1492: The Year Our World Began (17 page)

If Charlemagne’s road through Naples led—at least in fiction—to Jerusalem, it was conceivable at the time that Charles VIII could follow him all the way. The prospects for renewing the crusade against the Turks seemed genuinely promising. The internecine squabbles of the Ottoman dynasty had driven the pretender to the sultanate, Prince Djem or Zizim, into the arms of the Knights of Rhodes, who had sent him to France for safekeeping in 1482.
The Book of the Kings’ Three Sons
featured a Turkish prince who embraced Christianity and converted his people: to Charles, it must have read like a prophetic text. The sultan of Egypt, who put politics above religion, offered a million ducats in support of a new crusade. Meanwhile, the menace of Turkish power in the Mediterranean grew as raids spread as far as Italy and a Turkish task force seized Otranto. In 1488, a Venetian publicist visited France to canvas support. “Today,” he complained, “faith has fallen, zeal is dead. The Christian cause has tumbled to a point so low that it is no longer for the sake of Jerusalem, or Asia, or even Greece that the Holy See has sent us to your Majesty, but it is for Italy herself, for the very towns of the holy Roman Church, her cities and people, that we have come to beg your aid.”
²⁴

On the way to Jerusalem and the lands of the Turks, the crown of Naples and Sicily gleamed. As early as 1482, the pope—Sixtus IV at that time—trailed the possibility before the unresponsive eyes of Louis XI, suggesting explicitly that young Charles could be the beneficiary. If France wanted to conquer Naples, “now is the acceptable time…. This realm belongs by hereditary right to his royal Majesty…. The pope’s will is that his Majesty or the lord dauphin be invested with this kingdom.”
²⁵

In the late 1480s, dissensions within the kingdom of Naples seemed to make the project increasingly practicable. In 1489, Charles received a group of dissident Neapolitan nobles at his court. Their numbers grew
over the next three years. During 1490, they laid out plans for the conquest at repeated meetings of Charles’s council. The pope’s envoys reported—with some cautious qualifications—that the French at last seemed to be steeled for the invasion. Charles prepared his route southward by alliance with Milan and covered his northern flank by marrying Anne of Brittany and attaching that dangerously independent duchy firmly, at last, to France. The news of the fall of Granada in January 1492 came like a call to compete for glory. A few weeks later, Innocent made his peace with Naples. Broadly speaking, the terms were that the pope would continue to dispense justice in Naples—but only according to the king’s wishes—while Naples would support the papacy with force of arms. To seal the bargain, the Neapolitans presented the pope with their most precious relic—the tip of the lance that was supposed to have pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion. Ironically, the settlement excited French interest as the dispute never had. French lust for the Neapolitan crown began to increase, with consequences that would prove fatal in the future. From March to May 1492, a Milanese embassy was in Paris, enticing the king into a final decision. Their machinations infuriated Peter Martyr, who from his vantage point at the court of the King of Aragon thought it “folly to place a viper or scorpion in one’s own bed in the hope that it may poison one’s neighbor…. You will all see. Charles, if he has any sense, will know how to exploit his chance.”
²⁶

While they were at work, news of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death arrived. A major obstacle disappeared. Florence, weakened by Lorenzo’s death and awestruck by Savonarola’s preaching, would be unable to put up much resistance to a French advance. Meanwhile, almost as soon as Innocent fixed matters with Naples and took solemn possession of the Holy Spear, a new, protracted illness overcame him, which proved to be his last. His physicians grew desperate. One of them allegedly offered to succor his patient with his son’s blood, which the pope refused to drink. By July, Innocent’s stomach pains were becoming unbearable, the sores on his legs unsightly. The shadow of his impending death seemed visible. The mob grew restive. The cardinals began to maneuver in prepara
tion for the conclave. By July 19, according to the Florentine ambassador, the pope’s body was effectively dead and only his soul remained to him. He yielded it up five days later. Before an invasion could begin, however, another obstacle arose. Innocent VIII had already decided to back a rival contender for the throne of Naples; but between indecision and infirmity he is unlikely to have offered serious opposition to Charles’s hopes, had he lived.

