THE spiritual sway of the papacy at this time enjoyed great advantages over its temporal dominion. Although the former had necessarily been more permanent and influential under a Gregory or a Boniface, than when wielded by imbecility or divided by schism, it continued as yet undisputed. The power of the Keys was acknowledged to the utmost limits of Christendom, whatever might be thought of their possessor or policy. Monarchs and armaments, who defied or defeated the pontifical banner, quailed under an interdict, and humbled themselves to the dust for absolution. Another important vantage-ground of the Roman ecclesiastical polity, well set forth by Robertson, was its unity. Faithful to long traditionary maxims, as the magnetic needle to its pole, few cases could occur unprovided for by precedent; and so numerous were the checks and balance-wheels of the complicated machine, which was kept in motion and regulated by a large and well drilled staff, rather than by its apparent director, that his personal conduct or private aims seldom perceptibly affected its working. Although the same dignitaries who, by education and habit, were enabled to maintain and transmit this unvarying system, formed also the administrative government of the Papal State, they were, in the latter capacity, merely ministers of a temporal prince, bound by interest to flatter his foibles as well as to obey his behests. And the sovereignty of Rome being elective, under circumstances often inferring a very transient tenure of power, it was usually wielded with much waywardness, selfishness, and caprice, even to the detriment of that order by whom, through whom, and for whom the ecclesiastical authority was exercised. Apart from the general question of the fitness of priests for temporal sway, their circumstances were peculiarly unfavourable at a time when no special requisites of character were indispensable for holy orders, these being often regarded as a mere qualification for preferments closed against the laity. When legates were sent to lead armies, and cardinals took the field as condottieri; when papal diplomacy and intrigue were rarely veiled by a semblance of truth or honour; when poisoning by prelates passed into a proverb, and "son of a clergyman" ceased to be an imputation, it is not surprising that priest-ruled and priest-ridden Italy should have become thoroughly demoralised. It was of this age that Masse has pointedly remarked that "never were holy things mocked with greater impunity, or spiritual power more unblushingly profaned; never were the humane virtues held in such disrepute, nor blood so treacherously spilt; never did poison more perfidiously contaminate the veins of those whose presence was burdensome, or who clogged an ambitious career, or whose death could serve any end whatever." Under the new pontificate these evils were fully developed, and the fatal influence exercised by it on Duke Guidobaldo and his state will demand from us from time to time detailed notices of Alexander and his race.

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Alfonso Borgia, on whom the triple tiara had been conferred in 1455, with the title of Calixtus III., was descended from the ancient Spanish family of Borja, at Xativa, in the kingdom of Murcia. His sister Giovanna, or Isabella, married Giuffredo or Alfonso Lenzuoli, and to them was born, in 1427, Roderigo, whose youth was spent in arms, but on obtaining a page's appointment at the court of Alfonso V., he laid aside the sword, and finally, in compliance with the wishes of his family, entered the Church. Being there destined for high preferment by the influence of his uncle, who had adopted him, he exchanged his paternal name for that of Borgia. By this step, and by his personal qualities, he so completely gained the favour of Calixtus that, during his short pontificate, he rose to the highest honours, and accumulated the best benefices at his disposal. To the dignities of cardinal, vice-chancellor of the Church, and archbishop of Valencia, were added the temporalities of three other archiepiscopal and two episcopal sees, besides a shower of minor but rich endowments, and various important legations. For the conspicuous part he was thus called to fill nature had fully qualified him. His unbounded ambition was supported by vigorous and varied talents; and, although his acquirements by study were limited, his address and pliant sagacity, seconded by great facility of speech, enabled him to bend people and events to his purposes.[*231]

The influence which Cardinal Borgia enjoyed from his abilities and preferments was but little impaired by his notorious personal vices; for the corruption of manners which disgraced the golden age of Italian refinement had deeply tinctured the court of Rome. His open immoralities brought upon him public censure from the worthy Pius II., but the laxer discipline of succeeding pontiffs left such scandals unchecked. In order more easily to carry on a disgraceful intercourse with his mistress Caterina Vanozza, he married her to a Roman, named Domenico Arignano, and subsequently had by her three sons and a daughter, whom he fully acknowledged as his children, allowing them his adopted name. His general conduct and language were in all respects consistent with such licentious courses. Guicciardini describes him as of most debauched habits, insatiable avarice, immoderate ambition, savage cruelty, and unscrupulous nepotism; without sincerity, truth, good faith, shame, or religion. It would be easy to adduce similar testimony from other contemporary authorities, which, although widely varying in their details of scandal, agree in the general estimate of his public and private character, even before his elevation to the tiara.

