The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (36 page)

It remained, as always, a battleground. In Italy, too, the year 1492 had been a milestone; it had seen the deaths of both Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent), ruler of Florence, and, just three months later, of Pope Innocent VIII. Lorenzo, now remembered principally for his patronage of the arts, had also been largely responsible for preserving the always tenuous balance of the Italian states; by maintaining the alliance of Florence, Milan and Naples he had provided a focus for the smaller powers such as Mantua, Ferrara and some of the Papal States, and had also kept in check the dangerous ambitions of Venice. With his death and the succession of his feckless son Piero, that moderating influence was gone. Pope Innocent, for all his corruption and nepotism, had also been a force for peace; Rodrigo Borgia, the Spaniard who succeeded him as Pope Alexander VI, was quite simply out for what he could get. Italy lay once again open to attack, and that attack was not long in coming.

The
casus belli
was Naples. Though it still claimed Sicily as part of its kingdom, it had in fact been separated from the island proper ever since the Sicilian Vespers, when the house of Anjou had been driven out by that of Aragon and had retreated to the mainland. In 1435 the Angevin line had died out with Queen Joanna II, and the mainland throne of Naples, which she had left to an Angevin relative, had been seized by the island ruler Alfonso of Aragon. Thus the two kingdoms were now effectively reunited; each, however, had retained its separate identity, and on Alfonso’s death in 1458 they were separated again, the mainland being devolved on his illegitimate son Ferdinand.
¹²⁴
Ferdinand inherited what continued to be, in every important respect, a medieval monarchy. Feudal principles still prevailed; municipal liberties on the northern model were still unheard of. The King–greedy, ruthless but extremely capable–was feared and detested by his subjects, as was his son Alfonso, who succeeded him in January 1494. But the bastard grandson of a usurper, it was generally agreed, had but a tenuous claim to the throne. Alfonso’s position was open to challenge, and that challenge came on 1 September 1494, when the twenty-two-year-old King Charles VIII of France–described by the historian H. A. L. Fisher as ‘a young and licentious hunchback of doubtful sanity’–led an army of some 30,000 into Italy to claim for himself, as a descendant of Charles of Anjou, the Neapolitan throne. At once the two-hundred-year-old rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Aragon flared up again.

Charles’s appearance was hardly what might have been expected in a dashing young military adventurer. ‘His Majesty,’ reported the Venetian ambassador
¹²⁵
in that same year, ‘is small, ill-formed and ugly of countenance, with pale, short-sighted eyes, nose far too large and abnormally thick lips which are always apart. He makes spasmodic movements with his hands that are most unpleasant to look upon, and his speech is extremely slow.’ For him, too, 1492 had been significant, being the year in which he had been freed from the stern control of the former regent, his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu. She, certainly, would never have countenanced an adventure of the kind on which her brother had now embarked, from which his ministers had also done their best to dissuade him but in which he believed himself to be abundantly justified. He had no wish, he protested, to conquer the territory of others, only to claim such lands as belonged to him by right–which, for him, unquestionably included the Kingdom of Naples. And there was a further consideration: with this kingdom there had for the past three centuries been associated the style of King of Jerusalem,
¹²⁶
a title which would give him the prestige necessary, once his Italian dominions were safely confirmed, to launch and lead the long-overdue Crusade of which he dreamed.

The expedition began promisingly enough. Charles, with his cousin the Duke of Orleans and his army–its cavalry drawn from the high nobility and gentry of France–his Swiss halberdiers and German pikemen, his Gascon archers and his quick-firing light artillery, crossed the Alps without incident over the Mont Genèvre pass, his heavy cannon having been shipped separately to Genoa. Milan, under its brilliant and all-powerful ruler Ludovico Sforza, received him with enthusiasm; so too did Lucca and Pisa; in Florence, welcomed as a liberator by the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, the King took the opportunity to expel Piero de’ Medici–who displayed none of the statesmanship of his father Lorenzo. On 31 December Rome opened her gates, while a terrified Pope Alexander briefly took refuge in the Castel Sant’ Angelo before sullenly coming to terms. Finally, on 22 February 1495, Charles entered Naples, while its people–who had never looked on the rival house of Aragon as anything other than foreign oppressors–welcomed him with enthusiasm. His Aragonese rivals fled to Sicily, and on 12 May Charles was for the second time crowned a king.

