As Lodovico Sforza was the first to utter the fatal invitation to the French, he was fitly the first scapegoat. But, not alone in his sin, he was not alone in the punishment. If we condemn him for starting the ruin of his country by delivering Naples to Charles, what shall we say of Venice, Florence and the Pope, who each for their own selfish interests completed it by selling Milan to Louis? The inexorable retribution did not fail to fall upon them also. The first years of the sixteenth century are its history. Alexander, dying, dragged down that son and that earthly dominion for which he had given his soul. Venice, shaken nigh to destruction in her turn, by an iniquitous combination, had to forget her wide dreams of empire and be content with a narrow liberty, passing into stagnation and decay. Julius, continuer of Alexander’s worldly policy, may well have seen with prophetic eye, when death called him too, his unaccomplished scheme of a renovated Church,—Papacy and Empire in one, head of a new heaven on earth, which should lay the sword of temporal and spiritual victory at the feet of the purified Venus, Madonna with her Son upon her knee, shrink to the monastic ideals and the rigid excluding tyranny of the Catholic reaction. Last of all, Florence, most constant of the lovers of liberty, with her most melancholy fall filled up the cup of expiation and sealed the final subjugation of the country.
[Illustration: SCOPETTA OF LODOVICO IL MORO]
“Il povero Milano cridava, pensando di poter cridare, ma fu una mala cosa per Milano.”—BURIGOZZO.
At Novara, Milan lost her independence for ever. The restoration of the Sforza, witnessed twice over in the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, was a mere puppet-show, barely concealing the hand of greater Powers behind. The Gascon archers, who from the Castello walls amused themselves by shooting to fragments the great clay model of ‘the Horse,’ had ruined as effectively the fair social fabric, as unique, as fragile, and as incomplete, which Leonardo’s work symbolised in the person of its founder, Francesco Sforza.
With the captivity of Lodovico began in fact that long foreign subjugation of Milan which was to endure into modern times. Her vicissitudes during the short period that still comes within the scope of our mediæval story are too sad to linger over. Reoccupied by the French after Novara, the city was mulcted in an enormous sum as the penalty of rebellion, and instead of the comparatively mild régime under a native governor, first instituted by Louis, she had to suffer the iron rule of a foreign viceroy, whose aim was to stamp out every spark of free and patriotic aspiration in the people.