We have seen that the reforms of Andrea destroyed the popular constitution, placed all political power in the hands of the patricians, and opened the doors of the Republic to Spanish supremacy. When the city of Finale, exasperated by the lust and avarice of Alfonso Del Caretto, shook off his yoke, the dispossessed lord appealed as an imperial vassal to the Diet of Augusta; and the emperor, far from favouring the Republic, which had taken part in the fall of Alfonso, decided that the marquis should be restored to his feud, compelled Genoa to pay him for the damage he had suffered. The Republic clamoured against the sentence, it is true; but when a few years later Gabrielle Della Cueva, duke of Albuquerque, and governor of Milan, garrisoned Finale, Genoa had not courage to oppose the measure, and suffered a foreign power to intrench itself in the very heart of Liguria. At the death of Marquis Francesco (1598), the line of Carretto became extinct, and the Senate allowed Finale to pass into the possession of Spain, who, not content with this, assassinated Ercole Grimaldi, in order to become master of the principate of Monaco, (1614.)
Conquests and wars were finished, and Genoa had scarcely strength to keep down domestic revolt, and resist the aggressions of immediate neighbours. The greater part of the conspiracies which for almost a century disturbed the dreams of our masters, had no other object than to restore the popular constitution. The free systems were falling throughout the Peninsula. The people hoped when the council of Trent was opened that it would not only correct the gross abuses of the Papal court, but restore the church itself to its ancient democratic forms. But when the council closed, it was found that no innovation had been effected, that a few vices had been forbidden; but the Church remained a monarchy, as Gregory VII. and Innocent III. had left it. Not content with this, the Papacy, with its famous bull In cœna domini (1567), endeavoured to attach all the powers of the world to its triumphal car. The fall of the communes was complete, and the Latin principle was strangled by the monarchial and foreign element.
The Italian states, for the most part subject to foreign powers, were changing into monarchies. Italy was a province of Spain; and yet so detestable was that power that Navagero tells us, Paul IV. never spoke of the emperor or the Spaniards without calling them “heretics, robbers, accursed of God, children of Moors and Jews, offscouring of the earth,” and bewailing the fate of Italy compelled to serve such vile masters. Spain left such fierce antipathies behind her that the interjection “Cursed be Spain,” came down to our times. A wise Pope, Sixtus V., who tried to oppose the imperial power, died by poison (1590). For two centuries, the decrees which regulated Italian politics came from Madrid. Naples and Milan groaned in chains; the lords of Mantua, Ferrara, and Parma, gloried in their shameful bondage. Venice herself purchased peace by ignoble sacrifices. Of Rome I do not speak. That she was badly governed, witness the incessant revolts of her people, the conspiracy of Benedetto Accolti, and the obsequies of Paul IV.
Emanuele Filiberto, who won for Austria the battles of San Quintino and Gravelines, consolidated with his victories the foreign dominion; and, educated in the school of Phillip II., he extinguished liberty in Savoy by abolishing his states general, and bathed his valleys with the blood of the Vaudois. The Republics of central Italy saw their last days in the same terrible period; Florence was in the grasp of Cosimo, Pistoia under the guns of a fortress; Arezzo paid with her liberties for favouring the imperial army; Lucca bought with money and the blood of Burlamacchi a short reprieve; Siena more generous than all others fought to the last extremity and perished, like Saguntum, among her own ruins. Thus while in the middle of the sixteenth century the great nations were consolidated which now control Europe, Italy was dying and dying by the fault of her own sons. The treaty of Castel Cambrese recognized and sealed the foreign dominion.
From that moment, the love of letters ceased to be a worship. The form was polished; but the spirit was stifled. Our most illustrious artists, forced to live upon the patronage of foreign princes, preferred the security of servile ease to the dignity and modesty of true art. The money of the great seduced them to abandon truth and the people without whom genius is neither great nor productive. Pleasure for courtiers was their only aim. The country was dying, but no voice sang the hymn of death; no one gave history those pages of heroism which save the dignity of vanquished nations. On the contrary, Giovio with unblushing brow eulogized his golden pen; Casa sang in honour of the Charles V. whom he had once satirized. Alamanni apologized to the emperor for his famous verse saying that it is the poet’s office to lie, and Cellini himself could write:—“I work for pay.”
In this general decline, the ideas of Fieschi did not utterly die. Some generous souls continued to protest. Let it suffice to cite Tassoni and Campanella, the last of whom in his conspiracy against Spain was supported not only by many barons but also by the Visir Cicala, a Calabrian renegade (though of Ligurian descent) who promised to land Turks in the kingdom. Nor would we forget that some of our nobles in Genoa tried to tear up the poisonous plant which had taken root in the Republic; as, for example, Agostino and Francesco, Pallavicini, Nicolò Doria, who married a sister of Gianluigi Fieschi, and Agostino Vignolo who during the Piedmontese wars intrigued with lord bishop Brissac to aid the French arms.
But the Spanish government, which was destroying letters and arts, struck its roots more deeply every day and we reached such depths of degradation, we tremble in writing it, that the Senate issued a decree in the Spanish language and consented that it should be used in lectures and sermons. The plebeians, groaning under a double slavery, sometimes appealed to Spain against the arrogant despotism of the patricians; but the appeal reacted against the petitioners and Doctor Ligalupo, a man of much learning and great virtue, was imprisoned for life.
In the reports of the Venitian ambassadors to the Senate, the condition of Genoa is described in a few fit words; Badoero writes:—“They hate the Spanish nation as strongly as possible and matters stand thus:—the people see only France; those in power see only Spain, and none seem to think of the common weal.”
With the loss of liberty our manners became dissolute. Courtesans were held in honour. Imperia in Rome. Tullia in Venice were courted by men of genius. Catarina da S. Celso, Vanozza, Borgia and Bianca Capello married into illustrious houses. To speak of Liguria alone, a brief of Pope Clement VII. to the archbishop of Genoa and the prior of S. Teodoro, exhorts these prelates to unite with the government in reforming the cloisters, because the nuns have become utterly dissolute from contact with every sort of persons. The Genoese nuns had infamous repute throughout Italy. Bandello says:—They go where they please and when they return to the cloister say to the abbess “Mother, by your permission, we have been to divert ourselves.” It seems that subterranean passages were opened between the cloisters of nuns and friars. In our times, when the convent of S. Brigida was torn down, in the open walls were found skeletons of children who had been buried there as soon as born. Cardinal Bembo justly said that “all human vices and crimes were perpetrated in the cloisters under cover of a diabolical hypocrisy.”
On the fourth of September 1551, another brief on the corrupt morals of the convents was issued by Julius III., but it produced no effect. Gregory XIII., in a third brief of the first of July, 1583, made a new attempt to correct the gross immoralities of the cloister and the fruitlessness of his efforts is shown by the fact that he issued another soon after. The Aragonese license, penetrating the palace and the sanctuary, corrupted everything exalted or sacred; and then gradually diffused itself among the people, who had hitherto been so virtuous that the magistracy of Virtue, instituted in 1512, had no occasion to make regulations in regard to popular morals.