History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic, vol 3 | Page 4

duchy in little more than a fortnight; and, although the prize was snatched for a moment from his grasp, yet French valor and Swiss perfidy soon restored it. The miserable Sforza, the dupe of arts which he had so long practised, was transported into France, where he lingered out the remainder of his days in doleful captivity. He had first called the barbarians into Italy, and it was a righteous retribution which made him their earliest victim. [3]
By the conquest of Milan, France now took her place among the Italian powers. A preponderating weight was thus thrown into the scale, which disturbed the ancient political balance, and which, if the projects on Naples should be realized, would wholly annihilate it. These consequences, to which the Italian states seemed strangely insensible, had long been foreseen by the sagacious eye of Ferdinand the Catholic, who watched the movements of his powerful neighbor with the deepest anxiety. He had endeavored, before the invasion of Milan, to awaken the different governments in Italy to a sense of their danger, and to stir them up to some efficient combination against it. [4] Both he and the queen had beheld with disquietude the increasing corruptions of the papal court, and that shameless cupidity and lust of power, which made it the convenient tool of the French monarch.
By their orders, Garcilasso de la Vega, the Spanish ambassador, read a letter from his sovereigns in the presence of his Holiness, commenting on his scandalous immorality, his invasion of ecclesiastical rights appertaining to the Spanish crown, his schemes of selfish aggrandizement, and especially his avowed purpose of transferring his son Caesar Borgia, from a sacred to a secular dignity; a circumstance that must necessarily make him, from the manner in which it was to be conducted, the instrument of Louis the Twelfth. [5]
This unsavory rebuke, which probably lost nothing of its pungency from the tone in which it was delivered, so incensed the pope that he attempted to seize the paper and tear it in pieces, giving vent at the same time to the most indecent reproaches against the minister and his sovereigns. Garcilasso coolly waited till the storm had subsided, and then replied undauntedly, "That he had uttered no more than became a loyal subject of Castile; that he should never shrink from declaring freely what his sovereigns commanded, or what he conceived to be for the good of Christendom; and, if his Holiness were displeased with it, he could dismiss him from his court, where he was convinced, indeed, his residence could be no longer useful." [6]
Ferdinand had no better fortune at Venice, where his negotiations were conducted by Lorenzo Suarez de la Vega, an adroit diplomatist, brother of Garcilasso. [7] These negotiations were resumed after the occupation of Milan by the French, when the minister availed himself of the jealousy occasioned by that event to excite a determined resistance to the proposed aggression on Naples. But the republic was too sorely pressed by the Turkish war,--which Sforza, in the hope of creating a diversion in his own favor, had brought on his country,--to allow leisure for other operations. Nor did the Spanish court succeed any better at this crisis with the emperor Maximilian, whose magnificent pretensions were ridiculously contrasted with his limited authority, and still more limited revenues, so scanty, indeed, as to gain him the contemptuous epithet among the Italians of _pochi denari_, or "the Moneyless." He had conceived himself, indeed, greatly injured, both on the score of his imperial rights and his connection with Sforza, by the conquest of Milan; but, with the levity and cupidity essential to his character, he suffered himself, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the Spanish court, to be bribed into a truce with King Louis, which gave the latter full scope for his meditated enterprise on Naples. [8]
Thus disembarrassed of the most formidable means of annoyance, the French monarch went briskly forward with his preparations, the object of which he did not affect to conceal. Frederic, the unfortunate king of Naples, saw himself with dismay now menaced with the loss of empire, before he had time to taste the sweets of it. He knew not where to turn for refuge, in his desolate condition, from the impending storm. His treasury was drained, and his kingdom wasted, by the late war. His subjects, although attached to his person, were too familiar with revolutions to stake their lives or fortunes on the cast. His countrymen, the Italians, were in the interest of his enemy; and his nearest neighbor, the pope, had drawn from personal pique motives for the most deadly hostility. [9] He had as little reliance on the king of Spain, his natural ally and kinsman, who, he well knew, had always regarded the crown of Naples as his own rightful