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RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

THE AGE OF THE DESPOTS

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF

STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS, SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE, ETC.

____________________

'Di questi adunque oziosi principi, e di queste vilissime armi, sarà piena la mia Istoria'

MACH. 1st Fior. lib. i.

____________________

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1888

RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.

TO

MY FRIEND

JOHN BEDDOE, M.D., F.R.S.,

I DEDICATE MY WORK

ON

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.

AUTHOR'S EDITION

AUTHORS NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

Though these books taken together and in the order planned by the author form one connected study of Italian culture at a certain period of history, still each aims at a completeness of its own, and each can be read independently of its companions. That the author does not regard acquaintance with any one of them as essential to a profitable reading of any other has been shown by the publication of each with a separate title-page and without numeration of the volumes, while all three bear the same general heading of "Renaissance in Italy."

PREFACE.

This volume is the First Part of a work upon the 'Renaissance in Italy.' The Second Part treats of the Revival of Learning. The Third, of the Fine Arts. The Fourth Part, in two volumes, is devoted to Italian Literature.

Owing to the extent of the ground I have attempted to traverse, I feel conscious that the students of special departments will find much to be desired in my handling of each part. In some respects I hope that the several portions of the work may complete and illustrate each other. Many topics, for example, have been omitted from Chapter VIII. in this volume because they seemed better adapted to treatment in the future.

One of the chief difficulties which the critic has to meet in dealing with the Italian Renaissance is the determination of the limits of the epoch. Two dates, 1453 and 1527, marking respectively the fall of Constantinople and the sack of Rome, are convenient for fixing in the mind that narrow space of time during which the Renaissance culminated. But in order to trace its progress up to this point, it is necessary to go back to a far more remote period; nor, again, is it possible to maintain strict chronological consistency in treating of the several branches of the whole theme.

The books of which the most frequent use has been made in this first portion of the work are Sismondi's 'Républiques Italiennes'; Muratori's 'Rerum Italicarum Scriptores'; the 'Archivio Storico Italiano'; the seventh volume of Michelet's 'Histoire de France'; the seventh and eighth volumes of Gregorovius' 'Geschichte der Stadt Rom'; Ferrari's 'Rivoluzioni d' Italia'; Alberi's series of Despatches; Gino Capponi's 'Storia della Repubblica di Firenze'; and Burckhardt's 'Cultur der Renaissance in Italien.' To the last-named essay I must acknowledge especial obligations. It fell under my notice when I had planned, and in a great measure finished, my own work. But it would be difficult for me to exaggerate the profit I have derived from the comparison of my opinions with those of a writer so thorough in his learning and so delicate in his perceptions as Jacob Burckhardt, or the amount I owe to his acute and philosophical handling of the whole subject. I must also express a special debt to Ferrari, many of whose views I have adopted in the Chapter on 'Italian History.' With regard to the alterations introduced into the substance of the book in this edition, it will be enough to say that I have endeavored to bring each chapter up to the level of present knowledge.

In conclusion, I once more ask indulgence for a volume which, though it aims at a completeness of its own, is professedly but one part of a long inquiry.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.

• Difficulty of fixing Date--Meaning of Word Renaissance--The Emancipation of the Reason--Relation of Feudalism to the Renaissance--Mediæval Warnings of the Renaissance--Abelard, Bacon, Joachim of Flora, the Provencals, the Heretics, Frederick II.--Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio--Physical Energy of the Italians--The Revival of Learning--The Double Discovery of the World and of Man--Exploration of the Universe and of the Globe--Science--The Fine Arts and Scholarship--Art Humanizes the Conceptions of the Church--Three Stages in the History of Scholarship--The Age of Desire--The Age of Acquisition--The Legend of Julia's Corpse--The Age of the Printers and Critics--The Emancipation of the Conscience--The Reformation and the Modern Critical Spirit--Mechanical Inventions--The Place of Italy in the Renaissance [1]

CHAPTER II.

ITALIAN HISTORY.

• The special Difficulties of this Subject--Apparent Confusion--Want of leading Motive--The Papacy--The Empire--The Republics--The Despots--The People--The Dismemberment of Italy--Two main Topics--The Rise of the Communes--Gothic Kingdom--Lombards--Franks--Germans--The Bishops--The Consuls--The Podestas--Civil Wars--Despots--The Balance of Power--The Five Italian States--The Italians fail to achieve National Unity--The Causes of this Failure--Conditions under which it might have been achieved--A Republic--A Kingdom--A Confederation--A Tyranny--The Part played by the Papacy [32]

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF THE DESPOTS.

• Salient Qualities of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in Italy--Relation of Italy to the Empire and to the Church--The Illegitimate Title of Italian Potentates--The Free Emergence of Personality--Frederick II. and the Influence of his Example--Ezzelino da Romano--Six Sorts of Italian Despots--Feudal Seigneurs--Vicars of the Empire--Captains of the People--Condottieri--Nephews and Sons of Popes--Eminent Burghers--Italian Incapacity for Self-government in Commonwealths--Forcible Tenure of Power encouraged Personal Ability--The Condition of the Despot's Life--Instances of Domestic Crime in the Ruling Houses--Macaulay's Description of the Italian Tyrant--Savonarola's and Matteo Villani's Descriptions of a Tyrant--The Absorption of Smaller by Greater Tyrannies in the Fourteenth Century--History of the Visconti--Francesco Sforza--The Part played in Italian Politics by Military Leaders--Mercenary Warfare--Alberico da Barbiano, Braccio da Montone, Sforza Attendolo--History of the Sforza Dynasty--The Murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza--The Ethics of Tyrannicide in Italy--Relation of the Despots to Arts and Letters--Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta--Duke Federigo of Urbino--The School of Vittorino and the Court of Urbino--The Cortegiano of Castiglione--The Ideals of the Italian Courtier and the Modern Gentleman--General Retrospect [99]

CHAPTER IV.

THE REPUBLICS.

• The different Physiognomies of the Italian Republics--The Similarity of their Character as Municipalities--The Rights of Citizenship--Causes of Disturbance in the Commonwealths--Belief in the Plasticity of Constitutions--Example of Genoa--Savonarola's Constitution--Machiavelli's Discourse to Leo X.--Complexity of Interests and Factions--Example of Siena--Small Size of Italian Cities--Mutual Mistrust and Jealousy of the Commonwealths--The notable Exception of Venice--Constitution of Venice--Her wise System of Government--Contrast of Florentine Vicissitudes--The Magistracies of Florence--Balia and Parlamento--The Arts of the Medici--Comparison of Venice and Florence in respect to Intellectual Activity and Mobility--Parallels between Greece and Italy-- Essential Differences--The Mercantile Character of Italian Burghs--The 'Trattato del Governo della Famiglia'--The Bourgeois Tone of Florence, and the Ideal of a Burgher--Mercenary Arms [193]

CHAPTER V.

THE FLORENTINE HISTORIANS.

• Florence, the City of Intelligence--Cupidity, Curiosity, and the Love of Beauty--Florentine Historical Literature--Philosophical Study of History--Ricordano Malespini--Florentine History compared with the Chronicles of other Italian Towns--The Villani--The Date 1300--Statistics--Dante's Political Essays and Pamphlets--Dino Compagni--Latin Histories of Florence in Fifteenth Century--Lionardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini--The Historians of the First Half of the Sixteenth Century--Men of Action and Men of Letters; the Doctrinaires--Florence between 1494 and 1537--Varchi, Segni, Nardi, Pitti, Nerli, Guicciardini--The Political Importance of these Writers--The Last Years of Florentine Independence, and the Siege of 1529--State of Parties--Filippo Strozzi--Different Views of Florentine Weakness taken by the Historians--Their Literary Qualities--Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli--Scientific Statists--Discord between Life and Literature--The Biography of Guicciardini--His 'Istoria d'Italia,' 'Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze,' 'Storia Fiorentina,' 'Ricordi'--Biography of Machiavelli--His Scheme of a National Militia--Dedication of 'The Prince'--Political Ethics of the Italian Renaissance--The 'Discorsi'--The Seven Books on the Art of War and the 'History of Florence. [246]

CHAPTER VI.

'THE PRINCE' OF MACHIAVELLI.

• The Sincerity of Machiavelli in this Essay--Machiavellism--His deliberate Formulation of a cynical political Theory--Analysis of 'The Prince'--Nine Conditions of Principalities--The Interest of the Conqueror acknowledged as the sole Motive of his Policy--Critique of Louis XII.--Feudal Monarchy and Oriental Despotism--Three Ways of subduing a free City--Example of Pisa--Principalities founded by Adventurers--Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, Theseus--Savonarola--Francesco Sforza--Cesare Borgia--Machiavelli's personal Relation to him--Machiavelli's Admiration of Cesare's Genius--A Sketch of Cesare's Career--Concerning those who have attained to Sovereignty by Crimes--Oliverotto da Fermo--The Uses of Cruelty--Messer Ramiro d' Orco--The pessimistic Morality of Machiavelli--On the Faith of Princes--Alexander VI.--The Policy of seeming virtuous and honest--Absence of chivalrous Feeling in Italy--The Military System of a powerful Prince--Criticism of Mercenaries and Auxiliaries--Necessity of National Militia--The Art of War--Patriotic Conclusion of the Treatise--Machiavelli and Savonarola [334]

CHAPTER VII.

THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE.

• The Papacy between 1447 and 1527--The Contradictions of the Renaissance Period exemplified by the Popes--Relaxation of their hold over the States of the Church and Rome during the Exile in Avignon--Nicholas V.--His Conception of a Papal Monarchy--Pius II.--The Crusade--Renaissance Pontiffs--Paul II.--Persecution of the Platonists--Sixtus IV.--Nepotism--The Families of Riario and Delia Rovere--Avarice--Love of Warfare--Pazzi Conspiracy--Inquisition in Spain--Innocent VIII.--Franceschetto Cibo--The Election of Alexander VI.--His Consolidation of the Temporal Power--Policy toward Colonna and Orsini Families--Venality of everything in Rome--Policy toward the Sultan--The Index--The Borgia Family--Lucrezia--Murder of Duke of Gandia--Cesare and his Advancement--The Death of Alexander--Julius II.--His violent Temper--Great Projects and commanding Character--Leo X.--His Inferiority to Julius--S. Peter's and the Reformation--Adrian VI.--His Hatred of Pagan Culture--Disgust of the Roman Court at his Election--Clement VII.--Sack of Rome--Enslavement of Florence [371]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CHURCH AND MORALITY.

• Corruption of the Church--Degradation and Division of Italy--Opinions of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and King Ferdinand of Naples--Incapacity of the Italians for thorough Reformation--The Worldliness and Culture of the Renaissance--Witness of Italian Authors against the Papal Court and the Convents--Superstitious Respect for Relics--Separation between Religion and Morality--Mixture of Contempt and Reverence for the Popes--Gianpaolo Baglioni--Religious Sentiments of the Tyrannicides--Pietro Paolo Boscoli--Tenacity of Religions--The direct Interest of the Italians in Rome--Reverence for the Sacraments of the Church--Opinions pronounced by Englishmen on Italian Immorality--Bad Faith and Sensuality--The Element of the Fancy in Italian Vice--The Italians not Cruel, or Brutal, or Intemperate by Nature--Domestic Murders--Sense of Honor in Italy--Onore and Onesta--General Refinement--Good Qualities of the People--Religious Revivalism [447]

CHAPTER IX.

SAVONAROLA.

• The Attitude of Savonarola toward the Renaissance--His Parentage, Birth, and Childhood at Ferrara--His Poem on the Ruin of the World--Joins the Dominicans at Bologna--Letter to his Father--Poem on the Ruin of the Church--Begins to preach in 1482--First Visit to Florence--San Gemignano--His Prophecy--Brescia in 1486--Personal Appearance and Style of Oratory--Effect on his audience--The three Conclusions--His Visions--Savonarola's Shortcomings as a patriotic Statesman--His sincere Belief in his prophetic Calling--Friendship with Pico della Mirandola--Settles in Florence, 1490--Convent of San Marco--Savonarola's Relation to Lorenzo de' Medici--The death of Lorenzo--Sermons of 1493 and 1494--the Constitution of 1495--Theocracy in Florence--Piagnoni, Bigi, and Arrabhiati--War between Savonarola and Alexander VI.--The Signory suspends him from preaching in the Duomo in 1498--Attempts to call a Council--The Ordeal by Fire--San Marco stormed by the Mob--Trial and Execution of Savonarola [497]

CHAPTER X.

CHARLES VIII.

• The Italian States confront the Great Nations of Europe--Policy of Louis XI. of France--Character of Charles VIII.--Preparations for the Invasion of Italy--Position of Lodovico Sforza--Diplomatic Difficulties in Italy after the Death of Lorenzo de' Medici--Weakness of the Republics--Il Moro--The year 1494---Alfonso of Naples--Inefficiency of the Allies to cope with France--Charles at Lyons is stirred up to the Invasion of Italy by Giuliano della Rovere--Charles at Asti and Pavia--Murder of Gian Galeazzo Sforza--Mistrust in the French Army--Rapallo and Fivizzano--The Entrance into Tuscany--Part played by Piero de' Medici--Charles at Pisa--His Entrance into Florence--Piero Capponi--The March on Rome--Entry into Rome--Panic of Alexander VI.--The March on Naples--The Spanish Dynasty: Alfonso and Ferdinand--Alfonso II. escapes to Sicily--Ferdinand II. takes Refuge in Ischia--Charles at Naples--The League against the French--De Comines at Venice--Charles makes his Retreat by Rome, Siena, Pisa, and Pontremoli--The Battle of Fornovo--Charles reaches Asti and returns to France--Italy becomes the Prize to be fought for by France, Spain, and Germany--Importance of the Expedition of Charles VIII. [537]

APPENDICES.

• No. I.—The Blood-madness of Tyrants [589]

• No. II.—Translations of Nardi, 'Istorie di Firenze,' lib. l. cap. 4; and of Varchi, 'Storia Fiorentina,' lib. iii. caps. 20,21, 22; lib. ix. caps. 48, 49, 46[592]

• No. III.—The Character of Alexander VI., from Guicciardini's 'Storia Fiorentina,' cap. 27[603]

• No. IV.—Religious Revivals in Mediæval Italy[606]

• No. V.—The 'Sommario della Storia d' Italia dal 1511 al 1527, by Francesco Vettori[624]

• INDEX[639]

RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.

CHAPTER I.

THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.

Difficulty of fixing Date—Meaning of Word Renaissance—The Emancipation of the Reason—Relation of Feudalism to the Renaissance—Mediæval Warnings of the Renaissance—Abelard, Bacon, Joachim of Flora, the Provençals, the Heretics, Frederick II.—Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—Physical Energy of the Italians—The Revival of Learning—The Double Discovery of the World and of Man—Exploration of the Universe and of the Globe—Science—The Fine Arts and Scholarship—Art Humanizes the Conceptions of the Church—Three Stages in the History of Scholarship—The Age of Desire—The Age of Acquisition—The Legend of Julia's Corpse—The Age of the Printers and Critics—The Emancipation of the Conscience—The Reformation and the Modern Critical Spirit—Mechanical Inventions—The Place of Italy in the Renaissance.

The word Renaissance has of late years received a more extended significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent—the Revival of Learning. We use it to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World; and though it is possible to assign certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say—between this year and that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer. The truth is, that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is progressive. As in the transformation scene of some great Masque, so here the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the new scene be finally set up?

In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian, again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism, the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority and the erection of the Papacy into an Italian kingdom, and in the last place the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in the Revolution; these are the aspects of the movement which engross his attention. Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the false decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman Code, and the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of modern jurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law. Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all these instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving. Yet neither any one of these answers taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. By the term Renaissance, or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.

How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries after Christ, to speak roughly, the intellect of the Western races awoke as it were from slumber and began once more to be active? That is a question which we can but imperfectly answer. The mystery of organic life defeats analysis; whether the subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the commencement of a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or a new phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point out what are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover, we must be careful not to be carried away by words of our own making. Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we find it convenient to name; while history itself is one and continuous, so that our utmost endeavors to regard some portion of it independently of the rest will be defeated.

A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after the dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there was no immediate possibility of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had deluged Europe had to absorb their barbarism: the fragments of Roman civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated: the Germanic nations had to receive culture and religion from the people they had superseded; the Church had to be created, and a new form given to the old idea of the Empire. It was further necessary that the modern nationalities should be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated, before the indispensable conditions for a resurrection of the free spirit of humanity could exist. The first nation which fulfilled these conditions was the first to inaugurate the new era. The reason why Italy took the lead in the Renaissance was, that Italy possessed a language, a favorable climate, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, at a time when other nations were still semi-barbarous. Where the human spirit had been buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins of that Empire; and the Papacy, called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated, throned and crowned, upon the ashes thereof, to some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.

Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the Renaissance was intellectual, that it was the emancipation of the reason for the modern world, we may inquire how feudalism was related to it. The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration before the idols of the Church—dogma and authority and scholasticism. Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate, without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved during the Middle Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was done unconsciously—that it was a gradual and instinctive process of becoming. The reason, in one word, was not awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediæval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles hardly less idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle were alive but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to bid them speak with voice intelligible to the modern mind. It is no less pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of humanity sweeping from all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but unavailing foam upon the shores of Palestine, whole nations laying life down for the chance of seeing the walls of Jerusalem, worshiping the sepulcher whence Christ had risen, loading their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the sacred earth, while all the time within their breasts and brains the spirit of the Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of freedom which erelong was destined to restore its birthright to the world.

Meanwhile the middle age accomplished its own work. Slowly and obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters, and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed. The qualities which render modern society different from that of the ancient world, were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity, by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further phase. After the nations had been molded, their monarchies and dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany numerous principalities sprang into pre-eminence; and though the nation was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of which the king could say, 'L'Etat c'est moi.' England developed her complicated constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of transformation. The Papacy became more autocratic. Like the king, the Pope began to say, 'L'Eglise c'est moi.' This merging of the mediæval State and mediæval Church in the personal supremacy of King and Pope may be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism which preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary conditions and external circumstances were prepared. The organization of the five great nations, and the leveling of political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.

Meanwhile, it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms. Far from that: within the middle age itself, over and over again, the reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that 'the Gospel of the Father was past, the Gospel of the Son was passing, the Gospel of the Spirit was to be.' These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their sway. The premature civilization of that favored region, so cruelly extinguished by the Church, was itself a reaction of nature against the restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical discipline; while the songs of the wandering students, known under the title of Carmina Burana, indicate a revival of Pagan or pre-Christian feeling in the very stronghold of mediæval learning. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites—heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by the Church. We have to commemorate the vast conception of the Emperor Frederick II., who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the Papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophitic members of half-molded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; Popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.

Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art, conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal, of antique culture as the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race, his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the Renaissance—its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of freedom. His conception of human existence as joy to be accepted with thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering, familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semi-pagan gladness which marked the real Renaissance.

In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived; but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain. With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of the world, the goodliness of youth and strength and love and life, unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.

It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire in her Communes of the thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the old world. Behind stretched the centuries of mediævalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted; their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fiber of the men who were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from skepticism, the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They yearned for magnificence, and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the same time the period of satiety was still far off. Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are not blunted nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing is more remarkable than the fullness of the life that throbbed in them. Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of personality in action. We may apply to them what Mr. Browning has written of Sordello's temperament:—

A footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half germinating spices, mere decay
Produces richer life, and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not seen the beauty of the world or had seen it only to cross himself, and turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like S. Bernard traveling along the shores of the Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule; even like this monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had scarcely known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win; ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission; abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life: these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediæval Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of the reason from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.

An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with the ancient mind which followed upon what is called the Revival of Learning. The fall of the Greek Empire in 1453, while it signalized the extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under all previous manifestations and in its uninterrupted continuity was generated. Men found that in classical as well as Biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to be one.

The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the world and the discovery of man.[1] Under these two formulæ may be classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The discovery of the world divides itself into two branches—the exploration of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is in fact what we call Science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain statement; for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have ensued, that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been added to civilization. In like manner, it is worth while to pause a moment and consider what is implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system. The world, regarded in old times as the center of all things, the apple of God's eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars, suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable suns attended each by a cortège of planets, and scattered, how we know not, through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that Paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples. The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo for his proof of the world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology. Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and religious metaphysic was declared. Henceforth God could not be worshiped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new meaning had been given to the words: 'God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' The reason of man was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a part, and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious but also incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life, and then considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hand of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment she has never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, Science may be called the first-born of the spirit of the modern world.

[1] It is to Michelet that we owe these formulæ, which have passed into the language of history.

Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable globe, and on the other the conquest by Science of all that we now know about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations, illustrated by Pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations, illustrated by Biblical antiquity; these are the two regions, at first apparently distinct, afterwards found to be interpenetrative, which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work, art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulæ from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshiper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms he saw around him. But with the dawning of the Renaissance, a new spirit in the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister-frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols, and brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of physical perfection, and to introduce 'un bel corpo ignudo' into the composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly human, was revealed to their astonished eyes. Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michael Angelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Pheidias. Titian's Virgin received into Heaven, soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went further, and plunged into Paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.

Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body, which, since the destruction of antique civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the mediæval cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of Boethius—and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints—together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the Bible in its original tongues was rediscovered. Mines of Oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. The Aryan and Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship 'Litteræ Humaniores,'—the more human literature, or the literature that humanizes.

There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosimo de Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshiped by these men, just as the reliques of Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the Crusades was revived in this quest of the Holy Grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of Pagan authors were valued like precious gems, reveled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho—absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those long-buried amphora of inspiration. What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm which pervaded all classes Italy for antique culture. Popes and princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde, alike became scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On the 18th of April 1485 a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription, 'Julia, Daughter of Claudius,' and inside the coffer lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed, so goes the legend, to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old Pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshipers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description: she was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.[1]

[1] The most remarkable document regarding the body of Julia which has yet been published is a Latin letter, written by Bartholomæus Fontius to his friend Franciscus Saxethus, minutely describing her, with details which appear to prove that he had not only seen but handled the corpse. It is printed in Janitschek, Die Gesellschaft der R. in It.: Stuttgart, 1879, p. 120.

Then came the third age of scholarship—the age of the critics, philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries. There were then no short cuts to learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck. Florence, Venice, Basle, Lyons, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius, or of Henricus Stephanus, or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.

This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his "Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation, comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic literature was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world, and emancipated from the thralldom of unproved traditions. The force to judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The minds of the Italians assimilated Paganism. In their hatred of mediæval ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity to a reaction—in the north to Puritanism, in the south to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously imperiled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially retarded by the reaction it produced.

The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom, is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side Descartes and Bacon, Spinoza and Locke, are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon or as a mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits in the region of religious thought and national politics what the Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science—the recovered energy and freedom of the reason. We are too apt to treat of history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the biography of the human race. To observe the connection between the several stages of a progressive movement of the human spirit, and to recognize that the forces at work are still active, is the true philosophy of history.

The Reformation, like the revival of science and ofculture, had its mediæval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church successfully combated in North Italy, France, and Bohemia were the precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type—Reuchlin in Germany, Aleander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as a humanist—contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part, incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity, as distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between the human soul and God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established. Thus the principles involved in what we call the Reformation were momentous. Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on the other side with the intolerance of mere authority it led to what has since been named rationalism—the attempt to reconcile the religious tradition with the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie the conceptions of the popular religious consciousness. Again, by promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national politics, the reformation was linked historically to the revolution. It was the Puritan Church in England stimulated by the patriotism of the Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty, and introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This high political abstraction, latent in Christianity, evolved by criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the second half of the last century, was externalized in the French Revolution. The work that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern world is the organization of society in harmony with democratic principles.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world, and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future is how through education to render knowledge accessible to all—to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world, in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages, be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity from the Renaissance onward has tended in this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental and physical, which nature raises between individuals, and which constitute an actual hierarchy, will always be impossible. Yet it may happen that in the future no civilized man will lack the opportunity of being physically and mentally the best that God has made him.

It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was first made of cotton in Europe about 1000, and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The feudal castle, the armor of the Knight and his battle-horse, the prowess of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the canon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property of every one, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite, and must occur to every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.

In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared. But it must never be forgotten that as a matter of history the true Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediæval world were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany achieved the labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has collected, centralized, and diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But if we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we find that, at a time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had already begun to organize the various elements of the modern spirit, and to set the fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and live.

CHAPTER II.

ITALIAN HISTORY

The special Difficulties of this Subject—Apparent Confusion—Want of leading Motive—The Papacy—The Empire—The Republics—The Despots—The People—The Dismemberment of Italy—Two main Topics—The Rise of the Communes—Gothic Kingdom—Lombards—Franks—Germans—The Bishops—The Consuls—The Podestàs—Civil Wars—Despots—The Balance of Power—The Five Italian States—The Italians fail to achieve National Unity—The Causes of this Failure—Conditions under which it might have been achieved—A Republic—A Kingdom—A Confederation—A Tyranny—The Part played by the Papacy.

After a first glance into Italian history the student recoils as from a chaos of inscrutable confusion. To fix the moment of transition from ancient to modern civilization seems impossible. There is no formation of a new people, as in the case of Germany or France or England, to serve as starting-point. Differ as the Italian races do in their original type; Gauls, Ligurians, Etruscans, Umbrians, Latins, Iapygians, Greeks have been fused together beneath the stress of Roman rule into a nation that survives political mutations and the disasters of barbarian invasions. Goths, Lombards, and Franks blend successively with the masses of this complex population, and lose the outlines of their several personalities. The western Empire melts imperceptibly away. The Roman Church grows no less imperceptibly, and forms the Holy Roman Empire as the equivalent of its own spiritual greatness in the sphere of secular authority. These two institutions, the crowning monuments of Italian creative genius, dominate the Middle Ages, powerful as facts, but still more powerful as ideas. Yet neither of them controls the evolution of Italy in the same sense as France was controlled by the monarchical, and Germany by the federative, principle. The forces of the nation, divided and swayed from side to side by this commanding dualism, escaped both influences in so far as either Pope or Emperor strove to mold them into unity. Meanwhile the domination of Byzantine Greeks in the southern provinces, the kingdom of the Goths at Ravenna, the kingdom of the Lombards and Franks at Pavia, the incursions of Huns and Saracens, the kingdom of the Normans at Palermo, formed but accidents and moments in a national development which owed important modifications to each successive episode, but was not finally determined by any of them. When the Communes emerge into prominence, shaking off the supremacy of the Greeks in the South, vindicating their liberties against the Empire in the North, jealously guarding their independence from Papal encroachment in the center, they have already assumed shapes of marked distinctness and bewildering diversity. Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, Siena, Perugia, Amalfi, Lucca, Pisa, to mention only a few of the more notable, are indiscriminately called Republics. Yet they differ in their internal type no less than in external conditions. Each wears from the first and preserves a physiognomy that justifies our thinking and speaking of the town as an incarnate entity. The cities of Italy, down to the very smallest, bear the attributes of individuals. The mutual attractions and repulsions that presided over their growth have given them specific qualities which they will never lose, which will be reflected in their architecture, in their customs, in their language, in their policy, as well as in the institutions of their government. We think of them involuntarily as persons, and reserve for them epithets that mark the permanence of their distinctive characters. To treat of them collectively is almost impossible. Each has its own biography, and plays a part of consequence in the great drama of the nation. Accordingly the study of Italian politics, Italian literature, Italian art, is really not the study of one national genius, but of a whole family of cognate geniuses, grouped together, conscious of affinity, obeying the same general conditions, but issuing in markedly divergent characteristics. Democracies, oligarchies, aristocracies spring into being by laws of natural selection within the limits of a single province. Every municipality has a separate nomenclature for its magistracies, a somewhat different method of distributing administrative functions. In one place there is a Doge appointed for life; in another the government is put into commission among officers elected for a period of months. Here we find a Patrician, a Senator, a Tribune; there Consuls, Rectors, Priors, Ancients, Buonuomini, Conservatori. At one period and in one city the Podestà seems paramount; across the border a Captain of the People or a Gonfaloniere di Giustizia is supreme. Vicars of the Empire, Exarchs, Catapans, Rectors for the Church, Legates, Commissaries, succeed each other with dazzling rapidity. Councils are multiplied and called by names that have their origin and meaning buried in the dust of archæology. Consigli del Popolo, Credenza, Consiglio del Comune, Senato, Gran Consiglio, Pratiche, Parlamenti, Monti, Consiglio de' Savi, Arti, Parte Guelfa, Consigli di Dieci, di Tre, I Nove, Gli Otto, I Cento—such are a few of the titles chosen at random from the constitutional records of different localities.

