Chapter 13: Reform, Trade, and Innovation, 1552-1559
By the eighth year of his reign, King Alberto Carlo II of Modena had settled into his role as a reformist monarch. He had largely rebuilt Modena following the devastation of the wars of 1532-1545 and since the Treaty of Venice, which had ended the War of the League of Strasbourg, peace had prevailed for his kingdom. However, the truces with Austria and its allies had expired and the new Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I of Austria, was beginning to act aggressively toward Modena. He began to assemble a new coalition with renewed hopes of rolling back Modenese gains in Italy. This new coalition, while not as large or unified as the League of Strasbourg still represented a significant threat to the Italian kingdom. Along with Austria, the old League members Baden, the Palatinate, and Modena’s old rival in Italy, Milan were in it. Additionally, Hungary joined Maximilian I’s coalition as well. The former Modenese ally had a number of grievances against Modena and still hoped to take Ragusa.
To counter this growing threat, Alberto Carlo turned to diplomacy once again. His main focus, just like all of his predecessors, was the relationship with France. Following the War of the League of Strasbourg, the Franco-Modenese partnership experiences some rough times. King Charles VIII had felt betrayed by Alberto Carlo’s dealing with the former Emperor, Ladislav I and had grown to greatly dislike the Modenese king. However, Charles VIII died in 1548 and Alberto Carlo found a kindred spirit in his son, King Francois I. Both sought peace for their kingdoms and wanted to avoid war at all costs. Accordingly, both also agreed that the Franco-Modenese alliance was essential to maintaining this peace as any foreign power would have to think twice before going to war with both of these major powers. On New Year’s Day 1553 the two monarchs signed a renewed treaty of friendship and understanding which healed the rifts caused by the previous war and recommitted both kingdoms to mutual defense and assistance. With the French alliance restored to its previous level of strength, Alberto Carlo could refocus on internal matters.
The King of Modena’s policy of non-interference with the Protestants had worked well for the first eight years of his reign and there had been no notable religious disturbances since his coronation in 1544. However, this would be put to the test when Father Azeglio Dorso, a parish priest in the province of Ancona, published a Bible translated into Italian. The Church, and especially the Inquisition, raised a huge chorus of condemnation. The Warden of the Faith, Father Annibale Tomba, led the charge to crack down on this heresy. The Inquisition had been largely marginalized by King Alberto Carlo but the hard-line institution now saw an issue they could use to rally the more conservative elements within the Church and regain some of their influence.
Father Tomba declared that the Bible translation was a sign that the king’s hands off policy was failing. The policy was supposed to prevent the Protestants from raising disturbances and the Inquisition considered this to be a huge one. Tomba said this showed that softening the kingdom’s efforts to counter the Reformation was only emboldening the Protestants. He believed that it was the brutal crackdown in the Romagna in 1541 that had tamed the Protestants, not the king’s tolerant policies. The Warden of the Faith began touring the Catholic strongholds of the Modenese countryside rallying the conservative peasantry around his program of a renewed anti-Protestant crackdown. While King Alberto Carlo was greatly angered by this subversion of his rule by the maverick priest, he saw no choice but to yield on this matter. He acquiesced to Tomba’s demands and allowed the Inquisition free reign to deal with the heresy as they saw fit. Alberto Carlo rationalized this abandonment of his policy by saying that since the priest was a member of the Church the Inquisition had the right to deal with him as they saw fit. Privately however, he considered it a serious defeat and worried greatly that this would inflame religious tensions in the kingdom once again.
Father Dorso in question was burned at the stake on 28 December 1552. The Inquisition, once again playing its favored role as the hammer of the Catholic Church, did not stop there. They had all the other priests in the monastery scattered and reassigned to spread out locations around the kingdom and beyond. They wanted to ensure that no ideological core could form supporting and furthering this heresy. The Inquisition then burned Father Dorso’s church to the ground. The priest always insisted that his translation of the Bible was not mean at all to further the Reformation, but rather to strengthen the Catholic Church. He argued that a large part of what was causing so many conversions was that the people could not understand the Church’s messages and rituals because mass and the Bible were in Latin. As a result, they were turning to the simpler, more accessible Protestant sects. Dorso believed that the key to stemming the tide of the Reformation was to bring the Church closer to the masses. His theories drew directly from the ideological heritage of the Tolleranti, who had held many of the same views. Nevertheless, the Inquisition considered a Bible translated into Italian to be a huge threat and proceeded with the priest’s execution.
