Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy .............................................................................................................1

Jacob Burckhardt.....................................................................................................................................1

Part I. THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART...........................................................................................2

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................................2

Despots of the Fourteenth Century..........................................................................................................4

Despots of the Fifteenth Century.............................................................................................................6

The Smaller Despotisms........................................................................................................................10

The Greater Dynasties ............................................................................................................................13

The Opponents of the Despots ...............................................................................................................19

The Republics: Venice and Florence.....................................................................................................21

Foreign Policy ........................................................................................................................................30

War as a Work of Art .............................................................................................................................32

The Papacy .............................................................................................................................................34

Patriotism...............................................................................................................................................42

Part Two. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL .................................................................42

Personality.............................................................................................................................................42

Glory......................................................................................................................................................46

Ridicule and Wit....................................................................................................................................49

Part Three. The Revival of Antiquity....................................................................................................54

Introductory ............................................................................................................................................54

The Ruins of Rome................................................................................................................................56

The Classics...........................................................................................................................................59

The Humanists.......................................................................................................................................62

Universities and Schools ........................................................................................................................65

Propagators of Antiquity ........................................................................................................................71

Epistolography: Latin Orators ................................................................................................................75

The Treatise, and History in Latin.........................................................................................................79

Antiquity as the Common Source ..........................................................................................................82

NeoLatin Poetry ...................................................................................................................................84

Fall of the Humanists in the Sixteenth Century .....................................................................................89

PART FOUR. THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN...............................................93

Journeys of the Italians..........................................................................................................................93

The Natural Sciences in Italy .................................................................................................................94

Discovery of the Beauty of the Landscape............................................................................................97

Discovery of Man................................................................................................................................100

Biography in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance.......................................................................108

Description of the Outward Man.........................................................................................................113

Description of Human Life..................................................................................................................115

Part Five. SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS............................................................................................117

Equality of Classes ...............................................................................................................................117

Costumes and Fashions ........................................................................................................................120

Language and Society ..........................................................................................................................123

Social Etiquette ...................................................................................................................................124

Education of the 'Cortigiano' ................................................................................................................126

Music...................................................................................................................................................127

Equality of Men and Women ...............................................................................................................128

Domestic Life .......................................................................................................................................130

Festivals...............................................................................................................................................131

Part Six. MORALITY AND RELIGION............................................................................................139

Morality and Judgement......................................................................................................................139

Morality and Immorality ......................................................................................................................140

Religion in Daily Life..........................................................................................................................149

Strength of the Old Faith.....................................................................................................................158

Religion and the Spirit of the Renaissance..........................................................................................161

Influence of Ancient Superstition........................................................................................................167

General Spirit of Doubt ........................................................................................................................178

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 civilization present a different

picture; and in treating of a civilization which is the mother of our own, and whose influence is still at work

among us, it is unavoidable that individual judgement 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 is granted us, and if this book

be taken and judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty of the history of civilization 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 to fulfill only 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 organized 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, with its creatures and allies, was strong enough to hinder national unity in the future, but

not strong enough itself to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a multitude of political

unitsrepublics and despotsin part of long standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded

simply on their power to maintain it. 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 egotism, 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 historythe 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 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 Il. 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 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 centralized, in a

manner hitherto unknown in the West, the whole judicial and political administration. 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. 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 examples of Mohammedan rules 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 all 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 Lucera 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

At the side of the centralizing Emperor appeared a usurper of the most peculiar kind; his vicar and

soninlaw, 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 Cesare 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

It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, 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. 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. In them 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

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 organized with a view to this

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. The chief secret of government in the hands of the prudent ruler lay in

leaving the incidence of taxation as 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 wellplanned confiscation was held a preferable means of raising money,

provided only that it left public credit unshakenan end attained, for example, by the truly Oriental practice

Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the bodyguard, 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 honorable 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 for 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. 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. 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.

Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the enemywith thy subjects goodwill is

sufficient. By citizens, of course, I mean those who love the existing order; for those who daily desire change

Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction of the omnipotence of the State. The prince is to

take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore churches and public buildings, to keep up the

municipal police, to drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; so to distribute the taxes

that the people can recognize their necessity; 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, like the Visconti, who practiced the fisherman's craft on the Lake of Garda, 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. 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 Agnello of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden scepter, 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. More often, however, the old Florentines speak on this

subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and characterized well the vulgarity and commonplace

which marked the ambition of the new princes. 'What else mean their trumpets and their bells, their horns and

their flutes, but "come, hangmen come, vultures!"' The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is

lofty and solitary, full of dungeons and listeningtubes, the home of cruelty and misery. Misfortune is

foretold to all who enter the service of the despot, 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.' 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

The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the tyrants gave, in the minds of their

contemporaries, a peculiar color to this awful and Godforsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no

longer defend the walls and gates of the plaguestricken 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 Bernabo and the worst of the Roman Emperors is unmistakable; the

most important public object was the prince's boarhunting; 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

powerone of those brilliant plots which make the heart of even late historians beat more quickly was

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 dikes, to divert

in case of need the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua, and thus to render these cities

defenseless. 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 and the cathedral of Milan, 'which exceeds in size

and splendor 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. It would have been strange indeed if a prince of this character had not also cherished the

highest ambitions in political matters. King Wenceslaus made him Duke (1395); he was hoping for nothing

less than the Kingdom of Italy 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 1447), had they lived in a different country and under other traditions, cannot be said. But, as

heirs of their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and cowardice which had been

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 Emperor Valentinian I. 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

Condotierre of the insane ruler, lay in at Pavia, and cut down Giovanni 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 wife to take for a second husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice. We

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

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 Aragonese 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 immunity 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 halfreligious 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 Italians. '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.'

The mediaeval features in the character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long become

unintelligible to the Italians. 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. 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

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. 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 Villani 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. 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 Gabrino Fondolo, was seized with the desire to throw them both over.

On his second visit Sigismund came as a mere adventurer; 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 holidaytrips or

pleasuretours made at the expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity

is 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. At Ferrara, 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. notariescounts, 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 rights to legitimatize 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. 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 some of them with the conventional

acclamations of the poets of imperial Rome. Poggio confessed that he no longer knew what the coronation

meant: in the old times only the victorious Imperator was crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.

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 Lodovico il 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 could be involved no longer. When Louis XI was

expected in Genoa (1507), and the imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal palace and replaced

by painted lilies, the historian Senarega 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

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 Commines 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 Federigo 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 Lionello. The latter had also had a lawful wife, herself an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I of

Naples by an African woman. 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 recognized, which

took no account of pure or impure birth. The fitness of the individual, his worth and 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.' 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. At this time began those morganatic marriages of affection which in the fifteenth century, on

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

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; 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. 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. 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 storyone of those which are true and not true, everywhere and nowheredescribes 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 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 Roberto

Malatesta just after the victory he had won for Sixtus IV (1482); if they failed, the vengeance of the

Venetians on Carmagnola 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 treacher ous 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; 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 honoring in him 'the common father of the

menatarms.' The race of the Sforza has this special interest that from the very beginning of its history we

seem able to trace its endeavors after the crown. 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 thirtieth 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 license of his troops, and reluctantly destroyed or injured a

conquered city. He gave his wellknown mistress, Lucia, the mother of Francesco, in marriage to another, in

order to be free for 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 hardmouthed 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

marvelous, 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

His example was contagious. Aeneas Sylvius wrote about this time: 'In our changeloving Italy, where

nothing stands firm, and where no ancient dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.' One man in

particular, who styles himself 'the man of fortune,' filled the imagination of the whole country: Giacomo

Piccinino, the son of Niccolo;. 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 selfmade 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, recognized their

interest in supporting him: '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 Nuovo. Even the Condottieri who had obtained their dominions by inheritance, never

felt themselves safe. When Roberto Malatesta and Federigo of Urbino died on the same day (1482), the one

at Rome, the other at Bologna, it was found 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, Polissella Ruffo, Countess of Montalto, who

bore him a daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child, and seized the inheritance.

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, monopolized 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; 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; 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

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, 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, Prince of Pesaro, brother of the great Francesco, and

stepfather of Federigo 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 (14631508),

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 lastnamed family

towards the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable historical narratives of Graziani and Matarazzo.

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 recognized 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 t he 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 Communale, thirtyfive 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 nipote of Innocent VIII

was in open day run through in the street. A nipote 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 socalled '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

amour 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 immortalized in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something of

them, it may be, lives eternally in the large 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 greatnephews, Grifone

and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of the two was also nephew of Varano Prince of Camerino, and brotherinlaw

of one of the former exiles, Gerolamo 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 himself 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 pre sent 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

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 Sant' Ercolano,

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

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 daughterinlaw in search of the dying man. All stood aside as

the two women approached, each man shrinking from being recognized 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 bloodstained garments. It was Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards

painted the worldfamous 'Deposition,' with which she laid her own maternal sorrows at the feet of a yet

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

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

twentyseven 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

For a time they seemed to have formed good resolutions, to have brought their own party into power, and to

have protected the public officials against the arbitrary acts of the nobility. But the old curse broke out again

like a smoldering fire. In 1520 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 before 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. 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. We shall meet again with the names of the rulers of

Rimini. Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture have been seldom combined in one

individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta (d. 1467). 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, 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 Cesare Borgia, a sort of epidemic

fell on the petty tyrants; few of them outlived this date, and none to t heir 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 f or himself gave rise to a treatise, the dedication of which bears the date of April of

this year. The postscript is a sad one. 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

A neardespotism, without morals or principles, such as Pandolfo Petrucci exercised from after 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 juris prudence 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 Cesare Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons maintained a qualified supremacy for many

In treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient t discuss the Aragonese, on account of its special

character, apart from the rest. The feudal system, which from the days of the Nor mans had survived in the

form of a territorial supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive color 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, dignified and affable

in intercourse, admired rather than blamed even for his old man's passion for Lucrezia d'Alagno, he had the

one bad quality of extravagance, 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 the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the contributions of the dead. By such

means Alfonso was able to entertain distinguished guests with unrivalled splendor; 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 'Cyropaedeia' into Latin.

