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Updated: June 18, 2025
"According to universal opinion," says Guicciardini, "Italy for several centuries had seen nothing like these military operations." We are not proof against the pleasure of giving a place in this history to a deed of virtue and chivalrous kindness on Bayard's part, the story of which has been told and retold many times in various works.
On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy, who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded.
'His passage, says Guicciardini, 'was the cause not only of change in states, downfalls of kingdoms, desolations of whole districts, destructions of cities, barbarous butcheries; but also of new customs, new modes of conduct, new and bloody habits of war, diseases hitherto unknown.
Palla Strozzi and Giovanni Guicciardini, though each had assembled a large number of men, kept in their houses; and therefore Rinaldo sent a messenger to request their attendance and to reprove their delay. Giovanni replied, that he should lend sufficient aid against their enemies, if by remaining at home he could prevent his brother Piero from going to the defense of the palace.
He must paint the Popes of the Renaissance as they appeared in the midst of society, when Lorenzo de' Medici called Rome 'a sink of all the vices, and observers so competent as Machiavelli and Guicciardini ascribed the moral depravity and political decay of Italy to their influence.
I took my way toward the new church, looking around to see if I could discover any of the famous storks' nests, but there were none visible. The tradition of the storks of Delft is still alive, and no traveller writes about this city without mentioning it. Guicciardini calls it "a memorable fact of such a nature that peradventure there is no record of a like event in ancient or modern times."
In this sketch of his career I must not omit to mention that Guicciardini was declared a rebel in 1527 by the popular government on account of his well-known Medicean prejudices, and that in 1530 he had been appointed by Clement VII. to punish the rebellious citizens.
D'Auton, too, bears witness to this wholesale violation of the women, "which," he adds, "is the very worst of all war's excesses." He informs us further that "the foot-soldiers of the Duke of Valentinois acquitted themselves so well in this, that thirty of the most beautiful women went captive to Rome," a figure which is confirmed by Burchard. "What an opportunity was not this for Guicciardini!
'The king of Naples, says Guicciardini, 'though he dissembled his grief, told the queen, his wife, with tears tears which he was wont to check even at the death of his own sons that a Pope had been made who would prove most pestilent to the whole Christian commonwealth. The young Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, again, showed his discernment of the situation by whispering in the Conclave to his kinsman Cibo: 'We are in the wolf's jaws; he will gulp us down, unless we make our flight good. Besides, there was in Italy a widely spread repugnance to the Spanish intruders Marrani, or renegade Moors, as they were properly called who crowded the Vatican and threatened to possess the land of their adoption like conquerors.
The first and more notable instance of persecution on which the Government of Tuscany ventured, after the banishment of Count Guicciardini and his companions, was the imprisonment of Francesco and Rosa Madiai, for reading the Word of God in the Italian language. The sufferings of these confessors turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel.
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