V. Age of the Despots.—Thus the Italians, during the heat of the civil wars, were ostensibly divided between partisans of the empire and partisans of the church. After the death of Frederick II. their affairs were managed by Manfred Origin of Tyrannies. and by Charles of Anjou, the supreme captains of the parties, under whose orders acted the captains of the people in each city. The contest being carried on by warfare, it followed that these captains in the burghs were chosen on account of military skill; and, since the nobles were men of arms by profession, members of ancient houses took the lead again in towns where they had been absorbed into the bourgeoisie. In this way, after the downfall of the Ezzelini of Romano, the Della Scala dynasty arose in Verona, and the Carraresi in Padua. The Estensi made themselves lords of Ferrara; the Torriani headed the Guelphs of Milan. At Ravenna we find the Polenta family, at Rimini the Malatestas, at Parma the Rossi, at Piacenza the Scotti, at Faenza the Manfredi. There is not a burgh of northern Italy but can trace the rise of a dynastic house to the vicissitudes of this period. In Tuscany, where the Guelph party was very strongly organized, and the commercial constitution of Florence kept the nobility in check, the communes remained as yet free from hereditary masters. Yet generals from time to time arose, the Conte Ugolino della Gheradesca at Pisa, Uguccione della Faggiuola at Lucca, the Conte Guido di Montefeltro at Florence, who threatened the liberties of Tuscan cities with military despotism.

Left to themselves by absentee emperors and exiled popes, the Italians pursued their own course of development unchecked. After the commencement of the 14th century, the civil wars decreased in fury, and at the same time it was perceived that their effect had been to confirm tyrants in their grasp upon free cities. Growing up out of the captain of the people or signore of the commune, the tyrant annihilated both parties for his own profit and for the peace of the state. He used the dictatorial powers with which he was invested to place himself above the law, resuming in his person the state-machinery which had preceded him. In him, for the first time, the city attained self-consciousness; the blindly working forces of previous revolutions were combined in the will of a ruler. The tyrant’s general policy was to favour the multitude at the expense of his own caste. He won favour by these means, and completed the levelling down of classes, which had been proceeding ever since the emergence of the communes.

In 1309 Robert, grandson of Charles, the first Angevine sovereign, succeeded to the throne of Naples, and became the leader of the Guelphs in Italy. In the next year Henry VII. of Luxembourg crossed the Alps soon after his Decline of civil wars. Advent of the bourgeoisie. election to the empire, and raised the hopes of the Ghibellines. Dante from his mountain solitudes passionately called upon him to play the part of a Messiah. But it was now impossible for any German to control the “Garden of the Empire.” Italy had entered on a new phase of her existence, and the great poet’s De monarchia represented a dream of the past which could not be realized. Henry established imperial vicars in the Lombard towns, confirming the tyrants, but gaining nothing for the empire in exchange for the titles he conferred. After receiving the crown in Rome, he died at Buonconvento, a little walled town south of Siena, on his backward journey in 1313. The profits of his inroad were reaped by despots, who used the Ghibelline prestige for the consolidation of their own power. It is from this epoch that the supremacy of the Visconti, hitherto the unsuccessful rivals of the Guelphic Torriani for the signory of Milan, dates. The Scaligers in Verona and the Carraresi in Padua were strengthened; and in Tuscany Castruccio Castracane, Uguccione’s successor at Lucca, became formidable. In 1325 he defeated the Florentines at Alto Pascio, and carried home their carroccio as a trophy of his victory over the Guelphs. Louis of Bavaria, the next emperor, made a similar excursion in the year 1327, with even greater loss of imperial prestige. He deposed Galeazzo Visconti on his downward journey, and offered Milan for a sum of money to his son Azzo upon his return. Castruccio Castracane was nominated by him duke of Lucca; and this is the first instance of a dynastic title conferred upon an Italian adventurer by the emperor. Castruccio dominated Tuscany, where the Guelph cause, in the weakness of King Robert, languished. But the adventurer’s death in 1328 saved the stronghold of republican institutions, and Florence breathed freely for a while again. Can Grande della Scala’s death in the next year inflicted on the Lombard Ghibellines a loss hardly inferior to that of Castruccio’s on their Tuscan allies. Equally contemptible in its political results and void of historical interest was the brief visit of John of Bohemia, son of Henry VII., whom the Ghibellines next invited to assume their leadership. He sold a few privileges, conferred a few titles, and recrossed the Alps in 1333. It is clear that at this time the fury of the civil wars was spent. In spite of repeated efforts on the part of the Ghibellines, in spite of King Robert’s supine incapacity, the imperialists gained no permanent advantage. The Italians were tired of fighting, and the leaders of both factions looked exclusively to their own interests. Each city which had been the cradle of freedom thankfully accepted a master, to quench the conflagration of party strife, encourage trade, and make the handicraftsmen comfortable. Even the Florentines in 1342 submitted for a few months to the despotism of the duke of Athens. They conferred the signory upon him for life; and, had he not mismanaged matters, he might have held the city in his grasp. Italy was settling down and turning her attention to home comforts, arts and literature. Boccaccio, the contented bourgeois, succeeded to Dante, the fierce aristocrat.

