All history is the record of change, either in the direction of social progress or decay; but so gradual is this movement that, like the transition from night to dawn or noon to evening, it is beyond our vision to state the moment when tendencies began or ceased. It is only possible to note the definite changes in their achievement, and then to disentangle the threads by turning back along the twisted chain into which they have been woven.

Sometimes in history there have been so many changes within a short time that the effect has been cumulative and an epoch has been created, as at the break-up of the Roman Empire, when civilization was merged in the ‘Dark Ages’. Again, it is true of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century and during the greater part of the sixteenth, a period usually called ‘the Renaissance’, or time of ‘New Birth’, because then it became apparent that the old mediaeval outlook and ways of life had vanished, while others much more familiar and easy to understand had taken their place: the Modern World had been called into being.

The most obvious change to be found at the Renaissance was the collapse of the mediaeval ideal of a world-empire ruled in the name of God by Pope and Emperor. The Western Empire still remained pretentious in its claims; but its wiser rulers, such as Rudolph I and Charles IV, had already realized that success lay rather in German kingship than in imperial influence. The Popes had been restored to Rome, but the threat of councils that could depose and reform hung like a cloud over their insistence on the absolute obedience of Christendom; and, recognizing the inevitable, the Vatican had sunk the ambitions of an Innocent III in those of a temporal Italian Prince. Searching along the chain of causes, it becomes clear enough that the trend of history during the later Middle Ages had been this development of the smaller unity of the nation out of the bigger unity of the world-state. By the end of the fifteenth century England, France, and Spain were already nations; while even Germany and Italy, feeling the call in a lesser degree, had substituted for a wider sense of nationality devotion to a province or city state.

The second of the great changes that characterize the Renaissance was the development of the idea of man as an individual. All through the Middle Ages, except perhaps in the case of rulers, men and women counted in the life of the world around them, not so much as separate influences as a part of the system into which they were born or absorbed. In early days the tribe accepted its members’ acts, whether good or bad, as something that was the concern of all to be atoned for, supported, or avenged, as a public duty. Still more strongly was this attitude expressed in family affairs, as in the numerous ‘vendettas’, or feuds like those of the Welfs and Waiblingen, or of ‘the Blacks’ and ‘Whites’ in Florence.

Turning from racial ties to social, we find mediaeval associations of all kinds holding a man bound, not by his own personal choice or discretion, but by the decision of the group to which he happened to be attached. The feudal system was never complete enough in practice to make a good example of this bondage, but in theory from the tenant-in-chief to the landowner lowest in the social scale there was a settled rule of life, dictating the duties and responsibilities of lord and vassal. Still more was this binding rule true of that greatest of all mediaeval corporations—monasticism, that demanded from its sons and daughters absolute obedience in the annihilation of self. St. Bernard, whose personality was so strong that he could not remain hidden amongst the mass of his fellows, was yet, we remember, angry with Abelard for this above all other failings—that he had set up his individual judgement as a test of life. In Abelard, as in Arnold of Brescia, lay the first stirrings of the independent modern spirit that at the Renaissance was to shake the foundations of the mediaeval world. Besides monasticism there were other associations—the universities and the class corporations, merchant guilds such as the North German Hansa, and smaller city guilds, such as the ‘Greater’ and ‘Lesser Arts’ in Florence, comprising groups of lawyers, fishmongers, &c. All these last maintained a standard of uniformity, regulating not only hours of work, rate of pay, nature of employment, scale of contributions, like a modern trade union, but went much farther, interfering in the life of each individual member to insist on what he should wear in public and how he might spend the money he had earned. It was a spirit of benevolent slavery that held sway so long as the strivings of the individual mind were overborne by a sense of helplessness in the face of ignorance or by the weight of tradition.

This weight of tradition leads naturally to the third great change heralded by the Renaissance—the breaking-up of a sky curtained in mental darkness into separate groups of clouds, still heavily charged with superstition and ignorance, but their density relieved by the light of a genuine inquiry after truth for its own sake. During the Middle Ages we have seen that men and women looked back for inspiration to the Roman Empire, and this made them distrust progress, just as a timid rider will dread a spirited horse because he fears to lose control and to be carried into unknown ways.

