CHAPTER VIII. DESPOTS AND TYRANTS OF THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
[ca. 1309-1496 A.D.]
In the present chapter we shall take up the history of Italy in the latter part of the fourteenth century and carry it forward to about the year 1500, with chief reference to the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily—which become united into the kingdom of the Two Sicilies—in the south, and the tyranny of the Visconti and Sforza at Milan in the north. The history of these principalities necessarily involves reference to most of the states of Italy, as they were constantly embroiled one with another. But for such incidental references, we shall reserve the more specific history of the important maritime republics, Venice and Genoa, and of the chief Tuscan republic, Florence, for separate treatment in later chapters. During the dominance of the Visconti in Milan in the latter half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, this principality dominated northern Italy and was much of the time in open warfare with Florence. The history of Florence will, therefore, be given considerable prominence, and our later chapters will be chiefly directed to the events of the period of the great Medici, Cosmo and Lorenzo, whose dictatorship in Florence, it will be recalled, coincides in time with the later events of the present chapter. The period now under consideration introduces a number of really important men, including Alfonso the Magnanimous, king of Sicily and Naples.
But the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the duchy of Milan, important as they must have seemed to their Italian contemporaries, had no very direct world-historical influences. They embroiled Italy and kept her in touch with the nations of the north, to her disadvantage; but their rulers had no thought beyond self-aggrandisement, and no one of them attained sufficient influence to bring the entire peninsula under his control. Despite the picturesqueness of individual characters,[16] therefore, we shall be justified in dealing with the period somewhat briefly, reserving larger space for the more important developments that came about through the influence of the commercial republics.