Part 87

Charles VIII. died in April, 1498, and was succeeded by Louis of Orleans, who ascended the throne as Louis XII. On his coronation, Louis XII. "assumed, besides his title of King of France, the titles of King of Naples and of Jerusalem, and Duke of Milan. This was as much as to say that he would pursue … a warlike and adventurous policy abroad. … By his policy at home Louis XII. deserved and obtained the name of 'Father of the People;' by his enterprises and wars abroad he involved France still more deeply than Charles VIII. had in that mad course of distant, reckless, and incoherent conquests for which his successor, Francis I., was destined to pay by capture at Pavia and by the lamentable treaty of Madrid, in 1526, as the price of his release. … Outside of France, Milaness (the Milanese district) was Louis XII.'s first thought, at his accession, and the first object of his desire. He looked upon it as his patrimony: His grandmother, Valentine Visconti, widow of that Duke of Orleans who had been assassinated at Paris in 1407 by order of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, had been the last to inherit the duchy of Milan, which the Sforzas, in 1450, had seized. When Charles VIII. invaded Italy in 1494, 'Now is the time,' said Louis, 'to enforce the rights of Valentine Visconti, my grandmother, to Milaness.' And he, in fact, asserted them openly, and proclaimed his intention of vindicating them so soon as he found the moment propitious. When he became king, his chance of success was great. The Duke of Milan, Ludovic, the Moor, had by his sagacity and fertile mind, by his taste for arts and sciences and the intelligent patronage he bestowed upon them, by his ability in speaking, and by his facile character, obtained in Italy a position far beyond his real power. … Ludovic was, nevertheless, a turbulent rascal and a greedy tyrant. … He had, moreover, embroiled himself with his neighbours, the Venetians, who were watching for an opportunity of aggrandizing themselves at his expense." Louis XII. promptly concluded a treaty with Venice, which provided for the making of war in common upon the Duke of Milan, to recover the patrimony of the king—the Venetians to receive Cremona and certain forts and territory adjacent as their share of the expected spoils. "In the month of August, 1499, the French army, with a strength of from 20,000 to 25,000 men, of whom 5,000 were Swiss, invaded Milaness. Duke Ludovic Sforza opposed to it a force pretty near equal in number, but far less full of confidence and of far less valour. In less than three weeks the duchy was conquered; in only two cases was any assault necessary; all the other places were given up by traitors or surrendered without a show of resistance. The Venetians had the same success on the eastern frontier of the duchy. … Louis was at Lyons when he heard of his army's victory in Milaness and of Ludovic Sforza's flight. He was eager to go and take possession of his conquest, and, on the 6th of October, 1499, he made his triumphal entry into Milan amidst cries of 'Hurrah! for France.' He reduced the heavy imposts established by the Sforzas, revoked the vexatious game-laws, instituted at Milan a court of justice analogous to the French parliaments, loaded with favours the scholars and artists who were the honour of Lombardy, and recrossed the Alps at the end of some weeks, leaving as governor of Milaness John James Trivulzio, the valiant Condottiere, who, four years before, had quitted the service of Ferdinand II., King of Naples, for that of Charles VIII. Unfortunately Trivulzio was himself a Milanese and of the faction of the Guelphs. He had the passions of a partisan and the habits of a man of war; and he soon became as tyrannical and as much detested in Milaness as Ludovic the Moor had but lately been. A plot was formed in favour of the fallen tyrant, who was in Germany expecting it, and was recruiting, during expectancy, amongst the Germans and Swiss, in order to take advantage of it. On the 25th of January, 1500, the insurrection broke out; and two months later Ludovic Sforza had once more became master of Milaness, where the French possessed nothing but the castle of Milan. … Louis XII., so soon as he heard of the Milanese insurrection, sent into Italy Louis de la Trémoille, the best of his captains, and the Cardinal d' Amboise, his privy councillor and his friend. … The campaign did not last long. The Swiss who had been recruited by Ludovic and those who were in Louis XII.'s service had no mind to fight one another; and the former capitulated, surrendered the strong place of Novara, and promised to evacuate the country on condition of a safe-conduct for themselves and their booty." Ludovic attempted flight in disguise, but fell into the hands of the French and remained in captivity, at the castle of Loches, in Touraine, during the remainder of his life,—eight years. "And 'thus was the duchy of Milan, within seven months and a half, twice conquered by the French,' says John d' Auton in his 'Chronique,' 'and for the nonce was ended the war in Lombardy, and the authors thereof were captives and exiles.'"

