of the Court of Milan, there had been no discord. The young Duke, half a captive, had a doglike docile affection for his tyrant; he was content to yield his place and keep his title; and Lodovico was satisfied to have the place without the name. But Isabel of Arragon was a Neapolitan and a Spaniard—a nature passionate, arrogant, intense. In vain she urged her husband to assert his rights. He promised what she would, and then confessed their conversation to his uncle. When her child was born, and still the bride of Lodovico sat on the throne which should have been her throne—Isabel would no longer possess her soul in patience. This time she did not appeal to her husband—a beautiful youth, soft as silk, innocent as flowers, incapable of revenge or determination; she wrote to her father and her grandfather at Naples, men as different from him as men can be. She asserted her rights (“essendo giovane di grand’ animo”); she told them of the intolerable yoke of Lodovico—of her husband, a grown man and a father, yet kept in tutelage. She told them doubtless by her messenger (no word of personal complaint appears in her letter) what Corio tells us: that amid all the luxury of Milan, the Duke and the Duchess procured with difficulty the bare necessities of life. There was much indignation in her old home, and Alfonso wrote to Il Moro demanding the throne and government of Milan for his son-in-law. “You make a laughing-stock of my daughter—shall we endure to see our blood despised?”[112] Lodovico, as his manner was, returned a soft answer. And a year or two went by in procrastination and recrimination; but in 1493 the house of Naples, in defence of the young Duke, declared war upon the Regent of Milan.

Footnote 112:

Corio, book vii.

In another place I have spoken of the dismay and terror of that hour; the still rage of Lodovico—a rage not unmixed with joy and with the presentiment of success; the anger of his young wife, determined not to quit her throne, determined to take at last from the detested Isabel that one fine thing which as yet she had not dared to take from her: the title of Duchess. My readers know how, on the one hand, Lodovico sent to the Emperor admitting the illegal nature of the Sforza claim, and entreating him (for a consideration) to bestow it on him anew; how, on the other hand, he sent into France reminding Charles VIII. of the French claim to Naples; and how the French crossed the Alps in September; and how, in September also, very secretly, the Emperor’s Investiture arrived in Milan; and how on the morrow after the French left Milan the young Duke died (Teodoro di Pavia discovering in his body the evident signs of poison); and how the people, overawed by the neighbourhood of the French, were taught to acclaim Lodovico, consecrated thus alike by Imperial privilege and popular voice; so that he ruled at last as Duke in Milan.

Meanwhile Isabel and her little son had wandered about in exile, vainly seeking supporters. Success smiled on her rival, Beatrice, the mother of two sons who each, after many adventures, should rule as Duke of Milan. In September, 1496, while Isabel, her child in her arms, was discovering the futility of resistance, Beatrice at Vigevano was entertaining Maximilian. The great Emperor was at that time a man of thirty-seven, with long whitening hair, dressed in a long black velvet coat, a black woollen French cap, black stockings and sleeves; he wore no ornament save a little gold chain with the order of the Golden Fleece. He was under a vow to wear nothing but black until he could boast a Turkish victory. But, melancholy and grizzled Don Quixote as he appeared, Maximilian was no less an Emperor; and the Diary of Marino Sanuto shows us the splendour with which the Duke and Duchess of Milan made him welcome.

That splendour was very costly. Not only did it compel the Duke to levy grievous taxes (_grandissime exstrusione a li so populi_) on his subjects, so that they were like desperate men, desiring any change. If the expense of this entertainment was paid in tears, no less a price should be exacted for its fatigue. In September the Duchess Beatrice was pregnant: Marino Sanuto will conclude the story.[113]

Footnote 113:

“Nuove del mexe de Zener. 1497 O.S.

“Chome a Milano nel Castello a dì 3, la duchessa, moglie dil ducha
presente Lodovico, chiamata Beatrice, figlia dil ducha di Ferrara, poi
parturido uno fiol morto; etiam la era morta 5 hore dopo el puto. Di
la qual morte el ducha steva in gran mesticia, serade le fenestre in
una camera a lume di candela. Et è da saper, come vidi una lettera,
che detta Duchessa morite a dì 2 zener, a hora 6 di note, et che in
quel zorno era stada di bona voglia in carretta per Milano, et fatto
ballar in Castello fin hore 2 di note. Et lassò do soli figlioli, uno
chiamato Maximiliano ch’è Conte di Pavia e l’altro, Sforza, di anni 3.
La qual morte el Ducha non poteva tolerar, per il grande amor le
portava et diceva non si voller più curar ne de figlioli, ne di Stato,
ne di cossa mondana; et apena voleva viver. Stava in una camera per
mesticia tutta di panni negri, et cussi stete per 15 zorni. Et che in
questa notte instessa in che la Duchessa morite, caschò a terra li
muri dil suo zardin, non essendo sta ni vento ni terra moto; el qual
da alcuni fu tolto per mal augurio.”

