The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

During the fifteenth century Italy enjoyed a period of relative immunity from outside interference. An emperor was crowned at Rome in the early days of the century, to be sure, and there were various efforts at interference by other powers, including the coming of Charles VIII in 1494. But, as a general thing, it was the Italians themselves who competed with one another, rather than outside powers who quarrelled with Italy as a whole. The great forces were, as before, the few important cities. These were forever quarrelling one with another. Pisa became subordinate to Florence, and the latter city waxed steadily in greatness. In Milan the rule of the Visconti continued till towards the middle of the century, when, on the disappearance of the last member of that important family, the house of Sforza came to the fore and took to itself the task of dictatorship. In Naples King Ladislaus, and later Queen Joanna II, maintained regal influence and made their principality a world power. Thus in the middle of the century the four great powers were Naples, Milan, Venice, and Florence.

In these wars the mercenary leaders were much in evidence. These were men to whom fighting was simply a business,—a means to a livelihood. No question of patriotism was involved in their warfare; they gave their services to the state that offered the most liberal payment in gold or its equivalent. Half a dozen of these men gained particular distinction in the fifteenth century. These were Braccio, Fortebraccio, Sforza Attendola, and his son Francesco Sforza, Carmagnola, Niccolo Piccinino, and Colleno Coleoni. These men were variously matched against one another in the important wars.

Braccio and Sforza Attendola came into prominence in the papal wars, having to do with the Great Schism, and beginning about the close of the first decade of the fifteenth century. Braccio fought for Florence, and Sforza at first for Pope John XXIII, and subsequently for King Ladislaus of Naples, who at this time was the strongest ruler in Italy. This war concerned most of the powers of Italy, and involved Anjou and France as well. The death of Ladislaus helped to terminate the conflict, but at the same time precipitated a new war, by raising the question of succession to the throne of Naples.

In this war of the Neapolitan succession Fillipo Maria, duke of Milan, upheld the cause of the house of Anjou, while Florence sided with Alfonzo. The chief scene of the war was in the north where the forces of Milan and Naples competed with those of Florence and Venice. It was here that Carmagnola (born Francesco Dussone) was given the opportunity to show his genius as a leader. He served first under Fillipo, but subsequently entered the service of Venice and acquired new honours as the opponent of his old employer. In later campaigns his chief opponent was Francesco Sforza. The tragic end of Carmagnola will be recalled by every reader.

After the settlement of this war of the Neapolitan succession Fillipo Maria was soon embroiled again, this time with Pope Eugenius. The pope took refuge in Florence and the Tuscans, again supported by Venice, upheld him. Francesco Sforza now fought for the Florentines, his opponent, the leader of the Visconti’s army, being Niccolo Piccinino. But before the war was over the Visconti had gained Sforza back again. On the death of Fillipo the Milanese established a republic, avowing that they would never again submit to a tyrant. But necessity soon drove them to call on Francesco Sforza to aid them in a war against Venice, and their successful general presently usurped power, and established a new line of tyrants. In the later wars between Milan and Venice Colleno Coleoni appeared, and after bartering his services first to one party and then to the other, became permanently established as generalissimo of the land-forces of Venice in 1454.

One of the most striking features of this warfare was that it came to nothing. So many rival interests were involved, so kaleidoscopic were the shiftings of the various leaders, so utterly lacking is any great central cause of contention, that it is sometimes almost impossible to say where one war ends and another begins. Each petty state is thinking of its own interests. And the only thing approaching a general principle of action is the fear on the part of each state that any other single state might gain too much influence over Italy as a whole. In other words the thought of maintaining a balance of power is in the mind of all such leaders as have no hope of making themselves supreme. As Florence at no time has a hope of becoming politically dominant, her efforts are always directed towards maintaining a balance of power, and where personalities do not enter into the matter, she tends in the main to champion the cause of the weaker party.

But despite the interest which necessarily attaches to all these political jarrings, the really world-historical importance of Florentine history during this period has to do not with wars, but with the marvellous internal culture development. Already in the van of the Renaissance movement Florence holds her proud position securely throughout the fifteenth century, and is incontestably the culture centre of the world.

This was the age of the Medici. It was then that Cosmo the Great and Lorenzo the Magnificent made their influence felt, and enjoyed practical dictatorship, though the form of government continued a democracy. The real source of Florentine influence was founded on the old familiar basis of commercial prosperity. We have seen how Florence in the previous century produced such men as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Giotto. The intellectual supremacy thus evidenced was maintained in the ensuing century, but the early part of that century has no names to show that are comparable to these in artistic greatness. The stamp of the times, at least of the first half of the fifteenth century, is industrial rather than artistic. This is the time when the gradually increasing commercial and industrial importance of Italy has culminated in unequivocal world supremacy. Venice and Florence are now the commercial centres of the world. In Florence various forms of craftsmanship have attained a degree of importance which will make them famous for all time. The guilds of woollen weavers, of cloth merchants, of silk weavers, and of money-changers have become institutions of world-wide influence. The money lenders of Florence are found plying their trade in every capital of Europe. Despite their extortions they are regarded everywhere as a necessary evil; and Florentine gold in this century exercises an influence almost as wide as the quondam influence of Roman arms. The Florentine money-changer holds almost unchallenged the position that the Jew occupied at a later day. Oddly enough, it may be noted that the Jew himself is barred from plying the trade of money lender in Florence until about the end of the first third of the fifteenth century when, paradoxical as it may seem, he is legally granted the privilege, to protect the borrower from the extortions of the native usurers of the city.