He did not remain long in his new kingdom; already his success was beginning to turn sour. The Neapolitans, delighted as they had been to get rid of the Aragonese, soon discovered that one foreign occupier was very much like another. Unrest also grew among the populations of many smaller towns, who found themselves having to support, for no good reason that they could understand, discontented and frequently licentious French garrisons. Beyond the Kingdom of Naples, too, men were beginning to feel alarm. Even those states, Italian and foreign, who had previously looked benignly upon Charles’s advance were asking themselves just how much further the young conqueror might be intending to go. Ferdinand and Isabella decided to send a fleet to Sicily; the Holy Roman Emperor-elect Maximilian,
¹²⁷
terrified that Charles’s successes might lead him in his turn to claim the imperial crown, also made his preparations; Pope Alexander, never happy about Charles, was becoming increasingly nervous; and even Ludovico Sforza of Milan, by now as alarmed as anyone, was further disconcerted by the continued presence at nearby Asti of the Duke of Orleans–whose claims to Milan through his grandmother, the Duchess Valentina Visconti, he knew to be no less strong than those of Charles to Naples. The result was the formation of what was known as the Holy League, ostensibly pacific but in fact with a single objective: to send the new King packing.

When news of the League was brought to Charles at Naples, he flew into a fury, but he did not underestimate the danger with which he was now faced. Only a week after his coronation, he left his new kingdom for ever and headed north. Following the west coast of the peninsula up to La Spezia, he then branched right along the mountain road that would bring him across the northern range of the Apennines and down again into Lombardy. Even in midsummer, the task of dragging heavy artillery over a high mountain pass must have been a nightmare. The ascent was bad enough, but the journey down was infinitely worse; it sometimes needed as many as 100 already exhausted men, lashed together in pairs, to restrain a single heavy cannon from careering over a precipice–and, if they did not act quickly, carrying them with it. At last, on 5 July, Charles was able to look down on the little town of Fornovo–and, deployed just behind it, on some 30,000 soldiers of the League under the command of the Marquis of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga.

Gonzaga’s army had every advantage. It outnumbered the French by three–possibly four–to one; it was fully rested and provisioned; and it had had plenty of time to choose its position and prepare for the coming encounter. The French, by contrast, were exhausted, hungry and disinclined to fight. But fight they did, the King himself as bravely as any; the battle that followed was the bloodiest that Italy had seen for two hundred years. It did not, however, last long; according to the French ambassador to Venice, Philippe de Commines, who was present, everything was over in a quarter of an hour. Somehow Gonzaga managed to present it as a victory–even, on his return to Mantua, building a
chiesetta di vittoria
(a ‘little church of victory’) with a specially commissioned altarpiece by Mantegna; not everyone, however, would have agreed with him. The French admittedly forfeited their baggage train, but their losses were negligible compared with those of the Italians, who had utterly failed to stop them–as was seen when Charles and his men continued their march that same night and reached Asti unmolested only a few days later.

There was bad news awaiting them. A French naval expedition against Genoa had failed, resulting in the capture of most of the fleet. Louis of Orleans was being besieged in Novara by a Milanese army and unlikely to hold out much longer. Alfonso’s son Ferrantino had landed in Calabria where, supported by Spanish troops from Sicily, he was rapidly advancing on Naples. On 7 July 1495 he reoccupied the city. Suddenly, all the French successes of the past year had evaporated. In October Charles managed to come to an agreement with Sforza which ended the effectiveness of the League; a week or two later he led his army back across the Alps, leaving Orleans behind to maintain a French presence as best he could.

