FOOTNOTES:

The fact that Venicedidmaintain great artists after the artistic arrest of Tuscany and Lombardy, is part of the proof that, as above contended (p. 221), it was papal and Spanish misrule rather than the change in the channels of trade that impoverished Italy in the sixteenth century. Venice could still prosper by her manufactures when her commerce was partly checked, because the volume of European trade went on increasing. As Hallam notes: "We are apt to fall into a vulgar error in supposing that Venice was crushed, or even materially affected [phrase slightly modified in footnote], as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the Portuguese. She was in factmore opulent, as her buildings themselves may prove, in the sixteenth century than in any preceding age. The French trade from Marseilles to the Levant, which began later to flourish, was what impoverished Venice rather than that of Portugal with the East Indies." As the treatise of Antonio Serra shows (1613), Venice was rich when Spanish Naples was poor (Introduction to the Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 165, 166).

(b) As regards Genoa, the explanation is similar. That republic resembled Venice in that it was from the beginning a city apart from the rest of Italy, devoted to foreign commerce, and absorbed in the management of distant possessions or trade colonies. When we compare the intellectual history of two such States with that of Florence, which was not less but more republican in its government, it becomes clear that it was not republicanism that limited culture in the maritime cities. Rather we must recognise that their development is analogous with that of England in the eighteenth century, when the growth of commerce, of foreign possessions, and of naval power seems to have turned the general energies, hitherto in large proportion intellectually employed, predominantly towards practical and administrative employment.[591]The case of Florence is the test for the whole problem. Its pre-eminence in art and letters alike is to be explained through (1) its being in constant touch with all the elements of Italian and other European culture; and (2) its having no direct maritime interests and no foreign possessions.[592]

IV. With the patronage of the princes of Ferrara, historyassociates the poetry of Ariosto and Tasso, though as a matter of fact theOrlando Furiososeems to have been written before Ariosto entered the ducal service. But even if that and theGerusalemmebe wholly credited to the principle of monarchism, it only needs to weigh the two works against those which were brought forth in the atmosphere of the free cities in order to see how little mere princely pay can avail for power and originality in literature where the princely rule thwarts the great instincts of personality. Ariosto and Tasso are charming melodists; and as such they have had an influence on European literature; but they have waned in distinction age by age, while earlier and later names have waxed. And all the while, what is delightful in them is clearly enough the outcome of the still manifold Italian culture in which they grew, though it may be that the influence of a court would do more to foster sheer melody than would the storm and stress of the life of a Republic.

Sismondi (Républiques italiennes, iv, 416-18), admits the encouragement given to men of letters by despots like Can' Grande, and the frequent presence of poets at the courts. But he rightly insists that the faculty of imagination itself visibly dwindled when intellectual freedom was gone. It is interesting to note how Montaigne, writing within a century of the production of theOrlando Furioso, is struck by its want of sustained imaginative flight in comparison with Virgil (Essais, B. ii, 10; éd. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 432). Compare the estimate of Cantù,Storia degli Italiani, cap. 142, ed. pop. x, 180-86.

In fine, we can rightly say with Mr. Symonds himself that the history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.[593]Andthisprocess, surely, was not accomplished at the courts of the despots. Nor can it well be disputed, finally, that the Spanish domination was the visible and final check to intellectual progress on the side of imaginative literature, at a time when there was every prospect of a great development of Italian drama. "It was the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit."[594]

Equally clear is it that the republican life evolved an amount ofexpansive commercial energy which at that period could not possibly have taken place under a tyrant. The efforts by which Florence developed her trade and power—efforts made possible by the mere union of self-interest among the commercial class—will compare with any process of monarchic imperialism in respect of mere persistency and success. Faced by the jealous enmity of Pisa, their natural port, and suffering from the trade burdens laid on them by the maritime States while they lacked a marine, the Florentines actually opened up trade communication with China when shut out from Egypt by the Venetians; traded through the port of Talamone when the Pisans barred their traffic; took Provençal and Neapolitan galleys in their pay when the Pisans and Genoese tried to close Talamone; and, after becoming masters of Pisa in 1406, not only established a well-ordered marine, but induced Genoa to sell to them the port of Leghorn. They could not, indeed, successfully compete with the Genoese and Venetians till the fall of the Greek Empire; but thereafter they contrived to obtain abundant concessions from the Turks, while the Genoese were driven out of the Levant. Commercial egoism, in fact, enabled them to tread the path of "empire" even as emperors had done long before them; and they hastened to the stage of political collapse on the old military road, spending on one war of two years, against Visconti, a sum equal to £15,000,000 at the present time; and in the twenty-nine years of struggle against Pisa (1377-1406) a sum equal to £58,000,000.[595]Thus they developed a capitalistic class, undermined in the old way the spirit of equity which is the cement of societies, and prepared their own subjection to a capitalist over-lord. But that is only another way of saying that the period of expansive energy preceded the age of the tyrant, wise or unwise.

When all is said, however, there can be no gainsaying of the judgment that the strifes of the republics were the frustration of their culture; and it matters little whether or not we set down the inveteracy of the strifes to the final scantiness and ill-distribution of the culture. Neither republics nor princes seem ever to have aimed at its diffusion. The latter, in common with the richer ecclesiastics, did undoubtedly promote the recovery of the literature of antiquity; but where the republics had failed to see any need for systematic popular tuition[596]the princes naturally did not dream of it. It wouldbe a fallacy, however, to suppose that, given the then state of knowledge and of political forces, any system of public schooling could have saved Italian liberty. No class had the science that could solve the problem which pressed on all. The increase and culmination of social and political evil in Renaissance Italy was an outcome of more forces than could be checked by any expedient known to the thought of the time. It must never be forgotten that the very dividedness of the cities, by maximising energy, had been visibly a cause of their growth in riches;[597]and that, though peace could have fostered that when once it had been attained, anything like a federation which should secure to the satisfaction of each their conflicting commercial interests was an enormously difficult conception. It would be a bad fallacy, again, to suppose that there was lacking to the Italians of the Renaissance a kind of insight or judgment found in other peoples of the same period. There is no trace of any such estimate in that age; and we who look back upon it are rather set marvelling at the intense and luminous play of Italian intelligence, keen as that of Redskins on the trail, so far as the realisation of the self-expressive and self-assertive appetites could go. The tragedy of the decadence, here as in the case of Rome, is measured by the play of power from which men and States fall away; for the forces which next came to the top stand for no mental superiority. The problem, in fact, was definitely beyond the grasp of the age. It remains to realise this by a survey of the process of decline from self-government to despotism.