“Diarii di Marino Sanudo, January 9, 1496.”

“News of the month of January, 1496 (Old Style).

“How at Milan, in the castle, on the third day of the month, the Duchess, wife of the reigning Duke Lodovico, Beatrice by name, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, was delivered of a still-born son; _etiam_ she herself was dead five hours after the child. And the said death hath plunged the Duke in heavy sorrow, so that he keepeth his room, the shutters closed and candles lit in daytime. And ’tis also reported—as I saw it set down in another letter—that the said Duchess died on the second day of the month, at six o’clock after noon; and that very day she had gone riding in her carriage through the streets of Milan, and had held a ball at the castle until two o’clock after dinner. And she hath left only two children behind her, boys—the one, Maximilian, Count of Pavey; the other, Sforza, three years of age. And the Duke cannot suffer the sorrow of this loss, for the great love he bore to his wife; and he saith he hath no heart for his children, nor his State nor for aught under the sun; so that almost is he weary of his life. And, out of sadness, he keepeth his chamber, which is hung all in black; and there for a fortnight he hath shut himself in. And ’tis said that, in the selfsame night the Duchess died, the walls of her garden fell crashing to the ground, and yet was there neither tempest, wind nor earthquake; which thing was held by many for a sign of very evil omen.”

* * * * *

Last year I was in Lombardy, and, as a faithful adherent of the Viscontis, I stayed a little in Pavia. I found it a rather gloomy little Lombard town, white-washed and paven. Here and there a wine-coloured wall or tower broke the pallid monotony of the streets. The famous fortress, where Isabel of Arragon eat her heart in bitterness so many years, still exists, much rebuilt and altered indeed, but always a mass of fine red colour. In Pavia, however, there was nothing so interesting to me as those phantoms of vanished Viscontis and long-supplanted Sforzas that seemed so strangely out of place in this sad little sordid university town. And among these ranks of tragic shadows, the least forgiven, the least beloved, was always the Duchess Beatrice.

I had known her too long, the youthful and charming Lady Macbeth of Lombardy. I knew her as well as one can know a person, familiar through the gossip of acquaintance, although unseen and distant. I had heard of her as a haughty and ambitious woman, accepting with a smile the crimes that placed the crown of Milan on her head. She appeared as some Herodias of Luini’s, exquisite and sinister. And yet I knew she had been dearly worshipped in her lifetime and long lamented in her tomb. There are such Sirens, heartless and chill themselves, but capable of seizing an honest love with the same hands that grasp at a blood-stained treasure. Such, in my eyes, was the adored and evil wife of Lodovico il Moro.

It was Christmas-time and cold; with difficulty I roused myself to visit the Certosa. It is six miles, I suppose, from Pavia. The wretched carriage slowly dragged along through the muddy country; and from the whitened window one felt rather than saw the immense desolation of the view. On either hand of the raised road, a sluggish canal, and beyond a monotonous landscape of brown marshy pastures and bright green rice fields flecked with water, across which the scant snow drifted. The road seemed to extend for ever in front, unbroken, unturning. Suddenly in the middle of the country the carriage stopped; I walked a few steps up a muddy lane. To the right over a wall there appeared a great dome, with rose-red minarets, with spires of pale red, ivory and marble, among innumerable shaft-like towers tipped with cream-white columns. It is the Certosa.

At another season and in better health I should have found much to linger over in the great façade of the Certosa, fantastic, incoherent as a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every inch of the front is covered thickly with ornament in high relief—Roman emperors and paladins of chivalry, eagles with praying angels on their outspread pinions, exquisite maidens floating full-length on a dolphin’s back, Sirens suckling their unearthly babes, hippogriffs, Prophets of Israel: strange, unexpected as the visions of delirium, they are assembled there. But, alone, in the bitter wind, I glanced at it all for a moment and entered the vast foundation of Giangaleazzo Visconti. Great halls, enormous, cold, spoiled as much as may be by the seventeenth century; a few good pictures by Borgognone, many bad ones; posthumous portraits of the great Viscontis: it was not so interesting as I had supposed.

