THE SECRET OF HER INFLUENCE.
The recent reprint, and large circulation of the "Legend" and Letters of St. Catherine, give a present interest to her story, which it would otherwise want, and indicate but too clearly, that her influence is not a mere thing of the past, but a living and active fact. But the causes and nature of this influence are far from being a secret to those who have paid any attention to the present condition of Italy, and who understand the modus operandi, and policy of a church, the whole purpose, scope, and meaning of whose being, is the preservation of its own existence, and that of the sovereigns, its partners and accomplices in the subjugation and plundering of the people. And the direct and indirect uses of Saintly literature towards this end, however well worthy of being studied, form no proper part of the present subject. The influence, far more difficult to be accounted for, which Catherine cannot be denied to have exercised over Popes and Kings, her contemporaries, is what should be here explained, as far as any explanation can be found for it.
That none such must be sought in the literary qualities of her writings, has probably been made sufficiently manifest. When every allowance has been made for the intellectual difference, which may be supposed to exist between a fourteenth century and a nineteenth century reader, it still remains incredible, that such missives, as that above translated from the Saint's Italian, should, irrespectively of any otherwise manifested claims of the sender of them, have been found powerfully persuasive by those to whom they were addressed. We have no proof, indeed, that this especial letter did produce any effect on the King of France. And with regard to the letters written to Urban, after the breaking out of the schism, it may be argued, that, whatever he may have privately thought of Catherine's pretensions and powers, he was no doubt too well aware of the importance an enthusiastic, well accredited Saint, might be of to his party, to think of throwing cold water on her zeal and exertions. The success of her mission to Avignon, however, and the employment of her intercession with the Pope by the rulers of Florence, testify abundantly to the esteem in which she was held.
Can it be supposed, that the wide-spread reputation she acquired, and the marvellous power she exercised, were derived from the impression made on her contemporaries by her virtues, the purity of her life, the earnestness of benevolence, and the zeal of her charity? But that would be to attribute to mere goodness a power over one of the most corrupt generations in the history of the world, which it has never been seen able to exert over any age. It would be to attribute to the virtue of Catherine a triumph, which the infinitely more perfect virtue of One infinitely greater than she failed to achieve.
Of all possible solutions this would be the least compatible with the conditions of the age in which she lived. But the low morality, to which mere purity of life would have appealed in vain, was especially favourable to the powerful and successful operation of another class of the Saint's pretensions. In proportion as the intellectual and moral darkness of men make a spiritual conception of Deity more and more impossible to them, are they prone in the desolation of their unacknowledged, but none the less effective atheism, to accept with ready awe and reverential fear any such gross material manifestations, as profess to reveal to them a God sufficiently ungodly not to be disturbingly out of place in their scheme of life and eternity. Those "ages of faith," therefore, whose title to that appellation consists in their eager readiness to accept and believe any quantity of such miracles as could be conceived to proceed only from the will of a God created in the likeness of a very unspiritual man, were probably as little faithful to any spiritually profitable ideal of the Divine nature, as any generations since the dawn of Christianity.
To such ages Catherine was admirably adapted to appeal with remarkable force and success. Her strength of will, and her infirmity of body, both contributed to produce the effect to be explained. The first, as evidenced by the unflinchingly persevering infliction of self-torments, such as would have been wholly intolerable to a weaker will, and by continued exertion under suffering, weakness, and malady, made a large and important part of the saintly character; as the same qualities differently evidenced would have led to eminence in any career, and in any age. But joined to this potent strength of will may be observed evidences of a very remarkable degree of spiritual egotism, and "the pride that apes humility." The poor Sienese dyer's daughter must have been one of those rare natures, to whom the quiet obscure career marked out for them, as it might seem, irrevocably by the circumstances of their birth, was an intolerable impossibility. A woman, poor, plebeian, unlettered, frail in health, and in the fourteenth century! Surely no possible concatenation of circumstances could be devised, from which it would appear so impossible to emerge into power and celebrity! But the "Io Caterina schiava dei servi di Dio," of the letters, who thinks that entire nations shall be accepted or rejected as reprobate by the Eternal in accordance with the measure of HER merits or demerits, and who bargains with God to bear in HER own person the sacrilegious sin of a whole revolted people!—this Caterina was one whom no position could doom to the obscurity intolerable to such idiosyncrasies. And she rushed forth with uncontrollable determination on the one only path open to her;—not by any means necessarily with the conscious intention of making hypocritical use of the profession of sanctity for the achievement of distinction; but driven by the unrecognised promptings of ambition to the determination to excel in the department of human endeavour, which all contemporary opinion pointed out to her, as the highest, holiest, and noblest, open to mankind.
But the peculiar infirmity to which she was subject contributed a part of her extraordinary adaptability to the career she was to run, fully as important as any of the elements of strength in her character. Not only did her frequent cataleptic trances obtain from the people the most unhesitating belief in her supernatural communion with God, and in the miraculous visions which she related, in all probability with perfect sincerity, as having taken place therein; but they had as powerful a subjective as an objective effect. The Saint arose from each of these abnormal conditions of existence, nerved for fresh endurance, armed with increased pretensions, and animated with renewed enthusiasm, the result of hallucinations produced by the intensity of her waking wishes, imaginations, and aspirations.
To these fortunately combined elements of success must be added a third, perhaps hardly less essential to it than either. Catherine, with her equally valuable and rare gifts and infirmities, fell from the outset of her career into hands well skilled and well able to make the most of them. She was from the beginning a devoted member of the great Order of St. Dominick; and it may be doubted on which side lies the balance of obligation between the Saint and her order. If she was to them a fruitful source of credit, profit, and power, they afforded her a status, worldly-wisdom, and backing, without which she could not have attained the position she did. She had for her confessor and special adviser one whom we must suppose to have been the most notable man among the Dominicans of his time, inasmuch as he became their General. And we have seen enough of this able monk in his quality of Saint-leader, to authorise the belief, that he was quite ready to supply as much of the wisdom of the serpent, as might be needed to bring to a good working alloy the Saint's dove-like simplicity. In what exact proportions the metal was thus run, that was brought to bear on the Popes and other great people so strangely influenced by Catherine, it is impossible to say. But there will be little danger of error in concluding, that the effect of either ingredient solely would not have been the same.
