Part 28

Driven by a momentary resentment, a gust of pity and remembrance, into Pisa, Charles was no sooner in the city than the King resumed his empire over the Man. He sent, as I have said, an embassy to Florence, reassuring as best he could the potent and wealthy city, putting off his answer, and asking meanwhile for an instalment of money and three hundred lances. The Florentines sent no money and only eighty lances, and Charles perceived that the least extra strain would break the slender thread that still bound her to the French. Henceforth he steeled his royal heart against impolitic pity. It was in vain that he looked on the statue of himself upon the bridge, embellished in sculpture, resolute, heroic, Saviour of the City, trampling underfoot the Lion of Florence and the Viper of Milan. It was in vain, that, at the entrance of the army, the little children of Pisa dressed in white satin sown with _fleur-de-lis_ rushed to the gates to meet the soldiers, crying in their high, sweet, confident voices, “Viva Francia!” It was in vain that, in the early morning, as the King returned from the intenerating Sacrament of the Mass, he met in the streets the fairest ladies of the town, barefoot, dishevelled, dressed like slaves in coarse mourning garments, who dropped before him on their knees, sighing and wailing for liberty.

The most that Charles could do was to defer, to temporize, to vacillate; he could not be brought to pledge himself to more. He, with a remnant of his army, was alone in an inimical country, subject at any moment to encounter the forces of Venice, Milan, Spain, the Emperor and the Pope; meanwhile Florence was his one efficient friend. Florence to him had been a leal and honest ally; dare he desert her? ought he to repay her sacrifice with ruin? And yet this faithful Florence had behaved to Pisa in a fashion cruel and anti-human beyond words. And Pisa also had trusted him; Pisa was tenderly his friend. Could he fling the wounded hare which had taken refuge under his royal mantle to the fierce eyes and gaping jaws of the hound which served him?

The question wrung the conscience of the man. But, for the King, the matter was easily decided. His first duty was to his country and his troops; Florence could help him to reach the forces of Orleans in safety and with some degree of glory; but Pisa could furnish no active aid at all.

Meanwhile, the army had become fired with entirely different convictions. Suddenly King Charles, the adored conqueror, the second Charlemagne, the unlettered and ugly little captain whose soldiers’ devotion so amazed the Milanese, beheld himself in the midst of his troops almost without authority. The army, like one man, rose and spoke on behalf of the Pisans.

Insulated in this shelter of Pisa, with the offended Florentines continually harassing his outposts, with in front the fastnesses of the Apennines, and (God alone knew where) the five-toothed Trap of the League into which his little force must fall—in this terrible complication Charles beheld himself menaced by no less than the mutiny of his own army. And for what? Not on account of the light head and imprudent heart that had brought this handful of soldiers to fight such fearful odds. This rebellion was inspired purely by the pity inspired by men whose situation was certainly less hazardous than the peril of their indignant champions.

But all day long the army surged in front of the palace clamouring “Liberty! liberty!” in more virile voices than the Pisans’. The army infected the Court; and one day, when the King sat playing draughts alone with M. de Piennes, forty or fifty gentlemen of the Royal household with their partisans forced their way into his chamber and declaimed the woes of Pisa. Charles was indignant, and spoke so roughly, that they took their persuasions and menaces elsewhere. Even the poor archers, says Commines, moved by pity for the tears and lamentations of the Pisans, threatened those whom they believed persuaded the King to keep his oath at Florence. A private archer menaced Briçonnet; others used rude language to Marshal de Gié; and for three nights President Gannay durst not sleep in his lodgings. The Frenchmen infected the Swiss; and these ferocious giants, who a few days later should massacre man, woman, and child at Pontremoli, proved themselves as passionate in their apology for liberty. “Do you want money?” cried young Sallezart their paymaster. “Is it mere money that leads you to this infamy? Take rather our collars, our buckles, and our silver ornaments; stop our wages and spend the sum of our arrears. We will pay you as well as Florence! only set the Pisans free!”

