The Ugly Renaissance (37 page)

Perhaps as a result of a youth spent at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, Federico also had a deep sensitivity for art and architecture and, emulating Cosimo de’ Medici’s obsession with “magnificence,” lavished money on every imaginable form of patronage.
In 1464, he commissioned the Dalmatian architect
Luciano Laurana (later replaced by
Francesco di Giorgio Martini) to rebuild the Palazzo Ducale completely and, in doing so, created one of the most dramatic and impressive of all Renaissance palaces. Sumptuous almost to a fault, Federico’s new residence was filled with the works of the best artists of the day, and he was to become a long-standing patron of painters including
Piero della Francesca,
Paolo Uccello,
Justus of Ghent, and
Pedro Berruguete himself.
So fabulous was Federico’s court that he was later acclaimed by the apostolic secretary
Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510) as one of the two greatest patrons of art of the period (the other being Cosimo de’ Medici).

Yet at the same time, Berruguete’s portrait discreetly testifies to a very different side of Federico da Montefeltro’s character. As in all other surviving depictions of the condottiere, Berruguete’s portrait shows Federico in profile. Only the left part of his face is visible, while his nose seems strangely hooked. In his youth, he had been horribly wounded in a joust. His right eye had been torn out, leaving him with a huge and horrible scar across his face. Finding his field of vision severely restricted, and fearful of being surprised, he had surgeons hack out the bridge of his nose. Although he was careful only to be painted from the side from this point on, there was no disguising the personality traits that had been revealed by his injury. Despite his undoubted courage, he was impulsive and violent in the extreme. And perhaps most important, the lengths to which he was prepared to go to prevent anyone from sneaking up on him point not only toward a measure of paranoia, but also toward a ruthless character that viewed conspiracies and assassinations as a natural part of life.

Federico was not unusual. Although they had become more effective commanders and more attentive patrons, fifteenth-century condottieri were worse than their fourteenth-century counterparts in almost every respect, and it is no exaggeration to say that their enthusiasm for the arts grew in direct proportion to their mounting brutality.

Almost inevitably, the landed interests, long-term appointments, and progressive infeudation of condottieri conspired to politicize the role of the mercenary commander. Far from being more closely bound to
their employers as a result of the emoluments and prizes they received, the condottieri of the fifteenth century became increasingly independent political actors. Although some—like
Bartolomeo Colleoni—were to earn a reputation for loyalty, the majority recognized that they, too, were players in the great game of Italian politics and were in a position to make significant gains for themselves. Mercenaries had found themselves in similar situations before (
Castruccio Castracani,
signore
of Lucca, being one of the more notorious examples), but the fact that the greater number were exiles or foreigners had meant instances of autonomous political action were few and far between: from the fifteenth century onward, they were more and more the norm.

This only served to compound many of the mercenary generals’ worst character traits. Although they never entirely abandoned the time-honored practice of looting and pillaging, condottieri like Federico da Montefeltro were acutely conscious of the immense influence they wielded and had no compunction about manipulating it for their own ends. Even the best of them was prepared essentially to blackmail his employers for greater rewards, a fact that was
excoriated by the Florentine chancellor
Leonardo Bruni in his
De militia
(1421). As
Niccolò Machiavelli complained in
The Prince
in the next century,

Mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy; they have no fear of God; they do not keep faith with their fellows; they avoid defeat just so long as they avoid battle; in peacetime you are despoiled by them, and in wartime by the enemy … if [condottieri] are [skilled], you cannot trust them, because they are anxious to advance their own greatness, either by coercing you, their employers, or by coercing others against your own wishes.

In contrast to the mercenary generals of earlier centuries, this new breed of condottieri often wanted more than just cash. Far from tightening their hold over their employees,
signori
often found that their openhanded displays of generosity obliged them to go cap-in-hand to their increasingly wealthy captains. In 1441, for example,
Niccolò Piccinino (1386–1444) haughtily demanded to be invested with the fiefdom
of Piacenza before he would deign to fight for Filippo Maria Visconti against the Papal States in the Fourth Lombard War. Furious, Visconti exclaimed,

These condottieri have now reached the stage when, if they are defeated, we pay for their failures, and, if victors, we must satisfy their demands and throw ourselves at their feet—even more than if they were our enemies. Must the Duke of Milan bargain for the victory of his own troops, and strip himself to receive favours from them?