Not one is insignificant. Not one but indicates some moment of importance in the social evolution of the state. Not one but speaks of civil strife, whereby the burgh in question struggled into individuality and defined itself against its neighbor. Like fossils, in geological strata, these names survive long after their old uses have been forgotten, to guide the explorer in his reconstruction of a buried past. While one town appears to respect the feudal lordship of great families, another pronounces nobility to be a crime, and forces on its citizens the reality or the pretense of labor. Some recognize the supremacy of ecclesiastics. Others, like Venice, resist the least encroachment of the Church, and stand aloof from Roman Christianity in jealous isolation. The interests of one class are maritime, of another military, of a third industrial, of a fourth financial, of a fifth educational. Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice depend for power upon their fleets and colonies; the little cities of Romagna and the March supply the Captains of adventure with recruits; Florence and Lucca live by manufacture; Milan by banking; Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, owe their wealth to students attracted by their universities. Foreign alliances or geographical affinities connect one center with the Empire of the East, a second with France, a third with Spain. The North is overshadowed by Germany; the South is disquieted by Islam. The types thus formed and thus discriminated are vital, and persist for centuries with the tenacity of physical growths. Each differentiation owes its origin to causes deeply rooted in the locality. The freedom and apparent waywardness of nature, when she sets about to form crystals of varying shapes and colors, that shall last and bear her stamp for ever, have governed their uprising and their progress to maturity. At the same time they exhibit the keen jealousies and mutual hatreds of rival families in the animal kingdom. Pisa destroys Amalfi; Genoa, Pisa; Venice, Genoa; with ruthless and remorseless egotism in the conflict of commercial interests. Florence enslaves Pisa because she needs a way to the sea. Siena and Perugia, upon their inland altitudes, consume themselves in brilliant but unavailing efforts to expand. Milan engulfs the lesser towns of Lombardy. Verona absorbs Padua and Treviso. Venice extends dominion over the Friuli and the Veronese conquests. Strife and covetousness reign from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. But it is a strife of living energies, the covetousness of impassioned and puissant units. Italy as a whole is almost invisible to the student by reason of the many-sided, combative, self-centered crowd of numberless Italian communities. Proximity foments hatred and stimulates hostility. Fiesole looks down and threatens Florence. Florence returns frown for frown, and does not rest till she has made her neighbor of the hills a slave. Perugia and Assissi turn the Umbrian plain into a wilderness of wolves by their recurrent warfare. Scowling at one another across the Valdichiana, Perugia rears a tower against Chiusi, and Chiusi builds her Becca Questa in responsive menace. The tiniest burgh upon the Arno receives from Dante, the poet of this internecine strife and fierce town-rivalry, its stigma of immortalizing satire and insulting epithet, for no apparent reason but that its dwellers dare to drink of the same water and to breathe the same air as Florence. It would seem as though the most ancient furies of antagonistic races, enchained and suspended for centuries by the magic of Rome, had been unloosed; as though the indigenous populations of Italy, tamed by antique culture, were reverting to their primal instincts, with all the discords and divisions introduced by the military system of the Lombards, the feudalism of the Franks, the alien institutions of the Germans, superadded to exasperate the passions of a nation blindly struggling against obstacles that block the channel of continuous progress. Nor is this the end of the perplexity. Not only are the cities at war with one another, but they are plunged in ceaseless strife within the circuit of their ramparts. The people with the nobles, the burghs with the castles, the plebeians with the burgher aristocracy, the men of commerce with the men of arms and ancient lineage, Guelfs and Ghibellines, clash together in persistent fury. One half the city expels the other half. The exiles roam abroad, cement alliances, and return to extirpate their conquerors. Fresh proscriptions and new expulsions follow. Again alliances are made and revolutions accomplished, till the ancient feuds of the towns are crossed, recrossed, and tangled in a web of madness that defies analysis. Through the medley of quarreling, divided, subdivided, and intertwisted factions, ride Emperors followed by their bands of knights, appearing for a season on vain quests, and withdrawing after they have tenfold confounded the confusion. Papal Legates drown the cities of the Church in blood, preach crusades, fulminate interdictions, rouse insurrections in the States that own allegiance to the Empire. Monks stir republican revivals in old cities that have lost their liberties, or assemble the populations of crime-maddened districts in aimless comedies of piety and false pacification, or lead them barefooted and intoxicated with shrill cries of 'Mercy' over plain and mountain. Princes of France, Kings of Bohemia and Hungary, march and countermarch from north to south and back again, form leagues, establish realms, head confederations, which melt like shapes we form from clouds to nothing. At one time the Pope and Emperor use Italy as the arena of a deadly duel, drawing the congregated forces of the nation into their dispute. At another they join hands to divide the spoil of ruined provinces. Great generals with armies at their backs start into being from apparent nothingness, dispute the sovereignty of Italy in bloodless battles, found ephemeral dynasties, and pass away like mists upon a mountain-side beneath a puff of wind. Conflict, ruin, desolation, anarchy are ever yielding place to concord, restoration, peace, prosperity, and then recurring with a mighty flood of violence. Construction, destruction, and reconstruction play their part in crises that have to be counted by the thousands.

In the mean time, from this hurricane of disorder rises the clear ideal of the national genius. Italy becomes self-conscious and attains the spiritual primacy of modern Europe. Art, Learning, Literature, State-craft, Philosophy, Science build a sacred and inviolable city of the soul amid the tumult of seven thousand revolutions, the dust and crash of falling cities, the tramplings of recurrent invasions, the infamies and outrages of tyrants and marauders who oppress the land. Unshaken by the storms that rage around it, this refuge of the spirit, raised by Italian poets, thinkers, artists, scholars, and discoverers, grows unceasingly in bulk and strength, until the younger nations take their place beneath its ample dome. Then, while yet the thing of wonder and of beauty stands in fresh perfection, at that supreme moment when Italy is tranquil and sufficient to fulfill the noblest mission for the world, we find her crushed and trampled under foot. Her tempestuous but splendid story closes in the calm of tyranny imposed by Spain.

Over this vertiginous abyss of history, where the memories of antique civilization blend with the growing impulses of modern life in an uninterrupted sequence of national consciousness; through this many-chambered laboratory of conflicting principles, where the ideals of the Middle Age are shaped, and laws are framed for Europe; across this wonder-land of waning and of waxing culture, where Goths, Greeks, Lombards, Franks, and Normans come to form themselves by contact with the ever-living soul of Rome; where Frenchmen, Spaniards, Swiss, and Germans at a later period battle for the richest prize in Europe, and learn by conquest from the conquered to be men; how shall we guide our course? If we follow the fortunes of the Church, and make the Papacy the thread on which the history of Italy shall hang, we gain the advantage of basing our narrative upon the most vital and continuous member of the body politic. But we are soon forced to lose sight of the Italians in the crowd of other Christian races. The history of the Church is cosmopolitan. The Sphere of the Papacy extends in all directions around Italy taken as a local center. Its influence, moreover, was invariably one of discord rather than of harmony within the boundaries of the peninsula. If we take the Empire as our standing-ground, we have to write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges. After Frederick II. the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were reasserted by Charles V. upon the platform of modern politics. A power so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted, so impotent to control the development of the Italians, cannot be chosen as the central point of their history. If we elect the Republics, we are met with another class of difficulties. The historian who makes the Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development, reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which occupy no less than half the country. Again, the great age of the Renaissance, when all the free burghs accepted the rule of despots, and when the genius of the Italians culminated, is for him a period of downfall and degradation. Besides, he leaves the history of the Italian people before the starting-point of the Republics unexplained. He has, at the close of their career, to account for the reason why these Communes, so powerful in self-development, so intelligent, so wealthy, and so capable of playing off the Pope against the Empire, failed to maintain their independence. In other words he selects one phase of Italian evolution, and writes a narrative that cannot but be partial. If we make the Despots our main point, we repeat the same error in a worse form. The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors. Each and all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired Republics. Though they are all-important at one period of Italian history—the period of the present work—they do but form an episode in the great epic of the nation. He who attempts a general history of Italy from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for the whole drama. Finally we might prefer the people—that people, instinctively and persistently faithful to Roman traditions, which absorbed into itself the successive hordes of barbarian invaders, civilized them, and adopted them as men of Italy; that people which destroyed the kingdoms of the Goths and Lombards humbled the Empire at Legnano, and evolved the Communes; that people which resisted alien feudalism, and spent its prime upon eradicating every trace of the repugnant system from its midst; that people which finally attained to the consciousness of national unity by the recovery of scholarship and culture under the dominion of despotic princes. This people is Italy. But the documents that should throw light upon the early annals of the people are deficient. It does not appear upon the scene before the reign of Otho I. Nor does it become supreme till after the Peace of Constance. Its biography is bound up with that of the republics and the despots. Before the date of their ascendency we have to deal with Bishops of Rome, Emperors of the East and West, Exarchs and Kings of Italy, the feudal Lords of the Marches, the Dukes and Counts of Lombard and Frankish rulers. Through that long period of incubation, when Italy freed herself from dependence upon Byzantium, created the Papacy and formed the second Roman Empire, the people exists only as a spirit resident in Roman towns and fostered by the Church, which effectually repelled all attempts at monarchical unity, playing the Lombards off against the Goths, the Franks against the Lombards, the Normans against the Greeks, merging the Italian Kingdom in the Empire when it became German, and resisting the Empire of its own creation when the towns at last were strong enough to stand alone. To speak about the people in this early period is, therefore, to invoke a myth; to write its history is the same as writing an ideal history of mediæval Europe.

The truth is that none of these standpoints in isolation suffices for the student of Italy. Her inner history is the history of social and intellectual progress evolving itself under the conditions of attraction and repulsion generated by the double ideas of Papacy and Empire. Political unity is everywhere and at all times imperiously rejected. The most varied constitutional forms are needed for the self-effectuation of a race that has no analogue in Europe. The theocracy of Rome, the monarchy of Naples, the aristocracy of Venice, the democracy of Florence, the tyranny of Milan are equally instrumental in elaborating the national genius that gave art, literature, and mental liberty to modern society. The struggles of city with city for supremacy or bare existence, the internecine wars of party against party, the never-ending clash of principles within the States, educated the people to multifarious and vivid energy. In the course of those long complicated contests, the chief centers acquired separate personalities, assumed the physiognomy of conscious freedom, and stamped the mark of their own spirit on their citizens. At the end of all discords, at the close of all catastrophes, we find in each of the great towns a population released from mental bondage and fitted to perform the work of intellectual emancipation for the rest of Europe. Thus the essential characteristic of Italy is diversity, controlled and harmonized by an ideal rhythm of progressive movement.[1] We who are mainly occupied in this book with the Italian genius as it expressed itself in society, scholarship, fine art, and literature, at its most brilliant period of renascence, may accept this fact of political dismemberment with acquiescence. It was to the variety of conditions offered by the Italian communities that we owe the unexampled richness of the mental life of Italy. Yet it is impossible to overlook the weakness inflicted on the people by those same conditions when the time came for Italy to try her strength against the nations of Europe.[2] It was then shown that the diversities which stimulated spiritual energy were a fatal source of national instability. The pride of the Italians in their local independence, their intolerance of unification under a single head, the jealousies that prevented them from forming a permanent confederation, rendered them incapable of coping with races which had yielded to the centripetal force of monarchy. If it is true that the unity of the nation under a kingdom founded at Pavia would have deprived the world of much that Italy has yielded in the sphere of thought and art, it is certainly not less true that such centralization alone could have averted the ruin of the sixteenth century which gives the aspect of a tragedy to each volume of my work on the Renaissance.

[1] See Guicciardini (Op. Ined. vol. i. p. 28) for an eloquent demonstration of the happiness, prosperity, and splendor conferred on the Italians by the independence of their several centers. He is arguing against Machiavelli's lamentation over their failure to achieve national unity.

[2] This was the point urged by Machiavelli, in the Principe, the Discorsi, and the Art of War. With keener political insight than Guicciardini, he perceived that the old felicity of Italy was about to fail her through the very independence of her local centers, which Guicciardini rightly recognized as the source of her unparalleled civilization and wealth. The one thing needful in the shock with France and Spain was unity.

Without seeking to attack the whole problem of Italian history, two main topics must be briefly discussed in the present chapter before entering on the proper matter of this work. The first relates to the growth of the Communes, which preceded, necessitated, and determined the despotisms of the fifteenth century. The second raises the question why Italian differs from any other national history, why the people failed to achieve unity either under a sovereign or in a powerful confederation. These two subjects of inquiry are closely connected and interdependent. They bring into play the several points that have been indicated as partially and imperfectly explanatory of the problem of Italy. But, since I have undertaken to write neither a constitutional nor a political history, but a history of culture at a certain epoch, it will be enough to treat of these two questions briefly, with the special view of showing under what conditions the civilization of the Renaissance came to maturity in numerous independent Communes, reduced at last by necessary laws of circumstance to tyranny; and how it was checked at the point of transition to its second phase of modern existence, by political weakness inseparable from the want of national coherence in the shock with mightier military races.

Modern Italian history may be said to begin with the retirement of Honorius to Ravenna and the subsequent foundation of Odoacer's Kingdom in 476. The Western Empire ended, and Rome was recognized as a Republic. When Zeno sent the Goths into Italy, Theodoric established himself at Ravenna, continued the institutions and usages of the ancient Empire, and sought by blending with the people to naturalize his alien authority. Rome was respected as the sacred city of ancient culture and civility. Her Consuls, appointed by the Senate, were confirmed in due course by the Greek Emperor; and Theodoric made himself the vicegerent of the Cæsars rather than an independent sovereign. When we criticise the Ostro-Gothic occupation by the light of subsequent history, it is clear that this exclusion of the capital from Theodoric's conquest and his veneration for the Eternal City were fatal to the unity of the Italian realm. From the moment that Rome was separated from the authority of the Italian Kings, there existed two powers in the Peninsula—the one secular, monarchical, with the military strength of the barbarians imposed upon its ancient municipal organization; the other ecclesiastical, pontifical, relying on the undefined ambitions of S. Peter's See and the unconquered instincts of the Roman people scattered through the still surviving cities.[1] Justinian, bent upon asserting his rights as the successor of the Cæsars, wrested Italy from the hands of the Goths; but scarcely was this revolution effected when Narses, the successor of Belisarius, called a new nation of barbarians to support his policy in Italy. Narses died before the advent of the Lombards; but they descended, in forces far more formidable than the Goths, and established a second kingdom at Pavia. Under the Lombard domination Rome was left untouched. Venice, with her population gathered from the ruins of the neighboring Roman cities, remained in quasi-subjection to the Empire of the East. Ravenna became a Greek garrison, ruling the Exarchate and Pentapolis under the name of the Byzantine Emperors. The western coast escaped the Lombard domination; for Genoa grew slowly into power upon her narrow cornice between hills and sea, while Pisa defied the barbarians intrenched in military stations at Fiesole and Lucca. In like manner the islands, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, were detached from the Lombard Kingdom; and the maritime cities of Southern Italy, Bari, Naples, Amalfi, and Gaeta asserted independence under the shadow of the Greek ascendency. What the Lombards achieved in their conquest, and what they failed to accomplish, decided the future of Italy. They broke the country up into unequal blocks; for while the inland regions of the north obeyed Pavia, while the great duchies of Spoleto in the center and of Benevento in the south owned the nominal sway of Alboin's successors,[2] Venice and the Riviera, Pisa and the maritime republics of Apulia and Calabria, Ravenna and the islands, repelled their sovereignty. Rome remained inviolable beneath the ægis of her ancient prestige, and the decadent Empire of the East was too inert to check the freedom of the towns which recognized its titular supremacy.

[1] When I apply the term Roman here and elsewhere to the inhabitants of the Italian towns, I wish to indicate the indigenous Italic populations molded by Roman rule into homogeneity. The resurgence of this population and its reattainment of intellectual consciousness by the recovery of past traditions and the rejection of foreign influence constitutes the history of Italy upon the close of the Dark Ages.

[2] It will be remembered by students of early Italian history that Benevento and Spoleto joined the Church in her war upon the Lombard kingdom. Spoleto was broken up. Benevento survived as a Lombard duchy till the Norman Conquest.

The kingdom of the Lombards endured two centuries, and left ineffaceable marks upon Italy. A cordon of military cities was drawn round the old Roman centers in Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Duchy of Spoleto. Pavia rose against Milan, which had been a second Rome, Cividale against Aquileia, Fiesole against Florence, Lucca against Pisa. The country was divided into Duchies and Marches; military service was exacted from the population, and the laws of the Lombards, asininum jus, quoddam jus quod faciebant reges per se, as the jurists afterwards defined them, were imposed upon the descendants of Roman civilization. Yet the outlying cities of the sea-coast, as we have already seen, were independent; and Rome remained to be the center of revolutionary ideas, the rallying-point of a policy inimical to Lombard unity. Not long after their settlement, the princes of the Lombard race took the fatal step of joining the Catholic communion, whereby they strengthened the hands of Rome and excluded themselves from tyrannizing in the last resort over the growing independence of the Papal See. The causes of their conversion from Arianism to orthodox Latin Christianity are buried in obscurity. But it is probable that they were driven to this measure by the rebelliousness of their great vassals and the necessity of resting for support upon the indigenous populations they had subjugated. Rome, profiting by the errors and the weakness of her antagonists, extended her spiritual dominion by enforcing sacraments, ordeals, and appeals to ecclesiastical tribunals, organized her hierarchy under Gregory the Great, and lost no opportunity of enriching and aggrandizing her bishoprics. In 718 she shook off the yoke of Byzantium by repelling the heresies of Leo the Isaurian; and when this insurrection menaced her with the domestic tyranny of the Lombard Kings, who possessed themselves of Ravenna in 728, she called the Franks to her aid against the now powerful realm. Stephen II. journeyed in 753 to Gaul, named Pippin Patrician of Rome, and invited him to the conquest of Italy. In the war that followed, the Franks subdued the Lombards, and Charles the Great was invested with their kingdom and crowned Emperor in 800 by Leo III. at Rome.

The famous compact between Charles the Great and the Pope was in effect a ratification of the existing state of things. The new Emperor took for himself and converted into a Frankish Kingdom all the provinces that had been wrested from the Lombards. He relinquished to the Papacy Rome with its patrimony, the portions of Spoleto and Benevento that had already yielded to the See of S. Peter, the southern provinces that owned the nominal ascendency of Byzantium, the islands and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis which formed no part of the Lombard conquest. By this stipulation no real temporal power was accorded to the Papacy, nor did the new Empire surrender its paramount rights over the peninsula at large. The Italian kingdom, transferred to the Franks in 800, was the kingdom founded by the Lombards; while the outlying and unconquered districts were placed beneath the protectorate of the power which had guided their emancipation. Thus the dualism introduced into Italy by Theodoric's veneration for Rome, and confirmed by the failure of the Lombard conquest, was ratified in the settlement whereby the Pope gave a new Empire to Western Christendom. Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and the maritime Republics of the south, excluded from the kingdom, were left to pursue their own course of independence; and this is the chief among many reasons why they rose so early into prominence. Rome consolidated her ancient patrimonies and extended her rectorship in the center, while the Frankish kings, who succeeded each other through eight reigns, developed the Regno upon feudal principles by parceling the land among their Counts. New marches were formed, traversing the previous Lombard fabric and introducing divisions that decentralized the kingdom. Thus the great vassals of Ivrea, Verona, Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against Pavia. The monarchs, placed between the Papacy and their ambitious nobles, were unable to consolidate the realm; and when Berengar, the last independent sovereign strove to enforce the declining authority of Pavia, he was met with the resistance and the hatred of the nation.

The kingdom Berengar attempted to maintain against his vassals and the Church was virtually abrogated by Otho I., whom the Lombard nobles summoned into Italy in 951. When he reappeared in 961, he was crowned Emperor at Rome, and assumed the title of the King of Italy. Thus the Regno was merged in the Empire, and Pavia ceased to be a capital. Henceforth the two great potentates in the peninsula were an unarmed Pontiff and an absent Emperor. The subsequent history of the Italians shows how they succeeded in reducing both these powers to the condition of principles, maintaining the pontifical and imperial ideas, but repelling the practical authority of either potentate. Otho created new marches and gave them to men of German origin. The houses of Savoy and Montferrat rose into importance in his reign. To Verona were intrusted the passes between Germany and Italy. The Princes of Este at Ferrara held the keys of the Po, while the family of Canossa accumulated fiefs that stretched from Mantua across the plain of Lombardy, over the Apennines to Lucca, and southward to Spoleto. Thus the ancient Italy of Lombards and Franks was superseded by a new Italy of German feudalism, owing allegiance to a suzerain whose interests detained him in the provinces beyond the Alps. At the same time the organization of the Church was fortified. The Bishops were placed on an equality with the Counts in the chief cities, and Viscounts were created to represent their civil jurisdiction. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Otho's concessions to the Bishops. During the preceding period of Frankish rule about one third of the soil of Italy had been yielded to the Church, which had the right of freeing its vassals from military service; and since the ecclesiastical sees were founded upon ancient sites of Roman civilization, without regard to the military centers of the barbarian kingdoms, the new privileges of the Bishops accrued to the benefit of the indigenous population. Milan, for example, down-trodden by Pavia, still remained the major See of Lombardy. Aquileia, though a desert, had her patriarch, while Cividale, established as a fortress to coerce the neighboring Roman towns, was ecclesiastically but a village. At this epoch a third power emerged in Italy. Berengar had given the cities permission to inclose themselves with walls in order to repel the invasions of the Huns.[1] Otho respected their right of self-defense, and from the date of his coronation the history of the free burghs begins in Italy. It is at first closely connected with the changes wrought by the extinction of the kingdom of Pavia, by the exaltation of the clergy, and by the dislocation of the previous system of feud-holding, which followed upon Otho's determination to remodel the country in the interest of the German Empire. The Regno was abolished. The ancient landmarks of nobility were altered and confused. The cities under their Bishops assumed a novel character of independence. Those of Roman origin, being ecclesiastical centers, had a distant advantage over the more recent foundations of the Lombard and the Frankish monarchs. The Italic population everywhere emerged and displayed a vitality that had been crushed and overlaid by centuries of invasion and military oppression.

[1] It is worthy of notice that to this date belongs the war-chant of the Modenese sentinels, with its allusions to Troy and Hector, which is recognized as the earliest specimen of the Italian hendecasyllabic meter.

The burghs at this epoch may be regarded as luminous points in the dense darkness of feudal aristocracy.[1] Gathering round their Cathedral as a center, the towns inclose their dwellings with bastions, from which they gaze upon a country bristling with castles, occupied by serfs, and lorded over by the hierarchical nobility. Within the city the Bishop and the Count hold equal sway; but the Bishop has upon his side the sympathies and passions of the burghers. The first effort of the towns is to expel the Count from their midst. Some accident of misrule infuriates the citizens. They fly to arms and are supported by the Bishop. The Count has to retire to the open country, where he strengthens himself in his castle.[2] Then the Bishop remains victor in the town, and forms a government of rich and noble burghers, who control with him the fortunes of the new-born state. At this crisis we begin to hear for the first time a word that has been much misunderstood. The Popolo appears upon the scene. Interpreting the past by the present, and importing the connotation gained by the word people in the revolutions of the last two centuries, students are apt to assume that the Popolo of the Italian burghs included the whole population. In reality it was at first a close aristocracy of influential families, to whom the authority of the superseded Counts was transferred in commission, and who held it by hereditary right.[3] Unless we firmly grasp this fact, the subsequent vicissitudes of the Italian commonwealths are unintelligible, and the elaborate definitions of the Florentine doctrinaires lose half their meaning. The internal revolutions of the free cities were almost invariably caused by the necessity of enlarging the Popolo, and extending its franchise to the non-privileged inhabitants. Each effort after expansion provoked an obstinate resistance from those families who held the rights of burghership; and thus the technical terms primo popolo, secondo popolo/i>, popolo grasso, popolo minuto, frequently occurring in the records of the Republics, indicate several stages in the progress from oligarchy to democracy. The constitution of the city at this early period was simple. At the head of its administration stood the Bishop, with the Popolo of enfranchised burghers. The Commune included the Popolo, together with the non-qualified inhabitants, and was represented by Consuls, varying in number according to the division of the town into quarters.[4] Thus the Commune and the Popolo were originally separate bodies; and this distinction has been perpetuated in the architecture of those towns which still can show a Palazzo del Popolo apart from the Palazzo del Commune. Since the affairs of the city had to be conducted by discussion, we find Councils corresponding to the constituent elements of the burgh. There is the Parlamento, in which the inhabitants meet together to hear the decisions of the Bishop and the Popolo, or to take measures in extreme cases that affect the city as a whole; the Gran Consiglio, which is only open to duly qualified members of the Popolo; and the Credenza, or privy council of specially delegated burghers, who debate on matters demanding secrecy and diplomacy. Such, generally speaking, and without regard to local differences, was the internal constitution of an Italian city during the supremacy of the Bishops.

[1] It is not necessary to raise antiquarian questions here relating to the origin of the Italian Commune. Whether regarded as a survival of the ancient Roman municipium or as an offshoot from the Lombard guild, it was a new birth of modern times, a new organism evolved to express the functions of Italian as different from ancient Roman or mediæval Lombard life. The affection of the people for their past induced them to use the nomenclature of Latin civility for the officers and councils of the Commune. Thus a specious air of classical antiquity, rather literary and sentimental than real, was given to the Commune at the outset. Moreover, it must be remembered that Rome herself had suffered no substantial interruption of republican existence during the Dark Ages. Therefore the free burghs, though their vitality was the outcome of wholly new conditions, though they were built up of guilds and associations representing interests of modern origin, flattered themselves with an uninterrupted municipal succession from the Roman era, and pointed for proof to the Eternal City.

[2] The Italian word contado is a survival from this state of things. It represents a moment in the national development when the sphere of the Count outside the city was defined against the sphere of the municipality. The Contadini are the people of the Contado, the Count's men.

[3] Even Petrarch, in his letter to four Cardinals (Lett. Fam. xi. 16, ed. Fracassetti) on the reformation of the Roman Commonwealth, recommends the exclusion of the neighboring burghs and all strangers, inclusive of the Colonna and Orsini families, from the franchise. None but pure Romans, how to be discovered from the colluviet omnium gentium deposited upon the Seven Hills by centuries of immigration he does not clearly say, should be chosen to revive the fallen majesty of the Republic. See in particular the peroration of his argument (op. cit. vol. iii. p. 95). In other words, he aims at a narrow Popolo, a pura cittadinanza, in the sense of Cacciaguida Par. xvi.

[4] In some places we find as many as twelve Consuls. It appears that both the constituent families of the Popolo and the numbers of the Consuls were determined by the Sections of the city, so many being told off for each quarter.

In the North of Italy not a few of the greater vassals, among whom may be mentioned the houses of Canossa, Montferrat, Savoy, and Este, creations of the Salic Emperors, looked with favor upon the development of the towns, while some nobles went so far as to constitute themselves feudatories of Bishops.[1] The angry warfare carried on against Canossa by the Lombard barons has probably to be interpreted by the jealousy this popular policy excited. At the same time, while Lombardy and Tuscany were establishing their municipal liberties, a sympathetic movement began in Southern Italy, which resulted in the conquest of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily by the Normans. Omitting all the details of this episode, than which nothing more dramatic is presented by the history of modern nations, it must be enough to point out here that the Normans finally severed Italy from the Greek Empire, gave a monarchical stamp to the south of the peninsula, and brought the Regno they consolidated into the sphere of national politics under the protection of the Pope. Up to the date of their conquest Southern Italy had a separate and confused history. It now entered the Italian community, and by the peculiar circumstances of its cession to the Holy See was destined in the future to become the chief instrument whereby the Popes disturbed the equilibrium of the peninsula in furtherance of their ambitious schemes.

