J. M. Robertson

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 there never was a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered under 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," in Historical 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.

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 setting those 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 the prey 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 it the 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, the paterini, 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 learned Histories of 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 in The 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; and A 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 furious strife; 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 of Frederick II, establishing twelve anziani or magistrates, replaced every two months, and two foreign judges—one the upper-class podestÀ and 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 the credenza, 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 lower bourgeoisie and 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 three priori 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 to signoria. 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 new bourgeois tendencies; 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 his successor, 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, the Neri, gave up to plunder, the proceeds of which he pocketed, the houses of the other or pro-Ghibelline faction, the Bianchi, 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.

The rÉgime of the local tyrant now rapidly developed. On the fall 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 the signoria on 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 of florins 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 their signoria to 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 the signoria for 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.

Sismondi, in his Short History, pp. 147, 148, seems to represent the episode as wholly one of wanton popular caprice and venality, even representing that Duke Gaultier was only by chance in the city. The narrative of Machiavelli explicitly sets forth how he came through the appeal of the Commission of Twenty; how the nobility and some of the bourgeoisie conspired with him; and how the populace were worked upon by the conspirators. The public acclamation, bad as it was, had been carefully subsidised. The middle class, whose war policy, however, had brought the city into such danger, were far more guilty than the mostly unenfranchised populace. Sismondi had latterly an undue faith in the principle of middle-class rule. (Cp. Mr. Boulting's Memoir in his recast of the RÉpubliques, p. xxiv.) In his Histoire des rÉpubliques italiennes (v, 329-53) he sets forth the financial corruption of the middle-class rulers (p. 330), and recognises that they and the aristocrats were alike dangerous to liberty. Cp. as to his change of front, F. Morin, Origines de la dÉmocratie, 3e Édit. 1865, introd. pp. 17-18.

Within a year, partly on the sudden pressure of a scarcity, the tyrant was overthrown, after having wrung from Florence 400,000 florins and infuriated all classes against him and his race. Not the least of his offences was his conclusion of a peace with Pisa, by which she for a given period was to rule over Lucca. The rising against him was universal. Three of his henchmen were literally torn to pieces with hands and teeth: a madness of fury which was only too profoundly in keeping with the self-abandonment that had placed the tyrant in power. The political organism was beginning to disintegrate. A new constitution was set up, with a leaning to aristocracy, which was soon upset by the middle class, who in turn established yet another. The nobles, believing the populace to be hostile to the bourgeoisie, attempted anew a revolution, and were utterly crushed. And now began, according to the greatest of the publicists of the Renaissance, the final enfeeblement of Florence, in that the ruin of the nobility, whose one merit had been their fighting power, led to the abandonment of all military exercise.[617] Yet Florence a generation later made vigorous war under a "committee," and in the meantime at least the city tasted domestic peace and grew in civilisation. And though we doubtless exaggerate when we conceive of a transition from what we are apt to figure as the fierce and laughterless Florence of Dante to the gay Florence of the Medici, it is hard to hold that life was worsened when men changed the ways which made them collectively capable of rending with their teeth the carcases of those they hated, and which left the Viscontis of Milan capable of torturing their political prisoners to death through forty days.

Still the process of disintegration and reintegration proceeded. The tyrants of the smaller cities usually established themselves by the aid of professional mercenaries, German and other, whom, when their funds failed, they turned loose to shift for themselves, having in the meantime disarmed the citizens. These companies, swelled by others disbanded after the English wars in France, ravaged and plundered Italy from Montferrat to Naples, and were everywhere bought off save by Florence. Only the Pope and the greater tyrants could keep them regularly in pay; and by their means the Viscontis became lords of sixteen cities of Lombardy, while the Papacy began to build up a military power. Naples, on the other hand, continuously degenerated; while Genoa and Venice exhausted each other in deadly strife for the commercial monopoly of the East; and Pisa leaned to the Viscontis, who ultimately obtained its headship.

