The success of the Beguines had made them an example; the idea of a guild of pious uncloistered workers in the world had seized the imagination of Europe. Before St. Francis and St. Dominic instituted the mendicant orders, there had silently grown up in every town of the Netherlands a spirit of fraternity, not imposed by any rule, but the natural impulse of a people. The weavers seated all day long alone at their rattling looms, the armourers beating out their thoughts in iron, the cross-legged tailors and busy cobblers thinking and stitching together—these men silent, pious, thoughtful, joined themselves in a fraternity modelled on that of the Beguines. They were called the Weaving Brothers. Bound by no vows and fettered by no rule, they still lived the worldly life and plied their trade for hire. Only in their leisure they met together and prayed and dreamed and thought. Unlettered men, with warm undisciplined fancies, they set themselves to solve the greatest mysteries of earth and heaven. Sometimes, in their sublime and dangerous audacity, they stumbled on a truth; more often they wandered far afield, led by the will-o’-the-wisp of their own unguided thoughts. In the long busy hours of weaving and stitching they found strange answers to the problems of human destiny, and, in their leisure, breathless and eager, discussed these theories as other men discussed their chance of better wage. Such were the founders of the great fraternity of Fratres Textores, or Beghards as in later years the people more generally called them. And their philosophy is so strangely abstract and remote that we could not explain it, did we not know that from time to time some secular priest or wealthy and pious laymen joined the humble fraternity. And the priest would bring, to their store of dim wonderings,

the

the

Each order had its different mission. The Dominicans, the preaching brothers, should persuade the hard of heart, strengthen the failing, console the desolate, warn the erring, and exterminate the heretic. Yet, singularly enough, this most orthodox order, these watch-dogs of the Lord, were to become in Germany a centre of mystical heresies. The order of St. Francis, the Lesser Brothers, had a more tender and ecstatic ideal. They went begging through the world, tending the sick, loving the helpless, preaching to the birds and the fishes, full of a quaint compassionate unworldliness, a holy folly. There were few hearts so hard that, though unshaken by the storms of Dominic, they did not melt before the sweet Franciscan sanctity. And so the two orders traversed the world, twin forces and voices of pity. But the chivalrous and militant pity of Dominic, eager to avenge the outraged Christ continually crucified by infidels, too often took the form of wrath and burnings, while Francis loved the erring with a simple human pity. In return the world bestowed, and still bestows, upon him something of the wondering compassionate reverence which Eastern nations give to the Pure Fool, the man unsoiled by the wisdom of the world and still wrapped round with the simplicity of God. Between them, the two orders were to divide the Christian world. Sanctioned in the same year and under the same hospitable rule of Augustine, they went out triumphantly upon their different missions. Inspired, it is most probable, by the example of the Beguines, they would soon absorb the secular order into their mighty forces. And the real decline of Beguinism begins, not in 1250, when first the secular fraternities became conspicuous for heresy, but on that day of the year 1216 when the learned Dominic and the visionary Francis met and embraced each other in the streets of Rome.

Mechtild was, as she herself recalls, the dearest of her parents’ children; and these courtly and pious Thuringian nobles seem to have been as proud as they were fond of their little daughter. She received a liberal education. Her book on the flowing light of Godhead is written with an energy, sweetness, and variety of style strongly in contrast with the Gertrudenbuch and the Mechtildenbuch of Helfta. The music of her verse proves her familiar with the lyrics of the Minnesingers. They may no doubt have visited her father’s castle. But the little Mechtild did not dream of poetry and of knights-at-arms. It was later that she would deplore the poor vain

minstrels

minstrels

So for thirty years Mechtild preached against error and prophesied punishment, sang of the love of God, and saw visions of a hell where wicked ecclesiastics burn for persecuting the innocent. For thirty years she lived, in her beguinage, the strenuous, earnest, indignant life of the reforming seer, the life of Dante, the life of Savonarola. And then the vigorous frame wore out. In her fifty-third year even Mechtild saw that an end must be put to this unrelaxed endeavour. Fain would she have gone, like Jutta von Schönhausen, into the wild woods to preach to the heathen Prussians. But this could not be; the body was too weak. She retired to the Cistercian cloister of Helfta, the home of the great Abbess Gertrude, and of her sister, the younger Mechtild. But even there she did not rest. “What shall I do in a cloister—I?” she demanded in agonized prayers. “Teach and enlighten,” answered a heavenly voice. And so for twelve years longer Mechtild lives, and teaches the cloister of the great world beyond its walls, and finishes her book on the flowing light of Godhead, till, honoured and loved by all, she ends her eventful life in the year 1277.

“God,” she says, “is pure simplicity; out of the eternal spring of Deity I flowed, and all things flow, and thence shall all return.” These earnest phrases of mystical pantheism escape her lips, though they do not touch her heart. She does not consider all that they imply; for if all things, having arisen in the Deity, flow back to their source when life is over, how can Evil have a real existence, how can sinners be punished for ever in the city of Eternal Hate? If God be the one thing real, there is no evil and there is no hell. If all souls released from existence return to that pure and holy simplicity, there is no personal immortality either for bliss or for bale. Mechtild did not perceive the bearings and the consequences of her phrase; but the Beguines pushed the meaning to its term. The pantheism of Alexandria, the pantheism of the suppressed Almarician heresy, stirred and quickened in the thoughts of pious and schismatic Beguinism. And pantheism, with its two extremes of austerity and sensualism, increased and deepened in the sect.

It is not easy to prevent the growth of an idea among a community so widely spread, so constantly changing. Segarelli was burned at Parma all in vain. His doctrines had percolated everywhere. Inspired by the example of the mendicant orders, many of the Beghards and Beguines had returned to the vagabond life. Pious vagrants all in rags, staffless, scripless, they wandered through the country from beguinage to beguinage, begging for their food along the way. It was a change indeed from the early habits of the order, so busy, so hard at work, so pious, so responsible. But in the hearts of the lowest classes the secular fraternities were never so dear, never so much revered as now. In 1295 the Council of Mayence forbad them to wander through the streets, exciting public pity and crying, “Brod durch Got!” and Guillaume de St. Amour lamented that the people were blinded by the rags, the hunger, the false piety of these vagrants. This, of course, is the view of churchmen who did not entertain such strict opinions with regard to the merit of Franciscan mendicants. Indeed, much of the ill-favour with which the Church regarded the wandering Beghards and Beguines of these later days may be set down to a jealousy lest the piety of these irregular brothers should defraud the begging orders of their due. From one cause or another the thunders of the Church began to fall heavy and frequent upon the secular fraternities.

The persecution of the wandering Beguines and Beghards had thoroughly begun. In the history of the time, in the chronicles of any town along the Rhine or in the Low Countries, we may meet the dolorous little entry: On such a day so many Beghards were burned or imprisoned in perpetual In pace. A special German Inquisition was instituted against them.

They gave, and the friars took, and the Beghards took, and still the cry was “Give.” The Fratricelli, Apostolici, Beghards, Beguines, Brothers of the Free Spirit, overran the whole of Europe. These all must be fed no less than the orthodox fraternities. And year by year the number of the mendicants increased. The careless wandering life without responsibility or consequence, the absence of ties or of toil, the prestige in idleness, attracted the vagabond and lazy. And many of the pious really believed it the noblest human life. Since the idea of Divinity was simplicity, mere simplicity, then the more the saint was simplified and the less heed he took for apparel or for food the nearer he was to heaven. These men and women, strange descendants of the spinning sisters and the Fratres Textores, were like the lilies of the field inasmuch as they toiled not, neither did they spin. They thus fulfilled the popular ideal of piety. Year by year labour and forethought grew more discredited, as it was discovered that, if you did not feed yourself, a more worldly person would always feed you; until in 1317 we read in the sentences collected by Johann von Ochsenstein that no exterior motive, not even the desire of the kingdom of heaven, should tempt a good man towards activity.

It was in vain for even the Pope to preach, for Guillaume de St. Amour to attack all mendicants alike, for councils and bishops to thunder against the indolence, the mendicancy, the lax morals and loose opinions of these men. The mendicants grew more and more. The nations groaned under the holy burden. Then, about 1310, unable to contain her displeasure any longer, the Church bursts forth into interdicts and persecution. Fifty Beghards are burned at Cologne. At Magdeburg some Beguines are cast into prison. At Strasburg, at Constance, at Mayence, the Beguines and Beghards are punished unless converted within three days. It is war to the knife against the wandering heretics.

But at the same time a strange mystical pantheistic tendency became noticeable in many sermons and lessons of the Church herself. All this multitude of heretic Beguines, suddenly made orthodox within three days, all this vast accession of vague Almarician piety was not without an influence on the conquering faith. Among the Dominicans of Strasburg the mystical bent grew more decided year by year. These much-admired doctors and magisters were lights of the Church, men of influence and learning; but the mysticism which was orthodox in them was really identical with the neoplatonist theories of the Beghards. And, indeed, these men,—Eckhart, Tauler, Rulmann Merswin—went further in the way of pantheism than the heretic brotherhood had gone before.

From the year 1312 until 1320 Master Eckhart, the great Dominican preacher, was living in Strasburg. His deep and original mind, which so vastly was to influence the speculation of his time, was now itself brought under the influence of Beguinism. From 1312 to 1317 he preached and visited in the Dominican beguinages of Strasburg. Always a mystic and a neoplatonist, before that date he was not suspected of

heresy

heresy

From this time the cohesive force of Beguinism rapidly diminishes. In 1365 Pope Urban V. still speaks of the “children of Belial, Beghards and Beguines,” but their name slips gradually out of the chronicles of edicts and of councils. Or it is applied to any new sect of heretics. In 1373 we hear of “the Beghards or Turlupins,” and in the next century Beghard is frequently synonymous with Lollard. The great heresy of the Free Spirit was divided into a hundred unimportant divisions. By the middle of the fifteenth century,

the

the

Amor rapit, unit, satisfacit: the practical Gerson lets fall the fiery phrase. Each of these virgin visionaries had said as much. Open the books of their exercises, their revelations; the dusty pages exhale a violence and tenderness of passion that the minnesingers never caught, the troubadors never felt, in their earthly singing. For these saintly visions are all of love—love which ravishes; nay, love which drowns, annihilates, swallows up. Love in a dream, and yet the one real thing in a cramped and narrow life; love which fills every interstice and cranny of a void and aching heart; love unseen, untouched, unheard, for which the visionary waits hour by hour, in an anguish of tense devotion, waits till the muttered monotony of her prayers, the fixed, unvaried straining of her eyes, shall have lulled the body to a death-like trance, shall set free the soul to show her the mirage of her own unsatisfied desire.

The convent of Rodardesdorf, near Eisleben, and the great princely convent of Quedlinburg, gave an especial religious distinction to Thuringia; but not until about the year 1234, when the rich and noble Freiherr von Hackeborn of Helfta placed at Rodardesdorf his little five-year-old daughter Gertrude, was the specially illustrious future of that house decided. Rodardesdorf was a convent of Cistercians, a thoughtful and peaceful place. The little Gertrude was happy there. She was a serious and earnest child, “not content,” says the chronicle, “with childish innocence, but, even when a babe, gifted with a constant gravity and prudence of demeanour.” Indeed, that childish head was troubled with many things, for the little girl was passionately eager to learn all that came in her way: science, liberal arts, grammar, theology. So that she became no less honoured for her acquirements than beloved for her docility and modesty of bearing.

According to the code of Abelard the convent was divided into six functions, all alike subject to the direction of the abbess. The sacristan was responsible for the convent treasury; she kept the keys, and had the care of the church plate and sacred vessels; and it was her duty to set the virgin sisters to prepare the wafers for the Host, which must not be made by widows. The chantress taught singing and reading, had care of the choir and of the library, to which she was expected to add by copying and illuminating manuscripts. The head of the infirmary had charge of the sick. Another sister was mistress of the wardrobe, and responsible not only for all the spinning, weaving, and sewing necessary for the convent, but also for the tanning and cobbling. The cellarer had in her charge the wines for the altar and the sick, the provisioning of the table, and the management of whatever the convent possessed in orchards and garden-land, flocks and herds and hives, trout streams and mills. Lastly, the doorkeeper, who was especially chosen for courteous manners, judgment, and trustworthiness, was responsible for the keeping of the gate, the entertainment of guests, and the distribution of hospitality.

When she remembered, in the long vacant hours of sleeping or copying, the books she used to read, what thoughts would they naturally suggest to her? She had, we may be sure, read no books that would give her visions of the world outside—poems of Virgil the magician, or the minnesingers. To her the humanities were themselves books of theology; the writings of the fathers of the Church, a tract of St. Bonaventura’s it may be, or one of the sermons of Eckhart or of Albertus Magnus (then at the prime of their renown), certainly the works of Dionysius Areopagita. What would they have taught her, these books which she had given up to imitate the lowliness of Christ? They told her, one and all, how much more desirable was feeling than reason, ecstasy than care for others, faith than works; how far above all natural tenderness of human charity was the virtus infusa, the theological virtue, the love of God. Every hour of her life must have repeated the lesson. The eight offices of the day, the lesson from the Martyrology, which was all the food this hungry and active mind was given to fast upon; the daily task of copying prayers; the long, weary misery of being no one, in no true position. All these things must have spoken to this earnest, self-preoccupied Gertrude, who had toiled so long to make herself pleasing in the eyes of every one; and, now, knowing so well what was necessary, would she not strive in prayer for this last, dearest gift? Would she not set herself to learn this one thing needful? Most likely she had not long to pray, nor ever consciously began to learn, before the gift was granted, the science acquired, the strong mind weakened and perverted, the student an ecstatic.

From that first moment of vision the fame of Gertrude grew so high and so rapidly, that when in 1251 the abbess of Rodardesdorf expired, this girl-ecstatic of nineteen was elected her successor. It is strange that the duties of her new position, the great responsibilities of so famous a convent, did not draw her from her visions; but the influence of the time was strong, and the abbess of Rodardesdorf was beset by no imperious need for reform. There was no cleansing work of righteousness to be performed in that well-ordered house of high-born mystical ladies. All that Gertrude could do was, seven years after her nomination, when the springs of Rodardesdorf dried up, to remove the convent to her own castle of Helfta, an act which naturally increased her own position in the convent, and tripled her glory of abbess, benefactress, and ecstatic. Gertrude, however, was not the only saint in Helfta. Besides her sister, the sweet, fanciful Saint Mechtild, there was Gertrude the Nun,^[3] sometimes confounded with the abbess, who in all probability wrote the concluding book of the Vita, certainly finished after St. Gertrude’s death. The two daughters of the Count of Mansfeld were also professed in the convent, and were gifted disciples of its mystical doctrines. Sophia spent her life in enriching the already valuable library of Helfta, and Elizabeth painted, probably in the chapel.

From that first moment of vision the fame of Gertrude grew so high and so rapidly, that when in 1251 the abbess of Rodardesdorf expired, this girl-ecstatic of nineteen was elected her successor. It is strange that the duties of her new position, the great responsibilities of so famous a convent, did not draw her from her visions; but the influence of the time was strong, and the abbess of Rodardesdorf was beset by no imperious need for reform. There was no cleansing work of righteousness to be performed in that well-ordered house of high-born mystical ladies. All that Gertrude could do was, seven years after her nomination, when the springs of Rodardesdorf dried up, to remove the convent to her own castle of Helfta, an act which naturally increased her own position in the convent, and tripled her glory of abbess, benefactress, and ecstatic. Gertrude, however, was not the only saint in Helfta. Besides her sister, the sweet, fanciful Saint Mechtild, there was Gertrude the Nun,^[3] sometimes confounded with the abbess, who in all probability wrote the concluding book of the Vita, certainly finished after St. Gertrude’s death. The two daughters of the Count of Mansfeld were also professed in the convent, and were gifted disciples of its mystical doctrines. Sophia spent her life in enriching the already valuable library of Helfta, and Elizabeth painted, probably in the chapel.

The spectacle of her suffering convinced the whole convent of Gertrude’s sanctity. They believed her in daily communication with their unseen Head. It was natural, therefore, that they should bring their sorrows to her and entreat her intercession, as men ask a minister to counsel the king, or a steward to remedy the carelessness of the absent master, or a favoured mistress to beg that, for her love’s sake, a piece of justice may be granted that otherwise were withheld. It was natural, also, that Gertrude should believe herself capable of guiding the will of God; natural that the strange vanity of the visionary and the hysteric should obscure the eyes of her mind, and lead her further on the road she had chosen. After visions, miracles.

As the mystical life spread like a contagion through the convent, many of the younger sisters, underfed, deprived of air and exercise, had not strength to support the abnormal existence of the visionary. Sickness was frequent in this convent of ecstatics, and whether at Rodardesdorf or at Helfta its mortality was excessive. The nuns died young of undefined diseases. We are always meeting allusions to their short, dream-visited lives, to their early and inexplicable dying. They perish of anæmia, before the acknowledgedly consumptive sisters; and the nuns can find no reason for their death unless it be that God was anxious to remove so much sweetness to flourish perpetually in His presence. The diseases of the convent are such physical ills as are induced by mental strain and by bodily inanition—consumption, hysteric convulsions, or paralysis, disturbances of the liver. Such as cannot die—such as, like Gertrude herself, have too strong a fibre to perish in girlhood—linger, tormented by sickness, prematurely old and useless. All they have to console them is the phrase, vouchsafed by her heavenly bridegroom to Gertrude in vision, “Lo! ye that fain would hasten into my presence, ye are as a spouse that bare and unadorned would venture into the nuptial chamber; know, that after this death which ye so much desire, no further grace can accrue to the soul, nor can it suffer any more for God’s sake.”

VII.

For she had given to her now, as a gift that should not be taken away, that perfect quiescence and immobility of body which she had practised so often, so patiently, by day and night, in times gone past. And soon she was to be granted that other wing of ecstasy, complete abstraction of the mind from all human thoughts and affairs. So heavy became the burden of her infirmity that she could no longer order the affairs of the household, no longer care for others. At last she could not speak, she could not pray, she could not think. She was perfected in the mystical way; annihilated, stultified, palsied, she had attained the summit of her desire. Never moving, never changing, dead-alive, she lay there month by month, a helpless burden upon the community. Worshipped as one indeed highly favoured of the Lord by those whose feet were all set on the same sterile and deadly road, she could give utterance to no other words but these, “My soul!” And this phrase she repeated over and over again, finding it marvellously ample and sufficient to express all the movements of the spirit. O pitiless ideal, O cruel and revolting doctrine, is it to this you would reduce the living, thinking, active human mind? Is the end of such continued sacrifice, such years of hourly, daily labour nothing but this—a palsied useless body, a dumb, numb soul, with no thought and no desire beyond itself? At length the hour of dissolution was at hand, the night in which no man shall work; and in waiting for this the days of life had gone by fruitless and wasted; in hoping for this the sun had risen and set in vain, the seasons had changed unnoticed; in preparation for this soul and heart and mind and physical powers had deliberately hamstrung their noblest faculties; and now the long-awaited night was at hand, the night in which all mistakes are forgotten, all cares and anguish set at rest.

Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions, quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact, the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man, having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God, and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who, thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he seeth not God.”

Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions, quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact, the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man, having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God, and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who, thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he seeth not God.”