In front of such enthusiasm Charles dared not avow a contrary decision. It was in vain that Briçonnet and his party urged instant fidelity to Florence. It was useless for Commines to observe that keeping faith with Florence did not preclude a sentiment of tenderest concern for Pisa, though after all, as the excellent diplomat observed, “Divers cities in Italy that be in subjection are as evil-entreated as she”—_Sie ist nicht die Erste_. Charles would promise nothing to Pisa, nothing definite; but also he would make no vows to Florence. He knew that the task before his little army was of the sternest and of the severest, physically impossible to discouraged and disaffected troops. Therefore he wrote to the Florentines saying that he would give his answer, not at Lucca, but at Asti; and while, in his heart, as we shall see, he meant to make the best of terms for Pisa, and then restore her to the Florentines, he left for the nonce, a French garrison in the city, three hundred picked men, difficultly spared, under the governorship of Robert de Balzac Seigneur d’Entragues. Thus, by a judicious temporizing, Charles hoped to untie the Gordian knot. By turning his back on the difficulty he thought he had suppressed it. And yet, were these three hundred men left behind in Pisa, likely to become more obedient to an absent monarch? Was Entragues, a man of Orleans’ household, Ligny’s candidate, likely to carry out the views of Commines or of Briçonnet against the avowed policy of his master and his patron? Charles, it may be supposed, did not ask himself these questions. He bestowed on Entragues, not merely the governorship of Pisa, but the command of the frontier castles, and, without further hesitation, left the town.

Robert de Balzac, Seigneur d’Entragues, was, says Commines, a very ill-conditioned fellow. But a similar opinion has been entertained by many historians for the most successful of their political opponents. Robert de Balzac was the son of Jean d’Entragues and his wife the sister of the famous Comte de Dammartin. Robert was a very young man when the accession of Louis XI. brought about the disgrace and exile of his all-powerful uncle. Every student of history is familiar with the legend of that great disgrace: how the estates of the unhappy minister were divided among the favourites at Court; how his wife with her suckling child was left destitute and hunted out of all her castles; how forsaken by all her friends, she wandered like an excommunicated woman along the lanes of Dammartin begging for her bread, until a poor day-labourer, Anthoine Le Fort, took the abandoned Countess to his hovel and sheltered her and her baby, eighteen months old, the starving little godson of the Duke of Bourbon. Jeanne was still in the peasant’s hut; her husband had fled for his life to Germany; when, as a last effort, Robert de Balzac, the Count’s nephew, was sent to Court to plead his cause. It was no light task to undertake. Men had been banished or odiously imprisoned for entreating the pardon of Dammartin, and many well-meaning friends would have dissuaded the young man. But he went his way, arriving at Court about the end of 1466, and pleaded so well that, after several audiences, the King recalled his uncle and placed him high in favour.

Such was the man—about forty years of age, rhetorical, impulsive, brave, generous, and audacious whom the King had left in command at Pisa.

VI.

The little army of Charles, dragging its artillery with lacerated hands across the Apennines, cutting its way through the Venetian forces at Fornovo, arrived at last in Asti; and, when August came, the prospect of peace began to brighten before them. The King had come to terms with Florence; and—granted the inevitable treachery of the situation—the Treaty of Turin was not unkind. It is true that the King agreed to restore the city of Pisa, with the other Tuscan fortresses, to his ally of Florence; but on the express proviso of not merely an amnesty for the Pisans. Henceforth they were to trade by sea and land on equal terms with Florence, they were to enjoy the same civil rights, their ancient arts of navigation and ship-building were to be released from embargo, and their sequestered property was to be given back to their possession. Charles had put his muzzle on the hound; Pisa, though restored to her immemorial energy, should henceforth be protected by the chief ally of Florence.

It was, in fact, a comparative equality that Charles proposed. Still remaining an intrinsic part of the Florentine territory, as indeed the safety and prosperity of that Republic demanded, henceforth the admirable commercial situation of Pisa was not to be turned merely to a Florentine profit, nor were the Pisans to be entirely governed for Florentine ends and by a Florentine Council. In their government henceforth the Pisans themselves should have a place and a right; and the only exclusive advantage which the Florentines should retain would be that superior dignity, that reserve of power, with which a powerful mother-country inevitably controls her colonies and her dependencies. Henceforth in law, in all that can be assessed by franchise and by jurisdiction, the Pisans should stand on an equal footing with the Florentines.

