Duchess of Milan (48 page)

. . . The French army will parade again tomorrow, in honor of the arrival of the Duchess of Ban and what is said to be a contingent of Milanese ladies so formidable that the King may suffer a fatal apoplexy at the mere sight of them, thus bringing to an unexpected conclusion the most audacious military enterprise of our times. . . .

Asti, 11 September 1494

Eighty Milanese ladies of distinction, all of whom had vied viciously for the honor of greeting the French King, rode behind the Duchess of Bari into the center of Asti, proceeding up the main avenue, a concourse of medieval shop arcades punctuated randomly with ancient Roman colonnades. The arcades were jammed with spectators, who gaped at the Milanese ladies as if they had never seen women before. Certainly few of them had ever seen women like these, faces painted as vividly as polychrome statues, diamonds and pearls flashing in the glaring sunlight like hundreds of little lamps, plump gleaming breasts so exposed by plunging bodices that at first glance they seemed naked to their high waists.

Beatrice rode with her straightest posture (“Ride tall,” she heard Mama say), conscious that she represented not simply her husband and her family but all Italy. She wore a
camora
of green silk velour with contrasting gold stripes, the yoke studded with diamonds, pearls, and rubies; the white linen of her chemise puffed out of the patterned slits in her sleeves. Her hair had been pulled back into a single long braid wrapped with silk ribbons, and she wore a pearl-laced hair net beneath a rakishly tilted French-style velvet riding cap. She looked into the entranced, even stunned eyes of the spectators and experienced a thrilling yet vaguely frightening communion with them, a premonition that when these people were old and dying they would still recall the Duchess of Bari riding into Asti at the head of her ladies.

Beatrice led her retinue to the west side of the cobbled piazza in front of the cathedral, directly opposite a grandstand already filled with a dazzling assembly of brocade-and-damask-clad nobility (spotted liberally with red-robed cardinals and white-robed lesser clerics), who had made the pilgrimage to Asti from all over northern and central Italy. Beatrice stayed in the saddle, and her ladies-in-waiting, also still mounted, arrayed themselves in a file to her right, as if they were part of the spectacle about to unfold. In a sense they were, combatants in the confrontation of Italian sophistication with the brute power of France.

The chattering crowd was suddenly blasted into silence by a thunderous, rattling percussion. A minute or so later, dozens of boys entered the piazza at the north end, red-faced from the baking late summer heat, pounding a furious tattoo on the barrel-like drums strapped to their waists. Once the drummers had passed, the music was provided by the endless tramp of the infantrymen’s leather boots against the cobblestones. On and on they went for more than an hour: tens of thousands of Swiss and German mercenaries in perfect military order, marching forests of long, ax-headed spears called halberds; corps of arquebusiers shouldering the ponderous portable firearms; thousands of Gascon arbalesters armed with heavy wood-and-iron crossbows. With their banners and plumed hats and multicolored doublets, the foot soldiers seemed more like prosperous tradesmen than merchants of mayhem, their battalions summoned to build a new Italy rather than destroy the old. Whatever lingering anxiety Beatrice might have felt about her instrumental role in bringing these men to Italy vanished with their every purposeful stride.

The sound changed to a long, steady rumble. At the north end of the piazza, sunlight glittered on polished steel. The French knights hesitated for effect before beginning their promenade. Then they came on at a proud canter, rank after rank, mounted on huge war horses, fully sheathed in steel from head to toe, iron-tipped lances pointed straight up, helmets crowned with feathered plumes. The concussion of their passage was so powerful that when Beatrice closed her eyes she could feel them go by. She wondered if the baby who had just begun to kick in her womb could also feel them.

After a quarter of an hour a reedy whine rose above the roar of the passing cavalry. A corps of flutists appeared, then more knights, armed with iron maces, and finally hundreds of mounted arbalesters in silken doublets embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, formed in a tight cordon around a cloth-of-gold baldachino that rose above the horsemen like an enormous gold mushroom cap. Beneath this canopy, mounted on a black horse, rode his Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII, King of France, Jerusalem, and the Two Sicilies. King Charles wore a flat, round white sable hat embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lis, and a doublet of gold silk over his steel breastplate. He propped a battle lance on his thigh, striking the pose most commonly used for equestrian statues of famous
condottieri.
Beatrice’s first thought was that the French King was not nearly so ugly or small in stature as she had heard.

