THE ITALIAN STATES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Leo X., and his false glories—Desperate condition of the Italian states in the sixteenth century—Their aversion to the Austrian power—The Sack of Rome—Wars and Plagues—Charles V. and Francis I.—The Despotism of Christian powers causes Italian powers to desire the yoke of the Turks—The Papal theocracy renews with the empire the compact of Charlemagne.

The age of Leo X., in painting whose meretricious splendours, our historians have rivalled each other, was one of the most unfortunate in the history of Italy. Let others call the age of Valentine and Charles V. the age of gold; Raphael, Titian, and Michael Angelo cannot make us forget Leyva, Baglioni, and the barbarians who overran Italy, bringing in plague, famine, and intestine war. Swiss and French in Lombardy, French and Spaniards in Naples, Swiss and Germans in Venetia rendered every region desolate and every government despotic. Julius II. spoke falsehood when he boasted that he had expelled the Ultramontanes from Italian soil; he merely drove out one foreigner by the help of another, and the last invaders filled the people with desperate longing for the old oppressors. After his death the Papal dignity was conferred on Leo de’ Medici, whose name has a false lustre in letters and arts.

It was a grave delusion or a sychophantic flattery to attribute to him the impulse that revived liberal studies. The great intellects who flourished under his pontificate had risen to fame before his time. He covered them with wealth and honours out of no sympathy with their pursuits, but to emasculate their independent spirits and stifle the groans of the nation in whose bosom the spirit of independence began to react under the hammer of incessant misfortune.

The manners of Leo were wholly corrupt and his religion atheism. The Lutheran doctrines which spread in his time owed their success to the trade in indulgences, the profits of which he conferred before collection upon his sister Magdalene Cybo, to repay her family for the princely receptions they gave him in Genoa.

The scribblers called him The Great, because they lived upon him, and were only idle ornaments of a luxurious court. He entertained the Romans with feasts and games, because he was a devotee of pleasure, and, according to the saying of the people, wished to enjoy the papacy. But the chases of Corneto and Viterbo, the infamies of Malliana, the suppers of the gods, and the fisheries of Bolsena were paid for with money borrowed at forty per cent. The people of the Romagna, bleeding under his insatiable collectors of revenue, prayed for the Turkish yoke, as a relief from that of the Popes. When it was his plain duty to restore his wasted provinces by permanent peace, he excited new wars, for whose conduct he had neither money, energy, nor talents. History has been strangely generous with Leo. His intrigues, his wrongheaded policy, the fictitious conspiracy of Florence,—for which Macchiavello was beheaded, Braccioli and Capponi killed, and many others imprisoned or banished,—still await a pen sharp enough to cut away his borrowed glories.

At the death of Maximilian of Austria, the electors conferred the empire on Charles V. of Spain, who was already master of the Two Sicilies. The power of Charles threatened the independence of Rome, and Leo formed a league with France, in the audacious hope of expelling the Spaniard from Italy. But he betrayed his ally for a dukedom in the kingdom, conferred on his bastard son Alexander de’ Medici. A war broke out, and the Papal and Imperial troops, led by Prospero Colonna and Marquis Pescara, had already occupied Milan, when the sudden death of Leo cut short his enterprises. His successor was the Flemish Van Trusen, under the title of Hadrian VI. He had never set foot in Italy, and was therefore called a barbarian. The corrupt prelates despised a Pope, under whom absolution cost only a ducat.

Hadrian was unable to continue the war, the Papal treasury having been drained by the prodigality of Leo. Besides the Rovere, Baglioni and Malatesta had seized the Papal dominions. The other states of Italy were not more fortunate than the Papal. Venice had been bleeding to death since the league of Cambray; Florence was under the heel of Julius de’ Medici; the lords of Mantua and Ferrara were in the grasp of a master; the Marquis of Monferrato and the Duke of Savoy were protected by French garrisons; the kingdom of Naples was barbarized and taxed to the verge of ruin by those Spanish hordes who from the poverty of their clothing were called the Bisogni.[11] Charles did not pay his armies a sous, and they had scarcely routed the French under Lautrec when they began a general pillage of Italy. Though the Pope was Charles’ ally the pontificial territory did not escape the common fate. The excesses of Ultramontane lust and avarice bred a terrible pestilence in Florence and in Rome; new wounds for Italy. When the plague had reached its height, the pontiff in an insane fright abolished the sanitary laws on the plea that they were offensive to Heaven and heretical. Thus the pestilence, encountering no obstacles, raged with unchecked violence.

