The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

3

The rulers and their dependents were together called ‘lo stato,’ and this name afterwards acquired the meaning of the collective existence of a territory.

4

C. Winckelmann, De Regni Siculi Administratione qualis fuerit regnante Friderico II., Berlin. 1859. A. del Vecchio, La legislazione di Federico II. imperatore. Turin, 1874. Frederick II. has been fully and thoroughly discussed by Winckelmann and Schirrmacher.

5

Baumann, Staatslehre des Thomas von Aquino. Leipzig, 1873, esp. pp. 136 sqq.

6

Cento Novelle Antiche, ed. 1525. For Frederick, Nov. 2, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 53, 59, 90, 100; for Ezzelino, Nov. 31, and esp. 84.

7

Scardeonius, De Urbis Patav. Antiqu. in Grævius, Thesaurus, vi. iii. p. 259.

8

Sismondi, Hist. de Rép. Italiennes, iv. p. 420; viii. pp. 1 sqq.

9

Franco Sacchetti, Novelle (61, 62).

10

Dante, it is true, is said to have lost the favour of this prince, which impostors knew how to keep. See the important account in Petrarch, De Rerum Memorandarum, lib. ii. 3, 46.

11

Petrarca, Epistolæ Seniles, lib. xiv. 1, to Francesco di Carrara (Nov. 28, 1373). The letter is sometimes printed separately with the title, ‘De Republica optime administranda,’ e.g. Bern, 1602.

12

It is not till a hundred years later that the princess is spoken of as the mother of the people. Comp. Hieron. Crivelli’s funeral oration on Bianca Maria Visconti, in Muratori, Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, xxv. col. 429. It was by way of parody of this phrase that a sister of Sixtus IV. is called in Jac Volateranus (Murat., xxiii. col. 109) ‘mater ecclesiæ.’

13

With the parenthetical request, in reference to a previous conversation, that the prince would again forbid the keeping of pigs in the streets of Padua, as the sight of them was unpleasing, especially for strangers, and apt to frighten the horses.

14

Petrarca, Rerum Memorandar., lib. iii. 2, 66.—Matteo I. Visconti and Guido della Torre, then ruling in Milan, are the persons referred to.

15

Matteo Villani, v. 81: the secret murder of Matteo II. (Maffiolo) Visconti by his brother.

16

Filippo Villani, Istorie, xi. 101. Petrarch speaks in the same tone of the tyrants dressed out ‘like altars at a festival.’—The triumphal procession of Castracane at Lucca is described minutely in his life by Tegrimo, in Murat., xi., col, 1340.

17

De Vulgari Eloqui, i. c. 12: … ‘qui non heroico more, sed plebeo sequuntur superbiam.’

18

This we find first in the fifteenth century, but their representations are certainly based on the beliefs of earlier times: L. B. Alberti, De re ædif., v. 3.—Franc. di Giorgio, ‘Trattato,’ in Della Valle, Lettere Sanesi, iii. 121.

19

Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 61.

20

Matteo Villani, vi. 1.

21

The Paduan passport office about the middle of the fourteenth century is referred to by Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 117, in the words, ‘quelli delle bullete.’ In the last ten years of the reign of Frederick II., when the strictest control was exercised on the personal conduct of his subjects, this system must have been very highly developed.

22

Corio, Storia di Milano, fol. 247 sqq. Recent Italian writers have observed that the Visconti have still to find a historian who, keeping the just mean between the exaggerated praises of contemporaries (e.g. Petrarch) and the violent denunciations of later political (Guelph) opponents, will pronounce a final judgment upon them.

23

E.g. of Paolo Giovio: Elogia Virorum bellicâ virtute illustrium, Basel, 1575, p. 85, in the life of Bernabò. Giangal. (Vita, pp. 86 sqq.) is for Giovio ‘post Theodoricum omnium præstantissimus.’ Comp. also Jovius, Vitæ xii. Vicecomitum Mediolani principum, Paris, 1549. pp. 165 sqq.

24

Corio, fol. 272, 285.

25

Cagnola, in the Archiv. Stor., iii. p. 23.

26

So Corio, fol. 286, and Poggio, Hist. Florent. iv. in Murat. xx. col 290.—Cagnola (loc. cit.) speaks of his designs on the imperial crown. See too the sonnet in Trucchi, Poesie Ital. ined., ii. p. 118:

“Stan le città lombarde con le chiave
In man per darle a voi … etc.
Roma vi chiamo: Cesar mio novello
Io sono ignuda, e l’anima pur vive: