The relations of trust which _bravi_ occasionally maintained with foreign Courts, supply some curious ill.u.s.trations of their position in Italian society. One characteristic instance may be selected from doc.u.ments in the Venetian Archives referring to Lodovico dall"Armi.[228]
This man belonged to a n.o.ble family of Bologna; and there are reasons for supposing that his mother was sister to Cardinal Campeggi, famous in the annals of the English Reformation. Outlawed from his native city for a homicide, Lodovico adopted the profession of arms and the management of secret diplomacy. He first took refuge at the Court of France, where in 1541 he obtained such credit, especially with the Dauphin, that he was entrusted with a mission for raising revolt in Siena against the Spaniards.[229] His transactions in that city with Giulio Salvi, then aspiring to its lordship, and in Rome with the French amba.s.sador, led to a conspiracy which only awaited the appearance of French troops upon the Tuscan frontier to break out into open rebellion. The plot, however, transpired before it had been matured; and Lodovico took flight through the Florentine territory. He was arrested at Montevarchi and confined in the fortress of Florence, where he made such revelations as rendered the extinction of the Sienese revolt an easy matter. After this we do not hear of him until he reappears at Venice in the year 1545. He was now accredited to the English amba.s.sador with the t.i.tle of Henry VIII."s "Colonel," and enjoyed the consideration accorded to a powerful monarch"s privy agent.
[Footnote 228: See Rawdon Brown"s _Calendar of State Papers_, vol. iv.]
[Footnote 229: See Botta, Book IV., for the story of Lodovico"s intrigues at Siena.]
His pension amounted to fifty crowns a month, while he kept eight captains at his orders, each of whom received half that sum as pay.
These subordinates were people of some social standing. We find among them a Trissino of Vicenza and a Bonifacio of Verona, the one ent.i.tled Marquis and the other Count. What the object of Lodovico"s residence in Italy might be, did not appear. Though he carried letters of recommendation from the English Court, he laid no claim to the rank of diplomatic envoy. But it was tolerably well known that he employed himself in levying troops. Whether these were meant to be used against France or in favor of Savoy, or whether, as the Court of Rome suggested, Henry had given orders for the murder of his cousin, Cardinal Pole, at Trento, remained an open question. Lodovico might have dwelt in peace under the tolerant rule of the Venetians, had he not exposed himself to a collision with their police. In the month of August he a.s.saulted the captain of the night guard in a street brawl; and it was also proved against him that he had despatched two of his men to inflict a wound of infamy upon a gentleman at Treviso. These offenses, coinciding with urgent remonstrances from the Papal Curia, gave the Venetian Government fair pretext for expelling him from their dominions. A ban was therefore published against him and fourteen of his followers. The English amba.s.sador declined to interfere in his behalf, and the man left Italy.
At the end of August he appeared at Brussels, where he attempted to excuse himself in an interview with the Venetian amba.s.sador. Now began a diplomatic correspondence between the English Court and the Venetian Council, which clearly demonstrates what kind of importance attached to this private agent. The Chancellor Lord Wriothesley, and the Secretary Sir William Paget, used considerable urgency to obtain a suspension of the ban against Dall"Armi. After four months" negotiation, during which the Papal Court endeavored to neutralize Henry"s influence, the Doge signed a safe-conduct for five years in favor of the bravo. Early in 1546 Lodovico reappeared in Lombardy. At Mantua he delivered a letter signed by Henry himself to the Duke Francesco Gonzaga, introducing "our n.o.ble and beloved familiar Lodovico Dall"Armi," and begging the Duke to a.s.sist him in such matters as he should transact at Mantua in the king"s service.[230] Lodovico presented this letter in April; but the d.u.c.h.ess, who then acted as regent for her son Francesco, refused to receive him.
She alleged that the Duke forbade the levying of troops for foreign service, and declined to complicate his relations with foreign powers.
It seems, from a sufficiently extensive correspondence on the affairs of Lodovico, that he was understood by the Italian princess to be charged with some special commission for recruiting soldiers against the French.
[Footnote 230: This letter is dated February 16, 1546.]
The peace between England and France, signed at Guines in June, rendered Lodovico"s mission nugatory; and the death of Henry VIII. in January 1547 deprived him of his only powerful support. Meanwhile he had contrived to incur the serious displeasure of the Venetian Republic. In the autumn of 1546 they outlawed one of their own n.o.bles, Ser Mafio Bernardo, on the charge of his having revealed state secrets to France.
