The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
the capture of Constantinople had been from the aim of the Fourth Crusade. These considerations might well weigh with Charles’s counsellors in advising an agreement with the Pope, although they must have known that conditions extorted by compulsion would bind no longer than compulsion endured. They might indeed have obtained substantial security from the Pope, if they could have constrained him to yield the Castle of St Angelo; but this he steadfastly refused. Cannons were twice pointed at the ramparts; but history cannot say whether they were loaded, and only knows that they were never fired. It was at length agreed that the Pope should yield Civita Vecchia, make his Turkish captive over to the King, and give up his son Cesare as a hostage. Nothing was said of the investiture of Naples, and although Charles afterwards urged this personally upon the Pope at an interview, Alexander, with surprising constancy, continued to refuse, expressing however a willingness to arbitrate upon the claims of the competitors. On January 28, 1495, Charles left Rome to march upon Naples, and two days afterwards was taught the value of diplomatic pledges by the escape of Cesare Borgia, and by Alexander’s refusal to surrender Civita Vecchia. A month afterwards the much-coveted Jem died,—of poison, it was said, administered before his departure from Rome; but this is to attribute to poison more than it is capable of performing. Others professed to know that the Prince had been shaved with a poisoned razor; but his death seems sufficiently accounted for by bronchitis and irregularity of living. Jem’s death took place at Naples, which Charles had already entered as a conqueror. King Ferdinand’s successor, Alfonso, timorous as cruel, and oppressed by a consciousness of the popular hatred, had abdicated and fled to Sicily, leaving his innocent son Ferrante (or Ferrantino) to bear the brunt of invasion. The fickle people of Naples, who had had ample reason to detest the severity of the late King Ferrante’s government, and were without sufficient intelligence to appreciate the wisdom and care for the public welfare which largely compensated it, hastened to acclaim Charles, and Ferrantino retired with touching dignity. Within two months the Neapolitans became as weary of, Charles as they had ever been of Ferrante, and a dangerous League was formed in Italy behind his back. Ludovico Sforza had come to perceive how great a fault he had committed in inviting the French King; for the claims of the Duke of Orleans to Milan were at least as substantial as Charles’s pretensions to Naples. Maximilian and Ferdinand were no less perturbed at the rapidity of the French conquests; the Pope’s sentiments were no secret; and even the cautious Venetians saw the necessity of interference. Between these five Powers a League was concluded (March 31, 1495), whose object was veiled in generalities, but which clearly contemplated the expulsion of the French from Naples. The menace sufficed; on May 20, eight days after his solemn coronation as King of Naples, Charles quitted it, never to return. He did indeed leave a garrison, which was soon dislodged by Spanish troops sent from Sicily, aided by a popular rising, and the young King, so lately deserted by all, was welcomed back with delight. Charles, meanwhile, had proceeded towards Rome, professing an unreciprocated desire to confer with the Pope. Alexander withdrew first to Orvieto, then to Perugia. Charles, after a short stay in Rome, renewed his march northwards. On July 5 an indecisive engagement with the forces of the League at Fornovo, near Parma, insured him a safe retreat, and he was glad to obtain even so much. Notwithstanding the inglorious termination of an expedition which had begun so brilliantly, it forms an epoch in the history of Italy and Europe. In revealing the weakness of Italy, the decay of her military spirit, the faithlessness and disunion of her princes and republics, it not only invited invasion, but provided Europe with a new battlefield. It set up an antagonism between France and Spain, and, while alluring both Powers with visions of easy conquest, ruined the latter State by imposing sacrifices upon her to which she would in any case have been unequal, just at the time when her new acquisitions in America taxed her to the uttermost. It preserved Europe from France by diverting the energies which, wisely exerted, would easily have subdued the Low Countries and the Rhine provinces. Most important of all, the condition of general unsettlement which it ushered in greatly promoted all movements tending to the emancipation of the human intellect. Great was the gain to the world in general, but it was bought by the devastation and enslavement of the most beautiful region of Europe.
