form, attained greater unity in the conduct of war, and also had more men at their command, from their greater territorial power. The Florentines achieved some brilliant successes, but most of their campaigns were unfortunate, and the ability of individual citizens employed as military commissaries could not outweigh the disadvantages which sprung from general strategic incapacity and the want of unity in the commanders. The tactics of the condottieri were on the decline throughout Italy, while the art of fortification and besieging was still in its infancy. The fertile though unhealthy plain which stretches on both sides of the sluggish Chiana, between Arezzo, Cortona, and Montepulciano, was desolated by the enemy, who, however, lay for thirty-six days before the little castle of Fojano, which was only defended by 200 people. They had to retire from Castellina, another weakly-fortified place between Siena and Florence, without having effected anything, and only owed to the cowardice of the commander of Bada, in the Maremma, the capture of this unimportant fortress, before which a fleet of twenty galleys and other vessels cruised. So low had Italian strategy fallen, that they were only able to reduce even slightly defended places by hunger, while even the more practised generals feared to venture a battle, and the principal method of war was unsparing devastation of the land. The Florentines, destitute of good soldiers, sought to give another turn to affairs by inviting once more into Italy Alfonso’s old rival, René, and then his son, John of Anjou, who also bore the title of Duke of Calabria, as his father retained that of King of Naples. They thus sought to relieve the Duke of Milan, and free themselves from the incursions of the Neapolitans, who once advanced to within six miles of the town, and did great damage. In the summer of 1453 their enemies were driven back upon the Sienese territory. But a foreign event contributed more than all to terminate this miserable war, and put an end to the petty squabbling of the Italian powers.
On May 29, 1453, Mohammed II. stormed Constantinople. The West was threatened, more especially Venice, which had such great and wealthy possessions in the Levant, and Naples. This time the excellent Pope Nicholas V. did not exert himself in vain. On April 9, 1454, Venice concluded a tolerably favourable peace with Francesco Sforza at Lodi, in which King Alfonso, Florence, Savoy, Montferrat, Mantua, and Siena, were to be included. The king, who had made considerable preparations for war, did not ratify the compact till January 26 of the following year. The States of Northern and Central Italy then joined in an alliance, and a succession of peaceful years followed, which were only momentarily interrupted in the case of Florence by the freebooting expedition of Jacopo Piccinino, a son of the Niccolò who was conquered at Anghiari. Dismissed from the Venetian service, he attacked the Sienese territory in 1455, on his own account, but was defeated and compelled to set sail for Naples from Orbetello. In the confusion which broke out in Naples after king Alfonso’s death neither Florence nor Venice was involved. The ancient Florentine friendship with the house of Anjou had to yield to other influences. At the same time, when the Turks conquered the Morea, and thus approached nearer and nearer to the coasts of Italy, the Angevin party in the kingdom attempted a new rising against Ferrante of Aragon, who in 1460 suffered a defeat from Duke John, which would have driven him from the throne had his opponents been more united and more powerful. Assistance from Milan and from Rome, where Pius II. now occupied the Holy See, after the short reign (not quite three years) of Calixtus III., combined with his own energy and skill, facilitated the King’s restoration to power; and not long after, he saw the Anjou expelled from the kingdom by the decisive victory at Troia, and the insurrectionary barons, among whom were several of his near relations, given into his power. Thus Florence, like Venice, which had then little time to think of anything except danger from the Turks, was appealed to for assistance by Ferrante on the ground of the alliance concluded in consequence of the peace of Lodi; but Florence refused, from a consideration of the late King’s double dealing in the affair of Piccinino.
In the midst of the civil disputes and confusion above described, of repeated foreign troubles, and an immense exertion of material power to secure her political position, Florence in the times of Cosimo de’ Medici was still the harbour of refuge for all Italy, and, in consequence of an event important in the history of the world, the haven of Christendom. The ever-memorable movement in the intellectual world will be mentioned later; the occurrence which forms an important epoch in ecclesiastical history must be considered here.
