Having slain the Duke of Milan, Girolamo Olgiati went in search of a door that might deign to open. He had counted upon the entire city. He was compelled, first of all, to persuade his own kin. In Machiavelli’s account, his father and brothers turn him away; his mother alone procures him a refuge in the house of a priest. The would-be liberator concealed himself beneath borrowed vestments. Outside, Milan went on without him.
Yet his deed had not been improvised. In concert with Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani and Carlo Visconti, he had long weighed the death of Galeazzo Maria Sforza. They spoke of it as an event whose consequences would be plain: a tyrant would fall, grateful citizens would rise, and liberty would return within the city walls. The sole difficulty lay in reaching the prince. What was to follow seemed almost assured. It was precisely what would fail them.
A share of this confidence was drawn from books. Master Cola Montano, who taught Latin letters, fostered in his pupils an ardent admiration for the ancient republics and their champions. Brutus was not to them a distant figure, enclosed within a page; he offered a pattern of conduct. In learning to extol those who had struck down tyrants, the young men also learned to imagine their own renown. Ancient history supplied the heroes; Milan, it seemed, offered them the occasion to rival them.
The reign of Galeazzo Maria gave ample cause for such resentment. The Duke patronised the arts, maintained a brilliant court, and imposed his authority with an unsparing hand. Around him circulated tales of violence and humiliation. In tracing the conspirators’ motives, Machiavelli mingles the republican ideal with private grievances: honours withheld, interests thwarted, insults offered to the reputation of their houses. Hatred of a ruler is rarely fed by a single spring. The three men could utter the word of liberty in unison without attaching to it entirely the same meaning.
Their long-standing familiarity served their purpose well. Men were accustomed to seeing them gather, converse at length, and keep each other’s company; such intimacy gave no cause for alarm. They selected a ceremony at which the Duke would appear surrounded, yet accessible. On the twenty-sixth of December 1476, the feast of Saint Stephen, he was to attend Mass in the church dedicated to the saint. They would know where to await him. The sanctuary lent the encounter the appearance of an act of homage and, in their eyes, a solemnity worthy of the deed they contemplated.
They had likewise marked out the dwellings of those close to the regime, among them that of the secretary Cicco Simonetta, toward which the populace might be directed. In a season of material hardship, the prospect of plunder would, they believed, draw adherents to their cause. Their ideal republic thus counted upon very ordinary appetites as well.
Lampugnani assembled men from his retinue. According to Machiavelli, several believed they were accompanying him to settle a private dispute concerning property; they knew nothing of what would truly be required of them. The conspirators thereby swelled their numbers without multiplying their confidences. This calculation was intended to preserve secrecy, yet it already betrayed the frailty of their design. They possessed hands about them, not wills committed to an insurrection. Once the first blow was struck, each man would have to choose according to what he understood and what he was prepared to venture.
The ceremony brought the Duke with his household and envoys from neighbouring courts. The assassins took their places along his path. A movement seemingly intended to ease his passage afforded them the means of approach. Lampugnani struck first; Visconti and Olgiati joined him. Galeazzo Maria was mortally wounded. The courtiers recoiled, the retainers responded, and those who had not seen sought to understand why the press of people was parting in disarray. In a matter of moments, the tumult swept away the fine order the three friends had bestowed upon their scheme.
Lampugnani did not leave the church alive. Olgiati succeeded in gaining the street. He was now to meet that populace whose enthusiasm he had so often foretold. But a city does not learn of its prince’s death as three conspirators announce it to one another in a bedchamber. It receives confused shouts, conflicting reports, the dread of reprisal, and uncertainty as to who still commands. The inhabitants of Milan had made Olgiati no promise to follow him. Their silence was no betrayal of their word: they had never pledged it.
Machiavelli regards this disillusionment as the true political denouement of the assassination. The perpetrators had believed that hatred of the Duke would suffice to bring about collective action. Yet to detest, to approve in secret, to open one’s door, and to take up arms are very different determinations. As Olgiati sought an asylum, these differences took on for him the measure of a street to cross, a chamber to abandon, a countenance that turned away. He had removed the prince; he had not removed the fear of his government.
The refuge obtained by his mother could offer no lasting shelter. Disguised in clerical attire, the young man waited for a rising that never came. The court, for its part, remained far from idle. The death of Galeazzo Maria left a child as heir, Gian Galeazzo, around whom the dynastic interests could readily rally. The servants of the state commanded offices, men-at-arms, and the authority to issue decrees. The surviving conspirators possessed nothing left save hiding places.
Olgiati was apprehended. The narrative of his enterprise passed thenceforth into the hands of those appointed to judge him and of those who, in after times, would seek to explain it. He confessed his part. The ancient ideal to which he had clung afforded him no protection; it merely furnished him with a posture to sustain his character in the face of death. His condemnation was followed by a public execution in the opening days of January 1477. The republican restoration promised in their secret colloquies had not come to pass.
A final utterance remains attached to his memory. Machiavelli relates that he exhorted himself to fortitude, setting the bitterness of death against the endurance of fame. Such was indeed the idiom of his schooling: even upon the scaffold, Olgiati was seeking the place that posterity would grant him. He perished vanquished in the city of flesh and stone, yet still hoped to prevail in the city of books.
Into those books he did indeed enter, though without securing entirely the part he had coveted. Historians have retained his name among the slayers of Galeazzo Maria; treatises upon conspiracy have made of his ruin an enduring example. His name survives that of many a prudent servant of the duchy. Yet the cruellest scene of his history remains that arrival after the crime, when he was reduced to begging for shelter. To strike down a prince, three men had been found. To govern what was to follow, they had summoned nothing more than a hope.