Still I wandered on, making reflections on the difference of type in the Sforza and Visconti heads: the older tyrants keen-faced, refined with delicate, bone-less oval faces, and thin firm lips ridged out in a narrow line. There is something wolf-like in the long pointed noses, the pointed chins, low foreheads, as well as in the keen eyes, narrow and high in the head; altogether an interesting type, subtle, cruel, intellectual, and fierce. The Sforzas with their Wellington noses, their strongly marked eyebrows, prim-pursed lips and rounded chins, seem a square-faced kindly race of captains. Lodovico il Moro himself is there, with the fat face and fine chin of the elderly Napoleon, the delicate beak-like nose of Wellington; a small querulous neat-lipped mouth, and immense eyebrows, stretched like the talons of an eagle across the low forehead, complete the odd, refined physiognomy of the man. I looked at him with interest for a moment. But there, straight before me, stood the tomb of the wife he lost so young, the Duchess Beatrice.

To think that she is dead, and to think she was a woman! Impossible. She is a lively child, fallen asleep in playtime: motionless, but full of a contained vivacity. Her tumbled curls hang loosely round her shoulders, and stand up in a little frizz above the rounded childish forehead. As she lies there, a look of infantine candour is diffused over the soft, adorable, irregular features. She has straight, brief eyebrows like a little girl, but her closed eyelids are rounded like the petals of a thick white flower, and richly fringed with lashes. The little nose is of no particular shape—not quite a straight nose, but certainly not a snub; it is the prettiest nose at Court, with a rounded end like a child’s. The cheeks, too, are round apple-cheeks, not in the least like the Herodias of Luini; and round is the neat bewitching chin. But her chief beauty is her mouth—a mouth with the soft-closed lips of a dear child pretending to be asleep, yet smiling as if to say, “Soon I shall jump up and throw my arms round your neck, and you will be so surprised!”

The round head rises from a long plump throat. The small figure too is slender and plump at once, and very small, full of life still, it seems, under the pretty tight silk dress, with the slashed and purfled sleeves, and the long train of brocade, so lovingly, so carefully arranged not to encumber nor hide those little pattened feet, that were so fain of dancing and seem so ready to awake and dance again. This, then, is the famous Beatrice!—I looked and looked, at last I understood not only her, but the love of Lodovico: “And so, dear child, thou canst not live without a crown?—Ah well! What shouldst thou know of murder, dishonour, and the ruin of great states? Thou wilt never understand these gloomy things, and I shall pay the price—Ah God in heaven, I thank Thee for the gift of an immortal soul, since I may lose it for the pleasure of this child!”

Perhaps it was in this way that Lodovico reasoned; or perhaps it may be that at heart Macbeth is no less ambitious than his wife. Who knows? The wife, at least, must stand for something. At least, some share in the ruin of their country must be accorded to these three women—Bonne, who recalled Lodovico to Milan; Isabel, who inspired the war of Arragon and Sforza; and Beatrice, whose ambition urged her husband to invite the French to Italy.

THE FLIGHT OF PIERO DE’ MEDICI.

(OCTOBER-NOVEMBER, 1494.)

When, in the October of 1494, the King of France marched south from Asti, a torpor of stupefaction fell upon the princes of Italy. For the last three years there was no one of them but had coquetted more or less with France; there was no one of them but was the enemy of that arrogant house of Arragon which had lost Scutari to Venice, and which had dared reprove the usurpation of Milan by Lodovico Sforza. Charles was coming into Italy to dethrone these evil and malignant princes, “fathers of all treason,” as the author of “De Bello Gallico” has called them; “tyrants by whom I think that Nero himself would seem a saint.” But now that the French were actually in Lombardy, it struck the Italian despots with ominous force that he might not be content with only Naples. Few of them had any just title to their possessions; none of them, save Venice, could resist the power of France. “The princes of Italy,” wrote the Venetian secretary, “aghast at this passing of the mountains, tried to arrange that the King should pass no farther south, each one doubting for his own estate, and doubting most of all the enthusiasm of his own subjects.” For if the tyrants of Italy dreaded the advent of the French, the populace—the poor, starved, degraded slaves of these illegal despots—welcomed their coming with open arms. “They were so called and cried upon,” goes on our author, “so invoked by all the populace of Italy, that there was none who could withstand them, for all the people said _Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini_.”

