Part 17

The policy of the French court detained her while the cities of the north of France opened their gates to the newly consecrated king. Bedford, however, who had been left without money or men, had now received re-enforcements, and Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, fell back behind the Loire, while the towns on the Oise submitted again to the Duke of Burgundy. In this later struggle Jeanne fought with her usual bravery, but with the fatal consciousness that her mission was at an end, and during the defense of Compiègne she fell into the power of the Bastard of Vendôme, to be sold by her captor into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, and by the duke into the hands of the English. To the English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after a year’s imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head. Throughout the long process which followed every art was employed to entangle her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the peasant-girl foiled the efforts of her judges. “Do you believe,” they asked, “that you are in a state of grace?” “If I am not,” she replied, “God will put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in it.” Her capture, they argued, showed that God had forsaken her. “Since it has pleased God that I should be taken,” she answered, meekly, “it is for the best.” “Will you submit,” they demanded, at last, “to the judgment of the Church militant?” “I have come to the King of France,” Jeanne replied, “by commission from God and from the Church triumphant above; to that Church I submit.... I had far rather die,” she ended, passionately, “than renounce what I have done by my Lord’s command.” They deprived her of mass. “Our Lord can make me hear it without your aid,” she said, weeping. “Do your voices,” asked the judges, “forbid you to submit to the Church and the Pope?” “Ah, no! Our Lord first served.”

Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it is no wonder that, as the long trial dragged on and question followed question, Jeanne’s firmness wavered. On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed firmly to God. “I hold to my Judge,” she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, “to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always been my lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had power over me.” It was only with a view to be delivered from the military prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared, in fact, among the English soldiery those outrages to her honor, to guard against which she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime, and she abandoned it; but a renewed insult forced her to resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy, which doomed her to death. A great pile was raised in the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated “witch” from the hands of the clergy and hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. “O Rouen, Rouen!” she was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city from the lofty scaffold, “I have great fear lest you suffer for my death.... Yes; my voices were of God!” she suddenly cried, as the last moment came; “they have never deceived me!” Soon the flames reached her, the girl’s head sank on her breast, there was one cry of “Jesus!” “We are lost,” an English soldier muttered, as the crowd broke up; “we have burned a saint!”

MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II.

BY EDWARD GIBBON.

[Surnamed the Great and the Victorious, born 1430, died 1481. His main title to fame is that he consummated the dreams of his predecessors, and after a siege of nearly two months, with a force of two hundred and fifty thousand men and a large fleet, carried the city of Constantinople by storm on May 29, 1453.]

The siege of Constantinople by the Turks attracts our first attention to the person and character of the great destroyer. Mahomet II was the son of the second Amurath; and though his mother had been decorated with the titles of Christian and princess, she is more probably confounded with the numerous concubines who peopled from every climate the harem of the sultan. His first education and sentiments were those of a devout Mussulman; and as often as he conversed with an infidel, he purified his hands and face by the legal rites of ablution. Age and empire appear to have relaxed this narrow bigotry; his aspiring genius disdained to acknowledge a power above his own, and in his looser hours he presumed (it is said) to brand the Prophet of Mecca as a robber and impostor. Yet the sultan persevered in a decent reverence for the doctrine and discipline of the Koran. His private indiscretion must have been sacred from the vulgar ear, and we should suspect the credulity of strangers and sectaries, so prone to believe that a mind which is hardened against truth must be armed with superior contempt for absurdity and error. Under the tuition of the most skillful masters, Mahomet advanced with an early and rapid progress in the paths of knowledge; and, besides his native tongue, it is affirmed that he spoke or understood five languages--the Arabic, the Persian, the Chaldean or Hebrew, the Latin, and the Greek. The Persian might indeed contribute to his amusement, and the Arabic to his edification; and such studies are familiar to the Oriental youth. In the intercourse of the Greeks and Turks, a conqueror might wish to converse with the people over whom he was ambitious to reign; his own praises in Latin poetry or prose might find a passage to the royal ear; but what use or merit could recommend to the statesman or the scholar the uncouth dialect of his Hebrew slaves?