Ferrante, who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son by a Spanish lady, but was not improbably the

son of a halfcaste Moor of Valencia. 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, recognized 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 irreconcilable 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 corn; 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 practiced regardless of all rights of property, his

pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in wellguarded prisons, or

dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume which they wore in their lifetime. He would chuckle in talking of

the captives with his friends, and make no secret whatever of the museum of mummies. His victims were

mostly men whom he had got into his power by treachery; some w ere even seized while guests at the royal

table. His conduct to his prime 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 a

suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in

The elder of the King's sons, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years a kind of coregency with his

father. He was a savage, brutal profligate, who in point of frankness alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and

who openly avowed his contempt for religion and its usages. 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 purpose of luxury or display. Even the genuine Spaniards seem to have almost always

degenerated in Italy; but the end of this crossbred 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 onesidedly,

and yet on the whole rightly observes on this occasion, '_Jamais homme cruel ne fut hardi_': there was never

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 (14121447), is a character of peculiar interest, and of which

fortunately an admirable description 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

egotism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by

magnificent gardens, arbors, 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 honorable. 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; 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, and caused his dying favorites 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 soninlaw and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco Sforza (1450 1466), 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 P.et recognize 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. Let us listen t o the

balancesheet of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II, a judge in such matters: '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 h ad won in war, he lost again 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 pervading 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

egotism. Galeazzo Maria (14661476), solicitous only of outward effect, too k 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. 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, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they murdered him, and

thereby delivered the State into the power of his brothers, one of whom, Lodovico il Moro, threw his nephew

into prison, and took the government into his own hands. From this usurpation followed the French

Lodovico Sforza, called 'il Moro,' the Moor, is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a kind

of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgement. Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the

means he employed, he used them with perfect ingenuousness; no o ne 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. In 1486 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. With marvelous presence of mind he weighed, even in his last

extremity (1499), a possible means of escape, and at length he 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. 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 later 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 again st 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. 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. 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 founded 6 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;

Leonardo, 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 Lodovico il Moro, it is found in the long stay of the

enigmatic master at his court. That afterwards Leonardo entered the service of Cesare 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, his sons were badly brought up among strangers. 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 t he change, endeavored 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. It is a f act 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

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.7 The Marquis Francesco Gonzaga 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

of the 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

Cesare Borgia, she felt as a vindication of the honour of Italy. Our judgement 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 (14441482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro or not, Urbino possessed a

brilliant representative of the princely order. As a Condottiere 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.' 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 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; 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

ne ar 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' (pungent prices); public servants of the most various kinds, customhouse

officers, bailiffs (massari), notaries, 'podesta,' judges, and even 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 socalled 'andar per ventura,' in

which they took presents from, at any rate, the more wealthy citizens. The gifts, however, did not consist of

It was the pride of the duke for all Italy to know that at Ferrara the soldiers received their pay and the

professors at 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 (14301471),

by Ercole 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 splendor Borso never appeared but in embroidery

and jewels indulged in no illconsidered 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

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 labored for his own

culture as, for instance, Alfonso I? His travels in France, England, and the Netherlands we re undertaken for

the purpose of study: by means of them he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of

these countries. It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner's work which he practiced 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 up on 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 wellcalculated interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject: personal

admiration was transferred into a new sentiment of duty. The city of Ferrara raised in 1451 a bronze

equestrian statue to their Prince Niccolo, 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.' A citizen who, when abroad in Venice,

had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed against 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, who was anxious to leave no

distinguished stranger unhonored, this regulation served a hospitable purpose; Ercole I 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. An unfailing

means of popularity was the sudden dismissal of oppressive officials. When Borso arrested in person his chief

and confidential counsellors, when Ercole I removed and disgraced a taxgatherer 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, Ercole 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 their ruler for sending away the 'enemy of

God and man.' But Ercole 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 1496 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

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 Lodovico Casella died, no court of law or

place of business in the city, and no lectureroom at the University, was allowed to be open: all had to follow

the body to San 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. 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, on the Death of Leonora of Aragon, wife of Ercole 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 bloodstained scythe, but fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every

fear was allayed.' But we meet, also, with 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, 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 question 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 Leonardo, should paint the mistresses of their patrons was no more than a matter

But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises of others; it undertook to celebrate itself. In the

Palazzo Schifanoia Borso caused himself to be painted in a series of historical representations, and Ercole

(from 1472 on) 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 long expressed at this court by the

Order of the Golden Spur, an order which had nothing in common with medieval chivalry. Ercole I added to

the spur a sword, a goldlaced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which there is no doubt that regular

The patronage of art and letters for which this court has obtained a worldwide 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. Boiardo, 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,

In face of this centralized 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 caps or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like Machiavelli knew well enough that Milan and

Naples were too 'corrupt' for a republic. Strange judgements fell on these two socalled parties, which now

An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim 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

Lodovico il 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 the Guelphs, till Tortona was

utterly laid waste. 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 los e 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 openly: '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; Machiavelli, 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 coldblooded 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 Fabrianese murdered (1435) the members of their ruling house,

the Chiavelli, 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 Lodovico il 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

Giuliano 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

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 t he 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. 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 h* 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 practiced 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!

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 tell us expressly that the conspirators were students of

Sallust, and the fact is indirectly confirmed by the confession of Olgiati. Elsewhere, too, we meet with the

name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern of the conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could

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 Donatello

Judith with the dead Holofernes was taken from their collection and placed before the Palazzo della Signoria,

on the spot where the 'David' of Michelangelo now stands, with the inscription, 'Exemplum salutis publicae

cives posuere 1495. No example was more popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante, 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 Giuliano, Giovanni, and Giulio 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 prison 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 bad 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,8 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 Michelangelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly to ideas of this kind, may be inferred from his

bust of Brutus in the Bargello. He left it unfinished, like nearly all his works, but certainly not because the

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

disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it rather than to combine with others for its destruction.

Things must have been as bad as at Camerino, Fabriano, or Rimini, 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 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 is of opinion that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard

confederation against Barbarossa (from 1168 on) 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 neighbors in a condition of helpless dependence in

short, they each fancied they could get on by themselves without the assistance of the r est, 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. 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

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 recognized itself from the first as a strange and mysterious creation the fruit of a higher power than

human ingenuity. The solemn foundation of the city was the subject of a legend: on March 25, 1413, at

midday, 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, t 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, S 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 6 gold and marble shall arise to Thee.' The island city at the end [' of

the fifteenth century was the jewelcasket of the world. It ; is so described by the same Sabellico, with its

ancient cupolas, [ its leaning towers, its inlaid marble facades, its compressed k splendor, where the richest

decoration did not hinder the y practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the crowded

Piazza before San Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business of the world is transacted, not amid shouting

and confusion, but with the subdued bum of many voices; where in the porticoes round the square 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 i t, 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,

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, 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 inflicted upon it by the discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the

Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed to the frank loquacity of the scholars of his

day, remarks elsewhere with some astonishment, that the young nobles who came of a morning to hear his

lectures could not be prevailed upon 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 imposition 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; the popes, the Italian princes, and even the

secondrate 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 Lodovico il 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

lifepension 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 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. About this time a Soranzo was hanged, though not in 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 into 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

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 labor, 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 conspirators 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 tb^ 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 o ne another pain' should continue at the expense of justice. Nevertheless this free movement in the open

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 S

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 Consiglio, 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. 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

dispatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which Ascanio Sforza was sending to his

brother Lodovico il 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 Consiglio, in other words, before all the

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. Gonzaga of Mantua

alone had as many as I,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 Cambrai (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 aggrandizement. The Venetians, in fact, were not free from the mistake

of those overclever people who will credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate conduct.

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. The League of Cambrai was an event of the same character, in so

far as it was clearly opposed to the interests of the two chief members, Louis XII and Julius II. The hatred of

all Italy against t}e 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 d'Amboise and his king, Venice

ought long before to have recognized 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

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 seignorial 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 balancesheet. 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. The absolute

monarchy of Frederick II in Lower Italy was organized 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

The writers of the time speak of these things with the greatest freedom. 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 'animae,' and thus

to get the most neutral basis for further calculation. About this time, 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 bedside 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 warloan of four million

ducats, the public debt ('il monte') still amounted to six million ducats; the current trade (it seems) to 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. These were 1,000 nobles whose incomes 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.

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 rant. The literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and

especially that enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere. The aptitude of the Venetians,

says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence was in itself not smaller than that for commerce and politics.

George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the Latin translation of Plato's Laws at the feet of the Doge, was

appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and finally dedicated his 'Rhetoric' to the

Signoria. If, however, we look through the history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has

appended to his wellknown book, 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 Manuzio, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance, most scantily represented.

The library which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the State (1468) narrowly escaped dispersion and

destruction. Learning could be had at the University of Padua, where, however, physicians and jurists the

latter for their opinion on points of law 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 deficiencies

were made good. 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. The bodies of saints and other relics imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest

were bought at the greatest sacrifices and received by the Doge in solemn procession.12 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') in a halfclerical character. They were almost all

festivals in memory of political events, and competed in splendor with the great feasts of the Church; the

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 Villani 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 any life shall last.' And besides the

witness to its past, Florence obtained through its historians something further a greater fame than fell to the

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. 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

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 ringing

verses, which will remain proverbial so long as political events of the same kind recur;14 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 newborn political speculation are

in his case not without a poetical grandeur. He is proud to be the first who trod this path,16 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 judgement 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 judgement of Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate these and other arguments of the

same kind, but Dante's passion never fail s to carry us with him. In his letters he appears as one of the earliest

publicists, 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 Eloquentia (About the Vernacular) 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

To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep political reflection 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 economic 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 twentyfive millions of gold florins, would be

incredible on any less trustworthy authority. 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. Most important facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this time:

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 50,000 and the population of

the whole territory; the excess of 300 to 500 male children among the 5,800 to 8,000 annually baptized 18 the

schoolchildren, 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 most valuable details; of the mint, the provisioning of the city, the public officials, and so

on. 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. The economic results of the black death were and could be observed and

described nowhere else in all Europe as in this city.20 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 labor

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 hill 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 'denarii' to every beggar in the city, the attempt is made to give a comprehensive

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 1422 mentions, within the compass of the same document,

the seventytwo 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 Leonardo 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 which date from about the same year, certainly give

evidence of larger property and profit 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 recognize

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. In 1478 we have

again a most important and in its way complete view of the commerce and trades of this city, 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 jewelry and work in gold. The inborn talent of the Florentines for

the systematization 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, although no little study will be needed to extract clear and

definite results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in recognizing the city, where dying parents

begged the government in their wills to fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practice a regular

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. 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.

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 proletariat, limited and unlimited democracy,

pseudodemocracy, 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. At length Machiavelli 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 Machiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the case in his life of

Castruccio Castracania fancy picture of the typical despot. We might find something to say against every

line of the 'Storie 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 Pisaa 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 welltimed dissolution 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

From this evil and from the illstarred Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which

familiarized 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 152930. 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

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, was constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Machiavelli 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 naively fetch their

examples from classical antiquity, and borrow the party names 'ottimati,' 'aristocrazia,' 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 oithor rhnrnotPrimPrl tho rnilqP nt iqqllP or cnrsnz

from the caprice of accident. But how a name colors or discolors a political cause!

But of all who thought it possible to construct a State, the greatest beyond all comparison was Machiavelli.

He treats existing forces as living and active, takes a large and 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 Judgement 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 on us, who have

seen in what sense political morality is understood by the statesmen of our own century. Machiavelli was at

all events able to forget himself in his cause. In truth, although his writing s, with the exception of very few

words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the Florentines themselves treated him at last as a

criminal, 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 program for the construction of a new political system at Florence is set forth in the

memorial to Leo X, 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 recognizes, 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 characterized 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.' 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 un at the wrong

end, and from the first made deadly Pisa, Lucca, and Siena, while Pistoia, 'treated like a brother,' had

It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other republics which still existed in the fifteenth

century and this unique citythe 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. Aeneas Sylvius 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. Genoa scarcely comes within range of our task, as before the

Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher culture.

Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a char acter, 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 all who took part in public affairs were at the

same time almost without exception active men of business. The example of Genoa shows in a striking

manner with what insecurity wealth and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of

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 recognized 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

aggrandizement 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 recognized 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

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. 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, 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

Cambrai actually did strike a serious blow at the State which all Italy ought to have supported with united

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. Lodovico il Moro, the Aragonese kings

of Naples, and Sixtus IVto say nothing of the smaller powers kept Italy in a constant 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

The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of France. Florence had never ceased to

confess with shocking _naivete _its old Guelph preference for the French. 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. In the imagination of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example the

ideal picture of a wise, just, and powerful savior 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 FrancoEnglish 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 if 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 1462. 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. 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 for 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.' 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

Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the expedition of Charles VIII. 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

centralized 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 counterreformation, long held Papacy among its other

subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in

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. From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta nothing better could be

expected than that he should call the Turks into Italy. But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom

Mohammedat the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments, especially of Venicehad once

wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II against the Venetians. The same charge

was brought against Lodovico il 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 Lodovico, had

entertained the Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan. 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. 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 Lodovico il Moro in Constantinople to further a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the

latter threatened him with a Council. It is clear that the notorious alliance between Francis I and Soliman II

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 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 o f this kind, and that Ancona in particular desired it.

When Romagna was suffering from the oppressive government of Leo X, a deputy from Ravenna said openly

to the Legate, Cardinal Giulio Medici: 'Monsignore, the honorable 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.'

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. 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 mediaeval 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 with that of its neighbors 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. 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 selfinterest is shown by the celebrated visit (1478)

which Lorenzo Magnifico, to the universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante at

Naplesa man who would certainly be tempted to keep him a prisoner, and was by no means too scrupulous

to do so. 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 Peronne (1468), seemed madness to the

Italians; 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 pointespecially 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. A man like Machiavelli 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

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.

It must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed the character of a product of reflection.

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 Crecy and Maupertuis. Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of

mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organization; and the early intro duction of firearms

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 gunfounder, and of the artillerist

men belonging to another class than the nobilitywas 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 organized

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

lately been invented in Germany. We read that Paolo Vitelli, while recognizing and himself adopting the

cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of the captured 'schioppettieri' (arquebusiers) 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 build ing of fortifications and in the

means of attacking them. 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

MilanoVenetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of

the latter were attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcellio dei Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of

Naples to write a report of the campaign. 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 Caesar'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, 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. 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 Schilling, still retain the shapelessness

and matter offact dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest _dilettante _who has ever treated in that

character of military affairs, Machiavelli, 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 practiced long before the famous 'Challenge of Barletta' (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 judgement, 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

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 forty days' devastation of Piacenza, which Sforza was compelled

to permit to his soldiers (1477), the town long stood empty, and at last had to be peopled by force. 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

The Papacy and the dominions of the Church 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 Albornoz, 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 shown so little gratitude; their place had been

taken by a crowd of princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty and obedience signified little. As

selfdependent powers, standing on their own merits, they have an interest of their own; and from this point

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 Basle. In Italy

itself there was 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; among them notorious transgressors like Vitelozzo Vitelli, who still prayed to be absolved by

Alexander VI, when the Pope's son had him strangled. 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

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

antipapal radicalism, 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 Porcari against Nicholas V

(1453), the very Pope who had done most for the prosperity of the city. Porcari aimed at the complete

overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices, who, though their names are not handed

down to us, 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

The Catilinarian gang with which Pius II had to (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 accom plishment of his wishes for this very year. Several of the chief men of Rome, the Prince

of Taranto, 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 prelatesthe conspirators had

the Car dinal of Aquileia especially in viewwe 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 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

unheardof proportions, and which extended from the appointment of cardinals down to the granting of the

smallest favours. 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, 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 to

him. 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 endeavors 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 un favour of their relatives, 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 others 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

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, to which his wife belonged.

In the conclave (1484) which followed the death of Sixtus that in which Innocent VIII was electedan

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 Lodovico il Moro, sold their votes with shameless effrontery; 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

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 Cibo, and expected not only favours of all kinds for his own son,

Cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo X, but also the rapid promotion of his soninlaw. 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 allthe acquisition and accumulation of money. The

manner, however, in which father and son practiced this occupation must have led sooner or later to a final

catastrophethe dissolution of the State. If Sixtus had filled his treasury by the sale 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 wellfilled coffers. He betrayed himself at

last, on the occasion of a false report (1490) of his father's death; he endeavored 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. 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. Also 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

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

Cesare; Lucrezia, 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 Cesare in the war of 1500; and even his hangman, Don Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastiano

Pinzon Cremonese, seem to have been of the same nation. Among his other achievements, Cesare, 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. Their immediate purpose, which, in

fact, they attained, was the complete subjugation of the pontifical State. All the petty despots, 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 socalled Guelph Orsini as well as the socalled 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

dangerwhen Charles VIII was in Italywent 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.

The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his

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, and that the seller

would far exceed the simony of the buyer. It must be remembered that the vicechancellorship 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 Cesare 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 Cesare isolated his father, murdering brother,

brotherinlaw, 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 bestloved son, the Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly dread of Cesare.

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. But no one will accept this as his ultimate design. The Pope Alexander himself, in his

discussions with the Venetian ambassador, went further 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.' Cesare

indeed 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, Cesare's hopes of the Papacy are chiefly spoken of; but now and then a supremacy

over all Italy is hinted at, and finally we are given to understand that as temporal ruler Cesare's projects were

of the greatest, and that for their sake he had formerly surrendered his cardinalate. In fact, there can be no

doubt whatever that Cesare, 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 secularized the States of the

Church, and he would have been forced to do so in order to keep them. Unless we are much deceived, this is

the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Machiavelli treats the great criminal; from Cesare, or from

nobody, could it be hoped that he 'would draw the steel from the wound,' in other words, annihilate the

Papacythe source of all foreign intervention and of all the divisions of Italy. The intriguers who thought to

divine Cesare's aims, when holding out to him hopes of the Kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been

But all logical conclusions from his premises are idle, not because of the unaccountable genius, which in fact

characterized him as little as it did Wallenstein, 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

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 Leonardo da Vinci as chief engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1502, other facts

nevertheless bear such a character of unreason that our judgement, 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 newlywon

State, which Cesare still intended to keep and to rule over. 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, 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 Capello reported in the year 1500: 'Every night four or five murdered

men are discoveredbishops, prelates and othersso that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed

by the Duke (Cesare).' He himself used to wander about Rome in the nighttime with his guards, 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 persons

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 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 powder 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. The official

epitomizer of the history of the Popes, Onofrio Panvinio, mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio and

Michiel, whom Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth, Giovanni Borgia, whom Cesare 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 scholars 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 I 500, when

these phenomena were repeated, they were held to be 'cosa diabolica.' The report of these events seems at

last, through the wellattended jubilee 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.

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, '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 Cesare have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not

himself been laid upon a sickbed! 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

poisonand this at a time when there was no French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the

Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III was elected, and, after his speedy death, that which

Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II, in all essential respects he was the savior 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 favorites, 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 the Church. The 700,000 ducats which were stored up in the

Castel Sant' 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. 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 per sonality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If

despite all his highsounding '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, 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 goodwill, made on the whole the impression most desirable in his situationthat of the 'Pontefice

terribile.' 26 He could even, with 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 entry into Bologna, at the

end of the 'Iter Julii Secundi' by the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendor of its own, and Giovan

Antonio Flaminio, in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to

In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced the simony of the Papal elections.

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 bestendowed cardinal, the incompetent Raphael Riario. 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 Sauli, Riario, and Corneto (1517), which at most could

have occasioned a change of and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheardof creation of

thirtyone new cardinals, a measure which additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real

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 endeavored 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. 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 secularize 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 hardwon conquests to the Church. He did on compulsion and without credit what, if

it had been done voluntarily, would have been to his lasting honour. What 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. Who could guarantee that, since the last decades had seen so great an increase of their power at home,

their ambition would 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 to laying the Pope under contribution, 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. Meantime Luther had already appeared upon the scene.

Under Adrian VI (15211523), 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

Under Clement VII the whole horizon of Rome was filled with vapors, like that leaden veil which the sirocco

drew over the Campagna, and which made the last months of summer so deadly. The Pope was no less

detested at home than abroad. Thoughtful people were filled with anxiety, 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; the faction of the Colonna raised its head defiantly; the indomitable Cardinal Pompeo Colonna,

whose mere existence 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 Castel Sant' Angelo, and the fate

for which he 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 GermanoSpanish army under Bourbon and Frundsberg (1527). It is certain 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

Charles seems to have wished to bring the Pope, who had fled a second time to the Castel Sant' 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. Whether the Emperor ever thought seriously of the

secularization of the States of the Church, for which every body 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

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

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 right 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, forbade the

scheme. 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, 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

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

secularizationthe 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

worldwide 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 aggrandizement, and which, in alliance with the Catholic

princes, and impelled by a newborn 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 Reformationif, indeed, it is possible to think it awaythe

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

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, 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 recognized in the Emperor one supreme head. The first patriotic utterances of German

literature, if we except some verses of the 'Minnesanger,' belong to the humanists of the time of Maximilian I

and after, and read like an echo of Italian declamations. 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. 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. The sense of local patriotism may be said in some measure to have taken the place of this feeling,

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 firstborn among the sons of modern

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousnessthat 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 a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporationonly 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, _recognized himself as such. In the same way

the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arab 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

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 tenth century described to us by Liudprand, some of the contemporaries of Gregory VII (for example,

Benzo of Alba), 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 ban 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 artthis manysided representation and criticismwill be discussed in separate chapters;

here we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself. This fact appears in the most decisive and

unmistakable 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 seeming unlike his neighbors.

Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or

Condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used as his toolsthe 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

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 vigor 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 favored 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

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,

acquired so marked a personal character that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to them in

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 economy is the first complete

programme of a developed private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and

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 Gioviano Pontano, '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, be

cause they found its political or economic condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the

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.' 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.' The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the

constraints of fixed residence. 'Only he who has learned everything,' says Ghiberti,'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,

An acute and practiced 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 il 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

When this impulse to the highest individual development was combined with a powerful and varied nature,

which had mastered all the elements of the culture of the age, then arose the 'allsided man''l'uomo

universale'who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were of encyclopedic 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 practiced, were masters of a vast circle of spiritual

Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a philosopher, by others a theologian,

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 wordsare not the most weighty of his time. For the visual arts he is of the

first importance, and this for better reasons than the few references to contemporary artistshe soon became

The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the manysided 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; 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 is

now, to the theoretical knowledge of classical antiquity, but had to serve the practical needs of daily life.