The earliest guardian of mediaeval knowledge had been the Church, and in the light that she understood her task she faithfully taught the world about her. Her motto was ‘Reverence for the Past’; but, bent in worship before the altar of tradition, she lost sight of that other great world-motto, ‘Trust the Future’, which has been one of the guiding stars of modern times. Her interpretation of the Faith, of the legitimate bounds of knowledge, of the limits of Art, had been almost a necessary school of discipline for the early Middle Ages with their tendency to barbaric licence; but as she civilized men’s minds and their aptitude for reasoning and understanding deepened, the restrictions of the school became the bars of a prison. The mediaeval Church, once a pioneer, lost her grip on realities, her spiritual outlook became obscured by material ambitions, her faith weakened; until at last so little sure was she in her heart of the complete truth of her teaching that she opposed and denounced criticism or discovery, much like a merchant who is secretly afraid that his methods of business may be obsolete refuses to entertain ‘newfangled notions’ that would open his eyes.

When Columbus laid his scheme for crossing the Atlantic before a council of bishops and leading members of the Spanish universities, mediaeval knowledge derided his presumption by quoting texts from the Old Testament and various statements of St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church. There could be no Antipodes, they argued, because it was distinctly said that the world was peopled by the descendants of Noah, and how could such men have crossed these miles of ocean? Many similar objections were raised and the mariner’s project condemned, just as Roger Bacon had been judged a heretic for his scientific inquiries two hundred years before.51 It is significant of the change of mental outlook that while Roger Bacon wasted his last years in prison and Abelard was driven from the lecture-hall to a monastery, Columbus found public support, vindicated his calculations, and so opened up a new world.

The great secret of the Renaissance is indeed this release of the restless spirit of inquiry after truth, that is as old as humanity itself, and that, swooping like a bird through the door of a cage out into the air and sunshine, reckless of danger, carried along by the sheer joy of unfettered life, sometimes foolish and extravagant in its zest for experience, was at first too absorbed in the glory and interest of freedom to feel any regret for the prison that had been at least a shelter from the many stormy problems that were to rend the modern world.

Charlemagne had believed that ‘without knowledge good works were impossible’. The men of the early Renaissance were not so intent upon the importance of good works or the hope of salvation as their forefathers, but they would have assented eagerly to the statement that ‘without knowledge any true understanding of human life was impossible’. Had the conditions under which knowledge could be obtained remained as restricted as in mediaeval times, the Renaissance on its intellectual side would in all probability have become a cult, a movement shared by a few learned men and women to which the mass of the people in every nation had no clue; and in this way it would have died out like a plant unable to spread its roots. Human invention intervened with the discovery of printing, which brought the great thoughts of the world out of the monastic libraries, where they had been laboriously collected and copied by hand, to distribute them, slowly at first but ever faster and faster, throughout the busy centres of Europe, where brains as well as stomachs are always eager for food.

It was a German, John Gutenburg, who invented printing by means of movable types, but because he had not enough money to carry out his design he was forced to borrow from a rich citizen of Mainz called John Fust. This Fust treated John Gutenburg very badly, for he demanded back the money he had lent so soon as he understood the value of the other’s secret, and by this means forced Gutenburg, when he could not pay, to hand over his plant in compensation. Fust then began to print on his own account, and when the people of Mainz saw the copies of the Bible that he produced, each number an exact replica of the first, they declared that he had sold himself to the devil and was practising magic. Thus, it is said, started the legend of Doctor Faustus that has inspired poets, musicians, and dramatists.

The first English printer was William Caxton, a Kentishman, to view whose press came King and court in great amazement, interested, but utterly unaware of what a mental revolution this small piece of machinery was to bring about.

The greatest of Italian printers were the Venetians, whose famous Aldine press produced volumes that are still the admiration of the world as well as treasure trove for book-collectors. In modern times the desire for knowledge, or rather for information, has become a scramble, and printing has degenerated into a trade. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was regarded as an art, and Aldus Manutius, the Roman who established his press at Venice, intending to reproduce an edition of all the Greek authors then known, was a great scholar, who modelled his letters on the handwriting of the Italian poet Petrarch, and gathered around him the most intellectual and enterprising minds of his day to advise and help him. It was at the Aldine press that one of the leaders of the Dutch Renaissance, Erasmus, had several of his books printed, and Venice at this time became a centre for scholars, and for all whose minds were alive with a thirst for new impressions.