_F. P. Guizot, Popular History of France, chapter 27._

ALSO IN: _A. M. F. Robinson, The End of the Middle Ages: Valentine Visconti; The French claim to Milan._

_E. Walford, Story of the Chevalier Bayard, chapters 3-4_.

{1834}

ITALY: 15-16th Centuries. Renaissance. Intellectual advance and moral decline.

"At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of European civilization: while the other nations were still plunged in a feudal barbarism which seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies as is the condition of some American or Polynesian savages, the Italians appear to us as possessing habits of thought, a mode of life, political, social, and literary institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas and aims, whose general views, resemble our own in that main, indefinable characteristic of being modern. They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of feeling, they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic modes of thinking, they had trampled under foot the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages; no symbolical mists made them see things vague, strange, and distorted; their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as our own, and, if they saw less than we do, what they did see appeared to them in its true shape and proportions. Almost for the first time since the ruin of antique civilization; they could show well-organized, well-defined States; artistically disciplined armies; rationally devised laws; scientifically conducted agriculture; and widely extended, intelligently undertaken commerce. For the first time, also, they showed regularly built, healthy, and commodious towns; well-drained fields; and, more important than all, hundreds of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by citizens; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants. While in the rest of Europe men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but vague half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive, and sceptical; modern administrators, modern soldiers, modern politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have obtained the philosophic, literary, and artistic inheritance of Greece; the administrative, legal, and military inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own strong, original, essentially modern activities. Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as all these advantages developed, the moral vitality of the Italians was rapidly decreasing, and a horrible moral gangrene beginning to spread: liberty was extinguished; public good faith seemed to be dying out; even private morality flickered ominously; every free State became subject to a despot, always unscrupulous and often infamous; warfare became a mere pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries; diplomacy grew to be a mere swindle; the humanists inoculated literature with the filthiest refuse cast up by antiquity; nay, even civic and family ties were loosened; assassinations and fratricides began to abound, and all law, human and divine, to be set at defiance. … The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy price for … intellectual freedom and self-cognizance, which they not only enjoyed themselves, but transmitted to the rest of the world; the price was the loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They had thrown aside all accepted rules and criteria, they had cast away all faith in traditional institutions, they had destroyed and could not yet rebuild. In their instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been taught them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, for what had been called right and wrong. Could it be otherwise? Had they not discovered that what had been called right had often been unnatural, and what had been called wrong often natural? Moral teachings, remonstrances, and judgments belonged to that dogmatism from which they had broken loose; to those schools and churches where the foolish and the unnatural had been taught and worshiped; to those priests and monks who themselves most shamefully violated their teachings. To profess morality was to be a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be narrow-minded. There was so much error mixed up with truth that truth had to share the discredit of error."