On the death of Innocent VIII., Borgia was much the oldest cardinal. His talents were unquestioned; his dissolute conduct could scarcely be pleaded as disqualifying him from a dignity which CibÒ and della Rovere had just held. His rivals were Ascanio, son of the great Francesco Sforza, and Giuliano della Rovere. The latter, at the head of a feeble minority of five, who refused to sell their votes, earned his uncompromising hatred. The former, finding success unattainable, preferred making profit of his adherence to the winning candidate. To him, to Orsini, Colonna, Savelli, and other influential members of the conclave, those high dignities and benefices which their choice of Borgia would render vacant, were lavishly promised, and, as an earnest of future favours, treasures long purposely hoarded by the wily Spaniard, were distributed amongst them in mule-loads. On the 11th of August, Roderigo Borgia ascended the chair of St. Peter, amid festive pageants more suited to a heathen triumph than a Christian coronation, hailed by such epigrams as this:—

"Great under CÆsar, greatest under thee, Rome hailed him hero, here a God we see!"[232]

The sacred office to which Alexander VI. was thus elevated had no salutary effect upon his unholy passions.[*233] The power he had attained he administered by intrigue. Simony and poisoning were the instruments of his administration; nepotism was its end. His temporal policy was equally selfish, unstable, and dishonest. He was resolute in nothing but his breaches of good faith. In the broils which he fomented he sold his adherence to the best bidder, but ever kept himself open for a higher offer. His contemporary, Machiavelli, thus stamps his character, which he had carefully studied:—"His entire occupation, his only thought, was deception, and he always found victims. Never was there a man with more effrontery in assertion, more ready to add oaths to his promises, or to break them; yet did his deceit ever succeed to his heart's content."[*234] Sismondi terms him "the most odious, the most publicly scandalous, and the most wicked of all miscreants who ever misused sacred authority to outrage and degrade mankind." No ecclesiastical writer has undertaken to defend his reputation; most of them have treated him as a disgrace to the papacy. Tommasi has termed him a "perfidious, sanguinary, and most insatiable wolf, capable of insinuating himself like a fawning and attached spaniel."

Out of the conflicting statements which have reached us of the Borgian pedigree and of Alexander's spurious offspring, we have prepared the accompanying table as on the whole probable.[235] Francesco (called by others Giovanni or Pietro), his eldest son by La Vanosia, was, at the Pope's request, created Duke of Gandia by Ferdinand the Catholic, and, as we shall see, came to a fearful end. The title descended to his progeny, and was borne by his great-grandson, the famous general of the Jesuits, who died in 1572, and was canonised as San Francesco Borgia.[236] Cesare was his father's favourite, and we shall have frequent occasion to trace him through the various phases of cardinal, count, condottiere, usurper, sovereign, and prisoner. Giuffredo, with the hand of a natural daughter of Alfonso II. of Naples, acquired high honours in that kingdom. Lucrezia, after being branded with triple incest and frequent poisonings, and after changing her husbands as often as suited her father's schemes, dedicated her maturer years to the patronage of letters and the cultivation of piety. Upon the details and crimes of such a character there is fortunately little occasion here to enter. Those who wish to learn them have only to turn to any historian of her age; such as would see nearly all that has been charged against her confronted with whatever redeeming traits exist, and ingeniously redargued by negative proofs and assumed improbabilities, may consult the dissertation appended to Roscoe's Leo the Tenth.[*237]

We have now reached a period when our narrative must be extended, and must include those great events which, besides revolutionising almost every state in Italy, ultimately affected the political relations of Western Europe. The fiery natures and turbulent spirits of the Italian republicans and condottieri had for many years expended their energies in petty broils and intestine struggles for mastery. Henceforward the bloody drama was to be varied by the introduction of a new class of actors; the battles of European ambition were to be fought on the sunny plains of the Peninsula; her flourishing cities were to be the spoil of victor and vanquished: the protracted struggle was destined to leave her strength prostrated, her wealth wasted, her nationality extinguished, her treasures of art defaced, the character of her people degraded, their political independence destroyed. Although, from 1466 to 1494, Italy had never remained very long free from intestine commotions, the seat of serious warfare was during that interval removed to Hungary, Turkey, and the Levant, and she enjoyed a comparative repose, under the balmy influence of which, letters and the liberal arts rose to high perfection. The invention of printing, the study of the classics, the revival of ancient literature and philosophy, the cultivation of vernacular poetry, and the adoption of these tastes at many of the minor courts, all tended to this happy result.

