Part 18

We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillows of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola’s soul. Here for the first time he prophesied, “The Church will be scourged, then regenerated, and this quickly.” These are the celebrated three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic utterances adhered.

But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His voice was weak, his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him. Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had learned by heart each voice of the Old and New Testaments. Pondering on their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame which began to smolder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. “Midway upon the path of life,” he opened the book of Revelation; he figured to the people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue. He pictured to them their city flowing with blood. His voice, which now became the interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of Gascon de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia, her citizens recalled the apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.

As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of preaching. We have abundant material for judging what his features were, and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration. Fra Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of St. Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and grace of expression which his stern lineaments could assume. It is a picture of the sweet and gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar of God. In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen, uncompromising, beneath its heavy cowl. But the noblest portrait is an intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now to be seen in the Uffizi at Florence. Of this work Michael Angelo, himself a disciple of Savonarola, said that art could go no further. We are therefore justified in assuming that the engraver has not only represented fully the outline of Savonarola’s face, but has also indicated his peculiar expression.

A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders. Beneath it can be traced the curve of a long and somewhat flat skull, rounded into extraordinary fullness at the base and side. From a deeply sunken eye-socket emerges, scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that blazed with lightning. The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the stress of vehement emotion. The mouth has full, compressed, projecting lips. It is large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence; it is supplied with massive muscles, as if to move with energy and calculated force and utterance. The jaw-bone is hard and heavy, the cheek-bone emergent; between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestling in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener features of the classic orators. Savonarola was a visionary and a monk.

The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him. The wings of dreams have winnowed and withered that cheek as they passed over it. The spirit of prayer quivers upon those eager lips. The color of Savonarola’s flesh was brown; his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet strong; like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained, they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than by the evolution of fresh electricity. With Savonarola fasts were succeeded by trances, and trances by tempests of vehement improvisation. From the midst of such profound debility that he could scarcely crawl up the pulpit steps, he would pass suddenly into the plenitude of power, filling the Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his discourse by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon the lips of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx of embattled arguments and pointed illustrations, pouring his thought forth in columns of continuous flame, mingling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings of severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience to tears, at another freezing them with terror, again quickening their souls with prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ.

His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they advanced, the ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, till the sympathies of the whole people of Florence gathered round him, met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouth-piece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery _crescendo_, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar-steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing voice.

The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these sermons at times breaks off with these words: “Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on.” Pico della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of Savonarola’s voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through all its space with people, was like a clap of doom; a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his head stood on end, as he listened. Another witness reports: “These sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears that every one passed through the streets without speaking, more dead than alive.”

Such was the preacher, and such was the effect of his oratory. The theme on which he loved to dwell was this: “Repent! A judgment of God is at hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity--for the sins of the Church, whose adulteries have filled the world--for the sins of the tyrants who encourage crime and trample upon souls--for the sins of you people, you fathers and mothers, you young men, you maidens, you children that lisp blasphemy!” Nor did Savonarola deal in generalities. He described in plain language every vice; he laid bare every abuse; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of his hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults appallingly betrayed and ringed around with fire. He entered with particularity into the details of the coming woes. One by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies, the desolating wars that were about to fall on Italy. You may read pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives of what afterward took place in the sack of Prato, in the storming of Brescia, in the battle of the Ronco, in the cavern-massacre of Vicenza. No wonder that he stirred his audience to their center. The hell within them was revealed. The coming down above them was made manifest. Ezekiel and Jeremiah were not more prophetic. John crying to a generation of vipers, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” was not more weighty with the mission of authentic inspiration.

“I began,” Savonarola writes himself with reference to a course of sermons delivered in 1491--“I began publicly to expound the Revelation in our Church of St. Mark. During the course of the year I continued to develop to the Florentines these three propositions: That the Church would be renewed in our time; that before that renovation God would strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement; that these things would happen shortly.” It is by right of the foresight of a new age, contained in these three famous so-called conclusions, that Savonarola deserves to be named the Prophet of the Renaissance. He was no apostle of reform; it did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute the discipline or to criticise the authority of the Church. He was no founder of a new order; unlike his predecessors, Dominic and Francis, he never attempted to organize a society of saints or preachers; unlike his successors, Caraffe the Theatine, and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia for the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for education. Starting with simple horror at the wickedness of the world, he had recourse to the old prophets. He steeped himself in Bible studies. He caught the language of Malachi and Jeremiah. He became convinced that for the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent. From that conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief that a new age would dawn. The originality of his intuition consisted in this, that while Italy was asleep, and no man trembled for the future, he alone felt that the stillness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its tranquillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown from the very nostrils of the God of hosts.

CÆSAR BORGIA.

BY CHARLES YRIARTE.

