“ The war was general, but everywhere waged with the national forces. Every city armed its militia, which, headed by the magistrates, attacked the neighbouring nobles or towns of a contrary party. While each city imagined it was fighting either for the pope or the emperor, it was habitually impelled exclusively by its own sentiments: every town considered itself as a whole, as an independent state, which had its own allies and enemies; each citizen felt an ardent patriotism, not for the kingdom of Italy, or for the empire, but for his own city. ”

“ From the epoch of the Peace of Constance to the end of the twelfth century, the history of Venice is occupied by no occurrence which deserves to be recorded. But the first years of the thirteenth century are the most brilliant and glorious in the long annals of the republic. They are filled with the details of a romantic and memorable enterprise—the equipment of a prodigious naval armament, the fearless pursuit of a distant and gigantic adventure, the conquest of an ancient empire, the division of the spoil, and the consummation of commercial grandeur. ”

“ Already I behold the swarms of angry barbarians; our opulent cities, the places flourishing in a long peace, are shaken with fear, desolated by slaughter, consumed by rapine, and polluted by intemperance and lust. I see the massacre or captivity of our citizens, the rapes of our virgins and matrons. In this extremity (he interrogates a friend) how must the Sicilians act? By the unanimous election of a king of valour and experience, Sicily and Calabria might yet be preserved; for in the levity of the Apulians, ever eager for new revolutions, I can repose neither confidence nor hope. ”

“ CHAPTER VII. ROME UNDER RIENZI
He is accused not of betraying but of defending liberty; he is guilty not of surrendering but of holding the Capitol. The supreme crime with which he is charged, and which merits expiation on the scaffold, is that he dared affirm that the Roman Empire is still at Rome, and in possession of the Roman people. Oh, unpious age! Oh, preposterous jealousy, malevolence unprecedented! What dost thou, O Christ, ineffable and incorruptible judge of all? Where are thine eyes with which thou art wont to scatter the clouds of human misery? Why dost thou turn them away? ”

“ On November 27th the Italian parliament assembled for the first time in Rome at Montecitorio. The speech from the throne was as the circumstances demanded, majestic and solemn. “Here where our people,” it said, “after being dispersed through many centuries, are gathered for the first time in the majesty of their representatives; here where we recognise the mother-country of our dreams, all things speak to us of greatness. At the same time all things remind us of our duty.” ”

“ Carmignano was his first conquest; he then marched to Lecore, to Signa, Campi, Brozzi, and Guaracchi; all were captured or fell a prey to flames and plunder; Peretola, within two miles of Florence, became for a while his headquarters, while from the Arno to the mountains he ravaged all the plain, a plain covered, then as now, but more richly, with magnificent villas and beautiful gardens, the delight of the citizens and the admiration of the world. All was destroyed. The wealth was plundered, the monuments of then reviving art were carried away and reserved for the conqueror’s triumph. ”

“ Florence was still a mere unknown parish when Pisa, her neighbour, already covered the Mediterranean with her vessels; and while Milan and the towns of Lombardy were engaged in deadly fight against the empire, the Tuscan city stood perfectly aloof from the struggle of the two parties, which were dividing not only Italy, but the whole of Europe, and, from the Alps to the Sicilian straits, covering the peninsula with ruins and deluging it in blood. ”

“ It would have been to expect from the illustrious citizens of Venice more than one could expect from the human race to ask them to forget the glory and splendour of their house, to raise themselves above domestic interests, to work only for the grandeur of the state, and make this generation consist in the equality of all the citizens. The tendency towards aristocracy was for a long time only the result of influence given by riches, office, the remembrance of service rendered, and the respect which attaches itself naturally to an illustrious name. ”

“ To understand these times we must remember that there had been no real conquest because no national resistance. No one in the fifteenth century had really defended the sovereignty of Italy. When Europe presented herself she entered as into a vacant heritage, devoid of humanity. Italy did not defend herself, because practically non-existent. She had not been able to pull herself together. Never has such a thing been seen on the earth: a great people invaded, and this invasion finding no obstacle. ”