Under this prosperous state of things the condition of the Peninsula is thus eloquently described by her Thucydides:—"Reduced to profound peace and tranquillity, cultivated on her sterile and rugged sites as in her more fertile districts, swayed by none but native masters, not only did her population, commerce, and wealth abound, but she was rendered gloriously eminent by the magnificence of her many princes, by the splendour of her numerous noble and fair cities, and by the seat and sovereignty of religion; whilst her celebrity was maintained among all nations by the men whom she produced of high capacity for public affairs, of elevated genius and acquirements in each branch of learning, and every liberal or useful art, as well as of military fame not unworthy of their age."[238] This was indeed her golden era, but the pure metal was henceforward to be tarnished. The middle ages, during which the civilisation of Europe had centred within her shores, were now passed away: modern history was about to open, and with it her subjugation. She had to learn, on a greater and more impressive scale, the lesson which her annals have too often afforded, and as her old republics had fallen one by one from want of union, so, at this juncture, her states, failing in mutual good faith, became an unresisting prey to the spoiler. She was in truth on the eve of that fearful struggle which, after trampling for half a century on her energies, left her to all intents at the mercy of those northern powers whom she deemed barbarians. Their armies had heretofore descended into her plains to fight under her banners and to receive her pay; henceforward they warred on their own account, though not less at her expense: formerly her mercenaries, they were in future her foes.

The immediate cause of these evils was the disputed succession to the crown of Naples, which we have formerly seen convulsing Italy, and which it will require a brief digression and the annexed table to explain. The Norman knights who in the eleventh century visited Lower Italy in a crusade against the Saracens, soon contrived to make that country their own. One of them, Robert Guiscard, by his valour and talents acquired a supremacy in which he was succeeded by his nephew Roger, who had by similar means made himself master of Sicily. In 1130, the latter procured from Innocent II. the investiture of a kingdom nearly equal in extent to that of the Two Sicilies in our day, which, during next century, passed by marriage into the line of the Hohenstaufen emperors of Germany. But the same incurable jealousies, which gave rise to the Guelphic and Ghibelline parties, made the popes look with little favour on their new neighbours, who however maintained their ground for three generations, notwithstanding repeated offers of a competing investiture, by successive pontiffs, to various English and French princes. The crown, thus sent a-begging, was at length accepted by Charles Count of Anjou and Provence, seventh son of Louis VIII. of France, who, in 1266, defeated and slew Manfred, the last monarch of the Hohenstaufen line, and assuming the title of Charles I., founded the first Angevine dynasty. But in consequence of the brutal behaviour of his soldiery, he lost Sicily in a revolt, during which there occurred, in 1282, the massacre of the French, known as the Sicilian vespers. On this opening, Alfonso III. of Aragon put in a claim through his mother, a daughter of Manfred, and having established himself as King of Sicily, that title continued in his successors, and was ultimately reunited to the crown of Naples. The first house of Anjou, however, maintained themselves upon the throne of Naples for about one hundred and seventy years, notwithstanding the testamentary disposition of the maligned and unfortunate Queen Joanna I., who, in 1382, bequeathed that kingdom and the county of Provence to Louis I., second son of John II. of Anjou.

This will had been dictated by dislike of her second cousin and adopted heir Charles Count of Durazzo, but it did not prevent him, his son Ladislaus, and his daughter the beautiful and dissolute Joanna II., from establishing a de facto right to their heritage. Meanwhile Louis I., Louis II., and Louis III., their rivals of the second Angevine line, as it was called, persisted in styling themselves kings of Naples as well as of Jerusalem, and having patched up their defective title, by obtaining a recognition of their claims and investitures from several popes, they each invaded their titular kingdom. The first Angevine dynasty being about to close by the childless death of Joanna II., she was persuaded to terminate the struggle by settling her crown upon the second Angevine race, which at her death in 1435, was represented by RÉnier, usually called RenÉ le Bon. The fatality of a disputed succession, with its attendant miseries, was however still in store for unhappy Naples. Joanna II. had already in 1421 adopted as her heir Alfonso V., King of Aragon and Sicily, who was likewise representative of whatever claims might have been transmitted from the old Norman dynasty, being in fact similar to those upon which his family had acquired Sicily before 1300. Eugene IV., at the same time, still further complicated this confusion, by interposing his right as over-lord, alleging that the investiture had, by failure of the reigning dynasty, lapsed to the Holy See.

After ineffectually attempting by an invasion to vindicate his title against his rival of Aragon, RenÉ retired to his little state of Provence, to dedicate his life to literature and the arts, but especially to those chivalrous lyrics which, casting the halo of poetic romance around the troubadours and their times, have wreathed his brows with laurels far more enduring than the crown of Naples could have conferred. Yet he and his nephew Charles continued titular kings, until the latter, dying without surviving male issue in 1481, left all his property, and therewith his claims upon Lower Italy, to Louis XI. of France, his third cousin and nearest male heir, upon whose death in 1483, these passed to Charles VIII. Alfonso V., having repulsed the good RenÉ, had no further serious disturbance in his possession of Naples and Sicily, now once more united; but he being succeeded in these by a natural son Ferdinand I., his Spanish crown going to his brother John II., the already defective title of the house of Aragon to their Italian dominions on terra firma was thereby further weakened, at a moment when they exchanged the competition of a petty and unwarlike prince for that of the powerful and ambitious monarch of France.

