The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
excitement that families were riven asunder, father standing against son and brother against brother; the Ridolfi, the Salviati, the Soderini were divided. It was said, indeed, that Paol’ Antonio Soderini made the family fortunes safe by inducing his son to join the Compagnacci, a dining club of young bloods and swashbucklers irreconcilable to reform. The line of demarcation was as much ethical as political. Guicciardini has admirably analysed the parties: behind Capponi were ranged aristocrats who hated popular government, sceptics who disbelieved in prophecy, libertines who feared molestation in their pleasures, devotees of the Franciscans and other Orders. Against these Valori led an equally heterogeneous force; serious men who believed in Savonarola’s prophecies or welcomed his good works, hypocrites who drew a mantle of sanctity round secret sin, worldlings whose avenue to popularity and office lay through the stronger party. The outward test was foreign policy. Here the line was hard and fast. The Plagnoni steadfastly looked to France for terrestrial salvation. The Arrabbiati, in the phrase of the Spanish Pope and the Austrian Maximilian, would be “good Italians’“; they would join the Italian League and close the Peninsula to the foreigner; they courted the Pope and the Duke of Milan, whose ambassador Somenzi became the receptacle or the source of all the scandal and intrigue against the Friar. It was certain that sooner or later foreign politics would help to decide the issue. All depended on the realisation of prophecies as to the recovery of Pisa. Florence could not permanently remain in isolation. Prophecy, unfortified by French aid, would prove a stimulant with inevitable reaction.
If Savonarola, in Machiavelli’s words, was an unarmed prophet, the chosen city was a weak military State. The rebellion of Pisa tasked her whole strength for many years to come. When Charles VIII retired from Naples, Savonarola met him on the Florentine frontier at Poggibonsi (June, 1495),—and this on no public mission, but as one directly inspired by God. The King was threatened with the condign punishment of heaven if he did not behave honestly towards Florence. The prophecy seemed to receive fulfilment in the death of the King’s children, but this was slight consolation to the injured town. Charles, indeed, avoided Florence, but he demanded the third instalment of his subsidy, and dismissed the prophet with vague promises. Indignation was already expressed against the folly of clinging to France at the instigation of a “foreign Friar.” “Believe now in your Friar,” men cried, “who declared that he held Pisa in his fist!” No sooner had Charles left Italy, than the French commandants, corrupt and insubordinate, sold the fortress of Pisa to its inhabitants, and Lorenzo de1 Medici’s conquests, Sarzana and Pietra Santa, to the Genoese and Lucchese respectively. Beaumont, governor of Leghorn, alone restored his charge. Thus Florence had lost her seaboard from the mouth of the Magra to the Pisan marshes, while the natural road northwards was blocked by unfriendly States. Nor was this all; in the far south Montepulciano revolted to Siena, whilst beyond the Apennines the protectorate of Faenza was abandoned and control lost of the well-worn route to the Adriatic by the Val di Lamone. On the tableland of the Mugello, in the mountain basin of the Casentino, in the subject city of Arezzo and all down the Chiana valley, Florence had to fear a revival of local autonomy or lingering attachment to the Medici. From furthest North to extremest South, from the Pisan littoral to the backbone of the Apennines, the State was threatened with disintegration. The League, which in March, 1495, had been formed against the French, took Pisa under its protectorate; Ludovico il Moro, indeed, soon withdrew his troops; he had no wish to exasperate the Florentines. His aim was the erection of an oligarchy which would re-connect the chain of Florentine-Milanese alliance, snapped by Piero. But Venice had come to stay. By her settlements in Romagna and Apulia she was making the Adriatic a mare clausum; Pisa should be a stepping-stone to the monopoly of the Tuscan Gulf.