About the middle of November, Bernardo, then living in concealment at Ravenna, was lured into the pine forest by two men furnished with tokens which secured his confidence. He was there murdered, and the a.s.sa.s.sins turned out to be paid instruments of Lodovico. It now came to light that Lodovico and Ser Mafio Bernardo had for some time past colluded in political intrigue. If, therefore, the murder had a motive, this was found in Lodovico"s dread of revelations under the event of Ser Mario"s capture. Submitted to torture in the prisons of the Ten, Ser Mafio might have incriminated his accomplice both with England and Venice. It was obvious why he had been murdered by Lodovico"s men. Dall"Armi was consequently arrested and confined in Venice. After examination, followed by a temporary release, he prudently took flight into the Duchy of Milan. Though they held proof of his guilt in the matter of Ser Mafio"s murder, the Venetians were apparently unwilling to proceed to extremities against the King of England"s man. Early in February, however, Sir William Paget surrendered him in the name of Lord Protector Somerset to the discretion of S. Mark. Furnished with this a.s.surance that Dall"Armi had lost the favor of England, the Signory wrote to demand his arrest and extradition from the Spanish governor in Milan. He was in fact arrested on February 10. The letter announcing his capture describes him as a man of remarkably handsome figure, accustomed to wear a crimson velvet cloak and a red cap trimmed with gold. It is exactly in this costume that Lodovico has been represented by Bonifazio in a picture of the Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents. The bravo there stands with his back partly turned, gazing stolidly upon a complex scene of bloodshed. He wears a crimson velvet mantle, scarlet cap and white feather, scarlet stockings, crimson velvet shoes, and rose-colored silk underjacket. His person is that of a gallant past the age of thirty, high-complexioned, with short brown beard, spare whiskers and moustache.
He is good to look at, except that the sharp set mouth suggests cynical vulgarity and shallow rashness. On being arrested in Milan, Lodovico proclaimed himself a privileged person _(persona pubblica)_, bearing credentials from the King of England; and, during the first weeks of his confinement, he wrote to the Emperor for help. This was an idle step.
Henry"s death had left him without protectors, and Charles V. felt no hesitation in abandoning his suppliant to the Venetians. When the usual formalities regarding extradition had been completed, the Milanese Government delivered Lodovico at the end of April into the hands of the Rector of Brescia, who forwarded him under a guard of two hundred men to Padua. He was hand-cuffed; and special directions were given regarding his safety, it being even prescribed that if he refused food it should be thrust down his throat. What pa.s.sed in the prisons of the State, after his arrival at Venice, is not known. But on May 14, he was beheaded between the columns on the Molo.
Venice, at this epoch, incurred the reproaches of her neighbors for harboring adventurers of Lodovico"s stamp. One of the Fregosi of Genoa a certain Valerio, and Pietro Strozzi, the notorious French agent, all of whom habitually haunted the lagoons, roused sufficient public anxiety to necessitate diplomatic communications between Courts, and to disquiet fretful Italian princelings. Banished from their own provinces, and plying a petty Condottiere trade, such men, when they came together on a neutral ground, engaged in cross-intrigues which made them politically dangerous. They served no interest but that of their own egotism, and they were notoriously unscrupulous in the means employed to effect immediate objects. At the same time, the protection which they claimed from foreign potentates withdrew them from the customary justice of the State. Bedmar"s conspiracy in 1617-18 revealed to Venice the full extent of the peril which this harborage of ruffians involved; for though grandees of the distinction of the Duke of Ossuna were involved in it, the main agents, on whose ambition and audacity all depended, sprang from those French, English, Spanish, and Italian mercenaries, who crowded the low quarters of the city, alert for any mischief, and inflamed with the wildest projects of self-aggrandizement by policy and bloodshed. Nothing testifies to the social and political decrepitude of Italy in this period more plainly than the importance which folk like Lodovico Dall"Armi acquired, and the revolutionary force which a man like Jaffier commanded.
_Brigands, Pirates, Plague_.
After collecting these stories, which ill.u.s.trate the manners of the upper cla.s.ses in society and prove their dependence upon henchmen paid to subserve lawless pa.s.sions, it would be interesting to lay bare the life of the common people with equal lucidity. This, however, is a more difficult matter. Statistics of dubious value can indeed be gathered regarding the desolation of villages by brigands, the mult.i.tudes destroyed by pestilence and famine, and the inroads of Mediterranean pirates. I propose, therefore, to touch lightly upon these points, and especially to use our records of plague in different Italian districts as tests for contrasting the condition of the people at this epoch with that of the same people in the Middle Ages.