The conclave that followed his death took place in an atmosphere redolent of corruption. Moralists loved to find fault with Rome. According to the most anticlerical and sententious of the diarists of the time, the city housed sixty-eight hundred harlots “not counting those who practiced their nefarious trade under the cloak of concubinage and those who practiced their arts in secret.” The front-runner to succeed Innocent VIII seemed representative of all that was rotten in Rome. Rodrigo Borgia had been the favorite and runner-up at the last conclave, when Innocent VIII was elected, but his reputation, as a Florentine ambassador recorded, was already unsavory: false and proud. People excused his notorious womanizing, and the three children he fathered, on the grounds that he was fatally attractive. The wealth he piled up by accumulating benefices and offices of profit quenched all his disadvantages. “He possesses,” as a diarist who knew him observed, “immense quantities of silver plate, pearls, hangings, and vestments embroidered in gold and silk, and all of such splendid quality as would befit a king or a pope. I pass over the sumptuous adornments of his litters and trappings for his horses, and all his gold and silver and silks, together with his magnificent wardrobe and his hoards of treasure.”
²⁷

To win the new election, Borgia supposedly bought Cardinal Sforza’s vote with four mule loads of silver—on the pretext that they would go to his house for safekeeping. He got most of the rest of the votes he needed without compromising his own fortune—by promising to reward his supporters from the church’s stock of profitable jobs. Stefano Infessura, a humanist diarist with a talent for satire, explained how on his election the new pope began his reign “by giving his goods to the poor”—by paying
for the votes he had bought with promises. The cardinals elected him Pope Alexander VI on the night of August 10.

It was a scandalous choice but not—for the times—an inappropriate one. Borgia was an accomplished and indefatigable man of business. His flagrant nepotism dominates historical traditions about him. He heaped honors and titles on his children. “Ten papacies,” according to the ambassador of Ferrara, would not have yielded enough to satisfy all the Borgia cousins who thronged the curia. Abuses, however, did not doom the Church. The problems that proved intractable were diplomatic.

From the pope’s point of view, a French invasion, which his predecessors had sought so ardently, would now be a disaster. The arrangements Innocent VIII made with Naples were perfectly satisfactory. The new heir to the Neapolitan throne bettered them and paid Alexander handsomely for his support. Charles VIII, the pope knew, would spread ruin and scatter ban. As Alexander strove to uphold the royal house of Naples, Charles took the offensive, igniting the pope’s deepest fear by impugning the validity of his election. In effect, Alexander had bribed his way into the papacy, and the legitimacy of his position was questionable. Charles recalled the French cardinals and banned all payments of church dues to Rome. He bade for a higher source of legitimation than even the pope could confer. He took a crusading oath and vowed that he would not stop at Naples, but use it as a launching point for the conquest of Jerusalem.

While Charles secured his flanks and rear by treaties with his enemies the rulers of England and the Netherlands, the invasion was postponed until 1494. When the king of Naples died in January 1494, the French were almost ready to invade. On September 3, 1494, Charles left the French frontier and marched on Naples with an army of some forty thousand men. Peter Martyr, watching events unfold, raged in frustration: “What Italian can take up his pen without crying, without dying, without being consumed by pain?” The invader’s progress south was like a triumph, as cities and duchies capitulated and the pope’s partisans defected or fled. Along the way, Charles picked up fortunes in ran
soms—the price communities paid to avoid pillage. Pope Alexander, seeming to accept the inevitable, surrendered Rome into the king’s hands, counting himself lucky to escape deposition. Rome emptied of notables and valuables. “People are in terror,” wrote the Milanese envoy in May 1495, “not only for their property, but for their lives also. Rome has never been so entirely cleared of silver and valuables of all sorts. Not one of the cardinals has enough plate to serve six persons. The houses are dismantled.”
²⁸
Refusing to anoint Charles as king of Naples, Alexander fled.

