This attempt sufficed to put the Spanish government, already full of distrust, still more on their guard. Philip III, at Rome, roused Cardinal Farnese, head of his faction, against Aldobrandini. The garrisons of Tuscany were strengthened; Fuentes, governor of Milan, assembled sufficient troops to scare the whole peninsula. He would have done more, if the king of Spain, Philip III, and his minister, the duke of Lerma, satisfied with maintaining their domination, had not taken every precaution not to rouse the intervention of Henry IV from beyond the Alps.[i]
Fully to appreciate the character of the times just treated, one must recall the state of contemporary civilisation. We have been brought somewhat in contact with the conditions in Germany, France, and Spain, because these countries were in constant political association with Italy. To complete the picture, it should be recalled that the sixteenth century was the age of Henry VIII and Elizabeth in England; therefore, the time of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. It was the age also of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin; the time when the spirit of the Reformation was actively battling with the old ecclesiasticism, and when the counter influence of the Inquisition made itself felt everywhere. Italy being relatively uninfluenced by the Reformation was also relatively free from the excesses of the Inquisition. Nevertheless, it furnished just at the close of the century a most striking illustration of inquisitorial power in the persecution, imprisonment, and finally the execution by burning at the stake of the famous philosopher, Giordano Bruno.
But the Italian civilisation of the time presents some more attractive features. The artistic impulses of the Renaissance, at which we have glimpsed in an earlier chapter, could not be blotted out in a single generation; and it must be recalled that Michelangelo lived until the year 1564; so the art movement did not pass its climax before the middle of the century. In the field of literature the activities of the earlier generation were unabated. “Among the numbers of men who had devoted themselves to letters,” says Sismondi,[k] “Italy produced at this glorious epoch, at least thirty poets, whom their contemporaries placed on a level with the first names of antiquity, and whose fame, it was thought, would be commensurate with the existence of the world. But even the names of these illustrious men begin to be forgotten; and their works, buried in the libraries of the learned, are now seldom read.
“The circumstances of their equality in merit has doubtless been an obstacle to the duration of their reputation. Fame does not possess a strong memory. For a long flight, she relieves herself from all unnecessary encumbrances. She rejects, on her departure, and in her course, many who thought themselves accepted by her, and she comes down to late ages, with the lightest possible burthen. Unable to choose between Bembo, Sadoleti, Sanazzaro, Bernardo Accolti, and so many others, she relinquishes them all.”
There is one name, however, that stands out from amidst this company in a secure position. This is the name of Torquato Tasso, the famous author of the Gerusalemme Liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered”), a poem dealing with the First Crusade, which by common consent has high rank among the great epics, and which placed its author in contemporary estimation, as in that of posterity, on an approximate level with Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto. The appearance of Tasso in this epoch is another illustration of that fruitage of literary genius in times of political degeneration to which reference has previously been made.[a]
CHAPTER XVI. A CENTURY OF OBSCURITY
From the fall of Siena on to the nineteenth century Italy can scarcely be said to have existed at all except as a geographical expression. Italians still ruled over certain parts of the land, but they had the vices without the virtues of their nation, and reigned more as the dependents of foreign sovereigns than as independent princes. During the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the early part of the nineteenth centuries, Italy was made the scene of wars in which her people had no interest, and was divided by treaties which brought her no good.[b]—Hunt.
[1601-1700 A.D.]