Indeed, all Italy but Venice and Naples was now under French domination or influence. Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna hastened to submit. Florence clung to her alliance with France as her only protection against Caesar Borgia. Ferdinand of Spain, though so closely kin to the Aragonese dynasty in Naples, entered into a secret compact at Granada (November 11, 1500) with the representatives of Louis, for the joint conquest of all Italy south of the Papal States. Alexander VI, needing French aid in reconquering these States, co-operated by issuing a bull that deposed Federigo III of Naples and confirmed the partition of the Kingdom between France and Spain.
In July, 1501, a French army under the Scot Stuart d’Aubigny, Caesar Borgia, and Lodovico’s traitorous favorite Francesco di San Severino marched through Italy to Capua, took and plundered it, and advanced upon Naples. Federigo, abandoned by all, yielded the city to the French in return for a comfortable refuge and annuity in France. Meanwhile el gran capitán, Gonzalo de Córdoba, won Calabria and Apulia for Ferdinand and Isabella; and Federigo’s son Ferrante, who surrendered Taranto after being promised his liberty by Gonzalo, was sent as a prisoner to Spain on Ferdinand’s demand. When the Spanish army came into contact with the French on the borders between Apulia and the Abruzzi, disputes arose over the boundary line between the two thefts; and to Alexander’s relief Spain and France went to war over the exact division of the spoils (July, 1502). “If the Lord had not put discord between France and Spain,” said the Pope to the Venetian ambassador, “where should we be?”5
For a time the fortunes of the new war favored the French. D’Aubigny’s forces overran almost all southern Italy, and Gonzalo shut up his troops in the fortified town of Barletta. There a medieval incident brightened a dismal war (February 13, 1503). Angered by the comment of a French officer that the Italians were an effeminate and dastardly people, the commander of an Italian regiment in the Spanish army challenged thirteen Frenchmen to fight thirteen Italians. It was agreed; the war was interrupted; and the hostile armies stood as spectators while the twenty-six combatants fought until all thirteen Frenchmen had been disabled by wounds and taken prisoner. Gonzalo, with the Spanish chivalry that often rivaled Spanish cruelty, paid from his own pocket the ransoms of the prisoners, and sent them back to their army.6
The incident restored the morale of the Great Captain’s troops; they issued from Barletta, defeated and dispersed the besiegers, and defeated the French again at Cerignola. On May 16, 1503, Gonzalo entered Naples unresisted, and was acclaimed by the populace, which can always be relied upon to applaud the victor. Louis XII sent another army against Gonzalo; he met it on the banks of the Garigliano, and routed it (December 29, 1503); in that rout Piero de’ Medici, fleeing with the French, was drowned. Gonzalo now laid siege to Gaeta, the last stronghold of the French in southern Italy. He offered them generous terms, which they soon accepted (January 1, 1504); and the fidelity with which he kept to these terms after the French had been disarmed led them—struck by so great a violation of precedents—to call him le gentil capitaine.7 By the treaty of Blois (1505) Louis saved a bit of face by assigning his Neapolitan rights to his relative Germaine de Foix, who was, however, to marry the widowed Ferdinand and bring Naples to him as her dowry. The crowns of Naples and Sicily were added to those already on Ferdinand’s insatiable head; and thereafter, till 1707, the Kingdom of Naples remained an appanage of Spain.
III. THE LEAGUE OF CAMBRAI: 1508–16
Italy was now half foreign: southern Italy was Spain’s; northwestern Italy from Genoa through Milan to the outskirts of Cremona was in the power of France; the minor principalities accepted French influence; only Venice and the papacy were comparatively independent, and they were intermittently at war for the cities of the Romagna. Venice longed for additional mainland markets and resources to replace those lost to the Turks or threatened by Atlantic routes to India; she took advantage of Alexander’s death, and Caesar Borgia’s illness, to seize Faenza, Ravenna, and Rimini; Julius II proposed to recapture them. In 1504 he persuaded Louis and Maximilian to stop their unchristian quarreling and join him in attacking Venice and dividing among them the Venetian possessions on the mainland.8 Maximilian’s spirit was willing, but his treasury was weak, and nothing came of the plot. Julius kept on trying.
