One of the chief features of the Renaissance was the appearance for the first time on the stage of history of full-formed and colossal nations.  France, Spain, Austria, and England are now to measure their strength.  Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, even Rome, are destined in the period that is opening for Europe to play but secondary parts.  Italy, incapable of coping with these great powers, will become the mere arena of their contests, the object of their spoliations.  Yet the Italians themselves were far from being conscious of this change.  Accustomed through three centuries to a system of diplomacy and intrigue among their own small states, they still thought more of the balance of power within the peninsula than of the means to be adopted for repelling foreign force.  Their petty jealousies kept them disunited at an epoch when the best chance of national freedom lay in a federation.  Firmly linked together in one league, or subject to a single prince, the Italians might not only have met their foes on equal ground, but even have taken a foremost place among the modern nations. Instead of that, their princes were foolish enough to think that they could set France, Germany, or Spain in motion for the attainment of selfish objects within the narrow sphere of Italian politics, forgetting the disproportion between these huge monarchies and a single city like Florence, a mere province like the Milanese.  It was just possible for Lorenzo de’ Medici to secure the tranquillity of Italy by combining the Houses of Sforza and of Aragon with the Papal See in the chains of the same interested policy with the Commonwealth of Florence.  It was ridiculous of Lodovico Sforza to fancy that he could bring the French into the game of peninsular intrigue without irrevocably ruining its artificial equilibrium.  The first sign of the alteration about to take place in European history was the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII.  This holiday excursion of a hairbrained youth was as transient as a border-foray on a large scale.  The so-called conquest was only less sudden than the subsequent loss of Italy by the French.  Yet the tornado which swept the peninsula from north to south, and returned upon its path from south to north within the space of a few months, left ineffaceable traces on the country which it traversed, and changed the whole complexion of the politics of Europe.

The invasion of Italy had been long prepared in the counsels of Louis XI.  After spending his lifetime in the consolidation of the French monarchy, he constructed an inheritance of further empire for his successors by dictating to the old King René of Anjou (1474) and to the Count of Maine (1481) the two wills by which the pretensions of the House of Anjou to the Crown of Naples were transmitted to the royal family of France. On the death of Louis, Charles VIII. became King in 1483.  He was then aged only thirteen, and was still governed by his elder sister, Anne de Beaujeu. It was not until 1492 that he actually took the reins of the kingdom into his own hands.  This year, we may remark, is one of the most memorable dates in history.  In 1492 Columbus discovered America:  in 1492 Roderigo Borgia was made Pope:  in 1492 Spain became a nation by the conquest of Granada.  Each of these events was no less fruitful of consequences to Italy than was the accession of Charles VIII.  The discovery of America, followed in another six years by Vasco de’ Gama’s exploration of the Indian seas, diverted the commerce of the world into new channels; Alexander VI. made the Reformation and the Northern Schism certainties; the consolidation of Spain prepared a way for the autocracy of Charles V. Thus the commercial, the spiritual, and the political scepter fell in this one year from the grasp of the Italians.

Both Philip de Comines and Guicciardini have described the appearance and the character of the prince who was destined to play a part so prominent, so pregnant of results, and yet so trivial in the affairs of Europe.  Providence, it would seem, deigns frequently to use for the most momentous purposes some pantaloon or puppet, environing with special protection and with the prayers and aspirations of whole peoples a mere manikin.  Such a puppet was Charles.  ’From infancy he had been weak in constitution and subject to illness.  His stature was short, and his face very ugly, if you except the dignity and vigor of his glance.  His limbs were so disproportioned that he had less the appearance of a man than of a monster.  Not only was he ignorant of liberal arts, but he hardly knew his letters.  Though eager to rule, he was in truth made for anything but that; for while surrounded by dependents, he exercised no authority over them and preserved no kind of majesty.  Hating business and fatigue, he displayed in such matters as he took in hand a want of prudence and of judgment.  His desire for glory sprang rather from impulse than from reason.  His liberality was inconsiderate, immoderate, promiscuous.  When he displayed inflexibility of purpose, it was more often an ill-founded obstinacy than firmness, and that which many people called his goodness of nature rather deserved the name of coldness and feebleness of spirit.’  This is Guicciardini’s portrait.  De Comines is more brief:  ’The king was young, a fledgling from the nest; provided neither with money nor with good sense; weak, willful, and surrounded by foolish counselors.’

These foolish counselors, or, as Guicciardini calls them, ’men of low estate, body-servants for the most part of the king,’ were headed by Stephen de Vesc, who had been raised from the post of the king’s valet de chambre to be the Seneschal de Beaucaire, and by William Briconnet, formerly a merchant, now Bishop of S. Malo.  These men had everything to gain by an undertaking which would flatter the vanity of their master, and draw him into still closer relations with themselves.  Consequently, when the Count of Belgioioso arrived at the French Court from Milan, urging the king to press his claims on Naples, and promising him a free entrance into Italy through the province of Lombardy and the port of Genoa, he found ready listeners.  Anne de Beaujeu in vain opposed the scheme.  The splendor and novelty of the proposal to conquer such a realm as Italy inflamed the imagination of Charles, the cupidity of his courtiers, the ambition of de Vesc and Briconnet.  In order to assure his situation at home, Charles concluded treaties with the neighboring great powers.  He bought peace with Henry VII. of England by the payment of large sums of money.  The Emperor Maximilian, whose resentment he had aroused by sending back his daughter Margaret after breaking his promise to marry her, and by taking to wife Anne of Brittany, who was already engaged to the Austrian, had to be appeased by the cession of provinces.  Ferdinand of Spain received as the price of his neutrality the strong places of the Pyrénées which formed the key to France upon that side.  Having thus secured tranquillity at home by ruinous concessions, Charles was free to turn his attention to Italy.  He began by concentrating stores and ships on the southern ports of Marseilles and Genoa; then he moved downward with his army, to Lyons, in 1494.

At this point we are called to consider the affairs of Italy, which led the Sforza to invite his dangerous ally.  Lorenzo de’ Medici during his lifetime had maintained a balance of power between the several states by his treaties with the Courts of Milan, Naples, and Ferrara.  When he died, Piero at once showed signs of departure from his father’s policy.  The son and husband of Orsini, he embraced the feudal pride and traditional partialities of the great Roman house who had always been devoted to the cause of Naples.  The suspicions of Lodovico Sforza were not unreasonably aroused by noticing that the tyrant of Florence inclined to the alliance of King Ferdinand rather than to his own friendship.  At this same time Alfonso, the Duke of Calabria, heir to the throne of Naples, was pressing the rights of his son-in-law, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, on the attention of Italy, complaining loudly that his uncle Lodovico ought no longer to withhold from him the reins of government. Gian Galcazzo was in fact the legitimate successor of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who had been murdered in Santo Stefano in 1476.  After this assassination Madonna Bona of Savoy and Cecco Simonetta, who had administered the Duchy as grand vizier during three reigns extending over a period of half a century, governed Milan as regents for the young Duke.  But Lodovico, feeling himself powerful enough to assume the tyranny, beheaded Simonetta at Pavia in 1480, and caused Madonna Bona, the Duke’s mother, on the pretext of her immorality, to quit the regency.  Thus he took the affairs of Milan into his own hands, confined his nephew in an honorable prison, and acted in a way to make it clear that he intended thenceforth to be Duke in fact. It was the bad conscience inseparable from this usurpation which made him mistrust the princes of the house of Aragon, whose rights in Isabella, wife of the young Duke, were set at nought by him.  The same uneasy sense of wrong inclined him to look with dread upon the friendship of the Medici for the ruling family of Naples.