Rome, popeless, and domineered over by warring nobles, had its brief vision of a republic under the dreamer Cola di Rienzi, who at last fell by the hand of the masses whom he had for a brief space hypnotised. Neither he nor they were meet for the destiny they fain would have fulfilled; and had people and leader alike been worthier, they would ultimately have failed to master the forces joined against them. Rienzi's brief, and on some sides remarkably vigorous, administration in 1346-47 was not wholly unworthy of his ideal of "the good estate"; he seems, indeed, to have ruled the Roman territory with an efficiency that recalled the ancient State; and his early successes against the nobles tell of unexpected weakness on their side and energy on that of the people. His dream of an Italian federation, too, remains to prove that he was no mere mob-leader. But had he been as stable in purpose and policy as he was heady and capricious, and had the Roman populace been as steadfast as it was turbulent, the forces of division represented by the nobles and the Papacy would ultimately have overthrown any republican polity. What Florence could not compass, Rome could not maintain. Two centuries before, Arnold of Brescia had fallen, after fifteen years of popularity, as soon as pope and emperor joined hands against him; and the papalism of Rienzi was as fatal to him as anti-papalism had been to Arnold. Had Rienzi had his way, the Pope would have at once returned to Rome; and where the Papacy was, no republic could endure, however strong and sober were its head. And Rienzi was not sober. After his overthrow in 1347 and his seven years of wandering exile, he was restored solely by the choice and as the agent of the Pope at Avignon; and his death in a tumult after four months of renewed office was the end of his cause.

In Florence the disintegration went on apace. A new emperor, Charles IV, charged the city 100,000 florins (1355) for her immunities, leaving all men hopeless as ever of the Empire as a political solution; and when the crimes of the Viscontis drove cities and Papacy to call Charles in against them (1368), he did but use the opportunity to levy blackmail wherever he went. Later (1375), the Papacy combined with Florence against the reigning Visconti, but only to betray its ally. And now occurred what for a time must have seemed a vital revolution in Italian affairs; the infuriated Florentines suddenly allying themselves with Visconti, the enemy of the day before, against the treacherous Pope, and framing a league with Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Church that Florence had so long sustained. Eighty towns in ten days drove out their legates; and furious reprisals broke out on all hands, till the very Pope at Avignon was fain to come to stay the universal warfare. Now, however, an aristocratic and papalist party in Florence bitterly opposed "The Eight" who managed the war, the aristocracy having gravitated to the papal side; and at length exhaustion and the absolute instability of all alliances brought about a peace in which most of the cities, freed from the Papacy—now become an affair of two mutually anathematising heads—fell once more under local tyrants. In the hour of extreme need the Papacy was, if possible, a worse influence than the emperor; nowhere was to be found a force of stability save in the tyrannies, which were merely unstable with a difference.

Florence, still republican and still obstinately prosperous, stood as a strange anomaly in the general transformation. But she had now reached the stage when the long-ignored populace—the multitude beneath the popolo—made up of handworkers with no nominal incorporation or franchise, was able to press its claims as against the other orders, which in turn were divided, as of old, by the jealousies between the major and minor middle-class guilds and between the new nobility of capital and their former equals. Refused the status of incorporation, the ciompi ("chums" or "mates," from the French compÈre) made their insurrection in turn, finding for the nonce in a wool-carder a leader of the best quality the time could show, who carried his point, was chosen head magistrate, enforced order among his own partisans, and established a new magistracy, with three representatives of the major arts, three of the minor (1378).

But where the educated burgesses and nobles had failed in the science of self-government, the mass of untrained toilers[618] could not succeed. Suborned doubtless by the other classes, they rebelled against the man whom they had made leader, and were by him promptly and capably suppressed, many being exiled; whereupon in due course he was himself deprived of his post by the old parties, and the new order was annulled (1382). After fresh strifes and proscriptions among the aristocracy themselves, all traces of the popular rising were effaced, and the aristocracy of wealth was definitely re-established.

What had happened was the attainment of the capitalistic stage and the enthronement of capital in the republican State. In place of strifes between wealth and nobility there had arisen the strife of capital and labour, the new aristocracy of wealth having in large part taken the place of that of descent. The latter transition had occurred nearly simultaneously in the other remaining Republics. Genoa had substituted factions with the names of new wealthy families for the old. In Siena, where the bourgeoisie dispossessed the nobles, they were in turn assailed by "reformers" of the lower class, who were finally defeated in battle and exiled wholesale (1385). Meantime the hereditary tyrants of Milan, the Visconti, with their singular continuity of capacity, had grown stronger than ever, had built up a native and scientific military system, and more than ever menaced all their neighbours. Florence called in aid successively from Germany and France (1390-91); but the Milanese army triumphed over all; and the skilled adventurer Sir John Hawkwood, the hired general of the Florentine troops, could not hold his ground. The Emperor, as usual, was satisfied to take payment for non-intervention; and the reigning Visconti, Gian Galeazza, invested by the Emperor with the titles of Duke of Mantua and Count of Pavia, and the lordship of twenty-six cities, had by the year 1402 further compassed, by all manner of fraud and force, the mastery of Pisa, Perugia, Genoa, Siena, Lucca, and Bologna, dying of the plague at the height of his power. His sons being boys, his power broke up among his generals, to be in large part recovered later, however, by his second son, who first assassinated the elder.

