Biography
After spending a few years as a merchant's clerk he took to soldiering at an early age, and served his apprenticeship under Giovanni de' Medici, in the latter's Black Bands (Delle Bande Nere being Giovanni de' Medici's nickname, from the blackl stripes on his insignia) in various parts of Italy, earning a reputation as a daring fighter and somewhat of a swashbuckler. When Pope Clement VII and the emperor Charles V decided to reinstate the Medici in Florence, during the War of the League of Cognac, they attacked the Florentine republic, and Ferruccio was appointed Florentine military commissioner, where he showed great daring and resource by his rapid marches and sudden attacks on the Imperials.
Early in 1530 Volterra had thrown off Florentine allegiance and had been occupied by an Imperial garrison, but Ferruccio surprised and recaptured the city. During his absence, however, the Imperials captured Empoli by treachery, thus cutting off one of the chief avenues of approach to Florence. Ferruccio proposed to the government of the Republic that he should march on Rome and terrorize the Pope by the threat of a sack into making peace with Florence on favorable terms, but although the war committee appointed him commissioner-general for the operations outside the city, they rejected his scheme as too audacious.
Ferruccio then decided to attempt a diversion by attacking the Imperials in the rear and started from Volterra for the Apennines. But at Pisa he was laid up for a month with a fever, which enabled the enemy to get wind of his plan and to prepare for his attack. At the end of July Ferruccio left Pisa at the head of about 4,000 men. Although the besieged in Florence, knowing that a large part of the Imperialists under the Prince of Orange Philibert of Châlon, had gone to meet Ferruccio, wished to co-operate with the latter by means of a sortie, they were prevented from doing so by their own treacherous commander, Malatesta Baglioni.
Left alone, Ferruccio encountered a much larger force of the enemy on August 3 at Gavinana. In the desperate battle that ensued, the Imperials were at first driven back by Ferruccio's onslaught and the Prince of Orange himself was killed. But when 2,000 Landsknecht reinforcements under Fabrizio Maramaldo arrived, the Florentines were almost annihilated, and Ferruccio was wounded and captured. Maramaldo out of personal spite dispatched Ferruccio with his own hand: "Vile, tu uccidi un uomo morto!" ("Coward, you kill a dead man!") were, according to popular accounts, Ferruccio's last words uttered to his murderer. This defeat sealed the fate of the Republic, and nine days later Florence surrendered. Maramaldo's deed earned him immortal infamy, even turning his own surname as a synonym for "villainous" in Italian.
Read more about this topic: Francesco Ferruccio
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)