Finally, should it still seem difficult to believe, that two fourteenth century Popes, one a mild Frenchman, and the other an overbearing and choleric Italian, should have accepted the Sienese Virgin as a special messenger from Heaven, have really credited her miraculous pretensions, and have accorded a respect to her epistles on the score of their being inspired (which they assuredly would not have yielded to them as simply human compositions), it may be suggested, that men placed in the position of those Popes may possibly not have sincerely believed all that they deemed it politic to seem to believe. The miracle-working Saint, who came with such a man as Father Raymond to prompt her, backed by all the power and interest of the Dominican Order, with the ambassadorial credentials of the revolted and dangerous community of Florence in her hand, and with almost unlimited power of moving and directing the passions of large masses of the populace, was not a personage to be set at nought by a prudent Pontiff in the position of either Gregory XI. or Urban VI.
The history of Catherine's Saintship since her canonisation has been too much the same, as that of all her brethren and sisters of the calendar, to make it at all interesting to enter into details of the "dulia"—not worship! observe Protestant reader!—offered to her. She has her chapels, her relics, her candles, her office, her day, her devotees, like the rest of Rome's holy army. But what she could not be permitted to have, despite the recognition of Urban VIII., in 1628, was a claim to blood-relationship with the noble family of Borghese. Whether the Saint's heraldic backers were correct in attributing to her such an honour, or those of the Borghese right in disputing the fact, it is clear that that remarkably noble family had not sufficient respect for saintly reputation, however exalted, to endure that a dyer's daughter, let her have been what she might, should mar by her vicinity the nobleness of the many barbarous barons and worthless knights who have borne the family name. So great was the outcry they raised, that Urban VIII. was obliged infallibly to unsay his previous saying on the subject.
By way of a conclusion, which, while it shows, that in the case of Catherine at least, there is an exception to the rule that excludes a prophet from honour in his own country, proves also that the subject of her Saintship is not a matter of mere historical interest, but aspires to the dignity of an "actualité," an anecdote may be told of the present Pope's recent journey through Tuscany.
Arrived at Siena, he too, like his predecessors, either thought it holy, or thought it politic, to pay due attention to the popular Saint in her own city. He accordingly directed the Saint's head, in its setting of silver and precious stones, to be brought from the Dominican church to his lodging in the Grand-ducal palace. But the populace of the city, especially the women of the ward in which the Saint was born, estimated the value of the precious relic so much more highly than they did the honesty of the Pontiff, that they insisted on not losing sight of their treasure, and could hardly be persuaded that Pio Nono had no burglarious intentions respecting it.
CATERINA SFORZA.
1462.-1509.
Of Catherine's father, the Duke, and of his magnificent journey to Florence.
The latter years of the fifteenth century, up to 1494, were a time of unusual prosperity in Italy. Never since the fall of the Roman empire, one thousand years previously, says Guicciardini,[43] had she enjoyed a period so flourishing and happy. "Reposing in perfect peace and tranquillity," continues the great historian, "cultivated in the more sterile and mountainous regions, as well as in the plains and fertile districts, subject to none save her native rulers, she not only abounded with inhabitants, trade, and wealth, but was especially adorned by the magnificence of a great number of princes, by the splendour of many noble and beautiful cities, by the majesty of the supreme seat of religion, and by the excellence of her great men in every art, pursuit, and science."
Of these noble and wealthy cities, Milan was one of the noblest and wealthiest; and Galeazzo Maria Sforza, its Duke, was one of the princes who most notably "adorned Italy with his magnificence." The Visconti had reigned there from 1277, till the death of Filippo, the last Duke of that race, in 1447, without heirs male. He had, some years before his death, given his daughter Bianca, and the succession to his duchy, to the celebrated soldier of fortune Francesco Sforza. And the magnificent Galeazzo, whose lot fell on the halcyon times described by Guicciardini, was the son of Francesco and Bianca, and succeeded his father in 1466.
Now, in the smiling and happy city of Milan, in these merry days of the good old time, there lived, eating his polenta, paying church-dues and taxes, and so pursuing, as quietly as he might, his way to dusty death among a crowd bound for the same bourne, a citizen named John Peter Landriano. To this John Peter, also, it might have been permitted to sleep in tranquil oblivion together with the others of his probably polenta-eating, and certainly tax-paying, fellow-citizens, instead of being still, after now four hundred years, thus extant, despite his "fallentis semita vitæ," had not Mnemosyne marked him for her own, by right of one small fact. He was the husband of a remarkably beautiful wife, named somewhat unhappily Lucretia, on whom it pleased his magnificent Highness Galeazzo Maria to look with condescension in the year 1462. In a later part of that same year, the family of John Peter Landriano was increased by the birth of a female child, named Catherine, whom his Highness was so good as to consider and educate as his own.
This splendid prince, who was, as Catherine's priestly biographer,[44] Burriel, informs us, more bookishly inclined than could have been expected from a person of his exalted rank, took care that her education should be sedulously attended to by some of the learned persons who abounded in his court. And he had reason to be so well contented with the promise of her early years, that shortly after she had reached the age of eight, he caused her to be "legitimatised "—a curious process, which would seem to prove that, though not Jove himself has power o'er the past, Holy Mother Church possesses it.
Thenceforward Catherine's education was conducted under the superintendence of the Duchess Bona, a princess of the house of Savoy, whom Duke Galeazzo married in 1468 after the death of his first wife, Dorotea Gonzaga, by whom he had no child. It is to be supposed, probably, that the process of "legitimation," among its other mysterious virtues, had that of inspiring a good church-woman with maternal feelings for the offspring of another; for the Duchess Bona, who seems to have been a kind and gentle rather than a royal-souled lady, appears to have affectionately welcomed the little stranger as a princess of the noble house of Sforza, and to have done her best to prepare her duly for the high fortunes to which her father destined her, as a means of extending the connections and assuring the greatness of his house.