That a great many people everywhere at one time ardently desire one thing is certainly no proof that their desire shall be satisfied; but it shows a real want in the heart of man—a want which may be stopped by altered conditions, if not by the actual things desired. As many people longed for extinction in the harassed Middle Ages as pine for immortality to-day. I do not mean to say they formulated this desire, for most of them were fervent Christians. But life was bitter then, and they hoped to extinguish their weary and craving souls in the unconscious Godhead. When life is bitter now, we say “Eternal Justice owes us a happier experience to discharge our sufferings here.” But in both attitudes the same one fact remains, that so long as life is bitter, men will crave and will complain. No modern preacher has spoken more fervently of the joys of immortality than these medieval Mystics spoke of the Abyss. Each to each has been the final and immeasurable recompense for all the wrongs that ever there were in the world. By many ardent Churchmen, and many saints, and many thinkers in the Middle Ages, God was chiefly worshipped as the Abyss. He was the Supreme Annihilation. The soul must plunge, says Eckhart, into pure Nothingness. The soul must sink, says Tauler, in the Divine Darkness, into the secret place of the Divine Abyss. “There is no safety,” says Guillame Briçonnet, “save in the Abyss” (“l’abysme qui abysme en désabysmant”). Adventitious reward, says Suso, may come in the consciousness of having conquered evil and done good; but true reward, essential reward, is only in the wild waste and deep abyss of inscrutable Deity, in the union of the soul with sheer impersonal Godhead. This Godhead, says Eckhart, is a simple stillness without quality or distinction. God is neither this nor that. Who can distinguish and say, “This is good, sees not God; for all that is in the Godhead is absolutely one, and formless, and void, and interminable, and passive.” And the names under which God is chiefly worshipped show this strange impersonal attitude. The Divine Dark, the Obscure Night, the Desert, the Abyss, the Unimaged Nakedness, the Infinite Essence, the Hidden Darkness, the One, the Supreme Nothing: these are the names of this remote, abstract Jehovah of the mediæval Mystics.

What then, we ask again, what is the satisfaction that draws your souls so firmly towards the Abyss? Will no one answer? And Tauler, the great Mystical Dominican, replies, “There remains to a man, the fathomless annihilation of himself; and an absolute ignoring of his personal self—of all aims, of all will, heart, purpose, use, or way.”

“The One,” begins Plotinus, “is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul, neither moving, nor at rest, not in place and not in time; neither is it of any sort or kind.” Thus we learn what things were not intrinsic to the Deity; we learn that we must conceive a bodiless, unqualified, impersonal, interminable Void; an eternal, undifferentiate essence of existence; an infinite Being not to be approached by reason or by soul. Eckhart goes a step further, and affirms not only what the Godhead is not, but even what it is. “There is a Godhead,” he says, “above God. The Godhead neither moves nor works.... It is a simple Stillness, an eternal Silence.”

This indeed appears almost an absurd position; and yet the position of the Mystics was honourable and intelligent. They attempted to answer questions which even to-day the theologians elude (see Newman, “Grammar of Assent,” p. 210). “Whence comes Evil?” Evil, they reply, is not created by God, but, so to speak, the blanks and spaces not filled up by His creation. Evil and pain have no Real Existence; they are but a deficiency of vitality; they are negative and temporary qualities unrecognized by an unconscious God innocent of inflicting them. “Why are we created responsible beings without our own consent?” Our bodies are not created by God and we are not responsible to Him for their errors. They are the expressions of our Eternal souls—their own expressions at their own desire as a modus vivendi in the world. “How can God need our action if He is omnipotent? If omnipotent, how tolerant of Evil? If permitting suffering, sin, and Hell, how then All-loving? If All-loving, how Just?” These questions are all answered by the mystical conception of God as a Divine Passivity, an unconscious Fund of Existence. All that is impossible and absurd in the theories of the Mystics is caused by adapting them to religious ideas. They had to explain the immortality of the soul, ... and they spoke of eternal absorption into an Infinite Nothing. They had to explain a good and omnipotent God creating an evil and impotent humanity. They made the one nothing and the other nothing.

The letters of St. Catherine came frequently to Avignon, and with them came other letters from the French Governors telling of the increasing difficulty of keeping together the little that was left of the patrimony of St. Peter. Gregory became visibly disturbed. His conscience urged him to return to Rome. In July the Duke of Anjou^[6] came to Avignon to dissuade the Pope from an enterprise so disastrous, as he believed, to the future of France. Of all the royal princes Anjou was the one specially concerned with Italian policy. He was a man handsome, impressive, with a breadth of view and a force of ambition that made him many followers. This son of St. Louis could not fail to influence the Pope. He made it harder to go from Avignon; but the persuading voice of Catherine would not be stilled. The Pope was ill and afraid, a timid man; his sisters and his parents clung to him, entreating him to stay; his Cardinals opposed him; his king commanded: yet on the 13th of September he quitted Avignon. Evil omens added to the discouragement of his spirit; his horse stumbled under him at starting, and fearful tempests delayed him on the sea. But on January 17, 1377, the Pope re-entered Rome.

The seventy years which had made the beauty of Avignon had ruined Rome. No longer the pilgrims brought her the custom of foreign countries; the Court of the Vatican no longer gave an impetus to trade; the prestige of the Pope had ceased to make of Rome the centre of Europe; and the deserted city had realized her intrinsic poverty. Thirty years ago Rienzi had proclaimed her a cave of robbers rather than the abode of decent men. The churches were in ruins,^[7] many of them wholly roofless; and in St. Peter’s and the Lateran the flocks nibbled the grass of the pavement up to the steps of the altar. Row after row of ruined dwelling-places gave way to wild fields and heaths—scars of desolation upon the depopulated enclosure of Aurelian. If mediæval Rome lay in ruins, the Rome of antiquity was yet more ruthlessly destroyed, and the temples and theatres of the pagans were used as a quarry or a limekiln by their savage and impoverished successors. For with prosperity, peace and order had deserted Rome. The fierce clans of Colonna and Orsini terrorized the starved and fever-stricken populace; and there was no law beyond their tyranny. Murder was frequent, vendetta an honoured custom, and the Eternal City the shambles of unpunished bloodshedding.

Robert of Geneva, Cardinal of the Twelve Apostles, was, like the Pope himself, a Frenchman of good family and aristocratic prejudice. His father was the Count of Geneva, his mother Mahault of Auvergne and Boulogne. In his eyes the revolt of subjects was a crime beyond excuse; and when, as in the present case, there was added to the denial of the divine right of sovereigns a heretic apostasy from the dominion of the Church, his indignation dried the founts of pity in his heart. The history of his whole life proves the Cardinal to be not naturally cruel, nor even vindictive; but his campaign in Italy was terrible. With the Frenchman’s distrust of the Italians, Robert refused to engage Italian condottieri; he knew that these companies, changing masters continually, were gentle to the enemy of the moment, the brother-in-arms of yesterday and to-morrow. The Cardinal, fiercely in earnest, engaged the Breton Jehan de Malestroit who had cried, “Where the sun can enter, I can enter!” and the Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood, with his White Company the most terrible of the day. Supported by these pitiless auxiliaries, Robert of Geneva quenched in blood the fierce resistance of Florence, Bologna, Cesena, Faenza, and other rebellious cities. Massacre after massacre, sack and pillage innumerable marked his progress; but the voice of the Churchman was never heard to cry for mercy. He had no admiration for the obstinate courage of the besieged; they were rebels, and beyond pity. “I will wash my hands in their blood!” he cried at Bologna and at Cesena there were 5,000 slain. These things made the name of the young Cardinal an abomination in Italy. But they secured in one campaign the submission of the Italians.

It was the first Conclave that had been held in Rome for fifty-seven years, and the Roman populace clamoured in the streets for a Roman Pope. But among the sixteen Cardinals of the Conclave, eleven were French. They might easily have carried the necessary majority of two-thirds had they been of one mind among themselves; but the hatred of North and South did not merely divide the French from the Italians; it divided the Frenchmen among themselves. Gregory and Clement had both been Limousins, and the majority of the French Cardinals decided to continue this tradition. The remnant, however—the Gallicans, as they called themselves—preferred even an Italian to a Limousin; and their spokesman, Robert of Geneva, made overtures to the Trans-Alpines. The result was the election of a man of no party, a man who was not even a Cardinal. Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, was an Italian; but he was something more than an Italian; he was a Neapolitan, a subject of Queen Giovanna, and therefore presumably in favour of the French. He had lived at Avignon, and was familiar with French customs and French policy. It was hoped that he might prove a bond of union. Scarcely was his election accomplished, in haste, amid the noises of the shouting mob outside, when the impatient Romans burst into the Conclave, clamouring for a Roman Pope. The Cardinals dared not confess their choice of a Neapolitan, and in their terror they lied, imposing on the people the Cardinal of St. Peter’s, a Roman born. This fraud, together with the constraint put on the Conclave by the violence of the mob, were a few months later alleged against the validity of the election of Prignano.

But at first no conscience was troubled by this irregularity. For six months the Archbishop of Bari wore an undisputed tiara, and Urban VI. succeeded quietly to Gregory. Urban was zealous for reform, passionately determined against simony, pure in his life, energetic, resolute; but virtue has seldom been manifest in so unlovable an Avatar. The man was a Neapolitan peasant: short, squat, coarse, and savage. He flung rude words and violent speeches like mud in the faces of his elegant French Cardinals. “Fool!” “Blockhead!” “Simoniacal Pharisee!”—such were the hard nails with which he studded the ever unpalatable word Reform; and one day, had not Robert of Geneva caught the holy father by the sleeve, he would have struck a Cardinal in the assembled Consistory.

Robert of Geneva was thirty-six years old; he was tall, commanding, with a handsome face and fine manners. His aristocratic urbanity veiled a nature that did not scorn to do and dare. There could be no greater contrast to the Pope than he, and he became the idol of the Cardinals, although, in fact, he, the Arch-Gallican, was the distant cause of the election of Urban. His reputation for ferocity in battle added a prestige to his pleasant courtliness: it was he who should have been the Pope! He would not have kept the College, throughout the sweltering summer, in Rome where the detested Urban declared that he would live and die. Something must be done, and at once, for Urban threatened to create a majority of Italian Cardinals. One by one the Cardinals left Rome for their health. Their resort was first Anagni, thence they went to Fondi. It was an open secret in Rome wherefore they found the air so good there. Urban got wind of their conferences, and on the 18th of September he created twenty-eight Italian cardinals. Two days later there was a great ceremony in the church at Fondi. The French Cardinals announced to the world that at last a legitimate Pope had been elected in succession to Gregory. He was, of course, a Frenchman; he was Robert of Geneva; he was Clement VII., the first Antipope of the great Schism.

Valentine Visconti.

Galeazzo Visconti had taken with him from Milan his wife, Blanche of Savoy, his little daughter Iolanthe, and his married son Giangaleazzo, with his wife Isabelle. These last were the parents of Valentine. When she was born her mother was sixteen and her father fifteen years of age.^[12] At her nativity there were, we are told, incredible rejoicings; for the pride of Galeazzo Visconti was gratified by the birth of a grandchild who was no less the grand-daughter of a King of France.

The mother of Valentine was that little French princess who, six years ago, had been sold into Lombardy to help to raise the golden millions of her father’s ransom. John the Good had received for his daughter the sum of five hundred thousand golden florins, a sort of inverse marriage portion, the price of a royal alliance. But Galeazzo had not paid for barren honour only: Isabelle had brought her husband the county and the title of Vertus in Champagne. Though the little girl had gone weeping into Italy, her tears were soon dried. She had left a devastated and ruined country; she came into a land of sumptuous tyranny, of riches and magnificence. Life was easy at Milan and at Pavia, where Galeazzo was busied with his new university, where Giangaleazzo—a timid, intellectual, orderly creature—spent day after day in his study full of enormous parchment ledgers, directing the staff of secretaries who copied into them his accounts, his memoranda, and duplicates of his correspondence. Priests and friars from the old Certosa, professors of law and learning from the new college, poets also—the English poet, Master Geoffrey Chaucer, and the prince of poets himself, Messer Francesco Petrarca,—learned men like Philippe de Mézières, visitors from so far away as England, France, or Cyprus—these were the guests of the palace. Gradually the stately home echoed with children’s voices. Valentine was born in 1366. One brother grew strong and playful at her side; another died in babyhood. When the third was born, in 1373, Isabelle died, and a few months afterwards her baby followed her.

and mentions the courtesy of “la touse mignotte”—the dainty dame. This conveys an impression of nothing more positive than elegance and grace. We can fill up the frame with a couple of portraits which still exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale: small grisaille illuminations adorning a manuscript poem^[14] in defence of Valentine. There is nothing very distinctive in either portrait—no accent of striking personality or resemblance. They represent the same young and slender woman, rather tall, with a long neck and slim arms, and a bust both full and delicate. The head is small, the hair parted from ear to ear across the middle of the head, the back locks being tied in a Greek knot, the front ones divided again in the middle and looped in pendant braids above the ear. Under this severe coiffure we discern a serious gentle placid face—long narrow eyes, a high forehead, a full mouth with pretty pursed lips; a face too closely following the mediæval ideal for it to impress us very strongly as a likeness. Valentine is clothed in a low-cut, tight gown girdled round the hips, with long, tight sleeves descending to the knuckles of the slim and delicate hands—over this she wears a very ample trained surtout, also low in the neck, falling in rich folds to her feet and buttoned down the front to the hips, where it is sewn together, but split up at the arms in immense wide sleeve-holes, a yard long, revealing the under dress. If the young duchess was not precisely beautiful, yet certainly she was beautifully attired. The catalogue of her gala-dresses is a thing to wonder on: scarlet, and silver, and cloth of gold, and rich embroidery; cloths of peacock-green and mulberry colour; tissues of netted pearls. And she had as many pearls, diamonds, sapphires, and balass-rubies as any princess in a fairy-story. She wore them sewn all over her caps, round her girdles, encircling her young throat, and showered broadcast across the brocades and embroidery of her gowns. With all this, at sixteen, and with the subtle sweetness of the natural Lombard grace, it is not necessary to be beautiful.

He had plotted so well that one sole death secured this change. On the 6th of May, 1385, Giangaleazzo, apparently en route for the shrine of our Lady of Varese, passed by the gates of Milan. His uncle and his cousins went out to meet him, smiling at the immense guard which ever attended the timid Hermit of Pavia. But now Giangaleazzo dropped the mask. In an hour Milan was his, his cousins his prisoners, and his uncle, with his dilettissima amante, fast in the Castle of Trezzo. Giangaleazzo, no less skilled in poisons than his father, had him poisoned there, and buried him in Milan in a sepulchre of splendid marble. But he showed no wanton cruelty. His cousins escaped, destitute indeed, but unharmed. No unnecessary pain attended the murder of the tyrant Bernabò, decently executed by a well-cooked dish of vegetables. Ambition, not revenge, nor the blood-mania of his race, was the master passion of the new Lord of Lombardy. If any questioned his proceedings, he could produce the investiture of Wenzel, granting him absolute authority and final judgment. The children of Bernabò were stupefied and did not rebel; most of the sons went to fight in the ranks of Sir John Hawkwood; and the people of Milan hailed the Count of Vertus as a deliverer. He taxed them heavily, indeed, but without disorder; and his police were so excellent that he used to smile and say, “I am the only robber in my provinces.” Giangaleazzo was now master of a great domain, immensely rich, three-and-thirty. He meant to go far. In 1386 he sent to Pope Urban, demanding the title of King of Italy.

Urban refused, and in future the Ghibelline Count of Vertus addressed his requests to the Emperor, or else to the Anti-Pope at Avignon, who asked nothing better than to make himself a party in Italy. But first of all, Giangaleazzo began to conquer his kingdom. Verona, Padua, Pisa, Siena, Perugia, Assisi, Bologna, Spoleto, fell like ninepins before his gathering force. Florence began to tremble. Foreign countries began to talk of this new conqueror, of his force, his wealth, his one young daughter. Clement the Pope of Avignon, among others, perceived that with Anjou in the south and Visconti in the north, a great Gallic party might be formed in Italy. Clement was at once the creature and the patron of the kings of France. In the winter of 1386-87, while the Milanese messenger still were in the saddle arranging a marriage between Valentine and the Emperor’s brother, suddenly the Governor of Vertus arrived at Pavia. He brought a message from the King of France, the young Charles VI. The King demanded the hand of Valentine for his only brother, Louis.

It is interesting to note that in this early draft there is no thought of any possible French claim to Milan. Valentine is dowered with Asti and its revenue—for which her husband was never to be constrained to pay homage; she was also to bring her husband 450,000 golden florins, and to come to him “bien joyellée et aornée de joyaulx.” And, only after the death of her father, she was to succeed to the county of Vertus in Champagne.

Even without this, Valentine was a very wealthy heiress; she brought back to France her mother’s dowry, the county of Vertus in Champagne. In addition to this she took into the kingdom 450,000 golden florins, a freight of golden ornaments and jewels, furniture to the amount of 70,000 florins, gold and silver plate, and the county of Asti in Lombardy, with a yearly income of nearly 30,000 golden florins.^[15]

For in France a powerful faction opposed the marriage. The king was little more than a lad; entirely—or, of late, almost entirely—submissive to his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. When the wise King Charles expired in the autumn of 1380, he left the custody of his two children to this younger brother of his, who in all his battles and adventures had been his right-hand man. But the King left the Regency of the Kingdom to the elder of his brothers, the Duke of Anjou. In every sense the brothers were rivals and antagonists; the interests of Anjou lay to the South, the interests of Burgundy to the North. Anjou was a man of culture, made by nature to be the head of a society of nobles; while Burgundy, the Captain, was the champion of popular rights. In nothing were they at one. When Anjou left the kingdom to conquer Naples, and when the news came to France that he would nevermore return, the supremacy of Burgundy appeared secure. But Anjou had left behind him a successor—not his son, the child-king of Sicily. No, the real successor to his aims and policy was his nephew, the Prince Louis, the younger of the two sons of the dead king.

Little harmony between this lad and his uncle of Burgundy! At ten years old the child fights like a hero at Rosebecque; but the old captain, his tutor, keeps all his smiles for the other nephew, the docile and amiable king. He feels in Louis a spirit of danger, a breath of insubordination. And, in truth, one after the other, the ancient counsellors and servitors of Anjou take shelter in the household of the prince. Burgundy feels that Louis is Anjou Redivivus—he must be kept low. And for this the testament of Charles V. gives ample warrant: for that king, well-named the Wise, feeling that the danger of France lay in the greatness of her princes, had conquered his fatherly heart and decreed that his younger son should have no more than a pension of 12,000 livres a year. But this was not to be. As time went on, and the Regency came to an end, Louis stimulated his placid brother to a sense of independence. And the young king, less Roman than his father, and glad perhaps to feel in the kingdom another power than that of Burgundy, began to enrich his only brother, giving him the counties of Valois and Beaumont, lands in Cotentin, Caen, Champagne, and Brie: then the Duchy of Touraine; the promise of the inheritance of the old Duchess of Orleans; finally, this rich marriage with Valentine Visconti.

It was the 17th of August, 1389, according to the dates of the Monk of St. Denis, when Valentine rode into Melun to meet her bridegroom. The King was there as well as all the Court—a Court full of kinsmen for Valentine. The Viscontis counted their alliances with the kings of France back into those mythical ages when Æneas, ancestor of either House, founded the city of Angleria. Valentine found plenty of more recent connections. The King and her husband were both her first cousins, and so was the young King of Sicily; the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry were her uncles. She was also, as I have said, first cousin once removed to the King’s young wife, Isabel of Bavaria. She was cousin also to Madame de Montauban, cousin by marriage to Madame d’Armagnac. But these three kinswomen looked on her with horror, and all her splendour seemed to them unholy spoil fresh from the unclean hands of her father, the triumphant assassin of his kinsmen.

