Chapter XIV: The “last Day of Italy” (4)

Bourbon encamped in the fields near Rome on the 5th of May and with military insolence sent a trumpeter to the pope to ask for passage through the city, that he might lead his army into the kingdom of Naples. The next day at daybreak he attacked Borgo on the side of the mountain and the church of Santo Spirito, resolved to conquer or die (for indeed no other hope was left him) and a fierce battle was begun. Fortune favoured him in approaching, for a thick fog arose before day which enabled him more securely to establish his army in the place where the battle commenced. From the first Bourbon fought desperately at the head of his troops, not only because he had no refuge if the victory failed him but also because it appeared to him that the German infantry proceeded coldly to the assault. The assault was but begun when he was wounded by an arquebuse and fell dead.[b] The fall of Bourbon was due to Benvenuto Cellini, if we may accept the statements of that somewhat egotistical autobiographer. Cellini was participating in the defence of Rome and has left us a vivid account of many of its incidents. He tells us that he had gone with one Alexander del Bene to the walls of Campo Santo, and that finding the enemy irresistible they had determined to return with the utmost speed, but that before doing so he was determined to perform some manly action.[a] “Having taken aim with my piece,” he says, “where I saw the thickest crowd of the enemy, I fixed my eye on a person who seemed to be lifted up by the rest: but the misty weather prevented me from distinguishing whether he was on horseback or on foot. Then turning suddenly about to Alexander and Cecchino, I bade them fire off their pieces, and showed them how to escape every shot of the besiegers. Having accordingly fired twice for the enemy’s once, I softly approached the walls, and perceived that there was an extraordinary confusion among the assailants, occasioned by our having shot the duke of Bourbon: he was, as I understood afterwards, that chief personage whom I saw raised by the rest.”[c] The fall of Bourbon, far from cooling the ardour of his soldiers did but increase it, and after fighting furiously for two hours they entered Borgo at last, assisted by the weakness of the defences and the faint resistance of the enemy.

As it is always difficult to carry an assault without cannon, the besiegers lost about a thousand men. As soon as the imperial army had forced an entrance, everyone took to flight, and many made for the castle, leaving the suburbs at the mercy of the conquerors. The pope, who awaited the event in the Vatican, when he heard that the enemy was in the city, immediately fled to the castle with many cardinals. Here he considered whether he should stay where he was, or if he might escape through Rome with the light cavalry of his guard and reach a place of safety.

News was brought him by Berard de Padone, of the imperial army, of the death of Bourbon and that the troops, full of consternation at their loss, were disposed to come to terms. The pope sent an envoy to their chiefs and unfortunately gave up the idea of flight, while he and his captains had never been so irresolute in taking measures for their own defence as they were on this occasion. The Spaniards, finding no attempt was made to defend the Trastevere, entered it at noon without any resistance. They had no difficulty in entering Rome by the Ponte Sisto at five o’clock the same evening. Here, as is usual in such cases, everything was in confusion, and all the court and citizens had taken to flight except those who trusted in the name of their party, and certain cardinals who were known for their adherence to Cesare, and therefore thought themselves safer than the rest. Then the soldiers sacked the city on every side without distinction of friend or foe.

It is impossible to estimate the extent of the spoil because of the accumulation of riches, and rare and precious things belonging to the courtiers and merchants, and of the quality and number of the prisoners for whom heavy ransoms were paid. But worst of all, the soldiers, especially the Germans, who were rendered cruel and insolent by their hatred for the Roman church, seized several prelates and having dressed them in their pontifical robes and the insignia of their office, mounted them on asses and led them with scorn and derision through the streets of Rome.

Four thousand men or thereabout perished in the battle or in the fury of pillage. The palaces of the cardinals were all sacked (including that of Cardinal Colonna, who was not with the army) excepting those palaces in which the merchants had taken refuge with their personal effects and those of many others, and which were spared from pillage upon payment of large sums of money. Many who had thus compounded with the Spaniards were pillaged by the Germans or obliged to compound with them also. The marchioness of Mantua paid 50,000 ducats to save her palace, this sum being furnished by the merchants who had taken refuge there; it was rumoured that 10,000 went to her son Don Ferrand. The cardinal of Siena, who had inherited his adherence to the emperor from his ancestors, was taken prisoner by the Germans, who sacked his palace though he had compounded for it with the Spaniards. They led him bareheaded through Borgo with many blows, and he only escaped from their hands by payment of 5,000 ducats. The cardinals of Minerva and Ponzetto met with a similar misfortune; they were taken prisoner by the Germans and paid their ransom, but they were first led through Rome in a vile procession. The Spanish and German prelates, who did not expect insult from their compatriots, were taken prisoner and treated as cruelly as the rest.

On every side arose the cries and lamentations of Roman ladies and nuns dragged off by bands of soldiers to satisfy their lust. Everywhere arose the wails of those who were being horribly tortured to force them to pay ransom, and reveal where their property was concealed. All the holy things, the sacrament, and relics of saints, of which the churches were full, lay scattered on the ground stripped of their ornaments and further outraged by the barbarous Germans. Whatever escaped the soldiers (which was everything of little value) was pillaged by the peasants of the lands of Colonna who arrived later; but Cardinal Colonna who arrived next day saved many ladies who had taken refuge in his palace. It was said that the spoil in money, gold, silver, and precious stones amounted to 1,000,000 ducats, and that the ransoms amounted to a much higher sum.

While the imperial army was taking Rome, Count Guido at the head of the light cavalry and eight hundred arquebusiers appeared on the Ponte de Salara, expecting to enter the city that evening; for in spite of the letter of the bishop of Verona he had continued on his way, not wishing to lose the glory of having helped to save the capital. But being informed of what had occurred, he resolved to withdraw to Orticoli where he rejoined the rest of his troops. As it is human nature to judge mildly and favourably of one’s own actions and to look with the utmost severity on the actions of others, there were some who greatly blamed the count for having missed so good an opportunity; for the imperial troops all intent on pillage, ransacking the houses, seeking hidden treasures, taking prisoners and removing their booty to a safe place, were scattered about the city in disorder, heedless of their banners and of the commands of their captains. Therefore many believed that if Count Guido had promptly led his men into Rome and marched upon the castle, which was not besieged nor guarded by any from without, he might not only have liberated the pope but also have achieved a more glorious success. The enemy was so intent on plunder that it would have been difficult to assemble a large number upon any sudden alarm. This was most certainly proved a few days later when by command of the captains, or upon some alarm, the call to arms was sounded and not a soldier rallied to his banner. However, men often persuade themselves that if a certain act had been done or omitted, certain results would have followed; whereas if the matter had been put to the proof, experience would often show them their mistake.[b]

[Sidenote: [1527-1528 A.D.]]

The capital of Christendom was thus abandoned to a pillage unparalleled in the most calamitous period--that of the first triumph of barbarism over civilisation: neither Alaric the Goth nor Genseric the Vandal had treated it with like ferocity. 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 brutal 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.

The 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. On the 18th of August, 1527, Henry VIII of England and Francis I contracted the Treaty of Amiens, for the deliverance, as the two sovereigns announced, of the pope. A powerful French army, commanded by Lautrec, entered Italy in the same month, by the province of Alessandria. They surprised Pavia on the 1st of October, and during eight days barbarously pillaged that great city, under pretence of avenging the defeat of their king under its walls. After this success, Lautrec, instead of completing the conquest of Lombardy, directed his march towards the south; renewed the alliance of France with the duke of Ferrara, to whose son was given in marriage a daughter of Louis XII, sister of the queen of France. He secured the friendship of the Florentine Republic, which, on the 17th of the preceding May, had taken advantage of the distress and captivity of the pope to recover its liberty and to re-establish its government in the same form in which it stood in 1512. The pope, learning that Lautrec had arrived at Orvieto, escaped from the castle of St. Angelo on the 9th of December, and took refuge in the French camp. The Spaniard Alarcon had detained him captive, with thirteen cardinals, during six months, in that fortress; and, though the plague had broken out there, he did not relax in his severity. After having received 400,000 ducats for his ransom, instead of releasing him, as he had engaged to the next day, it is probable that he suffered him to escape, lest his own soldiers should arrest him in order to extort a second ransom.