Such schemes, and others directed to the same end, formed the principal serious occupation of the Italian princes of that time, and were the fruitful source of atrocities and abominations innumerable, as the reader of Italian history well knows. To a certain degree such ambition found its excuse in the great law of self-preservation. For in the perpetually shifting scene produced by the alliances, jealousies, leagues, ruptures, friendships and treasons, of a crowd of petty potentates, it was well nigh impossible for any family of princely rank to hold its own, neither encroaching itself, nor encroached on by others. The fortunes of each were ever on the rise, or on the decline. And at the period of our heroine's appearance on the scene, the peace, which Italy was then enjoying, was preserved only by a careful maintenance of the balance of power between some four or five of the leading princes of the peninsula.
How large a portion of the labours and of the abilities of statesmen has been devoted to the perpetual trimming of this troublesome balance, at a later period of the world's history on the great theatre of Europe, we all know. And it is interesting to observe how thoroughly the theory was understood, and how perfectly and sedulously reduced to practice by exceedingly accomplished professors of the art of state-craft, in the miniature world shut off from the rest of Europe by the Alps. Indeed, the smallness of the objects to be weighed against each other rendered the task of keeping the scales even in that microcosm a peculiarly delicate one. Where very small matters were capable of disarranging the adjustment of the balance, only great dexterity and prudence could preserve the equilibrium. And accordingly, the game of checking and counter-checking, far-sighted schemes of attack, and still more cunningly devised means for future defence, was carried on upon that small chess-board with a perfection of duplicity, vigilance, and small vulpine sagacity, which might give a lesson to most modern professors of the same art.
Ferdinand of Aragon at Naples, Popes Paul II., and his successor Sixtus IV. at Rome, Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, Galeazzo Maria Sforza at Milan, and the Republic of Venice,[45] were the powers between whom and by whom the balance of power, the peace of Italy, and the possessions of each of them, were to be preserved. The first four of these were, at the time in question, united in a common course of policy by the necessity of watching and keeping in check the ambitious Queen of the Adriatic, far more powerful than any one of the four, though much less so than all of them together. The rest of Italy, not comprised in the above five states, consisted of a crowd of petty principalities, which served singularly to complicate the game played by the great players, and to increase the interest of its vicissitudes. If endowed with any military talent, these small princes of a city and its immediate neighbourhood would take service as generals of the forces, in the pay of one or other of their more powerful neighbours. And in this way several of them became important elements in the calculations of those potentates. Some, again, would die without heirs male, and leave their female successors, daughter or widow, a prize to be scrambled for by the royal crowd always on the look out for such windfalls. Others were perpetually at feud with their own subjects, and thus gave an opportunity to some neighbour to intervene on behalf of one or the other party, with the same ultimate result. Finally, (and this was perhaps the way in which they most seriously compromised the tranquillity and influenced the destinies of Italy)—they formed the material from which each new Pope, who was anxious to be the founder of a princely family sought to carve out a dominion for his "nephews" by any of those arts of fraud or intimidation, of which Rome was so consummate a mistress.
No sooner had Catherine's legitimation given her the value of a piece on the political chess-board, than she became involved in the moves of the game. At a very early age she had been promised in marriage to the Count Onorato Torelli, scion of a noble family, which had in the preceding generation given valuable support to the Sforzas, ere their star was so decidedly in the ascendant. But Catherine became a princess; the young Onorato very conveniently died; and Duke Galeazzo conceived schemes for selling his daughter in a better market. The Manfredi were lords of Imola, a neat little city, situated in the midst of a rich alluvial territory between the foot of the Apennines and the Adriatic, about twenty miles to the south of Bologna; a compact and very desirable little sovereignty in short, with taxes capable of an increased yield in the hands of an enterprising possessor.
Now it so happened, that Tadeo Manfredi, the reigning prince, was involved in a dangerous quarrel with Guidazzo, his son, who complained that his spendthrift father was loading "the property" with an unconscionable amount of debt. And this uncomfortable state of things was talked over at the splendid court of Milan. Whereupon Duke Galeazzo came forward with a proposition, which he hoped would prove acceptable to all parties. He would assign within the limits of his duchy an appanage to Tadeo, would pay that extravagant old gentleman's debts, and would give his daughter Catherine, with the lordship of Imola, which was thenceforth to be his, to Guidazzo. The bargain certainly appeared advantageous enough to the Manfredi. The debts would be paid, and Guidazzo the heir, would after all be lord of his father's state; and whether in his own right, or that of his wife, would not so much signify.
But that little lady was, at the time she was thus disposed of, scarcely more than eight or nine years old. Poor Guidazzo had therefore to content himself with the promise of her hand, when she should have reached a marriageable age. And never was there period in the world's history, or clime on its surface, where slips between cup and lip were more abundant than in those good old times on the sunny side of the Alps.
Meanwhile old Tadeo is shelved on the estate of Castelnuovo, near Alessandria; Imola and its territory has passed into the hands of Duke Galeazzo; and young Guidazzo is dangling about the gay and magnificent court of Milan, and deems his fortune is a ripening, while his promised bride is daily growing in grace, beauty, and princely accomplishments, under the hot-house influences of the same splendid and dazzling environment.[46]
Dazzling indeed was the pomp, and ostentatiously reckless the expenditure of wealth, amid which Catherine passed those years of her life, when the impressions eagerly received from external objects are the most busy in forming the taste, and modifying the character. For the age was one of rapidly increasing luxury and riches. And the parvenu sovereign of Milan was especially bent on eclipsing his peers, and proving his right to his position among them by an unrivalled display of all that tailors, upholsterers, mercers, and jewellers can do towards creating the majesty that should hedge a king.