Fifteenth-century Italy was not, on the surface, so very different from Italy in the fourteenth. The complete domination of the five Powers, foreshadowed in the earlier century, had become fixed, and three of them—Milan, Florence, and Naples—had succeeded in forming an alliance to preserve the balance of power in the peninsula, and to keep at bay the ambitions of Venice, whose empire was still spreading over the mainland. In Naples ruled Ferrante I, an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon, a typical despot like the Angevins his father had replaced. In Milan the Visconti had merged themselves in the House of Sforza, through a clever ruse of one of the most famous of mediaeval condottieri, Francesco Sforza, who, besieging his master, Filippo Maria Visconti, in Milan in 1441, had forced him to give him his only daughter and heiress Bianca in marriage, and then to acknowledge him as his successor.

The grim traditions established by the Visconti continued under this new family, christened with their very names. Francesco’s son, Galeazzo Maria, whose life was spent in debauch, is said to have poisoned his mother and buried his subjects alive. When he was assassinated, his brother, Ludovico, called from his swarthy complexion Il Moro, or ‘the Moor’, seized the reins of government, and proceeded to act on behalf of his young nephew, Gian Galeazzo, whom he kept in the background at Pavia, declaring him a helpless invalid.

Philip de Commines describes Ludovico as ‘clever, but very nervous and cringing when he was afraid: a man without faith when he thought it to his advantage to break his word’. Outwardly he displayed the genial manners customary in a Renaissance prince, and presided at Milan over a court so famed for its hospitality, wit, and intellect that it drew within its circle painters, sculptors, writers, and scholars, as well as military heroes and men of fashion.

It will be seen that Italy opened her arms wide to the new spirit of intellectual and artistic enjoyment. Venice, Naples, Milan, each vied with the other in attracting and rewarding genius: even the Popes at Rome, whose natural instinct as the guardian of mediaeval tradition was to distrust freedom of thought, were influenced by the atmosphere around them, and to Pope Nicholas V the world owes the foundation of the wonderful Vatican Library.

To the Queen of the Renaissance states we turn last—to Florence, the ‘City of Flowers’, that we left distracted by the internal discords of her ‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’, and by her wars against Filippo Maria Visconti. The turning of the century had seen great changes in Florence, the whittling away of the old ideal of liberty that would brook no master, so that she became willing to accept the domination of a family superficially disguised as a freely elected government.

The Medici were no royal stock, nor were they flaunting condottieri like the Sforza, but a house of bankers, who by brains and solid hard work had built up for itself a position of respect, not only in Florence, but also throughout Europe, where their loans had secured the fortunes of many a monarchy that would otherwise have tumbled in ruins owing to lack of funds. It was the advantage of such monarchies to preserve the credit of the House of Medici, and so the bankers gained outside influence to aid their ambitions at home.

Within Florence the Medici posed as common-sense men of business, unassuming citizens, easy of access, ready friends, ever the supporters, while they were climbing the ladder of civic fame, of the popular party that loved to shout ‘Liberty!’ in the streets, while it voted her destroyers into public offices.

Cosimo de Medici, the first of the family to establish a position of supremacy, was related to many of the nobles debarred by their rank from any share in the government: but, though he won the allegiance of this faction, he took care to claim no honour himself that might frighten the public mind with terrors of a despot. Instead, simply clad and almost unattended, he walked through the streets, chatting in friendly equality with the merchants he met, many of whose interests were identical or wrapped up with his own financial projects; discussing agriculture with the Tuscan farmers like a country gentleman, freely spending his money on the schemes of the working classes, or scattering it amongst beggars.

When he died his mourning fellow citizens inscribed on his tomb the words Pater Patriae, ‘Father of his Country’. They had felt the benefits received through Cosimo’s government: they had not realized, or were indifferent to, the chains with which he had bound them. Some bitter enemies he had, of course, aroused, but these with quiet but remorseless energy he had swept from his path. It was his custom to sap the fortunes of possible rivals by immense exactions—to make them pay in fact for the liberal government, for which he would afterwards receive the praise, while drawing away their friends and supporters by bribery and threats. At last, ruined and deserted, they would be driven from the city; and here even Cosimo did not rest, since his influence at foreign courts enabled him to hunt his prey from one refuge to another until they died, impotently cursing the name of Medici, a warning to malcontents of the length and breadth of a private citizen’s revenge.

The Medici, it has been said, ‘used taxes as other men use their swords’, and the charge of deliberate corruption that has been brought against them is undeniable. ‘It is better to injure the city than to ruin it,’ once declared Cosimo himself, adding cynically, ‘It takes more to direct a government than to sit and tell one’s beads.’