We are told that in these straits, the Romans longing to find a barrier to such a flood of woes, sacrificed a bull with all the pagan ceremonies to the divinities of the ancient Republic. To such a degree had the atheism of the popes taken root among the people!

Julius, of the Medici family, succeeded to Hadrian VI.; but he did not bring peace to Italy. The French, led by Bonnivet made a new attempt to recover Lombardy. Prospero Colonna made them pay dearly for the enterprise; but Francis I. invaded Italy in force, and Milan, desolated by the plague, came into his power. Who at that period cared for the independence of Italy? Venice, Venice alone. In the battle of Pavia, Francis I. was beaten and captured. Venice seeing the knife pointed at her own breast by Imperial hands, proposed to Louisa of Savoy, mother of the captive French king and regent of France, a general league of the enemies of Spain, the mustering of armies and the liberation of the illustrious prisoner. The Pope opposed the scheme and bound himself closer to the emperor whose satellites he paid largely for leaving him in peace. The German leaders divided the money and went on robbing the subjects of the Pope.

In the meantime the treaty of Madrid (1526) released Francis I. from prison and he made haste to violate the stipulations extorted from him by force. He formed an alliance for the liberation of Italy, with the Pope, the Venitians and Francis Sforza. The French monarch proclaimed himself the apostle of liberty for oppressed people and awakened everywhere the spirit of resistance to the Spanish power. A strange delusion that the French monarch sought to enfranchise Italy seized upon the most illustrious men of our Peninsula. The Genoese were especially forward in urging the Pope to abandon the Imperial alliance and join the French league. Foremost among those who shared this delusion was Giammateo Ghiberti of Genoa, chancellor of Clement VII., a knight of stainless honour and a prelate uncontaminated by the moral leprosy which raged in the Roman court.

The choicest spirit in literature and science supported the generous hopes of Ghiberti. Among them was Pietro Bembo who had been secretary to Leo X., Ludovico Canossa, the French ambassador in Venice, and Jacopo Sodoleto, an extraordinary genius whom the amorous overtures of the beautiful Imperia failed to degrade. Sodoleto, a man deeply religious and patriotic had urged Clement to make bold reforms in the bosom of the church. He founded in Rome, with the cÖperation of Ghiberti, Bembo, Caraffa and many others, the oratorio of divine love, and he openly professed his belief in the doctrine of justification by faith, a dogma of the evangelical churches.

Around these leaders, the lovers of liberal studies and of their country, began to form a party, which included such men as Valeriano Pierio, Vida, Bini, Blasio, Negri, Navagero and even Berni, who, when he saw that Pope Clement neglected the advice of patriots and clung to Spain, prophesied that the Pope and his shearers would share the ruin of Italy. This awaking to liberty and the increasing aversion of the Italians to the Imperial power, stimulated the Spanish governors to harsher measures. The desertion of their party by the duke of Milan furnished the conquerors with a specious pretext for desolating whole provinces and draining the blood of the people by taxation and subsidies. This unfortunate country saw at that moment a spectacle of unbridled barbarity without parallel in history. The Spanish soldiers were quartered in the houses of the Milanese, and the citizen was treated not as a host but as a prisoner. His feet were tied to a bed, or to a beam; or he was thrown into a cellar, where he would be tormented into surrendering money or lands; or to the gratification of a more vile cupidity. When the unfortunate victim died of grief or, impelled by rage and despair, drowned himself in a well or threw himself from a window, the Bisogni immediately sought another house in which to renew the same barbarities. The Lombard provinces had not even the consolation of human pity. The duke of Urbino, commanding the armies of Venice and Rome, gave them no encouragement to hope. Indeed, he lacked the means for open war or even for skirmishing with the Spanish army. Germany poured down new soldiers. Shall we say soldiers? George Frandesperg marched at the head of fifteen thousand robbers, and swore to put a halter round the neck of the Pope and to pay his legions with the pillage of Italian cities.