Brigandage, though this was certainly a curse of the first magnitude to Central and Southern Italy, cannot be paralleled, either for the miseries it inflicted, or for the ferocity it stimulated, with the munic.i.p.al warfare of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
In those internecine struggles whole cities disappeared, and fertile districts were periodically abandoned to wolves. The bands of an Alfonso Piccolomini or a Sciarra Colonna plundered villages, exacted black mail, and held prisoners for ransom.[231] But their barbarities were insignificant, when compared with those commonly perpetrated by wandering companies of adventure before the days of Alberigo da Barbiano; nor did brigands cost Italy so much as the mercenary troops, which, after the Condottiere system had been developed, became a permanent drain upon the resources of the country. The raids of Tunisian and Algerian Corsairs were more seriously mischievous; since the whole sea-board from Nice to Reggio lay open to the ravages of such incarnate fiends as Barbarossa and Dragut, while the Adriatic was infested by Uscocchi, and the natives of the Regno not unfrequently turned pirates in emulation of their persecutors.[232]
[Footnote 231: See Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. ii. p. 167, for the pillage of Lucera by Pacchiarotto.]
[Footnote 232: Sarpi"s _History of the Uscocchi_ may be consulted for this singular episode in the Iliad of human savagery. See Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 182, on the case of the son and heir of the Duke of Termoli joining them; and _ibid._ p. 180 on the existence of pirates at Capri.]
Yet even these injuries may be reckoned light, when we consider what Italy had suffered between 1494 and 1527 from French, Spanish, German and Swiss troops in combat on her soil. The pestilences of the Middle Ages notably the Black Death of 1348, of which Boccaccio has left an immortal description, exceeded in virulence those which depopulated Italian cities during the period of my history. But plagues continued to be frequent; and some of these are so memorable that they require to be particularly noticed. At Venice in 1575-77, a total of about 50,000 persons perished; and in 1630-31, 46,490 were carried off within a s.p.a.ce of sixteen months in the city, while the number of those who died at large in the lagoons amounted to 94,235.[233] On these two occasions the Venetians commemorated their deliverance by the erection of the Redentore and S. Maria della Salute, churches which now form princ.i.p.al ornaments of the Giudecca and the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Milan was devastated at the same periods by plagues, of which we have detailed accounts in the dispatches of resident Venetian envoys.[234] The mortality in the second of these visitations was terrible. Before September 1629, fourteen thousand had succ.u.mbed; between May and August 1630, forty-five thousand victims had been added to the tale.[235]
[Footnote 233: Mutinelli, _Annali Urbani di Venezia_, pp.
470-483,549-550.]
[Footnote 234: Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. i. p. 310-340, and vol.
xiv. pp. 30-65.]
[Footnote 235: It is worth mentioning that Ripamonte calculates the mortality from plague in Milan in 1524 at 140,000.]
At Naples in the year 1656, more than fifty thousand perished between May and July; the dead were cast naked into the sea, and the Venetian envoy describes the city as _"non piu citta ma spelonca di morti_."[236] In July his diary is suddenly interrupted, whether by departure from the stricken town, or more probably by death, we know not. Savoy was scourged by a fearful pestilence in the years 1598-1600.
Of this plague we possess a frightfully graphic picture in the same accurate series of the State doc.u.ments.[237] Simeone Contarini, then resident at Savigliano, relates that more than two-thirds of the population in that province had been swept away before the autumn of 1598, and that the evil was spreading far and wide through Piedmont. In Alpignano, a village of some four hundred inhabitants, only two remained. In Val Moriana, forty thousand expired out of a total of seventy thousand. The village of San Giovanni counted but twelve survivors from a population of more than four thousand souls. In May 1599, the inhabitants of Turin were reduced by flight and death to four thousand; and of these there died daily numbers gradually rising through the summer from 50 to 180. The streets were enc.u.mbered with unburied corpses, the houses infested by robbers and marauders. Some incidents reported of this plague are ghastly in their horror. The infected were treated with inhuman barbarity, and retorted with savage fury, battering their a.s.sailants with the pestiferous bodies of unburied victims.
[Footnote 236: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. in. pp. 229-233. Botta has given an account of this plague in the twenty-sixth book of his _History_.]
[Footnote 237: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. ii. pp. 287-307.]
To the miseries of pestilence and its attendant famine were added lawlessness and license, raging fires, and what was worst of all, the dark suspicion that the sickness had been introduced by malefactors.