But Charles was the victim of his own success. He occupied the kingdom of Naples with such ease that all Europe’s neutrals, and even some of his former friends, became as alarmed as his enemies at the growth of his power. The pope put together a coalition of Venice, Spain, England, and the Duke of Milan, ostensibly to fight the Ottomans but really to reverse Charles’s achievements. It was not, at first, militarily active, but it was effective in encouraging local opposition to Charles. When the king returned to France with his booty in July, Milanese forces ambushed him and seized almost all the treasures he had gathered. Over the next couple of years, Spanish-led forces chased out the garrisons he left behind in Naples.

“1494: Charles VIII invades Italy. Beginning of modern times.” I can still recall the list of memorable dates my history teacher wrote on the blackboard when I was at my first school. The idea behind what at the time was a conventional way of dating the dawn of modernity was that until the French invasion, the Renaissance was confined to Italy. Charles unlocked it and took Italian arts and ideas back with him across the Alps, making it possible for the initiatives that made our world to spread around Europe.

No one still thinks anything of the sort. The Renaissance no longer looks like a new departure in the history of the world; rather, it was just more of the same, or an intensification of medieval traditions of humanistic learning and reverence for classical antiquity. New ideas were not all of Italian origin, and humanism and classicism had independent
origins in other parts of Europe—especially in France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Italian learning and technical and artistic savoir-faire were already sought after in much of Europe. In Spain, the fall of Granada did most to introduce Italian taste, for the conquered city cried out for new churches and palaces in a classicizing spirit. Charles VIII, in any case, did little to spread Italian taste even in France. The year 1492 was at least as decisive as 1494 in the history of his involvement in Italy, for it was then that he made up his mind to invade.

In combination, the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the invasion of Charles VIII constituted a crisis in the history of the Renaissance. Ficino thought Plato’s fortunes had collapsed with Lorenzo’s death.
²⁹
After the Bonfire of the Vanities, even Botticelli gave up painting erotic commissions and reverted to old-fashioned piety. The Renaissance seemed in abeyance. But the greatest age was long over. By the mid–fifteenth century, the generation of Brunelleschi (d. 1446), Ghiberti (d. 1455), Donatello (d. 1466), Alberti (d. 1472), and Michelozzo (d. 1472) was aging, dead, or dying. The institutions of the republic had fallen under the control of a single dynasty. But the tradition of excellence in arts and learning lived on. The sculptor Andrea Verocchio and the incomparable painter Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) lived next door to the house of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose writings popularized knowledge of the continent that came to be named after him. In the church of Ognissanti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio (1448–96) worked on commissions from Vespucci’s family.

Although the revolution that was to overthrow the Medici in 1494 caused a temporary loss of opportunities for patronage, the careers of the next generation—including Michelangelo, who was Ghirlandaio’s apprentice—were already under way. At the time, Machiavelli was an unknown twenty-something. Florence’s fertility in the production of genius seemed inexhaustible. Leonardo da Vinci had left the city in 1481 and went to Milan, where he struggled to get paid for his paintings and worked hard glorifying the local tyrant in bronze or designing engineering works. Michelangelo was just eighteen years old when the
death of Lorenzo forced him from the security of the Medici court back to his father’s home. He worked hard to regain favor and in January 1494 was commissioned by the new head of the Medici family to produce a snow statue. The snow seemed hardly to have melted when political upheaval forced the Medici out. Michelangelo (among other artists) went with them and took refuge in Venice.

Nor is it fair to say that Lorenzo’s death, or even the revolution that followed it, seeded Florentine talent throughout Italy. There had long been a lively market for skills in artistry and eloquence. Rome was the most important focus, for the popes had a long tradition as collectors of antiquities, patrons of art, and employers of high achievers not only in sacred learning but also in law, diplomacy, rhetoric, and the formulation of propaganda. To the frustration of believers in the exemplary value of ancient republican virtues, the rise of dictators and despots in Italian cities actually stimulated the markets in learning and art. Autocrats needed rhetoricians to advocate their merits, justify their usurpations of power, and excuse their wars. Tyrants needed sculptors and architects to design and erect their monuments and perpetuate their images. Courts needed artists to paint their personnel and design their theaters of power—the masques and jousts, the processions and parades that awed enemies and enthused followers. Because artists often doubled as engineers, and sculptors skilled in bronze casting could transfer their talents to making guns, the growing political tensions in Italy also created opportunities for artists all over the peninsula.