While studying Pliny, 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 Dot 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 diplomatistnot always to his own

But among these manysided men, some, who may truly be called all sided, tower above the rest. Before

analyzing 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).

His biography, 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

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, crossexamining artists, scholars and artisans of all descriptions, down to the

cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he practiced by the way,

and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited by his

mysterious 'camera obscura,' 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. 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

dinnerspeeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life in four books; and even a funeral oration

on his dog. 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 cornfields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he

honored as 'a delight of nature,' and could never look at them enough. Perfectly formed animals won his

goodwill as being specially favored by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful

landscape cured him. 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 that of the Popes many years beforehand, and to be able to read in 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 Leonardo 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

To this inward development of the individual corresponds a new sort of outward distinctionthe modern

In the other countries of Europe the different classes of society lived apart, each with its own medieval caste

sense of honour. The poetical fame of the Troubadours and Minnesanger 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 not zealously studied, are filled and saturated with the conception of fame,

and that their subject itselfthe 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

Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called is Dante. He strove for the poet's garland

with all the power of his soul.33 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.34 But in his prose

writings he touches also 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. And in his great poem he firmly maintains the emptiness

of fame, although in a manner which betrays that his heart was not free from the longing for it. In Paradise

the sphere of Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones 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, while those in Purgatory only entreat his prayers and those of others for their

deliverance.37 And in a famous passage, the passion for fame'lo gran disio dell'eccellenza' (the great desire

of excelling)is reproved for the reason that intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to the times, and

The new race of poetscholars 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 Mussatus, 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, it seems, with

burning tapers, to salute him and bring him presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he fell into disgrace

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' 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. In his dialogue on

fortune and misfortune, 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 Byzantium knows him as well by his writings as

Charles IV 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. 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 Portincula of St. Francis near Assisi; and one

or two great jurists so enjoyed the halfmythical 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'

(died in 1260), but, nevertheless, suffered it to be destroyed. It is probable that the great incomes and the

political influence which some jurists obtained as consulting lawyers made a lasting impression on the

To the cult of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of their graves, and, in the case of Petrarch,

of the spot where he died. In memory of him Arqua became a favorite resort of the Paduans, and was dotted

with graceful little villas. 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 Crocelabored 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. Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo il 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 content with erecting a cenotaph. And even Dante,

in spite of all the applications to which Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis, remained

sleeping tranquilly in San Francesco at Ravenna, 'among ancient tombs of emperors and vaults of saints, in

more honorable company than thou, O Florence, 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 there by the grave, with the

words, 'Take them; thou art more worthy of them than He, the Crucified One! ' (Franco Sacchetti, Novella

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.

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. 'Sulmona,' says Boccaccio, '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,

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, was shown to strangers,

like the 'Scuola di Virgilio' at Naples. Como claimed both the Plinys for its own, and at the end of the

fifteenth century erected statues in their honour, sitting under graceful baldachins on the facade of the

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

In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and of the bones and relics in their churches. With

these the panegyrist of Padua in 1450, Michele Savonarola, 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. 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 chessboard; the Emperor Henry IV, who built

the cathedral; a King Marcus, whose head was preserved in Monselice; 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 Abano; 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. It is nevertheless honorable 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

Gattemelata of Narni (d. 1443), whose brazen equestrian statue, 'like a Caesar in triumph,' already stood by

the church of the Santo. The author then names a crowd of jurists and physicians, 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, and in conclusion the name of a fencingmaster 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

pseudoSuetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch _(Mulierum virtutes), _Jerome _(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

threefourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages. 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 I Fazio, and lastly of Paolo Giovio.

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

The poetscholar 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. Boccaccio complains of a fair one to whom he had done

homage, and who remained hardhearted 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. Sannazaro, in two magnificent sonnets,

threatens Alfonso of Naples with eternal obscurity on account of his cowardly flight before Charles VIII.

Angelo Poliziano seriously exhorts (1491) King John of Portugal 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, to a new quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio, with all his superficiality and graceful

caprice, promised himself immortality, 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, regardless of all means and

consequences. Thus, in the preface to Machiavelli's Florentine history, in which he blames his predecessors

Leonardo, 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. 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, Machiavelli conceives the character of Stefano Porcari; of the murderers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza

(1476), 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. Still more

stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio. Lorenzino, according to him, pilloried by a pamphlet of Molza,

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

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. 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 Minnesanger, as their political poems show, could adopt this tone when necessary.

But wit could not be an independent element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual with

personal pretensions, had appeared. Its weapons were then by no means limited to the tongue and the pen, but

included tricks and practical jokes the socalled 'burle' and 'beffe' which form a chief subject of many

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; 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, must be called the chief master of colossal comedy. With Petrarch 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 _naivete,_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 naivete

with conventional morality and the ordinary relations of the worldthings 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 Condottieri 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. The

inventors and retailers of jokes soon became inevitable figures, and among them there must have been some

who were classical far superior to all the mere courtjesters, 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, 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, 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 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

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 courtfool 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 halfmythical 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, colored and

shaped by local influences. But if the comparison be allowed, and extended to the jests of the nonItalian

nations, we shall find in general that the joke in the French _fabliaux, _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 courtfool of the Este retaliated more than once by his keen satire and refined

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 jackpuddings, among them two monks and a cripple; at public feasts he treated them

with deliberate scorn as parasites, setting before them monkeys and crows in the place of savory meats. Leo,

indeed, showed a peculiar fondness for the 'burla'; it belonged to his nature sometimes to treat his own

favorite pursuits music and poetryironically, parodying them with his factotum, Cardinal Bibbiena.

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 feast of St. Cosmas and St. 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 Emmanuel the Great of Portugal, while the

Pope looked down from above through his eyeglass. The brute, however, was so terrified by the noise of the

trumpets and kettledrums, and the cheers of the crowd, that there was no getting him over the bridge of Sant'

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. It was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of

Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedians 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 lovelorn 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 il Magnifico wrote the most admirable

travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in

his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a halfconscious 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 Coccaius he described the journeys and exploits of his fantastic vagabonds (also in the same spirit

of parody) in halfLatin 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

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. In his work on

speaking, especially in the third and fourth books, he tries by means of the comparison of numerous jokes or

'facetiae' to arrive at a general principle. How wit should be used among people of position is taught by

Baldassare Castiglione in his 'Cortigiano.' 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 wrongdoers, and make enemies of the

powerful and the spoiled children of fortune; 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; 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

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 wayFilelfo, 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

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. An easygoing contempt of everything and

everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society. Machiavelli, in the remarkable prologue to his

'Mandragola,' refers rightly or wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general habit of

evilspeaking, 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 'Facetiae' are dated from the Chamber of Lies _(bugiale) _of the apostolic notaries; and when we

remember the number of disappointed placehunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of the favorites, 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 widespread hatred borne to the

priests, and the wellknown instinct of the mob to lay any horror to the charge of the great, there results an

untold mass of infamy. Those who were able, protected themselves best by contempt both of the false and

true accusations, and by brilliant and joyous display. More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when they

found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more deeply in slander. 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, 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. 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 scapegoat 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. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco Berni, threatening to have thrown into

the Tiber not, as people said, 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; 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; Berni and others sketch the environment

of the Pope 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 anyone who can read between the lines an

unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous at least for the Italians of that timeto hear how Adrian

applied to the Chapter of Saragossa for the jawbone 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 be died of

drinking too much beerwhereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by midnight

revellers, and adorned with the inscription, 'Liberatori Patriae 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. 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

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

We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life, (152756), 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. Venice, which sheltered him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed. The rest of

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

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 wellknown motto, 'Veritas odium parit.' He never, conse quently, 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

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, but to forgive, at the

moment when the wailings of the devastated city were ascending to the Castel Sant' 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. 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, 1545, is alone

of its kind; along with all the admiration he expresses for the 'Last Judgement' 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 menthat 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. 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, 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 nonItalians he was grossly

fulsome; 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, which he

did liberally, considering his habitual parsimonyto the extent, at least, of 160 ducats a yearhe 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 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

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. 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

It is a good sign for 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.

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 onesidedly 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

colored 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 the visual arts, as well as in other spheres, it is remarkably great; and

hence the alliance between two distant epochs in the civilization 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 mediaeval faith and civilization. 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 thisthat 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 antipopular, 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 recognized, 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 civilization 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 tendenciesthis civilization had long been exerting a partial influence on

mediaeval Europe, even beyond the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charlemagne 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

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 civilization; 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 civilization, and the influence of religion

and the Churchcombined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which was destined to serve as the model

How antiquity influenced the visual arts, 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 keynote of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We mean the author of the best

pieces in the socalled '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. 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' and the 'Aestuans Interius' can have been a northerner

as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom we owe 'Dum Diana 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 medieval

form of the verse in which it is set forth. careful imitation of the antique appears both in the hexameter and

pentameter of the meter and in the classical, often myth ological, character of the subject, and which yet

have not anything like the same spirit of antiquity about them. In the hexametric chronicles and other works

of Guglielmus Apuliensis and his successors (from about 1100), we find frequent trace of a diligent study of

Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and Claudian; but this classical form is, after all, a mere matter of archaeology,

as is the classical subject in compilers like Vincent of Beauvais, or in the mythological and allegorical writer,

Alanus ab Insulis. The Renaissance, however, is not a 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 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 civilization, with its wealth of truth and knowledge in every spiritual interest. Both the form

and the substance of this civilization were adopted with admiring gratitude; it became the chief part of the

culture of the age. The general condition of the country was favourable to this transformation. The medieval

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 existing 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 worldwide 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 fullness, but in its most salient

Rome itself, the city of ruins, now became the object of a holly different sort of piety from that of the time

when the 'Mirabilia Roma' and the collection of William of Malmesbury ere composed. The imaginations of

the devout pilgrim, or of the seeker after marvels 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, 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 brought back from the jubilee of the year 1300 was the

resolution to write his history which bad 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, 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 these

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

This double current of feeling is also recognizable in the 'Dittamondo' of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about

the year 1360a 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 Aracoeli and of Santa Maria in Trastevere are mentioned.

Still, the pagan splendor of ancient Rome unmistakably exercises a greater charm upon them. A venerable

matron in torn garmentsRome herself is meanttells them of the glorious past, and gives them a minute

description of the old triumphs; she then leads the strangers through the city, and points out to them the seven

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 bestpreserved

of the ruins. 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

In Poggio's walks through Rome the study of the remains themselves is for the first time more intimately

combined with that of the ancient authors and inscriptionsthe latter he sought out from among all the

vegetation in which they were imbeddedthe 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 Caecilia 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.' The inhabitants of that day, in their

peasant's cloaks and boots, looked to foreigners like cowherds; and in fact the cattle were pastured in the city

up to the Banchi. The only social gatherings were the services at church, on which occasion it was possible

In the last years of Eugenius IV (d. 1447) Biondus 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

With Nicholas V (14471455) 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, 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. It is true that, both as priest and

cosmographer, he was 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 Otriculum, and whatever he saw he noted down. He

followed the Roman roads and aqueducts, and tried to fix the boundaries of the old tribes which had 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 socalled 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.

