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 ransoms—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 polit
ical tensions in Italy also created opportunities for artists all over the peninsula.
Even in combination with the events of 1494, those of 1492 did not stimulate the Renaissance, liberate it from the confines of Florence, or disseminate it around the world. Lorenzo the Magnificent and Charles VIII no longer look like harbingers of modernity. The mental world they shared was chivalric. They looked back for their values: Lorenzo to antiquity, Charles to a fictional version of the classical and medieval past. Savonarola, perhaps, was a more important or representative figure for the future of the world. At first glance, he seems an even more regressive type than his chivalrically minded contemporaries, sunk in the ostentatiously austere late-medieval piety that most people nowadays find baffling or irksome. His addiction to millenarianism, his confidence in visions, his prophetic stridency, his hatred of art, and his mistrust of secular scholarship align him with aspects of the modern world most moderns reject: religious obscurantism, extreme fanaticism, irrational fundamentalism. In some ways, the conflicts he brought to a head—the confrontation of worldly and godly moralities, the uncomprehending debate between rational and subrational or suprarational mind-sets, the struggle for power in the state between the partisans of secularism and spirituality or of science and scripture—are timeless, universal features of history. Yet they are also, in their current intensity and ferocity, among the latest novelties of contemporary politics. The culture wars of our own time did not begin with Savonarola, but he embodied some of their most fearsome features.
In his prescriptions for Christendom, Savonarola was not an innovator, but he seemed “swollen with divine virtue,” according to Machiavelli, who, as a youngster, heard the friar’s sermons as he huffed and puffed in the pulpit. He brought unique force to the expression of some long-standing priorities of the reforming prophets of the late medieval Church: revulsion from the Church’s involvement in the world and the corrupting effects of wealth and secular power; denunciation of the overweening power of the popes over clergy and the clergy over laypeople; horror at the way pharisees seemed to have taken over the Church, binding and laming the search for salvation with obedience to formulaic rules and meaningless rituals. He was convinced that Scripture contained the whole of God’s message, universally accessible, and that readers of Scripture needed no other knowledge except of prayer and mortification. His condemnation of Roman excess—though perhaps not quite as colorfully insulting as Luther’s, with its rich language of the lavatory and the whorehouse—anticipated in tone and content the invective of the founder of Protestantism:
Go to Rome and see! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see! Thou shalt find them all with the books of the humanities in their hands, telling one another that they can guide men’s souls by means of Virgil, Horace, and Cicero…. The prelates of former days had fewer gold miters and chalices, and what few they possessed were broken up and given to relieve the needs of the poor. But our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support. Dost thou not know what I would tell thee?…O Lord, arise, and come to deliver thy Church from the hands of devils, from the hands of tyrants, from the hands of iniquitous prelates.30
Savonarola prefigured Luther, too, in his insistence on the doctrine of salvation by the free grace of God, which—except in the hands of reformers who used it to denounce the Church’s rules of charity and piety—was perfectly innocent, orthodox Catholicism, but which became the slogan of the Reformation:
God remits the sins of men, and justifies them by his mercy. There are as many drops of compassion in heaven as there are justified men upon earth; for none are saved by their own works…. And if, in the presence of God, we could ask all these justified sinners, “Have you been saved by your own strength?” all would reply as with one voice, “Not unto us, O Lord! not unto us; but to thy name be the glory!” Therefore, O God, do I seek thy mercy, and I bring not unto thee my own righteousness; but when by thy grace thou justifiest one, then thy righteousness belongs unto me; for grace is the righteousness of God.31
An anonymous painting from 1498 shows what became of Savonarola, and how Florentines wanted the rest of us to remember his fate. Here, in place of the “vanities” the prophet had kindled in the same place a few years before, the flames consume Savonarola himself. It is a depiction of his death at the stake: the pyre is gigantic, towering, more like a ship than a scaffold, with its skyward, mastlike reach, topped with a cross. A high causeway links it to the municipal palace, from where the preacher was led to public execution. But the man who once turned heads and sparked ardor in the hearts of the people is now strangely ignored. Children play, merchants pass through; it is business as usual in the Piazza della Signoria. Only those who carry wood to the pyre are engaged in Savonarola’s reckoning. The message of the image is obvious: Florence spared no pains or expense to burn the heretic, but did not want to appear to have taken any notice of him.