[Son of Pope Alexander VI, at first prelate, then soldier and statesman, born about 1457, died 1507. All the contemporary annals concur in giving Cæsar Borgia nearly every private vice, and stamp him as murderer, sensualist, and a man of ruthless ambition. Successively made bishop and cardinal in his earlier years, he was finally secularized and became Duke of Romagna and Valentinois. After having dispossessed the rulers of many small principalities and united them into a duchy, he is believed to have nourished the scheme of founding a united Italy. After some years of vicissitudes Cæsar lost his political ascendency by the election of a pope inimical to his interests, and his military power by the jealousy of the Kings of France and Spain. A consummate soldier and politician, he showed during the short period during which he exercised the functions of a ruler all the traits of a wise, upright, and public-spirited sovereign, in shining contrast with the hideous crimes which had blackened his career as a man. Cæsar Borgia was the model on which Machiavelli drew his “Prince,” in the celebrated politico-historical treatise of that title.]

Was Cæsar merely going straight before him, led by the insatiable ambition which lays hands upon all within its reach, or was he aiming at a distinct end, at the realization of a vast conception? Granting that he had no dreams of reconstituting the kingdom of Central Italy himself, Florence at least felt herself threatened. As long ago as his first campaign, when, after making himself master of Imola and Forli, he was still besieging Cesena preparatory to his entry into Pesaro and his progress to Rome by way of Urbino, the Florentine Republic had sent Soderini on a mission to him, to find out his intentions and his terms. The following year, with increased anxiety, as she felt herself approached more closely through the taking of Arezzo, which had fallen into the hands of Cæsar’s troops, she sent him Machiavelli, the most clear-sighted of her secretaries. The spectacle of these two champions face to face is one unique in history. From the day when he arrived in the camp, Machiavelli, who had recognized in the Duke of Valentinois a terrible adversary, felt that it was of vital interest to the state that he should not lose sight of him for a moment. As a point of fact, he never left his side up to the day when he saw him hunted down like a wild beast, vanquished by destiny, fettered beyond all power of doing harm to any one.

Of course, we may refuse to accept the verdict of the secretary of the Florentine Republic. Gregorovius, the celebrated author of the “History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages,” goes so far as to say that it is a reproach to the memory of the founder of political science that he made a blood-stained adventurer like Cæsar the “Italian Messiah”--the precursor, in a word, of Italian unity. Again, P. Villari, in his fine work “N. Machiavelli e suoi tempi,” says that the Florentine secretary, though he was an eyewitness of the actual deeds of Valentinois, made of him an imaginary personage, to whom he attributed the great ideas by which he himself was animated.

Still, we have a right to point out that in history purpose is controlled by action. A great number of the heroic deeds and of the portentous decisions which have determined the lofty destiny of empires have not been the consequence of long premeditation; they have often been the result of the passions and desires of mankind, or simply that of the need of action natural to a vigorous mind. Undoubtedly the immediate object of Alexander VI was the aggrandizement of his children, and the increase of their territory; he cared only for the power of the Church insomuch as it augmented that of his own family, but the deeds accomplished by father and son contributed none the less to reconstitute the temporal dominion of the Church--a work which, after its completion by Julius II, was destined to continue for more than three centuries, from 1510 to 1860.

The ambitious Cæsar himself was turning aside the current for his own particular advantage. When Julius II assumed the triple crown, the officers who held the fortresses of Romagna with one accord refused to give them up to the Church, considering them as the lawful conquest and personal property of their leader. Machiavelli looked only at the results; this is the justification of the opinion which he expresses concerning Valentinois in his book, “Il Principe,” in the “Legazione,” the “Descrizione dei fatti di Romagna,” and the “Decennale.” He was present when these things were done; he calculated the effect of the events he witnessed. From his observation of Cæsar at work, he noted the strength of his will and the resources of his mind, his strategic talents, and his administrative faculty; and as within certain limits the acts of Valentinois tended toward a distinct goal, an ideal not unlike that at which he himself aimed, the Florentine secretary was not the man to be squeamish about ways and means. What did it matter to him whose hand struck at the despots of the petty principalities of Italy? What cared he about the personal ambition of the man who, after overthrowing them, busied himself at once with the organization of their states, gave them laws, kept them under stern discipline, and ended by winning the affections of the people?

Once the idea of union was accepted, a prince of more blameless private life would succeed Cæsar, and there was always so much progress made toward the realization of the great conception. The Sforza had fallen; the princes of the houses of Este and Mantua were not equal to such a task; Lorenzo de’ Medici was no soldier. Impatient to reach his end, Machiavelli cast his eyes around in vain; nowhere could he find a personality capable of great undertakings. Cæsar alone, with his youth and daring, quick to seize an opportunity, free from scruples, imposing by his magnificence--Cæsar, who always went straight to the very core of a matter, a consummate soldier, full of high purposes and lofty schemes--seemed the one man capable of aiming at the goal and attaining it. From that time forward, the secretary made him the incarnation of his ideal prince, removing from his character the hideous elements which lurked beneath the fair exterior of the skillful diplomate and hardy soldier.