[1] The Pelavicini of S. Donnino, for example, gave themselves to Parma.

The greatness of the Roman cities under the popular rule of their Bishops is illustrated by Milan, second only to Rome in the last days of the Empire. Milan had been reduced to the condition of abject misery by the Kings, who spared no pains to exalt Pavia at the expense of her elder sister. After the dissolution of the kingdom, she started into a new life, and in 1037 her archbishop, Heribert, was singled out by Conrad II. as the protagonist of the episcopal revolution against feudalism.[1] Heribert was in truth the hero of the burghs in their first strife for independence. It was he who devised the Carroccio, an immense car drawn by oxen, bearing the banner of the Commune, with an altar and priests ministrant, around which the pikemen of the city mustered when they went to war. This invention of Heribert's was soon adopted by the cities throughout Italy. It gave cohesion and confidence to the citizens, reminded them that the Church was on their side in the struggle for freedom, and served as symbol of their military strength in union. The first authentic records of a Parliament, embracing the nobles of the Popolo, the clergy, and the multitude, are transmitted to us by the Milanese Chronicles, in which Heribert figures as the president of a republic. From this date Milan takes the lead in the contests for municipal independence. Her institutions like that of the Carroccio, together with her tameless spirit, are communicated to the neighboring cities of Lombardy, cross the Apennines, and animate the ancient burghs of Tuscany.

[1] He was summoned before the Diet of Pavia for having dispossessed a noble of his feud.

Having founded their liberties upon the episcopal presidency, the cities now proceeded to claim the right of choosing their own Bishops. They refused the prelates sent them by the Emperor, and demanded an election by the Chapters of each town. This privilege was virtually won when the war of Investitures broke out in 1073. After the death of Gregory VI. in 1046, the Emperors resolved to enforce their right of nominating the Popes. The two first prelates imposed on Rome, Clement II. and Damatus II., died under suspicion of poison. Thus the Roman people refused a foreign Pope, as the Lombards had rejected the bishops sent to rule them. The next Popes, Leo IX. and Victor II., were persuaded by Hildebrand, who now appears upon the stage, to undergo a second election at Rome by the clergy and the people. They escaped assassination. But the fifth German, Stephen X., again died suddenly; and now the formidable monk of Soana felt himself powerful enough to cause the election of his own candidate, Nicholas II. A Lateran council, inspired by Hildebrand, transferred the election of Popes to the Cardinals, approved by the clergy and people of Rome, and confirmed the privilege of the cities to choose their bishops, subject to Papal ratification. In 1073 Hildebrand assumed the tiara as Gregory VII., and declared a war that lasted more than forty years against the Empire. At its close in 1122 the Church and the Empire were counterposed as mutually exclusive autocracies, the one claiming illimitable spiritual sway, the other recognized as no less illimitably paramount in civil society. From the principles raised by Hildebrand and contested in the struggles of this duel, we may date those new conceptions of the two chief powers of Christendom which found final expression in the theocratic philosophy of the Summa and the imperial absolutism of the De Monarchiâ. Meanwhile the Empire and the Papacy, while trying their force against each other, had proved to Italy their essential weakness. What they gained as ideas, controlling the speculations of the next two centuries, they lost as potentates in the peninsula. It was impossible for either Pope or Emperor to carry on the war without bidding for the support of the cities; and therefore, at the end of the struggle, the free burghs found themselves strengthened at the expense of both powers. Still it must not be forgotten that the wars of Investitures, while they developed the independent spirit and the military energies of the Republics, penetrated Italy with the vice of party conflict. The ineradicable divisions of Guelf and Ghibelline were a heavy price to pay for a step forward on the path of emancipation; nor was the ecclesiastical revolution, which tended to Italianize the Papacy, while it magnified its cosmopolitan ascendency, other than a source of evil to the nation.

The forces liberated in the cities by these wars brought the Consuls to the front. The Bishops had undermined the feudal fabric of the kingdom, depressed the Counts, and restored the Roman towns to prosperity. During the war both Popolo and Commune grew in vigor, and their Consuls began to use the authority that had been conquered by the prelates. At first the Consuls occupied a subordinate position as men of affairs and notaries, needed to transact the business of the mercantile inhabitants. They now took the lead as political agents of the first magnitude, representing the city in its public acts, and superseding the ecclesiastics. The Popolo was enlarged by the admission of new burgher families, and the ruling caste, though still oligarchical, became more fairly representative of the inhabitants. This progress was inevitable, when we remember that the cities had been organized for warfare, and that, except their Consuls, they had no officials who combined civil and military functions. Under the jurisdiction of the Consuls Roman law was everywhere substituted for Lombard statutes, and another strong blow was thus dealt against decaying feudalism. The school of Bologna eclipsed the university of Pavia. Justinian's Code was studied with passionate energy, and the Italic people enthusiastically reverted to the institutions of their past. In the fable of the Codex of the Pandects brought by Pisa from Amalfi we can trace the fervor of this movement, whereby the Romans of the cities struggled after resurrection.

One of the earliest manifestations of municipal vitality was the war of city against city, which began to blaze with fury in the first half of the twelfth century, and endured so long as free towns lasted to perpetuate the conflict. No sooner had the burghs established themselves beneath the presidency of their Consuls than they turned the arms they had acquired in the war of independence, against their neighbors. The phenomenon was not confined to any single district. It revealed a new necessity in the very constitution of the commonwealths. Penned up within the narrow limits of their petty dependencies, throbbing with fresh life, overflowing with a populace inured to warfare, demanding channels for their energies in commerce, competing with each other on the paths of industry, they clashed in deadliest duels for breathing space and means of wealth. The occasions that provoked one Commune to declare war upon its rival were trivial. The animosity was internecine and persistent. Life or death hung in the balance. It was a conflict for ascendency that brought the sternest passions into play, and decided the survival of the fittest among hundreds of competing cities. The deeply rooted jealousies of Roman and feudal centers, the recent partisanship of Papal and Imperial principles, imbittered this strife. But what lay beneath all superficial causes of dissension was the economic struggle of communities, for whom the soil of Italy already had begun to seem too narrow. So superabundant were the forces of her population, so vast were the energies emancipated by her attainment of municipal freedom, that this mighty mother of peoples could not afford equal sustenance to all her children. New-born, they had to strangle one another as they hung upon the breast that gave them nourishment. It was impossible for the Emperor to overlook the apparent anarchy of his fairest province. Therefore, when Frederick Barbarossa was elected in 1152, his first thought was to reduce the Garden of the Empire to order. Soon after his election he descended into Lombardy and formed two leagues among the cities of the North, the one headed by Pavia, the center of the abrogated kingdom, the other by Milan, who inherited the majesty of Rome and contained within her loins the future of Italian freedom. It is not necessary to follow in detail the conflict of the Lombard burghs with Frederick, so enthusiastically described by their historian, Sismondi, It is enough for our present purpose to remember that in the course of that contention both leagues made common cause against the Emperor, drew the Pope Alexander III. into their quarrel, and at last in 1183, after the victory of Legnano had convinced Frederick of his weakness, extorted by the Peace of Constance privileges whereby their autonomy was amply guaranteed and recognized. The advantages won by Milan who sustained the brunt of the imperial onslaughts, and by the splendor of her martyrdom surmounted the petty jealousies of her municipal rivals, were extended to the cities of Tuscany. After the date of that compact signed by the Emperor and his insurgent subjects, the burghs obtained an assured position as a third power between the Empire and the Church. The most remarkable point in the history of this contention is the unanimous submission of the Communes to what they regarded as the just suzerainty of Cæsar's representative. Though they were omnipotent in Lombardy, they took no measures for closing the gates of the Alps against the Germans. The Emperor was free to come and go as he listed; and when peace was signed, he reckoned the burghers who had beaten him by arms and policy, among his loyal vassals. Still the spirit of independence in Italy had been amply asserted. This is notably displayed in the address presented to Frederick, before his coronation, by the senate of Rome. Regenerated by Arnold of Brescia's revolutionary mission, the Roman people assumed its antique majesty in these remarkable words: 'Thou wast a stranger; I have made thee citizen; thou camest from regions from beyond the Alps; I have conferred on thee the principality.'[1] Presumptuous boast as this sounded in the ears of Frederick, it proved that the Italic nation had now sharply defined itself against the Church and the barbarians. It still accepted the Empire because the Empire was the glory of Italy, the crown that gave to her people the presidency of civilization. It still recognized the authority of the Church because the Church was the eldest daughter of Italy emergent from the wrecks of Roman society. But the nation had become conscious of its right to stand apart from either.

[1] 'Hospes eras, civem feci. Advena fuisti ex transalpinis partibus, principem constitui. Quod meum jure fuit, tibi dedi.' See Ottonis Episcopi Frisingensis Chronicon, De Rebus Gestis Frid. i. Imp. Lib. ii. cap. 21. Basileæ, 1569. The Legates appointed by the Senate met the Emperor at Sutri, and delivered the oration of which the sentence just quoted was part. It began: 'Urbis legati nos, rex optime, ad tuam a Senatu, populoque Romano destinati sumus excellentiam,' and contained this remarkable passage: 'Orbis imperium affectas, coronam præbitura gratanter assurgo, jocanter occurro ... indebitum clericorum excussurus jugum.' If the words are faithfully reported, the Republic separates itself abruptly from the Papacy, and claims a kind of precedence in honor before the Empire. Frederick is said to have interrupted the Legates in a rage before they could finish their address, and to have replied with angry contempt. The speech put into his mouth is probably a rhetorical composition, but it may have expressed his sentiments. 'Multa de Romanorum sapientia seu fortitudine hactenus audivimus, magis tamen de sapientia. Quare satis mirari non possumus, quod verba vestra plus arrogantiæ tumore insipida quam sale sapientiæ condita sentimus.... Fuit, fuit quondam in hac Republica virtus. Quondam dico, atque o utinam tam veracitur quam libenter nunc dicere possemus,' etc.

Strengthened by their contest with Frederick Barbarossa, recognized in their rights as belligerent powers, and left to their own guidance by the Empire, the cities were now free to prosecute their wars upon the remnants of feudalism. The town, as we have learned to know it, was surrounded by a serried rank of castles, where the nobles held still undisputed authority over serfs of the soil. Against this cordon of fortresses every city with singular unanimity directed the forces it had formed in the preceding conflicts. At the same time the municipal struggles of Commune against Commune lost none of their virulence. The Counts, pressed on all sides by the towns that had grown up around them, adopted the policy of pitting one burgh against another. When a noble was attacked by the township near his castle, he espoused the animosities of a more distant city, compromised his independence by accepting the captaincy or lieutenancy of communes hostile to his natural enemies, and thus became the servant or ally of a Republic. In his desperation he emancipated his serfs, and so the folk of the Contado profited by the dissensions of the cities and their feudal masters. This new phase of republican evolution lasted over a long and ill-defined period, assuming different characters in different centers; but the end of it was that the nobles were forced to submit to the cities. They were admitted to the burghership, and agreed to spend a certain portion of every year in the palaces they raised within the circuit of the walls. Thus the Counts placed themselves beneath the jurisdiction of the Consuls, and the Italic population absorbed into itself the relics of Lombard, Frank, and German aristocracy. Still the gain upon the side of the republics was not clear. Though the feudal lordship of the nobles had been destroyed, their wealth, their lands, and their prestige remained untouched. In the city they felt themselves but aliens. Their real home was still the castle on the neighboring mountain. Nor, when they stooped to become burghers, had they relinquished the use of arms. Instead of building peaceable dwelling-houses in the city, they filled its quarters with fortresses and towers, whence they carried on feuds among themselves and imperiled the safety of the streets. It was speedily discovered that the war against the Castles had become a war against the Palaces, and that the arena had been transferred from the open Contado to the Piazza and the barricade. The authority of the consuls proved insufficient to maintain an equilibrium between the people and the nobles. Accordingly a new magistrate started into being, combining the offices of supreme justiciary and military dictator. When Frederick Barbarossa attempted to govern the rebellious Lombard cities in the common interest of the Empire, he established in their midst a foreign judge, called Podestà quasi habens potestatem Imperatoris in hâc parte. This institution only served at the moment to inflame and imbitter the resistance of the Communes: but the title of Podestà was subsequently conferred upon the official summoned to maintain an equal balance between the burghers and the nobles. He was invariably a foreigner, elected for one year, intrusted with summary jurisdiction in all matters of dispute, exercising the power of life and death, and disposing of the municipal militia. The old constitution of the Commune remained to control this dictator and to guard the independence of the city. All the Councils continued to act, and the Consuls were fortified by the formation of a College of Ancients or Priors. The Podestà was created with the express purpose of effecting a synthesis between two rival sections of the burgh. He was never regarded as other than an alien to the city, adopted as a temporary mediator and controller of incompatible elements. The lordship of the burgh still resided with the Consuls, who from this time forward began to lose their individuality in the College of the Signoria—called Priori, Anziani, or Rettori, as the case might be in various districts.

The Italian republics had reached this stage when Frederick II. united the Empire and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was a crisis of the utmost moment for Italian independence. Master of the South, Frederick sought to reconquer the lost prerogatives of the Empire in Lombardy and Tuscany; nor is it improbable that he might have succeeded in uniting Italy beneath his sway but for the violent animosity of the Church. The warfare of extermination carried on by the Popes against the house of Hohenstauffen was no proof of their partiality for the cause of freedom. They dreaded the reality of a kingdom that should base itself on Italy and be the rival of their own authority. Therefore they espoused the cause of the free burghs against Frederick, and when the North was devastated by his Vicars, they preached a crusade against Ezzelino da Romano. In the convulsions that shook Italy from North to South the parties of Guelf and Ghibelline took shape, and acquired an ineradicable force. All the previous humors and discords of the nation were absorbed by them. The Guelf party meant the burghers of the consular Communes, the men of industry and commerce, the upholders of civil liberty, the friends of democratic expansion. The Ghibelline party included the naturalized nobles, the men of arms and idleness, the advocates of feudalism, the politicians who regarded constitutional progress with disfavor. That the banner of the Church floated over the one camp, while the standard of the Empire rallied to itself the hostile party, was a matter of comparatively superficial moment. The true strength of the war lay in the population, divided by irreconcilable ideals, each eager to possess the city for itself, each prepared to die for its adopted principles. The struggle is a social struggle, played out within the precincts of the Commune, for the supremacy of one or the other moiety of the whole people. A city does not pronounce itself either Guelf or Ghibelline till half the burghers have been exiled. The victorious party organizes the government in its own interest, establishes itself in a Palazzo apart from the Commune, where it develops its machinery at home and abroad, and strengthens its finance by forced contributions and confiscations.[1] The exiles make common cause with members of their own faction in an adverse burgh; and thus, by the diplomacy of Guelfs and Ghibellines, the most distant centers are drawn into the network of a common dualism. In this way we are justified in saying that Italy achieved her national consciousness through strife and conflict; for the Communes ceased to be isolated, cemented by temporary leagues, or engaged in merely local conflicts. They were brought together and connected by the sympathies and antipathies of an antagonism which embraced and dominated the municipalities, set Republics and Regno on equal footing, and merged the titular leaders of the struggle, Pope and Emperor, in the uncontrollable tumult. The issue was no vulgar one; no merely egotistic interests were at stake. Guelfs and Ghibellines alike interrogated the oracle, with perfect will to obey its inspiration for the common good; but they read the utterances of the Pythia in adverse senses. The Ghibelline heard Italy calling upon him to build a citadel that should be guarded by the lance and shield of chivalry, where the hierarchies of feudalism, ranged beneath the dais of the Empire, might dispense culture and civil order in due measure to the people. The Guelf believed that she was bidding him to multiply arts and guilds within the burgh, beneath the mantle of the Pope, who stood for Christ, the preacher of equality and peace for all mankind, in order that the beehive of industry should in course of time evolve a civil order and a culture representative of its own freely acting forces.

[1] It is enough to refer to the importance of the Parte Guelfa in the history of Florence.

During the stress and storm of the fierce warfare carried on by Guelfs and Ghibellines, the Podestà fell into the second rank. He had been created to meet an emergency; but now the discord was too vehement for arbitration. A new functionary appears, with the title of Captain of the People. Chosen when one or other of the factions gains supreme power in the burgh, he represents the victorious party, takes the lead in proscribing their opponents, and ratifies on his responsibility the changes introduced into the constitution. The old magistracies and councils, meanwhile, are not abrogated. The Consiglio del Popolo, with the Capitano at its head, takes the lead; and a new member, called the Consiglio della Parte, is found beside them, watchful to maintain the policy of the victorious faction. But the Consiglio del Comune, with the Podestà, who has not ceased to exercise judicial functions, still subsists. The Priors form the signory as of old. The Credenza goes on working, and the Gran Consiglio represents the body of privileged burghers. The party does but tyrannize over the city it has conquered, and manipulates the ancient constitution for its own advantage. In this clash of Guelf with Ghibelline the beneficiaries were the lower classes of the people. Excluded from the Popolo of episcopal and consular revolutions, the trades and industries of the great cities now assert their claims to be enfranchised. The advent of the Arti is the chief social phenomenon of the crisis.[1] Thus the final issue of the conflict was a new Italy, deeply divided by factions that were little understood, because they were so vital, because they represented two adverse currents of national energy, incompatible, irreconcilable, eternal in antagonism as the poles. But this discordant nation was more commercial and more democratic. Families of merchants rose upon the ruins of the old nobility. Roman cities of industry reduced their military rivals of earlier or later origin to insignificance. The plain, the river, and the port asserted themselves against the mountain fastness and the barrackburgh. The several classes of society, triturated, shaken together, leveled by warfare and equalized by industry, presented but few obstacles to the emergence of commanding personalities, however humble, from their ranks. Not only had the hierarchy of feudalism disappeared; but the constitution of the city itself was confused, and the Popolo, whether 'primo' or 'secondo or even 'terzo,' was diluted with recently franchised Contadini and all kinds of 'novi homines.'[2] The Divine Comedy, written after the culmination of the Guelf and Ghibelline dissensions, yields the measure of their animosity. Dante finds no place in Hell Heaven, or Purgatory for the souls who stood aloof from strife, the angels who were neither Guelf nor Ghibelline in Paradise. His Vigliacchi, 'wretches who never lived,' because they never felt the pangs or ecstasies of partisanship, wander homeless on the skirts of Limbo, among the abortions and offscourings of creation. Even so there was no standing-ground in Italy outside one or the other hostile camp. Society was riven down to its foundation. Rancors dating from the thirteenth century endured long after the great parties ceased to have a meaning. They were perpetuated in customs, and expressed themselves in the most trivial details. Banners, ensigns, and heraldic colors followed the divisions of the factions. Ghibellines wore the feathers in their caps upon one side, Guelfs upon the other. Ghibellines cut fruit at table crosswise, Guelfs straight down. In Bergamo some Calabrians were murdered by their host, who discovered from their way of slicing garlic that they sided with the hostile party. Ghibellines drank out of smooth, and Guelfs out of chased, goblets. Ghibellines wore white, and Guelfs red, roses. Yawning, passing in the street, throwing dice, gestures in speaking or swearing, were used as pretexts for distinguishing the one half of Italy from the other. So late as the middle of the fifteenth century, the Ghibellines of Milan tore Christ from the high-altar of the Cathedral at Crema and burned him because he turned his face to the Guelf shoulder. Every great city has a tale of love and death that carries the contention of its adverse families into the region of romance and legend. Florence dated her calamities from the insult offered by Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti to the Amidei in a broken marriage. Bologna never forgot the pathos of Imelda Lambertazzi stretched in death upon her lover Bonifazio Gieremei's corpse. The story of Romeo and Juliet at Verona is a myth which brings both factions into play, the well-meaning intervention of peace-making monks, and the ineffectual efforts of the Podestà to curb the violence of party warfare.

[1] The history of Florence illustrates more clearly than that of any other town the vast importance acquired by trades and guilds in politics at this epoch of the civil wars.

[2] This is the sting of Cacciaguida's scornful lamentation over Florence Par. xvi.

Ma la cittadinanza, ch' è or mista
Di Campi e di Certaldo e di Figghine,
Pura vedeasi nell' ultimo artista.
Tal fatto è fiorentino, e cambia e merca,
Che si sarebbe volto a Semifonti,
Là dove andava l' avolo alia cerca.
Sempre la confusione delle persone
Principio fu del mal della cittade,
Come del corpo il cibo che s' appone.

So deep and dreadful was the discord, so utter the exhaustion, that the distracted Communes were fain at last to find some peace in tyranny. At the close of their long quarrel with the house of Hohenstauffen, the Popes called Charles of Anjou into Italy. The final issue of that policy for the nation at large will be discussed in another portion of this work. It is enough to point out here that, as Ezzelino da Romano introduced despotism in its worst form as a party leader of the Ghibellines, so Charles of Anjou became a typical tyrant in the Guelf interest. He was recognized as chief of the Guelf party by the Florentines, and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was conferred upon him as the price of his dictatorship. The republics almost simultaneously entered upon a new phase. Democratized by the extension of the franchise, corrupted, to use Machiavelli's phrase, in their old organization of the Popolo and Commune, they fell into the hands of tyrants, who employed the prestige of their party, the indifference of the Vigliacchi, and the peace-loving instincts of the middle class for the consolidation of their selfish autocracy.[1] Placing himself above the law, manipulating the machinery of the State for his own ends, substituting the will of a single ruler for the clash of hostile passions in the factions, the tyrant imposed a forcible tranquillity upon the city he had grasped. The Captaincy of the people was conferred upon him.[2] The Councils were suffocated and reduced to silence. The aristocracy was persecuted for the profit of the plebs. Under his rule commerce flourished; the towns were adorned with splendid edifices; foreign wars were carried on for the aggrandizement of the State without regard to factious rancors. Thus the tyrant marked the first emergence of personality supreme within the State, resuming its old forces in an autocratic will, superseding and at the same time consciously controlling the mute, collective, blindly working impulses of previous revolutions. His advent was welcomed as a blessing by the recently developed people of the cities he reduced to peace. But the great families and leaders of the parties regarded him with loathing, as a reptile spawned by the corruption and disease of the decaying body politic. In their fury they addressed themselves to the two chiefs of Christendom. Boniface VIII., answering to this appeal, called in a second Frenchman, Charles of Valois, with the titles of Marquis of Ancona, Count of Romagna, Captain of Tuscany, who was bidden to reduce Italy to order on Guelf principles. Dante in his mountain solitudes invoked the Emperor, and Italy beheld the powerless march of Henry VII. Neither Pope nor Emperor was strong enough to control the currents of the factions which were surely whirling Italy into the abyss of despotism. Boniface died of grief after Sciarra Colonna, the terrible Ghibelline's outrage at Anagni, and the Papal Court was transferred to Avignon in 1316. Henry VII. expired, of poison probably, at Buonconvento, in 1313. The parties tore each other to fragments. Tyrants were murdered. Whole families were extirpated. Yet these convulsions bore no fruit of liberty. The only exit from the situation was in despotism—the despotism of a jealous oligarchy as at Florence, or the despotism of new tyrants in Lombardy and the Romagna.[3]

[1] Not to mention the republics of Lombardy and Romagna, which took the final stamp of despotism at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is noticeable that Pisa submitted to Uguccione da Faggiuola, Lucca to Castruccio Castracane, and Florence to the Duke of Athens. The revolution of Pisa in 1316 delivered it from Uguccione; the premature death of Castruccio in 1328 destroyed the Tuscan duchy he was building up upon the basement of Ghibellinism; while the rebellion of 1343 averted tyranny from Florence for another century.

[2] Machiavelli's Vita di Castruccio Castracane, though it is rather a historical romance than a trustworthy biography, illustrates the gradual advances made by a bold and ambitious leader from the Captaincy of the people, conferred upon him for one year, to the tyranny of his city.

[3] The Divine comedy is, under one of its aspects, the Epic of Italian tyranny, so many of its episodes are chosen from the history of the civil wars:
Chè le terre d' Italia tutte piene
Son di tiranni; ed un Marcel diventa
Ogni villan che parteggiando viene.

Those lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (Purg. vi.) where Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme authority in Europe.

Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to employ cruelty and craft in combination. From the confused and spasmodic efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance. It would be sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil. The divisions of Italy and the weakness of both Papacy and Empire left no other solution of the political problem. All branches of the municipal administration, strained to the cracking-point by the tension of party conflict, were now isolated from the organism, abnormally developed, requiring the combining effort of a single thinker to reunite their scattered forces in one system or absorb them in himself. The indirect restraints which a calmer period of municipal vitality had placed upon tyrannic ambition, were removed by the leveling of classes and the presentation of an equal surface to the builder of the palace-dome of monarchy. Moreover, it must be remembered that what the Italians then understood by freedom was municipal autonomy controlled by ruling houses in the interest of the few. These considerations need not check our sympathy with Florence in the warfare she carried on against the Milanese tyrants. But they should lead us to be cautious in adopting the conclusions of Sismondi, who saw Italian greatness only in her free cities. The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed, under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which raised Italy to a first place among civilized nations. Of the manners of the Despots, and of the demoralization they encouraged in the cities of their rule, enough will be said in the succeeding chapters, which set forth the social conditions of the Renaissance in Italy. But attention should here be called to the general character of despotic authority, and to the influence the Despots exercised for the pacification of the country. We are not justified by facts in assuming that had the free burghs continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a greater height. Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican career, produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her splendor in the art of painting to aliens from Cadore, Castelfranco, and Verona. Genoa remained silent and irresponsive to the artistic movement of Italy until the last days of the republic, when her independence was but a shadow. Pisa, though a burgh of Tuscany, displayed no literary talent, while her architecture dates from the first period of the Commune. Siena, whose republican existence lasted longer even than that of Florence, contributed nothing of importance to Italian literature. The art of Perugia was developed during the ascendency of despotic families. The painting of the Milanese School owed its origin to Lodovico Sforza, and survived the tragic catastrophes of his capital, which suffered more than any other from the brutalities of Spaniards and Frenchmen. Next to Florence, the most brilliant centers of literary activity during the bright days of the Renaissance were princely Ferrara and royal Naples. Lastly, we might insist upon the fact that the Italian language took its first flight in the court of imperial Palermo, while republican Rome remained dumb throughout the earlier stage of Italian literary evolution. Thus the facts of the case seem to show that culture and republican independence were not so closely united in Italy as some historians would seek to make us believe. On the other hand it is impossible to prove that the despotisms of the fifteenth century were necessary to the perfecting of art and literature. All that can be safely advanced upon this subject, is that the pacification of Italy was demanded as a preliminary condition, and that this pacification came to pass through the action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the oligarchies of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the Despots were in close sympathy with the masses of the people, shared their enthusiasms, and promoted their industry. When the classical revival took place at the close of the fourteenth century, they divined this movement of the Italic races to resume their past, and gave it all encouragement. To be a prince, and not to be the patron of scholarship, the pupil of humanists, and the founder of libraries, was an impossibility. In like manner they employed their wealth upon the development of arts and industries. The great age of Florentine painting is indissolubly connected with the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes her magnificence to the despotic Popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was a creation of the ducal house of Urbino.

After the death of Henry VII. and the beginning of the Papal exile at Avignon, the Guelf party became the rallying-point of municipal independence, with its headquarters in Florence. Ghibellinism united the princes in an opposite camp. 'The Guelf party,' writes Giovanni Villani, 'forms the solid and unalterable basis of Italian liberty, and is so antagonistic to all tyranny that, if a Guelf become a tyrant, he must of necessity become at the same moment Ghibelline.' Milan, first to assert the rights of the free burghs, was now the chief center of despotism; and the events of the next century resume themselves in the long struggle between Florence and the Visconti. The chronicle of the Villani and the Florentine history of Poggio contain the record of this strife, which seemed to them the all-important crisis of Italian affairs. In the Milanese annals of Galvano Fiamma and Mussi, on the other hand, the advantages of a despotic sovereignty in giving national coherence, the crimes of the Papacy, which promoted anarchy in its ill-governed States, and the prospect of a comprehensive Italian tyranny under the great house of the Visconti, are eloquently pleaded. The terms of the main issue being thus clearly defined, we may regard the warfare carried on by Bertrand du Poiet and Louis of Bavaria in the interests of Church and Empire, the splendid campaigns of Egidio d'Albornoz, and the delirious cruelty of Robert of Geneva, no less than the predatory excursions of Charles IV., as episodical. The main profits of those convulsions, which drowned Italy in blood during nearly all the fourteenth century, accrued to the Despots, who held their ground in spite of all attempts to dispossess them. The greater houses, notably the Visconti, acquired strength by revolutions in which the Church and Empire neutralized each other's action. The lesser families struck firm roots into cities, infuriated rather than intimidated by such acts of violence as the massacres of Faenza and Cesena in 1377. The relations of the imperial and pontifical parties were confused; while even in the center of republican independence, at Florence, social changes, determined in great measure by the exhaustion of the city in its conflict, prepared the way for the Medicean tyranny. Neither the Church nor the Empire gained steady footing in Italy, while the prestige of both was ruined.[1] Municipal freedom, instead of being enlarged, was extinguished by the ambition of the Florentine oligarchs, who, while they spent the last florin of the Commune in opposing the Visconti, never missed an opportunity of enslaving the sister burghs of Tuscany. In a word, the destiny of the nation was irresistibly impelling it toward despotism.