The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court. Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, she was not satisfied with the devotion of her husband. Charles VI. was a gentle, kind-hearted, stalwart young man, at two-and-twenty already rather bald, clear of eye and cheek, generous, slow-witted, unapt to State and dignity. He was lovable and sweet in temper; “he emitted, like an odoriferous flower, the ingenuity of his perfect character,” writes the anonymous Monk of St. Denis. But at his side, more brilliant and more eloquent than he, rode the first knight of chivalry, the King’s only brother, Louis, Duke of Touraine. This young man was eighteen years old, extremely handsome, so witty and so wise that in the University of Paris there were no doctors who were proof against his bonne memoire et belle loquelle. Often at night, in the Hôtel de Saint Paul at Paris, he and the young Marshal Boucicault would sit into the grey hours of the morning, devising and arguing the nature of the soul, or making rondels, songs, and ballads. Other days and nights were spent in less innocent amusements; for the beautiful Duke of Touraine was so irresistible a lover that popular fancy endowed him with a magic wand and an enchanted ring, making him absolute master of all women. None the less—though in a knight it were more noble to succour than to enslave fair ladies—the Duke was considered (a woman has pronounced it) “the very refuge and retreat of chivalry.” And the charm of his youth and beauty, of his rhetoric and laughter, of his gentle manners and brilliant knightliness, still exhales from the dusty pages of Christine de Pisan and Juvenal des Ursins. These two loved him. But the hostile Monstrelet, the critical Monk of St. Denis, the unenthusiastic Froissart—even these assure us of his enchanting presence.

V.

Thus, after all, Queen Isabel played but the second part in the pageant of her entry. Soon, however, she forgot her jealousy of the Italian—a jealousy which on that holiday kept her sick in her chamber, while Valentine danced with Touraine and the King in the royal ball below. But Valentine was no rival of the beautiful, bright little Queen: she was a persistent, ambitious, and devoted woman, never vain and never timid. From the first she lavished on her boyish husband that passionate devotion of an elder woman which asks no return from the radiant young creature she adores. She did not grudge Louis the love of Isabel, if, indeed, that love was his. A stranger thing happened: Valentine united with her rival to push the fortunes of Touraine. These two women were ever together, ever scheming, and planning the welfare of the unfaithful husband of the one, whom an unbroken tradition has regarded as the criminal lover of the other. An unnatural league; but it served to strengthen Touraine.

VI.

About an hour afterwards, suddenly, the King set upon his brother, his spear a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag.... The more distant of the royal party thought the King had spied a hare or a hart in the forest.... Then, as the truth dawned, there was a dreadful scene. Cries, wounds, men falling from their horses, and a fanatic madman who none the less was still a sacred and irresistible presence! The King of France was furiously and murderously mad.

The King mad; the King’s brother a wizard! There was a contagion of horror in France. “Many nobles and poor people,” writes the Monk of St. Denis, “began to change and sicken with the same strange malady that had attacked the King.” The fanatic terror of supernatural evil spread and deepened.

Charitable souls like Demoiselle Christine declared in vain—“C’est impossible que son âme et ses mœurs n’en vaillent mieux.” Charitable souls are rare. The mass of the people did not hesitate to say that Louis visited the Celestines the better to conspire with a certain monk there—an old counsellor of his father’s—one Sire Philippe de Mézières. This person was acknowledged to be wise, experienced, able, and a man of science, according to the age. “Cestui vieil solitaire” for forty years had been the counsellor of princes. For thirty years he had been the life and soul of the policy of Cyprus, of Rhodes, of the Christian East. Then disgraced by an ungrateful king—Pierre II. de Lusignan—he took refuge in France, bringing to the service of Charles V. his enthusiasm, his political wisdom, his minute and extensive acquaintance with the Courts of Italy and the East. In 1379 he entered the Convent of the Celestines in Paris; not too secluded to remain the trusted counsellor of Charles V., and in his turn, of his son Louis of Orleans. But though the good Sire was a monk, the crowd doubted of his religion, for it was common rumour that he said there was no truth in sorcery. Let him say it! Sire Philippe de Mézières was none the less no judicious companion for the Duke of Orleans. The Sire had lived too long in Lombardy: “a country,” as Juvenal describes it, “where they practice magic and the casting of spells.”

The King was mad again; he had fallen into the first of innumerable relapses. Henceforth, for thirty years, any moment of too poignant feeling would throw him back in agony and madness. At such times he suffered much. It would happen (says the Monk of St. Denis), that as he sat in his council chamber, receiving his ambassadors and discoursing with sense and clearness, a sudden shudder would pass over him, the actual world would drift into oblivion. Again the forest near Mans, the leper’s warning, would rise on his tormented vision. He would shriek out for help against his enemies, and yet, poor king, be still aware these enemies were phantasms. At such moments he would cry and wail and sob, till all the Court fell a-weeping to hear him. “O not madness. Death, any pain, anything but madness!” and joining his hands he would look eagerly in face after face of his kinsmen. “I pray you, for the love of Christ, if any of you be party to this magic, then let me die at once and end it.” But no prayers avail, and as the fantastic world of lunacy gradually eclipsed the receding truth, the King’s last entreaty showed the unaltered sweetness of his tormented nature. “Keep away all the knives,” he would cry. “I had rather die than hurt any one.” For no lapse of time, no suffering effaced in his gentle character the stamp of that terrible moment of Mans when he had awoken to find his innocent hands stained henceforth for ever with innocent and loyal blood.

Who was this lady?—Valentine of Milan. “Now,” says Juvenal, “her father was the Duke of Milan,^[20] who was a Lombard, and in his country they practise magic and the casting of spells.” “The common people,” says the Monk, “declared the King was bewitched. They accused the Duke of Milan, and in confirmation of this ridiculous proposition they said the Duchess of Orleans was the only person the King recognized or cherished in his sickness. They did not scruple to say she was a witch, though that so generous a lady should commit so great a crime is a fact that never has been proved.” “The King’s physicians, arioles, and charmers,” says Froissart, “affirmed the King was poisoned or bewitched by craft of sorcery; they said they knew it by the spirits that had showed it to them. Of these diviners, arioles, and charmers, certain were burned at Paris and at Avignon. They spake so much, and said the Duchess Valentine of Orleans, daughter to the Duke of Milan, had bewitched the King.”

In those days the accusation of sorcery was terrible and ominous. To bewitch the King was the most damnable of crimes, for witchcraft in itself was treason against God. It was indeed no less than taking out of heaven the tremendous issues of life and death, apportioning them with profane and mortal hands, and breaking the heavenly order of the universe. God was mocked. This side of sorcery excited the horror of theologians, but it was not this that infuriated with helpless terror the shuddering populace. We know how the Polynesian islanders will die to-day of a fatal langour if they believe their enemy has prayed against them. The citizens of Paris in the Middle Ages died as easily. “Throughout the kingdom,” says the Monk of St. Denis, “many nobles and poor people are attacked with the same strange malady as the King’s.” A contagion of fear paralysed the sources of life. “For they can bewitch you,” said, in 1407, Maître Jean Petit, a very learned doctor in theology; “and they can bewitch the King, and make him die in a very subtle manner, quite unapparent, by the casting of a spell.” “A word is enough,” said two Augustine friars who suffered for sorcery in 1397, “a word, a touch; it is no natural malady.” To those who suffered, and saw their near and dear ones suffer of this incurable, inexorable enchantment, there was no death too cruel for the wizard.

The powers of the Prince of the Air were in high places. Valentine was not only protected by Satan—not only served by Hermas and Astramin the two livid demons of Montjoy that obeyed the House of Orleans—she was also sheltered by the effulgence of the throne. Every power, every protection was hers. Hell and earth obeyed her, and heaven smiles upon the sins of princes. Yet with the cruel heroism of pity the people of Paris rose against her, pouring down the streets, reaching out their fanatic hands to tear in pieces no omnipotent demon in a violent aureole of flame, but a pale neglected foreign woman far from home. They determined to save the King, and at last the peril of the duchess grew so great that Marshal Sancerre and many other nobles advised her husband to send her out of Paris. So in great pomp, nowise abashed, but with all the splendour of a royal progress, Valentine left the city. She went to a fair castle of her husband’s near Pontoise, and then to Neufchatel upon the Loire. She went alone, for Orleans was kept by State affairs in Paris. There was a subtle political reason for the irritation of France against the Milanese. In the complex recesses of the human heart an actual terror of supernatural evil, a crusader’s passion to avenge the honour of God, may co-exist with the most sordid calculations of a worldly advantage to be gained. It was not only for the love of God that the Jews and Moors of Spain, the Protestants of Flanders, the monasteries of England, were made to enrich their persecutors. It was not entirely for thirty pieces of silver that Judas delivered a heretic to the secular arm. And it was the easier to condemn the Duke of Milan that he was not only a wizard, but the political rival of France for the rich suzerainty of Genoa.

Visconti had easily acquired the direction of his son-in-law’s policy. It is not surprising. A lad of eighteen, poor, kept under, systematically neglected, Orleans before his marriage had known little of power, nothing of supremacy. He was nominally Duke of Touraine; but his estates were administered by the King. Until a few months before his marriage he had not even a house of his own, but lived with his retinue in a corner of his brother’s palace. In February, 1389, he appeared for the first time at the Royal Council. Valentine brought him wealth, consideration, and ambition; for, with the possession of Asti, and under the guidance of his father-in-law, the young Duke began to dream of battles and signiories in Italy.

But nothing can be done without the indispensable Visconti. What is his plan? At first he holds back, loving by nature the attitude of suspense. But in 1392 the moment came to decide. Armagnac at that moment was invading Italy in defence of the rights of his sister Beatrice and the elder branch of Visconti. He suffered defeat, indeed, and death at the hands of Milan, but not before he had inflicted so severe a check upon his victor that Giangaleazzo no longer saw his triumph clear. Nay, unwelcome as the ghost of Banquo at the board of Macbeth, the pale figures of the dead Armagnac, the once laughing Beatrice, the poisoned Bernabò, intrude themselves between him and his end. Do not such sights as these clamour for revenge?—and Armagnac and Beatrice have a living brother; Bernabò Visconti has left a troop of sons. Milan may yet be snatched from his grasp. He is not safe in Lombardy, and he would fain be King of Italy. But how to obtain that crown? Already Armagnac has forced him to restore Padua to the Carraresi. And Florence, the irreconcileable enemy, is grouping round her a league of hostile states. In August, 1392, Florence, Padua, Faenza, Ravenna—a little later the Malatestas and Forli—are united against Visconti. He is not safe in Milan till he wear the crown of Florence too.

Then he sends to the Pope and to the King of France and announces his plan. How did the Lord of Milan hear of the secret Adrian project? Did Anjou, passing through Pavia, drop a word? Did one of the many Angevines sheltered in the house of Orleans, familiar with Asti and Milan, broach the plan? We know not, but this was the scheme of Visconti: Naples for Anjou; Rome for the Frenchman Clement VII.; Adria, that is to say the centre of Italy from Spoleto to Ferrara, and from Massa to Ancona, Adria for Orleans, the North for Visconti. That is to say, Italy for the father of Valentine and his allies.^[25] As Walsingham tells us Visconti secured for himself the double crown of Tuscany and Lombardy. But in the very moment when the reluctant Pope (less hasty and less egoistic now than at Sperlonga), had promised thus to alienate the Church lands as the price of his restoration, a Divine Hand, as it must have seemed, interposed to save the Church. On the 28th of August, 1394, Pope and Cardinals had approved the Schedule of Orleans. A fortnight later, on the 16th of September, suddenly, Clement VII. died at Avignon.

His successor was less able; and the scheme of Adria was abandoned. Valentine would never reign as Queen of Adria. Yet, as Duchess of Genoa, she would be nearer home. Then in all manner of subtle and secret ways Orleans and Visconti immediately manœuvred to secure the Ligurian province. Armies in the field, diplomats in the Cabinet, worked for one end alone. In November, 1394, Savona had submitted to Orleans. Now Genoa must be gained. The young Duke had already a strong faction in his favour. The Lomellini, Spinole, Flischi, figure in the rolls of Orleans’ army.^[28] But, at the same time, they were intriguing with an unsuspected enemy.^[29] In August, 1395, the Doge of Genoa sent to Paris offering to Charles himself the suzerainty of Genoa. There was in France a strong current of popular opinion running in favour of Italian colonization. Why should Orleans have Genoa?—asked the people. Why not the King? Why not all of us? Why not France? The King, as we know, was never a very solid creature. Honest, but feeble, he let himself be dominated by the nearest influence. The Duke of Burgundy was in Paris, and he, it is probable, persuaded Charles^[26] to abandon his brother and to accept the gift of the Doge. In October, Genoa was united to the Crown of France. In December the King bought from Orleans his rights in Savona and Genoa.^[27] This was checkmate both to Orleans and Visconti.

Thus the machinations of Milan served to exasperate the French. And the indignity and insult offered to Valentine were as great a cause of irritation to Visconti. He and his daughter, with their Lombard indifference to

superstition

superstition

says

says

Thus the machinations of Milan served to exasperate the French. And the indignity and insult offered to Valentine were as great a cause of irritation to Visconti. He and his daughter, with their Lombard indifference to

superstition

superstition

says

says

Yet now, perhaps, for the first time the French people, not unjustifiably, might have heaped their odium on Valentine. For her latest historian supports a theory suggested long ago by Froissart.^[35] While the French were projecting their invasion of Lombardy—while the son of that Burgundy who had advised the King in the affair of Genoa was leading against the Turks a French Crusade which might easily return homewards viâ Lombardy and Milan—Giangaleazzo, furious and humiliated, sought any means of salvation and revenge. He, like many another Italian, was in correspondence with the Turk; and an idea, successfully practised by many another Italian,^[34] may not unnaturally have suggested itself to him. If France joined the Florentine League then adieu for ever to the hopes of Visconti. And Burgundy, as he knew, was in favour of Florence. And the son of Burgundy was captain of the French army. Small hope here; yet, if the French army could be destroyed in Turkey, Milan would be safe! Then the astute Visconti would smile to think of his daughter in France. Valentine who wrote him everything—also told him doubtless (as the author of Maistre Jehan de Meun tells us^[33]) of the vain young aristocrats, ruined by free living and fine carousing, who were starting on that terrible journey, thinking of nothing more serious than the elegant spectacle of their departure:

Orleans and Burgundy turn by turn usurped the direction of affairs. Vainly King and Queen and Court attempted to assuage their rivalry. On the 14th of June, 1401, the Queen of France (the King being mad), the King of Sicily, the Dukes of Berri and Bourbon, made a League “pour apaiser les Ducs d’Orlèans et de Bourgogne.”^[38] In vain. The King himself was powerless, and could only bid his subjects—as in 1405 he bade the Bailly de Caux—to stand aside and take no part nor lot in the discord existing between the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy.^[39] This impartiality was only apparent. The growing influence of Burgundy was dreaded by Berri and the Queen, no less than by Orleans himself. And in the winter of 1405, these three persons joined themselves together in an “Alliance défensive et réciproque, pour se maintenir au pouvoir.”^[40] Thus, if Burgundy had the nation on his side, the authority of the Queen, the influence of Valentine (all-powerful with the King), was with Orleans. In 1404 Philip of Burgundy died, and his faction gained new vigour with the accession of his son, a man less temperate, less aristocratic than his father. The blood of his Flemish mother worked in the veins of the young man, restless, violent, demagogic as a burgher of Ghent. The young Duke of Burgundy had no woman to work for him; it was even rumoured that the portrait of his own wife hung in that locked chamber where Orleans kept the pictures of his mistresses. But Jean-sans-Peur did not need any feminine advocate. He was young, he was rich. In 1404 his father’s death bequeathed him Burgundy, next year his mother died and left him Flanders. A small ugly man, alert, blunt, brutal even, serving public interests to reach his own ends, Jean-sans-Peur of Burgundy was the hero of the people. “Brun et barbu et bien aimé,“ writes Burcarius.

XI.

Of the two legitimate sons of the great Duke of Milan—one was a handsome young Nero, blood-mad, inept, given over to passion and cruelty; the other an astute child, timid, unscrupulous, who later should develop a trace of the genius of his father. At first their hold on their inheritance was so slight that Orleans determined on invading Lombardy, whether to defend or to supplant his nephews, who shall say? In October, 1403, he started for Lombardy, accompanied by 13 knights-banneret, 43 knights, 212 squires, 28 archers, 20 crossbow-men, and other soldiers.^[43] On the way south he passed by Beaucaire, and had an interview with his charge, the Antipope Benedict. He took into his service the famous captain of adventure, Bernardon de Serres. He made friends with another mighty captain—an ancient enemy—the Count of Armagnac.^[42] Vast and serious appeared his project of invasion, but, on the very verge of the Alps, suddenly, on January, 1404, he abandoned the prosperous enterprise, turned right about, and faced home for Paris.

At the first word of the matter Orleans had turned his back on his contemplated campaign and marched back to Paris, fury in his heart. Probably behind the interference of Boucicaut he divined the inspiration of Burgundy, his enemy;—Burgundy who, as events should prove, had unsuspected designs of his own upon the State of Pisa. Back in wrath marched Orleans: stalked indignant into Paris his men at his heels: found the King in his senses, and docile as was his wont. From him, on the 24th of May, Orleans extracted the deed which we append,^[45] a deed that repudiates the action of Boucicaut, and transfers all the rights of France in Pisa to Orleans, who henceforth shall meet with neither let nor hindrance in his projects.

The deed was granted in Council, the King being then in his senses, and assisted by Berri, Bourbon, Tancarville, and others. The reader will remark the noteworthy absence of Burgundy. He will remember also that Berry, in 1405, will join Orleans in a defensive league against Jean-sans-Peur. It is possible that Burgundy knew nothing of the deed drawn up behind his back.

For a moment Orleans was obliged to pause in his Italian policy—to pause only, not to abandon it, since in 1406^[48] he still reclaimed authority on Pisa, and in the very year of his death was taking an active part in the affairs of Lombardy.^[47] That pause was filled in a manner disastrous, fatal, yet natural enough in a man suffocating under a sense of bitter indignation and revolt. Burgundy had interfered with Orleans abroad. Very well; Orleans would interfere with Burgundy at home. Already the first steps were taken. In 1401, Orleans had married his cousin Mary Harcourt to the Duke of Gueldres, the enemy and the neighbour of Burgundy, with whom his rival now concluded an alliance and a league. In 1402, Orleans purchased from the King of the Romans the Duchy of Luxembourg. In 1405,^[46] he assembled at Melun the entire strength of his faction, sending even to Asti for the Governor and his men. In 1405 also he allied himself with Berri and the Queen against Jean-sans-Peur. With the Court on one hand, and on the other Gueldres, the most reckless captain of his age;—with an army at his heels, and (through the county of Soissons, and down the banks of the Oise and the Marne), an uninterrupted passage through his own possessions into his new Duchy of Luxembourg: Orleans was a deadly enemy to Burgundy. A glance at the map will show the reader how, like a wedge or like a rivet, Luxembourg must split apart or hold together the domains of the Netherlands and the provinces of Franche Comté and Burgundy. In the hands of Orleans, Luxembourg was a wedge; and the domains of Burgundy were no longer a compact and formidable territory, but two principalities with Brussels for the capital of the one, and Dijon for the capital of the other. Should Orleans march an army into Luxembourg, should Gueldres come to his aid with an armed force, the suppression of the Dukedom of Burgundy would fall within the range of practical politics.

One Wednesday evening—it was St. Clement’s day, the 23rd of November, 1407—Orleans was supping with the Queen. Isabel was ill and dispirited. Ten days ago her new-born baby had died at its birth, and she sorrowed for this child and loved it as she had never loved her other children. Isabel was away from her husband in her new Hôtel de Montaigu, near the Porte Barbette. It was here that Orleans came every day to see her, and here they “supped right joyously together,” says the Monk of St. Denis. Orleans had been ill all autumn at his Castle of Beauté, and had only recently come back to Paris. Valentine, with her four children and the Princess Isabel, was still in the country.

