The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (19 page)

The king of France was playing a political game of great risk by pretending not to care about the fate of his two eldest sons; he would rather have given them up for dead than part with a foot of his sovereign territory. In fact, François had renounced ever seeing his two eldest boys again, and had begun grooming his youngest son, Charles d’Angoulême, for the throne.

F
OLLOWING the French king’s breach of the Treaty of Madrid and the formation of the League of Cognac, Charles V sent the imperial army back into Italy. In early 1527 the renegade Charles de Bourbon captured Milan, but was left in Italy with his army and no further orders. The former Constable was now unrecognizable as the delicate, handsome young man painted by François Clouet just a few years previously. His treason and guilt, as well as the strain of constant fighting, had affected him badly. In Spain, he had tried to approach his captive former king, but he had been absolutely rebuffed. With his desperate look, hollow eyes and cheeks, he had become half warlord, half outlaw; yet he was adored by his
Landsknechte
, the wild German mercenaries from Franche-Comté.

Bourbon must have lost his senses when, after taking Milan, he promised untold riches to his untamed German troops, who had not been paid for months and were on the edge of murderous mutiny. The emperor was not aware of Bourbon’s promise or his plan to get the promised booty by pillaging Rome. The
Landsknechte
were Lutheran and welcomed the opportunity to sack the seat of Catholicism. These Germans had suffered constant privations resulting in a total breakdown of discipline, and when they reached the Eternal City in April 1527, their generals were powerless to restrain them. Shouting: “Blood, blood, kill, kill, Bourbon, Bourbon,” the men looted and burned, broke into convents and priories, raped nuns and tortured clergy. They desecrated altars and holy relics, and stabled their horses in Saint Peter’s. The Medici Pope Clement VII fled from the Vatican by an underground passage to the Castel Sant’ Angelo and watched horrified as the city was laid to waste and plundered for several weeks. Not since the invasion of Alaric and his Visigoths in
A.D.
410 had Rome suffered such a terrible fate. The frightful sack of the Eternal City was carried out with such senseless brutality that it is still remembered as one of the most abominable acts of war in history.

On July 6, 1527, as the German soldiers tried to storm Sant’ Angelo and capture the pope, perhaps to hold him for ransom, Charles de Bourbon was struck by a bullet and killed.
⁷
He was buried by his
soldiers in Saint Peter’s, but his body was later exhumed and exhibited in Gaeta as a curiosity until the eighteenth century, when it disappeared.

Pope Clement VII was forced to surrender and was imprisoned for six months. His release cost the Vatican a huge indemnity as well as several of the most important Italian cities belonging to the Papal States. The pope could not bear to live in the ruined city and moved first to Orvieto, then to Viterbo.

T
HE struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France had reached a complete impasse. It was too much for the fifty-three-year-old Louise de Savoie. Her grandsons’ fate moved her even if it did not affect her son, and she decided to act. With the support of her daughter, Marguerite, now queen of Navarre, she boldly approached the emperor’s forty-five-year-old aunt, Margaret of Austria, governor of the Netherlands, a lady as formidable as herself. She also contacted the emperor’s sister, Eleonore of Portugal, who was still waiting in Spain to come to France and marry the king. As the men were too stubborn to see any form of reason, these four ladies agreed to put their redoubtable intelligence, subtlety, and good sense to the task of negotiating a solution.

On July 5, 1529, the four met at Cambrai, in northern France, with the aim of establishing a lasting peace. The French ladies settled into the imposing mansion of Saint-Pol, and the Spanish were housed in an abbey opposite. To facilitate their meetings, a temporary covered wooden footbridge was built to link the two buildings. Hung with tapestries, it kept the ladies protected from the stares of the passersby and their hems free from the dirt on the road.

After two weeks of hard bargaining, there came a moment when Louise felt it politic to pretend she was abandoning the clogged negotiations and returning home. The ruse worked. By the beginning of August, just one month after they arrived, all four negotiators were satisfied. The treaty was recognized as so sensible and fair that neither Eleonore’s brother in Spain nor Louise’s son in France could find a reason
to reject it. Although it was officially called the Treaty of Cambrai, it became known as “
La Paix des Dames
”—“The Peace of the Ladies.”

France would renounce any rights to Milan and Naples and abandon its Italian allies. Florence was kept out of the Treaty of Cambrai—Pope Clement VII had his own plans for his native city. François I’s Italian dream had finally come to an end. France would cede its sovereignty over Artois, Flanders, Tournai, and Hesdin in the Pas-de-Calais. Once Charles V realized François I would not release Burgundy to him, he set an enormous ransom for the return of the princes: four tons of gold;
⁸
the emperor was very short of money. In return, Charles V would renounce his rights to Burgundy, Auxerre, Mâcon, and Auxonne, and the other claimed territories. The treaty was tough but fair.

