Part 20

A little more than a year after this the King would gladly have sent his cousin of Orleans to conquer Milan: it was the Duke who made excuses and would not go. For soon after the French returned to France, the Dauphin died. Charles, who had inherited that terrible distrust of his own children from which he had suffered in his father, did not greatly mourn, or so at least Commines assures us. But if the quickness of a little child of three—his own son—had given him concern, much more did he dread his new heir, the Duke of Orleans. The queen, bewailing the loss of her child, had fallen into a lamentable melancholy, and Charles, with an absurd idea of cheering the poor mother, ordered a masque of gentlemen to dance before her. Orleans was among them, and he danced to such purpose, with such lightness of heart and heel, such buoyancy and gladness, that the sorrowing queen was seriously offended; and Charles himself determined, if possible, to send his cheerful heir a little further from the throne.

An opportunity soon offered. Florence, faithful against all the world to France, sent to the King at Amboise, asking him to come and uproot the Sforza out of Milan. She offered to furnish 800 men-at-arms and 5,000 footmen at her own cost. The cardinal of St. Peter in Vinculis, the Orsini, Bentivoglio of Bologna, Este of Ferrara, Gonzaga of Mantua, all had promised to hire their forces to the King. Genoa was to be conquered by Trivulzio while Orleans marched on Milan. The plan of campaign was settled, the troops were all drawn up, Trivulzio had already entered Italy with 6,000 infantry and 800 men-at-arms, when, on the very night of his departure, Orleans suddenly abandoned his post. On his own private quarrel, he declared, he could not and he would not go; as the King’s lieutenant, and at his express command, he was ready to depart—not otherwise. “I would never force him to the wars against his will,” exclaimed Charles, and, though for many days the Florentine ambassadors besought him to exercise the authority of the throne, he refused to interfere with Orleans. “Thus was the voyage dashed,” relates Commines, “spite of great charges and all our friends in a readiness. And this was done to the King’s great grief, for Milan being once won, Naples would have yielded of itself.”

What, then, had happened to change the mind of Orleans—Orleans, disobedient at Novara, and disobedient again to-day for so opposite a reason? “He shunned this enterprise,” continues our historian, “because he saw the King ill-disposed of his body, whose heir he should be if he died.” “He would not go,” relates Guicciardini, “for he saw that the King was ill, and to himself belonged the succession of the crown.”

Just a year after this, on the morning of Palm Sunday (April 8, 1498), Louis of Orleans, fallen into a sort of undetermined half-disgrace, was standing at a window in his house at Blois, when he saw in the street some soldiers of the royal guard, running quickly. “God save the King!” they cried; “Vive le roi Louis XII.!” This was the first King Louis heard of the sudden death of his cousin. The day before, Charles VIII. had fallen down, suddenly stricken to death, as he and his wife were watching a game of tennis from the gallery at Amboise.

XI.

The French claimant to Milan was now the King of France. From this moment the pretensions of Orleans became a factor in European history. The plans of the first Duke of Milan went so grievously astray, that, instead of France and Germany each holding the other in check, for half a century their armies occupied the soil of Lombardy, nor, when they withdrew, was the land left at peace, but, baffled and paralyzed, the helpless prey of Spain.

This Iliad is too important to be contained within the slender limits of an essay. We can but briefly indicate the events which developed and then extinguished the right of the French to Milan. Conquered in 1499, by Louis XII. of France, Lombardy remained for five and twenty years an intermittent province of that kingdom, continually revolting, continually reconquered. During this time several privileges and investitures, extracted from the Emperor, confirmed the victories of France, and annulled the claims of Lodovico Sforza. These investitures are worthy of at least our brief consideration, since, from the moment of their bestowal, the French claim to Milan, already emphasised by the rights of heredity, testamentary bequest, and contract, received the final sanction of the feudal law.