While affairs were in this state, and as yet no open disturbance in Lorenzo’s balance of power had taken place, Alexander VI. was elected to the Papacy.  It was usual for the princes and cities of Italy to compliment the Pope with embassies on his assumption of the tiara; and Lodovico suggested that the representatives of Milan, Florence, Ferrara, and Naples should enter Rome together in a body.  The foolish vanity of Piero, who wanted to display the splendor of his own equipage without rivals, induced him to refuse this proposal, and led to a similar refusal on the part of Ferdinand.  This trivial circumstance confirmed the suspicions of Lodovico, who, naturally subtle and intriguing, thought that he discerned a deep political design in what was really little more than the personal conceit of a broad-shouldered simpleton. He already foresaw that the old system of alliances established by Lorenzo must be abandoned.  Another slight incident contributed to throw the affairs of Italy into confusion by causing a rupture between Rome and Naples.  Lorenzo, by the marriage of his daughter to Franceschetto Cibo, had contrived to engage Innocent VIII. in the scheme of policy which he framed for Florence, Naples, Milan, and Ferrara.  But on the accession of Alexander, Franceschetto Cibo determined to get rid of Anguillara, Cervetri, and other fiefs, which he had taken with his father’s connivance from the Church.  He found a purchaser in Virginio Orsini.  Alexander complained that the sale was an infringement of his rights.  Ferdinand supported the title of the Orsini to his new acquisitions.  This alienated the Pope from the King of Naples, and made him willing to join with Milan and Venice in a new league formed in 1493.

Thus the old equilibrium was destroyed, and fresh combinations between the disunited powers of Italy took place.  Lodovico, however, dared not trust his new friends.  Venice had too long hankered after Milan to be depended upon for real support; and Alexander was known to be in treaty for a matrimonial alliance between his son Geoffrey and Donna Sancia of Aragon.  Lodovico was therefore alone, without a firm ally in Italy, and with a manifestly fraudulent title to maintain.  At this juncture he turned his eyes towards France; while his father-in-law, the Duke of Ferrara, who secretly hated him, and who selfishly hoped to secure his own advantage in the general confusion which he anticipated, urged him to this fatal course.  Alexander at the same time, wishing to frighten the princes of Naples into a conclusion of the projected marriage, followed the lead of Lodovico, and showed himself at this moment not averse to a French invasion.

It was in this way that the private cupidities and spites of princes brought woe on Italy:  Lodovico’s determination to secure himself in the usurped Duchy of Milan, Ercole d’ Este’s concealed hatred, and Alexander’s unholy eagerness to aggrandize his bastards, were the vile and trivial causes of an event which, however inevitable, ought to have been as long as possible deferred by all true patriots in Italy.  But in Italy there was no zeal for freedom left, no honor among princes, no virtue in the Church.  Italy, which in the thirteenth century numbered 1,800,000 citizens ­that is, members of free cities, exercising the franchise in the government of their own states ­could show in the fifteenth only about 18,000 such burghers: and these in Venice were subject to the tyranny of the Council of Ten, in Florence had been enervated by the Medici, in Siena were reduced by party feuds and vulgar despotism to political imbecility.  Amid all the splendors of revived literature and art, of gorgeous courts and refined societies, this indeed was the right moment for the Dominican visionary to publish his prophecies, and for the hunchback puppet of destiny to fulfill them.  Guicciardini deplores, not without reason, the bitter sarcasm of fate which imposed upon his country the insult of such a conqueror as Charles.  He might with equal justice have pointed out in Lodovico Sforza the actor of a tragi-comic part upon the stage of Italy.  Lodovico, called II Moro, not, as the great historian asserts, because he was of dark complexion, but because he had adopted the mulberry-tree for his device, was in himself an epitome of all the qualities which for the last two centuries had contributed to the degradation of Italy in the persons of the despots.  Gifted originally with good abilities, he had so accustomed himself to petty intrigues that he was now incapable of taking a straightforward step in any direction.  While he boasted himself the Son of Fortune and listened with complacency to a foolish rhyme that ran:  God only and the Moor foreknow the future safe and sure, he never acted without blundering, and lived to end his days in the intolerable tedium of imprisonment at Loches.  He was a thoughtful and painstaking ruler; yet he so far failed to win the affection of his subjects that they tossed up their caps for joy at the first chance of getting rid of him.  He disliked bloodshed; but the judicial murder of Simonetta, and the arts by which he forced his nephew into an early grave, have left an ineffaceable stain upon his memory.  His court was adorned by the presence of Lionardo da Vinci; but at the same time it was so corrupt that, as Corio tells us, fathers sold their daughters, brothers their sisters, and husbands their wives there.  In a word Lodovico, in spite of his boasted prudence, wrought the ruin of Italy and himself by his tortuous policy, and contributed by his private crimes and dissolute style of living no little to the general depravity of his country.

Amid this general perturbation of the old political order the year 1494, marked in its first month by the death of King Ferdinand, began ­’a year,’ to quote from Guicciardini, ’the most unfortunate for Italy, the very first in truth of our disastrous years, since it opened the door to numberless and horrible calamities, in which it may be said that a great portion of the world has subsequently shared.’  The expectation and uneasiness of the whole nation were proportioned to the magnitude of the coming change.  On every side the invasion of the French was regarded with that sort of fascination which a very new and exciting event is wont to inspire.  In one mood the Italians were inclined to hail Charles as a general pacificator and restorer of old liberties. Savonarola had preached of him as the flagellum Dei, the minister appointed to regenerate the Church and purify the font of spiritual life in the peninsula.  In another frame of mind they shuddered to think what the advent of the barbarians ­so the French were called ­might bring upon them.  It was universally agreed that Lodovico by his invitation had done no more than bring down, as it were, by a breath the avalanche which had been long impending.  ’Not only the preparations made by land and sea, but also the consent of the heavens and of men, announced the woes in store for Italy.  Those who pretend either by art or divine inspiration to the knowledge of the future, proclaimed unanimously that greater and more frequent changes, occurrences more strange and awful than had for many centuries been seen in any part of the world, were at hand.’  After enumerating divers signs and portents, such as the passing day after day in the region round Arezzo of innumerable armed men mounted on gigantic horses with a hideous din of drums and trumpets, the great historian resumes:  ’These things filled the people with incredible fear; for, long before, they had been terrified by the reputation of the power of the French and of their fierceness, seeing that histories are full of their deeds ­how they had already overrun the whole of Italy, sacked the city of Rome with fire and sword, subdued many provinces of Asia, and at one time or another smitten with their arms all quarters of the world.’