Father Azeglio Dorso was burned at the stake for publishing a Bible translated into Italian
After that, it did not take long for King Alberto Carlo’s fears of renewed religious strife to be realized. Shortly thereafter, in June of 1553, massive pro-Protestant demonstrations broke out in Ferrara and Ancona. Even though Father Dorso had never meant for his translation to hurt the Catholic Church, his execution led to widespread support for the Protestants. While the protests in Ancona remained peaceful, the ones in Ferrara turned to riots and several Catholic priests were killed, two churches were burned down, and portions of the translated Bible, which had been salvaged and then copied, were distributed amongst the crowds.
King Alberto Carlo was furious. He called Father Tomba into a meeting and threatened him directly this time. While the Warden of the Faith was an independent post and the king had no authority to fire him, the priest’s protection was provided by the kingdom. King Alberto Carlo told Tomba that if he ever undermined the crown’s policies again, he would withdraw all protection from the priest and leave him at the mercy of whoever might choose to come after him. The king subtly hinted that he might have some idea where this threat might come from. After that, Tomba was cowed. He appealed to the Pope for support but, not wanting to risk another conflict with Modena, the Papacy refused to intervene on his behalf. Regardless, the damage was done. Ferrara was now firmly in the Protestant grip, Ancona was further alienated, and Alberto Carlo had to deal with religious issues once again.
Following the burning of Father Dorso, pro-Protestant riots broke out throughout the province of Ferrara
One positive development for Modena on the religious front during this time was the rise of Cardinal von Ihering to the curia. As a young priest he had been an ardent follower of the anti-Protestant hardliner, Archbishop Bottura of Modena. Originally from Bavaria, von Ihering had gotten a transfer to the kingdom in order to study and work under Bottura, had helped the archbishop craft his Counter-Reformation policy, and had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the creation of the office of Warden of the Faith. However, over time, von Ihering’s views had softened. This was especially true following the atrocities of 1541 in Romagna. By the time he became Archbishop of Pisa and Alberto Carlo took the throne, von Ihering was a supporter of the non-interference policy and helped marshal support amongst the Modenese clergy for that position. Originally good friends, he and Father Tomba had become heated enemies. It delighted King Alberto Carlo to see von Ihering going to Rome while Tomba was still stuck in his same office. The events at Ferrara had soured even the Pope’s opinion of Tomba and led to drastic budget cuts for the Modenese Inquisition. While the Inquisition was far from breathing its last, for the moment it was cowed.
Cardinal von Ihering was the first religious figure loyal to Modena to reach the highest levels of the Church, he was a supporter of King Alberto Carlo’s non-interference policy
Cardinal Matthias von Ihering
On the military front, matters were also tricky for Modena. Alberto Carlo had largely left the Modenese army to its own devices and it was really beginning to stagnate. The king’s push to enroll the best and brightest young people in the universities had left the military with a shortage of good officers. Additionally, major funding cuts were causing lowered morale and degraded capabilities. The troops had to make do with faulty and obsolete equipment and had only limited opportunities to drill and train. There was a great deal of debate within the military about how to proceed. Some of the younger officers, rising in the ranks in the years following the end of the War of the League of Strasbourg, favored taking the army in a more defensive direction. Many of them subscribed to King Alberto Carlo’s anti-war policies and felt that the offensively-minded army of the past had been culpable for precipitating conflict. Most of the remaining officers who had fought in the wars, felt instead that the army should maintain in its offensive posture, even in lean times. There was, without doubt, a generational conflict going on. The king, as expected, came down on the side of the younger, defensively-minded officers. He decided to follow their proposals to invest more in fixed fortifications and to back the inclusion of more defensive doctrine being taught in the military academies. There was a boost in army morale as a result of the new investments, but this did nothing to address the discipline problem plaguing the force or the internal conflicts it was facing.
The military took a more defensively minded posture during these years
However, the old guard would have their moment in the sun as well. In 1556, four veteran officers of the last wars published The Lessons of the Wars of 1532-1545 to international acclaim. The book gave a history of the wars, laid out the main successes and failures of the Modenese war strategy, and came up with doctrinal remedies that, if put into place, the authors felt could improve the Modenese army’s performance even further. The most brilliant and insightful of the four was Foresto d’Appiani d’Aragona. D’Aragona, the son of Spanish parents who had immigrated to Modena, had been one of General Cosimo Casadei’s best battery commanders. He emerged from the wars as one of the lucky junior officers to have survived and, avoiding disillusionment with army institutions, continued his military career. Writing the portion of Lessons on artillery, he revisited and expanded on General Lazzaro Giardini and General Casadei’s theories of fire support coordination and combined arms. D’Aragona proved once again that even in the face of budget cuts and institutional stagnation, the Modenesi remained at the cutting edge of field artillery tactics and strategy. The same applied for the other officers who wrote the other sections of the book. All four of them showed that they had learned from and adapted to the different circumstances and events of the wars they had fought in.