The history and geography of the world were familiar to his memory; the lives of the heroes of the East, perhaps of the West, excited his emulation; his skill in astrology is excused by the folly of the times, and supposes some rudiments of mathematical science; and a profane taste for the arts is betrayed in his liberal invitation and reward of the painters of Italy. But the influence of religion and learning was employed without effect on his savage and licentious nature. I will not transcribe, nor do I firmly believe, the stories of his fourteen pages, whose bellies were ripped open in search of a stolen melon, or of the beauteous slave whose head he severed from her body, to convince the Janizaries that their master was not the votary of love. His sobriety is attested by the silence of the Turkish annals, which accuse three, and three only, of the Ottoman line of the vice of drunkenness.

But it can not be denied that his passions were at once furious and inexorable; that in the palace, as in the field, a torrent of blood was spilled on the slightest provocation; and that the noblest of the captive youth were often dishonored by his unnatural lust. In the Albanian war he studied the lessons, and soon surpassed the example, of his father; and the conquest of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and two hundred cities--a vain and flattering account--is ascribed to his invincible sword. He was doubtless a soldier, and possibly a general. Constantinople has sealed his glory; but if we compare the means, the obstacles, and the achievements, Mahomet II must blush to sustain a parallel with Alexander or Timour. Under his command, the Ottoman forces were always more numerous than their enemies; yet their progress was bounded by the Euphrates and the Adriatic, and his arms were checked by Huniades and Scanderbeg, by the Rhodian knights and by the Persian king.

In the reign of Amurath he twice (A.D. 1451, February 9--A. D. 1481, July 2) tasted of royalty, and twice descended from the throne; his tender age was incapable of opposing his father’s restoration, but never could he forgive the viziers who had recommended that salutary measure. His nuptials were celebrated with the daughter of a Turkoman emir, and after a festival of two months he departed from Adrianople with his bride to reside in the government of Magnesia. Before the end of six weeks he was recalled by a sudden message from the divan, which announced the decease of Amurath and the mutinous spirit of the Janizaries. His speed and vigor commanded their obedience; he passed the Hellespont with a chosen guard, and at a distance of a mile from Adrianople, the viziers and emirs, the imams and cadis, the soldiers and the people, fell prostrate before the new sultan. They affected to weep, they affected to rejoice. He ascended the throne at the age of twenty-one years, and removed the cause of sedition by the death, the inevitable death, of his infant brothers. The ambassadors of Europe and Asia soon appeared to congratulate his accession and solicit his friendship, and to all he spoke the language of moderation and peace. The confidence of the Greek emperor was revived by the solemn oaths and fair assurances with which he sealed the ratification of the treaty; and a rich domain on the banks of the Strymon was assigned for the annual payment of three hundred thousand aspers, the pension of an Ottoman prince, who was detained at his request in the Byzantine court. Yet the neighbors of Mahomet might tremble at the severity with which a youthful monarch reformed the pomp of his father’s household; the expenses of luxury were applied to those of ambition, and a useless train of seven thousand falconers was either dismissed from his service or enlisted in his troops. In the first summer of his reign he visited with an army the Asiatic provinces; but after humbling the pride, Mahomet accepted the submission, of the Caramanian, that he might not be diverted by the smallest obstacle from the execution of his great design.

The Mahometan, and more especially the Turkish casuists, have pronounced that no promise can bind the faithful against the interest and duty of their religion, and that the sultan may abrogate his own treaties and those of his predecessors. The justice and magnanimity of Amurath had scorned this immoral privilege; but his son, though the proudest of men, could stoop from ambition to the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit. Peace was on his lips, while war was in his heart; he incessantly sighed for the possession of Constantinople; and the Greeks, by their own indiscretion, afforded the first pretense of the fatal rupture.

From the first hour of the memorable 29th of May, when the beleaguered city was carried by storm, disorder and rapine prevailed in Constantinople till the eighth hour of the same day, when the sultan himself passed in triumph through the gate of St. Romanus. He was attended by his viziers, bashaws, and guards, each of whom (says a Byzantine historian) was robust as Hercules, dexterous as Apollo, and equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals. The conqueror gazed with satisfaction and wonder on the strange though splendid appearance of the domes and palaces, so dissimilar from the style of Oriental architecture. In the hippodrome, or _atmeidan_, his eye was attracted by the twisted column of the three serpents; and as a trial of his strength he shattered with his iron mace or battle-axe the under jaw of one of these monsters, which in the eyes of the Turks were the idols or talismans of the city. At the principal door of St. Sophia he alighted from his horse and entered the dome; and such was his jealous regard for that monument of his glory, that on observing a zealous Mussulman in the act of breaking the marble pavement, he admonished him with his cimeter, that, if the spoil and captives were granted to the soldiers, the public and private buildings had been reserved for the prince. By his command the metropolis of the Eastern Church was transformed into a mosque, the rich and portable instruments of superstition had been removed; the crosses were thrown down, and the walls, which were covered with images and mosaics, were washed and purified and restored to a state of naked simplicity. On the same day, or on the ensuing Friday, the _muezzin_ or crier ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the _ezan_, or public invitation, in the name of God and his prophet. The imam preached, and Mahomet II performed the _namaz_ of prayer and thanksgiving on the great altar where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Cæsars. From St. Sophia he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: “The spider hath wove his web in the imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.”

