But it is misleading to regard the history of these forty years as a mere chronicle of heroic efforts ending in hopeless failure. The very divisions of Germany, while they weakened its nationality, gave greater scope and variety to local development. From this period we date the rise to greatness of the two vigorous dynasties of Luxemburg and Hapsburg. To it we have also to look for the first origins of the Swiss Confederation [see chap. [vii].], for the rise of the Hanseatic League [see chap. [xviii].], and for the establishment of a great territorial power in Prussia by the Teutonic Order [see chap. xix.]. It is necessary to follow the fortunes of the monarchy in order to understand why German development was so different from that of other contemporary states, but the real interest of German history is to be found in the vigorous growth of these political organisations on the extremities rather than in the declining vitality of the central power.
CHAPTER II
ITALY AND THE PAPACY, 1273-1313
Italy in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries—Causes of Italian disunion—The Guelfs and Ghibellines—The Italian towns—The House of Anjou in Naples—The Sicilian Vespers—The Popes and their States—Celestine V. is succeeded by Boniface VIII.—The last of the Mediæval Popes—The difficulties of Benedict XI. and Clement V.—The retirement of Clement V. to Avignon and beginning of the ‘Babylonish Captivity’—The condition of Tuscany—The Florentine Constitution—Genoa and Milan—The Venetian Constitution—Henry VII. makes an Expedition into Italy—Its failure—Death of Henry VII.
The two centuries which are treated in this volume constitute |Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.| the most brilliant period in Italian history since the age of Augustus. The absence of any central authority, which disappeared even more completely in Italy than in Germany, opened the way for the growth of a number of political organisations, whose history is as fascinating as their variety is bewildering. In addition to the great dynasties of Anjou, Visconti, and Medici, we have to watch the fortunes of the great republics of Venice, Florence, and Genoa, of the temporal states of the Church, and of a number of lesser families, such as the House of Este in Ferrara, the della Scalas in Verona, the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Montefeltri in Urbino, whose kaleidoscopic changes are narrated with such wealth of detail in the volumes of Sismondi. But what gives its special importance to the history of this period is that in it Italy becomes the teacher of Europe. It is to Italy that we trace that great movement, known as the Renaissance, which began with the revival of classical learning, but led on to the growth of national literatures, to the rise of a new spirit in the arts of painting and sculpture, and to the enfranchisement of human thought from the fetters of superstition, routine, and the formulas of scholasticism. In the fifteenth century, Italy originated the art of writing history as distinguished from the compilation of mediæval chronicles. And finally, Italy instructed Europe in politics as well as in letters and art. The foremost European rulers of the sixteenth century learnt the maxims of government from Italian princes and Italian writers: the great states of modern times learnt from Italy the practices of diplomacy and the theory of the balance of power. Political science, which had made no progress since the days of Aristotle, was revived by the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.
Yet Italy profited less than any other state from the lessons which she taught. France, England, and Spain, all of them the pupils of Italy, became strong, united, and wealthy states, while Italy herself, in the very middle of an intellectual and artistic activity which has remained the wonder of the world, subsided into political insignificance, and only finds a place in subsequent history as the stage on which other nations fight out their quarrels. The solution of this crucial problem, the combination of intellectual progress with political decadence, can only be found in a careful study of the conditions which |Causes of Italian disunion.| prevented the people of Italy from following the normal tendencies of the period, and becoming a nation. The causes of disunion are too numerous and deep-seated to be summed up in a few sentences. But it may be instructive to form a clear conception, at starting, of some of the most notable conditions which influenced the course of Italian history in the period which we have to consider. In the first place, geography in Italy, as in Greece, tended to disunion. The Apennines cut off the Lombard plain from the rest of Italy, and divided the latter into two unequal parts which were again split up by the lateral offshoots into divisions, not quite so small as those of Greece, but almost equally marked off. The nominal subjection to an elective emperor, who was also king of Germany, rendered impossible the rise of any strong native power which could weld together the separate political units. The influence of the Papacy, which in the thirteenth century combined the sovereignty of an Italian state with the spiritual headship of Latin Christendom, proved almost as great an obstacle as the Empire to national union. The great length of Italy, by increasing isolation, hindered the growth of common interests. The leagues occasionally founded for common aims, such as the Lombard league against Frederick Barbarossa and the league of Venice against Charles VIII., were never more than temporary alliances, and fell to pieces as soon as their immediate object was gained.
