Italy’s condition when she left the death-stricken hands of the dynasty of Charles V made a lively impression on her new sovereigns. It showed what could be done towards the unhappiness of a country by foreign rule—a rule which only thought from day to day of gathering fruits of conquest, without even trying to assure those of the morrow.
For a century and a half the governors of Milan and Naples, and following their example the independent sovereigns, egoists, or oppressors, with rare exceptions, had allowed ancient evils to subsist or replaced them by new ones. They had only sought to exploit to their own profit the privileges, the old institutions of the Middle Ages, instead of reforming or ameliorating them. Nobles and clergy in particular had been left in possession of their old rights over the chase, fishing, mills, furnaces, justice even, and were the real instruments of domination. Thence arose the strangest position of affairs.
Legislations, ancient and contradictory customs which in the south went back to the Normans, the Hohenstaufens, and the Angevins, or in the north at Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena, survived in institutions of lost republics, formed an inextricable chaos where the arbitrator reaped a rich harvest. Privileges and jurisdictions, both feudal and clerical, confused or perverted the systems of judicial and political administration; taxation varied in every country and for every person; power made itself oppressively but universally felt. The general tax-collectors, to whom finance was given over, and venal officials, who represented authority, still further augmented disorder. Lastly the power of the holy see, taking a more active part in political institutions in Italy than anywhere else, came as a final burden.
In the country the rights of primogeniture, mortgage, trusteeship, and free pasturage condemned the land to sterility. In towns the old corporations, statutes, and recent monopolies killed all commerce and industry. There were hardly any natural products in this the most fertile country of Europe, still less of manufactured products in towns which formerly had filled the markets of Europe with their exports, and the bad condition of the roads overburdened with turnpikes did not allow of transit over a peninsula so admirably situated and which in the Middle Ages had served as a link between Europe and the Levant. Moreover the deserted state of Apulia recalled the times of the decadence of the Roman Empire. In the kingdom of Naples the royal pasturage had an extent of fifty miles in length and fifteen miles in breadth. In Tuscany and the papal states the Maremma reached as far as the Mediterranean coasts. The greater part of the towns in central and southern Italy were depopulated, their palaces deserted, the houses fallen into ruins and never repaired. Even literature and art, which had maintained themselves up to that time, had now shared the common fate.[h]
[1701-1725 A.D.]
Politically the eighteenth century, like the sixteenth, began in Italy with fifty years of warfare; but the sufferings of the country, although often heavy, were always much lighter than those which had prevailed during the great struggle between France and the house of Charles V.
There broke out successively four European wars, into all of which the Italians were dragged by their foreign masters.[f] The first of these was the war of the Spanish Succession; the second, the war of the Quadruple Alliance; the third, the war of the Polish Succession; the fourth, the war of the Austrian Succession. A brief review of the effect upon Italy of these wars will form the chief topic of the present chapter. But before taking up the sweep of these political events, it may be of interest to glance at the internal conditions of the most interesting of Italian states, Tuscany, and witness the passing of its famous family of Medici, which now becomes extinct after three centuries of domination. Cosmo III, who occupied the ducal throne at the close of the century, continued to reign until 1723.[a]
Although neither public nor private conditions were very satisfactory under his government, the brilliancy of the court gave no indication that times were bad. There never was a time of greater luxury, nor had so many rich gifts ever found their way into foreign lands before. Cosmo had an abnormal craving for notoriety. He wished to pass for the most magnificent of sovereigns, while his ever-increasing leaning towards piety gave rise to the most singular contrasts between his private and his court life—contrasts which were intensified by the habits and surroundings of his sons and for a time of his own brother also. The latter, Francesco Maria, when cardinal, knew no moderation in his expenditure, and the learned French Benedictines who saw him in Rome, in 1687, report that the grand duke was forced on account of his