There was wailing and mourning in the house of Orleans, grief and horror in the house of the King. The deed was soon known, though as yet it was only surmised that one Raoul d’Actonville, a dismissed steward, had wreaked in this ghastly fashion his spite against his master. The next day the royal princes, all in black, with a great multitude of the people of Paris, brought the murdered Duke to the church of St. Guillaume, close at hand. He who had ever loved the good through all his wickedness, lay now among the watching friars, who sang psalms and repeated vigils day and night for his soul; there he lay until they took him to be buried in his own chapel of the Celestines, which is called the Blancs-Manteaux to-day. The people followed him with torches, remembering only his gay and gracious qualities, his capricious generosity, his gentle raillery, his rhetoric and eloquence, how he had loved learning, and that he had often lived as a monk for days among the Celestines. All Paris wept, those also who had prayed Jesus Christ in heaven to deliver them from Orleans; even Burgundy went in the funeral procession, all in black, weeping also. But when the funeral was over Jean-sans-Peur took Berri and the King of Sicily aside: “I had it done. I slew him. It was an inspiration of the demon’s.”

The mistress and the wife took the matter in a very different spirit. At first, in her transports of sorrow, Valentine could not act. She tore out her hair and shred her garments; she sobbed so much, that for weeks afterwards her voice was hoarse. But when the first paroxysm was over her strong Italian character centred itself upon one fixed idea—justice, vengeance for her murdered husband. Valentine had no thought of her own safety. She sent her two elder sons and her girl into Blois, and then, with the Princess Isabel and little John, her youngest child, on either hand, the Duchess of Orleans set out from Château-Thierry for Paris.

It was near a week before the news came down to Blois. When she heard it, Valentine felt that all was over. No vengeance was possible. On the 4th of December the unhappy woman died, with her last breath entreating her little children never to forget their father’s murder. But these children were only children, and they were orphans. The death of Valentine seemed to secure the triumph of her enemy. Jean-sans-Peur did not seek to hide his rejoicing: “Car icelle Duchesse continuoit moult asprement et diligemment sa poursuitte.“ But already Retribution at her grindstone was sharpening the fatal battle-axe of Montereau.

I.

For many centuries there has been much debate concerning the claim of Orleans to Milan. Much argument and little evidence has confused the question; it is only the evidence that we shall examine here. In the National Archives of Paris^[50] there exists the original marriage-contract of Valentine Visconti. A copy of this document is contained in a brown leather folio, stamped with the Visconti serpent, existing in the British Museum.^[49] It is an instrument granted by the Antipope, Clement of Avignon, on January 27, 1387, in favour of Louis of Orleans and Bertrand de Guasche, Governor of Vertus, as representing the father of Valentine. To the marriage contract are appended a dispensation (Louis and Valentine were cousins), a deed of transfer for the bride’s dowry of Asti and its dependencies, and a declaration of her right to succeed her father in Milan, in case his direct male line should become extinct. The clause which chiefly concerns us runs as follows: “Item est actum et in pactum solempni stipulatione vallatum et expresse deductum quod in casu quo præfatus dominus Johannes Galeas vicecomes, comes Virtutum, dominus Mediolanensis, decedat sine filiis masculis de suo proprio corpore ex legitimo matrimonio procreatis, dicta domina Valentina, nata sua, succedat et succedere debeat in solidum in toto dominio suo presente et futuro quocumque, absque eo quod per viam testamenti, codicillorum, seu alicujus alterius ultimæ voluntatis, aut donatione inter vivos, ipsa aliquid faciat seu facere possit in contrarium quovis modo.”

The husband of Valentine was for many years the tool with which the astute Visconti hoped to assure his own supremacy in Italy. In 1393 and in 1394 Visconti had no dearer scheme than that Clement, the Antipope at Avignon, should make the Duke of Orleans king of Adria. With Clement at Rome, Anjou at Naples, Orleans ruling the centre from Spoleto to Ferrara, Visconti beheld the annihilation of Venice and the Tuscan republics—a united Italy north of Rome. Doubtless he intended the kingdom of Adria and the kingdom of Lombardy to lose themselves in one monarchy: but whether that result was to be attained by the subsequent spoliation of Orleans or by his adoption as heir to Milan, was a question which probably depended on the living or dying of the sons of Giangaleazzo. Orleans, however, though so young, proved himself no facile instrument. He had no intention that Adria and Lombardy should unite to his own disadvantage; and silently he contemplated another scheme—to secure the docility of Lombardy by bounding it on the south by Adria and on the north by another French principality, to be formed by a fusion of Asti and Genoa. Orleans, therefore, determined to begin by the conquest of Genoa; and for three years he displayed so much ability that Giangaleazzo began to suspect this count of Asti and seigneur of Savona, whom the Genoese implored to become the governor of the Ligurian republic. Then came the scandal of the acquisition of Genoa by Charles VI., to the detriment of his brother. From 1395 to 1397 there is a moment of division between the interests of Orleans and Visconti; but, as we shall see, the last act of Visconti was to enforce the claims of Orleans to Milan, and the Duke of Orleans in his will^[51] expressly bequeaths to his eldest son “la comté d’Ast et autres terres que j’ay et puis avoir au pays de Lombardy et d’outre les monts.” As far as Orleans and Visconti could decide, there is no doubt of the claim of Orleans to Milan. But it is more difficult to decide by what right Giangaleazzo Visconti disposed of the emperor’s fiefs of Milan; for although, when Visconti signed his daughter’s marriage-contract, he was simply the illegal despot of Milan, eight years later the emperor made him duke and received tribute at his hands. The lands which Visconti had gained by succession, by fraud, and by conquest, which he had ruled by force and national custom, were now indubitably his by feudal right. But in order to acquire the security of this legality, the Duke of Milan, in theory at all events, had sacrificed a certain portion of his independence.

Any ambiguity was dispelled the following year. There was then a possibility of war between France and Milan, grievously estranged at that date by the presence of the French in Genoa, and by the rumours of witchcraft which defamed the reputation and endangered the safety of Madame Valentine in France. At this juncture Giangaleazzo, probably alarmed at the terms of his daughter’s marriage-contract, procured a second imperial investiture,^[54] distinctly limiting the succession to male heirs. But this was not the end. In 1396 news came to Paris of the battle of Nicopolis, which necessitated an immediate rapprochement with Milan; for Giangaleazzo Visconti, feared and hated because of his friendship with the Turk, was at this juncture the one necessary man, capable of mediating between the French and the East. Great court was paid to him, and he accepted the French advances. Peace and amity being restored between the two countries, on March 30, 1397, he obtained a third and last investiture from Wenzel,^[53] which restored the conditions of inheritance to their original footing, and bestowed the duchy of Milan on Giangaleazzo Visconti, descendentes et successores sui.

This ambiguity of phrase may possibly have been designed. The fact that the fief was a pm corr 189.17 Fahnlehn Fahnlehen>, directly dependent on the emperor, and that (so far as I can discover) no special Imperial privilege had been granted to Madame Valentine, would in Germany itself appear as strong evidence in favour of a solely masculine succession as even the second investiture could afford. But in Italy, by the custom of the country and the authority of contract and testament, the children of Valentine would be included among the heirs and descendants of her father; and, in case the whole race of his sons expired, the vague terms of the investiture would allow the line of Orleans to put in a claim which would prevent so important a part of Italy from relapsing to the foreign emperor. Such at least, as it appears to me, must have been the design of the duke in obtaining this last investiture, a two-edged weapon in the hands of him who has been described as the wisest and the most astute among all the princes of the west.

But, the reader will exclaim, can a feoffer dispose of a fief without the written consent of his feodary? Here, as in the question of feminine succession, the matter was chiefly decided by the custom of the province. In certain countries—as, for example, Nassau, Friedland, Ober Lausitz—a feoffer might dispose of his possessions by will, although a contrary law held good in other countries.

Yet claiming and acting upon his own authority to dispose of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti involved his testament in the same web of intrigue and counter-intrigue which characterized his earlier policy. No less than three wills, entirely different, are open to us; and as the most important of these is only known in an undated copy, it is difficult to decide which was his final disposition of affairs. The first, familiar enough to the student of Corio, was drawn up in 1397, and was modified in 1401; it makes no provision at all for Valentine. The second (No. ccxxiii in the first volume of Osio’s documents), undated, but probably composed in 1397, confirms her in all possessions previously bestowed, but grants her nothing else, unless she should fall into a state of poverty or widowhood, in which case she was to have sufficient and princely nurture in her brother’s home at Milan, with a dowry in case she should contract a second marriage. This is all, yet this is enough to confirm the contract of 1387. But it is the latest-found of the testaments of Giangaleazzo Visconti which is most important to the student of the French claim to Milan. This will, discovered in 1872 by Signor Luigi Osio in the Milanese Archives, gives an entirely new force to the pretensions of Orleans. Yet it exists only in copy and in extract—like a passage of Sappho saved by some unconscious grammarian—quoted by a Sforzesco advocate in a letter of warning addressed to Lodovico il Moro on Jan. 10, 1496.

Meanwhile a melancholy fate had pursued the French heirs to Milan, the children of Valentine and Orleans. This is not the place to explain how their young dissensions with their father’s murderers summoned the English into France; or how the youngest, John of Angoulême, was sent to England, a mere child, in 1412, as a hostage for his brother’s debt; or how, three years later, the defeat at Agincourt sent Charles of Orleans to join him there. The sons of Valentine remained in prison all their youth. When, in 1440, the son of their father’s murderer, the gentle Duke of Burgundy, ransomed the Duke of Orleans out of bondage, Charles was a man of forty-six,^[55] who returned home to find his estates half ruined by disastrous wars; his brother Philip dead; his half-brother a hero—Dunois, the restorer of his country. It was late to regain his position in this altered world, but at least he lost no time. In the same month of the same year (November, 1440) Charles married a niece of Burgundy, Mary of Cleves. In 1445 his brother, John of Angoulême, newly released from England, married a neighbour of his sister’s—Marguerite de Rohan, to whose elder sister he had been contracted in his youth. The two princes were determined to recover their inheritance, to raise up children, and restore the ancient dignity of their house. Much of Angoulême and much of Orleans and much of the inheritance of Bonne d’Armagnac was still in the hands of the English. The estates of Orleans in France were grievously diminished. And outside France Asti had been lost also.

In the year 1422, when Charles of Orleans had lain already seven years, and John ten years, in an English prison, when Philip of Vertus was dead, when France was paralysed, and Henry VI. of England crowned the king of France in Paris, the county of Asti, in great fear of the English (those Goths of the Riviera) and of the nearer jealousies of ambitious Montferrat, sent to Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and begged him to receive Asti under his guardianship and protection^[57] until such time as either of his nephews should be released from England. The Duke of Milan consented willingly. Asti was the Calais of Italy, and from the Italian point of view it appeared intolerable and unnatural that this one county should remain a little island of France in Lombardy, a pied-à-terre across the mountains for invading Gaul. And now, after twenty years of undisturbed possession, the Duke of Milan turned a deaf ear to his nephew’s reminder that he was home again and ready to reassume his inheritance. As a fact the Duke did not dare to restore Asti. In 1438 he had made Francesco Sforza his lieutenant there; and he was afraid of Sforza. It was in vain sending letters and requisitions; so in the beginning of the year 1441 the princes of Orleans sent Dunois to Milan.^[56]

Thus eyed suspiciously by rival heirs, Dunois, as the representative of Orleans, crossed the Alps in 1441 and came to Milan, both to require the restitution of Asti, and also, as Ventura remarks, to confer on other matters with the Duke. The Duke of Milan was a sad, timid, indifferent man, old at five-and-fifty and harassed by an almost lunatic suspicion of danger from his friends. As he grew older his fears and doubts grew stronger, and he saw no motive for any sort of conduct beside the desire to succeed him in Milan. Oppressed by hypochondria, corpulent to deformity, fatigued by the weight of his body, and exhausted by the heaviness upon his spirits, this timid and sceptical Volpone of Lombardy found his sole amusement in weaving into a complicated perplexity the expectations of his heirs. Sitting immovable in his corner at Milan, like some huge spider spinning in the dusk, he crossed and recrossed, twisted and confused, in his dreary web, the hopes of Sforza and of Orleans, of Savoy and of the bastard cousins of his house.

No one could be sure of the succession. Sforza, the object of his senile fondness, was the object also of his insane suspicion. The Duke had tried a score of times to shuffle out of a promise to give him his natural daughter; and the very week that he had finally consented to their marriage, he sent a private messenger to Lionello d’Este, offering him the hand of Madonna Bianca. Nevertheless, in 1441 Sforza married Bianca, a mere girl, but bringing in her dowry the Signories of Cremona and Pontremoli, in addition to his lieutenancy of Asti. After the marriage he was no more sure of the Duke of Milan than he had been before. The uncertain seesaw of the Duke’s caprices continued as unsteady as of old. On the one hand, the Duke was aware that Sforza, though the son of a peasant, was the most remarkable Italian of his day, courageous, frank, spirited, kind of heart, and cunning. His immense strength of will both attracted and repelled the vacillating and suspicious Visconti. He admired Sforza, and Sforza was the husband of his only child. Still more, Sforza was secretly supported by Agnese del Maino, the mother of Bianca, the sole woman whose influence had ever touched the indifferent and preoccupied heart of Filippo Maria. On the other hand, the Duke was afraid of

Sforza

Sforza

With some thought in his heart, doubtless, of the success of Alfonso, Dunois turned his steps to Milan. He also was handsome, persuasive, rhetorical; and if no longer young, his comely head was encircled by the aureole of heroic victory. But Dunois lacked the enthusiasm, the spontaneity, that, in Arragon, had warmed for a moment the numb and chilly heart of the Duke of Milan. Dunois was as cold, as sceptical, as wise, as worldly as himself. His flowers of speech made no real effect upon the weary Duke, who, to get rid of him, made, doubtless, some magnificent promise for the future; for Dunois did not insist on his demand for Asti, but returned almost immediately to France, hoping to settle matters by the friendly intervention of the Emperor Frederic; but at that time the customary malentendu as to the occupation of Alsace estranged France and Germany, and Frederic declined to interfere with the projects of the Duke of Milan.

The negotiations with Louis proceeded briskly, and in May the Milanese ambassador arrived in Paris, where he found grande garra e divisione between the restless Dauphin and King René of Sicily, who he remarks (to our unfeigned surprise) è quello che governa tucto questo reame. Meanwhile Louis, young as he was, had already learned a maxim as true in policy as in almsgiving: he let not his right hand divine the secrets of his left; and while on the one side he treated with the Duke of Milan, on the other he practised with Savoy. According to the latter plan Savoy and the Dauphin, aided by Montferrat and Mantua and Ferrara, were to conquer between them the north of Italy; France was to take Genoa, the Lucchese, Parma, Piacenza, Tortona—all south of the Po and east of Montferrat; Savoy was to gain Milan and keep the Riviera; Alessandria was to be handed over to Montferrat, and the Duke of Ferrara and the Marquis of Mantua were, for the present, to keep their actual possessions; but this significant phrase was followed by one more significant still: “All future conquests are to be divided at the rate of two shares to France and one share to Savoy.”^[59]

On the 9th of February, 1447, an indiscreet French squire, riding to Rome upon a message, let out to the Florentines that a league had been formed between the Dauphin of France and the Duke of Milan.^[61] According to this report Visconti had offered to aid the lad to recover Genoa, and had volunteered, in defiance of the rights of Orleans, to make him lord of Asti. A document in Osio (t. iii. ccclxxiii.) dated the 20th of December, 1446, and a series of letters in the Bibliothèque Nationale,^[62] confirm this remarkable statement, which, if it spread horror throughout Italy, caused no less indignation among the heirs of Valentine. Strangely enough it was Sforza, at that time the Milanese governor of Asti, who advocated the cause of the Dauphin. “Give him Asti, and he will do you excellent service. Pay him well; and yet contrive it in such a way that none but your Highness shall be cock or hen in this country.” This advice was rendered still more unpalatable to the Italians and to the house of Orleans by a rumour that the Duke of Milan intended to adopt the Dauphin as his heir. Before the month was out the north Italian princes formed themselves into a counter-league against France and Milan, and Orleans and Dunois had despatched to Milan the baillie of Sens, a certain Reynouard du Dresnay, with a demand for the immediate restitution of Asti. This time they would brook no refusal, they would be tempted by no future benefits. Indignant and disenchanted, they instructed their lieutenant to press the matter home; and on the 4th of May, Asti again returned to France. The conditions of the surrender were peculiar. The county was not directly given back to Orleans, but yielded to Du Dresnay as the lieutenant of the king, so long as the said king should preserve the good will and consent of Charles of Orleans, directus dominus ipsius civitatis et patriæ.

On the 9th of February, 1447, an indiscreet French squire, riding to Rome upon a message, let out to the Florentines that a league had been formed between the Dauphin of France and the Duke of Milan.^[61] According to this report Visconti had offered to aid the lad to recover Genoa, and had volunteered, in defiance of the rights of Orleans, to make him lord of Asti. A document in Osio (t. iii. ccclxxiii.) dated the 20th of December, 1446, and a series of letters in the Bibliothèque Nationale,^[62] confirm this remarkable statement, which, if it spread horror throughout Italy, caused no less indignation among the heirs of Valentine. Strangely enough it was Sforza, at that time the Milanese governor of Asti, who advocated the cause of the Dauphin. “Give him Asti, and he will do you excellent service. Pay him well; and yet contrive it in such a way that none but your Highness shall be cock or hen in this country.” This advice was rendered still more unpalatable to the Italians and to the house of Orleans by a rumour that the Duke of Milan intended to adopt the Dauphin as his heir. Before the month was out the north Italian princes formed themselves into a counter-league against France and Milan, and Orleans and Dunois had despatched to Milan the baillie of Sens, a certain Reynouard du Dresnay, with a demand for the immediate restitution of Asti. This time they would brook no refusal, they would be tempted by no future benefits. Indignant and disenchanted, they instructed their lieutenant to press the matter home; and on the 4th of May, Asti again returned to France. The conditions of the surrender were peculiar. The county was not directly given back to Orleans, but yielded to Du Dresnay as the lieutenant of the king, so long as the said king should preserve the good will and consent of Charles of Orleans, directus dominus ipsius civitatis et patriæ.

Above the corpse, scarcely yet cold, the rival heirs, in eager expectation, gathered to the reading of the will. The Duchess-dowager represented Savoy; Madonna Bianca appeared for the absent Sforza; Raynouard du Dresnay came to Milan on behalf of Orleans; while, at a distance, Montferrat and Jacopo Visconti looked to their own interests; the Venetians had hopes of their own; the Milanese, as we know, intended to inaugurate a republic; the emperor, serene above these petty quarrels, declared that by feudal law Milan had already devolved to him. Absent or present, there was not one of these, save him, but had some promise of Filippo Maria’s in his mind when at length the testament was opened. The will was dated August 12th,^[63] the day before the death of the Duke. There was no mention in it of his daughter, Madonna Bianca, none of his wife, none of any of his nephews or kinsmen. He left Alfonso of Arragon his universal heir.