Neither he nor his descendants were the type of ruler represented by Charlemagne or Alfred the Great. Their ideals were frankly low, with self-interest in the foreground, however skilfully disguised. When this has been admitted, however, it should be also remembered that Cosimo employed no army of hired ruffians to terrorize fellow citizens as the Visconti had done. Florence was willing to be corrupted, and if she lost the freedom she had loved in theory, yet she rose under the benevolent despotism of the Medici to a greater height of material and political prosperity than ever before or since in her history. ‘The authority that they possessed in Florence and throughout Christendom’, says Machiavelli, ‘was not obtained without being merited.’

It was under the fostering care of the Medici that Florence, more than any of the other Italian states, became the home of the intellectual Renaissance, from which the ‘New Learning’ was to radiate out across the world. This intellectual movement was twofold. Still under mediaeval influence, it began at first by finding its inspiration in the past, and so introduced a great classical revival, in which manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors and statues of gods and nymphs were almost as much revered as relics of the saints in an earlier age. Rich men hastened on journeys to the East in order to purchase half-burned fragments of literature from astonished Greeks, while in the lecture-halls of Italy eager pupils clamoured for fresh light on ancient philosophy and history. So great was the enthusiasm that it is said one famous scholar’s hair turned white with grief when he learned of the shipwreck of a cargo of classical books.

Cosimo de Medici had been a ‘friend and patron of learned men’; but it was in the time of his grandson, Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’, that the Renaissance reached its height in Florence. It was Lorenzo who founded the ‘Platonic Academy’ in imitation of the old academies of Greek philosophers, an assembly that became the battle-ground of the sharpest and most brilliant intellects of the day. Here were fought word-tournaments, often venomous in the intensity of their partisanship, between defenders of the views of Plato and of Aristotle: here were welcomed like princes cultured Greeks, driven into exile by Mahometan invasion, certain of crowded and enthusiastic audiences if only they were prepared to lecture on the literary treasures of their race. The enthusiasm recalled the days when Abelard held Paris spellbound by his reasoning on theology, but showed how far away had slipped the age of dialectics. The last great name amongst the schoolmen is that of Duns Scotus, a Franciscan of the thirteenth century, who raised the process of logical reasoning to such a fine art that it has been said of him, ‘he reasoned scholasticism out of human reach’. Ordinary theologians could not dispute with him, since it made their brains reel even to try and follow his arguments, so at last they snapped their fingers at him, crying, ‘Oh, Duns! Duns!’ Thus by his excessive skill in intellectual juggling he reduced himself and his subject to absurdity, and ‘Dunce’ has passed down to posterity as a fitting name for some one unreasonably stupid.

Scholasticism, the glory of mediaeval lecture-halls, held no thrill or charm for men of the Renaissance, and though Aristotle was still revered and a great deal of labour expended on trying to make his views and those of Plato match with current religious beliefs, yet the spirit that underlay this attempt was wholly different to the efforts of mediaeval minds.

‘Salvation’, ‘The City of God’—such words and phrases had been keys to the thought of the Middle Ages from St. Augustine to St. Dominic and St. Thomas Aquinas. To Renaissance minds there was but one master-word, ‘Humanity’.

What message had these classical philosophers, that tradition held had lived in a golden age, for struggling humanity more than a thousand years later? The men and women of the Renaissance, as they put this question, hoped that the answers they discovered would agree with the Faith that the Church had taught them; but there was no longer the same insistence that they must or be disregarded as heresy. The interest in an immortal soul had become mingled with interest in what was human and transitory, with the beauty and charm of this life as well as with the glory of the next.

Searching after beauty, no longer under the stern school-mistress ‘tradition’, but led by that will-o’-the-wisp ‘literary instinct’, the poets and authors under the influence of the Renaissance gradually turned from the use of Latin and Greek to that more natural medium of expression, their own language.

This was the second aspect of the ‘New Learning’, the disappearance of the belief that Latin and Greek alone were literary, and the gradual linking up of mediaeval with modern scholarship by the discovery that the growth of national ideals and aspirations could best be expressed in a living national tongue. The forerunners of this movement lived long before the period that we usually call the Renaissance. Thus Dante, greatest of mediaeval minds, was inspired to employ his native Italian in his masterpiece, the Divina Commedia, that, had his genius been less original, might have been merely a classical imitation. Petrarch, the friend of Rienzi and lover of liberty, who lived at the papal court at Avignon, was half-ashamed of his Italian sonnets, yet it is by their charm still more than by his Latin letters that he lives to-day, as Boccaccio by the witty easy-flowing style of his tales.