Nor were foreigners the only tormentors of the bleeding peninsula. In Rome the Orsini supported the Pope the Colonna were partisans of CÆsar. Cardinal Pompeo collected eight thousand peasants on the Agro Romano and unleashed them against the Vatican. They made a general pillage and their leader compelled the Sultan of Christianity, as he styled the Pope, to break the league he had formed with Venice and France. Deeds were committed which history shrinks from recording. The Ultramontanes, not content with enslaving provinces, slaked their thirst in the blood of the people. The inhumanity of the Germans, the avarice of the Swiss—who even then made merchandise of their fealty—the rapacity of the Aragonese and the licentiousness of the Gauls reached and polluted everything in Italy.

It is true that there was this diversity in their manners, that the Swiss and Germans, despising the restraints of both law and religion, utterly despoiled the vanquished and revelled in every species of brutality; while the French divided the spoils with those to whom they belonged and seduced, instead of violating, the women. As for the Spaniards, words are inadequate to describe the cruelty with which they slaughtered and tore in pieces our conquered populations. Macchiavello has finely contrasted the French and the Spaniards of that time. “The Frenchman is equally prodigal of his own property and that of his neighbour and he robs with small concern whether he is to eat the booty, destroy it or make riot of it with the lawful owner. The spirit of the Spanish plunderer is different; when he robs you do not hope to see a shred of your own again.” Spanish despotism imprinted its bloody hands on the face of every province. Witness the pillage of Rome by the Constable of Bourbon—who perished there, perhaps by the hand of Cellini—for proof that the Goth Alaric and every other barbarian leader were less ferocious than a christian army. The Spanish hordes plundered all the wealth and precious vessels which the devotion of christendom had amassed in the churches of Rome during twelve centuries. The Spanish catholics were worse vandals than the German Lutherans. Whoever escaped the clutches of the one was put to death by the other, or at best only saved himself by paying heavy ransom. In Rome the most venerable things were put to unseemly uses. Drunken soldiers in sacred robes and mitres danced obscene dances in the streets and public squares, and their impious mockeries always ended in bloody saturnalia. The corpses of murdered citizens strewed the streets; and after nine months of this carnival of death, a fierce pestilence broke out to complete the desolation.

The emperor derived no advantage from imprisoning the Pope, wasting his provinces and butchering his people. A pressing want of money induced Charles to restore Julius to his throne, as the same motive had led him to liberate the French king. It seems incredible that the master of Spain, the Netherlands, Sicily, the Lombard provinces and Mexico should have drawn no profit from his vast possessions. The Lutheran movement in Germany, the threats of France, the distrust of the king of England, the secret intrigues of the Pope and the doubtful fidelity of some Italian princes, whom Venice was inciting to revolt, may have conspired to palsy his arms in the very moment of victory.

A little before the sack of Rome, Odo di Foix, lord of Lautrec and general of France avenged the defeat of his sovereign at Pavia by capturing this city and subjecting it to an eight day’s pillage. The edifices were so ruined and the population so thinned that Leandro Alberti writes;—“The sight of it excited compassion.” It is melancholy satisfaction to write, that, of the crowds of foreigners who poured into Italy to plunder and ravage, very few returned to their native lands. The Peninsula became their sepulchre—of the French particularly—who to speak truth, seldom committed those excesses which were common to the Spaniards and Germans. It may be added, too, that it has always been the misfortune of France to make useless conquests in Italy. Her army which, after the destruction of Melfi, advanced to the siege of Naples, counting more than twenty-five thousand men, was so thinned by pestilential fevers that two months afterwards it did not contain four thousand men fit for duty. The frightful plague did not spare Lautrec, and after the treaty of Antwerp only a few skeletons were permitted to set foot on the soil of France. The army which deluged Rome with blood met with a more calamitous fate. Shut up in Naples under the Prince of Orange, governor of that city, it was attacked and mowed down by a pestilence which was at once the consequence and punishment of its insane license. Even Francis Bourbon, count of San Polo, who, the Bisogni having left nothing to plunder, put the villages and hamlets through which he passed to fire and sword, was totally defeated and made prisoner in Landriano (1529) by the ferocious Antonio di Leyva, the scourge of Lombardy.

