Jacob Burckhardt
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

PREFACE

DR. Burckhardt’s work on the Renaissance in Italy is too well known, not only to students of the period, but now to a wider circle of readers, for any introduction to be necessary. The increased interest which has of late years, in England, been taken in this and kindred subjects, and the welcome which has been given to the works of other writers upon them, encourage me to hope that in publishing this translation I am meeting a want felt by some who are either unable to read German at all, or to whom an English version will save a good deal of time and trouble.

The translation is made from the third edition of the original, recently published in Germany, with slight additions to the text, and large additions to the notes, by Dr. Ludwig Geiger, of Berlin. It also contains some fresh matter communicated by Dr. Burckhardt to Professor Diego Valbusa of Mantua, the Italian translator of the book. To all three gentlemen my thanks are due for courtesy shown, or help given to me in the course of my work.

In a few cases, where Dr. Geiger’s view differs from that taken by Dr. Burckhardt, I have called attention to the fact by bracketing Dr. Geiger’s opinion and adding his initials.

THE TRANSLATOR.

PART I.
THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION

THIS work bears the title of an essay in the strictest sense of the word. No one is more conscious than the writer with what limited means and strength he has addressed himself to a task so arduous. And even if he could look with greater confidence upon his own researches, he would hardly thereby feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilisation present a different picture; and in treating of a civilisation which is the mother of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us, it is unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every moment both on the writer and on the reader. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions. Such indeed is the importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh investigation, and may be studied with advantage from the most varied points of view. Meanwhile we are content if a patient hearing be granted us, and if this book be taken and judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty of the history of civilisation that a great intellectual process must be broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in order to be in any way intelligible. It was formerly our intention to fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the Renaissance,’—an intention, however, which we have been able only to fulfil¹ in part.

The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a political condition which differed essentially from that of other countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal system was so organised that, at the close of its existence, it was naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth century, even in the most favourable case, were no longer received and respected as feudal lords, but as possible leaders and supporters of powers already in existence; while the Papacy,² with its creatures and allies, was strong enough to hinder national unity in the future, not strong enough itself to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a multitude of political units—republics and despots—in part of long standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded simply on their power to maintain it.³ In them for the first time we detect the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own instincts, often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egoism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture. But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way compensated, a new fact appears in history—the state as the outcome of reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art. This new life displays itself in a hundred forms, both in the republican and in the despotic states, and determines their inward constitution, no less than their foreign policy. We shall limit ourselves to the consideration of the completer and more clearly defined type, which is offered by the despotic states.

The internal condition of the despotically governed states had a memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily, after its transformation by the Emperor Frederick II.⁴ Bred amid treason and peril in the neighbourhood of the Saracens, Frederick, the first ruler of the modern type who sat upon a throne, had early accustomed himself, both in criticism and action, to a thoroughly objective treatment of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal condition and administration of the Saracenic states was close and intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the field all the resources at his command. Frederick’s measures (especially after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown in the West, the whole judicial and political administration by establishing the right of appeal from the feudal courts, which he did not, however, abolish, to the imperial judges. No office was henceforth to be filled by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were introduced; the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find, not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan rulers that Frederick traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving to himself the monopoly of many commodities, and restricting in various ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police, and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of Saracens who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria—men who were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the Church. At a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had long been forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to use the system which he found already at work.

At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper of the most peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands as the representative of no system of government or administration, for all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his successors, not even Cæsar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt of Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and his fall led to no return of justice among the nations, and served as no warning to future transgressors.

It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional monarchy, in which the prince was to be supported by an upper house named by himself, and a representative body elected by the people; in vain did he concede to the people the right of revolution.⁵ Such theories found no echo outside the lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century. Their personality, already half legendary, forms the most important subject of ‘The Hundred Old Tales,’ whose original composition falls certainly within this century.⁶ In them Frederick is already represented as possessing the right to do as he pleased with the property of his subjects, and exercises on all, even on criminals, a profound influence by the force of his personality; Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe which all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eyewitnesses to the half-mythical tragedy⁷ of later poets.

Immediately after the fall of Frederick and Ezzelino, a crowd of tyrants appeared upon the scene. The struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline was their opportunity. They came forward in general as Ghibelline leaders, but at times and under conditions so various that it is impossible not to recognise in the fact a law of supreme and universal necessity. The means which they used were those already familiar in the party struggles of the past—the banishment or destruction of their adversaries and of their adversaries’ households.

CHAPTER II.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

THE tyrannies, great and small, of the fourteenth century afford constant proof that examples such as these were not thrown away. Their misdeeds cried forth loudly and have been circumstantially told by historians. As states depending for existence on themselves alone, and scientifically organised with a view to this object, they present to us a higher interest than that of mere narrative.

The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no prince out of Italy had at that time a conception, joined to almost absolute power within the limits of the state, produced among the despots both men and modes of life of a peculiar character.⁸ The chief secret of government in the hands of the prudent ruler lay in leaving the incidence of taxation so far as possible where he found it, or as he had first arranged it. The chief sources of income were: a land tax, based on a valuation; definite taxes on articles of consumption and duties on exported and imported goods; together with the private fortune of the ruling house. The only possible increase was derived from the growth of business and of general prosperity. Loans, such as we find in the free cities, were here unknown; a well-planned confiscation was held a preferable means of raising money, provided only that it left public credit unshaken—an end attained, for example, by the truly Oriental practice of deposing and plundering the director of the finances.⁹

Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the body-guard, of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings were met, as well as of the buffoons and men of talent who belonged to the personal attendants of the prince. The illegitimacy of his rule isolated the tyrant and surrounded him with constant danger; the most honourable alliance which he could form was with intellectual merit, without regard to its origin. The liberality of the northern princes of the thirteenth century was confined to the knights, to the nobility which served and sang. It was otherwise with the Italian despot. With his thirst of fame and his passion for monumental works, it was talent, not birth, which he needed. In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a new position, almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy.

No prince was more famous in this respect than the ruler of Verona, Can Grande della Scala, who numbered among the illustrious exiles whom he entertained at his court representatives of the whole of Italy.¹⁰ The men of letters were not ungrateful. Petrarch, whose visits at the courts of such men have been so severely censured, sketched an ideal picture of a prince of the fourteenth century.¹¹ He demands great things from his patron, the lord of Padua, but in a manner which shows that he holds him capable of them. ‘Thou must not be the master but the father of thy subjects, and must love them as thy children; yea, as members of thy body.¹² Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the enemy—with thy subjects goodwill is sufficient. By citizens, of course, I mean those who love the existing order; for those who daily desire change are rebels and traitors, and against such a stern justice may take its course.’

Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction of the omnipotence of the state. The prince is to be independent of his courtiers, but at the same time to govern with simplicity and modesty; he is to take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore churches and public buildings, to keep up the municipal police,¹³ to drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; he is to exercise a strict justice, so to distribute the taxes that the people can recognise their necessity and the regret of the ruler to be compelled to put his hands in the pockets of others; he is to support the sick and the helpless, and to give his protection and society to distinguished scholars, on whom his fame in after ages will depend.

But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system, and the merits of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth century were not without a more or less distinct consciousness of the brief and uncertain tenure of most of these despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions like these are naturally secure in proportion to the size of the territory in which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly tempted to swallow up the smaller. Whole hecatombs of petty rulers were sacrificed at this time to the Visconti alone. As a result of this outward danger an inward ferment was in ceaseless activity; and the effect of the situation on the character of the ruler was generally of the most sinister kind. Absolute power, with its temptations to luxury and unbridled selfishness, and the perils to which he was exposed from enemies and conspirators, turned him almost inevitably into a tyrant in the worst sense of the word. Well for him if he could trust his nearest relations! But where all was illegitimate, there could be no regular law of inheritance, either with regard to the succession or to the division of the ruler’s property; and consequently the heir, if incompetent or a minor, was liable in the interest of the family itself to be supplanted by an uncle or cousin of more resolute character. The acknowledgment or exclusion of the bastards was a fruitful source of contest; and most of these families in consequence were plagued with a crowd of discontented and vindictive kinsmen. This circumstance gave rise to continual outbreaks of treason and to frightful scenes of domestic bloodshed. Sometimes the pretenders lived abroad in exile, and like the Visconti, who practised the fisherman’s craft on the Lake of Garda,¹⁴ viewed the situation with patient indifference. When asked by a messenger of his rival when and how he thought of returning to Milan, he gave the reply, ‘By the same means as those by which I was expelled, but not till his crimes have outweighed my own.’ Sometimes, too, the despot was sacrificed by his relations, with the view of saving the family, to the public conscience which he had too grossly outraged.¹⁵ In a few cases the government was in the hands of the whole family, or at least the ruler was bound to take their advice; and here, too, the distribution of property and influence often led to bitter disputes.

The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Aguello of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden sceptre, and show himself at the window of his house, ‘as relics are shown.’ reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by kneeling attendants.¹⁶ More often, however, the old Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and characterised well the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition of the new princes.¹⁷ ‘What mean their trumpets and their bells, their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman—come, vultures?’ The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is a lofty and solitary building, full of dungeons and listening-tubes,¹⁸ the home of cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service of the despot,¹⁹ who even becomes at last himself an object of pity: he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust no one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation of his fall. ‘As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated, so grows in their midst the hidden element which must produce their dissolution and ruin.’²⁰ But the deepest ground of dislike has not been stated; Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be suffered to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest dependents. The control of the individual was rigorously carried out, even down to the establishment of a system of passports.²¹

The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar colour to this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard him cry to the devil ‘to come and kill him.’

The most complete and instructive type of the tyranny of the fourteenth century is to be found unquestionably among the Visconti of Milan, from the death of the Archbishop Giovanni onwards (1354). The family likeness which shows itself between Bernabò and the worst of the Roman Emperors is unmistakable;²² the most important public object was the prince’s boar-hunting; whoever interfered with it was put to death with torture; the terrified people were forced to maintain 5,000 boar-hounds, with strict responsibility for their health and safety. The taxes were extorted by every conceivable sort of compulsion; seven daughters of the prince received a dowry of 100,000 gold florins apiece; and an enormous treasure was collected. On the death of his wife (1384) an order was issued ‘to the subjects’ to share his grief, as once they had shared his joy, and to wear mourning for a year. The coup de main (1385) by which his nephew Giangaleazzo got him into his power—one of those brilliant plots which make the heart of even late historians beat more quickly²³—was strikingly characteristic of the man. Giangaleazzo, despised by his relations on account of his religion and his love of science, resolved on vengeance, and, leaving the city under pretext of a pilgrimage, fell upon his unsuspecting uncle, took him prisoner, forced his way back into the city at the head of an armed band, seized on the government, and gave up the palace of Bernabò to general plunder.

In Giangaleazzo that passion for the colossal which was common to most of the despots shows itself on the largest scale. He undertook, at the cost of 300,000 golden florins, the construction of gigantic dykes, to divert in case of need the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua, and thus to render these cities defenceless.²⁴ It is not impossible, indeed, that he thought of draining away the lagoons of Venice. He founded that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia,²⁵ and the cathedral of Milan, ‘which exceeds in size and splendour all the churches of Christendom.’ The Palace in Pavia, which his father Galeazzo began and which he himself finished, was probably by far the most magnificent of the princely dwellings of Europe. There he transferred his famous library, and the great collection of relics of the saints, in which he placed a peculiar faith. King Winceslaus made him Duke (1395); he was hoping for nothing less than the Kingdom of Italy²⁶ or the Imperial crown, when (1402) he fell ill and died. His whole territories are said to have paid him in a single year, besides the regular contribution of 1,200,000 gold florins, no less than 800,000 more in extraordinary subsidies. After his death the dominions which he had brought together by every sort of violence fell to pieces; and for a time even the original nucleus could with difficulty be maintained by his successors. What might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died 1412) and Filippo Maria (died 1417), had they lived in a different country and among other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and cowardice which had been accumulated from generation to generation.

Giovanni Maria, too, is famed for his dogs, which were no longer, however, used for hunting, but for tearing human bodies. Tradition has preserved their names, like those of the bears of the Emperor Valentinian I.²⁷ In May, 1409, when war was going on, and the starving populace cried to him in the streets, Pace! Pace! he let loose his mercenaries upon them, and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of the gallows it was forbidden to utter the words pace and guerra, and the priests were ordered, instead of dona nobis pacem, to say tranquillitatem! At last a band of conspirators took advantage of the moment when Facino Cane, the chief Condottiere of the insane ruler, lay ill at Pavia, and cut down Giovan Maria in the church of San Gottardo at Milan; the dying Facino on the same day made his officers swear to stand by the heir Filippo Maria, whom he himself urged his wife²⁸ to take for a second husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice. We shall have occasion to speak of Filippo Maria later on.

And in times like these Cola di Rienzi was dreaming of founding on the rickety enthusiasm of the corrupt population of Rome a new state which was to comprise all Italy. By the side of rulers such as those whom we have described, he seems no better than a poor deluded fool.

CHAPTER III.
THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

THE despotisms of the fifteenth century show an altered character. Many of the less important tyrants, and some of the greater, like the Scala and the Carrara, had disappeared, while the more powerful ones, aggrandized by conquest, had given to their systems each its characteristic development. Naples for example received a fresh and stronger impulse from the new Arragonese dynasty. A striking feature of this epoch is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent dynasties of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things, apart from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent and audacity win the great prizes. The petty despots, to secure a trustworthy support, begin to enter the service of the larger states, and become themselves Condottieri, receiving in return for their services money and impunity for their misdeeds, if not an increase of territory. All, whether small or great, must exert themselves more, must act with greater caution and calculation, and must learn to refrain from too wholesale barbarities; only so much wrong is permitted by public opinion as is necessary for the end in view, and this the impartial bystander certainly finds no fault with. No trace is here visible of that half-religious loyalty by which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and calculation are the only means of advancement. A character like that of Charles the Bold, which wore itself out in the passionate pursuit of impracticable ends, was a riddle to the Italian. ‘The Swiss were only peasants, and if they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not be 5,000 ducats the greater.’²⁹ The mediæval features in the character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long become unintelligible to the Italian. The diplomatists of the South, when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service, when he maltreated his troops to punish them for a defeat, and then threw the blame on his counsellors in the presence of the same troops, gave him up for lost.³⁰ Louis XI., on the other hand, whose policy surpasses that of the Italian princes in their own style, and who was an avowed admirer of Francesco Sforza, must be placed in all that regards culture and refinement far below these rulers.

Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the fifteenth century. The personality of the ruler is so highly developed, often of such deep significance, and so characteristic of the conditions and needs of the time, that to form an adequate moral judgment on it is no easy task.³¹

The foundation of the system was and remained illegitimate, and nothing could remove the curse which rested upon it. The imperial approval or investiture made no change in the matter, since the people attached little weight to the fact, that the despot had bought a piece of parchment somewhere in foreign countries, or from some stranger passing through his territory.³² If the Emperor had been good for anything—so ran the logic of uncritical common sense—he would never have let the tyrant rise at all. Since the Roman expedition of Charles IV., the emperors had done nothing more in Italy than sanction a tyranny which had arisen without their help; they could give it no other practical authority than what might flow from an imperial charter. The whole conduct of Charles in Italy was a scandalous political comedy. Matteo Villani³³ relates how the Visconti escorted him round their territory, and at last out of it; how he went about like a hawker selling his wares (privileges, etc.) for money; what a mean appearance he made in Rome, and how at the end, without even drawing the sword, he returned with replenished coffers across the Alps. Nevertheless, patriotic enthusiasts and poets, full of the greatness of the past, conceived high hopes at his coming, which were afterwards dissipated by his pitiful conduct. Petrarch, who had written frequent letters exhorting the Emperor to cross the Alps, to give back to Rome its departed greatness, and to set up a new universal empire, now, when the Emperor, careless of these high-flying projects, had come at last, still hoped to see his dreams realized, strove unweariedly, by speech and writing, to impress the Emperor with them, but was at length driven away from him with disgust when he saw the imperial authority dishonoured by the submission of Charles to the Pope.³⁴ Sigismund came, on the first occasion at least (1414), with the good intention of persuading John XXIII. to take part in his council; it was on that journey, when Pope and Emperor were gazing from the lofty tower of Cremona on the panorama of Lombardy, that their host, the tyrant Gabino Fondolo, was seized with the desire to throw them both over. On his second visit Sigismund came as a mere adventurer, giving no proof whatever of his imperial prerogative, except by crowning Beccadelli as a poet; for more than half a year he remained shut up in Siena, like a debtor in gaol, and only with difficulty, and at a later period, succeeded in being crowned in Rome. And what can be thought of Frederick III.? His journeys to Italy have the air of holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity it flattered to entertain an emperor. The latter was the case with Alfonso of Naples, who paid 150,000 florins for the honour of an imperial visit.³⁵ At Ferrara,³⁶ on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty titles; he created knights, counts, doctors, notaries—counts, indeed, of different degrees, as, for instance, counts palatine, counts with the right to create doctors up to the number of five, counts with the right to legitimatise bastards, to appoint notaries, and so forth. The Chancellor, however, expected in return for the patents in question a gratuity which was thought excessive at Ferrara.³⁷ The opinion of Borso, himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an annual payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron was distributing titles and diplomas to all the little court, is not mentioned. The humanists, then the chief spokesmen of the age, were divided in opinion according to their personal interests, while the Emperor was greeted by some³⁸ of them with the conventional acclamations of the poets of imperial Rome. Poggio³⁹ confessed that he no longer knew what the coronation meant; in the old times only the victorious Inperator was crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.⁴⁰

With Maximilian I. begins not only the general intervention of foreign nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to Italy. The first step—the investiture of Ludovico Moro with the duchy of Milan and the exclusion of his unhappy nephew—was not of a kind to bear good fruits. According to the modern theory of intervention, when two parties are tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its share, and on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice were appealed to no longer. When Louis XII. was expected in Genoa (1502), and the imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal palace and replaced by painted lilies, the historian, Senarega⁴¹ asked what after all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions had spared, and what claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more about the matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a camera imperii. In fact, nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to any such questions. At length, when Charles V. held Spain and the empire together, he was able by means of Spanish forces to make good imperial claims; but it is notorious that what he thereby gained turned to the profit, not of the empire, but of the Spanish monarchy.

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century, was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners—for example, to Comines—appeared so remarkable. The two things went naturally together. In northern countries, as in Burgundy, the illegitimate offspring were provided for by a distinct class of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like; in Portugal an illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by constant effort; in Italy, on the contrary, there no longer existed a princely house where, even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not patiently tolerated. The Aragonese monarchs of Naples belonged to the illegitimate line, Aragon itself falling to the lot of the brother of Alfonso I. The great Frederick of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro at all. When Pius II. was on his way to the Congress of Mantua (1459), eight bastards of the house of Este rode to meet him at Ferrara, among them the reigning duke Borso himself and two illegitimate sons of his illegitimate brother and predecessor Leonello.⁴² The latter had also had a lawful wife, herself an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I. of Naples by an African woman.⁴³ The bastards were often admitted to the succession where the lawful children were minors and the dangers of the situation were pressing; and a rule of seniority became recognised, which took no account of pure or impure birth. The fitness of the individual, his worth and his capacity, were of more weight than all the laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age, indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties. In the sixteenth century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the counter-reformation which then began, the whole question was judged more strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate children ‘is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from eternity.’⁴⁴ Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici founded his claim to the lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl.⁴⁵ At this time began those morganatic marriages of affection which in the fifteenth century, on grounds either of policy or morality, would have had no meaning at all.

But the highest and the most admired form of illegitimacy in the fifteenth century was presented by the Condottiere, who, whatever may have been his origin, raised himself to the position of an independent ruler. At bottom, the occupation of Lower Italy by the Normans in the eleventh century was of this character. Such attempts now began to keep the peninsula in a constant ferment.

It was possible for a Condottiere to obtain the lordship of a district even without usurpation, in the case when his employer, through want of money or troops, provided for him in this way;⁴⁶ under any circumstances the Condottiere, even when he dismissed for the time the greater part of his forces, needed a safe place where he could establish his winter quarters, and lay up his stores and provisions. The first example of a captain thus portioned is John Hawkwood, who was invested by Gregory XI. with the lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola.⁴⁷ When with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the Condottieri; and from the greatest of them, Facino Cane, the house of Visconti inherited, together with his widow, a long list of cities, and 400,000 golden florins, not to speak of the soldiers of her first husband whom Beatrice di Tenda brought with her.⁴⁸ From henceforth that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became more and more common. An old story⁴⁹—one of those which are true and not true, everywhere and nowhere—describes it as follows: The citizens of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and then worship him as our patron saint.’ And so they did, following the example set by the Roman senate with Romulus. In fact, the Condottieri had reason to fear none so much as their employers; if they were successful, they became dangerous, and were put out of the way like Robert Malatesta just after the victory he had won for Sixtus IV. (1482); if they failed, the vengeance of the Venetians on Carmagnola⁵⁰ showed to what risks they were exposed (1432). It is characteristic of the moral aspect of the situation, that the Condottieri had often to give their wives and children as hostages, and notwithstanding this, neither felt nor inspired confidence. They must have been heroes of abnegation, natures like Belisarius himself, not to be cankered by hatred and bitterness; only the most perfect goodness could save them from the most monstrous iniquity. No wonder then if we find them full of contempt for all sacred things, cruel and treacherous to their fellows—men who cared nothing whether or no they died under the ban of the Church. At the same time, and through the force of the same conditions, the genius and capacity of many among them attained the highest conceivable development, and won for them the admiring devotion of their followers; their armies are the first in modern history in which the personal credit of the leader is the one moving power. A brilliant example is shown in the life of Francesco Sforza;⁵¹ no prejudice of birth could prevent him from winning and turning to account when he needed it a boundless devotion from each individual with whom he had to deal; it happened more than once that his enemies laid down their arms at the sight of him, greeting him reverently with uncovered heads, each honouring in him ‘the common father of the men-at-arms.’ The race of the Sforza has this special interest, that from the very beginning of its history we seem able to trace its endeavours after the crown.⁵² The foundation of its fortune lay in the remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco’s father, Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and sisters, all brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid the perils of one of the endless Romagnole ‘vendette’ between their own house and that of the Pasolini. The family dwelling was a mere arsenal and fortress; the mother and daughters were as warlike as their kinsmen. In his thirteenth year Jacopo ran away and fled to Panicale to the Papal Condottiere Boldrino—the man who even in death continued to lead his troops, the word of order being given from the bannered tent in which the embalmed body lay, till at last a fit leader was found to succeed him. Jacopo, when he had at length made himself a name in the service of different Condottieri, sent for his relations, and obtained through them the same advantages that a prince derives from a numerous dynasty. It was these relations who kept the army together when he lay a captive in the Castel dell’Uovo at Naples; his sister took the royal envoys prisoners with her own hands, and saved him by this reprisal from death. It was an indication of the breadth and the range of his plans that in monetary affairs Jacopo was thoroughly trustworthy; even in his defeats he consequently found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the peasants against the licence of his troops, and reluctantly destroyed or injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known mistress, Lucia, the mother of Francesco, in marriage to another in order to be free from a princely alliance. Even the marriages of his relations were arranged on a definite plan. He kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his contemporaries, and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules: ‘Let other men’s wives alone; strike none of your followers, or, if you do, send the injured man far away; don’t ride a hard-mouthed horse, or one that drops his shoe.’ But his chief source of influence lay in the qualities, if not of a great general, at least of a great soldier. His frame was powerful, and developed by every kind of exercise; his peasant’s face and frank manners won general popularity; his memory was marvellous, and after the lapse of years could recall the names of his followers, the number of their horses, and the amount of their pay. His education was purely Italian: he devoted his leisure to the study of history, and had Greek and Latin authors translated for his use. Francesco, his still more famous son, set his mind from the first on founding a powerful state, and through brilliant generalship and a faithlessness which hesitated at nothing, got possession of the great city of Milan (1447-1450).

His example was contagious. Æneas Sylvius wrote about this time:⁵³ ‘In our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.’ One man in particular, who styled himself ‘the man of fortune,’ filled the imagination of the whole country: Giacomo Piccinino, the son of Niccolò. It was a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in founding a princely house. The greater states had an obvious interest in hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognised their interest in supporting him:⁵⁴ ‘If it were all over with him, we should have to go back and plough our fields.’ Even while besieging him at Orbetello, they supplied him with provisions; and he got out of his straits with honour. But at last fate overtook him. All Italy was betting on the result, when (1465), after a visit to Sforza at Milan, he went to King Ferrante at Naples. In spite of the pledges given, and of his high connections, he was murdered in the Castel dell’Uovo.⁵⁵ Even the Condottieri, who had obtained their dominions by inheritance, never felt themselves safe. When Roberto Malatesta and Frederick of Urbino died on the same day (1482), the one at Rome, the other at Bologna, it was found⁵⁶ that each had recommended his state to the care of the other. Against a class of men who themselves stuck at nothing, everything was held to be permissible. Francesco Sforza, when quite young, had married a rich Calabrian heiress, Polissena Russa, Countess of Montalto, who bore him a daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child, and seized the inheritance.⁵⁷

From the death of Piccinino onwards, the foundations of new States by the Condottieri became a scandal not to be tolerated. The four great Powers, Naples, Milan, the Papacy, and Venice, formed among themselves a political equilibrium which refused to allow of any disturbance. In the States of the Church, which swarmed with petty tyrants, who in part were, or had been, Condottieri, the nephews of the Popes, since the time of Sixtus IV., monopolised the right to all such undertakings. But at the first sign of a political crisis, the soldiers of fortune appeared again upon the scene. Under the wretched administration of Innocent VIII. it was near happening that a certain Boccalino, who had formerly served in the Burgundian army, gave himself and the town of Osimo, of which he was master, up to the Turkish forces;⁵⁸ fortunately, through the intervention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he proved willing to be paid off, and took himself away. In the year 1495, when the wars of Charles VIII. had turned Italy upside down, the Condottiere Vidovero, of Brescia, made trial of his strength:⁵⁹ he had already seized the town of Cesena and murdered many of the nobles and the burghers; but the citadel held out, and he was forced to withdraw. He then, at the head of a band lent him by another scoundrel, Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, son of the Roberto already spoken of, and Venetian Condottiere, wrested the town of Castelnuovo from the Archbishop of Ravenna. The Venetians, fearing that worse would follow, and urged also by the Pope, ordered Pandolfo, ‘with the kindest intentions,’ to take an opportunity of arresting his good friend: the arrest was made, though ‘with great regret,’ whereupon the order came to bring the prisoner to the gallows. Pandolfo was considerate enough to strangle him in prison, and then show his corpse to the people. The last notable example of such usurpers is the famous Castellan of Musso, who during the confusion in the Milanese territory which followed the battle of Pavia (1525), improvised a sovereignty on the Lake of Como.

CHAPTER IV.
THE PETTY TYRANNIES

IT may be said in general of the despotisms of the fifteenth century that the greatest crimes are most frequent in the smallest states. In these, where the family was numerous and all the members wished to live in a manner befitting their rank, disputes respecting the inheritance were unavoidable. Bernardo Varano of Camerino put (1434) two of his brothers to death,⁶⁰ wishing to divide their property among his sons. Where the ruler of a single town was distinguished by a wise, moderate, and humane government, and by zeal for intellectual culture, he was generally a member of some great family, or politically dependent on it. This was the case, for example, with Alessandro Sforza,⁶¹ Prince of Pesaro, brother of the great Francesco, and stepfather of Frederick of Urbino (d. 1473). Prudent in administration, just and affable in his rule, he enjoyed, after years of warfare, a tranquil reign, collected a noble library, and passed his leisure in learned or religious conversation. A man of the same class was Giovanni II., Bentivoglio of Bologna (1462-1506), whose policy was determined by that of the Este and the Sforza. What ferocity and bloodthirstiness is found, on the other hand, among the Varani of Camerino, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Manfreddi of Faenza, and above all among the Baglioni of Perugia. We find a striking picture of the events in the last-named family towards the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable historical narratives of Graziani and Materazzo.⁶²

The Baglioni were one of those families whose rule never took the shape of an avowed despotism. It was rather a leadership exercised by means of their vast wealth and of their practical influence in the choice of public officers. Within the family one man was recognised as head; but deep and secret jealousy prevailed among the members of the different branches. Opposed to the Baglioni stood another aristocratic party, led by the family of the Oddi. In 1487 the city was turned into a camp, and the houses of the leading citizens swarmed with bravos; scenes of violence were of daily occurrence. At the burial of a German student, who had been assassinated, two colleges took arms against one another; sometimes the bravos of the different houses even joined battle in the public square. The complaints of the merchants and artisans were vain; the Papal Governors and Nipoti held their tongues, or took themselves off on the first opportunity. At last the Oddi were forced to abandon Perugia, and the city became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedral as barracks. Plots and surprises were met with cruel vengeance; in the year 1491, after 130 conspirators, who had forced their way into the city, were killed and hung up at the Palazzo Comunale, thirty-five altars were erected in the square, and for three days mass was performed and processions held, to take away the curse which rested on the spot. A nephew of Innocent VIII. was in open day run through in the street. A nephew of Alexander VI., who was sent to smooth matters over, was dismissed with public contempt. All the while the two leaders of the ruling house, Guido and Ridolfo, were holding frequent interviews with Suor Colomba of Rieti, a Dominican nun of saintly reputation and miraculous powers, who under penalty of some great disaster ordered them to make peace—naturally in vain. Nevertheless the chronicle takes the opportunity to point out the devotion and piety of the better men in Perugia during this reign of terror. When in 1494 Charles VIII. approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity, that every house in the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled, the peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called ‘Christian flesh.’ When Alexander VI. withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII., then returning from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that he might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he proposed to Guido a festival or tournament, or something else of the same kind, which would bring the whole family together. Guido, however, was of opinion, ‘that the most impressive spectacle of all would be to see the whole military force of Perugia collected in a body,’ whereupon the Pope abandoned his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack, in which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won them the victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad of scarcely eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of followers against hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with more than twenty wounds, but recovered himself when Astorre Baglione came to his help, and mounting on horseback in gilded armour with a falcon on his helmet, ‘like Mars in bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.’

At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at school under Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days are perhaps immortalised in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something of them, it may be, lives eternally in the great painting of St. Michael: and if Astorre Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it is in the figure of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.

The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly scattered in terror, and were henceforth incapable of another enterprise of the kind. After a time a partial reconciliation took place, and some of the exiles were allowed to return. But Perugia became none the safer or more tranquil: the inward discord of the ruling family broke out in frightful excesses. An opposition was formed against Guido and Ridolfo and their sons Gianpaolo, Simonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Gentile, Marcantonio and others, by two great-nephews, Grifone and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of the two was also nephew of Varano, Prince of Camerino, and brother of one of the former exiles, Ieronimo della Penna. In vain did Simonetto, warned by sinister presentiment, entreat his uncle on his knees to allow him to put Penna to death: Guido refused. The plot ripened suddenly on the occasion of the marriage of Astorre with Lavinia Colonna, at Midsummer 1500. The festival began and lasted several days amid gloomy forebodings, whose deepening effect is admirably described by Matarazzo. Varano fed and encouraged them with devilish ingenuity: he worked upon Grifone by the prospect of undivided authority, and by stories of an imaginary intrigue of his wife Zenobia with Gianpaolo. Finally each conspirator was provided with a victim. (The Baglioni lived all of them in separate houses, mostly on the site of the present castle.) Each received fifteen of the bravos at hand; the remainder were set on the watch. In the night of July 15 the doors were forced, and Guido, Astorre, Simonetto, and Gismondo were murdered; the others succeeded in escaping.

As the corpse of Astorre lay by that of Simonetto in the street, the spectators, ‘and especially the foreign students,’ compared him to an ancient Roman, so great and imposing did he seem. In the features of Simonetto could still be traced the audacity and defiance which death itself had not tamed. The victors went round among the friends of the family, and did their best to recommend themselves; they found all in tears and preparing to leave for the country. Meantime the escaped Baglioni collected forces without the city, and on the following day forced their way in, Gianpaolo at their head, and speedily found adherents among others whom Barciglia had been threatening with death. When Grifone fell into their hands near S. Ercolono. Gianpaolo handed him over for execution to his followers. Barciglia and Penna fled to Varano, the chief author of the tragedy, at Camerino; and in a moment, almost without loss, Gianpaolo became master of the city.

Atalanta, the still young and beautiful mother of Grifone, who the day before had withdrawn to a country house with the latter’s wife Zenobia and two children of Gianpaolo, and more than once had repulsed her son with a mother’s curse, now returned with her step-daughter in search of the dying man. All stood aside as the two women approached, each man shrinking from being recognised as the slayer of Grifone, and dreading the malediction of the mother. But they were deceived: she herself besought her son to pardon him who had dealt the fatal blow, and he died with her blessing. The eyes of the crowd followed the two women reverently as they crossed the square with blood-stained garments. It was Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards painted the world-famed ‘Deposition,’ with which she laid her own maternal sorrows at the feet of a yet higher and holier suffering.

The cathedral, in the immediate neighbourhood of which the greater part of this tragedy had been enacted, was washed with wine and consecrated afresh. The triumphal arch, erected for the wedding, still remained standing, painted with the deeds of Astorre and with the laudatory verses of the narrator of these events, the worthy Matarazzo.

A legendary history, which is simply the reflection of these atrocities, arose out of the early days of the Baglioni. All the members of this family from the beginning were reported to have died an evil death—twenty-seven on one occasion together; their houses were said to have been once before levelled to the ground, and the streets of Perugia paved with the bricks—and more of the same kind. Under Paul III. the destruction of their palaces really took place.⁶³

For a time they seem to have formed good resolutions, to have brought their own party into order, and to have protected the public officials against the arbitrary acts of the nobility. But the old curse broke out again like a smouldering fire. Gianpaolo was enticed to Rome under Leo X., and there beheaded; one of his sons, Orazio, who ruled in Perugia for a short time only, and by the most violent means, as the partisan of the Duke of Urbino (himself threatened by the Pope), once more repeated in his own family the horrors of the past. His uncle and three cousins were murdered, whereupon the Duke sent him word that enough had been done.⁶⁴ His brother, Malatesta Baglione, the Florentine general, has made himself immortal by the treason of 1530; and Malatesta’s son Ridolfo, the last of the house, attained, by the murder of the legate and the public officers in the year 1534, a brief but sanguinary authority.

Here and there we meet with the names of the rulers of Rimini. Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture, have been seldom so combined in one individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta (d. 1467).⁶⁵ But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss. Pandolfo, Sigismondo’s nephew, who has been mentioned already, succeeded in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the Venetians refused to abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt he might be chargeable with; when his subjects (1497), after ample provocation,⁶⁶ bombarded him in his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of Cæsar Borgia, a sort of epidemic fell on the petty tyrants: few of them outlived this date, and none to their own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 a poor scholar, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled from the sack of Rome to the hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni Francesco Pico, nephew of the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to the sepulchral monument which the prince was constructing for himself gave rise to a treatise, the dedication of which bears the date of April in this year. The postscript is a sad one.⁶⁷—‘In October of the same year the unhappy prince was attacked in the night and robbed of life and throne by his brother’s son; and I myself escaped narrowly, and am now in the deepest misery.’

A pseudo-despotism without characteristic features, such as Pandolfo Petrucci exercised from the year 1490 in Siena, then torn by faction, is hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant and malicious, he governed with the help of a professor of jurisprudence and of an astrologer, and frightened his people by an occasional murder. His pastime in the summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top of Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After succeeding, where the most prudent failed, in escaping from the devices of Cæsar Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons maintained a qualified supremacy for many years afterwards.

CHAPTER V.
THE GREATER DYNASTIES

IN treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient to discuss the Aragonese, on account of its special character, apart from the rest. The feudal system, which from the days of the Normans had survived in the form of a territorial supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive colour to the political constitution of Naples; while elsewhere in Italy, excepting only in the southern part of the ecclesiastical dominion, and in a few other districts, a direct tenure of land prevailed, and no hereditary powers were permitted by the law. The great Alfonso, who reigned in Naples from 1435 onwards (d. 1458), was a man of another kind than his real or alleged descendants. Brilliant in his whole existence, fearless in mixing with his people, mild and generous towards his enemies, dignified and affable in intercourse, modest notwithstanding his legitimate royal descent, admired rather than blamed even for his old man’s passion for Lucrezia d’Alagna, he had the one bad quality of extravagance,⁶⁸ from which, however, the natural consequence followed. Unscrupulous financiers were long omnipotent at Court, till the bankrupt king robbed them of their spoils; a crusade was preached, as a pretext for taxing the clergy; the Jews were forced to save themselves from conversion and other oppressive measures by presents and the payment of regular taxes; when a great earthquake happening in the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the contributions of the dead. On the other hand, he abolished unreasonable taxes, like that on dice, and aimed at relieving his poorer subjects from the imposts which pressed most heavily upon them. By such means Alfonso was able to entertain distinguished guests with unrivalled splendour; he found pleasure in ceaseless expense, even for the benefit of his enemies, and in rewarding literary work knew absolutely no measure. Poggio received 500 pieces of gold for translating Xenophon’s ‘Cyropædeia.’

Ferrante,⁶⁹ who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son by a Spanish lady, but was not improbably the son of a half-caste Moor of Valentia. Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life by the barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain that he was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time. Restlessly active, recognised as one of the most powerful political minds of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned profound dissimulation and an irreconcileable spirit of vengeance, on the destruction of his opponents. He had been wounded in every point in which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies. Extreme measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were exacted in the same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick II. had introduced: the Government alone dealt in oil and wine; the whole commerce of the country was put by Ferrante into the hands of a wealthy merchant, Francesco Coppola, who had entire control of the anchorage on the coast, and shared the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by forced loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides hunting, which he practised regardless of all rights of property, his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume which they wore in their lifetime.⁷⁰ He would chuckle in talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of the museum of mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got into his power by treachery; some were even seized while guests at the royal table. His conduct to his first minister, Antonello Petrucci, who had grown sick and grey in his service, and from whose increasing fear of death he extorted present after present, was literally devilish. At length the suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the barons gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo and Porzio makes one’s hair stand on end. The elder of the King’s sons, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years a kind of co-regency with his father. He was a savage, brutal profligate—described by Comines as ‘the cruelest, worst, most vicious and basest man ever seen’—who in point of frankness alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and who openly avowed his contempt for religion and its usages.⁷¹ The better and nobler features of the Italian despotisms are not to be found among the princes of this line; all that they possessed of the art and culture of their time served the purposes of luxury or display. Even the genuine Spaniards seem to have almost always degenerated in Italy; but the end of this cross-bred house (1494 and 1503) gives clear proof of a want of blood. Ferrante died of mental care and trouble; Alfonso accused his brother Federigo, the only honest member of the family, of treason, and insulted him in the vilest manner. At length, though he had hitherto passed for one of the ablest generals in Italy, he lost his head and fled to Sicily, leaving his son, the younger Ferrante, a prey to the French and to domestic treason. A dynasty which had ruled as this had done must at least have sold its life dear, if its children were ever to hope for a restoration. But, as Comines one-sidedly, and yet on the whole rightly observes on this occasion, ‘Jamais homme cruel ne fut hardi.’