Among all the potentates of Italy, Alfonso of Naples had the most to dread; for against him the invasion was specially directed.  No time was to be lost.  He assembled his allies at Vicovaro near Tivoli in July and explained to them his theory of resistance.  The allies were Florence, Rome, Bologna, and all the minor powers of Romagna. For once the southern and the middle states of Italy were united against a common foe.  After Alfonso, Alexander felt himself in greatest peril, for he dreaded the assembly of a Council which might depose him from the throne he had bought by simony.  So strong was his terror that he had already sent ambassadors to the Sultan imploring him for aid against the Most Christian King, and had entreated Ferdinand the Catholic, instead of undertaking a crusade against the Turk, to employ his arms in opposition to the French.  But Bajazet was too far off to be of use; and Ferdinand was prudent.  It remained for the allies to repel the invader by their unassisted force.  This might have been done if Alfonso’s plan had been adhered to.  He designed sending a fleet, under his brother Don Federigo, to Genoa, and holding with his own troops the passes of the Apennines to the North, while Piero de’ Medici undertook to guard the entrances to Tuscany on the side of Lunigiana.  The Duke of Calabria meanwhile was to raise Gian Galeazzo’s standard in Lombardy.  But that absolute agreement which is necessary in the execution of a scheme so bold and comprehensive was impossible in Italy.  The Pope insisted that attention should first be paid to the Colonnesi ­Prospero and Fabrizio being secret friends of France, and their castles offering a desirable booty.  Alfonso, therefore, determined to occupy the confines of the Roman territory on the side of the Abruzzi, while he sent his son, with the generals Giovan Jacopo da Trivulzi and the Count of Pitigliano, into Lombardy.  They never advanced beyond Cesena, where the troops of the Sforza, in conjunction with the French, held them at bay.  The fleet under Don Federigo sailed too late to effect the desired rising in Genoa.  The French, forewarned, had thrown 2,000 Swiss under the Baily of Dijon and the Duke of Orleans into the city, and the Neapolitan admiral fell back upon Leghorn.  The forces of the league were further enfeebled and divided by the necessity of leaving Virginio Orsini to check the Colonnesi in the neighborhood of Rome.  How utterly Piero de’ Medici by his folly and defection ruined what remained of the plan will be seen in the sequel.  This sluggishness in action and dismemberment of forces ­this total inability to strike a sudden blow ­sealed beforehand the success of Charles.  Alfonso, a tyrant afraid of his own subjects, Alexander, a Pope who had bought the tiara to the disgust of Christendom, Piero, conscious that his policy was disapproved by the Florentines, together with a parcel of egotistical petty despots, were not the men to save a nation.  Italy was conquered, not by the French king, but by the vices of her own leaders.  The whole history of Charles’s expedition is one narrative of headlong rashness triumphing over difficulties and dangers which only the discord of tyrants and the disorganization of peoples rendered harmless.  The Ate of the gods had descended upon Italy, as though to justify the common belief that the expedition of Charles was divinely sustained and guided.

While Alfonso and Alexander were providing for their safety in the South, Charles remained at Lyons, still uncertain whether he should enter Italy by sea or land, or indeed whether he should enter it at all.  Having advanced so far as the Rhone valley, he felt satisfied with his achievement and indulged himself in a long bout of tournaments and pastimes.  Besides, the want of money, which was to be his chief embarrassment throughout the expedition, had already made itself felt. It was an Italian who at length roused him to make good his purpose against Italy ­Giuliano della Rovere, the haughty nephew of Sixtus, the implacable foe of Alexander, whom he was destined to succeed in course of time upon the Papal throne.  Burning to punish the Marrano, or apostate Moor, as he called Alexander, Giuliano stirred the king with taunts and menaces until Charles felt he could delay his march no longer.  When once the French army got under weigh, it moved rapidly.  Leaving Vienne on August 23, 1494, 3,600 men at arms, the flower of the French chivalry, 6,000 Breton archers, 6,000 crossbowmen, 8,000 Gascon infantry, 8,000 Swiss and German lances, crossed the Mont Genevre, debouched on Susa, passed through Turin, and entered Asti on September 19. Neither Piedmont nor Montferrat stirred to resist them.  Yet at almost any point upon the route they might have been at least delayed by hardy mountaineers until the commissariat of so large a force had proved an insurmountable difficulty.  But before this hunchback conqueror with the big head and little legs, the valleys had been exalted and the rough places had been made plain.  The princes whose interest it might have been to throw obstacles in the way of Charles were but children.  The Duke of Savoy was only twelve years old, the Marquis of Montferrat fourteen; their mothers and guardians made terms with the French king, and opened their territories to his armies.

At Asti Charles was met by Lodovico Sforza and his father-in-law, Ercole d’ Este.  The whole of that Milanese Court which Corio describes followed in their train.  It was the policy of the Italian princes to entrap their conqueror with courtesies, and to entangle in silken meshes the barbarian they dreaded.  What had happened already at Lyons, what was going to repeat itself at Naples, took place at Asti.  The French king lost his heart to ladies, and confused his policy by promises made to Delilahs in the ballroom.  At Asti he fell ill of the small-pox, but after a short time he recovered his health, and proceeded to Pavia.  Here a serious entanglement of interests arose.  Charles was bound by treaties and engagements to Lodovico and his proud wife Beatrice d’ Este; the very object of his expedition was to dethrone Alfonso and to assume the crown of Naples; yet at Pavia he had to endure the pathetic spectacle of his forlorn cousin the young Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza in prison, and to hear the piteous pleadings of the beautiful Isabella of Aragon.  Nursed in chivalrous traditions, incapable of resisting a woman’s tears, what was Charles to do, when this princess in distress, the wife of his first cousin, the victim of his friend Lodovico, the sister of his foe Alfonso, fell at his feet and besought him to have mercy on her husband, on her brother, on herself?  The situation was indeed enough to move a stouter heart than that of the feeble young king.  For the moment Charles returned evasive answers to his petitioners; but the trouble of his soul was manifest, and no sooner had he set forth on his way to Piacenza than the Moor resolved to remove the cause of further vacillation.  Sending to Pavia, Lodovico had his nephew poisoned. When the news of Gian Galeazzo’s death reached the French camp, it spread terror and imbittered the mistrust which was already springing up between the frank cavaliers and the plausible Italians with whom they had to deal.