_Vernon Lee, Euphorion, volume 1, pages 27-29, 47-48._

"The conditions under which the Italians performed their task in the Renaissance were such as seem at first sight unfavourable to any great achievement. Yet it is probable that, the end in view being the stimulation of mental activity; no better circumstances than they enjoyed could have been provided. Owing to a series of adverse accidents, and owing also to their own instinctive preference for local institutions, they failed to attain the coherence and the centralised organisation which are necessary to a nation as we understand that word. Their dismemberment among rival communities proved a fatal source of political and military weakness, but it developed all their intellectual energies by competition to the utmost. At the middle of the fifteenth century their communes had lost political liberty, and were ruled by despots. Martial spirit declined. Wars were carried on by mercenaries; and the people found itself in a state of practical disarmament, when the neighboring nations quarrelled for the prize of those rich provinces. At the same time society underwent a rapid moral deterioration. When Machiavelli called Italy 'the corruption of the world,' he did not speak rhetorically. An impure and worldly clergy; an irreligious, though superstitious, laity; a self-indulgent and materialistic middle class; an idle aristocracy, excluded from politics and unused to arms; a public given up to pleasure and money-getting; a multitude of scholars, devoted to trifles, and vitiated by studies which clashed with the ideals of Christianity—from such elements in the nation proceeded a widely-spread and ever-increasing degeneracy. Public energy, exhausted by the civil wars and debilitated by the arts of the tyrants, sank deep and deeper into the lassitude of acquiescent lethargy. Religion expired in laughter, irony and licence. Domestic simplicity yielded to vice, whereof the records are precise and unmistakable. The virile virtues disappeared. What survived of courage assumed the forms of ruffianism, ferocity and treasonable daring. Still, simultaneously with this decline in all the moral qualities which constitute a powerful people, the Italians brought their arts and some departments of their literature to a perfection that can only be paralleled by ancient Greece. The anomaly implied in this statement is striking; but it is revealed to us by evidence too overwhelming to be rejected. … It was through art that the creative instincts of the people found their true and adequate channel of expression. {1835} Paramount over all other manifestations of the epoch, fundamental beneath all, penetrative to the core of all, is the artistic impulse. The slowly self-consolidating life of a great kingdom, concentrating all elements of national existence by the centripetal force of organic unity, was wanting. Commonwealths and despotisms, representing a more imperfect stage of political growth, achieved completion and decayed. But art survived this disintegration of the medieval fabric; and in art the Italians found the cohesion denied them as a nation. While speaking thus of art, it is necessary to give a wide extension to that word. It must be understood to include literature. … We are justified in regarding the literary masterpieces of the sixteenth century as the fullest and most representative expression of the Italian temperament at the climax of its growth. The literature of the golden age implies humanism, implies painting. … It is not only possible but right to speak of Italy collectively when we review her work in the Renaissance. Yet it should not be forgotten that Italy at this time was a federation, presenting upon a miniature scale the same diversities in her component parts as the nations of Europe do now. … At the beginning of such a review, we cannot fail to be struck with the predominance of Florence. The superiority of the Tuscans was threefold. In the first place, they determined the development of art in all its branches. In the second place, they gave a language to Italy, which, without obliterating the local dialects, superseded them in literature when the right moment for intellectual community arrived. That moment, in the third place, was rendered possible by the humanistic movement, which began at Florence. … What the Lombards and Venetians produced in fine art and literature was of a later birth. Yet the novelists of Lombardy, the Latin lyrists of Garda, the school of romantic and dramatic poets at Ferrara, the group of sculptors and painters assembled in Milan by the Sforza dynasty, the maccaronic Muse of Mantua, the unrivalled magnificence of painting at Venice, the transient splendour of the Parmese masters, the wit of Modena, the learning of the princes of Mirandola and Carpi, must be catalogued among the most brilliant and characteristic manifestations of Italian genius. In pure literature Venice contributed but little. … Her place, as the home of Aldo's Greek press, and as the refuge for adventurers like Aretino and Folengo, when the rest of Italy was yielding to reactionary despotism, has to be commemorated. … The Romans who advanced Italian culture, were singularly few. The work of Rome was done almost exclusively by aliens, drawn for the most part from Tuscany and Lombardy. After Frederick II.'s brilliant reign, the Sicilians shared but little in the intellectual activity of the nation."

_J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature, chapter 17._

ITALY: A. D. 1501-1504. Perfidious treaty for the partition of Naples between Louis XII. of France and Ferdinand of Aragon. Their joint conquest. Their quarrel and war. The French expelled. The Spaniards in possession.