Mortally chagrined at not being able to charm Ulysses to his destruction, the siren Parthenope drowned herself from pure spite; she was buried on the spot where Naples now stands, and gave her name to that city, one of the most beautifully situated in the world. Naples has undergone a great many sieges,—so many, that of some we shall be able to give but a very short notice.

FIRST SIEGE, A.D. 536.

Belisarius besieged Naples. That city, admirably situated, was defended by good ramparts and a numerous garrison. Its inhabitants had resolved to perish rather than surrender, and for twenty days all the assaults of the Roman general were in vain. He was about to abandon the enterprise, when a happy chance offered him the success he had ceased to hope for. An Isaurian soldier was curious to see the structure of an aqueduct which Belisarius had caused to be cut off at a considerable distance from the city, and there found a rock pierced with a channel large enough to allow water to flow through it, but not sufficiently wide to enable a man to pass. He thought that by enlarging this channel it would be possible to gain entrance into the city, and hastened to inform his general of the discovery. Belisarius secretly charged some Isaurians with the task, which they performed in a few hours, making a passage for an armed man. Belisarius, with his usual humanity, anxious to save life, had an interview with one of the principal citizens, and in vain endeavoured to persuade him to escape the cruelty of the soldiery by a surrender. Reduced to employ force, the Roman general selected that evening a body of four hundred men, completely armed, and as soon as it was dark led them, each being provided with a lantern, towards the aqueduct. They were preceded by two trumpets, which were to be sounded as soon as they were in the place. Belisarius ordered the ladders to be ready for an escalade at the same time, all the troops being under arms. When the detachment had entered the aqueduct, the greater part of them were seized with a panic, and retraced their steps, in spite of the efforts of their conductors to urge them on. Belisarius had them replaced by two hundred of the bravest men of his army, when the others, ashamed of their cowardice, followed close upon their heels. The aqueduct, covered by a brick vault, penetrated far into the city; and the soldiers, without knowing it, were already beneath the streets of Naples, when they arrived at the mouth of the channel, in a basin, whose sides were high and impracticable to armed men. Their embarrassment was extreme; more continued coming, and there was not sufficient room for them in so small a place. One of the soldiers, more active and bold than the rest, took off his arms, climbed to the top, and found himself in the miserable ruins of an old building, inhabited by an old woman: he threatened to kill her if she opened her mouth. He then threw a cord down, the end of which he fastened to an olive-tree, and by this species of ladder the band of soldiers gained the top of the basin two hours before day. They advanced towards the wall on the northern side, surprised the guards of two towers, and put them to the sword. Masters of this part of the wall, they gave the signal agreed upon with the trumpets, and Belisarius immediately had the ladders planted. They were found to be too short; but he ordered two to be tied together, and by that means reached the parapets. The Romans spread themselves through the city, where they met with little resistance. The soldiers gave themselves up to blind indiscriminate cruelty. Belisarius succeeded at length in putting a stop to this frightful course, by threatening some and entreating others. After having abandoned the booty to them as a recompense for their valour, he re-established quiet in the city, and caused children to be restored to their parents, and wives to their husbands.

SECOND SIEGE, A.D. 543.

Totila laid siege to Naples. To intimidate the garrison, the king of the Goths caused Demetrius, the Roman general, taken prisoner in a convoy, to be led close to the walls, loaded with chains and a cord about his neck, and compelled him to cry aloud to the besieged, that the emperor was not in a condition to send them any succours. This speech, but still more the famine which raged in the city, induced the Neapolitans to surrender.

THIRD SIEGE, A.D. 818.

Sicon, prince of Beneventum, declared war against the Neapolitans, and after a long siege, reduced them to the rank of tributaries.

FOURTH SIEGE, A.D. 1253.

Naples had yielded itself up to the Pope, upon which, the emperor Conrad laid siege to it, and shortly brought it back to a sense of its duty.

FIFTH SIEGE, A.D. 1381.