The most marked proof of the change which came over Italy towards the middle of the 14th century is furnished by the companies of adventure. It was with their own militia that the burghers won freedom in the war of independence, subdued the nobles, and fought the battles of the parties. But from this time forward they laid down their arms, and played the game of warfare by the aid of mercenaries. Ecclesiastical overlords, interfering from a distance in Italian politics; prosperous republics, with plenty of money to spend but no leisure or inclination for camp-life; cautious tyrants, glad of every pretext to emasculate their subjects, and courting popularity by exchanging conscription for taxation—all combined to favour the new system. Mercenary troops are said to have been first levied from disbanded Germans, together with Breton and English adventurers, whom the Visconti and Castruccio took into their pay. They soon appeared under their own captains, who hired them out to the highest bidder, or marched them on marauding expeditions up and down the less protected districts. The names of some of these earliest captains of adventure, Fra Moriale, Count Lando and Duke Werner, who styled himself the “Enemy of God and Mercy,” have been preserved to us. As the companies grew in size and improved their discipline, it was seen by the Italian nobles that this kind of service offered a good career for men of spirit, who had learned the use of arms. To leave so powerful and profitable a calling in the hands of foreigners seemed both dangerous and uneconomical. Therefore, after the middle of the century, this profession fell into the hands of natives. The first Italian who formed an exclusively Italian company was Alberico da Barbiano, a nobleman of Romagna, and founder of the Milanese house of Belgiojoso. In his school the great condottieri Braccio da Montone and Sforza Attendolo were formed; and henceforth the battles of Italy were fought by Italian generals commanding native troops. This was better in some respects than if the mercenaries had been foreigners. Yet it must not be forgotten that the new companies of adventure, who decided Italian affairs for the next century, were in no sense patriotic. They sold themselves for money, irrespective of the cause which they upheld; and, while changing masters, they had no care for any interests but their own. The name condottiero, derived from condotta, a paid contract to supply so many fighting men in serviceable order, sufficiently indicates the nature of the business. In the hands of able captains, like Francesco Sforza or Piccinino, these mercenary troops became moving despotisms, draining the country of its wealth, and always eager to fasten and found tyrannies upon the provinces they had been summoned to defend. Their generals substituted heavy-armed cavalry for the old militia, and introduced systems of campaigning which reduced the art of war to a game of skill. Battles became all but bloodless; diplomacy and tactics superseded feats of arms and hard blows in pitched fields. In this way the Italians lost their military vigour, and wars were waged by despots from their cabinets, who pulled the strings of puppet captains in their pay. Nor were the people only enfeebled for resistance to a real foe; the whole political spirit of the race was demoralized. The purely selfish bond between condottieri and their employers, whether princes or republics, involved intrigues and treachery, checks and counterchecks, secret terror on the one hand and treasonable practice on the other, which ended by making statecraft in Italy synonymous with perfidy.