The first of these Imperial investitures was bestowed on King Louis XII. by the hand of Maximilian on April 7, 1505.[103] It secured the Duchy of Milan (_non obstante priore investitura illustri Ludovico Sfortia prius exhibita_) to the King of France and to his sons; or, in default of males, to his daughter Claude. At this time, through the influence of Queen Anne, Claude was most unnaturally betrothed to the permanent enemy of her country, the future Charles V., and in this document he is mentioned as her husband and co-heir—a fact he did not allow to slip. But fortunately the heiress of Brittany, Orleans, and Milan, was not allowed to marry the great rival of France. On June 14, 1509, a second investiture confirmed the inheritance of Claude, and associated with her therein her future husband, Francis of Angoulême, her cousin, equally with herself the offspring of Valentine and Orleans.[104] This Imperial document explicitly admits the right of feminine succession to a Lombard fief,[105] for Claude, it affirms, is the heiress to Milan through her father, the grandson of Madame Valentine. But it says nothing of the descent of Francis of Angoulême, although it provides that if Claude should die in childhood, and the King have no other children born to take her place, then Francis of Angoulême shall be recognized as in his own right Duke of Milan because he is the heir of the King of France.

Footnote 103:

Luenig, sectio ii. classis i.: “De Ducato Mediolanesi,” xliv.

Footnote 104:

See in Luenig, June 14, 1509, No. xlv., and also, with some unimportant variations of text, Bib. Nat. Paris, MS. 2950, Ancien Fonds Français.

Footnote 105:

_Præfatus rex ex ducibus Mediolani originem trahit, medio illustris quondam dominæ Valentinæ aviæ suæ, filiæ quondam illustris Johannis Galeatii Mediolani ducis._

These are the rights of Francis I. to Milan, rights absolute and impregnable. But it was only by continual conquest that the French could keep their hold upon the Milanese. For the tendencies of ages go to show us that there is a natural right more potent than the claims of blood, succession, testament, adoption, or investiture. The French dukes of Milan were, in their own dominions, foreigners. And, as the wise Commines foresaw—

“There is no great seniorie but in the end the dominion thereof remaineth to the natural countrymen. And this appeareth by the realm of France, a great part whereof the Englishmen possessed the space of four hundred years, and yet now hold they nothing therein but Calais and two little castles, the defence whereof costeth them yearly a great sum of money. And the self-same appeareth also by the realm of Naples and the Isle of Sicily, and the other provinces possessed by the French, where now is no memorial of their being there, save only their ancestors’ graves.”

It was the fatal battle of Pavia which really lost her Italian dependencies to France. The treaty of Madrid, extorted by compulsion, which proved so powerless to restore to the Emperor Burgundy (already become an integral part of France), resigned to him for ever the dominions of the French in Italy; not, however, without a struggle. No sooner was Francis released from Madrid than he declared that extorted contract void. He despatched protest after protest[106] to all the courts in Europe: but what availed to retain his hold on Cognac, proved vain to regain him the Milanese.

Footnote 106:

See for example “Protestations de François 1^{er},” Bib. Nat. MS. 2846.

Immediately after the battle of Pavia, Charles V. had invested Francesco Sforza II., the son of Il Moro, with the duchy of his fathers. But what should happen on the death of Francesco Sforza, a childless man? Foreseeing this event, the hopes of the king of France were not extinguished; and the ten years between 1530 and 1540 are filled with the various endeavours, menaces, persuasions, by which he strove to obtain from the emperor the Duchy of Milan for the second son of France. Since it was evidently impossible to induce Charles V. to let Milan be an adjunct to the French Crown, the ambition of the king persevered upon a lower level, and a French Duke of Milan became the sum of his desires. At two different moments the realization of this scheme appeared possible. In 1535, after the death of Francesco Sforza II., negotiations were set on foot to obtain the Milanese for Orleans. A document still existing in the National Library at Paris[107] proves how lively and how sanguine at this moment was the hope of Francis I. to recover Milan. The king offered a promise never to unite this duchy to the Crown of France, and declared himself ready to expend an immense sum on its investiture. But the Venetians,[108] aware of the danger to themselves which a great French state must create in Italy, temporized and manœuvred so well that the matter came to nothing; for Charles V. was in a humour to credit their assertions, that any time was better than time present. The affairs of Italy were dull and dead to him. All his energies were fixed upon the idea of the crusade against Algiers. It was proposed that Orleans should join him in this enterprize,[109] and that, hand to hand in this holy fight, emperor and prince might consent to forget the bitter memory of bygone days. But in 1536 the eldest son of Francis died, and Orleans became the Dauphin of France. The schemes, the policy which during several years had endeavoured to secure for the husband of Catherine de’ Medici an Italian principality, collapsed before that unexpected stroke of fate. Orleans was not to be the head of an Italian kingdom reaching from the Alps to Rome, and in 1540 Charles V. invested his own son, Philip of Spain, with the Duchy of Milan. Yet France could not acquiesce in this alienation of her transalpine inheritance, and in 1544 the disastrous treaty of Crépy provided that, in two years from that date, either Milan or the Netherlands should be bestowed upon the third son of Francis. But before the time of the engagement had expired, Prince Charles was dead, and Milan fast in the grasp of the Spaniards.