This belief appears to have taken hold upon the popular mind during the plague of 1598 in Savoy and in Milan.[238] Simeone Contarini reports that two men from Geneva confessed to having come with the express purpose of disseminating infection. He also gives curious particulars of two who were burned, and four who were quartered at Turin in 1600 for this offense.[239] "These spirits of h.e.l.l," as he calls them, indicated a wood in which they declared that they had buried a pestilential liquid intended to be used for smearing houses. The wood was searched, and some jars were discovered. A surgeon at the same epoch confessed to having meant to spread the plague at Mondovi. Other persons, declaring themselves guilty of a similar intention, described a horn filled with poisonous stuff collected from the sores of plague-stricken corpses, which they had concealed outside the walls of Turin. This too was discovered; and these apparent proofs of guilt so infuriated the people that every day some criminals were sacrificed to judicial vengeance.
[Footnote 238: See Mutinelli, _op. cit._ p. 241 and p. 289. We hear of the same belief at Milan in 1576, _op. cit._ vol. i. pp. 311-315.]
[Footnote 239: _Ibid._ p. 309. See also vol. iii. p. 254 for a similar narration.]
The name given to the unfortunate creatures accused of this diabolical conspiracy was _Untori_ or the Smearers. The plague of Milan in 1629-30 obtained the name of "La Peste degli Untori" (as that of 1576 had been called "La Peste di S. Carlo"), because of the prominent part played in it by the smearers.[240] They were popularly supposed to go about the city daubing walls, doors, furniture, choir-stalls, flowers, and articles of food with plague stuff. They scattered powders in the air, or spread them in circles on the pavement. To set a foot upon one of these circles involved certain destruction. Hundreds of such _untori_ were condemned to the most cruel deaths by justice firmly persuaded of their criminality. Exposed to prolonged tortures, the majority confessed palpable absurdities. One woman at Milan said she had killed four thousand people. But, says Pier Antonio Marioni, the Venetian envoy, although tormented to the utmost, none of them were capable of revealing the prime instigators of the plot. So thoroughly convinced was he, together with the whole world, of their guilt, that he never paused to reflect upon the fallacy contained in this remark. The rack-stretched wretches could not reveal their instigators, because there were none; and the acts of which they accused themselves were the delirious figments of their own torture-fretted brains. We possess doc.u.ments relating to the trial of the Milanese _untori_, which make it clear that crimes of this sort must have been imaginary. As in cases of witchcraft, the first accusation was founded upon gossip and delation.
The judicial proceedings were ruled by prejudice and cruelty. Fear and physical pain extorted confessions and complicated accusations of their neighbors from mult.i.tudes of innocent people.[241] Indeed the parallel between these unfortunate smearers and no less wretched witches is a close one. I am inclined to think that, as some crazy women fancied they were witches, so some morbid persons of this period in Italy believed in their power of spreading plague, and yielded to the fascination of malignity. Whether such moral mad folk really extended the sphere of the pestilence to any appreciable extent remains a matter for conjecture; and it is quite certain that all but a small percentage of the accused were victims of calumny.
After taking brigandage, piracy, and pestilence into account, the decline of Italy must be attributed to other causes. These I believe to have been the extinction of commercial republics, the decay of free commonwealths, iniquitous systems of taxation, the insane display of wealth by unproductive princes, and the diversion of trade into foreign channels. Florence ceased to be the center of wool manufacture, Venice lost her hold upon the traffic between East and West.[242] Stagnation fell like night upon the land, and the population suffered from a general atrophy.
[Footnote 240: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. ii. pp. 51-65.]
[Footnote 241: Cantu"s _Ragionamenti sulla Storia Lombarda del Secolo XVII._ Milano, 1832. The trial may also be read in Mutinelli, _Storm Arcana_, vol. iv. pp. 175-201. Mutinelli inclines to believe in the _Untori_. So do many grave historians, including Nani and Botta. See Cantu, _Storia degli Italiani_, Milano, 1876, vol. ii. p. 215.]
[Footnote 242: Mr. Ruskin has somewhere maintained that the decline of Venice was not due to this cause, but to fornication. He should read the record given by Mutinelli (_Diari Urbani_, p. 157), of Venetian fornication in 1340, at the time when the Ducal Palace was being covered with its sculpture. The public prost.i.tutes were reckoned then at 11,654.
Adulteries, rapes, infanticides were matters of daily occurrence. Yet the Renaissance had not begun, and the expansion of Venice, which roused the envious hostility of Europe, had yet to happen.]