Lautrec passed the Tronto to enter the Abruzzi with his powerful army on the 10th of February, 1528. 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 in 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 Lautrec as a deliverer. He would probably have obtained complete success, if Francis had not just at this moment withheld the monthly advance of money which he had promised. That monarch, identifying his pride of royalty with prodigality, exhausted his finances in pleasures and entertainments; his want of economy drew on him all his disasters.

Lautrec, on his side, although he had many qualities of a good general, was harsh, proud, and obstinate: he piqued himself on doing always the opposite of what he was counselled. Disregarding the national peculiarities of the French, he attempted in war to discipline them in slow and regular movements. He lost valuable time in Apulia, where he took and sacked Melfi, on the 23rd of March, with a barbarity worthy of his adversaries, the Spaniards: he did not arrive till the 1st of May before Naples. The prince of Orange had just entered that 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, Lautrec, 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 imperial fleet was destroyed, on the 28th of May, in the gulf of Salerno, by Filippino Doria, who was in the pay of France. 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 at the same time in the French camp. The soldiers, under a burning sun, surrounded with putrid water, condemned to every kind of privation, harassed by the light cavalry of the enemy, infinitely superior to theirs, sank, one after the other, under pestilential fevers. In the middle of June, the French reckoned in their camp twenty-five thousand men; by the 2nd of August there did not remain four thousand fit for service. At this period all the springs were dry, and the troops began to suffer from hunger and thirst. Lautrec, ill as he was, had till then supported the army by his courage and invincible obstinacy; but, worn out at last, he expired in the night of the 15th of August: almost all the other officers died in like manner. The marquis of Saluzzo, on whom the command of the army 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 returning to France.

[Sidenote: [1528-1529 A.D.]]

During the same campaign another French army, conducted by François de Bourbon, count of 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 cold-blooded ferocity of Leyva, who still commanded the Spanish garrison. Leyva seized all the provisions brought in from the country; and, to profit by the general misery, resold them at an enormous price. Genoa had remained subject to the French, and was little less oppressed; none of its republican institutions was any longer respected: but a great admiral still rendered it illustrious. Andrea Doria had collected a fleet, on board of which he summoned all the enterprising spirits of Liguria: his nephew Filippino, who had just gained a victory over the imperialists, was his lieutenant. The Dorias demanded the restoration of liberty to their country as the price of their services: unable to obtain it from the French, they passed over to the imperialists. Assured by the promises of Charles, they presented themselves, on the 12th of September, before Genoa, excited their countrymen to revolt, and constrained the French to evacuate the town: they made themselves masters of Savona on the 21st of October, and a few days afterwards of Castelletto. Doria then proclaimed the republic, and re-established once more the freedom of Genoa, at the moment when all freedom was near its end in Italy. The winter passed in suffering and inaction. The following year, Antonio de Leyva surprised the count de St. Pol at Landriano, on the 21st of June, 1529, and made him prisoner, with all the principal officers of the French army. The rest dispersed or returned to France. This was the last military incident in this dreadful war.

Peace was ardently desired on all 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 Louise of Savoy, the mother of the king of France, met at Cambray; and, in 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. Not only had Suleiman invaded Austria, and, on the 13th of September, arrived under the walls of Vienna, but the reformation of Luther excited in all the north of Germany a continually increasing ferment. 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 Alessandro de’ Medici, who was to marry an illegitimate daughter of Charles V. On the 5th of August following, Louise and Margaret signed the Treaty of Cambray, by which France abandoned, without reserve, all its 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 terms: 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 23rd of December, 1529, Charles granted peace to the Venetians; who restored him only some places in Apulia, and gave up Ravenna and Cervia to the pope. On the 20th of March, Alfonso 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 Alfonso the possession of Modena, Reggio, and Rubiera, as fiefs of the empire; and he made the pope give him the investiture of Ferrara. On the 25th of March, 1530, a diploma of the emperor raised the marquisate of Mantua to a duchy, in favour of Federigo de Gonzaga. The duke of Savoy and the marquis of 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 favour. The republics of Genoa, Siena, and Lucca had permission to vegetate under the imperial protection; and Charles, having received from the pope, at Bologna, on the 22nd 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.

THE FALL OF FLORENCE

[Sidenote: [1527-1530 A.D.]]