This decided, Charles, satisfied he had been unfair to nobody, on August 16th, wrote from Turin a letter to Entragues, signed with his own signature and countersigned by Orange, Vincula, Briçonnet, Gié, De la Trémouille, Commines, and (somewhat to our surprise) Piennes. This list of names is eloquent of the triumph of the diplomatic party; Ligny is not there, nor D’Amboise nor Étienne de Beaucaire, though these were among the nearest of the Royal counsellors. It was, in fact, necessary that something should be done at once. Orleans and his men were still starving in beleaguered Novara; Montpensier and the army were fighting at desperate odds in Naples. Peace with Florence would immediately place in the hands of the King 70,000 ducats and 250 men-at-arms;[131] besides releasing the soldiers in Pisa, Murrone, Leghorn, Sarzana, Pietra Santa, and Librafatta, who with the Florentine contingent would be an efficient succour to Montpensier. But Florence would not pay the money until the fortresses were in her hand.

Footnote 131:

A man-at-arms was a varying quantity of soldiers, from five in France to three or sometimes one in Italy.

The King’s letter to Entragues arrived in Pisa on the 29th of August. “You may feel,” the letter ran,[132] “_on account of your oath_, a certain difficulty in placing the new Citadel of Pisa in other hands than ours, but we absolve and discharge you of that oath, and command you, so soon as you receive this letter, incontinent to deliver the said Citadel of Pisa into the hand of the Commissioners of Florence, provided that one or any of our Councillors assure you that the Government of Florence have accorded and agreed to our Articles.”

Footnote 132:

Archives de Florence, No. 52, quoted by Cherrier, ii. 294.

“A cause du serment que vous avez fait, vous pourriez différer de ne mettre la dicte Citadelle neufve de Pise en aultres mains que les nostres.” This phrase conveys the suggestion that on leaving Pisa, Charles had promised a permanent French protection to the city. At least it seems clear that Entragues had sworn to yield his position only to the French.

These three months Entragues and his men had lived as the saviours of Pisa with the Pisans, feted by the citizens, lodged not only in the citadel but in the palace of the Medici upon Lung’ Arno; no longer an insignificant portion of the motley hosts of France, but the beloved guests and masters of this exquisite Southern city. They had the advantage of the port from which to ship a succour to or from the armies in the South; they enjoyed the great pine-woods of the sea, full of game for hunting; they had grown to love the wide, soft views of fertile plains bounded by a dim line of blue mountains where their comrades held the frontier castles. The position of the French in Pisa was not only felicitous, but strong; and they were required to abandon it into the hands of the Florentines, allies, it is true, of their king, but to them desperate and deadly enemies with whom, in defiance of the truce, they had continually waged an aggravated and embittering guerilla war of raids and plunder. And these three months, which had increased the original suspicion and dislike which the French army entertained of Florence, had been spent in befriending and helping the Pisans, for whom even at the first they had felt so divine a rage of pity, and whom they were now commanded to betray. Most of the men had probably made relations in the town. Entragues as we know from Guicciardini, was much in love with, and probably deeply influenced by, the daughter of Messer Luca del Lante; and a little later he married either this or some other Pisan lady, for Marin Sanuto speaks of San Cassano, the Pisan Ambassador at Venice, as “el cugnato d’Andrages.” Thus passion, no less than resentment, and the sense of well-being as well as compassion bound Entragues to Pisa. Add to this, incredible as it may seem, the sentiment of loyalty; for long as was the reign of Louis XI., it had not been long enough to extirpate the feudal idea, and Entragues, although the subject of the King, felt himself in a far more intimate degree the vassal of Orleans, and the lieutenant of Ligny. Now, as I have said, the names of Orleans and Ligny are conspicuously absent from the signatures below the letter of the King. To yield Pisa would have been to reverse their policy; and it is possible (to Commines, Guicciardini, Giulini, Porto Venere, and other contemporaries, it appeared quite certain) that Orleans or Ligny wrote to Entragues, and bade him resist the decision of the King. This much at least is sure: _Entragues refused to yield the fortresses_.