It was very shortly after he had concluded the arrangements for Catherine's future marriage, that, fired with this right royal ambition, Galeazzo determined on a festal journey to Florence, Lucca, Pisa, and so home by Genoa. Lorenzo, "the Magnificent," was sovereign in all save name at Florence, and now he was to be shown that Milan's Duke could advance a better claim to so proud a title. The Duchess Bona accompanied him. And from the provision of no less than twelve litters, it may be concluded that the other female members of his family, and doubtless Catherine among them, were of the party. These litters are called by a contemporary writer,[47] carts—"caretti"—but he adds that they were carried on mules over the mountains. The carts were covered with awnings of cloth of gold, embroidered with the ducal arms; and the "mattresses and feather beds" which were laid in the bottoms of them, were some of cloth of gold, some of silver, and some of crimson satin.
All the great feudatories who held of the Duke, and all the members of his council, each followed by several splendidly dressed servants, attended him. All the members of the ducal household were clothed in velvet. Forty footmen were decorated with golden collars, and other forty with embroidery. The Duke's grooms were dressed in silk, ornamented with silver. There were fifty led horses, with housings of cloth of gold, and gilt stirrups; an hundred men-at-arms, "each dressed as if he were a captain;" five hundred foot soldiers, all picked men; an hundred mules, covered with cloth of gold; and fifty magnificently caparisoned pages. Two thousand other horses, and two hundred more mules, all covered with rich damask, carried the baggage of the multitudinous host. Five hundred couples of hounds, with huntsmen and falcons and falconers in proportion, together with trumpeters, players, mimes, and musicians, made part of the monstrous cortège.[48]
Let the reader picture to himself this gilded and velvet covered army, slowly wending in long slender file, glistening dazzlingly in the southern sun, but grievously tormented under their ponderously magnificent trappings by the same, as they laboured over the steep and sinuous Apennine paths, by which alone they could reach mountain-girt Florence. For only a difficult bridle-path then crossed those mountains, over which the traveller now rolls in his carriage between Modena and Florence. Let him imagine, too, the camp of the brilliant, but wayworn host, pitched for the night amid the shelter of a chestnut? forest, in the midst of those wild hills, where even now, and much less then, there is neither town nor village capable of housing a tithe of such a multitude. And further, while amusing his fancy with such gorgeous and picturesque imaginings, let him not forget, that every yard of this cloth-of-gold, and richly-tinted velvet, represented the value of some horny palm's hard labour, the sweat of some weary brow, wrung from the wronged labourer by the most cruel and lawless severities of extortion.
But while the Duke and his Court were startling the world with the glories of this unprecedented cavalcade, making awe-struck peasants wonder, emulous peers envy, and angels weep, there were three young nobles, who had remained at home at Milan, engaged in reading "certain passages of Roman history" with their schoolmaster, one Cola Montano. Their names were Giovanni Andrea Lampugnano, Girolamo Olgiato, and Carlo Visconti; and, I dare say, descendants of theirs, whether under those names or others, may yet be found in the fair city of Milan; and perhaps they may be equally fond of reading the Roman history,—an occupation, it might be supposed, as innocent, though not so fatiguing, as riding over the Apennines in a suit of cloth of gold. Yet the reverend and right-minded historian,[49] who mentions the circumstance, speaks of their occupation with much disgust and indignation. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps "certain passages of Roman history" are not wholesome reading for the subjects of splendid princes.
For the present, however, we will let Galeazzo ride on in his glory, and the young gentlemen pursue their story-fed meditations in tranquillity at Milan.
The Duke arrived at Florence on the 13th of March, and was magnificently received by the magnificent Lorenzo, who entertained him and his family in his own house, while the enormous body of his retainers and followers were lodged and fed at the cost of the city. The Florentine historian, Ammirato,[50] after having enumerated all the particulars of the pomp detailed above, goes on in the true spirit of the old Italian city-patriotism to maintain, that Galeazzo, "for all that, young and proud, and the minion of Fortune, as he was, found himself obliged to admit that all his splendour was outdone by the magnificence of Lorenzo," inasmuch as the precious treasures of the Medici were far more admirable from the artistic excellence of the workmanship, than from the mere value of the material. "He could not but confess," continues the partisan of the Italian Athens, "that art had a higher value than mere costliness, as being attainable only by more arduous labour, and with greater difficulty; while he declared, that in all Italy he had not seen so great a number of paintings by the first masters, of gems, beautiful vases, statues ancient and modern, bronzes, medals, and rare books, as he now saw collected in the palace of the Medici;—treasures which he should esteem cheaply purchased by any quantity of silver or gold."
Florence did all she could for the amusement of her princely guests. But as it was in time of Lent, she could not, as she did twelve years previously, when Galeazzo had visited the city as a boy, show him a "hunt," as the historian calls it,[51] of wolves, boars, lions, and a giraffe, on the Piazza of Santa Croce! To be "like the time," it was necessary that the dissipations should be of an ecclesiastical character. So the gallant company were treated to a representation of the Annunciation in the church of St. Felice, to the Ascension in the church of the Carmine, and to the descent of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles, at the church of the Santo Spirito.[52] The souls of the Lombards, says Ammirato, were filled with admiration of the wonderful artifices and ingenuity displayed on this occasion. And all passed off with the greatest éclat, save that the church of Santo Spirito was burned to the ground by the forked tongues of fire.
This little accident was the only circumstance, that tended, says the historian, to mingle some flavour of bitterness with the general rejoicing. But the graver citizens of the republic complained that the brilliant Duke, when he started two days after this disaster on his return to his own states, full of compliments and admiration at his hospitable reception, left behind him among the young Florentine nobles a taste for profusion and display, which was a far greater evil than the enormous expense to which the city had been put, including the cost of rebuilding their burned church.
A Franciscan Pope and a Franciscan Cardinal.—A notable illustration of the proverb concerning mendicant's rides.—The Nemesis of Despotism.
The first news that reached the Court of Milan, after the return of the Duke, full of gratified vanity and glorification from his progress, was that of the death of Pope Paul II.,—that superb old man, who, if he had none other of the qualities befitting the head of the Church, yet at least looked every inch a Pope; of whom one of the chroniclers of the time says, that not having succeeded very well in his attempts at literary culture, "he determined to make his pontificate reputable by ornamental pomp, in which his majestic presence, and pre-eminently tall and noble person helped him not a little, giving him, as it did, the appearance of a new Aaron, venerable and reverend beyond that of any other Pontiff."
