Before reviewing the chief city-states of northern Italy, it will be well to say a word about two other political divisions of the country. The southern third of the peninsula comprised the ancient kingdom of Naples, which had grown up about the city of that name, and which together with the large island of Sicily, was called the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
[Sidenote: Southern Italy in 1500: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies]
This state, having been first formed by Scandinavian adventurers in the eleventh century, had successively passed under papal suzerainty, under the domination of the German emperors, and at length in 1266 under French control. A revolt in Sicily in the year 1282, commonly called the Sicilian Vespers, had severed the relation between the island and the mainland, the former passing to the royal family of Aragon, and the latter troublously remaining in French hands until 1442. The reunion of the Two Sicilies at that date under the crown of Aragon served to keep alive the quarrel between the French and the Spanish; and it was not until 1504 that the king of France definitely renounced his Neapolitan claims in favor of Ferdinand of Aragon. Socially and politically Naples was the most backward state in Italy.
[Sidenote: Italy in 1500: the Papal States]
About the city of Rome had grown up in the course of centuries the Papal States, or as they were officially styled, the Patrimony of St. Peter. It had early fallen to the lot of the bishop, as the most important person in the city, to exercise political power over Rome, when barbarian invasions no longer permitted the exercise of authority by Roman emperors; and control over neighboring districts, as well as over the city, had been expressly recognized and conferred upon the bishop by Charlemagne in the eighth century. This bishop of Rome was, of course, the pope; and the pope slowly extended his territories through central Italy from the Tiber to the Adriatic, long using them merely as a bulwark to his religious and ecclesiastical prerogatives. By the year 1500, however, the popes were becoming prone to regard themselves as Italian princes who might normally employ their states as so many pawns in the game of peninsular politics. The policy of the notorious Alexander VI (1492-1503) centered in his desire to establish his son, Cesare Borgia, as an Italian ruler; and Julius II (1503-1513) was famed more for statecraft and military prowess than for religious fervor.
[Sidenote: The City-States of Northern Italy in 1500]
North and west of the Papal States were the various city-states which were so thoroughly distinctive of Italian politics at the opening of the sixteenth century. Although these towns had probably reached a higher plane both of material prosperity and of intellectual culture than was to be found at that time in any other part of Europe, nevertheless they were deeply jealous of each other and carried on an interminable series of petty wars, the brunt of which was borne by professional hired soldiers and freebooters styled condottieri. Among the Italian city-states, the most famous in the year 1500 were Milan, Venice, Genoa, and Florence.
[Sidenote: Italian City-States: Milan Governed by Despots]
Of these cities, Milan was still in theory a ducal fief of the Holy Roman Empire, but had long been in fact the prize of despotic rulers who were descended from two famous families—the Visconti and the Sforza—and who combined the patronage of art with the fine political subtleties of Italian tyrants. The Visconti ruled Milan from the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth, when a Sforza, a leader of condottieri established the supremacy of his own family. In 1499, however, King Louis XII of France, claiming the duchy as heir to the Visconti, seized Milan and held it until he was expelled in 1512 by the Holy League, composed of the pope, Venice, Spain, and England, and a Sforza was temporarily reinstated.
[Sidenote: Venice, a Type of the Commercial and Aristocratic Italian
City-States]