The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we have already referred.

Florence not only existed under political forms more varied than those of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally, but it reflected upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of the relations of individuals and classes to a variable whole. The pictures of the great civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as they are delineated in Froissart, and the narratives of the German chroniclers of the fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the primacy of a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean despotism—all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors are laid bare to the light.[173 - So far as Cosimo (1433-1465) and his grandson Lorenzo Magnifico (d. 1492) are concerned, the author refrains from any criticism on their internal policy. The exaltation of both, particularly of Lorenzo, by William Roscoe (Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, called the Magnificent, 1st ed. Liverpool, 1795; 10th ed. London, 1851), seems to have been a principal cause of the reaction of feeling against them. This reaction appeared first in Sismondi (Hist. des Rép. Italiennes, xi.), in reply to whose strictures, sometimes unreasonably severe, Roscoe again came forward (Illustrations, Historical and Critical, of the Life of Lor. d. Med., London, 1822); later in Gino Capponi (Archiv. Stor. Ital. i. (1842), pp. 315 sqq.), who afterwards (Storia della Rep. di Firenze, 2 vols. Florence, 1875) gave further proofs and explanations of his judgment. See also the work of Von Reumont (Lor. d. Med. il Magn.), 2 vols. Leipzig, 1874, distinguished no less by the judicial calmness of its views than by the mastery it displays of the extensive materials used. See also A. Castelman: Les Medicis, 2 vols. Paris, 1879. The subject here is only casually touched upon. Comp. two works of B. Buser (Leipzig, 1879) devoted to the home and foreign policy of the Medici. (1) Die Beziehungen der Medicus zu Frankreich. 1434-1494, &c. (2) Lorenzo de’ Medici als italienischen Staatsman, &c., 2nd ed., 1883.] At length Macchiavelli in his Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies without our province to determine whether and in what points Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the case in his life of Castruccio Castracane—a fancy picture of the typical despot. We might find something to say against every line of the ‘Istorie Fiorentine,’ and yet the great and unique value of the whole would remain unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo Pitti, Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of illustrious names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us! The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the highest and most original life which the world could then show may appear to one but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another a devilish delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to a third may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an object of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was for ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once powerful and now conquered rivals like Pisa—a rule of which the necessary consequence was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly an extreme one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded Florence to accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances, would have been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal union of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to the scaffold.[174 - Franc. Burlamacchi, father of the head of the Lucchese Protestants, Michele B. See Arch. Stor. Ital. ser. i. tom. x., pp. 435-599; Documenti, pp. 146 sqq.; further Carlo Minutoli, Storia di Fr. B., Lucca, 1844, and the important additions of Leone del Prete in the Giornale Storico degli Archiv. Toscani, iv. (1860), pp. 309 sqq. It is well known how Milan, by its hard treatment of the neighbouring cities from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, prepared the way for the foundation of a great despotic state. Even at the time of the extinction of the Visconti in 1447, Milan frustrated the deliverance of Upper Italy, principally through not accepting the plan of a confederation of equal cities. Comp. Corio, fol. 358 sqq.] From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarised it with foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who does not admire the people, which was wrought up by its venerated preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem, when looked at from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best results shine forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were ‘fools,’ as Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon Florence, but he confesses himself that they achieved things which seemed incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would have got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than that Florence ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of its enemies. It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and gardens, and the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it would have been the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling memories.

In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a combination of existing forces and tendencies,[175 - On the third Sunday in Advent, 1494, Savonarola preached as follows on the method of bringing about a new constitution: The sixteen companies of the city were each to work out a plan, the Gonfalonieri to choose the four best of these, and the Signory to name the best of all on the reduced list. Things, however, took a different turn, under the influence indeed of the preacher himself. See P. Villari, Savonarola. Besides this sermon, S. had written a remarkable Trattato circa il regimento di Ferenze (reprinted at Lucca, 1817).] was constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli is not wholly free from it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices, sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive the rich and the poor alike. They naïvely fetch their examples from classical antiquity, and borrow the party names ‘ottimati,’ ‘aristocrazia,’[176 - The latter first in 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici. See Varchi, i. 121, &c.] as a matter of course. The world since then has become used to these expressions and given them a conventional European sense, whereas all former party names were purely national, and either characterised the cause at issue or sprang from the caprice of accident. But how a name colours or discolours a political cause!

But of all who thought it possible to construct a state, the greatest beyond all comparison was Macchiavelli.[177 - Macchiavelli, Storie Fior. l. iii. cap. 1: ‘Un Savio dator di leggi,’ could save Florence.] He treats existing forces as living and active, takes a large and an accurate view of alternative possibilities, and seeks to mislead neither himself nor others. No man could be freer from vanity or ostentation; indeed, he does not write for the public, but either for princes and administrators or for personal friends. The danger for him does not lie in an affectation of genius or in a false order of ideas, but rather in a powerful imagination which he evidently controls with difficulty. The objectivity of his political judgment is sometimes appalling in its sincerity; but it is the sign of a time of no ordinary need and peril, when it was a hard matter to believe in right, or to credit others with just dealing. Virtuous indignation at his expense is thrown away upon us who have seen in what sense political morality is understood by the statesmen of our own century. Macchiavelli was at all events able to forget himself in his cause. In truth, although his writings, with the exception of very few words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the Florentines themselves treated him at last as a criminal,[178 - Varchi, Stor. Fior. i. p. 210.] he was a patriot in the fullest meaning of the word. But free as he was, like most of his contemporaries, in speech and morals, the welfare of the state was yet his first and last thought.

His most complete programme for the construction of a new political system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to Leo X.,[179 - ‘Discorso sopra il riformar lo Stato di Firenze,’ in the Opere Minori, p. 207.] composed after the death of the younger Lorenzo Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519), to whom he had dedicated his ‘Prince.’ The state was by that time in extremities and utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not always morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he hopes to set up the republic in the form of a moderate democracy, as heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of concessions to the Pope, to the Pope’s various adherents, and to the different Florentine interests, cannot be imagined; we might fancy ourselves looking into the works of a clock. Principles, observations, comparisons, political forecasts, and the like are to be found in numbers in the ‘Discorsi,’ among them flashes of wonderful insight. He recognises, for example, the law of a continuous though not uniform development in republican institutions, and requires the constitution to be flexible and capable of change, as the only means of dispensing with bloodshed and banishments. For a like reason, in order to guard against private violence and foreign interference—‘the death of all freedom’—he wishes to see introduced a judicial procedure (‘accusa’) against hated citizens, in place of which Florence had hitherto had nothing but the court of scandal. With a masterly hand the tardy and involuntary decisions are characterised, which at critical moments play so important a part in republican states. Once, it is true, he is misled by his imagination and the pressure of events into unqualified praise of the people, which chooses its officers, he says, better than any prince, and which can be cured of its errors by ‘good advice.’[180 - The same view, doubtless borrowed from here, occurs in Montesquieu.] With regard to the government of Tuscany, he has no doubt that it belongs to his native city, and maintains, in a special ‘Discorso’ that the reconquest of Pisa is a question of life or death; he deplores that Arezzo, after the rebellion of 1502, was not razed to the ground; he admits in general that Italian republics must be allowed to expand freely and add to their territory in order to enjoy peace at home, and not to be themselves attacked by others, but declares that Florence had always begun at the wrong end, and from the first made deadly enemies of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena, while Pistoja, ‘treated like a brother,’ had voluntarily submitted to her.[181 - Belonging to a rather later period (1532?). Compare the opinion of Guicciardini, terrible in its frankness, on the condition and inevitable organisation of the Medicean party. Lettere di Principi, iii. fol. 124, (ediz. Venez. 1577).]