Sorely he was needed, that _Flagellum Dei_, of whom the inspired voice of Savonarola prophesied daily in the great Cathedral of Florence. Sorely he was required. For that autumnal Italy which at their coming the Frenchmen found so fair, was no more than a waving green enchanted garden full of poisons—poisons for the body, swift or slow, used without scruple by Venice and Milan as a means to power, by Rome as an easy way to wealth, by Naples for the vile gratification of cruel passions. The terrible pages from the “Secreta Secretissima,” published by Lamansky in 1884, the folios of Marino Sanuto’s “Diaries,” the chronicles which fill the “Archivio Storico,” are full of tragic murders, the more tragical because so commonplace; and the quiet, impartial voice of Philippe de Commines falters when he speaks of “les pitiez d’Italie.”

Not only poison for the enviable, slavery for the conquered, famine and cruelty for the poor, and treachery among the princes of the earth; for all alike there was a corrupt and horrible dissolution of moral restraints. “There is no city in Italy,” records the Venetian, “not Rome or Naples, not Bologna, Florence, Milan, or Ferrara, not my own Venice even, that is holier than the Cities of the Plain.” Milan, with the frescoes of Leonardo fresh upon the walls; Venice, where the girl-madonnas of Giovanni Bellini were not yet all begun; Florence, peopled with the saints of Botticelli, with the angels of the aged Gozzoli upon the walls of Piero de’ Medici’s palace; Ferrara, where the youthful Ariosto dwelt—these homes of the brightest and the fairest art were morally no better than the Rome of the Borgias or the Naples of Ferdinand and Alfonso. They were vile dens of corruption. And yet the painted angels of Florence, the saints of Lombardy, were _not_ a mere external fashion, a refined hypocrisy; they were the expression of a movement in Italian hearts deeper than even this permeating evil—pure underneath the mask of their perversion. When the French came into Lombardy they found a contagion of spiritual enthusiasm among the people; they encountered holy women who neither ate, drank, nor slept, but dwelt in a continual ecstasy; and as they went along the roads the poorer inhabitants came out to meet them, bearing palms in their hands, and having on their pale and haggard faces a strange exalted smile. “Blessed is he,” they sang, “who cometh in the name of the Lord;” for the people were eager to be quit of the sin that hemmed them round. They embraced the knees of their conquerors, and suffered willingly a great deal of hardship at their hands, glad to be purified for ever by the Scourge of God.

Had it not been for the welcome that they met, the French could never have penetrated into Italy. They came ill-provided, without good generals, without money. “There’s not a penny in the treasury,” wrote Orleans to Ridolfi, in October, “and I have spent four thousand ducats of my own to pay the troops.” The Italian despots trusted that this lack of means would cause the French to retire before the winter, and Orleans was in secret treaty with them to this end. Milan, says this interested advocate, would be enough to satisfy the honour of France—Milan and a yearly homage paid by Naples to the Crown of France.[114] But these designs were frustrated by the enthusiasm with which the French were received in the invaded provinces. The women brought their jewels to pay the troops; the men threw open the gates of the cities; every difficulty was overridden, for, says Commines, touched with the grave exaltation of Italy, “God was Himself our leader: _Dieu monstroit conduire l’entreprise_.”

Footnote 114:

See Desjardins I., “Négociations diplomatiques dans la Toscane.”

“At our first arrival,” he goes on, “the people honoured us as saints, supposing all faith and virtue to be in us; but this opinion endured not long.” The rude French soldiery—Gascons, Normans, Swiss, and German mercenaries—pathetically ignorant of the fancied aureole playing round their weatherbeaten faces, marched through Italy as through any other conquered country. At Rapallo they put the town to the sword; they took Fivizzano by a murderous assault; they shed much blood at Pontremoli; for they could not understand that they seemed the Elect of Heaven, and they sought by fierce reprisals to keep up a military prestige. But if in Lombardy, in Lunigiana, the rude passage of the troops had to some extent dispelled the illusions of the people—where the army had not yet arrived the cities with open gates awaited it in holy awe. Arragon retired from point to point without a battle fought. The subjects of Catarina Sforza threatened her with rebellion if she refused submission to the French; Bologna, against the will of Bentivoglio, insisted on making peace with Charles. And in the Duomo of Florence, where Savonarola preached of the Purifying Scourge of God, the people shouted, “Franza, Franza!” where they were only used to sob in bitter patience, “Misericordia.” And to these enthusiasts, impatient of Medicean luxury, it was no drawback that the King, their deliverer, was a mere ugly youth, “more a monster than a man,” as Guicciardini plainly states, quite uncultured, and knowing neither Greek nor Latin. “In fact,” as the Milanese Corio remarked, “an uninstructed person, though none the less able to address his soldiery in telling terms, so that for love of him they dash upon the enemy, shouting, ‘Alive or dead!’” In the autumn of 1494 this ugly, bright-eyed youth had inspired an equal devotion in the populace of Florence.