The kings becoming weary, the people being drained of their blood, the necessity of peace was strongly felt. Charles V., who had no title to greatness, but the extent of his dominions, who was crooked in design and avaricious of spirit, hastened to form an incestuous union with the Pope, and the fruit of their embraces was the slavery of Florence. CÆsar bound himself to immolate the Republic to the vengeance of Clement and put under Papal pay the hordes of assassins who had already desolated the greater part of the Peninsula. The bastard Alexander de’ Medici married a bastard daughter of the emperor; whence the treaty of Cambray by which France delivered Italy, bound hand and foot to Charles Fifth, recovering Bourgogne and his children for the shameful desertion. He ignominiously lost in this treaty the honour which he preserved stainless in his defeat and capture at Pavia. This king had strange contradictions in his character. He promised, with apparent sincerity, liberty to nations and then abandoned them at caprice; he was hated by people whom he overwhelmed with public burdens, but loved by the learned whom he protected and honoured. He offered his hand to the heretics of Germany, and burned under a slow fire the heretics of France. He invited the Turks into Italy and betrayed the Venitians and Florentines; but he kept faith with his bitter enemy, granting Charles V. safe conduct through French territory.

The pontiff being about to crown Charles in Bologna with the Lombard and Imperial diadems, the latter ordered the Italian princes, as his vassals, to pay him homage on that occasion (1530). Alfonso d’Este, Frederick Gonzaga, the dukes of Urbino and Savoy, and the Marquis of Monferrato submitted to him; the Republics of Genoa, Siena and Lucca counted themselves happy in being permitted to retain their old form of government, and Florence which under the influence of NicolÒ Capponi had elected Christ for its king, now vainly defended by the brave Ferruccio was forced to humble herself to slavery. That portion of North Italy which in modern language is called Piedmont was involved in equal if not greater disasters. On account of its situation between Austria and France, it was overrun and desolated by barbarian invaders from 1494 to 1559. “We do not believe,” say the commissioners of Henry VIII. of England, “that it is possible to find in all Christendom greater wretchedness than reigns in this country. The best towns are either in ruins or depopulated. There are few districts in which food is to be found. The extensive plain, fifty miles in length, which lies between Vercelli and Pavia, once so fertile in cereals and wines, is reduced to a desert. The fields are uncultivated; except three poor women gathering a few grapes, we saw not the shadow of a human creature. There, they neither sow nor reap; the country sides are growing wild, and the uncultivated vines are returning to their primitive state.”

Charles III., the unfortunate, was ruling over these desolated provinces and his subjects suffered every species of indignity, outrage and despotism. To render matters, if possible, a little worse, Gonzaga urged the Emperor to reduce to a swamp all that wide plain between the Alps and the Po to form a barrier to French invasion of Lombardy.