These are the names of literary ‘immortals’, and perhaps it may seem strange to find, when we pass from them to the ‘New Learning’ itself, that the greater part of the works published by members of the ‘Platonic Academy’ and other intellectual circles are now as dead as the dialectics of the schoolmen. Yet it is still harder, if we turn their pages, to believe that such florid sentences and long-drawn arguments could ever have stirred men’s blood to a frenzy of enthusiasm or passion. The explanation lies in the fact that for all the charm of its newly-won freedom, the Renaissance, on its literary side, was not a time of creation but of criticism and inquiry. Its leaders were too busy clearing away outworn traditions, collecting material for fresh thought, and laying literary foundations, to build themselves with any breadth of vision. Where they paused exhausted, or failed, the ‘giants’ of the modern world were able to erect their masterpieces.

Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ himself we can remember for the genuine love of nature and poetry apparent in his sonnets, but his claim to remain immortal in the world’s history must rest, not on his literary achievements, but on his generous patronage and appreciation of scholars and artists, as well as on the political wisdom that made him the first statesman of his day.

If the literature of the Renaissance was mainly experimental in character, painting was pre-eminently its finished glory—the representation of that sense of beauty in nature and in human life from which the Middle Ages had turned away, as from a snare set by the Devil to distract souls from Paradise. Here again, in painting, there is a twofold aspect: the artist mind seeking in the past as well as aspiring to the future for inspiration to guide his brush. It was in the life of St. Francis, ‘the little Brother of Assisi’, that Giotto, the great forerunner of the ‘new’ art, found that sense of humanity idealized that spurred him to break away from the old conventional Byzantine models, stiff, decorative, and inhuman, in order to attempt the realization of life as he saw it around him in the street and field.

Cimabue, a famous Florentine painter, had found Giotto as a shepherd lad, cutting pictures of the sheep grouped round him with a stone upon the rockside. He carried the boy away to be his apprentice, but the pupil soon excelled the master and not merely Florence but all Italy heard of his wondrous colours and designs. ‘He took nature for his guide,’ says Leonardo da Vinci; and many are the tales of this kindly peasant genius, small and ugly in appearance but full of the joy and humour of the world that he studied so shrewdly. The Angevin King Robert of Naples once asked him to suggest a symbol of his own turbulent Southern kingdom, whereupon the artist drew a donkey saddled, sniffing at another saddle lying on the ground. ‘Such are your subjects,’ he remarked, ‘that every day would seek a new master.’ No politician could have made a more fitting summary of mediaeval Naples.

Giotto’s chief fame to-day lies in his frescoes of the life of St. Francis on the walls of the double chapel at Assisi and in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Most of them, damaged by the action of time and weather on the rough plaster, have been repaired to their disadvantage, though a few remain unharmed to show the painter’s clear, delicate colouring and boldness of outline. To the average sightseer to-day they seem perhaps just legendary pictures, more or less crude in design, but when Giotto painted we must remember that the crowds who watched his brush in breathless admiration read as they gazed the story of the most human of saints—a man who had but lately walked amongst the Umbrian hills, and whose words and deeds were to them more vivid than many a living utterance.

To understand what the genius of Giotto meant to his own day we must consider the stiff unreality of former art, just as we cannot realize the greatness of Columbus by thinking of a modern voyage from the Continent to America, but only by recalling the primitive navigation of his time. Giotto, like Columbus, had many imitators and followers, some of them famous names, but the pioneer work that he had done for art was commemorated at the Renaissance when, by the orders of Lorenzo de Medici, a Latin epitaph was placed on his tomb containing these words: ‘Lo! I am he by whom dead Art was restored to life ... by whom Art became one with Nature.’

It would be impossible to condense satisfactorily in a few short paragraphs the triumphant history of Renaissance painting, the rapid development of which Giotto and his ‘school’ had made practicable, or even to give a slight sketch of the artists on whom that history depends. Never before has so much genius been crowded into so few years; but before we leave this pre-eminent age in modern Art, there is one arresting figure who must be described, a man who more than any other embodies the spirit of the Renaissance at its best, Leonardo da Vinci, ‘foremost amongst the supreme masters of the world’.