FOOTNOTES:[541]Leo estimates that as early as the reign of Louis the Pious the Church owned about one-third of the land of Italy. Cp. B. iii, cc. 1, 3, as to the process.[542]Names derived from the German Welf (or Wölf) and Waiblingen; Italianised as Guelfo and Ghibellino. Waiblingen was the name of a castle in the diocese of Augsburg belonging to the Salian or Franconian emperors, the descendants of Conrad the Salic, Welf was a family name of the Dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, who constantly resisted the predominance of the emperors, both of the Franconian and the Hohenstaufen lines. The names seem to have become war-cries in Italy about the end of the twelfth century. In Florence they appear first in 1239. Villari,Two First Centuries, p. 181,note.[543]Sismondi,Short History, p. 81.[544]As to the relations of successive popes in the Dark Ages—each cancelling the acts of his predecessor—see Sismondi,Républiques, i, 142; Gregorovius, as last cited, andpassim.[545]Prof. Butler (Communes of Lombardy, p. 231), credits the Italians with having acquired, as a result of the perpetual wars of the cities, "a breadth of view and a vigour of mind unknown among the urban populations of other lands." How can "breadth of view" in politics be ascribed to communities whose unending strifes finally brought them all under despotism?[546]Machiavelli,Istorie fiorentine, l. ii. The seven majorartiwere (1) the judges and notaries; (2) the dealers in French cloths; (3) the money-changers; (4) the wool traders; (5) the physicians and apothecaries; (6) the silk dealers and mercers; and (7) the furriers.[547]Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. trans. iii, 260.[548]H. Scherer,Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels, 1852, i, 337, 338.[549]Cp. Symonds,Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 26-27.[550]Villari,Two First Centuries, p. 310; Hallam,Introd. to Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 8, 16, 19, 71, 77, 78. But see p. 74 as to the stimulus from Italy in the eleventh century. Cp. Gregorovius,Geschichte der Stadt Rom, B. viii, Kap. vii, § i (Bd. iv, 604-605), as to the primitive state of mental life in Rome in the twelfth century, and the resort of young nobles to Paris for education.[551]In the previous edition I accepted the still current statement that Salerno drew its first medical lore from the Saracens. But Dr. Rashdall has, I think, sufficiently shown that there is no basis for the theory (The Universities in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 77-86). Salerno seems rather to have preserved some of the classic lore on which the Saracens also founded. Arabic influence in the Italian schools began in the twelfth century, and was in full force early in the fourteenth, when Salerno was in complete decline (Id. p. 85).[552]As to the attitude and influence of Gregory the Great see Hallam,Literature of Europe, as cited, i, 4, 21, 22; and Gregorovius, B. iii, cap. iii, § 2 (ii, 88). As to the reforms of Gregory VII in the tenth century, see also Gregorovius, B. vii, cap. vii, § 5 (iv, 288). See the latter writer again, B. vii, cap. vi (iv, 242-46), and Guizot,Civilisation en Europe, leçon vi, ed. 1844, pp. 159-60, as to the effect of Hildebrandt's policy in dividing the Church.[553]Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 9; Muratori,Dissert.xv, cited by Lecky,Hist. of European Morals, ii, 71; Milman, as last cited, ii, 51.[554]We know further from Salvian, as noted above, p. 119, that the Christians of Gaul treated their slaves as badly as the pagans had ever done (De gubernatione Dei, l. iv). As to the whole subject, see the valuable researches of Larroque,De l'esclavage chez les nations chrétiennes, 2e éd. 1864, and Biot,De l'abolition de l'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.[555]Lea,Hist. Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 2nd ed. pp. 242-43.[556]Cp. Sismondi, as before cited, and Testa, as cited, p. 92. Testa's book, like so many other modern Italian treatises, is written with the garrulity of the Middle Ages, but embodies a good deal of research. The pietistic passage on p. 93 is contradicted by that on p. 92.[557]Hardwick,Church History: Middle Age, 1853, p. 58 and refs. Manumission was the legal preliminary to ordination; but it was often set aside, with the object of having the serf-priest more subject to discipline. Cp. Tytler,Hist. of Scotland, ed. 1869, ii, 255, as to bondmen-clerks in Scotland in the thirteenth century.[558]As in the war of cities against nobles under Conrad the Salic. See above, p. 203.[559]Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. 2.[560]Cp. Butler, pp. 224, 229.[561]As to these see Testa, p. 56. Compare the accounts of the later bloodless battles of thecondottieri, which were thus not without Italian precedent. Between 1013 and 1105 Pavia and Milan had six wars. Butler,The Communes of Lombardy, p. 58.[562]Cp. Heeren,Essai sur l'influence des Croisades, Villers' tr. 1808, p. 101; Bryce,Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. pp. 199, 211, 213, 223; Stubbs,Germany in the Middle Ages, 1908, pp. 105, 197.[563]Memoirs of Fra Salimbene, tr. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in same vol. withThe Duke and the Scholar, 1875, p. 120.[564]Butler, p. 98.[565]Id.p. 314.[566]Wealth-accumulation first took the form of land-owning. At the beginning of the twelfth century the Florentine territory was merely civic; at the end it was about forty miles in diameter. (Trollope,History of the Commonwealth of Florence, 1865, i, 85.) The figure given for the beginning, six miles, is legendary and incredible. See Villari,Two First Centuries, pp. 71-72.[567]As everywhere else in the Middle Ages, interest at Florence was high, varying from ten to thirty per cent. Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. 1823, iii, 280. Cp. Hallam,Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 337.[568]Bartoli,Storia della letteratura italiana, 1878, tom. ii, cap. vii.[569]Sismondi,Literature of the South of Europe, Eng. tr. i, 61, 85, 86, 87, 89; Bouterwek,History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 22, 23; Bartoli, i, 94.[570]Sismondi, as last cited, i, 74, 76, 80, 242; Bartoli, tom. ii, cap. i, and p. 165.[571]"The union of Provence, during two hundred and thirteen years, under a line of princes who ... never experienced any foreign invasion, but, by a fraternal government, augmented the population and riches of the State, and favoured commercial pursuits ... consolidated the laws, the language, and the manners of Provence" (Sismondi, as last cited, i, 75).[572]See above, p. 135sq., as to the theory of the culture-value of the despot.[573]Sismondi,Républiques, xii, 38-41. The land was already cultivated on themétayersystem, half the crop going to the tenant—a state of things advantageous all round. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 315) pronounces that the Florentines looked sagaciously to trade, but harassed agriculture. This does not seem to be true of Italian polity in general.[574]As to these, consult M'Crie,History of the Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 23-25.[575]See Sismondi,Républiques, xii, 39, as to the utter ruin of the Pisan territory by Florence.[576]J.A. Symonds,The Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 61-62.[577]Sismondi,Républiques italiennes, iv, 174-77.[578]Villari,Two First Centuries, p. 239. So Perrens: "Its glory belonged to the democratic period" (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. vii, p. 171).[579]Cp. Zeller,Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309.[580]Roscoe (Life of Leo X, ii, 318) attributes to the rivalry of Leonardo and Michel Angelo at Florence (in 1500, while the Medici were in exile, and the city was self-governed) the kindling of the art life of the greatest period. And see Perrens (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. cited, p. 457, also as cited below, p. 249) on the decay of architecture and the check to art through the policy of Lorenzo. "Art under the grandfather," he declares (p. 434), "completeda remarkable evolution which has no equivalent under the grandson." Previously (p. 200) he had noted that "many works of which the fifteenth century gets the glory because it finished them, were ordered and begun amid the confusion and terrible agitation of the demagogy." As to Cosimo's expenditure on building see p. 166, and on letters p. 168.[581]Zeller, p. 310. TheDe falsa donationewas certainly an abusive document. See Hallam,Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, sect. i, par. 7,note.[582]Burckhardt, as cited, p. 279. Another estimable type was Fra Urbano. See Roscoe, Leo X, i, 351, 352. On the character of Poliziano see Perrens, trans. cited, p. 441.[583]Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203, 204, 291; Zeller, p. 330; and von Reumont,Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. trans. ii, 18. Lorenzo expressly cut down the scope and the resources of the FlorentineStudiofor selfish personal reasons. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 436-37. It was Bernardo Nerli, not Lorenzo, who bore the cost of printing Homer.Id.p. 443.[584]See the estimate of Venetian ideals in Burckhardt,Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, pt. i, ch. vii.[585]Nys,Researches in the History of Economics, 1899, pp. 66-67; Frignet,Histoire de l'association commerciale, 1868, p. 78.[586]Prof. Giacomo Gay,Dei Carattere degli Italiani nel medio evo e nell' età moderna, Asti, 1876, p. 8.[587]By Prof. Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 97.[588]Compare these as described by Ranke (Latin and Teutonic Nations, Eng. tr. p. 248) with those of old Athens.[589]Burckhardt (Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 71, 72) gives some illustrative details. See also H. Brown inCambridge Modern History, 1902, i, 284. But cp. Geiger,Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland, Berlin, 1882, pp. 265-66, as to theper contra.[590]Nys,Researches in the History of Economics, 1899, pp. 64-65, and ref.[591]Cp.The Dynamics of Religion, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.), 1897, pp. 175, 176, 181.[592]"Non partecipavi Firenze nelle faccende d'Europa così largamente, come Venezia e Genova, sì per essere continuamente straziata dalle fazioni e sì per non avere dominio di mare. Dal che nasceva, che niun cittadino potesse sorgere in lei di nome e di appichi esterni tanto possente che potesse stabilirvi da per se o la libertà o la tyrannide" (C. Botta,Storia d' Italia, 1837, i, 124). But Genoa also had countless strifes of faction, so that the vera causa of the greater inner development of Florence must be held to be her lack of external dominion and occupation.[593]Vol. cited, p. 3. Cp. Burckhardt,Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, pt. iv, ch. iv, p. 309. Both writers adopt the language of Michelet.[594]Burckhardt, p. 317. The Counter-Reformation, of course, must always be taken into account in estimates of the latter period of Italian history. The regeneration of the Papacy after the Reformation is to be credited jointly to Spain and the Reformation itself.[595]Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 282-92.[596]Study suffered in Florence particularly from the faction troubles. TheStudioor college, founded in 1348, was closed between 1378 and 1386; reopened then, shut in 1404, again opened in 1412, and so on. Cp. Napier,Florentine History, 1846, iv, 75; Perrens,Histoire de Florence, Eng. tr. of vol. vii, pp. 172-77; and von Reumont,Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. tr. i, 428-30.[597]Mr. Symonds notes (Age of the Despots, p. 34) how Guicciardini argued this (Op. Ined.i, 28), as against Machiavelli's lament over the lack of Italian unity.