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI.

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

[Surnamed the “Magnificent,” born 1448, died 1492. The Medici family had in the latter part of the fourteenth century become one of the most influential and powerful in the Florentine Republic. It had amassed vast wealth in the pursuits of commerce, and spent it with the munificence of the most public-spirited princes. Cosmo de’ Medici about the year 1420 became the leading man of the state, and practically exercised control over the republic, though without definite authority, as ruler. The splendor of the family culminated in his grandson Lorenzo, who for a quarter of a century held the powers of the state in the palm of his hand, and made the city of Florence the most brilliant center of literature, learning, art, and refined luxury in Europe. Though he curtailed the liberties of the people, the city reached under him the highest degree of opulence and power it had ever attained. Eminent as statesman, poet, and scholar, the enthusiastic patron of authors and artists, munificent in his endowment of schools and libraries, he was the most favorable example of the Italian tyrants of the middle ages; and his life was the source of a stream of influences which helped to revolutionize his own age and that which succeeded it.]

In one point Lorenzo was inferior to his grandfather. He had no commercial talent. After suffering the banking business of the Medici to fall into disorder, he became virtually bankrupt, while his personal expenditure kept continually increasing. In order to retrieve his fortunes it was necessary for him to gain complete disposal of the public purse. This was the real object of the constitutional revolution of 1480, whereby his privy council assumed the active functions of the state. Had Lorenzo been as great in finance as in the management of men, the way might have been smoothed for his son Piero in the disastrous year of 1494.

If Lorenzo neglected the pursuit of wealth, whereby Cosmo had raised himself from insignificance to the dictatorship of Florence, he surpassed his grandfather in the use he made of literary patronage. It is not paradoxical to affirm that in his policy we can trace the subordination of a genuine love of art and letters to statecraft. The new culture was one of the instruments that helped to build his despotism. Through his thorough and enthusiastic participation in the intellectual interests of his age, he put himself into close sympathy with the Florentines, who were glad to acknowledge for their leader by far the ablest of the men of parts in Italy.

According as we choose our point of view, we may regard him either as a tyrant, involving his country in debt and dangerous wars, corrupting the morals and enfeebling the spirit of the people, and systematically enslaving the Athens of the modern world for the sake of founding a petty principality; or else as the most liberal-minded noble of his epoch, born to play the first part in the Florentine Republic, and careful to use his wealth and influence for the advancement of his fellow-citizens in culture, learning, arts, and the amenities of life. Savonarola and the Florentine historians adopt the former of these two opinions. Sismondi, in his passion for liberty, arrays against Lorenzo the political assassinations he permitted, the enervation of Florence, the national debt incurred by the republic, and the exhausting wars with Sixtus carried on in his defense.

His panegyrists, on the contrary, love to paint him as the pacificator of Italy, the restorer of Florentine poetry, the profound critic, and the generous patron. The truth lies in the combination of these two apparently contradictory judgments. Lorenzo was the representative man of his nation at a moment when political institutions were everywhere inclining to despotism, and when the spiritual life of the Italians found its noblest expression in art and literature. The principality of Florence was thrust upon him by the policy of Cosimo, by the vote of the chief citizens, and by the example of the sister republics, all of whom, with the exception of Venice, submitted to the sway of rulers. Had he wished, he might have found it difficult to preserve the commonwealth in its integrity. Few but _doctrinaires_ believed in a _governo misto_; only aristocrats desired a _governo stretto_; all but democrats dreaded a _governo largo_. And yet a new constitution must have been framed after one of these types, and the Florentines must have been educated to use it with discretion, before Lorenzo could have resigned his office of dictator with any prospect of freedom for the city in his charge. Such unselfish patriotism, in the face of such overwhelming difficulties, and in antagonism to the whole tendency of the age, was not to be expected from an oligarch of the Renaissance born in the purple, and used from infancy to intrigue.