Nor was the enthusiasm for the classical past of Italy confined at this period to the capital. Boccaccio had

already called the vast ruins of Baia 'old walls, yet new for modern spirits'; and since his 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) travelled not only through Italy, but through other countries of the old Orbis

terrarum, and brought back countless inscriptions and sketches. When asked why he took all this trouble, he

replied, 'To wake the dead.' 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 colonization which started

from the capital; 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 Viterbo he

said frankly to the Roman deputies who begged him to return, 'Rome is as much my 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 'neas 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 had led a

colony to Parma, and whose successors had been driven by party conflicts to migrate to Venice. 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 novelist Bandello tried

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 on April 18, 1485, that the corpse of a

young Roman lady of the classical periodwonderfully beautiful and in perfect preservation had been

discovered. Some Lombard masons digging out an ancient tomb on an estate of the convent of Santa Maria

Nuova, on the Appian Way, beyond the tomb of Caecilia 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 colors 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 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 colored 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 harmonize 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

Meanwhile the material knowledge of old Rome was increased by excavations. Under Alexander VI the

socalled 'Grotesques,' that is, the mural decorations of the ancients, were discovered, and the Apollo of the

Belvedere was found at Porto d'Anzio. Under Julius II followed the memorable discoveries of the Laocoon,

of the Venus of the Vatican, of the Torso of the Cleopatra. 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 (or Castiglione's) celebrated letter (1518 or 1519) speaks of. 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 judgement 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 archaeology

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 him, 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. 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. The Rome of Leo, as described by Paolo Giovio, forms a picture too splendid to turn away from,

unmistakable as are also its darker aspectsthe 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. 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 longabandoned hope of

Medicean protection, were the baits which really attracted him, if he were again asked to go as Ferrarese

But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only archaeological zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but

an elegiac of sentimental melancholy. In Petrarch and Boccaccio we find touches of this feeling. Poggio

Bracciolini often visited the temple of Venus and Roma, 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, and soon afterwards (1467) appeared the first pictures of ruins, with a commentary by Polifilo. Ruins of

mighty arches and colonnades, half hid in planetrees, 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. That artificial ruins became afterwards a necessity of landscape gardening

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 often

been set forth; no more can here be attempted than to point out a few lessknown features of the picture.

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 bad long been known than to the discovery of much

that was new. The most popular latin poets, historians, orators and letterwriters, to gether 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 favored 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, vas made at Petrarch's

suggestion, and with Boccaccio's help, by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato. But with the fifteenth century

began the long list of new discoveries, the systematic creation of libraries by means of copies, and the rapid

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. 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 6,000 volumes, 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, 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

The Florentine Niccolo Niccoli, 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 later

books of Ammianus Marcellinus, the 'De Oratore' of Cicero, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy

the best manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lubeck. 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

Of the two great bookfinders, Guarino and Poggio, the latter, on the occasion of the Council of Constance

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. Gallen, now at Zurich; in

thirtytwo 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 Leonardo Aretino he unearthed the last twelve

The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion, in whom patriotism was mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a

great sacrifice, 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

The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history of its own, into which we cannot here enter.

The chief collector for Lorenzo il 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

The library of Urbino, now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of the great Federigo of Montefeltro. 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 Bonaventura. The collection, however,

was a manysided one, and included every work on medicine which was then to be had. Among the

'moderns' the great writers of the fourteenth centuryDante and Boccaccio, with their complete

worksoccupied the first place. Then followed twentyfive 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 codex must have quickly disappeared from Urbino, else the philologists

We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which manuscripts and libraries were

multiplied. 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 honorable name of 'scrittori.' Their number was always limited, and the pay they

received very large. 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. The copyists

at Rome in the time of Nicholas V were mostly Germans or Frenchmen'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 favorite

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

fortyfive writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twentytwo months. The catalogue of the works to be

copied was sent to Cosimo by Nicholas V, who wrote it with his own hand. Ecclesiastical literature and the

books needed for the choral services naturally held the chief place in the list.

The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in use in the preceding century, and

which makes the sight of one of the books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V, Poggio, Gianozzo

Manetti, Niccolo Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves wrote a beautiful hand, and desired

and tolerated none other. The decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were full of

taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts, with the light and graceful scrolls which begin

and end the lines. The material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy people, was

always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver

clasps. Where there was so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of its outward

form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of printed books was greeted at first with anything but

But the weary copyistsnot those who lived by the trade, but the many who were forced to copy a book in

order to have itrejoiced at the German invention. It was soon applied in Italy to the multiplication first of

the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and for a long period nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no

means the rapidity which might have been expected from the general enthusiasm for these works. After a

while the modern relation between author and publisher began to develop itself, and under Alexander VI,

when it was no longer easy to destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo promise to do, the prohibitive

The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the advancing study of languages and antiquity belongs

as little to the subject of this book as the history of scholarship in general. We are here occupied, not with the

learning of the Italians in itself, but with the reproduction of antiquity in literature and life. One word more on

Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth

centuries. The impulse which had proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio, superficial as was their own

acquaintance with Greek, was powerful, but did not tell immediately on their contemporaries, except a few;

on the other hand, the study of Greek literature died out about the year 1520 with the last of the colony of

learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of fortune that northerners like Erasmus, the Stephani, and

Budaeus had meanwhile made themselves masters of the language. That colony had begun with Manuel

Chrysoloras and his relation John, and with George of Trebizond. Then followed, about and after the time of

the conquest of Constantinople, John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios Chalcondylas, who brought up

his sons Theophilos and Basilios to be excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros and the

family of Lascaris, not to mention others. But after the subjection of Greece by the Turks was completed, the

succession of scholars was maintained only by the sons of the fugitives and perhaps here and there by some

Candian or Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic studies began about the time of the death of Leo X

was due partly to a general change of intellectual attitude, and to a certain satiety of classical influences

which now made itself felt; but its coincidence with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly a matter

of accident. The study of Greek among the Italians appears, if we take the year 1500 as our standard, to have

been pursued with extraordinary zeal. Many of those who then learned the language could still speak it half a

century later, in their old age, like the Popes Paul III and Paul IV. But this sort of mastery of the study

Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained paid teachers of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara,

Venice, Perugia, Pavia and other cities occasional teachers. Hellenistic studies owed a priceless debt to the

press of Aldo Manuzio at Venice, where the most important and voluminous writers were for the first time

printed in the original. Aldo ventured his all in the enterprise; he was an editor and publisher whose like the

Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now assumed considerable proportions. The controversial

writings of the great Florentine statesman and scholar, Giannozzo Manetti (d. 1459) against the Jews afford

an early instance of a complete mastery of their language and science. His son Agnolo was from his

childhood instructed in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The father, at the bidding of Nicholas V, translated the

whole Bible afresh, as the philologists of the time insisted on giving up the 'Vulgata.'

Many other humanists devoted themselves before Reuchlin to the study of Hebrew, among them Pico della

Mirandola, who was not satisfied with a knowledge of the Hebrew grammar and ScriptureS, but penetrated

into the Jewish Cabbalah and even made himself as familiar with the literature of the Talmud as any Rabbi.

Among the Oriental languages, Arabic was studied as well as Hebrew. The science of medicine, no longer

satisfied with the older Latin translations of the great Arab physicians, had constant recourse to the originals,

to which an easy access was offered by the Venetian consulates in the East, where Italian doctors were

regularly kept. Hieronimo Ramusio, a Venetian physician, translated a great part of Avicenna from the

Arabic and died at Damascus in 1486. Andrea Mongaio of Belluno lived long at Damascus for the purpose of

studying Avicenna, learnt Arabic, and emended the author's text. The Venetian government afterwards

We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before passing on to the general effects of

humanism. He was the only man who loudly and vigorously defended the truth and science of all ages against

the onesided worship of classical antiquity. He knew how to value not only Averroes and the Jewish

investigators, but also the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their writings. In

one of his writings he makes them say, 'We shall live for ever, not in the schools of wordcatchers, but in the

circle of the wise, where they talk not of the mother of Andromache or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper

causes of things human and divine; he who looks closely will see that even the barbarians had intelligence

_(mercurium), _not on the tongue but in the breast.' Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant Latin, and a

master of clear exposition, he despised the purism of pedants and the current overestimate of borrowed

forms, especially when joined, as they often are, with one sidedness, and involving indifference to the wider

truth of the things themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at the lofty flight which Italian philosophy

would have taken had not the counterreformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the people.

Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a venerated antiquity, and made the

They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face today and another tomorrow; but they

clearly felt themselves, and it was fully recognized by their time that they formed, a wholly new element in

society. The 'clerici vagantes' of the twelfth century may perhaps be taken as their forerun nersthe same

unstable existence, the same free and more than free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same

pagan tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which

was essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilization, founding itself on

that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential because they

knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think,

and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a

Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far more independent and essentially national

culture, such as appeared in Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so completely swamped by the

humanists. There was then, we are told, nobody in Florence who could not read; even the donkeymen sang

the verses of Dante; the best Italian manuscripts which we possess belonged originally to Florentine artisans;

the publication of a popular encyclopedia, like the 'Tesoro' of Brunetto Latini, was then possible; and all this

was founded on d strength and soundness of character due to the universal participation in public affairs, to

commerce and travel, and to the systematic reprobation of idleness. The Florentines, it is urged, were at that

time respected and influential throughout the whole world, and were called in that year, not without reason,

by Pope Boniface VIII, 'the fifth element.' The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralysed

native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and

consequently allowed literature to turn into mere quotation. Nay, the very fall of civil freedom is partly

ascribed to all this, since the new learning rested on obedience to authority, sacrificed municipal rights to

These charges will occupy us now and then at a later stage of our inquiry, when we shall attempt to reduce

them to their true value, and to weigh the losses against the gains of this movement. For the present we must

confine ourselves to showing how the civilization even of the vigorous fourteenth century necessarily

prepared the way for the complete victory of humanism, and how precisely the greatest representatives of the

national Italian spirit were themselves the men who opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to

To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius had presided over Italian culture, whatever

elements their natures might have absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a characteristic

and stronglymarked national stamp. But neither Italy nor Western Europe produced another Dante, and he

was and remained the man who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture. In the 'Divine

Comedy' he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one

another. Just as, at an earlier period of the Middle Ages, types and anti types were sought in the history of

the Old and New Testaments, so does Dante constantly bring together a Christian and a pagan illustration of

the same fact. It must be remembered that the Christian cycle of history and legend was familiar, while the

ancient was relatively unknown, was full of promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the

upper hand in the competition for public sympathy when there was no longer a Dante to hold the balance

Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a great Italian poet, owed his fame

among his contemporaries far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that he

imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavored by his voluminous historical and philosophical writings not to

supplant but to make known the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on matters of

antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an

It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was known of the 'Decameron' north of the

Alps, he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology, geography

and biography. One of these, 'De Genealogia Deorum,' contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a

remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the

age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to 'poesie,' as closer observation shows that he means

thereby the whole mental activity of the poetscholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously

combatsthe frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical

theologian, to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy

lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars,

described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality.