And the tidings of the death of this magnificent lay-figure Pope were very shortly followed by the yet more interesting news of the election of his successor, on the 9th of August, 1471.
This successor was Francesco della Rovere, who had risen from the cell of a Franciscan friar by his merit as a scholar and theologian, and by his eloquence as a preacher, to be first, General of his order, then Cardinal; and now reached, as Sixtus IV., the highest aim of an ecclesiastic's ambition. He was the son of a poor fisherman of the coast near Savona. For the fiction of the heralds, who found for him a place in the genealogy of the noble family of the same name, was an afterthought of the time, when such a relationship was acceptable to all the parties concerned. For though the Borghesi decidedly objected, as we have seen, to own any connection with a roturiere saint, the Della Rovere were well pleased enough to find a kinsman in a Pope, whose greatness manifested an immediate tendency to take a quite terrestrial and tangible shape.
For this barefooted mendicant friar—the vowed disciple of that St. Francis whom no degree of poverty would satisfy short of meeting his death naked and destitute on the bare earth—this monk, sworn to practise an humility abject in the excess of its utter self-abnegation, was the first of a series of popes who one after the other sacrificed every interest of the Church, waded mitre deep in crime and bloodshed, and plunged Italy into war and misery, for the sake of founding a princely family of their name.
It is curious to observe, that generally throughout the pontifical history, scandalously infamous popes and tolerably decent popes, are found in bunches, or series of six or eight in succession; a striking proof of the fact that when they have been of the better sort, the amelioration has been due to some force of circumstance operative from without. Never were they worse, with perhaps one or two exceptions, than during the century which preceded the first quickly-crushed efforts of the Reformation in Italy—from about 1450, that is to say, down to 1550. Competing Protestantism then began to act on the Roman Church exactly as competing Methodism acted on the Anglican Church three centuries later; and a series of Popes of a different sort was the result.
But the conduct of the great family-founding popes, which strikes us, looking at it through the moral atmosphere of the nineteenth century, as so monstrous, wore a very different aspect even to the gravest censors among their contemporaries. The Italian historians of the time tell us of the "royal-mindedness" and "noble spirit" of this ambitious Franciscan, Pope Sixtus, in a tone of evident admiration. And the gross worldliness, the low ambition, and the unscrupulous baseness, of which he may fairly be accused, did not seem even to Du Plessis Mornai,[53] and the French Protestant writers of that stamp, to be sufficient ground for denouncing him and the system which produced him. Otherwise they would not have disgraced themselves and their cause by asserting that he was guilty of hideous and nameless atrocities, for which, as the less zealous but more candid Bayle[54] has sufficiently shown, there is no foundation either in fact or probability.
The new Pope lost no time in turning the papacy to the best possible account, in the manner which had for him the greatest attractions. And it so happened that he was singularly well supplied with the raw material from which the edifice of family greatness he was bent on raising was to be furnished forth. He had no less than nine nephews: five of them the sons of his three brothers, and four the sons of his three sisters!—a field for nepotism sufficiently extensive to satisfy the "high-spirited" ambition of even a Sixtus IV. But among all this wealth of nephews, the two sons of his eldest sister, Girolamo and Pietro Riario, were distinguished by him so pre-eminently, that a great many contemporary writers, thinking it strange that he should prefer them to those of his own name, have asserted that these young men were in fact his sons.[55] Giuliano della Rovere, the eldest of all the nine, who received a cardinal's hat from his uncle, but could obtain from him no further favour, was nevertheless destined, as Pope Julius II., to become by far the most important pillar of the family greatness. The course of Catherine's fortunes, however, will justify the present reader in confining his attention, as all Rome was doing in the year 1472, to the two fortunate young men on whom the pontifical sun shone brightest.
Peter Riario was, like his uncle, a Franciscan monk, and was twenty-six years old when the latter was elected. Within a very few months he became Bishop of Treviso, Cardinal-Archbishop of Seville, Patriarch of Constantinople, Archbishop of Valentia, and Archbishop of Florence! From his humble cell, from his ascetic board, from his girdle of rope and woollen frock renewed yearly, and baked occasionally to destroy the vermin bred in its holy filth, this poverty-vowed mendicant suddenly became possessed of revenues so enormous, that his income is said to have been larger than that of all the other members of the Sacred College put together! The stories which have been preserved[56] of his reckless and unprecedented expenditure at Rome, would seem almost incredible were they not corroborated by the fact that he had in a very short time, besides dissipating the enormous wealth assigned to him, incurred debts to the amount of sixty thousand florins! He gave a banquet to the French ambassadors which cost twenty thousand crowns, a sum equal to more than ten times the same nominal amount at the present day. "Never," says the Cardinal of Pavia, "had pagan antiquity seen anything like it. The whole country was drained of all that was rare and precious; and the object of all was to make a display, such as posterity might never be able to surpass.[57] The extent of the preparations, their variety, the number of the dishes, the price of the viands served up, were all registered by inspectors, and were put into verse, of which copies were profusely circulated, not only in Rome, but throughout Italy, and even beyond the Alps."
Girolamo, the brother of this spendthrift monk, and equally a favourite of his uncle, was a layman; and the process of enriching and aggrandising him was necessarily a somewhat slower one. Not even a fifteenth-century pope could accomplish so monstrous an iniquity and insult to humanity as the promotion of Peter Riario in any other branch or department of human affairs save the Church! Girolamo, however, who was, we are told, "not literate," was at once made Captain-General of the pontifical troops, and Governor of the Castle of St. Angelo. And for his further advancement measures were adopted, which, among other advantages, have conferred upon him that of occupying a prominent place in these pages.