What was this beautiful land in the midst of which they found themselves, a land whose marble palaces were thronged with cut-throats in disguise, whose princes poisoned while they smiled, whose luxuriant meadows concealed fever, whose ladies carried disease upon their lips?  To the captains and the soldiery of France, Italy already appeared a splendid and fascinating Circe, arrayed with charms, surrounded with illusions, hiding behind perfumed thickets her victims changed to brutes, and building the couch of her seduction on the bones of murdered men.  Yet she was so beautiful that, halt as they might for a moment and gaze back with yearning on the Alps that they had crossed, they found themselves unable to resist her smile.  Forward they must march through the garden of enchantment, henceforth taking the precaution to walk with drawn sword, and, like Orlando in Morgana’s park, to stuff their casques with roses that they might not hear the siren’s voice too clearly.  It was thus that Italy began the part she played through the Renaissance for the people of the North. The White Devil of Italy is the title of one of Webster’s best tragedies.  A white Devil, a radiant daughter of sin and death, holding in her hands the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and tempting the nations to eat:  this is how Italy struck the fancy of the men of the sixteenth century.  She was feminine, and they were virile; but she could teach and they must learn.  She gave them pleasure; they brought force.  The fruit of her embraces with the nations was the spirit of modern culture, the genius of the age in which we live.

Two terrible calamities warned the Italians with what new enemies they had to deal.  Twice at the commencement of the invasion did the French use the sword which they had drawn to intimidate the sorceress.  These terror-striking examples were the massacres of the inhabitants of Rapallo on the Genoese Riviera, and of Fivizzano in Lunigiana.  Soldiers and burghers, even prisoners and wounded men in the hospitals, were butchered, first by the Swiss and German guards, and afterwards by the French, who would not be outdone by them in energy.  It was thus that the Italians, after a century of bloodless battles and parade campaigning, learned a new art of war, and witnessed the first act of those Apocalyptic tragedies which were destined to drown the peninsula with French, Spanish, German, Swiss, and native blood.

Meanwhile the French host had reached Parma, traversing, all through the golden autumn weather, those plains where mulberry and elm are married by festoons of vines above a billowy expanse of maize and corn.  From Parma, placed beneath the northern spurs of the Apennines, to Sarzana, on the western coast of Italy, where the marbles of Carrara build their barrier against the Tyrrhene Sea, there leads a winding barren mountain pass.  Charles took this route with his army, and arrived in the beginning of November before the walls of Sarzana.  Meanwhile we may well ask what Piero de’ Medici had been doing, and how he had fulfilled his engagement with Alfonso.  He had undertaken, it will be remembered, to hold the passes of the Apennines upon this side.  To have embarrassed the French troops among those limestone mountains, thinly forested with pine and chestnut-trees, and guarded here and there with ancient fortresses, would have been a matter of no difficulty.  With like advantages 2,000 Swiss troops during their wars of independence would have laughed to scorn the whole forces of Burgundy and Austria.  But Piero, a feeble and false tyrant, preoccupied with Florentine factions, afraid of Lucca, and disinclined to push forward into the territory of the Sforza, had as yet done nothing when the news arrived that Sarzana was on the point of capitulation.  In this moment of peril he rode as fast as horses could carry him to the French camp, besought an interview with Charles, and then and there delivered up to him the keys of Sarzana and its citadel, together with those of Pietra Santa, Librafratta, Pisa, and Leghorn.  Any one who has followed the sea-coast between Pisa and Sarzana can appreciate the enormous value of these concessions to the invader.  They relieved him of the difficulty of forcing his way along a narrow belt of land, which is hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by the highest and most abrupt mountain range in Italy.  To have done this in the teeth of a resisting army and beneath the walls of hostile castles would have been all but impossible.  As it was, Piero cut the Gordian knot by his incredible cowardice, and for himself gained only ruin and dishonor.  Charles, the foe against whom he had plotted with Alfonso and Alexander, laughed in his face and marched at once into Pisa.  The Florentines, whom he had hitherto engaged in ah unpopular policy, now rose in fury, expelled him from the city, sacked his palace, and erased from their memory the name of Medici except for execration.  The unsuccessful tyrant, who had proved a traitor to his allies, to his country, and to himself, saved his life by flying first to Bologna and thence to Venice, where he remained in a sort of polite captivity ­safe, but a slave, until the Doge and his council saw which way affairs would tend.

On the 9th of November Florence after a tyranny of fifty years, and Pisa after the servitude of a century, recovered their liberties and were able to reconstitute republican governments.  But the situation of the two states was very different.  The Florentines had never lost the name of liberty, which in Italy at that period meant less the freedom of the inhabitants to exercise self-government than the independence of the city in relation to its neighbors.  The Pisans on the other hand had been reduced to subjection by Florence:  their civic life had been stifled, their pride wounded in the tenderest point of honor, their population decimated by proscription and exile.  The great sin of Florence was the enslavement of Pisa:  and Pisa in this moment of anarchy burned to obliterate her shame with bloodshed.  The French, understanding none of the niceties of Italian politics, and ignorant that in giving freedom to Pisa they were robbing Florence of her rights, looked on with wonder at the citizens who tossed the lion of the tyrant town into the Arno and took up arms against its officers.  It is sad to witness this last spasm of the long-suppressed passion for liberty in the Pisans, while we know how soon they were reduced again to slavery by the selfish sister state, herself too thoroughly corrupt for liberty.  The part of Charles, who espoused the cause of the Pisans with blundering carelessness, pretended to protect the new republic, and then abandoned it a few months later to its fate, provokes nothing but the languid contempt which all his acts inspire.

After the flight of Piero and the proclamation of Pisan liberty the King of France was hailed as saviour of the free Italian towns.  Charles received a magnificent address from Savonarola, who proceeded to Pisa, and harangued him as the chosen vessel of the Lord and the deliverer of the Church from anarchy.  At the same time the friar conveyed to the French king a courteous invitation from the Florentine republic to enter their city and enjoy their hospitality.  Charles, after upsetting Piero de’ Medici with the nonchalance of a horseman in the tilting yard, and restoring the freedom of Pisa for a caprice, remained as devoid of policy and indifferent to the part assigned him by the prophet as he was before.  He rode, armed at all points, into Florence on November 17, and took up his residence in the palace of the Medici.  Then he informed the elders of the city that he had come as conqueror and not as guest, and that he intended to reserve to himself the disposition of the state.

