The forces of the Holy League, however, were far from successful. They had failed to take Bologna; and, on Easter Saturday 1512, they were stopped in their tracks on the banks of the Ronco on their way to the relief of Ravenna. In the ensuing savage battle – in which the Spanish and French cannon, roaring ceaselessly in the smoke, sent their balls bouncing and ploughing through whole rows and columns of men-at-arms – the losses on both sides were so enormous that scarcely ever before in the history of Europe had so many men been left dead upon the field. Almost ten thousand soldiers of the Holy League are said to have been killed, and nearly as many men in the French army.
Cardinal Giovanni, who had ridden along the Spanish ranks on a white palfrey before the battle began, exhorting the troops to fight well and praying to God for victory, had been captured as he gave comfort to the dying amidst the littered corpses of the dead. He was escorted to Bologna where his stout figure in scarlet robes and his sweating face beneath the broad-brimmed tasselled hat were exposed to the taunts of the populace. The Bentivoglio, however, treated him with kindness. He was also treated well upon his removal to Modena where Bianca Rangone sold her jewels to provide him with food and clothing. At his eventual destination, Milan, he was provided with comfortable lodgings in the house of Cardinal Federigo Sanseverino.
The French, so Giovanni then believed, had gained an undoubted victory outside Ravenna from which they had forced the cruelly mauled forces of the Holy League to withdraw. The Florentines thought so, too, and lit huge bonfires to celebrate the Pope’s defeat as they had done to celebrate the rout of the Venetians at Agnadello. But it proved to be an immensely costly victory from which the winning side could reap no advantage. In the closing stages of the battle, the talented young French commander, Gaston de Foix, had been knocked from his horse by a stray shot and, spattered with blood and brains, had been hacked to death by Spanish infantrymen. Moreover, a large Swiss army had marched down towards French-occupied Lombardy to take advantage of the confusion, while France itself was threatened with invasion by both England and Spain. The French forces, running short of provisions, were obliged to withdraw from Ravenna and Bologna, then from Milan, and finally from Lombardy altogether.
Cardinal Giovanni, far too valuable a hostage to leave behind, was compelled to go with them. But determined to decamp long before he reached the Alps, he feigned illness at a village on the banks of the Po, where a priest who was accompanying him managed to slip away from the French guard and to enlist the help of two local landowners in a plan of escape. As the cardinal was about to step into a barge at the river bank the following morning, a band of armed peasants from the landowners’ estates burst out of the reeds and, in the ensuing uproar, hustled the captive away. Improbably disguised as a soldier, Giovanni was then taken to a pigeon-house in the courtyard of a castle belonging to one of the landowners’ kinsmen, then to Godiasco, then to Mantua where he learned that preparations were already far advanced to use the army of the Holy League, now free of the French, to enforce a change of government in Florence. His arrival in Mantua ensured that there could be no doubt what form that new government would take.
Since the execution of Savonarola, Florence, no longer an important power, had failed to regain the vitality and gaiety of the golden age it had enjoyed during the last years of Lorenzo the Magnificent. A series of financial crises had brought several guilds almost to the verge of ruin. The long, exhausting, humiliating war against Pisa, incompetently conducted by treacherous condottieri, had drained the Signoria’s resources. The French King’s representative in Tuscany, Robert de Balzac Entragues, had sold Sarzana to Genoa and Pietra-santa to Lucca. Gloom descended over the city, a gloom which was reflected in the final paintings of Botticelli, a prematurely old man now, limping through the streets, ‘unable to stand upright and moving about with the help of crutches’.2
Four years after the death of Savonarola, an attempt had been made to strengthen the government of the city by appointing a Gonfaloniere for life. The man chosen for this appointment was Piero Soderini, an honest, hard-working but unremarkable administrator whose fame has been eclipsed by that of the relatively minor official in the government whom he came to consult on all matters of importance, Niccolò Machiavelli.
Machiavelli was a thin, neat, pale man whose sparse black hair was brushed straight back from a high and bony forehead. In the only portrait of him that survives he returns the spectator’s gaze with a look at once amused, questioning and sardonic. The son of a lawyer from an old Tuscan family, he had been appointed to his present post at the age of thirty following the execution of Savonarola, whose ideas and methods he had disdained. One of the concerns of Machiavelli’s department was war; and it was his strongly held view, as it had been of other Florentines before him, including Leonardo Bruni, that the Republic’s traditional system of hiring troops to fight its battles would have to be abandoned in favour of a national militia. It had been found so often in the past that condottieri were utterly untrustworthy: sometimes they declined to fight alongside other bands hired to co-operate with them; at other times they refused to fight against condottieri with whom they were on friendly terms; occasionally they accepted money from both sides; always they were unwilling to risk the lives of their men and thus waste their assets. Soderini agreed to have the formation of a national militia approved by the Signoria and he entrusted Machiavelli with the task of organizing it. Machiavelli began to do so with energy and enthusiasm, and by February 1506 he was able to hold a parade in the Piazza della Signoria of the first recruits. They were mostly peasants from the outlying country who were, so Landucci recorded,
each given a white waistcoat, a pair of stocking, half red and half white, a white cap, shoes, and an iron breastplate. Most also had lances; some of them had arquebuses. They were soldiers but lived in their own homes, being obliged to appear when needed, and it was ordered that many should be equipped in this way throughout the country, so that we should not need any foreigners. This was thought the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.
Landucci’s confidence in the militia was not dispelled when the Spanish forces of the Holy League began to march for the Florentine frontier from Bologna under command of Raymond de Cardona. Even when the Spaniards, repeatedly demanding a change of government in Florence, reached Barberino and advanced on Campi and frightened peasants ran in from the hills to seek shelter behind the walls of the city, it seemed to Landucci as to all ‘intelligent people’ that there was ‘no need of fear. On the contrary it was rather for the enemy to fear, because if they came down into these plains, they would fare badly. Many battalions of militia had been levied, and all the men-at-arms were eager to encounter the enemy.’