extravagance to recall him to Siena, and then describe how refreshments alone cost him daily twenty-five louis d’or. Besides monks of all orders, who were always to be found in the palace (the prince had founded near the Ambrogiana an Alcantarian[21] monastery which was maintained at his expense), individuals of all nations presented themselves at court. The ambassadors took the greatest pains to gratify Cosmo’s wishes: Czar Peter sent him four Calmucks, and from the Danish king, Frederick IV, he received Greenlanders. The residences were filled with treasures and curiosities of all kinds, and the princely vineyards and gardens were of the choicest. At the end of the winter of 1719, King Frederick IV of Denmark spent nearly six weeks in Florence, which he had already visited as crown prince in 1692 under the incognito of the count of Schaumburg. The great trouble which the ceremonial gave, in spite of the incognito on that occasion, is described by the prince’s attendant, Hans Heinrich von Ahlefeld, in his account of the journey. An inscription on the archway of the Porta San Gallo commemorates the visit of the Scandinavian monarch, whose predecessor, Christian I, had passed through that very gate 235 years before. Cosmo celebrated the visit of his exalted guest, in spite of the Lenten season, by balls and music. A large print which represents the evening progress of the princess Violante Beatrice at the time of the investment of Siena on April 12th, 1717, gives some idea of the brilliancy and ceremonial as well as of the costumes and uniforms in customary use on official occasions: the princess drove through the gaily decorated town in her state carriage, almost entirely made of crystal and drawn by six horses, surrounded by pages and halberdiers bearing torches, and followed by the magnificent carriages of the nobility on to the Piazza del Campo, whose every tower and roof was brilliantly illuminated and which was filled to overflowing by a surging crowd. The privations and losses of later years so depressed Cosmo, however, that he could think of nothing but his religious exercises, and the distinguished flower of Florentine youth went into foreign lands to seek compensation for the restrictions imposed upon them at home. When in 1720 the electoral princess of the Palatinate, who was by no means a pleasure-seeker, felt it incumbent upon her to break through this severe régime by encouraging the carnival festivities, the whole nation showed unmistakably how hateful this morose existence had been to them.[b]
Cosmo III died at an advanced age on October 31st, 1723, leaving as his successor his son Giovan Gastone. The country at this time was plunged in debt, industries had decayed, prosperity was destroyed. The new archduke drove away the monks and priestly flatterers that had surrounded his father, suppressed several pensions that had been awarded, converted heretics, Turks, and Jews—lightened, in a word, many of the burdens that oppressed the land without displaying the energy necessary to remove the worst evils from which it suffered. He held at a distance his German wife, who had lately entered with alacrity upon the duties of her position as reigning archduchess in Florence. In matters pertaining to exterior politics he followed closely in the footsteps of his father. Entertaining little hope of setting aside the decisions of the Quadruple Alliance, he took good care to fix the allodial estates of the house of Medici and to indicate which portions could be looked upon as territorial and which must be ceded to the electress of the Palatinate as compensation for the future transfer of the feudal tenure to another family of the Medici female line.
A new turn was given to Tuscan affairs in 1725, while the belief still prevailed that the infante Charles would shortly arrive from Spain with an armed force with the intention of so establishing himself in Tuscany that his position and that of his successors could not be shaken either by the negotiations at Cambray or the pretensions of the emperor. Instead of this solution the Madrid court secretly despatched to Vienna Baron de Ripperda, an able Belgian who had recently gone over to the Catholic church. This envoy succeeded in effecting a separate contract between the emperor and Philip V whereby Tuscany and Parma were to be held as possessions of the infante Charles and his successors without the establishment there of foreign garrisons, exactly in accordance with the provisions of the Quadruple Alliance. Although this agreement (which brought to a close the congress of Cambray) dispelled the fears of the archduke as to an irruption of the Spaniards into his domains before his death, and made possible an undisturbed continuance of his dissolute mode of life, fresh mistrust arose between the courts of Vienna and Madrid which created renewed tension in the affairs of the Italian states.[c]