[541]Leo estimates that as early as the reign of Louis the Pious the Church owned about one-third of the land of Italy. Cp. B. iii, cc. 1, 3, as to the process.

[542]Names derived from the German Welf (or Wölf) and Waiblingen; Italianised as Guelfo and Ghibellino. Waiblingen was the name of a castle in the diocese of Augsburg belonging to the Salian or Franconian emperors, the descendants of Conrad the Salic, Welf was a family name of the Dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, who constantly resisted the predominance of the emperors, both of the Franconian and the Hohenstaufen lines. The names seem to have become war-cries in Italy about the end of the twelfth century. In Florence they appear first in 1239. Villari,Two First Centuries, p. 181,note.

[543]Sismondi,Short History, p. 81.

[544]As to the relations of successive popes in the Dark Ages—each cancelling the acts of his predecessor—see Sismondi,Républiques, i, 142; Gregorovius, as last cited, andpassim.

[545]Prof. Butler (Communes of Lombardy, p. 231), credits the Italians with having acquired, as a result of the perpetual wars of the cities, "a breadth of view and a vigour of mind unknown among the urban populations of other lands." How can "breadth of view" in politics be ascribed to communities whose unending strifes finally brought them all under despotism?

[546]Machiavelli,Istorie fiorentine, l. ii. The seven majorartiwere (1) the judges and notaries; (2) the dealers in French cloths; (3) the money-changers; (4) the wool traders; (5) the physicians and apothecaries; (6) the silk dealers and mercers; and (7) the furriers.

[547]Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. trans. iii, 260.

[548]H. Scherer,Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels, 1852, i, 337, 338.