_The Proletariate_.
In what concerns social morality it would be almost impossible to define the position of the proletariate, tillers of the soil, and artisans, at this epoch. These cla.s.ses vary in their goodness and their badness, in their drawbacks and advantages, from age to age far less than those who mold the character of marked historical periods by culture. They enjoy indeed a greater or a smaller immunity from pressing miseries. They are innocent or criminal in different degrees. But the ground-work of humanity in them remains comparatively unaltered; and their moral qualities, so far as these may be exceptional, reflect the influences of an upper social stratum. It is clear from the histories related in this chapter that members of the lowest cla.s.ses were continually mixing with the n.o.bles and the gentry in the wild adventures of that troubled century. They, like their betters, were undergoing a tardy metamorphosis from mediaeval to modern conditions, retaining vices of ferocity and grossness, virtues of loyalty and self-reliance, which belonged to earlier periods. They, too, were now infected by the sensuous romance of pietism, the superst.i.tious respect for sacraments and ceremonial observances which had been wrought by the Catholic Revival into ecstatic frenzy. They shared those correlative yearnings after sacrilegious debauchery, felt those allurements of magic arts, indulged that perverted sense of personal honor which const.i.tuted psychological disease in the century which we are studying. It can, moreover, be maintained that Italian society at no epoch has been so sharply divided into sections as that of the feudalized races. In this period of one hundred years, from 1530 to 1630, when education was a privilege of the few, and when Church and princes combined to r.e.t.a.r.d intellectual progress, the distinction between n.o.ble and plebeian, burgher and plowman, though outwardly defined, was spiritually and morally insignificant. As in the Renaissance, so now, vice trickled downwards from above, infiltrating the ma.s.ses of the people with its virus. But now, even more decidedly than then, the upper cla.s.ses displayed obliquities of meanness, baseness, intemperance, cowardice, and brutal violence, which are commonly supposed to characterize villeins.
I had thought to throw some light upon the manners of the Italian proletariate by exploring the archives of trials for witchcraft. But I found that these were less common than in Germany, France, Spain, and England at a corresponding period. In Italy witchcraft, pure and simple, was confined, for the most part, to mountain regions, the Apennines of the Abruzzi, and the Alps of Bergamo and Tyrol.[243] In other provinces it was confounded with crimes of poisoning, the procuring of abortion, and the fomentation of conspiracies in private families. These facts speak much for the superior civilization of the Italian people considered as a whole. We discover a common fund of intelligence, vice, superst.i.tion, prejudice, enthusiasm, craft, devotion, self-a.s.sertion, possessed by the race at large. Only in districts remote from civil life did witchcraft a.s.sume those anti-social and repulsive features which are familiar to Northern nations. Elsewhere it penetrated, as a subtle poison, through society, lending its supposed a.s.sistance to pa.s.sions already powerful enough to work their own accomplishment. It existed, not as an endemic disease, a permanent delirium of maddened peasants, but as a weapon in the a.r.s.enal of malice on a par with poisons and provocatives to l.u.s.t.
I might ill.u.s.trate this position by the relation of a fantastic attempt made against the life of Pope Urban VIII.[244]
[Footnote 243: Dandolo"s _Streghe Tirolesi_, and Cantu"s work on the Diocese of Como show how much Subalpine Italy had in common in Northern Europe in this matter.]
[Footnote 244: See _Ra.s.segna Settima.n.a.le_, September 18, 1881.]