At this stage Venice once more intervenes, taking up the cause of Verona against the tyrant of Padua, whom, having defeated him by her carefully-chosen and supervised mercenaries, she put to death (1406). He had been the ally of Florence; but Florence let him fall, being now wholly bent on reconquering Pisa, her natural seaport. Pisa, in turn, always invincibly opposed to Florentine rule, was on commercial grounds backed by Genoa, now under the nominal rule of a representative of the King of France, who, however, sought to sell Pisa to the Florentines, and did receive from them 200,000 florins. Still resisting, the Pisans recalled an exile to lead them; and he in turn sold them for 50,000 florins, this time to their complete undoing. Refusing all Florentine favours, the bulk of the ruling middle-class abandoned the city for ever, taking much of its special commerce with them. Meantime, the kingdom of Naples, under an energetic king, Ladislaus, had acquired most of the States of the distracted Church, menaced Florence, and was pressing her hard, despite French support, when Ladislaus died (1414). By this time the new Visconti was establishing himself at Milan by means of mercenaries, commanded for him by well-chosen captains. Six times were the Florentines defeated by his forces; till his capable general, Carmagnola, whom he had disgraced, revealed to the Council of Venice his master's intention to attack them; and Venice joined Florence to crush the tyrant. Carmagnola, acting slackly, met ill success, and was therefore executed by his Venetian masters. But the Visconti too finally died defeated, leaving his power to a new adventurer, Francesco Sforza, who had married his daughter, and had fought both for and against him in the endless imbroglio of Italian conspiracy.

Florentine republicanism was now near its euthanasia. By the fatal law of empire, the perpetual enterprise of destroying other men's freedom left Florence unfit to use or to defend her own; and the tyrants of Pisa became meet for the yoke of tyranny. The family of Medici, growing rapidly rich, began to use the power of capital as elsewhere less astute adventurers used the power of the sword. From the overthrow of the ciompi party in 1382 to 1434, the Republic had been ruled by a faction of the new commercial aristocracy with substantial unity; and the period is claimed as the most prosperous, intellectually and materially, though not the most progressive, in Florentine history.

Cosimo de' Medici, descendant of a democrat, was grown too rich to be one in his turn; and between him and the Albizzi, who led the ruling faction, there grew up one of the old and typical jealousies of power-seekers. Exiled by a packed balia, Cosimo's wealth enabled him to turn the tables in a year and exile his exilers, taking their place and silently absorbing their power. "The moment was come when the credit of the Medici was to prevail over the legal power of the Florentine signoria." Thus when the Visconti died, Cosimo and the doge of Venice combined their forces to prevent the recovery of the republican independence of Milan, whose middle class, divided by their own jealousies, speedily succumbed to the fraud and force of Sforza, the Visconti's heir.

For thirty years Cosimo maintained at Florence, by the power of capital, prosperity and peace under the semblance of the old constitution, the richer of the ever-renewed capitalist class accepting his primacy, while the populace, being more equitably governed than of yore under the old nobility, and being steadily prosperous, saw no ground for revolt. Capital as "tyrant" had in fact done what the tyrants of early Greece and Rome are presumed to have often done—favoured the people as against the aristocracy; Cosimo's liberality giving employment and pay at the same time to the artisans and to the scholars. Under Cosimo and his political colleagues, doubtless, the subject cities were corruptly governed; but Florence seems to have been discreetly handled. Attempts to break the capitalistic domination came to nothing, save the exile or at a pinch the death of the malcontents.