The rapid development of commerce and industry brings with it, not unnaturally, a great change in the habits of the Florentine people. Early in the century the houses in Florence are still simple and relatively plain in their equipment. The windows are barred by shutters, glass not being yet in common use; the stairways are narrow; the entrances unostentatious. But before the close of the century all this is changed. The power of wealth makes itself felt in the houses, equipments, and costumes of the people; in their luxurious habits of living; their magnificent banquets and demonstrations; and all that goes to make up a life of sensuous pleasure.

Most significant of all, however, is the influence which wealth has enabled one family to attain; for the power of the Medici is, in its essentials, the power of gold. It is a power wielded deftly in the hands of prominent representatives of the family; a power that seems to make for the good of the city. Under Lorenzo the Magnificent every form of art is patronised and cultivated, and Florence easily maintains its supremacy as the culture centre of Italy. Such sculptors as Donatello, Berrochio, and their fellows; such painters as Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo, not to mention a varied company of almost equal attainments; and a company of distinguished workmen in all departments of the lesser arts, lend their influence to beautify the city under the patronage of Lorenzo. The school of art thus founded is to give the world such names as Michelangelo and Raphael in the succeeding generations. Curiously enough, by some unexplained oversight, the greatest painter of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, was led to make his greatest efforts in Milan and not in Florence during the life of Lorenzo, though he returned to the latter city not long after the death of the great patron of art.

As a patron of literature Lorenzo was no less active. He founded and developed a wonderful library in which the treasures of antiquity were collected, in the original or in copies, without regard to expense, from all parts of Europe. The art of book-making was carried to its highest development in this period. The manuscripts of the time are marvels of beauty. The ornamentation is beautiful, and the letters themselves are printed with a degree of regularity closely rivalling the uniformity of a printed page. And then not long after the middle of the century, just when this art of the scribe was at its height, the printing-press was introduced from Germany, and an easy mechanical means was at hand by which the most perfect technique could be attained. True, the connoisseur did not at first recognise the printed book as a possible rival of the old hand-made work. For a long time the collector continued to employ the hand workman, and the dilettante looked upon the printed book with much the same scornful glance which the modern collector of paintings bestows upon a chromo or lithograph. The first printing-press was set up, according to Von Reumont, at Subiaco in a Benedictine monastery in 1465. Some fifteen years later Vespasiano da Bisticci, writing about the library of the duke of Urbino, could proudly state that “All the volumes are of the most faultless beauty, written by hand, with elegant miniatures, and all on parchment. There are no printed books among them; the duke would have been ashamed to have them.”[2]

Notwithstanding the scornful attitude of the connoisseur, however, the art of printing books made its way rapidly. Hitherto the cost of production had rendered even the most ordinary book a luxury not to be possessed by any but the relatively wealthy. Naturally enough, an eager band of book lovers hailed the advent of the new method, despite its supposed artistic shortcomings; and before the end of the century there were printing-presses in all the important centres of Italy, and numberless classics, beginning with Virgil, had been given a vastly wider currency than had ever previously been possible. It is needless here to dwell upon the remoter influences of this rapid diffusion of classical treasures; but nowhere was the influence more important than in Italy.

Summarising in a few words the influences of the fifteenth century in Italy, it may be repeated that, as a whole, it is an epoch of industrial and commercial progress rather than of the greatest art. The culminating achievements of the century, the invention of the printing-press and the discovery of America were not Italian triumphs; though as the birthplace of Columbus and the home of Amerigo Vespucci, Italy cannot well be denied a share in the finding of the New World. Indeed, the association of Italy with this great achievement is perhaps closer than might at first sight appear. For on the one hand, it is held that the geographical work of Toscanelli was directly instrumental in stimulating Columbus to the conception of a western passage to India; while, in another view, the influence of the spirit of exploration and discovery fostered by the commercial relations of Italy in making possible the feat of Columbus, must have been inestimable. Be all that as it may, the discovery of the New World—made in the last decade of the century, and, as it chanced in the same year in which Lorenzo de’ Medici died—may well be considered not merely as a culminating achievement of the century, but as symbolical of that commercial and industrial spirit for which the century is chiefly remarkable.

We have now advanced to the date which is usually named as closing the mediæval epoch, but what has been said about the arbitrary character of this classification should be borne in mind. The discovery of America in 1492 did indeed mark the beginning of a new era in one sense, since it opened up a new hemisphere to the observation and residence of civilised man. That discovery, too, prepared the way for the demonstration of the fact that the world is round; hence it became an important corner-stone in the building of that new structure of man’s conception of cosmology of which the master builders were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. But the building of this new structure,—a revolutionising of man’s conception of the cosmos,—did not come about in a year or a century; the superstitions based on the old conception of cosmology have not lost their hold on mankind even in our own day. It has even been suggested that the year 1859, when the promulgation of thought occurred which gave the death-blow to the old ideas of cosmogony, and which may be said for the first time to have rendered the old superstitions truly obsolescent,—that this year rather than the year 1492 might well be named as limiting the mediæval epoch. So perhaps it may be with more remote generations of the future, but for the twentieth century observer the older date will doubtless seem the better one. But, after all, the question is one of no moment. Considering the recognised arbitrariness of all such divisions it does not in the least matter as to the exact bounds given to the mediæval epoch.