Part 11 (1/2)

Now that we have followed Milan into the service of Spanish masters, we must do a somewhat similar office for Florence. But Florence's liberty was put out in glory. The politic statesman, Lorenzo dei Medici, whose sagacity had contributed so much to the pleasant state of Italy prior to the French invasion, died in 1492. The great period of Florentine intellectual primacy ended with him, for, though Florence continued to pour forth genius, that genius no longer was gathered together at home but emigrated to honour other places. Nevertheless, she again challenges our admiration; the ancient republican city once more a.s.serted its preminence by a burst of moral enthusiasm. Nowhere else in Italy throughout the Renaissance was such a spectacle seen, and though the leader, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98), was a native of Ferrara, yet it was in Florence, and among Florentines, that he kindled enthusiasm and ran his brilliant career. Savonarola was the reincarnation of a Hebrew prophet, a Florentine Habakkuk, pa.s.sionately sure of the moral government of G.o.d, pa.s.sionately convinced that the wickedness of Italy must bring its own punishment and purification. Shortly before Lorenzo's death he became a distinguished preacher, spoke in the cathedral, and won the ear of the people. He preached righteousness and judgment to come. He proclaimed spiritual evils and political punishments, and foretold that G.o.d would stretch forth His hand and send His avenger to punish Italy. The prophecies were so definite, and fitted the invasion of Charles VIII so accurately, that Savonarola was hailed as a prophet. In the excitement over the French invasion Lorenzo's sons were driven out, the former republican const.i.tution restablished, and Savonarola raised by a burst of popular enthusiasm practically to the position of guiding and governing the city. The best way to understand Savonarola's influence is to read a few extracts from the diary of Luca Landucci, a Florentine apothecary:--

”December 14, 1494. On this day Fra Girolamo greatly laboured in the pulpit that Florence should adopt a good form of government; he has been preaching in Santa Maria del Fiore [the Duomo] every day, and this day, Sunday, he preached, and he did not want women but men, and he wanted the officers of the city, and n.o.body stayed in the Palace [Palazzo Vecchio, the City Hall] except the Gonfaloniere and one other; all the officials in Florence were there, and he preached about matters of state, that we ought to love and fear G.o.d and love the common weal, and that no man henceforth should wish to hold his head high or wish himself great. He always inclined to the people's side, and insisted that no blood should be shed, but that punishment should be made in some other way; and he preached like this every day....

”April, 1495. Fra Girolamo preached and said that the Virgin Mary had revealed to him how the city of Florence would become richer, more glorious, and more powerful than she had ever been, but not till after many troubles; and he spoke all this as if he were a prophet, and most of the people believed him, especially the better sort who had no political or partisan pa.s.sions....

”June 17, 1495. The Frate nowadays is held in such esteem and devotion in Florence that there are many men and women who would obey him implicitly, if he should say 'walk into the fire.' Many believe him to be a prophet, and he said so himself....

”February 16 [1496], the Carnival. Fra Girolamo preached a few days ago that the children, instead of foolish pranks, throwing stones, etc., should collect alms and distribute them to the worthy poor; and, thanks to divine grace, such a change was wrought, that in place of tomfoolery the children collected alms for days beforehand, [and to-day six thousand of them or more, carrying olive branches and singing hymns, marched to the Duomo where they offered up their alms] so that good sensible men wept from tenderness and said, 'Truly this new change is the work of G.o.d.' ... I have written this because it is the fact and I saw it, and I felt the greatest happiness to have my children among those blessed innocent bands....

”August 15, 1496. Fra Girolamo preached in Santa Maria del Fiore [the Duomo, where great scaffolds had been erected which were filled with children singing], and there was so much holiness in the church, and it was so sweet to hear the children sing, above, below, and on every side, singing so simply and so modestly, that they did not seem like children.

I write this because I was there and saw it and felt so much spiritual sweetness. In truth the Church was full of angels.”

The friar's political enemies were strong, and the Pope, the very notable Borgia, Alexander VI, in anger and in fear, excommunicated him, and bade the Signory of Florence forbid him to preach. There was great disturbance over this action, and feeling ran to a pa.s.sionate height.

One of Savonarola's disciples, a foolish Dominican, challenged an adversary to the ordeal by fire; the challenge was accepted, and on the appointed day all Florence, in great excitement, flocked to the _piazza_. The Dominican and his adversary were there, and their respective partisans, but nothing was done. One delay followed another; there was nothing but hesitancy, disagreement as to conditions, backing and filling. The disappointed populace turned on Savonarola. They had believed him a prophet and expected to see a judgment of G.o.d. The Pope took advantage of this resentment, and demanded his trial. Savonarola was tried, and tortured. During the torture a confession was extorted from him, which was undoubtedly pieced out by forgery. Our apothecary says:--

”April 19, 1498. The confession of Fra Girolamo was read before the Council in the Great Hall, which he had written with his own hand,--he whom we held to be a prophet,--and he confessed that he was not a prophet, and had not received from G.o.d the things he preached, and he confessed to many things in the course of his preaching which were the opposite of what he had given us to understand. I was there to hear the confession read, and was bewildered and stood astonished and stupefied.

