The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [66]
In 1515 the French returned under Francis I at the head of an imposing army with 3000 noble cavalry, skilled artillery and infantry of German mercenaries to launch themselves upon the reconquest of Milan. After judicious consideration, the Pope joined the none too energetic members of the Holy League in resistance, relying on the Swiss for combative force. Unhappily, at the hard-fought battle of Marignano outside Milan, the French were victorious. Though the combat was touch-and-go for two days, papal forces camped at Piacenza less than fifty miles away took no part.
Once more in control of the great northern duchy, the French sealed it by a treaty of “eternal peace” with the Swiss. They were now in too strong a position for the Pope to contend with them, so he reasonably changed sides and, meeting with Francis at Bologna, reached an accommodation which was largely a cession. He yielded Parma and Piacenza, long contested by Milan and the Papacy, and settled the old struggle over Gallican rights concerning Church appointments and revenues. One provision, designed to improve the quality of appointees, required bishops to be over the age of 27 and trained in theology or law, but these qualifications could conveniently be suspended if the nominees were blood relatives of the King or noblemen. Undertaken in such a spirit, these reforms, like those of the Lateran Council, accomplished small improvement.
On the whole, the Concordat of Bologna, even though the French Church found some of its provisions objectionable, marked a further surrender by the Papacy of ecclesiastical power, just as the French reconquest of Milan marked the final crippling, for this period, of Italian independence. Though obvious to bitter critics like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, that result, if he noticed it, did not greatly trouble Leo. Fuori i barbari! was not his battle cry. He preferred harmony. Never able to refuse, he promised at Francis’ request to give him the Laocoon, planning to palm off a copy, which he subsequently ordered from the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli (and which is now in the Uffizi). He obtained a French princess for his brother and another for his nephew Lorenzo, and remained happy enough with the French until power shifted with the accession of Charles V as Emperor in 1519, uniting the Spanish and Hapsburg thrones. Finding it expedient to change sides again, Leo allied himself with the new Emperor. The wars continued, largely as conflicts of the great powers fighting out their rivalry on Italy’s soil while the Italian states in their inveterate separation shuffled futilely among them.
The peculiar family passion of the popes which seemed to make family fortunes more important to them than the Holy See was fully shared by Leo, to his undoing. Having no children of his own, he focused his efforts on his closest relatives, beginning with his first cousin Giulio de’ Medici, bastard son of the Giuliano killed in the cathedral by the Pazzi. Leo disposed of the birth barrier by an affidavit stating that Giulio’s parents had been legally if secretly married, and, thus legitimized, Giulio became a Cardinal and his cousin’s chief minister, eventually to occupy his seat as Clement VII. Altogether Leo distributed among his family five cardinalships, to two first cousins and three nephews, each a son of one of his three sisters. This was merely routine. The trouble came when, on the death of his brother, Leo determined to make their common nephew Lorenzo, son of their deceased elder brother Piero, the carrier of Medici fortunes. To obtain the