[1] Machiavelli, in his Istorie Fiorentine (Firenze, 1818, vol. i. pp. 47, 48), points out how the competition of the Church and Empire, during the Papacies of Benedict XII. and Clement VI. and the reign of Louis strengthened the tyrants of Lombardy, Romagna, and the March. Each of the two contending powers gave away what did not belong to them, bidding against each other for any support they might obtain from the masters of the towns.

In order to explain the continual prosperity of the princes amid the clash of forces brought to bear against them from so many sides, we must remember that they were the partisans of social order in distracted burghs, the heroes of the middle classes and the multitude, the quellers of faction, the administrators of impartial laws, and the aggrandizers of the city at the expense of its neighbors. Ser Gorello, singing the praises of the Bishop Guido dei Tarlati di Pietra Mala, who ruled Arezzo in the first half of the fourteenth century, makes the Commune say:[1] 'He was the lord so valiant and magnificent, so full of grace and daring, so agreeable to both Guelfs and Ghibellines. He, for his virtue, was chosen by common consent to be the master of my people. Peace and justice were the beginning, middle, and end of his lordship, which removed all discord from the State. By the greatness of his valor I grew in territory round about. Every neighbor reverenced me, some through love and some through dread; for it was dear to them to rest beneath his mantle.' These verses set forth the qualities which united the mass of the populations to their new lords. The Despot delivered the industrial classes from the tyranny and anarchy of faction, substituting a reign of personal terrorism that weighed more heavily upon the nobles than upon the artisans or peasants. Ruling more by perfidy, corruption, and fraud than by the sword, he turned the leaders of parties into courtiers, brought proscribed exiles back into the city as officials, flattered local vanity by continuing the municipal machinery in its functions of parade, and stopped the mouths of unruly demagogues by making it their pecuniary interest to preach his benefits abroad. So long as the burghers remained peaceable beneath his sway and refrained from attacking him in person, he was mild. But at the same moment the gallows, the torture-chamber, the iron cage suspended from the giddy height of palace-roof or church tower, and the dreadful dungeons, where a prisoner could neither stand nor lie at ease, were ever ready for the man who dared dispute his authority. That authority depended solely on his personal qualities of will, courage, physical endurance. He held it by intelligence, being as it were an artificial product of political necessities, an equilibrium of forces, substituted without legal title for the Church and Empire, and accumulating in his despotic individuality the privileges previously acquired by centuries of consuls, Podestàs, and Captains of the people. The chief danger he had to fear was conspiracy; and in providing himself against this peril he expended all the resources suggested by refined ingenuity and heightened terror. Yet, when the Despot was attacked and murdered, it followed of necessity that the successful conspirator became in turn a tyrant. 'Cities,' wrote Machiavelli,[2] 'that are once corrupt and accustomed to the rule of princes, can never acquire freedom, even though the prince with all his kin be extirpated. One prince is needed to extinguish another; and the city has no rest except by the creation of a new lord, unless it chance that one burgher by his goodness and great qualities may during his lifetime preserve its temporary independence.' Palace intrigues, therefore, took the place of Piazza revolutions, and dynasties were swept away to make room for new tyrants without material change in the condition of the populace.

[1] Mur. Scr. R. It. xv. 826. Compare what G. Merula wrote about Azzo Visconti: 'He conciliated the people to him by equal justice without distinction of Guelf or Ghibelline.'

[2] Discorsi. i. 17.

It was the universal policy of the Despots to disarm their subjects. Prompted by considerations of personal safety, and demanded by the necessity of extirpating the factions, this measure was highly popular. It relieved the burghers of that most burdensome of all public duties, military service. A tax on silver and salt was substituted in the Milanese province for the conscription, while the Florentine oligarchs, actuated probably by the same motives, laid a tax upon the country. The effect of this change was to make financial and economical questions all-important, and to introduce a new element into the balance of Italian powers. The principalities were transformed into great banks, where the lords of cities sat in their bureau, counted their money, and calculated the cost of wars or the value of towns they sought to acquire by bargain. At first they used their mercenary troops like pawns, buying up a certain number for some special project, and dismissing them when it had been accomplished. But in course of time the mercenaries awoke to the sense of their own power, and placed themselves beneath captains who secured them a certainty of pay with continuity of profitable service. Thus the Condottieri came into existence, and Italy beheld the spectacle of moving despotisms, armed and mounted, seeking to effect establishment upon the weakest, worst-defended points of the peninsula. They proved a grave cause of disquietude alike to the tyrants and the republics; and until the settlement of Francesco Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, when the employers of auxiliaries had come to understand the arts of dealing with them by perfidy, secret assassination, and a system of elaborate counter-checks, the equilibrium of power in Italy was seriously threatened. The country suffered at first from marauding excursions conducted by piratical leaders of adventurous troops, by Werner of Urslingen, the Conte Lando, and Fra Moriale; afterwards from the discords of Braccio da Montone and Sforza Attendolo, incessantly plotting to carve duchies for themselves from provinces they had been summoned by a master to subdue. At this period gold ruled the destinies of Italy. The Despots, relying solely on their exchequer for their power, were driven to extortion. Cities became bankrupt, pledged their revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants. A series of obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become unbearable. The lower classes of the burghers rose against the 'popolani grassi,' and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis. Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on Florence, and Baglioni on Perugia and the Petrucci on Siena.

[1] Perugia, for example, farmed out the tax upon her country population for 12,000 florins, upon her baking-houses for 7,266, upon her wine for 4,000, upon her lake for 5,200, upon contracts for 1,500. Two bankers accepted the Perugian loan at this price in 1388.

The emergence of the Condottieri at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the anarchy they encouraged for their own aggrandizement, and the financial distress which ensued upon the substitution of mercenary for civic warfare, completed the democratization of the Italian cities, and marked a new period in the history of despotism. From the date of Francesco Sforza's entry into Milan as conqueror in 1450, the princes became milder in their exercise of power and less ambitious. Having begun by disarming their subjects, they now proceeded to lay down arms themselves, employing small forces for the protection of their person and the State, engaging more cautiously in foreign strife, and substituting diplomacy, wherever it was possible, for warfare. Gold still ruled in politics, but it was spent in bribery. To the ambitious military schemes of Gian Galeazzo Visconti succeeded the commercial cynicism of Cosimo de' Medici, who enslaved Florence by astute demoralization.[1] The spirit of the age was materialistic and positive. The Despots held their state by treachery, craft, and corruption. The element of force being virtually eliminated, intelligence at last gained undivided sway; and the ideal statecraft of Machiavelli was realized with more or less completeness in all parts of the peninsula. At this moment and by these means Italy obtained a brief but golden period of peace beneath the confederation of her great powers. Nicholas V. had restored the Papal court to Rome in 1447; where he assumed the manners of despotism and counted as one among the Italian Signori. Lombardy remained tranquil under the rule of Francesco Sforza, and Tuscany under that of the Casa Medici. The kingdom of Naples, conquered by Alfonso of Aragon in 1442, was equally ruled in the spirit of enlightened despotism, while Venice, who had so long formed a state apart, by her recent acquisition of a domain on terra firma, entered the community of Italian politics. Thus the country had finally resolved itself into five grand constituent elements—the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of S. Mark, Florence, Rome, and the kingdom of Naples—all of them, though widely differing in previous history and constitutional peculiarities, now animated by a common spirit.[2] Politically they tended to despotism; for though Venice continued to be a republic, the government of the Venetian oligarchy was but despotism put into commission. Intellectually, the same enthusiasm for classical studies, the same artistic energy, and the same impulse to revive Italian literature brought the several centers of the nation into keener sympathy than they had felt before. A network of diplomacy embraced the cities; and round the leaders of the confederation were grouped inferior burghs, republican or tyrannical as the case might be, like satellites around the luminaries of a solar system. When Constantinople was taken by the Turks in 1453, Italy felt the need of suppressing her old jealousies, and Nicholas V. induced the four great powers to sign with him a treaty of peace and amity. The political tact and sagacity of Lorenzo de' Medici enabled him to develop and substantiate the principle of balance then introduced into Italian politics; nor was there any apparent reason why the equilibrium so hardly won, so skillfully maintained, should not have subsisted but for Lodovico Sforza's invitation to the French in 1494. Up to that date the more recent wars of Italy had been principally caused by the encroachments of Venice and the nepotism of successive Popes. They raised no new enthusiasm hostile to the interests of peace. The Empire was eliminated and forgotten as an obsolete antiquity. Italy seemed at last determined to manage her own affairs by mutual agreement between the five great powers.

[1] I have attempted to analyze Cosimo's method in the article on 'Florence and the Medici,' Studies and Sketches in Italy.

[2] This centralization of Italy in five great powers was not obtained without the depression or total extinction of smaller cities. Ferrari counts seventeen towns, who died, to use his forcible expression, at the close of the civil wars. Storia delle Rivoluzioni d' Italia, iii. 239.

Still the ground beneath this specious fabric of diplomacy rung hollow. The tyrannies represented a transient political necessity. They were not the product of progressive social growth, satisfying and regulating organic functions of the nation. Far from being the final outcome of a slow, deliberate accretion in the states they had absorbed, we see in them the climax of conflicting humors, the splendid cancers and imposthumes of a desperate disease. That solid basis of national morality which grounds the monarch firm upon the sympathies and interests of the people whom he seems to lead, but whom he in reality expresses, failed them. Therefore each individual despot trembled for his throne, while Italy, as in the ominous picture drawn by her historian, felt that all the elements were combining to devour her with a coming storm. The land of earthquakes divined a cataclysm, to cope with which she was unable. An apparently insignificant event determined the catastrophe. The Sforza appealed to France, and after the disastrous descent of Charles VIII. the whole tide of events turned. Instead of internal self-government by any system of balance, Italy submitted to a succession of invasions terminating in foreign tyranny.

The problem why the Italians failed to achieve the unity of a coherent nation has been implicitly discussed in the foregoing pages upon the history of the Communes and the development of despotism. We have already seen that their conception of municipal independence made a narrow oligarchy of enfranchised burghers lords of the city, which in its turn oppressed the country and the subject burghs of its domain. Every conquest by a republic reduced some village or center of civil life to the condition of serfdom. The voices of the inhabitants were no longer heard debating questions that affected their interests. They submitted to dictation from their masters, the enfranchised few in the ascendant commonwealth. Thus, as Guicciardini pointed out in his 'Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,' the subjection of Italy by a dominant republic would have meant the extinction of numberless political communities and the sway of a close oligarchy from the Alps to the Ionian Sea.[1] The 3,200 burghers who constituted Florence in 1494, or the nobles of the Golden Book at Venice, would by such unification of the country under a victorious republic have become sovereigns, administering the resources of the nation for their profit. The dread of this catastrophe rendered Venice odious to her sister commonwealths at the close of the fifteenth century, and justified, according to Guicciardini's views of history, the action taken by Cosimo de' Medici in 1450, when he rendered Milan strong by supporting her despot, Francesco Sforza.[2] In a word republican freedom, as the term is now understood, was unknown in Italy. Municipal autonomy, implying the right of the municipality to rule its conquests for its own particular profit, was the dominant idea. To have advanced from this stage of thought to the highly developed conception of a national republic, centralizing the forces of Italy and at the same time giving free play to its local energies, would have been impossible. This kind of republican unity implies a previous unification of the people in some other form of government. It furthermore demands a system of representation extended to all sections of the nation. Their very nature, therefore, prevented the republican institutions won by the Italians in the early Middle Ages from sufficing for their independence in a national republic.

[1] Op. Ined. vol. i. p. 28.

[2] Ib. vol. iii. p. 8.

It may with more reason be asked in the next place why Italy did not become a monarchy, and again why she never produced a confederation, uniting the Communes as the Swiss Cantons were combined for mutual support and self-defense. When we attack the first of these two questions, our immediate answer must be that the Italians had a rooted disinclination for monarchical union.[1] Their most strenuous efforts were directed against it when it seemed to threaten them. It may be remembered that they were not a new people, needing concentration to secure their bare existence. Even during the great days of ancient Rome they had not been what we are wont to call a nation, but a confederacy of municipalities governed and directed by the mistress of the globe. When Rome passed away, the fragments of the body politic in Italy, though rudely shaken, retained some portion of the old vitality that joined them to the past. It was to the past rather than the future that the new Italians looked; and even as they lacked initiative forces in their literature, so in their political systems they ventured on no fresh beginning. Though Rome herself was ruined, the shadow of the name of Rome, the mighty memory of Roman greatness, still abode with them. Instead of a modern capital and a modern king, they had an idea for their rallying-point, a spiritual city for their metropolis. Nor was there any immediate reason why they should have sacrificed their local independence in order to obtain the security afforded by a sovereign. It was not till a later epoch that Italy learned by bitter experience that unity at any cost would be acceptable, face to face with the organized armies of modern Europe. But when the chance of securing that safeguard was offered in the Middle Ages, it must have been bought by subjection to foreigners, by toleration of feudalism, by the extinction of Roman culture in the laws and customs of barbarians. Thus it is not too much to say that the Italians themselves rejected it. Moreover, the problem of unifying Italy in a monarchy was never so practically simple as that of forming nations out of the Teutonic tribes. Not only was the instinct of clanship absent, but before the year 800 all attempts to establish a monarchical state were thwarted by the still formidable proximity of the Greek Empire and by the growing power of ecclesiastical Rome. We have seen how the Goths erred by submitting-to the Empire and merging their authority in a declining organization. We have seen again how the Lombards erred by adopting Catholic Christianity and thus entangling themselves in the policy of Papal Rome. Both Goths and Lombards committed the mistake of sparing the Eternal City; or it may be more accurate to say that neither of them were strong enough to lay hands of violence upon the sacred and mysterious metropolis and hold it as their seat of monarchy against the world. So long as Rome remained independent, neither Ravenna nor Pavia could head a kingdom in the peninsula. Meanwhile Rome lent her prestige to the advancement of a spiritual power which, subject to no dynastic weakness, with the persistent force of an idea that cannot die, was bent on subjugating Europe. The Papacy needed Italy as the basis of its operations, and could not brook a rival that might reduce the See of S. Peter to the level of an ordinary bishopric. Rome therefore, generation after generation, upheld the so-called liberties of Italy against all comers; and when she summoned the Franks, it was to break the growing power of the Lombard monarchs. The pact between the Popes and Charles the Great, however we may interpret its meaning, still further removed the possibility of a kingdom by dividing Italy into two sections with separate allegiances; and since the sway of neither Pope nor Emperor, the one unarmed, the other absent, was stringent enough to check the growth of independent cities, a third and all-important factor was added to the previous checks upon national unity.

[1] Guicciardini (Op. Ined. i. 29) remarks: 'O sia per qualche fato d' Italia, o per la complessione degli uomini temperata in modo che hanno ingegno e forze, non è mai questa provincia stata facile a ridursi sotto uno imperio.' He speaks again of her disunion as 'quello modo di vivere che è più secondo la antiquissima consuetudine e inclinazione sua.' But Guicciardini, with that defect of vision which rendered him incapable of appreciating the whole situation while he analyzed its details so profoundly, was reckoning without the great nations of Europe. See above, pp. 40, 41.

After 1200 the problem changes its aspect. We have now to ask ourselves why, when the struggle with the Empire was over, when Frederick Barbarossa had been defeated at Legnano, when the Lombard and the Tuscan Leagues were in full vigor before the Guelf and Ghibelline factions had confused the mainsprings of political activity, and while the national militia was still energetic, the Communes did not advance from the conception of local and municipal independence to that of national freedom in a confederacy similar to the Swiss Bund. The Italians, it may be suggested, saw no immediate necessity for a confederation that would have limited the absolute autonomy of their several parcels. Only the light cast by subsequent events upon their early history makes us perceive that they missed an unique opportunity at this moment. What they then desired was freedom for expansion each after his own political type, freedom for the development of industry and commerce, freedom for the social organization of the city beloved by its burghers above the nation as a whole. Special difficulties, moreover, lay in the way of confederation. The Communes were not districts, like the Swiss Cantons, but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom were in a very different position from the peasant communities of Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the Norman Conquest, offered a serious obstacle; and though the Regno might have been defied and absorbed by a vigorous concerted movement from the North and center, there still remained the opposition of the Papacy. It had been the recent policy of the Popes to support the free burghs in their war with Frederick. But they did this only because they could not tolerate a rival near their base of spiritual power; and the very reasons which had made them side with the cities in the wars of liberation would have roused their hostility against a federative union. To have encouraged an Italian Bund, in the midst of which they would have found the Church unarmed and on a level with the puissant towns of Lombardy and Tuscany, must have seemed to them a suicidal error. Such a coalition, if attempted, could not but have been opposed with all their might; for the whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right when he asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation in disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends. We have furthermore to add the prestige which the Empire preserved for the Italians, who failed to conceive of any civilized, human society whereof the representative of Cæsar should not be the God-appointed head. Though the material power of the Emperors was on the wane, it still existed as a dominant idea. Italy was still the Garden of the Empire no less than the Throne of Christ on earth. After the burghs had wrung what they regarded as their reasonable rights and privileges from Frederick, they laid down their arms, and were content to flourish beneath the imperial shadow. To raise up a political association as a bulwark against the Holy Roman Empire, and by the formation of this defense to become an independent and united nation, instead of remaining an aggregate of scattered townships, would have seemed to their minds little short of sacrilege. Up to this point the Church and the Empire had been, theoretically at least, concordant. They were the sun and moon of a sacred social system which ruled Europe with light and might. But the Wars of Investiture placed them in antagonism, and the result of that quarrel was still further to divide the Italians, still further to remove the hope of national unity into the region of things unattainable. The great parties accentuated communal jealousies and gave external form and substance to the struggles of town with town. So far distant was the possibility of confederation on a grand scale that every city strove within itself to establish one of two contradictory principles, and the energies of the people were expended in a struggle that set neighbor against neighbor on the field of war and in the market-place. The confusion, exhaustion, and demoralization engendered by these conflicts determined the advent of the Despots; and after 1400 Italy could only have been united under a tyrant's iron rule. At such an universal despotism Gian Galeazzo Visconti was aiming when the plague cut short his schemes. Cesare Borgia played his highest stakes for it. Leo X. dreamed of it for his family. Machiavelli, at the end of the Principe, when the tragedy of Italy was almost accomplished, invoked it. But even for this last chance of unification it was now too late. The great nations of Europe were in movement, and the destinies of Italy depended upon France and Spain. When Charles V. remained victor in the struggle of the sixteenth century, he stereotyped and petrified the divisions of Italy in the interest of his own dynastic policy. The only Italian power that remained unchangeable throughout all changes was the Papacy—the first to emerge into prominence after the decay of the old Western Empire, the last to suffer diminution in spite of vicissitudes, humiliations, schisms, and internal transformation. As the Papacy had created and maintained a divided Italy, as it had opposed itself to every successive prospect of unification, so it survived the extinction of Italian independence, and lent its aid to that imperial tyranny whereby the disunion of the nation was confirmed and prolongated till the present century.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF THE DESPOTS.

Salient Qualities of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in Italy—Relation of Italy to the Empire and to the Church—The Illegitimate Title of Italian Potentates—The Free Emergence of Personality—Frederick II. and the Influence of his Example—Ezzelino da Romano—Six Sorts of Italian Despots—Feudal Seigneurs—Vicars of the Empire—Captains of the People—Condottieri—Nephews and Sons of Popes—Eminent Burghers—Italian Incapacity for Self-Government in Commonwealths—Forcible Tenure of Power encouraged Personal Ability—The Condition of the Despot's Life—Instances of Domestic Crime in the Ruling Houses—Macaulay's Description of the Italian Tyrant —Savonarola's and Matteo Villani's Description of a Tyrant—The Absorption of Smaller by Greater Tyrannies in the Fourteenth Century—History of the Visconti—Francesco Sforza—The Part played in Italian Politics by Military Leaders—Mercenary Warfare—Alberico da Barbiano, Braccio da Montone, Sforza Attendolo—History of the Sforza Dynasty—The Murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza—The Ethics of Tyrannicide in Italy—Relation of the Despots to Arts and Letters—Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta—Duke Federigo of Urbino—The School of Vittorino and the Court of Urbino—The Cortegiano of Castiglione—The Ideals of the Italian Courtier and the Modern Gentleman—General Retrospect.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be called the Age of the Despots in Italian history, as the twelfth and thirteenth are the Age of the Free Burghs, and as the sixteenth and seventeenth are the Age of Foreign Enslavement. It was during the age of the Despots that the conditions of the Renaissance were evolved, and that the Renaissance itself assumed a definite character in Italy. Under tyrannies, in the midst of intrigues, wars, and revolutions, the peculiar individuality of the Italians obtained its ultimate development. This individuality, as remarkable for salient genius and diffused talent as for self-conscious and deliberate vice, determined the qualities of the Renaissance and affected by example the whole of Europe. Italy led the way in the education of the Western races, and was the first to realize the type of modern as distinguished from classical and mediæval life.

During this age of the despots, Italy presents the spectacle of a nation devoid of central government and comparatively uninfluenced by feudalism. The right of the Emperor had become nominal, and served as a pretext for usurpers rather than as a source of order. The visits, for instance, of Charles IV. and Frederick III. were either begging expeditions or holiday excursions, in the course of which ambitious adventurers bought titles to the government of towns, and meaningless honors were showered upon vain courtiers. It was not till the reign of Maximilian that Germany adopted a more serious policy with regard to Italy, which by that time had become the central point of European intrigue. Charles V. afterwards used force to reassert imperial rights over the Italian cities, acting not so much in the interest of the Empire as for the aggrandizement of the Spanish monarchy. At the same time the Papacy, which had done so much to undermine the authority of the Empire, exercised a power at once anomalous and ill-recognized except in the immediate States of the Church. By the extinction of the House of Hohenstauffen and by the assumed right to grant the investiture of the kingdom of Naples to foreigners, the Popes not only struck a death-blow at imperial influence, but also prepared the way for their own exile to Avignon. This involved the loss of the second great authority to which Italy had been accustomed to look for the maintenance of some sort of national coherence. Moreover, the Church, though impotent to unite all Italy beneath her own sway, had power enough to prevent the formation either by Milan or Venice or Naples of a substantial kingdom. The result was a perpetually recurring process of composition, dismemberment, and recomposition, under different forms, of the scattered elements of Italian life. The Guelf and Ghibelline parties, inherited from the wars of the thirteenth century, survived the political interests which had given them birth, and proved an insurmountable obstacle, long after they had ceased to have any real significance, to the pacification of the country.[1] The only important state which maintained an unbroken dynastic succession of however disputed a nature at this period was the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The only great republics were Venice, Genoa, and Florence. Of these, Genoa, after being reduced in power and prosperity by Venice, was overshadowed by the successive lords of Milan; while Florence was destined at the end of a long struggle to fall beneath a family of despots. All the rest of Italy, especially to the north of the Apennines, was the battle-field of tyrants, whose title was illegitimate—based, that is to say, on no feudal principle, derived in no regular manner from the Empire, but generally held as a gift or extorted as a prize from the predominant parties in the great towns.

[1] So late as 1526 we find the burlesque poet Folengo exclaiming (Orlandino, ii. 59)—

If we examine the constitution of these tyrannies, we find abundant proofs of their despotic nature. The succession from father to son was always uncertain. Legitimacy of birth was hardly respected. The last La Scalas were bastards. The house of Aragon in Naples descended from a bastard. Gabriello Visconti shared with his half-brothers the heritage of Gian Galeazzo. The line of the Medici was continued by princes of more than doubtful origin. Suspicion rested on the birth of Frederick of Urbino. The houses of Este and Malatesta honored their bastards in the same degree as their lawful progeny. The great family of the Bentivogli at Bologna owed their importance at the end of the fifteenth century to an obscure and probably spurious pretender, dragged from the wool-factories of Florence by the policy of Cosimo de' Medici. The sons of popes ranked with the proudest of aristocratic families. Nobility was less regarded in the choice of a ruler than personal ability. Power once acquired was maintained by force, and the history of the ruling families is one long catalogue of crimes. Yet the cities thus governed were orderly and prosperous. Police regulations were carefully established and maintained by governors whose interest it was to rule a quiet state. Culture was widely diffused without regard to rank or wealth. Public edifices of colossal grandeur were multiplied. Meanwhile the people at large were being fashioned to that self-conscious and intelligent activity which is fostered by the modes of life peculiar to political and social centers in a condition of continued rivalry and change.

Under the Italian despotisms we observe nearly the opposite of all the influences brought to bear in the same period upon the nations of the North. There is no gradual absorption of the great vassals in monarchies, no fixed allegiance to a reigning dynasty, no feudal aid or military service attached to the tenure of the land, no tendency to centralize the whole intellectual activity of the race in any capital, no suppression of individual character by strongly biased public feeling, by immutable law, or by the superincumbent weight of a social hierarchy. Everything, on the contrary, tends to the free emergence of personal passions and personal aims. Though the vassals of the despot are neither his soldiers nor his loyal lieges, but his courtiers and taxpayers, the continual object of his cruelty and fear, yet each subject has the chance of becoming a prince like Sforza or a companion of princes like Petrarch. Equality of servitude goes far to democratize a nation, and common hatred of the tyrant leads to the combination of all classes against him. Thence follows the fermentation of arrogant and self-reliant passions in the breasts of the lowest as well as the highest.[1] The rapid mutations of government teach men to care for themselves and to depend upon themselves alone in the battle of the world; while the necessity of craft and policy in the conduct of complicated affairs sharpens intelligence. The sanction of all means that may secure an end under conditions of social violence encourages versatility unprejudiced by moral considerations. At the same time the freely indulged vices of the sovereign are an example of self-indulgence to the subject, and his need of lawless instruments is a practical sanction of force in all its forms. Thus to the play of personality, whether in combat with society and rivals, or in the gratification of individual caprice, every liberty is allowed. Might is substituted for right, and the sense of law is supplanted by a mere dread of coercion. What is the wonder if a Benvenuto Cellini should be the outcome of the same society as that which formed a Cesare Borgia? What is the miracle if Italy under these circumstances produced original characters and many-sided intellects in greater profusion than any other nation at any other period, with the single exception of Greece on her emergence from the age of her despots? It was the misfortune of Italy that the age of the despots was succeeded not by an age of free political existence, but by one of foreign servitude.

[1] See Guicciardini, 'Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze,' Op. Ined. vol. ii. p. 53, for a critique of the motives of tyrannicide in Italy.