It was a dramatic moment.  Florence, with the Arno flowing through her midst, and the hills around her gray with olive-trees, was then even more lovely than we see her now.  The whole circuit of her walls remained, nor had their crown of towers been leveled yet to make resistance of invading force more easy Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotto’s tower and Arnolfo’s Palazzo and the Loggie of Orcagna gave distinction to her streets and squares.  Her churches were splendid with frescoes in their bloom, and with painted glass, over which as yet the injury of but a few brief years had passed.  Her palaces, that are as strong as castles, overflowed with a population cultivated, polished, elegant, refined, and haughty.  This Florence, the city of scholars, artists, intellectual sybarites, and citizens in whom the blood of the old factions beat, found herself suddenly possessed as a prey of war by flaunting Gauls in their outlandish finery, plumed Germans, kilted Celts, and particolored Swiss.  On the other hand these barbarians awoke in a terrestrial paradise of natural and aesthetic beauty.  Which of us who has enjoyed the late gleams of autumn in Valdarno, but can picture to himself the revelation of the inner meaning of the world, incomprehensible yet soul-subduing, which then first dawned upon the Breton bowmen and the bulls of Uri?  Their impulse no doubt was to pillage and possess the wealth before them, as a child pulls to pieces the wonderful flower that has surprised it on some mountain meadow.  But in the very rudeness of desire they paid a homage to the new-found loveliness of which they had not dreamed before.

Charles here as elsewhere showed his imbecility.  He had entered and laid hands on hospitable Florence like a foe.  What would he now do with her ­reform the republic ­legislate ­impose a levy on the citizens, and lead them forth to battle?  No.  He asked for a huge sum of money, and began to bargain.  The Florentine secretaries refused his terms.  He insisted.  Then Piero Capponi snatched the paper on which they were written, and tore it in pieces before his eyes.  Charles cried:  ’I shall sound my trumpets.’  Capponi answered:  ‘We will ring our bells.’  Beautiful as a dream is Florence; but her somber streets, overshadowed by gigantic belfries and masked by grim brown palace-fronts, contained a menace that the French king could not face.  Let Capponi sound the tocsin, and each house would become a fortress, the streets would be barricaded with iron chains, every quarter would pour forth men by hundreds well versed in the arts of civic warfare.  Charles gave way, covering with a bad joke the discomfiture he felt:  Ah, Ciappon, Ciappon, voi siete un mal Ciappon! The secretaries beat down his terms.  All he cared for was to get money. He agreed to content himself with 120,000 florins.  A treaty was signed, and in two days he quitted Florence.

Hitherto Charles had met with no serious obstacle.  His invasion had fallen like the rain from heaven, and like rain, as far as he was concerned, it ran away to waste.  Lombardy and Tuscany, the two first scenes in the pageant displayed by Italy before the French army, had been left behind.  Rome now lay before them, magnificent in desolation; not the Rome which the Farnesi and Chigi and Barberini have built up from the quarried ruins of amphitheaters and baths, but the Rome of the Middle Ages, the city crowned with relics of a pagan past, herself still pagan, and holding in her midst the modern Antichrist.  The progress of the French was a continued triumph.  They reached Siena on the second of December.  The Duke of Urbino and the lords of Pesaro and Bologna laid down their arms at their approach.  The Orsini opened their castles:  Virginio, the captain-general of the Aragonese army and grand constable of the kingdom of Naples, hastened to win for himself favorable terms from the French sovereign.  The Baglioni betook themselves to their own rancors in Perugia.  The Duke of Calabria retreated.  Italy seemed bent on proving that cowardice and selfishness and incapacity had conquered her.  Viterbo was gained:  the Ciminian heights were traversed:  the Campagna, bounded by the Alban and the Sabine hills, with Rome, a bluish cloud upon the lowlands of the Tiber, spread its solemn breadth of beauty at the invader’s feet.  Not a blow had been struck, when he reached the Porta del Popolo upon the 31st of December 1494.  At three o’clock in the afternoon began the entry of the French army.  It was nine at night before the last soldiers, under the flaring light of torches and flambeaux, defiled through the gates, and took their quarters in the streets of the Eternal City.  The gigantic barbarians of the cantons, flaunting with plumes and emblazoned surcoats, the chivalry of France, splendid with silk mantles and gilded corselets, the Scotch guard in their wild costume of kilt and philibeg, the scythe-like halberds of the German lanz-knechts, the tangled elf-locks of stern-featured Bretons, stamped an ineffaceable impression on the people of the South.  On this memorable occasion, as in a show upon some holiday, marched past before them specimens and vanguards of all those legioned races which were soon to be too well at home in every fair Italian dwelling-place.  Nothing was wanting to complete the symbol of the coming doom but a representative of the grim, black, wiry infantry of Spain.

The Borgia meanwhile crouched within the Castle of S. Angelo.  How would the Conqueror, now styled Flagellum Dei, deal with the abomination of desolation seated in the holy place of Christendom?  At the side of Charles were the Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Giuliano della Rovere, urging him to summon a council and depose the Pope.  But still closer to his ear was Briconnet, the ci-devant tradesman, who thought it would become his dignity to wear a cardinal’s hat.  On this trifle turned the destinies of Rome, the doom of Alexander, the fate of the Church.  Charles determined to compromise matters.  He demanded a few fortresses, a red hat for Briconnet, Cesare Borgia as a hostage for four months, and Djem, the brother of the Sultan. After these agreements had been made and ratified, Alexander ventured to leave his castle and receive the homage of the faithful.

Charles staid a month in Rome, and then set out for Naples.  The fourth and last scene in the Italian pageant was now to be displayed.  After the rich plain and proud cities of Lombardy, beneath their rampart of perpetual snow; after the olive gardens and fair towns of Tuscany; after the great name of Rome; Naples, at length, between Vesuvius and the sea, that first station of the Greeks in Italy, world-famed for its legends of the Sibyl and the sirens and the sorcerer Virgil, received her king.  The very names of Parthenope, Posilippo, Inarime, Sorrento, Capri, have their fascination.  There too the orange and lemon groves are more luxuriant; the grapes yield sweeter and more intoxicating wine; the villagers are more classically graceful; the volcanic soil is more fertile; the waves are bluer and the sun is brighter than elsewhere in the land.  None of the conquerors of Italy have had the force to resist the allurements of the bay of Naples.  The Greeks lost their native energy upon these shores and realized in the history of their colonies the myth of Ulysses’ comrades in the gardens of Circe.  Hannibal was tamed by Capua.  The Romans in their turn dreamed away their vigor at Baiae, at Pompeii at Capreae, until the whole region became a byword for voluptuous living.  Here the Saracens were subdued to mildness, and became physicians instead of pirates.  Lombards and Normans alike were softened down, and lost their barbarous fierceness amid the enchantments of the southern sorceress.

Naples was now destined to ruin for Charles whatever nerve yet remained to his festival army.  The witch too, while brewing for the French her most attractive potions, mixed with them a deadly poisonthe virus of a fell disease, memorable in the annals of the modern world, which was destined to infect the nations of Europe from this center, and to prove more formidable to our cities than even the leprosy of the Middle Ages.