[549]Cp. Symonds,Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 26-27.

[550]Villari,Two First Centuries, p. 310; Hallam,Introd. to Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 8, 16, 19, 71, 77, 78. But see p. 74 as to the stimulus from Italy in the eleventh century. Cp. Gregorovius,Geschichte der Stadt Rom, B. viii, Kap. vii, § i (Bd. iv, 604-605), as to the primitive state of mental life in Rome in the twelfth century, and the resort of young nobles to Paris for education.

[551]In the previous edition I accepted the still current statement that Salerno drew its first medical lore from the Saracens. But Dr. Rashdall has, I think, sufficiently shown that there is no basis for the theory (The Universities in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 77-86). Salerno seems rather to have preserved some of the classic lore on which the Saracens also founded. Arabic influence in the Italian schools began in the twelfth century, and was in full force early in the fourteenth, when Salerno was in complete decline (Id. p. 85).

[552]As to the attitude and influence of Gregory the Great see Hallam,Literature of Europe, as cited, i, 4, 21, 22; and Gregorovius, B. iii, cap. iii, § 2 (ii, 88). As to the reforms of Gregory VII in the tenth century, see also Gregorovius, B. vii, cap. vii, § 5 (iv, 288). See the latter writer again, B. vii, cap. vi (iv, 242-46), and Guizot,Civilisation en Europe, leçon vi, ed. 1844, pp. 159-60, as to the effect of Hildebrandt's policy in dividing the Church.

[553]Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 9; Muratori,Dissert.xv, cited by Lecky,Hist. of European Morals, ii, 71; Milman, as last cited, ii, 51.

[554]We know further from Salvian, as noted above, p. 119, that the Christians of Gaul treated their slaves as badly as the pagans had ever done (De gubernatione Dei, l. iv). As to the whole subject, see the valuable researches of Larroque,De l'esclavage chez les nations chrétiennes, 2e éd. 1864, and Biot,De l'abolition de l'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.

[555]Lea,Hist. Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 2nd ed. pp. 242-43.

[556]Cp. Sismondi, as before cited, and Testa, as cited, p. 92. Testa's book, like so many other modern Italian treatises, is written with the garrulity of the Middle Ages, but embodies a good deal of research. The pietistic passage on p. 93 is contradicted by that on p. 92.

[557]Hardwick,Church History: Middle Age, 1853, p. 58 and refs. Manumission was the legal preliminary to ordination; but it was often set aside, with the object of having the serf-priest more subject to discipline. Cp. Tytler,Hist. of Scotland, ed. 1869, ii, 255, as to bondmen-clerks in Scotland in the thirteenth century.

[558]As in the war of cities against nobles under Conrad the Salic. See above, p. 203.

[559]Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. 2.

[560]Cp. Butler, pp. 224, 229.

[561]As to these see Testa, p. 56. Compare the accounts of the later bloodless battles of thecondottieri, which were thus not without Italian precedent. Between 1013 and 1105 Pavia and Milan had six wars. Butler,The Communes of Lombardy, p. 58.

[562]Cp. Heeren,Essai sur l'influence des Croisades, Villers' tr. 1808, p. 101; Bryce,Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. pp. 199, 211, 213, 223; Stubbs,Germany in the Middle Ages, 1908, pp. 105, 197.

[563]Memoirs of Fra Salimbene, tr. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in same vol. withThe Duke and the Scholar, 1875, p. 120.

[564]Butler, p. 98.

[565]Id.p. 314.

[566]Wealth-accumulation first took the form of land-owning. At the beginning of the twelfth century the Florentine territory was merely civic; at the end it was about forty miles in diameter. (Trollope,History of the Commonwealth of Florence, 1865, i, 85.) The figure given for the beginning, six miles, is legendary and incredible. See Villari,Two First Centuries, pp. 71-72.

[567]As everywhere else in the Middle Ages, interest at Florence was high, varying from ten to thirty per cent. Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. 1823, iii, 280. Cp. Hallam,Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 337.

[568]Bartoli,Storia della letteratura italiana, 1878, tom. ii, cap. vii.

[569]Sismondi,Literature of the South of Europe, Eng. tr. i, 61, 85, 86, 87, 89; Bouterwek,History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 22, 23; Bartoli, i, 94.

[570]Sismondi, as last cited, i, 74, 76, 80, 242; Bartoli, tom. ii, cap. i, and p. 165.

[571]"The union of Provence, during two hundred and thirteen years, under a line of princes who ... never experienced any foreign invasion, but, by a fraternal government, augmented the population and riches of the State, and favoured commercial pursuits ... consolidated the laws, the language, and the manners of Provence" (Sismondi, as last cited, i, 75).

[572]See above, p. 135sq., as to the theory of the culture-value of the despot.

[573]Sismondi,Républiques, xii, 38-41. The land was already cultivated on themétayersystem, half the crop going to the tenant—a state of things advantageous all round. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 315) pronounces that the Florentines looked sagaciously to trade, but harassed agriculture. This does not seem to be true of Italian polity in general.

[574]As to these, consult M'Crie,History of the Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 23-25.

[575]See Sismondi,Républiques, xii, 39, as to the utter ruin of the Pisan territory by Florence.

[576]J.A. Symonds,The Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 61-62.

[577]Sismondi,Républiques italiennes, iv, 174-77.

[578]Villari,Two First Centuries, p. 239. So Perrens: "Its glory belonged to the democratic period" (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. vii, p. 171).

[579]Cp. Zeller,Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309.

[580]Roscoe (Life of Leo X, ii, 318) attributes to the rivalry of Leonardo and Michel Angelo at Florence (in 1500, while the Medici were in exile, and the city was self-governed) the kindling of the art life of the greatest period. And see Perrens (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. cited, p. 457, also as cited below, p. 249) on the decay of architecture and the check to art through the policy of Lorenzo. "Art under the grandfather," he declares (p. 434), "completeda remarkable evolution which has no equivalent under the grandson." Previously (p. 200) he had noted that "many works of which the fifteenth century gets the glory because it finished them, were ordered and begun amid the confusion and terrible agitation of the demagogy." As to Cosimo's expenditure on building see p. 166, and on letters p. 168.

[581]Zeller, p. 310. TheDe falsa donationewas certainly an abusive document. See Hallam,Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, sect. i, par. 7,note.