At Cosimo's death there was dynastic strife of capital, as elsewhere of blood; but the blundering financier Pitti went to the wall, and the invalid Piero de' Medici kept his father's power. At his death the group of his henchmen kept their hold on it; and in time his son Lorenzo ousted them and engrossed all, escaping the plot which was fatal to his brother. The failure of that and other plots, in Florence and elsewhere, sufficed to prove that the artisans, well employed and protected by the laws, had no concern to upset the orderly and business-like "tyranny" either of one great capitalist or of a prince, in the interest of an oligarchy which would rule no better, which gave them no more of political privilege than did he, and which was less ready than he with public gifts. Thus he had little difficulty in cutting down every institution that restricted his power, whether popular or oligarchic.[619] Italian republicanism had always been a matter of either upper-class or middle-class rule; and when the old upper class of feudal descent was superseded by one of commercial descent, the populace had nothing to gain by supporting the bourgeoisie. A capitalistic "lord," most of whose wealth was in its nature unseizable, was thus a more stable power than any mere swordsman among swordsmen; and Lorenzo de' Medici not only crushed all the conspiracies against him, but held his own against the dangerous alliance of the republican Pope Sixtus IV and the King of Naples—the menace of Turkish invasion helping him. When, early in his reign, he joined in and carried through the plot for the confiscation of Volterra, chiefly in order to secure a hold on its rich alum mines, his popularity at Florence was in the ratio of the baseness of his triumph. As always, imperialism and corruption went hand in hand, and the Florentines ensured their own servitude by their eagerness to compass the fall of others.[620]

After Lorenzo's death (1492) only the incompetence of his son Piero at the hazardous juncture of the new French invasion under Charles VIII could upset the now hereditary power of the house; but such incompetence at such a crisis was sufficient, Savonarola having now set up a new democratic force, partly analogous to that of Puritanism in the England of a later age. The new party, however, brought no new political science.[621] Republican Florence in its interim of self-government proceeded as of old to make war on indomitable Pisa, with which it could never consent to live on terms of equality. Time after time, vanquished by force and treachery, the Pisans had again cast loose, fighting for independence as fiercely as did their fathers of a previous generation. Savonarola, who had no better light for this problem than was given to the other Florentines of his age, "staked the truth of his inspiration on the recovery of Pisa"; he had not a grain of sympathy for the Pisans, and punished those who had;[622] and though his party had the wisdom to proclaim a general amnesty for Florence (1495), the war against Pisa went on, with the French king insensately admitted as a Florentine ally. Savonarola in his turn fell, on his plain failure to evoke the miraculous aid on the wild promise of which he had so desperately traded; his party of pietists went to pieces; and the upper-class party which succeeded carried on the war, destroying the Pisan harvests every year, till, under the one-man command of Loderini, Florence triumphed (1507), and the staunch sea-city fell once more. Even now the conquering city consented to pay great bribes to the kings of France and Aragon for leave to take her prey. And once more multitudes of Pisans emigrated, refusing to live in subjection, despite all attempts at conciliation.[623]

Slowly the monarchic powers closed in; France, after several campaigns, decisively defeated and captured Lodovico Sforza, lord of Milan, and proceeded by a secret treaty with Spain to partition the kingdom of Naples—a rascals' bargain, which ended in a quarrel and in the destruction of two French armies; Spain remaining master of Naples and the Sicilies, while France held the Milanese and Liguria, including Genoa. For a few years Cesare Borgia flared across the Italian sky, only to fall with his great purposes unfulfilled; and still the foreign powers encroached. France, with Swiss support, proceeded in turn to make war on Venice; and the emperor, the pope, Spain, and the smaller neighbouring despots, joined in the attack. Against these dastardly odds the invincible oligarchy of Venice held out, till Pope Julius, finding his barbarian friends worse than his Italian enemies, changed sides, joined the republic, and after many reverses got together an anti-French league of English, Swiss, and Spanish. Finally the emperor betrayed his French allies, who were once more driven out of Italy, leaving their ally, Florence, to fall into the hands of the Spaniards (1512).

Now came the restoration of the family of Medici, soon followed by the elevation of Giovanni de' Medici to the Papacy as Leo X; whence came yet more wars, enough to paralyse Italy financially had there been no other impoverishing cause. But Leo X, now the chief Italian power, misgoverned in secular affairs as badly as in ecclesiastical; and the wars, so barbarous in themselves, were waged upon dwindling resources. Venice, pressed afresh by Maximilian, made alliance with Louis, who was defeated by the Swiss, as defenders and "lords" of Milan; whereupon the Spanish, papal, and German forces successively ravaged the Venetian territories. Francis I zealously renewed the war, grappled with the Swiss in the desperate battle of Marignano in such sort as to get them to come to terms, and compassed the sovereignty of Milan. On the succession of Charles V to the throne of Spain and the Empire (1519), war between him and Francis set in systematically, and continued under Adrian and Clement VII as under Leo, both combatants feeding on and plundering Italy. The defeat of Francis at Pavia (1525) brought no cessation to the drain; a new league was formed between France, the Papacy, Venice, and Sforza; and soon, besides the regular armies, a guerilla horde of Germans on the imperial side, receiving no pay, was living by the plunder of Lombardy. At length, in 1527, came the sack of Rome by the imperial forces, Germans and Spanish combining for nine miserable months to outdo the brutalities and the horrors of all previous conquests, Christian or heathen. Two years' more fighting "only added to the desolation of Italy, and destroyed alike in all the Italian provinces the last remains of prosperity."[624] When a fresh German army entered Lombardy, in 1529, there was "nothing more to pillage."[625]

