The success of Francis was complete. Cardona withdrew to Naples. The Pope began to treat. The Swiss, though the Forest Cantons were opposed to peace, were sick of a league which had left all the hard work to them and did not even supply the sinews of war. Sforza surrendered the castles of Milan and Cremona and became a pensioner of France. In December the Pope and King met in Bologna, and conditions were arranged which restored peace between the Holy See and the Most Christian King. But the claims of Venice still presented difficulties, and Maximilian could not acquiesce in the occupation of Milan. The Swiss League was seriously divided. Eight cantons were ready for a peace, even for a league with France, but five were eager to renew the struggle. With the aid of these latter Maximilian invaded Milan in March, 1516; but the Swiss were unwilling to fight against their countrymen in French service, and finally the imperial host broke up. In November the whole Swiss League concluded an everlasting peace with Francis. Early in the same year Ferdinand had died, and his successor, Charles, was not for the present ready to take up his heritage of hostility to France. So at Noyon it was arranged between Charles and Francis to dispose of Naples by way of marriage (August, 1516); and at length, in December, the Emperor made terms at Brussels, which closed the war of Cambray by a precarious truce. Soon after Verona was restored to Venice, who had in the interval conquered Brescia.
Here we may halt, while war is hushed awhile, to glance at the results of all these years of strife. France is established temporarily in Milan, Spain more lastingly in Naples. The extent of the papal possessions has been increased, and the papal rule therein has been made firmer and more direct. A close alliance between the Papacy and the interests of the Medici family has been established. Venice has recovered all her territory, though the sacrifices of the war and the shifting of trade-routes will prevent her from ever rising again to her former pride of place. The short-lived appearance of the Swiss among the great and independent powers of Europe is at an end. The international forces of the West have assumed the forms and the proportions that they are to retain for many years to come.
Little has been accomplished to compensate for all this outpouring of blood and treasure. The political union of the Italian nation is as far removed as ever. Misfortune has proved no cure for moral degeneration. Little patriotism worthy of the name has been called out by these cruel trials; the obstinate resistance of Pisa, the steadfastness and endurance of Venice, show local patriotism at its best, but Italian patriotism is far to seek.
Though almost every province of Italy has been devastated in its turn, though many flourishing cities have been sacked, and the wealth of all has been drained by hostile or protecting armies, literature, learning, and art do not appear at first to feel the blight. The age of the war of Cambray is also the age of Bramante, Michel Angelo, and Raffaelle. Julius II is not only the scourge of Italy, but the patron of art. The greatest or at least the most magnificent age of Venetian art is the age of her political and commercial declension. The vigorous vitality that had been fostered in half a century of comparative peace served to sustain the Renaissance movement through many years of war and waste. Peace multiplies wealth, and art is the fosterchild of wealth; but wealth is not its true parent. No statistician’s curve can render visible the many causes of the rise and fall of art. The definite decline, which is perceptible after the sack of Rome, may be due in part to economic changes, and those to the influence of war, but its fundamental causes are spiritual and moral, and elude all material estimation.
As a chapter in military history the period is full of interest. The individual heroism of panoplied knights still plays its part amid the shock of disciplined armies at Novara or at Marignano. Yet in all the battles and campaigns we see the tactics and strategy of infantry working towards a higher evolution, in which Swiss and German and Spaniard each bears his part. Hand fire-arms, though constantly employed, seldom appear to influence results. On the other hand at Ravenna the skilful use of artillery determined for the first time the issue of an important battle. And the art of military engineers, especially that of mining, shows considerable advance.
War plays its part in promoting the intercourse of nations and in spreading the arts of peace. Captive Italy made her domination felt, not only in France, but also in Germany and Spain. But apart from this meagre and indirect result we look in vain for any of the higher motives or tendencies that sometimes direct the course of armies and the movement of nations. Greed, ambition, the lust of battle, the interests of dynasties, such are the forces that seem to rule the fate of Italy and Europe. Yet amidst this chaos of blind and soulless strife the scheme and equilibrium of the western world is gradually taking shape.
CHAPTER V. FLORENCE (I): SAVONAROLA, by Edward Armstrong
HAD Girolamo Savonarola died before the French invasion of 1494 he would scarcely have been distinguished above other missionary friars, who throughout the fifteenth century strove faithfully to revive the flagging religion of Italy. The French King and the Italian Dominican were poles asunder in character and aims, yet their fortunes were curiously linked. On Charles VIII’s first success Savonarola became a personage in history, and his own fate was sealed by the Frenchman’s death. The Friar’s public career was very short, less than four years in all, but, apostle of peace as he was, it was a truceless war. Nor did the grave bring peace. Savonarola’s ashes were cast into the running Arno, yet they seem to be burning still. Twenty years after his death the old passions which his life had fired blazed up in Florence yet more fiercely; his followers held the town against Pope and Emperor without, against Medicean and aristocrat within. Until this very day Catholics and Protestants, Dominicans and Jesuits, men of spiritual and men of secular temperament, fight over Savonarola’s memory with all the old zest of the last decade of the fifteenth century.
San Bernardino and Savonarola were both missionary friars; not half a century divided them; they made their homes in neighbour towns; their objects were similar or the same; neither could claim from the other the palm of personal holiness or unselfish sacrifice. Yet how very different were their ends, how different their fate in after history! The impersonal symbol of the one, the IHS, is set in its blue and primrose disc as in a summer sundown; the stern figure of the other, grasping the crucifix, stands out in its medal against a lowering sky rent by the sword of an avenging God. Why is the preacher of madcap Siena an admitted Saint, and why does the merest hint of the canonisation of the evangelist of sober Florence convert men of peace into fiery controversialists throughout Western Europe?
Savonarola’s early life was as uneventful as that of most preaching friars. His grandfather, a Paduan, was a physician of repute at the court of Ferrara; his father a nonentity even for the hagiologist; his stronger characteristics have been attributed, as is usual, to his Mantuan mother. He thus had no inheritance in the keen, rarefied air from the Tuscan mountains, which is believed to brace the intellect and add intensity to the imagination of the dwellers in the Arno valley; he was a child of the north-eastern waterlands, more sluggish in intellectual movement but swept from time to time by storms of passion. Girolamo refused to enter his grandfather’s profession for which he was brought up; he secretly left home to enter the Order of St Dominic at Bologna. He preached later at Ferrara, but was no prophet in his own country, and was thence ordered to Florence to join the convent of Lombard Dominican Observantists who had been established by Cosimo de’ Medici in San Marco. Successful in teaching novices, he failed as a preacher until he found his natural gift of utterance among a more simple, less critical congregation at San Gimignano. His reputation was made at Brescia, and it is noticeable that in both these cases the fire of eloquence was kindled by a spirit of prophecy; the people were spell-bound by the denunciation of wrath to come. When he returned to Florence he stood on a different plane; the Florentines always gave a warm welcome to a reputation. In the following year (1491) he was elected Prior of San Marco. As this convent was under the peculiar patronage of the ruling house of Medici, Savonarola was in a position to become a leader of Florentine opinion.