[582]Burckhardt, as cited, p. 279. Another estimable type was Fra Urbano. See Roscoe, Leo X, i, 351, 352. On the character of Poliziano see Perrens, trans. cited, p. 441.

[583]Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203, 204, 291; Zeller, p. 330; and von Reumont,Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. trans. ii, 18. Lorenzo expressly cut down the scope and the resources of the FlorentineStudiofor selfish personal reasons. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 436-37. It was Bernardo Nerli, not Lorenzo, who bore the cost of printing Homer.Id.p. 443.

[584]See the estimate of Venetian ideals in Burckhardt,Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, pt. i, ch. vii.

[585]Nys,Researches in the History of Economics, 1899, pp. 66-67; Frignet,Histoire de l'association commerciale, 1868, p. 78.

[586]Prof. Giacomo Gay,Dei Carattere degli Italiani nel medio evo e nell' età moderna, Asti, 1876, p. 8.

[587]By Prof. Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 97.

[588]Compare these as described by Ranke (Latin and Teutonic Nations, Eng. tr. p. 248) with those of old Athens.

[589]Burckhardt (Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 71, 72) gives some illustrative details. See also H. Brown inCambridge Modern History, 1902, i, 284. But cp. Geiger,Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland, Berlin, 1882, pp. 265-66, as to theper contra.

[590]Nys,Researches in the History of Economics, 1899, pp. 64-65, and ref.

[591]Cp.The Dynamics of Religion, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.), 1897, pp. 175, 176, 181.

[592]"Non partecipavi Firenze nelle faccende d'Europa così largamente, come Venezia e Genova, sì per essere continuamente straziata dalle fazioni e sì per non avere dominio di mare. Dal che nasceva, che niun cittadino potesse sorgere in lei di nome e di appichi esterni tanto possente che potesse stabilirvi da per se o la libertà o la tyrannide" (C. Botta,Storia d' Italia, 1837, i, 124). But Genoa also had countless strifes of faction, so that the vera causa of the greater inner development of Florence must be held to be her lack of external dominion and occupation.

[593]Vol. cited, p. 3. Cp. Burckhardt,Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, pt. iv, ch. iv, p. 309. Both writers adopt the language of Michelet.

[594]Burckhardt, p. 317. The Counter-Reformation, of course, must always be taken into account in estimates of the latter period of Italian history. The regeneration of the Papacy after the Reformation is to be credited jointly to Spain and the Reformation itself.

[595]Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 282-92.

[596]Study suffered in Florence particularly from the faction troubles. TheStudioor college, founded in 1348, was closed between 1378 and 1386; reopened then, shut in 1404, again opened in 1412, and so on. Cp. Napier,Florentine History, 1846, iv, 75; Perrens,Histoire de Florence, Eng. tr. of vol. vii, pp. 172-77; and von Reumont,Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. tr. i, 428-30.

[597]Mr. Symonds notes (Age of the Despots, p. 34) how Guicciardini argued this (Op. Ined.i, 28), as against Machiavelli's lament over the lack of Italian unity.

THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE

§ 1

Given the monarchic and feudal environment, the chronic strife within and between the Italian cities can be seen to be sufficient in time to undo them;[598]and some wonder naturally arises at their failure to frame some system of federal government that should restrain their feuds. It was their supreme necessity; but though the idea was now and then broached,[599]there is no sign that the average man ever came nearer planning for it than did the Ghibelline Dante, with his simple theory that Cæsar should ride the horse,[600]or than did the clear brain of Machiavelli, with its longing for a native ruler[601]like Cesare Borgia, capable of beating down the rival princes and the adventurers, and of holding his own against the Papacy. One of the statesmen who harboured the ideal was Rienzi; but he never wrought for its realisation, and his devotion to the Papacy as well as to the headship of Rome would have made it miscarry had he set it on foot.[602]The failure of Cesare Borgia, who of all Italians of his day came nearest to combining the needed faculties for Italian unification, is the proof of the practical impossibility of that solution. But a federation of States, it has been reasoned, was relatively feasible; why then was it never attempted? As usual, the question has been answered in the simple verbalist way, by the decision that the Italians did not strike out a political philosophy or science because they were not that way given. They lacked the "faculty" for whatever they did not happen to do; whereas the ancient Greeks, on the contrary, did theorise because that faculty was theirs, though they had not the faculty to work out the theories.

E.g.the reasoning of so intelligent a thinker as Heeren: "Among those countries in which [political speculation] might have been expected to give the earliest sign of life, Italy was undoubtedly the first: all the ordinary causes appear to have united here; a number of small states arose near each other; republican constitutions were established; political parties were everywhere at work and at variance; and with all this, the arts and sciences were in the full splendour of their revival. The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!—a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that therenever wasa philosophical system of character or influence which prosperedunder the sky of Italy. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. The history of the Roman philosophy, a mere echo of the Grecian, proves this of its earlier ages, nor was it otherwise in its later." (Essay "On the Rise and Progress of Political Theories," inHistorical Treatises, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 118.)To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo, Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more that on this principle the Germans must be pronounced to have been devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.

To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo, Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more that on this principle the Germans must be pronounced to have been devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.

Seeking a less vacuous species of explanation, we are soon led to recognise (1) that the case of medieval Italy was to the extent of at least two factors more complicated than that of ancient Greece; and that these factors alone might suffice to explain their non-production of a "theory" which should avail for the need; (2) that the theories of the Greeks did not avail to solve their problem; and (3) that the Italians all the while had really two theories too many. At the very emergence of their republics they were already possessed or wrought upon by the embodied theories of the Empire and the Papacy, two elements never represented in the Greek problem, where empire was an alien and barbarian thing suddenly entering into the affairs of civilised Hellas, and where there was nothing in the nature of the Papacy. These two forces in Italian life were all along represented by specific theories; and their clash was a large part of the trouble. Their pressure set up a chronic clash of parties; and the theorist of to-day may be challenged to frame a theory which could have worked well for Italy otherwise than by settingthose forces aside—a thing quite impossible in the Middle Ages. If mere system-making on either side could have availed, Thomas Aquinas might have rendered the service.[603]

The economic and political destiny of the Church may be said to have been determined in the eleventh century, when, after a desperate struggle, begun by Pope Hildebrandt, celibacy was forced on the secular clergy. The real motive to this policy was of course not ascetic but economic, the object being to prevent at once the appropriation of church property by married priests for family purposes, and the creation of hereditary titles to church benefices. An evolution of that kind had actually begun; and there can be no question that had it not been checked it would have been fatal to the Papacy. Naturally the married clergy on their part resisted to the uttermost. Only the desperate policy of Hildebrandt, withdrawing popular obedience and ecclesiastical protection from those who would not give up their wives, broke down the resistance; and even thereafter Urban II, as we saw, had to resort to the odious measure of making priests' wives slaves.[604]From that period we may date the creation of the Church as a unitary political power. Sacerdotal celibacy took many generations to establish; but when once the point was carried it involved a force of incorporation which only the strongest political forces—as at the Reformation—could outdo, and which since the Reformation has kept the Church intact.