The kingdom of Naples, through the frequent uncertainty which attended the succession to the throne, as well as the suzerainty assumed and misused by the Popes, had been for centuries a standing cause of discord in Italy.  The dynasty which Charles now hoped to dispossess was Spanish.  After the death of Joanna II. in 1435, Alfonso, King of Aragon and Sicily, who had no claim to the crown beyond what he derived through a bastard branch of the old Norman dynasty, conquered Naples, expelled Count René of Anjou, and established himself in this new kingdom, which he preferred to those he had inherited by right.  Alfonso, surnamed the Magnanimous, was one of the most brilliant and romantic personages of the fifteenth century.  Historians are never weary of relating his victories over Caldora and Francesco Sforza, the coup-de-main by which he expelled his rival René, and the fascination which he exercised in Milan, while a captive, over the jealous spirit of Filippo Maria Visconti. Scholars are no less profuse in their praises of his virtues, the justice, humanity, religion, generosity, and culture which rendered him pre-eminent among the princes of that splendid period. His love of learning was a passion.  Whether at home in the retirement of his palace, or in his tent during war, he was always attended by students, who read aloud and commented on Livy, Seneca, or the Bible.  No prince was more profuse in his presents to learned men.  Bartolommeo Fazio received 500 ducats a year for the composition of his histories, and when, at their conclusion, the scholar asked for a further gift of 200 or 300 florins, the prince bestowed upon him 1,500.  The year he died, Alfonso distributed 20,000 ducats to men of letters alone.  This immoderate liberality is the only vice of which he is accused.  It bore its usual fruits in the disorganization of finance.

The generous humanity of Alfonso endeared him greatly to the Neapolitans.  During the half-century in which so many Italian princes succumbed to the dagger of their subjects, he, in Naples, where, according to Pontano, ‘nothing was cheaper than the life of a man,’ walked up and down unarmed and unattended.  ’Why should a father fear among his children?’ he was wont to say in answer to suggestions of the danger of this want of caution.  The many splendid qualities by which he was distinguished were enhanced rather than obscured by the romance of his private life.  Married to Margaret of Castile, he had no legitimate children; Ferdinand, with whom he shared the government of Naples in 1443, and whom he designated as his successor in 1458, was supposed to be his son by Margaret de Hijar.  It was even whispered that this Ferdinand was the child of Catherine the wife of Alfonso’s brother Henry, whom Margaret, to save the honor of the king, acknowledged as her own.  Whatever may have been the truth of this dark history, it was known for certain that the queen had murdered her rival, the unhappy Margaret de Hijar, and that Alfonso never forgave her or would look upon her from that day.  Pontano, who was Ferdinand’s secretary, told a different tale.  He affirmed that the real father of the Duke of Calabria was a Marrano of Valentia.  This last story is rendered probable by the brusque contrast between the character of Alfonso and that of Ferdinand.

It would be terrible to think that such a father could have been the parent of such a son.  In Ferdinand the instinct of liberal culture degenerated into vulgar magnificence; courtesy and confidence gave place to cold suspicion and brutal cruelty.  His ferocity bordered upon madness.  He used to keep the victims of his hatred in cages, where their misery afforded him the same delight as some men derived from watching the antics of monkeys. In his hunting establishment were repeated the worst atrocities of Bernabo Visconti:  wretches mutilated for neglect of his hounds extended their handless stumps for charity to the travelers through his villages. Instead of the generosity for which Alfonso had been famous, Ferdinand developed all the arts of avarice.  Like Sixtus IV. he made the sale of corn and oil a royal monopoly, trafficking in the hunger of his subjects. Like Alexander VI. he fattened his viziers and secretaries upon the profits of extortion which he shared with them, and when they were fully gorged he cut their throats and proclaimed himself the heir through their attainder. Alfonso had been famous for his candor and sincerity.  Ferdinand was a demon of dissimulation and treachery.  His murder of his guest Jacopo Piccinino at the end of a festival, which extended over twenty-seven days of varied entertainments, won him the applause of Machiavellian spirits throughout Italy.  It realized the ideal of treason conceived as a fine art.  Not less perfect as a specimen of diabolical cunning was the vengeance which Ferdinand, counseled by his son Alfonso, inflicted on the barons who conspired against him. Alfonso was a son worthy of his terrible father.  The only difference between them was that Ferdinand dissembled, while Alfonso, whose bravery at Otranto against the Turks had surrounded him with military glory, abandoned himself with cynicism to his passions.  Sketching characters of both in the same paragraph, de Comines writes:  ’Never was man more cruel than Alfonso, nor more vicious, nor more wicked, nor more poisonous, nor more gluttonous.  His father was more dangerous, because he could conceal his mind and even his anger from sight; in the midst of festivity he would take and slaughter his victims by treachery.  Grace or mercy was never found in him, nor yet compassion for his poor people.  Both of them laid forcible hands on women.  In matters of the Church they observed nor reverence nor obedience.  They sold bishoprics, like that of Tarento, which Ferdinand disposed of for 13,000 ducats to a Jew in favor of his son whom he called a Christian.’

This kind of tyranny carried in itself its own death-warrant.  It needed not the voice of Savonarola to proclaim that God would revenge the crimes of Ferdinand by placing a new sovereign on his throne.  It was commonly believed that the old king died in 1494 of remorse and apprehension, when he knew that the French expedition could no longer be delayed.  Alfonso, for his part, bold general in the field and able man of affairs as he might be, found no courage to resist the conqueror.  It is no fiction of a poet or a moralist, but plain fact of history, that this King of Naples, grandson of the great Alfonso and father of the Ferdinand to be, quailed before the myriads of accusing dead that rose to haunt his tortured fancy in the supreme hour of peril.  The chambers of his palace in Naples were thronged with ghosts by battalions, pale specters of the thousands he had reduced to starvation, bloody phantoms of the barons he had murdered after nameless tortures, thin wraiths of those who had wasted away in dungeons under his remorseless rule.  The people around his gates muttered in rebellion.  He abdicated in favor of his son, took ship for Sicily, and died there conscience-stricken in a convent ere the year was out.

