*I wonder how the rest of that long-famed Sirte clan is doing today.
From THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY by John Addington Symonds.
To enumerate all the catastrophes of reigning families, occurring in the
fifteenth century alone, would be quite impossible within the limits of
this chapter. Yet it is only by dwelling on the more important that any
adequate notion of the perils of Italian despotism can be formed.
Thus Girolamo Riario was murdered by his subjects at Forli (1488), and
Francesco Vico dei Prefetti in the Church of S. Sisto at Viterbo
(1387).
At Lodi in 1402 Antonio Fisiraga burned the chief members of the
ruling house of Vistarini on the public square, and died himself of
poison after a few months.
His successor in the tyranny, Giovanni
Vignate, was imprisoned by Filippo Maria Visconti in a wooden cage at
Pavia, and beat his brains out in despair against its bars.
At the same
epoch Gabrino Fondulo slaughtered seventy of the Cavalcabu family
together in his castle of Macastormo, with the purpose of acquiring
their tyranny over Cremona. He was afterwards beheaded as a traitor at
Milan (1425).
Ottobon Terzi was assassinated at Parma (1408), Nicola
Borghese at Siena (1499).
Altobello Dattiri at Todi (about 1500),
Raimondo and Pandolfo Malatesta at Rimini, and Oddo Antonio di
Montefeltro at Urbino (1444).
The Varani were massacred to a man in
the Church of S. Dominic at Camerino (1434), the Trinci at Foligno
(1434), and the Chiavelli of Fabriano in church upon Ascension Day
(1435). This wholesale extirpation of three reigning families introduces
one of the most romantic episodes in the history of Italian despotism.
From the slaughter of the Varani one only child, Giulio Cesare, a boy of
two years old, was saved by his aunt Tora. She concealed him in a truss
of hay and carried him to the Trinci at Foligno. Hardly had she gained
this refuge, when the Trinci were destroyed, and she had to fly with her
burden to the Chiavelli at Fabriano. There the same scenes of bloodshed
awaited her. A third time she took to flight, and now concealed her
precious charge in a nunnery. The boy was afterwards stolen from the
town on horseback by a soldier of adventure. After surviving three
massacres of kith and kin, he returned as despot at the age of twelve to
Camerino, and became a general of distinction. But he was not destined
to end his life in peace. Cesare Borgia finally murdered him, together
with three of his sons, when he had reached the age of sixty.
Less
romantic but not less significant in the annals of tyranny is the story
of the Trinci. A rival noble of Foligno, Pietro Rasiglia, had been
injured in his honor by the chief of the ruling house. He contrived to
assassinate two brothers, Nicolo and Bartolommeo, in his castle of
Nocera; but the third, Corrado Trinci, escaped, and took a fearful
vengeance on his enemy. By the help of Braccio da Montone he possessed
himself of Nocera and all its inhabitants, with the exception of Pietro
Rasiglia's wife, whom her husband flung from the battlements. Corrado
then butchered the men, women, and children of the Rasiglia clan, to the
number of three hundred persons, accomplishing his vengeance with
details of atrocity too infernal to be dwelt on in these pages. It is
recorded that thirty-six asses laden with their mangled limbs paraded
the streets of Foligno as a terror-striking spectacle for the
inhabitants. He then ruled the city by violence, until the warlike
Cardinal dei Vitelleschi avenged society of so much mischief by
destroying the tyrant and five of his sons, in the same year.
Equally
fantastic are the annals of the great house of the Baglioni at Perugia.
Raised in 1389 upon the ruins of the bourgeois faction called Raspanti,
they founded their tyranny in the person of Pandolfo Baglioni, who was
murdered together with sixty of his clan and followers by the party
they had dispossessed. The new despot, Biordo Michelotti, was stabbed in
the shoulders with a poisoned dagger by his relative, the abbot of S.
Pietro. Then the city, in 1416, submitted to Braccio da Montone, who
raised it to unprecedented power and glory. On his death it fell back
into new discords, from which it was rescued again by the Baglioni in
1466, now finally successful in their prolonged warfare with the rival
family of Oddi. But they did not hold their despotism in tranquillity.
In 1500 one of the members of the house, Grifonetto degli Baglioni,
conspired against his kinsmen and slew them in their palaces at night.
As told by Matarazzo, this tragedy offers an epitome of all that is
most, brilliant and terrible in the domestic feuds of the Italian
tyrants.