Leonardo ‘the Florentine’, as he liked to call himself, was born in the fortified village of Vinci midway between Florence and Pisa. The illegitimate son of a notary, born as it would seem to no great heritage, he was yet early distinguished amongst his fellows.

‘The richest gifts of Heaven,’ says Vasari, ‘are sometimes showered upon the same person, and beauty, grace, and genius, are combined in so rare a manner in one man that, to whatever he may apply himself, every action is so divine that all others are left behind him.’ This reads like exaggeration until we turn to the facts that are known about Da Vinci’s life, and find he is all indeed Vasari described—a giant amongst his fellows in physique and intellect, and still more in practical imagination. So strong was he that with his fingers he could bend a horseshoe straight, so full of potent charm for all things living that his presence in a room would draw men and women out of sadness, while in the streets the wildest horses would willingly yield to his taming power. Of the cruelty that rests like a stain on the Middle Ages there was in him no trace—rather that hot compassion for suffering and weakness so often allied with strength. It is told of him as of St. Francis that he would buy the singing-birds sold in cages in the street that he might set them free.

His copy-books are full of the drawings of horses, and probably his greatest work of art, judged by the opinion of his day and the rough sketches still extant of his design, was the statue he modelled for Ludovico ‘Il Moro’ of Francesco Sforza, the famous condottiere poised on horseback. Unfortunately it perished almost at once, hacked in pieces by the French soldiery when they drove Ludovico from his capital some years later.

Leonardo has been called the ‘true founder of the Italian School of oil-painting’. His most celebrated picture, ‘The Last Supper’, painted in oils as an experiment, on the walls of a convent near Milan, began to flake away, owing to the damp, even before the artist’s death. It has been so constantly retouched since, that very little, save the consummate art in the arrangement of the figures, and the general dramatic simplicity of the scene depicted, is left to show the master-hand. Even this is enough to convey his genius. Amongst the most famous of his works that still remain are his ‘Mona Lisa’, sometimes called ‘La Gioconda’, the portrait of a Neapolitan lady, and the ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, both in the gallery of the Louvre.

Leonardo excelled his age in engineering, in his knowledge of anatomy and physics, in his inventive genius that led him to guess at the power of steam, and struggle over models of aeroplanes, at which his generation laughed and shrugged their shoulders. He himself took keen pleasure in such versatility, but his art, that held other men spellbound with admiration, would plunge him in depression. ‘When he sat down to paint he seemed overcome with fear’, says one account of him, and describes how he would alter and finally destroy, in despair of attaining his ideal, canvases that those about him considered already perfect. It is little wonder then that few finished works came from the brush of this indefatigable worker; but his influence on his age and after-centuries was none the less prodigious.

Leonardo stands for all that was best in the Renaissance—its zest for truth, its eager vitality and love of experiment, but most of all for its sympathy. He is the embodiment of that motto that seems more than any other to express the Renaissance outlook: Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto—‘I am a man, and nothing pertaining to mankind is foreign to my nature.’

Italy, we have seen, was pre-eminently the home of the Renaissance—the teacher destined to give the world the ‘New Learning’ as she had preserved the old during the Dark Ages. In those sunny days, when Lorenzo ‘the Wise’, as well as ‘the Magnificent’, ruled in Florence, and by his statesmanship preserved so neat a balance of politics that the peninsula, divided by five ambitious Powers, yet remained at peace, a glorious future seemed assured; but in 1492, the year that Columbus discovered America, Lorenzo died. ‘The peace of Italy is dead also,’ exclaimed a statesman with prophetic insight, when he heard the news: and indeed the stability and moderation that Lorenzo and his house had symbolized was soon threatened.

In Florence, Wisdom was succeeded by Folly in the person of Piero, Lorenzo’s son, an Orsini on his mother’s side, and an inheritor to the full of the haughty, intractable temperament of the Roman baronage. Playing his football in the streets amongst the shopkeepers’ open booths, insolent to the merchants his father had courted, reckless of advice, Piero was soon to learn that a despotism, such as that of the Medici, founded not on armies but on public goodwill, falls at the first adverse wind. This wind, a whirlwind for Italy, blew from France; but it was Ludovico ‘Il Moro’, not the young Medici, who actually sowed the seed.

‘Nervous and cringing,’ as Philip de Commines had described him, Ludovico had found himself involved by his treatment of his nephew in a fog of suspicions and fears. Left to himself, uneducated and ailing in health, Gian Galeazzo Sforza would never have dared to thwart his ambitious uncle; but he had married a Neapolitan princess of stronger fibre, a granddaughter of Ferrante I, and when she complained to her relations, and they in turn remonstrated with ‘Il Moro’, trouble began.

