CHAPTER XXXII

THE AGE OF STAGNATION, POLITICS (1580-1789)

We have now reached a period of comparative stability in which dukes, viceroys, oligarchs, and Popes sit settled in their respective dominions with a security that appears a little tame after the whir and uproar of Barbarian invasion. To be sure, the wars between Spain, France, and Austria, waged first to abate the over-greatness of the House of Hapsburg and afterwards that of the House of Bourbon, were often fought out in the north of Italy; nevertheless, the period of confusion has passed, and each principality has a consecutive political history, which runs along for two hundred years. Our best course will be to glance at the careers of the several states, one by one, until they reach the tumultuous influences of the French Revolution. Venice, the noblest as well as the most powerful, deserves to come first.

Venice

Venice still ranked as one of the great powers of Europe; she was sought as an ally, she took part in European counsels, and bore herself with resolute dignity and pride. The change that was going on went on so slowly, and her statesmen were so well trained and so far-sighted, that her reputation remained intact after the power which had created it had shrunk and dwindled. In spite of the battle of Lepanto she lost the island of Cyprus to the Turks, but secured a peace which lasted for two generations, a surprisingly long time, considering that the two states were destined to fight each other till both were exhausted. She was less successful in keeping at peace with her Christian neighbours, and became embroiled in a celebrated quarrel with the Holy See.

There was an irritating papal bull which was issued and reissued under the stimulus of the reinvigorating Counter-Reformation, entitled In Coena Domini (for the Lord's Supper), usually read on Maundy Thursday. It was probably the very bull that Montaigne heard read from the balcony of St. Peter's. This bull asserted papal claims of extreme character, not unworthy of Boniface VIII, and, in fact, revealed complete consciousness of renewed youth and vitality. Other states in Italy bowed and accepted, or pretended to accept, this declaration of papal authority; but Venice refused to publish the bull. In fact, though Venice had always professed great respect for the Holy See, she had been consistently self-willed and opposed to papal pretensions, and likewise somewhat free-thinking. Moreover, there had been festering disagreements concerning territory and politics. Venice insisted upon the right to tax Church property within the state, and to try priests charged with crime before her lay tribunals. Acting upon the latter right she arrested and tried two priests guilty of crime. This action traversed the doctrine laid down in the papal bull. The Pope put Venice under an interdict (1606). In retaliation the Signory issued a decree of banishment against all priests and monks who should obey the interdict. Various Orders quitted the city. The Pope stood firm in his position that "there could be no true piety without entire submission to the spiritual power." All Europe looked on, the Protestants backing Venice, the Catholics supporting the Pope. War was in the air; but the danger of a European mêlée was too great. The French King, Henry IV, enacted the peacemaker; and the forces in favour of compromise succeeded in reëstablishing peace.

Out of the quarrel one man issued with a noble historic reputation. Fra Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623) was the last of the great Venetians. In boyhood he was so precocious a scholar that at eighteen he was made professor of Positive Theology, and, a little later, of Philosophy and of Mathematics. Grown up, he became a man of science, the foremost of his time excepting Francis Bacon. He discovered the valves of the veins, and also, independently of Harvey, the circulation of the blood. He made discoveries in optics. He studied heat, light, sound, colour, pneumatics, the magnetic needle. In astronomy Galileo called him, "il mio padre e maestro—my father and my master." Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador to Venice, said, Fra Paolo is "as expert in the history of plants as if he had never perused any book but Nature." In addition to these achievements, he wrote a very celebrated history of the Council of Trent. At the time of the breach with the Papacy, this brilliant savant was appointed Theological Counsellor to the Republic, and was abruptly flung into the confusion and passion of violent political strife. Deeply patriotic,—his last thought was for Venice, "Esto perpetua, may she live forever,"—he held a brief, as it were, for his country, and as her advocate argued her cause before all Europe with brilliant success.

At this period the Venetian Signory belonged, in spirit at least, to an international political party which was opposed to Spain and to the Papacy, and for that reason was favoured by the French, especially when Henry of Navarre was on the throne. In fact, this quarrel between Venice and the Papacy may be considered an episode in the great struggle between the party of European freedom and the tyrannical House of Hapsburg, seated on the thrones of Spain and Austria, and supported by the Papacy.

But Venice was not able to concentrate her attention upon European affairs. Later in the century war with the Turks was renewed; she was too weak to resist them single-handed, and, after a struggle which lasted for twenty-five years, she lost Crete (1669). Not many years later, having obtained allies, she renewed the war, fought with great gallantry, and actually conquered the Morea, which, on the conclusion of hostilities, was ceded to her (1699). This conquest, now best remembered from the fact that in the attack on Athens a Venetian bomb blew up the Parthenon, was the last great military exploit of the Venetians, and within twenty years the Morea was lost again.

Martial vigour ebbed slowly but surely. During the war of the Spanish Succession, when, the course of fortune having shifted, Europe combined to resist the overbearing power of Louis XIV and the House of Bourbon, Venice remained neutral. Like an old dog which has fought many good fights in its youth and prime, and now, lame and scarred, maintains a dignified abstention from canine frays, Venice lay back. In 1718, after the war with Turkey in which she lost the Morea, she took part in the treaty between Austria and Turkey. This was her last active diplomatic intervention in the affairs of Europe. She had lost Cyprus, Crete, the Morea; and now her province in Italy, bits of Illyria, and some of the Ionian Islands, alone remained from her old empire. She shut her eyes to the past, and concentrated her attention on making her beautiful city "the revel of the earth, the masque of Italy." On the eve of the mighty upheaval of the French Revolution, her old sea glory flashed up under her last great admiral, Angelo Emo (1731-92), who cleared the seas of the Algerine pirates; but it was too late, Venice had run her course, and the end was at hand.

Spanish Provinces

West of Venetian territory, the unfortunate duchy of Milan fulfilled its melancholy lot of being the prize possessed by Spain, yet coveted and fought for by France. Its history takes no special hold upon the memory. Against a constant background of French ambition (Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV), the Spanish governors step forward upon the Milanese stage, levy taxes, scheme how to circumvent the French, and how to extend Spanish dominion, and then go home, a little richer but without leaving any definite impression on the page of history except as they have served to create the scenes depicted in the romantic novel "I Promessi Sposi." One has a vague idea of ceremony, bows, obeisances, ignorance, rapacity, and cruelty, but the idea is nebulous, and we need not stop.

Leaving local affairs aside, we will proceed at once to see how the titles to Milan and other Spanish provinces in Italy passed from Spain into other hands. History here acts as an attorney and coldly records the transfer from one monarch to another. Like lots of land the provinces of Italy were bartered and granted in consideration of war, dynastic love, and affection, or for the sake of the political equilibrium of Europe. The great Powers fell to blows over the succession to the crown of Spain (1700-14), to the crown of Poland (1733-35), and other matters in which Italy had no voluntary concern; and, after years of war, made treaties to reëstablish European equilibrium by an elaborate system of weights and counterweights. Where the balances hung unevenly, a province of Italy was thrown in to restore them to a level. In this way Milan, Parma, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia were disposed of. All we need do is to remember that in place of conveyances there were treaties, and in place of offer, counter-offer, haggling, and bargaining, there were battles, sieges, devastation, and pillage.