Such was the political position of Naples; that of Milan must now claim our attention. Giovanni Galeazzo had succeeded to the dukedom, upon the assassination of his debauched father Galeazzo Maria, in 1476. Being then but seven years old, his mother, a princess of Savoy, managed the government during four years, until the intrigues of his uncle Ludovico supplanted her, and possessed himself virtually of the sovereignty, though exercising it in the name of his nephew. He married him at the age of twenty to Isabella, daughter of Alfonso heir-apparent of Naples, but availing himself of his feeble character maintained his own position, even after the Duke had attained to manhood. He was generally known by the surname of Il Moro, from using as his device the mulberry, which, being the last tree to hazard its buds, and the first to mature its fruit, was the received emblem of discretion and cautious policy. Ludovico il Moro may thus be rendered Louis the Discreet, an epithet little in keeping with his character, at once rash and restless, wavering and weak. Accordingly, in pursuing his designs of unprincipled ambition, this unscrupulous usurper most signally overreached himself, and, as we shall in due time see, brought utter ruin upon his own person and house.

Venice, now at the summit of her pride and power, is thus finely apostrophised by Politian;—

"Sole Queen of Italy! of regal Rome The beauteous rival, ruling earth and sea, Sovereigns would fain thy citizens become. Ausonia's honoured light! 'tis but in thee, Unquenched by barbarous hosts, our freedom glows; 'Tis to thy beams our sun a brighter radiance owes."[239]

As yet she was the mart of the known world, for a commerce with the enterprise of Columbus and the daring of De Gama were on the eve of directing into new channels and rival ports. Her navy scarcely knew a competitor on the seas. Her eastern possessions not only gave security to her trade, but placed her foremost in defence of Christendom against the Infidel, a post of natural glory and influence which it is now difficult fully to appreciate. But these honourable and substantial advantages sufficed her not. It was her ever cherished but fatal ambition to swell her mainland possessions by every means of arms or diplomacy. Although her citizens had no turn for military exploits, although the gloomy genius of her government found no sympathy among her terra firma subjects, she pursued the ruinous policy of intermingling in every combination, co-operating in every war, which could add to her territories. At the moment of Charles's invasion, she had gained her object of becoming one of the five great Italian powers. How she lost it at the hands of his successor, and how, in defending a pre-eminence she never should have desired, she impaired the true sources of her superiority, will, in course of events, come under our view.

In Florence Lorenzo de' Medici, to whose bright name history has done justice, at the expense perhaps of some coeval stars in the Italian hemisphere, had died a few months before Innocent VIII. He was happy in living during a breathing time of comparative tranquillity, which he had been not uninstrumental in preserving, and which it was perhaps his good fortune not to survive. He had lived long enough to gain an imperishable fame, and passed from life just before the golden age, of which he was the signal ornament, began to be dimmed by influences which he and his family were instrumental in promoting. Our admiration of the assiduous and enlightened encouragement bestowed by him, and by his son Leo X., upon letters and art, ought not to blind us to the melancholy truths that the theoretical paganism of Lorenzo, the practical worldliness of Leo, and the disastrous blundering of Clement VII., have left upon the religion, the nationality, and the public spirit of Italy, effects which counterbalance that vast impulse to genius which the two first had the power to create, without the judgment and virtue to direct. Lorenzo the Magnificent was succeeded in his authority by his eldest son Pietro; but as that was founded exclusively upon personal claims, and unsupported either by official or hereditary dignities, it quickly passed from his feeble hands. It was the folly of this Pietro that supplied a train to the smouldering elements which we have endeavoured in this digression to analyse, and which, had his father been spared, might have been welded into a compact aggregate calculated to withstand barbarian aggression, instead of, as we shall now see, bursting into a simultaneous and destructive conflagration.[240]

