Another century and more was to pass before the Cape route was in regular use; throughout the sixteenth century there would be plenty of traffic passing through the Mediterranean. But henceforth the writing was on the wall. Even when the Turks did not make trouble–and they usually did–all cargoes bound for the further east had to be unloaded in Alexandria or some Levantine port. Thence they would be either transported overland to the pirate-infested Red Sea or consigned to some shambling camel caravan which might take two or three years to reach its destination. Now, merchants could look forward to a time when they could sail from London or Lisbon and arrive in India or Cathay in the same vessel. Meanwhile, thanks to Columbus and those who followed him, the New World was proving infinitely more profitable than the old, possessed as it was of a fabulous wealth, the lion’s share of which went to Spain–and legally too. Within only seven months of Columbus’s first landfall, Pope Alexander had issued the first of his five bulls settling the competing claims of Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered territories;123 within twenty-five years, the galleons were regularly returning to their homeland loaded to the gunwales with loot. No wonder that the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella had their eyes fixed so firmly on the west. Jerusalem could wait.
It was not immediately apparent that this sudden opening-up of the oceans on both sides had dealt trade in the Mediterranean what would prove to be a paralysing blow. Gradually, however, men realised that–at least from the commercial point of view–the Middle Sea had become a backwater. To the east of the Adriatic it was now passable only with great difficulty and much good luck. To the west, it was still indispensable to Italy; but France was nowadays finding her northern ports on the English Channel a good deal more useful than Marseille or Toulon, while Spain, now entering her years of greatness, had other and better fish to fry. Not for another three hundred years, until the building of the Suez Canal, would the Mediterranean regain its old importance as a world thoroughfare.
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 ambassador125 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.
But alas, the Treaty of Granada had left too many questions unanswered. Nothing had been said about the province of the Capitanata, which lies between the Abruzzi and Apulia, nor about the Basilicata, on the instep of Italy between Apulia and Calabria. One might have thought it possible to settle such bones of contention by amicable means, but no: by July France and Spain were at war. The fighting continued on and off for two years, victory finally going to the Spaniards, who in 1503 smashed the French army at Cerignola. On 16 May Gonzalo entered Naples. In the last days of December he fell on the French yet again, by the Garigliano river. This time the battle was decisive, spelling the end of the French presence in Naples. Gaeta, the last French garrison in the kingdom, surrendered to S
panish troops on 1 January 1504. Thenceforth in the mainland kingdom, as well as in Sicily and Spain, the house of Aragon reigned unchallenged.
At this point in the story the spotlight shifts, briefly, to Cyprus. Some two and a half centuries before, the island had been bestowed by Richard Coeur-de-Lion on the hopeless Guy of Lusignan; and although it had from time to time fallen under foreign influences–notably that of Genoa in the fourteenth century and that of Cairo (to which it was still a tributary) in 1426–the house of Lusignan had continued to reign. In 1460, however, James of Lusignan, bastard son of the former king John II, had seized the throne from his sister Queen Charlotte and her husband Louis of Savoy, forcing them to take refuge in the castle of Kyrenia for three years until they could escape to Rome. Once king, James needed allies, and, turning to Venice, he had formally requested the hand in marriage of Caterina, the beautiful young daughter of Marco Cornaro (or Corner, as the Venetians had it), whose family had long been associated with the island. Marco himself had lived there for many years and had become an intimate friend of James, for whom he had accomplished several delicate diplomatic missions, while Caterina’s uncle Andrea was shortly to become Auditor of the Kingdom. On her mother’s side her lineage was still more distinguished: there she could boast as a great-grandfather no less a personage than John Comnenus, Emperor of Trebizond.128
The prospect of a Venetian Queen of Cyprus was more than the government of the Serenissima could resist; lest James should change his mind, it arranged for an immediate marriage by proxy. On 10 July 1468, with all the considerable pomp and magnificence of which the Republic was capable, the fourteen-year-old Caterina was escorted by forty noble matrons from Palazzo Corner at S. Polo to the Doge’s Palace. There Doge Cristoforo Moro handed a ring to the Cypriot ambassador, who placed it on the bride’s finger in the name of his sovereign. She was then given the title of Daughter of St Mark–an unprecedented honour which caused the Bishop of Turin acidly to observe that he never knew that St Mark had been married and that, even if he had, his wife must surely be a little old to have a child of fourteen. Four years later, on 10 November 1472, Caterina sailed away, with an escort of four galleys, to her new realm.
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