The Florentines who, from 1512, had been victims of all the faults of Leo X and Clement VII, who had been drawn into all the oscillations of their policy, and called upon to make prodigious sacrifices of money for projects with which they had not even been made acquainted, were taught under these popes to detest the yoke of the Medici. When the constable of Bourbon approached their walls in his march to Rome, on the 26th of April, 1527, they were on the point of recovering their liberty; the cardinal De Cortona, who commanded for the pope at Florence, had distributed arms among the citizens for their defence, and they determined to employ them for their liberation; but the terror which this army of brigands inspired did the cardinal the service of repressing insurrection. When, however, they heard soon after of the taking of Rome, and of the captivity of the pope, all the most notable citizens presented themselves in their civic dress to the cardinal De Cortona; declared firmly, but with calmness, that they were henceforth free; and compelled him, with the two bastard Medici whom he brought up, to quit the city. It was on the 17th of May, 1527, that the lieutenant of Clement obeyed; and the constitution, such as it existed in 1512, with its grand council, was restored without change, except that the office of gonfalonier was declared annual. The first person invested with this charge was Niccolo Capponi, a man enthusiastic in religion, and moderate in politics; he was the son of Pietro Capponi, who had braved Charles VIII. In 1529, he was succeeded by Baldassare Carducci, whose character was more energetic, and opinions more democratic. Carducci was succeeded, in 1530, by Raffaelle Girolami, who witnessed the end of the republic.

Florence, during the whole period of its glory and power, had neglected the arts of war; it reckoned for its defence on the adventurers whom its wealth could summon from all parts to its service; and set but little value on a courage which men, without any other virtue, were so eager to sell to the highest bidder. Since the transalpine nations had begun to subdue Italy to their tyranny, these hireling arms sufficed no longer for the public safety. Statesmen began to see the necessity of giving the republic a protection within itself. Macchiavelli, who died on the 22nd of June, 1527, six weeks after the restoration of the popular government, had been long engaged in persuading his fellow citizens of the necessity of awakening a military spirit in the people; it was he who caused the country militia, named _l’ordinanza_, to be formed into regiments. A body of mercenaries, organised by Giovanni de’ Medici, a distant kinsman of the popes, served at the time as a military school for the Tuscans, among whom alone the corps had been raised; it acquired a high reputation under the name of _bande nere_. No infantry equalled it in courage and intelligence. Five thousand of these warriors served under Lautrec in the kingdom of Naples, where they almost all perished. When, towards the year 1528, the Florentines perceived that their situation became more and more critical, they formed, among those who enjoyed the greatest privileges in their country, two bodies of militia, which displayed the utmost valour for its defence. The first, consisting of three hundred young men of noble families, undertook the guard of the palace, and the support of the constitution; the second, of four thousand soldiers drawn only from among families having a right to sit in the council general, were called the civic militia; both soon found opportunities of proving that generosity and patriotism suffice to create, in a very short period, the best soldiers. The illustrious Michelangelo was charged to superintend the fortifications of Florence; they were completed in the month of April, 1529. Lastly, the ten commissioners of war chose for the command of the city Malatesta Baglioni of Perugia, who was recommended to them as much for his hatred of the Medici, who had unjustly put his father to death, as for his reputation for valour and military talent.

Clement VII sent against Florence, his native state, 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 in the month of September, 1529, and took possession of Cortona, Arezzo, and all the upper Val d’Arno. On the 14th of October the prince of Orange encamped in the plain of Ripoli, at the foot of the walls of Florence; and, towards the end of December, Ferdinando di Gonzaga led on the right bank of the Arno another imperial army, composed of twenty thousand Spaniards and Germans, which occupied without resistance Pistoia and Prato. Notwithstanding the immense superiority of their forces, the imperialists did not attempt to make a breach in the walls of Florence; they resolved to make themselves masters of the city by a blockade. The Florentines, on the contrary, animated by preachers who inherited the zeal of Savonarola, and who united liberty with religion as an object of their worship, were eager for battle; they made frequent attacks on the whole line of their enemies, led in turns by Malatesta Baglioni and Stefano Colonna. They made nightly sallies, covered with white shirts to distinguish each other in the dark, and successively surprised the posts of the imperialists; but the slight advantages thus obtained could not disguise the growing danger of the republic. France had abandoned them to their enemies; there remained not one ally either in Italy or the rest of Europe; while the army of the pope and emperor comprehended all the survivors of those soldiers who had so long been the terror of Italy by their courage and ferocity, and whose warlike ardour was now redoubled by the hope of the approaching pillage of the richest city in the West.