Of these “high purposes” of which Machiavelli speaks we have also other proofs, without speaking of the, in a manner, prophetic declaration of the young cardinal who, at twenty, fixed his eyes on the example of the Roman Cæsar, and took as his motto “CUM NUMINE CÆSARIS OMEN.” Some of the contemporaries of the Duke of Valentinois have expressed themselves in distinct terms regarding him. We have here some real revelations of his personal intentions which are free from the _après coup_ of the judgments pronounced by later historians. Speaking of the war which the Spaniards were carrying on to prevent the Pope from extending his dominions beyond the Neapolitan frontier, Signor Villari recognizes the fact that Alexander VI had declared his intention of making Italy “all one piece.” As for Cæsar, we read in the dispatches of Collenuccio, the ambassador of Ferrara, that Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, had taken into his service a secretary who had been for some time in Cæsar’s employ, and that this person averred that he had heard the Duke of Romagna say that he had “deliberately resolved to make himself _King of Italy_.” Here we have it in so many words.

As regards Machiavelli, could we collect in one page all the traits of character sketched from nature, scattered here and there in his dispatches to the Florentine Signoria, we should have a literary portrait of Valentinois, signed with the name of the most sagacious observer that ever honored Italian diplomacy. Cæsar had never learned the art of war, yet it would be impossible to pass with greater facility from the Consistory to the camp than he did. He was no mere warrior. Brave and impetuous as he was, he had more serious work in hand than the exchanging of sword-thrusts. He was at once a general, a strategist, and an administrator. Hardly had he taken a town when he made laws for it, and organized its administration; the breaches in its fortifications were repaired, and its defense and retention made as safe as if the conquest were final. No sooner had Imola, Forli, and Cesena fallen into his power, than he sent for Leonardo da Vinci to provide for a sufficient supply of water, to repair the fortresses, and to erect public monuments. He founded _Monts de Piété_, set up courts of justice, and did the work of civilization everywhere. The cities which fell under his sway never misunderstood his efforts; they looked back on the time of his supremacy with regret.

“This lord is ever noble and magnificent; when his sword is in his hand, his courage is so great that the most arduous undertakings seem easy to him; in the pursuit of glory or advantage he shrinks from no toil or fatigue. He has the good-will of his soldiers; he has secured the best troops in Italy: it is thus that he makes himself formidable and victorious. Add to this, that fortune is constantly favorable to him. He is of solitary habits, and he possesses craft, promptness, the spirit of order and good fortune; he has an extraordinary power of profiting by opportunity very secret (_molto segreto_). He controls himself with prudence; (_gran conoscitore della occasione_.”)

So Machiavelli warned the Florentines not to treat Cæsar “like the other barons, but as a new power in Italy, with whom they might conclude treaties and alliances, rather than offer him an appointment as _condottiere_.” The purely military element, which was Machiavelli’s speciality, did not escape the attention of the secretary. Once he had found the right man, the next requisite was the proper tool to work with--that is, the army; and so, when he saw these well-disciplined battalions, and the perfect order that reigned among them, the system of supplies secured by treaties, the regular equipment, and, above all, the formidable artillery, “in which department Cæsar alone is as strong as all the sovereigns of Italy put together,” the Secretary of the Republic recognized in Cæsar a born commander, for whom he prophesied the most lofty career.

Cæsar’s life was very short, and the vicissitudes of his fortune followed each other in rapid succession. In youth he was a murderer, in youth a conqueror, and in youth he died. His period of activity as a general extended from the autumn of 1499 to April, 1503, and his actual reign as Duke of Romagna lasted only two years.

On the 26th of January, 1500, having accomplished the first half of his task, he entered Rome as a conqueror--on which occasion a representation was given of the triumph of Cæsar with the various episodes of the life of the Roman Cæsar shown in _tableaux vivants_, suggested by the painter Mantegna. Eleven allegorical cars started from the Piazza Navona, Borgia himself, crowned with laurel, representing in his own person the conqueror of the world. Before his departure for his second campaign, he had, as we have already seen, caused the assassination of Lucrezia’s second husband, Alfonso de Bisceglie, to prepare for the third marriage of his sister, who was this time to become Duchess of Ferrara, and thus secure him an alliance which would forward his projects as Duke of Romagna. On the 27th of September, 1500, he left Rome again to complete his work, but returned quickly to take part in the war which the King of France had carried into the Neapolitan kingdom, when he possessed himself of the city of Capua, thus acquitting his obligation toward his protector, Louis XII. On the 29th of November his father changed his title of Vicar of the Holy See to that of Duke of Romagna.