For Alfonzo of Arragon showed no inclination to take up arms in defence of his unexpected bequest. Although, in the city of Milan itself, he had a considerable party in his favour, at this time neither Alfonso nor his rivals appear to have regarded the will of the late duke in any serious spirit. The story ran in Milan that, in the week before his death, when that astounding testament was made, Filippo Maria had smiled and said, “It will be good to see how it will go to pieces when I am dead.” A cynical pleasure in aggravating as much as possible this imminent ruin must, I think, have prompted the Duke to leave Milan to Alfonso. And if his detached, amused, malevolent soul could really from any extra-mundane point of vantage have watched the events which quickly followed his decease, he would have found the spectacle as exciting and as novel as he wished. The Milanese at once declared themselves a free republic, governed by various Princes of Liberty. Whereupon all the subject cities announced that if Milan was a republic, so was each of them, for they would not submit to bear the yoke of a city no nobler than the rest. Hereupon such of the cities as were not strong enough to stand alone gave themselves, some to the Venetians, some to Savoy, some to Genoa, some to Orleans, some to Montferrat, some to Ferrara; and all these powers sent armies into Lombardy to protect their rights. Matters were still further complicated by the dissensions of the Bracceschi and Sforzeschi, the Guelfs and Ghibellines. In Pavia alone, for instance, the Guelfs declared, some for Venice, some for Orleans, some for the King of France, some for the Dauphin; the Bracceschi declared for Alfonzo of Arragon; Savoy and Montferrat each had a faction at their service, but the great body of the Ghibellines were in favour of Count Francesco Sforza, to whom finally the city submitted. This was a blow to the free republic of Milan next door; but in the miserable state of their dominions, the unfortunate Princes of Liberty did not dare to remonstrate with their too potent commander, and Count Francesco, sovereign at Pavia, continued to be the servant of the Milanese republic.

par le décès du feu Duc son oncle, qui est naguères allé de vie à trespas, comme son plus prochain hoir, nous a bien exprès faict dire et remonstré le bon droict qu’il ha au dict Duché de Milan.

There was no help here from the violence of Raynouard. Venice especially declared that against France and Genoa she would do nothing. And every day recorded the conquests of the French. The Milanese ambassadors returned very sadly, “despised by the Venetians,” says Corio, “and treated as perniciously as possible.” In vain they bade Francesco Sforza give battle to the audacious little force of Raynouard. Count Francesco, who had ever been favourable to France, pursued his waiting game, although Bosco Marengo, closely besieged by the French, was almost at the end of possible resistance, and the fall of Bosco meant the loss of Alessandria. At last the Milanese succeeded in scraping together about fifteen hundred soldiers, and these, under Coglioni, they sent to Alessandria to harass the enemy. The French were taken between two fires—on the one side Coglioni, on the other the Alessandrian reinforcements; yet at first they gained the day, but so furious was their anger, and so long they dallied in the slaughter of their enemies, that before they had despatched the last, a further reinforcement of the Milanese, and a successful sally on the part of the besieged, intercepted their return. Raynouard was taken prisoner with many of his men; the cities which had revolted to him returned to the allegiance of the Milanese republic; and the royal troops, leaderless and disbanded in the very hour of victory, fled home as best they might to Asti.

At first the arrival of the Duke of Orleans appeared an event of immeasurable importance. The Guelfs in every Lombard town, who at first had thought only of Venice, began, more loudly even than during the campaign of Raynouard, to declare for France. The Duke came armed with promises from France, from Burgundy, from Brittany, from England. There were no bounds to the magnificence with which he declared himself about to take the field. But perhaps it would not be necessary to take the field at all. The Duke sent a deputation to the Milanese republic; the lord of Cognac, one of the nobles of Ceva, Caretti (whose family all the while were practising none too secretly with Montferrat), Secondino Natti, Antonio Romagnano, and Francesco Roero, requested the Milanese to submit to the allegiance of their lawful duke. But the Milanese were all too well aware of the hateful consequences of tyranny. Men were still alive whose brothers and whose children had been torn to pieces, limb by limb, by the hounds of Giammaria Visconti, the uncle of this man. The suspicion, the cunning, the timid fear of Filippo Maria had succeeded to that oppression. “This time,” said the people of Milan, “we will preserve ourselves a free republic.”

“We are ready to grant you all possible aid and favour, and there is no other prince on earth whom we so warmly desire to be our neighbour in Milan. Hasten the King of France, for if any good effect is to follow our endeavours, the troops should come at once. And rely upon it, so soon as your French auxiliaries are in readiness, we also will provide a satisfactory contingent to help in the conquest of Milan. And we are the readier to do this, since the peace which we had begun to treat with the Milanese republic is already broken, and we at this moment are in open war with Milan.”

Orleans had scarcely crossed the Alps before he was as completely disregarded as though he had never seemed the most dangerous pretender to the throne of Milan. Savoy had taken his place. The claim of Savoy was quite childish and ridiculous. He pretended that, on the payment of his sister’s dowry to the late Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria had promised to leave his duchy, in default of sons, to the Duke of Savoy.^[74] It was evident that the Duke had done nothing of the sort; he had left his throne to Arragon. Besides, it is difficult to see how his testament could dispose of property which, by his father’s will and his sister’s marriage contract, was entailed on his nephews of Orleans, and which, by feudal law, must return to the Holy Roman Empire. But, however shadowy his claims, the Duke of Savoy was a great person to the Milanese. He was loved by them and he was feared by them; and had he hazarded a bold stroke instead of counteracting his own efforts by a perfect maze of petty intrigues, he might easily have made himself, if not the Duke of Milan, at any rate protector of the Milanese republic.

In the summer and early autumn of 1448, both Venice and the Milanese believed that a republic under the joint protection of Venice and Savoy might flourish in Milan, were it not for the undying energy and resolution of Count Francesco

Sforza

Sforza

Among the innumerable conspirators, intriguing diplomatists, and successful tradesmen who filled the high places of the Italy of that day, Francesco Sforza appears at least a man. Simple, direct, and brave, no sudden honour and no reverse of fortune took from him that natural dignity of a balanced mind which is one of the finest attributes of the Italian. Good sense and kindness made a moral force of this captain of adventure. He disciplined his troops, erected a court-martial, and punished offences of rape and violence by death; so that while the miserable populations of Lombardy had everything to fear from the other armies that occupied their soil, gradually they learned to feel themselves secure in the rough, mailed hands of Count Francesco. Among the soldiers his reputation was more than mortal. We have to leap over a dozen generations before the prestige of the Little Corporal present an analogy to such devotion. But Count Francesco was loved and respected even by his enemies; and there is a story of him which has ever struck me as among the most charming in military history. It was at the siege of Como, in that very February of 1450, when, unknown to him, the Milanese who had so long and so furiously resisted him, were crying, “Sforza! Sforza!” in an ecstasy of hungry enthusiasm in the great piazza. Meanwhile Sforza and his men were occupying Monte Barro; by means of a little hill in front, overlooking the Adda, and fortified by five bastions, they kept in check the troops of Venice and Milan, ranged in impotent lines along the further side of the river. The bulwarks of the little hill were but slight, improvised in a few days for the occasion, and the poor Italian artillery of the fifteenth century, wrought no great destruction; yet such was the spell of Sforza’s name, that the two armies across the Adda never ventured to try the place by assault. One night, however, it leaked out that Count Francesco was not in the fort; he had gone up the mountain to arrange a fresh disposition of his troops upon the summit of Monte Barro. In his absence it was decided to attack the hill, and in the late February dawn the Venetians and Milanese poured under the slender bulwarks, armed with artillery, which silenced that of the fort, and, planting their scaling ladders against the ramparts, they soon were in possession of the place. Now, as it happened, unknown to either army, late at night Count Francesco had returned home, and hearing the clamour in the place, he started out of sleep and strode at once to the ramparts, ignorant that the enemy had taken the place by surprise and that his soldiers, unaware of his presence in their midst, had already given the sign of surrender. “Defend yourselves, for I am here!” rang out the clear voice of the Count; and at that moment he perceived that he stood alone in the midst of his foes. But the mere fact of his presence was a better defence to his bastions than a world of soldiers. The assailants, like chidden children, withdrew from their positions, dropped the guns and pieces they were carrying away, and with uncovered heads made for their scaling-ladders. As they passed the Count, standing alone there, they made for his hand—kneeling, crowding to touch it. “Father and ornament of Italian arms we salute you,” cried the soft Venetian voices; and in little knots and groups, as quickly as they might, they dropped over the walls into the moat again, leaving Count Francesco the master of his ramparts. It was to this man, so eminently the hero of his hour, that the three Milanese delegates brought their news of the submission of the city.

It is one thing to have a thing by might, another to hold that thing by right. The theory that might is right appears sufficient in the hour of conquest, yet it is but a slender basis for future government; and Francesco Sforza, safely lodged in Milan, hedged round with troops, greeted as duke by the very citizens who had so long repulsed him, was none the less aware that men regarded him merely in the light of a successful usurper. Even in Milan there were many who regretted the loss of a legitimate dynasty; there were those who looked to the King of Naples, the adopted heir of the late duke; and there was a party anxious to proclaim the suzerainty of the Emperor; and a larger party still who placed their faith in Charles of Orleans, the legitimate descendant of the great Giangaleazzo. In the eyes of such men as these what claim had Captain Francesco Sforza, soi-disant> Duke of Milan? He was merely a successful soldier, the husband of the late duke’s bastard daughter, unmentioned as heir to Milan in any testament or codicil, who by force and famine had succeeded in imposing himself, as the alternative to starvation, upon the miserable Milanese. In the sight of the Emperor, Francesco Sforza had compromised whatever shadow of right he might once have had by accepting from the illegal hand of the people the imperial gift of his duchy.

But if there was discontent in Milan, outside the walls the success of Sforza was regarded with unqualified hatred and desire for vengeance. Savoy wished to oust him from his seat. France and Orleans and Arragon and Germany thought it sufficient for the present to brand him as usurper. But the hatred of the Venetians for the man who once had been their servant was of a deeper kind, and they did not shrink from plotting his murder. On April 22, 1450, they had already decreed his death, and by August 26th the plan was in full train. The Council had heard through that gentleman and soldier, Ser Giacobo Antonio Marcello of Crema, that Vittore dei Scoraderi, the squire of Francesco, est contentus occidere Comitem Francescum; et sicut omnes intelligere possunt, mors illius comitis est salus et pax nostra et totius Italiæ. Nothing was to be sent in writing to this person which might compromise the Venetian Senate, but Marcello was instructed to offer him ample terms. Further injunctions were despatched on September 2nd, and early in December we hear again of a candidate, una persona intelligente et discreta, not a Venetian subject, who promised to despatch Count Francesco with aliqua venenosa materies.^[82] To this intelligent assistant the Council recommended the use of certain little round pellets which, thrown upon the fire, exhale a most sweet and delectable odour; but before they were despatched for experiment on so illustrious a subject a secret trial was to be given them in Venice on the person of a prisoner condemned to death for larceny. In May, 1451, the Council added three other persons to the conspiracy, and by June the proffered reward had grown to the extravagant sum of 5,000 ducats, with a yearly revenue of 1,000 ducats in addition, and liberty to recall four exiles. In return for so much munificence it is expected that Count Francesco “shall by your industry be despatched before the end of October.” But in August an extension of leave was granted until December. Then the messages became frequent; and it is easy to divine that the noble person who is to despatch the Count is none other than Innocentio Cotta, a man of one of the great Guelf houses of Milan, who, despite his blue blood, was the most ardent champion of popular rights, and who is familiar to the readers of Corio’s history as the head and front of that little group of nobili audacissimi, who in 1459, unbroken by famine and long misery, spurred the people of Milan on to resist the arms of Sforza, and plundered the party of the Ghibellines for money to furnish troops to defend the city. The success of Count Francesco had added ruin to the chagrin and hatred of this man, and one of the conditions that Cotta demanded of the Venetians was that he should regain quelle forteze, terre e possessioni mie chio goldeva al tempo de la felice memoria del duca passato. To this man, even as to the Council, it appeared that the death of Count Francesco could only be useful and fertile in good (practica non potest esse nisi utilis et fructuosa, quum ex ea nullum damnum sequi potest), and with the sentiments less of an assassin than of a lofty classic tyrannicide—a character ever dear to the Italians—Innocentio Cotta received, in his Brescian exile, the little round and perfumed pellets of poison.

The so-called Duke of Milan was irate, and despatched a curt letter to the suspicious and insubordinate lawyer, and by the same messenger he sent a line to the Castellan of Pavia, informing him that Oliari had not come, and bidding him despatch the notary at once, cum dicto testamento et non cum la copia. But neither the Duke nor the constable of the castle could induce Oliari to go back from his decision. “I really cannot come,” he replied to Sforza on February 24th, “for I have neither money nor horses.” Now Pavia is not so long a journey from Milan, but that, to serve a sovereign, a man might borrow his neighbour’s hackney. The same day, the 24th, the Duke replied in anger, both to Oliari and to the castellan, that he could not conceive why it should be so difficult to come at the said testament. “And forasmuch as you hold dear our favour, and under pain of rebellion, you must be here with us to-morrow with the said will, for if you dost not come we will make you repent it.” Oliari dared not hold out against so ominous a command. He made in secret five copies of the precious document, and then we may suppose that he took the original to Sforza, for no more letters require it from his custody. Thus the original will of Giangaleazzo Visconti was destroyed.

In 1453 the Dauphin still had designs on Italy, and offered to the Venetian Signory his aid in Italy to combat Count Francesco.^[86] It was arranged that he should come with from eight to ten thousand men, dispossess Sforza, and conquer for himself a Duchy of Milan to extend from Adda to Ticino, from Padua beyond Piacenza. Or, if the King and the Dauphin would guarantee the army, Venice professed herself willing to aid the Duke of Orleans in the same undertaking. But while these princes were arranging their future conquests, a spirit stronger than they was making these conquests impossible—a spirit which, a score of years ago, had begun to draw together Scotland and England, those ancient enemies, to the alarm of France; a spirit which had estranged Burgundy and Brittany from their English companions in so many battles, and which was leading them to the feet of the long-despised and outraged King of France; a spirit which now should reconcile Venice with Sforza, Florence with Milan, and make, for a brief moment of millennium, those immemorial foes at peace together; a spirit which awoke in these middle years of the fifteenth century—aroused Heaven knows whence or how—and strangely changed the world it breathed across: I have named the spirit of Nationality.

In 1453 the Dauphin still had designs on Italy, and offered to the Venetian Signory his aid in Italy to combat Count Francesco.^[86] It was arranged that he should come with from eight to ten thousand men, dispossess Sforza, and conquer for himself a Duchy of Milan to extend from Adda to Ticino, from Padua beyond Piacenza. Or, if the King and the Dauphin would guarantee the army, Venice professed herself willing to aid the Duke of Orleans in the same undertaking. But while these princes were arranging their future conquests, a spirit stronger than they was making these conquests impossible—a spirit which, a score of years ago, had begun to draw together Scotland and England, those ancient enemies, to the alarm of France; a spirit which had estranged Burgundy and Brittany from their English companions in so many battles, and which was leading them to the feet of the long-despised and outraged King of France; a spirit which now should reconcile Venice with Sforza, Florence with Milan, and make, for a brief moment of millennium, those immemorial foes at peace together; a spirit which awoke in these middle years of the fifteenth century—aroused Heaven knows whence or how—and strangely changed the world it breathed across: I have named the spirit of Nationality.

In 1453 the Dauphin still had designs on Italy, and offered to the Venetian Signory his aid in Italy to combat Count Francesco.^[86] It was arranged that he should come with from eight to ten thousand men, dispossess Sforza, and conquer for himself a Duchy of Milan to extend from Adda to Ticino, from Padua beyond Piacenza. Or, if the King and the Dauphin would guarantee the army, Venice professed herself willing to aid the Duke of Orleans in the same undertaking. But while these princes were arranging their future conquests, a spirit stronger than they was making these conquests impossible—a spirit which, a score of years ago, had begun to draw together Scotland and England, those ancient enemies, to the alarm of France; a spirit which had estranged Burgundy and Brittany from their English companions in so many battles, and which was leading them to the feet of the long-despised and outraged King of France; a spirit which now should reconcile Venice with Sforza, Florence with Milan, and make, for a brief moment of millennium, those immemorial foes at peace together; a spirit which awoke in these middle years of the fifteenth century—aroused Heaven knows whence or how—and strangely changed the world it breathed across: I have named the spirit of Nationality.

At Christmas-time in 1453 the Venetians spared neither pains nor prayers nor promise to induce the Dauphin to come and suppress Count Francesco Sforza. In April of the next year^[89] they sent to tell him, as delicately as possible, that they had no further need of his services (a refined way of informing him that they would oppose him), since they had made peace with the man whom four months ago they had called the Common Enemy of his countrymen, and whom they had so many times endeavoured to assassinate. And probably the Dauphin was not sorry. For the spirit that animated these Italians inspired him also. Already it had touched his intelligent and sensitive spirit. Already, in 1447,^[88] he had laughed for joy when the French lost Genoa, and had declared “le Roy se gouvernoit si mal qu’on ne pouvoit pis.” In the five years between 1445 and 1450 the Dauphin had passed from the friendship of Orleans to the friendship of Burgundy, and his ideal had changed. He raged to see the King prefer Italy to the north, and amuse himself with taking Genoa and securing Asti when he should have set to conquering Normandy. He said aloud that the true place for such a King as that was in such a Hermitage as the Duke of Savoy’s. He plotted to seize the government of affairs himself, and leave the King, in prosperous desuetude, to amuse himself with his Belle Agnès and his pleasures. As we know, the plot fell through, and the impatient Dauphin, a discomfited fugitive, was himself the one to seek a hermitage at the Court of Burgundy. There he spent five years of chafing exile and mortification while his father ruled France, not unsuccessfully, after his own fashion, pursuing shadows indeed in Italy, yet at home administering affairs and inventing a regular army with no less zeal and skill for this extraneous ambition. Louis was still at the Court of Philip of Burgundy when, in 1461, he heard the news of his father’s death. And the prince who, of all others, should do most for the reintegration of his country ascended the throne of France.^[87]

As we know, the law of historic necessity required that the Dauphin should renounce his ambition of a North Italian state—he had, in fact, already renounced it; that he should abandon his early visions and his early friends, and adopt for his counsellors the very men who once had ruined him. Henceforth he must bend the whole strength of his spirit to the furthering of that policy which he had so long, and at so great a sacrifice, resisted and attempted to destroy. The interests of the time required that France should forego all ambitions foreign to herself in order to consolidate herself; that she should sacrifice the south in order to insure the north; that she should also sacrifice the aristocracy to the people; and Louis XI., who, as a prince, had paid so dear for his adherence to the rights of the nobles, became the monarch who more than any other was governed by men of low and base condition—who more than any other oppressed and resisted the pride of feudalism. Those who had been his friends became his enemies; those likewise who had been his enemies became his friends. Francesco Sforza, from whom he had been so eager to take his duchy, became the one man alive whom he admired and respected. Yes, this successful captain of adventure, who for years had prevented him in Milan, in Naples, and in Genoa, who once had been the chief stumbling-block in the path of the Dauphin, became the corner-stone of the policy of the King. Like Catherine de’ Medici, like Rodrigo Borgia, like most unscrupulous rulers, there was something oddly magnanimous in the moral indifference of Louis IX. Sforza never suffered for his enmity of yore. The new King of France was a being as destitute of rancour as devoid of gratitude.

At first the cousins of the King could not believe that he had actually abandoned them—he who had begun his career as the pupil of Dunois, and had suffered so long as the champion of the nobles. So late as October 10, 1465, the descendants of Valentine Visconti sent a very secret embassy to Venice^[92] to propose to the Ten a league between their government and the Duke of Orleans, the Count of Angoulême, and the Duke of Brittany, for the purpose of ousting the usurper, Count Francesco, and delivering the Duchy of Milan to Charles of Orleans. This league, which could not be confirmed by the Pope, a political adversary, might, it was suggested, be headed by the King of France. Probably the Venetians were better informed as to the real intentions of Louis XI. Certainly they knew that it was too late or too early to dream of dislodging the Sforzas from Milan. They replied that they loved the house of France, but that peace also was dear to them: they begged to be excused from attacking Count Francesco.