Many militaries around Europe made The Lessons of the Wars of 1532-1545 required reading in their academies and it revived interest in the wars within the Modenese army itself. However, the highest levels of the military leadership, appointed to their current ranks by the king, refused to allow the book to be made part of the Royal Military Academy of Modena’s curriculum. This lead to the odd situation where a book written by Modenese officers was being studied by cadets and officers almost everywhere in Europe but not in Modena itself. It would take a return to war for the book to be made part of Modenese military doctrine and for its lessons to finally be internalized by the army.
The publication of The Lessons of the Wars of 1532-1545 represented a major advance in Modenese military thought, but it would take years for the army to turn it into doctrine
During the period of 1552-59 Alberto Carlo focused more on international affairs than in the earlier years of his reign. This was partly by choice and partly by necessity. On 28 July 1555, Hungarian agents were discovered fabricating claims on Treviso. This sparked alarm throughout the kingdom and led to threats of war by both sides. There was no doubt in the minds of King Alberto Carlo’s advisors that Hungary wanted war. However, the king urged restraint. He was not convinced that any of Hungary’s allies would join a war if Hungary was the attacker. There was no kingdom in Europe that would be willing to risk hostilities with France just to help the Hungarians take a province in Italy. The Austrians certainly would not do so, as they had designs on northern Italy themselves, and any other Hungarian allies would be too weak to swing the balance of the war in the Hungarians’ favor.
Still, Modena sought to make new alliances. After the break with Hungary, the Modenese strategy of encircling Austria with allies was left with a gap to the east. Since the early days, Modena had sought to deter Austrian aggression be guaranteeing that any attack by the Habsburgs would force them to fight a war on four fronts. At the moment, Modena retained the alliance with France to cover the west, Bohemia to cover the north, and Modena covered the south itself. Alberto Carlo decided to try and peel away some old members of the League of Strasbourg from Austria’s orbit. The two main targets were Poland and Brandenburg. Both of these kingdoms had contributed heavily to the previous war effort but were left with no gains at all and were frustrated by Austrian arrogance. They felt that their troops had been sacrificed while Austrian troops were kept safe. Whether or not this is actually true remains debatable, but the perception was there.
Modena dispatched its two best diplomats to Warsaw and Berlin to negotiate new alliances with King Wladyslaw IV of Poland and King Johann Georg I of Brandenburg. The overture to Poland had the added bonus of being able to use Modena’s newfound enmity with Hungary to its advantage. The Hungarians and Poles were longtime rivals and Poland resented the way that the Austrians were cozying up to their enemies following the former’s break with Modena. Ferdinando Pico, the Modenese emissary to Poland, stressed the two kingdom’s mutual hatred of Hungary and pledged support to Poland should it come to war. As a result of Pico’s efforts, King Wladyslaw signed an alliance with Modena on 29 December 1555.
The wooing of Brandenburg took longer. The German kingdom had strong cultural and linguistic ties to Austria and they shared no common enemies with Modena either. Ippolito Allegri, the Modenese diplomat in Berlin, tried a variety of approaches but in the end, it would take a royal wedding to seal the partnership between the two kingdoms. Alberto Carlo’s younger sister, Eugenia, now 26 years old, married the much younger Prince Albrecht of Brandenburg, only 14, on 27 February 1559. With the houses of Jagiellon and Este now joined in marital union, King Johann Georg signed an alliance with Modena. The renewed encirclement of Austria was complete.
Throughout his reign, the merchants were Alberto Carlo’s strongest and most steadfast supporters. Therefore, the king wanted to make sure that they had all of the support they needed. In addition to curbing freedom of trade and increasing tariffs on foreign traders, the king also wanted to make sure their trade routes were properly protected. To do this, Alberto Carlo invested heavily in the Modenese trade fleet. When he came to power, the Modenese navy totaled 20 ships. By 1559, the size of the fleet had more than doubled to 44 vessels. The increase represented the largest and most rapid growth in the navy’s history. Not only did the kingdom invest in more ships, but also in naval technology, leading to the construction of better ships as well. As a result, Modena now had significant trading power in the major nodes of Ragusa, Genoa, and, most importantly, Venice. The merchants were happy, and they paid their king back by significantly increasing the amount of money the kingdom was making from trade.
By 1559, Modena’s merchants and its trade fleet were amongst the strongest in the Mediterranean
Despite his best efforts however, Alberto Carlo could not keep Modena out of conflict forever. In the spring of 1559, the kingdom would once again find itself engulfed in war. The fourteen years of peace under King Alberto Carlo II had worked wonders for Modena, but it was once again time to honor alliances, strap on the armor, and go into battle. As the new martial tests came, Modena would learn once again why it was so important to maintain a strong and competent army. The army officers and troops who had persevered through the lean years of neglect would have their chance to prove to the world that, no matter what, Modenese soldiers were up to any challenge.
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