It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and this unique city—the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the modern European spirit. Siena suffered from the gravest organic maladies, and its relative prosperity in art and industry must not mislead us on this point. Æneas Sylvius[182 - Æn. Sylvii, Apologia ad Martinum Mayer, p. 701. To the same effect Macchiavelli, Discorsi, i. 55, and elsewhere.] looks with longing from his native town over to the ‘merry’ German imperial cities, where life is embittered by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary officials, and by no political factions.[183 - How strangely modern half-culture affected political life is shown by the party struggles of 1535. Della Valle, Lettere Sanesi, iii. p. 317. A number of small shopkeepers, excited by the study of Livy and of Macchiavelli’s Discorsi, call in all seriousness for tribunes of the people and other Roman magistrates against the misgovernment of the nobles and the official classes.] Genoa scarcely comes within range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher culture.[184 - Piero Valeriano, De Infelicitate Literator., speaking of Bartolommeo della Rovere. (The work of P. V. written 1527 is quoted according to the edition by Menken, Analecta de Calamitate Literatorum, Leipz. 1707.) The passage here meant can only be that at p. 384, from which we cannot infer what is stated in the text, but in which we read that B. d. R. wished to make his son abandon a taste for study which he had conceived and put him into business.] Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a character, and disturbed so violently the whole course of life, that we can hardly understand how, after so many revolutions and invasions, the Genoese ever contrived to return to an endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing to the fact that nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the same time almost without exception active men of business.[185 - Senarega, De reb. Genuens, in Murat. xxiv. col. 548. For the insecurity of the time see esp. col. 519, 525, 528, &c. For the frank language of the envoy on the occasion of the surrender of the state to Francesco Sforza (1464), when the envoy told him that Genoa surrendered in the hope of now living safely and comfortably, see Cagnola, Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 165 sqq. The figures of the Archbishop, Doge, Corsair, and (later) Cardinal Paolo Fregoso form a notable contrast to the general picture of the condition of Italy.] The example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what insecurity wealth and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of distant colonies, are compatible.

Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES

AS the majority of the Italian states were in their internal constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign countries also a work of art. That nearly all of them were the result of recent usurpations, was a fact which exercised as fatal an influence in their foreign as in their internal policy. Not one of them recognised another without reserve; the same play of chance which had helped to found and consolidate one dynasty might upset another. Nor was it always a matter of choice with the despot whether to keep quiet or not. The necessity of movement and aggrandisement is common to all illegitimate powers. Thus Italy became the scene of a ‘foreign policy’ which gradually, as in other countries also, acquired the position of a recognised system of public law. The purely objective treatment of international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples, attained a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty and grandeur of its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression of a bottomless abyss.

Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or gradually so to reduce its strength that one state after another must fall into her hands.[186 - So Varchi, at a much later time. Stor. Fiorent. i. 57.] But on a closer view it is evident that this complaint did not come from the people, but rather from the courts and official classes, which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while the mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence. Even Florence,[187 - Galeazzo Maria Sforza, indeed, declared the contrary (1467) to the Venetian agent, namely, that Venetian subjects had offered to join him in making war on Venice; but this is only vapouring. Comp. Malipiero, Annali Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. p. 216 sqq. On every occasion cities and villages voluntarily surrendered to Venice, chiefly, it is true, those that escaped from the hands of some despot, while Florence had to keep down the neighbouring republics, which were used to independence, by force of arms, as Guicciardini (Ricordi, n. 29) observes.] with its restive subject cities, found itself in a false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial jealousy and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of Cambray actually did strike a serious blow at the state (p. 68 (#x5_x_5_i31)), which all Italy ought to have supported with united strength.

The other states, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly, and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which their evil conscience might suggest. Ludovico Moro, the Aragonese kings of Naples, and Sixtus IV.—to say nothing of the smaller powers—kept Italy in a state of constant and perilous agitation. It would have been well if the atrocious game had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the nature of the case that intervention and help should at last be sought from abroad—in particular from the French and the Turks.

The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking naïveté its old Guelph preference for the French.[188 - Most strongly, perhaps, in an instruction to the ambassadors going to Charles VII. in the year 1452. (See Fabroni, Cosmus, Adnot. 107, fol. ii. pp. 200 sqq.) The Florentine envoys were instructed to remind the king of the centuries of friendly relations which had subsisted between France and their native city, and to recall to him that Charles the Great had delivered Florence and Italy from the barbarians (Lombards), and that Charles I. and the Romish Church were ‘fondatori della parte Guelfa. Il qual fundamento fa cagione della ruina della contraria parte e introdusse lo stato di felicità, in che noi siamo.’ When the young Lorenzo visited the Duke of Anjou, then staying at Florence, he put on a French dress. Fabroni, ii. p. 9.] And when Charles VIII. actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed unaccountable.[189 - Comines, Charles VIII. chap. x. The French were considered ‘comme saints.’ Comp. chap. 17; Chron. Venetum, in Murat. xxiv. col. 5, 10, 14, 15; Matarazzo, Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor. xvi. ii. p. 23, not to speak of countless other proofs. See especially the documents in Desjardins, op. cit. p. 127, note 1.] In the imagination of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a wise, just, and powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the difference that he was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long before all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their part, tried to make use of France in a wholly different way. When the Franco-English wars came to an end, when Louis XI. began to cast about his diplomatic nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of what was to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as 1642.[190 - Pii II. Commentarii, x. p. 492.] The mortal terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during the Burgundian war, in which he was apparently the ally of Charles as well as of Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.[191 - Gingins, Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais, etc. i. pp. 26, 153, 279, 283, 285, 327, 331, 345, 359; ii. pp. 29, 37, 101, 217, 306. Charles once spoke of giving Milan to the young Duke of Orleans.] The plan of an equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by Lorenzo the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic spirit, which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the best. When Louis XI. offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of Naples and Sixtus IV., he replied, ‘I cannot set my own advantage above the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do so, Italy is lost.’[192 - Niccolò Valori, Vita di Lorenzo, Flor. 1568. Italian translation of the Latin original, first printed in 1749 (later in Galletti, Phil. Villani, Liber de Civit. Flor. famosis Civibus, Florence, 1847, pp. 161-183; passage here referred to p. 171). It must not, however, be forgotten that this earliest biography, written soon after the death of Lorenzo, is a flattering rather than a faithful portrait, and that the words here attributed to Lorenzo are not mentioned by the French reporter, and can, in fact, hardly have been uttered. Comines, who was commissioned by Louis XI. to go to Rome and Florence, says (Mémoires, l. vi. chap. 5): ‘I could not offer him an army, and had nothing with me but my suite.’ (Comp. Reumont, Lorenzo, i. p. 197, 429; ii. 598). In a letter from Florence to Louis XI. we read (Aug. 23, 1478: ‘Omnis spes nostra reposita est in favoribus suæ majestatis.’ A. Desjardins, Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane (Paris, 1859), i. p. 173. Similarly Lorenzo himself in Kervyn de Lettenhove, Lettres et Négotiations de Philippe de Comines, i. p. 190. Lorenzo, we see, is in fact the one who humbly begs for help, not who proudly declines it.Dr. Geiger in his appendix maintains that Dr. Burchhardt’s view as to Lorenzo’s national Italian policy is not borne out by evidence. Into this discussion the translator cannot enter. It would need strong proof to convince him that the masterly historical perception of Dr. Burchhardt was in error as to a subject which he has studied with minute care. In an age when diplomatic lying and political treachery were matters of course, documentary evidence loses much of its weight, and cannot be taken without qualification as representing the real feelings of the persons concerned, who fenced, turned about, and lied, first on one side and then on another, with an agility surprising to those accustomed to live among truth-telling people (S.G.C.M.)Authorities quoted by Dr. Geiger are: Reumont, Lorenzo, 2nd ed., i. 310; ii. 450. Desjardins: Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane (Paris, 1859), i. 173. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Lettres et Négociations de Philippe de Comines, i. 180.] For the other princes, the King of France was alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.[193 - Fabroni, Laurentius Magnificus, Adnot. 205 sqq. In one of his Briefs it was said literally, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo;’ but it is to be hoped that he did not allude to the Turks. (Villari, Storia di Savonarola, ii. p. 48 of the ‘Documenti.’)]

Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the expedition of Charles VIII.[194 - E.g. Jovian. Pontan. in his Charon. In the dialogue between Æcus, Minos, and Mercurius (Op. ed. Bas. ii. p. 1167) the first says: ‘Vel quod haud multis post sæculis futurum auguror, ut Italia, cujus intestina te odia male habent Minos, in unius redacta ditionem resumat imperii majestatem.’ And in reply to Mercury’s warning against the Turks, Æcus answers: ‘Quamquam timenda hæc sunt, tamen si vetera respicimus, non ab Asia aut Græcia, verum a Gallis Germanisque timendum Italiæ semper fuit.’] And when Charles was back again on the other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of intervention had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was understood too late that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had become great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence and territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised Italian states, and indeed to copy them, only on a gigantic scale. Schemes of annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held the Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all came to a bad end.

Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too, with as little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had at various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken, and Frederick II. had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the Oriental nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived the old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them, there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II. and his successors. And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of Alfonso King of Naples.[195 - Comines, Charles VIII., chap. 7. How Alfonso once tried in time of war to seize his opponents at a conference, is told by Nantiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1073. He was a genuine predecessor of Cæsar Borgia.] From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks into Italy.[196 - Pii II. Commentarii, x. p. 492. See a letter of Malatesta in which he recommends to Mohammed II. a portrait-painter, Matteo Passo of Verona, and announces the despatch of a book on the art of war, probably in the year 1463, in Baluz. Miscell. iii. 113. What Galeazzo Maria of Milan told in 1467 to a Venetian envoy, namely, that he and his allies would join with the Turks to destroy Venice, was said merely by way of threat. Comp. Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. p. 222. For Boccalino, see page 36.] But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom Mohammed—at the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments, especially of Venice[197 - Porzio, Congiura dei Baroni, l. i. p. 5. That Lorenzo, as Porzio hints, really had a hand in it, is not credible. On the other hand, it seems only too certain that Venice prompted the Sultan to the deed. See Romanin, Storia Documentata di Venezia, lib. xi. cap. 3. After Otranto was taken, Vespasiano Bisticci uttered his ‘Lamento d’Italia, Archiv. Stor. Ital. iv. pp. 452 sqq.]—had once wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II. against the Venetians.[198 - Chron. Venet. in Murat. xxiv. col. 14 and 76.] The same charge was brought against Ludovico Moro. ‘The blood of the slain, and the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to God for vengeance against him,’ says the state historian. In Venice, where the government was informed of everything, it was known that Giovanni Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of the Moor, had entertained the Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan.[199 - Malipiero, l. c. p. 565, 568.] The two most respectable among the Popes of the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died in the deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to lead in person; their successors embezzled the contributions sent for this purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded the indulgences granted in return for them into a private commercial speculation.[200 - Trithem. Annales Hirsaug, ad. a. 1490, tom. ii. pp. 535 sqq.] Innocent VIII. consented to be gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a salary paid by the prisoner’s brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI. supported the steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter threatened him with a Council.[201 - Malipiero, l. c. 161; comp. p. 152. For the surrender of Djem to Charles VIII. see p. 145, from which it is clear that a connection of the most shameful kind existed between Alexander and Bajazet, even if the documents in Burcardus be spurious. See on the subject Ranke, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber, 2 Auflage, Leipzig, 1874, p. 99, and Gregorovius, bd. vii. 353, note 1. Ibid. p. 353, note 2, a declaration of the Pope that he was not allied with the Turks.] It is clear that the notorious alliance between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new or unheard of.

Indeed, we find instances of whole populations to whom it seemed no particular crime to go over bodily to the Turks. Even if it were only held out as a threat to oppressive governments, this is at least a proof that the idea had become familiar. As early as 1480 Battista Mantovano gives us clearly to understand that most of the inhabitants of the Adriatic coast foresaw something of this kind, and that Ancona in particular desired it.[202 - Bapt. Mantuanus, De Calamitatibus Temporum, at the end of the second book, in the song of the Nereid Doris to the Turkish fleet.] When Romagna was suffering from the oppressive government of Leo X., a deputy from Ravenna said openly to the Legate, Cardinal Guilio Medici: ‘Monsignore, the honourable Republic of Venice will not have us, for fear of a dispute with the Holy See; but if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put ourselves into his hands.’[203 - Tommaso Gar, Relaz. della Corte di Roma, i. p. 55.]

It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the enslavement of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it under the Turkish rule.[204 - Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker. The opinion of Michelet (Reforme, p. 467), that the Turks would have adopted Western civilisation in Italy, does not satisfy me. This mission of Spain is hinted at, perhaps for the first time, in the speech delivered by Fedra Inghirami in 1510 before Julius II., at the celebration of the capture of Bugia by the fleet of Ferdinand the Catholic. See Anecdota Litteraria, ii. p. 419.] By itself, divided as it was, it could hardly have escaped this fate.

If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of this period deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by fear, passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern fashion, with its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each possessed he held in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant nobility to foster in the mind of the prince the mediæval sense of honour, with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular case and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose services were used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no pride of caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the class of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably more accurate acquaintance with its own country and that of its neighbours, than was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated the economical and moral capacities of friend and foe down to the smallest particular. The rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born masters of statistical science. With such men negotiation was possible; it might be presumed that they would be convinced and their opinion modified when practical reasons were laid before them. When the great Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of Filippo Maria Visconti, he was able to satisfy his gaoler that the rule of the House of Anjou instead of his own at Naples would make the French masters of Italy; Filippo Maria set him free without ransom and made an alliance with him.[205 - Among others Corio, fol. 333. Jov. Pontanus, in his treatise, De Liberalitate, cap. 28, considers the free dismissal of Alfonso as a proof of the ‘liberalitas’ of Filippo Maria. (See above, p. 38, note 1.) Compare the line of conduct adopted with regard to Sforza, fol. 329.] A northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way, certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like that of Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of self-interest is shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo the Magnificent, to the universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante at Naples—a man who would be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner, and was by no means too scrupulous to do so.[206 - Nic. Valori, Vita di Lorenzo; Paul Jovius, Vita Leonis X. l. i. The latter certainly upon good authority, though not without rhetorical embellishment. Comp. Reumont, i. 487, and the passage there quoted.] For to arrest a powerful monarch, and then to let him go alive, after extorting his signature and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis XI. at Péronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;[207 - If Comines on this and many other occasions observes and judges as objectively as any Italian, his intercourse with Italians, particularly with Angelo Catto, must be taken into account.] so that Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or else not to come back at all. The art of political persuasion was at this time raised to a point—especially by the Venetian ambassadors—of which northern nations first obtained a conception from the Italians, and of which the official addresses give a most imperfect idea. These are mere pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious etiquette, was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank speaking in diplomatic intercourse.[208 - Comp. e.g. Malipiero, pp. 216, 221, 236, 237, 468, &c., and above pp. 88, note 2, and 93, note 1. Comp. Egnatius, fol. 321 a. The Pope curses an ambassador; a Venetian envoy insults the Pope; another, to win over his hearers, tells a fable.] A man like Macchiavelli appears in his ‘Legazioni’ in an almost pathetic light. Furnished with scanty instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of inferior rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his pleasure in picturesque description. From that time Italy was and remained the country of political ‘Istruzioni’ and ‘Relazioni.’ There was doubtless plenty of diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy alone at so early a period has preserved documentary evidence of it in considerable quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the life of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the hand of Pontano and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander VI., gives us the highest opinion of this class of political writing, although it is only quoted incidentally and as one of many written. And how many other despatches, as important and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of this and later times, still remain unknown or unedited![209 - In Villari, Storia di Savonarola, vol. ii. p. xliii. of the ‘Documenti,’ among which are to be found other important political letters. Other documents, particularly of the end of the fifteenth century in Baluzius, Miscellanea, ed. Mansi, vol. i. See especially the collected despatches of Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of sixteenth centuries in Desjardins, Négotiations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane. vols. i. ii. Paris. 1859, 1861.]

A special division of this work will treat of the study of man individually and nationally, which among the Italians went hand in hand with the study of the outward conditions of human life.

CHAPTER IX.