Footnote 107:

Bib. Nat. MS. 2846, No. 57: _Instruction baillée au Seigneur d’Espercieu après la mort du duc de Milan, Sforce, &c._

Footnote 108:

Ibid.: _Les Vénitiens ont practiqué bien avant cette mattière et laissent, ce semble, le dict Sieur de Granvelle entendre qu’ils parlent autrement que le roy, par aventure, ne pense; l’ambassadeur parle assez publiquement de diviser le dict estat en plusieurs pièces_.

Footnote 109:

Ibid.

THE MALATESTAS OF RIMINI.

NOTES AND DETAILS.

It is a centre for many memories, this little town of Rimini, set in the plain by the Adriatic. Here ruled and ravaged the Mastin Vecchio of Dante. The eyes of Francesca and her lover remember eternally these yellow sands. Here Parisina left her innocence. Here dwelt Gismondo, prince of traitors. And there are older memories than these. Yet in the city whence Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, whence Augustus began the great Flaminian Way, we remember, not Cæsar or Augustus, but that strange, brave, cruel, perfidious race of petty despots, whose encroaching personality and whose genius for architecture has left an enduring trace on the cities of Romagna.

Pesaro, Fano, Cesena, Verruchio, and many another town owned the unquiet sway of these Malatestas, and found them a perverse and twisted race, shot with opposite qualities. They were a race of wrongheads, as their surname tells us. Criminal often and yet not merely vicious, having some great thought in them mostly, some fine intention still manifest through the error of their lives, many of their vices were due to circumstance. A dominant, courageous race of princelings, mostly illegitimate, never sure of their tenure, it was only by unquestioned autocracy and a never-relaxed grasp that they could secure their state from inner and outer ravage. Their hand was against every man, and every man’s against them. Not only the Pope anxious to enlarge his Venetian frontier, and Venice eager for another province on the Adriatic seaboard; not only the Duke of Urbino, the hereditary foe, perched like an eagle on the hills above, watching the unguarded moment to pounce upon his prey: not only these, and Sforza and Arragon, but every brother or cousin of the house, from his petty stronghold in the plain, was ready to snatch from the lord of Rimini, his dearly held supremacy.

Such absolute power in the present, with such uncertain future, is above all things dangerous to heady natures. The Malatestas grew mad sometimes with their unrestrained indulgence, mad with cruelty and wild debauch; but we repeat they were not merely vicious. They were strong, cunning, brave unto death, ambitious; they knew how to make their subjects love them; they left their little seaside village a monument of art, and made their few miles of plain a power in Italy.

In 1427 there was no lawful heir to this long-enriched possession. Carlo Malatesta, twice married, lived in childish state at Rimini: Pandolfo of Fano, dying in 1427, left no heir from his three brides; but, in bequeathing to his brother Carlo his estate of Fano, he also sent to him three natural children, still young boys, for whom both uncle and father had in vain attempted to obtain a bull of legitimation. Powerful enemies stood in their path. By excluding these children, Malatesta of Pesaro on the one hand, and Frederic of Urbino on the other, hoped to succeed to Rimini and Fano; and for long they persuaded the Pope to their own interests. But Carlo Malatesta was not easily thwarted.