The long quarrel between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen |Guelfs and Ghibellines.| Emperors bequeathed a fatal heritage to Italy in the party feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines. These famous factions not only set one state against another, but also gave rise to violent discord within each state. And the parties lasted long after the original cause of quarrel had come to an end. When the Hohenstaufen had perished with Manfred and Conradin, when Rudolf of Hapsburg had abandoned all imperial claims over central and southern Italy, when the Papacy itself had quitted Italy to find a home on the further boundary of Provence, it seemed as if party feuds must inevitably die out for want of the fuel which had originally kindled them. But the blaze of mutual hatred continued to rage as fiercely as ever. The famous strife of the Bianchi and Neri in Florence, which drove Dante into exile from his native city, was fought out when Albert I. and Boniface VIII. were in close alliance. These stereotyped and quasi-hereditary feuds were not only destructive of all sense of nationality, but they were strong enough to overpower the far stronger and more local sentiment of common citizenship.
Perhaps the strongest of all the disruptive forces in Italy was the development, in the northern and central provinces, of the municipality or commune as the normal |The Commune as a political unit.| unit of political life. This applies not only to the republics proper, but also to those cities whose liberties were overthrown by the rise of some dominant family. The subjection of lesser cities by more powerful neighbours did not create a state in which all subjects stood in an equal relation of submission to a despotic government, but one in which subject communes were enslaved by a dominant commune, and were excluded by it from all voice in the government. The citizens of Pavia and Cremona were not the direct subjects of the Visconti on a level with the Milanese themselves. They were the subjects of Milan, and were ruled by Milanese governors, just as Pisa and Pistoia were ruled by Florentines. The absorption of the lesser cities continued, until in the fifteenth century Italy practically consisted of five dominant states—Naples, Milan, Venice, Florence, and the Papacy. The result was the creation of a large subject population, deprived of that share in politics which Italian citizens had learnt in earlier times to consider their dearest right, and constituting a permanent and dangerous element of discontent. It was from this population that the condottieri recruited those mercenary armies to which Italian writers agree in attributing the disasters that befel their country, and it was this population which welcomed foreign invasion as a chance of escaping from domestic oppressions. Commines tells us that the Italians ‘welcomed as saints’ the French army that followed Charles VIII. to Naples, and the phrase is significant of the unsoundness of the political condition of Italy and of the utter absence of any sense of nationality.
The quarrel between Frederick II. and the Popes had been embittered by the former’s possession of Naples and Sicily, which brought him into threatening proximity to the territories in central Italy which the Popes claimed to rule. To drive the Hohenstaufen from Italian soil the Popes did not hesitate to call in foreign assistance. After a vain attempt to draw England into the quarrel, the crown of Sicily was offered as a papal fief to |The House of Anjou in Naples.| Charles of Anjou, the brother of Louis IX., and Count of Provence through his wife Beatrix. At the battle of Grandella near Benevento (February 26, 1266) Manfred, the illegitimate son of Frederick II., was slain; and the still more famous battle of Tagliacozzo (August 23, 1268) was followed by the capture and execution of Conradin, the last male representative of the House of Hohenstaufen. These two victories secured Charles’s possession of Naples and Sicily, though the marriage of Manfred’s daughter, Constance, to Peter III. of Aragon created a rival claim which proved a source of subsequent danger.
