palace.
* * * * *
Federigo di Montefeltro is generally said to have been born on the 7th of June, 1422, and the earliest incident of his childhood was his premature betrothal.*57 The mountain-land from whence spring the Metauro and the Foglia, including some of the loftiest Apennine summits, was then called Massa Trabaria, and had been long held in fief by the Brancaleoni. Mercatello was the petty metropolis of some twenty townlets which obeyed Bartolomeo, the last male of that race. Art has given to his merits a record withheld by history, and the few travellers who visit the church of S. Francesco in that town, a very shrine of local æsthetics, will pause to admire his Gothic tomb, beautiful even through its disguise of recent whitewash, and to read this touching epitaph:—"Joanna Aledusia during her life erected this monument of affection to Bartolomeo Brancaleone, prince of this place, her most faithful husband, and to herself." This lady was born an Alidosio of Imola, and being left with an only daughter, Martin V., to whom the fief had lapsed, conferred its interim administration upon Count Guidantonio of Urbino, as rector, with promise of a new investiture to his son Federigo, on condition of his marriage with the orphaned Gentile. They were accordingly affianced ere the boy-bridegroom had completed his eighth year, and the spouses were brought up together under the fond and judicious tutelage of the Lady Joanna.
* * * * *
The return of the popes to Rome was the beginning of a new act in the great drama of Italian mediæval history. Deserting their proper capital, they had left it for above a century a prey to faction, strife, and rapine, which there was no authority to control, nor any holier influence to modify. The example of such disorganisation spread through the Peninsula, and aggravated dissension in all its cities. In absence of the papal court, the gloom of a dark age again brooded over the ecclesiastical states, for the few sparks of learning had been carried by emigrant churchmen to Provence. But, with its restoration, Rome became once more the metropolis of Christendom, and Italy began to feel that kindling glow, which, radiating from its centre, disseminated the cheering light and healthful flush of knowledge and civilisation over the globe. In one respect, however, and that a material one, was the position of the papacy altered. The protracted scandal of recent repeated schisms had shaken men's reliance on its infallibility; the fierce bickerings between popes and anti-popes, hurling anathemas and bandying abuse, had raised in the spectators a doubt if their cause could be more sacred than their weapons. The days when an emperor would hold the stirrup for a successor of St. Peter were passed away. Nor were affairs altogether satisfactory as regarded the domestic security of the latter. The dread of again losing their sovereign court formed a convenient check upon the factious citizens of Rome; but the barons of the Campagna were restless neighbours and turbulent vassals, and though the Gaetani and Frangipani were no longer formidable, the Savelli, the Orsini, and the Colonna by turns carried fire and sword into each other's holdings, or scoured the streets of Rome itself in their forays. To assert an effectual jurisdiction over the province immediately surrounding their capital, and to maintain their waning influence abroad, became the two great objects of successive pontiffs during the fifteenth century: one of these was perhaps a painful necessity, the other originated a policy ruinous to Italy; both occasioned frequent appeals to carnal weapons, pregnant with mischief to the Holy See.
Among many anomalies in the papacy, was the inverse ratio of its foreign influence and its domestic strength. Even whilst Rome and its vicinity had been most lawless, whilst the authority of popes in preceding centuries had been most fettered by faction, or most exposed to seditious outrage, their spiritual sway attained its height, and was acknowledged over Christendom without question. The reason is obvious. The religious spirit of the age bowed to ecclesiastical domination, while the factious temperament of the Romans fretted under all restraints of order. After their long exemption from the personal control of the popes, it became more than ever requisite to curb these feverish citizens, and to break down their robber noblesse: we shall hereafter see by what unscrupulous means, and at how great a sacrifice of character, this was finally effected by Alexander VI. But the popedom, whose unity had been rudely shaken by schism and absence, began, after its return to Rome, to suffer manifest inroads from the extension of their political individualities by the chief states of Europe. In order to maintain itself against this new tendency, it had recourse to a like policy; it sought by temporal aggrandisement to compensate the decay of spiritual authority. During its antecedent struggles with the empire, the cause of the Church had been that of freedom, its rallying cry the watchword of liberty. In those days its successes were hailed as a boon by the communes of Italy. Even the feudatories, whose jurisdiction had grown up under shelter of the imperial name, were glad to confirm their title by enrolling themselves as vassals of the Holy See. But when the successors of St. Peter began to develop ulterior aims—when they descended into the arena of mere political ambition, and sought to aggrandise their territorial dominion by intrigue and arms—a marked reaction took place. The princes and republics of the Peninsula stood on their defence against a new power of discord, the most fickle in its policy, the most unscrupulous in its expedients, that they had yet been called to resist. The ultra-montane nations pressed on to cope with or to conquer those degenerate Vicars of Christ, who, abandoning their high calling as shepherds and pacificators of Christendom, became its perturbators.
The rapid sketch which we have given in our first chapter of the seigneuries and communities of Central Italy may suffice to exhibit the general condition of Umbria, the March of Ancona, and Romagna as far as the Po. In Tuscany, democratic institutions had taken deeper root, among a population addicted rather to arts than to arms, and preferring wealth earned by industry and commercial enterprise to the precarious glory and profits of the sword. Their peaceful habits permitted capital to accumulate; its increase gave them a stake in its security; leisure and consequent intelligence enabled them to mature ideas of liberty beyond those of neighbouring states. It was in Florence especially that a more perfect system of municipal institutions established communal freedom upon a firmer basis, which, amid the ceaseless convulsions of domestic factions, and even through the long atrophy of later Medicean domination, has preserved for that city a political and intellectual pre-eminence, finely acknowledged by old Sanzi in his exclamation,
"For to curtail fair Florence of her freedom,
Were to pluck forth an eye from Italy,
And cause her orb to wane."
In the adjacent commonwealths of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena, similar results sprang from somewhat analogous causes, although they were from time to time, in the words of Dante,
"O'erthronged
With tyrants, and a great Marcellus made
Of any petty factious villager,"
until, by degrees encroached on by their more powerful neighbour, they were finally absorbed in the state which owned the Arno's queen as its capital.*58
Lombardy was no longer the emporium whence commercial wealth circulated over Europe, but her cities, surrounded by plains of unequalled fertility, gave no signs of decay, her universities were crowded by transalpine students. She had fully realised the stinging reproaches of Alighieri—
"Thy living ones
In thee abide not without war, and one
Malicious gnaws another, ay, of those
Whom the same wall and the same moat contain;"
but her Ezzelino and Can della Scala were no more, and many of her petty principalities had been merged in the wide-spreading duchy of Milan, or the mainland conquests of Venice. The Lion of St. Mark was in the ascendant during the fifteenth century, and, though we have no occasion to follow the fleets of Venice as they spread terror among the Turks, we shall in due time find her terra-firma policy complicating the relations and hampering the diplomacy of Italy. Naples, long exposed to the calamities of a disputed succession, which we shall hereafter explain, endured the feeble sway of the notorious Joanna II., by whose death in February, 1435, the crown passed to Alfonso V.—notwithstanding her death-bed recognition of the claims of the first Angevine dynasty, then represented by the good King René of Provence—and the dynasty of Aragon was continued by his illegitimate descendants until the close of this century.
Having thus endeavoured in a few pages to exhibit the condition of those