It must further be noticed that the rise of mercenaries was synchronous with a change in the nature of Italian despotism. The tyrants, as we have already seen, established themselves as captains of the people, vicars of the empire, vicars for the Change in type of despotism. church, leaders of the Guelph and Ghibelline parties. They were accepted by a population eager for repose, who had merged old class distinctions in the conflicts of preceding centuries. They rested in large measure on the favour of the multitude, and pursued a policy of sacrificing to their interests the nobles. It was natural that these self-made princes should seek to secure the peace which they had promised in their cities, by freeing the people from military service and disarming the aristocracy. As their tenure of power grew firmer, they advanced dynastic claims, assumed titles, and took the style of petty sovereigns. Their government became paternal; and, though there was no limit to their cruelty when stung by terror, they used the purse rather than the sword, bribery at home and treasonable intrigue abroad in preference to coercive measures or open war. Thus was elaborated the type of despot which attained completeness in Gian Galeazzo Visconti and Lorenzo de’ Medici. No longer a tyrant of Ezzelino’s stamp, he reigned by intelligence and terrorism masked beneath a smile. He substituted cunning and corruption for violence. The lesser people tolerated him because he extended the power of their city and made it beautiful with public buildings. The bourgeoisie, protected in their trade, found it convenient to support him. The nobles, turned into courtiers, placemen, diplomatists and men of affairs, ended by preferring his authority to the alternative of democratic institutions. A lethargy of well-being, broken only by the pinch of taxation for war-costs, or by outbursts of frantic ferocity and lust in the less calculating tyrants, descended on the population of cities which had boasted of their freedom. Only Florence and Venice, at the close of the period upon which we are now entering, maintained their republican independence. And Venice was ruled by a close oligarchy; Florence was passing from the hands of her oligarchs into the power of the Medicean merchants.

Between the year 1305, when Clement V. settled at Avignon, and the year 1447, when Nicholas V. re-established the papacy upon a solid basis at Rome, the Italians approximated more nearly to self-government than at any other Discrimination of the five great powers. epoch of their history. The conditions which have been described, of despotism, mercenary warfare and bourgeois prosperity, determined the character of this epoch, which was also the period when the great achievements of the Renaissance were prepared. At the end of this century and a half, five principal powers divided the peninsula; and their confederated action during the next forty-five years (1447-1492) secured for Italy a season of peace and brilliant prosperity. These five powers were the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, the republic of Florence, the republic of Venice and the papacy. The subsequent events of Italian history will be rendered most intelligible if at this point we trace the development of these five constituents of Italian greatness separately.

When Robert of Anjou died in 1343, he was succeeded by his grand-daughter Joan, the childless wife of four successive husbands, Andrew of Hungary, Louis of Taranto, James of Aragon and Otto of Brunswick. Charles of The Two Sicilies. Durazzo, the last male scion of the Angevine house in Lower Italy, murdered Joan in 1382, and held the kingdom for five years. Dying in 1387, he transmitted Naples to his son Ladislaus, who had no children, and was followed in 1414 by his sister Joan II. She too, though twice married, died without issue, having at one time adopted Louis III. of Provence and his brother René, at another Alfonso V. of Aragon, who inherited the crown of Sicily. After her death in February 1435 the kingdom was fought for between René of Anjou and Alfonso, surnamed the Magnanimous. René found supporters among the Italian princes, especially the Milanese Visconti, who helped him to assert his claims with arms. During the war of succession which ensued, Alfonso was taken prisoner by the Genoese fleet in August 1435, and was sent a prisoner to Filippo Maria at Milan. Here he pleaded his own cause so powerfully, and proved so incontestably the advantage which might ensue to the Visconti from his alliance, if he held the regno, that he obtained his release and recognition as king. From the end of the year 1435 Alfonso reigned alone and undisturbed in Lower Italy, combining for the first time since the year 1282 the crowns of Sicily and Naples. The former he held by inheritance, together with that of Aragon. The latter he considered to be his by conquest. Therefore, when he died in 1458, he bequeathed Naples to his natural son Ferdinand, while Sicily and Aragon passed together to his brother John, and so on to Ferdinand the Catholic. The twenty-three years of Alfonso’s reign were the most prosperous and splendid period of South Italian history. He became an Italian in taste and sympathy, entering with enthusiasm into the humanistic ardour of the earlier Renaissance, encouraging men of letters at his court, administering his kingdom on the principles of an enlightened despotism, and lending his authority to establish that equilibrium in the peninsula upon which the politicians of his age believed, not without reason, that Italian independence might be secured.

