As bishop and prince of Geneva, he respected the franchises of his new acquisition; but the poor city was fated somewhat later to serve as food to the offspring of this bird of prey. In 1451, Amadeus being dead, Peter of Savoy, a child eight or ten years old, grandson of the pope, hermit, and bishop, mounted the episcopal throne of Geneva; in 1460 came John Louis, another grandson, twelve years of age; and in 1482 Francis, a third grandson. To the Genevans the family of the pope seemed inexhaustible. These bishops and their governors were as leeches sucking Geneva even to the bones and marrow.
Their mother, Anne of Cyprus, had brought with her to Savoy a number of ‘Cypriote leeches’ as they were called, and after they had drained the blood of her husband’s states, she launched them on the states of her children. One Cypriote prelate, Thomas de Sur, whom she had appointed governor to little Bishop Peter, particularly distinguished himself in the art of robbing citizens of their money and their liberty. It was Bishop John Louis, the least wicked of the three brothers, who inflicted the most terrible blow on Geneva. We shall tell how that happened; for this dramatic episode is a picture of manners, carrying us back to Geneva with its bishops and its princes, and showing us the family of that Charles III. who was in the sixteenth century the constant enemy of the liberties and Reformation of the city.
Duke Louis of Savoy, son of the pope-duke Amadeus, was good-tempered, inoffensive, weak, timid, and sometimes choleric; his wife, Anne of Cyprus or Lusignan, was arrogant, ambitious, greedy, intriguing, and domineering; the fifth of their sons, by name Philip-Monsieur, was a passionate, debauched, and violent young man. Anne, who had successively provided for three of her sons by placing them on the episcopal throne of Geneva, and who had never met with any opposition from the eldest Amadeus IX., a youth subject to epilepsy, had come into collision with Philip. The altercations between them were frequent and sharp, and she never missed an opportunity of injuring him in his father’s affections; so that the duke, who always yielded to his wife’s wishes, left the young prince without appanage. Philip Lackland (for such was the name he went by) angry at finding himself thus deprived of his rights, returned his mother hatred for hatred; and instead of that family affection, which even the poets of heathen antiquity have often celebrated, an implacable enmity existed between the mother and the son. This Philip was destined to fill an important place in history; he was one day to wear the crown, be the father of Charles III. (brother-in-law to Charles V.) and grandfather of Francis I. through his daughter Louisa of Savoy. But at this time nothing announced the high destiny which he would afterwards attain. Constantly surrounded by young profligates, he passed a merry life, wandering here and there with his troop of scapegraces, establishing himself in castles or in farms; and if the inhabitants objected, striking those who resisted, killing one and wounding another, so that he lived in continual quarrels. ‘As my father left me no fortune,’ he used to say, ‘I take my property wherever I can find it.’--‘All Savoy was in discord,’ say the old annals, ‘filled with murder, assault, and riot.’[37]