It seemed to Ludovico, assailed by secret visions of Naples allying herself with Milan’s most dreaded enemy Venice, or even with Florence and Rome to secure revenge and his own downfall, that he must hastily give up the idea that Lorenzo had advocated of a balance of power within the peninsula itself, and look instead beyond the mountains for help and support. Mediaeval annals could give many instances of Popes and former rulers of Milan who had taken this same unpatriotic step, while a ready excuse could be found for invoking the aid of France, on account of the French King’s descent from the Second House of Anjou, that Alfonso V, Ferrante’s father, had driven from Naples.52

Acting, then, from motives of personal ambition, not from any wide conception of statecraft, Ludovico persuaded Charles VIII of France, son of Louis XI, that honour and glory lay in his renewal of the old Angevin claims to Naples, and in 1494, with a great flourish of trumpets, the French expedition started across the Alps. ‘I will assist in making you greater than Charlemagne,’ Ludovico had boasted, when dangling his bait before the young French King’s eyes; but the results of what he had intended were so far beyond his real expectations as to give him new cause for ‘cringing and fear’. ‘The French,’ said Pope Alexander VI sarcastically, ‘needed only a child’s wooden spurs and chalk to mark up their lodgings for the night.’

Almost without opposition, and where they encountered it achieving easy victories, the French marched through Italy from north to south, entering Florence, that had driven Piero and his brothers into exile, compelling the hasty submission of Rome, sweeping the Aragonese from Naples, whose fickle population came out with cheers to greet their new conquerors.

Certainly the causes of this victory were not due to the young conqueror himself, with his ungainly body and over-developed head, with his swollen ambitions and feeble brain, with his pious talk of a crusade against the East, and the idle debauch for which he and his subjects earned unenviable notoriety. Commines, a Frenchman with a shrewd idea of his master’s incompetence, believed that God must have directed the conquering armies, since the wisdom of man had nothing to say to it; but Italian historians found the cause of their country’s humiliation in her political and military decadence.

We have seen how ‘Companies’ of hired soldiers held Italy in thrall during the fourteenth century; but with the passing of years what was once a serious business had become a complicated kind of chess with mercenary levies for pawns. Fifteenth-century condottieri were as great believers in war as ever Sir John Hawkwood; but, susceptible to the veneer of civilization that glosses the Renaissance, they had lost the mediaeval taste for bloodshed. What they retained was the desire to prolong indeterminate campaigns in order to draw their pay, while reducing the dangers and hardships involved to the least adequate pretence of real warfare. Here is Machiavelli’s sarcastic commentary:

‘They spared no effort,’ he says, ‘to relieve themselves and their men from fatigue and danger, not killing one another in battle but making prisoners ... they would attack no town by night nor would those within make sorties against their besieging foes. Their camps were without rampart or trench. They fought no winter campaigns.’

Before the national levies of France, rough campaigners with no taste for military chess but only determined on as speedy a victory as possible, the make-believe armies of Italy were mown down like ninepins or ran away. Thus clashed two opposing systems—one real, the other by this time almost wholly artificial—and because of its noise and stir, 1494, the year of Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy, is often taken as the boundary-line between mediaeval and modern times, just as the year 476, when Romulus Augustulus gave up his crown, is accepted as the beginning of the Middle Ages. In both cases it is not the events of the actual year that can be said to have created the change. They are merely the culminating evidence of the end of an old order of things and the beginning of a new.

By 1494 Constantinople was in the hands of the Turks: Columbus had discovered America: John Gutenburg had invented his printing-press: Vasco da Gama was meditating his voyage to India. All these things were witness of ‘a new birth’, the infancy of a modern world; but the year 1494 stands also as evidence of the death of an old, the mediaeval.

Stung by the oppression and insolence of their conquerors, Italian armies and intrigue were to drive the French in the years to come temporarily out of Naples; but in spite of this success the effect of Charles VIII’s military ‘walk-over’ was never to be effaced. Italy, in Roman times the centre of Europe from which all law and order had radiated, had clung to a fiction of this power and glory through mediaeval days. Now at last the sham was exposed, and before the forces of nationality her boasted supremacy collapsed. The centre of political gravity had changed, and with it the traditions and ideals for which the supremacy of Italy had stood.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.