Pope Urban VI. having excommunicated Joan, the first queen of Naples, intrusted the execution of the sentence to Charles de Duras, whom that queen, a few years before, had declared her legitimate heir. This prince appeared at the gates of Naples, in which city he had many partisans. A great number of the inhabitants came over the walls to bring refreshments to his troops, by whom he learnt that the city was divided into three factions, the most powerful of which demanded him for king. Two Neopolitan knights serving in Charles’s army, took a novel means of obtaining entrance to a besieged city. It had always been deemed that the sea formed a sufficient defence at what was called the Gate Conciara, and it was neither closed nor guarded. The knights, under the guidance of some deserters, swam close under the ramparts and entered the open gate without obstruction. They then advanced into the market-place, crying aloud, “Long live Charles Duras and Pope Urban!” Followed by the populace, they opened the market gate and admitted Charles and his army. The next day he laid siege to the castle, in which the queen had taken refuge. Joan, reduced to the last extremity by famine, having no vessel in which to escape, and no resource but in her husband, Otho of Brunswick, who was made prisoner by Charles, was obliged to surrender.

SIXTH SIEGE, A.D. 1442.

Alphonso, king of Arragon, the implacable enemy of RenÉ of Anjou, who was a kind of titular king of Naples, laid siege to the capital of that country. This RenÉ is a character somewhat associated with our national historical recollections, being the father of Margaret of Anjou, one of the most remarkable of our queens. Alphonso was pressing the siege warmly, when a mason, named Anello, informed him that he was acquainted with an aqueduct by which it would be possible to penetrate to a house close to the gate of Capua; and if a number of soldiers and officers were introduced into that house, they could easily render themselves masters of that gate. The king determined to make the attempt, and appointed two companies of infantry for the service. Anello, stimulated by the hope of a great reward, placed himself at their head and conducted them to the regard (opening) of the aqueduct, more than a mile from the city. They proceeded in single files, with large lanterns, and armed with cross-bows and partizans. Whilst Alphonso drew nearer to the walls to watch the event of this expedition, Anello and his troop followed the aqueduct till it brought them to the house of a tailor, near the gate of St. Sophia, where they issued by means of a dry well, to the amount of forty. Not daring to force the guard, they were compelled to terrify the wife and daughter of the owner of the house, in order to keep them quiet. Whilst they were so engaged, the tailor came home, and, surprised at seeing his house filled with soldiers, he turned sharply round and ran out, exclaiming, “The enemies are in the city!” The forty adventurers then, judging they could no longer hesitate, attacked the guard of the gate of St. Sophia; but they met with such resistance, that RenÉ had time to come up, when he killed part of them and forced the rest to retreat. Alphonso, not seeing the signal agreed upon, imagined that the enterprise had failed, and was returning to his camp, when he heard the noise of a conflict carried on in the city, and retraced his steps towards the walls. RenÉ had reinforced the guard and placed the gate of St. Sophia in safety; but three hundred Genoese charged with the defence of that of St. Januarius, abandoned their post the moment they heard the enemy was in the city. A gentleman named Marino Spezzicaso, a partisan of the house of Arragon, threw down several cords from the walls, by means of which, Pierre de Cardonna, general of the army of Alphonso, climbed up the walls, and was soon followed by a great number of his bravest men. Whilst he was traversing the streets, shouting the war-cry of Arragon, he met an officer named Brancazzo, going on horseback to join King RenÉ. He stopped him, made him prisoner, took from him his horse, and mounting it, led on a party of Arragonese to attack RenÉ. That prince, on beholding him, believed that the enemy really had possession of the city, and, listening to nothing but the dictates of his courage, he attacked the advancing troop and put them to flight. But they soon rallied and returned to the charge. RenÉ, obliged to give way to numbers, opened with his sword a passage for himself to the New Castle. So the king of Arragon made himself master of Naples by means of an aqueduct, as Belisarius had done when he took it from the Goths, ten centuries before. RenÉ, being without hope or resources, embarked for Provence, whilst Alphonso entered Naples in triumph, in imitation of the ancient Romans—in a chariot drawn by four white horses. All paid homage to his good fortune and his valour, and the kingdom of Naples was reunited to that of Sicily, from which it had been separated a hundred and sixty years.

SEVENTH SIEGE, A.D. 1503.