Charles VIII. of France had attained his twenty-third year. It has been well remarked of him that few monarchs have played so active a part with fewer personal qualifications for success or distinction. The hideous deformity of his body seems to have been equalled by the defects of his character. Impetuous and fickle, ignorant and wilful, he was alike devoid of judgment and of perseverance. The wars of the Neapolitan succession, that had during much of the preceding century harassed Lower Italy, were not forgotten, and the latent claims of the Angevine dynasty became serious grounds for fresh anxiety, when vested in the youthful monarch of a powerful ultra-montane nation. Ludovico Sforza, situated nearest to the quarter whence the storm threatened, was the first to take alarm, and for once his selfish policy tended to a great and beneficial object. He proposed a general defensive alliance of the Italian states against all foreign invasion. But his counsels flowed from a tainted source. The King of Naples had already interposed to emancipate his grand-daughter's husband from the unduly prolonged regency of Ludovico, who soon perceived that his usurped authority must be relinquished ere his overtures would be listened to in that quarter. Yet the stake was worth an effort, and the new Pope's elevation suggested a fit opportunity for the attempt, since it attracted to Rome many embassies of congratulation which, when thus congregated, might conveniently arrange the terms of a league. As a preliminary, the Regent of Milan proposed that the various ambassadors should give moral weight to their union, by entering the capital of Christendom on the same day, in one imposing procession. This idea was approved by most of the parties, but Pietro de' Medici, conceiving that his personal vanity would be more effectively gratified by exhibiting the superior magnificence of his retinue in a separate display, resolved to thwart by indirect means a proposition to which he could offer no reasonable objection. He, therefore, induced Ferdinand to interpose some obstacles of etiquette, which marred by miserable jealousies the intended unanimity of the demonstration. Ludovico, having ascertained the origin of this intrigue, saw in it a separation from the common cause by the two powers whose interests were the most at variance with his own. The Medici were formidable neighbours, as wielding the preponderating power of Florence, while with the King of Naples the seeds of a domestic quarrel were already rife.

Upon the coldness thus generated, other influences were brought coincidently to bear. The Colonna and the Orsini had long been most prominent and influential among the great barons of Rome. The authority which they exercised over their fiefs in the Campagna was to all intents sovereign. They alternately wasted that fair land with their mutual broils, or bearded their ecclesiastical over-lord in his capital. Those who have journeyed from Monterosi to Albano along the lonely plain which, curtained by the Sabine mountains and the Alban hills, stretches far around the Eternal City, or have cantered for miles and miles across its vast expanse of undulating sward in solitude and stillness; who have marked its rich vegetation running wild in the most genial of European climes, its melancholy lines of interrupted aqueducts witnessing to a long-degraded civilisation, its distant and dilapidated watch-towers telling only of former forays, its few isolated dwellings sheltering beneath crumbled walls and broken battlements the units of a scanty and squalid population; and who, to account for the spell of such a singular desolation, conclude that this dreary waste has been depopulated by the course of nature; such may wonder to hear that the mischief and misery are chiefly the act of man. The calm serenity of these forlorn downs becomes deeply touching from remembering that the soil was for centuries sodden with blood, and covered with smouldering ruins; that European civilisation there was nurtured, there waned, and there struggled into a second life, amid the din of battles, the devastation of armies, the rapine of banditti; that its long grass springs from the grave of ancient refinement, of classic memorials, of mediÆval strife.

In the middle ages much of the Campagna was fertile, and peopled by an industrious peasantry. Its undulating slopes waved with abundant crops, varied and sheltered by venerable woods, which the Goths and Vandals of former centuries had spared. But incessant civil feuds proved more fatal than barbarian hordes. The Ghibelline Colonna, from their fortresses of Marino and Palestrina, watched the fitting moment to pour their armed retainers on the plain, and, crossing the Tiber, carried fire and sword, through the estates of their rivals, to the very gates of Bracciano. The Guelphic Orsini waited for revenge only till the ripened harvest had prepared for them a golden spoil in their foemen's fields. Year after year did this miserable partizan-warfare ravage those devoted lands till the peasantry by degrees were exterminated, or driven to seek a livelihood in some more tranquil spot; till of their smiling homes no stone remained upon another, except where, at long intervals, the farm buildings were turned by these men of blood into fortresses, or the tombs of the dead were desecrated into defences for the living. A soil teeming with fertility under a burning sun, and abandoned by man, ran to rank vegetation, which, gradually choking the water-courses, generated miasma. The evil, thus commenced, was augmented by cutting down the trees which shadowed the burning earth, and, not unfrequently, covered a hostile ambush. But the crowning mischief was the rash destruction of a vast forest which, extending between the Campagna and the sea, excluded the malaria that brooded over the Mediterranean coast from Leghorn to Mola di Gaeta. Once admitted, that fearful scourge took possession of the depopulated territory, which has ever since remained a puzzle to the physiologist, a mystery to the moralist, a terror to all. At no period had the feuds of the Colonna and Orsini been more virulent than during the feeble reign of Innocent, when their armed bands had more than once scoured the streets of Rome, and overawed the papal government. The Savelli, the Frangipani, and the Gaetani, those great families who, a century or two before, had been their rivals, were no longer able to cope with them, and the lesser barons of the Comarca sought protection and employment by ranging themselves as their respective partizans. To humble these rampant houses was thus the natural policy of the successors of St. Peter, and especially of Alexander VI., who soon devoted his ambition and his authority to provide temporal sovereignties for his illegitimate progeny. His ruthless proceedings, and the changes which ensued over the whole country, at length effectually quelled the lawless turbulence of these chiefs; but it was too late to remedy the ruinous havoc which their insatiate strife had occasioned.