The Florentines had one solitary chance of deliverance. Francesco Ferrucci, one of their citizens, who had learned the art of war in the _bande nere_, and joined to a mind full of resources an unconquerable intrepidity and an ardent patriotism, was not shut up within the walls of Florence; he had been named commissary-general, with unlimited power over all that remained without the capital. Ferrucci was at first engaged in conveying provisions from Empoli to Florence; he afterwards took Volterra from the imperialists, and, having formed a small army, proposed to the signoria to seduce all the adventurers and brigands from the imperial army, by promising them another pillage of the pontifical court, and succeeding in that, to march at their head on Rome, frighten Clement, and force him to grant peace to their country. The signoria rejected this plan as too daring. Ferrucci then formed a second, which was little less bold. He departed from Volterra, made the tour of Tuscany, which the imperial troops traversed in every direction, collected at Livorno, Pisa, the Val di Nievole, and in the mountains of Pistoia, every soldier, every man of courage, still devoted to the republic; and, after having thus increased his army, he intended to fall on the imperial camp before Florence and force the prince of Orange, who began to feel the want of money, to raise the siege. Ferrucci, with an intrepidity equal to his skill, led his little troop, from the 14th of July to the 2nd of August, 1530, through numerous bodies of imperialists, who preceded, followed, and surrounded him on all sides, as far as Gavinana, four miles from San Marcello, in the mountains of Pistoia. He entered that village about midday, on the 2nd of August, with three thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry. The prince of Orange at the same time entered by another gate, with a part of the army which besieged Florence. The different corps, which had on every side harassed Ferrucci in his march, poured in upon him from all quarters; the battle instantly began, and was fought with relentless fury within the walls of Gavinana. Philibert de Châlons, prince of Orange, in whom that house became extinct, was killed by a double shot, and his corps put to flight, but other bands of imperialists successively arrived, and continually renewed the attack on a small force exhausted with fatigue; two thousand Florentines were already stretched on the field of battle, when Ferrucci, pierced with several mortal wounds, was borne bleeding to the presence of his personal enemy, Fabrizio Maramaldi, a Calabrese, who commanded the light cavalry of the emperor. The Calabrese stabbed him several times in his rage, while Ferrucci calmly said, “Thou wouldst kill a dead man!” The republic perished with him.

[Sidenote: [1530-1531 A.D.]]

When news of the disaster at Gavinana reached Florence, the consternation was extreme. Baglioni, who for some days had been in treaty with the prince of Orange, and who was accused of having given him notice of the project of Ferrucci, declared that a longer resistance was impossible, and that he was determined to save an imprudent city, which seemed bent upon its own ruin. On the 8th of August he opened the bastion, in which he was stationed, to an imperial captain, and planted his artillery so as to command the town. The citizens in consternation abandoned the defence of the walls to employ themselves in concealing their valuable effects in the churches; and the signoria acquainted Ferdinando di Gonzaga, who had succeeded the prince of Orange in the command of the army, that they were ready to capitulate. The terms granted on the 12th of August, 1530, were less rigorous than the Florentines might have apprehended. They were to pay a gratuity of 80,000 crowns to the army which besieged them, and to recall the Medici. In return, a complete amnesty was to be granted to all who had acted against that family, the pope, or the emperor. But Clement had no intention to observe any of the engagements contracted in his name. On the 20th of August, he caused the parliament, in the name of the sovereign people, to create a balia, which was to execute the vengeance of which he would not himself take the responsibility; he subjected to the torture, and afterwards punished with exile or death, by means of this balia, all the patriots who had signalised themselves by their zeal for liberty. In the first month 150 illustrious citizens were banished; before the end of the year there were more than one thousand sufferers; every Florentine family, even among those most devoted to the Medici, had some one member among the proscribed.