Vainly the King reiterated his urgent letters—imploring letters, still preserved in the Florence Archives under the dates of the 29th and 31st of August, the 25th of September, the 1st and 22nd of October—letters, beseeching, commanding the evacuation of the garrisons, but all in vain. Not only Pisa, but Sarzana, Pietra Santa, Librafatta, and Murrone, obstinately held out against the royal mandate; only the Governor of Leghorn, on the 17th of September, yielded to the entreaties of his sovereign. Meanwhile in Naples, in Gaeta, Taranto, and Atella, in all the desolate villages of the wild Abbruzzi, the famished and abandoned army looked northwards, in vain, day after day across the mountains. Winter began to whistle shrilly across the windy hills; blue mists and subtle fevers rose out of the marshy valleys; corn failed, and a cruel famine began to devastate the land; and still the promised reinforcements never came. Of that gallant army nearly every soldier should perish by hunger, shipwreck, or malaria; for the troops that were to bring them a succour out of Tuscany never left the cities where they dwelt.

On the 18th of September, Entragues drew up a formal treaty with the Signory of Pisa. If in three months the King did not re-enter Tuscany, he bound himself to evacuate the citadel, and leave it in the hands of Pisa. Meanwhile they were to supply him every month with the two thousand ducats necessary to pay and provision the garrison; and on his abandonment of the fortress they were to purchase his artillery and to give him the sum of 20,000 (or as Sanuto has it, 30,000) ducats for himself. These terms were not excessive: the Florentines a few years ago had cheerfully paid 150,000 ducats as the price of Pietro Santa, a less important place. It was, however, as much as Pisa could pay: and to raise the sum the ladies of Pisa cheerfully sold the brightest of their jewels. And the Pisans in their gratitude for the staunchness and moderation of Entragues awarded him a large estate, newly confiscated from the Florentines, and a palace in the city. “It cannot be for money that he did it,” remarks Guicciardini, “for certainly the Florentines would have given him twice as much.” It was probably out of friendship and pity, out of a genuine enthusiasm, out of an antiquated sentiment of feudal devotion, combined with a desire to make a profit, that Entragues committed this fatal and disastrous error.

VII.

The Florentines were indeed in a peculiarly evil case; for Charles, who was their ally, found himself powerless to procure them the restitution of Pisa; and the Italian cities were resolved that, at no risk, must Pisa pass to the ally of Charles. That post, in the hands of the friends of France, would mean not merely a door always open from Marseilles into Tuscany, but a continual supply of help to the French garrisons in Naples. It was certain that Pisa must be kept, yet Pisa was too weak to stand alone; plot and counter-plot darkened the decision as to which great State the port of Pisa should belong.

From the 16th of September to the 14th of December, Captain Fracassa, the Duke of Milan’s captain, held the town, dogged by the jealous surveillance of a Venetian commissary, while Entragues and his Frenchmen shut themselves inside the citadel. A few months later the Sienese, Lucchese, and Genoese, united in a secret league with Pisa against the Florentines. Milan and Venice wove a ceaseless web of intrigue around the place. And it is quite possible that by persisting in the citadel, Entragues may have been animated by a lofty and heroic disobedience, hoping by his presence to maintain Pisa in fidelity to France, and to prevent it from strengthening the hands of the deadly enemies of his country.

Be this as it may, on the 1st of January, Entragues, having some days ago assisted at the expulsion of Fracassa, placed the citadel in the hands of the Pisan Signory. Great was the joy. Before the falling of the night, the hated fortress, built by the Florentines to dominate the town, was a shapeless heap of ruins. New money was struck, bearing the head of Charles VIII.; and salvo on salvo of artillery rang right across the plain to the very walls of Florence, announcing with a threat the dawn of the New Year, which had begun with liberty in Pisa.