Frederick II. was at the same time the last emperor who maintained imperial sway in Italy in person, and also the beginner of a new system of government which the despots afterwards pursued. His establishment of the Saracen colony at Nocera, as the nucleus of an army ready to fulfill his orders with scrupulous disregard for Italian sympathies and customs, taught all future rulers to reduce their subjects to a state of unarmed passivity, and to carry on their wars by the aid of German, English, Swiss, Gascon, Breton, or Hungarian mercenaries, as the case might be. Frederick, again, derived from his Mussulman predecessors in Sicily the arts of taxation to the utmost limits of the national capacity, and founded a precedent for the levying of tolls by a Catasto or schedule of the properties attributed to each individual in the state. He also destroyed the self-government of burghs and districts, by retaining for himself the right to nominate officers, and by establishing a system of judicial jurisdiction which derived authority from the throne. Again, he introduced the example of a prince making profit out of the industries of his subjects by monopolies and protective duties. In this path he was followed by illustrious successors—especially by Sixtus IV. and Alfonso II. of Aragon, who enriched themselves by trafficking in the corn and olive-oil of their famished provinces. Lastly, Frederick established the precedent of a court formed upon the model of that of Oriental Sultans, in which chamberlains and secretaries took the rank of hereditary nobles, and functions of state were confided to the body-servants of the monarch. This court gave currency to those habits of polite culture, magnificent living, and personal luxury which played so prominent a part in all subsequent Italian despotism. It is tempting to overstrain a point in estimating the direct influence of Frederick's example. In many respects doubtless he was merely somewhat in advance of his age; and what we may be inclined to ascribe to him personally, would have followed in the natural evolution of events. Yet it remains a fact that he first realized the type of cultivated despotism which prevailed throughout Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Italian literature began in his court, and many Saracenic customs of statecraft were transmitted through him from Palermo to Lombardy.

While Frederick foreshadowed the comparatively modern tyrants of the coming age, his Vicar in the North of Italy, Ezzelino da Romano, represented the atrocities towards which they always tended to degenerate. Regarding himself with a sort of awful veneration as the divinely appointed scourge of humanity, this monster in his lifetime was execrated as an aberration from 'the kindly race of men,' and after his death he became the hero of a fiendish mythus. But in the succeeding centuries of Italian history his kind was only too common; the immorality with which he worked out his selfish aims was systematically adopted by princes like the Visconti, and reduced to rule by theorists like Machiavelli. Ezzelino, a small, pale, wiry man, with terror in his face and enthusiasm for evil in his heart, lived a foe to luxury, cold to the pathos of children, dead to the enchantment of women. His one passion was the greed of power, heightened by the lust for blood. Originally a noble of the Veronese Marches, he founded his illegal authority upon the captaincy of the Imperial party delegated to him by Frederick. Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre, and Belluno made him their captain in the Ghibelline interest, conferring on him judicial as well as military supremacy. How he fearfully abused his power, how a crusade was preached against him,[1] and how he died in silence, like a boar at bay, rending from his wounds the dressings that his foes had placed to keep him alive, are notorious matters of history. At Padua alone he erected eight prisons, two of which contained as many as three hundred captives each; and though the executioner never ceased to ply his trade there, they were always full. These dungeons were designed to torture by their noisomeness, their want of air and light and space. Ezzelino made himself terrible not merely by executions and imprisonments but also by mutilations and torments. When he captured Friola he caused the population, of all ages, sexes, occupations, to be deprived of their eyes, noses, and legs, and to be cast forth to the mercy of the elements. On another occasion he walled up a family of princes in a castle and left them to die of famine. Wealth, eminence, and beauty attracted his displeasure no less than insubordination or disobedience. Nor was he less crafty than cruel. Sons betrayed their fathers, friends their comrades, under the fallacious safeguard of his promises. A gigantic instance of his scheming was the coup-de-main by which he succeeded in entrapping 11,000 Paduan soldiers, only 200 of whom escaped the miseries of his prisons. Thus by his absolute contempt of law, his inordinate cruelty, his prolonged massacres, and his infliction of plagues upon whole peoples, Ezzelino established the ideal in Italy of a tyrant marching to his end by any means whatever. In vain was the humanity of the race revolted by the hideous spectacle. Vainly did the monks assemble pity-stricken multitudes upon the plain of Paquara to atone with tears and penitence for the insults offered to the saints in heaven by Ezzelino's fury. It laid a deep hold upon the Italian imagination, and, by the glamor of loathing that has strength to fascinate, proved in the end contagious. We are apt to ask ourselves whether such men are mad—whether in the case of a Nero or a Maréchal de Retz or an Ezzelino the love of evil and the thirst for blood are not a monomaniacal perversion of barbarous passions which even in a cannibal are morbid.[2] Is there in fact such a thing as Hæmatomania, Bloodmadness? But if we answer this question in the affirmative, we shall have to place how many Visconti, Sforzeschi, Malatesti, Borgias, Farnesi, and princes of the houses of Anjou and Aragon in the list of these maniacs? Ezzelino was indeed only the first of a long and horrible procession, the most terror-striking because the earliest, prefiguring all the rest.

[1] Alexander IV. issued letters for this crusade in 1255. It was preached next year by the Archbishop of Ravenna.

[2] See Appendix, No. I.

Ezzelino's cruelty was no mere Berserkir fury or Lycanthropia coming over him in gusts and leaving him exhausted. It was steady and continuous. In his madness, if such we may call this inhumanity, there was method; he used it to the end of the consolidation of his tyranny. Yet, inasmuch as it passed all limits and prepared his downfall, it may be said to have obtained over his nature the mastery of an insane appetite. While applying the nomenclature of disease to these exceptional monsters, we need not allow that their atrocities were, at first at any rate, beyond their control. Moral insanity is often nothing more than the hypertrophy of some vulgar passion—lust, violence, cruelty, jealousy, and the like. The tyrant, placed above law and less influenced by public opinion than a private person, may easily allow a greed for pleasure or a love of bloodshed to acquire morbid proportions in his nature. He then is not unjustly termed a monomaniac. Within the circle of his vitiated appetite he proves himself irrational. He becomes the puppet of passions which the sane man cannot so much as picture to his fancy, the victim of desire, ever recurring and ever destined to remain unsatisfied; nor is any hallucination more akin to lunacy than the mirage of a joy that leaves the soul thirstier than it was before, the paroxysm of unnatural pleasure which wearies the nerves that crave for it.

In Frederick, the modern autocrat, and Ezzelino, the legendary tyrant, we obtain the earliest specimens of two types of despotism in Italy. Their fame long after their death powerfully affected the fancy of the people, worked itself into the literature of the Italians, and created a consciousness of tyranny in the minds of irresponsible rulers.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we find, roughly speaking, six sorts of despots in Italian cities.[1] Of these the first class, which is a very small one, had a dynastic or hereditary right accruing from long seignioral possession of their several districts. The most eminent are the houses of Montferrat and Savoy, the Marquises of Ferrara, the Princes of Urbino. At the same time it is difficult to know where to draw the line between such hereditary lordship as that of the Este family, and tyranny based on popular favor. The Malatesti of Rimini, Polentani of Ravenna, Manfredi of Faenza, Ordelaffi of Forli, Chiavelli of Fabriano, Varani of Camerino, and others, might claim to rank among the former, since their cities submitted to them without a long period of republican independence like that which preceded despotism in the cases to be next mentioned. Yet these families styled themselves Captains of the burghs they ruled; and in many instances they obtained the additional title of Vicars of the Church.[2] Even the Estensi were made hereditary captains of Ferrara at the end of the thirteenth century, while they also acknowledged the supremacy of the Papacy. There was in fact no right outside the Empire in Italy; and despots of whatever origin or complexion gladly accepted the support which a title derived from the Empire, the Church, or the People might give. Brought to the front amid the tumults of the civil wars, and accepted as pacificators of the factions by the multitude, they gained the confirmation of their anomalous authority by representing themselves to be lieutenants or vicegerents of the three great powers. The second class comprise those nobles who obtained the title of Vicars of the Empire, and built an illegal power upon the basis of imperial right in Lombardy. Of these, the Della Scala and Visconti families are illustrious instances. Finding in their official capacity a ready-made foundation, they extended it beyond its just limits, and in defiance of the Empire constituted dynasties. The third class is important. Nobles charged with military or judicial power, as Capitani or Podestàs, by the free burghs, used their authority to enslave the cities they were chosen to administer. It was thus that almost all the numerous tyrants of Lombardy, Carraresi at Padua, Gonzaghi at Mantua, Rossi and Correggi at Parma, Torrensi and Visconti at Milan, Scotti at Piacenza, and so forth, first erected their despotic dynasties. This fact in the history of Italian tyranny is noticeable. The font of honor, so to speak, was in the citizens of these great burghs. Therefore, when the limits of authority delegated to their captains by the people were overstepped, the sway of the princes became confessedly illegal. Illegality carried with it all the consequences of an evil conscience, all the insecurities of usurped dominion all the danger from without and from within to which an arbitrary governor is exposed. In the fourth/i> class we find the principle of force still more openly at work. To it may be assigned those Condottieri who made a prey of cities at their pleasure. The illustrious Uguccione della Faggiuola, who neglected to follow up his victory over the Guelfs at Monte Catini, in order that he might cement his power in Lucca and Pisa, is an early instance of this kind of tyrant. His successor, Castruccio Castracane, the hero of Machiavelli's romance, is another. But it was not until the first half of the fifteenth century that professional Condottieri became powerful enough to found such kingdoms as that, for example, of Francesco Sforza at Milan.[3] The fifth class includes the nephews or sons of Popes. The Riario principality of Forli, the Della Rovere of Urbino, the Borgia of Romagna, the Farnese of Parma, form a distinct species of despotisms; but all these are of a comparatively late origin. Until the Papacies of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. the Popes had not bethought them of providing in this way for their relatives. Also, it may be remarked, there was an essential weakness in these tyrannies. Since they had to be carved out of the States of the Church, the Pope who had established his son, say in Romagna, died before he could see him well confirmed in a province which the next Pope sought to wrest from his hands, in order to bestow it on his own favorite. The fabric of the Church could not long have stood this disgraceful wrangling between Papal families for the dynastic possession of Church property. Luckily for the continuance of the Papacy, the tide of counter-reformation which set in after the sack of Rome and the great Northern Schism, put a stop to nepotism in its most barefaced form.

[1] This classification must of necessity be imperfect, since many of the tyrannies belong in part to two or more of the kinds which I have mentioned.

[2] See Guicc. Ist. end of Book 4.

[3] John Hawkwood (died 1393), the English adventurer, held Cotignola and Bagnacavallo from Gregory XI. In the second half of the fifteenth century the efforts of the Condottieri to erect tyrannies were most frequent. Braccio da Montone established himself in Perugia in 1416, and aspired, not without good grounds for hope, to acquiring the kingdom of Italy. Francesco Sforza, before gaining Milan, had begun to form a despotism at Ancona. Sforza's rival, Giacomo Piccinino, would probably have succeeded in his own attempt, had not Ferdinand of Aragon treacherously murdered him at Naples in 1465. In the disorganization caused by Charles VIII., Vidovero of Brescia in 1495 established himself at Cesena and Castelnuovo, and had to be assassinated by Pandolfo Malatesta at the instigation of Venice. After the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, in 1402, the generals whom he had employed in the consolidation of his vast dominions attempted to divide the spoil among themselves. Naples, Venice, Milan, Rome, and Florence were in course of time made keenly alive to the risk of suffering a captain of adventure to run his course unchecked.

There remains the sixth and last class of despots to be mentioned. This again is large and of the first importance. Citizens of eminence, like the Medici at Florence, the Bentivogli at Bologna, the Baglioni of Perugia, the Vitelli of Città di Castello, the Gambacorti of Pisa, like Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena (1502), Roméo Pepoli, the usurer of Bologna (1323), the plebeian, Alticlinio, and Agolanti of Padua (1313), Giovanni Vignate, the millionaire of Lodi (1402), acquired more than their due weight in the conduct of affairs, and gradually tended to tyranny. In most of these cases great wealth was the original source of despotic ascendency. It was not uncommon to buy cities together with their Signory. Thus the Rossi bought Parma for 35,000 florins in 1333; the Appiani sold Pisa; Astorre Manfredi sold Faenza and Imola in 1377. In 1444 Galeazzo Malatesta sold Pesaro to Alessandro Sforza, and Fossombrone to Urbino; in 1461 Cervia was sold to Venice by the same family. Franceschetto Cibo purchased the County of Anguillara. Towns at last came to have their market value. It was known that Bologna was worth 200,000 florins, Parma 60,000, Arezzo 40,000 Lucca 30,000, and so forth. But personal qualities and nobility of blood might also produce despots of the sixth class. Thus the Bentivogli claimed descent from a bastard of King Enzo, son of Frederick II., who was for a long time an honorable prisoner in Bologna. The Baglioni, after a protracted struggle with the rival family of Oddi, owed their supremacy to ability and vigor in the last years of the fifteenth century. But the neighborhood of the Papal power, and their own internal dissensions, rendered the hold of this family upon Perugia precarious. As in the case of the Medici and the Bentivogli, many generations might elapse before such burgher families assumed dynastic authority. But to this end they were always advancing.

The history of the bourgeois despots proves that Italy in the fifteenth century was undergoing a natural process of determination toward tyranny. Sismondi may attempt to demonstrate that Italy was 'not answerable for the crimes with which she was sullied by her tyrants.' But the facts show that she was answerable for choosing despots instead of remaining free, or rather that she instinctively obeyed a law of social evolution by which princes had to be substituted for municipalities at the end of those fierce internal conflicts and exhausting wars of jealousy which closed the Middle Ages. Machiavelli, with all his love of liberty, is forced to admit that in his day the most powerful provinces of Italy had become incapable of freedom. 'No accident, however weighty and violent, could ever restore Milan or Naples to liberty, owing to their utter corruption. This is clear from the fact that after the death of Filippo Visconti, when Milan tried to regain freedom, she was unable to preserve it.'[1] Whether Machiavelli is right in referring this incapacity for self-government to the corruption of morals and religion may be questioned. But it is certain that throughout the states of Italy, with the one exception of Venice, causes were at work inimical to republics and favorable to despotisms.

[1] Discorsi, i. 17. The Florentine philosopher remarks in the same passage, 'Cities, once corrupt, and accustomed to the rule of a prince, can never acquire their freedom even though the prince with all his kith and kin be extirpated. One prince is needed to extinguish another; and the city has no rest except by the creation of a new lord, unless one burgher by his goodness and his great qualities may chance to preserve its independence during his lifetime.'

It will be observed in this classification of Italian tyrants that the tenure of their power was almost uniformly forcible. They generally acquired it through the people in the first instance, and maintained it by the exercise of violence. Rank had nothing to do with their claims. The bastards of Popes, who like Sixtus IV. had no pedigree, merchants like the Medici, the son of a peasant like Francesco Sforza, a rich usurer like Pepoli, had almost equal chances with nobles of the ancient houses of Este, Visconti, or Malatesta. The chief point in favor of the latter was the familiarity which through long years of authority had accustomed the people to their rule. When exiled, they had a better chance of return to power than parvenus, whose party-cry and ensigns were comparatively fresh and stirred no sentiment of loyalty—if indeed the word loyalty can be applied to that preference for the established and the customary which made the mob, distracted by the wrangling of doctrinaires and intriguers, welcome back a Bentivoglio or a Malatesta. Despotism in Italy as in ancient Greece was democratic. It recruited its ranks from all classes and erected its thrones upon the sovereignty of the peoples it oppressed. The impulse to the free play of ambitious individuality which this state of things communicated was enormous. Capacity might raise the meanest monk to the chair of S. Peter's, the meanest soldier to the duchy of Milan. Audacity, vigor, unscrupulous crime were the chief requisites for success. It was not till Cesare Borgia displayed his magnificence at the French Court, till the Italian adventurer matched himself with royalty in its legitimate splendor, that the lowness of his origin and the frivolity of his pretensions appeared in any glaring light.[1] In Italy itself, where there existed no time-honored hierarchy of classes and no fountain of nobility in the person of a sovereign, one man was a match for another, provided he knew how to assert himself. To the conditions of a society based on these principles we may ascribe the unrivaled emergence of great personalities among the tyrants, as well as the extraordinary tenacity and vigor of such races as the Visconti. In the contest for power, and in the maintenance of an illegal authority, the picked athletes came to the front. The struggle by which they established their tyranny, the efforts by which they defended it against foreign foes and domestic adversaries, trained them to endurance and to daring. They lived habitually in an atmosphere of peril which taxed all their energies. Their activity was extreme, and their passions corresponded to their vehement vitality. About such men there could be nothing on a small or mediocre scale. When a weakling was born in a despotic family, his brothers murdered him, or he was deposed by a watchful rival. Thus only gladiators of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to religious and moral scruples, dead to national affection, perfected in perfidy, scientific in the use of cruelty and terror, employing first-rate faculties of brain and will and bodily powers in the service of transcendent egotism, only the virtuosi of political craft as theorized by Machiavelli, could survive and hold their own upon this perilous arena.

[1] Brantôme Capitaines Etrangers, Discours 48, gives an account of the entrance of the Borgia into Chinon in 1498, and adds: 'The king being at the window saw him arrive, and there can be no doubt how he and his courtiers ridiculed all this state, as unbecoming the petty Duke of Valentinois.'

The life of the despot was usually one of prolonged terror. Immured in strong places on high rocks, or confined to gloomy fortresses like the Milanese Castello, he surrounded his person with foreign troops, protected his bedchamber with a picked guard, and watched his meat and drink lest they should be poisoned. His chief associates were artists, men of letters, astrologers, buffoons, and exiles. He had no real friends or equals, and against his own family he adopted an attitude of fierce suspicion, justified by the frequent intrigues to which he was exposed.[1] His timidity verged on monomania. Like Alfonso II. of Naples, he was tortured with the ghosts of starved or strangled victims; like Ezzelino, he felt the mysterious fascination of astrology; like Filippo Maria Visconti, he trembled at the sound of thunder, and set one band of body-guards to watch another next his person. He dared not hope for a quiet end. No one believed in the natural death of a prince: princes must be poisoned or poignarded.[2] Out of thirteen of the Carrara family, in little more than a century (1318-1435), three were deposed or murdered by near relatives, one was expelled by a rival from his state, four were executed by the Venetians. Out of five of the La Scala family, three were killed by their brothers, and a fourth was poisoned in exile.

[1] See what Guicciardini in his History of Florence says about the suspicious temper of even such a tyrant as the cultivated and philosophical Lorenzo de' Medici. See too the incomparably eloquent and penetrating allegory of Sospetto, and its application to the tyrants of Italy in Ariosto's Cinque Canti (C. 2. St. 1-9).

[2] Our dramatist Webster, whose genius was fascinated by the crimes of Italian despotism, makes the Duke of Bracciano exclaim on his death-bed:—

'O thou soft natural Death, thou art joint-twin
To sweetest Slumber! no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.'

Instances of domestic crime might be multiplied by the hundred. Besides those which will follow in these pages, it is enough to notice the murder of Giovanni Francesco Pico, by his nephew, at Mirandola (1533); the murder of his uncle by Oliverotto da Fermo; the assassination of Giovanni Varano by his brothers at Camerino (1434); Ostasio da Polenta's fratricide (1322); Obizzo da Polenta's fratricide in the next generation, and the murder of Ugolino Gonzaga by his brothers; Gian Francesco Gonzaga's murder of his wife; the poisoning of Francesco Sforza's first wife, Polissena, Countess of Montalto, with her little girl, by her aunt; and the murder of Galeotto Manfredi, by his wife, at Faenza (1488).

To enumerate all the catastrophes of reigning families, occurring in the fifteenth century alone, would be quite impossible within the limits of this chapter. Yet it is only by dwelling on the more important that any adequate notion of the perils of Italian despotism can be formed. Thus Girolamo Riario was murdered by his subjects at Forli (1488), and Francesco Vico dei Prefetti in the Church of S. Sisto at Viterbo[1] (1387). At Lodi in 1402 Antonio Fisiraga burned the chief members of the ruling house of Vistarini on the public square, and died himself of poison after a few months. His successor in the tyranny, Giovanni Vignate, was imprisoned by Filippo Maria Visconti in a wooden cage at Pavia, and beat his brains out in despair against its bars. At the same epoch Gabrino Fondulo slaughtered seventy of the Cavalcabò family together in his castle of Macastormo, with the purpose of acquiring their tyranny over Cremona. He was afterwards beheaded as a traitor at Milan (1425). Ottobon Terzi was assassinated at Parma (1408), Nicola Borghese at Siena (1499). Altobello Dattiri at Todi (about 1500), Raimondo and Pandolfo Malatesta at Rimini, and Oddo Antonio di Montefeltro at Urbino (1444).[2] The Varani were massacred to a man in the Church of S. Dominic at Camerino (1434), the Trinci at Foligno (1434), and the Chiavelli of Fabriano in church upon Ascension Day (1435). This wholesale extirpation of three reigning families introduces one of the most romantic episodes in the history of Italian despotism. From the slaughter of the Varani one only child, Giulio Cesare, a boy of two years old, was saved by his aunt Tora. She concealed him in a truss of hay and carried him to the Trinci at Foligno. Hardly had she gained this refuge, when the Trinci were destroyed, and she had to fly with her burden to the Chiavelli at Fabriano. There the same scenes of bloodshed awaited her. A third time she took to flight, and now concealed her precious charge in a nunnery. The boy was afterwards stolen from the town on horseback by a soldier of adventure. After surviving three massacres of kith and kin, he returned as despot at the age of twelve to Camerino, and became a general of distinction. But he was not destined to end his life in peace. Cesare Borgia finally murdered him, together with three of his sons, when he had reached the age of sixty. Less romantic but not less significant in the annals of tyranny is the story of the Trinci. A rival noble of Foligno, Pietro Rasiglia, had been injured in his honor by the chief of the ruling house. He contrived to assassinate two brothers, Nicolà and Bartolommeo, in his castle of Nocera; but the third, Corrado Trinci, escaped, and took a fearful vengeance on his enemy. By the help of Braccio da Montone he possessed himself of Nocera and all its inhabitants, with the exception of Pietro Rasiglia's wife, whom her husband flung from the battlements. Corrado then butchered the men, women, and children of the Rasiglia clan, to the number of three hundred persons, accomplishing his vengeance with details of atrocity too infernal to be dwelt on in these pages. It is recorded that thirty-six asses laden with their mangled limbs paraded the streets of Foligno as a terror-striking spectacle for the inhabitants. He then ruled the city by violence, until the warlike Cardinal dei Vitelleschi avenged society of so much mischief by destroying the tyrant and five of his sons, in the same year. Equally fantastic are the annals of the great house of the Baglioni at Perugia. Raised in 1389 upon the ruins of the bourgeois faction called Raspanti, they founded their tyranny in the person of Pandolfo Baglioni, who was murdered together with sixty of his clan and followers by the party they had dispossessed. The new despot, Biordo Michelotti, was stabbed in the shoulders with a poisoned dagger by his relative, the abbot of S. Pietro. Then the city, in 1416, submitted to Braccio da Montone, who raised it to unprecedented power and glory. On his death it fell back into new discords, from which it was rescued again by the Baglioni in 1466, now finally successful in their prolonged warfare with the rival family of Oddi. But they did not hold their despotism in tranquillity. In 1500 one of the members of the house, Grifonetto degli Baglioni, conspired against his kinsmen and slew them in their palaces at night. As told by Matarazzo, this tragedy offers an epitome of all that is most, brilliant and terrible in the domestic feuds of the Italian tyrants.[3] The vicissitudes of the Bentivogli at Bologna present another series of catastrophes, due less to their personal crimes than to the fury of the civil strife that raged around them. Giovanni Bentivoglio began the dynasty in 1400. The next year he was stabbed to death and pounded in a wine-vat by the infuriated populace, who thought he had betrayed their interests in battle. His son, Antonio, was beheaded by a Papal Legate, and numerous members of the family on their return from exile suffered the same fate. In course of time the Bentivogli made themselves adored by the people; and when Piccinino imprisoned the heir of their house, Annibale, in the castle of Varano, four youths of the Marescotti family undertook his rescue at the peril of their lives, and raised him to the Signory of Bologna. In 1445 the Canetoli, powerful nobles, who hated the popular dynasty, invited Annibale and all his clan to a christening feast, where they exterminated every member of the reigning house. Not one Bentivoglio was left alive. In revenge for this massacre, the Marescotti, aided by the populace, hunted down the Canetoli for three whole days in Bologna, and nailed their smoking hearts to the doors of the Bentivoglio palace. They then drew from his obscurity in Florence the bastard Santi Bentivoglio, who found himself suddenly lifted from a wool-factory to a throne. Whether he was a genuine Bentivoglio or not, mattered little. The house had become necessary to Bologna, and its popularity had been baptized in the bloodshed of four massacres. What remains of its story can be briefly told. When Cesare Borgia besieged Bologna, the Marescotti intrigued with him, and eight of their number were sacrificed by the Bentivogli in spite of their old services to the dynasty. The survivors, by the help of Julius II., returned from exile in 1536, to witness the final banishment of the Bentivogli and to take part in the destruction of the palace, where their ancestors had nailed the hearts of the Canetoli upon the walls.

[1] The family of the Prefetti fed up the murderer in their castle and then gave him alive to be eaten by their hounds.

[2] Sforza Attendolo killed Terzi by a spear-thrust in the back. Pandolfo Petrucci murdered Borghese, who was his father-in-law. Raimondo Malatesta was stabbed by his two nephews disguised as hermits. Dattiri was bound naked to a plank and killed piecemeal by the people, who bit his flesh, cut slices out, and sold and ate it—distributing his living body as a sort of infernal sacrament among themselves.

[3] See the article 'Perugia' in my Sketches in Italy and Greece.

To multiply the records of crime revenged by crime, of force repelled by violence, of treason heaped on treachery, of insult repaid by fraud, would be easy enough. Indeed, a huge book might be compiled containing nothing but the episodes in this grim history of despotism, now tragic and pathetic, now terror-moving in sublimity of passion, now despicable by the baseness of the motives brought to light, at one time revolting through excess of physical horrors, at another fascinating by the spectacle of heroic courage, intelligence, and resolution. Enough however, has been said to describe the atmosphere of danger in which the tyrants breathed and moved, and from which not one of them was ever capable of finding freedom. Even a princely house so well based in its dynasty and so splendid in its parade of culture as that of the Estensi offers a long list of terrific tragedies. One princess is executed for adultery with her stepson (1425); a bastard's bastard tries to seize the throne, and is put to death with all his kin (1493); a wife is poisoned by her husband to prevent her poisoning him (1493); two brothers cabal against the legitimate heads of the house, and are imprisoned for life (1506). Such was the labyrinth of plot and counterplot, of force repelled by violence, in which the princes praised by Ariosto and by Tasso lived.

Isolated, crime-haunted, and remorseless, at the same time fierce and timorous, the despot not unfrequently made of vice a fine art for his amusement, and openly defied humanity. His pleasures tended to extravagance. Inordinate lust and refined cruelty sated his irritable and jaded appetites. He destroyed pity in his soul, and fed his dogs with living men, or spent his brains upon the invention of new tortures. From the game of politics again he won a feverish pleasure, playing for states and cities as a man plays chess, and endeavoring to extract the utmost excitement from the varying turns of skill and chance. It would be an exaggeration to assert that all the princes of Italy were of this sort. The saner, better, and nobler among them—men of the stamp of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Can Grande della Scala, Francesco and Lodovico Sforza, found a more humane enjoyment in the consolidation of their empire, the cementing of their alliances, the society of learned men, the friendship of great artists, the foundation of libraries, the building of palaces and churches, the execution of vast schemes of conquest. Others, like Galeazzo Visconti, indulged a comparatively innocent taste for magnificence. Some, like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, combined the vices of a barbarian with the enthusiasm of a scholar. Others again, like Lorenzo de' Medici and Frederick of Urbino, exhibited the model of moderation in statecraft and a noble width of culture. But the tendency to degenerate was fatal in all the despotic houses. The strain of tyranny proved too strong. Crime, illegality, and the sense of peril, descending from father to son, produced monsters in the shape of men. The last Visconti, the last La Scalas, the last Sforzas, the last Malatestas, the last Farnesi, the last Medici are among the worst specimens of human nature.

Macaulay's brilliant description of the Italian tyrant in his essay on Machiavelli deserves careful study. It may, however, be remarked that the picture is too favorable. Macaulay omits the darker crimes of the despots, and draws his portrait almost exclusively from such men as Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Francesco and Lodovico Sforza, Frederick of Urbino, and Lorenzo de' Medici. The point he is seeking to establish—that political immorality in Italy was the national correlative to Northern brutality—leads him to idealize the polite refinement, the disciplined passions, the firm and astute policy, the power over men, and the excellent government which distinguished the noblest Italian princes. When he says 'Wanton cruelty was not in his nature: on the contrary, where no political object was at stake, his disposition was soft and humane'; he seems to have forgotten Gian Maria Visconti, Corrado Trinci, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and Cesare Borgia. When he writes, 'His passions, like well-trained troops, are impetuous by rule, and in their most headstrong fury never forget the discipline to which they have been accustomed,' he leaves Francesco Maria della Rovere, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Pier Luigi Farnese, Alexander VI., out of the reckoning. If all the despots had been what Macaulay describes, the revolutions and conspiracies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would not have taken place. It is, however, to be remarked that in the sixteenth century the conduct of the tyrant toward his subjects assumed an external form of mildness. As Italy mixed with the European nations, and as tyranny came to be legalized in the Italian states, the despots developed a policy not of terrorism but of enervation (Lorenzo de' Medici is the great example), and aspired to be paternal governors.

