Milan was subject to only one transfer, from Spain to Austria, by the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt (1713-14), which closed the war of the Spanish Succession. Those same treaties took Naples and the island of Sardinia from Spain and gave them to Austria, and also took Sicily from Spain and gave it to Savoy. Spain, however, was dissatisfied, and attempted to recover what she had lost; but a new European coalition forced her to renounce her claim. In the general pacification after the war, for the purpose of making a more satisfactory arrangement, Sardinia was exchanged for Sicily, giving Sardinia to Savoy and Sicily to Austria (1720). Finally, after the war of the Polish Succession by the Peace of Vienna (1738), Austria ceded Naples and Sicily to younger sons of the royal family of Spain, the Spanish Bourbons, on condition that those provinces should never be united with the crown of Spain, and received in exchange the little duchy of Parma, which had fallen to a Spanish Bourbon on the extinction of the Farnesi. But ten years later, at the close of the war of the Austrian Succession, Austria ceded Parma back again to other members of the Spanish Bourbon family.
Tuscany
Another paragraph is necessary to complete the Austrification and the Spanification of Italy. The Medici of Tuscany died out. After the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, six successors had followed, dwindling away in incapacity, luxury, and bigotry. The last died in 1737. Then, by virtue of that general reapportionment after the war of the Polish Succession, the Grand Duchy was handed over to the Duke of Lorraine, husband of Maria Theresa, of the House of Hapsburg, Empress of Austria, and became an appanage of the Austrian Empire, under the rule of the younger sons of the Imperial house. It is a relief to turn from these Austrian and Spanish provinces to the two living powers, Savoy and the Papacy.
Savoy
It would be impossible to chronicle here the history of the Savoyard dukes, who were advanced to the title of Kings of Sardinia after the acquisition of that island. Savoy lay in the way of the three fighting nations, France, Spain, and Austria. The plain of Piedmont was an admirable fighting-ground, and the combatants chose it on all possible occasions, but it would not be fair to charge the whole blame upon those three nations. The Dukes of Savoy were ambitious men, full of all sorts of schemes for increasing their dominions and their personal glory. Whenever any one of them thought he perceived an opportunity to seize some neighbouring territory, he caught at it, reckless of collision with his powerful neighbours. The general upshot was that Savoy lost its old Swiss provinces and its old French provinces, and that Piedmont became the head and front of the new Kingdom of Sardinia. Equally important to Italy was the fact that, while the people of the other Italian provinces became more and more incapable of bearing arms or of making any real martial effort, the people of Piedmont gradually became a nation of soldiers. In devastation, war, and apparent ruin, Piedmontese valour and Piedmontese character were trained and developed, and Piedmont little by little came to feel, and likewise to impress upon the other Italian States, that she, and she alone, was the refuge and hope of whatever Italian patriotism might still exist.
The Papacy
The Papacy we left at the end of the sixteenth century in the full flood of revival. The Popes were swept on by the tide. The bold and successful front opposed to the enemy was supplemented by discipline within. Heresy was traced and tracked. Inquisitors roamed about, spying what they might; they frightened the learned from publishing, printers from printing, and almost all from freedom of talk and thought. Thus traitors were rooted out. And at the same time faithful soldiers of the Church were trained and educated. Seminaries for priests of divers nations were founded in Rome; Jesuit schools were helped everywhere. Sixtus V (Felice Peretti), 1585-90, was a Pope worthy of the great period. He entertained a plan to reconquer Egypt, and make the Mediterranean and Red Seas a high-road for armies and navies that should break up the Ottoman power. He attacked the banditti of the Papal State, as his predecessors had attacked the barons, and, for a time at least, suppressed them. He was a great builder; he completed the dome of St. Peter's, set up the Egyptian obelisk in the piazza before the cathedral, substituted statues of St. Peter and St. Paul in place of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius on the tops of the two great bronze columns that adorn the Foro Trajano and the Piazza Colonna. He brought fresh water, named after him Acqua Felice, into the city from over twenty miles away, and gave Rome an aspect worthy of the capital of the Latin world. He fixed seventy for the number of cardinals; he revised the Vulgate; and pondered many great designs, for which, as he said, his strength would have been inadequate, even had he lived.
But these Popes of the Revival, who carried into effect the papal principles of the Council of Trent, vigorous, and in many respects admirable, as they were, need not detain us, for the history of the Papacy in this period scarcely belongs to Italy. It has a far wider reach, and is intimately bound up with the great Catholic, one might say the great Latin, effort to restore or extend Catholicism and Latin supremacy throughout the world. In the British Isles, in Scandinavia, in Poland, in Russia, in Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the Church fought with the old Roman spirit of conquest. Everywhere the Jesuit fathers went, busy, devoted, heroic. The ardour of St. Francis Xavier, the self-abnegation of St. Francis de Sales, the passionate mysticism of St. Theresa, infected and controlled thousands of disciples. Everywhere were great manifestations of activity. In South America there were bishops and archbishops, hundreds of monasteries and innumerable priests. In Mexico there were schools of theology. In India, thousands and thousands of converts clustered around the city of Goa. In China and Japan the Jesuits built churches, and converted to Christianity disciples of Confucius and Buddha. The Church had founded an empire on which the sun never set. But our business is not with this great Latin conquest, this great Catholic revival. We must pass on to the next series of Popes, less memorable for their imitation of Scipio and Cæsar, than of Lucullus and Crassus. Here we find the names of the founders of great papal families, so familiar in Rome, not as missionaries, teachers, or martyrs, but as owners of palaces, villas, pictures and statues: Borghese (Paul V, 1605-21), the Pope who quarrelled with the Venetian Republic; Ludovisi (Gregory XV, 1621-23), in whose pontificate the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (College for Propagating the Faith) was established; Barberini (Urban VIII, 1623-44), whose family, famous from the squib "Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecerunt Barberini," built its palaces out of Roman ruins. During the pontificate of Barberini, Galileo was brought before the Holy Office, and his opinion that the earth moved condemned as "absurd, false in philosophy, and essentially heretical."
Under his successor Panfili (Innocent X, 1644-55), Catholic Europe stopped fighting Protestant Europe, and the Thirty Years' War was closed by the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The Catholic Powers gave over the attempt to reduce the Protestant States, and acknowledged their independence. Panfili launched his bull against the treaty, but the weary world disregarded the old man's curses. After him came Chigi (Alexander VII, 1655-67), Rospigliosi (Clement IX, 1667-69), Odescalchi (Innocent XI, 1676-89), whose names mean little to us.
Long before this time the forces of revivification which had borne onward and upward the Catholic counter-charge on the Protestant ranks, had begun to fall away. The great Catholic monarchs of Europe turned their minds to personal ambitions; the Popes squandered papal revenues on their own families; the Jesuits loosened their rigid hold on their once high principles. The period of reform had passed, and the Papacy settled down into a policy of maintaining the ecclesiastical empire left to it and of enjoying its little Italian monarchy. In politics it pursued a shifting course towards Austria, Spain, and France, dictated rather by passing fears than by wisdom or lofty ambition. At the time of the close of the war of the Spanish Succession the Papacy was hardly regarded as a European power. The proof of decline was most visible in the concessions made by the Papacy to the Catholic sovereigns, by its forced acquiescence in the repeated attacks on the Jesuits, and finally, by its bull suppressing, or rather attempting to suppress, the Order (1773).