WAR AS A WORK OF ART

IT must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed the character of a product of reflection.[210 - The subject has been lately treated more fully by Max Jähns, Die Kriegskunst als Kunst, Leipzig, 1874.] Throughout the countries of the West the education of the individual soldier in the middle ages was perfect within the limits of the then prevalent system of defence and attack: nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts of besieging and of fortification. But the development both of strategy and of tactics was hindered by the character and duration of military service, and by the ambition of the nobles, who disputed questions of precedence in the face of the enemy, and through simple want of discipline caused the loss of great battles like Crécy and Maupertuis. Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organisation; and the early introduction of fire-arms did its part in making war a democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of the gun-founder, and of the artillerist—men belonging to another class than the nobility—was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the soul of the small and admirably-organised bands of mercenaries, would suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the introduction at least of the musket, which had been lately invented in Germany.[211 - Pii II. Comment. iv. p. 190, ad. a. 1459.] We read that Paolo Vitelli,[212 - The Cremonese prided themselves on their skill in this department. See Cronaca di Cremona in the Bibliotheca Historica Italica, vol. i. Milan, 1876, p. 214, and note. The Venetians did the same, Egnatius, fol. 300 sqq.] while recognising and himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of the captured ‘schioppettieri,’ of the enemy, because he held it unworthy that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid low by a common, despised foot soldier. On the whole, however, the new discoveries were accepted and turned to useful account, till the Italians became the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of fortifications and in the means of attacking them.[213 - To this effect Paul Jovius (Elogia, p. 184) who adds: ‘Nondum enim invecto externarum gentium cruento more, Italia milites sanguinarii et multæ cædis avidi esse didicerant.’ We are reminded of Frederick of Urbino, who would have been ‘ashamed’ to tolerate a printed book in his library. See Vespas. Fiorent.] Princes like Federigo of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian I. appears superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there existed a comprehensive science and art of military affairs; here, for the first time, that impartial delight is taken in able generalship for its own sake, which might, indeed, be expected from the frequent change of party and from the wholly unsentimental mode of action of the Condottieri. During the Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter were attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign.[214 - Porcellii Commentaria Jac. Picinini, in Murat. xx. A continuation for the war of 1453, ibid. xxv. Paul Cortesius (De Hominibus Doctis, p. 33, Florence, 1734) criticises the book severely on account of the wretched hexameters.] It is written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Cæsar’s Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like. Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,[215 - Porcello calls Scipio Æmilianus by mistake, meaning Africanus Major.] Piccinino through the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army; the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks, praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to posterity.[216 - Simonetta, Hist. Fr. Sfortiæ, in Murat. xxi. col. 630.] Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of educated men in general as well as of specialists, while the contemporary narratives of northerners, such as the ‘Burgundian War’ by Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest dilettante who has ever treated in that character[217 - So he was considered. Comp. Bandello, parte i. nov. 40.] of military affairs, was then busy writing his ‘Arte della Guerra.’ But the development of the individual soldier found its most complete expression in those public and solemn conflicts between one or more pairs of combatants which were practised long before the famous ‘Challenge of Barletta’[218 - Comp. e.g. De Obsidione Tiphernatium, in vol. 2, of the Rer. Italic. Scriptores excodd. Florent. col. 690. The duel of Marshal Boucicault with Galeazzo Gonzaga (1406) in Cagnola, Arch. Stor. iii. p. 25. Infessura tells us of the honour paid by Sixtus IV. to the duellists among his guards. His successors issued bulls against duelling.] (1503). The victor was assured of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to the Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer regarded as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit, and to the minds of the spectators seemed to be both the decision of an exciting competition and a satisfaction for the honour of the army or the nation.[219 - We may here notice parenthetically (see Jähns, pp. 26, sqq.) the less favourable side of the tactics of the Condottieri. The combat was often a mere sham-fight, in which the enemy was forced to withdraw by harmless manœuvres. The object of the combatants was to avoid bloodshed, at the worst to make prisoners with a view to the ransom. According to Macchiavelli, the Florentines lost in a great battle in the year 1440 one man only.]

It is obvious that this purely rational treatment of warlike affairs allowed, under certain circumstances, of the worst atrocities, even in the absence of a strong political hatred, as, for instance, when the plunder of a city had been promised to the troops. After the four days’ devastation of Piacenza, which Sforza was compelled to permit to his soldiers (1447), the town long stood empty, and at last had to be peopled by force.[220 - For details, see Arch. Stor. Append. tom. v.] Yet outrages like these were nothing compared with the misery which was afterwards brought upon Italy by foreign troops, and most of all by the Spaniards, in whom perhaps a touch of Oriental blood, perhaps familiarity with the spectacles of the Inquisition, had unloosed the devilish element of human nature. After seeing them at work at Prato, Rome, and elsewhere, it is not easy to take any interest of the higher sort in Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles V., who knew what these hordes were, and yet unchained them. The mass of documents which are gradually brought to light from the cabinets of these rulers will always remain an important source of historical information; but from such men no fruitful political conception can be looked for.

CHAPTER X.

THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS

THE Papacy and the dominions of the Church[221 - Here once for all we refer our readers to Ranke’s Popes, vol. i., and to Sugenheim, Geschichte der Entstehung und Ausbildung des Kirchenstaates. The still later works of Gregorovius and Reumont have also been made use of, and when they offer new facts or views, are quoted. See also Geschichte der römischen Papstthums, W. Wattenbach, Berlin, 1876.] are creations of so peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the general characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only occasionally. The deliberate choice and adaptation of political expedients, which gives so great an interest to the other states, is what we find least of all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this state undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and a great statesman and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who again brought the ecclesiastical state into complete subjection. The danger of a final dissolution was still greater at the time of the schism, when neither the Roman nor the French Pope was rich enough to reconquer the newly-lost state; but this was done under Martin V., after the unity of the Church was restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the same danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and remained a thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in and near Rome itself, the Papacy was defied by the great families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, and Anguillara; in Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic republics had almost ceased to exist, for whose devotion the Papacy had showed so little gratitude; their place had been taken by a crowd of princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty and obedience signified little. As self-dependent powers, standing on their own merits, they have an interest of their own; and from this point of view the most important of them have been already discussed (pp. 28 sqq., 44 sqq.).

Nevertheless, a few general remarks on the Papacy can hardly be dispensed with. New and strange perils and trials came upon it in the course of the fifteenth century, as the political spirit of the nation began to lay hold upon it on various sides, and to draw it within the sphere of its action. The least of these dangers came from the populace or from abroad; the most serious had their ground in the characters of the Popes themselves.

Let us, for this moment, leave out of consideration the countries beyond the Alps. At the time when the Papacy was exposed to mortal danger in Italy, it neither received nor could receive the slightest assistance either from France, then under Louis XI., or from England, distracted by the wars of the Roses, or from the then disorganized Spanish monarchy, or from Germany, but lately betrayed at the Council of Basel. In Italy itself there were a certain number of instructed and even uninstructed people, whose national vanity was flattered by the Italian character of the Papacy; the personal interests of very many depended on its having and retaining this character; and vast masses of the people still believed in the virtue of the Papal blessing and consecration;[222 - For the impression made by the blessing of Eugenius IV. in Florence, see Vespasiano Fiorent, p. 18. See also the passage quoted in Reumont, Lorenzo, i. 171. For the impressive offices of Nicholas V., see Infessura (Eccard, ii. col. 1883 sqq.) and J. Manetti, Vita Nicolai V. (Murat. iii. ii. col. 923). For the homage given to Pius II., see Diario Ferrarese (Murat. xxiv. col. 205), and Pii II. Commentarii, passim, esp. iv. 201, 204, and xi. 562. For Florence, see Delizie degli Eruditi, xx. 368. Even professional murderers respect the person of the Pope.The great offices in church were treated as matters of much importance by the pomp-loving Paul II. (Platina, l. c. 321) and by Sixtus IV., who, in spite of the gout, conducted mass at Easter in a sitting posture. (Jac. Volaterran. Diarium, Murat. xxiii. col. 131.) It is curious to notice how the people distinguished between the magical efficacy of the blessing and the unworthiness of the man who gave it; when he was unable to give the benediction on Ascension Day, 1481, the populace murmured and cursed him. (Ibid. col. 133.)] among them notorious transgressors like that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who still prayed to be absolved by Alexander VI., when the Pope’s son had him slaughtered.[223 - Macchiavelli, Scritti Minori, p. 142, in the well-known essay on the catastrophe of Sinigaglia. It is true that the French and Spanish soldiers were still more zealous than the Italians. Comp. in Paul. Jov. Vita Leonis X. (l. ii.) the scene before the battle of Ravenna, in which the Legate, weeping for joy, was surrounded by the Spanish troops, and besought for absolution. See further (ibid.) the statements respecting the French in Milan.] But all these grounds of sympathy put together would not have sufficed to save the Papacy from its enemies, had the latter been really in earnest, and had they known how to take advantage of the envy and hatred with which the institution was regarded.

And at the very time when the prospect of help from without was so small, the most dangerous symptoms appeared within the Papacy itself. Living, as it now did, and acting in the spirit of the secular Italian principalities, it was compelled to go through the same dark experiences as they; but its own exceptional nature gave a peculiar colour to the shadows.