Pope Eugenius IV. had, as we have seen, to battle at once with a double opposition, which, different in origin as in significance, united for a time, and clouded a considerable part of his reign of sixteen years. The attempt to restrain within reasonable limits the Colonna, the relations of his predecessors, who had been immoderately favoured and had grown insolent, excited agitation in Rome, and kindled a strife which extended through the greater part of the States of the Church. The course pursued by the council at Basle, opened not much more than four months after the elevation of Eugenius, necessarily led to irreconcilable dissension with the pontificate, because the new assembly, instead of considering the altered position of affairs since the termination of the great schism, and confining itself firmly and with wise moderation to what was truly edifying and necessary (as exemplified, for instance, in the new Frankish-Germanic countries), raised its pretensions so high, that if they had prevailed, the Papacy would have become a cipher. The simultaneous occurrence of the ecclesiastical contest at Basle with the ambitious plans of Filippo Maria Visconti, had filled Romagna and the frontiers, the patrimony—nay, even the Campagna—with the din of war; and on June 4, 1434, the Pope was obliged to take flight from Rome. As early as the end of January affairs had assumed such an aspect in the States of the Church, especially in Bologna, that Florence deemed it necessary to arm, foreseeing that the Pope would be forced to leave Rome, and Rinaldo degli Albizzi had then expressed his opinion that it would be advantageous and honourable for the State if Eugenius IV. should choose Florence as his residence.[89] Received honourably in the city, where he had already found support in his feud with the Colonna, and residing in the convent of Sta. Maria Novella, he was witness of the revolution which brought Cosimo de’ Medici to the helm of affairs, and he remained at Florence till April 1436, when he repaired to Bologna. As the controversy with the fathers assembled at Basle became hotter every year, and he himself was cited before their tribunal, he transferred the council to Ferrara on October 1, in the following year.
While, early in 1438, the fathers at Basle were pronouncing the suspension of the Pope, the latter opened, in the capital of the house of Este, a council, at which appeared shortly afterwards the Greek Emperor, John Palæologus, in whom the distress of his crumbling empire had aroused the hope of securing the assistance of the West by a union with the Church. A pestilence which broke out in Ferrara caused the removal of the synod to Florence, where in January 1439 it began its sittings, and on July 6 proclaimed the reunion of the two churches,[90] six weeks after the deposition of Eugenius IV. had been decreed by the council at Basle, which had degenerated into a conciliabulum, and which a few months later elected Duke Amadeus VIII. of Savoy, a powerless anti-Pope, under the name of Felix V. The bronze doors of the church of St. Peter’s in the Vatican, the work of two Florentine artists, though not the best specimen of the Florentine sculpture of that age, commemorate these events in the reliefs. The reconciliation between East and West could not be of long duration; the schism, a double one, as it was a question of doctrine as well as supremacy, and was deeply rooted in the feelings of the people, broke out again immediately afterwards. But for Florence, where also a reconciliation of the Armenians with the Church of Rome took place, the council formed an epoch in the world’s history.
Eugenius IV. resided for four years in the city, while powerful regents, entrusted with full power, governed Rome. First, the cardinal-patriarch Giovanni Vitelleschi, for a time Archbishop of Florence, and involved in the catastrophe of Rinaldo degli Albizzi, as Luca Pitti was, six years later, in that which ended in his violent death; then Cardinal Ludovico Scarampi, likewise Archbishop of Florence at a time when this see needed a more worthy pastor than these prelates, wearing coat-of-mail and sword. It was precisely during these years that the Pope was more involved than suited his pastoral dignity in that endless confusion in the Romagna and the frontiers which occupied the last years of Filippo Maria Visconti, nor did his Holiness hold himself quite aloof from a share in Florentine party divisions. It would have been better for him if he had appeared there less as a temporal prince than as Pope. On March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, with which the year began, according to Florentine custom, he consecrated Sta. Maria del Fiore, where the solemn proclamation of union in the Church followed: