Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading

by George Park Fisher

VENICE.—Venice, in the fourteenth century, was as strong as any Italian state. Its constitution was of gradual growth. The doge, elected by the people, divided power in 1032 with a senate; and in 1172 the Grand Council was organized. This council by degrees absorbed the powers of government, which thus became an aristocracy. In 1297 the Senate became hereditary in a few families. In 1311 the powerful Council of Ten was constituted. For a long period Venice was not ambitious of power in Italy, but was satisfied with her commerce with the East. Her contest with Genoa began in 1352, and lasted for thirty years. In the war of Chioggia,—so called from a town twenty-five miles south of Venice,—the Venetians were defeated by Luciano Doria in a sea-fight on the Adriatic. He blockaded Venice; but Doria, in turn, was blockaded in Chioggia by the Venetians, and forced to surrender. After reducing the naval power of Genoa, they added Verona, Vicenza, and Padua to their territories (1410). Under Francesco Foscari, who was doge from 1423 to 1457, Venice took an active part in Italian affairs.

FLORENCE: THE MEDICI.—In Florence, the Medici family gained an influence which gave them a practical control of the government. In 1378 Salvestro de Medici signalized himself by a successful resistance to an oligarchical faction composed partly of the old nobility. The brilliant period in the history of Florence begins with this triumph of the democracy. Pisa was bought from the Duke of Milan, and forced to submit to Florentine rule (1406). John de Medici, a very successful merchant, was twice chosen gonfalonier (1421). His son Cosmo I., who was born in 1389, was also a merchant, possessed of great wealth. He attained to the leading offices in the state, having overcome the Albizzi family, at whose instigation he was for a while banished. Cosmo ruled under the republican forms, but with not less authority on that account. He was distinguished for his patronage of art and letters. By his varied services to Florence, he earned the title of "Father of his Country," which was given him by a public decree.

THE ROMAN PRINCIPALITY: RIENZI.—After the popes took up their abode in Avignon, in the first half of the fourteenth century, Rome was distracted by the feuds of leading families who built for themselves strongholds in the city. In 1347 the Romans, fired by the enthusiast Rienzi, who sought to restore the old Roman liberty, undertook to set up a government after the ancient model. Rienzi was chosen tribune. He found much favor in other cities of Italy. But his head was turned by the seeming realization of his dreams. He was driven out of Italy by the cardinals and the nobles. He returned afterwards, sent by Pope Innocent VI., to aid in winning back Rome to subjection to the Holy See. But his power was gone. He disgusted the people with his pomps and shows, and, while trying to escape in disguise, was put to death (1354). Cardinal Albornoz succeeded in reuniting the dissevered parts of the papal kingdom. But in the period of the Schism (1378-1417), in the cities old dynasties were revived, and new ones arose; towns and territories were ceded to nobles as fiefs; and a degree of freedom almost amounting to independence was conceded to old republics, as Rome, Perugia, and Bologna. It was the work of Pope Nicholas V. and his successors (from 1477) to regain and cement anew the fragments of the papal principality.

LITERATURE AND ART.—In this period, in the midst of political agitation in Italy, there was a brilliant development in the departments of literature and art. The major part of Dante's life (1265-1321) falls within the thirteenth century. Petrarch (1304-1374), Boccaccio (1313-1375), a master in Italian prose, and Dante, are the founders of Italian literature. They are followed by an era of study and culture, rather than of original production. In the arts, Venice and Pisa first became eminent. The church of St. Mark was built at Venice, in the Byzantine style, in 1071. At about the same time the famous cathedral at Pisa was begun; which was followed, in the twelfth century, by the Baptistery and the Leaning Tower. The Campo Santo, or cemetery, was built in 1278. In the thirteenth century, when architectural industry was so active, numerous high brick towers were built in Florence for purposes of defense. Some of them remain "to recall the bloody feuds of the irreconcilable factions of the nobility. In these conflicts, the strife was carried on from tower to tower, from house to house: streets were barricaded with heavy chains, and homes made desolate with fire and sword." Churches and great public buildings were constructed in this period. At the end of the thirteenth century the church of Santa Croce was built at Florence; and in the century following, Brunelleschi, the reviver of classical art in Italy, placed the great cupola on the Cathedral. The Gothic cathedral of Milan, with its wilderness of statues, was begun in 1346. Cimabue, who died about 1302, and Giotto, who died about 1337, laid the foundations of the modern Italian schools of painting.