What I have said about Italian despotism is no mere fancy picture. The actual details of Milanese history, the innumerable tragedies of Lombardy, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona, during the ascendency of despotic families, are far more terrible than any fiction; nor would it be easy for the imagination to invent so perplexing a mixture of savage barbarism with modern refinement. Savonarola's denunciations[1] and Villani's descriptions of a despot read like passages from Plato's Republic, like the most pregnant of Aristotle's criticisms upon tyranny. The prologue to the sixth book of Matteo Villani's Chronicle may be cited as a fair specimen of the judgment passed by contemporary Italian thinkers upon their princes (Libro Sesto, cap. i.): 'The crimes of despots always hinder and often neutralize the virtues of good men. Their pleasures are at variance with morality. By them the riches of their subjects are swallowed up. They are foes to men who grow in wisdom and in greatness of soul in their dominions. They diminish by their imposts the wealth of the peoples ruled by them. Their unbridled lust is never satiated, but their subjects have to suffer such outrages and insults as their fancy may from time to time suggest. But inasmuch as the violence of tyranny is manifested to all eyes by these and many other atrocities, we need not enumerate them afresh. It is enough to select one feature, strange in appearance but familiar in fact; for what can be more extraordinary than to see princes of ancient and illustrious lineage bowing to the service of despots, men of high descent and time-honored nobility frequenting their tables and accepting their bounties? Yet if we consider the end of all this, the glory of tyrants often turns to misery and ruin. Who can exaggerate their wretchedness? They know not where to place their confidence; and their courtiers are always on the lookout for the despot's fall, gladly lending their influence and best endeavors to undo him in spite of previous servility. This does not happen to hereditary kings, because their conduct toward their subjects, as well as their good qualities and all their circumstances, are of a nature contrary to that of tyrants. Therefore the very causes which produce and fortify and augment tyrannies, conceal and nourish in themselves the sources of their overthrow and ruin. This indeed is the greatest wretchedness of tyrants.'

[1] See the passage condensed from his Sermons in Villari's Life of Savonarola (Eng. Tr. vol. ii. p. 62). The most thorough-going analysis of despotic criminality is contained in Savonarola's Tractato circa el Reggimento e Governo della Città di Firenze, Trattato ii. cap. 2. Della Malitia e pessime Conditioni del Tyranno.

It may be objected that this sweeping criticism, from the pen of a Florentine citizen at war with Milan, partakes of the nature of an invective. Yet abundant proofs can be furnished from the chronicles of burghs which owed material splendor to their despots, confirming the censure of Villani. Matarazzo, for example, whose sympathy with the house of Baglioni is so striking, and who exults in the distinction they conferred upon Perugia, writes no less bitterly concerning the pernicious effects of their misgovernment.[1] It is to be noticed that Villani and Matarazzo agree about the special evils brought upon the populations by their tyrants. Lust and violence take the first place. Next comes extortion; then the protection of the lawless and the criminal against the better sort of citizens. But the Florentine, with intellectual acumen, lays his finger on one of the chief vices of their rule. They retard the development of mental greatness in their states, and check the growth of men of genius. Ariosto, in the comparative calm of the sixteenth century, when tyrannies had yielded to the protectorate of Spain, sums up the records of the past in the following memorable passage:[2] 'Happy the kingdoms where an open-hearted and blameless man gives law! Wretched indeed and pitiable are those where injustice and cruelty hold sway, where burdens ever greater and more grievous are laid upon the people by tyrants like those who now abound in Italy, whose infamy will be recorded through years to come as no less black than Caligula's or Nero's.' Guicciardini, with pregnant brevity, observes:[3] 'The mortar with which the states of the tyrants are cemented is the blood of the citizens.'

[1] Arch. Stor. xvi. 102. See my Sketches in Italy and Greece, p. 84.

[2] Cinque Canti, ii. 5.

[3] Ricordi Politici, ccxlii.

In the history of Italian despotism two points of first-rate importance will demand attention. The first is the process by which the greater tyrannies absorbed the smaller during the fourteenth century. The second is the relation of the chief Condottieri to the tyrants of the fifteenth century. The evolution of these two phenomena cannot be traced more clearly than by a study of the history of Milan, which at the same time presents a detailed picture of the policy and character of the Italian despot during this period. The dynasties of Visconti and Sforza from 1300 to 1500 bridged over the years that intervened between the Middle Age and the Renaissance, between the period of the free burghs and the period during which Italy was destined to become the theater of the action of more powerful nations. Their alliances and diplomatic relations prepared the way for the interference of foreigners in Italian affairs. Their pedigree illustrates the power acquired by military adventurers in the peninsula. The magnitude of their political schemes displays the most soaring ambition which it was ever granted to Italian princes to indulge. The splendor of their court and the intelligence of their culture bear witness to the high state of civilization which the Italians had reached.

The power of the Visconti in Milan was founded upon that of the Della Torre family, who preceded them as Captains General of the people at the end of the thirteenth century. Otho, Archbishop of Milan, first laid a substantial basis for the dominion of his house by imprisoning Napoleone Della Torre and five of his relatives in three iron cages in 1277, and by causing his nephew Matteo Visconti to be nominated both by the Emperor and by the people of Milan as imperial Vicar. Matteo, who headed the Ghibelline party in Lombardy, was the model of a prudent Italian despot. From the date 1311, when he finally succeeded in his attempts upon the sovereignty of Milan, to 1322, when he abdicated in favor of his son Galeazzo, he ruled his states by force of character, craft, and insight, more than by violence or cruelty. Excellent as a general, he was still better as a diplomatist, winning more cities by money than by the sword. All through his life, as became a Ghibelline chief at that time, he persisted in fierce enmity against the Church. But just before his death a change came over him. He showed signs of superstitious terror, and began to fear the ban of excommunication which lay upon him. This weakness alarmed the suspicions of his sons, terrible and wolf-like men, whom Matteo had hitherto controlled with bit and bridle. They therefore induced him to abdicate in 1322, and when in the same year he died, they buried his body in a secret place, lest it should be exhumed, and scattered to the winds in accordance with the Papal edict against him.[1] Galeazzo, his son, was less fortunate than Matteo, surnamed Il Grande by the Lombards. The Emperor Louis of Bavaria threw him into prison on the occasion of his visit to Milan in 1327, and only released him at the intercession of his friend Castruccio Castracane. To such an extent was the growing tyranny of the Visconti still dependent upon their office delegated from the Empire. This Galeazzo married Beatrice d' Este, the widow of Nino di Gallura, of whom Dante speaks in the eighth canto of the Purgatory, and had by her a son named Azzo. Azzo bought the city, together with the title of Imperial Vicar, from the same Louis who had imprisoned his father.[2] When he was thus seated in the tyranny of his grandfather, he proceeded to fortify it further by the addition of ten Lombard towns, which he reduced beneath the supremacy of Milan. At the same time he consolidated his own power by the murder of his uncle Marco in 1329, who had grown too mighty as a general. Giovio describes him as fair of complexion, blue-eyed, curly-haired, and subject to the hereditary disease of gout.[3] Azzo died in 1339, and was succeeded by his uncle Lucchino. In Lucchino the darker side of the Visconti character appears for the first time. Cruel, moody, and jealous, he passed his life in perpetual terror. His nephews, Galeazzo and Barnabas, conspired against him, and were exiled to Flanders. His wife, Isabella Fieschi, intrigued with Galeazzo and disgraced him by her amours with Ugolino Gonzaga and Dandolo the Doge of Venice. Finally suspicion rose to such a pitch between this ill-assorted couple, that, while Lucchino was plotting how to murder Isabella, she succeeded in poisoning him in 1349. In spite of these domestic calamities, Lucchino was potent as a general and governor. He bought Parma from Obizzo d' Este, and made the town of Pisa dependent upon Milan. Already in his policy we can trace the encroachment which characterized the schemes of the Milanese despots, who were always plotting to advance their foot beyond the Apennines as a prelude to the complete subjugation of Italy. Lucchino left sons, but none of proved legitimacy.[4] Consequently he was succeeded by his brother Giovanni, son of old Matteo il Grande, and Archbishop of Milan. This man, the friend of Petrarch, was one of the most notable characters of the fourteenth century. Finding himself at the head of sixteen cities, he added Bologna to the tyranny of the Visconti in 1350, and made himself strong enough to defy the Pope. Clement VI., resenting his encroachments on Papal territory, summoned him to Avignon. Giovanni Visconti replied that he would march thither at the head of 12,000 cavalry and 6,000 infantry. In the Duomo of Milan he ascended his throne with the crosier in his left hand and a drawn sword in his right; and thus he is always represented in pictures. The story of Giovanni's answer to the Papal Legate is well told by Corio:[5] 'After Mass in the Cathedral the great-hearted Archbishop unsheathed a flashing sword, which he had girded on his thigh, and with his left hand seized the cross, saying, "This is my spiritual scepter, and I will wield the sword as my temporal, in defense of all my empire."' Afterwards he sent couriers to engage lodgings for his soldiers and his train for six months. Visitors to Avignon found no room in the city, and the Pope was fain to decline so terrible a guest. In 1353 Giovanni annexed Genoa to the Milanese principality, and died in 1354, having established the rule of the Visconti over the whole of the North of Italy, with the exception of Piedmont, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara and Venice.

[1] We may compare what Dante puts into the mouth of Manfred in the 'Purgatory' (canto iii.). The great Ghibelline poet here protests against the use of excommunication as a political weapon. His sense of justice will not allow him to believe that God can regard the sentence of priests and pontiffs, actuated by the spite of partisans; yet the examples of Frederick II. and of this Matteo Visconti prove how terrifying, even to the boldest, those sentences continued to be. Few had the resolute will of Galeazzo Pico di Mirandola, who expired in 1499 under the ban of the Church, which he had borne for sixteen years.

[2] This was in 1328. Azzo agreed to pay 25,000 florins. The vast wealth of the Visconti amassed during their years of peaceful occupation always stood them in good stead when bad times came, and when the Emperor was short of cash. Azzo deserves special commendation from the student of art for the exquisite octagonal tower of S. Gottardo, which he built of terra cotta with marble pilasters, in Milan. It is quite one of the loveliest monuments of mediæval Italian architecture.

[3] Lucchino and Galeazzo Visconti were both afflicted with gout, the latter to such an extent as to be almost crippled.

[4] This would not have been by itself a bar to succession in an Italian tyranny. But Lucchino's bastards were not of the proper stuff to continue their father's government, while their fiery uncle was precisely the man to sustain the honor and extend the power of the Visconti.

[5] Storia di Milano, 1554, p. 223.

The reign of the archbishop Giovanni marks a new epoch in the despotism of the Visconti. They are now no longer the successful rivals of the Della Torre family or dependents on imperial caprice, but self-made sovereigns, with a well-established power in Milan and a wide extent of subject territory. Their dynasty, though based on force and maintained by violence, has come to be acknowledged; and we shall soon see them allying themselves with the royal houses of Europe. After the death of Giovanni, Matteo's sons were extinct. But Stefano, the last of his family, had left three children, who now succeeded to the lands and cities of the house. They were named Matteo, Bernabo, and Galeazzo. Between these three princes a partition of the heritage of Giovanni Visconti was effected. Matteo took Bologna, Lodi, Piacenza, Parma, Bobbio, and some other towns of less importance. Bernabo received Cremona, Crema, Brescia, and Bergamo. Galeazzo held Como, Novara, Vercelli, Asti, Tortona, and Alessandria. Milan and Genoa were to be ruled by the three in common. It may here be noticed that the dismemberment of Italian despotisms among joint-heirs was a not unfrequent source of disturbance and a cause of weakness to their dynasties. At the same time the practice followed naturally upon the illegal nature of the tyrant's title. He dealt with his cities as so many pieces of personal property, which he could distribute as he chose, not as a coherent whole to be bequeathed to one ruler for the common benefit of all his subjects. In consequence of such partition, it became the interest of brother to murder brother, so as to effect a reconsolidation of the family estates. Something of the sort happened on this occasion. Matteo abandoned himself to bestial sensuality; and his two brothers, finding him both feeble and likely to bring discredit on their rule, caused him to be assassinated in 1355.[1] They then jointly swayed the Milanese, with unanimity remarkable in despots. Galeazzo was distinguished as the handsomest man of his age. He was tall and graceful, with golden hair, which he wore in long plaits, or tied up in a net, or else loose and crowned with flowers. Fond of display and magnificence, he spent much of his vast wealth in shows and festivals, and in the building of palaces and churches. The same taste for splendor led him to seek royal marriages for his children. His daughter Violante was wedded to the Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III. of England, who received with her for dowry the sum of 200,000 golden florins, as well as five cities bordering on Piedmont.[2] It must have been a strange experience for this brother of the Black Prince, leaving London, where the streets were still unpaved, the houses thatched, the beds laid on straw, and where wine was sold as medicine, to pass into the luxurious palaces of Lombardy, walled with marble, and raised high above smooth streets of stone. Of his marriage with Violante Giovio gives some curious details. He says that Galeazzo on this occasion made splendid presents to more than 200 Englishmen, so that he was reckoned to have outdone the greatest kings in generosity. At the banquet Gian Galeazzo, the bride's brother, leading a choice company of well-born youths, brought to the table with each course fresh gifts.[3] 'At one time it was a matter of sixty most beautiful horses with trappings of silk and silver; at another, plate, hawks, hounds, horse-gear, fine cuirasses, suits of armor fashioned of wrought steel, helmets adorned with crests, surcoats embroidered with pearls, belts, precious jewels set in gold, and great quantities of cloth of gold and crimson stuff for making raiment. Such was the profusion of this banquet that the remnants taken from the table were enough and to spare for 10,000 men.' Petrarch, we may remember, assisted at this festival and sat among the princes. It was thus that Galeazzo displayed his wealth before the feudal nobles of the North, and at the same time stretched the hand of friendly patronage to the greatest literary man of Europe. Meanwhile he also married his son Gian Galeazzo to Isabella, daughter of King John of France, spending on this occasion, it is said, a similar sum of money for the honor of a royal alliance.[4]

[1] M. Villani, v. 81. Compare Corio, p. 230. Corio gives the date 1356.

[2] Namely, Alba, Cuneo, Carastro, Mondovico, Braida. See Corio, p. 238, who adds sententiously, 'il che quasi fu l' ultima roina del suo stato.'

[3] Corio (pp. 239, 240) gives the bill of fare of the banquet.

[4] Sismondi says he gave 600,000 florins to Charles, the brother of Isabella, but authorities differ about the actual amount.

Galeazzo held his court at Pavia. His brother reigned at Milan. Bernabo displayed all the worst vices of the Visconti. His system of taxation was most oppressive, and at the same time so lucrative that he was able, according to Giovio's estimate, to settle nine of his daughters at an expense of something like two millions of gold pieces. A curious instance of his tyranny relates to his hunting establishment. Having saddled his subjects with the keep of 5,000 boar-hounds, he appointed officers to go round and see whether these brutes were either too lean or too well-fed to be in good condition for the chase. If anything appeared defective in their management, the peasants on whom they were quartered had to suffer in their persons and their property.[1] This Bernabo was also remarkable for his cold-blooded cruelty. Together with his brother, he devised and caused to be publicly announced by edict that State criminals would be subjected to a series of tortures extending over the space of forty days. In this infernal programme every variety of torment found a place, and days of respite were so calculated as to prolong the lives of the victims for further suffering, till at last there was little left of them that had not been hacked and hewed and flayed away.[2] To such extremities of terrorism were the despots driven in the maintenance of their illegal power.

[1] 'Per cagione di questa caccia continoamente teneva cinque mila cani; e la maggior parte di quelle distribuiva alla custodia de i cittadini, e anche a i contadini, i quali niun altro cane che quelli potevano tenere. Questi due volte il mese erano tenuti a far la mostra. Onde trovandoli macri in gran somma di danari erano condannati, e se grossi erano, incolpandoli del troppo, erano multati; se morivano, li pigliava il tutto.—Corio, p. 247.

Read M. Villani, vii. 48, for the story of a peasant who was given to Bernabo's dogs to be devoured for having killed a hare. Corio (p. 247) describes the punishments which he inflicted on his subjects who were convicted of poaching—eyes put out, houses burned, etc. A young man who dreamed of killing a boar had an eye put out and a hand cut off because he imprudently recounted his vision of sport in sleep. On one occasion he burned two friars who ventured to remonstrate. We may compare Pontanus, 'De Immanitate,' vol. i. pp. 318, 320, for similar cruelty in Ferdinand, King of Naples.

[2] This programme may be read in Sismondi, iv. 282.

Galeazzo died in 1378, and was succeeded in his own portion of the Visconti domain by his son Gian Galleazzo. Now began one of those long, slow, internecine struggles which were so common between the members of the ruling families in Italy. Bernabo and his sons schemed to get possession of the young prince's estate. He, on the other hand, determined to supplant his uncle, and to reunite the whole Visconti principality beneath his own sway. Craft was the weapon which he chose in this encounter. Shutting himself up in Pavia, he made no disguise of his physical cowardice, which was real, while he simulated a timidity of spirit wholly alien to his temperament. He pretended to be absorbed in religious observances, and gradually induced his uncle and cousins to despise him as a poor creature whom they could make short work of when occasion served. In 1385, having thus prepared the way for treason, he avowed his intention of proceeding on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Varese. Starting from Pavia with a body guard of Germans, he passed near Milan, where his uncle and cousins came forth to meet him. Gian Galeazzo feigned a courteous greeting; but when he saw his relatives within his grasp, he gave a watchword in German to his troops, who surrounded Bernabo and took him prisoner with his sons. Gian Galeazzo marched immediately into Milan, poisoned his uncle in a dungeon, and proclaimed himself sole lord of the Visconti heirship.[1]

[1] The narrative of this coup-de-main may be read with advantage in Corio, p. 258.

The reign of Gian Galeazzo, which began with this coup-de-main (1385-1402), forms a very important chapter in Italian history. We may first see what sort of man he was, and then proceed to trace his aims and achievements. Giovio describes him as having been a remarkably sedate and thoughtful boy, so wise beyond his years that his friends feared he would not grow to man's estate. No pleasures in after-life drew him away from business. Hunting, hawking, women, had alike no charms for him. He took moderate exercise for the preservation of his health, read and meditated much, and relaxed himself in conversation with men of letters. Pure intellect, in fact, had reached to perfect independence in this prince, who was far above the boisterous pleasures and violent activities of the age in which he lived. In the erection of public buildings he was magnificent. The Certosa of Pavia and the Duomo of Milan owed their foundation to his sense of splendor. At the same time he completed the palace of Pavia, which his father had begun, and which he made the noblest dwelling-house in Europe. The University of Pavia was raised by him from a state of decadence to one of great prosperity, partly by munificent endowments and partly by a wise choice of professors. In his military undertakings he displayed a kindred taste for vast engineering projects. He contemplated and partly carried out a scheme for turning the Mincio and the Brenta from their channels, and for drying up the lagoons of Venice. In this way he purposed to attack his last great enemy, the Republic of S. Mark, upon her strongest point. Yet in the midst of these huge designs he was able to attend to the most trifling details of economy. His love of order was so precise that he may be said to have applied the method of a banker's office to the conduct of a state. It was he who invented Bureaucracy by creating a special class of paid clerks and secretaries of departments. Their duty consisted in committing to books and ledgers the minutest items of his private expenditure and the outgoings of his public purse; in noting the details of the several taxes, so as to be able to present a survey of the whole state revenue; and in recording the names and qualities and claims of his generals, captains, and officials. A separate office was devoted to his correspondence, of all of which he kept accurate copies.[1] By applying this mercantile machinery to the management of his vast dominions, at a time when public economy was but little understood in Europe, Gian Galeazzo raised his wealth enormously above that of his neighbors. His income in a single year is said to have amounted to 1,200,000 golden florins, with the addition of 800,000 golden florins levied by extraordinary calls.[2] The personal timidity of this formidable prince prevented him from leading his armies in the field. He therefore found it necessary to employ paid generals, and took into his service all the chief Condottieri of the day, thus giving an impulse to the custom which was destined to corrupt the whole military system of Italy. Of these men, whom he well knew how to choose, he was himself the brain and moving principle. He might have boasted that he never took a step without calculating the cost, carefully considering the object, and proportioning the means to his end. How mad to such a man must have seemed the Crusaders of previous centuries, or the chivalrous Princes of Northern Germany and Burgundy, who expended their force upon such unprofitable and impossible undertakings as the subjugation, for instance, of Switzerland! Not a single trait in his character reminds us of the Middle Ages, unless it be that he was said to care for reliques with a superstitious passion worthy of Louis XI. Sismondi sums up the description of this extraordinary despot in the following sentences, which may be quoted for their graphic brevity: 'False and pitiless, he joined to immeasurable ambition a genius for enterprise, and to immovable constancy a personal timidity which he did not endeavor to conceal. The least unexpected motion near him threw him into a paroxysm of nervous terror. No prince employed so many soldiers to guard his palace, or took such multiplied precautions of distrust. He seemed to acknowledge himself the enemy of the whole world. But the vices of tyranny had not weakened his ability. He employed his immense wealth without prodigality; his finances were always flourishing; his cities well garrisoned and victualed; his army well paid; all the captains of adventure scattered throughout Italy received pensions from him, and were ready to return to his service whenever called upon. He encouraged the warriors of the new Italian school; he knew well how to distinguish, reward, and win their attachment.'[3] Such was the tyrant who aimed at nothing less than the reduction of the whole of Italy beneath the sway of the Visconti, and who might have achieved his purpose had not his career of conquest been checked by the Republic of Florence, and afterwards cut short by a premature death.

[1] Giovio is particular upon these points: 'Ho veduto io ne gli armari de' suoi Archivi maravigliosi libri in carta pecora, i quali contenevano d' anno in anno i nomi de' capitani, condottieri, e soldati vecchi, e le paghe di ogn' uno, e 'l rotulo delle cavallerie, et delle fanterie: v' erano anco registrate le copie delle lettere le quali negli importantissimi maneggi di far guerra o pace, o egli haveva scritto ai principi o haveva ricevuto da loro.'

[2] The description given by Corio (pp. 260, 266-68) of the dower in money, plate, and jewels brought by Valentina Visconti to Louis d'Orleans is a good proof of Gian Galeazzo's wealth. Besides the town of Asti, she took with her in money 400,000 golden florins. Her gems were estimated at 68,858 florins, and her plate at 1,667 marks of Paris. The inventory is curious.

[3] 'History of the Italian Republics' (1 vol. Longmans), p. 190.

At the time of his accession the Visconti had already rooted out the Correggi and Rossi of Parma, the Scotti of Piacenza, the Pelavicini of San Donnino, the Tornielli of Novara, the Ponzoni and Cavalcabò of Cremona, the Beccaria and Languschi of Pavia, the Fisiraghi of Lodi, the Brusati of Brescia. Their viper had swallowed all these lesser snakes.[1] But the Carrara family still ruled at Padua, the Gonzaga at Mantua, the Este at Ferrara, while the great house of Scala was in possession of Verona. Gian Galeazzo's schemes were first directed against the Scala dynasty. Founded, like that of the Visconti, upon the imperial authority, it rose to its greatest height under the Ghibelline general Can Grande and his nephew Mastino, in the first half of the fourteenth century (1312-51). Mastino had himself cherished the project of an Italian Kingdom; but he died before approaching its accomplishment. The degeneracy of his house began with his three sons. The two younger killed the eldest; of the survivors the stronger slew the weaker and then died in 1374, leaving his domains to two of his bastards. One of these, named Antonio, killed the other in 1381,[2] and afterwards fell a prey to the Visconti in 1387. In his subjugation of Verona Gian Galeazzo contrived to make use of the Carrara family, although these princes were allied by marriage to the Scaligers, and had everything to lose by their downfall. He next proceeded to attack Padua, and gained the co-operation of Venice. In 1388 Francesco da Carrara had to cede his territory to Visconti's generals, who in the same year possessed themselves for him of the Trevisan Marches. It was then that the Venetians saw too late the error they had committed in suffering Verona and Padua to be annexed by the Visconti, when they ought to have been fortified as defenses interposed between his growing power and themselves. Having now made himself master of the North of Italy,[3] with the exception of Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna, Gian Galeazzo turned his attention to these cities. Alberto d' Este was ruling in Ferrara; Francesco da Gonzaga in Mantua. It was the Visconti's policy to enfeeble these two princes by causing them to appear odious in the eyes of their subjects.[4] Accordingly he roused the jealousy of the Marquis of Ferrara against his nephew Obizzo to such a pitch that Alberto beheaded him together with his mother, burned his wife, and hung a third member of his family, besides torturing to death all the supposed accomplices of the unfortunate young man. Against the Marquis of Mantua Gian Galeazzo devised a still more diabolical plot. By forged letters and subtly contrived incidents he caused Francesco da Gonzaga to suspect his wife of infidelity with his secretary.[5] In a fit of jealous fury Francesco ordered the execution of his wife, the mother of several of his children, together with the secretary. Then he discovered the Visconti's treason. But it was too late for anything but impotent hatred. The infernal device had been successful; the Marquis of Mantua was no less discredited than the Marquis of Ferrara by his crime. It would seem that these men were not of the stamp and caliber to be successful villans, and that Gian Galeazzo had reckoned upon this defect in their character. Their violence caused them to be rather loathed than feared. The whole of Lombardy was now prostrate before the Milanese tyrant. His next move was to set foot in Tuscany. For this purpose Pisa had to be acquired; and here again he resorted to his devilish policy of inciting other men to crimes by which he alone would profit in the long-run. Pisa was ruled at that time by the Gambacorta family, with an old merchant named Pietro at their head. This man had a friend and secretary called Jacopo Appiano, whom the Visconti persuaded to turn Judas, and to entrap and murder his benefactor and his children. The assassination took place in 1392. In 1399 Gherardo, son of Jacopo Appiano, who held Pisa at the disposal of Gian Galeazzo, sold him this city for 200,000 florins.[6] Perugia was next attacked. Here Pandolfo, chief of the Baglioni family, held a semi-constitutional authority, which the Visconti first helped him to transmute into a tyranny, and then, upon Pandolfo's assassination, seized as his own.[7] All Italy and even Germany had now begun to regard the usurpations of the Milanese despot with alarm. But the sluggish Emperor Wenceslaus refused to take action against him; nay, in 1395 he granted to the Visconti the investiture of the Duchy of Milan for 100,000 florins, reserving only Pavia for himself. In 1399 the Duke laid hands on Siena; and in the next two years the plague came to his assistance by enfeebling the ruling families of Lucca and Bologna, the Guinizzi and the Bentivogli, so that he was now able to take possession of those cities.

[1] Il Biscione, or the Great Serpent, was the name commonly given to the tyranny of the Visconti (see M. Villani, vi. 8), in allusion to their ensign of a naked child issuing from a snake's mouth.

[2] Corio, p. 255, tells how the murder was accomplished. Antonio tried to make it appear that his brother Bartolommeo had met his death in the prosecution of infamous amours.

[3] Savoy was not in his hands, however, and the Marquisate of Montferrat remained nominally independent, though he held its heir in a kind of honorable confinement. Venice, too, remained in formidable neutrality, the spectator of the Visconti's conquests.

[4] The policy adopted by the Visconti against the Estensi and the Gonzaghi was that recommended by Machiavelli (Disc. iii. 32): 'quando alcuno vuole o che un popolo o un principe levi al tutto l' animo ad uno accordo, non ci è altro modo più vero, nè più stabile, che fargli usare qualche grave scelleratezza contro a colui con il qual tu non vuoi che l' accordo si faccia.'