After this for many years the house of Orleans ceased to struggle. Before the year was out Charles of Orleans was dead, and the French pretender to the crown of Milan was only an infant, three years old. Before the child was six Dunois was also dead. Dunois—who had not suffered the children of his adoptive mother to be cheated of their inheritance in Asti—would, had he lived, have instructed his nephew in the details of his claim to Milan. But Louis II. of Orleans, born in his father’s seventy-second year, was naturally doomed to lose in infancy his father’s contemporaries. As the child grew up every link was severed that might have bound him to the past, and he knew little or nothing of the pretensions of his house. His mother, who had a romantic worship for the memory of Valentine Visconti, related to her son many a legend of the quasi-royal power which during the last century his ancestors possessed. But that supremacy seemed at an end for ever. In France, in Italy, the star of Orleans suffered a long eclipse. By his own experience in rebellion Louis XI. was aware how dangerous to the Crown and how disastrous to the kingdom was the power of the great feudal houses. Alençon and Armagnac and many another he diminished by confiscation and captivity; Dunois, Bourbon, Saint-Vallier, Sancerre, he attached to the Crown by royal marriages. Kinship in subjection, independence in imprisonment: these were the two alternatives presented by the King to the nobles of France. Among the most unfortunate of those who accepted the former gift was the young Louis d’Orléans. Louis XI. had decided that with this young man the house of Orleans should end; and when its representative was eleven years of age, the King married him to Jeanne of France, a gentle girl, deformed, incapable of offspring, and so ugly that when she was brought to court for her wedding the king himself exclaimed: Je ne la croyais pas si laide. To this bride the young duke was married in 1473. “They will have no expense with a nursery,” wrote the malicious King to Dammartin: ils n’auraient guères à besoigner et nourrir les enfans qui viendraient du dit mariage: mais toutefois se feroit-il.

Just at this moment Venice was in sore distress. Almost every power in Italy was against her, and she turned for help to France. On January 16, 1484, she sent Antonio Loredan to Charles VIII., complaining of the aggressions of Naples, Milan, and Ferrara, and desiring a resumption of the Franco-Venetian league of Louis XI. That league had been a very tame and passive piece of policy; the Venetians hoped a bolder favour from a younger king. Loredan was bidden to insist upon the suggestion that the kingdom of Naples occupied by Ferdinand of Arragon, belonged in fact to France.^[95] “Nor content with that,” run the instructions of the Senate, “this king it was who instigated Lodovico Sforza to the usurpation of Milan.” Lodovico il Moro,^[94] the fourth son of Count Francesco Sforza, had, as a matter of fact, usurped the position of his nephew in 1481, and, though nominally regent, conducted himself as Duke of Milan. But this intrusion was not the seizure which now the Venetians meant to blame. They wished to suggest, as the lawful claimant, not the young son of Galeazzo Sforza, but the Duke of Orleans.

“Express to the Duke of Orleans in secret our desire for his exaltation [run the instructions given to Loredan], and explain to him how good is the opportunity for him to recover the Duchy of Milan, which belongs to him by right; and how his claim would be favoured by the differences and dissidences at present existing between ourselves and Milan, as also by the discontent of the Milanese with their tyrants. Inform the Duke that Lodovico Sforza aspires to seize the sovereignty for himself, amid the murmurs of his people, and that he will certainly massacre all who uphold the claim of the Duchess Bona. Inflame and excite as best you can the Duke of Orleans to pursue this enterprise, ... and if the French should choose to make good their claim to Naples as against the tyrant Ferdinand, they could not find a better time than now.”^[93]

So ended the project for a French succession. Louis of Orleans, thwarted of his foreign ambition, strove for greatness at home, and contested the regency with Anne of Bourbon. The civil war, the flight into Brittany, the pretensions of Louis to the hand of his beautiful cousin (the heiress to that duchy), the defeat of the Orleanist troops at Saint-Aubin on July 28, 1488, and the three years’ captivity of the Duke, are matters of common knowledge. But as Charles VIII. grew out of the tutelage of his sister, more and more he grew to favour his imprisoned cousin. There was little to fear from him now that the King was a major, and Anne of Brittany the Queen of France. In 1491 the Duke was released; and when in 1494 Charles at the head of his troops invaded Italy, Louis of Orleans preceded him across the mountains, chief in command, master of the fleet, destined to drive the Neapolitans from Genoa, and thence to lead the fleet of France into the port of Naples.

Sforza and Orleans were now the nearest neighbours, bound to each other by their interest in the King. Fate has seldom brought about more ironic complication. When Lodovico Sforza, out of revenge and anger towards King Ferdinand, had revived the French claim to Naples, and had instigated Charles to enter Italy, he had not foreseen the accident that left the Duke of Orleans within a league or two of Milan. Charles VIII. entered Italy as the friend and guest of Lodovico il Moro, the Regent of Milan. To the external and uninitiated world the French claim to the duchy appeared about as actual as the claim of the English kings to France. Lodovico il Moro, familiar with the France of Louis XI., knew that the claims of Orleans were not likely to be countenanced by the throne.

Giangaleazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, a youth of five-and-twenty, kept in prison by his uncle, the Regent Lodovico, died no less suspiciously than the little princes in the Tower. He left behind him a son four years old, his legitimate successor. But, with ominous prevision, a year before this time, Lodovico the regent had negotiated with the Emperor to obtain the reversion of the duchy. He had admitted that his father, his brother, his nephew were no more than illegal usurpers: moreover they had prejudiced the rights of the empire by receiving their titles only from the people. Thus the infant son of Giangaleazzo was the son, not merely of a usurper, but of a man who had forfeited whatever rights he originally had. Conceding this, Lodovico besought the Emperor, of his free grace and bounty, to bestow the duchy on himself and his descendants, even as once before an emperor had bestowed Milan upon a man who had no legal claim—namely, on Giangaleazzo Visconti. Maximilian consented, and on Sept. 5, 1494, the Imperial letters of promise^[98] were despatched from Antwerp, letters for which the Regent paid the sum of 100,000 ducats.

This was also the feeling of the Milanese, for whom Giangaleazzo had invented security and peace, for whom he had conquered immense possessions. They forgot his sins, his crimes, and the first duke became the hero of the place. To be the last descendant of this man seemed in itself a claim to inherit his possessions, to sit in his place, to expel the usurper. While this was their feeling, in October the usurper died.

Conscious of the secret diploma in his pocket, Lodovico could enjoy the pleasure of this ceremony with a feeling of security. Yet his crown did not sit quite smoothly on his brows. Orleans in Asti was assuming an intolerable air of patronage. And behind that thin row of partisans shouting with their hired voices, “Duca! Duca!” there was a sullen, silent crowd. Those, and the rest of Italy, believed that Lodovico had poisoned the father in order to usurp the inheritance of the child, Francesco. Of the three pretenders, by far the most popular was the unconscious infant, who bore so quaintly in his mother’s arms the beloved and redoubtable name of his grandfather, the great condottiere. “Nearly all the Milanese,” wrote Commines, “would have revolted to the King had he only followed Trivulzio’s advice and set up the arms of the child-duke.” But Charles refused to injure the claims of his cousin of Orleans.

Secret as the Council had been at Venice, it had not escaped the notice of Commines, who wrote in March to Orleans bidding him look to the walls of Asti, and sent a messenger to Bourbon in France bidding him despatch a reinforcement to the scanty force of Orleans. The young Duke at Asti was not sorry to receive the message. He had now been six months in Lombardy; he had done nothing; and he was eager to come to battle with Lodovico. To all the French, by this time, Il Moro appeared a traitor and a secret poisoner. To Louis of Orleans he appeared all this and also the usurper of his inheritance.

Unfortunately, the real commission that Orleans had received from his cousin was to keep quiet and on no account to break the peace (for the league was defensive, and did not menace the royal troops if they retired without offence) until Charles and his diminished army had arrived at Asti. They would be in imminent peril if any rash act of Orleans should let loose upon them, amid the bewildering passes of the mountains, the eager concourse of their vigilant enemies. But Orleans did not remember this. He was burning for personal conflict with his rival, indignant at his treachery, and persuaded that he could easily secure the whole of Lombardy to France. Thrice in April he wrote to Bourbon entreating succour. “Only send me the reinforcements at once, and I think I shall do the King a service that men will talk of many a year.” The forces came; and Orleans saw himself the master of 5,000 foot, 100 archers, 1,300

men-at-arms

men-at-arms

X.

This was a heavy price to pay for one man’s disobedient ambition. All the harder did it seem to buy nothing with so great expense. There were many who were still unwilling for peace. Orleans had endeared himself to his troops by his conduct during the hunger of Novara, where he had fared and fasted like any common man-at-arms, setting aside the ducal mess for the use of the sick in hospital. His mess-fellows were willing still to die for him. By an ironic turn of fate, on the very day on which the army evacuated Novara, 20,000 Swiss came to the relief of the king. With such a reinforcement as this, cried Orleans, Ligny, D’Amboise and their men, Charles might not only conquer Milan, but make himself master of the whole of Italy. But the negotiations for peace already were begun; Novara was lost; the French soldiers were few and much enfeebled; and it was rumoured that the Swiss meant no less than to capture King Charles with all his nobles, carry them off into the impregnable fastness of the Alps, and then exact a fabulous ransom for their liberty.

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.”

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.

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.

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—

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

Galeotto was scarcely buried when new troubles burst upon the city. Urbino and Pesaro laid siege to Lungarino, one of the fiefs of the Riminese. Grief and fear again awoke in the harassed and impoverished town; but in this trouble Sigismond saw his opportunity. He had chafed and fumed and wasted under the regency of the two widows, his sister-in-law and his aunt. He, a conqueror at thirteen, was surely at fifteen able to rule a city. A daring scheme presented itself to the impatient boy; a scheme which, chance what might, would he knew but increase his favour with the people, however the Ladies-Regent might bewail it. He escaped in disguise from Rimini, and having given notice to his old adherents, collected them outside the walls, and gaining new battalions as he marched towards Lungarino, won a tremendous victory there—a victory which utterly routed Urbino and Pesaro, and proved Sigismond Malatesta one of the most valiant champions in Italy.

Close to the Palazzo Roelli stood the Palazzo del Cimiero, where Francesco degli Atti, a merchant of noble birth, lived in sufficient state and splendour with his young son and his motherless daughter Isotta.

Fœmina belligera et fortis: thus the chronicle of Rimini describes her. A nature not immoral, but unscrupulous, a woman in whom will, passion, and intellect were strong enough each to balance the other. Isotta gained an influence over the perverse, defiant, passionate Gismondo which raised her to a position in the state far superior to that of the lawful wife; a position in which the lax morality of her age saw little disgraceful or revolting.

Sigismond was now free to marry a wife who would bring him legal heirs; Isotta cannot have doubted that she would be that woman. But Gismondo, the ardent lover and writer of verses, was not of the character to throw away so valuable a chance of alliance. He possessed Isotta already, and she had no powerful supporters. In 1442 he married Polissena Sforza, the natural daughter of Francesco Sforza, that magnificent soldier of fortune, already on the alert to seize (when death should offer him the chance) his father-in-law’s rich Duchy of Milan.

A strange ceremony it must have been, that Jubilee service in the newly-opened temple. The prelates and great dignitaries of the church meet, appalled, in that splendid shrine to Diva Isotta, which a little later the Pope should adduce as absolute and sufficient proof of the paganism of its founder. From door to transept, from pedestal to cornice, no memento of Christ; only everywhere the I.S. of Isotta and her lover mocking the sacred

monogram

monogram

None dared accuse him then. He was at the height of his power and formidable triumph—at the summit, the climax, beyond which is no ascent. Yet even then he had made a deadly enemy, scorned at present, but who knew how to wait. Not Sforza, who seems to have taken the loss of his daughter with strange indifference. It was the perfidy and not the violence of Sigismond that wrought his ruin. Engaged to fight for Arragon in the war of the Milanese succession, he had received in advance a large portion of his pay. Then the Florentines sought to tempt him from his allegiance. With true Tuscan shrewdness they chose for their agent no Medici, no magnificent money-bag or puissant general—but Gianozzo Manetti the Humanist. Him and his rare manuscripts they send into Gismondo’s camp; and as the scholar treats with the great captain, he shows him such-and-such a precious Greek fragment, or a perfect copy of Virgil—or the Platonists, pointing without too obvious intention the superior culture of Florence to barbarous Arragon. Gismondo, fascinated, stepped into the snare. The next day he deserted to Florence, refusing, moreover, to restore the immense wage he had drawn from the Duke of Arragon for services never to be rendered. Nor at the time was there any redress for that prince; but the time of vengeance was to come.

Meanwhile, incautious, believing that he could compass heaven and earth between his courage and his perfidy, Sigismond earned yet more of the traitor’s wages. Scarcely was the peace of Lodi signed (in 1454), than he hired himself and his troops to the Republic of Siena in their quarrel against the lord of Pittigliano. Again he deserted to the enemy, thinking to make a better bargain with him. The Sienese sent him his demission, “in terms of great courtesy and haughtiness,” but denounced his treachery to all the great powers with which they were allied, including Arragon. He, perceiving in this double proof of treachery, sufficient cause for a quarrel, sent Piccinino, the greatest soldier of fortune of his day, against the wall of Rimini. Yet all was not lost; for Sforza came to the aid of his son-in-law. Had Sigismond stuck to his sword all might have gone well; but of late he had become perilously adept in the traitor’s cunning trade. He despatched a secret message to René, king of Anjou, offering—in return for present help—to invade the kingdom of Naples, oust Alfonso of Arragon and restore it to the Angevines. René accepted, and landed at Genoa, but only in time to learn the sudden death of Alfonso. Sforza, learning all the details of the scheme, withdrew his forces from Rimini, alienated once and for ever from the traitor who would call the French to settle his quarrels; for Sforza, as we know, had reasons for wishing the kinsman of Charles of Orleans well on the other side the Alps. At this moment the succession of a Sienese, Æneas-Sylvius Piccolomini, to the papal throne under the title of Pius II., left Gismondo without a friend in Italy, five years after his triumphs in war and in peace of the glorious year 1450.

Little time now for temple-building. Gismondo, before Siena, had amused himself with drawing out plans for the dome in intervals of battles and traitorous despatches. He now found enough to do in keeping Piccinino at bay. The Angevines were of no service; they had but estranged the sympathies of Italy from his cause. He tried even, it is said, to tempt the universal enemy of Christendom, the Grand Turk himself, to espouse his cause. There is no knowing to what lengths he would not go in his lonely, impotent, swift despair, and defiant ruin; and it is possible that he may have remembered the examples of Carlo Zeno and the great Visconti. One good and wise thing, at least, Gismondo did in these terrible years of friendless battle. He married the faithful Isotta, who proved herself a right valiant defender and regent of his city.

Sigismond, maddened and desperate, looked vainly round for an ally. Siena, Arragon, Florence, Milan, all were hostile, or at best neutral. Yet help must be found. Almost alone, facing a hundred perils, Gismondo trudged across the Apennines to the kingdom of Naples in search of his fatal friends the Angevines. But from them he got no help, not a promise even. Back to Rimini, desperate, baited, hurried the miserable Sigismond. Finding the towns still held out, he took to the sea, and went to Venice—praying in his abject extremity for succour, for protection. And the Venetians, bound to him by old ties, did indeed afford him a slender assistance. By the aid of this he escaped death and flagrant ruin. The Pope made peace with him, though only on condition that he and his brother Domenico should make public penance for their misdeeds at Rome, resigning all their possessions save their capitals and a few castles, which also must devolve to the Holy See after the deaths of their present lords. And to these terms he consented. Nothing but his sword and his city were now left to the once triumphant Sigismond. Leaving Rimini to the staunch Isotta—fœmina belligera et fortis—he hired himself to the Venetians, to conduct their forces against the Turks in the Morea. Here a faint shadow of his former glory played for a while around him; and in 1465 Gismondo returned to Rimini, enriched, and bringing with him as his dearest possession the bones of Gemisthus Pletho, the Platonist, to place in the first sarcophagus of the temple.

Within the year Pius II. died, and Paul II. reigned in the Vatican. The new pontiff called Sigismond to Rome, and there concluded with him what seemed a most favourable treaty. But Gismondo was no sooner back in Rimini than the Pope, jealous of Venice, proposed to him to cede his city to Rome, in exchange for Spoleto and Foligno. When Sigismond comprehended this proposal a veritable madness seemed to seize him. Resign Rimini, the city he had saved at thirteen, had fought for ever since, had spent his whole life and fortune in embellishing! He and Isotta and his sons go into exile in the marshes of Foligno! Rimini, with the Rocca and temple of his building, with the tombs of centuries of ancestors—Rimini, with its salts and its seaboards—yield that? Sigismond sent no answer to the Pope; but mad, in a burning fever, he journeyed by day and night to Rome. His attendants noticed that he never slept, that he clutched under his coat a dagger, never relaxed. Arrived at Rome, he went instantly to the Vatican, demanding a private audience; but the Pope, warned, it may be, appointed a meeting for the morrow. Then he received the lord of Rimini, guarded by a great concourse of princes and cardinals. Sigismond had not foreseen such a reception. Gazing wildly, and clutching still the ineffectual hidden dagger which he could not use, he made what terms he could, since revenge was impossible. The right to remain in Rimini was finally conceded him, but under the pretext of a captainship of troops the Pope kept him far from home, employed in petty guerilla warfare. A year later the fever had gained a fearful hold upon him. He dragged himself back to Rimini, to Isotta. Impoverished, friendless, powerless, the city was at least his own to die in. His last thoughts were for Isotta and her children, left friendless in an unkind world. Thus he died, the great Malatesta.

The Ladies of Milan.

This was in 1476. For three years all went well in Milan. Simonetta had so long guided the course of affairs that the death of the Duke made little difference to the external policy of the state. Galeazzo Maria had called himself a Ghibelline, Cecco Simonetta dared at last to avow himself a Guelf; but under one as under the other, the course of Milan continued Liberal and French. Inside the city there were a few less murders,—less ominous stories than were told in the lifetime of the handsome, cruel, dilettante Duke. His widow, the Duchesse Bonne, had the wardship of her children, and lived a pleasant life in her beautiful palace, where Commines remembered to have seen her in great authority. She had two little boys and a girl; she had excellent counsellors, a court full of admirers, beautiful clothes, and a devoted lover.

All that follows sound like a passage in some ancient novel of adventure. The Duchess sends to Genoa to Il Moro, who, coming at night to Milan, is secretly admitted by the Duchess and her lover through the garden gate of the palace. Lodovico returns not alone; Bari is dead but, in place of the lost brother, Roberto di Sanseverino a great captain, dare-devil, incorrigible, comes at his heels: a man whom Simonetta had exiled with the sons of Francesco Sforza, a Ghibelline à l’outrance, a personal enemy of Cecco. These were the men whom Bonne, weary of her ancient counsellor’s respectability, called home, “through great simplicity,” as Commines declares, “supposing they would do the said Cecco no harm, and the truth is that so they had both of them sworn and promised.”

When Sanseverino and Il Moro were safe in the palace, the Duchess sent for Simonetta and told him all she had done. She must have been alarmed to see the horror and consternation on the faithful secretary.^[111] “Duchessa Illustrissima,” said the man, with the quiet of despair, “he will cut off my head, that is all; a little time more and he will send you packing!” The Duchess probably remembered these words when, the third day after their return, Il Moro and Sanseverino caused the man who had signed their exile to be carried through the streets of Milan in a wine barrel, and then—still in this ridiculous tumbril—taken to the fortress at Pavia. There was Simonetta imprisoned; but once inside the gates his lot appeared to mend. Lodovico il Moro frequently rode across to Pavia to take counsel with the wise old

statesman

statesman

English readers know what to expect when an ambitious uncle, in the Middle Ages, leaves two little Princes in the Tower. But no midnight assassin cut short the days of Giangaleazzo and his brother Ermes. They were more useful to their uncle, living—at least until he had made his own position surer: for at present he only ruled in Milan as Tutor and Regent of the little Duke. But, by whatever title, he ruled effectually, and soon he rid his palace of the tearful and frivolous presence of Madame Bonne, whom he exiled from her duchy “for immorality,” and who carried her inept remonstrances and her tarnished honour to find a none too chivalrous asylum at the court of her brother-in-law, Louis XI. of France, a man impatient of unsuccessful women.