In fine, there was no city in all Italy which was not conquered and oppressed by foreign armies. Of Genoa I shall speak in its place. It is worth while to mention Nice, where in 1538 Paul III. held the congress at which a truce was concluded between CÆsar and Francis I. Five years afterwards, Francis marched upon and besieged it with the help of the Turks. This siege is memorable in Italian history for the heroic spirit of Segurana, but after the death at the sword’s point of all her bravest defenders, the city was forced to surrender. The citizens abandoned their homes, though they had obtained a promise of immunity for their property from pillage by the soldiery. The Turks kept faith, while the French violated their pledges, thus giving rise to a general desire among Italians to become subject to the Turks, from a conviction that they could no longer endure the weight of their misfortunes. There were writers as Vives, who speaking of Italy, (1529) sought to discourage this sentiment, telling the Italians that the Turks would heap worse miseries upon them. But it is incredible that Soliman could have equalled the endless tortures inflicted by Francis I. and Charles V. Segni says: “More than two hundred thousand persons killed in war, more than a hundred cities and important castles sacked and destroyed, so many thousands of innocent men and women destroyed by pestilence and famine that one cannot number them, matrons debauched, maidens ravished, abominable practices with children, an endless catalogue of crimes against religion and nature committed against each other by christians, all owe their origin to the implacable enmity of two men, who were born and have grown old in eternal hatred to each other. They are not weary of shedding the blood of their fellows; they continue to fight and will fight to the end of their lives.”[12] He proceeds:—“Afflicted peoples cannot do better than pray God to destroy or subject them both to the sway of the grand Turk, so that the world may come under the power of a single monarch, who, though he be a barbarian and an enemy to our laws, may give us a little repose wherein to rear our children to a life, of poverty indeed, but free from the burdens of our miserable existence.”

The people of Germany, always restless under the yoke of ancient Rome, were rising against the Papal power, which had taken the place of the ancient empire. At the voice of Luther laying bare the festering diseases of the Roman court, the learned of Italy were moved. The Pope comprehended that there was no other means of extirpating the seeds of reform which had already sprung up in Italy but to ally himself with catholic Spain: she was in the zenith of her glory. Such captains as Cortes and Pizzaro sailed away with a galley and returned conquerors of a new world. Who better than the compatriots of Torquemada could suffocate in blood the free voices of the disciples of Huss and Wicliffe? From that moment the compact of Charlemagne was renewed between Charles V. and the Roman theocracy, and through it the Spaniards tightened their grasp on Milan, Naples, Palermo and Cagliari, and established their ascendency over the whole Peninsula.

From Charles V. dates our humiliation and slavery. From his time the Peninsula has had no proper history. Its vicissitudes and calamities are only episodes of the great drama enacted by the nations who have fought against each other for our blood. The council of Trent was not an act of national life. It grew out of the philosophic spirit of reform and the scandals of the Roman court, and was initiated by Germany and France while England was separating herself from the catholic church. This celebrated synod shows nothing but the conflict between the church and the empire, between the reformers and the courtiers of Rome struggling to maintain their privileges, between the Popes who fought to maintain their abuses and the secular princes who secretly laboured to shake off the priestly yoke. The Italian people had no part in it. The religious discussions upon divine grace, predestination and justification by faith did not reach us, who were everywhere plotting to recover our independence and freedom.

In fact this is the century of popular conspiracies, which were always strangled by degenerate nobles and foreign armies. It is true that the most illustrious Italians sided with the people and died for their righteous cause; but these were vain struggles. From the day that Lorenzino de’Medici, for whom the Spanish power (which Duke Alexander was consolidating in Italy) was too bitter, formed the design of restoring the Republic and then, bought by promises of lascivious embraces, stifled his own purpose, the spark of liberty took fire and in every city the plebeians rose against their foreign oppressors.

Such, briefly, was the condition of Italy in the early part of the sixteenth century, in which she lost that preËminence and reputation under which she had hitherto flourished. It is necessary to study this period, because it was then that Europe initiated the great work of her civil renovation, while in Italy there was desperate strife between dying liberties and rising tyrannies. Two hostile forces were wrestling together and shaking men’s souls; the regal and foreign dominion supported by the nobles, and the generous pride of citizens making heroic sacrifices to remain a people. Charles V. turned the trembling balance. Only in that age could have risen the company of Jesus, who did not, like the monks, constitute a democracy but an absolute monarchy such as CÆsar was founding on the ruins of our communes. The disciples of Loyola and the nobles were the sole supporters of the Austro-Spanish power, and they showed a common solicitude to strengthen the principles of despotic government.