The King and his bodyguards dismounted in the middle of the piazza, and Beatrice signaled the Milanese pages to assist herself and her ladies from their horses. Once on the ground, she could not see the King among the circle of approaching archers and knights, hot sweating men who brought their own pungency to the prevailing odor of horse sweat and manure. Then the bodyguards stepped aside to reveal His Most Christian Majesty.

Only by the white sable cap could Beatrice be certain that this was the man she had seen at a distance moments earlier. Unhorsed he was not as tall as she was; his armored legs looked like little metal stumps. He was ugly indeed, his face dominated by an absurdly oversized nose and lips. But what she found truly remarkable was the animation of the King’s features, or rather the lack of it. His huge eyes seemed incapable of focusing, his slack lips incapable of speaking; his head wobbled as if attached to his shoulders by a string. He gasped at the sight of Beatrice’s ladies-in-waiting.

Charles swept his hat from his head and held it before him with trembling hands. Beatrice curtsied deeply. A French interpreter made the introductions, and Beatrice took the King’s hand. The little monster attacked her, pressing his clammy lips to each cheek. He quickly moved down the entire rank of her ladies, kissing each cheek along the way. While he did so, Beatrice was introduced to another armored Frenchman, wearing a sable cap much like the King’s, a man of medium height who seemed to possess almost everything the King lacked: rakish features, a smile that hinted at intellect and radiated sensuality, and a firm handshake that communicated a vibrant physical energy. Only when she heard the name, Louis Duc d’Orleans, did she try to look into his eyes. They held hers for a moment, then with absolutely no embarrassment slid across her bare shoulders and down the exposed tops of her breasts before moving on to the ladies nearest her.

The King returned, mesmerized by the welcoming kisses. He stammered for a moment before he could deliver his message to his interpreter, and Beatrice felt sorry for him. He seemed utterly overwhelmed by the might he commanded.

“His Most Christian Majesty begs you to remain in this heat a short while longer, as he is most desirous to show you his artillery,” the interpreter said. Beatrice nodded and smiled at the King, who actually blushed in response. She marveled that this hideous little man was winning her with all the qualities he was deficient in.

Charles stood timidly beside Beatrice while his guards cleared the piazza; the Duke of Orleans, as First Prince of the Blood, took his place next to the King like a faithful alter ego. From the north end of the piazza came another steady rumbling.

The big siege cannons burst into the piazza with heart-stopping suddenness. Mounted on four-wheeled carriages loaded with iron projectiles the size of a man’s head, drawn by thundering teams of thirty-six horses, they swept by at a fast canter, dozens of them, war machines so daunting that their mere display might conquer Naples. Yet the cannons themselves were strangely lovely, with sleek, tapering contours in brightly polished bronze; the carriages drew them across the cobbles so evenly and quickly that they seemed to be marvelous golden dolphins gliding past.

The big guns appeared and disappeared with such speed that Beatrice felt light and exhilarated and certain she had just seen one of the great marvels of her day. As the rumble of the siege cannons faded, smaller, cast-iron fieldpieces mounted on two-wheeled carriages continued to roll by. Beatrice turned to her left and looked up the street that fed the piazza, wondering if this river of French arms stretched all the way back to Lyons.

Louis Duc d’Orleans leaned forward, and his rapid glance intercepted her gaze. He nodded slightly to confirm her attention. Then his eyes leisurely caressed her exposed flesh, the expression on his easy, handsome mouth so openly licentious that those lips might have been touching her breasts. At first Beatrice was amused. But after a moment she recognized the ambition in the hard edge of Louis’s jaw. And then she saw something even more disturbing, a love of danger in his restless eyes that seemed eerily like her own, an aspect of herself she could not confront in her own mirror but was forced to recognize when she saw it on another face. She looked away. The guns rattled past. In some distant recess of her consciousness, Mama murmured a warning, words she would not allow herself to hear.