Even when placed in positions of trust in peacetime, they were liable to abuse their authority in the most outrageous manner. On being appointed to the governorship of
Bologna by the anti
pope John XXIII in 1411,
Braccio da Montone (1368–1424) proceeded to exact what amounted to protection money from the towns nearby.

It would, however, be wrong to think that mercenary generals restricted themselves to extortion. Possessing territories of their own, noble condottieri lusted constantly for ever more lands and had no shame about nibbling away at the fringes of the greater Italian states amid the chaos of war. This, indeed, was a particularly pronounced phenomenon among those mercenary generals who came from the marches, a kind of no-man’s-land between the Milanese, Venetian, and papal spheres of interest. Sometimes, urban centers would hand themselves over to a condottiere voluntarily, in the hope that by submitting, they would gain his assistance in ongoing feuds. In 1407, for example,
Rocca Contrada (now Arcevia in the Marche) gave itself to Braccio da Montone in return for his aid against Fermo. But most of the time, condottieri were more than prepared to hold entire cities to ransom or simply to seize whatever towns took their fancy.
Pandolfo III Malatesta—scion of one of the most notorious mercenary houses of all—was among the worst in this regard. Taking a break from his campaigns on behalf of Venice in the early years of the century, Pandolfo seized the papal towns of
Narni and
Todi and rampaged happily through
Como,
Brescia, and
Bergamo over the next decades with the express intention of carving out a little empire of his own on his employers’ doorstep. Similarly, in the confusion that reigned after the death of
Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan in 1447, Francesco Sforza did not hesitate to take the Milanese city of
Pavia for himself, even though he was nominally the captain general of Milan. Nothing was sacred.

But most of all, the increasingly political autonomy of fifteenth-century condottieri predisposed them toward coups, conspiracies, and the most brutal acts of murder. Although some, like
Bartolomeo Colleoni and
Erasmo da Narni, were unusually decent sorts in this regard, it was certainly not unknown for condottieri to hack down anyone who stood between them and their dreams of grandeur. After the death of his erstwhile patron, Francesco Sforza not only took Pavia but also turned against the short-lived Golden Ambrosian Republic, sided with Venice, and forced Milan to acclaim him duke. Those who had opposed him were immediately rounded up and executed, their heads put on display on spikes on the Broletto Nuovo as a grisly warning to anyone who thought about getting in Francesco’s way.

To say that ambitious, independent-minded, and politically aware condottieri were prepared to butcher their way to power is, however, to tell only half the story. More often than not, they acknowledged no bonds of loyalty whatsoever, even where those bonds were grounded in blood. A surprising number of condottieri killed, captured, fought, or usurped members of their own families in the most coldhearted manner imaginable.
Taddeo Manfredi (1431–ca. 1486), lord of Imola, was thought very mild merely for fighting a decades-long war against his uncle
Astorre II Manfredi, who happened to control neighboring Faenza. Only a few years earlier,
Pino I Ordelaffi (ca. 1356–1402) had seized power in Forlì after usurping and imprisoning his uncle Sinibaldo, and was later to poison his cousin Giovanni for similar ends. Worse still was Oliverotto da
Fermo (1475–1502), who was to be held up as the paradigm of evil by Machiavelli. Unable to brook even the slightest restraint on his ambition, Oliverotto felt that it was “servile” to take orders from anyone, least of all from his maternal uncle
Giovanni Fogliani, who was then in control of Fermo, albeit in a benign and protective capacity. As Machiavelli recorded, after returning to his native city from campaigning,

Oliverotto prepared a formal banquet to which he invited Giovanni Fogliani and the leading citizens of Fermo. After they had finished eating and all the other entertainment usual at such banquets was done with, Oliverotto artfully started to
touch on subjects of grave importance … When Giovanni and the others began to discuss these subjects in turn, he got to his feet all of a sudden, saying that these were things to be spoken of somewhere more private, and he withdrew to another room, followed by Giovanni and all the other citizens. And no sooner were they seated than soldiers appeared from hidden recesses, and killed Giovanni and all the others. After this slaughter, Oliverotto mounted his horse, rode through the town, and laid siege to the palace of the governing council; consequently they were frightened into obeying him and into setting up a government of which he made himself the prince.