A few years after Savonarola’s immolation, Luther visited Florence. But he did not need to experience the place to adopt the martyred friar as a hero or succumb to his influence. Savonarola’s popularity with his followers, and the informal power he exercised in the Florentine republic after the fall of the Medici, ensured that almost every word he uttered from the pulpit found its way into print. Luther knew his sermons well, reprinted two of them, with an admiring preface of his own, and acknowledged him as a forerunner. “The Antichrist of that time made the memory of that great man perish,” he complained, “but see! He lives. And his memory is blessed.” 32
Chapter 6
Toward “the Land of Darkness”
Russia and the Eastern Marches of Christendom
June 7: Casimir IV, king of Poland and Grand Prince
of Lithuania, dies.
The messengers turned back. They were on their way from Moscow, the capital or courtly center of Muscovy—an upstart state that had become, in twenty years of aggressive dynamism, the fastest-expanding empire in Christendom. Their destination was the court of Casimir IV, king of Poland and sovereign—“Grand Prince” or “Grand Duke” in the jargon of the time—of Lithuania. Casimir was, by common assent, the greatest ruler in Christendom. His territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Its eastern frontier lay deep inside Russia, along the breakwater between the Dnieper and Volga valleys. Westward, it unfolded as far as Saxony and the satellite kingdoms of Bohemia, and Hungary, which Casimir more or less controlled. On the map, it was the biggest and most formidable-looking domain in the Latin world since the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Kremlin, the “citadel of Moscow,” as it appeared to an ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire in 1517, with the stone structures conspicuous among the wooden houses.
S. von Herberstein, Notes Upon Russia (London, 1852). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society.
The envoys from Moscow, however, were undaunted. They were carrying breathtakingly defiant demands for the surrender of most of Casimir’s Russian dominions, which Muscovites had been infiltrating for years, into the hands of their own prince. They turned back, not because the power of Poland and Lithuania deterred them, nor because the summer roads were hot, boggy, and mosquito-ridden, but because the world had changed.
By rights, the world should have been close to ending. According to Russian reckoning, 1492 marked the close of the seventh millennium of creation, and prophets and visionaries were getting enthusiastic or apprehensive, according to taste. Calendars stopped in 1492. There were skeptics, but they were officially disavowed, even persecuted. In 1490, the patriarch of Moscow conducted an inquisition against heretics, torturing his victims until they confessed to injudicious denunciations of the doctrine of the Trinity and the sanctity of the Sabbath. Among the proscribed thoughts of which the victims were accused was doubt about whether the world was really about to end.
The news that made the Muscovite messengers backtrack reached them in the second week o
f June. Casimir IV had collapsed and died while hunting in Trakal, not far from Vilnius, where they had been hoping to meet for negotiations. For Russia, the prospects defied the prophecies. Casimir’s death improved Muscovy’s outlook. The messengers rode hard for Moscow. It was time for new instructions and even more outrageous ambitions.
Between the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkan uplands in the south and the Baltic Sea in the north, eastern Europe’s geography is hostile to political continuity. Cut and crossed by invaders’ corridors, it is an environment in which—with its flat, open expanses, good communications, and dispersed populations—states can form with ease, survive in struggle, and thrive only with difficulty. There are forty thousand square miles of marshland in the middle of the region, covering much of what is now Belarus, around the upper Dnieper. Around this vast bog, the steppeland curls to the south and the bleak, ridgeless North European plain—choked with dense, dark forests—stretches uninterruptedly westward from deep inside Siberia. The lay of the land favors vast and fragile empires, vulnerable to external attack and internal rebellion. Armies can shuttle back and forth easily. Rebels can hide in the forests and swamps. Volatile hegemonies have come and gone in the region with bewildering rapidity. In the fifth century the Huns extended their sway from the steppelands to the east around the marshes and into the northern plain. In the ninth century a state the Byzantines called Great Moravia reached briefly from the marshes to the Elbe. In the late tenth and eleventh centuries a native Slav state occupied most of the Volga Valley. The most spectacular empire makers to unify the region arrived sweating from the depths of Asia in the thirteenth century, driving their vast herds of horses and sheep. The Mongols burst into Western history—like a scourge, as some chroniclers said, or, said others, like a plague.
1492 Page 15