Lorenzo was a man of marvelous variety and range of mental power. He possessed one of those rare natures fitted to comprehend all knowledge and to sympathize with the most diverse forms of life. While he never for one moment relaxed his grasp on politics, among philosophers he passed for a sage, among men of letters for an original and graceful poet, among scholars for a Grecian sensitive to every nicety of Attic idiom, among artists for an amateur gifted with refined discernment and consummate taste. Pleasure-seekers knew in him the libertine who jousted with the boldest, danced and masqueraded with the merriest, sought adventures in the streets at night, and joined the people in their May-day games and carnival festivities. The pious extolled him as an author of devotional lauds and mystery-plays, a profound theologian, a critic of sermons. He was no less famous for his jokes and repartees than for his pithy apothegms and maxims, as good a judge of cattle as of statues, as much at home in the bosom of his family as in the riot of an orgy, as ready to discourse on Plato as to plan a campaign or to plot the death of a dangerous citizen.

An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was the epitome of his nation’s most distinguished qualities, that the versatility of the Renaissance found in him its fullest incarnation. It was the duty of Italy in the fifteenth century not to establish religious or constitutional liberty, but to resuscitate culture. Before the disastrous wars of invasion had begun, it might well have seemed even to patriots as though Florence needed a Mæcenas more than a Camillus. Therefore, the prince who in his own person combined all accomplishments, who knew by sympathy and counsel how to stimulate the genius of men superior to himself in special arts and sciences, who spent his fortune lavishly on works of public usefulness, whose palace formed the rallying-point of wit and learning, whose council-chamber was the school of statesmen, who expressed his age in every word and every act, in his vices and his virtues, his crimes and generous deeds, can not be fairly judged by an abstract standard of republican morality. It is nevertheless true that Lorenzo enfeebled and enslaved Florence. At his death he left her socially more dissolute, politically weaker, intellectually more like himself, than he found her. He had not the greatness to rise above the spirit of his century, or to make himself the Pericles instead of the Pisistratus of his republic. In other words, he was adequate, not superior to, Renaissance Italy.

This, then, was the man round whom the greatest scholars of the third period assembled, at whose table sat Angelo, Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michael Angelo Buonarotti, Luigi Pulci. The mere enumeration of these names suffices to awake a crowd of memories in the mind of those to whom Italian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo’s villas, where this brilliant circle met for grave discourse or social converse, heightening the sober pleasures of Italian country life with all that wit and learning could produce of delicate and rare, have been so often sung by poets and celebrated by historians that Careggi, Caffagiolo, and Poggio a Cajano are no less familiar to us than the studious shades of Academe. “In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence,” writes the austere Hallam, moved to more than usual eloquence in the spirit-stirring beauty of his theme, “on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most congenial accompaniment.” As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole or linger beneath the rose trees that shed their petals from Careggi’s garden walls, once more in our imagination “the world’s great age begins anew”; once more the blossoms of that marvelous spring unclose. While the sun goes down beneath the mountains of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden, and Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and the large Italian stars come forth above, we remember how those mighty master spirits watched the sphering of new planets in the spiritual skies. Savonarola in his cell below once more sits brooding over the servility of Florence, the corruption of a godless church. Michael Angelo, seated between Ficino and Poliziano, with the voices of the prophets vibrating in his memory, and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears, rests chin on hand and elbow upon knee, like his own Jeremiah, lost in contemplation, whereof the after-fruits shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medicean tombs. Then, when the strain of thought, “unsphering Plato from the skies,” begins to weary, Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo’s last made _ballatta_.

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

[An Italian reformer, a member of the Dominican order of monks, born 1452, executed 1498. His fervid eloquence as a preacher, and his fierce denunciation of the vice and corruption of the Italian Renaissance speedily made Savonarola a power to be reckoned with in Florentine affairs. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the prophet’s activity extended to political as well as religious ideals, and he preached an austere theocratic republic and the deposition of the Pope. The return of the Medici family to power was the downfall of Savonarola’s hopes; and he and two of his companion reformers were strangled and their bodies burned.]