The despotism of the Dukes of Milan, whose government from the time of Giangaleazzo onwards was an absolute monarchy of the most thorough-going sort, shows the genuine Italian character of the fifteenth century. The last of the Visconti, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), is a character of peculiar interest, and of which fortunately an admirable description⁷² has been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be made by the passion of fear, is here shown with what may be called a mathematical completeness. All the resources of the State were devoted to the one end of securing his personal safety, though happily his cruel egoism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbours, and lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making his excursions only in the country, where lay several of his splendid castles; the flotilla which, drawn by the swiftest horses, conducted him to them along canals constructed for the purpose, was so arranged as to allow of the application of the most rigorous etiquette. Whoever entered the citadel was watched by a hundred eyes; it was forbidden even to stand at the window, lest signs should be given to those without. All who were admitted among the personal followers of the Prince were subjected to a series of the strictest examinations; then, once accepted, were charged with the highest diplomatic commissions, as well as with the humblest personal services—both in this Court being alike honourable. And this was the man who conducted long and difficult wars, who dealt habitually with political affairs of the first importance, and every day sent his plenipotentiaries to all parts of Italy. His safety lay in the fact that none of his servants trusted the others, that his Condottieri were watched and misled by spies, and that the ambassadors and higher officials were baffled and kept apart by artificially nourished jealousies, and in particular by the device of coupling an honest man with a knave. His inward faith, too, rested upon opposed and contradictory systems; he believed in blind necessity, and in the influence of the stars, and offering prayers at one and the same time to helpers of every sort;⁷³ he was a student of the ancient authors, as well as of French tales of chivalry. And yet the same man, who would never suffer death to be mentioned in his presence,⁷⁴ and caused his dying favourites to be removed from the castle, that no shadow might fall on the abode of happiness, deliberately hastened his own death by closing up a wound, and, refusing to be bled, died at last with dignity and grace.

His step-son and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco Sforza (1450-1466, see p. 24), was perhaps of all the Italians of the fifteenth century the man most after the heart of his age. Never was the triumph of genius and individual power more brilliantly displayed than in him; and those who would not recognise his merit were at least forced to wonder at him as the spoilt child of fortune. The Milanese claimed it openly as an honour to be governed by so distinguished a master; when he entered the city the thronging populace bore him on horseback into the cathedral, without giving him the chance to dismount.⁷⁵ Let us listen to the balance-sheet of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II., a judge in such matters:⁷⁶ ‘In the year 1459, when the Duke came to the congress at Mantua, he was 60 (really 58) years old; on horseback he looked like a young man; of a lofty and imposing figure, with serious features, calm and affable in conversation, princely in his whole bearing, with a combination of bodily and intellectual gifts unrivalled in our time, unconquered on the field of battle,—such was the man who raised himself from a humble position to the control of an empire. His wife was beautiful and virtuous, his children were like the angels of heaven; he was seldom ill, and all his chief wishes were fulfilled. And yet he was not without misfortune. His wife, out of jealousy, killed his mistress; his old comrades and friends, Troilo and Brunoro, abandoned him and went over to King Alfonso; another, Ciarpollone, he was forced to hang for treason; he had to suffer it that his brother Alessandro set the French upon him; one of his sons formed intrigues against him, and was imprisoned; the March of Ancona, which he had won in war, he lost again in the same way. No man enjoys so unclouded a fortune, that he has not somewhere to struggle with adversity. He is happy who has but few troubles.’ With this negative definition of happiness the learned Pope dismisses the reader. Had he been able to see into the future, or been willing to stop and discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled despotism, one prevading fact would not have escaped his notice—the absence of all guarantee for the future. Those children, beautiful as angels, carefully and thoroughly educated as they were, fell victims, when they grew up, to the corruption of a measureless egoism. Galeazzo Maria (1466-1476), solicitous only of outward effect, took pride in the beauty of his hands, in the high salaries he paid, in the financial credit he enjoyed, in his treasure of two million pieces of gold, in the distinguished people who surrounded him, and in the army and birds of chase which he maintained. He was fond of the sound of his own voice, and spoke well, most fluently, perhaps, when he had the chance of insulting a Venetian ambassador.⁷⁷ He was subject to caprices, such as having a room painted with figures in a single night; and, what was worse, to fits of senseless debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his nearest friends. To a handful of enthusiasts, at whose head stood Giov. Andrea di Lampugnano, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they murdered him,⁷⁸ and thereby delivered the State into the power of his brothers, one of whom, Ludovico il Moro, threw his nephew into prison, and took the government into his own hands. From this usurpation followed the French intervention, and the disasters which befell the whole of Italy.

The Moor is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgment. Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the means he employed, he used them with perfect ingenuousness; no one would probably have been more astonished than himself to learn, that for the choice of means as well as of ends a human being is morally responsible; he would rather have reckoned it as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had abstained from too free a use of the punishment of death. He accepted as no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the Italians for his political genius.⁷⁹ In 1496 he boasted that the Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his Condottiere, Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France his courier, who must come and go at his bidding.⁸⁰ With marvellous presence of mind he weighed, even in his last extremity, all possible means of escape, and at length decided, to his honour, to trust to the goodness of human nature; he rejected the proposal of his brother, the Cardinal Ascanio, who wished to remain in the Citadel of Milan, on the ground of a former quarrel: ‘Monsignore, take it not ill, but I trust you not, brother though you be;’ and appointed to the command of the castle, ‘that pledge of his return,’ a man to whom he had always done good, but who nevertheless betrayed him.⁸¹ At home the Moor was a good and useful ruler, and to the last he reckoned on his popularity both in Milan and in Como. In former years (after 1496) he had overstrained the resources of his State, and at Cremona had ordered, out of pure expediency, a respectable citizen, who had spoken against the new taxes, to be quietly strangled. Since that time, in holding audiences, he kept his visitors away from his person by means of a bar, so that in conversing with him they were compelled to speak at the top of their voices.⁸² At his court, the most brilliant in Europe, since that of Burgundy had ceased to exist, immorality of the worst kind was prevalent: the daughter was sold by the father, the wife by the husband, the sister by the brother.⁸³ The Prince himself was incessantly active, and, as son of his own deeds, claimed relationship with all who, like himself, stood on their personal merits—with scholars, poets, artists, and musicians. The academy which he founded⁸⁴ served rather for his own purposes than for the instruction of scholars; nor was it the fame of the distinguished men who surrounded him which he heeded, so much as their society and their services. It is certain that Bramante was scantily paid at first;⁸⁵ Lionardo, on the other hand, was up to 1496 suitably remunerated—and besides, what kept him at the court, if not his own free will? The world lay open to him, as perhaps to no other mortal man of that day; and if proof were wanting of the loftier element in the nature of Ludovico Moro, it is found in the long stay of the enigmatic master at his court. That afterwards Lionardo entered the service of Cæsar Borgia and Francis I. was probably due to the interest he felt in the unusual and striking character of the two men.

After the fall of the Moor—he was captured in April 1500 by the French, after his return from his flight to Germany—his sons were badly brought up among strangers, and showed no capacity for carrying out his political testament. The elder, Massimiliano, had no resemblance to him; the younger, Francesco, was at all events not without spirit. Milan, which in those years changed its rulers so often, and suffered so unspeakably in the change, endeavoured to secure itself against a reaction. In the year 1512 the French, retreating before the arms of Maximilian and the Spaniards, were induced to make a declaration that the Milanese had taken no part in their expulsion, and, without being guilty of rebellion, might yield themselves to a new conqueror.⁸⁶ It is a fact of some political importance that in such moments of transition the unhappy city, like Naples at the flight of the Aragonese, was apt to fall a prey to gangs of (often highly aristocratic) scoundrels.

The house of Gonzaga at Mantua and that of Montefeltro of Urbino were among the best ordered and richest in men of ability during the second half of the fifteenth century. The Gonzaga were a tolerably harmonious family; for a long period no murder had been known among them, and their dead could be shown to the world without fear. The Marquis Francesco Gonzaga⁸⁷ and his wife, Isabella of Este, in spite of some few irregularities, were a united and respectable couple, and brought up their sons to be successful and remarkable men at a time when their small but most important State was exposed to incessant danger. That Francesco, either as statesman or as soldier, should adopt a policy of exceptional honesty, was what neither the Emperor, nor Venice, nor the King of France could have expected or desired; but certainly since the battle at Taro (1495), so far as military honour was concerned, he felt and acted as an Italian patriot, and imparted the same spirit to his wife. Every deed of loyalty and heroism, such as the defence of Faenza against Cæsar Borgia, she felt as a vindication of the honour of Italy. Our judgment of her does not need to rest on the praises of the artists and writers who made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage; her own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness, full of kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello, Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court, small and powerless as it was, and empty as they found its treasury. A more polished and charming circle was not to be seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the old Court of Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the society of Ferrara was inferior to that of Mantua. In artistic matters Isabella had an accurate knowledge, and the catalogue of her small but choice collection can be read by no lover of art without emotion.

In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative of the princely order. As a Condottiere—and in this capacity he served kings and popes for thirty years after he became prince—he shared the political morality of soldiers of fortune, a morality of which the fault does not rest with them alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the plan of spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and taxing his people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two successors, Guidobaldo and Francesco Maria, we read: ‘They erected buildings, furthered the cultivation of the land, lived at home, and gave employment to a large number of people: their subjects loved them.’⁸⁸ But not only the state, but the court too, was a work of art and organization, and this in every sense of the word. Federigo had 500 persons in his service; the arrangements of the court were as complete as in the capitals of the greatest monarchs, but nothing was wasted; all had its object, and all was carefully watched and controlled. The court was no scene of vice and dissipation: it served as a school of military education for the sons of other great houses, the thoroughness of whose culture and instruction was made a point of honour by the Duke. The palace which he built, if not one of the most splendid, was classical in the perfection of its plan; there was placed the greatest of his treasures, the celebrated library.⁸⁹ Feeling secure in a land where all gained profit or employment from his rule, and where none were beggars, he habitually went unarmed and almost unaccompanied; alone among the princes of his time he ventured to walk in an open park, and to take his frugal meals in an open chamber, while Livy, or in time of fasting, some devotional work, was read to him. In the course of the same afternoon he would listen to a lecture on some classical subject, and thence would go to the monastery of the Clarisse and talk of sacred things through the grating with the abbess. In the evening he would overlook the martial exercises of the young people of his court on the meadow of St. Francesco, known for its magnificent view, and saw to it well that all the feats were done in the most perfect manner. He strove always to be affable and accessible to the utmost degree, visiting the artisans who worked for him in their shops, holding frequent audiences, and, if possible, attending to the requests of each individual on the same day that they were presented. No wonder that the people, as he walked along the street, knelt down and cried: ‘Dio ti mantenga, signore!’ He was called by thinking people ‘the light of Italy.’⁹⁰ His gifted son Guidobaldo,⁹¹ visited by sickness and misfortune of every kind, was able at the last (1508) to give his state into the safe hands of his nephew Francesco Maria (nephew also of Pope Julius II.), who, at least, succeeded in preserving the territory from any permanent foreign occupation. It is remarkable with what confidence Guidobaldo yielded and fled before Cæsar Borgia and Francesco before the troops of Leo X.; each knew that his restoration would be all the easier and the more popular the less the country suffered through a fruitless defence. When Ludovico made the same calculation at Milan, he forgot the many grounds of hatred which existed against him. The court of Guidobaldo has been made immortal as the high school of polished manners by Baldassar Castiglione, who represented his eclogue Thyrsis before, and in honour of that society (1506), and who afterwards (1518) laid the scena of the dialogue of his ‘Cortigiano’ in the circle of the accomplished Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga.

The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.⁹² Within the palace frightful deeds were perpetrated; a princess was beheaded (1425) for alleged adultery with a step-son;⁹³ legitimate and illegitimate children fled from the court, and even abroad their lives were threatened by assassins sent in pursuit of them (1471). Plots from without were incessant; the bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the crown from the lawful heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards (1493) to have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the instigation of her brother Ferrante of Naples, was going to poison him. This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of two bastards against their brothers, the ruling Duke Alfonso I. and the Cardinal Ippolito (1506), which was discovered in time, and punished with imprisonment for life. The financial system in this State was of the most perfect kind, and necessarily so, since none of the large or second-rate powers of Italy were exposed to such danger and stood in such constant need of armaments and fortifications. It was the hope of the rulers that the increasing prosperity of the people would keep pace with the increasing weight of taxation, and the Marquis Niccolò (d. 1441) used to express the wish that his subjects might be richer than the people of other countries. If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of the prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the capital, no houses were to be let.⁹⁴ Ferrara is the first really modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true capital; wealthy fugitives from all parts of Italy, Florentines especially, settled and built their palaces at Ferrara. But the indirect taxation, at all events, must have reached a point at which it could only just be borne. The Government, it is true, took measures of alleviation which were also adopted by other Italian despots, such as Galeazzo Maria Sforza: in time of famine corn was brought from a distance and seems to have been distributed gratuitously;⁹⁵ but in ordinary times it compensated itself by the monopoly, if not of corn, of many other of the necessaries of life—fish, salt meat, fruit, and vegetables, which last were carefully planted on and near the walls of the city. The most considerable source of income, however, was the annual sale of public offices, a usage which was common throughout Italy, and about the working of which at Ferrara we have more precise information. We read, for example, that at the new year 1502 the majority of the officials bought their places at ‘prezzi salati;’ public servants of the most various kinds, custom-house officers, bailiffs (massari), notaries, ‘podestà,’ judges, and even captains, i.e., lieutenant-governors of provincial towns, are quoted by name. As one of the ‘devourers of the people’ who paid dearly for their places, and who were ‘hated worse than the devil,’ Tito Strozza—let us hope not the famous Latin poet—is mentioned. About the same time every year the dukes were accustomed to make a round of visits in Ferrara, the so called ‘andar per ventura,’ in which they took presents from, at any rate, the more wealthy citizens. The gifts, however, did not consist of money, but of natural products.

It was the pride of the duke⁹⁶ for all Italy to know that at Ferrara the soldiers received their pay and the professors of the University their salary not a day later than it was due; that the soldiers never dared lay arbitrary hands on citizen or peasant; that the town was impregnable to assault; and that vast sums of coined money were stored up in the citadel. To keep two sets of accounts seemed unnecessary; the Minister of Finance was at the same time manager of the ducal household. The buildings erected by Borso (1430-1471), by Hercules I. (till 1505), and by Alfonso I. (till 1534), were very numerous, but of small size: they are characteristic of a princely house which, with all its love of splendour—Borso never appeared but in embroidery and jewels—indulged in no ill-considered expense. Alfonso may perhaps have foreseen the fate which was in store for his charming little villas, the Belvedere with its shady gardens, and Montana with its fountains and beautiful frescoes.

It is undeniable that the dangers to which these princes were constantly exposed developed in them capacities of a remarkable kind. In so artificial a world only a man of consummate address could hope to succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought. Their characters are not without dark sides; but in all of them lives something of those qualities which Italy then pursued as its ideal. What European monarch of the time so laboured for his own culture as, for instance, Alfonso I.? His travels in France, England, and the Netherlands were undertaken for the purpose of study: by means of them he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of these countries.⁹⁷ It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner’s work which he practised in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom with which he surrounded himself by masters of every art. The Italian princes were not, like their contemporaries in the North, dependent on the society of an aristocracy which held itself to be the only class worth consideration, and which infected the monarch with the same conceit. In Italy the prince was permitted and compelled to know and to use men of every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a caste, were forced in social intercourse to stand upon their personal qualifications alone. But this is a point which we shall discuss more fully in the sequel.

The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling house was a strange compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian sense of well-calculated interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject: personal admiration was transformed into a new sentiment of duty. The city of Ferrara raised in 1451 a bronze equestrian statue to their Prince Niccolò, who had died ten years earlier; Borso (1454) did not scruple to place his own statue, also of bronze, but in a sitting posture, hard by in the market; in addition to which the city, at the beginning of his reign, decreed to him a ‘marble triumphal pillar.’ And when he was buried the whole people felt as if God himself had died a second time.⁹⁸ A citizen, who, when abroad from Venice, had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed on his return home, and condemned to banishment and the confiscation of his goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty restrained from cutting him down before the tribunal itself, and with a rope round his neck the offender went to the duke and begged for a full pardon. The government was well provided with spies, and the duke inspected personally the daily list of travellers which the innkeepers were strictly ordered to present. Under Borso,⁹⁹ who was anxious to leave no distinguished stranger unhonoured, this regulation served a hospitable purpose; Hercules I.¹⁰⁰ used it simply as a measure of precaution. In Bologna, too, it was then the rule, under Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, that every passing traveller who entered at one gate must obtain a ticket in order to go out at another.¹⁰¹ An unfailing means of popularity was the sudden dismissal of oppressive officials. When Borso arrested in person his chief and confidential counsellors, when Hercules I. removed and disgraced a tax-gatherer, who for years had been sucking the blood of the people, bonfires were lighted and the bells were pealed in their honour. With one of his servants, however, Hercules let things go too far. The director of the police, or by whatever name we should choose to call him (Capitano di Giustizia), was Gregorio Zampante of Lucca—a native being unsuited for an office of this kind. Even the sons and brothers of the duke trembled before this man; the fines he inflicted amounted to hundreds and thousands of ducats, and torture was applied even before the hearing of a case: bribes were accepted from wealthy criminals, and their pardon obtained from the duke by false representations. Gladly would the people have paid any sum to this ruler for sending away the ‘enemy of God and man.’ But Hercules had knighted him and made him godfather to his children; and year by year Zampante laid by 2,000 ducats. He dared only eat pigeons bred in his own house, and could not cross the street without a band of archers and bravos. It was time to get rid of him; in 1490 two students and a converted Jew whom he had mortally offended, killed him in his house while taking his siesta, and then rode through the town on horses held in waiting, raising the cry, ‘Come out! come out! we have slain Zampante!’ The pursuers came too late, and found them already safe across the frontier. Of course it now rained satires—some of them in the form of sonnets, others of odes.

It was wholly in the spirit of this system that the sovereign imposed his own respect for useful servants on the court and on the people. When in 1469 Borso’s privy councillor Ludovico Casella died, no court of law or place of business in the city, and no lecture-room at the University, was allowed to be open: all had to follow the body to S. Domenico, since the duke intended to be present. And, in fact, ‘the first of the house of Este who attended the corpse of a subject’ walked, clad in black, after the coffin, weeping, while behind him came the relatives of Casella, each conducted by one of the gentlemen of the Court: the body of the plain citizen was carried by nobles from the church into the cloister, where it was buried. Indeed this official sympathy with princely emotion first came up in the Italian States.¹⁰² At the root of the practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the utterance of it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal sincerity. One of the youthful poems of Ariosto,¹⁰³ on the Death of Lionora of Aragon, wife of Hercules I., contains besides the inevitable graveyard flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages, some thoroughly modern features: ‘This death had given Ferrara a blow which it would not get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate in heaven, since earth was not worthy of her; truly, the angel of Death did not come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was allayed.’ But we meet, also, with a sympathy of a different kind. Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell us the love-stories of the prince, even before his death,¹⁰⁴ in a way which, to later times, would seem the height of indiscretion, but which then passed simply as an innocent compliment. Lyrical poets even went so far as to sing the illicit flames of their lawfully married lords, e.g. Angelo Poliziano, those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano Pontano, with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem in question¹⁰⁵ betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the most fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful! That the greatest artists, for example Lionardo, should paint the mistresses of their patrons was no more than a matter of course.

But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises of others; it undertook to celebrate them itself. In the Palazzo Schifanoja Borso caused himself to be painted in a series of historical representations, and Hercules kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a procession which was compared to the feast of Corpus Christi; shops were closed as on Sunday; in the centre of the line walked all the members of the princely house (bastards included) clad in embroidered robes. That the crown was the fountain of honour and authority, that all personal distinction flowed from it alone, had been long¹⁰⁶ expressed at this court by the Order of the Golden Spur—an order which had nothing in common with mediæval chivalry. Hercules I. added to the spur a sword, a gold-laced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which there is no doubt that regular service was required.

The patronage of art and letters for which this court has obtained a world-wide reputation, was exercised through the University, which was one of the most perfect in Italy, and by the gift of places in the personal or official service of the prince; it involved consequently no additional expense. Bojardo, as a wealthy country gentleman and high official, belonged to this class. At the time when Ariosto began to distinguish himself, there existed no court, in the true sense of the word, either at Milan or Florence, and soon there was none either at Urbino or at Naples. He had to content himself with a place among the musicians and jugglers of Cardinal Ippolito till Alfonso took him into his service. It was otherwise at a later time with Torquato Tasso, whose presence at court was jealously sought after.

CHAPTER VI.
THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY

IN face of this centralised authority, all legal opposition within the borders of the state was futile. The elements needed for the restoration of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and the field prepared for violence and despotism. The nobles, destitute of political rights, even where they held feudal possessions, might call themselves Guelphs or Ghibellines at will, might dress up their bravos in padded hose and feathered caps¹⁰⁷ or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like Macchiavelli¹⁰⁸ knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too ‘corrupt’ for a republic. Strange judgments fall on these two so-called parties, which now served only to give an official sanction to personal and family disputes. An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim¹⁰⁹ advised to put them down, replied that their quarrels brought him in more than 12,000 ducats a year in fines. And when in the year 1500, during the brief return of Ludovico Moro to his States, the Guelphs of Tortona summoned a part of the neighbouring French army into the city, in order to make an end once for all of their opponents, the French certainly began by plundering and ruining the Ghibellines, but finished by doing the same to their hosts, till Tortona was utterly laid waste.¹¹⁰ In Romagna, the hotbed of every ferocious passion, these two names had long lost all political meaning. It was a sign of the political delusion of the people that they not seldom believed the Guelphs to be the natural allies of the French and the Ghibellines of the Spaniards. It is hard to see that those who tried to profit by this error got much by doing so. France, after all her interventions, had to abandon the peninsula at last, and what became of Spain, after she had destroyed Italy, is known to every reader.

But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple mind, we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power is derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and lose all traces of their violent origin. But from characters and imaginations inflamed by passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind could not be expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or else, without reflecting even to this extent, they sought only to give a vent to the universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune or personal affront. Since the governments were absolute, and free from all legal restraints, the opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom. Boccaccio declares openly¹¹¹ ‘Shall I call the tyrant king or prince, and obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies, spies, ambushes and fraud; to do so is a sacred and necessary work. There is no more acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant.’ We need not occupy ourselves with individual cases; Macchiavelli,¹¹² in a famous chapter of his ‘Discorsi,’ treats of the conspiracies of ancient and modern times from the days of the Greek tyrants downwards, and classifies them with cold-blooded indifference according to their various plans and results. We need make but two observations, first on the murders committed in church, and next on the influence of classical antiquity. So well was the tyrant guarded that it was almost impossible to lay hands upon him elsewhere than at solemn religious services; and on no other occasion was the whole family to be found assembled together. It was thus that the Fabrianese¹¹³ murdered (1435) the members of their ruling house, the Chiavistelli, during high mass, the signal being given by the words of the Creed, ‘Et incarnatus est.’ At Milan the Duke Giovan Maria Visconti (1412) was assassinated at the entrance of the church of San Gottardo, Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) in the church of Santo Stefano, and Ludovico Moro only escaped (1484) the daggers of the adherents of the widowed Duchess Bona, through entering the church of Sant’ Ambrogio by another door than that by which he was expected. There was no intentional impiety in the act; the assassins of Galeazzo did not fail to pray before the murder to the patron saint of the church, and to listen devoutly to the first mass. It was, however, one cause of the partial failure of the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and Guiliano Medici (1478), that the brigand Montesecco, who had bargained to commit the murder at a banquet, declined to undertake it in the Cathedral of Florence. Certain of the clergy ‘who were familiar with the sacred place, and consequently had no fear’ were induced to act in his stead.¹¹⁴

As to the imitation of antiquity, the influence of which on moral, and more especially on political, questions we shall often refer to, the example was set by the rulers themselves, who, both in their conception of the state and in their personal conduct, took the old Roman empire avowedly as their model. In like manner their opponents, when they set to work with a deliberate theory, took pattern by the ancient tyrannicides. It may be hard to prove that in the main point—in forming the resolve itself—they consciously followed a classical example; but the appeal to antiquity was no mere phrase. The most striking disclosures have been left us with respect to the murderers of Galeazzo Sforza—Lampugnani, Olgiati, and Visconti.¹¹⁵ Though all three had personal ends to serve, yet their enterprise may be partly ascribed to a more general reason. About this time Cola de’ Montani, a humanist and professor of eloquence, had awakened among many of the young Milanese nobility a vague passion for glory and patriotic achievements, and had mentioned to Lampugnani and Olgiati his hope of delivering Milan. Suspicion was soon aroused against him: he was banished from the city, and his pupils were abandoned to the fanaticism he had excited. Some ten days before the deed they met together and took a solemn oath in the monastery of Sant’ Ambrogio. ‘Then,’ says Olgiati, ‘in a remote corner I raised my eyes before the picture of the patron saint, and implored his help for ourselves and for all his people.’ The heavenly protector of the city was called on to bless the undertaking, as was afterwards St. Stephen, in whose church it was fulfilled. Many of their comrades were now informed of the plot, nightly meetings were held in the house of Lampugnani, and the conspirators practised for the murder with the sheaths of their daggers. The attempt was successful, but Lampugnani was killed on the spot by the attendants of the duke; the others were captured: Visconti was penitent, but Olgiati through all his tortures maintained that the deed was an acceptable offering to God, and exclaimed while the executioner was breaking his ribs, ‘Courage, Girolamo! thou wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is eternal.’¹¹⁶

But however idealistic the object and purpose of such conspiracies may appear, the manner in which they were conducted betrays the influence of that worst of all conspirators, Catiline—a man in whose thoughts freedom had no place whatever. The annals of Siena tells us expressly that the conspirators were students of Sallust, and the fact is indirectly confirmed by the confession of Olgiati.¹¹⁷ Elsewhere, too, we meet with the name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern of the conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could hardly be discovered.

Among the Florentines, whenever they got rid of, or tried to get rid of, the Medici, tyrannicide was a practice universally accepted and approved. After the flight of the Medici in 1494, the bronze group of Donatello¹¹⁸—Judith with the dead Holofernes—was taken from their collection and placed before the Palazzo della Signoria, on the spot where the ‘David’ of Michael Angelo now stands, with the inscription, ‘Exemplum salutis publicæ cives posuere 1495.’¹¹⁹ No example was more popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante,¹²⁰ lies with Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against Guiliano, Giovanni, and Guilio Medici failed (1513), was an enthusiastic admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow his steps, only waited to find a Cassius. Such a partner he met with in Agostino Capponi. His last utterances in prison¹²¹—a striking evidence of the religious feeling of the time—show with what an effort he rid his mind of these classical imaginations, in order to die like a Christian. A friend and the confessor both had to assure him that St. Thomas Aquinas condemned conspirators absolutely; but the confessor afterwards admitted to the same friend that St. Thomas drew a distinction and permitted conspiracies against a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against their will. After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro (1537), and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,¹²² which is probably his own work, and certainly composed in his interest, and in which he praises tyrannicide as an act of the highest merit; on the supposition that Alessandro was a legitimate Medici, and, therefore, related to him, if only distantly, he boldly compares himself with Timoleon, who slew his brother for his country’s sake. Others, on the same occasion, made use of the comparison with Brutus, and that Michael Angelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly to ideas of this kind, may be inferred from his bust of Brutus in the Uffizi. He left it unfinished, like nearly all his works, but certainly not because the murder of Cæsar was repugnant to his feeling, as the couplet beneath declares.

A popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to the monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic states of the Renaissance. Each individual protested inwardly against despotism, but was rather disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it, than to combine with others for its destruction. Things must have been as bad as at Camerino, Fabriano, or Rimini (p. 28), before the citizens united to destroy or expel the ruling house. They knew in most cases only too well that this would but mean a change of masters. The star of the Republics was certainly on the decline.

CHAPTER VII.
THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE

THE Italian municipalities had, in earlier days, given signal proof of that force which transforms the city into the state. It remained only that these cities should combine in a great confederation; and this idea was constantly recurring to Italian statesmen, whatever differences of form it might from time to time display. In fact, during the struggles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great and formidable leagues actually were formed by the cities; and Sismondi (ii. 174) is of opinion that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard confederation against Barbarossa was the moment when a universal Italian league was possible. But the more powerful states had already developed characteristic features which made any such scheme impracticable. In their commercial dealings they shrank from no measures, however extreme, which might damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours in a condition of helpless dependence—in short, they each fancied they could get on by themselves without the assistance of the rest, and thus paved the way for future usurpation. The usurper was forthcoming when long conflicts between the nobility and the people, and between the different factions of the nobility, had awakened the desire for a strong government, and when bands of mercenaries ready and willing to sell their aid to the highest bidder had superseded the general levy of the citizens which party leaders now found unsuited to their purposes.¹²³ The tyrants destroyed the freedom of most of the cities; here and there they were expelled, but not thoroughly, or only for a short time; and they were always restored, since the inward conditions were favourable to them, and the opposing forces were exhausted.

Among the cities which maintained their independence are two of deep significance for the history of the human race: Florence, the city of incessant movement, which has left us a record of the thoughts and aspirations of each and all who, for three centuries, took part in this movement, and Venice, the city of apparent stagnation and of political secrecy. No contrast can be imagined stronger than that which is offered us by these two, and neither can be compared to anything else which the world has hitherto produced.

Venice recognised itself from the first as a strange and mysterious creation—the fruits of a higher power than human ingenuity. The solemn foundation of the city was the subject of a legend. On March 25, 413, at mid-day the emigrants from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto, that they might have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations of the barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the presentiment of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio Sabellico, who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow of his hexameters, makes the priest, who completes the act of consecration, cry to heaven, ‘When we hereafter attempt great things, grant us prosperity! Now we kneel before a poor altar; but if our vows are not made in vain, a hundred temples, O God, of gold and marble shall arise to Thee.’¹²⁴ The island city at the end of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket of the world. It is so described by the same Sabellico,¹²⁵ with its ancient cupolas, its leaning towers, its inlaid marble façades, its compressed splendour, where the richest decoration did not hinder the practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the crowded Piazza before S. Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business of the world is transacted, not amid shouting and confusion, but with the subdued hum of many voices; where in the porticos round the square¹²⁶ and in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money-changers and goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and warehouses above their heads. He describes the great Fondaco of the Germans beyond the bridge, where their goods and their dwellings lay, and before which their ships are drawn up side by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet laden with wine and oil, and parallel with it, on the shore swarming with porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto to the square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers’ cabinets. So he conducts the reader from one quarter of the city to another till he comes at last to the two hospitals which were among those institutions of public utility nowhere so numerous as at Venice. Care for the people, in peace as well as in war, was characteristic of this government, and its attention to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, excited the admiration of other states.¹²⁷ Public institutions of every kind found in Venice their pattern; the pensioning of retired servants was carried out systematically, and included a provision for widows and orphans. Wealth, political security, and acquaintance with other countries, had matured the understanding of such questions. These slender fair-haired men,¹²⁸ with quiet cautious steps, and deliberate speech, differed but slightly in costume and bearing from one another; ornaments, especially pearls, were reserved for the women and girls. At that time the general prosperity, notwithstanding the losses sustained from the Turks, was still dazzling; the stores of energy which the city possessed and the prejudice in its favour diffused throughout Europe, enabled it at a much later time to survive the heavy blows which were inflicted by the discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the Mamelukes in Egypt, and by the war of the League of Cambray.

Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed to the frank loquacity of the scholars of his day, remarks elsewhere¹²⁹ with some astonishment, that the young nobles who came of a morning to hear his lectures could not be prevailed on to enter into political discussions: ‘When I ask them what people think, say, and expect about this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they know nothing about the matter.’ Still, in spite of the strict inquisition of the state, much was to be learned from the more corrupt members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay enough for it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were traitors among the highest officials;¹³⁰ the popes, the Italian princes, and even second-rate Condottieri in the service of the government had informers in their pay, sometimes with regular salaries; things went so far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even supposed that Ludovico Moro had control of a definite number of votes among the latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the high rewards—such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who informed against them—were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility, could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by two of that order, that the state should annually spend 70,000 ducats for the relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the matter was near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.¹³¹ About this time a Soranzo was hung, though not at Venice itself, for sacrilege, and a Contarini put in chains for burglary; another of the same family came in 1499 before the Signory, and complained that for many years he had been without an office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine children, that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no trade and had lately been turned on to the streets. We can understand why some of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes whole rows of them, to provide free lodging for their needy comrades. Such works figure in wills among deeds of charity.¹³²

But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes upon abuses of this kind, they were greatly in error. It might be thought that the commercial activity of the city, which put within reach of the humblest a rich reward for their labour, and the colonies on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, would have diverted from political affairs the dangerous elements of society. But had not the political history of Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the stormiest? The cause of the stability of Venice lies rather in a combination of circumstances which were found in union nowhere else. Unassailable from its position, it had been able from the beginning to treat of foreign affairs with the fullest and calmest reflection, and ignore nearly altogether the parties which divided the rest of Italy, to escape the entanglement of permanent alliances, and to set the highest price on those which it thought fit to make. The keynote of the Venetian character was, consequently, a spirit of proud and contemptuous isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by the other states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity within. The inhabitants meanwhile were united by the most powerful ties of interest in dealing both with the colonies and with the possessions on the mainland, forcing the population of the latter, that is, of all the towns up to Bergamo, to buy and sell in Venice alone. A power which rested on means so artificial could only be maintained by internal harmony and unity; and this conviction was so widely diffused among the citizens that the conspirator found few elements to work upon. And the discontented, if there were such, were held so far apart by the division between the noble and the burgher, that a mutual understanding was not easy. On the other hand, within the ranks of the nobility itself, travel, commercial enterprise, and the incessant wars with the Turks saved the wealthy and dangerous from that fruitful source of conspiracies—idleness. In these wars they were spared, often to a criminal extent, by the general in command, and the fall of the city was predicted by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles ‘to give one another pain’ should continue at the expense of justice.¹³³ Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the Venetian aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.

And when envy and ambition called for satisfaction an official victim was forthcoming, and legal means and authorities were ready. The moral torture, which for years the Doge Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered before the eyes of all Venice, is a frightful example of a vengeance possible only in an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand in everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of financial affairs and military appointments, which included the Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had overthrown so many powerful men before,—this Council was yearly chosen afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consilio, and was consequently the most direct expression of its will. It is not probable that serious intrigues occurred at these elections, as the short duration of the office and the accountability which followed rendered it an object of no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the proceedings of this and other authorities might be, the genuine Venetian courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the Republic had long arms, and if it could not catch him might punish his family, but because in most cases it acted from rational motives and not from a thirst for blood.¹³⁴ No state, indeed, has ever exercised a greater moral influence over its subjects, whether abroad or at home. If traitors were to be found among the Pregadi, there was ample compensation for this in the fact that every Venetian away from home was a born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that the Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions of the secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico Grimani had the despatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which Ascanio Sforza was sending to his brother Ludovico Moro, and forwarded them to Venice; his father, then exposed to a serious accusation, claimed public credit for this service of his son before the Gran Consilio; in other words, before all the world.¹³⁵

The conduct of the Venetian government to the Condottieri in its pay has been spoken of already. The only further guarantee of their fidelity which could be obtained lay in their great number, by which treachery was made as difficult as its discovery was easy. In looking at the Venetian army list, one is only surprised that among forces of such miscellaneous composition any common action was possible. In the catalogue for the campaign of 1495 we find 15,526 horsemen, broken up into a number of small divisions.¹³⁶ Gonzaga of Mantua alone had as many as 1,200, and Gioffredo Borgia 740; then follow six officers with a contingent of 600 to 700, ten with 400, twelve with 400 to 200, fourteen or thereabouts with 200 to 100, nine with 80, six with 50 to 60, and so forth. These forces were partly composed of old Venetian troops, partly of veterans led by Venetian city or country nobles; the majority of the leaders were, however, princes and rulers of cities or their relatives. To these forces must be added 24,000 infantry—we are not told how they were raised or commanded—with 3,300 additional troops, who probably belonged to the special services. In time of peace the cities of the mainland were wholly unprotected or occupied by insignificant garrisons. Venice relied, if not exactly on the loyalty, at least on the good sense of its subjects; in the war of the League of Cambray (1509) it absolved them, as is well known, from their oath of allegiance, and let them compare the amenities of a foreign occupation with the mild government to which they had been accustomed. As there had been no treason in their desertion of St. Mark, and consequently no punishment was to be feared, they returned to their old masters with the utmost eagerness. This war, we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a century’s outcry against the Venetian desire for aggrandisement. The Venetians, in fact, were not free from the mistake of those over-clever people who will credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate conduct.¹³⁷ Misled by this optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar weakness of aristocracies, they had utterly ignored not only the preparations of Mohammed II. for the capture of Constantinople, but even the armaments of Charles VIII., till the unexpected blow fell at last.¹³⁸ The League of Cambray was an event of the same character, in so far as it was clearly opposed to the interest of the two chief members, Louis XII. and Julius II. The hatred of all Italy against the victorious city seemed to be concentrated in the mind of the Pope, and to have blinded him to the evils of foreign intervention; and as to the policy of Cardinal Amboise and his king, Venice ought long before to have recognised it as a piece of malicious imbecility, and to have been thoroughly on its guard. The other members of the League took part in it from that envy which may be a salutary corrective to great wealth and power, but which in itself is a beggarly sentiment. Venice came out of the conflict with honour, but not without lasting damage.

A power, whose foundations were so complicated, whose activity and interests filled so wide a stage, cannot be imagined without a systematic oversight of the whole, without a regular estimate of means and burdens, of profits and losses. Venice can fairly make good its claim to be the birthplace of statistical science, together, perhaps, with Florence, and followed by the more enlightened despotisms. The feudal state of the Middle Ages knew of nothing more than catalogues of signorial rights and possessions (Urbaria); it looked on production as a fixed quantity, which it approximately is, so long as we have to do with landed property only. The towns, on the other hand, throughout the West must from very early times have treated production, which with them depended on industry and commerce, as exceedingly variable; but, even in the most flourishing times of the Hanseatic League, they never got beyond a simple commercial balance-sheet. Fleets, armies, political power and influence fall under the debit and credit of a trader’s ledger. In the Italian States a clear political consciousness, the pattern of Mohammedan administration, and the long and active exercise of trade and commerce, combined to produce for the first time a true science of statistics.¹³⁹ The absolute monarchy of Frederick II. in Lower Italy was organised with the sole object of securing a concentrated power for the death-struggle in which he was engaged. In Venice, on the contrary, the supreme objects were the enjoyment of life and power, the increase of inherited advantages, the creation of the most lucrative forms of industry, and the opening of new channels for commerce.

The writers of the time speak of these things with the greatest freedom.¹⁴⁰ We learn that the population of the city amounted in the year 1422 to 190,000 souls; the Italians were, perhaps, the first to reckon, not according to hearths, or men able to bear arms, or people able to walk, and so forth, but according to ‘animæ,’ and thus to get the most neutral basis for further calculation. About this time,¹⁴¹ when the Florentines wished to form an alliance with Venice against Filippo Maria Visconti, they were for the moment refused, in the belief, resting on accurate commercial returns, that a war between Venice and Milan, that is, between seller and buyer, was foolish. Even if the duke simply increased his army, the Milanese, through the heavier taxation they must pay, would become worse customers. ‘Better let the Florentines be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free city, they will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen industry with them, as the Lucchese did in their distress.’ The speech of the dying Doge Mocenigo (1423) to a few of the senators whom he had sent for to his bedside¹⁴² is still more remarkable. It contains the chief elements of a statistical account of the whole resources of Venice. I cannot say whether or where a thorough elucidation of this perplexing document exists; by way of illustration, the following facts may be quoted. After repaying a war-loan of four million ducats, the public debt (‘il monte’) still amounted to six million ducats; the current trade reached (so it seems) ten millions, which yielded, the text informs us, a profit of four millions. The 3,000 ‘navigli,’ the 300 ‘navi,’ and the 45 galleys were manned respectively by 17,000, 8,000, and 11,000 seamen (more than 200 for each galley). To these must be added 16,000 shipwrights. The houses in Venice were valued at seven millions, and brought in a rent of half a million.¹⁴³ There were 1,000 nobles whose income ranged from 70 to 4,000 ducats. In another passage the ordinary income of the state in that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats; through the disturbance of trade caused by the wars it sank about the middle of the century to 800,000 ducats.¹⁴⁴

If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical turn which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important side of modern political life, in that culture, on the other hand, which Italy then prized most highly she did not stand in the front rank. The literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and especially that enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere.¹⁴⁵ The aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence was in itself not less remarkable than for commerce and politics; but this aptitude was neither developed in themselves nor rewarded in strangers as it was rewarded elsewhere in Italy. Filelfo, summoned to Venice not by the state, but by private individuals, soon found his expectations deceived; and George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the Latin translation of Plato’s Laws at the feet of the Doge, and was appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and finally dedicated his ‘Rhetoric’ to the Signoria,¹⁴⁶ soon left the city in dissatisfaction. Literature, in fact, like the rest at Venice, had mostly a practical end in view. If, accordingly, we look through the history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended to his well-known book,¹⁴⁷ we shall find in the fourteenth century almost nothing but history, and special works on theology, jurisprudence, and medicine; and in the fifteenth century, till we come to Ermolao Barbaro and Aldo Manucci, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance, most scantily represented. Similarly we find comparatively few traces of the passion, elsewhere so strong, for collecting books and manuscripts; and the valuable texts which formed part of Petrarch’s legacies were so badly preserved that soon all traces of them were lost. The library which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the state (1468) narrowly escaped dispersion and destruction. Learning was certainly cultivated at the University of Padua, where, however, the physicians and the jurists—the latter as the authors of legal opinions—received by far the highest pay. The share of Venice in the poetical creations of the country was long insignificant, till, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, her deficiences were made good.¹⁴⁸ Even the art of the Renaissance was imported into the city from without, and it was not before the end of the fifteenth century that she learned to move in this field with independent freedom and strength. But we find more striking instances still of intellectual backwardness. This Government, which had the clergy so thoroughly in its control, which reserved to itself the appointment to all important ecclesiastical offices, and which, one time after another, dared to defy the court of Rome, displayed an official piety of a most singular kind.¹⁴⁹ The bodies of saints and other reliques imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest were bought at the greatest sacrifices and received by the Doge in solemn procession.¹⁵⁰ For the coat without a seam it was decided (1455) to offer 10,000 ducats, but it was not to be had. These measures were not the fruit of any popular excitement, but of the tranquil resolutions of the heads of the Government, and might have been omitted without attracting any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances, would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of the piety of the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences of an Alexander VI. But the state itself, after absorbing the Church to a degree unknown elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical element in its composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the state, appeared in twelve great processions (‘andate’)¹⁵¹ in a half-clerical character. They were almost all festivals in memory of political events, and competed in splendour with the great feasts of the Church; the most brilliant of all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on Ascension Day.

The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this sense deserves the name of the first modern state in the world. Here the whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the social and political condition of the state, and as incessantly describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above all other states in the world, the home of historical representation in the modern sense of the phrase. The spectacle of ancient Rome and a familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence; Giovanni Villani¹⁵² confesses that he received the first impulse to his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately on his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000 pilgrims of that year may have been like him in gifts and tendencies and still did not write the history of their native cities! For not all of them could encourage themselves with the thought: ‘Rome is sinking; my native city is rising, and ready to achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its past history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and as long as my life shall last.’ And besides the witness to its past, Florence obtained through its historians something further—a greater fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.¹⁵³

Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable state, but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this history.¹⁵⁴

In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The descriptions of them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.

And what a politician is the great victim of these crises, Dante Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile! He uttered his scorn of the incessant changes and experiments in the constitution of his native city in verses of adamant, which will remain proverbial so long as political events of the same kind recur;¹⁵⁵ he addressed his home in words of defiance and yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his countrymen. But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole world; and if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it, was no more than an illusion, it must yet be admitted that the youthful dreams of a new-born political speculation are in his case not without a poetical grandeur. He is proud to be the first who had trod this path,¹⁵⁶ certainly in the footsteps of Aristotle, but in his own way independently. His ideal emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only, the heir of the universal sway of Rome to which belonged the sanction of nature, of right and of the will of God. The conquest of the world was, according to this view, rightful, resting on a divine judgment between Rome and the other nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this empire, since under it he became Man, submitting at his birth to the census of the Emperor Augustus, and at his death to the judgment of Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate these and other arguments of the same kind, but Dante’s passion never fails to carry us with him. In his letters he appears as one of the earliest publicists,¹⁵⁷ and is perhaps the first layman to publish political tracts in this form. He began early. Soon after the death of Beatrice he addressed a pamphlet on the state of Florence ‘to the Great ones of the Earth,’ and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes, and cardinals. In these letters and in his book ‘De Vulgari Eloquio’ the feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is constantly recurring that the exile may find elsewhere than in his native place an intellectual home in language and culture, which cannot be taken from him. On this point we shall have more to say in the sequel.

To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep political reflexion as fresh and practical observations, together with the elements of Florentine statistics and important notices of other states. Here too trade and commerce had given the impulse to economical as well as political science. Nowhere else in the world was such accurate information to be had on financial affairs. The wealth of the Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII. amounted to twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be incredible on any less trustworthy authority.¹⁵⁸ Here only, at Florence, do we meet with colossal loans like that which the King of England contracted from the Florentine houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum of 1,365,000 gold florins (1338)—their own money and that of their partners—and nevertheless recovered from the shock.¹⁵⁹ Most important facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this time:¹⁶⁰ the public income (over 300,000 gold florins) and expenditure; the population of the city, here only roughly estimated, according to the consumption of bread, in ‘bocche,’ i.e. mouths, put at 90,000, and the population of the whole territory; the excess of 300 to 500 male children among the 5,800 to 6,000 annually baptized;¹⁶¹ the school-children, of whom 8,000 to 10,000 learned reading, 1,000 to 1,200 in six schools arithmetic; and besides these, 600 scholars who were taught Latin grammar and logic in four schools. Then follow the statistics of the churches and monasteries; of the hospitals, which held more than a thousand beds; of the wool-trade, with its most valuable details; of the mint, the provisioning of the city, the public officials, and so on.¹⁶² Incidentally we learn many curious facts; how, for instance, when the public funds (‘monte’) were first established, in the year 1353, the Franciscans spoke from the pulpit in favour of the measure, the Dominicans and Augustinians against it.¹⁶³ The economical results of the black death were and could be observed and described nowhere else in all Europe as in this city.¹⁶⁴ Only a Florentine could have left it on record how it was expected that the scanty population would have made everything cheap, and how instead of that labour and commodities doubled in price; how the common people at first would do no work at all, but simply give themselves up to enjoyment; how in the city itself servants and maids were not to be had except at extravagant wages; how the peasants would only till the best lands, and left the rest uncultivated; and how the enormous legacies bequeathed to the poor at the time of the plague seemed afterwards useless, since the poor had either died or had ceased to be poor. Lastly, on the occasion of a great bequest, by which a childless philanthropist left six ‘danari’ to every beggar in the city, the attempt is made to give a comprehensive statistical account of Florentine mendicancy.¹⁶⁵

This statistical view of things was at a later time still more highly cultivated at Florence. The noteworthy point about it is that, as a rule, we can perceive its connection with the higher aspects of history, with art, and with culture in general. An inventory of the year 1422¹⁶⁶ mentions, within the compass of the same document, the seventy-two exchange offices which surrounded the ‘Mercato Nuovo;’ the amount of coined money in circulation (two million golden florins); the then new industry of gold spinning; the silk wares; Filippo Brunellesco, then busy in digging classical architecture from its grave; and Lionardo Aretino, secretary of the republic, at work at the revival of ancient literature and eloquence; lastly, it speaks of the general prosperity of the city, then free from political conflicts, and of the good fortune of Italy, which had rid itself of foreign mercenaries. The Venetian statistics quoted above (p. 70), which date from about the same year, certainly give evidence of larger property and profits and of a more extensive scene of action; Venice had long been mistress of the seas before Florence sent out its first galleys (1422) to Alexandria. But no reader can fail to recognise the higher spirit of the Florentine documents. These and similar lists recur at intervals of ten years, systematically arranged and tabulated, while elsewhere we find at best occasional notices. We can form an approximate estimate of the property and the business of the first Medici; they paid for charities, public buildings, and taxes from 1434 to 1471 no less than 663,755 gold florins, of which more than 400,000 fell on Cosimo alone, and Lorenzo Magnifico was delighted that the money had been so well spent.¹⁶⁷ In 1472 we have again a most important and in its way complete view of the commerce and trades of this city,¹⁶⁸ some of which may be wholly or partly reckoned among the fine arts—such as those which had to do with damasks and gold or silver embroidery, with woodcarving and ‘intarsia,’ with the sculpture of arabesques in marble and sandstone, with portraits in wax, and with jewellery and work in gold. The inborn talent of the Florentines for the systematisation of outward life is shown by their books on agriculture, business, and domestic economy, which are markedly superior to those of other European people in the fifteenth century. It has been rightly decided to publish selections of these works,¹⁶⁹ although no little study will be needed to extract clear and definite results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in recognising the city, where dying parents begged the Government in their wills to fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practise a regular profession.¹⁷⁰

For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no state in the world possesses a document like the magnificent description of Florence by Varchi.¹⁷¹ In descriptive statistics, as in so many things besides, yet another model is left to us, before the freedom and greatness of the city sank into the grave.¹⁷²

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

Florence not only existed under political forms more varied than those of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally, but it reflected upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of the relations of individuals and classes to a variable whole. The pictures of the great civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as they are delineated in Froissart, and the narratives of the German chroniclers of the fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the primacy of a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean despotism—all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors are laid bare to the light.¹⁷³ At length Macchiavelli in his Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies without our province to determine whether and in what points Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the case in his life of Castruccio Castracane—a fancy picture of the typical despot. We might find something to say against every line of the ‘Istorie Fiorentine,’ and yet the great and unique value of the whole would remain unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo Pitti, Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of illustrious names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us! The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the highest and most original life which the world could then show may appear to one but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another a devilish delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to a third may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an object of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was for ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once powerful and now conquered rivals like Pisa—a rule of which the necessary consequence was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly an extreme one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded Florence to accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances, would have been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal union of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to the scaffold.¹⁷⁴ From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarised it with foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who does not admire the people, which was wrought up by its venerated preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem, when looked at from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best results shine forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were ‘fools,’ as Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon Florence, but he confesses himself that they achieved things which seemed incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would have got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than that Florence ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of its enemies. It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and gardens, and the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it would have been the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling memories.

In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a combination of existing forces and tendencies,¹⁷⁵ was constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli is not wholly free from it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices, sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive the rich and the poor alike. They naïvely fetch their examples from classical antiquity, and borrow the party names ‘ottimati,’ ‘aristocrazia,’¹⁷⁶ as a matter of course. The world since then has become used to these expressions and given them a conventional European sense, whereas all former party names were purely national, and either characterised the cause at issue or sprang from the caprice of accident. But how a name colours or discolours a political cause!

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

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

It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and this unique city—the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the modern European spirit. Siena suffered from the gravest organic maladies, and its relative prosperity in art and industry must not mislead us on this point. Æneas Sylvius¹⁸² looks with longing from his native town over to the ‘merry’ German imperial cities, where life is embittered by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary officials, and by no political factions.¹⁸³ Genoa scarcely comes within range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher culture.¹⁸⁴ Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a character, and disturbed so violently the whole course of life, that we can hardly understand how, after so many revolutions and invasions, the Genoese ever contrived to return to an endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing to the fact that nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the same time almost without exception active men of business.¹⁸⁵ The example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what insecurity wealth and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of distant colonies, are compatible.

Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES

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

Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or gradually so to reduce its strength that one state after another must fall into her hands.¹⁸⁶ But on a closer view it is evident that this complaint did not come from the people, but rather from the courts and official classes, which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while the mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence. Even Florence,¹⁸⁷ with its restive subject cities, found itself in a false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial jealousy and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of Cambray actually did strike a serious blow at the state (p. 68), which all Italy ought to have supported with united strength.

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

The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking naïveté its old Guelph preference for the French.¹⁸⁸ And when Charles VIII. actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed unaccountable.¹⁸⁹ In the imagination of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a wise, just, and powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the difference that he was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long before all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their part, tried to make use of France in a wholly different way. When the Franco-English wars came to an end, when Louis XI. began to cast about his diplomatic nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of what was to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as 1642.¹⁹⁰ The mortal terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during the Burgundian war, in which he was apparently the ally of Charles as well as of Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.¹⁹¹ The plan of an equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by Lorenzo the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic spirit, which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the best. When Louis XI. offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of Naples and Sixtus IV., he replied, ‘I cannot set my own advantage above the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do so, Italy is lost.’¹⁹² For the other princes, the King of France was alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.¹⁹³

Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the expedition of Charles VIII.¹⁹⁴ And when Charles was back again on the other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of intervention had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was understood too late that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had become great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence and territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised Italian states, and indeed to copy them, only on a gigantic scale. Schemes of annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held the Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all came to a bad end.

Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too, with as little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had at various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken, and Frederick II. had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the Oriental nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived the old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them, there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II. and his successors. And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of Alfonso King of Naples.¹⁹⁵ From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks into Italy.¹⁹⁶ But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom Mohammed—at the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments, especially of Venice¹⁹⁷—had once wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II. against the Venetians.¹⁹⁸ The same charge was brought against Ludovico Moro. ‘The blood of the slain, and the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to God for vengeance against him,’ says the state historian. In Venice, where the government was informed of everything, it was known that Giovanni Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of the Moor, had entertained the Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan.¹⁹⁹ The two most respectable among the Popes of the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died in the deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to lead in person; their successors embezzled the contributions sent for this purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded the indulgences granted in return for them into a private commercial speculation.²⁰⁰ Innocent VIII. consented to be gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a salary paid by the prisoner’s brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI. supported the steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter threatened him with a Council.²⁰¹ It is clear that the notorious alliance between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new or unheard of.

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

It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the enslavement of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it under the Turkish rule.²⁰⁴ By itself, divided as it was, it could hardly have escaped this fate.

If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of this period deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by fear, passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern fashion, with its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each possessed he held in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant nobility to foster in the mind of the prince the mediæval sense of honour, with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular case and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose services were used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no pride of caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the class of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably more accurate acquaintance with its own country and that of its neighbours, than was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated the economical and moral capacities of friend and foe down to the smallest particular. The rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born masters of statistical science. With such men negotiation was possible; it might be presumed that they would be convinced and their opinion modified when practical reasons were laid before them. When the great Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of Filippo Maria Visconti, he was able to satisfy his gaoler that the rule of the House of Anjou instead of his own at Naples would make the French masters of Italy; Filippo Maria set him free without ransom and made an alliance with him.²⁰⁵ A northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way, certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like that of Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of self-interest is shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo the Magnificent, to the universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante at Naples—a man who would be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner, and was by no means too scrupulous to do so.²⁰⁶ For to arrest a powerful monarch, and then to let him go alive, after extorting his signature and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis XI. at Péronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;²⁰⁷ so that Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or else not to come back at all. The art of political persuasion was at this time raised to a point—especially by the Venetian ambassadors—of which northern nations first obtained a conception from the Italians, and of which the official addresses give a most imperfect idea. These are mere pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious etiquette, was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank speaking in diplomatic intercourse.²⁰⁸ A man like Macchiavelli appears in his ‘Legazioni’ in an almost pathetic light. Furnished with scanty instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of inferior rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his pleasure in picturesque description. From that time Italy was and remained the country of political ‘Istruzioni’ and ‘Relazioni.’ There was doubtless plenty of diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy alone at so early a period has preserved documentary evidence of it in considerable quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the life of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the hand of Pontano and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander VI., gives us the highest opinion of this class of political writing, although it is only quoted incidentally and as one of many written. And how many other despatches, as important and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of this and later times, still remain unknown or unedited!²⁰⁹

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

CHAPTER IX.
WAR AS A WORK OF ART

IT must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed the character of a product of reflection.²¹⁰ Throughout the countries of the West the education of the individual soldier in the middle ages was perfect within the limits of the then prevalent system of defence and attack: nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts of besieging and of fortification. But the development both of strategy and of tactics was hindered by the character and duration of military service, and by the ambition of the nobles, who disputed questions of precedence in the face of the enemy, and through simple want of discipline caused the loss of great battles like Crécy and Maupertuis. Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organisation; and the early introduction of fire-arms did its part in making war a democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of the gun-founder, and of the artillerist—men belonging to another class than the nobility—was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the soul of the small and admirably-organised bands of mercenaries, would suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the introduction at least of the musket, which had been lately invented in Germany.²¹¹ We read that Paolo Vitelli,²¹² while recognising and himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of the captured ‘schioppettieri,’ of the enemy, because he held it unworthy that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid low by a common, despised foot soldier. On the whole, however, the new discoveries were accepted and turned to useful account, till the Italians became the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of fortifications and in the means of attacking them.²¹³ Princes like Federigo of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian I. appears superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there existed a comprehensive science and art of military affairs; here, for the first time, that impartial delight is taken in able generalship for its own sake, which might, indeed, be expected from the frequent change of party and from the wholly unsentimental mode of action of the Condottieri. During the Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter were attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign.²¹⁴ It is written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Cæsar’s Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like. Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,²¹⁵ Piccinino through the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army; the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks, praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to posterity.²¹⁶ Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of educated men in general as well as of specialists, while the contemporary narratives of northerners, such as the ‘Burgundian War’ by Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest dilettante who has ever treated in that character²¹⁷ of military affairs, was then busy writing his ‘Arte della Guerra.’ But the development of the individual soldier found its most complete expression in those public and solemn conflicts between one or more pairs of combatants which were practised long before the famous ‘Challenge of Barletta’²¹⁸ (1503). The victor was assured of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to the Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer regarded as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit, and to the minds of the spectators seemed to be both the decision of an exciting competition and a satisfaction for the honour of the army or the nation.²¹⁹

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

CHAPTER X.
THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS

THE Papacy and the dominions of the Church²²¹ are creations of so peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the general characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only occasionally. The deliberate choice and adaptation of political expedients, which gives so great an interest to the other states, is what we find least of all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this state undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and a great statesman and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who again brought the ecclesiastical state into complete subjection. The danger of a final dissolution was still greater at the time of the schism, when neither the Roman nor the French Pope was rich enough to reconquer the newly-lost state; but this was done under Martin V., after the unity of the Church was restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the same danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and remained a thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in and near Rome itself, the Papacy was defied by the great families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, and Anguillara; in Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic republics had almost ceased to exist, for whose devotion the Papacy had showed so little gratitude; their place had been taken by a crowd of princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty and obedience signified little. As self-dependent powers, standing on their own merits, they have an interest of their own; and from this point of view the most important of them have been already discussed (pp. 28 sqq., 44 sqq.).

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

Let us, for this moment, leave out of consideration the countries beyond the Alps. At the time when the Papacy was exposed to mortal danger in Italy, it neither received nor could receive the slightest assistance either from France, then under Louis XI., or from England, distracted by the wars of the Roses, or from the then disorganized Spanish monarchy, or from Germany, but lately betrayed at the Council of Basel. In Italy itself there were a certain number of instructed and even uninstructed people, whose national vanity was flattered by the Italian character of the Papacy; the personal interests of very many depended on its having and retaining this character; and vast masses of the people still believed in the virtue of the Papal blessing and consecration;²²² among them notorious transgressors like that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who still prayed to be absolved by Alexander VI., when the Pope’s son had him slaughtered.²²³ But all these grounds of sympathy put together would not have sufficed to save the Papacy from its enemies, had the latter been really in earnest, and had they known how to take advantage of the envy and hatred with which the institution was regarded.

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

As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, small account was taken of its internal agitations, so many were the Popes who had returned after being expelled by popular tumult, and so greatly did the presence of the Curia minister to the interests of the Roman people. But Rome not only displayed at times a specific anti-papal radicalism,²²⁴ but in the most serious plots which were then contrived, gave proof of the working of unseen hands from without. It was so in the case of the conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro against Nicholas V. (1453), the very Pope who had done most for the prosperity of the city, but who, by enriching the cardinals, and transforming Rome into a papal fortress, had aroused the discontent of the people.²²⁵ Porcaro aimed at the complete overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices, who, though their names are not handed down to us,²²⁶ are certainly to be looked for among the Italian governments of the time. Under the pontificate of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous declamation against the gift of Constantine, with the wish for the speedy secularisation of the States of the Church.²²⁷

The Catilinarian gang, with which Pius II. had to contend²²⁸ (1460), avowed with equal frankness their resolution to overthrow the government of the priests, and its leader, Tiburzio, threw the blame on the soothsayers, who had fixed the accomplishment of his wishes for this very year. Several of the chief men of Rome, the Prince of Tarentum, and the Condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, were accomplices and supporters of Tiburzio. Indeed, when we think of the booty which was accumulated in the palaces of wealthy prelates—the conspirators had the Cardinal of Aquileia especially in view—we are surprised that, in an almost unguarded city, such attempts were not more frequent and more successful. It was not without reason that Pius II. preferred to reside anywhere rather than in Rome, and even Paul II.²²⁹ was exposed to no small anxiety through a plot formed by some discharged abbreviators, who, under the command of Platina, besieged the Vatican for twenty days. The Papacy must sooner or later have fallen a victim to such enterprises, if it had not stamped out the aristocratic factions under whose protection these bands of robbers grew to a head.

This task was undertaken by the terrible Sixtus IV. He was the first Pope who had Rome and the neighbourhood thoroughly under his control, especially after his successful attack on the House of Colonna, and consequently, both in his Italian policy and in the internal affairs of the Church, he could venture to act with a defiant audacity, and to set at nought the complaints and threats to summon a council which arose from all parts of Europe. He supplied himself with the necessary funds by simony, which suddenly grew to unheard-of proportions, and which extended from the appointment of cardinals down to the granting of the smallest favours.²³⁰ Sixtus himself had not obtained the papal dignity without recourse to the same means.

A corruption so universal might sooner or later bring disastrous consequences on the Holy See, but they lay in the uncertain future. It was otherwise with nepotism, which threatened at one time to destroy the Papacy altogether. Of all the ‘nipoti,’ Cardinal Pietro Riario enjoyed at first the chief and almost exclusive favour of Sixtus. He soon drew upon him the eyes of all Italy,²³¹ partly by the fabulous luxury of his life, partly through the reports which were current of his irreligion and his political plans. He bargained with Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan (1473), that the latter should become King of Lombardy, and then aid him with money and troops to return to Rome and ascend the papal throne; Sixtus, it appears, would have voluntarily yielded it to him.²³² This plan, which, by making the Papacy hereditary, would have ended in the secularization of the papal state, failed through the sudden death of Pietro. The second ‘nipote,’ Girolamo Riario, remained a layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From this time the ‘nipoti,’ by their endeavours to found principalities for themselves, became a new source of confusion to Italy. It had already happened that the Popes tried to make good their feudal claims on Naples in favour of their relatives;²³³ but since the failure of Calixtus III. such a scheme was no longer practicable, and Girolamo Riario, after the attempt to conquer Florence (and who knows how many other places) had failed, was forced to content himself with founding a state within the limits of the papal dominions themselves. This was, in so far, justifiable, as Romagna, with its princes and civic despots, threatened to shake off the papal supremacy altogether, and ran the risk of shortly falling a prey to Sforza or the Venetians, when Rome interfered to prevent it. But who, at times and in circumstances like these, could guarantee the continued obedience of ‘nipoti’ and their descendants, now turned into sovereign rulers, to Popes with whom they had no further concern? Even in his lifetime the Pope was not always sure of his own son or nephew, and the temptation was strong to expel the ‘nipote’ of a predecessor and replace him by one of his own. The reaction of the whole system on the Papacy itself was of the most serious character; all means of compulsion, whether temporal or spiritual, were used without scruple for the most questionable ends, and to these all the other objects of the Apostolic See were made subordinate. And when they were attained, at whatever cost of revolutions and proscriptions, a dynasty was founded which had no stronger interest than the destruction of the Papacy.

At the death of Sixtus, Girolamo was only able to maintain himself in his usurped principality of Forli and Imola by the utmost exertions of his own, and by the aid of the House of Sforza. He was murdered in 1488. In the conclave (1484) which followed the death of Sixtus—that in which Innocent VIII. was elected—an incident occurred which seemed to furnish the Papacy with a new external guarantee. Two cardinals, who, at the same time, were princes of ruling houses, Giovanni d’Aragona, son of King Ferrante, and Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Moor, sold their votes with the most shameless effrontery;²³⁴ so that, at any rate, the ruling houses of Naples and Milan became interested, by their participation in the booty, in the continuance of the papal system. Once again, in the following Conclave, when all the cardinals but five sold themselves, Ascanio received enormous sums in bribes, not without cherishing the hope that at the next election he would himself be the favoured candidate.²³⁵

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

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

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

What they were and what they did has been often and fully described.²⁴⁰ Their immediate purpose, which, in fact, they attained, was the complete subjugation of the pontifical state. All the petty despots,²⁴¹ who were mostly more or less refractory vassals of the Church, were expelled or destroyed; and in Rome itself the two great factions were annihilated, the so-called Guelph Orsini as well as the so-called Ghibelline Colonna. But the means employed were of so frightful a character, that they must certainly have ended in the ruin of the Papacy, had not the contemporaneous death of both father and son by poison suddenly intervened to alter the whole aspect of the situation. The moral indignation of Christendom was certainly no great source of danger to Alexander; at home he was strong enough to extort terror and obedience; foreign rulers were won over to his side, and Louis XII. even aided him to the utmost of his power. The mass of the people throughout Europe had hardly a conception of what was passing in Central Italy. The only moment which was really fraught with danger—when Charles VIII. was in Italy—went by with unexpected fortune, and even then it was not the Papacy as such that was in peril, but Alexander, who risked being supplanted by a more respectable Pope.²⁴² The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his son Cæsar Borgia.

In the nature of the father, ambition, avarice, and sensuality were combined with strong and brilliant qualities. All the pleasures of power and luxury he granted himself from the first day of his pontificate in the fullest measure. In the choice of means to this end he was wholly without scruple; it was known at once that he would more than compensate himself for the sacrifices which his election had involved,²⁴³ and that the simony of the seller would far exceed the simony of the buyer. It must be remembered that the vice-chancellorship and other offices which Alexander had formerly held had taught him to know better and turn to more practical account the various sources of revenue than any other member of the Curia. As early as 1494, a Carmelite, Adam of Genoa, who had preached at Rome against simony, was found murdered in his bed with twenty wounds. Hardly a single cardinal was appointed without the payment of enormous sums of money.

But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence of his son Cæsar Borgia, his violent measures assumed that character of devilish wickedness which necessarily reacts upon the ends pursued. What was done in the struggle with the Roman nobles and with the tyrants of Romagna exceeded in faithlessness and barbarity even that measure to which the Aragonese rulers of Naples had already accustomed the world; and the genius for deception was also greater. The manner in which Cæsar isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other relations or courtiers, whenever their favour with the Pope or their position in any other respect became inconvenient to him, is literally appalling. Alexander was forced to acquiesce in the murder of his best-loved son, the Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly dread of Cæsar.²⁴⁴

What were the final aims of the latter? Even in the last months of his tyranny, when he had murdered the Condottieri at Sinigaglia, and was to all intents and purposes master of the ecclesiastical state (1503) those who stood near him gave the modest reply, that the Duke merely wished to put down the factions and the despots, and all for the good of the Church only; that for himself he desired nothing more than the lordship of the Romagna, and that he had earned the gratitude of all the following Popes by ridding them of the Orsini and Colonna.²⁴⁵ But no one will accept this as his ultimate design. The Pope Alexander himself, in his discussions with the Venetian ambassador, went farther than this, when committing his son to the protection of Venice: ‘I will see to it,’ he said, ‘that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to you.’²⁴⁶ Cæsar certainly added that no one could become Pope without the consent of Venice, and for this end the Venetian cardinals had only to keep well together. Whether he referred to himself or not we are unable to say; at all events, the declaration of his father is sufficient to prove his designs on the pontifical throne. We further obtain from Lucrezia Borgia a certain amount of indirect evidence, in so far as certain passages in the poems of Ercole Strozza may be the echo of expressions which she as Duchess of Ferrara may easily have permitted herself to use. Here too Cæsar’s hopes of the Papacy are chiefly spoken of;²⁴⁷ but now and then a supremacy over all Italy is hinted at,²⁴⁸ and finally we are given to understand that as temporal ruler Cæsar’s projects were of the greatest, and that for their sake he had formerly surrendered his cardinalate.²⁴⁹ In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that Cæsar, whether chosen Pope or not after the death of Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost, and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could not as Pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody, could have secularised the States of the Church, and he would have been forced to do so in order to keep them.²⁵⁰ Unless we are much deceived, this is the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Macchiavelli treats the great criminal; from Cæsar, or from nobody, could it be hoped that he ‘would draw the steel from the wound,’ in other words, annihilate the Papacy—the source of all foreign intervention and of all the divisions of Italy. The intriguers who thought to divine Cæsar’s aims, when holding out to him hopes of the kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been dismissed with contempt.²⁵¹

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

Even if we assume that the destruction of the petty despots in the pontifical state had gained for him nothing but sympathy, even if we take as proof of his great projects the army, composed of the best soldiers and officers in Italy, with Lionardo da Vinci as chief engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1503, other facts nevertheless wear such a character of unreason that our judgment, like that of contemporary observers, is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of this kind is the devastation and maltreatment of the newly won state, which Cæsar still intended to keep and to rule over.²⁵² Another is the condition of Rome and of the Curia in the last decades of the pontificate. Whether it were that father and son had drawn up a formal list of proscribed persons,²⁵³ or that the murders were resolved upon one by one, in either case the Borgias were bent on the secret destruction of all who stood in their way or whose inheritance they coveted. Of this money and movable goods formed the smallest part; it was a much greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death, and that he received the revenues of their offices while vacant, and the price of these offices when they were filled by the successors of the murdered men. The Venetian ambassador, Paolo Capello²⁵⁴ announces in the year 1500: ‘Every night four or five murdered men are discovered—bishops, prelates and others—so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the Duke (Cæsar).’ He himself used to wander about Rome in the night time with his guards,²⁵⁵ and there is every reason to believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on the persons of those unknown to him.

As early as the year 1499 the despair was so great and so general that many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put to death.²⁵⁶ But those whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence, fell victims to their poison. For the cases in which a certain amount of discretion seemed requisite, a white powder²⁵⁷ of an agreeable taste was made use of, which did not work on the spot, but slowly and gradually, and which could be mixed without notice in any dish or goblet. Prince Djem had taken some of it in a sweet draught, before Alexander surrendered him to Charles VIII. (1495), and at the end of their career father and son poisoned themselves with the same powder by accidentally tasting a sweetmeat intended for a wealthy cardinal, probably Adrian of Corneto.²⁵⁸ The official epitomiser of the history of the Popes, Onufrio Panvinio,²⁵⁹ mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio, and Michiel, whom Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth, Giovanni Borgia, whom Cæsar took into his own charge—though probably wealthy prelates seldom died in Rome at that time without giving rise to suspicions of this sort. Even tranquil students who had withdrawn to some provincial town were not out of reach of the merciless poison. A secret horror seemed to hang about the Pope; storms and thunderbolts, crushing in walls and chambers, had in earlier times often visited and alarmed him; in the year 1500,²⁶⁰ when these phenomena were repeated, they were held to be ‘cosa diabolica.’ The report of these events seems at last, through the well-attended jubilee²⁶¹ of 1500, to have been carried far and wide throughout the countries of Europe, and the infamous traffic in indulgences did what else was needed to draw all eyes upon Rome.²⁶² Besides the returning pilgrims, strange white-robed penitents came from Italy to the North, among them disguised fugitives from the Papal State, who are not likely to have been silent. Yet none can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of Christendom might have gone, before they became a source of pressing danger to Alexander. ‘He would,’ says Panvinio elsewhere,²⁶³ ‘have put all the other rich cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by death.’ And what might not Cæsar have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sick-bed! What a conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all his weapons, he had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had judiciously reduced by poison—and this at a time when there was no French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses itself in an abyss.

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

Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II. in all essential respects he was the saviour of the Papacy. His familiarity with the course of events since the pontificate of his uncle Sixtus had given him a profound insight into the grounds and conditions of the Papal authority. On these he founded his own policy, and devoted to it the whole force and passion of his unshaken soul. He ascended the steps of St. Peter’s chair without simony and amid general applause, and with him ceased, at all events, the undisguised traffic in the highest offices of the Church. Julius had favourites, and among them were some the reverse of worthy, but a special fortune put him above the temptation to nepotism. His brother, Giovanni della Rovere, was the husband of the heiress of Urbino, sister of the last Montefeltro Guidobaldo, and from this marriage was born, in 1491, a son, Francesco Maria della Rovere, who was at the same time Papal ‘nipote’ and lawful heir to the duchy of Urbino. What Julius elsewhere acquired, either on the field of battle or by diplomatic means, he proudly bestowed on the Church, not on his family; the ecclesiastical territory, which he found in a state of dissolution, he bequeathed to his successor completely subdued, and increased by Parma and Piacenza. It was not his fault that Ferrara too was not added to the dominions of the Church. The 700,000 ducats, which were stored up in the castle of St. Angelo, were to be delivered by the governor to none but the future Pope. He made himself heir of the cardinals, and, indeed, of all the clergy who died in Rome, and this by the most despotic means; but he murdered or poisoned none of them.²⁶⁴ That he should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an unavoidable necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at a time when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer or anvil, and when personality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If, despite all his high-sounding ‘Away with the barbarians!’ he nevertheless contributed more than any man to the firm settlement of the Spaniards in Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to the Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And to whom, sooner than to Spain, could the Church look for a sincere and lasting respect,²⁶⁵ in an age when the princes of Italy cherished none but sacrilegious projects against her? Be this as it may, the powerful, original nature, which could swallow no anger and conceal no genuine good-will, made on the whole the impression most desirable in his situation—that of the ‘Pontefice terribile.’ He could even, with a comparatively clear conscience, venture to summon a council to Rome, and so bid defiance to that outcry for a council which was raised by the opposition all over Europe. A ruler of this stamp needed some great outward symbol of his conceptions; Julius found it in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s. The plan of it, as Bramante wished to have it, is perhaps the grandest expression of power in unity which can be imagined. In other arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of a wholly different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for his predecessors. The entrance into Bologna, at the end of the ‘Iter Julii Secundi,’ by the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendour of its own, and Giovan Antonio Flaminio,²⁶⁶ in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.

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

We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis, Riario, and Corneto (1517) which at most could have occasioned a change of persons, and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of creation of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real merit.²⁶⁹

But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread during the first two years of his office were perilous to the last degree. He seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation, the kingdom of Naples for his brother Giuliano, and for his nephew Lorenzo a powerful North Italian state, to comprise Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.²⁷⁰ It is clear that the Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would have become a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would have been no further need to secularise it.

The plan found an insuperable obstacle in the political conditions of the time. Giuliano died early. To provide for Lorenzo, Leo undertook to expel the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, but reaped from the war nothing but hatred and poverty, and was forced, when in 1519 Lorenzo followed his uncle to the grave, to hand over the hardly-won conquests to the Church.²⁷¹ He did on compulsion and without credit what, if it had been done voluntarily, would have been to his lasting honour. What, partly alone, and partly in alternate negotiations with Francis I. and Charles V., he attempted against Alfonso of Ferrara, and actually achieved against a few petty despots and Condottieri, was assuredly not of a kind to raise his reputation. And this was at a time when the monarchs of the West were yearly growing more and more accustomed to political gambling on a colossal scale, of which the stakes were this or that province of Italy.²⁷² Who could guarantee that, since the last decades had seen so great an increase of their power at home, their ambition could stop short of the States of the Church? Leo himself witnessed the prelude of what was fulfilled in the year 1527; a few bands of Spanish infantry appeared—of their own accord, it seems—at the end of 1520, on the borders of the Pontifical territory, with a view of laying the Pope under contribution,²⁷³ but were driven back by the Papal forces. The public feeling, too, against the corruptions of the hierarchy had of late years been drawing rapidly to a head, and men with an eye for the future, like the younger Pico della Mirandola, called urgently for reform.²⁷⁴ Meantime Luther had already appeared upon the scene.

Under Adrian VI. (1522-1523), the few and timid improvements, carried out in the face of the great German Reformation, came too late. He could do little more than proclaim his horror of the course which things had taken hitherto, of simony, nepotism, prodigality, brigandage, and profligacy. The danger from the side of the Lutherans was by no means the greatest; an acute observer from Venice, Girolamo Negro, uttered his fears that a speedy and terrible disaster would befall the city of Rome itself.²⁷⁵

Under Clement VII. the whole horizon of Rome was filled with vapours, like that leaden veil which the scirocco draws over the Campagna, and which makes the last months of summer so deadly. The Pope was no less detested at home than abroad. Thoughtful people were filled with anxiety,²⁷⁶ hermits appeared upon the streets and squares of Rome, foretelling the fate of Italy and of the world, and calling the Pope by the name of Antichrist;²⁷⁷ the faction of the Colonna raised its head defiantly; the indomitable Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, whose mere existence²⁷⁸ was a permanent menace to the Papacy, ventured to surprise the city in 1526, hoping with the help of Charles V., to become Pope then and there, as soon as Clement was killed or captured. It was no piece of good fortune for Rome that the latter was able to escape to the Castle of St. Angelo, and the fate for which himself was reserved may well be called worse than death.

By a series of those falsehoods, which only the powerful can venture on, but which bring ruin upon the weak, Clement brought about the advance of the Germano-Spanish army under Bourbon and Frundsberg (1527). It is certain²⁷⁹ that the Cabinet of Charles V. intended to inflict on him a severe castigation, and that it could not calculate beforehand how far the zeal of its unpaid hordes would carry them. It would have been vain to attempt to enlist men in Germany without paying any bounty, if it had not been well known that Rome was the object of the expedition. It may be that the written orders to Bourbon will be found some day or other, and it is not improbable that they will prove to be worded mildly. But historical criticism will not allow itself to be led astray. The Catholic King and Emperor owed it to his luck and nothing else, that Pope and cardinals were not murdered by his troops. Had this happened, no sophistry in the world could clear him of his share in the guilt. The massacre of countless people of less consequence, the plunder of the rest, and all the horrors of torture and traffic in human life, show clearly enough what was possible in the ‘Sacco di Roma.’

Charles seems to have wished to bring the Pope, who had fled a second time to the Castle of St. Angelo, to Naples, after extorting from him vast sums of money, and Clement’s flight to Orvieto must have happened without any connivance on the part of Spain.²⁸⁰ Whether the Emperor ever thought seriously of the secularisation of the States of the Church,²⁸¹ for which everybody was quite prepared, and whether he was really dissuaded from it by the representations of Henry VIII. of England, will probably never be made clear.

But if such projects really existed, they cannot have lasted long: from the devastated city arose a new spirit of reform both in Church and State. It made itself felt in a moment. Cardinal Sadoleto, one witness of many, thus writes: ‘If through our suffering a satisfaction is made to the wrath and justice of God, if these fearful punishments again open the way to better laws and morals, then is our misfortune perhaps not of the greatest.... What belongs to God He will take care of; before us lies a life of reformation, which no violence can take from us. Let us so rule our deeds and thoughts as to seek in God only the true glory of the priesthood and our own true greatness and power.’²⁸²

In point of fact, this critical year, 1527, so far bore fruit, that the voices of serious men could again make themselves heard. Rome had suffered too much to return, even under a Paul III., to the gay corruption of Leo X.

The Papacy, too, when its sufferings became so great, began to excite a sympathy half religious and half political. The kings could not tolerate that one of their number should arrogate to himself the rights of Papal gaoler, and concluded (August 18, 1527) the Treaty of Amiens, one of the objects of which was the deliverance of Clement. They thus, at all events, turned to their own account the unpopularity which the deeds of the Imperial troops had excited. At the same time the Emperor became seriously embarrassed, even in Spain, where the prelates and grandees never saw him without making the most urgent remonstrances. When a general deputation of the clergy and laity, all clothed in mourning, was projected, Charles, fearing that troubles might arise out of it, like those of the insurrection quelled a few years before, forbad the scheme.²⁸³ Not only did he not dare to prolong the maltreatment of the Pope, but he was absolutely compelled, even apart from all considerations of foreign politics, to be reconciled with the Papacy which he had so grievously wounded. For the temper of the German people, which certainly pointed to a different course, seemed to him, like German affairs generally, to afford no foundation for a policy. It is possible, too, as a Venetian maintains,²⁸⁴ that the memory of the sack of Rome lay heavy on his conscience, and tended to hasten that expiation which was sealed by the permanent subjection of the Florentines to the Medicean family of which the Pope was a member. The ‘nipote’ and new Duke, Alessandro Medici, was married to the natural daughter of the Emperor.

In the following years the plan of a Council enabled Charles to keep the Papacy in all essential points under his control, and at one and the same time to protect and to oppress it. The greatest danger of all—secularisation—the danger which came from within, from the Popes themselves and their ‘nipoti,’ was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. Just as this alone had made the expedition against Rome (1527) possible and successful, so did it compel the Papacy to become once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. The institution thus developed during the latter years of Clement VII., and under Paul III., Paul IV., and their successors, in the face of the defection of half Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism, with its attempts at territorial aggrandisement,²⁸⁵ and which, in alliance with the Catholic princes, and impelled by a new-born spiritual force, found its chief work in the recovery of what had been lost. It only existed and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with perfect truth that, the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to its mortal enemies. And now its political position, too, though certainly under the permanent tutelage of Spain, became impregnable; almost without effort it inherited, on the extinction of its vassals, the legitimate line of Este and the house of Della Rovere, the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino. But without the Reformation—if, indeed, it is possible to think it away—the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands.

In conclusion, let us briefly consider the effect of these political circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.

It is evident that the general political uncertainty in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was of a kind to excite in the better spirits of the time a patriotic disgust and opposition. Dante and Petrarch,²⁸⁶ in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the object of the highest efforts of all her children. It may be objected that this was only the enthusiasm of a few highly-instructed men, in which the mass of the people had no share; but it can hardly have been otherwise even in Germany, although in name at least that country was united, and recognised in the Emperor one supreme head. The first patriotic utterances of German Literature, if we except some verses of the ‘Minnesänger,’ belong to the humanists of the time of Maximilian I.²⁸⁷ and after, and read like an echo of Italian declamations, or like a reply to Italian criticism on the intellectual immaturity of Germany. And yet, as a matter of fact, Germany had been long a nation in a truer sense than Italy ever was since the Roman days. France owes the consciousness of its national unity mainly to its conflicts with the English, and Spain has never permanently succeeded in absorbing Portugal, closely related as the two countries are. For Italy, the existence of the ecclesiastical State, and the conditions under which alone it could continue, were a permanent obstacle to national unity, an obstacle whose removal seemed hopeless. When, therefore, in the political intercourse of the fifteenth century, the common fatherland is sometimes emphatically named, it is done in most cases to annoy some other Italian State.²⁸⁸ The first decades of the sixteenth century, the years when the Renaissance attained its fullest bloom, were not favourable to a revival of patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and artistic pleasures, the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme interests of self-development, destroyed or hampered the love of country. But those deeply serious and sorrowful appeals to national sentiment were not heard again till later, when the time for unity had gone by, when the country was inundated with Frenchmen and Spaniards, and when a German army had conquered Rome. The sense of local patriotism may be said in some measure to have taken the place of this feeling, though it was but a poor equivalent for it.

PART II.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

CHAPTER I.
THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL

IN the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms, lies, not the only, but the chief reason for the early development of the Italian. To this it is due that he was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe.

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual,²⁸⁹ and recognised himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of Italy.

In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free personality which in Northern Europe either did not occur at all, or could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious wrongdoers in the sixteenth century described to us by Luidprand, some of the contemporaries of Gregory VII., and a few of the opponents of the first Hohenstaufen, show us characters of this kind. But at the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante’s great poem would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national herald of his time. But this unfolding of the treasures of human nature in literature and art—this many-sided representation and criticism—will be discussed in separate chapters; here we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself. This fact appears in the most decisive and unmistakeable form. The Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming²⁹⁰ unlike his neighbours.²⁹¹

Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or Condottiere himself,²⁹² but also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools—the secretary, minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and influence.

But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of the Byzantine empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did not cease to be considerable, and a Church which, unlike that of the Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the State—all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a dilettante, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene, too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.

In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders, especially in Florentine history,²⁹³ acquired so marked a personal character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob von Arteveldt.

The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into a position like that of the subjects of the despotic States, with the difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446), whose work on domestic economy²⁹⁴ is the first complete programme of a developed private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and thanklessness of public life²⁹⁵ is in its way a true monument of the age.

Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. ‘In all our more populous cities,’ says Giovanni Pontano,²⁹⁶ ‘we see a crowd of people who have left their homes of their own free-will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes.’ And, in fact, they were by no means only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.

The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, ‘My country is the whole world.’²⁹⁷ And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: ‘Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars; everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people. Even my bread will not fail me.’²⁹⁸ The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. ‘Only he who has learned everything,’ says Ghiberti,²⁹⁹ ‘is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.’ In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: ‘Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.³⁰⁰

CHAPTER II.
THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL

AN acute and practised eye might be able to trace, step by step, the increase in the number of complete men during the fifteenth century. Whether they had before them as a conscious object the harmonious development of their spiritual and material existence, is hard to say; but several of them attained it, so far as is consistent with the imperfection of all that is earthly. It may be better to renounce the attempt at an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and talent had in the life of Lorenzo Magnifico. But look at a personality like that of Ariosto, especially as shown in his satires. In what harmony are there expressed the pride of the man and the poet, the irony with which he treats his own enjoyments, the most delicate satire, and the deepest goodwill!

When this impulse to the highest individual development³⁰¹ was combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the elements of the culture of the age, then arose the ‘all-sided man’—‘l’uomo universale’—who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were of encyclopædic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages, for this knowledge was confined within narrow limits; and even in the twelfth century there were universal artists, but the problems of architecture were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture and painting the matter was of more importance than the form. But in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, we find artists who in every branch created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest impression as men. Others, outside the arts they practised, were masters of a vast circle of spiritual interests.

Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a philosopher, by others a theologian,³⁰² pours forth in all his writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the interest of the subject, feels himself carried away. What power of will must the steady, unbroken elaboration of the ‘Divine Comedy’ have required! And if we look at the matter of the poem, we find that in the whole spiritual or physical world there is hardly an important subject which the poet has not fathomed, and on which his utterances—often only a few words—are not the most weighty of his time. For the plastic arts he is of the first importance, and this for better reasons than the few references to contemporary artists—he soon became himself the source of inspiration.³⁰³

The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men. There is no biography which does not, besides the chief work of its hero, speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the limits of dilettantism. The Florentine merchant and statesman was often learned in both the classical languages; the most famous humanists read the ethics and politics of Aristotle to him and his sons;³⁰⁴ even the daughters of the house were highly educated. It is in these circles that private education was first treated seriously. The humanist, on his side, was compelled to the most varied attainments, since his philological learning was not limited, as it now is, to the theoretical knowledge of classical antiquity, but had to serve the practical needs of daily life. While studying Pliny,³⁰⁵ he made collections of natural history; the geography of the ancients was his guide in treating of modern geography, their history was his pattern in writing contemporary chronicles, even when composed in Italian; he not only translated the comedies of Plautus, but acted as manager when they were put on the stage; every effective form of ancient literature down to the dialogues of Lucian he did his best to imitate; and besides all this, he acted as magistrate, secretary, and diplomatist—not always to his own advantage.

But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants—Leon Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).³⁰⁶ His biography,³⁰⁷ which is only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture. We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to distinction.

In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many years, till exhaustion brought on a severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity, cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions, down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’³⁰⁸ in which he showed at one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.³⁰⁹ To all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings—novels and other works—of which some have been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life³¹⁰ in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog. Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of—the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough. Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.³¹¹ No wonder that those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’

And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante. Would only that Vasari’s work were here supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.

CHAPTER III.
THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME

TO this inward development of the individual corresponds a new sort of outward distinction—the modern form of glory.³¹²

In the other countries of Europe the different classes of society lived apart, each with its own mediæval caste sense of honour. The poetical fame of the Troubadours and Minnesänger was peculiar to the knightly order. But in Italy social equality had appeared before the time of the tyrannies or the democracies. We there find early traces of a general society, having, as will be shown more fully later on, a common ground in Latin and Italian literature; and such a ground was needed for this new element in life to grow in. To this must be added that the Roman authors, who were now zealously studied, and especially Cicero, the most read and admired of all, are filled and saturated with the conception of fame, and that their subject itself—the universal empire of Rome—stood as a permanent ideal before the minds of Italians. From henceforth all the aspirations and achievements of the people were governed by a moral postulate, which was still unknown elsewhere in Europe.

Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called is Dante. He strove for the poet’s garland³¹³ with all the power of his soul. As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be esteemed the first in his own walks.³¹⁴ But even in his prose writings he touches on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal acquaintance with famous men is disappointing, and explains how this is due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to envy, and partly to the imperfections of the hero himself.³¹⁵ And in his great poem he firmly maintains the emptiness of fame, although in a manner which betrays that his heart was not set free from the longing for it. In Paradise the sphere of Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones³¹⁶ as on earth strove after glory and thereby dimmed ‘the beams of true love.’ It is characteristic that the lost souls in hell beg of Dante to keep alive for them their memory and fame on earth,³¹⁷ while those in Purgatory only entreat his prayers and those of others for their deliverance.³¹⁸ And in a famous passage,³¹⁹ the passion for fame—‘lo gran desio dell’eccellenza’—is reproved for the reason that intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to the times, and may be surpassed and eclipsed by greater successors.

The new race of poet-scholars which arose soon after Dante quickly made themselves masters of this fresh tendency. They did so in a double sense, being themselves the most acknowledged celebrities of Italy, and at the same time, as poets and historians, consciously disposing of the reputation of others. An outward symbol of this sort of fame was the coronation of the poets, of which we shall speak later on.

A contemporary of Dante, Albertinus Musattus or Mussattus, crowned poet at Padua by the bishop and rector, enjoyed a fame which fell little short of deification. Every Christmas Day the doctors and students of both colleges at the University came in solemn procession before his house with trumpets and, as it seems, with burning tapers, to salute him³²⁰ and bring him presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he fell into disgrace with the ruling tyrant of the House of Carrara.

This new incense, which once was offered only to saints and heroes, was given in clouds to Petrarch, who persuaded himself in his later years that it was but a foolish and troublesome thing. His letter ‘To Posterity’³²¹ is the confession of an old and famous man, who is forced to gratify the public curiosity. He admits that he wishes for fame in the times to come, but would rather be without it in his own day.³²² In his dialogue on fortune and misfortune,³²³ the interlocutor, who maintains the futility of glory, has the best of the contest. But, at the same time, Petrarch is pleased that the autocrat of Byzantium³²⁴ knows him as well by his writings as Charles IV.³²⁵ knows him. And in fact, even in his lifetime, his fame extended far beyond Italy. And the emotion which he felt was natural when his friends, on the occasion of a visit to his native Arezzo (1350), took him to the house where he was born, and told him how the city had provided that no change should be made in it.³²⁶ In former times the dwellings of certain great saints were preserved and revered in this way, like the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Dominican convent at Naples, and the Portiuncula of St. Francis near Assisi; and one or two great jurists also enjoyed the half-mythical reputation which led to this honour. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the people at Bagnolo, near Florence, called an old building the ‘Studio’ of Accursius (b. about 1150), but, nevertheless, suffered it to be destroyed.³²⁷ It is probable that the great incomes and the political influence which some jurists obtained as consulting lawyers made a lasting impression on the popular imagination.

To the cultus of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of their graves,³²⁸ and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he died. In memory of him Arquà became a favourite resort of the Paduans, and was dotted with graceful little villas.³²⁹ At this time there were no ‘classic spots’ in Northern Europe, and pilgrimages were only made to pictures and relics. It was a point of honour for the different cities to possess the bones of their own and foreign celebrities; and it is most remarkable how seriously the Florentines, even in the fourteenth century—long before the building of Santa Croce—laboured to make their cathedral a Pantheon. Accorso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the jurist Zanobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there erected to them.³³⁰ Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Magnifico applied in person to the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the answer that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in the shape of distinguished people, for which reason they begged him to spare them; and, in fact, he had to be contented with erecting a cenotaph.³³¹ And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis,³³² remained sleeping tranquilly by the side of San Francesco at Ravenna, ‘among ancient tombs of emperors and vaults of saints, in more honourable company than thou, O Home, couldst offer him.’ It even happened that a man once took away unpunished the lights from the altar on which the crucifix stood, and set them by the grave, with the words, ‘Take them; thou art more worthy of them than He, the Crucified One!’³³³

And now the Italian cities began again to remember their ancient citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never forgotten its tomb of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had become attached to the name, and the memory of it had been revived by Petrarch and Boccaccio, who both stayed in the city.

The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed that they possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder Antenor, but also those of the historian Livy.³³⁴ ‘Sulmona,’ says Boccaccio,³³⁵ ‘bewails that Ovid lies buried far away in exile; and Parma rejoices that Cassius sleeps within its walls.’ The Mantuans coined a medal in 1257 with the bust of Virgil, and raised a statue to represent him. In a fit of aristocratic insolence,³³⁶ the guardian of the young Gonzaga, Carlo Malatesta, caused it to be pulled down in 1392, and was afterwards forced, when he found the fame of the old poet too strong for him, to set it up again. Even then, perhaps, the grotto, a couple of miles from the town, where Virgil was said to have meditated,³³⁷ was shown to strangers, like the ‘Scuola di Virgilio’ at Naples. Como claimed both the Plinys³³⁸ for its own, and at the end of the fifteenth century erected statues in their honour, sitting under graceful baldachins on the façade of the cathedral.

History and the new topography were now careful to leave no local celebrity unnoticed. At the same period the northern chronicles only here and there, among the list of popes, emperors, earthquakes, and comets, put in the remark, that at such a time this or that famous man ‘flourished.’ We shall elsewhere have to show how, mainly under the influence of this idea of fame, an admirable biographical literature was developed. We must here limit ourselves to the local patriotism of the topographers who recorded the claims of their native cities to distinction.

In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and of the bones and relics in their churches.³³⁹ With these the panegyrist of Padua in 1440, Michele Savonarola,³⁴⁰ begins his list; from them he passes to ‘the famous men who were no saints, but who, by their great intellect and force (virtus) deserve to be added (adnecti) to the saints’—just as in classical antiquity the distinguished man came close upon the hero.³⁴¹ The further enumeration is most characteristic of the time. First comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua with a band of Trojan fugitives; King Dardanus, who defeated Attila in the Euganean hills, followed him in pursuit, and struck him dead at Rimini with a chess-board; the Emperor Henry IV., who built the cathedral; a King Marcus, whose head was preserved in Monselice (monte silicis arce); then a couple of cardinals and prelates as founders of colleges, churches, and so forth; the famous Augustinian theologian, Fra Alberto; a string of philosophers beginning with Paolo Veneto and the celebrated Pietro of Albano; the jurist Paolo Padovano; then Livy and the poets Petrarch, Mussato, Lovato. If there is any want of military celebrities in the list, the poet consoles himself for it by the abundance of learned men whom he has to show, and by the more durable character of intellectual glory; while the fame of the soldier is buried with his body, or, if it lasts, owes its permanence only to the scholar.³⁴² It is nevertheless honourable to the city that foreign warriors lie buried here by their own wish, like Pietro de Rossi of Parma, Filippo Arcelli of Piacenza, and especially Gattamelata of Narni (d. 1642),³⁴³ whose brazen equestrian statue, ‘like a Cæsar in triumph,’ already stood by the church of the Santo. The author then names a crowd of jurists and physicians, among the latter two friends of Petrarch, Johannes ab Horologio and Jacob de Dondis, nobles ‘who had not only, like so many others, received, but deserved, the honour of knighthood.’ Then follows a list of famous mechanicians, painters, and musicians, which is closed by the name of a fencing-master Michele Rosso, who, as the most distinguished man in his profession, was to be seen painted in many places.

By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (Mulierum virtutes), Hieronymus (De Viris Illustribus), and others: or they wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’ and Boccaccio in the ‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages.³⁴⁴ By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino, Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese,³⁴⁵ and lastly of Paolo Giovio.³⁴⁶

The North of Europe, until Italian influence began to tell upon its writers—for instance, on Trithemius, the first German who wrote the lives of famous men—possessed only either legends of the saints, or descriptions of princes and churchmen partaking largely of the character of legends and showing no traces of the idea of fame, that is, of distinction won by a man’s personal efforts. Poetical glory was still confined to certain classes of society, and the names of northern artists are only known to us at this period in so far as they were members of certain guilds or corporations.

The poet-scholar in Italy had, as we have already said, the fullest consciousness that he was the giver of fame and immortality, or, if he chose, of oblivion.³⁴⁷ Petrarch, notwithstanding all the idealism of his love to Laura, gives utterance to the feeling, that his sonnets confer immortality on his beloved as well as on himself.³⁴⁸ Boccaccio complains of a fair one to whom he had done homage, and who remained hard-hearted in order that he might go on praising her and making her famous, and he gives her a hint that he will try the effect of a little blame.³⁴⁹ Sannazaro, in two magnificent sonnets, threatens Alfonso of Naples with eternal obscurity on account of his cowardly flight before Charles VIII.³⁵⁰ Angelo Poliziano seriously exhorts (1491) King John of Portugal³⁵¹ to think betimes of his immortality in reference to the new discoveries in Africa, and to send him materials to Florence, there to be put into shape (operosius excolenda), otherwise it would befall him as it had befallen all the others whose deeds, unsupported by the help of the learned, ‘lie hidden in the vast heap of human frailty.’ The king, or his humanistic chancellor, agreed to this, and promised that at least the Portuguese chronicles of African affairs should be translated into Italian, and sent to Florence to be done into Latin. Whether the promise was kept is not known. These pretensions are by no means so groundless as they may appear at first sight; for the form in which events, even the greatest, are told to the living and to posterity is anything but a matter of indifference. The Italian humanists, with their mode of exposition and their Latin style, had long the complete control of the reading world of Europe, and till last century the Italian poets were more widely known and studied than those of any other nation. The baptismal name of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was given, on account of his book of travels—certainly at the proposal of its German translator into Latin, Martin Waldseemüller (Hylacomylus)³⁵²—to a new quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio, with all his superficiality and graceful caprice, promised himself immortality,³⁵³ his expectation has not altogether been disappointed.

Amid all these preparations outwardly to win and secure fame, the curtain is now and then drawn aside, and we see with frightful evidence a boundless ambition and thirst after greatness, independent of all means and consequences. Thus, in the preface to Macchiavelli’s Florentine history, in which he blames his predecessors Lionardo Aretino and Poggio for their too considerate reticence with regard to the political parties in the city: ‘They erred greatly and showed that they understood little the ambition of men and the desire to perpetuate a name. How many who could distinguish themselves by nothing praiseworthy, strove to do so by infamous deeds! Those writers did not consider that actions which are great in themselves, as is the case with the actions of rulers and of states, always seem to bring more glory than blame, of whatever kind they are and whatever the result of them may be.’³⁵⁴ In more than one remarkable and dreadful undertaking the motive assigned by serious writers is the burning desire to achieve something great and memorable. This motive is not a mere extreme case of ordinary vanity, but something demonic, involving a surrender of the will, the use of any means, however atrocious, and even an indifference to success itself. In this sense, for example, Macchiavelli conceives the character of Stefano Porcaro (p. 104);³⁵⁵ of the murderers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (p. 57), the documents tell us about the same; and the assassination of Duke Alessandro of Florence (1537) is ascribed by Varchi himself to the thirst for fame which tormented the murderer Lorenzino Medici (p. 60). Still more stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio.³⁵⁶ Lorenzino, according to him, pilloried by a pamphlet of Molza on account of the mutilation of some ancient statues at Rome, broods over a deed whose novelty shall make his disgrace forgotten, and ends by murdering his kinsman and prince. These are characteristic features of this age of overstrained and despairing passions and forces, and remind us of the burning of the temple of Diana at Ephesus in the time of Philip of Macedon.

CHAPTER IV.
MODERN WIT AND SATIRE

THE corrective, not only of this modern desire for fame, but of all highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially when expressed in the victorious form of wit.³⁵⁷ We read in the Middle Ages how hostile armies, princes, and nobles, provoked one another with symbolical insult, and how the defeated party was loaded with symbolical outrage. Here and there, too, under the influence of classical literature, wit began to be used as a weapon in theological disputes, and the poetry of Provence produced a whole class of satirical compositions. Even the Minnesänger, as their political poems show, could adopt this tone when necessary.³⁵⁸ But wit could not be an independent element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual with personal pretentions, had appeared. Its weapons were then by no means limited to the tongue and the pen, but included tricks and practical jokes—the so-called ‘burle’ and ‘beffe’—which form a chief subject of many collections of novels.

The ‘Hundred Old Novels,’ which must have been composed about the end of the thirteenth century, have as yet neither wit, the fruit of contrast, nor the ‘burla,’ for their subject;³⁵⁹ their aim is merely to give simple and elegant expression to wise sayings and pretty stories or fables. But if anything proves the great antiquity of the collection, it is precisely this absence of satire. For with the fourteenth century comes Dante, who, in the utterance of scorn, leaves all other poets in the world far behind, and who, if only on account of his great picture of the deceivers,³⁶⁰ must be called the chief master of colossal comedy. With Petrarch³⁶¹ begin the collections of witty sayings after the pattern of Plutarch (Apophthegmata, etc.).

What stores of wit were concentrated in Florence during this century, is most characteristically shown in the novels of Franco Sacchetti. These are, for the most part, not stories but answers, given under certain circumstances—shocking pieces of naïveté, with which silly folks, court-jesters, rogues, and profligate women make their retort. The comedy of the tale lies in the startling contrast of this real or assumed naïveté with conventional morality and the ordinary relations of the world—things are made to stand on their heads. All means of picturesque representation are made use of, including the introduction of certain North Italian dialects. Often the place of wit is taken by mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy, and obscenity; one or two jokes told of Condottieri³⁶² are among the most brutal and malicious which are recorded. Many of the ‘burle’ are thoroughly comic, but many are only real or supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph over another. How much people were willing to put up with, how often the victim was satisfied with getting the laugh on his side by a retaliatory trick, cannot be said; there was much heartless and pointless malice mixed up with it all, and life in Florence was no doubt often made unpleasant enough from this cause.³⁶³ The inventors and retailers of jokes soon became inevitable figures,³⁶⁴ and among them there must have been some who were classical—far superior to all the mere court-jesters, to whom competition, a changing public, and the quick apprehension of the audience, all advantages of life in Florence, were wanting. Some Florentine wits went starring among the despotic courts of Lombardy and Romagna,³⁶⁵ and found themselves much better rewarded than at home, where their talent was cheap and plentiful. The better type of these people is the amusing man (l’uomo piacevole), the worse is the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and banquets with the argument, ‘If I am not invited, the fault is not mine.’ Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young spendthrift,³⁶⁶ but in general they are treated and despised as parasites, while wits of higher position bear themselves like princes, and consider their talent as something sovereign. Dolcibene, whom Charles IV., ‘Imperator di Buem,’ had pronounced to be the ‘king of Italian jesters,’ said to him at Ferrara: ‘You will conquer the world, since you are my friend and the Pope’s; you fight with the sword, the Pope with his bulls, and I with my tongue.’³⁶⁷ This is no mere jest, but a foreshadowing of Pietro Aretino.

The two most famous jesters about the middle of the fifteenth century were a priest near Florence, Arlotto (1483), for more refined wit (‘facezie’), and the court-fool of Ferrara, Gonnella, for buffoonery. We can hardly compare their stories with those of the Parson of Kalenberg and Till Eulenspiegel, since the latter arose in a different and half-mythical manner, as fruits of the imagination of a whole people, and touch rather on what is general and intelligible to all, while Arlotto and Gonnella were historical beings, coloured and shaped by local influences. But if the comparison be allowed, and extended to the jests of the non-Italian nations, we shall find in general that the joke in the French fabliaux,³⁶⁸ as among the Germans, is chiefly directed to the attainment of some advantage or enjoyment; while the wit of Arlotto and the practical jokes of Gonnella are an end in themselves, and exist simply for the sake of the triumph of production. (Till Eulenspiegel again forms a class by himself, as the personified quiz, mostly pointless enough, of particular classes and professions). The court-fool of the Este saved himself more than once by his keen satire and refined modes of vengeance.³⁶⁹

The type of the ‘uomo piacevole’ and the ‘buffone’ long survived the freedom of Florence. Under Duke Cosimo flourished Barlacchia, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century Francesco Ruspoli and Curzio Marignolli. In Pope Leo X., the genuine Florentine love of jesters showed itself strikingly. This prince, whose taste for the most refined intellectual pleasures was insatiable, endured and desired at his table a number of witty buffoons and jack-puddings, among them two monks and a cripple;³⁷⁰ at public feasts he treated them with deliberate scorn as parasites, setting before them monkeys and crows in the place of savoury meats. Leo, indeed, showed a peculiar fondness for the ‘burla’; it belonged to his nature sometimes to treat his own favourite pursuits—music and poetry—ironically, parodying them with his factotum, Cardinal Bibbiena.³⁷¹ Neither of them found it beneath him to fool an honest old secretary till he thought himself a master of the art of music. The Improvisatore, Baraballo of Gaeta, was brought so far by Leo’s flattery, that he applied in all seriousness for the poet’s coronation on the Capitol. On the anniversary of S. Cosmas and S. Damian, the patrons of the House of Medici, he was first compelled, adorned with laurel and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his recitations, and at last, when all were ready to split with laughter, to mount a gold-harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a present to Rome by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, while the Pope looked down from above through his eye-glass.³⁷² The brute, however, was so terrified by the noise of the trumpets and kettle-drums, and the cheers of the crowd, that there was no getting him over the bridge of S. Angelo.

The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which here meets us in the case of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry.³⁷³ It was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedian into his plays. But the same maturity of culture which at a certain period produced parody among the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch’s sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and Lorenzo Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the ‘Inferno’ (‘Simposio’ or ‘I Beoni’). Luigi Pulei obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his ‘Morgante,’ and both his poetry and Bojardo’s are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately undertaken by the great parodist Teofilo Folengo (about 1520). Under the name of Limerno Pitocco, he composed the ‘Orlandino,’ in which chivalry appears only as a ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas. Under the name of Merlinus Coccajus he described the journeys and exploits of his phantastic vagabonds (also in the same spirit of parody) in half-Latin hexameters, with all the affected pomp of the learned Epos of the day. (‘Opus Macaronicorum’). Since then caricature has been constantly, and often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus.

About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical analysis of wit was undertaken, and its practical application in good society was regulated more precisely. The theorist was Gioviano Pontano.³⁷⁴ In his work on speaking, especially in the third and fourth books, he tries by means of the comparison of numerous jokes or ‘facetiæ’ to arrive at a general principle. How wit should be used among people of position is taught by Baldassar Castiglione in his ‘Cortigiano.’³⁷⁵ Its chief function is naturally to enliven those present by the repetition of comic or graceful stories and sayings; personal jokes, on the contrary, are discouraged on the ground that they wound unhappy people, show too much honour to wrong-doers, and make enemies of the powerful and the spoiled children of fortune;³⁷⁶ and even in repetition, a wide reserve in the use of dramatic gestures is recommended to the gentleman. Then follows, not only for purposes of quotation, but as patterns for future jesters, a large collection of puns and witty sayings, methodically arranged according to their species, among them some that are admirable. The doctrine of Giovanni della Casa, some twenty years later, in his guide to good manners, is much stricter and more cautious;³⁷⁷ with a view to the consequences, he wishes to see the desire of triumph banished altogether from jokes and ‘burle.’ He is the herald of a reaction, which was certain sooner or later to appear.

Italy had, in fact, become a school for scandal, the like of which the world cannot show, not even in France at the time of Voltaire. In him and his comrades there was assuredly no lack of the spirit of negation; but where, in the eighteenth century, was to be found the crowd of suitable victims, that countless assembly of highly and characteristically-developed human beings, celebrities of every kind, statesmen, churchmen, inventors, and discoverers, men of letters, poets and artists, all of whom then gave the fullest and freest play to their individuality? This host existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by its side the general culture of the time had educated a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born critics and railers, whose envy called for hecatombs of victims; and to all this was added the envy of the famous men among themselves. In this the philologists notoriously led the way—Filelfo, Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and others—while the artists of the fifteenth century lived in peaceful and friendly competition with one another. The history of art may take note of the fact.

Florence, the great market of fame, was in this point, as we have said, in advance of other cities. ‘Sharp eyes and bad tongues’ is the description given of the inhabitants.³⁷⁸ An easy-going contempt of everything and everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society. Macchiavelli, in the remarkable prologue to his ‘Mandragola,’ refers rightly or wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general habit of evil speaking, and threatens his detractors with the news that he can say sharp things as well as they. Next to Florence comes the Papal court, which had long been a rendezvous of the bitterest and wittiest tongues. Poggio’s ‘Facetiæ’ are dated from the Chamber of Lies (bugiale) of the apostolic notaries; and when we remember the number of disappointed place-hunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of the favourites, of idle, profligate prelates there assembled, it is intelligible how Rome became the home of the savage pasquinade as well as of more philosophical satire. If we add to this the wide-spread hatred borne to the priests, and the well-known instinct of the mob to lay any horror to the charge of the great, there results an untold mass of infamy.³⁷⁹ Those who were able protected themselves best by contempt both of the false and true accusations, and by brilliant and joyous display.³⁸⁰ More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when they found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more deeply in slander.³⁸¹ In course of time calumny became universal, and the strictest virtue was most certain of all to challenge the attacks of malice. Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527,³⁸² Giovio gives us to understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a genuine Curial in these matters.³⁸³ He generally begins by telling his story, then adds that he does not believe it, and then hints at the end that perhaps after all there may be something in it. But the true scape-goat of Roman scorn was the pious and moral Adrian VI. A general agreement seemed to be made to take him only on the comic side. Adrian had contemptuously referred to the Laöcoon group as ‘idola antiquorum,’ had shut up the entrance to the Belvedere, had left the works of Raphael unfinished, and had banished the poets and players from the court; it was even feared that he would burn some ancient statues to lime for the new church of St. Peter. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as people said,³⁸⁴ the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the satires themselves. The vengeance for this was the famous ‘Capitolo’ against Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by hatred, but by contempt for the comical Dutch barbarian;³⁸⁵ the more savage menaces were reserved for the cardinals who had elected him. The plague, which then was prevalent in Rome, was ascribed to him;³⁸⁶ Berni and others³⁸⁷ sketch the environment of the Pope—the Germans by whom he was governed³⁸⁸—with the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the modern feuilletoniste turns black into white, and everything into anything. The biography which Paolo Giovio was commissioned to write by the Cardinal of Tortosa, and which was to have been a eulogy, is for any one who can read between the lines an unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous—at least for the Italians of that time—to hear how Adrian applied to the Chapter of Saragossa for the jaw-bone of St. Lambert; how the devout Spaniards decked him out till he looked ‘like a right well-dressed Pope;’ how he came in a confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly break off the most important business when dinner was announced; and lastly, at the end of an unhappy reign, how he died of drinking too much beer—whereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S. P. Q. R.’ It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of compensation because he was ‘no poet,’ that is to say. no pagan.³⁸⁹ But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim. After the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along with the unrestrained wickedness of private life.

But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in Rome, the greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino. A glance at his life and character will save us the trouble of noticing many less distinguished members of his class.

We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life (1527-1557), which he passed in Venice, the only asylum possible for him. From hence he kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege, and here were delivered the presents of the foreign princes who needed or dreaded his pen. Charles V. and Francis I. both pensioned him at the same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other. Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself more closely to Charles, because he remained master in Italy. After the Emperor’s victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of adulation passed into the most ludicrous worship, in observing which it must not be forgotten that Aretino constantly cherished the hope that Charles would help him to a cardinal’s hat. It is probable that he enjoyed special protection as Spanish agent, as his speech or silence could have no small effect on the smaller Italian courts and on public opinion in Italy. He affected utterly to despise the Papal court because he knew it so well; the true reason was that Rome neither could nor would pay him any longer.³⁹⁰ Venice, which sheltered him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed. The rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion.

Aretino affords the first great instance of the abuse of publicity to such ends. The polemical writings which a hundred years earlier Poggio and his opponents interchanged, are just as infamous in their tone and purpose, but they were not composed for the press, but for a sort of private circulation. Aretino made all his profit out of a complete publicity, and in a certain sense may be considered the father of modern journalism. His letters and miscellaneous articles were printed periodically, after they had already been circulated among a tolerably extensive public.³⁹¹

Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science; his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, ‘Veritas odium parit.’ He never, consequently, found himself in the false position of Voltaire, who was forced to disown his ‘Pucelle’ and conceal all his life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his name to all he wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious ‘Ragionamenti.’ His literary talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and things, would have made him a considerable writer under any circumstances destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais.³⁹²

In such circumstances, and with such objects and means, he set to work to attack or circumvent his prey. The tone in which he appealed to Clement VII. not to complain or to think of vengeance,³⁹³ but to forgive, at the moment when the wailings of the devastated city were ascending to the Castle of St. Angelo, where the Pope himself was a prisoner, is the mockery of a devil or a monkey. Sometimes, when he is forced to give up all hope of presents, his fury breaks out into a savage howl, as in the ‘Capitolo’ to the Prince of Salerno, who after paying him for some time refused to do so any longer. On the other hand, it seems that the terrible Pierluigi Farnese, Duke of Parma, never took any notice of him at all. As this gentleman had probably renounced altogether the pleasures of a good reputation, it was not easy to cause him any annoyance; Aretino tried to do so by comparing his personal appearance to that of a constable, a miller, and a baker.³⁹⁴ Aretino is most comical of all in the expression of whining mendicancy, as in the ‘Capitolo’ to Francis I.; but the letters and poems made up of menaces and flattery cannot, notwithstanding all that is ludicrous in them, be read without the deepest disgust. A letter like that one of his written to Michelangelo in November 1545³⁹⁵ is alone of its kind; along with all the admiration he expresses for the ‘Last Judgment’ he charges him with irreligion, indecency, and theft from the heirs of Julius II., and adds in a conciliating postscript, ‘I only want to show you that if you are “divino,” I am not “d’acqua.” ’ Aretino laid great stress upon it—whether from the insanity of conceit or by way of caricaturing famous men—that he himself should be called divine, as one of his flatterers had already begun to do; and he certainly attained so much personal celebrity that his house at Arezzo passed for one of the sights of the place.³⁹⁶ There were indeed whole months during which he never ventured to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in with some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did he escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies,³⁹⁷ although they failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a famous sonnet. Aretino died in his house, of apoplexy.