Meanwhile Lodovico il Moro flourished in Milan. Under his cultured and dignified rule it became a magical city, a capital of masterpieces. There in 1483, Leonardo da Vinci took up his abode, cast his bronze statue of Francesco Sforza, painted pictures, and founded a school of Lombard painters, little less exquisite, mysterious, and sensual than himself. The Choir of Singers, whom Galeazzo Maria Sforza had brought across the Alps, increased, and the singing and playing of Milan became a thing of note. Temples and palaces sprang up as by enchantment; and learned humanists—grave Romans, bearded Greeks, astute Orientals—from all the centres of knowledge in the world, came to lecture on law, science, and the classics, in brilliant Milan. Nor was the Court of Venus, says Corio, less distinguished than the Court of Minerva. “All were willing to concede their best and fairest to the Court of Cupid; fathers their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters.” And the laxity of Lombard manners which had scandalized the very Court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in 1471, was not less abandoned, not less luxurious, although more natural and freer from cruelty under the sceptre of the Regent Lodovico who appears at the head of this princely retinue, a man majestic, suave, omniscient, as any Duke of Shakespeare’s plays.

So long as there had been no woman at the head of the Court of Milan, there had been no discord. The young Duke, half a captive, had a doglike docile affection for his tyrant; he was content to yield his place and keep his title; and Lodovico was satisfied to have the place without the name. But Isabel of Arragon was a Neapolitan and a Spaniard—a nature passionate, arrogant, intense. In vain she urged her husband to assert his rights. He promised what she would, and then confessed their conversation to his uncle. When her child was born, and still the bride of Lodovico sat on the throne which should have been her throne—Isabel would no longer possess her soul in patience. This time she did not appeal to her husband—a beautiful youth, soft as silk, innocent as flowers, incapable of revenge or determination; she wrote to her father and her grandfather at Naples, men as different from him as men can be. She asserted her rights (“essendo giovane di grand’ animo”); she told them of the intolerable yoke of Lodovico—of her husband, a grown man and a father, yet kept in tutelage. She told them doubtless by her messenger (no word of personal complaint appears in her letter) what Corio tells us: that amid all the luxury of Milan, the Duke and the Duchess procured with difficulty the bare necessities of life. There was much indignation in her old home, and Alfonso wrote to Il Moro demanding the throne and government of Milan for his son-in-law. “You make a laughing-stock of my daughter—shall we endure to see our blood despised?”^[112] Lodovico, as his manner was, returned a soft answer. And a year or two went by in procrastination and recrimination; but in 1493 the house of Naples, in defence of the young Duke, declared war upon the Regent of Milan.

In another place I have spoken of the dismay and terror of that hour; the still rage of Lodovico—a rage not unmixed with joy and with the presentiment of success; the anger of his young wife, determined not to quit her throne, determined to take at last from the detested Isabel that one fine thing which as yet she had not dared to take from her: the title of Duchess. My readers know how, on the one hand, Lodovico sent to the Emperor admitting the illegal nature of the Sforza claim, and entreating him (for a consideration) to bestow it on him anew; how, on the other hand, he sent into France reminding Charles VIII. of the French claim to Naples; and how the French crossed the Alps in September; and how, in September also, very secretly, the Emperor’s Investiture arrived in Milan; and how on the morrow after the French left Milan the young Duke died (Teodoro di Pavia discovering in his body the evident signs of poison); and how the people, overawed by the neighbourhood of the French, were taught to acclaim Lodovico, consecrated thus alike by Imperial privilege and popular voice; so that he ruled at last as Duke in Milan.

“News of the month of January, 1496 (Old Style).

Still I wandered on, making reflections on the difference of type in the Sforza and Visconti heads: the older tyrants keen-faced, refined with delicate, bone-less oval faces, and thin firm lips ridged out in a narrow line. There is something wolf-like in the long pointed noses, the pointed chins, low foreheads, as well as in the keen eyes, narrow and high in the head; altogether an interesting type, subtle, cruel, intellectual, and fierce. The Sforzas with their Wellington noses, their strongly marked eyebrows, prim-pursed lips and rounded chins, seem a square-faced kindly race of captains. Lodovico il Moro himself is there, with the fat face and fine chin of the elderly Napoleon, the delicate beak-like nose of Wellington; a small querulous neat-lipped mouth, and immense eyebrows, stretched like the talons of an eagle across the low forehead, complete the odd, refined physiognomy of the man. I looked at him with interest for a moment. But there, straight before me, stood the tomb of the wife he lost so young, the Duchess Beatrice.

When, in the October of 1494, the King of France marched south from Asti, a torpor of stupefaction fell upon the princes of Italy. For the last three years there was no one of them but had coquetted more or less with France; there was no one of them but was the enemy of that arrogant house of Arragon which had lost Scutari to Venice, and which had dared reprove the usurpation of Milan by Lodovico Sforza. Charles was coming into Italy to dethrone these evil and malignant princes, “fathers of all treason,” as the author of “De Bello Gallico” has called them; “tyrants by whom I think that Nero himself would seem a saint.” But now that the French were actually in Lombardy, it struck the Italian despots with ominous force that he might not be content with only Naples. Few of them had any just title to their possessions; none of them, save Venice, could resist the power of France. “The princes of Italy,” wrote the Venetian secretary, “aghast at this passing of the mountains, tried to arrange that the King should pass no farther south, each one doubting for his own estate, and doubting most of all the enthusiasm of his own subjects.” For if the tyrants of Italy dreaded the advent of the French, the populace—the poor, starved, degraded slaves of these illegal despots—welcomed their coming with open arms. “They were so called and cried upon,” goes on our author, “so invoked by all the populace of Italy, that there was none who could withstand them, for all the people said Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.”

The people were led by the monk Savonarola; but many of the old Florentine families (the Nerli, Gualterotti, Sonderini, Capponi) were no less anxious than the people to banish their parvenu tyrant. Out of all the crowd of monks, enthusiasts, bankers, patricians, and politicians which made up the popular party, two silhouettes stand strongly forth. One is the preacher Savonarola—a man of middle height, of dark complexion, and sanguine, bilious temperament. At forty-two his face is lined with seams and wrinkles—a harsh, strong face with a sweet expression, like Samson’s honey in the lion’s mouth; eyes that flash and flame from under shaggy black eyebrows and shed their spiritual gleam over the heavy Roman nose and the large mouth with the loose, thick lips of the orator firmly closed and drawn into a painful smile; a kind, noble, spiritual, tragic face, with something mad in it, or something at the least that must pass for mad in this uninspired and transitory world.

Behind the strong profile of the friar we note another head, also worthy of remark. This is Piero Capponi, a man of old Florentine family, republican by descent. Sturdily built and square, with brilliant eyes, he has a certain air of a courser sniffing battle; brief and resolute in speech, vigorously mature in age, he seems the very embodiment of virile energy. He is rich, for an astrologer at his birth having foretold his death in battle, he was persuaded by his father to devote himself to commerce. The man worked at money-getting with the restless, dominant force he put into everything he did, and made his fortune in a sort of fury. Then he threw up his career, having enough, and entered public life at thirty years of age. A republican, his restless need of activity made him accept the Medicean service. He had been ambassador in France, and was as French as Savonarola. “See them near, like ghosts,” he used to say, “and there is nothing to be afraid of in these French.” Although at this time the right arm of the Republic, his patrician birth, his acquaintance with the magnificence of princes, made him recoil from the extremer measures of the monk. A man of the greatest spirit, the staunchest energy, the very width of his views and his natural love of change made him a danger to a peaceful but imperfect Government. Born to be a great captain, he loved, above all things, a difficult campaign; and he spent his life in fighting alternately his enemies and his friends, until at last the astrologer’s prediction, true in spite of human prudence, set a bridle on his martial soul.

These two men represent the two parties who chiefly desired the advent of the French—the enthusiasts, the poor, the children of Savonarola, and the powerful burghers, as rich and may be better born than Piero de’ Medici, who resented their tyrant’s views on the republic, who resented almost more his alliance with the detested Spanish autocrats of Naples. On the other side—the side of the Orsini, of Cardinal Bibbiena, of Bernardò del Nero, and the aristocratic party, there is but one man that can arrest us as Capponi or Savonarola must arrest us, and that is Piero de’ Medici himself.

In 1494 Piero de’ Medici was about four-and-twenty years of age. He was beautiful in person and very vigorous. He was clever at games and sports; he had a charming way of pronouncing his words, a winning voice, and a great facility in making

impromptu

impromptu

What could he do? The French were now within fifty miles of Pisa, and though the mountain fortresses ought to have kept them at bay all the winter long, Piero remembered too late that he had forgotten to provision them; that he had neglected to call the Pisan hostages into Florence, and that Pisa hated her cruel mistress, and was certain to revolt to France. Only one course suggested itself to the desperate young man, and this course was so adventurous, romantic, and unusual, that it captivated at once his unsteady imagination. Many years ago, when Arragon had worsted Florence on the battlefield, Lorenzo de’ Medici had gone as his own ambassador to Naples, running, it is true, a great risk of steel or poison, but by his fascinating address making a devoted friend of an exasperated enemy. Piero determined to follow the example of his father. On the 26th of October he heard that the French were arriving before Sarzana, within two days’ march of Florence. On the evening of that day the tyrant of Florence secretly escaped from his own palace, left the city in the dusk of evening, and rode through the chill autumn night as far as Empoli.

The King sat like a quaint elfin child in his tent among his splendid counsellors. These polite and courtly people had rather a more decided smile than usual about their pleasant lips as they glanced towards Piero. The young Florentine was submerged, drowned, in his satisfaction with the King and with his own reception. He was on the best terms with his friend, the King of France. Charles, who did not quite understand the situation, asked a great deal more than ever he hoped to obtain from penitent Florence, thinking he would have to abate his demands (a few weeks in Italy had taught him how to bargain), especially when dealing with a mercantile person like Piero de’ Medici. He put forward in fact an extravagant requisition: the Florentine troops were all to be dismissed (the troops that Piero had ordered yesterday), the fortresses of Sarzana, of Sarzanello, Librafatto, Pisa, Leghorn, and Pietra Santa were to be delivered to the King; his army was to have free passage, and he was to receive a loan of 200,000 ducats. Now the French party of Florence were prepared to allow the King to lodge in Pisa, and to grant him a free passage, but more than this had never been dreamed of by Savonarola or Capponi. Piero, however, when he heard the King’s demand, did not abate a jot of it. Who was he to contradict the King? (“I go,” he had said; “I go head down in front of peril to bring you back a welcome message, or else to leave my bones in the camp of the enemy!”) He immediately agreed to grant the whole, yielding the entire force and estate of Florence into the power of France. “Those that negotiated with the said

Peter,

Peter,

V.

It was the 8th of November when he came home to Florence. On the morning of the 9th he rode to the Piazza with his ordinary guard to announce the King’s coming, but when he knocked at the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio, young Nerli refused to let him in unless he sent away his soldiery. Piero, indignant at this behaviour, rode home again and sent a message to his wife’s brother, Pagolo Orsini, captain of the horse, to bid him lead the troops at once to Florence. Meanwhile, in the streets the ominous cry of “Liberty, liberty!” gathered and grew. All the adventurous temper of Piero de’ Medici was roused. Without waiting for the troops, he armed himself and a few servants, and rushed cavalcading along the hostile streets, crying out the rallying cry of his family, “Palle! Palle!” But everywhere he was met with sullen silence—silence that gradually broke into a roar of disapproval, a shout of “Libertà!” By the time Orsini and the soldiers came, Piero was glad of their assistance, not to quell the disaffected Florentines, but to escape from a town in open mutiny. They left the women behind in the great house in Via Larga, and, accompanied by a few cavaliers, the three young Medici fled from their city. Piero rode in the middle, disguised as a monk. It was the second time in fourteen days that he had secretly escaped from Florence.

Thenceforth, for centuries Florence gloriously flourished, while the fame of Pisa dwindled to a mere proverb, an old tale but half believed. First she lost her supremacy, then her wealth, then her renown, and at last her independence. A family of despots arose in her midst. Soon she was to regret this comparative liberty, for in 1397 Giangaleazzo Visconti conquered the city, and left it, on his death in 1402, to his mistress, Agnese Mantegazza, and to their son, Gabriello Maria Visconti. But Messer Gabriel’ Maria was not strong enough to keep Pisa single handed against his envious neighbours of Florence, Genoa, and Lucca; so on April 15, 1404, he agreed to hold the city as a fief of France.

The great Visconti died in September, 1402; and in the same year Marshal Boucicaut was sent as Governor to Genoa. Boucicaut was an enemy of Milan,^[118] a hater of the Turk, a man who saw in the Visconti the secret allies of the Sultan, a man who had been a captive at Nicopolis. A pure, devoted, honourable spirit, yet officious, yet impatient:—a restless hero working persistently in a nervous and unquiet fashion the thing that he believed to be the Will of God—Boucicaut is a figure as unusual among the factions and intrigues of fifteenth-century history as Gordon among the small surroundings of to-day. The Marshal was sent to Genoa because that jealous and unaccountable people (“qui n’aime pas qu’on aille leur desbauscher leurs femmes”) would no longer endure his predecessor. They found in him the man they had prayed to have, a sterner master. Boucicaut was as rigid as he was simple: a man soon deceived, but swift and inflexible in the punishment of treachery. His immaculate life, his proved authority, his skill in regulating and organizing commercial traffic, gave him a great position in Northern Italy, made him the man of men there, the central figure, even as before him had been Giangaleazzo Visconti. For one reason, these two men, so unlike in every detail, were alike in the great fact that they were thinkers, men with a mission, inspired by an idea that ruled their lives and to which they subordinated every consideration. The Duke of Milan dreamed of a great United Italian Confederation, of which he should be the head, and of which the Pope should be merely the ornament and crown: his dream was the dream of the Emperor Napoleon III. Boucicaut, a crusader by nature and tradition, above all things a religious spirit, dreamed of ending the Schism, of gaining state after state to the adherence of the true Pope at Avignon, and, pari passu, of extending the dominions of his lord the King of France. The ambition of Boucicaut was all spiritual loyalty and feudal devotion; the ambition of Visconti, stained with crimes, was directed only to self-aggrandizement: different stars were theirs, shining from different poles. But the men who see a star and follow where it leads them, though they go as far apart as Hell and Heaven, have more in common than the mere human bond which ties them to the obscure multitude of their fellows, swaying hither and thither, devoid of purpose, will, or way.

The great Visconti died in September, 1402; and in the same year Marshal Boucicaut was sent as Governor to Genoa. Boucicaut was an enemy of Milan,^[118] a hater of the Turk, a man who saw in the Visconti the secret allies of the Sultan, a man who had been a captive at Nicopolis. A pure, devoted, honourable spirit, yet officious, yet impatient:—a restless hero working persistently in a nervous and unquiet fashion the thing that he believed to be the Will of God—Boucicaut is a figure as unusual among the factions and intrigues of fifteenth-century history as Gordon among the small surroundings of to-day. The Marshal was sent to Genoa because that jealous and unaccountable people (“qui n’aime pas qu’on aille leur desbauscher leurs femmes”) would no longer endure his predecessor. They found in him the man they had prayed to have, a sterner master. Boucicaut was as rigid as he was simple: a man soon deceived, but swift and inflexible in the punishment of treachery. His immaculate life, his proved authority, his skill in regulating and organizing commercial traffic, gave him a great position in Northern Italy, made him the man of men there, the central figure, even as before him had been Giangaleazzo Visconti. For one reason, these two men, so unlike in every detail, were alike in the great fact that they were thinkers, men with a mission, inspired by an idea that ruled their lives and to which they subordinated every consideration. The Duke of Milan dreamed of a great United Italian Confederation, of which he should be the head, and of which the Pope should be merely the ornament and crown: his dream was the dream of the Emperor Napoleon III. Boucicaut, a crusader by nature and tradition, above all things a religious spirit, dreamed of ending the Schism, of gaining state after state to the adherence of the true Pope at Avignon, and, pari passu, of extending the dominions of his lord the King of France. The ambition of Boucicaut was all spiritual loyalty and feudal devotion; the ambition of Visconti, stained with crimes, was directed only to self-aggrandizement: different stars were theirs, shining from different poles. But the men who see a star and follow where it leads them, though they go as far apart as Hell and Heaven, have more in common than the mere human bond which ties them to the obscure multitude of their fellows, swaying hither and thither, devoid of purpose, will, or way.

At the same moment, as we know, Orleans beyond the Alps was mysteriously advancing southwards; his aim, no less than that of the Florentines, the reduction of Pisa. For through his wife, Valentine Visconti,^[119] he had, as he considered, a prior claim on Pisa, and indeed on all possessions of the dead Duke not included in the heritage of the two legitimate sons. Gabriel’ Maria, the bastard, supported only by his mother, besieged by the Florentine allies of France, threatened by his brother-in-law the puissant brother of the King of France,—what hope had he? None indeed, save in the disquiet which the news of Orleans’ coming might inspire among his neighbours. For was it only on Pisa intent that so great a lord was advancing on Lombardy? At this moment the young Visconti of Milan were at open war with Boucicaut, and had declared their intention to drive him out of Genoa and to obtain for themselves the rich province of which the French had baulked their father. Did Orleans also remember with rancour that disappointment of ten years ago? Did he intend to join his brothers-in-law of Milan, take Genoa first and Pisa afterwards? It might be; and yet it were difficult to be at once the ally of the Milanese Visconti, and the usurper of their half-brother’s possessions. Was it possible that the King’s brother intended to unite his army to that of the King’s lieutenant, defeat the young Visconti before Genoa, drive them from Lombardy as well as out of Pisa, and make for himself a great territory (Milan, Asti, Pisa) alongside of the French protectorate of Genoa? Boucicaut was an ancient and intimate companion of the Duke of Orleans; it was rumoured that Orleans had frequent interviews with Pope Benedict at Beaucaire; it was possible that the three had come to an understanding.

And Orleans marched south. And Florence assailed Pisa. So late as April 17, 1404,^[120] the Florentines believed that by diplomacy, if not by force, they might secure their prey. But in the end of February or the beginning of March the Duke of Orleans turned north in high dudgeon, indignantly marching on Paris. And in April it was commonly known that, on the 4th of that month, Messer Gabriel’ Maria Visconti had been acknowledged a vassal of the Crown of France; he was “homme du Roy” and the King’s men henceforth would support him in Pisa.

The Pisans cared little for Pope or Antipope; they were fanatic for liberty. They detested Agnese Mantegazza and her bastard with a Tuscan hatred for the Visconti, treacherous alike to God and man. One day in 1405, while Messer Gabriel’ Maria was absent in Genoa, some Florentine soldiers made a raid on Pisa. The citizens, not without reason, suspected their tyrant of selling them to the Florentines,—old neighbours and rivals yet more odious than the Milanese. They rose as one man fighting for death or liberty in the streets. No sooner had they driven back the Florentines than they rushed on the Fortress, surging through the narrow corridors, till, in the heart of the palace, they came on Madonna Agnese. A man raised his harquebuss and shot her through the heart. Her son was absent in Genoa. For the moment the Pisans were quit of the Visconti.