My soul was in pain to see such an edifice tumble to earth because it all rested on a lie. I expected Florence to be a new Jerusalem from which should proceed laws, glory, and the example of a good life and to behold the restoration of the Church, the conversion of the infidels, and the comfort of good men, and now I behold the opposite,--and I took the medicine. In Thy will, O G.o.d, stand all things.”

Savonarola was condemned to death for heresy; he was hanged, his body burned, and his ashes flung into the Arno. So ended the one moral effort of the Italian Renaissance.

After his death the Republican government endured for a time; but the Medicean faction was powerful and forced its way back in 1512. Then Lorenzo's second son, Giovanni (1475-1521), following the steps of Florentine art and humanism, went to Rome and became Pope Leo X. As Pope, he was able to strengthen his family in Florence and to extend its dominion. But Republicanism, quickened by the events then happening in Rome, flared up once more in 1527; but it was helpless before the hostile spirit of the time. Another Medici had become Pope, Clement VII, and the requirements of policy induced the calculating Emperor, Charles V, to suppress what he deemed a rebellion. Florence made a gallant defence; Michelangelo strengthened her walls, and the courage of the defenders threw a dying glory over the city. A great grandson of Lorenzo, Alessandro dei Medici, was put into power, and married to a daughter of Charles V. He was succeeded by a distant cousin, Cosimo (1537), who was honoured by His Holiness the Pope with the t.i.tle of Grand Duke of Tuscany. Thus Florentine liberty was extinguished, and the Medici were established as dukes in name as well as in fact.

_The Two Sicilies, 1494-1516_

In the south, it will be remembered, Alfonso the Magnanimous, as the grateful humanists dubbed him, had united Sicily and the mainland; but on his death (1458) the kingdom fell asunder. Sicily, as a part of the Kingdom of Aragon, devolved on a legitimate brother, whereas Naples, claimed as a conquest, was bequeathed to a b.a.s.t.a.r.d son, Ferdinand the Cruel. The two kingdoms followed their respective dynasties for nearly fifty years, when Sicily came by inheritance to Ferdinand of Aragon.

That crafty and eminently successful monarch, not satisfied with Castile, Granada, Sicily, and a transatlantic realm, but coveting the Kingdom of Naples, conspired with Louis XII of France, who now represented the traditional Angevin claim; the two invaded the coveted kingdom, and divided it between them (1500-1). Naturally, the rogues disagreed over the division of the spoils, and fell foul of each other.

The Spaniards were triumphant, and the Kingdom of Naples was annexed to the crown of Spain. Thus the Two Sicilies were reunited under the Spanish crown, and on Ferdinand's death (1516) descended to his grandson, the Emperor Charles V. The unfortunate kingdom remained an appanage of Spain for two hundred years.

_Venice, 1453-1508_

In the northeast Venice still led a brilliant career, like a charming woman who has received some fatal hurt and does not know it, but instinctively lives more brilliantly than ever. Her fatal hurt was the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453). At first the only obvious ill consequence was war. Venice, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, stepped into the place of Constantinople, and became ”the bulwark of the West.” She waged war after war with the Turks and maintained her reputation for valour and resolution, but Turkey was too strong for her, and little by little stripped her of her long-drawn-out empire of coast and island. A far worse blow than direct war was the cutting of the great trade routes with the East, which damaged all the maritime cities of Italy, but Venice most. Turkey stopped the supplies of Venetian greatness, and slowly but surely sapped Venetian strength. On the stoppage of the straight road to Asia, the blocked current of commerce poked about for a new way, and discovered that it could reach the East by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Commerce thus avoided Turkey, but it also abandoned the Mediterranean, great centre and source of ancient civilization, and left the maritime cities of Italy stranded, as it were, on the sh.o.r.es of a forsaken sea.

This doom, however, was still hidden in the obscurity of the future, and Venice appeared to be at the height of prosperity. The French amba.s.sador, Philippe de Commines, called her ”the most triumphant city I have ever seen.” The Venetians were a people apart from other Italians; they never suffered from foreign invasion, or domestic revolt; they lived in isolation, maintained their own customs and usages, and enjoyed a sumptuous, opulent life, in proud security. Venice was the richest, the most comfortable, the best governed city in the world. In military strength she was commonly reckoned the first power in Italy, with the Papacy, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Duchy of Milan about equal in second rank. Venice entertained no suspicion of any seeds of decadence, and continued her greedy career of annexation on the mainland, with a haughtiness worthy of ancient Rome. She laid hands on part of Romagna, and angered the Popes who had a t.i.tle thereto, which, however imperfect, was much better than the Venetian t.i.tle. She provoked the Emperor Maximilian, of the House of Hapsburg, who claimed Verona as an Imperial city; and to the west she came into dangerous compet.i.tion with the French invaders. These enemies, taking their cue from the piratical seizure of Naples by the French and Spanish, agreed together to part.i.tion the Venetian territory on the mainland, and invited all the powers of Europe to join them and take a share of the booty. The coalition planned a kind of joint-stock piracy. This was the League of Cambrai (1508), which stripped Venice of all her Italian territory, and threatened the city herself. The allies, however, fell out among themselves; and Venice, by biding her opportunity, in the course of time managed to recover most of her lost territory. Thus, though for a season the Barbarians brought the haughty city to her knees, she weathered the storms better than the rest of Italy, and continued to maintain her independence for three centuries to come.

