Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 | Page 4

the Republics of Genoa, Lucca, Siena; the Duchy of Ferrara, including Modena and Reggio; the Marquisates of Mantua and Montferrat; and the Duchy of Urbino. For our immediate purpose it is not worth taking separate account of the Republic of Pisa, which was practically though not thoroughly enslaved by Florence; or of the despots in the cities of Romagna, the March. Umbria, and the Patrimony of S. Peter, who were being gradually absorbed into the Papal sovereignty. Nor need we at present notice Savoy, Piemonte, and Saluzzo. Although these north-western provinces were all-important through the period of Franco-Spanish wars, inasmuch as they opened the gate of Italy to French armies, and supplied those armies with a base for military operations, the Duchy of Savoy had not yet become an exclusively Italian Power.
The kingdom of Naples, on the death of Alfonso the Magnanimous in 1458, had been separated from Sicily, and passed by testamentary appointment to his natural son Ferdinand. The bastard Aragonese dynasty was Italian in its tastes and interests, though unpopular both with the barons of the realm and with the people, who in their restlessness were ready to welcome any foreign deliverer from its oppressive yoke. This state of general discontent rendered the revival of the old Angevine party, and their resort to French aid, a source of peril to the monarchy. It also served as a convenient fulcrum for the ambitious schemes of conquest which the princes of the House of Aragon in Spain began to entertain. In territorial extent the kingdom of Naples was the most considerable parcel of the Italian community. It embraced the whole of Calabria, Apulia, the Abruzzi, and the Terra di Lavoro; marching on its northern boundary with the Papal States, and having no other neighbors. But though so large and so compact a State, the semifeudal system of government which had obtained in Naples since the first conquest of the country by the Normans, the nature of its population, and the savage dynastic wars to which it had been constantly exposed, rendered it more backward in civilization than the northern and central provinces.
The Papacy, after the ending of the schism and the settlement of Nicholas V. at Rome in 1447, gradually tended to become an Italian sovereignty. During the residence of the Popes at Avignon, and the weakness of the Papal See which followed in the period of the Councils (Pisa, Constance, and Basel), it had lost its hold not only on the immediate neighborhood of Rome, but also on its outlying possessions in Umbria, the Marches of Ancona, and the Exarchate of Ravenna. The great Houses of Colonna and Orsini asserted independence in their principalities. Bologna and Perugia pretended to republican government under the shadow of noble families; Bentivogli, Bracci, Baglioni. Imola, Faenza, Forlì, Rimíni, Pesaro, Urbino, Camerino, Città di Castello, obeyed the rule of tyrants, who were practically lords of these cities though they bore the titles of Papal vicars, and who maintained themselves in wealth and power by exercising the profession of condottieri. It was the chief object of the Popes, after they were freed from the pressing perils of General Councils, and were once more settled in their capital and recognized as sovereigns by the European Powers, to subdue their vassals and consolidate their provinces into a homogeneous kingdom. This plan was conceived and carried out by a succession of vigorous and unscrupulous Pontiffs--Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X.--throughout the period of distracting foreign wars which agitated Italy. They followed for the most part one line of policy, which was to place the wealth and authority of the Holy See at the disposal of their relatives, Riarios, Delia Roveres, Borgias, and Medici. Their military delegates, among whom the most efficient captain was the terrible Cesare Borgia, had full power to crush the liberties of cities, exterminate the dynasties of despots, and reduce refractory districts to the Papal sway. For these services they were rewarded with ducal and princely titles, with the administration of their conquests, and with the investiture of fiefs as vassals of the Church. The system had its obvious disadvantages. It tended to indecent nepotism; and as Pope succeeded Pope at intervals of a few years, each bent on aggrandizing his own family at the expense of those of his predecessors and the Church, the ecclesiastical States were kept in a continual ferment of expropriation and internal revolution. Yet it is difficult to conceive how a spiritual Power like the Papacy could have solved the problem set before it of becoming a substantial secular sovereignty, without recourse to this ruinous method. The Pope, a lonely man upon an ill-established throne, surrounded by rivals whom his elevation had disappointed, was compelled to rely on the strong arm of adventurers with whose interests his