The vicissitudes of the Bentivogli at Bologna present
another series of catastrophes, due less to their personal crimes than
to the fury of the civil strife that raged around them. Giovanni
Bentivoglio began the dynasty in 1400. The next year he was stabbed to
death and pounded in a wine-vat by the infuriated populace, who thought
he had betrayed their interests in battle. His son, Antonio, was
beheaded by a Papal Legate, and numerous members of the family on their
return from exile suffered the same fate. In course of time the
Bentivogli made themselves adored by the people; and when Piccinino
imprisoned the heir of their house, Annibale, in the castle of Varano,
four youths of the Marescotti family undertook his rescue at the peril
of their lives, and raised him to the Signory of Bologna. In 1445 the
Canetoli, powerful nobles, who hated the popular dynasty, invited
Annibale and all his clan to a christening feast, where they
exterminated every member of the reigning house. Not one Bentivoglio was
left alive.
In revenge for this massacre, the Marescotti, aided by the
populace, hunted down the Canetoli for three whole days in Bologna, and
nailed their smoking hearts to the doors of the Bentivoglio palace. They
then drew from his obscurity in Florence the bastard Santi Bentivoglio,
who found himself suddenly lifted from a wool-factory to a throne.
Whether he was a genuine Bentivoglio or not, mattered little. The house
had become necessary to Bologna, and its popularity had been baptized in
the bloodshed of four massacres. What remains of its story can be
briefly told. When Cesare Borgia besieged Bologna, the Marescotti
intrigued with him, and eight of their number were sacrificed by the
Bentivogli in spite of their old services to the dynasty. The survivors,
by the help of Julius II., returned from exile in 1536, to witness the
final banishment of the Bentivogli and to take part in the destruction
of the palace, where their ancestors had nailed the hearts of the
Canetoli upon the walls.
To multiply the records of crime revenged by crime, of force repelled
by violence, of treason heaped on treachery, of insult repaid by fraud,
would be easy enough. Indeed, a huge book might be compiled containing
nothing but the episodes in this grim history of despotism, now tragic
and pathetic, now terror-moving in sublimity of passion, now despicable
by the baseness of the motives brought to light, at one time revolting
through excess of physical horrors, at another fascinating by the
spectacle of heroic courage, intelligence, and resolution.
Enough
however, has been said to describe the atmosphere of danger in which the
tyrants breathed and moved, and from which not one of them was ever
capable of finding freedom. Even a princely house so well based in its
dynasty and so splendid in its parade of culture as that of the Estensi
offers a long list of terrific tragedies. One princess is executed for
adultery with her stepson (1425); a bastard's bastard tries to seize the
throne, and is put to death with all his kin (1493); a wife is poisoned
by her husband to prevent her poisoning him (1493); two brothers cabal
against the legitimate heads of the house, and are imprisoned for life
(1506). Such was the labyrinth of plot and counterplot, of force
repelled by violence, in which the princes praised by Ariosto and by
Tasso lived.
Isolated, crime-haunted, and remorseless, at the same time fierce and
timorous, the despot not unfrequently made of vice a fine art for his
amusement, and openly defied humanity. His pleasures tended to
extravagance. Inordinate lust and refined cruelty sated his irritable
and jaded appetites. He destroyed pity in his soul, and fed his dogs
with living men, or spent his brains upon the invention of new tortures.
From the game of politics again he won a feverish pleasure, playing for
states and cities as a man plays chess, and endeavoring to extract the
utmost excitement from the varying turns of skill and chance.
It would
be an exaggeration to assert that all the princes of Italy were of this
sort. The saner, better, and nobler among them–men of the stamp of Gian
Galeazzo Visconti, Can Grande della Scala, Francesco and Lodovico
Sforza, found a more humane enjoyment in the consolidation of their
empire, the cementing of their alliances, the society of learned men,
the friendship of great artists, the foundation of libraries, the
building of palaces and churches, the execution of vast schemes of
conquest. Others, like Galeazzo Visconti, indulged a comparatively
innocent taste for magnificence.
Some, like Sigismondo Pandolfo
Malatesta, combined the vices of a barbarian with the enthusiasm of a
scholar. Others again, like Lorenzo de' Medici and Frederick of Urbino,
exhibited the model of moderation in statecraft and a noble width of
culture.
But the tendency to degenerate was fatal in all the despotic
houses. The strain of tyranny proved too strong. Crime, illegality, and
the sense of peril, descending from father to son, produced monsters in
the shape of men. The last Visconti, the last La Scalas, the last
Sforzas, the last Malatestas, the last Farnesi, the last Medici are
among the worst specimens of human nature....