Alessandro, the bastard Medici, whom Clement had appointed chief of the Florentine Republic in preference to his cousin Ippolito, did not return to his country till the 5th of July, 1531; he was the bearer of a rescript from the emperor, which gave Florence a constitution nearly monarchial; but, so far from confining himself within the limits traced, Alessandro oppressed the people with the most grievous tyranny. Cruelty, debauchery, and extortion marked him for public hatred. On the 10th of August, 1535, he caused to be poisoned his cousin, the cardinal Ippolito, who undertook the defence of his fellow countrymen against him. He at last, on the 6th of January, 1537, was himself assassinated by his kinsman and companion in licentiousness, Lorenzino de’ Medici.

[Sidenote: [1531-1737 A.D.]]

But the death of Alessandro did not restore freedom to his country. The agents of his tyranny, the most able but also the most odious of whom was the historian Guicciardini, needed a prince for their protector. They made choice of Cosmo de’ Medici, a young man of nineteen, descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brother of the former Cosmo. On the 9th of January, 1537, they proclaimed him duke of Florence, hoping to guide him henceforth at their pleasure; but they were deceived. This man, false, cool-blooded, and ferocious, who had all the vices of Filippo II, and who shrank from no crime, soon got rid of his counsellors, as well as of his adversaries. Cosmo I, in 1569, obtained from the pope, Pius V, the title of grand duke of Tuscany, a title that the emperor would not then acknowledge, though he afterwards, in 1575, granted it to the son of Cosmo. Seven grand dukes of that family reigned successively at Florence. The last, Gian Gastone, died on the 9th of July, 1737.[d]

Right had disappeared, cries Quinet, leaving an immense gap--in fact a gulf which opened under the nation’s feet and into which she went head foremost, almost dragging her conquerors after her. To understand these times we must remember that there had been no real conquest because no national resistance. No one in the fifteenth century had really defended the sovereignty of Italy. When Europe presented herself she entered as into a vacant heritage, devoid of humanity. Italy did not defend herself, because practically non-existent. She had not been able to pull herself together. Never has such a thing been seen on the earth: a great people invaded, and this invasion finding no obstacle. The foreigners who entered, by the always open breach of the papacy, came with precaution. They sounded the land, thinking to find a people, and only found an illusion. Reassured, they came on restrainedly. Europe overflowed the empty places.

In her last moments Italy made profession of worshipping only strength, crying with Macchiavelli, “Woe to the conquered!” She reserved for her defeat none of those life doctrines which nourish even corpses and prevent their crumbling to powder. Her theories were only for the victorious. Now that she was conquered she was taken in her own trap, and could not well revive because she had pronounced her own death sentence.

Evil had arrived at such a pitch that two things were equally necessary: Luther’s reform to break Catholicism; the chastisement of Italy to restore that which threatened to disappear--the human conscience. Each town was smitten by the arms proper to her. Venice fell slowly but noiselessly, like a body drowned by the doges in the lagunes. There were other cities which languished as if they had been poisoned. As for Florence, who had gained so many subjects, she perished, put up and sold at auction like poisoners bought and sold for the pleasure of choking them.

In reality, the papacy had the honour of aiming the two decisive blows. Julius II, in the league of Cambray, crushed Venice. Clement VII, in league with Charles V, crushed Florence. These two vital centres once destroyed, all was lost.[i]

[Sidenote: [1494-1530 A.D.]]

The evil destiny of Italy was accomplished. Charles VIII, when he first invaded that country, opened its gates to all the transalpine nations: from that period Italy was ravaged, during thirty-six years, by Germans, French, Spaniards, Swiss, and even Turks. They inflicted on her calamities beyond example in history; calamities so much the more keenly felt, as the sufferers were more civilised, and 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 organisation of the nation; if they had not themselves introduced the Spaniards into the kingdom of Naples, and the Germans into the states of Venice; forgetting that both must soon after be subject to Charles V. The independence of Italy would have been beneficial to France; the rapacious and improvident policy which made France seek subjects where it should only have sought allies, was the origin of a long train of disasters to the French.

A period of three centuries of weakness, humiliation, and suffering, in Italy, began in the year 1530; from that time she was always oppressed by foreigners, and enervated and corrupted by her masters. These last reproached her with the vices of which they were themselves the authors. After having reduced her to the impossibility of resisting, they 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, were 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.[d]