It is true that the monk Arnold of Brescia, burned alive by the Papacy in 1155, fought a long battle (1139-55) against the papal power, creating an immense ferment in Lombardy, and rousing a strong anti-papal movement in Rome itself (Sismondi,Républiques italiennes, i, chs. 7, 8; Gibbon, ch. 69); and that, as noted by M'Crie (Reformation in Italy, p. 1), "the supremacy claimed by the bishops of Rome was resisted in Italy after it had been submitted to by the most remote churches of the west"; but once papalised, Italy necessarily remained so in her own pecuniary interest. Cp. Rogers,Economic Interpretation of History, p. 79. Arnold's movement led even to a revolution in Rome; but after he had ruled there for ten years, overbearing two successive popes, one of greater energy, Adrian IV, excommunicated the city, so expelling Arnold. Adrian then, making a bargain with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa at his coronation, got the republican leader in his power; and the movement ended with Arnold's life. The Papacy was now an irremovable element of division in Italy; and disunion was thenceforth the lot of the land.

If we seek to localise the disease, however, we find that no one factor is specially responsible. The alien emperor, coming in from outside, and setting city against city, Pavia against Milan, and nobles against burghers, is clearly a force of strife. Again, whereas the cities might on the whole have combined successfully against the emperor, to the point of abolishing his rule, the Papacy, calling him in to suit its own purposes, and calling in yet other aliens at a pinch, is still more a force of discord. At times the emperors, in the worst days of Roman corruption, had to choose among the competitors nominated to the Papacy by the intrigues of courtesans and nobles and the venal votes of the people, thus identifying the man they chose with their cause. Hildebrandt, again, after securing that the popes should be elected by the cardinals, became the fiercest of autocrats. By his strife with Henry IV he set up civil war through all Italy and Germany; and when in his despair he called in the Normans against Rome, they sold most of the people into slavery.[605]Later, in the minority of Frederick II, Innocent III so strengthened the Church that it was able by sheer slaughter to crush for a generation all Provençal heresy, and was able to prevail against Frederick in its long struggle with him; in so doing, however, deepening to the uttermost the passion of faction in all the cities, and so preparing the worst and bloodiest wars of the future.

Yet, on the other hand, if we make abstraction of pope and emperor, and consider only the nobles and the citizens, it is clear that they had among them the seeds of strife immeasurable. The nobles were by training and habit centres of violence.[606]Their mutual feuds, always tending to involve the citizens, were a perpetual peril to order; and their disregard of law kept them as ready to make war on citizens or cities as on each other. Again and again they were violently expelled from every Lombard city, on the score of their gross and perpetual disorders; but they being the chief experts in military matters, they were always welcomed back again, because the burghers had need of them as leaders in the feuds of city with city, and of Guelphs with Ghibellines. So that yet again, if we put the nobles out of sight, the spirit of strife as between city and city was sufficient, as in ancient Greece, to make them all theprey of any invader with a free hand. They could not master the science of their problem, could not rise above the plane of primary tribal or local passion and jealousy; though within each city were faction hatreds as bitter as those between the cities as wholes. Already in the twelfth century we find Milan destroying Lodi and unwalling Como. Later, in the thirteenth century, Genoa ruins the naval power of Pisa,[607]then under the tyranny of Ugolino, in a war of commercial hatred, such as Pisa had before waged with Amalfi and with Lucca; in the fourteenth, Genoa and Venice again and again fight till both are exhausted, and Genoa accepts a lord to aid her in the struggle, Pisa doing likewise, and so recovering strength on land;[608]in the fifteenth and sixteenth, Florence spares no cost or effort to keep Pisa in subjection. This fatal policy, in turn, was the result of the frequent attempts of the Pisans to destroy Florentine trade by closing their port to it.[609]All along, inter-civic hates are in full flow through all the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines; and the menace of neither French nor Spanish tyranny can finally unify the mutually repellent communities.

We may, indeed, make out a special case against the Papacy, to the effect that, but for that, Italian intelligence would have had a freer life; and that even if Italy, like Spain and France and England, underwent despotism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, her intellectual activity would have sufficed to work her recovery at least as rapidly as the process took place elsewhere. It has been argued[610]that the liberating force elsewhere in the sixteenth century was the Reformation—a theory which leaves us asking what originated the Reformation in its turn. Taking that to be the spirit of (a) inchoate free thought, of developing reason, or (b) of economic revolt against the fiscal exactions of an alien power, or both, we are entitled to say broadly that the crushing of such revolt in Italy, as in Provence and in Spain, clearly came of the special development of the papal power thus near its centre—the explanation of "national character" being as nugatory in this as in any other sociological issue.