The Pisan volunteers were now stiffened by the seasoned mercenaries of Venice, whose trained engineers strengthened the defences which her artillery could arm. Her incomparable Stradiot light-horse, swimming rivers and treating mountain watercourses as highroads, pushed far into Florentine territory, raided down the line of the modern railway towards Volterra, wasted the rich corn-lands of the Elsa, threaded the intricate hill country towards the Nievole, endangering Florentine communications with Pistoia. In 1509 their ubiquity was to be the bugbear of the finest French and Imperial troops; it is small wonder that they caused embarrassment to the inexperienced Florentines. Pisa controlled a large territory; she was protected to west and south by stagnant side-channels of the Arno and miasmatic marshes; to east and north-east lay a mass of tumbling hills. The Pisan peasantry fought desperately, and every hill-village became a fortress. Pisa could not be starved, for the sea was open to Genoese and Corsican cornfactors; Lucca afforded a ready market for the sale of Pisan property; through Lucchese and Pisan hills wound convoys, whose local knowledge enabled them to baffle the vigilance, or utilise the somnolence, of the Florentine condottieri.
Savonarola staked the truth of his inspiration on the recovery of Pisa; all that Florence had lost should be restored, and much that she had never possessed should be her prize. The prophet’s reputation would necessarily rise or fall with every turn in the Pisan war. Amid all the new-born enthusiasm for liberty at Florence there was no sympathy for the Pisans, who so bravely asserted theirs. Sympathetic as Savonarola was by nature, while he had not been born to a share in the old Florentine hatreds, not a word escaped his lips on behalf of the revolted town. Towards the close of the war Florentines of the upper classes felt for the ruined peasantry and the women and children a pity which they scarcely dared express; but, when at this earlier stage a solitary canon of the Cathedral asserted that Pisa had a right to liberty, he was severely punished by the Piagnone government. The idea of liberty stretched but a yard beyond the four quarters of Florence, and even there its currency was conditional on its being stamped with the hallmark of her guilds; in the new constitution no reforms bettered the condition of her extensive territory.
Charles VIII had left Italy never to return, but the autumn of 1496 witnessed another flying royal visit. The King of the Romans had been induced by Milan and Venice to enter Italy in favour of the League. He came, however, as little more than Ludovico Moro’s condottiere; he had few troops and less money; “he had sailed,” as the saying went, “with a short supply of biscuit in his galley.” His wider schemes shrank to the relief of Pisa. In welcoming a King of the Romans the Pisans felt a glow of their old Ghibelline enthusiasm. They had thrown the Florentine lion from their bridge into the Arno, and a statue of Charles VIII was reigning in its place; they now served the French king as they had served the lion. From Pisa Maximilian sailed to take Leghorn; its capture must have sealed the fate of Florence, for it was her last port, the last gate open to her French allies. But Leghorn was stoutly held. From the village of Impruneta was brought to Florence the sacred figure of the Madonna, and, as it reached the Ponte Vecchio, a horseman brought the news that a storm had scattered Maximilian’s ships, and that a French squadron with supplies had broken the blockade. To Florentine imagination, kept at fever-heat by prophecy, this seemed a miracle wrought by Savonarola’s intercession; and the belief became a certainty, when it transpired that the French had left Marseilles on the very day on which the Florentines had sent to Impruneta. The French alliance recovered its popularity; Maximilian hurried back to Tyrol, leaving Italy to wonder or to laugh.
Savonarola’s fame was doubled by the salvation of Leghorn, and the close of the year 1496 was perhaps its zenith. In the previous spring a group of aristocrats of secondary importance had formed an electoral ring to reject all opposition candidates. This in Florence was a criminal offence; they were condemned by the Eight, and appealed to the Council without success, while their leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment. Then died Piero Capponi, shot before a paltry fortress in the Pisan hills. So fierce was faction that the people rejoiced at Capponi’s death. Yet he was the hero of 1494, a passionate champion against French and Medici, the most, perhaps the only, capable soldier and statesman in the city. Nor was he an uncompromising opponent; he had cooperated with Savonarola in saving the Mediceans, and his attitude towards the Friar had not been consistently unfriendly. But marked character and high ambitions the Florentine love of equality could not brook; the ideal was a citizen who did everything that he was asked to do, and nothing very ill or very well.
Capponi’s death disorganised his party, and the year closed with triumph for the Piagnoni, for Francesco Valori was elected Gonfalonier for January, 1497. In the long run Valori’s leadership was no blessing to his party, but as yet he was the people’s darling. One of the few citizens above suspicion of corruption, he was devoted heart and