The close of Charles’s expedition is also an eventful date in the history of Alexander VI. Up to this date he appears the sport of circumstances, which he was henceforth in some manner to shape and control. It was to his credit not to have been seduced into conduct incompatible with his character of a good Italian. Some passages in his conduct might appear ambiguous; in the main, however, whether impelled by honourable or by selfish motives, he had acted as became a patriotic Italian prince, and he was the only Italian prince who had done so. He had been tortuous, perfidious, temporising under stress of circumstances: yet in the main he had obeyed the first and great commandment, to keep the foreigner out of Italy. Had he not afterwards, with what extenuations it will remain to enquire, adopted a different course, the judgment of history upon him as Italian statesman and sovereign must have been highly favourable. A new chapter of his reign was now about to open, pregnant with larger issues of good and ill. He meanwhile manifested his content with the past by causing the most striking episodes of the French invasion of Rome to be depicted in the Castle of St Angelo by the pencil of Pinturicchio. Full of authentic portraits, and costumes and lively representations of actual incidents, these pictures would have been one of the most interesting relics of the age. Their subjects have been preserved by the Pope’s German interpreter, who saw them ere they were destroyed by the vandalism of a successor.
Alexander’s first step after his return to Rome was the obvious one of strengthening the Castle of St Angelo, which even before the French invasion he had connected with the Vatican by a covered way. His general policy presented no mark for censure. He appeared to aim sincerely at union among the Italian States, and not to be as yet estranged from the public interest by the passion for aggrandising his family. His efforts to bring Florence into the national alliance were laudable; and, if Savonarola obstructed them, it must be owned that in him the preacher predominated over the patriot, and that his tragic fate was in some measure a retribution. This painful history, the right and wrong of which will be perpetually debated, does not however concern the history of the Temporal Power. Alexander’s first important step towards the confirmation of the papal authority was the legitimate one of endeavouring to reduce the Orsini, who, though bound to himself by vassalage and to the King of Naples by relationship, had abandoned both during the French invasion. It was nevertheless of evil omen that the papal forces should be commanded by the eldest of Alexander’s illegitimate children, the Duke of Gandia, dignified by the title of Gonfaloniere of the Church. The war began in October, 1496; and notwithstanding a severe defeat in January, 1497, Alexander was able to conclude a peace in February, by which he recovered Cervetri and Anguillara, the fiefs whose alienation to the Orsini by Franceschetto Cibo had four years before been the beginning of trouble. He was now at liberty to attack Ostia, still in the occupation of the French, who menaced the food-supplies of Rome. The fortress was reduced by Spanish troops, brought from Sicily by Gonzalo de Cordova. Their presence in Rome excited tumults, almost a solitary instance of any open expression of public discontent with Alexander’s policy. Personally, indeed, he was never popular; but his efficiency as an administrator formed the brightest side of his character, and his care for the material interests of his subjects was exemplary. Years afterwards those who had most detested the man wished back the ruler “for his good government, and the plenty of all things in his time.”
Unhappily for Alexander’s repute, the glory which he might acquire as a just and able rulerwas nothing in his eyes compared with the opportunities which his station afforded him for aggrandising his family. Up to this time he had been content with the comparatively inoffensive measures of dignified matrimonial alliances and promotions in Church and State, and had not sought to make his children territorial princes; but, profiting by the death of King Ferrante of Naples, who was succeeded by his uncle Federigo, he now revived papal claims on the territory of Benevento, and erected it into a duchy for the Duke of Gandia. This was to despoil the Church, supposing her claims to have been well founded; so complete, however, was Alexander’s ascendancy over the Sacred College that only one Cardinal dared to object. Simultaneously, Alexander pushed forward his schemes for the advancement of his daughter Lucrezia by divorcing her from her husband Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, whose dignity now seemed unequal to the growing grandeur of the Borgia, and who moreover belonged to a family politically estranged from the Pope. A colour of right was not wanting, the divorce, which was decreed by the College of Cardinals