Then follows the defence of poetry, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings

which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull

And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work, the writer justifies the new relation in which his

age stood to paganism. The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to fight its way

among the heathen. Nowpraised be Jesus Christ !true religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed,

and the victorious Church in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and study paganism

almost _(fere) _without danger. This is the argument invariably used in later times to defend the Renaissance.

There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of men to maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause

ought not to have stopped short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately, and conceded the

first place to purely national elements of culture. No conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind

There was a symbolical ceremony peculiar to the first generation of poetscholars which lasted on into the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired itthe coronation of the

poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this custom in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the

ceremony never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and visible expression of literary

enthusiasm, and naturally its form was variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the sense

of a halfreligious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like

thousands of other Florentine children, he had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have

anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore

died uncrowned. From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held to be

inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The most recent source to which the practices could be

referred is to be found in the Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists, founded by Domitian

in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five years, which may possibly have survived for a time the

fall of the Roman Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante desired to do,

the question arises, to whom did this office belong? Albertino Mussato was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the

bishop and the rector of the University. The University of Paris, the rector of which was then a Florentine

(1341), and the municipal authorities of Rome, competed for the honour of crowning Petrarch. His

selfelected examiner, King Robert of Anjou, would have liked to perform the ceremony at Naples, but

Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This honour was long the highest

object of ambition, and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the

Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the

ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Start ing from the fiction that the coronation of poets

was a prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently was no less his own, he crowned (May 15,

1355) the Florentine scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to

recognize this 'laurea Pisana' as legitimate. Indeed, it might be fairly asked with what right this stranger, half

Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgement on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the emperors

crowned poets wherever they went on their travels; and in the fifteenth century the popes and other princes

assumed the same right, till at last no regard whatever was paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under

Sixtus IV, the academy of Pomponius L'tus gave the wreath on its own authority. The Florentines had the

good taste not to crown their famous humanists till after death. Carlo Aretino and Leonardo Aretino were

thus crowned; the eulogy of the first was pronounced by Matteo Palmieri, of the latter by Giannozzo Manetti,

before the members of the council and the whole people, the orator standing at the head of the bier, on which

the corpse lay clad in a silken robe. Carlo Aretino was further honoured by a tomb in Santa Croce, which is

The influence of antiquity on culture, of which we have now to speak, presupposes that the new learning had

gained possession of the universities. This was so, but by no means to the extent and with the results which

Few of the Italian universities show themselves in their full vigor till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

when the increase of wealth rendered a more systematic care for education possible. At first there were

generally three sorts of professorshipsone for civil law, another for canonical law, the third for medicine;

in course of time professorships of rhetoric, of philosophy, and of astronomy were added, the last commonly,

though not always, identical with astrology. The salaries varied greatly in different cases. Sometimes a capital

sum was paid down. With the spread of culture, competition became so active that the different universities

tried to entice away distinguished teachers from one another, under which circumstances Bologna is said to

have sometimes devoted the half of its public income (20,000 ducats) to the university. The appointments

were as a rule made only for a certain time, sometimes for only half a year, so that the teachers were forced to

lead a wandering life, like actors. Appointments for life were, however, not unknown. Sometimes the promise

was exacted not to teach elsewhere what had already been taught at one place. There were also voluntary,

Of the chairs which have been mentioned, that of rhetoric was especially sought by the humanist; yet it

depended only on his familiarity with the matter of ancient learning whether or no be could aspire to those of

law, medicine, philosophy, or astronomy. The inward conditions of the science of the day were as variable as

the outward conditions of the teacher. Certain jurists and physicians received by far the largest salaries of all,

the former chiefly as consulting lawyers for the suits and claims of the State which employed them. In Padua

a lawyer of the fifteenth century received a salary of 1,000 ducats, and it was proposed to appoint a celebrated

physician with a yearly payment of 2,000 ducats, and the right of private practice, the same man having

previously received 700 gold florins at Pisa. When the jurist Bartolommeo Socini, professor at Pisa, accepted

a Venetian appointment at Padua, and was on the point of starting on his journey, he was arrested by the

Florentine government and only released on payment of bail to the amount of 18,000 gold florins. The high

estimation in which these branches of science were held makes it intelligible why distinguished philologists

turned their attention to law and medicine, while on the other hand specialists were more and more compelled

to acquire something of a wide literary culture. We shall presently have occasion to speak of the work of the

Nevertheless, the position of the philologists, as such, even where the salary was large, and did not exclude

other sources of income, was on the whole uncertain and temporary, so that one and the same teacher could

be connected with a great variety of institutions. It is evident that change was desired for its own sake, and

something fresh expected from each newcomer, as was natural at a time when science was in the making, and

consequently depended to no small degree on the personal influence of the teacher. Nor was it always the

case that a lecturer on classical authors really belonged to the university of the town where he taught.

Communication was so easy, and the supply of suitable accommodation, in monasteries and elsewhere, was

so abundant, that a private appointment was often practicable. In the first decades of the fifteenth century,

when the University of Florence was at its greatest brilliance, when the courtiers of Eugenius IV, and perhaps

even of Martin V thronged the lectureroom, when Carlo Aretino and Filelfo were competing for the largest

audience, there existed, not only an almost complete university among the Augustinians of Santo Spirito, not

only an association of scholars among the Camaldolesi of the Angeli, but individuals of mark, either singly or

in common, arranged to provide philosophical and philological teaching for themselves and others. Linguistic

and antiquarian studies in Rome had next to no connection with the university (Sapienza), and depended

almost exclusively either on the favour of individual popes and prelates, or on the appointments made in the

Papal chancery. It was not till Leo X (1513) that the great reorganization of the Sapienza took place, which

now had eightyeight lecturers, among whom there were the most able men of Italy, reading and interpreting

the class;cs. But this new brilliancy was of short duration. We have already spoken briefly of the Greek

To form an accurate picture of the method of scientific instruction then pursued, we must turn away our eyes

as far as possible from our present academic system. Personal intercourse between the teachers and the

taught, public disputations, the constant use of Latin and often of Greek, the frequent changes of lecturers and

the scarcity of books, gave the studies of that time a color which we cannot represent to ourselves without

There were Latin schools in every town of the least importance, not by any means merely as preparatory to

higher education, but because, next to reading, writing, and arithmetic, the knowledge of Latin was a

necessity; and after Latin came logic. It is to be noted particularly that these schools did not depend on the

Church, but on the municipality; some of them, too, were merely private enterprises.

This school system, directed by a few distinguished humanists, not only attained a remarkable perfection of

organization, but became an instrument of higher education in the modern sense of the phrase. With the

education of the children of two princely houses in North Italy institutions were connected which may be

At the court of Giovan Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (14071444) appeared the illustrious Vittorino da

Feltre, one of those men who devote their whole life to an object for which their natural gifts constitute a

He directed the education of the sons and daughters of the princely house, and one of the latter became under

his care a woman of learning. When his reputation extended far and wide over Italy, and members of great

and wealthy families came from long distances, even from Germany, in search of his instructions, Gonzaga

was not only willing that they should be received, but seems to have held it an honour for Mantua to be the

chosen school of the aristocratic world. Here for the first time gymnastics and all noble bodily exercises were

treated along with scientific instruction as indispensable to a liberal education. Besides these pupils came

others, whose instruction Vittorino probably held to be his highest earthly aim, the gifted poor, whom he

supported in his house and educated, 'per l'amore di Dio,' along with the highborn youths who here learned to

live under the same roof with untitled genius. Gonzaga paid him a yearly salary of 300 gold florins, and

contributed to the expenses caused by the poorer pupils. He knew that Vittorino never saved a penny for

himself, and doubtless realized that the education of the poor was the unexpressed condition of his presence.

The establishment was conducted on strictly religious lines, stricter indeed than many monasteries.

More stress was laid on pure scholarship by Guarino of Verona (1370 1460), who in the year 1429 was

called to Ferrara by Niccolo d'Este to educate his son Lionello, and who, when his pupil was nearly grown up

in 1436, began to teach at the university of eloquence and of the ancient languages. While still acting as tutor

to Lionello, he had many other pupils from various parts of the country, and in his own house a select class of

poor scholars, whom he partly or wholly supported. His evening hours till far into the night were devoted to

hearing lessons or to instructive conversation. His house, too, was the home of a strict religion and morality.

It signified little to him or to Vittorino that most of the humanists of their day deserved small praise in the

matter of morals or religion. It is inconceivable how Guarino, with all the daily work which fell upon him,

still found time to write translations from the Greek and voluminous original works.

Not only in these two courts, but generally throughout Italy, the education of the princely families was in part

and for certain years in the hands of the humanists, who thereby mounted a step higher in the aristocratic

world. The writing of treatises on the education of princes, formerly the business of theologians, fell now

From the time of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Italian princes were well taken care of in this respect, and the

custom was transplanted into Germany by Aeneas Sylvius, who addressed detailed exhortations to two young

German princes of the House of Habsburg on the subject of their further education, in which they are both

urged, as might be expected, to cultivate and nurture humanism. Perhaps Aeneas was aware that in addressing

these youths he was talking in the air, and therefore took measures to put his treatise into public circulation.