Giacomo Centini, the nephew of Cardinal d"Ascoli, fostered a fixed idea, the motive of his madness being the promotion of his uncle to S. Peter"s Chair. In 1633 he applied to a hermit, who professed profound science in the occult arts and close familiarity with demons. The man, in answer to Giacomo"s inquiries, said that Urban had still many years to live, that the Cardinal d"Ascoli would certainly succeed him, and that he held it in his power to shorten the Pope"s days. He added that a certain Fra Cherubino would be useful, if any matter of grave moment were resolved on; nor did he reject the a.s.sistance of other discreet persons. Giacomo, on his side, produced a Fra Domenico; and the four accomplices set at work to destroy the reigning Pope by means of sorcery. They caused a knife to be forged, after the model of the Key of Solomon, and had it inscribed with Cabalistic symbols. A clean virgin was employed to spin hemp into a thread. Then they resorted to a distant room in Giacomo"s palace, where a circle was drawn with the mystic thread, a fire was lighted in the center, and upon it was placed an image of Pope Urban formed of purest wax. The devil was invoked to appear and answer whether Urban had deceased this life after the melting of the image. No infernal visitor responded to the call; and the hermit accounted for this failure by suggesting that some murder had been committed in the palace. As things went at that period, this excuse was by no means feeble, if only the audience, bent on unholy invocation of the power of evil, would accept it as sufficient. Probably more than one murder had taken place there, of which the owner was dimly conscious. The psychological curiosity to note is that avowed malefactors reckoned purity an essential element in their nefarious practice. They tried once more in a vineyard, under the open heavens at night. But no demon issued from the darkness, and the hermit laid this second mischance to the score of bad weather. Giacomo was incapable of holding his tongue. He talked about his undertaking to the neighbors, and promised to make them all Cardinals when he should become the Papal nephew. Meanwhile he pressed the hermit forward on the path of folly; and this man, driven to his wits" end for a device, said that they must find seven priests together, one of whom should be a.s.sa.s.sinated to enforce the spell. It was natural, while the countryside was being raked for seven convenient priests by such a tattler as Giacomo, that suspicions should be generated in the people. Information reached Rome, in consequence of which the persons implicated in this idiotic plot were conveyed thither and given over to the mercies of the Holy Office. The upshot of their trial was that Giacomo lost his head, while the hermit and Fra Cherubino were burned alive, and Fra Domenico went to the galleys for life. Several other men involved in the process received punishments of considerable severity.
It must be added in conclusion that the whole story rests upon the testimony of Inquisitorial archives, and that the real method of Giacomo Centini"s apparent madness yet remains to be investigated. The few facts that we know about him, from his behavior on the scaffold and a letter he wrote his wife, prejudice me in his favor.
Enough, and more than enough, perhaps, has been collected in this chapter, to throw light upon the manners of Italians during the Counter-Reformation. It would have been easy to repeat the story of the Countess of Cellant and her murdered lovers, or of the d.u.c.h.ess of Amalfi strangled by her brothers for a marriage below her station. The ma.s.sacres committed by the Raspanti in Ravenna would furnish a whole series of ill.u.s.trative crimes. From the deeds of Alfonso Piccolomini, Sciarra and Fabrizio Colonna details sufficient to fill a volume with records of atrocious savagery could be drawn. The single episode of Elena Campireali, who plighted her troth to a bandit, became Abbess of the Convent at Castro, intrigued with a bishop, and killed herself for shame on the return of her first lover, would epitomize in one drama all the princ.i.p.al features of this social discord. The dreadful tale of the Baron of Montebello might be told again, who a.s.saulted the castle of the Marquis of Pratidattolo, and, by the connivance of a sister whom he subsequently married, murdered the Marquis with his mother, children, and relatives. The hunted life of Alessandro Antelminelli, pursued through all the States of Europe by a.s.sa.s.sins, could be used to exemplify the miseries of proscribed exiles. But what is the use of multiplying instances, when every pedigree in Litta, every chronicle of the time, every history of the most insignificant township, swarms with evidence to the same purpose? We need not adopt the opinion that society had greatly altered for the worse. We must rather decide that mediaeval ferocity survived throughout the whole of that period which witnessed the Catholic Revival, and that the piety which distinguished it was not influential in curbing vehement pa.s.sions.
The conclusions to be drawn from the facts before us seem to be in general these. The link between government and governed in Italy had snapped. The social bond was broken, and the const.i.tuents that form a nation were pursuing divers aims. On the one hand stood Popes and princes, founding their claims to absolute authority upon t.i.tles that had slight rational or national validity. These potentates were ill-combined among themselves, and mutually jealous. On the other side were ranged disruptive forces of the most heterogeneous kinds--remnants from antique party-warfare, fragments of obsolete domestic feuds, new strivings after freer life in mentally down-trodden populations, blending with crime and misery and want and profligacy to compose an opposition which exasperated despotism. These anarchical conditions were due in large measure to the troubles caused by foreign campaigns of invasion. They were also due to the Spanish type of manners imposed upon the ruling cla.s.ses, which the native genius accepted with fraudulent intelligence, and to which it adapted itself by artifice. We must further reckon the division between cultured and uncultured people, which humanism had effected, and which subsisted after the benefits conferred by humanism had been withdrawn from the race. The retirement of the commercial aristocracy from trade, and their a.s.sumption of princely indolence in this period of political stagnation, was another factor of importance. But the truest cause of Italian retrogression towards barbarism must finally be discerned in the sharp check given to intellectual evolution by the repressive forces of the Counter-Reformation.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
INDEX.