The people were led by the monk Savonarola; but many of the old Florentine families (the Nerli, Gualterotti, Sonderini, Capponi) were no less anxious than the people to banish their _parvenu_ tyrant. Out of all the crowd of monks, enthusiasts, bankers, patricians, and politicians which made up the popular party, two _silhouettes_ stand strongly forth. One is the preacher Savonarola—a man of middle height, of dark complexion, and sanguine, bilious temperament. At forty-two his face is lined with seams and wrinkles—a harsh, strong face with a sweet expression, like Samson’s honey in the lion’s mouth; eyes that flash and flame from under shaggy black eyebrows and shed their spiritual gleam over the heavy Roman nose and the large mouth with the loose, thick lips of the orator firmly closed and drawn into a painful smile; a kind, noble, spiritual, tragic face, with something mad in it, or something at the least that must pass for mad in this uninspired and transitory world.

This was the man who for a good four years was virtually the ruler of Florence; this was the man who, more than any other, helped on the cause of France in Italy. “A man of holy life,” says Commines, who knew him. And Guicciardini describes him: “Full of charity, of natural goodness, and religion—so clever in philosophy, one would think he himself had had the making of it; without a trace of lust or avarice; but if he had a vice it was simulation, the prompting of a proud ambition.” One more voice arrests us: “A treacherous friar, worthy the end of the wicked.” But it is Marino Sanuto who speaks, the political enemy of Savonarola and a personal stranger to his qualities.

Behind the strong profile of the friar we note another head, also worthy of remark. This is Piero Capponi, a man of old Florentine family, republican by descent. Sturdily built and square, with brilliant eyes, he has a certain air of a courser sniffing battle; brief and resolute in speech, vigorously mature in age, he seems the very embodiment of virile energy. He is rich, for an astrologer at his birth having foretold his death in battle, he was persuaded by his father to devote himself to commerce. The man worked at money-getting with the restless, dominant force he put into everything he did, and made his fortune in a sort of fury. Then he threw up his career, having enough, and entered public life at thirty years of age. A republican, his restless need of activity made him accept the Medicean service. He had been ambassador in France, and was as French as Savonarola. “See them near, like ghosts,” he used to say, “and there is nothing to be afraid of in these French.” Although at this time the right arm of the Republic, his patrician birth, his acquaintance with the magnificence of princes, made him recoil from the extremer measures of the monk. A man of the greatest spirit, the staunchest energy, the very width of his views and his natural love of change made him a danger to a peaceful but imperfect Government. Born to be a great captain, he loved, above all things, a difficult campaign; and he spent his life in fighting alternately his enemies and his friends, until at last the astrologer’s prediction, true in spite of human prudence, set a bridle on his martial soul.

These two men represent the two parties who chiefly desired the advent of the French—the enthusiasts, the poor, the children of Savonarola, and the powerful burghers, as rich and may be better born than Piero de’ Medici, who resented their tyrant’s views on the republic, who resented almost more his alliance with the detested Spanish autocrats of Naples. On the other side—the side of the Orsini, of Cardinal Bibbiena, of Bernardò del Nero, and the aristocratic party, there is but one man that can arrest us as Capponi or Savonarola must arrest us, and that is Piero de’ Medici himself.

Piero and the King of France were mortal enemies; the King of Naples had no more resolved ally than Medici, though the French inclinations of the city prevented him from showing the true colour of his opinions. He was, in fact, “immoderately bound up with Arragon, and determined to chance the same fortune,” as Guicciardini tells us; since in return for this alliance he had arranged that Ferdinand of Naples should support him in turning his old republic into a new monarchy. Naples in those days represented in Italy the kingdom as distinguished from the Signory; it was the natural pole-star of the aristocrat. And Piero was drawn to the south as much by sentiment as by inclination; his mother Clarice, his young wife Alfonsina, both came of the Roman family of Orsini.