On December 10, 1508, a grand conspiracy was hatched against Venice at Cambrai. The Emperor Maximilian joined it because Venice had taken from imperial control Goriza, Trieste, Pordenone, and Fiume, because Venice ignored his imperial rights in Verona and Padua, and because Venice had refused him and his little army free passage toward Rome for the papal coronation upon which he had set his heart. Louis XII joined the League because disputes had arisen between France and Venice as to the division of northern Italy. Ferdinand of Spain joined it because Venice insisted on retaining Brindisi, Otranto, and other Apulian ports which for centuries had been part of the Kingdom of Naples, but had been seized by Venice during Naples’ troubles in 1495. Julius joined the League (1509) because Venice not only refused to evacuate the Romagna, but made no secret of her ambition to acquire Ferrara—an acknowledged papal fief. The European powers now planned to absorb all the mainland holdings of Venice: Spain would recover her cities on the Adriatic; the Pope would regain the Romagna; Maximilian would get Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Friuli, and Verona; Louis would receive Bergamo, Brescia, Crema, Cremona, and the valley of the Adda River. Had the plan succeeded, Italy would have ceased to exist; France and Germany would have reached down to the Po, Spain almost up to the Tiber; the Papal States would have been hemmed in helplessly; and the Venetian bulwark against the Turks would have been destroyed. In this crisis no Italian state offered Venice aid; she had provoked almost all of them by her rapacity; indeed, Ferrara, reasonably suspicious of her, joined the League. The noble Gonzalo, rudely retired by Ferdinand, offered his services as general to Venice; the Senate dared not accept, for its sole hope of survival lay in detaching one ally after another from the League.
Venice deserved sympathy now only because she stood alone against overwhelming power, and because her loyal rich and her conscripted poor alike fought with incredible pertinacity to a Pyrrhic victory. The Senate offered to restore Faenza and Rimini to the papacy, but the angry Julius responded with a blast of excommunication, and sent his troops to recapture the Romagna cities while the French advance compelled Venice to concentrate her forces in Lombardy. At Agnadello the French defeated the Venetians in one of the bloodiest battles of the Renaissance (May 14, 1509); six thousand men died there on that day. The desperate Signory recalled its remaining troops to Venice, allowed the French to occupy all Lombardy, evacuated Apulia and the Romagna, confessed to Verona, Vicenza, and Padua that she could no longer defend them, and gave them full freedom to surrender to the Emperor or resist him as they chose. Maximilian came down with the largest army—some 36,000 men—yet seen in those parts, and laid siege to Padua. The surrounding peasantry made all the trouble they could for his men; the Paduans fought with a bravery that attested the good government they had enjoyed under Venice. Maximilian, impatient and always pinched for funds, left in disgust for the Tirol; Julius suddenly ordered his troops to withdraw from the siege; Padua and Vicenza voluntarily returned to Venetian control. Louis XII, having obtained his share of the spoils, disbanded his army.
Julius had by this time realized that the full victory of the League would be a defeat for the papacy, since it would leave the popes at the mercy of northern powers among whom the Reformation was already beginning to find voice. When Venice again offered him all that he could ask, he, “vowing that he would ne’er consent, consented” (1510). Having reclaimed what he considered to be the just property of the Church, he was free to turn the fury of his spirit against the French who, controlling both Lombardy and Tuscany, were now unpleasant neighbors of the Papal States. At Mirándola he vowed never to shave till he had driven the French from Italy; so grew the majestic beard of Raphael’s portrait. Now the Pope gave to Italy, too late, a stirring motto, Fuor
i i barbari!—” Out with the barbarians!” In October, 1511, he formed a “League of Holy Union” with Venice and Spain; soon he won to it Switzerland and England. By the end of January, 1512, Venice had recaptured Brescia and Bergamo with the joyful co-operation of the inhabitants. France kept most of her troops at home to meet possible invasion from England and Spain.
One French force remained in Italy, under the command of a dashing and courtly youth of twenty-two years. Resenting inaction, Gaston de Foix led this army first to the relief of besieged Bologna, then to defeat the Venetians at Isola della Scala, then to retake Brescia, finally to win a brilliant but costly victory at Ravenna (April 11, 1512). Nearly 20,000 corpses fertilized that battlefield; and Gaston himself, fighting in the front, received mortal wounds.