Heeren naturally rests on this solution. The "new religion," he says, "was suited to the north, but not to the south. The calm and investigating spirit of the German nations found in itthe nourishment which it required and sought for.... The more vivid imagination and sensitive feelings of the people of the south ... found little to please them in its tenets.... It was not, therefore, owing to the prohibitions of the government, but to the character of the nations themselves, that the Reformation found no support among them" (vol. cited, pp. 58, 59). The two explanations of climate and race can thus be employed alternatively at need. Ireland, though "northern," is to be got rid of as not being "German." For the rest, the Albigenses, thepaterini, the reforming Franciscans, and the myriad victims of the Inquisition in Spain, are conveniently ignored. Heeren's phrase about the "almost total exclusion" of the southern countries from the "great ferment of ideas which in other countries of civilised Europe gave activity and life to the human intellect" can be described only as a piece of concentrated misinformation. And a similar judgment must be passed on the summing-up of Mr. Symonds that "Germany achieved the labour of the Reformation almost single-handed" (Renaissance in Italy, 2nd ed. i, 28). There is far more truth in the verdict of Guizot, that "la principale lutte d'érudition et de doctrine contre l'Eglise catholique a été soutenue par la réforme française; c'est en France et en Hollande, et toujours en français, qu'ont été écrits tants d'ouvrages philosophiques, historiques, polémiques, à l'appui de cette cause" (Civilisation en France, i, 18). Motley, though an uncritical Teutophile and Gallophobe, admits as to Holland that "the Reformation first entered the Provinces, not through the Augsburg but the Huguenot gate" (Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 162). As to the spirit of reformation in Italy and Spain, the student may consult the two careful and learnedHistoriesof M'Crie, works which might have saved many vain generalisations by later writers, had they heeded them. The question of the supposed racial determination of the Reformation is discussed at some length inThe Saxon and the Celt, pp. 92-97, 143-47, 203, 204. Cp.The Dynamics of Religion, 1897, pt. i;Letters on Reasoning, 2nd ed. 1905, pp. 20-24; andA Short History of Freethought, vol. i, chs. ix, x, xi.

The history of Italian religious life shows that the spirit of sheer reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stronger there than even in France in the sixteenth, where again it was perhaps positively stronger than in Germany, though not stronger relatively to the resistance. And in Italy the resistance was personified in the Papacy, which there had its seat and strength. When all is said, however, the facts remain that in England the Reformation meant sordid spoliation, retrogression in culture, and finally civil war; that in France it meant long periods of furiousstrife; that in Germany, where it "prospered," it meant finally a whole generation of the most ruinous warfare the modern world had seen, throwing back German civilisation a full hundred years. Save for the original agony of conquest and the special sting of subjection to alien rule, Italy suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less evils than these.

The lesson of our retrospect, then, is: (1) generally, that as between medieval Italian development and that of other countries—say our own—there has been difference, not of "race character" and "faculty," but of favouring and adverse conditions; and (2) particularly, that certain social evils which went on worsening in Florence and are in some degree present in all societies to-day, call for scientific treatment lest they go on worsening with us. The modern problem is in many respects different from that of pre-Reformation Italy; but the forces concerned are kindred, and it may be worth while to note the broad facts of the past process with some particularity.

§ 2

The central fact of disunion in Italian life, complicated as we have seen it to be by extraneous factors, analyses down to the eternal conflict of interests of the rich and the poor, the very rich and the less rich, or, as Italian humour figured it, the "fat" and the "lean." For Machiavelli this is the salient trouble in the Florentine retrospect, since it survived the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline; though he sets down to the Papacy the foreign invasions and the disunion of the cities. The faction-feuds, of course, tell of the psychological conditions of the feud of rich and poor, and were to some extent an early form of the feud,[611]the imperialist Ghibellines being originally the more aristocratic faction; while the papalist Guelphs, by the admission of Machiavelli, were the more friendly to the popular liberties, that being the natural course for the Papacy to take. The imperial cause, on the other hand, was badly compromised by the tyranny of the terrible Ezzelino III, the representative of Frederick II in the Trevisan March, who ruled half-a-dozen cities in a fashion never exceeded for cruelty in the later ages of Italian tyranny.[612]Whatever democratic feeling there was must needs be on the other side.

After Florence had recast its constitution at the death ofFrederick II, establishing twelveanzianior magistrates, replaced every two months, and two foreign judges—one the upper-classpodestàand the other the captain of the people[613]—to prevent grounds of quarrel, matters were in fair train, and the city approved its unity by the sinister steps of forcing Pistoia, Arezzo, and Siena to join its confederation, capturing Volterra, and destroying several villages, whose inhabitants were deported to Florence. But new plots on behalf of Manfred led to the expulsion of the Ghibellines, who in turn, getting the upper hand with no sense of permanence, reasoned that to make their party safe they must destroy the city; a purpose changed, as the familiar story goes, only by the protest of the Florentine Ghibelline chief, Farinata degli Uberti. They then tried, in obvious bad faith, the expedient of conciliating the people, whom they had always hitherto oppressed, by giving them a quasi-democratic constitution, in which the skilled workers were recognised as bodies, to which all citizens had to belong.[614]But this scheme being accompanied by fresh taxation, the Ghibellines were driven out by force; and once more the Guelphs, now backed by Charles of Anjou (1266), organised a government of twelve magistrates, adding a council of twenty-four upper-class citizens, called thecredenza, and yet another body of 180 popular deputies, thirty for each of the six quarters of the city, making up with the others a Council General. To this, however, was strangely added yet another council of 120, charged with executive functions. The purpose was to identify the Guelph cause with that of the people—that is, the lowerbourgeoisieand skilled artisans; and the property of the exiled Ghibellines was confiscated and divided among the public treasury, the heads of the ruling party, and the Guelphs in general. At this stage the effort of Gregory X, at his election, to effect a restoration of the Ghibellines and a general reconciliation, naturally failed. Yet when his successor, Nicolas III, persisted in the anti-French policy, he was able through his northern legate to persuade the city, suffering from the lawlessness of the Guelph as of old from that of the Ghibelline nobles, to recall the latter and set up a new constitution of fourteen governors, seven of each party,all nominated by the Pope—a system which lasted ten years. Then came another French interregnum; whereafter, on the fall of the French rule in Sicily in 1282, there was set up yet another constitution of compromise. For the council of fourteen was set up one of threepriori delle arti, heads of the crafts—a number immediately raised to six, so as to give one prior to each ward of the city, with a change in the title tosignoria. These were to be elected every two months. The system, aristocratic in respect of its small governing body, yet by its elective method lent itself peculiarly to the newbourgeoistendencies; and thenceforward, says Machiavelli, we find the parties of Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence supplanted by the simpler enmity of rich and poor. Soon many of the nobles, albeit Guelph, were driven out of the city, or declared disqualified for priorship on the score of their past disorders; and outside they set up new feuds.