But the relations of the humanists to the rulers will be discussed separately. We have here first to speak of

those citizens, mostly Florentines, who made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives, and

who were themselves either distinguished scholars, or else distinguished _dilettanti _who maintained the

scholars. They were of peculiar significance during the period of transition at the beginning of the fifteenth

century, since it was in them that humanism first showed itself practically as an indispensable element in

daily life. It was not till after this time that the popes and princes began seriously to occupy themselves with

Niccolo Niccoli and Giannozzo Manetti have been already spoken of more than once. Niccoli is described to

us by Vespasiano as a man who would tolerate nothing around him out of harmony with his own classical

spirit. His handsome longrobed figure, his kindly speech, his house adorned with the noblest remains of

antiquity, made a singular impression. He was scrupulously cleanly in everything, most of all at table, where

ancient vases and crystal goblets stood before him on the whitest linen. The way in which he won over a

pleasureloving young Florentine to intellectual interests is too charming not to be here described. Piero de'

Pazzi, son of a distinguished merchant, and himself destined to the same calling, fair to behold, and much

given to the pleasures of the world, thought about anything rather than literature. One day, as he was passing

the Palazzo del Podesta, Niccolo called the young man to him, and although they had never before exchanged

a word, the youth obeyed the call of one so respected. Niccolo asked him who his father was. He answered,

'Messer Andrea de' Pazzi.' When he was further asked what his pursuit was, Piero replied, as young people

are wont to do, 'I enjoy myself' ('attendo a darmi buon tempo'). Niccolo said to him, 'As son of such a father,

and so fair to look upon, it is a shame that thou knowest nothing of the Latin language, which would be so

great an ornament to thee. If thou learnest it not, thou wilt be good for nothing, and as soon as the flower of

youth is over, wilt be a man of no consequence' (virtu). When Piero heard this, he straightway perceived that

it was true, and said that he would gladly take pains to learn, if only he had a teacher. Whereupon Niccol

answered that he would see to that. And he found him a learned man for Latin and Greek, named Pontano,

whom Piero treated as one of his own house, and to whom he paid 100 gold florins a year. Quitting all the

pleasures in which he had hitherto lived, he studied day and night, and became a friend of all learned men and

a nobleminded statesman. He learned by heart the whole 'neid and many speeches of Livy, chiefly on the way

between Florence and his country house at Trebbio. Antiquity was represented in another and higher sense by

Giannozzo Manetti (13931459). Precocious from his first years, he was hardly more than a child when he had

finished his apprenticeship in commerce and became bookkeeper in a bank. But soon the life he led seemed

to him empty and perishable, and he began to yearn after science, through which alone man can secure

immortality. He then busied himself with books as few laymen had done before him, and became, as has been

said, one of the most profound scholars of his time. When appointed by the government as its representative

magistrate and tax collector at Pescia and Pistoia, he fulfilled his duties in accordance with the lofty ideal

with which his religious feeling and humanistic studies combined to inspire him. He succeeded in collecting

the most unpopular taxes which the Florentine State imposed, and declined payment for his services. As

provincial governor he refused all presents, abhorred all bribes, checked gambling, kept the country well

supplied with corn, was indefatigable in settling lawsuits amicably, and did wonders in calming inflamed

passions by his goodness. The Pistoiese were never able to discover to which of the two political parties he

leaned. As if to symbolize the common rights and interests of all, he spent his leisure hours in writing the

history of the city, which was preserved, bound in a purple cover, as a sacred relic in the town hall. When he

took his leave the city presented him with a banner bearing the municipal arms and a splendid silver helmet.

For further information as to the learned citizens of Florence at this period the reader must all the more be

referred to Vespasiano, who knew them all personally, because the tone and atmosphere in which he writes,

and the terms and conditions on which he mixed in their society, are of even more importance than the facts

which he records. Even in a translation, and still more in the brief indications to which we are here compelled

to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book is lost. Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly familiar

with the subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of its intellectual significance.

If we seek to analyze the charm which the Medici of the fifteenth century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d.

1464) and Lorenzo the Magnificent (d. 1492 ) exercised over Florence and over all their contemporaries, we

shall find that it lay less in their political capacity than in their leadership in the culture of the age. A man in

Cosimo's positiona great merchant and party leader, who also had on his side all the thinkers, writers and

investigators, a man who was the first of the Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by culture such a

man was to all intents and purposes already a prince. To Cosimo belongs the special glory of recognizing in

the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, of inspiring his friends with the

same belief, and thus of fostering within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of

antiquity. The story is known to us minutely. It all hangs on the calling of the learned Johannes Argyropulos,

and on the personal enthusiasm of Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such that the great Marsilio

Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism was concerned, the spiritual son of Cosimo. Under Pietro

Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's grandson, the illustrious

Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished fellowscholars were Bartolommeo

Valori, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini. The enthusiastic teacher declares in several passages of

his writings that Lorenzo had sounded all the depths of the Platonic philosophy, and had uttered his

conviction that without Plato it would be hard to be a good Christian or a good citizen. The famous band of

scholars which surrounded Lorenzo was united together, and distinguished from all other circles of the kind,

by this passion for a higher and idealistic philosophy. Only in such a world could a man like Pico della

Mirandola feel happy. But perhaps the best thing of all that can be said about it is, that, with all this worship

of antiquity, Italian poetry found here a sacred refuge, and that of all the rays of light which streamed from

the circle of which Lorenzo was the centre, none was more powerful than this. As a statesman, let each man

judge him as he pleases; a foreigner will hesitate to pronounce what in the fate of Florence was due to human

guilt and what to circumstances, but no more unjust charge was ever made than that in the field of culture

Lorenzo was the protector of mediocrity, that through his fault Leonardo da Vinci and the mathematician Fra

Luca Pacioli lived abroad, and that Toscanella, Vespucci, and others remained at least unsupported. He was

not, indeed, a man of universal mind; but of all the great men who have striven to favour and promote

spiritual interests, few certainly have been so manysided, and in none probably was the inward need to do so

The age in which we live is loud enough in proclaiming the worth of culture, and especially of the culture of

antiquity. But the enthusiastic devotion to it, the recognition that the need of it is the first and greatest of all

needs, is nowhere to be found in such a degree as among the Florentines of the fifteenth and the early part of

the sixteenth centuries. On this point we have indirect proof which precludes all doubt. It would not have

been so common to give the daughters of the house a share in the same studies, had they not been held to be

the noblest of earthly pursuits, exile would not have been turned into a happy retreat, as was done by Palla

Strozzi; nor would men who indulged in every conceivable excess have retained the strength and the spirit to

write critical treatises on the Natural History of Pliny like Filippo Strozzi. Our business here is not to deal out

either praise or blame, but to understand the spirit of the age in all its vigorous individuality.

Besides Florence, there were many cities of Italy where individuals and social circles devoted all their

energies to the support of humanism and the protection of the scholars who lived among them. The

correspondence of that period is full of references to personal relations of this kind. The feeling of the

But it is now time to speak of humanism at the Italian courts. The natural alliance between the despot and the

scholar, each relying solely on his personal talent, has already been touched upon; that the latter should

avowedly prefer the princely courts to the free cities, was only to be expected from the higher pay which he

there received. At a time when the great Alfonso of Aragon seemed likely to become master of all Italy,

Aeneas Sylvius wrote to another citizen of Siena: 'I had rather that Italy attained peace under his rule than

under that of the free cities, for kingly generosity rewards excellence of every kind.' Too much stress has

latterly been laid on the unworthy side of this relation, and the mercenary flattery to which it gave rise, just as

formerly the eulogies of the humanists led to a too favourable judgement on their patrons. Taking all things

together, it is greatly to the honour of the latter that they felt bound to place themselves at the head of the

culture of their age and country, onesided though this culture was. In some of the popes, the fearlessness of

the consequences to which the new learning might lead strikes us as something truly, but unconsciously,

imposing. Nicholas V was confident of the future of the Church, since thousands of learned men supported

her. Pius II was far from making such splendid sacrifices for humanism as were made by Nicholas, and the

poets who frequented his court were few in number; but he himself was much more the personal head of the

republic of letters than his predecessor, and enjoyed his position without the least misgiving. Paul II was the

first to dread and mistrust the culture of his secretaries, and his three successors, Sixtus, Innocent, and

Alexander, accepted dedications and allowed themselves to be sung to the hearts' content of the poets there

even existed a 'Borgiad,' probably in hexameter but were too busy elsewhere, and too occupied in seeking

other foundations for their power, to trouble themselves much about the poetscholars. Julius II found poets

to eulogize him, because he himself was no mean subject for poetry, but he does not seem to have troubled

himself much about them. He was followed by Leo X, 'as Romulus by Numa'in other words, after the

warlike turmoil of the previous pontificate, a new one was hoped for wholly given to the muses. Enjoyment

of elegant Latin prose and melodious verse was part of the pro gramme of Leo's life, and his patronage

certainly had the result that his Latin poets have left us a living picture of that joyous and brilliant spirit of the

Leonine days, with which the biography of Jovius is filled, in countless epigrams, elegies, odes, and orations.

Probably in all European history there is no prince who, in proportion to the few striking events of his life,

has received such manifold homage. The poets had access to him chiefly about noon, when the musicians had

ceased playing; but one of the best among them tells us how they also pursued him when he walked in his

garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him

with a mendicant ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of Olympus. For Leo, prodigal of

his money, and disliking to be surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his gifts which

was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that followed. His reorganization of the Sapienza has been

already spoken of. In order not to underrate Leo's influence on hu manism we must guard against being

misled by the toywork that was mixed up with it, and must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the

apparent irony with which he himself sometimes treated these matters. Our judgement must rather dwell on

the countless spiritual possibilities which are included in the word 'stimulus,' and which, though they cannot

be measured as a whole, can still, on closer study, be actually followed out in particular cases. Whatever

influence in Europe the Italian humanists have had since 1520 depends in some way or other on the impulse

which was given by Leo. He was the Pope who in granting permission to print the newly found Tacitus,

could say that the great writers were a rule of life and a consolation in misfortune; that helping learned men

and obtaining excellent books had ever been one of his highest aims; and that he now thanked heaven that he

The sack of Rome in the year 1527 scattered the scholars no less than the artists in every direction, and spread

Among the secular princes of the fifteenth century, none displayed such enthusiasm for antiquity as Alfonso

the Great of Aragon, King of Naples. It appears that his zeal was thoroughly unaffected, and that the

monuments and writings of the ancient world made upon him, from the time of his arrival in Italy, an

impression deep and powerful enough to reshape his life. With strange readiness he surrendered the stubborn

Aragon to his brother, and devoted himself wholly to his new possessions. He had in his service, either

successively or to gether, George of Trebizond, the younger Chrysoloras, Lorenzo Valla, Bartolommeo

Fazio and Antonio Panormita, of whom the two latter were his historians; Panormita daily instructed the King

and his court in Livy, even during military expeditions. These men cost him yearly 20,000 gold florins. He

gave Panormita 1,000 for his work; Fazio received for the 'Historia Alfonsi,' besides a yearly income of 500

ducats, a present of 1,500 more when it was finished, with the words, 'It is not given to pay you, for your

work would not be paid for if I gave you the fairest of my cities; but in time I hope to satisfy you.'

When he took Giannozzo Manetti as his secretary on the most brilliant conditions, he said to him, 'My last

crust I will share with you.' When Giannozzo first came to bring the congratulations of the Florentine

government on the marriage of Prince Ferrante, the impression he made was so great, that the King sat

motionless on the throne, 'like a brazen statue, and did not even brush away a fly, which had settled on his

nose at the beginning of the oration.' His favorite haunt seems to have been the library of the castle at Naples,

where he would sit at a window overlooking the bay, and listen to learned debates on the Trinity. For he was

profoundly religious, and had the Bible, as well as Livy and Seneca, read to him, till after fourteen perusals

he knew it almost by heart. Who can fully understand the feeling with which he regarded the suppositions

remains of Livy at Padua? When, by dint of great entreaties, he obtained an armbone of the skeleton from

the Venetians, and received it with solemn pomp at Naples, how strangely Christian and pagan sentiment

must have been blended in his heart! During a campaign in the Abruzzi, when the distant Sulmona, the

birthplace of Ovid, was pointed out to him, he saluted the spot and returned thanks to its tutelary genius. It

gladdened him to make good the prophecy of the great poet as to his future fame. Once indeed, at his famous

entry into the conquered city of Naples (1443) he himself chose to appear before the world in ancient style.