Paradoxically, Charles’s Italian adventure was to have its most lasting effect in northern Europe. When his army was paid off at Lyons in November 1495, it dispersed across the continent with reports of a warm, sunlit land inhabited by a people whose life of cultivated refinement went far beyond anything known in the greyer, chillier climes of the north, but who were too disunited to defend themselves against a determined invader. As the message spread, and as the painters, sculptors, plasterworkers and woodcarvers whom Charles had brought back with him from Italy began to transform his old castle at Amboise into a Renaissance palace, so Italy became ever more desirable in the eyes of her northern neighbours, presenting them with an invitation and a challenge which they were not slow to take up in the years to come.

The disbanded mercenaries carried something else too–deadlier far than any dream of conquest. Columbus’s three ships, returning to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493, had brought with them the first cases of syphilis known to the Old World; through the agency of the Spanish mercenaries sent by Ferdinand and Isabella to support King Alfonso the disease had rapidly spread to Naples, where it was rife by the time Charles arrived. After three months of
dolce far niente
, his men must in turn have been thoroughly infected, and all available evidence suggests that it was they who were responsible for introducing the disease north of the Alps. By 1497 cases were being reported as far away as Aberdeen. In that year Vasco da Gama reached India, where the disease is recorded in 1498; seven years later it was in Canton.

But however swift the spread of the
morbo gallico
–the French disease, as it was called–death came to Charles VIII more quickly still. At Amboise on the eve of Palm Sunday 1498, while on his way to watch the
jeu de paume
being played in the castle ditch, he struck his head on a low lintel. He walked on and saw the game, but on his way back to his apartments, just as he was passing the place where the accident had occurred, he collapsed. Although it was the most sordid and tumbledown corner of the castle–‘a place,’ sniffs Commines, ‘where every man pissed that would’–his attendants for some reason thought it better not to move him. There he lay on a rough pallet for nine hours; and there, shortly before midnight, he died. He was twenty-eight years old.

Since Charles’s only son had died in infancy, the throne now passed to his cousin the Duke of Orleans, thenceforth to be known as Louis XII. To the rulers of Italy, who had had plenty of experience of Louis in recent years, his succession could mean one thing only: a new invasion of the peninsula, this time to vindicate not only the Angevin claim to Naples but the Orleanist one to Milan. They were not in the least surprised to hear that the new King had expressly assumed the title of Duke of Milan at his coronation. The superiority of French arms had been proved at Fornovo, and the army that Louis was preparing bid fair to be considerably larger, better equipped and more efficiently organised than that of his predecessor. Pope Alexander might have objected, but Louis had managed to buy him without difficulty by offering to the Pope’s son Cesare–who, bored with being a cardinal, had decided to abandon the Church in favour of a life of military adventure–the rich Duchy of Valentinois and the hand in marriage of Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the King of Navarre.

It was in mid-August 1499 that this second invasion took place. On 2 September Duke Ludovico Sforza fled with his treasure to the Tyrol, and on 6 October King Louis made his solemn entry into Milan. He still did not have things entirely his own way–exactly four months later, after the King’s return to France, Sforza was back in the city–but ultimately the French army was too strong, and in April the Duke was taken prisoner, never to regain his liberty. Louis, however, was still not satisfied. Naples beckoned. His cousin Charles had won the city but then lost it again; he himself would be more careful. In November 1500 he concluded with Ferdinand of Aragon the secret Treaty of Granada, in which the two rulers would conquer Naples jointly. In return for his alliance–or at least his non-intervention–Ferdinand would receive a fair half of the kingdom, including the provinces of Apulia and Calabria. To Louis would go Naples itself, Gaeta and the Abruzzi. The Pope duly gave his approval, and in May 1501 the French army, supplemented by 4,000 Swiss mercenaries, was on the march.

The first news of the coalition to reach King Federico of Naples–brother and successor of Ferrantino, who had died soon after his return to his city–came from Rome, in the shape of a papal bull deposing him and dividing his kingdom according to the terms agreed at Granada. He retired to the island of Ischia, where after a time he accepted Louis’s offer of asylum in France. Two days after his departure French garrisons occupied the castles of Naples, while other contingents headed north into the Abruzzi. Simultaneously, the celebrated Spanish captain Gonzalo de Cordoba occupied his master’s share of the kingdom.