“ Three centuries and a half had elapsed since this same Veronese march, the cradle of the Lombard League, had repelled the invasion of Frederick Barbarossa. But while the world boasted a continual progress, since that period, in civilisation,—while philosophy and justice had better defined the rights of men,—while the arts, literature, and poetry had quickened the feelings, and rendered man more susceptible of painful impressions,—war was made with a ferocity at which men in an age of the darkest barbarism would have blushed. ”

“ He had dreamed even at that early period of the unification of Italy, and now it seemed as if he were the divine agent to bring about this unification. Sovereign princes became his allies. He surrounded himself with all the tokens of magnificence that occurred to a fertile and greedy imagination. He bathed in the porphyry font of Constantine; he assumed the dalmatic worn by the ancient emperors at their coronation, took the sceptre of government in his hand and placed seven crowns on his head symbolising the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; he even compared himself to Christ. ”

“ Florence, during the whole period of its glory and power, had neglected the arts of war; it reckoned for its defence on the adventurers whom its wealth could summon from all parts to its service; and set but little value on a courage which men, without any other virtue, were so eager to sell to the highest bidder. Since the transalpine nations had begun to subdue Italy to their tyranny, these hireling arms sufficed no longer for the public safety. Statesmen began to see the necessity of giving the republic a protection within itself. ”

“ After the wonderful development of the sixteenth century it is amazing to consider this time of deterioration. The day of great men is not altogether past—witness Galileo—but there are no such great poets, historians, artists, as in past generations. Even the events of the political world have small world-historical importance. Italy is the battle-ground of nations; it is a geographical territory but it is scarcely a state. It has no unity, it has no individuality; it has no important autonomous states as a whole that command the attention of the historian. ”

“ The condition of Italy after the nominal restoration of her independence, offers, as a philosophical writer has well remarked, a striking lesson of political experience. The powers of Europe, after having in some measure annihilated a great nation, were at length awakened to a sense of the injury which they had inflicted upon humanity, and upon the general political system of the world. They laboured sincerely to repair the work of destruction; there was nothing which they did not restore to Italy, except what they could not restore—the extinguished energies and dignity of the people. ”

“ At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country’s regeneration. ”

“ But, in the fourteenth century, the faction of the Ghibellines had become that of tyranny—of the Guelfs that of liberty. The former displayed those great military and political talents which personal ambition usually develops. In the second were to be found, almost exclusively, patriotism, and the heroism which sacrifices to it every personal interest. The republic of Pisa alone, in Italy, united the love of liberty with the sentiments of the Ghibelline party. This republic had been thunderstruck by the death of Henry VII at a moment when a career of glory and prosperity seemed to open on him. ”

“ Many of the most illustrious barons died in that fierce battle, which was the grave of the old Roman nobility. The tribune, being no warrior, could not boast of a real victory, but he nevertheless celebrated his triumph, and like the ancients, he had arms hung up in the temples, and he laid his steel sceptre and his crown of olive leaves at the feet of the Virgin in Santa Maria in Ara Cœli, boasting before the people of having done with his sword what neither pope nor emperor had been able to do. ”

“ It was with the aid of the Swiss that the pope designed to liberate Italy. He admired the valour and piety of that warlike people; he saw, with pleasure, that cupidity had become their ruling passion. The Italians, who needed the defence of the Swiss, were rich enough to pay them; and a wise policy conspired for once with avarice; for the Swiss republics could not be safe if liberty were not re-established in Italy. Louis XII, by his prejudice in favour of nobility, had offended those proud mountaineers, whom, even in his own army, he considered only as revolted peasants. ”

“ It was the misfortune of Italy at this epoch that she had not only to fight for independence, but also to decide upon the form of government which the nation should elect when it was constituted. All right-thinking and patriotic men agreed in their desire to free the country from foreign rule, and to establish national self-government. But should they aim at a republic or a constitutional monarchy? Should they be satisfied with the hegemony of Piedmont? ”

“ The Ghibellines had incarnated this principle in the house of Hohenstaufen, and the Guelfs for many years in the house of Anjou, but it had been overthrown in Italy at the very moment when it was triumphing over all the rest of Europe. And hence it doubtless was that arose the incomparable lustre of Italian civilisation at the dawn of the Renaissance, that universal blossoming of literature and art even in the most humble towns where there was then more intellectual culture than in the greatest cities of Germany, of England, or even of France. ”