As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, small account was taken of its internal agitations, so many were the Popes who had returned after being expelled by popular tumult, and so greatly did the presence of the Curia minister to the interests of the Roman people. But Rome not only displayed at times a specific anti-papal radicalism,[224 - In the case of the heretics of Poli, in the Campagna, who held the doctrine that a genuine Pope must show the poverty of Christ as the mark of his calling, we have simply a kind of Waldensian doctrine. Their imprisonment under Paul II. is related by Infessura (Eccard, ii. col. 1893), Platina, p. 317, &c.] but in the most serious plots which were then contrived, gave proof of the working of unseen hands from without. It was so in the case of the conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro against Nicholas V. (1453), the very Pope who had done most for the prosperity of the city, but who, by enriching the cardinals, and transforming Rome into a papal fortress, had aroused the discontent of the people.[225 - As an illustration of this feeling see the poem addressed to the Pope, quoted in Gregorovius, vii. 136.] Porcaro aimed at the complete overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices, who, though their names are not handed down to us,[226 - Dialogus de Conjuratione Stephani de Porcariis, by his contemporary Petrus Godes de Vicenza, quoted and used by Gregorovius, viii. 130. L. B. Alberti, De Porcaria Conjuratione, in Murat. xxv. col. 309. Porcari was desirous ‘omnem pontificiam turbam funditus exstinguere.’ The author concludes: ‘Video sane, quo stent loco res Italiæ; intelligo qui sint, quibus hic perturbata esse omnia conducat....’ He names them ‘Extrinsecus impulsores,’ and is of opinion that Porcari will find successors in his misdeeds. The dreams of Porcari certainly bore some resemblance to those of Cola Rienzi. He also referred to himself the poem ‘Spirto Gentil,’ addressed by Petrarch to Rienzi.] are certainly to be looked for among the Italian governments of the time. Under the pontificate of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous declamation against the gift of Constantine, with the wish for the speedy secularisation of the States of the Church.[227 - ‘Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam Cæsaris.... Tunc Papa et dicetur et erit pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesiæ,’ &c. Valla’s work was written rather earlier, and was aimed at Eugenius IV. See Vahlen, Lor. Valla (Berlin, 1870), pp. 25 sqq., esp. 32. Nicholas V., on the other hand, is praised by Valla, Gregorovius, vii. 136.]

The Catilinarian gang, with which Pius II. had to contend[228 - Pii II. Comment. iv. pp. 208 sqq. Voigt, Enea Silvio, iii. pp. 151 sqq.] (1460), avowed with equal frankness their resolution to overthrow the government of the priests, and its leader, Tiburzio, threw the blame on the soothsayers, who had fixed the accomplishment of his wishes for this very year. Several of the chief men of Rome, the Prince of Tarentum, and the Condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, were accomplices and supporters of Tiburzio. Indeed, when we think of the booty which was accumulated in the palaces of wealthy prelates—the conspirators had the Cardinal of Aquileia especially in view—we are surprised that, in an almost unguarded city, such attempts were not more frequent and more successful. It was not without reason that Pius II. preferred to reside anywhere rather than in Rome, and even Paul II.[229 - Platina, Vita Pauli II.] was exposed to no small anxiety through a plot formed by some discharged abbreviators, who, under the command of Platina, besieged the Vatican for twenty days. The Papacy must sooner or later have fallen a victim to such enterprises, if it had not stamped out the aristocratic factions under whose protection these bands of robbers grew to a head.

This task was undertaken by the terrible Sixtus IV. He was the first Pope who had Rome and the neighbourhood thoroughly under his control, especially after his successful attack on the House of Colonna, and consequently, both in his Italian policy and in the internal affairs of the Church, he could venture to act with a defiant audacity, and to set at nought the complaints and threats to summon a council which arose from all parts of Europe. He supplied himself with the necessary funds by simony, which suddenly grew to unheard-of proportions, and which extended from the appointment of cardinals down to the granting of the smallest favours.[230 - Battista Mantovano, De Calamitatibus Temporum, l. iii. The Arabian sells incense, the Tyrian purple, the Indian ivory: ‘Venalia nobis templa, sacerdotes, altaria sacra, coronæ, ignes, thura, preces, cælum est venale Deusque.’ Opera, ed. Paris, 1507, fol. 302 b. Then follows an exhortation to Pope Sixtus, whose previous efforts are praised, to put an end to these evils.] Sixtus himself had not obtained the papal dignity without recourse to the same means.

A corruption so universal might sooner or later bring disastrous consequences on the Holy See, but they lay in the uncertain future. It was otherwise with nepotism, which threatened at one time to destroy the Papacy altogether. Of all the ‘nipoti,’ Cardinal Pietro Riario enjoyed at first the chief and almost exclusive favour of Sixtus. He soon drew upon him the eyes of all Italy,[231 - See e.g. the Annales Placentini, in Murat. xx. col. 943.] partly by the fabulous luxury of his life, partly through the reports which were current of his irreligion and his political plans. He bargained with Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan (1473), that the latter should become King of Lombardy, and then aid him with money and troops to return to Rome and ascend the papal throne; Sixtus, it appears, would have voluntarily yielded it to him.[232 - Corio, Storia di Milano, fol. 416-420. Pietro had already helped at the election of Sixtus. See Infessura, in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1895. It is curious that in 1469 it had been prophesied that deliverance would come from Savona (home of Sixtus, elected in 1471) within three years. See the letter and date in Baluz. Miscell. iii. p. 181. According to Macchiavelli, Storie Fiorent. l. vii. the Venetians poisoned the cardinal. Certainly they were not without motives to do so.] This plan, which, by making the Papacy hereditary, would have ended in the secularization of the papal state, failed through the sudden death of Pietro. The second ‘nipote,’ Girolamo Riario, remained a layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From this time the ‘nipoti,’ by their endeavours to found principalities for themselves, became a new source of confusion to Italy. It had already happened that the Popes tried to make good their feudal claims on Naples in favour of their relatives;[233 - Honorius II. wished, after the death of William I. (1127), to annex Apulia, as a feof reverted to St. Peter.] but since the failure of Calixtus III. such a scheme was no longer practicable, and Girolamo Riario, after the attempt to conquer Florence (and who knows how many other places) had failed, was forced to content himself with founding a state within the limits of the papal dominions themselves. This was, in so far, justifiable, as Romagna, with its princes and civic despots, threatened to shake off the papal supremacy altogether, and ran the risk of shortly falling a prey to Sforza or the Venetians, when Rome interfered to prevent it. But who, at times and in circumstances like these, could guarantee the continued obedience of ‘nipoti’ and their descendants, now turned into sovereign rulers, to Popes with whom they had no further concern? Even in his lifetime the Pope was not always sure of his own son or nephew, and the temptation was strong to expel the ‘nipote’ of a predecessor and replace him by one of his own. The reaction of the whole system on the Papacy itself was of the most serious character; all means of compulsion, whether temporal or spiritual, were used without scruple for the most questionable ends, and to these all the other objects of the Apostolic See were made subordinate. And when they were attained, at whatever cost of revolutions and proscriptions, a dynasty was founded which had no stronger interest than the destruction of the Papacy.

At the death of Sixtus, Girolamo was only able to maintain himself in his usurped principality of Forli and Imola by the utmost exertions of his own, and by the aid of the House of Sforza. He was murdered in 1488. In the conclave (1484) which followed the death of Sixtus—that in which Innocent VIII. was elected—an incident occurred which seemed to furnish the Papacy with a new external guarantee. Two cardinals, who, at the same time, were princes of ruling houses, Giovanni d’Aragona, son of King Ferrante, and Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Moor, sold their votes with the most shameless effrontery;[234 - Fabroni, Laurentius Mag. Adnot. 130. An informer, Vespucci, sends word of both, ‘Hanno in ogni elezione a mettere a sacco questa corte, e sono i maggior ribaldi del mondo.’] so that, at any rate, the ruling houses of Naples and Milan became interested, by their participation in the booty, in the continuance of the papal system. Once again, in the following Conclave, when all the cardinals but five sold themselves, Ascanio received enormous sums in bribes, not without cherishing the hope that at the next election he would himself be the favoured candidate.[235 - Corio, fol. 450. Details, partly from unpublished documents, of these acts of bribery in Gregorovius, vii. 310 sqq.]