Extract of a letter of Bona of Savoy, Duchess Mother of Milan, to His Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII, King of France, Jerusalem, and the Two Sicilies. Pavia, 13 September 1494

My dearest nephew and your most illustrious and most Christian Majesty,

I pray to the Holy Mother that this reaches Your Majesty, as I am certain that Il Moro stops all my couriers. By all the love I still cherish for your mother of blessed memory, I have sworn to regard Your Majesty as my own son, and so I will risk whatever I must to warn Your Majesty of the great danger that Il Moro presents to you. Your Majesty cannot trust him. He has made my daughter Empress of the Germans only to obtain for himself the title my son holds as Duke of Milan. I know this is so because a priest who has gone to Germany with my daughter has reported to me that Il Moro has requested that the German Emperor should grant him investiture as Duke of Milan whenever Your Majesty has dealt with the scoundrels from Naples. He will use Your Majesty thusly and then turn upon you when he has achieved what he wants. I am comforted by Your Majesty’s promises to ensure the title my son now holds. But Gian Galeazzo has been ill for two weeks, and I am certain that Il Moro is trying to poison him, which has been done to prevent Gian Galeazzo from welcoming his most beloved cousin as he would have wished. If your beloved mother’s soul is to have any peace, Your Majesty must come to Pavia, where my son and I have taken refuge, and you must extend Your Majesty’s mighty arms around us to shield us from the perfidy of the tyrant who wishes to deceive us and Your Glorious Majesty. . . . Again I invoke your mother’s name and pray that as she watches from her heavenly seat she will witness Your Most Christian Majesty’s bold succor of a widowed mother and her son whose lives are now in peril. . . .

Extract of a letter of international traveler and raconteur Benedetto Dei to Leonardo da Vinci, military engineer at the Court of Milan. Asti, 6 October 1494

My dear Leonardo,

He goes forth! The Great Charlemagne goes forth on his Crusade! The fever that has confined His Most Christian Majesty to bed for these two weeks (during which his entire enterprise was in doubt) finally broke two days ago. His Most Christian Majesty departed for Casale today, with the main body of the army marching directly to Piacenza. The King’s Councillors insist that the affliction from which His Most Christian Majesty most miraculously recovered was smallpox. Others tell me that the French have brought with them a new disease said to be transmitted by coitus and that the King suffered an attack of this affliction, which is called the
mal francese.
God save us if this is so, for our women will forever be a source of pestilence even when the French are long departed.

Your lord Il Moro will no doubt be troubled to learn that Louis Duc d’Orleans has taken to his sickbed just as the King has left his. Louis has been struck down by a fever which does not appear in any fashion to endanger his life but is sufficiently severe that it will necessitate his prolonged residence in Asti, in the company of fifteen thousand elite troops. Indeed, most of the King’s Councillors are now of the conviction that the Great Crusade need venture no farther than Milan to achieve its glorious ends. . . .

Vigevano, 9 October 1494

The Marchesino Stanga, Milan’s Minister of Public Works, halted his exit for an afterthought. “Your Highness,” he told Il Moro, “you are aware that we are maintaining a reserve to cover our loans to the French in the event of their default?”

Il Moro waved his minister out. “Yes, yes, Marchesino. But when I have extended the canal to the Sestia, we will recover more than the cost of the work in additional revenues from the new farms. I will have Messer Calco send you the necessary documents as soon as we have received all of the requests for concessions and have arrived at a tax rate.”

The Marchesino bowed again and departed; a second later Galeazzo di Sanseverino’s artificially handsome face peered around the heavy marble doorframe. Il Moro flipped his fingers and Galeazz came in. He was followed by Il Moro’s security chief, the slender, dark-complected Bernardino da Corte.

Il Moro briefly lifted his hands from the arms of his chair. “His Most Christian Majesty has not been sufficiently delayed by his recent illness. Now that Messer Ambrogio has effected his cure, the King is adamant about going to Pavia. We can expect him here in Vigevano in two days and at Pavia two days after that.”

“Where is he now, Your Highness?” Galeazz asked.

“Casale.”

“That is a half day’s ride for me. I could go there tomorrow and try to dissuade him.”

Il Moro shook his head. “The King has it fixed in his mind that he must at least offer this courtesy to his mother’s sister and his cousin. It is a question of his honor, so I am told. And as you know, Galeazz, when the King has an
idée fixe
concerning his honor, any amount of persuasion is wasted.”