The records of conveyances in the office of history read as follows:—

LOTGRANTORGRANTEEDATE
MilanSpainAustria1713
NaplesSpainAustria1713
NaplesAustriaSpanish Bourbons1738
SicilySpainSavoy1713
SicilySavoyAustria1720
SicilyAustriaSpanish Bourbons1738
ParmaSpanish BourbonsAustria1738
ParmaAustriaSpanish Bourbons1748
SardiniaSpainAustria1713
SardiniaAustriaSavoy1720

Milan was subject to only one transfer, from Spain to Austria, by the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt (1713-14), which closed the war of the Spanish Succession. Those same treaties took Naples and the island of Sardinia from Spain and gave them to Austria, and also took Sicily from Spain and gave it to Savoy. Spain, however, was dissatisfied, and attempted to recover what she had lost; but a new European coalition forced her to renounce her claim. In the general pacification after the war, for the purpose of making a more satisfactory arrangement, Sardinia was exchanged for Sicily, giving Sardinia to Savoy and Sicily to Austria (1720). Finally, after the war of the Polish Succession by the Peace of Vienna (1738), Austria ceded Naples and Sicily to younger sons of the royal family of Spain, the Spanish Bourbons, on condition that those provinces should never be united with the crown of Spain, and received in exchange the little duchy of Parma, which had fallen to a Spanish Bourbon on the extinction of the Farnesi. But ten years later, at the close of the war of the Austrian Succession, Austria ceded Parma back again to other members of the Spanish Bourbon family.

Tuscany

Another paragraph is necessary to complete the Austrification and the Spanification of Italy. The Medici of Tuscany died out. After the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, six successors had followed, dwindling away in incapacity, luxury, and bigotry. The last died in 1737. Then, by virtue of that general reapportionment after the war of the Polish Succession, the Grand Duchy was handed over to the Duke of Lorraine, husband of Maria Theresa, of the House of Hapsburg, Empress of Austria, and became an appanage of the Austrian Empire, under the rule of the younger sons of the Imperial house. It is a relief to turn from these Austrian and Spanish provinces to the two living powers, Savoy and the Papacy.

Savoy

It would be impossible to chronicle here the history of the Savoyard dukes, who were advanced to the title of Kings of Sardinia after the acquisition of that island. Savoy lay in the way of the three fighting nations, France, Spain, and Austria. The plain of Piedmont was an admirable fighting-ground, and the combatants chose it on all possible occasions, but it would not be fair to charge the whole blame upon those three nations. The Dukes of Savoy were ambitious men, full of all sorts of schemes for increasing their dominions and their personal glory. Whenever any one of them thought he perceived an opportunity to seize some neighbouring territory, he caught at it, reckless of collision with his powerful neighbours. The general upshot was that Savoy lost its old Swiss provinces and its old French provinces, and that Piedmont became the head and front of the new Kingdom of Sardinia. Equally important to Italy was the fact that, while the people of the other Italian provinces became more and more incapable of bearing arms or of making any real martial effort, the people of Piedmont gradually became a nation of soldiers. In devastation, war, and apparent ruin, Piedmontese valour and Piedmontese character were trained and developed, and Piedmont little by little came to feel, and likewise to impress upon the other Italian States, that she, and she alone, was the refuge and hope of whatever Italian patriotism might still exist.

The Papacy

The Papacy we left at the end of the sixteenth century in the full flood of revival. The Popes were swept on by the tide. The bold and successful front opposed to the enemy was supplemented by discipline within. Heresy was traced and tracked. Inquisitors roamed about, spying what they might; they frightened the learned from publishing, printers from printing, and almost all from freedom of talk and thought. Thus traitors were rooted out. And at the same time faithful soldiers of the Church were trained and educated. Seminaries for priests of divers nations were founded in Rome; Jesuit schools were helped everywhere. Sixtus V (Felice Peretti), 1585-90, was a Pope worthy of the great period. He entertained a plan to reconquer Egypt, and make the Mediterranean and Red Seas a high-road for armies and navies that should break up the Ottoman power. He attacked the banditti of the Papal State, as his predecessors had attacked the barons, and, for a time at least, suppressed them. He was a great builder; he completed the dome of St. Peter's, set up the Egyptian obelisk in the piazza before the cathedral, substituted statues of St. Peter and St. Paul in place of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius on the tops of the two great bronze columns that adorn the Foro Trajano and the Piazza Colonna. He brought fresh water, named after him Acqua Felice, into the city from over twenty miles away, and gave Rome an aspect worthy of the capital of the Latin world. He fixed seventy for the number of cardinals; he revised the Vulgate; and pondered many great designs, for which, as he said, his strength would have been inadequate, even had he lived.