Julius repaired with negotiation what had been lost by arms. He persuaded Maximilian to sign a truce with Venice, to join the Union against France, and to recall the 4000 German troops that had been part of the French army. On his urging, the Swiss marched down into Lombardy with 20,000 men. The French forces, decimated by victory and the loss of their German contingent, fell back before a converging mass of Swiss, Venetian, and Spanish soldiery, and retreated to the Alps, leaving ineffectual garrisons in Brescia, Cremona, Milan, and Genoa. Out of apparently complete disaster the “Holy Union” had in two months after the battle of Ravenna, through papal diplomacy, driven the French from Italian soil; and Julius was hailed as the liberator of Italy.
At the Congress of Mantua (August, 1512) the victors divided the spoils. On the insistence of Julius, Milan was given to Massimiliano Sforza, Lodovico’s sort; Switzerland received Lugano and the territory at the head of Lago Maggiore; Florence was forced to restore the Medici; the Pope regained all the Papal States won by the Borgias, and besides acquired Parma, Piacenza, Modena, and Reggio; only Ferrara still eluded the pontifical grasp. But Julius left many problems to his successor. He had not really driven out the foreigners: the Swiss held Milan as a guard for Sforza, the Emperor claimed Vicenza and Verona as his reward, and Ferdinand the Catholic, wiliest bargainer of them all, had consolidated the power of Spain in southern Italy. Only French power seemed finished in Italy. Louis XII sent another army to take Milan, out it was defeated by the Swiss at Novara with the loss of eight thousand Frenchmen (June Ó, 1513). When Louis died (1515), nothing remained of his once extensive Italian empire except a precarious foothold at Genoa.
But Francis I proposed to recapture it all. Moreover (Brantôme assures us), he had heard that Signora Clerice of Milan was the most beautiful woman in Italy, and he desired her consumingly.9 In August, 1515, he led over a new Alpine pass 40,000 men—the largest army yet seen in these campaigns. The Swiss came out to meet it; at Marignano, a few miles from Milan, a furious battle raged for two days (September 13–14, 1515); Francis himself fought like a Roland, and was knighted on the spot by the Chevalier de Bayard; the Swiss left 13,000 dead on the field; they and Sforza abandoned Milan, and the city became again a French prize.
The councilors of Leo X, vacillating, asked Machiavelli’s advice. He warned against neutrality between King and Emperor, on the ground that the papacy would be as helpless before the victor as if it had taken part; and he recommended an entente with France as the lesser of two evils.10 Leo so ordered; and on December 11, 1515, Francis and the Pope met at Bologna to arrange terms of concord. The Swiss signed a similar peace with France; the Spaniards retired to Naples; the Emperor, foiled again, surrendered Verona to Venice. So ended (1516) the wars of the League of Cambrai, in which the partners had changed as in a dance, and the last condition of affairs was essentially as the first, and nothing had been decided except that Italy was to be the battlefield on which the great powers would fight duel after duel for the mastery of Europe. The papacy yielded Parma and Piacenza to France; Venice rewon her possessions in northern Italy, but was financially exhausted. Italy was devastated; but art and literature continued to flourish, whether by the stimulus of tragic events, or by the impetus of a prosperous past. The worst was yet to come.
IV. LEO AND EUROPE: 1513–21
The conference at Bologna pitted prestige and diplomacy against audacity and power. The handsome young King, magnificent in goldbraided cloak and zibeline furs, came with victory in his plumes and armies at his back, eager to swallow all Italy, merely keeping the Pope as a policeman; against which Leo had nothing but the glamour of his office and the subtlety of a Medici. If Leo thereafter played King against Emperor, and veered from side to side elusively, and simultaneously signed treaties with each against the other, we mnst not be too righteous about it; he had no other weapons to wield, and he had the heritage of the Church to protect. His opponents also used those weapons, in addition to brandishing regiments and artillery.
The secret agreements made at this meeting have remained secret to this day. Apparently Francis tried to bring Leo into an alliance with him against Spain; Leo asked for time to think it over—diplomacy’s way of saying no; it was contrary to the age-long policy of the Church to let the Papal States be hemmed in by one power on both north and south.11 The one definite result of the Concordat of 1516 was the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. This Sanction (1438) had asserted the superior authority of a general council over that of the popes, and had given the French king the right to appoint to all major ecclesiastical offices in France. Francis consented to annul the Sanction, provided the royal power of nomination remained; Leo agreed. It might seem a defeat for the Pope; but in so agreeing Leo was only accepting a custom centuries old in France; and without so planning it he was marrying Church and state in France in a way that left the French monarchy no fiscal reasons for supporting the Reformation. Meanwhile he ended the long conflict between France and the papacy over the relative power of councils and popes.