This Carlo was in many ways the most honourable of his race; a righteous, moral, pious soldier and captain, much such another as those who saved England under Cromwell. It is recorded of him that, entering Mantua in triumph on the morning of Virgil’s birthday, he found the great irregular square there full of revellers, dancing and singing and crowning with wreaths of flowers the statue of the poet. Whereat, incensed at such worship paid to a vain heathen idol, he led up his soldiers to the pedestal and bade them throw the statue into the Mincio; which being done, or reported to be done, such a chorus of blame and indignation rose throughout the humanistic Hellenist Italy of that day as not one of the orgies, crimes, brutalities, and lusts of Carlo’s kinsmen had ever wakened. All this gave little discomfiture to Carlo, himself in his way a connoisseur of art and letters, and the first patron of the young Ghiberti, whom he employed to decorate the Gattolo at Rimini. Seldom indeed was Rimini so enviable as during the long and prosperous reign of Carlo. But in 1429 Carlo died.

Just before his death he had procured the legitimation of his nephews. He was succeeded by Galeotto, the eldest, a lad of seventeen, who found a heavy load in the much-battered helmet and sheath left empty for him. Many hungry eyes adverse to him were fixed already on that jacent helm; Frederic of Urbino and the faithless cousin of Pesaro were ranked close beneath the city gates; the more ready to snatch his inheritance because Eugene IV., the newly elected Pope, discussed with much dislike and doubt the legitimation granted to Carlo by his predecessor. The Pope, represented by Urbino, claimed Rimini as devolving to the See; Sforza and Pesaro, each for himself, were ready to contest it with him. What chance against such tremendous odds had Galeotto, seventeen years old, weak in health, illegitimate, with no great ally to enforce his claims?

A more inadequate champion the mind cannot imagine. No David eager to fight the giant, this Galeotto Malatesta, but a wan, emaciated youth, half-crazed, half-saint. In the middle of the panic, with the horror of a triple sack maddening the miserable Riminese, this prince left the city to dwell in the monastery of Arcangelo, outside the gates. There he passed his days serene, scathless in the midst of peril; neither for himself nor his kingdom taking any thought.

So strange this spectacle, so awful, that the very enemies of Rimini stopped in their onslaught amazed. The lion, it is said, will not attack a sleeping prey. Eugene, the Pope (in his temporal character the deadly foe of Rimini), wrote to its lord, bidding him remember the imperative duties of his position. The letter reached that “magnificent man and potent prince” in the monastery at Arcangelo, where clad in the coarse robes of a Franciscan friar, he led an ascetic, starved, and mutilated life. What was the magnificence of earth to him? So harsh were his self-inflicted penances that the wounds on his body never ceased to bleed. What had he to do with rule and governance? The brothers of the monastery, and the young virgin wife who drooped and paled at his side, were all of mankind he knew or saw; and he himself the chief of sinners. Neither Pope nor armies could force him back to earth. Thus friends and foes alike failed to touch him; there was no pity in the heart of Galeotto the Saint.

Or rather—common, yet tragical transmutation of the Middle Ages—his pity took a retrospective turn; dead and dry to the present woes it might relieve, it rushed back in a mighty impotent tide to the foot of that sacred and awful Cross, whose divine tragedy was the continual spectacle of the saintly life. Pity for the dead Christ—throbbing, yearning, helpless, and indignant pity for the agonized Saviour—this surely lay at the bottom of all crusades, tortures, persecutions, inquisitions of the Middle Ages. Living ever with the crucifix in sight, dwelling ever and solely in presence of that dread expiation-such fanatics as Galeotto forgot the example of the life of Christ in the terror and pity of Golgotha. Vengeance on the enemies of God! vengeance on the traitors who still stab and crucify the ever newly sacrificed God and Victim! so ran the tenor of mediæval piety. And the contagion of this fanatic sentiment slaughtered the armies of the East, tossed Albigensian babies on to lance-points, and roasted before a ribald soldiery the pious Vaudois women; the martyrs of Saint Bartholomew and the martyrs of Smithfield were hewn and burned by the strength of it; and from its armoury the Inquisition drew its deadliest weapons.