Lorenzo the Magnificent, on his part, was anxious that the House of Medici should not be sent away with empty hands. He married his daughter Maddalena to the son of the new Pope—the first who publicly acknowledged his children—Franceschetto Cybò, and expected not only favours of all kinds for his own son, Cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., but also the rapid promotion of his son-in-law.[236 - A most characteristic letter of exhortation by Lorenzo in Fabroni, Laurentius Magn. Adnot. 217, and extracts in Ranke, Popes, i. p. 45, and in Reumont, Lorenzo, ii. pp. 482 sqq.] But with respect to the latter, he demanded impossibilities. Under Innocent VIII. there was no opportunity for the audacious nepotism by which states had been founded, since Franceschetto himself was a poor creature who, like his father the Pope, sought power only for the lowest purpose of all—the acquisition and accumulation of money.[237 - And perhaps of certain Neapolitan feofs, for the sake of which Innocent called in the Angevins afresh against the immovable Ferrante. The conduct of the Pope in this affair and his participation in the second conspiracy of the barons, were equally foolish and dishonest. For his method of treating with foreign powers, see above p. 127, note 2.] The manner, however, in which father and son practised this occupation must have led sooner or later to a final catastrophe—the dissolution of the state. If Sixtus had filled his treasury by the rule of spiritual dignities and favours, Innocent and his son, for their part, established an office for the sale of secular favours, in which pardons for murder and manslaughter were sold for large sums of money. Out of every fine 150 ducats were paid into the papal exchequer, and what was over to Franceschetto. Rome, during the latter part of this pontificate, swarmed with licensed and unlicensed assassins; the factions, which Sixtus had begun to put down, were again as active as ever; the Pope, well guarded in the Vatican, was satisfied with now and then laying a trap, in which a wealthy misdoer was occasionally caught. For Franceschetto the chief point was to know by what means, when the Pope died, he could escape with well-filled coffers. He betrayed himself at last, on the occasion of a false report (1490) of his father’s death; he endeavoured to carry off all the money in the papal treasury, and when this proved impossible, insisted that, at all events, the Turkish prince, Djem, should go with him, and serve as a living capital, to be advantageously disposed of, perhaps to Ferrante of Naples.[238 - Comp. in particular Infessura, in Eccard. Scriptores, ii. passim.] It is hard to estimate the political possibilities of remote periods, but we cannot help asking ourselves the question, if Rome could have survived two or three pontificates of this kind. Even with reference to the believing countries of Europe, it was imprudent to let matters go so far that not only travellers and pilgrims, but a whole embassy of Maximilian, King of the Romans, were stripped to their shirts in the neighbourhood of Rome, and that envoys had constantly to turn back without setting foot within the city.

Such a condition of things was incompatible with the conception of power and its pleasures which inspired the gifted Alexander VI. (1492-1503), and the first event that happened was the restoration, at least provisionally, of public order, and the punctual payment of every salary.

Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian civilization, this pontificate might be passed over, since the Borgias are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander spoke Spanish in public with Cæsar; Lucretia, at her entrance to Ferrara, where she wore a Spanish costume, was sung to by Spanish buffoons; their confidential servants consisted of Spaniards, as did also the most ill-famed company of the troops of Cæsar in the war of 1500; and even his hangman, Don Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastian Pinzon,[239 - According to the Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani, i. p. 60, and iii. p. 309, Seb. Pinzon was a native of Cremona.] seem to have been of the same nation. Among his other achievements, Cæsar, in true Spanish fashion, killed, according to the rules of the craft, six wild bulls in an enclosed court. But the Roman corruption, which seemed to culminate in this family, was already far advanced when they came to the city.

What they were and what they did has been often and fully described.[240 - Recently by Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 2 Bände 3 Aufl., Stuttgart, 1875.] Their immediate purpose, which, in fact, they attained, was the complete subjugation of the pontifical state. All the petty despots,[241 - Except the Bentivoglio at Bologna, and the House of Este at Ferrara. The latter was compelled to form a family relationship, Lucrezia marrying Prince Alfonso.] who were mostly more or less refractory vassals of the Church, were expelled or destroyed; and in Rome itself the two great factions were annihilated, the so-called Guelph Orsini as well as the so-called Ghibelline Colonna. But the means employed were of so frightful a character, that they must certainly have ended in the ruin of the Papacy, had not the contemporaneous death of both father and son by poison suddenly intervened to alter the whole aspect of the situation. The moral indignation of Christendom was certainly no great source of danger to Alexander; at home he was strong enough to extort terror and obedience; foreign rulers were won over to his side, and Louis XII. even aided him to the utmost of his power. The mass of the people throughout Europe had hardly a conception of what was passing in Central Italy. The only moment which was really fraught with danger—when Charles VIII. was in Italy—went by with unexpected fortune, and even then it was not the Papacy as such that was in peril, but Alexander, who risked being supplanted by a more respectable Pope.[242 - According to Corio (fol. 479) Charles had thoughts of a Council, of deposing the Pope, and even of carrying him away to France, this upon his return from Naples. According to Benedictus, Carolus VIII. (in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1584), Charles, while in Naples, when Pope and cardinals refused to recognise his new crown, had certainly entertained the thought ‘de Italiæ imperio deque pontificis statu mutando,’ but soon after made up his mind to be satisfied with the personal humiliation of Alexander. The Pope, nevertheless, escaped him. Particulars in Pilorgerie, Campagne et Bulletins de la Grande Armée d’Italie, 1494, 1495 (Paris, 1866, 8vo.), where the degree of Alexander’s danger at different moments is discussed (pp. 111, 117, &c.). In a letter, there printed, of the Archbishop of St. Malo to Queen Anne, it is expressly stated: ‘Si nostre roy eust voulu obtemperer à la plupart des Messeigneurs les Cardinaulx, ilz eussent fait ung autre pappe en intention de refformer l’église ainsi qu’ilz disaient. Le roy désire bien la reformacion, mais il ne veult point entreprandre de sa depposicion.’] The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his son Cæsar Borgia.

In the nature of the father, ambition, avarice, and sensuality were combined with strong and brilliant qualities. All the pleasures of power and luxury he granted himself from the first day of his pontificate in the fullest measure. In the choice of means to this end he was wholly without scruple; it was known at once that he would more than compensate himself for the sacrifices which his election had involved,[243 - Corio, fol. 450. Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor. vii. i. p. 318. The rapacity of the whole family can be seen in Malipiero, among other authorities, l. c. p. 565. A ‘nipote’ was splendidly entertained in Venice as papal legate, and made an enormous sum of money by selling dispensations; his servants, when they went away, stole whatever they could lay their hands on, including a piece of embroidered cloth from the high altar of a church at Murano.] and that the simony of the seller would far exceed the simony of the buyer. It must be remembered that the vice-chancellorship and other offices which Alexander had formerly held had taught him to know better and turn to more practical account the various sources of revenue than any other member of the Curia. As early as 1494, a Carmelite, Adam of Genoa, who had preached at Rome against simony, was found murdered in his bed with twenty wounds. Hardly a single cardinal was appointed without the payment of enormous sums of money.

But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence of his son Cæsar Borgia, his violent measures assumed that character of devilish wickedness which necessarily reacts upon the ends pursued. What was done in the struggle with the Roman nobles and with the tyrants of Romagna exceeded in faithlessness and barbarity even that measure to which the Aragonese rulers of Naples had already accustomed the world; and the genius for deception was also greater. The manner in which Cæsar isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other relations or courtiers, whenever their favour with the Pope or their position in any other respect became inconvenient to him, is literally appalling. Alexander was forced to acquiesce in the murder of his best-loved son, the Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly dread of Cæsar.[244 - This in Panvinio alone among contemporary historians (Contin. Platinæ, p. 339), ‘insidiis Cæsaris fratris interfectus … connivente … ad scelus patre,’ and to the same effect Jovius, Elog. Vir. Ill. p. 302. The profound emotion of Alexander looks like a sign of complicity. After the corpse was drawn out of the Tiber, Sannazaro wrote (Opera Omnia Latine Scripta 1535, fol. 41 a):‘Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sixte, putemusPiscaris natum retibus, ecce, tuum.’Besides the epigram quoted there are others (fol. 36 b, 42 b, 47 b, 51 a, b—in the last passage 5) in Sannazaro on, i.e. against, Alexander. Among them is a famous one, referred to in Gregorovius i. 314, on Lucrezia Borgia:Ergo te semper cupiet Lucretia Sextus?O fatum diri nominis: hic pater est?Others execrate his cruelty and celebrate his death as the beginning of an era of peace. On the Jubilee (see below, p. 108, note 1), there is another epigram, fol. 43 b. There are others no less severe (fol. 34 b, 35 a, b, 42 b, 43 a) against Cæsar Borgia, among which we find in one of the strongest:Aut nihil aut Cæsar vult dici Borgia; quidni?Cum simul et Cæsar possit, et esse nihil.(made use of by Bandello, iv. nov. 11). On the murder of the Duke of Gandia, see especially the admirable collection of the most original sources of evidence in Gregorovius, vii. 399-407, according to which Cæsar’s guilt is clear, but it seems very doubtful whether Alexander knew, or approved, of the intended assassination.]