Ferdinand, king of Castille and Arragon, having, in contempt of treaties of the most solemn kind, invaded the part of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily that belonged to France, charged his great captain Gonsalvo with the siege of the capital of that state. At the approach of the Spaniards, the French, who placed no confidence in the inhabitants, retreated to the fortresses of the ChÂteau-neuf and the Œuf. Gonsalvo attacked the first of these, and it made a vigorous resistance. The garrison had resolved to bury themselves under the ruins of the place rather than surrender; and without doubt the Spanish general would have failed in his enterprise if he had only employed ordinary means. But he had in his army a soldier called Peter of Navarre, from the name of his country, who opened the gates and destroyed the ramparts of the castle by the help of a new species of thunder, if we may so term it. This soldier, a very intelligent man, had been, in 1487, with an expedition in which the Genoese employed, but without success, those terrible volcanoes called mines. He examined the fourneau of one of these mines, and observed that the want of effect in this invention did not arise from any fault in the art, but from that of the workmen, who had not taken their dimensions correctly. He perfected this secret, and communicated it to Gonsalvo, who begged him to put it to the test. Peter of Navarre took his measures so well, that his mine had all the effect he could expect; he then pierced several others, which succeeded with such precision that the New Castle was blown up, and all its defenders were either cut to pieces or buried under the ruins of the walls. The governor of the castle of the Œuf, a brave gentleman from Auvergne named Chavagnac, were not discouraged by the melancholy fate of his compatriots; he was in vain summoned to surrender: he replied that nothing more glorious could happen to him than to die for his master, with his sword in his hand. Peter then commenced some fresh mines, which were sprung with the same terrible consequences as the former: the walls crushed the greater part of the soldiers, and the rest perished in sight of a Genoese fleet which came to their succour.

EIGHTH SIEGE, A.D. 1557.

The greatest captains have often been reproached with avoiding engagements. Their firmness in despising the railleries of the multitude and the scoffing opinions of their rivals, have in almost all cases placed the seal upon their reputations. Francis, duke of Guise, at the head of a French army and some troops furnished by Pope Paul IV., undertook the conquest of Naples. This general, too skilful not to be certain that the expedition could not succeed if it were not begun with some complete advantage, did all in his power to bring the Spaniards to a general action: he offered them so many favourable opportunities, that their officers could not pardon their leader, the duke of Alva, for neglecting them. The duke called a council of war, in which he said, in an animated yet haughty tone,—“I have always prayed God, gentlemen, to inspire my soldiers with a determined firmness and a fiery courage, so that, without fearing or reasoning, they would rush headlong to meet death, and expose themselves to any dangers when commanded to do so. But I ask other qualities of officers: much prudence and great phlegm, to moderate the impetuosity of the soldiers—that is the way by which they attain the rank of great captains. I will not conceal from you that I have been displeased with your ardour, because I have thought it immoderate and opposed to reason. To point out to you the occasions on which a great general should give battle, I will tell you it is when his object is to succour a strong place reduced to extremity, which may form the security of a province; when he knows that the enemy must receive succours which will render them his superior, or even his equal; when, at the beginning of a war, it is desirable to give reputation to his arms, to strengthen the fidelity of wavering subjects, retain allies, and prevent covert enemies from declaring themselves; when fortune not discontinuing to favour us, our enemies are in such consternation that they dare not stand before us; and lastly, when, pressed by famine and disease, and hemmed in on all sides, we must either conquer or die.

“A great captain will never hazard a considerable action if he is not sure of drawing great advantages from it, or unless he is forced into it: tell us what the dangers are which surround us, or what fruit our country can derive from the loss of our lives or of our blood? Suppose we are victorious over the duke of Guise, and the French are cut to pieces, what shall we be the better for it? Is it that the cities of the dominions of the Pope will be united to those of Philip? Is it that the baggage of the French will enrich us? If, on the contrary, the always uncertain fate of arms should prove to be against us, what misfortunes would not our rashness bring upon us? Do not, then, let us trouble ourselves about conquering Guise; he is flying before us. Could a murderous battle procure us anything more solid or more glorious? We gain a complete victory, without shedding a drop of blood. Our name alone serves as a defence and a rampart to all Italy.

“If this manner of making war did not appear to me suited to circumstances, I should remember what I did in Saxony; I would cross the greatest rivers, I would not shrink from wetting my feet with the sea: but whilst I find victory in the retreat of my enemy, I will remain faithful to my maxims, and will endeavour to combat your audacity and rashness. In a word, I will not risk a kingdom against a cassock of cloth of gold, which is all Guise can lose.”

The conjectures of the Spanish general were all verified. The French expedition had the most fatal issue.

It may be said that this speech contains the history of no siege; but Fabius Maximus was no less admirable than Scipio; and he who consumes his enemy in vain enterprises, is not a less able general than he who annihilates him in a battle. Military men will find more instruction in the motives which determined the duke of Alva not to risk a battle, than they would by the description of a siege.

Since the commencement of the French revolution, Naples has been the scene of several important political events, and has more than once succumbed to the power of the French; but as there has been no regular siege, these do not come within the scope of our plan.

---