The differences he made in his modes of flattery are remarkable: in dealing with non-Italians he was grossly fulsome;³⁹⁸ people like Duke Cosimo of Florence he treated very differently. He praised the beauty of the then youthful prince, who in fact did share this quality with Augustus in no ordinary degree; he praised his moral conduct, with an oblique reference to the financial pursuits of Cosimo’s mother Maria Salviati, and concluded with a mendicant whine about the bad times and so forth. When Cosimo pensioned him,³⁹⁹ which he did liberally, considering his habitual parsimony—to the extent, at last, of 160 ducats a year—he had doubtless an eye to Aretino’s dangerous character as Spanish agent. Aretino could ridicule and revile Cosimo, and in the same breath threaten the Florentine agent that he would obtain from the Duke his immediate recall; and if the Medicean prince felt himself at last to be seen through by Charles V. he would naturally not be anxious that Aretino’s jokes and rhymes against him should circulate at the Imperial court. A curiously qualified piece of flattery was that addressed to the notorious Marquis of Marignano, who as Castellan of Musso (p. 27) had attempted to found an independent state. Thanking him for the gift of a hundred crowns, Aretino writes: ‘All the qualities which a prince should have are present in you, and all men would think so, were it not that the acts of violence inevitable at the beginning of all undertakings cause you to appear a trifle rough (aspro).’⁴⁰⁰

It has often been noticed as something singular that Aretino only reviled the world, and not God also. The religious belief of a man who lived as he did is a matter of perfect indifference, as are also the edifying writings which he composed for reasons of his own.⁴⁰¹ It is in fact hard to say why he should have been a blasphemer. He was no professor, or theoretical thinker or writer; and he could extort no money from God by threats or flattery, and was consequently never goaded into blasphemy by a refusal. A man like him does not take trouble for nothing.

It is a good sign of the present spirit of Italy that such a character and such a career have become a thousand times impossible. But historical criticism will always find in Aretino an important study.

PART III.
THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

NOW that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization has been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity, the ‘new birth’ of which has been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up the whole period. The conditions which have been hitherto described would have sufficed, apart from antiquity, to upturn and to mature the national mind; and most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain to be noticed would be conceivable without it. But both what has gone before and what we have still to discuss are coloured in a thousand ways by the influence of the ancient world; and though the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival, it is only with and through this revival that they are actually manifested to us. The Renaissance would not have been the process of worldwide significance which it is, if its elements could be so easily separated from one another. We must insist upon it, as one of the chief propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world. The amount of independence which the national spirit maintained in this union varied according to circumstances. In the modern Latin literature of the period, it is very small, while in plastic art, as well as in other spheres, it is remarkably great; and hence the alliance between two distant epochs in the civilisation of the same people, because concluded on equal terms, proved justifiable and fruitful. The rest of Europe was free either to repel or else partly or wholly to accept the mighty impulse which came forth from Italy. Where the latter was the case we may as well be spared the complaints over the early decay of mediæval faith and civilisation. Had these been strong enough to hold their ground, they would be alive to this day. If those elegiac natures which long to see them return could pass but one hour in the midst of them, they would gasp to be back in modern air. That in a great historical process of this kind flowers of exquisite beauty may perish, without being made immortal in poetry or tradition is undoubtedly true; nevertheless, we cannot wish the process undone. The general result of it consists in this—that by the side of the Church which had hitherto held the countries of the West together (though it was unable to do so much longer) there arose a new spiritual influence which, spreading itself abroad from Italy, became the breath of life for all the more instructed minds in Europe. The worst that can be said of the movement is, that it was anti-popular, that through it Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and uncultivated classes. The reproach will appear groundless when we reflect that even now the fact, though clearly recognised, cannot be altered. The separation, too, is by no means so cruel and absolute in Italy as elsewhere. The most artistic of her poets, Tasso, is in the hands of even the poorest.

The civilisation of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies—this civilisation had long been exerting a partial influence on mediæval Europe, even beyond the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charles the Great was a representative was, in face of the barbarism of the seventh and eighth centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear under no other form. Just as in the Romanesque architecture of the North, beside the general outlines inherited from antiquity, remarkable direct imitations of the antique also occur, so too monastic scholarship had not only gradually absorbed an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but the style of it, from the days of Eginhard onwards shows traces of conscious imitations.

But the resuscitation of antiquity took a different form in Italy from that which it assumed in the North. The wave of barbarism had scarcely gone by before the people, in whom the former life was but half effaced, showed a consciousness of its past and a wish to reproduce it. Elsewhere in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed this or the other element of classical civilisation; in Italy the sympathies both of the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the side of antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol of past greatness. The Latin language, too, was easy to an Italian, and the numerous monuments and documents in which the country abounded facilitated a return to the past. With this tendency other elements—the popular character which time had now greatly modified, the political institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and other northern forms of civilisation, and the influence of religion and the Church—combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which was destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole western world.

How antiquity began to work in plastic art, as soon as the flood of barbarism had subsided, is clearly shown in the Tuscan buildings of the twelfth and in the sculptures of the thirteenth centuries. In poetry, too, there will appear no want of similar analogies to those who hold that the greatest Latin poet of the twelfth century, the writer who struck the key-note of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called ‘Carmina Burana.’ A frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the rhymed verses. Reading them through at a stretch, we can scarcely help coming to the conclusion that an Italian, probably a Lombard, is speaking; in fact, there are positive grounds for thinking so.⁴⁰² To a certain degree these Latin poems of the ‘Clerici vagantes’ of the twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless, a product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the song ‘De Phyllide et Flora’⁴⁰³ and the ‘Æstuans Interius’ can have been a northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom we owe ‘Dum Dianæ vitrea sero lampas oritur.’ Here, in truth, is a reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more striking from the mediæval form of the verse in which it is set forth. There are many works of this and the following centuries, in which a careful imitation of the antique appears both in the hexameter and pentameter of the metre in the classical, often mythological, character of the subject, and which yet have not anything like the same spirit of antiquity about them. In the hexameter chronicles and other works of Gulielmus Apuliensis and his successors (from about 1100), we find frequent traces of a diligent study of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and Claudian; but this classical form is after all here a mere matter of archæology, as is the classical subject in collectors like Vincent of Beauvais, or in the mythological and allegorical writer, Alanus ab Insulis. The Renaissance is not a mere fragmentary imitation or compilation, but a new birth; and the signs of this are visible in the poems of the unknown ‘Clericus’ of the twelfth century.

But the great and general enthusiasm of the Italians for classical antiquity did not display itself before the fourteenth century. For this a development of civic life was required, which took place only in Italy, and there not till then. It was needful that noble and burgher should first learn to dwell together on equal terms, and that a social world should arise (see p. 139) which felt the want of culture, and had the leisure and the means to obtain it. But culture, as soon as it freed itself from the fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages, could not at once and without help find its way to the understanding of the physical and intellectual world. It needed a guide, and found one in the ancient civilisation, with its wealth of truth and knowledge in every spiritual interest. Both the form and the substance of this civilisation were adopted with admiring gratitude; it became the chief part of the culture of the age.⁴⁰⁴ The general condition of the country was favourable to this transformation. The mediæval empire, since the fall of the Hohenstaufen, had either renounced, or was unable to make good, its claims on Italy. The Popes had migrated to Avignon. Most of the political powers actually in existence owed their origin to violent and illegitimate means. The spirit of the people, now awakened to self-consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to rest. And thus the vision of the world-wide empire of Italy and Rome so possessed the popular mind, that Cola di Rienzi could actually attempt to put it in practice. The conception he formed of his task, particularly when tribune for the first time, could only end in some extravagant comedy; nevertheless, the memory of ancient Rome was no slight support to the national sentiment. Armed afresh with its culture, the Italian soon felt himself in truth citizen of the most advanced nation in the world.

It is now our task to sketch this spiritual movement, not indeed in all its fulness, but in its most salient features, and especially in its first beginnings.⁴⁰⁵

CHAPTER II.
ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS

ROME itself, the city of ruins, now became the object of a wholly different sort of piety from that of the time when the ‘Mirabilia Romæ’ and the collection of William of Malmesbury were composed. The imaginations of the devout pilgrim, or of the seeker after marvels⁴⁰⁶ and treasures, are supplanted in contemporary records by the interests of the patriot and the historian. In this sense we must understand Dante’s words,⁴⁰⁷ that the stones of the walls of Rome deserve reverence, and that the ground on which the city is built is more worthy than men say. The jubilees, incessant as they were, have scarcely left a single devout record in literature properly so called. The best thing that Giovanni Villani (p. 73) brought back from the jubilee of the year 1300 was the resolution to write his history which had been awakened in him by the sight of the ruins of Rome. Petrarch gives evidence of a taste divided between classical and Christian antiquity. He tells us how often with Giovanni Colonna he ascended the mighty vaults of the Baths of Diocletian,⁴⁰⁸ and there in the transparent air, amid the wide silence, with the broad panorama stretching far around them, they spoke, not of business, or political affairs, but of the history which the ruins beneath their feet suggested, Petrarch appearing in their dialogues as the partisan of classical, Giovanni of Christian antiquity; then they would discourse of philosophy and of the inventors of the arts. How often since that time, down to the days of Gibbon and Niebuhr, have the same ruins stirred men’s minds to the same reflections!

This double current of feeling is also recognisable in the ‘Dittamondo’ of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year 1360—a description of visionary travels, in which the author is accompanied by the old geographer Solinus, as Dante was by Virgil. They visit Bari in memory of St. Nicholas, and Monte Gargano of the archangel Michael, and in Rome the legends of Araceli and of Santa Maria in Trastevere are mentioned. Still, the pagan splendour of ancient Rome unmistakably exercises a greater charm upon them. A venerable matron in torn garments—Rome herself is meant—tells them of the glorious past, and gives them a minute description of the old triumphs;⁴⁰⁹ she then leads the strangers through the city, and points out to them the seven hills and many of the chief ruins—‘che comprender potrai, quanto fui bella.’

Unfortunately this Rome of the schismatic and Avignonese popes was no longer, in respect of classical remains, what it had been some generations earlier. The destruction of 140 fortified houses of the Roman nobles by the senator Brancaleone in 1257 must have wholly altered the character of the most important buildings then standing; for the nobles had no doubt ensconced themselves in the loftiest and best-preserved of the ruins.⁴¹⁰ Nevertheless, far more was left than we now find, and probably many of the remains had still their marble incrustation, their pillared entrances, and their other ornaments, where we now see nothing but the skeleton of brickwork. In this state of things, the first beginnings of a topographical study of the old city were made.

In Poggio’s walks through Rome⁴¹¹ the study of the remains themselves is for the first time more intimately combined with that of the ancient authors and inscriptions—the latter he sought out from among all the vegetation in which they were imbedded⁴¹²—the writer’s imagination is severely restrained, and the memories of Christian Rome carefully excluded. The only pity is that Poggio’s work was not fuller and was not illustrated with sketches. Far more was left in his time than was found by Raphael eighty years later. He saw the tomb of Cæcilia Metella and the columns in front of one of the temples on the slope of the Capitol first in full preservation, and then afterwards half destroyed, owing to that unfortunate quality which marble possesses of being easily burnt into lime. A vast colonnade near the Minerva fell piecemeal a victim to the same fate. A witness in the year 1443 tells us that this manufacture of lime still went on; ‘which is a shame, for the new buildings are pitiful, and the beauty of Rome is in its ruins.’⁴¹³ The inhabitants of that day, in their peasants’ cloaks and boots, looked to foreigners like cowherds; and in fact the cattle were pastured in the city up to the Banchi. The only opportunities for social gatherings were the services at church, on which occasion it was possible to get a sight of the beautiful women.

In the last years of Eugenius IV. (d. 1447) Blondus of Forli wrote his ‘Roma Instaurata,’ making use of Frontinus and of the old ‘Libri Regionali,’ as well as, it seems, of Anastasius. His object is not only the description of what existed, but still more the recovery of what was lost. In accordance with the dedication to the Pope, he consoles himself for the general ruin by the thought of the precious relics of the saints in which Rome was so rich.⁴¹⁴

With Nicholas V. (1447-1455) that new monumental spirit which was distinctive of the age of the Renaissance appeared on the papal throne. The new passion for embellishing the city brought with it on the one hand a fresh danger for the ruins, on the other a respect for them, as forming one of Rome’s claims to distinction. Pius II. was wholly possessed by antiquarian enthusiasm, and if he speaks little of the antiquities of Rome,⁴¹⁵ he closely studied those of all other parts of Italy, and was the first to know and describe accurately the remains which abounded in the districts for miles around the capital.⁴¹⁶ It is true that, both as priest and cosmographer, he is interested alike in classical and Christian monuments and in the marvels of nature. Or was he doing violence to himself when he wrote that Nola was more highly honoured by the memory of St. Paulinus than by all its classical reminiscences and by the heroic struggle of Marcellus? Not, indeed, that his faith in relics was assumed; but his mind was evidently rather disposed to an inquiring interest in nature and antiquity, to a zeal for monumental works, to a keen and delicate observation of human life. In the last years of his Papacy, afflicted with the gout and yet in the most cheerful mood, he was borne in his litter over hill and dale to Tusculum, Alba, Tibur, Ostia, Falerii, and Ocriculum, and whatever he saw he noted down. He followed the line of the Roman roads and aqueducts, and tried to fix the boundaries of the old tribes who dwelt round the city. On an excursion to Tivoli with the great Federigo of Urbino the time was happily spent in talk on the military system of the ancients, and particularly on the Trojan war. Even on his journey to the Congress of Mantua (1459) he searched, though unsuccessfully, for the labyrinth of Clusium mentioned by Pliny, and visited the so-called villa of Virgil on the Mincio. That such a Pope should demand a classical Latin style from his abbreviators, is no more than might be expected. It was he who, in the war with Naples, granted an amnesty to the men of Arpinum, as countrymen of Cicero and Marius, after whom many of them were named. It was to him alone, as both judge and patron, that Blondus could dedicate his ‘Roma Triumphans,’ the first great attempt at a complete exposition of Roman antiquity.⁴¹⁷

Nor was the enthusiasm for the classical past of Italy confined at this period to the capital. Boccaccio⁴¹⁸ had already called the vast ruins of Baiæ ‘old walls, yet new for modern spirits;’ and since this time they were held to be the most interesting sight near Naples. Collections of antiquities of all sorts now became common. Ciriaco of Ancona (d. 1457), who explained (1433) the Roman monuments to the Emperor Sigismund, travelled, not only through Italy, but through other countries of the old world, Hellas, and the islands of the Archipelago, and even parts of Asia and Africa, and brought back with him countless inscriptions and sketches. When asked why he took all this trouble, he replied, ‘To wake the dead.’⁴¹⁹ The histories of the various cities of Italy had from the earliest times laid claim to some true or imagined connection with Rome, had alleged some settlement or colonisation which started from the capital;⁴²⁰ and the obliging manufacturers of pedigrees seem constantly to have derived various families from the oldest and most famous blood of Rome. So highly was the distinction valued, that men clung to it even in the light of the dawning criticism of the fifteenth century. When Pius II. was at Viterbo⁴²¹ he said frankly to the Roman deputies who begged him to return, ‘Rome is as much at home as Siena, for my House, the Piccolomini, came in early times from the capital to Siena, as is proved by the constant use of the names Æneas and Sylvius in my family.’ He would probably have had no objection to be held a descendant of the Julii. Paul II., a Barbo of Venice, found his vanity flattered by deducing his House, notwithstanding an adverse pedigree, according to which it came from Germany, from the Roman Ahenobarbus, who led a colony to Parma, and whose successors were driven by party conflicts to migrate to Venice.⁴²² That the Massimi claimed descent from Q. Fabius Maximus, and the Cornaro from the Cornelii, cannot surprise us. On the other hand, it is a strikingly exceptional fact for the sixteenth century that the novellist Bandello tried to connect his blood with a noble family of Ostrogoths (i. nov. 23).

To return to Rome. The inhabitants, ‘who then called themselves Romans,’ accepted greedily the homage which was offered them by the rest of Italy. Under Paul II., Sixtus IV., and Alexander VI. magnificent processions formed part of the Carnival, representing the scene most attractive to the imagination of the time—the triumph of the Roman Imperator. The sentiment of the people expressed itself naturally in this shape and others like it. In this mood of public feeling, a report arose, that on April 15, 1485, the corpse of a young Roman lady of the classical period—wonderfully beautiful and in perfect preservation—had been discovered.⁴²³ Some Lombard masons digging out an ancient tomb on an estate of the convent of Santa Maria Novella, on the Appian Way beyond the Cæcilia Metella, were said to have found a marble sarcophagus with the inscription, ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius.’ On this basis the following story was built. The Lombards disappeared with the jewels and treasure which were found with the corpse in the sarcophagus. The body had been coated with an antiseptic essence, and was as fresh and flexible as that of a girl of fifteen the hour after death. It was said that she still kept the colours of life, with eyes and mouth half open. She was taken to the palace of the ‘Conservatori’ on the Capitol; and then a pilgrimage to see her began. Among the crowd were many who came to paint her; ‘for she was more beautiful than can be said or written, and, were it said or written, it would not be believed by those who had not seen her.’ By the order of Innocent VIII. she was secretly buried one night outside the Pincian Gate; the empty sarcophagus remained in the court of the ‘Conservatori.’ Probably a coloured mask of wax or some other material was modelled in the classical style on the face of the corpse, with which the gilded hair of which we read would harmonise admirably. The touching point in the story is not the fact itself, but the firm belief that an ancient body, which was now thought to be at last really before men’s eyes, must of necessity be far more beautiful than anything of modern date.

Meanwhile the material knowledge of old Rome was increased by excavations. Under Alexander VI. the so-called ‘Grotesques,’ that is, the mural decorations of the ancients, were discovered, and the Apollo of the Belvedere was found at Porto d’Anzo. Under Julius II. followed the memorable discoveries of the Laöcoon, of the Venus of the Vatican, of the Torso, of the Cleopatra.⁴²⁴ The palaces of the nobles and the cardinals began to be filled with ancient statues and fragments. Raphael undertook for Leo X. that ideal restoration of the whole ancient city which his celebrated letter (1518 or 1519) speaks of.⁴²⁵ After a bitter complaint over the devastations which had not even then ceased, and which had been particularly frequent under Julius II., he beseeches the Pope to protect the few relics which were left to testify to the power and greatness of that divine soul of antiquity whose memory was inspiration to all who were capable of higher things. He then goes on with penetrating judgment to lay the foundations of a comparative history of art, and concludes by giving the definition of an architectural survey which has been accepted since his time; he requires the ground plan, section, and elevation separately of every building that remained. How archæology devoted itself after his day to the study of the venerated city and grew into a special science, and how the Vitruvian Academy at all events proposed to itself great aims,⁴²⁶ cannot here be related. Let us rather pause at the days of Leo X., under whom the enjoyment of antiquity combined with all other pleasures to give to Roman life a unique stamp and consecration.⁴²⁷ The Vatican resounded with song and music, and their echoes were heard through the city as a call to joy and gladness, though Leo did not succeed thereby in banishing care and pain from his own life, and his deliberate calculation to prolong his days by cheerfulness was frustrated by an early death.⁴²⁸ The Rome of Leo, as described by Paolo Giovio, forms a picture too splendid to turn away from, unmistakable as are also its darker aspects—the slavery of those who were struggling to rise; the secret misery of the prelates, who, notwithstanding heavy debts, were forced to live in a style befitting their rank; the system of literary patronage, which drove men to be parasites or adventurers; and, lastly, the scandalous maladministration of the finances of the state.⁴²⁹ Yet the same Ariosto who knew and ridiculed all this so well, gives in the sixth satire a longing picture of his expected intercourse with the accomplished poets who would conduct him through the city of ruins, of the learned counsel which he would there find for his own literary efforts, and of the treasures of the Vatican library. These, he says, and not the long-abandoned hope of Medicean protection, were the real baits which attracted him, when he was asked to go as Ferrarese ambassador to Rome.

But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only archæological zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac or sentimental melancholy. In Petrarch and Boccaccio we find touches of this feeling (pp. 177, 181). Poggio (p. 181) often visited the temple of Venus and Rome, in the belief that it was that of Castor and Pollux, where the senate used so often to meet, and would lose himself in memories of the great orators Crassus, Hortensius, Cicero. The language of Pius II., especially in describing Tivoli, has a thoroughly sentimental ring,⁴³⁰ and soon afterwards (1467) appeared the first pictures of ruins, with, a commentary by Polifilo.⁴³¹ Ruins of mighty arches and colonnades, half hid in plane-trees, laurels, cypresses, and brushwood, figure in his pages. In the sacred legends it became the custom, we can hardly say how, to lay the scene of the birth of Christ in the ruins of a magnificent palace.⁴³² That artificial ruins became afterwards a necessity of landscape gardening, is only a practical consequence of this feeling.

CHAPTER III.
THE OLD AUTHORS

BUT the literary bequests of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin, were of far more importance than the architectural, and indeed than all the artistic remains which it had left. They were held in the most absolute sense to be the springs of all knowledge. The literary conditions of that age of great discoveries have been often set forth; no more can be here attempted than to point out a few less-known features of the picture.⁴³³

Great as was the influence of the old writers on the Italian mind in the fourteenth century and before, yet that influence was due rather to the wide diffusion of what had long been known, than to the discovery of much that was new. The most popular Latin poets, historians, orators, and letter-writers, together with a number of Latin translations of single works of Aristotle, Plutarch, and a few other Greek authors, constituted the treasure from which a few favoured individuals in the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey,’ though a very bad one, was made at Petrarch’s suggestion and with Boccaccio’s help by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.⁴³⁴ But with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, the systematic creation of libraries by means of copies, and the rapid multiplication of translations from the Greek.⁴³⁵

Had it not been for the enthusiasm of a few collectors of that age, who shrank from no effort or privation in their researches, we should certainly possess only a small part of the literature, especially that of the Greeks, which is now in our hands. Pope Nicholas V., when only a simple monk, ran deeply into debt through buying manuscripts or having them copied. Even then he made no secret of his passion for the two great interests of the Renaissance, books and buildings.⁴³⁶ As Pope he kept his word. Copyists wrote and spies searched for him through half the world. Perotto received 500 ducats for the Latin translation of Polybius; Guarino, 1,000 gold florins for that of Strabo, and he would have been paid 500 more but for the death of the Pope. Filelfo was to have received 10,000 gold florins for a metrical translation of Homer, and was only prevented by the Pope’s death from coming from Milan to Rome. Nicholas left a collection of 5,000, or, according to another way of calculating, of 9,000 volumes,⁴³⁷ for the use of the members of the Curia, which became the foundation of the library of the Vatican. It was to be preserved in the palace itself, as its noblest ornament, like the library of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria. When the plague (1450) drove him and his court to Fabriano, whence then, as now, the best paper was procured, he took his translators and compilers with him, that he might run no risk of losing them.

The Florentine Niccolò Niccoli,⁴³⁸ a member of that accomplished circle of friends which surrounded the elder Cosimo de Medici, spent his whole fortune in buying books. At last, when his money was all gone, the Medici put their purse at his disposal for any sum which his purpose might require. We owe to him the completion of Ammianus Marcellinus, of the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero, the text of Lucretius which still has most authority, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy the best manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lübeck. With noble confidence he lent his books to those who asked for them, allowed all comers to study them in his own house, and was ready to converse with the students on what they had read. His collection of 800 volumes, valued at 6,000 gold florins, passed after his death, through Cosimo’s intervention, to the monastery of San Marco, on the condition that it should be accessible to the public, and is now one of the jewels of the Laurentian library.

Of the two great book-finders, Guarino and Poggio, the latter,⁴³⁹ on the occasion of the Council of Constanz and acting partly as the agent of Niccoli, searched industriously among the abbeys of South Germany. He there discovered six orations of Cicero, and the first complete Quintilian, that of St. Gall, now at Zürich; in thirty-two days he is said to have copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting. He was able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius, Lucretius, Valerius, Flaccus, Asconius, Pedianus, Columella, Celsus, Aulus, Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help of Lionardo Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of Plautus, as well as the Verrine orations, the ‘Brutus’ and the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero.

The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion,⁴⁴⁰ in whom patriotism was mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great sacrifice (30,000 gold florins), 600 manuscripts of pagan and Christian authors. He then looked round for some receptacle where they could safely lie until his unhappy country, if she ever regained her freedom, could reclaim her lost literature. The Venetian government declared itself ready to erect a suitable building, and to this day the library of St. Mark retains a part of these treasures.⁴⁴¹

The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history of its own, into which we cannot here enter. The chief collector for Lorenzo Magnifico was Johannes Lascaris. It is well known that the collection, after the plundering in the year 1494, had to be recovered piecemeal by the Cardinal Giovanni Medici, afterwards Leo X.

The library of Urbino,⁴⁴² now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of the great Frederick of Montefeltro (p. 44 sqq.). As a boy he had begun to collect; in after years he kept thirty or forty ‘scrittori’ employed in various places, and spent in the course of time no less than 30,000 ducats on the collection. It was systematically extended and completed, chiefly by the help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal picture of a library of the Renaissance. At Urbino there were catalogues of the libraries of the Vatican, of St. Mark at Florence, of the Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at Oxford. It was noted with pride that in richness and completeness none could rival Urbino. Theology and the Middle Ages were perhaps most fully represented. There was a complete Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete Buenaventura. The collection, however, was a many-sided one, and included every work on medicine which was then to be had. Among the ‘moderns’ the great writers of the fourteenth century—Dante and Boccaccio, with their complete works—occupied the first place. Then followed twenty-five select humanists, invariably with both their Latin and Italian writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of Pindar, and all of Menander. The last must have quickly disappeared from Urbino,⁴⁴³ else the philologists would have soon edited it. There were men, however, in this book-collecting age who raised a warning voice against the vagaries of the passion. These were not the enemies of learning, but its friends, who feared that harm would come from a pursuit which had become a mania. Petrarch himself protested against the fashionable folly of a useless heaping up of books; and in the same century Giovanni Manzini ridiculed Andreolo de Ochis, a septuagenarian from Brescia, who was ready to sacrifice house and land, his wife and himself, to add to the stores of his library.

We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.⁴⁴⁴ The purchase of an ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of which we need take no further account. Among the professional copyists those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they especially who bore the honourable name of ‘scrittori.’ Their number was always limited, and the pay they received very large.⁴⁴⁵ The rest, simply called ‘copisti,’ were partly mere clerks who made their living by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who desired an addition to their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who regarded the pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of the Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy; their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained of by Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were more numerous, and brought more knowledge to their calling, but in accuracy of work they never attained the conscientious precision of the old monks. They seem to have done their work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of that cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a beneficent activity, which often surprises us in the French and German manuscripts of the same period. This is more curious, as the copyists at Rome in the time of Nicholas V. were mostly Germans or Frenchmen⁴⁴⁶—‘barbarians’ as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by this means. When Cosimo de’ Medici was in a hurry to form a library for his favourite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.⁴⁴⁷

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1

History of Architecture, by Franz Kugler. (The first half of the fourth volume, containing the ‘Architecture and Decoration of the Italian Renaissance,’ is by the Author.)

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2

Macchiavelli, Discorsi, 1. i. c. 12. ‘E la cagione, che la Italia non sia in quel medesimo termine, ne habbia anch’ ella ò una republica ò un prencipe che la governi, è solamente la Chiesa; perchè havendovi habitato e tenuto imperio temporale non è stata si potente ne di tal virtè, che l’habbia potuto occupare il restante d’Italia e farsene prencipe.’

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3

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

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4

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

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5

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

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6

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

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7

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

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8

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

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9

Franco Sacchetti, Novelle (61, 62).

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10

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

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11

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

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12

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

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13

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

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14

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

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15

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

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16

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

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17

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

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18

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

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19

Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 61.

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20

Matteo Villani, vi. 1.

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21

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

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22

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

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23

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

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24

Corio, fol. 272, 285.

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25

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

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26

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

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

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27

Corio, fol. 301 and sqq. Comp. Ammian. Marcellin., xxix. 3.

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28

So Paul. Jovius, Elogia, pp. 88-92, Jo. Maria Philippus.

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29

De Gingins, Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais, Paris and Geneva 1858, ii. pp. 200 sqq. (N. 213). Comp. ii. 3 (N. 144) and ii. 212 sqq. (N. 218).

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30

Paul. Jovius, Elogia, pp. 156 sqq. Carolus, Burg. dux.

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31

This compound of force and intellect is called by Macchiavelli Virtù, and is quite compatible with scelleratezza. E.g. Discorsi, i. 10. in speaking of Sep. Severus.

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32

On this point Franc. Vettori, Arch. Stor. vi. p. 29. 3 sqq.: ‘The investiture at the hands of a man who lives in Germany, and has nothing of the Roman Emperor about him but the empty name, cannot turn a scoundrel into the real lord of a city.’

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33

M. Villani, iv. 38, 39, 44, 56, 74, 76, 92; v. 1, 2, 14-16, 21, 22, 36, 51, 54. It is only fair to consider that dislike of the Visconti may have led to worse representations than the facts justified. Charles IV. is once (iv. 74) highly praised by Villani.

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34

It was an Italian, Fazio degli Uberti (Dittamondo, l. vi. cap. 5—about 1360) who recommended to Charles IV. a crusade to the Holy Land. The passage is one of the best in this poem, and in other respects characteristic. The poet is dismissed from the Holy Sepulchre by an insolent Turk:

‘Con passi lunghi e con la testa bassa
Oltre passai e dissi: ecco vergogna
Del cristian che’l saracin qui lassa!
Poscia al Pastor (the Pope) mi volsi far rampogna
E tu ti stai, che sei vicar di Cristo,
Co’ frati tuoi a ingrassar la carogna?
Similimente dissi a quel sofisto (Charles IV.)
Che sta in Buemme (Bohemia) a piantar vigne e fichi
E che non cura di si caro acquisto:
Che fai? Perchè non segui i primi antichi
Cesari de’ Romani, e che non segui,
Dico, gli Otti, i Corradi, i Federichi?
E che pur tieni questo imperio in tregui?
E se non hai lo cuor d’esser Augusto,
Che non rifiuti? o che non ti dilegui?’ etc.

Some eight years earlier, about 1352, Petrarch had written (to Charles IV., Epist. Fam., lib. xii. ep. 1, ed. Fracassetti, vol. ii. p. 160): ‘Simpliciter igitur et aperte … pro maturando negotio terræ sanctæ … oro tuo egentem auxilio quam primum invisere velis Ausoniam.’

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35

See for details Vespasiano Fiorent. ed. Mai, Specilegium Romanum, vol. i. p. 54. Comp. 150 and Panormita, De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi, lib. iv. nro. 4.

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36

Diario Ferrarese, in Murat. xxiv. col. 217 sqq.

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37

‘Haveria voluto scortigare la brigata.’ Giov. Maria Filelfo, then staying at Bergamo, wrote a violent satire ‘in vulgus equitum auro notatorum.’ See his biography in Favre, Mélanges d’Histoire littéraire, 1856, i. p. 10.

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38

Annales Estenses, in Murat. xx. col. 41.

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39

Poggii, Hist. Florent. pop. l. vii. in Murat. col. 381. This view is in accordance with the anti-monarchical sentiments of many of the humanists of that day. Comp. the evidence given by Bezold, ‘Lehre von der Volkssouverainität während des Mittelalters,’ Hist. Ztschr. bd. 36, s. 365.

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40

Some years later the Venetian Lionardo Giustiniani blames the word ‘imperator’ as unclassical and therefore unbecoming the German emperor, and calls the Germans barbarians, on account of their ignorance of the language and manners of antiquity. The cause of the Germans was defended by the humanist H. Bebel. See L. Geiger, in the Allgem. Deutsche Biogr. ii. 196.

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41

Senarega, De reb. Genuens, in Murat. xxiv. col. 575.

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42

Enumerated in the Diario Ferrarese, in Murat. xxiv. col. 203. Comp. Pic. ii. Comment. ii. p. 102, ed. Rome, 1584.

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43

Marin Sanudo, Vita de’ Duchi di Venezia, in Murat. xxii. col. 1113.

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44

Varchi, Stor. Fiorent. i. p. 8.

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45

Soriano, Relazione di Roma, 1533, in Tommaso Gar. Relaz. della Corte di Roma, (in Alberi, Relaz. degli ambasc. Veneti, ii. ser. iii.).

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46

For what follows, see Canestrini, in the Introduction to vol. xv. of the Archiv. Stor.

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47

For him, see Shepherd-Tonelli, Vita di Piggio, App. pp. viii.-xvi.

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48

Cagnola, Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 28: ‘Et (Filippo Maria) da lei (Beatr.) ebbe molto tesoro e dinari, e tutte le giente d’arme del dicto Facino, che obedivano a lei.’

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49

Inpressura, in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1911. For the alternatives which Macchiavelli puts before the victorious Condottiere, see Discorsi, i. 30. After the victory he is either to hand over the army to his employer and wait quietly for his reward, or else to win the soldiers to his own side to occupy the fortresses and to punish the prince ‘di quella ingratitudine che esso gli userebbe.’

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50

Comp. Barth. Facius, De Viv. Ill. p. 64, who tells us that C. commanded an army of 60,000 men. It is uncertain whether the Venetians did not poison Alviano in 1516, because he, as Prato says in Arch. Stor. iii. p. 348, aided the French too zealously in the battle of S. Donato. The Republic made itself Colleoni’s heir, and after his death in 1475 formally confiscated his property. Comp. Malipiero, Annali Veneti, in Arch. Stor. vii. i. 244. It was liked when the Condottieri invested their money in Venice, ibid. p. 351.

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51

Cagnola, in Arch. Stor. iii. pp. 121 sqq.

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52

At all events in Paul Jovius, Vita Magni Sfortiæ, Rom. 1539, (dedicated to the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza), one of the most attractive of his biographies.

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53

Æn. Sylv. Comment. de Dictis et Factis Alfonsi, Opera, ed. 1538, p. 251: Novitate gaudens Italia nihil habet stabile, nullum in eâ vetus regnum, facile hic ex servis reges videmus.’

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54

Pii, ii. Comment. i. 46; comp. 69.

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55

Sismondi, x. 258; Corio. fol. 412, where Sforza is accused of complicity, as he feared danger to his own son from P.’s popularity. Storia Bresciana, in Murat. xxi. col. 209. How the Venetian Condottiere Colleoni was tempted in 1466, is told by Malipiero Annali Veneti, Arch. Stor. vii. i. p. 210. The Florentine exiles offered to make him Duke of Milan if he would expel from Florence their enemy, Piero de’ Medici.

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56

Allegretti, Diari Sanesi, in Murat. xxiii. p. 811.

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57

Orationes Philelphi, ed. Venet. 1492, fol. 9, in the funeral oration on Francesco.

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58

Marin Sanudo, Vita del Duchi di Venezia, in Murat. xxii. col. 1241. See Reumont, Lorenzo von Medici (Lpz. 1874), ii. pp. 324-7, and the authorities there quoted.

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59

Malipiero, Ann. Venet., Arch. Stor. vii. i. p. 407.

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60

Chron. Eugubinum, in Murat. xxi. col. 972.

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61

Vespas. Fiorent. p. 148.

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62

Archiv. Stor. xvi., parte i. et ii., ed. Bonaini, Fabretti, Polidori.

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63

Julius II. conquered Perugia with ease in 1506, and compelled Gianpaolo Baglione to submit. The latter, as Macchiavelli (Discorsi, i. c. 27) tells us, missed the chance of immortality by not murdering the Pope.

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64

Varelin Stor. Fiorent. i. pp. 242 sqq.

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65

Comp. (inter. al.) Jovian. Pontan. De Immanitate, cap. 17.

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66

Malipiero, Ann. Venet., Archiv. Stor. vii. i. pp. 498 sqq. After vainly searching for his beloved, whose father had shut her up in a monastery he threatened the father, burnt the monastery and other buildings, and committed many acts of violence.

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67

Lil. Greg. Giraldus, De Sepulchris ac vario Sepeliendi Ritu. Opera ed. Bas. 1580, i. pp. 640 sqq. Later edition by J. Faes, Helmstädt, 1676 Dedication and postscript of Gir. ‘ad Carolum Miltz Germanum,’ in these editions without date; neither contains the passage given in the text.—In 1470 a catastrophe in miniature had already occurred in the same family (Galeotto had had his brother Antonio Maria thrown into prison). Comp. Diario Ferrarese, in Murat. xxiv. col. 225.

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68

Jovian. Pontan. Opp. ed. Basileæ, 1538, t. i. De Liberalitate, cap. 19, 29, and De Obedientia, l. 4. Comp. Sismondi, x. p. 78, and Panormita, De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi, lib. i. nro. 61, iv. nro. 42.

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69

Tristano Caracciolo. ‘De Fernando qui postea rex Aragonum fuit, ejusque posteris,’ in Muratori XXII.; Jovian Pontanus, De Prudentia, l. iv.; De Magnanimitate, l. i.; De Liberalitate, cap. 29, 36; De Immanitate, cap. 8. Cam. Porzio, Congiura dei Baroni del Regno de Napoli contro il re Ferdinando I., Pisa, 1818, cap. 29, 36, new edition, Naples, 1859, passim; Comines, Charles VIII., with the general characteristics of the Arragonese. See for further information as to Ferrante’s works for his people, the Regis Ferdinandi primi Instructionum liber, 1486-87, edited by Scipione Vopicella, which would dispose us to moderate to some extent the harsh judgment which has been passed upon him.

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70

Paul. Jovius. Histor. i. p. 14. in the speech of a Milanese ambassador; Diario Ferrarese, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 294.

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71

He lived in the closest intimacy with Jews, e.g. Isaac Abranavel, who fled with him to Messina. Comp. Zunz, Zur. Gesch. und Lit. (Berlin, 1845) s. 529.

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72

Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Phil. Mariæ Vicecomitis, in Murat. xx., of which however Jovius (Vitæ xii. Vicecomitum p. 186) says not without reason: ‘Quum omissis laudibus quæ in Philippo celebrandæ fuerant, vitia, notaret.’ Guarino praises this prince highly. Rosmino Guarini, ii. p. 75. Jovius, in the above-mentioned work (p. 186), and Jov. Pontanus, De Liberalitate, ii. cap. 28 and 31, take special notice of his generous conduct to the captive Alfonso.

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73

Were the fourteen marble statues of the saints in the Citadel of Milan executed by him? See History of the Frundsbergs, fol. 27.

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74

It troubled him: quod aliquando ‘non esse’ necesse esset.

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75

Corio, fol. 400; Cagnola, in Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 125.

