But the cup was charged with a bitterness beyond these humiliations. Surrounded by ecclesiastical provinces, the inhabitants of the duchy had long a foretaste of their coming fate, which amply accounted for the exultation with which they had hailed the promised continuance of the ducal line, and their sullen despair on witnessing its inevitable extinction. The Venetian Relazioni, quoted by Ranke, supply us with the opinion of disinterested contemporaries as to the condition of the papal state during the seventeenth century. In 1600, its "nobles and people would gladly cast themselves upon any sovereign whatever, to escape from the hands into which they had fallen." Ten years later, the very blood of the inhabitants was wrung from them by excessive taxation, and their enterprise was crushed by commercial restrictions. "The foreign traders had quitted Ancona, the native merchants were bankrupt, the gentry impoverished, the artizans ruined, the populace dispersing." A year or two after the last Duke's death, his people are described as grumbling much at the change, calling the new government a tyranny, and sneering at the priests as interested solely in accumulating wealth, and aggrandising themselves. In 1666, we have this calamitous but probably overcoloured picture:—"It is palpably evident that the ecclesiastical realm is quite overburdened, so that many landholders, unable to extract enough from their possessions to meet the extraordinary public imposts, resort of necessity to the abandonment of their estates, in order to seek fortune and sustenance in less rapacious communities. I speak not of duties and customs, from which nothing eatable is excepted; because the taxes, donatives, subsidies, and other extraordinary extortions would excite pity and astonishment, even if the terrible commissioners sent from Rome into these cities, with absolute authority to inquire, sell, carry off, and confiscate, did not exceed all belief; no month ever passing without a flight of griffins and harpies, in the guise of commissioners, either of the fabric of St. Peter's, or of pious bequests, or of movable goods, or of archives, or of some five-and-twenty other Roman courts, by all which the already drained purses of the helpless subjects are tortured to the last degree. And thus,—setting aside Ferrara and Bologna, to which some consideration is extended, and which are favoured by nature and art with excellent soil, and with manufacturing industry,—all other cities of Romagna, La Marca, Umbria, the Patrimony, Sabina, and the Campagna are utterly wretched; and, to the disgrace of the Roman government, in none of them do woollen or silk factories exist, nor even of gold stuffs, except in a few such little towns as Fossombrone, Pergola, Matelica, Camerino, and Norcia, although the abundance of wool and silk might afford a most advantageous trade. The ecclesiastical territory is merely an estate leased out to tenants, who give no thought to its improvement, but only to extract the greatest possible amount of its produce from the unhappy land, whose scourged and arid soil will be unable to yield more than very barren crops to succeeding occupants.... The more hateful and abhorred they find themselves, the more merciless do they become; and dragging their hats over their brows, they look no one in the face. They glean all sorts of corn into their sheaves, intent wholly upon their own interests, without the smallest regard to the public." By the end of the century, matters had become worse, the country being "depopulated and uncultivated, ruined by extortions, and destitute of industry." The duchy of Urbino, which, according to the preceding extract, was the last refuge of the silk trade, had then fallen into deep decay, and the corn commerce of La Marca was clogged by export dues and injudicious restrictions.[130]

Anderson

VITTORIA DELLA ROVERE, GRAND DUCHESS OF TUSCANY

From the picture by Sustermans in the Pitti Gallery, Florence

These plaintive notes might still [1859] find not a few echoes along the papal coasts of the Adriatic—the focus of Italian discontent,—over-taxation to maintain a distant government being ever the burden of their song. But the question is not, in truth, one of financial administration. However open to stricture the fiscal details may be, when tested by sound principles, the amount of revenue raised is moderate in consideration of the wealth there lavished by beneficent nature, in a degree denied to other not less burdened districts of the Peninsula. Nor can the papal sway, however objectionable, be in fairness regarded as otherwise than mild. But centralisation is necessarily alien to the spirit of a people long broken up into miniature communities, as it was formerly uncongenial to their ancestors, whose personal pride, political influence, and hopes of promotion, equally turned upon the continuance of a sectional independence. Hence the popular dissatisfaction rests as much upon traditional evils as upon existing and obvious misgovernment. Four centuries ago there were above a dozen capitals, flourishing in the balmy atmosphere of as many gay courts, and basking in patronage and prosperity, all within the circuit of that province where now a few priestly legates perform the functions of sovereignty without either the taste or the means for indulging its trappings, and dwell in princely palaces without the habits or the popularity of their ancient lords.

But these are not matters for casual discussion. From the accession of Count Guidantonio in 1404, till the Devolution by Duke Francesco Maria in 1624, this little state had enjoyed two hundred and twenty years of a prosperity unknown to the neighbouring communities. Her sovereigns were distinguished in arts and arms, respected abroad, esteemed at home; her frontiers were comparatively exempt from invasion, her tranquillity unruffled by domestic broils: within her narrow limits were reared or sheltered many of the brightest names in literature, science, and art; her court was the mirror of refinement, her capital the Athens of Italy. Since the Devolution, she has passed an equal number of lustres in provincial obscurity and neglect. It has been the object of this work to portray somewhat of the splendours of that former period, though the subject would require colours more brilliant, and a hand more skilled. Here our task must close, for to follow her destinies to their decline and fall were one of few attractions.

"Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains
Clank over sceptred cities, nations melt
From power's high pinnacle, when they have felt
The sunshine for a while, and downward go!"