Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent. Alfred von Reumont
at his marriage by King Louis XI. as dowry.[151] So stood it then with Italian affairs and Italian princes. The Venetians, moreover, relied on the want of harmony among the allies, which the Duke could not deny. None trusted the other. It was the Florentines who principally held the league together. However much King Ferrante wished to agree with Piero de’ Medici, and whatever the Republic might effect through her financial connections, she was yet too weak in military matters to exercise preponderating influence. Between the King and Sforza distrust and aversion prevailed, and Ferrante said repeatedly that he suspected a separate peace with the enemy, in which he was not deceived. The Pope said neither Yes nor No. He had entered the league, but entrance into the league did not imply fulfilment of the stipulations. He wished to free Romagna from the war that desolated the country, but he had no inclination to make overtures to Venice, his native country; always put the tardiness of the Neapolitan’s movements forward as a pretext; wished for peace after the battle of La Molinella, especially because he feared being drawn into the thick of the contest by the allies, and wished to prescribe the conditions of this peace, while he really did so little to bring it about. But beside this, the war had displayed more than any other the defects of the Italian armies, and from this point of view it deserves more attention than it would otherwise claim. When we consider that the two most famous generals of Italy at that day, Federigo of Urbino and Bartolommeo, stood at the head of a considerable army; that a Duke of Milan and Crown Prince of Naples were there; that the lords of Lombardy and Romagna, who passed their lives in arms, and the best Neapolitan warriors, the Sanseverini, Orsini, Davalos, &c., were in the field; when we consider, on the other hand, the miserable results of this eight months’ campaign, we shall anticipate the approaching complete decline of that system of war which Alberigo da Barbiano had inaugurated a century before, and which had passed through many glorious days of military art and valour, although an evil lay in the very existence of mercenary troops from which other countries had to suffer.
The Neapolitan troops were certainly not among the worst, and had practised leaders. And yet how did they prosper? Even before they had marched out, there were the most unfavourable opinions as to their quality and discipline. ‘When you hear from ill-wishers,’ wrote the King on February 10, 1467, to one of his agents, ‘that our soldiers will run away as soon as they have passed the frontiers, you must not heed this, for, with God’s assistance, we hope to send them out in such excellence and order, that they would rather attract others than go over to them.’ But the result did not correspond with the expectation of the monarch, who, however, devoted untiring care to military affairs. The Duke of Calabria employed three months in crossing the Tronto and dragging his army through Tuscany and Umbria, while the enemy was in the heart of Romagna. The militia dispersed without fighting. ‘It grieves my very soul,’ wrote the King on August 1, ‘this flight of a part of our men-at-arms. But as the fault lies in their badness and cowardice, and not in the treatment they had experienced from us, we will bear it more easily.’ And on January 15, 1468, during the truce: ‘Most of the soldiers leave the camp and return home, which does not promote the general good, and is highly displeasing to us.’ The Duke of Calabria was amusing himself in the meantime in Florence and Milan, whither his consort had gone to sweeten for him the hard campaign, in which he never faced the foe. With the money advanced by the Florentine banks, those of the Medici, Strozzi, Gondi, &c., the desertion of the enemy’s horse and foot was purchased, while the Neapolitans, as they remained without pay, acted in friendly countries, in the districts of Arezzo and Cortona, as if they had to do with their enemies.