The Papacy deserves a chapter to itself.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE PAPAL MONARCHY (1471-1527)

The Papacy found itself in an exceedingly difficult situation. It had to adapt an ecclesiastical system, matured in the Middle Ages, to new political systems, to new knowledge, to new thought, in short, to a new world. During its struggle with the Empire, the course before it, however arduous, had been plain, namely, to abase the Emperors; during its captivity at Avignon, its duty to return to Rome (though individual Popes were blind or indifferent) likewise had been plain; during the schism, the one end to be aimed at was union. But now everything was new, and a new policy had to be devised. There were three matters which required particular consideration: the demand for reform which came from across the Alps; the great intellectual awakening of the Renaissance; and the ambitions of the other Italian powers. For these problems the solution which the Papacy tried was twofold: to establish a firm pontifical princ.i.p.ality, and to use the new intellectual forces as a motive power to keep itself at the head of Christendom. By a strong pontifical princ.i.p.ality the Papacy hoped to secure itself against the covetousness of the other Italian states. By using the new intellectual forces it hoped to range them on its side, and so to choke, or at least to overcrow, the ultramontane cry for reform. One need not suppose that such a plan was consciously thought out in detail from the beginning; rather it was the course which the Papacy gradually took, partly from theory, partly under the stress of pa.s.sing circ.u.mstances.

We remember that the Council of Constance closed the Great Schism, and sent Martin V (1417-31) back to Rome as sole Pope. His pontificate marks the end of the old Republican commune, which had made so much trouble for Popes and Emperors in days past, and therefore marks the first definite stage in the transformation of the Papacy into a local secular power. Rome, although she did not deny herself an occasional outbreak in memory, as it were, of good old days, settled down into a papal city.

The most interesting part of the papal story is the process that went on within the Church. The intolerable burden of ecclesiastical taxation, the growth of heresy, and the degeneration of the clergy, as well as the Great Schism, had roused Europe to a sense that something must be done, and Europe attempted the old remedy of Ec.u.menical Councils. At Constance the question of general reform had come up, but the papal party had managed to prevent action. At the next Council, held at Basel, internal difficulties appeared still more plainly. Party lines were sharply drawn; the ultramontanes, as before, wished to subject the Popes to the supremacy of Councils, to subst.i.tute an ecclesiastical aristocracy of bishops in place of a papal monarchy, and, as it were, transfer the centre of ecclesiastical gravity from Rome across the Alps. Feeling ran so high that the Council split in two. Part followed the Pope to Italy, and part stayed in Basel and elected an anti-pope (1439). It looked as if schism had come again, but the danger pa.s.sed. The anti-pope resigned; unity was restored and lasted for seventy years.

Nicholas V, as we have seen, hoped to maintain the Papacy at the head of Christendom by means of the new intellectual forces. Such a conception was purely Italian, and showed plainly enough that the Papacy had ceased to represent Christendom, had ceased to be the real head of a Universal Church, and had become a purely Italian inst.i.tution. While Nicholas and his successors were thinking of culture and of becoming Italian princes, the pious ultramontanes, comparatively indifferent to the intellectual excitement of the Renaissance, were thinking of sin and of the remedy for sin. The papal Curia was clever, but did not foresee that to subordinate the old conception of the Papacy as the head of the religious and ecclesiastical organization of Europe to the new conception of it as an Italian princ.i.p.ality would surely alienate the Teutonic peoples; it did not foresee that the Renaissance, with its spirit of examination, investigation, criticism, with its encouragement of the free play of the human mind, was necessarily preparing the way for the Reformation. But the Curia perceived the opposite difficulties, to which we are generally blind, that unless the Papacy did establish itself as a temporal power, it might well be reduced to another Babylonish Captivity by a king of Naples, a duke of Milan, or even by some _condottiere_. And it perceived that other difficulty as well, that if the Papacy turned against the intellectual movement, the intellectual movement would, in self-defence, turn against the Papacy.

The Popes did indeed seek to revive the old rle of the Papacy in one respect. They tried to arouse the sentiment of Christendom against the invading Turks, and to lead a crusade themselves. But the time for such a course had pa.s.sed. The kings and princes of Europe were busy with their own kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities and would not budge; and the Papacy was obliged to give up the plan. Discouraged by this failure it naturally turned to the new theory of a little papal kingdom and vigorously put the theory into practice. The three Popes who accomplished this task were Francesco della Rovere, Sixtus IV (1471-84), Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI (1493-1503), and Giuliano della Rovere, Julius II (1503-13). Their careers must be looked at more closely.