For it so happened, that the elevation of Sixtus IV. to the papal throne turned out to be the "slip" which dashed from poor Guidazzo's lips the cup he was waiting for in the shape of the bride, who was to bring back to him as her dower his lost principality of Imola. The tidings from Rome, which were astonishing all history with accounts of the wonderful and unprecedented "greatness" achieved by the Riario brothers, produced a prodigious sensation at the court of Milan. Here was evidently a rising sun worth a little worship! And now, how valuable became our little "legitimatised" Kate, as a means of hooking on our ducal fortunes to the career of this "high-spirited" Pope, and the magnificent nephews so evidently marked out for high destinies! What was Guidazzo and his little state of Imola in comparison to the favourite nephew of a "high-spirited" Pope? And besides, there is no reason to give up Imola, because we give up Guidazzo. Imola is in our own hands, and will make a dower for our daughter by no means unworthy of the consideration of a Franciscan monk's reputed son, about to start on his career of sovereign prince. So Guidazzo may go whistle for his patrimony!
The gorgeous accounts of the Cardinal Peter Riario's unprecedented splendour and reckless prodigality especially touched a sympathetic chord of admiration in the bosom of Maria Galeazzo. The splendid Duke, who lavished on upholstery, festivals, and courtezans, the substance wrung from a groaning people, recognised a kindred spirit in the princely churchman, who expended the revenues of a dozen sees on a banquet and revel. The spirit of noble rivalry, too, was awakened in the Ducal bosom. Here was a man in whose eyes it was worth while to shine, and whose admiration would confer real glory.
It was to the Cardinal, accordingly, that Galeazzo caused the first cautious overtures to be made; and the reception of them was such as to encourage him to entreat his Eminence to honour his poor court with a visit. The Cardinal was nothing loth to accept the invitation. He, too, recognised in the Duke of Milan that "greatness" which was most calculated to excite his sympathy and admiration. He, too, felt, that here was a spirit of his own calibre,—one with whom he would willingly pull together in the arduous work of furthering their mutual fortunes, and vie in the ostentation of magnificence.
The Cardinal's visit to Milan was accordingly arranged with as little delay as possible. He left Rome with a train more like that of the most magnificent of popes, say the chroniclers, than what might befit a cardinal, and reached Milan on the 12th of September, 1473.[58] Great were the preparations made to receive him, and bitter were the groans of the magnificent Duke's hapless subjects under the new extortions necessitated by their master's gorgeous "hospitality." The glittering cavalcade of the lay prince met the no less glittering cavalcade of the ecclesiastical prince at the gates of the city; and, as those were "ages of faith," both proceeded at once to the cathedral to inaugurate the pleasure and business of the meeting by a solemn "Te Deum." So thoroughly did the sanctifying influences of religion, as has been often remarked, pervade every affair of life in those happy times!
All Milan was witness to the festal doings on this notable meeting,—the processioning, revelling, tailoring, gilding, and reckless profusion, which marked the noble rivalry between these two great men. This friendly emulation was pushed to an intensity, which seems unhappily to have led the lay champion in the generous contest to have recourse to disloyal arms against his rival. For a tell-tale gossip of the pestilent race of scribblers has recorded that the great Galeazzo purchased secretly a quantity of imitation gems, and passed them off for real;[59] an anecdote extremely creditable to the fifteenth century artificers in that line. In all the ordinary pastimes and pleasures of the princes of that day, of whatever sort, the splendid Cardinal, though so recently a mendicant friar, was able and willing to run neck and neck with his secular host. But some of Maria Galeazzo's favourite enjoyments were not ordinary. He was ever an avid eye-witness of the executions, tortures, and mutilations, which his duty as a sovereign obliged him frequently to inflict on his subjects. We have indeed on record a sufficient number of instances of princes who had this taste, to justify our deeming it part of a despotic ruler's natural idiosyncrasy. But Galeazzo had stranger, if less maleficent, propensities. He revelled in the sight of death, and human decay. Some strange touch of that insanity, which so frequently, and with such salutary warning, develops itself in minds exposed to the poison that wells out from the possession of unchecked power, influenced, as in such cases it is apt to do, his moral rather than his intellectual nature. He would cause himself to be brought into the presence of the suffering, the dying, and the dead, for the mere pleasure of witnessing pain and destruction. He would rifle graves to gaze on the process of corruption, and haunted charnel-houses, impelled by the instinct of the ghoul, rather than by any touch of that sentiment, which impels the morbid fanatic to seek in such contemplatio a moving sermon on the vanity of human wishes. This man, whose wishes, hopes, and ambitions were as unbridled in their violence as low and vain in their aims and scope, would hurry from the death-chamber to the revel, and from the charnel-house hasten to plot long-sighted intrigues in the council-hall.
For the latter the pleasure-loving Cardinal was as ready as for gala making and revelry. Long conferences were held between the host and his guest in the secrecy of the Duke's private chambers. But princes are more than other men subjected to the vigilant surveillance of those who form their pomp or minister to their service. And their secrets, therefore, are rarely absolutely secret. Accordingly, Corio, the page, chamberlain, and annalist—a dangerous pluralism for better sovereigns than Galeazzo Sforza!—Corio informs us, though qualifying his assertion with a cautious "si dice," that these prolonged discussions had for their object the terms of a bargain between the Duke and the Cardinal, by virtue of which the former was to be exalted into King of Lombardy by the acquisition of sundry provinces from the smaller princes around him, and especially by the conquest of the terra-firma possessions of Venice; while the latter was to be insured the succession to his uncle on the papal throne. This statement of the chamberlain and page has been believed by most subsequent historians. Verri, without any qualification, writes that such was the fact. Rosmini contents himself with saying that such is believed to have been the case.
But alas! for the short span which should forbid such long-sighted hopes. To men who live such lives as his Eminence the Cardinal Riario, the span is apt to be especially short. And as for the Duke ... there are Cola Montano the scholar, and his three young pupils, all the time of this splendid revelry in Milan, reading Roman history harder than ever!
Meanwhile the other business, which had to be settled between the high contracting powers—the marriage of Catherine to Girolamo Riario—though not unattended with those difficulties which naturally arise between parties intent on driving a hard bargain, was at length brought to a satisfactory conclusion. The Duke was to give his daughter the city and territory of Imola, and sixteen thousand ducats, besides certain estates in the Milanese for her separate use. The Pope was to give Girolamo forty thousand ducats, and "expectations;" which, in the case of such a nephew of such a Pope, might fairly be reckoned at a high figure.
