Milan Undone

John Gagné

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780674249912
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

A new history of how one of the Renaissance's preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars. In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the "key to Italy, " found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion.John Gagné offers a new history of Milan's demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost. Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.

Part I

Politics

1

The Temporality of the State

King Louis XII entered the newly conquered city of Milan in triumph on 6 October 1499.¹ One week later, Girolamo Morone, a twenty-nine-year-old law graduate and clerk, penned a note to Jacopo Antiquario, almost two decades his senior and a career secretary to Duke Ludovico Sforza. The duke had fled just days earlier; Antiquario was biding his time in nearby Pavia. Morone teased his elder for seeking such an idyllic retreat and regretted the absence of two mutual friends. The young secretary was still in Milan, watching the Sforza state fall apart. He suspected that in Pavia, Antiquario could avoid “the difficulties of revolutions, the whirlwinds (turbines) of current times, and the pain of shared defeat” that were inescapable in the capital.² Times were circling, politics was rotating. Milan was experiencing what contemporaries called a mutazione di stato. Autumn 1499 marked Morone’s first use of this turbine locution in his long Milanese career. He remained in Milan as a royal fiscal advocate and senator under the French domination. But he wrote of whirlwinds again in 1512–1513, when Louis XII’s government abandoned Milan after the Battle of Ravenna, and once more in 1516, when the French recaptured the city after the slaughter at Marignano.³ There may have been other occasions when the term occurred to him: perhaps in 1521 with the second French withdrawal, or in 1525, when Habsburg agents tortured him—by then grand chancellor—to reveal his role in an anti-imperial plot. Morone knew Milan’s turbulent vicissitudes in his flesh and bones.

Like many of his contemporaries, Morone felt the peculiarity of his own era.⁴ In 1500, after the first of many Milanese uprisings in these years, he remarked how “a great reversal happens every day, and here you can observe the variety of fortune in these incredible times.”⁵ Such a comment was not mere boilerplate. Fortune’s wheel governed time with its unpredictable rotations, and the era’s seemingly incessant changes—its spiraling whirlwinds—expressed the workings of those cosmic forces.⁶ The state always existed in time, but an apprehension of its temporality erupted into particular prominence during moments of disruption. When one regime replaced another, fissures in the apparent continuity of history revealed themselves. Competing histories overlapped and interpenetrated. Old things became new, and novel things echoed the past. Visions of time thus multiplied in the vortices, fashioning histories and futures that accompanied the political narratives of clashing disputants—here mostly the Sforza and the French. Insofar as it served these calculated agendas, time also functioned as a tool of power, since jostling forces sought endlessly to structure both history and the future in ways beneficial to them. This chapter excavates three particular strata of time that help us understand the quarrels over Milan in the early sixteenth century: the ancient, the dynastic, and the governmental. In analyzing those different contexts, we not only gain purchase on Milanese government and history around 1500, but also see the construction and cultivation of time as an instrument of politics.

The Case for Foreign Indigeneity

The Milanese people are actually French. Such at least is what came to be extrapolated in later centuries from the fifth book of Livy’s Decades. The ancient historian related how, during the era of Rome’s last monarch, Tarquinius Priscus, the kingdom of the Gauls abounded with people. Wishing to unburden the land, King Ambigatus encouraged his two nephews to colonize new territory: Segovesus led his tribe to the Hercynian Forest in southern Germany, and Bellovesus forged the first road across the Alps to Italy. After routing Etruscans living near the River Ticino, Bellovesus founded a city in Insubria called Mediolanum.⁷ Through an ancient Gallic mass migration sealed with a military victory, Milan came into existence. Machiavelli alluded to this history in his essays on expansion and migration in the Discorsi.⁸ Bernardino Corio (1459–1504 / 5), Duke Ludovico Sforza’s court historiographer, faithfully paraphrased Livy’s words (“Si lege in Tito Livio …,” he begins) to launch his Historia Patria (1503), a history of Milan from its origins to 1500. But the Livian account had unavoidable contemporaneity in Corio’s own day: the last pages of his book narrated the fall of the Sforza and the installation of a new French regime in 1499. The Gauls had returned to (re)colonize the territory by force; time was circling upon itself. Although he evaluated a series of alternative tales of foundation, etymology, and mythic roots, Corio ultimately accepted Milan’s Gaulish foundations proposed by Livy, “in whom I have greater faith.”

Corio’s predecessors largely shared that faith; details may differ in histories from earlier centuries, but the Gallic element is always present. Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum (late eighth century) describes 100,000 Gauls who descended into ancient Italy and founded Pavia, Milan, Bergamo, and Brescia, and called the region Gallia Cisalpina.⁹ In 1288, the chronicler Bonvesin de la Riva relied upon Paul’s authority for the city’s Gallic origins in his De Magnalibus Mediolani, and although Galvano Fiamma’s Cronica Extravagans (1337) considered a wider array of sources than Bonvesin, his greatest difficulty lay in deciding which generation of Gauls should be credited with the city’s origins.¹⁰ Livy’s account was known in France as well; it was catnip to cultural agents of the crown during the military campaigns of the late fifteenth century because it amplified historical justifications for French incursions.¹¹ The novelty of French domination in the early sixteenth century could thus be framed as a return, a fruition of ancient seeds. The logics of that position implied that the French were more indigenous to Milanese soil than Italians. The Gaulish foundation story externalized the city’s origins in both time and space. The founders were not, as so often happened in Italy, a dead civilization from that same territory. Instead they were ancestors of modern French culture that in 1500 was still a living, expanding, and conquering entity. The story’s power thus lay in the ineluctability of French lordship: it was natural because both history and the present authorized it.

In the rhetorical culture of both French and sympathetic Italians, that narrative played an important part in legitimating the new regime.¹² After a Milanese revolt against French domination brought Ludovico Sforza briefly back to power for two months in early 1500, the tenor of reestablished French rule hardened.¹³ Milan was no longer imagined simply as a city that Louis XII had liberated from a tyrant; it had become the tyrant’s conspirator. The city’s second submission to France in April 1500 thus involved a Milanese delegation of good will culminating in a public dialogue between a mouthpiece for the city (Michele Tonso, tasked with voicing the city’s apology for its insurrection) and for the crown (the Neapolitan jurist Michele Riccio, absorbed into French service during Charles VIII’s conquest of Naples in 1494).¹⁴ Both speakers made recourse to Milan’s Gallic origins. Tonso observed that “it is agreed amongst historians that Milan, and all of Insubria, was once a colony of the Gauls.”¹⁵ In his responsory oration before the throngs of forcibly penitent Milanese citizens, Riccio scolded them for their infidelity, noting that the city’s own orator had just admitted that Milan belonged to the French kings, “legitimate successors in this Duchy.”

In a French translation of Riccio’s oration that circulated in Lyon and Paris that same year, the translator rendered Riccio’s claim about Milan’s Gallic past even more insistently. “You have French origins and foundations; the king is your true, indisputable, and natural lord (naturel seigneur) to whom—as God commands—you owe love, faith, and obedience.” The phrase naturel seigneur had emerged in France over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to bolster the kings during wars and succession crises, and it bundled together a set of arguments for the monarchy’s legitimacy, indigeneity, and stability; the expression reappeared frequently in French vernacular print on Milanese themes around 1500.¹⁶ Francophone readers were thus meant to understand that Valois lordship over Milan functioned according to bonds of affiliation identical to those tying France’s own subjects to their crown. In Milan, the oath of fidelity that French agents demanded in 1499 employed this feudal formula as a crutch, requiring the duchy’s subjects to swear in Latin legalese to behave as “good, faithful, upright, sincere, and obedient men, citizens, and subjects toward their natural and rightful lords (naturales et directos dominos) and superiors,”¹⁷ meaning the French monarchy and its operatives.

The union of antique origins with a discourse of natural subjection proved an effective ideological platform for Milan’s French domination.¹⁸ Praise for the city’s Gaulish origins became a historical platitude in the years of French rule. Celebrating the city in a 1518 oration at Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Francophile Milanese Dominican friar Isidoro Isolani noted that the ancient Gauls had “called Milan their metropolis,” and—exalting current French lords through their ancient forebears—he argued that the city had never been as safe and secure as under Gallic rule.¹⁹ That same year, the Pavian miniaturist Giovanni Ambrogio Noceto decorated a delicate paper portrait album of twenty-seven Milanese patrician women to present to King François I. The book closes with a clear invocation of Gallia Cisalpina in silver ink text on jet paper, addressing the young sovereign in the voice of Milan’s elite daughters: “Under Priscus’s reign, fierce Bellovesus first carried the Gallic standards across the Alps. At that time, Gaulish forebears founded Milan and birthed our fathers. Thus by rights the strong Gauls hold its walls; and so by rights do they rule over the ones they generated.”²⁰ For Isolani and Noceto—Lombards themselves—to voice the atavistic fantasies of French mastery in Italy reveals both the depth of the idea’s success and the partisan appeal of its logic.

The French desire for Italians always to comport themselves in perfect step with the ideology of domination found its most pervasive articulation in the idea of the good Frenchman (bon français), meaning an Italian whose outlook mirrored and facilitated the transalpine political ambitions of France.²¹ The concept preexisted the Italian Wars, with roots in the Guelph politics of earlier centuries.²² It did not depend upon the deep Gallic past or the seemingly natural lordship of the crown, but nor did it clash with those notions. It dovetailed with them and constructed an idealized persona, an amenable profile to which Italians were meant to aspire, a sort of modern subject of Gallia Cisalpina. One Italian frequently labeled a bon français by admirers was Giangiacomo Trivulzio, the Milanese patrician whose definitive rift with Ludovico Sforza in the 1490s led him to seek patronage from the French crown and who became not just marshal of France in the initial invasion of Milan in 1499, but the very ensign of Francophile collaboration for the first two decades of the century.²³ The bon français became pervasive in those years, a watchword to identify and promote compliant Italians. Not just individuals, but populations—usually those who refused to participate in activities the French considered treasonous—garnered the designation, whether faithful Genoese citizens or the Swiss foot soldiers who refused to join a foiled Milanese uprising against François I in 1516.²⁴ Truculent Italians, instead, fell on the opposite side of this naming practice. In that same year, Claude de Seyssel concluded that “the subjects and inhabitants of the Duchy are universally bad Frenchmen (mauuays francoys), and they hate France more than ever, a hate that grows daily, as much from the ills they suffer because of the war as from French disorder in all things, which is likely to worsen rather than improve.”²⁵

Italians them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Part I: Politics
• Part II: Property
• Part III: People
• Conclusion: The Empire Strikes Back
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index