While Florence thus held out, other cities sought safety in one-man-power, choosing some noble as "captain of the people" and setting him above the magistrates. Thus Pagano della Torre, a Guelph, became war-lord of Milan, and his brothers succeeded him, till the office came to be looked on as hereditary, and other cities inclined to choose the same head. And so astutely egotistic was the action of all the forces concerned, that when the Guelph house of Della Torre thus became unmanageably powerful, the Papacy did not scruple to appoint to the archbishopric of Milan an exiled Ghibelline, Visconti. "Henceforward," says Sismondi, "the rivalry between the families of Della Torre and Visconti made that between the people and the nobles almost forgotten." The Visconti finally defeated the other faction, made Milan Ghibelline, and became its virtual rulers.

On the other hand, the entrance of a French army under Charles of Anjou, called in by a French pope to conquer the Ghibelline realm of the Two Sicilies (1266), put a due share of wrong to the account of the Guelphs, the French power standing for something very like barbarism. Its first achievement was to exterminate the Saracen name and religion in Sicily. On its heels came a new irruption from Germany, in the person of Conradin, the claimant of the imperial succession, to whom joined themselves Pisa and Siena, in opposition to their big neighbour and enemy Florence, and the people of Rome itself, at quarrel with their Pope, who had left the city for Viterbo. By Conradin's defeat the French power became paramount; and then it was that the next pope, Gregory X, sought to restore the Ghibellines as counterpoise: a policy pursued by hissuccessor, to the end, however, of substituting (1278) papal for imperial claims over Italy. Even Florence at his wish recalled her Ghibellines. But then came the forced election of another French pope, who acted wholly in the French interest, and re-exiled everywhere the Ghibellines: a process speedily followed in turn by the "Sicilian Vespers," involving the massacre and expulsion of the French, and introducing a Spanish king as representative of the imperial line. Again the Papacy encouraged the other power, relieving Charles II, as King of Naples, from his treaty oath, and set him upon making a war with Sicily, which dragged for twenty-four years. Such were the main political features of the Italy of Dante. The Papacy, becoming a prize of the leading Roman families, played a varying game as between the two monarchies of the south and their partisans in the north; and the minor cities, like the greater, underwent chronic revolutions. Still, so abundant was the Italian outflow of intellectual and inventive energy, so substantial was the general freedom of the cities, and so soundly was the average regimen founded on energetic agriculture and commerce, that wealth abounded on all hands.

With the new French invasion (1302) under Charles of Valois, called in by Boniface VIII to aid him against Sicily, a partially new stage begins. Charles was received at Florence as the typical Guelph; but, being counselled by the pope to pacify Tuscany to his own advantage, allied himself with the ultra-Guelphs, theNeri, gave up to plunder, the proceeds of which he pocketed, the houses of the other or pro-Ghibelline faction, theBianchi, and enforced the execution or exile of its leading men, including Dante. Then came the election of a strictly French pope and his establishment at Avignon. A new lease being now given to faction, the cities rapidly lapsed into the over-lord system as the only means of preserving order; and when in 1316 a new emperor, Henry VII, presented himself for homage and claimed to place an imperial vicar in each city, most were well disposed to agree. When however Henry, like Charles, showed himself mainly bent on plunder, demanding 100,000 florins from Milan and 60,000 from Genoa, he destroyed his prestige. He had insisted on the recall of all exiles of either party; but all united against his demands, save the Pisans, who had sent him 60,000 florins in advance. His sudden death, on his way to fight the forces of Naples, left everything in a new suspense, save that Pisa, already shorn of maritime power, was soon eclipsed, after setting up a military tyranny as a last resort.

Therégimeof the local tyrant now rapidly developed. On thefall of the Pisan tyrant rose that of Lucca, Castruccio Castracani, the great type, after Ezzelino, of the Italian despot-adventurer of the Renaissance. Such a leader was too dangerous an antagonist to such a corporation as that of Florence—once more (1323) reconstructed on an upper-class basis, with a scrutinised franchise, election by ballot, and a more complicated system of offices than ever.[615]To command them against Castruccio, they called in the Catalonian general Cardona, who utterly failed them. He took the course of so handling and placing his troops as to force those citizens in the army who could afford it to buy leave of absence, and was finally defeated with his wilfully weakened army. Florence was driven to call in the King of Naples, at the price of conferring thesignoriaon his son. Meanwhile the new emperor Ludwig, called in by Castruccio, plundered the Milanese and imprisoned their lords, the Visconti, who had been of his own party; extorted 150,000 florins from the Pisans; tortured, to extort treasure, a Ghibelline who had given up to him a fortress in the papal State; and generally showed the Italians, before he withdrew, that a German tyrant could beat even a native at once in treachery, cruelty, and avarice. Castruccio and the son of the King of Naples, who had proved a bad bargain, died about the same time as did the reigning Visconti at Milan, the reigning tyrant at Mantua, and Can' Grande of Verona, the successor of Ezzelino, who had conquered Padua. Again the encouraged middle class of Florence recast their constitution (1328), annulling the old councils and electing two new: a Council of the "People," composed of 300 middle-class citizens, and a Council of the Commune, composed of 250 of both orders. Elsewhere the balance inclined to anarchy and despotism, as of old. A new emperor, John of Bohemia, offered (1330) a new chance of pacification, eagerly welcomed, to a harassed people, in large part shaken by military dangers in its devotion to republicanism, and weary of local tyrannies. But against the new imperialism Florence stoutly held out, with the aid of Lombard Ghibellines; the new emperor, leaving Italy, sold his influence everywhere to local tyrants, and once more everything was in suspense.

At length, in 1336, there occurred the new phenomenon of a combination between Florence and Venice against a new tyrant of Padua and Lucca, who had betrayed Florence; but the Venetians in turn did the same thing, leaving the Florentines half a million offlorins in debt; whereupon they were attacked by their old enemies the Pisans, who heavily defeated them and captured Lucca, for which Florence had been fighting. It was in this stage of demoralisation that the Florentines (1342) suddenly forced theirsignoriato give the war-lordship to the French Gaultier de Brienne, "Duke of Athens," formerly the right-hand man of the son of the King of Naples, who had now been sent to them as a new commander by that king, on the request of the Commission of Twenty charged with the war. The commission elected him to the sole command in order to save themselves[616]and pacify the people; and his natural associates, the old nobility, counselled him to seize the government, which he gradually did, beheading and exiling the discredited middle-class leaders, and so winning the support of the populace, who, on his putting himself for open election to thesignoriafor one year, acclaimed him to the function for life. To this pass had come the see-saw of middle class (popolo) and upper class, with a populace held in pupilage.

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