Orville Prescott - Princes of the Renaissance

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: THE RENAISSANCE

Volume 9

Princes of the Renaissance

First published in 1969 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd

This edition first published in 2020

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1969 Orville Prescott

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-25398-1 (Set)

ISBN: 978-0-429-29609-3 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-26272-3 (Volume 9) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-29235-4 (Volume 9) (ebk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Princes of the Renaissance

ORVILLE PRESCOTT

FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 1970

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the Publishers.

ORVILLE PRESCOTT , 1969

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY JOHN DICKENS AND CO LTD

NORTHAMPTON

To four old friends of mine:
Niccol Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Baldassare Castiglione and Francesco Matarazzo

Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

Lord Macaulay in his essay on Machiavelli

Contents

1. vi
2. vii

Guide

Illustrations

J UDGED BY THE NUMBER of books written about it, the Italian Renaissance is one of the most perennially interesting of all historical periods. By universal consent it is of the most important. The great cultural revolution which swept over Italy in the fifteenth century transformed European civilization and the minds of men. In the liberating excitement of all the new ideas and new attitudes there was an explosion of artistic genius. The painters, sculptors, writers and architects of the Renaissance are the glory of Italy. The society in which they lived was dominated by the princes who ruled the many independent states. These princes were themselves profoundly important shapers of the political, cultural and moral climate of their time. Most of them are not nearly as well known as the artists they patronized, bullied or ignored.

And just as the artists expressed the ideas and ideals of the time, so did the princes. Since they were men of power, absolute lords in their petty domains, they enjoyed complete liberty to play their parts on the Renaissance stage as they saw fit. Their furious energy, their flamboyant individualism, their ostentatious magnificence, their deceit and cruelty and their cultivation, combined with moral corruption, were all part of the Renaissance world. It was a grim and gaudy world and the dukes, marquises, lords and despots were a spectacularly colorful lot.

A few were great men. All were involved in great events. Their lives were melodramatic. They were also full of psychologically interesting demonstrations of the use of power and of the way powerful men lived in an era of artistic triumphs and political anarchy. This book is a popular narrative about the lives, personalities and politics of extraordinary people. Most of them are unknown except to students of the Renaissance.

Biographies of a few of the characters in this book are available. Facts about the rest are widely scattered in many learned and obscure books, some of which have never been translated into English. Other important aspects of the Renaissance, such as economics, the revival of learning and the philosophy of the humanist scholars, which do not properly fit into this book, are authoritatively discussed in numerous scholarly works.

Ignoring the currently fashionable question of just when was the Renaissance, I have written about Italy only in the years usually considered incontestably Renaissance in that countryfrom 1400 to 1530. I have not included chapters on the two families whose names are best known to most readersthe Medici and the Borgiasalthough members of both families frequently appear in these pages. Many books about the Medici and Borgias are available. Some of them are listed in the bibliography. I have preferred to write about other princes of the Renaissance, all of them as interesting and some of them as important.

It is a pleasure to thank five people who have generously given of their time to help me complete this book, either by tracking down elusive facts or by reading the manuscript and making suggestions for improving it: Carlo Beuf, biographer of Cesare Borgia; Serge Hughes, Professor of Italian at Hunter College; Paul Reynolds; Lilias Prescott, my wife; and Peter S. Prescott, my son. I am, of course, solely responsible for all sins of omission or commission. I also wish to thank the kind people who courteously provided me with books from the following libraries: the New York Public Library, the Society Library of New York, the library of the Century Association, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Bridgeport Public Library and the New Canaan Public Library.

Princes of the Renaissance

I
The Beginning of the End

T HE WINES OF I TALY were sour this year, and therefore not at all agreeable to the French, any more than the excessive heat of the atmosphere. The year was 1494. The French were the soldiers of King Charles VIII, invading Italy on their way to the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples. The writer was Philip de Commines, Lord of Argenton, a Flemish diplomat and bureaucrat who had served Louis XI for many years and had also served Louiss feckless son. Charless long march from Lyons to Naples and his long retreat back again is one of the key events in European history. It marked the end of an era and the beginning of another, the end of the independence of the separate states of Italy in which the Renaissance had flowered and the beginning of the domination of Italy by foreign powers and the ravaging of Italy by French, German, Spanish and Swiss troops.

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