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76

Pii II. Comment. iii. p. 130. Comp. ii. 87. 106. Another and rather darker estimate of Sforza’s fortune is given by Caracciolo, De Varietate Fortunæ, in Murat. xxii. col. 74. See for the opposite view the praises of Sforza’s luck in the Oratio parentalis de divi Francesci Sphortiæ felicitate, by Filelfo (the ready eulogist of any master who paid him), who sung, without publishing, the exploits of Francesco in the Sforziad. Even Decembrio, the moral and literary opponent of Filelfo, celebrates Sforza’s fortune in his biography (Vita Franc. Sphortiæ, in Murat. xx.). The astrologers said: ‘Francesco Sforza’s star brings good luck to a man, but ruin to his descendants.’ Arluni, De Bello Veneto, libri vi. in Grævius, Thes. Antiqu. et Hist. Italicæ, v. pars iii. Comp. also Barth. Facius, De Vir. III. p. 67.

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77

Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. pp. 216 sqq. 221-4.

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78

Important documents as to the murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza are published by G. D’Adda in the Archivio Storico Lombardo Giornale della Società Lombarda, vol. ii. (1875), pp. 284-94. 1. A Latin epitaph on the murderer Lampugnano, who lost his life in the attempt, and whom the writer represents as saying: ‘Hic lubens quiesco, æternum inquam facinus monumentumque ducibus, principibus, regibus, qui modo sunt quique mox futura trahantur ne quid adversus justitiam faciant dicantve; 2. A Latin letter of Domenico de’ Belli, who, when eleven years old, was present at the murder; 3. The ‘lamento’ of Galeazzo Maria, in which, after calling upon the Virgin Mary and relating the outrage committed upon him, he summons his wife and children, his servants and the Italian cities which obeyed him, to bewail his fate, and sends forth his entreaty to all the nations of the earth, to the nine muses and the gods of antiquity, to set up a universal cry of grief.

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79

Chron. Venetum, in Murat. xxiv. col. 65.

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80

Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. p. 492. Comp. 482, 562.

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81

His last words to the same man, Bernardino da Corte, are to be found, certainty with oratorical decorations, but perhaps agreeing in the main with the thoughts of the Moor, in Senarega, Murat. xxiv. col. 567.

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82

Diario Ferrarese, in Murat. xxiv. col. 336, 367, 369. The people believed he was forming a treasure.

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83

Corio, fol. 448. The after effects of this state of things are clearly recognisable in those of the novels and introductions of Bandello which relate to Milan.

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84

Amoretti, Memorie Storiche sulla Vita Ecc. di Lionardo da Vinci, pp. 35 sqq., pp. 83 sqq. Here we may also mention the Moor’s efforts for the improvement of the university of Pavia.

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85

See his sonnets in Trucchi, Poesie inedite.

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86

Prato, in the Arch. Stor. iii. 298. Comp. 302.

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87

Born 1466, betrothed to Isabella, herself six years of age, in 1480, suc. 1484; m. 1490, d. 1519. Isabella’s death, 1539. Her sons, Federigo (1519-1540), made Duke in 1530, and the famous Ferrante Gonzaga. What follows is taken from the correspondence of Isabella, with Appendices, Archiv. Stor., append., tom. ii. communicated by d’Arco. See the same writer, Delle Arti e degli Artifici di Mantova, Mant. 1857-59, 2 vols. The catalogue of the collection has been repeatedly printed. Portrait and biography of Isabella in Didot, Alde Manuce, Paris, 1875, pp. lxi-lxviii. See also below, part ii. chapter 2.

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88

Franc. Vettori, in the Arch. Stor. Append., tom. vi. p. 321. For Federigo, see Vespas. Fiorent. pp. 132 sqq. and Prendilacqua, Vita di Vittorino da Feltre, pp. 48-52. V. endeavoured to calm the ambitious youth Federigo, then his scholar, with the words: ‘Tu quoque Cæsar eris.’ There is much literary information respecting him in, e.g., Favre, Mélanges d’Hist. Lit. i. p. 125, note 1.

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89

See below, part iii. chapter 3.

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90

Castiglione, Cortigiano, l. i.

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91

Petr. Bembus, De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elizabetha Gonzaga Urbini ducibus, Venetis, 1530. Also in Bembo’s Works, Basel, 1566, i. pp. 529-624. In the form of a dialogue; contains among other things, the letter of Frid. Fregosus and the speech of Odaxius on Guido’s life and death.

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92

What follows is chiefly taken from the Annales Estenses, in Murat. xx. and the Diario Ferrarese, Murat. xxiv

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93

See Bandello, i. nov. 32.

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94

Diario Ferrar. l. c. col. 347.

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95

Paul. Jov. Vita Alfonsi ducis, ed. Flor. 1550, also an Italian by Giovanbattista Gelli, Flor. 1553.

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96

Paulus Jovius, l. c.

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97

The journey of Leo X. when Cardinal, may be also mentioned here. Comp. Paul. Jov. Vita Leonis X. lib. i. His purpose was less serious, and directed rather to amusement and knowledge of the world; but the spirit is wholly modern. No Northerner then travelled with such objects.

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98

Diar. Ferr. in Murat. xxiv. col. 232 and 240.

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99

Jovian. Pontan. De Liberalitate, cap. 28.

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100

Giraldi, Hecatomithi, vi. nov. 1 (ed. 1565, fol. 223 a).

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101

Vasari, xii. 166, Vita di Michelangelo.

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102

As early as 1446 the members of the House of Gonzaga followed the corpse of Vittorino da Feltre.

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103

Capitolo 19, and in the Opere Minore, ed. Lemonnier, vol. i. p. 425, entitled Elegia 17. Doubtless the cause of this death (above, p. 46) was unknown to the young poet, then 19 years old.

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104

The novels in the Hecatomithi of Giraldi relating to the House of Este are to be found, with one exception (i. nov. 8), in the 6th book, dedicated to Francesco of Este, Marchese della Massa, at the beginning of the second part of the whole work, which is inscribed to Alfonso II. ‘the fifth Duke of Ferrara.’ The 10th book, too, is specially dedicated to him, but none of the novels refer to him personally, and only one to his predecessor Hercules I.; the rest to Hercules I. ‘the second Duke,’ and Alfonso I. ‘the third Duke of Ferrara.’ But the stories told of these princes are for the most part not love tales. One of them (i. nov. 8) tells of the failure of an attempt made by the King of Naples to induce Hercules of Este to deprive Borso of the government of Ferrara; another (vi. nov. 10) describes Ercole’s high-spirited treatment of conspirators. The two novels that treat of Alfonso I. (vi. nov. 2, 4), in the latter of which he only plays a subordinate part, are also, as the title of the book shows and as the dedication to the above-named Francesco explains more fully, accounts of ‘atti di cortesía’ towards knights and prisoners, but not towards women, and only the two remaining tales are love-stories. They are of such a kind as can be told during the lifetime of the prince; they set forth his nobleness and generosity, his virtue and self-restraint. Only one of them (vi. nov. 1) refers to Hercules I., who was dead long before the novels were compiled, and only one to the Hercules II. then alive (b. 1508, d. 1568) son of Lucrezia Borgia, husband of Renata, of whom the poet says: ‘Il giovane, che non meno ha benigno l’animo, che cortese l’aspetto, come già il vedemmo in Roma, nel tempo, ch’egli, in vece del padre, venne à Papa Hadriano.’ The tale about him is briefly as follows:—Lucilla, the beautiful daughter of a poor but noble widow, loves Nicandro, but cannot marry him, as the lover’s father forbids him to wed a portionless maiden. Hercules, who sees the girl and is captivated by her beauty, finds his way, through the connivance of her mother, into her bedchamber, but is so touched by her beseeching appeal that he respects her innocence, and, giving her a dowry, enables her to marry Nicandro.

In Bandello, ii. nov. 8 and 9 refer to Alessandro Medici, 26 to Mary of Aragon, iii. 26, iv. 13 to Galeazzo Sforza, iii. 36, 37 to Henry VIII. of England, ii. 27 to the German Emperor Maximilian. The emperor, ‘whose natural goodness and more than imperial generosity are praised by all writers,’ while chasing a stag is separated from his followers, loses his way, and at last emerging from the wood, enquires the way from a countryman. The latter, busied with lading wood, begs the emperor, whom he does not know, to help him, and receives willing assistance. While still at work, Maximilian is rejoined, and, in spite of his signs to the contrary, respectfully saluted by his followers, and thus recognised by the peasant, who implores forgiveness for the freedom he has unwittingly taken. The emperor raises the kneeling suppliant, gives him presents, appoints him as his attendant, and confers upon him distinguished privileges. The narrator concludes: ‘Dimostrò Cesare nello smontar da cavallo e con allegra ciera aiutar il bisognoso contadino, una indicibile e degna d’ogni lode humanità, e in sollevarlo con danari e privilegii dalla sua faticosa vita, aperse il suo veramente animo Cesareo’ (ii. 415). A story in the Hecatomithi (viii. nov. 5) also treats of Maximilian. It is the same tale which has acquired a world-wide celebrity through Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (for its diffusion see Kirchhof’s Wendunmuth, ed. Oesterley, bd. v. s. 152 sqq.), and the scene of which is transferred by Giraldi to Innsbruck. Maximilian is the hero, and here too receives the highest eulogies. After being first called ‘Massimiliano il Grande,’ he is designated as one ‘che fu raro esempio di cortesia, di magnanimità, e di singolare giustizia.’

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105

In the Deliciæ Poet. Italorum (1608), ii. pp. 455 sqq.: ad Alfonsum ducem Calabriæ. (Yet I do not believe that the above remark fairly applies to this poem, which clearly expresses the joys which Alfonso has with Drusula, and describes the sensations of the happy lover, who in his transports thinks that the gods themselves must envy him.—L.G.).

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106

Mentioned as early as 1367, in the Polistore, in Murat. xxiv. col. 848, in reference to Niccolò the Elder, who makes twelve persons knights in honour of the twelve Apostles.

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107

Burigozzo, in the Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 432.

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108

Discorsi, i. 17, on Milan after the death of Filippo Visconti.

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109

De Incert. et Vanitate Scientiar. cap. 55.

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110

Prato, Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 241.

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111

De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, l. ii. cap. 15.

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112

Discorsi, iii. 6; comp. Storie Fiorent. l. viii. The description of conspiracies has been a favourite theme of Italian writers from a very remote period. Luitprand (of Cremona, Mon. Germ., ss. iii. 264-363) gives us a few, which are more circumstantial than those of any other contemporary writer of the tenth century; in the eleventh the deliverance of Messina from the Saracens, accomplished by calling in Norman Roger (Baluz. Miscell. i. p. 184), gives occasion to a characteristic narrative of this kind (1060); we need hardly speak of the dramatic colouring given to the stories of the Sicilian Vespers (1282). The same tendency is well known in the Greek writers.

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113

Corio, fol. 333. For what follows, ibid. fol. 305, 422 sqq. 440.

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114

So in the quotations from Gallus, in Sismondi, xi. 93. For the whole subject see Reumont, Lorenzo dei Medici, pp. 387-97, especially 396.

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115

Corio, fol. 422. Allegretto, Diari Sanesi, in Murat. xxiii. col. 777. See above, p. 41.

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116

The enthusiasm with which the Florentine Alamanno Rinuccini (b. 1419) speaks in his Ricordi (ed. by G. Aiazzi, Florence, 1840) of murderers and their deeds is very remarkable. For a contemporary, though not Italian, apology for tyrannicide, see Kervyn de Lettenhove, Jean sans Peur et l’Apologie du Tyrannicide, in the Bulletin de l’Académie de Bruxelles, xi. (1861), pp. 558-71. A century later opinion in Italy had changed altogether. See the condemnation of Lampugnani’s deed in Egnatius, De Exemplis Ill. Vir., Ven. fol. 99 b; comp. also 318 b.

Petr. Crinitus, also (De honestâ disciplinâ, Paris, 1510, fol. 134 b), writes a poem De virtute Jo. Andr. Lamponiani tyrannicidæ, in which Lampugnani’s deed is highly praised, and he himself is represented as a worthy companion of Brutus.

Comp. also the Latin poem: Bonini Mombritii poetæ Mediol. trenodiæ in funere illustrissimi D. Gal. Marie Sfor (2 Books—Milan, 1504), edited by Ascalon Vallis (sic), who in his dedication to the jurist Jac. Balsamus praises the poet and names other poems equally worthy to be printed. In this work, in which Megæra and Mars, Calliope and the poet, appear as interlocutors, the assassin—not Lampugnano, but a man from a humble family of artisans—is severely blamed, and he with his fellow conspirators are treated as ordinary criminals; they are charged with high treason on account of a projected alliance with Charles of Burgundy. No less than ten prognostics of the death of Duke Galeazzo are enumerated. The murder of the Prince, and the punishment of the assassin are vividly described; the close consists of pious consolations addressed to the widowed Princess, and of religious meditations.

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117

‘Con studiare el Catalinario,’ says Allegretto. Comp. (in Corio) a sentence like the following in the desposition of Olgiati: ‘Quisque nostrum magis socios potissime et infinitos alios sollicitare, infestare, alter alteri benevolos se facere cœpit. Aliquid aliquibus parum donare: simul magis noctu edere, bibere, vigilare, nostra omnia bona polliceri,’ etc.

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118

Vasari, iii. 251, note to V. di Donatello.

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119

It now has been removed to a newly constructed building.

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120

Inferno, xxxiv. 64.

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121

Related by a hearer, Luca della Robbia, Archiv. Stor. i. 273. Comp. Paul. Jovius, Vita Leonis X. iii. in the Viri Illustres.

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122

First printed in 1723, as appendix to Varchi’s History, then in Roscoe, Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici, vol. iv. app. 12, and often besides. Comp. Reumont, Gesch. Toscana’s seit dem Ende des Florent. Freistaates, Gotha, 1876, i. p. 67, note. See also the report in the Lettere de’ Principi (ed. Venez. 1577), iii. fol. 162 sqq.

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123

On the latter point see Jac. Nardi, Vita di Ant. Giacomini, Lucca (1818), p. 18.

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124

‘Genethliacum Venetæ urbis,’ in the Carmina of Ant. Sabellicus. The 25th of March was chosen ‘essendo il cielo in singolar disposizione, si come da gli astronomi è stato calcolato più volte.’ Comp. Sansovino, Venezia città nobilissima e singolare, descritta in 14 libri, Venezia, 1581, fol. 203. For the whole chapter see Johannis Baptistæ Egnatii viri doctissimi de exemplis Illustrium Virorum Venetæ civitatis atque aliarum gentium, Paris, 1554. The eldest Venetian chronicler, Joh. Diaconi, Chron. Venetum in Pertz, Monum. S.S. vii. pp. 5, 6, places the occupation of the islands in the time of the Lombards and the foundation of the Rialto later.

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125

‘De Venetæ urbis apparatu panagiricum carmen quod oraculum inscribitur.’

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126

The whole quarter was altered in the reconstructions of the sixteenth century.

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127

Benedictus Carol. VIII. in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1597, 1601, 1621. In the Chron. Venetum, Murat. xxiv. col. 26, the political virtues of the Venetians are enumerated: ‘bontà, innocenza, zelo di carità, pietà, misericordia.’

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128

Many of the nobles cropped their hair. See Erasmi Colloquia, ed. Tiguri, a. 1553: miles et carthusianus.

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129

Epistolæ, lib. v. fol. 28.

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130

Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. pp. 377, 431, 481, 493, 530; ii. pp. 661, 668, 679. Chron. Venetum, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 57. Diario Ferrarese, ib. col. 240. See also Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani (Flor. 1876), i. p. 392.

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131

Malipiero, in the Archiv. Stor. vii. ii. p. 691. Comp. 694, 713, and i. 535.

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132

Marin Sanudo, Vite dei Duchi, Murat. xxii. col. 1194.

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133

Chron. Venetum, Murat. xxiv. col. 105.

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134

Chron. Venetum, Murat. xxiv. col. 123 sqq. and Malipiero, l. c. vii. i. pp. 175, 187 sqq. relate the significant fall of the Admiral Antonio Grimani, who, when accused on account of his refusal to surrender the command in chief to another, himself put irons on his feet before his arrival at Venice, and presented himself in this condition to the Senate. For him and his future lot, see Egnatius, fol. 183 a sqq., 198 b sqq.

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135

Chron. Ven. l. c. col. 166.

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136

Malipiero, l. c. vii. i. 349. For other lists of the same kind see Marin Sanudo, Vite dei Duchi, Murat. xxii. col. 990 (year 1426), col. 1088 (year 1440), in Corio, fol. 435-438 (1483), in Guazzo Historie, fol. 151 sqq.

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137

Guicciardini (Ricordi, n. 150) is one of the first to remark that the passion for vengeance can drown the clearest voice of self-interest.

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138

Malipiero, l. c. vii. i., p. 328.

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139

The statistical view of Milan, in the ‘Manipulus Florum’ (in Murat. xi. 711 sqq.) for the year 1288, is important, though not extensive. It includes house-doors, population, men of military age, ‘loggie’ of the nobles, wells, bakeries, wine-shops, butchers’-shops, fishmongers, the consumption of corn, dogs, birds of chase, the price of salt, wood, hay, and wines; also the judges, notaries, doctors, schoolmasters, copying clerks, armourers, smiths, hospitals, monasteries, endowments, and religious corporations. A list perhaps still older is found in the ‘Liber de magnalibus Mediolani,’ in Heinr. de Hervordia, ed. Potthast, p. 165. See also the statistical account of Asti about the year 1250 in Ogerius Alpherius (Alfieri), De Gestis Astensium, Histor. patr. Monumenta, Scriptorum, tom. iii. col. 684. sqq.

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140

Especially Marin Sanudo, in the Vite dei Duchi di Venezia, Murat. xxii. passim.

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141

See for the marked difference between Venice and Florence, an important pamphlet addressed 1472 to Lorenzo de’ Medici by certain Venetians, and the answer to it by Benedetto Dei, in Paganini, Della Decima, Florence, 1763, iii. pp. 135 sqq.

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142

In Sanudo, l. c. col. 958. What relates to trade is extracted in Scherer, Allgem. Gesch. des Welthandels, i. 326, note.

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143

Here all the houses, not merely those owned by the state, are meant. The latter, however, sometimes yielded enormous rents. See Vasari, xiii. 83. V. d. Jac. Sansovino.

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144

See Sanudo, col. 963. In the same place a list of the incomes of the other Italian and European powers is given. An estimate for 1490 is to be found, col. 1245 sqq.

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145

This dislike seems to have amounted to positive hatred in Paul II. who called the humanists one and all heretics. Platina, Vita Pauli, ii. p. 323. See also for the subject in general, Voigt, Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, Berlin, 1859, pp. 207-213. The neglect of the sciences is given as a reason for the flourishing condition of Venice by Lil. Greg. Giraldus, Opera, ii. p. 439.

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146

Sanudo, l. c. col. 1167.

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147

Sansovina, Venezia, lib. xiii. It contains the biographies of the Doges in chronological order, and, following these lives one by one (regularly from the year 1312, under the heading Scrittori Veneti), short notices of contemporary writers.

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148

Venice was then one of the chief seats of the Petrarchists. See G. Crespan, Del Petrarchismo, in Petrarca e Venezia, 1874, pp. 187-253.

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149

See Heinric. de Hervordia ad a. 1293, p. 213, ed. Potthast, who says: ‘The Venetians wished to obtain the body of Jacob of Forli from the inhabitants of that place, as many miracles were wrought by it. They promised many things in return, among others to bear all the expense of canonising the defunct, but without obtaining their request.’

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150

Sanudo, l. c. col. 1158, 1171, 1177. When the body of St. Luke was brought from Bosnia, a dispute arose with the Benedictines of S. Giustina at Padua, who claimed to possess it already, and the Pope had to decide between the two parties. Comp. Guicciardini, Ricordi, n. 401.

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151

Sansovino, Venezia, lib. xii. ‘dell’andate publiche del principe.’ Egnatius, fol. 50a. For the dread felt at the papal interdict see Egnatius, fol. 12 a sqq.

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152

G. Villani, viii. 36. The year 1300 is also a fixed date in the Divine Comedy.

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153

Stated about 1470 in Vespas. Fiorent. p. 554.

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154

The passage which followed in former editions referring to the Chronicle of Dino Compagni is here omitted, since the genuineness of the Chronicle has been disproved by Paul Scheffer-Boichhorst (Florentiner Studien, Leipzig, 1874, pp. 45-210), and the disproof maintained (Die Chronik des D. C., Leipzig, 1875) against a distinguished authority (C. Hegel, Die Chronik des D. C., Versuch einer Rettung, Leipzig, 1875). Scheffer’s view is generally received in Germany (see W. Bernhardi, Der Stand der Dino-Frage, Hist. Zeitschr. N.F., 1877, bd. i.), and even Hegel assumes that the text as we have it is a later manipulation of an unfinished work of Dino. Even in Italy, though the majority of scholars have wished to ignore this critical onslaught, as they have done other earlier ones of the same kind, some voices have been raised to recognise the spuriousness of the document. (See especially P. Fanfani in his periodical Il Borghini, and in the book Dino Campagni Vendicato, Milano, 1875). On the earliest Florentine histories in general see Hartwig, Forschungen, Marburg, 1876, and C. Hegel in H. von Sybel’s Historischer Zeitschrift, b. xxxv. Since then Isidore del Lungo, who with remarkable decision asserts its genuineness, has completed his great edition of Dino, and furnished it with a detailed introduction: Dino Campagni e la sua cronaca, 2 vols. Firenze, 1879-80. A manuscript of the history, dating back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, and consequently earlier than all the hitherto known references and editions, has been lately found. In consequence of the discovery of this MS. and of the researches undertaken by C. Hegel, and especially of the evidence that the style of the work does not differ from that of the fourteenth century, the prevailing view of the subject is essentially this, that the Chronicle contains an important kernel, which is genuine, which, however, perhaps even in the fourteenth century, was remodelled on the ground-plan of Villani’s Chronicle. Comp. Gaspary, Geschichte der italienischen Literatur. Berlin, 1885, i. pp. 361-9, 531 sqq.

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155

Purgatorio, vi. at the end.

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156

De Monarchia, i. 1. (New critical edition by Witte, Halle, 1863, 71; German translation by O. Hubatsch, Berlin, 1872).

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157

Dantis Alligherii Epistolæ, cum notis C. Witte, Padua, 1827. He wished to keep the Pope as well as the Emperor always in Italy. See his letter, p. 35, during the conclave of Carpentras, 1314. On the first letter see Vitæ Nuova, cap. 31, and Epist. p. 9.

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158

Giov. Villani, xi. 20. Comp. Matt. Villani, ix. 93, who says that John XXII. ‘astuto in tutte sue cose e massime in fare il danaio,’ left behind him 18 million florins in cash and 6 millions in jewels.

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159

See for this and similar facts Giov. Villani, xi. 87, xii. 54. He lost his own money in the crash and was imprisoned for debt. See also Kervyn de Lettenhove, L’Europe au Siècle de Philippe le Bel, Les Argentiers Florentins in Bulletin de l’Académie de Bruxelles (1861), vol. xii. pp. 123 sqq.

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160

Giov. Villani, xi. 92, 93. In Macchiavelli, Stor. Fiorent. lib. ii. cap. 42, we read that 96,000 persons died of the plague in 1348.

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161

The priest put aside a black bean for every boy and a white one for every girl. This was the only means of registration.

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162

There was already a permanent fire brigade in Florence.

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163

Matteo Villani, iii. 106.

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164

Matteo Villani, i. 2-7, comp. 58. The best authority for the plague itself is the famous description by Boccaccio at the beginning of the Decameron.

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165

Giov. Villani, x. 164.

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166

Ex Annalibus Ceretani, in Fabroni, Magni Cormi Vita, Adnot. 34. vol. ii. p. 63.

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167

Ricordi of Lorenzo, in Fabroni. Laur. Med. Magnifici Vita, Adnot. 2 and 25. Paul. Jovius, Elogia, pp. 131 sqq. Cosmus.

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168

Given by Benedetto Dei, in the passage quoted above (p. 70, note 1). It must be remembered that the account was intended to serve as a warning to assailants. For the whole subject see Reumont, Lor. dei Medici, ii. p. 419. The financial project of a certain Ludovico Ghetti, with important facts, is given in Roscoe, Vita di Lor. Med. ii. Append, i.

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169

E. g. in the Arch. Stor. iv.(?) See as a contrast the very simple ledger of Ott. Nuland, 1455-1462 (Stuttg. 1843), and for a rather later period the day-book of Lukas Rem, 1494-1541, ed. by B. Greiff, Augsb., 1861.

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170

Libri, Histoire des Sciences Mathématiques, ii. 163 sqq.

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171

Varchi, Stor. Fiorent. iii. p. 56 and sqq. up to the end of the 9th book. Some obviously erroneous figures are probably no more than clerical or typographical blunders.

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172

In respect of prices and of wealth in Italy, I am only able, in default of further means of investigation, to bring together some scattered facts, which I have picked up here and there. Obvious exaggerations must be put aside. The gold coins which are worth referring to are the ducat, the sequin, the ‘fiorino d’oro,’ and the ‘scudo d’oro.’ The value of all is nearly the same, 11 to 12 francs of our money.

In Venice, for example, the Doge Andrea Vendramin (1476) with 170,000 ducats passed for an exceedingly rich man (Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p. 666. The confiscated fortune of Colleoni amounted to 216,000 florins, l. c. p. 244.

About 1460 the Patriarch of Aquileia, Ludovico Patavino, with 200,000 ducats, was called ‘perhaps the richest of all Italians.’ (Gasp. Veroneus Vita Pauli II., in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1027.) Elsewhere fabulous statements.

Antonio Grimani paid 30,000 ducats for his son’s election as Cardinal. His ready money alone was put at 100,000 ducats. (Chron. Venetum, Murat. xxiv. col. 125.)

For notices as to the grain in commerce and on the market at Venice, see in particular Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p. 709 sqq. Date 1498.

In 1522 it is no longer Venice, but Genoa, next to Rome, which ranks as the richest city in Italy (only credible on the authority of Francesco. Vettori. See his history in the Archiv. Stor. Append. tom. vi. p. 343). Bandello, parte ii. novello 34 and 42, names as the richest Genoese merchant of his time Ansaldo Grimaldi.

Between 1400 and 1580 Franc. Sansovino assumes a depreciation of 50 per cent. in the value of money. (Venezia, fol. 151 bis.)

In Lombardy it is believed that the relation between the price of corn about the middle of the fifteenth and that at the middle of the present century is as 3 to 8. (Sacco di Piacenza, in Archiv. Stor. Append. tom. v. Note of editor Scarabelli.)

At Ferrara there were people at the time of Duke Borso with 50,000 to 60,000 ducats (Diario Ferrarese, Murat. xxiv. col. 207, 214, 218; an extravagant statement, col. 187). In Florence the data are exceptional and do not justify a conclusion as to averages. Of this kind are the loans to foreign princes, in which the names of one or two houses only appear, but which were in fact the work of great companies. So too the enormous fines levied on defeated parties; we read, e.g. that from 1430 to 1453 seventy-seven families paid 4,875,000 gold florins (Varchi, iii. p. 115 sqq.), and that Giannozzo Mannetti alone, of whom we shall have occasion to speak hereafter, was forced to pay a sum of 135,000 gold florins, and was reduced thereby to beggary (Reumont, i. 157).

The fortune of Giovanni Medici amounted at his death (1428) to 179,221 gold florins, but the latter alone of his two sons Cosimo and Lorenzo left at his death (1440) as much as 235,137 (Fabroni, Laur. Med. Adnot. 2). Cosimo’s son Piero left (1469) 237,982 scudi (Reumont, Lorenzo de’ Medici, i. 286).

It is a proof of the general activity of trade that the forty-four goldsmiths on the Ponte Vecchio paid in the fourteenth century a rent of 800 florins to the Government (Vasari, ii. 114, Vita di Taddeo Gaddi). The diary of Buonaccorso Pitti (in Delécluze, Florence et ses Vicissitudes, vol. ii.) is full of figures, which, however, only prove in general the high price of commodities and the low value of money.

For Rome, the income of the Curia, which was derived from all Europe, gives us no criterion; nor are statements about papal treasures and the fortunes of cardinals very trustworthy. The well-known banker Agostino Chigi left (1520) a fortune of in all 800,000 ducats (Lettere Pittoriche, i. Append. 48).

During the high prices of the year 1505 the value of the staro ferrarrese del grano, which commonly weighed from 68 to 70 pounds (German), rose to 1⅓ ducats. The semola or remolo was sold at venti soldi lo staro; in the following fruitful years the staro fetched six soldi. Bonaventura Pistofilo, p. 494. At Ferrara the rent of a house yearly in 1455 was 25 Lire; comp. Atti e memorie, Parma, vi. 250; see 265 sqq. for a documentary statement of the prices which were paid to artists and amanuenses.

From the inventory of the Medici (extracts in Muntz, Prècurseurs, 158 sqq.) it appears that the jewels were valued at 12,205 ducats; the rings at 1,792; the pearls (apparently distinguished from other jewels, S.G.C.M.) at 3,512; the medallions, cameos and mosaics at 2,579; the vases at 4,850; the reliquaries and the like at 3,600; the library at 2,700; the silver at 7,000. Giov. Rucellai reckons that in 1473(?) he has paid 60,000 gold florins in taxes, 10,000 for the dowries of his five daughters, 2,000 for the improvement of the church of Santa Maria Novella. In 1474 he lost 20,000 gold florins through the intrigues of an enemy. (Autografo dallo Tibaldone di G.R., Florence, 1872). The marriage of Barnardo Rucellai with Nannina, the sister of Lorenzo de’ Medici, cost 3,686 florins (Muntz, Précurseurs, 244, i).

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173

So far as Cosimo (1433-1465) and his grandson Lorenzo Magnifico (d. 1492) are concerned, the author refrains from any criticism on their internal policy. The exaltation of both, particularly of Lorenzo, by William Roscoe (Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, called the Magnificent, 1st ed. Liverpool, 1795; 10th ed. London, 1851), seems to have been a principal cause of the reaction of feeling against them. This reaction appeared first in Sismondi (Hist. des Rép. Italiennes, xi.), in reply to whose strictures, sometimes unreasonably severe, Roscoe again came forward (Illustrations, Historical and Critical, of the Life of Lor. d. Med., London, 1822); later in Gino Capponi (Archiv. Stor. Ital. i. (1842), pp. 315 sqq.), who afterwards (Storia della Rep. di Firenze, 2 vols. Florence, 1875) gave further proofs and explanations of his judgment. See also the work of Von Reumont (Lor. d. Med. il Magn.), 2 vols. Leipzig, 1874, distinguished no less by the judicial calmness of its views than by the mastery it displays of the extensive materials used. See also A. Castelman: Les Medicis, 2 vols. Paris, 1879. The subject here is only casually touched upon. Comp. two works of B. Buser (Leipzig, 1879) devoted to the home and foreign policy of the Medici. (1) Die Beziehungen der Medicus zu Frankreich. 1434-1494, &c. (2) Lorenzo de’ Medici als italienischen Staatsman, &c., 2nd ed., 1883.

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174

Franc. Burlamacchi, father of the head of the Lucchese Protestants, Michele B. See Arch. Stor. Ital. ser. i. tom. x., pp. 435-599; Documenti, pp. 146 sqq.; further Carlo Minutoli, Storia di Fr. B., Lucca, 1844, and the important additions of Leone del Prete in the Giornale Storico degli Archiv. Toscani, iv. (1860), pp. 309 sqq. It is well known how Milan, by its hard treatment of the neighbouring cities from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, prepared the way for the foundation of a great despotic state. Even at the time of the extinction of the Visconti in 1447, Milan frustrated the deliverance of Upper Italy, principally through not accepting the plan of a confederation of equal cities. Comp. Corio, fol. 358 sqq.

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175

On the third Sunday in Advent, 1494, Savonarola preached as follows on the method of bringing about a new constitution: The sixteen companies of the city were each to work out a plan, the Gonfalonieri to choose the four best of these, and the Signory to name the best of all on the reduced list. Things, however, took a different turn, under the influence indeed of the preacher himself. See P. Villari, Savonarola. Besides this sermon, S. had written a remarkable Trattato circa il regimento di Ferenze (reprinted at Lucca, 1817).

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176

The latter first in 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici. See Varchi, i. 121, &c.

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177

Macchiavelli, Storie Fior. l. iii. cap. 1: ‘Un Savio dator di leggi,’ could save Florence.

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178

Varchi, Stor. Fior. i. p. 210.

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179

‘Discorso sopra il riformar lo Stato di Firenze,’ in the Opere Minori, p. 207.

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180

The same view, doubtless borrowed from here, occurs in Montesquieu.

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181

Belonging to a rather later period (1532?). Compare the opinion of Guicciardini, terrible in its frankness, on the condition and inevitable organisation of the Medicean party. Lettere di Principi, iii. fol. 124, (ediz. Venez. 1577).

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182

Æn. Sylvii, Apologia ad Martinum Mayer, p. 701. To the same effect Macchiavelli, Discorsi, i. 55, and elsewhere.

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183

How strangely modern half-culture affected political life is shown by the party struggles of 1535. Della Valle, Lettere Sanesi, iii. p. 317. A number of small shopkeepers, excited by the study of Livy and of Macchiavelli’s Discorsi, call in all seriousness for tribunes of the people and other Roman magistrates against the misgovernment of the nobles and the official classes.

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184

Piero Valeriano, De Infelicitate Literator., speaking of Bartolommeo della Rovere. (The work of P. V. written 1527 is quoted according to the edition by Menken, Analecta de Calamitate Literatorum, Leipz. 1707.) The passage here meant can only be that at p. 384, from which we cannot infer what is stated in the text, but in which we read that B. d. R. wished to make his son abandon a taste for study which he had conceived and put him into business.

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185

Senarega, De reb. Genuens, in Murat. xxiv. col. 548. For the insecurity of the time see esp. col. 519, 525, 528, &c. For the frank language of the envoy on the occasion of the surrender of the state to Francesco Sforza (1464), when the envoy told him that Genoa surrendered in the hope of now living safely and comfortably, see Cagnola, Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 165 sqq. The figures of the Archbishop, Doge, Corsair, and (later) Cardinal Paolo Fregoso form a notable contrast to the general picture of the condition of Italy.

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186

So Varchi, at a much later time. Stor. Fiorent. i. 57.

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187

Galeazzo Maria Sforza, indeed, declared the contrary (1467) to the Venetian agent, namely, that Venetian subjects had offered to join him in making war on Venice; but this is only vapouring. Comp. Malipiero, Annali Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. p. 216 sqq. On every occasion cities and villages voluntarily surrendered to Venice, chiefly, it is true, those that escaped from the hands of some despot, while Florence had to keep down the neighbouring republics, which were used to independence, by force of arms, as Guicciardini (Ricordi, n. 29) observes.

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188

Most strongly, perhaps, in an instruction to the ambassadors going to Charles VII. in the year 1452. (See Fabroni, Cosmus, Adnot. 107, fol. ii. pp. 200 sqq.) The Florentine envoys were instructed to remind the king of the centuries of friendly relations which had subsisted between France and their native city, and to recall to him that Charles the Great had delivered Florence and Italy from the barbarians (Lombards), and that Charles I. and the Romish Church were ‘fondatori della parte Guelfa. Il qual fundamento fa cagione della ruina della contraria parte e introdusse lo stato di felicità, in che noi siamo.’ When the young Lorenzo visited the Duke of Anjou, then staying at Florence, he put on a French dress. Fabroni, ii. p. 9.

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189

Comines, Charles VIII. chap. x. The French were considered ‘comme saints.’ Comp. chap. 17; Chron. Venetum, in Murat. xxiv. col. 5, 10, 14, 15; Matarazzo, Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor. xvi. ii. p. 23, not to speak of countless other proofs. See especially the documents in Desjardins, op. cit. p. 127, note 1.

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190

Pii II. Commentarii, x. p. 492.

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191

Gingins, Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais, etc. i. pp. 26, 153, 279, 283, 285, 327, 331, 345, 359; ii. pp. 29, 37, 101, 217, 306. Charles once spoke of giving Milan to the young Duke of Orleans.

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192

Niccolò Valori, Vita di Lorenzo, Flor. 1568. Italian translation of the Latin original, first printed in 1749 (later in Galletti, Phil. Villani, Liber de Civit. Flor. famosis Civibus, Florence, 1847, pp. 161-183; passage here referred to p. 171). It must not, however, be forgotten that this earliest biography, written soon after the death of Lorenzo, is a flattering rather than a faithful portrait, and that the words here attributed to Lorenzo are not mentioned by the French reporter, and can, in fact, hardly have been uttered. Comines, who was commissioned by Louis XI. to go to Rome and Florence, says (Mémoires, l. vi. chap. 5): ‘I could not offer him an army, and had nothing with me but my suite.’ (Comp. Reumont, Lorenzo, i. p. 197, 429; ii. 598). In a letter from Florence to Louis XI. we read (Aug. 23, 1478: ‘Omnis spes nostra reposita est in favoribus suæ majestatis.’ A. Desjardins, Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane (Paris, 1859), i. p. 173. Similarly Lorenzo himself in Kervyn de Lettenhove, Lettres et Négotiations de Philippe de Comines, i. p. 190. Lorenzo, we see, is in fact the one who humbly begs for help, not who proudly declines it.

Dr. Geiger in his appendix maintains that Dr. Burchhardt’s view as to Lorenzo’s national Italian policy is not borne out by evidence. Into this discussion the translator cannot enter. It would need strong proof to convince him that the masterly historical perception of Dr. Burchhardt was in error as to a subject which he has studied with minute care. In an age when diplomatic lying and political treachery were matters of course, documentary evidence loses much of its weight, and cannot be taken without qualification as representing the real feelings of the persons concerned, who fenced, turned about, and lied, first on one side and then on another, with an agility surprising to those accustomed to live among truth-telling people (S.G.C.M.)

Authorities quoted by Dr. Geiger are: Reumont, Lorenzo, 2nd ed., i. 310; ii. 450. Desjardins: Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane (Paris, 1859), i. 173. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Lettres et Négociations de Philippe de Comines, i. 180.

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193

Fabroni, Laurentius Magnificus, Adnot. 205 sqq. In one of his Briefs it was said literally, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo;’ but it is to be hoped that he did not allude to the Turks. (Villari, Storia di Savonarola, ii. p. 48 of the ‘Documenti.’)

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194

E.g. Jovian. Pontan. in his Charon. In the dialogue between Æcus, Minos, and Mercurius (Op. ed. Bas. ii. p. 1167) the first says: ‘Vel quod haud multis post sæculis futurum auguror, ut Italia, cujus intestina te odia male habent Minos, in unius redacta ditionem resumat imperii majestatem.’ And in reply to Mercury’s warning against the Turks, Æcus answers: ‘Quamquam timenda hæc sunt, tamen si vetera respicimus, non ab Asia aut Græcia, verum a Gallis Germanisque timendum Italiæ semper fuit.’