What were the final aims of the latter? Even in the last months of his tyranny, when he had murdered the Condottieri at Sinigaglia, and was to all intents and purposes master of the ecclesiastical state (1503) those who stood near him gave the modest reply, that the Duke merely wished to put down the factions and the despots, and all for the good of the Church only; that for himself he desired nothing more than the lordship of the Romagna, and that he had earned the gratitude of all the following Popes by ridding them of the Orsini and Colonna.[245 - Macchiavelli, Opere, ed. Milan, vol. v. pp. 387, 393, 395, in the Legazione al Duca Valentino.] But no one will accept this as his ultimate design. The Pope Alexander himself, in his discussions with the Venetian ambassador, went farther than this, when committing his son to the protection of Venice: ‘I will see to it,’ he said, ‘that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to you.’[246 - Tommaso Gar, Relazioni della Corte di Roma, i. p. 12, in the Rel. of P. Capello. Literally: ‘The Pope has more respect for Venice than for any other power in the world.’ ‘E però desidera, che ella (Signoria di Venezia) protegga il figliuolo, e dice voler fare tale ordine, che il papato o sia suo, ovvero della signoria nostra.’ The word ‘suo’ can only refer to Cæsar. An instance of the uncertainty caused by this usage is found in the still lively controversy respecting the words used by Vasari in the Vita di Raffaello: ‘A Bindo Altoviti fece il ritratto suo, &c.’] Cæsar certainly added that no one could become Pope without the consent of Venice, and for this end the Venetian cardinals had only to keep well together. Whether he referred to himself or not we are unable to say; at all events, the declaration of his father is sufficient to prove his designs on the pontifical throne. We further obtain from Lucrezia Borgia a certain amount of indirect evidence, in so far as certain passages in the poems of Ercole Strozza may be the echo of expressions which she as Duchess of Ferrara may easily have permitted herself to use. Here too Cæsar’s hopes of the Papacy are chiefly spoken of;[247 - Strozzii Poetae, p. 19, in the ‘Venatio’ of Ercole Strozza: ’ … cui triplicem fata invidere coronam.’ And in the Elegy on Cæsar’s death, p. 31 sqq.: ‘Speraretque olim solii decora alta paterni.’] but now and then a supremacy over all Italy is hinted at,[248 - Ibid. Jupiter had once promised‘Affore Alexandri sobolem, quæ poneret olimItaliæ leges, atque aurea sæcla referret,’ etc.] and finally we are given to understand that as temporal ruler Cæsar’s projects were of the greatest, and that for their sake he had formerly surrendered his cardinalate.[249 - Ibid.‘Sacrumque decus majora parantem deposuisse.’] In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that Cæsar, whether chosen Pope or not after the death of Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost, and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could not as Pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody, could have secularised the States of the Church, and he would have been forced to do so in order to keep them.[250 - He was married, as is well known, to a French princess of the family of Albret, and had a daughter by her; in some way or other he would have attempted to found a dynasty. It is not known that he took steps to regain the cardinal’s hat, although (acc. to Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 285) he must have counted on the speedy death of his father.] Unless we are much deceived, this is the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Macchiavelli treats the great criminal; from Cæsar, or from nobody, could it be hoped that he ‘would draw the steel from the wound,’ in other words, annihilate the Papacy—the source of all foreign intervention and of all the divisions of Italy. The intriguers who thought to divine Cæsar’s aims, when holding out to him hopes of the kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been dismissed with contempt.[251 - Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 334. Designs on Siena and eventually on all Tuscany certainly existed, but were not yet ripe; the consent of France was indispensable.]

But all logical conclusions from his premisses are idle, not because of the unaccountable genius which in fact characterized him as little as it did the Duke of Friedland, but because the means which he employed were not compatible with any large and consistent course of action. Perhaps, indeed, in the very excess of his wickedness some prospect of salvation for the Papacy may have existed even without the accident which put an end to his rule.

Even if we assume that the destruction of the petty despots in the pontifical state had gained for him nothing but sympathy, even if we take as proof of his great projects the army, composed of the best soldiers and officers in Italy, with Lionardo da Vinci as chief engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1503, other facts nevertheless wear such a character of unreason that our judgment, like that of contemporary observers, is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of this kind is the devastation and maltreatment of the newly won state, which Cæsar still intended to keep and to rule over.[252 - Macchiavelli, l. c. pp. 326, 351, 414; Matarazzo, Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor. xvi. ii. pp. 157 and 221. He wished his soldiers to quarter themselves where they pleased, so that they gained more in time of peace than of war. Petrus Alcyonius, De Exilio (1522), ed. Mencken, p. 19, says of the style of conducting war: ‘Ea scelera et flagitia a nostris militibus patrata sunt quæ ne Scythæ quidem aut Turcæ, aut Pœni in Italia commisissent.’ The same writer (p. 65 (#x5_x_5_i28)) blames Alexander as a Spaniard: ‘Hispani generis hominem, cujus proprium est, rationibus et commodis Hispanorum consultum velle, non Italorum.’ See above, p. 109.] Another is the condition of Rome and of the Curia in the last decades of the pontificate. Whether it were that father and son had drawn up a formal list of proscribed persons,[253 - To this effect Pierio Valeriano, De Infelicitate Literat. ed. Mencken, p. 282, in speaking of Giovanni Regio: ‘In arcano proscriptorum albo positus.’] or that the murders were resolved upon one by one, in either case the Borgias were bent on the secret destruction of all who stood in their way or whose inheritance they coveted. Of this money and movable goods formed the smallest part; it was a much greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death, and that he received the revenues of their offices while vacant, and the price of these offices when they were filled by the successors of the murdered men. The Venetian ambassador, Paolo Capello[254 - Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 11. From May 22, 1502, onwards the Despatches of Giustiniani, 3 vols. Florence, 1876, edited by Pasquale Villari, offer valuable information.] announces in the year 1500: ‘Every night four or five murdered men are discovered—bishops, prelates and others—so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the Duke (Cæsar).’ He himself used to wander about Rome in the night time with his guards,[255 - Paulus Jovius, Elogia, Cæsar Borgia. In the Commentarii Urbani of Ralph. Volaterianus, lib. xxii. there is a description of Alexander VI., composed under Julius II., and still written very guardedly. We here read: ‘Roma … nobilis jam carneficina facta erat.’] and there is every reason to believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on the persons of those unknown to him.

As early as the year 1499 the despair was so great and so general that many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put to death.[256 - Diario Ferrarese, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 362.] But those whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence, fell victims to their poison. For the cases in which a certain amount of discretion seemed requisite, a white powder[257 - Paul. Jovius, Histor. ii. fol. 47.] of an agreeable taste was made use of, which did not work on the spot, but slowly and gradually, and which could be mixed without notice in any dish or goblet. Prince Djem had taken some of it in a sweet draught, before Alexander surrendered him to Charles VIII. (1495), and at the end of their career father and son poisoned themselves with the same powder by accidentally tasting a sweetmeat intended for a wealthy cardinal, probably Adrian of Corneto.[258 - See the passages in Ranke, Röm. Päpste; Sämmtl. Werke, Bd. xxxvii. 35, and xxxix. Anh. Abschn. 1, Nro. 4, and Gregorovius, vii. 497, sqq. Giustiniani does not believe in the Pope’s being poisoned. See his Dispacci, vol. ii. pp. 107 sqq.; Villari’s Note, pp. 120 sqq., and App. pp. 458 sqq.] The official epitomiser of the history of the Popes, Onufrio Panvinio,[259 - Panvinius, Epitome Pontificum, p. 359. For the attempt to poison Alexander’s successor, Julius II., see p. 363. According to Sismondi, xiii. p. 246, it was in this way that Lopez, Cardinal of Capua, for years the partner of all the Pope’s secrets, came by his end; according to Sanuto (in Ranke, Popes, i. p. 52, note), the Cardinal of Verona also. When Cardinal Orsini died, the Pope obtained a certificate of natural death from a college of physicians.] mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio, and Michiel, whom Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth, Giovanni Borgia, whom Cæsar took into his own charge—though probably wealthy prelates seldom died in Rome at that time without giving rise to suspicions of this sort. Even tranquil students who had withdrawn to some provincial town were not out of reach of the merciless poison. A secret horror seemed to hang about the Pope; storms and thunderbolts, crushing in walls and chambers, had in earlier times often visited and alarmed him; in the year 1500,[260 - Prato, Arch. Stor. iii. p. 254; comp. Attilio Alessio, in Baluz. Miscell., iv. p. 518 sqq.] when these phenomena were repeated, they were held to be ‘cosa diabolica.’ The report of these events seems at last, through the well-attended jubilee[261 - And turned to the most profitable account by the Pope. Comp. Chron. Venetum, in Murat. xxiv. col. 133, given only as a report: ‘E si giudiceva, che il Pontefice dovesse cavare assai danari di questo Giubileo, che gli tornerà molto a proposito.] of 1500, to have been carried far and wide throughout the countries of Europe, and the infamous traffic in indulgences did what else was needed to draw all eyes upon Rome.[262 - Anshelm, Berner Chronik, iii. pp. 146-156. Trithem. Annales Hirsaug. tom. ii. pp. 579, 584, 586.] Besides the returning pilgrims, strange white-robed penitents came from Italy to the North, among them disguised fugitives from the Papal State, who are not likely to have been silent. Yet none can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of Christendom might have gone, before they became a source of pressing danger to Alexander. ‘He would,’ says Panvinio elsewhere,[263 - Panvin. Contin. Platinae, p. 341.] ‘have put all the other rich cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by death.’ And what might not Cæsar have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sick-bed! What a conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all his weapons, he had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had judiciously reduced by poison—and this at a time when there was no French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses itself in an abyss.

Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III. was elected, and, after his speedy death, that which chose Julius II.—both elections the fruits of a general reaction.

Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II. in all essential respects he was the saviour of the Papacy. His familiarity with the course of events since the pontificate of his uncle Sixtus had given him a profound insight into the grounds and conditions of the Papal authority. On these he founded his own policy, and devoted to it the whole force and passion of his unshaken soul. He ascended the steps of St. Peter’s chair without simony and amid general applause, and with him ceased, at all events, the undisguised traffic in the highest offices of the Church. Julius had favourites, and among them were some the reverse of worthy, but a special fortune put him above the temptation to nepotism. His brother, Giovanni della Rovere, was the husband of the heiress of Urbino, sister of the last Montefeltro Guidobaldo, and from this marriage was born, in 1491, a son, Francesco Maria della Rovere, who was at the same time Papal ‘nipote’ and lawful heir to the duchy of Urbino. What Julius elsewhere acquired, either on the field of battle or by diplomatic means, he proudly bestowed on the Church, not on his family; the ecclesiastical territory, which he found in a state of dissolution, he bequeathed to his successor completely subdued, and increased by Parma and Piacenza. It was not his fault that Ferrara too was not added to the dominions of the Church. The 700,000 ducats, which were stored up in the castle of St. Angelo, were to be delivered by the governor to none but the future Pope. He made himself heir of the cardinals, and, indeed, of all the clergy who died in Rome, and this by the most despotic means; but he murdered or poisoned none of them.[264 - Hence the splendour of the tombs of the prelates erected during their lifetime. A part of the plunder was in this way saved from the hands of the Popes.] That he should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an unavoidable necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at a time when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer or anvil, and when personality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If, despite all his high-sounding ‘Away with the barbarians!’ he nevertheless contributed more than any man to the firm settlement of the Spaniards in Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to the Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And to whom, sooner than to Spain, could the Church look for a sincere and lasting respect,[265 - Whether Julius really hoped that Ferdinand the Catholic would be induced to restore to the throne of Naples the expelled Aragonese dynasty, remains, in spite of Giovio’s declaration (Vita Alfonsi Ducis), very doubtful.] in an age when the princes of Italy cherished none but sacrilegious projects against her? Be this as it may, the powerful, original nature, which could swallow no anger and conceal no genuine good-will, made on the whole the impression most desirable in his situation—that of the ‘Pontefice terribile.’ He could even, with a comparatively clear conscience, venture to summon a council to Rome, and so bid defiance to that outcry for a council which was raised by the opposition all over Europe. A ruler of this stamp needed some great outward symbol of his conceptions; Julius found it in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s. The plan of it, as Bramante wished to have it, is perhaps the grandest expression of power in unity which can be imagined. In other arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of a wholly different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for his predecessors. The entrance into Bologna, at the end of the ‘Iter Julii Secundi,’ by the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendour of its own, and Giovan Antonio Flaminio,[266 - Both poems in Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi, iv. 257 and 297. Of his death the Cronaca di Cremona says: ‘quale fu grande danno per la Italia, perchè era homo che non voleva tramontani in Italia, ed haveva cazato Francesi, e l’animo era de cazar le altri.’ Bibl. Hist. Ital. (1876) i. 217. It is true that when Julius, in August, 1511, lay one day for hours in a fainting fit, and was thought to be dead, the more restless members of the noblest families—Pompeo Colonna and Antimo Savelli—ventured to call ‘the people’ to the Capitol, and to urge them to throw off the Papal yoke—‘a vendicarsi in libertà … a publica ribellione,’ as Guicciardini tells us in his tenth book. See, too, Paul. Jov. in the Vita Pompeji Columnae, and Gregorovius, viii. 71-75.] in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.

In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced the simony of the Papal elections.[267 - Septimo decretal. l. i. tit. 3, cap. 1-3.] After his death in 1513, the money-loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition by proposing that the endowments and offices hitherto held by the chosen candidate should be equally divided among themselves, in which case they would have elected the best-endowed cardinal, the incompetent Rafael Riario.[268 - Franc. Vettori, in the Arch. Stor. vi. 297.] But a reaction, chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered the miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected—the famous Leo X.

We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis, Riario, and Corneto (1517) which at most could have occasioned a change of persons, and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of creation of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real merit.[269 - Besides which it is said (Paul. Lang. Chronicon Cilicense) to have produced not less than 500,000 gold florins; the order of the Franciscans alone, whose general was made a cardinal, paid 30,000. For a notice of the various sums paid, see Sanuto, xxiv. fol. 227; for the whole subject see Gregorovius, viii. 214 sqq.]

But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread during the first two years of his office were perilous to the last degree. He seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation, the kingdom of Naples for his brother Giuliano, and for his nephew Lorenzo a powerful North Italian state, to comprise Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.[270 - Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 301. Arch. Stor. Append. i. p. 293 sqq. Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi, vi. p. 232 sqq. Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 42.] It is clear that the Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would have become a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would have been no further need to secularise it.

The plan found an insuperable obstacle in the political conditions of the time. Giuliano died early. To provide for Lorenzo, Leo undertook to expel the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, but reaped from the war nothing but hatred and poverty, and was forced, when in 1519 Lorenzo followed his uncle to the grave, to hand over the hardly-won conquests to the Church.[271 - Ariosto, Sat. vi. v. 106. ‘Tutti morrete, ed è fatal che muoja Leone appresso.’ Sat. 3 and 7 ridicule the hangers on at Leo’s Court.] He did on compulsion and without credit what, if it had been done voluntarily, would have been to his lasting honour. What, partly alone, and partly in alternate negotiations with Francis I. and Charles V., he attempted against Alfonso of Ferrara, and actually achieved against a few petty despots and Condottieri, was assuredly not of a kind to raise his reputation. And this was at a time when the monarchs of the West were yearly growing more and more accustomed to political gambling on a colossal scale, of which the stakes were this or that province of Italy.[272 - One of several instances of such combinations is given in the Lettere dei Principi, i. 65, in a despatch of the Cardinal Bibbiena from Paris of the year 1518.] Who could guarantee that, since the last decades had seen so great an increase of their power at home, their ambition could stop short of the States of the Church? Leo himself witnessed the prelude of what was fulfilled in the year 1527; a few bands of Spanish infantry appeared—of their own accord, it seems—at the end of 1520, on the borders of the Pontifical territory, with a view of laying the Pope under contribution,[273 - Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 333.] but were driven back by the Papal forces. The public feeling, too, against the corruptions of the hierarchy had of late years been drawing rapidly to a head, and men with an eye for the future, like the younger Pico della Mirandola, called urgently for reform.[274 - At the time of the Lateran Council, in 1512, Pico wrote an address: J. E. P. Oratio ad Leonem X. et Concilium Lateranense de Reformandis Ecclesiæ Moribus (ed. Hagenau, 1512, frequently printed in editions of his works). The address was dedicated to Pirckheimer and was again sent to him in 1517. Comp. Vir. Doct. Epist. ad Pirck., ed. Freytag, Leipz. 1838, p. 8. Pico fears that under Leo evil may definitely triumph over good, ‘et in te bellum a nostræ religionis hostibus ante audias geri quam pariri.’] Meantime Luther had already appeared upon the scene.