As the acknowledged head of the Guelf party, which was for the moment supreme, Charles of Anjou seemed likely to establish his ascendency over the greater part of Italy. The Pope, claiming supremacy during the Interregnum, appointed him imperial vicar and senator of Rome, while a number of cities in Tuscany and Lombardy acknowledged his lordship. But his ambitious schemes were suddenly checked by the very power of which he posed as the champion. The Papacy discovered that it had called in a protector who might prove as dangerous a neighbour as the Hohenstaufen. Gregory X. and Nicolas III., secured in their position by the concessions of Rudolf of Hapsburg, did not hesitate to oppose the further progress of the Neapolitan kings by a policy of mediation between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. The election of Martin IV. (February 24, 1281), a creature of Charles, seemed to offer a new opportunity for Angevin aggression. The ascendency of the Guelf faction was revived, and Charles was planning an enterprise against Constantinople, when he was arrested by the news of a great disaster. The |Sicilian Vespers, 1282.| Sicilians had long resented the harshness of French rule, and John of Procida, an old partisan of the Hohenstaufen, had returned from his refuge in Aragon to encourage the malcontents and to secure for them foreign assistance. His plans were still incomplete, when a sudden rising at Palermo was provoked by a brutal insult offered to a woman by a French soldier during a procession on Easter Monday (March 30, 1282). The people rose with shouts of ‘Death to the French!’ and more than four thousand men, women, and children were massacred that evening. The whole of Sicily joined in the rebellion, and offered the crown to Peter III. of Aragon. When Peter arrived in August he found that Charles, thirsting for vengeance, had already laid siege to Messina. But the Catalan |House of Aragon in Sicily.| fleet under Roger di Loria, the most distinguished naval commander of his time, was too formidable to be faced by the mere transport vessels with which Charles was provided. Sicily was perforce evacuated, and was never recovered by the House of Anjou. The Sicilian Vespers gave rise to a twenty years’ struggle, which concerns the history of France and Spain as well as Italy. The Pope decreed Peter’s deposition, both in Sicily and in Aragon, and offered the latter crown to Charles of Valois, the second son of Philip the Fair. But papal bulls failed to overcome Aragonese obstinacy and Sicilian devotion. In 1283 Charles’s son of the same name was captured in a naval battle by Roger di Loria, and remained a prisoner for the next five years. In 1285 Charles I. of Anjou died (January 7), after a career which had known no failure till towards its close. The same year witnessed the successive deaths of Pope Martin IV. (March 12) and of Peter III. (November 11). The latter was succeeded in Aragon by his eldest son Alfonso, and in Sicily by his second son James. In 1288 the mediation of Edward I. of England resulted in the conclusion of a treaty by which Charles II. of Anjou was released to take possession of the Neapolitan crown, and Sicily was confirmed to the House of Aragon. But the treaty was never observed. No sooner was Charles II. free than Nicolas IV. absolved him from his obligations, recognised him as king of the Two Sicilies on the same terms as his father, and renewed the excommunication against James. The war continued without a break. In 1291 Alfonso died, and James succeeded to the crown of Aragon. Wearied of the long struggle, and anxious to free his Spanish kingdom from the attacks of Charles of Valois, James agreed to renounce the crown of Sicily. But the Sicilians refused to return to French rule, and raised to the throne Frederick, the youngest son of Peter III., who continued the struggle even in opposition to his own brother. At last, in 1302, after an unsuccessful attack on Sicily by Charles of Valois, peace was concluded. Frederick was to marry Charles II.’s sister Eleanor, and to retain the kingdom of Sicily during his lifetime, but on his death it was to revert to the House of Anjou. This last stipulation was never fulfilled, and Sicily and Naples remained under separate rulers till 1435, when they were reunited under an Aragonese king. The only other notable event in the reign of Charles II. of Naples was the acquisition of the Hungarian crown by his grandson, Carobert, which has been already narrated (see p. [15]). In 1309 Charles II. died, and the crown of Naples passed to his second son, Robert, the superior hereditary claims of Carobert of Hungary being passed over. For the next thirty-four years Robert was the acknowledged head of the Guelf party in Italy.
To the north of the kingdom of Naples lay the temporal |The Papal States.| dominions which the Popes claimed by virtue of real or pretended donations from Emperors and others. These territories had by this time reached the boundaries which they retained to the present century. They included the whole of Romagna, the Pentapolis, the March of Ancona, and the Patrimony of St. Peter, with the city of Rome and the Campagna. The concordat with Rudolf of Hapsburg abolished all imperial suzerainty over these districts, and thus secured to the Papacy a territorial principality which Frederick II. had threatened to annihilate. But the victory, great as it appeared, was in reality deceptive. It had been won with the aid of the House of Anjou, whose protection might easily be converted into an oppressive patronage. And the difficulties of temporal rule were a serious addition to those of the spiritual oversight of Christendom, especially as the Popes were usually elected in advanced years, and their tenure of office was necessarily brief. More than two centuries elapsed before papal suzerainty in central Italy developed into direct papal government; and during that period the absorption in secular interests not only diverted the attention of the Popes from their higher duties, but also tended to lower their estimation in the eyes of Europe. The localisation of the Papacy in central Italy, while it gave some appearance of security to the papal power, really degraded it, just as the identification with the German monarchy degraded the dignity of the Empire.