[5] This lady was a first cousin as well as sister-in-law of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who in second marriage had taken Caterina, daughter of Bernabo Visconti, to wife. This fact makes his perfidy the more disgraceful.

[6] The Appiani retired to Piombino, where they founded a petty despotism. Appiano's crime, which gave a tyranny to his children, is similar to that of Tremacoldo, who murdered his masters, the Vistarini of Lodi, and to that of Luigi Gonzaga, who founded the Ducal house of Mantua by the murder of his patron, Passerino Buonacolsi.

[7] Pandolfo was murdered in 1393. Gian Galeazzo possessed himself of Perugia in 1400, having paved his way for the usurpation by causing Biordo Michelotti, the successor of the Baglioni to be assassinated by his friend Francesco Guidalotti. It will be noticed that he proceeded slowly and surely in the case of each annexation, licking over his prey after he had throttled it and before he swallowed it, like a boa-constrictor.

There remained no power in Italy, except the Republic of Florence and the exiled but invincible Francesco da Carrara, to withstand his further progress. Florence delayed his conquests in Tuscany. Francesco managed to return to Padua. Still the peril which threatened the whole of Italy was imminent. The Duke of Milan was in the plenitude of manhood—rich, prosperous, and full of mental force. His acquisitions were well cemented; his armies in good condition; his treasury brim full; his generals highly paid. All his lieutenants in city and in camp respected the iron will and the deep policy of the despot who swayed their action from his arm-chair in Milan. He alone knew how to use the brains and hands that did him service, to keep them mutually in check, and by their regulated action to make himself not one but a score of men. At last, when all other hope of independence for Italy had failed, the plague broke out with fury in Lombardy. Gian Galeazzo retired to his isolated fortress of Marignano in order to escape infection. Yet there in 1402 he sickened. A comet appeared in the sky, to which he pointed as a sign of his approaching death—'God could not but signalize the end of so supreme a ruler,' he told his attendants. He died aged 55. Italy drew a deep breath. The danger was passed.

The systematic plan conceived by Gian Galeazzo for the enslavement of Italy, the ability and force of intellect which sustained him in its execution, and the power with which he bent men to his will, are scarcely more extraordinary than the sudden dissolution of his dukedom at his death. Too timid to take the field himself, he had trained in his service a band of great commanders, among whom Alberico da Barbino, Facino Cane, Pandolfo Malatesta, Jacopo dal Verme, Gabrino Fondulo, and Ottobon Terzo were the most distinguished. As long as he lived and held them in leading strings, all went well. But at his death his two sons were still mere boys. He had to intrust their persons, together with the conduct of his hardly won dominions, to these captains in conjunction with the Duchess Catherine and a certain Francesco Barbavara. This man had been the Duke's body-servant, and was now the paramour of the Duchess. The generals refused to act with them; and each seized upon such portions of the Visconti inheritance as he could most easily acquire. The vast tyranny of the first Duke of Milan fell to pieces in a day. The whole being based on no legal right, but held together artificially by force and skill, its constituent parts either reasserted their independence or became the prey of adventurers.[1] Many scions of the old ejected families recovered their authority in the subject towns. We hear again of the Scotti at Piacenza, the Rossi and Correggi at Parma, the Benzoni at Crema, the Rusconi at Como, the Soardi and Colleoni at Bergamo, the Landi at Bobbio, the Cavalcabò at Cremona. Facino Cane appropriated Alessandria; Pandolfo Malatesta seized Brescia; Ottonbon Terzo established himself in Parma. Meanwhile Giovanni Maria Visconti was proclaimed Duke of Milan, and his brother Filippo Maria occupied Pavia. Gabriello, a bastard son of the first duke, fortified himself in Crema.

[1] The anarchy which prevailed in Lombardy after Gian Galeazzo's death makes it difficult to do more than signalize a few of these usurpations. Corio, pp. 292 et seq., contain the details.

In the despotic families of Italy, as already hinted, there was a progressive tendency to degeneration. The strain of tyranny sustained by force and craft for generations, the abuse of power and pleasure, the isolation and the dread in which the despots lived habitually, bred a kind of hereditary madness.[1] In the case of Giovanni Maria and Filippo Maria Visconti these predisposing causes of insanity were probably intensified by the fact that their father and mother were first cousins, the grandchildren of Stefano, son of Matteo il Grande. Be this as it may, the constitutional ferocity of the race appeared as monomania in Giovanni, and its constitutional timidity as something akin to madness in his brother. Gian Maria, Duke of Milan in nothing but in name, distinguished himself by cruelty and lust. He used the hounds of his ancestors no longer in the chase of boars, but of living men. All the criminals of Milan, and all whom he could get denounced as criminals, even the participators in his own enormities, were given up to his infernal sport. His huntsman, Squarcia Giramo, trained the dogs to their duty by feeding them on human flesh, and the duke watched them tear his victims in pieces with the avidity of a lunatic.[2] In 1412 some Milanese nobles succeeded in murdering him, and threw his mangled corpse into the street. A prostitute is said to have covered it with roses. Filippo Maria meanwhile had married the widow of Facino Cane,[3] who brought him nearly half a million of florins for dowry, together with her husband's soldiers and the cities he had seized after Gian Galeazzo's death. By the help of this alliance Filippo was now gradually recovering the Lombard portion of his father's dukedom. The minor cities, purged by murder of their usurpers, once more fell into the grasp of the Milanese despot, after a series of domestic and political tragedies that drenched their streets with blood. Piacenza was utterly depopulated. It is recorded that for the space of a year only three of its inhabitants remained within the walls.

[1] I may refer to Dr. Maudsley (Mind and Matter) for a scientific statement of the theory of madness developed by accumulated and hereditary vices.

[2] Corio, p. [301] mentions by name Giovanni da Pusterla and Bertolino del Maino as 'lacerati da i cani del Duca.' Members of the families of these men afterwards helped to kill him.

[3] Beatrice di Tenda, the wife of Facino Cane, was twenty years older than the Duke of Milan. As soon as the Visconti felt himself assured in his duchy, he caused a false accusation to be brought against her of adultery with the youthful Michele Oranbelli, and, in spite of her innocence, beheaded her in 1418. Machiavelli relates this act of perfidy with Tacitean conciseness (1st. Fior. lib. i. vol. i. p. 55): 'Dipoi per esser grato de' benefici grandi, come sono quasi sempre tutti i Principi, accusè Beatrice sua moglie di stupro e la fece morire.'

Filippo, the last of the Visconti tyrants, was extremely ugly, and so sensitive about his ill-formed person that he scarcely dared to show himself abroad. He habitually lived in secret chambers, changed frequently from room to room, and when he issued from his palace refused salutations in the streets. As an instance of his nervousness, the chroniclers report that he could not endure to hear the noise of thunder.[1] At the same time he inherited much of his father's insight into character, and his power of controlling men more bold and active than himself. But he lacked the keen decision and broad views of Gian Galeazzo. He vacillated in policy and kept planning plots which seemed to have no object but his own disadvantage. Excess of caution made him surround the captains of his troops with spies, and check them at the moment when he feared they might become too powerful. This want of confidence neutralized the advantage which he might have gained by his choice of fitting instruments. Thus his selection of Francesco Sforza for his general against the Venetians in 1431 was a wise one. But he could not attach the great soldier of fortune to himself. Sforza took the pay of Florence against his old patron, and in 1441 forced him to a ruinous peace; one of the conditions of which was the marriage of the Duke of Milan's only daughter, Bianca, to the son of the peasant of Cotignola. Bianca was illegitimate, and Filippo Maria had no male heir. The great family of the Visconti had dwindled away. Consequently, after the duke's death in 1447, Sforza found his way open to the Duchy of Milan, which he first secured by force and then claimed in right of his wife. An adverse claim was set up by the House of Orleans, Louis of Orleans having married Valentina, the legitimate daughter of Gian Galeazzo.[2] But both of these claims were invalid, since the investiture granted by Wenceslaus to the first duke excluded females. So Milan was once again thrown open to the competition of usurpers.

[1] The most complete account of Filippo Maria Visconti written by a contemporary is that of Piero Candido Decembrio (Muratori, vol. xx.). The student must, however, read between the lines of this biography, for Decembrio, at the request of Leonello d' Este, suppressed the darker colors of the portrait of his master. See the correspondence in Rosmini's Life of Guarino da Verona.

[2] This claim of the House of Orleans to Milan was one source of French interference in Italian affairs. Judged by Italian custom, Sforza's claim through Bianca was as good as that of the Orleans princes through Valentina, since bastardy was no real bar in the peninsula. It is said that Filippo Maria bequeathed his duchy to the Crown of Naples, by a will destroyed after his death. Could this bequest have taken effect, it might have united Italy beneath one sovereign. But the probabilities are that the jealousies of Florence, Venice, and Rome against Naples would have been so intensified as to lead to a bloody war of succession, and to hasten the French invasion.

The inextinguishable desire for liberty in Milan blazed forth upon the death of the last duke. In spite of so many generations of despots, the people still regarded themselves as sovereign, and established a republic. But a state which had served the Visconti for nearly two centuries, could not in a moment shake off its weakness and rely upon itself alone. The republic, feeling the necessity of mercenary aid, was short-sighted enough to engage Francesco Sforza as commander-in-chief against the Venetians, who had availed themselves of the anarchy in Lombardy to push their power west of the Adda.

Sforza, though the ablest general of the day, was precisely the man whom common prudence should have prompted the burghers to mistrust. In one brilliant campaign he drove the Venetians back beyond the Adda, burned their fleet at Casal Maggiore on the Po, and utterly defeated their army at Caravaggio. Then he returned as conqueror to Milan, reduced the surrounding cities, blockaded the Milanese in their capital, and forced them to receive him as their Duke in 1450. Italy had lost a noble opportunity. If Florence and Venice had but taken part with Milan, and had stimulated the flagging energies of Genoa, four powerful republics in federation might have maintained the freedom of the whole peninsula and have resisted foreign interference. But Cosimo de' Medici, who was silently founding the despotism of his own family in Florence, preferred to see a duke in Milan; and Venice, guided by the Doge Francesco Foscari, thought only of territorial aggrandizement. The chance was lost. The liberties of Milan were extinguished. A new dynasty was established in the duchy, grounded on a false hereditary claim, which, as long as it continued, gave a sort of color to the superior but still illegal pretensions of the house of Orleans. It is impossible at this point in the history of Italy to refrain from judging that the Italians had become incapable of local self-government, and that the prevailing tendency to despotism was not the results of accidents in any combination, but of internal and inevitable laws of evolution.

It was at this period that the old despotisms founded by Imperial Vicars and Captains of the People came to be supplanted or crossed by those of military adventurers, just as at a somewhat later time the Condottiere and the Pope's nominee were blent in Cesare Borgia. This is therefore the proper moment for glancing at the rise and influence of mercenary generals in Italy, before proceeding to sketch the history of the Sforza family.

After the wars in Sicily, carried on by the Angevine princes, had ceased (1302), a body of disbanded soldiers, chiefly foreigners, was formed under Fra Ruggieri, a Templar, and swept the South of Italy. Giovanni Villani marks this as the first sign of the scourge which was destined to prove so fatal to the peace of Italy.[1] But it was not any merely accidental outbreak of Banditti, such as this, which established the Condottiere system. The causes were far more deeply seated, in the nature of Italian despotism and in the peculiar requirements of the republics. We have already seen how Frederick II. found it convenient to employ Saracens in his warfare with the Holy See. The same desire to procure troops incapable of sympathizing with the native population induced the Scala and Visconti tyrants to hire German, Breton, Swiss, English, and even Hungarian guards. These foreign troops remained at the disposal of the tyrants and superseded the national militia. The people of Italy were reserved for taxation; the foreigners carried on the wars of the princes. Nor was this policy otherwise than popular. It relieved all classes from the conscription, leaving the burgher free to ply his trade, the peasant to till his fields, and disarming the nobles who were still rebellious and turbulent within the city walls. The same custom gained ground among the Republics. Rich Florentine citizens preferred to stay at home at ease, or to travel abroad for commerce, while they intrusted their military operations to paid generals.[2] Venice, jealous of her own citizens, raised no levies in her immediate territory, and made a rule of never confiding her armies to Venetians. Her admirals, indeed, were selected from the great families of the Lagoons. But her troops were placed beneath the discipline of foreigners. The warfare of the Church, again, had of necessity to be conducted on the same principles; for it did not often happen that a Pope arose like Julius II., rejoicing in the sound of cannon and the life of camps. In this way principalities and republics gradually denationalized their armies, and came to carrying on campaigns by the aid of foreign mercenaries under paid commanders. The generals, wishing as far as possible to render their troops movable and compact, suppressed the infantry, and confined their attention to perfecting the cavalry. Heavy-armed cavaliers, officered by professional captains, fought the battles of Italy; while despots and republics schemed in their castles, or debated in their council-chambers, concerning objects of warfare about which the soldiers of fortune were indifferent. The pay received by men-at-arms was more considerable than that of the most skilled laborers in any peaceful trade. The perils of military service in Italy, conducted on the most artificial principles, were but slight; while the opportunities of self-indulgence—of pillage during war and of pleasure in the brief intervals of peace—attracted all the hot blood of the country to this service.[3] Therefore, in course of time, the profession of Condottiere fascinated the needier nobility of Italy, and the ranks of their men-at-arms were recruited by townsfolk and peasants, who deliberately chose a life of adventure.

[1] VIII. 51.

[2] We may remember how the Spanish general Cardona, in 1325, misused his captaincy of the Florentine forces to keep rich members of the republican militia in unhealthy stations, extorting money from them as the price of freedom from perilous or irksome service.

[3] Matarazzo, in his Chronicle of Perugia, gives a lively picture of an Italian city, in which the nobles for generations followed the trade of Condottieri, while the people enlisted in their bands—to the utter ruin of the morals and the peace of the community.

At first the foreign troops of the despots were engaged as body-guards, and were controlled by the authority of their employers. But the captains soon rendered themselves independent, and entered into military contracts on their own account. The first notable example of a roving troop existing for the sake of pillage, and selling its services to any bidder, was the so-called Great Company (1343), commanded by the German Guarnieri, or Duke Werner who wrote upon his corselet: 'Enemy of God, of Pity and of Mercy.' This band was employed in 1348 by the league of the Montferrat, La Scala, Carrara, Este, and Gonzaga houses, formed to check the Visconti.

'In the middle of the fourteenth century,' writes Sismondi,[1] 'all the soldiers who served in Italy were foreigners: at the end of the same century they were all, or nearly all, Italian.' This sentence indicates a most important change in the Condottiere system, which took place during the lifetime of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Alberico da Barbiano, a noble of Romagna, and the ancestor of the Milanese house of Belgiojoso, adopted the career of Condottiere, and formed a Company, called the Company of S. George, into which he admitted none but Italians. The consequence of this rule was that he Italianized the profession of mercenary arms for the future. All the great captains of the period were formed in his ranks, during the course of those wars which he conducted for the Duke of Milan. Two rose to paramount importance—Braccio da Montone, who varied his master's system by substituting the tactics of detached bodies of cavalry for the solid phalanx in which Barbiano had moved his troops; and Sforza Attendolo, who adhered to the old method. Sforza got his name from his great physical strength. He was a peasant of the village of Cotignola, who, being invited to quit the mattock for a sword, threw his pickax into an oak, and cried, 'If it stays there, it is a sign that I shall make my fortune.' The ax stuck in the tree, and Sforza went forth to found a line of dukes.[2] After the death of Barbiano in 1409, Sforza and Braccio separated and formed two distinct companies, known as the Sforzeschi and Bracceschi, who carried on between them, sometimes in combination, but usually in opposition, all the wars of Italy for the next twenty years. These old comrades, who had parted in pursuit of their several advantage, found that they had more to lose than to gain by defeating each other in any bloody or inconveniently decisive engagement. Therefore they adopted systems of campaigning which should cost them as little as possible, but which enabled them to exhibit a chess-player's capacity for designing clever checkmates.[3] Both Braccio and Sforza died in 1424, and were succeeded respectively by Nicolo Piccinino and Francesco Sforza. These two men became in their turn the chief champions of Italy. At the same time other Condottieri rose into notice. The Malatesta family at Rimini, the ducal house of Urbino, the Orsini and the Vitelli of the Roman States, the Varani of Camerino, the Baglioni of Perugia, and the younger Gonzaghi furnished republics and princes with professional leaders of tried skill and independent resources. The vassals of these noble houses were turned into men-at-arms, and the chiefs acquired more importance in their roving military life than they could have gained within the narrow circuit of their little states.

[1] Vol. v. p. 207.

[2] This is the commonly received legend. Corio, p. 255, does not draw attention to the lowness of Sforza's origin, but says that he was only twelve years of age when he enlisted in the corps of Boldrino da Panigale, condottiere of the Church. His robust physical qualities were hereditary for many generations in his family. His son Francesco was tall and well made, the best runner, jumper, and wrestler of his day. He marched, summer and winter, bareheaded; needed but little sleep; was spare in diet, and self-indulgent only in the matter of women. Galeazzo Maria, though stained by despicable vices was a powerful prince, who ruled his duchy with a strong arm. Of his illegitimate daughter, Caterina, the wife of Girolamo Riario, a story is told, which illustrates the strong coarse vein that still distinguished this brood of princes. [See Dennistoun, 'Dukes of Urbino,' vol. i. p. 292, for Boccalini's account of the Siege of Forli, sustained by Caterina in 1488. Compare Sismondi, vol. vii. p. 251.] Caterina Riario Sforza, as a woman, was no unworthy inheritor of her grandfather's personal heroism and genius for government.

[3] I shall have to notice the evils of this system in another place, while reviewing the Principe of Machiavelli. In that treatise the Florentine historian traces the whole ruin of Italy during the sixteenth century to the employment of mercenaries.

The biography of one of these Condottieri deserves special notice, since it illustrates the vicissitudes of fortune to which such men were exposed, as well as their relations to their patrons. Francesco Carmagnuola was a Piedmontese. He first rose into notice at the battle of Monza in 1412, when Filippo Maria Visconti observed his capacity and bravery, and afterwards advanced him to the captaincy of a troop. Having helped to reduce the Visconti duchy to order, Carmagnuola found himself disgraced and suspected without good reason by the Duke of Milan; and in 1426 he took the pay of the Venetians against his old master. During the next year he showed the eminence of his abilities as a general; for he defeated the combined forces of Piccinino, Sforza, and other captains of the Visconti, and took them prisoners at Macalo. Carmagnuola neither imprisoned nor murdered his foes.[1] He gave them their liberty, and four years later had to sustain a defeat from Sforza at Soncino. Other reverses of fortune followed, which brought upon him the suspicion of bad faith or incapacity. When he returned to Venice, the state received their captain with all honors, and displayed unusual pomp in his admission to the audience of the Council. But no sooner had their velvet clutches closed upon him, than they threw him into prison, instituted a secret impeachment of his conduct, and on May 5, 1432, led him out with his mouth gagged, to execution on the Piazza. No reason was assigned for this judicial murder. Had Carmagnuola been convicted of treason? Was he being punished for his ill success in the campaign of the preceding years? The Republic of Venice, by the secrecy in which she enveloped this dark act of vengeance, sought to inspire the whole body of her officials with vague alarm.

[1] Such an act of violence, however consistent with the morality of a Cesare Borgia, a Venetian Republic, or a Duke of Milan, would have been directly opposed to the code of honor in use among Condottieri. Nothing, indeed, is more singular among the contradictions of this period than the humanity in the field displayed by hired captains. War was made less on adverse armies than on the population of provinces. The adventurers respected each other's lives, and treated each other with courtesy. They were a brotherhood who played at campaigning, rather than the representatives of forces seriously bent on crushing each other to extermination. Machiavelli says (Princ. cap. xii.) 'Aveano usato ogni industria per levar via a se e a' soldati la fatica e la paura, non s'ammazzando nelle zuffe, ma pigliandosi prigioni e senza taglia.' At the same time the license they allowed themselves against the cities and the districts they invaded is well illustrated by the pillage of Piacenza in 1447 by Francesco Sforza's troops. The anarchy of a sack lasted forty days, during which the inhabitants were indiscriminately sold as slaves, or tortured for their hidden treasure. Sism. vi. 170.

But to return to the Duchy of Milan. Francesco Sforza entered the capital as conqueror in 1450, and was proclaimed Duke. He never obtained the sanction of the Empire to his title, though Frederick III. was proverbially lavish of such honors. But the great Condottiere, possessing the substance, did not care for the external show of monarchy. He ruled firmly, wisely, and for those times well, attending to the prosperity of his states, maintaining good discipline in his cities, and losing no ground by foolish or ambitious schemes. Louis XI. of France is said to have professed himself Sforza's pupil in statecraft, than which no greater tribute could be paid to his political sagacity. In 1466 he died, leaving three sons, Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, the Cardinal Ascanio, and Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro.

'Francesco's crown,' says Ripamonti, 'was destined to pass to more than six inheritors, and these five successions were accomplished by a series of tragic events in his family. Galeazzo, his son, was murdered because of his abominable crimes, in the presence of his people, before the altar, in the middle of the sacred rites. Giovanni Galeazzo, who followed him, was poisoned by his uncle Lodovico. Lodovico was imprisoned by the French, and died of grief in a dungeon.[1] One of his sons perished in the same way; the other, after years of misery and exile, was restored in his childless old age to a throne which had been undermined, and when he died, his dynasty was extinct. This was the recompense for the treason of Francesco to the State of Milan. It was for such successes that he passed his life in perfidy, privation, and danger.' In these rapid successions we trace, besides the demoralization of the Sforza family, the action of new forces from without. France, Germany, and Spain appeared upon the stage; and against these great powers the policy of Italian despotism was helpless.

[1] In the castle of Loches, there is said to be a roughly painted wall-picture of a man in a helmet over the chimney in the room known as his prison, with this legend, Voilà un qui n'est pas content. Tradition gives it to Il Moro.

We have now reached the threshold of the true Renaissance, and a new period is being opened for Italian politics. The despots are about to measure their strength with the nations of the North. It was Lodovico Sforza who, by his invitation of Charles VIII. into Italy, inaugurated the age of Foreign Enslavement. His biography belongs, therefore, to another chapter. But the life of Galeazzo Maria, husband of Bona of Savoy, and uncle by marriage to Charles VIII. of France, forms an integral part of that history of the Milanese despots which we have hitherto been tracing. In him the passions of Gian Maria Visconti were repeated with the addition of extravagant vanity. We may notice in particular his parade-expedition in 1471 to Florence, when he flaunted the wealth extorted from his Milanese subjects before the soberminded citizens of a still free city. Fifty palfreys for the Duchess, fifty chargers for the Duke, trapped in cloth of gold; a hundred men-at-arms and five hundred foot soldiers for a body-guard; five hundred couples of hounds and a multitude of hawks; preceded him. His suite of courtiers numbered two thousand on horseback: 200,000 golden florins were expended on this pomp. Machiavelli (1st. Fior. lib. 7) marks this visit of the Duke of Milan as a turning-point from austere simplicity to luxury and license in the manners of the Florentines, whom Lorenzo de' Medici was already bending to his yoke. The most extravagant lust, the meanest and the vilest cruelty, supplied Galeazzo Maria with daily recreation.[1] He it was who used to feed his victims on abominations or to bury them alive, and who found a pleasure in wounding or degrading those whom he had made his confidants and friends. The details of his assassination, in 1476, though well known, are so interesting that I may be excused for pausing to repeat them here; especially as they illustrate a moral characteristic of this period which is intimately connected with the despotism. Three young nobles of Milan, educated in the classic literature by Montano, a distinguished Bolognese scholar, had imbibed from their studies of Greek and Latin history an ardent thirst for liberty and a deadly hatred of tyrants.[2] Their names were Carlo Visconti, Girolamo Olgiati, and Giannandrea Lampugnani. Galeazzo Sforza had wounded the two latter in the points which men hold dearest—their honor and their property[3]—by outraging the sister of Olgiati and by depriving Lampugnani of the patronage of the Abbey of Miramondo. The spirit of Harmodius and Virginius was kindled in the friends, and they determined to rid Milan of her despot. After some meetings in the garden of S. Ambrogio, where they matured their plans, they laid their project of tyrannicide as a holy offering before the patron saint of Milan.[4] Then having spent a few days in poignard exercise for the sake of training,[5] they took their place within the precincts of S. Stephen's Church. There they received the sacrament and addressed themselves in prayer to the Protomartyr, whose fane was about to be hallowed by the murder of a monster odious to God and man. It was on the morning of December 26, 1476, that the duke entered San Stefano. At one and the same moment the daggers of the three conspirators struck him—Olgiati's in the breast, Visconti's in the back, Lampugnani's in the belly. He cried 'Ah, Dio!' and fell dead upon the pavement. The friends were unable to make their escape; Visconti and Lampugnani were killed on the spot; Olgiati was seized, tortured, and torn to death.

[1] Allegretto Allegretti, Diari Sanesi, in Muratori, xxiii. p. 777, and Corio, p. 425, should be read for the details of his pleasures. See too his character by Machiavelli, 1st. Fior. lib. 7, vol. ii. p. 316. Yet Giovio calls him a just and firm ruler, stained only with the vice of unbridled sensuality.

[2] The study of the classics, especially of Plutarch, at this time, as also during the French Revolution, fired the imagination of patriots. Lorenzino de' Medici appealed to the example of Timoleon in 1537, and Pietro Paolo Boscoli to that of Brutus in 1513.

[3] 'Le ingiurie conviene che siano nella roba, nel sangue, o nell' onore.... La roba e l'onore sono quelle due cose che offendono più gli uomini che alcun' altra offesa, e dalle quali il principe si debbe guardare: perchè e' non può mai spogliare uno tanto che non gli resti un coltello da vendicarsi; non può tanto disonorare uno che non gli resti un animo ostinato alla vendetta.' Mach. Disc. iii. 6.

[4] See Olgiati's prayer to Saint Ambrose in Sismondi, vii. 87, and in Mach. Ist. Fior. lib. 7.

[5] Giovanni Sanzi's chronicle, quoted by Dennistoun, vol. i. p. 223, describes the conspirators rehearsing on a wooden puppet.

In the interval which elapsed between the rack and the pincers, Olgiati had time to address this memorable speech to the priest who urged him to repent: 'As for the noble action for which I am about to die, it is this which gives my conscience peace; to this I trust for pardon from the Judge of all. Far from repenting, if I had to come ten times to life in order ten times to die by these same torments, I should not hesitate to dedicate my blood and all my powers to an object so sublime.' When the hangman stood above him, ready to begin the work of mutilation, he is said to have exclaimed: Mors acerba, fama perpetua, stabit vetus memora facti—my death is untimely, my fame eternal, the memory of the deed will last for aye.' He was only twenty-two years of age.[1] There is an antique grandeur about the outlines of this story, strangely mingled with mediæval Catholicism in the details, which makes it typical of the Renaissance. Conspiracies against rulers were common at the time in Italy; but none were so pure and honorable as this. Of the Pazzi Conjuration (1478) which Sixtus IV. directed to his everlasting infamy against the Medici, I shall have to speak in another place. It is enough to mention here in passing the patriotic attempt of Girolamo Gentile against Galeazzo Sforza at Genoa in 1476, and the more selfish plot of Nicolo d' Este, in the same year, against his uncle Ercole, who held the Marquisate of Ferrara to the prejudice of his own claim. The latter tragedy was rendered memorable by the vengeance taken by Ercole. He beheaded Nicolo and his cousin Azzo together with twenty-five of his comrades, effectually preventing by this bloodshed any future attempt to set aside his title. Falling as these four conspiracies do within the space of two years, and displaying varied features of antique heroism, simple patriotism, dynastic dissension, and ecclesiastical perfidy, they present examples of the different forms and causes of political tragedies with a noteworthy and significant conciseness.[2]

[1] The whole story may be read in Ripamonti, under the head of 'Confessio Olgiati;' in Corio, who was a page of the Duke's and an eye-witness of the murder; and in the seventh book of Machiavelli's 'History.' Sismondi's summary and references, vol. vii. pp. 86-90, are very full.