The youthful bride, just past her eleventh birthday, was accordingly betrothed publicly to Girolamo Riario, who performed his part of the ceremony by proxy. The young couple had never seen each other; but we are told much of the mutual admiration of the future brother and sister-in-law for each other. The Cardinal was loud in his praises of the beauty, grace, and accomplishments of the hot-house forced child, who was to be made so important a stepping-stone to his brother's fortunes. And she was dazzled and delighted with his magnificence and splendour, and especially charmed, we are assured,[60] by his eloquence!
The luxuriously-nurtured little lady, it may be fancied, would not have appreciated so highly the "eloquence" of the mendicant friar, had he presented himself to her notice in his garb of some three years previously. But when grave historians[61] assure us, that the fortunate monk on his elevation "put on a lofty and imperial spirit," and when all Italy was admiringly marvelling at his cost-despising splendour, a little girl, and she the daughter of Galeazzo Sforza, may be excused for being captivated by one, who appeared to possess in a higher degree than any other man, all that her experience of life had taught her to value.
When these matters had thus been satisfactorily settled, the Cardinal prepared to bring his visit to a conclusion, and informed his host of his intention to pass a short time at Venice before returning to Rome. The Duke strongly urged him to abandon any such idea. The secret schemes which they had been engaged in concocting, were mainly based on the intended spoliation of the great republic. Uneasy suspicions, as the chroniclers mention, had already been aroused in various courts by the prolonged conferences of the Duke and his guest. The Signory of Venice had proverbially long ears, and unscrupulous arms at its command. It might well be, urged the Duke, that at the present conjuncture, Venice might not be so safe a place of sojourn for his Eminence as could be wished. Probably, also, Sforza had jealous suspicions that Riario's business at Venice might possibly be to play a double game,—to throw him over in case contingencies might arise to make such a policy expedient,—and to prepare his way with the Signory for any such eventualities.
At all events his representations and endeavours were in vain. The Cardinal was bent on visiting Venice; and to Venice he went. In all probability his leading motive was to exhibit his magnificence to the nobles of perhaps the richest and most pleasure-loving capital in Italy. Nowhere did that taste for show and festive pomp, which was so especially his own, prevail to so insane a degree as among the money-making nobles of the Queen of the Adriatic.
The celebrated "Compagnia della Calza," or Guild of the Stocking, was flourishing there, and distinguishing itself by extravagances altogether in the taste of the brilliant Franciscan Cardinal. This stocking brotherhood, which derived its name from the circumstance of each member wearing parti-coloured hose, differently quartered with brilliant colours, was instituted by the wealthy young nobles,—the jeunesse dorée of pleasure-loving Venice—for the avowed purpose of encouraging magnificence in dress, and of providing opportunities for the exhibition of it by organising those gala spectacles and pomps, which so many of the gorgeous artists of the republic have perpetuated on their glowing canvas. The description[62] given us of their costume is made up of velvet, satin, embroidery, cloth of gold, brocade and jewels. On the long pointed hood which hung at their backs, was embroidered the heraldic cognisance of each man's family; which was repeated on that part of the black or red cap, which hung pendant over the ear. The hair, which was kept as long and as abundant as possible, was tied up with a cord of silk. The doublets generally of velvet, were worn with slashed sleeves showing a portion of fine linen underneath, and tied with silken cords ornamented with tassels of solid gold. In the hand it was the mode to carry a ball containing perfumes.
The Cardinal, Archbishop of so many churches, was ambitious of exhibiting his magnificence among these illustrious youths, and taking a part in their gorgeous revels. Despite the prognostications of the Duke of Milan, he was received with all honour by the Venetians, hailed as a worthy compeer by the heroes of the parti-coloured stocking, fêted to his heart's content, and taken leave of, when towards the end of the year he started on his return to Rome, with every demonstration of respect and friendship.
But there were ancient Senators in Venice, very gravely sitting in one of those thick-walled smaller chambers on the second floor of the Ducal palace, reading despatches in cypher from secret agents, taking secret counsel together, and making secret provision for the safety of the republic, while the jeunesse dorée and the gay and gallant guest, who had so recently been plotting against the Queen of the Adriatic, were dazzling the citizens with their gilding and parti-coloured hose.... And it did so happen, that the young Cardinal died from some cause or other, a few days after his arrival in Rome.
Mnemosyne says nothing; since she knows nothing on the subject, beyond the facts here set down. But she may be permitted to observe, on the one hand, that fifteenth-century dissipation was particularly destructive of human life, and that the Cardinal had evidently for some time past been leading a life to kill any man;—and on the other hand, that as a specimen of the good old times, the very general contemporary suspicion that St. Mark's lion had stretched out on this occasion a long and stealthy paw, comes much to the same thing as evidence of character, as if the deed itself were chronicled.[63]
The Cardinal died on the 5th of January, 1474, to the great grief of Pope Sixtus, says Corio,[64] and to the infinite delight of the whole college of Cardinals. The indignation caused by the accumulation of so many scandalous vices, and so many rich benefices on one pair of purple shoulders, manifested itself after the wonted fashion of the eternal city in a volley of epigrams and satirical epitaphs more savage than witty. One somewhat to the following effect,[65] was found placarded on the monument raised over his remains by the afflicted Pope:
"Once more let worth, and long lost virtue reign,
And vice be banish'd from its throne in Rome!
Rogues, wretches, profligates, and all their train
No more shall find on Latian soil their home;
For he, the plague-spot of our church and state,
Peter, is gone to meet in hell his fate."
Orthodox Burriel, however, assures us, that all the malicious outpourings of envious hate were silenced and put to shame by the following victorious couplet in the genuine decorous tombstone style.
"Sage in his prime!—'tis that has caused our tears;
Death from his virtues deemed him full of years."
Among the select minority, who truly mourned the premature death of this youthful sage, the Duke of Milan and his daughter may be safely reckoned. The marriage arranged wholly by him might very possibly run risk of being broken off. And in any case the Duke's ulterior and more ambitious schemes were nipped in the bud.