The curtain now falls rapidly on every form of "independence" in Italy. Pope Clement VII, freed of his barbarian conquerors, sent them against Florence, which fell in a fashion not unworthy of its great republican tradition, after tasting three final years of its ancient and thrice-forfeited "freedom." With the dying Machiavelli to frame the ordinances of her revived military system, and Michel Angelo to construct her last fortifications, she had in her final effort bound up with her name as a republic two of the greatest Italian names of the age of the Renaissance. Then came the vengeance of the Medicean Pope, Clement VII, the ducal tyranny, and the end of a great period.

The prolonged life of the maritime and commercial-aristocratic republics of Genoa and Venice, interesting as a proof of the defensive powers of communities so placed and so ordered, was no prolongation of Italian civilisation, save in so far as a brilliant art survived at Venice till the close of the sixteenth century. It is sufficient to note that what of artistic and intellectual life Venice and Genoa had was dependent first on Venetian contact with Byzantium, and later on the fecundity of freer Italy. The mere longer duration of Venice was due as much to her unique situation as to her system. On the other hand, it seems substantially true that the Venetian oligarchy did rule its subjects, both at home and on the mainland, with greater wisdom and fairness than was shown by any other Italian power. When Castruccio Castracani drove nine hundred families out of Lucca in 1310, thus destroying some of its chief manufactures, Venice gave the silk-weavers among them a politic encouragement, and so widened her commercial basis.[626] Her rulers, in short, had the common sense of men of business, who knew the value of goodwill. There is thus an unwarrantable extravagance in the verdict of the young Macaulay, that in Venice "aristocracy had destroyed every seed of genius and virtue";[627] and in his outburst: "God forbid that there should ever again exist a powerful and civilised State which, after existing through thirteen hundred eventful years, shall not bequeath to mankind the memory of one great name or one generous action." Such actions are not rife in any history, and in mere civic selfishness of purpose the rulers of Venice were on a par with most others.[628] As citizens, or as a caste, they seem to have been not more but less self-seeking as against the rest of the community, despite their determined exclusiveness, than the same class in other States.[629] Their history does but prove that an astute oligarchy, protectively governing a commercial and industrial State, is not helpful to civilisation in the ratio of its power and stability, and that the higher political wisdom is not the appanage of any class.

When all is said, the whole Italian civilisation of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance represents a clear political gain over that of ancient Hellas in that it had transcended slavery, while failing to attain or to aim at the equality and fraternity which alone realise liberty. Despite, too, all the scandals of the Renaissance in general, and of papal Rome in particular, the life of such a city as Florence was morally quite on a par with that of any northern city.[630] But the later States and civilisations which, while so much more fortunate in their political conditions, are still so far from the moral liberation of their labouring masses—these are not entitled to plume themselves on their comparative success. "The petty done" is still dwarfed by "the undone vast."

What they and we may truly claim is that in the modern State, freed from the primal curse of fratricidal strife between cities and provinces, the totality of "good life," no less than of industrial and commercial life, is far greater than of old, even if signal genius be less common. To contrast the Genoa of to-day with the old City-State is to realise how peace can liberate human effort. The city of Petrarch, Columbus, and Mazzini has no recent citizen of European fame; but since a wealthy son bequeathed to her his huge fortune (1875), she has become the chief port of Italy, passing some forty per cent. of the total trade of the country. The fact that half her imports, in weight, consist of coal, tells of the main economic disadvantage of modern Italy as compared with the chief northern countries; but the modern development of industry is all the more notable. Under a system of general free trade, it might go much further.

The fact remains that modern Italy is no such intellectual beacon-light among the nations as she was in the "old, unhappy, far-off times"; and upon this the historical sentimentalist is prone to moralise. But there is no perceptible reason why the new life, well managed, should not yield new intellectual glories; and the latterday intellectual Renaissance of Italy may one day take its place in the historic retrospect as no less notable than that of the days of strife.