The late Pope, following the practice of the times, had endowed his natural son Francesco CibÒ (ancestor of the princes of Massa) with Anguillara, Cervetri, and other holdings to the north-west of Rome, and had married him to Madalena, sister of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Desirous of exchanging this precarious sovereignty for some more peaceful home, Francesco, by the influence of his brother-in-law, Pietro de' Medici, induced the King of Naples to advance 40,000 ducats to Gentile Virginio Orsini, for the purchase of these castles, which adjoined his fief of Bracciano. This slight circumstance served to kindle that train which the long series of events now alluded to had gradually prepared for combustion, and to ripen those jealousies already sown among the Peninsular powers. The Pope saw in it an accession of territory to one of those great barons of the Campagna whom he had resolved to humble; Ludovico il Moro, with the coward suspicions of guilt, watched every motion of Ferdinand, whose just indignation at his treatment of the Duke of Milan he had too good reason to dread. As soon, therefore, as he had ascertained that Pietro de' Medici, abandoning the cautious neutrality which his father had ever maintained between the Milanese and Neapolitan interests, had united with Ferdinand in the affair of Orsini, as well as in the less serious intrigue which had prevented the cementing of a general confederation he plotted to provide for the King full occupation at home.

Suddenly, however, the tangled policy of the Peninsular states assumed an aspect more favourable to Ludovico. The ambitious overtures of Alexander to obtain for his natural son Giuffredo the hand of Sancia of Aragon having been spurned by her father Alfonso, the impetuous Pontiff, in April, 1493, hastily concluded a defensive treaty with Milan and Venice, for the avowed purpose of expelling Orsini, the ally of Naples, from his recent acquisitions. These having been obtained by that feudatory, with the aid of his tried friend Ferdinand, and his relation Pietro de' Medici, he naturally looked to these two powers for support; and thus was Italy on the point of relapsing into her normal condition of feud. But the King of Naples, considering such a price extravagant for the mere gratification of family pride, had within a few weeks adjusted his differences with the Pope, by betrothing his granddaughter to Giuffredo Borgia. As if by repulsion of the magnetic poles, the accession of Ferdinand caused Il Moro to secede from the alliance he had just before joined, but from which he could no longer look for support in his lawless authority, and, judging his only security to consist in the depression of that monarch, he resolved to effect it at any price.

Upon these most inadequate grounds of personal pique, or personal apprehension, did Ludovico madly run upon the very danger against which he had been the first to prepare

"All the swords In Italy, and her confederate arms."

In his eagerness to disable Ferdinand's anticipated vengeance upon his own crimes, he renewed the calamities of a succession-war in the south, and thereby laid open the Peninsula to a scourge whose chastisement fell most heavily upon himself. Instead of heading a league against foreign aggression, as he had just before proposed, he made overtures to Charles VIII., tempting him with the diadem of Naples as the reward of an invasion of Italy, and offering him free passage through the Milanese. His private quarrel with the usurper did not blind Ferdinand to the insanity of this step, and, forgetting his feelings as a parent, he united with the other powers in representing the peril of his policy. Gladly would Ludovico have withdrawn the false step he had hastily made; but it was too late. The demon of ambition was roused in the French king; the hour for retraction was passed; that of bitter repentance was at hand. Behind her Alpine barrier there was gathered an army, ready to burst upon fated Italy, and to pour upon her plains calamities unknown since the fall of the Western Empire.

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With Federigo of Montefeltro and Roberto Malatesta, the old generation of Italian condottieri may be said to have passed away. Political changes and progressive civilisation, developed during forty years of comparative tranquillity, already tended to limit both the supply of veteran adventurers and the demand for their services. Under such genial influences, the great companies of adventure had melted down to petty followings, more proportioned to the exigencies of the age, and to the resources and experience of their new leaders. Peaceful times offered no rich prizes to call forth sustained daring, and to reward vast enterprises. Captains of minor reputation, heading small bands raised for some passing broil or petty foray, succeeded to the Hawkwoods, Montoni, and Malatesta, without rivalling their deeds, or maintaining their fame. The limited brigandage of the broken lances differed from the sweeping desolation of their marshalled thousands only in the narrower field on which it found scope; but the mercenary system became more manageable when deprived of its cumbrous machinery, and its leaders were henceforth the tools of their employers instead of their virtual masters.