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195

Comines, Charles VIII., chap. 7. How Alfonso once tried in time of war to seize his opponents at a conference, is told by Nantiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1073. He was a genuine predecessor of Cæsar Borgia.

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196

Pii II. Commentarii, x. p. 492. See a letter of Malatesta in which he recommends to Mohammed II. a portrait-painter, Matteo Passo of Verona, and announces the despatch of a book on the art of war, probably in the year 1463, in Baluz. Miscell. iii. 113. What Galeazzo Maria of Milan told in 1467 to a Venetian envoy, namely, that he and his allies would join with the Turks to destroy Venice, was said merely by way of threat. Comp. Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor. vii. i. p. 222. For Boccalino, see page 36.

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197

Porzio, Congiura dei Baroni, l. i. p. 5. That Lorenzo, as Porzio hints, really had a hand in it, is not credible. On the other hand, it seems only too certain that Venice prompted the Sultan to the deed. See Romanin, Storia Documentata di Venezia, lib. xi. cap. 3. After Otranto was taken, Vespasiano Bisticci uttered his ‘Lamento d’Italia, Archiv. Stor. Ital. iv. pp. 452 sqq.

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198

Chron. Venet. in Murat. xxiv. col. 14 and 76.

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199

Malipiero, l. c. p. 565, 568.

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200

Trithem. Annales Hirsaug, ad. a. 1490, tom. ii. pp. 535 sqq.

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201

Malipiero, l. c. 161; comp. p. 152. For the surrender of Djem to Charles VIII. see p. 145, from which it is clear that a connection of the most shameful kind existed between Alexander and Bajazet, even if the documents in Burcardus be spurious. See on the subject Ranke, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber, 2 Auflage, Leipzig, 1874, p. 99, and Gregorovius, bd. vii. 353, note 1. Ibid. p. 353, note 2, a declaration of the Pope that he was not allied with the Turks.

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202

Bapt. Mantuanus, De Calamitatibus Temporum, at the end of the second book, in the song of the Nereid Doris to the Turkish fleet.

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203

Tommaso Gar, Relaz. della Corte di Roma, i. p. 55.

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204

Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker. The opinion of Michelet (Reforme, p. 467), that the Turks would have adopted Western civilisation in Italy, does not satisfy me. This mission of Spain is hinted at, perhaps for the first time, in the speech delivered by Fedra Inghirami in 1510 before Julius II., at the celebration of the capture of Bugia by the fleet of Ferdinand the Catholic. See Anecdota Litteraria, ii. p. 419.

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205

Among others Corio, fol. 333. Jov. Pontanus, in his treatise, De Liberalitate, cap. 28, considers the free dismissal of Alfonso as a proof of the ‘liberalitas’ of Filippo Maria. (See above, p. 38, note 1.) Compare the line of conduct adopted with regard to Sforza, fol. 329.

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206

Nic. Valori, Vita di Lorenzo; Paul Jovius, Vita Leonis X. l. i. The latter certainly upon good authority, though not without rhetorical embellishment. Comp. Reumont, i. 487, and the passage there quoted.

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207

If Comines on this and many other occasions observes and judges as objectively as any Italian, his intercourse with Italians, particularly with Angelo Catto, must be taken into account.

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208

Comp. e.g. Malipiero, pp. 216, 221, 236, 237, 468, &c., and above pp. 88, note 2, and 93, note 1. Comp. Egnatius, fol. 321 a. The Pope curses an ambassador; a Venetian envoy insults the Pope; another, to win over his hearers, tells a fable.

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209

In Villari, Storia di Savonarola, vol. ii. p. xliii. of the ‘Documenti,’ among which are to be found other important political letters. Other documents, particularly of the end of the fifteenth century in Baluzius, Miscellanea, ed. Mansi, vol. i. See especially the collected despatches of Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of sixteenth centuries in Desjardins, Négotiations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane. vols. i. ii. Paris. 1859, 1861.

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210

The subject has been lately treated more fully by Max Jähns, Die Kriegskunst als Kunst, Leipzig, 1874.

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211

Pii II. Comment. iv. p. 190, ad. a. 1459.

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212

The Cremonese prided themselves on their skill in this department. See Cronaca di Cremona in the Bibliotheca Historica Italica, vol. i. Milan, 1876, p. 214, and note. The Venetians did the same, Egnatius, fol. 300 sqq.

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213

To this effect Paul Jovius (Elogia, p. 184) who adds: ‘Nondum enim invecto externarum gentium cruento more, Italia milites sanguinarii et multæ cædis avidi esse didicerant.’ We are reminded of Frederick of Urbino, who would have been ‘ashamed’ to tolerate a printed book in his library. See Vespas. Fiorent.

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214

Porcellii Commentaria Jac. Picinini, in Murat. xx. A continuation for the war of 1453, ibid. xxv. Paul Cortesius (De Hominibus Doctis, p. 33, Florence, 1734) criticises the book severely on account of the wretched hexameters.

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215

Porcello calls Scipio Æmilianus by mistake, meaning Africanus Major.

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216

Simonetta, Hist. Fr. Sfortiæ, in Murat. xxi. col. 630.

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217

So he was considered. Comp. Bandello, parte i. nov. 40.

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218

Comp. e.g. De Obsidione Tiphernatium, in vol. 2, of the Rer. Italic. Scriptores excodd. Florent. col. 690. The duel of Marshal Boucicault with Galeazzo Gonzaga (1406) in Cagnola, Arch. Stor. iii. p. 25. Infessura tells us of the honour paid by Sixtus IV. to the duellists among his guards. His successors issued bulls against duelling.

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219

We may here notice parenthetically (see Jähns, pp. 26, sqq.) the less favourable side of the tactics of the Condottieri. The combat was often a mere sham-fight, in which the enemy was forced to withdraw by harmless manœuvres. The object of the combatants was to avoid bloodshed, at the worst to make prisoners with a view to the ransom. According to Macchiavelli, the Florentines lost in a great battle in the year 1440 one man only.

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220

For details, see Arch. Stor. Append. tom. v.

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221

Here once for all we refer our readers to Ranke’s Popes, vol. i., and to Sugenheim, Geschichte der Entstehung und Ausbildung des Kirchenstaates. The still later works of Gregorovius and Reumont have also been made use of, and when they offer new facts or views, are quoted. See also Geschichte der römischen Papstthums, W. Wattenbach, Berlin, 1876.

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222

For the impression made by the blessing of Eugenius IV. in Florence, see Vespasiano Fiorent, p. 18. See also the passage quoted in Reumont, Lorenzo, i. 171. For the impressive offices of Nicholas V., see Infessura (Eccard, ii. col. 1883 sqq.) and J. Manetti, Vita Nicolai V. (Murat. iii. ii. col. 923). For the homage given to Pius II., see Diario Ferrarese (Murat. xxiv. col. 205), and Pii II. Commentarii, passim, esp. iv. 201, 204, and xi. 562. For Florence, see Delizie degli Eruditi, xx. 368. Even professional murderers respect the person of the Pope.

The great offices in church were treated as matters of much importance by the pomp-loving Paul II. (Platina, l. c. 321) and by Sixtus IV., who, in spite of the gout, conducted mass at Easter in a sitting posture. (Jac. Volaterran. Diarium, Murat. xxiii. col. 131.) It is curious to notice how the people distinguished between the magical efficacy of the blessing and the unworthiness of the man who gave it; when he was unable to give the benediction on Ascension Day, 1481, the populace murmured and cursed him. (Ibid. col. 133.)

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223

Macchiavelli, Scritti Minori, p. 142, in the well-known essay on the catastrophe of Sinigaglia. It is true that the French and Spanish soldiers were still more zealous than the Italians. Comp. in Paul. Jov. Vita Leonis X. (l. ii.) the scene before the battle of Ravenna, in which the Legate, weeping for joy, was surrounded by the Spanish troops, and besought for absolution. See further (ibid.) the statements respecting the French in Milan.

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224

In the case of the heretics of Poli, in the Campagna, who held the doctrine that a genuine Pope must show the poverty of Christ as the mark of his calling, we have simply a kind of Waldensian doctrine. Their imprisonment under Paul II. is related by Infessura (Eccard, ii. col. 1893), Platina, p. 317, &c.

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225

As an illustration of this feeling see the poem addressed to the Pope, quoted in Gregorovius, vii. 136.

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226

Dialogus de Conjuratione Stephani de Porcariis, by his contemporary Petrus Godes de Vicenza, quoted and used by Gregorovius, viii. 130. L. B. Alberti, De Porcaria Conjuratione, in Murat. xxv. col. 309. Porcari was desirous ‘omnem pontificiam turbam funditus exstinguere.’ The author concludes: ‘Video sane, quo stent loco res Italiæ; intelligo qui sint, quibus hic perturbata esse omnia conducat....’ He names them ‘Extrinsecus impulsores,’ and is of opinion that Porcari will find successors in his misdeeds. The dreams of Porcari certainly bore some resemblance to those of Cola Rienzi. He also referred to himself the poem ‘Spirto Gentil,’ addressed by Petrarch to Rienzi.

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227

‘Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam Cæsaris.... Tunc Papa et dicetur et erit pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesiæ,’ &c. Valla’s work was written rather earlier, and was aimed at Eugenius IV. See Vahlen, Lor. Valla (Berlin, 1870), pp. 25 sqq., esp. 32. Nicholas V., on the other hand, is praised by Valla, Gregorovius, vii. 136.

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228

Pii II. Comment. iv. pp. 208 sqq. Voigt, Enea Silvio, iii. pp. 151 sqq.

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229

Platina, Vita Pauli II.

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230

Battista Mantovano, De Calamitatibus Temporum, l. iii. The Arabian sells incense, the Tyrian purple, the Indian ivory: ‘Venalia nobis templa, sacerdotes, altaria sacra, coronæ, ignes, thura, preces, cælum est venale Deusque.’ Opera, ed. Paris, 1507, fol. 302 b. Then follows an exhortation to Pope Sixtus, whose previous efforts are praised, to put an end to these evils.

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231

See e.g. the Annales Placentini, in Murat. xx. col. 943.

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232

Corio, Storia di Milano, fol. 416-420. Pietro had already helped at the election of Sixtus. See Infessura, in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1895. It is curious that in 1469 it had been prophesied that deliverance would come from Savona (home of Sixtus, elected in 1471) within three years. See the letter and date in Baluz. Miscell. iii. p. 181. According to Macchiavelli, Storie Fiorent. l. vii. the Venetians poisoned the cardinal. Certainly they were not without motives to do so.

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233

Honorius II. wished, after the death of William I. (1127), to annex Apulia, as a feof reverted to St. Peter.

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234

Fabroni, Laurentius Mag. Adnot. 130. An informer, Vespucci, sends word of both, ‘Hanno in ogni elezione a mettere a sacco questa corte, e sono i maggior ribaldi del mondo.’

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235

Corio, fol. 450. Details, partly from unpublished documents, of these acts of bribery in Gregorovius, vii. 310 sqq.

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236

A most characteristic letter of exhortation by Lorenzo in Fabroni, Laurentius Magn. Adnot. 217, and extracts in Ranke, Popes, i. p. 45, and in Reumont, Lorenzo, ii. pp. 482 sqq.

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237

And perhaps of certain Neapolitan feofs, for the sake of which Innocent called in the Angevins afresh against the immovable Ferrante. The conduct of the Pope in this affair and his participation in the second conspiracy of the barons, were equally foolish and dishonest. For his method of treating with foreign powers, see above p. 127, note 2.

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238

Comp. in particular Infessura, in Eccard. Scriptores, ii. passim.

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239

According to the Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani, i. p. 60, and iii. p. 309, Seb. Pinzon was a native of Cremona.

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240

Recently by Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 2 Bände 3 Aufl., Stuttgart, 1875.

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241

Except the Bentivoglio at Bologna, and the House of Este at Ferrara. The latter was compelled to form a family relationship, Lucrezia marrying Prince Alfonso.

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242

According to Corio (fol. 479) Charles had thoughts of a Council, of deposing the Pope, and even of carrying him away to France, this upon his return from Naples. According to Benedictus, Carolus VIII. (in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1584), Charles, while in Naples, when Pope and cardinals refused to recognise his new crown, had certainly entertained the thought ‘de Italiæ imperio deque pontificis statu mutando,’ but soon after made up his mind to be satisfied with the personal humiliation of Alexander. The Pope, nevertheless, escaped him. Particulars in Pilorgerie, Campagne et Bulletins de la Grande Armée d’Italie, 1494, 1495 (Paris, 1866, 8vo.), where the degree of Alexander’s danger at different moments is discussed (pp. 111, 117, &c.). In a letter, there printed, of the Archbishop of St. Malo to Queen Anne, it is expressly stated: ‘Si nostre roy eust voulu obtemperer à la plupart des Messeigneurs les Cardinaulx, ilz eussent fait ung autre pappe en intention de refformer l’église ainsi qu’ilz disaient. Le roy désire bien la reformacion, mais il ne veult point entreprandre de sa depposicion.’

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243

Corio, fol. 450. Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor. vii. i. p. 318. The rapacity of the whole family can be seen in Malipiero, among other authorities, l. c. p. 565. A ‘nipote’ was splendidly entertained in Venice as papal legate, and made an enormous sum of money by selling dispensations; his servants, when they went away, stole whatever they could lay their hands on, including a piece of embroidered cloth from the high altar of a church at Murano.

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244

This in Panvinio alone among contemporary historians (Contin. Platinæ, p. 339), ‘insidiis Cæsaris fratris interfectus … connivente … ad scelus patre,’ and to the same effect Jovius, Elog. Vir. Ill. p. 302. The profound emotion of Alexander looks like a sign of complicity. After the corpse was drawn out of the Tiber, Sannazaro wrote (Opera Omnia Latine Scripta 1535, fol. 41 a):

‘Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sixte, putemus
Piscaris natum retibus, ecce, tuum.’

Besides the epigram quoted there are others (fol. 36 b, 42 b, 47 b, 51 a, b—in the last passage 5) in Sannazaro on, i.e. against, Alexander. Among them is a famous one, referred to in Gregorovius i. 314, on Lucrezia Borgia:

Ergo te semper cupiet Lucretia Sextus?
O fatum diri nominis: hic pater est?

Others execrate his cruelty and celebrate his death as the beginning of an era of peace. On the Jubilee (see below, p. 108, note 1), there is another epigram, fol. 43 b. There are others no less severe (fol. 34 b, 35 a, b, 42 b, 43 a) against Cæsar Borgia, among which we find in one of the strongest:

Aut nihil aut Cæsar vult dici Borgia; quidni?
Cum simul et Cæsar possit, et esse nihil.

(made use of by Bandello, iv. nov. 11). On the murder of the Duke of Gandia, see especially the admirable collection of the most original sources of evidence in Gregorovius, vii. 399-407, according to which Cæsar’s guilt is clear, but it seems very doubtful whether Alexander knew, or approved, of the intended assassination.

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245

Macchiavelli, Opere, ed. Milan, vol. v. pp. 387, 393, 395, in the Legazione al Duca Valentino.

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246

Tommaso Gar, Relazioni della Corte di Roma, i. p. 12, in the Rel. of P. Capello. Literally: ‘The Pope has more respect for Venice than for any other power in the world.’ ‘E però desidera, che ella (Signoria di Venezia) protegga il figliuolo, e dice voler fare tale ordine, che il papato o sia suo, ovvero della signoria nostra.’ The word ‘suo’ can only refer to Cæsar. An instance of the uncertainty caused by this usage is found in the still lively controversy respecting the words used by Vasari in the Vita di Raffaello: ‘A Bindo Altoviti fece il ritratto suo, &c.’

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247

Strozzii Poetae, p. 19, in the ‘Venatio’ of Ercole Strozza: ’ … cui triplicem fata invidere coronam.’ And in the Elegy on Cæsar’s death, p. 31 sqq.: ‘Speraretque olim solii decora alta paterni.’

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248

Ibid. Jupiter had once promised

‘Affore Alexandri sobolem, quæ poneret olim
Italiæ leges, atque aurea sæcla referret,’ etc.

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249

Ibid.

‘Sacrumque decus majora parantem deposuisse.’

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250

He was married, as is well known, to a French princess of the family of Albret, and had a daughter by her; in some way or other he would have attempted to found a dynasty. It is not known that he took steps to regain the cardinal’s hat, although (acc. to Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 285) he must have counted on the speedy death of his father.

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251

Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 334. Designs on Siena and eventually on all Tuscany certainly existed, but were not yet ripe; the consent of France was indispensable.

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252

Macchiavelli, l. c. pp. 326, 351, 414; Matarazzo, Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor. xvi. ii. pp. 157 and 221. He wished his soldiers to quarter themselves where they pleased, so that they gained more in time of peace than of war. Petrus Alcyonius, De Exilio (1522), ed. Mencken, p. 19, says of the style of conducting war: ‘Ea scelera et flagitia a nostris militibus patrata sunt quæ ne Scythæ quidem aut Turcæ, aut Pœni in Italia commisissent.’ The same writer (p. 65) blames Alexander as a Spaniard: ‘Hispani generis hominem, cujus proprium est, rationibus et commodis Hispanorum consultum velle, non Italorum.’ See above, p. 109.

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253

To this effect Pierio Valeriano, De Infelicitate Literat. ed. Mencken, p. 282, in speaking of Giovanni Regio: ‘In arcano proscriptorum albo positus.’

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254

Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 11. From May 22, 1502, onwards the Despatches of Giustiniani, 3 vols. Florence, 1876, edited by Pasquale Villari, offer valuable information.

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255

Paulus Jovius, Elogia, Cæsar Borgia. In the Commentarii Urbani of Ralph. Volaterianus, lib. xxii. there is a description of Alexander VI., composed under Julius II., and still written very guardedly. We here read: ‘Roma … nobilis jam carneficina facta erat.’

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256

Diario Ferrarese, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 362.

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257

Paul. Jovius, Histor. ii. fol. 47.

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258

See the passages in Ranke, Röm. Päpste; Sämmtl. Werke, Bd. xxxvii. 35, and xxxix. Anh. Abschn. 1, Nro. 4, and Gregorovius, vii. 497, sqq. Giustiniani does not believe in the Pope’s being poisoned. See his Dispacci, vol. ii. pp. 107 sqq.; Villari’s Note, pp. 120 sqq., and App. pp. 458 sqq.

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259

Panvinius, Epitome Pontificum, p. 359. For the attempt to poison Alexander’s successor, Julius II., see p. 363. According to Sismondi, xiii. p. 246, it was in this way that Lopez, Cardinal of Capua, for years the partner of all the Pope’s secrets, came by his end; according to Sanuto (in Ranke, Popes, i. p. 52, note), the Cardinal of Verona also. When Cardinal Orsini died, the Pope obtained a certificate of natural death from a college of physicians.

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260

Prato, Arch. Stor. iii. p. 254; comp. Attilio Alessio, in Baluz. Miscell., iv. p. 518 sqq.

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261

And turned to the most profitable account by the Pope. Comp. Chron. Venetum, in Murat. xxiv. col. 133, given only as a report: ‘E si giudiceva, che il Pontefice dovesse cavare assai danari di questo Giubileo, che gli tornerà molto a proposito.

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262

Anshelm, Berner Chronik, iii. pp. 146-156. Trithem. Annales Hirsaug. tom. ii. pp. 579, 584, 586.

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263

Panvin. Contin. Platinae, p. 341.

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264

Hence the splendour of the tombs of the prelates erected during their lifetime. A part of the plunder was in this way saved from the hands of the Popes.

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265

Whether Julius really hoped that Ferdinand the Catholic would be induced to restore to the throne of Naples the expelled Aragonese dynasty, remains, in spite of Giovio’s declaration (Vita Alfonsi Ducis), very doubtful.

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266

Both poems in Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi, iv. 257 and 297. Of his death the Cronaca di Cremona says: ‘quale fu grande danno per la Italia, perchè era homo che non voleva tramontani in Italia, ed haveva cazato Francesi, e l’animo era de cazar le altri.’ Bibl. Hist. Ital. (1876) i. 217. It is true that when Julius, in August, 1511, lay one day for hours in a fainting fit, and was thought to be dead, the more restless members of the noblest families—Pompeo Colonna and Antimo Savelli—ventured to call ‘the people’ to the Capitol, and to urge them to throw off the Papal yoke—‘a vendicarsi in libertà … a publica ribellione,’ as Guicciardini tells us in his tenth book. See, too, Paul. Jov. in the Vita Pompeji Columnae, and Gregorovius, viii. 71-75.

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267

Septimo decretal. l. i. tit. 3, cap. 1-3.

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268

Franc. Vettori, in the Arch. Stor. vi. 297.

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269

Besides which it is said (Paul. Lang. Chronicon Cilicense) to have produced not less than 500,000 gold florins; the order of the Franciscans alone, whose general was made a cardinal, paid 30,000. For a notice of the various sums paid, see Sanuto, xxiv. fol. 227; for the whole subject see Gregorovius, viii. 214 sqq.

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270

Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 301. Arch. Stor. Append. i. p. 293 sqq. Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi, vi. p. 232 sqq. Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 42.

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271

Ariosto, Sat. vi. v. 106. ‘Tutti morrete, ed è fatal che muoja Leone appresso.’ Sat. 3 and 7 ridicule the hangers on at Leo’s Court.

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272

One of several instances of such combinations is given in the Lettere dei Principi, i. 65, in a despatch of the Cardinal Bibbiena from Paris of the year 1518.

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273

Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 333.

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274

At the time of the Lateran Council, in 1512, Pico wrote an address: J. E. P. Oratio ad Leonem X. et Concilium Lateranense de Reformandis Ecclesiæ Moribus (ed. Hagenau, 1512, frequently printed in editions of his works). The address was dedicated to Pirckheimer and was again sent to him in 1517. Comp. Vir. Doct. Epist. ad Pirck., ed. Freytag, Leipz. 1838, p. 8. Pico fears that under Leo evil may definitely triumph over good, ‘et in te bellum a nostræ religionis hostibus ante audias geri quam pariri.’

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275

Lettere dei Principi, i. (Rome. 17th March, 1523): ‘This city stands on a needle’s point, and God grant that we are not soon driven to Avignon or to the end of the Ocean. I foresee the early fall of this spiritual monarchy.... Unless God helps us we are lost.’ Whether Adrian were really poisoned or not, cannot be gathered with certainty from Blas Ortiz, Itinerar. Hadriani (Baluz. Miscell. ed. Mansi, i. p. 386 sqq.); the worst of it was that everybody believed it.

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276

Negro, l.c. on Oct. 24 (should be Sept.) and Nov. 9, 1526, April 11, 1527. It is true that he found admirers and flatterers. The dialogue of Petrus Alcyonus ‘De Exilio’ was written in his praise, shortly before he became Pope.

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277

Varchi, Stor. Fiorent. i. 43, 46 sqq.

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278

Paul. Jov., Vita Pomp. Columnae.

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279

Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte (4 Aufl.) ii. 262 sqq.

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280

Varchi, Stor. Fiorent. ii. 43 sqq.

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281

Ibid. and Ranke, Deutsche Gesch. ii. 278, note, and iii. 6 sqq. It was thought that Charles would transfer his seat of government to Rome.

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282

See his letter to the Pope, dated Carpentras, Sept. 1, 1527, in the Anecdota litt. iv. p. 335.

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283

Lettere dei Principi, i. 72. Castiglione to the Pope, Burgos, Dec. 10, 1527.

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284

Tommaso Gar, Relaz. della Corte di Roma, i. 299.

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285

The Farnese succeeded in something of the kind, the Caraffa were ruined.

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286

Petrarca, Epist. Fam. i. 3. p. 574, when he thanks God that he was born an Italian. And again in the Apologia contra cujusdam anonymi Galli Calumnias of the year 1367 (Opp. ed. Bas. 1581) p. 1068 sqq. See L. Geiger, Petrarca, 129-145.

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287

Particularly those in vol. i. of Schardius, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, Basel, 1574. For an earlier period, Felix Faber, Historia Suevorum, libri duo (in Goldast, Script. rer. Suev. 1605); for a later, Irenicus, Exegesis Germaniæ, Hagenau, 1518. On the latter work and the patriotic histories of that time, see various studies of A. Horawitz, Hist. Zeitschrift, bd. xxxiii. 118, anm. 1.

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288

One instance out of many: The Answers of the Doge of Venice to a Florentine Agent respecting Pisa, 1496, in Malipiero, Ann. Veneti. Arch. Stor. vii. i. p. 427.

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289

Observe the expressions ‘uomo singolare’ and ‘uomo unico’ for the higher and highest stages of individual development.

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290

By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of dress for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own way. See the Canzone of Franco Sacchetti: ‘Contro alle nuove foggie’ in the Rime, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 52.

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291

At the close of the sixteenth century Montaigne draws the following parallel (Essais, l. iii. chap. 5, vol. iii. p. 367 of the Paris ed. 1816): ‘Ils (les Italiens) ont plus communement des belles femmes et moins de laides que nous; mais des rares et excellentes beautés j’estime que nous allons à pair. Et j’en juge autant des esprits; de ceux de la commune façon, ils en ont beaucoup plus et evidemment; la brutalité y est sans comparaison plus rare; d’ames singulières et du plus hault estage, nous ne leur en debvons rien.’

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292

And also of their wives, as is seen in the family of Sforza and among other North Italian rulers. Comp. in the work of Jacobus Phil. Bergomensis, De Plurimis Claris Selectisque Mulieribus, Ferrara, 1497, the lives of Battista Malatesta, Paola Gonzaga, Bona Lombarda, Riccarda of Este, and the chief women of the House of Sforza, Beatrice and others. Among them are more than one genuine virago, and in several cases natural gifts are supplemented by great humanistic culture. (See below, chap. 3 and part v.)

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293

Franco Sacchetti, in his ‘Capitolo’ (Rime, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 56), enumerates about 1390 the names of over a hundred distinguished people in the ruling parties who had died within his memory. However many mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still remarkable as evidence of the awakening of individuality. On the ‘Vite’ of Filippo Villani, see below.

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294

Trattato del Governo della Famiglia forms a part of the work: La Cura della Famiglia (Opere Volg. di Leon Batt. Alberti, publ. da Anicio Bonucci, Flor. 1844, vol. ii.). See there vol. i. pp. xxx.-xl., vol. ii. pp. xxxv. sqq. and vol. v. pp. 1-127. Formerly the work was generally, as in the text, attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446; see on him Vesp. Fiorent., pp. 291 and 379); the recent investigations of Fr. Palermo (Florence 1871), have shown Alberti to be the author. The work is quoted from the ed. Torino, Pomba, 1828.

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295

Trattato, p. 65 sqq.

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296

Jov. Pontanus, De Fortitudine, l. ii. cap. 4, ‘De tolerando Exilio,’ Seventy years later, Cardanus (De Vitâ Propriâ, cap. 32) could ask bitterly: ‘Quid est patria nisi consensus tyrannorum minutorum ad opprimendos imbelles timidos et qui plerumque sunt innoxii?’

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297

De Vulgari Eloquio, lib. i. cap. 6. On the ideal Italian language, cap. 17. The spiritual unity of cultivated men, cap. 18. On home-sickness, comp. the famous passages, Purg. viii. 1 sqq., and Parad. xxv. 1 sqq.

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298

Dantis Alligherii Epistolae, ed. Carolus Witte, p. 65.

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299

Ghiberti, Secondo Commentario, cap. xv. (Vasari ed Lemonnier, i. p. xxix.).

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300

Codri Urcei Vita, at the end of his works, first pub. Bologna 1502. This certainly comes near the old saying: ‘ubi bene, ibi patria.’ C. U. was not called after the place of his birth, but after Forli, where he lived long; see Malagola, Codro Urceo, Bologna, 1877, cap. v. and app. xi. The abundance of neutral intellectual pleasure, which is independent of local circumstances, and of which the educated Italians became more and more capable, rendered exile more tolerable to them. Cosmopolitanism is further a sign of an epoch in which new worlds are discovered, and men feel no longer at home in the old. We see it among the Greeks after the Peloponnesian war; Plato, as Niebuhr says, was not a good citizen, and Xenophon was a bad one; Diogenes went so far as to proclaim homelessness a pleasure, and calls himself, Laertius tells us, ἁπολις. Here another remarkable work may be mentioned. Petrus Alcyonius in his book: Medices Legatus de Exilio lib. duo, Ven. 1522 (printed in Mencken, Analecta de Calam. Literatorum, Leipzig, 1707, pp. 1-250) devotes to the subject of exile a long and prolix discussion. He tries logically and historically to refute the three reasons for which banishment is held to be an evil, viz. 1. Because the exile must live away from his fatherland. 2. Because he loses the honours given him at home. 3. Because he must do without his friends and relatives; and comes finally to the conclusion that banishment is not an evil. His dissertation culminates in the words, ‘Sapientissimus quisque omnem orbem terrarum unam urbem esse ducit. Atque etiam illam veram sibi esse patriam arbitratur quæ se perigrinantem exciperit, quæ pudorem, probitatem, virtutem colit, quæ optima studia, liberales disciplinas amplectitur, quæ etiam facit ut peregrini omnes honesto otio teneant statum et famam dignitatis suæ.’

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301

This awakening of personality is also shown in the great stress laid on the independent growth of character, in the claim to shape the spiritual life for oneself, apart from parents and ancestors. Boccaccio (De Cas. Vir. Ill. Paris, s. a. fol. xxix. b) points out that Socrates came of uneducated, Euripides and Demosthenes of unknown, parents, and exclaims: ‘Quasi animos a gignentibus habeamus!’

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302

Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 16.

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303

The angels which he drew on tablets at the anniversary of the death of Beatrice (Vita Nuova, p. 61) may have been more than the work of a dilettante. Lion. Aretino says he drew ‘egregiamente,’ and was a great lover of music.

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304

For this and what follows, see esp. Vespasiano Fiorentino, an authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century Comp. pp. 359, 379, 401, etc. See, also, the charming and instructive Vita Jannoctii Manetti (b. 1396), by Naldus Naldius, in Murat. xx. pp. 529-608.

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305

What follows is taken, e.g., from Perticari’s account of Pandolfo Collenuccio, in Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi iii. pp. 197 sqq., and from the Opere del Conte Perticari, Mil. 1823, vol. ii.

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306

For what follows compare Burckhardt, Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer, Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.

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307

In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we can believe what we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (Opera, p. 622, Epist. 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master in several subjects.

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308

Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp. Gyangos, The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain (London, 1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, Literaturgesch. der Araber, i. Introd. p. li.

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309

Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id prope divinum ducebat.

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310

This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.

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311

In his work, De Re Ædificatoria, l. viii. cap. i., there is a definition of a beautiful road: ‘Si modo mare, modo montes, modo lacum fluentem fontesve, modo aridam rupem aut planitiem, modo nemus vallemque exhibebit.’

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312

One writer among many: Blondus, Roma Triumphans, l. v. pp. 117 sqq., where the definitions of glory are collected from the ancients, and the desire of it is expressly allowed to the Christian. Cicero’s work, De Gloria, which Petrarch claimed to own, was stolen from him by his teacher Convenevole, and has never since been seen. Alberti, in a youthful composition when he was only twenty years of age, praises the desire of fame. Opere, vol. i. pp. cxxvii-clxvi.

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313

Paradiso, xxv. at the beginning: ‘Se mai continga,’ &c. See above, p. 133, note 2. Comp. Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 49. ‘Vaghissimo fu e d’onore e di pompa, e per avventura più che alla sua inclita virtù non si sarebbe richiesto.’

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314

De Vulgari Eloquio, l. i. cap. i. and esp. De Monarchia, l. i. cap. i., where he wishes to set forth the idea of monarchy not only in order to be useful to the world but also ‘ut palmam tanti bravii primus in meam gloriam adipiscar.’

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315

Convito, ed. Venezia, 1529, fol. 5 and 6.

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316

Paradiso, vi. 112 sqq.

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317

E.g. Inferno, vi. 89; xiii. 53; xvi. 85; xxxi. 127.

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318

Purgatorio, v. 70, 87, 133; vi. 26; viii. 71; xi. 31; xiii. 147.

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319

Purgatorio, xi. 85-117. Besides ‘gloria’ we here find close together ‘grido, fama, rumore, nominanza, onore’ all different names for the same thing. Boccaccio wrote, as he admits in his letter to Joh. Pizinga (Op. Volg. xvi. 30 sqq.) ‘perpetuandi nominis desiderio’.

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320

Scardeonius, De Urb. Patav. Antiqu. (Græv. Thesaur. vi. iii. col. 260). Whether ‘cereis’ or ‘certis muneribus’ should be the reading, cannot be said. The somewhat solemn nature of Mussatus can be recognised in the tone of his history of Henry VII.

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321

Franc. Petrarca, Posteritati, or Ad Posteros, at the beginning of the editions of his works, or the only letter of Book xviii. of the Epp. Seniles; also in Fracassetti, Petr. Epistolæ Familiares, 1859, i. 1-11. Some modern critics of Petrarch’s vanity would hardly have shown as much kindness and frankness had they been in his place.

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322

Opera, ed. 1581, p. 177: ‘De celebritate nominis importuna.’ Fame among the mass of people was specially offensive to him. Epp. Fam. i. 337, 340. In Petrarch, as in many humanists of the older generation, we can observe the conflict between the desire for glory and the claims of Christian humility.

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323

‘De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ’ in the editions of the works. Often printed separately, e.g. Bern, 1600. Compare Petrarch’s famous dialogue, ‘De Contemptu Mundi’ or ‘De Conflictu Curarum Suarum,’ in which the interlocutor Augustinus blames the love of fame as a damnable fault.

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324

Epp. Fam. lib. xviii. (ed. Fracassetti) 2. A measure of Petrarch’s fame is given a hundred years later by the assertion of Blondus (Italia Illustrata, p. 416) that hardly even a learned man would know anything of Robert the Good if Petrarch had not spoken of him so often and so kindly.

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325

It is to be noted that even Charles IV., perhaps influenced by Petrarch, speaks in a letter to the historian Marignola of fame as the object of every striving man. H. Friedjung, Kaiser Karl IV. und sein Antheil am geistigen Leben seiner Zeit, Vienna, 1876, p. 221.

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326

Epist. Seniles, xiii. 3, to Giovanni Aretino, Sept. 9, 1370.

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327

Filippo Villani, Vite, p. 19

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328

Both together in the epitaph on Boccaccio: ‘Nacqui in Firenze al Pozzo Toscanelli; Di fuor sepolto a Certaldo giaccio,’ &c. Comp. Op. Volg. di Boccaccio, xvi. 44.

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329

Mich. Savonarola, De Laudibus Patavii, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1157. Arquà remained from thenceforth the object of special veneration (comp. Ettore Conte Macola, I Codici di Arquà, Padua, 1874), and was the scene of great solemnities at the fifth centenary of Petrarch’s death. His dwelling is said to have been lately given to the city of Padua by the last owner, Cardinal Silvestri.

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330

The decree of 1396 and its grounds in Gaye, Carteggio, i. 123.

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331

Reumont, Lorenzo de’ Medici, ii. 180.

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332

Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 39.

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333

Franco Sacchetti, nov. 121.

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334

The former in the well-known sarcophagus near San Lorenzo, the latter over a door in the Palazzo della Ragione. For details as to their discovery in 1413, see Misson, Voyage en Italie, vol. i., and Michele Savonarola, col. 1157.

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335

Vita di Dante, l. c. How came the body of Cassius from Philippi back to Parma?

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336

‘Nobilitatis fastu’ and ‘sub obtentu religionis,’ says Pius II. (Comment. x. p. 473). The new sort of fame must have been inconvenient to those who were accustomed to the old.

That Carlo Malatesta caused the statue of Virgil to be pulled down and thrown into the Mincio, and this, as he alleged, from anger at the veneration paid to it by the people of Mantua, is a well-authenticated fact, specially attested by an invective written in 1397 by P. P. Vergerio against C. M., De dirutâ Statuâ Virgilii P. P. V. eloquentissimi Oratoris Epistola ex Tugurio Blondi sub Apolline, ed. by Marco Mantova Benavides (publ. certainly before 1560 at Padua). From this work it is clear that till then the statue had not been set up again. Did this happen in consequence of the invective? Bartholomæus Facius (De Vir. Ill. p. 9 sqq. in the Life of P. P. V. 1456) says it did, ‘Carolum Malatestam invectus Virgilii statua, quam ille Mantuæ in foro everterat, quoniam gentilis fuerat, ut ibidem restitueretur, effecit;’ but his evidence stands alone. It is true that, so far as we know, there are no contemporary chronicles for the history of Mantua at that period (Platina, Hist. Mant. in Murat. xx. contains nothing about the matter), but later historians are agreed that the statue was not restored. See for evidence, Prendilacqua, Vita di Vitt. da Feltre, written soon after 1446 (ed. 1871, p. 78), where the destruction but not the restoration of the statue is spoken of, and the work of Ant. Possevini, jun. (Gonzaga, Mantua, 1628), where, p. 486, the pulling down of the statue, the murmurings and violent opposition of the people, and the promise given in consequence by the prince that he would restore it, are all mentioned, with the addition: ‘Nec tamen restitutus est Virgilius.’ Further, on March 17, 1499, Jacopo d’Hatry writes to Isabella of Este, that he has spoken with Pontano about a plan of the princess to raise a statue to Virgil at Mantua, and that Pontano cried out with delight that Vergerio, if he were alive, would be even more pleased ‘che non se attristò quando el Conte Carola Malatesta persuase abuttare la statua di Virgilio nel flume.’ The writer then goes on to speak of the manner of setting it up, of the inscription ‘P. Virgilius Mantuanus’ and ‘Isabella Marchionissa Mantuæ restituit,’ and suggests that Andrea Mantegna would be the right man to be charged with the work. Mantegna did in fact make the drawings for it. (The drawing and the letter in question are given in Baschet, Recherches de documents d’art et d’histoire dans les Archives de Mantoue; documents inédits concernant la personne et les œuvres d’Andrea Mantegna, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, xx. (1866) 478-492, esp. 486 sqq.) It is clear from this letter that Carlo Malatesta did not have the statue restored. In Comparetti’s work on Virgil in the Middle Ages, the story is told after Burckhardt, but without authorities. Dr. Geiger, on the authority of Professor Paul of Berlin, distinguishes between C. Cassius Longinus and Cassius Parmensis, the poet, both among the assassins of Cæsar.

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337

Comp. Keyssler’s Neueste Reisen, p. 1016.

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338

The elder was notoriously a native of Verona.

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339

This is the tone of the remarkable work, De Laudibus Papiæ, in Murat. xx., dating from the fourteenth century—much municipal pride, but no idea of personal fame.