Not far from the market a breach forty ells wide was made in the wall, and through this he drove in a gilded

chariot like a Roman Triumphator. The memory of the scene is preserved by a noble triumphal arch of marble

in the Castello Nuovo. His Neapolitan successors inherited as little of this passion for antiquity as of his other

Alfonso was far surpassed in learning by Federigo of Urbino, who had but few courtiers around him,

squandered nothing, and in his appropriation of antiquity, as in all other things, went to work considerately. It

was for him and for Nicholas V that most of the translations from the Greek, and a number of the best

commentaries and other such works, were written. He spent much on the scholars whose services he used, but

spent it to good purpose. There were no traces of a poets' court at Urbino, where the Duke himself was the

most learned in the whole court. Classical antiquity, indeed, only formed a part of his culture. An

accomplished ruler, captain, and gentleman, he had mastered the greater part of the science of the day, and

this with a view to its practical application. As a theologian, he was able to compare Scotus with Aquinas,

and was familiar with the writings of the old Fathers of the Eastern and Western Churches, the former in

Latin translations. In philosophy, he seems to have left Plato altogether to his contemporary Cosimo, but he

knew thoroughly not only the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle but the Physics and some other works. The rest

of his reading lay chiefly among the ancient historians, all of whom he possessed; these, and not the poets, 'he

The Sforza, too, were all of them men of more or less learning and patrons of literature; they have been

already referred to in passing. Duke Francesco probably looked on humanistic culture as a matter of course in

the education of his children, if only for political reasons. It was felt universally to be an advantage if a prince

could mix with the most instructed men of his time on an equal footing. Lodovico il Moro, himself an

excellent Latin scholar, showed an interest in intellectual matters which extended far beyond classical

Even the petty rulers strove after similar distinctions, and we do them injustice by thinking that they only

supported the scholars at their courts as a means of diffusing their own fame. A ruler like Borso of Ferrara,

with all his vanity, seems by no means to have looked for immortality from the poets, eager as they were to

propitiate him with a 'Borseid' and the like. He had far too proud a sense of his own position as a ruler for

that. But intercourse with learned men, interest in antiquarian matters, and the passion for elegant Latin

correspondence were necessities for the princes of that age. What bitter complaints are those of Duke

Alfonso, competent as he was in practical matters, that his weakliness in youth had forced him to seek

recreation in manual pursuits only! or was this merely an excuse to keep the humanists at a distance? A

Even the most insignificant despots of Romagna found it hard to do without one or two men of letters about

them. The tutor and secretary were often one and the same person, who sometimes, indeed, acted as a kind of

court factotum. We are apt to treat the small scale of these courts as a reason for dismissing them with a too

ready contempt, forgetting that the highest spiritual things are not precisely matters of measurement.

Life and manners at the court of Rimini must have been a singular spectacle under the bold pagan

Condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta. He had a number of scholars around him, some of whom he provided for

liberally, even giving them landed estates, while others earned at least a livelihood as officers in his army. In

his citadel'arx Sismundea'they used to hold discussions, often of a very venomous kind, in the presence

of the 'rex,' as they termed him. In their Latin poems they sing his praises and celebrate his amour with the

fair Isotta, in whose honour and as whose monument the famous rebuilding of San Francesco at Rimini took

place 'Divae Isottae Sacrum.' When the humanists themselves came to die, they were laid in or under the

sarcophagi with which the niches of the outside walls of the church were adorned, with an inscription

testifying that they were laid here at the time when Sigismundus, the son of Pandulfus, ruled. It is hard for us

nowadays to believe that a monster like this prince felt learning and the friendship of cultivated people to be a

necessity of life; and yet the man who excommunicated him, made war upon him, and burnt him in effigy,

Pope Pius II, says: 'Sigismondo knew history and had a great store of philosophy; he seemed born to all that

We have here first to speak of those citizens, mostly Florentines, who made antiquarian interests one of the

chief objects of their lives, and who were themselves either distinguished scholars, or else distinguished

_dilettanti_ who maintained the scholars. They were of peculiar significance during the period of transition at

the beginning of the fifteenth century, since it was in them that humanism first showed itself practically as an

indispensable element in daily life. It was not till after this time that the popes and princes began seriously to

Niccol� Niccoli and Giannozzo Manetti have been already spoken of more than once. Niccoli is described to

us by Vespasiano as a man who would tolerate nothing around him out of harmony with his own classical

spirit. His handsome longrobed figure, his kindly speech, his house adorned with the noblest remains of

antiquity, made a singular impression. He was scrupulously cleanly in everything, most of all at table, where

ancient vases and crystal goblets stood before him on the whitest linen. The way in which he won over a

pleasureloving young Florentine to intellectual interests is too charming not to be here described. Piero de'

Pazzi, son of a distinguished merchant, and himself destined to the same calling, fair to behold, and much

given to the pleasures of the world, thought about anything rather than literature. One day, as he was passing

the Palazzo del Podest�, Niccol� called the young man to him, and although they had never before exchanged

a word, the youth obeyed the call of one so respected. Niccol� asked him who his father was. He answered,

'Messer Andrea de' Pazzi'. When he was further asked what his pursuit was, Piero replied, as young people

are wont to do, 'I enjoy myself' ('attendo a darmi buon tempo'). Niccol� said to him, 'As son of such a father,

and so fair to look upon, it is a shame that thou knowest nothing of the Latin language, which would be so

great an ornament to thee. If thou learnest it not, thou wilt be good for nothing, and as soon as the flower of

youth is over, wilt be a man of no consequence' (_virt�_). When Piero heard this, he straightway perceived

that it was true, and said that he would gladly take pains to learn, if only he had a teacher. Whereupon

Niccol� answered that he would see to that. And he found him a learned man for Latin and Greek, named

Pontano, whom Piero treated as one of his own house, and to whom he paid 100 gold florins a year. Quitting

all the pleasures in which he had hitherto lived, he studied day and night, and became a friend of all learned

men and a nobleminded statesman. He learned by heart the whole AEneid and many speeches of Livy,

chiefly on the way between Florence and his country house at Trebbio. Antiquity was represented in another

and higher sense by Giannozzo Maneeti (13931459). Precocious from his first years, he was hardly more

than a child when he had finished his apprenticeship in commerce, and became bookkeeper in a bank. But

soon the life he led seemed to him empty and perishable, and he began to yearn after science, through which

alone man can secure immortality. He then busied himself with books as few laymen had done before him,

and became, as has been said, one of the most profound scholars of his time. When appointed by the

government as its representative magistrate and tax collector at Pescia and Pistoia, he furfilled his duties in

accordance with the lofty ideal with which his religious feeling and humanistic studies combined to inspire

him. He succeeded in collecting the most unpopular taxes which the Florentine State imposed, and declined

payment for his services. As provincial governor he refused all presents, abhorred all bribes, checked

gambling, kept the country well supplied with corn, was indefatigable in settling lawsuits amicably, and did

wonders in calming inflamed passions by his goodness. The Pistoiese were never able to discover to which of

the two political parties he leaned. As if to symbolize the common rights and interests of all, he spent his

leisure hours in writing the history of the city, which was preserved, bound in a purple cover, as a sacred relic

in the town hall. When he took his leave the city presented him with a banner bearing the municipal arms and

For further information as to the learned citizens of Florence at this period the reader must all the more be

referred to Vespasiano, who knew them all personally, because the tone and atmosphere in which he writes,

and the terms and conditions on which he mixed in their society, are of even more importance than the facts

which he records. Even in a translation, and still more in the brief indications to which we are here compelled

to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book is lost. Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly familiar

with the subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of its intellectual significance.

If we seek to analyse the charm which the Medici of the fifteenth century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d.

1464) and Lorenzo the Magnificent (d. 1492) exercised over Florence and over all their contemporaries, we

shall find that it lay less in their political capacity than in their leadership in the culture of the age. A man in

Cosimo's position a great merchant and party leader, who also had on his side all the thinkers, writers and

investigators, a man who was the first of the Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by culture

such a man was to all intents and purposes already a prince. To Cosimo belongs the special glory of

recognizing in the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, of inspiring his

friends with the same belief, amd thus of fostering within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher

resuscitation of antiquity. The story is known to us minutely. It all hangs on the calling of the learned

Johannes Argyropulos, and on the personal enthusiasm of Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such,

that the great Marsilio Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism was concerned, the spiritual son of

Cosimo. Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's

grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished

fellowscholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini. The enthusiastic

teacher declares in several passages of his writings that Lorenzo had sounded all the depths of the Platonic

philosophy, and had uttered his conviction that without Plato it would be hard to be a good Christian or a

good citizen. The famous band of scholars which surrounded Lorenzo was united together, and distinguished

from all other circles of the kind, by this passion for a higher and idealistic philosophy. Only in such a world

could a man like Pico della Mirandola feel happy. But perhaps the best thing of all that can be said about it is,

that, with all this worship of antiquity, Italian poetry found here a sacred refuge, and that of all the rays of

light which streamed from the circle of which Lorenzo was the centre, none was more powerful than this. As

a statesman, let each man judge him as he pleases; a foreigner will hesitate to pronounce what was due to

human guilt and what to circumstances in the fate of Florence, but no more unjust charge was ever made than

that in the field of culture Lorenzo was the protector of mediocrity, that through his fault Leonardo da Vinci

and the mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli lived abroad, and that Toscanella, Vespucci, and others at least

remained unsupported. He was not, indeed, a man of universal mind; but of all the great men who have

striven to favour and promote spiritual interests, few certainly have been so manysided, and in none

The age in which we live is loud enough in proclaiming the worth of culture, and especially of the culture of

antiquity. But the enthusiastic devotion to it, the recognition that the need of it is the first and greatest of all

needs, is nowhere to be found in such a degree as among the Florentines of the fifteenth and the early part of

the sixteenth centuries. On this point we have indirect proof which precludes all doubt. It would not have

been so common to give the daughters of the house a share in the same studies, had they not been held to be

the noblest of earthly pursuits; exile would not have been turned into a happy retreat, as was done by Palla

Strozzi; nor would men who indulged in every conceivable excess have retained the strength and the spirit to

write critical treatises on the 'Natural History' of Pliny like Filippo Strozzi. Our business here is not to deal

out either praise or blame, but to understand the spirit of the age in all its vigorous individuality.

Besides Florence, there were many cities of Italy where individuals and social circles devoted all their

energies to the support of humanism and the protection of the scholars who lived among them. The

correspondence of that period is full of references to personal relations of this kind. The feeling of the

But it is now time to speak of humanism at the Italian courts. The natural alliance between the despot and the

scholar, each relying solely on his personal talent, has already been touched upon; that the latter should

avowedly prefer the princely courts to the free cities, was only to be expected from the higher pay which they

there received. At a time when the great Alfonso of Aragon seemed likely to become master of all Italy,

AEneas Sylvius wrote to another citizen of Siena: 'I had rather that Italy attained peace under his rule than

under that of the free cities, for kingly generosity rewards excellence of every kind'. Too much stress has