TRADE AND COMMERCE.—The seaports, Venice and Genoa, were centers of a flourishing commerce, extending to the far East and to the coasts of Spain and France. The interior cities—Milan with its two hundred thousand inhabitants, Verona, Florence—were centers of manufactures and of trade. The Italians were the first bankers in Europe. The bank of Venice was established in 1171, and the bank of Genoa, although it was projected earlier, was founded in 1407. The financial dealings of Italian merchants spread over all Europe.

MORALITY.—The one thing lacking in Italy was a broader spirit of patriotism and a higher tone of morality. Advance in civilization was attended with corruption of morals.

III. SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY.—Resistance to the Arabs in Spain began in the northern mountainous region of Cantabria and Asturia, which even the West Goths had not wholly subdued, although Asturia was called Gothia. Asturia, a Christian principality (732), expanded into the kingdom called Leon (916), of which Castile was an eastern county. East of Leon, there grew up the kingdom of Navarre, mostly on the southern, but partly on the northern side of the Pyrenees. On the death of Sancho the Great, it was broken up (1035). At about the same time the Ommiad caliphate was broken up into small kingdoms (1031). After the death of Sancho, or early in the eleventh century, we find in Northern Spain, beginning on the west and moving eastward, the kingdom of Leon, the beginnings of the kingdom of Castile, the reduced kingdom of Navarre, the beginnings of the kingdom of Aragon, and, between Aragon and the Mediterranean, Christian states which had been comprised in the Spanish March over which the Franks had ruled. The two states which were destined to attain to the chief importance were Castile and Aragon. Of these, Castile was eventually to be to Spain what France was to all Gaul. Ultimately the union of Castile and Aragon gave rise to the great Spanish monarchy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The four kingdoms of Leon, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, after the death of Sancho, as time went on, were joined and disjoined among themselves in many different ways. Castile and Leon were finally united in 1230. Portugal, lying on the ocean, was partly recovered from the Arabs towards the close of the eleventh century, and was a county of Leon and Castile until, in 1139, it became a kingdom. From this time Castile, Aragon, and Portugal were the three antagonists of Moslem rule. Each of these kingdoms advanced. Portugal spread especially along the Atlantic coast; Aragon, along the coast of the Mediterranean; Castile, the principal power, spread in the interior, and included by far the greater part of what is now Spain. In the latter part of the thirteenth century the Moslems were confined to the kingdom of Granada in the South, which was conquered by Castile and Aragon (1492), whose sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, were united in marriage. Their kingdoms were united in 1516. In the latter part of the Middle Ages, Aragon, from its situation on the eastern coast, played an important part in the politics of Europe. Castile and Portugal led the way in maritime exploration.

THE MOORS.—It has been already related (p. 282), that, after the fall of the Ommiad caliphate, African Mohammedans came over to the help of their Spanish brethren. These Moors did not supplant the Arabic speech or culture. The two principal invasions of the Moors were the invasion by the Almoravides (1086-110), and that by the Almohades (1146).

ARAGON: NAVARRE.—The kingdoms of Aragon and Castile existed for centuries side by side. Aragon sought to extend its conquests along the eastern coast; Castile, to enlarge itself toward the south. James I., or James the Conqueror (1213-1276), joined the Moslem state of Valencia, by conquest, to his kingdom of Aragon, to which Catalonia had already been added. The union of these peoples developed a national character of a definite type. In its pride of birth and of blood, its tenacious clinging to traditional rights, and in its esteem of military prowess before intellectual culture, it resembled the old Spartan temper. Peter III.,(1276-1285), the son of James I., united with the three states Sicily, which, though it became a separate kingdom, gave to the house of Aragon its influence in Southern Italy. Nearly the whole of the fourteenth century was taken up by Aragon in the acquisition of Sardinia, which the Pope had ceded, and in the endless wars, connected with this matter, which it waged with the Genoese. In 1410 the ruling house of Barcelona became extinct. In the revolutions that followed, Navarre and Aragon were united under John II., second son of Ferdinand I., king of Aragon. John, by his marriage with Blanche of Navarre, shared her father's throne with her after his death. He was guilty of the crime of poisoning his own son Don Carlos, Prince of Vianne. John was the father of Ferdinand "the Catholic," under whose scepter the kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, and Navarre were brought together.