The conference concluded by the French leaders begging forgiveness of Leo for having warred against his predecessor. “Holy Father,” said Francis, “you must not be surprised that we were such enemies to Julius II, since he was always the greatest enemy to us; insomuch that in our times we have not met with a more formidable adversary. For he was in fact a most excellent commander, and would have made a much better general than a pope.”12 Leo gave all these doughty penitents absolution and benediction, and they ended by almost kissing his feet away.13
Francis returned to France under a halo of glory, and for a time contented himself with Venus and mercury. When Ferdinand II died (1516) the French King planned again the conquest of Naples, perhaps as a glorious means of checking the excess population of France. Nevertheless he signed a treaty of peace with Ferdinand’s grandson Charles I, the new King of Aragon, Castile, Naples, and Sicily. But when Maximilian died (1519), and his grandson Charles was put forward to succeed him as head of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis thought himself fitter to be Emperor than the nineteen-year-old King of Spain, and actively sought election. Leo was again in a dangerous position. He would have preferred to support Francis, for he foresaw that the union of Naples, Spain, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands under one head would give that ruler such preponderance of territory, wealth, and men as would destroy the balance of power that had hitherto protected the Papal States. And yet the election of Charles over papal opposition would alienate the new emperor precisely when his aid was vitally needed to suppress the Protestant revolt. Leo hesitated too long to make his influence felt; Charles I was chosen emperor, and became Charles V. Still playing balance of power, the Pope offered Francis an alliance; when the King in turn hesitated, Leo abruptly signed an agreement with Charles (May 8, 1521). The young Emperor offered him almost everything: the return of Parma and Piacenza, aid against Ferrara and Luther, the reconquest of Milan for the Sforza family, and the protection of the Papal States and Florence from any attack.
In September, 1521, the duel was renewed. “My cousin Francis and I,” said the Emperor, “are in perfect accord; he wants Milan, and so do I.”14 The French forces in Italy were led by Odet de Foix, Vicomte de Lau
trec; Francis had appointed him at the solicitation of Lautrec’s sister, who was for the moment the King’s mistress. Louise of Savoy, the King’s mother, resented the appointment, and secretly diverted to other uses the money provided for Lautrec’s army by Francis;15 and the Swiss in that army deserted for lack of pay. As a strong papal-imperial force—ably commanded by Prospero Colonna, the Marquis of Pescara, and the historian Guicciardini—approached Milan, the Ghibelline supporters of the Empire there raised a successful revolt of the overtaxed populace. Lautrec withdrew from the city into Venetian territory; the troops of Charles and Leo took Milan almost bloodlessly; Francesco Maria Sforza, another son of Lodovico, became Duke of Milan as an imperial vassal; and Leo could die (December 1, 1521) in the unction of victory.
V. ADRIAN VI: 1522–3
His successor was an anomaly in Renaissance Rome: a Pope who was resolved at all costs to be a Christian. Born of lowly folk in Utrecht (1459), Adrian Dedel imbibed piety and scholarship from the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, Scholastic philosophy and theology at Louvain. At thirty-four he was chancellor of that University; at fortyseven he was appointed tutor of the future Charles V. In 1515 he was sent on a mission to Spain, and so impressed Ferdinand with his administrative ability and moral integrity that he was made bishop of Tortosa. After Ferdinand’s death Adrian helped Cardinal Ximenes to govern Spain in the absence of Charles; in 1520 he became regent of Castile. Through all this progress he remained modest in everything but certainty, lived simply, and pursued heretics with a zeal that endeared him to the people. The repute of his virtues reached Rome, and Leo made him a cardinal. In the conclave that met after Leo’s death his name was put forward as a candidate for the papacy, apparently without his knowledge, and probably through the influence of Charles V. On January 2, 1522, for the first time since 1378 a non-Italian—for the first time since 1161 a Teuton—was chosen pope.