[2] It is worthy of notice that very many tyrannicides took place in Church—for example, the murders of Francesco Vico dei Prefetti, of the Varani, the Chiavelli, Giuliano de' Medici, and Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The choice of public service, as the best occasion for the commission of these crimes, points to the guarded watchfulness maintained by tyrants in their palaces and on the streets. Banquets and festivities offered another kind of opportunity; and it was on such occasions that domestic tragedies, like Oliverotto's murder of his uncle and Grifonetto Baglioni's treason, were accomplished.

Such was the actual condition of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. Neither public nor private morality in our sense of the word existed. The crimes of the tyrants against their subjects and the members of their own families had produced a correlative order of crime in the people over whom they tyrannized. Cruelty was met by conspiracy. Tyrannicide became honorable; and the proverb, 'He who gives his own life can take a tyrant's,' had worked itself into popular language. At this point it may be well to glance at the opinions concerning public murder which prevailed in Italy. Machiavelli, in the Discorsi iii. 6, discusses the whole subject with his usual frigid and exhaustive analysis. It is no part of his critical method to consider the morality of the matter. He deals with the facts of history scientifically. The esteem in which tyrannicide was held at Florence is proved by the erection of Donatello's Judith in 1495, at the gate of the Palazzo Pubblico, with this inscription, exemplum salutis publicæ cives posuere. All the political theorists agree that to rid a state of its despot is a virtuous act. They only differ about its motives and its utility. In Guicciardini's Reggimento di Firenze (Op. Ined. vol. ii. pp. 53, 54, 114) the various motives of tyrannicide are discussed, and it is concluded that pochissimi sono stati quelli che si siano mossi meramente per amore della libertà della sua patria, a' quali si conviene suprema laude.[1] Donato Giannotti (Opere, vol. i. p. 341) bids the conspirator consider whether the mere destruction of the despot will suffice to restore his city to true liberty and good government—a caution by which Lorenzino de' Medici in his assassination of Duke Alessandro might have profited; for he killed one tyrant in order only to make room for another. Lorenzino's own Apology (Varchi, vol. iii. pp. 283-295) is an important document, as showing that the murderer of a despot counted on the sympathy of honorable men. So, too, is the verdict of Boscolo's confessor (Arch. Stor. vol. i. p. 309), who pronounced that conspiracy against a tyrant was no crime. Nor did the demoralization of the age stop here. Force, which had been substituted for Law in government, became, as it were, the mainspring of society. Murders, poisoning, rapes, and treasons were common incidents of private as of public life.[2] In cities like Naples bloodguilt could be atoned at an inconceivably low rate. A man's life was worth scarcely more than that of a horse. The palaces of the nobles swarmed with professional cut-throats, and the great ecclesiastics claimed for their abodes the right of sanctuary. Popes sold absolution for the most horrible excesses, and granted indulgences beforehand for the commission of crimes of lust and violence. Success was the standard by which acts were judged; and the man who could help his friends intimidate his enemies, and carve a way to fortune for himself by any means he chose, was regarded as a hero. Machiavelli's use of the word virtù is in this relation most instructive. It has altogether lost the Christian sense of virtue, and retains only so much of the Roman virtus as is applicable to the courage, intellectual ability, and personal prowess of one who has achieved his purpose, be that what it may. The upshot of this state of things was that individuality of character and genius obtained a freer scope at this time in Italy than during any other period of modern history.

[1] 'Very few indeed have those been, whose motive for tyrannicide was a pure love of their country's liberty; and these deserve the highest praise.'

[2] It is quite impossible to furnish a complete view of Italian society under this aspect. Students must be referred to the stories of the novelists, who collected the more dramatic incidents and presented them in the form of entertaining legends. It may suffice here to mention Bartolommeo Colleoni, Angelo Poliziano, and Pontano, all of whom owed their start in life to the murder of their respective fathers by assassins; to Varchi and Filelfo, whose lives were attempted by cut-throats; to Cellini, Perugino, Masaccio, Berni, in each of whose biographies poison and the knife play their parts. If men of letters and artists were exposed to these perils, the dangers of the great and noble may be readily imagined.

At the same time it must not be forgotten that during this period the art and culture of the Renaissance were culminating. Filelfo was receiving the gold of Filippo Maria Visconti. Guarino of Verona was instructing the heir of Ferrara, and Vittorino da Feltre was educating the children of the Marquis of Mantua. Lionardo was delighting Milan with his music and his magic world of painting. Poliziano was pouring forth honeyed eloquence at Florence. Ficino was expounding Plato. Boiardo was singing the prelude to Ariosto's melodies at Ferrara. Pico della Mirandola was dreaming of a reconciliation of the Hebrew, Pagan, and Christian traditions. It is necessary to note these facts in passing; just as when we are surveying the history of letters and the arts, it becomes us to remember the crimes and the madness of the despots who patronized them. This was an age in which even the wildest and most perfidious of tyrants felt the ennobling influences and the sacred thirst of knowledge. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, might be selected as a true type of the princes who united a romantic zeal for culture with the vices of barbarians.[1] The coins which bear the portraits of this man, together with the medallions carved in red Verona marble on his church at Rimini, show a narrow forehead, protuberant above bushy eyebrows, a long hooked nose, hollow cheeks, and petulant, passionate, compressed lips. The whole face seems ready to flash with sudden violence, to merge its self-control in a spasm of fury. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta killed three wives in succession, violated his daughter, and attempted the chastity of his own son. So much of him belongs to the mere savage. He caused the magnificent church of S. Francesco at Rimini to be raised by Leo Alberti in a manner more worthy of a Pagan Pantheon than of a Christian temple. He incrusted it with exquisite bas-reliefs in marble, the triumphs of the earliest Renaissance style, carved his own name and ensigns upon every scroll and frieze and point of vantage in the building, and dedicated a shrine there to his concubine—Divæ Isottæ Sacrum. So much of him belongs to the Neo-Pagan of the fifteenth century. He brought back from Greece the mortal remains of the philosopher Gemistos Plethon, buried them in a sarcophagus outside his church, and wrote upon the tomb this epigraph: 'These remains of Gemistus of Byzantium, chief of the sages of his day, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, son of Pandolfo, commander in the war against the king of the Turks in the Morea, induced by the mighty love with which he burns for men of learning, brought hither and placed within this chest. 1466.' He, the most fretful and turbulent of men, read books with patient care, and bore the contradictions of pedants in the course of long discussions on philosophy and arts and letters. So much of him belonged to the new spirit of the coming age, in which the zeal for erudition was a passion, and the spell of science was stronger than the charms of love. At the same time, as Condottiere, he displayed all the treasons, duplicities, cruelties, sacrileges, and tortuous policies to which the most accomplished villain of the age could have aspired.

[1] For a fuller account of him, see my 'Sketches in Italy and Greece,' article Rimini.

It would be easy, following in the steps of Tiraboschi, to describe the patronage awarded in the fifteenth century to men of letters by princes—the protection extended by Nicholas III. of Ferrara to Guarino and Aurispa—the brilliant promise of his son Leonello, who corresponded with Poggio, Filelfo, Guarino, Francesco Barbaro, and other scholars—the liberality of Duke Borso, whose purse was open to poor students. Or we might review the splendid culture of the court of Naples, where Alfonso committed the education of his terrible son Ferdinand to the care of Lorenzo Valla and Antonio Beccadelli.[1] More insight, however, into the nature of Italian despotism in all its phases may be gained by turning from Milan to Urbino, and by sketching a portrait of the good Duke Frederick.[2] The life of Frederick, Count of Montefeltro, created Duke of Urbino in 1474 by Pope Sixtus IV., covers the better part of the fifteenth century (b. 1422, d. 1482). A little corner of old Umbria lying between the Apennines and the Adriatic, Rimini and Ancona, formed his patrimony. Speaking roughly, the whole duchy was but forty miles square, and the larger portion consisted of bare hillsides and ruinous ravines. Yet this poor territory became the center of a splendid court. 'Federigo,' says his biographer, Muzio, 'maintained a suite so numerous and distinguished as to rival any royal household.' The chivalry of Italy flocked to Urbino in order to learn manners and the art of war from the most noble general of his day. 'His household,' we hear from Vespasiano, 'which consisted of 500 mouths entertained at his own cost, was governed less like a company of soldiers than a strict religious community. There was no gaming nor swearing, but the men conversed with the utmost sobriety.' In a list of the court officers we find forty-five counts of the duchy and of other states, seventeen gentlemen, five secretaries, four teachers of grammar, logic, and philosophy, fourteen clerks in public offices, five architects and engineers, five readers during meals, four transcribers of MSS. The library, collected by Vespasiano during fourteen years of assiduous labor, contained copies of all the Greek and Latin authors then discovered, the principal treatises on theology and church history, a complete series of Italian poets, historiographers, and commentators, various medical, mathematical, and legal works, essays on music, military tactics and the arts, together with such Hebrew books as were accessible to copyists. Every volume was bound in crimson and silver, and the whole collection cost upwards of 30,000 ducats. For the expenses of so large a household, and the maintenance of this fine library, not to mention a palace that was being built and churches that required adornment, the mere revenues of the duchy could not have sufficed. Federigo owed his wealth to his engagements as a general. Military service formed his trade. 'In 1453,' says Dennistoun, 'his war-pay from Alfonso of Naples exceeded 8,000 ducats a month, and for many years he had from him and his son an annual peace-pension of 6,000 in name of past services. At the close of his life, when captain-general of the Italian league, he drew in war 165,000 ducats of annual stipend, 45,000 being his own share; in peace, 65,000 in all.' As a Condottiere, Federigo was famous in this age of broken faith for his plain dealing and sincerity. Only one piece of questionable practice—the capture of Verucchio in 1462 by a forged letter pretending to come from Sigismondo Malatesta—stained his character for honesty. To his soldiers in the field he was considerate and generous; to his enemies compassionate and merciful.[3] 'In military science,' says Vespasiano, 'he was excelled by no commander of his time; uniting energy with judgment, he conquered by prudence as much as by force. The like wariness was observed in all his affairs; and in none of his many battles was he worsted. Nor may I omit the strict observance of good faith, wherein he never failed. All to whom he once gave his word, might testify to his inviolate performance of it.' The same biographer adds that 'he was singularly religious, and most observant of the Divine commands. No morning passed without his hearing mass upon his knees.'

[1] The Panormita; author, by the way, of the shameless 'Hermaphroditus.' This fact is significant. The moral sense was extinct when such a pupil was intrusted to such a tutor.

[2] For the following details I am principally indebted to 'The Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino,' by James Dennistoun; 3 vols., Longmans, 1851. Vespasiano's Life of Duke Frederick (Vite di uomini illustri, pp. 72-112) is one of the most charming literary portraits extant. It has, moreover, all the value of a personal memoir, for Vespasiano had lived in close relation with the Duke as his librarian.

[3] See the testimony of Francesco di Giorgio; Dennistoun, vol. i. p. 259. The sack of Volterra was, however, a blot upon his humanity.

While a boy, Federigo had been educated in the school of Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua. Gian Francesco Gonzaga invited that eminent scholar to his court in 1425 for the education of his sons and daughter, assembling round him subordinate teachers in grammar, mathematics, music, painting, dancing, riding, and all noble exercises. The system supervised by Vittorino included not only the acquisition of scholarship, but also training in manly sports and the cultivation of the moral character. Many of the noblest Italians were his pupils. Ghiberto da Correggio, Battista Pallavicíni, Taddeo Manfredi of Faenza, Gabbriello da Cremona, Francesco da Castiglione, Niccolo Perrotti, together with the Count of Montefeltro, lived in Vittorino's house, associating with the poorer students whom the benevolent philosopher instructed for the love of learning. Ambrogio Camaldolese in a letter to Niccolo Niccoli gives this animated picture of the Mantuan school: 'I went again to visit Vittorino and to see his Greek books. He came to meet me with the children of the prince, two sons and a daughter of seven years. The eldest boy is eleven, the younger five. There are also other children of about ten, sons of nobles, as well as other pupils. He teaches them Greek, and they can write that language well. I saw a translation from Saint Chrysostom made by one of them which pleased me much.' And again a few years later: 'He brought me Giovanni Lucido, son of the Marquis, a boy of about fourteen, whom he has educated, and who then recited two hundred lines composed by him upon the shows with which the Emperor was received in Mantua. The verses were most beautiful, but the sweetness and elegance of his recitation made them still more graceful. He also showed me two propositions added by him to Euclid, which prove how eminent he promises to be in mathematical studies. There was also a little daughter of the Marquis, of about ten, who writes Greek beautifully; and many other pupils, some of noble birth, attended them.' The medal struck by Pisanello in honor of Vittorino da Feltre bears the ensign of a pelican feeding her young from a wound in her own breast—a symbol of the master's self-sacrifice.[1] I hope to return in the second volume of this work to Vittorino. It is enough here to remark that in this good school the Duke of Urbino acquired that solid culture which distinguished him through life. In after years, when the cares of his numerous engagements fell thick upon him, we hear from Vespasiano that he still prosecuted his studies, reading Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, and Physics, listening to the works of S. Thomas Aquinas and Scotus read aloud, perusing at one time the Greek fathers and at another the Latin historians.[2] How profitably he spent his day at Urbino may be gathered from this account of his biographer: 'He was on horseback at daybreak with four or six mounted attendants and not more, and with one or two foot servants unarmed. He would ride out three or four miles, and be back again when the rest of his court rose from bed. After dismounting, he heard mass. Then he went into a garden open at all sides, and gave audience to those who listed until dinner-time. At table, all the doors were open; any man could enter where his lordship was; for he never ate except with a full hall. According to the season he had books read out as follows—in Lent, spiritual works; at other times, the history of Livy; all in Latin. His food was plain; he took no comfits, and drank no wine, except drinks of pomegranate, cherry, or apples.' After dinner he heard causes, and gave sentence in the Latin tongue. Then he would visit the nuns of Santa Chiara or watch the young men of Urbino at their games, using the courtesy of perfect freedom with his subjects. His reputation as a patron of the arts and of learning was widely spread. 'To hear him converse with a sculptor,' says Vespasiano, 'you would have thought he was a master of the craft. In painting, too, he displayed the most acute judgment; and as he could not find among the Italians worthy masters of oil colors, he sent to Flanders for one, who painted for him the philosophers and poets and doctors of the Church. He also brought from Flanders masters in the art of tapestry.' Pontano, Ficino, and Poggio dedicated works of importance to his name; and Pirro Perrotti, in the preface to his uncle's 'Cornucopia,' draws a quaint picture of the reception which so learned a book was sure to meet with at Urbino.[3] But Frederick was not merely an accomplished prince. Concurrent testimony proves that he remained a good husband and a constant friend throughout his life, that he controlled his natural quickness of temper, and subdued the sensual appetites which in that age of lax morality he might have indulged without reproach. In his relations to his subjects he showed what a paternal monarch should be, conversing familiarly with the citizens of Urbino, accosting them with head uncovered, inquiring into the necessities of the poorer artisans, relieving the destitute, dowering orphan girls, and helping distressed shopkeepers with loans. Numerous anecdotes are told which illustrate his consideration for his old servants, and his anxiety for the welfare and good order of his state. At a time when the Pope and the King of Naples were making money by monopolies of corn, the Duke of Urbino filled his granaries from Apulia, and sold bread during a year of scarcity at a cheap rate to his poor subjects. Nor would he allow his officers to prosecute the indigent for debts incurred by such purchases. He used to say: 'I am not a merchant; it is enough to have saved my people from hunger.' We must remember that this excellent prince had a direct interest in maintaining the prosperity and good-will of his duchy. His profession was warfare, and the district of Urbino supplied him with his best troops. Yet this should not diminish the respect due to the foresight and benevolence of a Condottiere who knew how to carry on his calling with humanity and generosity. Federigo wore the Order of the Garter, which Henry VII. conferred on him, the Neapolitan Order of the Ermine, and the Papal decorations of the Rose, the Hat, the Sword. He served three pontiffs, two kings of Naples, and two dukes of Milan. The Republic of Florence and more than one Italian League appointed him their general in the field. If his military career was less brilliant than that of the two Sforzas, Piccinino, or Carmagnuola, he avoided the crimes to which ambition led some of these men and the rocks on which they struck. At his death he transmitted a flourishing duchy, a cultivated court, a renowned name, and the leadership of the Italian League to his son Guidobaldo.

[1] Prendilacqua, the biographer of Vittorino, says that he died so poor that his funeral expenses had to be defrayed.

[2] Pius II. in his Commentaries gives an interesting account of the conversations concerning the tactics of the ancients which he held with Frederick, in 1461, in the neighborhood of Tivoli.

[3] The preface to the original edition of the 'Cornucopia' is worth reading for the lively impression which it conveys of Federigo's personality: 'Admirabitur in te divinam illam corporis proceritatem, membrorum robur eximium, venerandam oris dignitatem, ætatis maturam gravitatem, divinam quandam majestatem cum humanitate conjunctam, totum præterea talem qualem esse oportebat eum principem quem nuper pontifex maximus et universus senatus omnium rerum suarum et totius ecclesiastici imperii ducem moderatoremque constituit.'

The young Duke, whose court, described by Castiglione, may be said to have set the model of good breeding to all Europe, began life under the happiest auspices. From his tutor Odasio of Padua we hear that even in boyhood he cared only for study and for manly sports. His memory was so retentive that he could repeat whole treatises by heart after the lapse of ten or fifteen years, nor did he ever forget what he had resolved to retain. In the Latin and Greek languages he became an accomplished scholar,[1] and while he appreciated the poets, he showed peculiar aptitude for philosophy and history. But his development was precocious. His zeal for learning and the excessive ardor with which he devoted himself to physical exercises undermined his constitution. He became an invalid and died childless, after exhibiting to his court for many years an example of patience in sickness and of dignified cheerfulness under the restraints of enforced inaction. His wife, Elizabetta Gonzaga, one of the most famous women of her age, was no less a pattern of noble conduct and serene contentment.

Such were the two last princes of the Montefeltro dynasty.[2] It is necessary to bear their virtues in mind while dwelling on the characteristics of Italian despotism in the fifteenth century. The Duchy of Urbino, both as an established dynasty not founded upon violence, and also as a center of really humane culture, formed, it is true, an exception to the rule of Italian tyrannies: yet, if we omitted this state from our calculation, confining our attention to the extravagant iniquities of the Borgia family, or to the eccentricities of the Visconti, or to the dark crimes of the court of Naples, we should gain a false notion of the many-sided character of Italy, in which at that time vices and virtues were so strangely blended. We must never forget that the same society which produced a Filippo Maria Visconti, a Galeazzo Maria Sforza, a Sigismondo Malatesta, a Ferdinand of Aragon, gave birth also to a Lorenzo de' Medici and a Federigo da Montefeltro. It is only by studying the lives of all these men in combination that we can obtain a correct conception of the manifold personality, the mingled polish and barbarism, of the Italian Renaissance.

[1] It is not easy to say what a panegyrist of that period intended by 'a complete knowledge of Greek,' or 'fluent Greek writing,' in a Prince. I suspect, however, that we ought not to understand by these phrases anything like a real familiarity with Greek literature, but rather such superficial knowledge as would enable a reader of Latin books to understand allusions and quotations. Poliziano, it may be remarked, thought it worth while to flatter Guidobaldo in a Greek epigram.

[2] After Guidobaldo's death the duchy was continued by the Della Rovere family, one of whom, Giovanni, Prefect of Rome and nephew of Sixtus IV., married the Duke's sister Giovanna in 1474.

Some more detailed account of Baldassare Castiglione's treatise Il Cortegiano will form a fitting conclusion to this Chapter on the Despots. It is true that his book was written later than the period we have been considering,[1] and he describes court life in its most graceful aspect. Yet all the antecedent history of the past two centuries had been gradually producing the conditions under which his courtier flourished; and the Italian of the Renaissance, as he appeared to the rest of Europe, was such a gentleman as he depicts. For the historian his book is of equal value in its own department with the Principe of Machiavelli, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and the Diary of Burchard.

[1] It was written in 1514, and first published in folio by the Aldi of Venice in 1528. We find an English translation so early as 1561 by Thomas Hoby. At this time it was in the hands of all the gentlefolk of Europe. It is interesting to compare the 'Cortegiano' with Della Casa's 'Galateo,' published in 1558. The 'Galateo' professes to be a guide for gentlemen in social intercourse, and the minute rules laid down would satisfy the most exacting purist of the present century. In manners and their ethical analysis we have certainly gained nothing during the last three centuries. The principle upon which these precepts of conduct are founded is not etiquette or fashion, but respect for the sensibilities of others. It would be difficult to compose a more philosophical treatise on the lesser duties imposed upon us by the conditions of society—such minute matters as the proper way to blow the nose or use the napkin, being referred to the one rule of acting so as to cause no inconvenience to our neighbors.

In the opening of his 'Cortegiano' Castiglione introduces us to the court of Urbino—refined, chivalrous, witty, cultivated, gentle—confessedly the purest and most elevated court in Italy. He brings together the Duchess Elizabetta Gonzaga; Emilia Pia, wife of Antonio da Montefeltro, whose wit is as keen and active as that of Shakespeare's Beatrice; Pietro Bembo, the Ciceronian dictator of letters in the sixteenth century; Bernardo Bibbiena, Berni's patron, the author of 'Calandra,' whose portrait by Raphael in the Pitti enables us to estimate his innate love of humor; Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours, of whom the marble effigy by Michael Angelo still guards the tomb in San Lorenzo; together with other knights and gentlemen less known to fame—two Genoese Fregosi, Gasparo Pallavicini, Lodovico, Count of Canossa, Cesare Gonzaga, l' Unico Aretino, and Fra Serafino the humorist. These ladies and gentlemen hold discourse together, as was the custom of Urbino, in the drawing-room of the duchess during four consecutive evenings. The theme of their conversation is the Perfect Courtier. What must that man be who deserves the name of Cortegiano, and how must he conduct himself? The subject of discussion carries us at once into a bygone age. No one asks now what makes the perfect courtier; but in Italy of the Renaissance, owing to the changes from republican to despotic forms of government which we have traced in the foregoing pages, the question was one of the most serious importance. Culture and good breeding, the amenities of intercourse, the pleasures of the intellect, scarcely existed outside the sphere of courts; for one effect of the Revival of Learning had been to make the acquisition of polite knowledge difficult, and the proletariat was less cultivated then than in the age of Dante. Men of ambition who desired to acquire a reputation whether as soldiers or as poets, as politicians or as orators, came to court and served their chosen prince in war or at the council-table, or even in humbler offices of state. To be able, therefore, to conduct himself with dignity, to know how to win the favor of his master and to secure the good-will of his peers, to retain his personal honor and to make himself respected without being hated, to inspire admiration and to avoid envy, to outshine all honorable rivals in physical exercises and the craft of arms, to maintain a credable equipage and retinue, to be instructed in the arts of polite intercourse, to converse with ease and wit, to be at home alike in the tilting-yard, the banquet-hall, the boudoir, and the council-chamber, to understand diplomacy, to live before the world and yet to keep a fitting privacy and distance,—these and a hundred other matters were the climax and perfection of the culture of a gentleman. Courts being now the only centers in which it was possible for a man of birth and talents to shine, it followed that the perfect courtier and the perfect gentleman were synonymous terms. Castiglione's treatise may therefore be called an essay on the character of the true gentleman as he appeared in Italy. Eliminating all qualities that are special to any art or calling, he defines those essential characteristics which were requisite for social excellence in the sixteenth century. It is curious to observe how unchangeable are the laws of real politeness and refinement. Castiglione's courtier is, with one or two points of immaterial difference, a modern gentleman, such as all men of education at the present day would wish to be.

The first requisite in the ideal courtier is that he must be noble. The Count of Canossa, who proposed the subject of debate, lays down this as an axiom. Gaspar Pallavicino denies the necessity.[1] But after a lively discussion, his opinion is overruled, on the ground that, although the gentle virtues may be found among people of obscure origin, yet a man who intends to be a courtier must start with the prestige of noble birth. Next he must be skillful in the use of weapons and courageous in the battle-field. He is not, however, bound to have the special science of a general, nor must he in times of peace profess unique devotion to the art of war: that would argue a coarseness of nature or vainglory. Again, he must excel in all manly sports and exercises, so as, if possible, to beat the actual professors of each game, or feat of skill on their own ground. Yet here also he should avoid mere habits of display, which are unworthy of a man who aspires to be a gentleman and not an athlete. Another indispensable quality is gracefulness in all he does and says. In order to secure this elegance, he must beware of every form of affectation: 'Let him shun affectation, as though it were a most perilous rock; and let him seek in everything a certain carelessness, to hide his art, and show that what he says or does comes from him without effort or deliberation.' This vice of affectation in all its kinds, and the ways of avoiding it, are discussed with a delicacy of insight which would do credit to a Chesterfield of the present century, sending forth his son into society for the first time. Castiglione goes so far as to condemn the pedantry of far-fetched words and the coxcombry of elaborate costumes, as dangerous forms of affectation. His courtier must speak and write with force and freedom. He need not be a purist in his use of language, but may use such foreign phrases and modern idioms as are current in good society, aiming only at simplicity and clearness. He must add to excellence in arms polite culture in letters and sound scholarship, avoiding that barbarism of the French, who think it impossible to be a good soldier and an accomplished student at the same time. Yet his learning should be always held in reserve, to give brilliancy and flavor to his wit, and not brought forth for merely erudite parade. He must have a practical acquaintance with music and dancing; it would be well for him to sing and touch various stringed and keyed instruments, so as to relax his own spirits and to make himself agreeable to ladies. If he can compose verses and sing them to his own accompaniment, so much the better. Finally, he ought to understand the arts of painting and sculpture; for criticism, even though a man be neither poet nor artist, is an elegant accomplishment. Such are the principal qualities of the Cortegiano.

[1] Italy, earlier than any other European nation, developed theoretical democracy. Dante had defined true nobility to consist of personal excellence in a man or in his ancestors; he also called 'nobiltà' sister of 'filosofia.' Poggio in his 'Dialogue De Nobilitate,' into which he introduces Niccolo Niccoli and Lorenzo de' Medici (Cosimo's brother), decides that only merit constitutes true nobility. Hawking and hunting are far less noble occupations than agriculture; descent from a long line of historic criminals is no honor. French and English castle-life, and the robber-knighthood of Germany, he argues, are barbarous. Lorenzo pleads the authority of Aristotle in favor of noble blood; Poggio contests the passage quoted, and shows the superiority of the Latin word 'nobilitas' (distinction) over the Greek term [Greek: eugeneia] (good birth). The several kinds of aristocracy in Italy are then discussed. In Naples the nobles despise business and idle their time away. In Rome they manage their estates. In Venice and Genoa they engage in commerce. In Florence they either take to mercantile pursuits or live upon the produce of their land in idleness. The whole way of looking at the subject betrays a liberal and scientific spirit, wholly free from prejudice. Machiavelli ('Discorsi,' i. 55) is very severe on the aristocracy, whom he defines as 'those who live in idleness on the produce of their estates, without applying themselves to agriculture or to any other useful occupation.' He points out that the Venetian nobles are not properly so called, since they are merchants. The different districts of Italy had widely different conceptions of nobility. Naples was always aristocratic, owing to its connection with France and Spain. Ferrara maintained the chivalry of courts. Those states, on the other hand, which had been democratized, like Florence, by republican customs, or like Milan, by despotism, set less value on birth than on talent and wealth. It was not until the age of the Spanish ascendency (latter half of sixteenth century) that Cosimo I. withdrew the young Florentines from their mercantile pursuits and enrolled them in his order of S. Stephen, and that the patricians of Genoa carried daggers inscribed 'for the chastisement of villeins.'

The precepts which are laid down for the use of his acquirements and his general conduct, resolve themselves into a strong recommendation of tact and caution. The courtier must study the nature of his prince, and show the greatest delicacy in approaching him, so as to secure his favor, and to avoid wearying him with importunities. In tendering his advice he must be modest; but he should make a point of never sacrificing his own liberty of judgment. To obey his master in dishonorable things would be a derogation from his dignity; and if he discovers any meanness in the character of the prince, it is better to quit his service.[1] A courtier must be careful to create beforehand a favorable opinion of himself in places he intends to visit. Much stress is laid upon his choice of clothes and the equipment of his servants. In these respects he should aim at combining individuality with simplicity, so as to produce an impression of novelty without extravagance or eccentricity. He must be very cautious in his friendships, selecting his associates with care, and admitting only one or two to intimacy.