In bidding adieu to that system, we may quote the sweeping condemnation bestowed upon it by Machiavelli; yet it is right to remember that, as the advocate of infantry and national militia, he had no toleration for the military art which they superseded, and that he witnessed its practice only after its spirit was gone. "Whoever relies for power upon mercenaries will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, undisciplined, faithless: braggarts among friends, dastards before the foe; destitute of fear of God, or faith with man. To delay their assault is to postpone your own ruin; in peace, you are plundered by them, in war by the enemy. The reason of all this is, that they have no object, no inducement to keep the field beyond their pittance of pay, which is never such as to induce them to spend life and limb for you. They readily enough take service, so long as you don't go to war, but when that comes, they desert or fly. It were easy to establish all this, for the destruction of Italy has arisen from no other cause but that, for many years, she depended upon mercenary troops; who, indeed, occasionally did something, and wore a semblance of valour when pitted against each other, but, on the appearance of the stranger, showed in their true colours. Thus was Charles of France allowed to take possession of the Peninsula as easily as he would have chalked off his cantonments, and the result of all their prowess left the country overrun by him, ravaged by Louis, trampled on by Ferdinand, and insulted by the Swiss; in fine, by their means she was enslaved and disgraced."

These changes led to considerable modifications in the art of war, to which other circumstances greatly contributed. The invasion of Italy by successive ultra-montane hosts brought into her battle-fields other races, armed, drilled, and disciplined upon new principles; and the descent of Charles VIII., which we are now about to describe, forms an era in military tactics. The heavy accoutrements, the staid evolutions, the blockade sieges, the bloodless encounters of the old system were admirably suited for troops whose grand object was to perform their term of service without unnecessary personal risk, and to spare themselves all exertion which did not promise a meed of booty. The invention of gunpowder at first tended to exaggerate the very inconveniences which it was destined eventually to supplant: for a time, defensive armour became more and more massive, and horse-trappings less manageable. In order to resist the additional weight, chargers of the most powerful shapes were sought for; but they were in proportion sluggish and unhandy, apt to fall on the slightest stumble, difficult to maintain in condition, and incapable of sustained exertion. These evils having become apparent, the men-at-arms ceased to be regarded as the sole sinews of war, and many of them were converted into lances.

Unlike the cavalry which now bear that name, these lances were heavy troops, and, like the men-at-arms, they each consisted of three mounted soldiers—a head-lance on his charger, a soldier on his steed, and a lacquey on his pad. The pay of these troops, which in 1492 were already used in Romagna,[*241] was twelve florins for every lance, being four times that of a foot-soldier; and they were reckoned twice as effective as balestrieri or light-horse, both new varieties of mounted force. The former were brought into repute by Camillo Vitelli,

"In heart a lion, though a calf in name,"[242]

and were armed with cross-bows, their tactics being to gall the enemy without coming to close quarters. Of the latter there were several varieties, the most efficient of which were the Stradiotes. Accustomed from childhood to constant skirmishes with their Turkish foes, in the mountains of Albania, where manoeuvres of regular cavalry were impracticable, they partook of the agility and address for which Cossacks and Circassians have lately become celebrated. Their arms were a spear ten feet long, a broad-sword and a mace, and they were defended by an iron skull-cap, a small shield, and a short quilted jerkin. They were introduced by the Venetians into Lombardy, where their dashing qualities, as well as their ferocity, soon established the reputation of these irregular horse as most formidable mercenaries.

Infantry occupied, under the new system, a place until then denied them. They had hitherto been of small account in the mustering of armies, and were rarely relied on except in situations which excluded cavalry evolutions. They carried small shields, and halberts or lances, but were scarcely at all drilled, and never attempted to stand against a charge of horse. More effective were their cross-bows, and the rude muskets which they began to use. As fire-arms were made more handy, the value of infantry rapidly increased, and its discipline became an important branch of the military art. But in this section of the service, Italians had to learn costly lessons from their alpine neighbours.

In a land where nature had lavished her most sublime efforts, she reared a race as hardy in heart and sinew as their climate was severe, their scenery wild, their hardships extreme. Life was there a perpetual struggle with privations, an unceasing exercise of toil. To provide the necessaries of existence required limbs enduring of fatigue, an eye of unerring accuracy, perseverance inexhaustible, courage indomitable. And such were the qualities of the Swiss mountaineers, which they developed in the chase, exercised in rude sports, and perfected in their struggles with the house of Hapsburg, until their shouts of victory echoed through the valleys around Morgarten,—until Europe stood aghast at the issue of Granson, and of

"Morat the proud, the patriot field."