But these Popes of the Revival, who carried into effect the papal principles of the Council of Trent, vigorous, and in many respects admirable, as they were, need not detain us, for the history of the Papacy in this period scarcely belongs to Italy. It has a far wider reach, and is intimately bound up with the great Catholic, one might say the great Latin, effort to restore or extend Catholicism and Latin supremacy throughout the world. In the British Isles, in Scandinavia, in Poland, in Russia, in Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the Church fought with the old Roman spirit of conquest. Everywhere the Jesuit fathers went, busy, devoted, heroic. The ardour of St. Francis Xavier, the self-abnegation of St. Francis de Sales, the passionate mysticism of St. Theresa, infected and controlled thousands of disciples. Everywhere were great manifestations of activity. In South America there were bishops and archbishops, hundreds of monasteries and innumerable priests. In Mexico there were schools of theology. In India, thousands and thousands of converts clustered around the city of Goa. In China and Japan the Jesuits built churches, and converted to Christianity disciples of Confucius and Buddha. The Church had founded an empire on which the sun never set. But our business is not with this great Latin conquest, this great Catholic revival. We must pass on to the next series of Popes, less memorable for their imitation of Scipio and Cæsar, than of Lucullus and Crassus. Here we find the names of the founders of great papal families, so familiar in Rome, not as missionaries, teachers, or martyrs, but as owners of palaces, villas, pictures and statues: Borghese (Paul V, 1605-21), the Pope who quarrelled with the Venetian Republic; Ludovisi (Gregory XV, 1621-23), in whose pontificate the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (College for Propagating the Faith) was established; Barberini (Urban VIII, 1623-44), whose family, famous from the squib "Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecerunt Barberini," built its palaces out of Roman ruins. During the pontificate of Barberini, Galileo was brought before the Holy Office, and his opinion that the earth moved condemned as "absurd, false in philosophy, and essentially heretical."

Under his successor Panfili (Innocent X, 1644-55), Catholic Europe stopped fighting Protestant Europe, and the Thirty Years' War was closed by the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The Catholic Powers gave over the attempt to reduce the Protestant States, and acknowledged their independence. Panfili launched his bull against the treaty, but the weary world disregarded the old man's curses. After him came Chigi (Alexander VII, 1655-67), Rospigliosi (Clement IX, 1667-69), Odescalchi (Innocent XI, 1676-89), whose names mean little to us.

Long before this time the forces of revivification which had borne onward and upward the Catholic counter-charge on the Protestant ranks, had begun to fall away. The great Catholic monarchs of Europe turned their minds to personal ambitions; the Popes squandered papal revenues on their own families; the Jesuits loosened their rigid hold on their once high principles. The period of reform had passed, and the Papacy settled down into a policy of maintaining the ecclesiastical empire left to it and of enjoying its little Italian monarchy. In politics it pursued a shifting course towards Austria, Spain, and France, dictated rather by passing fears than by wisdom or lofty ambition. At the time of the close of the war of the Spanish Succession the Papacy was hardly regarded as a European power. The proof of decline was most visible in the concessions made by the Papacy to the Catholic sovereigns, by its forced acquiescence in the repeated attacks on the Jesuits, and finally, by its bull suppressing, or rather attempting to suppress, the Order (1773).

Throughout the eighteenth century the papal part in European affairs was insignificant; and in Italy the general effects of papal rule were steadily increasing poverty, superstition, and incompetence. It is a relief to turn away, knowing that the French Revolution is blowing its refreshing blasts ahead of us.