Besides Louis XI., another foreign sovereign tried to put a stop to a war so prejudicial to the common Christian interest in a moment when the progress of the Turks menaced both Italy and the Danubian provinces. It was Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, who sent George Hasznoz, afterwards Archbishop of Colocza to Venice, in order to bring about an arrangement.[152] The Hungarian envoy, getting nothing but empty words, went to Colleone’s camp, and meeting there with the same ill-success, proceeded to Florence and Rome, to give an account of his negotiation. More than six months had passed since the day of La Molinella in useless marching and treating, in the midst of mutual reproaches and quarrelling. Tommaso Soderini at Venice, Otto Niccolini in Rome, acted with zeal and ability as Florentine ambassadors; the Marquis of Ferrara did his best as mediator; Florence itself had made many efforts, but in vain. At last, on Candlemas day 1468, Pope Paul II. proclaimed peace in the church of Sta. Maria Araceli, on the Capitol. The existing league, including Venice, was to be renewed. Bartolommeo Colleone was to be sent to Albania to fight the Turks, with an annual salary of 100,000 gold florins as captain-general, after resigning the places in the Romagna held garrisoned by him. He had, besides, demanded thrice the sum as compensation for the expenses of a war which he had himself begun! King Ferrante protested four days later; shortly before, he had declared he would do the Holy Father’s pleasure in everything reasonable, but he would rather lose everything than give Colleone a farthing. Galeazzo Maria was of the same opinion; he said his money should not serve for an attack upon his state. The Florentines seemed to have most wished to come to terms, and were much disturbed when the King, Sforza, and Venice took up arms again. Finally, the Marquis of Ferrara succeeded in reconciling the parties, though Pope Paul was very angry; and on April 25 the definitive peace was proclaimed at Rome, and two days later at Florence, in which Colleone was not mentioned, and every one was to receive his own again. In Florence the peace was solemnised by church festivals and illuminations. Bartolommeo Colleone, then seventy-five years old, but still in full strength, did not go to Albania, where the death of Scanderbeg, which had happened in the February of the same year, 1468, would have made a valiant general necessary, if the tactics of Italian condottieri had been suitable for such a land and such an enemy. A throne such as the Florentine exiles had placed in his view, he certainly was as far from obtaining as he was from reaping laurels in his last campaigns. But he enjoyed for seven years longer the highest honours paid to him by the Republic of Venice and foreign and Italian princes, in his castle, where he died February 1, 1475, having made a use of his colossal fortune which more honoured him than many of the means by which it had been brought together.
The ill-success of Bartolommeo Colleone’s undertaking put an end of course to all the exiles’ hopes of returning to their homes.
The biographer of Donato Acciaiuoli, Angiolo Segni, observes rightly, ‘The war excited by the exiles was soon ended. Bartolommeo’s army was not defeated in battle with the allies, but it was equally far from conquering, and the cause of the rebels was lost thereby. For those who ruled in Florence it was enough not to be defeated; not so with those in the field. Only by a victory could they expel their enemies, and regain their home.’ All the distinguished men of the losing side had been with Colleone—foremost of all Diotisalvi Neroni and Niccolò Soderini, who in Venice opposed his own brother, whom Florence had sent thither as her representative. Agnolo Acciaiuoli joined them at last. Persuaded at length by the representations of his friends, he had quitted Barletta and gone to Naples; King Ferrante, who, remembering old connections, wished him well, vainly sought to persuade him not to trust to the matter, nor to break the exile pronounced on him. He went to Rome, and from thence to Romagna. When he saw the organisation of Colleone’s troops, he is said to have anticipated the result at once. When peace was concluded, he was declared a rebel with all the others, his property confiscated, and a price put upon his head; he returned to Naples, where he lived on the support afforded him by the King, and passed his days mostly in pious exercises and the companionship of the Carthusian monks, whose order had stood in intimate connection with his family for more than a century. Niccolò Soderini went to Ravenna, where the Emperor Frederick III. made him a knight and Palatine on his second journey to Rome—cheap honours then, which could hardly have sweetened the exile in which he died, 1474. Niccolò, says Alamamo Rinuccini, was far more courageous than prudent; he did not know fear. Had his advice been followed when he wished directly to give battle, his party would not perhaps have had to submit, but Messer Luca, either cowardly or bribed, betrayed his party and himself. Diotisalvi Neroni, at first banished to the island of Sicily, saw sixteen years of exile pass away, and died in extreme old age at Rome, where his tombstone is to be seen in the Dominican church, Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, which contains many Florentine monuments.[153]
One event during the war shows how high the waves of party feeling rose. Lucrezia de’ Medici was at the Bagno a Morba with her son Giuliano, the bath in the district of Volterra employed, perhaps