The storm had been brewing since the autumn of 1494 when the French king Charles VIII had crossed the Alps at the head of a large army aiming to reactivate a shaky claim as a descendant of the Angevins to the throne of Naples. Charles’s invasion unleashed an unprecedented succession of wars and shifting alliances among European powers seeking dynastic control in Italy, which did not finally begin to peter out until 1530. The French descent into Italy encouraged the Republic’s territorial ambitions, which aggravated the other powerful states more than ever. The long-standing fear that Venice intended to extend its rule over the whole of Italy and perhaps even beyond the Alps seemed to be confirmed when in 1498 the Republic formed an alliance with the new French king, Louis XII, and provided substantial military support for a French occupation of Milan. ‘You Venetians’, roared Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, ‘are wrong to disturb the peace of Italy, and not to rest content with the fine state that is yours. If you knew how everyone hates you, your hair would stand on end.’19 In 1503 the Republic took advantage of the power vacuum in Rome created by the death of the Borgia pope Alexander VI and the illness of his son Cesare to enlarge its grain supplies and trading opportunities by occupying the papal territories in the Romagna of Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, Faenza and Imola. It was a move that incurred the implacable rage of Alexander’s bellicose successor Pope Julius II. Niccolò Machiavelli, in Rome on a mission for the Florentine government, spoke for many Italians when he wrote in a dispatch: ‘One finds here a universal hatred of them … and to sum up, one draws the conclusion that the campaign of the Venetians … will either throw open to them the whole of Italy, or lead to their ruin.’20
While Julius II bided his time, Maximilian I of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor presumptive, and the French king Louis XII were the first to react. In September 1504 they met at the French court at Blois where they signed a treaty of alliance, which contained a hidden clause providing for an attack on Venice. Maximilian struck first. It was his intention to make his way to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope and to assess what the French were up to in Italy. When the Venetian government refused him safe passage, in 1508 he assembled an army of 6,000 men, crossed the pass above Cortina d’Ampezzo and trained his guns on Titian’s hometown Pieve di Cadore. The Venetian commander who resided in the castle surrendered without conditions, and Maximilian tried to persuade the local authorities to accept incorporation into the Tyrol. But a committee of fifteen Cadorines, including three senior members of the Vecellio family – Titian’s grandfather Conte, Conte’s brother Andrea, and Andrea’s son Tiziano – urged resistance and got word of the invasion through to Venice. On 2 March a Venetian army, led by the commander in chief Bartolomeo d’Alviano and equipped with mountain guns and an escort of cavalry, made its way up the Piave and crossed the bridge over the Boite river. Joined by a contingent of men from Cadore that included Titian’s father, they surprised the German army at Valle, below the slopes of Monte Antelao a few miles to the west of Pieve. At the end of a bloody battle, which raged all night in freezing mist, the German guns were all taken, their army routed, and those who tried to escape were massacred by the Venetian cavalry. D’Alviano went on to force the surrender of imperial possessions in the Friuli. It was the most successful military campaign Venice had fought – or would fight – for a long time, and by 5 June Maximilian was left with no choice but to sign a three-year peace treaty with Venice.
The victory of 1508 remained a source of local and family pride in Cadore for many years to come, and the first-hand descriptions of the battle that Titian heard from relatives and family friends who had fought in it stuck in his mind and furnished the setting for a different, legendary battle he would paint thirty years later for the doge’s palace. (The painting no longer exists, but a vivid preparatory sketch set on the bridge over the Boite below the slopes of Monte Antelao survives.) It was not, however, the last Cadore would see of Maximilian, who broke his truce with Venice and returned to the Friuli, sacking and burning to the ground whole villages in western Cadore, occupied Cortina d’Ampezzo (which remained Austrian until 1918) and finally succeeded in storming the castle of Pieve.
Nevertheless a treaty was formulated on 10 December 1508 at Cambrai, a conference centre in north-east France. Instigated by Pope Julius, ostensibly for the purpose of a crusade against the Turks, the hidden agenda at Cambrai was in the first instance a pact of aggression aimed at clipping the wings of the mighty St Mark. The leading members of what became the League of Cambrai were Louis XII, Julius II, Maximilian on behalf of the empire, Ferdinand of Aragon for Spain, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The estates of both the latter two shared a boundary with the Venetian domain and both had lost territory to Venice during its land-grabbing campaigns. They agreed:
to put an end to the losses, the injuries, the violations, the damages which the Venetians have inflicted, not only on the Apostolic See but also on the Holy Roman Empire, the House of Austria, the Dukes of Milan, the Kings of Naples and divers other princes, occupying and tyrannically usurping their goods, their possessions, their cities and castles, as if they had deliberately conspired to do ill to all around them …
Thus we have found it not only well advised and honourable, but even necessary, to summon all people to take their just revenge and so to extinguish, like a great fire, the insatiable rapacity of the Venetians and their thirst for power.
On 27 April of the following year Julius excommunicated the doge and imposed an interdict on the city. On 14 May French troops led by Louis XII moved east from Milan to Agnadello, where they inflicted a resounding defeat on a Venetian army. Four thousand Venetians were gunned down and the Venetian commander, Bartolomeo d’Alviano, who had made the strategic mistake of crossing the River Adda into French-occupied territory, was taken prisoner. Sanudo, who was in the ducal palace when the news arrived, described the reaction:
a secretary came running in with letters in his hand from the battlefield, with many gallows drawn on them. Thereupon the doge and the Savi read the letter and learned that … our forces had been routed … And there began a great weeping and lamentation and, to put it better, a sense of panic … Indeed they were as dead men.
Two days later when a raging wind blew out a glass window in the Great Council Hall and tore off one of the wings of the lion of St Mark on its column in the Piazzetta, Sanudo interpreted the freak summer storm as a portent of worse to come. He was right. The remains of the League’s army moved eastwards on to Padua, the university city only a few miles up the Brenta from Venice, where an imperialist faction opened the gates and declared Padua a republic under the protection of Maximilian. Venice, stripped of all its mainland possessions except Treviso, saw the farms and villages across the lagoon in flames, heard the guns of an apparently unstoppable enemy and prepared for siege.
‘To tell the truth, as I am bound to do,’ wrote Girolamo Priuli, ‘no one would ever have imagined that the Venetian mainland state could be lost and destroyed within fifteen days, as we have now seen … There was no human mind or intellect which would have considered it, nor any astrologer, nor philosopher, nor necromancer, nor expert practitioner in predicting the future who would have considered it nor prophesied it …’21 Speaking as the head of one of the three Venetian banks at the time, he added that the value of state bonds had plummeted to 40 per cent of their pre-war value and that the state was no longer able to pay interest. Priuli maintained that in turning its face from the sea to the mainland and giving way to dissolute habits Venice had courted its own doom. Over and over again his diaries examine the causes of the shocking reversal of God’s goodwill: mal-administration, delays in the dispensation of justice, corruption, sumptuary laws not enforced and soon forgotten. The habit of wearing what he thought were French fashions at a time when Venice was at war with France was unpatriotic as well as frivolous and corrupt. His fellow patricians had grown flabby