Thus Galeotto, unmoved by the misery of the people who, owing allegiance to him, died, starved, and sorrowed for his sake, was nevertheless, not without his private schemes of sanctity and militant devotion. High thoughts were born in that narrow mind, as in the intervals of penance and office the lord of Rimini paced the monastery garden. Monk as he was by life and feeling, he too had his ambition; he too had his work to fulfil. And here solved that the Jews should be cast out from Rimini.

Months went on, and the details of his scheme matured in the brain of the cloistered prince; but, meanwhile, his foes pressed closer and closer round him, and there was no leader to lead the few forlorn troops out to battle; yet ruin stared upon the city nearer every day, and now or never must the decisive step be taken. Still Galeotto prayed and dreamed in his cell at Arcangelo. But an unsuspected deliverer was in Rimini. One autumn night in 1430, secret to most of the citizens, a desperate sally was made from the gates of the town. A short, brisk uncertain conflict in the terrifying darkness, and the surprised armies were driven back, ignorant of the small number of their assailants. And as in the dawn, the conqueror led his troops back inside the gates, flushed and triumphant, the people crowded out into the streets to look at him and bless him, crying that the great days of Carlo and of Verruchio had returned; and behold this saviour of the city was the brother and heir of Galeotto—was the boy Sigismond, or Gismondo, Malatesta, not yet thirteen years old!

Whether the Pope and the oncoming armies perceived that at last they had a substantive enemy to deal with, or whether touched with compassion by so much youthful daring, they concluded a peace with Rimini only a few days after the successful sally. A ruinous peace indeed; forfeiting many broad lands and territories in return for the acknowledgment of the true right to Rimini, Fano, and Cesena of these legitimized Malatestas. But the people were thankful for any peace, and Galeotto easily yielded, seeing here the needed opportunity to prove his piety. He signed the treaty on consideration that the Holy Father would authorize him to expel the Jews from Rimini.

It was a cruel step. This plain by the Adriatic had long been a refuge to the outcast nation, who brought thither their genius for wealth, their industry, and their abundance. It was represented to Galeotto that the fortunes of Rimini were bound up with the presence of these patient and long-enduring exiles. They had given no cause for just offence; they had, indeed, offered to defray the heavy amnesty exacted by the Pope; and to banish them would yet further enfeeble the war-shattered city. The Pope, indeed, perceived these thing; but neither gratitude, policy, nor compassion, weighed with the fanatic Galeotto. “Better starve,” thought he, “than favour the enemies of Christ.” So the law went forth, and when the winter made doubly dreary the wide sandy war-ravaged plains, a melancholy train of miserable outcasts set out from the city they had enriched; banished and ruined for no fault of their own, with no home before them, and leaving behind them, uprooted and strengthless as it seemed, the fortunes of the little town.

So the edict ran, and many went out in exile scarcely was the exodus completed when Galeotto died. His fasts and scourgings, his long-continued vigils had worn out his life at twenty years of age. No hermit of the Thebaid had lived more sparsely or hardly than this prince of the pagan renaissance. He was borne to his grave in the monastery churchyard as simply as any other brother; four monks of the order bore his bier, holding flaming torches. They laid him to rest the poor half-mad, self-absorbed visionary. And all the people mourned him, forgiving his injuries because he was a saint; and also, it may be, for some endearing quality in his thwarted nature which does not reach us across the gulf of years. For his virgin widow Margaret of Este loved him and mourned him through all the days of her long life, never marrying again, and praying on her deathbed to be buried at his feet; and the city was proud of Galeotto the Saint. Nevertheless, life appeared more possible now that he was dead.