Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/471

 LEO X. 451 An army of Swiss, called into the field by Leo s diplomacy, repelled the invasion, and Italy enjoyed peace until the death of Louis XII., two years subsequently, brought to the throne a young prince who only lived for military glory, and whose entire reign was dominated by the ambition of recovering Milan and Naples. On September 13, 1515, Francis I. totally defeated the Swiss at Mariffnano. One of the first consequences of the battle, which reduced Leo to submission by placing the Medici in Florence at the mercy of the victor, was the loss of Parma and Piacenza. These duchies, but recently acquired by Julius II., were reunited to Milan, and Leo, temporizing in the true spirit of Italian statecraft, consented to a public interview with Francis, and became apparently his ally. Little as the pope s professions were to be depended upon, Francis thus gained the substantial advantage of a concordat seriously restricting the liberties of the Church of France. Leo meanwhile endeavoured to indemnify himself for the loss of Parma and Piacenza by seizing upon the duchy of Urbino for the benefit of his nephew Lorenzo, an enterprise fully as unscrupulous as any of the similar exploits of Caesar Borgia, and by no means executed with equal ability. After a severe struggle, however, Leo s arms triumphed for the time, but the undertaking proved as injurious to his credit as to his exchequer, and the financial exhaustion which it occasioned helped to prepare the great disaster of his reign. Another unfortunate occurrence of this period was a plot of several cardinals to poison the pope, which led to the execution of one and the imprisonment of several others. Leo has been accused of excessive severity, but apparently without reason, although he may be censured for having held out expectations of pardon which he did not intend to fulfil. This conspiracy probably made him distrustful of the sacred college as then constituted, and led to one of the most remarkable acts of his pontificate, the creation of thirty-one cardinals in a single day. This dangerous stretch of authority made him absolute master in his own court for the remainder of his reign, and it must be admitted that most of the new cardinals were men of distinguished merit. A much more momentous event was now at hand, which, however, belongs more properly to the biography of Luther than that of Leo. On All Saints eve, 1517, the daring protest of Luther against the intolerable impostures and rapacity of the papal vendors of indulgences, com missioned by Leo to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter s, gave the signal for the Reformation. Leo was at first amused. &quot; The axe,&quot; he said, alluding to the clanger he had lately escaped from, the conspiracy of the cardinals, &quot;is taken from the root, and laid to the branches.&quot; When at length his eyes were opened he followed the policy of mingled menace and cajolery which was alone possible where the secular arm was unavailable, and which might probably have succeeded with a man of different mould from. Luther. By 1520 the breach had become irreparable, and an invincible fatality had linked the name of the most ostentatious of the popes with the profounclest humiliation of the church. Leo died before the full extent of the calamity was apparent, and amid a full tide of political prosperity which would have easily consoled him for the diminution of his spiritual prerogatives. He had profited by the general tranquillity to expel the petty tyrants of the ecclesiastical states. Perugia, Sinigaglia, Fermo had been added to the domains of the church, and Ferrara had narrowly escaped. The death of his nephew Lorenzo about the same time made him the virtual ruler of Florence also. Abroad, his policy had apparently received a check by the election of Charles V. as emperor, but the continued rivalry between Charles and his competitor Francis soon placed the dearest wish of his heart within his reach. &quot; Could I recover Parma and Piacenza for the church,&quot; he had said to the Cardinal de Medici, &quot; I would willingly lay down my life.&quot; His wish was granted him. Allying himself with Charles, he contributed efficaciously to the expulsion of the French from Milan in November 1521. Parma and Piacenza returned to the Holy See, and there was talk of the Medici replacing the Sforzas on the ducal throne of Milan. The news reached Leo at his villa of Malliana on a November night. Overjoyed, his mind engrossed by ambitious projects, he long paced a chamber through whose open window streamed the chill and malarious air of the adjoining woods. He returned to Koine in apparent health, but on the 24th of November withdrew indisposed to his apartments, and on December 1 expired with such suddenness that the last sacraments could not be administered. Poison was generally suspected, but the circumstances alleged in support of this belief wear the aspect of inventions, and seem inconsistent with the universal dismay excited by his decease. There was more ground for this consternation than men fully knew. The most fortunate and magnificent of the popes had bequeathed his successors a religious schism and a bankrupt exchequer. If, however, his profusion had impoverished the church and indirectly occasioned the destruction of her visible unity, he had raised her to the highest rank as the apparent patron of whatever contributed to extend knowledge or to refine and embellish life. If he had not kindled the genius of Raphael, employed equally by his predecessor, he had recognized and fostered it, and in so doing had apparently reconciled antique art with Christianity, and effaced the re proach of indifference or hostility to culture which for fifteen centuries had more or less weighed upon the latter. As a patron of literature Leo s merits had been even more con spicuous : every Italian man of letters, in an age of singular intellectual brilliancy, had tasted or might have hoped to taste of his bounty; had Italy been Europe, the scholars and authors elsewhere forward in revolt would have been indissolubly attached to the Church of Rome. The essential paganism of the Renaissance art and literature was not then perceived ; and even now that it is fully understood the prestige which Leo gave the church remains but little impaired. The hostility of the Renaissance to Catholicism has been unanswerably shown by Catholic writers them selves, but the popular imagination only notes that Raphael and Michelangelo wrought in the name of religion, and at the bidding of a pope. However severely then Leo may be judged from the strictly sacerdotal point of view, sacerdotalism itself cannot deny its obligations to him; while, from the point of view of liberal culture, he appears as near perfection in his ecclesiastical character as that character admits. His personal disposition lias been the subject of much controversy. &quot; Among all the individuals who have attracted the attention of mankind, there is perhaps no one whose character has stood in so doubtful a light as that of Leo X.&quot; This exaggerated dictum of Roscoe s at all events expresses the fact that men s views of Leo s, character have been coloured in a more than ordinary degree by party spirit. To one class he represents the ideal of the papacy as a civilizing and beneficent institution ; to another comprising Catholics as well as Protestants he is the personification of its worldliness and apostacy. The merit or demerit of his actions will be variously estimated to the end of time. The leading traits of his character, however, are matters of fact, which prepossessions should not be allowed to distort, and it may be confidently affirmed that they were mostly amiable and laudable. He was constitution ally kind, compassionate, and bountiful, endowed with Florentine prudence and circumspection, but cast altogether in a more liberal mould than the mercantile race from which he sprung. The best of the Medici except his father Lorenzo, he is in many^points more humanly interesting than the latter, and the disadvantage at which he occasionally appears is mainly attributable to his being less perfectly equipped by nature for the part assigned to him by fortune. His geniality sometimes degenerated into indecorum, and