The last member of the Visconti family of whom we had occasion to speak was Azzo, who bought the city in 1328 from Louis of Bavaria. His uncle Lucchino succeeded, but was murdered in 1349 by a wife against whose life he Duchy of Milan. had been plotting. Lucchino’s brother John, archbishop of Milan, now assumed the lordship of the city, and extended the power of the Visconti over Genoa and the whole of north Italy, with the exception of Piedmont, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara and Venice. The greatness of the family dates from the reign of this masterful prelate. He died in 1354, and his heritage was divided between three members of his house, Matteo, Bernabò and Galeazzo. In the next year Matteo, being judged incompetent to rule, was assassinated by order of his brothers, who made an equal partition of their subject cities—Bernabò residing in Milan, Galeazzo in Pavia. Galeazzo was the wealthiest and most magnificent Italian of his epoch. He married his daughter Violante to our duke of Clarence, and his son Gian Galeazzo to a daughter of King John of France. When he died in 1378, this son resolved to reunite the domains of the Visconti; and, with this object in view, he plotted and executed the murder of his uncle Bernabò. Gian Galeazzo thus became by one stroke the most formidable of Italian despots. Immured in his castle at Pavia, accumulating wealth by systematic taxation and methodical economy, he organized the mercenary troops who eagerly took service under so good a paymaster; and, by directing their operations from his cabinet, he threatened the whole of Italy with conquest. The last scions of the Della Scala family still reigned in Verona, the last Carraresi in Padua; the Estensi were powerful in Ferrara, the Gonzaghi in Mantua. Gian Galeazzo, partly by force and partly by intrigue, discredited these minor despots, pushed his dominion to the very verge of Venice, and, having subjected Lombardy to his sway, proceeded to attack Tuscany. Pisa and Perugia were threatened with extinction, and Florence dreaded the advance of the Visconti arms, when the plague suddenly cut short his career of treachery and conquest in the year 1402. Seven years before his death Gian Galeazzo bought the title of duke of Milan and count of Pavia from the emperor Wenceslaus, and there is no doubt that he was aiming at the sovereignty of Italy. But no sooner was he dead than the essential weakness of an artificial state, built up by cunning and perfidious policy, with the aid of bought troops, dignified by no dynastic title, and consolidated by no sense of loyalty, became apparent. Gian Galeazzo’s duchy was a masterpiece of mechanical contrivance, the creation of a scheming intellect and lawless will. When the mind which had planned it was withdrawn, it fell to pieces, and the very hands which had been used to build it helped to scatter its fragments. The Visconti’s own generals, Facino Cane, Pandolfo Malatesta, Jacopo dal Verme, Gabrino Fondulo, Ottobon Terzo, seized upon the tyranny of several Lombard cities. In others the petty tyrants whom the Visconti had uprooted reappeared. The Estensi recovered their grasp upon Ferrara, and the Gonzaghi upon Mantua. Venice strengthened herself between the Adriatic and the Alps. Florence reassumed her Tuscan hegemony. Other communes which still preserved the shadow of independence, like Perugia and Bologna, began once more to dream of republican freedom under their own leading families. Meanwhile Gian Galeazzo had left two sons, Giovanni Maria and Filippo Maria. Giovanni, a monster of cruelty and lust, was assassinated by some Milanese nobles in 1412; and now Filippo set about rebuilding his father’s duchy. Herein he was aided by the troops of Facino Cane, who, dying opportunely at this period, left considerable wealth, a well-trained band of mercenaries, and a widow, Beatrice di Tenda. Filippo married and then beheaded Beatrice after a mock trial for adultery, having used her money and her influence in reuniting several subject cities to the crown of Milan. He subsequently spent a long, suspicious, secret and incomprehensible career in the attempt to piece together Gian Galeazzo’s Lombard state, and to carry out his schemes of Italian conquest. In this endeavour he met with vigorous opponents. Venice and Florence, strong in the strength of their resentful oligarchies, offered a determined resistance; nor was Filippo equal in ability to his father. His infernal cunning often defeated its own aims, checkmating him at the point of achievement by suggestions of duplicity or terror. In the course of Filippo’s wars with Florence and Venice, the greatest generals of this age were formed—Francesco Carmagnola, who was beheaded between the columns at Venice in 1432; Niccolò Piccinino, who died at Milan in 1444; and Francesco Sforza, who survived to seize his master’s heritage in 1450. Son of Attendolo Sforza, this Francesco received the hand of Filippo’s natural daughter, Bianca, as a reward for past service and a pledge of future support. When the Visconti dynasty ended by the duke’s death in 1447, he pretended to espouse the cause of the Milanese republic, which was then re-established; but he played his cards so subtly as to make himself, by the help of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, duke de facto if not de jure. Francesco Sforza was the only condottiero among many aspiring to be tyrants who planted themselves firmly on a throne of first-rate importance. Once seated in the duchy of Milan, he displayed rare qualities as a ruler; for he not only entered into the spirit of the age, which required humanity and culture from a despot, but he also knew how to curb his desire for territory. The conception of confederated Italy found in him a vigorous supporter. Thus the limitation of the Milanese duchy under Filippo Maria Visconti, and its consolidation under Francesco Sforza, were equally effectual in preparing the balance of power to which Italian politics now tended.

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