Francesco Ferruccio

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Francesco Ferruccio (or Ferrucci) (1489 – August 3, 1530), was a Florentine captain who fought in the Italian Wars.

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[edit] Biography

After spending a few years as a merchant's clerk he took to soldiering at an early age, and served in the Bande Nere 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 favourable 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 despatched Ferruccio with his own hand: "Vile, tu uccidi un uomo morto!" ("Coward, you kill a dead man!") were, according to legend, 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 sinonym for "villainous" in Italian.

[edit] Posthumous myth

Ferruccio was one of the most famous soldiers of the age, although his positive fame was largely exaggerated by Italian writers and poets in search of national myths in the course of the Unification of Italy (19th century). He is indeed cited in Il Canto degli Italiani, the national anthem of Italy composed in 1847 by Goffredo Mameli.

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