Catherine was, however, as her biographer assures us, "infinitely rejoiced and comforted" by an early courier from Rome, bearing assurances, that her unseen bridegroom and his august kinsman had no intention of allowing the Cardinal's death to make any difference in the arrangements for the marriage.
Let the reader's mind dwell a moment on the "infinite rejoicing and comfort" of this eleven-year-old princess, at the news that she was not after all to lose her marriage with an unseen stranger;—remembering the while that, making allowance for longitude and latitude, we Northerns may for "eleven" read thirteen or fourteen.
The Duke prudently hastened to make peace with his powerful and dangerous neighbours, the Venetians, and having accomplished this, soothed his disappointment by giving a magnificent reception to some envoys sent to him by the Sultan of Egypt; a circumstance so novel in Europe, as greatly to exalt, we are told, the name and glory of the house of Sforza among neighbouring, and even among transalpine, courts and princes; and which naturally and necessarily required, in order to do due honour to the occasion, new taxes on the subjects of a dynasty so distinguished, new pretexts for compelling rich citizens to purchase pardon for imaginary offences, and new perversions of law for the purpose of colouring confiscations.
These, however, were little matters, which passed in the shade fitted for such things. The broad sunlight of prosperity shone gloriously on the house of Sforza, on its apparently durably established fortunes, and on the gala doings in the gay streets of sunny Milan. The poor might grumble low down in the social depths out of hearing about scarcity and dearness of bread; a few citizens might groan over ducats or lands abstracted, or wives or daughters abducted for the needs or pleasures of their gracious sovereign; but the admirable principles of civil and religious duty and subordination, which prevailed in those ages of faith, were such, that in all probability the great Galeazzo might have continued to preserve order, and save society in Milan, had not those gloomy students, whom we have from time to time caught sight of poring over their crabbed folios, while the merry city was gazing at some brilliant and costly pageant or other, brought their studies to a conclusion towards the end of the year 1476. For though it did so happen,[66] that two out of Cola Montano's three pupils owed to the Duke's profligacy a sister's shame, while the family of the third had been unjustly deprived by him of an inheritance, yet the historians, who have recorded the facts, seem to be unanimously of opinion, that had it not been for those pernicious historical readings, they would have borne these misfortunes as meekly as hundreds of their fellow-citizens did similar mishaps, instead of posting themselves at the door of the cathedral on St. Stephen's day in December of the year 1476, and there stabbing to death their sovereign lord in the midst of his guards, and of the assembled crowd.
The names of these misled youths were Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani, Girolamo Olgiato, and Carlo Visconti. The first was killed by one of the Duke's attendants immediately after the commission of his crime. Visconti was arrested, and ordered to immediate execution by being quartered. Olgiato escaped from the church, and fled to his father's house. But father and brothers alike refused to afford him any shelter. His mother alone found means to persuade a certain priest to hide the murderer in his house. After three days' concealment, the unhappy youth crept forth to ascertain the aspect of the city, and the feelings of the citizens thus liberated from their tyrant. The first sight that met his eyes was the corpse of his friend and fellow criminal Lampugnani, dragged through the streets by an exulting and ferocious rabble. This horrible proof of the futility of all his hopes, and of the judgment passed upon his deed by his fellow-citizens, so drove him to despair, that he at once gave himself up into the hands of justice. On his trial for the crime, seeing that none were left alive who could be injured by the recital, he gave a full account of the whole conspiracy. And from this document are drawn the narratives of the historians. He was condemned to be torn to pieces by iron pincers, "tanagliato;"—that being the proper juridical term to indicate a by no means unprecedented mode of punishment.
"Stabit vetus memoria facti" were the last words uttered by the dying regicide, as the living flesh was being rent from the quivering muscles. And indeed the sad story has been made the subject of a tragedy much praised by Milanese[67] writers; but which does not seem, unfortunately, to have so moralised the tale, as to make it likely that it should at present be represented in the theatres of that city.
And, truly, when we find a man in the position, and of the character of Verri, writing a grave and learned history at the close of the last century, and representing in its well-considered pages the deed of Girolamo Olgiato as similar in kind to that of Oliver Cromwell, we cannot but become sensible how wholly and irreconcileably different the views and moral judgments of a law-respecting Anglo-Saxon on such subjects, must needs be from those of a people, to whom, for centuries, LAW has been presented only as the expression of a despot's will. To the inmost heart of nations so trained amiss, we may be sure, that "the wild justice of revenge" will commend itself with a force of honest conviction, proportioned ever to the amount of wrong suffered, and not to the heinousness of wrong done, by those who, at their own risk and peril, take upon themselves the execution of it.
Thus died at the age of thirty-two years the magnificent Maria Galeazzo Sforza, our heroine's father. Did these pages profess to give a biography of him instead of his daughter, it would be necessary to follow the chroniclers of his time through the long and sickening list of his cruelties and abominations. This we may spare ourselves. For the purpose of showing what tendencies and dispositions his daughter may be supposed to have inherited, and what were the manners and habits of the home in which, and from which, she received her early impressions and education, it will be sufficient, in addition to what has been already said, to mention one or two of the facts which history has put on record against this man.
There is every reason to believe that he murdered his mother by poison. All the authorities concur in representing her as an excellent and very able princess, whose wisdom and energy ensured his quiet succession to his father's throne. He very soon became jealous of her authority; drove her by his ill treatment from Milan; and is believed to have poisoned her at the first halting-place of her journey from that capital towards her own dower city, Cremona. His guilt was very generally credited by his contemporaries, and subsequent writers concur in thinking their suspicions in all probability just.
Enough has probably been said in previous pages to give the reader some idea of the profligate debauchery which marked the whole course of his life. It is unnecessary to transfer to an English page the details of cynical immorality, mingled with a ferocious cruelty, which seems to mark them to a certain degree with the character of insanity, as recorded by the old writers,[68] especially by Corio, his own personal attendant. It is sufficient to have drawn attention to the influences which must have been exercised by the moral atmosphere of such a court, and such a home on the young bride, who is about to step from it to a court of her own.