“ In letting them feel the weight of a foreign yoke, the senate knew that it only rendered more dear the paternal authority of the republic; and, in fact, those citizens who had eagerly opened their gates to the French, Germans, and Spaniards, soon contrasted, in despair, their tyranny with the just and equal power which they had not had the courage to defend. The Germans, above all, no sooner entered the Venetian cities, than they plunged into the most brutal debauchery; offending public decency, and exercising their cruelty and rapacity on all those who came within their reach. ”

“ It was the independence born of this prosperity that made Venice feared and hated by all the other powers of Italy—feared and hated, but also admired. We read in Villanic that when in the early part of the fourteenth century Venice condescended to take common cause with Florence against the tyrant of Milan, the Florentines regarded it as a singular honour for their country to have become the confederate of the Venetians, “who, for their great excellence and power, had never allied themselves with any state or prince, except at their ancient conquest of Constantinople and Romania.” ”

“ The day was already named for the attack of the palace of government: it was determined to overpower the foreign guard; to cast the senators from the windows; to massacre all the individuals embraced in the privileged order; to change the constitution of the republic; and finally, to invest Vachero with the supreme authority of the state, by the title of doge, and under the protection of the duke of Savoy. But at the moment when the conspiracy was ripe for execution, it was betrayed to the government by a retainer of Vachero, who had been appointed to act a subordinate share in it. ”

“ Legislations, ancient and contradictory customs which in the south went back to the Normans, the Hohenstaufens, and the Angevins, or in the north at Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena, survived in institutions of lost republics, formed an inextricable chaos where the arbitrator reaped a rich harvest. Privileges and jurisdictions, both feudal and clerical, confused or perverted the systems of judicial and political administration; taxation varied in every country and for every person; power made itself oppressively but universally felt. ”

“ But let us step before Leonardo’s finest works, and see if the dreams of ideal existence do not appear natural and significant! As splinters of metal are drawn to the magnet as it moves through iron filings, and adhere to it in a thousand fine points, while the grains of sand fall powerless away, so there are men, who, passing through the lifeless throng of constant intercourse, carry away with them, involuntarily, only the traces of the genuine metal in it, in this following their nature alone, which absorbs it on every side. They are rare privileged men to whom this is awarded. ”

“ Forty years of profound peace succeeded to their attempt; and these were only forty years of effeminacy, weakness, and corruption—a memorable example to statesmen that the mere act of their will can neither renovate a degraded nation, nor replenish its weight in the political balance; and that national independence is a vain boon, where the people are not interested in its preservation, and where no institutions revive the spirit of honour, and the honest excitement of freedom. ”

“ It has been urged that Rome itself did not know it had fallen in the year 476; and that the Roman Empire—even the Roman Republic, in the phrasing of the time—went on, as the minds of contemporaries conceived it, uninterruptedly for many centuries after the date which we of later time fix for the quietus of Roman imperial life. But few things are better established than the fact that a clear conception of history demands a certain opportunity for the observation of events in perspective. In other words a contemporary judgment is rarely, if ever, the best judgment regarding any epoch. ”

“ Nevertheless if Florence was free from the excesses that disgraced every other Italian state, if Lorenzo’s rule was mild and blameless compared to that of Cosmo, not only the continuance of peace, the assured position of the country, and the habit on the part of the people of submitting to such a rule were to be thanked for it, but the views and ability of the man who stood at the head. Lorenzo de’ Medici was determined to be obeyed, but he was no tyrant: on the one hand too keen-sighted a reader of men, and too well-versed in the traditions of his people ”

“ Niccolo held steadily to the bridge; many were driven into the marshes or dragged by their stirrups through them; the flights of arrows were sometimes so dense as to obscure the sun, and this deadly archery did infinite mischief; the air itself seemed changed and terrified, and this great multitude was full of groaning, blood, and death!” Every hope of victory at length vanished and the Milanese broke, surrendered, and fled in all directions. ”