What François I had wanted more than anything was to preserve the conquests of Louis XI. The treaty fulfilled this condition. The princes would be able to come home, and François would finally marry Eleonore of Portugal. Her dowry would be deducted from the amount due to Spain for the princes’ return. Furthermore, the French king was to renounce his allegiance to the Sultan, who was currently threatening Vienna, the Habsburg capital of Austria. A clever realist, Louise de Savoie understood that in order to secure a safe future, Christianity—represented in this treaty by France, the Italian states, and the emperor—must unite against the Ottoman. For François to abandon an infidel ally was one thing; but to allow the Italian states to whom he had promised his protection to fall under the Habsburg yoke constituted betrayal. Still, the king of France did not hesitate.

To celebrate the successful outcome of their negotiations, the king’s mother and sister mounted two white mares and galloped through the streets of Cambrai, scattering handfuls of gold and silver coins among the townspeople.

F
RENCH officials signed the Treaty of Cambrai on August 3, 1529, relinquishing all rights to territory beyond the Alps. Pope
Clement VII and the emperor could now make it their common cause to act against schism in the empire and move against the Turks at the gates of Vienna. Further, with the help of the emperor, the pope could implement his plan to retake Florence, which had ousted the Medici in 1527.

While the Medici pope was being besieged in Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome in 1527, a hostile faction led by the Capponi family had seized power in Florence. Eight-year-old Catherine was brought to Florence and placed, for her safety, in a Dominican convent. When plague erupted in their quarters, the French ambassador moved Catherine to the Convent of the Santissima Annunziata delle Murate. There the good Benedictine sisters welcomed her with affection born out of admiration for her family name.

In the Convent of the Murate, Catherine received an excellent education in Greek and Latin and was able to absorb the sisters’ sweetness, seriousness, and good manners. Although the young girl was completely reclusive, the nuns treated her as a pet and would do anything for her. Despite the austerity due to the siege, the nuns somehow managed to make Catherine little cakes and even baked patisseries in the shape of the Medici arms so that she could pick off the sugared pills.

One of the nuns, Sister Justine Niccolini, kept a diary from which we learn that Catherine was a likable child, whom they all loved. She was naturally caring, and sent parcels of food to the poor and those in prison in the city. Catherine learned charm and how to use it. According to the nun’s diary, it was in the convent that Catherine perfected her most valuable attribute: the art of dissimulation.

With Florence in rebellion against the Medici, the incompetent Cardinal Passerini of Cortona, whom Clement VII had left to rule Florence once he was elected to the Holy See, fled the city to safety with Catherine’s two cousins, Alessandro and Ippolito de’ Medici. Catherine remained shut in the Convent of the Murate for the next three years, until she was eleven years old. There she was protected from though not unaware of the struggle for power among the many factions tearing Florence apart through vandalism, plunder, rape, and pillage. A few of the little patisseries in the shape of Catherine’s arms
found their way into the city and the nuns were accused of being part of a Medici plot against Florence. The flight of the cardinal with the two Medici boys infuriated the more extreme groups to such an extent that they threatened to hold Catherine hostage, or throw her into a brothel to ruin her potential as a political pawn, or even chain her naked to the city walls for use as target practice. Bernardo Castiglione (who should have known better, coming from that great family) suggested she be raped by all the soldiery. Happily, good sense prevailed. Catherine de’ Medici was too valuable to waste.

The pope was convinced that only Charles V could restore the Medici to power in Florence; in return for his support, he promised to crown Charles Holy Roman Emperor at last. By June 29, 1529, Clement VII made peace with the emperor whose army under Bourbon had savaged Rome, and signed a treaty restoring the Medici as rulers of Florence. Of course, the treaty was cemented by a marriage: the pope’s illegitimate son Alessandro de’ Medici married the emperor’s natural daughter, Margaret of Austria. Their wedding gift was to be Florence, which had been excluded from the 1529 Treaty of Cambrai. The emperor gave Clement VII an army with which to lay siege to his own city, the same force of wild German
Landsknechte
who had so brutally attacked and sacked Rome.

To prevent the pope or François I from attempting to rescue their valuable little Medici hostage, the Florentine city fathers decided to move her to the secure cloister of Santa Lucia. All reports state that, when the city commissioners came to take her away, despite the hysteria of the Benedictine sisters who loved her, eleven-year-old Catherine kept her nerve. She shaved her head, donned the habit of a novice nun, and announced to the commissioners that she had joined the order and that they could not remove her. Nonetheless, one month later, on July 20, 1529, Catherine was taken to Santa Lucia.

The following month, Charles V sent his vassal, Philibert de Châlon, the Prince of Orange, to punish Florence. Châlon arrived from Rome in mid-August with the army that had taken part in the sacking two years earlier. Having attacked Perugia, which surrendered, he approached Florence, while Charles V, en route to his coronation in Bologna, landed with his army at Genoa. The Florentine representatives
who came to Genoa hoping to negotiate were summarily dismissed. Florence had failed to surrender unconditionally, and had to prepare for the consequences.