The Pisans listened respectfully while “moult leur dict de belles paroles,” but when the sermon was over they replied that never should Messer Gabriel’ be their lord again, rather would every man of them be hewn in pieces; but, they went on to say, the Marshal Boucicaut himself should be welcomed and honoured by all the citizens of Pisa, if he would accept her as his fief. “Never,” cried the Marshal, “could I draw such a profit from a friend’s misfortune” (“car ce n’est mie l’usaige des François d’user de tels tours”). And he fell again to praising Messer Gabriel’, but all in vain, for the last word of the Pisans was that, if the Marshal himself would not accept the city for his own, then they prayed him to meet them at Leghorn another day, and there they would give themselves directly to the King of France, accepting a French governor for their waiter, even as the Genoese had done ten years before.

Arrived in Genoa he sent for Messer Gabriel’, and told him the case; “de quoy feult moult dolent Messire Gabriel,” who doubtless wished that he had sent to Porto Venere, a spokesman less eloquent and less engaging. But Boucicaut persuaded him that since he could not hope to leave the city for himself, ’twas better to entrust it to the King of France—who would recompense so generous a vassal with lands as good elsewhere—than to let it fall into the power of an enemy or a neighbour. Gabriel’ Maria agreed—as he must perforce agree—and Boucicaut set out again to meet the rebels at Leghorn.

Thus amply provisioned at Boucicaut’s expense, the Pisans began to feel secure of liberty. They sent to Florence, offering her four of their castles if she would help them to regain Leghorn, where at the moment Boucicaut and Gabriel’ Maria were esconced, and to revenge themselves on both these men. But the Florentines returned a dilatory answer, for they were, in truth, pursuing a more fruitful negotiation.

When the persuasive Gabriel’ Maria broke the news to his host, at first the Marshal “qui toujours y avoit la dent,” emphatically refused to consent to the alienation of a Royal fief; he even sent to Pisa to acquaint the rebels with the designs of their ex-tyrant, hoping by this means to induce them to declare themselves the subjects of the King. But the Pisans went on shouting “Libertà.” Meanwhile Gabriel’ Maria and the Florentines set the matter before the Marshal in another light. For Messer Gabriel’—a clever person—advised the Florentines to become vassals to the Crown of France for the fief of Pisa. The Florentines fell in with the suggestion, which carried visible weight with the Boucicaut. And the Marshal was left to consider the matter.

Along these altered streets, embellished for the festival, a train of priests, in stole and chasuble, carrying their holiest relics, went out to meet the King. But this, the arranged and official feature of his reception, faded, on the event, into absolute unimportance. All took place at first as had been designed. The great motley travel-stained crowd of the French army came trampling down the boughs of pine and roses; the priests met the soldiers; and finally the King came riding on his great black horse, Savoy, under the blue-silk canopy sustained by the nobles of Pisa: but when the people caught sight of this little young man, with the large head, bright eyes, thin legs, high shoulders, and quaint amiable air of elfin ugliness, then they forgot the dignity of an official reception. This was the King of France! This was the all-potent power which, at different moments of history had stretched its invited and benevolent ægis over Asti, Genoa, Savona, nay, even over Naples and haughty Florence, to shelter them from the cruelty of a tyrannic neighbour. But instead of the dread magnificent symbolic monarch they had expected to behold, lo, a benevolent, rather grotesque little youth, with the most shining and enthusiastic eyes, a kind ugly face, engaging rather timid manners, and a total lack of that anti-human splendour which these enslaved republicans had expected in a king. A great wave of love, of anticipated gratitude swept through the hearts of all these people: he was, he must be, their hero, their deliverer. It was with tears of passion streaming down their cheeks that men, women, even little children, rushed into the ranks of the astonished soldiery, seeing round each weather-beaten face the shimmer of an aureole, pressing, hurrying, thronging towards the King—crying all together in their sobbing voices “Libertate, Libertate!” while such as could master a word or two of French, stammered in their soft lisping Pisan accent, an appeal in the language of his distant country: “Liberté, liberté, cher Sire!” There was no affectation in this outburst of enthusiasm, nay, almost of idolatry. Any man who was stronger than Florence was a possible hero to the Pisans. The great motley army of Charles proved his force, and in the rugged amiable faces of master and of men the Pisans recognized the faculty of sympathy.

The Pisans hesitated only for a moment. From Venice or from Milan they had always hoped to gain their liberty at last, or at the least a change of masters. France, backed by Milan, seemed the most desirable deliverer: the ancient suzerain of the city supported by its latest friend. It was difficult at that moment to imagine a stronger conjunction in Italy; for in 1494 Charles was spoken of as the second Charlemagne, and no one ventured to set a bound to the triumphs of Lodovico of Milan. “All that he desires,” the Venetian secretary was writing almost at this very time, “all that he desires, Fortune has conceded him, and all his plans come true.” For France and Milan to protect Pisa against the rest of Italy in 1494, was as if Russia and a stronger Servia to-day were to join their forces to secure Bulgaria against the anger of the other Balkan States.

And so that very night the Pisans, still in their gala-dresses, but with torn hair, faces of mourning, clasped hands and streaming eyes, thronged into the council-chamber of the astonished King. “It was lamentable,” writes an

eye-witness, “to hear

eye-witness, “to hear

That night the Florentines in Pisa—men in office, judges, merchants, and soldiers of the garrison—were driven at the sword’s point out of the rebellious city. The statue of Marzocco on the bridge was hurled in a thousand pieces into the muddy Arno; the standard of Florence was dragged and trampled in the mire; and bonfires until morning hailed the discomfiture of the King’s allies. On the morrow after noon Charles left the city. He had placed a garrison of three hundred French soldiers in the new citadel; he had appointed three commissioners to superintend affairs; but he had taken no steps to impose the least restraint of civil order upon this impassioned and suddenly enfranchised people. Fortunately the nobles of the town took the matter into their wiser hands. Twenty-four hours after the entry of the French, Pisa was a free Republic governed by a Gonfalonier, six Priors, and a Balia of Ten, with a new militia of its own, and, for the first time in eight and eighty years, a Pisan garrison in the ancient citadel.

If we ask, What right had the King of France to set at liberty the subjects of his allies, lent to him in his need as a temporary gage? we find the question difficult to answer. To statesmen like Commines or Briçonnet there was something shocking and dishonourable in the liberation of Pisa by the King, something that the tenderest palliation for generous youth and inexperience could not attempt to

justify.

justify.

Yet what had Florence done more audacious than that which Charles himself had sanctioned in the Pisans? Florence had expelled the Medici; Pisa the Florentines, almost at the selfsame hour. But the fact that the Florentines condemned the loan of the fortresses hardened the heart of the King, conscious that by the liberation of the Pisans he had justified the greatest of their fears. This was, in fact, the direst harm with which an enemy could threaten Florence; and Charles had done it despite his name of friend. It was only natural that he should nourish a grievance against the ally whom he had injured; and when on the 17th of November the French entered Florence, it was remarked that the King rode through the streets, lance on thigh, with the bearing of an offended conqueror. His mind was as haughty as his mien, and he was prepared to claim from the Republic the independence of Pisa and the restoration of Piero to the chief place in the government.

Such was the position of the Court when, in the January of 1495, the Pisans sent to Rome, as a last desperate advocate of their extremity, a gentleman of their city, skilled in French, one Messer Burgundio Legolo, or Lolo as the slurring Pisan voices gave the name. The King received the ambassador graciously, but in the presence of the Florentine envoys; and the party of pity, and the party of honour (if so we may name the factions of Ligny and of Briçonnet) were both assembled when the Pisan advocate began to address the King:

So spoke the hard-headed Bishop of Volterra. But even as reported by a Florentine historian these arguments do not make any great effect; and it was quite clear, as he avows, that the Pisan advocate had made a far deeper impression on the King. And as, that very week, Briçonnet was sent to Florence upon a diplomatic mission, the party of Pisa remained triumphant in the camp where with (Commines in Venice and Briçonnet in Tuscany) Beaucaire and Ligny and Piennes held for the moment the whole of Royal favour.

Madonna Lionora was a young princess of more than common interest, the last Altamura in the direct line, the last of that race which claimed to be descended from the Three Kings of the East. It was easy to make the Count of Ligny virtually the Prince of Altamura by marrying him to this young girl. This was done, but Ligny was barely seven days the bridegroom of his lovely Mage when the King, alarmed at the preparations of the League, determined to march northwards. Ligny of course went with him, leaving his bride behind him in a convent. And on the long road northwards the desire to be near his young wife and his new possessions gave a keener zest to the scheme of a Central Italian French dependency of which Ligny himself should be made the governor. When the army reached Siena, though the city was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, and therefore implicated in the Anti-Gallic league, none the less the Republic declared for France, demanding Ligny for her governor. The young man left a garrison there under Gaucher de Tinteville, and went with the King, hoping to pursue a like policy in Pisa.

In these uncertainties two days went by; the King alternately assuring Savonarola that he would keep his word to Florence, and protesting that he had not the heart to break that earlier promise given to the Pisans. Out of this hobble there was no way except by broken vows and treachery. It was a delicate question for a chivalrous prince, nourished, like Charles, on Amadis and Arthur: for to keep faith with the Pisans would be to ruin his ally; and to keep faith with Florence to hand over to slavery a people who had solemnly placed themselves under his protection. Nor were the political advantages quite easy to decide. Florence, of course, offered men and money sorely needed; but Pisa offered an asylum in case of reverses further north, or in case the Florentines should prove as faithless as the rest of the Italians. For Pisa was not merely a friendly city, but a city actually in the hands of France. This was certainly an argument—“nevertheless,” says Guicciardini, “I doubt if anything so logical could influence the King. Much more potent with such as he were the tears, and entreaties of the Pisans.” Those tears, invisible and ample as the waters of life, Burgundio Lolo had quoted to the King at Rome; and after all these months the memory of the Pisan advocate pleaded successfully against the actual influence of Savonarola.

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.

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

Gié

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.

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.

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.

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.”

1. The principal sources for this and the two following articles are as follows:—Mosheim, “Institutiones Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ;” Dr. Schmidt’s “Strasburger Beginen-häuser

im

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Geschichte

Geschichte

2. “Der viel arme Spielmann der mit hohem Mŭthe sündliche Eitelkeit machen kann, der weint in der Hölle mehr Thränen denn alles Wassers ist in dem Meer.” I like to give the reader a line of Mechtild’s book—from what I have read of it, that is to say, in the pages of Herr Preger and elsewhere—to show him the musical lilt of her style, the emotional charm (foreshadowing Heinrich Suso), and a certain easy lightness of heart I remember in no other mystical book, except in the exquisite Fioretti di San Francesco.

The Beguines and the Weaving Brothers.^[1]

Mechtild was, as she herself recalls, the dearest of her parents’ children; and these courtly and pious Thuringian nobles seem to have been as proud as they were fond of their little daughter. She received a liberal education. Her book on the flowing light of Godhead is written with an energy, sweetness, and variety of style strongly in contrast with the Gertrudenbuch and the Mechtildenbuch of Helfta. The music of her verse proves her familiar with the lyrics of the Minnesingers. They may no doubt have visited her father’s castle. But the little Mechtild did not dream of poetry and of knights-at-arms. It was later that she would deplore the poor vain

minstrels

minstrels

3. Herr Preger, notwithstanding the authority of other scholars, and the entire tradition of the Church, maintains the Gertruden-buch to be the work not of Gertrude von Hackeborn, but of a certain Gertrude the Nun, living at the same time in the same convent. He also, in an argument of great ingenuity, separates Mechtild the chantress from our Mechtild von Hackeborn, to whom, however he leaves the authorship of her works; but as in the Venetian edition of the Vita (1583 and 1605), I find the words, “Now Gertrude, with her sister Mechtild the chantress, managed all the affairs of the convent,” with constant indications of the identity of Gertrude the abbess and Gertrude the saint; and as Lansperg, the earliest chronicler, expressly states them both to be the daughters of the Graf von Hackeborne, I have decided in this one matter not to accept the dictate of a scholar, to whom all students of the subject must remain indebted.

4. “La vraie et unique vertue et donc de se haïr. Il est injuste qu’on s’attache à moi, quoiqu’on le fasse avec plaisir et volontairement. Je tromperais ceux à qui j’en ferais naître le désir; car je ne suis la fin de personne et n’ai pas de quoi les satisfaire:” Pascal told his married sister she ought not to caress her own children or suffer them to caress her.

From that first moment of vision the fame of Gertrude grew so high and so rapidly, that when in 1251 the abbess of Rodardesdorf expired, this girl-ecstatic of nineteen was elected her successor. It is strange that the duties of her new position, the great responsibilities of so famous a convent, did not draw her from her visions; but the influence of the time was strong, and the abbess of Rodardesdorf was beset by no imperious need for reform. There was no cleansing work of righteousness to be performed in that well-ordered house of high-born mystical ladies. All that Gertrude could do was, seven years after her nomination, when the springs of Rodardesdorf dried up, to remove the convent to her own castle of Helfta, an act which naturally increased her own position in the convent, and tripled her glory of abbess, benefactress, and ecstatic. Gertrude, however, was not the only saint in Helfta. Besides her sister, the sweet, fanciful Saint Mechtild, there was Gertrude the Nun,^[3] sometimes confounded with the abbess, who in all probability wrote the concluding book of the Vita, certainly finished after St. Gertrude’s death. The two daughters of the Count of Mansfeld were also professed in the convent, and were gifted disciples of its mystical doctrines. Sophia spent her life in enriching the already valuable library of Helfta, and Elizabeth painted, probably in the chapel.

As time went on, Gertrude transferred all her earnestness, all her powers of feeling, from the outer world to this dream-born inner life. Censorious, abstracted, caring little for physical suffering, she was tender and anxious to the last degree in all matters that concerned the soul. And this without any interest in the personality of the creature she longed to save. She had, says her biographer, not one friend so dear that to save her she would by so much as one word commit an offence against perfect justice, and would declare that rather would she consent to the injury of her own mother than harbour an evil thought against an enemy. Her conversation was in heaven, and the things of the world were as dust to her. Nay, as poison. She was as careful as Pascal^[4] by no word of hers ever to draw to herself the heart of any person; it was not for her who was beloved of God to unite herself in earthly friendship, and as one would fly a person stricken with a pestilent disease, she fled from any one who sought her affection. Never now could she endure to hear a word of earthly love; rather would she remain deprived of the services and the goodwill of all the world than ever consent that, by reason of human favour the heart of any should be joined to hers.

5. Paris: Bib. Nat.

Français

Français

6. July 17, 1376.

7. Pastor, “Geschichte der Päpste,” i. 63, after Gregorovius.

8. Creighton, “History of the Papacy,” vol. i. p. 64.

9. Especially in Germany—Mayence, Breslau, Constance, Metz, Loire, Breslau, Lübeck, &c. See Pastor., op. cit., book ii. p. 108, et seq.

10. Sept. 6, 1382. Vide Pastor., p. 108.

Tout prince que lors fut vivant.”^[5]

The letters of St. Catherine came frequently to Avignon, and with them came other letters from the French Governors telling of the increasing difficulty of keeping together the little that was left of the patrimony of St. Peter. Gregory became visibly disturbed. His conscience urged him to return to Rome. In July the Duke of Anjou^[6] came to Avignon to dissuade the Pope from an enterprise so disastrous, as he believed, to the future of France. Of all the royal princes Anjou was the one specially concerned with Italian policy. He was a man handsome, impressive, with a breadth of view and a force of ambition that made him many followers. This son of St. Louis could not fail to influence the Pope. He made it harder to go from Avignon; but the persuading voice of Catherine would not be stilled. The Pope was ill and afraid, a timid man; his sisters and his parents clung to him, entreating him to stay; his Cardinals opposed him; his king commanded: yet on the 13th of September he quitted Avignon. Evil omens added to the discouragement of his spirit; his horse stumbled under him at starting, and fearful tempests delayed him on the sea. But on January 17, 1377, the Pope re-entered Rome.

The seventy years which had made the beauty of Avignon had ruined Rome. No longer the pilgrims brought her the custom of foreign countries; the Court of the Vatican no longer gave an impetus to trade; the prestige of the Pope had ceased to make of Rome the centre of Europe; and the deserted city had realized her intrinsic poverty. Thirty years ago Rienzi had proclaimed her a cave of robbers rather than the abode of decent men. The churches were in ruins,^[7] many of them wholly roofless; and in St. Peter’s and the Lateran the flocks nibbled the grass of the pavement up to the steps of the altar. Row after row of ruined dwelling-places gave way to wild fields and heaths—scars of desolation upon the depopulated enclosure of Aurelian. If mediæval Rome lay in ruins, the Rome of antiquity was yet more ruthlessly destroyed, and the temples and theatres of the pagans were used as a quarry or a limekiln by their savage and impoverished successors. For with prosperity, peace and order had deserted Rome. The fierce clans of Colonna and Orsini terrorized the starved and fever-stricken populace; and there was no law beyond their tyranny. Murder was frequent, vendetta an honoured custom, and the Eternal City the shambles of unpunished bloodshedding.

The Church was terribly divided by this news—Clement, elected by all the French, was not repudiated by the Italian Cardinals, who, playing the waiting game of their nation, remained neutral. Yet the contest was a contest not of persons, but of nationalities. “The significance of Urban’s election lay in the fact that it restored the Papacy to Rome, and freed it from the influence of France.”^[8] Catharine of Siena clearly perceived this significance, and wrote of Clement, who was to undo her sacred mission, as “a devil in the shape of man.” In the North of Italy the campaign of Clement in the previous year persuaded the decimated cities of the truth of this opinion; but the South was not firm for Urban, and Naples openly declared herself the champion of his rival. The confusion was not only in Italy. The Church everywhere was shaken to its foundations. In many bishoprics there were two bishops;^[9] there was a terrible doubt in the minds of the Faithful, for of the two Popes, one must be Antichrist, his followers heretics, and consigned to eternal damnation. It is not too much to say that the authority of the Church never recovered from this long and terrible questioning. The minds of the pious turned from the Church to God; Mysticism and heresy consoled the uncertain; and false prophets were common in the land.

The Church was terribly divided by this news—Clement, elected by all the French, was not repudiated by the Italian Cardinals, who, playing the waiting game of their nation, remained neutral. Yet the contest was a contest not of persons, but of nationalities. “The significance of Urban’s election lay in the fact that it restored the Papacy to Rome, and freed it from the influence of France.”^[8] Catharine of Siena clearly perceived this significance, and wrote of Clement, who was to undo her sacred mission, as “a devil in the shape of man.” In the North of Italy the campaign of Clement in the previous year persuaded the decimated cities of the truth of this opinion; but the South was not firm for Urban, and Naples openly declared herself the champion of his rival. The confusion was not only in Italy. The Church everywhere was shaken to its foundations. In many bishoprics there were two bishops;^[9] there was a terrible doubt in the minds of the Faithful, for of the two Popes, one must be Antichrist, his followers heretics, and consigned to eternal damnation. It is not too much to say that the authority of the Church never recovered from this long and terrible questioning. The minds of the pious turned from the Church to God; Mysticism and heresy consoled the uncertain; and false prophets were common in the land.

Confusion in the Church was echoed by confusion in the State. England, because of the war with France, was passionate for Urban. The Empire also was for Urban; and Brittany, and all whose hand was against the French. “France desires not merely the Papacy, but the universal monarchy of the globe,” wrote Urban to the Emperor.^[10] But among the smaller states France had still her supporters; Scotland, Savoy, Naples, Leon, and Castile followed in her wake, and declared for Clement. There was great joy in France. Louis of Anjou, perhaps the first of European princes to send in his adhesion to the Antipope, was consoled for the departure of Gregory; and when the news was brought to the king, he exclaimed, “I am Pope at last!” But the joy was the joy of princes, not the joy of the people. The nation mourned the confusion that had fallen on the Church, and the University of Paris wrapped itself in a melancholy neutrality.