Entragues himself, rich in the price of the gems of Pisan beauty, retired for a month or two to Lucca, to conclude his traffic on the fortresses. Pietra Santa he sold to Lucca, Sarzana to Genoa. He did a good turn to Pisa, distributing them, for a round sum, among her allies. But if he hoped that Pisa would maintain her independence by the protection of these humbler friends he must easily have been deceived: it was no later than the 26th of January when Messer Gianbernardin del Agnolo was sent to Venice with a humble message, entreating the august protection of that city for the young Republic. It was Venice, rather than Milan, to whom the Pisans turned—Venice preponderate now in the Peninsula, sheltering in secret Pisa and Taranto under her wide-reaching ægis. During thirteen years from this date the shifting fortunes, the greeds and jealousies of the great Italian cities, fostered an artificial liberty in Pisa. Thrown like a ball from Milan to Venice, Venice to Maximilian, Max again to Venice, and thence to Cæsar Borgia, the unhappy Republic described the whole circle of desperate hope, agonized courage, misery, poverty, cunning, and betrayal. But with the anguish of her heroic vicissitudes we have, at this moment, no concern. The conduct of Entragues is our affair.

From that New Year’s Day all hope was over for the French in Naples. Gaeta, Taranto, Atella, Ostia fell; Montpensier died of heartbreak, the troops of fever; the great Guelf kingdom, the vision of so many centuries, disappeared like fairy gold as soon as the French had grasped it.

In France, the Count of Ligny, Entragues’ patron, was banished from the Court in disgrace. “He is gone to his estates in Picardy,” wrote Antonio Vincivera, “like a desperate creature. The King has disgraced him because of the affair of Pisa.” Thus Entragues, in the most effectual manner, had ruined his master’s chances: and though in time Ligny was pardoned by the King, it was not in the lifetime of his bride. In February, 1498, the daughter of the Mages expired, far from the arms of Ligny, in her Nunnery at Naples.

But if the action of Entragues proved unfortunate to his friends, it had a more deadly consequence to his enemies in Florence. The party of Savonarola never recovered that failure of the French to give back Pisa. For some time, amid famine, pestilence, and ruin, they kept a weakening hold upon the city: “And still they stand in hope of the things above,” mocks Maron Sanuto, in the spring of 1497, “and still they expect the coming of the King.” A year later, in the May of 1498, Savonarola expiated that delusion by the flaming penance of the stake. “Questa è la fine dei cattivi!” ejaculates the Venetian Secretary.

Of all the actors in this complicated drama, the one person who suffered not at all was that dishonoured liberator, Entragues himself. He went back to live in Pisa where he seems to have displayed an eminent and almost official dignity. Twice in moments of difficulty it was proposed that Entragues should be sent as envoy to Venice, in place of his brother-in-law; but the necessity passed away. He remained in comfort and splendour in Pisa, where we read of his receiving the Lucchese ambassadors and conducting the diplomacy of the Republic. Pisa herself—unhappy devotee of liberty!—grew poorer and ever poorer, a humble pensioner on Venetian bounty: “They adore us,” remarks Sanuto with some fatuity, “and, of a verity, they would starve without us.” But, shorn of all her territories as she was, Pisa housed her liberator in a palace, and little did it matter to this voluntary exile that his King declared a readiness to decapitate him with royal hands. Meanwhile he remained the natural centre of all dignity in Pisa. Here we catch a last glimpse of him in that sinister spring of 1498 which witnessed in Florence the martyrdom of Savonarola and in France the sudden death of Charles VIII. The whirlwind that destroyed these mighty vessels allowed the idle straw to float unharmed. “Entragues is back in Pisa,” writes Sanuto, “which city is very poor now, having lost all her lands and subsisting only on that which we afford her. He has returned some time from his visit to Jerusalem. He lives with certain families in Pisa. He has money of his own, and gives himself his pleasures.”

Five years later, when the eminence of Venice was dangerously threatened by Italian jealousy, the Pisans began to look about for a new Protector. “We will offer ourselves to the Devil,” they declared, “rather than to Florence.” As a matter of fact they offered themselves to Cæsar Borgia. They made very few conditions: two of them are noteworthy in view of the present history:

“The Pisans will bestow themselves upon Il Valentino if neither he nor the Pope will ever make peace or truce with Florence.

“The new Duke must promise the city never to make any peace or league with France.”