Ferdinand, a brave youth, beloved by the nation in spite of his father’s and grandfather’s tyranny, reigned in his stead.  Yet even for him the situation was untenable.  Everywhere he was beset by traitors ­by his whole army at San Germano, by Trivulzi at Capua, by the German guide at Naples.  Without soldiers, without allies, with nothing to rely upon but the untried goodwill of subjects who had just reason to execrate his race, and with the conquerors of Italy advancing daily through his states, retreat alone was left to him.  After abandoning his castles to pillage, burning the ships in the harbor of Naples, and setting Don Federigo together with the Queen dowager and the princess Joanna upon a quick-sailing galley, Ferdinand bade farewell to his kingdom.  Historians relate that as the shore receded from his view he kept intoning in a loud voice this verse of the 127th Psalm:  ’Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’  Between the beach of Naples and the rocky shore of Ischia, for which the exiles were bound, there is only the distance of some seventeen miles.  It was in February, a month of mild and melancholy sunshine in those southern regions, when the whole bay of Naples with its belt of distant hills is wont to take one tint of modulated azure, that the royal fugitives performed this voyage.  Over the sleeping sea they glided; while from the galley’s stern the king with a voice as sad as Boabdil’s when he sat down to weep for Granada, cried:  ’Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’

There was no want of courage in the youth.  By his simple presence he had intimidated a mob of rebels in Naples.  By the firmness of his carriage he subdued the insolent governor of Ischia, and made himself master of the island.  There he waited till the storm was overpast.  Ten times more a man than Charles, he watched the French king depart from Naples leaving scarcely a rack behind ­some troops decimated by disease and unnerved by debauchery, and a general or two without energy or vigor.  Then he returned and entered on a career of greater popularity than could have been enjoyed by him if the French had never made the fickle race of Naples feel how far more odious is a foreign than a familiar yoke.

Charles entered Naples as a conqueror or liberator on February 22, 1495.  He was welcomed and feted by the Neapolitans, than whom no people are more childishly delighted with a change of masters.  He enjoyed his usual sports, and indulged in his usual love-affairs.  With suicidal insolence and want of policy he alienated the sympathies of the noble families by dividing the titles, offices, and fiefs of the kingdom among his retinue. Without receiving so much as a provisional investiture from the Pope, he satisfied his vanity by parading on May 12 as sovereign, with a ball in one hand and a scepter in the other, through the city.  Then he was forced to return upon his path and to seek France with the precipitancy he had shown in gaining Naples.  Alexander, who was witty, said the French had conquered Italy with lumps of chalk and wooden spurs, because they rode unarmed in slippers and sent couriers before them to select their quarters.  It remained to be seen that the achievements of this conquest could be effaced as easily as a chalk mark is rubbed out, or a pair of wooden spurs are broken.

While Charles was amusing himself at Naples, a storm was gathering in his rear.  A league against him had been formed in April by the great powers of Europe.  Venice, alarmed for the independence of Italy, and urged by the Sultan, who had reason to dread Charles VIII., headed the league.  Lodovico, now that he had attained his selfish object in the quiet position of Milan, was anxious for his safety.  The Pope still feared a general council.  Maximilian, who could not forget the slight put upon him in the matter of his daughter and his bride, was willing to co-operate against his rival.  Ferdinand and Isabella, having secured themselves in Roussillon, thought it behooved them to re-establish Spaniards of their kith and kin in Naples.  Each of the contracting parties had his rôle assigned to him.  Spain undertook to aid Ferdinand of Aragon in Calabria.  Venice was to attack the seaports of the kingdom; Lodovico Sforza, to occupy Asti; the King of the Romans, to make a diversion in the North.  Florence alone, though deeply injured by Charles in the matter of Pisa, kept faith with the French.

The danger was imminent.  Already Ferdinand the Catholic had disembarked troops on the shore of Sicily, and was ready to throw an army into the ports of Reggio and Tropea.  Alexander had refused to carry out his treaty by the surrender of Spoleto.  Cesare Borgia had escaped from the French camp.  The Lombards were menacing Asti, which the Duke of Orleans held, and without the possession of which there was no safe return to France.  Asti indeed at this juncture would have fallen, and Charles would have been caught in a trap, if the Venetians had only been quick or wary enough to engage German mercenaries. The danger of the situation may best be judged by reading the Memoirs of De Comines, who was then ambassador at Venice.  ’The league was concluded very late one evening.  The next morning the Signory sent for me earlier than usual.  They were assembled in great numbers, perhaps a hundred or more, and held their heads high, made a good cheer, and had not the same countenance as on the day when they told me of the capture of the citadel of Naples. My heart was heavy, and I had grave doubts about the person of the king and about all his company; and I thought their scheme more ripe than it really was, and feared they might have Germans ready; and if it had been so, never could the king have got safe out of Italy.’  Nevertheless De Comines put a brave face on the matter, and told the council that he had already received information of the league and had sent dispatches to his master on the subject. ‘After dinner,’ continues De Comines, ’all the ambassadors of the league met for an excursion on the water, which is the chief recreation at Venice, where every one goes according to the retinue he keeps, or at the expense of the Signory.  There may have been as many as forty gondolas, all bearing displayed the arms of their masters upon banners.  I saw the whole of this company pass before my windows, and there were many minstrels on board.  Those of Milan, one at least of them who had often kept my company, put on a brave face not to know me; and for three days I remained without going forth into the town, nor my people, nor was there all that time a single courteous word said to me or to any of my suite.’

Returning northward by the same route, Charles passed Rome and reached Siena on June 13.  The Pope had taken refuge, first at Orvieto, and afterwards at Perugia, on his approach; but he made no concessions.  Charles could not obtain from him an investiture of the kingdom he pretended to have conquered, while he had himself to surrender the fortresses of Civita Vecchia and Terracina.  Ostia alone remained in the clutch of Alexander’s implacable enemy, the Cardinal della Rovere.  In Tuscany the Pisan question was again opened.  The French army desired to see the liberties of Pisa established on a solid basis before they quitted Italy.  On their way to Naples the misfortunes of that ancient city had touched them:  now on their return they were clamorous that Charles should guarantee its freedom.  But to secure this object was an affair of difficulty.  The forces of the league had already taken the field, and the Duke of Orleans was being besieged in Novara.  The Florentines, jealous of the favor shown, in manifest infringement of their rights, to citizens whom they regarded as rebellious bondsmen, assumed an attitude of menace.  Charles could only reply with vague promises to the solicitations of the Pisans, strengthen the French garrisons in their fortresses, and march forward as quickly as possible into the Apennines.  The key of the pass by which he sought to regain Lombardy is the town of Pontremoli.  Leaving that in ashes on June 29, the French army, distressed for provisions and in peril among those melancholy hills, pushed onward with all speed.  They knew that the allied forces, commanded by the Marquis of Mantua, were waiting for them at the other side upon the Taro, near the village of Fornovo.  Here, if anywhere, the French ought to have been crushed.  They numbered about 9,000 men in all, while the allies were close upon 40,000.  The French were weary with long marches, insufficient food, and bad lodgings.  The Italians were fresh and well cared for.  Yet in spite of all this, in spite of blind generalship and total blundering, Charles continued to play his part of fortune’s favorite to the end.  A bloody battle, which lasted for an hour, took place upon the banks of the Taro. The Italians suffered so severely that, though they still far outnumbered the French, no persuasions could make them rally and renew the fight.  Charles in his own person ran great peril during this battle; and when it was over, he had still to effect his retreat upon Asti in the teeth of a formidable army.  The good luck of the French and the dilatory cowardice of their opponents saved them now again for the last time.

On July 15, Charles at the head of his little force marched into Asti and was practically safe.  Here the young king continued to give signal proofs of his weakness.  Though he knew that the Duke of Orleans was hard pressed in Novara, he made no effort to relieve him; nor did he attempt to use the 20,000 Switzers who descended from their Alps to aid him in the struggle with the league.  From Asti he removed to Turin, where he spent his time in flirting with Anna Soleri, the daughter of his host.  This girl had been sent to harangue him with a set oration, and had fulfilled her task, in the words of an old witness, ’without wavering, coughing, spitting, or giving way at all.’  Her charms delayed the king in Italy until October 19, when he signed a treaty at Vercelli with the Duke of Milan.  At this moment Charles might have held Italy in his grasp.  His forces, strengthened by the unexpected arrival of so many Switzers, and by a junction with the Duke of Orleans, would have been sufficient to overwhelm the army of the league, and to intimidate the faction of Ferdinand in Naples.  Yet so light-minded was Charles, and so impatient were his courtiers, that he now only cared for a quick return to France.  Reserving to himself the nominal right of using Genoa as a naval station, he resigned that town to Lodovico Sforza, and confirmed him in the tranquil possession of his Duchy.  On October 22 he left Turin, and entered his own dominions through the Alps of Dauphiné.  Already his famous conquest of Italy was reckoned among the wonders of the past, and his sovereignty over Naples had become the shadow of a name.  He had obtained for himself nothing but momentary glory, while he imposed on France a perilous foreign policy, and on Italy the burden of bloody warfare in the future.

A little more than a year had elapsed between the first entry of Charles into Lombardy and his return to France.  Like many other brilliant episodes of history, this conquest, so showy and so ephemeral, was more important as a sign than as an actual event.  ‘His passage,’ says Guicciardini, ’was the cause not only of change in states, downfalls of kingdoms, desolations of whole districts, destructions of cities, barbarous butcheries; but also of new customs, new modes of conduct, new and bloody habits of war, diseases hitherto unknown.  The organization upon which the peace and harmony of Italy depended was so upset that, since that time, other foreign nations and barbarous armies have been able to trample her under foot and to ravage her at pleasure.’  The only error of Guicciardini is the assumption that the holiday excursion of Charles VIII. was in any deep sense the cause of these calamities. In truth the French invasion opened a new era for the Italians, but only in the same sense as a pageant may form the prelude to a tragedy.  Every monarch of Europe, dazzled by the splendid display of Charles and forgetful of its insignificant results, began to look with greedy eyes upon the wealth of the peninsula.  The Swiss found in those rich provinces an inexhaustible field for depredation.  The Germans, under the pretense of religious zeal, gave a loose rein to their animal appetites in the metropolis of Christendom.  France and Spain engaged in a duel to the death for the possession of so fair a prey.  The French, maddened by mere cupidity, threw away those chances which the goodwill of the race at large afforded them. Louis XII. lost himself in petty intrigues, by which he finally weakened his own cause to the profit of the Borgias and Austria.  Francis I. foamed his force away like a spent wave at Marignano and Pavia.  The real conqueror of Italy was Charles V. Italy in the sixteenth century was destined to receive the impress of the Spanish spirit, and to bear the yoke of Austrian dukes.  Hand in hand with political despotism marched religious tyranny.  The Counter-Reformation over which the Inquisition presided, was part and parcel of the Spanish policy for the enslavement of the nation no less than for the restoration of the Church.  Meanwhile the weakness, discord, egotism, and corruption which prevented the Italians from resisting the French invasion in 1494, continued to increase.  Instead of being lessoned by experience, Popes, Princes, and Republics vied with each other in calling in the strangers, pitting Spaniard against Frenchman, and paying the Germans to expel the Swiss, oblivious that each new army of foreigners they summoned was in reality a new swarm of devouring locusts.  In the midst of this anarchy it is laughable to hear the shrill voice of priests, like Julius and Leo, proclaiming before God their vows to rid Italy of the barbarians.  The confusion was tenfold confounded when the old factions of Guelf and Ghibelline put on a new garb of French and Spanish partisanship.  Town fought with town and family with family, in the cause of strangers whom they ought to have resisted with one will and steady hatred.  The fascination of fear and the love of novelty alike swayed the fickle population of Italian cities.  The foreign soldiers who inflicted on the nation such cruel injuries made a grand show in their streets, and there will always be a mob so childish as to covet pageants at the expense of freedom and even of safety.

In spite of its transitory character the invasion of Charles VIII., therefore, was a great fact in the history of the Renaissance.  It was, to use the pregnant phrase of Michelet, no less than the revelation of Italy to the nations of the North.  Like a gale sweeping across a forest of trees in blossom, and bearing their fertilizing pollen, after it has broken and deflowered their branches, to far-distant trees that hitherto have bloomed in barrenness, the storm of Charles’s army carried far and wide through Europe thought-dust, imperceptible, but potent to enrich the nations.  The French alone, says Michelet, understood Italy.  How terrible would have been a conquest by Turks with their barbarism, of Spaniards with their Inquisition, of Germans with their brutality!  But France, impressible, sympathetic, ardent for pleasure, generous, amiable and vain, was capable of comprehending the Italian spirit.  From the Italians the French communicated to the rest of Europe what we call the movement of the Renaissance.  There is some truth in this panegyric of Michelet’s.  The passage of the army of Charles VIII. marks a turning-point in modern history, and from this epoch dates the diffusion of a spirit of culture over Europe.  But Michelet forgets to notice that the French never rightly understood their vocation with regard to Italy.  They had it in their power to foster that free spirit which might have made her a nation capable, in concert with France, of resisting Charles V. Instead of doing so, they pursued the pettiest policy of avarice and egotism.  Nor did they prevent that Spanish conquest the horrors of which their historian has so eloquently described.  Again, we must remember that it was the Spaniards and not the French who saved Italy from being barbarized by the Turk.

For the historian of Italy it is sad and humiliating to have to acknowledge that her fate depended wholly on the action of more powerful nations, that she lay inert and helpless at the discretion of the conqueror in the duels between Spain and France and Spain and Islam.  Yet this is the truth.  It would seem that those peoples to whom we chiefly owe advance in art and knowledge, are often thus the captives of their intellectual inferiors.  Their spiritual ascendency is purchased at the expense of political solidity and national prosperity.  This was the case with Greece, with Judah, and with Italy.  The civilization of the Italians, far in advance of that of other European nations, unnerved them in the conflict with robust barbarian races.  Letters and the arts and the civilities of life were their glory.  ’Indolent princes and most despicable arms’ were their ruin.  Whether the Renaissance of the modern world would not have been yet more brilliant if Italy had remained free, who shall say?  The very conditions which produced her culture seem to have rendered that impossible.