Italian Renaissance - John Addington Symonds

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of Naples, hastened to win for himself favorable terms from the French sovereign. The Baglioni betook themselves to their own rancors in Perugia. The Duke of Calabria retreated. Italy seemed bent on proving that cowardice and selfishness and incapacity had conquered her. Viterbo was gained: the Ciminian heights were traversed: the Campagna, bounded by the Alban and the Sabine hills, with Rome, a bluish cloud upon the lowlands of the Tiber, spread its solemn breadth of beauty at the invader's feet. Not a blow had been struck, when he reached the Porta del Popolo upon the 31st of December 1494. At three o'clock in the afternoon began the entry of the French army. It was nine at night before the last soldiers, under the flaring light of torches and flambeaux, defiled through the gates, and took their quarters in the streets of the Eternal City. The gigantic barbarians of the cantons, flaunting with plumes and emblazoned surcoats, the chivalry of France, splendid with silk mantles and gilded corselets, the Scotch guard in their wild costume of kilt and philibeg, the scythe-like halberds of the German lanz-knechts, the tangled elf-locks of stern-featured Bretons, stamped an ineffaceable impression on the people of the South. On this memorable occasion, as in a show upon some holiday, marched past before them specimens and vanguards of all those legioned races which were soon to be too well at home in every fair Italian dwelling-place. Nothing was wanting to complete the symbol of the coming doom but a representative of the grim, black, wiry infantry of Spain.

      [1] The want of money determined all Charles's operations in this expedition. Borrowing from Lodovico, laying requisitions on Piero and the Florentines, pawning the jewels of the Savoy princesses, he passed from place to place, bargaining and contracting debts instead of dictating laws and founding constitutions. La carestia dei danari is a phrase continually recurring in Guicciardini. Speaking of the jewels lent to Charles by the royal families of Savoy and Montferrat at Turin, de Comines exclaims: 'Et pouvez voir quel commencement de guerre c'estoit, si Dieu n'eut guidé l'oeuvre.'

      Charles staid a month in Rome, and then set out for Naples. The fourth and last scene in the Italian pageant was now to be displayed. After the rich plain and proud cities of Lombardy, beneath their rampart of perpetual snow; after the olive gardens and fair towns of Tuscany; after the great name of Rome; Naples, at length, between Vesuvius and the sea, that first station of the Greeks in Italy, world-famed for its legends of the Sibyl and the sirens and the sorcerer Virgil, received her king. The very names of Parthenope, Posilippo, Inarime, Sorrento, Capri, have their fascination. There too the orange and lemon groves are more luxuriant; the grapes yield sweeter and more intoxicating wine; the villagers are more classically graceful; the volcanic soil is more fertile; the waves are bluer and the sun is brighter than elsewhere in the land. None of the conquerors of Italy have had the force to resist the allurements of the bay of Naples. The Greeks lost their native energy upon these shores and realized in the history of their colonies the myth of Ulysses' comrades in the gardens of Circe. Hannibal was tamed by Capua. The Romans in their turn dreamed away their vigor at Baiæ, at Pompeii at Capreæ, until the whole region became a byword for voluptuous living. Here the Saracens were subdued to mildness, and became physicians instead of pirates. Lombards and Normans alike were softened down, and lost their barbarous fierceness amid the enchantments of the southern sorceress.