Italian Journeys Part 16

This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the n.o.blest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public for more than two centuries.

All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of t.i.tian and Tintoretto, as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio, as Ba.s.sano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had infected their dialect, and that they fas.h.i.+oned their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the a.s.sa.s.sination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital pa.s.sed away, I perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever hara.s.sed an unhappy city.

The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts the d.u.c.h.ess herself survives in the marble of Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio, Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay, in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses breaking the Tables of the Law" is visible in the midst of a mult.i.tude of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but that august and awful presence.

Undoubtedly the best gallery of cla.s.sical antiquities in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders of the Mus...o...b..rbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup--a burly, worthless, disgraceful demiG.o.d.

The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and l.u.s.t of Fame which would brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This _Theatrum orbis miraculum_ was built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand spectators; at a later _fete_ it held only ten thousand; the last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the s.p.a.ce once flooded for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty auditorium.

DUCAL MANTUA.

In that desperate depth of h.e.l.l where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the d.a.m.ned the daughter of a Theban king, and discourses to his charge:--

Manto was she: through many lands she went Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.

Therefore I choose thou be on me intent A little. When from life her father pa.s.sed, And they of Bacchus' city became slaves, Long time about the world the daughter cast.

Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves The feet of Alps that lock in Germany: Benaco called....

And Peschiera in strong harness sits To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques, Where one down-curving sh.o.r.e the other meets.

There all the gathered waters outward flow That may not in Benaco's bosom rest, And down through, pastures green a river go.

As far as to Governo, where, its quest Ended at last, it falls into me Po.

But far it has not sought before a plain It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.

Here pa.s.sing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid Saw land in the middle of the sullen main, Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid Of human neighborhood, she made her lair, Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade, And lived, and left her empty body there.

Then the spa.r.s.e people that were scattered near Gathered upon that island, everywhere Compa.s.sed about with swamps and kept from fear.

They built their city above the witch's grave, And for her sake that first made dwelling there The name of Mantua to their city gave.

To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures,--"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."

But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is mult.i.tudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona, and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid railway train,--a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape.

The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out of sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt this poor landscape _was_ imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Ca.n.a.l without understanding as to price.

But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against possibility of change in the political condition of this part of Italy. Compa.s.sed about by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position; and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before him.

I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city.

But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have some erudite a.s.sociations with the place as giving the term of _mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?

For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty, indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.

I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Ill.u.s.trazione de Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo Arrighi: _Grande Ill.u.s.trazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle Citta, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.

Per Cura di Cesare Cantu, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its t.i.tle, and figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.

The "Grande Ill.u.s.trazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.

This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories, he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of the scenes. Whatever ill.u.s.trated character in princes or people he carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose, to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help, and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,

"Which was an image of the mighty world,"

and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with something like exultation.

As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy; as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth, and rect.i.tude in streets, as well as human nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian amba.s.sador, two centuries since, to write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways, moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the entry-halls, as they appeared to the pa.s.sing glance, were clean, and had not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the before-quoted amba.s.sador speaks, because they found them faced with cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to all long and intensely munic.i.p.alized communities. But Mantua has a ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders.

But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and selling, and about the doors of the caffes, where there was a good deal of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fas.h.i.+on.

If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both pity and wonder for the past of this city,--pictures full of the glory of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering, and sin.

Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair.

In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good fortune to win back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied, another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples of the G.o.ds are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle the city.

Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy, and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that day.

When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and the _contadini_, or inhabitants of each _contado_ (county), became absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all cla.s.ses were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus.

Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.

At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda.

Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough to read of after so much cutting and slas.h.i.+ng. The viands were pa.s.sed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine.

Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will.

Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.

An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope p.r.o.nounced the Blood genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout mult.i.tudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the b.l.o.o.d.y tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily as bears do the h.o.a.rded honey of civilized bees.

After the death of Boniface the lords.h.i.+p of Mantua fell to his famous daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion.

She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chast.i.ty together, and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was a great friend to learning,--founded libraries, established the law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover, nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up, the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114, and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.

The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every direction,--with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the factious n.o.bility. Dante has peopled his h.e.l.l from the Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and l.u.s.ts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, pa.s.sing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.

Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Ba.s.sano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence pa.s.ses, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Munic.i.p.al pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.

Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League.

It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua, Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones, and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege.

But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the siege and look to his dominion of other cities.

After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years, and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the eyes honest and slow," whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of thine own land!"

Of Virgil the superst.i.tion of the Middle Ages had made a kind of wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders; he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This final disposition of Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of a.s.signing a place among the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is true, tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she was also compa.s.sionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. _For if the gentle Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza_." The lady, whose salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and Sordello was early called to this n.o.bleman's court, having already given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape with Sordella from her husband's court, and that, under the protection of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them.

The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must pa.s.s through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given him by his truculent brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non venir piu per questa vile strada ad opere ancor piu vili."--"Let this suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler deeds."

It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where he learned to poetize in the Provencal tongue, in which he thereafter chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of Sordello's Provencal poems exist in ma.n.u.script in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose "History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet, as his Provencal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before him." He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died with him in 1284.

The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their a.s.sembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amus.e.m.e.nt of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom.

He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Pa.s.serino, a very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief.

The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Pa.s.serino's, being of Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing them with Pa.s.serino. For this the Pope naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Ta.s.soni made his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (_La Secchia Rapita_), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena.

Meantime, while Pa.s.serino had done everything to settle himself comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.

According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770 where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth--it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these ridiculous, wicked old shadows--that this lady's husband should have fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's; and, after publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this pa.s.sion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle, Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi, while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning, having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual, believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven back, and Pa.s.serino, wounded to death under the great Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible, that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact altogether. Pa.s.serino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was liberated.

In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by her deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans, who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished back their old tyrant,--the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap, remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.