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 us the impression of a bottomless abyss.
Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period.Venice in particular was long accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or gradually so to reduce its strength that one State after another must fall into her hands.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 strength.
The other States, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly, and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which their evil conscience might suggest.Lodovico il Moro, the Aragonese kings of Naples, and Sixtus IV--to 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 that intervention sought from abroad--in particular the French and the Turks.
The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of France.Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking _naivete _its old Guelph preference for the French.And when Charles VIIIactually 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 Franco-English wars came to an end, when Louis XI began to cast about his diplomatic nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point.It became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of time, even 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 return as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.
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 counter-reformation, long held Papacy among its other subjects.The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all came to a bad end.