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340

De Laudibus Patavii, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1138 sqq. Only three cities, in his opinion—could be compared with Padua—Florence, Venice and Rome.

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341

‘Nam et veteres nostri tales aut divos aut æternâ memoriâ dignos non immerito prædicabant, quum virtus summa sanctitatis sit consocia et pari ematur pretio.’ What follows is most characteristic: ‘Hos itaque meo facili judicio æternos facio.’

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342

Similar ideas occur in many contemporary writers. Codrus Urceus, Sermo xiii. (Opp. 1506, fol. xxxviii. b), speaking of Galeazzo Bentivoglio, who was both a scholar and a warrior, ‘Cognoscens artem militarem esse quidem excellentem, sed literas multo certe excellentiores.’

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343

What follows immediately is not, as the editor remarks (Murat. xxiv col. 1059, note), from the pen of Mich. Savonarola.

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344

Petrarch, in the ‘Triumph’ here quoted, only dwells on characters of antiquity, and in his collection, De Rebus Memorandis, has little to say of contemporaries. In the Casus Virorum Illustrium of Boccaccio (among the men a number of women, besides Philippa Catinensis treated of at the end, are included, and even the goddess Juno is described), only the close of the eighth book and the last book—the ninth—deal with non-classical times. Boccaccio’s remarkable work, De Claris Mulieribus, treats also almost exclusively of antiquity. It begins with Eve, speaks then of ninety-seven women of antiquity, and seven of the Middle ages, beginning with Pope Joan and ending with Queen Johanna of Naples. And so at a much later time in the Commentarii Urbani of Ralph. Volaterranus. In the work De Claris Mulieribus of the Augustinian Jacobus Bergomensis (printed 1497, but probably published earlier) antiquity and legend hold the chief place, but there are still some valuable biographies of Italian women. There are one or two lives of contemporary women by Vespasiano da Bisticci (Arch. Stor. Ital. iv. i. pp. 430 sqq.). In Scardeonius (De Urb. Patav. Antiqu. Græv. Thesaur. vi. iii. col. 405 sqq.,) only famous Paduan women are mentioned. First comes a legend or tradition from the time of the fall of the empire, then tragical stories of the party struggles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; then notices of several heroic women; then the foundress of nunneries, the political woman, the female doctor, the mother of many and distinguished sons, the learned woman, the peasant girl who dies defending her chastity; then the cultivated beauty of the sixteenth century, on whom everybody writes sonnets; and lastly, the female novelist and poet at Padua. A century later the woman-professor would have been added to these. For the famous woman of the House of Este, see Ariosto, Orl. xiii.

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345

Bartolommeo Facio and Paolo Cortese. B. F. De Viris Illustribus Liber, was first published by L. Mehus (Florence, 1745). The book was begun by the author (known by other historical works, and resident at the court of Alfonso of Naples) after he had finished the history of that king (1455), and ended, as references to the struggles of Hungary and the writer’s ignorance of the elevation of Æneas Silvius to the cardinalate show, in 1456. (See, nevertheless, Wahlen, Laurentii Vallæ Opuscula Tria, Vienna, 1869, p. 67, note 1.) It is never quoted by contemporaries, and seldom by later writers. The author wishes in this book to describe the famous men, ‘ætatis memoriæque nostræ,’ and consequently only mentions such as were born in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and were still living in, or had died shortly before, the middle of the fifteenth. He chiefly limits himself to Italians, except in the case of artists or princes, among the latter of whom he includes the Emperor Sigismund and Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg; and in arranging the various biographies he neither follows chronological order nor the distinction which the subject of each attained, but puts them down ‘ut quisque mihi occurrerit,’ intending to treat in a second part of those whom he might have left out in the first. He divides the famous men into nine classes, nearly all of them prefaced by remarks on their distinctive qualities: 1. Poets; 2. Orators; 3. Jurists; 4. Physicians (with a few philosophers and theologians, as an appendix); 5. Painters; 6. Sculptors; 7. Eminent citizens; 8. Generals; 9. Princes and kings. Among the latter he treats with special fulness and care of Pope Nicholas V. and King Alfonso of Naples. In general he gives only short and mostly eulogistic biographies, confined in the case of princes and soldiers to the list of their deeds, and of artists and writers to the enumeration of their works. No attempt is made at a detailed description or criticism of these; only with regard to a few works of art which he had himself seen he writes more fully. Nor is any attempt made at an estimate of individuals; his heroes either receive a few general words of praise, or must be satisfied with the mere mention of their names. Of himself the author says next to nothing. He states only that Guarino was his teacher, that Manetti wrote a book on a subject which he himself had treated, that Bracellius was his countryman, and that the painter Pisano of Verona was known to him (pp. 17, 18, 19, 48; but says nothing in speaking of Laurentius Valla of his own violent quarrels with this scholar. On the other hand, he does not fail to express his piety and his hatred to the Turks (p. 64), to relieve his Italian patriotism by calling the Swiss barbarians (p. 60), and to say of P. P. Vergerius, ‘dignus qui totam in Italia vitam scribens exegisset’ (p. 9).

Of all celebrities he evidently sets most store by the scholars, and among these by the ‘oratores,’ to whom he devotes nearly a third of his book. He nevertheless has great respect for the jurists, and shows a special fondness for the physicians, among whom he well distinguishes the theoretical from the practical, relating the successful diagnoses and operations of the latter. That he treats of theologians and philosophers in connection with the physicians, is as curious as that he should put the painters immediately after the physicians, although, as he says, they are most allied to the poets. In spite of his reverence for learning, which shows itself in the praise given to the princes who patronised it, he is too much of a courtier not to register the tokens of princely favour received by the scholars he speaks of, and to characterise the princes in the introduction to the chapters devoted to them as those who ‘veluti corpus membra, ita omnia genera quæ supra memoravimus, regunt ac tuentur.’

The style of the book is simple and unadorned, and the matter of it full of instruction, notwithstanding its brevity. It is a pity that Facius did not enter more fully into the personal relations and circumstances of the men whom he described, and did not add to the list of their writings some notice of the contents and the value of them.

The work of Paolo Cortese (b. 1645, d. 1510), De Hominibus Doctis Dialogus (first ed. Florence, 1734), is much more limited in its character. This work, written about 1490, since it mentions Antonius Geraldinus as dead, who died in 1488, and was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who died in 1492, is distinguished from that of Facius, written a generation earlier, not only by the exclusion of all who are not learned men, but by various inward and outward characteristics. First by the form, which is that of a dialogue between the author and his two companions, Alexander Farnese and Antonius, and by the digressions and unequal treatment of the various characters caused thereby; and secondly by the manner of the treatment itself. While Facius only speaks of the men of his own time, Cortese treats only of the dead, and in part of those long dead, by which he enlarges his circle more than he narrows it by exclusion of the living; while Facius merely chronicles works and deeds, as if they were unknown, Cortese criticises the literary activity of his heroes as if the reader were already familiar with it. This criticism is shaped by the humanistic estimate of eloquence, according to which no man could be considered of importance unless he had achieved something remarkable in eloquence, i.e. in the classical, Ciceronian treatment of the Latin language. On this principle Dante and Petrarch are only moderately praised, and are blamed for having diverted so much of their powers from Latin to Italian; Guarino is described as one who had beheld perfect eloquence at least through a cloud; Lionardo Aretino as one who had offered his contemporaries ‘aliquid splendidius;’ and Enea Silvio as he ‘in quo primum apparuit mutati sæculi signum.’ This point of view prevailed over all others; never perhaps was it held so one-sidedly as by Cortese. To get a notion of his way of thinking we have only to hear his remarks on a predecessor, also the compiler of a great biographical collection, Sicco Polentone: ‘Ejus sunt viginti ad filium libri scripti de claris scriptoribus, utiles admodum qui jam fere ab omnibus legi sent desiti. Est enim in judicando parum acer, nec servit aurium voluptati quum tractat res ab aliis ante tractatas; sed hoc ferendum. Illud certe molestum est, dum alienis verbis sententiisque scripta infarcit et explet sua; ex quo nascitur maxime vitiosum scribendi genus, quum modo lenis et candidus, modo durus et asper apparcat, et sic in toto genere tanquam in unum agrum plura inter se inimicissima sparsa semina.’

All are not treated with so much detail; most are disposed of in a few brief sentences; some are merely named without a word being added. Much is nevertheless to be learned from his judgments, though we may not be able always to agree with them. We cannot here discuss him more fully, especially as many of his most characteristic remarks have been already made use of; on the whole, they give us a clear picture of the way in which a later time, outwardly more developed, looked down with critical scorn upon an earlier age, inwardly perhaps richer, but externally less perfect.

Facius, the author of the first-mentioned biographical work, is spoken of, but not his book. Like Facius, Cortese is the humble courtier, looking on Lorenzo de’ Medici as Facius looked on Alfonso of Naples; like him, he is a patriot who only praises foreign excellence unwillingly and because he must; adding the assurance that he does not wish to oppose his own country (p. 48, speaking of Janus Pannonius).

Information as to Cortese has been collected by Bernardus Paperinius, the editor of his work; we may add that his Latin translation of the novel of L. B. Alberti, Hippolytus and Dejanira, is printed for the first time in the Opere di L. B. A. vol. iii. pp. 439-463.

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346

How great the fame of the humanists was is shown by the fact that impostors attempted to make capital out of the use of their names. There thus appeared at Verona a man strangely clad and using strange gestures, who, when brought before the mayor, recited with great energy passages of Latin verse and prose, taken from the works of Panormita, answered in reply to the questions put to him that he was himself Panormita, and was able to give so many small and commonly unknown details about the life of this scholar, that his statement obtained general credit. He was then treated with great honour by the authorities and the learned men of the city, and played his assumed part successfully for a considerable time, until Guarino and others who knew Panormita personally discovered the fraud. Comp. Rosmini, Vita di Guarino, ii. 44 sqq., 171 sqq. Few of the humanists were free from the habit of boasting. Codrus Urceus (Vita, at the end of the Opera, 1506, fol. lxx.), when asked for his opinion about this or that famous man, used to answer: ‘Sibi scire videntur.’ Barth. Facius, De Vir. Ill. p. 31, tells of the jurist Antonius Butriensis: ‘Id unum in eo viro notandum est, quod neminem unquam, adeo excellere homines in eo studio volebat, ut doctoratu dignum in examine comprobavit.’

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347

A Latin poet of the twelfth century, one of the wandering scholars who barters his song for a coat, uses this as a threat. Carmina Burana, p. 76.

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348

Sonnet cli: Lasso ch’i ardo.

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349

Boccaccio, Opere Volgari, vol. xvi. in Sonnet 13: Pallido, vinto, etc.

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350

Elsewhere, and in Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi, iv. 203.

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351

Angeli Politiani Epp. lib. x.

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352

Quatuor navigationes, etc. Deodatum (St. Dié), 1507. Comp. O. Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, 1859, ed. 2, 1876.

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353

Paul. Jov. De Romanis Piscibus, Præfatio (1825). The first decade of his histories would soon be published, ‘non sine aliqua spe immortalitatis.’

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354

Comp. Discorsi, i. 27. ‘Tristizia’ (crime) can have ‘grandezza’ and be ‘in alcuna parte generosa’; ‘grandezza’ can take away ‘infamia’ from a deed; a man can be ‘onorevolmente tristo’ in contrast to one who is ‘perfettamente buono.’

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355

Storie Fiorentine, l. vi.

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356

Paul. Jov. Elog. Vir. Lit. Ill. p. 192, speaking of Marius Molsa.

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357

Mere railing is found very early, in Benzo of Alba, in the eleventh century (Mon. Germ. ss. xi. 591-681).

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358

The Middle Ages are further rich in so-called satirical poems; but the satire is not individual, but aimed at classes, categories, and whole populations, and easily passes into the didactic tone. The whole spirit of this literature is best represented by Reineke Fuchs, in all its forms among the different nations of the West. For this branch of French literature see a new and admirable work by Lenient, La Satire en France au Moyen-âge, Paris, 1860, and the equally excellent continuation, La Satire en France, ou la littérature militante, au XVIe Siècle, Paris, 1866.

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359

See above, p. 7 note 2. Occasionally we find an insolent joke, nov. 37.

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360

Inferno, xxi. xxii. The only possible parallel is with Aristophanes.

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361

A modest beginning Opera, p. 421, sqq., in Rerum Memorandarum Libri IV. Again, in Epp. Seniles, x. 2. Comp. Epp. Fam. ed. Fracass. i. 68 sqq., 70, 240, 245. The puns have a flavour of their mediæval home, the monasteries. Petrarch’s invectives ‘contra Gallum,’ ‘contra medicum objurgantem,’ and his work, De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia; perhaps also his Epistolæ sine Titulo,’ may be quoted as early examples of satirical writing.

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362

Nov. 40, 41; Ridolfo da Camerino is the man.

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363

The well-known jest of Brunellesco and the fat wood-carver, Manetto Ammanatini, who is said to have fled into Hungary before the ridicule he encountered, is clever but cruel.

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364

The ‘Araldo’ of the Florentine Signoria. One instance among many, Commissioni di Rinaldo degli Albizzi, iii. 651, 669. The fool as necessary to enliven the company after dinner; Alcyonius, De Exilio, ed. Mencken, p. 129.

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365

Sacchetti, nov. 48. And yet, according to nov. 67, there was an impression that a Romagnole was superior to the worst Florentine.

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366

L. B. Alberti, Del Governo della Famiglia, Opere, ed. Bonucci, v. 171. Comp. above, p. 132, note 1.

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367

Franco Sacchetti, nov. 156; comp. 24 for Dolcibene and the Jews. (For Charles IV. and the fools, Friedjung, o.c. p. 109.) The Facetiæ of Poggio resemble Sacchetti’s in substance—practical jokes, impertinences, refined indecency misunderstood by simple folk; the philologist is betrayed by the large number of verbal jokes. On L. A. Alberti, see pp. 136, sqq.

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368

And consequently in those novels of the Italians whose subject is taken from them.

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369

According to Bandello, iv. nov. 2, Gonnella could twist his features into the likeness of other people, and mimic all the dialects of Italy.

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370

Paul. Jov. Vita Leonis X.

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371

‘Erat enim Bibiena mirus artifex hominibus ætate vel professione gravibus ad insaniam impellendis.’ We are here reminded of the jests of Christine of Sweden with her philologists. Comp. the remarkable passage of Jovian. Pontanus, De Sermone, lib. ii. cap. 9: ‘Ferdinandus Alfonsi filius, Neapolitanorum rex magnus et ipse fuit artifex et vultus componendi et orationes in quem ipse usus vellet. Nam ætatis nostri Pontifices maximi fingendis vultibus ac verbis vel histriones ipsos anteveniunt.

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372

The eye-glass I not only infer from Rafael’s portrait, where it can be explained as a magnifier for looking at the miniatures in the prayer-book, but from a statement of Pellicanus, according to which Leo views an advancing procession of monks through a ‘specillum’ (comp. Züricher Taschenbuch for 1858, p. 177), and from the ‘cristallus concava,’ which, according to Giovio, he used when hunting. (Comp. ‘Leonis X. vita auctore anon, conscripta’ in the Appendix to Roscoe.) In Attilius Alessius (Baluz. Miscell. iv. 518) we read, ‘Oculari ex gemina (gemma?) utebatur quam manu gestans, signando aliquid videndum esset, oculis admovebat.’ The shortsightedness in the family of the Medici was hereditary. Lorenzo was shortsighted, and replied to the Sienese Bartolommeo Soccini, who said that the air of Florence was bad for the eyes: ‘E quella di Siena al cervello.’ The bad sight of Leo X. was proverbial. After his election, the Roman wits explained the number MCCCCXL. engraved in the Vatican as follows: ‘Multi cæci Cardinales creaverunt cæcum decimum Leonem.’ Comp. Shepherd-Tonelli, Vita del Poggio, ii. 23, sqq., and the passages there quoted.

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373

We find it also in plastic art, e.g., in the famous plate parodying the group of the Laöcoon as three monkeys. But here parody seldom went beyond sketches and the like, though much, it is true, may have been destroyed. Caricature, again, is something different. Lionardo, in the grotesque faces in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, represents what is hideous when and because it is comical, and exaggerates the ludicrous element at pleasure.

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374

Jovian. Pontan. De Sermone, libri v. He attributes a special gift of wit to the Sienese and Peruginese, as well as to the Florentines, adding the Spanish court as a matter of politeness.

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375

Il Cortigiano, lib. ii. cap. 4 sqq., ed. Baude di Vesme, Florence, 1854, pp. 124 sqq. For the explanation of wit as the effect of contrast, though not clearly put, see ibid. cap. lxxiii. p. 136.

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376

Pontanus, De Sermone, lib. iv. cap. 3, also advises people to abstain from using ‘ridicula’ either against the miserable or the strong.

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377

Galateo del Casa, ed. Venez. 1789, p. 26 sqq. 48.

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378

Lettere Pittoriche, i. p. 71, in a letter of Vinc. Borghini, 1577. Macchiavelli (Stor. Fior. vii. cap. 28) says of the young gentlemen in Florence soon after the middle of the fifteenth century: ‘Gli studî loro erano apparire col vestire splendidi, e col parlare sagaci ed astuti, e quello che più destramente mordeva gli altri, era più savio e da più stimato.’

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379

Comp. Fedra Inghirami’s funeral oration on Ludovico Podocataro (d. Aug. 25, 1504) in the Anecd. Litt. i. p. 319. The scandal-monger Massaino is mentioned in Paul. Jov. Dialogues de Viris Litt. Illustr. (Tiraboschi, tom. vii. parte iv. p. 1631).

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380

This was the plan followed by Leo X., and his calculations were not disappointed. Fearfully as his reputation was mangled after his death by the satirists, they were unable to modify the general estimate formed of him.

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381

This was probably the case with Cardinal Ardicino della Porta, who in 1491 wished to resign his dignity and take refuge in a monastery. See Infessura, in Eccard. ii. col. 2000.

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382

See his funeral oration in the Anecd. Litt. iv. p. 315. He assembled an army of peasants in the March of Aneona, which was only hindered from acting by the treason of the Duke of Urbino. For his graceful and hopeless love-poems, see Trucchi, Poesie Inedite, iii. 123.

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383

How he used his tongue at the table of Clement VII. is told in Giraldi, Hecatomithi, vii. nov. 5.

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384

The charge of taking into consideration the proposal to drown Pasquino (in Paul. Jov. Vita Hadriani), is transferred from Sixtus IV. to Hadrian. Comp. Lettere dei Principi, i. 114 sqq., letter of Negro, dated April 7, 1523. On St. Mark’s Day Pasquino had a special celebration, which the Pope forbade.

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385

In the passages collected in Gregorovius, viii. 380 note, 381 sqq. 393 sqq.

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386

Comp. Pier. Valer. De Infel. Lit. ed. Mencken, p. 178. ‘Pestilentia quæ cum Adriano VI. invecta Romam invasit.’

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387

E.g. Firenzuola, Opera (Milano 1802), vol. i. p. 116, in the Discorsi degli Animali.

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388

Comp. the names in Höfler, Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Academie (1876), vol. 82, p. 435.

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389

The words of Pier. Valerian, De Infel. Lit. ed. Mencken, p. 382, are most characteristic of the public feeling at Rome: ‘Ecce adest Musarum et eloquentiæ totiusque nitoris hostis acerrimis, qui literatis omnibus inimicitias minitaretur, quoniam, ut ipse dictitabat, Terentiani essent, quos quum odisse atque etiam persequi cœpisset voluntarium alii exilium, alias atque alias alii latebras quærentes tam diu latuere quoad Deo beneficio altero imperii anno decessit, qui si aliquanto diutius vixisset, Gothica illa tempora adversus bonas literas videbatur suscitaturus.’ The general hatred of Adrian was also due partly to the fact that in the great pecuniary difficulties in which he found himself he adopted the expedient of a direct tax. Ranke, Päpste, i. 411. It may here be mentioned that there were, nevertheless, poets to be found who praised Adrian. Comp. various passages in the Coryciana (ed. Rome, 1524), esp. J. J. 2b sqq.

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390

To the Duke of Ferrara, January 1, 1536 (Lettere, ed. 1539, fol. 39): ‘You will now journey from Rome to Naples,’ ‘ricreando la vista avvilita nel mirar le miserie pontificali con la contemplazione delle eccellenze imperiali.’

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391

The fear which he caused to men of mark, especially artists, by these means, cannot be here described. The publicistic weapon of the German Reformation was chiefly the pamphlet dealing with events as they occurred; Aretino is a journalist in the sense that he has within himself a perpetual occasion for writing.

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392

E.g. in the Capitolo on Albicante, a bad poet; unfortunately the passages are unfit for quotation.

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393

Lettere, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 12, dated May 31, 1527.

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394

In the first Capitolo to Cosimo.

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395

Gaye, Carteggio, ii. 332.

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396

See the insolent letter of 1536 in the Lettere Pittor. i. Append. 34. See above, p. 142, for the house where Petrarch was born in Arezzo.

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397

L’Aretin, per Deo grazia, è vivo e sano,
Ma’l mostaccio ha fregiato nobilmente,
E più colpi ha, che dita in una mano.’
(Mauro, ‘Capitolo in lode delle bugie.’)

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398

See e.g. the letter to the Cardinal of Lorraine, Lettere, ed. Venez. fol. 29, dated Nov. 21, 1534, and the letters to Charles V., in which he says that no man stands nearer to God than Charles.

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399

For what follows, see Gaye, Carteggio, ii. 336, 337, 345.

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400

Lettere, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 15, dated June 16, 1529. Comp. another remarkable letter to M. A., dated April 15, 1528, fol. 212.

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401

He may have done so either in the hope of obtaining the red hat or from fear of the new activity of the Inquisition, which he had ventured to attack bitterly in 1535 (l. c. fol. 37), but which, after the reorganisation of the institution in 1542, suddenly took a fresh start, and soon silenced every opposing voice.

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402

[Carmina Burana, in the Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, vol. xvi. (Stuttg. 1847). The stay in Pavia (p. 68 bis), the Italian local references in general, the scene with the ‘pastorella’ under the olive-tree (p. 146), the mention of the ‘pinus’ as a shady field tree (p. 156), the frequent use of the word ‘bravium’ (pp. 137, 144), and particularly the form Madii for Maji (p. 141), all speak in favour of our assumption.]

The conjecture of Dr. Burckhardt that the best pieces of the Carmina Burana were written by an Italian, is not tenable. The grounds brought forward in its support have little weight (e.g. the mention of Pavia: ‘Quis Paviæ demorans castus habeatur?’ which can be explained as a proverbial expression, or referred to a short stay of the writer at Pavia), cannot, further, hold their own against the reasons on the other side, and finally lose all their force in view of the probable identification of the author. The arguments of O. Hubatsch Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder des Mittelalters, Görlitz, 1870, p. 87) against the Italian origin of these poems are, among others, the attacks on the Italian and praise of the German clergy, the rebukes of the southerners as a ‘gens proterva,’ and the reference to the poet as ‘transmontanus.’ Who he actually was, however, is not clearly made out. That he bore the name of Walther throws no light upon his origin. He was formerly identified with Gualterus de Mapes, a canon of Salisbury and chaplain to the English kings at the end of the twelfth century; since, by Giesebrecht (Die Vaganten oder Goliarden und ihre Lieder, Allgemeine Monatschrift, 1855), with Walther of Lille or Chatillon, who passed from France into England and Germany, and thence possibly with the Archbishop Reinhold of Köln (1164 and 75) to Italy (Pavia, &c.). If this hypothesis, against which Hubatsch (l. c.) has brought forward certain objections, must be abandoned, it remains beyond a doubt that the origin of nearly all these songs is to be looked for in France, from whence they were diffused through the regular school which here existed for them over Germany, and there expanded and mixed with German phrases; while Italy, as Giesebrecht has shown, remained almost unaffected by this class of poetry. The Italian translator of Dr. Burckhardt’s work, Prof. D. Valbusa, in a note to this passage (i. 235), also contests the Italian origin of the poem. [L. G.]

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403

Carm. Bur. p. 155, only a fragment: the whole in Wright, Walter Mapes (1841), p. 258. Comp. Hubatsch, p. 27 sqq., who points to the fact that a story often treated of in France is at the foundation. Æst. Inter. Carm. Bur. p. 67; Dum Dianæ, Carm. Bur. p. 124. Additional instances: ‘Cor patet Jovi;’ classical names for the loved one; once, when he calls her Blanciflor, he adds, as if to make up for it, the name of Helena.

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404

In what way antiquity could serve as guide and teacher in all the higher regions of life, is briefly sketched by Æneas Sylvius (Opera, p. 603, in the Epist. 105, to the Archduke Sigismund).

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405

For particulars we must refer the reader to Roscoe, Lorenzo Mag. and Leo X., as well as to Voigt, Enea Silvio (Berlin, 1856-63); to the works of Reumont and to Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter.

To form a conception of the extent which studies at the beginning of the sixteenth century had reached, we cannot do better than turn to the Commentarii Urbani of Raphael Volatterranus (ed. Basil, 1544, fol. 16, &c.). Here we see how antiquity formed the introduction and the chief matter of study in every branch of knowledge, from geography and local history, the lives of great and famous men, popular philosophy, morals and the special sciences, down to the analysis of the whole of Aristotle with which the work closes. To understand its significance as an authority for the history of culture, we must compare it with all the earlier encyclopædias. A complete and circumstantial account of the matter is given in Voigt’s admirable work, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums oder Das erste Jahrhundert der Humanismus, Berlin, 1859.

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406

In William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglor. l. ii. § 169, 170, 205, 206 (ed. Lond. 1840, vol. i. p. 277 sqq. and p. 354 sqq.), we meet with the dreams of treasure-hunters, Venus as ghostly love, and the discovery of the gigantic body of Pallas, son of Evander, about the middle of the eleventh century. Comp. Jac. ab Aquis Imago Mundi (Hist. Patr. Monum. Script. t. iii. col. 1603), on the origin of the House of Colonna, with reference to the discovery of hidden treasure. Besides the tales of the treasure-seekers, William of Malmesbury mentions the elegy of Hildebert of Mans, Bishop of Tours, one of the most singular examples of humanistic enthusiasm in the first half of the twelfth century.

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407

Dante, Convito, tratt. iv. cap. v.

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408

Epp. Familiares, vi. 2; references to Rome before he had seen it, and expressions of his longing for the city, Epp. Fam. ed. Fracass. vol. i. pp. 125, 213; vol. ii. pp. 336 sqq. See also the collected references in L. Geiger, Petrarca, p. 272, note 3. In Petrarch we already find complaints of the many ruined and neglected buildings, which he enumerates one by one (De Rem. Utriusque Fort. lib. i. dial. 118), adding the remark that many statues were left from antiquity, but no paintings (l. c. 41).

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409

Dittamondo, ii. cap. 3. The procession reminds one at times of the three kings and their suite in the old pictures. The description of the city (ii. cap. 31) is not without archæological value (Gregorovius, vi. 697, note 1). According to Polistoro (Murat. xxiv. col. 845), Niccolò and Ugo of Este journeyed in 1366 to Rome, ‘per vedere quelle magnificenze antiche, che al presente sipossono vedere in Roma.’

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410

Gregorovius, v. 316 sqq. Parenthetically we may quote foreign evidence that Rome in the Middle Ages was looked upon as a quarry. The famous Abbot Sugerius, who about 1140 was in search of lofty pillars for the rebuilding of St. Denis, thought at first of nothing less then getting hold of the granite monoliths of the Baths of Diocletian, but afterwards changed his mind. See ‘Sugerii Libellus Alter,’ in Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptores, iv. p. 352.

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411

Poggii Opera, fol. 50 sqq. ‘Ruinarum Urbis Romæ Descriptio,’ written about 1430, shortly before the death of Martin V. The Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian had then their pillars and coating of marble. See Gregorovius, vi. 700-705.

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412

Poggio appears as one of the earliest collectors of inscriptions, in his letter in the Vita Poggii, Muratori, xx. col. 177, and as collector of busts, (col. 183, and letter in Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 258). See also Ambros. Traversarii Epistolæ, xxv. 42. A little book which Poggio wrote on inscriptions seems to have been lost. Shepherd, Life of Poggio, trad. Tonelli, i. 154 sqq.

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413

Fabroni, Cosmus, Adnot. 86. From a letter of Alberto degli Alberti to Giovanni Medici. See also Gregorovius, vii. 557. For the condition of Rome under Martin V., see Platina, p. 227; and during the absence of Eugenius IV., see Vespasiano Fiorent., p. 21.

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414

Roma Instaurata, written in 1447, and dedicated to the Pope; first printed, Rome, 1474.

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415

See, nevertheless, his distichs in Voigt, Wiederbelebung des Alterthums, p. 275, note 2. He was the first Pope who published a Bull for the protection of old monuments (4 Kal. Maj. 1462), with penalties in case of disobedience. But these measures were ineffective. Comp. Gregorovius, vii. pp. 558 sqq.

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416

What follows is from Jo. Ant. Campanus, Vita Pii II., in Muratori, iii. ii. col. 980 sqq. Pii II. Commentarii, pp. 48, 72 sqq., 206, 248 sqq., 501, and elsewhere.

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417

First dated edition, Brixen, 1482.

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418

Boccaccio, Fiammetta, cap. 5. Opere, ed. Montier, vi. 91.

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419

His work, Cyriaci Anconitani Itinerarium, ed. Mehus, Florence, 1742. Comp. Leandro Alberti, Descriz. di tutta l’Italia, fol. 285.

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420

Two instances out of many: the fabulous origin of Milan in Manipulus (Murat. xl. col. 552), and that of Florence in Gio. Villani (who here, as elsewhere, enlarges on the forged chronicle of Ricardo Malespini), according to which Florence, being loyally Roman in its sentiments, is always in the right against the anti-Roman rebellious Fiesole (i. 9, 38, 41; ii. 2). Dante, Inf. xv. 76.

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421

Commentarii, p. 206, in the fourth book.

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422

Mich. Cannesius, Vita Pauli II., in Murat. iii. ii. col. 993. Towards even Nero, son of Domitius Ahenobarbus, the author will not be impolite, on account of his connection with the Pope. He only says of him, ‘De quo verum Scriptores multa ac diversa commemorant.’ The family of Plato in Milan went still farther, and nattered itself on its descent from the great Athenian. Filelfo in a wedding speech, and in an encomium on the jurist Teodoro Plato, ventured to make this assertion; and a Giovanantonio Plato put the inscription on a portrait in relief carved by him in 1478 (in the court of the Pal. Magenta at Milan): ‘Platonem suum, a quo originem et ingenium refert.’

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423

See on this point, Nangiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1094; Infessura, in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1951; Matarazzo, in the Arch. Stor. xvi. ii. p. 180. Nangiporto, however, admits that it was no longer possible to decide whether the corpse was male or female.

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424

As early as Julius II. excavations were made in the hope of finding statues. Vasari, xi. p. 302, V. di Gio. da Udine. Comp. Gregorovius, viii. 186.

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425

The letter was first attributed to Castiglione, Lettere di Negozi del Conte Bald. Castiglione, Padua, 1736 and 1769, but proved to be from the hand of Raphael by Daniele Francesconi in 1799. It is printed from a Munich MS. in Passavant, Leben Raphael’s, iii. p. 44. Comp. Gruyer Raphael et l’Antiquité, 1864, i. 435-457.

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426

Lettere Pittoriche, ii. 1, Tolomei to Landi, 14 Nov., 1542.

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427

He tried ‘curis animique doloribus quacunque ratione aditum intercludere;’ music and lively conversation charmed him, and he hoped by their means to live longer. Leonis X. Vita Anonyma, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 169.

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428

This point is referred to in the Satires of Ariosto. See the first (‘Perc’ ho molto,’ &c.), and the fourth ‘Poiche, Annibale’).

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429

Ranke, Päpste, i. 408 sqq. ‘Lettere dei Principi, p. 107. Letter of Negri, September 1, 1522 … ‘tutti questi cortigiani esausti da Papa Leone e falliti.’ They avenged themselves after the death of Leo by satirical verses and inscriptions.

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430

Pii II. Commentarii, p. 251 in the 5th book. Comp. Sannazaro’s elegy, ‘Ad Ruinas Cumarum urbis vetustissimæ’ (Opera, fol. 236 sqq.).

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431

Polifilo (i.e. Franciscus Columna) ‘Hypnerotomachia, ubi humana omnia non nisi somnum esse docet atque obiter plurima scita sane quam digna commemorat,’ Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1499. Comp. on this remarkable book and others, A. Didot, Alde Manuce, Paris, 1875, pp. 132-142; and Gruyer, Raphael et l’Antiquité, i. pp. 191 sqq.; J. Burckhardt, Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, pp. 43 sqq., and the work of A. Ilg, Vienna, 1872.

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432

While all the Fathers of the Church and all the pilgrims speak only of a cave. The poets, too, do without the palace. Comp. Sannazaro, De Partu Virginis, l. ii.

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433

Chiefly from Vespasiano Fiorentine, in the first vol. of the Spicileg. Romanum, by Mai, from which edition the quotations in this book are made. New edition by Bartoli, Florence, 1859. The author was a Florentine bookseller and copying agent, about and after the middle of the fifteenth century.

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434

Comp. Petr. Epist. Fam. ed. Fracass. l. xviii. 2, xxiv. 12, var. 25, with the notes of Fracassetti in the Italian translation, vol. iv. 92-101, v. 196 sqq., where the fragment of a translation of Homer before the time of Pilato is also given.

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435

Forgeries, by which the passion for antiquity was turned to the profit or amusement of rogues, are well known to have been not uncommon. See the articles in the literary histories on Annius of Viterbo.

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436

Vespas. Fiorent. p. 31. ‘Tommaso da Serezana usava dire, che dua cosa farebbe, se egli potesse mai spendere, ch’era in libri e murare. E l’una e l’altra fece nel suo pontificato.’ With respect to his translation, see Æen. Sylvius, De Europa, cap. 58, p. 459, and Papencordt, Ges. der Stadt Rom. p. 502. See esp. Voigt, op. cit. book v.

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437

Vespas. Fior. pp. 48 and 658, 665. Comp. J. Manetti, Vita Nicolai V., in Murat. iii. ii. col. 925 sqq. On the question whether and how Calixtus III. partly dispersed the library again, see Vespas. Fiorent. p. 284, with Mai’s note.

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438

Vespas. Fior. pp. 617 sqq.

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439

Vespas. Fior. pp. 457 sqq.

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440

Vespas. Fiorent, p. 193. Comp. Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 1185 sqq.

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441

How the matter was provisionally treated is related in Malipiero, Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor. vii. ii. pp. 653, 655.

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442

Vespas. Fior. pp. 124 sqq., and ‘Inventario della Libreria Urbinata compilata nel Secolo XV. da Federigo Veterano, bibliotecario di Federigo I. da Montefeltro Duca d’Urbino,’ given by C. Guasti in tbe Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani, vi. (1862), 127-147 and vii. (1863) 46-55, 130-154. For contemporary opinions on the library, see Favre, Mélanges d’Hist. Lit. i. 127, note 6. The following is the substance of Dr. Geiger’s remarks on the subject of the old authors:—

For the Medicean Library comp. Delle condicioni e delle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508 ricerche di Enea Piccolomini, Arch. stor. ital., 265 sqq., 3 serie, vol. xix. pp. 101-129,254-281, xx. 51-94, xxi. 102-112, 282-296. Dr. Geiger does not undertake an estimate of the relative values of the various rare and almost unknown works contained in the library, nor is he able to state where they are now to be found. He remarks that information as to Greece is much fuller than as to Italy, which is a characteristic mark of the time. The catalogue contains editions of the Bible, of single books of it, with text and annotations, also Greek and Roman works in their then most complete forms, together with some Hebrew books—tractatus quidam rabbinorum hebr.—with much modern work, chiefly in Latin, and with not a little in Italian.

Dr. Geiger doubts the absolute accuracy of Vespasiano Fiorentino’s catalogue of the library at Urbino. See the German edition, i. 313, 314. [S.G.C.M.]

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443

Perhaps at the capture of Urbino by the troops of Cæsar Borgia. The existence of the manuscript has been doubted; but I cannot believe that Vespasiano would have spoken of the gnomic extracts from Menander, which do not amount to more than a couple of hundred verses, as ‘tutte le opere,’ nor have mentioned them in the list of comprehensive manuscripts, even though he had before him only our present Pindar and Sophocles. It is not inconceivable that this Menander may some day come to light.

[The catalogue of the library at Urbino (see foregoing note), which dates back to the fifteenth century, is not perfectly in accordance with Vespasiano’s report, and with the remarks of Dr. Burckhardt upon it. As an official document, it deserves greater credit than Vespasiano’s description, which, like most of his descriptions, cannot be acquitted of a certain inaccuracy in detail and tendency to over-colouring. In this catalogue no mention is made of the manuscript of Menander. Mai’s doubt as to its existence is therefore justified. Instead of ‘all the works of Pindar,’ we here find: ‘Pindaris Olimpia et Pithia.’ The catalogue makes no distinction between ancient and modern books, contains the works of Dante (among others, Comœdiæ Thusco Carmine), and Boccaccio, in a very imperfect form; those of Petrarch, however, in all completeness. It may be added that this catalogue mentions many humanistic writings which have hitherto remained unknown and unprinted, that it contains collections of the privileges of the princes of Montefeltro, and carefully enumerates the dedications offered by translators or original writers to Federigo of Urbino.—L. G.]

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444

For what follows and in part for what has gone before, see W. Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 2nd. ed. Leipzig, 1875, pp. 392 sqq., 405 sqq., 505. Comp. also the poem, De Officio Scribæ, of Phil. Beroaldus, who, however, is rather speaking of the public scrivener.

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445

When Piero de’ Medici, at the death of Matthias Corvinus, the book-loving King of Hungary, declared that the ‘scrittori’ must now lower their charges, since they would otherwise find no further employment (Scil. except in Italy), he can only have meant the Greek copyists, as the caligraphists, to whom one might be tempted to refer his words, continued to be numerous throughout all Italy. Fabroni, Laurent. Magn. Adnot. 156 Comp. Adnot. 154.

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446

Gaye, Carteggio, i. p. 164. A letter of the year 1455 under Calixtus III. The famous miniature Bible of Urbino is written by a Frenchman, a workman of Vespasiano’s. See D’Agincourt, La Peinture, tab. 78. On German copyists in Italy, see further G. Campori, Artisti Italiani e Stranieri negli Stati Estensi, Modena, 1855, p. 277, and Giornale di Erudizione Artistica, vol. ii. pp. 360 sqq. Wattenbach, Schriftwesen, 411, note 5. For German printers, see below.

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447

Vespas. Fior. p. 335.

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