In their country of crags and ravines it was impossible either to rear powerful horses, or to manoeuvre with heavy cavalry; the accoutrements of gens d'armerie were also too costly for a population of scanty and much divided means. They therefore adopted, what proved more effective even in the plain, an infantry so armed and drilled as to withstand the shock of men-at-arms. In lines four deep, or in cross-shaped columns, they received the charge upon their bristling pikes, and with two-handed swords dealt fell blows on the broken squadrons. Their defensive armour was of the least cumbrous description, consisting generally but of breastplates; and with the axe-headed halberts, which some of them carried, they unseated their enemies, or cut their reins in the mÊlÉe. By these means they were enabled so well to apply the activity and endurance bestowed upon them by nature, as to meet on equal terms with armies apparently much their superiors. Louis XI. was the first sovereign to avail himself of a new element, whose qualities he had learned by bloody experience at the passage of the Birsa, in 1444.[243] But after the Swiss mercenaries had tasted the gratification of regular pay, and the plunder of lands more golden than their own, an appetite for adventure superseded the pristine simplicity of their habits. The cantons, finding it difficult to keep their youth at home, became parties to contracts which hired out their services to the best bidder; and we shall henceforth find them in the champagne lands of Lombardy, following with equal goodwill the lilies of France, the lion of St. Mark, or the Papal gonfalone. Thus in a few years, the military aspect of Southern Europe became changed, not only by the employment of Swiss infantry in all important enterprises, but from an adoption of their system by the troops of Italy, France, and Germany.

The Emperor Maximilian was the first to organise in Germany a militia of foot, under the name of lanznechts, against whom the Swiss, recollecting their ancient struggles for liberty, nourished a rancour, which only their common stipendiary interests could for the moment suspend. Lightly armed with lance and dagger, but encumbered by a preposterous camp-following; reckless of danger, yet indifferent to glory; they were fractious, disobedient, debauched, impatient of suffering, greedy of pay, devoted to plunder. But our notice of the ultra-montane infantry would be incomplete without the Spaniards. They were brought into Italy to maintain Ferdinand's pretensions upon Naples, and to support the aspirations of his successor to extended dominion in the Peninsula. Levied by tuck of drum, with scanty promise of pay, but unlimited licence to pillage, they campaigned in the spirit of pirates; and though the energy of Gonsalvo di Cordova ultimately brought the Hispano-Neapolitan army into a very efficient state, this stain was never effaced. The character for ferocity which attached to their birth is stamped upon their military exploits, and has left its traces to this day upon the inhabitants of Lower Italy. The cavalry of Germany and Spain was decidedly inferior to the Italian light horse and men-at-arms, and played but an unimportant part in the wars which we are now to consider.

Our review of the military art in the Peninsula must needs include the recent introduction of fire-arms. The researches of Gaye have discovered that projectiles were used in Italy considerably earlier than the date usually assigned to their invention, a due provision of "cannons and metal balls," both for field-service and fortification, being ordered by the Florentine government in February, 1326.[244] Whatever may have been its origin, the invention was slowly followed up; for, after nearly a century and three quarters, the Italian artillery was still so cumbrous and defective as to be of little practical utility, and it was rarely employed except in sieges. Indeed, according to Guicciardini, the very name of cannons had passed out of use, and the light and rapidly-served field-pieces of the French army were regarded with as much surprise as apprehension.

The development of the new power was extremely gradual; and although we have seen it in operation at the battle of Molinella, in 1467, no other instance occurred during that century of its being used with effect in the field.[245] Nor is this surprising, when we consider the unmanageable nature of the service, and the gradual steps whereby science superseded rude contrivance. Heavy cannon were then from ten to twelve feet long, requiring at times fifty yoke of oxen. They carried balls of stone or metal of ten or twelve hundred pounds; and after each discharge, some hours were needed to clean out, reload, and point the piece. Even the flying artillery (passa volanti) were in length sixty diameters, and the basilisks, reckoned as light guns, were two-hundred pounders. We cannot now pursue the subject, but any one who visits a complete armoury of 1480-1500, or examines the works upon military engineering of that age, will probably conclude that few modern discoveries in the destructive art had not even then been approximated. For attack and defence of fortified places these machines were certainly better adapted; yet, with all the talent and princely encouragement then expended upon fortification, it must be considered as in its infancy. But when the chivalry of the north poured upon fated Italy, under Charles VIII., no part of their array appeared so formidable as their field-train, powerful yet compact, heavy but easily moved; and the unimportant service required from it in that brief campaign, was performed in a manner which showed how much even the Italians had to learn in this department. At the Taro, the nature of the ground prevented it from contributing much to the success of that bloody day, and it was reserved for the sanguinary conflict of Ravenna to develop the capabilities of a service which gradually became the right arm of European warfare.

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