In 1494 Piero de’ Medici was about four-and-twenty years of age. He was beautiful in person and very vigorous. He was clever at games and sports; he had a charming way of pronouncing his words, a winning voice, and a great facility in making impromptu verses. But this handsome, graceful personage was not popular in Florence. He was haughty and arrogant beyond expression, subject to furies of animal anger, proud, and cruel. He would have men waylaid at night in the street and beaten violently by private bravos. He was so absolute, that even in matters he did not pretend to understand, he would govern all according to his fancy. And this aristocrat of a free republic was as fiery, vain, careless, and impatient as he was presumptuous. While the people murmured “Franza” with white excited faces; while Savonarola was thundering his prophecies of the _Flagellum Dei_; while news of the massacres and the irresistible advance of France struck a religious terror into Tuscany—the young head of the state left the garrisons unprovided and unguarded; not a week’s provisions in Sarzana or Pietra Santa; not a handful of infantry in the fastnesses of the hills. While winds of rebellion, war, and outrage swept the city, he, the one man unmoved, was to be seen as usual playing _pallone_ in the public streets, a light-minded aristocrat, full of a certain easy and handsome bravado, caring for no one’s safety, not even for his own.

But even Piero, as he knocked the tennis-ball against the palace front, must now and then have felt a certain twinge of anxiety. For every day brought news of the farther retreat of Arragon, and only success, and brilliant success, could justify the Arragonese alliance in the eyes of the Florentines. Already that aristocratic alliance had touched the mercantile republic in a sensitive point: in June the King of France had expelled the Florentine bankers and merchants out of his kingdom. This meant ruin to many honourable families, and decided the burghers to join the party of Savonarola, so weakening the Medicean faction that people whispered it was Capponi who had thus advised King Charles, in order to disgust the impoverished merchants with their tyrant. But the documents published in Desjardins contradict this supposition. It was from Lodovico il Moro, the determined enemy of Florence and of Piero, that King Charles accepted this happy suggestion.

The burghers were all for France, in order to regain their commerce. The people, under Savonarola, the Republican families under Capponi, desired nothing more than the advent of King Charles. The very cousins of Piero himself had become so French, that a year ago he had exiled them to their country villas, where they lived in comfortable durance, surrounded by the light of popular martyrdom. To resist all these varied forces, Piero, on his side, could count a few old friends of his father, such as Bernardò del Nero and his secretary Bibbiena, an ambitious priest, and his wife’s brother, Pagolo Orsini, captain of the forces of the republic.

The situation was grave indeed, but he took it lightly, with a facile temerity that would not condescend to prudence. On the 3rd of October his ambassador at Milan wrote that the French spoke of wintering in Pisa and Sarzana. Yet not a single fortress had a week’s provisions. So late as the 22nd of October, in answer to a last appeal from France, he sent the Bishop of Arezzo to King Charles with a vague, exasperating, indecisive answer. The same week the two cousins of Piero escaped from their villas, and rode post-haste to the French camp. “Sire,” they cried to Charles, “be not angry with Florence. The tyrant is against you, but you have the faithful devotion of the people.” The King was well inclined to believe the two young men with whom he had often practised, and who had suffered a year’s imprisonment for his sake. “We do not confuse the people of Florence with the governor,” answered the Council. “The last alone is the King’s enemy.” And, departing from Piacenza, the armies of France marched on the Florentine territories.

In a few days they were on the Tuscan border. At Fivizzano and Pontremoli they had so avenged a slight resistance that the gates flew open at their approach. Who dare resist the Scourge of God? Terror and awe bent every head before them. In Florence the populace surged along the narrow streets, and declared they would not resist the King of France. Three days after Piero had sent off the Bishop of Arezzo, a popular tumult seemed ready to burst at any moment.

What could he do? The French were now within fifty miles of Pisa, and though the mountain fortresses ought to have kept them at bay all the winter long, Piero remembered too late that he had forgotten to provision them; that he had neglected to call the Pisan hostages into Florence, and that Pisa hated her cruel mistress, and was certain to revolt to France. Only one course suggested itself to the desperate young man, and this course was so adventurous, romantic, and unusual, that it captivated at once his unsteady imagination. Many years ago, when Arragon had worsted Florence on the battlefield, Lorenzo de’ Medici had gone as his own ambassador to Naples, running, it is true, a great risk of steel or poison, but by his fascinating address making a devoted friend of an exasperated enemy. Piero determined to follow the example of his father. On the 26th of October he heard that the French were arriving before Sarzana, within two days’ march of Florence. On the evening of that day the tyrant of Florence secretly escaped from his own palace, left the city in the dusk of evening, and rode through the chill autumn night as far as Empoli.