Federico da Montefeltro’s supposed involvement in the assassination of his half brother was remarkable only in that he seems to have taken the trouble to employ a little subtlety.

Cruelty and murder in the service of broader political ends were one thing; an almost sadistic viciousness was quite another. And it seemed that mercenary captains’ propensity for violence and brutality grew in proportion to their independence and military strength.
Giovanni Bentivoglio (1443–1508), tyrant of Bologna, for example, earned notoriety for torturing and murdering the astrologer
Luca Gaurico simply for giving an unfavorable prophecy, while his contemporary
Everso II degli Anguillara (d. 1464) was “
blasphemous and cruel and could kill a man as easily as he could a sheep.” Indeed, Everso

raped [the] wives and daughters [of his subjects] in his palace; he constantly indulged in adultery and fornication and was even accused of incest, as if the chastity of his own daughters meant nothing. He often flogged his sons and threatened them with his sword.

Even worse was
Braccio da Montone, whom
Michael Mallett has rightly acclaimed as one of the two greatest condottieri of the period. Though he thought Braccio “
pleasant and charming in conversation,” Pius II observed that “in his heart, he was cruel”:

He would laugh as he ordered men to be tortured and racked by the most excruciating torments, and he took pleasure in hurling
his wretched victims off the tops of towers. At Spoleto, when a messenger brought him a hostile letter, he had him flung headlong from a high bridge. In Assisi, he pitched three men off the high tower in the piazza. When eighteen friars in the convent of the Minorites dared to oppose him, he had their testicles beaten to a pulp on an anvil.

Federico da Montefeltro might not have been so inventively savage, but he was certainly typical of fifteenth-century condottieri in concealing a very unpleasant nature behind his public persona. An illegitimate son, his path to power in Urbino had been paved with violence. When, in 1444, his younger half brother, Oddantonio, was unexpectedly assassinated by an angry mob, the twenty-two-year-old Federico immediately became count. Of course, he claimed that he had nothing to do with the plot. But there was no denying the fact that he happened to be waiting outside the city with a posse of soldiers at just the right moment to step quickly and easily into Oddantonio’s still-warm shoes. Federico’s bloody fingerprints were all over the affair, yet he does not appear to have been troubled by any pangs of guilt.

Not content with mere fratricide, Federico was among the most underhanded, backstabbing men of the age. Though charming to a fault, he lived and breathed treachery and never seems to have thought twice about spying, poisoning, and murder. The most dramatic example of his amorality is provided by his betrayal of some of his closest friends and allies. Despite his earlier collusion with
Cosimo de’ Medici, Federico conspired with
Pope Sixtus IV to aid the Pazzi family in killing Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo and seizing control of Florence in 1478.
Corresponding with his network of spies and cutthroats around Italy using a secret (and only recently deciphered) code, Federico arranged to maneuver some six hundred heavily armed troops outside Florence, ready to storm in as soon as the Medici had been given the coup de grâce. It was more by a stroke of luck than as a result of failure in the planning that Lorenzo de’ Medici escaped with his life. But when confronted with his treacherous role in the conspiracy, Federico simply shrugged once again. For him, a condottiere could not afford to have friends. He may have lived by the sword, but he wasn’t going to die by it or let the deaths of others trouble him too much. And this was precisely what he was trying to conceal with
Berruguete’s portrait.

T
HE
U
GLY
: M
ERCENARIES ON THE
E
DGE OF
M
ADNESS

If condottieri like
Sir John Hawkwood and Federico da Montefeltro were bad,
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was the paradigm of all that was truly dreadful about the Renaissance mercenary. He pushed the boundaries further than anyone else and was able to do so by virtue of the interplay between the peculiar balance of power in Renaissance Italy and his own unique psychology.